[There's something there behind that word, something to spark offense off the cold and unwelcome anger that had lodged in his breast three years ago. But he can't quite make the intuitive leap he did before, can't quite scavenge disparate elements into a real cause for offense. Maybe if--
Gears slip, catch, and fall apart. He lets it go. There are some weapons you shouldn't use; some people you don't use them against.
This is Van, cousin and friend, best ally and loyal opposition. Even in those black days--weeks--months following the uprising, even when the only light in the darkness was a miserable fury over what had happened, he'd defended Vandelin to his detractors. It was instinct--automatic, disconnected from feeling, but as so often happens sentiment had followed action and even if Myr had started with doubt (Did he do this? Did he mean it?) and hurt, a part of him believed, and that belief grew.
Doubt gave way to conviction, gave way to-- Providence. What a perfectly Vandelin way to put it.
Myr smiles to himself to hear it, rueful and fond.] Yeah. Maybe you should wonder-- You could ask Him about it.
[Not "you should thank Him for it". He knows, he remembers, he gets it. But he can't stop leaving that door open--]
That's--that is what matters. That we're here. That you were out here, for me to find again. That kept me going, you know that? Even if I didn't know we'd find each other again--even as angry as I was--
["Your cousin is still out there," someone had said, when he was flat on his back in feverish agony and heartbreak. Maybe it had been meant as a spur to revenge, a don't give up, justice needs to be served--maybe that's how he'd taken it at first.
Or maybe the voice hadn't belonged to anyone in the Circle at all. Maybe that's the kinder way to imagine it--divine reminder--and Myr in all his need to believe the best had come round to that. Van was still out there.]
--even when I thought it would be better to b, be Tranquil and not have to feel things anymore about what had happened, like Cas--o, or just go to sleep and never wake up again because I could still see in the Fade--even then, I thought about you and thought you'd be so fucking mad if I did that. You'd never forgive me. I wouldn't hear the end of it. So I kept--I kept going.
[It isn't meant to wound.]
Edited (rearranged the meat on the bones, minor sentiment fixes) 2017-11-11 19:05 (UTC)
[This is not a conversation that Kit is meant to overhear, and he knows it, but there's also no way for him to extract himself from the situation without making it patently obvious that yes, he's heard every word. He stays put a few more seconds, deliberating in the dark and the silence over what the hell he's supposed to do now, then swings his legs over the side of the bed and eases himself up to his feet.
There's no point in hiding it, he decides. Vandelin will know that he knows the second they next see each other. Better get it out of the way now.
He takes a step towards the ladder leading downstairs; the creak of the floorboards enough to indicate that someone is awake, and moving around.]
[It's kind of Kit to make his presence known, respectfully and in the hopes that he won't hear any more of what he shouldn't. Through no fault of his, it's already too late for that. Before those creaking floorboards can make a noise, Vandelin lets out a sob--and for one long frozen moment, he feels dissociated from it, as if adamantly rejecting the notion that so vulnerable a noise could ever come from his own throat, until another follows on its heels, and his heart drops low with panic. Why can't he make them stop?
Kit's footsteps freeze him in his tracks like the petrified rabbit he feels like, and before he can think, he's bolted out to the darkness of the living room, away from him, anything he can do to put distance between himself and the man who was never supposed to know any of this. Shivering in his hastily-donned smallclothes in the drafty room, he wedges himself into a corner.
he didn't say that he didn't say that he didn't say any of this, none of this happened, none of this is happening, none of it has to be real, he doesn't mean it he doesn't mean it it's not my fault it was never my fault it wasn't]
I'm sorry.
[It's the first time he's cried in well over a decade, and even now, he would have denied he was doing it until he heard his own voice choked with tears. He can distance himself from his own body as thoroughly as he needs to, but he can't run from what he knows of Myr's pain anymore; he can't hide from the too-vivid thought of him lying with hollowed-out eye sockets in an infirmary bed and wishing for death, worse, wishing for Tranquility, and even in the face of all of that, of all of that, still loving Vandelin more than Van has ever earned in a lifetime.]
Vandelin, [Kit starts to say, but Vandelin has already fled from him to the bare living room on the first level of the floor. Grimacing, Kit chafes a hand against the top of his bald head, unsure of whether or not to follow--but in a moment he clambers down the rickety ladder leading to the first floor.]
..Vandelin?
[It's weird to wonder whether he should be asking if he should leave his own house, but--well, if the shoe were on the other foot, would he want anyone to bear witness to him losing his composure like this? Maybe that's reason enough for him to stay. He takes a few more steps closer and reaches out to touch Vandelin's shoulder, hesitates, then lets his palm rest against his arm.]
[How long has it been since last he heard his cousin cry? (Or apologize explicitly for something he'd done, in words rather than deed--) Even through the haze of alcohol hearing the two together shocks Myr to his core--not enough to sober him up but plenty to wring a sudden protective anxiety out of him. It's the old, old instinct to leap to Van's defense against all comers, to redress any injury done his cousin--
Except who's he supposed to go after when he's the one who did it, all unknowing, and there's no unsaying the words? (Not that he would if he could: They're true. And they needed to be said, if there was any healing the festering wound between them. Cut it wide open to clean it out.)
