God takes the responsibility Paul threw at his feet like a gauntlet, once, and it is another victory to count among all the rest strewn around them like haruspecy. God, who is a man, looks through the radiance of a stellar ghost, and his eclipsed eyes have never been so hideous as they are when he says It hurts more to be both. A man who is one third less a god than he was the last time he spoke to Paul looks out to sea, and he gives his third reprieve.
"A choice," Paul says, wonderingly, and the slivered metal around them trembles in echo. "Is that what this was?" He asks, as unseen lethal spectrums open inside the salt of his blood. "Is that what this is?"
Even as he asks - even as salt catalyzes to acid, as every dark interior of his body is alight in caustic brilliance - even as the scales fall from his eyes - he knows. He's known since he crawled out of the waters with the question in his hand.
"I was a choice. I was a choice to end all choices. I was born to be an end. But I wanted not to be. I wanted to be for anything. To be for them. If I couldn't be me, I could be for them. But it always ends like this. I see that. I see what I am." A tooth chews at bone in clenched fist as his voices echo with God's own gentleness. "No one else does. No one else ever does. Not even you."
He unfolds each awful word like opening petals, each a marvel of new understanding. He gleams in the night like a revelation himself. On the threshold of the choice that this is, he brings his own empty, shining hand to God's shoulder in consolation. He brings himself to his knees on the sand at his left side.
"Everything I reach for, I tear apart - and everything I look at dies - and I can't stop, and nothing - ever - stops me." He says, in a grief so wild and vast it cannot be held in any voice, the great, heaving horror of it tender in his mouth, and he does the only thing that's left to him.
The tooth changes in his hand even as he brings it up and under hallowed ribs. It sinks in clean and deep, a perfection of violence that pierces and severs and consumes.
"Make me stop," he says, only as himself, "Please, God, make me stop."
cw: radiation, death-seeking, violence
"A choice," Paul says, wonderingly, and the slivered metal around them trembles in echo. "Is that what this was?" He asks, as unseen lethal spectrums open inside the salt of his blood. "Is that what this is?"
Even as he asks - even as salt catalyzes to acid, as every dark interior of his body is alight in caustic brilliance - even as the scales fall from his eyes - he knows. He's known since he crawled out of the waters with the question in his hand.
"I was a choice. I was a choice to end all choices. I was born to be an end. But I wanted not to be. I wanted to be for anything. To be for them. If I couldn't be me, I could be for them. But it always ends like this. I see that. I see what I am." A tooth chews at bone in clenched fist as his voices echo with God's own gentleness. "No one else does. No one else ever does. Not even you."
He unfolds each awful word like opening petals, each a marvel of new understanding. He gleams in the night like a revelation himself. On the threshold of the choice that this is, he brings his own empty, shining hand to God's shoulder in consolation. He brings himself to his knees on the sand at his left side.
"Everything I reach for, I tear apart - and everything I look at dies - and I can't stop, and nothing - ever - stops me." He says, in a grief so wild and vast it cannot be held in any voice, the great, heaving horror of it tender in his mouth, and he does the only thing that's left to him.
The tooth changes in his hand even as he brings it up and under hallowed ribs. It sinks in clean and deep, a perfection of violence that pierces and severs and consumes.
"Make me stop," he says, only as himself, "Please, God, make me stop."