(SE) a whisper in our ear, or a bottle for our fears

don't you know i'm no good for you?

His work stops too with the admission, and when he finally summons the courage to turn and glance at his husband, he can see those static arms still working, still fitting things together and separating the pile as well. His gaze tears from them back to Nate’s face, working his jaw silently while the words hit him. He never thought they’d be here either, in all honesty, and he can’t help but to look like a deer in the headlights as soon as Nate airs the question.

He flushes a bit, because of course he does, the question is loaded and he doesn’t know where to begin but somewhere… Somewhere deep down he doesn’t think any answer he gives will be right. So at the very least, he can try to give multiple answers. “Because I… Chose a side. Because I made a deal behind your back.” He says quietly, chewing on his cheek, suddenly pulling his gaze away to better himself. “Because I’m fathering a child and it… Wasn’t talked about. And it’s with Safrin who harmed you and I believed that she could help.”

He’s glad he’s looking away as the grimace overcomes his face, as he worries at his lip, chewing and trying to focus on anything else, like the planks of wood in his hands that he brings over to the space where he can saw it down to size. He doesn’t look at Nate, sure his answer is wrong, and cringes for it regardless.

i've learned to lose, you can't afford to

SUNJATA

you're trying not to tell him you love him, and you're trying to choke down the feeling

It’s so hard to be angry. So hard, and yet not at all. Nate doesn’t know what he wants, doesn’t know what Sunjata should be doing, but this isn’t it. This isn’t what he wants. Whatever they’re doing right now. Whatever conversation they’re about to have. It doesn’t undo what Sunjata’s done.

A deep sigh leaves Nate, his hands dropping away and clenching at his sides. ”That is a lot of very good reasons for me to be angry.” His voice is just as soft, sharp underneath the velvet purr. Nate doesn’t move, doesn’t look away from Sunjata. ”And I am. I think I will be for a while.” Theres a but, hiding around the corner, so obvious that he doesn’t bother saying it.

”You made me a stranger in my own home.” All at once, that sharpness rears its ugly head, anger replacing sorrow in an instant. ”I can’t trust you with anything anymore. I can’t tell you where I’m going, I can’t tell you what I’m doing, none of it. Not until this fucking war is over.” Not until there’s no chance it will get back to Safrin. Nate already carries enough on his shoulders, and now there’s no alleviation.

& you're trembling and he reaches over

and touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist

NATE

don't you know i'm no good for you?

Throwing himself into his work has become suddenly stilted, grabbing the saw and placing a board up and marking it while he listens, waits for the ball to drop, the reasons why he was wrong. But Nate mentions they’re good points — still not correct — but points nonetheless. He can’t help the tension in his shoulders at the unsaid ‘but’ that surely follows, hands braced on the edges of the saw horse. He lets the words wash over him, the realization, chewing on the inside of his ruined cheek before he reaches up to rub at the tattoo.

He huffs out a long sigh, head dipping between his shoulders as if he’s hanging it with the heaviness of the realization he’s just had. “I’m a spy.” It’s weak and it hurts, but he hadn’t realized it at the time. All he’d wanted to do was help. All he wanted to do was never have to go without Nate. Eventually he pulls himself together enough to turn around and face his husband.

“I didn’t… I guess some part of me thought she’d find out all along the things I’ve been up to. It’s why I didn’t see her after taking the Voice’s cure.” His jaw clenches and feathers sprinkle out along his neck, in his curls, along his shoulders. “I didn’t realize it.” Here, he stares at Nate’s feet.

i've learned to lose, you can't afford to

SUNJATA

you're trying not to tell him you love him, and you're trying to choke down the feeling

Sunjata’s head dips, the weight of Nate’s words hanging off him heavily. It’s almost worth it. And it only makes it worse, that this is the first time Sunjata’s realizing. ”You’re a spy!” He shouts, kicking at a loose board and turning away from the other man. Thunder rumbles in the distance, a storm rumbling over the ocean, and at least one fucking thing in the world feels fitting.

Disembodied arms pause, flickering as Nate falters. As he cracks just a little bit more, just enough for the bottle of emotions in his chest to leak. ”You chose Safrin over me!” Turning again, Nate directs his fury at the other man, where he can’t turn it towards the stars. The arms fade out of existence, tools dropping to the ground with a clatter, and reappearing wrapped around his torso. Holding him back and holding him together.

