So in summary this game ripped/is ripping my soul out because the twins (Jacob especially) are both cinnamon rolls who are too pure for this world. Thus, this fic came into existence.
Probably expect to see more on the way. I'm kind of a garbage can and I love this game too much for my own health, so when I get a chance between screaming over other fandoms and finishing Syndicate, I'll probably be writing more.
Shoutout to the ever-lovely Guava at [ drk ravenn . tumblr ], who willingly has talked with me about this game for literal hours, to include an approximaately two hour conversation on the wonderfully twisted fuckery that is Rothfrye. She's an amazing artist and an amazing person, and she's 98% of why I actually got off my hump and started writing this for once, so if you liked the story, thank her for the fact that it actually exists outside my head. XDXDXD
Hope you all enjoy and I'll be back with more oneshots at some point soon, probably!
She's running. The Blighters are swarming around her, a sea of red vests and Templar greats swinging with knives and clubs and fists, laughing, their breath reeking of blood and whiskey, and she can feel them suffocating her even as she lashes back at them. Her cane sword moves like lightning, a deadly extension of her arm, her hidden blades flashing silver and her feet barely seeming to touch the ground as she dances through the sea in a whirl of punches and slashes and dodges, trying to swim her way through the crimson tide. Lucy Thorne's blood is on her hands, is clogging her nose with the scent of iron and robbing her of her senses, and Crawford Starrick's eyes are diamonds, sharp and deadly. The two of them are spinning, dancing. His hands are at her waist. They're around Jacob's throat. They're around hers.
Evie wakes with a sharp intake of breath, her eyes wide open and staring intently at the dark shadows the moonlight casts through the windows of the stopped train onto the ceiling of her car, and her heart is pounding a tattoo against the inside of her ribs, a familiar, terrified tattoo that only serves to exacerbate the residual pain from the still-healing bruises she earned from taking on the legendary Crawford Starrick.
Her pulse is loud in her ears, her breath a sharp staccato despite her efforts to even it, and she concentrates harder on slowing it to reasonable rhythms, chiding herself softly as she sits up in bed. She's twenty-one years old, far too old to be so bothered by night terrors, but the images remain in her head as if burned to the back of her eyelids. Jacob is choking, Jacob is dying. She's in a sea of Blighters, drowning in blood that doesn't belong to her. They are both out of each other's reach.
She shakes her head. Enough, she tells herself. Come morning, those thoughts would be memories, at least until evening returned. There was no point to letting them plague her waking hours as well as her sleeping ones.
Evie can remember a time when such stern admonishments to herself would have done some good, but tonight, they're of little use. Weary, she shakes off the last vestiges of sleep, well aware that she has no intents of returning to so much as a fitful doze now that she's awake. There seems to be little point if all that it will grant her is a second rude awakening.
She has no idea what she'll do with the spare time until morning – sketch, perhaps, or read, maybe plan out another venture for her and Jacob to take on – but she's spared from having to come up with one when she hears a sound, barely more than a whisper of movement from the end of her car. Her head shoots toward it just as the hint of a silhouette slips from the edge of a doorway she knows she did not leave open, but there is no noise as the shadow slips away.
Almost no noise, she corrects herself, focusing her hearing on the retreating tread of boots as the silhouette fades into the night. The rhythm is familiar, the same way the shadow was, and it confirms her suspicions. Jacob, she thinks, and frowns. It's the third time in as many nights that he's found his way over to her train car, opened the door, then slipped away as soon as she looked toward him, and she's torn between concern and impatience. What could he be looking for at such an hour?
What better time to find out? Evie thinks, and swings her legs out of bed, feet touching down silently on the carpet. For a moment, she toys with the idea of not putting on her boots, then decides the tread will be helpful if the roof is slick with London mist as it so often tends to be. The last thing she needs is illness or a fall. Quickly, she laces the boots up, then stands and grabs her jacket from where she laid it carefully over the edge of a chair, shrugs it on as she pads silently through the doorway, and ascends.
