Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

An evening prayer for your deaf gods:

Tell me there’s an end to this tunnel. I beseech thee for a sign. It does not have to be a light; I am not a picky lamb. I’ll even take the slaughterhouse. I only need it to end. 

—

There lay a body upon their apartment floor–John’s apartment, rather–and Ludger hadn’t woken up until not only the battle, but the interrogation was over. It would not be the first, nor the last time he was too late for a loved one.

Ludger had snapped upright from a nightmare at the sound of a body hitting the floor of the apartment. He was on his feet before he realized he’d left the bed, and his hand found the wand on his nightstand before his sleep-blurred vision stopped spinning.

It could’ve been that John Doe had just fallen down, but he was certain he’d detected a foreign mana signature, which meant an intruder. He fumbled open the door, a shadow-step spell locked just beneath his teeth in case he needed to get his partner out of there.

“Oh, hey,” John’s voice had called out in response, “rise and shine, Ludger.” 

The intruder, whoever he was, lay limp on the floor with John’s cane thwacking against his temple. A gun had skidded across the hardwood a few feet away from the body’s outstretched, bruising hand. His throat was bleeding from its two arteries, and Ludger guessed the culprit was the fruit knife John was spinning in his hand. 

Ludger stared long enough to verify that he wasn’t moving, wasn’t going to move, was either fully unconscious or dead, before he looked back up at his partner.

John was sitting on a wooden highchair with his legs dangling and wrist flicking his cane up and down against the body on the floor. His short, azure hair was tangled from sleep, but his eyes were wide open and awake with adrenaline. 

Though dim, the light from the full moon, the short sleeves of his blue silk nightshirt and the cut of his shorts allowed Ludger to verify with a quick glance that he was no more scarred and bruised than he normally was. 

He asked, anyway, “Are you alright?”

“Yep,” John chirped, not looking up from the enemy. “Just some assassin. I thought he was after you, actually, but he attacked me straightaway.”

Ludger peered at the clock, which had barely ticked past the three.

They were in John Doe’s apartment, Ludger having stayed over after paper-grading had occupied him so late into the night he deemed it to not be worth the effort of trudging back to campus past curfew and explaining to the guards that the reason for his lateness had been a mere lapse in awareness of the time. He’d gotten to bed just before one, only because he was starting to lose the strength to hold a pencil, by which point he had thought John was already asleep. 

Then again, given the state of his hair and disarray, maybe he had been asleep, just up until the attack. 

“Why were you awake at this hour?” Ludger winced, tension and grogginess finally easing away from his stiff limbs enough for him to take a step forward to examine the body more closely.

“I sensed someone was scoping out the apartment,” John shrugged. The neckline of his sleepwear left a v of his collar-bone exposed, subjecting Ludger to another reminder of just how far the scars from the train incident had crawled along his body.  “There’s a way loiterers have of moving that didn’t match what this person was doing. So I got up to handle it.”

The assassin’s chest neither rose nor fell, and the ends of his fingers were taking on a blue-ish hue. He was dressed in generic streetwear and free of any insignia. “You killed him,” he observed, then clarified, “I thought you might be the type to keep him alive to interrogate him.” 

John looked up at him, and cracked a faint grin. “I already did.” 

Ludger stared. “...how much of the scuffle did I sleep through?” 

“Not much. I’m just efficient.” His cane smacked the top of the assassin’s lifeless head. “And, frankly, there just wasn’t much to find. He was a hired hitman with no personal connection to you or I–just orders to kill me. I spoke to him briefly and it became apparent he didn’t even know who his client was; just that they weren’t wanting for money.” 

“You were attacked, subdued him, and held a whole conversation with him,” Ludger said, with faint horror, “and I slept through it.” 

John stared at him, brow pinching in confusion. “You’re exhausted, Ludger. It’s hardly your fault.”

That was no excuse. Someone like him, who’d been practically raised by assassination, should have known better. On the other hand, it was at least reassuring to know that John could still handle his own, even with the mobility hindrance he was working with.  

“I should’ve been here sooner.”

John shook his head. “You didn’t need to be. I was fine. Black Dawn First Order, remember?”

Yes, Ludger thought but did not say, but one who can’t run.

One look at John’s scar-mottled flesh seemed to beg the question of how someone could go through so much and remain alive. He had marks over marks; the red remains of surgical incisions and stitches overlaying the thin, crescent-like marks of having been caned all along the backs of his legs. He had purple marbling of burn scars wrapping up and down his legs, along his torso, and scraping down his left arm.

Ludger had been through his own fair share of assassinations, sure, but it always felt less real than when he looked at John. His skin never showed it like John’s did; never kept the memory of injury, no matter how deep.

It didn’t help, either, that the first time they met was when he watched John die. 

“In any event, this man,” another thwack of the cane, which was beginning to make Ludger feel sorry for the disrespected corpse, “fought me like he didn’t expect me to fight back. So I suppose whoever sent him hasn’t caught onto the fact that I’m John Doe, which I gather means that his real aim was to hurt you –either Ludger Cherish the professor, or John Doe of Black Dawn–or to test how we would react to it.” 

Ludger cast his mind back to the meeting of first orders, and Nikolai’s jabbed, accusatory finger. “Nikolai was aggressive towards me last we met. I suppose he hasn’t given up his endeavor to kill ‘John Doe’, who he now thinks is me.”

