deercountry | who's seen jezebel?

The effort Mercy makes to ward against the glory of God's benevolence is as futile as every other effort she has made here. The pulse of stasis she attempts to infuse her breaking body with proves as much barrier to him as flimsy under a blowtorch, and she is mended in a singular instant that sears the back of her brain and the throbbing cavity of her chest in holy star-fire.

She is made whole; she screams, once, in raw, red frustration, the idiot blare of an alarm.

The butterfly that toppled from God's hand in a fright of distress spirals up from the cobblestones of scalded blood and fiber in answer, bobbing between him and his Saint in useless intervention. She shivers at her boundaries, and if anyone could see her inside the fury of this storm they might mark her blossom of new colors.

Mercy, please, she pleads, trembling in her terror, Stop - stop - don't hurt him -

Mercymorn throws her head back and keens, a high, trembling, maddened note. She wails as God comes to her, shadows boiling in his steps, to where she is bound like a gore-slick martyr to the prow of a great ship, and every part of her is joined in her abhorrence.

She comes apart faster, this time. She slits once more, inward wounds parting in astonishing defiance, blood and worse fluids gushing in unruly gouts from every orifice above the neck, and when that is not enough, when the maelstrom horror of pent corruption demands new vent, she permits it.

Her ribs split at the join of her sternum. She arches her spine as they spring apart, jagged and dripping, their broken tips alight with the uncanny blue of thanergic fission.

The detonation is laced with sharpened chips of bone flechettes. It knocks her back flat, her skull cracking dully on a raised stone. Perhaps most importantly of all, it stops her screaming, which must come as no small relief.

It's a bad sound. It's a worse sight, and he does recoil, now, at what comes up out of her face. His expression isn't plain disgust but a more personal, angrier revulsion— horror at what's been done to her, at what she's doing to herself, at how far she is from what she should be— no one should be able to flay a Lyctor from herself into this dying wreck before him.

She blows up her torso at him, which is very unpleasant. He snaps her own blood and bone up to blunt the blows, face twisted nearly to snarling when darts embed heavy in his hip, his gut, his shoulder. He picks them out with his fingers and casts them aside, Darkblood glittering in little sprays like black sand.

"That was a lot," John informs her, and he heals her again like a kick. He is, at this point, being petty. There is no pity in the set of his face if she writhes with it: she has succeeded in making him mad. "Are we done?"

She does writhe, a mindless, aching series of spasms, her heels churning in the sticky mess she's collapsed into. The sizzling char of her torso seals over shut, the clean expanse of her bare skin soon spattered in cast off splotches of blood. Her lungs heave, new alveoli popping open in a tumbling suck of air, and her eyes slam wide with them.

Mercy stares up at the pitiless black of God's gaze, and the moment stretches out like saltwater taffy. She blinks with clotted lashes, her brow furrowing in the lightest tracery of bewilderment. She looks at him like she should know him, and does not.

Cristabel dives to the crook of John's neck, little hooked tarsi clinging to his collar, and she hides herself there in a wilt of folded wings and quivering antennae.

Mercy, she whispers.

"No," Mercy says, dreamily, "No...I don't think so, John."

This cracks some fresh frustration open in him. He picks her lingering cells out of his body in ugly little gobbets of flesh and slivers of bone shrapnel, and scrubs them off his skin with the heel of his hand, through his stained and punctured shirt. Every wound fizzles miserably with Vileblood even as it closes, the hurt lingering like nettle stings.

He brings his hand up to his collar, and curves a palm over the butterfly as though to shield her. John, intent on draining the boil, presses his worst angle. He'd rather have her shouting than gone distant and unreal.

He says: "If you won't listen to me, at least listen to Cristabel."

Her vagueness disappears. She knows him again, focus clicking into place with the finality of a lever flung. Her mouth twists up horribly, chin crumpled with tragic dimples, trembling on the verge of violent tears, but she's there, lucidity swimming in her red-rimmed eyes.

But when the knot unties itself, the noise that bubbles up from her throat is a bright, crystal shatter of a laugh. She lets her head fall back into the mussed, lank halo of her pooled hair, come undone from its loose braid somewhere along the way.

"It's as bad as that," she says, irrelevantly, a giddy, broken-hearted slur. Her fingers uncurl. She collects water in her palms, floating on the stone beneath her, and if only there were flowers.

"All right." Indulgently, she lolls in the muck. "All right...I owe you that much. Go on, John. Speak, and I will listen. Tell me what you came to tell me...tell me what will call me from the wilderness."

Under the shield of John's palm, Cristabel's trembling lessens. She leans against the pulse in his throat like a staggered soldier in the ebb of the battle, her relief very nearly more palpable that she is.

