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The apartment smells of smoke and iron and singed flesh. The books scattered about on every surface are written in a myriad of languages, some of which would melt a human mind were they to speak them aloud. It’s from one of those that John obtained the sigil he’s drawn on the floor—the one he now sits in the center of, the one he’s burned onto the backs of his hands.
… Arthur’s hands. They’re still Arthur’s hands. Even though Arthur is—
John strikes a match and lights the candles. The room becomes awash with flickering golden light, and John takes a single trembling breath before beginning the incantation.
It burns his tongue—Arthur’s tongue—as he speaks it. There are probably going to be scars, but that doesn’t matter. It can’t matter.
Nothing matters more than getting Arthur back.
This is going to work.
(John can’t think about what will happen if it doesn’t. The last time he felt this kind of hope, it was destroyed so thoroughly it broke him in two. He doesn’t know if he’ll survive that again.)
This is going to work.
(Because otherwise, Arthur is really, truly gone. And it’s all John’s fault.)
[Scene break]
Maybe John had thought, for a fleeting moment after Kayne had pressed the dagger into Arthur’s hands, that it was, in fact, quite pretty. Not that he would ever admit it aloud. Something about the way Kayne smiled, sharp and with too many teeth, made him think that that might be a bad idea.
He certainly doesn’t think it’s pretty now, though, as it glints in Arthur’s hand.
“Arthur,” he says—a warning and a plea and a question and a prayer wrapped into one.
It’s like Arthur doesn’t even hear him. “I know what this dagger is for,” he says.
John realizes what he means a single moment before the King does, which should give him some sick satisfaction. Instead, John just feels sick. “Don’t,” he says, like that’ll do any good, like Arthur has ever fucking listened to him. He wants to reach for Arthur’s hand, but he’s the only thing keeping Arthur upright at the moment, hand braced against the ground where Arthur collapsed after the King snapped his leg like a twig.
“Goodbye, John,” Arthur says, and this cannot be fucking happening—
“Arthur!”
Arthur drives the knife into his throat, and everything goes hazy.
The King is shouting something—making promises that John knows he won’t keep. That he’ll heal Arthur. That he’ll save him.
John responds to none of them.
He catches Arthur as he slumps, hesitating for just a moment before letting Arthur slide fully to the ground.
Then, he reaches for Arthur’s hand.
It’s wet with blood, which would make John gag if he had a throat with which to do so. “Why the fuck did you do that?” John bites out. He puts as much anger as he can into his voice, because if he doesn’t, he’s going to cry, and that’s so much worse.
Arthur makes a horrid gurgling noise in response. It sounds a bit like John’s name.
“Join me and I’ll save him!” the King roars, but it’s all a lie, it’s all a fucking lie, and John is not going to abandon Arthur for an empty promise
Instead, he holds Arthur’s hand and says again, softer, his voice breaking around the words: “Why the fuck did you do that.”
Arthur doesn’t respond. His breathing slows, and then it stops. He falls still—so very still—and it snaps something inside of John. He shouts Arthur’s name, voice hoarse with the sob that’s crawling up the back of his throat. Arthur says nothing, and the silence is like getting the tip of his finger bitten off all over again. The despair slams into him full-force, a tsunami wave of soul-wrenching agony. John hears nothing but the ringing in his own ears as he says Arthur’s name again and again, each time torn from him bloody and broken. He’s scrabbling for Arthur’s hand, checking for a pulse he knows isn’t there, begging Arthur to breathe, to move, to say his name, to say something, please, Arthur, I can’t do this alone, I can’t, I can’t, where are you, where did you go, where—
“Where are we?” Arthur says.
John’s words stick in his throat so abruptly he nearly gags. He blinks at the expanse of plateau before them, awash in deep purple twilight. He blinks again, harder, because this—they’d been on the ground, and the King had—and there had been so much blood, so much blood, and now they’re standing, and—John doesn’t—
They’re standing.
Arthur is standing.
Arthur’s okay.
A heady mix of shock and relief cuts through the grief like a—well. John’s not really in the mood for sharp metaphors right now. He still feels a sob caught in his throat, so it takes Arthur repeating the question for him to finally say hoarsely, “Arthur?”
Arthur pauses. “John? Are you all right?” Then: “I’m … sorry about Lilly. Truly, I am. But I’m afraid we don’t have much time for mourning at the moment. There’s—”
Movement, out of the corner of John’s eye. The sound of light feet skittering across the plateau. Arthur cuts off with a sharp inhalation. “John, I need you to tell me what we’re looking at,” he whispers.
John doesn’t respond, mute with shock.
It’s the Dancers. They’re flooding out of the shadows, smiles cut across their faces like split seams, cloaks gauzy and formless about their lithe forms, and John doesn’t understand. He’s hit with the bone-deep knowledge that he’s been here before, something like déjà vu but more solid. More real.
This has happened before.
John doesn’t understand.
“John!” Arthur hisses. “Tell me what you see.”
“I—I don’t—” John cuts off. His hand, unbidden, wanders up to Arthur’s neck. He knows—he knows—that there had been blood spilling free from it not moments before. He remembers the feeling of it, the sight of it. The pain of it.
His hand comes away clean.
“What?” John whispers.
“We are a team,” Arthur hisses, frightened and thus frustrated. “I need you to be my eyes, John. Tell me what—fuck!”
The Dancer flits away with a twinkle of laughter, blood glinting on her sharp fingers where she’d sliced through Arthur’s cheek. “She cut me!” Arthur says accusatorily.
John hardly hears the words. “You’re okay?” he says, voice barely audible. “You’re … you’re okay.”
“I’m bleeding, actually,” Arthur snaps. “What the fuck are those things?”
“Dancers,” John says faintly. “They’re not supposed to be here. They’re—they were already here, I don’t—I don’t know what’s happening.”
“What do you mean, ‘already here’?” Arthur sounds half-confused, half-accusatory. “What are Dancers? What the hell is going on, John?”
“Heralds of the King,” John says. And the moment he voices it—the moment he says his name aloud—he knows. The certainty of it strikes him solidly in his nonexistent chest. “This is his doing.”
“What is—”
John cuts Arthur off. “It’s all a trick, an—an illusion. He’s trapped us somewhere, I don’t—fuck!”
“John,” Arthur says impatiently, “you’re not making any sense.”
“This isn’t real,” John says, looking around, trying to find the weak point of the illusion, the place where it all falls apart. It’s very convincing, or perhaps he’s just forgotten the nuances of it all.
“Yeah, well, it feels pretty fucking real,” Arthur snaps. “I need you, John. Tell me how to avoid these—these Dancers.”
They won’t hurt you, John thinks. Not in any way that matters. Not here. Not when you’re already—
John can’t even think it. He has to believe that Arthur is still alive outside of the facade he finds himself in now. He has to. Otherwise…
John bites back a distressed noise. Don’t think about it. “Left,” he says, because giving Arthur directions is familiar and safe and right now he needs that desperately. Arthur dodges left just as another Dancer stabs a finger where his right shoulder had been.
“Jesus Christ,” Arthur says, sounding winded. “I need you to work with me, John. We need to—”
And then Arthur crumples at the waist, bending over with his right hand pressed to his ear, as the unearthly trumpets blare, signaling the arrival of the King.
Every emotion overwhelming John—the shock, the despair, the confusion, the frustration—crystalizes in a single instant into white-hot rage. It flows through him and out of him, landing squarely on the yellow-clad shoulders of the horrible thing currently descending from the black sky above.
John looks upon the King, and he doesn’t think he’s ever hated anything more in his entire existence.
The words tear through him like shrapnel. “You let him die!” They would turn John’s throat ragged and raw if he had one. His voice is hoarse all the same. “You killed him, and you trapped me here. Cut the bullshit and release me.”
The King doesn’t respond. Maybe he can’t even fucking hear John over his stupid eldritch brass fanfare.
There’s so much happening, all at once, and John can’t process any of it. Arthur is crying out, and the Dancers are flitting about the plateau, and the King is descending from the heavens in a spectacularly grandiose display that isn’t nearly as effective the second time around, and John just needs a fucking moment to process this. He just watched Arthur—he just saw—he just had to watch his friend—had to sit there, helpless, while Arthur—
… Maybe that was the illusion. Maybe there’s … John doesn’t know. Maybe there’s something about this place. He has some memories from when he was the King, yes, but it’s all scattershot throughout his brain, like a disassembled puzzle. He’s lucky if he can fit a few pieces together.
“John, for fuck’s sake, what is happening?” Arthur snaps.
Underneath the anger and frustration, his voice trembles.
He’s scared.
The anger drains away slowly, leaving John feeling exhausted and wrung out. Maybe this isn’t Arthur at all. Maybe it’s just some elaborate illusion. It’s probably not real. But…
“The King is … the King is above us,” John says slowly. He can see it, and Arthur can’t, and maybe this is the only way forward. To tell Arthur what he sees, to help the scene progress, to hope that everything is going to be all right. “He’s floating down from the sky, yellow cloak moving slow and tendril-like, as if in some … unseen breeze.”
Just like before, Arthur struggles to his feet and stares up defiantly at the King. “Well, we’re here,” he says, and oh, there’s the déjà vu again, even stronger now. Like somebody has hit the rewind button on a tape recorder. “You’ve managed to bring us to your … domain on our own accord. So. Are you going to kill me, or what?”
Red flashes across John’s vision, violent and bloody, and he can’t help the desperate, “No, Arthur!” that escapes him.
The King ignores him. “You know that’s not what I want,” he says, voice strong enough to rumble the ground beneath them.”
“You want me,” John had said last time. (Last time? Was that real? Is any of this real? Is this how the humans had felt, underneath the King’s influence, before their brains melted out through their ears?) This time, he says, “Don’t hurt him.”
It’s all he can think to say, still gripped by visions of red spilling across the ground. Arthur’s chest, rising and falling, slower and slower. John’s name, gasped through a mangled throat.
Don’t hurt him.
The King regards John with something that John might almost call curiosity if he didn’t know better. “Return to me, and I will have no need to do so.”
John hardly has time to entertain the thought before Arthur is speaking, the words sharp and immediate and filled with so much conviction it’s almost startling. “You don’t get to have him. Not as long as I have anything to say about it.”
The King hums. “And what are you offering in return?”
Wait. John remembers this. “Arthur, don’t give him anything,” he tries, but it’s too late—Arthur is already tilting his chin in the air and asking the King what he wants, and then his body goes rigid as the King whisks him away to whatever invisible reality he’s constructed. An illusion inside an illusion, layers upon layers of falsehoods.
John sits in Arthur’s mind, in the resulting quiet, and reels.
This isn’t right. None of this is right. John doesn’t know what’s happening—he doesn’t know what’s real—and he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do. He doesn’t know what he can do.
The dagger still sits heavy in their backpack.
Maybe…
John only has time to get the backpack off Arthur’s back and unzip it before Arthur returns to himself with a gasp. It’s too late to grab the dagger, so John simply throws the entire bag to the side, hoping that Arthur is still too out of it to notice him do so. It slides across the plateau before coming to rest at the feet of a Dancer, who picks it up and eyes it curiously.
Fuck. That had … perhaps not been wise. But at least it’s out of Arthur’s hands. John doesn’t know what he would do if he had to watch it again—the arc of Arthur’s wrist, the glint of the knife in the moments before it buried itself in the side of Arthur’s throat.
The King is talking, voice deep and threatening now. John remembers what’s going to happen a moment before it does, and he barely has time to cry Arthur’s name before Arthur’s leg snaps and crumples.
Arthur screams, and it’s just as horrible as it was the first time.
The King snaps another bone—that was just the tibia, here’s the femur—and Arthur collapses. It’s all happening so fast, yet John still feels like he’s trapped in molasses—slow, sluggish, unable to process any of it, helpless to do anything but watch and wait for whatever the climax of this grand illusion is meant to be.
Don’t hurt him. Please, don’t hurt him. Stop. Stop. Please, just stop. Don’t hurt him.
The King, his memory a discordant harmony against the melody of John’s pleas:
Return to me, and I will have no need to do so.
John doesn’t hesitate.
“I’ll go,” he says, the words a faint scratch amongst Arthur’s hiccuping gasps of pain. “Stop, I’ll go. Just … just stop!”
The King stops. “No, John, don’t,” Arthur says weakly, but John ignores him.
“You want to leave now?” the King says, incredulous and amused in equal measure. “Why the change of heart?”
Fuck this. Fuck all of this. “You know why,” John bites out, feeling horribly like he’s following some script. “Now, will you just fucking do it already?”
“No!” Arthur repeats, stronger this time, more vehement. “No, John, we can’t trust him.”
Yeah, John fucking knows that. But it’s not like they have any other choice. Not one that matters, anyway.
“He’s going to leave you be,” John says, glaring up at the King. “He’s going to return you to Earth, alive and unharmed and safe, or I am going to tear him apart from the inside out.”
“Is that so?” the King says, humored, like John is nothing more than a squalling, declawed kitten.
“It is.” Then, quieter, to Arthur: “I have to. I’m sorry, but this is … it’s the only way.”
“Deal,” the King says. The satisfaction in his voice is sickening.
“No,” Arthur says, choked and desperate. “No, no, you can’t, you—”
Arthur cuts off with a sharp, upset noise. He takes one shaking breath, then another. Then, his voice hard and cutting: “I won’t let you win.”
He reaches for his bag, and his hand meets empty air.
“Wh…” Arthur pats at his back like that will somehow make the bag reappear. “What?”
There is no dagger. There is no scrambling to stall the King, or blood to stain the stone beneath them. John has a single moment to feel it—the aching, overwhelming sense of relief that he has, at the very least, prevented Arthur’s death.
Then, the King says, “Come,” in a tone that brooks no argument. There’s a horrible sucking sensation, vertigo, something like freefall but faster and in all directions at once, and then…
It’s hard to describe what rejoining the King feels like. John doesn’t know that there are words for it in human language. Perhaps the closest approximation is the way that the morning light seeping in through curtains turns a once-dark interior hazy and gray.
He doesn’t know if he’s the light or the darkness in this analogy. He’s not sure that it matters. He’s having a hard time clinging to the fact that he is a he and that he has a name and that that name is not Hastur or the King in Yellow or the Lord of Carcosa.
The King—he—they sigh in contentment.
And the Dancer steps forward and, in one swift motion, slices the knife across Arthur’s throat.
“No!” John roars. It echoes across the plateau, born from lips that are at once achingly familiar and horribly, sickeningly wrong.
“John?” Arthur says. It’s barely audible through the blood burbling through his lips, but Arthur has said his name so many times—has shouted it, gasped it, whispered it, wielded it like a weapon and a comfort and a prayer. John knows the shape of it more intimately than he knows himself, and for a moment, it anchors him. John. That’s him. John Doe.
Arthur’s trembling hand lifts to his throat. It comes away wet, and Arthur stares at it in shock, like he’d had absolutely no idea that his throat was fucking leaking.
The blood is bright and red. So very red.
John makes the body that he is occupying lurch forward, limbs that both are and are not his whipping through the air and wrapping around Arthur. He doesn’t know what he plans to do. Some of the limbs retreat just as quickly, flinching away with spasms of muscle that are beyond his control, but John clings to Arthur’s left wrist, squeezing tightly. “No,” he says again, and then his mouth continues, “You’ve lost, Arthur Lester.”
Fuck you, John says, but the words don’t make it past his throat. He’s slipping, losing control, and Arthur is slipping too, eyes going glassy and unfocused, blood spilling down the front of his shirt and staining the plateau below. It’s all so familiar, so fucking familiar, and nothing’s changed.
This is an illusion—a trick, a lie—but Arthur was dead then and he’s dead now and there is no reality in which he is not dead. It rips at John, tears him in two, makes the muscles in his neck twitch and his limbs spasm. He watches, a scream caught in the places it cannot escape, as Arthur’s eyes go blank.
And then—
And then…
And then Arthur says, “Where are we?”
John looks out at the plateau, awash with purple light, and says, “Fuck.”
[Scene break]
John sits in the center of the sigil until the wicks of the candles have burned down to nothing. His back aches, and the ground is hard and unforgiving beneath him, but if John just waits a bit longer—just a little longer—then maybe something will happen.
Something is supposed to happen.
The candles go out one by one until John is engulfed in darkness. He’d drawn all the curtains when he’d started the ritual to block out the golden glow of sunset. Now, there’s only the faintest moonlight spilling through the cracks.
Maybe I was supposed to wait until a different time of the month. Maybe I said something wrong, drew something wrong, translated something wrong. I have to try again. I have to.
John stands and almost immediately collapses again, his legs wobbling and tingling with pins and needles. Arthur’s body is still stiff, even though John has been trying so goddamn hard to take care of it. The scars pull and ache, and his shoulder feels like it’s going to pop right back out of its socket when he moves it the wrong way, and he swears he can still feel the jagged edges of a hunting knife as it slices through his stomach.
Arthur has been through so much, and John is only feeling the aftershocks of it.
He’s been through even more that John doesn’t feel. Things that Arthur doesn’t remember but that John can never forget.
John closes his eyes for a moment, recentering himself. Then, he turns on the lamp in the corner and settles down at his desk.
He flips through the books, quickly at first and then slower, more deliberate. He must have missed something. There must be something here that he didn’t see the first time. Stupid, careless. He reads for hours until he finds himself nodding off, slumping with his back against the wall of his bedroom. Then, because he doesn’t own this body, he’s renting it, and he’s going to take good fucking care of it, he forces himself to go to bed.
The sigils on the backs of his hands sting as the sheets brush against them. John fights the urge to get back up and repeat the ritual over and over again until his throat is rubbed raw and the floor is slick with blood. Instead, he curls onto his side and presses his face into his pillow.
… It didn’t work.
John knows despair like an old friend. It’s been a constant companion for—Christ, he doesn’t even know how long now. It’s not like it had been easy to keep track of time during the loops, and he only has a guess as to how long he’s been on Earth. At least a year, he thinks. Probably more. He should be used to it by now—the tightening of his chest, the stinging at the corners of his eyes, the intense desire to drive his fist straight through a wall.
But he isn’t. Every day is a new agony. Lying in bed, breathing in the faint scent of detergent and cotton, John feels the ache in his chest. A hope he hadn’t even realized he’d still been clinging to has been torn away, leaving him ragged and worn.
He feels like a broken shell of himself.
He feels numb.
“I’m sorry, Arthur,” he says into the quiet night. His voice sounds so very small. The room is so very empty. “I don’t know what else to do.”