“Maybe. But I can’t fathom why Nikolai would target the one who he thinks is my boyfriend in that circumstance,” John frowned. “If he was trying to kidnap me–the ‘boyfriend’–that would be one thing. I’d think maybe he was doing it for the purposes of blackmail. But killing the boyfriend? That would just tick ‘John Doe’ off.”

Ludger tried to recall anyone he might’ve made an enemy of under his professor identity, as he reached to take the bloody knife off of John’s hands. Cleaning up after him felt like the least he could do as recompense for his uselessness.  “I angered Duke Lumos, if that’s relevant.” 

John’s nose wrinkled. “A duke would never be so sloppy. This hitman’s a cheap hire; hardly knew a scrap of magic.”

“It could’ve been a test of your skill level, an attempt to lower our guards, or an empty gesture of aggression,” Ludger supplied regardless, and advanced towards the sink so he could clean off the weapon. There was a bottle of hydrogen peroxide beneath the sink that he meant to make use of. “A symbol, that is, to frighten us.”

“Yeah, could be.”

John struggled to his feet, holding onto the kitchen counter with one arm to pull himself up and stabilizing himself as he did with his cane. He grimaced when he relied too much on his right leg, and tried to shift his weight onto the other. Ludger finished wiping down the knife and laid it on the drying rack. 

“Well, let’s not go telling the Knights,” John suggested. “Either the culprit is stupid, or they have the police in their pocket and wanted to create an excuse for them to raid our living spaces.”

“I did anger a few wealthy professors. It could be one of them,” Ludger admitted. He hoped it was, actually, because if it was just them, then this was a petty, not convoluted scheme. Neither Professor Hugo nor his underlings were particularly intelligent. “In any event, I’ll take care of the body. You should rest.”

“No way. I’m fine.”

“You hit something in your right knee during the fall, didn’t you?’

Ludger leveled his partner with a knowing stare, briefly tossing his gaze down to how unusually reluctant John was to using what was normally the better of his legs. 

John’s false bravado whittled away little by little, until he laughed—empty—and abandoned his attempt to stand. He fell back down, catching himself with the palms of his hands. 

John Doe’s pain remained confounding to him. It often seemed like a hundred and one things could trigger it—sunlight, windows left open, ventilation, temperatures. It originated from severe nerve damage done by burns and frostbite when he was thrown from the brunt of an explosion into the tundras of a mountaintop, courtesy of what was apparently an assassination attempt by his own coworker. 

Muscle aches, itching, and a faint burning sensation near the bone were the most common symptoms, John said. But he added that he’d lost some of his mobility too; that his muscles were easier to pull and tear, and his nerves were less forgiving to rapid motion. 

“You’re observant,” John mumbled, leaning back on one of his hands as he attempted to extend his injured leg. His expression bent with pain throughout the motion. “I guess I bashed a nerve or something. Whatever it is it’s,” he outstretched his fingers, as if to model his analogy, “like a lightning bolt pulsing up my leg. I can feel it all the way to my hip.”

“I’ll take you back to your room in a moment. It’s likely my fault you were attacked in the first place.” 

“Hey, we don’t know that.”

“It’s—late. Let’s not argue about this at this hour.”

“Fine.”

Ludger crouched down to the corpse and began a cursory examination. There was nothing distinctive about the assassin’s button-up and coat. Maybe the bits of dirt under his soles could offer something useful, but that was something he’d rather put off for the morning. Nothing about the pattern of calluses on his hands or his build gave Ludger any suggestion that this person was anything but an independent hitman for hire. Were it the liberation army, Ludger would’ve expected to see signs of manual labor, or factory-related injuries. 

“I’ll dispose of the body while leaving behind his belongings.” 

“Woah woah, fingerprint the guy first,” John said, reaching his hand towards the row of cabinets in the kitchen. He heard the words of some sort of telekinetic spell on John's lips, and then the door swung up and a water glass floated out.  

Ludger lifted a brow. “What’s the purpose of—oh. Glass picks up fingerprints.” He murmured that last part more to himself than anything as he took the glass, pinching it at the top and grabbing the dead man’s hand so he could press his fingertips into the side column. “How morbid.”

“We can take the body down to a farm that’s a little way’s out from here,” John suggested. “I know the owner. He lets me feed corpses to his pigs.”

Ludger’s impression of John was always in constant fluctuation between fragile and mass murderer. Moments like this reminded him of the latter, very vital fact.

“That,” he said, grimacing in faint disgust, “won’t be necessary. I have a spell that can take care of this neatly.”

Ludger set the glass safely on the counter so it wouldn’t be destroyed when he summoned what he was about to.

With a wave of his right hand, a crack in reality cut through the air, creating a door to a realm beyond them, where the human-loving goddess was sealed. 

Her form was best described as an amalgam of human bodies, and to add more to her collection she stuck her fingers through the gap in the world’s cage Ludger opened for her. Those fingers in question were thin tendrils of fused bones and flesh bound by human skin, which religious texts often mistook for tentacles. 

Forming the crack wasn’t so difficult; widening it for the goddess to press her way through, was.

The gap had to be wrung open, not with hands but his will. A throbbing pain pounded through his skull that he was sure would last into a migraine. The whispering in the back of his head grew louder; spoken in a language not meant for mortal ears.

John Doe’s hand wrapped around Ludger’s left, and gently squeezed. 

When the goddess’s touch reached the body, its insides melted into a thick, gel-like colloid, bound formlessly by a sac of epidermal cells that was then gradually absorbed. 

