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so I open the window to hear sounds of people

Summary:

"You know I had to do it to them," John mumbles.

He misses the beach. The real beach. The current one is mostly soil with a lacy veneer of nuclear ash, clammy and streaky and hilariously radioactive, which is a real bummer when he thinks about it too hard. But the twenty-five meter sea level rise that came when all the freshwater ice finished melting around the mid-century mark ate away at the shoreline, rolled in between the skyscrapers on a new tide, swallowed up all the people who couldn't afford to move anywhere else. Have you seen the rent rates lately?

And then John accidentally'd the entire nuclear stockpile of the planet Earth.

Notes:

(See the end of the work for notes.)

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1. If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

2. When you stop digging, you are still in a hole.

- the laws of holes

What are we made of but hunger and rage?

- Anne Carson, Plainwater

---

AND ON THE FIRST DAY THEY RESTED.

---

"You know I had to do it to them," John mumbles.

He misses the beach. The real beach. The current one is mostly soil with a lacy veneer of nuclear ash, clammy and streaky and hilariously radioactive, which is a real bummer when he thinks about it too hard. But the twenty-five meter sea level rise that came when all the freshwater ice finished melting around the mid-century mark ate away at the shoreline, rolled in between the skyscrapers on a new tide, swallowed up all the people who couldn't afford to move anywhere else. Have you seen the rent rates lately?

And then John accidentally'd the entire nuclear stockpile of the planet Earth. So now there's a beach on every street corner. Water is pouring into the hot new crater of what is left of Melbourne. It's all free real estate.

So he doesn't think about the beach. He is not on the beach. He is somewhere else. He is everywhere else.

He has fallen entirely out of his body. He is out of his mind, in the most literal possible sense of the term. He is a vacuum, an absence, a still-open mouth. He cannot see a damn thing, but he holds the solar system in the palms of his hands. Almost twelve billion kilometers across, the disc of the Kuiper belt his threshold, his event horizon, and within the loving embrace of his arms absolutely everyone is dead.

He knows, because he can still taste them. All eleven billion of them, white hot and still sublimating, bubbling in his throat like seafoam.

It tickles.

And after them - after the First - after all of that was still not enough - he murdered the Sun, and the other planets, and he can now say that he has it, on the highest and most final authority, that Pluto still counts. They were so hungry, so desperate to reach, that they ate the whole thing.

And so now it's just him and the Earth. Just the two of them, together.

He lies face down on the beach. The ash under his cheek feels clammy. From a long way away, he blinks the stinging layer of nuclear fallout from his staring eyes - sloughs off the outermost layers of the cornea, too, gone mildly cancerous in his brief moment of navel-gazing.

Across from him, the First stares back. She has lain herself down in an exact mirror of his body language, right down to the upturned palms of the hands that rest between them, so precisely aligned that the nails of their pinkies touch in a closed circuit. Her eyes are a burnished gold, white-hot at the seams; her hair is platinum blond, a silken cascade that falls all the way to her knees. He lost focus trying to get the clothes right - all he managed, before they went on their interplanetary bender, was a diaphanous robe of white gold. Every slender limb is perfectly formed, every bone proportionate, her skin as marble pale as any Greek statue with the paint picked off, and when he blinks again - a tedious procedure - she is an uncanniness. She is the dirt beneath them, and she is his blood, his bone, the marrow of his hastily sectioned ribs reshaped into the most beautiful body he could envision in a moment of transcendent, batshit crazy.

She's unnaturally symmetrical. An AI face generator couldn't have done a better job of subtly fucking it up.

He still loves her, with all of the hollow, sucking ache in his chest.

She does not blink. She is drooling sea water.

He checks. He wipes the drool from the side of his own cheek. They've been lying there a while; long enough for the vomit and spittle to cake on; long enough for his rib cage to regrow, a flower blooming in reverse.

They sit up together, in perfect unison.

In an absent afterthought, John relights the Sun.

---

AND ON THE SECOND DAY GOD GETS HIS SHIT TOGETHER.