He cradles the sending crystal in his palms, head held low as the sounds of Van's misery wash over him, lower lip caught between his teeth. What does he say?]
--Vandelin. I-- shit. --I know, Van. I know you're sorry; Maker's breath, I know--
[There's something else he needs to say here and he can't find the words with how thick his head feels, how inept his tongue--]
[It isn't any one particular factor that makes Vandelin jerk his arm away from that touch as if burned. It's a whole confluence of them--the weight of his cousin's words, the shame of Kit's concern for him, the fact that he's standing here in nothing but a pair of flimsy linen shorts while his emotions rise up and rebel against him more violently than he had against the Hasmal loyalists.
(Not more violently. Nowhere near as violently, because fuck it, he can still see. He'd never thought about lying down and surrendering himself to the Fade, never had to wonder if it would be better to burn all the color and feeling out of the world than face another day in it with the weight of the rebellion's aftermath on his shoulders. He'd locked his memories of Myr tightly away because he could afford to, because he could distract himself, because he had the chance to supplant feelings with fighting until the entire bloody affair had hardened over in his mind like a callus.)
He knows what it feels like to rip off a callus and leave it bleeding-raw. It's nothing so painful as this, everything flooding back at once, the notion of accepting forgiveness he hasn't earned and then having to explain to Kit why he needed it in the first place. But he deserves it. He hasn't set foot in a confessional in nearly twenty years--he's got penance built up to the rafters. He'd far sooner owe it to Myr than to the Maker.]
I never would have let you hear the end of it. I would have hunted you down in the Fade. [If he'd ever found out. How would he have known? He would have tracked Myr down with the Inquisition's resources as soon as he got his hands on them, had it not been rendered unnecessary by his timely arrival, but--]
I thought you were safe when I left. I didn't think I would have to track you down. I thought--for the longest time, I thought the tower was still standing, just--without us. We didn't know. It was chaos out in the world, but when I asked for news about Hasmal, nobody knew of anything that had happened beyond the uprising, and--as far as I knew--you'd only been asleep when I left. I thought you had snapped out of it and...gone about your life. I thought you'd gotten what you wanted and I'd gotten what I wanted.
I never saw Rohesia again once she slipped the gate.
[The explanation is for Kit's benefit, too, even if he doesn't say so, doesn't tailor it to him. He knows he'll need to explain. He can't escape it. But this is a start.]
[Vandelin recoils, and Kit is quick to pull his hand back. Right, he thinks without resentment, he should have expected that response, all things considered.
He looks to where his smokes and book of matches rest on the rickety table near the door, turns, and walks heavily over to them.] I'll just be outside, [he tells Vandelin softly, in a moment where he won't be interrupting. He pulls on his coat and hat and disappears through the open doorway.
He doesn't go far at all; just to the other side of the narrow alleyway, to light his cigarette and smoke in silence, his eyes turned up towards the sliver of dark sky he can see between the rooftops. It's not that he doesn't want to help, or that he doesn't want to know more, to sort out how best to help--but whatever conversation Vandelin and Myr need to have with each other won't be helped by having him hanging awkwardly in the corner, wanting to help but not being able to.[
['I thought you'd gotten what you wanted and I'd gotten what I wanted.'
He makes a choked, involuntary noise--a laugh, and not--and presses the crystal to his lips. (Dimly, he catches the sound of Kit's voice, of Kit leaving. Oh. That means...something. That means something he'll be able to think about in the morning.)
I thought, I thought-- His voice is quiet, when he can find it to speak with again:]
If you'd known different, would you have come back? Or kept running?
[He watches Kit go, torn and half-ready to reach out and grab his arm by way of apology and make him stay--if only because in his previous experience, when Kit walks away, he doesn't always come back. (Never mind that this is Kit's house. Van might well owe him an apology for that later.)
But Myr isn't done with that siege weapon aimed at his defenses, and they feel all the weaker for that moment there when he'd thought he was safe. He reels, physically, back against the painful chill of the wall. Half of him thinks of hanging up.]
That's what you'd have wanted, is it? You wanted me to come back?
That would have made a great story for them to tell you in your sickbed. 'We caught your traitor cousin trying to sneak back. Don't worry; he can't get to you again. We killed him on sight.'
Or in the best-case scenario, you could eventually have visited me in the dungeons like you do with the magister. You seem to enjoy those talks. Maybe it would have been fun for you.
What good would it have done either of us for me to do anything but keep running?
[Kit watches the smoke rise from the burning end of his cigarette, schools his expression into one of neutrality, and waits for the storm to blow itself out. The winds won't be calm, once the call comes to an end; the air will be unsettled, electric, quick to whip up into another gale. In the intervening moments that Kit has to himself, he waits for it.
