deercountry | 14 . winter catch-all

Entry tags:

14 . winter catch-all

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.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Incredibly, John's expression opens from steady grimness to dawning surprise. Some of the weight comes off his shoulders as he looks Lazarus up and down, tracing the way he shivers, drawn in by the cascade of a body in rapid decay. He can watch it happen on a cellular level. He knows how much it hurts.

"You just don't quit," he says, soft and marveling. They both speak softly, here, but it doesn't matter. There is no other noise in the world but the hiss of wet firewood, the distant roar of surf, the gentle nothing-sound of falling ash. "I'm impressed."

Lazarus came to him on a beach, once, dying from the inside out. They've played it out before.

John doesn't pretend he needs to touch him, this time.

It isn't the sudden solar-flare punch of healing; he takes Lazarus's ruined body and holds it as it is. This is only a backdrop thrum of power, the quiet grace of preservation. Annabel stirs in her sleep, and makes a little restless sound; John exhales a short breath and regards the body he's stilled in the act of dying. Cytherea would kill him for it.

"Go on."

John closes his eyes as though this hurts him: the sound the shrike makes, the stutter and spasm as his body begins to fail. The bird folds down awkwardly next to him, clumsy with dying.

God raises a hand, thinking to touch him; to help him; to gentle away some of the damage, little as it will matter in a place as deep-fried as this. He stills at the question. He drops his hand.

"People did," he says, finally. "We built a way to kill her... a dozen ways, a hundred... it happened slow and then all at once. We worried about it for so long, you know? We argued it in circles, round and round, but we kept killing her the whole time. The bombs were just the last of it."

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.

Edited 2023-01-11 16:12 (UTC)

Yeah.

[He said tightly, trying to put on a brave face while he squirmed internally. This needed to be done-- but he was hurting and he generally didn't like being touched.

Turning his face away, he pouted.]

Don't fuck with magic books. Destroy them on sight-- that's what my teacher said. He was just a guy, but this was one thing he was serious about.

L's toes dig into the soggy, polluted substrate, rooting himself so that he might sway without falling. The world wavers and weaves around the Emperor and his bride, who remain a constantly clearer focal point. Historically, as long as he has one of those, the detective just doesn't quit. He shakes his head grimly, water from his sopping hair dripping down his neck. It is, strangely, not the first time he's realized that he'll be dead by the time he's dry.

Knowing there's an end in sight is some kind of comfort. His skin is tender and painful to the point where it feels like his own clothes are burning him. His stomach cramps and his head swims with confusion, to the point where it's a growing effort to keep this situation straight.

He shakes his head, again, before realizing that he did already. He could continue to not give up on not giving up a few more times, but the brain-boiling levels of radiation he's been exposed to are probably high enough that he won't even have a latent stage and return to some level of functionality as a dead man walking. That would have come in handy around the time his only real edge in his fight with a planet-killing self-proclaimed god, his wit, is starting to decay along with the rest of him. The ground seems to pull at his heavy and tired body. His ankles tremble as though they're complicit, wishing just as much to make him topple.

He doesn't. Something's been plucked out of line to stop a chain reaction of tiny but devastating consequences. If his skin hurt and his mind buzzed frantically before, it's nothing compared to the sudden gripping notion that this agony could simply go on, racing indefinitely on a treadmill towards elusive, blessed death.

The realization strikes. His body is his enemy more than usual, now that it can keep him caged as it burns. He digs his nails into the prickling side of his jaw, drawing blood with shocking ease. More pressure would probably peel away the skin.

He doesn't waste words when he speaks, not dying any faster but feeling every moment slower. His lungs try to escape his chest with every breath, so he keeps them shallow and careful.

"You are the wind in the cloud."

"We're-- kinda missing the carousels and the corn dogs!"

Oscar fell against John and held fast, trying desperately to cover his surge of panic with sarcastic quips and a disaffected detachment. The floor was hot-- everything was hot-- and he had no Aura to help bolster him while he gripped those thin arms tightly to compensate for the lack of leg.

This was... bad. He hadn't realized quite how bad until he was freed.

Looking up, there was finally no quips in his eyes-- just worry.

"How are we even gonna get outta here, John?"

It's bad to watch. He sits in patient, exhausted half-pity while Lazarus tries to rouse himself back to coherence. It takes heavy, dragging moments. The blood catches the greasy firelight, bright and uncanny against the dirty greys of the beach.

At the reveal, John exhales long and slow. He murmurs, low under the hiss of the fire:

"You think I don't know that."

He sits back, and drops the theorem. His company resumes dying. John doesn't expect Lazarus to keep his feet long; he settles in and watches the man decay.

