Work Text:
It’s like this:
You’ve heard of the white elephant, right?
It’s this thing where, in ancient times - somewhere in Asia, maybe, he thinks, he’s not sure - in ancient times they’d have an emperor, and the emperor would be all like “hey, it’s me, I’m the emperor. And I’m so rich that I’m gonna go travelling all around my country, and I’m gonna…” No, that’s not it. Like, the emperor probably did still do all that travelling, but…
He’s getting off track. So the emperor’s this really rich guy, right, ‘cos he’s in charge of the whole country - empire - whatever. And if you’re in his court you’ve gotta be really nice to him, yeah? Really… watch your step. And if you didn’t - well, they weren’t gonna be, like, rude to you about it, at least not out loud, but you’d still be in hot water. But the point is that if the emperor didn’t like you, he’d give you the gift of the white elephant.
(It’s like this: Jimmy finds out who his soulmate is when they die.)
White elephants are sacred. They’re holy, they’re revered - they must be protected at all costs. They cannot be allowed to die.
White elephants are also (and you’ll pardon his French here for a minute, eh) an absolute bitch to take care of. They’re sensitive to the sun, because they’re so pale, which means you have to keep them undercover - especially in the… whatever country - empire, darn it - whatever place you live, where it’s hot. It’s hot in the place, not sure if he mentioned that. They need to be fed and watered and constantly accompanied, which means you need a dedicated white-elephant-carer to clean its ears and bring its dinner and pick up after its poop. Forever, ‘cause you cannot allow your white elephant to die. You’d be unholy and you’d have disgraced a gift from the emperor; you just can’t do that.
(It’s like this: Tango apologises, and Jimmy laughs, and tells him that they’d better set up camp near spawn, because he’s sure they’re gonna need it. The laugh’s only skin deep, though.)
The gift of a white elephant would, more often than not, run the recipient completely dry of cash in a matter of years. And then you couldn’t come to court any more. And then the emperor wouldn’t have to put up with you - not when he hadn’t really wanted to in the first place, and he’d given you the white elephant to show it.
But someone’s gotta take care of the white elephant. It’s gonna die on its own. So you bankrupt yourself taking care of a stupid animal nobody wants. You ruin your life in the name of some ethereal, intangible goodness of looking after the gift some higher power’s given you, and you… Well, he supposes you could complain, but he doesn’t know anybody who does.
(It’s like this: they make a ranch together; they make a home. Chickens and cows, seeded rows of wheat outside. A ramshackle little thing that’ll pitch over at the first strong wind, but it is theirs.)
Night falls, and beside the velvet quiet that is Tango fast asleep, Jimmy slips outside.
He sort of knows the way - he came by here earlier, when they were doing their round trip of begging, but it’s one thing coming by on your way past the rest of the entire map and it’s another trying to get there straight through the valley. More than once Jimmy wonders if he might just be lost out here, doomed to spend the rest of the night blocked up in a one-by-two crevice in the side of a stone wall lest he get them down to red before the game’s even really started. But he doesn’t get ambushed, or attacked, or assaulted, or anything else that starts with an A and involves Tango waking up in the dead of night to silence and his soulmate’s dying screams. He just walks through the forest for maybe twenty minutes - dodges a couple of spiders - hears the cackle of a witch and steers widely around its source. Otherwise, it’s almost weirdly quiet.
Makes it a lot easier to find the base he’s looking for, though. He’s about halfway down a relatively steep cliffside, pick in hands to keep him anchored on the smoother stretches of stone wall, when the bridge finally comes into view - and from there it’s a climb, scrambling from outcrop to outcrop, trying to get up to the flat bit without losing his balance or being sniped by some random skeleton he probably wouldn’t even be able to see from here. Up and up and up until cliffside becomes slope becomes grassy surface, and Jimmy kneels for a second, panting until he can catch his breath. He’s made it.
