John's sheepish voice is maybe the saddest thing he's ever heard, and makes Noel feel like a heel. His gift of words seems to be stuck under the ice somewhere, but he digs out "John," muttered both to John as an apology and to himself as a reminder.

Maybe it'll help that he has a similarly unguarded 'hey what the fuck' sort of face when he looks at Arthur's hand, ungloved and infested. The ice in his brain is starting to melt but he feels like he's underwater, dragged sideways by another riptide of exhaustion that he's getting aware enough to be scared of on two levels now. He hears voices talking about dead trees, ugly stumps that used to be a forest, talking to Charlie Noel Charlie Noel, only his eyes have slipped closed again.

Maybe he catches it first or maybe they do, but either way his eyes snap open with another bodily jerk, another round of violent shivering, and he says something half-coherent that started life as "keep talking to me".