#keynlest

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You took your heart out of your chest and gave it to your brother because wolves had devoured his, lapping and frothing at the torn open hole in his ribs because emotions are hearts drawn in teenage notebooks and etched into trees with scars that outlast the relationships they proclaim, and you saw the life fading from his eyes even as they glowed with the desperation that comes from siphoning sustenance from demons. You filled the hole in your chest with drugs and bad decisions and stitched the wound tight with jagged lines that you covered up and let no one see, least of all yourself.

And you lived your life like that for a while, running off of vitriol and arrogance as your heart beat against your brother's ribs and pulsed love and happiness and sacrifice through his veins. And just as you think you've finally begun to figure out how to live with the lumpy, uneven conglomerate taking up space above your stomach and under your throat, your brother comes to you with his hands across his chest and asks, is this his real heart? Or is it fabricated with silken threads, hairline fractures running through its embroidery?

Your tongue dries up and your voice fills with butterflies, wings beating against the skin of your throat, but before the frogs can leap out of your mouth the stitching across your chest becomes undone and spills to the floor in a pile of regrets you never let yourself have. You stare down at the mess at your feet and lie, ignore the way the blood slows and stops in your own veins. You have never been good at lying. Your brother knows this. You know your brother knows this. You do it anyway.

His eyes are disappointed in a way that he'd been expecting this from you, and somehow the cavern in your chest grows a little bigger when you come to this realization, that you have never been able to deceive him, that what he believed was entirely what he wanted to believe, and now he's ready to try and regrow what has been lost; he just needs to know what he's lost, first. But he is the jungles and the wilds, and you are the desiccated desert sands in dunes and dust storms, and you are, more than anything, afraid of the beasts lurking in the undergrowth, ready to pounce when your lies are laid bare.

So you brush the sands over old ruins, sealing archaeological evidence inside and maybe one day they will be discovered, with no context, the pieces of the story you've worked so hard to weave. But for now you watch those desperate eyes close and seal and stitch another regret into your skin.

A week later you hear that your brother has gone, and he's taken your heart with him, into the depths of the ocean. You hear how he swam until he was too tired to swim back, think about how he sank into the saltwater and waited for any sign to sharpen the border between fabrication and reality, how he waited to wake up with a jolt and a breath from a nightmare until the waves crashed into his lungs and dragged him to the sands below. You stand on the shore he started on and feel something form amidst the lumps and assorted pieces, and for the second time the stitches fall out and you're looking at the things you've done. Reaching into your chest, your fingers wrap around something flat and circular, like the shape of your palm. It is a small weathered stone, sides made smooth by years of erosion and tiny, microscopic grains sanding over its edges.

You hold the stone between your forefinger and your thumb and flick it out across the water. You can feel the motion as it skips along the waves that took your brother, you hold your breath as it plunges beneath the surface. Water rushes into your ears, across your skin, when you look up to the surface you can see bubbles rising from air previously trapped in your empty chest. Distorted and muted, the moon is rapidly shrinking as you sink deeper and deeper, but a sharp sound draws you back.

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Keynlest stared at him with wide eyes, and Rathsin froze in their doorway, heartbeat racing in his throat. His brother’s shoulders tensed; green eyes narrowed as the priest took in the sight in front of him, an aura around his hands pulsing with a dark energy. Rathsin hardly dared to breathe. One hand wrapped so tight around the reins of a white hawkstrider that he could feel his pulse in his fingertips; the other had stopped on its way to a wave, lifted awkwardly near his chest in a hesitant “hello.”

“What.” Keynlest finally spoke. “Have you done to your hair.”

In hindsight, maybe it would’ve been a better idea to rent a room in the Silvermoon Inn, just for an hour or two in order to clean up, maybe take a bath. But the prospect had seemed silly at the time, extravagant, when the house of his childhood was just a few blocks away. Now it didn’t seem so extravagant at all. It seemed prudent, even. Even more so when his brother crossed the distance between them, twisted a handful of the matted, tangled hair, and yanked him inside by it.

Rathsin’s head smacked against the doorframe and he stumbled through the Embersilk curtains. His ears were ringing from the impact and he let go of the hawkstrider’s reins to reach out to try and regain his balance on anything he could, but Keynlest smacked his hand away.

