InsaneJournal

Who: Will and Severin
What: Rescue and hugs and crazyness.
Where: The Bathos
When: After this
Warnings: A few blood mentions, but other than that, nothing.



A hallway that was not very long at all seemed very long indeed when you were barrelling through it and looking at discreet little gold-plated numbers to find the door behind which your brother lay. It was like game-shows, Will thought wildly, as he did up the belt on his jeans (Saturdays were mostly spent in a pile of books or sleeping off an extremely bad hangover: he’d been doing both which was more uncomfortable than either component might be separately) it was like all those times sat in front of a plastic-looking woman who made excited arm-gestures and indicated boxes to pick, a ‘something’ inside that was never quite as exciting once they’d made their choice. Except Severin was not a choice in a box. He was supposed to be at school, being taught things that made that glass-bright mind shine beyond the rest of their reach -- Will’s feet skidded on hallway, he dodged around a small family clustered around the stair-well with an apologetic look but he didn’t stop.

The door didn’t resist pushing, and the numbers here were faded, scabbed over by someone repainting the door and leaving little flecks of brown all over the gold. It was ugly in the way of unloved homes but the handle gave when he turned it and for that, Will loved the apartment very much indeed in that moment. When he came through the door, hurtled in with all the impetus of fraught brother-love and family and the kind of worry that held itself in the throat and made it difficult to breathe, the light from the hall came in too. The door pushed up against piled up mail, refused to open properly, refused to give access and Will kicked it with bare feet that did little to make the door open and rather a lot to hurt and nothing at all to assuage the sense that something was very wrong in between the broken sentences that had prompted the invasion.

“Severin,” he said, and the door wedged itself open enough for him to step past the mail and into the gloom of whoever’s apartment is was, an unlikely refuge for a brother supposed to be surrounded by people and not alone in half-light. “Severin,” Will said again, more surely, and his voice sliced through the nothing of the place as keenly as a sword held in hand.

The hallway the door opened on to was dark, as were most of the rooms in the apartment. There was a light on, however, down at the end of the hall. It was dim, but it was there, cutting a small swathe across the floor. The rooms that the other doors opened onto were furnished but dark. Not so long abandoned that dust had been given much of a chance to settle, no, but there was a pervasive feeling of despair - even the couches and chairs that had been in the apartment since the woman moved in two years earlier looked barely used, china sets sitting polished and clean but untouched in the cabinets. It felt abandoned - it felt as if it had been abandoned, in thought if not in presence, for some time.

Still, there was that light at the end of the hall, and a few long moments after Will called out, a voice came back. “I’m writing.”

Severin was in the back bedroom. The bedspread was rumpled and tossed aside, recently slept in, and he was laying on the floor. The laptop he’d been using was pushed off to the side, and he was intent on a newspaper that he’d folded up, resting his cheek on it. The date was from about a week earlier, and the headline concerned a school that had burned to the ground only to reveal itself as an illegal human experimentation facility. There were words missing all over the article, cut or ripped out and scattered across the carpet, and Severin was adding to the dozens of black lines scoring the article with a pen, scratching out words, writing in new ones.

No one could see Severin and think that he looked well. He had taken a shower the day before, his first in about a week, but then he’d put on the same torn rags he’d been wearing since he left the institute, the remnants of a uniform. One of the sleeves had ripped off, and a dirty trenchcoat was thrown across the bed. There were a few superficial cuts on the tops of his arms and one across his chin, long scabbed over. The uniform had been grey, but dirt, mud, and a dark substance that might or might not have been spots of blood had darkened it to something closer to black.

When Will came in, he looked up. It had been three years. He seemed eons older, worlds away. “It’s not accurate,” he said.

Will stood in the doorway and it took a moment or two for eyes to adjust to the light after the deathly dull non-light of the hallway beyond. He hadn’t stopped to think a great deal about the furniture in the place and the dust or lack of it, or the gloom that hung oppressive overhead, like thick cloud gathering before thunder. It simply felt wrong, in a way beyond mess and clutter -- it felt like someone had shut up all the windows and left the place without air and when he’d opened the door onto light, he’d expected -- something other than what he saw. His brother? Severin was young and thin and gawky in the way all of the Connollys had been except for Warren -- but his smile was like their mother’s, and the memory Will had carried with him through his doctorate, when waking up with his cheek against dense-set type amid other books, was of Severin at not-quite seventeen, walking around his rooms at Yale and examining every book on his shelf with a running commentary on the validity of the opinions contained within, hands in his pockets in an unconscious similarity to the way all the brothers stood. It was a good memory, and one that made him smile as he’d pushed open the door, and that smile took a second of looking and then one of seeing before it died quite completely against Will’s mouth.

