Disclaimer: I own nothing.
Author's Note: So I just busted this out while I was supposed to be working from home. Not sure where it came from, but it kicked in the door and got written in two hours, so.
Hope ya'll are staying safe in the quarantine
I really don't know what "I love you" means. I think it means "Don't leave me here alone."
-Neil Gaiman
Yuan loves many people.
He loves every single Renegade that has ever come under his care in the two hundred odd years that the organization has been going. Even if he doesn't like some of them, he loves them with a ferocity that most who make his acquaintance think he has forgotten. He loves them when they drive him up a wall, and he loves them when he sits with them in the infirmary—a never-ceasing sentry and support. He loves them when he toasts at their weddings, and he loves them when he holds their grown children at their funerals.
He loves their brave spirits, their teasing, their hands on his shoulders, their children on his hip, loves their quickfire wits and their desperate, hard-won brand of loyalty.
He loves the people of Triet and Flanoir, who he interacts with the most. He love them in a distant way to see their waving him down when he comes through the marketplace, their offers of sweet and a cup of coffee while he waits for his Renegades to finish their shopping. The sweets he will tuck into his pocket and save them for the children back in the base. The shopkeepers and laundresses trade him gossip for gossip, and Yuan joins in on their betting pools about whether the two lasses that work at the local inn will figure out that they've been mooning after each other for over a year now. His Renegades come and find him sometimes, sitting by the stalls with a worn mug of coffee, watching the world go, while one of the aunties tuts at him and shoves small dumplings in his hands because he should eat more.
Yuan loves them for their community for their open willingness to connect and care for strangers—not that they're strangers anymore after all this time. He loves them because they remind him that the world is not as terrible as Mithos says, that there are still people somewhere that are worth all of this.
He loves Mithos and Kratos, still, after everything. He loves them with a distinct, terrible ache that is as part of him as his lungs, his own slow-beating heart. If Yuan wants, he can stretch his memory to a time when he did not know them, but those years were nothing, quiet and empty in the way of early childhood memories. For better or worse, they are part of his family, and he hates them so often, hates Mithos for what he has done, for what he has twisted their dreams and work into, hates Kratos for the way he gave in, the way he lost the fight in him, hates him for the yawning chasm in his eyes, deeper than the void of space.
But hate and love are not exclusive to each other, Yuan knows. There are many days he wishes he could forget them, that he could be entirely numb to their presence, their memories, but he cannot. They have been through their best and worst with each other. Dragged each other through blood-drenched fields and shattered landscapes, hoisted each other high on their shoulders and celebrated a relief they never thought would come. Yuan sits and schemes and machinates around Mithos' intricate web holding the worlds apart, and there is a quiet hope in his heart that they will live with him in this new world the Renegades dream of, that they can learn to be scholars, or farmers, or artists—whatever they wanted to be, without expectations of…anything. A quiet life. They have never known it. Yuan is not sure he is even imagining it properly, but he thinks he is.
Yuan has known them and loved them for all except ten of his four thousand and twenty-odd years of life. He loves them for their faces tucked into his shoulder in the middle of the night, trembling with nightmares, loves them for beaming smiles in the sun, and smacking kisses on the cheek, loves them for fascinated delight in the secretive lantern-light of a forbidden library, loves them for their grief, their devotion, their ferocity, their viciousness and gentleness in turns. Loves them for cleverness, for imagination and rebellion, and the fragile tissue-paper quality of their sweetest memories.
Yuan has loved Martel Yggdrasill since he was fifteen years old. He had not known it, exactly, the shape of it, but it had been a fact of him as much as the fact that Kratos is his brother in all but blood, and that he was born under Volt's star. He loved her when she snapped at him, exhausted with deep shadows beneath her eyes and blood beneath her fingernails that wouldn't be scrubbed away. He loved her with her cold venom when anyone dared to think she wasn't capable of anything she set her mind to. His love blossomed in laughter when she punched out a soldier for his comments about her, and another punch when another soldier, years later, said something rude about Kratos' heritage. He loved the thick callouses on her hands, and her fierce kindness that had her lips trembling as she shared her own meager rations, and had her comforting shell-shocked children even as she tried to fight her own mind as the bombs went off. He loved her when she ran into the surf, her hair flying about her, giggling at the cold sea, and he loved her when they lay in the hills behind their encampment, sticky and sated and her sugar-sweet smile against his skin.
He loves Martel—present-tense. He has loved her nearly all his life, and will love her for whatever slice of eternity he has ahead of him—for a faith as unwavering as the earth beneath their feet and the stars in the sky. He loves her for the way she loved others, clutching them tightly and her teeth bared at any who would dare take them away. He loves her for her strength of wishing for an easy path, but never finding one. He loves her for giving him light in a darkness he thought would never fade, for letting him be her crutch when the world tried to take her out at the knees.
He loves her for her sweet smile and the mischief in her grin, and he hates her for dying and leaving them, hates her for that same kindness that had her on the road the day those humans came. He hates himself for hating her, even if it is only in his darkest moments, when the space of four thousand years gapes open and raw in him.
He loves Botta in a way that surprises him. He had not expected, upon meeting a dirt-poor, janitor/inventor at the Palmacosta Academy, to one day wake up with him in his bed in the wee hours of the morning, and to know the taste of his skin, and know the shape of his amusement. He does not expect the blueprints he finds with Botta's handwritings and measurements to find their way into every inch of the Renegade bases, into the sleek shapes of the flying machines that a janitor dreamed of when he was supposed to be working. He does not expect the dry wit from the young man in line with him at the kebab stand in Palmacosta that day, does not think he will hear it for the next eighty years. He does not expect the quiet loyalty of a man who learns to fight for a group of Renegades, for complete strangers who envelop him into a new family. Botta's loyalty comes with an odd kind of trust that involves him following suggestions and questioning orders, but Yuan does not have many direct orders anyway. Yuan loves Botta for the scorch marks in the labs, with the utterly unabashed look on Botta's face while one or more of his shame-faced students scrape their shoes on the floor. He loves Botta over shared wine and books, and for his quick fingers stealing sweets from his pocket in the markets. He loves him for the casual bump of their shoulders when they're on laundry duty, and for the unamused angle of his eyebrows when Yuan ends up in the infirmary. Again. He loves him for the pages of sketches and scribbles that lay on the nightstand, and for the ink-stained fingers idly braiding Yuan's hair.
He loves Botta for being entirely unexpected, for his humor so subtle that most wouldn't catch it, for his bull-headed determination that looks something like hope. He loves him for solid strength beneath his hands, and the laughter hiding in the corner of his mouth. He loves him for his openness with his inventions, and his patience to those he teaches. He loves him for the blush in his ears, and his half-asleep bumping into bed in the late night. He loves him for the pride that tilts his chin and squares his shoulders, for the resolute set in his jaw when he stands himself between people spitting hatred at half-elves in the street, and the young people under his care when they go to market.
Yuan loves him for never flinching from duty, and hates him for not being content to stay behind at the base. He loves him for never demanding that Yuan remove his wedding ring, and he hates him for dying in the sake of cleaning up a tangled mess of Yuan's making.