Chapter Text
Part I
“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
C.S. Lewis
When Jack awoke, he was met by the sweet calling of a violin. Surprise registered in his foggy mind as his eyes fluttered open. It was much too dark to be dawn quite yet, but the singing of the stringed instrument drifted in through the summer breeze passing through his window. He stayed entangled in his bedsheets, training his ears to the melancholic notes. He could feel the weight of a certain sadness on his heart as he listened to the stranger’s soul bared forth in sorrow. In the dim moonlight, Jack vaguely wondered what had prompted the distant melody at such a late hour. As the music slid into a crescendo, he found himself on his feet, wrapped in a curious haze.
The silence of the castle only enhanced the sad echoes of the violin. The swirling notes tugged at Jack’s heartstrings, and memories pricked at the back of his eyes, forcing dew to gather on his eyelids. The guards paid him little mind as he quietly tread by on bare feet. He was on a mission. The sounds of the violin were what guided him to her.
She was a pale creature, hardly had seen the sun by the looks of her. She was lithe, her slender fingers expertly grasping the bow. Her moonlit form was swirled with colors and designs that looked traditional in a sense. Her straight, blonde hair glittered nearly silver in the starlight. Jack found himself staring at her, enchanted. In the back of his brain, some part of him recognized her as an otherworldly creature, too perfect to be human and yet too ethereal to be a demon of the Nether. Suddenly, it clicked. She was a muse, elvish in nature and angelic. A rare sighting.
Jack settled his gaze on her, and hers to his, locking him into place with glittering eyes of sorrowful blue. The realization dawned on him that she was grieving as she stood, the freshly laid dirt seeping between her toes. The dark body of the violin fit snugly under her chin as she rent the night chill with the melancholic crying of the bow on the strings. Jack closed his eyes as the last low note reverberated throughout the cemetery air, fading into the dull noise of the summertime night. When he opened them again, he found himself alone with the flowers already beginning to wilt in the humid air and the tombstone glistening with dewdrops.
The tears threatened to return, but he blinked them away. Deep under his feet laid the solid casing of an obsidian casket buried under six feet of earth, the Ramsey green banner shielding the glossy stone from the dirt laid there the day before. Jack felt the sharp thorn of grief render his heart asunder once more. He couldn’t help but feel the regret like lead return to his feet. Desperately somewhere in his mind, Jack cried to whatever deity there might be to rewind time so that he might have done something else to stop this.
Memories cascaded in his mind of the ceremony. It had been more than simply grim. Jack had donned the ceremonial black clothing and spoken like he had for the past three funerals. He had been grateful that no one had brought it up to him that these were his friends he was laying into the ground, but that reassurance did nothing to help him forget the faces of those death had obscured. Jack had felt the warmth of hot tears streaming from his eyes as he had laid the Ramsey banner over this last casket. He had almost not been able to proceed with the final words of his address, the sorrow had become too great to say in finality “may he rest in peace at last”. He recalled the harsh sting of remorse, and it stayed with him still.
The reminder that it was too late came in the receding echoes of the muse’s song. With a heavy sigh, Jack turned back to the torchlight flickering on the dull silver glow that was the castle. He hesitated, turning briefly to register the four tombstones. His heart ached. What a mess this whole thing had become, and now he felt more alone than he had ever been in his life. He steeled himself to return to what his life had become. He couldn’t stay here with the already vanished muse and mourn the already dead. He was needed back where his home was. He had things to do. The blacksmith gathered his wits about him and trudged back the way he had come. He was astounded by the sudden silence the muse had left in her wake. Neither owl nor bug made a single chirrup as he reentered the building, gently tugging the oaken door behind him, leaving the royal cemetery to bask in the silver starlight.
