ᴛʜᴇ ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ ᴜɴᴅʏɪɴɢ (
necrolord) wrote in
deercountry2022-09-17 06:05 pm
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
13 . autumn catch-all
Who: John Gaius and company.
What: After a rough summer, the King Undying lays low.
When: September - October
Where: Mostly Gaze.
Content Warnings: Tagged in headers as needed. Note all the usual warnings of this character.
What: After a rough summer, the King Undying lays low.
When: September - October
Where: Mostly Gaze.
Content Warnings: Tagged in headers as needed. Note all the usual warnings of this character.
no subject
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."
no subject
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.