i get up in the morning to the beat of a drum

@arthur-talbot​

Maybe it would have been nice if this was the first time he had driven around with a corpse in the bed of his truck. Normal people lived like that. Supposedly. Normal people also didn’t do their girlfriend’s mother a favor by disposing of her great-however many generations back uncle either, but that was kind of par for the course at this stage in his life. According to legend the average vampire was supposed to turn into dust when they were staked, which was disappointingly inaccurate. At the very least it didn’t stink like anything worse than dusty graveyard, so his biggest problem was disposal. Isaac had been mulling over the options at hand when the door of his truck opened to reveal one Arthur Meadowes, whom he hadn’t been expecting at all. “Wǒ kào!” Isaac hissed, jumping slightly at the surprise. Arthur seemed amused and that just rubbed some salt in the wound to boot, given they were both veterans of a line of work that required them to be observant at all times at the cost of their own lives. “Now you’re just embarrassing me to remind me how rusty I am. I see how it is.” He sighed, aware that Arthur seemed to be aware already of what nasty cargo sat in the truck bed behind them. “I’m doing Odette and Riley a favor.”

Date: September 22nd, 2020 Time: 10:40 pm Location: Lethe Woods, a mile north of The Threaded Needle

@riley-voss

The shop had closed hours before and they had said their goodbyes, Isaac returning to his apartment the next floor up and Riley brushing off his offer to walk her home with a laugh. She wasn’t wrong, he did make that offer precisely because he wanted an excuse to spend more time with her, but on a deeper level it was out of worry. She was undead and powerful all her own, but last year someone had killed the chief of police with half of the town in attendance. So he worried and he was even more so by the sound of explosions off in the distance, shooting text after text to his brother and getting no response. By the time she had called him, she should have been home, and so it was a surprise to him that he could hear sounds of crickets behind her voice. Her shaking voice, that threw him too. She hadn’t told him much, mainly she had told him where she was (as best she could) and begged him to come. He made a decision to trust that Adam Mallory with his brother, to get him out of the mess, but Riley had begged, cried, all things that made him bolt from his apartment so quickly he forgot to lock the door. Too late for that now, he thought to himself as he ran through the woods as quickly as one could in semi-darkness. She was so small, so well hidden that he ran past her for a moment before he darted back towards her, curled up at the base of a tree. Bloodied, far more battered than he would have expected a vampire to be in any circumstance. Rage began to boil up in the back of his mind, an urge to inflict the same damage and then some on whomever had dared raise a hand to her.

Whomever was a narrow category, it was a special level of reckless to go after someone that well connected, but he kicked the rage aside for now as he crouched beside her. “It’s okay, mon soleil. It’ll be okay, alright? I’m here with you.” He said, his hand curving under her jaw as he looked her in the eyes. She didn’t seem to believe him, not with the pain he could feel radiating off of her in waves with the fear, but he could try. A chunk from her side, multiple wounds to her arms, and...she was going to need to feed immediately to heal those up. Probably before he could even get her halfway home to where she stored her blood supply. Shit. That left one other option, which she wouldn’t like at all and which even gave him pause to offer. Isaac slid into a sitting position beside her, then pulled her gently, oh so gently onto his lap. A vampire wounded bled sluggishly, but they bled, and he knew she hadn’t fed at all during the day today. “Riley, mon trésor. We can talk about what happened when you’re ready, we can talk about all of that, but I think you need to feed or you aren’t going to heal any of this enough for me to move you far.” Isaac looked into her blue eyes, trying to radiate as much calm as possible. “I trust you, do you understand?”

