Work Text:
Clive was on his way to leave the cloud palace, when he felt the unmistakable presence of a divine aura. It was only tangible to him for a brief moment. Just long enough to make it clear the god in question wanted him to know they had visited. He sighed. He had a good idea which god it was, and who they had come to see. He had been planning to do some important work, but nothing was more important than something Knowledge herself assigned. He turned back towards the living quarters, and made his way to Jason’s room.
He couldn’t be sure that the goddess had personally told Gabrielle to inform Clive about Jason’s relationship troubles, or that it had been for a specific reason, but Clive could speculate. He’d been terrified when Jason had disappeared. He knew the kinds of things his boss was capable of. There was a reason he escorted Belinda to and from the palace every day, and why he’d processed all her new hire paperwork and conducted her training personally. He’d immediately alerted Humphrey, who had enlisted all the local Gellers to conduct a search and rescue, only to find out Jason had just gone on an impromptu road contract. Clive was fully prepared to haul off on him when he finally returned. It was reckless and irresponsible and impulsive, in all the ways that were only charming when silver rankers weren’t looking to get revenge. The only thing that had stopped him was the news that Jason had just been dumped. It was difficult to yell at someone who had obviously just stopped crying. He didn’t want to be the reason he started again.
He waved his hand over the panel by the door, and waited. It slid open to reveal a room with three walls. The fourth had melted away to provide full access to the attached patio. Clive couldn’t see Jason at first, but he had to be here. Otherwise, he wouldn't have been able to open the door.
Eventually, he spotted him, sitting on the edge of the balcony with his legs dangling over the edge, his arms slung across the rail, and his clothes nowhere to be seen. At least he still had his undergarments on. There was a sizeable bottle on the floor next to him. Clive was willing to bet good money it was more empty than full. Jason turned bleary eyes towards him as he approached.
“Clive! Hey, what are you doing here?” Jason’s tone was jovial, in stark contrast to his entire demeanor.
“I just finished speaking with Rufus, and thought I would see if you wanted to go get that drink. It looks like you may have had a head start, though,” he said.
“Oh. Yeah.”
Jason looked down at his bare torso, seeming to just realize the state he was in. Clive expected him to conjure up some fresh clothes, but he made no move to do so. Instead, he gestured with the bottle swaying in his hand.
“I would offer you some, but this might kill you. I think there’s some iron rank stuff on the counter inside.”
“I’ll stick with that fruit punch of yours for now, if you have it,” Clive said, taking a seat next to him. Jason pulled a bright red drink from his inventory and handed it over. Clive took a sip, and hummed appreciatively.
“That is delicious. So how are you doing?” He asked.
“I’m day drinking in my underwear. How are you?”
“Day drinking in my regular clothes.”
“Day drinking specifically means alcohol, not any liquid at all,” Jason told him.
“Oh,” Clive said. “I thought it was referring to having a relaxing break in the sun. It’s not a term on this world. Or rather, I’ve never heard anyone use it before. I suppose I haven’t been in many situations where it would come up.”
“You don’t take relaxing breaks very often?”
“No. Although, that had started to change for a bit, recently. Lamprey dragged his feet on handing over the research from the expedition as long as he possibly could, so I had a lot of downtime while I was waiting.”
“I really hate that guy.”
“Me too. He always makes decisions based on who can get him favors, rather than who is most qualified to do the work.”
“You could get him a pretty big favor, though. You’re friends with me, and you have access to the girl he’s obsessed with.”
“He tried that angle,” Clive said darkly. “He can’t outright order one of his employees to kill someone, so I just pretended to miss the subtext in his words until he gave up.”
“I really put you in an awful position,” Jason said, self-hatred clear enough in his voice that even Clive noticed. It was a lot easier to read Jason’s emotions when he was intoxicated. Clive filed that information away for future reference.
