cigsandbeer | IC INBOX

"You don't have to, you know."

Leave, that is. But Hakkai had promised he wouldn't push too much, not more than Gojyo wants him to: he shakes his head a little, letting his gaze fall, and gives Gojyo's arm a slight squeeze before he lets go.

"...Anyway. You were going to watch a show together, sometime later."

The image comes to mind: what if Gojyo stays. He and Hakkai could sit together on the couch, without Jedao there to make things weird, and maybe they could--

They could maybe--

Nah. Jedao is in the other room, and he's sad, and he needs Hakkai.

"--No, I do. You gotta attend to your husband."

...You know what.

"'Sometime later', at least one of us probably gotta stick to just one drink, as much as it pains me to say it."

Jedao and Gojyo being drunk together just seems to always end in 1) Jedao running away crying, or 2) in a fist-fight. It's becoming something of a pattern.

Gojyo has an extremely good point. Hakkai hesitates, then sighs, and ducks his head in agreement.

"You're probably right about drinking together."

Sober meetings only. Until they can get past all the things they're struggling with, at least. And for now....

"I'll see you tomorrow?" he offers to Gojyo, in lieu of insisting he stay.

"Yeah, um...

Breakfast is good?"

.........;;;

"Breakfast," Hakkai agrees with a quick smile, and turns to accompany Gojyo to the door before he goes to check on Jedao in the spare room.

"...I can't believe you let him go again," Jedao mumbles. "I did think about putting a message on the terminal screen but that seemed like it might freak him out more."

"I'm not going to make him stay if he wants to leave," Hakkai says, a little stiffly, settling into the window seat beside Jedao. He'd asked Gojyo to stay, first. And Gojyo had been right that Hakkai should take care of Jedao, too, who had been the first one to be drunk and upset and need to come home - even if they were all distracted by other revelations, after that.

"He wanted to stay. He wanted some time alone with you," Jedao murmurs, quiet and a little remote. He was watching through the cameras, of course. Jedao often doesn't understand Gojyo, but he knows what that smothered wanting looks like.

"I just...when I've run away on purpose it's okay to tell him that I can wait." That Gojyo can come first for a bit, even though he assumes otherwise, no matter who Hakkai is married to.

He reaches for Hakkai anyway, accepting his presence and his comfort even if he didn't need it right now.

Edited 2025-10-30 14:57 (UTC)

"Maybe, but... he said not now."

Hakkai slides his arms around Jedao's waist, pulling him close, and adds, "Tomorrow isn't so far away. But I'll remember, next time." That it's okay to let Gojyo know that Jedao needing space doesn't mean he has to go, if he doesn't want to.

But that can wait for tomorrow: right now he's here, and he's glad Jedao is willing to accept that comfort from him.

"It's the only thing he wants from me," Jedao says quietly, voice quavering just a little bit. He meant to say I don't know what he wants from me but he does know: nothing. Space. Jedao wishes they'd let him give it.

"I'm sorry."

"I thought it was going all right, until I got up," Hakkai sighs: he can't see the cameras, himself, unless he has them up on the screen. He's not sure what it was that went wrong behind him, but he knows there was something.

"I'm the one who messed it up," Jedao admits. "I tried...it doesn't matter what I tried. You were right that I shouldn't, I'm always too much. I just...he doesn't wan't me to be fake, but he also don't want me to be sad when he rejects me. Instant contempt, no matter how quiet I try to make it. Like, let me a little disappointed, fuck. But he doesn't want me to even want to be friends with him. Or he doesn't want to have to notice it. But I'm not allowed to hide it either."

He's rambling, drunkenly.

"He just...he wants me to be gruff like you guys, enough to ignore. He wants me to not be me, and he wants me to not care about him so that he doesn't have to feel bad about not wanting to deal with me."

Hakkai listens to the drunken rambling, still curled close: after a moment, a little rueful, he murmurs, "I think... I didn't see, but what I heard him say... I'd have interpreted it as 'I'm not rejecting you so don't be sad about it.' Not, 'Don't be sad when I reject you.'"

Admittedly, Gojyo never quite says what he means. But Hakkai's learned how to interpret over the years, and he's usually confident about it.

Jedao snorts.

"If that's what he means, then he's even more in denial about how he feels about me than he was about you."

"Well, I don't mean to say he was saying yes," Hakkai points out. "I still don't know what you were asking. It sounded to me like he was trying to say that you took what he did say harder than he meant it, that's all."

