January 18, 2011

On God's orders, Simon and John picked off a New Haven househusband of a family with a dog, a cat, and two-point-five kids. John might have felt some guilt about it, if he hadn't been busy dodging semiautomatic fire the whole time while his brother snuck around back for the kill, if they hadn't found the blocks and blocks and blocks of what might have been heroin, or cocaine, or Bliss stashed in the garage. The irony wasn't lost on him. The irony was about fucking killing him, these days.

He dropped Simon off at the house, giving him the big upstairs bed. Then he went back to the roof of the opera house. Couldn't find the elevator. The wall was there. But it didn't sound hollow when he knocked on it, or metallic; there were no seams or buttons or bricks. Just bare plaster painted white. He tried and tried and couldn't shortcut back into the building. Not only could he not reach those gray featureless halls, he wasn't even being shunted into somewhere else in the opera house. It was as if God were simply refusing to hear him.

He had the next day off, his last day of scheduled "physical therapy." He'd walked out. She'd talked about going back to Vrashne, and he'd walked out, so it didn't surprise him to discover that she wasn't at the casino. He told himself that the ache in his chest, his feeling of his ribs squeezing too tightly on his lungs and his heart every time he breathed, was just because he'd put himself in such an impossible fucking position, and not because he missed her. He had nobody to blame but himself.

But there was someone he could talk to. If he was very careful about the questions, and thought very hard about the answers. He prayed, as he always did, for guidance and wisdom. He prayed that Harper was alive and well, somewhere. And then he stepped out of his house and into a certain featureless hallway in the basement of the Throne of Saturn, opened the door that stood directly ahead of him, and walked through.

Here were the things that were the same about sweet little Sarah's cell: the Plexiglas partition, the furniture inside the back half of the room, the papers and crayons and child-like drawings scattered everywhere. The little girl humming lullabies and nursery rhymes to herself while she worked on coloring a particular, larger piece of paper.

Here were the things that were different: the wards around the cell almost visibly fraying at the edges, pulsing occasionally in heartbeat time, the little girl's dress that was blood-red instead of innocent white, and the strawberry blonde shade of the little girl's swaying curls. And the stretch of acid green that ate through the red-and-black crayon maze on the paper, the silver lightning streaks that assaulted the blue at the core of the maze.

In the front half of the room, there was no sound. Just the little girl visible through the partition, coloring with an acid-green crayon over a line of black wax. It still took five or six strokes with the crayon before any color remained on the page, and that was a small bit of progress; it was still, undoubtedly, progress. After a moment, the little girl turned up her head from the page, and looked at John, and smiled with pearly-white baby teeth at him.

She had really very pretty jewel-green eyes, apart from the raw red scars around her lids.

"Morana," John whispered, his voice as constricted as his lungs, and flattened his hands against the glass separating him from utter destruction.

The little girl's smile brightened, and she gestured with little fingers at him, curl and release: 'come here'. The kind of gesture a child gives to an adult when they want to tell a secret, or some piece of important news, like the frog they just found in the stream.

This time he very carefully unclipped the S&W's holster from his belt and laid it on the padded flooring before straightening. If he had to take her on, a gun was not going to help him. Straightening, he studied her for a moment longer. He wondered whether his death would give her the fuel she needed to finish off the wards. He wondered if killing her body under God's grace was enough to banish her. He took a deep breath that made his lungs scream, and slid one Vans-clad foot into a glow of golden light that led him into the heart of an abyss.

Inside the wards was a hellstorm to the supernatural senses while Sarva's manipulations sent lances and dragging pressure against Morana's wards. Little Sarah wasn't humming now, but she was coloring again while she waited for John. She spoke without looking up again. "You came back. It's not the next day, but you came back. Did you bring me something?"

"Yes," he said, and fought his way through the near-physical urge to flee, walking over to the table, where he pulled one of the chairs out and sat. Fishing through the pockets of his jeans, he pulled out a packet of candy-coated chocolate and laid them on the table. The blue she'd drawn was the color he'd seen in Morana's eyes sometimes, wasn't it? The candies were all red.

There was nothing in Sarah's presence that suggested the gleam of bright silver streaking through that core of the maze. "Thank you." She was very mannerly, and put down the crayon to pick up the paper pack of candies. The action relieved some of the swirling magical pressure in the room. "Why did you come back? I didn't think you would."

"Because I said I'd try," he said, and reached for one of the blank pieces of paper with a questioning glance that was only a little watery.

Sarah's head nodded with a bob of curls, though she hadn't actually looked up to see him reach for the paper. She was frowning intently at the packet of candies, tearing it open to scatter them on the table. "They're all red! I like that. Red's my very favorite color, 'specially when it's people-red."

"They don't taste so much like people, though. You want out." That much was screamingly obvious. He would have figured it out by now even if Morana hadn't told him about the failing wards. "What are you gonna do when you get out?" He folded one corner of the paper up to make a triangle, flattened the crease, then creased and tore off the extra strip at the top.

"Oh." Disappointment for the information about the flavor of the candy. But she popped one in her mouth and crunched through the shell before she smiled. "Oh! These are good anyway. You can bring more of them, next time you come." Then she reached again for the green crayon she'd started with. "I don't know. It's almost time, but we were missing someone before she put me in here. I guess I'll try to find him. Then it'll be time!" Happily, while she put crayon to paper again.

