middaeg | Sad Song, Warm Occasion [Closed]

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Sad Song, Warm Occasion [Closed]

Who: L and Myr
When: Before quests
Where: L's cottage
What: Soft talks after they got matching magical tattoos
Warnings: Soft stuff, maybe sad stuff

[There's something bittersweet about two people mutually deciding that pursuing any sort of romance would be ill-advised and unhealthy, and then opting to get matching tattoos. They serve a practical purpose, of course, as well as a symbolic one; prior to a dangerous mission, a spell to address one of L's particular blind spots isn't exactly unwise, and if it's a way to amplify the boons L receives by merit of being Bonded to a faun, all the better.

With limited options on a sparse and bony frame, L had chosen for the design to cap his shoulder: two bees and a honeycomb nestled against a bunch of plum blossoms. It'll take some time before he's used to seeing himself with it; he's certainly never worn anything so ornate or colorful. Any warmer and his skin would look grey against the hues, but the design's palette was well-chosen, soft, and harmonious.

Even if they weren't, he reasons, it's rare for him to expose much skin at all even when the weather is warm. Only a hypothetical lover would be in a position to see it, and such occasions aren't exactly routine for the withdrawn detective.

As they approach the cottage, L glances over his tattooed (and currently covered) right shoulder, back at his companion, who is still clad in mourning black since Everett's departure.

Typically, Myr jingles softly even when he's standing still. L's accustomed to the ambient sound of charms clinking against each other, but Myr's removed his antlers, as well.]

I hope you'll stay for tea.

[The words are more frequent in L's vocabulary since the dream with the True Fae. He knows that there's a line between a demand (stay so we can be together) and silent pining (go, so I can imagine that we are), and "I hope" seems to strike the gentlest balance. It's permission and reassurance, laying the decision in the lap of one who can be trusted with it.]

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[L is human, and as the previous month's nightmare had seemed to confirm more than his associates already knew, all too glad to pursue what he found interesting even if it was dangerous, damaging, sure to bring ruin on his head. When he was practicing magic among the true fae, a part of him likes to think that the same concerns occurred to him as to Myr; intellectually, he does acknowledge the troubling correlation between such recklessness and the natural laws requiring pacts between witches and monsters just to maintain some kind of balance without catastrophe. In practice, the rush had obliterated all such concern.

These words, heard for the first time by both of them, are his own, but melted through a prism that is less cantrip or cast, and more an ongoing state drifting in and out of sharper focus. Diviners may deepen or dull it, of course, but never really turn it off. As the Dreamers prove, even sleep is hardly a rest.

There are some this suits, however, and L is undeniably one of them. He's always existed on a slightly shifted plane from the rest of his world, and Divination is a study that seems to reward a particular type of mind, burdened in some ways and unclouded in others. While the softly intoned words make sense to him, there are cryptic pieces, words he chose without being entirely certain why. Given the way the tea leaves fell, though, they were the only ones that fit, as there's only one way to put any particular jigsaw puzzle together.

He blinks free of those locked pieces when Myr instantly recognizes and responds to them. The ebb and flow of this process is recognizing and forming pictures, and then more fluid discussion and interpretation, as well as whatever the tea's drinker might add to clarify or question.]

You weren't successful...

[He squeezes Myr's hand a little more tightly.]

It was one more reason to keep you at arm's length. You were seen, but... for thorns, rather than petals.

Edited 2021-04-15 17:34 (UTC)

[Myr had not failed to notice L's joy among the true Fae, but dreams...operated under a different moral calculus. The Faun himself had been more free with his own magic in his nightly sojourns in the Fade, without worry for who might be fearful or disapproving of his displays. Though any mage who cared for his own soul--to say nothing of the safety of those around him--contested with demons in deadly earnest, there had always been an element of play in Myr's dreams. There had always been a fierce joy in being the uncontested hero of his own story.

It wasn't only his own unspoken duty to give L space, nor his fight with the true Fae, that had kept him away from that part of the dream.

There were some things he still felt he could succeed at, when it came to making others happy.]

No. I never was.

