Alternate Realities

Stillness and Silence

Anonymous: Hey☺️ eeep love your blog🙌🏼😍 I was wondering if you could please write a prompt where Mare never dodge the letter opener and ended up dying?? I really want to see Cals reaction omg 😭😭 ofc you don't have to do it if you don't want to tho 💕

Answer:

Dreading his brother's body, Cal marches in even steps up to the house his mother loved so much. Briefly, he imagines it a mausoleum, a place he'll visit to commune with the ghosts of his family. He doesn't know if he'll be able to stand living here again. Inside the foyer, he expects Mare to be dazed, waiting for him. Ready to take him to a body he asked her to make. She isn't there. His spine prickles with unease.

Cal cranes his neck around corners and holds still as a statue hoping for an echo of life to guide him. What little he hears comes through open windows from outside, or at least that's the impression he has.

Footsteps. Running footsteps. One set. Breathing to go with them. It quiets when the source goes through a doorway. Cal follows stepping past two bodies in the hallway–guards.

"Mare?" Kilorn calls, careening around one door and into the next. He's searching the rooms one by one, silver blood staining his sleeve, and gun out and ready. "Mare!" He looks in a confused circle getting his bearings in the hall before darting across to the ballroom.

"Kilorn?" Cal shouts, follows, fails to keep up. Kilorn darts into another room.

They collide outside the double doors to the kitchen. Kilorn huffs, swallowing back saliva and bending over as he gulps. His eyes water and his cheeks are red with exertion. He shakes his head, warding off desperation. Kilorn points at himself and then in one direction. He then points at Cal and then in another. They split up.

Cal has fresher legs and makes quick progress of the remainder of the first floor. But Kilorn had fewer doors on his half to check. Kilorn disappears above him. Cal launches himself two stairs at a time to the second floor. The shallow steps slow him down.

"No, no, no, no!" Kilorn devolves into wailing screams that muffle as he charges deeper.

People that had entered to find Cal and Mare rush up the stairs behind him. Kilorn sobs sound like an injured animal. Cal staggers forward. A healer and Farley push past him, following the echos.

He's not ready, not for this. Not for the source of Kilorn's shrieking sobs. Kilorn has no love for Maven, only for Mare.

"Fuck," Farley curses loud enough to re-start his feet.

She stops him at the door. Her shocked face is wet with tears and grime. She shakes her head and pushes him backwards. He lets her. He accepts the delay as quickly as he accepts why she wants to pause his approach.

"Let the healer..." she trails off and Cal feels the lie. It's punctuated by more guttural weeping.

Cal steps forward. She puts a hand on his shoulder, stopping him for just a moment then lets him pass.

The apartment is as familiar to him as any of the homes they'd stayed at throughout the year. Though it's clearly marred by Maven's influence. The furniture, covered in white sheets, seems catawompus–out of place and tilted like a bad dream. The healer slumps in the doorway to the expansive closet. The man shrinks into himself as the crying quiets inside.

Cal knows he will never be able to un-see the scene in the room. His mind flashes through dozens of grotesque exaggerations with blood splattered and her eviscerated. He hopes Maven had been more kind to her body than his own brain seems to expect. His mind has a way that both prepared him and make him sick. Staying upright becomes a struggle as his body weakens.

The medic holds his eye and shakes his head, gripping his elbows and stepping out of the doorway. Clearly there's no healing that can be offered.

"I'm sorry," he whispers, hoarse, and losing composure.

Cal runs his hand through the tears on his cheek and then through his hair. The grime he pushes around makes his eyes burn and blink more wetness out. He shakes, steps forward, and searches the dark room for the horror of his loss.

Kilorn pushes her blood-filled hand up onto her stomach over and over. He takes measured breaths and then weaves her fingers together with her other hand. Her hands stay. He sits back and looks at Mare, then sets to separating the lock of hair dried to her forehead with blood. Her eyes are closed but her lids don't fully cover the white.

Kilorn's grief, and ritual movements hold Cal's eyes as his mind seeks not to look at Mare's body. He forces himself back to her face, the eyes he is certain Kilorn has carefully closed. His knees hurt when they strike the floor. His body aches under the pressure of the silent stone. Cal breathes but with a sense that his chest can never be full again. His fingers sweep an arch from where he held them out in front of him down to his side. His left collides with something smooth.

He looks down and follows the supple black leather to the white exposed skin of a lower leg and further up. No one has been there to close Maven's eyes or to position his arms. No one has posed him into a position of sleep, of peace. Maven's mouth hangs open, hands gripping at his throat in relaxed claws. Cal shifts up the legs, crawling on hands and knees to his brother's side.

The ice blue eyes carry none of the burdens bestowed by Elara and in their relaxed clarity look less like eyes than like washed out jewels. Cal hates to close them, to say goodbye to them, and at the same time, feels robbed of a last look at Mare's. He pulls the thin lids down, holds them like he has on other bodies, and then releases. Maven is cold. Cal tries to heat the room, to warm them back to life. The stone holds him back.

Sheets are stolen from the chairs outside. Farley has cleared more bodies than she has friends left in the world. Cal can see it's still not easy when they roll Mare and wrap the white cloth around her. They fold the sheet over her face, so that he can pull it back and examine her one last time.

Her pallor reminds him of the way they painted her. The way they made her into Mireena, fake, an imposter. She lacks everything that made her Mare. He stops short of touching her, short of assuring that the body is real. Cal cannot bring himself to touch her. He can't replace the warmth of her skin and the heat of her heart with the chill of death. The blood drying and seeping into the white is evidence enough.

Maven's body falls mostly to him, though Kilorn assists in getting the sheet positioned. He carries his brother to the table in the sitting room. Kilorn moves her to the desk, hand lingering on top of her arms.

Kilorn cries on the floor cross-legged and rocking. Farley combs his hair before she disappears. Cal stands and watches as an awkward sentry in the middle of the bodies. He dare not leave Maven to the hands of the victors, and he cannot step away from Mare. Leaving the side of one to join the other splits him until he slides down in the center and joins neither.

Time lapses. It stops moving in stillness and jumps forward to sobs that last twice as long as Cal knows. Someone cares for him. Someone brings water and food. He ignores both. He waits and cries until there are no more tears and he is the only one competing with silence in his ears.