This crisis between Vandelin and Myr clearly predates him by months, if not by years, and there's no amount of mediation that Kit could possibly provide that would mend those wounds. It isn't his place to be involved in it; somewhere in the back of his thoughts, he forces himself to consider the possibility that maybe his old instincts were right. Maybe he has no place in their lives at all--
--then Chuck, drunk and disheveled and in the wrong neighbourhood yet again, wobbles into view from the shadows, and Kit quickly puts out his cigarette and ambles over to kindly take his arm.] Not again, salroka, [he sighs tiredly, sends once glance towards the front door to his hovel again, then back to Chuck.] You need me to walk you home?
[He can only hope that Vandelin will still be there, when he comes back.]
Fuck you, that isn't what I meant and you know it!
[Push Myr enough and the fury at the sheer unfairness of it all breaks through-- And right now it seems really fucking unfair that Vandelin can't simply know the intent behind his words despite the sloppy phrasing. He starts to his feet in his anger--stumbles against the desk, knocking over his glass and spilling the contents.]
Shit, [as he picks it up and sets it to rights hard enough to be heard over the crystal,] I don't want you dead. I don't want you imprisoned. I wanted-- I want--
[Silence punctuated by the steady drip, drip of liquid to the floor, as he cards through thoughts gone woolly.] --Just stop running. Don't--abandon me again because I'm broken and you can't bear to look at me, after what's happened. The way, [thickly] the way everyone else in Hasmal wouldn't look.
You did this and you didn't mean it and I can forgive you that but not if you won't stay. If you run again.
Fuck you! I didn't know that! What else could you possibly have meant?
[An eye for an eye, in the most gruesomely, sickeningly literal sense of the word--isn't that what anyone would want? Now that he's finally shouldered the blame he deserves to, admitted his share of the fault, won't Myr want retribution? An apology isn't enough; it never has been, not for anyone, because people don't work that way. He can't even begin to fathom what else Myr could have meant or what more he could want.
He can hear that clumsy drunk fumbling, wishes for an irrational moment that he were there to clean it up, because Maker knows Myr can't when he's in a state like this. He remembers, sudden, unbidden, that day he'd come to Myr's room to find it trashed in a rage with Rohesia's incendiary flyer on the door--remembers tidying it, fearful for his cousin's reputation should anyone else witness such a loss of control.
The actual explanation comes like a punch, a winding blow, and he sinks into the chair he'd furnished Kit's living room with.]
When have I--when have I ever done that? What do you mean, 'again?' Why do you think--
[Maybe, to a loyalist, fleeing to freedom reads like personal abandonment. It never would have occurred to Vandelin that it might. But here, at the end of the road, when they've found each other against mountainous odds--how could he do anything like it again?]
I was never running from you. You were never a thing to run from. After everything we did to stay together--
You know they threatened to transfer me after my Harrowing if I made trouble, don't you? Why the fuck do you think I followed the Aequitarians for so long? Why do you think I joined them? You think I actually believed in them? I was afraid that if I rocked the boat with the Libertarians, I'd never see you again.
I stopped compromising when I knew they'd let me stay. But I didn't call it abandonment when you stuck with the Chantry all along. I would've given anything to make you come with me, but I never said you abandoned me by staying.
Never you dead. Andraste's tits, Van, why would I--
[Momentum gutted, he gives up halfway through the sentence and slumps back into his own chair and silence.
There's a pitter-patter of tiny feet--tiny hands--and a querulous wuffle as Myr's nuglet emerges at last to see what all the noise and strange smells are about. She sets to work on the puddle of posca as her owner cradles his head in his hands, crystal dangling between his fingers.
Quietly, barely voiced:] I missed you so fucking much and I couldn't follow you. Even if I'd had eyes--I couldn't leave the Circle, not when th, the city wanted us gone so badly they'd starve us out with all our wounded. [With him among them.]
I couldn't. Not and leave Cas behind to that.
You had to choose the same way. Sometime. And I knew between me and freedom which way you'd go.
Shouldn't be angry about that. Shouldn't blame you. Some things, there's some things no one can expect anyone else to give up--but you were better at that than I am.
Oh, I was better at it than you were? I was better at it? We had to choose the same way?
[He never raises his voice with anyone but Myr, never lets anybody but his cousin see him this furious and exposed, but he can't help it now.]
You would never have dreamed of compromising the way I did for you. It would never even have occurred to you that I could be something to choose over the Chantry. The idea's never even crossed your fucking mind. But of course, it's different when you do it, because your principles are holy ones.
You get to spend your entire fucking life choosing your principles over me and claim the automatic moral high ground because it's for Andraste, and then you chastise me for finally doing the same thing for what I hold sacred.
[Cas doesn't figure in here, because he can't rebut that, can't address it, can't think about it. Cas hasn't figured into Van's arguments in years, because he could never be used to win them. But there are other misconceptions to clear up right now.]