Had she spent two centuries looking and never once checked into Niall? It was naive of her to think he had stayed in the Otherlands, that his fingers couldn’t stretch across the distaste to this world and take what was dear to her. She couldn’t stop the tremble in her fingers or the way she was shaking like a leaf in the wind, and the brush of skin, almost fleeting and entirely accidental, was enough to halt everything. She gasped aloud, overwhelmed by the memories flashing through her head, of the emptiness on Niall’s face as he hurt the ones dependent on him and the fear on Isaac – no, on Jinghao, on her son’s face as he cowered. The day that fear turned to protectiveness for the two children standing with him. No, no more, she can’t– and yet, she wasn’t controlling the road map of memories. Her punishment for losing him was to watch every agonizing second. She cried, unsure of where she was in that moment, and they didn’t stop when he yanked away. The contact was brief, only snippets of the life he lived, and yet she couldn’t halt the tears nor could she stop the little gasps coming from her lips. Too much, too much. She blinked, looking up at him. Her son was tall. So tall. She cried more, outraged by the loss all over again, and she swiped angrily at her cheeks. “He wouldn’t know how to be a father if he read all the books on parenting in the world and touched the hearts of a thousand fathers,” she spat, angry and trembling, with fury and with sadness. She tried to swallow it back, eyes locked on his face hungrily, as if she would sooner be hit by a car before she looked away. “Its meant to contain memories, ones that you hold dear. I stole that from my home before you were born, as a vow to keep you and your memories safe. Its tradition in my family.” A fantastic job she did with that, really, when the sight of her seemed to rattle him. She sucked in a breath, trying to calm her racing heart. “My name is Yue. I’m your mother.”

Maybe it was the shock, maybe her walls were strong than his now that they had been demolished by his own loss, but he just felt her pain blindly. No specific memories came to mind, just flashes. A keening cry as she crumpled to her knees, the pain she carried from a loss nigh unbearable, and a search thwarted time and time again. It was easier to react to her words than sort through the aftermath of their touch and so he watched her expression screw up into anger blankly, he processed what she was saying with a mute nod. “He didn’t care to be. I was...a tool. A burden. Only useful if I stole enough to pay for his booze, his needs.” Isaac said, realizing belatedly that they were both crying. Tissues weren’t something he carried around, but he patted his pockets anyway. A clean red bandana was the best he could do and he pressed it into her hand. Mother. He didn’t know what to do with that title, with that knowledge. It explained that woman that had burst into Riley’s shop before, accusing him of freezing out his mother as if he had any idea what she was talking about. There was a part of him that wanted to believe her offhand, so accept their similarities in face and the memories that had flitted between them as gospel. A little boy full of longing on a New Orleans street watching children with their own mother, perhaps. He remembered being that boy, but that boy had learned to be wary long before he learned to love. “You must understand, it isn’t...I felt what you felt. Your loss. Your pain, what was taken. I just...I don’t know what to do here.” His arms folded in front his his chest, his shoulders hunched slightly in an old gesture. One that felt safe when all the world was falling around his ears. “He told me I wasn’t wanted. That you didn’t want me. I’m not saying I believe him, I just...I raised myself, my siblings. I was taught to survive, to steal from age four onwards.” A stray thought hit him then and he frowned deeply. “You had a name in your head, when we touched. Not your name. Your son’s. What was it?”

Date: 09/10/2020 Time: 7:49 pm Location: A parking lot near Irving Square

@arthur-talbot

“I don’t do that kind of work anymore, I had told her that. Getting better about the pilfering thing, the feeling like I’m watched every step I take. But that Odette, you know...” Isaac explained to Arthur as they sat in what he termed his junker car, an elderly looking truck with a camping shell. What most didn’t know was that it was tricked out underneath the hood with a brand new engine and that he lavished attention on it as much as he could. Perfectly innocuous until it wasn’t. “You kinda get where Riley gets that stubbornness, that steely core, talking to her. She’s worse than Katherine even in that regard. But anyway, while I could theoretically pull this off myself, it’s not the smart bet.” Which was why he was sitting here with Arthur, someone he respected as much as he feared the wrath of, given he was dating the man’s foster daughter. Even so, it felt easy to talk to Arthur about this kind of thing. Like one master craftsman to another, though he didn’t have children at home to worry about. Or a wife that would skin Isaac alive if anything happened to her husband. “Now, I know you aren’t in that business anymore either. You’ve got kids, a family. But you’re also Riley’s family. You don’t have to trust me, I won’t ask that of you. Hell, I wouldn’t expect your trust given what I did then.” Now he had to add feelings into the mix, to be candid past his comfort point, and Isaac sighed. Suck it up, buttercup. He looked at Arthur, all sharp lines and dark hair, and looked him straight in the eye. “I would die to protect her, but I think she’s had enough suffering. So my thought is that between the two of us we can make him suffer instead. He deserves it.”