”Not realizing doesn’t make it better.” It might make it worse, a fact that Nate is sure runs through both their heads at the same time. Squeezing his eyes closed right, Nate clenched his teeth and sighs, trying to not let any more words leak out of him. How often had he said something he regretted? How often had he pushed too hard and broken things? This is delicate for him. And that’s the worst part of all of this, isn’t it?

& you're trembling and he reaches over

and touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist

NATE

don't you know i'm no good for you?

The shout, the kick at the board has him internally flinching, swallowing hard  when he finally turns to Nate – watches his husband hold himself together. His heart cracks again, lending a slight shiver of sorrow down his spine, enough of one that pinches his brows as the realization continues to overcome him. ’You chose Safrin over me!’ And that? Could he deny that? Did he want to try?

No. He doesn’t. But there is a small part of him that internally wants to shout back that Safrin had attuned him long before he’d met Nate. But it would simply be repeating those things Safrin had told him. She had loved him first. She had been there first.

Fuck.

“Nate, I can’t…” His voice hesitates, he swallows, his heart thundering in his chest, beneath those inky black spots of her tattoo. It beats against his ribcage where she’d burned herself into his bones. “I can’t lose you.” The tones crack as he tries to keep himself steady. “I only did it because of that.” Step back, Sunjata an internal voice seems to scream at him – because it’s all coming out wrong and he wishes he knew how to say what he means without it sounding so horrible.

His hand comes up to stop Nate should he wish to reply to that recent fuck up, the Attuned gasping down a huff of air. “She called me to her. She woke me up out of bed to come and see her.” Nate has to know that tug, right? “And when I got there it was entirely about the war. It was about choosing a side. And I told her that I couldn’t – I wouldn’t hurt you. I’d sooner hurt myself than hurt you.” And here he was hurting Nate in the process regardless. “I love you so fucking much, Nate, that I couldn’t bear the thought of facing you there. But she was going to make me, regardless, and I did the only thing I knew to do.”

But it’s selfish, at the end of the day, isn’t it? “And I should have asked, I should have talked to you, I should have seen if it was something you even wanted after all of it and I didn’t. I’m sorry.” No forgiveness, he doesn’t expect it. “I’m selfish and terrified to lose you.” But he always loses everything, doesn't he?

i've learned to lose, you can't afford to

SUNJATA

you're trying not to tell him you love him, and you're trying to choke down the feeling

”You pus-“ It’s the only thing that leaves Nate before he’s stopped, a hand in his face that he snarls at. He desperately tries to cling to the anger, to not give into despair. It’s a losing battle, but he tries, just so he doesn’t have to face anything else.

It’s clear Nate doesn’t understand the call Sunjata speaks about, that the very idea disturbs him, fans the fire in his chest. ”Did she promise that you wouldn’t have to harm me? Did she say that?” Or was the attuned simply assuming what he wanted, without clarification? Without knowing for sure? ”You know if she can’t save me, and she can’t, and you fight against the Voice, you’re fighting for me to die, right?” It’s harsh, and it’s the truth. He has no one left, not after this betrayal. ”I love you too, but I didn’t promise the Voice a fucking baby to keep you safe.”

The worst part of it, the very worst part, is that nothings changed. ”We’re just deeper in the same fucking hole.” For the second time, in a handful of days, Nate all but collapses to the ground, a puppet with its strings cut. His face is buried in his hands, the telltale shimmer of fluid on his cheeks whenever he shifts. ”And there’s no way out. There’s nothing we can do. And you keep digging.”

”Fuck you, and fuck your goddess. Don’t fucking apologize to me.” Somehow, Nate finds some measure of anger again, spitting it at Sunjata’s feet unceremoniously. ”You lose me in the end either way.”

Anger drains from him, lowering his shoulders, the edges of his mouth. ”What do you expect me to do? What would you do?”

& you're trembling and he reaches over

and touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist

NATE

don't you know i'm no good for you?

The snarl is charged past as quickly as he can, fumbling for anything he can say. “She told me she’d never ask me to hurt you.” But who knew? He’d bounced between reasons and no reasons to doubt Safrin, and he didn’t know what side of the tightrope that left him falling on. Nate’s words sting and Sunjata finds himself tearing a hand through his hair, feathers ruffling as each barb hits him dead in the chest. “I deserve that, but you can’t say you didn’t choose your side either.” He grits his teeth, trying to clamp down on the swell of emotions that burn within him. “You’re a demigod now. You’re hers.” The Voice’s, to do whatever it was she wished him to.

