A/T: The past half year, ladies and gentlemen, has been absolute shit. And not just shit, either - the accurate description for my life in the past six months is too foul even for an M rated story. But, onto the chapter.

I own nothing but the story and the setting. But you already know that.

Da - Rus - Yes

Dorogoy - Rus - Darling

Tupien - Bel - Dumbass

Práklon - Bel - Dammit

Dy - Bel - Yes

Bruder - Ger - Brother

Chapter 23

"Is he asleep?"

Ivan looked up, and accepted the bowl of gruel that accompanied, the question. "Da. He has his brother both," he said, shifting to make room for Shree to sit beside him. "But you would have known that much before me, wouldn't you, dorogoy?"

Shree muttered into the gruel, her words causing bubbles to rise to the surface. Ivan chuckled, and took a sip of his gruel. "Always less salt," he muttered distastefully, but unwilling to give up his rather comfortable seat on the rock, he didn't get up to get the salt from where it was kept, next to where the pot was kept boiling over a fire.

"You always say that," Shree murmured between sips. "How many more days till we reach?"

Ivan held his bowl down, and frowned thoughtfully. "Another two. By that time, we will be reaching into our emergency rations."

Shree frowned, worry casting furrows across her brow. Ivan drank the rest of his gruel, and looked at Shree. "There's no point in thinking about it. When we reach, we reach."

"But there's not much to think about now, is there?" Shree asked.

"Now, Shree," Ivan murmured. "As priests, we can never claim to not be doing anything. If nothing else, we meditate."

Shree chuckled, but worry remained etched over her features. Ivan sighed. "Shree, what is going on?"

Shree didn't look surprised or taken aback - in fact, she looked prepared for the question. "Something that is required for the propagation of our species," she tried to joke, but it felt flat to both of them.

"That isn't half of your problem, and you know it," Ivan said, and got up for refilling his bowl. "Shree, you aren't one of the most powerful person in the spiritual world just for the sake of someone needing to fill positions. You have worked for it, and you have earned it. There are few people spiritually more powerful than you are, at least in this Realm. Never forget that."

Shree sighed and looked into her own half finished bowl of gruel. She wished she could feign ignorance, but, the thing was, she had received this lecture, twice before, once from Ivan himself. True, she had worked her way to the higher rungs of spiritual accomplishment, and did enough to stay there, but it hadn't been easy. And falling from that position, slipping off those rungs was much too easy - all she had to do was be an idiot of the first order, do immoral things, and she was there.

With a deep sigh, she finished the rest of her gruel,and looked at the bottom of her bowl. To stay at her level, she had to meditate regularly, to regulate the flow of energy through her, align it with the energy of the environment, and revise her knowledge of mantras and incantations.

But, all she did now was sit and stare into space. She couldn't concentrate as well as she could before - that was not to say that she couldn't. But, it was that much harder to do so, and it was aggravating.

Natalya didn't say anything - Nat wouldn't. She wouldn't consider it any of her business, and she would feel that Shree was old enough to take care of things herself.

But Ivan would. He would know - he had undergone the derailment that he warned Shree of. And, Shree was sure hers was for the same reason his had been.

She was in love.

"I really think you should be resting," I told Mattie. Mattie, as usual, was busy studying the surroundings of the memory we were in. "Mattie!"

"Relax, Alfred," Matt said. "I'm getting rest - at least my body is. This way, I'm getting some work done - I can't do anything when I'm awake, anyway - all I do is puke and and generally stay sick."

I couldn't really argue with that logic, even though I really didn't want him taxing himself. So I watched as he puttered around, carefully observing every object in the projection.

We were in a room of some sort - it looked like a bedroom. But the only thing that made it look like a bedroom was the bed. The rest of the place was a mess - the sheets were torn into shreds, the pillows were ripped apart. The entire room was in a disarray - photo frames were smashed, shards of glass and china were littered on the ground. There didn't seem to be any windows where we were, but I figured that the windows didn't play much of a role in the memory.

All memory projections were like this -they only showed the objects involved with the memory, with fine details and surprising vividity, whereas other aspects of the settings not involved with the memory were hazy, with undefined boundaries, the colours blending into one another.