He thought about that for a moment as she drew and he started folding up the now-square piece of paper, his callused hands working deftly over the sheet. "I can't help you get free if I know that you're going to hurt the people I care about." Behind his glasses, under the brim of the Yanks cap, his brown eyes were expressive as they studied her.

"That's okay. I think I'm going to get out anyway." She paused from more drawing, pressing on the paper, to pop another candy into her mouth. Then she stopped again to look at the folding piece in his hands. "What are you making?" Making. Creation. It was an endlessly fascinating subject.

"Just something to do with my hands," he said, "so that I don't cry like a little girl while I'm sitting here." He'd come in planning to cut a deal with her. That was right out the fucking window. The other things he wanted to talk about paled into absolute insignificance against her sparkling green eyes. "Distraction, you know?" He eyed her again.

"Oh." She almost sounded disappointed, and pushed a candy across the table at him. "Here. Doesn't chocolate make people feel better in their heads?" She stopped coloring again. "She's really good at distraction. I think that's how she put me in here. Why do you want to cry?"

"Because I'm sad. Because it hurts me so much to be in here. Here. Put the crayon down for a second." He finished the origami crane, pulled out its head and tail, and set it aside. "Make two Ls with your thumbs and fingers and put your thumbs together."

"You burn me, but not as much as you burn her, and not as much as I burn you." She frowned at him in puzzlement but obeyed him after a moment. "Are you going to come back again while it hurts? I'd like it if you did." Little goalpost with little fingers. "You're different."

"I'm not sure if I can...you might get out faster than I can come back." His first shot was miserably wide, probably because his hands were shaking. The second one went in. He grinned, tight and brief. "I'm different because Elohim made me." Then he made a much bigger goalpost for her.

She giggled at the 'goal', a sound that was exactly what it should be for a small child entertained by a simple game, and she said something no little girl could understand. "Elohim is funny?He keeps thinking He'll win in the end. But the end means that we win, so it won't be done until then. It's really slow trying to get out." Her lower lip pouted out at that. Then she flicked one of the candies toward the goal. It fell short, so she tried again.

He kept his hands steady for that, and tried to tell himself that it was reassuring that it took her longer than she'd thought it should. "I'm not high enough on the totem pole to argue those kinds of points. You could go talk to him yourself, if you wanted. I can let you out that way." Pushing the chair out, he ducked down so that his nose was about a foot behind and right between his 'goalposts.'

"No. I'm not strong enough for the Word." She pouted the lower lip out further at that, managed to bean one of the little red candies directly off his nose. Her eyes sparkled with her giggle, and the little sparks were acid-green against the jewel-toned brightness. "Why did you come back today? Is it because she's not here?"

He flinched, then grinned again?this time it was something more closely resembling a natural smile, though it wasn't quite there yet. Straightening up, he said, "I just had one question. I wanted some other advice, but I don't think you're the person I need to be talking to about that." He twisted his hands around into a double thumbs-up, then dropped them onto his thighs so he could rub his sweaty palms dry.

"Okay." She popped another candy in her mouth. "Do you want me to do a drawing for you?"

"I..." John was cute when he was wary, wasn't he? "What would you draw?"

"I could draw lots of things. Do you want a now picture or a then picture, or a will-be picture?" She stood up and went to pull out a clean sheet of paper from the stack. Maybe she was delaying his departure; more likely she had more in mind.

"Can you answer my question, first?"

"Okay." She agreed, while she brought the paper back around the table and sat down, reached for a dark green crayon. "What's your question?"

"There's goodness in her." That wasn't it, not exactly. But it was the closest he'd been able to come to describing what he felt. "Where is it coming from?"

Scowl of adorable little features down at the paper, and she looked over at her original drawing, the maze, the green, the black and red and blue and silver. "He?she calls him Marius?he built up a shell to hide something in, and then he hid it, and he wanted to hide it better, so he tried to add in lies, and he put Druj' in the shell too. So when she's Morana, she's mixed up." She changed her mind, dropped the dark green crayon to trade it for gold. "What he hid is trying to get out, too. Otherwise I couldn't make things happen here."

Names have power. "So it's hurting her." He got it, at that point, and looked up and around at the cancerous, weakening wards pulsing and reflecting the horror he was trapped with back at him. "I'm hurting her." With more than just the occasional I love you, apparently.

"Uh-huh." She started to draw, carefully, with etchings of gold that took even longer to color the paper than the acid-green had. "It makes me laugh. But she hasn't killed you, and she keeps going back. I think the thing Marius hid is getting stronger, maybe. It's hard to feel through Druj'."

He pushed the hat back, dragged both hands down his face, then, and wished he had someone to give him a bag of candies and tell him everything was gonna be okay. After blowing a sigh through his fingers he reseated the cap and said, "Yeah. Draw something for me. Your choice."

"Okay. You're funny. I'll draw you a maybe picture. Who don't you want me to hurt?" She asked it from the very beginnings of their conversation, while the gold swirled its way onto the picture, out from a hollow space. Then she dropped the gold, reached for dark green.

"Morana." For starters. He folded his arms across his chest, pulling the shirt (that navy blue waffle-knit Henley he liked so much) tight in a few different directions, and jogged one knee as he watched her.

"Oh. But she put me in here, and she was supposed to help me." The dark green filled in most of the spaces between the gold, except for the hollow area at the center. She traded for silver, and tongue stuck between her teeth, started to draw in a stick-figure wolf at one side of the hollow space. "Who else?"

