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lobelia321Ichor, contd and ended
Part: 3/3
Ichor, Part 1/3 and Header / Ichor, Part 2/3
Part 3
John coughed up water, and more water. He seemed made of water. The airbead was limp and shrivelled, sucked dry of its last dram of oxygen. The sand frothed under John's hands. The pads of his fingers had lost their sense of touch; they were corrugated and spongy soft.
He coughed up another trickle of the world's ocean and then collapsed sideways onto the ground. His eyes streamed. He tried to focus his one working pupil. A surging patchwork of dark and light imprinted itself on his retina. The ground oscillated beneath him: were these quakes, the after-shocks of the eruption? Or simply his body's memory of hours and hours of floating in the waves?
"Ken?" His voice came out slurred.
There was no reply.
John struggled to his elbows. The wraith lay slumped on its right side, just behind John on the beach. Only its lidless left eye was visible. The eye was rigid and blank.
"Ken?" John repeated. "Wraith?"
He shook the wraith by the shoulder. Its body rolled over onto its back, and the right side of its face hove into view.
"Jesus," whispered John.
He rubbed his good eye and blinked but still the sight remained the same. The belt around the wraith's head was gone. The wraith's right spiracle had oozed open; the skin on that whole side of its visage had come away. It looked as if something had eaten up its skull from the inside, like acid burning a slow hole. The wraith's face gaped open from just below its eye to its chin. Gleet, pus and a viscous mucus seeped from the wound. There was a smell of dead things.
"Ken," said John, trying to steady his voice. "Wraith. Come on." He shook the wraith's shoulder again, tentatively this time. "Don't bail out on me now. Not after all this."
He fumbled for the wraith's wrist. There was no pulse. "No, no," he said. "No."
Used to the wraith's normal horse-strength heartbeat, it took him long moments of held breath before he finally located a faint quivering, a minute distension of the artery.
He tore off what remained of his T-shirt sleeve and dabbed at the discharge on the wraith's cheek.
"Come on," he muttered. "Do your thing, your self-healing thing. Seal up this hole in your face. Come on, stay with me here."
The wraith didn't move. Its pulse was a weak beacon, barely there.
John coughed again. He wanted to throw up. His throat ached; he hadn't had anything to drink in days, weeks, aeons; time had stopped under the surface of the sea. His own pulse jumped and knocked erratically.
The wraith's skin was cold, like a reptile's; John remembered it strong and hot. He clawed at the buckles of its coat. In all their months together on the island, he'd never seen the wraith's torso but here it was, pale green and glabrous, nipple-less, navel-less. He pressed his hands down on its sternum. He pinched its broad nose, pried apart its lips and tried to recall how mouth-to-mouth worked.
He kept breathing down the wraith's throat. He kept pumping the wraith's lungs.
A soft hiss issued from the gash on the wraith's cheek, like air escaping a punctured tire.
"Oh, shit. Oh, Jesus." He covered up the hole with his hand but even so, he could feel the air venting against his numbed skin. Instead of resuscitating the wraith, he'd done something to its respiratory system, and now the wraith was bleeding air, and there was nothing he could think to do.
"Come on, wraith, for the love of..."
But he didn't know whose love to invoke. God, yes -- but John hadn't called on any god in decades; there was no god; god was an expletive and nothing more, and John was left alone, on an island in outer space, and there was nothing and no one, no one at all.
Mist palled John's right eye. He swiped at it, helplessly; and then angrily. He moved his hands over the wraith's bare chest, along its neck, trying to pinpoint a pulse.
Then he remembered his own chest and its five-pronged wound.
"That's what you need to do. You need to lick this shut. Wraith, come on, all you need to do is..." He prised apart the wraith's set of teeth. He pushed his fingers into the wraith's mouth and felt around for its tongue, and he pulled that out past the teeth.
The tongue was long and slim but not that long. It was not long enough to reach the wraith's own cheek.
"You've got something," muttered John. "You've got something in your spit, haven't you, some kind of something, enzyme, healing sap. But how to get at it. How to get at it..."
He leaned down over the wraith's face. The wraith smelled of sea and salt only. Its own wraith stench was as faint as its heartbeat. John dug his fingers into the wraith's mouth, drew them along the insides of its cheeks, sank them into the fleshy pockets of the wraith's gums. He licked the tip of the wraith's tongue. He sucked it. He licked his own fingers, licked off the thin film of sticky residue, smeared it onto his own tongue, and then he bent across and licked the wraith's oozing cheek.
He licked all around the wound, willing it to close up. He dived in for more mouth mucus, mixed wraith spit with his own spit. He chafed the wraith's wrist, rubbed his gummy fingers over the hole in the wraith's cheek, into the hole. And at one point, swore and wiped his own eye because how stupid would that be, to re-infect the wraith with his own salt.
The wraith tasted of death, and the wraith's wound tasted of death; it made John dizzy, and after a while, he thought he would faint and die himself but it didn't matter because he would die, anyway, and then a shudder went through the wraith.
The wraith spluttered and retched and convulsed in spasms. Its pupils shivered into life.
When John lifted his head, he saw, through one throbbing eye, that the wraith's cheek was a ghastly colour and covered in pockmarks but that it was whole. It was healed.
He slumped down on the wraith's chest and fell into a mindless coma.
***
When John came to, stars burnt up the firmament. The cloud of ash was gone.
"Wraith?" he said.
The wraith didn't stir. Its heartbeat was steady against John's temple.
"Wraith," John whispered. He tried to sit up but couldn't. "Listen. I haven't had anything to drink in days. Two, or three, I don't even know. Come on, wake up. Make some water."
The wraith lay inert. Waves rushed the shore.
John didn't think he would be able to move but then he did. He crouched in the sand. It was all that he could think of: the syringe. He prodded the wraith until, after many attempts, it lurched to one side. He bunched up the back of its coat and tugged at its unbelted trousers. They weren't real trousers, it turned out; they were some sort of leg covering, knotted and lashed at the groins. John managed to pull off a flap over the wraith's lower spine and expose its lower back.
The wraith had buttocks, like a human man, and yes, in between the buttocks, there nestled a small rucked opening: the cloaca.
John, desperate and faint, crooked his finger into the wraith's anus, worked it up and touched a hard surface. The vial! He wormed another finger up, and then wept with frustration because he couldn't get a purchase. He curled in a third finger and widened the rectum. He managed to pincer two fingers around the base of the syringe, and very slowly, very gingerly, with the shivering patience of despair, he extracted it.
He looked at the vial with a dazed eye. It glinted in the starlight. He shook it.
It was empty.
"God," he said. "Oh god, what now?"
His temples pounded. He rolled the wraith back onto its back. He pulled at the front of the wraith's leggings. A leather panel flapped open, and there they were. The wraith's dual penes.
John looked at them, lolling palely against hairless skin.
And then he bent down and took hold of one of them between his thumb and forefinger.
He massaged the penis with the tips of his fingers. He kneaded its soft small shaft until it stood up against his palm; the other penis drooped to one side. It was a pointy thing, slim and hard like a tuber, lightly barbed at its tip. The scarifications encircled it in delicate relief.
When it twitched, John took it in his mouth and sucked.
He closed his eyes and sucked, tasting frog spawn and formic acid, until the penis throbbed once, and then he quickly upended the syringe over it, kept on working it with his fingers and felt the vial gain weight in his hand.
It worked. I don't believe it.
Thank you, god.
He clamped the lid down on the syringe and fell back, sucking in air.
He clutched the vial in his hands and waited. Water trickled out of his earholes. The stars turned, Kuratka, the Claw, the Sailing Queen. He waited for the alchemy to work.
He didn't know how long it would take, spinning gold from straw, straw from gold. He tried to remember; his thoughts were confused. He couldn't see the contents in the dark.
At dawn, he peered into the tube. It was clear. It looked like water.
He opened the syringe and put it to his mouth and drank in needy greedy gulps.
But then he stopped. He swayed to his knees and pushed the vial deep into the wraith's mouth. The wraith's adam's apple bobbed. The wraith swallowed.
John fell back into the sand. The water had been glorious. But it had been barely an ounce, and that wasn't enough. He tried to speculate about the wraith's re-load time, and wondered if he could maybe activate the other penis, and then the skies reeled and he passed out yet again.
***
It was the scent that woke him. It was a scent he hadn't tasted in months, in years: the mellow sweetness of honey, intermingled with an aroma of crushed sage, jasmine and lavender.
He sat up and gazed in wonder.
Flowers. Flowers everywhere.
As far as his one eye could see, the island was covered in flowers. He crawled over to the nearest clump: a profusion of small star-shaped blossoms, and another type, with petals growing upwards in the shape of a cup, and within the cup, gorgeous and wet, drops of gold-coloured nectar.
He tore up the flowers as fast as his hands would move. He stuffed them into his mouth whole, chewing on leaves and sepals and petals and whatever else they consisted of, and letting their sweet, sweet juices coat his throat. He got up and he ran into the meadows around him. Here was another kind, opulent and purple, filled to the brim with cordial. Its stem was fleshy, and when he tore it open with his teeth, a milky substance poured out and into his mouth.
He ran further. He threw himself down among the blooms and wallowed in their splendour. He had been transported into a dream. The sun was radiant. He was drunk with it all.
He dug his hands into the ground, and it was thick, crumbly soil. The flowers were burnt at the roots, and he marvelled to think that all this time, all these notches, their seeds had been buried in this desert sand, waiting, patiently waiting for an eruption and the stimulant of lava.
He whirled around, and there, not far from the shore, sat the copse.
The lava had destroyed the outermost trees but spared the rest. The calendar tree was gone, and with it his binoculars and his long-dead radio. It made sense. Why else would trees grow just there? The remaining tree clump was protected, in a huddled spot between two runnels. Ember nuts glinted fatly on singed branches.
John bent back his head and laughed wild laughs.
The wraith was there, alive, about. It had made its way to the copse and to shelter. It presented him with a full syringe, in shaky hands. "Keep it," laughed John, "drink it, drink it all. I've got plenty."
Rose-coloured crustaceans clambered out of the sea and staggered up the beach in their hundreds. They mauled the blossoms with their fragile claws and stuck their probosces into pools of nectar.
John whooped with delight. He scampered into the creatures' midst, scattering bodies, shell scraping against shell; he scooped them up, whole armfuls of them. He tore off their heads and pulled out their raw white flesh with his teeth, and when he'd had enough, he darted over to the other side of the island, full of energy, and found the fumaroles, and found some newly-opened fissures, and on those volcanic stoves he cooked more of the little crayfish -- although they weren't really crayfish; they had eleven legs, not eight, and strange facetted eyes, feeding tubes like butterflies; but they tasted divine, absolutely divine. Never, ever had John eaten anything so heavenly.
He staggered back home, crushing flowers and animals underfoot. "Drink, drink," he called to the wraith, slumped in the shade.
But then he realised what was really the matter, and still laughing, he scudded to his knees and pulled off his T-shirt. "You look like shit," he said. "You must be starving."
***
Glutted on nectar and ambrosia, John, in the nick of noon, put his hand to his crotch.
Sand crunched. The wraith stood by, and John took his hand away again.
The wraith settled down next to John. It stretched its leather legs out in front.
The air was still. The wraith didn't move; it stayed in John's part of the copse. Coal-seams of scent wafted across the trees.
"You elicited the elixir of life," the wraith said.
"Ah," said John. "Yes."
"You elicited it in a very unusual fashion. You applied your mouth to the penis and you sucked upon it."
"So you did notice that? I thought you were out cold-- Hey! Hang on--"
In the blink of an eye, the wraith had taken John's cock out through the slitted fly of his boxer shorts, and in another blink, it had bent forwards and wrapped its long tongue around John's glans.
"Stop," said John. "I told you before--"
"You did this," said the wraith, its voice muffled by its own tongue, and then the wraith tongue slipped up and down the shaft of John's cock, all the way from the very tip to the very root, and John's cock hardened in surprise.
He tried to squirm away. The grip of the wraith's tongue tightened, like a strand of seaweed twined around John's cock. The tongue probed. It was a prehensile tubeworm, sandpaper soft, slimy and undulant.