Edited 2022-09-30 14:54 (UTC)

This is dubiously promising. It's something; it isn't numb distance; he takes to it like she's cracked herself open to feast upon, like he has to hurry while the blood is hot.

John rocks down into a squat, arms laid across his thighs, the one that makes Harrow look like she'll have a fit. He takes his gentle palm away from Cristabel, and he touches Mercy's hand. This is a gamble, and a bad one: if she goes for him, he may not be fast enough to stop her. He knows that she could take him apart thoroughly enough, here, for it to matter.

But she doesn't know it, and he wants to touch her.

God smooths the pad of his thumb over the bruisy bumps of her knuckles. He eases a gobbet of something off the curve of a nail and ignores the Vileblood crusted into the cuticle. There is still smoke boiling in his shadow, wisping up and curling at his back. In the green haze of the fog, he almost looks alight with it, like someone's lit him to smolder.

With his eyes on her hands, John murmurs the worst thing that has ever been said to him, soft as a prayer or a private joke:

"I still love you."

He traces the tips of his fingers fretfully along the creases of her palms, gummed up as they are with gore. He worries a little piece of gristle free, if she'll let him.

"Come back with me," he says, abruptly and hideously earnest. He looks her in the face, now, and the lines pinched around his eyes are all open pain. "You're welcome to hate me— I've got a head start on you, believe me— but come and do it by my side. This place is a nightmare and I can't unpick it without you. It kills me to have you out here where I can't see."

Her hand is pliant in his, obedient to his gentle, fraught touch. She observes with hooded gaze as he fusses over her, uncertainty clinging to him almost as close as the pall of strange smoke. She has hardly ever seen him so lost.

Mercy closes her slim, careful fingers around his as their eyes meet, and hers, spiteful, spitting things that they are, are made tender by his sorrow. The vulnerable, rare shade of a beating heart. She presses herself up to sitting, shivering with the effort, and with cold. She reaches out to cup his cheek above Cristabel's wings, bumping the once against the inside of his knee as she leans in towards him.

"It would be like the old days, wouldn't it? The good ones, the beginning...when there was still so much to do, so much to learn," she says, wistfully, stroking her thumb over the wounded creases by his eyes. She lifts their hands still on the earth and brings them to her bare chest, his knuckles cradled to the bony crest of her gladiolus.

"You, and I, and the others, all of us in a house by the sea, with the work yet to be done...but this time, we would do it right, from the very start." She will draw his forehead down to hers, if he will let her; flatten his palm between her breasts with the innocence of children. "Is that how it would be? Would you take me home, John? Even now, after everything...even now, if I hated you?"

John gentles into the touch, eased with hope by the set of her eyes. He tips his head into the contact, his cheek set whole and warm against her palm. He touches his brow to hers, such that his breath moves the sticky lines of her hair. His palm spreads to feel her heartbeat, gone slow and steady under his hand. If she kills him now, like this, there isn't much he can do about it.

"Yes," he croaks, rough with numbing poison or with the weight of the word. "Yes. We can't do it over— it's not a clean slate— but it could be something. I want you there."

This is the trap he's been led into, the test he's been shown: this is the resignation they've wanted since the start. John shuts his eyes in ugly submission.

He can bear her hatred better than her distance. Annabel always hated him anyway, or would have, if she'd known how.

Mercy makes a wordless, soothing sound as John closes his eyes, patting his cheekbone with the pad of her thumb. He is warm wherever he touches her, banishing some of the low, grinding ache that gnaws at her marrow. His hand is an aegis over her heart. She lets her eyes follow his example, and this rain could be the rain on a thousand other worlds.

"I never hated you," she tells him, gentle as sin, "Not once."

Her chest is sticky where his hand lies. Her skin puckers, it parts. She takes a breath like a fist cocked back, and her lips stay half-open, too wet at the corners. The shivering hasn't stopped, doesn't even when she makes more insistent the press of her palm capturing him.

"Before I knew my name, I loved you, and I will love you after I forget it. I loved you terribly...the worst of all, but I loved you." The words have a strange shape in her mouth, too soft. "And I am not coming back."

John makes a noise, soft and hitching, as though she's put a blade through his belly. His shoulders twitch with it as though he's taken a blow. The heel of his hand sinks into her chest, and he opens his eyes to regard her, the corners scrunched with misery.

The smoke behind him constructs itself up, up, flaring out spindly wet phalanges and the shiver of hideous wings. The sound begins as a low hive drone: it starts in the teeth and the amygdala. There is no mistaking it.

"Mercy," he says. Low and desperate, and listing back towards frustration. "Come on."

A nightmare rises behind John in awful angles. Someone's voice curdles into a nail on chalk shriek. Someone slumps over a hand that sinks into a chest that suckles at the fingers that splay over the heart. Someone opens corpse-clouded eyes to stare blind into the absence of stars. Someone opens the mouths below their eyes, twin grinning crescents full of teeth like broken seed pearls that hug the arch of someone else's skull.

