Bran Davies has always known Will Stanton was slightly strange--there was just something off about him that made a person a bit on edge.
Although Bran might not have been the person to judge, really--most everyone seemed to like Stanton quite a lot, and not much of anyone liked Bran, except for Cassie.
Cassandra Channing was beautiful, green eyed and completely mad about Bran, or so she assured him. They'd met up in high school and were instantly drawn to one another through their common hatred of the rest of their classmates, and, though most of the time she didnt really understand Bran or his moodiness, he thought maybe he loved her.
He took her up to visit Rhys, once, when they were sixteen---and of course they'd met with the Stantons again.
Bran remembers Will as a stocky, ordinary looking boy--dull brown hair that flopped inelegantly into his face, a pleasant smile--except when you had a look at his eyes.
Bran thought that maybe Will Stanton had stranger eyes than he did, and that was saying something.
Cassie agreed with him. "Just bother you a bit," she'd said, leaning on her elbows. "Its like maybe he's looking right through me or something. But you...Well. I just dont like the way he looks at you at all, Bran m'lad."
Bran doesnt remember Will looking at him any differently; just that looking into those eyes made him as uncomfortable as he'd ever felt in his life. Not that Will had ever done anything odd; it was just the feeling the eyes gave off.
Which is why, two years later and in college himself, Bran has no trouble at all recognizing the plain English face on the other side of the cash register.
"You're Will Stanton!" he cries out, pleased that the name is as fresh as the face (no, the eyes) because he sometimes has trouble remembering things like names.
For an instant Will Stanton looks completely shocked, face so white Bran wonders if maybe his skull is peeking through, and then he relaxes into a comfortable grin.
"Hello yourself, Bran Davies," he says in a quiet tone; the kind of voice Bran thinks would be nice to have in your kitchen on a lazy Sunday with a cup of tea.
Bran lets his purchase slap onto the counter (his sixth copy of the Hobbit--he keeps accidentally leaving them out in the rain, or on the seats of public buses, or Cassie spills coffee on them, like the last one. He never gets tired of buying them, though.)
"How've you been?" Bran asks, half of him wondering how to end the conversation politely so he can get back to home and bed and Cassie with the black hair who still says she loves him (although he's caught her in the tanned arms of Mark Berenson twice.) The other half of him is strangely intent; something almost like desperate to know the true answer.
Bran doesnt really know why.
"All right," Will says non-commitally, and Bran feels a sudden surge of disappointment at the not answer.
"No, really," he says, leaning over the edge of the counter so Will is trapped in his cashier's booth, "how are you, Will Stanton?"
Will hesitates for a moment, then answers simply, "Old. And tired." Bran catches his breath for a second, and then Will leans back and away from him, reaching for the Alan-Lee illustrated version Bran picked out this time thats still lying on the counter.
"Hey, why are you in such a hurry? Dont scare you anymore, do I, sais-bach?" he asks over the rim of his still black glasses, the teasing rolling off his lips with a familiarity that almost scares him.
"Dont be silly," Will says briskly, ringing the book through. "I mean, Id love to catch up a bit, Bran, really I would, but I am on the job right now, and if my boss caught me chatting instead of working..."
Bran wants to point out that they're the only two people inside this tiny little bookstore and that even if Will's boss was in the back room he couldnt see them because the door's closed, but then he wonders why he's trying to prolongue the conversation at all.
"Yeah, yeah all right," Bran says reluctantly as he counts out the dollar bills to hand to Will, noticing maybe for the first time the odd tattoo that's burned into the palm of Will's right hand--almost like scarrification.
Something inexplicable makes him add "So how about we get together for lunch sometime? Im up visiting for a couple of days, can surely fit in some time to see a friendly face, right?'
Will hesitates again, not doing anything so normal as to worry at his lower lip, but his mouth presses together as if he wants to.
"I suppose that would be all right," he says cautiously, as if he suspects such a thing would not be allowed under normal circumstances.
Bran writes Stanton's number down on the back of a receipt in his wallet, and gives Will his, too, just to make sure they're on the same page.