“What is that?” His lover before him asked. Ludger barely picked out the words over the sound of the other gods’ screeching. 

“A goddess,” Ludger answered, strained. The longer it took for the goddess to recede into her realm beyond the cage, the more it felt like his skull would shatter. Hurry up. 

He swore, she could not have taken longer to return if she tried. The last tentacle withdrew into the portal at a sloth’s pace, and Ludger thought an eye might hemorrhage.

When the last of her was through the rift, he released the spell all at once. The pressure slamming into his head lifted like a dispersed fog, and he rubbed his temples to assuage the echoes of former pain. 

“You were so casual about that.” John chuckled. He’d softened his voice, something Ludger would reflect later was probably done to not worsen Ludger’s headache. “What’s that? Oh nothing! Just the spare goddess I keep in my back pocket.” 

“And you accepted that explanation just as easily,” Ludger shot back, wiping his mouth. Screwing his eyes shut he reached blindly behind him, palmed for a drawer handle, and fished around its contents until his hand found the familiar shape of a migraine relief bottle. 

“Would you lie to me?” 

“No.”

“Then, there you go.” 

Ludger stared in faint disbelief. John smiled back. Ludger sighed, and dry swallowed a dose of the pills. 

After setting the bottle back, he grabbed onto the counter and used it to help him stand. John Doe folded his legs back in and parodied the motion in his attempt to stand. He managed to make it to his feet with less wincing this time, which Ludger supposed was an improvement. 

He reached his hand out as an unspoken offer. John hesitated before he took it, and looked apologetic once he did. Leaving behind the belongings and clothes of the deceased, John clung to his arm for balance as they returned to the shared bedroom. 

The domesticity of the moment threatened to tempt Ludger to relax, a fact which alarmed him right back onto his guard. Just minutes ago there was an intruder in the apartment, he reminded himself. And even if it weren’t for that, Ludger’s life as a whole had grown too distracted as of recent.

He was meant to search for pieces of the relic, and here he was doing anything but.

“What’s wrong, Ludger?”

John stared up at him, soft-eyed and worried, and a pang of guilt hit Ludger for thinking of his lover as a detour. 

“It’s nothing. I was thinking about tomorrow.”

“Busy day?”

“I more so meant what we should do tomorrow. Regarding the intruder.” 

“We’ll go through his stuff for evidence.” John answered easily. “If I see Zero Order, I’ll ask if he has any insights.” 

The door to the bedroom was already open, courtesy of Ludger having practically thrown it open when he heard the noise in the apartment. John observed this with some amusement before moving towards the bed. 

This left Ludger with the spare mattress they’d dug out from the closet. John had actually offered to take the more subpar sleeping arrangement instead, which took profuse insistence otherwise on Ludger’s part to resolve. 

“You still speak with Zero Order?”

“He kinda just stops by,” John shrugged. “Sometimes I’ll walk around and he’s just there, and we chat. I guess if I wanted to meet him I could probably just,” he pointed at the ring he’d been given on the nightstand, “put that on. But I haven’t tried it yet.” 

Ludger sat down on the bed across from John’s and tried to calm his mind down from the adrenaline rush; hand running through his hair. “That’s intrusive of him.” 

“Yeah. He’s like that.” 

Ludger let out a long, aggrieved sigh. “Is he getting any better?”

“He is who he is.” 

“I await the day you allow me to land a decent punch on him.”

“Don’t. He gets enough shit hurled at him as is.”

Ludger decidedly refrained from voicing his disagreement with that statement.  

He laid down on top of the covers instead, and murmured a vague good night to his partner. The odds of a second aggressor swooping in were low, but if one did come, he didn’t want to have to waste time chucking aside the bedsheets. 

With the feeling of blood on his hands, Ludger found that morning could not come soon enough. 

—

When John Doe woke up in the morning, everything still hurt like hell.

Actually, could you call it waking up if you were barely ever asleep in the first place? His rest that night was best described as an awkward, half-asleep, barely lucid limbo where he begged every God he knew the name of to stop sending him throbbing pain in any part of his body he dared to lay on for more than ten minutes.

Evidently, they all smelled the atheism in him, because they kept their mercy far away from him.

Granted, a nightly problem, but it was still a shitty thing to deal with. You’d think you’d get used to it, but the pain never really diminishes, you just get used to it being there. 

He was slower about getting out of bed this time. Any movement was presently liable to send his fatigued, light-sensitive vision spiraling into a blurry nebula. Not to call it early and jinx himself, but his legs seemed to have a bit more strength in them than they typically did, so he reckoned he might actually be able to go somewhere this time. 

As long as he did it with his eyes half shut, anyhow, which was becoming the norm for him.

His makeup was the first thing that went on once he was done washing his face. The bottoms of his eyelids were dark and the edges reddened with his sleep deprivation. He covered that up with meticulous color corrector placement, and then concealer. 

His chosen outfit for that day consisted of a beige sweater vest and a white button-up fitted with a swallow-tailed collar, stole black pleather gloves from Ludger, and changed his pants for a wide-legged pair just long enough to brush against the tops of his shoes. 

Ludger bought him a wide variety of clothes the other week, saying he tried to base his selection on what he thought he saw Doe’s eyes linger on. Truth be told, John Doe didn’t even know he had a preference for any particular style until Ludger’s selection threw it in his face, and he realized that he did prefer the preppy, unisex pieces Ludger chose for him.

After confirming he’d covered up his scars—except behind his ears, and beneath his chin, which he couldn’t address with clothes anyway—he made his way to the kitchen.

