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starshifter · 4 days

Text

my hopes the wind done scattered

malevolent. john/arthur, king in yellow/arthur. 8.3k

Ao3 Link if you'd prefer to read it there

I am currently sick and also I haven't posted anything here in like...fuck eight years? But I finished writing this yesterday and I am releasing it on the world now. It's as cooked as my balloon brain. Let's fucking go

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The walls loomed up around him, dark and extending up until they vanished completely from sight. Arthur hunched further back against the wall behind him. Across from him, an indistinct humanoid shape watched him.

The bucket sat between them.

Water splashed inside it and Arthur lurched forward. He needed it. If he didn’t get it first, he knew that he wouldn’t get any at all.

Bent over the large basin, he brandished the shard of sharpened bone towards the lurking figure to warn it off. He would fight it. He wouldn’t let it get him.

He reached into the basin and his hand hit the bottom of a dry bucket.

Then the shadow was on him. His legs shattered under him as its hands closed around his neck.

He felt like he was suspended in jello. Moving his limbs was an inordinate amount of effort, but he would die if he didn’t.

He strained harder and then the shadow was pinned under him. Triumphant, he pressed his thumbs into its eyes and began to laugh as it screamed—

Arthur looked up from his well-lit desk at the knock on their office door. “Come in,” he called as he gathered the papers in front of him into a neat pile. A shadow shifted behind the frosted glass on the door and there was silence for a long moment.

The knock came again.

Frowning, Arthur got up and went over to the door. “It’s unlocked, Parker. You don’t have to—” he started to say as he opened the door.

Darkness greeted him. A void stretched out from the doorway, a blackness utterly untouchable by the dim electric light. Faint whispers caught in his ears that he could almost understand. If he could just hear them a little clearer...

He tipped forward, compelled by their words, and something shifted.

He froze.

He couldn’t see a thing past his door frame, but somehow he knew that something was there — lurking in the dark.

Watching.

Waiting.

His breath caught in his chest and his heart pounded as he stumbled back. He needed to get away. He needed to—

There was a flash of color in the void. A whirl of yellow.

“Arthur!” John’s voice called faintly, as if from far away.

“John,” he whispered. Then again, louder, “John!”

He plunged forward into the void.

Something huge and unfathomable closed around him.

Arthur gasped awake.

He stared up into darkness from where he lay and, for a disoriented moment, thought he was still in that void. The past few days returned to him abruptly. He was trapped in a cabin, surrounded by snow with two broken legs, and still completely and utterly blind. John was lost to the King and he was starving to death in the middle of who the fuck knew where.

It had been a dream.

He closed his eyes, not that it made any fucking difference, and reached down to pull the blanket over his head.

It wasn’t there.

“What?”

He propped himself up on his elbows — and at the very least he had all his limbs back, for all the good that did him — and the surface he was lying on tilted slightly underneath him.

He froze.

Something was very, very wrong.

For one thing, it was warm — almost hot, in fact. The cabin he had been trapped in had been cold even with the fire lit. And the surface he was on… It didn’t feel like the cot he had fallen asleep on. It didn’t feel like a mattress at all. In fact, it wasn’t even a flat surface. It almost cupped him, with his head on an incline that scooped gently downwards until it rose back up under his legs, his knees curving gently over another bump.

He carefully rubbed his hand against the material. It was smooth, cool to the touch, and velvety soft with a bit of give to it. Except velvet had never felt so alive before.

“Oh god,” he whispered and sat up.

Immediately, the surface shifted again as it closed around him.

It was a hand, a massive hand, but like no other hand Arthur had ever known. It seemed to be made entirely of fingers, the palm non-existent, but the fingers had no joints. They curled smoothly without bending as they wrapped around him like living prison bars.

“Fuck,” he yelled and started struggling in earnest to get out. The pressure around him increased and he quickly found himself immobilized around the upper torso, only his legs able to kick freely.

“Have you figured out where you are yet, Arthur Lester?” a deep, reverberating voice asked. It was a voice he could never forget.

“No,” Arthur choked out through the sudden surge of nauseating horror. “No, no!” He thrashed violently, straining as hard as he could against the hold around him.

“Calm down, Arthur,” the King in Yellow said in that slimy, manipulative way of his and sheer rage flushed the terror out of his veins.

“Release me! Release me right this second or I swear I will find a way to kill you.” Arthur dug the heels of his feet as hard as he could into the hand holding him.

“If you insist,” the King said, uncaring.

His stomach swooped violently with a sensation not dissimilar to an elevator suddenly ascending, only this was much faster than any elevator he had been on. The wind whistled past him for a split second as he was lifted. To some sort of platform, perhaps?

The fingers unwrapped from around him and he shoved himself up to sitting, intending next to get to his feet.