"Just because he didn't mean it doesn't mean it isn't true," Jedao says truculently. "It's not that he doesn't like me, it's just all the things I say and do and feel and want that are too much or embarrassing or whatever."

He scrubs his face with a hand. "It took me a minute and a trick question just to wheedle him into sitting in a room with me long enough to watch a bunch of epic all-girl softcore. I feel dirty." Gojyo's right, is the thing: it is pathetic, Jedao reaching over and over for someone who doesn't want him.

"... what I meant, before," Hakkai murmurs, capturing Jedao's nearer hand in his to give it a reassuring squeeze, "is that you don't have to always try, because if he's shy of what you're offering, I hate that it hurts you when he turns it down. Not that he doesn't want you around. Not that you're too much, or... any of that. That I do think he'll get used to the idea, but it's going to take some time, and... it's okay, if it takes that time."

He falls silent for a long moment, then adds, a bit wry, "But maybe your technique is better than mine, actually. When you were in my shoes, you'd gotten him into bed long ago."

Hakkai might possibly be giving him too much space.

Jedao doesn't want to think about that life. It hurts so much, was laced with the deep-down grief for his little boy like a body laced with capillaries, touching every single cell, and now it hurts smaller too, smarting and fresh, remembering what Gojyo tasted like, tucking him in while he made wheezy little snores, wriggling like an eel into his life.

Floods and breaches don't tell you anything on purpose, Jedao believes that. But they shine through you like sunlight through stained glass, and the colors reveal things. His life in Shangri-La, his life as the Marchioness, his life at St. Nautica's - the pattern is obvious. Jedao is greedy for Gojyo, and Gojyo is....nearby, putting up with him, to one degree or another, with mixed feelings or none at all.

"I wouldn't mind being turned down so much if he ever did want me around," Jedao says. "But he doesn't, Hakkai. You get used to it when something is an unfortunate necessity. That's what I am to him. And I'm not even allowed to be sad like a normal fucking person that someone I want to love, to even, just be friends with, considers me just...something to put up with, something that he will definitely eventually get used to for your sake if I stop trying so hard and get out of his face. But I am too much. The trying is me, Hakkai-shei. I..." He squeezes his eyes and Hakkai's hand too tight, takes a deep, shuddering breath.

"I don't care what he's telling me don't be sad about. If he's telling me don't be sad, and also don't fake smile, then what he's telling me is you need to be a different fucking person who doesn't care about this, because I don't want to be around you when you care."

Hakkai squeezes Jedao's hand back, just as hard, not letting go.

"I needed time to get used to being close to you, at first," he says softly. "I needed to feel safe around you, and come to care for you, slowly. Not because I didn't want it, but because it's hard for me to be close to anyone. I needed time with Gojyo, and he needed time with me; he took me in and called a doctor the night he found me, but we took a long time even to be friends, really. Needing time doesn't mean you're never really wanted. Breaches...."

Our teams fought, Gojyo had said. Hakkai doesn't know the whole outline of it, but he can guess.

"Breaches and floods show you a way you could be, not the way you are. He went to get you when you texted him, didn't he?"

It's awkward between them, that's true. Hakkai doesn't fool himself into thinking that Gojyo loves Jedao, or wants him, but that doesn't mean it's impossible: just not true yet.

He also has no real idea if this is the right thing to say, to soothe the hurt. He does hate feeling helpless.

"He brought you to come get me. He only came because he has the other key."

Jedao is...quiet, and glum. It's the one moment he's honestly...not sure about, that might be a moment of reaching out back. But it feels actively, purposely stupid to let himself hope that it means anything at all, feels graspingly self-delusional, letting his want bias the evidence, when there are so many other explanations.

"He probably just wanted me to stop texting him. It took you time to get used to being close to me, but you...you showed that you wanted to try. You checked on me after the fire, when I hadn't bothered you at all. You gave me the garlic. I'm not crazy, I'm not...I know the difference between shy and uhg, this guy again."

And he knows which one he's getting from Gojyo.

"You're not crazy," Hakkai assures him. "But... well, I couldn't really tell if he wanted me around for a year or more, even when I was living with him all the time. And he'd have lent me the key if he didn't care to come get you himself."

