Find Your Center II

"Find Your Center II" is a [SEASON NUMBER] thread written on [IRL DATE].
==Summary==
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==Full Text==
Maybe it came from watching too many movies, but Yun was hardly surprised to have Milae tell him to meet him outside the Jaw after dinner. He was glad to not have it turn into some kind of mystical hike, but at the same time, he felt like getting there the traditional way would do him some good tonight. The broken-down bone of Fenrir’s jaw had been turned into a kind of small highway, so he followed it into the surrounding hills, and in the distance, saw a long staff rising above the waves of rippling silvery moonlit grass before he saw Milae himself, his dark blue cloak rising and snapping with each breath of wind. He turned to face Yun as the young man approached, and dipped his head in welcome. “Taking the long way tonight?” he teased.
“It felt right.” Yun put his hands in his pockets and regarded the half-breed, still marveling at the realistic and yet strange sight of him. 
Milae used the butt of the staff and tapped on the ground. “Please, join me.” The goat bent his hocks and sat, laying the staff behind him. Yun took a glance around at the prairie before doing the same, his vision now only limited to the immediate vegetation and his new mentor. 
Milae peered at Yun as he sat across from him, making the grass bend and flutter. “I trust Dario treated you well?” he asked.
“He fussed enough over me, yeah,” Yun said with a self-conscious grin, which Milae returned.
“Only because he cares.” Like a curious dog, Milae tilted his head to the side, looking Yun up and down. He was starting to get used to these appraisals. “Did you bring it?” he said.
“Well, that’s the thing…” Yun extended a hand outwards, palm down, thick green sleeve swaying in the breeze. There was a moment of relative silence, as Yun seemed to focus inward. Then the two of them saw his seal light up from his fingers up towards his elbow, and just below Yun’s palm, a familiar teal glow extended outwards into the shape of a bar. At the very end of it, a ribbony flash of material whipped into existence and floated down slowly, as the light coalesced into a pointed blade. The magic died away, and Yun gently closed his hand around the handle of the naginata, his arm lowering as its weight settled between his fingers. “I don’t think I can leave it anywhere,” Yun finished.
The show had revealed Milae’s gleaming eyes, who had been watching with rapt attention. “That,” he admitted, “is new.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Yun responded, lifting his other hand up to run a finger along the flat of the blade, watching it shine in the moonlight. “I mean, I guess I would, but…this is all new to me.”
“It’s certainly something I have not seen, either. We’ll chalk it up to your recently acquired seidr, and study it later. We won’t need it immediately.” The goat gestured aside, and Yun obediently laid the weapon down in the soil next to him. Then he mirrored Milae, putting one hand on each knee as he sat in the middle of the prairie, back straight, legs crossed. They looked at each other, half-breed to human, and Milae regarded him so honestly, warmly and fondly that Yun felt a bit of emotion rising up in his throat for the nth time that week. 
“How are you doing so far?” Milae asked. “I must be frank; I feared for your ability to adapt. You’ve come to us from another world entirely.”
“It’s not so bad,” Yun said, looking up at the unfamiliar constellations above them. “I’m kind of used to things being just a little bit off. Or just feeling out of place, even when I’m technically in the right time.”
“I understand. I heard that your world does not believe in magic of any kind.”
“Well…there’s no ‘proof’,” Yun said, putting air quotes around the word. “I think there’s a lot of magic, weird things that happen that nobody has an explanation for. But it’s not as common as Aidorin, no.”
“Ah, I see.” Milae also looked out at the world around them, a small sniff lifting his mouth into a smile. “Ever we find we are the same. But that comes as no surprise to us.”
“No, it definitely doesn’t.” 
“Well, let’s get to making you feel more comfortable.”
Yun laughed a little. “I thought you were trying to do the opposite, earlier?”
“Certainly not,” Milae said, mockingly offended. Yun grinned and pushed him in the shoulder teasingly. Chuckling, Milae caught his wrist before he could put it down, resting Yun’s hand in his lap and inspecting it once more. “You are in a predicament that no other being in the universe could be experiencing at the moment. But I was once where you stood, and now that I can no longer be in your place, I will instead be at your side, no matter where or when you are.”
Yun, once alone in a world that didn’t believe in him, reached out with his other hand, and Milae obliged and held both of them, squeezing them comfortingly. Milae heard him breathing too shallowly through his nose, and he lifted both his wrists and shook them a little, making him glance up. “Andaðu. You still have a lot to learn tonight, yes? Chin up.”