[His mother had not been a happy woman, in the short years he'd lived with her. Too ill, too preoccupied, too...unsuited, as they all were, to life in the alienage. Myr lifts his free hand to run through his hair, before resting his forehead in his palm, elbow propped on the table. His fur's still on end, his side of the Bond still roiling like stirred tea.

Had he not seen L's own mother a year ago in dreams, he might not say more, unprompted. But L knew what it was to love someone he could not please, and labor under despite from the one who'd given him birth.]

She closed me behind the only door in our house and sent for the Templars. That same day--and I was too busy crying over the flowers to try running.

[She'd struck them from his hands in dawning horror when he'd shown her his new talent. Didn't have time to gather up the fallen petals before she'd shoved him in the bedroom, alone and sobbing from a broken heart.]

Have I been wrong to blame her? [Everything she believed named him a demon asleep. Everything she was had seemed too frail for motherhood, for the weight of a child's trusting hand in her own. Could that be held against her?

He hasn't had an answer in all his years of asking.]

[Myr can't see L's guarded, pale face, or the anxious gloss this topic puts over his dark eyes. The reasons for it are precisely the reasons the man is in a position to empathize, somewhat, and so the effect through the Bond is a mixed and strange one, both safely distant and painfully close to home. Emotion can be allocated between the two as needed, to make this approachable; L's already good at it.]

No.

[The answer comes sharply, quickly. Too quickly for any kind of teacup consultation, in truth; it's all L's own immediate and reflexive answer.]

The world of a child is limited; the authority of a parent is absolute. Whatever the parent's struggles... the child's will be greater.

[Immediately, or at some future point. Now he does look at the cup, because in his own case, only one absolute authority had existed in his tiny, cramped world. The control she'd lacked had been the closest thing to it and the result had been a chaotic hell that they'd inhabited together, miserably.

Counterclockwise; quarter turn.]

Your father was powerless to stop your removal. Your people collectively answered to a higher authority?

[More absolute, even, than a parent's to a child?]

[Something in the texture of their Bond (misery shared is misery halved) makes Myr unfold from his hunched posture and rest his free hand over their twined fingers. L would well know what a child might blame a parent for; L had lived in that nightmare unrelieved for years. His reflex in this instance carries the weight of that experience, makes the words trustworthy.

Makes them painful, too, and moves the Faun to rub a thumb over his Witch's knuckles.]

I suppose, [he says, still quietly,] it would have been easier to judge if she'd done it to anyone but me.

[Easy to say someone else was innocent. Harder to say that he (they) had not, somehow, disappointed the one he most wanted to love him.]

The Chantry, and the Templar Order beneath her. [A low sigh.] "A mage is fire made flesh and a demon asleep." We couldn't be left in our homes, untrained; we'd be a risk to everyone if we became possessed, or even used our magic recklessly.

[L watches Myr's hand, the way it covers and shelters them both. Something shared; something lost and gained, alike. Their experiences aren't dissimilar, and it's the rare circumstance where the elven mage and the human detective can be said to truly and naturally empathize with one another. To call it effortless would be a stretch, of course, because this is a difficult subject to stare at too long, a difficult matter, when both of them had doubtless borrowed tears from the rest of their lives to spend on those early and painful years.]

Doubtless.

[His voice rasps in a throat slightly dry when he answers. He sets aside Myr's teacup for a moment to reach for his own, sipping it, then changing their places once more.

Quarter turn.]

That wasn't the way you saw it, then. Was it truly so, or just what you were told? To make it seem as though there was a reason for you to leave your home?

Edited 2021-04-18 02:19 (UTC)

No. [It wasn't the way he saw it.] But I was a child, and I'd watched my cousin carried off by them two years before--kicking and screaming so much they had to stuff in him a sack to get him out of there.

[One corner of Myr's mouth quirks up at the reminiscence; the whole episode had been awful, but also so characteristically Vandelin that he has to smile, even if sadly.

He's silent a moment before answering the actual question, a fingerling of awareness slipping through their Bond: He'd have answered this differently two years ago.]