He never got the chance. The hand holding him tipped to the side and he was falling.

He didn’t even have time to scream before he crashed messily into a soft surface.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he gasped out. Fingers cupped around him again, though they didn’t close him in the way they had before.

Nauseous, furious, and terrified; Arthur grabbed at the finger closest to him and clung to it with all his strength. He’d been lifted up. There was no way of knowing how high up in the air he was right now. If the King decided to drop him for real instead of tossing him between hands like some kind of fucking baseball, it might just kill him.

A deep, menacing laugh rumbled around him. “Would you still like to be released?”

“Fuck you,” Arthur spat at him and he hated how breathless he sounded. He took a deep breath, forced himself to stop trembling, and tried to think. He couldn’t let the King manipulate him again. “Isn’t this a breach of your deal? I was supposed to go home, which you couldn’t manage either, by the way. That was not Arkham.”

“It was Earth. Humans are capable of traveling between their little cities.”

“Not with two broken legs!” Arthur yelled. Then he paused. His legs had been broken in that cabin. He’d set them himself before passing out from the pain of it.

They were completely fine now though. Even the make-shift splints had vanished. The King had healed him? Why? What did he gain by giving Arthur back his mobility?

“What do you want from me,” he spat at the King.

“You wanted what you called “John” back, didn’t you?” the King asked him.

Arthur went still. “… What?”

Had he heard that correctly? Was the King really offering…?

No. No, this was a trick of some kind. Or some kind of fucked up game he was playing. Arthur wasn’t going to fall for that.

“What are you saying?” he inquired guardedly.

“Exactly what I said. You didn’t wish to be parted from your friend.” He said it matter-of-factly, as if he knew Arthur better than he did himself.

It pissed him off.

“You didn’t care about that before. Why are you bringing it up now? I don’t believe for a second that you’ll just give me John back out of the kindness in your heart. If you even have one of those,” he couldn’t resist spitting out at the end.

The King didn’t sound bothered in the least by his righteous anger. “It changes, actually.”

“What?” Arthur asked, completely taken off guard.

“Hearts. The number of them changes. Right now, I have three.”

“How—” Arthur started to ask before he realized he was being directed off topic again. “No, I don’t care about that. Why aren’t you answering my questions?”

The hand cupping him shifted slightly, the fingers curling in towards him. Arthur tightened his grip on the finger he held. He might be doll-sized to this creature, but he wouldn’t let himself be tossed about like a toy.

“You didn’t answer mine. Did you want “John” back?”

“Of course I fucking want John back!” The words burst out of him before he could stop it. “I want John and I want to go back home!”

“But you wanted him out of your head. You wanted to give him his own body,” the King pressed, as if that had any bearing on Arthur’s answer.

“It’s none of your business what we wanted to do. What do you fucking want?”

“I want you to answer my fucking questions when I ask them,” the King finally raised his voice back and it shook with a sound that could only be described as electric static. The sound thrilled Arthur as much as it terrified him.

Mortal terror wasn’t enough to stop him now. “Well, too bad! I answered one of yours, so now you can answer one of mine! What do you really fucking want from me?”

The fingers closed around him and squeezed. The air wheezed out of him at the sudden pressure and he released his grip in a panic to try to shove the fingers away before they crushed him.

“I will give you one offer. You can either go back to your precious Arkham alone or you can have your “John” back and in his own body here in the Dreamlands.” Arthur opened his mouth to tell the King to go fuck himself, he would have both even if it killed him, and the King cut him off before he could get the words out. “Think very carefully before you answer or you will get neither. My patience for your insolence grows thin.”

And Arthur’s anger faltered. For a moment, the only thing he could think of was lying in the Prison Pits, John silent in the face of his ill temper, and staring up into darkness as he lay slowly wasting away in his own filth. It flushed a deep shame through him as soon as he realized that the subservience the King had worked to instill in him had taken, at least on some level.

But it also served as a wake up call. He was being an idiot. He knew exactly the sort of person he was dealing with and charging forward in a blind temper could only end poorly.

He would never go back to those Pits. He’d already died once to avoid going back to those Pits and he would die again if that’s what it took. But maybe he could avoid reaching that point at all. The King clearly wanted something from him. He needed to figure out what was going on and then find a way to turn it in his favor.

He’d beaten the King once when he climbed out of those Pits. He could do it again.

He needed to play along. At least for now.

There was no way he could trust a word that came out of the King in Yellow’s lying mouth. He knew he wouldn’t get John or a way out of the Dreamlands no matter which he picked, but all he needed to do right now was answer the question.

It was an easy question too. It wasn’t even a choice which he would pick.

“John. I choose John.”

John wouldn't leave him here. John would help him find a way for them to both escape, just as they’d always done before.

The King let out a pleased sounding rumble. “Very good, Arthur.”