Pilfering through the assassin’s belongings turned up no insignia or ID. Nothing about the clothing suggested anything distinctive. He set into a bag a few fibers and dirt scraps he thought might net some locational information. After examining the shoes for a while and committing the print of the soles to memory, as well as the rough sizing relative to his own, he shoved the rest into a trash bag that he magically whisked into a trashcan, which he placed a second trash bag over to conceal.

“I don’t suppose you’re having much luck,” Ludger observed, emerging from the bedroom where he’d been getting dressed for the day. He’d chosen a black vest for the day, which gleamed a dark, forest green when it caught the light. This was situated over a white dress shirt, though he swiftly covered that up with a gold-lined coat.

“I’ve got nothing until I can figure out what battery of diagnostics to run through this.” He shook the bag. “I’m going to work on that, and probably walk around for a while.” 

“Will that be alright? I thought you injured your leg the other night.”

It was still tight, but. “Nah, it’s gone away now. I can handle it.”

Probably.

Ludger nodded, and began to tie up his hair. “When you’re done for the night, come to my quarters in Ceoren. They’ll be better guarded than your apartment.”

“You’ve got to get me a proper visitor’s pass one of these days,” John scoffed, and pulled himself off the floor by the counter. “I’m tired of inventing new ways to prove to the guards that I am indeed the Professor Ludger Cherish’s partner.”

Looking at least somewhat guilty, Ludger said, “…I’ll lend you my ID. It should suffice as proof.” 

Taking it from the spot on the dinner table he’d left it, Ludger walked over to and passed the lanyard over John’s neck with a deft movement of his hand. “Try not to get strangled.”

“I’ll do my best.” He gave the lanyard strap an experimental flick before tucking the ID under his vest. “Good luck with class. I have lesson plans, you know, if you ever want them.”

“Put a pin in that for Friday,” Ludger suggested, busy assembling his belongings into his briefcase for work. “Tomorrow I have an audit, so I won’t have time then.” 

“You have a what?”

“An audit. The chancellor made me the Director of Planning until she can hire a more qualified candidate.”

John gaped. “Jeez, man. Save some career success for the rest of us. It’s only been what, three months since you got hired?”

“It’s only an interim position, and it was handed to me based more on trust in my character than in my skills.” 

“Okay, well I feel like both played a part there. You were a war hero and in a commanding position, so something tells me it was the management skills you learned there that got you put on.”

Ludger shook his head. “You’re making it out to be a bigger deal than it was.”

Doe blinked. Very slowly. Was this guy actually serious?

He gave Ludger a long look, and the confusion Ludger responded with unfortunately suggested he was, in fact, serious.

“Did you dig a grave for your self-efficacy or some shit? Because it’s six feet under.”

“It’s not important.”

John meant to object, but Ludger cleared his throat and moved on before he could get his mouth open. “It—”

“Regardless, I’ll be staying late to compile the necessary evidence. Be back before curfew, if you can.”

“You got it.”

As the door clicked shut, John began to chalk a locator spell onto a board.

This sort of spell was common among forensics teams, though it came with no shortage of heavy restrictions. It only worked on organic substances, either living or fresh enough dead that it bore traces of mana, but lost its effectiveness the more complex the matter was. Human remains could be tracked in this manner, but it would be traced with less accuracy than a leaf due to its increased variety and complexity of cells.

John traced circles for each type of substance he’d gathered, and determined a general direction each was in hours before the attack. 

It was a form of triangulation, in a way. He’d erase and bring the time forward until he found the time that all of the traces pointing in the same direction. From there, he worked backwards, bringing the time back until he had a rough timeline of when each substance was picked up—joined the rest of the group directionally—and in what direction they were pointing in when they were.

Each time he had to erase or rewrite something, he’d dump the excess chalk onto the glass with the assassin’s fingerprints from the previous night. Waste not want not, or something like that.

When he was done, he’d established that at some point, the assassin walked to a location, picking up remnants of a probably-urban landscape along the way, before arriving upon the location, where most of the plant material came from. Then, everything else was picked up on a rough, not quite straight-shot route to his apartment.

Judging that location to have been visited some time yesterday morning, he erased and reset the time again, then set the board aside.

He lifted the fingerprints with a column of tape, and set them over a section of a magazine that was all black, and then prepared himself to leave.

Following where the majority of traces led via carriage rides had led him away from the urban aspects of the city, and had involved passing pastures of roaming cattle. On one occasion, he swore he saw a collection of Cold Steel knights gathered by a motel, which was quite a long way from their usual post to be. He made a light inquiry about this to the carriage driver, who told him that curiosity was one of the greatest killers of men, and it wasn’t anything they should entangle themself in.

Where he wound up was somewhere on the spectrum between rural and suburban, with houses speckled here and there, but given the isolation of the location he was more inclined to believe this was where the assassin met with the client, not where he lived.

The hamstring on his right leg still felt taut, and a faint stripe of pain fired down a nerve in that leg every now and again. He was trying to take the pressure off of it by relying more on his left leg, but his left was his weaker leg, so he was left with soreness in both limbs. 

Regardless, he felt drawn to the forest. 

It was thick with trees, bushes, and hanging vines, which seemed to have been fed on mana given their size and vibrance. Come night time it would provide cover for a meet-up well enough, but at the same time why walk out that far? And, also, the area was so level and unobstructed, anyone looking out their windows would see you walking there.

