Chapter Text
It’s one of those days.
Cregan can tell as soon as he gets home from work. He steps into the house and is met with the bitter scent of burnt spice, as if someone set a cinnamon stick on fire and let it turn to gray cinders. It cloys in his nose, despite the fact that the windows are all wide open and the house smells of cleaner. Nothing is stronger than that scent; The scent of Jace’s distress.
Gauzy white curtains blow in the breeze, and Cregan shivers a bit as he slips off his jacket and hangs it where it goes in the entryway. It’s a bit too cold of a day to be airing out the house. He slides each window closed as he makes his way through with light, unobtrusive footsteps. Each room is the same; immaculately cleaned, freshly blown through with an early autumn breeze… and stinking of bitter cinnamon. He follows it like a trail of foreboding breadcrumbs, seeing Jace’s day in his mind’s eye clearly as he goes. The scrubbing and dusting, the sweeping, the pushing the furniture around to reach beneath it.
So this is why he hasn’t returned any of Cregan’s usual texts throughout the day. As if to confirm this, he finds Jace’s phone on the end of the kitchen island, dead. There are two pieces of toast in the trash, Cregan notices. One whole, the other with no more than two bites out of it.
The freshly vacuumed stairs creak softly beneath Cregan’s sock feet. He took his boots off, knowing Jace won’t want them tracking dirt into the house. Normally, he wouldn’t mind all that much. But this isn’t normally. This is one of those days.
Upstairs is no different than downstairs, aside from the thickening of the bitter scent in the air. Up here, it’s almost unbearable. It stirs something in Cregan, twists his heart until it’s tight in his chest. He can taste the way his own scent has changed since he entered the house, and he tries to dampen it, because his own distress is not going to be helpful.
He finds Jace in The Spare Room.
That’s what they call it; the empty room that sits upstairs, down the hall from their cozy bedroom in their perfect house with their vibrant-gardened green yard enclosed with a pristine white picket fence. The Spare Room. Because if they called it what it was, then they’d have to face it. Jace would have to face it. And Cregan knows he can’t do that. So it’s The Spare Room.
Jace is sitting in the center of the room, surrounded by piles of folded laundry that he’s sorting into meticulous stacks. There’s no music playing. He usually likes to listen to music while he folds laundry. But it’s just him and the silence and the mountains of fabric squares. Cregan can hear the washer and dryer going right now in the background. He must have been running it all day.
“Jace, baby,” Cregan says softly. He knows Jace knows he’s there, but the omega jumps all the same, as if he’s been caught doing something he shouldn’t be doing. He casts the quickest of glances over his shoulder in acknowledgment before going back to his folding.
“Hi,” he says, and his voice is distant. Not unwelcoming, or unkind, just distant. Cregan doesn’t step into the room.
“The house looks good,” Cregan says carefully. “I did close the windows, I hope that’s okay. It’s gonna get dark soon.”
Jace nods curtly, just once, his back to Cregan. He finishes another stack and sets it aside. “Yeah, that’s fine.”
Cregan lets out a long breath, steeling himself. It’s rare for him to feel far from Jace in any way. At least, it used to be. Sometimes it's still alright. Sometimes they can go days like normal. And sometimes it's like this; Like there is a divide so long and so wide between them that Cregan could scream and Jace would still do nothing but sit there on the other side of the ravine and dangle his feet off and stare at nothing. Like Cregan could jump and not make it to the other side and Jace wouldn’t lift a finger to help him.
And he gets it. Or at least, he gets it as much as he can. He tries. It just never feels like enough.
And the bitch of it all is it isn’t. It isn’t enough. It never can be. So he watches Jace sort laundry for a long while, and then he starts to build the bridge to the other side. He slips into the room. He watches Jace’s shoulders twitch when he does, but Jace doesn’t move to stop him. Doesn’t say anything as Cregan crouches down beside him.
“Have you eaten today?”
He can see Jace’s face now, his dark brows drawn together in focus. The question flickers through him. He nods.