"Names have power," he said, very quietly. That knee kept right on bouncing. His eyes, under the shadow of the brim, flicked restlessly from the drawing to her face.

"Oh. I didn't think you knew that, not really." She scowled at the paper, reached for a black crayon. A stick figure woman sprawled at the center of the gold and green, brown made the hair, and red was a spill from the stick-throat outwards, red that blended into and became the gold. Then she started carefully drawing the red into the wolf's mouth. Here, John Angelo Michael Benandanti, have a picture. She pushed it over the table to him and pulled her first drawing close, reached for the acid-green crayon. He took it and examined it as closely as if it were a masterwork and he saw meaning in every brushstroke.

Sarah started humming again, "Hush Little Baby"?apparently it was a favorite?while she pressed acid-green crayon into the black and red of the maze, working through and over one of the walls, over and over until a little stain of color remained on the paper. He laid the sheet down?something told him it was a very bad idea to carry anything of hers out with him. "Thanks, Sarah." He thought he meant it.

"You're welcome. So are you gonna come back and visit me again? You're fun. And you could bring more candies with you." She looked up at him again with those pretty, pretty green eyes surrounded by those red scars, and smiled.

"If I can," he said, and added, "No promises."

"Okay." She accepted that, and bent her head to the drawing again. Press, press, press of green on black and red.

He took a step backward, and another. Pivoting, he stepped into forever...and did not go home. Here was to hoping he wasn't walking in on a torture session.

God ate John up. Almost fifteen minutes passed before he was spat out again at that same distance away from her, wearing a parka, gloves and hiking boots. The Yanks cap's brim stubbornly peeked out from under the parka's faux-fur-lined hood. A swirl of snow spun past his refogged glasses, borne away by a knife cut of wind. He looked around for her.

She was still on the fallen log, and at that remove the opening of the portal had been a slice, a flinch against her nerves instead of a piercing wound. So by the time his glasses unfogged, Morana was able to smile and lower her hands from where she'd been breathing on her cupped, gloved fingers. "That looks much more comfortable, darling."

He strode up to her, looked down at her for a moment. Then he reached into a pocket, pulled out a plain silver hip flask and offered it to her.

Eyebrows lifted into a high arch, but she took the flask with a little curve of her lips, unscrewed the lid, and sniffed at the scent from the top before she took a quick swallow and offered it back. "Thank you, darling." Heartbeat pause, and, "Can you still feel it?"

"Yeah." He'd been by her apartment, apparently, as the taste of the scotch was a familiar one. Or maybe he'd bought a bottle and stashed it for the next time she came over. Hard to say, with his face so carefully structured in unexpressive lines like that.

Pocketing the flask, he offered her a hand. It turned out the man was hard to read when he wanted to be. His inexpressive set of features earned him the pleasant, smiling mask she used as neutral state when she took his hand and stood. Silence for silence with a further small curve of her lips and a flicker of dying blue, brighter red surfacing in its place. He squeezed her fingers before releasing her and turned through another arc, eyes shuttered, face turned up into the cold. That way, he decided, and started walking.

She seemed perfectly content to walk with him in silence, her hands held deep in the pockets of her coat while their foot-steps crunched over pine needles, skidded over slick rocks, and left footsteps through the patches of gathering snow that gradually filled in their wake. The wind was bitter-cold and Morana had the stray, passing thought that she could sympathize with it, despite the burning sun walking at her side.

Ten minutes passed that way before he spoke. He picked his way around rocks, crunched over frozen crusts of snow, walked past dead tufts of grass and stunted brush that had shut down for the winter. The fog faded from his glasses, the parka fur fluttered and blew in the relentless wind. He twisted at last to look over her past the rim of the hood, and said the words. "I'm sorry."

Deep brown eyes skidded sideways, one eyebrow lifted in a questioning arc. "You say that a lot, darling. What are you apologizing for?" She pulled up at a stream, a minor branch of the freed river that hadn't yet frozen over, and pursed her lips while she studied the possible avenues across.

He really did, didn't he? Apologize a lot. He had to think about that for a while, too, while he surveyed the river. It hadn't frozen over, but all the rocks he could see were viscid with smears and streaks of ice. "I didn't get a lot of sleep last night." Which was a hell of a thing to apologize for. He slithered down the lip of the bank to the washed-up gravel at the water's edge, turned back to face her.

"You don't need to apologize to me for a poor night's sleep," she pointed out, and hopped rather than slithered down the bank, from one jutting protrusion to another, and wound up on the gravel just a few feet away from him. The hood of her coat had fallen back, so the wind was picking strands from her French braid and pulling them into little whips across her face. "Do we have to cross this?"

"I think I do. I..." he scowled at nothing, swung around to face the water again. "It's not nearby. I might lose it again if I try skipping closer."

"Then we'll go the hard way. The rocks over there don't look as slick as the rest." She nodded toward her right, a little way downstream, and started that direction without waiting for his answer.

He watched her retreating back, reflected that he could hit her from behind hard enough to break her neck before she could react, and followed after her. "Don't, you know, wait for the big strong man to go first and make sure it's okay or anything," he muttered when he caught up with her. He rolled his eyes toward her. One corner of his mouth kicked up, a self-deprecating twitch.

