IC INBOX for The Last Voyages

[magician_king]

You know what to do.

Comments

[ninefox]

[Nothing about it is like Kujen. He would never - not in another four hundred years, not in four thousand - have cared for Jedao's comfort like this. Would never have noticed a story like that - if, Jedao mused, he ever read fiction at all. They had that in common, before.

Jedao listens to the story again and cries through most of it, and it isn't about the story at all. He feels like a house after a bombing run, too many fragments and no rooms left to put them in, spilling out into the street.

Thank you, he thinks, again, but it feels like a butter knife. It isn't big enough or sharp enough for what he means.]

this

helps

[magician_king]

[He's been saving the Last Cheng Beng Gift for him for a while, though he doesn't say so. Just reads it into the feed that night, once it's already dark. He loves him too.]

[ninefox]

[Jedao cries more, feels a sharpness in his chest like something coming into focus, like a knife taking its edge, or a crystal coming free of rock. He cries for things he can actually name now, for his mother pulled to pieces, and for forgetfulness he did not choose, for his ghost's voice begging to be heard and for all the children he shot and the three little daughters his brother shot and all the children of the future he would never see, who would live with the Compact's new Calendar. Whose New Year celebrations would be about anything else.

For the children they had been, chasing the squirrels and writing their first games.

He sleeps, when there's nothing left in him, wakes up feeling light and stiff and hollow, like an infestation of bamboo, brittle but impossible to extinguish. He also feels tacky and ravenously hungry, eats three ration bars just because he can get them down fast, and takes his first shower in most of two weeks: cool enough that a shimmer of old panic turns over in his spine without waking, and then so hot he's light-headed and dizzy when he steps out.]

i love you

im kind of

shattered, right now, in all the parts I love you with, but i love you so fucking much

[magician_king]

If you're not leaving then I'm still waiting.

Just promise you're still working your way back to me and I'll read you a story every day for the next year.

[ninefox]

[He hadn't known, until today, is the truly horrible thing - had wanted desperately, had hoped, with hope all braided into fear, but hadn't known. Had known he was wading agonizingly through it, but been completely unable to see where the path out of the mire would take him.

He's said so little to Quentin, at least in part, because he can guess how devastating that truth would have been if he let it slip.

But he knows now.]

i promise

i promise i am

i'll cut my fingers to the bone picking out the slivers if i have to but i'm coming back to you

[Jedao misses him with the aching empty confusion of new scars, dead nerves where he doesn't yet expect them, a part of himself gone strange and blind. Jedao misses him even as he flinches from the thought of actually seeing him. But all the aftershocks now are only weakness to overcome, not the bottomless paralyzing vortex of true doubt. This is Quentin. This is his Quentin.]

[magician_king]

I know the power of the things we have to do alone. So I won't ask if I can help, and I won't come until you call. But know I am here. I love you.

[ninefox]

it's not that, exactly

but it's my damage and ive hurt you already

and i just

dont want to hurt you worse if you see me reacting before im mostly there

[magician_king]

What if we just did like

five minutes

and neither of us were allowed to say anything we just held hands

[ninefox]

i cant touch anyone right now, not even fives

i want it and then I actually think about it and i feel like i'd rip his hand off and then my skin if he tried

[Which is easier than admitting, I might flinch just seeing you.]

[magician_king]

Okay, that's okay.

But tell me if a half measure that wouldn't hurt ever comes up? I would lie face down and listen to your footsteps on my floorboards if I could right now. Or wear your jackets except I won't fit them at all.

[ninefox]

i'll send you one anyway

i was

i was being literal, it's *seeing* that's hardest

fucvk he would have snapped your body up in a heartbeat, you're exactly the type

only i cant stand blindness either

could you make, i don't know, blinders with light on the inside? like when you close your eyes against the noon sun and it's all yellow and oragne

[magician_king]

who's he? what would he have done with my body?

[ninefox]

anchoring

possessed you, i guess, in the idiom of ghosts

[He then spends an unreasonably long time half-paralyzed, trying to figure out how to answer the other question.]

[magician_king]

[He infers the rest from the silence. Then offers;]

I have a solution. My door is unlocked. Text when you're coming over, then come in and find me. The cabin is changed a lot, but if you keep heading straight back you'll get to me.