Thank goodness Scott and Cleo live on opposite sides of the gorge, is all he’ll say.
It feels like good fortune that he can actually see the faint flicker of torchlight coming through Scott’s windows - at this time of night, he was honestly expecting to have to wake Scott up, and to deal with the consequences from him and… Pearl or Martyn, right? One of the two? - in the morning when they showed their sleep-deprived faces. It actually spurs him on to be brave enough to knock without the usual several minutes of back-and-forth hesitation.
(Of course, Jimmy should have never been so stupid as to think that good fortune would fall on him.)
Scott opens the door a few seconds later. He’s holding a handful of sticks. “Jimmy?”
“Hey, Scott.”
“What’re you doing here? It’s, like, two o’clock in the morning.”
“I - look, I’ll get to that. Why are you up?”
Scott sours. “Pearl’s Australian. She’s refusing to just cooperate with the time zone.”
“Oh.” On second thoughts, maybe this is why Jimmy feels a little jetlagged. He’d thought it was the soulbond, insisting that since Tango was asleep, Jimmy ought to be joining him. It might be both, actually - Jimmy wasn’t exactly listening the entire time when Grian laid out the rules of the game. (He checks out of Grian’s explanations a lot. It feels like payback for the stupid late-slip excuses Grian’s always giving.) “That’s not good.”
“Yeah,” continues Scott, scowl somehow deepening, “you ever had second-hand frostbite, Jimmy? You know what that feels like? That’s what I would call not good.”
“Oh,” he repeats.
“Yup.”
They stare at each other for a moment. Then Jimmy takes a breath. “Look -”
“- if you’re having troubles with your soulmate, Jimmy, I can’t help you.”
“What? No, it’s not - Tango’s great.”
“And I don’t want to team again, I’m happy with Cleo -”
“Look,” Jimmy blurts, “I’m feeling bad enough already, with the whole we’re the first yellows thing, and I know we’re not supposed to be repeating teams if we can help it, which is why I’m not here to team with you, and I hope you’re having a bloomin’ wonderful time with Cleo if she’s the person you want to be with, I just wanted to - talk, because I haven’t really been able to do this sort of thing with anybody else ever since the first game and obviously Lizzie’s great as well but she’s not here right now so you were kind of the only person I could think of that would be willing to put up with me for long enough to actually hear me out about my problem and it’s okay if you aren’t willing to put up with me any more because let’s face it most people aren’t and I can just bog off if you want me to but I really felt like it would -”
“Jimmy. Shut up.”
The stream of self-deprecation dies in his throat. Oh, gosh, he’s just been dumping his issues all over somebody without warning them again. “I’m so sorry.”
“Just -” Scott huffs sharply “- come in.”
Inside Scott’s base is a lot warmer than it was out on the cliffs. It’s quiet but for the gentle crackle of lantern fire, and the wood barely creaks under his feet. Scott was always the better builder. “You’ve done well, for the first week.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve had a lot of spare time to work on it, ‘cause somebody doesn’t know how to sleep when it’s good for her.”
“But - I’ve been seeing you and Pearl about. In the day.”
“She won’t sleep on my terms. I won’t sleep on hers. There’s about a three hour window where we overlap.”
“You’re getting three hours a night?”
“It’s enough.” Scott opens a chest and drops the sticks in. “And my chests are beautifully sorted now.”
“That’s gonna drive you insane,” Jimmy worries.
“Yeah, well, I’m gonna be the one with a stable support system to handle my craziness. Pearl’s gonna crack, or she’s gonna… crack.” He whirls a finger around his ear.
Jimmy blinks. “Now I almost feel like you should be the one coming to me.”
“Oh, right - you’re here for a reason!” He pulls a few stair blocks from the side bar, placing them across from one another in the middle of the floor. “Take a seat, take a seat.”
So he sits.
“Right,” Scott says again, settling down across from him, legs crossed loosely and arms folded, “tell Uncle Scott what the problem is.”