---

Days are subjective, actually. The corpses of the planets still turn in their orbits, and the Sun is conveniently plugged in again - you're welcome - but the clouds clot thick and low and hideous in the sky, a sickly, shifting, murky bile yellow, and he stopped noticing his circadian cycle long before the world ended.

It's a figure of speech, is what he's saying. Time is a construct, etc., etc.

He loses track again, for a while. Goes on a little wander, takes it all in. He walks and he walks, and when he comes to the edge of the water he raises up great slabs of basalt to the surface and keeps walking.

It's not great, not terrible. The world is a lukewarm grave, open to the air and lightly irradiated. The water rises along the coasts, as always, shimmering with a neon green light in a mockery of bioluminescent algae. The cities they visit are metal skeletons with the glass blown out, melted and warped into hollow cathedrals, dust sifting in and out of the air with the rise and fall of the wind.

But none of the bodies are rotting. They should be charcoal, should be atoms, should be water-logged and swollen and hypostatic in death where they bob in the churning brown water.

But John holds them, incorruptible, unchanging. Eleven billion souls, incorporated.

Effervescent.

He can no longer hear the screaming, unless One opens her mouth to speak.

(One. He thinks it's clever, for a while. One, which means beach, means soil, means earth.)

They drink up the water and the blood. Their hunger comes and goes, in and out with the shuddering tide, and it's a damn good thing the bodies aren't rotting, for they have a craving that only meat and marrow will satisfy. Chew and swallow. The most natural thing in the world.

At first, he lets One gorge herself on her first instinct, because it's marginally less nasty. She eats sand, shatters and regrows her teeth on raw rock - and he makes her stop when it all comes back up, indigestible. She howls in her grief, which is also her hunger, which is also her rage. She writhes in her skin like she consists of two hundred and six furious ferrets in a meat suit instead of bones, and then collapses like her spine has snapped in her exhaustion.

Sometimes her spine has snapped.

She gets better.

They eat people instead.

-

But eventually, he snaps out of it.

He looks down at the barbecued thigh on his paper plate - scavenged from a convenience store - and realizes - really realizes, with the part of his mind that is still lives in neurons - that he's eating human being.

Not even ethically sourced human being. This is just straight up war crimes, no matter how you squint at it.

"Well, that's fucked up," he says, out loud.

Then - "All my friends are dead."

And then he throws up.

-

This is followed, rather rapidly, by the epiphany.

He looked out over all that he had made, and realized that he could fix it. He could fix this.

The world is entirely empty. Wiped clean. At long last, there are no more excuses. No more economics, no more logistics, no more politics. No more fucking around.

The whole Sun thing maybe should have clued him in earlier.

He takes her hand in both of his, very gently. There's a bluish cast to both of them, under the current cloud cover (bruise blue, with a chance of showers). She had been so sick, for so long, after all, and then he flatlined her with 12,000 nuclear warheads and a hand to the throat.

Every breath that hitches through her is a convulsion, taken half a second too late.

He says her name with a lump in his throat. He says, "I can save you now. Everyone that hurt you is gone."

And she looks at him and says-screams, with the voice of eleven billion dead souls, "YOU HURT ME."

And he says, "I know. I'm sorry. I can make you well again. Through us all things are possible, so jot that down."

And she asks, "WHAT ABOUT THE OTHERS?"

And he says, "You first."

-

So the road trip back home is considerably nicer. He leaves the sea where it levels out; leaves the half-drowned cities, polished up until the spires gleam in the clean sunlight, for coral and fish to make reefs of their shells. He threshes the radioactivity from the atmosphere and the soil and the water, and renders it inert. Then he does the same for the buried nuclear waste that was already there. He smelts down the mountainous landfills and dissolves the plastics from the oceans with designer bacteria. He combs his fingers through the ocean currents, bleeds excess heat out of atmo until they're back to pre-industrial temperatures, on average. Over time, she will find equilibrium again. She's so good at that.

