14 . winter catch-all

[necrolord]

Who: John Gaius and company.
What: As the cold sets in, the God of Necromancers gets restless.
When: Late November through December
Where: Gaze and the Sleeper Farm.

Content Warnings: Tagged in headers as needed. Note all the usual warnings of this character.

Comments

the sleeper farm. cws: captivity, gore, bug monster

[necrolord]

0. not here.

[ It's funny: they never tried to come for him, the first time around. Back then, he'd thought they were clever enough to realize he was beyond their weight class. Now, a year and change into Trench, he knows better than to think that'll hold forever.

They grab Pyrrha, first, and he feels it all secondhand. The town is stilling into December by the time they grab him.

The wildest thing is the feeling of waking up blind.

John comes to a groggy partial awareness, disoriented and slow. The usual background thrum of thalergy in the earth, the people, the distant town— it's all muffled, so distant he could be in deep space. He can't feel the squids in the sea or the bones in the woods. Trench keeps his usual planetary range crunched down to a postage stamp on a good day, but this is sensory deprivation. He has nothing.

He tries to pull bone from his wrists to break the cold metal shackles, but the power has gone slippery and faraway. All he can do is rattle the chains, feeble as any drugged captive. John squints through the muggy darkness of the room, and through the haze of what's been done to him, and realizes there is nothing he can do.

There are footsteps in the hall, clanging echoes, but he can't feel whoever's throwing the sound. They have him cornered and helpless in the dark. He's alone.

This is when he starts, quietly, to lose his shit. ]

1. the wife.

Maybe you're only just waking up, Sleeper, to find yourself in chains. Maybe you've been awake for grueling hours, strung up on meat hooks or laid out for vivisection. Maybe you've only just pried yourself free of what's been done to you, and you're already creeping along in the dark.

There is a sudden clatter of footsteps in the hall, and a strange, building drone of wasp wings. If you have any affinity for the eldritch, for spirit magic gone wrong, you might parse the hideous bad undertones in the sound.

Then a seven-foot humanoid death wasp bursts into the room, shuddering with noise and fury, limned with indigo eddies of Darkblood. It hangs in the air, and then it turns on you.

2. john alone.

The problem with Blood Crazed Zealots is twofold: they know how to take down Sleepers because they're Sleepers themselves. This is how they can switch off God's powers and then, insult to injury, trap his Omen with a twist of Darkblood.

He runs.

Staggering down the hall, clumsy and trailing broken chains, is the Emperor Undying. There's a spatter of Vileblood on his shirtfront. He's missing a shoe.

This is not his best day ever.

1. Cw: child endangerment, reference to torture

[justoscar]

He was strung up-- and not for the first time. Bereft of his shirt and his shoes, as well as the prosthetic that was based on the borrowed schematics of Atlesian tech and Ruby Rose's brilliance, the scar on his chest was visible for all to see. A lesser person would have lost themselves after such an onslaught-- but Oscar hadn't been alone. Ozpin had helped him endure the torture during that blurry haze of a day, with the memories of the pain punctuated by long stretches of silence... Or his vocal chords straining under the intensity of his own howling.

-- this time, for the first time in a very long time, he was completely and truly alone. Even without access to the magic of Remnant, Ozpin's presence in the back of his mind was a quiet comfort that he could rely on in a crisis. But in that moment he had nothing except the tingling in his hands that indicated a lack of blood circulation, the fearful tempo of his heart, and the stories in his head.

His blood went cold when the insectoid being burst into his room. Startled out of his traipsing along the edge of unconsciousness, he instinctively felt himself struggle to pull back. This was --

"John." He gasped. "John. That's you, right? Oh no no no..."

Oscar shook his head, loose locks falling into his face as he did so. He wanted to go home, but not like this!

[necrolord]

The monster approaches with a low droning hum of wasp's wings. It moves slowly, in this moment, as though curious; the trapped teenager doesn't seem to strike it as threat. He's an oddity, and she buzzes closer, the raw skull of her head cocked towards him in blank fascination.