“No, you’re not - I’m not calling you Uncle Scott.”
“Fine. Tell your poor abandoned ex-husband -”
“You’re not abandoned, we’ve just both got new partners!”
“- tell your tired as hell ex-husband with a very short fuse what the problem is, Jimmy.”
Jimmy wavers. “... You’ve heard of the white elephant, right?”
His ex-husband nods tersely. “Like Secret Santa, but with terrible gift ideas.”
“No, it’s - well, that’s probably based on the thing I’m talking about, but… It doesn’t matter, actually. I guess you don’t really have to know what the original thing is to - never mind.”
“And this has something to do with you and Tango?”
“Yes. No. Basically. It’s - gosh, I feel bad for bringing it up now. I shouldn’t have come, really.”
“Go on, Jimmy. Two a.m. therapy is the best and only therapy you’re gonna get out here.”
Jimmy dips his head. “Okay. It’s like this. White elephants are - basically, they’re this thing, where you think you’re getting a gift, but it turns out to be a massive drain on your life, and you can’t get rid of it or you’ll basically be a pariah.”
“Right.”
“And… well, I just… I feel like these soulbonds are the so-called gifts here.”
“I thought you said Tango was great?”
“No no no, he’s great! It’s - it’s me.”
Scott purses his lips. Understanding flickers in his eyes. “Ah. It’s just Jimmy Hates Himself, Episode Five Million And Twelve. I can do this one.”
“Oi - that’s not… shush yourself, Scott. I don’t -”
“You really do.”
“I’m not -”
“You definitely are.”
“Okay, so if I’m so predictable, what’s my problem?”
Scott leans forward. “From what you’ve said already, I’m gathering that you feel like you’re just gonna be a drain on Tango. Like you’re gonna weigh him down for the whole game, like you’re gonna pull a canary and die first again, and you’re gonna take him out with you. And I’m also betting that you’re gonna sit there while Tango tells you - and anyone else, for that matter - tells you that you’re not a burden and you’re not useless and you’re not cursed, and just think that they’re only saying that because they believe in the golden magic power of the soulbond that can do no wrong and make no stupid choices.”
Oh.
Well -
yeah, that’s - that was pretty much it, actually.
Out loud, Jimmy does not say that. “I sort of am cursed, though, is the thing.”
“Oh, really? Who cursed you?”
Jimmy draws a blank.
“Jimmy,” and now Scott’s reaching out an arm to pull Jimmy close as well by the shoulder, “listen to me when I say this. You do not have to give one single solitary damn what the soulbond says.”
“I mean - and I’m gonna be frank with you here, Scott - you’re not exactly the most unbiased of sources here.”
“Exactly! Imagine if you’d asked Impulse that question! He would’ve told you no, it’s fine, you can trust the stupid soul magic, no doubt about it. I’m one of the few people on the server who actually understands that the soulbond? It does nothing beyond link your sensations.”
“I don’t know if I… follow.”
“So - me and Cleo, right? We got divorced. And we can still feel Martyn and Pearl! Obviously! You can’t just get rid of magic that easily. It’s still there. But that doesn’t mean we love them.”
“Yeah,” Jimmy frowns, “‘cause of that whole thing with the Nether, wasn’t it?”
“In principle. But the important thing is that, no matter what our magical links are trying to tell us, we still decided that we didn’t want to have those connections. We chose other people. It’s not the soulbond that makes you stay with your partner. Love takes work.”
“Okay…?”
“So,” Scott gestures widely like he’s teaching a classroom of toddlers what comes after three, “if you’ve already spent the whole week with Tango, and literally died for him, and built a whole base together, and a business model, and you’re still together, then that means…”
“Okay, but - but it’s like you said, it doesn’t mean he must love me, because it’s - it’s the white elephant, I told you. It’s - you have to take care of it or you’re done for.”
“Does that mean I’m done for? Because I’m certainly not planning on looking after my white elephant any time soon. She can take care of her damn self.”