Arthur doesn’t respond. John doesn’t know why he still sometimes expects him to. Because he’s an idiot, probably.
It takes two hours for sleep to come, and when it does, it’s hardly restful at all.
[Scene break]
John realizes what’s happening on the sixth loop.
In retrospect, it’s fucking embarrassing that it took him so long to figure it out—that this isn’t an illusion, and it’s not him finally going mad, and it’s not a dream or a trick or a torment devised by the King to fuck with them. It’s not like he doesn’t know that time is as malleable as clay in the hands of gods. The Dark World taught him many lessons that he’d like to forget, and that’s one of them.
It’s just been a little hard to concentrate when Arthur keeps fucking dying.
He’s been so goddamn angry since the third loop, when he couldn’t get rid of Arthur’s backpack in time and Arthur—stupid, idiotic, suicidal Arthur—shoved the dagger so far into his throat that John swore he could taste it. He spent the entire fourth loop sulking about it, silent and simmering, because how could Arthur do that when John explicitly told him not to? Didn’t he care? Didn’t he want to live? Didn’t he promise that they would figure things out together?
Then, after Arthur fucking did it again, John spent the fifth loop saying it all aloud, ranting at Arthur until he was out of words and out of breath and Arthur was lying on the ground once again, the life slowly bleeding out of him.
John thought it was some kind of sick, twisted joke. A way for the King to try to convince him that mortals were fickle things, or that they died easily, or that Arthur didn’t care enough to live for John. Then, when he finally released John from the illusion, John would be so overwhelmed and frustrated that he would rejoin the King by choice. It was the only logical explanation.
So when John blinks to see the plateau stretching out before him for the sixth fucking time, he doesn’t even wait for Arthur to say, “Where are we?” before he begins to shout at his other half.
Arthur startles, clearly caught off guard. John almost feels bad, but he shakes it off quickly. It doesn’t matter what Arthur thinks. He’s an illusion, a tool in the hands of the King, a manipulation tactic. And John is fucking pissed about it.
“I know what you’re trying to do,” John snarls, “and it won’t work. You’re not going to convince me that the way to save Arthur’s life is to abandon him.”
There’s no sign of the King, but John can feel him—an oppressive weight in the back of his mind. Distantly, he hears Arthur say, “John, what the fuck are you talking about? Is he here? The King? I need you to talk to me!”
John ignores him. He’s not real; none of this is real. The black stone of the plateau isn’t real. The Dancer that slices Arthur’s cheek isn’t real. The ear-splitting brass isn’t real.
The King, cloaked in yellow and floating leisurely down from the sky, is the singular thing that John is absolutely certain exists. And thus, he is the only thing that John has any control over. The King has trapped him here, and the King is going to set him free.
“You’ve made your point,” John snarls. He doesn’t bother shouting over the unearthly fanfare; he knows the King can hear him. “I get it. Trapping me here in this fucking illusion isn’t going to get you what you want. It’s just pissing me off. I am never going to return to you.” John laughs humorlessly. “If anything, you’ve made me even more certain of that. I return to you, and Arthur dies anyway. What kind of a deal is that?”
The King has reached the plateau now. Arthur is saying something, but John pays no attention to it. His focus is on the King—on the ugly, rotten parts of himself that he used to take such pride in. There’s no expression on the King’s masked face, no emotion in his voice when he says, “Is that what you want? Reassurance that if you come to me, the human will live?”
Arthur protests. John talks over him. “No, I want you to stop fucking with me!”
“Perhaps I wouldn’t need to if you would simply cooperate. This human offers you nothing.”
That’s not true. Arthur offers John things he’s never had before, that he hadn’t even known to want. But he doesn’t voice the thought aloud. He’s not going to let himself get distracted arguing about something the King will never understand. “We both know that’s a lie. I cooperate, you stab Arthur in the throat, he dies, and the whole thing repeats again. What’s the fucking point?”
The King … hesitates. Just for a moment. “I will spare the human,” the King says tightly, like it physically pains him to do so, and John…
Something isn’t right. The hesitation fractures John’s composure, knocking him askew. He staggers for a moment, then catches himself and continues, trying to hide the fact that he’s been rattled. “You won’t. We both know you won’t. We’ve both seen it. The loops? The fucking—repetitions? This scene, over and over again? Whatever you’re trying to convince me to do, you’ve failed.”
Another hesitation. This one is longer, more unsettling. The cracks within John spread, spiderwebbing outward at a rapid-fire pace. Wrong, something inside John screams. Wrong, this is all wrong. I’ve got it wrong.
Then, the King says flatly, “Loops.” The word carries an edge of disdain, like he thinks that John has descended into the wrong kind of madness, and it strikes John hard in the chest, leaving him gasping and weightless.
The King isn’t doing this.
“You don’t—” John says, then stops. He suddenly feels very, very afraid.
“John,” Arthur hisses. “I understand that you’re cross with me, but I need you to tell me what the hell is going on!”
“I … I don’t know.” Everything feels so very far away all of a sudden. Why does John feel like he can’t breathe? He doesn’t have any fucking lungs. “I—I thought that … I don’t…”
“What is the King doing?” Arthur presses. There is fear in his voice as well, trembling just beneath the surface. It strikes John then, like a knife to the chest:
Arthur is going to die, and there is nothing he can do about it.
This isn’t an illusion. This isn’t some dream created by the King. This isn’t a series of pretty lies, and this isn’t a trick. It’s real.
It’s real, and Arthur is…
And Arthur has been…
John’s world tilts on its axis, and he’s falling, falling, falling.
Arthur says something else, muffled. The King responds. John hears none of it through the ringing in his ears, the whistling of the wind as he plummets, the hammering of his own terrified heart.
Arthur is going to die.
And there is nothing I can do about it.
Arthur is going to—
Arthur is—
Arthur—
Arthur’s scream cuts through the haze, and John hits the ground at terminal velocity. The shock of it is electric, and John gasps as everything snaps back into focus. The purple light surrounding them. The King, bright yellow and looming over them, lower half an undulating mass of tentacles. Arthur’s chest, heaving as he fights back sobs.
Arthur’s leg, twisted and broken beneath him.
John knows how this story goes.
He knows that the King will not stop until he gets what he wants.
He says, “I’ll go.”
He adds, uselessly, “Don’t hurt him. Please.”
He grabs Arthur’s wrist and pins it to the ground when it reaches for his backpack. Arthur, still in control of the left shoulder and upper arm, wrenches John’s hand away.
He says, his voice small and pleading. “Please don’t.”
He repeats, as Arthur’s hand brushes against the dagger: “Please, don’t. It’s not worth it. It won’t work. This isn’t what Kayne meant. Please, Arthur, you … I know you don’t trust me, but you have to listen to me.”
He grabs for Arthur’s hand as it raises the dagger to his throat.
He only succeeds in altering its course so it slices directly through Arthur’s windpipe.
“Come to me, and I’ll save him!” the King snarls, desperate, pleading, scared. John knows the fucking feeling.
It’s not going to work.
John goes anyway.
The King sighs as he becomes whole, and Arthur’s teeth stain red as he draws his last breath.
And Arthur stands before a purple-lit plateau and says, “Where are we?”
[Scene break]
John spends the day after the failed ritual lying in bed, wishing he’d done things differently.
Or, perhaps more accurately, wishing he could have done things differently.
It’s a feeling he’s intimately familiar with. He’s not trapped in the loops anymore, but the hopeless despair he’d cultivated on the plateau has never truly left him. It permeates his days and nights, dragging at him even as he searches for Arthur with a single-minded focus that feels almost frantic at times. It makes everything so goddamn difficult.
He’s been trying to ignore the quiet voice in the back of his mind that tells him that he’s never going to see Arthur again. That there’s no way for him to bring him back without going to the Dark World, and even then, there’s no guarantee that Arthur is there. But the voice gets louder with every failure, with every day that John spends alone, with every reminder that he is just as helpless now as he had been back then.
Right now, it feels like it’s screaming at him.
You are never going to see Arthur again.
John tries not to let himself hope anymore. It’s a useless endeavor, and it only ends up hurting him in the end. But he hadn’t been able to stop himself as he’d prepared for the most recent ritual. It had been stupid, foolish; he should have squashed those feelings instantly. He couldn’t help it, though.
He carved the sigil into the floor, lit the candles, read the incantation. And he hoped.
He should have known better.
John rolls onto his side and stares at the wall. It’s plain white, undecorated. He hadn’t wanted to bother with personal effects in a place that he still calls temporary, even though he’s been here for going on a year now. The furniture is minimal, the shelves near-empty, the tabletops uncluttered and neat. It hardly looks lived in at all. And it’s not, not really. John is simply borrowing it, just as he is borrowing the body he currently occupies.
Speaking of. John reluctantly drags himself out of bed and goes to fix himself food. He drinks a cup of water, chokes down a plate of vegetables and rice and beans, then forces himself to sit on the couch instead of crawling back into bed. He picks up the book of poetry sitting on the end table and cracks it open.
Even though he knows it’s not helpful and will likely only make him feel worse, John indulges the aching, clawing thing inside of him and says aloud, “The poem on this page is entitled The Conqueror Worm by Edgar Alan Poe. Does that sound interesting, Arthur?”
Arthur doesn’t respond.
John swallows and looks down at the book. “… Okay.”
Then, haltingly, he begins to read.
[Scene break]
John’s missed his chance on this loop.
He’s grown skilled at realizing when things have gotten too far out of his control to do anything about, and it’s hit the point of no return now. Fuck-you number forty-four. John feels strangely numb about it. He’s not really sure what that says about him.
He just hopes it’s quick this time.
He doesn’t bother trying to get rid of the dagger anymore because it always ends up coming back in one way or another. He’d even managed to throw the fucking thing off the side of the plateau once—loop fifteen, back when he still thought there might be an end to all of this. He’d watched it sail into the abyss, and a wave of cruel hope had washed over him. There. Good fucking riddance. You won’t win, not this time.
He’d had so much fight in him back then. He’d stuck with Arthur, refusing to leave, even as the King broke Arthur’s fingers one by one, then his toes. He won’t kill him. I’ve seen enough to know that. He needs Arthur alive. He won’t kill him.
He won’t.
Then, a glint of metal had caught John’s eye, and he’d watched with sick horror as the King withdrew a familiar dagger from beneath his cloak.
“This scares you,” the King said, contemplative. He regarded the dagger with a detached curiosity, and when he next spoke, his voice had an edge to it that John couldn’t place. “Considering who gave it to you, perhaps it should.”
What the fuck does that mean? John intended to say. But then the King continued, “If you refuse to leave him and come to me, I will use this dagger to flay Arthur alive. I will let him heal, and I will do it again and again, skinning him and stitching him back up again for eons.”
And, well. John found himself a bit preoccupied with that.
He left, in the end. He almost always leaves. He wonders what that says about him. He doesn’t want to think about it.
He doesn’t want to think at all.
(He doesn’t think about the origins of the dagger for another four loops. He wishes he’d ignored it for longer.)
John is going to leave this time as well. It’s inevitable at this point. He’s seen what happens if he doesn’t, and it’s so, so much worse than what happens if he does. For all that Arthur has hurt and suffered and bled, it pales in comparison to the exquisite agony inflicted by a god who has lost his patience.
Why had they ever thought that this was a fight they could win?
John’s chance to fix things—if there ever actually was one—slipped away when Arthur took the dagger from the bag and brandished it boldly at the King. He should have noticed Arthur reaching for it sooner. Perhaps he hadn’t been paying attention. Perhaps he hadn’t cared.
He’s so fucking tired.
“And what are you planning to do with that?” the King says, amused. A tentacle snakes down and deftly smacks the dagger from Arthur’s hand, sending it skittering across the plateau and off the edge. It’ll reappear, John knows; it always does. Probably with its tip already sinking into Arthur’s throat. “Now. Give me what is mine.”
“No,” Arthur snarls—fighting to the end, like he always does. John feels a strong wave of … something. Affection? Pride? It doesn’t matter; he quickly stifles it. It’ll only hurt more if he lets himself feel.
“I’ll go,” he says flatly. Then, because he’s past the point of caring whether or not he says something that makes no fucking sense at all: “And I’ll go the next time, and the next, and the next. I’ve tried everything else. Nothing works. So what’s the point? If it’s all just going to reset, what is the goddamn point.”
Silence.
“John?” Arthur says tentatively. He sounds knocked off-kilter. John can sympathize.
The King, as he nearly always does, pays John’s rambling no mind. “Then come,” he says. There’s power in those words—a pull that John knows he cannot refuse. John feels it tugging at the core of him, and there’s absolutely no reason for him to fight it.
He does anyway. He fights it, because even if he is going willingly it is still for damn sure against his will. He struggles, and he clings to Arthur with everything he has, and he says because it’s important, “It’s going to be okay, Arthur. This is—you’re not going to believe me, but we’re stuck in some sort of—fucking—time loop, and you’re going to die, but it’s okay because you’ll come back.”
“John—” Arthur begins. He doesn’t believe him, John can hear it in his voice, so John forges on.
“And I don’t know how to fix it. I don’t know if … I don’t know if I’ll ever know how to fix it. We might be stuck here forever.” Fuck, don’t think about that—I can’t have another breakdown about this. “I’m sorry.” John can feel his grip slipping. There’s so little time left. “I’m sorry for all of it.”
And then his resistance crumbles, and his entanglement with Arthur stretches thin and breaks, and he’s slotted back into a space that no longer fits him, and he wants to break down and sob.
(He doesn’t want Arthur to think that he’s abandoning him. That he’s giving up. That he doesn’t care. He cares a whole fucking lot. And part of him thinks that’s why he’s stuck in the first place, doomed to repeat this moment over and over and over again. Because, even now, it still hurts.)
The King snaps Arthur’s neck. It’s horrible, but at least it’s quick.
And John opens his eyes to vibrant purple.
[Scene break]
A few days after the failed ritual, John cooks—properly cooks, instead of just sticking whatever he happens to have in the fridge in a pan until it’s properly warmed. He pulls spices from his cabinets and lines them up neatly on the countertop next to an assortment of vegetables, then clicks the burner on and begins caramelizing onions. One of the books he’d read, back when he hadn’t been particularly discriminatory about what he chose from the discount shelves of the bookstore, was a cookbook, so although he’s lacking in practical experience, he has enough rudimentary knowledge to get by.
He likes to think he’s getting rather good at it. Perhaps he and Arthur can cook together, once…
John’s eyes sting, and he forces himself to set the knife down mid-dice. Fuck. That’s usually a comforting thought.
He cooks to take care of Arthur’s body, yes, but also so he can take care of Arthur when he finally gets back. They’ll move somewhere quiet, settle down where nobody can find them. John will still have Arthur’s eyes and his left hand, so they’ll have to work together to cook. Arthur deserves good food, and John wants to give it to him.
He wants…
He tries not to think about what he wants.
Instead, he focuses on what he can do. What he can control. Which, right now, is whether or not his onions burn to the bottom of the pan.
John exhales and turns down the heat, then returns to dicing vegetables. He eyes the beans soaking on the countertop with contempt. He’s not a fan of them, but according to the cookbook, it’s important to have protein in one’s diet.
John has tried meat exactly once—a small cut of cheap pork he’d bought at a local grocer. The smell alone had made him nauseous, and the first bite had sent him stumbling into the bathroom to empty the contents of his stomach into the toilet. He could taste the iron on his tongue, could hear the slick squishing of viscous fluid as thumbs dug into eye sockets and teeth tore through uncooked flesh. He remembered watching that cruel and messy death, over and over and over again, and feeling the terror of a man who would have killed them but who still desperately did not want to die.
John threw the remaining pork in the trash and bought a two-pound bag of beans. It was cheaper anyway, he told himself. Practical. Easier to prepare.
The onions are done. John exhales slowly and pushes the rest of the chopped vegetables into the pan, then seasons them accordingly. He makes the rice noodles as per the instructions, mixes more sauce than he thinks he needs and then some because he never ends up having enough, then combines it all and lets it simmer for a few minutes before turning off the heat.
It’s good. John still isn’t used to taste, easily overwhelmed by strong flavors, but he has a fondness for well-balanced spices. In the time he’d spent with Arthur, he viewed eating as a chore, or a privilege, or a distraction. During the first few months in this apartment, he’d felt the same. He’d forced himself to eat, deriving little pleasure from it, not understanding the obsession so many humans seemed to have with food. Some days, he still doesn’t feel like going through the work of cooking and he’ll dig a can of soup out from the cupboard and eat it cold, just to get something in his stomach.
But while cooking had started out as simply a method of taking care of Arthur’s body, it has since become a comfort. John is discovering what he likes and what he doesn’t, what he can reliably cook and what he always fucks up, what he can make that will stretch his meager income the furthest. It’s challenging, and it makes him think, and he likes it.
He wants to share it with Arthur.
The next bite of noodles goes sour in his mouth. John forces himself to swallow, then sighs heavily. Christ. And he was so sure today would be a good day.
He tries to eat more, but it’s all gone ashen in his mouth. With a sigh, John stores the rest of it in the refrigerator for later before cleaning the dishes mechanically. He can feel a familiar numbness creeping through him, starting in his toes and fingers and spreading to his arms and legs, and he doesn’t care for it at all.
He doesn’t give in to the urge to sleep and instead hunches over his desk for hours, poring over new books and trying to decipher strange languages that he only marginally understands. When he’s finally torn from the haze of research by an urgent pressure in his bladder, it’s to the sight of a darkened window and a clock reading two in the morning.
Ugh.
John shuffles to the bathroom and then collapses into bed. Sleep finds him quickly, which is a relief. He never knows which he’ll be greeted with—exhaustion or insomnia. Some days, the insomnia is a blessing, keeping him awake and productive and free from the possibility of dreams. Today, though, he just wants to sleep.
And tomorrow, he will find a way to bring Arthur back.
… There has to be one. Even if his previous attempt failed. Even if he really thought that this time, he would succeed.
The scars on the back of his hands from the sigils itch. John puts it out of mind and lets himself rest. Tomorrow, he can start again.
[Scene break]
“Why don’t you fucking believe me?”
“You mean, why don’t I believe that we’re trapped in some—what, infinite loop of me dying? Come off it, John.”
John wants to scream, or maybe cry, or maybe strangle Arthur just a little bit. “I’m not lying to you. Why the fuck would I make this up? We’re stuck in a time loop of this—this confrontation with the King. This is the tenth time I’ve been here, Arthur!”