The sand rolled. John stared into the ember fronds.
"This provides a gratifying sensation for you," the wraith said, releasing its tongue.
"No," said John.
"There is evidence to the contrary. In humans, the erection of the male genitalia betokens carnal pleasure."
"Shut up; no," said John. He didn't move.
"You are lying," said the wraith, as if observing a fact about the weather.
John stared at the spiky sky. "Yes," he said.
And gave up. And gave in.
And if you gave in, then what did it matter? Then it's just the sun on your head and the sky in your eye and the slithery muscles of an alien tongue around your private parts. Snaking, sliding, probing. Trying out the slit at the top of your cock but withdrawing when you flinch. Curling around the base; shimmying along the ridge behind your balls.
Continuing along, one hand pushing you to the sand and clawing at the boxers. And you, oh you, you lift your hips obligingly, and the impossibly long tongue worms its way all the way back and up and into your arsehole.
John was on his back, with his knees spread wide and his hands above his head, clutching the trunk of the embertree, and the tongue slid in deep, so deep, so fucking deep; it was unbelievable what it was doing to the insides of John's rectum.
Honey-sweet sweat broke out on his forehead and in his armpits. In the confusion, he bit his own cheek instead of his tongue. He didn't know how to behave. Sound strangled in his throat.
It was too strange to be strange.
Further than anybody, further than anything, the tongue was in deep. It was soft and hard at the same time, taut and malleable, nosing along the corrugations of his guts. It moulded its hardness to the walls of John's insides. It moved in, and it moved out, and his arsehole closed around the tongue like a sucking mouth.
Fuck, he thought or moaned, fuck, oh fuck.
Then the wraith's hand closed around John's cock. The wraith's palm pulsed against his flesh, and in the palm, there was the feeding mouth, a thick moisture, a rippling like an octopus's arse, a suction pad around his glans.
Like a cunt.
Like a cunt fucking his cock.
John held onto the tree with both his hands. He held on for dear life. But it wasn't life that was sapping out of him, it was something else; it was come, pumping out of him in deep gulps.
He clamped a hand across his face and tried to stop the sounds falling out of him, the fuck, the god, the oh sweet heaven, but they tumbled out regardless.
His orgasm dumped him in zero gravity. Worms shot out from his balls, up through urethra, rectum, sphincter, all the way to his left eyeball.
Multiple suns orbited behind his eyelids. The sky pulsed.
His cock shrank. He could feel its tip nudge right into the wraith's oozing hand-mouth.
"Stop," he said. "Stop."
God, he'd come into the wraith's feeding mouth.
"No, really," he gasped, "you've got to stop now. It's over."
The wraith's tongue slithered out.
"That," said John and lowered his shaking knees. "That..."
The wraith sat up. "You cannot continue?"
"Hah." John laughed, a short drunken laugh.
"When wraith mate," said the wraith, "they ejaculate for many hours."
"Really?" John pulled himself into a vaguely upright position. Sand breezed across his naked thighs.
"It is a failing in your kind. The brevity of the human climax is doubtless one of the causes for the diminishing birth rate of your species."
"Yeah, right." John laughed again. "That must be something else, your wraith orgasm. And hey... can't you use that for making lots and lots of water?"
"Mating is a very different matter from producing water."
"Yeah," said John. "Yeah." He looked out across the flowers spreading to the horizon of his world.
The wraith lifted its palm and sniffed at it. "Interesting." It lapped John's come up with its slender tongue. A gossamer thread stretched between teeth and hand. "But not sustaining." John could think of nothing to say. "Now I shall make some water."
"Oh. You need a helping hand?" And then John burst out laughing again because life had spiralled into vortices of lunacy but it didn't matter, it didn't matter one whit for the entire island breathed the fragrance of orchids and the air rustled with the casings of crayfish.
He rolled out onto the sand and kept rolling into the zone of lava. He spread his arms and his bare legs and pressed his groin into the blossoms.
Some were wilting already but he didn't care. He was going to comb every inch of this damned beautiful island and he was going to find every last one of those seeds; he was going to shake the pips from the stamens of these flowers and plant them in the shade of the copse; he was going to collect lava from the cracks of the fissures and he was going to grow himself a fucking orchard of flowers, and he'd keep those little crayfish in a net-enclosed tank near the promontory and feed them on ember nuts and seabeans and he was never, ever going to be thirsty again.
Not once did it occur to him that this new plan did away with his need for the wraith's vial.
Not once did he ponder sneaking down to the sea at night and dousing the wraith in salt water until it dissolved into sand.
***
The crustaceans, one night, upped and scuttled down into the sea and disappeared into the deeps. The blossoms wilted. The sand reverted to its glinting black surface.
But a tiny field of flowers remained. That, and a small bevy of crayfish, swimming in circles among the promontory boulders, in a trough woven of seaweed and emberbark. John kept back a portion of his already minuscule daily water ration and used it to water his plants. He didn't expect anything to happen because this seemed to be a fire-responsive plant, and he had no fire. But within six notches, a scattering of buds did appear: tiny miracles.
"Pity you can't enjoy this," John said to the wraith and licked his fingers clean of the nectar and juices of oily lobster.
The wraith sat and massaged its genitals. It palpated the dual penes with the tips of its strong long fingers, stroking them like teats. Sandfleas darted from tree to tree.
John looked at the wraith penes, looked at the sea, looked at the wraith again.
They seemed to have moved beyond any notions of secrecy. Of modesty. Of shame.
Beyond shame. Beyond the pale.
"Here," John said. "Let me."
He pushed the wraith's talons aside and started pumping the penes himself with two hands, one thumb and finger on each of them. Everything was very still. Only the surf sucked at the sands. The wraith caught its elixir in the syringe and clamped the lid on.
John let go.
"And now," said the wraith, half-burying the upright vial in the sand, "it is time."
It placed its hand on John's bare chest and pulled forth the string of screams.
***
Fifteen notches later, the wraith, pale in the Mouthstar's shadows, was kneeling before John kneeling, and breathed on his forehead with its benthic voice.
"It has occurred to me," the wraith rasped, "that there may be a remedy for your distress during the feeding."
John couldn't see the wraith's face, and even if he had been able to, there was never any expression in the wraith's face, or at least none that he could read or understand.
"I have pondered this," continued the wraith. "It is not conducive to your health to suffer anguish. I cannot distract you psychically. But I can attempt to distract you physically."
"Well," said John. "I didn't know you cared."
"Your semen tasted of wraith," said the wraith, as if by way of explanation, yet John could not think what was being explained, and then his thinking yawed out of kilter because the wraith, without preliminaries, shifted to kneel behind John and pushed him forward. It pushed him just enough so that John's buttocks, bare in the hot night, parted by a fraction, and then the wraith drove its dual penes right in, both of them, right into the centre of John's arse.
Sand struck John's cheek and choked his tongue as he fell, open-mouthed and speechless, onto his elbows.
The twin organs crawled inside, stiff and smooth like the roots of a weed. They tapered like fingers. They slipped in without resistance as their barbed tips held open the entrance.
Once past John's sphincter, the penes fanned out, probing the cavity of human rectum.
There was no fucking as such, no pumping in and out. The wraith rested against John's arse, perfectly still. Only its penes moved inside him, and its breath hissed through its teeth, as if in pain. John's own breath veered in zigzags. His knees ached against the ground; his fingers clawed at sweaty granules. His loins moved of their own accord; they humped the sand in staccato bursts; they thrust up against the wraith's pelvis. The penes, like millipedes, palpated John's rectal walls.
The universe zeroed in on this sensation. John closed his eyes to block out vision; no, not vision, the night was black, the night was shining, eyes open, eyes closed, it made no difference. His brain reeled, and then shut itself off.
One of the penes looped round and round the walls; the other stroked spots with its snub-nose tip, spot after spot, until it touched the one spot, and John lost it, and new spots were made, and all of John was just one spreading spot.
He didn't know what was happening to him. Something was taking him apart, increment by increment, and then in great big gashes.
John howled primordially into the sand.
And then his howl flipped into a shriek as the wraith reached round from behind and dug its claws into John's chest.
It ripped him open. There were no thoughts to contain the world as it rushed in and out through the vortex at the centre of John's soul.
All went silent. The silence was eerie in contrast to what had been a ceaseless shriek, and mixed in with that shriek, which was John's shriek, had been the guttural roar of the wraith as it fed.
But now nothing.
The silence of utter death.
John was not frightened. He floated through a mute minute of nothing.
Somewhere in there blipped his orgasm, a grain lost in vastness.
But in the wake of that orgasm, riding its rippling slipstream, came a thought.
An alien thought, pointed like a snub-nose finger.
It lodged itself in John's head, and then gave a startled throb and blossomed out into something open and strange. A foreign presence opened his mind, unfolded him like a head of lettuce, peeling away leaf after leaf.
It was the wraith. It was inside his head.
It was an oil stain, spreading through the liquid of his self. It was foam, swirling through the fog of his mind. It was sharp like a lemon, bright like cymbals. Corridors opened out that had never been there before. Vistas. Vectors. The wash of stars.
Shadows moved and whispered. The shadowy shapes of wraith. And more wraith. Dimly felt as mulling murmurings. Sights he had never seen and had always known. The breath of the Mother all about him. The breath of home. The memories of a hundred others. Woven through it all, a terrible yearning.
Veering into their alien world, and then suddenly, he lurched into his own childhood, as if a trapdoor had been knocked through, and then another, and another, in bewildered succession. Odd unrelated snippets of memory, moments long forgotten. The goldfish frozen three feet from the surface of a winter pond. The smell of burn cream, applied to an electrified finger. The popping of ants' heads under the solar death ray of his magnifying glass. Pictures of a volcano, lava rolling -- but no, it was only television; and on he stuttered, wildly back and forth, interspersed with the murmurs of the wraith. The sound of the blue alarm clock. Folding paper airplanes and gluing paper clips into their snouts for increased speed. Ladybugs on his mother's grave. Stargates squelching, city lights, his hands like gloves on the mould of the Chair. And o my god, my life is flashing before my eyes, this is it this is it is this it O MY BRETHREN MY SIBLINGS Wherefore is this O THE SLIPSTREAM OF COMMUNION The beating home The long paths flying on the shoulders of time Mingling Merging Amalgam of HOME NEVERMORE TO BE O FOOD ON THIS PIN O HUMAN TO UNITE
YE
O
***
John was a kite, flying through the infinite blue, and the wraith was the tail, clinging to his trajectory. John was the tail, holding onto a buoy in the puzzling cataract of woven worlds.
And sometimes the wraith was a point of certitude, and sometimes the wraith was baffled, aghast, unsure, torn between delight and fear.
John's own thoughts swam through a haze of alien realms. Foggy chimerae drifted along on waves of somnambulance. But the wraith's presence, his wraith, was clear as a gong, an enveloping grotto of branching memories and impressions, a questing, restless diligence, not at all the sluggish creature of the copse.
John gave into it. It drew him in. This oneiric weaving in and out of the other and of the self, this glide through the interstices of selves. The oddest thing was that the more John lost himself in the caverns of the wraith, the more he came up against his own being, but a being transformed and strangely scumbled, permeated and permeating, himself echoed back from within the wraith's mental vessels. There was all the substance taken from him during feedings and now part of the wraith's own make-up; and at the same time, the enzyme suffusing John's own self with parts of wraith.
John forgot how to speak. He forgot what was the point of speaking. He forgot about the gulf between identities that can only be bridged with words.
He forgot words.
The wraith's name sounded in his heart like a breve.
***
Sound slammed back into his eardrums: surf, wind, breath, the scrape of sand under fingernails, blood in his temples.
He was helpless on the ground. There was grit on his tongue. Oceans of liquid oozed from his anus which throbbed like an open mouth; streams of air were sucked into his innards.
Someone picked him up and whacked him against bark so hard that he began to bleed out of his nostrils.
Dizzy and sick, he crashed to the ground.