He's gone further than she had anticipated, but she can make out Jacob's outline in the moonlight several carriages down, sitting on the roof of the bar car, just down from the carriage which holds his own sleeping quarters. He isn't moving, just staring idly off the edge into the distance, looking at what, she doesn't know. What is he doing? she thinks curiously, feet already propelling her toward him.
It only takes a minute to close the distance between them. Her voice is quiet and inquisitive as it cuts through the night to where he sits a few feet away, lost in thought. "Jacob?"
He startles visibly, jumping and reaching toward the knife she knows he keeps at his waist nearly constantly these days until he registers who has interrupted his thoughts. The startled muttering turns to swearing. "Hello, Evie," he says. "Must you sneak up on me in the middle of the night?"
"Good to see you too, dear brother," she murmurs, a wry twist to her lips as she moves to sit beside him, sweeping the longer tails of her jacket back behind her to avoid sitting on top of them.
"Bit late for a stroll, don't you think?" Jacob asks, raising an eyebrow at her.
She returns the gesture. "You've been out longer than I have."
He looks away at that. "I'm attempting to become nocturnal," he offers by way of explanation, nodding vaguely toward where the city sleeps in the distance. "There's much more of interest that happens at nights than there is in the day. Think of how productive it could be."
"Of course," Evie agrees. "And if you watch the city at night, I can cover it by day. They'll have constant protection by the unstoppable Frye twins."
"By us or from us?" Jacob mutters wryly.
It's deprecating in a way Evie doesn't expect, and she can't help smiling at it. "A bit of both, perhaps," she concedes, and it's Jacob's turn to chuckle appreciatively.
"The criminal classes won't know what do with themselves," he remarks, voice light with the joking. "They'll never be able to sleep again."
"At least not without shifts." Evie is smiling, but the road the conversation has led them along reminds her far too well of her own dilemmas, of the reason why she herself is not asleep and is instead trading quips with Jacob on top of a stopped train in the dead of night. "Then again," she continues, "neither will we at this rate."
The humour is gone from Jacob's face in an instant, and he looks away. "And there goes the fun part of this evening, I expect," he murmurs, not meeting her gaze. She can hear a sort of dread in his voice, but she doesn't comment on it or ask for an explanation. Not immediately. There are other concerns.
Evie leans forward, locking her elbows around her knees and resting her chin on her crossed arms. She tilts her head to look at Jacob, studying his face. "Bad dreams?" she asks softly.
He doesn't move his gaze from the landscape. "Something on those lines," he replies vaguely, and she can see the corners of his mouth twitch with the desire to smile, to fake a lopsided grin as he so often does and try to laugh it off. She's thankful that he doesn't quite manage the full effort. He knows she's been able to see through it every time since they were young and he first started doing it.
She changes her focus, looks out to some point in the distance the same way he is, and she doesn't say what they're both thinking. They've both killed plenty of people in their lives in the name of the Creed, but for all the blood on their hands, the stains they've accrued in the past few weeks are the only ones which seem to have sunk into their skin like dyes and stayed there, haunting souvenirs of the battles they've won. Instead, it's several minutes before Evie asks her question. "Does Starrick frequently visit your dreams as well?"
There's a pause, as if Jacob is debating with himself on how to answer. "Among others," he confesses eventually. "There's getting to be an impressive crowd."
"In mine as well," Evie admits, thinking of the sea of Blighters, of Lucy Thorne's blood in her lungs and her nose, choking off air. An involuntary shudder rattles through her, and though she tries to suppress it, the look on Jacob's face tells her that success is somewhat limited.
He studies her for a moment as if looking for answers, then turns away. The expression on his face holds a dark sort of amusement. There's a slightly cynical twist to his lips, and he says simply: "Perhaps we should start charging rent."