“Severin,” he said, because it could not be. He refused to allow it, none of them would -- their brother was in a glorious testament to learning, a place where they understood him, he was not here, in the tatters of what (with a sickening roil of the stomach) he recognized as a macabre, destroyed version of what all those glossy photographs had pictured the boys and girls at the Institute being dressed in. He looked like a soldier, one of those taken from foreign places and set down in a bedroom with a dusty pink ruffled skirt on the bed, and pictures painted on plates on the walls -- he looked like someone had beaten him, in the way no one tried with the Connolly boys because it was an easy way to being hung from something very high up by your underpants and no one had risked it since he, Will had been thirteen and accused of being homosexual -- which Will hadn’t minded except the way it was couched made it very clear the accuser considered it an insult and a very foul one at that; the beating had been to establish that homosexuality wasn’t akin to something untouchable.

He looked at Severin and he looked at the project across the floor, a drift of newspaper words that made no sense at all to Will standing there, and in his threadbare jumper and his jeans, Will sat down on the edge of the bed because it felt as though his knees wouldn’t hold him any longer.

“Severin,” he said softly, and it wasn’t a question but hollow with horror.

He looked up at him on the bed, his expression faltering a little. He’d seemed very sure a moment ago, but now he winced a little, and tapped the paper with his pen. “They left things out. They are missing the formulas and the experiences. They don’t know what it was. It needed to be fixed I had to - I had to make it right.” He tapped the pen a little harder, and winced again. “Loud. Did you see her, coming in?”

The bed eased under his weight and shifted; the trenchcoat across it smelled hideous, like something had died inside its folds. Will looked at it dubiously, gingerly pushed it further away and then turned his attention back to his brother. “Did I see who?” Severin had always made sense, the crystalline kind that scored like a scalpel through conventional wisdom. He wasn’t making any.

“What are you doing?” His voice was the careful sort of tone, the one used to calm rather than startle, the kind used for strangers and scared things that might bolt if he spoke too quickly. It took almost everything to ignore that he’d never had to speak to one of his brothers that way.

“Her. The woman,” he said, and he’d gone back to his article like that ought to explain it. After viciously crossing out another line of text, he went on. “She shut the windows and the doors for a good long while, and when she went out again she never came back. Because he left her.” He pushed some of the words on the carpet away, clearing them from his work.

“I’m making it accurate,” he said, speaking slowly, and looking up at him. Then he paused, and smiled a little. “You’re really here, aren’t you? It’s not a trick.”

Some of the words scribbled into the margins of the paper made sense, some didn’t on account mostly of being smudged and illegible. The words one could make out included insertions of the word ‘Creation’ into sentences, ‘114’ and then, later, ‘108’ and then, further down still, ‘103.’ There were names, as well, names that ran into one another, with arrows connecting them to various parts of the article. The other words were phrases, seemingly unrelated. ‘I know,’ and ‘They know,’ and, ‘It was buried.’

Will was used to being talked down to by Severin. It was a part of it, a part of him; tremendously intelligent, extremely poor people-skills when it came to explaining things that seemed obvious enough to Severin himself and impossible for anyone else playing catch-up. The tone, the slowing pace of words as if to say ‘keep up’ -- the corner of Will’s mouth twitched at the fractional familiarity, broken apart utterly by the next question. Severin even needed to ask -- “No, it’s not a trick,” Will said, very softly. The newspaper -- for it was a newspaper and not something else at all -- that he was so intent upon was a mess, barely readable at all beneath the cramped handwriting that littered the article, a tangled scrawl of names and numbers and the type marching blandly on beneath it all, as if it had nothing to do with what was being scored above it.

He never felt stupid, except when faced with Severin, but this wasn’t analysis of a piece of seventeenth century literature, or a math problem that Severin could sail through and leave him behind in. The knot to unfurl had enmeshed him and he wasn’t quite certain where to begin.

“Can I see?”