“It’s not your fault a grown man wanted to prioritize his temper tantrum above the safety of the city,” Clive said. “Besides, I knew what I was getting into. I was given a choice, and I made the choice I could live with.”
“It’s not a choice you’d have been forced to make, though, if it wasn’t for me,” he replied, true to character. He was always finding ways to blame himself for everything, except things that were actually his fault. It was one of his more irritating qualities. Clive reminded himself that Jason was already feeling bad enough, and reigned in his impulse to yell.
“That might be true, but it still doesn’t make you responsible. If you followed that logic, you might as well say your own demotion was Miss Wexler’s fault, and I know you don’t believe that.”
Jason shook his head, overbalancing slightly and swaying his whole upper body back and forth.
“No, I don’t. She was just doing her best to survive. I’m the one who went and poked the hornet’s nest.”
“There you are, then. If anything, I was more responsible for the retaliation I’m facing than you were. I wasn’t laboring under any misconceptions of how this would play out. I knew what the consequences would be when I agreed to help. Just like I know we still haven’t heard the last of it.”
“Yeah.” Jason stared out at the water, clearly deep in thought. “I really need to start learning how to think through the consequences of my actions before I take them.”
“I somehow doubt that would make much of a difference,” Clive said.
“I told a goddess to sod off today,” Jason said offhandedly, as if that wasn’t even more insane than their scheme to help the girls. “Right to her face. I’m sure it will have repercussions I can’t see yet. And I’m sure I won’t be the only one facing those repercussions. She offered me the chance to find the people who killed Farrah. She warned me that they were incredibly dangerous, and tried to give me the tools to defeat them. And I turned her down. Who knows how many more people will die because of that choice? Joining a religion seems like such a small price to pay for the chance to save lives, especially when those lives are most likely people I care about. But I couldn’t do it. And I don’t regret it. What does that say about me?”
Clive suddenly had an idea why the goddess wanted him to come here. She would know how frantically he’d been looking for that exact information. Perhaps she’d been hoping he would convince Jason to reconsider. That was a helpful thought, regardless of whether it was true. It allowed Clive to redirect his anger away from Jason and towards the god voluntarily withholding valuable information from the people who could use it most, and using the death of their friend as leverage. He failed to see how Knowledge was behaving any differently from Lucian Lamprey. It wasn’t technically blasphemy unless he said it out loud, but he felt a sense of vindictive satisfaction from the fact that she would know he thought it.
“It says you know where your bottom line is,” Clive stated definitively. “I might not always agree with you on where the line is, but, at the risk of encouraging your recklessness, I will admit I admire your absolute refusal to cross it. Farrah did, too. I think she would like knowing you didn’t compromise that for the sake of her memory.”
Jason swallowed sharply. His eyes watered up again, and for a moment Clive was afraid he was going to cry again. Instead, he took another long swig from his bottle. When he set it down again, Clive surreptitiously slid it out of Jason’s reach, and set it on his other side.
“You don’t think I’m insane and likely to get us all killed?” Jason asked.
“I never said that,” Clive laughed. “But if we do get killed, at least it will be for something worth dying over.“
He wasn’t sure how to properly articulate his true feelings on the matter. For anyone else, he wouldn’t have even bothered trying. But he had promised Farrah, so he had to make the effort. It helped that Jason was so… Jason about things. He knew however much he struggled to find the words, Jason would put just as much effort into understanding what he was trying to say.
“You have no idea what my life was like before meeting you,” Clive said. “How many years I spent resigned to just getting through the day. I could never stand the corruption in this city, but I didn’t know what to do about it. Every idea I had seemed like it would make things even worse. I ended up doing nothing. You might not be great at thinking about the consequences of your actions, but I’ve come to realize that can sometimes be preferable to thinking about them so much you never get around to taking any.” That was something he was learning from Belinda. Her ability to improvise with imperfect conditions was a wonder to behold. Working with her had opened his eyes to just how rigid his thinking had become.
