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The thing that Arthur remembers the most from the first time John consumes him is the darkness.
He’s blind, of course—the complete sort, where there’s never anything but nothing. Like somebody’s wrapped thick cloth around his eyes, trapped him in a small box, and buried that box beneath six feet of soil. Still, when Arthur casts his mind back, all he can recall is how the world grew somehow, impossibly, frighteningly black. Blacker than black. The sort of black he imagines one might find at the center of a great, yawning void. Madness-inducing black.
They’re sitting in the abandoned captain’s cabin of a beached freighter. The air still smells vaguely of singed flesh. Arthur’s not sure if it’s from him or the recently deceased snake monster. Or John, because apparently, that’s an option now.
John is quiet. It’s an awkward silence, heavy with what’s not being said. Arthur isn’t usually content to let these kinds of silences sit—hates them, in fact, like they’re choking him, burying him alive underneath the tension—but he’s still trying to figure out how he feels about all of this.
He flexes his fingers where they’re resting on his thigh. Less than a minute ago, they’d been part of … whatever John can become now. Some writhing mass of…
Arthur works very hard to fight back a shudder.
Not hard enough, apparently, because John finally breaks the silence. “I’m not … I’m not doing this on purpose, Arthur. I’m not sure I know how to do this on purpose.”
Arthur hears the unsaid yet at the end of that sentence. His hand curls into a fist. “You said you wouldn’t take any more of me.”
“That’s not what’s happening.”
“Isn’t it?” Arthur can feel the heat of his leg through his trousers. His leg. He moves it, just to make sure he still can.
“No,” John says vehemently. “I know as much about what’s happening here as you do.”
Arthur laughs humorlessly. “Sure.”
John makes a frustrated noise. “If I knew what I was doing and how to do it on purpose, why would I have stopped? Why wouldn’t I be … whatever I was, right now?”
Arthur doesn’t have a good answer for that, so he makes one up. “Maybe it’s a—a temporary effect. Or one you can’t sustain for a long period of time.”
“Maybe it is. But I don’t know.”
Arthur almost snaps back, God forbid you know anything useful about the monster you used to be, but he stops himself. Clenches his fist tighter. Lets out a long breath through his nose. “Well, we should figure it out,” he says at length. “We need to know what we’re dealing with here.”
“I told you—I don’t know how to do it on command.”
“Then—fine! What did it—” Arthur stops. Swallows. “What did it … feel like. When it happened. For you.”
John falls silent for a moment. Then: “It felt like … like what I imagine it felt like for you to get out of bed for the first time at that hospital in Harper’s Hill. After your coma.”
Arthur scoffs. “Painful and awkward?”
“Yes,” John says honestly. “That, but also … like I was stretching something that had been dormant for a long, long time.”
He sounds … wistful, almost. Longing. And it strikes Arthur how different their experiences of John’s sudden manifestation must have been. Tolerable—even pleasurable—for John, if Arthur is reading the breathiness of his voice right. And for Arthur…
Cool, dry tendrils, wrapping themselves around Arthur’s forearms and neck and ankles. A growing pressure, completely alien, like being encased in concrete if concrete were thrumming and pulsing and contracting and alive. Opening his mouth to breathe and those same tendrils snaking down his throat and into his lungs. Attempting to struggle only to find himself twisted and moved like a puppeteer does a marionette. Darkness, more complete than any he’s ever known before.
Trapped in a body that is no longer his own.
Arthur stands, too fast, and grits out, “Well, I would really rather you not do it again. We should find something to eat and drink.”
He stalks across the cabin—stubs his toe on something, flinches, bites back a cry, keeps moving. “I told you,” John says as Arthur crouches down next to what he thinks are cabinets. “I can’t control it.”
“Then learn,” Arthur says, clipped. He opens the cabinet. “Is there anything in here?”
“I’m doing my fucking best,” John snaps back. He pointedly does not answer Arthur’s question. “If we’re going to understand this, then maybe you should tell me what it felt like for you.”
Arthur slams the cabinet shut with a bit more force than he intends, then opens the one next to it. “Bad,” he says shortly. “Anything in this one?”
“Sand,” John says. It’s petulant, pissy, childish, and Arthur grits his teeth. This time, he does slam the door on purpose.
“If you’re not going to be helpful, then we are going to starve,” Arthur hisses. He moves on to the next cabinet. Opens it.
