happy birthday to me, have a fic idea that's been bouncing around in my head for a little while :D
it's probably not at all how truthwatching actually works ... but sue me I just really wanted someone to actually know about Kal's sad, sad life...
Sometimes, Renarin wishes there was more of a pattern to the visions.
Not the timing—they're usually consistent in that, coming during highstorms much like his father's had. He's grateful that he gets that much at least, that he has some warning before he collapses. Or—well—at least some of the time that's how it goes. Sometimes he doesn't lose control of his body entirely, and then he cries out and half-sees reality in the vision and comes out of it even more lost and exhausted than otherwise.
Glys says he can eventually learn to control them, to go into trances rather than to suddenly wind up on the floor, but that's taking time. He's fairly confident, as confident as he gets, that one day he'll be able to. Maybe not any day soon; right now he's little more than a bumbling wreck that messes up more than he fixes, but someday. Hopefully. But it's not the timing of the visions that bothers him most.
No, the pattern he wishes for is in the content.
The carefully-inscribed glyphs in the notebook he keeps in his bedroom, on a bookshelf now as opposed to being stuffed under his mattress to avoid sight, record each vision as faithfully as he can describe it. His hand is often shaky despite his best attempts, since he always tries to write as soon as the visions end, despite his exhaustion and the storm of emotions always left raging inside him. He flips through the last couple of pages, skimming the slight notes he made (death, horror, denial, blood), and sighs slightly. There's a highstorm coming soon.
Adolin, sitting on the end of his bed and idly flipping through an old issue of a fashion journal, looks up immediately. "Yes?"
Renarin mentally scolds himself for letting that sigh out. His brother is in here looking through old journals because he's bored, so of course he would pay full attention to even the slightest sign of something wrong from Renarin himself.
"It's nothing," he says calmly, or as calmly as he can, when the visions are coming with the highstorm and he can already feel them, a slight twisting, tugging, nauseating discomfort in his core. It'll only grow as the storm nears.
"Renarin." Adolin frowns at him ever so slightly. It isn't an angry frown, just the skeptical one that says more clearly than words, we both know that I know you better than to believe that. Then he shifts, his posture becoming a bit more hesitant, a bit more open. "Is it, uh, a Radiant… thing?"
Firmly pressing his lips together and looking away for a moment is his only acknowledgment of the defeat of his emotional barrier. "Yes…"
"Ah," Adolin says eloquently, looking a bit bashful as he rubs the back of his neck. In that moment, Renarin feels a surge of warmth, looking at his brother; here he is, utterly out of his depth when it comes to "Radiant things", but despite that he still wants to help. "Well… what is it anyway? I can listen, if you want to talk about… something."
The highstorm inches nearer. It's probably mere minutes away. The nausea spikes for a second before dying back down, its new level stronger than before. Glys says that that, too, will go away as he learns to control the visions, but for now, it makes him feel ill.
Renarin puts the notebook down, neatly centered on his desk with the bottom parallel to the desk's edge and a pen laying aligned with the book's left margin. "I…" He sighs, pushing himself to his feet and moving to sit on the bed too, though he leaves a large gap between himself and his brother. "There's a highstorm coming."
"Yeah," Adolin agrees. "So… one of your visions, too?"
Renarin nods. It's why he moved to the bed; the time he hadn't been quick enough and had fallen, hitting his head on the bedpost and waking up with blood in his eyes, was enough warning and then some to remind him to never wait til the last second again. (That had been before the Everstorm, and he'd told everyone he just tripped. Neither Adolin nor their father knew the actual reason Renarin had joined them for dinner with a bandage around his brow.) Glys says he can learn to control all of it, even to have proper visions outside highstorms, but for now it's easiest (and often happens of its own accord) during them.
"I'm just not really looking forward to it, I guess," he says after a moment. "They're tiring."
He doesn't just mean physically, although that's a large component of it. But the emotional toll is just as much if not worse; the ones where he had seen flashes of Dalinar, sent flying like nothing more than a rag doll by the Assassin in White, or Adolin, slowly but surely worn down by Parshendi warriors until he fell (with a war cry, in a blaze of glory, for surely Adolin Kholin would go down no other way)… those had been exhausting in a whole other sense.
"Well, it's evening already," Adolin says, glancing at the spheres that illuminate the room. "No one would blame you for just going to bed after the highstorm passes."
"That's not what I mean," Renarin shakes his head slightly. "They're tiring."
He glances at Adolin, willing him to understand, because he's never been good enough with words to craft images and pictures from them without spending time agonizing about it beforehand.
