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If there was one thing John prided himself on, it was his ability to gather, analyze, and delineate information.
Perhaps that pride was only magnified by the fact that eyes were one of the few aspects of the body he had ever truly controlled. Even so, after an objectively tumultuous start, he had strove to construct a picture of their surroundings for Arthur’s benefit, to describe and capture as many things as was in his power to the most accurate degree.
Surely, there was some part of him, small or large, that reveled in the artistry of simple shapes and colors—the way the sky gilded toward evening, the way people spoke and moved, the way creatures dripped with blood and saliva and malice.
He was accustomed to seeing the world through a particular set of eyes, no matter how much more limited they had been when compared to the King's. Yet, despite such inferior, mortal restraints, he still took to his role as narrator—as guide—without much delay.
And he was fucking good at it. Yes, there had been some blunders and he missed things at times, but, in the grand scheme, he was a fucking invaluable asset.
He was Arthur's eyes.
And Arthur trusted him.
Only…
The former wasn't true now.
Now, he had his own eyes. His own pupils, and irises, and sclera, and pumping blood vessels; his own lids making a valiant attempt to drag themselves shut against the weight of exhaustion; his own two eyes watching Arthur from without instead of within.
The shitty motel room was bathed in shadows, the sole light trickling from the partially ajar bathroom door, dabbing a stripe of maize over the sheets and stained wallpaper.
But the glaring light in the otherwise dark room was not what had drawn John's fading attention.
No.
Arthur had done that.
Arthur, who had scrubbed his face in what was likely cold water from a too-old tap, who ran his fingers through his mussed hair, who slowly discarded layer after layer of clothing, bundling coat, tie, and shirt neatly on the counter.
Arthur, thin as a rail, weariness clinging to every jutting bone, battered and bruised and separate and…
Freckled.
The thought arrived sluggishly through a bleary mind and, with it, came an odd sort of bewilderment.
He had seen Arthur’s face multiple times in mirrors, and windows, and, when he had faced Yellow in the Order of the Fallen Star, from above. He had long since committed the face of his vessel and, soon enough, friend to memory. He recalled the dots of different sizes and shades peppered on his face, the curve of his nose, the spot between his brows. Their existence was not surprising.
However, over a year of looking through those selfsame eyes, he had never noticed the sheer number of dots scattered across every conceivable portion of skin, now so much more visible with Arthur in only undershirt and shorts, as though someone had taken a brush and flicked brown paint haphazardly on his face and limbs.
John tracked the movement of his shoulder blades, of the speckles superimposed over jagged scar tissue. Weak muscles shifted as Arthur toweled his face and there was something so overwhelmingly, irresistibly human about the scene. Something so baffling in the fact Arthur allowed himself to be so unguarded. So vulnerable.
In front of him.
John watched him flip off the bathroom light and hesitate at the threshold of the door, the room dark and quiet.
“John?” he asked, softly. Venturing. The slightest bit fearful that, maybe, this had all been a dream and they hadn't completed the ritual after all. John could hardly believe it, himself.
“Arthur,” he met, equally soft. Beckoning. Reassuring.
He watched his friend’s shoulders relax slightly at his name, at the confirmation that, no, John hadn't vanished into the ether in the last five minutes and was still safely tucked in bed.
Arthur followed his voice to the bed proper, John trying and failing to not stare so openly at him. It wasn’t as though Arthur could see him.
He shimmied beneath the covers with a heavy sigh of relief. “Goodnight, John.”
“Goodnight, Arthur.”
Arthur shifted a few times, finally rolling over so his back faced John, and settled.
Silence soon followed, but the tug of sleep that had seemed so tantalizing before was all but forgotten.
He couldn’t stop staring at Arthur’s skin, skin that used to be his own now so unfamiliar. A body he had once resided within now so far away, even though they were no more than a few inches apart.
This close, John could see the freckles that much clearer, a cluster of dark dots on his shoulder, more sporadically strewn across the back of his upper arm and elbow. There were even a few visible—three, to be exact—at the nape of his neck, partially concealed by locks of wavy hair in desperate need of a cut.
There were so many, innumerable as grains of sand, as stars in the night sky. So many more than there were scars on his skin and part of John found himself immensely grateful for that—how such beauty still saw fit to grace Arthur’s body despite all the wounds and pain that had been inflicted upon it, like flowers budding through cracks in concrete.
Time passed and, eventually, curiously, he raised a hand to lightly trace the space between a dot on Arthur’s neck and one mostly obscured by the neckline of his undershirt. Then the space between that dot and one on his shoulder. He continued a lazy trail over bumps and long-healed injuries, across pores and fine hairs, the pad of his finger featherlight, until the surface beneath it tensed.
“John.” His name, neutrally said, was not so much a warning, but rather acknowledgment.
He merely hummed in reply, continuing the outline of invisible shapes: the five points of a star. The branches of a tree. The peaks of a mountain range.
Arthur released a quick puff of air that may very well have been a laugh and turned onto his back, effectively eradicating John’s canvas. “What are you doing?”