The rocks weren't quite as slick, but that didn't mean the footing was easy. She stretched for the first semi-flat rock, and it was a good thing she did have long legs to make it. Her balance, as it turned out, was superb. Once she reached the relatively stable perch, she turned in place to face him, and the mask eased away enough for a curl of a real smile. "But darling. Big strong men are so slow." Then she spun again, chose the next rock in the ragged "path" across the river, and hopped to it.

John cheated. Four legs were more stable than two, no matter how well said two legs were working. He padded his big furry ass across the rocks behind her, picking his way with exquisite care.

She didn?t begrudge him his cheats, just laughed with amusement for them when she finally made it to the other side of the river and jumped the last stretch to the sand and gravel on the other side. Once her footing was secure, she tipped her head up to examine the sky, glanced back over her shoulder toward the half-dismantled dam. "They must have finished for the day. You missed the last blast, while you were getting your coat."

The wolf touched the sand on the far side, and the man kicked a clot of ice off his boot. "Why are they blowing it?"

"There was a conflict here, recently. We're in the Vrashne Uplands; the river that dam is blocking provides most of the water for this region. The Prince of Dalibad, one of the neighboring countries, built the dam to take control of the water supply prior to his invasion. He...lost. Now the Uplanders and their allies are tearing it down." She was able to give the little summary with perfect calm, and the shimmer of blue through her eyes that came with truth. "I was taking advantage of the confusion to find this?this...whatever it is."

He looked back at it. His shrug was lost within the depths of the parka. Climbing the bank at an angle to stop it from collapsing on him, he re-sought the source of the strangeness?which was, upon reflection, more than a little like what he'd felt in her?and started walking again. Clomp, clomp, crunch.

She skidded once on the way up, so she was a step or two behind him when she made it to the top of the bank. That didn't last, when she lengthened her stride to catch up. "Nightmares or insomnia?" Her hands were back in her pockets, her hood pulled up and shielding her face from direct examination. "Or just business?"

"Just you." He was starting to sound like a broken fucking record. Because he was contrary, because he wanted to see her face again, he pulled the flask out and offered it to her once more.

"It seems I'm bad for your health." A slip of a smile when she glanced over, saw the offered flask, and claimed it. She unscrewed the cap while they walked, stopped to tip it back for a generous slug of the scotch. "But then, so is this." Gloved fingers spun the lid back into place, offered the flask back.

"I think it's the other way around, actually." He took it, had a drink of his own before disappearing it again. "I had this idea last night. I thought I could go to her, maybe convince her to stop undoing the wards if I swore to her that I'd find a way to get her free. Buy you some time. Something."

There was the flash of her eyes to his face, a little wide before they narrowed. "Making deals with the devil is never wise. If you'd sworn to try and get her free, darling, you would have tried to do it. That wouldn't have bought me time, just your death." She put her hands back into her pockets, started walking again. "You changed your mind." Inviting explanation without asking the question.

"She looked at me," he agreed, and hunched a little deeper into the coat to ward off the chill of the memory. "And she had a lot of other things to talk to me about."

"She's very perceptive. It's one of her skills." She ducked under a low branch, had to pull a hand from her pocket to yank free her hair when it caught on the pine. "She's dangerous, darling. You should be more careful than to go in there alone."

"I'm not going back in there unless it's your life on the line or I'm killing her." He had a way of saying things, sometimes. The words were cocky as hell. The tone wasn't threatening, wasn't the calm cold certainty so well projected by Hollywood actors. If anything, he sounded a little tired, maybe a little sad, too. "I thought about trying it, then. But I wasn't sure that killing the body wouldn't make things worse."

When he said he?d thought about killing her, she took an alarmed half-step forward. Her hand went up, clenched on his shoulder, relaxed slowly. "The form?it's part of how I'm keeping her trapped. She broke the seals on her vision, but she hasn't been able to touch the rest of it, yet. If you'd killed the form, she would have been all but free. You wouldn't have survived that."

"Glad I didn't do it, then." He looked over at her, after the squeeze. "She thought it'd be a great fucking idea for me to kill you."

"Of course she did, darling. She wants to be free. She wants to be set loose again." Her hand slid from his shoulder, back into the pocket of her coat. "Will you?"

"No." The word was blunt, and the look he gave her was more than a little suspicious, as if he wondered whether she was testing or teasing him. "She implied that it would release whatever it is that Marius hid inside you. Whatever it is that I feel when I'm around you."

She hadn't, for once, been teasing or testing. But the additional information he provided?she glanced over at him, thoughtfully. "And you still won't do it. I don't think I understand you, Benandanti. Did she tell you anything else?"

He put a foot down, paused, reoriented and started walking again. "She told me plenty. She said I'm the reason the wards are failing." He gave her a glimpse of brown eyes, a harsh expression around the edge of the parka.

She stopped in her tracks, frowned at him from the depths of her hood. It cast her eyes into shadow, barely visible. "You haven't touched my wards. You sidestep them when you slide through His Presence, but there's no damage. My wards are failing because she's eating at them, constantly."

He stopped when she did, turned to face her. "I love you." It was just as blunt as that single 'no.'

Oh, damn the man! The words?more than the words, the honesty of them?sliced and twisted and coiled up from within, lashing out, and she flinched while her eyes gleamed summer blue from within the shadows. Her shoulders hunched up with the reaction of it, the control to keep from screaming while she looked at him. Her voice came out low. "Sarva loves pain. It's her, as much as I am lies."

