“That’s fucking perfect.” Hendrik’s heart tugged, as if it wanted him to be even closer to Dagan somehow, in that moment. “Did you really feel alone?”
“Oh, yes.” Dagan buried his face in Hen’s neck again. “Everyone does, lovely. You were spared that, at least. Even if it left you in love with a ghost.”
“And you wouldn’t mind? If I was still in love with him?” Hen wondered about that sometimes. His love for Kass was very different now than it had been when he was alive, of course. And as the pain of it began to fade into something sweeter, Hen found himself hoping it would stick around.
“Would you like me to?” Dagan chuckled again. “It’s more difficult to be jealous of the absent, but I could try.”
“No.” Hen laughed too, but he wasn’t entirely sure Dagan was right. Kass had been his reason for existing, his destiny, the light of his gray, regimented life. But when he and Kass had talked about the future, a future Hen was so desperate to grasp he was terrified of it, Hendrik had never been able to believe in it. A practical man who won’t be soothed by impractical things, Jak had called him. And Kass had been the most impractical—and yet the most inevitable—person Hendrik had ever known.
He didn’t think he could love Dagan more than he loved Kass, or the other way around; he just thought they were two very, very different things. And, “I sometimes think I loved what I secretly hoped we could be. Me and Kass, I mean,” he admitted.
Dagan lifted his face to look him in the eye again. “How do you mean?”
“Sorry. Is it weird to bring that up now?”
“No. Actually it’d be weirder if you were avoiding the subject, considering the conversation,” Dagan replied. “Go on, please.”
“You wouldn’t stop scouting for anyone; that’s right and good. Anyone who’d ask you to would definitely be failing to appreciate what makes you Dagan, right?”
“Yes, that’s true.”
“Kass wouldn’t stop being a god. It wasn’t something he chose, but I think that made it even more impossible to avoid, for him. It was his destiny, and if he didn’t embrace it, he’d have been fucking miserable. He didn’t know how to be miserable, so he embraced it.
“But that destiny meant he couldn’t have anything else. He never had a family, he never had a home, he never had anything but me and every luxury money could buy in the High City. And he knew he’d have to give me and honeyed apricots up, too, when the time came.” It was spilling out of Hendrik all at once now, even as he had the thoughts, no time to filter or arrange them neatly. “The priests said he’d have his own palace in heaven, with whatever he wanted, so really, even the luxuries would still be there. So it was just me he’d lose, except that he was supposed to be able to look out for me from above.”
“That is so not the same thing.” Dagan made a face.
“Right?” Finally, someone got it! Okay, so it was only Kass who hadn’t, but, “Kass couldn’t think like that, though. I don’t know if he was incapable or if it would’ve broken him. I never will. All I know is he really thought when I eventually met him in heaven, we could carry on like we’d never been apart—because as a god, you know, he could just bring me there with him instead of the lowly heaven for mortals.”
“Obviously,” Dagan said in a tone that made it clear that it was nothing of the kind.
God, it felt good to hear someone else acknowledge how absurd it all was. At last. Hen went on, “But I wished…in some deeply buried, heretical part of me, I wished every fucking day that he’d at least consider what it might look like if he could stay with me. And again, I don’t know if he couldn’t or wouldn’t. But he didn’t. And that’s so fucking selfish because he actually believed he was going to be in a heavenly palace directing the path of the Stone City from on high, so why would he mind missing out on a few years of mortal bullshit with—?”
“No,” Dagan interrupted. “No, don’t do that. You’re allowed to feel that. You’re allowed, and I’d feel the same.”
“Would you really, though? You’re—not selfish.”
“I think tonight’s
antics have proven that I am.” Dagan smiled softly. “I can’t even
remember how many times I’ve wished that, just once, someone would
be more than mildly disappointed when we parted ways after a good
fuck. If I magnify that feeling a billion times, I can at least
try to understand.”
“I wouldn’t have left him.” Hendrik felt like he’d dropped a hundred-pound boulder off his back, when he said it. He wouldn’t have left Kass in this world for all the palaces in heaven. And Kass hadn’t even hesitated. Logically, Hen knew that Kass couldn’t have. Even if he was capable of it, after all the indoctrination, it would’ve ruined him if he allowed himself to.
And yet, that was what Hen had always wanted. To matter.
“I know you wouldn’t.” Dagan brushed fingers across his cheek and hair. “And I know it wasn’t his fault; he was made to leave the world early, and didn’t know anything else. But you’re made differently.”
Hen digested this for a few silent moments, watching Dagan’s eyes and smoothing out the last few knots in his own mind. So many things he’d kept boxed up and tucked away. So many feelings and thoughts that had been sublimated, subjugated even by the horror of Kass’s death and the revelations that followed.
He was safe here, though. He was safe, and he could feel these things. And Dagan had him. “It was always a hopeless love. Completely fucking hopeless, and I knew it, but I couldn’t help myself.”
It suddenly occurred to him that this was probably the real reason guards and their charges weren’t supposed to fuck. Because fucking and love were tangled up for so many people—not all, of course not all, but for many one led easily into the other. And that kind of love, the wild, obsessive, burning romantic love Hen had known with Kass, was disorder. He’d done ridiculous, disordered things, when that love ruled him. And guards who were disordered were utterly useless to the See.
That was why guards had same-sex charges: Queer kids were less common than straight ones. Even with the racing hormones of adolescence, it cut down on disordered love stories to keep doing it that way. But every now and then, there was bound to be a fuck-up. Two boys or two girls who couldn’t help themselves. Who fell in love, and then fell into pure chaos when parted. Guards that ended up professional drunks or went missing weren’t all queer, there was no way, but Hen wondered if more than a few of them were.
“I always thought they wanted to break the guards; that it was a good side-effect of the inheritances, as far as the priests were concerned. I didn’t know why, though. Was it so they could remake us into what they wanted all over again after we fulfilled our first purpose? Or was it so we’d always be afraid to care about anyone again? Perfect fucking soldiers.”
“That’s the most fucked up thing I’ve ever heard,” Dagan said with a sigh. “And it’s almost certainly true, too.”
“Exactly. By all the gods, it’s nice to hear someone agree with the disordered shit I’ve been thinking…I don’t know. My whole life.”
“It’s not any more disordered than the situation itself, darling. Also, if it makes you feel any better,” Dagan added after a moment, “if for some reason I had to choose between scouting and never seeing you again—or until after death, somehow—it wouldn’t be an easy choice.”
“That’s why I can’t compare it.” Hen put his forehead to Dagan’s. “I tried to be hopeless about us. You wouldn’t let me.”
“No, sweetheart. We can fight and cry and yell, but never be hopeless.” Another little kiss. “The start of a new life. The stirrings of resistance. Restoration of the Heart Wood. Everything around us has always been about hope.”
“And if we really do all die?” Hen laughed.
Dagan did too. “Then we die trying. Together.”
*
Though they hardly slept, Hendrik and Dagan were careful not to keep the rest of the camp awake—or made a good faith effort at it, anyhow. They’d both been remarkably thirsty for each other, as it turned out, and so they’d drunk deep and long. When everyone looked fresh and ready for the trail the next day, Hendrik was relieved.
Piret, seeing him arrive by the fire with Dagan at his side, nodded in acknowledgement. Hen was mildly annoyed that she probably thought they’d made up because she’d commanded it, but that couldn’t last long. Very little could’ve disturbed Hendrik’s peace that morning.
Kajja, who sat down beside him, breakfast bowl in hand, said, “Are you finally going to stop treating him like he’s as useless as Kass, now?”
Hendrik prickled. “What in all the burning hells?”