Both, I think. It's what most of them truly believed--and I did, too, after a time. [The Chantry and the Circle had the rearing of him, and he had accepted much of their reasoning on a mage's place in the world.] Though I always disagreed with strictness of it, and the notion that we were cursed and always dangerous, rather than gifted and in need of guidance. But mages, especially untrained ones, can be a great danger to those around them and need--a stricter ethos, than anyone without magic.

I... [A sigh. This is a tender, uncomfortable thing to talk about, but it distracts from the other tender, painful things they could be talking about.] I've come to believe, [some on the strength of their association, and what being raised in isolation had done to L, to Mello, to Eli,] that the particular form of the Circles wasn't necessary. That we didn't need to be taken from our families or forbidden contact; there could have been a better compromise than the one the Chantry settled on.

[L makes a small, attentive sound to indicate that he's listening; he wants to add something to the Bonds complicated tapestry, and Myr can't see his wide eyes, the way his lips part softly, the tilt of his head.

It's ironic, that Myr not being able to see him probably allows him to inhabit his own body and expressions more authentically. He can step outside of that eerie uncanny valley only for his blind Bonded.]

Anyone gifted, and bored enough, is quite dangerous. In any world, you know...

[Something else he doesn't need the teacup for, to know.]

It was worth the trouble to train you. If someone was profiting from your labors, separating you from your family and forbidding contact would have only benefitted them by making you more reliant.

[Myr's blindness has never been a gift to him, but--he would be pleased to know, in an odd way, that it is to others. Certainly he has a notion that L's more wholly himself around him; it is a comfort to know, even if he doesn't know every detail of why.

It is a comfort; it is enough.]

I know. [A troubled breath out, an almost-laugh. Had Light been bored as well as driven by some awful, abstract justice?]

Yes; it would have, on the balance, been easier to kill us if it was truly only about fear. [Profiting off your labors. Myr hackles visibly to hear it but takes a deep breath in before he can speak from the annoyance and pain that evokes. It isn't wholly wrong, and that's why he's upset; but knowing that does not make him any less so.] But it wasn't--all about making calculated use of us. [However many mages were deployed in war, or hired out as healers to the wealthy.] The better Circles remembered we were owed lives and care, too, even if those lives were--restricted.

And we were at least allowed letters, in Hasmal. Noble families might visit now and again, too; I'd... [He'd looked forward to finishing his training and an enchanter's limited freedom of travel--though that dream had died with one of the few people he'd wanted to visit.]

...Some mages, [he picks up, shifting focus away from himself,] trustworthy and exceptional ones--could have lives entirely outside the Circle.

[It's a slipshod defense, he knows. His heart isn't in it and perhaps can't be, when there's so little of his heart left to be in anything right now.

But also, perhaps, it came of trying to defend something that was in so many ways indefensible.]

[In L and Light's world, boredom had in fact plagued them both. It had abated just long enough for them to find and kill each other.

The strange, and beautiful, and difficult things about both their lives might as well be spread across the table like dried flowers, rather than merely contained in the dregs of this teacup. There are things L can say because he knows them firsthand; there are things he can't for the same reason, and this dances close, the subject of being more precious tool than living child.

He peers closer. More to see, even now, and his voice lulls rhythmic and low.]

Ere closing of your second year,
The letters stopped, from one held dear.
Iolan left his blooms and spade,
To walk no more, in glen or Fade.

[He draws a deeper breath as the meaning of that sinks in.]

I'm truly sorry...

[Scarcely surprising, after Myr's near-mention of it, that L should pick his father's death right out of memory and history. (There is a detached academic question there: Could L scry things that Myr himself did not remember or had not witnessed, and thus did not bring with him to Talam?

Could he--

No. Better not to ponder that unknown.)

At least the grief this stirs is old and scarred over--the urge to weep over it not nearly as strong, though it surges through his chest like a breath of winter cold. Frost-bringing cold, flower-killing cold.

(It had been spring when they'd gotten Ben's letter, not winter at all.)