There was ragged breathing. There was more blood; John's chest was bathed in it. His eyes were open but there was nothing to see. Something batted his foot: it was his own hand, spasming uncontrollably.
He was turned over with brutal force. A moist tongue rasped across the wounds in his chest, viciously, deep into them, suturing them, and it hurt; wild pain returned; and John screamed.
A weight slapped him across his bleeding nose. John shouted again but more of a recognisable yell this time, more from an everyday sensation of pain.
Someone forced a crushed flower between his lips. Nectar squirted down his throat, just a few short drops. He gagged even so, coughed, spluttered up gobs of mucus.
Another slap, and he managed to groan, "What the hell, cut that out."
"You are alive?" It was the wraith's physical voice.
"Yes, fuck." John retched up a gobbet of blood.
The sand rearranged itself as the wraith stood up abruptly.
"What?" said John. Then he blacked out.
***
He awoke, smeared in blood, sand, semen, enzyme, and wraith ejaculate. He stank of life in its myriad rankness. Life.
Life.
He crawled to the shore on all fours and sprawled in the hard wet sand, letting the surf stumble over him. Then he dragged himself a few feet further up, into the black heat of castor-sugar sand. There he lay, in a stunned trance.
Inside his head, the wraith still marvelled and moved.
By the time John rose on unsteady feet, the sun was high. It had burned sore patches onto his bare buttocks.
He blinked into the aching glare and tottered up the incline until he reached the copse and slumped down in its shade.
Sandfleas flitted. He needed to tend his orchard. He needed to go and prepare mud. He couldn't move.
Sandflea-thoughts flitted around his brain. The wraith wuthered through his psychic conduits.
And there it was: the bodily bulk of the wraith. It loomed over him, breathing raggedly. John could see its hands, at the level of his eyes. They were streaked with blood.
John's gaze lolled.
He opened his mouth. No sound came.
"John," said the wraith with the voice of its throat. "John Sheppard."
"What," John tried. His speech was slurred. It had the timbre of an old man's voice. "What in hell was that?"
The wraith spoke, in a voice of tar. "I forewent responsibility."
"How," mumbled John. He struggled to focus his one eye. He was astounded to find that his body obeyed his will. His hands moved in soft sand. Rose-coloured spots danced among the fronds; it must be evening time.
The wraith was a silhouette against the sun's waning.
"I almost fed in full. I..." The wraith faltered. John could feel it faltering in his mind. "I did not know what was going to happen."
The sun rumbled.
"You fed" said John. "Almost in full?" His thoughts were long strings; they refused to be harnessed.
"We will not do this again," spoke the wraith, and John couldn't be sure whether he was hearing the words on the wind or reverberating in his own head. "I do not know why this happened," said the wraith. "In truth, I am..." The waves curled and withdrew, curled and withdrew. "...disconcerted by the loss of my control."
John shrugged. He had shoulders; they shrugged. He had a body. He had palms; minute grains of sand clung to the sweat on his palms. The world was underneath him, a solid earth.
"You must tend to your feeding," said the wraith. "It is important. I... do not have water."
"No water?" said John. Where had the wraith's water gone? "Ah."
They had forgotten themselves. They had got lost in each other.
The wraith abruptly turned. It staggered down the beach.
"Wait," croaked John. He jumped up, and he could. His body was dizzy with enzyme. He bounded after the wraith. Stars flew from his hair. Contrails of speed streamed along the surfaces of his arms. "I'll get..." There was the orchard. There was the pool.
Three-quarters of his flowers had died.
"How long?" he asked the wraith. "How many..." He gathered his language. "How many years?"
He touched his beard and his neck. There was a fold under his chin that hadn't been there before. He looked at his hands, at the liver-coloured spots on the backs of his hands. He looked down at his naked chest, at his hollow belly, at the ribs like spokes along his torso, at the thatch of pubic hair peppered with silver.
He had gone grey.
How many years had he given to the wraith?
In the dying light of the earth, the wraith was a ghastly apparition. Its formerly bronze-green skin was sallow; the markings on its cheek were sunken gashes, its eyes rimmed in red, the whites of the eyeballs bloodshot and veined, the fleshy lips broken and cracked. Just like him, John thought; the wraith was a mirror of himself.
And yet, it had fed. Almost to the full.
"What happened back there?" John said. "How many years did we lose?"
***
"Wraith," John said. He was careful to articulate the words with his throat and mouth. "What happened?"
The ocean slapped the sand. Sand fleas sank their tuberoles into John's skin; he had collected no mud; he didn't care; it was strangely good to be reminded of his bodily self in punctures of tiny pain.
"What happened to us?" John said.
The wraith's eyes were unfathomable. Fathoms plumbed John's mind.
"I did not know this could happen," said the wraith, at last.
"The thing" John said slowly, "the mind... thing. The sex mind thing--"
The wraith cut him off. "It is not sex."
John tried to crack a smile. "Could have fooled me."
"It is not sex," the wraith said. "It is..." It stopped. It seemed to struggle for articulation. John could sense the struggle in his own head, its effort to give words to something beyond words.
"It is the foregathering," the wraith finally said.
Moments passed. "What's that?" But even as John said it, a tremor of remembered communion murmured through the far reaches of his mind.
"There is no human speech for it. It is what we do. It is the hive's coming together. It is the foregathering. I did not know it was possible without the hive." The wraith's voice skidded on the edge of despair. "I did not know it was possible with a human."
John swallowed. There was nothing to swallow; his throat burned. "I wouldn't have thought it was possible, either... Inter-species sex--"
"It is not sex," the wraith interrupted in an abrupt tone.
"Oh yeah, I forgot."
"It is so perhaps for you. I do not engage in what you call sex."
"But you did. Actually. You did."
"I am not a beast. I transcend the material gratifications!"
"Shit, wraith." John laughed. He surprised himself into it. The laugh set up shaky ripples inside his mind. The ripples cradled the wraith's mind. "Not this again." Sparks of himself struck the wraith's tinder brain. The laugh reverberated within.
The wraith lurched towards John. "Humans are beasts," it hissed. "They have sexual urges. The urges drive them to mate. Humans mate even if there is no chance of reproduction."
The wraith's entire body was shaking now. Its voice strummed with revulsion.
"You are trapped inside your physical bodies and inside your individual corporealities. But this is not for us. This is not for me. It is..." He made a peculiar gesture with his hand. "... vile to me. Vile." Its speech trailed off into a confused spiral, and the spiral wound its whip way into John's thoughts.
"It's not bestial," John said, feeling stupid. "It's beasts that have sex only for mating. Humans, you said it yourself, have sex also for other reasons."
"What are the reasons? What are the reasons we experience this?"
John closed his eyes. Vermicelli squirmed in his dead left eye. "I don't know," he said. "I don't know the reasons. I don't know anything." I am old. I am tired. I sink into the hive.
There is no hive. There is only the memory of the hive.
There are only murmurings, traces like slime trails across the universe's sentient map.
What is it that I am? What is it that I was?
The wraith didn't know. Its presence in the folia of John's being groped and ricocheted. Alien thoughts within alien thoughts.
John opened his eyes. His face was wet; he couldn't remember how it had got so wet. He touched his finger to his cheek, and to his lip. Salt wet.
He couldn't afford to lose moisture. He had to care about these things. He had to take care of the matters of the flesh.
They were standing in the noon-day sun, even the wraith. Their shadows were puddles underneath their feet.
John's thoughts were wood shavings, curling along the corridors of the wraith's world.
"This foregathering thing you're talking about," he said. "That's some kind of collective hive orgasm, right? Is it like that hour-long mating that you talked about the other day?"
"I have, of course, never mated."
The sun hiccupped.
"You haven't?" said John blankly.
"I am not an inseminator." The wraith's thoughts shook with disdain.
"Ah," said John.
"The Queen consumes Her begettors. No one survives after mating. Naturally."
"Naturally," echoed John.
Spit froze on his lips. The ocean sang.
The words tumbled out. "How long does it last, this foregathering? Nearly all the flowers are dead. How long does it take for flowers to die? How long, wraith? How long did you feed? How long did you forget yourself?"
"It is a terrible thing to forget."
"Listen," John said. "I'll tell you what happened. You fed on me, and at the same time, we had a sort of... hive orgasm. And that made you lose control, during the feeding."
"There is no precedent. We enter virgin constellations. It cannot be fathomed."
"Yes, it can. Because you may not have mated but I have. And I can tell you that it's not so very weird to lose control when you're in the middle of it. To lose the plot a little."
Silence.
"Simple," said John, in a voice so light it could be air.
As simple as trying to calculate dart speeds while in the middle of coming. Like being asked to stop shooting your load half-way through.
As simple as an orgasm that lasted hours not seconds. As simple as an orgasm that shattered the boundaries between worlds.
"You cannot understand," said the wraith.
"No, but I can," said John. I can. I do. I have.
WE CAN WE DO yes WE HAVE THE UNFATHOMABLE yes THE UNKNOWABLE but we know THE ARCHEAN THE NEVER-BEFORE
***
Later, much later or a little later, a few flowers later or none, John paced down to the surf and kept going. He swam under the sun.
The heat pressed in upon him and dissolved his boundaries. The ocean rushed on as blood inside his ears, and he was a speck on the foam. When he opened his right eye, the unbroken blue extended into eternity. There was no distance to it, no future, no past, no beginning and no end, no modulation of its brightness except for the sprites mottling John's eyeball.
Strange, how the sky was so blue yet it continued up and up until it turned into black space. And then it flowed on until it quickened to blue again, around the germ of another world. It was all the one thing: sky, space, the heavens above and the heavens below.
This, John thought, this was him. He was a creature of earthly matter. He could sprint and climb, he could dig and swim and hunt and eat. He could be fucked. He could come.
And he was a son of the stars. He could soar through the spaces of his mind; he could join hands with the wraith in a cosmic roundelay.
Time, thought John, as his eye stared at the immobile blue. Time stands still.
Then he thought, no, it doesn't. If I just lie here, without moving, even if I never do another thing, just lie here... Time will continue to pass through me. Because eventually death will come for me.
It was the one sure thing in all the universes. Death. In heaven as it is on earth.
If I just lie here, without doing a single thing, I will die. Dying is only time. Time works through me. It is time that is killing me every single moment.
It was a strangely peaceful realisation.
Death had been something to be actively sought out. You flew planes at breakneck speed, jumped down wells, steered into hive ships, sped into space. In seeking death, you miraculously cheated death. Time and time again.
But it wasn't like that at all. Death did not need to be sought out; it sought you out. Death did not need to be evaded because it was always there, like a security net. All you had to do was lie here and wait.
John had never known death to live in time like this.
No matter how alien the galaxy, it always had death in it.
And life.
He floated on the waves.
The island was a drop in the ocean, casting circles in John's soul.
***
"Even you die" said John to the wraith. "You heal amazingly, sure, but you die."
The wraith scribbled things in John's head. What it said aloud was, "We do not go into oblivion as you do. We slough off the material vessel and join with the living hive. The brethren will come and feed on us, and then our bodies shrivel because our bodies do not matter. They matter only because they allow us to feed and be one."
"Hang on. You feed off each other? On purpose?"
"That is how we become one with the song of the hive."
"You have them all inside your head? Is that what you're saying? All the dead wraith?"
John remembered a crashed wraith ship and a cannibal wraith, on a planet long ago. He remembered a hive queen bending over a humanised wraith, sucking out the wraith's life on a hospital bed, in a time far away.
His memories burgeoned with things that he only now understood: dark feedings, sweet release.
And what about me? What will happen to me once I'm dead? John thought, spinning in the endless blue heat. My body will decompose and rot into this soil. Maybe my DNA will change something minute in the make-up of this world, who knows. But what is going to happen to the other thing that's me? The not-body part?
The part that is taken by the wraith?
My life force. My years. My soul.
Taken by the wraith. Preserved by the wraith. Changed and tempered and joined.
But if death is everywhere, John thought, then it's the same everywhere. And it doesn't matter where I die.
The island, its black sand hard under John's hot spine, its air shimmering with sulphur, seemed as good a place as any.
