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 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.'"