InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "Wangoballwime"

The recovery mission had been fairly standard, compared to the other recovery missions Ty had gone in the past. They managed to get in, recover the necklace, and return back to the base. No one had been captured or killed, they had what they needed to return and hopefully fix this. They needed to fix this, because Ty was now certain he wouldn’t survive if they were here too much longer.

It wasn’t sudden. He’d had a few warnings that he ignored. The tingling in the tips of his fingers and his heart feeling it. His focus had been more on finding Julian at first, then it had shifted to helping retrieve the necklace. Ty couldn’t afford to be weak, to do anything but ignore the pain that was growing out from his heart due to his distance from Livvy.

But it was only getting worse. There was no way Kit had not noticed it during the mission, when Ty had stumbled and grabbed at his side, and it took him a few long seconds to be able to walk properly. He had worried it would be an issue as soon as Livvy wasn’t able to follow him through the portal - they’d had no reason to think she couldn’t, when she could portal travel with him at home - but at the time that had been a worry for future Ty.

Unfortunately, that worry was now.

He and Kit had a shared space in the Rebel camp, but it was only semi-private, with tarps functioning as the walls and door, leading to other areas of the camp in these sewers. He sat criss-cross on the bed they’d been sharing now, and thumbed at the heron necklace dangling from a chain. Ty felt weak, and he hated it. “Do you think it’s worth seeing if a magic user can improve the spellwork that Magnus put on this, or is that too much of a risk that they could undo it entirely?”

"I don't know," Kit said, painfully honest as he offered up one of the water bottles he had snagged from the other Outlanders after the mission. He had felt useful in the moment, using all the tricks he had picked up from being a Rook and then being a Herondale (and in some ways, also being a Carstairs.) He had been careful, attentive, cataloging all the sights and sounds and sensory details to tell Jem and Tessa about his adventure. But it had started to feel less like an adventure now. The high from the mission had come to a grinding halt when he noticed how weak Ty had become.

He felt bad for not noticing it sooner. At least, not noticing it until they were on their way back out from the cave after pilfering a dead body. He'd worry about the ethical quandaries of grave robbing later. Right now his focus had been Ty, and how he didn't think to question him about the Livvy situation until now.

"Everything is kind of backward here," Kit continued, sitting down beside Ty. If their sleeping accommodations weren't the first sign. He had tried to downplay them to Tessa and Jem when they finally could make contact with their Vallo. "They might try to help and then you become a ghost. Or it might overload. Or one of those shadow things might think it's violence and come after you. I just don't know. Too many variables."

That was a Ty word: variables. Kit had proudly picked it up while studying over his shoulder, and he liked using it in conversation now. "And I don't want you to get hurt more than you already are. How do you feel now?"

Ty was pale - he was always at least a little pale given his standard complexion, but now it had a sheen of grey tones to it that made him look more sickly than just white. There weren’t many mirrors around but Ty was relatively certain that was a newer side-effect. Still, he had a little bit of confidence in his voice when he replied to Kit, “I’m pretty sure I won’t turn into a ghost unless I die.”

Being away from Livvy this long might kill him, but he didn’t say that part out loud. He instead looked down at his hands, and the necklace, and then his lap - anywhere but Kit. “I’m feeling okay. Tired. But I’m glad this is almost over.”

Now that they had the amulet in question, going home would be soon, right? Ty wasn’t in the position to make any demands about getting back as quickly as possible, he knew everyone was playing their parts and doing what they could but-

Well, he was antsy. He wanted his brother back, he wanted to check on Livvy, he wanted to live. Ty blew out a breath and dropped his voice to a whisper, “Feels a little like a piece of me is missing. Like I’m not whole anymore.”

"You might turn into a ghost," Kit argued, but not seriously. He didn't want to think about Ty dying. He didn't like the way he looked right now—which was absolutely deathly—under the lights of the sewer. It was easy to trick himself that it was just their environment and not that something was seriously wrong. But Kit knew the truth, and Kit couldn't ignore the truth.

Kit took Ty's free hand, and held it between two of his own. Normally he was more careful and cautious about touching without giving obvious tells he was about to. But the tenor in Ty's voice, the way he sounded wiped out when he had done far more exhaustive things made Kit worry. He tried to keep his face serious though, for the both of them.

"It will fix itself when we go back. You don't have to feel like you're missing a piece of yourself for long. Think about something else, something we can do right now that's not laying here and thinking about it. It's only going to make you feel worse." Kit was offering up a distraction, or trying to. He didn't think kissing would make it better, or ease the pain of what Julian had become in this weird Vallo.

Then Kit stupidly suggested, "Maybe you can talk about Livvy. Tell me a story about her. Make it feel like she's here." A beat, then he added, "Well, not here-here. Here kind of sucks."

