deuceoftears | TLV IC Inbox

[Gonou makes a soft noise from the bed. It's not much, it's not loud, but it's the first in almost a month.]

Ah...

[He's a little uncoordinated as he raises his hand; he has to try twice to brush his hair away from his eye, and he blinks up at the ceiling. Jedao's room has a very distinctive ceiling. It's the right place for him to be waking up, as often as not, but he feels strangely stiff, like a porcelain doll ill-strung, joints too loose or grinding tight by turns.

His blink at the ceiling is turning, slowly, into a frown as he catalogs the sensation.]

Jedao is sitting up against the headboard next to him, slate over his bent knees, so that his ankle is just brushing Gonou's hip.

"Good morning, beautiful."

Gonou smiles at him, tension ebbing from his shoulders, and yawns jaw-crackingly wide as he props himself up on an elbow.

"Good morning, Jedao-shei," he says, sitting up a bit further so that he can lean over for a kiss. "Did I oversleep?"

It could explain the wrongly-put-together feeling. Or --

He'd feel something if he'd been in a coma, wouldn't he? Jedao would've reacted more strongly.

(But he also can't imagine he wouldn't have woken up at least a little when Jedao settled into bed, sitting up, to work, and he remembers nothing at all.)

"For about a month. Although I missed some of it myself."

Which had helped his anxiety about the whole situation, somewhat. He leans over to play Eiffel's recording for him.

"A month--?"

Eiffel's voice, the echo a little flat from the small device, cuts him off, and he blows out the rest of his breath unvoiced, leaning against Jedao. Even if Jedao missed some of it himself (and there's a part of his mind that's worrying, now, about what happens if they both disappear), it's hard, waiting for someone important to wake up.

As Eiffel's voice winds to an end, he murmurs, "Well, that answers a few more questions. How long have you been awake?"

"Mmmhm. You missed a flood and a port. Barely."

And the flood had been so wretched that waiting for Gonou after it was over had been - easier.

"Four days."

He lifts a hand to his forehead, pressing two fingers lightly against the eyebrow over his empty socket. He's not shifting away, though; he lets his weight fall more heavily against Jedao instead.

"That's quite a lot," he murmurs. "What were they?"

"Memory fuckery." Just a little too terse. "And then we just left this vast cave system. It was..."

Beautiful, in a different way for Jedao than anyone else, the way he could feel the whole twisting shape of passages, chasms, and caverns around him.

"Strange. Lovely. I fought a dragon."

"You do have a little of the mythic hero in you," Gonou says, soft and fond, reaching up to entwine his fingers with those of Jedao's nearer hand. "I'm sorry I missed the caves."

That said -- that first, because he can understand exactly why memory fuckery is such a sensitive subject -- he adds quietly, "And I'm sorry that I fell asleep with such bad timing."

He does, he thinks, remember a little of the beginning of that flood. He remembers waking up and feeling that something was wrong. But he's not sure, not anymore, what it might have been or why.

Jedao snorts a little at mythic hero, less flatly disbelieving and more slightly cynical; if it's true, it's true in the worst possible way. Jedao One is legendary, after all. He twines his fingers right back, though.

"I went into kind of. Measured crisis mode. I don't know if I'd have been any good at accepting comfort if you were awake," he admits quietly. "But I held you maybe a weird amount."

"No matter how much you held me," Gonou says, and squeezes his hand, "I don't think it's weird."

It makes him feel a little better to know that, even if he wasn't awake to talk to Jedao, he was there to hold.

"What did it do to your memories?"

He takes a fortifying breath, squeezing back gratefully.

"Tossed them to the crowd. We all had - bits and pieces of each other, and no way to tell for sure whose was whose. I could barely remember anything before the barge and the Citadel."

Bits and pieces of each other--

Gonou hesitates, a pin-scratch frown flickering into view between his eyebrows for a moment as his gaze grows abstracted. There's... something about that idea.

He finds his thumb skimming the edge of Jedao's hand in short little strokes as if he's holding a worry-stone when he looks down, and forces it to still.

"...But it would be over now," he says, and doesn't add, right?

"Some people thought it wasn't," he admits, glancing away. "But I feel asleep pretty soon after."

"I feel a little... wrong," Gonou admits in turn. "But it might just be that I'm disoriented."

He sighs and settles in against Jedao, tucking his head in under Jedao's chin. It probably is just disorientation: waking up from a month's coma is leaving his mind unsettled and unanchored. He doesn't need to worry about it.

"I'm not sure how I would even know. They felt like your own. Like dreaming - the way you don't question anything. It wouldn't be until I said things out loud I realized they didn't fit, and that didn't even feel any different from me reacting with Jedao One's skills or instincts and then realizing, oh shit, I guess I know how to do that."

If he thinks about it too much, he makes himself crazy. So he just...has not been letting himself think about it too much.

"Is there any way to tell?"

For peace of mind, if nothing more.

"Asking one of the mind-readers here, or..." Jon's powers are gone now, which is too bad, in situations like this. Even if he's happier that way.

Jedao shakes his head.

"I tried - something I've been researching, from the Hexarchate. And I could see memories, but they were - they just blended in. I could try it again, though. Maybe it'd be different now that the flood is over?"

Something has to be different. Right?

"Maybe. If there is something... how does your method work?"

Not that he knows how the Barge works, when it's affecting their minds. But knowing how one of the methods works is better than not understanding either of them.

Gonou might be the only person on board Jedao would be willing to give a more illuminating description of Calendrical Mechanics than "it's a lot of math," but he also doesn't particularly want to get into it.

"There's a lot of math, but in the end I just...look. The Admiral gave me a Calendrical amplifier lens a while ago, and I can use it to see someone's soul, if I set up the effect right."

Gonou considers it, for a long moment, head tucked under Jedao's chin.

"...So, you'd be able to see any pieces that don't fit where they've been put."

Seeing someone's soul sounds -- deeply intimate to him, but not something he'd be afraid of as long as it was Jedao looking. But if he's also worried about not having all his pieces put back correctly--

"Can anyone else use it to see you? You said you didn't know how you'd be sure they were all gone."

"Hopefully, yeah."

It didn't work before, but it should have. He knows it should have. He checked his math so many times. He knows he didn't make a stupid sign error this time.

"I'm more worried about things that are missing. If it's not mine, I'll notice eventually. My experiences are...pretty out of the ordinary, here."

"Yes," Gonou murmurs. "I -- imagine they would be. I don't..."

He pulls a face, deliberately lightening his voice.

"There's a lot of things I don't remember, or only remember parts of, already. I don't think I'd notice something missing, but I'd probably notice if something were too out of place with my other memories."

There is... something, now that he's focusing on the question. A room that's like Jedao's, but the decoration isn't right. Jedao's room is all greens, all pastels: the other he remembers has bright and clashing decor--

He's fallen silent for several heartbeats too long. Quietly, he murmurs, "I might have one of yours."

Jedao swallows, and doesn't say, fuck.

It's not that he's scared of Gonou seeing them - Gonou knows the worst of the worst. But none of them have been pleasant.

"What happened?"

"It was -- the rooms looked like this one. Were built like this one, but the furnishings were all different." The emotions, as he focuses on the memory, are overwhelming. Unlike his own: he grasps for precision and detail, floundering.

"Someone had an appointment. When," I, he stops himself from saying, "--you went in, he grabbed you and kissed you..."

Was that Dhanneth? The name fits the memory, and he's still for a long moment against Jedao's shoulder. He remembers the surge of hot desire, of temptation and distress, that goes with the memory of hands closing on his arms and a taller man bending to kiss him.

It is upsetting all out of proportion to its contents.

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