“Then why don’t I remember it?”
“I don’t know, okay? But it’s real. You’ll just have to trust me.”
Arthur scoffs. “Right. Because I’ve had so many reasons to do that lately.”
For fuck’s sake.
John doesn’t have time to respond before a Dancer, quick and nimble, slices a neat line through the skin of Arthur’s cheek. Arthur curses and stumbles back, straight into the arms of another Dancer who drives a pointed finger through Arthur’s left shoulder.
Fuck. John felt that one, the pain radiating through his forearm and hand. He pushes the Dancer away and prioritizes their immediate safety, helping Arthur evade the rest of the Dancers’ grasping hands. Then, in the scant moments they have before the King arrives, he says, “I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry for what I said. I’m sorry you don’t feel you can trust me anymore. But I am not lying to you. We are in danger, and it’s … it’s not just from the King. There’s something else keeping us trapped here. Something … worse.”
Arthur says nothing for a long moment. Then, hesitantly: “… If not the King, then what?”
Thank Christ. “I don’t know,” John admits. “I’m still trying to figure that out.”
“Right.” Arthur exhales. “Any ideas on how to fix it?”
“… No.”
“Right,” Arthur says again. “Right, then maybe we can—”
And then the unearthly trumpets blare, and Arthur drops to his knees with a cry, and there is no more time for discussion.
[Scene break]
High up in the nosebleeds, a thing that looks like a man props its feet up on the chair in front of it and grins.
[Scene break]
The loops following the fifteenth are not ones John likes to reflect on.
John is accustomed to helplessness. He’s experienced various shades of it ever since he was sliced from the King and dumped unceremoniously into the Dark World, blind and scared and bodyless and trapped in an endless cycle of misery. Even now, he is constantly reminded of the fact that he is simply a passenger in Arthur’s body, clinging to him desperately and hoping that Arthur doesn’t steer them off a cliff. (Which he has done more than once. Quite literally.)
John had never felt that helplessness so acutely as he did in the garden, when Arthur had gone glassy-eyed and had walked, unerring and heedless of John’s shouts and pleas, directly into the hands of the monstrous things that would become their jailors. He had never been more aware of the fact that he was simply a voice in Arthur’s head, with no control over where Arthur’s body walked and no way to protect them when things went inevitably wrong.
Now though, trapped in these loops with no way out and no way to change things and no end in sight, John is falling, spiraling down and down and down.
He has never felt so powerless.
He has never felt so utterly alone.
He doesn’t say a word the sixteenth loop—simply floats, unmoored and untethered, as Arthur shouts at him and then chokes on his own blood with dagger in hand.
The sight of it jars him—reminds him that for so many of these loops, Arthur is stabbing himself, is turning the dagger upon his own flesh and ripping and cutting and siphoning away the life he told John he wanted to cling to. Anger spikes white-hot in John’s chest, and as soon as the next loop starts, he says, “You fucking idiot, Arthur.”
Arthur sputters, then snarls like a wild animal threatened. John doesn’t back down, letting his frustrations pour out in the form of insults and how could yous and do you realize how stupid you’ve beens and how could you be so selfishes. He doesn’t know if he means any of them. He means every single goddamn word.
John leaves quickly this time, spurred on by his desire to just—just get away. It’s a rash decision that he immediately regrets, particularly when the King grasps Arthur in one hand and drives sharp-tipped fingers through his eyes with the other, removing all trace of glittering gold before dropping Arthur, limp and unresisting, to the ground.
Arthur dies, from blood loss or brain damage or both, and John begins the next loop regretful and shaken and desperate to never have to see it again.
“I’m sorry,” he says as soon as he is able to. He tries to say other things, but he can’t make his mouth form the words. I’m sorry, Arthur. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to. I don’t want this. I don’t know what to do to fix it. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
Arthur takes the dagger in hand. John remembers the thud of Arthur’s body hitting the ground, eye sockets a red and bloody mess, legs bent at all the wrong angles, and he doesn’t try to stop him.
John lets Arthur slit his own throat, and he says, “I’m so sorry, Arthur. I love you. I’m sorry.”
It’s the first time John tells Arthur he loves him.
Arthur is never going to remember it.
Something washes over John, too intense for him to identify. It feels like he’s been kicked in the chest repeatedly, a sharp ache that refuses to abate.
He wants to curl up in a corner and sob.
But he can’t. He’s staring at the plateau again. Arthur is saying, “Where are we?” like he always does. John’s too tired to try anything—to protest or scream or convince Arthur that they’re in a time loop. He just wants to be done.
He opens his mouth to tell Arthur that they’re on the plateau. That the King will be here soon.
Instead, he says, “I love you.”
Arthur makes a series of sputtering noises. “What?”
John is fighting back tears. He doesn’t want to be here anymore. He doesn’t want to do this anymore. It’s only been—eighteen times now? Nineteen? And it’s already too much. “I’m sorry,” he says thickly. “I know that doesn’t—I know you don’t understand what’s happening. But you’re going to die again, and you won’t remember anything I’ve said, so—why does it fucking matter? I love you. I love you. So fucking much.”
“I…” Arthur hesitates, clearly unsure what he’s meant to do in this situation. John wants to laugh, but he thinks if he does, he won’t be able to stop. “Are you … all right?”
Is he all right. What a funny fucking question. “No, I’m not all right,” John says. He sounds like he’s approximately three seconds from losing his composure. He feels like it too.
“Okay,” Arthur says quickly, like he’s trying to talk down a snarling dog. “Okay, I’m sorry. We don’t have to talk about it.”
It’s quick and tentative and conciliatory, a side of Arthur John doesn’t often see, and he nearly lets a laugh escape him. He’s always found it a bit amusing, how Arthur is whip-quick with his response to anger and violence but flounders in the face of raw vulnerability. It’s also more than a bit frustrating. Arthur is such a difficult man to care about, but fuck if John hasn’t gone and done it anyway.
Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe that’s why he’s stuck. Because despite everything, he can’t bring himself to let Arthur go.
He only entertains the thought for a moment before discarding it. As if he has that kind of power in this situation.
“Just—walk forward,” John says. The corners of his eyes prickle. He doesn’t want to do this again. Not again. “The Dancers will be here soon, and they’ll cut you if you aren’t careful.”
Arthur does so. He doesn’t say anything, following John’s instructions with mute compliance. It’s unsettling, and it’s making John fucking nervous. He can never really tell what Arthur’s thinking—though he tells himself he’s gotten better at making educated guesses—but here, it’s particularly poignant.
It’s only when the King is descending from the heavens, cloak billowing around him, that Arthur says quietly, “I feel the same.”
So wrapped up in his own thoughts, it takes John a moment to parse his meaning. “… Oh.”
Arthur hums. “I can tell that you’re scared,” he says, nearly inaudible against the King’s blaring fanfare. “But I’m not going to let him take you from me. I’ll fight.”
John knows. That’s what he’s most afraid of.
He doesn’t tell Arthur that, though. He doesn’t want to think about it—the inevitable loss, the ache of having Arthur ripped from him yet again, the utter helplessness of it all. Instead, he allows himself a scant few moments to feel the comfortable weight of Arthur’s words pressing down on him, an invisible embrace.
I feel the same.
I love you.
Even after everything that John has said and done, Arthur still…
John finds Arthur’s hand, threads their fingers together, and squeezes once. “Then I’ll fight alongside you. My friend.”
Arthur squeezes back, tighter, and for the briefest of moments, John feels at peace.
But it ends as quickly as it came. The King speaks, then steals Arthur away. John doesn’t know what words pass between them in that in-between space, but when Arthur emerges, he’s taut as a bowstring and ready to snap. He fights, more fiercely than in any of the other loops. He struggles to his knees after the King snaps his leg into pieces, despite the pain he’s surely in. He whimpers through the cracked fingers and the shattered ribs and the broken nose, and John tells him that he loves him but this has to end, can’t Arthur see that? John needs to leave. The King will keep hurting Arthur if he doesn’t.
Arthur sets his jaw and says, “No.”
So John doesn’t leave.
Instead, he takes the dagger and presses it into Arthur’s hand.
Arthur can barely get a grip on it with his fingers mangled the way they are. Or perhaps he simply isn’t trying. He pushes it back, hisses through his teeth, “Fuck you, that isn’t the answer,” and John has never been so glad and so dismayed in equal measure.
Arthur can turn the dagger upon himself a dozen times, but of course, the one time John asks him to, he refuses. It’s so fucking typical, so Arthur, that it almost makes John laugh.
Instead, all he manages is an exasperated huff. “It’s the only answer, Arthur. The King is going to tear you apart and put you back together, over and over again, unless I leave or you…”
“No,” Arthur snaps. “Fuck you, John.”
The thought crosses John’s mind, however briefly: I could just do it myself.
He recoils immediately, disgust clawing its way up his throat. No. Absolutely not. Never.
The King shatters a bone in Arthur’s left upper arm and they both cry out. The pain tightens his throat and makes it hard to speak, but John manages to say, “Please, Arthur. We can’t defeat him, but we don’t have to let him win.”
Arthur stiffens. “What did you say?”
His voice too is tight with agony, but there’s an intensity to it that, in any other situation, might make John think that he’d misstepped.
He hasn’t misstepped. He knows what he’s doing.
“When Kayne gave you the dagger. He said you’d know when to use it—that Daniel told you.”
John means to say more, but the memory of Lilly strikes him suddenly and sharply in the chest and the rest of his argument dies on his lips. He inhales raggedly, anger and frustration collecting at the back of his throat.
All these fucking loops, and he’s never sent back far enough to save her.
… Though perhaps that’s for the best. He probably would have been forced to kill her over and over and over again, watching her death on repeat like he has Arthur’s. Perhaps this is the kinder option.
Life is loss. Yeah. That’s a lesson that John has learned extremely fucking well.
“I—I thought…” Arthur trails off, uncertain. In the silence, the King snaps a few of the finer bones in Arthur’s foot, and Arthur dissolves in a reedy whimper of agony. John spares a moment to wonder why the King has allowed them to talk this long. Why hasn’t he stolen the dagger away already and cast it off the side of the plateau? Perhaps he simply hasn’t noticed? It feels ridiculous—he must have noticed—but…
It doesn’t matter. It’s not important. John puts it out of his mind, lest he tempts fate into taking action.
“We don’t have to let him win,” John repeats, more insistently. Fuck, this is hard. Why is he doing this? He knows what will happen if Arthur dies. They’ll wake up again on the plateau, and the Dancers will appear, and then the King, and Arthur will die, and everything will begin anew. Nothing’s going to change. Arthur is going to die, and he’s going to keep dying, and John wants to stop it. He can’t keep doing this, he can’t, but here he is, pressing the dagger against Arthur’s hand. Why? Why isn’t he trying harder to change things? Why isn’t he resisting? Why is he letting the King win? Why is he doing this?
Why is he asking his best friend to kill himself?
The King coils two tentacles around Arthur’s lower and upper leg and bends it at all the wrong angles. The tendons around Arthur’s knee rip and tear and twist, and Arthur screams in the ragged way one does when they’re running out of the energy to do so. He’s dropped in a whimpering heap on the ground, and when the King asks if they’re ready to give in yet, neither of them responds.
Right. That’s why.
“Please,” John says hoarsely. “Arthur, please. I can’t…”
I can’t watch you suffer for nothing.
I can’t watch you suffer at all.
I need this loop to be over.
I need to start again.
“Please,” John says again, and nothing more.
The King wraps his tentacles around Arthur’s other leg.
Arthur takes the knife.
John hasn’t been with Arthur when he died since the first loop. He’s left every time, unable to watch Arthur suffer or desperate for change or ready for it all to just end.
(Or afraid. Afraid at his core of being sucked back into the Dark World, trapped and alone and blind and terrified for all eternity. Arthur lost to him, sent someplace better or, worse—trapped alongside him, just out of reach. Afraid of dying.
A fragment of an immortal god, afraid of death. There’s something bitterly funny there, John thinks, if he were in the mood to look for it.)
John is with Arthur now, though. He’s there as Arthur raises the dagger to his throat and, after a moment’s hesitation, slices through his windpipe.
It’s horrible. It’s horrible every time. Arthur slowly drowns in his own blood as the King howls in dismay and demands that John return to him, and it’s horrible. The King promises that he will save Arthur’s life, that he will return Arthur to Earth, that Arthur will die if John does not leave, and it’s horrible. John can’t stop the tears clustering at the corners of his eyes from finally spilling over, and it’s horrible.
It’s all horrible. But John still takes Arthur’s hand in his and says, with as much tender conviction as he can muster, “I love you.”
Arthur squeezes John’s hand so tightly it aches. I love you too.
Arthur dies. And John weeps.
“Where are we?” Arthur says a moment later, and fuck, can’t John have a single goddamn moment to collect himself? His vision is still stained red—from the blood, from the pain, from that fucking ruby-encrusted dagger. ‘Use it when the time is right’—fuck that. They’ve used the dagger every single time, and it’s only made things worse.
“John?” Arthur says after a long pause, clearly waiting for an answer. But John doesn’t give him one. He’s too distracted by the realization that’s smacked him square in the face.
They’ve used the dagger every single time.
The dagger that came back after John threw it over the edge of the plateau. The dagger that the King acted so goddamn cryptic about. The dagger that was gifted to them by an entity John didn’t recognize and knows nothing about and who looked at them with mouth stretched into such a grotesque display of raw glee that it still makes John shudder to think about.
The goddamn fucking dagger.
It’s the twentieth loop, then, when John first puts a name to the thing that has been slowly and methodically tearing him apart at the seams.
Kayne.
Bastard.
[Scene break]
Of all the times Arthur died, John killed him himself exactly once.
It was the fifty-first loop. John remembers it so clearly, seared into his mind like a brand. It hadn’t occurred to Arthur to reach for the dagger. Perhaps his mind had been too hazy with pain, as this time, the King had decided to start with each individual vertebra in his back, cracking them one by one while Arthur screamed. Perhaps somehow, subconsciously, Arthur had recoiled from the thought of choking on his own blood yet again.
Or perhaps it was just another way to fuck with John.
The King had snapped Arthur’s body into its constituent parts and then reassembled him twice already. Nothing John said—pleaded, begged, screamed—made a fucking difference. He should have left, should have just given up and left, but he couldn’t. He was so tired, and he just wanted to stay by Arthur’s side. He just…
He didn’t want Arthur to die alone. Not this time.
The dagger was warm when John pulled it from Arthur’s backpack, like it remembered the heat of Arthur’s blood. Maybe it did, or maybe Arthur’s body was simply so flushed with pain that anything he touched seemed boiling hot. John could feel the pain radiating through to his fingertips as he slowly tightened his grip on the knife. It was agonizing.
It was so, so much worse for Arthur.
Arthur’s mandible snapped, turning his unending stream of pleas into inarticulate gurgling wails, and John let out a small sob of his own.
“I’m sorry, Arthur,” he said. Then, quickly, before the King could react, before Arthur could have another part of him broken like driftwood in the tide, John raised the knife to Arthur’s throat and—
And he doesn’t like to think back on what it was like. To hear Arthur’s wails cut abruptly short as his life drained out of him through the gash John had torn open himself. He doesn’t like to remember how Arthur’s hand, broken and mangled, found his and squeezed as tightly as it could, like John was the one who needed comfort while Arthur died for the fifty-first time.
John killed the only person he had ever cared about. And all he could do was watch him die and wait for it to begin again.
[Scene break]
John’s hands only shake a little bit as he places the tip of the knife against the inside of his wrist. Arthur’s wrist. He hates adding scars to Arthur’s skin, but it’s hard to find a ritual that doesn’t require sacrifice of some kind. The marks on the backs of his hands from the previous one can attest to that.
But at least it’s not the deadly kind. The King always preferred those.
John exhales and makes the cut. It bleeds freely, and John quickly guides his wrist over the sigil he’d carved into the floor. (He is not getting his security deposit back.) The blood runs along the grooves, staining them a dark crimson that glows faintly in the candlelight. As soon as it’s fully saturated, John wraps a scrap of fabric around the cut and ties it off tightly, watching red blossom across the makeshift bandage. Then, he looks down at the book sitting on his crossed knees and begins to chant.
It feels different than the other rituals. It feels … more. Like reading the book he’d come from, or the one in the library, or the ones in the underground caves. It feels as if there’s a deeper power that exists beneath the text, waiting to break free and consume him utterly.
It feels…
It feels like it’s going to fucking work!
Forgetting not to hope, John speaks louder, putting as much effort as he can muster into the words. The candlelight trembles and flickers, the sigil glows a vibrant red, and the hairs on the back of John’s neck raise. He’s close to the end, so close he can taste it, and the shadows are getting longer, and there’s a tension in the air begging to finally snap, and it’s happening, it’s finally happening!
The moment John speaks the last word, every single candle goes out. The sigil still glows, though not bright enough to see by, and John feels electrified. Fuck, he hasn’t felt this optimistic in months. He sits, vibrating, scarcely daring to breathe, and he waits.
And waits.
And waits.
And slowly, ice begins to creep back into John’s veins.
Fuck.
He … he’d really thought…
John can feel himself beginning to crumble, but he forces himself to keep it together. No. There’s still time. It was working, he’s sure it was. It was … it was working, there was…
Twenty minutes.
Then thirty.
John’s back is beginning to ache from how rigidly he’s sitting. He ignores it. He also ignores the void opening up inside of him, threatening to consume him.
This is why he doesn’t allow himself to hope.
Fuck.
How had he let himself forget? How had he been so stupid?
An hour after the candles went out, John finally breaks. He screams and throws the book, still gripped in white-knuckled hands, across the room. It hits the wall, a dull and unsatisfying thud, and it’s not enough.
John needs to tear this entire room apart with his bare hands, or the horrible grief welling up inside of him will tear him apart instead.
The candles crush easily underfoot. The table, covered with detailed notes and carefully organized files, is upended. Papers scatter across the ground, blanketing the sigil, blood long since dried. There is so little in this room to destroy, but John slashes at it with angry hands and a sharp knife until everything is in disarray.
He still feels empty inside. He still feels lost.
John sinks down in the middle of the mess, buries his face in his hands, and begins to sob.
And somewhere in the room, someone blows a very loud and very obnoxious raspberry.
John’s head jerks up so quickly it hurts his neck. It’s still dark, but his eyes have adjusted enough that he sees a shape bleed out of the shadows—tall and thin and just a bit too sharp around the edges.
