cigsandbeer | IC INBOX

"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.

He's sure he's right that it's a normal thing to be sad about, that it isn't a moral failing to break someone's heart by being Just Not That Into Them, but that it shouldn't be a moral failing be heartbroken, either. He hears Dhanneth in his memory, so quiet, begging. Let me be something to you.

Jedao has been chasing Gojyo the whole time, on the barge and through worlds and time. Jedao who went after him the first night, Jedao who asked Gojyo to show him a place in the enclosure, Jedao who's harassed him and needled him and flirted with him. Jedao who dragged him on a boat ride to the dawn that he regretted so profoundly. Jedao who asked Gojyo to take the Engine Room key, the biggest declaration of trust Jedao has, except for asking Gojyo to be family to Edwin, and he'd done that too. JD tying up Gojyo's alter ego and asking him to dance, while Gojyo just thought he was a creep. Jedidiah Shufflewing who thought his brother hung the moon in the sky, while Galahad the bastard lived his life in a messy mix of jealousy and obligations for his strange half-sibling-slash-employer.

Jedao asks, and Gojyo grudgingly goes along with it until Jedao asks for too much, and eventually he always does. Gojyo needs time. Not to spend with him, but without him, time without being asked and pushed and wanted. Time is a measurement of how much nothing Gojyo wants from him.

"I know he...I knew guilt was part of it. And I didn't think he really thought like that exactly. But that's how it makes me feel. Like...if it's so unbearable that I'm sad, then...it's not okay that I'm sad. And if I'm sad because I want something I can't have, and it's normal to be sad about that, then the wrong thing is that I want it at all."

He closes his eyes and leans onto Hakkai's shoulder. "He can't be the problem for making me upset because me being upset is not the failure condition. The goal isn't a life where I'm always happy and get everything I want. The goal is that we can both be an equal part of your life. And if me being sad means he has to leave, then...me being sad is poison."

"Or you're both just people," Hakkai says quietly. "You each have vulnerable places and rough edges. You keep catching each other where it hurts, but that doesn't make either of you poison."

Just people. He sighs out a long breath.

"It's not failure if he can't always stay, either. It was - we said a lot, tonight. Before you got upset, it was already a lot."

And Gojyo wanting to stay the night would have been... good, Hakkai wouldn't have said no, but it would have been so much that it would have scared him to say yes. Not many things scare him, but he's afraid of moving too fast, of being too vulnerable. Jedao always has the courage to rush ahead, but Hakkai-- no.

"I'll see him tomorrow, and that's all right. And I'll let him know you don't want him to feel like he has to leave if you need a moment, but if he needs to leave it's not because your feelings are wrong, just... it's a vulnerable spot for him."

"But if I could stop having them, maybe he'd stay."

Just because they're not evil doesn't mean they aren't still wrong.

"Maybe I'm also an adult who doesn't need everyone I love to be perfect all of the time," Hakkai says gently. "I don't want him to hurt you, but I really don't want you to feel like you're doing anything wrong by hurting.

"Whether he stays-- that's about him. Not about you doing anything wrong."

"I know I don't need to be perfect for you," Jedao mumbles. It's just that if he were a different, better person, he could be perfect for achieving the objective, could somehow be welcoming and indifferent to Gojyo at the same time, the way that he wants, never caring enough to be upset, but just enough caring to not do all the things Gojyo thinks are too slutty or embarrassingly earnest or - whatever.

"It's the wrong...move. The wrong heart to have."

"It's the right heart if it's yours," Hakkai murmurs. "I don't want Gojyo to know a different you."

They're both more important to him than any particular objective.

"It doesn't seem right that he's pickier than you, and yet," Jedao mutters.

Hakkai offers a little chuckle, still holding Jedao's hand; he tells over the knuckles with his thumb in a little reassuring stroke.

"In some ways, yes," he admits. He's had more practice loving than Gojyo, as much as Gojyo's heart is kinder than his own.

"You could probably stand to ask a little, though. He didn't hear you last time."

He passes over his communicator, letting Hakkai see the actual disastrous texts that started the whole evening.

"I did figure that out," Hakkai sighs, skimming through the conversation. "When he really thought we were mocking him."

You're drunk, go home indeed.

"But the point of not spooking him is to leave a little room to think about it differently," he adds, with a faint upwards crook at the corner of his mouth: it's not exactly funny, but it's ironic. "If he doesn't want to think about it the way we meant it."

It wasn't really meant to let him miss the point if he did want to hear it the way they meant it, but at least they've clarified things. Belatedly.

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