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 Only a hypothetical lover would be in a position to see it, and such occasions aren't exactly routine for the withdrawn detective.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 cants his head, unseen by his partner, in quiet bewilderment. Of course Myr wants him to move on, this way; they'd decided it was best, they'd gently agreed, and Myr can be free of the pathetic pining that would otherwise plague him. L is no stranger, after all, to warping himself in order to fit new truths; the process repeated so often may have left him mangled, but the truth can stay as it was formed and shaped, perfect, eternal, tucked away safe.

There's nothing petty or cruel-intentioned in the thread, barely noticeable, through the Bond. Isn't this what you wanted...?]

Of course...

[Myr's had a long day. Myr's likely exhausted, to say the least.]

Would... you like me to stay for awhile? Until you're sleeping, or just a bit after?

I would. [A pause, a beat.] I would like you to stay as long as it suits you.

[He does not miss the bewilderment, not when it echoes the question he'd asked himself not so long ago. Wasn't this exactly the desired outcome?]

You know-- [Myr says--suddenly, hurriedly, with more animation than he's shown, because misery this thick impels him to action to solve it even if he can't think of how,] --tell me you know that when I said we'd be lovers in other circumstances, I meant that. It wasn't--it wasn't some polite fiction.

[He can learn to tolerate this if it's what L thinks is necessary to manage their mutual feelings. But if it's founded on the presupposition of a lie, however gentle...]

[It's unusual for someone with L's intelligence to feel so very dense, and it's disconcerting when he does. Granted, it's exactly this kind of situation that draws it out in him, makes him feel hapless and naive.]

I know...

[Said slowly, because that covers such a wide range, including worlds that don't exist, people they could hypothetically be, who are not them. But isn't it in both their best interest to accept the here and now, the options available to them?]

I feel that I'm the one doing wrong by you, now, and... I'm truly trying not to. I truly thought I knew what you wanted in this regard, and... you're aware, certainly, that hope is one of the most effective torture devices known to man.

[And his collection of things that might have been is already as extensive as it is falsely comforting.]

[It's no more of a comfort for Myr, who at least had the illusion he had some grasp on his own emotions, and those of others. That they've come to him having to nakedly beg for confirmation this way makes it feel all the worse.

But now that he's broached the topic they at least might get somewhere by speaking of it. They might--change circumstances that have come to feel intolerable to them both.

He makes a helpless noise, almost a laugh, at L's veiled rebuke.]

It is, but if it eases things any, I put my own leg in the jaws of that trap beside yours. [Which is to say,] I...thought I knew what I wanted, in this regard, but it isn't this. It isn't being only your dear friend and knowing you feel like a thief for touching me, and wanting to be touched in turn. It isn't--

[It isn't, that's all he knows. He doesn't have words for the exact shape of the thing he wants, only the space it occupies in his longing, tangled up with grief for the other hole that's opened in his life.]

--I don't know what it is, but it's not...this, that we're--we're negotiating. It isn't pining away alone in each other's company.

[With all of this intended to comfort Myr, the fact that it's falling short is something of a problem. L's thumb wanders toward his mouth, where he gnaws pensively at the pad of it.]

I'd rather this Bond was as painless for you as possible...

[Considering how much of it seems unavoidable, just by merit of being who I am, and being how I am.

He waits for Myr to expand on what it isn't, or is. What he gets is half-formed, uncertain, and fraught.]

I wonder what circumstances you wish for, that would make something else a viable option. If it truly is impossible... I suppose identifying it would kill all hope, and take away all the uncertainty.

[No doubt, and therefore, no sorrow. No pining; no pain.]

Edited 2021-05-04 00:43 (UTC)

And I don't, [Myr replies, with a huffing sigh.] Life isn't meant as an anesthetic existence; if pain is the cost of building something better at your side, I pay it gladly.

[L's implicit question, though...is a good one, since it gives some structure for Myr to hang his own ill-formed longings on. The reasoning behind it is sound (as L's reasoning is often sound) as well, if bleak.

He runs his fingers through his own hair, half-consciously swerving them around an antler that's not there anymore. It takes him a minute, or more, to answer--a measure of how deeply he considers what L's asking.]

