#background haidelius

[vampiresuns]

Lay Down, My Friend, We’re Going Home

✴︎ LAY DOWN, MY FRIEND, WE’RE GOING HOME ✴︎

1.5k words. In which Anatole thinks it’s impossible not to love Zurkhi.

This is a lovesong to Anatole chugging his ‘I love my friends’ juice, found family, and the one and only Zurkhi.

Zurkhi and Haider belong to @atypicalacademic​, happy Monday, Kani.

Anatole should’ve known he was going to fall in love with Zurkhi in his own, platonic way the moment he saw him, because he had almost the same face as someone he had loved once, and still carried with him with infinite tenderness. 

The Kaur were a Prakran family, both Hindi and Gujarati, but settled in the capital. Devdas, a doctor, and Rajni, a social worker had seven children: Navneet, a surgeon, Sashi, a cartographer, the twins Althea, a botanist, and Leonore, a therapist and soon to be Doctor of the science of social behaviour, and lastly the triplets: Isha, a theatre student, Vaishnavi, a seamstress apprentice and Ashok, a student of history. 

He had met them through Leonore. Him, Medea and Anatole himself had shared quarters when they all attended the University of Prakra. Medea and Anatole had the same studies but with different focus, and while Leonore had a different field of study altogether, the three of them became inseparable. The year Anatole turned 30 would also mark almost 11 years of them being friends. 

Zurkhi did not have Leonore’s face. He had Navneet’s. Once, him and Anatole could’ve been in love. Perhaps they had been, quietly, neither of them realising until it was better to remain friends. He still loved him, however, in his own way. They were friends, and friends were the family you chose. The Kaur had opened his home to him and Medea, and Leonore — along with Medea — had been of the fundamental pillars in his process of healing from many things Anatole rarely talked of.

Like Decimo Lemione. 

Navneet had been part of that by closing the process. By giving him a gentle but steady reminder of where he was now, and where he had come from. He would never forget their final conversation on the matter, with Navneet’s steady hand drawing mehendi on Anatole’s own as they both realised their feelings a little too late. 

By that time, Anatole had already begun working at the Vesuvian Court, and a couple of months later he would meet Julian Devorak, when the Plague was still unheard of in Vesuvia. His life would take a lot of turns before it somewhat settled, if life ever settled, but Anatole who had ‘love conquers all’ tattooed over his heart would carry all those loves which had grown, settled, gone or transformed into something different. Piling them up with those he had found along the way, like Nadia’s, or more importantly Haider’s. 

The first time he talked to Zurkhi it was because from the angle he was looking at him, he looked just like Navneet, but then Zurkhi turned to him with his blue eyes and the spell was broken. Kind of. He still looked just like Navneet, scars, blue eyes and red hair aside. From there it was a quest of its own rhythm: of shared passions and topics, of jokes and colliding moments, of each of them developing their own sense of respect for each other to the point where Haider and Nadia had to ask them to please return their partner to them, if they would be so kind. 

The loneliness Zurkhi had etched on his bones was a loneliness he had learnt to recognise because he grew up with it. It was the loneliness of his father, who still had inside of him the child who for 14 years had to endure Matilda Cassano and Krešmir Radošević for parents. It was, above all else, the one of his mother: taken away from her family and her country — by her own family at that — because she had the courage to speak against military regimes. His wonderful, brave exiled mother who had raised him to never feel like she had felt for years, and his taciturn, immensely loving father who raised him in such a way so he never doubted that he mattered. 

And it wasn’t because they had bonded over exposing their wounds to each other, nor his parents at their time, nor him and Zurkhi now. That had come out at it’s own time, on its own accord. Anatole loved his friend because of who he was, and Anatole respected his friend for how he had chosen to live, but Anatole was so incredibly moved by Zurkhi because he too understood what it was like to have life be infinitely unfair to you when all you ever did was speak your truth. 

Not because Anatole had been lucky at life, not because he danced and sung and dared and lived didn’t mean he was never done no injury. Those were very different things. 

Haider pulled him out of his daydream. 

“Amar shona, have you seen Zurkhi?” 

“I thought he was with my mother?”