When he reaches to take the book from Will (he hates bags, why waste the plastic when he needs to feel the heavy weight of the paper and glue and ink in his hands before he can ever truly own it?) his fingers brush against the others with a sharp jolt of electricity.
Will snatches his hand back and Bran unthinkingly sticks his index finger in his mouth to soothe the burning feeling.
The eyes still scare him; scare him so that Bran has tried very hard so far not to meet them.
They scare him right now--simple and brown like a film on the surface while the actual iris is split like a broken mirror into shards of too many emotions to count--anger, sorrow, jealousy, longing, content, despair, affection, nostalgia, nervousness, hatred, fear.
They're filled up with too much for Bran to handle; their jagged edges might cut him if he got too close--probe some old, secret wound inside of him that Bran instincitvely knows would bleed to the point of death.
None of this explains why Bran leans over the counter, catches Will's face in his hands and kisses him.
The Hobbit falls to the floor, and Bran reflects absently that it should be different, kissing a man--and it is--just not the way he expected it to be.
He wasn't expecting to feel a sudden surge of urgency deep in his belly so that he crushes the other man to him with fearful intensity--not just with arousal, although that is certainly present, but with a sharp terror that Will might be snatched away from him.
"I didnt know," he whispers brokenly into the kiss, "Oh god, Will, I wasnt--wasnt expecting--," and the hands that grip his hair fiercely, the arms that are suddenly tangled with his are enough to stop his mouth; the passionate kiss that follows is hardly neccesary.
Tears are streaming out of his eyes now, and he realizes slowly that they are both shaking.
Will's hand slips down from Bran's hair to rest over his heart, and Bran screams as something in his chest breaks open; something sealed in iron and turned to stone suddenly so painful and cold against his ribcage it feels like burning and then melting oh so agonizingly slowly before it becomes a flood, a flood that attacks his mind and his heart and his soul and sets him to whimpering inside Will's mouth.
Bran clings to him as images, faces, people, dreams all come rushing to his mind at once in a rainfall of shards like Will's eyes--Merriman, Old One, his dog could see the wind, a stone that wasn't a stone he gave to a girl he could never have loved, the face of a man dressed in blue that he desperately wanted to love; a sword shining brighter than Cavall's eyes and a white white skeleton and so many mirrors and glass and a rose colored ring on an old woman's finger.
"Im sorry," Will is whispering against his forehead, one hand stroking the too-white strands of Bran's hair, the other securely about his waist; grounding him.
"Will," Bran manages, gasping for breath, his hands tightening convulsively around the Old One's shoulders. "Will, jesus, Will, I've gone mad," he shudders.
"I know," comes the quiet reply.
"Will--" he really would fall if not for that hand, he thinks--amazing.
"Bran," the other whispers, his mouth wrapping around the long vowel the way it was just wrapped around Bran's tongue, and Bran needs to tell him, tell him before his tongue and mind and heart are sealed again.
"I love you." They sound awkward, even untrue, hanging in the air between them and he feels the blood running to his not-so-snowy face from the way he was crying a minute ago and thinks distantly that maybe he looks almost human in this moment, and that maybe that makes it hurt even more, because he means it, oh dear god how he means it.
"You can't," Will says softly, kissing the tears from his face. "I'm not a part of your story anymore, Bran Davies."
Will's voice, rather than rising into anger or bitterness, subsides even further into gentleness. "You're to marry a beautiful laughing girl and love her," and the lid of one eye is kissed shut, "and have beautiful children with crow-black hair and tawny eyes," and a kiss is pressed to the other, "and you're to love them all."
He kisses Bran's mouth again, very very gently. "You're supposed to be happy, Bran Davies, and not dream about a future that was never meant to happen."
"No," Bran whispers angrily, his fingers digging into the other's sides so hard that they will probably bruise. "Dont you get it, you bloody stupid dewin?"
Will immediately shuts his eyes, as if hearing that tone from Bran's mouth again gives him actual physical pain.
Bran presses his momentary advantage, willing his voice not to break. "I love you, d' you understand? I loved you before I really even knew what that meant---when I was eleven and the nearest to love I'd gotten was kindness and Blanche Rowlands' arms. I loved you when I didn't even know who you were."
