none of us is, or else we all are
Two weeks after Lughnasadh, 1017 II Age
Ast Petyriel settled into an uneasy truce, forged largely by Lilia’s unwillingness to tolerate Yakov in her house for a period longer than a handful of days, and an understanding that everyone would travel up the last pass of the King’s Road after the autumn equinox. Viktor seemed largely unconcerned by the possibility of a second confrontation with his father, though Yuri seemed to be gearing up for one, more irritable than usual and more ready to jump to Otabek’s defense at the most innocuous slight. Yuuri was certain the younger brother hadn’t even noticed his change in habits, and it reminded him almost of the way Yuri had behaved towards him at Vaux Romandith, with a fierce protectiveness that was admirable once he learned to see beyond its abrasiveness.
Lazy, early Autumn days passed: mornings in which he usually woke up to find Viktor watching him, instead of the other way around. Viktor took him for leisurely walks through the surrounding forest, swapping stories about their childhoods that slowly transformed the Prince further, made him more real, something Yuuri felt less guilty about when he touched. Young Viktor had been a handful, from the sound of it, too mischievous for stony Yakov and sometimes quietly encouraged to be wily by the witchy woman (Yakov’s words) who’d raised him. Slowly the pressure of responsibility had forged him into something else, but Yuuri saw the dart and dash of the elven child Viktor had been once in the handsome edges of his smirk and the playful, predatory glint his eyes took on sometimes.
Alone together like this, Vitya allowed the stag to walk alongside them, corporeal, and even Yuuri let the phoenix out (grown as it was now, with feathers that were less of a brilliant scarlet and approaching a deep crimson) to fly overhead without worrying about anyone noticing, anyone asking questions, anyone talking.
The afternoons got busy, an artifice he didn’t realize was Viktor’s doing until a few days in: Lilia, inviting him to sit on discussions in the forum, or Mila taking him shopping. Inevitably Viktor didn’t come along, insisting he’d be in the library, a separation Yuuri tolerated only until the Prince began to radiate despondence over his lack of progress looking through the ancient texts, his inability to find a neat solution, a cure.
After a week of that he moved into the library, too. “This involves me,” Yuuri said, when Viktor looked at him, questioning and unsure. “I should shoulder some of the work.”
He was starting to get tired earlier, too; it was always Viktor who woke him up from a doze, curled up into one of the library’s chaises with a book or hunched over an unrolled scroll.
- - -
Three weeks after Lughnasadh, 1017 II Age
“You seem disapproving,” Otabek noted idly, having chanced by Seung-gil as he sat in an alcove overlooking the high street, watching the afternoon ritual of the Prince leading the Easterling into the library.
The reaper glanced up, expressionless. “He’s convinced he can change it.”
“You’re convinced he can’t,” Otabek countered, albeit without real disagreement. He chose a spot on the wall to lean against, one free of the tapestries and paintings Lilia seemed to have nearly everywhere. Growing up amongst the ban side he’d always heard the elven queen referred to as the weaver and now he was beginning to understand why.
“Even if he could, do you really think it would be wise?” Seung-gil’s dark, flat gaze became pointed, and Otabek gave the question the consideration it was due. He knew the place it came from. The aes sidhe of the first age had been much too eager to impose their will on the world; had long over-reached its development. They had all paid the price.
“I suppose it depends,” Otabek admitted. “… on the price.” You’re the reaper, he thought, though this went unsaid. You should know.
“Hard to know until it happens. If it can even happen. I’ve never heard of it.” Seung-gil shrugged and glanced back out the intricate window, awash in many colors. The High Prince and his lover were gone. “What I do know is this: the phoenix before him had a family, too, and this cycle was part of their life together, the way the wheel is, the way the cougar thanks the rabbit and the grass thanks the cougar.”
“The last phoenix had a mate? Your mother told you this?”
“…Mm. His having a family is the only reason she spent most of the years back in the ranges at all.”
“So what happened to them?”
Seung-gil sighed heavily, and glanced around surreptitiously, wary of being overheard. “Let’s go for a ride,” he said instead, and summoned the three headed dog to his side, heading for the door. The both of them would feel more comfortable outside, anyway; underneath an open sky, darting between the understanding trees.
