Now feels like not the time to poke at Quentin's shitty taste like a kid with a loose tooth, and Jedao certainly doesn't have the heart for it. This is good, and warm, and they all need a little of that.
"I really am fine. I couldn't expect you to predict - that." Hence needing all the more to tell, once it happened the first time.
"We brought you breakfast and barely let you have any of it. Float the tray over here, I want to hand feed you things."
Fives is content to air back on the couch and be buried under the pair of them as they talk now. He goes back to letting himself run his fingers gently through Quentin's hair while his other hand futzes with the seals on Jedao's uniform so he can slip his hand under his shirt and press it against warm skin.
"You are ten times more gregarious and shiny and chaotic than I am on any given day, but I like being around that. It pulls a richness into my life I'd normally be unable to sustain outside of a manic swing."
The rare and distressing other side of the coin to his periods of exhaustion.
"Maybe when you think you've fucked up," Jedao muses, "Take my reaction and scale it down by a factor of ten and see if you still think it's a sign that you're going to lose everything."
Because Quentin certainly isn't wrong about Jedao's default volume. Sure, most of the kneejerk fear is Quentin's history talking, but maybe some of what Jedao's saying gets magnified in translation, too.
"I honestly can't remember anyone who made me feel....peaceful, the way you do. I sort of thought it was a thing poets made up to pretend they were happy being bored," he admits.
"You're always kinder than I expect. I love the softness of your voice and the way your face scrunches up when you're exasperated with me. I love how....clear you are, about some things, and how confusing about others. It reminds me of living groundside and getting up early enough to see the sunrise, when everything was quiet and the light is pulling the sky open along its spine, but the cool opaque mist is still clinging to the grass. It's a new day, and I'm thirteen or sixteen and not a monster and anything could happen, but I don't have to do it all quite now."
He squeezes his arm around Fives' waist; he loves Fives in a completely different way, with all his wild, needy traitor's heart. Fives is safe and sturdy and the impossible miracle that he can be known, trusted, not left alone. Fives is every bit of joy he managed to scrape out of his wars. The burning brightness of his loyalty and honor and determination and bravery reminded Jedao that fighting could be bright instead of only writhing and trudging in the dark, that all his bloody skill could be worthwhile. Fives is everything Jedao has ever known he admired; Quentin is so much he didn't know, is still learning.
Jedao ducks his head, not actually blushing, but still slightly abashed; he didn't mean to say all that when he started, but he does mean it.
Fives curls around them both and listens and finds, surprisingly, that he doesn't feel left out or forgotten. He just feels good, listening to them and knowing they've found their equilibrium again. That they're safe and in love and he hasn't ruined anything.
"J-" complains Quentin, because how is he supposed to hold himself together when he says things like that. He clears his throat croakily, and casts the spell a bit belatedly to bring the breakfast tray in, to come hover and settle onto the coffee table in front of him, while he works on dialing back the deep, helpless blush.
"I hope you're still a quarter so enchanted when we're old and wrinkly."
"Well, you've already got the hair," Jedao muses, his smile sliding slowing from stupid and smitten to a vivid shit-eating grin as he reaches for a strawberry. "It's very distinguished."
Fives shrugs, grinning at him. "Some of us have. The sergeant at my first duty station was already going grey and he couldn't have even have been eleven yet. So probably eventually, even if most of us haven't yet."
"We're all going to be such sexy grandpas," Jedao predicts, wiggling with uncontained happiness, kissing the corner of Fives' mouth and then leaning back, draping himself across both laps now that Quentin has joined them on the couch.
He settles and gazes up adoringly at both of them.
"Uhhh...one-fifty, one-sixty? Some people live a few decades longer obviously but I'm only forty-five and I haven't been exactly gentle on my body. But you're fixing all the clones up, right? That's going to work? Is it different for magicians?"
"Definitely going to work, definitely different for magicians. Men in my time usually make it to about eighty. I could live a lot longer than that, but probably not until more that one sixty or so. But possibly way shorter; my mortality risk from magic is going to stay pretty static even if I don't follow you into a war."