And once it’s done, it doesn’t need to change again. He can lock the climate in, self-maintaining, and no one will ever be able to poison her again. He won’t allow it.

He does it all simply by holding his hand out. After you've killed a few planets, you have the range. Omelet, eggs, so on and so forth.

He smiles as they walk along the land bridge he raised up from the seabed. "Take me home, country roads," he sings, swinging her hand between them. She allows this by leaving her hand limp, indifferent. She is immaculately cold. "To the place. I belong." A violent inhale. "Aotearoa -"

The last things to clean up are his incorruptible corpses. They need to be out of the way, really. That was always the plan - remove the population, let her heal - and the only real difference now is that he’s put them on ice in a rather more metaphysical way.

He can fix that too. He’s sure of it. Positive.

But for now, it’s - better this way. Better with all of them quiet and out of the way, so he can get things done without everyone running around screaming bloody murder all the time. So he moves them as he effortlessly as he can Ulysses and Titania. He walks each incorruptible body into the waiting, swallowing oceans, and tucks them away in capsules of bone and soft skin, everything that A- and M- and he had developed for the cryo cans grown organically into pale reefs that he layers under the surface in loving, elegant frills. The ones still out in orbit, in the interplanetary satellites and crafts and facilities that lay where he bit through them, he stacks just the same.

He'll need to think about them, eventually. About who deserves to come back; about who can be trusted to come back.

By the time they reach the scattered, shining filigree that’s all that’s left of Auckland, he's in high spirits, and has moved on to poetry. "I was a child and she was a child, in this kingdom by the sea," he says, his voice spilling over itself in his excitement, and his Annabel Lee watches his mouth shape the words with her head cocked to the side, eyes bird-bright and unblinking.

He's not really sure she can. Blink, that is. Slight oversight.

Anyway. He turns Auckland into a kingdom. When half of your soul is the Earth itself, manipulating steel and rock is as effortless as meat. It is only another body, after all. He leaves some of the wreckage as a monument, to grow over with vines and green things, and raises dazzling metal docks above the water line. Raises a castle of blinding white, gold-veined stone out of the incandescently clear sea. He makes sure the wings are spacious, the terraces sprawling, leaves plenty of empty cavities within to live in. The air is warm and mild and sweet with salt, the sunlight spilling over the ramparts, and as John gazes upon it with his arms outstretched, his mind humming with the exercise, he remembers abruptly again that all of his friends are dead.

His smile freezes in a rictus on his face.

---

AND ON THE THIRD DAY HE BLASTS MITSKI.

---

So he builds himself a depression tower in the middle of the bay that used to be Wellington.

He’s accepted it, alright? He’s a necromancer. He’s a wizard. He’s earned this. He deserves to have a nice wizard tower, with all the fancy wizard tower accoutrements like plumbing (fuck, he missed plumbing), and baby soft, hand-grown mattresses, and a vinyl record player scavenged from someone’s apartment on which to blast Mitski albums while he lies on the floor and stares at the underside of the bell cot and feels awful. Just - like absolute shit.

His Annabel Lee picks through the detritus he’s left scattered on the floor around him. He’s too depressed to do much cleaning up, at the moment. Her sopping wet hair trails along the floor, reeking of saltwater. She still prefers bathing in the ocean, which is probably fine, given that it is no longer radioactive. Whenever a cyclone spins up, part of the ongoing process of the hard climate reset, she goes out to stand on the balcony like a statue carved out of marble, baring her teeth in an open-mouthed smile at the sky as her white-gold hair streams unnaturally out to the side in 270 kilometer an hour winds.

As long as she’s having fun.

That is what matters, he tells himself, whenever his mood drops precipitously low, on the verge of the final abyss. He cannot die while she’s alive; she cannot die while he’s alive. Neither the angels in Heaven above, nor the demons down under the sea, can ever dissever his soul from her soul. They form a perfect ouroboros - eternally eating each other, eternally feeding into each other, eleven billion souls and counting - and no one will ever fuck with the Earth again. She never has to be so scared and so mad again. For he so loved the world -

It’s not enough.