He hesitated, then sat up and handed it to him, eyes intent on the paper, then on his face. “It’s not done,” he said, like the work was a scholarly paper and not what appeared to be the work of a particularly industrious conspiracy theorist. “Judge it based on the merit of the unfinished work,” he said quietly. Then he added, eyes still on him, “The knot is Gordian, but that doesn’t mean it ought to be solved with a sword. Brute strength hardly ever works in these situations.”

Startled, Will took the paper from outstretched hands, fingers brushing past one another -- it was an odd sort of first contact for a family prone to hugs, to bodily envelopment as though they were all extensions of the same person and needed to come together once again whenever they met. A Gordian knot -- even when Severin looked (and smelled) nothing like Severin, he still had the most apt way of putting things. But Will didn’t think he had mention--

“I’ll take it under advisement,” he said very gravely, whether of the remark about how best to go about things, or the judgment of the paper -- it wasn’t certain as to which or both -- and looked down at the article. It wasn’t new, but that would have been easy to see from the amount of labor invested in layer after layer of handwriting. It was an article he hadn’t read before, but Will rarely read anything printed before nineteen hundred, so that wasn’t exactly unusual. The subject content however -- awareness crept up on him, like a thief until the knife-point clarity pressed itself coldly against him, slid sweetly inside and turned with cool and cruel understanding. “This was... your school, Sev, wasn’t it?” He studied the words in a storm of non-comprehension -- Creations, vague phrases that made little sense broken apart the way they were, and his mind recoiled back from them, held itself apart very deliberately. The paper hung limp in his fingers, unwanted.

“I think,” Will said and his words were very careful, shuffled into order like a card-player calculating risk, “We ought to go back to my place. And call Warren.” It was the first instinct, the best instinct, to look upon his brother’s upturned face and see something there that shouldn’t be -- call Warren, Warren would know what to do, how to fix it -- “And you can borrow some clothes.” Ink-stained and tatty most of Will’s wardrobe might be, but they smelled of soap powder and lay folded in drawers. With a pang -- Sev was taller now, nearly his own height. They’d fit.

After handing the paper off he pulled his knees up close to his chest, watching him. Will was upset - his thoughts were hiding. “It was a school,” he said distantly. It had been, on the top floor. “For some.”

“Warren?” he said, lifting his head again. “He’s here?” He hadn’t really expected to see him, even after Will had told him that he was here somewhere in this city. It was hard to learn to believe promises again, but this was Will, who wouldn’t lie to him about something as important as family. “I have clothes,” he said, but it wasn’t really a protest, voice gone distant again. Will was here, and Warren was somewhere. What about everyone else? He thought of his parents and then shied away from the idea.

He held a hand up toward him, clearly expecting it to be taken, face suddenly open and pleased. “I missed you,” he said. “I missed...everyone.”

Will took the hand, with the same solemnity and quiet meaning that the reaching seemed to have, and he looked at them: his own fingers, ink-stained, wrapped around Severin’s in a knot of family and brother-love and squeezed lightly. A small, promise-no-words of not letting go again.

“We missed you too,” but the guilt would bite and snap and sit beside Severin like an obedient dog that followed at his heels; how and why they would ask -- the article had spoken of burning to the ground, Will wanted to salt the place, make it a nothing that could never be a something again, never seduce families into giving up brothers with glass-bubble dreams to be dashed against cruelty. “Warren’s here.” Ensconced in the Aubade, with a maid service and a celebrity that probably wouldn’t like broken brothers who didn’t make sense -- hell, a celebrity that didn’t like ordinary brothers who got lost in books a little too frequently. But he’d know, and he’d come and until they could rally the others, it was the better option.

He leaned down, and the hand-clasp became a hug, the kind of awkward elbows-and-arms one surprisingly warm and easy on the inside, the kind the Connollys gave and took like it were easy as breathing. “You smell,” he told Severin, with his mouth against his little brother’s ear, where he couldn’t see the mess but could only feel Severin’s hair tickle his cheek and chin the way it always had when hugging Severin. It made it easier. “And you need to change. And we need to get out of this place.” The walls seemed too sodden with sadness to be anything but a place for despair.

He stiffened at first in his grip. Again, he wondered at a trick - but no, nothing happened. He relaxed in the hug, and awkward as it was, the sense that it was well-meant meant absolutely everything. There had been no contact like this in the Institute, no hugs, no human touching that didn’t have something to do with needles or scalpels or pain. Everything inside Will was good, all of it soothing, even the worried thoughts and the ones that jangled with anger, and that made the contact that much better.