Laying aside the truly impossible situations--the ones that change your world, or mine, and put us together outside Talam... I suppose it's as I said, then. In the dream--I don't want to, I shouldn't be the only one who cares for you for your own sake. I don't want to become your whole world, [or L's other world, outside his tight and furious orbit of Light Yagami,] and if we were lovers, too--I very well could be.

[After a year and a half he knows the contours of L's need and isolation better than he knows his own. The notion of being the only answer to it who was not also a lethal threat to the detective is--starkly frightening.]

Love isn't--it doesn't exist only in the shadow of death, or abuse, or abandonment. It isn't healthy when it grows there, amatus, and I could not bear to love you and know I held that power over you.

[It's parlous close to that as it is. How much more with the insistent vulnerability of sex thrown into the equation? Thinking of that...actually provokes a rueful, self-deprecatory laugh from him.]

Point of fact, and damn me for a poor example of a Faun, but we'd have a terrible first time if I were worried about hurting you. I don't perform well under stress. [Not that way, anyway. And having been hurt himself once by someone who'd panicked in the act--

Thinking of it sends a cold frisson through the Bond. Oh, no. He could not risk doing that to his Witch. He could not.]

[L's breath catches, holds for just a moment. Life, as far as he is concerned, can be an anesthetic experience, or one thrumming and sped-up to a heart-pounding pace. It depends on what's needed, and sometimes, one needs to not feel.

When pain is the cost though, he pays it; he's always paid it. It's some mercy that Myr can't see it in his eyes, even if the Bond betrays him at times.

It's worth knowing what Myr considers truly impossible. It's worth knowing where one who knows his heart believes his limitations truly are.

He listens. Maybe he grieves, but there's a surprise, in that he doesn't realize just how much relief it brings him to know Myr's reasoning. It would have all been a strange thing to explain, and a worse thing to discover in real time, because Myr is not wrong. L's lived his life in the shadow of death, abuse and abandonment; he hasn't been healthy for a single day of it, nor has he been fully under his own power.

What he'd give freely doesn't matter, when he's never seen it as his to begin with, and his mind goes back to his wilted, thin body in the bath, Myr washing him and telling him of people in his world who chose a kind of anesthesia, forever, for all their lives.]

You know, we'd...

[No point, speaking of what might have been.]

Whether or not my partner stands to hurt me... physically, or with an emotional attachment... I've found that sex can be complicated. I'm a man, I'm twenty-seven... or near enough, but...

[Heat rises to his cheekbones, because the reasons for it are haunting. What might have been is haunting.]

It seemed like the right choice when I was young.

[A bitter part of him thinks it wasn't; a quieter, but more persistent voice, is still unsure.]

I never grew old in that world, but... here, I might, and so I... mourn, what I can't get back.

[The patient peace of nature and time working as they were meant to.]

Edited 2021-05-04 02:25 (UTC)

[They are not comfortable or comforting words to say; this is not a comfortable or comforting topic to unpack in its details--but having spoken of it, having understood what his own hesitations are, at least leaves Myr feeling more at peace. The other circumstances he had in mind all along are not impossible ones; hope might be nurtured without being cruel.

If...there were not other obstacles in the way. The discomfort in their Bond whispers danger to Myr's instincts, danger enough that he goes very still--scarcely breathing--even as he keeps his ears trained on his Witch. The freeze lasts mere moments--not enough, even, for L to make an end of speaking--but it is instinct's demand in the face of something that upsets his Bonded so.

He finds himself gripping L's hand the harder in the wake of the revelation. It...is not unexpected, in its way, since he'd had a difficult time of fitting any kind of sex life into what he knew of L's past. Easier to reflect his Witch's internal image of someone appropriately celibate as a Circle mage should be, and be content with the illusion that prevented. (Content, beyond a moon-mad Faun's occasional, irresistible dreams of what could be...but those were less than nothing, somewhere people mostly dreamed inside their own skulls.)

Except the SQUIP had tarnished that illusion with its own insinuations, and Mello had shattered it, and Myr--for his own sake as much as his Bonded's--had not pried deep enough to correct any misconceptions he might have had.

Maybe that had been the right choice, up until now. Sex is, as L had said, complicated, and further complicates anything it's involved in.]

You were--celibate, until Aefenglom. [Had the SQUIP been his first? ...He doesn't like that thought.] Almost--more than that?