“More than a bite of toast at seven this morning?”
Jace scowls, and that is answer enough. Cregan rubs his hands together, worries at the inside of his lip. “I tried texting you–” He cuts off as Jace stands abruptly, piling a few of the laundry stacks into his arms.
“I was busy.”
Cregan trails him to the closet. It’s only then that he sees Jace has emptied the entire thing of its contents from top to bottom. Each shelf is bare and wiped down, each bin emptied. He watches as Jace pulls out one of the empty bins and lays the stack of clothes in carefully. They’re tiny – far too tiny. Cregan’s heart twists again. He reaches for Jace.
“Sweetheart–”
Jace shrugs him off, leaving the closet and returning to pile more clothes into his arms.
“They needed to be washed.” His voice is thick, and he’s still not looking at Cregan. He shoves some blankets into the closet. There are little dragons patterning one of them, colorful and fat. “I don’t want them attracting pests. We might… We might need them someday. If Luke has kids he can–he can–” he cuts off as his voice breaks. His hand goes up to his mouth to stifle a sound. A sob, but Cregan is sure he's not meant to comprehend that.
“Jace,” Cregan says gently, “Come downstairs and eat something.”
Jace ignores him.
He’ll keep doing this all night, Cregan knows. Until the sun rises tomorrow. Maybe longer. Until there’s absolutely nothing left to do, until he’s scrubbed all the baseboards and faced every cobwebbed corner of the house so that he doesn’t have to face the inside of his own head, or the workings of his own body. But Cregan can’t let him do that. Won’t. And Jace must scent it because before Cregan can even reach for him he’s yanking away.
“Stop.”
“Jace–”
“Stop, Cregan. I’m fine.” He kneels down. Stacks more folded laundry into his arms. Wipes his nose with the back of his hand and blinks hard.
“We have to talk about this,” Cregan says. This time he stays where he is when Jace disappears into the closet, knowing he isn’t welcome. Not in there. Not really in this room.
In all the years they’ve lived here, it could have become anything; an office space, or a guest room. A hobby room for Cregan’s leatherworking, a library for Jace’s books. Anything.
But the printer lives in the corner of the living room, and they sit with their laptops at the dining room table on the rare occasions it's necessary. Guests sleep on the pullout couch. Cregan has a workspace in the garage, and Jace keeps his books in the bedroom. And this room, The Spare Room, sits empty.
On the good days, they used to sit in here together, in the middle of the carpeted floor, leaning against each other, sharing dreams of little fat dragons on too-small blankets made of the softest fabric, and tiny socks for tiny feet, and a collection of storybooks that Jace has saved from his childhood.
But the bad days… The bad days, this is where Jace disappears. And on the bad days, Cregan can’t follow. And the bad days are all they have now.
He can’t tell if it’s worse, now that the rocking chair is gone. The mobile. The crib. Sometimes he thinks it is - sometimes he thinks that when they removed those things, they removed all of Jace’s hope along with them. Because now all that’s left is empty walls and a closet full of tiny clothes for a tiny body that doesn’t exist and never will.
They’ve tried. God, they’ve tried. It is not for lack of trying, for a lack of desire. If these things depended upon desire and trying , their house would be three times too small by now. But these things don’t depend on that. They depend on nature. And fate. And god, what cruel mistresses they have proved to be.
'It happens sometimes.' That’s what the first doctors had told them unhelpfully, with a half-sympathetic shrug. As if they hadn’t just delivered a killing blow to everything Jace had ever expected to be. Cregan had wanted to throttle them. Would have, if Jace hadn’t been staring at nothing.
He hadn’t cried. Hadn’t gotten angry. He’d just stared. That’s what Cregan remembers most. His fiery, passionate, opinionated Jace just blank-faced and desolate.
'There must be some way,' Cregan had said. Some treatment. 'We’ll do whatever it takes.'
