Work Text:
Never once in all of their months tied together had John been able to imagine the true joy of owning a body.
He had tried, certainly. Flexing his fingers and toes, taking careful note of each minute stretch and give of tendons and muscles and fat, then attempting to envision how that feeling would expand and fan out through more flesh, more limbs and nerves. An idle reach for grandiosity from within the short chains of a beggar, knowingly pointless yet yearning all the same. When imagination was all one had, it felt as good as gold.
Imagination, though, had nothing on reality. For in reality, John could stretch far wider and feel as each joint along his spine and limbs popped to life. In reality, John could curl above a mattress and beneath blankets and around his friend’s form, all to feel warmth bloom through an entire heavy body as drowsy contentment draped itself over him. He could spend mornings basking in sunlight as it crawled through the bedroom, afternoons walking with the caress of wind through his curls and across the back of his neck, evenings hooking strong arms around Arthur’s torso and a chin on top of his shoulders.
Reality brought nerve endings and sensations and emotions that John could have never imagined before, not even when he had controlled dreams and wishes and woven them into tapestries that defied the farthest bounds of the mind itself. Reality was tangible, a thing both more and less than the ephemerality of all his fantasized musings from before, shockingly simple yet wonderfully intricate in the way that humans alone seemed capable of balancing with their small, wide lives.
The balance was strange. John feared he would never perfect it, that he would always dip too far in one direction only to overcorrect to the opposite, then repeat the process over and over with his stumbling feet.
Every moment of the day was a walk on the wire, high above the limitations of his past self and euphoric on adrenaline, blood pounding with exhilaration and terror at once. And on the other side, standing on the far platform with a sharp yet kind smile and an outstretched hand, was the human who kept him steady, the person who had taught him how to climb the ladder to this height in the first place.
Every moment of the day, John knew he could always lock his eyes on Arthur, ignore whatever war of imbalance took place inside himself, and walk to a new life at his friend’s side without fear of falling.
Knowing where he needed to go made each day easier, for if he made it there, he could be as good as the man awaiting him. And that was all he needed. He didn’t need kingdoms and blind obedience, or magic and false power— all he needed was evenings after a long day of heartfelt work tracking down various clients and suspects, eventually standing in a cramped apartment kitchen with weary muscles helping the man who lived with him, going through simple mundane motions with idle conversation while the sun streamed over their backs from the window.
Evenings like this, feeling the residual warmth of a thin body right next to his in front of the cabinets with food scattered across the countertops.
“Generic as nature poetry might be, I do think I’ve gained a newfound appreciation for Frost’s work recently,” Arthur said as he laid out a cutting board and went to unwrap the paper from the chicken they had picked up at the butcher shop.
“Oh?” John prompted absentmindedly, focused on placing the knife just right to ensure even cuts of the potato under his hand. Arthur insisted it didn’t matter, not when the pieces would be eaten and digested all the same, but John enjoyed the knowledge that he had done the job right, exhibited as much fine motor control and careful attention as he possibly could. “Why is that?”
“Well, I mean I’ve always quite liked his verses before, you know.”
John hummed, still partly focused on his own task. A bright silver flash suddenly caught the corner of his eye as Arthur picked up a knife from the counter.
“Now, though, there’s a new level of… comfort, I suppose, that I keep finding in them. Hearing him describe all the world that I can’t see anymore— it’s quite reassuring.” Carefully, as he spoke, Arthur felt out the end of the bones nestled between a leg of the chicken and the rest of the body, his finger running over the smooth, wet joint.
For some reason, the careless precision of the motion snagged on something in the back of John’s mind. He felt himself slow to a stop, setting the knife in his own hand down before his mind had even thought through the motion. His eyes locked onto the way Arthur felt out the perfect place for severance.
“I appreciate getting to read the pictures that I can no longer see for myself. It’s almost like hearing you at my side again, at times. A voice to craft the entire world, just for me.”
Words would not form for John to respond. He watched Arthur, frozen blood clamping jaws and limbs into stillness, a rigor mortis of the living mirroring the bird splayed on the cutting board.
The chicken’s flesh gave easily under Arthur’s hands. His thin but sure hands, hands that knew how to tear and slice the exact right way. Hands that knew how to manipulate much smaller joints for the slaughter. Soon the leg’s joint was positioned into prone vulnerability. Deftly, a grin of sleek, gleaming metal poised above tender flesh.
Arthur brought the knife down.
John flinched.