Evie can't help it. She laughs. Laughs because the notion is as absurd as it is morbid, because she tries to imagine Starrick's face if anyone ever demanded he pay them a cent for his board, tries to picture Lucy Thorne politely writing out checks to a landlord and finds that it's far easier to imagine her face twisted with outrage at the prospect, her brain already full of schemes on how to kill her proprietor. Rent indeed, she thinks to herself, her breath a low chuckle she tries to keep down for the other residents on the train. We'd be able to buy out Queen Victoria in a month with the proceeds from that venture. "I could see the benefit," she manages eventually, once she has control of herself again, "but I'm afraid any payments addressed by dead persons are likely to arrive rather late. They're not the most reliable sort."
"In life or death," Jacob mutters in agreement, setting Evie to laughing quietly again, a smile settling across his own face.
The silence returns for a few minutes after that, companionable for a while. Then the humour of the previous joking wears off, and Evie starts to feel the quiet's edges, jagged and persistent and cutting at her nerves once again. She came up here for a reason, and she knows it wasn't simply to joke with Jacob. The threat of Starrick has not been long out of commission, but she knows as surely as she's ever known anything that they still have a long road before they can rest. Starrick was not the last Templar London ever would know, wasn't even the last the city housed currently. Until they'd stripped the corruption off every street-corner of England, there would be little time for rest.
They would need their wits about them if they wanted to succeed, unfrazzled from sleepless nights. That meant they would have to strip their nerves down to the core first to heal the damage from the inside out. It isn't a task she particularly looks forward to, but it is one to which she will submit.
When the time comes, of course. For her, the time is not now. For now, her focus is Jacob. Her own madness can wait.
"'I've noticed your new decoration," she says after a few minutes of quiet, her voice almost casual. She waits for a response. All she gets is silence and a raised eyebrow. "The crow, Jacob," she clarifies. "The dead one."
His shoulders twitch as if he's seen this coming and wants to slump in defeat but is too proud to bother. "Rook," he says, his tone clipped by a forced lightness, and Evie isn't sure if it's a correction or a name.
"It's a bit morbid, don't you think? Considering the circumstances."
Jacob doesn't respond for a moment. When he does, it sounds like he's talking around glass. "He was a parting gift," he says, "from an ex-associate who wanted my company at a show of his after our partnership dissolved."
Roth, Evie realises immediately, and it occurs to her that he is one foe whose death she has not seen the terrible side-effects of and had to straighten out, and one of the ones she knows the least about.
She doesn't realise she spoke the name until Jacob looks at her quizzically. "How did you know?"
"He did send you a letter," Evie points out. "It wasn't exactly a subtle invitation."
"But it was one we agreed to ignore," he disagrees.
Evie almost laughs. "And when has that stopped you, Jacob?" she asks, then feels immediately guilty when Jacob flinches and looks away. She curses herself inwardly for the slip of the tongue, no doubt caused by the exhaustion of both of them. Her and Jacob have made up, but their peace still feels tenuous at times, and she doubts she's the only one who feels it between them, the threat of a sea that could rise any moment and shove them both adrift to opposite shores if they failed to watch their tongues. "I'm sorry," she apologises immediately.
Jacob shakes his head. "No need," he says, the same wry, sad smile on his face that he'd worn under the cathedral. "What is it Father always used to say about changing the truth if it hurt to hear it?"
The phrase jumps to mind without a second thought, but Evie ignores it. "It doesn't matter,'' she says. "It does no good to assault someone with the truth when they're already trying. Change doesn't happen in an instant." Change doesn't happen at all, sometimes, she thinks, and is glad that now is not one of those times. If neither of them changed, they'd both have been lost, and now that she's no longer wrapped up totally in her own emotional insecurities and temperamental outbursts, she can tell quite clearly how unbearable the thought of a life without Jacob is.
From his spot on the roof of the train, Jacob angles his head to look at her for a long moment, and she meets his gaze in silence until he turns away without a further word on the subject. She expects that they'll be quiet for some time now, as is usually the case when one of them says anything overtly forgiving in the other's direction, but to her surprise, Jacob speaks up again after only another minute. "He knew I was there," he says out into the night, his tone suggesting clearly that he was shooting for nonchalance but quite obviously missed. "When I came to the Alhambra, he was talking to me, even though he couldn't have seen me. He knew I would come."
