Chapter Text
In the house belonging to Illuga and Lohen, silence was never simply silence. It was always filled with meaning, taut like a crossbow string, ready to snap at any moment and strike painfully at the nerves. Today, this silence rang especially loud, broken only by the steady ticking of the old clock in the living room and the rare crackling of firewood in the fireplace.
Lohen sat in his armchair, upholstered in dark green velvet, which he had chosen himself many years ago at some fair on the outskirts. He held a book in his hands, but had not turned a page for a solid hour. His gaze, usually sharp and attentive, capable of noticing the slightest detail in the behavior of an adversary or a friend, was now unfocused, directed somewhere into the space before him. Shadows danced in the fireplace, distorting his lean, aristocratic face, making it look older and harsher. His long fingers, accustomed to delicate work with mechanisms, gripped the leather binding with a barely noticeable tremor.
At the other end of the room, by the window overlooking the neglected garden, stood Illuga. He was looking at the bare branches of the trees, which the wind tormented mercilessly in the early winter twilight. His posture seemed relaxed: one shoulder leaning against the window frame, arms crossed over his chest. But Lohen knew him too well. He saw how tense the muscles of his back were under the thin fabric of his shirt, how Illuga was almost imperceptibly tapping a finger against his elbow—a sure sign that a storm was raging inside him, which he was trying with all his might to suppress.
The quarrel that had erupted an hour ago was not like their usual squabbles—short, sharp, like an exchange of blows, followed by an equally stormy reconciliation. No, this quarrel was different. It had been smoldering for weeks, growing out of small grievances, unspoken reproaches, and mutual misunderstanding that, like poison ivy, entwined their lives, strangling everything alive.
It all began with another risky venture that Lohen had embarked on without consulting Illuga. Nothing new: dark deeds, dubious allies, the scent of danger that Lohen seemed to inhale with morbid pleasure. But this time, everything was different. This time, Illuga did not simply listen to his report with a gloomy expression, did not just make a caustic comment about Lohen's recklessness. He exploded.
And he unleashed upon Lohen everything that had accumulated over the long years. Every careless word, every instance when Lohen placed his ambitions and his game above their shared peace, every time he returned home with blood on his clothes—someone else's or his own, it did not matter. Every time Illuga had to wait, not knowing if the one he... the one with whom he shared shelter was alive.
At first, Lohen tried to defend himself, to parry with his characteristic logic and cold irony. He spoke of duty, of a great purpose, of how Illuga simply did not understand the complexity of the situation. But his words only added fuel to the fire. Illuga did not want to hear about duty and great purposes. He wanted to hear about something else, something for which Lohen seemed to have neither words nor understanding.
"The issue is not complexity, Lohen!" Illuga's voice, usually low and calm, rang with tension. He finally turned away from the window, and his eyes, the color of stormy skies, flashed lightning. "The issue is that you have once again decided everything for the both of us. You once again placed yourself at the center of your chess game, and left me somewhere on the edge of the board, a pawn that can be sacrificed or simply forgotten!"
"That's not true," Lohen put aside the book he had never read and rose. He was slightly shorter than Illuga, but now, squaring his shoulders, he seemed no less imposing. "You are exaggerating. I have always kept you informed."
"Informed?!" Illuga laughed bitterly. "You present me with a fait accompli! 'Illuga, I am leaving for a week,' 'Illuga, do not wait for me tonight, I have a meeting with people who might kill us.' Is that keeping me informed, in your opinion? That is notification, Lohen. Cold, soulless notification, which puts me on the same level as your butler."
Lohen winced. The comparison was unpleasant, but, as always, Illuga's words were precise and struck right at the heart of the matter. He himself did not understand why he acted this way. Why, knowing that Illuga was the only one he trusted unconditionally, he still continued to act alone, leaving him behind, as his most reliable rear guard, but not as an equal partner on the battlefield.
"I do not want to involve you in this," he said quietly, averting his gaze. "It is dirty work. The less you know, the safer you are."
"I did not ask you for safety!" Illuga exploded, stepping forward. "I asked you for trust! For you to see me not as a porcelain doll that must be protected from drafts, but as a person who can stand shoulder to shoulder with you! But you, it seems, do not understand at all what it means to be together. For you, 'together' is when I wait for you in a warm house, and you come home, tired and heroic, and I am supposed to lick your wounds without asking unnecessary questions."
A heavy pause hung in the room. Lohen stood, staring at the floor, feeling two feelings battling within him: wounded pride and a strange, aching melancholy from the realization of his own wrongness. Illuga was right. Damnably, devastatingly right. And that only made it more painful.
"What do you want from me, Illuga?" he asked, raising his head. His voice sounded hollow. "For me to drop everything? To renounce my life's work?"
