Chapter 2. Ex nihilo nihil fit
The fog pervading the crisp pre-sunrise air did not feel particularly heavy as it soaked into his cape, but he felt very vividly every inch of moss that sagged under his feet, and the dew that ferns and rare underbrush left on his shoes made the rims of his trousers stick to the fine leather. Neither the fog nor the copse seemed too thick, but there was no visible end to the bleak scenery, spiced only with countless black-eyed birch trunks sandwiched between two layers of thin moss-green foliage that surrounded him from all sides. He was not searching for an exit, however: the object of his pursuit, something in him insisted, was wandering in the forest as well. Though the name escaped him, he knew with clarity what, or rather, whom he was looking for – the knowledge was almost instinctual.
Another glance around had his gaze snagging on the ends of a pale blond mane, and though it disappeared almost instantly among the scant flora, his feet carried him as confidently as if there was a well-walked path. He knew, though, that even if he ran, there would be no catching up to the blonde: by the time he rounded that tree, nothing would be there to see except for the never-changing fogginess of the grove.
Look here
He swivelled to the right, where the voice seemed to have come from. He knew the owner of that voice. He was searching for her, but why wouldn't she come out? Why couldn't he catch up? The questions ricocheted in his skull like rubber balls, yet as he set off in the newly registered direction, his thoughts scattered chaotically and stubbornly escaped his mental grasp.
Look at me, brother
He stopped, turned around and even managed to glimpse her back before she tore through a particularly thick copse of underbrush and vanished from sight once more. This queer game of hide-and-seek, markedly his inability to end it, was beginning to grow worrying; the newly added sunlight hitting the ground nearby only amplified the dim apprehension, and the lilt in her voice when she called to him again, like she was going to do something he'd love to see, like a child trying to impress her parents, when he'd turned to look at the hills spreading barely a dozen metres from him, where the border between forest and field lay, and where she stood, that gleeful tone did nothing to soothe the dread.
The sun was rising.
Watch me, Virgil.
Legs heavier than lead, feet mired in spongy, wet moss, he stood centimetres from the sunlit ground and watched his sister's body slowly, slowly devour itself, corroding until she screamed with pain, and screamed, screamed, screamed…
The ringing in Virgil's ears persisted in the airtight early morning silence that filled his bedroom, drowning out the timid ticking of the tabletop clock and drawing out shadowy spectres from the darker nooks; the lack of light was, in a way, comforting. He usually woke from nightmares in that manner: with precise, all-embracing awareness of a pillow under his head, both heart and breath rate retaining a semi-normal pace, and that particular dream had added many more cases to the statistics.
He was sick of seeing it.
From what he knew about psychology, there had to be a sort of stimulus, internal or otherwise, to fuel the imagery. He supposed the night after the assault incident, when he'd candidly admitted to himself his incompetence in certain matters, was the starting point, but as to where the rest of it came from, he had only a vague understanding. He was well aware of a gap in his generally amiable relationship with Vanessa – a gap of ten-odd years when he'd been tailing his father not unlike a lost puppy and barely had the time to speak two words with her, and a gap he was quietly hoping to mend, for it stood between what seemed like utterly different universes: their current lifestyle as the leader of the Underground Methuselah and his occasional aide, and the first eighteen years of their lives, spent at the small castle back in the county, when they had been all but joined at the hip. He was also aware of the golden film his mind kept casting over memories, but the desire to connect the two so vastly different parts of his life into one undivided concept was, one, simply inarguable, two, just as inarguably hinged on restoring at least a part of the ease that used to pervade their bond like fog before sunrise. That snowy night in March, the damper he kept on his persistent fondness for his sister had been lifted only by the force of highly unusual circumstances, but he had profound doubts that the affectionate gesture would have been accepted had she been in a relatively normal state of mind. The Vanessa from thirty years ago would have left no place for such doubts.
They'd both changed, perhaps too much; for all his wanting to 'mend the gap', he didn't even know where to start.
He could, however, start going back to sleep by washing the dry aftertaste from his mouth.
