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In the candle-lit spark of a darkened sanatorium holding room, Bren’s eyes are sea-at-storm blue, the color nearly swallowed by the night-sky entropy of his blown out pupils. They are close enough to touch, although no one has reached out. Astrid had left after a few minutes. She has never quite known how to hold something so still and uncomfortable as this. She has not had the practice.
Eadwulf rests his chin on his hands and his elbows on his knees and stares at Bren. He has been here twenty minutes. He has said hello. The words he wants to say keep getting stuck in his throat. Bren does not seem to be capable of speech. His wounds have healed; there’s no evidence of the burns or of the ferocious head blows. He looks good. He looks clean. He looks whole. He looks like a fucking ghost.
“Will you look at me?” Wulf whispers. “Please?”
The eyes blink, slow, as if he is a child fighting sleep. He makes a soft sound, not quite distressed.
Eadwulf reaches out, hating the way Bren doesn’t even flinch, doesn’t reach back. Even if their last moments had been fire and flame and choking smoke and nails scraping skin, Bren has always reacted. He doesn’t know how to stay still. Even as boy, he was always fidgeting, knobby knees hit Wulf’s, shaking benches that were meant to be still with his legs restless movements, always twisting his fingers together, apart, together. Cats cradle with string. Somatic spell components later. Calloused thumbs. Scraped palms.
Now, Eadwulf cradles Bren’s face in his hands and Bren’s hands remain in his lap. Perfectly, unnaturally still. Wulf presses his forehead to Bren’s. Closes his eyes. He can feel the soft repeated exhale of Bren’s breaths on his lips, lighter than any kiss they’d ever shared.
He opens his eyes.
Bren is watching him. There’s a bit more blue to his eyes, even if they’re still empty as glass.
“Look at me,” Wulf whispers. “Don’t look at anything else.”
“Look at me,” Astrid whispers, “Don’t look at anything else.” She reaches up and tangles her fingers in Wulf’s hair, hard enough to hurt. They’re hurting and hollowed out, insides scraped raw of every last spark of arcana. Eadwulf’s body feels heavy and sore, and even though his body is one of the only things he can rely on to be real, he feels lost right now. It had been harder, today, to look away. Harder to not flinch at the screaming. They’re unbalanced, without Bren.
“Wulf.” Astrid digs her nails in, light pinpricks of pain on the back of his neck, his scalp.
“Tell me what to do,” Wulf whispers. He’s wandering. He’s lost. The room is dim and all he can see are the faint flicker of candle flames. His nose is still burning with oil and smoke. They still burn corpses sometimes, and it always reminds him of Bren. He does not think he will ever cast another evocation spell again. “Please.”
She raises an eyebrow. It’s an unspoken rule, not to touch each other’s minds or will. A promise the three of them had sworn as teenagers, bruised and bright eyed, pinkies wrapped tight enough around each other to feel the raw press of bone beneath skin.
But he’s asking. And Bren is gone. And neither of them quite know who to be in the aching awful aftermath.
Astrid closes her eyes and exhales slowly, tilting her head back. She mouths his name before she says the spell, with the same reverence. There’s his name. Eadwulf. And then, in the same breath, the last embers of arcana in her body making the command sweet, Look.
“Look,” the Shadowhand snarls, spinning the blackboard around with enough force chalk shivers off the slate. “What your master is proposing doesn’t make any fucking sense.”
Eadwulf has not flinched back from a tone since he was a stubborn boy on a farm far away from these spiraling wizard towers, and he doesn’t flinch now. “So you think you’re more clever, is that it?”
Essek Thelyss honest to gods hisses at him, ears pinning back like Frumpkin’s used to when—
Oh. He hasn’t thought about Frumpkin in a very long time.
“Trent is a brilliant wizard,” Essek says, twisting the chalk in between his fingers. It passes from his right hand to his left. Back again. A nervous tell. He’s embarrassed by his outburst, perhaps. “But he lacks important theoretical fundamentals, particularly concerning time. And—“
Eadwulf doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but that doesn’t matter. It’s the shape of the words, the fevered fury, the kinetic want that is propelling the drow in circles around the room, teeth bared, unspent arcana shimmering just out of Wulf’s vision. He is sure that if he were to reach out, Essek would be warm to the touch.
Fucking academics, he thinks, and it’s fond. It hurts. Eadwulf had his desire for knowledge and his empathy beaten out of him a long time ago, once Trent figured out that he was never exactly going to be the brains of any operation. That had always been Bren’s job. And now it is Astrid, who is half as clever and ten times as ambitious.
But here is a wizard nearly mad with desire for knowledge. A crick spy of course— Eadwulf does not trust that anything he says is not also being passed on to their Bright Queen no matter how tightly Trent has Essek wound with whatever the hell he’s holding over him—but Essek Thelyss cares more about those chalkboard theoretical equations than the souls he’s condemned to death and the religion he’s mocked. It is clear that perhaps that aloof calm over the last several months has been a ruse.
“Enough,” Eadwulf says finally, and it’s muscle memory, it’s instinctive, that he reaches out. He’s a fool, and he’s thinking of Bren, and they’re alone, arcana making the room shiver with heat, chalk dust heavy in his nose.
Essek is not Bren. He side steps Eadwulf’s reach. moving to the opposite end of the room, hands raised defensively. His fingers are crooked with the somatic components for counter spell. The chalk cracks in two pieces in his grip in his free hand.
Wulf laughs; he can’t help it. “We are allies in this, yes? I’m not going to hurt you.”
Essek laughs too; it is the first time Wulf has heard it. It’s a harsh sound, scraping on a throat already raw from shouting. It’s beautiful. It fractures. It shatters. “I’d like to see you try.”