Then he blinked. Why would he flinch? He couldn’t understand why this should unnerve him, but he also couldn’t stop the wave of nausea that now roiled in him. The air in his lungs stung, as though he had inhaled a slurry of ice in lieu of oxygen.
A gravity seemed to lock his eyes in an unbreakable entanglement with the knife’s slide, the twist of fingers through pliant meat, the sticky dig of nails into exposed bone and ligament.
And, above all, the contrast of stiff, black wood against soft, pale skin.
John must have gone silent for too long, staring paralyzed at the sure, precise slice of meat and bone on the cutting board, because Arthur tilted his head and furrowed his brows in faint concern after some time without hearing his companion. “John?”
John quietly shook himself, swallowing the odd lump in his throat. “Right here, Arthur,” he reassured, voice low, somehow masking its internal shake. “I… I’m glad that they bring you some comfort. Although, I do hope that they haven’t overtaken my eloquent descriptions as your favorite prose,” he added, trying to cover hesitation with their regular banter.
It seemed to work, since Arthur smirked and returned to his task. “Not yet, they haven’t,” he said, feeling out the next joint to drag the knife to. “I don’t know, though, Frost has some very apt diction choices— you might need to start studying to keep ahead.”
“I’ll take that into consideration,” John murmured, ripping his eyes away from the sight of the chicken. It didn’t stop the sound of each joint popping out of place, though.
They continued cooking, and the chicken- the… carcass, the body was slowly broken down. Arthur deftly moved maneuvered the meat with his hands, pulling the blade through its joints with a practiced, mindless precision.
John returned to the potatoes, hurrying through the task of chopping, eager to set aside the knife and work on the seasoning. He tried not to gag on the wet, violent sounds of muscle tearing and cartilage splitting that squirmed from his ears to his throat.
He finished the seasoning on the potatoes, then pulled the marinade from the refrigerator. Arthur put it on the chicken; John couldn’t bring himself to touch it. When they had put the potatoes in the oven, and placed the chicken in a pan with oak chips and covered it on the stove top, they sat on the floor and talked. What should have been a simple comfort pricked at the underneath of John’s skin as the smell of the chicken grew stronger by the minute.
None of it disturbed Arthur— and why should it? Whatever this was sat within John’s own addled mind, and he refused to make it Arthur’s problem. While Arthur rambled and joked and insulted as usual, John forced himself to nod and grumble and insult right back in their typical routine. If Arthur noticed the way his partner’s steps faltered in the dance tonight, he made no mention.
They continued on until the food was done, when the smell of meat and oak had swollen to near-suffocating in the kitchen air.
Arthur prepared their plates like normal, never once falling out of the comfortable mundane routine. John stumbled through as well, a half-beat behind him.
When they sat down, John could hardly bring himself to look at the plate. Still, he forced himself to glance down and acknowledge he final cut of meat resting there at the end of its journey, which Arthur, his friend and beloved, had worked to give John. A sacrifice, of sorts. An unearned gift from Arthur that John could not stomach the thought of wasting.
He choked out the part of his mind faintly screaming at the sight, picked up his fork, and ate every bite of meat from the plate.
It all tasted like wood.
John could not stop staring at hands.
His, to be exact, and Arthur’s. The left hands.
He supposed he could call them both his hands, but that felt… wrong. Or, not entirely wrong, but mostly wrong. Much as the grooves along Arthur’s palm— kept hidden and intimate within the hold of thin fingers— felt like an old home to John, he could not bring himself to leave his signature on the deed.
Instead, over the days, his eyes kept tracing the line of fine bone across the back of the hand, following them to their ends to find the start of fine, dark splinters laced into flesh.
John watched the way light caught on the wooden pinky, almost absorbed into it as though the piece of a different reality refused to play the game of earthly optical physics. And John watched the way his own pinky— pure flesh, dark and warm brown still not nearly as dark as the wood, far wider and softer than the pointed piece of tree— did catch the light right, stepped through highlights and shadows exactly as a human body should.
He flexed his pinky, curled it upon itself and felt the disappointing lack of any pain or discomfort.
When the wooden pinky had been on his hand, it had always hurt. Each shift or jostle would shove the foreign body of wood into the pliant body of flesh, a deep, aching sting through every fiber that stitched their jagged ends together. John had loved it. Not at first; right after leaving the woods, the ache had disoriented him, making his presence within blood and skin terrifyingly, undeniably real for the first time.
It had not taken long for that to change. Soon, as he found himself inevitably entwining further, tighter with the loose threads of Arthur’s fabric, the penance of wood took on new meaning.
