deercountry | 14 . winter catch-all

"You look worried," he says, low and rueful. As though this isn't a circle of hell, a declawed god and a tortured teenager in somebody's creepy pressure cooker. "Come on. I've seen worse. We'll find the corn dogs yet."

He shifts Oscar's weight on him and weighs the options. With contact, he can still read the patterns of thalergy and thanergy in this human body as clearly as he can see the floor under their feet. Whatever they've done to him, they can't strip all of what he is; he's hazy-eyed, not blind.

"Any guess where they've put the leg? I can fix you up with something, short-term, but it won't be quite the same style."

He doesn't want to tip his hand by fucking up something as basic as a limb regrowth, especially with Sleeper anatomy fighting him the whole way down. Might be safer to stick with the basics.

Jurgen Leitner, [ he echoes, thoughtful. It gives them something easy to say while he works and while Oscar pulls a brave face about it. ] Doesn't ring a bell. Love the style, though, I'm always more willing to listen to a guy who knows what he wants.

[ The arm is mended. John looks back down at him, matches that bright gaze with his own dark eyes. ]

Never Mind, you think? I'll confess I'm not his biggest fan.

"I've been in pretty tight squeezes, too." Oscar said quietly, hanging on tight but also prepared to bail if needed. John didn't look to be a man that was blessed with great physical strength-- and Oscar wasn't about to make himself a burden right now.

"This time was like the last time," He explained, thinking of his torturous stay on the Whale. "I haven't seen much anything outside this room."

It was harrowing to admit. He didn't like the weight of relative helplessness sitting on his shoulders.

"Do you think they have a storage room somewhere? I don't want you spending what you don't have in case we get in trouble. We'll really need it, then."

...I haven't really paid attention to that stuff.

[Oscar admitted, slowly daring to look in that direction once more. He couldn't fully read John's dark gaze, but the acknowledgement of his warning was reassuring. At least now he didn't feel like he was just throwing rocks into the ocean.]

The magic here worries me, so I haven't looked too much into it. I'm more concerned about gardening, and making sure my family has enough food for the winter.

And, after Gerry's warning? I didn't want to mess with anything that looked too weird. Especially if it looked like a book.

"No." He offers up the agreement like a palmful of water in the desert. "We suffer under the tyranny of the linear."

He squeezes God's shoulder, dares to give it the sort of light, reassuring shake of comrades in a bolthole. The jostling of the body to stir up the spark of life left in it.

"Except for here," he says, with terrible good humour, the sort that always falls short of the eyes, that exists as an alternative to worse options, "But this place builds itself on exceptions."

He drops his hand from God's shoulder to the sand, but instead of leaving it to linger there, he shifts himself sideways to bring them close enough that he can carefully settle his lean arm around John like a mantle. It's a shockingly presumptuous gesture, but he makes it as though it's the most natural thing in the world.

"Being alone was some of the worst of it." As if the woman who isn't a woman on the sand isn't there; she might as well not be, for what he means by it. "I thought I'd gotten used to it. I had, I think. Resigned myself, at least. But then I came back here, and I..."

He breathes out, ribs shifting, contracting. Breathes out, and they spread like wings.

"Do you remember that time in the kitchen, when you stayed with me?"

[ Oscar looks back at him, something a little steadier in it, and John exhales. ]

Can't fault you for that.

[ He claps the kid on the arm, a sort of there, that's done, and steps away. The shirt's a loss, but at least he won't go home hurting. It's funny, remembering he's on the books here as a healer. ]

Your friend catches fire again, you can let me know. I'll be here.

[ Apparently. For all that he hates it; for all that it's more than he can bear; for all that he knows there's a boy melting down, half a town away, and that it's too broken to mend. Everything is.

But maybe, sometimes, he can still play Jesus as consolation prize. ]

"The bombs," Illarion echoes dumbly. His fingers fumble on the fastenings of his coat, gone numb and insensible. He dips his chin far as the mask will permit, obsessed with the task, anxious with it.

It's too hot. Patches like heat rash (far worse than that) already mar his chalk-white skin.

"I know--bombs, lord. Artillery. Demolition. Worse-- But nothing..." His voice trails into silence as he stares around them again. Then he resumes struggling with his coat, removing it only with great effort.

And only with great effort can he reach to offer it to John, shy and trembling and vulnerable in his terrible confusion. "For her," he says and gestures. "It's hard to die. Cold. She needs-- she needs comfort."

