Work Text:
Tourniquet
Some mornings he woke up torn between three realities, his essence spun thin and fine into each one. It made his hands shake with the effort not to unravel into them, to allow himself to dissolve (dissolute, so close a word) into all three. He was always broken into shards, a billion splinters of the fragmentary man he'd been.
A man so in love with dying and every breath and pulse of the world echoed in the emptiness of him.
There was an irony there, he was certain of it.
He wondered if he'd become this because he was an addict, that he'd kicked open some door and the world had come in after. Sometimes he thought it must be the reverse, that he'd become a junkie as a defence against all of this ... awareness, this knowing; only by dulling the edges of it could he keep its sharpness from flaying him to his bones. Ouroboros, he decided, stretching against his dirty sheets, carefully not touching the woman beside him, but it was a gesture only because her dreams threaded into him, filament-fine worms of fancy and despair.
There was no walking away cleanly in the morning, any morning.
He stood, naked, found his way to the toilet to piss and hated it all even as a slow pulse of love kept his heart beating, kept his blood moving and the breath coming. Kept a damning flicker of hope alive.
The woman in his bed, his star-struck fuck, sighed restlessly as her dreams shifted to darkness, so he twisted their threads to pull her back into light.
Because there was no walking away cleanly.
**
The first reality was this:
The world between of the Ancestral Garden, the Dream. He sat along a river that always was and never is and waited for a face to emerge, to come to him and teach him his lesson.
Today it was the Christ.
Jeshua to his friends.
The first thing Jeshua had ever said to him was that Paul was a misogynistic ass, and the greatest of all things was still love. He had no idea where the shit about marrying or burning came from. "Although sometimes there's a fire in the marriage bed," and he'd laughed and poured them both some wine.
Today Jeshua was wearing the crown of thorns and his robes were bloodied and torn.
"Is this still about love?" Jeroen asked. He touched the riverbank where the blood had turned the sand to mud. He felt the whip score his back, and barely managed to keep from letting it drive him to his knees.
"Always." Jeshua smiled around a mouth of smashed teeth. "It's always about love, Jeroen. It's always at the root of things, even under the hatred and the fear. Now, please, take me down into the river."
Jeroen lifted the small, bloodied rabbi and waded into the rushing water, holding him in the cold flow until the impossible blue was stained incarnadine. Jeshua was gasping: sharp, final breaths. "Do you understand, Jeroen, that it's love?" and they were last words. "This much love, and nothing less." And then the eyes went dark and the memory of the body let go, faded away. In the water, in the midst of blood and piss and other earthly things Jeroen took the crown that was left behind and set it on his temples and he wept. For it was love, at the root of it all it was love, and it was killing him.
More slowly than heroin, but it was killing him all the same.
**
The second reality was this:
The Carrier. She talked to him, though not like she did to the Engineer. For him it was dreams and whispers, like a child crawling into a grown-up's lap.
He wondered when he had become a grown-up. Maybe at his first death.
Jenny Quantum made a noise against his shirt and he looked down to her knowing gaze. "Stop trying to boss me around, weinig meisje." He turned his gaze to the dreams floating past. "You think you know so much, but you are limited to your time. Powerful, yes, but limited." He chucked her under her chin, his long fingers tender and kindly. Jenny Sparks was in there, but Jenny Quantum was something new, too, and where Sparks had felt contempt so deep it was a palpable thing, this little one just loved him, almost boundlessly. She, too, was full of dreams and secrets and she whispered them to him just as the Carrier did.
He slid to the floor, cross-legged, and cradled the small one against his chest, humming to her tunelessly before shifting to a lullaby. "Slaap kindje slaap," and his fingers moved, twisted and pulled and a tiny white sheep made of dust and dreams grazed on his knee. "Daar buiten loopt een schaap!" Jenny clapped her hands and rocked forward to touch the tiny white sheep and he let it nibble her fingertips as he sang the stupid little ditty over and over again.
