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It starts with the coma. The loneliness, the endless hours where he - not John yet, not back then – sees only the darkness behind Arthur’s eyelids, hears but the chatter of the nurses, feels nothing.
He finds himself thinking then, after a while, after a few weeks of useless powerless anger, after hours spend screaming at Arthur inside his head. After his screams turns into begging, into pleading instead, for Arthur to wake up, to move, to open his damned eyes. To talk to him.
It’s when he starts remembering. Small moments, times when they weren’t arguing. Normal conversations, as normal as things can get between them.
Arthur recounting a past memory, making a wry observation, figuring out something and presenting it to John in a way that would feel too self-satisfied if he didn’t have to begrudgingly admit that sometimes this human in fact was right about things.
Arthur talking. Talking to him. In the silence of their room and the silence of Arthur’s head, he keeps remembering and isn’t quite sure why.
Later on – when he is John, when he wants to be John – there is no reason to keep remembering Arthur talking to him. Rather, John thinks darkly, he’d very much prefer it if Arthur would shut up instead. Sometimes that is, he then emends.
Other times, Arthur opens his mouth and starts singing. It’s a silly song, John thinks, and he can tell that Arthur is not taking it very serious either, not by the way he keeps emphasizing the madness line.
But his voice is melodic, the sound of the paddle hitting the water forming a backdrop to the harmony of the song and John finds himself reluctantly captured by it.
“Now you call it madness. But I call it love.”
He must have heard people sing before, John thinks. People who likely were even better singers than Arthur. He might not remember his past but there must have been music in it, right?
So he doesn’t know what it is about this song that makes him feel almost sad once it is over and Arthur falls silent.
There is no music afterwards anymore. There is his regret, his anger about his past, about the person he was, the person he almost became again. There is Arthur’s anger too and it can rival his own, a deep ocean of fury to his own burning rage.
They keep going though. What else is there, John thinks. It’s a stupid question, he knows that now, knows it more acutely than he had before. There is so much more, beyond Arthur’s world, beyond the Dreamlands, and it’s all terrifying madness-inducing horror, the likes he wishes he will never fully remember.
And pain. There is so much pain too. Vast and endless and incomprehensible. And small and contained and understandable. Like a finger as a sacrifice.
“This too shall pass,” Arthur says and he can’t focus on it because of the pain. But once it’s over, once the finger – Arthur’s finger, John’s pain, their sacrifice – is gone, he mulls it over.
A comforting thought, Arthur calls it. And is that what it was supposed to be, John thinks. Comfort? The woods around them are anything but welcoming, the lands surrounding them even less so. This place they had been stranded in is dangerous and merciless and devoid of anything as mundane or simple as comfort. But still, John keeps thinking of it.
This too shall pass and Arthur’s voice, a small comfort in this world of none. It eases the pain of the lost finger a bit for some reason.
And maybe, he later thinks, maybe it’s not just Arthur’s voice but also the words coming from it. Even though they are not his own words right now as John still finds himself listening.
“The radiant skies of evening,” Arthur says and it’s just words and yet he still sees the bright red of a setting sun. “With its rainbow o'er us all.” Spreading out over the sky, in all its glorious colors.
Just words, he thinks.
That’s very … sweet, he says and wants to bite his non-existent tongue as he does so.
“It’s about a man’s courting of his wife,” Arthur answers and it stays with him, as they wander through the mountain, through the darkness, through the fear.
Courting, he ponders. Did the man who wrote this poem use words like this? To flatter her, to make her fall for him.
Manipulation, he thinks – wants to think – and nothing more. Imagining and forcing beauty into this world, fragile and fleeting and most importantly a lie.
But, he then thinks, was she moved by the poem. By his words? Did she listen to every word he had created, was reciting for her, took it in and wanted to commit it to her memory forever.
Did she feel weirdly warm, like something had been set on fire and was now burning deep inside of her?
Do you know any more poems? he asks and doesn’t know why.
And then – afterwards, later, down in the abyss, running from death again – it’s nothing and everything at once. It’s pain and horror and fear and comfort and beauty and hope and whatever it is John feels when Arthur talks and somehow brings all of these things into the world.
Theseus in the maze. Trapped with the minotaur.
“He found it in the furthest corner of the labyrinth … and killed it,” Arthur says and there is no beauty in death but there is hope in survival. They pick up the stone and later, John thinks, when they get out of this hole, when they survive, he will ask Arthur to tell him another story. Sing him a different song, read him more poems.
Ask Arthur to talk and just listen to him.
It’s much later before John remembers this. Arthur sits across him and even now – several weeks later – he finds himself staring at him. He had only seen him in snippets before, in mirrors and puddles of water, seeing him like this, fully and all the time, still feels overwhelming sometimes.
As overwhelming as this body, strange and new and his. All his. He finds himself touching his hands, his face, late at night, marveling at the ability to both do so and to feel it.It does come with drawbacks too though.
“We can rest a bit longer,” Arthur says, sounding indulgent and it frustrates John. This patience for this body that stumbles and falters and seems to run out of energy way too quick.“We need to get going”, he bites out, relishing how his voice is still able to sound like a growl, even in this body. “The King…”
“Hasn’t caught us so far,” Arthur interrupts him calmly. And then he suddenly shifts forward and puts a hand on John’s shoulder.
“Rest, we will leave later. Wouldn’t want you to fall apart on me now that you finally got your own body,” he says with a smile as he squeezes John’s shoulder and John … John is already falling apart.
All those past moments are suddenly running through his head. The poems, the song, every small moment of kindness. How much it had meant to him, how he had been unable to understand why exactly.
With Arthur’s touch on his shoulder lingering too long and Arthur still looking at him – so patient, so indulgent, so soft- he suddenly understands. Understand what he feels when Arthur talks and he wants to listen forever.
He thinks of beauty and pain and of Arthur and himself and later, even later, he will ask Arthur to tell him more poems, as they lie together, tangled on an unmade bed, and he feels another hand touch him.