deercountry | o5 . bone house mingle!

Entry tags:

o5 . bone house mingle!

Who:

necrolord and CR!
What: Several teens move into the horrible necromancy mansion, and sometimes they bring their friends.
When: Early March.
Where: Bone House in Gaze.

Content Warnings: Skeletons, discussions of death and grief, violence where marked, vomit where marked. Note all the usual warnings of this character.

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A body crawls out of the reeking, gore-slicked sea. Broken black armor covers it everywhere except for the slippery, pale caul wrapped around its head, a thin membrane it tears off with its nails and leaves to dissolve into iridescent foam in the shallows. From a great distance, a self-watching-self observes its progress up the shore, its slow rise to carefully set feet. The way it opens an unslit hand and contemplates the thing it has brought with it, out of the cold, deep places where this body had dreamed.

The wreckage of a canvas tent is where the body curls up, knees tucked to chest, sitting underneath a black-blood stained shred of cloth still hanging limply from a snapped pole like the battle standard of a vanquished army. It faces out to the sea it came from in the drowning light just after the setting of the sun, the polluted waters shimmering with strange refractions of unspeakable colors.

Everyone is reborn new, their blood purified, their hearts husked. The self-inside-self looks at the thing in its (his) hand, barbed and fission-white.

(He's not coming back.)

As the last traces of day fade from the sky, a radiant emanation blooms on the sand, soft, smeared arcs of light bent around the huddled, dreaming self. Buried shrapnel pulls itself from the sand in a shivering ring under this false aurora, each jagged tip pointed inexorably inwards.

Edited 2022-03-03 01:42 (UTC)

For the second time, or the hundredth: across the sand walks God.

He looks no different than he had in that maelstrom of sea life and gore. He makes his way down the beach with the same quiet, steady pace. The sand shivers, magnetized, beneath his feet; unnatural colors lick up along his simple black clothing. He keeps walking.

Paul is dangerous. This is a fact he knows to his core, with a dispassionate sort of interest like a man taking inventory; and with the deeper thrill of a catching, unexpected pain. Paul is dangerous to him: that's the novelty, that's the miracle. It isn't coincidence. This is the fistfight. God is a piece on someone else's board.

He pushes through the ring of shivering shrapnel-bits with the calm resolution of a man wading into a river. At the center is a Paul-shaped thing with horrible eyes, curled small and wet and bony beneath the ripped skin of a tent.

Cherenkov blue glows over Paul's folded arms, his face half-hidden against them as he stares blankly out at the dark horizon. He doesn't stir, not even to look up, motionless except for the fitful drifting of salt-stiff curls across his face in the sea-wind. The tooth juts backward from his left hand, held loosely along his upper arm as if forgotten, or meaningless.

It's the other lights that move. As God approaches, the pulsing of their half-real orbits accelerates and sharpens, plasma-lambent halos spinning out from an invisible central line that runs straight through the still thing on the sand. A scattering of unseeable lights brush across and through God's skin, the type that could be caught, ghost-images in silver, to show his holy bones.

Ten thousand disharmonious voices lashed together to mimic only one, drowned and distant: "What took you so long?"

Paul looks well and truly fucked up. God considers the wheeling auras of light, the shiver of radiation he can parse as a cascade through his every cell. He considers the shudder of ten thousand voices: not the unreal crush of ten thousand million, but that unholy reverb makes something deep in him flinch all the same. For a moment he stills upon the sand. He simply stands there and regards the sight before him.

Then he takes that final step forward. He stops near enough to touch, gazing down at the ruin of a boy before him, this demigod, this immensely sad kid.

"Life has gone on." His tone is low and calm, just as it always is. It is that same agonizing gentleness, that same patience. "I'm here to walk you back to it, if you'd like to come."

"So says the resurrecting king."

The voices answer in a soft murmur, quiet as the waves rolling endlessly onto the shore. Paul tucks his legs a hair's breath closer, his chin tilting down to further obscure his face.

"Life has gone on. It goes on. It will go on." His hands twitch tighter as a tremor runs through him, one that echoes in the shivering whisper of cold metal-on-metal as the ring around them stirs, then ebbs. "The fractal unfolding. I know. I dreamed of it, in the water." He breathes in, his shoulders rising only to fall further on the exhale. "I keep dreaming."

He lifts his head, then, and meets God's black eyes with the strange, flickering illumination of his own.

"Would you sit with me?" Plaintive and lost in a way that a thing that sounds like he does should never be. "Please."