“You have a vast horde at your disposal then,” she said, absently, well aware that they were dancing around a subject that had little to do with petty thievery. When did she stop flinching at things like that, at thieves and murderers? Maybe when she took a life herself or maybe when Lethe decided to flip on its head, both of which changed her. Lethe began crumpling as Riley was brought to her - was that the price of knowing her? Lethe was a child of hers in a way, but… What did Lethe matter compared to Riley? Very little, she was starting to realize! Odette mustered a half smile, gaze flickering to the other room, where she could almost hear Orion’s quiet movements. The faint sounds of the piano drifted out to them and her gaze drifted back to Isaac at his heartfelt words. The truths of it sang to her. “Good,” she said firmly. “I don’t belittle your suffering, or underestimate your bravery. Riley deserves someone who has seen darkness like her and not been tainted by it.” Odette didn’t need to be a lich or even a psychologist to know that Isaac and Riley thought themselves irrevocably ruined by their pasts. Changed, yes, but not ruined. Odette nodded, eyes not quite narrowed, but focused. “You know who Edmund is and what he’s done. You know he won’t leave us alone forever, not if his grudge has lasted this long. You have an in with him that none of us do, can you find him?” She wanted him in front of her - in front of her family - to answer for it. A long time ago Odette had weighed her own morality against her ex-husband’s life and found it a worthwhile trade. It didn’t bother her to make that same check now. “Can you bring him here?”

That was high praise coming from Riley’s mother and he knew it without the benefit of knowing her as well as he might like to in the future. Isaac nodded, eyes wide, and decided that he may as well accept it at face value. Liches could lie, certainly, but Odette didn’t seem to bother with lies when harsh truths could do the same job far more quickly. “Riley deserves the moon and the sun, she deserves anything I could give her and then some. But she seems to have decided that I am enough, and I am...honored to have her regard.” He knew Odette, in her way, was harder than Riley. Fiercer, cold in a way that Riley had never quite hardened herself to, but Odette’s request still caught him by surprise. This was the kind of reckless thing that he had been trying to avoid, that he had promised his brother he wouldn’t do any longer, but it was righteous too, was it not? He could find Edmund in a matter of days if he put his mind to it, and Edmund wasn’t beyond his abilities by any means. You just had to flatter him the right way, lure him to a point, and...ambush him. Not difficult, but something he would have to prepare for thoroughly. “Edmund is piss poor at holding onto confederates, to employees. He thinks very highly of his own abilities and poorly of anyone else’s unless they benefit him.” Isaac mused, leaning back against the side of an armchair with his arms folded in front of his chest. She could read what she wanted into that gesture, most likely she would be right and they were beyond artifice now. “I know what he wants, he was stupid and greedy enough to tell me as much. And he has no way of knowing I can’t deliver his sister to him. Katherine is crafty, Katherine is canny, and Katherine would never concede to meet him far from her territory. So I could tell him that I’ve cultivated ties with her in Lethe, that I could get her to meet us a few miles outside of Lethe.” He had casual contact with Katherine, she had insisted upon it after she heard of his involvement with Riley. So he knew how plausible this was, and to Edmund? It was extremely so. “I assume you want him brought back alive, but do you have any objections to him being bound?”

Panic takes root quickly when his brother takes the bottle from his hands and turns away. Even when Isaac had been far away and almost entirely unreachable, Oliver had held onto some sort of hope that they’d find each other again. Even as anger simmered and grief boiled over, he knew he would eventually have his brother. That was always the pattern of things. But if Isaac is about to turn his back and close the door, he will have nothing at all. With both siblings lost, he will be unmoored completely, left to drift alone with not even a semblance of what used to make up his world. In this split second, his mind jumps to worst case scenario, as it has so often during these two long years. And, God, he is glad to be proven wrong. So glad, in fact, that something akin to a sob wrenches from his chest at Isaac’s reassurance, at the feeling of warm arms around him. He has his brother, at least. If nothing else, he still has his brother. “It’s fine, it’s fine,” Oliver feels bound to urge, anger forgotten in seconds, the grappling hold of grief eased by the embrace of his remaining sibling. And though the rain interrupts, it’s easier to breathe than it has been all day as he enters his brother’s apartment, unable to help a wry smile as he’s tossed a blanket. Funny, the unspoken things. He’s wiped his eyes, settled onto the sofa, and wrapped the blanket around his shoulders by the time Isaac sits in front of him, leaving him feeling impossibly childlike. 