"Because of the bait?" Evie asks, imagining her brother getting a dead crow in the post, with no hope of missing the implications of the threat such a gruesome delivery would imply.
"No," Jacob says. "Because I wanted to see him."
Oh. Evie knows her brother, knows him almost as well as she knows herself. He is not the type to hold idle conversations with anybody if he can be doing something more proactive, and he's certainly not the type to hold such conversations with men who would happily see him dead. He'd sooner surprise them and cut off whatever they were going to say with a blade to their throat. That such was not the case for Roth spoke volumes more than anything else Jacob could say.
She tries to imagine the sort of man who could prompt Jacob to look for answers in anything so mundane as words and comes up blank. "You were friends."
Jacob snorts and leans backward, palms pressed on the roof of the train, resting his weight on them. "Hell if I know what we were," he says, and sounds almost bitter. "Thought we were that, until he tried to have me blow up a factory full of children. Then he sent me his dead pet as an invitation to see him perform and I came along like a leashed dog, and he turned it all into a theatre show with splendid effects when his performers cocked up their aim firing at the volunteers." His words are coming faster now, a harsh bite to them like the edge of a knife, and Evie feels her stomach twist in a way that has precious little to do with the terrible circus Jacob is describing. "Wrapped it all up with a nice toast, too, gentleman bastard that he was, and when I say toast, I mean he lit the theatre up and waited for me to come do him in. Asked for it, really. It was truly a unique performance."
Evie doesn't know what to say, doesn't know what words Roth has already said to turn Jacob's tone so bitter at the thought of him, but she has to try. "Jacob-"
"I wanted to know why, Evie," Jacob says, his voice abruptly flatter. The previous frustrated fervor has drained from his tone, taking with it any attempts for lightness. Now he just sounds weary, exhausted the way she feels, but she's afraid that his exhaustion goes deeper than their battle wounds, that it bleeds past even his dreams and into his foolishly brave heart, the vulnerable one he's always been so terribly lax about protecting. She tries to imagine Jacob with these sorts of wounds scarred into him and finds that the concept is nearly enough to make her sick, even with all the things she's seen, and she thinks of a night, years ago, in their father's study when she'd bonded with him over lamplit texts while Jacob faked sleep upstairs and they both pretended to believe him.
Why are you so much harder on him? she'd asked quietly, her eyes searching as she sat with her feet tucked under her and an open manuscript in her laps. Jacob doesn't like books, but he's seen himself out of plenty of scrapes, and he has me. He's still smart.
I know he is, Evie, Father had said, and he'd sounded tired. But your brother tends to think with his heart before he looks with his eyes, and one day, it will see him killed.
"Jacob," she says, concern written across her face. There are a million things she wants to say, and she feels them there on the tip of her tongue, but when she goes to speak them, they die out, smothered by the pained light in her brother's eyes and the harsh smile he's forced on his face.
"I wanted to know why," he repeats, "and all he had to tell me was 'why not?'" There's a mocking, almost sad edge to the quote, and his voice is quieter when he speaks again, rough with bitterness and an unfamiliar emotion that almost sounds like remorse. "He kissed me and then he died, and that was it. 'Why not?'"
Evie, for once in her life, doesn't know what to say. Don't let your feelings get in the way of the mission, she thinks, struck by the horrible irony of her brother fighting the terrible pragmatism of the code at the same time she was without her even having noticed. She almost regrets it when the first words that come to mind fall out before she can stop them. "I'm sorry."
Jacob snorts, cynical and self-deprecating. "What for?" he asks. "It's hardly your fault. You'd never have answered that summons, and if you had, you'd have snuck in and speared him while his guard was down, not paired up with him like a git."