“You smell like you haven’t bathed since you left Silvermoon!” Keynlest snapped at him, which wasn’t technically true. The lakes of Pandaria had such fresh water that diving in for treasure was basically taking a bath, just without the soap. And he’d sat through the grooming sessions with Cuzu, where the white lion would put a paw the size of a dinner plate on his chest and pick out with his teeth the dried blood and grass and sometimes bugs that’d buried themselves in the long, blonde locks. Those counted!

He kept his mouth shut, though, because he was pretty sure Keynlest would slit his throat with those manicured, lacquered nails if he’d mentioned those things.

“Hi, Keyn,” Rathsin said instead. His scalp was aching, but he knew better than to try and wrench out of his brother’s Elementium grip, even though his back and neck were aching from being dragged down to Keynlest’s height.

“Don’t talk to me,” Keynlest responded, one hand dipped in the bath he was filling. The heavy scent of perfume and herbs rising from the water made Rathsin’s head swim, but before he could protest he was unceremoniously thrown in, armor and all.

The water clouded almost immediately, the dirt and sweat and everything else blooming out from his entry point like an underwater explosion. Within seconds, the water was a murky shade of brown.

Keynlest looked like he’d been slapped, staring at the water with disbelief. His hand hovered over the surface. He dipped it downward once or twice, but his fingers never broke the surface of the increasingly muddier bath.

“Drain it,” he commanded instead, and Rathsin sighed and pulled the plug by his hand. As the tub drained he took the time to unbuckle his now-soaked armor and set it outside. Keynlest gave it a disdainful look but took it onto the balcony, where the sun could dry it.

When he returned, he turned the faucet on as high as it would go, and now commanded him to sit under it. With a resigned sound, Rathsin scooted under the high-pressure water, looked down, and watched his hair change from a brunette shade back to its original white-blonde.

“I can’t believe this. You’re the one to get Mother’s hair color, and you treat it like THIS.” Something cold poured onto his hair, and Rathsin jerked before a hand grabbed his hair and pulled him back. It was just shampoo, and soon afterwards he felt Keynlest lathering it in.

Suddenly, the hands disappeared, and Rathsin dared to open an eye. His brother wasn’t one to leave a job half-finished, and he peeked over his shoulder to find Keynlest staring, shampoo-covered fingers holding something out at arm’s length.

“Rathsin,” he began, and his voice quivered (though with anger or fear, Rathsin couldn’t tell.) “I just pulled.” Keynlest swallowed and tried again. “YOU. HAVE. SPIDERS. IN YOUR HAIR.”

Well, of course that was inevitable. Rathsin spent most nights sleeping in trees or on the bare ground, and sometimes that was where spiders lived. He was a little surprised it’d managed to cling on through the plunge into the bath and then the faucet’s torrent that followed, but the news itself was nothing he hadn’t experience before.

“It’s not doing any harm,” Rathsin tried to argue, and then he was glad that Keynlest wasn’t a mage because otherwise he’d probably have burst into flame right there. He shrunk down into the tub and tried again. “I’m… sorry?”

 “I can’t believe we’re related,” Keynlest said. Somehow, the flat tone of his voice, devoid of the anger it usually crackled with, made Rathsin shrink further into the tub, until it was just the mismatched tips of his ears sticking out over the edge.

Behind him, he could hear the wet sound of a spider being flicked out the window, and he winced. Then he was being shoved under the water again, and that was followed by a scrub from a brush he was fairly sure was made out of sandpaper, with a soap that smelled so strongly of nectar he was sure he’d attract bees. Keynlest even made him tilt his head back and stay still as he shaved the beard off with a straight razor, and Rathsin was only mildly terrified that his brother was going to slip and slice the blade across his throat. Let him feel like he was drowning in his own blood for a little while before he’d send the healing touch of the Light through the wound. But Keynlest apparently didn’t feel like undoing so much of his hard work by getting blood all over him again, so Rathsin was spared from that, at least.

When he was finally done, Rathsin barely even recognized himself. His skin had been scrubbed a shade lighter, and he was blonde again. He felt like he’d regressed several years, like he was getting ready for (he winced, mentally) mage training for the day. Almost any minute he expected his tutor to walk through the door, but instead it was just a curious Faiza peeking in through the curtains of the bathroom.

She stared at him, blue eyes wide, in almost the exact same expression Keynlest had when he first walked through the doorway. Keynlest looked down at her, confused. Raptors weren’t common in the walls of Silvermoon, especially not hatchlings.

