#also! going to say that liz /does/ think of joui as hers. but also she thinks she’s a failure and terribly unfit for his respect

[rabbit-harpist]

parting deferred

For perhaps the last time, Joui talks to Liz. pre-desconjuraçao, also posted to my ao3.

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Shamefully, his gaze passes over her at first. She’s only another old woman sitting in the back of the library, white head bowed over a study table. But the way she frowns at the mess of papers before her is all Liz.

Joui tries his best to assess her condition as he navigates the shelves. She’s alive. And unhurt, and perhaps even sober. He can breathe more easily now that he sees her. 

Someone unexpectedly exits a row in front of him—he startles, reaches for the weight at his hip, apologizes, heart racing—arrives.

Another moment of unfamiliarity. Joui could be looking at someone else’s grandmother reading the paper.

He shakes off the moment, and the uncertainty that suddenly rises in his chest.

“Liz-senpai?”

It takes a moment for his voice to register—she’s absorbed in whatever the papers are telling her. He can see the recognition in her face, the way the hand that holds the pen stops its motion. 

She covers her notes as she turns to him. He tries to suppress the sting. 

“Joui? What do you want?”

“You didn’t respond to the group chat,” he says, his tone more accusing than he means it to be.

“I muted it. It was distracting me.”

“We were worried. Liz, I went to your apartment and the landlord said it had been sold. And you weren’t answering calls or texts and—“

“How did you find me?” she asks.

Joui is thrown off. “Ce-Kaiser tracked your phone,” he says honestly.

Liz purses her lips. “I see.”

“We were worried,” Joui explains. (I was worried) “You disappeared—what if something had happened to you?”

“Well. As you can see, I’m fine. As fine as I can be. You can tell that to the others.”

Joui looks at the pile of papers—newspapers, dated recently. “Liz-senpai, what are you working on? Can I help?”

She slips her notebook into her bag, covering the table with the other hand. “Joui—I appreciate your concern, but I’m fine. I can take care of myself.”

And she can—Joui knows Liz, and she’s strong—but how strong is she now? She’s smart—smart enough to get to the bottom of this, whatever it is, and put herself right back in danger.

He misses hearing her theorize, brow furrowed and eyes alight. He misses her laugh and her smile. He misses Liz herself—she’s right in front of him again, but she feels a thousand miles away. 

“Don’t disappear again,” he pleads. “We need you.” (I need you, he wants to say, but he’s terrified that it won’t be enough to keep her with him.) “The Order needs you.”

That makes Liz laugh—a bitter echo of his memories. “The Order doesn’t know what it’s doing.” She straightens the papers on the table. “Symptoms,” she says. “They’re treating symptoms, and the heart is rotten. We throw ourselves into a brick wall over and over until every one of us is dead and broken.”

Joui doesn’t know what to say. It’s a mirror of the thoughts that haunt him at night, laid over the memories that never fade. He doesn’t have words of hope—he has to be the strong one now, but he doesn’t know what to do.

Liz turns over the newspapers, arranging and rearranging them feverishly. Joui watches and he doesn’t know what to say and he doesn’t know what to do. 

He puts a hand on her shoulder, finally, clawing past the uncertainty that freezes him in place.

“Liz-senpai. Look at me, please.”

She meets his gaze, and whatever he’d tentatively planned to say next escapes his mind. Her eyes are older than the wrinkles on her face. The eyes of the monster of death flash into his mind—a thought he despises as soon as he has it.

“Liz-senpai?” he repeats.

“Get out, Joui,” she says, and she just looks tired now.

He isn’t hurt that she’s still putting herself in danger—he understands the itch to do something, anything. He’s hurt that she doesn’t want him beside her. Joui isn’t sure of many things these days, but he knows bone deep that they need to protect each other. If he loses Liz—and Arthur and Kaiser—every part of him that matters will have died.

“If you think I’d leave you, you don’t know me,” he snaps. 

Something flashes over Liz’s face. “I suppose I can’t make you do anything—it’s not like I’m your mother.”

Joui wishes she had hit him instead. He tries to say something else and can’t manage it.

He thinks she wants to say something else too. She pauses as she walks away, looks back—but she leaves anyway.