But no. Not in cases like these, they were told. In cases like these, treatments would only prove to put stress on the omega’s body for a very slim chance of desired results. Even if it did take, there was no saying he would come to term. The only thing they could recommend now was to perhaps consider adoption.
'Tell me,' Jace had said. And there was a spark behind his eyes. Not gone. Never gone. At least, not that early on. ' Tell me the treatments.'
The doctors had pursed their lips and glanced at each other in silent concern. Every single one that they went to the reaction was the same. And every single time, Jace shook his head, denying them, determined. When at last he accepted their words, it was only to inform them that he would be trying the treatment until it took and damn the consequences.
He had to sign papers saying he understood how slim of a chance it was. And how dangerous it could prove to be. He signed them so hard that the three papers beneath were imprinted with his signature.
It was a weekly shot, to induce his heats, to prime his body to accept what they both so desperately wanted it to. It strung him out, made him irritable unless he was doing something to prepare; Fucking, nesting… More fucking, more nesting. Cregan sometimes wondered how he kept up, and he’d never lacked for stamina before. Jace apologized many times for what the treatments did to him, knowing he wasn’t acting like himself when he snapped at Cregan. And Cregan could forgive it, because there was always that chance. That it would be worth it. That Jace's seemingly blind faith had grounds. That they weren't jumping into an abyss. That it would take.
Well, it had taken. They had beaten the odds on that front. That was the worst part– That they were the exception to the rule... until they weren’t. Until he came home from work one day and found Jace kneeling on the blood-slick bathroom floor, his hands stained red to the wrists, a horribly confused look in his eyes.
'I don’t understand,' he’d said, looking up at Cregan with glassy eyes, his shoulder braced against the cabinets, his hands in the air like he was afraid to touch anything. But it was too late - they’d had to throw away the rug and two of the towels. And there was blood on his temple and in his hair, where he’d torn at it in distress. ' I don’t understand.'
He kept saying it, when Cregan scooped him into his arms and put him in the car, all the way to the hospital. He said it again two days later when they were at the specialist.
'I don’t understand. I’m an omega, I should… It should work. This is what my body is supposed to do… This is the one thing my body is supposed to do.'
This doctor, at least, gave him more than half-sympathies. She was entirely professional. They trusted her. They should, they’d been working with her for over a year. She’d nodded, so Jace felt heard, and then said, ‘ I’m so sorry. I understand how frustrating and disappointing it can be. But Jace, if you continue these treatments know you are bordering on dangerous territory. Even more so than you already were. Professionally, I cannot recommend you continue. Inducing heats is relatively uncharted territory. There’s no telling what this could do to your body longterm–”
'I don’t care.' He’d glanced at Cregan-- like Cregan was his god, like he would protect him just by existing-- then back at the specialist. 'I want to… I want to try again.'
The doctor had pursed her lips in tight disapproval, but nodded. ' In that case–'
' No.'
Jace had started at the sound of Cregan’s voice. It had taken a moment for him to really hone in on him, like he thought maybe the word came from the walls. Then he’d stared at him in surmounting confusion.
'Cregan, it’s fine. It took once, it’ll take again. I’ll be more careful, I’m willing to do whatever–’
‘I’m not.’
Jace had stood then, his chair kicking back with the force of it. ' This is my choice, and if I want to try again–'
'This is not only your choice!' Cregan snapped. His eyes stung. He wiped at them and let out a shaky breath as Jace stared daggers into him. 'I’m not willing to risk you. I can’t do it again, Jace. I... I won't.' His head fell into his hands. God, he was so tired. He still is.
The door had opened and closed, and Cregan had known they were alone in the examination room. Jace stayed standing there, his entire body wired. He should have been sitting. Should have been resting. It’d been less than three days since… since…
'I'm not gonna sit here and watch you destroy yourself over this. I'm not taking any more part in it.'
