IC INBOX for The Last Voyages

[magician_king]

You know what to do.

Comments

[magician_king]

the book is a detective story about a wealthy american who learns of an inheritance abroad who goes overseas to find that the property and his family name have been cursed

he hires a brilliant detective who sends his most loyal friend to chaperone the young heir out to his country home to watch over him and not let him be consumed by the haunting, or rather by his own imagination because our detective is logical and sensible and does not believe in ghosts

[ninefox]

[Ghosts laugh at people like that, Jedao thinks. But that's probably not the point.]

is it terrible for you if i ask you to read it to me?

[magician_king]

[He just loses it here, puts down and turns off the communicator, pausing only to call Credence to ask him to come now.]

[ninefox]

[There are other messages, later, a scattered straggling string.]

sorry


your voice is only you and i still



sorry im sorry i hate this



i love you all wrong and im poison andi cant trust myself and you deserve everything
poisoned
poison
it's the same thing if you use enough ti was so long so there's biomagnification to worry about


ill stop
sorry
ill read the book if you leave it for me and i wont call you until im less
this
if you don't first
okay

[At which point he drops his communicator in the fish tank and drinks until he falls asleep.]

[magician_king]

[He waits through all of this, until 'if you don't first' which isn't a lot, but is leeway, is a toe in the door. He stays up late recording the audiofile in batches, one scratchy, hoarse hour at a time. The sorry sounds sadder than it probably should, of course. It still isn't a happy one exactly, but it's a little closer than before.]

[ninefox]

[Jedao listens to it while he's hungover, the lights as low as he can stand, the communicator tucked against his chest while he lies on the floor, eyes unfocused gazing at the gentle blue of his fish tank. Jedao listens to it wedged in a suit locker on the Roci, close as a coffin. Jedao listens to it while turning the communicator over and over and over in his hands, making Quentin's voice waver in soft sine curve, when he doesn't trust himself to touch his gun. When his teeth hurt with how badly he wants to taste it.

It's stupid, Kujen is dead and he is - neither free nor alive, but farther away than he could have imagined. Kujen is dead and Jedao imagines he can feel a beautiful long-fingered hand squeeze gently with every pump of his heart. Some wretched part of Jedao wishes the feeling were clearer.

Jedao wants to crawl to Quentin and - beg him, beg him for anything, and he doesn't know if he wants to be cradled in those hands or kicked away. He hates himself for not being able to pull them perfectly apart in his mind, and wonders how much trouble it would be to steal enough vinegar from the kitchen to bury his head in a bucket of it - a lot more trouble, now that he's quit. Fives would notice if he took cleaning supplies. He wants to feel scoured, wants to drip his own scathing acid contempt on himself and then wash it away, but he also can't be bothered to finish the orange Fives brought him, or put his boots on or move for hours at a time, so he doesn't. It's pathetic and it's absurd, hisses the part of him that knows how utterly, radically different they are. But none of the bitter chorus are trustworthy.

For which of my bad parts didst thou first fall in love with me, that's what Clark's play said. Does he love Quentin for his wonders, for his perfect gentleness - or for all of them together, with the part of himself that asked Quentin to hurt him until he couldn't think, that invited Quentin to ask whatever his scientific endeavors prompted him to ask, that always wants to curl up like -

The story runs out, and Jedao has only the vaguest idea of the ending, but he starts it again, and makes himself tea. He thinks of New Year's Dances. His vision swims a little and he almost throws up again, but his hands don't shake. His hands never shake. Ginger tea for nausea. It's easier than breathing, after the week's practice he got with Nico.]

thank you

[magician_king]

Fives was really worried about you this port. Have you been able to help him know you're back and it's okay?

okay-ish?

[ninefox]

he did find me. he put my heart back in

[And I guess I forgive him, thinks some sore and petty of him. But really he hadn't needed to.]

he makes me eat, and stuff. did you have breakfast today

[magician_king]

I've gotta go. I'll send you another book later.

[ninefox]

okay

[Which Jedao realizes he is starting to use for, I love you, but I'm confused and cowardly and I hate myself to much to say it properly.]

[magician_king]

[He reads to him all that sleepless night, another Holmes story, this one by Neil Gaiman and called A Study in Emerald. Cthulhu features. Quentin can never stay normal for long.]

[ninefox]

i like that one

[magician_king]

[He doesn't answer. He just reads him a couple of old Arthurian legends about the quest for the holy grail, in their old and prickly authentic language- and then Chivalry, the real story, the one he wanted him to have context for.]

[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?