"You're missing most of the story. I didn't start the fire... I'm just the guy who pulled the trigger, right at the very end. But I did pull the trigger. Here's what it got me."

His mouth slants into a wry, humorless line. His eyes are heavy with anguish. Around them, the ash keeps falling, and John's voice is still soft under it.

"It'll go on like this for a long time. I won't keep you for it."

«That's your fear talking, John, not prescience.»

"Oh — no, please, my Lord," young Augustine protests, reaching over, reaching up, and catching the hand of God on its way to grind poisonous ash ever deeper into His pores. His (not-quite-saintly) hand is slender and pale, long fingers circling around a rich-brown wrist with an easy familiarity and a deeply-hesitant uncertainty all at once; his fingertips meet the flutter of God's pulse with a flutter of their own. "Don't — you're so — you already saved us! You brought us back — you don't have to stay alone!"

«— and abandoned to your fate and your fears, like every other part of this corpse you named the First House —»

"And you don't — you don't have to do all the work yourself, my — John — you could let people discover things themselves," he tries, stumblingly shy over the Name of God held in his mouth. He might be blushing, a little.

(He's so young.)

On the other hand, it might just be the fallout causing the flush, of course.

L stays standing longer than most would. Maybe he cheats and buys himself a few extra seconds by ensuring his gangly frame is well-balanced. He doesn't fall over onto his face, just follows the general course set by his knees buckling and everything above them taking turns knocking into the ground, a stone, some other corpse.

He ends up on his side, curling his limbs inward towards his twisting, cramping stomach. He's able to raise himself to cough and heave, and, emptied out already, his vision dims as the gray sand is streaked in thick, dark red with an uneven, clotted texture. He reaches out toward one of larger chunks with detached curiosity, wondering if it's an undigested morsel of food the other purges somehow missed, but his slender fingers withdraw almost immediately from the bloody, gelatinous, unidentifiable piece of him.

The next time he needs to vomit, he doesn't have the strength to lift his head. Afterward, still damp from the irradiated seawater and wearing hideous evidence of internal bleeding, he can't stop shivering.

He reaches toward a piece of John's life, a piece of this mourning. He thinks of little edits, big edits, something he can pry into the shape of at least killing this pain. And it's still in his grasp to do it; as sick as he is, as confused as he's becoming, he can still change what's here in order to escape it.

Too weak to lift his face out of his own paleblood, he is tempted. When the pain becomes so great that he can't stay silent through it, the Emperor might notice a sudden pinched gathering at the edge of this vision, some warm enticing glimmer of a whole list of changes that L could always deliver on while here, but chose not to. He chooses now, as well, opting for the rough wet sand and the tortuous garments on his skin and the moans that might as well be coming from someone else, for all the ability he has to control and modulate them.

It's all real, after all. An admirably preserved crime scene, and he loves it, for that. Perhaps even with a love that's more than love, because doesn't he know, too, what it's like to love something so much that a person becomes a little bit of a monster?

"How long-"

Something strange happens to the world. L's looking somewhere else when he can see. He believes he's lost time, and would realize at once that it had been a seizure if he was in a place to objectively view all the pieces alone and together, instead of in this strange jumble.

"How long did you know...?"

Edited 2023-01-11 07:27 (UTC)

It starts bad and gets worse. For a moment he thinks the question is a plea, but he should have known better: John exhales a breath with a note of voice to it, a little sound in his throat, wordless disappointment. He would have ended it if he'd been asked. He can answer the easy prayers.

He answers this one: he tells the truth.

"I didn't know until I did it," says John. "I was trying to save her."

For a moment he is silent, and there's nothing between them but the fire and the sounds Lazarus makes as his systems fail. John's throat works with his own building grip of nausea, a passing spell of pain.

"You know what's funny?" It's in his voice, the clench of tension; he turns his face out to the sea. He speaks low and deliberate against the backdrop of softly falling ash, like a man telling a bedtime story. "Ten billion people when the bomb dropped, and you're the only one to die like this."

He doesn't like to close his eyes for these; it makes it harder to know when he's passing out, and he can't hold tight to Annabel through this one. He fixes his gaze on Lazarus, instead, and watches what would be happening to him if he were still human.

"I didn't give anybody else the chance." He says it like insistence, like defense. "It was quick, it was clean. I just reached out and made them all stop. A planet's worth, can you believe it? Nobody should be able to snap their fingers and ice a planet. Only God."

He hitches into a wet cough, but it clears. It always does. He wipes away the speckle of blood in his palm; the ground stains his hands with dark and muddied ashes.