***
The island rotated along with its world.
John braided intricate braids inside his head and let himself be played with, subtly, fussily, vitally.
One noon, he blinked and saw the wraith's body. It hurt to blink; his lids rasped dryly across their eyeballs. "You know, " John said and tried to clear his throat. He couldn't remember when last he'd spoken out aloud. "You're not looking too hot."
Deep within John's skull, the wraith lived attentive and bright, an alert and softly crawling presence. In all its alien wraithness, it was not the wraithness that revealed itself but the wraith's unique selfness.
The wraith's outer shell was a different matter. John had forgotten to inspect the wraith with his mortal eye, and now he did. "You look like crap, in fact. Your face is full of pus; and you're a yellow colour; and your hair's falling out."
The wraith, too, had not spoken in a long while. Now it did. "I have not fed."
Oh shit.
John hadn't realised.
He had been lost in the universe of thoughts. He'd stopped counting days or notches.
"I will not feed on you anymore."
"What?" John's words staggered. "Why not?" A wild pulse started up in his chest.
"I will die. I can die after your death, or I can die before your death. Those are the choices. I do not want to die alone. Death by starvation: it is not a good death. Already, the hunger is terrible. I do not want to suffer this alone. I do not want to die after your death."
Psychic splinters, fragmented over the past few days or weeks, began to make sense.
"So you want me to suffer alone?" John said. "If you die, I'll be the one dying alone. The flowers need your water; I need your water."
I need you.
"John Sheppard," the wraith said with sudden urgency, turned and grabbed John's upper arm. Its breath was hot against John's face. It smelled of nectar and oyster hearts. "I cannot starve here. Alone. How will I merge with my brethren? I am lost, I will be lost, I am lost even now." Its voice and hand shook. John's mind flexed with the wraith's desperation.
"You mean because there's no wraith to feed on you? Once you're dead?"
"There is no wraith at all!" wailed the wraith. "There is only emptiness! I do not know what will happen to me."
"Once you're dead."
"I cannot be the last one. You must not die before me."
"Don't be ridiculous. We're neither of us going to die. We're going to be rescued. No one gets left behind." He said this but he knew even as the words formed that he no longer believed them.
"When you die," said the wraith, "I will lose my last solace. The emptiness will return. How much longer have you got? You are starting to look old; you have white hair; you have wrinkles; you have spots on the back of your hand."
They looked at one another with their physical eyes.
The wraith sagged against the ember bark.
"Feed," said John and pulled off the shreds of his T-shirt. "Feed, goddamnit." He slid in between the wraith's knees and took the wraith's hand in his own. "Feed on my death."
***
INSENSATE INCOGNATE INCOMMUNICATE BEREFT OF ALL THAT YE ARE O MY BRETHREN AH WOE WHAT IS LIFE BUT SURVIVAL IN THE ASTRAL DOLDRUMS IN THE LEE OF LIFE STUCK ON A PIN OF MATTER O DROWNING LOST SO ALONE WITHIN THE CONFINES OF ONE SKULL WITH ONLY ONE HELPMEET AH TIME TO DIE TIME TO SING THE UNISON OF NEBULAE O THREADS IN SPACE O BEADS IN BLACK ETERNITY O MY ONE SOLACE O MY LAST BENISON
***
The End
John was in the shallows by Sunrise Promontory. He'd forgotten why he had come there; then he remembered. He bent and looked at the ladybugs. He needed to pluck these. He needed to harvest them; he couldn't quite remember why.
Oh yes, to eat. To feed on. To survive.
The wraith was in the copse. The wraith stirred in his mind.
The sky hummed.
Now, that was a strange sound.
He squinted up into the sun. A black shadow turned the day into night. He cowered down but then it came to him: He knew this sound!
"Hey, wraith," he said, in slow wonder. He scrambled to his feet. "We're being rescued."
The shadow screeched, banked, landed. There was a loud smell of gunmetal and tungsten. It ignited odd thoughts in John's mind, memories long shredded.
"Wraith." He faltered on his legs. The surf drowned in the shriek of an engine revving and throttling.
It was a gut memory. John knew what the ship was going to do, instants before it happened. The sounds were imprinted within his body, the changes in pitch, and he could see that it was going to land, right next to the copse, and then it had landed, and he recognised the hiss of the portals and the tramp of boots on steel.
"Guys," he said into the glare and the clouds of disturbed sand. "What took you so long?"
Time flowed and stuttered.
Something.
Something was not right.
ENFOLD MY SPIRIT WITHIN THE HIVE
What?
A pain stabbed the centre of him. It was an inexplicable thing, a lightning fork driven through the heart of his soul.
"Stop!" he screamed. He was running now, stumbling through the surf.
TO END THE CELESTIAL ROUND NO MORE THE PUPAE SJOSTIRNITH
"Wraith! No!"
Run. Run, run, run.
But it was too late.
IF WE DO DIE
Without warning, others appeared. People. They swarmed across the beach in mad zigzags. People with high, tinny voices. There was a blur of faces; John had never seen so many faces. They stared at John with small hard eyes, pupils like pinpricks. They talked and shouted in their shrill voices, all at once, a cacophony of syllables.
NO MORE
O
And then nothing.
The copse exploded in a ball of fire.
John fell into the water.
Down was up, and up was down.
"Wraith?"
The wind whispered. A cosmic silence screamed through the ether. The universe flatlined.
He retched up dry sick. Alien shouts swallowed the sky. "John! Jesus, John! What happened here?"
Hands touched his clammy skin, human hands with short soft fingers.
"Sorry, Colonel, that we couldn't make it earlier," a voice shouted right near his ear. He was jostled and prodded. An arm was thrown around his shoulders; his skin flinched at the touch. "What happened to your face? What happened to your eye? Jesus Christ, what happened to your chest?"
Acrid plumes rose on the air. The trees, the shade, all the season's ember harvest, the orchard: it all crackled and fumed.
"Was that a wraith? That was a wraith, wasn't it? Dead now."
Names. These people had names. "Rodney," John said. "Ronon." Where was...? He touched his temple, the long-gone comm.
"John? You okay? Ready to come home?" The persons smelled of water and of chemical deodorant.
"I'm fine," he said.
And he was.
"Copy that? Over and out."
The sun whirled in the apex of the sky.
***
IF WE DO DIE WE DO DIE AMONG OUR BRETHREN IF WE DO PERISH WE DO DISSOLVE AMONG OUR BRETHREN THERE IS NO END OF US ONLY RECYCLING ONLY THE CIRCLE OF SPIRIT BUT WOE WOE TO DIE IN EXILE TO DIE BEREFT WHO WILL TAKE MINE THOUGHTS INTO THEIR THOUGHTS WHO WILL ENFOLD MINE SPIRIT WITHIN THE SPIRIT OF THE HIVE WHO WILL DRINK OF MINE AND FIND SUCCOUR IN THE MOTHER O WOE MINE HUSK WILL ROT UPON THIS ROCK BUT WHITHER MINE SPIRIT IT WILL WITHER INTO DUST ALREADY IT IS DUST EXECRABLE FILTH O MINE ONLY SOLACE
***
THE END.
All original parts of this story © Lobelia.
9 May 2006. Final draft 29 April 2008.
Feedback? If you liked this story, please leave some! I love all feedback -- a paragraph, a line, a word, even. It's all good!
Part: 3/3
Ichor, Part 1/3 and Header / Ichor, Part 2/3
John coughed up water, and more water. He seemed made of water. The airbead was limp and shrivelled, sucked dry of its last dram of oxygen. The sand frothed under John's hands. The pads of his fingers had lost their sense of touch; they were corrugated and spongy soft.
He coughed up another trickle of the world's ocean and then collapsed sideways onto the ground. His eyes streamed. He tried to focus his one working pupil. A surging patchwork of dark and light imprinted itself on his retina. The ground oscillated beneath him: were these quakes, the after-shocks of the eruption? Or simply his body's memory of hours and hours of floating in the waves?
"Ken?" His voice came out slurred.
There was no reply.
John struggled to his elbows. The wraith lay slumped on its right side, just behind John on the beach. Only its lidless left eye was visible. The eye was rigid and blank.
"Ken?" John repeated. "Wraith?"
He shook the wraith by the shoulder. Its body rolled over onto its back, and the right side of its face hove into view.
"Jesus," whispered John.
He rubbed his good eye and blinked but still the sight remained the same. The belt around the wraith's head was gone. The wraith's right spiracle had oozed open; the skin on that whole side of its visage had come away. It looked as if something had eaten up its skull from the inside, like acid burning a slow hole. The wraith's face gaped open from just below its eye to its chin. Gleet, pus and a viscous mucus seeped from the wound. There was a smell of dead things.
"Ken," said John, trying to steady his voice. "Wraith. Come on." He shook the wraith's shoulder again, tentatively this time. "Don't bail out on me now. Not after all this."
He fumbled for the wraith's wrist. There was no pulse. "No, no," he said. "No."
Used to the wraith's normal horse-strength heartbeat, it took him long moments of held breath before he finally located a faint quivering, a minute distension of the artery.
He tore off what remained of his T-shirt sleeve and dabbed at the discharge on the wraith's cheek.
"Come on," he muttered. "Do your thing, your self-healing thing. Seal up this hole in your face. Come on, stay with me here."
The wraith didn't move. Its pulse was a weak beacon, barely there.
John coughed again. He wanted to throw up. His throat ached; he hadn't had anything to drink in days, weeks, aeons; time had stopped under the surface of the sea. His own pulse jumped and knocked erratically.
The wraith's skin was cold, like a reptile's; John remembered it strong and hot. He clawed at the buckles of its coat. In all their months together on the island, he'd never seen the wraith's torso but here it was, pale green and glabrous, nipple-less, navel-less. He pressed his hands down on its sternum. He pinched its broad nose, pried apart its lips and tried to recall how mouth-to-mouth worked.
He kept breathing down the wraith's throat. He kept pumping the wraith's lungs.
A soft hiss issued from the gash on the wraith's cheek, like air escaping a punctured tire.
"Oh, shit. Oh, Jesus." He covered up the hole with his hand but even so, he could feel the air venting against his numbed skin. Instead of resuscitating the wraith, he'd done something to its respiratory system, and now the wraith was bleeding air, and there was nothing he could think to do.
"Come on, wraith, for the love of..."
But he didn't know whose love to invoke. God, yes -- but John hadn't called on any god in decades; there was no god; god was an expletive and nothing more, and John was left alone, on an island in outer space, and there was nothing and no one, no one at all.
Mist palled John's right eye. He swiped at it, helplessly; and then angrily. He moved his hands over the wraith's bare chest, along its neck, trying to pinpoint a pulse.
Then he remembered his own chest and its five-pronged wound.
"That's what you need to do. You need to lick this shut. Wraith, come on, all you need to do is..." He prised apart the wraith's set of teeth. He pushed his fingers into the wraith's mouth and felt around for its tongue, and he pulled that out past the teeth.
The tongue was long and slim but not that long. It was not long enough to reach the wraith's own cheek.
"You've got something," muttered John. "You've got something in your spit, haven't you, some kind of something, enzyme, healing sap. But how to get at it. How to get at it..."
He leaned down over the wraith's face. The wraith smelled of sea and salt only. Its own wraith stench was as faint as its heartbeat. John dug his fingers into the wraith's mouth, drew them along the insides of its cheeks, sank them into the fleshy pockets of the wraith's gums. He licked the tip of the wraith's tongue. He sucked it. He licked his own fingers, licked off the thin film of sticky residue, smeared it onto his own tongue, and then he bent across and licked the wraith's oozing cheek.
He licked all around the wound, willing it to close up. He dived in for more mouth mucus, mixed wraith spit with his own spit. He chafed the wraith's wrist, rubbed his gummy fingers over the hole in the wraith's cheek, into the hole. And at one point, swore and wiped his own eye because how stupid would that be, to re-infect the wraith with his own salt.
The wraith tasted of death, and the wraith's wound tasted of death; it made John dizzy, and after a while, he thought he would faint and die himself but it didn't matter because he would die, anyway, and then a shudder went through the wraith.