“Right. Because ‘bad’ is such a helpful descriptor,” John says acerbically. “There are some bottles in here. They’re not labeled.”
Arthur reaches out and fumbles until his hand wraps around the neck of one. He uncorks it and brings it to his nose to smell it, then nearly gags. “Eugh, not water.” He sets the bottle down, then sits back on his heels. “And bad is a helpful descriptor. It was bad, and therefore, I don’t want you to do it again.”
“But why was it bad?” John urges as Arthur picks up the other bottles. They’re all some kind of really, really strong alcohol. Arthur puts one in his pack, just in case. “Maybe if I know what was bad, then next time, I—”
“I don’t want there to be a next time, John.”
“I told you, I can’t control it!”
“Try.”
“If I asked you to control your own heartbeat, you would scoff at me and tell me I’m being unreasonable.”
“That’s different.”
“How?”
Arthur slams the door of the cabinet hard enough that the bottles that are still within it rattle. “Because we are in the Dreamlands, John,” he hisses. “We are stumbling along through the King’s domain, hoping that we can find our way out before he catches up to us and destroys us. And now, all of a sudden, you have this—this new power over me.” And it terrifies me, Arthur does not say. Instead, he digs his fingernails into the soft wooden floor and says, “You say you still don’t remember being … him, but then you do this, and I … I wonder if that’s true.”
Arthur can feel John swallowing whatever knee-jerk response he has to that. After a few moments, John says, as if through gritted teeth, “I swear to you, Arthur: I don’t know what this is. I don’t remember anything more than … vague feelings, at times. Sensations. Like déjà vu. Whatever this is, I don’t know why it’s happening, and I don’t know how to stop it. I’m sorry. But…” John hesitates. “But perhaps it’s … useful.”
“Useful,” Arthur echoes.
“There are a lot of things here that want us dead,” John says bluntly. “I think I can … withstand them. To a degree. Protect you.”
Arthur bristles slightly. “I don’t need your protection.”
John sighs, heavy and weary. “I’m not saying you’re weak, Arthur. I’m saying this place is dangerous. More dangerous than anything any human is equipped to survive. This way, I can … I can do something other than watch. I can help.”
Arthur exhales slowly through his nose. He can tell that John truly believes what he’s saying, and hell, maybe there’s a bit of truth to it. That … snake thing would have killed him if John hadn’t erupted from his skin like living armor. But the thought of doing it again…
Arthur shudders, then stands and brushes his hands off on his thighs. “Well, let’s just hope it doesn’t come to that,” he says briskly, suddenly uninterested in continuing this conversation any further.
John sighs but lets the matter drop.
. . .
It does, in fact, come to that. Because John was right: this place is more dangerous than anything people are meant to survive. And it so badly wants to kill him.
The ground crumbles beneath Arthur’s foot. He has enough time for one desperate, sharp gasp before his ankle twists and the ground vanishes and he’s falling, falling, falling. His ears ring, and the terror of it steals all the breath from his lungs, and he is gripped with the sudden conviction that there is no bottom to this pit and he’ll be falling for the rest of his life and more.
His shoulder hits the side of the wall with a sickening crunch, John says, “Fuck,” and then—
And then, John blooms.
He bleeds from Arthur’s pores, drips from his nose, surges up his throat like the worst sort of nausea. The world grows muffled as Arthur is encased in cool and damp and shifting dark. He thinks he hits the ground, the impact rattling his teeth and making it impossible to breathe, but it’s so hard to focus on anything other than the fact that his brain is no longer in control of the minute twitches of his arms and legs and fingers and toes.
He tries to open his mouth—to breathe, to protest, to scream—and the darkness pours down his throat like an oil slick. His vision goes impossibly blacker, and he tries to scrape together enough coherent thought to plea for release, but he can’t quite seem to manage it. Distantly, he hears John say, “Arthur, there’s something here,” his voice tinny and crackling and far too loud, like Arthur has stuck his head in a Victrola, and—
And it’s too much.
Arthur snaps, and he lets himself drift.
(Maybe it’s appropriate, that it feels like drowning.)
But Arthur does not drown. The waves ebb and flow, and Arthur ebbs and flows with them, and he doesn’t see the tsunami until it’s upon him. It strikes him in the chest, pushing him violently forward, crashing his vulnerable form into building after building after building, and it hurts, it hurts, it hurts, and—
And Arthur wakes with a scream stuck in his throat, white-hot agony radiating through his right arm, and John’s hand clasped tightly over his mouth.
