[Lazarus' hands had fashioned a noose when they first met, when left idle with string. Paul thought that this dream might be another of the same knot, and he'd wondered, as he did then, who it might be for.
He draws himself up inside Lazarus' arms, pushes back with one flattened palm on Lazarus' sternum so that he can look at him. The lightning has left his eyes. They glow a color that Lazarus of all people, with his depth and breadth of knowledge, will know: Cherenkov blue, physics' ghost, the drowned light of nuclear fission.]
Yes, you are.
[Paul looks at him with fascination written everywhere it stays legible beyond the creeping spread of that light through the tracery of veins around his eyes, bleeding through the thick artery of his tongue now visible behind his teeth. He reaches out for Lazarus' burned face with flaring fingertips that cast no shadows, but stops short.]
You think you want so much. [The choir says, in the resonance of the deep ocean trenches, wondering.] You think you need so much. You think I don't know how to give, and you don't know how to take.
[Lazarus is here for him. He came to the desert for Paul, in his wanderings - his hermit, his wise man, his mentat - to give of himself, whatever the price. To fetch back the deep and terrible knowing for Paul, so he could take the fault from him, and Paul's heart hangs like a star behind the dark bars of his ribs.]
Lazarus. Why don't you dream of rain?
[Paul smiles, like someone who knows a wonderful secret. He looks out towards the desert, the way that he sees it, a wilderness of unblossomed possibility.
He waves his hand. The sky opens and falls in great silvered sheets, crashing into the sand like the sea itself, and Paul still smiles, even as the hot scent of scorching metal floods the air almost as thickly as that of blood-warm salt-rain.]
no subject
He draws himself up inside Lazarus' arms, pushes back with one flattened palm on Lazarus' sternum so that he can look at him. The lightning has left his eyes. They glow a color that Lazarus of all people, with his depth and breadth of knowledge, will know: Cherenkov blue, physics' ghost, the drowned light of nuclear fission.]
Yes, you are.
[Paul looks at him with fascination written everywhere it stays legible beyond the creeping spread of that light through the tracery of veins around his eyes, bleeding through the thick artery of his tongue now visible behind his teeth. He reaches out for Lazarus' burned face with flaring fingertips that cast no shadows, but stops short.]
You think you want so much. [The choir says, in the resonance of the deep ocean trenches, wondering.] You think you need so much. You think I don't know how to give, and you don't know how to take.
[Lazarus is here for him. He came to the desert for Paul, in his wanderings - his hermit, his wise man, his mentat - to give of himself, whatever the price. To fetch back the deep and terrible knowing for Paul, so he could take the fault from him, and Paul's heart hangs like a star behind the dark bars of his ribs.]
Lazarus. Why don't you dream of rain?
[Paul smiles, like someone who knows a wonderful secret. He looks out towards the desert, the way that he sees it, a wilderness of unblossomed possibility.
He waves his hand. The sky opens and falls in great silvered sheets, crashing into the sand like the sea itself, and Paul still smiles, even as the hot scent of scorching metal floods the air almost as thickly as that of blood-warm salt-rain.]