The feeling fades. In fact, as his brother confesses his means of healing, Oliver feels a flash of pride. He’s about to voice it, too, when Isaac goes on. The next words rob him of any sort of smile but it takes him a moment to speak, knowing fair and well that the words he’s about to speak aren’t his own at all. She’s got a way of getting into his head, though, gone as she may be. “Bullshit.” And again, to affirm it: “That’s bullshit, Izzy.” He has to give credit where credit is due, though, and so Oliver sighs and elaborates. “That’s what Abby would’ve said, you know. Me, on the other hand… everything I can come up with is lame in comparison.” Hell if he won’t try, though. “I don’t. Blame you, that is. Don’t blame either of us, even if it’s hell to live without her. Also, you didn’t fuck up. I’ve just… never been very good at being alone. Not your fault.” His shrug is as passive as he hopes his words seem and he feels somehow smaller now than before. A long moment of quiet is allowed in order to listen to the rain before he goes on. “I’ve missed you a lot, that’s true. But you did what you needed to do. Considering how much time you spent putting us before yourself, it’s probably about time.” Oliver is no stranger to his brother’s generosity. That train of thought brings a sudden pang of guilt with it after his previous frustration, even if that feels long gone now. “You didn’t fuck up. Not with Abby, not with me.” 

It didn’t make him feel better, per-say. Oliver’s absolution just felt like an ill fitting shirt, as genuine as it so obviously was. It might sink in with time, as Orion had told him once. You just had to let it lie, let it take its own time to find its way into your mind instead of swiping it away like he had so many times in the past. That went both ways though, and Isaac swatted gently at his baby brother when he started to denigrate himself. “Now that’s some bullshit too, Jun-Seo. I’m proud of you for keeping yourself kind, for not letting the shit we lived through make you hard. And nothing you say is lame.” Isaac said, dragging out Oliver’s birth name to add some serious clout to the situation. It wasn’t something he did often or lightly, but the look on his brother’s face when he did made it clear it hit the mark. Never good at being alone, that was true. At least when Isaac had been working during their childhood, Oliver had Abby to hold onto. Twins were half of your soul, or so he had been told by Abby more than once. So now Oliver was missing half of himself, while Isaac was just missing a sister. One he loved dearly, sure, but not his twin. The sigh he let out then was halting, still damp with tears, but he let it out all the same. Sitting across from Oliver had lost its appeal quickly and hell, he was always cold, so Isaac stood, then plopped onto the sofa.

“Hana never liked being alone either, your maman. Whenever she could get me to, she’d ask me to stay with her. Offer to tell me stories, brush my hair.” Isaac said, moving slightly to the right so that he could put an arm over Oliver’s shoulder. It had been years since they had this kind of brotherly contact and affection. Lost years. Wasted ones, if not for Isaac’s conviction that they had in fact been safer when he kept away, but he didn’t walk that tightrope anymore. Didn’t have to. “You’re more like her than Abby was. I think Abby was what Hana would have wanted to be, more confident and vivacious. But Hana was kind, she was accepting of anyone to a fault. So you’re not lame, Jun-Seo. You’re just your mother’s son.” Isaac could practically anticipate the waterfalls of tears this sharing of memories might inspire in his brother, so he reached over for a tissue box and sat it in Oliver’s lap ahead of time. There was a warmth to being close to his brother again, and an even brighter one than in the past knowing he couldn’t be harmed just for being around him. Not here. Not now. It was almost enough to make him think...well, Oliver wouldn’t want that. Then again, he hadn’t asked. “You wanna know a secret? I don’t much like it either. But it was always safer, being alone.” He paused, rolling the thought around again, then shrugged. What was he going to do, say no? “We could be roommates, if you don’t want to be alone anymore. I don’t wanna toot my own horn or anything, but I have the cash to buy us a house. More than that in bullshit I need to sell. Up to you.”