“Arthur!” John hisses. “Don’t. Say. Anything. We’re safe for now, but it’s hunting us.”
Arthur sort of wants to bite John’s hand, but he feels like he’s been—well, like he’s been dropped off the side of a cliff. So he lets his head thunk against the stone floor he’s lying on, and after a moment, John removes his hand. “I,” John says, then stops. “Are you—?” Stops again. “Should we…?” Another pause, longer. Then: “I’m sorry. That I … took control again. But you would have died.”
Arthur huffs through his nose and reaches over to deliver a strongly worded pinch to the back of John’s hand. John flinches and hisses, jerking his hand away. “Do you want to know how long it took us to hit the bottom after you fell? Do you want to know what we landed on? Your spine would have snapped in half, followed quickly by your skull. And then…” John shudders. “And then there was that … thing. This is the first chance I’ve had to … to withdraw.” A pause. “I think, though … while I was … well. I had more time to … feel whatever this is. And I think I might be able to … I understand it more now, to an extent. I might not need to be … fully attached. Or complete.”
Well, what the fuck does that mean? “So you can control it?” Arthur hisses, and John goes to clap a hand over his mouth, but it’s too late; there’s movement outside wherever it is they’re hiding, the garbled speech of something Arthur finds himself very grateful that he cannot see.
“In the ceiling,” John says urgently. “There’s a crack, big enough for us to fit through. I … I think if I help, we can make it.”
“Help?” Arthur whispers.
“Take control again. Just—”
“Absolutely fucking not.”
“—Just of your hands and feet!”
“Absolutely fucking not!”
“You would rather die?”
Arthur thinks about suffocation, then thinks about being torn apart by the monster outside. “Yes,” he snaps, and then, after a moment: “… Fine. Where’s the crack?”
“A bit to your left. It’s … it’s going to be a bit of a squeeze,” John adds apologetically.
Arthur grits his teeth. “I’ll be fine.”
“Sure,” John says, and he lets Arthur climb.
Arthur’s fingers struggle to keep their grip on the jagged stone, his feet scrabbling for any sort of foothold. At first, he thinks John isn’t going to help after all, that he’s realized Arthur doesn’t need it. Then, his hand slips, just for a moment, before—
It’s like dunking his hand in ice water, if water had the consistency of thick glue. Arthur instinctively goes to shake it off, but his hand doesn’t respond to the command his brain sends it. Instead, it reaches up, pulling his arm with it, and digs into the stone, sending small chunks skittering down the side of the wall. Then, his foot does the same.
Cold begins to seep through Arthur, spreading from his hands and feet to his ankles, his wrists, his elbows and knees. He shudders, and his body keeps climbing, and John says, “Is this … are you okay?”
“Fuck you,” Arthur says, and then nothing more as the rock begins to close in around him.
John huffs but falls silent as he continues to pull Arthur along through the crack in the stone. It’s narrow, incredibly so, and Arthur can’t tell if the squeezing in his chest is due to the physical pressure of the stone against him or his own rapidly mounting anxiety. He tries to modulate his breathing, to not give away the fact that this is all rapidly becoming far too much, but it’s hard to hide from someone who occupies the same body as you.
“Breathe, Arthur,” John says, voice low and deep, an attempt at soothing. “We’re almost there. Just breathe.”
The cold hits Arthur’s chest, crystalizing around his lungs and heart, and Arthur gasps, “Stop. Just—just stop.”
“A few more seconds. I can see the top.”
Arthur’s vision begins to turn that impossible black, and his hands continue to draw him inch by excruciating inch through the fissure, and he is absolutely certain that he’s about to pass out. Maybe this time he won’t wake and John will puppet around his limp and unresponsive body, like he had when he’d put his hands around Parker’s throat and squeezed.
Had it felt like this? Had Arthur been floating and aware, feeling his own hands draining the life out of his best friend? Or had it been like the fall, consumed entirely and utterly removed from his own body’s experience of the world?
If John put his hands to Arthur’s throat, right now, would Arthur even be able to stop him?
