14 . winter catch-all

[necrolord]

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.

Comments

eventual cws: graphic radiation sickness, gas injuries, mercy kill

[unsheathedfromreality]

The water is bad.

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.

[necrolord]

There's something darkly funny about it, one dead man dragging himself through this landscape in a gas mask and the other killing time around his cooking fire. John thinks Big Bird might even get the joke. He is quiet, shoulders bowed and ash in the creases of his brow, as the shrike struggles up to him through the fallout.

"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.

[unsheathedfromreality]

He looks, first, at the blonde and fragile form lying slack in careless sleep. This is her body, except he's witnessed this part of her before--through Omen eyes and stranger ((senses))--so he looks away to the dead beach and dead sky. To the heaps of organic wreckage, waste of an ecosystem's treasure. To the ash that still sifts down on him, piling up on his shoulders and hair.

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?

[necrolord]

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."

[unsheathedfromreality]

"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."

[necrolord]

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."