How is he supposed to explain the bone-crushing exhaustion that comes from seeing people you know (the crew of Bridge Four, other members of the warcamps he knows in passing, people he knows from Kholinar), people you love, die and being unable to do anything about it? Or the soul-numbing weariness born of watching strangers live their lives and die their deaths, screaming, crying, and praying?
It's true, not every vision is of death and horror, but enough of them are that he almost dreads highstorms, dreads the visions themselves, sometimes. He still dreads being a Radiant, sometimes, in all its entirety. It terrifies him. He just doesn't know how to make his brother understand—
"Oh," Adolin says quietly, and from the tone of his voice, he does understand. Renarin looks up at him hopefully. "Renarin…"
"Glys told me I can learn to control them so that it isn't like this," he says quickly, before Adolin can say the things he's about to say—things about how he wishes he could help, about how it isn't fair that Renarin has to deal with this while Bridgeboy gets to fly around, about…
The highstorm creeps closer. No—creeps is wrong. It… it roars. It comes unassumingly, full force out in the open, demanding, unyielding. It doesn't creep; it crashes and it devastates and it cleanses. And it comes closer.
The nausea spikes again, and he wraps his arms around himself, wincing. Glys, too shy to show himself to Adolin yet, murmurs a comforting it'll be over soon, you can handle it near his ear.
"Renarin—!" Adolin reaches for him, intending to wrap an arm around him, maybe, to offer comfort at least in the face of the dread and the sick feeling. But Renarin pulls away, shaking his head.
"Don't," he says softly. "I might… I might accidentally hurt you. Don't come near—"
Adolin chuckles and scoots closer again, wrapping his arm around him anyway. "Little brother," he says warmly, "I can assure you, if you manage to land a punch on me while only partially conscious, I'll have to congratulate you on being able to accomplish something that most of my sparring partners cannot while in full control of their faculties."
That almost gets a smile from Renarin. Almost.
He opens his mouth to reply with a quiet list of reasons why Adolin should still leave him alone for this—the unstated one being that no one has ever seen him in a vision before save during the Everstorm, and no one paid attention to him then—but before he can, the highstorm hits.
Blood.
Oh no, he thinks. Oh, storms, no. Not another one like this.
So much blood.
He must be on a battlefield. Looking around, he figures the fighting has been raging for hours, if not longer, but it's not the Shattered Plains—the ground is more fertile, more hilly, with no gaping chasm maws in sight. And both sides of combatants look to be Alethi.
He looks down on himself and realizes with a jolt of shock that this time, instead of seeing from the eyes of a random soldier, he's in the body of a child. What is a boy this small doing out here—?
There's a spear in his hand, his hold on it weak and clumsy and unpracticed. Renarin doesn't know how to hold spears anyway, so he couldn't have adjusted it much, even if he had any control over the bodies he borrows for visions. But the fact that it's a spear tells him that this boy is darkeyed, and that tells him what he's doing on the battlefield. It also leaves a foul taste in his mouth, or it would if this was his mouth. As it is, he's left with merely an uncomfortable disembodied sense of disgust.
The boy looks around, shifting his grip on his spear nervously. He turns a bit and Renarin realizes there are two others with him, roughly the same age, looking equally inexperienced and terrified.
"We're gonna die," one of them says, his brown eyes wide and brimming with tears. "We're gonna die. We're never going home."
"No, we're not," Renarin's boy says. He feels himself smile and marvels—how is there a boy of surely no more than twelve years out here, on the battlefield, surrounded by death and the dying, able to smile and comfort another boy? "We'll be okay. Everything will be fine and we will go home! You'll see your mom again, and… and..."
He trails off, looking around. The taller, slightly older boy—the third one, who had been silent until now—takes a shaky breath. "They're gonna be here soon," he says so softly that Renarin almost misses hearing his voice crack.
No! No, no, no! No more! Please, he wants to cry. He wants to squeeze his eyes shut, he wants to run away, he doesn't want to see these three children get butchered—why is he even seeing this? He doesn't know how long ago it was, who these darkeyed boys are, any of it!
"T-they told my ma, when they took me, they told her I wasn't gonna go to the field," the first boy stammers, his voice wavering. "They said I'd just run messages. They told her I would go home!"
The boy whose body Renarin is in bites his lip. Then he says softly, "They told my parents that, too."
The tall one scoffs, a harsh, bitter laugh that's all the more jarring because of his youth. "Hah! They lied to all our families then. Gonna send us home, yeah, sure, in ash urns!"