“Okay, got it, got it.” Yun wiped his nose and nodded in determination. “What am I learning about?”
“We are teaching each other, for now. You are a seidkonur of many mysteries, and if you’re just as willing as I am to unravel them, that is what we will do.” Milae shifted his hooves to rest underneath Yun’s palms, encouraging them to sit flat on top of his. “Will you resonate for us, just at a low level?”
Yun nodded and the light of his tattoos returned, glowing and shifting under his sleeves. Milae pushed his hooves further under Yun’s arms and helped him slide the shirt back, baring the markings to the night sky. Their hands rejoined. Milae exhaled, the chilly night air and the light below his face revealing his breath. “It’s been so long.”
“Is it weird?”
“It is. But what happened needed to happen. I don’t enjoy the consequences it brought upon you. However, that is beyond us now.” He met Yun’s eyes, and his bent up a little in mirth, as he used a hoof to tap the corner of his eye, like he had earlier that day, while they kicked up dirt and gained bruises. “Tell me what you feel right now.”
With a sheepish smile, Yun closed his eyes. His index fingers tapped the veins in Milae’s wrists. “Hooves.” He was gratified to hear the half-breed sniff with a small laugh. “Um…the wind, it’s cold. So’s the ground, it’s wet and…not as firm.” The breeze whispered past, and the fields bent around the two of them with a rolling hiss. Several coarse stalks brushed around his knees and his shoulders. “Oh, there’s the grass.”
“Let’s focus on that. While you’re resonating, I want you to truly feel the world around you using those senses. The grass bends in the wind, but know how many stalks there are, even just in this small area around you and I. None of them move quite in the same way, and certainly none of them bow the same distance twice. So it is with the threads of time.” Yun frowned slightly, listening, and trying to follow along. “The possibility of one single blade bending a certain way is endless. The more the stalk moves, the more paths it can take, all of which can end up looking very different from each other.”
“Like timelines, right?”
“Yes, like timelines. These fields have a thread tied to every stalk of grass, every insect that feeds, every mouse that forages. But you must imagine how small these threads are, despite their infinity.”
“Yeah, they barely affect anything,” Yun responded, his eyelids twitching naturally as he did.
“Not in the way that it matters to you. Surely a scholar could dive into the study of consequence, the effects of a sparrow’s wing, stirring the air in such a way that causes ripples and waves out towards a hurricane in the Wildest East. But we were not refined for such miniscule details. Our seidr reflects more closely on the depth of the soul, and how its decisions affect the threads of the universe. But this doesn’t mean that such a small world is closed off entirely from you.” Yun felt the tips of his hooves tap on the underside of his hands. “Take a moment and feel. Seek out these threads.”
Yun shifted in place and then did as he was told, bowing his head and using the hum of the magic inside of him to feel how it connected everything around him in a delicate, shimmering web. His eyes were closed, but he could almost see the strings Milae was talking about, dancing with multicolored, luminous detail in his imagination. “Whoa,” he said in a low voice. “I can see them, yeah.” A shrew several yards away had several thicker strings dancing around it and leading up into the sky, like everything else, but as a snake struck from its hiding spot, and a brief struggle ensued, Yun could sense the threads re-weaving around them, cutting off the animal as it died and leaving only the predator to sit with its feet and tail sticking out of its gullet. Yun felt a memory bubble to the surface, of Milae’s thousands of timelines recorded in string, and how he would cut one loose after dying in it. 
“Broaden your sense,” the older half-breed instructed. He rubbed his pointed, cloven thumbs back and forth along either side of Yun’s hands, to ground him. “These strings interconnect everything around you, including yourself.”
Yun already felt what Milae was referencing. Between the two of them, there were countless bright threads floating in an unnatural wind. He felt further threads winding back to the Jaw in convoluted loops, leading to people he already knew and people he hadn’t met yet. And all of these people, guarding, resting, worrying, living people, began to visually build a web of such immense mass that it made him dizzy to behold. And there were trillions of bindings leading from the rebels to places he couldn’t even see from here.
“Do you feel them?”
“Yeah…this is crazy. There’s more than I ever could’ve imagined.”