“No - Scott - you’re not -”
“I’m not complying with your - your frustrating little worldview where everybody’s secretly out to get you, Jimmy. Tango loves you. I love you. We all love you. I do not get what’s so hard about grasping that for you.”
Jimmy’s getting overwhelmed. He can tell because he’s angry and upset and desperate to get out of this house all at the same time. “Scott,” he half-growls, “don’t just say things like that like they don’t mean anything.”
“I do mean that, Jimmy.”
“You can’t -” you can’t be sure. You can’t know, you can’t tell me something that big and expect me to just believe it “- you can’t -” you can’t be telling the truth.
“Hey - Jimmy, hey - Jimmy, breathe.”
Oh, he’s breathing, alright. Some would call it hyperventilating. Jimmy calls it freaking painful.
"Jimmy, I'm - Jimmy - I'm sorry -" and he feels so stupid, for getting so worked up when all Scott's done is be a bit mean, but he's crying and his brain is sort of fuzzing into static at the same time and he can't "- Jimmy, can you breathe a little more slowly for me, okay?" Scott's voice sounds like it's coming from far away, or underwater, maybe, like he can't be reached from here.
Jimmy tries to catch his breath. It won't come. He just keeps gasping, ragged inhales forcing themselves back out of him as quickly as they came. God, how pathetic is he? Whatever happened to sticks and stones?
"Damn it," Scott mutters, turning away, "can I - who can I - oh, why did you have to turn up in the middle of the night, you -?"
Look at him. Two o'clock in the morning, having a breakdown at his ex-husband's house because he felt bad about dragging someone into his personal mess. What a joke.
Scott says something else, but he can't parse it - the static has spread into his vision, too, now, even with his face buried in his hands, and he wonders for a second if he might white out entirely. Jimmy's never fainted before, although he's seen other people do it.
He's still expending too much of his energy on crying to actually do anything but keep himself breathing. Coming to Scott's, he decides, was a mistake.
When he finally feels like he's been all wrung out - no sobs left to pour out of him, just heavy breaths and hollowness - he looks up. Scott's gone. Of course he is. Jimmy wouldn't want to deal with Jimmy either, especially on three hours' sleep. Instead, on reflex, he checks his comm.
Tango whispers to you: jimmy??
Tango whispers to you: jimmy are you at the ranch
Tango: guys does anyone know where jimmy is
Tango: i just woke up and he's not home
PearlescentMoon: Sorry no
Smajor1995: hes at mine tango
Tango: oh good i'll be right over
Smajor1995: hes having a funky lil breakdown
Smajor1995: dw you didnt do anything just be warned
Tango: what's wrong???
Smajor1995: he just gets easily upset
Smajor1995: i think better to tell you in person than over main chat
It doesn’t look like anyone’s been woken up in the middle of the night, at least. Anyone except for Tango.
That might have had him making some sort of wordless, guilty utterance earlier in the night, but as it is Jimmy just stares at the screen in front of him and rereads it a dozen times. Scott’s flippancy about his funky little breakdown is - well, it’s not appreciated, alright. That man needs to get some rest, Jimmy decides, or he’s going to end up ticking half the server off by the end of the week, and that’s not exactly a great idea in a death game.
He’s interrupted in his irritated musings by the sound of hushed, muffled conversation outside - Jimmy stands and ends up pressing himself against the window, trying to see far enough around the corner of the wall to work out whether it’s… Yep. Tango’s here. Jimmy runs sweaty hands across his face and hopes that it’s a good enough approximation of washing it, because he (admittedly probably in vain) kind of doesn’t want Tango to know he’s been crying.
Scott, who’s been muttering away to Tango this entire time, spins around to let him in, and immediately catches eye contact with Jimmy through the glass. He jerks his head back towards his newest guest, as if to say, here - I fetched your partner, since you were too busy being useless.
Jimmy steps back.
