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.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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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?
no subject
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?
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
(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.)]
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.