John blinked at him in the dimness of the room. “I thought you were asleep.”
“And I see you are anything but.”
“I’m not tired,” John lied through a yawn.
“Really? You could have fooled me. And you still didn’t answer my question.” Arthur rubbed his arm roughly with a hand. “Whatever you were doing, it fucking tickled.”
“Oh.” John didn’t really know what to say to that. The last thing he wanted was to be a nuisance the moment Arthur actually got some fucking rest. “I was just looking at you.”
Arthur spluttered, somehow inhaling wrong and choking on air. The tips of his ears turned pink. “R-right. That’s… Perhaps let’s reevaluate the ‘touching people while they’re asleep’ pastime, if that’s alright with you—”
“Your freckles.” The words seemed to tumble from John’s lips before he could stop them. “I didn’t know you had so many.”
Arthur’s ears were definitely pink. “You haven’t gone to sleep…because you were staring at my freckles?” Another small laugh, disbelieving. “John. You’re acting like you’ve never seen me before. Were you not the one to say I had the ‘cold, calculated demeanor of someone not to fuck with’? Or am I confusing you with somebody else?”
The teasing lilt in his voice made John’s stomach twist into something like a knot, but more pleasant.
“I’ve seen your face, yes, and your arms and legs, but… I don’t know. I’ve never been able to see you in your entirety, I suppose.”
He had been too disoriented the day they first separated, but, now that a few had passed, he was beginning to understand the appeal of his own body, even if it still felt Off—the double-edged sword that was being detached from Arthur, while also being able to view him as any other outsider would.
No. Not any other outsider.
He doubted anyone appreciated this man in all his faults and strengths as much as he did. As much as he would continue to.
Slowly, John pressed another featherlight touch to the skin just above his collarbone and the particularly dark spot there. He felt Arthur’s breath flounce about like his lungs couldn’t decide whether to inhale or exhale.
“You have three freckles on the back of your neck. Did you know that?”
Arthur swallowed, throat contracting and moving the flecks adjacent to the white slash of his scar. “I… I suppose I didn’t. But it’s just skin, John. Nothing more than darker pigmentation exacerbated by the sun—”
“You have two behind your right ear,” John cut in, scooting closer, hand traveling upward. “And one underneath your chin.”
He touched the spot gently.
Again, Arthur’s breath played funny little notes of surprise.
“There are some on your right shoulder blade, and another cluster on your elbow, freckles more concentrated at the point of it before spreading outward like petals unfolding at the onset of dawn. The longer one stares at them, the more intricate they appear, as though a god has stored all his most precious constellations in a single place before transferring them to the sky.”
Arthur found his hand and drew it away from his face, though he didn’t let go. “John…”
And John had experienced earth for months on end, same body or otherwise. He had fallen for so much of what it had to offer: sunrises and sunsets; snow and rainfall; music and flowers and birds and art and tea and yet—all of those things paled in comparison to Arthur. The act of being close to him, so simple in all its complexity.
He had seen the expressions on people’s faces as they’d passed them in the streets. The world took one look at Arthur Lester and deemed him incapable. Damaged. Sickly. Only John saw him for what he truly was.
Intelligent.
Unconquerable.
“Beautiful,” he said softly, and the grip on his hand tightened. “I think your freckles are beautiful, Arthur.”
And maybe that was the true reason why he hadn’t been able to fall asleep; he’d needed to utter those words.
He watched Arthur swallow again, all too obviously fighting some internal monsoon of counterpoints. “I… I don’t quite know how to respond to that, if I’m honest.”
“Then don’t. You don’t have to always get the last word in.”
That seemed to be enough to make him laugh some of the tension out of his shoulders. “Says the literal four-day-old.”
John blustered. “I am not! You and I both know we shared a body for over a year.”
“Fine. A one-year-old, then.”
A growl was working its way up his throat and he allowed his tone to dip low. “I am older than this entire planet and its solar system.”
Arthur shrugged. “All I’m saying is you're far more petty.”
“I take it back. Your freckles are fucking atrocious.”
Arthur snorted. “That so?”
“Yes,” John said primly. “It is so.”
Hearing Arthur's laughter did something to John's insides, that pleasant knot twisting further in on itself. Fluttering.
Tragically, the sound petered out and silence filled the space it had left like a vacuum. Arthur scrubbed at his eyes with his knuckles. As if only just remembering his hands existed, he turned them over.
“And y— My hands,” he said softly. “You didn’t mention anything there.”
“I’m sure you don’t need me to explain to you what your own hands look like, Arthur.”
The pause that followed was a bit too long for comfort. “Humor me?” he asked, and, even though John never seemed to fucking pinpoint emotions in other people, Arthur had never been more akin to an open book, the words between the pages all too clear to John’s ears.
Maybe I’ve forgotten.
Carefully, John took hold of both of Arthur’s hands in his, there, hovering in the space between their chests as they lay face-to-face on their sides. He ran a thumb over blue, blue veins, so bright beneath pale skin.
“There are some,” he murmured. “A freckle below the second knuckle of your right middle finger, one beneath your right pinky, and two toward the center of your hand. I only see one on m— your left. I don’t think I’ve ever noticed it before now.”