"What the hell are you doing, Doctor?" and the Engineer was standing there watching him, her cool silver face set in disapproving lines. She had called him Jeroen, that once.
"I'm making sheep," and he offered her one. "It's clean. Hypoallergenic. Grazes on dust." Jenny squirmed, reaching for the second sheep. This one had black wool.
"Does Midnighter know you've got Jenny?" the Engineer demanded. "Is she supposed to be up this late?" Her hands moved at her sides, as though tempted to take the baby from him.
"Apollo asked me to watch her for a couple of hours," The Doctor replied, and the black sheep wandered down to join the white. They nibbled Jenny's toes. "I promised not to shoot up in front of the baby or feed her any pretty pills, no matter how nicely she asked."
Jenny caught the tone, and her small fist curled into his shirt, pulling his attention back to her. "You can leave her with the nice junkie, she's perfectly safe," he said and he started making more sheep, a flock of them. A sharp, angry breath and then nothing. He listened to the Engineer walk away and Jenny was silent and the Carrier was silent and there was only the sound of sheep.
"Kut!" he said at last, then looked down at the baby. "You tell no one that I taught you that word, and I'll teach others, all right?"
Jenny crowed and there were her dreams again, and the Carrier, reaching out timidly, and he sang about sheep until he had a flock's worth to follow them as he carried Jenny off to bed.
**
This was the third reality:
The door closed and him on one side of the room and his box on the other.
He had been so fucking terrible at life. Good at computers, of course, but terrible at life. He'd wanted happiness and it just ... didn't seem to exist.
Everything had felt ... too much, too overwhelming. Going crazy had seemed the best option. He'd opened up his arms, first to shit and then to bleed out and yet here he was, at the heart of all creation.
And they wanted him ... rational, dependable. They wanted him to be in control of himself but that kind of control? Godverdomme. That kind of control would make a monster of him. Better to be a bit crazy, a bit of a coward. Better to be a junkie overdosed on smack than on power.
So he sat and he wanted what was in the box so damn badly he was sick with it. His gut churned and his hands shook and yet he wasn't getting up and getting it.
Because he had something to prove, maybe, although what and to whom he wasn't sure. Not to the fucking idiot masses that judged him, the world that saw only the news report that showed his shit-stained sheets and his puke-stained shirt. Not Angie or the Midnighter or any of those made heroes who had their bodies altered, who were more than men and so seemed to think they were above mankind.
Whereas he ... he was Everyman, always a part and always apart at the same time.
"Can I come in, Doctor?" and he realised suddenly that his door was open. He waved Apollo in, who handed him a mug only to take it back again when his hands shook so badly that he spilled scalding tea over them.
"Here," and Apollo held the cup to his lips, and shit but it was sweet, like he'd dumped a dozen cubes in. "It helps, a little," Apollo said. "Or so I'm told." He sat down on the edge of the bed.
"It does," Jeroen nodded once he'd downed the mug. "Now what can I do for you? The sheep become a problem?"
Apollo laughed. "Jenny loves them. They love her. And they're quiet at night, so no problem. I had a question, actually." Jeroen made a gesture, and Apollo smiled at him and god, it really was like the sun. "What you said to the Doctor ... the other Doctor ... about feeling everything, all the time?"
Jeroen nodded. "It's true. It's always there. Everything that lives. Did you know trees sing when their roots deepen, when the sap rises? Do you know that roses keen when they're cut? That more than a million children were raped tonight, in their own beds? Those that have beds."
"Jesus."
"He's a nice guy, prefers to be called Jeshua," Jeroen said and he snorted.
"Jesus." Apollo said again and moved closer, leaned across, kissed his temple, a brief dry press of lips right over where the thorns bit deep into memory. "And Jeroen," he said. He kissed him again, on the forehead. "I'll remember this," Apollo said at last, before leaving.
Jeroen sat on his bed and stared at his box but did not cross the room, because sometimes the love didn't just tear you apart.
It put pieces of you back.