Yet, it also had visible footsteps leading up to it.

Two sets, that was; presumably the client and the hitman. He had gotten a good look at the assassin’s shoe either, and after examining ten or so renditions of the prints, he was pretty confident that one of them was a match. 

Most concerningly, though: while both footprints led into the forest, only the assassin’s went out. Either the client knew teleportation, left a different way, or was still in there, and none of those possibilities were the least bit comforting. 

As he approached the forest border, however, he felt a shift in the air—or rather, in the mana in the air—from just ahead of him. No, scratch that, above him.

When he looked up, he was locking eyes with a demon. 

Her yellow eyes bore bi-colored pupils; one ebony and one ivory. They were curved with mirth and a complement to her thin, amused smile. Two-toned hair, silver on the side of the ivory pupil and black on the other, fell at either side of her face. The front pieces were cropped just below her cheekbones, while the back pieces curled around her neck and just barely brushed her exposed collarbone. 

He asked, “A friend of Surna’s?” 

To keep yourself from being on the weaker end of the conversation, you should knock a stronger opponent off balance. A demon trumps him in combat, experience, and in this case, literal high ground alike. If he wanted to claim something close to equal footing, he had to have the upper hand of info and mystery.

It had its intended effect: the woman’s brows jumped up in surprise, and her smile widened a fraction. 

“Wow, does he talk about me? I’m flattered,” she laughed, hopping down from the branch. “We’re not friends. Are you here to see him?”

Did that mean Surna was here? “The only demons who’d know John Doe are ones who’d know Surna, and if you know John Doe is me, he must be friendly with you,” he explained, bargaining for a good impression. The dirt was hard to walk in with the cane, so he slowed his steps now that he was being watched. “But nah, I didn't really come here for him.”

“Cold.”

“You wouldn’t have happened to have seen anyone enter this place, oh about,” Doe reread his chalkboard, “twenty-six hours ago? Early morning yesterday?”

“Wasn’t here,” she shrugged. “Perfect question to ask Surna, though. He knows what goes on around here.”

“What’s the boss doing monitoring a place like this?”

“Yeoch. That’s what you call him?” The woman laughed. “He’s terrible at this.”

“At what?”

“Nothing,” she swatted the air. “I just think, you know, you’re real easy on the eyes. If he isn’t more forward—someone else might come along and, well.”

She giggled to herself. Doe decided friendliness might suit him in this situation, and laughed along. “Then I hate to break it to you, but I have a partner already.”

“Heathcliff, was it?”

“He goes by Ludger.”

“Mhm. Yeah I remember him,” She thought aloud. “You guys can sort that out. He’s hanging out up ahead, feeling sentimental. A surprise visit from you oughta cheer him up.” 

Doe wondered, making connections instinctually, if this place was connected to the loved one Surna fought for. “Well I’m not really much of a mood-lifter, but I’ll go,” he said. “We have things to catch up on anyway.”

“I think you’ll do fine,” she said ambiguously, winking before she began to walk past Doe; her movements fluid enough to almost look like she were gliding. “Be gentle with our lover boy, yeah? Thanks.”

She was gone in a whirl or pink smoke before John Doe could even begin to compose a question asking why she was calling Surna lover boy. No forget why, how. They must’ve been close if he even allowed that. 

He followed the fading line of footprints into the forest, where the terrain only got rougher. The densely packed flora meant tree roots jutting out, moss-covered branches sticking every which way and all sorts of plants to climb around. The trail of prints disappeared just so spite him, and he was pretty sure this setup was designed to screw over his angle-intolerant joints specifically. 

Regardless, John Doe reached with his weak hand for necessary holds, and stumbled his way about the copious amounts of foreground elements. 

It was hard to say whether or not the assassin and client might’ve been through this route as well. Or rather, he’d like to say they didn’t, except the footprints indicated they entered, but the forest showed no signs of disturbance. Doe noticed that when he turned around, all the leaves he shoved aside returned to their normal places, and any crushed plants either revitalized or were soon grown over. This forest, enchanted as it was, didn’t keep wear or tear.

Eventually, he pushed back a row of vines and found Surna sitting atop a dome composed of winding trees towards the back of a small clearing. The canopy above him was so densely woven it had a dimming effect on the area below. In his lap he had a collection of yellowed papers and tattered maps. In one hand he had an old, papyrus book and in the other a pencil. 

The dome was formed by the roots, trunks, and branches of neighboring trees contorting themselves into a basket-like weave. It was tall enough that Doe was pretty confident he could stand upright in it without hitting his head against the ceiling, and sealed tightly enough that that sunlight wouldn’t come in except through the archway opening on the side, which Surna’s legs dangled over. 

From afar, Surna resembled a marble statue. He was tall and lithe, and his face was both timelessly attractive, but faintly androgynous—sharp jaw, but soft contours at the cheekbones. But, it was also too smooth to not feel uncanny once you noticed. Where was the texture? The pores? The blankness made your eyes want to linger on his eyes instead—bright yellow as they were—and then maybe his short, ink-like hair. 

And, fortunately, Doe confirmed with a quick glance that his shoes didn’t match the footprints outside. Surna being the client was never really in question, if only because he just would not be stupid enough to leave a trail of breadcrumbs straight from the murder site to himself. But it was nice to have a few redundancies.

When he lifted his head to address Doe’s approach, and smiled, he looked feline.   