He does not know what to say to L's extended sympathy; "thank you" doesn't seem right. Wordless and awkward, he grips his Bonded's hand with his own that much tighter, and presses the heel of his other to the bridge of his nose, as if to forestall tears that cannot fall.

A minute--he needs a minute, or more, to process this reminder, before offering its context. If he can do that.

(And it is spring, now, that he grieves for someone who'd returned that same paternal kindness he'd missed for nearly two decades.)]

[The Bond wavers, exposing tender places that glimmer in and out of focus. L's affinity is frost; as an ice witch, his hand is always slightly colder, his bearing slightly icier even when he wants to nestle closer, smile brighter, open like the earliest and bravest of flowers.

He's not the source of this cold; he has to remind himself of it, even as he can feel, secondhand, the ache where Myr's eyes used to be. His hand remains for Myr's to grip, and L waits in silence as unassuming as he can make it, with a mind that always looks for some conclusion.]

He was murdered. [His father. Not his lost Bonded--even if Myr had so lately speculated on whether "return" meant "death" from the mirrors.

Murder required an agent.]

He was killed, in the street, like a dog--by some noble shem who'd accused him of theft.

[Myr had not been there. If he had been there'd have been two dead elves on the pyre that day, for all the protective and grief-stricken anger that bleeds into the Bond.]

[It's an astonishing and humbling thing, to feel vicariously pure and genuine outrage for a terrible injustice. L has felt it himself very seldom, for a man in his profession; there's a childish sense of "fair" and "unfair", of course, and always has been, but it's warped and broken, beneficial in some ways, disastrous in others. Even when he is himself the victim of an injustice, it isn't felt or responded to quite as it should be.

Quarter turn, and a soft sigh.]

A harsh punishment, with no trial, for a crime he didn't commit. But that's... not an uncommon story, in your world.

[How much of it is the reading, and how much of it is a question, is unclear, though it's certain he's requesting elaboration.]

No. It is not.

[There's something of the toll of a funeral bell in Myr's tone, a condemnation for a world so unjust and disordered. There were reasons a child as gentle as he had been sought to become the nearest thing a mage could be to a Templar, the Maker's own Champions. There were reasons the parts of the Chant he sung with the most vigor were his Creator's condemnations against those who harmed the least of His children.

There were reasons, even if Myr did not admit them all to himself, for his place in the world had not been one suited to acting on them.]

He had pointed ears, and his--patron--had a ledger that didn't balance. That's all it's ever taken to kill one of us.

[Bitterly, then, and he is so rarely bitter:] Sometimes it doesn't even need that much.

[L watches Myr's face with a knit in his brow. L's own ethnicity, mixed and ambiguous, might have allowed him to relate on some level had he lived a different life with more exposure in the world proper. Outside of glancing encounters that were still heavily shielded, controlled and easy to exit, it was never quite the same; behind a computer screen, where he spent most of his time, he could be anyone, after all, usually whatever his valued associates assumed a default human to be.]

The Circle added value to your life, then... while it ceased to be entirely your own. That he died at all was senseless and wasteful... but it must have hurt even more that you lost any chance to see him again when you might have had one, if you'd remained at home or even been allowed to visit.

Edited 2021-04-22 05:57 (UTC)

Two more years. [The bitterness leaks out of Myr's tone as water from a cracked vessel; dregs remain, but the force is gone. This isn't the obliterating depression that followed the Evergreen Circle's fall, ... but it isn't much better at leaving him space to breathe, or feel.]

I could have had two more years with him. Not enough.

[But it would have been more than he got.]

...It's because it did give me so much that I couldn't resent it for that. [Said quietly.] Couldn't resent the Maker's gift that sent me there, either. Dad wouldn't have--wanted me to be ungrateful.

He...knew, somehow. Guessed. That I might be a mage. Taught me not to be afraid of it or what would come after.

A good parent wants the best possible life for their child, in any world.

[There's a spark of strength and comprehension here, as opposed to the baseline bewilderment often present through the Bond when L attempts to contextualize or comprehend the feelings of others. In this case, his handler was the closest thing he ever knew to a father, and didn't Watari want the best possible life for him?