There were no windows in their quarters, positioned among the former lab rooms as they were, and the weak lights in the hall were always on – even for a Methuselah, by however little their night vision surpassed that of Terrans', seeing without a single light source would prove impossible. There was also always a carafe of water in the great room, and as he slowly emptied the glass, his mind obediently slinked away from fog-shrouded vigilant trees to the more material concerns. The investigation for the perpetrator behind that assault had only given them the fact of a single unauthorized use of the surface door a few hours before the supposed time of the attack, which meant that he had long since left the premises by that moment, but no name came up to go with the figures. The scarceness of population should have made absence of even one person at least somewhat salient, and yet according to the verbal account collected by their police, no one had been reported missing; the possibility of being deliberately misinformed could not be cast off, for all it could mean. There were also a few notorious for skipping work or class for weeks on end and then turning up none the wiser about social obligation, and they were, understandably, the first ones on the list of suspects, but there was no giving to the Londinium police the identities of possibly uninvolved people – that would be very unlikely to end well for them. The city officers had already tried to force their way in, on orders from one of the dukes – orders not sanctioned by Her Majesty, mind, - and he had had to reluctantly divulge some blurred details to the House of Lords to give the impression of progress. Vanessa, too, had been summoned to the meetings a couple of times, but the purposes of those summons ultimately remained unclear: one of the questions had concerned the likelihood of any deliberate damage done by her hand to the currently recuperating duke, and then a lengthy discussion had ensued on the topic of the credibility of her words. He could see that the condescension had cut deep, but could offer little except for a few words aimed to comfort, but dubiously succeeding. She was not fit for fending off vipers within their own nest.
Not until a pale blotch standing out against the dimly lit surroundings registered in the corner of his eye did he take notice of the object of his musings frozen in the doorway, sleep-tousled and disoriented to an extent and clad only in panties and a camisole; however many degrees of familial relations bound them, he couldn't categorize his sister's current attire as anything other than unacceptably shameless, seeing how he'd bothered to tie a dressing gown over his own nightclothes. Vanessa hadn't even let go of the pillow. At least she'd left the blanket be this time.
The second detail he spotted was the deeper-than-normal breaths she took and the slight stiffness of her posture, which left him puzzled and wondering if perhaps she did possess some degree of self-consciousness after all, but the idea was dismissed within moments on the grounds of not belonging to this world.
"Brother?"
She appeared to relax a fraction, and he surmised that the surprise he'd unwittingly set up for her was not completely unpleasant.
"What's wrong? It is unlike you to be wandering around during the day," he asked, and, when his only answer was a sideways semi-scowl and subsequent loss of eye contact, followed up with a justified educated guess. "Did you have a bad dream?"
She narrowed her eyes with scoff, in her lurking ingenuousness unable to attempt a lie after being caught, but at least not driving him away with a few choice words, as she would have treated anyone else. "Kinda," she begrudgingly conceded, and patted with her bare feet down to the sofa, eager to escape contact with the cold floors; his eyes roved up the sides of her unsettlingly skinny thighs for the whole of half a second before he tore his sight back towards the glass he was setting down, reminding himself to act like a gentleman and not stare. A nearby armchair proved as good a distraction, and he settled into it with the mannerisms of someone preparing to listen.
"Would you like to tell me about it?" he invited, nothing about his posture suggesting any doubt about the expected answer, and he wasn't quite sure where his sudden boldness had sprung from. If she honestly did not wish to share, he wouldn't press, but he felt that whatever she'd seen, it had been terrifying enough to warrant getting out of bed, which made discussion sound like the preferable option. Nightmares were usually a rare occasion for both of them – usually.
"It was just a dream. Stupid, too," she grumbled, drawing her knees up and crossing her arms over her stomach, and the faint tremor that shook her for a moment did not go unnoticed.
"I promise not to laugh."