There’s a second, after Tango comes inside, where they just look at each other. Jimmy can feel a twisting in his gut, and he’s not sure if it’s his or -
Tango surges forward and wraps him in a hug.
And Jimmy wants to melt into it, really, he does - he wants to be part of this picture perfect soulbond relationship that the world has promised him, he wants to believe that everything’s just going to fall into place, or that Scott’s right and Tango really is just doing this because he wants to be here. But he just… can’t. It can’t be that easy. So he stands there, tense under Tango’s touch, and waits for it to end.
“Jimmy,” Tango murmurs in his ear, “I was so worried.”
“Sorry.”
“I just - you scared me to death. I woke up and I was so - I was freaking out already, I guess that was because you were… struggling, over here, but I thought we were in danger and I came looking for you but you were missing and I couldn’t… Just - don’t run off like that, okay? Not without telling me first.”
“Okay,” Jimmy says hesitantly.
Tango pulls back, just a little, just enough to look Jimmy in the eyes. It feels like putting a finger directly in a wound - it's too much, too soon. Jimmy looks away. "Hey," says Tango, "what is it?"
Jimmy doesn't say anything.
"It's okay if you don't wanna tell me," his soulmate continues, "I just… I can't believe… were you having a panic attack, before?"
He opens his mouth to answer no, of course not, but finds the denial dry on his tongue. "Maybe," he says instead.
"Because - I don't think I've - it was… I woke up and I just - couldn't breathe. And I was so scared, and you were gone, and I didn't know the soulbond could… do that."
Great. Not only has he saddled Tango with the responsibility of him, but he's also given the man a second-hand breakdown within days of meeting him and possibly taught him what a Jimmy-level freakout feels like. (Panic attack is new. He’s always sort of dismissed that term as a thing that happens to other people - Jimmy doesn’t have any mental health background, any formal diagnoses or therapy under his belt or anything, so how could he be somebody that panic attacks happen to?)
“And I know that you and Scott have… history, but he told me you guys weren’t cheating on me, and I definitely wanna believe him when he says that -”
“Yeah,” Jimmy rushes, “yeah, no, definitely not. Scott’s my ex, I wouldn’t - I feel bad enough lumping one person in on my problems at this point, I don’t have any plans to get Scott involved as well.”
“Good,” says Tango, a little breathless. Jimmy can feel the exhaustion coating the back of his throat, dripping down into his lungs - he wonders if Tango ran here.
“So it’s - everything’s alright, yeah? Can go home now.” It’s a careful omission of any pronoun, because Jimmy doesn’t want to presume that he and Tango are going home together, not now that he’s pulled a stunt like this. It would be easy enough for Tango to just renounce him here and now, claim the ranch for his own, leave Jimmy to figure out something in the wake of it. (Scott’s done it; Cleo’s done it. Martyn and Pearl must have done it. Jimmy could do it too.)
“If - if you want, we can?” Tango’s hand creeps up, resting at the base of Jimmy’s hair, and the nerves in the nape of his neck light up. It’s such a small gesture, but it’s an intimacy he really hasn’t had since… well, since Scott. “But I was thinking we should probably stay the night, seeing as, y’know, it’s so late.”
“Both of us?”
“... yeah? Where you go, I go. I mean, ideally.”
Jimmy scoffs quietly. “That’s a terrible idea.”
“Why?”
“I - Tango, you know I’m cursed, right? You remember from the last two games?”
“I remember you were the first one out last time,” Tango frowns, “I didn’t realise it was, y’know, a thing.”
“Oh. Oh, it’s a thing alright. It’s - every single time, Tango, even outside the games, any time there’s a chance to die first, it’s me who does it. I’d call that a curse. Canary in the coalmine, someone called it once, ‘cause of -” he gestures feebly at the place where his wings would spread if he weren’t bound from flying in this life “- well, I guess you’ve never seen them before, but…”
“You have wings?”
