WHO: Rhy & Kell Maresh WHAT: Kell's memory charm breaks WHEN: Backdated to late May WHERE: by the river WARNINGS: Mentions of death, violence against children, kidnapping
Kell was by the river when the memory charm broke.
His eye had turned black the day before his fourth birthday.
He and Iona would hide in the floorboards in the barn underneath the chickens when they came. Because they always did come. Their parents had worked to hide that Kell’s magic had manifested itself in the rarest of ways, but it didn’t matter. Word always got out. A boy couldn’t disappear without a trace, not entirely. A black eye couldn’t be hidden, not entirely. Though they tried both.
Some came just to see. Some came to believe.
And many others came because they wanted.
They lived in a stronghold of anti-Arnesian sentiment that ran deep, mixed with the blood and the land. The clan nearest them came the first time in peace, asking the whole family to come stay with them, that they would want for nothing, that they would make the boy a God among men. The second time they came with warnings. The third time with threats.
And each time, with each visitor, Kell and Iona would sneak away and hide. At first, Kell thought it was a kind of game -- the kind he and Iona would play all the time. They would take down snacks and some water, and their father would entrust Iona with his knife. Kell didn’t ask why. But Iona would use it to carve into the ground beneath them and tell him stories to pass the time, because Kell grew bored quickly and it was Iona’s job to keep him quiet. More than once they slept down there, cramped together.
When the visitor had left, their father would come and knock on the floor and Kell and Iona would rise again.
But the last time the clan came, there was no knock. There were many other sounds -- of things shattering, glass breaking. The chickens were quiet. Kell grasped Iona’s hand tightly.
The noises came closer and for the first time in Kell’s young life, he was truly afraid. Iona leaned in close, pressed a kiss to his temple, and said something so soft that even Kell couldn’t hear it.
The men above them pried up the floorboards and fished them out one a time -- they took Iona first, and Kell screamed and wailed, trying to cling to her. Someone yanked him away from her, their fingers tearing apart. He was hefted under someone’s arm like a sack of potatoes, the world gone askew. The last thing he saw before he was taken away from the only home he had ever known was Iona. She ran after him.
One of the men caught her again and slit her throat.
It took three days to reach the clan’s home village. When they arrived, they took Kell through the main square to show him off. They reached the center and Kell burned it all down, the magic seeping through him and his grief. He couldn’t have stopped it if he had wanted to, but he hadn’t really wanted to. His pain was viscous and it destroyed everything around him. He killed every person in that village.
He walked back along the road, taking twice as long. He was soot streaked and his feet were bloody. A few people tried to stop and pick him up, but most were too wary -- scared off by his appearance or the black eye or both.
He reached the house again, but it didn’t really matter. Everything was gone. His parents were physically still there, but they all knew the world as they had known it no longer existed.
He didn’t ask where they were going when they loaded him onto a boat the next day. They sailed and Kell wanted to enjoy the ocean, but there was a deep blackness in him that eclipsed everything else. He didn’t like the world anymore.
Kell stayed on Maris’ boat for three months. He liked it there, as much as he could. There were many things -- things to hide in, things to hide behind. He could be still and quiet there sometimes. He wouldn’t talk, and they didn’t like that. They said he was unnatural.
The old-not-old-woman Maris would come and make him eat at least once a day and they would sit there in silence that wasn’t companionable because it wasn’t really anything.
“You’re the rarest of all things,” Maris said when she told him where he would go. “But I have tried to find you a place that will bring you the least pain. They will try to protect you.”
Kell didn’t care.
In the end, it was Master Tieren who suggested the memory charm when he came to pick Kell up.
“Perhaps it’s just too much sorrow for one so young,” he said.
Kell collapsed to his knees and wept.
…
The relief that Rhy felt at having his own power back was intense. He was glad to no longer feel like the power inside him was barely contained, tired of exerting all his energy just to have some semblance of control, which hilariously had made him seem almost as broody as Kell.
Kell wasn’t with him when it happened, but he could still feel the connection to his brother, could feel the power coming from him. This time, Rhy didn’t rush to him to make sure he was alright. He thought they were both probably better now, and it was late at night.