Paul slides an arm around his shoulders, and this jars John free of something: there is half a moment's startle from him, a hesitating bewilderment. There is a hideous vulnerability in the crease of his brow. It unwinds from him in a slow, barely-there exhale, a man sinking to resignation by degrees. The silence hangs for a long moment, gentled only by the falling of the ash.

"I'm sorry about Lazarus."

John's never been good at apologies. He's always ducking out behind levity or collapsing them under the weight. Even this is a dodge, a sentiment crudely misplaced: it isn't what Paul is carving open for them, isn't the tender heart of the question. Still, he looks out to the heaving and ruined sea, the sand gone dingy grey.

"He got the same view."

Lazarus could've stopped it happening. John could've made it quick. Neither of them would have: it felt like breaking a vigil.

He's put this vigil over everyone, in the end. He's been keeping it for ten thousand years. Being alone has been the worst of it.

"I remember."

He wants to say he won't be spending anything, that he doesn't work like that, that he's God. Now's clearly not the fucking time. John caves to the about forty other things he's worried about right now, and keeps carrying the limping, one-legged teenager.

"Let's go poking around."

He tips his head to Lenore, and she shivers out ahead of them, all smoke and wasps's wings. She can play their scout. They'll know she found something if the screaming starts.

"This is my first visit, so you'll be our tour guide. If trouble finds us, leave it to Lenore."

He looks at the total incomprehension in the shrike's face, the baffled fright with which he regards the ashes, and John exhales long and slow.

"I'm glad," he says, too softly. There's a note of something hard in it, flinty like insistence. "We never should've known them. This is all they were built to do."

The bird struggles out of his coat, and John can see him rotting from inside and from out. He can see the skin and what's under the skin, even if he can only gauge the shapes by hideous intuition, by the same borrowed instinct he'd fumble his way through the River. It'd be like operating on a Beast, trying to halt the inevitable here. It'd still be inevitable.

"This is not a place of honor," he says, like a joke. Like a gutturally sad one. John scoops up a few fingerfuls of damp ash, lets it tip from his hand in ugly clumps. "There isn't any comfort here."

He takes the coat with fallout on his fingers, and looks back at the bird as though he'll find something in the muzzy eyes of the mask. Annabel sleeps, still and thoughtless, beside them. John puts the coat down. His hand comes up instead to skim Illarion's shoulder, the slim lines of his neck, the ugly straps of the mask where they meet his temple; his fingers hesitate there, at the parting of the feathers. There's an ugly, pinched longing in his face.

Softly, so softly, he says: "This place is only for the dead."

Oscar didn't look forward to that screaming-- but, if it meant ensuring their safety, it's a possibility that he would not balk at. Holding fast to the Necrolord himself, Oscar was just glad that feeling was starting to return to his hands.

"I dunno, John." He said quietly. "All the halls kinda look the same, complete with the bad lighting and no windows. I'm not sure that being tour guide is as easy as you're saying."

He was just a teen, after all. Sure, he had the memories of an ancient, body hopping wizard, but he had none of the control or the lived experiences. That, and he didn't know the first thing about what he was doing in regards to blood magic. Striking a balance was hard-- and he was realizing that he would need to rethink his methods with every awkward step that they took.

"It really does have an ambiance." He is being doggedly, relentlessly casual about this, like he will pry a decent joke up from the overheated grates of the floor. "That classic slasher-film energy. I respect what they've done with the place."

They start finding doors. John catches in a doorway and hesitates there. What's inside is bad by any reasonable metric— a lot of disassembled bodies, parts of people— but that isn't what holds him up. The problem is that he has to fumble and grasp for an awareness of whether all that flesh is still alive, when he should be able to know from a planet away. Now he can barely figure it out from fifty paces.

"No survivors." He doesn't think to tell Oscar not to look. He just squeezes his shoulder and continues them on. Would've been a nightmare, if they'd found more fucked-up chained Sleepers: he knows the trouble of trying to shepherd a flock you can't actually handle.

(He might have made it clean, but he would not have left them behind.)

Edited 2023-02-03 16:35 (UTC)

The pass of Paul's thumb over God's shoulder, through his rags, is light enough to be ignored. He doesn't tighten his arm around God, nor does he flinch at the invocation of the name hanging between them.

"So am I," he says, genuinely, "And for more than that."

Paul is good at apology, when he wants to be. He retained the skill of genuine contrition, something that people in his position so often fail to acquire in the first place. He applies fleeting pressure with his draped arm, a tiny shift of weight.