Later he explained the brutal math of all of it: “Eventually what it comes down to is this, Otabek. Either everyone lives forever, or nobody does.” Long ago his mother’s phoenix had taken a wife, a Southron halfling who’d born him a daughter, and for centuries his magic had extended her life, had made his daughter hale and healthy. Then his child had married, and her children had married, and there were grandchildren and cousins and nephews to manage, youth who grew up and then became old men whose spouses tried to make the impossible journey past the havens, or who passed.
“For a long time, that made it easier for my mother. She says family makes the mantle of it more bearable, makes them braver, gives them strength to hold off illness for longer in the fall … Growing up we spent nine whole months in the ranges, and just three in the South …”
“Until?”
“Until one day his wife told him that she thought perhaps it was best not to hold on to life for so long,” Seung-gil murmured. “Maybe we come back, she told him, maybe we come back after death somehow and I could fall in love with you a second time, like we were new again.”
“So they decided to die.”
Seung-gil nodded. “They chose. The old man ceded the phoenix to Yuuri, and mother ceded the hounds to me, and …”
Ceded. Otabek’s eyes widened somewhat. “Seung-gil…”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” chided the other banshee, suddenly, unwilling to accept condolences now, not when he’d been prepared for this for decades. His father had accepted this truth, had mourned, and then had resumed his patrols with the Rangers, a duty he would continue until he, too, went beyond the veil and traveled into the mystery beyond that all of the ban side sensed but could not fully understand. “This is the way of things,” he said instead.
“The sun rises. It also sets. Real life has both. Real life is balance.”
- - -
Four weeks after Lughnasadh, 1017 II Age
Ast Petyriel did not have Hasetsuil’s hot springs, but it did have stone pools that could be filled and then carefully heated by a whole system of whirring wheels and stoked fires that suggested Yakov’s influence and Viktor’s — only the King could have designed something so intricate, but only Vitya would have wanted the pools to work in this way in the first place, and with such specificity: one cool, one warm, one steaming hot the way home was, where the healing waters were. Viktor, chronically fond of bathing, who washed his long hair with something that smelled a little bit like lavender and whose skin always smelled like honey: Yuuri had no doubt in his mind that he’d seen the possibilities and then helped Yakov engineer Lilia’s house to precisely this state.
Viktor preferred the cool pool, the largest of the three, but settled for warmth when Yuuri’s fever got the best of him; had picked the halfling up and then hesitated for a moment, walking over to the bath. He’s lost weight. Travel had hardened Yuuri’s muscles compared to the softness that he recalled on the Ardor, and now he had an impression of a waning that he hadn’t noticed until just now, perhaps because in every evening’s cradle the changes were too subtle to catch by comparison.
“Viktor?”
“It’s nothing,” he said, and moved again into the warmed waters, settling Yuuri against his chest. “My mother’s started weaving something new,” he added, because he’d begun to learn that Yuuri was fond of these little stories, a habit they’d begun to build in the morning walks, careful and slow, through the Petyriel woods. “She took everything out of the forum which means she’s trying to keep it a secret …” Trying and succeeding. He’d determined nothing from her thoughts. When Lilia decided to do something, she did it, and this, whatever it was, would likely remain hidden until she felt ready to unveil it. He wiggled his fingers, summoning a little bit of water to dribble across Yuuri’s shoulders, watching as it pooled in his collarbones and then fell back down his chest. This time, when Yuuri shivered, it wasn’t from the fever. “Should we make guesses?”
“She likes tapestries, you said?”
“Mm. She made the one in my room, when I was a child.”
“I like that one,” Yuuri murmured, tilting his head back onto Viktor’s shoulder to attempt to peer back up at the prince. In Viktor’s room, on its longest wall, hung a long mural: on one side, the sun rose over the ocean, where waves crashed into rocky crags on the shore, and as the sea progressed the sky became darker, stormy. In the midst of this blackness was a stylized elf figure, white-haired, bow drawn. At the far right side he shot for the moon, and instead of rain, the stars fell.
What does it mean, he nearly asked, seized up by a fit of coughing that came and went. Yuuri wiped at his mouth, about to repeat the question, when Viktor snatched his hand, looking at the small spatter of red on the back with a plunge of feelings that Yuuri felt as if they were his own.
Oh.