She dithered for a few moments before fixing him with a defeated glare and flinging her pillow at his head; with no actual malice behind the attack, it was all too easy to intercept. After a few more seconds of fighting with the words, she finally spoke, calm and even distant, as if it wasn't minutes ago that she'd had all kind of disturbing experiences. "There's… that freaky bloke, with some creepy incantations. And then there's that… creature, thing, I don't know, it was slimy, it had tentacles, and one of them sort of burst my stomach right open, and it was all one big tear-" More and more revulsion seeped into her voice with every words, until she cringed, most likely trying to ignore the phantoms of sensations her mind was gladly providing. "It's all so bloody disgusting, messy, just…"
Silence reigned while she shooed away the disquieting memories and Virgil tried to wrap his head around the concept of waking up from a hole in one's midriff that had intestines dangling from it like sausage links. His own imagination never pulled those kinds of tricks on him while he slept, and that made his suspicions that he had somehow received a heavily edited version all the more solid.
"Was that surgery too much after all?" he sighed at last, more to himself than anything, growing faintly disconcerted that she'd had to go through that, but she'd heard him anyway and bristled almost immediately.
"Who are you taking me for?!" she growled, back to her usual demeanour at once. "I can handle a few yards of intestinal tract just fine! It's just kinda different when it's your own, you know?" she gibed, sarcasm laid on thick, and his swarming concerns reluctantly retreated. The feeling that something was missing from the story, however, did not.
"Is there something else I should know?" he enquired cautiously, fully aware of the degree to which his present curiosity was misplaced, but consideration took second place after the lingering worry that was feeding off some vague details of her expression – he couldn't pinpoint any of those even if he tried his best, and the overall impression was ringing a bell.
"Not really," came the reply, only a modicum too strained to sound convincing, but the simultaneous message of 'Don't pry' was just as clear, and he smiled to show that he would comply with her wishes. Then she livened up a little with a decidedly confusing "Your turn now," and at his raised eyebrows, aimed at him a mildly cross look she usually reserved for thick-headed children. "I told you my dream, now you tell me yours."
A few moments of startled wondering gave way to soft amusement, and the following "How did you know I had a bad dream as well?" brought some genuine befuddlement to her face. Something inside him hoped that she'd come to that conclusion due to still being capable of knowing what was going through his head with very little to go on, but he realised that simple association was much more likely to be the cause, and that made her confusion all the more endearing in his eyes; he caught the urge to plant a kiss on her forehead in time and reeled it back in. In all seriousness, though, this kind of affection was something completely new.
"Lost my way in a forest," he provided without further prompting, still smiling faintly at the contrast between both the dreams themselves and their respective accounts. She didn't need to know the more gory details of his dream, not when the stormy atmosphere appeared to have lifted; her look turned incredulous.
"Seriously? That's it? Jeez, brother, you can be so pathetic at times," she grimaced in good-natured exasperation, and his recent decision made all the more sense. The good mood was worth too much to be ruined right now, and it just might ward off any other phantasms that could decide to continue disturbing her sleep. He started rising to his feet, intending to conclude this on a happy note, when her voice, still bright with curiosity, but somehow also startlingly solemn and subdued, stopped him dead in his tracks. "Virgil... Tell me about father."
For a few seconds, he froze, and then carefully sat back down.
He couldn't have anticipated that. The man had died decades ago, and why she would ask now of all times escaped him. There had always been ground for curiosity – after all, the man had hardly paid his daughter any attention before her abrupt change from skirts to trousers, and even then the distance between the two had remained too great for anything warmer than an occasional reserved 'Good morning'. The one who'd spent most of the time with him was Virgil, hauled along to witness the various complicated proceedings of the Underground, learn, and be properly broken into court conduct, and it made a somewhat sad sort of sense that he would be the obvious choice for extraction of information. Still, he had to wonder if he was the best choice. He might have been shadowing his father for five-odd years, but he'd hardly ever felt like he knew what was going through the man's head. His father, plenty of time as Virgil had spent by his side, had left after himself only a very indistinct image, little to none parental warmth and a small wagon of responsibilities.
He watched her shift slightly in her seat, her eyes maintaining that semi-inquisitive, semi-expectant note, and couldn't for the life of him figure out where his reluctance to narrate stemmed from.