“The rebels are harbingers of fate themselves. What you see is more likely an exception than a commonality. Either way, I want you to truly grasp the depth of the world you have been brought into. This is the way the very universe itself is built, from the smallest speck of dust to the largest celestial being. Were you to sit and meditate amongst the stars, I have no doubt that you would be able to see every timeline, every eventuality, as bright and strong as you see the threads of fate before you now. Every cut string has a consequence. They can stretch and unravel and knot and tangle, as they are wont to do. When I speak of your use of seidr, I want you to always, always remember how you intertwine with everything around you, because unlike everyone else, your manipulation of these threads is extremely singular and powerful.” Though Yun still couldn’t see him, he heard his voice grow more melancholy. “This is a lesson I was not taught during my first excursions into other timelines, and I paid many avoidable prices for being my own instructor. I want you to be free of regret and uncertainty, as these are things that can tie you down and constrict you just as strongly.”
“Yeah, this is…this is so much.” Yun blinked his eyes open, refocusing on Milae. What he had been shown was utterly daunting. “That’s a lot of responsibility.”
“And yet, it is your lot in life. Those who have the ability to wield power that others cannot have a duty to do so. So it was with myself.” Milae put a hoof to his chest. “So it is with you.” He touched Yun’s center. 
“Yeah, it makes sense.” He still felt a little queasy, but bolstered at Milae’s words.
“I place so much faith in you that it may be seen as unwise. But if I know you…” Milae gave a wry smile, “…and I believe I do, it is faith that must be placed. That is my responsibility now. If there are people who do not understand that, or try to vilify your efforts, don’t lose hope. Trust yourself, for your instincts are good.”
Yun looked down at their hands, which were now resting lower between them. The seal on his arms faded into black ink once more. “I didn’t want to come back,” he confessed, motivated by something unknown. “I felt…really stuck. It’s something I feel a lot, actually. I get stuck between myself, and what I should be doing, and what I want to do, and the people around me. I feel like I just freeze up. I did it earlier today, when you had me pinned. When I left, I wanted to stay home. I didn’t know what the right thing to do was.”
Milae’s expression shifted from serene to more sympathetic and pained, and he gripped Yun’s hands firmly. “What do you think the cause is?” he asked softly.
There were several undefinable minutes of silence, as Yun stared down at Milae’s forearms, taking in their battered, furry appearance. “I’m scared,” he finally whispered. Milae leaned in to hear him, and he swallowed, trying to keep his words clear for him. “I’m scared of messing up. I keep thinking that…” He laughed self-consciously. “It’s really stupid.”
“Tell me.”
The young man used his shoulder to wipe under his nose. “I keep thinking I’m going to accidentally, like, break something, or tear something, and it’ll mess up the timeline, or let Frigga in or something like that.”
“That is an extremely valid fear, but I can tell you that I don’t think you could do that on purpose if you wanted to.” Milae’s tone was amused while still being sympathetic. “And this is why I also wanted to show you these threads around us, because now you may have a clearer picture of what your options are, should things turn south for us. Yes?”
“Yeah, I think so.” He shrugged a little, still flushing while speaking to Milae about the things that haunted him. “I’m also just normal scared.”
“Ahh, the hardest malady to cure.” Milae pressed Yun’s hands together so that he could enfold them in his own. There was a playfulness to his mentor’s presence that couldn’t stop Yun’s lips from tugging upwards. “Do you truly believe being scared is a bad thing, seinni helmingur? Something to remove, as though it doesn’t belong?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?” Yun answered in some confusion. Thinking about embracing the awful, choking, freezing feeling that chained him down in times of need made him absolutely reject the idea. “I don’t like being scared. I want to just…do what needs to be done.” He pushed his hands into Milae’s as he gestured helplessly. “Like you. You don’t get scared, you just…take care of things.” 
What he said hadn’t necessarily felt wrong, but Milae’s eyes piercing through him made him suddenly feel very small. His next words were soft. “Heldurðu að ég þekki ekki ótta?”
Yun’s stomach clenched. Do you think I do not know fear?
“Auðvitað ekki.…” His voice was barely audible. Of course not.
Milae nodded. “I have as much fear as you do. I promise. It is about the expression of such emotions that sets us apart.” A dull hoof tapped the center of Yun’s forehead. “You believe you must tie it down and suppress and hide it. For as long as I have been alive, I waste little time trying to excise what I think I shouldn’t be feeling. Your emotions are not a hindrance. They are your fuel. They are your life and blood. I’ll be damned if I let your enemies turn you into something that cannot feel, for there are the worst monsters born.”
It hit far too hard for what Yun had just experienced over the past few days. Both Jin and Juro’s faces echoed in his memory, struggling to maintain neutrality. His chest ached, and his vision blurred. “Then what do I do?” Yun said weakly. “I’m just…” He stopped to hiccup. “I’m scared and I can’t do anything about it.”