It wasn’t all bad – the treatments. Of course it wasn’t bad. An induced heat is not so different than a regular heat, aside from the slightly medicated scent that never quite left Cregan’s nostrils even when he was deep inside Jace, with his teeth buried in his scent glands. The fucking wasn’t the hard part– at least not in the beginning. It was easy to whisper those same dreams from the carpeted floor into Jace’s ear in the heat of the moment, to go delirious with promises and get drunk on the lies that hope allowed them both.
It was the after that he couldn’t take anymore. The constant testing and doctor’s visits and the disappointments. That unflagging manic look in Jace’s eyes. The wanting with absolutely nowhere to go. Because of course Cregan wanted it. He wants it, still. More than he can say. Just not enough. Not enough to risk it.
'Cregan, please.' There had been real fear in Jace’s voice, like he was holding onto a cliffside with one finger.
'No,' Cregan replied, in a way that ended the conversation. The closing of a door a year and some months thrown wound-wide open.
It was the first time he saw Jace break. The first time there was anything aside from determination in those eyes since they'd first told him he couldn't conceive on his own. And it was his doing.
Jace had slumped back into his chair and only then had he sobbed and pleaded and sobbed. Cregan was surprised when Jace let him hold him while his entire frame shook with hysteria, when he’d run his fingers through those curls that he cherished more than any false hope or broken dream. And once Jace had quieted, he’d ushered him out of the office for the last time with his arm wrapped tightly around him.
The anger came later, after they got home. It hit Jace seemingly out of nowhere, like something finally clicked. They’d been laying in bed in each other’s arms, in the quiet, and then Jace had tensed, and rolled away, and that had been that.
The good days-- the now good days, not the before good days -- he cries or takes out fossilized hope and holds it in his hands like an old photograph, and lets Cregan hold it too.
On the bad days… it’s this. Anger, with nowhere to go. A lonely fortress that they call The Spare Room, because nursery isn’t helpful. And it isn’t accurate.
“I don’t want to talk,” Jace says now.
Cregan stands next to the doorframe, watches Jace’s dance with the laundry. Back and forth and back and forth from the floor to the closet, more and more agitated the longer Cregan stands there.
Cregan scrubs a hand over his face. Eventually, he leaves. Goes downstairs, too dizzy and tired to watch anymore.
He puts Jace’s phone on the charger, starts dinner, ruins the unmarred cleanliness of the kitchen with a couple of pots and pans. By the time he returns, the towers of laundry are gone, the floor an empty plain. He thinks for a moment that Jace has left, but he finds him sitting crosslegged on the floor of the closet, an unopened storybook in his hands-- One of his favorites, the edges frayed from the passage of many small hands. Jace’s mother, Jace himself, and all of his siblings. Or at least the older ones. His scent has changed – it’s sweeter now. Sadder. He still doesn’t look up when Cregan comes in and sets two bowls of pasta in front of them then takes a seat next to him on the closet floor.
“Eat,” Cregan says, and Jace, surprisingly, complies, setting the book aside to pick up the bowl. He takes a bite, chews, swallows. Does it again. Over and over, just like the laundry. Likely because he senses Cregan’s going to force feed him if he doesn’t.
Cregan picks up the book, not feeling particularly hungry himself. He flips through the pages absently. The art style is sophisticated - not something you’d expect from a children’s book. There are more words than he’d have expected from a children’s book, too. It seems to tell the story of some medieval knight. There’s a green dragon, and a princess with long silver hair. Cregan flips to the last page. The princess is weeping.
“This book looks sad.”
“The dragon dies at the end.”
“Isn’t that a good thing?”
Jace looks across to where the book sits in Cregan’s lap. Blinks. Looks back to his bowl. “He was the princess’s friend. The knight didn’t know.”
“Oh. Didn’t think to ask, huh?”
Jace shakes his head. His eyes flicker again, between Cregan and his own bowl of pasta sitting on the floor. He nudges it with his knee, and through a small mouthful says, “Eat.”
Cregan pushes out a long breath through his nose and picks up his bowl. The fork clacks at the bottom as he stabs a piece of pasta and takes a bite. Fair is fair.