"He was... a very restrained man. A remarkable example of perpetual politeness, but without an ounce of warmth to it, be it his closest subordinate or a higher nobleman. I was no exception, though I suppose he did adopt a somewhat colder attitude toward you; but still, as far as I remember, he'd only ever smiled at me once." And not from any particular parental love, either: he'd spoken of the utopia he'd called 'future', of how the two-way discrimination between Methuselah and Terrans would have to give someday, and when Virgil had affirmed that yes, he understood, only then did his father's lips stretch into that amiable, but still hopelessly generic, expressionless 'smile'. "He was idealistic to a fault, too, very zealous about the possibility of coexisting with Terrans," the very idea that had driven him to re-evaluate his admiration of the man that used to run the ghetto with such efficiency, the idea that, in the face of his still so fresh back then childhood experiences - the ventures into the small town by the castle had not gone smoothly even once, - sounded to him ludicrous at best. Vanessa snorted; her memory served her just as well. "He'd nursed plans, solid projects even concerning our gradual integration into the surface population. As far as I know, though, the queen never quite approved, and what small-scale experiments had been conducted all ended rather disastrously.
"Now that I think about it, the late queen, Bridget, was the only one who'd had the pleasure of being acquainted with his warmer demeanour. The few times I'd accompanied him to her office, I caught him smiling at her quite often, and it seems that they used to be on friendly terms, though I am not aware of the extent. He looked at her with that expression..." he slowed down a bit in apprehension of his listener's reaction, but now that he'd begun talking, there was little that could prevent him from getting this off his chest - their father, or rather, failure thereof, had always been a topic evaded and ignored, but there was no use in denying the man's contribution to the way things have become, - "the way Grace would look at us when she thought we wouldn't notice." He'd felt so out of place when he'd realised where his father's parental feelings were channelled, he'd almost hated the woman; fortunately, though, he hadn't considered his father's affections worth hating for, else his respect for the Queen might have suffered a serious blow. For family, the twins had always had each other first and foremost, and their wet-nurse and nanny was a gladly accepted mother figure; perhaps, the continued absence of a father during their pre-Awakening years had been the force behind his relatively painless acceptance of the fact that his father would only grow as close to him as a teacher, at best. He remembered Vanessa being much more excited about meeting the man, though, and wondered idly if the disappointment had born a heavier impact on her – she'd still been such a child, living up to her title of a little sister quite spectacularly for all her being only a few hours younger.
"They say father didn't use to be quite as reserved, that he'd been rather more congenial before our mother's death." The mother that had lost her life in giving them theirs, the mother whose portrait they'd found in the great room on first coming to the Underground, and whose miniature, encased in an intricately decorated locket, had come into Virgil's possession through none other than Her Majesty Bridget, who'd received it from the former Count of Manchester himself shortly before his death. Now it was stored away in Virgil's desk, collecting dust, as he couldn't bring himself to hold much longing for a woman he'd only ever known from pictures – he hadn't even thought to ask the other Underground dwellers what she'd been like. His definition of family just didn't stretch to someone completely missing from his childhood, and neither did Vanessa's, as far as he would guess.
"I wouldn't give them the benefit of the doubt," Vanessa muttered somewhat glumly in the brief silence that his musings had unwittingly created, and he doubted softly if the aftertaste of this particular tale would allow them to sleep in peace.
"Whatever has brought this question on?" he asked in genuine curiosity, but she only shrugged, a bit tense and covertly evading his eyes; he noticed nonetheless.
"I've just been wondering if..." she squirmed and scowled in some inner conflict, but at last spat, "if he'd always been such an ass" in a normal aggravated voice.
She wasn't fooling his time-honed ability to detect when she wasn't saying what she was thinking, but if she couldn't trust him with it, then that was that. It was far from a pleasant feeling, but that was that. That was the gap.
