the gods we can touch /calamity + johnny

You want to be alone in your pain.

You always want to be alone in it, always have, since you were too young to even understand why that might be. At the barest hint of tears, you'd disappear, gone off somewhere secret to let them out, to hold yourself and weep. It's almost like you've always understood how much you don't belong with everyone else. It's always been this way, there's you and there's them and you never exist all at once.

It's a complex feeling, not something you really know how to describe. It's just that when you were three years old and everyone else was in their mother's lap around the dinner table, you were alone, on the bench beside your father, who was always busy with someone else.

"The Mother holds me," you mutter softly to yourself as your fingernails dig into the skin of your arms. "I am held," you answer yourself but it isn't very convincing. You don't really know what that's like.

"Calamity? Are you hurt?"

Johnny is here.

You don't know when he arrived, you didn't expect anyone to come after you, for a moment you kneel there, rigid, breathe caught in your throat. There's pain in that though, you can't hold the air from entering your lungs, you can't keep it from leaving you either. A short breath huffs out of you and you flick your eyes briefly to him before focusing back on the mossy ground in front of you.

"Calamity?"

"I'm fine," you lie.

And it sits there so pathetically between you that even the koi fish go still in the pond in front of you out of respect.

"Just a lot of pain in the earth back there," you try to explain, "I feel it like a..... like a stone on my shoulders, crushing me. It's, overwhelming like..."

You trail off, fist unfurling from the moss.

"I left you three to fight alone, Johnny," you say softly, "I don't deserve your worry."

"That's done."

He extends his hand down to you, it rests there like an offering, steady and strong. You look at his palm, at the pads of his fingers and see calluses there. Dried blood sticks stubbornly to the cracks in his skin, a reminder of his labour. You're afraid to touch him almost, you know without feeling that there is so much pain beneath his skin.

Your father raised you to see it, to find people like him and gather them close, to teach them of The Mother and envelope them in her light.

If you were brighter, perhaps just less trusting, you'd know why your father taught you to go for them. Your belief has never wavered though, not even now, on your knees in the dirt of a foreign place.

You place your hand in Johnny's hesitantly, afraid to entrust yourself to someone else but not knowing how not to. You were raised entwined with others, you were created to love and be loved by many. You were born, after all, to bring about the end. Shame isn't an emotion you should even know how to feel, it doesn't apply to you.

You place your other hand under Johnny's holding him, warming him with your touch, spilling the Mother's light into him as best as you can in way of thanks.

Your breathing is still stiff, sort of wrong, but it's ebbing, like the last few drops of warm rain after a summer storm.

"I know," you whisper, "I know you think yourself cold and unkind." You push your palm down into his, so hard that your fingers lift. You transfer the love that you carry into him, tying him to you. "But you are so much more than the things you have done."

No one ever taught you a normal way to thank a person I guess.