Work Text:
"Sooner or later you love what you lose."
“Hm?” Kirin looked up, breaking away from fiddling with the power port on his latest machine - he couldn’t even remember what it was, at the moment, just that he could not figure out how to hook the damn thing up to the power supply, and that he couldn’t go to bed until he did - to look over to where Lying was lounging on a chest, staring blankly up at the ceiling but clearly seeing something very different, arms pillowing their head and feet hanging, just barely- they were so tiny it still boggled Kirin sometimes - off the end of the chest. “What was that Lying?”
“And I lost everything.” Lying continued as though he’d never interrupted, carrying on whatever strange thought was currently occupying their mind. “The whole world, just. Sheared away. By you.” Here they turned their head and looked at Kirin, staring him straight in the eyes, and though their own eyes remained distant and far away, Kirin thought he still saw something like reproach and a cold, hurt anger in them, burning fiercely but buried deep, deep beneath the surface. “And in the dark, wishing, longing for the light, I found the truth in those words. I heard them from you, I think. Fitting, isn’t it? Or, was it you? It’s so hard to remember, now, and I suppose it doesn’t really matter. In any case, I always found them ridiculous; how can you love something once it’s gone, if you never loved it while it was present?” They paused for a moment, and Kirin wondered whether they were expecting some sort of reply, but before he could come up with one they had already resumed speaking, in the same measured, thoughtful tone so unlike their usual scathing bite. “And yet. I never really liked you, before. Oh, I appreciated you as a rival, and I admired your passion for all your little… projects. But to be honest, I couldn’t stand you. Your company was just… unbearable. And then you locked me away. You left me with nothing to do, gave me every reason to hate you, and, god, did I try. All those nights and days, and every single second in between that just piled up like so much rubbish - because what good is time if you have no way to measure it or spend it? - all that that time spent just trying to convince myself that I should hate you for what you’d done, but I found that I just. I couldn’t. I couldn’t do it, couldn’t do this one, perfectly simple thing. Instead, I just felt this emptiness, this… loss. I missed it all too much, the way it’d been, before, to be able to hate any part of what made it what it was. As the darkness wore on, I missed the light, of the moon and the stars and even, eventually, of the cruel and unforgiving sun; as the air grew stale I missed the wind, as the garden shrivelled and died I missed all the life that had made such a nuisance of itself on the surface, and as the loneliness pressed in… I missed you. And I learned that in time, loss makes fools of us all, and lovers out of even the most cynical. As revelations go, this was perhaps not the most earth shattering, but. I just thought you might like to know that you were right. God knows you won’t hear me say that twice.” Here they smiled, just a little, a wry little twist that was just a little too hard, a little too spiteful to feel genuine, the intensity never leaving their eyes even as they turned them back towards the ceiling. Kirin wondered whether perhaps they had buried the emotions of those… however long it had been - neither of them could even begin to guess how much time had actually passed, from Lying’s perspective - so deep that even they couldn’t see them anymore. Despite what they’d said, Kirin couldn’t believe that they didn’t harbour at least some ill-will towards him for his actions. He would have, if their situations had been reversed, and he considered himself much less vindictive than the small witch. “Then again, perhaps if I’d understood what it meant, I might not have disagreed with you at the time… You talk so much of love, Kirin, did you ever notice that? It makes you hard to understand, sometimes… But perhaps in this case, ‘love’ wasn’t your kind of love at all. In fact, I’m fairly certain it wasn’t. I think it was mine. ‘Sooner or later, you love what you lose.’ And really, that’s not so bad. It gives you an incentive to get it back.”
Kirin waited to see if they had anything else to say, but they’d fallen silent. Unsure of how to respond, he said nothing, returning to his work in silence as he puzzled over his - friend’s? rival’s? Even he didn’t know anymore - strange burst of verbosity. Maybe he should ask Su about it; surely she would know what that was about. Busy forming his question in his mind, he missed it when Lying spoke again.
"Even if it’s just to ensure that it’s your hands that go around their neck. Isn’t that right… friend?”