“He was, but Louisa wanted to show him something, and he excused himself, and now we can’t find him.” 

“Have you tried yelling ‘I believe in the divine right of governments to destroy their citizens as they see fit’?”

“Yes, but given your family lives here, it’s more likely I’ll feel the wrath of 17 different Radošević-Cassano before we find Zurkhi… and your mother’s.”

“That’s fair, I’ll look.”

If it didn’t take him long to find him, it was only because he asked someone in his staff who had the chance to have seen him recently, and surely enough Anatole found him where they said: sitting alone, on a bench, looking at a painting. Anatole sat by him, crossing one of his legs over the other.

“Who’s that?”

“That’s Vitale Cassano and that’s Mirabel, his mother— why?”

“Where they both Consuls?”

“Yep.”

“He looks like you, if you squint.”

“If you say so… any reason you’re sitting in an empty room, looking at a painting of my great, great grandfather?”

“To rob you all.” 

“You know I can tell when you’re lying, right? Look, you don’t have to tell me, but I also can tell when you’re upset, Zurkhi, because I know you.”

“I just needed some time alone.”

“Do you want me to go, then?”

Zurkhi looked at him, asking him to stay before he resorted to look everywhere but at Anatole. When he spoke again, he was looking at his hands. “Were they all like you? You know, did they all think like us?”

“Not all of them, but most of them had ideas in that direction. The family belief of ‘protecting’ Vesuvia doesn’t come from being insufferable, it comes from the idea of bettering the City so it’s sustainable on it’s own— it doesn’t always go right by Counts and Countesses though, but I do suppose most of us did think similarly, to a degree.”

“You’re all so weird.”

“I know.”

“How has no one assassinated any of you?”

“That’s… a fairly good question, but there is a saying that nothing mortal can kill a Cassano, so perhaps there’s your answer.”

“That would’ve been a helpful thing to be at some point of my life.” 

“Who says you aren’t?” Anatole said after a pause. “The Cassano were friends with the Radosšević for a generation or two, before Mircea married Florentino. Valerian’s best friend was Mircea’s mother.”

“What did she do?”

“The same thing as you.”

“What?”

“Baba Elysian was a partisan, Zurkhi. You’re old news, my friend… you know, my mother was looking for you, but I can tell her you needed a moment. Actually, I don’t know if that’s a good idea, she’ll think you have a headache and the Dr. De Silva instinct will kick in.” 

“You know, in my head, there’s still part of me who thinks families don’t do this. I know happy families exist but they seem like an abstraction to me.”

“I don’t think there’s such a thing as a happy family.”

“Fake modesty, really?”

“No, dumbass, what I mean is happy families don’t exist, loving families do. And you have one. You have your friends, and Nadia… and you have us. Just think about it.”

They sat in silence again, but when Anatole stood to leave, Zurkhi spoke. “I don’t remember what it’s like.”

“How what was like?”

“Having one.”

“I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Means you can define what it means. That’s what we do, Zurkhi. We take the pieces and we rearrange them to suit ourselves. Doesn’t fix anything immediately, but we all need a place to lay down and rest.”

His friend smiled at him. Tentative and nervous, bright and hopeful all the same. “That doesn’t sound too bad.”

“Oh, not at all. Best part is, I can get you new shoes as a gift and there’s no way you can deny them, or I can tell my mother you’re overworking yourself and send Dr. De Silva down on you—”

Louisa’s accented Vesuvian interrupted her son. “Who’s overworking themselves?”

Anatole said Zurkhi quicker than what a second lasted, which began a snowball effect of bickering as Louisa gently but surely guided Zurkhi back to where everyone was so they could relax properly and share some time with their friends in the same way she went after Anatole when he was being difficult. 

Anatole himself walked a little behind, leaning against a distant wall to yell incendiary things so Zurkhi got more pampering as he leaned against it. 

“Nana, what have you done?” Haider asked, amusement dancing in his eyes.

“Caused problems on purpose, obviously,” he said as he wrapped his arm around Haider’s waist. “He deserves it. I hope he knows I’d kill for him.”

“You know? I think he does.”