deercountry | eternalised, objectified

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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