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Cycle 30, end
The first time they meet, Merle makes him laugh.
And John kills him.
Cycle 37, beginning
They’ve been getting to know each other, Merle and John.
It’s uncomfortable, even when they’ve been in Parlay a few times now. They’ve gotten the big questions out of the way, the “What are you after”, the “how are you immortal”, the usual pleasantries, the black fire.
Merle goes first, that cycle, asking a question that Lup had put in and Davenport had allowed after much convincing (mostly Lup physically leaning on him until he gave in). “So, Johnster, can you talk to people from planes you’ve eaten?”
John pauses, staring at the shirtless dwarf. “What did you just call me?”
“Is that your question?”
“No, no,” John sighs, and steeples his fingers. “I don’t suppose I’ve ever tried. Is there someone in particular you wanted to see?”
“Yeah, uh, there was this one guy I had beef with, back in the ol home plane, ya know. This one guy, a dick by the name of Greg Grimaldis, middle name fuckin?”
“Um,” John says, eloquently. “I could try, I suppose. Greg Grimaldis, you say?”
“Yeah, uh-huh, you got it. Greg fuckin Grimaldis.”
John nods, slightly, and his eyes go black, shot through with reds and blues and yellows and greens. It’s eerie, in his human face, and Merle shifts in the suddenly lumpy office chair, watching the entity at the end of the table.
There isn’t time, not really, in the Parlay space, but Merle finds himself fidgeting at first, and then growing bored, while John sits and stares with his black opal eyes over still steepled fingers. The silence stretches, and Merle considers actually doing some of that meditation shit they had shown him at the abbey, when John blinks.
“No,” he says. “Not in this space.”
“Oh,” Merle says, disappointed (for Lup, of course. She would have loved to hear about Merle kicking that douche Greg’s ass).
“I believe it’s my turn,” John says, leaning forward.
“Uh, yeah, sure, go ahead.”
“You said you had a family, before,” John says. “Can you… can you tell me about them?”
Merle can’t hold back a surprised laugh, and hurriedly swallows it at the flicker of black flame. “Oh! Sure, John, just wasn’t expecting a question like that, that’s all.”
John remains stiff, watching Merle with an unreadable expression. “Are you going to answer my question?”
“Sure, sure,” Merle says, waving a hand. “Well, we got these twins on board-”
“On board your ship?”
“Hey, one question per round, buddy!”
“Right,” John says, with a hint of impatience and more than a hint of black flame.
“Alright, alright. So, these elf twins…”
And Merle has him laughing over stories of Lup and Taako, learning mongoose and blowing things up, of Magnus and his vehicle proficiency and bleeding heart, of quiet Lucretia and her many journals and dry wit, of nervous, brilliant Barry who has to be coaxed from his lab every cycle, of Davenport, their wonderful captain, sharp and clever and the greatest pilot who’s ever lived.
His voice softens, talking about Davenport, and John’s eyebrows draw together, eyes narrowing.
“So, my turn,” Merle says, winding down a longer-than-necessary anecdote about Davenport illusioning a puppy running around the Starblaster, just to cheer up Magnus one gloomy, rain-soaked cycle.
“I think that’s it for this time,” John says tightly.
And he kills him.
Cycle 41, beginning
“In case you were wondering, he really is into vore.”
“No one wanted you to say that, old man!”
Merle goes back into Parlay laughing.
He’s still laughing when John kills him.
Cycle 43, beginning
They always disagree on who first suggested chess.
Merle insists it was John, on the grounds that it’s the sort of high minded fancy pants game that John would be into.
John counters that it was Merle, after John refuses checkers, battleship, and fantasy twister.
Merle always wins the chess game.
But then, John always kills him too.
It’s a stalemate, really.
Cycle 46, end
After a particularly fraught late-night conversation with Taako of all people, not to mention more than a few sharpened comments from Davenport, Merle starts pulling John into Parlay at the end of each year, instead of the beginning.
John asks, the third year in a row this happens, when it’s clear it’s a pattern. “Why the end of the year, Merle? Why change now, after 16 years?”
Merle laughs. “Well, somebody’s gotta be around to not heal em, ya know?”
John raises sculpted eyebrows. “I didn’t know you were a healer.”
“Well, I am a man of the cloth.”
John laughs at that, long and full, a sound and feeling he’s becoming more and more used to. “You, Merle, are a cleric. Of who?”
Merle raises his chin at that, hard as it may be to see with the beard. His voice is still joking, genial, but his eyes are sharper than usual. “I’ll have you know it’s Pan, thank you very much.”
John’s still laughing.
Merle waits, without joining in.
“Oh, alright,” John says after a while, wiping at his eyes. “So, tell me about it. What’s it like, to put faith in something that can fail you?”
