Work Text:
Bronte locks himself in his castle the next day.
The rest of the Council are drafting the announcement, a scroll to send to their concerned citizens. Members of the elves Nobility are invited to mourn; the rest, left to wonder about the state of their world in the chaos.
He wants no part of it, the impersonal funeral or the whispers that are bound to follow all of them, but especially him and Oralie.
After all, everybody knows who killed Kenric.
Bronte wishes he didn’t.
He doesn’t sleep the night after the incident. He only returns home at three in the morning, after all of the Everblaze has been put out and his glittering holy city is half-ashes. But even then, he doesn’t retire to his rooms—he can’t, not when they are ripe with memories of a man whom he should not grieve, with photos on the wall of a family that could never be satisfied.
So Bronte spends the night pacing, and pointedly not thinking about what he has lost. He pushes away every memory of his friend, every gala spent dealing with Kenric and Oralie’s antics. He suppresses every stray thought of his childhood, of being twelve years old and Fintan fifteen, both unable to control the raging power within themselves.
He drinks tea. It’s not what he needs to drink, but he figures that he ought to maintain some sense of decorum.
(That feeling falls apart, come dawn. He needs the strongest medicine that his crystal castle can offer.)
The next morning, when he knows that he’s expected to show up to the Council meeting, he can’t bring himself to get off of his couch.
How unprofessional , the weak, rational part of himself says.
But what is professionalism worth anymore, anyway? Miss Foster had only days ago proven with her Inflicting session that he is far beyond unfit for his position.
(Maybe that’s why he can’t stop grieving a murderer. Maybe the dark matter that controls his brain is making him evil, immoral .)
(Maybe villainy runs in the family.)
So Bronte skips the Council meeting, that day, and waits for someone to scold him.
Nobody comes.
He takes a nap on the floor of his kitchen. It’s not comfortable, but he doesn’t deserve comfort. He needs pain, to force him out of his grief.
It doesn’t work, unsurprisingly. But the slumberberry tea does drown him in darkness. It’s made poorly, but he still manages to sleep an hour, dreamless.
Until the shrill ringing of his doorbell wakes him, and he lies on the hard crystal tile for a moment, wondering why he ever chose to make his doorbell human music , of all things.
After about five minutes of pointless lying on the ground, he forces himself up and to the foyer. He expects that his colleagues have sent someone to retrieve him, likely believing that he’s overslept or some other, equally forgivable reason for missing work.
When he opens the door, he finds Oralie, in the same, rumpled, ash-covered gown as yesterday afternoon.
“Oralie?” Bronte asks. He’s tempted to slam the door in her face, because he can’t deal with her, not now. Not when he still can’t shake the grief and empathy for the man who killed her lover.
…Almost lover. In everything but name.
Oralie stares at him from the doorway. Her eyes are wide and red and Bronte can’t help but remember when she’d first been elected to the Council, how Kenric had sworn that she was unfit for the role. How the two of them had spent the next five years arguing over every little thing, firmly believing the other to be an incompetent fool.
Look at them now, he thinks. So lost in each other’s eyes that they forget their surroundings, all too often. They had been one of Bronte’s few sources of entertainment during tedious meetings.
“Bronte,” Oralie replies, after a long moment. Her voice is rough and broken, accompanied by a sniffle that she seems determined to hide.
Bronte stares at her, wondering why she, of all people, would pay him a visit during the working day. “Did they send you here?” he asks. When she frowns, he clarifies, “To attempt to convince me to come to the meeting. I won’t, before you try.”
She laughs, though without any real amusement behind it. “I didn’t go,” she tells him frankly. “I have no use for their pity. They all know what he was to me, I don’t need to hear their condolences.”
Bronte can say mostly the same. But he doesn’t, because he doubts that much of the Council knows of his… unfortunate family relations.
Though, with the fire went the last of his family, it seems.
Now Bronte is officially alone.
Alone, except for his best friend standing in his foyer with bloodshot eyes. The last remaining disgraces.
“I understand,” he tells her. “And I’m sorry, for what it’s worth.”
“It’s not worth shit,” she replies curtly. “You know that as well as I do.”
Bronte stares at her, daring her to say more. “Do I, now?” he asks, as calmly as his voice can muster.
She pauses. “Kenric was your friend as much as he was mine.” At his raised eyebrow, she amends, “Well, you were friends.”
