Chapter Text
“Right,” Jesper cast the last page of the transfer document he’d been working through down onto the desk, “That ought to do it,”
Wylan nodded, stretching his arms out over the desk to bring a soft, welcoming ache through his elbows and twisted his wrists. He began to pack the papers back into their neat little piles; he and Jesper had designed a colour coding system and bought a set of paperweights to match a key that Jesper drew up, so that Wylan could easily see what each stack of documents corresponded to but that to anyone else would just look like a whimsical set of office supplies. The system had to be updated relatively often to keep up with whatever they were working on, but memorising it was never a problem for Wylan.
He stood and stretched his spine slightly, they had been sitting here for hours now, and then began to pack away the little pen and ink set Jesper had been using earlier.
“Are you taking Kiada to Church tomorrow?” he asked, not looking up from the desk.
“Erm, I need to check with her but yeah, I think so - Wy?” Jesper laid a hand gently against Wylan’s arm, and Wylan looked up in slight surprise at the nervous edge to his voice, “Can I talk to you about something?”
Wylan watched him for a moment, nodding slowly and returning to his chair at the desk. When he moved Jesper began to pull his hand away, but Wylan caught it in the air and planted them together on the surface of the table so their fingers were part way intertwined.
“Something serious?”
“Well- I mean, I’m kind of hoping - but if you don’t want to then obviously not, and I don’t want to try and sway you if you don’t want to, but I only- I mean, forget I said ‘hope’, okay, I just mean that I thought-”
“Jes,” Wylan squeezed his husband’s fingers lightly, “Take a breath,”
Jesper obliged.
“What’s going on?”
Jesper shifted slightly, but he didn’t withdraw his hand from Wylan’s.
“I wanted to talk to you about Nachtspel,”
Wylan stiffened in spite of himself, his fingertips pressing painfully into the hardwood surface of the desk. When he and Jesper moved into this house and began the renovations, redoing the office was one of the first things they did - and moving it was another. They’d discussed it at length when they did the remodel; Wylan wasn’t confident that any amount of redecorating would let him exist in the room - the shape of it, the structure, things they couldn’t change would be doomed to reconstruct it in his mind over and over again. Instead, they had their study set up in what had once been a guest room of the Van Eck home, and what had once been his father’s office was now a disused space. It had almost ended up becoming Aimee’s, but Wylan didn’t want his daughter’s bedroom to be a haunted one.
“Nachtspel?” he repeated, cursing internally as he stared at his and Jesper’s hands on the desk because he knew that Jesper had noticed his muscles tightening.
Wylan hadn’t celebrated Nachtspel in a decade. Actually, celebrated might not be the right word for that - he wasn’t sure it had ever been a celebration for him. But for the past decade, Wylan had pretty much been refusing to acknowledge its existence.
“I know we were able to work around it pretty easily last year because of the trip,” Jesper was saying, “But Aimee mentioned it in passing the other day, and…”
Wylan nodded.
“I know,” he murmured, “It’s not fair to keep her from it - either of them,”
“I just thought, if you’re not up for it - and you don’t have to be, I’m not trying to pressure you - but that maybe I could just take the girls to one of the events in town or something, you wouldn’t even have to come if you don’t want to. I just- I don’t…” Jesper pursed his lips for a moment, and now it was Wylan’s turn to feel his hand tightening against the desk, “I’ll have to talk to them, I know, to make sure that it’s not too much or anything, but they’ve missed out on so much. I don’t want to…”
“I know,” Wylan said again.
And why deny it? He’d been thinking about this too. He didn’t want his daughters to grow up with sour attitudes to something that was only supposed to bring them happiness. Nor did he want to take something away from them, just because he’d had it taken from him. And maybe, just maybe, there was a tiny part of him that didn’t want this to be taken away from him anymore. His father didn’t deserve that satisfaction.
“I reserve the right to check out at any time,”
Jesper squeezed his hand.
“You always have that right,”
Wylan nodded.
“Okay. I want to do it. Properly,”
Jesper smiled.