"'And yet,' she said, 'she keeps coming back, and she hasn't killed you yet.' She said that it makes her laugh." He faced her squarely, hands shoved deeply into his pockets, boots shoulder width apart, his body braced against the wind's occasional tug. Though he wasn't frowning outright, the lines around his mouth were cut deep, and his brown eyes were ablaze. "I don't fully understand how the wards work to begin with. I never had to deal with any of this shit before I came here. But she implied that the pain I was causing you by my proximity was weakening them. She said she was waiting for one other, and that she was going to have to look for him."

"Indra." She pushed the word past numb lips. "It's closer than I thought." For the moment, she wasn't looking at him at all. Her expression was abstracted, turned inward, and war blazed to life in her eyes, a volcano against a pure autumn sky. Her lips moved without sound, shaping?not Abyssal, but Hindi and Farsi. Eventually she looked back at him and asked, "What would you do, if the pain you gave me was weakening the wards?"

"Part of that was why I didn't get any sleep last night." He broke off watching her to gauge the progress of the day in this alien place. It was late afternoon; they had an hour or two more of daylight, and there was already a full moon hanging low in the eastern sky, pale but visible and faintly greenish.

She was still watching his face, and her eyes narrowed. "You hadn't seen her, spoken to her, last night."

"No, but it's related. I was thinking about who the so-called 'good guy' and 'bad guy' really are in this."

That lifted her eyebrows way up while she walked a few more steps forward, past him. "Darling, is there any question? You are a Hound of your God, you walk across His face and do His bidding. My presence burns you. I know what I am, mērē apanē, and so should you." She turned back to face him again, spread her arms wide. "I am the 'bad guy'. What else is there to think about?"

He turned to face her as she moved, orienting on his own personal midnight sun. "You think? Is it selfless of me to be glad that I'm here with you even though you're hurting me? Is it selfish because I know that I'm hurting you? Maybe I'm glad because I'm apparently corrupting you. But that's okay, right? Because I'm making you good, it's okay if I hurt you in the process, force you to change."

He was, very literally, talking beyond her capacity to understand. Her face went blank, eyes wide and pure dark brown. She had to dissect the sentences, and the first ones?selfless and selfish and what did selfless mean, anyway? There wasn't anything if there was no self?she let fall by the wayside. "I thought you said you weren't the one who did this to me, darling? 'Maybe I triggered it,' you said, 'but it was already there'." Her lip curled up, might have been a smile. "You weren't lying."

He watched her face go blank, heard the words that came after, and the muscles along his jaw leaped into high relief. Abruptly he pushed off, stalked over to her, caught her shoulders like he wanted to shake her until her teeth rattled. "I am hurting you," he told her, head ducked so he could get right up in her face with it. "How I feel hurts you. I can't say the words without hurting you. How I feel means that I don't want to hurt you. But I do, because I'm a selfish bastard. And you let me walk out last night, and you didn't say a fucking thing to me about how I had to have known all that already, how I shouldn't have been surprised."

She would have understood the shaking better than the fierce words, honestly. It took her a few moments to process all of that, a frown sliding up and pulling down the corners of her mouth. "John. I hurt you, too. My presence causes you pain, my blood gives you blisters." Pause, breath, then, "Why would I say anything when you were walking out?"

"But I'm not?" Which was when he stopped. And stared at her, still breathing hard. Because he was.

Now the frown twisted further, became a scowl of frustration and annoyance and irritation and a little flutter of pain right there at the core. "You're not what?"

"Changing," he said. His hands moved on her shoulders like he was remembering the impromptu massage he'd given her in the shower. On the heels of that single word, he pulled her into his arms.

Whoof went any air she'd managed to pull back into her lungs. The frustration and annoyance and irritation were gone into bafflement, but the curl of pain was still twisting there, putting down roots. After a moment she relaxed against him, wrapped her arms back around him, and burned herself alive in his furnace. "I don't understand you at all, mērē bhēṛiyā."

"I don't understand you either," he mumbled into her hood. "What did you just say?" And leaned back like an Inuit about to bust out a lambada, to peer down into her face.

Hesitation before she spat out the answer, quick. "Wolf. My wolf, in Hindi." Lean on the 'my'?her own personal possession, the way she said it. He'd been walking that way, hadn't he? She tried to pull out of his arms and head off in their previous direction of travel.

The explanation was enough of a surprise that he let her go and stood there like an idiot as she marched off to the end of the world.

Nothing spilled her out on the bedroom floor of her apartment with a reaction nearly as strong as John's to the trip and she bit her lip bloody with trying to keep from screaming; she'd been too full of that pure golden-green power and Void had tried to steal it all away. She had no idea how much longer she stayed there, curled on the carpet, reassembling the self that belonged in this place. It could have been seconds or hours. Eventually she pushed up, staggered to the bathroom, and turned on the hot water full force in the shower. Good remote.

It wasn't that terribly long. And it wasn't as long as he thought he'd spent alone, before he stepped out from Everything and into the bedroom at the foot of that bed. He stared blankly at it for a moment before shaking his head and looking around. There was the sound of the shower. Here was to hoping this time would go better than the last time. He left a trail of clothes to the bathroom: the dusty Yankees hat, the parka and scarf, one glove (the other was stuffed into a parka pocket,) his shoes. The no-fog glass fronting the shower gave him a glorious Technicolor view of her. Remember that ache in his chest? It was back.