[No referent but eunuchs (and the Tranquil) exist for someone robbed of desire for the act; it's difficult to interpret, though not impossible.]

...Was it--mm. I... [Hff.] I--want to understand why. And who...brought you that choice.

[But he wants more not to pry in a way that would be invasive, unwelcome, and painful itself.] But that--matters far less to me, amatus, than that you not--feel ashamed for making it. Nor ashamed for mourning that loss, nor for not--for not having the experiences the rest of us have had, who didn't have that choice to make.

...It is complicated. It complicates many, many things in many ways, that those who had charge of us...might wish didn't happen.

[That L chooses to speak of this as openly and freely as he does is a testament to something that has shifted in a notable way. Comfort with Myr is a possibility; so is the continued attempt to make a celibate relationship between them the only logical choice.]

I was.

[He confirms it. His celibacy before Aefenglom, at least, is cut-and-dried, shielded and uncomplicated. And though he has no desire to speak at length of things that do shame him, he finds that he wants Myr to understand, too.]

I wasn't around people. There was no one, except for myself and my handler, and though the suggestion was his, initially... I agreed that it would keep distractions at bay. I could focus more fully on my work, but...

[There's always one, in extreme situations like these, some trade-off.]

When I arrived here, and a couple of months had passed without my chemical regimen, I felt my body for the first time in over a decade. It was like some demanding stranger was always with me; you were actually more familiar to me the day we met for the first time.

Maker's love, [the Faun breathes, both oath and prayer. He had imbibed enough of this from their Bond to know L's existence had been a lonely one, lonelier far than Myr's upbringing in a Circle's walled village--but intuiting it and being told are two very different things.]

And you went through all that here in Aefenglom, without anyone you knew or who knew you.

[It aches, in retrospect, to think through the implications of that. Surrounded by a culture that made so much of its sexual freedom, with no familiar touchstones--no same-aged, affectionate and awkward friend to fumble into a mutual awakening with...

Beyond complicated; even to Myr's own abnormal and cramped experience that seemed--nightmarish.]

[The reason this isn't something L speaks of visits heavily, now, weighing down his shoulders and pressing the breath from the lower chambers of his lungs. Virtually everyone who arrives in Aefenglom through a mirror experiences a difficult adjustment period, but L's might have been brutal even by those standards. Meeting the SQUIP had marked a turning point in more ways than one; it had been L's first physical encounter, but their Bond and relationship had also been a prolonged and deeply flawed crash course on how to exist and function within a society.]

It's like an execution in a way. Knowing that when you care for someone enough, it's supposed to follow that you'll share physical pleasure as the manifestation of love. If it did turn out to be terrible... maybe it was never love, just... a nice walk to the guillotine.

[Because you were never adequate, never whole, never worthy.]

As much as I've wanted to share physical pleasure with you... I think I've dreaded it spelling the end of the best thing in my life.

Edited 2021-05-04 17:58 (UTC)

[Though much about their lives--and their earliest experiences in Aefenglom--had been very different, enough lines up that Myr hears his own pain reflected in his Witch's words. It had not been so long ago he'd faced the thought his own life had become, and would remain, a celibate one; it was not so long ago he'd felt irreparably broken and humiliated because he'd panicked at the mere thought of intimacy with a welcoming stranger.

If it did turn out to be terrible...

Carefully, heart in his throat, Myr gets up from his seat, following the table the short distance 'round to where L is sitting. Tucking up behind the chair and resting his hands on his Witch's shoulders feels more intimate, more protective than mere hand-holding--within easy distance of an embrace, if needful.

And, he thinks, he would very much like to hold his Bonded when they're done talking.]

When I was newly come to Aefenglom, [he starts, quietly,] I met Everett at a wedding and he took me home with him. I froze before we even got beyond kissing. [Their Bond adds context in broad strokes: Dim impressions of how Myr had gone from a favorite of his Circle to feeling a mutilated pariah; of hearing the horror and disgust in a former lover's voice in a most vulnerable moment with her. (Because he was no longer whole, nor adequate, nor worthy.)]

He held me until I stopped shaking, and was patient, and very kind--and didn't ask a thing of me I didn't want to do. When we Bonded, he pledged to me that we could wait, and relearn together what it was to be intimate. It was months before we slept together, and I do not doubt he would have waited years, and still cared for me the whole time.