What the hell do you think freedom means to me? You think all I wanted to do was leave the Circle, and that's what I was fighting for? Like I wanted to have fun traveling the world, sipping champagne in fancy Orlesian gardens, and that's why I left?
Do you think I want to be here? In fucking Kirkwall? Three different people try to mug me every fucking time I leave the Gallows, and you think I just left because I wanted to be somewhere other than a Circle tower? You think I spent months starving and freezing and running and watching my friends get butchered one by one because--what, I wanted to see what it was like to go camping?
Then Myr sets his crystal down on his desk with a quiet click and buries his face further in his hands. Maker, please, is all he can manage of a prayer before the blackness swells up and chokes him and he bites his tongue to keep from screaming--or sobbing.
What's happened to him that he can't make himself understood anymore?
He can't give himself time enough to let the megrim pass, to wrestle it drunkenly back down where it belongs. He has to answer--has to try--has to not fuck it up this time because he can't stand the thought of Van not speaking to him, again.
He picks the crystal back up.]
You were better, [the words are spoken so, so carefully,] at knowing what I couldn't give up and letting me be. I thought.
I thought you didn't hold that against me. Hold--my faith against me, the way I held what you wanted against you.
Even when I knew you were smothering. When I knew it would be better for you to go.
I prayed, Van. I begged Him to take that anger away and He wouldn't.
You deserved better and anger wouldn't get you that. And then you were gone and I thought I'd never have the chance again.
[Starving and freezing and running and watching my friends get butchered one by one-- While Myr at least had the safety of a roof over his head, of people he called family around him, even if they'd most of them grown strange around him. It hadn't been so bad. It hadn't--]
[He understands better now. Maybe it's just a question of willingness to listen, or maybe that click forces him back from the edge, thinking for a second that he's been hung up on. He doesn't hasten to leap on that with a rebuttal, the way he otherwise might. He listens, quiet.]
I don't hold your faith against you. Not inherently. Only when--
[When you make a double standard of it, when you condemn me for doing what you do, everything Myr's just admitted to on his own, and all but begged forgiveness for besides. There's no call for Vandelin to rub his face in it. Myr deserves far better than that, too.]
When I say I want freedom, I mean I want it for the mages who come after us. I don't want our children to be ripped from their families; I don't want our future generations to grow up and never be allowed to fall in love. I don't want accidents of birth to put us all at the mercy of people who can take away what few scraps of affection and stability we have at a whim.
We shouldn't have had to be the lucky exceptions, Myr. We shouldn't have had to grow up being grateful for that, don't you understand? We shouldn't have had to live in constant fear of being separated. They shouldn't have been able to exploit that the way they did just to make us behave. And if the bureaucracy had been working as it should, it wouldn't even have been an option. We'd be nothing to each other now. I don't want to know who I would have been without you.
[Nell Voss would have liked the person he would be now without Myr's influence. But Van wouldn't.]
We deserve to have families. And I couldn't fight for that from inside a tower.
[It's always been a matter of listening--listening and hearing what was said. Myr's track record on that is far from perfect but--
The loss of one sense sharpens the others; losing Vandelin put an edge on keen-set hunger for the only blood family he still had. It makes him attentive now, struggling as he is to attend to what's said through the fog of inebriation.
(Talk of falling in love very nearly takes him out of the flow of the words. Distraction creeps in in the memory of a stolen touch between sparring bouts, of desire-demon dreams. Still not an option, something whispers; he lays the thought gently aside along with the self-admission embedded in it.)
It isn't comfortable to be reminded they shouldn't've been so fortunate. It isn't meant to be comfortable; it twists in his gut and makes him hunch his shoulders as if he could fend off the truth by doing so. We deserve to have families.
How could he deny anyone else the gift they'd been given, all undeserving?]
You do, [because maybe I did deserve this,] we do.
You're right. You are--it has to be better. It shouldn't be done at all if it can't be better.
I'm s, sorry Van. I am--for the whole fucking mess this is. That you had to go so far for something we should've--we should've had all along. If things were right or--if they were right or just.
[His silence now is the stunned kind, in the face of that admission--everything he's wanted to convince Myr of, everything he's argued in their endless debates, everything he's longed to hear, spilling from his cousin's mouth all at once in that moment of drunken candor. It shouldn't be done at all if it can't be better.
(There are people who would tell him that isn't enough. He hates that that voice is in his head at a moment like this.)]
Then what are we here for now, if not to make it better?
We have each other again. We don't have to be at odds anymore. [Regardless of whether the credit for it goes to random fortune or to the Maker, they have the second chance neither of them ever thought they would get--how can they toss it away with argument and misunderstanding? (Except that Vandelin doesn't know how to do anything but.)]
[Laughter right now is wholly inappropriate--but Van's words wrench a muffled laugh from Myr anyway.]
To fight fuckin' Corypheus. A, and to dress up pretty for the shems in Hightown like they'll even notice--and argue over who's given up more for mages and whether rifters deserve anything out of us and--
[Miracle of miracles he catches his mouth before it can run away with him entirely, preventing the whole black litany of complaints he's been swallowing back from spilling out all at once.] --and make things better. For all of us.