It was about survival. That was what he’d told himself when he’d stared out into that dark forest, slowly filling with the dread of realizing what it would take to make it out alive— to survive. It wasn’t his body, not really, but it was his mortality on the line. And so the math, however upsetting, had nonetheless been simple: give up the tiniest part of himself so that the man whom he was latched onto would not die. It hadn’t mattered that John already had almost no body to own, to move and feel. It hadn’t mattered that this small joint from hinge to tip constituted so much of his already meager possessions.
What John wanted was not important then (it was not before then, either, nor would it be afterward). His body or whatever he tried to call his body did not matter when Arthur’s body was what determined their survival or their demise, what decided Arthur’s joy and comfort, and thus John’s happiness in turn.
It did not matter how his metaphorical stomach had turned inside out at the sight of the joint spat unceremoniously onto the leaf-strewn ground, blood sprinkled in a tiny trail behind it, white and red on its inside glittering in the light and branding themselves into the back of John’s brain with hot, sickening loss. Strange, to mourn stolen flesh as the original thief. Impossible, though, to not miss a single grain of sand when he barely held half a handful to begin with.
What mattered in the end was Arthur, always, and what John could provide for Arthur.
Without a body to pilot on his own, John had no way to offer himself up like Arthur did, carved and cut and bled for the sake of carrying them both to another day alive. And yet… somehow, he had offered himself. It was small, of course, a pebble amounting to nothing in comparison to the mountains of hurt that Arthur took on every day. But it was something— to John, it became everything, the one single point of tangibility to prove his loyalty and love.
He’d never achieved that again after the forest.
John had tried; he tried every fucking day to be more than he was truly capable of, never satisfied with the sum of himself.
Despite all his desperate effort, slowly he’d realized his limited role within their perverted game of survival, and he settled into the script as best he could. The desire to spread his wings and climb his way to true paradisiacal autonomy gradually shriveled to the earthly disappointment of mere flesh and limited form. Tattered feathers clipped, John had cradled his wings and walked through dirt on hands and feet alone. Even those became too much for him after a while.
John was not sure when exactly he’d stopped thinking of the hand and foot as his body, though he does know that it was in England, somewhere between the shame of realizing he’d once again attempted to overtake Arthur’s mind and life for his own selfish fears, the panic and despair of watching blades and bugs and gods infest themselves into Arthur’s flesh and try to steal away even more of the man’s already half-dissected body, and the dread of realizing that not even an ability to manifest himself to grand physicality could do anything to help Arthur without ripping more pain through him.
John had spent their days in New York trying to claw his way to independence, in the hopes that he might make something good, something that could proudly be called ‘friend’ and easily offer perfect protection and unencumbered companionship. None of that effort had mattered in the end. Trying to take ownership of a handful of extremities brought on far more pain for his friend than John’s comfort was worth.
Eventually, as they’d trudged through a foreign time and place, the thought of laying claim to any part of Arthur’s body had come to bring on only an explosion of nausea.
All the guilt and shame and awareness of just how much dark, sticking toxicity seeped from him built higher and higher until he had wished he could simply invert the skin upon his stolen hand and foot and scrape the underside clean of every last trace of himself within his friend’s bloodstream.
Ashamed, John had retreated to just a voice and a pair of eyes. That was all he needed to be— all he could be. What had once been theirs became Arthur’s alone.
It had been safer that way, he was sure.
Arthur could aim and throw the rocks, Arthur could point the gun and pull the trigger, Arthur could carve the chest and hold the stone.
And John could choose to not touch the world and do any more harm. Sight and voice couldn’t exercise violence or greed. Flesh could. It had to go, and John was willing to resign himself to something lesser, something better. The body was Arthur’s alone; it did not belong to John.
Except…
Somehow, through it all, the pinky had remained his.
An odd sight each time he caught it in the periphery. Wood, or something akin to wood as humans knew it. Shadowed veins, dead cells, desecrated roots petrified into permanent rigor mortis. A strange, unearthly presence. Not quite alive, not quite dead. His.
The pinky was everything he could be, everything he should be. It may not have had flesh, yet it held a weight that had meant everything when it had mattered most.
A thing that was not, yet undeniably was.
An absence, yet a presence.
A sacrifice, yet a gift.
A passenger, yet a companion.
A parasite, yet a friend.
An entity, yet a man.
An unidentifiable body, an unknown, yet John Doe.
It was his— his.
It was what had brought comfort during the bleakest of times, the thing that caught on Arthur’s blood-stained shirt in the depths of a mine or his sweat-drenched shirt in the dark of a witch den as John offered all the comfort he could, reminding him of the good he could be, the survival he could ensure.