“You really know how to take a perfectly good situation and just—” The shadow blows another raspberry, along with a motion of its hand that John thinks is meant to be a thumbs-down. “Aren’t you enjoying your new human life, John? You even have your own body and everything!”
Every emotion that John has ever felt crashes over him, nearly smothering him. He can’t muster any words, so he simply stares. Dimly, he registers that he’s no longer crying. Thank fuck for that, at least.
“Though, I suppose it’s not really your body.” When Kayne finally steps close enough for his features to resolve themselves, John sees a smile like a scythe curving across his face. “Is it?”
That knocks something loose inside John, and he snaps, “Shut the fuck up.”
Kayne makes a delighted noise. “He speaks! Though those aren’t very nice words, John.” Kayne clicks his tongue in disappointment. “I’m just telling it like it is! That used to be Arthur’s body, and now it’s yours. Bit of a hand-me-down, if you ask me. You should have held out for better. Something big and strong!”
“I didn’t—!” John cuts off. No. Fuck that. He’s not giving Kayne the high-ground satisfaction of getting worked up. He takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “You can bring him back.”
“Mm. I could, I could. But why would I do that?”
“Because you have to.” John stands, crosses his arms. “I’m the one who summoned you, and the rules state that you have to do what I—”
“And do the rules state that I also have to stay inside the bounds of this pretty little sigil?” Kayne toes the line of said sigil before stepping across it. He hops back and forth a few times, apparently delighting in the game of it, then raises an eyebrow at John. “You didn’t summon me. I came because I wanted to! Because I wanted to pay you a visit. Aren’t I wonderful?”
“… What?”
“I’ll take that as a yes.” Kayne hops up onto John’s desk, now devoid of papers, and kicks his feet back and forth. “I’ve been enjoying the little pokes and prods you’ve been giving me these past few months—very cute. Tickles a bit sometimes. So I decided to come down and see what you’ve been up to!” Kayne makes a show of looking around, then gives John an exaggerated pout. “Aren’t you supposed to tidy up before you have guests over?”
“Stop!” John snaps. “Just—fucking—stop talking. You need to bring him back.”
Kayne laughs like fingernails on a chalkboard. “Who? You’ve got to be more specific, Johnny boy. There’s a whole lotta dead people out there I could choose from.”
The word dead rings through John’s head like a gong. He feels dizzy, but he grits his teeth and tries to steady himself. He has a goal here, and he has to reach it. He doesn’t have a choice in the matter. “You know who!” John swallows, hard. “… Arthur. You can bring him back.”
“Mm. I could, yes. But that wasn’t our deal, was it? It’s not my fault you dropped the ball when it counted.” Kayne’s eyes sparkle, humor a thin layer atop sharp cruelty. “Sorry, Charlie. I’ve got nothing for you.”
Fuck. John had expected that, but it still makes his stomach twist. He swallows again.
This is a really, really bad idea.
“Then let’s make a new deal.”
Kayne’s eyebrows raise, though John isn’t fooled into thinking he’s the least bit surprised. He came here, knowing what John would say. He’s in control of this conversation. “Oh?”
“To get Arthur back. Alive and unharmed. And not trapped in another fucking time loop.” John hesitates, then says, “I … I want him back. With me. The way things were.”
Kayne’s grin is wide, with too many teeth. John is fully aware that he’s giving Kayne the upper hand here, but he doesn’t care. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is Arthur.
John has been living without him for almost a year, and it’s been hell. If his future doesn’t have Arthur Lester in it, then he doesn’t fucking want it.
“How disgustingly sweet,” Kayne croons, reaching out to pinch John’s cheeks. John flinches away, and Kayne laughs, loud and unhinged. “You would give up your one chance at having a body of your own for him? Your one chance at freedom? You’d rather be a hand and a foot and a pair of eyes until Arthur keels over and dies?”
Without hesitation, John says, “Yes.”
Kayne blinks, and for a moment—a single moment—he looks … something. Disgusted, maybe. Disdainful. Repulsed. Then, the movie-star smile is back in full force. “And why should I agree? I have no stakes in this. What do you have to offer me?”
Nothing. I have nothing left to give.
“What do you want?”
Kayne is inches from John’s face in an instant, tilting John’s chin up with a single finger. The tip of his fingernail is sharp, cutting into the underside of John’s jaw. He feels blood run down his neck, staining his shirt collar. “That,” Kayne says, “is a very dangerous question to ask.”
John doesn’t flinch. He meets Kayne’s eyes, twin voids that spiral on forever and ever into infinity, and says, “I know.”
They hang there suspended for a moment longer, frozen in time. Then, Kayne drops his hand and steps back, settling on the desk once more and crossing his legs. John, who feels like he has just relearned how to breathe, is left gasping for air. “All right,” Kayne says breezily. He sets his elbow on his knee and props his chin up with his hand, giving John a lazy grin. “Then let’s talk terms and conditions.”
[Scene break]
John is ready this time. He wasn’t quick enough the previous loop, but he’s learned not to make the same mistakes twice. This time, he’s prepared.
The plateau appears before them, and John says, before Arthur even draws breath to speak, “Arthur, stop!”
Arthur stops. Thank fucking Christ, Arthur stops. “John?” he says, worried. “What? What’s wrong?”
John doesn’t explain. There’s no time. He keeps his voice urgent, insistent, just fucking listen to me so we don’t die. “Take five steps backward. Only five.” Then, when Arthur hesitates: “Arthur, now!”
“Okay, okay!” Arthur does so, and John holds his breath as the plateau ripples before them, like a reflection in a pool of water. Then, for the briefest of moments, there is nothing but black as Arthur passes through the portal—rapidly closing, Christ, they were almost too late. John can feel his hand burn where it brushes the edge of the portal where something turns to nothing.
Arthur had gotten torn apart by that nothing the previous loop because he’d been just a second too slow. John was more careful this time to prioritize fucking move.
Arthur takes the fifth step backward and almost topples down the stairs. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he says as he barely regains his balance, wobbling on the top stair as the portal closes with a faint sucking sound. The void vanishes and leaves behind—oh, fuck, that’s a long drop. The stairs simply end, and John can see a glimpse of the ground below—so, so, so far below.
“What happened?” Arthur says breathlessly.
John tears his eyes away from the drop. They’re standing on the stairs, with nowhere to go but down. There is no way back to the plateau—at least not for now, not until another portal opens—and a dangerous feeling stirs in John’s core. One he hasn’t felt for the past twenty-two loops.
Hope.
“What happened, John?” Arthur repeats, more insistent. “Did we reach the top?”
Christ, John has never been good at explaining this. Not that Arthur has ever been particularly receptive to it. Over the past several dozen loops, John has curated an approximation of the truth that usually at least convinces Arthur to sit down and listen.
“Kayne is fucking with us, Arthur. He’s been forcing us to relive this moment with the King, over and over again, wiping your memory each time. It’s tied to the dagger he gave us, and we can’t get rid of it—we’ve tried. I think he’s been letting me remember each of these … these loops because it’s more entertaining for him.”
He’s pretty sure it’s Kayne, at least. It’s not like the bastard has ever shown up to take the credit, but the dagger, the cryptic message, cropping up in the city, the fascination with Arthur—it’s not hard to draw conclusions.
John doesn’t mention the deaths. It’s not important, and it’ll just upset Arthur, and it’s … it’s not important.
“Okay,” Arthur says after a long moment. His voice is predictably incredulous. “That still doesn’t answer my question. Where are we? What happened?”
Right, yes. “We’re at the top of the stairs,” John says, slipping into the easy familiarity of narration. “The loops reset to the moment we step through a portal that takes us from the top of these stairs to the plateau where the King waits for us. There is a short window of time between the beginning of the loop and the portal closing. We were able to make it back through the portal this time before it closed.”
“This time?” Arthur echoes, because of course that’s what he focuses on.
“The previous time was … unsuccessful,” John says begrudgingly. He doesn’t want to talk about the previous time. He doesn’t want to think about how Arthur had screamed as his molecules had been pulled into infinite directions and scattered amongst the dark cosmos. He doesn’t want to remember what it had felt like to be completely and utterly untethered in the black nothingness, suspended in his own horror, before the plateau had snapped back into focus.
“Unsuccessful?”
But of course Arthur wants to talk about it. Naturally.
“It doesn’t matter. The portal closed, we were still in it, it was bad, and then things reset and we were faster this time. We’re back on the stairs, and our path to the King is gone.”
“Gone?” Arthur sounds startled. “Then how are we meant to get there?”
John bites back a growl of frustration. “We aren’t going. Trust me, Arthur; I know you can’t remember, but it’s not worth it.”
Arthur doesn’t bother to hide his own frustration. “How else are we meant to get home, John? Back to Earth? It’s not like we’re flush with options!”
John’s been thinking about this for the past nine loops, and he has an answer. “We’re not going home.”
Arthur makes a choked, baffled noise. “Excuse me?”
“We’re staying here. In the Dreamlands. Like you suggested. ‘Fuck it,’ remember?”
“Y-yes,” Arthur says, clearly knocked off-balance, “but that was before…”
Before they realized that their continued presence here would only bring pain. Before they remembered that they are but playing cards in the hands of gods with far more power than either of them could ever dream of having. Before Lilly.
But what other option is there? Go to the plateau, just to die? To be stuck in an endless cycle of death and rebirth? To be trapped, forever? Arthur would hate that, if he were aware of it—the awful fruitlessness of it all. Arthur likes having control, agency. The ability to make his own decisions, to craft his own fate. He would drown under the onslaught of nothing you do will ever change how this story ends that John has been drowning in for what feels like several eternities.
John is not unfamiliar with helplessness. He was helpless trapped in a book and he was helpless lying in a hospital in Harper’s Hill and he was helpless as the guards threw Arthur’s unresisting body into a pit and he has been helpless on that goddamn plateau time and time and time again.
But he is not fucking helpless now. For the first time, they have a chance. They can walk away.
“Please, Arthur,” John says, and he’s going off-script, and he doesn’t know if Arthur will listen to him, but he doesn’t care. “There is nothing for us up there but suffering and loss. At least if we find that in the Dreamlands, we will have still made the choice to walk away from a path that Kayne and the King and the entire fucking universe want us to take. We won’t have given in.”
He’s not sure if Arthur understands. He needs Arthur to understand. He needs it so badly he’s nearly sick with it.
“So fuck it,” John says, voice tight. “We’re not giving any of them what they want. Not this time.”
Arthur is quiet for a long moment. John knows he still doesn’t understand, and maybe he never will. To be told that you have lived a life is not the same as having lived it. There’s a gap, a chasm that can’t be filled, a ravine with no bridge to cross it. There’s only emptiness, made worse with the knowledge that it exists.
It’s a feeling John knows all too well.
Arthur exhales. Then, slowly, he says, “All right.”
“All right?” John echoes.
“Fuck it,” Arthur says, with enough bite that John believes he truly means it and isn’t just humoring John for some reason. “You’re right; we’ve been pushed around by things far beyond our comprehension for too long, and … if what you’re saying is true, and things have been … repeating, perhaps this is the way to break the cycle.” He lets out a wry chuckle. “And if it’s not, well—I suppose we’ll just have to try again, won’t we?”
Easy for you to say, John thinks bitterly. You won’t remember a thing.
“I suppose,” he says aloud.
If Arthur picks up on John’s bone-deep weariness, he doesn’t comment on it. Instead, he turns carefully in place until he’s facing down the steps. Fuck, they’re steep. John imagines they’ll be one of the rare few to ever descend this particular flight of stairs. He has the feeling it’s almost always a one-way trip.
Arthur, who has the distinct pleasure of not being able to see the ease with which they can fall to their doom, hums. “Lead the way, my friend.”
John takes a breath, and they begin their descent.
[Scene break]
For all that John has thought about steering Arthur off the edge of a cliff, he’s never imagined what that would feel like in practice.
Turns out, it’s pretty fucking awful.
He directs Arthur to the right—tells him to run, to sprint, that the Dancers are following them, that it’s safe to the right. Just keep running. You’re almost there, Arthur. Just a few more steps.
Time freezes in the moment that Arthur’s feet leave solid ground. They hang there suspended for the briefest of instances, nothing before them but the endless cosmos and nothing below them but nothing.
Arthur makes a sound, small and terrified.
And then they fall.
They don’t hit anything that might be called ground. Arthur falls for hours, for days, for weeks, for years, for millennia. There is no sense of time and no sense of place and no sense of anything other than the falling. Arthur is silent, all words stolen from him by vertigo and the endless vacuum.
There is nothing, and they fall.
It occurs to John that they may fall forever. No death, no life. Just this.
He didn’t think he could fear anything more than the crimson wash of Arthur’s blood as his heart ceased to beat, but. Well.
John doesn’t know how Arthur dies. Shock, perhaps? Lack of oxygen? Something far more eldritch and strange?
All he knows is that when Arthur takes his last shaking breath and John’s next blink reveals a wash of purple plateau, all he feels is a sickening sense of relief.
[Scene break]
They end up back in the broken city. It’s not by choice; John would like nothing more than to get far, far away from here. But no matter how hard he looks, and no matter how much Arthur insists that there must be a way down somewhere, John has to resign himself to the fact that this is as far as they can go for now. The stairs they’d come up on are nowhere to be found; there is nothing along the perimeter. Arthur walks until he’s breathless and aching. He sits with his back against the tall stone wall encircling the city, catching his breath and muttering something about endurance and atrophy and fucking pits.
“Perhaps,” Arthur says, voice hoarse with exertion, “we should stay here. Like we originally planned to. Find a nice house, a bed, maybe some food—real food, god, what I wouldn’t give for…”
Arthur trails off with a deep sigh. “Water, perhaps, should come first, though,” he says, struggling to push himself to his feet. “I may collapse if I don’t get some fluids in me.”
John tells himself that they’ll find a way down later and has them backtrack to a gate they’d passed ten minutes ago.
The city is barren and quiet. It makes John’s skin crawl, and as if on cue, Arthur shivers. “No noisy neighbors, at least,” he jokes.
They venture further in. The buildings are tall and pristine, glittering in some unseen light. There’s something extremely unsettling about it all that John can’t quite put his finger on. It’s not the silence, though that is indeed disquieting. It’s not a feeling of another unseen presence, or too-long shadows, or a sound just on the periphery of one’s hearing.
… It’s an absence.
John puts a name to it when they pass a building—glass-fronted, with a large sign out front proclaiming it to be a music shop—and he realizes with a start that he recognizes it. The last time he’d seen it, the sign had been hanging from a single chain, the windows smashed in, a body missing both its arms slung halfway through the window frame, mouth agape in a silent scream. Now, it’s pristine.
The bodies are gone. All of them.
“John?” Arthur says cautiously. “Are you all right? You’ve gone quiet.”
“Yes,” John says, too quickly. He can’t see Arthur’s raised eyebrow, but he can imagine it. “… It’s clean.”
“Clean?” Arthur echoes.
“The … bodies,” John says reluctantly. “Somebody’s removed them. Fixed the buildings. There’s still nobody here, but it’s…”
“Clean,” Arthur says again, this time thoughtfully. “So, what. Is this … some sort of trick?”
Probably. It’s not like John doesn’t know who’s orchestrating all of this, and if he’s cleaned up his mess, he almost certainly has something planned. But this is the first time that they haven’t been trapped on that plateau, at the King’s mercy, ticking down the seconds until they die yet again. There, they have no options. Leave, stay, fight, give in, run, hide—it’s all the same. The King tears them apart in the end.
Here, there’s a chance. A chance that things can go right. A chance that they make it through alive.
Here, there’s hope.
It’s a very dangerous thing to have. John clings to it anyway.
“Maybe,” John says, because Arthur will see through his bullshit if he tries to say that everything is fine and wonderful. “But we’ve made our choice. Until we’re able to find a way out of the city, I think we should simply … carry on.”
Arthur exhales. “All right. Just … keep an eye out, okay? I don’t want to end up strewn about the streets.”
It occurs to John that there are so many ways for Arthur to die here. More than he can conceptualize or count or keep track of. Fear strikes him, hot and sharp, and he snaps, “I’m not a fucking idiot, Arthur. I’m not going to sit around and let you get mauled.”
Arthur pauses for just a moment, like a skipped record. “… I didn’t say you would.”
John almost tells Arthur about the deaths then. But he swallows it back. Arthur doesn’t need to know. He doesn’t need to know how much John has riding on this, how much terror clings to the shape of him, how he feels on edge at every shift of fabric and crunch of rock and footstep that echoes strangely.
Then, Arthur says, “So. Tell me about the … what did you call them? The loops?”
John is taken off guard. Arthur’s never asked him to explain before. Then again, he’s never had much time to explain before. They’re usually busy being broken in two by the King. “What?” he says, like an idiot.
“The repetitions,” Arthur clarifies, like John has misunderstood him. “Kayne, trapping us in this—this cycle. Why can’t I remember anything?”
Because he’s fucking with me, and he’s using you to do it. “I don’t know.”
Arthur makes a thoughtful noise, like this is an unsatisfactory answer but he’ll take it for now. “What’s the—what would you call it. The … catalyst, I suppose? The event that makes the loops restart.”
John feels ill. “I don’t know,” he says again, for lack of anything better.
John can hear the frown in Arthur’s voice. “It’s random?”
“I guess so.”
“Hm.” Arthur is quiet for a moment. “Well, perhaps there’s a pattern. Could you describe the loops to me? Try to be as detailed as possible—it’ll help us figure out what’s happening and how to stop it.”
Maybe John should have just told the whole fucking truth in the first place. “There have been a lot of loops, Arthur—it’s going to take some time to describe them all, and I might not be able to describe the early ones in great detail.”
That’s a lie. Some loops are fuzzy, yes, but only because he’d gone through them in a haze, trying desperately not to think about what was happening and what would continue to happen. All the others he remembers in awful, painful detail.
Arthur is quiet for a moment. Then: “… How many repetitions have there been, John?”
John doesn’t really want to answer that.
“… Fifty-six.”
Arthur stops walking. “Fifty-six?” he echoes. “Jesus Christ.”
“It’s fine,” John says shortly. He doesn’t know why he says it. It’s clear in his voice that it’s distinctly not fine. But maybe he just needs to say it aloud, to make another half-hearted attempt to believe it.
It’s fine.