[We don't have to be at odds anymore.
That sounds nice.
That sounds so nice, and precisely what he needs, but--] Don't know.
Won't be as fun that way. 'Sides, iron sharpens iron, Van.
[He never lets himself laugh unbidden for anyone else, except sometimes Kit, just sometimes--but that draws a quick burst of it from his throat in turn, before he can stop it. Maybe his idealism had run away with him there, just a little.]
Yeah, sure, fine, there's Corypheus. But that goes without saying. [Maybe that litany of complaints could go without saying, too, but Van's grim snort of agreement is a kind of satisfaction, grateful he wasn't the only one thinking it--that his envy of Myr's social desirability at the party had still been misplaced, when all was said and done.
They're not meant to be in agreement all the time. They never have been completely at peace, never once in their entire lives. Van would chafe at it like a restraint if he tried to commit to it for too long, and Myr knows that better than anyone else alive, and loves him anyway--]
I missed you, too. And I don't plan on ever having to again.
[Even if he can't articulate it so well as Van did right now, Myr needs Vandelin every bit as much as his cousin needs him. Three years without had taught him not to believe otherwise.
There will be other fights, he knows. There will be disagreements. They might even stop talking to each other again for a while.
But they won't be separated again. And knowing that means the whole world right now.]
Good. I'll-- [--yawn right before he can make a comedic threat about coming after Van in the Fade if Van didn't keep up his end of that plan. All right.] --mmphg. Fuck. I'm tired.
Should go back to bed. You too. Tell Kit I'm sorry for waking the two of you up.
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[There's something there behind that word, something to spark offense off the cold and unwelcome anger that had lodged in his breast three years ago. But he can't quite make the intuitive leap he did before, can't quite scavenge disparate elements into a real cause for offense. Maybe if--
Gears slip, catch, and fall apart. He lets it go. There are some weapons you shouldn't use; some people you don't use them against.
This is Van, cousin and friend, best ally and loyal opposition. Even in those black days--weeks--months following the uprising, even when the only light in the darkness was a miserable fury over what had happened, he'd defended Vandelin to his detractors. It was instinct--automatic, disconnected from feeling, but as so often happens sentiment had followed action and even if Myr had started with doubt (Did he do this? Did he mean it?) and hurt, a part of him believed, and that belief grew.
Doubt gave way to conviction, gave way to-- Providence. What a perfectly Vandelin way to put it.
Myr smiles to himself to hear it, rueful and fond.] Yeah. Maybe you should wonder-- You could ask Him about it.
[Not "you should thank Him for it". He knows, he remembers, he gets it. But he can't stop leaving that door open--]
That's--that is what matters. That we're here. That you were out here, for me to find again. That kept me going, you know that? Even if I didn't know we'd find each other again--even as angry as I was--
["Your cousin is still out there," someone had said, when he was flat on his back in feverish agony and heartbreak. Maybe it had been meant as a spur to revenge, a don't give up, justice needs to be served--maybe that's how he'd taken it at first.
Or maybe the voice hadn't belonged to anyone in the Circle at all. Maybe that's the kinder way to imagine it--divine reminder--and Myr in all his need to believe the best had come round to that. Van was still out there.]
--even when I thought it would be better to b, be Tranquil and not have to feel things anymore about what had happened, like Cas--o, or just go to sleep and never wake up again because I could still see in the Fade--even then, I thought about you and thought you'd be so fucking mad if I did that. You'd never forgive me. I wouldn't hear the end of it. So I kept--I kept going.
[It isn't meant to wound.]
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There's no point in hiding it, he decides. Vandelin will know that he knows the second they next see each other. Better get it out of the way now.
He takes a step towards the ladder leading downstairs; the creak of the floorboards enough to indicate that someone is awake, and moving around.]
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Kit's footsteps freeze him in his tracks like the petrified rabbit he feels like, and before he can think, he's bolted out to the darkness of the living room, away from him, anything he can do to put distance between himself and the man who was never supposed to know any of this. Shivering in his hastily-donned smallclothes in the drafty room, he wedges himself into a corner.
he didn't say that he didn't say that he didn't say any of this, none of this happened, none of this is happening, none of it has to be real, he doesn't mean it he doesn't mean it it's not my fault it was never my fault it wasn't]
I'm sorry.
[It's the first time he's cried in well over a decade, and even now, he would have denied he was doing it until he heard his own voice choked with tears. He can distance himself from his own body as thoroughly as he needs to, but he can't run from what he knows of Myr's pain anymore; he can't hide from the too-vivid thought of him lying with hollowed-out eye sockets in an infirmary bed and wishing for death, worse, wishing for Tranquility, and even in the face of all of that, of all of that, still loving Vandelin more than Van has ever earned in a lifetime.]
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Maker, I'm sorry--
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..Vandelin?