“We’re almost there,” John says, and Arthur can feel the world opening back up around his head and shoulders. His numb hands drag him out of the crack in the stone, and he wants to respond, but his brain feels like it’s been soaked in molasses and then frozen solid. It’s so dark, so cold, so helpless, Parker, Parker had been helpless, his body cool and still beneath Arthur’s hands as he’d dragged it into the closet, and Bella was the same as she lay in the morgue, Faroe squirming and crying as Arthur held her in his arms, Faroe, Faroe, a floor slowly soaking through with water, nothing but the cold and the dark and a horrible rushing in Arthur’s ears, a hand turning off the tap, a muffled voice, saying his name, spitting it, screaming it, Arthur, how could you, Arthur, what have you done, Arthur, you monster, Arthur, it should have been you, Arthur, I will never forgive you, Arthur, Arthur, Arthur—
“Arthur!” John growls, and Arthur comes to with a gasp, feeling very much like he’s just gotten done drowning at the bottom of a very cold, very deep lake. He kneels on—whatever he’s kneeling on, dry-heaves, then drops his head to the ground beneath him, forehead kissing cool stone.
“Are you…?” John begins, then stops. “…You’re crying.”
Fuck. Arthur scrubs a hand across his eyes and it comes away wet. “Let’s just get out of this fucking place.” He attempts to get to his feet, stumbles, catches himself, and stands on slightly unsteady legs. “Which way?”
John hesitates, and Arthur knows him well enough by now to recognize the unasked questions in his silence. But in the end, all John says is, “To the right. There’s a path that leads around the edge of the pit.”
And they carry on.
. . .
The third time that John takes control of Arthur’s body, he tries to kill him.
Arthur doesn’t know what stops him, in the end. He never knows much of anything after the cold sets in, his brain slowly liquifying into a puddle of inky darkness that he’s certain will one day be permanent. He’s not entirely sure it isn’t already carving away pieces of him, leaving him a little bit more unstable and weak every time he comes back to himself. He hasn’t felt well since he first woke up disoriented on the floor of his office, so it’s hard to determine how much of his current state is the journey continuing to take its toll on him and how much is something worse.
He certainly isn’t able to put up a fight when John snarls and floods through every inch of Arthur’s body in a single tidal-wave instant. He doesn’t even have time to take a breath before he’s choking. It’s quicker this time—the snap of his mind trying and failing to make sense of the sensations sweeping over him. Arthur’s last thought should probably be one of rage or fear or desperation. You bastard. You used her against me. You lied. You’re going to kill me. After everything, you’re going to kill me. Maybe I deserve it, but not to you. Not like this.
Instead, what chases him into the roiling storm of John’s consumption is a memory: laughter, joy, tearing off pieces of bread and throwing them to the ducks. A small, chubby hand clutching tightly at his.
And then Arthur is lost.
But John does not kill him. Perhaps he can’t when they’re like this. Arthur doesn’t know how it works, and sitting at the bottom of a pit with a body that does not know how not to ache anymore and white-hot rage curling in his chest, he has absolutely no desire to ask.
“This is your fault,” Arthur snarls. “All of your talk about how you can control it, how you’re so powerful when you fucking consume me, and you couldn’t even outrun a few goddamn monsters.”
“My fault?” John’s voice is thick with venom and disdain. Arthur wants to wrap his hands around John’s neck and strangle him. “You’re the one who let the King trick you. You’re the one who got us stuck in here in this—this fucking pit, where I can’t—I can’t—”
Arthur feels cold lick against the edges of him—John trying and failing to stretch himself beyond the confines of Arthur’s skin. “I can’t fucking do anything!” John growls. His voice distorts, going ragged and raw and monstrous in a way that makes Arthur shudder. “We’re drugged and chained and trapped, and we wouldn’t be here if you had just trusted me.”
“I am never,” Arthur snaps, pushing himself up into a sitting position, “going to trust you again. Ever. Not after—”
Arthur chokes on the end of his sentence. It hurts too much to think about it, much less to say it. Like a gunshot to the chest.
“Not ever,” he repeats, quieter. Colder.
There’s a long moment of silence. When John speaks again, his voice is more subdued, the heat of anger leeched from it and replaced with something timid and small. Arthur might almost call it regret if he didn’t know better. “Arthur, I didn’t mean—”
“Shut up,” Arthur hisses. “Not one goddamn word. You hear me? I don’t want to talk to you.”
“Arthur, I—”
“I said,” Arthur grinds out, “not a fucking word.”
