milliways_bar | (no subject)

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Tuesday - Gil had always liked Tuesdays for some reason. He trotted out of the kitchen, head filled with plans for that night's dinners and began to pick up empties.

Of course most of them had already been done - but it was a good excuse to get out of the kitchen for a few and see some people - any people.

"Don't take it personally," he said to Ratty, who was on his shoulder. "I like to talk to humans and gods and stuff as well."

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"Gil?" Asar-Suti asks, turning up from near the fireplace where he'd been sitting and brooding.

"How's things today?" he asks, almost - timidly.

"Oh, busy busy," Gil says smiling and stopping to fish a plate out from under the table.

"You got up early this morning?" he said. "Have you been having fun?"

Asar-Suti heaves a deep sigh.

"Gil..." he says, cautiously.

"Yes, love?" Gil asks, moving closer, face concerned.

Sooty often looks thoughtful lately but it's not often he sighs like that.

Asar-Suti looks as if he were going to cry.

"Something is wrong. I don't understand what," he says glumly. "I'm sorry if I offended you in some way..."

Positively flinching, and with all the signs of a dreadfully bad conscience. Experience with Lochiel has taught the Dark God to deeply fear the anger of the one he loves.

"Oh, Sooty," Gil is shocked. "You haven't offended me at all."

He crouches, ungainly with his spindly legs, beside Sooty's chair, and lays his hands on his right way round knees.

"Please don't be upset. I'm sorry - for whatever I've done to make you feel that."

For Asar-Suti, Gil's knees aren't the wrong way round. Gil is a faun. He has faun legs. They are supposed to be that way around, with delicate hocks.

"You haven't done anything," he says, glumly. "I'm sure it's my fault. I can be a right pest at times, and talk before I think, and upset people. I'm sure Lochiel had reason to be upset about me, too. If I get on your nerves, I'm really sorry."

He bends forward to kiss Gil, very tentatively, as if to make sure he's really welcome to do so.

Gil doesn't flinch from the kiss but returns it, even as his stomach turns over at being compared to Sooty's great if ultimately unhappy love.

At least Lochiel was human, he thinks, whereas I ...

He puts his arms around Sooty's shoulders, shifting uncomfortably and murmurs, "No, no, you've done nothing wrong. You don't get on my nerves. We'll - work it out."

"Yes," Asar-Suti says, in a rather small voice.

"It's just that I don't even quite get what 'it' is - I feel so stupid!" he declares, sheepishly, most likely digging himself in even further.

"I love you," he adds, lamely, craning his neck for another kiss.

"And I love you," Gil says against his lips, "even though ..." His voice dies away and he hugs Sooty fiercely, even while telling himself not to be stupidly possessive.

"Even though what?" Asar-Suti says, hugging back just as fiercely. "Even though I'm a stupid overbearing dolt at times? I know I am. I'm sorry. I try to mend my ways, I really do."

Anything for Gil. He really wants nobody else, just his faun, Asar-Suti thinks, secretly just as fiercely possessive.

He just leans his cheek against Gil's, and sighs again.

Ratty from Gil's shoulder squeaks, tugging his ear and Gil sighs too.

It's hopeless really. He's seen for himself how affectionate Sooty has become with other people - like calls to like and even though Sooty can assume faun shape he can't assume a faun mind.

"It's not you," he says sadly. "It's me - if only I had stayed human. If only I had had the sense to accept Jack's offer ..."

"Do you miss other fauns, now?" Asar-Suti asks, voicing his deepest worry. "Would you rather have a real faun than a shape-shifting pool of purple fire?"

He shakes his head. "I thought you were going to look into that animagus process from your world to see if you could have both shapes? You have changed often enough already; your morphogenic field would know both shapes as 'really you', I suppose."

"Oh no, not other fauns," Gil assures him. "They are silly little creatures - you saw what I was like a few months back. They are sweet but so boring. No, Sooty, I just wish I could be what you want me to be. The animagus process might serve but I'd need help with it - help I can't find here."

"You would have to go to your own world for a bit?" Asar-Suti asks, nodding.

"But for that other part - do you know who I really want you to be? Just you. Your gentle, sensible soul, your practical disposition, your brutal faun logic, your love, the way you take care of everybody and tame wild creatures with a sentence. The expression in your eyes when you look at me. You could be human or faun or centaur, Cheysuli, Ihlini or Greenskin, angel, demon or fae - I don't care as long as you are yourself. But if you want to go to your world to learn, of course..."

He stops running out of breath, and bends to kiss Gil again.

"I think I may have to," Gil says, "but I don't want to. In the meantime, Sooty, you do know you're free don't you?"

"Everybody is free, even Kitt Knight, though he denies it," Asar-Suti declares. "What do you mean by 'free', particularly?"

Gil looks down, drawing a little circle on Sooty's knee with a finger, then bisecting it with a wiggly line. It's no real surprise to Gil that nothing happens.

"I mean," he says softly, "if you find someone else who can please you - who can do the things I no longer can - if you have the opportunity for happiness please take it. I don't want you to be - lacking in any way."

Gil should probably have used his wand for that, but Asar-Suti doesn't say so aloud, because he is touched and a bit shocked at the same time.

"I have been a pool of purple fire for aeons," he says. "And when I came here, human-shaped, and - failed at getting what I came for" - trying not to mention Lochiel's name twice in one conversation, Asar-Suti is perhaps just as unnerving for laboriously not-mentioning him - "I went on a binge, that is true. But I can live without poking myself into somebody, or being poked that way. It's much more important to me to kow that in whatever shape, you still love me, and want to be with me - you do, do you?"

"Of course I do," Gil whimpers, his eyes filling. "And I very much want us to be happy again."

He pauses, wincing as his hocks twinge.

"But won't it be easier if I'm human again?"

Asar-Suti almost starts crying as well. Well, he does bawl rather easily.

"Sit beside me - let me hug you!" Asar-Suti says, making room in his chair.

So familiar.

"And yes, I think it might be easier if you were able able to be both faun and human - for your sake as well, not just for mine. I want you to be happy again as well, and to be happy again with you, and for that, you should be all you really can be. Faun and man both. And not worry that something might be lacking. Because it is all yours, really."

Gil wriggles into the chair by Sooty, his hooves sticking up rather comically and hugs him, petting his hair.

"I'll get it sorted out," he promises. "If there's any way I can do it I will."

Asar-Suti pulls him very close, his head on Gil's shoulder.

"Yes, I trust that you will - I trust that we both will, and work out whatever needs to be worked out," he says.

Gil will probably have to do things on his own, though, Asar-Suti muses, and he should keep his orverly large divine nose out of the actual animagus, and not pokinate details.

That would just cause new problems, he suspects.

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