“We both picked our sides, Nate. And you know what? I want the Voice to win. I want her to win.” He reiterates his point, trying to strain it across. “But there was absolutely no way Safrin would let me fight against her. You have to know that.” He could say it until he’s blue in the face and somehow, somehow, he doesn’t think his husband would understand.

He takes in a shuddering breath, a step backwards until his hip hits the sawhorse and he stills there, tearing his gaze away from Nate from the space he’s sitting – wanting to comfort and hold and refraining from it because it would only make things worse. “Honestly? I don’t know.” He doesn’t know what he’d do put in Nate’s position. He can’t imagine it. And he had been the one to bring it upon him.

So he controls some of his frustration, the best he can though it’s essentially like holding onto a wet tissue, moving so that he kneels before Nate in the dirt and dune grasses outside of their home through the storm clouds. “When you Ascended, the Voice changed you. Like… Parts of you.” He begins, sucking down a sharp breath, scanning Nate’s shape for any semblance of understanding while he tries to explain it. “When I attuned, Safrin reached inside my chest, in my soul, and she changed parts of me too.”

His voice cracks, his scarred face twists in his shame and sorrow. “We chose our sides long before this war with the hopes of hiding away in bunkers until it’s over, telling ourselves that it would work and it would be fine.” Exhaustion weighs on him as he shakes his head and rubs at his face, shutting his eyes tightly. “I think we knew it would be a lie.”

i've learned to lose, you can't afford to

SUNJATA

you're trying not to tell him you love him, and you're trying to choke down the feeling

”Apparently, she doesn’t have to ask you! She can just tell you to, and you’ll do what she says without thinking about it.” A high, hysterical note enters Nate’s voice, mocking and panicked all in one. ”I am, because Safrin cursed me, and it was how we fixed it. I am, because it’s the only way I can keep a whole group of people safe when no one but us seems to give a fuck!” Why he didecided to carry all of that, he couldn’t say, but it’s another burden he has to deal with, another thing that he can’t put down. ”The Voice has never lied to me. She’s never tried to manipulate me. She was nicer to you than Safrin ever was to me. She never,” Nate very nearly chokes on his voice, on a sob, ”never had you try to compete with her.”

A tremor starts in Nate’s hands, wrapped tightly around himself, crawling up his spine and his neck. He wants to flinch away from the words, from the repeated point, but that’s all they are. Words. It’s all every ‘I love you’ is, it’s all marriage vows had been. Just words, that he’d put so much faith into they’d started to feel real.

There’s something new in Nate’s eye when he looks up again, something wild and terrified and glassy. Something that’s shattered to a thousand pieces, soemthi that the ascended can no longer hold onto. ”What do you mean you don’t know? How can you not know?” A breathless, hiccuping sob coughs from him, garbling the words that he can’t stop. ”...ow to fix you every time you came home broken! I didn’t know how to wait for you to be spit up by the ocean!”

Rage flows out of him once again, the ascendeds head ducking so his face can hide behind his knees, his hands. So he doesn’t have to look up at the kneeling attuned to see broken promises and breaking love, so he doesn’t have to widen the cracks of his being. He pulls himself tighter while his husband speaks, as if he can deny the words by shutting himself up tighter, as if he can still change their reality.

But it doesn’t change. They’re still so different, despite all the pieces that mesh together, they are fundamentally different. A handful of quick, panicked gasps leave Nate, before stopping altogether. He wishes that stopping in this case meant something dramatic, wishes it had the same kind of punch as standing on the railing of a bridge and being talked down, but it’s just one more kind of reality, the push that drives him back up to his feet, opening space between himself and the attuned.

”No. No. It’s isn’t, it wasn’t a lie. You made it a lie. You broke it, and, and...” Broke me, the stark panic on his face, in his voice says. Fluid tears run down his face freely now, leaving behind shimmering tracks that Nate scrubs away roughly as he paces around the garden, unable to fall still for an instant. Unwilling to let himself be still.

& you're trembling and he reaches over

and touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist

NATE

don't you know i'm no good for you?

How can he think about it? He doesn’t get the choices that Nate’s gotten with the Voice. He doesn’t get to sit there and pick and choose. It’s either there or it’s gone. But Nate’s panicked voice has him cracking, his heart shattering again and again until it feels like lead in his stomach, until he thinks it’s nausea that rears its ugly head in the back of his mouth, down his throat.

Gods how he wanted to keep them safe too. He can’t, he never even could again. All he can do is duck his head, shut his eyes tight in his agreement that the Voice had never made him choose… But when had he sought out the Voice without Nate there? Never.

