deuceoftears | TLV IC Inbox

Jedao can't help it; he's already holding Edwin, but he squeezes him so tight. It feels like Edwin must be able to feel Jedao's false heart pounding against his false ribs.

"I don't want you to feel outside. I want you to come with me so I can love you up close always. I want you to let me write your name after ours in Xie Lian's family book, Cho Hakkai, Cho Jedao, and Cho Edwin. I want you to come with me to a world where none us are weird, where all of us can have friends in any form we want, because aliens with all kinds of limbs and shapes are already everywhere. I want you to meet my best friend who's a machine shaped like a snake who loves music and bad dramas. We'll find a way you can visit John, and even Arthur if he promises to be nice, but I want you to come with us, please."

Please don't take my sunshine away.

Positioned under his sweater as Edwin is at this point, Jedao will get to experience the probably profoundly weird sensation of Edwin's face pressed against him as he starts to cry. The cool gel-like feel of the blobby against bare skin gets streaked with even colder little stripes as the oddity of Edwin's tears trickle over his face and sink back into his skin underneath his chin.

"Can--" His voice breaks softly on the one word. "Can we bring the other Yellow too, maybe, if he wants to come?"

"If you want him to come, and he wants to come," Jedao agrees. "I can't promise I'll know how to love him like I love you. But I promise he'll be welcome."

"It's okay, I think." Soft and sincere and pained all at once. "That's okay. He won't... know, anyway, what being loved is like. I just don't want him to be... lonely. To feel like being lonely is the only choice he can have. He can find a family too, make one for himself, but I want him to be... safe. Safe to look and know they want him too."

"Ours is pretty big," Jedao says, and the only thing that's tentative about it is calling it our family, his and Lao Jedao's, the connection he's never sure how much he wants to lean on.

"There's your grandfathers here. But Jedao One has two husbands and a girlfriend and thirty-seven other kids, and Fives has a million clone brothers. So...there'd even be lots of people who understand being...almost exactly the same, but still your own people. There'd be lots of room for him."

"Two husbands and a girlfriend?" Somehow that sounds harder to manage than thirty-seven children, but what does he know. Romance is weird.

"He's a very...energetic person," Jedao mutters, like he doesn't have a husband, three boyfriends, and two more he's got his eye on.

There's a long moment where Edwin stays quiet, letting his mind catch up with all the feelings of the last ten minutes. He has that same sense of something released, of something being settled somehow, but this time there's no layer of pain to it. Melancholy, a little, with--what had John said, the death of a hope? It's less a death than being put to rest, in a way, this time.

He snuggles against Jedao and closes his eyes--

And promptly remembers something he hasn't even mentioned yet, something that gets him excited enough to flail around briefly inside the sweater before he gets his limbs in order and crown on straight enough that he doesn't get caught in it as he noodles his head out of Jedao's collar so Edwin can see his dad's face.

"I dreamed! I forgot to tell you. During the movie night that John had, I was in my body and I fell asleep and I dreamed."

"Oh. That's very exciting. Was it a good dream?" He hopes so.

"...It was weird and didn't make sense." Mostly.

"Yeah. Dreams can be like that a lot." Jedao strokes Edwin's head a little bit.

He shifts, quiet, but only for a handful of seconds. There's something in Jedao's manner making him uneasy. "Are-- Did I say something wrong?"

"Oh, no Sunshine, you didn't say anything wrong. I was just - pensive, I suppose."

He knows his body dreamed, before Kujen woke it up. He doesn't remember what.

"Why?" He pokes his head out of Jedao's collar to give him a gently affectionate headbutt to the face.

He drops a little kiss on the top of Edwin's head.

"Well...I want to be happy for you. I am happy for you. But I don't know what to say about it. I don't often remember my own dreams. And where I come from, dreams can be vulnerable."

"Vulnerable?" He knows--academically speaking--that dreams are vulnerable in his universe too. It's a way the King in Yellow can slip in, start to corrupt and drive mad to create new supplicants and slaves. Edwin shivers, thinking about it that way for the first time. "A... weak point?"

"Yeah. There were - there are people who can go into your dreams and hunt you there, learn your secrets. Probably weapons that work through dreams too, since there are defenses. It's not something I've studied a lot, though."

Mikodez was never going to let the Rahal scry him, fortunately.

"...What if I-- well, I can't, but John could probably give you dreams. Safe ones, that people can't touch." There's distinct hesitation after the I can't. He wants to be able to. He wants to be the one who gives Jedao something special that he couldn't have before.

"I like the awake that you give me," Jedao promises, warmly.

"Even--" He stops, not wanting to spoil the conversation, afraid that he will, but John told him to say true things, not correct ones. "Even if I... do... things I know are wrong?"

Edited 2024-03-25 03:11 (UTC)

Jedao is quiet for a few seconds. It's important to him to always tell Edwin the truth, too - which is not something he worries about for most people. But Edwin really listens.

"It makes me sad, that you did that to Collins. But that doesn't take away from how happy it makes me, that you're you, and that you're with me. Both of those things are real at the same time. One doesn't change the other."

Edited 2024-03-25 03:36 (UTC)

Well. That's about as shocking as John pointing out that not being truthful, trying to please, means not letting people know him, or noting that humans are all made the same way but are wildly different from each other still. As shocking as John coming to find him in the woods all the way back at Halloween. As stunning as Roman saying Edwin has a conscience, or Malcolm apologizing and explaining the answers to Edwin's questions about philosophy when he realized the questions themselves were genuine. As Arthur saying he was sorry the first time. Hunter not hurting him after he killed Collins. It's that same firecracker-loud, flare-bright sensation in his mind, the shock of something important stitching itself into him.

"R... Really?"

"Yes, really. You're always my baby, and I love you. No matter what." Jedao gives him a little extra squeeze.

"Even though I really don't like torture. I don't want you to ever do something like that again."

He puts a fingertip on Edwin's nose.

"I'm not asking you to promise me. I'm just...telling you, that's a true thing. But I'm proud of you for thinking of him, and trying to make amends."

He stays very still with that fingertip perched on his gel-cool skin, the smell a strange sideways echo of the scent he thinks of as John's--the cold between stars, the light of foreign moons, scents that humans would say aren't scents because they don't know how to breathe them in properly.

His eyes are doing that annoying tearing-up-thing again. John probably doesn't cry half this much. "I don't want to do it again."

"Okay," Jedao says gently, petting Edwin's ears. "I believe you. And I want to help you, whatever you're trying to do instead."

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howtheyshine - 2024-03-28 04:43 (UTC) - Expand