“Maybe not if it gets my friends killed, though,” Jason muttered.
“Your friends are smart enough to decide for themselves whether something is worth getting killed over, and smart enough to get out of the way if they think it isn’t.”
That got a brief chuckle out of his inebriated friend.
“You sound like Farrah, “Jason told him. Clive couldn’t think of a higher compliment he’d ever received. “She was always telling me I need to focus on my own choices, and accept that everyone else has the right to make theirs.”
“I know,” Clive said. “We talked about it a lot. She said I might need to remind you now and then.”
He knocked his arm against Jason’s, earning another tiny laugh. Rather than straightening back up, Jason leaned further in, resting his head on Clive’s bicep. It was an awkward angle, given their height difference. Clive wasn’t entirely sure how to proceed. He wished Belinda was the one here instead of him. She was much better at comforting people. He wished Farrah was here. She wasn’t, though. It was down to him. He took a guess, and shifted his arm around so he was holding Jason in a weird half-hug. It seemed to be the right move, given the way Jason curled into him. Some of his hair tickled Clive’s chin in a mildly uncomfortable way. He used his opposite hand to gently smooth it down, eliciting a soft sigh from Jason. That reminded Clive of the way he used to soothe his younger cousins when they were little. Maybe this wasn’t so foreign, after all. He relaxed, and let muscle memory take over. Absently, his thumb started rubbing circles into Jason’s shoulder. They sat like that long enough that Clive was just about to check whether Jason had fallen asleep, when he spoke again.
“I really miss her.”
“So do I.”
Clive tightened his grip unconsciously, before continuing.
“It’s like you said, though. Like she said. She knew what she was doing, and she chose to–” His voice broke. He swallowed, and tried again. “ To die protecting others, rather than save herself. If you’re going to continue behaving the way you do, you can’t be surprised when you end up surrounded by people who share your values.”
“I suppose not. That doesn’t mean I always make the best choices to support those values, though. I didn’t see you running off to sulk for two weeks after you got hit with the backlash. You were right here, working the entire time. You’re reliable. I’m not.” He gave a weary sigh, hinting that there was more to that statement.
“Is this about Cassandra?” He guessed. Jason nodded, bumping his excessively pointy chin against Clive’s chest. He reminded himself this was not the time for jokes about being impaled.
“Yeah. That’s what she said when we broke up. She needs someone reliable. She said that was just her family, that she disagrees. But I kind of pushed her to say that. Deep down, we both know it’s true.”
Clive also knew that. In fact, he had planned on yelling at Jason for that very thing earlier. He couldn’t stand the thought of agreeing with a bunch of Mercers, though.
“I think you might be confusing reliability with consistency,” he said instead. “If left to my own devices, I can maintain the same routine without fail for years. That’s easy for me. The challenge is stopping to reflect on what I’m doing and whether or not I should be doing it. You might not be terribly consistent in your day to day behavior, but I can always rely on you to look at the external factors in a situation, and to speak up if something is amiss.”
“I’m not sure that’s an asset. Half the time, I speak up before I really understand what I’m saying. I could probably benefit from learning how to swallow my pride and do the job I was assigned. Sometimes, that’s what people actually need.”
“Maybe it all comes back to what we were talking about earlier. When you act the way you do, you end up surrounded by people who share your values. That also means you’ll end up driving away the ones who don’t. Regardless of her reasoning, at the end of the day, you two had incompatible priorities. If she values stability, then, I’m sorry, but it was never going to work out.”
“Are you calling me unstable?” asked the man who’d been drinking lethal quantities of alcohol from the bottle, outdoors, in his underpants in the middle of the day. Clive elected to treat the question as rhetorical.
“And if you value standing up for your principles, you never would have been able to tolerate the realities that came with marrying a Mercer. There would always come a time when you were forced to choose between doing what was right, and what would look good for the family. Isn’t it better to find that out now, instead of several years down the line?”
