nikolai (damnably handsome) (ofravka) wrote in valloic, @ 2023-01-18 17:46:00 |
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Entry tags: | !: action/thread/log, the last binding: edwin courcey, ₴ inactive: nikolai lantsov (2) |
Who: Edwin and Nikolai
When: December (backdated)
Where: Edwin's apartment
What: It turns out critical thinking about one's future is kind of important in a relationship!
Nikolai’s smile had been fixed the last few days, ever since he’d gotten the notification that David had gone home. What a euphemism for the shitshow left behind, he thought uncharitably to himself, spending much of his free time with Genya to offer his support. He didn’t speak of it much to Edwin beyond the occasional grimace. They were adults, and they’d both suffered loss. Nikolai rarely enjoyed focusing on things he couldn’t control, and so he did an adequate job of pretending he wasn’t injured and kept going through his ordinary routine.
Still, he knew Edwin was merely tolerating his blithe act, and he did get tired of it, so one evening when Edwin came home and Nikolai had slunk in the front door like a fickle stray cat and poured them both glasses of wine, he confessed in a playful voice:
“This place really doesn’t pull punches, does it? Moving from one drama to another before you’ve had the chance to process the first.”
Edwin didn’t really know what he was supposed to do. He knew that Nikolai and Genya both must have been grieving David’s disappearance – was grieving the proper word, in this case? For all of Edwin’s vocabulary, he couldn’t think of a single proper word for the pain that Vallo’s disappearances could cause – but he didn’t know the first thing about what he ought to proceed. He’d never had to comfort anyone before – Hawthorne had kept everyone, including Edwin, at a distance following Elsie’s death, and had made it clear once he’d returned that if he wanted comfort at all, it wasn’t to come from Edwin – and he was at a total loss.
And so he thought he’d give Nikolai space. He wouldn’t pry, or force himself into the inner workings of Nikolai’s mind. He tried to continue to study Flora Sutton’s journals instead, except he kept finding himself distracted. By David’s disappearance and how much of Nikolai’s cheer was put on, like a cat who’d hurt his paw and refused to show it. By the idea of time disturbances, and the amount and sort of magic that could bring children from the future to the past, or turned people into children, or into older versions of themselves, and how one could study such a thing, and what it meant. By the always present question of just how much ambient magic was floating around in the atmosphere here. By the fact that many of the children that had arrived from the future belonged to same-sex couples.
He wondered if he should bring it up: David’s disappearance and Nikolai’s feelings around it. He wondered if it would be insensitive and cruel to, like poking at an open wound. He wished, not for the first time, that he was better at this whole human interaction thing, at having people he cared about. He wished he wasn’t so bloody useless and insensitive.
He could have cried out in relief when Nikolai finally broached the subject, even if it was in a roundabout way. He managed to keep himself contained, taking the spare glass of wine from Nikolai and then pulling him by his now-emptied hand onto the couch.
“Ah, but then they’d have to remove ‘Never a dull moment’ from the travel brochures,” he said dryly, knocking a knee against Nikolai’s. His tone was a little softer when he added, “I think we might be given some time now though, if you needed it. Are you alright?”
Nikolai folded himself into a sitting position on the couch, his extraneous limbs either on or near Edwin’s. He was better at physical comfort than verbal; like Edwin he was a little too clear-eyed to offer kind nothings when the situation was dire, but touch was easy, and thankfully required little thought or machination.
“Not particularly,” he said baldly, voice light, “and neither is Genya. It’s salt in a wound for both of us, I’m afraid, given what he’s going back to.” It was cruel. Nikolai was familiar with cruel, but that didn’t mean the slice of it didn’t sting nonetheless. “Vallo giveth, Vallo taketh away,” he drawled, and downed the glass of wine in a handful of seconds. Nikolai was not a man who bothered with intoxication much - he preferred sharpness to oblivion - but at this point, please, saints, someone take the edges off. He pondered the angles of Edwin’s face for a moment, his smile going flat, more honest. “It’s how this place functions, I’m afraid,” he said. “I suppose one day it could be either of us, dread the thought.”
David being removed from Vallo truly was worst-case-scenario, given what had happened to him. Nikolai frankly didn’t know how Genya was still standing. She’d been forged in the fires of the Darkling’s torture - and, he admitted to himself - his father’s - but no one should have to be tested like that, over and over again by the viciousness of fate. Or whatever they were calling Vallo’s capricious whims.
