16 . spring catch-all

[necrolord]

Who: John Gaius and company.
What: Important conversations, old ghosts, bodyswaps.
When: March into April
Where: Trench

Content Warnings: Tagged in headers as needed. Note all the usual warnings of this character.

Comments

[necrolord]

"My necromancy is something else."

He drops his hands, and seems to drop to some degree of resignation, too: his tone is weary, serious.

"Funny how power works, right? When a guy has too much, it's always too easy to use it... And the local atmosphere doesn't help." He tips his head to Trench, in the broad sense, around them. "Makes things erratic... unreliable. That has to be a hassle for everyone who can shoot lightning, bench press cars, the usual.

"You need the right kind of body and the right kind of soul, for necromancy. You're short on the second, and let's be glad for it. Rule of thumb, necromancers don't do lightning... we only deal in death."

When you hand someone the ability to stop every heart in a kilometre radius, no one can be that surprised at what a slip-up looks like.

[wannasmash]

It's strange watching his body speak to him in the way Mr. Aizawa does after a particularly grueling day of teaching class: old and tired in a relatively young body. (But he knows John isn't anywhere near young, and remembering how he learned this from Paul is sobering.)

"It's not really lightning. The energy just sort of needs to go somewhere, like a too-full cup. But I haven't shocked anyone... I'm a Warmblood, so whatever the 'blood weather' does isn't too bad."

That's what he's taken to calling it, the fluctuations month to month that make people anxious, affectionate, or just weird. But all this pales next to what Midoriya really worries about:

"So that's why you call it a... haunting." Does he think I killed a bunch of vengeful spirits?

He looks at the palm of his (John's) hand and remembers that empires are built with the deaths of others. He also remembers the origin of his Quirk. It was inadvertently created by a supervillain. Like Midoriya, he too accumulated power and granted multiple Quirks to his science experiments. This was why Midoriya was mistaken for a monster back home when he gave up trying to hide his extra powers.

He says in a small, quiet voice, "But isn't it that you also deal in life?"

[necrolord]

Blood weather is a charming phrase for it, and John softens a little at that, amused. The moment is still and quiet as Midoriya frowns down at John's plain brown hands, and as John watches him, holding two sets of destructive power.

Handing his out doesn't bear thinking about. Maybe that means he should be ready for it, someday. Maybe he'd watch some other guy nearly dig their fingers to the soul of the planet and get slapped down for it. The concept feels very far away, and makes him so goddamn tired.

"Sometimes."

He touches Midoriya's fingertips to his temple, as though he can touch the spirits— the fragments?— imprinted on the body.

"We can heal. We can perceive the soul, the essence of a person... we can talk to them after they're gone."

[wannasmash]

No one responds to the gesture. In visual media characters use gestures as stances, or people to use them for concentration, but it doesn't affect the vestiges hovering at the edges of perception (one a bit less "solid" than the rest).

"You could be doing so much good, bringing life instead of death..." he murmurs. "We need to find a way to switch back."

Here's the tricky bit. Awkwardness of having a different body aside, does John want to give up having two sets of power? Granted, Midoriya's Quirk is difficult to use. He learned that the hard way. Furthermore, the vestiges would harry John every step of the way. But, Midoriya surmises, one doesn't rule an empire for ten thousand years without being persistent.

Midoriya counts on John's lack of knowledge about his Quirk to prevent himself from panicking. John isn't the only one who can hardly bear to think about a worst-case scenario.

[necrolord]

John doesn't flinch at the implication he's been wasting his power on vengeance, much as the subject has hung so loudly unspoken these past few months. He does look up, his eyes two deep shadows in Midoriya's face, with an air of deep exhaustion.

"I've done that bit," he says, of bringing life. "I've sworn off resurrections."

Still. He drops his borrowed hands, and splays his palms again like a man giving up without a fight.

"I'm with you. Any cursebreaking ideas? I'll hear them."

[wannasmash]

("Hey, just what do you mean about resurrections? Are you messing around with corpses? Hoping to make bigger better humans, huh? Well, I got news for you--" "Shut up a minute!")

"Not undead, no..." Midoriya says, oblivious to the bickering going on inside John's head. He just thinks John is touching his own head to check that everything is where it's meant to be. He knows necromancy can sense bodily processes like that. "I meant healing. Which is why I thought you might have more ideas about how the body works than me. My Quirk doesn't heal or rewind or anything like that."

Just a bunch of odd comic book superpowers in addition to the voices he never talks about with anyone he's met in Trench. He gently and experimentally rolls his shoulders. He's technically a Darkblood now, isn't he...

"I don't know if our Omens switched too. Uh... your Omen... won't attack me, will they?"

He levels slightly wide eyes at John-in-his-body. The insectoid horror was a force to be reckoned with on the beach. Midoriya remembers aiming air blasts at her as covering fire for Paul's mad dash across the black sand.