Though the understanding is bent at an angle and flawed, it adds form and function to the conviction he offers.]

Is that how you think of Aefenglom? In that... none of us could control that we arrived here, or how, but after almost two years, there are things to feel grateful for?

[Or is that Stockholm syndrome? Maybe better that isn't a thing, where Myr's from. Someone from L's world would probably make that argument.]

Edited 2021-04-22 13:33 (UTC)

[He dips his head in silent acknowledgement of that: His father had been good in every sense of the word. A scant seven years had nevertheless been long enough to press deep thumbprints of that goodness into Myr--left him with a permanent role model who could only grow more idealized for his early absence.

So much of what Myr strove for in his attitude toward others derived from Iolan; so much of what he wanted to be, as protector and guide and teacher, lay in that paternal example. He gives L's hand a gentle squeeze to recognize the reminiscence flowing between them. At least the detective had someone, even if it was imperfect.]

Yes, [he says, after a moment's hesitation.] Yes, it is. There's so much--

[A pause, as he struggles once again with memory, with origins, with the monstrous reminder he'd had more than a year ago that home had not been a place of love or honor for him for a long time. His fault, a part of him insisted, for breaking and then taking his brokenness out on those who loved him best.

But even taking that warped ownership had not made it hurt any less.] --It's better here, too, in so--so many ways. Even if it's taken my magic, it's given me you and the others, it's-- [A skipped hitch of a breath.] --the same way. It's let me be more than I'd been.

[Is that wrong? Is that disloyal? Did I quit the real fight to play pretend at things I cannot be?]

Edited 2021-04-26 05:14 (UTC)

[It's nice, to connect, to feel something in relation to another. Myr's given him more of that than anyone else, save Light Yagami, and even then... well, it's a different sort, isn't it? Quieter and meeker than that fierce brand, but also strikingly resilient, for all they've been through.]

I get the feeling... both of us didn't really have a true separation before between where we lived, and where we worked. It all blended together, but here...

[He bites his lip. He voice is such a monotone, so often; only his Bonded can likely feel the variance that he does when he tries to communicate these things.]

There's a separation, isn't there? A beneficial one.

[It applies to a lot of things. Work and play; bonds, and lovers, and the space between.]

I'm glad for the present, but what you were was worth knowing. I wish I could have... and I know why you miss it, for all that this chance has afforded us.

[As though it's equal, as though L has something to go back to if he returned to the moment he departed, other than a swift death.]

No, we hadn't. It was one set of walls around us and one set of people within them. [Even if L's boundaries had been more social than literal--even if he'd roamed further than Myr had ever dreamed of, seen and done things beyond a Circle mage's well-constrained ambitions--they had been boundaries even still.

But now even the Bright Wall can't contain them if they choose to go beyond it; both their worlds have gotten impossibly larger with the addition of an entire second reality, and boundaries have become precarious and often self-constructed things. Myr lifts a listening ear to the fleeting notion beneath L's words, beneath a separation.]

One we've defined ourselves, with walls bricked in by hand. Sometimes it's hard to know where they ought to be, isn't it? [Boundaries were difficult things. L's experience with every one of his Bonded attested to that. And yet, Myr wonders...

He grips his Witch's hand in silent thanks for that gladness, that sympathy, and something melancholic swirls through their Bond. Mourning Everett as he is, at least he knows his Faun had something to return to, if return it was and not death that waited beyond the mirrors.

There's no difference on either branch for L. It shades the detective's despairing loneliness in another color.]

My past is as much yours as my present, as far as you'd care to walk it. I trust you with it. [For what he had, somehow, managed to tell L that he still could not entrust to others. Though he cannot think of that for very long, and breathes out in a heavy sigh to dismiss it.]

Amatus, [there's something almost tentative about his tone, tentative and worried and sad,] do you feel I've done wrong by you?

[To have built his own walls, shallow as they were, in the places he did.]

[Sometimes, the freedom is giddy and exhilarating. Other times, it's like being adrift at sea, lost and drowning. A harbor, or even a sandbar, would be a welcome kind of separation, than all that open sea and all those chances to slip under.]