Except, just the next morning, he was flooded with overwhelming emotion, sadness strong enough that it made Rhy’s eyes fill with tears. It wasn’t his grief, though. Kell.
For the second time in a week, he ran, following the connection to his brother. He found Kell on his knees by the river, and stopped beside him, pressing a hand to Kell’s shoulder. “Kell,” he said, breathless from running, “What’s wrong?”
--
Kell wasn’t one to cry normally, but he simply didn’t know what to do with the onslaught of memories and emotions that accompanied them. Later, he would be embarrassed that he had collapsed in a place where anyone could have seen him. Now, he was too devastated.
He didn’t know what he would have done if anyone besides Rhy had found him, but because it was Rhy, Kell stumbled to his feet, wrapped his arms around Rhy, and buried his face into his shoulder.
…
Rhy’s arms immediately went around his brother in return. He hugged Kell tight, his own eyes wet, his throat tight with his brother’s emotion, and his own heart ached with sympathy.
Kell hadn’t answered his question, so he didn’t say anything else, just kept holding on. He closed his eyes, curled his fingers into Kell’s jacket, and let a few of his own tears slip out.
—
Only slowly did Kell come back into himself, but he was still half torn between being aware of being held by Rhy and being immersed in the memories he had just received. He kept paging back through them, sticking on the parts that hurt -- on Iona’s face when they had pulled him away. How much it hurt when he had walked back, and he hadn’t cared. He didn’t even know why he was walking back at that point but there was simply nowhere else to go.
“I had a sister,” Kell whispered wetly into Rhy’s shirt.
…
Rhy could not help but notice that Kell hadn’t said anything about his parents. He didn’t know if that necessarily said anything bad about them, or just that Kell’s grief for his sister was stronger. Was it grief? Had she died? Or had she still been alive when he had been taken away?
“What was her name?” he asked quietly, starting with a simple question, giving Kell room to offer more information if he wanted.
--
Kell hesitated -- not because he didn’t want Rhy to know her name, but because he knew, already, that it was going to hurt and be strange to say. That perhaps he didn’t really have a right to say it.
They may have been his memories, but there was also no denying that the little boy who’d been in them was dead. Erasing those memories meant that Kell hadn’t grown from him -- he’d become a new person entirely, made of a void and magic only. He still remembered those odd first few weeks in the palace when everything had been new and terrifying. The world had only been full of strangers -- with the gradual exception of Rhy and Tieren. He had never been ready for the interest the court and Arnes and the world had shown him.
“Iona,” Kell managed to answer.
…
When Kell hesitated, Rhy wondered if he’d asked the wrong question. But he waited, giving Kell room to decide if he was going to answer, and if so, how. He kept his hold on his brother, supporting him in whatever decision he made.
Iona. Iona and Kell. It wasn’t hard for Rhy to imagine Kell with a sister; he remembered Kell as a child, at their first meeting. His imagination conjured a slightly smaller redheaded girl, not Antari, both of her eyes blue. It made him sad to think that he had never gotten to meet her.
--
“We would hide together,” Kell said, his voice still tight, the words not coming easily. He didn’t know if they would make any sense to Rhy or not -- that they hid when people came to look for him because he was Antari. He didn’t know if any of this made sense or not. His head was reeling, and he wanted badly for everything to go very quiet and very still, to give him a minute to breathe.
…
“Hide and seek?” Rhy asked, because that had been one of their favorite games as children in the palace. He wondered where they had played it, what kind of home they had grown up in. He knew Kell could answer those questions, but Kell was struggling to speak still, so he didn’t press any further.
--
“No,” Kell said, clearing his throat a little.
“We’d hide when people would come to take me,” Kell said, and it felt more unreal as he spoke the words, casting everything in the light of a hazy dream. “There was a space under the chickens in the barn.”
…
“Oh,” Rhy said, a soft and surprised sound. He had not imagined it that way; he didn’t know quite what that meant. He remembered how often his father had said that Kell was a target, that people would either take him or kill him if they had a chance. But that had not actually happened; Kell had been targeted for other reasons.
