o5 . bone house mingle!

[necrolord]

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.

Comments

cw: gore

[necrolord]

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."

cw: gore, blood in icon

[terriblepurpose]

"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."

cw: gore

[necrolord]

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.