Jimmy nods. “Nice ones, too. Really - go with the hair, an’ all.”
“I’m sure they’re beautiful.”
He leans up against the wall, presses his back to Scott’s apparently meticulously sorted chests. The pressure doesn’t exactly help him forget what he’s missing at the moment, but it sort of feels like it’s what he should be doing. Remembering his role in this world, his place. “I’m sorry, by the way. In advance.”
“For what?”
“For dying. It’ll be me again. I’m sure of it.”
“Hey - things are different this time, aren’t they? You never know -”
“Okay, but - Tango, but I do know. I know it’s gonna be the same again. And don’t try to tell me it’s gonna be - ‘cause it’s not, and I just - that’s why I came - Scott gets it. That there’s nothing we can do to get out of it. I knew you wouldn’t understand.”
His frown deepens. “I’ll try to understand.”
Jimmy had thought he was fresh out of tears, but a new wave spring to his eyes at that, and he’s not even really sure why. It’s - maybe it’s something about the - it’s a kindness that feels raw, too-quickly sprouted, undeserved.
“Scott… told me the short version. But I’d like to hear it from you, if that’s okay.”
He’s not sure if he’s ready, not quite secure in the assumption that Tango will take it better than Scott did. But he also feels like he has no place to say no - so he acquiesces. “It’s like this - you’ve heard of the white elephant, right?”
Tango shakes his head wordlessly, and so Jimmy explains. It takes way too long; he keeps getting off track, distracting himself, and he finds by the end of it that he really didn’t know the story as well as he’d thought he did in the first place. Still, as he’s telling it he finds that Tango does nothing but listen. That’s… comforting, in its own small way. Tango just listens, and lets Jimmy finish, and doesn’t try to offer him the words that he’s forgetting when he stumbles over them like Scott does. And he can’t speak for too long, not threadbare as he is from the stress of the last hour - but he does get through it, in the end. And Tango doesn’t complain.
“... I don’t know anybody who does,” Jimmy finishes.
Tango’s expression is kind of inscrutable. He swallows, and when he speaks it’s still a little thickly. “Jimmy,” he says, “I… am so sorry.”
“What?” He’s the one who should be apologising here, really. Tango’s just the guy who got dragged along for the ride.
“I’m sorry that I let you feel like I didn’t care about you.”
“Hey,” Jimmy puts his hands out, “you don’t have to -”
“No, no. I know you’re… hesitant, to accept it. Scott told me you were having a hard time coming around to that. But I’d still be here if there was no link. Please know that.”
“But I can’t, though,” he insists. It’s so - what’s so hard about this that they don’t get? “And you can’t, either.”
Tango pauses, pensive. “Alright. Well… I guess it doesn’t matter, thinking about what-ifs and other worlds. I’m here now.”
“Yeah, ‘cause you have to be.”
“If I didn’t like you, don’t you think I would have left by now?”
“I don’t know. Maybe not.”
“Jimmy, we spent the whole day together yesterday just cleaning up the farm. I could have left then. I could have left before we got the animals, or before we built the ranch at all. I could have left as soon as I died that first time, as soon as I found out that it was you. But I’m still here.”
He blinks. One of the tears from before frees itself from his eyelid, streaks down the side of his face, and Tango reaches up to wipe it away with a careful thumb.
“And maybe it is gonna cost me, being with you. Maybe we’re gonna lose, because you sound pretty sure of it. But I’m choosing to be here anyway. I know that I don’t have to, but I am.”
“It’s a shit job,” he whispers, “being stuck with me.”
“I’ll take it,” Tango breathes back.
It’s impossible to accept. The promise knocks against the wall in Jimmy’s head, desperate to be let in - but that wall’s a mile high and built entirely out of self-loathing, and it is a sturdy flippin’ thing. His eyes well up again, and a rushing builds in his ears; Tango tilts a little where he stands, off-kilter all of a sudden, and their hands find each other’s shoulders to steady themselves. He feels - god, he feels blind, like they’re leading each other through the darkness, like they’ve crossed the world to get here, and maybe that’s accurate, but he’s never felt it more than he does now.