“Right,” Arthur says, still sounding dazed. He starts walking again, a bit slower this time. “Well, perhaps we should just … start at the beginning, then. The first loop. What happened at the very end of it? That might be our best clue as to what’s triggering the resets.”
John is trying to decide whether to just fucking tell Arthur the truth or to dance around it until Arthur finds out for himself and gets pissed about it when he catches a glimpse of color out of the corner of his eye. He flinches before his brain catches up to what his eyes are seeing.
“Arthur, stop.”
Arthur stops. “What? What is it?”
It’s a small shop with baskets on racks outside of it, filled to the brim with various kinds of food. It must be pulled from dreams—apples and oranges and breads and cheeses and vegetables and various bottled things, including what looks to be water. Everything is in pristine condition, which makes the skin on the back of John’s hand prickle. But Arthur is so thin and slightly unsteady on his feet, and he deserves to know that it’s here. So John says, “In front of us is a small shop with various kinds of food outside of it. Fruit, vegetables, bread, cheese—and water, along with what looks to be several varieties of alcohol.”
“Oh, thank god,” Arthur says, relief dripping from his voice like honey. He takes two steps forward, then pauses. “… Is it … safe?”
It clearly pains him to ask. John wishes he had a more reassuring answer than, “I’m not sure, but it looks normal,” but Arthur seems to accept it nonetheless.
“Well,” he says with a sigh. “I suppose I’ll just have to settle for that. Besides, there are far easier ways to kill me.”
Perhaps. Or perhaps Kayne doesn’t like John bending the rules and wants to put an end to it.
John has to clench his hand into a fist to resist the urge to slap the cheese out of Arthur’s hand when he takes it. Arthur raises it to his lips, chews. Swallows. Makes a frankly obscene sound, deep in his throat. “God, that’s heavenly.”
“The water is to your right.”
“Right! Right, yes.”
Arthur sifts through the bottles until John is fairly certain he’s located water and not clear spirits. Arthur sniffs it suspiciously, then—evidently deeming it acceptable—he takes a long drink, then another.
“Careful—you’ll get sick if you drink too fast,” John says, though it doesn’t stop Arthur from draining the whole bottle anyway.
Arthur huffs. “I’m just glad to have the chance to get sick on it. Are there more?”
John directs Arthur through two more bottles of water, an orange, a banana, two rolls, a bunch of carrots, and a handful of small round things that John doesn’t recognize but that Arthur tells him are macadamia nuts. John keeps waiting for something to happen—for Arthur to choke, or for the poison to take effect, or for some horrible beast to come charging out of the store and embed its fangs into their throat. But there’s nothing.
It doesn’t make John feel safe at all. It just makes him feel like they’re being toyed with. Lulled into a false sense of security before the blade finally drops upon them both. Because it always drops.
Arthur stuffs his bag nearly to the brim with more water and food. He cites practicality—they don’t know if this place will still be here or if they’ll be able to find more food in the future—but there’s a touch of restlessness in his hands as he works that makes John think it might be something more.
He thinks of how Arthur’s hands had shaken when he’d deliberated over which part of Faust to consume next—which would rot the fastest, which would be the least likely to make him so ill he vomited the entire meal back up in the corner of the pit designated for waste—and he says nothing.
[Scene break]
John wonders, if he took Arthur’s hand in the moment between death and rebirth, if he would relive the last few moments of Arthur’s life.
It’s not something he’s tested on any of the previous loops. It’s not something he particularly wants to know, nor that he wants to experience. But still, he wonders.
He’s hated the ability to view the deaths of others from the moment it was forced upon him. It’s unpleasant and horrifying and painful, and time has not lessened the effect of it on John’s psyche. If anything, it’s gotten worse. Though John’s unsure if that’s because he’s grown sensitive to death as a general concept, or because of…
Because of Faust.
They haven’t talked about Faust. There was never a good time, and even if there was, it was clear Arthur was uninterested in doing so. Mealtimes were quiet, tense affairs, broken up only by the wet sounds of chewing and the whimpers John couldn’t quite contain as he watched Arthur dig his thumbs into Faust’s eyes again and again and again.
… Though of course, one of those thumbs was John’s. He remembers the brief moments of resistance before the eye had given way in a damp squish of warm fluid. He remembers the scrape of his fingernail against bone as they pushed in, in, in, and Faust wailed so loudly it still rings in John’s ears when Arthur sleeps. The sense-memory of the death visions had mingled with the muscle memory of carving out a space in Faust’s skull, and if John had control of Arthur’s stomach, he would have vomited.
It’s good that he didn’t. They would have died in that pit. Wasted away into nothing, killed by John’s own inability to do what it took to survive.
John is still unable to do what it takes to survive. Arthur has died so many times already, and John hasn’t been able to stop it. He should probably be trying harder, but he hasn’t quite been able to focus the past few loops. Instead, he keeps thinking about it, turning the concept over in his mind.
If he touches Arthur’s skin, in that brief moment before the next loop begins, what will he see?
Arthur drives the knife into the side of his throat.
John waits.
The blood rushing in their ears slows. Stops.
And John brushes his fingers against the inside of Arthur’s wrist.
“No!” the King shouts, so loudly it shakes the ground beneath them.
John lets his hand fall away.
Nothing.
John hates the death visions. He wishes he could cut them from his body and set them alight. He would do almost anything to ensure that he never has to endure them again.
John touches Arthur, and he sees nothing, and the disappointment is a dagger stuck straight through his heart.
[Scene break]
They continue through the city. Arthur is full and content, but there’s a wariness to his steps that tells John he’s not complacent. He’s on edge, too. He can feel the tension in the air.
They avoid the amphitheater where they’d first seen Kayne, drenched to the elbows in blood and grinning with teeth that were just a bit too white. Unspoken, they also avoid the street where John had spilled Lilly’s blood, vision nearly blinded by tears. Instead, they head in a new direction, past pristine and deathly silent buildings, until Arthur sighs and says, “I suppose we ought to find a place to lie down. If we’re going to be staying here.”
“You think it’s safe?” John says, then feels stupid for saying it.
Predictably, Arthur laughs wryly. “Not in the slightest. But I think…” He hesitates. “Well. There’s no use in worrying about something that hasn’t happened yet.”
John thinks there is a great deal of use in worrying. But he can hear the tension in Arthur’s voice—the unspoken knowledge that whatever is going to happen will happen whether they are out in the streets or curled up atop a warm and abandoned bed—so he says nothing. Instead, he guides Arthur towards what looks to be a townhouse, thin and white and just a bit out of proportion with typical Euclidean geometry.
Arthur steps inside and locks the door behind him. If it was quiet on the streets, it is even more so in here. The silence echoes, making the cramped front hall seem much larger than it ought to be. Arthur shifts, and the creak of wood underneath his feet is as loud as a gunshot, so much so that John’s hand flinches against Arthur’s side, his toes curling in his shoe.
“Old houses,” Arthur murmurs before stepping forward.
The wood creaks again. John doesn’t flinch this time.
Mostly.
Arthur makes his way into the kitchen. It’s spotless, pans hanging above the stovetop and a vase of flowers on the table. They’re slightly wilted, which is somehow comforting. Still, John says, “Arthur, I don’t think we should stay here.”
“Then where should we go, John?” Arthur opens a cupboard and reaches inside, feeling out the shape of the cans within. “We don’t have many other options.”
“… I know.”
Arthur sighs and straightens, closing the cupboard. “Look. I can tell that these … these loops have rattled you badly. I can understand why, I suppose—trapped in an endless cycle, unable to escape, not knowing what’s causing it or when it will come to an end. But I’m afraid all we can do is move forward.”
Move forward. It feels like such a novel concept. “I … suppose.”
As Arthur makes his way to what they presume to be the bedroom, he says, “Oh, that reminds me. You never did answer my question.”
“Hm?”
“What happened at the end of the first loop? What triggered the reset?”
Right. John had hoped that Arthur had forgotten, but of course he hadn’t. “I … I can’t say for certain.”
Arthur hesitates at the door to what looks to be a bedroom. “What does that mean?”
“It means I can’t say for certain,” John snaps.
“Can’t?” Arthur says, voice growing sharp around the edges. “Or won’t?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“How are we meant to fix it if you won’t talk about it?”
“Fix it?” John echoes. “We can’t, Arthur. We can’t fix it.” He’s so tired suddenly, the bite leaving his voice. “I’ve tried. I’ve been trying. This is … this is the closest we’ve come so far to…”
John can’t articulate it. If he does—if he truly lets himself think about how much hope he has staked on this city, on their lives here, on this loop that has already lasted longer than all the others—he thinks he may lose himself.
“Then let me help,” Arthur says insistently. “If this is the closest we’ve ever come, then we have the chance to put an end to it.”
“I…”
Arthur exhales. “Look. I know we haven’t been on the best of terms lately. And frankly, I’m not sure if we can ever go back to what we had before … before. But … I don’t know. I’d like to try, I think. And if we really are trapped in some endless cycle, then it benefits both of us to find a way out of it. Right?”
“… Right.”
Arthur sighs, and a moment later John feels fingers brush against the back of his hand—brief, gone in a moment, but a comfort all the same. “So let’s sit down,” he says, “and talk about it. And then perhaps you can tell me what you’ve been keeping from me.”
“I’m not keeping anything from you,” John says reflexively.
Arthur huffs, clearly unconvinced, and finds his way to the bed. He lies on his back, eyes trained sightlessly on the ceiling, one hand resting atop his chest. Hesitantly, John brings his hand up as well until it’s resting just beside Arthur’s. He half-expects Arthur to flinch away, or at the very least to pretend like it’s not there. Instead, Arthur shifts so their fingers are tangled together, squeezing once before letting them rest. “The truth, if you please,” he says lightly, still staring at the ceiling. “It’s rather hard to investigate something when you don’t have all the facts.”
Arthur’s hand is so warm in his. It’s not scrabbling desperately at black rock or stained with blood or grasping a broken leg or reaching for John where he’s locked away inside the King. John doesn’t know what to do with it. He knows it can’t last. He desperately hopes it never ends.
He doesn’t know how to say this in a way that isn’t blunt or deadly sharp. There is no gentle way to tell somebody that they have died fifty-six times already. How will Arthur take it? He hasn’t believed John before, but they also haven’t had as much time before as they do now. The scant few moments before the Dancers come do not leave much room for nuance, and fear is not an adequate backdrop upon which to tell somebody that they are about to die because they’ve already done so dozens of times.
But here, with Arthur lying in bed in a facsimile of safety, maybe it will be okay. Maybe he can finally get through to Arthur in a way that he hasn’t been able to before.
Maybe they can figure things out after all. And maybe they can fix them.
“I…” John hesitates a moment more. He closes his eyes to see if that makes things easier. It doesn’t. But Arthur’s hand is still warm in his, so John continues, “… I know what’s triggering them. The loops. Or at least, I know what happens before they reset. The mechanics of it are … unclear. Though I have some theories.”
“Really?” Arthur shifts as if to sit up, but instead, he simply grips John’s hand a bit harder. “That’s great! If we know what’s causing the resets, we can stop it. Why didn’t you mention this before?”
“Because it’s … complicated,” John grits out.
“Complicated?” Arthur echoes. “How so?”
Christ. John doesn’t know why this is so hard. He suspects it has something to do with the way Arthur is holding his hand, like he’s the one who needs comfort in this situation. But he doesn’t. This isn’t about him. Or rather, it is about him, but it’s also about Arthur, and it’s about Arthur being used to hurt him, and how can John feel pity for himself when Arthur’s the one being treated like a tool?
But Arthur doesn’t know that. He doesn’t know what’s been done to him, over and over and over again. He’d gone through so much before the loops, endured so much, and he’d survived all of it. He doesn’t know that on fifty-six versions of the King’s plateau, he’s failed to do so. To him, this is the first loop, and the only loop.
“John,” Arthur says after a long moment of silence. His voice has an impatient edge to it, but the middle of it is softer, almost concerned. “I need you to be honest with me. Whatever you aren’t saying … I need to know. I can handle it.”
“Maybe you can’t,” John snaps. What will Arthur do? How will he react? Will he be mad? Frightened? Upset? I don’t want to know. I don’t want to find out. I don’t want any of this.
I’m scared.
Arthur sighs and says, clearly reaching the end of his patience, “Well, that’s for me to decide, isn’t it.”
“You don’t know what you’re asking for.”
“Because you won’t tell me.” Arthur lets go of John’s hand and scrubs across his face. “For the love of Christ, would you please just say it already?”
“You die, Arthur.”
Arthur’s next sentence, clearly already sitting on the back of his tongue, nearly chokes him. His breath hitches, and he goes very still on the bed.
John says nothing. Simply waits for Arthur to make the next move.
I’m so fucking scared.
“… I die,” Arthur says at length. The words are tight as a bowstring. His tone is completely unreadable.
“Yes, Arthur—you die. And then the loop resets, and you die again. And again. And again.” And there is nothing I can do to stop it.
“… Every time?”
“For fuck’s sake, Arthur, yes, every time! Ever since you stuck that fucking dagger through your throat, I have watched you die over and over again, and I have tried to stop it, but nothing fucking works, okay? Whatever this is, it’s—I don’t know if I can—this, what we’re doing now, being in the city, away from the plateau, it’s … it’s the best chance we have of fixing things.”
John doesn’t know if it is. The city is clean, and he feels hunted, and they still have the dagger, and Kayne is somewhere out there watching them, but everything is different now that they’re not on the plateau anymore. There are more paths available to them than John knows what to do with, and one of them has to work. It has to.
“Since I … what?” Arthur says sharply. He sits up, hand lifting to brush against his windpipe. “Why would I…?”
Fuck, John doesn’t want to talk about this. He wants to be back in Arkham, walking through the streets with Arthur and describing the color of the sky and the way the clouds move across it in lazy arcs. He wants to feel the sun sting his eyes, to feel raindrops against the back of his hand, to hear the crunch of gravel underfoot as they step over potholes and avoid some of the more suspicious-looking puddles. He wants to sit on a bench in a park and watch the birds hop past, begging for scraps of bread, while he tells Arthur about the various people he sees milling about.
He wants things that he is never going to have again. And it hurts.
“We go to the plateau, and … he’s there,” John says haltingly. “The King. He—it’s different every time, but the first time, he … he tried to convince you to push me away, then he tried to convince me to leave. It didn’t work, and he…” John curls his hand into a loose fist. “He hurt you. Your legs, he—and he wasn’t going to stop, so I … I said I would go.”
Arthur stiffens. “You—”
“I had to,” John interjects quickly. “I’ve tried it the other way, and I … I had to.” John’s fist curls tighter. “We were never going to win against him, Arthur. I don’t know why he waited so long to break us, but when he finally did … the only way to stop it was to go. So I … I asked him what would happen if I left.” John’s voice takes on a slightly bitter edge to it. “And then you decided that Kayne gave you the dagger so you wouldn’t have to let the King win, and you took it out, and you stuck it into your own neck.”
Arthur sucks in a breath. “Oh.”
Yeah. Oh.
“That’s when it started,” John says, trying to push aside the sudden rush of anger and frustration that he thought he was over by now. He’s seen Arthur kill himself enough times that he should be over it. (He doesn’t think he’ll ever be over it.) “I wouldn’t leave you, not after that. You died, and there was a moment of nothing, and then we were standing on the plateau again. You died again, and then we were standing there again, and nothing that I’ve done has changed that. It’s beyond our control.”
Arthur is quiet for a long moment. Then: “Nothing that you’ve done.”
“I’ve been doing my fucking best, okay?” John snaps.
“Yes, yes,” Arthur says dismissively, fuck you very much, “but now we can work together! You’ve never had time to explain it all to me before, yes? Not in full, at least.”
“… Correct.”
“And now you do. We should go through it all—every loop, every detail, every theory. There must be something there that will tell us how to fix this.”
“And what if we can’t?” John says tightly. “I don’t know if you fucking heard me, but you die, Arthur, and you keep dying. Doesn’t that matter to you?”
“Of course it does. But sitting around, waiting to die … that’s not me. That’s not us. I don’t want to just—just roll over because I’m afraid of what might happen.”
“That’s not what I’m suggesting.”
“Then what are you suggesting, John?”
“I—” John cuts off with a frustrated noise. He doesn’t even know why he’s arguing about this. This is everything he could have hoped for and more.
He just. He wants, so very badly, for them to survive.
“I don’t know,” John says. He’s aware of how exhausted he sounds, voice flat and drooping around the edges. Hollow. “I don’t want you to die, Arthur.”
Arthur hums. “Well, neither do I. But … if it’s like you said and the loops reset every time I do, then you can just—try again, right? It’s a lot better odds than we’ve had in the past.”
“Try again,” John echoes. “You don’t understand what it’s been like, Arthur—to be trapped in these loops. I can’t just try again. I can’t watch you die. I don’t want to watch you die. Don’t you fucking get that? Don’t you fucking understand that—”
That I love you, John almost says before he bites back the words. He doesn’t know how Arthur will react. Things are different here than on the plateau, less dire. Maybe everything Arthur has said to him in the past—I feel the same—was just to placate John, or because he knew he was about to die.
John has so much riding on this loop. He can’t afford to ruin it.
“—that I don’t want to lose you?” John says instead. He doesn’t know if his hesitation was noticeable. Probably. Arthur has a keen eye for this sort of thing. Hopefully, he won’t think anything of it—chalk it up to nerves or fear or desperation or … something.
Arthur says nothing for a long moment. Then, he exhales slowly. “I … understand that you’re afraid,” he says carefully. John can’t tell what he’s thinking. “But it is in our best interest to work together to figure out what’s causing these loops and how to stop them. If we do nothing, I may die anyway. We don’t know, John. But what we do know is that this isn’t going to solve itself.”
Arthur’s hand finds John’s again, and he brushes his thumb across the back of it. “I want things to be better too,” he says softly. “I would like nothing more than to settle down somewhere safe and live out the rest of our lives in happy comfort. But I don’t think…”
Arthur trails off. John fills in the gaps for him. “You don’t think it’s possible.”
Arthur sighs. “I don’t think it’s possible while we’re still here in the Dreamlands, knowing that my death will reset all the progress we’ve made.”
Christ, John hates it when Arthur’s right.
“... Okay. Just—promise me that we’ll figure this out.”
Arthur squeezes John’s hand. “I promise.” Then, with a hint of a smile: “I am one of the best private detectives in Arkham.”
“And one of the humblest as well, I see.”