"If you wanted to be here so badly," says John, soft under the whisper of fallout, "you can die like it."

He doesn't make it quick or clean. He just lets it happen. It hurts to watch, all the way to the end.

Edited 2023-01-11 08:05 (UTC)

The smile falls away, although John won't be able to see it. Paul looks at him, at his shoulders, at the golden-haired woman and what John has set aside for them, and his gaze never falters in its softness. Some unarticulated feeling clings to his eyes like a bruise before he blinks against the smoke.

The sand whispers under Paul's weight when he kneels at John's side, facing out towards the ocean from underneath the feeble shelter of the soot-streaked tarp. He takes the world in anew from this perspective: the dead sea and scalded sky, with all the bodies laid down between them.

"So this is when it was," he says, with delicacy tempered by deference to the terrible weight bearing down on the man next to him, king in the ashes, "I didn't know."

John hmms agreement, soft under the wet hiss of the fire. He opens his eyes to look, too, and the ugly dead coastline hurts all over again. His mouth twists with it. He does not look at Paul.

"Not very scenic," he says, because all he can say to that is nothing at all. Then, with a sudden weight of intent, like he wants to be understood: "She was dying for a long time. Cut by cut. Even when it all went up, the throes went on forever. That's all this is."

A spasm of tension hitches in his throat, the shadow of a retching cough. He stifles it against the back of a hand, impatiently thumbs the specks of blood away, and settles in again.

"Wish you could've seen her before. You would've loved her."

Paul turns his head to watch John cough. His fingers curl slightly on his knees, some other gesture suppressed and redirected.

"I would have." The agreement comes naturally. He leans forward and sinks the fingertips of one hand into the sand up to the first knuckle, then pulls them back. They're above the waterline. Nothing rushes in to fill the holes. He rubs the grit between the pads of his fingers as he settles back on his heels.

"Atomics," he says, seeing John out of the corner of his eye, "I can't imagine what you thought, looking at me."

Another ruined beach full of poisoned corpses and an infant star burning like ghostfire. The cosmic irony of it washes over Paul like the waters over the dead here, and he lets his eyes half-lid as it does.

The second gesture is not suppressed. He extends his hand like a man reaching out to a wounded animal, slowly and steadily, to reach for John's heavy, sunken shoulder.

"Or perhaps I can."

He exhales a hah, like it's funny. Paul's hand is warm and gentle on his shoulder, but horribly steady. The boy on the beach, tucking a blanket around him like a cape, did not move like this. John hates that he moves like this, even-handed as a man being God.

"You told me once," he says, heavily, "about a dream."

His brow tightens, voice lulled with the cadence of remembering:

"Ash on the sand... pillars of fire, pillars of salt... and they give you a crown."

There's an implicit question in it, a great stretch of apprehension. He opens his eyes and looks at Paul over the bridge of his extended arm. There is a twist of misery in the set of his mouth, barer now than ever.

Like a truth, like a parable, he says:

"And it still feels just like this."

He drops his gaze, and his hands, to the sand. Clenches his fingers into it, like that'll take the blood off, even through another hitching little cough. He has to blink past the dizziness. This bit never lasts long, but he's always hated it.

"While I still have breath in my body," he says to the sand, with the low gravity of a vow, "I will not let them get away with it. I decided that."

He opens his hands, and the sand comes out in dirty, clotted clumps.

"I've been breathing a long time."

Augustine catches his hand, and John lets him keep it. He doesn't fight that gentle, hesitant touch. It's the dusting of pink across pale cheekbones that does something to him: he's struck with an ugly thrill of memory, Augustine with his hair mussed and his lips swollen, Augustine looking at him with stripped-open reverence. His wrist in the man's grip flexes, miserable at the contact but unwilling to shake him away.

It feels wrong, here, viscerally out of place among the wreckage. This is a vigil, somehow— corpses should be laid to rest—

"It isn't worth it," he says, in desperation. "The whole thing was a mess— a nightmare— what's the point in letting it drag on? This is our clean slate."

That's what the flood is for. If it isn't that, the old sins wiped away, then there's nothing to be salvaged from the end.

"We're here because you're always here," says the man beside him — practically nothing more than a boy, no matter the way middle-age leaves patterns pressed into his skin — and the way the yellow sky lights his eyes, as he glances sideways, is almost, almost as golden as John's eyes were, for such a brief span; as golden as the eyes of the beautiful creature asleep behind them —

(There is something at least as inhuman as her eyes are at their worst, as variably present as the palmaris longus tendon — traced by the light scrape of a thumbnail's edge — when calculated statistically throughout the population John has killed in cold blood, at the end of humanity and in all the days since; there, and gone again, as often as the sun tries to pierce the impenetrable clouds.)

