deercountry | eternalised, objectified

"Ow?" She echoes back, appalled. "Ow? Oh - I'll show you ow, you unbelievable - !!"

With that, she throws herself knee first on the bed, bouncing only lightly before she snatches up the pillow not creased by his head and, for lack of anything harder, begins to punctuate her sentences with it.

"I said, what the fuck, John -" a blow to the chest "- why did I wake up -" she advances with an awkward, infuriated shimmy "- covered in skin -" a feathery thwack to the face "- after I specifically told you not to use your bloody magic fingers on me -"

Her shuffling forward through the mass of comforter and sheets has brought her close enough to slam the pillow against his bare chest with both hands, so she does, glaring so fiercely at him she's near to go cross-eyed, and that's when it's clear that on top of everything else that's so frighteningly askew, so is he.

The wave of her wrath crests and breaks. Her mouth screws up so hard her chin dimples as she glances from one orbital socket to the other.

"What happened to your eyes?" She asks, voice shrunken and unhappy.

She flings herself at him, and John startles the rest of the way up, hands half-raised in hapless entreaty. She barrels right through it to pummel him with a pillow. He plainly did not expect this: she thwaps him right in the face, and he recoils, crowded back by the onslaught like a man faced with a storm. He blinks through every blow as though trying to take in sunlight. He maybe makes a noise.

It puts her nearly in his arms, her chest heaving with life and breath, her face flushed and furious. He is left frozen, his hands hovering an awkward inch between them.

This is, in the moment, the worst question he has ever been asked.

Her eyes are a young and furious blue. There's still a little goop in her eyebrows. Something changes in his face: the marvel and worry creased into his brow darkens with the gravity of something far-off, some distant tide that doesn't fit on his plain and human face. He takes a shallow breath.

"Okay," says John, in the voice he uses when he is stalling. It catches and, for one splintered instant, breaks. "We— might have a lot to cover, here."

His hands touch down light and awkward on her upper arms, and it's not clear whether he's trying to soothe her or hold her off. He smooths the pads of his thumbs over her skin, as though to worry the tacky grime away, then stops.

"I didn't do the skin thing," he says, like he's only just catching up to the accusation. "The skin thing was somebody else. I am not the only skin guy, here. They don't actually take feedback from me."

She was in a car accident, once. She was never able to remember exactly what had happened.

She had been in the passenger seat, watching the countryside roll by. She'd been sitting on a curb a kilometre away from the wreck with her knees pulled up to her chest and blood dripping from her forehead to her jumper. Everything in between had only been a brilliant, shrieking crush of sound and motion. She had to be told later how she'd let herself out of the car and started walking, walking, walking, too small and quiet for anyone to notice until she was already gone.

John settles his hands on her arms like he doesn't know what to do with her, and she feels the same glossy, bubble-headed shock she did then. She feels like fingers right before someone lets go of the rubber band stretched tight around them. Her hands' pressure against his chest through the pillow loses its directed force. She leans into his touch and his breaking voice with a hard, shaking exhale.

"You're not the only skin guy," she says, in disconnected bafflement, "There are - 'skin guys'. In the plural."

Her throat bobs in a swallow, which she distantly regrets, the taste of a fluid she hesitates to call amniotic copper-sweet on the back of her tongue.

"Walk me through it," she tells him, like she has a thousand times.

He watches it roll through her, feels it in the flex of her palms through the pillow. He can't stop looking at her face, her eyes. Whatever is happening in the depths of him rises perilously close to the surface, his throat closed by some great and terrible swell of emotion.

"It's," tries John, but his voice fails him; this goes nowhere. He starts again: "I don't," and then abandons that tack too. For a very bad moment it's clear in every line of him: he's afraid.

His grip squeezes and steadies on her arms. He blows out a long breath, then drops into the tone which uniformly means he is about to say something she will hate.

"I'm not saying it's aliens," he says to her, almost gently, "but it's aliens."

"Aliens," she says, in much the way she said 'skin guys', the protective absence she's enveloped in wobbling but unbroken.

Aliens. Why not? They'll go with the wizardry and the cult and the rest of the end of days. They're a bit past the point of disbelief, however much whatever is left of her academic integrity kicks at it.

The only evidence she has to go on is circumstantial and paltry, with a dozen superior alternative explanations she could come up with if she stopped to think about them, but what convinces her is this: John's afraid before he says it.

She pulls her hands back from the pillow. They stick unpleasantly, but she's had worse things on her hands. Her fingers come to curl below his bare elbows, and they're pressed forearm to forearm, an unbreakable loop. His skin is warm against hers. Good. Familiar.