The strange elevator like sensation came back, but this time he was being moved sideways. He was pressed up against the softest cloth he had felt in his entire life. Silken wasn’t a fine enough word for it. Silk was far too coarse in comparison. This material felt as if someone had plucked the gentle starlight down from the heavens and woven it into the ideal of fabrics that could only be found in dreams. Even the velvet-soft skin he was cradled in felt rough and unfinished in comparison.

There was an off-putting noise akin to the wind, if the wind could be described as solid, that was accompanied by a faint echo of whispers. Then it changed into something sideways to the sound of a multitude of shuffling bare feet and a flag rippling in the breeze. It made the hair on the back of Arthur’s neck prickle up.

John hadn’t described the King in much detail, but Arthur was starting to think that may have been a kindness. There was something very wrong with the way he moved, like nothing that had ever graced the Earth.

“Let’s get you settled in,” the King said simply as they moved.

“Settled where?” he asked sharply.

“A room, of course. This is your home now. I would hate for you to feel unwelcome,” the King crooned, clearly trying to put him at ease. It only made his hackles go up. He knew when he was being lied to and that tone of voice was nothing but falsehoods laid over a monster’s visage.

A guest. Ha. What a laugh.

He was just as much a prisoner now as he was before, no matter how nicely the King tried to dress it up for this go around. What in the world did he want from him? He’d already taken everything Arthur had left.

But… Wait. He was thinking about this incorrectly. The chance that the King wanted something from him specifically wasn’t likely. No, the only reason the King had ever cared about him was because of his connection to John. And now the King had kidnapped him back to the Dreamlands and was asking him about John.

Was this… Was this because John was fighting back? Was the King looking for leverage over him? Fuck, had Arthur doomed them both by agreeing to stay?

But would the outcome have changed if he said he wanted to go back home? The King wouldn’t have sent him back if he had meant to keep him from the start.

So the choice had been false like he first thought. It had been another clever manipulation because he knew just enough about Arthur to know which option he would pick and was hoping he could pull the wool over his eyes by making him feel like he had a choice. It had been a clever ruse to create some good will.

Well, Arthur was on to him. He wouldn’t find an easy mark here.

The sensation of movement and that brain twisting noise came to a stop. He was lifted away from that dreamlike fabric and tipped gently onto his feet on some sort of solid surface. The soft scent of flowers unlike any he had smelled before washed over him. Underneath their perfume, there was the faint scent of what he could only describe as clean water. It drew him forward a thoughtless step before he stopped.

He had no idea what lay before him. This was the King’s domain. There was an equal chance that some kind of paradise lay before him as that it was some kind of illusory trap that would send him into another monster’s lair.

“You are at the doorway of a lavish room,” the King began, in the same cadence that John had always used to describe what they saw. The sheer longing that ripped through him at the sound made his breath hitch painfully.

“The walls and floor are made of polished, dark stone with veins of violet crystal. It stretches out nearly fifty feet from one side of the circular room to the opposite. Golden tapestries hang from the walls between sconces lit with crystals full of trapped starlight. Right now, the room is lit with a gentle blue light in reflection of the sun outside. It will soon cycle through to red.

“Various pieces of furniture are scattered about the room. There are lounges, desks, bookshelves, and other soft looking surfaces to rest on. A large, circular bed lies set into the floor off to your far right. To your left, there is a large pool set with mosaicked tiles that depict the Hyades. Each of the glass stars glows with their own light. The water steams softly and soft towels and plates with fruit and flatbread lie along the pool’s rim.”

Arthur’s stomach clenched painfully at the mention of food. God, he didn’t even know how long it had been since he last ate. Time was strange in the cabin he dragged himself to. He kept passing in and out of consciousness and he couldn’t see the light outside to estimate the time. All he had to tell time was the number of times he awoke freezing and had to relight the fire.

“In the center of the room is an open circle set with the heart of another mosaic that stretches beyond the initial circle like golden rivers through the rest of the room. Along its edges are a variety of instruments, including a piano.”

It felt like a slap in the face. Arthur’s nails dug into his palms painfully. A piano. What a sick joke. “You don’t have to describe it. I’ll figure it out myself.”

“Very well. I’ll leave some of my Dancers with you. If you require anything, tell them and they’ll see it done.”

“I don’t need their help.”

“Then don’t ask anything of them.”

So they were his new prison wardens then.

There was a rustle of fabric from the King’s direction as he prepared to take his leave.

“What about John?” burst out of him without any further thought.

The King neatly sidestepped the question. “For now, you should bathe.”

Arthur wasn’t letting it go that easily. “And then what? You’ll produce John like some kind of party trick? Or is he contingent on good behavior? Do exactly what I say and you can have your friend back? You promised me John! Let me speak to him! I’d rather have him here than these Dancers.”