"Listen to her," this someone pants, a slouching beast run out under the sun, "Listen to you...I want, I want. Nowhere you can go. It kills me. I can't, without you. Mercy."

The precipice, the fall, the revelation. Her teeth (all of them) chatter as she drags herself up, up, one more time, fingers a great, greedy rake in the sodden cloth of his shirt as she brings her mouth (her first one) to drool pale ichor onto his shoulder. The butterfly on John's throat peels away, drifts to touch her lips, their slick-sticky interior, the tip of her tongue.

"Liar," she says, in a slur of teeth and blood and fragmenting wings, and she flings herself apart.

It's almost lovely how she unfolds. Layers of her unravel in shivering waves, fluttering like pennants as they peel away from John. Her organs spiral into translucent fistfuls of gauze and float upward untethered, her bones soften and flow like glass. They coalesce in the air before him, winding around a spindle of paled light to form a slowed whirlwind, a quickened tower, and as they spin the mist begins to draw towards it, then the gore, all the mess that Mercy made of the street undone for the construction of this glistening monument. Even the residue of her left behind on John comes away, leaving him clean.

The thing that was Mercymorn unfolds its own wings, thin as breath, and a storm of them fling themselves towards God. They are as nearly butterflies as the Omen behind him is nearly a wasp.

"Fuck," says John, and "Shit," and "Don't do this."

He presses the thing behind him down and away, and she shudders out of existence, back to fizzing smoke. He cannot handle that and this at once. He watches her other mouths open; he beholds the little whites of her teeth; God's face is set in wound-tight horror. He clutches her more tightly. His hand spasms in a desperate little clench within the warm and melting ruin of her chest.

She comes apart like ribbon. It's pretty, in a bad way.

The thing that was Mercymorn peels itself away from him, even the blood, even the tacky and dripping discharge. He makes a wounded noise as it goes. He rocks back onto his heels and then onto his ass on the wet cobblestones. Smoke pools and licks up around him like low-lying fog set to boil.

"Mercy," he says again, low and cracked, just noise. Then she's on him. He does not actually try to stop her.

The thing that was Mercy and now is not, that is both more and less, has no answer for him but the blur of green-tinged pink that breaks and swirls around him, a swarm that engulfs so completely that the vacuous light of the tower is strained through the veined membrane of their wings.

They do not hurt him. They barely graze across his skin, light as the lapping of a kitten at milk, but everywhere they touch, they leave their mark. A pink haze of spores hangs about him, infiltrates through the eye and the lung and the parted mouth, and every secret, interior place they touch, they bloom.

As swiftly as they fell upon him, they depart, called back to the undulating fission of the whirlwind as it opens into a bilateral symmetry of ovaline bone hoops strung through with lashings of tongue and gut, opens into fourths, opens into eighths, a slowly revolving stained glass window at the very annex of hell. It tilts over him vast enough to nearly brush the ruins on either side of the street, whole enough to shelter him from the rain, and all about it the wild pangs of its grief swarm in scintillating clouds. The black-hot foundry of its necromancy pulses in tides.

It sings. When its yearning stretches out to sink hooks into the radiant glory of God's own soul, when divinity boils up in a flare at the transgression, it sings still, low, crooning, inhuman.

For a horrible moment, he tips back his head and lets them come. They alight on the bared stretch of his throat, on his lips, on his eyelids. John shudders a breath under their gauzy fluttering.

Then they shiver away, and the tower begins to eat.

To consume God's soul is a death sentence, a suicide by existential fire: it is too big. It splits everything open at the seams, hot as thermonuclear fusion. He knows this. The sound he makes is a ragged scream and then it is a laugh, sagging and half-hysterical. He does something very like backhanding the thing that isn't Mercy: there is a surge and snap of thanergy, an ugly punch and tear through the tower's delicate tissues. Lenore crystallizes, humming in the air, to her full iridescent glory. Everything is very bad.

He has a fallback. He has something so humiliating— such pointed mockery— but this is a shitshow. There's still gore at the back of his head and tears in his eyes. A Herald dogs his steps like warped shadow, as God steps forward and draws something from his pocket.

The Moon Drop glows pretty and white, even here: on this fucked-up street, in this fucked-up little world, cupped in the palm of a fucked-up God who cannot bring her back without it. He steps forward with a monster at his back, and a monster ahead of him, and someone else's blessing between his fingers.

Mercymorn will wake later, as herself, in a necromancer's cluttered and well-worn study. She will have dreamt of serenity and sweet white light. They won't talk about it.

who's seen jezebel? | september catch-all

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cw: the body horror is back

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