“… You’re really dying,” Viktor whispered, painfully still and terribly fragile, and Yuuri bowed his head for a moment, trying to find his place in the midst of all of that hurt.
“Yes,” he said softly, because it was coming, that death, and before Viktor had ever scoured the library, Lilia had, and before Lilia there had been Seung-gil and centuries of this; the phoenix and the reaper. What he wanted was to spare Viktor all of it, the pain of parting, the witnessing of such an inelegant decline, the —
“Stop.” Viktor’s arms tightened around him, an instinctive reaction to that protectiveness, that concern. “You have to go through all this and you’re trying to save me?”
“I don’t want you to be hurt.”
“I’m going to be hurt,” Viktor replied, sure as rainfall. Still, he turned them, tugged on Yuuri’s shoulder and then brushed his chin, leaned forward to capture the kiss that had a subtly coppery tang, death’s first blood.
He had lectured his father about joy, thought now about that last step of the bond between them.
Was it too much, too soon?
“I’m going to be hurt,” he repeated again, like a mantra, a prayer, “and it will have been worth it.”
“Vitya —“ Yuuri’s feelings were such a new piece of insight and so, so complicated: they shifted, the way tongues of flame did, and changed colors and tones from heated reds to purples. Viktor felt himself more straightforward: desperate, certainly, but desperate in love as much as he was in despair. Yuuri felt the entire gamut; there was love, of course, Viktor cherished that; but his cares seemed to shift, leapt from one target to the next, flammable and never fully extinguished.
“Over and over again, if I have to,” he reminded Yuuri then, words they’d spoken to each other in an oasis before he’d known just how true they were. “I will do this for decades. For centuries. And I will hate it every time but I am made of strong enough stuff to survive it and choose again. Will you?”
Sometimes that love of Yuuri’s flickered up like a bonfire and all Viktor could do was sit in awe of it. Yuuri whose feverish fingers crept up his face now, and tangled into his hair, who kissed him so hard this time that their teeth clicked.
Yes.
Handfasting, Viktor thought. He’d have to ask Lilia about handfasting.
Yakov would have to learn to live with it.
- - -
Five weeks after Lughnasadh, 1017 II Age
They gathered outside the great gates of Ast Petyriel to prepare to leave for Mosciren; the Northerners and Seung-gil rallying the horses while Otabek summoned his wyvern guardian into being. Yuuri’s family stood under the wingspan of the eagles, getting ready for flight, and Viktor went to speak to the ranger captain as they prepared to all say their farewells.
“… Tell me you’ll bear him if he gets too tired to fly,” he murmured quietly, glancing back at Yuuri, who seemed preoccupied by some sort of game with Vicchan. Viktor didn’t like this, the separation of travel, but even he could admit that it would be faster and less arduous for the Easterlings to take their birds Northwards without crossing the pass on foot. Meanwhile he and the Northerners would lead Seung-gil up to Mosciren, accustomed to the mountain route and its sometimes treacherous ways.
Otabek inclined his head, all subtle acquiescence. “Of course,” he said, simple as that, and Viktor exhaled a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.
“Take care,” he reminded the ranger with a wry smile, glancing sidelong as Yuri led his own horse out into the clearing. Beka, Yuri called him, whenever he thought nobody was paying attention. Beka his someday brother. “Now you’re carrying two things that are precious to me.”
Otabek said nothing but his gaze softened somewhat and even he couldn’t quite stop a subtle smile. Yuri stepped forward towards them both, reaching up to touch the wyvern’s giant, dark snout.
“… It’s still amazing,” said the blonde, and he glanced over at Otabek, with an uncharacteristically soft smile. “Will you tell me how you do it, someday?”
“That’s the problem with you high elves,” Otabek replied, with a gleam in his eyes that suggested he was at least partially teasing. The ranger leaned over, and deposited a rare, public kiss atop Yuri’s forehead, and then sprang up onto the wyvern’s back. In spite of his words his gaze was fond:
“You always want to do, you have to learn how to be.”
Four eagles and a wyvern took off into the brilliance of a blue sky, leaving a circle of horses and two brothers standing side by side below: Yuri and Viktor, who stood there in stillness and a strange sort of yearning for a moment and a moment only before they, too, leapt up onto horseback and darted up for the North, united in at least one thought:
The sooner to Mosciren the better.