No-fog glass or not, there was still a lot of steam swirling up in the enclosure; she had the water just this side of scalding. Her clothes were in a sad little pile by the sink and she had her hands, blisters, bruises and all flat-palm on the tile wall and her head bent. Of course she knew he was there; he was a blazing gold-green sun just now. And her mouth flooded with the taste and scent of chocolate when he entered the room.

He was going to remember that image for the rest of his life, however long that life might be: the sheet of glass separating them, the steam playing out a seductive fan-dance around her, hiding and revealing her gorgeous body with its bronze skin aglow and slick under the water, the sudden reveal of her hands, red and purpling against the darker tile. There was no sneaking up on her. She had to know that he was there, had to be just as lividly aware of him as he was of her. Still, decency or desire drove him to say her name again. "Morana."

"Do you need me to go?" The words were almost as slurred as they'd been under the spreading branches of the riven Tree. The giddiness, though, the soaring joy?that was definitely gone.

"Yes." She turned her head, then, and looked at him through the glass, the running water, with deep, deep brown eyes. "No." A breath in while she stayed there, braced, and finally straightened, let her hands fall away from the tile. "No." A quirk of her mouth. "You owe me a foot rub."

Hindi. Huh. There were some people out in the Marketplace who might know Hindi. Maybe the people at Tamarind in Stars' End. He padded into the room in his sock feet, tossing his glasses onto the counter and pulling his shirt off over his head. The flare of muscles along his back was lit by the lamps over the mirror; they lovingly picked out the roughened skin over his left shoulder, the rope of scar tissue down his spine, the dashes that chased down either side of it. At the small of his back things got really messy. He'd never again have the dimples. Shedding the rest of his clothes on the way over, he reached the glass door, flattened his nose and mouth against it, and made some random weird noise.

She'd seen the scars during their last shower, appreciated them again in the mirror before his arrival at the glass, and then?then she just laughed. Maybe a bit of a hysterical edge in there?about the same as the note in his voice when he'd thought of Amitiel with endowment?but definitely laughter. And good thing there were benches in there, because she just sat down on one of them while the peals of it rolled out.

He leaned his yellow and purple-stained forehead against the glass and watched her laugh, and smiled a very small smile as he did. When she looked like she could breathe again he asked, "Bath?"

"Please." Dying giggles as she stood again, tilted her face up to the running water. Who knew if the bath would kill the burn of him the way that the shower did? But she wanted to soak, too. "Did you want in the shower first, John?"

"No." Yes, please. He couldn't feel her. She was just another insanely beautiful hysterically giggling woman. "It's okay." No, it's not. Grumbling at a certain ridiculously-happy-to-see-her part of his anatomy, he rambled off to fill the bathtub and wonder why he couldn't be attracted to redheads. Normal redheads.

Sable eyes tracked him across the room, lingered on the scars on his back again, the line of his spine still visible and the broad stretch of muscle through his upper back and shoulders. Then she reached over, turned off the cold water and then the hot with hands that ached.

Maybe, El Stiffo reminded him with a sharp throb, it was because she was, bar none, the hottest piece of ass it had ever been his great good fortune to encounter. And really, the baggage wasn't that big a deal, was it? He climbed into the tub, flipped the stopper and started the water thundering in. Maybe it was time to meditate on that a little bit. Please, Morana, pay no attention to the man sitting in the tub and laughing at himself.

She slicked most of the water from her hair, eyed him again at the laughter?and as it turned out, the water pouring from the faucet in the tub did kill some of the burn though not all of it?and finally left the shower to pad carefully, bare wet feet on slick tile, across to the tub built for two. She ached. Even the places that weren't bruised or blistered ached, as if she'd been the bell that someone struck and split with one echoing slam. "Share with me, darling, do."

"I'm nuts." His eyes started at about knee-level on her and took their time meeting hers. "Hi." The laugh was gone, the smile was missing, but good humor?and increasing sobriety?were visible in his gaze.

"Is this something you're just realizing, John?" She climbed into the tub with him, slid down carefully as the water rose; the unfortunate part of such a large tub was how long it took to fill. "Hello." A gleam, a flash of the pure blue before brown dominated again. "Are you feeling a little less drunk, now?"

"Hey," a protest without heat, "I'm not the only crazy one in this room. What did you do? Did it work?" He reached for her hands, brows furrowing.

She eyed him and while she gave her hands over for inspection and flesh-melting heat of touch, she asked slowly, "You touched the Tree, darling, and I touched you. It worked. How much do you remember? What do you remember?"

He inspected them first with a doctor's competent compassion, then with plain and mute anguish at the recognition of the shape of the bruises on her hand. "I don't remember any of it. Not really. Jesus Christ, what did I do?" He brought her fingers to his lips, one set and the other, and let her go. The tub was nearly full and she was closer to the faucet, but with her hands so damaged...he leaned in, waited, then spun the taps.

"You held my hand. You anchored me to myself and poured the power from the Heart of the world into me." She sighed, sank chin-deep into the hot water. "You were rambling?and you sounded drunk, almost, once I could hear again." Her lips twitched up in a bit of a smile. "Fickle man. You said you were leaving me for the Tree, that you hoped I didn't mind."