"But that's-" He raises his other hand, sweeps lightly at the air in front of him. "That's pain. That's regret. There's enough of that."

The residual warmth left in God's body bleeds through to Paul's. It's a very human warmth. He feels it, improbably, in the hollow of his throat, and it comes through again in his own voice, like the magic trick of passing a coin from one hand to the other.

"You could have left me to suffer. It was what I deserved, breaking bread with your enemies, inviting them into your house, letting them steal from you. I would have let me suffer. But you stayed. You even helped me, when I asked you to."

The grey phantom of the burn is in his hand, in the rest of him. Once consumed by fire, the ashes never leave the body, even if they cannot be found in the marrow. He flexes his fingers.

"That's what I'd rather remember. That's why I'm here." A pale, gentle smile touches the corner of his mouth, on the far side from God's view. "I want to help you, Teacher. I never stopped wanting to help you - and I tried to. God, did I try. But I've never been very good at letting go of the things I love."

"Will you let me help you, if I ask? Would you trust me with that, if nothing else?" He turns to look at God - at John - again, eyes softly, tentatively green. "Please."

Curious eyes can't help but notice the carnage of mangled bodies contorted into unnatural shapes. Oscar stared for a moment too long, heart and stomach squeezing up towards his throat in the seconds it took for his mind to register what it was that he was viewing. Only John's voice and the squeeze on his shoulder kept him moving-- hobbling step by imbalanced step as they tried find escape from whatever hellish dungeon they were in.

"It'd be a miracle if anyone survived that..."

He trailed, tearing his eyes away from the gore to focus in on the path ahead. The monotonous, continuing pattern of the hallways was dizzying. But, it wasn't like they had options.

"Not one of mine, I hope."

The God jokes get weaker when he's limping along with a kid tucked awkward against his side. They stumble on like that for a while, following the droning thrum of wasp's wings; he orients to Lenore like a compass to true north, drawn along behind her in mindless synchronicity. It's a little eerie, given how she is.

Still. They don't hit trouble; there isn't any screaming. By some genuine miracle— definitely not one of his— they find a storage room, unguarded, and John shuts the door with a low grating metal-on-metal rasp. Inside it, with Lenore alighted and still beside the shelves and shelves of Sleepers' things, John draws a breath of relief.

"Oh, thank the Brothers...."

Oscar groaned at the sight, letting go of John so he could sink to the floor for a few moments of heart-rending quiet in that nightmarish den. They both deserved a break-- Oscar wanted nothing more than to just sleep for a night or a week, but they needed to get out first.

"Just-- just give me a minute?"

He asked breathlessly, knowing full well that they probably didn't even have a minute to spare.

"Our luck may not hold that long."

He sounds grave but not unkind, or at least that's the goal. While Oscar catches his breath, John goes rifling through their captors' prizes. His monstrous Omen stands still as a guardian statue, her great insectoid head swiveling gently to track John's movements.

Paul doesn't flinch, and that's worse, somehow. John can't even feel the willful not-flinch, the tight and fearful control. This sits uneasily with him, and it shows in the unhappy tilt of his mouth, as Paul goes on: I would have let me suffer hits too sure and heavy. It was what I deserved makes his hands go still, like he isn't sure whether to argue it.

He shuts his eyes, at love. When Paul turns to him, that creased pain is still on his face, open and ruined against the composure of a man he hates to recognize.

"There's a lot that can't be helped." With the whole world's carcass torn open beside them, this sounds rougher than he'd like it to. The curve of his shoulder shifts against Paul's hand, tension bunching and holding, but he doesn't draw away. The moment hangs long, and then the tension drops with a long, scraped-out breath.

"But I shouldn't be that much of a hypocrite, right?" It's said like a rhetorical, like a quiet lamentation. John looks at the man beside him, and searches his face— his eyes— for something, for the flinch he doesn't find. He stills, like a man bracing. "You can try."

This is where the flinch comes. It comes as a clutch, an arm tightening around the gathered stillness of John like he can gather it still further, hold him anchored down to a singular point. Something sparks in his eyes, a flint in the dark.

(There's another world, a different world, where empathy would be unkindness enough. To see, to be seen. Such a terrible thing to do, even to such a terrible thing.)

"But there are things that still can be helped." He presses his own voice down low, pinned to the back of his throat. "Here. Back there. Two worlds - and two of us."

The flame-flicker lilt of a smile comes back, amusement sharp and iron, fleeting as smoke: "Almost like fate, isn't it?"