The idea of leaving filtered through, and he nodded, breaking away from him and getting up from the floor. He walked over to the bedside table. There was a photo on it of a man and a woman and he took it and turned it down to face the table top. Then he turned back. He really was a mess, taller than he had been at seventeen but thinner as well, cheekbones standing out with marked prominence that called to question how often he’d been eating. The muscles under his tattered uniform, however, were stronger and more lithe than he’d ever been. When he reached to turn the photo down, there was a flash of white marks along the underside of his arm, there and gone again.

He walked back over to him. “Where are we going?” he asked, seeming more calm and at ease than he had since Will had arrived there.

There were too many questions to ask to even begin to sift through and pick one, but Will watched the byplay with the photograph with furrowed brow and confusion -- feeling bemused by Severin was one thing, but this went beyond bemusement into feeling like Sev was part of a complicated dance that only he knew the steps to, and to move out on the floor to join him would quickly lead to falling. Instead, Will looked at his brother and catalogued the differences, slid them alongside the known and well-loved images of him he’d held onto -- but the new ones, the things he didn’t know stood out in bright relief and made the old Severin fade and curl in memory, like a too-old photograph laid beside a polaroid, stark and unforgiving.

“My apartment, Sev. It’s just down the hall, it won’t take long. And then you can shower and change and I’ll call Warren and he’ll come.” It was a soft litany of what to do, facts laid out in order like toys lined up, a very small comfort. “It won’t take long.”

He nodded. The list of things to do helped give him a little better sense of direction. “Clothes,” he mused. It would be a relief to get these clothes off. They were a symbol, and he didn’t like looking at them.

He picked the trench coat up off the bed and walked out without waiting for Will, walking past the dusty, dead, abandoned rooms of the apartment without looking into them. He was leaving, and the woman had left, and her man had before that. This was a place people left.

He walked out into the hall and struck off down it toward Will’s apartment. He knew where he was going.

Will was left behind, to follow after Severin who seemed to know exactly where he was when a moment before he’d had no idea at all. Following Severin was not new -- not since Severin had been old enough to write, to read, to speak, but this Severin was not the same Severin and he walked out without a backward glance and the dust of the apartment swelled up in his wake as if reaching out to pull him back in again. A moment or two of bewilderment, and Will was striding after him, trying to keep pace with the man who used to be the boy who was his brother.

Severin turned toward where Will’s apartment was as if he knew it as well as Will did, as if he had visited the way he would have if he’d been here, had been part of the brother camaraderie rather than shut into a school that did -- experiments -- Will hastily shut that away, deal with it later -- The apartment door was unlocked. It pushed open onto a wide and expansive room that was all bookcases and couch and armchairs, dark and rich colors everywhere and light streaming through half-closed blinds. It was very obviously lived in; things were strewn about like cushions and books and occasionally socks, and once walked into, there was a hall on the immediate right and beyond the couches and stacks of books and lamps in odd places that were perfect for reading, was a dais and an office sort of place with folded screens - the computer still gleamed artificial light, the forums pulled up as a page.

“Do you -- have you eaten recently?” There wasn’t much food in his apartment, clearly, he needed to buy food, and keep it in case long-lost brothers who weren’t supposed to be long-lost turned up, Will thought, distractedly. Something else to sort out. “I can call for food?”

He liked it much more in this apartment, and he felt safer as soon as he walked in. It was so familiar, so comforting - Will had always lived like this, with books everywhere and things scattered and chaotic. It felt more like home than anything had in such a long time, and he walked over to a couch and sat down heavily, unable to go any further.

This was real. It wasn’t a dream.

His eyes were wet, but he smiled. “There was food, but it rotted.” Or, rather, there had been perfectly good food left behind by a dead woman, and so he had eaten as little of it as possible. It was rotted out with misery, with a terrible hopelessness.

This was how the Connollys operated, with a mother who fed them as much as she loved them and often confused the two. Food was as much a part of family life as the hugs and the arguments were. When the boys went home, it was to a positive deluge of food cooked -- Moira showing them her love as tangible as stews and bread and anything else she might shape with hands that cupped her children’s chins up to kiss their cheeks. Of all of them, Will had been the least able to imitate this way of loving, he barely knew more than to boil water but now, all he coul think of was homemade bread slathered in butter, the plates set before them all after school, and watching Severin eat it each day, over books their mother chided them for producing at tables, and whisked away.

