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For one long moment that dragged out an eternity, you were she who killed God. Your friend, God, John – the man whose betrayal soured every facet of your very being. You unmade him, felt every layer of his body and reduced it to nothing, Every length of nerve and bone, yours. You went beyond killing God for those minutes; you knew him more intimately than anyone had ever dared. You loved God, and you hated God, and you resolved those feelings as neatly as anyone could.
And, because he was God and annoyingly good at what he did, he came back, stripped you of your short-lived title, and killed you.
He didn’t even have the decency to do it right, either. Or, you didn’t have the decency to die a good death as you wanted. Retreat into the River wasn’t perfect, but you wanted to rest after everything. You felt as if you had earned the right to that, if nothing else, but having your chest ripped out meant instinct overtook logic.
Instead, your existence – ghoulishly simple – revolved around the man who killed you. If there was ever a thing such as hell, this was it: your casket and funeral, marred by his need to eulogize you in that pathetic ‘woe is me and all who have turned upon me’ way that made your (theoretical) stomach churn.
You know that John is still mad at you, your memory, because he’s not doing it exactly as you wanted. He’s mad that you even managed to do that, and that you didn’t forgive him for his massive fuck-ups.
It’s his hands, you think, the fingers that tore through you and ripped out your heart. Those are the anchors to which you’re bound, because you can feel their pull the strongest. It’s as if John’s soul is burning in one room of a house and you’re in the other, and the smoke and heat tells you that there’s a fire but you can’t see it, and the flames can’t burn too bright or hurt you, as dangerous as you are. His hands are a safe buffer for his soul which would burn your soul to crisps.
But oh, you cannot stand the way this man waves them around, gestures at the sad little casket that houses what remains of your old body. He’s tried to make it look less gory, but there’s no getting around the elephant in the room.
Not like anyone left cares, anyways. It’s just the children and John. For all that he was an awful man, Augustine at least had some sense of loyalty left in him at the end. You saw it – felt it, really, the events immediately following your death far too tumultuous to really make sense of while you got your bearings – and you think that your fate is, somehow, a kinder one. Barely. At least Augustine managed to get out, no strings attached. The teeth may have ground him to little bits though and taken longer, but it was a fair trade.
Ianthe, sycophant that she was to the worst person in the room, did as John bid: she spoke of the advice and guidance you gave her as an older Lyctor (briefly) and your failures at the end of your life (at length). And then he chastised her, because you were really a ‘good person’ that did a lot for him, and he loved you, but he didn’t chastise her as much as he could have. You tuned out the words – you did not want to spend your time in death hanging onto everything they said when it no longer mattered.
The other child didn’t speak. You didn’t blame her – you hadn’t met on good terms, with the attempted murder in question. Surely she understood why you did it, no hard feelings involved?
(You find that in death, it’s easier to forgive – everything you were is muted. Your rage, your passion. It’s all burned out embers now, a suggestion of who you once were. It makes it easier to approach things the way you did before when you wanted to scream and rip out John’s throat with your teeth: irritation, contempt, open disdain.)
Kiriona was inscrutable, which was weird because every single thing that she did lacked any sense of decorum or couth. Thankfully, she was not your child (how embarrassing would that have been, beyond the fact of even having one to begin with. Gross!) and thus you had no claim on her lack of manners, but for how loud and apparent she was with every insignificant feeling she had, you felt something churning underneath her skin whenever she was in a room. As if she was at war with herself – which, all things considered, seemed strange when she had everything she ever wanted.
You suppose that if it was John giving you everything you wanted, you’d be more than a little miffed too knowing how badly he could mess it all up. And then he wouldn’t even really fix it, just slap a bandaid on it!
Or it was her body – this you bore witness to, and the sensation was unlike anything you’ve ever felt or wanted to feel. It was like dying again, the brief moment of overwhelming pain before you gave out played over. Endless wounds without the hope or relief of healing – it was all misery and pain and sickness he was stuffing into her body, so much so that the body itself fought back. A wild animal, teeth and all ready to strike out for the act of having made it so.
John cried, after it was done – was it for what he did, or having done it to his daughter? The bond meant something to him, enough that he was making an effort to make up for being an absentee dad. But you’re not sure that anyone who loved another person would make such a mockery of their existence.
You have a lot of time left to think, but you don’t want to think about what that meant for him and you.
-
John didn’t cry during your funeral. Instead, he went to his room, holed up in there and sobbed like his heart was broken. He wailed your name and Augustine’s like a dying animal, pressed his palms to eyes to blot away the tears. You wished you had any sway on him (you were so annoyed sometimes that he was God), could press further down until his eyeballs were squished into jelly. You’d settle for a finger, knowing the damage that it could do, but no, all you could do was sit and deeply ponder every bone in them, tracing over them with your mind and the illusion of your hands in mind. You hoped it made him itch, somehow.
