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

[unchoose]

This is where the flinch comes. It comes as a clutch, an arm tightening around the gathered stillness of John like he can gather it still further, hold him anchored down to a singular point. Something sparks in his eyes, a flint in the dark.

(There's another world, a different world, where empathy would be unkindness enough. To see, to be seen. Such a terrible thing to do, even to such a terrible thing.)

"But there are things that still can be helped." He presses his own voice down low, pinned to the back of his throat. "Here. Back there. Two worlds - and two of us."

The flame-flicker lilt of a smile comes back, amusement sharp and iron, fleeting as smoke: "Almost like fate, isn't it?"

"You belong with your world. You belong to it." But the heat stays, fervent and insistent. "And it is intolerable to me to see you kept from it. I failed you once as your navigator. Would you bear me trying one more time?"

[necrolord]

Paul holds warm and tight to him, the way no one ever has, here: the fallout whispers down around them in awful counterpoint, the rest of the world faded pale around this central gravity. He can't bear it. He can't draw away any more than the ash might resist falling.

John leans fractionally closer, into the solid heat around his shoulders, to hear the proposal. There is a stopped-breath moment of incomprehension, something raw and bewildered in his face.

"That's a lost fight from the start." It takes a great effort to say this, heavy and low. "You saw what that got me."

Paul couldn't have failed at something that was never on his shoulders. When the storm came, it was John's storm, everyone else swept along as collateral damage: he can't have to explain that. Not here, sitting in the rotting ruin of his failures.

[unchoose]

Funny, Paul thinks. It's funny, the things he doesn't anticipate.

"Hey," he says, in a cadence he hasn't used in years, a cadence that, according to his history, he never truly learned in the first place, the voice of a boy who only ever could have existed here, "What did I just say?"

Then, as though it's the most natural thing in the world, Paul jostles John lightly, a companionable shake of his captured shoulders.

"I don't give up on people. I didn't give up on you." His fingers are pressed too hard into John's upper arm. Not enough to hurt, this time. Not by way of nerves and compressed tissue. "I've seen miracles before. I've brought them out of my own two hands, and I've seen you do the same."

"Believe in me. Just once. Let me do something for you that no one else can. Let me - let this - have been worth anything to you. And when you go home, you'll go knowing that the past can be undone, and the wrongs can be righted, and you can see your purpose through to the end." Paul exhales, and it should be smoke, white and hot, from the mouth of the furnace in his heart. "And you'll know Gideon is safe, here. With me. Isn't that what you want?"

[necrolord]

Paul gives him a comforting little shake of the shoulders, all easy friendship. John shuts his eyes like a flinch, as though he's been hit. There is still an awful tensed confusion in his brow, in the miserable set of his mouth.

"Seriously?" For a moment it's unclear which bit this is in reference to, but he presses on, with rough-edged incredulity: "I can give you ten billion reasons."

Something hard solidifies in the slant of his shoulders, the tensing of his arms in Paul's embrace. He twists his fingers into the sand like a knife in a wound.

"The past can't be undone. What's it worth, if you can just—" and here he makes an aborted little gesture, sharp and open, as though sweeping clutter off a table. "There's no righting this. There's never any righting this. There's just finishing it."

He subsides back into silence. The ash whispers down. He is still wound tight as a cornered animal, and still he does not leave Paul's arms.

"I'd like to do at least one thing right." Here is the horrible twist of levity again, that familiar near-grimace to go with a joke. He looks Paul in the eye, as though the black-hole burn of his own can be the punchline. "High bar, I know. Personally, I think that ship sailed a myriad ago. But I don't need another boat trip."

There isn't any hesitation: only that same tight exhaustion, scraped raw.

"There's no undoing any of it. Not what I am, and not what she is."

[unchoose]

Their eyes meet. Paul's are only ordinary, in the face of the divine, but they hold John's all the same.

The fire in him doesn't die all at once. It ebbs out of him slowly, doused bit by bit in the empty, aching cold of John's exhaustion. The ebullient certainty he carried with him out of the water collapses in on itself as a paper lantern sags in rain, laying bare its scaffolding under the weight of what it cannot withstand.

There's only Paul left. Older than he was, but it's nothing, next to the ages behind John's eyes. He might as well still be a child, the one he was on that other beach, struggling under the terrible realizations of his own limits. His breath stutters as it draws up in his chest.

"...I know," Paul murmurs, "I know. The tyranny of the linear."

He closes his eyes, a flinch more hideous than his calm, his mouth screwing up into a wounded, unhappy line. Paul turns his face back out towards the sea, and his hand moves tentatively from John's shoulder to the back of his neck, a slipping anchor to keep him grounded.

"It's only - I wanted -"

When he leans into John's side, it's the shameful, shameless curl of someone much younger than he is, even in his callow handful of years compared to John's myriad of them. It's a boy waking from a nightmare and crawling into his parents' bed to tuck himself into the safety of their warmth. He stays there too long, one heartbeat, the next.

"Was there ever anything I could have done for you?" He asks, quietly, eyes still shut. "Anything that would have changed any of it?"