He loves them too much. He has her and all of creation, but he’s lost the only people he ever needed.

He hadn’t realized, you see. He hadn’t noticed he’d forgotten their names.

It's all a blur now, really. Their faces like a watercolor painting where you've let it dry and then dunk it in sea water. Their features and colors are blotching and smudging like blood from bruised and broken veins.

Somewhere in that terrible moment, while he was doing his best to digest eleven billion souls and the Sun and all the rest, everything became too much. Too real. He collected up their souls first, before anyone else’s, because they mattered most, but when you’re exchanging your own soul with that of an entire planet, the individuals grow so dim and distant. His perspective had blown out to accommodate hers, and then both of them had extended so far past that, his need and her scream taking them to the Kuiper belt and back, expanding exponentially with every planet they murdered, and once your consciousness gets that big it’s hard to think tiny human thoughts. He lost - pieces of himself.

He still has them, of course. He kept them safe even when he was nothing but scraps of id and a ravenous hunger, because he loved them. He holds them in his gut, souls fluttering and pinned in place so that they can’t slip away into the abyss. If he weren't so careful, he would've lost track of them in the searing white fusion engine that is his eleven billion souls.

But that is not the same as holding them. That’s not the same as having them here.

There is still so much work to be done, and the world is not enough. Annabel Lee is a terrible hugger compared to N-.

"My God, I'm so lonely," he mumbles along with Mitski.

It's not until Venus, planet of love, was destroyed by global warming - that the Earth sits up and looks at the record player so sharply and directly that her spine snaps.

He flinches. Some fears are atavistic. "One, we've talked about this," he begs. "The neck thing."

"Where now Ishtar?" she asks. They've been working on volume control. She does not look at him; she stares, rapt, at the turning vinyl record. "Where now, you sulfur thing?"

He stares back, helpless, as the record player croons. Did its people want too much, too?

"It - had to go," he says, from a long way off. "Remember? We needed it."

She tosses her head, a spasm of spine reconnecting, bone re-fusing. It's not quite a human gesture, though she's picked up some bits and bobs from him. She mirrors his body language constantly; it's part of what makes her hugs so shit. It just feels like he's holding himself.

"Where did all the people go?" she asks again. She does not sound plaintive - he feels her feel it. "Why did they all go?"

"They were hurting you, Ao Rauropi," he says, gently.

(And that still burns, when he thinks about it too hard. The rats that ran. The ones that deserved it most.

Really, objectively, no matter how you look at it, this whole ‘eleven billion dead people’ thing? All their fault. Look what they made him do.)

"Love never hurt me," she says, and then she crawls over to gnaw on his fingers in a sulk.

He lets her eat his hand - they still haven’t quite kicked that habit - and contemplates his life choices as the teeth snap through his metacarpals.

"You'll be better soon," he tells her, patting the back of her head. Very gently, he extracts his arm before she can start trying to choke down the ulna. "But maybe that’s enough Mitski for one day. Let’s put on some Taylor."

---

AND ON THE FOURTH DAY THERE IS ICE CREAM.

(DID YOU KNOW COWS ARE REMARKABLY STRONG SWIMMERS?)

---

He spends the next day trying to figure out ice cream.

Exactly twenty four hours. The sun rises and sets and rises on his quest, and he is inordinately proud of that.

He is. Less proud of the cow thing.

Their hunger is still a great and terrible thing, you see. Their hunger sometimes seems to exist as a separate entity from them, a bottomless urge, a gnawing emptiness, and if he’s gonna fill that pit with ice cream instead of fingers they’re going to need a lot of ice cream.

So he pushes up from where he’s been languishing with a hand on the side of Annabel’s new kiddie pool full of salt water, and tells her, "I'm going on an ice cream run."

She erupts from beneath the water and comes with him. Her feet leave prints on the damp marble walkway between them and the shore. They've got shoes now, but she hates wearing them; hates having anything between her soles and herself.