Ideally, Ty would’ve liked to have gone for a walk, maybe someplace quiet, with his hand tucked into Kit’s. He liked taking walks with Kit. But it was too dangerous in this Vallo, too risky with the current climate of Council members that could come after them at any point.

They needed to stay safe. All of them. Because if they didn’t get back through the portal after it was fixed, there was a chance they would be trapped. Bronislovas had talked about a lot of theories, and so that was still up in the air, but it wasn’t a risk Ty wanted to put on the group of rebels here if he could help it. He just had to hope that Julian would be right again when they made it back.

Stories about Livvy, though, he could manage. Ty brought his legs up to sit under him, but kept a sure grip on Kit’s hand between them. He didn’t want to break off contact, not when it felt like it was helping. “When we were little, someone asked us if we had “twin ESP” and I didn’t know what that meant, but Livvy had looked them dead in the eyes and said ‘We do, but it doesn’t work on cloudy days.’ She didn’t know she had to clarify for me, so I did a bunch of research of ESP and then I went around for almost a full year thinking that we could be telepathic with each other, but it just wasn’t working because of the weather. I would drag her out to the sun and then stare at her and she had no idea why.”

The crook of Ty’s mouth twisted up a little. “I finally had to fess up and she laughed a lot, but she felt bad. Months of me trying to get her to read my mind whenever it was sunny.”

Kit liked this story. Losing Livvy had been difficult, and Kit hadn't even been her twin. He didn't have a bundle of stories to keep tucked away in his mind for days like this. He often felt how unfair it was that Ty had a sister and then suddenly didn't. As the years had passed between them, when he and Ty didn't speak, he had started to understand why the ritual had been a sole focus, why Livvy was now a ghost. He probably couldn't be that person who had his whole half scooped out instantly and then told to live with it. How did he?

He squeezed Ty's hand a little tighter, getting worked up for no good reason. Ty had become his other half, and he thought he might go a little insane without him. "Sometimes I thought you both had twin ESP," Kit admitted, instead of saying what he was actually feeling. It was too much to dump on Ty when he was like this. And they were going for distractions.

"You both would look at each other and just kind of know something. I thought it was cool. So maybe you did, even on the cloudy days. But it's not like the telepathic stuff like in the X-Men. It's something else really special." Kit smiled when Ty did, and then without thinking just brought their clasped hands together so that he could kiss the back of Ty's hand. It felt instinctual to do it, and he had hoped it was comforting.

Ty smiled a little, and he couldn’t argue with Kit. Sometimes it felt like they did have ESP, from just being around each other as much as they had been. In those years between losing their parents and Ty losing Livvy, they’d barely been apart. Julian and Emma had made sure they could all stay together at the Institute, and Ty had always been thankful for that because Livvy had been the one person he could be around without feeling drained or oversensitized.

That was until Kit had entered their lives. Kit had become the second person on that list, and it was special. Livvy had known it then, and knew it now, just how important Kit was to him. “I don’t know anything about the X-Men but sometimes I think it just seemed like that because we know each other really well.” And Livvy was so smart when it came to Ty, she made it look easy.

His eyes flashed up to look at Kit when Ty’s hand was kissed, and his face flushed. Finally some color was in his cheeks, after everything that had happened, but only because of feeling pleased and warm and not because he felt normal. That went a long way to helping, though. His throat felt like it was closing up when Ty finally blurted out, “I love you.” In a rush of words, not unlike when Kit had first said it to him, but also in the Ty way where it was obvious he’d been thinking them for a long, long time. He never said anything without thinking it through, if he could help it.

"Don't worry, I'll show you some of the X-Men comics. Or we can watch movies. Something really low-key when we're back in our world and you're connected back with Livvy," Kit said, trying not to sound worried. He felt like they were close to doing that; Ty had done so much to make sure that their shot at getting back would work. And the old dead guy would probably be super proud.

But as he watched Ty flush at the gentle affection, and Kit smiled a little wider, he didn't expect—well, his face just went surprisingly blank. Not in a bad way, just unexpected. And then everything happened quickly: his heart rate started to skyrocket, his breath getting sharp and fast, his grip on Ty's hand tightened, and oh my god were his eyes burning? Was he going to cry? No, not crying, just overwhelmed. He had never thought in a million years—hyperbolic, but still—Ty would say them back. Not after Kit's own disastrous admission.

His voice was dry, and it cracked a little when he finally said, "I love you too. I never—" Kit exhaled, then tried to swallow back that little unexpected sob that was trying to crawl out of him. He didn't think the words would have such an effect on him. But here they were, Ty in pain, hiding in a sewer, in a twice-removed world of their own, saying they loved each other. It was really wrecking him in the best way. "I never stopped, Ty."