"You still dream of it, all the time; you've never stopped."

They're John's own words, and they might have been thrown back in his face — but they're spoken like prophecy, like it's not Augustine but some sort of oracle here beside him, seeing visions caused by the fumes of a dying world's paroxysms. They are each held and considered, like pieces of a puzzle with no reference image, and set down in place between them with deliberate certainty.

"You can't ever stop remembering."

He twists; he shifts; he resettles, and he's kneeling in front of John, now — but since John is sitting, and Augustine has always been taller than him anyway, the absence of the feeling of worshipful prostration is as sharp as a thorn, as a whole crown's worth of thorns, piercing his flesh and pinning him, on display. Augustine kneels before him, his wrist still trapped in that pale and gentle grip, and then Augustine's right hand is pressed against his face, cupping his jaw, his cheek —

There's no moonlight here; no soul-destroying rattle of wasps' wings, just the muted roar of the ocean, the fitful crackle of the fire, the occasional catch of John's breath in his lungs; and Augustine, holding him, looking at him so thoughtfully.

Perceiving him, or something in him, in his protests —

"Your slate isn't clean, my Lord," he says, as gentle as a caress. "Ten billion lives? You've only dyed the whole page a solid black." He shakes his head — only slightly, not dropping eye contact. "No matter how often you lie to the rest of us, it's time to stop lying to yourself about that."

(His thumb slips, tracing the edge of John's lower lip with far too familiar a knowledge for youth or oracle either one.)

He exhales a hah like a laugh, low and soft. He reaches up to rub his brow, and never mind how it only adds to the streaks of ash between his eyes.

"It's a special time of year," says God to his child, without looking up, "when you ask your parents to buy you an Xbox."

It's the same weary deadpan as usual, which says nothing good about the usual state of him. But he scrubs the dirty pads of his fingers back through his hair, as though trying to rouse back to wakefulness, and says:

"It's a celebration of a beginning."

And there's the irony, because all this looks like is an end.

Augustine sits before him, slides slim fingers up to fan out beside one oil-black eye. John looks at him in breathless stillness. It's at the twist of the knife that he flinches hard, eyes shut and shoulders hitching, a whole-body buck of distress. But he doesn't pull away; he turns his cheek further into the gentle curve of Augustine's palm, makes a soft noise of misery like a man pressing a bruise.

"My slate's not clean," he agrees, but doggedly, like he can salvage this. "I'm not asking for forgiveness."

He can't. He knows that like he knows the shape of his own soul. This fucking town, this nonsense afterlife of blood and gods and children, all it seems to want is for him to want it. He won't take it. It feels every inch like a trap.

But he still—

"I couldn't go on like this," he says, low and cracked, against the tip of Augustine's thumb. "I couldn't build anything like this, if I'm only ever this. It's all ashes and more ashes. Let me dream something else."

He's always been good at running from his mistakes. It's what he's done since the start.

Magic books, huh.

[ Oscar turns away like a kid preparing for a shot, so John makes it simple: he reaches out, plain and gentle, and touches his arm just above the wound. The kick of healing is a bright flare of nothing, sharp and citric, and the skin knits itself cleanly shut. ]

All magic books? What's the story there?

[The healing injuries itched under John's touch, and Oscar did his best not to squirm and recoil away. Not watching helped-- much like it would for a kid, indeed.]

Gerry didn't give me a lot of details,

[He explained, reaching out with his other hand to gently rub Diggs snout. The omen, now returned to its smaller form, hovered nearby and kept a watchful eye on John. Both boy and omen were alike in being careful... although, they could perhaps be a little moreso.

Oscar continued:]

All he said was to burn any book that said it belonged to the collection of Jurgen Leitner on sight. He was one of those guys who liked heavy metal, wore all black and these big, heavy boots, and always had his hair dyed black. He even helped me dye mine, once.

[Frowning at the bittersweet recollections of one of the first adults he had trusted outside of Remnant, Oscar finally looked up at John. His hazel eyes were bright and serious, even in the dim lighting.]

The book this time said it belonged to the Archivist. I don't know who that is, and I had told my friend to burn it anyway.

...Turns out they didn't.

Paul has always sought to be a good listener. He listens now, faint creases of sorrow touching the corners of his mouth, his eyes, like the marks left behind by once folded paper. He presses his thumb down when God talks about his old dream, and traces a small circle as the sand falls from his palms.

"I didn't think you remembered all of that."