Paul says please, and what could he say to that? For all the hideous echoes, it's said in the tones of a child. He looks upon a broken scrap of a boy; a force of nature, a monster, a shuddering hazard on the sand; but he knows how to see both. He knows it better than anyone.

He's still trying for kindly.

God exhales a breath, and he folds himself downwards onto the sand. It puts the city at their backs; it faces them out to the slow dark churn of the sea. Wind touches his hair and the worn collar of his shirt. He sits forward over his very ordinary knees, flexing his plain brown knuckles, and he turns his lightless eyes to meet the blue-nebula flares of Paul's.

"If you want to tell me about the dream," he says, patient and mundane and so very gentle, "I'll hear it."

The shrapnel prostrates itself on the sand when God sits. The orbital rings of light around Paul avert themselves in deference. The ratcheted tension in Paul's spine eases back by degrees, one softening vertebrae at a time.

"I always tell this one wrong," he says, softly, "I'll try to get it right, this time."

He stays with those gravity wells a while longer, searching. There's no fear in his examination, or reverence. If there's anything at all, past those lights, it's a bruised wistfulness. Then he turns away, back towards the black sea.

"It starts like this," Paul begins, in the gentle cadence of a bedtime story, "I wake up. I have a knife in my hand. There's ash on the sand, and the world is already over."

"But I'm still there." Paul sets the barbed tooth against the horizon in his line of sight, held horizontal and steady. "And the desert opens at my back. When I turn, I see the path laid out. It's not meant for me, but I take it. I take the prophecy, and the people who follow it. They take my name, and give me new ones, and I make them mine, my knives and my words. They dream of water. I teach them how to dream of storms."

"There's still ash on the sand, but I have the desert, and I close my hands around its throat until the great bronze rivers run dry, and the sails hang lifeless between the stars, and my names are as smoke in my enemy's halls."

"They come to destroy me and my people. They imagine themselves cruel, and they inflict -" a catch in his breath, at last "- cruelties."

"So I bring them revelation," he says, every voice empty, "I bring them the pillars of fire. I turn them to salt. I swallow them in the eyes of the universe. I give them mercy like ash."

Paul falls silent. He tilts the tooth in his hand, one way, then the other. The calm that lies over him is like an emptied shoreline, the hush of fleeing birds.

"You like jokes," he observes, mildly, "Do you want to hear one?"

Edited 2022-03-18 20:09 (UTC)

His breathing stills from There's ash on the sand, and the world is already over.

Paul says It's not meant for me, and God shuts his eyes. Paul says I make them mine, and God opens them with the same air of a man sustaining a blow. He watches the slow, implacable roll of the ocean up the shore. He listens. He catalogues the catch in breath, and says nothing. Through it all, God observes:

This kid is terrifying. It's easy to say he reminds him of the man he'd been in the ashes. It's just as true to say he reminds John of the woman he'd met there, and John knows she was never really a woman. Never even close.

Paul asks that last question, and God exhales a held breath. He turns his gaze from the sea, back to the miserable tucked-together curl of the boy on the shore. He does not look at Paul like he's a god, or a bomb, or a too-familiar ghost. He does not look at him like a mirror. For a mirror he would not wear this weariness that reads so much like aching pity.

"Always," he says. His voice sounds so human, by comparison: just the one voice, alone. "Shoot."

Paul sees God's expression out of the corner of his eye. He sees it in the flashing storm of the next second, and the next, when it drags him away from the knife's subtle tessellations.

"It's a dream where I get everything I want," he says, voices a tremor to match the whispers of metal against sand, drawing inward, "The universe kneels at my feet to give me a crown. I wave my hand, and the desert blooms. I close my fist, and my enemies suffer. I drown the stars in blood, and they call me a messiah. They call me emperor. And do you know what it feels like?"

It's a question he already knows the answer to, as close as the heartbeat throb of radiance in the delicate capillaries around his eyes, branching filaments of starlight that unfurl underneath his skin. The air floods with the electric stink of ozone as he raises the tooth and draws an arc across the ruined, blood-polluted beach.

"It still feels like this." Bleakness in every choral shade. "Like watching everything burn. Like nothing."

The word echoes across the sand in a tumult of languages. It falls into the night the way Paul's arm drops, seemingly unbearably heavy, across his knees.

"That's not the funny part," he says, the way people telling bad jokes always have. The wait for it, the no, really. The stay with me a little longer.

"I thought it could be different here." Paul half-smiles, and in the horror of the rest of his face, it is small and soft and human. "That I could be different, if I wanted to be. And then there you were, on the beach, the other end of ten thousand years, and I thought - there's the sign. There it is. If even you could be different, then -"

He lifts his shoulders, lets them collapse.

