Work Text:
“Arthur.”
“John,” he said, for what else was there to say? Here they were, fallen again somewhere, put in place by Arthur’s failing body. It never got any easier to swallow.
His left hand - no, John’s hand - slowly crept up to his chest, as if wanting to brush away all his doubts; it stayed there when Arthur offered no protest, and for a moment he was reminded of those dark, seething pits. Closing his eyes, his other hand hesitantly found John’s, and then they were touching. Perhaps it was some trick of the light to lead him away from harsher memories, but then the entity somewhere behind his eyes had always lied, hadn’t he?
And Arthur, the investigator, the perpetually curious, the one who always found another string to pull… well. Maybe that was part of why he couldn’t stop himself from being pulled in, over and over.
“Would you… tell me?” That deep voice was hiding nerves under a front of aloofness. His mouth quirked.
“Tell you what?”
“About your dreams.”
Perhaps John had learned a thing or two from him after all. The thought of someone taking lessons on humanity from Arthur Lester of all people was certainly something; he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
He wanted to snap, buck and fight, but the blood was still fresh on his clothes. He was tired. So he opened his eyes again for all the difference that it did, and he found the words somehow.
“Light too thick
On the delicate cane-fields,
Jade and peridot looked at through amber glass.
Across the hot blue harbor
The city sleeps on the headland,
White shells heaping a September beach.
Too much beauty–
It is heavy on my eyelids…
I shall be glad when night has fallen.”
Silence falls. His body, overwrought and useless as it is, nevertheless tries to rally against itself. He hardly makes it to lean against the wall before falling back to the ground - crashing to the mud and the muck, familiar against his face as gravedirt.
“Arthur - god damn it, sit down! What are you even -” John’s growling becomes a hum in the background as he struggles again to stand, hands and knees scraped raw when he then falls. The pinky knocks into a wall, the hollow sound of wood on concrete ringing out sharply. His teeth grit and he shoves his shoulder, braces the rest of him upon that steadiness, and - falls. One of his legs gives out, shaking as he pants and John yells.
He breathes until everything is quiet, save his heart. But that’s something he has plenty of experience ignoring.
His dirty, hot face resting on cold, empty wall, Arthur stares at nothing and hears nothing and feels nothing.
For a moment, he wonders if this is what it’s like, being dead, trapped inside of a coffin - and digs his nails into his arms, violently tearing away that train of thought before it runs away with him.
“Arthur,” John says, and he doesn’t have the energy to decipher it. So he just breathes.
“John.”
And then - “We’ll get out of here. We will.”
Arthur breathes. A hand rests over his heart, counting each beat, fingers digging in. But it doesn’t hurt.
“But it’s going to take much longer if you keep trying to eat the elephant all at once. Remember how it’s done?”
Arthur’s head bows over that hand, once so familiar, now so strange, now someone else’s. It’s a trick of the light, it’s comfort calling late, it’s everything he doesn’t deserve but is selfish enough to take anyway. “...bite by bite.”
John’s voice leads him out of the dark, as it’s done so many times before. “Yes, Arthur! One bite at a time. Now…” Here he coughs, seeming a bit embarrassed, but still painfully sincere. “Rest. I’ll keep watch."
What a world, for the man in his head to be one of the best friends he’s ever had.
Arthur closes his eyes and he does not let go.