eternalised, objectified | january catch-all

[terriblepurpose]

Who: Paul Atreides, Ortus Nigenad, Mercymorn the First and you
What: January catch-all
When: January
Where: Various
Content warnings: Body transformation, memory alteration

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[necrolord]

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.

[acidjail]

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?"

[necrolord]

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.