"Don't say things like that, Gremm!" Renarin's boy looks pleadingly at his companion, and then he awkwardly leans his spear on his arm so he can pat the other boy's shoulder consolingly. "We're going to be fine!"
Dread washes over Renarin at the overly-optimistic words, coiling in the pit of his stomach like a snake readying itself to strike. It takes him a long moment to realize that it's not his stomach, it's the boy's.
Gremm shrugs. "I guess we all have different ways of coping," he says. "Denial for you, cryin' for him, and whatever the hell I'm doing, for me. We're gonna die, Ti."
"No, we're not," Renarin's boy—Ti—says stubbornly. "My brother promised me we'd go home together. So we're going to go home, together! And you'll get to go home too, both of you! Look, we have all the rest of our squad with us, they'll keep us safe."
"You—you really think so?" The crying boy wipes his cheeks and looks around. "I—I want to go home, storms, I do, but… they'll keep us safe, right?"
"Yup," Ti says confidently, smiling again. "That's what they're there for! Right, Gremm?"
Gremm looks dubious, but he nods anyway. "I guess…"
Please keep them safe, Renarin begs the squad. He can't bear seeing grown men die on the battlefield; children would just be too much. Please, please, please keep them safe.
"Incoming! All soldiers, eyes front!" a voice barks suddenly, coming from somewhere behind Ti. Renarin fights down an urge to sob, knowing it won't do anything here and that back in his room (this isn't real this isn't real this isn't real) he's probably already crying in Adolin's arms (it's real and he knows it's real; even though it isn't his life doesn't mean it isn't someone's. Or wasn't.)
"They're coming," Gremm whispers. Ti turns his gaze forward, and Renarin sees, through a child's eyes, precisely how terrifying a line of men in uniform can be.
The spears glint. That's the first thing he notices.
Some of them are crimson, already covered in blood from other men—or other children, Renarin realizes, feeling sick—while some are fresh, though those are rarer. On some the blood has dried, turning a dull, dark brownish red, and the men bearing them are also blood-spattered.
None of the men on that front line are children. They rise up, tall and hard and for all Ti knows, judging by his clumsy hold on the too-large spear, invincible, too.
"I'm going to go home," Ti whispers, mostly to himself. "My brother will keep us all safe, and we're going to go home together."
It's incredibly strange to feel one's heart wrench with sorrow when one doesn't have a heart at the moment. But Renarin doesn't know how else to describe the sudden wave of sick horror and sadness that crashes over him. No more, he pleads again, futile as ever. He never got away from seeing his family die, he never got away from seeing any other stranger die, so why should this one be any different?
He begs anyway. Please, no more, please, I can't, he's just a boy, please, don't make me watch this, he's going to die I know he is please, please—
But why should he be spared? Doesn't he at least owe it to poor Ti to witness his last moments, to know that he existed and he wept and he wanted to go home? Just like all the times he saw Adolin fall, and Father, and sometimes Mashala and all the other nameless figures he's seen in visions, strangers and people from distant lands, everyone ripped apart by the Everstorm? He owes it to all of them to see, to know. He has to see it.
"Oh, Almighty," the crying boy breathes, choking on a sob. "Oh, Stormfather, oh, we're gonna die. We're gonna die, we're dead!"
"Shut up, Nai!" Gremm hisses. "Just—just—run away! Both of you, maybe you can make it somewhere else, I don't know. Just shut up!"
"There's no time!" Nai wails. And it's true, no matter how appealing desertion seemed. The enemy line is mere seconds away—
"Tien!"
It's a frantic cry, ripped from someone's throat, and—why does he recognize that voice?
Ti whips around, and he smiles again as he catches sight of someone running toward them. Renarin wants to yell at him, wants to cry keep your eyes forward or honestly just run, run away, get out of here, but he's trapped, immobile, helpless. Stormfather, how is this boy smiling? It seems so out of place here, in an awful field of death and blood and pain, and yet here he is. Renarin wants to cry. Someone like this child doesn't belong here.
And then he realizes just who, exactly, the boy is smiling at. If he had been in his own body, Renarin would have said his heart stopped. As it is, Ti just felt a burst of confidence, somewhere in his chest—the person he sees gives him hope he'll survive. And that means Renarin knows exactly who Ti is looking at.
His brother.
Captain Kaladin.
Or—well—he's not a captain yet, obviously; he looks much younger, perhaps four or five years younger than he was when Renarin met him. His hair is shorter and there are no slave brands scarring his face.