Edwin frowned in concentration, and using the one-handed cradling that he’d been practising and pulling from the leyline that was Vallo, summoned the decanter of wine so that it was in arms reach. Using his old method, something like that would have half-drained his magic, but with Flora Sutton’s methods, it had barely drawn on his own well of magic at all.
That done, he wrapped his arm around behind Nikolai, letting his hand rest on the back of his neck, thumb and fingers on either side, making small, hopefully comforting circles.
“Liminal spaces,” Edwin muttered, more to himself than to Nikolai. It was, Edwin suspected, why Vallo was filled with so much magic, but liminal spaces were only transitional places; a waystop between one place and time and another.
Except, of course, that there was the possibility that some people would have decades – centuries, in some cases – of history here. Histories that weren’t set in stone, perhaps, but histories that were at least a possibility.
“I am sorry,” Edwin said. “And I’m sorry that he had to go back to a less-than-kind future. I was fond of him. Perhaps he might return someday.” He couldn’t decide if that was likely or not; people seemed to pop in and out of this place as often as his cats wanted in or out of the garden.
Nikolai watched as Edwin moved his fingers and created magic, his gaze curious. He was well used to being the one without magical ability back home - provided you didn’t count his ability to be preternaturally charming - but seeing it done so differently was always interesting to him. It looked nothing like Zoya’s lightning or Nina’s bodily manipulations.
Edwin’s kind words of sympathy drew his attention back to the conversation, and he inclined his head. “Perhaps he might,” he agreed, and offered his glass for Edwin to refill. “It seems there isn’t much of a limit when it comes to potential people that might arrive, lately.” His meaning was clear: the children. How very unexpected. How very Vallo. He was desperately trying not to be a grump about it.
“Ah yes. From the future even, it seems.” Which was honestly fascinating. If time could be manipulated by magic in his own world, no wizard had ever made mention of it. It was fairly universally accepted that time and death were two things that absolutely could not be affected by magic, and even the dead could be communicated with by way of a medium. It was hard even now to stop himself from immediately running off to find all he could about the phenomena, or to secret Gansey away to a room someplace so that the two of them could possibly research their way into an explanation.
It had taken him longer than he cared to admit to realize the more obvious result of it: that many of the kids,very possibly a majority of them, had come from men and women like him: people who preferred the company of the same sex. Most of them were, no doubt, adopted – that in itself being as impossible in his own world as time travel had been – but he was also relatively certain that some of them had been biologically their parents’ children as well, which brought up so many questions that Edwin didn’t know where to start.
Luckily, somewhere in the process of trying to decide what to ask first, he realized how inappropriate the questions would have been in the first place and managed, somehow, to hold his tongue.
It had set him to thinking though, thoughts that he’d never have begun to entertain at home. Children had never been in the cards for him, he’d realized that not very long after he realized he was gay, and so he’d made sure that it was never a thought he’d spent any time at all on, lest he discover that some hidden part of him longed for a family of his own.
He wasn’t entirely sure how he was supposed to parse through them all.
“Have you ever –” he started, and then stumbled to a stop, because of course Nikolai had thought of children before. He was king of his country, after all. He took an awkward gulp of his brandy.
Although Edwin had cut off his own question from forming, Nikolai got the gist of it - although truthfully Edwin’s suddenly jerky body language did as much for context as anything else. “Have I ever-- considered having children?” he asked, repeated even, as if the unspoken words were ghosts haunting them both, but to Nikolai’s credit he didn’t act as if that was a foolish question.
Because despite the obvious, it wasn’t. What one was obligated to do was not the same thing as what one actively pursued, after all. He supposed children had been more of a consideration for himself given that he had largely romantically pursued women. Coming from a more progressive place than Edwin, Nikolai had lacked the shock or delight at seeing same-sex couples with children, for it was accepted back home.
For other people, of course. As King of Ravka, he’d had different expectations.
“I of course would have children,” he said, putting a voice to what Edwin had already figured out. “Two, at least. With any luck they’d get along, although that’s rarely a given. And the lineage needed to be-- impeccable. Easy to trace. Given that my own was in such question,” he added with a fleeting little bitter smile. It was all very neat, wasn’t it, the path that his life necessitated taking. “But to be more specific: have I considered having them? As in, do I want children?”
He leaned against Edwin, smile turning vague. “I don’t-- honestly know. I haven’t considered it as something to want or not to want, no.” His eyes flicked to Edwin, narrowing, as if Edwin were a puzzle on a board he had yet to conquer. “Do you want children? Is that something you’ve thought of?”
Edwin gave a short, affirmative nod when Nikolai finished his question for him, and sat for a moment, letting himself digest exactly what Nikolai had said before he set to formulating a response.