Would she have made him compete with her for Nate’s attention at some point? Could these roles be reversed? He supposes they’ll never know. And he sinks down, to his knees in the dirt and the sand, in the grasses that sway, wet with heavy rain from the previous night. “Nate…” His voice cracks, it shatters against the hiccupping sob that leaves his husband, and he’s suddenly wondering if this is something that can be fixed. “I know. I –” It’s always been him, hasn’t it? Lusea, Nate, all of them. He was the common thread that destroyed them in the end.

He had always been the problem despite his good intentions.

He always will be the problem.

So he shuts down when Nate stands, unable to keep the closeness to him, and it’s his husband’s frantic voice, the panic, the sudden vibrant emotion that the demigod had spent the better half of their relationship hiding away, out in the open.

He knows it.

“Wait.” He doesn’t need the blood ring to feel the panic rebounding around him as he tries to scramble to his feet. The glassy sheen in Nate’s eyes is reflected in his own as well, red ringed with a tight chest, taking a stumbling step through the wet, soft ground, to reach for Nate because he can’t bear this. He’d always been terrible with words, better at explaining it with action. “I’m the problem. I always have been. I don’t know why. I don't know how to be better. I just... I just know how to survive, some-fucking-how. I want to be better.” He chokes on the words as they leave his tight throat. “I never meant for this to happen. Please believe me. You are the best thing to happen to me, I never... Never wanted to hurt you.” He reaches out, both hands extended to reach for Nate wherever he can to simply get him to stop, to get him to listen, to try and assure his husband with his touch that trembles, that he’d only ever meant any of this with the best intentions.

He just always fucked it up in the long run.

i've learned to lose, you can't afford to

SUNJATA

you're trying not to tell him you love him, and you're trying to choke down the feeling

”No, it’s...” How does he explain it? How can he explain it? ”You’re the hammer.” The pacing has stopped, but all that energy has to go somewhere, shaking out through his hands, in the quick glances towards the sky. ”You’re the hammer, and I... and you... it’s not your fault, but you, you have to take the hammer away.” His had opens and closes over his chest, a heartbeat, a cry for help that’s answered in the exact way it shouldn’t be.

Hands grab his shoulders. Hands that should be soothing. Hands that should be grounding. Hands that burn him like a hot coal. Hands that he doesn’t even feel. The true sign of how far gone he is is how long it takes him to react, a full second passing where Nate starts to sag, starts to lean into it. And then a quiet, panicked ”Wait, I-“ drops from his lips, cut off by a choked gasp, the ascended nearly swallowing his own tongue to keep from screaming.

A handful of panicked steps pull him back, even as arms rise, forgetting the pain the moment it’s cut off but craving the touch. His foot catches something, a board, an especially soft patch of dirt, and Nate goes toppling backwards.

Everything stops when he hits the ground, senseless sounds and frantic motions giving way to silence, to stillness. Nates eyes, seeing and unseeing both, stare into the vast expanse of clouds in the sky, searching for something. Anything. A heavy drop of rain hits him, the first in a torrent, but even that doesn’t convince Nate to move. He’s not sure anything will right now.

& you're trembling and he reaches over

and touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist

NATE

don't you know i'm no good for you?

It’s blown up in ways Sunjata hasn’t anticipated, in ways he couldn’t have anticipated. Once, they had been on the same page, and now? Now they were leagues apart and Sunjata fumbles and flounders through the pages to try and get back. And he fails.

It’s evident in the way that he doesn’t entirely understand Nate’s metaphor, in the way he tries to shake it off — it is his fault. Unless, of course, Nate means he’s being used as a tool of sorts. But even then, Sunjata doesn’t know how to take the hammer away. But he wants to. And so he tries, reaching out to grab onto Nate, not realizing that it’s pain at first, at simply thinking that it’s some crest of emotions on this wave that they’re on.

And Nate leans into it, and then gasps and chokes, and it’s like a blind flash of lightning in his mind. He’s hurting him.

His hands immediately withdraw, torn between looking at them and seeing if there was anything there that caused this, if he could wipe it off or make it stop. But there’s nothing, nothing but the tears that drip from his eyes, his face streaked with them when he looks back up and spies Nate falling, hitting the ground hard, and staring without quite seeing up at a sky that begins to break it’s own storm above them.