She is at her most uncanny in direct sunlight. She is luminous, shimmering, a vision, and her eyes boil as white as the sun. Beside her, John is dressed in shorts and a rain poncho, because the only season they have right now vacillates wildly between ‘balmy’ and ‘monsoon,’ and his eyes are iridescent oil slicks ringed with white.

He almost does it, unthinking. The moment they set foot on the shore, he reaches out, absently, to find the nearest cow.

Then he stops, and thinks about that.

Really thinks about what he almost just did.

He shudders. "No. Right. Convenience store is this way," he says, and heads down what’s left of the street.

He falls to his knees and buries his face in his hands in despair before the automatic doors when they fail to open. Like a bolt of lightning from the heavens, it occurs to him at last that he unleashed nuclear hell and continent-spanning electromagnetic pulses on the planet, which means that everything has been unrefrigerated for approximately the entire length of his recent mid-life crisis.

None of the meat has gone off. But that's beside the point.

With a heavy heart, he considers his options.

-

With an even heavier heart, God invents ice cream cows.

-

Like the roses he grew for C- and N-’s wedding, some of the ice cream cows turn out - odd. Toothy. It puzzled him at the wedding; he’d tried so hard to get it right, for them, but teeth kept fractalling out like petals even though he didn’t will them to, and the teeth are always human. A strange, stubborn sticking point.

Same with the cows. All he wants is to not think too hard about this latest entry in his ongoing list of cow-related atrocities - he doesn’t even need them to look like cows! - but teeth unspool along the seams of the organs, and fat lumps of tongue form like tumors he can’t melt away fast enough, and finally he walls the whole horrific amalgamation behind a stone wall so that all you can see when you look at it is a perfectly normal soft serve dispenser. Just goes full Montresor on it.

Once he’s done, he takes his ice cream out onto the balcony, where Annabel Lee sits watching the stars turn in the night sky. He names the constellations for her, and Te Mangoroa, and when he reaches Cetus and Tau Ceti, he almost doesn’t choke on his rage.

Almost.

And while the seas around his wizard tower of depression boil with the force of his fury renewed, Annabel Lee leans her chin on the balcony railing and stares softly up at the sweetly familiar stars.

---

AND ON THE FIFTH DAY GOD RENOVATES HIS SUMMER VACATION WIZARD TOWER.

---

Spite gives him the last kick in the pants he needs. The most reliable motivator in the universe. His will is annealed in the forge of his fuck-off pissed tantrum, and after he cools off, he begins the work.

He already has the theory. It’s going to hurt - it’s going to suck - but it will be fine. His energy is theoretically limitless. They don’t need to rest anymore. All he needs to do is renovate his wizard tower, and once that is done he can begin the Resurrection.

The trick is to do it in a way that doesn’t ruin everything.

He’s thought through the logistics. A few thousand should work for a starter population, to get infrastructure up and running on a small scale again. To finish what they started. They’re going to need those interplanetary facilities settled fully; let humanity be a string of pearls scattered across the solar system, while Earth heals in Edenic peace. He can sort everything out.

And if the Tau Ceti group ever dares to come back to darken his doorstep, he will look down and say perish, and it will be so.

When he is done, the Tower cuts the sky in two. He drills it down through the bed of the sea. A pillar, a needle, a sword.

The Earth howls like a Fury, chthonic, reverberating in his skull. It bursts a few times, until he gets sick of sticking his meat brain back together and adjusts the composition of the bone to keep it pressurized. To keep himself together. The world goes woozy at the edges, like he’s submerged, everything gone dreamlike and blood-stained and corpse-numb as he works his way down, reshaping the world as he goes.

He sets it aside. He has it under control.

They are both screaming, but they cannot die.

"Hush, Alecto," he says, absently, and activates the Tower.

-

He commits the act. He pays the price.

He brings them back. All the dreaming dead.

Well. Some of them. The ones he can forgive. The rest - the ones he casts aside - sink to the bottom. He smooths them over, like a hole in the surface of wet sand, to wait until maybe he feels a little better about them.