“I hadn’t thought…” he started, trailing off. Hadn’t considered all the thought that Nikolai would have had to put into into the technicalities, and into how little thought he’d have put into whether or not it was something he wanted on a personal level. Of course what Nikolai wanted would have never entered into it; if Edwin had learned only one thing about Nikolai these last months, it was that Nikolai would always put his country, and his duty thereto, before anything else.
He shifted his position so that his back rested against the arm of the couch, legs on either side of Nikolai and arms wrapped around his waist, and rested his head on his shoulder.
“I haven’t,” Edwin said. “Thought about it, I mean. I suppose you could say I had as much decision in the matter as you did; men like me… well, there was little point in putting too much thought into it; it would have been impossible no matter what I wanted.” He gave a small gesture with his fingers, as if brushing away the thought altogether.
Nikolai regarded him with one of his more inscrutable expressions - honed after years in the Little Palace - as Edwin admitted his own position (or lack thereof). Nikolai could hardly blame the man for prevaricating, given his own lack of strong opinion.
“Well, it sounds like both of us could afford to give it some more thought,” he concluded lightly, as if they were trying to determine which jam they preferred over all others. “It’s honestly something I might’ve pondered my feelings on before, but--” he smiled a lopsided smile, “I try not to think of home, to be honest.” Doing so brought him little comfort, these days. “But there’s little sense in it, is there? With the way people go, people arrive… it’s hardly some sort of locked door.”
Nikolai had never had many specific desires for a child or children of his own. He wanted them to be clever, educated. Loved. …protected. Which was something he could never, ever, promise them, not even now that he was--
“But before you get any ideas about securing the Courcey legacy to the Ravkan throne,” he teased, “I might warn you that I’ve no claim to it any longer at home. Not after the last memory update, as they call them.” He’d had it ages ago, but Nikolai was good at keeping secrets. And this wasn’t really a secret, was it, so much as a collection of little cuts and slapdash first aid. He’d never demanded to be treated like a royal here in Vallo. But if they were talking children (albeit… obliquely), Nikolai felt certain truths needed to be spoken out loud. Need to know was all well and good, but he felt Edwin… might need to know.
Edwin bit back the question that immediately rose to mind when Nikolai said it was something they should both consider: even if Nikolai wanted children, would he really want to have them with Edwin. The question wasn’t fair, not really. It was hard to look too far in the future, when the future of this place was so uncertain – even when bits of it liked to make an appearance sometimes – but however far this current river of the future carried him, he wanted to be carried with Nikolai, and Nikolai’d never given any indication of wanting otherwise. It was unjust of him to expect Nikolai to want to jump ship the first chance he got.
And any lingering insecurities he couldn’t try to logic away were forgotten at that next bit of information that Nikolai gave him. “You were deposed?” he asked, the words out of his mouth before he could think about cushioning them. “I didn’t… you didn’t tell me.”
Nikolai could tell that Edwin had almost said something, but pulled the words back before they could emerge, and wondered what they might have been. Edwin did that a lot - was deliberate in his responses, cautious in what he allowed - but Nikolai didn’t think it was a matter of dishonesty so much as self-editing. Nikolai doubted he could fault the man for the trait given his own predilections toward showmanship.
“Abdication before being deposed,” he clarified in an apologetic tone, “and I think I was dealing with it. It’s a strange thing, remembering something, and having another memory of being here on top of it. It made it- less real, somehow.” But real it was. He was in no mood to discuss specifics, and they didn’t matter much here. The future loomed, as ever, unknowable. “The point of all this is just to say - there’s a great deal I can’t really predict about what’s to come, or… how to be. I’ve rarely been without a tether.” Nikolai gave Edwin a nudge with his knee. “I hope you’ll be patient if I learn as I go.”
Edwin hadn’t had any memory updates of his own, but he could imagine how strange they would be. Gansey’s seemed as though he were sent to his own world for years, only to awake in his bed again the next morning – not impossible, given Vallo’s loose sense of how time worked. But he’d seen the others, where there were memories laid on top of memories. He wondered if it would be like Robin’s visions – something he saw, but didn’t really experience. He couldn’t decide if he wanted his own. He was nearly dying of curiosity: he wanted to know about the secrets of the Last Contract, he wanted to know if the other members of the Forsythia Club still lived, and what discoveries of magic, hinted at in Flora Sutton’s journals but never detailed, they had uncovered. But it had taken him a long time to sort through the confusion of his budding relationship with Robin back home, and his growing feelings for Nikolai here, and it wasn’t a confusion he wished to relive.