"Jacob," she says again, like she has so many times before in this conversation. She wasn't sure what to expect when she'd climbed up here after him, but she knows it was not this. If she had known these were the thoughts that chased in his head in the evenings, she would have followed him the first night, before he'd spent any longer dwelling on them. She reaches for his hand, now fisted tightly and resting on his thigh, and lays hers gently over it. "Stop."
Jacob tenses, but doesn't look over at her. His jaw clenches, and she takes advantage of the silence, continuing on as softly as she can without making it seem like pity. She wants Jacob to know she is there for him, but she has never been gentle, not even when they were young. Still, she tries. "I'm sorry because what happened was horrible. You'd never have trusted someone so far if you thought they were so mad, and I'm sorry Roth turned out to be a different man than who you thought he was-"
"Different than who I thought he was, sure," Jacob interrupts sardonically. "But exactly the same as I should have expected."
"No," Evie disagrees. "You've always been the kinder of us, Jacob, more willing to give people chances. That isn't a poor quality to possess." When Jacob shakes his head, she attempts a different approach. "Did you ever suspect he would try to kill children?" she asks, and Jacob freezes. He doesn't speak. "Did you think he would burn down his own theatre, just to see you suffer?"
Jacob closes his eyes. He says nothing, but Evie can see the answer waiting trapped behind his teeth. "Jacob," she says, quiet and low. "Tell me the truth."
There's another long moment. "He said he wanted freedom," he says, and the admission sounds bloody, as if it fought through a tunnel lined with glass shards working its way out of his throat.
Evie doesn't take it. "Jacob. Did you see it coming?"
He opens his eyes, glaring out at the stilled silhouettes of the world out before them. Then he shakes his head, almost imperceptibly. No.
"No," Evie echoes, out loud this time even though Jacob was silent. "You didn't think it would happen. And the moment it did, you left him and whatever he meant to help the children, didn't you? Even though the factory was still going to blow up, you went for them."
Jacob laughs, not sounding remotely amused. "It's hardly heroics when you're fixing the thing you cocked up to begin with, Eves. Besides," he says, inhaling sharply, a forced lightness to his tone, "Clara would hardly have forgiven us if I'd gotten children killed by being too blind to pay attention."
"I'm less concerned about Clara forgiving us than I am about the fact that you'd never forgive yourself, Jacob Frye," Evie says, and is surprised when her own voice comes out with an edge. Jacob's gaze shoots to her, his face familiar but his expression so foreign it's unreadable, even to her. He'd saved them at great cost to his own well-being, and still, he flagellated himself with the memory of what could have been. Evie doesn't want to imagine what sort of scars he'd bear now if he'd learned of the children's presence through the sound of their screams after the explosions detonated.
"What would there be to forgive, Evie?" Jacob asks, the same weariness back in his voice, the fight faded out of him like it's been ripped away. "Forgiven, unforgiven. It doesn't bring people back from the dead." He closes his eyes again. "It doesn't matter if they're children."
"No, it doesn't," Evie agrees. "But forgiveness gives the living a chance to find a better road." She's never been good with emotions, neither of them have - an unfortunate gift she thinks they both inherited from their father's tendency to maintain a stiff upper lip at all occasions with few exceptions that she can recall - but for this, she'll try. "We all have our edges, Jacob," she says, "lines we have to almost cross in order to realise the sorts of wastelands beyond them. Roth was yours, but you came back from him. You know what lies beyond now. You know what you're trying to avoid." She tightens her grip from where her hand still rests upon his clenched fist. "It's easier from here." And you won't be alone, she adds in her head. He'd spent enough time without her while she warred with her own lines in the sand, too busy trying to be their father to realise that who Jacob needed was her as herself, as Evie, his twin sister who he'd never known a day without and who had never known a day without him.