[To have someone who both wanted him but loved him enough to wait, even if waiting meant never, in the end, had been critical to Myr's own healing. Everett had been a divinely intended gift.

Now he has a chance to pay that gift forward--and begin to make something new and bright and beautiful from the ashes of loss.]

There is no rule in this realm or any other that says our love is meaningless without sex to consummate it--whatever we've heard or read or seen about what's supposed to follow. And as much as I've wanted that myself, when the moment's right, I will wait forever at your side and not consider a moment of it wasted if we only ever spend it chastely.

[He leans down to kiss the top of his Witch's head, greatly daring.]

And if, on that day we do decide to try each other, we don't enjoy it as much as we thought--it will change nothing of how I feel for you, because love does not reside in that act, it's in everything else we do to serve and lift and console each other--in every step we walk together.

[And I love you, L Lawliet, without a shade of doubt or wavering.]

[L shoulders curl beneath Myr's gentle and sturdy hands. Lots of sharp, unpadded bones; such a stark contrast between them, and a constant reminder that however real their affection toward each other, much about them will never fit together naturally or easily, and bitter notes will always cut and temper the sweet ones.

Myr paints further contrasts when he tells of Everett, along with some surprising parallels. L hadn't known, or even really guessed that Myr had ever needed to relearn or heal in this regard. It sounds like Everett took a particular place in Myr's life, around the same time as the SQUIP had taken up that posting in L's, and this is how he contextualizes the story.

How might the story have read, if their positions had been reversed, if their mentors in physical affection with such different attitudes and approaches had been switched?

His eyes raise at the press of lips against his shaggy, dark hair. One of his hands, unusually warm for having been cradling a teacup so recently, goes to his shoulder to rest atop Myr's knuckles.]

I'm glad to know...

[The relief in his voice is apparent, a tense, heaving weight finally cut loose.]

It's the difference between the date being pushed back, and learning that the execution is off, entirely.

[His hand travels along Myr's wrist, searching for a way to condense their contact and pull him closer.]

Edited 2021-05-05 17:38 (UTC)

Good; one death sentence hanging over you was already one too many. [It does feel like a stay of execution, enough to draw out the sudden bite of a Circle mage's unexpected black humor. There are relief and laughter and tears alike in Myr's tone; he could only wish L had had someone like Everett in his own life before now, but he is beyond glad to step into that role himself.

He lets himself be drawn down gladly, leaning in to wrap arms around his Witch's bony shoulders and pressing his face against L's cheek. This--feels good, feels right, feels the way it should with those weeks and months of tension that had always been a fraught undertone between them finally excised. There's an unutterable sweetness in holding his Bonded without that worry of an end lurking somewhere in the embrace.

(It will end someday, his grief reminds him. But it will not end in the bitter way they both and separately had feared.)]

Mm. [...The back of the chair's pressing into his breastbone, though.] Somewhere more comfortable, maybe?

[L's returning laughter is startled and strange. Sharing any sort of pleasure with others, including mere laughter, can be a bizarre experience for him, to the point where he can't always tell what's lovely and what's panic-inducing. He squeezes Myr's forearm to communicate appreciation for the kind of humorous darkness that only makes the light stand out more clearly.

The Light, after all, really is the death sentence hanging over him. Maybe not here... maybe not like this.]

Of course... you'd said that you wanted to lie down.

[Assumed, with grace, as though it weren't just the kind of excuse for distance that L himself would use.]

Should I look for the future in my own teacup and see if I stay the night?

That I did, [Myr murmurs, a shimmer of appreciation in the Bond. It is a kind recasting.] It would be much more comfortable.

[He gives a huffing little laugh of his own at the question. I think I'd be a poor guest, if you didn't, he almost teases--then reconsiders.

L had, after all, offered his divination as a gift. It seems fitting to finish the reading.]

Hmm--I've got my own prediction that one. Let's find out if they line up.

[Not that there's any need to guess about the answer he's expecting.]

[Gamely, L takes up his teacup, rotates it, behaves as though he's giving it a great deal of thought and consternation. In truth, he's not even looking at the contents of the half-full teacup.]