Whatever happened to Isaac during his separation from his mother is beyond Annya. She knew only what Yue knew, which meant they didn’t have a whole lot to off of. Through her digging, she found bits and pieces of his past, but nothing to indicate what happened to him during his childhood. Yue’s child had been a ghost in the wind. This is the closest Yue’s ever come to figuring out the truth. Annya’s not giving that up now. “That can’t be true,” she mutters, brow creasing. “If what I think is true, your mother never would have abandoned you, she…Yue has been searching for so long, trying to get her hands on any information she can to find her son. She wouldn’t have abandoned her child.” From what Yue had described to her, it seemed one minute she had a son and the next, she did not. Gone without a trace. Well, maybe until now. If this Isaac Dawson man is who she thinks he is, then they have found Yue’s son. 

 “How dare you speak to me that way,” Annya snaps back, eyes narrowed at the man in front of her. “You’ve been hurt but that’s no way to treat someone who’s only trying to help you. What would your vampire think of such behavior?” Perhaps bringing up Riley is a mistake. No, scratch that. Annya knows it’s a mistake, but she’s angry and frustrated. Their lives, Yue and Isaac’s both, have been so tainted by what happened all these years ago. And now, when they’re at arm’s length from one another, both seem too stubborn or too scared to find out the truth. To reunite. Perhaps it would be best if she minded her own business. But Annya being Annya, she not one to back down so easily. It’s not in her nature. “So you mean to tell me, you don’t care that your mother could be out there? That regardless of the fact that she’s been searching for you, you don’t want to meet her? You don’t even want to know?” Annya asks, sincerity in her voice now as she bags the file, stepping closer the angered fae. “So much anger,” she mutters in Mandarin, shaking her head as she nods to the door. “I don’t intend on leaving, you can stop wasting your energy.” Once she’s said her peace, she’ll leave and that will be that. “How long are you going to let that make your decision for you? Your past, what you have been through? I’ve traveled with Yue for many years now, and she is the best person I know. Please. If she is your mother, just give her a chance. One, that’s all I’m asking.” 

“No, how dare you! How dare you come in here with your bullshit and your assumptions and your fucking file folder like you have any idea who I am. Last time I checked, Madamoiselle No Aura, the dead don’t read minds.” God, he wanted to snatch up her damned folder and shred the thing, run it through the machine in the back office and then burn the pieces. Maybe there were truths in the pages, but more likely there were lies. He didn’t want either, not when he was starting to pull himself together after losing Abby. Help him? He could feel his shoulders tense at the presumption, at the very thought that some stranger slinking into Riley’s shop and yelling could be at all helpful. Again he gestured at the world outside the front door of the shop and again she stopped to snap at him. The Mandarin made him roll his eyes. What was it, the fact that he was clearly only half Chinese that made those who were more think he didn’t know the language? In her case it was probably just habit, but practically everything irked him right now. “Chūqù! Goddamn, how many times do I have to ask you?”

More than he had, apparently. Unfortunately for her, he had learned long ago how to block out the bulk of what someone was saying and he waited a solid minute after she had finished to even look her direction. “Mademoiselle, this isn’t my shop. If I have to call Ms. Meadowes to deal with you I will. And she’d probably bring along her husband, who even I wouldn’t fuck with. You decide.” Not that this woman would likely know why or much of anything about Arthur Talbot, let alone care. She seemed foolhardy and reckless in such a way that made it fairly obvious to Isaac how easily she must have wound up dead. Then again, he might enjoy seeing Cora roll down here like a fury thwarted to ream this woman out. He was going to have to lure her out, by the looks of it. So he stepped out into the street, door slamming shut behind him, and he walked around the side of the building towards his own staircase up to his apartment. If she followed, he could easily climb the balcony to get in and shut the front door before she could get back to it. If she didn’t, well, then he called Cora.