They sit like that for a long time, eating in the confines of the closet, with Jace’s sad childhood storybook sitting between them, and they don’t speak. They don’t speak until they do. Because they always do, eventually. Even on the bad days.
“Mom is pregnant,” Jace says, without inflection. “She… she didn’t want to tell me.”
Ah.
“How did you find out?”
“Joff let it slip on the phone.” Jace’s voice goes reedy. “She’s in the second trimester. It’s a girl. She’s really– she’s really hap–happy–” he breaks off with a staggered sob, but Cregan’s already folding him into his arms, taking the half empty bowl from him and setting it aside. Jace curls into him like a wounded animal, clawing into his biceps with a bruising grip as he shakes and cries.
Tears slip from Cregan too, for all they’re worth, forced out of him by the sight of Jace in distress. But he holds back on releasing a calming scent. Jace has told him before that sometimes it makes him resent him, that he has that kind of power over him. So he doesn’t. Even though every instinct screams at him to do so. He just holds his boy, and silently curses every single god under the sun that had anything to do with this bitter lot that has been forced onto Jace against his will.
Tears and snot soak into Cregan’s shirt. Jace’s hand moves to paw at the spot, trying fruitlessly to dry it even as he cries more. His breath begins to come in sharp, hysterical pants, and Cregan takes him by the face, forcing him to meet his eyes, hushing him gently.
“Calm,” he breathes. His breath ghosts Jace’s lips, and Jace shudders, trying to reject the instruction. Cregan grips him harder. “Calm,” he says again, and this time Jace takes a deep, shuddering breath. “Let me help you.” It’s almost a begging. Cregan’s stomach is in knots seeing Jace like this. His instincts are screaming for him to do something, and it’s painful not to. Jace hesitates, then nods his assent.
Cregan wastes no time tucking him into his chest, releasing a calming scent to envelope them both, forcing his breath to come even so Jace’s own lungs have something to follow in their panicked blindness. Jace says Cregan smells like a pine forest when he does this. The kind of scent that makes you want to inhale again - just faint enough that it’s never overwhelming, always a sweet taste.
Jace quiets. His sobs turn to sniffles, his eyes drooping as the day catches up with him.
“I feel like I’ll never be happy again,” he confesses against Cregan’s chest, his voice thick.
Cregan tilts his head back and looks up at the ceiling and admits to himself that he’s worried about the same thing. Not for himself, but for Jace. He can’t remember the last time he genuinely saw him smile, laugh. Even on the good days. Because even the good days are just fucking sad now. Because they can never exist as an island. There’s always the days before the good days, and the days after, both so much more innumerable.
“You will be,” Cregan says, stroking his hair. “I promise you will.”
Jace’s chest catches. His mouth forms a firm line as he swallows down a few more hicupped sobs. His eyes well with tears anew when he says, “I think I hate them.”
“Who?”
“Everyone. All the doctors who couldn’t help, my family who just watched with all that fucking pity in their eyes. My mother.” He looks away, maybe a little ashamed for a second, but when he looks back his words are steady. “Even you sometimes. For stopping me.”
Cregan knows that. He had known that would be the case the second he said no to continued treatments.
“It would have killed you, Jace.”
Jace shakes his head, but it isn’t born from denial because he just says, “I know.”
Cregan sighs, readjusts so Jace is straddling him. He runs his hands up and down his wrists gently, scenting him. The full force of Jace hits him, pure cinnamon and smoke, bright and unencumbered. The sadness trickles just beneath it now, like runoff from a rainstorm that’s spent itself.