[It's weird to wonder whether he should be asking if he should leave his own house, but--well, if the shoe were on the other foot, would he want anyone to bear witness to him losing his composure like this? Maybe that's reason enough for him to stay. He takes a few more steps closer and reaches out to touch Vandelin's shoulder, hesitates, then lets his palm rest against his arm.]
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Van--
[How long has it been since last he heard his cousin cry? (Or apologize explicitly for something he'd done, in words rather than deed--) Even through the haze of alcohol hearing the two together shocks Myr to his core--not enough to sober him up but plenty to wring a sudden protective anxiety out of him. It's the old, old instinct to leap to Van's defense against all comers, to redress any injury done his cousin--
Except who's he supposed to go after when he's the one who did it, all unknowing, and there's no unsaying the words? (Not that he would if he could: They're true. And they needed to be said, if there was any healing the festering wound between them. Cut it wide open to clean it out.)
He cradles the sending crystal in his palms, head held low as the sounds of Van's misery wash over him, lower lip caught between his teeth. What does he say?]
--Vandelin. I-- shit. --I know, Van. I know you're sorry; Maker's breath, I know--
[There's something else he needs to say here and he can't find the words with how thick his head feels, how inept his tongue--]
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(Not more violently. Nowhere near as violently, because fuck it, he can still see. He'd never thought about lying down and surrendering himself to the Fade, never had to wonder if it would be better to burn all the color and feeling out of the world than face another day in it with the weight of the rebellion's aftermath on his shoulders. He'd locked his memories of Myr tightly away because he could afford to, because he could distract himself, because he had the chance to supplant feelings with fighting until the entire bloody affair had hardened over in his mind like a callus.)
He knows what it feels like to rip off a callus and leave it bleeding-raw. It's nothing so painful as this, everything flooding back at once, the notion of accepting forgiveness he hasn't earned and then having to explain to Kit why he needed it in the first place. But he deserves it. He hasn't set foot in a confessional in nearly twenty years--he's got penance built up to the rafters. He'd far sooner owe it to Myr than to the Maker.]
I never would have let you hear the end of it. I would have hunted you down in the Fade. [If he'd ever found out. How would he have known? He would have tracked Myr down with the Inquisition's resources as soon as he got his hands on them, had it not been rendered unnecessary by his timely arrival, but--]
I thought you were safe when I left. I didn't think I would have to track you down. I thought--for the longest time, I thought the tower was still standing, just--without us. We didn't know. It was chaos out in the world, but when I asked for news about Hasmal, nobody knew of anything that had happened beyond the uprising, and--as far as I knew--you'd only been asleep when I left. I thought you had snapped out of it and...gone about your life. I thought you'd gotten what you wanted and I'd gotten what I wanted.
I never saw Rohesia again once she slipped the gate.
[The explanation is for Kit's benefit, too, even if he doesn't say so, doesn't tailor it to him. He knows he'll need to explain. He can't escape it. But this is a start.]
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He looks to where his smokes and book of matches rest on the rickety table near the door, turns, and walks heavily over to them.] I'll just be outside, [he tells Vandelin softly, in a moment where he won't be interrupting. He pulls on his coat and hat and disappears through the open doorway.
He doesn't go far at all; just to the other side of the narrow alleyway, to light his cigarette and smoke in silence, his eyes turned up towards the sliver of dark sky he can see between the rooftops. It's not that he doesn't want to help, or that he doesn't want to know more, to sort out how best to help--but whatever conversation Vandelin and Myr need to have with each other won't be helped by having him hanging awkwardly in the corner, wanting to help but not being able to.[
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He makes a choked, involuntary noise--a laugh, and not--and presses the crystal to his lips. (Dimly, he catches the sound of Kit's voice, of Kit leaving. Oh. That means...something. That means something he'll be able to think about in the morning.)
I thought, I thought-- His voice is quiet, when he can find it to speak with again:]
If you'd known different, would you have come back? Or kept running?
[From the Circle. From him.]
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But Myr isn't done with that siege weapon aimed at his defenses, and they feel all the weaker for that moment there when he'd thought he was safe. He reels, physically, back against the painful chill of the wall. Half of him thinks of hanging up.]
That's what you'd have wanted, is it? You wanted me to come back?
That would have made a great story for them to tell you in your sickbed. 'We caught your traitor cousin trying to sneak back. Don't worry; he can't get to you again. We killed him on sight.'
Or in the best-case scenario, you could eventually have visited me in the dungeons like you do with the magister. You seem to enjoy those talks. Maybe it would have been fun for you.
What good would it have done either of us for me to do anything but keep running?
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This crisis between Vandelin and Myr clearly predates him by months, if not by years, and there's no amount of mediation that Kit could possibly provide that would mend those wounds. It isn't his place to be involved in it; somewhere in the back of his thoughts, he forces himself to consider the possibility that maybe his old instincts were right. Maybe he has no place in their lives at all--
--then Chuck, drunk and disheveled and in the wrong neighbourhood yet again, wobbles into view from the shadows, and Kit quickly puts out his cigarette and ambles over to kindly take his arm.] Not again, salroka, [he sighs tiredly, sends once glance towards the front door to his hovel again, then back to Chuck.] You need me to walk you home?