-

(Beneath them - so far beneath - the first mouth rips open.

Far away, at the opposite ends of the universe, the revenants yearn back towards home.

At the base of the Tower, the walls stand, unchanging, permanent, absolute. A monument to his Resurrection. It will take ten thousand years for the hole to form, and for the devils to begin to slip out. Erosion plays a long game.)

---

AND ON THE SIXTH DAY GOD BE POPPING THE BIGGEST BOTTLES -

---

He’s so excited that he’s shaking with it.

He wakes them up without thinking.

Starts with G-, first, because G- really got the short end of the stick there. G- is unflappable. The man cannot be flapped. G- was always the rock that John leaned on, and he did not crack, even when John himself did. Now that John understands it all, with perfect clarity - now that he has really nailed it home - it is child’s play to wake him up. John greets him hand in clasped hand, knuckles too tight, hands folded together like a prayer, please, I need you.

And without hesitation G- pulls him down into a hug, and everything is right in the world. John almost thinks, for a blissful moment, that he can let go.

"Welcome back," he tells G-, damply. "You’re home."

"John," G- says, after he sits up and looks John up and down. "The hell are you wearing?"

John looks down at his black bathrobe.

"Awkward," he decides, and goes to change into something a little less ‘my depressed hot girl wizard era’ and more ‘welcome to the new age, here is our lovely new palace, I built it just for you, please do not ask where the cream for the tea is coming from or why I have entire herds of unnaturally specialized, semi-aquatic cows outside.’

After that, it’s impossible to decide who next. Impossible. But he is still being careful, because they are his and he loves them, and while eventually he will wake up whole age groups of people en masse, carefully selected from the necryo beds, always leaving a select assortment behind for insurance - for now he cradles his friends carefully, one at a time, as he pours them back into their bodies.

So it’s a random whim that has him wake up M-, after G- is settled safely with a plate of biscuits and tea in one of the wings of Canaan House. Yes, M- and then A- next, because even if he can’t remember their names he remembers that they held his hands with their hands, and M- understood. M- wanted to go together - they loved him, and he loves them.

And he wakes M- up.

(He is crying for this part.)

He chose a beautiful summer day for them to wake up. Whipped up some gorgeous clouds, transplanted some entirely, stunningly normal trees to fill out the gardens on the terrace. Plants work better when he and Ulysses and Titania cart them in. Originally, he tried to grow crocus and iris and smothering violet with his power, but it came out all toothy. Instead, he raided a few overgrown garden centers and let nature do its thing without his intercession. The birds have started to circle in all on their own, cries high and strident. Fantastic ambience.

He brought all of them from the facility in Greytown to their kingdom by the sea, so they won’t have to see all those bodies he left to rot on purpose. He sunk that facility into a customized sinkhole and filled the pit with water, dark and deep, where none of them will ever have to look at it again.

"I forgive you," M- tells him, after he explains.

And - "I know you didn’t want this."

And finally, she says, "Thank you for telling me the truth," and kisses his forehead, her nose wrinkled in embarrassment.

And then she waits for him to leave the room before she takes up the steak knife - they have a lot of beef to work through, okay - and kills herself.

Which seems a little silly of her.

But it sure teaches him a lesson.

He catches her, of course. But this time, he's not a man on the threshold of Godhood; his mind is not lost and adrift on the swelling tide of apotheosis. He has already stepped over the threshold. His mind is too clear.

So he feels her death punch through his sternum from behind. The shock empties his lungs. Even as he catches her soul in his hands he sinks to his knees with a horrible, awful little sound. He struggles for breath, and the next inhale is a sob, the exhale a wracking, throat tearing, animal scream.

He crawls back into the room and cries over his dead friend, the way he couldn't the first time around.

Alecto joins them, after a few minutes. She has been watching from the doorway the whole time, statue-still. He's not sure if either G- or M- even realized she was alive. She creeps in low to the ground, and drapes herself against him. Leans her head on his shoulder. She stares down at the body in his lap with its rosy, bloody tangles of hair. She watches as he kisses the side of M-'s temple and rocks her. As though there is anything at all he can do to fix this.