The joke is slightly forced, but Arthur still chuckles. “We all have room for improvement.” He taps his thumb on the back of John’s hand, a staccato rhythm to a song only he can hear. “Now then. Let’s start at the beginning.”
[Scene break]
“So we’re—” Arthur dodges one of the Dancers, narrowly avoiding their grasping, sharp fingers. “—stuck in a time loop? I’m sorry, John, but that seems a little bit far-fetched.”
“Well, it’s the truth.”
Arthur has responded to this the exact same way for the past four loops.
“And I’m just supposed to take you at your word?” Arthur says.
“And I’m just supposed to take you at your word?” John says, simultaneous. He even matches Arthur’s incredulous tone. Just to rub it in a little bit.
Arthur falters, clearly caught off guard. “Excuse me?”
“Like I said. I’ve been through this dozens of times already, Arthur. I know what I’m fucking talking about.”
“Fine. Fine!” Arthur still doesn’t believe him—John can hear it in his voice—but he’s cooperating, which is good enough. “Then how do we get out?”
“Right,” John says dryly. “Because I’ve known how to escape all along and I’ve just been biding my time. I don’t fucking know, Arthur.”
“You don’t have to be so—fuck!”
The Dancer cups slick red fingers over their mouth, stifling their giggles. Arthur swipes a hand across his cheek, and it comes away bloody. “Could we please just focus on the situation at hand?”
“It’s not like it’s going to make a difference.” Shit, John didn’t mean for that to sound so defeated. He told himself he’d have a better grip on things this loop. That he’d try harder. That he wouldn’t let himself continue to fade. But it’s so hard when he knows, deep down, that no matter what he does, he will still lose Arthur in the end. “Nothing’s going to change.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do.”
“Well, maybe things will be different this time.”
“Why would things be different?”
Arthur’s hand brushes against John’s, just for a moment. “Because I’m going to help. Because we’re … we’re going to work together. As a team. Okay?”
John knows it won’t matter. He’s told Arthur about the loops before, and it hasn’t mattered. He wants to tell Arthur this, to kill the hope before it has a chance to grow legs.
“Okay,” he says. He even manages to sound like he means it.
Because Arthur still has hope. And John can’t bring himself to take that away from him.
[Scene break]
Arthur is quiet throughout the entire recap, which is surprising (and perhaps a bit concerning).
John tries to tell the full truth, but it sticks in his throat sometimes until all he can do is swallow and move past it. He tells himself that it’s fine. It doesn’t matter what he said or did or didn’t do, not really. It doesn’t matter if he told Arthur that he loved him or that he hated him, if he pressed the knife into Arthur’s hand or threw it away, if he refused to rejoin the King or did so immediately.
All that matters is that he did everything he could think of, and Arthur still died.
And it all revolves around that fucking dagger.
Arthur had pulled it from their bag sometime around the seventeenth loop and begun to study it, running his finger up and down the blade and feeling out the shape of the jewels on the hilt. It’s very pretty, Kayne had said, and for all that John hates the bastard, he’d been right.
It’s beautiful in the way that a rattlesnake is beautiful right before it strikes.
“So,” Arthur says when John finally falls silent. “This is all happening because, at the end of the very first loop, I used the dagger that Kayne gave us to … slit my own throat.”
He says it matter-of-factly. Like it all happened to someone else. Like it’s not real. Though … to Arthur, John supposes, it’s not a memory; it’s a story. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. “Yes.”
Arthur hums. “So we think this is because of him. Some … game he’s playing.”
“He seems to have some control over the progression of time, if what he told us is true.”
“Which is a pretty big ‘if.’”
“Agreed. But I … I think it’s him.”
It’s John’s only theory. If it’s disproven, he’ll have nothing. The thought of that is a new and awful kind of despair.
“Okay.” Arthur exhales. “Based on what you’ve told me, I’m inclined to agree. And you’ve tried getting rid of the dagger?”
“I threw it off the side of the plateau. Multiple times. It always comes back.”
“Hm. Well, perhaps it’s still worthwhile to try to get rid of it now, or perhaps to destroy it. We don’t know for sure that it’s not causing the loops, particularly as it keeps returning to you. It’s best to account for every possible scenario, if only so we can be absolutely sure that we’ve tried everything. Though I’m … not entirely convinced that the loops won’t occur with or without the dagger.”
John feels vaguely ill. “Then how do we stop them? If the loops happen no matter what, what do we need to do to stop them?”
Arthur hesitates. “I … I don’t know yet. But we have plenty of time to think about it, John. We can stay here, rest, and plan our next move.”
“… All right,” John says reluctantly.
It’s about an hour later, after Arthur has explored the rest of the house and deemed it safe to sleep in, when they’re sitting at the kitchen table with bread in hand, that John musters up the courage to ask, “What if we can’t stop them?”
Arthur’s hand pauses halfway to his mouth. Slowly, he lowers the bread. John thinks he’s going to placate him—to assure him that they can, that they will, that they’re undefeated and nothing will change that. Instead, Arthur says, “It’s possible. I’ve been mulling it over, and if this is truly Kayne’s doing, it may be something that only he can undo.”
It’s not like John hasn’t been thinking it, but he hates hearing it all the same. “Then we find him,” John says, struck with a sudden frustrated anger. “We find him, and we ask him what he wants—what the price is for escaping this.”
Arthur exhales. “I’m not fond of the idea of bartering with forces we don’t understand. Are we truly desperate enough to make a deal with somebody like Kayne?”
“Yes,” John says vehemently. “If this isn’t something we can fix ourselves, then we have to. Otherwise, I … you … this isn’t going to end, Arthur.”
Eternity is a very long time. John knows that it’s hard for Arthur to comprehend the scale of their problem because it occupies so little time from his perspective, but he just. He can’t. He can’t do this anymore. He can’t endure any more loops. The longer they spend here, in this city, in this house, the more the hope inside him grows, spreading infectious vines through his lungs and veins and hand and eyes. To disentangle it now will surely ruin him. To start over, to watch Arthur die yet again after coming so far…
“We have to,” John repeats, and he pretends like the words aren’t trembling.
“Okay,” Arthur says after a moment. “If you truly think that it’s necessary, then … okay. But I think we should exhaust all our options first before resorting to … direct confrontation, as it were. All right?”
“… All right.”
After writing everything they know down in a small green notebook they’d found on the nightstand, Arthur retires to bed. Arthur’s breath evens out and deepens, and then Arthur is asleep and everything is quiet. So, so quiet.
John has always hated this—the hours he has to himself while Arthur sleeps with only his own thoughts to keep him company. But it’s particularly awful tonight. His fears and worries spin him around and around in circles until he’s dizzy and panicked. He convinces himself that Arthur is going to die in his sleep, and he spends the next hour and a half with his thumb pressed against the pulse point on Arthur’s neck, desperate to reassure himself that Arthur’s heart still beats. Afterward, when the panic has receded a bit, he stares up at the ceiling, hand resting on the center of Arthur’s chest. The shadows in the corners of the room seem to twitch and writhe, and John shudders.
No. It’s fine. They’re safe. There’s nothing lurking in the corner of the bedroom, waiting for him to drop his guard so it can stalk across the room and press sharp fingers to Arthur’s throat and rip and tear and—
John remains on edge the entire night. It’s draining, and he nearly cries with relief when Arthur finally rolls over and mumbles something into his pillow that sounds a bit like, “Suppose I can’t sleep forever.”
At John’s insistence, Arthur blearily drags himself out of bed, eats, and stands before the shower in stunned awe for altogether too long before carefully turning it on.
It looks like water—clear and warm, quickly filling the small bathroom with steam—but John sticks his hand into the spray first, just to be sure.
“It seems fine,” he says.
“Thank god,” Arthur says before stripping off his clothing—though it’s more dirt than clothing by this point, honestly—and stepping into the shower.
The sound he makes is obscene. “Oh, Christ, that’s heavenly,” he says, tipping his head back and allowing the water to run across his face. John barely closes his eyes in time. “How did they get the water so hot? The only times I’ve taken a shower, it’s been awfully frigid.”
John rubs the water away from their eyes and blinks up at the showerhead. “I don’t recognize the equipment, which isn’t saying much, but … it’s not like anything I saw in Arkham. It’s possible this is from a … different time. Some point in the future, perhaps. Oh, the soap is to your right.”
Arthur finds the soap and begins to wash himself. “The future? Is that even possible?” Then, just as John is drawing breath to answer: “No, sorry, don’t answer that. Stupid question.”
Arthur lingers in the shower even after he’s done washing up, standing in the spray until the skin on John’s palm is flushed and wrinkled. Finally, the water begins to run cold, and Arthur reluctantly turns off the tap and begins to towel himself dry. They find clothing in the closet—a touch too big for Arthur, clearly made for someone else, which puts John slightly more at ease.
Then, once Arthur is dressed, they begin to strategize.
It becomes painfully obvious that, despite having escaped the plateau, there are still very few options available to them. Only a few seem promising. Return to the amphitheater to look for clues. Attempt to destroy the dagger. Look for a way down from the city.
And, above them all: find a way to stop the loops.
If there even is a way to stop them. Right now, it seems like their options are limited to look around and hope for the best, which doesn’t exactly inspire much confidence within John. And with Arthur’s potential death still looming over them…
Well. The pipe-dream idea that John has been inadvisably allowing himself to entertain—stay here and live out the rest of our lives in relative peace—is beginning to seem more and more appealing. But if they spend months here—fuck, years, decades—and Arthur makes it far enough to die of old age, and everything resets again…
John doesn’t know what he’ll do. Break down completely, probably. Cease to function. Lose himself entirely.
He doesn’t want to find out.
They decide to go to the amphitheater first because it’s the most straightforward option. John isn’t sure what he’s expecting to find there. A clue, maybe? Kayne, waiting for them? The answer to all of their problems? Hell, maybe it’s a trap and there’s something waiting there to kill them. At least that would be something.
Instead, there’s nothing. The amphitheater is empty. No Kayne, no blood, no piano—not even after they flip that stupid coin Kayne had given them once, twice, a dozen fucking times. It’s a layered stone circle with a bare center, and Arthur’s voice echoes slightly as he stands in the middle of it and says, “And you’re sure there’s nothing here?”
“Yes, Arthur, I’m sure,” John snaps. He’s not mad at Arthur, not really, though it’s easy enough to take his frustrations out on him. He’s just … irritated. At all of it.
“All right, all right,” Arthur says, a touch defensively. “I’m just making sure. I don’t want us to miss anything.”
“I didn’t fucking miss anything.”
“I know!” Arthur exhales heavily. Then, quieter: “I know. I … I trust you to be my eyes, John. And I trust your judgment. If you think there’s nothing here, then there’s nothing here. We’ll move on.”
Well, fuck. Now John’s uncertain. “… Let’s walk around one more time. Just to be sure.”
Arthur exhales. “All right, then.”
They search the amphitheater four more times before John begrudgingly suggests they move on. They briefly squabble about what to do next. Arthur wants to circle the city, searching for a way down, while John wants to destroy the dagger first. He hates that they’re still carrying it around; it makes the skin on the back of his hand crawl. There is no circumstance in which using the dagger is the correct course of action. He’s sure of that, even if Arthur tries to argue otherwise.
Arthur wins out in the end, not in the least because he’s the one with the goddamn legs, the bastard. So the dagger remains stowed away in their backpack as they exit the gates of the city and begin to walk along the perimeter. John tries not to think about it, instead focusing on scanning the edge of the city for a set of stairs that will take them downwards.
“Nothing yet,” John says, unable to hide the disappointment in his voice. “The ground continues on a few feet past the pathway before simply … ending.”
Arthur hums. “Is it possible there simply isn’t a way down?”
John has been trying not to think about that. “… Yes. It’s possible.”
Arthur exhales slowly. “And if there isn’t?”
“Then we’re stuck here,” John says sharply. “Forever. Unless you’d like to try your luck jumping off the edge.”
Arthur laughs humorlessly. “I’d rather not. I’ve had more than enough experiences falling off things, and I’d rather not have another.”
“Agreed.”
They walk around the perimeter for hours. John’s convinced that they should have returned to the gate they originally exited from by this point, but his perception of distance has always been flawed. When he comments on it to Arthur, Arthur muses, “An effect of the Dreamlands, perhaps?” which is also possible. The likelihood of finding their way back to the same house is slim, which is unfortunate but expected. They’d packed all their belongings with them under the assumption that they wouldn’t be coming back.
“If we’re going to stay here, we should really make a map,” Arthur says. “It would be rather inconvenient to keep relocating ourselves just because we can’t find our way back to the house we’ve chosen.”
If we’re going to stay here. It’s sounding more and more appealing by the moment.
By mid-afternoon—or at least, the time Arthur declares to be mid-afternoon given the absence of any sort of normal sun patterns—they come across another gate into the city, and they decide to go back inside. If there is a way down, they haven’t found it yet, and they both agree that it may be best to take a break.
“Then,” Arthur says as he settles with his back against the wall and pulls a loaf of bread from his bag, “we can try to destroy the dagger.”
Fucking finally.
Arthur eats, and John tries not to think about the memories the sound of it brings back—flashes of crimson-stained skin, the sharp tang of iron and salt in the air, the wet squelching of flesh beneath dull teeth.
Then, Arthur reaches for the dagger, and John grabs his wrist.
“Wait. Let me hold it.”
He just—he can’t. He’s watched Arthur wield it too many times, seen him drive it into his own throat too many times. The thought of Arthur touching the dagger again after all that, even in an attempt to destroy it, makes him ill.
“Okay,” Arthur says after a moment of heavy silence. “Okay.”
John reluctantly releases Arthur’s wrist. Then, he pulls the dagger from the bag. It glints in the low light, brighter than it ought to be, and John wants it fucking gone.
“Okay,” he echoes, gripping the dagger tightly. “Now. How do we destroy it?”
[Scene break]
John drives the dagger against the floor of the plateau, again and again and again. It doesn’t break, but perhaps he’s simply not doing it hard enough. Above them, the King chuckles, and then there’s a tentacle wrapping around John’s wrist, another pulling the dagger neatly from his grip.
“None of that,” the King says. He flicks the dagger off into the vast unknown. Then, he wraps a tentacle around Arthur’s midsection and squeezes and squeezes until Arthur’s ribs crack like eggshells.
Arthur screams, and John leaves, and there’s purple, purple, so much fucking purple, and John wants to scream too.
“If you touch that fucking dagger again,” he says, ignoring Arthur’s where are we?, “I will never forgive you.”
It’s all he says to Arthur that loop. It’s all he can bear to say.
[Scene break]
In the end, they throw the dagger off the edge and watch it disappear into the darkness below.
John doesn’t like it. He doesn’t like not knowing where it is, not knowing who might have it. But it won’t melt, and it won’t break, and he doesn’t want it anywhere near them. So he lets Arthur pitch it into the unknown, even though he knows it’ll find them again.
It always does.
As they walk back into the city, Arthur says, “So that’s that, then.”
“I suppose so.”
“I’m not sure it’s changed anything, but … it does feel better to have it gone.”
For now, John does not say.
They walk for a few minutes in silence. Then, Arthur says with obvious reluctance, “I … suppose our last option is to … contact Kayne directly.”
“Yes.”
Arthur exhales. “Right. Can you find our way back to the amphitheater? I think that might be the best place to … call for him, as it were.”
Call for him. It sounds an awful lot like prayer.
They make it to the amphitheater. Arthur stands awkwardly in the center of it, like he’s unsure how he’s meant to position himself. “Sh-should I just … how does one do this?”
“How should I know?”
“I don’t know! Surely people … reached out to you, as the King in Yellow.”
Probably. Almost certainly. But John can’t remember any of them. He’s not sure if it’s his faulty memory, only allowing him glimpses of the god he once was, or if the King as well has forgotten the faces and names and existences of the people who gave their entire lives to him.
Humans are like insects to gods. Less than, even. An infinitesimal blip on the unfathomable canvas of eternity. Good for a few moments of entertainment, perhaps, but nothing more.
That’s what they are to Kayne. Entertainment. Like ants scurrying around in a glass box, waiting for the light to hit it the wrong way and burn them up in an instant.
Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that Kayne doesn’t respond to their calls. Arthur stands there for what must be hours, walking around in circles and trying all manner of ridiculous things to get the bastard who’s made both of their lives a living hell to show his face. But it’s useless.
Kayne isn’t interested in talking, apparently. Which John probably should have expected. It’s much more fun to sit back and watch as things slowly and inevitably fall apart, after all. Isn’t that what he used to do as the King?
Eventually, they leave. They manage to find their way back to the same house, to John’s surprise and Arthur’s relief and gratitude. It’s still stocked with food, and the shower is still hot, and the bed is still soft.
Arthur dreams, and John stares at the ceiling and tries to figure out what they’re doing wrong.
They try calling for Kayne again the following day with similar results. It’s only after four days of this—sleeping, waking, eating, showering, and wandering around the city—that John decides that enough is enough.
“He’s not listening,” John says as Arthur all but collapses into bed that night. “Maybe … maybe we should consider other options.”
“What other options?” Arthur curls up on his side. His hand brushes against John’s, a tingle of warmth that crystalizes as Arthur catches John’s pinkie with his own and squeezes. “Unless you have any other ideas, I’m fresh out. We haven’t seen any way down from the city, and we’ve gotten rid of the dagger already. I’m afraid there isn’t much else left for us to do.”
“… I know.” John takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “Maybe we should just … rest.”
“Rest?” Arthur echoes. “I have been trying to get my eight hours a night, you know. Having a real bed is a luxury one never truly appreciates until they’re forced to sleep in a hole in the ground for three months.”
“Yes, I’m fully aware of how long you’ve been sleeping,” John says dryly. “I meant … perhaps we should take a break. Just for a bit. Get our bearings, or … I don’t know. Something.”
“… I thought you wanted to figure out how to stop the loops.”
“I do! It’s just—” John cuts off with a frustrated noise. “Never mind. Forget I said anything.”
“No, wait—I’m not saying no. I’m just—I’m trying to understand. This is all quite new for me, and you … I know it’s been a long time for you and that you’ve been through a lot. But you’re right that there’s … well, there’s no point in chasing after something that can’t be caught, is there?”
Arthur’s hand shifts, fingers linking fully with John’s. His palm is warm and calloused, and when he squeezes John’s hand, John feels some of the tension that’s been coiled up inside him for what feels like several eternities finally relax.
“Exactly. So let’s just…” John hesitates. “Let’s go home. Okay?”