“Of a sort,” Bronte replies. “His death is tragic, of course, and I grieve his loss like all of us do.” Except you , he doesn’t say, because Oralie hardly needs a reminder of the love that she’s lost.
Oralie glares at him. “I don’t need your press answer.”
“Then, pray tell, why are you here?”
“You have the keys,” she tells him, and he’s not sure whether she’s being literal or metaphorical.
“What?”
“The keys,” she repeats, “to Kenric’s castle. I need—” She stops, overcome with a heaving sigh. “I need to see it. One final time.”
Bronte raises an eyebrow. “He didn’t leave any spare keys with you?”
She snorts. “How do you think that would’ve looked, Kenric leaving me the keys to his private rooms? Especially with our feelings being so blatantly obvious.”
…She does have a point, Bronte has to concede that. They hardly need any more fuel for the wildfire of rumours that spread about them.
He doubts that people will be kind enough to stop the rumours even now, when it is only Oralie left. They will scrutinise her appearance at the funeral, at the next crowning, at every occasion for years after today.
Bronte’s sure of it. He’s seen this happen before.
“Let me get them,” he says, and turns to retrieve the spare keys from his drawer. He and Kenric had exchanged spares, in case of emergency—although Bronte had never imagined that this would be the emergency.
(To be honest, he’d always thought that he would die first, out of all of them. Murder, probably. Old family problems coming back to bite him.)
He’s grateful, though, that Oralie isn’t pressing for an answer as to why he’s holed up in his castle, looking just as messy as she is.
How can he face her and tell her the truth? That his brother, his blood, had committed such a dire act of treason that the entire elven world is teetering on the edge of chaos not seen since Atlantis?
When he finds the smooth crystal, he hands it to Oralie, who smiles gratefully. But her smile doesn’t reach her eyes, and Bronte understands.
Nothing can be happy, in the wake of everything.
She reaches over to grab the keys from Bronte’s hand. As she does so, her fingers brush Bronte’s exposed wrist, and she immediately jumps back as if she’s been burned.
“Oralie?” Bronte asks, stepping forward. He freezes as she scrambles back, staring at her fingers as if she’s grown a third thumb.
Oralie is mumbling curses under her breath, he realises, and he wonders whether he should call a healer. Maybe the grief has finally gotten to her.
(It’s only a matter of time before it gets to him, too.)
Oralie finally looks up at him, after a moment, a deep fear in her eyes. “Guilt,” she murmurs, and his heart stops.
Guilt.
Oralie’s an Empath. She’d touched his arm.
How could I be so stupid?
Oralie steps forward, back into his foyer with a firm expression. “Are you guilty, Bronte?” she asks, and her voice begins to waver.
“I—I’m not—”
She continues forward, and Bronte has no choice but to back away lest he be trampled. Oralie’s determination has given away to anguish, and what seems to be anger directed towards him. “I’ve felt a broken man’s emotions before,” she says, “all those who have succumbed to the weight of their guilt. And what I just felt, Bronte…you’re far beyond them.” Quietly, she adds, “I don’t know how you’re still sane.”
“I don’t know, either,” he admits, but truthfully he has his suspicions. He can feel Miss Foster’s lingering positivity, in the corners of his mind, keeping his memories together like glue. Someday soon, it will fade, and his guilt over who he is will finally take him.
He won’t tell that to Oralie, though.
“I can’t lose both of the people closest to me,” she says, and her grief shines through her eyes once again. “One to a sick, twisted pyromaniac and the other to the weight of his own, misplaced guilt.”
Sick, twisted pyromaniac . Is that the man he knew? The man he grieves, the man whom he had loved through all of his childhood?
Maybe evil is all that runs through the blood in their veins. Maybe he and Fintan were always destined to be sad, sad men.
Oralie notices that her words have the opposite effect of what she’d intended, and she freezes. “What?” she says. “What did I say?”
“Nothing,” he tries to tell her, but she’s too quick.
“Fintan,” she murmurs, eyes wide. “What, do you think it’s your fault?”
No. He knows it.
He and Fintan had their arguments, as young men. None so bad as the one that drove Fintan out of their childhood home for good.
And then the Everblaze had rained down, and Bronte knew that his brother was unsalvageable.
“That’s…not quite it,” he replies. “But I guarantee you it’s nothing important. My mind will not break, Oralie. I have kept myself together for so many years yet.”