“I was wondering who that was, bumbling around the forest like a newborn fawn,” Surna chuckled, setting the papers in his hands into the pile in his lap. There was teasing undercurrent to his voice and thin smile. “But I wasn’t expecting you, deer.”

That was just typical wordplay, of course. Standard flirting! The most common out there when you name yourself doe, which refers to a deer, a word which sounds exactly like dear. But he shuddered regardless, felt the blood drain from his face, and tugged his collar up. “Aha—that’s me. You had a friend out there? I didn’t catch her name, but I happened to be in the area and she told me you were here.”

Yeah right, happened to be in the area his fucking ass. Why did he say that? He was supposed to ask about the assassin. That would’ve been the perfect segue. 

It took a moment for Surna to respond, as if he was stuck on Doe’s odd reaction to being called dear. “I don’t suppose you had a reason to be in the area? It’s quite way’s out from Redelberke, and this,” he gestured at the forest, “is not exactly known for tourism.”

“I was investigating some personal stuff,” Doe said vaguely. “I don’t think it’s a danger to you, though.”

“If it’s a danger to you, I’m concerned.”

“I can handle it,” Doe said, because it was kinder than saying that’s not what you thought a month ago.

Surna’s expression wavered almost imperceptibly, but John Doe didn’t make his acclaim on infiltration for nothing. He saw it. It was why he resented speaking with his teeth to Surna. 

It was easy to see, for someone like Doe, that the marble-like quality to his face was guardedness. Like he was always bracing for a blow, some new vitriol. Doe always wondered when the last time anyone tried to treat him gently was, and never liked the conclusion he came to.

Cradle his heart was a mantra he taught himself when he first began to fall for the man behind the mask. Be delicate with him. No one else is. 

John Doe was not good at a lot of things, but he was talented at taking a hit.

“I’ll take your word for that, then,” Surna said slowly. John Doe offered him a smile of reassurance, which caused his shoulders to relax. “The woman you met earlier is Helia. She’s slated to replace Esmeralda.”

“It sounded like she’d heard of me.”

“I’ve mentioned you to her before, yes. I had to explain to her that the mantle of ‘John Doe’ had passed from a former holder to Ludger. She must’ve looked around on her own outside of that, though.” Doe swore he heard a tinge of annoyance in Surna’s voice when he said that. “She didn’t try anything with you, did she?”

“She wasn’t hostile, if that’s what you mean?” The silence told Doe that it wasn’t. “I don’t think she cast any magic on me either.”

Surna accepted this assurance with a nod. Then, he looked away, as if ashamed. 

“I don’t know why I asked that.” He began to shuffle his papers into as even of a pile as they’d allow. “Helia is not the type of person who would…”

He trailed off, and, like a cat from a tree, hopped down and landed neatly onto his feet, with his knees slightly bent to cushion the impact. Doe angled his head to get a better look at the papers, only to find he couldn’t even read them. They were written in an antiquated form of Exilon’s and the Holy Empire’s common language, the last of which dated back centuries ago. 

“More scheming?” Doe asked, conversationally, because for some reason basic questions like know anything about an assassin coming by last morning? were locked in his throat. 

“Not exactly. I thumbed through these texts in search of some things, but they are of negligible importance. Things will fall into place even if I cannot page together these geographical details.” 

With a snap of his fingers and some sort of spatial magic of which Doe wasn’t academic enough to understand, the contents in his arms disappeared. 

“That aside,” Surna continued, pacing up to him, “you said you came to visit? I can spare a moment to chat.”

“I was told you were out here feeling sentimental, and not in a positive way. You wanna talk about that?”

The demon blinked. “Pardon?”

John pointed vaguely at the dome. “I mean, it looks like you have some pretty emotional ties to this place, and that maybe you came to reminisce. I’m gonna assume that means something to you. Like it was made to protect something.”

It took a moment of disbelief, but then Surna laughed. “Spot on, Doe. It was created to protect me.”

Now they were getting somewhere. 

John smiled, teasing. “I did not take you for a tree whisperer.”

“I am not. My God was, though, and this forest is nourished by Her remains, which rot beneath us. I suspect it was whatever parts of Her divinity and will remained in Her flesh that induced this forest to protect me. Similar to muscle memory, in a sense.”

Surna had explained to him a few days ago, over coffee, that while he was a ‘demon’ in the definitional sense, the Lumensis Church had a warped idea of what a demon was. The word technically meant a creature from a God who is not Lumensis; a label only used by the Lumensis church to refer to other apostles, regardless of their moral feats or crimes. Back then, the following of Lumensis was far more cultish, and to them, worshiping a different God was worse than being a murderer. An apostle was a demon and a creature of evil, yes, only because the Lumensis church believed agnostic was the most evil thing you could be. 

It was as centuries passed, and the other Gods and their followers were scrubbed bloodily from the face of the Earth, that the definition of evil changed, encompassing crime, malice, and cruelty; but the connection between demons and evil was held constant by influence of the Lumensis Church.

You seem to have no problem internalizing this, Surna mentioned, with some amusement. 

Was never very pious. The church didn’t like my mother, so I didn’t like them.

“I was run into the forest by a mob which nearly beat me to death, and the trees sheltered me until they went away.” Surna drummed his fingers along one of the scars on the branches. “That was over a thousand years ago, of course.”

Surna wore a conflicted smile as he paced in front of the dome, and traced around the opening he presumably left through. If anything, it looked like he was recalling a bittersweet childhood memory.