“I don’t need to produce “John,”” the King growled. And there is was. Arthur had known it was a lie and he still somehow felt his hopes shatter. He opened his mouth, to say what, he didn’t even know, but the King beat him to it. ““John” is already here.”

“He clearly isn’t!”

“Arthur…” the King said, disappointed and condescending. “You’re smarter than this. I know you understand what I mean.”

And damn it all, it only took Arthur a moment to catch on. “No. No, you are nothing like John. John is a good person. I know he’s still fighting you in there.”

Anger crept into the King’s voice. “And what do you know about me? Do you even know my name, Arthur Lester? Or will you keep calling me John until your final days?”

“I don’t need to know your name to know you’re a right prick. Even a fragment of your own soul wants nothing to do with you,” he spat back.

Silence rang between them for a long moment. An otherworldly growl like the screech of a slipping record echoed through Arthur’s bones and he froze completely still. He couldn’t even breath as the sound bounced back off the room’s walls.

“You forget yourself,” the King snarled, that horrific echo of the unknowable hammering the words directly into Arthur’s brain. “Maybe I should jog your memory.”

The scent of filth and despair flooded his senses and Arthur knew immediately where he was.

“No!” his voice cracked as he threw himself forward to claw at the hard-packed dirt walls. “Fuck! No, let me out! I won’t fucking go back! I won’t!”

Not the Pits.

Anything but the Pits.

The visceral scent and sensation of the walls under his nails abruptly vanished. He stumbled forward and collapsed to his knees. Shaken, he reached forward and patted his hands along the floor. It was hard, polished stone, not hard-packed dirt. Nothing like the floor of the Pit. Tears welled up in his eyes with the strength of his relief. He wasn’t there. He was still out.

He wasn’t there.

A sob ripped its way out of him.

“Arthur, I…” The King sounded so fucking much like John sometimes. It drew another helpless sob out of him.

Arthur couldn’t do this anymore. All he wanted was to go home. But how could he go back without John? He’d seen what waited for him on Earth without John. It was emptiness. He’d been dying alone and blind in a cabin in the middle of nowhere surrounded by snow. He couldn’t even pick a direction to drag himself in without risking death from exposure because he had no fucking clue if he was moving towards civilization or heading deeper into the wilderness.

“What do you fucking want from me?” His voice sounded so fucking small as it bounced off the walls of this fancy new prison.

He’d never wanted to hear John’s voice more than when he’d woken up on the floor of that fucking cabin.

But John hadn’t been there. John was here. John was a prisoner of the King still.

Arthur couldn’t leave him here alone.

He’d given his life up for John once. He could do it again. He didn’t have anything else waiting for him back home.

He dragged the tattered shreds of his resolve back around him and stood up. John needed him. He couldn’t fall to pieces now.

He wouldn’t let the King win again.

“Right now I want you to settle in. Take a bath, eat something, sleep. We can talk after that.” Arthur didn’t even have the energy left to get properly angry at how fucking gentle the King sounded now. The little flare that sputtered up died down almost as quickly as it appeared.

“Fine.” If the King was going to offer him respite, then Arthur would take full advantage of it. He would need it later if he wanted to escape with John.

“Then I will see you later,” the King told him. An unholy screech of electric reverberation and whispers clawed its way into Arthur’s brain and he brought his hands up to his ears with a pained exclamation. It did nothing to block out the noise.

Then there was a sudden sense of absence. He knew down to his bones that the King had departed.

After taking a second to pull himself back together, he stretched a hand out and shuffled to the left until he encountered a wall. Dragging his hand along it, he moved forward, carefully testing the ground with each step forward.

It was obvious when he reached the pool. The gentle caress of steam curled over his skin and the sweet, clean scent of water drifted up with it. He felt out with a foot until he found the lip of the pool. Eagerly, he reached for the tattered remains of his tie, before stopping.

The King had said he left some of his servants here.

He cleared his throat politely. “I would like to bathe privately now. If any Dancers in the room could either leave the room or turn away, that would be greatly appreciated.”

The rustle of cloth came from a few feet away from him and Arthur nearly jumped out of his skin.

“Jesus Christ,” he gasped. He’d had no clue they were so close. A new wave of annoyance hit him. The King couldn’t have included the locations of his fucking Dancers in his description of the room?

There was the sound of soft shoes moving away from him and then silence.

“I— Thank you,” he said shortly — hoping the sound had been their full compliance and not merely them moving back while continuing to stare — and started stripping out of his clothes. Though perhaps rags would be a better description of them. Mud, sweat, and blood was liberally encrusted into the fabric and the less said about the smell the better.