The door opened, a door which previously wasn't there, and we heard a click. Light flooded the room, which looked ghastlier than before. The broken glass and porcelain caught the light, their jagged ends gleaming. Everything glared in the light, unflatteringly so, almost as if the presence of light over the destruction triggered the walls of the room to scream out the reasons for the destruction.

We turned to the door, where an elderly woman stood, sadness and resignation filling her small blue eyes and enhancing the wrinkles that were beginning to etch into her weathered skin.

"That's Nonna!" Matt exclaimed, and I couldn't do much more than stare in shock. Nonna - she looked much younger before me than I remembered her to be - had been our caretaker, mine and Mattie's, after our father took us away from home. She was a wonderful, large woman, who loved to give us hugs and sing to us old songs about faeries and elves.

She walked into the room, a bucket in one hand, which was filled with various implements - from where I stood, I could see the handle of a broom, the staff of a mop, a plastic mug, a blue cap of some bottle which I couldn't really see. She set the bucket on a relatively clear part of the floor, and looked around the room. We looked around with her, everything her eyes fell on growing even more vivid.

The walls, previously hazy, came into focus, and I could see stains of blood on the wall. They weren't drops of blood, or even smears - there were splashes on blood, mural-like, on the wall, huge patches covering entire walls. Slowly, other parts of the room came into focus, small aspects of the room, which I hasn't really noticed, and slowly, the terrifying ghastliness of the room exposed itself, until it grew to become a nightmare.

I looked at Nonna, who was kneeling before the large bucket she had brought. Honestly, after mom died, the only good thing about our life with dad was Nonna, and her delicious cooking, and her extremely maternal personality. She somehow learnt all our favourite dishes, and gave us more dishes to love and look forward to. She was the nicest person I knew, and, honestly, I missed her.

"How is she?" I asked Mattie. Mattie looked up from observing Nonna, and looked at me.

"Dad sent her away after you…weren't there, gave her a house and a pension. I went to see her every three months or so. She stays alone - once in a while, her daughters visit her with their grandkids. Most of the time, she's alone."

I watched as she cleaned up the room, my attention absorbed by her work. She seemed to know exactly what to do, and did her work extremely systematically. Watching her made me think that she had done this multiple times.

"She misses you."

I looked up, and saw Matt looking at me, his eyes more moist than usual. "She never doubted you. She always asked me how you were doing."

My eyes grew moist, and I looked away from Mattie. I missed her - I honestly missed her. She was one of the few people who cared about me, and who loved me, and there had been times when I had thought about her in that hellhole. More than even the pain those chains brought me, the thought of Nonna and how she was doing hurt more terribly.

Time in the memory sped up, and we watched everything around us move faster - the floor was cleared, the walls were scrubbed of their blood. The torn sheets and shredded pillows were replaced with fresh, new ones. Even the broken photoframes were replaced with identical ones after the transfer of the pictures into the replacement frames. The whole room was brought back to normal, and in the moment before Nonna switched off the light and left the room, the room looked like how it had been originally made, with no evidence of the ghastly violence we had entered into.

"Was this a part of her job, too? Cleaning up this room which belongs to…" I trailed off, not having a clue as to whose room we were in.

"It's dad's," Matt said.

"How do you know?"

Matt walked to the wall opposite the bed, and tapped at the black markings on the wall.

'Everything I want, I will plan.

In everything I plan, I will succeed.'

"He used to tell that to us every day," Matt said as I read it. "Only he would walk up to read this first thing in the morning."

"But," I frowned, "Why would he" -

Anything I had to say got cut off at the sound of the door opening. Our vision grew more accustomed to the dark until we could see as well as we could see in the light, even though it was almost pitch black. It was totally weird, but, then again, these memories were never normal.

The door flew open, and a silhouette stood at the door, blocking the lights of the corridor behind him. Shadows engulfed his features, but it was obvious that a man stood before us, around the same height as me. He closed the door quietly, which would prove to be in complete contrast to his actions from that point onwards.

He let out a cry of pain, and something shook within me at that animal sound. He grabbed at his back, his nails repeatedly scratching over his shirt, as if he was attempting to tear his back out of his body. He whimpered in pain an urgency, the grabbing motions growing rapid. The whimper grew louder and louder, until they were finally punctuated by the sound of cloth tearing and ripping. He tore his shirt at the back and flung it off him.