Normally, he asked permission first to do this, but Ty had an impulsive moment and leaned in to kiss Kit. Even without asking permission, it felt right to do it like this, to kiss him after they’d both made confessions, because he had not been in the right frame of mind to do anything last time this topic had come up.

When he pulled away, Ty rested his forehead against Kit’s and took a deep breath. “I couldn’t tell you before. I didn’t know- what it was, I just- was focused on Livvy. My brain can only take one path at a time and I didn’t know how to separate things or listen to anything outside of that.” It was an explanation he felt owed, and he rushed it to get it all out at once. “But I did. And I do. I asked Julian once what it was like and when he told me it just made sense.”

Ty’s hand came up to Kit’s hoodie and pulled on one of the strings. “Even when everything else in the world hasn’t, you’ve always made sense to me. I don’t know how to explain it any other way.” Dru and Livvy were going to feel so vindicated when they heard about this.

Kissing Ty was, objectively, one of the best things that ever happened to Kit. The fact that it kept happening, over and over, did not seem to lessen the value of them, or how they felt, or the way his whole stomach did this ridiculous rollercoaster thing. He was just lucky he didn't have ESP with Ty or all his deepest, darkest hidden feelings would be on full display, all the time.

"It's okay, it is, it's okay," Kit repeated when Ty was trying to explain why he hadn't said it. Why things had been so complicated between them. And it was okay—now it was. At the time, Kit was heartbroken and felt like his whole world had imploded. There had been nothing to do to fix it and control was spiraling wildly out of his hands. He knew now that the way he and Ty dealt with grief and stress were so totally different. The rejection had not been a rejection at all, not really.

And to punctuate his point, he tipped his face forward to kiss Ty once again. "You don't have to explain it, I get it," Kit said, putting his other hand over Ty's where it was touching the drawstring of his hoodie. "I mean, I get what you're trying to say, about things just making sense. It doesn't, to me, when you're not around. And I was okay with just quietly loving you forever, and never saying anything, as long as I had you in my life."

Oh Kit felt like he was going to cry—the worry of Ty being in danger and in pain without Livvy, the admission of being in love with one another, the general state of things, it was a lot. He sniffed once, cleared his throat and tried again. "Now it doesn't have to be quiet."

It felt like they were both rambling now, but that didn’t stop Ty, not really. Even with Kit’s reassurance, he felt the need to say it, and repeat it, and then again to make sure Kit understood his meaning. Maybe nothing more needed to be said, at that point, there could just be kissing, but Ty wasn’t finished. “I just didn’t want you to think that you weren’t worth being loved then and now. I’ve thought about it a lot, what I would say.”

He hadn’t told anyone that, not even Livvy. Ty suspected she knew, though, and just wasn’t saying anything because she was nosy but not that nosy. Ty had always preferred sharing historical facts more than talking about feelings and Livvy knew better than to pry on certain topics.

There was more kissing. Enough kissing that it did distract him, even as tired as he was, but then he pulled away to glance around at the tent “walls” surrounding them. “Um well, we should be a little quiet, it’s not very private here.”

Worth being loved. That was an awful lot of big feelings tucked into a few little words. Some of those feelings were ones that Kit had never been able to voice, never been able to understand. He had been abandoned so much in his life, that love, and by proxy himself, was simply an easy thing to throw away—not worthy of it. But then suddenly, miraculously, unexplainably, Kit had so much love in his life that was given to him freely. He didn't have to ask, he didn't have to beg or pretend that he didn't need it. He did, he did need it.

And now Ty, without Kit having to ask, offered it up to him too. He wanted to say it wasn't real, this was a dream. But it wasn't, he knew that, and Kit simply leaned into Ty, gently in response. He wouldn't make him hold his weight, but just enough to to be comforting and to take comfort from him.

"I just meant—" Kit started to say, and realized that Ty was making a joke. His whole face scrunched up, trying to hide his laugh. "A little quiet then," Kit said, tilting his head up, and kissing Ty on the corner of his mouth. "But maybe you should, I don't know, rest first? I don't like the person I love being in pain. And I'm not going anywhere. I'll sit right here with you the whole time."

Ty wanted to object, and even started to shake his head.. They had things that needed doing. Supply runs, checking in on how the magic users were doing, following up on plans-- But he felt exhausted down to his bones. Maybe a little sleep could help him be more focused in the future.

He still frowned. “Okay but don’t let me sleep long. Just a nap?” He tugged on Kit’s arm to pull them both into a laying position on the narrow bed. “And you can lay with me, you need a nap too. We did a lot of walking, maybe we should have stolen the bus after all.”