Tango leans in, presses their foreheads together. The wall won’t falter, won’t budge for something so small as a confession of tolerance - but Jimmy thinks he can pretend to accept it for now.
“I’m really bad at this,” he explains quietly. “At everything, but - love, especially. I just can’t make myself believe it’s real.”
“Is that why things fell through with Scott?”
“Not… really. That was kind of the natural course of it - it was over when it ended, and we’re still close, obviously. I’d like to bring you back to Empires, I think.”
“Is that where you’re from? When you’re not in the game?”
“Yeah. You’d like it there.”
“I’m just a Hermit.”
“Okay, but - Hermitcraft is cool. You get that, right?”
“It’s kind of all I know,” Tango shrugs. Jimmy feels the movement under his hands, and it makes him smile, for some reason.
“It’s cool,” he repeats.
“Okay, well maybe I’ll bring you along and you can visit me. How’s that, huh?”
“You’d want that?” Jimmy asks, pretty much on reflex.
“Yes,” says Tango, and it’s painfully, palpably honest. Like he’ll say it as many times as Jimmy needs him to before it finally slips through the cracks in the wall and asserts itself as a truth. Tango wants him. Tango wants to be with him. Tango came to get him.
Tango will take care of him.
He’ll replay it in his mind until it’s true.
It’s like this:
Scott apologises, later, for being so blunt about the whole thing, and Jimmy accepts it. It’s easy to say things you don’t mean when you’re that sleep deprived, after all, and Scott’s already an endless fountain of snark, even on his good days. The pain of it’s dulled by now, anyway, now that he’s back at the ranch, now that it’s just him and Tango.
The morning is quiet, because the birds don’t nest this close, not while the building’s so new. A cow lows across the field - they’ll have to tend to her soon.
Not quite yet, though.
Now, Jimmy lays in bed with his eyes closed, wrapped up in the warmth that is Tango lying next to him, and just… breathes in the comfort of the day. The sunlight is still golden, still just testing fingers of light in the peace of their room, too afraid to make its bold entrance - or maybe too reluctant to wake them up, break the peace. The sun doesn’t know that Jimmy is awake already, though, doesn’t know that he’s drinking in this peace for every drop that he can get, swathing himself in it like air to a drowned man, clutching at it like the handle of his pick when it’s buried in the side of a cliff. To the outside eye, this is just two men - soulmates - partners - curled into one another’s arms, breaths slow and steady and deep.
To Jimmy, this is priceless.
(It’s like this: you are gifted to a stranger, somebody who the powers-that-be believed was the one who deserved your curse. He feeds you and cleans you and keeps you out of the sun anyway. He treats you like you’re sacred, like you’re holy - and you know there’s a parable in here somewhere, but you want to believe that he’s just doing it because he likes you. So you do.)
Eventually, Tango will wake up. He’ll mutter something sappy about having died and gone to heaven already, because the angel that’s awaiting him is too pretty to be real - Jimmy will laugh and duck his head, because it will slam straight into the wall like any other compliment, but they’ll spend the next half an hour just pillow-talking, and that will feel much more like proof.
The sun will keep them company. The night will bring with it the same dark questions, the same worries it always does - but Tango will hold his hand tight enough that Jimmy cannot lose himself to spiralling for all that long, and so he’ll sleep instead.
And maybe the canary’s curse will take them, as it’s taken Jimmy every time before - but that’s okay, he thinks. If he’s going out by anybody’s side, he’s happy that it’s Tango.
It’s like this: they build a life together; they build a home. It is fragile and it is precious, chickens and cows and seeded rows of wheat framing it like a nest - but it is better than the lives that came before. More importantly, it is theirs.
And Jimmy would not trade it for anything.