"You belong with your world. You belong to it." But the heat stays, fervent and insistent. "And it is intolerable to me to see you kept from it. I failed you once as your navigator. Would you bear me trying one more time?"

Paul holds warm and tight to him, the way no one ever has, here: the fallout whispers down around them in awful counterpoint, the rest of the world faded pale around this central gravity. He can't bear it. He can't draw away any more than the ash might resist falling.

John leans fractionally closer, into the solid heat around his shoulders, to hear the proposal. There is a stopped-breath moment of incomprehension, something raw and bewildered in his face.

"That's a lost fight from the start." It takes a great effort to say this, heavy and low. "You saw what that got me."

Paul couldn't have failed at something that was never on his shoulders. When the storm came, it was John's storm, everyone else swept along as collateral damage: he can't have to explain that. Not here, sitting in the rotting ruin of his failures.

Funny, Paul thinks. It's funny, the things he doesn't anticipate.

"Hey," he says, in a cadence he hasn't used in years, a cadence that, according to his history, he never truly learned in the first place, the voice of a boy who only ever could have existed here, "What did I just say?"

Then, as though it's the most natural thing in the world, Paul jostles John lightly, a companionable shake of his captured shoulders.

"I don't give up on people. I didn't give up on you." His fingers are pressed too hard into John's upper arm. Not enough to hurt, this time. Not by way of nerves and compressed tissue. "I've seen miracles before. I've brought them out of my own two hands, and I've seen you do the same."

"Believe in me. Just once. Let me do something for you that no one else can. Let me - let this - have been worth anything to you. And when you go home, you'll go knowing that the past can be undone, and the wrongs can be righted, and you can see your purpose through to the end." Paul exhales, and it should be smoke, white and hot, from the mouth of the furnace in his heart. "And you'll know Gideon is safe, here. With me. Isn't that what you want?"

Paul gives him a comforting little shake of the shoulders, all easy friendship. John shuts his eyes like a flinch, as though he's been hit. There is still an awful tensed confusion in his brow, in the miserable set of his mouth.

"Seriously?" For a moment it's unclear which bit this is in reference to, but he presses on, with rough-edged incredulity: "I can give you ten billion reasons."

Something hard solidifies in the slant of his shoulders, the tensing of his arms in Paul's embrace. He twists his fingers into the sand like a knife in a wound.

"The past can't be undone. What's it worth, if you can just—" and here he makes an aborted little gesture, sharp and open, as though sweeping clutter off a table. "There's no righting this. There's never any righting this. There's just finishing it."

He subsides back into silence. The ash whispers down. He is still wound tight as a cornered animal, and still he does not leave Paul's arms.

"I'd like to do at least one thing right." Here is the horrible twist of levity again, that familiar near-grimace to go with a joke. He looks Paul in the eye, as though the black-hole burn of his own can be the punchline. "High bar, I know. Personally, I think that ship sailed a myriad ago. But I don't need another boat trip."

There isn't any hesitation: only that same tight exhaustion, scraped raw.

"There's no undoing any of it. Not what I am, and not what she is."

Their eyes meet. Paul's are only ordinary, in the face of the divine, but they hold John's all the same.

The fire in him doesn't die all at once. It ebbs out of him slowly, doused bit by bit in the empty, aching cold of John's exhaustion. The ebullient certainty he carried with him out of the water collapses in on itself as a paper lantern sags in rain, laying bare its scaffolding under the weight of what it cannot withstand.

There's only Paul left. Older than he was, but it's nothing, next to the ages behind John's eyes. He might as well still be a child, the one he was on that other beach, struggling under the terrible realizations of his own limits. His breath stutters as it draws up in his chest.

"...I know," Paul murmurs, "I know. The tyranny of the linear."

He closes his eyes, a flinch more hideous than his calm, his mouth screwing up into a wounded, unhappy line. Paul turns his face back out towards the sea, and his hand moves tentatively from John's shoulder to the back of his neck, a slipping anchor to keep him grounded.

"It's only - I wanted -"

When he leans into John's side, it's the shameful, shameless curl of someone much younger than he is, even in his callow handful of years compared to John's myriad of them. It's a boy waking from a nightmare and crawling into his parents' bed to tuck himself into the safety of their warmth. He stays there too long, one heartbeat, the next.

"Was there ever anything I could have done for you?" He asks, quietly, eyes still shut. "Anything that would have changed any of it?"

14 . winter catch-all

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cw: glimpse of bodies, gore

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