deercountry | 14 . winter catch-all

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."

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)

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."

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."

"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?"

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."

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."

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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