He turned to the wall, banging his fists repeatedly on the wall, but his strength wasn't normal. The wall cracked, but the wall wasn't normal, either. A metallic thunk emerged from the wall after every punch, but that didn't seem to deter the man. He hit the wall, again and again, until the sound of cracking bone accompanied the dull metallic thunk.

In the darkness, I could see things that I couldn't have seen previously. And as I watched, in sick fascination, at the purple lotus on the man's back, vividly realistic and in full bloom across his skin. The voice behind the cries, the strength, the lotus on his back…

I didn't need Matt to tell me it was our father.

The cries grew to screams, screams of raw pain that sounded as if his gut was being pulled out through his intact skin, all in one powerful dragging motion. He went from fists to his own head, his bloody, misshapen palms nearly flat against the wall as he drove his head repeatedly into the wall. Blood rolled down the wallpaper, the stain against his head growing larger and larger.

"W-What is…he…doing…?" Matt whispered brokenly, and I looked at him. He recognised our father, maybe much earlier, and much better than I had. I looked at the man before us - he looked so much I did that it was fascinating and terrifying at the same time. Mom hadn't been wrong to name me after the man - I could pass off for him.

The man I remembered as my father had wrinkles around his eyes and mouth. When he frowned, his forehead would crease. And his eyes were hard as diamonds, at all times, the few and far between exceptions being when he spoke to me about Mattie, or even about myself. I didn't know this suffering man, screaming like a dying animal, harming himself in every way possible. And Mattie didn't seem to know this man, either.

Photo frames were smashed to the ground, cups, vases shattered into pieces, pieces which pierced his feet. But he didn't care. He was the embodiment of a mixture of anger and intense pain, tearing, ripping, crushing, breaking anything he got his hands on, be it the things around him, or he himself.

A dull throb settled in my chest. Mattie looked like he wanted to puke. The man had managed to hurt himself in every way possible - breaking his bones against the soundproof, metal walls, ripping and cutting gashes into himself with any pieces of glass he could get. Any and every object in the room which Nonna had painstakingly replaced had been violently destroyed beyond recognition.

And his screams…those screams were nothing new to me. I had screamed the same way, for God knows how many days, or weeks, or even months until I passed out. They were the screams of an animal having his insides set on fire, a fire so peculiar that it burnt for eternity without stop, damning its fuel to incessant pain.

The man, finally tiring, flung himself on the bed, his bleeding body staining the torn sheets and shredded pillow. And he began to sob, his broken, bloody body heaving painfully in sorrow. His voice was no longer human - it was of a broken animal sorry for its own existence. And he made the same sound, over and over again.

I didn't understand it immediately - his voice was hoarse, unintelligible, and his sounds made no sense. But finally, when it made sense, I choked back my tears. Mattie next to me wept.

"...Come back…come back…Mel…come back…Mel…"

Those words grew to fill the whole room, and continued even after the memory faded to black.

We didn't speak long after Matt wiped his tears. Those words still rang in my ears, and finally, the chains made sense to me.

"That…was dad…right?" Matt asked slowly, and I nodded.

"I think this was soon after the demon got…once the contract was, you know, established," I said. "The lotus looked…the skin around it was as red" -

"Could have been from the bleeding," Matt murmured almost unintelligibly.

"It was a different kind of red, Mattie. I know which the more recent parts of my contract are depending on the redness of the skin around it."

The silence between our exchanges were deafening, heavy, capable of choking someone.

"Dad…he was saying mom's name," Matt said quietly, his voice hoarse.

I couldn't do anything more than nod. He never talked about mom - in fact, he never brought it up even by mistake, and somehow, we never brought it up before him, either. We knew how they'd met, and how much they loved each other through mom - in fact, we would have never known about father if mom hadn't told us about him. But, for some reason, I had never thought about father's affection for mom - I'd never assumed that he had loved her, or that he didn't. I'd never assumed anything. But I'd never expected him to remember her, especially not when he was in pain.

"Did he ever speak to you…about mom?"

Mattie looked at me, and shook his head. "Never. After you…were taken away, he didn't speak about you - I don't know if he knew I came to see you or not, but he never said anything. And after Alicia…I never thought of asking him."