It was the final string holding his lifeline together, keeping him tied to the body that once was his but never truly belonged to him, yet still felt closer to home than any room ever could.
It was the only thing that made him real.
And it was not his. Not anymore.
The piece of John that carried the most of him was cradled in another’s palm. And— as much as he was grateful that, were anyone to hold his soul, it would be his friend who had moulded its birth to begin with— the heavy cavity of its absence in his bones weighed down his every second. It made him weightless, useless, left without proof of the one time he had ever fulfilled his true purpose and given something of himself for his beloved friend.
John could not stop staring at the pinky, and he could not stop aching with grief and guilt.
He had started finding excuses to touch Arthur’s hand for a while, convinced that whatever goodness had grown in those grains of wood could transfuse into this new bloodstream and remove the pollution of pure self-preoccupation. He had soon given up, though, when he touched the wood and never felt his body change, never felt the tangibility of devotion soak through his skin to prove it made of the same substance.
Now, John avoided touching the hand as much as he could. He needed to create distance so that he would not feel just how fresh and warm his hand felt in comparison, how clean and unblemished his flesh, how entirely it belonged to him alone and not to anyone else, including the other half of his fractured soul.
Arthur carried scars, broken eyesight, and the wooden body of another plane of existence. But he did not carry John. Not anymore. And John did not even have the decency to carry Arthur, either.
John could stare into the mirror and feel a million variations of pride and wonder at a body that was his— but he could not feel Arthur.
The joy felt beautiful, but how beautiful could it truly be if John held it all to himself? How pure could peace be if it was not to be given to the friend who’d given his life time and time again to earn it, if the owner of this new body and its peace had only ever once given the tiniest fragment of himself to move a single step forward in their journey through Hell?
John knew deception was a powerful tool upon the mind, had wielded it a thousand times until its cold weight had imprinted permanently upon his palms (his selfish, stolen palms and all their sinfully unblemished skin). He knew deception, and he knew when he himself was caught within an illusion.
He knew when to mistrust a good feeling.
So he knew when the joy and pride in his body could not be kept.
He knew when to remove the contagion before the rot.
John stood in the kitchen.
He was not sure when he had found his way there during the evening, nor just how long he had been standing over the counter, unmoving, transfixed like a fly watching the spider watch it right back, or a fox stuck staring at the metal teeth which are clamped arounds its foot and never once crying out.
Arthur was out, safely away, and John was alone, safe to be unsafe.
The sun had slowly set over the evening, drifting and morphing the shadows on the walls and cabinet doors into a dizzying, mesmerizing slide of warped reality. It sat somewhere behind his back, perched just over the city’s horizon. Dark gold and orange and pink exploded cabinet doors and countertop corners into a blast zone of stained-glass debris. The hidden, unseen places which could not be touched by the scatter of light were suspended in frozen blue, prematurely seeking out the shamed shadows of night.
In front of John sat one such shadow. The stretch of countertop which rested against his front offered a space far from the eyes of the warm star setting through the window. A space that was safe, where a set of selfish hands could unspool their true nature without worry of accidentally choking out any nearby goodness.
John stared down at his hands, dark and unscarred.
He stared at the knife inches away, smooth and cleaned to sharp silver since Arthur had last used it several days ago.
He looked back at his hands, moved over the fingers all the way to the pinky on his left. It twitched under his gaze.
Something twisted in his gut. Something ugly and selfish, he was sure; best not to think about it.
With that feeling pushed out of his mind, John could focus on the pinky, forcing it to hold still and stop twitching despite the fear tremoring through its delicate muscle. Fine threads of muscle woven together in a beautiful tapestry, allowing for miraculous levels of dexterity and skill. Strings of muscle stolen and knotted into a rope that tied a body to the home and friend and life which it had not earned.
John inhaled shakily and let out a stuttering breath that fluttered the fine hairs on the backs of his hands.
He kept his gaze steady on the pinky and thought about the chicken from the other night. It tore easily. Broke. Cleaved.
One entire, whole, unblemished body butchered into slices, strips, chunks of meat and fat that could be both discarded into the bin and stored for future use. Each step simultaneously mindless and meaningful.
Easy.
He thought about the pinky from a lifetime ago. It snapped easily. Crunched and popped underneath the sharp edge of something far stronger. Dropped itself to the ground to be consumed without thought, willing steer to the slaughterhouse, willing sacrifice to the altar of its god.
Easy.
That pinky had been his, had it not? So he could be the same now. Willing. Easy.
