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

[necrolord]

This Augustine is too young. Too young to get it, too young to know it from experience. He'll remember, at some point, and then that'll be the end of this earnest fumbling. John can't lean into the hand which hovers uncertain by his shoulder, waiting as he is for it to fall.

He misses this Augustine. He misses the man who got shot. He misses his Augustine, the one with God's handprint seared into his skin by moonlight, who already knows what it means to languish in the wreckage of something you can't take back.

"It'll change," he agrees, but it sounds rote. "We'll change it... you and me, and the others... we'll build something here, but it won't be—"

He breaks off, in choked frustration. Annabel stirs a little in her sleep. John scrubs the hand over his face again, then drops it, and looks at Augustine with pain tight in the lines around his eyes.

"Do you know what I hate," he says, with that same too-human plaintive note to it, "the worst part of it, really? It's still spasming. It's never felt all the way dead. You only ever knew the death... but I remember the dying."

They are abruptly in the shadow of another conversation: this bewildering cartography, this invasion force.

"I can't ever stop remembering."

[butnotyet]

This Augustine is too young; there are scars and creases missing from his face, something too-carefree about the restless ranging of his form — wasting energy that could be used more gainfully elsewhere, costing calories that he never could quite take for granted — but.

His eyes are no longer fixed on the form of God, before him, beside him, beneath his hovering hands.

His eyes are not fixed on the golden-haired inhuman beauty tucked away in the cave-like shelter behind God.

His eyes are fixed on the sea from whence he came — from whence they all came, each and every person who came to see John Gaius on the beach — and as he lets out a careful breath, his lips shape an M... but whatever other phonemes might have followed are silent and shapeless.

"I remember fixing it," he says, distant and slow, slower by far than anything else he's said since washing up on the beach. "Or — trying, anyway, I — "

His hand is on God's shoulder; he looks down at it, suddenly, startled and wondering when that happened, wondering how many other times they've had a conversation like this, or even this conversation —

"Have you ever thought about writing down a memoir? You could always teach her," teacher, "too," with a halfhearted nod toward the creature behind them.

[necrolord]

Augustine touches him, and John sags into it, a moment of mindless gravity. He stays there, listening to the fumble and catch as Augustine does not quite remember. He shuts his eyes again; he looks back to the sea.

"She's heard it all," he says. It's an easy confession, and a cowardly one, because he's making it to the wrong version of the man. This young Augustine looks at him so differently than his, open and unguarded. His Augustine is only ever unguarded when there's the weight of self-destruction in the giving of it, desperation in the offer. "But she doesn't understand it. None of them would. It'd become scripture, and they'd pantomime the stories... but to really know it, they'd have to know the dying, not the death."

He leans, cruel as it is, against this Augustine's bony shoulder. Feels the living warmth of him, the furnace-intensity of his fused and broken souls. The ash won't take him, but still he can't have this for long.

"Better to let it be dead," he says, too softly. "This part is mine to keep."

[butnotyet]

He takes the weight, without complaint — not as if it's a gift, but more as if it's as senselessly natural as the (missing) weight of sunshine.

(Has he renamed the sun, yet, as it hangs on the other side of that poisoned-yellow sky? Has he told them, yet, that he is the sun? Maybe his is the weight of sunshine.)

Augustine turns, unguarded still, to regard the God who Became Man, leaning against him; his expression is the same sort of calmly-quizzical it so often had been, in the first days after the Resurrection, tripping around a rearranged planet off-balance from the missing weight of his own memories, like an unanticipated massive haircut, and gives God a tiny, half-shy smile, uncertain in the face of such a profound — and confusing — half confession.

(His eyes are very clear, from so close up, as he clumsily offers adoration to the divine by meeting John's blackened gaze.)

«Is it really so much better, John, to have your greedy secrecy enshrined in your scriptures instead?»

"Enough of us remember what it is to die, my Lord," he murmurs, in the tiniest demurral. "History is always alien to those who learn it, but empathy finds its routes for understanding even so."

[necrolord]

He turns to take the offered openness, the easy cant of Augustine's neck and shoulders, gentle without fear. The smile just about kills him. Augustine never smiles like that, anymore; he hasn't for a long time. Maybe since Alfred.

The murmur in his head makes it so much worse.

John looks away, a touch too sharply, like he's been stung. He chews the inside of his cheek, frets aimlessly with his hands, rubbing again and again at the dirty creases of his face.

"You'd think, right?" he says, distress simmering under the levity of it. "But I couldn't make anyone understand— not really— not without exhuming the grave again and again, and even then, they'd only ever know its corpse. It'd kill me along the way. It nearly did, the first time." This is the first time: ash and empty horizons, and Augustine's earnest, uncomprehending little frown. "I can't— I couldn't."

He wants the Augustine who'll get it; he dreads the moment this one closes off. No matter what, he loses something.

[butnotyet]

«That's your fear talking, John, not prescience.»

"Oh — no, please, my Lord," young Augustine protests, reaching over, reaching up, and catching the hand of God on its way to grind poisonous ash ever deeper into His pores. His (not-quite-saintly) hand is slender and pale, long fingers circling around a rich-brown wrist with an easy familiarity and a deeply-hesitant uncertainty all at once; his fingertips meet the flutter of God's pulse with a flutter of their own. "Don't — you're so — you already saved us! You brought us back — you don't have to stay alone!"

«— and abandoned to your fate and your fears, like every other part of this corpse you named the First House —»

"And you don't — you don't have to do all the work yourself, my — John — you could let people discover things themselves," he tries, stumblingly shy over the Name of God held in his mouth. He might be blushing, a little.

(He's so young.)





On the other hand, it might just be the fallout causing the flush, of course.