"I want you to finally decide who I am to you," Illuga replied. He stopped a few steps from Lohen, and now they stood opposite each other like two duelists. "Your partner? Or just a convenient appendage to your life, which is always there and always will be, because he supposedly has nowhere else to go?"
He fell silent, catching his breath. And then he said the very words that tore the taut silence apart like a thunderclap:
"Leave, if you want. If you want—stay. I don't care anymore. I'm so fucking tired."
The words hung in the air, heavy and merciless. Lohen flinched as if slapped. For the first time in a long while, he heard in Illuga's voice not anger, not resentment, but a bottomless, all-consuming weariness. It was more terrifying than any fury. Defeat sounded in those words. As if Illuga had finally run out of strength and let go of the thread that bound them together, no longer believing it could bear their shared weight.
"What did you say?" Lohen asked quietly, although he had heard every word.
"You heard me perfectly well," Illuga turned away and walked back to the window, staring into the darkness. His shoulders slumped. "I am tired, Lohen. I am tired of fighting for a place in your life. I am tired of waiting for you to deign to notice that I am not just a shadow behind your shoulder. I am tired of your secrets, your risks, and your eternal 'I have decided.' Do what you want. If you want to leave—leave. I will not hold you. If you want to stay—stay. But I am not asking for that anymore either. I... don't care."
This "I don't care" was the most terrible lie Illuga had ever uttered. Lohen knew this. Knew it as surely as he knew the earth was round and water was wet. Illuga was not indifferent. If he were, he would not be shouting now, would not be standing at the window with his knuckles white, clutching the windowsill. But the very attempt to say it, the very fact that these words were spoken, meant that the cup of his patience was overflowing.
Lohen slowly, as if in a dream, walked to his work desk standing in the corner of the living room. On its perfectly organized surface lay blueprints, letters, and a small traveling valise, which he always kept at the ready. He placed his palm on the cool leather of the valise. The option to leave was always there. It was part of his life, as familiar as breathing. To pack in five minutes and disappear into the night, to dissolve into the labyrinth of streets, to get lost in a series of safe houses and clandestine meetings. It was simple. It was understandable.
He could leave right now. Slam the door, leaving behind this difficult conversation, this demanding gaze, this unbearable rightness of Illuga. He could return to his habitual element of solitude and shadows, where he needed to answer to no one, share decisions with no one, feel this aching, draining guilt before no one.
But something stopped him. Something that was stronger than his years-long habit of escape. He looked at his hand resting on the valise. His gaze fell on a thin scar on his wrist—a trace of a stray dagger blow he had received during one of the skirmishes. Illuga then, without uttering a word of reproach, had silently washed and bandaged the wound with his own hands. His movements had been spare and precise, but Lohen remembered how the tips of his fingers had trembled.
That was long ago. But such moments, like precious stones, were stored in his memory, creating the very foundation that did not allow him to simply turn around and leave. A foundation woven not of loud words, but of thousands of small, almost imperceptible gestures of care that Illuga had given him, asking for nothing in return. Except for one thing—the right to be by his side not as a servant, but as an equal.
Lohen pulled his hand from the valise and turned around. Illuga still stood with his back to him. In the firelight, his figure seemed carved from stone—monumental and unassailable. But Lohen knew that this monumentality was just a defense. He came closer but did not touch him. He just stopped a meter behind.
"Do you think this is easy for me?" he asked. His voice sounded unusually quiet and devoid of its usual irony. "Do you think I do not understand that my way of life is a constant blow to you?"
Illuga did not stir, but Lohen noticed how his shoulder twitched almost imperceptibly. He continued, and each word came with difficulty, as if he were pulling splinters out of himself:
"I am used to living alone. Used to relying only on myself. I... don't know how to do it any other way. I do not know how to share... all of this. Plans, risks, responsibility. I am afraid. Do you understand? I am afraid that if I let you stand beside me, I will drag you into such a quagmire from which you will never escape. And my protection, which you call mistrust, is the only thing I feel I can do right for you."
He fell silent. The confession had been hard for him. The words scratched his throat, coming out hoarse and cracked, stripped of his usual polished rhetoric.
Finally, Illuga slowly turned around. His face no longer blazed with anger. It was tired and haggard, but in his eyes, fixed on Lohen, there was not indifference, but a tormented, tense expectation.
"That is called guardianship, Lohen," he said. His voice had also become quieter. "And I am not a child, nor your ward. And if you have not yet realized, I have long been up to my neck in this 'quagmire.' I have been in it since the very day we crossed the threshold of this house. Your desire to protect me from information does not make me invulnerable to the consequences of your decisions. It simply deprives me of the right to vote. The right to know what I am risking for."