“I thought I should try to be open,” Surna clarified. “I know many of your vulnerabilities, after all. And, this aspect of me is not so private. I’m sure a history book has it noted somewhere. Except, that is, they leave out my God.” 

This felt like a thread he ought to pull. Surna seemed to enjoy the subject.

“Do you think She loved you?” Doe asked.

“Gods do not love in the way I believe you are conceptualizing ‘love’,” Surna shook his head. “It might be easier to think of a God’s relationship to their apostle as an artist to their painting. Our God meticulously crafts our personality, interests, appearance, ability, and other such details—often, we are caricatures of their ideals. In most cases, this renders the apostle unchanging, though I am somewhat of an exception in this department.”

The manual creation explained why Surna’s appearance was lacking in the finer details, like pores and crow’s feet around the eyes, Doe thought. “So when your God protected you, it was more like an instinct to protect herself?” 

“Like how a human’s finger automatically retracts when burned.”

“That’s kind of cold.”

“Hardly. I wasn’t born needing maternal affection, like humans are.”

That was what Surna said, but Doe thought the mix of fondness and grief with which he regarded the wooden dome told a different story. 

“Are you sympathizing with me?” Surna’s smile and tone took on a note of amusement. “There’s no need for that. I’m not human.”

“Human enough.” Doe shrugged. Then he cursed his stupid mouth. He wasn’t sure why he said that, or when he stopped watching his words around Zero Order. 

It might’ve been around when he stopped being Zero Order and started being Surna. 

“Why do you say that?” Surna asked, then, pausing, “but first, we’ve been standing for too long. Come.”

His knees were beginning to hurt, so it took no more convincing for him to follow Surna to a nearby log. His cane, adapted for cities and not terrain, bit into the soft dirt and threw his support in awkward angles. Surna sent him a cursory look of concern, but Doe refused the unspoken offer.

He hopped onto the log, followed shortly by his leader, and set his cane over his lap. By his feet, a small patch of yellow flowers formed.

“My question,” Surna reminded softly. Doe had been hoping he’d forget.

“Takes a certain degree of humanity to fight for a person you love, doesn’t it?” Doe leaned back on his palms so he could stare at the forest canopy, and the way sunlight bled in streams between the leaves. 

He penned a letter to no one about Zero Order once. It said: He is a knight too young. His armor was made for broader shoulders, and the sword in his hand is heavy, but he lost someone very dear to him, and for that he’ll fight. 

He is a corpse rotting, adjacently. He’s lost a lot of skin making it to today. His heart is still there; it’s the only thing left there pure.

He is a lot more human than your son turned out to be.

“Maybe you don’t see it, but that time I failed to acquire that artifact you wanted—when it fell into Exilon’s hands—you were mad, but not like a tyrant is. It was more like you were mad because you were afraid. Maybe of how much longer it would take to re-acquire it, now that your one moment of opportunity had been missed.”

It was subtle, but Doe swore he saw Surna tense. 

“There’s no way anyone else could tell,” he reassured. “I’m just—me.”

“That isn’t what I was worried about.”

“Then?”

Surna folded his hands together. “I’m trying to articulate an apology. I regret what I did back then, but I cannot retract it. I can’t imagine why you aren’t more afraid of me than you are.”

The cane between his hands was cold. 

He began to feel twenty-three again, kneeling on the hospital floor. The bullet wound in his thigh split, and his knees bruised for weeks.

“I,” Doe fumbled for words. Then he chuckled, like trying to fill space. “That’s—nice. I didn’t really expect out of you—I didn’t mean to laugh. I’m sorry. It’s—”

“It’s a nervous habit. I’m aware. It’s fine.”

“I guess I just—I don’t even know why you’re apologizing, since it doesn’t really matter, and I’m fine, so.”

He folded the fingers between each other and fidgeted and stared at the flowers on the ground. His heart pounded by his ears. When Zero Order visited him he leapt from his bed so fast it tore out his IV just to kneel at his feet. He kept his head down, part out of respect and partially to hide the grimace he couldn’t fight back due to the wound. Forgive me. Forgive me. Please. I'm still useful.

Zero Order had watched him for a while, had not bid him to rise.

Had circled behind Doe, and grazed his fingers along the plane of his back. Hospital gowns were thin.

Of course, Zero Order replied. No one is perfect.

It took Doe a moment to realize the motion wasn’t random; he was tracing the whip mark scars crosshatched across Doe’s back from his teenage handmaiden days.

I’ll give you a chance to redeem yourself.

“I did it to sate my anger,” Surna said. “I regret that, now.”

“I figured that out,” Doe laughed. “There are so many missions, one after the other— there’s only so many times you can send me injured half to death on another infiltration mission—and always as a servant —before it starts to send a message. But I told myself I deserved it so it’s—fine.”

“Is it?”

It has to be. Doe’s heart beat hard enough to burst. His head felt light and faraway. Rage was this exhausting thing that would sap all the strength from him if he let it run for too long. Better to dismantle it, dissect it, and tell himself you have no reason to be upset. He wouldn’t have done that if you weren’t so worthless.

“Pardon me if this is overstepping. I believe that a part of you has convinced yourself that you were deserving of everything you were forced to bear.” Surna grimaced at his own wording. “And so hearing an apology forces you to reckon with the fact that you didn’t.” 

When did this conversation swivel to spotlight him? Shit. 

Doe grit his teeth. “Why are you even telling me this? You didn’t have to apologize. I didn’t need one from you.”

“Heathcliff continues to impress upon me that I need to. And, I’m slowly coming to understand why.” 