“Keyn, dis is Faiza,” Rathsin said.

“Another one of your pets?”

On the floor, Faiza bristled and screeched at the older blood elf in indignation.

“No, no, I’m her da.”

Keynlest’s eyebrows looked like they were about to rocket from his face and up into the spires of Tempest Keep.

Rathsin held out a hand to Faiza, the scarred one, the one that her own teeth had marked some time earlier, and she screeched at him too.

“Aw, Faiza, you know me. It’s me! Rassin!” He reached out further and she stumbled over backwards trying to avoid his fingers. He heard her feet pit-pattering against the floors and straight outside, disappearing into the distance, and he sighed. Tracking down a very clever raptor hatchling in Silvermoon City, well, he’d find her eventually. Probably. Assuming she’d stop running away from him. Though he couldn’t really blame her – the past hour and a half had been a time of drastic transformation, and it’d probably take her a while to come to terms with it.

“What happened here?” Keyn asks, prodding at a nasty scar running from the jamb of his shoulder and into his ribs.

“Worgen rogue in Tol Barad Peninsula.”

“What about here?” That scar cut across his midsection, arching up slightly to meet his sternum.

“Angry Direhorn parent on Isle of Giants.”

“This one.” An oddly shaped one, almost shaped like a jagged crescent made up of three lines that stretched from down his side to over his hip, to the small of his back.

“Mantid in Dread Wastes. Er, big, spikey bugs. Stand on four legs, scyffs for arms. Some of ‘em use weapons.”

“Here.” A multi-branched scar fanning out across the back of his thigh, some of the tips of the various arms reached around to the front of his knee.

Rathsin paused, then gave a sheepish smile. “Fell outta tree.”

Keynlest’s mouth was set in a taut line, but not in its usual grumpy manner. He pulled a Windwool towel from storage and draped it over Rathsin’s head. “You don’t write about these things in your letters.”

“Can’t fit everyt’ing I do on a letter. Wouldn’t be able to afford da postage costs.”

“You’ll pay the postage to send back magically enchanted robes, stacks of different cloths, exotic leathers and furs of arctic beasts, enough books for me to have to build a new library in the basement AND the attic, tea pots, whatever this – “ Keynlest picked up a stone slab, with Pandaren writing etched into it. “ – thing is, relics and trinkets and other gifts. But you won’t spend the extra line to tell me about how you probably almost died when some cowardly Alliance piece of shit attacked you, or how you probably almost bled out on an island where the only other sentient beings are Zandalari trolls that would sooner eat your guts than stitch you back up.”

“Keyn-“ He wrapped the towel around his waist and stepped out of the tub, but Keynlest ignored his objection and continued to barrel forward.

“You show back up to Silvermoon after years of being gone. All I’ve heard from you is how you’ve been running around in the mountains of Northrend, and suddenly you’re telling me that if you weren’t so lucky, you’d probably have joined Mother and Father by now.”

“I – “ Rathsin started scooting back towards the main room, not that it would discourage his older brother’s rant.

“I remember when you fell off the roof pretending to be a Farstrider lookout and you shattered your arm and cried for three hours, way after Mother mended it with her magic, and you’re telling me you’re this tough hunter now who just bears these kinds of wounds with a grin? Give me a break. How dare you-“

“Here’s a gift,” Rathsin finally cut in, handing the reins to his brother. Keynlest blinked, stumbling from being interrupted, and looked from the leather straps in his hands to the white hawkstrider at the end blinking inquisitively at him.

“Where did you even get her?” the priest finally asked. “I thought these were a royal breed.”

“Guess ‘royal’ doesn’t mean much widdout any royalty left,” Rathsin said. “Found the egg in a wild nest on Quel’danas. She’s very smart. Trained her myself. But, well, way I run around, she doesn't stay white too long, and she doesn’t like dat.”

“Figures you would keep your pets cleaner than you keep yourself,” But Keynlest was already patting the bright feathers on her head, and she cooed and leaned into his touch.

“See? Perfect Match.”

“Get dressed.” Keynlest said, and lifted himself into the saddle. The hawkstrider cawed and shook out her feathers, lifting her legs in readiness to run.

“Are we going somewhere?”

“Well, we’ll need to find that pet of yours before it causes too much trouble. What did you call it? Fido?”

“Faiza. She won’t go to you, Keyn, she doesn’t trust strangers.”