Jacob is silent for a moment, musing. Evie lets the silence stand, well aware that he needs a moment to contemplate what she's said, process it through his disbelief and exhaustion and the self-deprecation he pretends doesn't plague him. After a long minute, his fist unclenches, his hand angling to grasp hers and squeezing gently, the way they always had when they were younger and needed the physical reminder of each other's presence more frequently. Even now, she finds it's still a comfort. When he finally speaks, there's still strain to his voice, but beneath it, Evie can sense the barest hint of his usual lightness. "You really have been studying up on your dead philosophers, haven't you?" he says. "I swear, I've read that exact speech in one of the books in your car."
Evie feels the tension slip from her own shoulders, at least some of it, and a fond smile breaks across her face. "And here I thought you hated reading," she teases. "Jacob Frye, a secret scholar. The plot thickens."
"As long as you don't tell the lads, I'll let that pass," Jacob permits, and when he looks over to Evie, the quicksilver light is back in his eyes, or at least trying to be, and there's a lopsided smile on his face. He stands up, and his joints pop loudly as he does, a rapid-fire series of cracks that he seems almost startled by.
Evie has to fight the very un-ladylike urge to snort, but fails to fully repress her smile. "Very stealthy, Sir Jacob," she comments, standing up smoothly until a traitorous tendon on her left ankle decides to make an audible snapping noise.
Jacob raises an eyebrow at her. "Likewise, Dame Evie," he says, and she rolls her eyes. "Now then, what say you to something to drink away from this bloody wind before we contract something?"
Evie smiles. "I say that sounds lovely," she returns, and follows him down the side.
It's late the next morning and the train is chugging steadily along the tracks when Henry finally allows himself to wonder where Evie is. On any normal occasion, she's usually the first to rise, or close to it, meeting him by the window to nurse a cup of tea and watch the sun rise over London in companionable silence or occasionally even mild chatter, as they've taken to exchanging recently. But this morning, she's nowhere to be found, and Henry finds that he's growing somewhat concerned by her absence. Starrick is dead, and Evie is no flower who would fall silently to anyone's blade, but he knows that she is learning to entrust herself to the care of others just as much as her brother is. He doesn't put it past her to be trying to conceal emotional scars.
I will check on her, he decides, smoothly traversing the train to her car. He doesn't even consider the prospect of barging in, though Evie had mentioned that he has little to concern himself with in regards to conduct breaches, given that she'd grown up in the company of a boy with no true concept of privacy and, more importantly, was an assassin with little time for being concerned with delicacy. Regardless of her background, simply strolling in still seems somehow improper, so instead, Henry elects to knock on the window of the car, and waits for her to come.
And waits. And waits.
When a few minutes pass without response, he considers trying again, then chooses not to. Evie is not the type to waste time in answering a summons if she hears it. Perhaps Jacob will know of where she's gone, he thinks, and moves toward the opposite end of the train. When he arrives at his destination, he pauses to knock, but is interrupted by a noise that he thinks, for a moment, must belong to the train until he hears it again.
Is that snoring? he thinks, almost in awe, and raises his gaze to look through the window on the door. When he finds the window too dirty to reveal much of anything, he flicks out a pair of lockpicks, the tools flashing in his hands. The killer instinct has never taken hold of him, but the Brotherhood's stealth was a lesson that had soaked into his skin like water from the beginning, and locks are little deterrent to him. Within a moment, there is a soft click, and he eases the door open gently, uncertain of who he'll find, or how they could possibly make such noise.
The scene that greets him is not of Jacob alone, as he expects. Instead, he is both surprised and relieved to see that it is both Fryes, lying side by side on a bed clearly intended for one person. Evie's head rests on Jacob's shoulder, and she's curled on her side with the exception of one leg that has sprawled across one of Jacob's. His unimpeded leg hangs off the bed, and one arm is wrapped around Evie's shoulders. It simultaneously looks like the most uncomfortable tangle of limbs he's ever seen, and the most peaceful rest. Both of their breaths are even, both of their brows unfurrowed, soft exhalations of snores punctuating the air at regular intervals.
Henry smiles to himself to see such peace, and eases the door shut.