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]

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.'"