“When I was a kid,” Jace says, his eyes a little distant, but not in the way that Cregan can’t reach, not right now, “Everyone was certain I was going to present as an alpha. And when I didn’t… It was like… Everyone looked at me differently. I hated it for so long. I tried covering my scent up when I would go out in public, just for the hope that maybe people wouldn’t notice what I was. I was… so ashamed.” He looks down and shakes his head at the memory. Cregan imagines it, that little omega, newly designated, so angry at a world that was not what he had been promised. Cregan himself can really only sympathize to the best of his abilities. The world was built for him. He had worked very hard to become someone that an omega wouldn’t have to fear, but it would never change the fact that the world is run by people of his designation and he benefits from it. He will never know what it is to be ashamed of who and what he is. To have those expectations and realities dashed and have it be his own body’s fault.
“But then my mother became pregnant with Joffrey. And watching her go through that, it… Changed me. It changed the way I viewed being an omega. It didn’t make her less-than. Her body had… a purpose.”
Cregan frowns sternly. “Your worth doesn’t lie in what your body can or cannot do.”
Jace sighs. It’s a sharp thing. “I know that. I only mean… I only mean I wanted to have one– A purpose. I spent so long feeling lost, feeling like fate had fucked up with me. Put me in the wrong box and shipped me off to live the wrong life. And watching her with Joff, and then Aegon, and Viserys, it made me understand what life could be for me. That I had an opportunity that I never would have had as an alpha. And then when I met you…” Jace swallows hard. His voice goes soft, and sad. “You made it not just something I fantasized about. You made it an actual possibility.”
His hand finds his abdomen, rubs absentmindedly, the fingers of his other hand clutching and unclutching in the collar of Cregan’s shirt. “And now my body has failed me all over again. And I can’t… I just can’t fucking… handle it.”
He lets his brow fall onto Cregan’s shoulder with a broken sigh. “My heat is starting soon.” Cregan had scented as much. In the beginning of their relationship, he hadn’t been able to. Not until the day before or day-of at least. But they’ve been together long enough now that even if he couldn’t scent it, he would know simply by Jace’s mood.
“I wanted to nest so bad today, but I… I couldn’t bring myself to. I guess I sort of did anyway.” He looks around at the closet in defeat. Cregan knows what he means, though. The instinct manifested, just not in the way Jace wanted.
Before, when they were trying, and for that short time that they weren’t but they had hope, Jace’s urge to nest was poured into the nursery. A mural done by hand that had taken Jace countless hours, furniture ordered and built, decor placed and replaced just so, baby clothes sorted, letters written to future small and less small hands.
Now, after , all of that energy has been spent deconstructing. When he gets in these moods, it’s hard to say what he’ll do. Clothes binned and put in this very closet. Furniture broken down, even though he cried and clawed at Cregan’s shoulder when he and Luke tried to move it out the first time to make space and fill the unfillable hole. The mural, painted over with a flat beige because Jace couldn’t stand to look at it anymore. Cregan had cried over that one himself, but Jace had been entirely dry-eyed with the roller in his hand and the job already done by the time he came home from work.
As for his heats, well… Cregan hasn’t been privy to those for some time now.
The first one, after the miscarriage, neither of them had seen coming. Jace’s body must have been out of whack, because it came early, and it hit hard . Harder than usual, which was saying a lot. Cregan had been barely three seconds awake before Jace was begging for him, his sleep shorts soaked in slick, his skin feverish to an almost alarming degree as he mounted him and sought friction through their clothes.
Cregan remembers the blissful feeling of his primal instincts taking over, like sleep was softly handing him over to another kind of sweet oblivion, Jace’s scent pumping through his veins faster than his own blood as he stripped them both and laid Jace out. He’d filled him like he had a hundred times before – maybe more so. And there had been no artificial scent to it, because it was raw and it was real, and that made it all the sweeter for them both. Cregan remembers being so thankful to have stopped the treatments. He remembers thinking that maybe things were getting back to normal-- Slowly, but surely. That they just needed time, and they needed this . And in retrospect, maybe that was the primal side of him talking, fucked out and drunk on Jace’s heat pheromones, because now, thinking back, all he feels is stupid.