This is when John, looking wholly human and not at all like a wasp monsters, staggers in the door behind her.

"Shit," gasps God, who is not looking his best. He staggers like he hurts, gasps like he's out of breath, which should all be frankly impossible. When he recognizes Oscar, his expression breaks into frank worry. "Hey— easy."

This is apparently directed to the wasp, not to Oscar. Bizarrely, she listens: she halts in the air, arm's reach from the boy and wings still thrumming.

[justoscar]

He wanted to sass. He wanted to squirm and complain-- but his own visceral fears from previous times that he had been strung up and treated like a punching bag had instinctively kept him still. While the Zealots were nothing like the numbing rage of Hazel Rainhart, they still saw an opportunity to test his limits.

It was as if they knew from looking at him that he had been tortured before.

"You're.... you."

Oscar trailed, his voice shaking while he heaved a visible sigh of relief. Bugs and John were not a good pair, in his recollection. The last thing he wanted to deal with was a corrupted and out of control Emperor John Gaius.

With Hazel, he knew there was a way to talk his way out. That wasn't an option once anyone went Beast Mode.

2, cw: zombies, gore, There Will Be Vore

[unsheathedfromreality]

The Emperor Undying runs, and something--something small, and feathered in funereal black-and-white--takes note of his retreat. There's a maybe-familiar glimpse of retreating wings around the next corner he turns, a brief flash of faceted red eyes, before a chimeric silhouette vanishes through a wall.

And around the next corner, or two or three--hard to tell distance and orientation in the awful press of the Farm--a wall of dead flesh awaits him. A half-dozen obvious revenants, fleshy and gross remains of animated Sleepers, clog the corridor. A much greater dead thing, black-feathered and starred in golden eyes, looms behind them.

The mob turns as one to regard the fleeing man with a sightless, impassive benevolence that might be worse than active hostility. Then the monster at the back politely shuts his eyes.

"Even you, ö̸̧͍̣̜̭͔̬̼̼͉̯͕̰͂̈̃͑̚͝ ̶̡̻̯͙̱̳͎̑͐͆̀̽͐̀͠L̶̤̤̯͈͕̫̖̦̹͚͑̉̔̊̑͌͌͝͝ơ̷̧̦̬͔̺̟̙͊̍̏̒̔̌͊̎͊̔́̃̽͋͂̐ŗ̶̥̯̻̰̯̬̩͇̘̲̮̻͙̱̗͐̾͋̎̉̓̐̉̃̚ͅd̴̨̛̥͗̀̄̊͑̆̐̇͒͘͘͝͠?̴̡̡̠̺̳͓̲̹̙̾͗ ̴͚͖̟̤̪̞̺̲̭̙̖̹̞̳̞̱͊̉̋̀̄̍̑̀̑̍̽ I am surprised."

And, he will not say, strangely delighted.

[necrolord]

It says something about John Gaius, that he reaches this sudden impasse of gore and relaxes like he's just come home. There is a sudden release of tension in his shoulders, in that first blind moment he realizes he stands before the dead.

It's only the thing behind them— the realization that the greater shape of the monster is here, fully instantiated— that quiets him into something else, worry and something like reverence scrunching his brow. He reaches up to wipe a speckle of stinging Vileblood from his cheek with the back of a wrist.

"Even me," he agrees, and while it's meant to sound rueful, it's not meant to sound so nakedly exhausted. "It's a real party, apparently."

He steps forward, the whole of his attention upon the feathered horror behind the corpses.

"You too, huh."

[unsheathedfromreality]

The monster laughs, low and many-voiced. He gestures with a primary arm in a great rustle of feather and chitin. The mob of the dead jerkily parts, offering John an avenue to approach their necromancer.