ꕂꕻ ꕂ ꔹꕮꔺꕥꔺꕮꔹ ꕂꕻꕂ
When giving voice to her curiosity more than half a day earlier, Vanessa had been hoping for some proof that that man had been an actual living being and not a bizarre cross between man and machine like that thing that was rumoured to be employed by the Vatican. Had the late Lord Walsh possessed at least a sliver of emotion under that stony hide of his, she could have come to terms with the cold the shoulder he'd been giving her for the whole duration of his presence in her life, but Virgil's vague 'They say' was hardly good enough. Still, 'hate' was too strong a word: she just didn't care enough for that. After all, it hadn't been so much her father as the whole goddamn gender-based condescension that had forced her into trousers and jackets. Besides, she did find her current attire convenient for many other purposes.
Such as traversing the ever soggy Londinium with its East End dirt in pursuit of a rendezvous with a very possible murderer who'd thrown the chronic tug-of-war between the House of Lords and the ghetto into a different gear altogether. No, scratch that – he'd basically pleaded guilty in that note. A confirmed murderer- assailant. Right.
Thinking about how the guy who used to be part of the strike force in her former 'gang' – the one that had been planning to hold the pope hostage, that one – couldn't even off one Terran felt self-deprecating, but less so than the fact that he was offing them at all: she'd thoroughly explained to all members that the whole 'violent phase' shebang was over, but it looked like her authority hadn't been enough to hold back the more vengeful ones. Her newly-found appreciation of peace – that disaster of an operation had driven the point home – was not easily shared, and she wasn't even going to try this time. She would, however, be more than happy to know what the actual fuck the bloke had been thinking, as he'd promised to explain himself, and if possible, guilt him into surrendering himself, and then the bloody dukes would be off their backs and Virgil would be cut some slack and she wouldn't have to trudge into those damned meetings on damned mornings every damned week. It was a little more bearable if it was evening – she could stick around for a few minutes and appreciate the opportunity to stargaze in the gardens, - but those times only happened once in a blue moon.
By the time she reached her destination, the ruins at the Kensington Royal Park, the stars had already dimmed to near-invisibility – such a difference from the spectacular display she couldn't help admiring; interesting how it took her half a decade of looking up at the expressionless Underground ceiling to fully realise just what their holed-up populace was missing out on. Common dwellers weren't allowed outside without a heavy reason, better a few, and a bunch of paperwork, by the regulations set by the surface and for the danger of being caught in the sun. The Walsh siblings, understandably, had unlimited permits, as well as the codes, and were counted on to be responsible enough not to overstay their welcome. By the sunrise schedule and her watch, as she spent too little time outside to differentiate sky hues well, Vanessa surmised she had at least a couple of hours – plenty of time to have a not-so-civilised conversation and get home safely. Now if only that duffer would show up.
The Kensington Park, contrary to its name, was little more than a transitory strip between the Buckingham palace gardens and the vast acres of royal forests where the monarchs could indulge in hunting. The grass was regularly trimmed and the underbrush mostly cleared out in favour of some decorative shrubs and flowers, leaving the trees pretty scarce, but that was the extent of it; the paths, though wide and properly coated with gravel, winded in mind-boggling turns that dutifully followed the terrain, and the landscape was dotted with irregularities like waterfalls, gazebos and so on. The 'ruins' were just a bit more authentic: a forgotten pavilion abandoned in the times when money had been tight, now little more than a few faded stone-teeth and a pile of boulders strategically surrounded by rose bushes to blend the picturesque disrepair better with the greenery. Fifteen minutes over the designated meeting time and half an hour after her arrival, Vanessa flopped down on one of the boulders and wrestled with an itching need to break something if her former underling didn't show his bloody mug within the next five minutes. Maybe less. She wasn't used to such tardiness! It was almost an insult. This wasn't some night out in town, damn it!
Of course, he could have just decided on skipping their little get-together. Maybe, he'd done so even before sending that note – which had come no earlier than the previous morning. As far as logic went, it could well be some sort of elaborate trap.
Had she been dealing with a Terran or a complete stranger, she would have entertained the idea.
With the beginnings of boredom joining the festering ire, she absently fingered the roses brushing against her seat, the tender buds barely showing the very tips of pink-tinges white petals. Virgil used to put rose blossoms in her hair, one after another, poking at her head and twisting the stems until the result was 'aesthetically gratifying' and her head felt heavy with half a dozen flowers and the potent smell, and she'd always puzzled over how that young and pretty short-fused Virgil could procure such patience in removing every thorn. Still, he'd been patient with her even before it had been pounded into him as a general rule of conduct.
