necrolord: <user name="thebutt"> (Default)
ᴛʜᴇ ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ ᴜɴᴅʏɪɴɢ ([personal profile] necrolord) wrote in [community profile] deercountry2022-09-17 06:05 pm

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.

acidjail: rights to use paid by me; do not take (06)

[personal profile] acidjail 2022-10-19 03:45 pm (UTC)(link)
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.