He tested the water with his foot carefully. Gentle, soothing, heat had him fumbling forward to get into the pool as quickly as possible. He splashed in and a groan ripped out of his throat. God, he hadn’t felt so good in… He didn’t even know anymore. It felt like it had been decades.

He took a second to just stand there, the water up to the bottom of his ribs, and soak in the heat. Then he ducked down and submerged himself fully in the water.

Suspended there in the water, time seemed to stop. There was nothing but heat and darkness and the sensation of being weightless. He folded himself down until he touched the bottom of the pool and there he sat.

His lungs began to burn with the need for air and, for a second, he considered just staying where he was. A visceral wave of disgust and horror followed hard on the heels of the thought and he shot back up to the surface of the pool.

He couldn’t.

He wouldn’t end it like that. Even the King in Yellow didn’t deserve to come back and find a corpse where there had been a living person.

The phantom sensation of the knife plunging into his throat burned at him and Arthur choked around it.

Jesus fucking Christ. He’d actually done that. He’d slit his own throat and it had…

It hadn’t been the relief he had thought it would be.

His stomach cramped hard and he dry-heaved. God. Fucking Christ. He didn’t want to think about this. He fumbled back over to the side of the pool and started feeling along the edges of it for some kind of soap.

His fingers encountered a metal platter of some sort and when he felt over it, he found what felt almost like… grapes? No, they were far too large for grapes and their otherwise oval shape ended in points rather than rounded edges. But their skin was smooth and cool like a grape’s. Maybe this was some alien fruit from the Dreamlands. He’d encountered so many oddities here. What were some strange fruits in comparison?

He left them where he found them for now. The thought of food made his stomach churn uncomfortably.

A little further on, he found a glass bottle of some sort. He pulled the stopper out and sniffed it cautiously. It was spicy and intoxicating and far too strong, but it had that soapy edge to its smell that indicated it was what he was looking for.

It wasn’t his preference, but clean was clean and he would use far more offensive scents if he had to. He tipped some into his palm and worked it into a lather before rubbing himself down.

As he worked it through his overgrown bush of a beard, he found himself wishing he had a razor. What he wouldn’t give to get a nice, clean shave right now.

He paused there, soap dripping slowly down his temple. Perhaps…

He cleared his throat loudly. “Excuse me, would there happen to be a razor I could use?”

There was the soft tap of shoes moving out of earshot and then a long stretch of silence. Perhaps there hadn’t been any razors in the room. Or perhaps the Dancer had run off to ask the King if it was okay to let him shave. Whatever. He would finish his bath regardless of getting a shave or not.

Not too long later, as he was rising his hair our for a second time, the soft tapping of shoes approached until it was directly in front of him. Hesitantly, he held up a hand and something cool and metallic was pressed into it. Feeling it out, he found that he had been given a straight razor. “Ah, thank you.”

There was a small titter of laughter before the dancer moved back. Feeling strangely self-conscious now, Arthur finished cleaning himself up quickly.

He hesitated when he’d finished. The idea of getting out of the warm water was incredibly unappealing. Would it hurt to stay in the pool a little bit longer? There was food along the rim of it. He could soak a while longer as he ate. His stomach had settled while he performed his ablutions and now was letting him know in no uncertain terms that it wanted attention too.

Mind made up, he felt along the edge of the pool until he encountered the metal platter again. He plucked up one of the strange fruits and turned it over in his hand. There would be no benefit in poisoning him now, so it was likely safe to eat.

He popped it in his mouth. Tart, sweet juice burst over his tongue like a sunburst. His stomach roared at him and, before he knew it, he had demolished most of the bunch.

His fingers brushed along another item next to the fruits and he realized it was the flatbread. Delighted, he tore a chunk off and ate that too. It was freshly baked, soft and warm on his tongue, and it vanished almost as quickly as the fruits had.

He proceeded to clear the rest of the platter and even found a goblet full of what might have been some kind of strange mulled wine next to it. He didn’t know and right now he didn’t particularly care.

Uncomfortably full and warm, a massive yawn escaped him. He bent forward over where his elbows braced him on the pool’s edge and debated the merits of falling asleep right where he was. It was incredibly tempting, but he didn’t feel like dealing with the humiliation when he would inevitably have to be fished out of the pool.

Reluctantly, he dragged himself out of the water. The towels were just as soft as he had been promised and he happily wrapped himself up in one.

God, he felt like a new person entirely. The difference such simple pleasures made in one’s life was frankly unbelievable. He could hardly believe he was in the same Dreamlands that he had spent the last three months suffering through. It felt like he would wake up back in the Pits at any second.

Maybe he would. He was at the King’s mercy here.

The rapid patter of shoes came directly up to both sides of him and Arthur flinched back at their sudden proximity, slipping on the wet tile and nearly falling before he caught himself. “Jesus Christ. Don’t do that.”

