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sidewaysTitle: Therapy
Rating: M (dubious consent)
Series: The Feasting Years
Wordcount: 1,166
Summary: Fisher receives some dedicated attention as a new recruit.
Remarks: Follows the disaster of Time After Time, after which Fisher attempted to drown himself, met a god, and joined a cult about it.
Rating: M (dubious consent)
Series: The Feasting Years
Wordcount: 1,166
Summary: Fisher receives some dedicated attention as a new recruit.
Remarks: Follows the disaster of Time After Time, after which Fisher attempted to drown himself, met a god, and joined a cult about it.
With his head angled across their lap just so, Jie could focus on the murky grey of the eyes set in the thin, pale face bent over him. If he held himself there, tracing the fine crackling that gave the illusion of liquid frozen in the midst of churning motion, he could keep at a distance the violent urge that burned in his gut whenever he put a name to that face. In the same way, the rhythmic hiss of pumping oxygen might have been the bubbling of seafoam as it was soaked up by sand. The fingers in his hair no more than the tidal stirring of a kelp forest.
"I thought it was me, at first," he said to the ocean inside the eyes. "My power, it was under - no, it was my skin." His hands lifted almost more in supplication than examination; pale palms round and soft, fingers slender and unscarred. "I was the knife. Do you understand? The knife was me."
The eyes blinked slowly in a cat's acknowledgement. Another laboured breath fogged the plastic mask. If Jie reached higher, fit his hands around the gaunt cheeks, slid his thumbs under the curve of those beautiful eyes, he could show them exactly what he meant: that the only difference between plastic and skin and bone was a matter of pressure.
"But I don't need to touch you to cut you," he said wonderingly. "I figured it out."
Skin split above him - not his doing. A parting of sticky lips behind the mask. "You realised the nature of your burden," they rasped.
Not the words he would have chosen - the pretentious preachings of a priest - but Jie didn't really have better words, so he didn't argue about it. There was never going to be a perfect way to explain the realisation that the thing making the world such a soft and malleable place had nothing to do with the boundaries of his body. That he could lose his hands, his legs, his other eye; he could be reduced to a barely breathing pile of immovable pulp, and the knife would still remain.
“I figured it out,” he said again. “I had to. I couldn't move fast enough to reach Arthur before everything reset, even once I decided I had to kill him. I mean, he was on the other side of the room. Maybe that was on purpose. I don't know. Arthur never liked it when I touched him.” So many times over the years their eyes had met across a room, and there was a flinch in every one. He never had known how to make himself dull enough for the comfort of someone so naturally dull. "So I figured out how to… I made the knife be everywhere in the room, I told him to come apart and-" his fingers spread in a lazy explosion, "poof.”
He waited for the surge of feeling at the memory, the guilt and the grief, but as was apparently usual now, it didn't really come. Only a wet fuse ending in a distant fizzling somewhere far away. Poof.
"This is the first time I've really talked about it," Jie murmured. Laid a hand down over his chest and the curious absence inside it. "That's funny. It was all they wanted back in - back there. Talk, talk, talk. Tell us what happened. But I couldn't do it then."
"You were still seeing it too closely." Fingers stroked gently. A sigh sounded above him like seabreeze. "The ignorant speak of the ocean washing away what they bring to her. As if she is soap and salt water for their dirty hands. Feh. She erases nothing. She only takes you deeper into your own understanding." Cold hands cupped his face maternally. The nauseous crawling down Jie's spine was outcompeted by the fluttering race of his heart. "You brought her grief, so grief was what she returned to you. Grief - and perspective."
Jie closed his eye, the words taking him under - pretentious and preachy, but her truth was in them, he could tell. Alone, he could only ever conjure up an unsatisfying echo of what he had seen - had experienced down there in the black water, drowning. Something too large and multidimensional to fit into a body that couldn't even house a fragment of its like without childishly spilling sharp edges all over the place. Here, with them, he sensed it again: her grief as the howl of a millennia. His own as a pathetic fleck of feeling. There was a terrible relief in it.
A thumb ran over the ridges of where his other eye had once been. The spell broke: Jie jerked, heart jumping, and barely caught the edges of his knife in time.
"My pearl is settling in well," was all they said, sounding pleased. "Does it still hurt?"
"Sure," he said. "Sometimes. If I try to stick my thumb in it."
The pleased look remained. As did the fall of their hair, the slope of their shoulders pocked with strange growths, the sweet curve of lips that gave orders as often as they gave sermons. Jie looked up at the face of Morpheus, and felt the burn kick in.
He smiled, relieved to feel it twist spitefully at the corners, and batted at the mask covering the lower half, knocking it askew. "You don't usually have this in the dreams. I wonder what that means. You feeling okay?"
"As ever," they said, unoffended, tugging the mask down entirely to hang loosely around their neck. Their smile widened, as devoid of warmth as his own. "You don't usually realise you're dreaming. Good, Fisher."
That name in their mouth made his hands tremble. Not that it mattered. He didn't need to reach up and touch them, after all. And, he considered with sudden revelation, if it was a dream then restraint was not so necessary either. It was a very interesting thought. Ocean would not care about violence done to her great, grand priest in this space.
But he had forgotten the rule of dreams: as fast as the dreamer runs, the monster stays the same distance behind. Jie could move fast as a thought, but somehow their grip was around his chin anyway, grey gaze darkening with amused knowing, and when skin split it was not his own doing, sticky lips parting briefly in a breathy laugh before they pressed against his own, soft as bloat.