"And not my first time. Imagine my d̸̫̏ę̶̇l̶͕̕ȋ̸̹g̸̜̏ḧ̴̡́t̸̞͗, that they remember their oaths year-to-year."

Iskierka shoves her way through a wall near his shoulder, a sparkling mote of white and ordinary black against a backdrop of space-dark fuligin. Illarion tilts his head toward her; she looks at him, then down the corridor at their back, then at John.

"Come. Join us. You may not be wholly s̴a̵f̶e̷ beneath my wings but it is better together than alone."

2.

[underbluesky]

[God runs, as though he were only a man, but in the Sleeper Farm, the Zealots are everywhere. He can only run so far before he finds a wall to his back and two or three enemies closing in. The end of the line is perhaps terrifying, perhaps infuriating, but no sooner does one of them reach out to grab him than they cry out in pain, a nail suddenly lodged in the meat of their palm.

A quick succession of further nails follows--and what's interesting to note is how they all land in terribly precise spots--the ACL, the Achilles tendon, the rotator cuff--and yet not one of them is a strike in a lethal spot, or even a potentially lethal one.

The fight that follows is equally strange; he fights evasively more than anything else, even when openings to kill the Zealots present themselves. He takes damage from their blood magic that doesn't require mobility. Ultimately, though, enough spilled Vileblood has a disorienting effect on others, and it gives them room to escape. John is all but unceremoniously tossed over a shoulder as Vash makes his escape, and he does not stop or look back until they've found a sufficiently obscured alcove to hide in.

When it appears to be safe enough to rest for a time, he turns to John, still seeping emerald rivulents through tears in the orange jumpsuit those kidnapped at the Farm wear.]

Are you alright?

[Because it's not like he's the injured one here, obviously. It's fine.]

[necrolord]

[ The worst thing— the most deeply humiliating, stupid thing— is that he'd ever struggle, at the end. What would he be afraid of? Pain? Death? He is pain and he is death. He let Darth Whoever carve his eyes out of his head and laughed about it. He had a whole bit he was going to do, singing through the crucifixion.

But he feels blind and boxed in, like this. He feels human and alone. When they grab him, he flinches.

It's almost as frustrating to be rescued as it was to be put in that corner.

The whole thing is a mess, and he can't even take relief in the familiarity of bloodshed, because he can barely sense the thalergy and Vileblood keeps speckling his vision out. The new guy grabs God like a sack of potatoes. By the time things quiet down, he sinks back against the wall like he doesn't trust himself to stay upright under his own power, and he surveys the bleeding-green wreck of a guy before him.

His senses must be more fucked than he'd thought, because what he sees makes less than zero sense. ]

Never better. [ His voice comes a little rough, a little clumsy, which matches the general state of him. ] You?

2

[survivalthroughhate]

Maul limps slowly through the heart of the zealots' territory. He was here last year and had no desire to end up within these walls again, but here he is. So Maul does what he always in these situations: he survives. He won't be made into some eviscerated wreck on a table being drained of blood like what happened to Wesker. The image of that is still in his mind.

Still, this place isn't all bad. When he sees John stumbling down the hallway, a rather satisfied expression comes over his face. "Look at that. A god on the run. How delightful."

[necrolord]

This is his luck. It's everybody's favorite guy, here to make a good day better.

"It's a very elegant tactical retreat," says God, balancing on one foot to keep his bare one off the burning floor. He leans against the wall to steady himself and only winces about it a little. "Plans within plans, believe me. Is this where you come for a good time?"

Voice | un: justafarmlad | backdated to the clusterfuck that was in October, after Oscar met with Pa

[justoscar]

[It was late in the evening by the time John received this direct from Omen transmission and a what is now probably familiar ping on the edge of his awareness. The muddled soul melange that was Oscar, tired and reeling from dipping too deep in the parts of himself that weren't really Him asked the question aloud and trusted Diggs to find a way. ]

Hey, Dad?