“What do you mean?”
“The gods, of course,” John scoffs. “I mean, I have, just scores of gods inside me, Merle, scores and scores. They’re nothing but somewhat more powerful beings, destined to fade and die eventually, no matter how long it takes. Certainly not worth putting faith into.”
Merle is silent a while, thinking. “Faith, ya know, can help get you through the tough times,” he says, watching John with a sharpness he doesn’t know how to read. “I mean, we’ve certainly been through a lot of tough times, me and my family, ya know?”
John shrugs. They’re silent again, not moving the pieces, just quiet.
“There have been some worlds, ya know, that are just empty,” Merle says eventually, gazing at the chess board. “Not of people, mind you, there are plenty ‘a people there, but… they’re empty. The gods are gone.”
John shrugs again. Gods, no gods, he devours them all, or would, if Merle and his little family didn’t keep stopping him. Provided he has the Light, it’s not like a Celestial plane that actually has inhabitants does anything against Him.
“There’s something lost about those worlds,” Merle says. “Hopeless. No faith at all.”
“Faith in the gods?” John snorts again, and Merle looks up this time, catches John’s constructed eyes with his own, and for some reason, John is uncomfortable.
“No,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be. But the faith there, in something bigger than yourself, can push ya, push ya towards faith in joy, in love.” He laughs a bit, as though uncomfortable himself with how serious he’s being. “Faith in kicking a friend’s ass at chess! Checkmate, ha!”
John groans as Merle gleefully pushes over his king. “Well, Merle,” he says, pointedly ignoring the friend comment, his palm filling with black fire. “Maybe next year.”
And he kills him.
Cycle 48, end
The year after Legato, John barely looks at Merle when he pops into Parlay.
“Hey, John,” Merle greets him, flopping into his office chair. “You were early last year!”
“And you didn’t come,” John says quietly, black fire already welling up in his palms.
“Oh, yeah, well,” Merle laughs. “Easy answer there. I was teaching interpretive jazz dancing!”
Almost twenty years of knowing this dwarf and John can still be struck dumb.
“You… what?”
“Here, lemme show you!”
He does. John is almost laughing too hard to kill him that year.
Cycle 66, middle
Merle pops into Parlay halfway through the year, blackened, beard singed, and bleeding.
“Merle!” John’s on his feet and skirting the conference table before he realizes what he’s doing. He forces himself to stop as the dwarf applies pressure to the slash across his chest.
“Hey there, John,” Merle says, a catch in his voice but still smiling. “How ya been?”
“I…” John shakes his head. “What happened to you? You’re bleeding! And last year…”
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Merle says, affecting gruffness that is undercut by the pained cough at the end of the sentence. “Got turned to stone by some nasty statue things? They were pretty damn judgy, actually. Can you believe they told me I was slothful? Pan almighty, the attitude on those things.”
“How do I help, Merle?” John asks, for once ignoring the clamoring of the multitudes always in his head.
The dwarf smiles. “Is that your question?”
John throws up his heads. “Yes, sure, fine!”
“Ah, just kill me already,” Merle says with a shrug that causes a fresh spurt of blood. “I’ll see ya next year.”
John lets his hands fill with black fire, trying to convince himself that it’s a less painful way to die than whatever happened to Merle.
He almost succeeds.
And he kills him.
Cycle 67, end
Merle comes into Parlay sick that year, illness-aided exhaustion lining his every expression, wrinkles deepening every time he coughs.
He ignores John’s questioning look, and instead they chat about Merle’s family.
(John doesn’t even tense up when Merle smiles, tenderly, when he talks about Davenport. It’s the only time he truly smiles during this year’s Parlay.)
Merle sobers again when he tells John about Lucretia’s painful, lonely year alone, and how proud they are of her, of the way she takes charge, the confidence she’s grown into.
“She’s got faith now!” Merle says, punctuating the statement with a cough. “Faith in herself, you know?”
“A world like that, Merle,” John says, more concerned with the world he described than his basically adopted daughter’s new confidence. Confidence won’t help her survive when John finally catches them all. “A world like that… shouldn’t exist.”
“Well, it don’t now!” Merle says. “Ya ate that one, no problem.”
John closes his eyes, searching through the multitudes within him and locating the monstrous, towering figures Merle described. He opens his eyes again to find Merle setting up the chess board, stopping every so often to wipe blood away from his mouth. “Yes,” he says. “But a world like that shouldn’t be allowed to exist.”
“Yeah, well,” and John’s never seen Merle look so tired. “Maybe not.”
John blinks back his surprise. “You… you agree with me?”
“It’s been a rough few cycles, Johnny boy, I won’t lie to ya,” Merle says with a humorless laugh.
