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The Other One
XI.
"The snow has finally stopped."
"Oh, was it snowing? I hadn't noticed."
Carver looks at her, frowning. Funny. She's trying to be funny, but the attempt falls pitifully short. Perhaps she's forgotten who she's dealing with. Perhaps she's mistaken him for someone else, someone who appreciates such dry humour, someone who has the patience for it, someone who has even a breath of laughter left in his body. He is none of those things. He's never been able to stomach her sarcasm and sass, always so ill-timed and misplaced.
He remembers his first sight of her in so many long years, barging into her room unannounced to find the high windows wide open, and her curled up on the bed amidst a flurry of snow. Yesterday, he reminds himself, though it seems much longer than that. He looks around the library. This house has done something to him, he's certain. Time has all but ceased here. Surrounded by snow. Suffocated. The world has come to a grinding halt, and they are trapped in the standstill. Trapped together. He cannot think of a worse fate; he cannot think of anyone else he would rather share eternity with. They are hopelessly tangled in each other, ever fighting the ties that bind them, and in their struggle they have only grown closer. How cruel, the Maker's sense of humour. It's much sharper than his sister's.
"Will you leave tomorrow, now that the storm has passed?"
Carver glances over his shoulder. She's sitting in the wing-back chair he'd dragged close to the fire for her, a monstrously heavy thing, upholstered in the same deep crimson he's found in the rest of the house. Red like the blood of their ancestors, the Amell blood coursing through both their veins. Strange, he thinks, that it is only the Hawke blood in them that has ever shown true. Strange, but fortunate – for both their sakes.
"No, I'll stay on a while longer," he assures her. The smile she gives him warms him more deeply than the fire before him. He knows he should feel regret and shame, but he cannot summon the will to. Would that he could tell her how she affects him so; would that he could allow it of himself to give in to it, everything else be damned. He's still fighting it then; little does he know how short-lived his battle will be.
"I missed having you with me, brother," she sighs, her smile fading into shadow. "There is no one else I trust more to guard my back."
"What of Fenris? You always seemed to trust him well enough."
Her eyes cut toward him, and she spends a moment searching his face. "I do trust him," she admits, "but he doesn't – he's not – he's not you." Her every word is nonchalant, but her cheeks flush deeply, and she is betrayed. He has to look away, so unwilling is he to see her like that, defeated and disgraced. His fist clenches and he leans a little heavier on the mantel. He does not know what has happened in his absence, but his imagination is all too cruel in its relentless quest to fill the empty spaces.
"You know I can't stay," he says, but he speaks to the blazing fire, thinking perhaps he will see his words catch fire, curl and burn like paper, only to crumble to ash and disappear into the updraught. Carried away on the wind, she might never have heard them. But she does. He hears the chair creak as she stands, the padding of her bare feet as she crosses the stone floor. He expects her arms to go about him, but they don't – instead, she presses her palms flat against his back, just below his shoulder blades, and buries her face in the notches of his spine. He can feel the warmth of her breath through the fabric of his shirt, and the way it gently, intimately dampens the skin beneath makes him shiver.
She says something then, whispered words that are lost to the crackling of the fire, but she has not given the words over to the flames as he had. She's given them to him, to the very flesh of him, as if she would brand him so he could never escape her. Foolish, really. Doesn't she know that he has always been marked as hers, that he has always belonged to her?
"Marian," he begins, but –
"You could stay, Carver," she says, her voice so small. A great shuddering breath goes through her, and he feels her tremble against him. Her hands close to fists, pulling at his clothes.
He stiffens. He cannot for a moment fathom the nerve of her, she who had turned him over to this cruel fate in her relentless pursuit to save everyone, his own desires left to the wayside. His bleeding heart of a sister, who could not bear to have his blood on her hands, and so she gave him up to taint and duty and sacrifice instead.
"You cannot ask me that," he says roughly. The arm braced against the mantel supports all his weight now, and hers as well, bearing them up with a dignity they have somehow lost, a grace they have never possessed.
"I must ask. I don't want to be alone."
"You're not alone. Aveline and the others, they're more a family to you than–"
"That does not change matters. With Mother gone... Carver, I would have you here so I would not lose what little remains to me of home. Yes, my friends are my family, but they are not home to me. I am so afraid." Her voice breaks, and her grip on his shirt tightens, her nails scraping against his skin.
"You, afraid?" he scoffs. "You aren't afraid of anything."
"I'm afraid of never seeing you again. I'm afraid of losing you."
"Mari–"
"Stay with me."
Carver grits his teeth so hard they ache, and he draws an unsteady breath with great difficulty. He closes his eyes as he slowly breathes another, and another, each bringing strength, each bringing clarity. He has never paid such attention to so small a thing, but in that moment, it becomes all he knows. And when at last he is calm, and his head is clear, he opens his eyes to flame and stone, and utters the words that will break her heart.
"No, sister. I cannot stay, not even for you."
She shakes her head then, her forehead still pressed to his back. "Cannot, or will not?"
"Whichever pleases you," he says. Her boundless obstinacy aggravates him to no end. He turns then, pushing himself away from the mantel, ready now to stand on his own two feet. She lets him go only because she must, but she does not step away from him, so that he is practically on top of her, towering over her as he always has.
"Do you think so little of me, that I would abandon my vows on a whim? Because you begged it of me?"
"Carver–"
"I am not your abomination, content to cower and hide, ignoring what is in my very blood in order to pursue my own vanity," he says, spitting out words that have long been inside him, words she never cared to hear. "I have finally found my purpose in this life, sister, and it is not to rot in this mansion, holding your hand with the curtains drawn, while you wallow and waste away. It's time to get over yourself so the world can start turning again. Maker only knows why it always stops for you."
She slaps him.
For a moment, everything stills, and in the next, everything happens at once. Her eyes go wide as his jaw tightens. Perhaps it was harder than she meant to, because her hands cover her mouth as she gasps. His cheek stings, a familiar, forgotten pain. It's not the first time she's struck him for being insensitive, and he's sure it won't be the last. He counts then, breathing deeply, and when he gets to five, and he's almost certain that he's done being a bastard for the time being, he leans over to place a kiss on her temple, and he leaves her there in the library, staring dumbstruck into the fire.
When he comes back down the stairs, cloak in hand, she's gone, and he's glad of it. He does not think he could bear to face her again, eyes filled with a new kind of shame, her teeth digging into her lip to stop the apologies that would flow if she gave them half the chance. She's never been one to say she's sorry, even when her mistakes are so grave and so vast that the very foundations of the world are shaken and torn asunder.
But as he stands in the great hall and fastens his cloak, he catches a glimpse of her on the gallery above. She seems so small, her arms folded about herself, the forlorn comfort he refused to give. She watches him as he storms out of the house into the dark and the snow, and he does not wait to hear if she calls him back.