John’s silence is loud enough that it makes Arthur want to scream, but he says nothing more. Arthur lies down again, rolls over onto his side, and stares into the yawning blackness where his vision used to be. Yet another thing John has stolen from him. He lets the silence build, thicken, and harden into something rigid and brittle.
He closes his eyes, exhales slowly, and digs his fingernails into the palm of his hand in search of an easier pain.
. . .
The last time is … different.
It’s entirely possible it won’t be the last time, of course. But something about this city, empty and silent and dead, feels final in a way that makes Arthur’s stomach turn over with nerves. Either they’ll escape the Dreamlands, and John’s ability to manifest will likely vanish, or they won’t, and…
Well. Either way, this feels like the end.
“You said,” Arthur begins, then stops.
“Yes?”
Arthur doesn’t know how to broach the subject. Doesn’t even know if he actually wants to. “When you … manifest,” he says cautiously. “You said you could … that you didn’t have to exist in the same space as me, as it were. That you could be … separate. Not fully attached.”
“I … I haven’t tried it yet, but … yes. I think I can.”
Arthur stops walking and takes a deep breath in through his nose. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“I’m … giving you permission, as it were. To—to try to be separate. Not—not whatever it is that you’ve done before. Just … just to try.”
John’s hesitation is audible. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
Arthur huffs. “No? Frankly, every time you’ve manifested has been horrible, and I’m surprised it hasn’t killed me yet. Perhaps it’s not capable of doing so. But we don’t know what we’re going to face here, and I … I want us to be prepared. Just in case.”
“I…” John hesitates again. “I promised that I wouldn’t. After…”
Jesus. “I’m aware,” Arthur says, exasperated. “And like I said, I don’t want you taking control of me, now or ever again. But if you can … if you can be distinct, like another appendage of my body rather than a puppeteer of it, then—I don’t know, John. Are you going to try or aren’t you?”
“I’m just trying to—” John cuts off with a frustrated huff. “… All right. I’ll try.”
Arthur opens his mouth to ask if he should sit, but before he can, he feels something deep within him shudder and shift. The space behind his eyes begins to tighten, like a cluster headache of ever-increasing magnitude, and Arthur grits his teeth and tries to ride the wave of pain as it crests and crests and crests.
It breaks, and—
It’s like a dam has burst. Something Arthur doesn’t have the right words to describe—formless yet corporeal, made of smoke and grasping tendrils and icy black water—floods out from behind his eyes, gushing and clawing and tearing, dripping down his cheeks like oily tears. It’s agonizing, agonizingly wrong, and Arthur wants to scream but it gets trapped in his throat, blocking his airway until he swallows it back down again.
He thinks he falls to his knees. He’s not entirely sure. Distantly, he registers that his body is still his own, and were he in possession of all of his faculties, he would be able to move it unimpeded.
He takes in a ragged breath, shudders, and falls still as the wave of strange bad wrong finally settles into a dull, throbbing ache.
“I … I think it worked,” John says. His voice reverberates off the stone beneath them and the buildings to either side, and it’s jarring, to hear him like this for the first time. Externally. He sounds … smaller, somehow, which Arthur wasn’t expecting. Like he’s just out of reach.
Arthur opens his mouth, manages a single, “Ngh,” and then takes a few deep, heaving breaths.
“Arthur? Are you okay?”
Then, John moves. Whatever is tethering him to Arthur moves as well, and the sensation of a hundred tiny threads sliding around the perimeter of his eye, feather-light and slithering like worms or snakes or eels or maggots or tiny tadpoles digging their teeth into his soft underbelly, overwhelms him.
Arthur doubles over and promptly vomits.
“Oh fuck,” John says. “Do you want me to—?”
He moves again, and Arthur retches. He manages to swallow down the second wave of bile, but only just. “Stop—” he tries, then gags again. “Moving.”
John goes still. Arthur takes deep breaths with his head between his knees, one hand pressed tightly over his mouth, until it no longer feels like his stomach is going to turn inside out. When his breathing finally levels out, he digs his fingernails into the tops of his thighs and says, “I don’t—I don’t think this is tenable.”
“… Do you want me to stop?”
Arthur grimaces at the thought of the dam bursting again but in reverse. “Just—just give me a moment.”
John gives him a moment.
Arthur breathes. Lifts his hands to scrub at his eyes, then stops himself. Tells himself not to blink, then realizes he’s been doing it this whole time and nothing has happened. Experimentally, he moves his head. There’s no pain, no sickening sensation. Nothing.