There was a rustle of fabric from his right and then incomprehensibly soft, smooth fabric was pressed against the back of his hand that hadn’t gone down to make sure his towel didn’t slip.

Curious, he accepted it and ran it through his hands. It was folded up, but when he shook it out, he realized it was some kind of robe. “Is this for me to change into?”

There was another whisper of cloth from the right.

“Are you… not able to speak?” He tried to remember how John had described the Dancers when they had encountered them before, but the details were largely overshadowed by what came after. Another pointed whisper of cloth followed. “Right, of course, how about… Tap my arm once for yes and twice for no.”

There came two soft taps against his arm. The hand, if it had been a hand, had not felt like skin, but rather more like the flat of a ceramic blade that was body-warm in temperature. It was decidedly off-putting.

He shifted back a step and pulled the garment up against his chest. It seemed fitting that the King would leave him with strange servants unable to answer his questions.

The Dancer to his left reached forward and tugged lightly at the fabric in his hands.

“I can dress myself, thank you,” Arthur told her sharply and unfolded the garment to do just that. It took him a second to work out where his head and arms went, but soon enough he had the robes on over top of his towel. Feeling somewhat foolish, he then let the towel drop.

Pettily, he left it where it fell. The King could just deal with him making a mess of his guest room.

He made his way back over to the wall and let his hand trail along it as he started towards the other side of the room where the King had said the bed was. The Dancers trailed in his wake. It was more than a little unnerving.

“I can walk across a room just fine on my own. You don’t need to hover. Go do whatever it is you normally do.” It was unlikely they would leave, but Arthur could settle for them giving him some space.

Their footsteps stopped for a moment before they moved off deeper into the room. It wasn’t long before the sound of them was lost in the vastness of the space. Somehow, not knowing where they were or what they were doing was worse than having them dogging at his heels, but Arthur refused to call them back.

The walk stretched on and he encountered nothing aside from the tapestries and a few bookshelves on the wall. A few times he felt the smooth marble-like floors under his bare feet shift into the mosaic tiles the King had described, but other than that he encountered nothing.

The room was big yes, but surely he should have reached the other side of it by now. It occurred to him that he had no idea whether the bed was up against the wall or not. He could have already walked past it and was now circling back around to the pool. Alternatively, it could be a few steps in front of him.

He didn’t know and he hated how helpless it left him feeling.

He stopped walking and took a deep breath. At some point he would need to map out the entire room, perhaps shuffle a few items around in it to serve as guidance posts, but right now he was exhausted. He just wanted to sleep. He could find the bed on his own, but he didn’t know how long it would take.

His free hand bunched up in the robe before he straightened it back out and smoothed the fabric down.

“Excuse me, could one of you point me in the direction of the bed?” he called out towards the center of the room.

There was silence for a moment and then one set of footsteps approached. A pair of heavy hands landed on his shoulders.

He flinched back automatically, his hands coming up to defend himself before he stopped. The grip vanished immediately. He took another deep breath before he put his hands back down. He would not apologize for a perfectly reasonable reaction. Not to one of the King’s own.

There was silence for a beat of time and then the hands came back, alighting on his shoulders as delicately as butterfly wings. Slowly, he was nudged about two-thirds of the way around from the wall.

Warmth flushed into his face as he realized that he had indeed overshot the bed. “Ah. Thank you.”

The Dancer retreated again with a flutter. There was a soft tittering sound almost like laughter from deeper in the room. Arthur’s face went even warmer as he clenched his jaw and marched forward.

He hated this. Even more, he hated how much this bothered him. What did it matter if the King’s heralds laughed at the poor blind man? If they underestimated him, it would just make his future escape easier.

He wanted John back so much it felt like being stabbed.

The bed announced its sudden presence by way of changing the hard stone into plush fabric. Arthur yelped and tripped forward. He caught himself with his hands against pillowy cotton that sank down almost an inch with his weight. Laughter rang out from deeper in the room.

“Would the two of you shut up,” he snapped. Hadn’t they said they couldn’t speak? What was this then?

Angrily, he shuffled forward on his knees, feeling around for the edge of the blankets and a pillow. The bed continued to stretch onwards and, before he knew it, he had abandoned his quest to settle down in order to find out just how big the bed was.

The answer was unaccountably massive. Arthur was relatively certain that he could have stretched himself out twice and barely touched the edges of the bed. It was far beyond lavish, it was unreasonably ostentatious. He felt ridiculous just being in its vicinity.

Still, it was soft and he’d earned something nice after everything he’d been through. He draped one of the light sheets over himself — it was warm enough in the room that it was more than enough to keep him comfortable — and dragged one of the many plush pillows under his head.

A long breath escaped him as he relaxed back into the most comfortable bed of his life. He was out in moments.