Me neither. I was still around when Alicia came into our lives, and I felt the same way after she arrived. But something occurred to me. "The dungeons…he put those chains to prevent me from doing what he had done to himself."

"You were a danger to yourself without even realising it. He was trying to protect you."

I was having none of it. "He was trying to protect himself, and his investments. Why else would he seal part of his demon into his own son, and take the credit for putting him down like the animal he was? He knew I wasn't going to die - if he could do…that to himself at night and then look perfectly fine by morning, he had insane regenerative ability, and he knew I had them, too. I wouldn't give him so much of a heart, Mattie."

Matt looked upset, but there was nothing I could do. I still hated my father, and nothing was going to change what he had done to deserve my hate.

But…something about seeing him call out mom's name like that…made me think that I didn't really know the man.

No, that was not correct.

No one knew who Johnny Doe was.

"We're here," Ivan said, and suddenly cranked up the accelerator. There were another 100 meters to go, and he let the horn blare as loudly as it possibly could. Nat, who was sitting in front with him, let out a hoot of excitement.

"Ivan! Will you please - ugh!" grunted Shree as they flew over another pothole. "You're going to wake Matt up!"

"I'm already up," Matt groaned, cringing in pain when Ivan disregarded the presence of another pothole in the road.

"I can't hear you, comrade!" Ivan singsonged.

"But they can, apparently," Nat said, looking at the flurry of activity a few tens of metres away, at the gate of the monastery. The enormous gates began moving apart, but they were slow in opening. Ivan, however, didn't give a damn.

The people opening the gates must have realised, and even as the gates opened, Ivan drove the car through the narrow - but wide enough - space, flying across the courtyard, spinning and finally skidding to a stop.

No one inside the car moved. As the dust outside the car settled, Alfred slowly said, "That's over, right?"

"I think I need a doctor," Gilbert said, holding his hand over his mouth.

"You are a doctor, tupien," Nat said drily. "I don't think I can feel my legs, though."

"We're here, so get comrade out of the car," Ivan said quite calmly, and himself got out of the car. Nat, in the shotgun seat, sighed, raking her hands though her straight hair, her mind coming up with a list of people she now owed an explanation to.

They all slowly got out of the car - Nat went to find priests who would who would be willing to take her to the Head Priest after their heart-attack-inducing entrance, and Alfred followed her; Ivan, Shree and Gilbert took Matt to the nearest room where Matt could rest; Eliza moved to the front of the car to find a place to park it.

"You going to apologise?" Alfred said, walking alongside Nat.

"For what?" Nat asked drily, genuinely unaware. "Oh, that? I enjoyed it."

Alfred assessed the shivering priests standing across the yard. "They looked like they didn't. I wouldn't be surprised if someone pissed their pants."

Nat chuckled in spite of herself. "Don't underestimate priests, Alfred." They walked in silence. "Even if they have not pissed themselves yet, they will now." As Alfred watched, Nat walked ahead and said, "Hey! You!

Alfred had to stifle a smile as the intensity of shivering increased amongst the priests. They all looked green behind the ears, and clearly didn't know how to handle a personality like Nat's.

"Is you Head Priest around?" Nat called out across the yard, having almost reached them. Alfred's hand covered his mouth as all the priests vigorously nodded their heads.

Nat felt her pockets for the scroll, but her pockets were empty. "Práklon," she growled, and turned to Alfred, who was holding it in his hand. "Ei. Give it here."

Alfred shrugged, and tossed it towards the priests. "Go give this to them as soon as you can," Alfred said gently, and the young men's eyes showed profuse relief. They ran away from the scene as fast as they could; Alfred and Nat followed them towards the main building of the monastery.

"Do we need to go and meet them?" Alfred asked. Nat, lost in her own thoughts, started and looked at him. "Meet who?"

Alfred was glad she didn't point out his use of 'we', which she would have before. "The Head Priest."

Nat pursed her lips thoughtfully. "We should, but protocol requires that Ivan and Shree should meet him first."

"They're ranked higher than you?"

"Dy," Nat said with no intonation of negativity of any sort, but as a fact. "But I know most of the House heads, so they don't mind. This person…will."

"Guy got a stick up his ass?" Alfred asked, looking around.

"It would explain a lot," Nat muttered, and Alfred chuckled. "Don't like him?"