Illuga sighed heavily and ran a palm over his face, wiping away the remnants of tension.
"Leave, if you want," he repeated, but this time his voice lacked that devastating, icy detachment. Rather, it was a statement of fact, an offer of a choice. "If you want to leave to think all this over alone, I will understand. I will not hold you. I truly am tired. I have told you everything I think. The decision is yours."
And he turned away again, this time towards the fireplace, stretching his hands towards the fire. The gesture was simple and mundane, but there was an abyss of loneliness in it, which Lohen suddenly felt with incredible sharpness. He understood that "I don't care" had not been a threat or the beginning of the end. It had been a white flag. A recognition of his own powerlessness to change their relationship alone. Illuga had laid down his arms and left them lying on the battlefield, giving Lohen the right to either pick them up and begin a new, different battle, or simply step over them and leave.
This time, the choice was not between "his own skin and duty," not between a "risky plan and a safe path." The choice was far more frightening and yet the simplest of all. The choice between a habitual solitude, in which Lohen was the king and sole subject, and a life where one had to learn every day to be together.
Lohen stood in the middle of the room, between the valise and the fireplace, between the past and the future. The ticking of the clock seemed deafening. He looked at Illuga's back, and suddenly, a painful longing came over him to touch that tense shoulder, to feel under his fingers the living warmth that had been the only real anchor in his life, full of illusions and reflections. But he did not dare. The gesture seemed too simple and too complicated at the same time.
Then he turned and walked away from the living room. His steps were slow and heavy. Illuga did not turn, but Lohen heard him inhale convulsively, with a kind of wheeze. The door creaked, and Lohen went out into the corridor.
The darkness of the corridor seemed cold and alien to him. He reached the door to his laboratory, took hold of the handle, but stopped. There, behind that door, were his blueprints, his mechanisms, his inventions—his entire ordered world, where he was a demiurge. But for some reason, the thought of that world brought no habitual solace now. It seemed sterile and lifeless to him.
He walked further, to the front door. He laid his palm on the cold wood. Beyond it lay freedom, night, the unknown, his familiar game of cat and mouse. He could leave now, and in an hour or two, a new plan would already be ripening in his head, a new brilliant move that would make him forget the longing lapping at the bottom of his soul. He could leave. Illuga had said he didn't care.
Liar. What a liar he was.
"I don't care."
The most terrible words he had ever heard from Illuga. And the most deceitful. Because if he truly did not care, he would not be standing by the fireplace now, turned into a pillar of salt.
Lohen sharply, until his fingers ached, squeezed the handle of the front door. And then he released his fingers. Slowly, as if overcoming the resistance of his entire being, he turned and walked back into the living room.
Illuga stood in the same pose, but, hearing the footsteps, he flinched and turned around. Bewilderment was in his gaze. He clearly expected the front door to slam, but Lohen had returned.
"If you want to stay..." Illuga began, but his voice broke.
"I want to stay," Lohen interrupted him. The words came unexpectedly easily. Perhaps because it was the truth. Perhaps the most difficult truth he had ever had to utter. "I want to stay. But not like before."
He walked to the sofa standing opposite the fireplace and sat down. He did not sit in his own armchair, which stood apart, but on the sofa—their shared sofa, which they had bought together once, while planning the house's furnishings.
"I do not know how to do this," Lohen continued, looking into the fire. "I do not know how to share plans. For me, a plan is something that matures in my head and either works or it does not. I have never discussed my ideas with anyone before they became reality. But... I will try. I will try, if you are ready to tolerate my... mistakes in this matter."
Illuga slowly, as if not believing what was happening, walked to the sofa and sat at its other end. There was still a distance of a couple of handspans between them, but it was closer than they had been all last month.
"Do you understand that you have just promised me the bare minimum?" asked Illuga. There was no mockery in his voice, only a bitter statement of fact. "You promised to try to talk to me. For most people, that is not even a question, it is the foundation of a relationship. And for us, it is a breakthrough."
"I understand," Lohen nodded. "I know I am terrible at this. But I have realized one thing. Leaving would have been easier for me. It is the truth. More familiar. But I do not want you to think that I... don't care."
He spoke the last words with emphasis.
"Because I do care, Illuga. Many things may not matter to me: intrigue, money, power... But not you. You are the only constant in my equation, and if I lose you, all my calculations will turn to dust."
Illuga was silent for a long time, digesting what he had heard. The fire crackled, casting warm, golden highlights on their faces. He reached out and laid his hand on the back of the sofa, so that his fingers were a few centimeters from Lohen's shoulder.