He wasn’t even drunk, which made it all the more sad. A grown man howling over the people that he killed! Maybe once, you would have believed that underneath his self-loathing he really was sorry, but you knew better now.
You saw the mask drop, when he knit himself back together.
You heard the coldness in his voice, calculating, a man more foreign than he had ever been.
You felt his fingers curl into your heart and squeeze, nails piercing through until they pressed into his own palms.
The act wasn’t fooling anyone except himself. So, the phalanx bones. Elementary anatomy, the kind that could put a baby to sleep.
-
Eventually, he stops crying. From your vantage point you can see that he has the worst eye bags in the universe and they’re all puffy, but he’s carrying himself as if he has dignity left to lose.
He emerges into the Mithraeum proper, pretends to be okay, and finds Kiriona with her sword in the training room. It’s where she is by default, avoiding conversation with anyone and everyone. She moves the sword as an extension of herself – without a lick of necromantic potential to her, she has to do something well, you suppose – and hacks away without stopping. Her body doesn’t need to factor in things like stamina as much anymore, let alone catching her breath when she sees John and stops.
“Hey, kiddo,” John says (and you hate it, because Kiriona is grown and John is by default a deadbeat trying to get his child to love him), “holding up okay?”
“Yep,” she replies, popping the ‘p’ at the end. Looking over John, she smiled – deeply disturbing despite it being little more than a shit-eating grin. She didn’t even need to say anything; one hand held up the sword and she waved her hand at her face as if to ask who had wrecked John’s. At least someone was getting something out of this.
He wraps a hand around the back of his neck and squeezes – you hate when it happens but you go with him a little bit, your poor soul tugged upward. Ugh. You wish you had gotten a better bargain, even if it was your beat up body. “That bad, huh?”
“You look like a hot bag of ass.”
He smiles, because John takes it as banter. You think that Kiriona can’t decide if she hates him or not. She probably does – you would. And you don't know if he sees it, but she plays out a lifetime of feeling on her face: a brief second of feigned normalcy that morphs into irritation, hollowness, the tiny and twitchy muscles telling you every secret she doesn't know she's keeping. You know your talents, but surely John isn't that oblivious to his daughter's very fucked-up plight. “Times like this would do that to a guy, even me. I just wanted to make sure that everything was still working okay.”
He was definitely her father; stunted emotionally and socially. You wanted to throttle him with her scarf wrapped firmly around her neck, hiding the wound you knew ran across her neck. Kiriona raises a hand up to adjust it. You hadn’t seen the gashes once since her return to life, and doubt you will ever willingly see them again.
“The whole, uh,” she waves a hand at herself, “is working, yeah. Haven’t fallen apart in the kitchen yet, at least.”
“Peak. Alright then, your dad won’t hang around and be a bore then,” (You wish you could curl up on yourself and never have to hear him say anything again), “ but let me know if you need anything, yeah? And stay safe.”
He points down at her wrist, and she sees it. The little band wrapped around it. It’s tacky and you cannot believe she would willingly wear it, let alone knowing who made it. You don’t want to think about the children like that, because if there’s anything between Lyctors that you know it’s that, inevitably, it all comes back to sex in the end. John knows it too, and apparently has no sense of shame when it comes to grabbing his dad of the year award.
“Oh, ew! No!” Kiriona sounds, for one moment, like his daughter if she was normal and he was not God. “It’s not – no, not with Ianthe. I don’t think anyone would want that.”
(You mentally place a bet on a month before John accidentally stumbles into something neither one of you want to see nor hear.)
-
The little moments of utter embarrassment are, however, the best entertainment you get from the living. The life of God was: a lot of logistics and planning and a lot more depression naps.
When John sleeps, you’re stuck. It gives you a lot more time to think than you want.
You imagine yourself digging every sharp part of yourself into him. Your teeth ripped out and turned to blades and biting down into his cervical arteries. Nails, his stomach, ripping through skin to pull out his body until it spilled out onto the sheets. You would unmake him again and again in every way that you knew, would disconnect every bit of flesh from the next until he was little more than a pile of John-bits. This fantasy isn’t satisfying anymore.
You imagine yourself pressed against John’s back. The security of someone else there, the comfort of his arms wrapped around you. You imagine Augustine, as awful as he was in bed, pressed against your back. Their hands on you, on each other – the rare times that you could bear to be in the same room as them both without fear of losing your sanity, let alone for something adjacent to pleasure. This fantasy never satisfied you even when you were alive.