And he looks terrified.
"Tien!" he cries again, desperation filling his voice as he sprints forward despite a bloodied leg. That's all the warning both Renarin and Ti get before suddenly their squad isn't there but the enemy soldiers are, and his legs feel like jelly because he's going to die, he's going to die, he's going to die. And oh, storms, that spearman is tall and his spear is huge and—
"NO!"
The vision fades. As the familiar lines of his room fade back into existence, Kaladin's tortured scream rings in his memory like a death-knell. Oh, storms, oh Almighty, oh, storms, he can almost still smell the blood and feel the terror and… and…
He realizes he's curled up into a defensive little ball, and he's crying, unable to shake the cold knot of fear that took up residence in his chest (not his chest, Ti's chest) mere seconds ago when that spear came rushing forward. But he's not lying on his bed alone; he's leaning against his brother, whose arms are wrapped around him protectively. There are no spearmen here. He's safe. Safe, safe, safe.
Unlike Ti. Tien, rather. Ti must be a nickname. Or—Ti must have been a nickname. He winces internally as he corrects his thought, feeling a wave of irrational guilt crash over him, trying to drown him. Tien is dead, has been dead for years.
He chokes on another sob, a hand flying to cover his mouth. "I—I can't—"
"Renarin! Is it—it's over, right?" Adolin's hand brushes his cheek, strokes his hair, and then his brother's arm wraps around him again, strong and comforting. "Renarin?"
Unable to find his voice under all the tears that he doesn't want to let out, Renarin just nods mutely. Yes, it's over. It's over, it's over, it's over. He's safe. He's safe, damn him he's safe, so why can't he stop crying?!
That… that had been Kaladin's brother. The realization still hasn't fully hit him, not yet, but it starts to sink in as he tries to take a stabilizing breath. It collapses into another shudder as new waves of horror and grief and guilt and residual fear arise, swirling and growing deeper and deeper until he thinks he will drown.
Has—has Kaladin ever told anyone about that? Surely he's told Bridge Four. And he must have told Dalinar. There was no reason for him to ever share it with Renarin, or probably Adolin, for that matter, but surely he told people.
His world feels shaken. Why did he have to have a vision about that? Strangers upset him, and seeing his own family butchered is awful, but this… this was the past of someone he knows. It feels almost wrong, like an invasion of utmost privacy, that he knows about Tien, when Kaladin never mentioned him; why did he have to see this? Why?
"Storms, Renarin…" Adolin murmurs, resting his chin atop his head, "Is it always this bad?" Why didn't you tell me? Renarin hears, a plaintive question that's all the more hurt and yet loving for being unvoiced.
He shifts, finally gains the strength to lift his head, and scoots closer so he can press his face into the crook of Adolin's neck, both to seek comfort and to avoid any possibility of eye contact. Adolin responds by shifting his arms around him and rocking him back and forth, just a little, not too much that it becomes overwhelming. Just enough to be soothing. He's always been good at that.
Avoiding the question, Renarin focuses on breathing, slowly, carefully, in and out, in and out, until he feels like the tears might not clog his throat if he tries to speak. His mind is still whirling, full of emotions and residual panic as if he had just been plucked from a battlefield, not just seen one. Stormfather, that was Kaladin's little brother! Stormfather!
"What…" he starts, and it's harder than he'd thought it would be, but he pushes himself to get the rest of the words out without crying anyway, "what would, what would you do, if I … if I died?"
His brother goes rigid as stone.
"Is that what you saw?" he asks, voice low and intense as he tightens his grasp protectively. "Because if it is, it doesn't matter. I won't ever, ever, let anything—"
"No," Renarin interrupts, his voice barely more than a whisper. Damn him, he should have thought before speaking, should have phrased that better. "It's… it's not that."
Can he tell Adolin about it? About Tien? It feels like he's already betrayed Kaladin's trust by having the vision. He shouldn't go telling people about it, should he? It's not really his story to tell, even if it is his burden to know…
Instead, he lifts his head from Adolin's shoulder and turns still-teary eyes to his desk. He needs his notebook, needs to write it down before the memory fades (not that it will anytime soon—the ones about people he knows never fade quickly, but it also gives him something to do other than thinking about it).
"What is it?" Adolin asks. "What do you need?"
He sounds almost desperate to do something, anything, to help; Renarin wishes he had enough eloquence to express just how much his being here is already helping. Being held, comforted, told it's okay and you're safe… he thinks back to when he had the visions alone, before, and would end up terrified and trembling and sobbing into his hands until his head throbbed and his cheeks were sticky with tears, and suppresses a shudder. He much prefers the current situation.