His brow furrowed, trying to imagine what sort of intentions people might have with a young, magical boy - beyond selling him, which had happened - and then he realized that that might have been their intentions. Maybe one or more of them had succeeded.
--
The response didn’t come as any real surprise -- because what was there to say to that?
After that surge of memory and emotion, though, his mind was giving up, allowing Kell to lean into the sort of numb sensation overtaking him. It was a relief after everything else, after that jarring juxtaposition of what he was to what he could have been. To questions answered that brought him the grief he had expected.
He started to unwind his arms from around Rhy.
…
Rhy slowly let Kell go, though his hands lingered even after his grip loosened, making sure Kell wanted to be released. He felt the numbness settling in, and he wasn’t entirely sure it was a good thing, but Kell seemed to be starting to pull himself together.
“Are you glad to know?” he asked, after a moment. “Even if it’s not easy.”
--
“Yes,” Kell answered and, that, at least, he didn’t have to think over too much. He had wondered for so long. He knew that, one way or another, he likely would have found the truth, so it was hard to regret finding something that he had searched for even if it did hurt him. He had been honest in that he wasn’t sure how this could have a happy ending.
...
“Good,” Rhy said, giving his brother a small smile. The amount of emotion it had caused Kell still left an ache in his heart, but he had thought, when they had first talked about it, that knowing would be better than not knowing. He knew that memory charm had plagued Kell all his life. Maybe if Kell had just one less thing to brood about, he could find some peace of mind.
--
“Sorry,” Kell said quietly, squeezing Rhy’s arm gently, because he knew how much he had scared Rhy with that onslaught of emotion. Even now, he could feel Rhy’s worry creeping through the bond, likely because of the way he was disengaging with the whole situation.
…
Rhy’s smile widened a little. “It’s okay, Kell,” he said easily. “I’m just always going to worry about you. You’re my brother.”
He knew that went both ways; Kell worried about him constantly, and carried the weight of Rhy’s entire life around, which was as heavy as Rhy had imagined - he knew exactly how it felt now, having had their roles reversed.
--
“I know,” Kell said, because if there was one thing that had always held true in his life, it was that. He would worry over Rhy, and Rhy would worry over him. They had their fights and their bickering -- because Rhy had dragged him out to so many places that Kell very much did not want to be. But in the end, they were always there for each other.
It was just strange, now, to know there was another person in his life who might have been this to him -- who one day had been.
…
Rhy lifted a hand, ran it through his curls. After a moment, he asked, “Are you glad to have your magic back?”
He didn’t want to change the subject if Kell had something else to say, but it seemed like Kell was done. And since the magic had changed back late in the night, he hadn’t checked in. He wondered, suddenly, if the timing of that was not just coincidence, if the return of Kell’s magic had something to do with breaking the memory charm. But it had been hours since then.
--
“I’ll tell you it all soon,” Kell promised quietly, because there was very little that he didn’t share with Rhy. He just wasn’t sure if he could give voice to all of that. Perhaps showing would be easier -- memories projected on water. But he didn’t know if Rhy really wanted to see all of the horror that would come with that.
…
Rhy nodded. He hadn’t really expected Kell to tell him the rest; Kell hadn’t been particularly forthcoming lately, even by his standards. But he was glad to hear that Kell did want to tell him, even if he was going to keep it to himself for a bit.
He put his hands in his pockets. “Okay.”
--
“But yes,” Kell said, returning to Rhy’s other question. “I’m glad to have my magic back.” He had always enjoyed the magic, a constant sort of companion, even if all the strings that it came with were rather complicated. It gave, and it took, but that seemed to be the way of all things in life.
…
Rhy let out a breath. “Good,” he said. “I’m glad you have it back, too.”
The deeper truth was that he was glad to be rid of the feeling of all that power, so much that he felt constantly on the verge of exploding with it. He had always felt overlooked, passed over by magic, especially since everyone said magic chose who it went to; for the first time he truly felt as though magic had chosen correctly when it came to him. Having more power had not made him feel safer, nor any better about himself, only wildly out of control. He was not going to miss it.
More selfishly, he was not going to miss the weight of Kell’s life that came with it. He felt awfully guilty for that part.