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

[hearthebell]

Crime scene. It's a crime scene. L sets his brain to it like a metronome, on the off-chance he's still strong enough to act on the urge to change something in this mourning.

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.

[necrolord]

Incredibly, John's expression opens from steady grimness to dawning surprise. Some of the weight comes off his shoulders as he looks Lazarus up and down, tracing the way he shivers, drawn in by the cascade of a body in rapid decay. He can watch it happen on a cellular level. He knows how much it hurts.

"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

[hearthebell]

L's toes dig into the soggy, polluted substrate, rooting himself so that he might sway without falling. The world wavers and weaves around the Emperor and his bride, who remain a constantly clearer focal point. Historically, as long as he has one of those, the detective just doesn't quit. He shakes his head grimly, water from his sopping hair dripping down his neck. It is, strangely, not the first time he's realized that he'll be dead by the time he's dry.

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."

[necrolord]

It's bad to watch. He sits in patient, exhausted half-pity while Lazarus tries to rouse himself back to coherence. It takes heavy, dragging moments. The blood catches the greasy firelight, bright and uncanny against the dirty greys of the beach.

At the reveal, John exhales long and slow. He murmurs, low under the hiss of the fire:

"You think I don't know that."

He sits back, and drops the theorem. His company resumes dying. John doesn't expect Lazarus to keep his feet long; he settles in and watches the man decay.

"You're missing most of the story. I didn't start the fire... I'm just the guy who pulled the trigger, right at the very end. But I did pull the trigger. Here's what it got me."

His mouth slants into a wry, humorless line. His eyes are heavy with anguish. Around them, the ash keeps falling, and John's voice is still soft under it.

"It'll go on like this for a long time. I won't keep you for it."

cw: emeto, blood

[hearthebell]

L stays standing longer than most would. Maybe he cheats and buys himself a few extra seconds by ensuring his gangly frame is well-balanced. He doesn't fall over onto his face, just follows the general course set by his knees buckling and everything above them taking turns knocking into the ground, a stone, some other corpse.

He ends up on his side, curling his limbs inward towards his twisting, cramping stomach. He's able to raise himself to cough and heave, and, emptied out already, his vision dims as the gray sand is streaked in thick, dark red with an uneven, clotted texture. He reaches out toward one of larger chunks with detached curiosity, wondering if it's an undigested morsel of food the other purges somehow missed, but his slender fingers withdraw almost immediately from the bloody, gelatinous, unidentifiable piece of him.

The next time he needs to vomit, he doesn't have the strength to lift his head. Afterward, still damp from the irradiated seawater and wearing hideous evidence of internal bleeding, he can't stop shivering.

He reaches toward a piece of John's life, a piece of this mourning. He thinks of little edits, big edits, something he can pry into the shape of at least killing this pain. And it's still in his grasp to do it; as sick as he is, as confused as he's becoming, he can still change what's here in order to escape it.

Too weak to lift his face out of his own paleblood, he is tempted. When the pain becomes so great that he can't stay silent through it, the Emperor might notice a sudden pinched gathering at the edge of this vision, some warm enticing glimmer of a whole list of changes that L could always deliver on while here, but chose not to. He chooses now, as well, opting for the rough wet sand and the tortuous garments on his skin and the moans that might as well be coming from someone else, for all the ability he has to control and modulate them.

It's all real, after all. An admirably preserved crime scene, and he loves it, for that. Perhaps even with a love that's more than love, because doesn't he know, too, what it's like to love something so much that a person becomes a little bit of a monster?

"How long-"

Something strange happens to the world. L's looking somewhere else when he can see. He believes he's lost time, and would realize at once that it had been a seizure if he was in a place to objectively view all the pieces alone and together, instead of in this strange jumble.

"How long did you know...?"

[necrolord]

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.

[hearthebell]

Consciousness grows increasingly difficult to hold onto. Every cell in his body is too exhausted to be angry, let alone fight the inevitable. All that's held together until this point is giving up and tugging at his own overextended strength of will. And still, Alecto sleeps, John sits, and L slips.

To anyone but a necromancer, it would be difficult to discern the exact point L stopped being able to see, hear, and comprehend. A necromancer might know that the coat of irradiated ash completed his blindness when John said "chance". A necromancer might also know that his ears, and comprehension, lasted until just after John said "you can die like it."

Reddened and unseeing, his open eyes will continue staring at John and his hut, presumably until this earth's ghoulish new "nature" takes its course.