[His voice was small-- and yet still, on the verge of just passing out, he was capable of being a manipulative little shit. Oscar needed John to pay attention, in a positive manner.

He had done the same with Pyrrha just earlier that night, and recalled their conversation about Bonds. Technically, in a weird way, this wasn't entirely incorrect. ]

I hope you're at home. I need a hand.

all my homies love backdating

[necrolord]

[ From the other side of the line comes a punched-out sound of surprise. It worked: Oscar has his attention.

There is a long moment's pause, then an exhale. ]

Sure. You know I'm good with those.

[ Wry as hell, but amused with it. This is the kind of bullshit he can appreciate. ]

Come on over.

[justoscar]

[There was no initial response-- except, within moments, a winged creature dropped down from the sky. Large enough to carry a teenager, closer inspection revealed the creature to be the ordinarily pint-sized chimera with both the features of a bird and a deer that typically trailed some ways after Oscar with their presence known if not seen. Diggs was in battle-mode, with its crown of antlers fully realized and the wary carriage of a creature that was both willing and able to use them, landed gently in front of the gothic mansion with their Sleeper safe on its back. The gleaming emerald glow of Oscar's Aura shimmering reflexively as the boy shifted enough to warily eye the man who would be God.

Clearly, God wasn't the only one who had an Encounter that night.

Oscar's coat was singed where the flames of Paul's fear-driven rage had burned through, blackened edges of fabric frayed and the streaks of soot darkening his cheeks. He cast John an uneasy, sheepish look that faded quickly.

He could handle pain-- but he didn't like putting on an act.]

Um. Hi?

WINTER MOURNING. cws: apocalypse, cannibalism, death, NtN spoilers.

[necrolord]

You come out of the water.

It's bad water. All around you is the wreckage: bits of houses, bits of cars. Whole trees are beached like so much driftwood, stripped skeletal by some great wind. You have to claw past the bodies to get up onto the beach. Bits of hair and gristle stick to you like seaweed.

It isn't snowing. What falls is ash, spiraling gently down from a muggy yellow sky. The whole shore is frothy and filmy with it. You can let it gather in your hair like dandruff or scramble away towards shelter, but if you know what this is, you know it won't matter.

Up the beach is a crude shelter, tarpaulin and driftwood, with the greasy smoke of a campfire rising black through the fallout. At its mouth sits a man in wet rags, head drooped like he's unconscious or dead: except that he stirs, opens familiar black-hole eyes, and looks at you.

God says, "Shit time to come sightseeing."

[lipochrome]

The only reason Kiriona can parse any of this is because she's seen Rocky, like, twenty times. They have cars in Rocky. The cars don't usually end up in the ocean.

Kiriona knows she's not supposed to be here before she even finishes crawling out of the ocean, choking for air not because she needs it but because the feeling of water stuck in her mostly-inert throat is really uncomfortable. She shakes herself dry as best she's able, but her jacket is far too waterlogged, so she strips it off at the risk of someone seeing the exposed gash across her neck. At least her chest is still covered.

And, as it turns out, the person up ahead won't be overly bothered about her wounds.

"'Sup, Dad?" Rhetorical question. Nothing good; he looks even worse than she does. "Thanks for the full-frontal family photo album experience."

[necrolord]

God peels himself upright with obvious effort, and he pats a patch of dirty sand beside him, like she should pull up a seat. Under the tarp is everything he has: some bundles of clothes, some bundles of meat for the fire. An old mattress in patchwork shades of filth. Curled up on it, dead asleep, is a woman with golden hair.

"Make it our Christmas card," he rasps. John Gaius looks as bad as he ever has, which is a fucking feat. He shuts his eyes like he doesn't want to see her looking at it all.

after everyone else (perhaps)

[butnotyet]

There's a man who's come out of the water, and his hair is grey with ash, plastered wet to his skull, and the only thing that's really bothering him about this little predicament is that there is no sword belted at his hip, now, because — because he's not old enough for it, yet, is he?