Usually.... these are hard to make out clearly, but there's no mistaking it. Not only am I staying here, tonight... you're rather stuck with me as your Bonded, long after that point.

Aha! Exactly as I thought.

[The exuberance behind the exclamation isn't all Myr playing at the over-invested scholar--or even mostly. It is good to hear L say that in so many words, however backhand they may be.]

Your dedication to divination must be rubbing off on me, amatus. Next I'll be predicting tomorrow's breakfast.

[Also an easy one, when he intends to make it for both of them. Enough of the gloom's dispersed that little tasks like that feel possible again; he can resume this much participation in the web of care knitting them together.

A little reluctantly, he unfolds himself from draping over his Witch, lingering long enough to press a chaste kiss to the detective's temple.]

Shall we?

[It's a playful and light game on the surface, a veneer over the deeper heart of the matter. Those who spend a lot of time around L find that he's actually and oddly a deeply honest man, so long as one can read the intentions behind these exercises, understand what his prism does to scatter that pure light into something he can accept others perceiving.]

In matters of breakfast I have firsthand knowledge that you do have a gift... I'd say there's a 99% chance that prophecy holds water.

[Prophecy, plan, prayer. They're all not so different, really, when no one's using magic at this precise moment.

He nods, standing to follow the faun to bed. Pausing for a second thought, he links an arm through Myr's to remain close every step of the way, there.]

[That aspect of L's relationship to the truth was both frustrating and thrilling by turns. In this moment there is a quiet delight in Myr to know he's earned that trust.]

Mm--so long as that's where it begins and ends for me and prophecy. [Said laughingly, but for an Andrastian, the notion of a prophet carries with her the idea of an early pyre.

(Though hadn't Myr already chosen one for himself in this, if it came to that?)

He links arms gladly with his Witch for the short walk to the bedroom, always and ever a glutton for contact. Now that he has private spaces to share with his loved ones, now that they're at no risk should anyone see, he's no reason not to indulge if they will indulge him in turn.

Though as they reach the door of the bedroom he stops, and pulls just enough away that he can turn toward his Witch like he'd meet L's eyes.]

Linden? [L?]

L can be shy and trepidatious about physical indulgence; so much red tape from attitudes imposed over years stand in the way of easy, gentle, flowing affection that is not carefully planned and choreographed before it's executed beat-for-beat. Even in spaces where he has every assurance that reaching out won't be rejected and rebuffed, a part of him considers it, foremost and automatically.

There's just a small pause before he reaches for Myr's blindfold, fingertips brushing it as an indication that his attention is on the faun's face.]

Yes?

[The intimacy of the gesture--from the first person in Aefenglom he'd trusted with the history of his blindness--makes Myr's breath catch briefly in his throat. (A year ago it would have startled him, made him cringe away; how much difference time and trust make.)]

Thank you. For today--and all you've done. I needed this.

[It is hard for him still to lay his burdens down in someone else's care.

How blessed he's been to have a Witch who's learned to help him with it.]

[There's a beat of silence and stillness as L freezes in his gentle caressing motion, fingertips coming to rest lightly against Myr's cheekbone.]

It makes me glad, when you have a problem that I can help solve. I don't know that anything actually makes me more glad.

[A pause, because L doesn't feel as though he was strictly the benefactor, and Myr strictly the beneficiary. Had they simply gone to sleep without a word after rising from the table, in fact, L would have interpreted the very opposite.]

...Thank you, as well. For...

[Staying, without judgment or the kind of overt, disgusted pity that would kill him, from one he wants to hold.]

Thank you for carrying something heavy, for me. For long enough to matter.

[It's always wondrous strange for Myr to hear something he knew with his head--but not his heart--put so clearly into words.

He reaches to reciprocate his Witch's gesture, palm to line of L's jaw by simple physical memory. There aren't words in him--yet--for the notion that L's eagerness to help invokes; it is something like then I should bring you more, and I've been remiss in not letting you help and I'm glad to see you grow, an idea that he should shake off his own shameful pride more often.

There aren't words yet, but let touch and the warm swell of their Bond suffice for now.]

It has been a joy for me too, amatus, [he says softly, to his Witch's thanks. And it is, for all that it has been won through suffering.] You are always welcome.

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Sad Song, Warm Occasion [Closed]

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