Jace had been below him, his legs wrapped tight around Cregan’s waist to keep him as close as possible while he fucked him dizzy. Cregan’s hand had grasped at Jace’s hip as it rolled with each deep thrust, and Jace had thrown his head back and Cregan nipped at his bared throat and promised– Promised to knot him, to fill him so full he’d feel it for days afterward. Because that’s what Jace was begging for, and always had. But that’s when the shift happened. Jace yanked himself upright, nearly smashing their faces together in the process, and Cregan had pulled out immediately, his body moving before his brain could even comprehend the fact that Jace was vomiting off the side of the bed.
Cregan had scrambled to hold his hair back, running soothing lines up and down his bare back, over skin that was still feverishly hot and drenched in both hot and cold sweat.
‘I can’t,’ Jace had sobbed brokenly. ‘ Oh my god, I can’t. I can’t.’
He’d kept saying it, over and over, in between wretching and weeping and Cregan had just held him, both of them shaking violently, until Jace told him to get out.
‘ I don’t want to leave you like this,’ Cregan had tried to insist. ‘ Sweetheart, you’re scaring me. Let me take you to the hospital.’
Jace shook his head, swallowing hard before another round of gagging sent the dregs of his stomach bile spilling out onto the carpet. ‘ Don’t wanna go. Don’t need to. Just need to be alone.’
Cregan had never felt more useless. ‘There has to be something I can do.’
‘There is. Get out.’ There had been snot running down his chin, along with vomit, and the odor along with that burnt cinammon of Jace's agony was vile, and still all Cregan wanted to do was hold him. He’d continued to hesitate until Jace had said, ‘ Please. My body won’t calm down, it still wants you. I still want you, but I can’t– I just– can’t deal with this right now. I can’t do it, I can’t. I don’t want it, please just go…’
Cregan had understood, then. Had hushed him gently, and stroked his hair and told him it was alright for just a second more before hurriedly taking his leave.
He’d spent the rest of Jace’s heat outside the bedroom door, utterly useless with grief as he listened to Jace sob into the pillows. A few times, Jace had called for him. He’d come rushing in every time, only for Jace to shake his head and wave him away with an apology.
Every heat after that was the same. Cregan tried to get on with his day, to distract himself, but he was torn up inside knowing Jace was suffering with this strange concoction of want and revulsion that neither of them could fully comprehend. Many times – so many times– Cregan offered to simply hold Jace through it all. Promised him on his life he wouldn’t touch him, even if Jace begged for it through a lust-filled haze, but Jace wouldn’t allow that, either. He’d said he trusts Cregan, but doesn’t trust himself, and ontop of that, Cregan’s proximity is too much. Too confusing.
Because Jace remains angry with him, even while his body wants him.
It’s something that goes beyond their natural instincts. A complication which simple nature and pheromones aren’t built to heed. The need to be close, to join and be one, scarred with the fear of what will come after.
Or worse, what won't.
“There must be something I can do to help,” Cregan says now, again, like he had that day months ago. Normally, he knows what to do. He’s not used to not knowing. He fears he did this to them, by forcing Jace to stop. But the fear that he would have lost him another way – a far worse and more permanent way – keeps him grounded in his decision. Every day, no matter how hard things get, he remembers that.
Jace will forgive him. Someday, Jace will have to forgive him.
Or he won’t. And in that case, Cregan can live with it. He can live knowing Jace is alive. That he didn’t throw his life away just to give Cregan children that he would have loved more than life itself, but who he would never have loved quite as much as the person who sits cradled in his lap right here, right now.
He reminds himself. Over and over again, he reminds himself. Even when Jace pushes off of him, stumbling a little as he stands and says, sadly, regretfully, almost as though he wishes it weren’t the case, “There’s not. I’m going to bed. You can come if you want.”
Cregan swallows hard, watches Jace shuffle out of The Spare Room that is too clean and too empty to be spare. It’s less than spare. If it were spare, something other than dead dreams would be in here. Something other than Cregan would be.
Jace leaves the light on when he goes. When Cregan follows, he clicks it off behind him, and pulls the door shut for good measure.