deercountry | 13 . autumn catch-all

She's awake, and that's a start. For a little while he clatters around in the background, preparing tea; chipped mugs clink as he fills them. There is the smell of steam and Earl Grey. He doesn't bother to have the skeletons fuss over this: it gives him something to do with his hands.

John sets the tray down on the table beside her, and stands there for a moment in silence, still rumpled and dirtied by rainwater and violence. There are rips in his shirt from her weaponized shards of bone. When he sinks to a crouch beside her, as he'd done in that foreign street, his wet cloak still bunches and drags around his shoulders.

"Feeling any better?"

To Cristabel he only tips his head in acknowledgement, uncertainty there and gone in the lines of his eyes and mouth.

Mercy does not trace his steps or the fussing of his hands. Her own stay tucked near the rent in her dress over her chest, one tucked into the shell of the other, as the nearly invisible stir of her breathing and intermittent slow blinks are the only signs of life outside of the black hole of her Lyctoral obscurity. Even when he's in front of her, she does not meet his eyes, contriving by some Mercymorn trick to avoid doing so without moving her own.

(Cristabel has no such compunctions. She flitted over to supervise his work, perching on the lid of the teapot even while it was poured, and returns on the lip of the tray, her wings fanned curls of fragrant steam.)

"You can't stand this."

There is a remote, impersonal wonder to the observation, delivered long after the conclusion had been reached. Her lips barely part to bring it forth, so easily does it come.

He takes the tea so he can turn it in his hands, but it is too hot to drink, and so he sets it down. He offers his fingertip to Cristabel, instead, so that he can shift her gently up to his shoulder. When he speaks he is still examining her wings, the patterns of pink, his mouth in an unhappy line.

"It's not my favorite," he agrees. "I'd rate this as 'not great.'"

He turns back to Mercy, or at least to the wet cloth he's brought. He plucks at it with one hand, as though indecisive, and with the other reaches out to touch her shoulder— as though to see whether she draws away, or takes up melting again. His fingers are still warm from the mug.

"But here we are."

She does not flinch. She does not lean in. She does not melt. Primarily, she does not, not even to resist the press of the shoulder upon her with the faint tensing of muscle. She is as pliable as she was when he last took her hand, a body not yet cooled to rigor mortis.

"It was the first thing I thought, once I understood...once I comprehended that this was not your eddy in the River." She blinks, damply, and stirs to work her tongue against the gummy roof of her mouth, thoughtful at the grit she finds there. "'He must not be able to stand it.' I was awake, in the waves, and all I thought - all I could think - was how much you must hate this."

She makes a very little noise, so much smaller than laughter. Cristabel is a tucked, still thing on John's shoulder, etched in subtle orchid darkening over undifferentiated shell-pink.

This hurts him. It closes in around his eyes, again, and his mouth twists with it: love and ache and misery, there in the flex of his fingers against her damp and gritty skin. He soothes it by closing his hand more firmly against her shoulder, bracing, and with the other he brings the rag to the dirtied column of her neck.

"Well, you got it in one," he agrees. "It was kind of a thing, recently. I went toe to toe with that ocean and lost. Kind of an embarrassing downgrade from axing planets, honestly."

She stirs to tilt her head further into the couch’s stained upholstery, a gesture that could be read as acquiescence or avoidance, but in either case lengthens the vulnerable span of her neck under the slight chill of the rag.

“Yes,” she says, with the barest rime of iciness, “This has been brought to my attention.”

There should be something typically awful from her to follow it, some razored blow of the tongue or the treat of a good haranguing. Instead, she lapses back into quiet, her eyes sliding nearly shut, and she swallows as the cloth brushes across the hollow of her throat.

“So what does that make of me? An affliction, or an olive branch?” She muses aloud, disinterested. “A consolation prize? I have never been very consoling.”

This is fair: it was a big story, and there's no way Pyrrha wouldn't have dragged him over it. He breathes a slow sigh, almost abashed, and with the rag he touches her as gently as he wants to. This soothes something in him. It quiets the creaking tension of his fear, his anger, that he can sit here at her side and she will let him.

Even if he did, more or less, have to kill her first. Even if she lies as still and quiet as though he has.

"I don't think I'm high on the list for prizes," he says, low and frank. "Pyrrha didn't keep me in line, and they're running out of big guns."

Pyrrha did try. He says, like they're catching up on funny gossip, "She shot me in the face. And stabbed me, but I'm not mad about that one, I think a five-year-old told her to. I haven't been polling very high."

That revelation snaps Mercy's gaze open and blaring onto John's. The contact between their eyes is an electric arc, lethal and sizzling, and her mouth tightens like the turn of a screw over locked teeth. She sieves her words through them in hot, thin splinters. Her hands clench each other like jaws.

"Good," she says, viciously, "She deserves it."

Pyrrha Dve never divided opinion. Mercy may have her own bodies to unbury with the woman, the putrid carcasses of all the dreadful things Mercy had done to her necromancer, all the dreadful things he'd done to her (tolerance, crueller than a knife), and how many of them, in retrospect, made suspect and strange, but on this point Mercy finds them in alignment.

"She always had more the knack for keeping you." She flicks her eyes away, scornfully. "I'd wish her luck - if I thought she had the slightest chance of success."

This cuts him, which is fair: it's better than the distant, floaty way she'd stared at nothing. John settles under her scorn like a creature reacclimating to pressure, like he thinks he can learn to breathe it as air. It plainly hurts going down.

For a moment he says nothing, his hands stilled in the silence she's dropped them into. Then he resumes, insistently gentle, clearing away the grime of a world he'd not been meant to see. She looks more herself, clean of it and under his hands. He can more easily forget the thing she'd unraveled into when he can feel the warm rhythm of her heartbeat in her skin.

"I don't make it easy," he admits. "Neither do our gracious hosts. They love to throw curveballs, here."

They love to bait him. Like clockwork, he always rises to it.

"Never a dull moment, sorry to say."

John keeps washing away the grime on her, that smokey, gritty, bloody patina that had lived in her skin all the while she was gone, far away from God's house and God's hands. She set herself in a place where he could not touch her on purpose, with spite and guilt heavy in her.

But even as she did it, she knew that it was as futile as anything else she might attempt, as anything else she ever did attempt. There is nowhere she may go where John cannot touch her.

Her hand goes out. Unlike her neck, it is still filthy, flaking greenish-black as she flattens it on his chest where she flattened his hand on her own. The tips of her fingers brush the notch at the hollow of his throat. She leaves a little sooty mark there, with a faint crease of bewildered concentration between her eyebrows as she looks at it.

"I shouldn't be cruel to you," she says, sincere like it surprises her to be so, "Not when everything else is, already. Not when you suffer so." Then, with a quaver like wings: "I never wanted to be cruel to you."

There is a clock far away, ticking. There is the tactile throb of a heart under her hand close. She had slipped her hands inside of him, and for one glorious, beautiful instant, she had held his heart in her palm, and she had known it perfectly, every fold and chamber.

"I wish that we were different," Mercy says, terribly.

13 . autumn catch-all

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