A hand—Surna’s—came to rest on the back of Doe’s head, then began to pet his hair. Doe felt the tension in his chest that signaled he might cry, but the prickling beneath his eyes that came with it was missing, as though a small part of him sought the release of tears, but his body wouldn’t cooperate. 

“Both from a practical standpoint as a leader, and from an emotional one, I regret that I wasn’t kinder to you sooner. If I had just tried to give you a will to live, rather than accepting your willingness to die for me, it would’ve been better for Black Dawn, myself, and you. Reconciliation requires acknowledging the full extent of what I did, no?”

“You did a lot more than that,” Doe muttered. He shut himself up until Surna gave his hand an encouraging squeeze, and he blurted, “you kept running me into the ground just for the hell of it. Mission after mission, right into the thick of danger. I could’ve sworn you liked seeing me come back injured.”

Doe wondered, in the back of his head, what response he was even looking for. Denial? Compensation? What could be offered to him at this point, that would make up for everything?

Surna said, softly, “You were always my favorite.”

Doe wanted to wring someone’s neck—his or Surna’s, he couldn’t decide.

“You were so sweet,” Surna recounted. “You always tried to hide your injuries from me for as long as you could, because you didn’t want to have to refuse my assignments. You wanted to be invincible for me. I thought it was cute.”

“Did you love me?” Doe asked. 

Surna’s expression softened with something like pity. “You could put up with anything as long as the person doing it loved you, couldn’t you?”

There were some statements so wrong, they rang in your ears like gongs. The sound was loud and cold and it made him stiffen.

“That’s not it,” he objected.

“I—”

“I could put up with you if you loved me,” Doe corrected. He batted away Surna’s hand and fixed up his own hair, just to mess it up again by running his fingers through it. “Not anyone. You.”

Surna rubbed the back of Doe’s palm with his thumb. “That’s a little unfortunate.”

“You’re telling me.”

“I mean to ask: why?”

Because you’re brilliant, and you saved me, and maybe if I defined myself in your shadow and you loved me, I’d have something like an identity. 

Doe shut his eyes in an attempt to reign himself back in and regain composure. “Because I love you. That's how this works.” 

“I still don’t really understand why you do, but I’m grateful for it.”

And if John Doe had it his way, Surna would never have to understand.

Understanding was a burden, after all. Surna’s shoulders bore enough weight as is.

Perhaps misunderstanding the silence, Surna leaned towards him slightly and offered, “It’s getting late. I’m sure you want to see Ludger. I’ll guide you back to the main road.”

“I’m not that tired.” And he still needed to investigate that damn assassin. He’d gotten much too caught up in himself, in his own feelings.

“We don’t need to resolve this today,” Surna said anyway, rising from his seat and maintaining the link in their hands. Even through the gloves, Doe could feel that Surna’s hands were cold and bloodless. 

“I want things to be better.” His voice was so quiet as to border on a whisper. “I want to resolve these things.”

Surna opened his mouth, but closed it soon afterwards. Perhaps whatever insight he had locked behind his lips was something that would’ve driven Doe over the edge. 

“You’re tired,” Surna said instead. “We can continue talking another day.”

“Okay.”

He tightened his grip on Surna’s hand, and Surna gently pulled him to his feet. 

He began to stand, realizing too late that he’d instinctively leaned on his right leg, stretching out the hamstring, extending his knee and fuck fuck he could feel the tightness resisting.

Then it burst.

Pain splintered through his leg like a bolt of lightning; a hot flash. He crumpled and braced to hit the ground hard and screw up his leg further, but Surna swept his other hand under Doe’s arm and yanked him towards him, catching him.

Fuck. It hurt. It hadn’t hurt this bad since the hospital he first when to, when he was in and out of surgery. What did he do to screw it up so bad this time? Did he hit a nerve? Pinch it? 

There always had to be something. Some part of his body had to scream at any given moment. He woke up choking on the blood in his throat once from his bleeding nose and another time from sleeping on his side, making his left leg fire out pain signals like it were on fire.  

“Where are you hurt?” Asked someone, somewhere.

“Right leg. Bent it weird. ‘t’s fine,” Doe murmured, strained. He was usually better at this, but usually things hurt less, and if they didn’t, he was always alone when it happened.

“You don’t look well.”

“Thanks, genius,” Doe hissed. “Sorry.”

“There’s no offense.” 

A hand carded through his hair. The arm that caught him wrapped around him and pulled him close. Doe tried to focus on the contact; to focus on anything other than the pain. 

“I can put you to sleep,” Surna suggested suddenly, then retracting, “if you trust me.”

“It doesn’t hurt that much,” he lied, and tried to look for his cane. It was on the floor somewhere. He’d have to bend down. That would hurt. He still had to look around, too. That would hurt.

“For an hour?” Surna asked, as if he hadn’t heard that.

His head felt foggy, like the pain was boiling it. He might’ve mumbled something in the affirmative, but even he wasn’t clear what his own voice was saying.

His throat closed up on its own, and as his legs bent beneath him another flare of pain shot through them. He clamped his sleeve over his mouth to muffle the strained breathing anyway and told himself, it’ll pass. It’ll pass. God, it has to fucking pass.

(The world has to take mercy on him at some point, right? There has to be an end. There has to be a finish line.)

Two taps against the back of his nape, and a sudden exhaustion washed over his eyes more strongly than even the pain.

(There has to be a day when everything stops.)