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“I know you’re not asleep, Jon,” Elias says into the dark of his room. Darkness has never agreed with him well, he prefers to be able to see what’s coming, but he must admit Jon strikes a particularly fetching lump curled beneath the blankets, a pillow crushed tight against his chest like a child might hold a teddy bear. And it’s not like Elias needs to be able to see what’s coming now. Not tonight.
“As if I could sleep,” Jon mumbles, curling tighter into himself as if he could deny the truth of it. The sleeplessness. His body. This world.
“I thought one last stroll beneath the Eye would suit you. Something familiar before it all goes—” Elias makes a fluttering gesture with his hand that would be obscured by the dark of his room, even if Jon had been turned to face him, but in spite of that he is sure that Jon saw and understood. The certainty of it rests warm in the bottom of his chest like a good wine.
“Will I not dream?” Jon asks. There’s no compulsion to the question, just a tight line of anxiety that has Elias’ hand drifting over and smoothing across Jon’s forehead calmingly. Brushing his bangs aside over and over again like a child.
“I don’t know,” Elias answers. “No one knows. No one has ever done what we will do, ever in the history of mankind. Everything we experience will be a discovery.”
“You make it sound beautiful,” Jon murmurs and Elias feels him press back a bit against the palm of his hand. “I should know better than to trust in beautiful things.”
Elias clicks his tongue in soft disapproval, and slides his fingers down to trace a delicate circle around one of the smooth circular scars dotted across Jon’s face. He knows where they all are by heart, like a favorite passage of a favorite book. All he has to do is close his eyes to see them.
“I find you beautiful. What we have made of you.” Elias lets his lips linger indulgently over the we just as his fingers alight on the puckered skin creasing Jon’s throat. “The experiences we have drawn into you.”
“Mmm,” Jon hums appreciatively, stretching just a bit as though he is eager to feel every inch of his own skin and resettle it on his bones. Reclaim it. “When you look at me, do you see your world, Elias?”
“You are the fountain of youth, Jon. You are the fruit of knowledge. You are everything men have died in desperate, endless pursuit of. You are legend, made real.”
In the bed beside him, the god yet unborn sits up and lets sheets drip from his arms like the scholar wraps of ancient Rome, and what wouldn’t Elias pay to have lived a thousand more years beyond his own ephemeral lifespan just to meet Jon again and again in every age and paint him every color a soul can be. Somewhere in the dark room, there is just enough light to catch and glint off Jon’s eyes. He is alive. He is alive and he is whole and he is perfect and he shifts forward to lean his forehead against Elias’.
“Tomorrow we’re ending the world, Elias,” Jon says in a voice that holds every bit of the humanity he has not yet lost. “I don’t need poetry.”
“You are poetry.”
“I am a stressed out, thirty year old office worker from Bournemouth.”
“What would you like me to say, Jonathan?” Elias finds Jon’s hand unerringly in the dark and draws it up to his face. One by one he presses each calloused fingertip to his lips. They taste like salt. “Would you like me to say I don’t care who you were, only what you’ve become? Would you like me to say that even when you were nothing but a struggling nobody jumping at cobwebs in your dormitory, even then you were destined to be mine? Would you like me to say that the moment I laid eyes on you, I wanted to have you here, like this, by my side for eternity?”
Jon shivers as Elias pulls him in closer so that he can kiss his way up from palm to wrist to the soft inside of his arm.
“Would you like me to say I love you?”
Jon squeezes his eyes closed. It is foolish and pointless and human and the sight of it fills Elias’ throat with so much unbearable fondness that he thinks after two hundred years of breathing autonomously, here, in the night before his triumph, he has entirely forgotten how.
Jon’s tiny, shameful nod is almost imperceptible, but that is what Elias does best. He can feel the heat of Jon’s cheeks radiating off of him, and it is a quality uniquely Jon’s that even now, after all this time and everything he has been through, he can still be unsure of the fact that he matters. As if he is not the single most important person in the universe. As if he is not the only person Elias would ever pull in close against his chest and allow to nestle there, against the vulnerable beating of his heart. Jon curls in close and takes Elias’ hand, pulling it tight to his chest and Elias wonders again about this world that took his comfort away from him so young. This world that will, soon enough, not exist.
“Then since you cannot sleep, I will say it all night,” Elias declares, wrapping his free arm around Jon’s thin shoulders, keeping him pulled in close. “And I will say it all of tomorrow, and through our ritual, and it will be the first words spoken in this beautiful new world we will make together.”
“It’s not wise to trust beautiful things,” Jon whispers.
“You have already swallowed the pomegranate,” Elias murmurs, resting his cheek in Jon’s soft hair. “You may as well take the crown.”
“More poetry.”
Elias chuckles lightly. “I can’t help myself. I’m a man in love.”
“Elias,” Jon begins, timidly, impossibly timid even in his ascendance. “I feel as though I’m supposed to be afraid.”
“Not anymore, love.” In the dark room, Elias cannot see Jon close his eyes, but he feels it like a held breath released. A final rest before they have to face the inevitability Elias has woven for them. He allows himself a moment as Jon falls asleep to wonder, premature in his nostalgia, if he will miss this. The simplicity of sharing a bed, in a world with beds, and sleep, and dreams, and heartbeats, and warmth. But the new world will always have Jon, and that is all Elias truly needs, in the end, for his eternal rule.
“You never have to be afraid again.”