Augustine — A—? — wipes the poisoned saltwater from his eyes, flicking it idly into the sand at his sodden feet, and quirks one eyebrow up at God, even as he starts to do his best to wring water from the rest of his clothes, impatient to be dry again.

"Hell of a time to act like that's the best you can do for a shelter," he remarks, idly enough — which is to say, not idly at all; which is also to say, tremendously idly, in tone and vibe. "Aren't you even going to seal it, my Lord?"

(Which version of him is this? How old is this man? Is he a Saint, yet? Does he know how lethal the very air is?)

His gaze is not turned outwards, to the water or the landscape, to the wreckage of a world and an Age of Humanity; it is focused, almost entirely, on the man sitting by the fire, with only fragmentary glances stolen at the golden-haired form on the ground beside him.

(... does he care?)

[necrolord]

The man comes out of the water, and for one bare moment, John Gaius starts up with a flash of something raw and frightened on his face. There is a flicker of a name in his mind, before he can register the way Augustine stands, the way he speaks, the color of his eyes. The grace of a Lyctor.

He relaxes onto the grimy sand, eased back into what might be comfort or might be despair.

"Didn't think of it," he says, aiming for rueful, but his voice is too rough and his shoulders too weighed down: he only looks exhausted, destroyed. "I was having a bad day."

He is, evidently, continuing to have a bad day. He could raise stone or sinew to keep out the ash, to hide himself from the wreckage; but he doesn't.

Instead, God shuffles aside a little, leaving a stretch of sand open in invitation. Annabel sleeps like the dead behind him. He looks past Augustine, out at the ruined sea.

"Welcome home."

cw: emeto

[hearthebell]

L doesn't feel well enough to swim, or well enough to stand. When he does, slogging ashore past bodies in roughly the same stage of decay, nausea has him doubling over and retching. It might not be strange for anyone else, but he hasn't lost the contents of his stomach over a corpse since he was a child.

That, more than anything, tells him that something is terribly wrong. Brushing away the soft and smudging ash, knowing that it will do little if anything to change a set course, he makes his way toward the smoke.

It's a Mourning. I could change this. The thought occurs to him almost immediately, and is tempting for several moments. Though his skin burns and dizziness lends a drunken weave to his steps, bringing his shins in bumping contact with stiff and rotting flesh, he likens the notion to screwing with a crime scene at the very best.

At worst, it would compromise everything he could possibly learn from the man in the makeshift tarpaulin shack. He has a feeling he knows who he'll find there, and as usual, there is some merit to L's gut feelings.

Not that his guts are in great shape. Better not to think about what's happening to him, or what he could do to save himself as the ash rains down on the just and the unjust alike.

"On the contrary, I've found that those are the most illuminating ti-"

His own throat cuts him off. It's hoarse and raw and gags on a hair-trigger. The cold and aloof dignity he'd had in mind when he formed the words, literally looking down on John as he would speak them, unravels. His legs are no good, here. He needs all of his strength to dry heave into the ash around his knees.

[necrolord]

There's a petty satisfaction in this: finally, Lazarus walks this ruined strip of memory as himself. The boy comes to him waterlogged and staggering, sickening, unraveling before John's eyes. He stands separate from the golden-haired woman who sleeps curled in their shelter, her back turned to all of this, one smooth and perfect shoulder rising and falling with her breath.

Laid out beside her is the meat for the fire, bloody and raw, skin still on. When they get hungry they will eat it with their hands. He doesn't look at it; all his weary attention is on Lazarus, on the terrible arch and hitch of his back as he tries to vomit.

"Take your time," says John, hoarse himself. But his throat will mend. There's no urgency in the way he rubs ash from his face, the way he sits forward in the grimy sand; it can only hurt him for a little while. "Happens to the best of us."