Quietly, slowly, John picked up the knife.
It scraped faintly along the countertop as he did, a sound near-silent, only just loud enough the make the hairs nestled in his eardrum pick up their heads and the fibers of his heart jump in anticipation.
Briefly, he wondered if he should step to the side and gain a strip of fading sunlight to see by. The question died almost immediately, though. No, this was best done in the dark, shielded from better souls and kinder hearts. Cruel blood did not deserve the warmth of Earth’s embrace; it should be kept in the shadows that tinged it as black and cold as the monstrous world to which it belonged.
The fingers of his right hand clenched and unclenched around the knife’s handle. It felt too heavy to lift, too light to keep hold of. Its blade shined blue silver in the shadow of his looming body, properly fitted to his influence if not to his handhold.
There was something like a scream or a sob swelling in the back of John’s throat. He swallowed it down like cyanide.
His fingers felt stiff, but he managed to curl the three and his thumb away from his target.
It was just his pinky left outstretched, sitting still, plush, and unbothered as a wolf well-fed on the flesh of his prey, a king well-sustained on the poverty of his subjects. Holding onto so much ease and comfort which had not been earned, but stolen instead, ripped away with teeth and blades. Not deserving of its luxury or wealth that had never touched a single day of hardship, never learned what it meant to suffer and sacrifice.
A piece of bone and blood on a body of more bone and blood, all taking humanity for nothing in return.
Selfish leech, vain parasite.
It had to go. It had to be severed, sacrificed.
He knew that. He knew.
This was the only way to make up for all the life he had taken, the only modification which could make this fresh, uncaring body worthy of the humanity it so desperately hoarded. This was the single act of penance that could apologize for what he was, the fervent Hail Mary falling from his lips and his fingertips to voice the revulsion, the remorse flooding his bloodstream.
One quick prayer, one single motion to fix it all.
Necessary. Easy.
So why couldn’t he just make the plunge?
Why couldn’t he give up what he had to?
Why couldn’t he tear off one single fucking inch of his body?
Why couldn’t he-
c-couldn’t….
he…
to his body—
his… his body—
body—
His—
The door creaked quietly open.
John froze.
Cheap, worn floorboards shifted and let out low groans under the weight of two feet and a lightly tapping walking stick. The rustle of fabric came as an overcoat was shed and tossed to the side. More faint sounds lifted into the air and added to its tension as Arthur, home once again, mindlessly settled back into their normal domestic ease, unaware of how taut another body stood poised by the counter.
John tried not to move, desperate to blend in with the room and let Arthur pass right by him to the bedroom, to somewhere safe and good. Everything inside squirmed violently at the decision to avoid Arthur and forgo his touch, the one thing that could always bring comfort, no matter how terrible the world around them became, or how dark or cold or ugly John grew. But John fought to strangle those fearful instincts, selfish children that needed to be scolded into sense and cloying leeches that needed to be cut off at the head.
He needed to keep his skin from touching another, stop his limbs from wrapping around Arthur before they stained or crushed or kil—
The old floor shifted under his feet despite their stillness.
No luck.
Arthur lifted his head. “John?”
His voice was so soft, so fucking casual and unbothered as though he was entirely sure that the house around him was free from any danger or harm (and it should be it should be, it could be if it weren’t for John weren’t for his disgusting desire to steal what didn’t belong to him what should belong to Arthur, but he just could fucking help himself could he?)
Terrified, John turned around to face Arthur. His eyes blinked against the setting sunlight still lingering around half the room and Arthur’s form, burning with the sharp switch from dark blue to golden yellow.
John wanted to say something, to wish his friend welcome back home from his errands, to fall over him and pour out a litany of love or a flood of confession that sought out his familiar comfort. But a lace of fear sewed his jaw still, refusing to indulge such a smothering instinct, unwilling to allow John’s interest in himself to bleed from veins he himself had opened for his own shock and thrill onto the innocence wrapped over Arthur.
Somehow, this was also the wrong answer. It always was.
Arthur’s brows furrowed at the lack of response, and he moved to speak again. “Are you alright?”
There was worry at the edge of his voice now.
No.
No, that wasn’t—
Arthur wasn’t supposed to be afraid anymore, not with John here. John was supposed to help him, to protect him, to never let anything hurt or main or even ever fucking touch his friend, his beloved.
John wasn’t supposed to be a burden, wasn’t supposed to burrow his teeth into the flesh still bleeding from his past intrusion, but he just couldn’t seem to stop himself, couldn’t seem to pull this disgusting strain of selfishness out of his veins before it contaminated all the good, holy water that had pulled him from birth to baptism to bodies and their beauty.