"You say that as if it's the solution to a geometric problem," he finally said. "I am not a constant, Lohen. I am a person. And I am tired of being just a point on your coordinate system."
"That is not what I meant..."
"I know what you meant," Illuga interrupted him. "But learn to phrase it. You are supposed to be our master of words, when it comes to interrogations or negotiations. Just try to apply that skill to us. Tell me now, in simple words, without metaphors and equations. Why did you come back from the door?"
The challenge had been thrown. Lohen felt everything inside him clench. This was the hardest thing—to speak directly, without the protective shell of irony, cynicism, or scientific terms.
"Because I do not want to be without you," he said. His voice was quiet, almost a whisper, but in the silence of the living room, every word rang out distinctly. "Because the thought of walking into the night and not returning, of not finding you here in the morning, seemed unbearable to me. I do not want to leave. I want to be here. With you."
Illuga closed his eyes. His face, having momentarily lost its control, reflected a whole gamut of feelings: relief, pain, disbelief, and hope. When he opened his eyes again, they were suspiciously bright.
"Leave, if you want..." he began for the third time that evening, but Lohen cut him off sharply.
"Enough!" He raised his voice for the first time that evening, but not from anger, from desperation. "Enough repeating that! I do not want to leave! I want to stay. But you must stop setting me conditions that imply my departure. Give me a chance to do this differently."
Illuga looked at him with a long, studying gaze. He saw before him not the self-confident, sharp-tongued intriguer he was used to. He saw a man who had clearly stepped onto shaky, unfamiliar ground and was trying with all his might to keep his balance.
"Alright," he said slowly. "I will stop. But you remember this evening. Remember how close everything came to falling apart completely. I am really fucking tired, Lohen. That was not a figure of speech. I am at my limit. And if we want something to change, we will both have to change."
He moved a little closer, reducing the distance between them. Their shoulders almost touched.
"I am no prize either," Illuga continued. "I pressured you, I demanded something you perhaps were simply not ready for. But I did it because for me, 'together' is not just a word. It is an action. It is constant work. And I am ready to do it, if I know that I am not alone here."
"You are not alone," Lohen, yielding to a sudden impulse, covered Illuga's hand lying on the sofa with his palm. The gesture was slightly awkward, but sincere. "Forgive me. For everything. For making you feel unnecessary. For making my care look like neglect."
"Do you know what the most terrifying thing was today?" asked Illuga, not pulling his hand away. "Not the quarrel. But the fact that you walked towards the door. I thought you would really leave. And my 'I don't care' at that moment seemed so pathetic and helpless even to myself. I lied. I do care. I have never not cared."
"I know," Lohen simply replied. "I have always known it."
They fell silent. The silence in the room had changed. It was no longer taut and ringing. It became thick, like honey, filled with the tension they had experienced and the peace that had come to replace it. The storm had passed. The house, their shared home, had stood firm. It was considerably battered, the roof leaked somewhere, there were drafts from the cracks, but the foundation had survived.
"What do we do now?" asked Illuga after a long time. The sky outside the window was already completely black; only rare stars pierced through the veil of clouds.
"Learn," Lohen answered. "I will learn to speak. You will learn to trust that my words are not just a concession. And together we will learn to live not as two loners under one roof, but as... a family."
He spoke the word "family" cautiously, as if tasting it. It was unfamiliar, but warm.
"Where do we start?" Illuga turned to him, and in his tired eyes, for the first time that evening, a spark of interest flickered.
"To begin with..." Lohen stood up and offered him his hand. "Let's have supper. I heard your stomach rumbling, and the tea has long gone cold. I will prepare something. And then... then I will tell you about the meeting I am planning for next week. I will tell you everything, from beginning to end. All the risks, all the participants. And I will ask for your opinion."
Illuga took his hand and rose. He looked at their clasped palms, and the corners of his lips twitched in the semblance of a smile—tired, but genuine.
"That sounds like a plan. Finally, a plan that concerns us both. And you know what?"
"What?"
"For once, the phrase 'if you want to stay' sounds not like a bitter smirk, but like an invitation."
Lohen could not find an answer. And there was no need for words. They left the living room together, leaving behind the dying fireplace, the old clock, and that specter of a rift that had hung in the air all that endlessly long evening. Ahead of them lay the kitchen, a simple supper, and a long, very long conversation—the first truly frank conversation in many years. Ahead lay their shared life, which, as it turned out, was worth fighting for, even when there was no strength left, even when it seemed all was lost, even when, from powerlessness and fatigue, the most terrible words slipped from the tongue: "I don't care."
Because in reality, they did care. And this knowledge, simple and clear, became their main support. Their silent, unspoken oath, sealed not by words, but by the readiness to leave and the conscious choice to stay.