The wraith spluttered and retched and convulsed in spasms. Its pupils shivered into life.
When John lifted his head, he saw, through one throbbing eye, that the wraith's cheek was a ghastly colour and covered in pockmarks but that it was whole. It was healed.
He slumped down on the wraith's chest and fell into a mindless coma.
***
When John came to, stars burnt up the firmament. The cloud of ash was gone.
"Wraith?" he said.
The wraith didn't stir. Its heartbeat was steady against John's temple.
"Wraith," John whispered. He tried to sit up but couldn't. "Listen. I haven't had anything to drink in days. Two, or three, I don't even know. Come on, wake up. Make some water."
The wraith lay inert. Waves rushed the shore.
John didn't think he would be able to move but then he did. He crouched in the sand. It was all that he could think of: the syringe. He prodded the wraith until, after many attempts, it lurched to one side. He bunched up the back of its coat and tugged at its unbelted trousers. They weren't real trousers, it turned out; they were some sort of leg covering, knotted and lashed at the groins. John managed to pull off a flap over the wraith's lower spine and expose its lower back.
The wraith had buttocks, like a human man, and yes, in between the buttocks, there nestled a small rucked opening: the cloaca.
John, desperate and faint, crooked his finger into the wraith's anus, worked it up and touched a hard surface. The vial! He wormed another finger up, and then wept with frustration because he couldn't get a purchase. He curled in a third finger and widened the rectum. He managed to pincer two fingers around the base of the syringe, and very slowly, very gingerly, with the shivering patience of despair, he extracted it.
He looked at the vial with a dazed eye. It glinted in the starlight. He shook it.
It was empty.
"God," he said. "Oh god, what now?"
His temples pounded. He rolled the wraith back onto its back. He pulled at the front of the wraith's leggings. A leather panel flapped open, and there they were. The wraith's dual penes.
John looked at them, lolling palely against hairless skin.
And then he bent down and took hold of one of them between his thumb and forefinger.
He massaged the penis with the tips of his fingers. He kneaded its soft small shaft until it stood up against his palm; the other penis drooped to one side. It was a pointy thing, slim and hard like a tuber, lightly barbed at its tip. The scarifications encircled it in delicate relief.
When it twitched, John took it in his mouth and sucked.
He closed his eyes and sucked, tasting frog spawn and formic acid, until the penis throbbed once, and then he quickly upended the syringe over it, kept on working it with his fingers and felt the vial gain weight in his hand.
It worked. I don't believe it.
Thank you, god.
He clamped the lid down on the syringe and fell back, sucking in air.
He clutched the vial in his hands and waited. Water trickled out of his earholes. The stars turned, Kuratka, the Claw, the Sailing Queen. He waited for the alchemy to work.
He didn't know how long it would take, spinning gold from straw, straw from gold. He tried to remember; his thoughts were confused. He couldn't see the contents in the dark.
At dawn, he peered into the tube. It was clear. It looked like water.
He opened the syringe and put it to his mouth and drank in needy greedy gulps.
But then he stopped. He swayed to his knees and pushed the vial deep into the wraith's mouth. The wraith's adam's apple bobbed. The wraith swallowed.
John fell back into the sand. The water had been glorious. But it had been barely an ounce, and that wasn't enough. He tried to speculate about the wraith's re-load time, and wondered if he could maybe activate the other penis, and then the skies reeled and he passed out yet again.
***
It was the scent that woke him. It was a scent he hadn't tasted in months, in years: the mellow sweetness of honey, intermingled with an aroma of crushed sage, jasmine and lavender.
He sat up and gazed in wonder.
Flowers. Flowers everywhere.
As far as his one eye could see, the island was covered in flowers. He crawled over to the nearest clump: a profusion of small star-shaped blossoms, and another type, with petals growing upwards in the shape of a cup, and within the cup, gorgeous and wet, drops of gold-coloured nectar.
He tore up the flowers as fast as his hands would move. He stuffed them into his mouth whole, chewing on leaves and sepals and petals and whatever else they consisted of, and letting their sweet, sweet juices coat his throat. He got up and he ran into the meadows around him. Here was another kind, opulent and purple, filled to the brim with cordial. Its stem was fleshy, and when he tore it open with his teeth, a milky substance poured out and into his mouth.
He ran further. He threw himself down among the blooms and wallowed in their splendour. He had been transported into a dream. The sun was radiant. He was drunk with it all.
He dug his hands into the ground, and it was thick, crumbly soil. The flowers were burnt at the roots, and he marvelled to think that all this time, all these notches, their seeds had been buried in this desert sand, waiting, patiently waiting for an eruption and the stimulant of lava.
He whirled around, and there, not far from the shore, sat the copse.
The lava had destroyed the outermost trees but spared the rest. The calendar tree was gone, and with it his binoculars and his long-dead radio. It made sense. Why else would trees grow just there? The remaining tree clump was protected, in a huddled spot between two runnels. Ember nuts glinted fatly on singed branches.
John bent back his head and laughed wild laughs.
The wraith was there, alive, about. It had made its way to the copse and to shelter. It presented him with a full syringe, in shaky hands. "Keep it," laughed John, "drink it, drink it all. I've got plenty."
Rose-coloured crustaceans clambered out of the sea and staggered up the beach in their hundreds. They mauled the blossoms with their fragile claws and stuck their probosces into pools of nectar.
John whooped with delight. He scampered into the creatures' midst, scattering bodies, shell scraping against shell; he scooped them up, whole armfuls of them. He tore off their heads and pulled out their raw white flesh with his teeth, and when he'd had enough, he darted over to the other side of the island, full of energy, and found the fumaroles, and found some newly-opened fissures, and on those volcanic stoves he cooked more of the little crayfish -- although they weren't really crayfish; they had eleven legs, not eight, and strange facetted eyes, feeding tubes like butterflies; but they tasted divine, absolutely divine. Never, ever had John eaten anything so heavenly.
He staggered back home, crushing flowers and animals underfoot. "Drink, drink," he called to the wraith, slumped in the shade.
But then he realised what was really the matter, and still laughing, he scudded to his knees and pulled off his T-shirt. "You look like shit," he said. "You must be starving."
***
Glutted on nectar and ambrosia, John, in the nick of noon, put his hand to his crotch.
Sand crunched. The wraith stood by, and John took his hand away again.
The wraith settled down next to John. It stretched its leather legs out in front.
The air was still. The wraith didn't move; it stayed in John's part of the copse. Coal-seams of scent wafted across the trees.
"You elicited the elixir of life," the wraith said.
"Ah," said John. "Yes."
"You elicited it in a very unusual fashion. You applied your mouth to the penis and you sucked upon it."
"So you did notice that? I thought you were out cold-- Hey! Hang on--"
In the blink of an eye, the wraith had taken John's cock out through the slitted fly of his boxer shorts, and in another blink, it had bent forwards and wrapped its long tongue around John's glans.
"Stop," said John. "I told you before--"
"You did this," said the wraith, its voice muffled by its own tongue, and then the wraith tongue slipped up and down the shaft of John's cock, all the way from the very tip to the very root, and John's cock hardened in surprise.
He tried to squirm away. The grip of the wraith's tongue tightened, like a strand of seaweed twined around John's cock. The tongue probed. It was a prehensile tubeworm, sandpaper soft, slimy and undulant.
The sand rolled. John stared into the ember fronds.
"This provides a gratifying sensation for you," the wraith said, releasing its tongue.
"No," said John.
"There is evidence to the contrary. In humans, the erection of the male genitalia betokens carnal pleasure."
"Shut up; no," said John. He didn't move.
"You are lying," said the wraith, as if observing a fact about the weather.
John stared at the spiky sky. "Yes," he said.
And gave up. And gave in.
And if you gave in, then what did it matter? Then it's just the sun on your head and the sky in your eye and the slithery muscles of an alien tongue around your private parts. Snaking, sliding, probing. Trying out the slit at the top of your cock but withdrawing when you flinch. Curling around the base; shimmying along the ridge behind your balls.
Continuing along, one hand pushing you to the sand and clawing at the boxers. And you, oh you, you lift your hips obligingly, and the impossibly long tongue worms its way all the way back and up and into your arsehole.
John was on his back, with his knees spread wide and his hands above his head, clutching the trunk of the embertree, and the tongue slid in deep, so deep, so fucking deep; it was unbelievable what it was doing to the insides of John's rectum.
Honey-sweet sweat broke out on his forehead and in his armpits. In the confusion, he bit his own cheek instead of his tongue. He didn't know how to behave. Sound strangled in his throat.
It was too strange to be strange.
Further than anybody, further than anything, the tongue was in deep. It was soft and hard at the same time, taut and malleable, nosing along the corrugations of his guts. It moulded its hardness to the walls of John's insides. It moved in, and it moved out, and his arsehole closed around the tongue like a sucking mouth.
Fuck, he thought or moaned, fuck, oh fuck.
Then the wraith's hand closed around John's cock. The wraith's palm pulsed against his flesh, and in the palm, there was the feeding mouth, a thick moisture, a rippling like an octopus's arse, a suction pad around his glans.
Like a cunt.
Like a cunt fucking his cock.
John held onto the tree with both his hands. He held on for dear life. But it wasn't life that was sapping out of him, it was something else; it was come, pumping out of him in deep gulps.
He clamped a hand across his face and tried to stop the sounds falling out of him, the fuck, the god, the oh sweet heaven, but they tumbled out regardless.
His orgasm dumped him in zero gravity. Worms shot out from his balls, up through urethra, rectum, sphincter, all the way to his left eyeball.
Multiple suns orbited behind his eyelids. The sky pulsed.
His cock shrank. He could feel its tip nudge right into the wraith's oozing hand-mouth.
"Stop," he said. "Stop."
God, he'd come into the wraith's feeding mouth.
"No, really," he gasped, "you've got to stop now. It's over."
The wraith's tongue slithered out.
"That," said John and lowered his shaking knees. "That..."
The wraith sat up. "You cannot continue?"
"Hah." John laughed, a short drunken laugh.
"When wraith mate," said the wraith, "they ejaculate for many hours."
"Really?" John pulled himself into a vaguely upright position. Sand breezed across his naked thighs.
"It is a failing in your kind. The brevity of the human climax is doubtless one of the causes for the diminishing birth rate of your species."
"Yeah, right." John laughed again. "That must be something else, your wraith orgasm. And hey... can't you use that for making lots and lots of water?"
"Mating is a very different matter from producing water."
"Yeah," said John. "Yeah." He looked out across the flowers spreading to the horizon of his world.
The wraith lifted its palm and sniffed at it. "Interesting." It lapped John's come up with its slender tongue. A gossamer thread stretched between teeth and hand. "But not sustaining." John could think of nothing to say. "Now I shall make some water."
"Oh. You need a helping hand?" And then John burst out laughing again because life had spiralled into vortices of lunacy but it didn't matter, it didn't matter one whit for the entire island breathed the fragrance of orchids and the air rustled with the casings of crayfish.
He rolled out onto the sand and kept rolling into the zone of lava. He spread his arms and his bare legs and pressed his groin into the blossoms.
Some were wilting already but he didn't care. He was going to comb every inch of this damned beautiful island and he was going to find every last one of those seeds; he was going to shake the pips from the stamens of these flowers and plant them in the shade of the copse; he was going to collect lava from the cracks of the fissures and he was going to grow himself a fucking orchard of flowers, and he'd keep those little crayfish in a net-enclosed tank near the promontory and feed them on ember nuts and seabeans and he was never, ever going to be thirsty again.
Not once did it occur to him that this new plan did away with his need for the wraith's vial.
Not once did he ponder sneaking down to the sea at night and dousing the wraith in salt water until it dissolved into sand.
***
The crustaceans, one night, upped and scuttled down into the sea and disappeared into the deeps. The blossoms wilted. The sand reverted to its glinting black surface.