They left him just enough time to be aware he was pressing back, letting them hinge his mouth open - before the water poured in, briny and foul, a scalding, freezing torrent down his throat, flooding his lungs. Salt burned in his nose and burst black stars in his vision.
When Jie woke in his bed, rolling to his knees to cough and choke with aching lungs, the pillow was still faintly damp beneath him, and salt crusted stiff and thick along the rim of the eyepatch.
"I thought it was me, at first," he said to the ocean inside the eyes. "My power, it was under - no, it was my skin." His hands lifted almost more in supplication than examination; pale palms round and soft, fingers slender and unscarred. "I was the knife. Do you understand? The knife was me."
The eyes blinked slowly in a cat's acknowledgement. Another laboured breath fogged the plastic mask. If Jie reached higher, fit his hands around the gaunt cheeks, slid his thumbs under the curve of those beautiful eyes, he could show them exactly what he meant: that the only difference between plastic and skin and bone was a matter of pressure.
"But I don't need to touch you to cut you," he said wonderingly. "I figured it out."
Skin split above him - not his doing. A parting of sticky lips behind the mask. "You realised the nature of your burden," they rasped.
Not the words he would have chosen - the pretentious preachings of a priest - but Jie didn't really have better words, so he didn't argue about it. There was never going to be a perfect way to explain the realisation that the thing making the world such a soft and malleable place had nothing to do with the boundaries of his body. That he could lose his hands, his legs, his other eye; he could be reduced to a barely breathing pile of immovable pulp, and the knife would still remain.
“I figured it out,” he said again. “I had to. I couldn't move fast enough to reach Arthur before everything reset, even once I decided I had to kill him. I mean, he was on the other side of the room. Maybe that was on purpose. I don't know. Arthur never liked it when I touched him.” So many times over the years their eyes had met across a room, and there was a flinch in every one. He never had known how to make himself dull enough for the comfort of someone so naturally dull. "So I figured out how to… I made the knife be everywhere in the room, I told him to come apart and-" his fingers spread in a lazy explosion, "poof.”
He waited for the surge of feeling at the memory, the guilt and the grief, but as was apparently usual now, it didn't really come. Only a wet fuse ending in a distant fizzling somewhere far away. Poof.
"This is the first time I've really talked about it," Jie murmured. Laid a hand down over his chest and the curious absence inside it. "That's funny. It was all they wanted back in - back there. Talk, talk, talk. Tell us what happened. But I couldn't do it then."
"You were still seeing it too closely." Fingers stroked gently. A sigh sounded above him like seabreeze. "The ignorant speak of the ocean washing away what they bring to her. As if she is soap and salt water for their dirty hands. Feh. She erases nothing. She only takes you deeper into your own understanding." Cold hands cupped his face maternally. The nauseous crawling down Jie's spine was outcompeted by the fluttering race of his heart. "You brought her grief, so grief was what she returned to you. Grief - and perspective."
Jie closed his eye, the words taking him under - pretentious and preachy, but her truth was in them, he could tell. Alone, he could only ever conjure up an unsatisfying echo of what he had seen - had experienced down there in the black water, drowning. Something too large and multidimensional to fit into a body that couldn't even house a fragment of its like without childishly spilling sharp edges all over the place. Here, with them, he sensed it again: her grief as the howl of a millennia. His own as a pathetic fleck of feeling. There was a terrible relief in it.
A thumb ran over the ridges of where his other eye had once been. The spell broke: Jie jerked, heart jumping, and barely caught the edges of his knife in time.
"My pearl is settling in well," was all they said, sounding pleased. "Does it still hurt?"
"Sure," he said. "Sometimes. If I try to stick my thumb in it."
The pleased look remained. As did the fall of their hair, the slope of their shoulders pocked with strange growths, the sweet curve of lips that gave orders as often as they gave sermons. Jie looked up at the face of Morpheus, and felt the burn kick in.
He smiled, relieved to feel it twist spitefully at the corners, and batted at the mask covering the lower half, knocking it askew. "You don't usually have this in the dreams. I wonder what that means. You feeling okay?"
"As ever," they said, unoffended, tugging the mask down entirely to hang loosely around their neck. Their smile widened, as devoid of warmth as his own. "You don't usually realise you're dreaming. Good, Fisher."
That name in their mouth made his hands tremble. Not that it mattered. He didn't need to reach up and touch them, after all. And, he considered with sudden revelation, if it was a dream then restraint was not so necessary either. It was a very interesting thought. Ocean would not care about violence done to her great, grand priest in this space.
But he had forgotten the rule of dreams: as fast as the dreamer runs, the monster stays the same distance behind. Jie could move fast as a thought, but somehow their grip was around his chin anyway, grey gaze darkening with amused knowing, and when skin split it was not his own doing, sticky lips parting briefly in a breathy laugh before they pressed against his own, soft as bloat.
They left him just enough time to be aware he was pressing back, letting them hinge his mouth open - before the water poured in, briny and foul, a scalding, freezing torrent down his throat, flooding his lungs. Salt burned in his nose and burst black stars in his vision.
When Jie woke in his bed, rolling to his knees to cough and choke with aching lungs, the pillow was still faintly damp beneath him, and salt crusted stiff and thick along the rim of the eyepatch.