John can hear the smile in Arthur’s voice as he says, “Okay.”
[Scene break]
John closes his eyes and ignores it all: Arthur’s frantic, irritated words; the swish of the Dancers around them; the deep, rumbling voice of the King; the awful snapping of Arthur’s bones; the gurgling of blood as Arthur chokes on it. It becomes a wash of sound, muddied and muted, like waves crashing on the shore of a dark lake.
John closes his eyes, and he thinks of home.
He’s never had one before, but he’d like one, he thinks. What would he put in it? A piano, certainly. Pretty things—paintings and tapestries and ceramics, brightly colored and glittering in the sunlight. A bed as well, soft and plush and covered in pillows and blankets, big enough for two.
It’s his dream; he’s allowed to be optimistic about it.
He could lie there with Arthur and read poetry together, tracing his finger along the words until Arthur interrupts him with a yawn and tells him that it’s late and it’s time for them to get some sleep. He could finally figure out what’s so goddamn special about eating, and maybe Arthur could make them both tea, and John could cup his hands around the mug and breathe in the scent of it. They could walk through Arkham, everywhere and nowhere in particular, because the destination doesn’t matter so much as the journey and the man who holds his hand throughout it. When they get home, they could collapse on the couch together, and perhaps Arthur could play the piano, or perhaps John could, or perhaps they could play together, pressed side-by-side on the narrow piano bench and laughing as John inevitably hits all the wrong notes.
They could do everything, or they could do nothing at all. And then they could wake the next day and do it all over again.
On the plateau, Arthur draws his last breath.
In the home they have built for themselves in John’s mind, Arthur rolls over in bed, smiles, and says, “Good morning, John.”
[Scene break]
They get three days of peace in Carcosa.
The first is spent at home, doing not much of anything. Flipping through the books Arthur finds in a cabinet in the living room. Sorting through their food and determining when they’ll have to gather more. Cooking, for the first time since John met Arthur, which is a more complicated endeavor than John anticipated. They only burn the food a little bit. Arthur tells him that they’ll get better at it, and his tone is so light and teasing that John believes him (and only sort of sulks about his apparent inability to tell the difference between ‘cooked’ and ‘burnt’).
The second is spent in the city, mapping out the place they’ve decided to make their temporary home. It’s still quiet and abandoned, which is unsettling but not altogether unwelcome. They duck into a few shops and return with more food and books, several articles of clothing, and a strange metal rectangle that Arthur calls a harmonica. It’s not as beautiful as the piano, but it’s compelling in its own way, and Arthur plays a few melodies on it while they walk back to their house.
Arthur showers and changes. John can tell that he’s pleased with the clothing—a dark gray suit and pressed white shirt, a deep green tie to match, smart wing-tipped shoes. They keep their more practical clothing tucked away should they need it, but John can tell that Arthur likes looking put-together again. They sit in front of a mirror, and Arthur pulls out the shaving kit and makes quick work of his beard and mustache. Then, he presses the scissors into John’s hand and has him cut away at his hair until it’s no longer ragged and tangled around his ears.
“You look like a new man, Arthur,” John says, and he means it. This is an Arthur he has never seen before—scarred and thin and tired, but with a steely resolve and fresh clothes and skin that smells vaguely of cinnamon. It makes something warm blossom inside of John, and even though he knows it’s dangerous, he lets it. Just for a moment, he thinks. Just for a moment, they can simply be.
The third is spent on their feet, restless and wandering. Arthur paces about the house, then about the streets of Carcosa when John tells him to just fucking go outside already. It’s clear that Arthur is itching for something—a solution, their next steps, a path forward—and John wishes he could give it to him. They exit through one of the gates of the city and do a quick perimeter search, but there still isn’t any way down. Arthur returns home, silent and taut, overflowing with anxious energy.
So John urges Arthur into the shower. He lathers soap onto his hand before scrubbing it through Arthur’s hair. He scratches his nails across Arthur’s scalp, then rinses Arthur’s hair and returns with a sweet-smelling something that Arthur called conditioner. Arthur melts in increments, and when they finally leave the shower, he’s relaxed and boneless enough that barely manages to pull on a pair of boxers before collapsing into bed.
The past few days, Arthur has been rising in tandem with the white sun, awakened by the bright light streaming in through their window.
Tonight, Arthur wakes when John grabs his shoulder and shakes it hard enough to rattle his teeth.
“Arthur,” he hisses. “Wake the fuck up!”
Arthur rouses after a few more shakes, scrubbing a hand blearily across his eyes. “What? John?”
“There’s something in the house,” John hisses, and Arthur goes very still.
And there it is again: the sound of something moving about in their kitchen. The squeak of a chair leg, the rattle of dishes on the countertop. John can’t tell what it is—human, god, monster, something even more horrifying—but it doesn’t matter, because it’s going to kill them.
“Calm down, John,” Arthur hisses, and John realizes that he’d said that last part aloud. “I need you to focus, okay? We’re going to go see what it is.”
“What? Arthur, no!”
Arthur ignores him, climbing out of bed and fumbling about until he finds the knife they’d stashed on the nightstand. He grips it tightly as he creeps over to the bedroom door. “I’m just going to open it a little bit. I need you to tell me what’s outside.”
“Do not open the fucking door, Arthur!”
“I need you to work with me, John! If we stay here, there’s a very good chance it will find us anyway. Right now, it doesn’t know we’re here. We have the element of surprise. Once we see what we’re up against, we can face it. We’ve survived worse.”
And then, because he’s a fucking idiot, Arthur opens the door.
John inhales sharply.
It’s Lilly.
“John?” Arthur breathes. “What? What is it?”
“It’s…” It can’t be, but it is. “It’s … Lilly.”
“What?” Arthur sounds just as shocked as John feels. “A-are you sure? I thought that we…”
“I thought so too. But there’s—she still has the marks from the harness, the one you cut off.” John swallows, his throat suddenly very tight. “It’s her.”
Arthur says nothing for a long moment, stunned into silence. Then, slowly, he opens the door fully and takes a few tentative steps into the living room. Lilly doesn’t react, still ambling about their kitchen. “What’s she doing?”
“She’s just … I don’t know, sniffing things. I don’t think … I don’t think she means us any harm.”
It should have been so obvious that something was wrong. It should have been so fucking obvious. John had wielded the dagger himself, had used it to cut Lilly’s throat, had sobbed as he’d watched the light leave her eyes. She shouldn’t be here.
But perhaps John had simply wanted, more than anything, more than reason, to believe that life could still be kind to them.
Arthur steps closer to Lilly, knife still in hand. “Hey, Lilly,” he says cautiously. “What are you doing here?”
Lilly looks at them and makes a small sound, something between a sniffle and a whine.
And something melts from the shadows and drives a dagger—sharp, ruby-encrusted, trust me, it’s very pretty—through the side of Arthur’s throat.
Arthur makes no sound as he drops. Or perhaps he does and John simply doesn’t hear it over the horrible ringing in his ears. Lilly is gone, and perhaps she’d never even been there at all, simply a lure, it’s a lure, my love, and whoever had attacked them is gone too, and the dagger is still there, embedded in Arthur’s throat, stealing away everything that John had so foolishly allowed himself to hope for.
“No,” he sobs, hand scrabbling at Arthur’s throat. He’s not supposed to remove the dagger; he thinks he read that somewhere. Or did somebody say it to him once? Where would he have learned it?
It doesn’t matter right now.
So he leaves the dagger in even though it sickens him. He presses down around it, trying to stop the flow of blood, but the tip of the dagger is sticking out the other side of Arthur’s throat, and there’s blood coming out there too, and John only has one hand, fuck, he’s so useless. It’s all happening so fast, and Arthur is—Arthur is—fuck, he’s—
“No, Arthur,” John says. His voice is cracked, broken, frayed to pieces. “You can’t fucking die on me now, not now! We were so close.” Another sob rips its way out of him, raw and aching. “We were so fucking close.”
Arthur tries to say something, but he chokes on the dagger that’s obstructing his entire windpipe. Or maybe he chokes on the blood that’s bubbling up between his lips, staining the ground in front of them a dark crimson. Arthur tries again, and this time, John can make something out amidst the awful sounds of death.
It’s his name.
Arthur has so little breath left, so little time, not enough fucking time, and he uses it to say John’s name. His hand, slick with blood and sweat, presses limply against John’s—a plea—and John answers it without hesitation. He takes Arthur’s hand in his and squeezes, laces their fingers together, tries to focus on them through the tears in his eyes. “Please,” he says, aware that he cannot have what he is begging for but unable to stop himself from doing so. “Please, Arthur, stay with me. Don’t go. Please, just a little bit longer. You can hold on just a little bit longer. You’re the strongest fucking person I know. The face of someone not to fuck with, right?”
Arthur laughs, though it’s more of a wet, choking sound. He squeezes John’s hand once more, drags it to his lips in a facsimile of a kiss, wet with blood, so much blood. Then, his grip goes limp, and his breaths stutter to a halt, and he falls still. So very, very still.
“No,” John chokes out, more broken anguish than word. He closes his eyes tightly and squeezes Arthur’s hand and thinks about the way Arthur had smiled at him in the mirror when John had seen him in his new suit with his new haircut, showered and shaved and rested and fed, and called him dapper.
And then Arthur says, “Where are we?” and John—
shatters.
He thinks he’s crying, but it’s hard to be sure when he can’t really feel much of anything. Things happen around him—horrible things, the same horrible things that have been happening—but they’re all just … white noise. A background hum. A wash of muted sound and color and sensation, too formless to grasp or make sense of.
Arthur says his name so many times it starts to lose all meaning, and then his neck is snapped by a Dancer and it all resets. It resets and it resets and it resets, and John stares blankly ahead and processes none of it. Sometimes his eyes begin to leak again, spilling tears down their cheeks. Arthur sounds concerned every time, asking John what’s wrong, what he sees. It only makes John cry harder.
There is no way for them to escape this. John understands that now. They’d gotten so far, tried everything, escaped the plateau, thrown away the dagger, started a fucking life together, and it hadn’t mattered a single fucking bit.
There was never a way for them to beat this. And there never will be.
So John doesn’t bother to pick up the broken pieces of himself this time. He lets them crumble, and he cries until he feels weak and trembling, and he—
He gives up.
[Scene break]
It’s gotten so bad—the drifting, the apathy, the complete and utter numbness—that John almost doesn’t notice when time stops completely.
Arthur has just driven the dagger through his own neck again. John can see the red staining his hand where it still grips the hilt. He’s slumped to the ground, choking and gasping for air, and then—
Nothing.
He’s frozen. The drips of blood from the blade hang suspended in midair. At first, John thinks it’s the King’s doing—something new, somehow, after all these loops. But the King is frozen too, tentacles halfway outstretched towards Arthur as if trying to stop him.
Perhaps John has finally snapped.
Then, a voice echoes across the plateau, loud and shrill and demanding, and a wave of white-hot rage cuts through the apathy as cleanly as a—well. As a dagger through a windpipe.
“Would it kill you to be just a little more exciting?”
And then he’s there, stepping into John’s field of vision like an actor taking the stage. His suit is immaculate, his hair slicked back, his sleeves glittering with bright red cufflinks. He sighs heavily and gives John a pointed look. “Honestly. Would you believe that this is all becoming a bit of a drag?”
Then, between one moment and the next, he’s kneeling beside them, face so close to theirs that John would recoil had he the bodily autonomy to do so. “It turns out there’s really only so many times you can watch the same guy die before it’s like, ‘Enough already!’ You were always fun to watch, of course, but then you got all weepy and sad and boring.”
The anger crystalizes into a sharp point. “Fuck off.”
Kayne gasps in faux-affront. “But you were calling so intently for me before! What changed?”
John’s heart clenches in his chest. “You know what.” He means for it to be bitter and vicious. It instead comes out sounding weak and miserable.
“No, no—really. I want you to spell it out for me.”
“Fuck. Off.”
Kayne laughs, loud and long and grating. “But I thought you wanted me to stop the loops?”
John should be ecstatic to hear Kayne finally, finally talking about ending the loops. He should be jumping for fucking joy. But he isn’t. He just feels hollow, empty, wrung-out and exhausted. “You’re not going to do that.”
Kayne grins, a sharp and dangerous thing. “Won’t I?” Then, his hand is beneath their chin, tipping it upward. Kayne’s eyes when they meet John’s are deep black and endless, and John is absolutely certain that if he weren’t a fragment of a god, they would rip him apart entirely. “Tell you what. I’ll give you one last chance. One last shot at saving poor Artie’s life. Maybe you succeed, maybe you don’t. Either way, that’s it. End of the line. No more loops.”
Everything leaves John in an instant—the anger, the apathy, the despair—and he feels gutted. “You…”
“Me! Aren’t I wonderful? One more time around, just for the fun of it!” Kayne grins and releases their chin, then taps a single finger against the tip of their nose. “So make it a good one, won’t you?”
Then, he stands and walks away. John watches him go, rendered speechless. All these loops, all these things he thought about saying to Kayne, shouting at him, screaming at him, and not a single one comes to mind in that moment. Instead, he stares in stunned silence as Kayne walks straight off the edge of the plateau and melts into the void.
And then everything snaps back into motion. Arthur gags and slumps to the ground, and the King roars, and John feels like he’s been dunked in ice water, and—
And the plateau stretches before him, dark and purple and expectant.
“Where are we?” Arthur asks, as he always does, as he has done so many times before.
Make it a good one, won’t you?
John is in shock. He’s not quick enough to coax Arthur back through the portal, not quick enough to keep Arthur from stepping onto the plateau proper. They’re stuck here, in a sequence of events that they’ve experienced over fifty times already, and Arthur has not survived a single one.
End of the line. No more loops.
John wants to be relieved. If Kayne is telling the truth, the loops are over. They’re no longer trapped. This isn’t forever; there is a finite end to it.
If Kayne is telling the truth, and Arthur dies…
“John?” Arthur says, and John—
John is terrified.
“We’re on the plateau,” he forces himself to say. He feels like he’s going to be sick, which is a uniquely strange and discomforting sensation for someone who isn’t in possession of a stomach. “A—a large circle of violet stone. There are cracks, and … stars on a pitch-black sky.”
The dagger. He’ll have to get rid of the dagger first. He’s never succeeded before, but this time—maybe this time he’ll be able to. He’ll be quick enough. Smart enough. Capable enough.
“We’re not in the mountain anymore, are we?” Arthur says. The déjà vu of it is familiar, a skipping record, and John isn’t sure what the right thing to say is. Should he try to talk to Arthur, tell him about the loops? Should they try to run away, even if it’s impossible? Should they fight the King? Should they do nothing?
He doesn’t know what to do.
Arthur is going to die.
“John, are you all right?” Arthur says, voice tight with concern and a hint of irritation. “I need you to tell me what you see.”
Arthur is going to die.
“S-something’s coming,” John forces out as the Dancers begin to flit onto the plateau. No, he needs to focus. Fucking focus! Arthur will die if he doesn’t guide him away from the things he already knows will kill him. He’ll only probably die from something unforeseen, so long as John gives everything he has to keep him alive.
If Arthur dies, that’s it. No more second chances. But if John succeeds—if they can escape this—then…
Then they can finally, truly live.
The thing that grips John tightly isn’t hope. He doesn’t think he has any of that left inside of him. Instead, it’s desperation. And its teeth are oh so very sharp.
“Move to the left, now!”
Arthur hesitates only a moment before complying. The Dancer slices through the area where Arthur once stood, blade-like fingers curling in a beckoning gesture before they retreat. “Forward five steps, then two to your right,” John says, urgency gripping him tight as a vise. Arthur follows his lead, weaving through the Dancers until they’re standing in front of the throne.
“What the fuck were those?” Arthur says, sounding winded.
“Dancers,” John says absently. He’s looking upward, watching for the King. It won’t be long now. “Heralds of the King.”
“What?” Arthur looks around, which is exceedingly unhelpful. “Is he here?”
The whispers start up, and John knows they have exactly three seconds before the King’s fanfare brings Arthur to his knees. “Cover your ears!”
“Cover my—what?”
And then sound erupts around them, and Arthur drops with a cry. It won’t kill him, it never has, even when Arthur groans, “It’s killing me,” but it doesn’t seem pleasant.
“Just—just hold on,” John says. It’ll be over soon. He focuses instead on the King, appearing from the vastness above, floating down slowly as the noise subsides into a whistling wind.
“He’s here,” John says, and the dread that suffuses his voice is entirely genuine.
After all this time, he’s still frightened by the god he used to be.
Arthur shivers, and John can’t help it; he reaches across their body and takes Arthur’s hand in his.
“It’ll be all right,” he says. He’s not sure how convincing he sounds, but Arthur doesn’t seem to care as he squeezes John’s hand tightly and nods.
“Well, we’re here,” Arthur says, angling his face up towards the King. “You’ve managed to bring us to your domain, on our own accord. So.” Arthur swallows and then tips his chin up in defiance. “Are you going to kill me or what?”
A million deaths flash through John’s mind, and he tightens his grip on Arthur’s hand to the point of pain. He just—he needs to think. He needs to think. What can he do? What hasn’t he tried?
What will work?
The King speaks flatly, unamused. “You know that’s not what I want.”
You want me, John has said in the past. A simple statement of fact.
This time, he says, “You are never going to have me. I’m not leaving him.”
The thought crystalizes in his mind, even as he recalls Arthur’s fate every single time he’s stayed. He remembers the King torturing Arthur until his body gave out. He remembers Arthur sobbing as he slid the knife across his throat. He remembers taking that knife in his own hand and doing the same.
He also remembers the soft way Arthur looked at him in the mirror in the house they briefly called home and the way Arthur’s fingers tangled with his when they slept, curled up and loose and warm.
“Oh?” The King sounds surprised, though how much of that is an affect, John doesn’t know. “Even after all that you’ve seen? All that you know?” The King’s voice tilts into a sneer. “You’d rather stay with a man who murdered his own child than become a god?”
Arthur sucks in a sharp breath.
Without hesitation, John says, “Yes.”
There’s a moment of silence. Then, the King laughs. “You really have forgotten yourself. It’s disgraceful.”
“Maybe. But I don’t care.” John steels himself. He hasn’t said this directly to the King before, and he’s not sure what will happen. “I love him. And I have no interest in living without him—not anymore.”
Arthur goes very still. Perhaps at the beginning of all of this, John would have taken that as a rejection. But he’s seen enough of Arthur’s reactions now, has seen enough of Arthur’s love, to know that it’s quite the opposite.