He drifted slowly out of sleep. It was warm and comfortable and he never wanted to get up. He turned over, intending to settle down and go back to sleep, and something stroked over his arm.

Arthur shot up out of bed with a strangled yell. For a moment, he struggled with the blanket, then he was free. He shoved the thing on his arm off as he frantically scooted away.

He stopped, confused, as his hand met nothing but cloth. “What…”

Cautiously, he patted around for the thing he had felt moving, and his hand closed around a bolt of impossibly soft fabric. A shaky laugh escaped from him. It hadn’t been something trying to kill him after all. It was just some fabric he’d been tangled with.

Then the bolt of fabric wrapped around his hand and tugged him forward.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Arthur gasped and frantically tried to claw it off of him.

A deep, unearthly laugh reverberated around the room. Dread pooled in his stomach and he froze where he was. The King had returned.

He shoved the fear down as far as he could, but he couldn’t help the way his hands continued to tremble at the shock.

“Did you have a good nap?” the King asked him, fond and teasing and sounding far too much like John.

Arthur bristled. He tugged his arm firmly against the grip around it — and what was it? It felt just like cloth, if soft enough that cloth didn’t feel like an adequate word to describe it, but it moved like it was alive — and it curled further up his arm in response. Frustrated, he let his arm go lax instead of giving the King the satisfaction of continuing to struggle hopelessly.

“Are you finally going to answer my question?” he shot back.

“I suppose I should,” the King said, sounding bored by the idea of it. “Very well. You are here because I would like you to be.”

What a non-answer. There were so many ways a statement like that could be meant. “And why exactly would you like that? Because the last I checked, you hated me.”

“Hatred is a strong word for what I felt. Annoyance would be closer. Perhaps frustration. You were like a fly buzzing in my ear and refusing to leave.”

“A fly the almighty King couldn’t even manage to swat,” Arthur said sarcastically, feeling strangely stung by the flippant dismissal. “Yes, I can see why you might call that frustrating. Now stop dodging the question. Why am I here? Truly.”

“I think I swatted you just fine,” the King said smugly.

“Not the point,” he hissed.

The King sighed and there was a shuffling of cloth and the faint hint of whispers carried on an otherworldly wind. The cloth around his hand squeezed once and twisted further up his arm. “I know you had your expectations of what returning John to me would entail and that he shared them, but returning to my whole, unbroken self has had a rather different outcome.”

There was a sudden ringing in his ears as he processed what the King had said.

“No,” Arthur breathed out in horror and then continued, louder, “No, John promised he’d fight you! He wouldn’t give in that fast!”

“Would you just fucking listen to me?” the King hissed at him. “I did— He did fight. Every fucking step of the way. And ultimately it was a draw. I chose to become whole again rather than remain broken, but I am not the same King in Yellow that I was before. I am changed. You changed me. I don’t know if I want to kill you for it or reward you, but it is done and it cannot be undone. You, Arthur Lester, have changed a piece of the fabric of the universe.”

Hope surged up in Arthur. “Then… you’re saying John is still there?”

“Fuck, is that all you care about? Yes, “John” is still here. I remember every step we walked together and every emotion you evoked in me.”

The idea of the King having all of John’s memories was sickening. Those had belonged to John, not a monster like the King. He had no right to them. This had to be fixed. He couldn’t give up on John now that there was a glimpse of hope on the horizon.

“And you don’t want to be changed, right?” he cajoled the King. “So what if you gave him back? Undo the change, so to say.”

“Did you listen to a single fucking word I said? The change is done. I am John and John is me. I might as well rip an arm off and hand that over to you. It would accomplish about the same as ripping another piece of my soul out and stuffing it in your head, you greedy, selfish human!” The King’s voice rose into a brain-rending shout and Arthur froze in place.

“Do you have any idea what that was like for me?” The King continued in a multi-toned mixture of a spitting electricity and a growl of the wind that made every hair on Arthur’s body stand up straight. The fabric around his arm curled agitatedly, sometimes tight enough to be painful and sometimes loose enough that he might have been able to pull free. He didn’t attempt to.

“I was a prisoner! I had nothing but a pair of eyes, a hand, and a foot. I couldn’t speak to anyone, I couldn’t control our actions, I couldn’t even make a single fucking decision except for what I chose to tell you! I should kill you for daring to hold me prisoner!”

As abruptly as the King’s anger surged, it ebbed back down. His voice was firm and deep with a hint of whispers behind it as he finished. “I won’t stuff myself back into you anymore than you will walk back into the Prison Pits.”

“That’s—” Arthur started to say, a lump forming in his throat.

“But maybe that’s not what you want,” the King continued while Arthur tried to breath through the sudden wave of nausea. “Maybe, you just want a harmless little pet to guide your every action.” It was John’s voice, curling comfortably inside his head the way it always had. “A dying branch turned into a crutch for the helpless, blind man and damn what it means for the tree you took the crutch from.”

