braymitch thornathy. (grever) wrote in emillion, @ 2014-05-26 23:08:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | !complete, !log, bram thornton, magnolia paget |
the difference between a rut and a grave is an inch.
Who: Magnolia Paget & Bram Thornton
What: Falling apart.
Where: The Thornton residence.
When: Backdated to late April, a few days after the attacks, late night.
Rating: F for Fucking Feels.
Status: Complete.
Days had passed, but it didn’t feel like it. The knock at the door stirred him out of whatever haze he’d slipped into; Bram experienced a blur of confusion, wondering why not the doorbell?, until his gaze drifted from the glass at his elbow to the grandfather clock by the wall. It was late. Somewhere along the way, the hours had blurred into one another and it was now late, Vera already ensconced upstairs, another care package from Elvira sitting on the counter, another night now sinking over the damaged city. The man rose to his feet slowly, carefully, and then made his way through the kitchen, into the living room, to the front door—where, at the sight of it, he felt a lurch of irrational fear (or perhaps it was too rational), perhaps it was another pair of Peacekeepers come to deliver bad news with their hats twisting between their hands and their guts twining in their stomach—but when he opened the door, it was only Mag, and Bram exhaled in relief. “Evening,” he said. His voice was steady but he didn’t look good. Her concern that she may have found him injured was replaced by a different sort of worry. Yet whatever may be wrong with him, at least physically he was in one piece. He was not another Kiernan lying motionless in a clinic bed. Without thinking, Mag took a step forward and hugged him. It was only when she felt him still in her arms that she realised she had never done it before. She released him and gave him a smile. There was much she wanted to ask him, but her relief took precedence. “Evening,” she said. “Sorry for coming so late. I went to the office, but you weren’t there, so I came straight here.” “Tried to stay there,” Bram said, “but I— couldn’t.” It was the smallest blip in his speech, like a record passing over a slight scratch, the word stuttering. Normally he might have haunted the hallways of the guildhall and its offices until late into the night, burying himself under the tidal wave of paperwork that sprang up even as the city fell. Every other catastrophe, that was what he’d done. “You look good, considering,” he managed to say, motioning her into the house. “Vera’s asleep. You’re all right?” Despite the fact that she was obviously walking and talking and well enough to visit others, it suddenly seemed the most imperative thing in the world to check that Magnolia was fine—that her condition hadn’t broken her on the field somehow, that she’d been to a clinic, that she wasn’t secretly bleeding inwardly while standing on his front stoop. “I saw a healer.” Indeed, it seemed all she had seen of late were healers, men and women in white robes rushing up and down the corridors of the clinic, from one patient to another. “I’m perfectly healthy. I must have been the only person to walk away from that mess unscathed.” Too many injured friends to count, and the list of the dead was already too long by existing. That, by some miracle, the name Aspel Cassul was not on the list was no small blessing—but Mag had replayed that moment over and over in her dreams, the fall of a woman in jet-black armor overlapping with a ghost of jet-black wings, and the ground shaking beneath her feet at the impact, as though flinching from their forms, as though unwilling to take them in. Somehow, looking at Bram, she did not think he had been sleeping all that well, either. “Are you okay?” she asked, voice quiet to avoid waking the woman sleeping in the bedroom. I’m fine would have been easy to say, another lie slathered atop the situation, Bram’s usual way of sweeping aside any trouble. I will be fine would have been closer to the truth. Something pragmatic, something with perspective, sensible and— “Zacheus is dead,” he said. Her eyes widened momentarily; then, she glanced away, muttered a curse under her breath. There was nothing that she could say. Jonah had died, and now the person who had been a surrogate son to Bram was dead, too. How could she hope to find words for that? (At once her thoughts flew to Kiernan, still in a coma, not knowing a man who had been a brother to him was now gone. Before he heard from anyone else, she would have to tell him the truth, when he woke up―if he woke up—) In the dim light of the room, she thought she could see the cracks appear in Bram’s usually unshakeable fortitude, wondered absently if he too could see she was barely holding the pieces together. “I’m so sorry any of this happened,” Mag said. In the absence of magical healing words, honesty was all she had left. Gently, she placed a hand on Bram’s arm. “Let’s sit down.” She was close enough now to catch the whiff of alcohol on his breath, but