“Is that so?” The King’s voice has gone frigid, a blade dipped in ice water. “Then I suppose I’ll simply have to resort to cruder methods of separating you. I have been patient, and I have given you options, but now I’m bored. Apparently, more active means of persuasion are needed. And I promise you.” A tentacle snakes out and settles beneath Arthur’s chin, tilting it up until John’s eyes are staring straight into the King’s. It’s a sight that would drive anybody else utterly mad. “In the end, I will get what I want.”
John knows what comes next. He realizes too late that he’s fucked it up, that he’s somehow skipped the bit where Arthur vanishes from his own awareness and John has time to get rid of the dagger. “Wait—” he says, not sure what he’s asking for but needing something—some sort of pause button, some sort of reset (and fuck if he doesn’t see the awful irony in that), anything.
He doesn’t get any further before the King wraps a tentacle around Arthur’s right calf and, in one quick motion, snaps it in two.
Arthur goes down with a scream.
The sound of it rips straight through John, and he doesn’t know what to do. He can’t leave Arthur, not again. He can’t stay, not when it means that Arthur will be in endless agony until the moment he ceases to be. John has thought this through, again and again, picked it apart from every angle, and he can’t find another path forward.
He stays, or he goes, and either way, Arthur dies.
Arthur dies, and this time—
No more second chances.
“Arthur,” John chokes out as the King breaks more bones, one right after the other. He’s angrier this time, and that’s almost certainly John’s fault, and he’s fucked it up, he’s fucked it all up, how could he ever have thought that he had any hope of winning? “Arthur, I’m so sorry. I’m so fucking sorry. I—I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to fix this, I—”
John cuts off when Arthur scrabbles for his hand and grips it tightly. He doesn’t say anything, too in pain to form words, but he doesn’t have to.
John takes a shaking breath and squeezes back.
Above them, the King snaps, “You think you’re in love? You don’t understand the first thing about love. You think you love this human, but a parasite can never truly love its host. It can only feast on it until there is nothing left to give. If you stay, he will die.”
Arthur’s hand twitches around John’s, like he’s thinking of letting go. John grips tighter and doesn’t let him. “I can’t save him,” John says, his voice broken and cracked. “It doesn’t matter what I do. I have been trying, so fucking hard, and I just … I can’t do it.” John takes a deep breath. “I can’t save him, but I don’t have to let you win.”
Arthur’s hand twitches again, his breath hitching, and John knows that Arthur has just remembered the dagger. But he refuses to let go of Arthur’s hand, even when Arthur tries to pull away. He isn’t going to let Arthur take his own life again. Not for him. Not for the fragment of an eldritch god who tricked Arthur into opening a book and consumed Arthur’s entire life in an instant.
He loves Arthur, so much. And he knows that Arthur loves him too. But if he could go back and rewrite time, erase the moment when he whispered into Arthur’s ear and promised that he could undo Arthur’s greatest mistakes, he would do so in an instant if it meant seeing Arthur happy.
Instead, Arthur is going to die here. For good.
All John can do is make sure that he doesn’t die alone.
“You’ve already lost,” the King says. It’s not a mockery or a threat. It’s said matter-of-factly. An absolute. “I will torture him for eternity, breaking him and rebuilding him over and over again. I will flay him alive, allowing time for the skin to heal before peeling away another layer. You think this is agony?” Another bone crunches, and Arthur wails. “You don’t know the meaning of agony.”
“John,” Arthur chokes out, sounding like it takes all of his strength to do so. “Don’t … don’t let him…”
John grips Arthur’s hand tighter. “I won’t.”
The King’s anger is a physical weight. John has no doubt in his mind that the King will uphold his promise—that he will torture Arthur for all eternity, unmaking him and rebuilding him and breaking him anew. John has broken beneath that weight before—has taken the knife to Arthur’s throat himself. He doesn’t know if he can do that again. But if he has to choose between Arthur’s continued suffering and a quick release, is it better to end it now? To sit with Arthur as the life drains from him, holding Arthur’s hand, making sure Arthur knows that he is loved until he draws his final breath?
Maybe. But John still can’t bring himself to let go of Arthur’s hand. All these loops, all these deaths, and he still fears it to the point of paralysis. It still hurts.
The King drives a sharp finger through one of the gaps in Arthur’s ribs, twisting and tearing as hiccupping sobs spill from Arthur’s throat. He breaks through Arthur’s ribs like they’re brittle twigs, pulls on Arthur’s insides until they come spilling out into the open. The King hooks a finger underneath what must be part of Arthur’s small intestine and tugs it upward, inspecting it with clear distaste. “Humans are messy, disgusting, fragile things. Is this what you want to be? Something so breakable?”
The King pulls harder, and Arthur makes an inhuman sound—something between a gurgle and a scream. Blood is spilling between his lips, and John can see it dripping onto their clasped hands, running down the gaps between their fingers. “No,” he moans, a reflex, punched out of him by the sight of Arthur’s blood. “No, no, Arthur—”
“Leave him and come to me, and this can all be over.”
Lies, fucking lies.
Arthur gasps something that John thinks is meant to be his name, but it comes out garbled. Don’t leave, he doesn’t say, but his hand grips John’s tightly to the point of pain, and John grips back. His fingernails dig into Arthur’s skin, and he’s sure it must hurt, but not nearly as much as everything else must hurt, and—fuck, John feels so fucking helpless. He’s felt helpless for so long, and this is his last chance to make things right, and all he can do is fucking sit here as Arthur writhes in agony, trapped between endless torment and death.
Arthur has suffered through so much, and he is continuing to suffer unimaginably, and his guts are being pulled out of his fucking stomach, and yet he still won’t let go of John’s hand. His grip has slackened, so John tightens his to compensate. Arthur’s fingers twitch against his, like he’s trying and failing to hold on, and a sudden wave of desperate determination crashes over John, so intense he drowns in it.
I can’t let Arthur endure this. Not for me.
The King slices through Arthur’s small intestine, and Arthur gags. The King’s eyes are cold, his fingers slick with blood and fluid as he wraps them around Arthur’s wrist.
I can’t watch this, not again. Please, not again.
The King rips Arthur’s hand from John’s grasp, Arthur’s wrist cracking beneath the pressure, and one thought crystalizes in John’s mind so clearly it whites out everything else.
I have to make it stop.
There’s a moment where everything seems to freeze. A hitch in the expanse of the universe. A single cosmic exhalation.
Then, John’s entire body explodes into blinding pain.
He immediately retches, doubling over and emptying the meager contents of his stomach onto the ground. It tastes fucking foul, acid tinged with the iron tang of blood. He instinctively curls up on himself as tightly as he can, only to cry out as the motion jostles the fucking hole in his stomach, the pieces of himself that are spilling across the ground in front of him twisting in agonizing—
The pieces of himself.
The contents of his stomach.
John’s body.
John stiffens. Legs, arms, hands, back, face, stomach—they all stiffen with him. He’d been so blindsided by the pain, lighting up every inch of him with a million volts of electricity, that he hadn’t registered the fact that he could feel it everywhere.
He has control of Arthur’s body. All of it.
What…
What has he done?
John forces his mouth to open, forces his lungs to form words. “Arthur?” he croaks, then coughs, which hurts, fuck, he’s never felt pain like this, not ever. He can barely think around it—how did Arthur survive this?—and it threatens to consume him. He steels his jaw and refuses to let it. He needs to know that Arthur’s all right. He needs to—he needs to—
What has he done?
Arthur doesn’t respond. There is no voice inside John’s head, no presence other than himself. Panic sweeps through John like a hurricane, and he repeats Arthur’s name, louder, so loud it nearly tears through his tissue-thin throat.
A hand grips John’s neck then—large, sharp, too tight, he can’t fucking breathe. The King lifts John into the air, uncaring of the way John gasps and thrashes and then goes abruptly limp, vision whiting out as agony spikes within him.
“After all this time,” the King murmurs, holding John up to eye level, “this is what it took for you to finally claim what belongs to you. To us.”
No, John wants to snap. No, this doesn’t belong to you. This doesn’t belong to me. This was an accident, I didn’t—I couldn’t—
But he can’t stop hearing the silence, deafeningly loud, after he said Arthur’s name. There’s a rushing in his ears, a vertigo he can’t shake. Every part of him is in the most exquisite kind of agony, but he can’t focus on any of it.
What has he done?
Arthur is gone.
Arthur is—
And John—
“You erased him,” the King says, and it strikes John directly in the chest. “If only you’d been strong enough to do it before.”
John has never felt weaker in his entire life.
He has never felt more like a monster.
“But it’s done now.” The King’s grip tightens, and John chokes. Even as he struggles to take in air, he can feel his body knitting itself back together: bones shifting and snapping, organs rearranging, skin slipping into place. “We will become whole once more, and we will use this body to cross to the earthly plane.”
Something crackles beneath John—a portal opening. A hole between worlds that only a mortal can pass through. John feels a tugging at his core—a call, one that he knows he won’t be able to refuse. Not without Arthur to anchor him.
And John killed him.
For the briefest of moments, John teeters on the edge of giving in and rejoining the King without a fight. What does it matter? What does any of it matter? John had tried so hard, so fucking hard, had sworn to himself that he wouldn’t hurt Arthur, but he’d done it anyway. He’d brought about Arthur’s inevitable death through his own inadvertent hands, erased him in his misguided attempt to take away Arthur’s pain. He’d fucked up so completely, so utterly, that he’d killed the only person he has ever truly cared about.
Why shouldn’t he just give up?
Then, John feels the weight of the dagger in his left hand. He doesn’t remember taking it out of his bag. Maybe he hadn’t. He’s not sure it really matters.
That’s … that’s what Daniel told me, Arthur had said, what feels like a million lifetimes ago now, when John had first stared Arthur’s death in the eyes on the plateau and flinched. It wasn’t that life is loss. He said … he said, “You cannot defeat it, but you don’t have to let it win.”
John doesn’t allow himself time to think. He swings the dagger upward and drives it into the side of the King’s wrist.
The King, who is despite it all a living, flesh-and-blood creature, shouts in pain. His hand loosens, and John falls. The dagger falls with him, and John knows without a shadow of a doubt that he would deserve it if the dagger drove itself right through his useless fucking heart.
Then, John passes through the portal. He only has a moment to register the cold before his back is hitting the ground, the snow blanketing it doing nothing to soften the fall. It’s hard enough to knock the wind out of him, and he gasps for air. The dagger rests beside him, blade glinting with yellow ichor, the rubies in the hilt shining in the moonlight.
The last thing John sees before the portal snaps closed is the King’s face, contorted into the purest form of rage.
Then, there’s nothing.
John is alone.
He can feel panic setting in, tightening his chest and making his breathing come in short bursts. He struggles to sit up, then forces himself to his feet.
You don’t have to let it win.
John picks up the dagger. The thought of carrying it with him is repulsive, but the thought of leaving it there in the snow is even more so. Fuck, John’s body is—no, Arthur’s body, it’s still Arthur’s body. John is just—he’s just occupying it for a bit, that’s all. God, he’s so fucking cold. He needs to get inside, or he’ll freeze to death.
Arthur’s already dead, so what’s the point?
John can’t breathe. He thinks he might be hyperventilating. Or something.
You don’t have to let it win.
He starts to walk.
He finds a cabin—unlocked, abandoned, suspicious, but it’s not like John is flush with options at the moment—and makes a fire. He piles the blankets from the bed around him and sits in front of it. The dagger rests on the floor next to him, glinting in the firelight.
What the fuck is he supposed to do now?
How can he—without Arthur, how can he—?
I can’t do this on my own. Please, Arthur, I can’t do this on my own. I don’t want to do this on my own.
You don’t have to let it win.
John sits in the cabin until the sun rises. Then, he sets out with a backpack full of rations and all the money he could find. He stumbles across a bar, asks around until he finds someone with a car. It’s unsettling, interacting with other people, just as it’s unsettling having control over an entire body. John feels clumsy, unpracticed, but he still manages to hitch a ride with a man who calls himself Irvine.
They leave the following morning. John spends the entire trip trying not to cry. The ache inside of him is growing, spreading, with every moment that Arthur is gone. He tries telling himself it again—you don’t have to let it win—but it’s getting harder and harder to believe.
John arrives in Boston listless and hollow. He forces himself through the motions—pay Irvine, thank him for the ride. Find temporary housing. Find a job to continue to pay for said housing. Try not to think about the aching loneliness inside of him.
You don’t have to—
John is a shell of himself for three weeks and four days. He’s not entirely sure what changes things. Perhaps he’s eaten enough and slept enough to return Arthur’s body to some semblance of health and it’s given him enough energy to care again. Perhaps he’s simply grown tired of the apathy and the self-pity.
Or perhaps it’s the advertisement he sees while grocery shopping, posted next to the door in big black letters.
Smith & Gessen, Private Investigators
John doesn’t note down the listed address, though he stares at the poster for long enough that people begin to shoot him strange looks. When he finally leaves the grocery store, there’s a thought rolling around in the back of his mind. It hasn’t crystalized yet, but when he wakes the following morning, there’s a fire kindled inside of him, slowly growing into an inferno.
He is going to get Arthur back. No matter the cost.
[Scene break]
Kayne’s heels hit the drawers of John’s desk as he kicks his feet back and forth. The rhythmic thump, thump, thump of it is setting John’s teeth on edge. He forces himself to ignore it and focus on the situation at hand. Kayne, here in his apartment after a year of fucking radio silence. The remnants of his failed ritual still scattered across the ground and carved into the wood slats of his floor. The offer of a deal—an agreement to get Arthur back, no matter the cost.
And Kayne, staring at John with a wicked smile and saying, “Then let’s talk terms and conditions.”
“Terms and conditions?” John echoes.
“You know!” Kayne makes an absent gesture with his hand. “I give you what you want and you give me what I want. Nothing in this world is free, darling.”
“I know that!” John snaps. He forces himself to take a breath. “… What do you want?”
“What I’ve always wanted, of course.” John waits for Kayne to elaborate, but instead, he continues, “Fine! I’ll give you Arthur back. He’ll be alive, back on Earth, and you’ll be in his head again like you always wanted. It’ll be like the time loops never even happened. Though, of course, we’ll both know the truth.”
John feels exhausted. “And I can’t tell Arthur about the loops, I suppose.”
“Oh, no, please—share to your heart’s content! Don’t let me stop you.”
John’s eyes narrow slowly. “It can’t be that simple.”
“But it is, my darling. Aren’t I wonderful?”
“There’s a catch. Tell me what it is.”
Kayne sighs dramatically. “I’m afraid that would ruin the surprise, my lovely little sunflower. And we wouldn’t want that, now would we?” Kayne leans forward and grins. “So. Do we have a deal?”
Of course.
It’s a bad deal. John knows it is. It would be incredibly foolish for him to agree, sight unseen, to whatever consequences or binding agreements Kayne will hold over his head later on. He’s not an idiot; he can tell by the glitter in Kayne’s eyes and the genuine excitement bleeding through his plastered-on smile that he has plans. John doesn’t know what he’ll be asked to do, or if there’s some horrible loophole, or if everything will come crashing down around him again.
It’s a horrible deal. But it’s the only way he’s going to get Arthur back. So it’s not really much of a choice at all.
“… Deal,” John says.
Kayne practically leaps from the desk, clapping his hands together. “Oh, John!” He looks like he’s about to lunge forward and hug John, or maybe strangle him, and John braces himself. But all Kayne does is press his hands to his mouth, like if he doesn’t, his excitement will come spilling out into the open, red and sticky and smelling of iron. “This is going to be so much fun.”
Then, he takes one of his hands away from his face and snaps his fingers, still giggling, and everything goes sideways.
[Scene break]
When Arthur wakes, it’s to the worst throbbing headache he’s ever experienced in his entire life.
He groans and rolls over—must be early still, perhaps he can get in a few more hours before they have to start their casework for the day—and his whole body twinges and aches in protest.
Arthur winces and forces himself to open his eyes.
… Oh. Right.
Arthur sits up, then nearly topples back over when his head spins and throbs. He presses the heels of his hand to his eyes—fuck, that’s awful—and tries to reorient himself.
He was … on the plateau, he thinks. The King was there, and John—John left? No, John stayed, of course he did, but then the King snapped his—wait, no, he—the dagger, he thinks he—no, that can’t be right, why would he have—
You don’t have to let it win.
Arthur sucks in a breath, and when he exhales, everything settles into place.
Right. Right. They went to the plateau, and the King was there. He tried to convince Arthur to give John up, and when that didn’t work, he…
Arthur presses a careful hand to his leg. He’s so sure that it had been broken—snapped in two, bone jutting out through the skin, pain, so much pain—but it feels whole and healed.
Huh.
Unbidden, Arthur’s hand raises to his neck. John had tried to leave, to save Arthur, and Arthur had…
There. A thin line runs across the length of his neck. It’s scarred over already, but it’s there, and it certainly hadn’t been before.
Arthur had slit his own throat. For John.
And he’d lost John anyway.
John had left anyway.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Arthur wants to lie back down, but he forces himself to remain sitting up. He braces a hand on the ground beneath him—hard, rough, wooden—and it’s only after he’s already stabilized himself that he realizes that he’s used his left hand.
… His left hand.
The rest of it comes rushing back: dragging himself through the snow, stumbling into the cabin, frantically setting his legs and tying a strip of cloth around his throat. Making the deal with Kayne.
He. Remembers. Nothing.
Had Arthur passed out again? After Kayne had left? That doesn’t seem—
… No. No, yes, he remembers now. Kayne had pressed a hand to his face, over his eyes, and told him to sleep, and he had slept. And now he’s awake.
Which means…
Arthur licks his lips. Then, quietly, he says, “… H-Hello? Is … anybody there?”
The moment of silence that follows is the longest of Arthur’s life. He doesn’t know what he’ll do if it lingers, stretches on into minutes and hours. He’s been without John for less than a day and he already feels so lost. He doesn’t—he can’t—he—
I love him. And I have no interest in living without him—not anymore.
Arthur inhales sharply. The shard of memory digs into his chest—is that right? Memory? When did John—?—and he grasps for it, but too quickly, it’s gone, leaving behind only a lingering ache that Arthur can’t quite recall the origin of. Anxiety, probably, as he waits, holding his breath, for something. Anything.
The dagger rests heavy in his bag, red rubies the color of fresh blood.
And a voice, soft and kind, says, “Don’t you remember?”