It's always difficult, to know.

[L has a reliable and perfect true north, in some regards. In others, it is always spinning, seasick. So he finds favorite stars, landmarks that are familiar enough to be friends.

He blinks, head shaking in automatic denial before he clears his throat, gives voice to the gesture for his blind Bonded's benefit.]

No... indeed you couldn't, Myr.

[For him to ask at all means something. Perceived ingratitude?]

You've lost a Bonded. Please believe that in time you'll feel less like there's a part of you missing, and you're not inadequate for feeling like it, now.

[It's all about balancing peace and pain, in the end, for everyone. It's a helpful reminder, and endlessly useful.]

Edited 2021-05-03 04:34 (UTC)

[L's swift answer makes Myr want to both laugh and cry--it is gallant and empathetic in L's awkward way, revealing and concealing alike. A part of him very, very much wants to press the issue on exactly those terms--and perhaps prove L's childlike trust wrong in the process. Labile and wounded and despairing as the Faun is, he could not be delicate in his inquiry; someone might get hurt.

No. No, he cannot do that. He makes a hiccuping little noise, catching up L's hand now to press lips to his Witch's knuckles.]

Lovely sentiment, but untrue; I could--I fear to. You deserve more.

[He has lost a Bonded. It makes the specter of losing another in short succession so much worse.]

But I--I will believe that. I'll strive to. I simply-- [Words crowd his throat and render him briefly speechless. What finally emerges is less fluent than his wont, halting and unfiltered.]

Things have--changed, between us--like you're, we're keeping distance out of fear. And I don't--I don't want to drive you away, by making my presence unbearable.

[By wanting--needing--a closeness that couldn't end in the consummation L wanted; by not bettering his Bonded's entire chance at life beyond an early grave with a happiness it seemed in his power to grant.

The rational part of him knows none of this is fair to either of them. It's also not in charge, in the current flux of grief.]

[Pain and peace tilt and waver. L had believed that it was best, to offer an explanation, a neat and easy way to deflect and bury this sentiment for both of them so it wasn't something to dwell on, examine, turn over and obsess over like seeds never planted, that could have grown into beanstalks high and majestic, or simply shriveled to nothing in the earth.]

I'm grateful.

[It's true. Simple. Soft.]

I'm deeply grateful, for what this is. What it can't be is just... mine, to learn and let go of.

[Set on a shelf with a loving mother's birthday candles, an intellectual rival's game of friendly chess that didn't end in death.]

It doesn't mean you've driven me away. Or that your presence is unbearable... dear friend. It's quite the contrary.

[Dear friend. ~~Intimus.~~

Myr sits silent with L's hand still clasped in both his own, and lets his Witch's words sink in. Like the mark of grasping fingers, like the unintended blade--they are what Myr had meant by explaining what could and could not be between them, but somehow they are not what he had wanted.

The hope he'd held out for a change in their circumstances had not, in the end, been only for L's sake.

He swallows down the lump in his throat at length, and nods, and lifts his chin and ears both through determined effort.]

As I am grateful, [a pause, a breath,] amatus.

[Grateful and blessed beyond measure and still somehow bleeding inside, still somehow wishing he were less of an honorable idiot doomed to lose everything in his devotion to duty.]

[L had been certain, as he'd spoken, that he was saying all the right things. That it was somehow a magical incantation to lay all of Myr's concerns to rest with a chaste goodnight kiss.

Myr's response seems to confirm that he'd done very well, admirably so, but the conflict through the Bond is unquiet dissonance, and the word Myr uses for him is still a favorite star, a cherished landmark; he doesn't wish for it to be distressing in a new context it can't quite fit.]

...hey.

[Said at the end of a tight exhale, with a smile that he pushes to be light and cheery.]

Talking like that, I won't ever get over you. Do I need to read more tea leaves to assure you that keeping me as your devoted Bonded isn't contingent on...

[This thing, that's lovely and unrealistic, that only exists in my head.]

In any case, it's not your job to try to comfort me when you're the one grieving.

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