“I can do food,” and there was something hard and difficult to swallow past in Will’s throat, something that misted his eyes and pulled hard from within. “I’ll order something. I can do that,” Will repeated, because it was something to hold onto, whilst he looked at Severin sitting amidst the poetry books as if he’d never been gone at all.

Severin pulled his knees up onto the couch, looking across the room at a stack of books, reading the titles. His smile widened a little before fading - the thought of stew and warm bread and family seemed so distant, but still closer to his reach than it had been since he left. “Can I have a book at the table?” he asked, picking one up from a stack close to him without even glancing at the title, running his fingers over the cover like it was a great and beautiful thing, a lost thing. He opened it and flipped the pages under his fingers, smelled ink and paper, and spread his fingertips across the page. Books. A thousand things missed, and books among them.

The books stacked around were a mixture of the crumpled kind of paperback left on subways all over America, the kind with creases down the front from bending, and water marks and the faint smell of coffee -- to the kind of book that came with white gloves to sift through pages like tissue, like silk and skin, and the sort of type that was cramped and often off at angles before the print became regulated. They mixed like people at parties, but without any self-consciousness about what they were and how expensive -- in Will’s apartment, all of them had uses. Now, it seemed, they had another use; under Severin’s hands they were a kind of balm and Will’s mouth was a laugh away from memories of Sev doing exactly the same thing with books of the past.

“You can have anything you like,” he said with an ease and a lightness from that one brief note of normality, playing out in all the discordance. “Anything.”

The book in his hands was a battered old copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and he began to page through it. Dreams, confusions, a mixture of reality and the world of the logical and the chaos of magic and imagination and fantasy. “One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,” he murmured. “That is the madman. You said there were clothes?” He looked up at him. He kept the trenchcoat close to his body, wrapped around one of his arms, but the other clothes could go. They wouldn’t change anything in the going, they would only take away a reminder of what had been. But he would feel a little better with them gone.

Clothes. Usually kept in drawers and closets, in Will’s place they were either dirty and scrumpled and thrown around the room as though competing for a very modern piece of modern art, or tucked into the black plastic sacks the laundry service used to deliver them back in -- folded and smelling, if not of their mother’s choice of detergent, of some synthetic and sweet smell that was better than the one clinging to Severin like a reluctant lover whose arms could not be pried away. Will sprang from his position with a speed that wasn’t expediency so much as a need to be doing something.

The bedroom was down the hall, and from it could be heard rustling of plastic bags and clothes and when Will returned, his hair was ruffled and he had a towel over one arm and a clean and ironed white shirt in one hand and jeans in the other, along with appropriate bits and pieces. “Clothes!” he said brightly, and then bit the inside of his cheek -- Severin might be not quite himself, but he sounded as though he was addressing an especially doddled and confused old person, which Sev was not.

He smiled a little, almost rueful, at Will’s cheery enthusiasm for the clean clothes. He got up from the couch and stepped towards him, taking the clothes from him. He was going to take them into the shower, and sit under the spray for as long as he wanted. “Don’t make me come out,” he said, walking towards the bathroom, oddly chiding and fond.

“You can take a book in,” Will called, and it was reminiscent of the old house, the one where bathrooms were always prone to queues, and both Sev and Will were ordered to hand over the book once seen to be on a trajectory toward a bathroom. He smiled, and he reached out to ruffle a hand through Sev’s hair, but the hand slid to his side and dropped -- after the shower, when it wouldn’t be dust and blood and loneliness to catch fingers through.

He lifted one hand, still holding the paperback, and ducked into the bathroom with the new clothes. Once the door was shut, the smile faded. He felt strangely alone even though he knew Will was just outside, and he set the clothes on the edge of the sink, looking at himself for a long moment. He hadn’t seen himself in a mirror since...he couldn’t remember. He touched the mirror. Different, but the ways in which he was slipped under his fingers like the smooth glass.

He turned the shower on, first very cold, and then very hot, close to scalding. He stood there, clothes still on, for a few long minutes, before sinking to the floor and pulling them off, shoving them into a corner of the shower and laying back against the tiled wall, leaving his mouth open to catch the spray as dirt and blood ran off of him in waves. The filth would leave stains on the floor to be cleaned out later. He barely noticed. He was completely absorbed in the pounding spray on his face and listening to his brother in the next room, tracking him through it. There were so many people in this building. above and below and on both sides. Following Will made things easier, as it always did when he focused on one thing at a time, and the other voices faded to white noise.

