Carefully, Gonou turns his face into Jedao's hair as he lets his energy slip into his lover's body. He's trying to be subtle about it, spurring healing from the bottom of the terrible rents he'd torn one-handed into Jedao's body, but he's not being careful at all about the amount of energy he's pouring in.
He takes a sharp breath, painful, and pulls Jedao just a little closer.
It feels so good, the easing of pain and the intimacy of Gonou's power inside him; it feels so gentle and yet Jedao feels a vertiginous terror at not knowing what it will cost him, knowing Gonou doesn't care. He doesn't know how to be grateful and careful of Gonou's guilt and explain that all he wants is to be held all at the same time.
He hears the pang of hurt in Gonou's breath and only wants to cling tighter and hates himself a little for that. Silently, horribly, utterly overwhelmed at the worst possible moment, he starts to cry.
Gonou curls tighter around him, his other arm sliding carefully under Jedao's side to pull him completely into an embrace.
He's not slowing down the flow of his power -- not until, at least, the wounds are down to something closer to superficial -- but he's not feeling any weakness worse than the death toll, either.
Quietly, into Jedao's hair, he murmurs, "I'm glad I -- didn't lose you."
He shudders in Gonou's grip; the healing is so fast, feels like so much.
"I'll be fine tomorrow," he promises, voice just a bit choked, which might have been ambitious without Gonou's help, but nevertheless. "You haven't. I fucking missed you."
"I liked him," Jedao sniffs, fingers curling tight in the cloth of Gonou's shirt. "When he was himself. You're a very difficult man to proposition, you know. It's your only fault."
He says this with the full fervor of mixed self-pity and absurdity, soft sulky insistence ready to spite all logic and knowledge.
"You should take that as a compliment," Gonou murmurs, and lets the flood of power ebb to a trickle as a moment of exhaustion shakes through him like a foreshock. Jedao's better, not fully healed, but better; it will do for now.
But he doesn't want to break the connection he feels entirely. He lets the trickle continue.
"Sorry, tired," he adds, aside, before finishing the first thought. A compliment, because-- "I said yes to you."
"If you're going to be sorry, I'm going to be sorry," Jedao threatens, since telling Gonou he doesn't need to be sorry has been, if not exactly a losing proposition, certainly an involved one in the past.
"It's just polite," Gonou mutters, a little sulky, and rests his hand on the back of Jedao's neck. His fingers describe little soothing circles.
At least he hadn't hurt Jedao there.
"How are you? Not just - being hurt." He'd felt Jedao shuddering against him a moment ago. Silent tears, he suspects. Past and future... they can both be hard.
"I'm just - very tired," Jedao says quietly, which isn't true, exactly, but it feels true, and it's the easiest piece of how he is to scrounge up words for. "Worried for you. Worried I fucked things up."
"Then I still would've tried to tear you to pieces, and you would have had to kill me," Gonou says, his voice low. "And I would have hated to do that to you, too.
"It's not your responsibility to save anyone from me. Not even yourself. Or myself."
"I handled the thing in yellow," Jedao mutters. "I could've knocked you out if I was smart about it." Instead of I was a dick to Eiffel, which he's also miserable about, but doesn't want to talk about.
"Maybe," Gonou says. "That me underestimated you."
He can't help sounding a little smug about it: there are a lot of things that 'Hakkai' had thought he'd known about which he had been very wrong. Jedao's strength is only one of them, but it still makes him smile to think about just how much stronger Jedao is than Hakkai had given him credit for.
"But there's a difference. Between -- could have done better -- with better information. And failed. And fucked up.
Gonou curls in more comfortably around him, closing his eyes, and reluctantly lets the last thread of energy he'd been maintaining fade to nothing. He does have more sense than to try to focus on sharing qi while he's falling asleep.
(He can imagine the face Xie Lian would make at him if he were that stupid very distinctly.)
It doesn't take long for his breath to even out as he slips back into slumber.
Gonou isn't very good at sleeping in, even -- it seems -- with a death toll to help; he murmurs something incoherent into Jedao's hair bright and early in the morning, cracks an eye open, and smiles.
"Good--"
-- which is about when he's struck with a coughing fit that curls him up like a shrimp, pulling away from Jedao's embrace to prop himself up on his less-aching arm and try to clear his throat.
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He takes a sharp breath, painful, and pulls Jedao just a little closer.
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He hears the pang of hurt in Gonou's breath and only wants to cling tighter and hates himself a little for that. Silently, horribly, utterly overwhelmed at the worst possible moment, he starts to cry.
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He's not slowing down the flow of his power -- not until, at least, the wounds are down to something closer to superficial -- but he's not feeling any weakness worse than the death toll, either.
Quietly, into Jedao's hair, he murmurs, "I'm glad I -- didn't lose you."
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"I'll be fine tomorrow," he promises, voice just a bit choked, which might have been ambitious without Gonou's help, but nevertheless. "You haven't. I fucking missed you."
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He says this with the full fervor of mixed self-pity and absurdity, soft sulky insistence ready to spite all logic and knowledge.
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But he doesn't want to break the connection he feels entirely. He lets the trickle continue.
"Sorry, tired," he adds, aside, before finishing the first thought. A compliment, because-- "I said yes to you."
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At least he hadn't hurt Jedao there.
"How are you? Not just - being hurt." He'd felt Jedao shuddering against him a moment ago. Silent tears, he suspects. Past and future... they can both be hard.
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"And we both know that's harder on you than the other way around would have been," Jedao points out. "If I'd taken things seriously from the start -"
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"It's not your responsibility to save anyone from me. Not even yourself. Or myself."
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"I don't care. I want to protect you. I get to want to."
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"Just. If you can't. It's not your fault." He huffs a tiny breath out, and adds as firmly as his rusty voice can manage, "You didn't fuck up."
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He can't help sounding a little smug about it: there are a lot of things that 'Hakkai' had thought he'd known about which he had been very wrong. Jedao's strength is only one of them, but it still makes him smile to think about just how much stronger Jedao is than Hakkai had given him credit for.
"But there's a difference. Between -- could have done better -- with better information. And failed. And fucked up.
"I'm grateful you tried."
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"Sleep here?"
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"Love you. Goodnight, Gonou-shei."
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(He can imagine the face Xie Lian would make at him if he were that stupid very distinctly.)
It doesn't take long for his breath to even out as he slips back into slumber.
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"Good--"
-- which is about when he's struck with a coughing fit that curls him up like a shrimp, pulling away from Jedao's embrace to prop himself up on his less-aching arm and try to clear his throat.
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