You imagine someone else in the bed. Smaller than John but strong still, brave, warm. Loving. You imagine someone you once loved and had chewed into nothingness for the sake of God. Her face and hair, the scent of it that hasn’t left you and refuses even now. This fantasy is not a fantasy. It hurts, hurts in a way that makes you feel as if you have a body on fire (and wasn’t it, once?).
In Lyctorhood, you never forgot her – every second of everyday, you felt her, the wood to the fire that burned in your stomach. But you could dull the feeling enough with the incessant work, the running, the Revenant Beasts. There was always something to do. But this, too, was taken from you.
Whoever’s to blame for this purgatory – you or John, and you’re hoping it’s John – will never be forgiven.
-
You want to haunt John in the way that ghosts should: you want to find something new to call your home that will actually obey you, and you want to use it to terrorize him.
Unfortunately, as repulsive as he is and as few corpses that he’s handling these days, you haven’t gotten a choice. It’s been weeks of watching him mope and do his silly little tasks.
The children were, as you expected, doing something together you didn’t want to think of. Something mean and vicious. They hated each other fiercely – if you had a heart, perhaps for a fraction of a second it might have warmed itself.
His silly little tasks were often dull, logistics and paperwork. The sort of stuff that he did out of a fake obligation even though anyone in the Cohort with a functioning brain cell could have filled it out (so, fewer people than one might expect but still). It made him feel useful, the good boss that really knew what his employees really wanted. Playing at normalcy as the Emperor.
Ugh. Just, ugh. At least it wasn’t on that stupid tablet of his. It must be a fantasy of his to play out these tasks as something vintage.
But you’ve finally scrapped up the courage to try and create a link between yourself and something else, and really do prefer this. It wasn’t that you were a coward – no one would have ever called you that as a Lyctor – but to fail would be the equivalent of locking yourself up and throwing away the key into the River. It would mean you were stuck to John and his awful soul for however long. And knowing that would be the single thing that could ruin you.
A thanergetic link is simple. A baby could do it, but it feels different now. Possible, but like pulling apart the world’s strongest magnets. God’s soul was a tricky and unknowable thing and it was magnetic, trying to suck you up into itself.
You were not going to be the dead woman’s photo stuck on his refrigerator forever. So, you waited until he was writing something that you did not read but you hoped was important enough to disrupt, and you pulled.
You pulled and felt the edges of yourself fray, the shape of your soul that tried to look like you breaking apart into a mist as fine as the one who had made John (you thought of this fondly and often, these days) You felt the limits of whatever power you had left strain themselves and flare, you were a burning star at the edge of the universe begging for the attention of anyone on any planet to look at you and see. You were trying to burn yourself up, the fuel lighting the plane on fire and crashing into the ocean.
You felt a little spark of something travel through you, through John, and down his hand.
The pen twitched. He yelped and pulled back, utterly confused. And you felt some little bit of you in that stupid pen (blue ink, not even black like a normal person would use).
You, reduced to haunting a pen and the tiniest bit of John’s fingertips. Great progress, you.
He picked up the pen once more, studied it intently, and pressed it to the page again. You made it (him?) jerk to the side, leaving behind a jagged line.
A pen, at least, could be useful; you weren’t thinking about what it could write but which parts of John that it could pierce. Every soft bit was a hole waiting to happen.
“Hello?” he asks, and you hope that he feels silly for having to ask his empty room and hands if anyone was there. Surely he’d seen and known stranger things than a haunting. The end of the pen clicks when you will it to, the sound echoing in his room. You definitely could control both of them, but at the cost of feeling as if a metaphorical space station had hit your metaphorical body.
John is a smart man, on very rare occasions. He presses the nib down, and you take ten-thousand years of experience and draw a line downward.
He pauses. “Augustine?”
You want to launch the pen through his mouth, because you cannot believe that he would believe someone that inept could manage this compared to you. It is a disgrace. Any chance that you could ever forgive him for anything withers away with your sheer disbelief.
Augustine would have never managed even the end of John’s pinky! Even saying Gideon would have been better than this!
You pull a line to the side, once and at a slant as you refuse to be mistaken for that man any longer. Not while you’re alive-slash-dead and you’re the only one who has to even be angry about it to begin with. It’s half of an ‘M’ in a child’s handwriting, but you hope it gets the point across.
“Mercymorn?”
Yes, John, who else would it even be at this point?
