Work Text:
(truth: mutually assured destruction has always been an acceptable outcome)
Any outcome that leaves the Farm a smoldering wreck scattered across its own ashes is an acceptable one. More than acceptable, even; It is what Jed has been working towards for years. He gave 'live and let live' a shot. They didn't agree. So now he's not taking that chance anymore. If they won't leave him to his life, he'll just need to make sure that they can't ever interfere with it again.
That he lives to savor it has never been a requirement.
(lie: loving daniel makes him want better)
It makes him want, yes, but all the wrong things, and in all the wrong ways. Like a wildfire wants drought, like prey yearns for predator.
Desire is dangerous, as much a weakness as it is weapon. If there’s anything to be said about the Farm, it is that their lessons have kept him alive. Some of them, anyway. This is one, but Jed isn’t above cutting off his nose to spite his face.
Because this is what desire lets him have:
He and Daniel, sitting together, soaking in the sunlight, breathless from exertion and shared laughter. Fingers intertwined. The curl of his name, whispered reverently. A smile in a pair of eyes blue like the endless sky.
He aches in ways physical and not, but softly. A kind of pain he can tolerate, a kind of pain he craves.
If this is weakness, let it be for now. There will be time later to ward against the flaws.
(truth: he does love daniel, the only way he knows how)
Heart beating from adrenaline, from the fight, from the flight. Is he confusing danger with love, or is it just that they’ve always been the same thing? Jed doesn’t know and he doesn’t think that he’s ever cared.
He wasn’t built with the capacity for love. Not the giving of it, not the receiving. It’s something he had to carve out himself, a hollow space in his chest stuffed full of every scrap of affection he could get his hands on. He pieced love together from shattered fragments, and it shows in his eyes, his hands, his kiss.
Daniel still laughs anyway, returns it as though he can’t taste the bitterness lingering beneath the surface. Maybe he really can’t.
(lie: it will be enough to save him. save them)
The world has stacked the deck against him, but even if it hadn’t, Jed knows that salvation isn’t in the cards for him. Once upon a time it might have been for Daniel, but that’s the point of all this training, isn’t it? Of the harsh afternoons sprawled across the rooftop, agitating one another’s bruises, pain answered with pain.
The point is that this is the kindest gift that Jed can ever give Daniel: the strength to save himself, so that he won’t be crushed under the weight of his own collapsed hopes waiting for a rescue that will never come.
He’ll mold Daniel into something stronger than he ever was. Something better. Something that won’t break when life inevitably proceeds as it must, and the two of them are pulled down into the abyss.
(truth: gravity cannot be denied forever)
He’s not delusional enough to think otherwise. It is a peace he has made with himself long ago; no matter how he twists together recollection and desire, this is not something meant to last. This dance between them ends only in heartbreak, and heartbreak ends only as Heartbreak did: Jed in pieces and the leftovers someone else’s mess to clean up.
(lie: it is enough that it is put off for now)
Nothing is ever enough, not when it comes to this. The emptiness in him wants like a black hole—destruction and desire melded together in the worst way. when the last moment comes, it will have to be Daniel who shuts the door, who pulls the trigger.
But until then…
Daniel grins at him, a slight hint of boyish mischief in the sheen of his eyes. “This is nice,” he says, leaning forward as though he were the one caught in the event horizon.
Jed laughs. Short, quiet. But never satisfied, never satiated.
“Yeah,” he agrees. “It is.”