“Not as many, then.”
“Not like the rest of you,” John agreed. He ran gentle fingers through the fringe drooping low in Arthur’s unseeing eyes. “You have a few more along your hairline, difficult to make out with the color; they seem to blend in almost entirely.”
“And even more so with this mop, I bet.” He sighed, voicing the thoughts John had had earlier that night. “I swear, one of these days we’ll track down a barber.”
John hummed, leaving his hand to idly wander through Arthur’s hair, unearthing hidden dots along the way—at his temples, under his eyes, just below his jaw. Not for the first time that week, he marveled at just how different these two bodies were from the other, how smooth and unmarked his own skin was by both the remnants of suffering and these little bits of humanity that suited Arthur more than anyone he had ever laid eyes upon.
For so long, that’s what Arthur had been to him: his humanity.
John allowed his hand to settle on his friend’s cheek, simply resting there, Arthur’s sleep-warm skin in turn warming his palm.
Arthur’s eyes fell shut for a moment, his face slack and relaxed, and John couldn’t find it in himself to stop marveling. To accept that Arthur trusted him this much, after everything. Could feel this much peace under his hand.
“…Did you mean what you said?” Arthur’s lips against his palm, his words pressed close and quiet.
All thoughts seemed to fizzle out and crumble into their disparate parts. “Mean what?”
Arthur let out another short laugh, though John could identify the anxiety weighing it down. “Never mind.”
“Arthur.”
“No, John. It’s— It’s nothing. Really. I suppose I’ve just never…”
Silence stretched out like gossamer thread.
“Never?”
Arthur’s eyes, a marble of brown and gold, watched him in the shadows for a moment before flicking away again like he was ashamed. “What you…called me.”
John cast his mind back on the past few minutes, drowsy snippets of dialogue and warmth and the feeling of Arthur’s hair through his fingers flitting through his mind. What had he—
Arthur’s face was twisted in a preemptive wince when John finally remembered.
“You mean…beautiful?”
His friend’s expression overcorrected a few times, his lips pressed into a thin line of consternation. “Sorry. I wasn’t trying to put words in your mouth—”
“Yes.”
“—or-or make you feel like you had to justify the reason why you’re awake by resorting to flattery—”
“Arthur.”
“What?”
“I meant it.” He reached up to tuck a wayward curl behind Arthur’s ear, revealing more freckles speckled along his cheekbone. He met Arthur’s eyes, despite the fact he could see nothing that John did, least of all himself. “You are beautiful, Arthur.”
“You don’t have to—”
“Just because you don’t see yourself that way doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”
That drew a snort from him. “This isn’t about perception, John. I’m a lot of things, but I’m not that. I mean, look at me—”
“I have been. That’s how I know you are.”
John had moved closer, still holding Arthur’s scarred, freckled face in his hands, hovering over a body thin enough that it would be a miracle if it did weigh eighty pounds sopping wet. Without sleeves, the jut of Arthur’s shoulders were all the more pronounced, the bags beneath his eyes still too dark to be healthy.
Yet here he was. Alive. Heart beating against his chest, breath coming soft and warm from his expanding lungs, everything etched into his flesh attesting to a life of battles well-fought and survived.
But it wasn’t the blue, moonlit tinge to Arthur’s hair or the gold still clinging in fractures within his dark irises. John had rarely had the opportunity to see Arthur’s appearance.
What he was familiar with most of all was inside.
And Arthur Lester was and would always be beautiful in his eyes.
His drive.
His endurance.
His resolve.
His music.
His compassion.
His love.
John smiled down at him, not quite hiding the slyness coloring his tone. “You would think a poet would know beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
“You would think a god who surrounded himself with artists would have better taste in beauty in the first place.”
Arthur said it in a similar, teasing fashion, but with a touch of something more, almost like he believed there was someone better. And how fucking ludicrous was that? Was he not someone who strove to see the good in other people? To cling to hope? Why was it so far-fetched to believe that a fragment of a god might consider him something worth worshipping?
Searching very briefly and finding no other possible recourse, John flicked Arthur in the forehead, earning him a sharp yelp. “Shut up for once in your fucking life and take the goddamn compliment.”
“I thought you said I was ‘fucking atrocious’?”
It was the shit-eating grin that did him in.
With a huff of frustration, John snatched a fistful of Arthur’s hair and tugged, spurring a rather spontaneous tussle in the bedsheets—an elbow here, a knocked knee there—until they were both out of breath and John was on his back, staring up at the ceiling, Arthur sprawled across his chest.
Slowly, at first, and then all at once, the two of them devolved into laughter. It echoed about the room, bouncing into the darkness and, ultimately, vanishing. Arthur leaned his head against his neck, John automatically bringing his arms around him.
Slumber called ever so sweetly, his eyelids feeling more like lead than flesh and blood. Just as he was drifting away on the tide, he felt Arthur’s lips softly graze over his cheek.
“Thank you, John.”
And they both sunk into the depths of sleep, John encircling something beautiful.