without another word, they shut the door and went over to the sofa. He glanced towards the kitchen for a moment, but then redirected his attention back to Mag. It was somehow easier to maintain composure while in the confines of his office; that place was a fortress like any other, the desk with its stacks of paper serving as walls and ramparts to hold others at bay while Bram Thornton, detective inspector, councilman, glowered at them from his seat. This house, however, granted him none of those defenses. Here he was just a man, wrinkled shirtsleeves and all. “I can’t do this,” he said after a pause. Not again. There was a deep well stewing in the man, something she’d only caught glimpses of before now—normally Bram kept the lid firmly on, shut and padlocked—but there was something fraying and unraveling in his voice now, though they both kept their conversation pitched low enough that the words wouldn’t carry upstairs, wouldn’t disturb a slumbering holy knight. She took a deep, shuddering breath, not daring to speak for the moment. His words rang all too true. To go through the same thing all over again―no, the first time was already one too many times. To get over the same all-consuming grief twice was something she could not do, either. She knew, because some nights the amulet around her neck pierced her chest with its unnaturally cold touch, and in the dark she could acknowledge that she had been unable to leave that grief behind even once. “I don’t know what else there is to do,” she whispered at last. Her hand reached out and found his, gripped it, an anchor for both of them. And that was the great tragedy of the matter, wasn’t it? There was nothing else to do but continue, stubbornly keep on keeping on—or give up. But even in these depths, Bram had never been a man for throwing in the halberd and abandoning the fight, no matter how hard. He looked at the younger woman, saw the loss reflected back in her eyes, and noted the hairline fractures. He’d recognised them in a sparring hall years ago, and could still see them now. The difference was that this time, he couldn’t be that steady rock—his own foundations had rotted and decayed over the last couple years, the ground slipping out from beneath him. So Bram leant towards that anchor instead, his hand tightening in hers. “What else? Pull up sticks. Leave Emillion. Start anew.” He wondered if it could be done. If it would help. Probably not. “—but I know I can’t,” he relented, exhaling. She would have asked what is it with our councilors and wanting to leave town? but the pain in his features was too familiar, a mirror image of her own feelings that she had become so adept at masking. Her voice wavered as she said the words she had been running away from for years. "I pulled up sticks and I started anew. And it didn't make one bit of difference." “Didn’t help at all?” Bram asked quietly. "I suppose I got better at not thinking about it," she answered, wry. "But it's not a perfect strategy. Once I start thinking about it, I'm screwed." Perhaps he was hoping to be told that it would get easier with time, that the pain would dull. But what she saw in his face told her if she had told him so, he would have known it to be a lie. Plus, it was much the same as they’d gone over before, in tracing over other old wounds: I don't think time helps, not in itself. "I'm happier here than I would have been if I had stayed, I think," she said. Mulling over Mag’s words, Bram’s hand crept away from hers, finally grudgingly detaching from that touch of physical intimacy (it had never been his strong suit; he’d always been stiff and distant, even as a young man). “So you’re a bit happier, but it doesn’t help in the main issue.” It was much as he’d suspected. Crippling loss had already hollowed him out last year—life, now, was simply a matter of finding the best way to persevere past it, eking out those small moments of happiness between the waves. Forgetting then remembering, ad nauseam. “They told me, before I left the Riders, that Warwick wouldn’t have liked to see me crying over what happened.” She looked down at her hands and breathed out the impulse to cry now. “But I still can’t figure out how to get past that.” She shook her head and chuckled, but there was no humor in it. “I can’t even figure out if I want to get past it.” Bram found himself staring blankly at the door to the kitchen once more, feeling that old itch in the corner of his mind, a thirst (for numbness, for oblivion) that was never quite slaked. “Then that makes two of us,” he said. It was a bleak club to be in, with no real perks or advantages—only drudgery and grief, weighing heavy and oppressive and claustrophobic. Like a shattered vase glued back together along the fractures: they were in the vague shape and approximation of humes, but with something indescribably different about them, a heart that didn’t quite tick right after what they’d suffered. But even in this, at least they still had each other. Surely that had to count for something. |