“Get out of my head!” he screamed. He jerked his arm back hard and the fabric finally fell away.

Arthur panted harshly in the heavy silence that fell over them. He could feel the King’s heavy regard pressing down on him like the stones of the cave under the lighthouse. He wrapped his arms around himself, half to keep them out of the King’s grip and half to reassure himself that he could still move.

After a couple moments to collect himself, he spoke again. “If there is any truth to what you just said, then you never do that again. Never. Do you understand me?”

He waited until he got a response.

“I understand,” the King said tightly after several long beats.

“Good.”

A charged silence fell over them.

Arthur’s felt like his emotions were being pulled in so many directions at once he was about to collapse in pieces. John was gone? For good? Oh god. He was—

He switched tracks. Had he really been imprisoning John? But John had wanted to stay with him! He wasn’t anything like the King and his cursed Pits.

But John also wasn’t really gone and still wanted him around, hence bringing him back to the Dreamlands? Hadn’t he been just as desperate to leave this place and return to Arkham as Arthur? Then the desire to stay here was the King?

It didn’t seem possible for his friend to be the same monster that had left him to rot in the Pits. He couldn't accept that. John was different. He knew it in his soul.

Was this all an elaborate ruse by the King to torment him as some kind of revenge? Arthur didn’t know if he could survive finding out that John was truly gone and this was just the King playing with him. But it felt so much like talking to John…

Arthur didn’t know. He felt like he didn’t know anything anymore. The rug was well and truly pulled out from under him.

But… Arthur had rebuilt himself from lower points than this. He had lost everything before. There was no excuse for falling to pieces now when there might still be something left.

It was likely a fool’s hope, and would come back to stab him through the heart, but he had to believe that John was still in there somewhere.

Unwinding his grip on himself, he wrapped his hands together, closing his right hand over his wooden pinkie. As John had said: there were miles still to go.

It was time to pick the pieces back up and carry on.

He could do this. He just needed to treat this like he had any other problem that needed to be worked through.

Arthur knew he was a damn good detective and very good at reading people. And, right now, he felt like he was being told the truth. Maybe not the entire truth, but very close to it. He could work with that.

“If I,” he swallowed heavily to force the lump down and tried again. “If I was your jailer, then why did you bring me back? Wouldn’t you have preferred to leave me to die on Earth?”

“Because you are also my friend, Arthur. I found that…” He fell silent.

“You found what?” Arthur prompted gently.

“I found that I missed you. As strange as that seems. I did not wish to leave you on Earth, especially when I knew I had injured you.”

He didn’t sound like the King. He sounded like John. Was it possible… Could John have defeated the King? Could he have absorbed the King rather than the other way around?

“John,” he questioned, the entirety of his tremulous hope contained in that single name.

“I suppose that is one of my names now,” he said with a hint of humor. “It’s been quite a while since I took a new one. Perhaps it was time.”

Arthur reached up in the direction John’s voice had been coming from. Hope and a kind of ecstasy he hadn’t know before swelled inside him. “Your hand. Give me your hand.”

Something warm pushed against his hand and Arthur closed both his hands around it. He would guess it was just a fingertip, but it was close enough. “I suppose I can’t quite shake your hand, but it’s still so good to finally properly meet you, John.”

“And I you, Arthur,” John rumbled back. His hand pulled away and Arthur felt strangely disappointed by the loss of contact.

Then John’s hand closed around him and he was lifted so gently he hardly even felt the movement of it.

Arthur still felt his stomach swoop and he clutched at the fingers around him for an anchor. “I’m not a doll. Don’t just go picking me up,” he objected.

“Of course not, Arthur. I simply wish to see you better. You are quite far down. I think I may get a crick in my neck talking to you.” John’s voice shook with suppressed amusement.

“Shut up. You’re the one who is far too big.”

“I prefer the term glorious.”

A finger pressed down on his head for a second and then lifted just enough to stroke over his hair. It was strange, but not entirely unwelcome. John had his own body. How novel. He released his grip with one hand and stroked over John’s finger in turn. How wonderful it was to be able to do something so mundane as touch his friend.

A laugh that was half hysteria and half honest joy bubbled up out of Arthur. This was utterly insane, but when had insanity stopped him before?

John was here. They would figure out the rest together, just like they always had.

#malevolent #jarthur #private eyes #just fucking take it #i finished a thing and i will not let a little fever stop me from posting #i will contribute to a fandom rather than just lurk for once #did i have a tagging system on the blog?#i think it did but it is lost now #my writing #the one problem with cross posting is i like to link them to each other but i cant fucking do that until theyre posted #so sorry if you try to click the ao3 link before the ao3 link fucking exists

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