Unnerving wasn’t the right word. Painful, that fit just as well, because the more she looked at him, the harder it was to breathe. She exhaled loudly, trying to figure out his face and the eerie familiarity to it. Isaac, Isaac, Isaac. A good enough name, but certainly not the one she gave her son. He wasn’t Jinghao. Yue ran a hand through her hair, face falling at this failure, and her reply was fairly quiet and disappointed. “Apologies, you look a lot like– Wait, Dawson, you say?” It was a common name, she knew, and yet… Did she believe in coincidences anymore? “As in… Niall? Are you a relative of his?” A man with the face of her brother and the last name of Niall? Her thoughts raced a mile a minute, ignoring Isaac’s question in favor of solving a riddle two centuries in the making. Then she blinked, her eyes catching on a piece of jade that hung around his neck, falling free from where it hung over his shoulder. The excitement returned, so quickly that she stumbled a little when she walked toward him, hand outstretched. Was it happening? Was this real? Yue swallowed, trying to stuff the hope back down where it couldn’t pinch her, even if it was damn near impossible to smother. She was quite close to him now and if she tried, she could touch the pendant, could see if it was just a cruel coincidence among other cruel coincidences. She didn’t, hands clenched in a fist at her sides and her eyes clocked on the pendant. “Where did you get this? I-I gave my son one, a long time ago.”

“He was my father. Not that he did much parenting.” Isaac didn’t believe in coincidences. You learned not to in his line of work, lest they pile up into a stumbling block or a bomb, or in the worst cases both. So he didn’t like a single bit of this interaction, of the way his father’s name slid off her tongue so easily and the look on her face. The closer she got the more he could feel her emotional landscape and he didn’t much like that either. Fear, surprise, muted joy and...the brush of her hand against his arm was enough to tip him headfirst into that empathy he had mistreated all his life. The scent of sandalwood incense, a soft musical voice singing a lullaby he half remembered, feeling drowsy as he sat nestled on the lap of the woman singing. He felt her pride, her joy, and his own contentedness sitting there in her lap, a child of no more than three. He felt...Isaac stepped back from the woman with a jolt, forcing their brief connection to end. His hand had shot to the pendant around his neck as he stepped away, still reeling, and he could feel tears in his eyes from the force of that memory. Her son. No, that wasn’t acceptable. Couldn’t be right. His mother abandoned him, she didn’t want him, he was a mistake. That was what his father told him as soon as he was old enough to understand, words he drew out like a knife to slash at him whenever he felt the need to draw extra blood. “I always had it. Always, ever since I can remember. He tried to sell it a few times and it always came back to me through...I don’t know, some kind of bad luck magic.” This couldn’t be his mother. This woman ached with pain, with loss. Even if she had dumped him and regretted it, that didn’t explain the depth of her pain. “Who are you? You demanded that from me, so who are you? What are you?”

Date: August 14th 2020 Time: 7:40 pm Location: Isaac’s Apartment

This is all happening because he’d woken up strangling himself. Not intentionally, of course, but his hand had been tangled in the chain he wore Abby’s ring on and suddenly it was hard to breathe. Harder than usual, anyway. Since then, his sister has been on his mind so constantly it’s dizzying, a hand absentmindedly rubbing at his throat more than once today though there was no mark left behind. Finishing his work day only made things worse: there’s no longer a distraction to keep his head from spinning. One thought had led to another and now he’s bound down the street with a bottle in hand, open-container laws be damned. (The bottle is still sealed, anyway. It’s not for him.) Once he has found his destination, Oliver has to arm himself with a deep breath before he has the nerve to reach forward and knock on his brother’s apartment door. Words come out with little of his typical hesitation as soon as he hears the sound of the latch, his speech practiced on the way over. “Hi. I’m sorry. I know this is weird. And I know I could’ve done this in a better way. But I can’t stop thinking about Abby. I mean, more than usual, you know? I tried all day at work, but I swear, it feels like she’s behind me. And then when I realize she isn’t, it’s worse. Like someone is standing on my chest. And I just–” He can feel the heat growing on his cheeks, derived from frustration and embarrassment and definitely not worth trying to combat. “I don’t know if I did something to upset you. If I did, I’m really sorry. And maybe I’m a jerk for not knowing what I must’ve done wrong. But I’m also really, really tired of missing my sister and brother. So please, if you have time right now, I just… could really use a sibling to talk to. Oh.” Monologue halted, Oliver remembers the bottle in his hand and holds it out. “Figured, you know, maybe sake’s a good peace offering.”