“No,” she replies, steely. “No! You’re obviously locking yourself up in this castle for a reason, and you’re obviously beating yourself up over something and it’s killing you!”
“I miss him,” Bronte blurts out, and immediately wishes he hadn’t.
Oralie pauses, obviously waiting for him to clarify.
“I miss Fintan,” he says, and it’s like a weight lifts off his shoulders.
The words seem to confuse Oralie. “You…what?” There’s something akin to anger in her voice, and Bronte’s guilt returns at full force.
“I wish I didn’t,” he tells her, pleading for forgiveness. “I thought I had resigned myself to his death, before. But he was the last of my family, and apparently I have yet to resolve myself from that attachment.”
Oralie’s eyes widen. “Family?” she repeats.
He almost can’t say the words. “My brother.”
Bronte turns away, just as Oralie says, “And you’re afraid that you’re just like him.”
“What?”
She breathes in sharply. “Kenric told me what happened in Sophie’s session. You think you’re irredeemable.”
That’s exactly right. “No.”
She curses under her breath and steps into his line of sight once again. “Your guilt is going to crush you,” she tells him frankly.
“I’m not guilty!” he proclaims, and sure, it isn’t true, but now certainly isn’t the time to work through millenia of unresolved family trauma.
Oralie grabs his arm, and he expects her to jump away as she had done before. Instead, though, she only drags him to his couch, silent. As they pass the kitchen, she raises an eyebrow at the blanket on the tiled floor, but still says nothing.
Finally, once Bronte is sufficiently confused, Oralie asks, “Did you actually sleep last night?”
“Did you ?” he retorts.
“No,” she replies, honestly. “I doubt any of us did. Watching him go up in flames….” She shudders. “Part of me wants to make the whole thing a Forgotten Secret.”
Bronte can’t disagree.
He wasn’t in the room, he didn’t have direct view of the healing like Oralie did. But the scent of Everblaze—the familiar scent—had reached him before any of the rest of the Councillors standing outside.
Bronte had known that Fintan was unstable, before. But there was a part of him—a part of him that still lingers—that genuinely believed his brother to be good. Perhaps it’s leftover from their mother’s endless, unfounded optimism, her firm belief that her sons were good men who would grow up to change the elven world.
And change the world, they certainly did. Just not for the better.
So forgetting the fire, forgetting his brother’s entire existence….the idea sounds enticing. But Bronte has a duty to his people, to himself , that he cannot forget.
And the only Telepath he would have trusted to wash his mind is dead, now, anyway.
“You know,” Oralie says, after a long moment, “we’re quite similar people, the two of us.”
Bronte raises an eyebrow. “Don’t put yourself down like that.”
“Oh, please. I’m no saint, either,” she replies. “But what you’ve done and what I’ve done are no matter, now.” She looks away, pensive. “What I meant, before, is that we’re in similar situations here. Your brother. My…Kenric. No-one else here understands, not like we do.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Bronte concedes. “But Fintan—”
“—was only broken because of us ,” Oralie interrupts. “It’s the actions of the Council, both past and present, that led to what happened yesterday. We’ve spent these years believing him to be a great man, until the blaze…but maybe that was just our own willful ignorance.”
“Careful,” Bronte says, an almost teasing lilt to his voice. “You almost sound like the rebels.”
Oralie freezes, for a moment, an action so small he almost misses it. “Very funny,” she says, but her joking tone falls flat.
Bronte frowns. That’s mildly concerning, but he’s not going to waste time worrying about Oralie’s rebel sympathies. He certainly hasn’t spent his time as a Councillor only following the law.
(Neither did Fintan. Or Fallon. Or anyone, honestly, other than poor Terik who very clearly does not want to be here.)
(Come to think of it, that does speak to the corruption in their system. But that hardly matters right now.)
“Look,” Oralie continues, clearly eager to shift focus from her previous slip-up, “what matters is that you’re obviously brimming with guilt and I…I don’t know what I’m feeling. I won’t judge you for your family connections anymore than I expect you to judge me for my romantic ones.”
“Thank you,” Bronte says, and it’s the most honest he’s been all morning.
Her hand brushes his wrist once again, and she sighs with obvious relief. “Don’t shatter on me,” she tells him. “Please. Promise me.”
The last thing he wants is to go out like his brother.
“I won’t,” he says. “I promise.”