There are times that John can almost forget what he was, but there are others where he is struck to the core by something that reverberates with Hastur, with madness and corruption and the broken edges of a person. With the darkness between the stars, the interstellar spaces. With the ruins of Carcosa and the dark waves of Hali.
Right now, this laughter, the noises, the way Jedao is gulping and cackling and grinding his knuckles...
He wishes it didn't feel so familiar, so- if not comfortable, if not satisfying, then at least known.
"Are you angry with yourself for loving them, despite their hatred... or for your hope that they might have learned to love you when they didn't?"
"Maybe I'm not angry with me," Jedao mutters. "Maybe I forgive myself for being lonely and stupid. Maybe I'm angry at the assholes who think people are gifts!"
I don't think people are gifts, Kujen. He'd said it out loud with his not-quite-human mouth, the first day of his life, and Kujen had brushed him off, like it was a silly, immature sort of objection.
"I didn't ask for him. I didn't - I asked for a fucking puppy." The horrible laughter drains out of him like bile from a wound; he's left hunched over, face in both hands.
"It was my very first breach," he says softly. "I had parents. But they didn't really. Care? I was lonely all the time. So I asked for a puppy. And they figured an actual human child would last longer and be better at cleaning up its own mess. So they adopted me a baby brother. They gave him to me to love, since I didn't have anyone else, and they didn't want to bother. And I just. Did it. I was so happy."
"I'm glad you forgive yourself," he says honestly. There's no hint of sarcasm or passive aggressiveness or even defensiveness. John's never really offended at being wrong. This particular kind of anger is one he has trouble understanding, not because he agrees with assholes. It's more complicated, as most things are.
Then again, thinking you're stupid feels like you might still be a little angry at yourself, but it's the kind of thing Arthur would say, so he's just going to roll with it, trust what someone says about themselves. That's the most important.
Hypothetical Arthur would be right and sort of wrong; really the person Jedao is angry at is very much still Nathaniel, but it's not Nathaniel's fault he isn't the person he was in the breach. It's easier for Jedao to be angry with himself, to insist it was his own idiocy, than it is to feel utterly helplessly angry at someone who simply doesn't care.
He drops his hands and stares at the wall.
"I was stolen by the fairies, so I suppose so. But the love wasn't fragile. He came to rescue me. When we were little I learned to crawl over our roof so I could sneak in his bedroom window and read him stories with a flashlight. I remember all his favorite bits in 1001 Nights. I taught him how to play cards and write codes. I learned to bake so I could make him gingerbread cookies at Christmas, because that was one of his only good memories from the orphanage and our parents didn't believe in pageantry. I poured every bit of love I had to give into that little boy, because he was all I had, and when I'd lost my memory and my life and my own name, he risked everything to come find me."
He gulps a few deep, quavering breaths.
"But it wasn't real. It wasn't anything. That boy didn't exist, and the whole premise of that world - when I was the human one, and not the double. Jedao Mandrake had a brother. But I don't. I never did. And the worst part is, he would have told me. He'd have told me not to - be blinded by sentiment. He'd have told me he didn't want or need family, that it was a weakness. And I didn't ask because I didn't want to hear it."
When John says the love was fragile, it isn't a judgement on the love. Love is fragile because the universe doesn't care about it. There's no mechanism to protect it, no inherent and visceral power that responds to it. The universe is cold and apathetic and so much bigger than most beings can even comprehend.
That fragility, the limited and temporary nature of love, that it is a part of a limited thing like a person's life... that doesn't make it less. That makes it rare and valuable and beautiful. The fact that you can't keep it in a glass jar or freeze it in stone or hold it, that through all of the layers of reality it can't even be touched-
To have the power it has, this strange creation of limited creatures, while being so fragile, so special- John loves love. He is devoted to it. He has entwined himself with it and his whole concept of being a person, of deciding to be John, is wrapped in it. It's the membrane that has slid between him and the King in Yellow. It's vital.
Maybe one day he'll tell Jedao about that. But it does take a bit of a preamble.