Adolin is helping, more than he knows, just by being here, and if he could find the right words, Renarin would tell him that, tell him all these things that make his chest tighten because he wants to let them out but can't figure out how. You're amazing and I love you and Thank you don't seem to be nearly enough.
"My notebook," he says instead of any of that. "I… I need to record it…"
Adolin twists around and leans back and stretches out to grab the book from Renarin's desk, barely in reach from the bed where they sit. "Here," he says, pressing it into Renarin's hands and letting go of him, scooting back to give him room. Then he folds his hands in his lap and sits anxiously, quietly radiating enough worry that in other circumstances Renarin would have laughed and teased and called him a fretful mother hen.
But the circumstances are what they are, and Renarin's mind couldn't be further from teasing. He flips through the pages with fumbling fingers until he finds the first blank one, and then uses the pen he leaves in the front cover to start inscribing more slightly shaky glyphs.
Adolin is peering at them, too, but Renarin pretends not to notice him, for the moment. He just has to write.
Loss. Guilt. Unfairness. Youth. Grief.
He pauses, pen hovering uncertainly over the paper, then draws the glyph for Grief again.
There's no way just two "grief"s can convey what he just saw (would even two hundred?), but it's the best way he can think of to describe how awful it was. Besides, he's sure that no glyph can ever do justice to what he sees almost every time. Perhaps the women's script would, but he doesn't know it, so he can't say. All he knows is that the feelings are entirely too… too… too much to be captured in just a short description. This is what he hates about being a Truthwatcher. All… all this. It's like he's drowning, stuck in the center of a malevolent storm that keeps sucking him back in no matter what he does. It's overwhelming and it's… it's just so much.
He sneaks a quick glance at Adolin before he adds the few strokes and dots that say Brothers.
Adolin stares at the ink, still glistening wet on the page, for a few long heartbeats. Then he turns his gaze to Renarin, who is stricken by how distraught he looks.
"Renarin," he says in that soft voice that means he's upset but doesn't want to show it, "I… you're… nothing is going to happen—I mean, we won't… I won't—"
"It wasn't about us," Renarin breaks in, feeling a sharp stab of guilt all over again for making his brother worry unnecessarily, just because he didn't think before speaking. "It was … it was about someone else. He, um… he was watching. When his brother… died."
Adolin is silent for another long moment, thoughts whirling about behind his pale eyes. Then, abruptly, he moves, scooping the book up and laying it on the bed next to him before he reaches over and clasps Renarin to his chest fiercely.
"I don't know what I would do if something happened to you," he whispers. "Because I can't even bear to think about it."
"Oh," Renarin breathes, and then because words are hard and he doesn't trust himself with them, he just wraps his arms around Adolin and tries to let that say for him, I love you, don't worry, we will be fine, I love you.
Adolin seems to get the message, more or less, because a few moments later when he leans back, he's smiling. "You know," he says thoughtfully, "I don't think I told you earlier. But Renarin, I am so, so proud of you."
"What?" That was unexpected. What has he done recently, other than hallucinate and cry?
"Well," his brother rubs the back of his head in that endearing way of his, "you've… you've just been dealing with so much, and on your own, too! I don't think I could have done it. You're amazing, you know."
He almost laughs through the tears that haven't quite left his throat. Adolin—dear, sweet, wonderful Adolin, who is better than him in every respect—thinks he's amazing? The concept is almost absurd, except that he knows Adolin would never lie to him, not about something like this, and so instead of being deflected like rain on a mountainside, the words seep in deep to his core and kindle a small, flickering flame. The warmth tells him that it's only his own self-doubt that finds this absurd, and he knows it's true.
It's funny—he's always thought Adolin was the amazing one of the two of them, admired his brother and thought of him as his hero. And he's thought that for so long that it didn't even occur to him that Adolin could ever see him in that light, but… as odd as it is, it also feels very, very good. The warmth in his chest grows, fighting back against the tears and horror still just out of reach.
"Thanks," he says softly, smiling slightly despite himself.
Adolin's smile grows, just like sunshine that pushes back the roiling dark clouds of grief and confusion. "Anytime, little brother," he says fondly, ruffling Renarin's hair. "Anytime."
And though the sunlight doesn't disperse the clouds—they'll have to be dealt with, sometime, eventually, later—it strengthens him, buoys him up, supports him, until he thinks perhaps he can weather the storm after all.