[He can only hope that Vandelin will still be there, when he comes back.]
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[Push Myr enough and the fury at the sheer unfairness of it all breaks through-- And right now it seems really fucking unfair that Vandelin can't simply know the intent behind his words despite the sloppy phrasing. He starts to his feet in his anger--stumbles against the desk, knocking over his glass and spilling the contents.]
Shit, [as he picks it up and sets it to rights hard enough to be heard over the crystal,] I don't want you dead. I don't want you imprisoned. I wanted-- I want--
[Silence punctuated by the steady drip, drip of liquid to the floor, as he cards through thoughts gone woolly.] --Just stop running. Don't--abandon me again because I'm broken and you can't bear to look at me, after what's happened. The way, [thickly] the way everyone else in Hasmal wouldn't look.
You did this and you didn't mean it and I can forgive you that but not if you won't stay. If you run again.
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[An eye for an eye, in the most gruesomely, sickeningly literal sense of the word--isn't that what anyone would want? Now that he's finally shouldered the blame he deserves to, admitted his share of the fault, won't Myr want retribution? An apology isn't enough; it never has been, not for anyone, because people don't work that way. He can't even begin to fathom what else Myr could have meant or what more he could want.
He can hear that clumsy drunk fumbling, wishes for an irrational moment that he were there to clean it up, because Maker knows Myr can't when he's in a state like this. He remembers, sudden, unbidden, that day he'd come to Myr's room to find it trashed in a rage with Rohesia's incendiary flyer on the door--remembers tidying it, fearful for his cousin's reputation should anyone else witness such a loss of control.
The actual explanation comes like a punch, a winding blow, and he sinks into the chair he'd furnished Kit's living room with.]
When have I--when have I ever done that? What do you mean, 'again?' Why do you think--
[Maybe, to a loyalist, fleeing to freedom reads like personal abandonment. It never would have occurred to Vandelin that it might. But here, at the end of the road, when they've found each other against mountainous odds--how could he do anything like it again?]
I was never running from you. You were never a thing to run from. After everything we did to stay together--
You know they threatened to transfer me after my Harrowing if I made trouble, don't you? Why the fuck do you think I followed the Aequitarians for so long? Why do you think I joined them? You think I actually believed in them? I was afraid that if I rocked the boat with the Libertarians, I'd never see you again.
I stopped compromising when I knew they'd let me stay. But I didn't call it abandonment when you stuck with the Chantry all along. I would've given anything to make you come with me, but I never said you abandoned me by staying.
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[Momentum gutted, he gives up halfway through the sentence and slumps back into his own chair and silence.
There's a pitter-patter of tiny feet--tiny hands--and a querulous wuffle as Myr's nuglet emerges at last to see what all the noise and strange smells are about. She sets to work on the puddle of posca as her owner cradles his head in his hands, crystal dangling between his fingers.
Quietly, barely voiced:] I missed you so fucking much and I couldn't follow you. Even if I'd had eyes--I couldn't leave the Circle, not when th, the city wanted us gone so badly they'd starve us out with all our wounded. [With him among them.]
I couldn't. Not and leave Cas behind to that.
You had to choose the same way. Sometime. And I knew between me and freedom which way you'd go.
Shouldn't be angry about that. Shouldn't blame you. Some things, there's some things no one can expect anyone else to give up--but you were better at that than I am.
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[He never raises his voice with anyone but Myr, never lets anybody but his cousin see him this furious and exposed, but he can't help it now.]
You would never have dreamed of compromising the way I did for you. It would never even have occurred to you that I could be something to choose over the Chantry. The idea's never even crossed your fucking mind. But of course, it's different when you do it, because your principles are holy ones.
You get to spend your entire fucking life choosing your principles over me and claim the automatic moral high ground because it's for Andraste, and then you chastise me for finally doing the same thing for what I hold sacred.
[Cas doesn't figure in here, because he can't rebut that, can't address it, can't think about it. Cas hasn't figured into Van's arguments in years, because he could never be used to win them. But there are other misconceptions to clear up right now.]
What the hell do you think freedom means to me? You think all I wanted to do was leave the Circle, and that's what I was fighting for? Like I wanted to have fun traveling the world, sipping champagne in fancy Orlesian gardens, and that's why I left?
Do you think I want to be here? In fucking Kirkwall? Three different people try to mug me every fucking time I leave the Gallows, and you think I just left because I wanted to be somewhere other than a Circle tower? You think I spent months starving and freezing and running and watching my friends get butchered one by one because--what, I wanted to see what it was like to go camping?
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Then Myr sets his crystal down on his desk with a quiet click and buries his face further in his hands. Maker, please, is all he can manage of a prayer before the blackness swells up and chokes him and he bites his tongue to keep from screaming--or sobbing.