Yes, there are a lot of practical reasons for Gojyo to have come with, starting with the fact that Hakkai can't enter the engine room himself, but there's also the fact that Gojyo takes care of people. Of course he'd go get someone who was sending him drunken texts. He doesn't not want to be around Jedao.

"Really," he says at last, looking down at their hands, "really, he just needs time. To know what he wants and doesn't want. I don't know what it is either, for you or for me--"

He'd heard clearly enough, even if Gojyo hadn't said it, the I love you but I don't know if I want to love anybody like that. So-- Hakkai isn't sure yet what he'll decide, in the end. Maybe this is all foolish because he'll still go back to Shangri-la in the end.

"But just not knowing doesn't mean never," he finishes the sentence, a little late, and sighs. "I don't like waiting, either. But no is easier than yes, so if we push, I'm afraid--"

That it will be the easy answer, if Gojyo feels cornered or presumed upon.

Maybe he likes taking care of people, so he took care of Jedao even though he doesn't like him. Maybe he wanted an excuse to talk to Hakkai after getting those texts with something to talk about that wasn't those texts.

"He told me not to be fake," Jedao hisses, and he's angry about that, he's so quietly, deeply angry at the overwhelming unfairness and hypocrisy of it. "He told me not to lie to him, only it turns out he absolutely doesn't want the truth of me either."

Because the truth is that Jedao considers being tolerated where he is unwanted to be a particular personal hell. That other Jedao only stayed with Gojyo long enough for anything to happen because everywhere felt equally hellish. Gojyo had brought him into the house, so he deserved whatever imposition Jedao made, and if he didn't like it he could kick Jedao out.

But now Jedao is inviting Gojyo into his home, and not kicking him out no matter how sad he feels, and Gojyo keeps leaving anyway.

The truth is that Jedao wants to try for anything, all the time, and he wants to move if he has an objective, a way forward, however tentative and shy and small. He can wait if he knows what he's waiting for, if it's a plan, but they've both told him over and over to stop planning, stop pushing.

"He saw something in you, Hakkai. He chose you, at the very beginning of that year. He's never chosen me, he's just...been stuck with me, if he wants you. And he does, even if he might be -"

Stupid enough, cowardly enough -

"Even if he might decide it's not worth it. But he did choose you, and that's...it's different. I don't think time will change all that much. Not for him and me. Because he doesn't want me lying, and he doesn't want me being true. He wants the truth of some other person who isn't so reckless and desperate and. I mean. You, obviously. So I just. I just have to accept that."

"I'm not good at guessing what anyone wants," Hakkai says, at last, quietly. He wants to argue - wants to try to explain, to translate, to show Gojyo what he loves in Jedao and Jedao what he loves in Gojyo, so that they can stop hurting each other - but it's not his place to do it, in the end. He can't, and if he did, he couldn't trust that he'd do it right and not simply be selling the lie he wants most to be true.

"But more than anything... I want to stop hurting you like this," he admits, softly, looking down at their fingers laced together, and lets out a long breath. "Whatever that means to you. Whatever you need."

Jedao can see that there's so much to love about Gojyo; that's a big part of the problem.

"Oh, darling," Jedao says softly, lifts their joined hands, indulges himself kissing Hakkai's knuckles. "It's not going to stop hurting for a while. It's...it's kind of normal, to be a little heartbroken when you want someone to be your family, and they don't want anything from you at all."

He's pretty sure that's right.

"I just wish..." He wishes a lot of things, most of them from Gojyo at the moment, none of which Hakkai can grant. But he picks one of the smaller ones. "I wish he wouldn't leave you just because I'm upset. It makes me feel like...like what I want is so psychotically greedy, or my sadness is so repulsively pathetic, that he can't even stand to be in the suite as me, not even for...someone he wants in his life always. Like I'm just...poison that gets into everything. I'm a grownup. I fucking promise one room is enough for me to sulk in."

Hakkai isn't so sure that's right, but he is sure that he doesn't want to speak for Gojyo and be wrong.

There is one thing he can say with absolute certainty, though. He does know Gojyo's insecurities inside out, and he'd seen Gojyo's face when he said he'd leave.

"It's not that you're poison. It's that he saw he hurt you and he thought, 'I'm the problem, I have to get out of here.'"

So: Hakkai's not sure he can promise to make Gojyo stay as if Jedao being hurt doesn't matter, not when he knows it would force Gojyo to feel like the problem in their family. It's not a small thing.

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