ᴛʜᴇ ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ ᴜɴᴅʏɪɴɢ (
necrolord) wrote in
deercountry2022-11-26 11:27 am
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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.
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.
WINTER MOURNING. cws: apocalypse, cannibalism, death, NtN spoilers.
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."
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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."
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"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.
cw: alcoholism
John shuts his eyes; Kiriona understands the impulse. She keeps looking out at the sea. It reminds her of something. She's not sure what.
"Mmm. What's Christmas?"
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"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.
after everyone else (perhaps)
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?)
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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."
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He's hesitating, if not quite stalling, as waves mark the passage of clock-free time since God's gesture of invitation. Maybe it's the casualness of the setting, or of God's response; maybe it's the presence of His (angelic?) Bodyguard, sleeping of all things — his gaze catches on her again, and he licks his salt-cracked lips to ask is she allowed to do that, my Lord? — only to swallow the words back, awkwardly folding himself up into the edge of the cleared sand instead.
Fragments of a centimeter are all that separate them, now, but they do remain separated; Augustine is not feeling quite so bold as to assume that God wants to be touched by one of His disciples, in this strange beachside wreck of a hovel of a shelter.
"My Lord," he says abruptly, all of five seconds after fully settling into place, the words nearly exploding from him like water from a poorly-blocked spigot, "why are we here? Were You waiting for me?"
(It's not the worst thing he could have said; he might have asked why this was supposed to be his home, after all.)
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"We're here because I'm always here, aren't I," he says, and it comes out startlingly petulant. It seems to surprise him, too, and so he goes on— "I still dream of it, you know? All the time. I've never stopped."
This isn't news to anyone who loves him. It brings things into focus, a little; he remembers being coaxed to sleep with her smooth fingers on his face. He remembers the time after, in the fresh absence of her. None of them knew what to do about it. Augustine had hovered, miserable at his misery, and John had loved him for it.
"Yeah," he decides, finally. "I was waiting for you. Nothing really started again, until you."
He shuts his eyes, and reaches up to run a hand over his ash-streaked face. Like he's bracing himself to wake up, or to have a proper conversation, but he never quite gets there: he just stops with his brow pressed into the crook of his palm, like that could hide him from anything.
"That's all this is. Waiting out the last spasms... waiting for it to feel still."
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Augustine's reply comes so hard on the heels of God's Words that he very nearly outright interrupts Him. "If You hate it so much, my Lord, then why — why wait, why stay, why not just —"
Go, says the shape of his lips, the crease of his brow, but his voice is absent, silenced by the temerity of what he is — very nearly — doing now: his hands hover, with all the grace and stillness of a pair of hummingbirds, a breath away from God's shoulder, from His hand that covers His eyes.
Fragments of a centimeter separate them, even now.
"You've changed it," Augustine says, in a tone of voice that is somehow both his traditionally laughing form of reasonable and every bit as plaintive as any man faced with God's fallibility might feel. "Before, I mean — I remember —"
He is silent; his hands still their fluttering, momentarily, as he blinks several times, swallowing hard on bile or fear or a resurgence of memory (or, perhaps, all of the above); whatever he was going to say, originally, is gone now.
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cw: emeto
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.
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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."
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He spits weakly into the sand, naturally slumping forward to rest. When he realizes this is happening, he presses a hand at his side, pushing himself upright. It's exhausting, just prolonging the inevitable for one who can't mend. He wipes his mouth, having nothing cleaner than a radioactive sleeve covered in affected water and ash, but somehow anything is better than clinging specks of vomit on his face when he's talking to him, here, at the crime scene.
His bloodshot eyes linger on the shelter and the sleeping form within, trying to memorize it through the dim, distant sense of panic. Uniquely, if this is a crime scene, it's the first time a pile of unidentified meat is actually the least interesting thing about it to the detective.
It's Sodom and Gomorrah, Noah's Ark, and the Garden of Eden, perhaps in that order. Nothing about this situation is contributing to a clear and impartial mental state, though, so L focuses on what he does know and can never forget: people like him weren't supposed to make it here.
"And the rest of us."
It's a parry for honor's sake, while he struggles to understand how quickly his body is failing him. As usual, knowing in theory differs greatly from knowing from experience.
Aware of the effects of radiation sickness, L realizes that a quick death is probably the greatest possible mercy for someone whose veins are actively liquefying. He also realizes that he's unlikely to get that from John.
He steadies his breath, plants a foot and pushes himself to his feet. He looks less steady than he did before, which is truly saying something, but for the moment, he's upright.
"Your favorite poem. I've concluded... you misunderstood."
He gets all the words out, but his voice is quiet and creaky. He wonders if it was heard at all, and whether he hopes more for a quick end or healing prompted by curiosity.
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"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."
cw: delirious self-harm
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."
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cw: emeto, blood
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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."
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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.
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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."
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"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."
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"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."
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eventual cws: graphic radiation sickness, gas injuries, mercy kill
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.
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"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.
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This is her body. This is a charnel house, a mass funeral, a battlefield grave. This is--Illarion shakes his head, once, trying to dislodge a notion that's gotten stuck. This is--something requiring solemn witness. (Why? He can't catch hold of the thought; he only knows that it is proper.)
(A living shrike is never all in the visible world, flat as he might make himself. Most of Illarion's bulk isn't subject to the hail of radiation cutting through his meager three-dimensional cross section. Most of the swift-dividing cells in his bone marrow and gut are safely out of danger.
But his brain isn't.
His heart isn't.)
"She is--" beautiful, would be an abominable lie. The shrike turns his eyes from the sea and the smeary fog that seems to obscure it. That seems to obscure everything, though it can't hide John's too-dense form from his sight. It cannot hide the woman asleep behind the Monarch who bound her.
His heart skips a beat and clenches in his chest as he looks on her again. Like the clutch of intense paternal worry--like a spasm of pity--
(like the caul around the beating muscle filling up with fluid,)
--and he makes a low noise of dismay. "She looks cold," he says, lapsing to Shriketongue without thinking.
Then he shakes his head again--fiercely--and has to reach up to steady the gas mask. Only after that half-conscious ritual does the implicit invitation click; he ducks beneath the tarp, takes a graceless seat by the fire.
It's too warm already, just being that close to the flames. He unbuttons the collar of his uniform.
"How--how did it come to this, o Lord? What hurt her?" What could do this?
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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."
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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."
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