Grim reality, unfortunately. He looks up to Fives;
"I'll set you all somewhere close to where a normal healthy adult Mandalorian is, and we'll do some fudging to approximate your physical age to a new lifespan- you look like you're in your mid twenties. So if they live to be a hundred you'll probably live seventy five more. Probably I'll do you all up with a range of about twenty years, give or take, so there isn't the looming certainty of death. Maybe a little longer- just to match Jedao neatly and compensate for previous bullshit."
Those sound like such impossible stretches of time to him, especially when he'd never expected to live even as long as he has, let alone to ever actually be the age Quentin says he looks.
"There's, uh, not really any such thing as a normal adult Mandalorian?" Fives answers, wrinkling his face up a little. "It's not a species, or even a race, it's just a culture. A Hutt could be Mando if they were willing to follow the resol'nare. But, uh, a hundred... actually it sounds kind of impossible to even imagine." So good, probably. And scary.
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magician_king) wrote2020-01-12 01:19 pm
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"I really am sorry. And I both love you and like you."
Just to be sure he knows, now that things are less harrowing.
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"I really am fine. I couldn't expect you to predict - that." Hence needing all the more to tell, once it happened the first time.
"We brought you breakfast and barely let you have any of it. Float the tray over here, I want to hand feed you things."
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The rare and distressing other side of the coin to his periods of exhaustion.
"I can't always keep up, but I do love trying."
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Because Quentin certainly isn't wrong about Jedao's default volume. Sure, most of the kneejerk fear is Quentin's history talking, but maybe some of what Jedao's saying gets magnified in translation, too.
"I honestly can't remember anyone who made me feel....peaceful, the way you do. I sort of thought it was a thing poets made up to pretend they were happy being bored," he admits.
"You're always kinder than I expect. I love the softness of your voice and the way your face scrunches up when you're exasperated with me. I love how....clear you are, about some things, and how confusing about others. It reminds me of living groundside and getting up early enough to see the sunrise, when everything was quiet and the light is pulling the sky open along its spine, but the cool opaque mist is still clinging to the grass. It's a new day, and I'm thirteen or sixteen and not a monster and anything could happen, but I don't have to do it all quite now."
He squeezes his arm around Fives' waist; he loves Fives in a completely different way, with all his wild, needy traitor's heart. Fives is safe and sturdy and the impossible miracle that he can be known, trusted, not left alone. Fives is every bit of joy he managed to scrape out of his wars. The burning brightness of his loyalty and honor and determination and bravery reminded Jedao that fighting could be bright instead of only writhing and trudging in the dark, that all his bloody skill could be worthwhile. Fives is everything Jedao has ever known he admired; Quentin is so much he didn't know, is still learning.
Jedao ducks his head, not actually blushing, but still slightly abashed; he didn't mean to say all that when he started, but he does mean it.
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"I hope you're still a quarter so enchanted when we're old and wrinkly."
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"You go gray at the temples, right?"
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"Jedao, what's your natural lifespan?"
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"Uhhh...one-fifty, one-sixty? Some people live a few decades longer obviously but I'm only forty-five and I haven't been exactly gentle on my body. But you're fixing all the clones up, right? That's going to work? Is it different for magicians?"
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Grim reality, unfortunately. He looks up to Fives;
"I'll set you all somewhere close to where a normal healthy adult Mandalorian is, and we'll do some fudging to approximate your physical age to a new lifespan- you look like you're in your mid twenties. So if they live to be a hundred you'll probably live seventy five more. Probably I'll do you all up with a range of about twenty years, give or take, so there isn't the looming certainty of death. Maybe a little longer- just to match Jedao neatly and compensate for previous bullshit."
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"There's, uh, not really any such thing as a normal adult Mandalorian?" Fives answers, wrinkling his face up a little. "It's not a species, or even a race, it's just a culture. A Hutt could be Mando if they were willing to follow the resol'nare. But, uh, a hundred... actually it sounds kind of impossible to even imagine." So good, probably. And scary.