But a tiny field of flowers remained. That, and a small bevy of crayfish, swimming in circles among the promontory boulders, in a trough woven of seaweed and emberbark. John kept back a portion of his already minuscule daily water ration and used it to water his plants. He didn't expect anything to happen because this seemed to be a fire-responsive plant, and he had no fire. But within six notches, a scattering of buds did appear: tiny miracles.
"Pity you can't enjoy this," John said to the wraith and licked his fingers clean of the nectar and juices of oily lobster.
The wraith sat and massaged its genitals. It palpated the dual penes with the tips of its strong long fingers, stroking them like teats. Sandfleas darted from tree to tree.
John looked at the wraith penes, looked at the sea, looked at the wraith again.
They seemed to have moved beyond any notions of secrecy. Of modesty. Of shame.
Beyond shame. Beyond the pale.
"Here," John said. "Let me."
He pushed the wraith's talons aside and started pumping the penes himself with two hands, one thumb and finger on each of them. Everything was very still. Only the surf sucked at the sands. The wraith caught its elixir in the syringe and clamped the lid on.
John let go.
"And now," said the wraith, half-burying the upright vial in the sand, "it is time."
It placed its hand on John's bare chest and pulled forth the string of screams.
***
Fifteen notches later, the wraith, pale in the Mouthstar's shadows, was kneeling before John kneeling, and breathed on his forehead with its benthic voice.
"It has occurred to me," the wraith rasped, "that there may be a remedy for your distress during the feeding."
John couldn't see the wraith's face, and even if he had been able to, there was never any expression in the wraith's face, or at least none that he could read or understand.
"I have pondered this," continued the wraith. "It is not conducive to your health to suffer anguish. I cannot distract you psychically. But I can attempt to distract you physically."
"Well," said John. "I didn't know you cared."
"Your semen tasted of wraith," said the wraith, as if by way of explanation, yet John could not think what was being explained, and then his thinking yawed out of kilter because the wraith, without preliminaries, shifted to kneel behind John and pushed him forward. It pushed him just enough so that John's buttocks, bare in the hot night, parted by a fraction, and then the wraith drove its dual penes right in, both of them, right into the centre of John's arse.
Sand struck John's cheek and choked his tongue as he fell, open-mouthed and speechless, onto his elbows.
The twin organs crawled inside, stiff and smooth like the roots of a weed. They tapered like fingers. They slipped in without resistance as their barbed tips held open the entrance.
Once past John's sphincter, the penes fanned out, probing the cavity of human rectum.
There was no fucking as such, no pumping in and out. The wraith rested against John's arse, perfectly still. Only its penes moved inside him, and its breath hissed through its teeth, as if in pain. John's own breath veered in zigzags. His knees ached against the ground; his fingers clawed at sweaty granules. His loins moved of their own accord; they humped the sand in staccato bursts; they thrust up against the wraith's pelvis. The penes, like millipedes, palpated John's rectal walls.
The universe zeroed in on this sensation. John closed his eyes to block out vision; no, not vision, the night was black, the night was shining, eyes open, eyes closed, it made no difference. His brain reeled, and then shut itself off.
One of the penes looped round and round the walls; the other stroked spots with its snub-nose tip, spot after spot, until it touched the one spot, and John lost it, and new spots were made, and all of John was just one spreading spot.
He didn't know what was happening to him. Something was taking him apart, increment by increment, and then in great big gashes.
John howled primordially into the sand.
And then his howl flipped into a shriek as the wraith reached round from behind and dug its claws into John's chest.
It ripped him open. There were no thoughts to contain the world as it rushed in and out through the vortex at the centre of John's soul.
All went silent. The silence was eerie in contrast to what had been a ceaseless shriek, and mixed in with that shriek, which was John's shriek, had been the guttural roar of the wraith as it fed.
But now nothing.
The silence of utter death.
John was not frightened. He floated through a mute minute of nothing.
Somewhere in there blipped his orgasm, a grain lost in vastness.
But in the wake of that orgasm, riding its rippling slipstream, came a thought.
An alien thought, pointed like a snub-nose finger.
It lodged itself in John's head, and then gave a startled throb and blossomed out into something open and strange. A foreign presence opened his mind, unfolded him like a head of lettuce, peeling away leaf after leaf.
It was the wraith. It was inside his head.
It was an oil stain, spreading through the liquid of his self. It was foam, swirling through the fog of his mind. It was sharp like a lemon, bright like cymbals. Corridors opened out that had never been there before. Vistas. Vectors. The wash of stars.
Shadows moved and whispered. The shadowy shapes of wraith. And more wraith. Dimly felt as mulling murmurings. Sights he had never seen and had always known. The breath of the Mother all about him. The breath of home. The memories of a hundred others. Woven through it all, a terrible yearning.
Veering into their alien world, and then suddenly, he lurched into his own childhood, as if a trapdoor had been knocked through, and then another, and another, in bewildered succession. Odd unrelated snippets of memory, moments long forgotten. The goldfish frozen three feet from the surface of a winter pond. The smell of burn cream, applied to an electrified finger. The popping of ants' heads under the solar death ray of his magnifying glass. Pictures of a volcano, lava rolling -- but no, it was only television; and on he stuttered, wildly back and forth, interspersed with the murmurs of the wraith. The sound of the blue alarm clock. Folding paper airplanes and gluing paper clips into their snouts for increased speed. Ladybugs on his mother's grave. Stargates squelching, city lights, his hands like gloves on the mould of the Chair. And o my god, my life is flashing before my eyes, this is it this is it is this it O MY BRETHREN MY SIBLINGS Wherefore is this O THE SLIPSTREAM OF COMMUNION The beating home The long paths flying on the shoulders of time Mingling Merging Amalgam of HOME NEVERMORE TO BE O FOOD ON THIS PIN O HUMAN TO UNITE
YE
O
***
John was a kite, flying through the infinite blue, and the wraith was the tail, clinging to his trajectory. John was the tail, holding onto a buoy in the puzzling cataract of woven worlds.
And sometimes the wraith was a point of certitude, and sometimes the wraith was baffled, aghast, unsure, torn between delight and fear.
John's own thoughts swam through a haze of alien realms. Foggy chimerae drifted along on waves of somnambulance. But the wraith's presence, his wraith, was clear as a gong, an enveloping grotto of branching memories and impressions, a questing, restless diligence, not at all the sluggish creature of the copse.
John gave into it. It drew him in. This oneiric weaving in and out of the other and of the self, this glide through the interstices of selves. The oddest thing was that the more John lost himself in the caverns of the wraith, the more he came up against his own being, but a being transformed and strangely scumbled, permeated and permeating, himself echoed back from within the wraith's mental vessels. There was all the substance taken from him during feedings and now part of the wraith's own make-up; and at the same time, the enzyme suffusing John's own self with parts of wraith.
John forgot how to speak. He forgot what was the point of speaking. He forgot about the gulf between identities that can only be bridged with words.
He forgot words.
The wraith's name sounded in his heart like a breve.
***
Sound slammed back into his eardrums: surf, wind, breath, the scrape of sand under fingernails, blood in his temples.
He was helpless on the ground. There was grit on his tongue. Oceans of liquid oozed from his anus which throbbed like an open mouth; streams of air were sucked into his innards.
Someone picked him up and whacked him against bark so hard that he began to bleed out of his nostrils.
Dizzy and sick, he crashed to the ground.
There was ragged breathing. There was more blood; John's chest was bathed in it. His eyes were open but there was nothing to see. Something batted his foot: it was his own hand, spasming uncontrollably.
He was turned over with brutal force. A moist tongue rasped across the wounds in his chest, viciously, deep into them, suturing them, and it hurt; wild pain returned; and John screamed.
A weight slapped him across his bleeding nose. John shouted again but more of a recognisable yell this time, more from an everyday sensation of pain.
Someone forced a crushed flower between his lips. Nectar squirted down his throat, just a few short drops. He gagged even so, coughed, spluttered up gobs of mucus.
Another slap, and he managed to groan, "What the hell, cut that out."
"You are alive?" It was the wraith's physical voice.
"Yes, fuck." John retched up a gobbet of blood.
The sand rearranged itself as the wraith stood up abruptly.
"What?" said John. Then he blacked out.
***
He awoke, smeared in blood, sand, semen, enzyme, and wraith ejaculate. He stank of life in its myriad rankness. Life.
Life.
He crawled to the shore on all fours and sprawled in the hard wet sand, letting the surf stumble over him. Then he dragged himself a few feet further up, into the black heat of castor-sugar sand. There he lay, in a stunned trance.
Inside his head, the wraith still marvelled and moved.
By the time John rose on unsteady feet, the sun was high. It had burned sore patches onto his bare buttocks.
He blinked into the aching glare and tottered up the incline until he reached the copse and slumped down in its shade.
Sandfleas flitted. He needed to tend his orchard. He needed to go and prepare mud. He couldn't move.
Sandflea-thoughts flitted around his brain. The wraith wuthered through his psychic conduits.
And there it was: the bodily bulk of the wraith. It loomed over him, breathing raggedly. John could see its hands, at the level of his eyes. They were streaked with blood.
John's gaze lolled.
He opened his mouth. No sound came.
"John," said the wraith with the voice of its throat. "John Sheppard."
"What," John tried. His speech was slurred. It had the timbre of an old man's voice. "What in hell was that?"
The wraith spoke, in a voice of tar. "I forewent responsibility."
"How," mumbled John. He struggled to focus his one eye. He was astounded to find that his body obeyed his will. His hands moved in soft sand. Rose-coloured spots danced among the fronds; it must be evening time.
The wraith was a silhouette against the sun's waning.
"I almost fed in full. I..." The wraith faltered. John could feel it faltering in his mind. "I did not know what was going to happen."
The sun rumbled.
"You fed" said John. "Almost in full?" His thoughts were long strings; they refused to be harnessed.
"We will not do this again," spoke the wraith, and John couldn't be sure whether he was hearing the words on the wind or reverberating in his own head. "I do not know why this happened," said the wraith. "In truth, I am..." The waves curled and withdrew, curled and withdrew. "...disconcerted by the loss of my control."
John shrugged. He had shoulders; they shrugged. He had a body. He had palms; minute grains of sand clung to the sweat on his palms. The world was underneath him, a solid earth.
"You must tend to your feeding," said the wraith. "It is important. I... do not have water."
"No water?" said John. Where had the wraith's water gone? "Ah."
They had forgotten themselves. They had got lost in each other.
The wraith abruptly turned. It staggered down the beach.
"Wait," croaked John. He jumped up, and he could. His body was dizzy with enzyme. He bounded after the wraith. Stars flew from his hair. Contrails of speed streamed along the surfaces of his arms. "I'll get..." There was the orchard. There was the pool.
Three-quarters of his flowers had died.
"How long?" he asked the wraith. "How many..." He gathered his language. "How many years?"
He touched his beard and his neck. There was a fold under his chin that hadn't been there before. He looked at his hands, at the liver-coloured spots on the backs of his hands. He looked down at his naked chest, at his hollow belly, at the ribs like spokes along his torso, at the thatch of pubic hair peppered with silver.
He had gone grey.
How many years had he given to the wraith?
In the dying light of the earth, the wraith was a ghastly apparition. Its formerly bronze-green skin was sallow; the markings on its cheek were sunken gashes, its eyes rimmed in red, the whites of the eyeballs bloodshot and veined, the fleshy lips broken and cracked. Just like him, John thought; the wraith was a mirror of himself.
And yet, it had fed. Almost to the full.
"What happened back there?" John said. "How many years did we lose?"
***
"Wraith," John said. He was careful to articulate the words with his throat and mouth. "What happened?"
The ocean slapped the sand. Sand fleas sank their tuberoles into John's skin; he had collected no mud; he didn't care; it was strangely good to be reminded of his bodily self in punctures of tiny pain.
"What happened to us?" John said.
The wraith's eyes were unfathomable. Fathoms plumbed John's mind.
"I did not know this could happen," said the wraith, at last.
"The thing" John said slowly, "the mind... thing. The sex mind thing--"
The wraith cut him off. "It is not sex."
John tried to crack a smile. "Could have fooled me."