He snickered at that. He couldn't help it. It dovetailed so neatly with what he'd been thinking. "All I can remember is being so full of life I thought I was going to explode. And I remember thinking?" Which was when he stopped. He'd sunk down in the water too, and his owlish blinking from just above his knees was probably comical. Insert extended silence here.

Eyebrows arched up with the slant of her eyes at his face. "You remember thinking...?" The prompt, easy, while she subjected her burned hands to the very hot water with a little flinch of the skin around her eyes.

"We...should probably..." fuck, he did not want to say this, "not have sex for the next few days."

"Really." There was something she hadn't expected to hear. And, quite frankly, didn't quite understand the motive for. "Why is that, darling?"

"Have you ever seen x-rays, CAT scans, MRIs of yourself?" He braced an elbow on that knee, started chewing on his thumb as he looked at her.

She shook her head. "No?I thought I told you, darling, I haven't been seen by a doctor for anything. There hasn't been any call for it."

"Then how do you know you're not reproductively functional?"

That caught her off-guard, and she blinked at him for a moment before her smile curved up with that little hint of bitter lurking around the edges. "I don't have a cycle, John, and constructs are incapable of creation." Except...she was able to make the Mr. Greys, flawed though they were. So there was the little flicker of red and black that shadowed lies until she spoke again, "Most constructs are incapable of creation. But?if I were functional in that manner?darling, it would have happened by now." Not just him, but the years before.

He cocked his head at her. "Yeah? How often did you fill up on life and creation before you slept with them?" Huh. That did sound a little bit like jealousy, didn't it?

She opened her mouth, closed it again, and looked at him very, very thoughtfully. Then she tilted her head back against the edge of the tub and sank down a little further into the water. "I used most of what you channeled to me, and when I Stepped away?the Void took most of the rest."

"You weren't the only one diddling around in it, either."

Now that was an excellent point; she hmm'd thoughtfully again, shut her eyes and submerged herself entirely. The whoosh of water in her ears was almost close to the sound that had blotted out everything. Ten, fifteen seconds passed before she surfaced again and took a breath. "That's a shame, really."

Oh, said his expression, almost stricken, don't be mean. To distract himself he filled his cupped hands with water and splashed them over his face, pulled his fingers through his hair. Then he reached for her right foot. "If I impregnated you, any baby we had would probably end up becoming a benevolent despot over all the known universes. I'd say he'd be the Antichrist, but I'm not sure how Frashokereti figures into that." One more look like that, though, the way she came up out of the water, and she was going to change his mind. The Benandantis were not well-known for their piously abstinent natures.

She laughed a little bit at that, let him claim her foot, and welcomed the burn of his touch. "Darling?if we had a child, what makes you think it would be benevolent? You're a cruel man." Because that would be the defining factor for poor little hypothetical Nameless, yes.

"I am not cruel," he protested, and hit that instep with both thumbs to prove it. John had strong hands.

Certainly couldn't prove it by her, when he dug in and she melted. Her foot was on fire, but that was all right because it was melting too. Cue the little moan when his thumbs circled and dug again. Inhale and then she said, "Of course you are, darling. But that's all right, it suits you."

"How am I cruel?" What was that? He followed the thin seam across the ball of her foot with the tip of his thumb, then hoisted her foot out of the water to frown at the bottom of it.

"Do you really want to hear it, darling?" Construction seam, like the ones on stuffed animals? No, just a nice long slice of a scar a few years old by the thin white look of it. She glanced over when he lifted her foot, frowned as he did, and shut her eyes. "I could give examples." Then her mouth curved up while her eyes stayed closed. "To begin with, you pointed out that we shouldn't have sex for a few days."

"Lead-lined condoms," he suggested again. Then he kissed the sole of her foot. Then he bit it.

She laughed at that, a sound that faded into a catch of a moan at the bite. "If that's all?condoms in the shower, darling." Now she opened her eyes and slanted a look at him that was wicked edged with thoughtful. "If my hypothetical and unlikely pregnancy is your only concern."

"Okay," he prompted after the last scrape of his teeth?not hard enough to hurt at all, just enough to tickle and tease. Then he wrapped his big hands around it and went back to rubbing, hitting pressure points no man should know about. "Is that all you got?"

There was another melting moan when he started digging in, but from newly-closed eyes she slit one open to look at him thoughtfully. "You seduced Maria." She of the dark eyes and coarse curls at Vinny's, "And left her there."

"Wait, what?" That prompted bewilderment. "Who?"

"At Vinny's, darling, our waitress. She was smitten, nearly swooning over you?you offered to take her home with us, darling, and left her there pining." The straight face she delivered that with would have been impressive in anyone who wasn't a being of deception.

"Oh." His expression cleared. He studied that miraculously straight face. And said, disbelieving, "She sicced the owner on us. I don't know that I'd call that seduced." He flexed her ankle, dug into the hollow behind her Achilles tendon.

"Ooohhh." That was for the flex and dig and really, who needed sex if he was willing to keep that up? Well, that was a silly thought, but she had other avenues when it came to it. "Oh, darling, that's just because you don't know women. She was hoping you would follow her, of course." See that? That was laughter hitting right there in her eyes.

"I'm thirty-five years old. If I don't know women by now, I might as well throw in the towel. Morana..." he sucked in a breath, held it, let it out. All the good humor bled out of his eyes.

She watched it happen and her expression turned opaque, pleasantly patient, while she waited for the words that were piling up behind his lips.