“I am not a cruel man, Merle,” John says slowly. “I don’t do this to be… evil. Yes, I absorb all the planar systems I can—”
“Sure, sure, unless we stop ya.”
A pause. “Right,” John continues. “But there is a reason I’m doing this, Merle. If I succeed, no one is gonna have to live in a world like that again.
“But you know,” Merle says, ignoring John’s point. “We got that fun cycle coming up!”
“And if you joi- what?” John asks, distracted entirely from his line of thought. “What ‘fun cycle’?”
Merle wiggles his eyebrows and winks. “You know!”
“I…. I don’t.”
“Cycle 69!” John sighs, deeply, and extends his hand. Merle just coughs and waves a blood covered hand back. “See ya next cycle, John.”
And he kills him.
Cycle 74, end
“So, Johnny boy,” Merle says with a stretch and a comfortable sigh, after they’ve been silent a long while over their usual chess game. “When do you think you’ll be done with this whole tantrum of yours?”
John slowly looks up from the chess game, eyebrows rising nearly to his hairline. “My tantrum?”
“Sure,” Merle shrugs, his hazel eyes sharper than usual in the orange-tinged, never changing light of the Parlay space. “You know you have a place, right?”
“With you?” John snorts, a bitterness welling up that he doesn’t know how to explain. “With your family?” he sneers the last word (or his voice will break on it).
“Why not?” Merle asks, still casual, as if he wasn’t suggesting something as ludicrous as him taking up cross-stitch, or building a secret moon base. “They’d come around.”
“Somehow, Merle,” John says, and the black fire fills his hands with something he won’t admit is regret. “I don’t think they would.”
And John kills him.
Cycle 79, beginning
“I dunno, Dav,” Merle sighs, after the usual Parlay debrief with the rest of the crew. They aren’t particularly interested to hear that John had preferred pie, back when he was human.
They’re rarely interested in what he learns from John anymore, although Lucretia dutifully records it in her journal.
At a questioning look from his captain friend Dav, Merle elaborates, allowing himself the rare luxury of a tired sigh as he sinks down on Davenport’s bed. “I dunno,” he starts, staring into his worn but not too worn hands, hands that don’t reflect the extra 78 years he’s lived, hands that bear no trace of scars from black fire. “I’m just not getting through to him.”
He hears Davenport bite back a sharp retort and smiles, wearily. “Go on, Dav. You’re gonna be saying it anyway.”
It’s a mark of how much Davenport has grown, after all this, that he takes the time to think. The Judges weren’t wrong, Merle thinks with a dark sort of humor, that Davenport’s sin was wrath.
(But then, neither was Davenport wrong, when he defiantly asked if they’d earned it.)
“Could you have ever gotten through?” the gnome asks finally, slipping one callused hand into Merle’s as they sit side by side on the bed.
“I don’t know,” Merle admits, and if he grasps Davenport’s hand far too tightly for comfort, well. The gnome doesn’t complain.
“Merle,” and Davenport pushes at his shoulder until the old dwarf groans and turns to face him, until they’re nearly nose to nose. Pleading blue eyes meet weary, watering hazel ones, and Davenport presses his forehead to Merle’s, gently, in a rare show of open affection that even now, the rest of the crew will likely never see. “Merle, stop going. Please.”
Merle closes his eyes, a lone tear escaping, tricking down into his beard.
They’re silent a long time.
“I can’t, Dav,” Merle says finally, voice hoarse and worn. “I ca- I won’t give up on him.”
“I know,” Davenport murmurs, still pressed against his medical officer friend Merle. “I know.”
Faerun
“And would ya guess it, I’ve died eleven more times since we saw each other last!”
John laughs again, although it clearly pains him, a crack oozing yellow widening on his cheek. “What? How?”
“Oh, ya know, shenanigans,” Merle says airily, waving his soulwood arm. “That ol magic cup, you know. Time loops and flips. Time tricks! Yeah, that’s it, time tricks.”
“Time tricks?” John repeats. “No one calls them that.”
“Wha- hey! You haven’t had a conversation in 30 years, how would you know!”
“Call it a guess,” John chuckles, and moves his king into the second row. “And you, Merle, have children?”
And Merle doesn’t kill him.
The Beach
It is silent, but for the shush of the waves coming and going on the sand, nearly but not quite touching their feet.
It is peaceful, and Merle wonders if John remembers his tales of the beach year. He had borrowed one of his handmade ornaments from Lucretia and gifted it to John back in cycle 54. Although now, he supposes, it’s black opal, or nothing at all.
It grows dark, and Merle loses his sense of everything, save for the soft hiss of waves on sand, and John’s hand, warm on his arm.
The sun is gone.
And so is John.