disclaimer: disclaimed
dedication: to tea and honey.
notes: knocked up (death to the throne remix) — lykke li.
title: all a coward can provide
summary: Brun and Hillared, on siblinghood. — Brun the Bard, Hillared Gastyr.
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The letter is everything Brun could have wanted. Signed, sealed, written in the late Lord Gastyr's own hand—there'd be no denying his lineage, if he were the sort of give a sod about that.
But he isn't, and that's the problem.
"What are you doing?"
Rooting around in you dead father's things, what does it look like? But that's not something that ought to be said aloud; Lady Hillared Gastyr is quite terrifying with that sword of hers, after all, and the woman without a fate rather likes her head where it is, thanks. She holds the letter careful between her fingertips. It's very old, ready to flake away with time.
"Hillared," the mercenary says, quiet and slow, "I think there's something you need to see."
—
"Why did you tell her?! You weren't supposed to tell her!"
The mercenary flips him a cocky grin, and leaves Brun to his ignoble death at his half-sister's hands.
It's very quiet between them. Klurikon sings around them: ocean waves, birds, the low moaning gloop of swamp-mud sounds loud in both of their ears. The heat is thick and wet through the trees. Brun winces, searching for words that he doesn't have.
"You never told me," Hillared says, finally, when he says nothing at all. Her arms are clenched into fists and her face is fierce, and Brun is reminded of how she'd been at ten years old, already crusading for justice, even as the war itself had barely begun.
"You wouldn't have believed me," Brun says.
"I know what my father was, you arse," Hillared retorts. "Everyone did! I would have believed you."
"You shouldn't have to," Brun inhales sharply. He looks into her face. Her angles are all so sharp. "Hills, I didn't want—"
"Oh, sod what you want! My whole—our whole family is dead! You'd take away the only brother I've got left, too? Even now?! When we've finally got a chance?! Don't be a prick, Brun!"
"I don't know how," Brun snaps, stung. It feels like ripping himself open, bleeding out the poison.
(An unhealed wound left to fester.)
The silence stretches long and gaping, horrible more and more as it grows.
Hillared looks at him for a very long time.
"Well," she says, at last. It should feel like a shackle. It sets something very loose in Brun's chest, instead. "I suppose I'll just have to teach you how to, then, won't I?"