"Do you honestly think he wouldn't have found another way to betray you both if you hadn't loved him, Jedao? His choice not to love you is a reflection on him, not you. And your choice to love him is a reflection on you, not him. You can-
"You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. And whatever he might think, he'll die without it. Whatever world he came from, whatever fucked up way it works... he's not getting back there until he figures out how to care about people properly. And if that didn't include people like you and I, I don't think the Admiral would have chosen us as wardens."
"It's not about having stopped him. Though I don't concede I couldn't have."
Nat is smart, but he's not actually in Jedao's league, not if Jedao were really set on outfoxing him.
"It's just that I could've - saved myself the trouble. Not spent a year standing next to the water, pretending it meant anything when it didn't." It's just that it wouldn't hurt so much, and Jedao wouldn't be the chump who let him be someone who could hurt Jedao so much. He wouldn't be grieving for something he never had.
"An attack isn't always a betrayal. It would have just been another miserable, pointless, petty barge attack." It wouldn't feel personal; and even more pointed for how impersonal it was for Nat.
"And there's nothing immoral about him not loving me. Most of the people I've loved haven't loved me. It just feels a bit pathetic, doesn't it?"
"It meant something to you," he says quietly. "And you had a year of love. Of loving someone. The fact that it hurts now just means that it was real, even if only to you. He's not hurting right now, but he also spent a year pretending and wasting time and not loving. It's not insignificant. And it gained him nothing."
His tone shifts a little, goes a little more casual.
"Something doesn't have to be immoral to be a shitty and self-destructive life choice. There's only one pathetic person in this whole mess, Jedao, and it isn't you. To keep loving... it's hard. But I think it's better than the alternative."
"False dichotomy," Jedao says quietly. He's pulling into himself a little, face going more opaque, on knee coming up to his chest, arms forming an enclosed circle.
"What would be better is if I learned to be just a tiny bit discriminating, instead of loving every cold-hearted power-hungry slavedriver who smiles at me. I mean, fuck! There is actually something wrong with me! Most people are perfectly capable of - of loving friends and family and partners without fixating on the actual worst people they know. Without loving fucking - sociopathic imperialist sadists."
Well. At least he's angry. But loving Nat is only one measure of the salt in the wound; there's no disentangling this from Jedao's underlying self-loathing, from knowing that people probably don't, and definitely shouldn't love him.
Thankfully, John's living out a certain meme because he has no idea what closed off body language is, really. Thus, he's not put off.
"It would be better," he agrees, "but loving isn't natural to everyone. I know I had to learn, am still learning, how it works. How to do it. How to... live with loving and wanting love and wanting to love. How to handle it when people don't love you in return."
He'll give a short, soft squeeze to Jedao's shoulder.
"You can be better. But it doesn't mean there's something wrong with you. It just means you're getting there."
He thinks John is still being rather optimistic; he knows in the pit of his stomach there is something wrong with him. But the idea of learning how to love...eases the awful grip of it, a little; John's frank admission of his own struggles is disarming, even as Jedao recognizes the tactic, all the more powerful because John doesn't realize it is one.
"I was...made," Jedao admits softly, after what feels to him like a long quiet, but is probably only twenty or thirty seconds.
"I was made to be a weapon, and a companion, for - someone who makes everyone in Mandrake's empire look like a friendly little kitten. He could change people's minds - rewrite them in all kinds of ways, to be tools or just to amuse him. And he took his favorite broken toy and rewrote a second draft, and that was me. What if he made me like this. To always be weak to - his type."
Given the King in Yellow, that kind of power isn't really startling. He could do that too, once upon a time, even if now the idea is horrifying.
"Maybe that's how he designed you, sure." He wouldn't doubt that, or deny it. "But that doesn't mean you have to stay that way. That you can't make yourself something different. That you can't grow and change beyond what he would have wanted."
A small huff.
"Fuck him. You already learned better. Hakkai's not like that. If you loved Mandrake, I'm definitely assuming you love Hakkai. And Hakkai isn't like that. I can't do anything to help Hakkai most of the time and I don't have anything to give him but he's still my friend and he likes spending time with me."
"I know he isn't," Jedao says softly, the caustic venom lifting from his voice as he does so. "He's wonderful. He cares so much." Maybe too much; maybe quite a lot of blood's worth of too much. But to Jedao, even Hakkai's worst excesses are a balm compared to Kujen's coldness.