At first he had excuses. Oliver was safer away from him, probably happier. He had gotten one sibling killed, did he really deserve to be around the other? Therapy had made it fairly obvious these were terrible excuses, it had made him realize he couldn’t hide behind them forever, but still he was..what? Afraid? Maybe. Guilt stricken for a certainty. So he had put off a reunion, he’d buried himself in other work and the company of other people though he knew that Oliver was just a stone’s throw away now that they both lived in Lethe. The thoughts could stay buried most of the time, they stayed under the earth best when he didn’t catch a glimpse of him on the street, but here he was, standing in the doorway looking as toil-worn and miserable as Isaac ever remembered seeing him. There were things he should say, interruptions he could make, but the words stuck in his throat and clearly Oliver had his own to spill. So he let him talk, he let him stand in the doorway of his apartment and felt his shoulders slump with every word. God, he had really fucked up here. Was Oliver safer without him around? Maybe. But clearly he wasn’t happier, and neither was Isaac for that matter. Again he tried for words, but when they didn’t come, he took the bottle from his baby brother’s hands, sat it on a table inside the door, and wrapped Oliver in a hug instead. “No. No, you didn’t do anything wrong.”

Isaac paused, closing his eyes against hot tears growing at the corners of his eyes, and just held his brother for a moment longer. How often had he been surprised by Oliver’s calmness, his sweetness that stood tall despite all the attempts others made to crush it when they were growing up? And here he was now, bringing over expensive sake as if he owed Isaac anything at all. “I...I fucked up. I should have talked to you. I...” Raindrops began to fall from the darkening sky and Isaac sighed, shaking his head as he pulled away from the hug. “Inside, don’t give yourself a cold or something. I’ll never forgive myself.” Oliver was always cold, always the first of the trio to get sick, and he had done enough damage to his life at this point. So he guided his brother inside, gestured for him to take a seat on the sofa, and handed him a throw blanket besides. He could have sat next to him, but instead he dragged an armchair over to sit in front, the better to look at him and be reminded he, at least, was still here. Still alive, though he couldn’t say for sure if he was thriving. It wasn’t his place to say so either. “I’m working with a therapist these days. I’m trying to...I don’t know. Put myself together the right way this time. But I fucked up by not going to you. By thinking you were better off without me. Didn’t I? I can feel it off you, Oliver. And Abby, shit. I thought maybe...I blame myself for what happened to her. So I thought maybe you might too. That I didn’t deserve you.”

Slapping her in the face would be kinder. She hadn’t seen her brother in two centuries and seeing his doppelganger across the street, painting the inn and laughing with the frowning dark-haired girl beside him, was nearly more than she could bear. Yue stopped in the street, one of those risky moves that Annya would scold her about, but her feet have been replaced with bricks and its only the blaring of a car horn that has her hopping back onto the sidewalk nearest him with a swear in Mandarin that drew aghast eyes from people who didn’t know the words but recognized the tone. “They didn’t understand what I said anyway,” she retorted back sharply, jerking her gaze from them back to the man with the familiar eyes. She adjusted her beanie for a moment to think, fussing with the fabric, but already he seemed poised to turn away. No time for it then, she had no way to set about this delicately and she didn’t know what to ask anyway. “You there. Who are you?”

@yuedais​

Isaac had just settled back into the rhythm of painting the inn’s shutters when the car horn blared behind him, making him jump as if he had been shocked at high voltage. That would have been far from an unusual sound anywhere else he had lived in his life, but in Lethe? A car horn, a flutter of movement, and the kind of vile cursing in Mandarin that he hadn’t heard since he was last in Shanghai many years ago. That was a little too much weirdness for him to ignore, and so he sat the brush on the lip of the can, turning around to look at this tiny woman who had just hopped onto the sidewalk. Looking at her sent a shiver down his spine, but he couldn’t even begin to say why. Was it just the way she looked at him? Wide eyed, then squinting as if she was trying to puzzle out something about him. He was pondering that when she began to speak and just about to say something himself when she spat out a question. Who was he? If he had felt even a whiff of ill intentions from her he wouldn’t answer, but there was something...he didn’t know what, just something that struck him about her. Something familiar. “They didn’t, I did. Either way, their windows were up so they didn’t hear anything at all.” No malice, just curiosity and a yearning that he didn’t understand. He wasn’t close enough to read her thoughts, just emotions, but what was she going to do? Hurt him? Unlikely. “Isaac Dawson. Who are you?”