Will’s thoughts were a malestrom; the scattering of memories that stirred in white and gold, like sunlight filtering through closed eyelids, the purpling swell of anger and helplessness and frustration, the books around him scattered -- he’d swept them off the desk with a hand as soon as the shower had started up loud enough to drown out the sound as they clattered onto polished hardwood floor. Through it all, two pulse-points remained steady, beating a tattoo in tandem. Warren -- Warren and knowing what to do, and needing a plan -- and the softer but still persistent thready beat of Severin found. He sank onto the faded plush of a couch, and punched a cushion for want of being able to punch anything else, and then he picked up the phone and dialed for food, because clearly, the way to handle this was to go through the slightly absurd motions, as if Sev were anyone else.

He waited to call Warren, however.

Severin tried to open his eyes against the spray and found it a little too strong to do so, so he sat up, bowing his head under it. When it came down to it, Will wanted to help, and he was angry. He could do nothing about either of those things, and he shut the water off, sitting on the bottom of the shower for another moment before climbing out and looking at himself in the mirror again. Still different, still in some ways the same. He took the towel and dried himself off, putting the clothes on and leaning against the counter, looking at the door. Will. Poor Will.

The thought was swept away as quickly as it had come, and he fingered the edge of his sleeve, glad for long-sleeved shirts in that moment. The clothes were soft, unlike anything he’d worn at the Institute, and they smelled like detergent and home, in the way that family members made things smell familiar. He opened the door, peeking his head out, book in hand again. The rest of him followed soon after, and he walked back into the living room and over to the couch without pausing, curling up along the arm. He’d brought the trenchcoat with him again, and set it off to the side, leaning his cheek on the arm of the couch. His eyes weren’t quite focused on anything, staring off into space.

Will’s hand settled, warm-firm against Severin’s back, heat blooming through well-worn shirt fabric. There was no doubt, without the dirt and with his fingers knocking against verterbrae, Sev was thinner than he should be, more angular than youth and bones gave him a right to be. He sat there for a moment or two, in silence that became more comfortable with each passing beat of it, and then he whistled, because the sound was low and easy and it filled the space of the room with a melody that was a half-tuneless version of things their mother used to sing around the house, hopelessly off-key. It wasn’t the kind of shiftless comfort that found itself a port as easily as a boat turned sightless yet direct for home the way the Connollys worked -- Sev was brittler on the outside, broken-fragile and he needed to shave and he needed to be fed and there was almost nothing to him of the athlete he’d been, once.

“What do you want, Sev?” he said, and the tone was baby-brother gentle, one he’d learned when he was nine and Severin had become something to protect, something very small and easily hurt and precious, and it came back now, halting and in pieces over time, but it was remembered, at least.

The hand on his back made him sink a little further into the couch. It was a comfort, in many ways - because it was warm, and there was no damage meant in it, and the touch connected him much closer to Will’s thoughts, which were of making things better and getting back something long gone. “Here,” he said, turning his eyes over to him. “I just wanted to come back here.” ‘Here’ was home, was this apartment, was the house he’d grown up in, was where his family was. He hummed a few bars of the melody Will had been whistling, hitting all the right notes, perfectly in key.

It would be a while before food arrived -- even the fastest of Chinese places was overloaded of a weekend, but there was a blanket draped over the back of the couch, for times when the call of a good book and a bottle of wine kept him there too long to make the walk to bed anything but onerous. Will tugged it down now, and he tucked it around his little brother’s shoulders with the care of years of practice, and he smoothed back the hair from Sev’s forehead with an awkward version of the gesture their parents had used years ago when they were small. It did not take much to provoke a Connolly to the care of another -- not much at all, even if that care usually came courtesy of a fist and a kick to those who did them wrong. But there was no one to hurt, no one to cut down in a glory of revenge; someone had already done that and razed the school and its false promises to nothing. There was only the aftermath to care for.

“Go to sleep, Sev,” and it was boyhood back again, babysitting his brother whilst doing homework the self-same brother could do in his sleep, warm and fond and betraying nothing of the calamity beneath the surface. “We’ll keep you safe now.” There was a great deal of making up to be done, after all.

He reached up and pulled the blanket down around his shoulders, hugging it tightly, eyes drifting closed almost immediately. He realized he was tired as he was falling asleep. “I’ll keep you safe,” he murmured, and almost before the last word was out, he was asleep.