"But he didn't mind if - it was never only him. It's just that I was his."
Loving Hakkai doesn't disprove the flaw in Jedao's base nature, no more than the disastrous crime of loving Dhanneth did.
Jedao has tried to tell himself - tried, desperately, to believe, or at least to live as though he believed, that he could grow beyond what he was made for. I'm your gun, Kujen, but that's not all I am!. Desperate, flailing defiance, flung into the face of a pitiless and vindictive man Jedao was in the process of murdering. Neither of them had been impressed by it.
"And when everything happened, when Mandrake was a fucking asshole, you were loyal to Hakkai. Not Mandrake. So even if he did put something in there, it's something you grew past. Something you don't have to listen to."
Jedao shakes his head. It was never that simple, between them.
"He couldn't make me perfectly loyal without destroying the military genius he wanted to win his war for him. He didn't like it, but he was reconciled to - managing me."
Read: manipulating, isolating, deceiving, and occasionally imprisoning Jedao whenever he went too off-script.
Submit to me, and I may yet forgive a great many things. Your predecessor, too, had a taste for treachery. Not Kujen's last words, but nearly. After he'd realized Jedao had not just the desire but the means to kill him.
Maybe Kujen would have been better off with the third draft.
"And you don't think he made it easier to 'manage' you by setting things up to make you think you were broken?"
He can't help but think of the King in Yellow, of how he'd manipulated them, how he'd tricked them, herded them, pushed them, how he'd poisoned the mind of Kellin and used the cult and how he would do terrible things trying to tear himself and Arthur apart, to get what he wanted, to be whole. He pushes it aside. That's him, not Jedao.
"Sorry. That was rude." A faint huff of self-depreciating amusement. "And you're not wrong. Sometimes, being a person sucks. It hurts and it's confusing and it feels like none of the rules make sense."
But Jedao is looking thoughtful; he drums his fingers on one kneecap.
"No, it's not rude. He would do that, if he thought it was an efficient way to control me. I don't know if it was efficient. But it's worth considering."
"The easiest way to control someone is to make them doubt themselves. Doubt what they think and feel, the instincts they have." A pause, before he admits- "That's how the King works."
"He lied to me a bit, about who was on what side. I figured it out, but...not fast enough. Really I think he was just relying on the loneliness. Everyone else hated me, except for someone he did control with psych surgery. It was just him. If I turned against him...I'd lose the only affection in the world."
Only I will never judge you. No one else will ever love you.
"Obviously it's not true. But it was very nearly true in that universe. And he did want to give me a life of infinite luxury and kinky sex, for the low price of letting him torture other people I didn't know on a galactic scale to fuel his power structures forever. That probably seemed like plenty of leverage to him."
"It's...stuff that most people don't think is hot, or even related to sex necessarily, but some people think is really hot. Usually a little more intense and elaborate. It's kind of a grab bag. Most people who like some kinky things don't like others."
"Yeah? But it's like. A sliding scale. And what's expected to be hot is different in different cultures. So - gloves are kinky, to me, but maybe not to someone from Earth. Humans don't normally have the possibility of having sex with tentacles, though, so it's like - kinky automatically, even if it's, uh, pretty common compared to some other kinks."
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Right now, this laughter, the noises, the way Jedao is gulping and cackling and grinding his knuckles...
He wishes it didn't feel so familiar, so- if not comfortable, if not satisfying, then at least known.
"Are you angry with yourself for loving them, despite their hatred... or for your hope that they might have learned to love you when they didn't?"
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I don't think people are gifts, Kujen. He'd said it out loud with his not-quite-human mouth, the first day of his life, and Kujen had brushed him off, like it was a silly, immature sort of objection.
"I didn't ask for him. I didn't - I asked for a fucking puppy." The horrible laughter drains out of him like bile from a wound; he's left hunched over, face in both hands.
"It was my very first breach," he says softly. "I had parents. But they didn't really. Care? I was lonely all the time. So I asked for a puppy. And they figured an actual human child would last longer and be better at cleaning up its own mess. So they adopted me a baby brother. They gave him to me to love, since I didn't have anyone else, and they didn't want to bother. And I just. Did it. I was so happy."