[necrolord]

Augustine catches his hand, and John lets him keep it. He doesn't fight that gentle, hesitant touch. It's the dusting of pink across pale cheekbones that does something to him: he's struck with an ugly thrill of memory, Augustine with his hair mussed and his lips swollen, Augustine looking at him with stripped-open reverence. His wrist in the man's grip flexes, miserable at the contact but unwilling to shake him away.

It feels wrong, here, viscerally out of place among the wreckage. This is a vigil, somehow— corpses should be laid to rest—

"It isn't worth it," he says, in desperation. "The whole thing was a mess— a nightmare— what's the point in letting it drag on? This is our clean slate."

That's what the flood is for. If it isn't that, the old sins wiped away, then there's nothing to be salvaged from the end.

[butnotyet]

"We're here because you're always here," says the man beside him — practically nothing more than a boy, no matter the way middle-age leaves patterns pressed into his skin — and the way the yellow sky lights his eyes, as he glances sideways, is almost, almost as golden as John's eyes were, for such a brief span; as golden as the eyes of the beautiful creature asleep behind them —

(There is something at least as inhuman as her eyes are at their worst, as variably present as the palmaris longus tendon — traced by the light scrape of a thumbnail's edge — when calculated statistically throughout the population John has killed in cold blood, at the end of humanity and in all the days since; there, and gone again, as often as the sun tries to pierce the impenetrable clouds.)

"You still dream of it, all the time; you've never stopped."

They're John's own words, and they might have been thrown back in his face — but they're spoken like prophecy, like it's not Augustine but some sort of oracle here beside him, seeing visions caused by the fumes of a dying world's paroxysms. They are each held and considered, like pieces of a puzzle with no reference image, and set down in place between them with deliberate certainty.

"You can't ever stop remembering."

He twists; he shifts; he resettles, and he's kneeling in front of John, now — but since John is sitting, and Augustine has always been taller than him anyway, the absence of the feeling of worshipful prostration is as sharp as a thorn, as a whole crown's worth of thorns, piercing his flesh and pinning him, on display. Augustine kneels before him, his wrist still trapped in that pale and gentle grip, and then Augustine's right hand is pressed against his face, cupping his jaw, his cheek —

There's no moonlight here; no soul-destroying rattle of wasps' wings, just the muted roar of the ocean, the fitful crackle of the fire, the occasional catch of John's breath in his lungs; and Augustine, holding him, looking at him so thoughtfully.

Perceiving him, or something in him, in his protests —

"Your slate isn't clean, my Lord," he says, as gentle as a caress. "Ten billion lives? You've only dyed the whole page a solid black." He shakes his head — only slightly, not dropping eye contact. "No matter how often you lie to the rest of us, it's time to stop lying to yourself about that."

(His thumb slips, tracing the edge of John's lower lip with far too familiar a knowledge for youth or oracle either one.)

[necrolord]

Augustine sits before him, slides slim fingers up to fan out beside one oil-black eye. John looks at him in breathless stillness. It's at the twist of the knife that he flinches hard, eyes shut and shoulders hitching, a whole-body buck of distress. But he doesn't pull away; he turns his cheek further into the gentle curve of Augustine's palm, makes a soft noise of misery like a man pressing a bruise.

"My slate's not clean," he agrees, but doggedly, like he can salvage this. "I'm not asking for forgiveness."

He can't. He knows that like he knows the shape of his own soul. This fucking town, this nonsense afterlife of blood and gods and children, all it seems to want is for him to want it. He won't take it. It feels every inch like a trap.

But he still—

"I couldn't go on like this," he says, low and cracked, against the tip of Augustine's thumb. "I couldn't build anything like this, if I'm only ever this. It's all ashes and more ashes. Let me dream something else."

He's always been good at running from his mistakes. It's what he's done since the start.

[butnotyet]

There's a murmur, a mindless croon of hushing, a there, there if ever there was one, and the way he kneels before the Man who Became God, the way he frames His face, it should be sexual — it certainly has been, often enough before — but that which studies John, inhuman, through Augustine's eyes, looks at him with an uncle-cousin's gaze instead; not paternal, and not patronizing, but more distantly benevolent a relation, perhaps, looking at a younger member of the flock who's just pulled approximately the dumbest fucking stunt of the century.

"You never ask for forgiveness," he observes, as almost-idly as the knife's-twist a moment before, or now. "'I pardon him, as God shall pardon me'... Have you ever considered that you should ask? Forgiveness isn't earned; there's no predictable price you can simply pay-as-you-go to accrue it on your desired schedule, then collect on demand — it isn't even about having it; being forgiven does not give you permission to repeat the offense, after all... No, it's about the journey, not the destination, O Lord wracked by guilt and nightmare. You must be a person who embodies compassion, generosity, remorse, love — oh, any number of virtues, really — along with doing your level best to make amends, whenever possible — not just that, but also not repeating past mistakes — and even then, you might never be forgiven."

Three men kneel before John Gaius, overlapped in time and space and a single body, and all of them know him — to varying degree — and all of them love him — to varying degree — and he could kill any of them, in less than a heartbeat, and all three know it and none of them flinch from his gaze: not the youth he built to suit his narrative of the Resurrection, not the Saint who has known and loved and hated him for a myriad, not even the man who is no human at all, and has the sense and history and morality of a creature meant to live ten thousand years.

(Not even the fourth man, hidden somewhere behind the others, seen more in the shadows that they cast — the man whose life ended just beside him, the man who never failed to believe in him — the man who told him that his golden eyes looked cool —)

"And yet," as light and soft as the feather weighed against one's soul after death, "'I say unto you: ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and the door shall be opened, yea, even unto you — for every one that asketh receives, and he that seeketh finds, and to him that knocks it shall be opened.'"