"It felt the same." He said it, let it sit there between them. And he was starting to recognize the face. And, he was starting to realize, he didn't like it much.

Well. She hadn't known what she was expecting, but whatever it she'd been expecting wasn't that. She blinked at him, and the mask slipped away with surprise. "What?it?the Tree? Felt the same as what?" He'd said something while he was rambling, earlier - but he'd been drunk on life and creation, then.

The heat of the water had flushed his cheeks, and tufts of his still-wet hair stuck up in the occasional odd direction. He'd washed the tangled lashes and tearstains away, but something of the profound connection he'd felt remained. "This is why I'm saying...I don't think we should." He left her sinfully long leg to drape over his and reached for her other foot.

She'd take the burn in trade for the other foot receiving the same treatment, but he hadn't actually answered her question. "The Tree felt the same as what, John?" She repeated herself and that very calm note? Not actually a good sign.

"As what I feel in you."

Her foot jerked in his hand when she started with surprise. Her eyes went narrow as she tested, tasted his words. And he believed them. Whether or not he was correct, he believed them. "No. That?isn't what I am. Believe me, darling, I know exactly what I am, and that isn't part of me." Some people might say 'who' they were, but no. She consistently referred to herself as 'what'.

He frowned at her, and his hands paused on her foot. "You think I'm lying?"

"You believe what you're saying. I think you're mistaken." She spoke very precisely while black and red fought to the surface of her eyes.

He took another one of those deep breaths and stepped it down a notch. Why was being around her such a freaking rollercoaster? Was it the constant burn that upset his normal equanimity? Around her, he lost his center. Was that a bad thing? "Why?"

"Because, darling, as I told you. I know exactly what I am." And he was rubbing salt into the wounds with every word, every question. Her shoulders were going tight as knotted wire despite the hot water and that was just one more thing to add to the irritation and anger and yes, bitterness that flavored her voice.

"This form was built by Marius, constructed by him to be used for whatever purpose he desired. He summoned lies to fill the body and got Druj," and she gave him that, the part her name he'd already known, and then she gave him the rest of it, an odd gift on the platter of her rage, "and I am Druj'itsu Naru Morana and there is nothing in me of life, darling, or creation, or honesty, or pity, or love. Marius never built those into the fabric of my being."

"You know this...how. Because he told you so?" He listened to all of that, and then he just kept asking questions. He was relentless, wasn't he? And his gaze had taken on that certain sharp edge. "Look?c'mere. I'm not trying to upset you. I promise." He laid down her foot and reached for the rest of her, intending to pull her onto his lap, astraddle or otherwise given the confines of the tub. She could pet the scars she'd given him. It might comfort her, who knew. "But you think you're right. I think I'm right. Either one of us is wrong, and I'm not willing to accept that it's me just on your say-so. Or there's a third answer."

The tub wasn't quite wide enough at that end to sit across his lap, so she was in fact astraddle when she settled up for the acid-raw touch of his skin. There was a significantly large part of her that wanted to add to the pretty scars on his chest; she settled for drawing her fingernails along the white seams of skin. "He told me. He took me apart and put me back together, and showed me my heart." Literally. "What third answer could there be, Benandanti, when I've seen the threads of my own construction?"

"And you don't think he could have lied, or hidden anything from you." Having settled her onto his lap, then, and acknowledged the part of him that was very sad that the bath did nothing to prevent her burning, and also the part of him that wanted to crawl from his crotch up into his ribcage somewhere to get away from the aforementioned burn, he started rubbing her back from the front. Her poor hands. Christ. "I mean...not one of the good guys, clearly. Why would he show you anything beyond what he thought you needed to know?"

"He?" She paused, and blinked suddenly. "I was never able to tell when he was lying. He was more powerful than I was." Gobsmacked, is that the word? That's how she suddenly felt, and vaguely embarrassed that she'd overlooked that for so long. But then there was, "My hands." Still blistered, bruised, red and sore when she held up the right for display. "If I were like the Tree, darling, it wouldn't have done this to me. You were able to touch it without harm."

He turned his head, gave her a three-quarter view of him while he studied her hand again. "Yeah, and the twins are trying to crawl off me right now. But I feel it. If I said the words, I'd see it in your eyes. Sarah said Marius built you around something. That he hid something inside you. And it might be metaphysical. But I still want to see a full-body MRI and set of x-rays."

"Poor John." Sympathetically, for the confession of his 'twins' crawling up into his torso. Her mouth slid into a frown at what he passed along from Sarah, though, and her eyes narrowed on him. "And where do you propose that I should get those, darling? What do you expect to find?" She wouldn't trust just anyone to take MRIs, CAT scans, x-rays.

"I don't know. With some coaching I can do the x-rays myself. The MRI I'd need some training in. At home they have mobile machines available for both. I don't know how it is here."

"The only facilities I'm aware of here are at Star's End and Riverview, and completely outside of my control." She frowned as she thought it over, and this was the tick-tick-tick of calculation. "We don't deal directly with your Earth, but Teobern does, as does Lashkar and Telluride. We might...be able to arrange to get the machines."

"Okay." His head was hurting again. He laced his fingers together at the small of her back and laid his head on her shoulder. A supernatural hangover. Thanks, God.

The question, of course, was whether the experience was worth the pain. She curled up around him, flayed the skin from her bones, and tested at the edges of the wards below and Sarva's renewed fury. A little smile curved up her mouth while they burnt each other alive.