Vanessa wondered fleetingly if the protectiveness he used to show had gone under the hammer of propriety as well, or if there were simply no fitting circumstances for it to show anymore.
Not that she needed protection, mind.
That was one of the reasons why she'd kept both the incident that had become her nightmare fuel and the note's existence from her brother, who was, by all means, entitled to the latter piece of information. She was fully capable of dealing with one man who wasn't a treacherous Terran ready to put a silver dagger in her back. More than that, though, she didn't want to jostle Virgil for something that could well turn out to be a fluke; last day's conversation made it clear to her that he was no better off than her for his association with their father, and that made all the difference. There was every chance the supposed persecutor just wouldn't turn up for one reason or another, and then she would have worked up not only her already troubled brother, but also probably the better part of those involved in the case, for nothing, and looking incompetent just didn't pay in her position.
For some part, though, she just felt it wasn't his business, despite the obvious logic, and felt guilty for feeling like that.
She really, really wanted this whole mess over, however scared of the possible outcome Virgil might be.
Nobody was coming, rose buds swayed with the breeze, tickling her fingers and letting loose tiny droplets of dew, and though Vanessa was pissed off just enough to turn her stupid irresponsible former underling in and be done with it, his reasons and the police's methods of extracting them be damned, she was still drawn into the hypnotizing melody of disturbed foliage. Here, away from Londinium's grime and East End's overpopulation, from the Underground ventilation systems and enclosed space, the air was intoxicatingly fresh, infused with that thin cocktail of scents she could never pick apart, just as how she couldn't analyse and formulate the roots of her indignation with the very existence of an underground ghetto that she could barely call home; there was only a distinct sense of wrongness about living even lower than sewage rats, in many sorts of meanings, and the many-layered wall between her people and this was only a part of it. They might not walk under the same sky as Terrans, but they had as good a birthright to it as any other living creature. Not to mention dusk and dawn were still fine for them-
Wait. Dawn?
Specks of molten gold, fragile and treacherously beautiful, trembled upon the dewdrops by her hand.
"Oh shit-"
ꕂꕻ ꕂ ꔹꕮꔺꕥꔺꕮꔹ ꕂꕻꕂ
How had it come to this?
No, that was not quite correct. That question he could still answer.
Why did it have to come to this?
If somebody could answer that, Virgil seethed, he would be much grateful.
It had been a nice, easy day with nothing to remind him of the guillotine blade hovering over his people's neck and the worst piece of news being someone messing up the sunrise forecast records, up until he was paid a visit by some of the former members of Vanessa's terrorist group and guiltily notified of the noose they'd helped tie, mostly unwittingly, around their ex-leader's neck. He'd had enough mind left to himself not to rush out of the room like a fool, instead gaining a worthy amount of intelligence from his informants: the absolute, driven dedication of The Assailant to removing every obstacle between his brethren and 'normal life', along with his identity and his questionable original intentions of convincing the younger Walsh to take his side. Involved were only a few of the former terrorists, but their testimony had been enough to assure the police that their 'friend' had never been outside. That wasn't the interesting part, though: apparently, they hadn't been the ones to botch the sunrise forecast, them knowing about it was the very thing that had pushed them into revealing their cards.
Which was how, after making sure that yes, Vanessa had left the ghetto that morning, and no, she hadn't raided the UV gel stash he kept at home, he found himself coming up with a new synonym for 'fool' with every breath he took. It had been foolish of her to create that terrorist cell. It had been even more foolish to meet who was essentially a renegade on her own and without warning a single soul. It was rather foolish, though he was loathe to admit, that he was in a state about her safety so, but logic had begun to fail him as of late when her wellbeing was being threatened, and after trying to reason with himself that she could well find cover in a park did nothing to alleviate the strangely familiar pull in his chest, he forewent rationalisation and focused on recalling the shortcuts he could take. Not only was he anxious to confirm Vanessa's safety with his own eyes, there were also the eyes of the waking Londinium trained on him whenever he turned to a wider street, which wouldn't let him resort to Haste as he would like to. His steps faltered regularly anyway, propriety rearing its head every once in a while, because his responsibilities said that his priorities at the moment were too skewed for a leader, that he should be doing something, even though he didn't yet have a clear idea of what exactly, about the freshly uncovered conspiracy, but even as he thought that, it was reinstated that he could do little right now. He wouldn't give the renegade the satisfaction of aborting the investigation, as was doubtlessly the true purpose of this set-up, but the ghetto was in no immediate danger, and any threat coming from the Albion nobles would not be alleviated if the guards found an unescorted Methuselah on the grounds and not in the process of leaving.