"Well." She squeezes him back, a touch too hard, fright skittering into her sharp little fingers. "It's like I've always said. Me and my friends would have beaten E.T. to death with hammers."

She knows things are bad when she starts telling his jokes for him.

He thinks she'll hit him again; he thinks she'll scrunch her face the way she does, the way he's used to, in utter distaste. What she does instead is worse.

John's breath hitches in one great, awful shudder of a failed laugh. There is a tremble through his shoulders, an aborted flex of his fingers: he could gather her into his arms and tuck his face against her throat. She'd let him. She is plain and human, brave as hell, and she'd do it because they're friends.

He doesn't. He goes agonizingly still, his expression on the edge of collapse. His throat works for a moment, his thumbs worrying the crooks of her elbows, a miserable aimless fidget. He can't stop looking at the way she looks at him.

"There's the bad news," he says, only a little unsteady in his levity. "Less E.T., more Lovecraft."

His hands still and settle, careful and deliberate. Crowded up too close under the heat of her panicked blue eyes, with no other out, he talks.

"They have a very definite aesthetic. One that I can get behind, honestly, as a fellow skin guy. Do you want me to—?"

He lifts one hand away from her arm, palm open in demonstration; the grime has come away on the pads of his fingers as though magnetized. Where he'd touched her, the skin is pale and clean.

There's a thought she had so fleetingly after she thrust her palms against his chest that it did not register as a thought. What it began to do instead was to loop, like all the worst thoughts, a shivering whispered repetition that is boring through the permeable shell that got her this far.

He's looking at you like he's seen a -

But it's not only the looking. It's the whole state of him. The crushed in wreck of his face, the tentativeness underlying the clinging of his hands. He's talking about Lovecraft and aesthetics in the jagged, jumpy way he gets stuck in when there's something else he doesn't want to talk about, but can't shake.

She's always been a bit perverse. His fragility rallies her where comfort might have failed. She breathes down to the bottom of her lungs, so deep it aches, and her freed arm snakes up so she can cup the back of his neck. She nods.

"No funny business," she tells him, reflexively, probing around the base of his neck for knots of tension. Her fingers are clinical, which means that they're gentle and they're through. Someone once told her in another life she would have made a damn fine pediatrician.

He makes a noise. Her fingers skim the place where she'd hurt him, out on the shitty cobblestone street of somewhere that doesn't matter, with a tidy lance of bone through the brainstem. He isn't mad about that. But he'd forgotten it had been this way: that she'd touched him this freely, crowding into his space with her palm smoothing up the nape of his neck. No reverence, no silent gravity. She just does it.

He tips his head and lets her. The little crease of distress between his brows waxes and wanes. His lips part, but he doesn't provide a comeback, which is dire. Instead, he touches her too.

He thumbs his way up her arms, over her bony elbows, fingers dipping up into the sleeves of her too-big nightshirt. He takes her unoccupied hand and rubs clean the hollows between her fingers, the nailbeds, the creases of each joint. He can see her now as he hasn't seen her since Cristabel died. In the absence of that burning void, she is tiny and radiant, perfectly complex.

It goes on too long. John isn't sure he can scan what funny business means, anymore. She's always been too clever to think he needs this much contact for anything. Still: he strokes his palms over her shoulders, soothing and reflexive, and the scum dries gritty in her shirt. He cards his fingers through her hair and a soft patter of dust falls out of it.

"If I were in charge, locally," he says, as he collects the goop from her eyebrows, "there would be at least fifty percent less slime. Just personal taste."

John's thumbs sweep across her brow, and she lets her eyes slip shut as she works at the first and largest knot with the bent knuckle of her thumb.

Maybe there was a time when she would have called the reverent pass of his hands over her with such shameless intimacy funny business. In university, in the first days, when she was the hard-buttoned-down piercing point of their queer triangle. When she could hardly stand for anyone to touch her at all.

It's been a long time since then, and they were never any good at the sorts of boundaries healthy people are supposed to have. His fingers stay on top of her skin. She doesn't feel the a foreign nudge at her pulse like a cat's wet nose. When he scrubbed her hand clean, she caught his fingers for a moment in hers, tangled like branches.

"It's not the slime I mind," she murmurs, ridiculously, "If it's a good, honest slime. I should go back up and get some of it on a slide before -"

She falls silent. She shifts her legs underneath her so she's more balanced on one hip than the other, knees tucked to the side, a position that demands the bracing of her forearm on his shoulder to support.