Hmm.
“Can you—?” Arthur says, then hesitates. “Just—just a little bit. But … can you try moving again?”
“Are you sure?”
Arthur laughs wryly. “No. But it’s that or sit here for the rest of our lives.”
“I … okay.”
John hesitates a moment more. Then, slowly and delicately, he shifts.
It’s horrible. It’s like what Arthur imagines it might feel like to carve one’s eye out with a whisk, if one ignored the pain involved in such a task. He presses his lips very tightly together, breathes through his nose, and then grits out, “Again.”
“Are you sure?” John repeats. “You don’t—this doesn’t seem very comfortable for you.”
Arthur laughs again humorlessly. “No, it is not. But we need to know if it’s an option, if I can just—just get used to how it feels. It doesn’t hurt, necessarily, and I’m still … I’m still myself. So. Again.”
John huffs, but he doesn’t argue. He moves, again and again, just a little bit each time, and Arthur grits his teeth against the waves of nausea and digs his nails further into his palm until he’s sure the crescent moons they leave will be permanent.
He almost doesn’t notice when something brushes against his right hand, so focused on keeping himself functional. He does notice, though, when that something—cold, amorphous, tangible, fingers tipped with sharp claws and made up of too many joints—carefully uncurls his hand. “I think we should stop,” John says, and his hand—because that’s what it is, Arthur realizes—presses Arthur’s palm up on the top of his thigh, forcing his fingers to splay wide and relaxed. “You’re bleeding.”
Is he? He hadn’t noticed. “I’m fine.”
John huffs, irritated. “Sure.”
Arthur pulls his hand away from John’s and flexes his fingers. “It’s fine. Keep going.”
“No.”
“We need to know that we can do this if we need to.”
“And I think we’ve established that we can. There’s no use in putting you through this further unless strictly necessary.”
“Then—I don’t know, just—stay like this. Then you don’t have to—”
“I can’t. You’re bleeding.”
Arthur scoffs. “My hand will be just fine, John.”
“I’m not talking about your fucking hand.”
Then, John moves—really moves, quick and sharp and twisting—and Arthur can’t help it: he vomits again. He’s distantly aware that he’s clenched his hand into a fist again, but he can’t even feel the pain of it beneath the violent heaving of his stomach.
That same hand—John’s hand—slips underneath his chin and tilts his head gently up. Another brushes a careful thumb beneath his eyes. “Your eyes are bleeding.”
Arthur, who had been attributing the wetness on his cheeks to tears he refused to acknowledge, stiffens. “Oh.”
“I’m … I’m worried that if we continue, you may … lose them altogether.”
Arthur exhales, then lets out a noise that might be a sob or might be a laugh. Maybe both. “Does it matter? They’re already lost.”
“We don’t know that. When we’re … when we’re separated, you might get them back. That won’t happen if they’ve melted out of your head.” A pause. “And I don’t … I don’t know if I’ll still be able to see. If they’re gone. My sight is … it’s not quite the same as yours, but I … I don’t know. I don’t know if the risk is worth it.”
Arthur almost says that he doesn’t care. That he’s already accepted that his vision is as good as gone. That, hell—he’s sort of accepted the fact that they’re never going to find a way to separate anyway. But through the nausea and the aching and the disgust, he registers the slight nervous tremor in John’s voice. He also remembers how much John hates it when it’s dark. How urgently he asks Arthur to find a light.
Arthur sags. “… Okay. Okay. It’s … you’re right. It’s not worth the risk. We’ll find another way to—to survive. To win.”
The hand shifts, cradling the side of Arthur’s face. Arthur would almost call it tender if he were willing to let himself linger on that thought for more than the single second it takes to discard it. “We always do.”
Going in is no easier than going out, but Arthur weathers it. When it’s over and done with, as he kneels on the cobblestone road, trying to catch his breath, a warm and more familiar hand brushes the remaining blood from his cheeks. “It was worth a shot,” John says quietly, his voice once again tucked within the confines of Arthur’s skull.
Arthur exhales, forces his hands to relax, and staggers to his feet. It only takes him a few tries to keep his footing, to coax his knees into bearing his weight. John, thankfully, doesn’t comment on it. Instead, he says, “The road before us is still empty, save for a few smashed-in windows and what looks to be trails of blood. Should we continue further in?”
Arthur shoulders his bag with a wince and sets his jaw. “Lead the way.”