Jason shrugged, dislodging Clive’s thumb momentarily.
“It would have been better to find out before I trashed everything.”
“Be honest with yourself. Even if you had known in advance how everything would play out, would you have done anything differently?”
“No,” he admitted. “I just wish it could be different. I wish she didn’t have to fall in line with her family’s wishes.”
“She didn’t. Jason, she made that choice.” Clive squeezed the shoulder he was holding for emphasis, as though he could physically push the concept into his body. “She would rather have the stability her family provides than take a risk by going against them. It wasn’t a choice you would make, I don’t think.”
Jason nodded.
“Oh, mate, you have no idea how true that is. I blew up my entire family over relationship drama. I actually haven’t spoken to most of them in years.” Clive recognized that this was a rare opportunity. He tried not to get it wrong.
“You don’t talk a lot about your family. Which, given how much you talk about everything else, seems intentional. What happened there?”
“It was so stupid, in hindsight. I was stubborn, and shortsighted.”
Clive couldn’t think of a non-sarcastic response to that, so he opted for silence. After a bit, Jason continued.
“There was this girl. Amy. My best friend since I was old enough to remember. We did everything together. And I loved her.”
He laughed ruefully.
“And she loved my brother. He never looked twice at her, though, and she eventually gave up on that dream and decided to settle for me. I was thrilled about it. I thought… she finally figured out what she wanted in life. That she wanted me. Maybe she even thought that, for a while. Right up until one week when she went home for a visit, and he realized what he’d been missing out on.”
“Oh, Jason, I’m sorry. That’s awful.”
He shrugged, dismissively.
“It was inevitable,” he said. “I think a part of me always knew that. If I had been a better friend, I would have respected that from the start. Instead, I got so focused on my own goal that I ended up losing the person who mattered most to me.”
That was the dumbest thing he’d ever heard. Clive tried to imagine what Farrah would say. He really wished she was the one having this conversation, instead of him. She would do a much better job.
“Jason, do you think you’re the only one alive with the ability to make decisions?”
Jason twisted his head to look incredulously up at Clive.
“What? No, of course not. I just should have seen how that would go. I should never have let anything happen between us in the first place.”
“She should have seen how it would go. People generally know their own feelings better than anyone else’s. Would you have dated her sister when you knew you were in love with her?”
“Amy didn't have a sister.”
“But would you have?”
“No. I didn’t even date other girls in school.”
“Why not?”
“Because it wouldn’t have led to anything good. I knew who I wanted to be with. Any attempt at dating someone else would have just been a means to an end for me, and I couldn’t do that. It wouldn’t have been fair.”
Clive gave the most pointed look he could manage. It was sadly lost on someone halfway through a bottle of bronze rank liquor.
“And you don’t think she was capable of coming to those same conclusions?”
Jason scrunched up his face, as though Clive’s words were a rotten dumpling he’d been forced to eat.
“I guess she was. I just also know how hard that choice must have been for her.”
“It was a hard choice for my wife too, but it was still her own fault she slept with you,” Clive said. It had the desired result, when Jason burst into a fit of giggles. He buried his face into Clive’s robes in a futile attempt to muffle the sound. Clive felt himself grinning, pleased to have said the right things to cheer his friend up. He was still technically crying, if the growing damp spot on his robes was anything to go by, but at least it was the kind of crying that came from laughing too hard. Clive wrapped his other arm around Jason, offering further support so he didn’t tumble off onto the deck floor. Not that it would matter, since everything was just cloud material, but it seemed like the courteous thing to do.
Eventually, Jason recovered enough to catch his breath.
“Thanks, mate. I needed that.”
He pulled back slightly, looking up with a watery smile. His eyes seemed to have trouble focusing. One second he was making eye contact, and the next, they had dropped down to somewhere around mouth level. The atmosphere shifted, slightly, and Clive wasn’t sure what to make of it. Jason was somehow both more relaxed, and more tense at the same time. He had no idea what had caused this sudden change. He debated whether he was supposed to drop his arms or not. He ended up letting the right one fall back to the floor, but left his other on Jason’s shoulder. It didn’t feel quite natural, and the odd tension popped like a soap bubble, leaving an awkward residue in its wake.