"But here I am," he says, in a unison of quiet ironies, "Here I remain."

Paul says, I drown the stars in blood. Paul says, They call me emperor. He is both small and horribly vast, like this: that light could unfurl from him to fill the whole of the beach, or the whole of the world. It is intimately familiar. God watches him draw his line through the ruined sand.

Paul says, If even you could be different, and God wants to bury his face in his hands.

"We're good at that, eh. Here we remain." He folds himself further over his knees, his weight on his elbows. It renders him a loose curve beside the tucked-in curl of Paul, the pair of them against a backdrop of endless storm and endless sea. "But that's the trick of it: wanting to be."

The power he holds here is great and terrible. He could say: There is no such thing as forgiveness. He could say: After ten thousand years, it will still feel just the same. But he looks upon Paul's thin delicate wrists, and the crust of sea-salt in his hair against his forehead, and he chooses mercy.

"Keep them close," he says, and he reaches out. He closes a hand over Paul's shoulder, warm and plain, heedless of whatever this does to them. "The people who matter— the people you want it to be different for. Even if it feels like pretending, like that's the dream—"

(He remembers the taste of Augustine's cigarettes; he remembers the jagged outward bloom of Mercy's ribcage beneath his palm.)

"You have to do it anyway," he says, quietly fierce. "You have to keep something of yourself. Once you're God, there's no going back. But you can't just be the flood. What's the point of anything, then? Be the Father and the Son."

His grip tightens upon that bony shoulder, then loosens again. The warm curve of his arm against Paul's back remains.

"It's why I'd never take offense." He looks back out to the sea, as though he might find something of value on that dark horizon. "I am man and God, and I hope I never forget it."

(He wishes it were enough to matter.)

God puts his gentle hand on Paul's shoulder. He opens his mouth, and he offers him mercy, and all Paul can think, as his stricken face vanishes behind a flood of impossible, pulsating light, is that the weight of a kindly God is indeed a fearful thing.

He wanted this. He wanted this on the ship, even with rotten citrus and despair as unswallowable as dry crackers on his tongue. He wanted this in the study, even as he toppled God from his pedestal in black depths of terrified fury. He wants this still, and always, in every shivering beat of his collapsing fusion-heart, when it's far too late to matter, when it never mattered at all.

"I tried," Paul says, from the lashing, furious throat of a hurricane, "I tried to pretend. I tried to keep them close. Behold, lord - the fruits of my fucking trying."

His hand clenches around the tooth. Silver wells between his fingers, as incandescent as his obscuring corona.

"Palamedes is gone," and he wants, and he wants, and he wants, "Because I tried. Because I wanted to be human more than I wanted him to live."

"Where do I keep that?" He asks God, in a thousand joyless laughing tremors. "How would I forget?"

Paul gets worse. John turns from the sea to that sick radiance, to the tangle and spill of a thousand voices in pain, and he aches with some new and hideous sympathy. He recalls the moment he wanted to kill the boy, there on his study floor. He feels it again now. It would be vastly simpler for the both of them— for a little while.

It's an absolute heartbreak, hearing Paul say fuck.

This boy is so small. He is so trapped, and he always will be, and there is nothing John could ever do to convince him otherwise. They are both too much of what they are; the point of no return was always too far back. For ten thousand years, John has fashioned that into his dogma: there was nothing else to be done.

"Palamedes was my responsibility, not yours," he says. It is maybe the only decent thing he has ever said to this boy. "But we are not infallible. We aren't in charge. We are hunted by bigger fish." He presses fingers to the crease between his eyes, then abandons pretense and runs a hand over his face wholesale. When he drops it to look at Paul, his eyes are the perfect inverse of Paul's light. "He went to that fight willingly. Every one of them did. You asked it of them, sure; you showed them the path; but they chose it. An unfair choice is still a choice... you have to leave them that."

He says, "Men feel like this. Gods don't. There will always be a body count— always— and it's up to men to feel it, and gods to watch it rise. It's a raw deal, being both. It hurts more to be both. But if you want it to be for anything, you have to... You can't stop caring. If you stop caring, they stop being yours."

He turns back, again, to the sea.

"Keep all of them, the lost ones especially. Honor them. Someone should."

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."

Edited 2022-03-28 15:41 (UTC)

Paul says everything I look at dies, and God's shoulders fall further into his slump, like some great slow erosion. Paul doesn't say— he chokes, he heaves— nothing ever stops me, and God shuts his eyes against the distant churning of the sea.