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Then again, thinking you're stupid feels like you might still be a little angry at yourself, but it's the kind of thing Arthur would say, so he's just going to roll with it, trust what someone says about themselves. That's the most important.
"Happiness... happiness is... fragile."
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He drops his hands and stares at the wall.
"I was stolen by the fairies, so I suppose so. But the love wasn't fragile. He came to rescue me. When we were little I learned to crawl over our roof so I could sneak in his bedroom window and read him stories with a flashlight. I remember all his favorite bits in 1001 Nights. I taught him how to play cards and write codes. I learned to bake so I could make him gingerbread cookies at Christmas, because that was one of his only good memories from the orphanage and our parents didn't believe in pageantry. I poured every bit of love I had to give into that little boy, because he was all I had, and when I'd lost my memory and my life and my own name, he risked everything to come find me."
He gulps a few deep, quavering breaths.
"But it wasn't real. It wasn't anything. That boy didn't exist, and the whole premise of that world - when I was the human one, and not the double. Jedao Mandrake had a brother. But I don't. I never did. And the worst part is, he would have told me. He'd have told me not to - be blinded by sentiment. He'd have told me he didn't want or need family, that it was a weakness. And I didn't ask because I didn't want to hear it."
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That fragility, the limited and temporary nature of love, that it is a part of a limited thing like a person's life... that doesn't make it less. That makes it rare and valuable and beautiful. The fact that you can't keep it in a glass jar or freeze it in stone or hold it, that through all of the layers of reality it can't even be touched-
To have the power it has, this strange creation of limited creatures, while being so fragile, so special- John loves love. He is devoted to it. He has entwined himself with it and his whole concept of being a person, of deciding to be John, is wrapped in it. It's the membrane that has slid between him and the King in Yellow. It's vital.
Maybe one day he'll tell Jedao about that. But it does take a bit of a preamble.
"Do you honestly think he wouldn't have found another way to betray you both if you hadn't loved him, Jedao? His choice not to love you is a reflection on him, not you. And your choice to love him is a reflection on you, not him. You can-
"You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. And whatever he might think, he'll die without it. Whatever world he came from, whatever fucked up way it works... he's not getting back there until he figures out how to care about people properly. And if that didn't include people like you and I, I don't think the Admiral would have chosen us as wardens."
A pause.
"...that love sounds beautiful, though."
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"It's not about having stopped him. Though I don't concede I couldn't have."
Nat is smart, but he's not actually in Jedao's league, not if Jedao were really set on outfoxing him.
"It's just that I could've - saved myself the trouble. Not spent a year standing next to the water, pretending it meant anything when it didn't." It's just that it wouldn't hurt so much, and Jedao wouldn't be the chump who let him be someone who could hurt Jedao so much. He wouldn't be grieving for something he never had.
"An attack isn't always a betrayal. It would have just been another miserable, pointless, petty barge attack." It wouldn't feel personal; and even more pointed for how impersonal it was for Nat.
"And there's nothing immoral about him not loving me. Most of the people I've loved haven't loved me. It just feels a bit pathetic, doesn't it?"
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His tone shifts a little, goes a little more casual.
"Something doesn't have to be immoral to be a shitty and self-destructive life choice. There's only one pathetic person in this whole mess, Jedao, and it isn't you. To keep loving... it's hard. But I think it's better than the alternative."
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"What would be better is if I learned to be just a tiny bit discriminating, instead of loving every cold-hearted power-hungry slavedriver who smiles at me. I mean, fuck! There is actually something wrong with me! Most people are perfectly capable of - of loving friends and family and partners without fixating on the actual worst people they know. Without loving fucking - sociopathic imperialist sadists."
Well. At least he's angry. But loving Nat is only one measure of the salt in the wound; there's no disentangling this from Jedao's underlying self-loathing, from knowing that people probably don't, and definitely shouldn't love him.
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"It would be better," he agrees, "but loving isn't natural to everyone. I know I had to learn, am still learning, how it works. How to do it. How to... live with loving and wanting love and wanting to love. How to handle it when people don't love you in return."
He'll give a short, soft squeeze to Jedao's shoulder.
"You can be better. But it doesn't mean there's something wrong with you. It just means you're getting there."