[ninefox]

okay

[And with a plan of action on the table, Jedao is literally incapable of delaying if he has no clear strategic reason to do so. He frets for - count 'em - four entire minutes.]

when

[And he's out the door.]

[magician_king]

The door is the same, but the inside of the cabin is very different. Instead of the cozy little dormroom, Quentin is back to the haunted house in Manhattan. It's an old building with high ceilings, a narrow hallway, and half-stripped down decor. Bulbs hang bare, paper peels from the walls, the air is a little bit too cold.

The doors all hang open, to sitting rooms with sheets draped over furniture, a disassembled bedframe and a mattress on the floor, dust and debris. Quentin's footfalls have worn a path through the dust to the room at the back. Shoes and socks and jeans have been dropped in a trail, a little light spills out of the back door into the kitchen.

The fox whines, crawling deeper under the kitchen table. Feelings are harder to keep ahold of, when they pierce through to his other form at all.

[ninefox]

Jedao's hair is still damp, and he didn't bother putting boots on - either after the shower or for most of the last two weeks, barring port - so he gets dust all over his feet. His eyes are raw and red and shadowed, but the material of the uniform covers all manner of sins. His stride is a little heavier than usual, a brisk forced march instead of understated duelist's grace, but it gets him where he's going.

"Oh, darling," he murmurs as he crouches down, his raspy voice wavering but not quite cracking. Of course, of course. He already knows, from playing with Tits, that touching animals is entirely bearable. Not entirely unaffected - even his own skin carries new horrors now, for all that he didn't actually have it in any of the memories. But Kujen never went in for any Feast of Fangs style private torments - too messy, too unpredictable. So animals are unrelated; animals are safe.

"What a brilliant thing you are. Come here?" he asks softly, and his voice does crack, finally. "Please?"

[magician_king]

Of course. He lunges out, a bounding white streak, and tangles himself around Jedao's knees, then scrambles up and at him, from zero to trying to dive into his arms. They don't need to talk, Jedao doesn't need to see him, but that doesn't mean they can't hold on.

[ninefox]

His memories of his heart's journey's in Fantasia are strange and vague, part animal and part dream, but he is reminded vividly, viscerally, of the lurching goose-creature surging and flapping into Fives' arms. He catches Quentin up perhaps a little too tight, clutches him to his chest and presses a nose into soft warm fur.

He crumples a little, first to a sloppy lotus sitting position, then letting himself tip onto his back in the dust, Quentin still held close against him. He breathes as though he's sobbing, in shuddering gasps and gulps and the occasional dust-triggered wheeze, although his eyes stay dry, as if completely expended at the moment.

[magician_king]

He noses him, chews his collar, licks under his chin, and eventually, finally settles down, pressed against him just as frantic and afraid. They can stay just like this, in Quentin's kitchen, just as long as they both need.

[ninefox]

Jedao thinks of opening the collar, the equivalent of a button or two, letting Quentin tuck his nose in the crook of Jedao's neck. The fear hits him like a block of stone falling on his rib cage, and for long seconds he can't breathe at all. Fox or not, Jedao knows Quentin isn't really - and the idea of opening his clothes is in some ways so inherently sensual, in a way removing them entirely isn't necessarily -

His hand is too tight in Quentin's fur, probably hurts, but he closes his eyes and forces himself to breathe again.

He just won't. It's bad so he won't. That's all.

[magician_king]

Quentin whines when Jedao does that, and settles, still as stone again, not objecting, not moving, just lying with his soft nose pressed tight against Jedao's hammering pulse. His eyes close, and his ears flatten back.

[ninefox]

"Sorry, baby," Jedao whispers roughly after a moment, letting go and flexing his hand a few times in and out of a fist before stroking Quentin's back again carefully. "Sorry."

[magician_king]

He licks his nose, twice, and turns his head, nuzzling into him, going calm and still again. No harm done, they're here now, and he isn't letting him up. Not now they're back together.

[ninefox]

"I wish you could have seen my heart," he says eventually, after a long quiet stretch of petting. The small warm weight of Quentin feels so good, like it's pressing some of the frenetic awfulness of the last two weeks out of him like cider from apples.

"It was so stupid. It creaked and honked and threw itself at people. I'm pretty sure it scammed Fives for kisses. Shameless little monster."