His tone grows mocking, the way it always did when Will said something foolishly Old and noble; nevermind the trembling that won't leave his limbs. "You think it hurt you, Old One, to remember me? You can't know half the pain of forgetting you. Of knowing all these years that there's something wrong with my life, that maybe my heart was made from stone to begin with and Im just incapable of loving, and why the hell do I feel guilty when I kiss the girl Im supposed to live my life with?"
A tear does slip out of Will's still-shut eyes, and within it all the fractures seem to have melted together into one liquid drop of feeling.
"We can't," he whispers helplessly into Bran's shoulder. "I--I am sorry, my--so sorry--but what's done is...is done..."
"Says who?!" Bran cries, very nearly wails, gripping Will's face in his hands like he wants to rip it off.
"You...made a choice." Will's voice is unaccountably weary; an Old One's voice indeed despite his youth. "You chose this, Bran, you chose this world. You...you cannot have both."
And suddenly Bran can see the might-have-beens, the might-have-beens that maybe everyone but himself were looking at underneath a silver tree, nine years ago.
He can see himself stepping onto the ship with Merriman, see himself standing at the prow of the ship, eyes locked firmly with Will's until they slide out of existence. He sees himself growing older but never really growing old in a land where he never had to see his father die, where a dog with silver eyes ran always at his side but was not his only friend, where he was loved and loved in return, but never a lover because everyone knew he was waiting for the Watcher to come back...
He sees the day, maybe hundreds of years later (but what did time matter when eternity was theirs?) when one lone ship sails into the harbor bearing one lone passenger, and he is there to meet it, there to see Will slip onto the dock and into his waiting arms, and there they are, forever.
Then he sees the other choice, the choice that even the rhyme expected him to make, the one where he chooses human grief and human joy and yes, a human ending, where he takes responsibility for the world and all it's marvellous joy, like Merriman said. He knew about that, and he knew about staying with Will, but he didn't know about the future that everyone else was looking at, where Will is a distant acquaintance and he marries a black haired girl named Cassandra that could see her own doom from the moment she took in Will's fractured eyes...
"Why do I remember now, then?" Bran asks finally, voice shaking. "Why--if--if those were always the only ways it could go--why are we here?"
"Ties made of the High magic are hard to break." Will says in a monotone, staring away.
"Is that all you have to say?"
"What more is there for me to say, Bran?" Will begins to say something else, then stops, squeezing his eyes tightly shut, and Bran resists the urge to scream.
"You're going to do it again, aren't you?" he glares. "You're going to--to take it all--again--"
Will kisses him silent, and Bran wants to punch him, to shoot his eyes out for daring to take away something so right--something so obviously meant to happen.
"Don't." Oh no, no, don't. "God, Will, please."
Bran can feel the magic stretching between them, the bond that was laid there before ever they were born, and the ties that friendship and (but surely not, for such things do not last from when you are eleven) love melded to each of them. He jerks away as he feels another tendril of...something...reaching out to him, sliding inside his mind.
"Will," he whispers. "Will."
Will's face does not crumple; he looks at Bran with a kind of forced calm instead, even though they can both see the tears in his eyes, slipping out one by one at random intervals. "I do love you, Bran Davies," he says, and his voice has all the pain of an immortal in it.
He raises his hands to Bran's brow, and Bran frantically tries to surround himself with his memories, to build them up like a shield around his mind so that nothing can take them away--but the only picture that forms in his head is Will, Will the way he is right now, with the shards of his eyes about to leave Bran bleeding and alone.
It is not like the last time, amnesia swirling in like sleep, leaving him to wake happily on a green hill in Wales.
No, his memories are torn from him now--he has less than a second to mourn the loss of the first glimpse of his father as he feels it ripped away before he cries out again as Eirias in his hands is taken and so is the Hunter with his eyes and oh, oh, oh, how it all hurts.
His mouth is bared in a savage rictus as he has only one image left, Blanche Rowlands screaming, and all he knows now is that this man in front of him is the source of all his pain, the reason he will never--never--
"I hate you," Bran snarls with his last breath, and can't remember what he will never do.