When was the last time he spoke so softly to anyone outside of his private chambers? A question so imprecise even his memory falters at first inquiry. Was it when he last spoke to his mother? A stray word to his sister when she still had ears for him?

Immaterial. He's always been too much of a solipsist when it comes to wonderings like that one.

"It has been a long time." Since the old dream on the beach, since the older dream on this one, since God set himself on a path of vengeance against the perpetrators of this grand murder. "That part, I still can't imagine. Being able to see a future...it isn't living it, however vividly you may paint it. You don't know the journey at its beginning, and by the time you've followed the path far enough to understand it..."

He breathes out.

"History has its inertia. People see their leaders at the crest of a flood and imagine that they are masters of its movement...they don't know that they are as swept away by it as everything else." He offers God a pallid, aching smile, with none of the easiness he brought with him at first. All of that is set aside. "And inside each of us is our own flood of history. We can't be other than we are, however it...whatever it costs us."

John exhales, a barely-there brush of air that doesn't catch. He raises his head, as Paul speaks, to regard him. Takes in the lines of his hands, of his eyes, the weight on his shoulders and the thin cant of his smile. It's another glimpse of the familiar, sun through the clouds.

It answers the question he hadn't asked: whether Paul got his crown. Whether it ruined him. Whether they were always going to be the same, in the end, clawing among their separate ashes for anything like satisfaction.

"Whatever it costs us," he echoes, bruised and low. It sounds almost like an apology. "There's never any going back."

Consciousness grows increasingly difficult to hold onto. Every cell in his body is too exhausted to be angry, let alone fight the inevitable. All that's held together until this point is giving up and tugging at his own overextended strength of will. And still, Alecto sleeps, John sits, and L slips.

To anyone but a necromancer, it would be difficult to discern the exact point L stopped being able to see, hear, and comprehend. A necromancer might know that the coat of irradiated ash completed his blindness when John said "chance". A necromancer might also know that his ears, and comprehension, lasted until just after John said "you can die like it."

Reddened and unseeing, his open eyes will continue staring at John and his hut, presumably until this earth's ghoulish new "nature" takes its course.

There's a murmur, a mindless croon of hushing, a there, there if ever there was one, and the way he kneels before the Man who Became God, the way he frames His face, it should be sexual — it certainly has been, often enough before — but that which studies John, inhuman, through Augustine's eyes, looks at him with an uncle-cousin's gaze instead; not paternal, and not patronizing, but more distantly benevolent a relation, perhaps, looking at a younger member of the flock who's just pulled approximately the dumbest fucking stunt of the century.

"You never ask for forgiveness," he observes, as almost-idly as the knife's-twist a moment before, or now. "'I pardon him, as God shall pardon me'... Have you ever considered that you should ask? Forgiveness isn't earned; there's no predictable price you can simply pay-as-you-go to accrue it on your desired schedule, then collect on demand — it isn't even about having it; being forgiven does not give you permission to repeat the offense, after all... No, it's about the journey, not the destination, O Lord wracked by guilt and nightmare. You must be a person who embodies compassion, generosity, remorse, love — oh, any number of virtues, really — along with doing your level best to make amends, whenever possible — not just that, but also not repeating past mistakes — and even then, you might never be forgiven."

Three men kneel before John Gaius, overlapped in time and space and a single body, and all of them know him — to varying degree — and all of them love him — to varying degree — and he could kill any of them, in less than a heartbeat, and all three know it and none of them flinch from his gaze: not the youth he built to suit his narrative of the Resurrection, not the Saint who has known and loved and hated him for a myriad, not even the man who is no human at all, and has the sense and history and morality of a creature meant to live ten thousand years.

(Not even the fourth man, hidden somewhere behind the others, seen more in the shadows that they cast — the man whose life ended just beside him, the man who never failed to believe in him — the man who told him that his golden eyes looked cool —)

"And yet," as light and soft as the feather weighed against one's soul after death, "'I say unto you: ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and the door shall be opened, yea, even unto you — for every one that asketh receives, and he that seeketh finds, and to him that knocks it shall be opened.'"

Maul considered that for a moment. He could work with a situation like that, despite knowing John likely wouldn't keep his end of the bargain if push came to shove. Maul's natural distrust of everyone around him would serve him well if he had to have this pseudo-god accompany him.

"Alright," he nodded. "Come along then. Keep your eyes open. If you can rot any of those zealots, I suggest you do so if one makes an appearance."

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Page 3 of 4

14 . winter catch-all

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

cw: delirious self-harm

no subject

no subject

no subject

cw: emeto, blood

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject