Work Text:
As Arthur walks them up that dark stairway, John is seething.
He can’t tell what the worst part about all of this is – the helplessness of not being able to do anything while Arthur drags him along, step by ringing step, or the fury that he has no space or choice but to contain. Even while he’s bitterly, poisonously angry at Arthur, he cannot step away to clear his head; can’t do anything but watch and brood and let his anger fester. While Arthur gets to let it out, if the force which he is putting on each step is anything to go by at least.
“The handle is to your left,” he tells Arthur shortly, refraining from describing the door because the carvings on it probably aren’t anything that Arthur cares about any more, apparently. And John’s not interested in trying to draw that decent, curious spark back out of Arthur at the moment. Not after what it did the last time.
“Thank you,” Arthur tells him primly, pausing – and John hates that too, that this shifting, changing Arthur has the capacity of making himself so fucking calm when John himself is boiling over. Bastard.
So John does nothing but watch as Arthur cautiously opens the door, and swings his head around for John to look in a movement that is, by now, practised and smooth. John doesn’t want to think about that.
“It’s a corridor,” John tells him eventually, because unless he wants them to stand there for the rest of their life, he has no fucking choice. “Three doors to the left, one directly to the right at the end of the corridor. None of them are open. No clues as to where they lead. Nothing on the walls.”
“Right, then,” Arthur says, and lumbers off without waiting for John’s opinion, of course. So when he reaches the door, John lets him find the handle on his own. It irritates him that Arthur succeeds in opening it so fast without him, so he’s distracted as they slip quietly through the door, and that’s maybe why it takes him a few seconds to realise what he’s looking at when Arthur’s stopped inside.
When he takes a breath – or whatever passes for it, without actually possessing lungs – Arthur makes a little questioning noise.
“It’s a room with three automobiles in it,” John says simply, a rising note of hope in his voice. At Arthur’s additional noise, he continues. “It looks and feels like a subterranean space, but there is a large sloped opening to the right of us that seems to lead outside, shielded from the wind and snow perhaps by direction, as well as a set of steps to the left leading up to an additional door. At least one of the automobiles, to the right – Arthur, it’s squat and heavy, it looks like it could make it through the snow. He must be prepared for this kind of weather.”
Arthur is taking a breath to say something when there is a noise: he swings their head immediately like a squirrel towards the left, where the sound of someone’s voice is bleeding gently through the door. John can’t make out the words, but it seems to mean something to Arthur: a little flinch goes through him, and he turns their body as if preparing to move.
But John keeps talking because he has to, because even if Arthur’s not going to listen, he has to. There is no likely way he can convince Arthur to care about going back down into that mine, as much as he fucking hates thinking that to himself — but if he could get Arthur to just leave without taking on Larsen, if he could just get Arthur away from here, maybe he’d be better, maybe —
“We could take one of those automobiles, Arthur. We could drive away from here right now.”
“No,” Arthur says, simply and shortly. He rocks back and forth on their feet, just for a second. John can feel it. “I can’t.”
“So that’s Larsen in there. And you’re going to murder him,” John says.
“Yes,’ Arthur says, just as simply, and starts moving.
He crosses the room in just a few steps and starts up the stone stairs without hesitation. And it’s so stupid, John thinks, that they’re probably going to die for this. That Arthur gets to make this decision for him. That he’s going to lose Arthur like this, after everything they’ve been through — so avoidably.
John wants to plead with him. John wants to hit him, to choke him out. But what he finds himself doing, instead, is speaking, as Arthur reaches the top step and starts to feel around for the handle.
John says, delicately emphasising every word, his voice halfway between disgust and sorrow, “So what do you think Faroe would think about you now?”
Arthur stops immediately, as if frozen in place.
So still. If he really tries, John can feel the strength of their heartbeat, shaking the hand he controls very slightly where Arthur has it against the door.
John tells himself this is revenge. He is twisting the knife in, protecting himself. If Arthur is going to kill them both, then it’s only fair that John gets in a parting shot before he goes, and what’s worse than this: what he swore he would never mention again, the thing that ripped Arthur apart from him so badly last time. Arthur deserves this: deserves to hurt.
But that, of course, isn’t the truth at all. Because Arthur is fucking right about him – he’s weak. Because John doesn’t want Arthur to die like this, whatever John has to do to make him turn around. If they go to the Dark World together, whenever that happens, he wants it to be far in the future. And more than that, when Arthur goes, he wants Arthur to be better than the man he is right now, someone who can be the right kind of father to Faroe if she’s there, because he thinks that Arthur would want that.
Because God fucking help him, John is so entwined with Arthur that less than a day ago he’d given himself up on the chance that Arthur would live. And apparently regardless of what Arthur does or how little that sacrifice seems to mean to him now, John can’t fucking shake that loose.
Yesterday, or whenever the Dreamlands had been, that feeling — that connection to Arthur he’d thought was so special — had been a stabilising fact, for all that the world around them was so wrong. Right now, he hates that he’s like this. But that’s the way it is.
So if he can stop Arthur from doing this, even if it means Arthur hates him, even if it means hurting Arthur right now – John will do it. God fucking help him.
What follows is a silence so long and achingly sharp that John can almost taste it. He feels the tendons inside the hand he controls flex and relax as Arthur tenses his whole body and then goes forebodingly, awfully loose.
He turns and walks down the stairs without a word, stumbling a little as John’s foot drags.
“Arthur,” John tries, foreboding building inside him at this unexpected silence, but Arthur doesn’t say anything in response. Instead, he goes from vehicle to vehicle a little clumsily, feeling the frame and trying the handles.
“Arthur — not this one, stop, listen to me,” John says, but Arthur ignores him, running a hand down the bonnet and moving to the next one. “Arthur. Please.”
Arthur is still awfully fucking silent as he reaches the right automobile, peels open the door and slides inside. When he gets into the seat, he puts his hand on the steering wheel, his foot on the pedal, and guns it immediately.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” John snarls, grabbing and wrenching the steering wheel with his other hand to stop them from hitting the wall, finding the brake with his foot. “Arthur, you’re going to kill us.”
Arthur still says nothing, just moves the automobile into a higher gear as they cross the room, hitting one of the other vehicles as they pick up speed. Swearing, John wrestles the steering wheel again and they scrape up the side of the exit slope and burst into the snow, and Arthur sets the gear higher again.
“Listen to me,” John hisses, fighting for control against the drifts and the darkness. He can barely make out the road ahead of them but he can’t hit the brake, not when they’re going so fast. “Arthur, please. If we drive in this, we are probably going to die—“
Arthur still doesn’t say anything. After a moment, John falls quiet as well. Looking at the way his hand is clenched on the steering wheel, John’s not sure if in this moment Arthur would mind that so much. He doesn't know what to say: he’s never, ever seen Arthur like this before. Forlorn, furious, curious, indignant: but never this kind of silent carelessness.
It is a long fucking drive. Longer still because Arthur doesn’t seem to give one single shit about actually doing any of the driving except for keeping his foot above the gas, and John has no idea where they’re actually going. While the roads are clearer once they make the pass, it’s still not easy at the speed Arthur is going. John swears him up and down, once, when they almost spin out after going around a corner, but Arthur doesn’t give any signal that he’s actually heard, so John keeps his head down, metaphorically, and concentrates on keeping them alive.
By the time they’re running out of gas, the sky ahead of them is darkening significantly. When John tells him – quietly, this time, that they’ll need to stop soon or the automobile will stop for them, and they seem to be coming up on a small village, Arthur reacts for the first time. Still silent, he slows the vehicle to a reasonable speed – finally – and seems to pick a moment at random to pull off, which happens to be into a verge. John has to swear at him again to get him to keep going until he can pull over properly, but Arthur waits until the last second to do it, like he’s thinking twice about whether or not to actually hear John. Like he’s pretending he’s not listening.
“So what’s your plan now?” John asks once they’re finally safely stopped, with a reasonable attempt at calm. Arthur says nothing, just sheds his jacket, seems to try and scrape the worst of the muck off his face and hands, and climbs out of the door.
Then he deliberately closes his eyes and starts to walk forwards on the pavement.
“Motherfu—” John swears as his vision disappears, but Arthur is already approaching someone a way down the street. John can hear a few sets of footsteps ahead of them: one of them stops as Arthur draws near.
“Excuse me,” Arthur says bluntly. “I’m looking for a hotel. I’m blind. Would you mind directing me towards a reasonable establishment, if you know of one?”
“Oh,” says a voice belonging to a man that John can’t fucking see, because Arthur has closed his fucking eyes, “Yeah – yes. Of course. There’s on the next road over. Do you want me to accompany you? I can take you to the entrance, if you’d like.”
“That would be a kindness,” Arthur says politely, and falls into step behind someone.
“You’ve decided you don’t need me anymore, so you’re going to shut me down?” John hisses at him. “I’m not a piece of machinery, John, you can’t just decide that I’m not still with you, especially not when you used me to drive all this way here. Arthur. Arthur.”
When he reaches out with the hand he still controls – to do what, he’s not sure, maybe try and slap some sense back into Arthur - Arthur slams his hand down onto the wrist with such instant and measured force that it takes John aback. Arthur pins it firmly against his hip, a movement that makes something go through John in a jolt. Arthur still, predictably, does not say anything.
If Arthur’s going to do it like this, John thinks with only a little bitterness, that’s fine. He has patience. He’s always been good at the long game: disarmed Arthur enough in the beginning to end up trusting him, anyway. He can wait, and wait, for Arthur to snap out of whatever funk he’s in right now.
So he keeps quiet all through their short journey and Arthur’s polite goodbye and even politer conversation with the hotel receptionist, and lets Arthur find his way towards the stairs. Arthur doesn’t seem to mind John’s lack of direction: doesn’t let the doors or the lock slow him down much. He searches out the dresser, and the bathroom door, and then the bed.
When Arthur falls onto the bed, finally he opens his eyes.
John doesn’t want to be thankful, but he is. Quite apart from the relief of having even a shred of control back again, this – it’s movement, it’s Arthur relenting on something. A crack in the armour, finally. So John is quiet, working on crafting the perfect, stinging epithet or sharp comment just to rile Arthur up a little, just to get Arthur to talk to him, but then he feels something.
His hand is shaking. And his hand is shaking because Arthur is shaking, and Arthur is shaking because Arthur is crying.
And because John is useless, and stupid, and soft, and all the things that Arthur’s accused him of – all of the things he used to hate and twist and use – everything he’s thinking dries up again in a moment. He is never, he thinks, not going to be there: in front of the King in Yellow, the person he used to be, giving up his everything to save the man whose body he shares.
“Oh, John,” Arthur says, and John hates that he can feel Arthur’s words inside him: the little part of him that thaws whenever Arthur says his name. He could sing for the thin, thready honesty in Arthur’s voice, replacing that awful coldness even just for a little while. “God.”
“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry,” John says, and means it. “I wouldn’t have said it if – well. I knew what it meant to you, and I still did it, and it hurt you. I’m sorry.”
“But you meant it,” says Arthur, not a question.
“Yes,” John tells him anyway.
“You were right,” Arthur says, and then there is a long silence between them.
“I don’t mean to be patronising by this,” Arthur says finally, rolling over. There is a little weak humour in his voice, “But... it is ironic. You told me I was the one who helped you to grow compassion. And now here you are. Trying to do the same for me. A god from a dark world, teaching me how to be human.”
John tries to put aside that same old hurt he has whenever Arthur talks about him like that. Arthur knows that he’s trying to be better than who he was, but at least he’s lost that strange and terrible numbness for the moment. That isn’t nothing, and John has learned, in his time here, to take what he can get.
“Do you remember what else I told you?” he tells Arthur. “That I was clawing my own way back from being a monster, and that it wouldn’t come easily, but it could be done. What makes you think the same cannot be said for you, Arthur?”
Arthur is silent again, and John feels cruel, a little bit, for comparing the two of them. The things he’s done as the King – but then again, the things that Arthur has done, as human. And Arthur doesn’t seem to mind: he’s half-sitting up loose and contemplative now, his foot and John’s tucked under him.
“You can always come back,” John continues, as gently as he can. Which admittedly isn’t very gentle, but then, not much that’s passed between themselves ever has been.
Arthur tips his head back: John watches his vision drift skywards.
“I used to be married,” he says, almost to himself. “I used to have a wife. And now – what I have is a being living inside me who hates me, one I can’t even t—“
He cuts himself off with a sharp breath.
John’s not quite sure what he means by most of this. Arthur doesn’t sound bitter. He sounds… wondering, as if he’s turning something over. But it still rankles John, how easy it is for Arthur to assume John’s own feelings. It would be simpler, maybe, for both of them, if Arthur was right about the way John feels about him. He isn’t.
“Would you prefer it, if I hated you?” John asks lowly.
Arthur draws a deep breath, half a snort.
“No,” he says. “No, you forget. I had that already with Yellow, I don’t – I don’t want that.”
“What do you want, Arthur?” John asks, and Arthur takes a long breath.
“Safety,” he says eventually. And then, in a second, his whole body seems collapse. John can feel the movement against his arm, and his vision drops in an instant as Arthur’s head goes down.
“But I’m not an idiot, John,” Arthur says, his voice hissingly angry all of a sudden. But this time, John doesn’t quite think it’s directed at him. He knows this feeling, he’s pretty sure – that kind of directionless anger, pushed out against a world that doesn’t care. “I know this – all of it – it isn’t going to end. It feels – god, how can I describe how it feels, to someone who’s come from where you’ve been. It’s like – I was born in the light, in a world that makes sense. But with every passing day, it feels like more of the world shuts down around me, goes dark, and the more closed that – that tunnel that I still have, the smaller it gets, the more pieces of myself I have to carve off to fit inside it.”
He’s crying again, gasping for breath between words. But the way he keeps talking, the words tumbling over themselves as they leave his mouth, John doesn’t know if he even knows he’s doing it.
“I feel like a rabbit in a fucking cage,” he says. “The only thing I have left to do is kick and kick. There’s no life for us back in Arkham – I know that. That apartment, that life, it’s – it’s a fantasy. What do we do, the two of us, even if by some miracle we reach the end of this.”
John tactfully does not say what he tactfully has not been saying this whole time, which is that he doesn’t and never has had anything waiting for him afterwards the way Arthur has done. He doesn’t really know what he can say.
Because Arthur’s right, probably. They’ve had enough scrapes and near misses and close shaves that somewhere along the line something is probably going to kill them. And it doesn’t seem like Arthur would much appreciate John’s current plan, which is simply to appreciate as much as he can of this world of such beautiful extremes – harshness and fragility, cruelty and kindness, survival and life and everything in between – with every second he has before he goes back to the darkness. And while that seems good enough to John for now, he doesn’t know that it would draw the same kind of comfort for Arthur.
He doesn’t know how to say any of this. For all of the growth he has imagined for himself over this time spent together, he is still very much a blunt instrument when it comes to self-expression. But he is struck, in some stupid way, by the fact of Arthur’s phrasing – “the two of us”, he’d said, “what do we do” – and that feeling, that Arthur hasn’t quite left him alone just yet, makes him want to reach out and try. Which is the infuriating thing about Arthur, of course. Every time John has given up on him, Arthur does this – reminds John all over again of that spark inside him that he’s so fucking hypnotised by.
John doesn’t know how many times they have to go through this painful dance before he stops trying. He doesn’t think he has an answer.
So what he does do is spread the hand he controls wide over the piece of Arthur that it’s currently resting on – a bicep, he thinks, although he can’t quite be sure – and after a slow and gentle squeeze, just leave it. An offering, a piece of comfort. A kindness, one he is creating himself.
It was an easy, thoughtless action which changes immediately when Arthur takes a hitched breath and reaches out his own shaking hand to touch it.
John feels it connect in an almost painful shock – Arthur’s thin and filthy fingers against his own, sliding against them clumsily. Arthur is still holding their breath as he slips his palm under John’s and brings their hands to rest gently against the ripped fabric at his torso, John’s hand cradled between the rough weave of his shirt and the slightly shaking press of Arthur’s fingers.
Something about this motion is so charged, almost electric – so slow, so careful, where Arthur is a man of such precise and constant action – makes John feel like he’s spinning. As if he’d been holding his own breath too, if he’d had any to hold.
For all the cruelty of this world that John now finds himself back in, it is a miracle to him, the way that he is always finding gentleness in the most unexpected places. This, he thinks before he can stop himself, is the sweetest and most painful one yet.
Because if he is being honest with himself, Arthur is not the only one that speaks of a future together as if a certainty, who has stopped making references to the two of them separating. No matter what Arthur becomes or what he does. John doesn’t know fully what this means – either for himself or for Arthur. However fully the two of them are capable of making that distinction at this point.
Arthur is fully curled over now. John can feel the crease of his belly where he is holding their two hands over himself, like he’s protecting something. His eyes are half-closed, the rest of the room a gentle blur to John now, and for the first time since John can remember – since before the Dreamlands, perhaps – he seems calm.
John loves that he is capable of doing this, that he can have this effect on Arthur by an action so thoughtless and simple. And he hates that he can do this in equal measure – the responsibility that this gives him over Arthur, when Arthur is so determined to make things difficult for him at every single step.
More than anything else, he wants to stay like this. In some way, he thinks, despite the dark and the bed and the closeness, it feels like they are at the top of some dizzying precipice, the rest of the world spread out so far and so small beneath, and any air between them thin and cold and brittle.
“If, when you think of me,” John says slowly, lazily, “inside you—“ Arthur takes a deep, heavy breath at this, “—where do you picture me?”
“It used to be — behind my eyes,” Arthur whispers. “When I thought about you, that’s where you’d be.”
“And now?” John asks.
Arthur doesn’t answer immediately. John feels him pull their arms together a little tighter.
“Would it be worse,” Arthur says eventually, his voice a quiet whisper, almost confessional, “If I said here—“ he lifts John’s hand to touch the middle of their chest, agonizingly slow, “–or if I said – everywhere, John. Everywhere.”
“Our… body,” John says, cautious and hushed and reverent, revelling in saying it out loud to the world for the first time. Or, just to Arthur, but John thinks there’s never as much distinction between those two concepts as he’d like there to be. “Our hands. Our feet. God, Arthur. Our heart, our lungs.”
Almost as if reminded, Arthur sucks in a deep, faltering breath.
“Yes. Yes. God,” he says, bewildered, and then he sounds panicked. “But there isn’t – John, I don’t know how to do this. There’s nothing in – books or newspapers, or radio shows, about – I know how to be married. I know how to, to c-court, but this is something so – I don’t even know where to start with this. I don’t even know what this is.”
“What makes you think I do either,” John shoots back, the vulnerability of all this putting his hackles up. “I’m in the dark as much as you are. Do you think I expected any of this?”
“If you hate it so much,” Arthur says, clearly stung by his tone, “then you can just—“
He falls quietly. If he can think about how that sentence was going to end, John certainly can’t. Not anymore.
“But this isn’t—“ Arthur says, and even as he speaks he sounds ashamed. ”—this isn’t you wanting to take over my body? That’s still not what you want?”
“No,” John says, and tries not to be insulted by that. It was true, once, after all. “I haven’t intended to be a parasite on you, despite what you think. Not since the hospital, anyway.”
“But you don’t want to, uh. Leave, either,” Arthur says, and it’s John who goes quiet for a moment now.
“No,” he says.
A long, quiet breath leaves Arthur then as if exorcising it, and with a little tremor he folds them into the bedsheets. Even while John feels their body go limp, the warmth of Arthur’s hand is bleeding through to his where Arthur’s still gently holding it.
When Arthur does finally speak, his voice is very low.
“John,” he says. “Everything you said about me earlier – it’s true. What I’ve been feeling, what I’ve been doing. If I keep… kicking. If you … if we… what if you end up tied to someone you no longer… like.”
John would snort, if he could.
“I’ve spent a lot of time not liking you, Arthur,” he says, but dryly. Arthur gives a wry chuckle. “I don’t imagine I always will all the time. If I’m being honest, that doesn’t feel like much of a consideration any more. I… left that behind a while ago. But I understand what you mean. However, you should understand, it’s in my best interests not to be tied to someone I no longer… ah. Well. You know. So I’ll do what I can to help. If you ever decide to listen to me.”
“I’ll try,” Arthur says, his voice small. “For you. For – for Faroe.”
“Just follow my voice,” John offers, and Arthur pushes their head further forwards into the bedsheets, closes their eyes until his vision fades away. But John can still hear him breathing, that steady rise and fall anchoring him to the here and now. To Arthur.
“And where will it lead me?” Arthur asks, quiet and amused now, like they’re sharing a secret.
“Back to me,” John says. In the darkness, with their eyes closed, he lets himself bathe in the feeling of being one person, the only thing in the world, their own quiet, private dark world. He lets himself say Arthur’s name the way he’s always wanted to. Tenderly. Possessively. In response, he feels the hand Arthur controls close back over his own with a little, beautiful gasp.
Their hands, together. Theirs. Their blood pumping through it, their breath in their lungs. The body they share.
“Oh, Arthur,” John tells him. “Always. Back to me.”