[unchoose]

The sky is a wrong colour. He looks at it a while, treading in the filthy sea, before he puts his hand over his heart and murmurs to himself. It sounds like a prayer. He can make anything sound like a prayer.

It's a long swim to shore. He cuts through the water like a pelagic creature until he can put his feet to the bottom, and then he walks, skirting waterlogged debris until he has to tread over them with light, sure steps. He traces the arc of the beach to the only sign of anything still living here, dripping poison that touches him not at all.

When God looks up at him, he smiles, gently, and rakes his hand through his dark, damp curls.

"We have to stop meeting like this, Teacher," Paul tells him, "It's a bad habit."

[necrolord]

John doesn't recognize him, at first. This Paul glides through the memory with an unreal ease, uncanny against the wreckage, untouched as a ghost. He only catches motes of familiarity: the way Paul moves across sand, the stillness of a body perfectly at rest, the way he says Teacher.

The scene clashes with that even heartrate, that too-easy smile. He isn't dying and doesn't start. John exhales a hitching sigh, and shuts his eyes as though the smile hurts him.

"Not sure about that," he says, voice gone rough with the latest round of ashfall. He sounds sick; he looks sick. It won't kill him. "Makes for a dramatic entrance."

There is space beside him under the tarp, looking out at the froth of the ocean, the downward spirals of the ash. He tips his hand in invitation. There is nothing to do and nowhere to go, here. A golden-haired woman is curled sleeping behind him; to the side of her is the meat he's cut for the fire, bundled wet and raw and fatty.

"Pull up a seat."

Writ across his shoulders, through the ash-creased lines of his face, is the deep and grinding shame. He did not want Paul to see this.

eventual cws: graphic radiation sickness, gas injuries, mercy kill

[unsheathedfromreality]

The water is bad.

The air is worse, thick with ash, reeking of decay. Illarion--alive, sighted, beautifully symmetric in his outward self--gasps for it anyway as he struggles from the rotting sea. He can't not, even as he regrets it instantly--even as he feels the sting of pyrolyzed plastics and organic volatiles deep in lung and air sac and breathing bone. An awful reflexive inhuman cough wracks him before he can catch it back; there is blood on the back of his tongue. Gas, he thinks dimly, already reaching for the mask hung round his neck.

Stars and saints look kindly on the Dog Keeper and his gifts, even if the filters are wet and the seal doesn't quite fit. Better a struggle to breathe than drowning in his own blood.

The awful little shelter catches his attention, once he's got it to spare. Even through fogged and watering eyes the figure inside's familiar and the shrike can't help a rasping laugh. The mere noise turns his stomach.

He gulps back acid and trudges up the ashy dunes to present himself to God.

"This is she?" he croaks by way of greeting, gesturing around them. Ironic echo of a meeting on another, fairer beach in another, fairer month. This is the world that died? In war, he assumes; in the Conflagration that Imperial philosophers put so much stock in.

He doesn't know the worst of it. Nephele was--would be--spared one horror Earth wasn't; no one considered whether a nuclear reactor might be used to birth weapons. No one needed to, in a world that held the Throne, where loose fragments of its divinity could be used to the same ends.

He doesn't know he's already dead.

[necrolord]

There's something darkly funny about it, one dead man dragging himself through this landscape in a gas mask and the other killing time around his cooking fire. John thinks Big Bird might even get the joke. He is quiet, shoulders bowed and ash in the creases of his brow, as the shrike struggles up to him through the fallout.

"This is her body," he says, with the edge of something in it— pride or protest, like he doesn't want anybody to see her like this. Like he doesn't want this to be all she is to anybody. It's his body, too, but this is back before he could get his head around that; this is back before he learned to be anything other than a dead man and a dead planet.

He shifts to make room around the fire, in silent invitation. The oily smoke of it still coils up between them. Curled sleeping behind him is a woman with golden hair; bundled beside her is the meat he's cut. Thighs, mostly.