He wouldn’t ask Nikolai about the experience, for the same reason he hadn’t asked when it first happened: Nikolai seemed to prefer to avoid thinking about any part of it, and Edwin wouldn’t jab the wound to get answers he didn’t actually need. Which didn’t mean that he didn’t wish that Nikolai had spoken to him. Hawthorne had hid his wounds too, and they’d festered; Nikolai wasn’t cruel like Hawthrone had been, but he didn’t think it was any healthier for Nikolai to hide those parts with him with glib humour as it had been for Hawthrone to hide them under barbed words.
He was quiet for a few moments as he considered his next words. “I’m nothing if not patient,” he promised him, reaching to twine his fingers with Nikolai’s. “But if you’ll let me, I would like to help you deal. You don’t need to keep it all to yourself. We can learn together, I think.” He smiled, wryly. “I’m sure it’s hard to believe, but this is all new for me too.”
Nikolai sensed Edwin was being careful in his words - not a surprise; the day Edwin wasn’t careful was likely a day that one shouldn’t get out of bed, because something hinky was afoot - but Edwin’s circling caution now bespoke of something tender, like a bruise. He threaded his fingers through Edwin’s offered ones, giving them a squeeze as he took Edwin’s response apart bit by bit like he was translating through a particularly strong Fjerdan local accent.
He supposed he had kept things a little quiet. Doing so had always been Nikolai’s way. No one wanted to hear the sob stories of a pampered little prince when people were starving, and besides, mulling over his wounds at home was only a waste of time when he could be striking back. He hadn’t considered that doing so might be a way to alienate, to defend.
“I’m sure it’s even harder to believe,” he said in a similar tone of voice, “but there are some skills that even I am not perfect at. But,” he raised Edwin’s hand to his lips, and brushed a kiss over his knuckles, “I’ll be certain to include you the next time I have a quiet crisis. Or - with any luck - a happy one in whatever future’s to come.”
“Oh, say it isn’t so,” Edwin teased. “Now I’ll have to readjust my entire way of thinking of you.” He gave Nikolai’s fingers a squeeze in return.
He sat quiet for a moment, organizing his thoughts into words. “I was… disappointed, I think, once I realized there wasn’t anyone from the future looking for us,” he said after a moment. “I don’t know if it was for a want of children, exactly, so much as I was looking for some sign of our future together. But I don’t think I’d hate having children with you.” He paused, frowned. “So long as they didn’t tear apart the books, or paw at them with sticky fingers.”
“Children do all those things, and worse.” Nikolai looked down his nose at Edwin with a little smirk, and nudged closer. “You may rethink your desires. I was exactly the sort of child growing up that prompted relatives to wish that I’d have one just like me.”
And because that wasn’t quite an answer, and Nikolai was nothing if not game to try to be a better, more communicative partner, he added: “I think I’m still untangling-- everything that happened, back home. I think I’d like to figure out what that means for me before I really put much thought into whether or not there are children in the future. I wouldn’t hate it. I know that much,” he added, mirroring Edwin’s expression. “But… I’ve a good feeling we’ve got time, if you’re patient.”
Half of Edwin’s mouth quirked upwards in a crooked smile. “I think I would have liked to have met you when you were a child,” he said. Edwin had been quiet and reserved even as a child, doing his best to make sure that he didn’t attract any undue notice, but Elise and Jack had both been loud, rambunctious friends, and he’d loved being surrounded with their energy. And Nikolai, like the Alston twins, would have been unlikely to have been scared off by his older brother.
He leaned in to kiss the corner of Nikolai’s mouth. “I’m in no rush, one way or another,” he assured him. “And I’ll happily take however much time with you that we’re permitted, whatever the future holds.”
“Are you sure? I was loud. Or the consequences were,” Nikolai teased half-heartedly, leaning in. His childhood had been bittersweet, remote. He’d read often, when he wasn’t causing trouble. Perhaps it would in fact happen one day - Vallo did that sort of thing, and more than once. It would likely do so again.
“Now that we’ve established that we’re not rushing, and are indeed taking our time, why don’t we carry that philosophy to the bedroom?” Nikolai suggested, giving Edwin’s hands a tug. “You’re my favorite sort of distraction, I’ll have you know.”
Edwin flushed, pleased. “I’m happy to be of service,” he said, letting Nikolai tug him up from the couch, and ran his thumb over Nikolai’s knuckles. “For the record,” he added, offering him an impish smile, “I have no complaints if you choose to be loud.”