Jason pushed himself back rapidly, bouncing his head on the railing, and hastily stumbled towards his room, babbling all the while.
“Well, I shouldn’t keep you any longer. Thanks for checking up on me, I’m feeling much better. Gonna go sleep the rest of this off and enjoy the bronze rank hangover tomorrow.”
Clive was baffled. He also got up, and went to follow Jason, who was refusing to turn around to look at him. He had clearly done something wrong, but he had no idea what. Jason’s words seemed friendly, but his body language was suddenly standoffish. Maybe Clive was supposed to have let go entirely, instead of with just one hand. This was why he rarely attempted hugging. There were too many unknown variables to account for.
“Jason? Are you…alright?”
“Absolutely! Just way too drunk, and in desperate need of sleep!”
Jason got halfway there, then tripped over his own foot. Clive reached out to steady him, but Jason jerked away with so much force he tumbled right into his bed. Clive stood there with his hand still stretched out uselessly, as Jason curled himself up into a ball. He still wasn’t looking at him.
“Okay then,” Clive said tentatively. “I hope you sleep well. See you tomorrow.” He picked up the blanket bunched up at the bottom of the bed, shook it out, and draped it over his friend. He wasn’t sure if that would make things any better, or even worse, but it was the only thing he could think to do.
It paid off. Jason relaxed slightly as the blanket settled over him. He finally turned around, opening his eyes to give a brief smile.
“Thanks,” he said. “See you tomorrow.”
With that, Clive turned and left the room. He shook his head, as if he could clear it of the confusing exchange he’d just taken part in. Friendship was complicated.
Alone in his room, Jason berated himself. He had almost just done something very stupid. Clive had been looking down at him, with his nose all scrunched up the way it did when he was trying to suppress a laugh, and one dimple showing. Jason had wanted very badly to kiss him. Instead, he made a quick retreat. He knew he couldn’t trust Drunk Jason. Drunk Jason had the self-control of a toddler loaded up on cold medicine. If left to his own devices, Drunk Jason would absolutely make a friendship-ruining mistake. He’d at least succeeded in stopping that catastrophic outcome. But now, he had to figure out what exactly he’d been thinking. As far as he knew, he was straight. This had never happened to him before.
Well. Not never. It was common knowledge that some guys were just universally attractive, regardless of sexuality. A bloke didn’t have to be gay to think about kissing someone like Rufus, with his perfect bone structure, flawless skin, and rippling muscles. He just had to possess a functioning set of eyes. Of course Jason fantasized about guys like that. Anyone would.
Clive was not one of those guys. He was cute enough, but he was also awkward, his hair was constantly a frazzled mess, and his proportions were all skewed, like someone had taken a JPEG of a person and stretched it out lengthwise. Nevertheless, Jason had been overcome with desire for the gangly scholar. He had no idea where it had come from. Was he really that heartbroken? Was he that desperate for comfort? Did he just have something inherently wrong with him, that made him want to sleep with his best friends regardless of gender?
That thought brought to mind a clear visual of Clive, in his bed, and all the things they could have gotten up to.
“Noooope!” Jason shouted at himself. He leapt up, overbalanced, fell to the floor, then got up again more carefully. Then he made his way to the bathroom, hopped into the shower, and turned it all the way to cold. He stayed there for a few minutes, letting the chill seep into his body and clear his mind. He tried to do one of the mental exercises Farrah had taught him. He was too drunk to do it properly, but it still succeeded in replacing all the other thoughts in his head.
When he felt like he was in control of himself again, he turned off the tap. Without bothering to dry off, he stumbled back to his bed, and promptly passed out.