"What hurt you?" his Fury asks, sudden, belated. As though the fact of his pain only just registered. "Did that hurt you?"

"Oh. Don't worry about it," he says, choked up. His voice is a ruin. "Come on, let's - let's put her to bed."

Before he can, for the first time, Alecto reaches out.

She places one hand on his shoulder, and one on his cheek, and kisses his forehead.

She wrinkles her nose, just so.

"I still love you," she promises, in M-'s voice.

When he goes very, very still, slack, all of his strings cut in one clean sweep - Alecto pats his head the same way he always pats hers.

-

And then Alecto stood, for she saw that it was good.

---

AND ON THE SIXTH DAY GOD BE POPPING THE BIGGEST BOTTLES - AND ON THE SIXTH DAY IT ALL GOES TITS UP.

---

People don’t forgive. Not really.

They say they do. But they don’t.

He is so lonely.

-

When he's cried himself out - when there is nothing left of him that feels much of anything at all - he goes to G-.

He says, "I am so sorry."

And G- asks, "Have you been crying? What the hell happened?"

John staggers to him. His limbs jolt with every step, as foreign to him as ever Alecto's have been to her. On his final stumble G- catches him, and for an awful, frankly embarrassing moment, John wants to weep again. He wants to crumple; he wants to beg absolution on bloody knees; he wants to eat G- alive, to show that he is loved.

There is a hollow place inside him he only knows how to fill one way.

But he doesn't. Obviously. That would be so rude. Instead he says, voice ragged, "Just - having a real Fleetwood Mac moment. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I will be better soon."

"Wait," G- says. His eyes narrow. "Which Fleetwood Mac song?"

Before they can get into any of that, John cups the back of G-'s head and kisses him. G- kisses him back - always game for a casual makeout session between friends, G-, though to be honest that list really only covered two people - and then John slices through the hippocampus.

John holds them both up when G-'s legs give out, bears their weight down to the ground until he can cradle G- in his lap, and finishes the work.

It's the easiest thing to do in the world.

-

It's not until after he's wiped the slate clean that he realizes he's forgotten to ask about their names.

-

This is fine.

-

There can't be forgiveness. So they have to forget.

He always intended to wipe the general population - more merciful, he thought. They don’t need to remember the existential terror, or the ecological collapse, or the intimate sensation of him killing them all, or the entire concept of hyper-capitalism.

No, a clean slate was always for the best. They wouldn't understand; so they don't have to. Nobody has to know.

But he'd thought his friends, at least, would understand. He thought he could still have this. A little optimistic, in hindsight. Now he knows that they won't forgive themselves; they won't forgive him. He doesn't know what to do to be truly forgiven, and he can't afford to ask. He's not sure if his heart could bear starting over again from scratch, like this.

If M- had only told him what to do, he would have done anything to make it right for her, because he loves them.

He will love them until all the stars go dark.

---

SO ON THE SEVENTH DAY WE GET IT RIGHT.

---

He wakes her up again in the morning.

It's a softer day. The air cooler, crisper, well into autumn. They've got curtains on the windows now, but he's left them open to let in the sea air and the gentle slant of the sun.

When she opens her eyes, she looks so puzzled. Augustine had that same look when he woke up, last week.

He rests his fingers on her fingers for a moment. Just the faintest, reassuring pressure. At the touch her eyes dart to him, and then to the figure who stands guard at his right shoulder. Both of them in pale robes, both of them haloed by the sun.

There is no recognition in her eyes. Only dawning awe.

He smiles, in love and in apology.

"Good morning, Mercy," says God. "Welcome to the First."

Notes:

I'm not sourcing all the memes, goddammit. Several quotes are pulled directly from Gideon/Harrow/Nona at will.

Take Me Home, Country Roads
Nobody - Mitski
That Fleetwood Mac song
Absence - Pablo Neruda
All My Friends Are Dead
A questionable video on the pronunciation of ao rauropi

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