[Lazarus rests his head against Paul's shoulder, and despite everything, including the way it makes his own head swim, he is still apparently enough of a child to think that things will be all right. He still mistakes his wishful thinking for what is, mistakes exhaustion for acceptance, mistakes the coincidental alignment of events for a sign he has control.
What is a teacher for, if not correcting such errors? When Lazarus struggles against him like an insect realizing its entanglement in a web, Paul lets him go in a shock of dissonance as much as spiking pain, but whose fault is it, still, that Paul keeps mistaking the nature of things at hand?
(That's funny. He thinks about saying it. Maybe he will.)
He's on his knees in a dark place soaked in blood. His hands are full of it (it's funny; it's funny), and all he hears is a whirlpool, a ravenous spiral of a throat, and he understands the sound is his rampant heartbeat in his ringing ears.
He looks up at Lazarus from the floor. He draws himself up in a column, into the empty blue eye of a storm, and he opens his mouth.]
Stop.
[It lashes out of him like a snapping chain, a Voice that is like and unlike the Voice his mother taught him, a Voice he's only spoken in once before, to her, buried under burning sands. It is not the Voice of obedience. It is the Voice of the imperative - and it falls apart in his throat like wet ash, the last trailing critical note broken by a sucking hitch of breath.]
Stop.
[He can't look at him anymore, not after that, a thing that closes around him like a swallow. He looks at his hands, and can't look at them either, but there's nowhere else he can look. He can't be here. He can't think, except of blood on sand and of how things always happen the same way, and his hands are always reddened to the wrists, streaked up to the elbows.]
I can't let you die.
[He says, in an empty kind of despair, shucked and raw. The question that follows comes in the same tone, but it's as if he's asking it of someone, or something, else - or of himself, or of all of them, or of nothing. He flexes his hands. He observes the differences between them.]
no subject
What is a teacher for, if not correcting such errors? When Lazarus struggles against him like an insect realizing its entanglement in a web, Paul lets him go in a shock of dissonance as much as spiking pain, but whose fault is it, still, that Paul keeps mistaking the nature of things at hand?
(That's funny. He thinks about saying it. Maybe he will.)
He's on his knees in a dark place soaked in blood. His hands are full of it (it's funny; it's funny), and all he hears is a whirlpool, a ravenous spiral of a throat, and he understands the sound is his rampant heartbeat in his ringing ears.
He looks up at Lazarus from the floor. He draws himself up in a column, into the empty blue eye of a storm, and he opens his mouth.]
Stop.
[It lashes out of him like a snapping chain, a Voice that is like and unlike the Voice his mother taught him, a Voice he's only spoken in once before, to her, buried under burning sands. It is not the Voice of obedience. It is the Voice of the imperative - and it falls apart in his throat like wet ash, the last trailing critical note broken by a sucking hitch of breath.]
Stop.
[He can't look at him anymore, not after that, a thing that closes around him like a swallow. He looks at his hands, and can't look at them either, but there's nowhere else he can look. He can't be here. He can't think, except of blood on sand and of how things always happen the same way, and his hands are always reddened to the wrists, streaked up to the elbows.]
I can't let you die.
[He says, in an empty kind of despair, shucked and raw. The question that follows comes in the same tone, but it's as if he's asking it of someone, or something, else - or of himself, or of all of them, or of nothing. He flexes his hands. He observes the differences between them.]
Are you punishing me?