"It is not sex," the wraith said. "It is..." It stopped. It seemed to struggle for articulation. John could sense the struggle in his own head, its effort to give words to something beyond words.
"It is the foregathering," the wraith finally said.
Moments passed. "What's that?" But even as John said it, a tremor of remembered communion murmured through the far reaches of his mind.
"There is no human speech for it. It is what we do. It is the hive's coming together. It is the foregathering. I did not know it was possible without the hive." The wraith's voice skidded on the edge of despair. "I did not know it was possible with a human."
John swallowed. There was nothing to swallow; his throat burned. "I wouldn't have thought it was possible, either... Inter-species sex--"
"It is not sex," the wraith interrupted in an abrupt tone.
"Oh yeah, I forgot."
"It is so perhaps for you. I do not engage in what you call sex."
"But you did. Actually. You did."
"I am not a beast. I transcend the material gratifications!"
"Shit, wraith." John laughed. He surprised himself into it. The laugh set up shaky ripples inside his mind. The ripples cradled the wraith's mind. "Not this again." Sparks of himself struck the wraith's tinder brain. The laugh reverberated within.
The wraith lurched towards John. "Humans are beasts," it hissed. "They have sexual urges. The urges drive them to mate. Humans mate even if there is no chance of reproduction."
The wraith's entire body was shaking now. Its voice strummed with revulsion.
"You are trapped inside your physical bodies and inside your individual corporealities. But this is not for us. This is not for me. It is..." He made a peculiar gesture with his hand. "... vile to me. Vile." Its speech trailed off into a confused spiral, and the spiral wound its whip way into John's thoughts.
"It's not bestial," John said, feeling stupid. "It's beasts that have sex only for mating. Humans, you said it yourself, have sex also for other reasons."
"What are the reasons? What are the reasons we experience this?"
John closed his eyes. Vermicelli squirmed in his dead left eye. "I don't know," he said. "I don't know the reasons. I don't know anything." I am old. I am tired. I sink into the hive.
There is no hive. There is only the memory of the hive.
There are only murmurings, traces like slime trails across the universe's sentient map.
What is it that I am? What is it that I was?
The wraith didn't know. Its presence in the folia of John's being groped and ricocheted. Alien thoughts within alien thoughts.
John opened his eyes. His face was wet; he couldn't remember how it had got so wet. He touched his finger to his cheek, and to his lip. Salt wet.
He couldn't afford to lose moisture. He had to care about these things. He had to take care of the matters of the flesh.
They were standing in the noon-day sun, even the wraith. Their shadows were puddles underneath their feet.
John's thoughts were wood shavings, curling along the corridors of the wraith's world.
"This foregathering thing you're talking about," he said. "That's some kind of collective hive orgasm, right? Is it like that hour-long mating that you talked about the other day?"
"I have, of course, never mated."
The sun hiccupped.
"You haven't?" said John blankly.
"I am not an inseminator." The wraith's thoughts shook with disdain.
"Ah," said John.
"The Queen consumes Her begettors. No one survives after mating. Naturally."
"Naturally," echoed John.
Spit froze on his lips. The ocean sang.
The words tumbled out. "How long does it last, this foregathering? Nearly all the flowers are dead. How long does it take for flowers to die? How long, wraith? How long did you feed? How long did you forget yourself?"
"It is a terrible thing to forget."
"Listen," John said. "I'll tell you what happened. You fed on me, and at the same time, we had a sort of... hive orgasm. And that made you lose control, during the feeding."
"There is no precedent. We enter virgin constellations. It cannot be fathomed."
"Yes, it can. Because you may not have mated but I have. And I can tell you that it's not so very weird to lose control when you're in the middle of it. To lose the plot a little."
Silence.
"Simple," said John, in a voice so light it could be air.
As simple as trying to calculate dart speeds while in the middle of coming. Like being asked to stop shooting your load half-way through.
As simple as an orgasm that lasted hours not seconds. As simple as an orgasm that shattered the boundaries between worlds.
"You cannot understand," said the wraith.
"No, but I can," said John. I can. I do. I have.
WE CAN WE DO yes WE HAVE THE UNFATHOMABLE yes THE UNKNOWABLE but we know THE ARCHEAN THE NEVER-BEFORE
***
Later, much later or a little later, a few flowers later or none, John paced down to the surf and kept going. He swam under the sun.
The heat pressed in upon him and dissolved his boundaries. The ocean rushed on as blood inside his ears, and he was a speck on the foam. When he opened his right eye, the unbroken blue extended into eternity. There was no distance to it, no future, no past, no beginning and no end, no modulation of its brightness except for the sprites mottling John's eyeball.
Strange, how the sky was so blue yet it continued up and up until it turned into black space. And then it flowed on until it quickened to blue again, around the germ of another world. It was all the one thing: sky, space, the heavens above and the heavens below.
This, John thought, this was him. He was a creature of earthly matter. He could sprint and climb, he could dig and swim and hunt and eat. He could be fucked. He could come.
And he was a son of the stars. He could soar through the spaces of his mind; he could join hands with the wraith in a cosmic roundelay.
Time, thought John, as his eye stared at the immobile blue. Time stands still.
Then he thought, no, it doesn't. If I just lie here, without moving, even if I never do another thing, just lie here... Time will continue to pass through me. Because eventually death will come for me.
It was the one sure thing in all the universes. Death. In heaven as it is on earth.
If I just lie here, without doing a single thing, I will die. Dying is only time. Time works through me. It is time that is killing me every single moment.
It was a strangely peaceful realisation.
Death had been something to be actively sought out. You flew planes at breakneck speed, jumped down wells, steered into hive ships, sped into space. In seeking death, you miraculously cheated death. Time and time again.
But it wasn't like that at all. Death did not need to be sought out; it sought you out. Death did not need to be evaded because it was always there, like a security net. All you had to do was lie here and wait.
John had never known death to live in time like this.
No matter how alien the galaxy, it always had death in it.
And life.
He floated on the waves.
The island was a drop in the ocean, casting circles in John's soul.
***
"Even you die" said John to the wraith. "You heal amazingly, sure, but you die."
The wraith scribbled things in John's head. What it said aloud was, "We do not go into oblivion as you do. We slough off the material vessel and join with the living hive. The brethren will come and feed on us, and then our bodies shrivel because our bodies do not matter. They matter only because they allow us to feed and be one."
"Hang on. You feed off each other? On purpose?"
"That is how we become one with the song of the hive."
"You have them all inside your head? Is that what you're saying? All the dead wraith?"
John remembered a crashed wraith ship and a cannibal wraith, on a planet long ago. He remembered a hive queen bending over a humanised wraith, sucking out the wraith's life on a hospital bed, in a time far away.
His memories burgeoned with things that he only now understood: dark feedings, sweet release.
And what about me? What will happen to me once I'm dead? John thought, spinning in the endless blue heat. My body will decompose and rot into this soil. Maybe my DNA will change something minute in the make-up of this world, who knows. But what is going to happen to the other thing that's me? The not-body part?
The part that is taken by the wraith?
My life force. My years. My soul.
Taken by the wraith. Preserved by the wraith. Changed and tempered and joined.
But if death is everywhere, John thought, then it's the same everywhere. And it doesn't matter where I die.
The island, its black sand hard under John's hot spine, its air shimmering with sulphur, seemed as good a place as any.
***
The island rotated along with its world.
John braided intricate braids inside his head and let himself be played with, subtly, fussily, vitally.
One noon, he blinked and saw the wraith's body. It hurt to blink; his lids rasped dryly across their eyeballs. "You know, " John said and tried to clear his throat. He couldn't remember when last he'd spoken out aloud. "You're not looking too hot."
Deep within John's skull, the wraith lived attentive and bright, an alert and softly crawling presence. In all its alien wraithness, it was not the wraithness that revealed itself but the wraith's unique selfness.
The wraith's outer shell was a different matter. John had forgotten to inspect the wraith with his mortal eye, and now he did. "You look like crap, in fact. Your face is full of pus; and you're a yellow colour; and your hair's falling out."
The wraith, too, had not spoken in a long while. Now it did. "I have not fed."
Oh shit.
John hadn't realised.
He had been lost in the universe of thoughts. He'd stopped counting days or notches.
"I will not feed on you anymore."
"What?" John's words staggered. "Why not?" A wild pulse started up in his chest.
"I will die. I can die after your death, or I can die before your death. Those are the choices. I do not want to die alone. Death by starvation: it is not a good death. Already, the hunger is terrible. I do not want to suffer this alone. I do not want to die after your death."
Psychic splinters, fragmented over the past few days or weeks, began to make sense.
"So you want me to suffer alone?" John said. "If you die, I'll be the one dying alone. The flowers need your water; I need your water."
I need you.
"John Sheppard," the wraith said with sudden urgency, turned and grabbed John's upper arm. Its breath was hot against John's face. It smelled of nectar and oyster hearts. "I cannot starve here. Alone. How will I merge with my brethren? I am lost, I will be lost, I am lost even now." Its voice and hand shook. John's mind flexed with the wraith's desperation.
"You mean because there's no wraith to feed on you? Once you're dead?"
"There is no wraith at all!" wailed the wraith. "There is only emptiness! I do not know what will happen to me."
"Once you're dead."
"I cannot be the last one. You must not die before me."
"Don't be ridiculous. We're neither of us going to die. We're going to be rescued. No one gets left behind." He said this but he knew even as the words formed that he no longer believed them.
"When you die," said the wraith, "I will lose my last solace. The emptiness will return. How much longer have you got? You are starting to look old; you have white hair; you have wrinkles; you have spots on the back of your hand."
They looked at one another with their physical eyes.
The wraith sagged against the ember bark.
"Feed," said John and pulled off the shreds of his T-shirt. "Feed, goddamnit." He slid in between the wraith's knees and took the wraith's hand in his own. "Feed on my death."
***
INSENSATE INCOGNATE INCOMMUNICATE BEREFT OF ALL THAT YE ARE O MY BRETHREN AH WOE WHAT IS LIFE BUT SURVIVAL IN THE ASTRAL DOLDRUMS IN THE LEE OF LIFE STUCK ON A PIN OF MATTER O DROWNING LOST SO ALONE WITHIN THE CONFINES OF ONE SKULL WITH ONLY ONE HELPMEET AH TIME TO DIE TIME TO SING THE UNISON OF NEBULAE O THREADS IN SPACE O BEADS IN BLACK ETERNITY O MY ONE SOLACE O MY LAST BENISON
***
The End
John was in the shallows by Sunrise Promontory. He'd forgotten why he had come there; then he remembered. He bent and looked at the ladybugs. He needed to pluck these. He needed to harvest them; he couldn't quite remember why.
Oh yes, to eat. To feed on. To survive.
The wraith was in the copse. The wraith stirred in his mind.
The sky hummed.
Now, that was a strange sound.
He squinted up into the sun. A black shadow turned the day into night. He cowered down but then it came to him: He knew this sound!
"Hey, wraith," he said, in slow wonder. He scrambled to his feet. "We're being rescued."
The shadow screeched, banked, landed. There was a loud smell of gunmetal and tungsten. It ignited odd thoughts in John's mind, memories long shredded.
"Wraith." He faltered on his legs. The surf drowned in the shriek of an engine revving and throttling.
It was a gut memory. John knew what the ship was going to do, instants before it happened. The sounds were imprinted within his body, the changes in pitch, and he could see that it was going to land, right next to the copse, and then it had landed, and he recognised the hiss of the portals and the tramp of boots on steel.
"Guys," he said into the glare and the clouds of disturbed sand. "What took you so long?"
Time flowed and stuttered.
Something.
Something was not right.
ENFOLD MY SPIRIT WITHIN THE HIVE
What?
A pain stabbed the centre of him. It was an inexplicable thing, a lightning fork driven through the heart of his soul.
"Stop!" he screamed. He was running now, stumbling through the surf.
TO END THE CELESTIAL ROUND NO MORE THE PUPAE SJOSTIRNITH
"Wraith! No!"
Run. Run, run, run.
But it was too late.