Even the guilt felt too selfish, making his eyes sting and his breath stutter into another problem that he couldn’t stifle himself, churning nausea into a wave that he had no choice but involuntarily vocalize in whatever he said. He tried to answer without dragging his problems to Arthur’s light, but it was useless.
“I-” John choked. “Y-yes, yes I’m- I-I—”
He was gasping, shaking all over and couldn’t get himself to shut up why couldn’t he ever just shut his mouth and keep it together-
Arthur started forward in a hurry at the pathetic sounds falling from John.
“John, hey,” he said far too concerned. “It’s alright, I’m here. Just breathe, darling, I’ve got you and-”
“No!”
The word came abruptly out like a spit of venom, the reflexive snap of a dog bleeding out at whoever got too close to its salivating, over-sharp teeth. John scrambled to press against the counter behind him.
Arthur froze for a moment, surprised. “It- it’s alright, John. I won’t hurt you.”
He took another tentative step forward and John could have hurled with the onslaught of panic and impeding guilt. “No, stay back. Don’t touch me.”
John held out his hands between them like a pathetic attempt at a shield for Arthur against the body in front of him. A flash of silver caught his eyes— he was still holding the knife. It was pointed straight at Arthur.
A strangle of anguish ripped through John’s throat. He tossed the knife clattering against the counter behind him like it burned, afraid of what selfishness might have tainted it within his hold for so long.
Arthur blinked, panic flashing in his sightless eyes as he tried to decipher what the metallic sound had been. As kind and concerned as always, he must have taken it as a sign of undeserved pain for John, because he tried to hurriedly move forward and help John once more. “What’s wrong-”
“Arthur, please,” John begged. Why couldn’t Arthur stop trying to give his care away? Why couldn’t he feel how it would only be wasted trying to please a greed whose nature was to never be satiated?
“John—” his voice still too fucking kind— “you’re hurt. You need to let me take care of you, so I can make whatever it is stop hurting.”
“No.” Every repetition of the word added more confused pain to Arthur’s eyes, which only strengthened John’s frantic resolve. “No, Arthur, you don’t understand. I can’t let you touch me. I’m not- th-this body, it isn’t safe. It’s never done anything to help someone else, never been good. I don’t- don’t deserve to stand here and leech off the rest you’ve earned when m-my body’s never done a god damn thing to pay for it. Especially wh-when I might hurt you, like before.”
That finally got Arthur to still. His expression turned to recognition, though still dark and concerned. He opened his mouth, surely to say something hopeful and reassuring that John absolutely had not earned.
John spoke before he had to hear the light of kind words burn him from within shadows. “Don’t try to argue that I’ve done a single thing for this life, Arthur,” he half-spat, half-sniveled. “You’ve carried me all the way to this point and I never held any of the weight along the journey. I’ve always taken, you’ve always given. I haven’t earned a fucking thing, and I don’t deserve this good of a body o-or this kind of a life.”
“John…”
Too earnestly patient, too good.
“Stop, Arthur. Don’t try to lie to me.”
“What I want to say isn’t a lie, John,” Arthur said stern. “The truth is that you do deserve all of this because you earned it just as much as I did.”
“How do you know?” John shouted. “How the hell can you say that when there’s no proof?”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“Look at me! Feel my body! There’s nothing, Arthur. No part of myself because this body doesn’t belong to me. It’s just a piece of energy that I stole from you to make something for me. If it belongs to anyone, it should be you. The last person who deserves it is me.”
Somewhere among the flood of words, his voice had trailed from a shout to a shamed hush, practically a whimper, sounding pathetic coming from his much larger body. The final words came out scratchy; they hurt falling from his mouth, almost like his body fought against allowing them a voice, like they didn’t belong in reality.
A sigh pulled John from his self-absorbed sulking in the weak aftermath of his outburst. He glanced back up from the floor, arms wrapped over himself, to see Arthur trying his best to meet John’s eyes. John unconsciously shifted to fix their alignment.
“You are such an idiot, sometimes, you know that?” Arthur said softly, not unkindly.
John only shifted his feet, tightening his grip on his own torso.
Slow, careful, Arthur took a small step forward. He paused for a moment, head tilted in deliberation. When John didn’t protest the approach, a bit of tension left Arthur’s shoulders and he closed the distance between them. His hand came up to rest on John’s arm, pale and thin, yet passing a warmth into the dark skin and fat of John’s body that he couldn’t quite produce on his own.