Vindication found, Virgil allowed some of his annoyance to take over, the emotion made worse when he figured it would be best to keep a low profile and surreptitiously vault over the fence instead of confronting the sentries and explaining the sheer ridiculousness of their situation. The blackness of her clothing stood out even in the deep shade of a large maple with low-swiping branches, and once she caught sight of him, he reigned in his pace to a moderate tense walk, ignoring the discomfort of walking through the occasional sunlit patch. She rose to her feet, face surprised, stunned even. Virgil tried to keep his own face straight – although there was no one but Vanessa around, it was like second nature, - but she seemed wary anyway.
"Brother-"
"What," he growled through the stone in his throat, "were you thinking?"
She looked at him blankly, as if not quite catching on. Was it that unusual of him to worry? Was she even seeing it instead of taking his words at face value as usual?
"I-"
"How did it even occur to you to jump in unprepared like that? Did you ignore even the possibility of a trap?" The temptation to call her a trusting idiot to her face was overwhelming. "There was no need for you to go at all, much less on your own."
He could imagine her hackles rising as the familiar scowl took place on her face, and for some curious reason, it diminished his own temper to a lukewarm ember, as if one of them growing angry was already plenty of aggression; with the agitation out of the way, relief slipped in through the cracks, and suddenly every imaginary thing that had riled him up seemed rather insignificant.
"Did you expect me to sit on my hands when I could do something to fix this mess?! I can't just stay still and wait for it all to pull us under!"
They had indeed both changed. It had hardly crossed his mind that where he had become a leader, detached and calculating and driving away personal affections automatically, as he'd been taught, she had somehow become strong, had drawn mettle from her ire and pounded it into shape, and where a half of her thorns had grown on their own, the other half was artificial, serving as a defence and a supporting frame all at once; it kept everyone from reaching her, and his leadership kept everyone from reaching him, and the gap, framed with thorns on both sides, was right there, with neither of them knowing how to go about closing it. The new layers the ghetto had cast over them were too much to overcome, and those layers were too essential for them to survive without now.
The epiphany hit him like a freight train. His sister had always preferred action to idleness and acceptance, always burning on the inside with the intensity of a forest fire, always feeling too strongly about all the wrongs of the world regardless of what she decided to do about that; it was her nature as much as his, only unharnessed and constantly out in the open. It was inevitable that she would take action at the prompting of a flimsy seedy note. It was inevitable that she would gather the Underground's most passionate souls in an organisation to fight for what they felt was righting the wrongs. It was inevitable that at least one of those souls wouldn't take too well to disbandment. It was inevitable that they would eventually take action, passionate as they had to be.
The noose had been thrown around their necks long before Virgil had taken over his father's duties, and it only tightened with every jostle they made. Somebody only had to kick the chair from beneath their feet.
It was almost a shame one couldn't strange a Methuselah. But they would be hanged anyway.
"Do you have any idea how worried I was?"
She huffed, somewhat calmer now than moment ago, and gave him a strange, almost sullen look that all but said 'Are you serious?' He wordlessly handed her the vial with UV gel and, after casting a fleeting look over the amount of skin her clothes revealed, unfastened his cloak in order to fix it over her shoulders; her eyes softened at last, retaining only a few thorns that he was used to.
"I'm not saying sorry," she spoke quietly, but clearly, traces of sulking permeating her tone, but he knew she was, the same way she knew he had been worried after all.