He knows it before it happens, because he feels the tense and coil of Paul's muscles, the shuddering bellows of his lungs. He knows what violence looks like in the instant before it plays out. It's a long instant. He holds dominion over muscles and lungs; over moments like these; over violence.

He doesn't stop it.

Paul puts the tooth through the wet cavity of his chest, and the blade goes fucking berserk. The blade goes wrong. It cuts him, and cuts him, and cuts him. It is one blow and it is a thousand, each landed a hair's width apart. God's chest is cleaved open in a sudden revelation of indigo; it shines like nebulas; the delicate curves of lung and and diaphragm are beautiful when exposed. He thinks so, anyway. There is something fundamentally satisfying about the dark weight of the liver, the round and naked span of the heart.

John looks at Paul. He looks at this ruin of a kid, of a king, of a deity, and what could he ever say? For ten thousand years he has accepted a law like gravity: there is no turning back.

God— with a blade through his heart, with his chest in tatters— leans forward, onto the knife. He exhales a hah, a little revelatory breath, as though he has thought of a joke. His hand rises to clasp the back of Paul's neck, the vulnerable pale stretch of his nape. God murmurs, into the salt-crusted tangle of his hair:

"You're tearing me apart, Paul."

It comes wet and ragged. His lungs have rewoven themselves, but his ribs grate nakedly against the tooth. It still buzzes-but-doesn't, humming with some sick unreality. It reminds him of chitin.

"We're going to work on it." He says this so softly; his voice is smoothing. In a murmur, you cannot hear the violence in it. His free hand comes up, but does not pry the tooth from those pale fingers. He smooths his palm across Paul's shoulders, instead, like someone soothing a crying child. The tooth judders against his heart; the muscle keeps seizing, spasming at the intrusion; he tells it not to. He doesn't care. "Alright? You and me."

He doesn't draw back enough to look the boy in the eyes, not again. He knows what he'd see. He says, into Paul's hair, "I'll help you."

Edited 2022-04-06 05:17 (UTC)

"No," he says, voices still collapsed to singularity under pressure, and he doesn't know what he says it to - the devastated bared heart of God, scoured by Paul's hideous light and pierced at his bloody hand, or the gentle touch that brushes across his back, the soft warmth of the words pressed into his dark, tangled hair.

The tooth clings to the wound like a burrowed tick, Paul's first effort to pull it free sliding through the clean edges of the lacerations already splitting his hand. His shoulders hitch soundlessly, crumple, and he does something irretrievable to the flexor tendons of his outer two fingers when he tightens his grip and tears the hungry thing loose. He tosses it aside with a near-keen lost in the whispering tumble of metal to sand as the shrapnel falls away like the droplet arc of shining Paleblood from his silver-slicked hand.

"No," worse the second time, hollowed and crushed with futile despair at what he's done, the consequences of his actions always so much worse than he intends. His self-maimed fingers writhe with lightning-flash plasma as they hover inches from that stilled wreck of a heart, and for this he should be a pillar of salt, for this he should be struck blind. Shame pours from the crown of his head in chill, fission-drowning sheets, for this violation, for all the ones that came before it.

"I'm sorry," he whispers, as if the hand that rises from the open cavity of God's chest to fumble at his far shoulder isn't gushing guilt, as if the face that hides itself against the crook of God's neck never stared down at him in contempt, "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry -"

Brilliance untwists from the air into nothingness as heat rises up the back of his throat and clots there, the unswallowable accretion of everything - of all of it -

"Yes," he breathes, tear-strangled, a sob swollen past wrenching out of his chest, "I'm sorry, yes, please."

Edited 2022-04-07 18:30 (UTC)

The tooth, the knife, goes away in the sand. God does not track its arc with his eyes; he doesn't need to; he feels it there where it falls, still buzzing with violence. In its absence, his chest weaves together whole again. His shirt hangs in tatters, but it only shows the warm expanse of his skin. He doesn't pay it any mind.

Paul clutches at him with his hand ruined and slippery, cut tendons pressed bare against his shoulder. God frees one hand to take Paul's, so gently, and correct the damage with the burning press of his fingers. He doesn't have the patience to leave a scar, to make a lesson of it. There's no need.

"It's alright," he soothes, and it's so easy. That unholy radiance winks out like night falling, and John rubs some mindless clumsy rhythm across Paul's shoulders. No one ever held him like this in the wake of what he became. Not except one person, and she couldn't have known how. "It's alright."

John can't fix him; John can't save him; but John knows him, and that's something. They're two of a kind.

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o5 . bone house mingle!

Early March; Paul.

March 1st

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cw: radiation, death-seeking, violence

cw: gore

cw: gore, blood in icon

cw: gore