"It is not like that," Nat explained. "He is a good person…He likes to follow rules to the last letter."

"You used to follow rules, too, when we first met," Alfred reminded softly.

"That was before I realised that this world is too chaotic, and rules give only a false sense of security," Nat said.

"No rules, then?" Alfred asked, genuinely surprised.

Nat looked at him and smiled, and he had a feeling that he was looking into a universe he didn't quite understand.

"No rules."

"Didn't think I would see the three of you together outside the Academy."

Nat suppressed the urge to snap at the man across the hall, and let Ivan do the talking.

"Well, comrade, we are here. And we require rooms."

"How many of you?"

"Seven of us."

"And for how long will you be here?"

"Until we stock up on supplies" -

"And then we'll be out of your hair," Nat interrupted Ivan. "Look. We've been travelling for eleven days with a sick man in our car, with no rest and only half of our ration supply so that we could get here. Give us ten hours of sleep, enough food in our bellies and medicine to treat our sick comrade, and then you'll get the explanation you want from us."

Roderich Edelstein, from across the hall, blinked at Nat, not really sure what he could say in reply to that. "The safety" -

"We have two demons, a doctor, two language experts and two warrior priestesses in our possy. No one is going to get hurt," Shree said.

Nat leaned forward to look at Shree around Ivan. "Where did you learn possy from?"

Shree leaned forward. "Alfred."

Nat rolled her eyes at the obviousness of it, and looked back at Roderich.

"I'll need to meet your team mates" -

"After all our conditions are met. You would not like us when we're hungry," Shree said.

"Shree Sharma, your way of talking is giving me a headache," Roderich said, visibly irritated. "Where have you learnt to speak like that? And Natalya, with all due respect, the rule demands that you let the senior most priests speak here, and that is Ivan" -

"Comrade, with all due respect, I have been sharing my food, water, bed and personal space with my six other team members," Ivan said, sounding more tired than respectful. "Rules don't apply unless man has had his essentials met, to allow him to look beyond his animal self. And, like my lovely priestesses pointed out, we don't have those for the past week, at least."

Roderich looked distressed now, unable to adjust to three highly ranked members of his world disregarding protocol the way they were. "And, I suppose you would like these 'team members' to share your specially assigned House rooms?"

Their looks were enough to bring on a raging migraine between Roderich's brows. He sighed heavily. "Do what you will. Send me a message when you and your 'team' are social enough to seek an audience with me."

Nat just nodded and left the room before Shree and Ivan did, just to piss Roderich off.

"How pissed was he?" Nat asked Shree when the two of them caught up.

"He looked like he was going to cry," she said, and Ivan chuckled beside her.

"The comrade is right about rules," Ivan said, "but they could all go to hell now, for all I care."

"I'm going to go check on Matt," Shree said, carefully avoiding Ivan's gaze. Before either of them could even acknowledge what she'd said, she went ahead and, at the bend in the corridor, disappeared.

Ivan looked at Nat, who, as he'd expected, didn't think anything about it. "Natalya?"

"Yes?" Nat said, switching to her mother tongue, the same as Ivan's, without blinking an eye.

"You need to talk to Shree."

"What about?" Nat asked, genuinely unaware.

"About Mathew."

"What about him?"

Ivan had to suppress the urge to give in to sighing long and deep. His adopted sister was the top of her class when it came to spiritual knowledge, and the same woman could be incredibly dense when it came to people. "She likes him," Ivan said finally.

"I know."

"Not the way you or I" -

"I know. She probably loves him. She definitely adores him."

"Oh." Ivan blinked. "Oh." Ivan blinked some more. "How long have you known?"

"It's been obvious for months now, Ivan."

He took back what he thought about his adopted sister. He was wrong.

"Have you spoken to" -

"No."

"Don't you think you should sp" -

"No."

"Why?"

Nat gave him a look that made him feel like he was the biggest idiot there was, and looked ahead as they walked. He walked alongside her, wondering why the hell she didn't consider it something worth talking about. The silence, however, gave him no answers, and he was almost bursting at his seams to ask her why again when she started speaking.

