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.