He sits there and stares at the paper, the ugly letter, and then lets out a shuddering noise not at all befitting of him. The benefits of being God meant that even something this unexpected wasn’t anything to dismiss – souls were weird, and they did weird things sometimes including this. “Right, okay. Well. Isn’t this kind of awkward?”
What does he want you to do, speak? You can’t, and you wait for him to put the pen back down again so that you can wrench it upward. A whole word isn’t going to happen today, but you think it gets the point across.
“Up for yes?” he asks, rhetorically of course – it’s the only answer he’s gotten and he’s interpreting it as he wants. He drops the pen to look at his fingers, staring a hole through the end of his index. “Is this what you’ve been reduced to?”
Oh, and now he wants to condescend. Even if he says it so sincerely, like he pities you, you feel your anger rolling off in hot waves. You wonder if John can feel it now, your soul, or if it’s buried deep underneath his and hidden away unless he starts turning over nail beds.
You make him wait next time – because what are you going to tell him with a yes? ‘Yes, John, I’ve been stuck underneath your ugly cuticles for the past few months and I’ve had to hear it every single time you’ve cried and gotten off?’ He’s impossible, God is, driving you to that level of crassness.
But you’re not going to be in a jail of your own answer, so you answer: yes, you’ve been reduced to the world’s worst haunting. Yes, it’s you.
“Right, Mercy, I am really sorry about how we left off then. I know we could have worked it out if we spoke, but I think that it was a bit overkill, the entire ‘blood mist debacle’’. I didn’t even lie to you, and I do want to make it up to you if I can?”
You scratch a long line to the side – he’s going to have to redo this entire page again.
“No, I can’t make it up to you?”
You think clearly not, I’m dead, but that wasn’t the point. It was more than that.
John’s lying, and that’s that. But you know that it would take a gargantuan feat to convey that to him now, and that’s the easy part. He’s not going to believe it at all, because he thinks that he feels sorry. But you think that he’s lonely and sulking and upset with the consequences of his own actions more than he’s upset for your sake. And you’re dead!
It never was easy with John and his moods. Years of what was a long, overpowered child’s tantrums when he got to thinking that he hadn’t done good enough, or that he could have made better choices along the way. You were over almost everything that happened in ten thousand years – why couldn’t he be?
You don’t deign to answer him again after that. The pen remains still until he sets it down and sighs, hands covering his face. You think you feel it differently now – stronger, an actual sensation of skin-on-skin.
“Okay,” he sighs. “Okay. We’ll – talk again tomorrow?” He places two fingers on the pen; you will allow him the luxury of knowing that you still exist, a phantom press against the surface of it so that it shifts. “Alright, okay. Good night.”
He takes you to bed, pulls the sheets around himself, and sleeps.
-
Bright and early the next morning, he doesn’t go immediately to his desk. Because it’s all about self-care on the Mithraeum, meaning a nice and healthy breakfast for all the necromancers. You have to wait through a torturously long family moment, with John enjoying his food and Kiriona and Ianthe sitting together as if they’re friends. Maybe they are, but they don’t seem the type to you. Maybe it’s out of kinship, the only two on board who have a remote chance of understanding each other for more than a conversation. Maybe it’s because they’re both toddlers in the face of everyone else and their youth is annoying to everyone else the same way it is to you.
They both came from Ianthe’s room, too, which made it all worse. John saw them walking together. Soon you’d have to go to another one of his parenting classes with him.
He has the grace to not make you wait any longer, which you think he owes you – the list of debts he has not paid you, will never repay, will only continue to grow until you come back to reap them. This is a small concession, not even a drop in the bucket.
“O-kay,” John draws out the word long. “Fresh sheet of paper, same pen? I can get you another one if you want. We’re going to have to do that when it runs out of ink. But we’re going to make this a little easier. ‘Yes, no’.” He writes them down, considering what to ask.
“Have you been here since, well.” His hand hovers over the no, first – hopeful thought – before going to yes. You leave a tiny dot behind.
He sucks in a breath behind his teeth. “Right, you’ve seen a lot. Sorry about that, again. And the funeral. Did you see the funeral?” Yes. “Well, it was a tough time and I could find your itinerary. And I was still upset about things, but I’ll see if we can redo it? Will that help at all?”
You don’t leave a dot behind.
“Can’t say I didn’t try. Alright. Did you do this, or did I? I don’t think I could ever want something like this.”
Alright, John continued to lie even at the most fundamental level. You expect this from him, but you do not have an answer. Or, you don’t have an answer you want to share with him. Because you’ve worked it out: while he certainly would want to do this, he didn’t do it – why would he keep you and kill you in the same breath, or not simply put you back together again? He hadn’t tried, not once.