The trek back to his room was filled with confused thought patterns drawn in his head that made little sense. As he tread past the silent guards, he found the profound silence to be everywhere but inside his own head. Sleep would be as elusive as his peace of mind, he mused in bitterness. But in his heart, he knew he must press on despite the hardships that had only just recently ravaged the kingdom, much less his heart. Within a year, the great king once thought to be immortal caved under the weight of a sickness replacing his lifeblood with poison. Within months, the bravest and brightest of the king’s knights fell to the darkness of his own heart. Within weeks, arguably the most steady of the knights had tumbled down a road too twisted and dark to be the road of the sane. Within days, the righteous knight become king who had stepped forward to help guide the kingdom back to its glory under the First was choked by his own blood through the single swipe of a shattered mind in madness’s glory. Within hours, the jester whose smile had lit the kingdom with brilliant joy had crumbled under his own despair. Jack couldn’t help but feel alone in the madness that had crashed into his life.
He blinked, barely registering his own surprise that he was already back to the door at the end of the hall. Beyond the solid oak in front of him was his bedroom, and one more door beyond that, concealed by a heavy bookcase, held the most painful memories of the past year. He didn’t want to think of those nights spent in silence with the five most influential people of his life. He didn’t want to recall the flickering candlelight glinting off the tears streaking down three knights’ otherwise stoic faces. He didn’t wish to remember the fool’s sickening screaming. He didn’t want to reminisce the final breath of his friend and king. He didn’t want to remember, but the memories forced their way into his mind, playing a disheartening cinematic broken record.
He pushed the door open, forcing himself to function after what seemed like an eternity. The blankets on the bed were in a bundle of pure mess, something Jack rarely allowed to happen, but he refused to lie down just yet. Dawn was assuredly hours away still, but he knew that the nightmares would plague him as soon as he rested his eyes. And so he pulled the chair out from under his desk and sat down to work.
As steward of a kingdom on the verge of self-destruction, his work was never done. Piles upon piles of parchment covered his desk, his sketches of magnificent weaponry yet to be forged swiped away to the floor. His smithy days were over, at least until the kingdom was back into order. He huffed a sigh, running calloused fingers through ginger hair. He plucked the quill from the inkwell and set to work. Documents of varying importance were spread throughout the room. It was then that Jack found himself absently wishing for the strong comfort of a certain king, but the great Geoffrey Ramsey was dead and gone. The blacksmith felt the pang of sadness and remorse once more in his chest. His ears ached for the breathless laughter of his long time friend, but reality would not give it to him. So he settled for the quiet scratching of quill upon parchment.
An hour slunk by, and the pile was no less higher than it had been when Jack had first tackled it. He kept the frustration at bay, however, reminding himself of the importance of these boring tasks. He was caught in the convoluted terminology of a nobleman's plea for more land for his estate when Jack suddenly felt the discomforting prickle of being watched on the back of his neck. He couldn't place when he had heard the door to the room creak open, but he deemed that information unworthy of his attention. He shrugged it off, firmly placing his focus on the task in front of his eyes. But it didn't take long for the unsettling feeling to force his attention elsewhere.
"Are you just going to sit there watching me? Or are you actually going to sleep in my bed?" The slightly annoyed, if a tad amused, man rumbled, turning his hazel gaze to find a figure wrapped in a bundle of his bed sheets, hooded eyes staring holes into him. Jack turned away from his own handwriting to face the intruder.
"Can't sleep," came the rough reply.
"Figured as much." Jack felt the edges of his lips twinge upward in an attempted warm smile. "Go on, make yourself comfortable. I probably won't be going back to sleep anytime soon, myself."
The ball of fabric grunted in return, halfheartedly flopping into what Jack could only assume was a prone position.
"Please just go to sleep. You need your rest," Jack urged. He frowned at the younger man's haggard appearance. He'd known the king hadn't been sleeping well, and the burial the day before must have triggered the return of insomnia. The dark purple creases under the man's eyes made him flinch when celadon irises found his own hazel ones.
"Can't sleep."
"Still. You need your rest." Silence filled the room for a moment as the realization suddenly clicked in Jack's head. He felt silly for not having thought of it before. "Nightmares?"