The sunlight had nearly entirely retreated from the kitchen, but a few trailing beams of it caught in curls on the back of Arthur’s head, haloing him in low, rich orange. John wondered whether— if Arthur had been able to see— he would have been able to find such vibrancy reflected in the highlight of John’s eyes.
“John,” he murmured, and the single syllable in his voice carried a weight of care and love that threatened to sweep John off his feet and drown him with overwhelm. Arthur swept his thumb over John’s skin in a gentle motion. “This body…” he said, “this body isn't mine, John— it's yours.”
A whine of protest rose in John’s chest. “How?” he whispered, unable to bring his voice any higher, afraid of what might emerge from inside him, of what might be heard in response. “How is it supposed to be mine?”
Arthur continued swiping his thumb, pouring unfathomable amounts of emotion through such a simple motion, overflowing with life. John latched onto that offer of comfort like the only thread holding him above total loss of himself. And it was, he knew. He knew.
“I-I know that this isn't how we've ever done things before,” Arthur said. “That you're used to, at best, our body, or when I've been at my worst, just my body. But we've reached a new world here with this home. You have earned your body, John, and you've more than earned my love for it as well. I don't need a physical sign to feel your love, or to feel the good man that you are. I have the proof of all of that right here.”
He gently pried one of John’s hands free— the left one— and pressed it against his own chest, letting John feel the pulse of Arthur’s heartbeat through the chest under his fingers and the smaller palm resting against the back of his hand. Arthur squeezed their hands tighter, smiling up at John.
Breathless, John watched how their fingers wove together, felt as the even pace of Arthur’s heartbeat coaxed his own pounding blood to slow. Two hands— one scarred and one smooth, one sharp and one soft, one steady and one unsure. Both forged in the same hellfire. Both sharing a flow of love that could never be frozen or drained, could never be dug off-course or polluted by outside forces. Both entwined into a single raging river that sustained their lives.
John knew there was love in them both— he knew and would hold onto that fact until the day he died, and carry it to whatever worlds waited for him after death. The love was there, and it was undeniable. Tangible.
But John was…
The pieces around the love weren’t-
The blood and the muscle and the- the body wasn’t…
John was sure his limbs tensed, though he could hardly feel them. He wanted to pull his hand back from Arthur’s chest, but the other man’s hand wouldn’t let him, leaving him to dig his fingers into Arthur’s shirt with desperation.
“But I can’t-” John tried to stutter out. His breath had turned ragged again. “I can’t feel it, Arthur. I can’t feel me.”
Arthur’s mouth twisted in concern. “What do you mean?”
“I look at my body and there’s nothing, not a single mark that can attest to what I am or where I’ve been. There is no proof of any good I’ve done because this body never has done good. You say that there’s good inside me, and that I’m inside this body, but I can’t feel it there.”
John needed to feel his worth, the one point of tangibility that had ever done something good for someone outside of himself. He needed to feel the catharsis of mutilation without to feel the proof of potential within.
But it was-
The point that needed to be severed was his.
His body.
No one else’s. Never touched by another. Never butchered for another. Never sacrificed and fed to something else like a nameless head of livestock, not born and bred to be mutilated and consumed.
He needed to bring back that tangibility which had once offered him more than just survival, the action which had first lit the path to self-salvation— but he could not do it. Not when it meant giving up the heaven that could finally be called ‘his.’
John shut his eyes and tried to resist the urge to claw at his own sacred skin, the urge to selfishly shield his fragile body from anything that might hurt it. He clutched at Arthur’s shirt tighter.
“How am I supposed to prove who I am to myself?”
The room was silent for a moment, no response coming. And maybe that was it. Maybe there was no proof because there was no John to be proven. Maybe— as he constantly seemed to stumble into— he really was no more than a thief posing in a life-turned-mannequin.
Then Arthur squeezed their joined hands, much tighter than he had before, almost frenzied.
“John Doe.”
The intensity of the voice, despite how quiet it was, made John open his eyes.
Filling his eyesight was Arthur, looking right into John’s face, still haloed by the sunset, yet with an electric light sparking in his eyes that entirely outshone the gold behind him. John’s breath hitched.
“John Doe,” Arthur repeated. “That’s your name, the one you chose— the one that’s you. Right?”
John blinked at the firmness of Arthur’s question, though his answer came easy. “Yes.” His name was a corner stone of fact, the string sewn through reality’s tapestry, that he knew. He had always known.
“Right.” Arthur nodded. “Your name…?” And he looked at John almost… expectantly?
“My name… J-John- John Doe.”