“It is not something to be done, or an action to be made.” Milae cupped his face and Yun shut his eyes and leaned into his hoof. “All I want is for you to stay human, and find your courage. But only after you truly feel your fear. The strength of your heart is your greatest weapon, your best shield. Those shouldn’t be turned against you.” He hesitated, and Yun looked at him questioningly. The goat’s hoof dropped to his shoulder. “I intentionally stoked that fear against you today.” 
Yun snorted a little, pushing his wrist into his eyes to try to forestall his tears. “Yeah, that was mean.”
“Did you know what was preying on you before then?”
“Um…” Yun blinked in surprise. How was he that observant? “No, I…I didn’t. I mean, I was worried about a lot of things, but…” 
“Yes, I could tell.” A firm squeeze of the shoulder. “You were stifling it.”
Something clicked in Yun’s head. “Oh. Okay, yeah.” 
The half-breed hesitated again. “Regarding whatever has happened between you and the Bookkeepers, I will keep to myself. But I can tell it’s troubling you, and I want you to feel secure in what you do during your time here, and not be held up by doubts.”
“I don’t know if that’s gonna happen,” Yun admitted, voice strangling itself. 
Milae’s ears lowered, and his eyes were sorrowful. “It is…quite bad, isn’t it?”
The pain of hurting and threatening your friend and his existence just by being who you are and the weight of millions upon millions of thin strings and the stalking shadows of gods and Norns and city states and governments and the blood of those trying to protect you–
Yun covered his mouth with a hand and shut his eyes tightly, his whole body starting to shiver. The grass quickly rustled, and then the warmth of another body settled next to Yun, and half of a thick cape rested over his shoulders. He felt one arm, then another collect him close to Milae, under his oddly-shaped chin. The cracks and folds of stress were far too obvious to hide any longer. As much as a small person with no strength or magic or power could, Milae hid Yun from the world, as he broke down in his arms for several minutes, letting the events of the past week catch up to him. The prairie around them continued to hiss and echo as the two small beings huddled together. 
Yun struggled to speak through a congested coughing fit. “It’s not…”
“Let it out.”
“It’s not fair!” The sudden, sobbing shout was caught and muffled in Milae’s cloak.
“I know.”
“No, you don’t…”
“It does not change things.”
Another few minutes of soft crying. Eventually, he drew in a shuddering breath. “I don’t want to be here.”
The goat was quiet, letting him process and expel.
“I wanna go home…”
Leaning down, Milae pressed his muzzle to Yun’s forehead. “We will weather every moment of this storm with you,” he said, his own voice just as hoarse as Yun’s. “And when it passes, when it’s all over, you can. And we will be here for every other one that builds on the horizon.” 
The clouds gently scudded across the starlit sky. The young human struggled to breathe, and Milae gathered up a corner of his cloak and held it up to his face, letting him sheepishly blow his nose into it. “Sorry,” he mumbled into the goat’s fur.
“No apologies.” Milae lightly swatted the top of his head, making him duck and chuckle. “I won’t hear of it.”
“Okay, you win.” Yun wearily sat up, but not without making sure Milae was subject to one of his typical hugs, which the goat gladly reciprocated. 
“How do you feel?”
The seidkonur paused, taking stock of the constant pain in his heart, and was immensely relieved to find it lessened. “So much better.”
“Still afraid?” Milae got to his hooves, and helped Yun follow suit.
“Well…hah, yeah. But…but it’s better.” 
Milae looked incredibly pleased. “Good. If it ever gets worse, you come find me or Dario. And if not us, then anyone in the Rebellion that we can call a friend. They have good souls.”
“Yeah, they do,” he agreed, looking up at the Jaw, and then back out at the dark grass fields. “Are you going back?”
“I was planning on it, yes. The Scrublands make for terrible rest.”
“I’ll catch up to you later, then.”
The two of them clasped forearms, but then it was the half-breed that pulled Yun into one more embrace. As he started his hike back into the settlement, Yun rolled down his sleeves and folded his arms against the cold, seeing them glow once more, and he summoned the vision of the world’s threads once more, seeing them flutter and billow in unfathomable patterns before him. In his mind’s eye, he reached out and ran his fingers through the nearest ones, a glowing skein of threads that didn’t seem to be connected to anything visible, simply stretching outwards and vanishing. One of them filtered through the rest, glowing with a gentle spectrum of white, gold, and blue. He held it in his palm, watching it pulse like the others. 
And I’ll be right here, waiting.
“I’ll see you later,” he said aloud, in little more than a whisper. Then he released his magic and his fear, and started his way back.