The shuffling of fabric was his only reply. He took it as an affirmation of his conclusion, but reserved the urge to push the small bundle any further. If Gavin wanted to talk about it, he would, but Jack had an inkling that maybe Gavin would never pull together the last strings of his courage to do so. It had been several days since the incident, and Gavin seemed even more defeated than he had been the night Jack had sought him out to relay the news of the younger man's father figure's passing. Jack couldn't help but notice the way Gavin's arms seemed to wrap around himself as he stood, closed off and unwilling to open for anyone, even the rough blacksmith who had known him for a decade. Worry pressed on Jack's mind, but if Gavin were to come back to himself, he mused, it certainly wouldn't be through Jack throwing himself into the Geoff-sized hole in the lad's heart.
He returned to the document, listening for any indication that Gavin might have fallen asleep. Aside from the scratch of the quill upon parchment, silence ruled the air. Again, the worry bled into his thoughts. What if Gavin turned into another Ryan with all the death and decay surrounding him?
Ryan had driven himself insane with the treacherous acts against his closest friends, even so far as to blame himself for Ray’s sudden and unexpected passing, though that part of his freakishly detailed plot to take Geoff out of the picture was not anticipated or planned. Jack shuddered, recalling the heated argument between himself and the Mad King that had ended with the blacksmith being banned from the throne room permanently. What unsettled him the most was the joyous gleam in Ryan’s ice cold eyes as he spilled his dastardly plot to Jack. His intentions had been pure at the start, Jack decided to give him that, but still his own philosophies had twisted against his pure soul and plunged him further into a darkness that Jack himself had been unaware of until that day. Ryan had blood on his hands from the first night, starting with Geoff’s poisoning.
What about Gavin? Jack paused in his writing, clenching his calloused fingers around the quill, a sudden surge of a cold chill prickling at the base of his spine. Gavin had blood on his hands just as Ryan had. Michael, Gavin’s best friend—his boy—was dead just as Ray, Ryan’s best friend, was. Though while Ray had taken it upon himself to leave them all behind by rite of suicide, Michael had been murdered by Ryan’s own hand in a bout of madness. Gavin—he had snapped in his own way and took it upon himself to rid the world of the Mad King and his knight. What did that mean to Gavin’s sanity? How could Jack care for a man too deep down the same path as the one who had started this whole mess? What would that mean for Geoff’s final request? Should he even be worried for the king’s sanity? Was he just paranoid after Ryan’s stunt? Of course Gavin had murdered Ryan, but was it out of protectiveness for the kingdom or his own emotional need to rid himself of the perpetrator of all this madness? Jack heaved a sigh. This was all too confusing to be mulling over so late at night.
“Jack?” The young man in question called for him weakly. “Are you okay?”
No, Jack wanted to say, he was not okay. He was confused and shaken and exhausted. But instead of speaking his mind, he turned to the younger man with a comforting grin and nodded.
“Just tired, Gav. Go to sleep. You’ve got a long day tomorrow,” he urged. “Don’t mind this silly old Hand.”
Gavin didn’t look convinced in the slightest, but the extreme tiredness seemed to catch up with him. Jack looked on in concern as he wrapped himself in a swath of Ramsey green. In that instant, he was reminded of the nights when Gavin would sneak into the throne room as Geoffrey and himself were working a particularly late night, wrapped in bundles of sheets and an expression of confused terror on his face. Geoff often had beckoned him over, a warm, if not concerned, smile inviting the small statured teenager into his arms. Gavin would stay there until the flickering torchlight pulled his curious eyes shut in slumber.
Despite the boy being just old enough to be considered close to adulthood, his mentality was one of a ten year old, especially on those nights. Jack watched the twenty-five year old man as sleep overtook him. He was reminded of those distant nighttime hours spent watching Geoff and this small boy curled up together on the throne—a spitting image of the king and his prince. No one would be able to tell that those two had no blood relation at all. A warm smile broke out on Jack’s face at the memory.
Maybe he had been too paranoid. Gavin was okay considering the circumstances that had lead to his kingship. He was going to be okay, and Jack was prepared to make that a certainty.
He had to. The kingdom and Geoff’s wishes balanced on that fact.