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"I was...made," Jedao admits softly, after what feels to him like a long quiet, but is probably only twenty or thirty seconds.
"I was made to be a weapon, and a companion, for - someone who makes everyone in Mandrake's empire look like a friendly little kitten. He could change people's minds - rewrite them in all kinds of ways, to be tools or just to amuse him. And he took his favorite broken toy and rewrote a second draft, and that was me. What if he made me like this. To always be weak to - his type."
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"Maybe that's how he designed you, sure." He wouldn't doubt that, or deny it. "But that doesn't mean you have to stay that way. That you can't make yourself something different. That you can't grow and change beyond what he would have wanted."
A small huff.
"Fuck him. You already learned better. Hakkai's not like that. If you loved Mandrake, I'm definitely assuming you love Hakkai. And Hakkai isn't like that. I can't do anything to help Hakkai most of the time and I don't have anything to give him but he's still my friend and he likes spending time with me."
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"But he didn't mind if - it was never only him. It's just that I was his."
Loving Hakkai doesn't disprove the flaw in Jedao's base nature, no more than the disastrous crime of loving Dhanneth did.
Jedao has tried to tell himself - tried, desperately, to believe, or at least to live as though he believed, that he could grow beyond what he was made for. I'm your gun, Kujen, but that's not all I am!. Desperate, flailing defiance, flung into the face of a pitiless and vindictive man Jedao was in the process of murdering. Neither of them had been impressed by it.
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He clamps on like a terrier.
"And when everything happened, when Mandrake was a fucking asshole, you were loyal to Hakkai. Not Mandrake. So even if he did put something in there, it's something you grew past. Something you don't have to listen to."
A soft grumble.
"You're not his. You're yours."
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"He couldn't make me perfectly loyal without destroying the military genius he wanted to win his war for him. He didn't like it, but he was reconciled to - managing me."
Read: manipulating, isolating, deceiving, and occasionally imprisoning Jedao whenever he went too off-script.
Submit to me, and I may yet forgive a great many things. Your predecessor, too, had a taste for treachery. Not Kujen's last words, but nearly. After he'd realized Jedao had not just the desire but the means to kill him.
Maybe Kujen would have been better off with the third draft.
"Sometimes I don't want to be mine," he admits.
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He can't help but think of the King in Yellow, of how he'd manipulated them, how he'd tricked them, herded them, pushed them, how he'd poisoned the mind of Kellin and used the cult and how he would do terrible things trying to tear himself and Arthur apart, to get what he wanted, to be whole. He pushes it aside. That's him, not Jedao.
"Sorry. That was rude." A faint huff of self-depreciating amusement. "And you're not wrong. Sometimes, being a person sucks. It hurts and it's confusing and it feels like none of the rules make sense."
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"No, it's not rude. He would do that, if he thought it was an efficient way to control me. I don't know if it was efficient. But it's worth considering."
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"The easiest way to control someone is to make them doubt themselves. Doubt what they think and feel, the instincts they have." A pause, before he admits- "That's how the King works."
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He fidgets a little with his pant cuff.
"I didn't even have anything to doubt, at first. I just woke up on his station. I had about two and half memories and a name. He was the whole world."
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He listens to Jedao talk about his first moments, waking up. That, he gets.
"But he wanted you to think for him, no? So... he had to have leverage."
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Only I will never judge you. No one else will ever love you.
"Obviously it's not true. But it was very nearly true in that universe. And he did want to give me a life of infinite luxury and kinky sex, for the low price of letting him torture other people I didn't know on a galactic scale to fuel his power structures forever. That probably seemed like plenty of leverage to him."
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"...what's 'kinky' sex?"
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"It's...stuff that most people don't think is hot, or even related to sex necessarily, but some people think is really hot. Usually a little more intense and elaborate. It's kind of a grab bag. Most people who like some kinky things don't like others."
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"Huh." A pause. Well, he might as well ask since it seems like a simple enough thing for Jedao. "Are tentacles considered kinky?"
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Jedao has seen a non-zero amount of Space Hentai.
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That's a new one. Huh. He never would have thought it. He's learning so much today.
"It's the only way I've ever done it. Not that I've done it like this."