"I don't even know if you have a lab."

He loves her for good, honest slime. He loves her for twining their fingers. He especially loves her for wanting to put it on a slide, much as the concept blindsides him: John blinks at her, off-kilter, abruptly chagrined. He hasn't had a lab since Canaan. He hasn't touched a microscope in millennia.

John loops an arm around her, lets her settle the warm curve of her spine against him.

"I have a study full of magic bones," he offers, in his tone of kidding-but-not.

She sinks into the cradle of his arm with a huff that's a pallid mimicry of her best ones, when she's under full steam like a locomotive behind schedule. There's something childlike in the tired splay of her limbs that won't let her gather her indignation to a head.

She pinches the back of his neck, not hard enough to hurt.

"I've never been able to do a thing with those, and you know it." Her cheek rests against the prop of her upper arm. Her hair falls loose over it and spills down to his chest, where she can watch it rise and fall.

"What was that movie we watched back in uni?" She asks, abruptly. "The Nic Cage one, with the numbers...he could see the future in them, or something like that - it doesn't matter. It turned out to have been aliens, in the end. They scooped up his children and whisked them away on an ark, and the Earth was destroyed."

She breathes out. Her hair stirs with it, floats with the faintest charge of static.

"I hated that ending."

It's so easy, the way she touches him. The way she dismisses necromancy like she isn't— won't be— the best in the universe, after him. She could still kick his ass on an anatomy test. He just does things, but Mercy knows them. He watched her learn.

This isn't Mercy, exactly. She pinches him and he makes a little sound of complaint. It's so easy he could laugh, he could break.

"Hell," says John, in genuine and faintly anguished astonishment, "I'd forgotten."

The silence is too big, in the wake of that. It is crowded with things he could say, things she could ask. His throat works with a hard swallow; the hitch of his breath disrupts the steady rhythm of her hair.

He settles on: "This one has more tentacles."

She closes her eyes when his breath ruffles her hair like the stifling wind from an opened oven. The hair on the back of her neck is lifted, although she doesn't know it. The rubber band is closing in.

"The aliens weren't the part of the ending I hated," she says, fetched up on the curb, "I hated that they left everything else."

The ships. The second and third waves that were never going to happen. Melbourne and the bomb and John telling them all, with the most frantic, cornered, fucked up hideous conviction, that it was going to work.

"Before I woke up," with a measured evenness that is so far from herself it almost scares her, too, if there wasn't something else so much worse to be afraid of, "I was having a nightmare."

The silence yawns open like a wound. His fingers catch and clench, unconscious, in her now-dusty nightshirt. He holds on too hard. For one blistering moment, he is angry— too angry to breathe— that this is being done to him. To both of them. Ghosts dangled like carrots and sticks.

But what the hell can he do about it? What the hell is he supposed to do?

"Yeah," he says, finally, too soft and too distant. "I have that one, too."

There's a noise that sounds like firecrackers inside her skull, intermittent pops that go off without rhythm or source, and she thinks, dizzily, of aneurysms, of the bulge and burst of the overstretched blood vessel, the flood of cellular death that follows.

She knows that's not the sound. It's a tattered, flimsy alternative she clutches like a blanket worried down to a threadbare frayed scrap. She twists her head down off her arm and lets her forehead hit John's collarbone as her heart rate picks up all over again, her throat closing around her breath like a fist.

There is nothing that comes after a person dies except a final release of chemicals, a theoretical hallucinatory aurora before the cessation of consciousness.

Her knees on a sticky kitchen floor. Her face turned up with blood on it, blood in her teeth, blood in her hair. Something in her gone electric and urgent, an arc current snapping and incandescent and assuredly fatal.

There's nothing that comes after you die. The thought terrified her, once, when she was young, and the worst thing she could imagine was that would be no more her. It doesn't scare her anymore. When she dies, she'll be over and done, and there will be no her to miss having been - when she dies, there will be no angel of judgment waiting to count out her sins or her graces, no hell to burn in or heaven to covet.

A hard blow to the chest, and before she could start to understand it, another to the head. Just like that. Her breath is coming too fast and shallow.

It isn't her death that scares her.

"John," she says.

"John, I need to know," she says, to her best friend, to the theoretical hallucinatory flood, to the angel of judgment, and she's shaking like reeds in the storm, "Did you make it? Did I save you?"

He feels it roll through her, sees the chemical cascade clear as anything, laid open and simple for him. She drops her head to his chest. John makes a soft sound, low fretful distress, and caves to ugly longing: he curls in around her, bundles her into his arms like a child. He can tuck her neatly under his chin.