It’s very upsetting, to be your own jailor. But you know that in the second before true death, you could’ve woven any theorem and knit your soul to the nearest thing that would accept it. Pure animal brain lashing out at the predator, hoping to scare it off so it could lick its wounds. Simple work for you – and simpler that it had been his hands, something real and tangible that you had worked to know for an eternity down to the last flaw.
“Just realized that it probably isn’t helpful when I don’t ask a yes or no question. Did I do this?”
No, and then yes when he asks if you did it to yourself. You would be seething if you had a body.
John lets out a loud ‘whoo’, the kind that comes with the realization that someone’s done something very dumb. “You did this to yourself and to me. Not even going to begin to figure out how that works, or how you’ve managed to stick onto me. Sheer grit? Well, we have some stuff we should get off our chests. Do you hate me?”
Yes. It was the simplest thing John could have asked you.
“I don’t hate you – I know you’re mad about the lying, but it was just – it was the best thing I could do, for everyone involved, alright? I cared about you guys enough to do that, and even if I didn’t tell you every detail, was it really that bad in the end? I don’t think that it was, until we all went mad.
“And I have to tell you, but I still care about you – I still love you, you know? Even the others, assuming they’re not around too.”
He’s not asking you anything, but the dot forms underneath yes, like a shiny blue bug.
For how could you have come to know God down to every atom of his being, and not love him? In some way, you had loved him – it was as passionate of a feeling as hatred, water without a vessel to pool itself in. It festered, grew awful things as it was left there, unmoving, but it was still there. Every deception was done out of necessity, but if things were different and had he not lied so easily, donned the mask over the true steel-cold husk that he was, perhaps you could have told him you loved him in some way.
Love – you had it once for Cristabel, and you still do, and to think John’s name after it is the gravest sin you have ever committed.
He ruins the moment by misunderstanding, and frankly this works for you. You do not want to get too sentimental about John, who has done nothing to earn the right to those feelings again.
You dutifully press no when he asks about the others. Just you and him, for the rest of his existence.
“Don’t get my hopes up like that – though I don’t think you’d like being stuffed together in the same pen, if you couldn’t handle a room.”
Silence – his jokes were never funny to you, not really, and now they fall even flatter without an audience to react.
He taps the end of the pen into his desk and you feel your soul vibrate, ripples on the water. He has a litany of bad habits and you hope this does not become one, for the sake of not only you but anyone with the displeasure of having to share a meeting with him.
“Do you want out? I mean, I know I’m a pretty good model to be driving around, but it – I know you’re upset at me, and it shouldn’t be that hard to figure out how to siphon you out. Benefits of godliness, and all.”
He’s brainless, utterly brainless. You try your best to stab the pen through his desk through ‘no’ but it just skates off to the side and leaves another one of those hideous lines that you are beyond sick of already. Yes, John, you think, I want out and I want to crush you with my hands until you could fit into a tin can but I’m going to have to settle for yours, not that you really need to know.
He doesn’t push the issue – for the sake of his own feelings, you assume, not for want of knowing yours. But he does push himself away from the desk, ripping away your voice.
“That’s enough for now – you know, it really shouldn’t be that bad, being haunted and all, but it really takes it out of a man,” Inept beast, “and out of you too. Even your soul has to be worn out, so we’ll talk again later.”
And because he is John, who refuses to actually confront his problems and issues in any one way that can make the situation better, he raises his hands towards each other and presses the fingers together. And then he joins both hands, bouncing them off one another.
“That’s us now, alright? You’re here with me for now, so we’re going to just – we’ll work through it, and that’s where we’re going to start. I miss your organizational talents.”
-
It couldn’t have taken that much out of him in such a short period of time (and you refuse to make any comment to yourself about his stamina), because the other two were still sitting together in a mockery of romance. You can imagine them holding their sweaty little hands underneath the table and trying to hide it, except someone’s bones are being broken every other second.
He claps; you shift, and the two children look befuddled.
Oh no, he is not –
“I’ve got some great news. We’ve got another friend with us here.” And he holds out his palm, fingers stretched outward. “And we might have to do a funeral over.”
He says it so – casually? Lightly? You have no idea how he thought this would go over at all.
Ianthe gives him a look, withering despite her need to suck up to him. You could never tell if she thought she was getting away with something, or just pretending that she was trying to. It works well on her. “Forgive me but, is this… a joke?”
Serves him right, you think – you could tear every strip of muscle from his frame, but it still wouldn’t wound his pride as much as the realization that people couldn’t tell his jokes from his reality anymore, let alone try to fake a laugh.
It will be the little things, you know, that will keep your spirit afloat until the time you kill God once more.