"He's lost his father, Ivan. His only family is his brother, who had been chained up in a dungeon for the better part of the decade. Their mother is probably dead, and they never talk about her. He feels like he never knew his father, he's away from everything he ever knew, everything that gave him comfort. His life has completely changed. Nothing he knows is the same."

Nat stared into Ivan's eyes, and suddenly, he saw it the way she did, and wondered why he hadn't seen it that way before.

"And you know Shree. She's gotten her heart broken before - by assholes, by people who seemed wonderful. She might be the most powerful person in the spiritual world. And you know the way people talk to her - as if she could do nothing wrong. I deal with it by being difficult - I know I'm difficult. You deal with it by letting people spread rumours about you. But we haven't been like her all our lives - I know I haven't. She's been a celebrity in our world, so to speak, under Om and Raj's shadow. Matt has been a shadow under his father, and to a certain extent, his brother as well, even if it's been in his head. He and she feel the same way about so many things. They have so many similar interests, so many things to talk about" -

"But, tomorrow, when we go" -

Nat stopped, and looked at Ivan. "Ivan. You are thinking about how this will play out at the end of all this. We don't know if we'll be alive tomorrow. We don't know what Johnny Doe has done. We don't know what we're up against. All any of us truly have is today. And, Ivan, if they make each other happy today…why not let them be happy?"

Nat watched his face as her words sank in, and a faint smile played on her lips. With a small shrug, she continued on ahead, Ivan walking next to her, his mind wrapping around the meaning of her words. And when he finally understood, he smiled.

He didn't care about what anyone thought about her, but Ivan was very, very proud of his little sister Natalya.

"This is all of you, correct?" Roderich asked Ivan, who, standing before him, nodded.

"This is certainly a curious set of events," Roderich said thoughtfully. "All I can do is provide my maximum assistance, and give you all that you need."

Ivan smiled. Roderich, for all his rules and regulations, was a good person. And after a full stomach and eleven straight hours of sleep, it was easier to see things in the right perspective.

"Where's your student?" Nat asked. "It's still Ludwig, right?"

"Yes, it" -

"Did you say Ludwig?"

They all turned to Gilbert, whose voice was hoarse and excited at the same time.

"Dy," Nat said, breaking the silence, an unsure expression on her face. "His name is Ludwig. Why do you" -

There was a knock on the door which cut Nat off, and at Roderich's permission, a tall blonde man entered. His well built body was not quite hidden by his loose fitting priest's robes, and his blue eyes went over all those sitting in the room calmly, until they connected gazes with a pair of shocked crimson eyes.

The cool, composed look that was on the tall man's face shattered, making way for utter confusion and sock.

Nothing Roderich said to the man, or Eliza said to Gilbert seemed to reach them - they stared at each other dumbly, their jaws slack with shock.

And, finally, once the whole room was plunged in silence, the two of them managed to squeak at the same time -

"Bruder?"

A/T: Cliffy!

I'm so sorry for not updating. I truly am. This past half year has been bad enough to be number two in my life's worst phases - number one still goes to 2013-14, but this came a close second. My personal life became a living hell, and added to that was the fact that I stopped writing because of all the shit I was dealing with simultaneously. I finally managed to clear out everything by the beginning of this year, and I've enjoyed fabulous mental health for the past three weeks. Still, I've managed to achieve so much in other aspects of my life, and I'm happy with the way other things have turned about. Right now, I'm just recuperating from the hurt and pain that I've undergone, and healing along the way.

I will try to update once a week for as long as I can - once I have to start studying for my exams, I can't say anything. But, for as long as I can, I will write - I can promise you that. One of the reasons I was not able to bounce back as quickly as I usually do from my horrible time was because I had no mental energy to write, and everything was going way too fast for me to understand. And because I didn't have my writing, things just became far, far worse than they had to be.

Still, that phase left me with a lot of lessons, a clear idea of what I want and my focus regained. I'm going to be the best I can possibly be - a person, a friend, a student, a veterinarian, an author, a musician, a footballer - whatever I put my mind to. And no person, no circumstance is allowed to take that away from me - this phase has left me with the confidence that anything that comes in my way, I will remove without any remorse.

I'll try to update as regularly as I can, once a week. And when I can't, I'm really sorry - please know that I'm really sorry.

And those who've stayed with this story...thank you so, so, very much.

All my love,

R. K. Iris.