milliways_bar | (no subject)

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Xaldin is sitting in the bar with a sign. Xigbar wrote the sign and it reflects his taste in speech. However the sentiment is correct.

Wanted: One professional shrink who's okay with magic and shit.'

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"Indeed," Teja says, smiling just a little. "Very much so, having spent many years as Nobodies, both of you."

Pause.

"Now I must choose between my love for Charlie, and my wish for physical faithfulness, struggling as these other people you knew were."

"Yes. Any time you want to talk you can rest assured that I won't judge you. The heart wants what it wants and it isn't to your shame."

"Thank you," Teja says. He does feel it, too. He will not be judged -- neither as old-fashioned, nor as weak-principled, depending on what his choice would be.

"You helped me." Xaldin says simply "You were my friend when I could not be yours."

"But now, you can be, and you are," Teja says.

"Yes." he says with a small, but honest, smile.

"Shall we share a drink?" Teja suggests. "It need not be intoxicating."

He remembers that Xaldin the man cannot stomach much of it, while Xaldin the Nobody drank Atlantean by the bottle to feel some effect.

"Did you suffer from your yearly illness again?"

"Cider would be nice." Xaldin likes hot juice as much as some like hot chocolate "And I did. Right on schedule over Christmas."

The one Christmas he was awake will be treasured his entire life.

Teja orders cider for them both -- simple hot cider for Xaldin, and the spiked version Gotho or Liuta had brewed that he'd had at Adalgoth's, when he appeared there as a ghost. He has become partial to that.

The rat bring the drinks almost immediately.

"That is a pity," Teja says. "There was not much happening here for those holidays, thought, this time. But one may imagine you would have liked spending them with Xigbar."

"I have always been sick on Christmas." Xaldin says with a smile "We celebrate it after I get better. When I was very small he would unwrap my presents for me so that I could play with them while I was awake even though I wasn't in any shape to really appreciate the holiday."

"That is sweet to imagine," Teja says, with a wistful little smile.

What must it be like, to have one that you feel about as he felt about Totila, once, and at the same time as he feels about Charlie, now? Their importance squared, so vital that it survived even utter nothingness?

Xaldin couldn't tell him. Xaldin has always had Xigbar. He no more knows what it's like to be without the other one than Teja knows what it's like to have a Xigbar of his own.

"For a selfish little jackass he can be exceedingly thoughtful." Just - usually only about Xaldin.

"He has a very foul vocabulary, too," Teja says. "And great swagger, at times. It is good that now he has a heart again to put into those."

Be a selfish little jackass, and feel good with it!

"He lives up to that swagger." Xaldin is pretty stupid about Xigbar sometimes. Most of the time. "And the speech is just part of him."

"Yes," Teja says. "I do not mind it at all."

He would mind, in others. There are words he never uses himself.

Well, hardly ever.

Xigbar is special. And he'd preen to know that he was the subject of this conversation even as he'd expect it.

"Will you be here more often, again?" Teja asks.

It would be good to see the former Nobodies again.

And Lexaeus, so warm-hearted even as a Nobody he would wait until all others have gained heart.

"I do not know." Perhaps not reassuring but true. There are often things that make being away better than being here.

"I will be ever glad to see you, and to speak with you," Teja says.

The boys, that Xaldin was so fond of, have not been here for a long time, either. Perhaps he sees less reason without the dearest friends he found here.

Many factors come together. "I am glad."

Teja nods quietly, and sips his cider.

[[OOC: Wrap here?]]

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