What's happened to him that he can't make himself understood anymore?
He can't give himself time enough to let the megrim pass, to wrestle it drunkenly back down where it belongs. He has to answer--has to try--has to not fuck it up this time because he can't stand the thought of Van not speaking to him, again.
He picks the crystal back up.]
You were better, [the words are spoken so, so carefully,] at knowing what I couldn't give up and letting me be. I thought.
I thought you didn't hold that against me. Hold--my faith against me, the way I held what you wanted against you.
Even when I knew you were smothering. When I knew it would be better for you to go.
I prayed, Van. I begged Him to take that anger away and He wouldn't.
You deserved better and anger wouldn't get you that. And then you were gone and I thought I'd never have the chance again.
[Starving and freezing and running and watching my friends get butchered one by one-- While Myr at least had the safety of a roof over his head, of people he called family around him, even if they'd most of them grown strange around him. It hadn't been so bad. It hadn't--]
What did it mean to you?
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I don't hold your faith against you. Not inherently. Only when--
[When you make a double standard of it, when you condemn me for doing what you do, everything Myr's just admitted to on his own, and all but begged forgiveness for besides. There's no call for Vandelin to rub his face in it. Myr deserves far better than that, too.]
When I say I want freedom, I mean I want it for the mages who come after us. I don't want our children to be ripped from their families; I don't want our future generations to grow up and never be allowed to fall in love. I don't want accidents of birth to put us all at the mercy of people who can take away what few scraps of affection and stability we have at a whim.
We shouldn't have had to be the lucky exceptions, Myr. We shouldn't have had to grow up being grateful for that, don't you understand? We shouldn't have had to live in constant fear of being separated. They shouldn't have been able to exploit that the way they did just to make us behave. And if the bureaucracy had been working as it should, it wouldn't even have been an option. We'd be nothing to each other now. I don't want to know who I would have been without you.
[Nell Voss would have liked the person he would be now without Myr's influence. But Van wouldn't.]
We deserve to have families. And I couldn't fight for that from inside a tower.
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The loss of one sense sharpens the others; losing Vandelin put an edge on keen-set hunger for the only blood family he still had. It makes him attentive now, struggling as he is to attend to what's said through the fog of inebriation.
(Talk of falling in love very nearly takes him out of the flow of the words. Distraction creeps in in the memory of a stolen touch between sparring bouts, of desire-demon dreams. Still not an option, something whispers; he lays the thought gently aside along with the self-admission embedded in it.)
It isn't comfortable to be reminded they shouldn't've been so fortunate. It isn't meant to be comfortable; it twists in his gut and makes him hunch his shoulders as if he could fend off the truth by doing so. We deserve to have families.
How could he deny anyone else the gift they'd been given, all undeserving?]
You do, [because maybe I did deserve this,] we do.
You're right. You are--it has to be better. It shouldn't be done at all if it can't be better.
I'm s, sorry Van. I am--for the whole fucking mess this is. That you had to go so far for something we should've--we should've had all along. If things were right or--if they were right or just.
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(There are people who would tell him that isn't enough. He hates that that voice is in his head at a moment like this.)]
Then what are we here for now, if not to make it better?
We have each other again. We don't have to be at odds anymore. [Regardless of whether the credit for it goes to random fortune or to the Maker, they have the second chance neither of them ever thought they would get--how can they toss it away with argument and misunderstanding? (Except that Vandelin doesn't know how to do anything but.)]
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To fight fuckin' Corypheus. A, and to dress up pretty for the shems in Hightown like they'll even notice--and argue over who's given up more for mages and whether rifters deserve anything out of us and--
[Miracle of miracles he catches his mouth before it can run away with him entirely, preventing the whole black litany of complaints he's been swallowing back from spilling out all at once.] --and make things better. For all of us.
[We don't have to be at odds anymore.
That sounds nice.
That sounds so nice, and precisely what he needs, but--] Don't know.
Won't be as fun that way. 'Sides, iron sharpens iron, Van.
I missed you.
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Yeah, sure, fine, there's Corypheus. But that goes without saying. [Maybe that litany of complaints could go without saying, too, but Van's grim snort of agreement is a kind of satisfaction, grateful he wasn't the only one thinking it--that his envy of Myr's social desirability at the party had still been misplaced, when all was said and done.
They're not meant to be in agreement all the time. They never have been completely at peace, never once in their entire lives. Van would chafe at it like a restraint if he tried to commit to it for too long, and Myr knows that better than anyone else alive, and loves him anyway--]
I missed you, too. And I don't plan on ever having to again.
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There will be other fights, he knows. There will be disagreements. They might even stop talking to each other again for a while.
But they won't be separated again. And knowing that means the whole world right now.]
Good. I'll-- [--yawn right before he can make a comedic threat about coming after Van in the Fade if Van didn't keep up his end of that plan. All right.] --mmphg. Fuck. I'm tired.
Should go back to bed. You too. Tell Kit I'm sorry for waking the two of you up.