“There.” Another squeeze to their hands, a motion of reassurance, of affirmation. “Say it again.”
Unsure of anything that was going on beyond his own name, he felt no choice but to lean into those two words. “John Doe.”
“Yes, that’s it,” Arthur smiled, still holding onto the solidity of his foundation. “Do you feel it?”
John blinked. “F-feel- what?”
“You.”
“I don’t… I don’t understand.”
“When you spoke, you were saying who you are. Did you feel yourself?”
John’s heart seized. “Arthur, I-I can’t-” His voice choked trying to grapple with too much for his vocal cords.
“Shh.” Arthur brushed his thumb across the back of John’s hand. “Just you for now, just your name. Try again.”
Shaking, John did, reaching for the one thing he could always be sure of. Terrified, excited, perhaps or probably both, he steadied his breath just enough to open his mouth, and spoke.
The name started as a touch to the palate, soft yet definitive. It moved wider, taller, coaxing mandible to part with its base above. But only for a moment, as the name just as soon pulled the mandible upward once more to reconnect the tongue with the roof of the mouth, drawing a small hum up into warm nasality.
Then the name easily slid into its second half, as though each word was designed to be interwoven into a single note, one continuous sound that announced the undefeated, unwavering strength of the soul for whom it stood. It laid the tip of the tongue against the ridge just behind the teeth once more, and pushed air to the space just beyond the teeth in miniscule explosion of force. Only, then, to cradle the air with rounded lips, showing the soft side of this forceful soul.
And then the name ended.
It did not end the way it had started, securely hidden within the mouth— it ended outside, spoken into the world not just in intention of the unseen soul, but in the journey of matter as it echoed past the lips. And the lips, left behind the word’s departure, did not close upon the name’s ending; rather, they stayed parted, open as they moulded to the roundness of the final sound, remaining loose almost as if they were promising the possibility of more sound, more breaths and words and life that would eventually pour forth from this soul that had just given itself shape in the form of sound.
It ended with hope.
It ended with life, tangible.
It ended with John Doe, undeniable.
For what felt like the hundredth time tonight, John’s breath stuttered. This time, however, it was under the weight of himself, and not of fear.
“John Doe,” he repeated. And he felt the name, felt what was his— what was him. “John Doe.”
Arthur smiled and brough his other hand came up to cradle John’s cheek. “You,” he whispered.
Tears pricked at John’s eyes, overwhelmed with the tangibility of himself for the first time in too, too long spent numb. He closed his eyes again before the tears could fall and turned to press his face further into the palm of Arthur’s hand.
“What if it’s not enough?” he whispered, afraid that anything louder might bring that fear to fruition now and ruin the weight he could still feel resting upon his tongue. “What if one day I say it, and it- it doesn’t feel like enough? I-if I need more than a voice to find it.”
Arthur’s palms were warm against John’s cheek and hand, hushing the flutter of fear under his skin. “Then we’ll find something else. A ring, perhaps, or a bracelet— something small that you could carry around wherever you go. We’ll have it engraved. And whenever you need to feel ‘you,’ you’ll be right there: John Doe. A physical reminder forever resting over the body that is yours.”
An ache of warmth wrapped around John’s chest.
The tears fell now, quiet and calm. Arthur assuredly felt them, but said nothing. He only continued to hold onto the body before him, the flesh and blood that held his friend and his love.
“Thank you,” John whispered. He broke their current position only to draw their bodies closer, arms encircling Arthur and pulling him in tight. Eyes still shut tight, he laid his head upon Arthur’s curls. “Thank you.”
There was no hesitation from Arthur. He simply wrapped his arms around John in turn, fingers splayed across his back and face pressed against his chest, all his weight shared with the body, the person that he trusted most.
“Always,” he whispered back. “Always, John Doe.”
John Doe.
John whispered it again, cradled within cinnamon curls around his mouth, just for himself. It still felt real. It still felt like him.
Sighing in relief, in wonder, John soaked in the feeling.
The sun had set by now, he was sure. The counter sat cool behind him, but in his arms sat Arthur, curls still holding onto residual warmth from the golden rays, small body radiating with the abundance of life kept inside.
And under his own skin, carried in each blood cell, flowing through every vein and bone, resting in every limb and organ, twitching in pinky and fingers and thumb, moving from head to stomach to toe, fueling every word and name that formed within the chest— in it all, sat a warmth that could not be stifled nor stolen, that could not be warped nor hidden, that could never, by any force or power outside of this body, be falsely claimed as anything other than what it truly was:
His.
Him.
John Doe.