He charges for Nate, stepping over the boards and dropping to his knees beside Nate, not touching him — not daring to. “NateI’mSoSorry.” Comes out in a gasped breath, scanning Nate for any sign of… Anything, really. But the Ascended doesn’t breathe, he doesn’t need to blink, and all he can offer is his company, however welcoming it may or may not be. He withdraws, sitting hard in the rain, peeling his shirt from his back, and moves to drape it across Nate’s torso if only to help block from the rain, to give him some sort of warmth and touch without it being him and his cursed self. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” A choked out repetition. And then he withdraws again, legs crossed and tucked up so his knees can hide his face, so he can wrap his arms around them in the hopes of not hurting anything else. And he can’t stop the tears from flowing now, from the shake in his spine and his shoulders, the muffled repetition of his apologies over and over and over again.

i've learned to lose, you can't afford to

SUNJATA

you're trying not to tell him you love him, and you're trying to choke down the feeling

Words are so distant. The apology is so small, so fast, zipping by Nate before he can even really parse it. Sunjata is there, and then he isn’t, dancing in the peripherals of a gaze that isn’t really seeing anything. He feels the shirt draped over his chest though, let’s it guide him back into something physical, Nate’s fist clenching at his side.

More apologies drop against him like the rain, the ascendeds hand lifting to tangle in the empty shirt, drawing it up towards his face. He turns, painfully slowly, to the curled up shape of his husband, and he wishes he could fix this. Wishes he could not care. Wishes it wasn’t such a big deal. He curls up on his side, wishing it hurt, wishing it would distract him, and hides his face in the fabric.

Gods only know how long they sit like that. Curled up and aching and soaked in mud and rain both. Whatever preparations they’d been working on are long forgotten by the time Nate shifts again, a hand grasping blindly at his chest trying to find the ring, trying to slip it onto a finger. He doesn’t know what he wants to say, but he knows what he’s feeling. And without a sense of touch, this has to be the next best thing.

Except, Nate isn’t sure what he’s even feeling. There’s simply a yawning chasm in him, but he’s there. He’s reaching out, in the only way he can right now. Sunjata?

& you're trembling and he reaches over

and touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist

NATE

don't you know i'm no good for you?

He doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t know what he can do. He’s only distantly aware of the movement from Nate from where he buries his head, where he burns internally, where he continues his apologies again and again, mentally, verbally, unintelligible from the next set of them. He doesn’t know how long it takes, all he knows is that he’s soaked to the bone with the rain but he doesn’t feel the cold. No, instead his body picks a shift better suited for repelling the water. His arms, neck, spine, all of him coat in the sleek black and bronze scales of his cobra shift, covering him so the water plinks off of him into small puddles by where he sits.

He doesn’t know how long it takes, he doesn’t know how long he sits like that, rampaging internally, warring with himself. If all he’d done was all of this to protect and save, if it had all been out of love, and yet the mere touch of him burns?

What then? What was it all for?

The feeling Nate will get when the ring is placed, Sunjata unaware due to the silence that overcomes the other end (which he’s let loose once he’d realized Nate wasn’t wearing the ring) becomes intensely full of regret, sorrow, a burning desire to do nothing but want to revert to the time where they’d been happy, when he’d come back from his days at sea and that was good enough for him.

Nate’s voice cuts through the bond, like an arrow that hits the bullseye in the center, and Sunjata’s emotions cut off so sharply that he takes a gasping breath of surprise, stilling  from where his head hangs against his arms. Nate? It’s a quiet, broken croak of a sound, and he manages to pull his head up to look at his husband through dark shadowed steel ringed in red. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I hurt you. Both in his actions and in his touch. His head ducks back down, pressing his face against his dark tattooed arms.

i've learned to lose, you can't afford to

SUNJATA

you're trying not to tell him you love him, and you're trying to choke down the feeling

It isn’t that he gets lost in the choking fog of Sunjata’s emotions. It’s the opposite, for all the difference it makes. Nate leans into the brush of emotions, less intense than his own anger had been, than his own sorrow had been, but better than the burnt out hollow within him. He should have said anything, shouldn’t had thought anything, and that regret is the first skittering feeling that comes from him. Inky, viscous despair follows, as Sunjata goes just as blank as he feels, cutting off this last, parasitic connection abruptly.

Better to be an emotional voyeur than it is to be alone, isn’t it? He can’t really tell right now.

Nates face still hides behind his husbands shirt, not moving, not breathing. A response bubbles slowly through his mind, slogging through the miasma of his thoughts. I know. You... He hesitates, a bright, glowing crack of leaking anger opening, and cooling again in a breath, a heartbeat, though neither of those things thump through him.. You don’t have to keep saying it.

& you're trembling and he reaches over

and touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist

NATE