IF WE DO DIE
Without warning, others appeared. People. They swarmed across the beach in mad zigzags. People with high, tinny voices. There was a blur of faces; John had never seen so many faces. They stared at John with small hard eyes, pupils like pinpricks. They talked and shouted in their shrill voices, all at once, a cacophony of syllables.
NO MORE
O
And then nothing.
The copse exploded in a ball of fire.
John fell into the water.
Down was up, and up was down.
"Wraith?"
The wind whispered. A cosmic silence screamed through the ether. The universe flatlined.
He retched up dry sick. Alien shouts swallowed the sky. "John! Jesus, John! What happened here?"
Hands touched his clammy skin, human hands with short soft fingers.
"Sorry, Colonel, that we couldn't make it earlier," a voice shouted right near his ear. He was jostled and prodded. An arm was thrown around his shoulders; his skin flinched at the touch. "What happened to your face? What happened to your eye? Jesus Christ, what happened to your chest?"
Acrid plumes rose on the air. The trees, the shade, all the season's ember harvest, the orchard: it all crackled and fumed.
"Was that a wraith? That was a wraith, wasn't it? Dead now."
Names. These people had names. "Rodney," John said. "Ronon." Where was...? He touched his temple, the long-gone comm.
"John? You okay? Ready to come home?" The persons smelled of water and of chemical deodorant.
"I'm fine," he said.
And he was.
"Copy that? Over and out."
The sun whirled in the apex of the sky.
***
IF WE DO DIE WE DO DIE AMONG OUR BRETHREN IF WE DO PERISH WE DO DISSOLVE AMONG OUR BRETHREN THERE IS NO END OF US ONLY RECYCLING ONLY THE CIRCLE OF SPIRIT BUT WOE WOE TO DIE IN EXILE TO DIE BEREFT WHO WILL TAKE MINE THOUGHTS INTO THEIR THOUGHTS WHO WILL ENFOLD MINE SPIRIT WITHIN THE SPIRIT OF THE HIVE WHO WILL DRINK OF MINE AND FIND SUCCOUR IN THE MOTHER O WOE MINE HUSK WILL ROT UPON THIS ROCK BUT WHITHER MINE SPIRIT IT WILL WITHER INTO DUST ALREADY IT IS DUST EXECRABLE FILTH O MINE ONLY SOLACE
***
THE END.
All original parts of this story © Lobelia.
9 May 2006. Final draft 29 April 2008.
Feedback? If you liked this story, please leave some! I love all feedback -- a paragraph, a line, a word, even. It's all good!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-30 01:13 am (UTC)*is still speechless*
That...was beautiful. A sad, creepy kind of beautiful. I don't think anyone has ever pulled off a wraith/John relationship so well.
...Wow.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-30 03:21 am (UTC)(ps - your feedback link on your website version is not quite right.)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-30 04:02 am (UTC)I think I must re-read this a few time for it to really sink in. Will rec this at Epic Recs as soon as I get a review written. :)
Mei
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-30 07:29 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-30 12:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-30 04:20 pm (UTC)I loved their relationship to the stars and how like bees they are, always in the air (or space in this case), but always able to find their way. Neat! I also loved the explanations as to why the don't have names as we understand them.
I felt really, really bad for John, at parts almost hitting the edges of my comfort zone, but I did liked him here, his interaction with the wraith, his will to survive and his acceptance of his faith. I don't think his integration back into Atlantis will be as easy as he thinks and a part of me wonder if he will be able to live without the enzyme, not because of addiction so much, but because in the end he was almost a Wraith himself in that he *understood* why they acted like they did. It's the first step into being assimilated by another culture and once that happens there's no going back. You never quite belong either to the culture you left behind nor to the new culture you adopted and are forever a mix of the two lost in the in-between.
Like Michael.
Thanks for sharing. I will have to reread it again with a bit more patience instead of in one big, fast gulp to let some of the finer aspects of the story truly think in.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-30 05:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-30 05:40 pm (UTC)Also, thanks for point re broken weblink. Is fixed now. Gads, it's been years since I last uploaded a fic to that site; I've lost the knack for it (plus the software)...
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-30 05:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-30 05:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-30 05:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-30 05:50 pm (UTC)And thank you so much for your thoughts on John here. It's very interesting that you found he had almost turned into a wraith; I guess that's sort of true. And I have started on a sequel, John back in Atlantis, and yes, I also can't imagine that it wont' be incredible to impossible to re-integrate, especially as he is now about 68 years old! Retiring age! But I get ahead of myself.
It's interesting that you ascribed such a lot to the enzyme. I have a slightly different reading of it but I don't want to intrude. :-) And ah, Michael.
I am also intrigued that what happened to John sometimes hit the edges of your comfort zone. Actually, I am really happy about that! Because my god: it's John/wraith, for goodness' sake. What else can it be but completely on the edge?? Or that's what I thought. :-) And oh dear, I am maybe somewhat too enamoured for my own good with helpless!John...
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-30 06:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-30 06:13 pm (UTC)It's a squick I have: I called it permanent mutilation squick. It's very irrational. I have a very thick skin for all kind of psychological and even physical torture/hurt/whatever as long as when it's over the characters are physically almost as they were going in. Almost. Psychologically I could care less. Oh, I suffer with them, and I've been known to cry, but it doesn't squick me.
I don't mind scars or things like that, but the moment limbs start missing or you know, the character is aged to almost to death, I'm squicked by it. I can't help it. Most of the time I hit the back button and try to forget the story. The thing that kept me reading yours was that you were so sneaky, just taking a bit of John's youth at a time, at first. Besides, with the Wraith there's always the possibility that they give back what they take. I was subconsciously counting on that, which is mostly to blame on my self-delusion as reader with a squick.
So when the Wraith was killed and John remained this old man, with his black eye and definitely not the same as he was going in, all my alarm bells starting going on, but by then I had read the fic and I had liked it. But yes the edge of my comfort zone was very, very close.
The enzyme will be a problem, yes, but for me the major trouble I see is the cultural assimilation. Maybe I'm projecting too much, because by life and by choice I've spent 1/3 of my life in a different country to the one I was born in. So, I'm confronted on daily basis with this culture clash, when after a while you are neither one nor the other, but something in between. Oh, you can perfectly adapt and blend in with both societies, but there are parts of you that are changed forever. This is something I've discussed with people who have lived for longer than five years in a foreign culture and they all agree with me. There is a moment where there's no return. Understanding a culture different to your own, changes you for the better most of the times, some times for the worse, but you're never quite at *home* like you were before. There's always something other about you that those who haven't been influenced by that other culture doesn't have nor do they understand it.
OK, and now I'm rambling so I'll shut up.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-30 06:24 pm (UTC)(Okay, example of what I didn't like: John's smart enough to know that his radio doesn't work interstellarly without an open stargate. He might try a quick blip to see if anyone followed him, but then quit. I also was a little confused by his burying things and then swimming around the island - seemed a little deus ex machina to get his stuff destroyed for the author's purposes.)
My absolute favorite bit was the wraith noting that they were both aliens there. Perfect punchline. The whole "what is alien" and "you are interrogating the species from the wrong perspective, because you as alien can have no clue about me" themes were awesome.
Yay!
Date: 2008-04-30 07:15 pm (UTC)Re: Yay!
Date: 2008-04-30 07:53 pm (UTC)I didn't even picture John going for his comm... :-) But I guess he does.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-30 07:55 pm (UTC)It's funny, isn't it, with pairings? Because while you couldn't imagine John/wraith, I couldn't not imagine it! This was way before Todd came on the scene; I think it was the whole wraith/John dynamic, from the very beginning, when he defies the queen, and then when he has that duel-thing in 'The Defiant One'. He was just so sexy in that... Energised by the wraith! *g*
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-30 08:05 pm (UTC)Isn't that interesting? The radio not working without a gate open... um, I assume that's a bit of canon that just, er, totally escaped me. And clearly totally escaped my betas, too... Ah well. What a blooper. One could interpret it, of course, as John hoping there might be an open stargate somewhere, on the off chance. Or of John going a bit noodly in the head, either from heat or from wraith-induced hallucinations. One could do this... :-)
There's another blooper that nobody has picked up (so far) but that I decided, in the end, to leave in there, as a little on-purpose blemish... *g*
Ah, John burying his stuff. This was indeed picked up by one of the betas, and I thought and I thought about this, and in the end I just couldn't re-think it. I had several different scenarios -- and in the end it wouldn't have mattered if he'd had his stuff or not; sooner or later he would have run out of water. There was indeed one version where he hangs around on the mountain top much longer and another version where he manages to occupy the copse but in the end, I wanted to speed things up, not have an endless hanging-around scenario. I guess I could have had the stuff burn up in the ship or something but (I'm realising now: an unkilled darling) I just fell too much in love with that tac vest. Hah, I should have asked you to beta, shouldn't I? *grins*
I, in the end, decided that John was muddled by heat and sun, and that he just made a dumb mistake. He does make dumb mistakes, in canon too, so it's just one of those stupid things. Now that I think of it, I could have brought out more clearly that John, at this stage, has no idea that the wraith won't go near the water.
Gads, is there ever an end to revising...??
Sorry, these are just my own ramblings now. I am very happy that you liked the bit about being alien. I liked that, too. :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-30 08:30 pm (UTC)This is the thing! I started this fic way before 'Common Ground'. I didn't want to bend over to incorporate this new regeneration canon, and I decided that my idea was not irreconcilable, really -- because the wraith is, by the end, as weak as John is, and in no shape to do any regeneration. That was, for me, always part of the pathos: their alliance could only last so long, one of them would have to die before the other; and this is where, for me, all those philosophical thoughts about time came in at the end. And you know? I am somehow happy that the old man-John stayed in your mind because I didn't make a huge thing of it in the fic but clearly enough for it to be conveyed.
I've spent 1/3 of my life in a different country to the one I was born in Oh! So what country were you born in and where did you go to live? Do you still live there? I was born in Germany, grew up in Indonesia and Sydney, went 'back' to Germany, lived in the States for a year and have lived for the major part of my life here in England. Almost 1/2 of my life! I find that the culture clash fades away after a while, or it did for me, as I just became more used and rooted, and now this is just 'the way things are' instead of 'they way things are in England'. The thing is I have never been at *home* anywhere, and maybe now (faced with a possible move to California and the need then to uproot my children just as I was uprooted) this is starting to haunt me a bit.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-30 10:46 pm (UTC)Maybe I expressed myself wrong. It's not that it doesn't feel like home. It's just that in Germany I will always be a bit Cuban (not in a bad sense; people love it; I love it, but I'm not you know 100% German nor will I ever be). The funny things is that when I go to visit Cuba, people there claim that I've become too German (also not bad, just other).
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-30 11:20 pm (UTC)I thought this was an astonishingly brave, wonderfully original and expertly focused piece. The concentration on the wraith as a sentient alien species and John's dogged determination to not see that aspect of it (purely because of it's anthropomorphic aspects?) gave the eventual breakdown of both the conceptual barriers between them and John's own humanistic internal boundaries the kind of psychological impact only the best H/c fics manage to do, the catalytic point being perhaps the genitalia scene, where John starts to not just think but know that he cannot relate to this being as if it is just an ugly human, that it truly is 'other'. And then the confronting, almost incomprehensible relations between them, and the kick twist where it's the alien who can't accept John's humanity... Superb! So good in fact that even what I've said here just isn't quite encompassing what I feel about it.
Really, really, really good work. Thank you so much for sharing.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-01 02:31 am (UTC)http://community.livejournal.com/epic_recs/
I've written the review already and will post it early next week :)
I watched an episode of Man vs Wild after reading this story (the one where the host had to survive the Moab desert and find a water source)... very enlightening (and got me quite scared).
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-01 02:53 am (UTC)Oh, and I loved, loved, loved, the Wraith's lament -- it was such an excellent way to show the humanity (for want of a better word) of the Wraith culture. And the names of the stars and his insistence that the Wraith care for their herds... Oh! And the philosophical differences within the Wraith communities on how best to care for their herds, was an excellent touch.
Really, really well done. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-01 08:29 am (UTC)