"Hey." He turns his face into her hair, rubs an aimless hand over the rumpled place in her shirt, like he can smooth the wrinkles out. "Hey, come on."

It's a horrible question. Amazing how he's thought of so many horrible questions she could ask, and she leads with this one, which he can't really answer at all. He feels so far away from her. He feels too ancient and too big.

"They didn't shoot me."

It's the only thing he can say that isn't a lie. He's pretty sure, anyway. He kind of lost track at that part.

"Good," she says, like glass cracking, "You're the only one of us who still had a chance to make it work."

She still has an arm loose over his shoulder. It falls across the back of his neck as she burrows into his chest and the pillow behind them, tucking herself up into the smallest configuration she can make of her small self. Her hand has nothing to grip but his opposite shoulder, and it grips as hard as her other hand does at the pillow, nails digging in like anchors. She makes a bad, low sound.

"Fuck." A hard, tearing inhale, the water rushing back from the shoreline. "Fuck, fuck, fuck!!"

She cries fiercely. She's always angry when she cries, because she hates the way it feels, all the hot, convulsive loss of control. So she tries to get it all over with as quickly as she can, and that means sobbing like a knife going in and out, her face flushed and ugly and sticking to John's chest.

"Those fucking cowards," she hisses, desolate, somewhere in the midst of it, "Those worthless fucking coward assholes."

Edited 2023-01-13 23:59 (UTC)

His breath catches, hard as though she's hit him, and hangs still and dead in his chest. She folds down so tight and small, juddering against him as a miserable knot of tension. Numbly, wordlessly, he holds her.

There was no one to hold him when he cried like this. The only person left wasn't really a person, and wouldn't have wanted to touch him, and did not know how. He doesn't know how, now that it's happening: he is too aware of the soul in her body and the bones in the earth, the black-hole shadow of Augustine down the hall, and how much of himself he's left dead and sleeping. He is too aware of how long he's failed to make it ever mean anything. It sticks in his throat like bone shards, splinters with her every snuffle and hitch against him.

John shuts his eyes tight, lets her dent his shoulder to bleeding, and says nothing at all.

She does get it over with quickly. The violence of her heaving subsides into tapering hitches, then to a final shivering hiccup. Her nails come out of his shoulder dry, which she thinks nothing of, not seeing the glimmering crescents of transubstantiating blood. She wipes her face aggressively on the pillow's case, so when she wriggles her way far enough back to lift her head to look at him her face is pink and matte with friction.

Her eyes are rimmed in red darker than her pale, tear-spiked eyelashes. They meet the oil spill black and coronal white of his without flinching, without the awareness that a flinch might be called for.

"Okay." She brings her hands up to rake her hair back and twist it into a loose, unbound lock that gets the sticking strands out of her face. "Okay. I'm done."

Like snapping the cover of a book shut. Like it's that neat and easy, which it never is, but it can be for now. She's pretty good at the for now. She twists to rub her still leaking nose on her shoulder, all dignity abandoned, and then unwinds.

"Are you," she starts, uncertainly, and her hand comes up to cup his face.

What did Lazarus say when he stepped out of his tomb? What did he think looking at the faces of his sister and his town when they saw the miracle? It was one of those things she always thought someone ought to have remembered and written down. Did they look at him with this mingled disbelief and grief? Did it feel like she feels now, bewildered and stumbling?

"Are you all right?"

He looks at her like he can drink it in and soak his bones with it: the color of her eyes, the way she runs her fingers through her hair, both fretful and decisive. He smooths a hand down the back of her shoulder, thoughtlessly reverent, aching with something too big to name. She's got her snot on his shoulder and her tears down his chest, and he does not have the first fucking clue where to go from here.

John exhales a breath, startled into a low little sound like pain. He tips his head into her hand and exhales, long and slow. He feels too big; he feels too hideously divine, and her too fragile, like he'll burn her up. He's afraid to touch her wrong, as though she'll see it in him suddenly, and realize.

"I'm," he starts, with no idea of where he's going next. It falls flat into, "I could be worse."

They didn't shoot him. This isn't her first awakening, except in all the ways that it is. But he can't tell her— he can't tell her. He doesn't want to tell her anything at all.

"You've missed a bit."

He doesn't want to be God to her. He wants to stay here forever and pick the slime out of her hair, and remember shit Nic Cage movies, and never have to think about what came next.

eternalised, objectified | january catch-all

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cw: violent gun death, existential dread

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