“I’d like to see you try,” Eadwulf says to the boy in the bar with the red hair who looks just enough like Bren that Wulf’s chest hurts.
“Oh I can out drink you,” the boy says. There’s not a spark of the arcane in him, but there’s heart in his words and callouses on his hands and good, tilled earth under his nails. A farmer. Like Bren was supposed to be. Like they all were supposed to be.
Wulf is alone, on assignment without Astrid because they only work in a pair these days when Trent wants to remind them of who they used to be, and Eadwulf is the more effective weapon of the two. Astrid is the better teacher.
He’s not near home, and he hasn’t been back to Blumenthal in years, but there are farmers all over the empire.
The boy is barely a boy; he’s easily in his early twenties, and confident enough in himself that he’s close enough to kiss, knee pressing against Wulf’s under the table.
Neither of them are drunk yet, but the alcohol has made the room hazy and warm. Eadwulf could take what is being offered. He could reach out and have the boy reach back. He could lie more about who he is and he could—
He doesn’t. This boy is not his to hold, not tonight.
He drinks until the ache in his chest eases and his throat smarts and he vomits on the red-head boy’s shoes when he tries to help him to bed.
What the fuck are you doing? Astrid’s voice whispers in his head when he drifts off to sleep.
Trying to live, Wulf says, bitter as bile.
She laughs, although it’s more an impression in his mind, a rush of affection and a thrill akin to terror. Let me know when you figure it out.
“Let me know when you figure it out,” one of Astrid’s students says to Wulf like a secret when he passes her in the hall.
Wulf doesn’t teach many classes these days, and he’s surprised to be addressed at all. He falls into step next to the girl. Her arms are bandaged, although she’s hiding it with sleeves well. She hasn’t quite graduated yet; they always have a look, when they do. Her hair is long and braided in two plaits, practical and tight, down her back. She’s young, maybe seventeen. There’s drying blood on the corner of her mouth and a fresh gash on her cheek. Her pockets are heavy with spell components and her bags are heavier with books. He will never learn her name. He says, “and what is it you think I need to figure out?”
She smirks and doesn’t answer.
When he asks Astrid about it, she wrinkles her nose. “All my students are convinced you’re in love with me.”
“Oh, so they have eyes.”
She smacks his arm.
He catches her hand. “Do you think I don’t still love you, Astrid?”
She twists out of his grip and pins him to the wall, hips sharp as blades against his thighs, nails inches from his eyes, trembling and spitting and furious. “I don’t think whatever the hell is between us can be called love anymore, Wulf.”
“Because Bren is gone?” He hasn’t said his name in years. It takes the fight out of Astrid and the air out of both their lungs.
Astrid relaxes, wrapping her arms around his neck in an embrace instead of something sharper. She presses a kiss to his collarbone. Another to his neck. A third to the side of his mouth. She whispers, “because I don’t even know what love means.”
Wulf traces the scar on her cheek, tilts her chin closer to his with a finger. He kisses her lips, her nose, her forehead.
He whispers, “here’s the secret. I’m never going to forget you.”
“Here’s the secret,” Eadwulf whispers, tracing the tips of Essek’s ears, his cheeks, his jaw, the bow of his open mouth. “I’m never going to forget you.”
The Shadowhand snaps his teeth, missing Eadwulf’s finger but making Astrid laugh, which had perhaps been his goal. He looks up at Eadwulf, eyes wide, hair messy in a delicious new way (Astrid has been running her fingers through it for the last twenty minutes). The three of them are spell spent and heartsore and it’s an echo, it’s a memory, its real, it’s real, it’s real—
“I’m not him,” Essek says.
“Who?” They haven’t told him about Bren.
“The boy you want; I can see him in your eyes.” Essek rubs a thumb along Wulf’s cheek. “You think of him when you look at me?”
“I think of you when I look at you,” Astrid whispers, nipping his ear.
He shivers. “You’re a distraction.”
“We need distractions,” Wulf says. “The three of us.”
Essek narrows his eyes. They’ve talked about this extensively, the three of them. It started with light permitted touches, and then stolen kisses in hallways, sparring matches and outbursts of furious violence. Whispers in late night check ins after study sessions. Meetings on the outskirts of town. Passing information in notes, in markings, in kisses, in vials of poison and spell components. They’re older than they had been, the last time two had become three. And Essek…Essek is a complicated individual. Wulf sees death shadowing his eyes every other blink, but that raw arcane hunger is still ferocious. Essek knows what he wants and the price he needs to pay to get it and he does not care. That is what Astrid likes about him. Wulf likes picking apart the tangle underneath the facade. He’s never been able to quite figure this one out. He’s not sure he ever will.
“I could make you forget,” Essek whispers, fingers at Wulf’s throat now. “If you wanted. Keen Mind can be a burden for one as heartsore as you.”
Eadwulf laughs. “Ah, you think you know me?”
A slight twitch, nearly a smile. Essek’s voice is warm with it when he says, “I do, I think.”
“You’ve studied me?”
Essek’s grin is wicked and full of teeth. “Careful, boy.”
“Hmm,” Astrid says, reaching over Essek to cradle Wulf’s face in her hands. “I’ve studied him longer, crick. Give me your theories.”
“You’re both ridiculous.” Eadwulf says, but he leans into the touch, shivers as Essek’s hands start working at his shirt. Astrid kisses him, fierce enough he doesn’t breathe. He holds his breath for as long as he can.
“There you are,” Essek says when Eadwulf gasps and breaks the kiss with Astrid. The drow pushes himself up on to his elbows, half in Astrid’s lap, but arching up into Wulf’s touch. He worries his thumb along Wulf’s cheek again, fingers hot with arcana. “Look at me,” he says, the words entirely his own but lifted from a memory years removed. “Don’t look at anything else.”