[Paul leans into the fleeting touch of God's steadying hand blank-faced and mute. He turns to trail behind him with downcast eyes that do not flit back to Lazarus, because Paul knows his mythology, and to look back at the ghost in the mouth of the Underworld is to both be lost, consumed by an all-too-human flaw.
They are an interminable distance from the iron tang of clinging air when Paul stops, boots crunching on loose, broken stone with the suddenness of it. He closes his hands into fists that barely tremble, tipping his head back to stare blindly into the starred sky.
To not look back is to leave something else behind. Dimly, through a caul, Paul grasps its shape.
(Sharkskin fingers tearing at his face with Paul's hands around its neck, its voice his own voice in his head, its eyes not unshaded blue or burning yellow or ash grey, not empty white, not depthless black -)
When he looks away from the vast unreachable expanse above, there is only a breath where it shows, a ruination of despair bleeding into numb resolution, and that would be bad enough. What's worse, what he knows, is the slivers of desperation long past hope shot through his green eyes like dark veins of infection.
He does not fall to his knees in repentance or prayer or apology. He doesn't make a sound, traitor tongue stitched to the roof of his mouth, as he falls back into step after the future guiding him home.]
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They are an interminable distance from the iron tang of clinging air when Paul stops, boots crunching on loose, broken stone with the suddenness of it. He closes his hands into fists that barely tremble, tipping his head back to stare blindly into the starred sky.
To not look back is to leave something else behind. Dimly, through a caul, Paul grasps its shape.
(Sharkskin fingers tearing at his face with Paul's hands around its neck, its voice his own voice in his head, its eyes not unshaded blue or burning yellow or ash grey, not empty white, not depthless black -)
When he looks away from the vast unreachable expanse above, there is only a breath where it shows, a ruination of despair bleeding into numb resolution, and that would be bad enough. What's worse, what he knows, is the slivers of desperation long past hope shot through his green eyes like dark veins of infection.
He does not fall to his knees in repentance or prayer or apology. He doesn't make a sound, traitor tongue stitched to the roof of his mouth, as he falls back into step after the future guiding him home.]