(A/N: A post-Feinster conversation between Brom and Arya. The whole end of Brisingr has so many implications for reawakening trauma for everyone, especially these two.
I want to make it abundantly clear, Brom and Arya never have and never will have any sort of romantic/sexual/couples thing between them! They're more of father/daughter, mentor/student and traumatized war buddies. They've known each other so long that there's a lot of trust and understanding between them concerning their traumas and the ways they cope. Anyway, cheers!)
"What the hell! Brom!"
The elder Rider jerked, nearly inhaling the entire half smoked cigarette that he held to his lips. He whipped around to face his accuser as he choked on the ash he had sucked in, his first words of protest lost when he immediately had to double over in an attempt to clear his irritated lungs.
Arya scowled from where she had stopped not a yard behind her mentor, arms crossed as she waited for Brom to finish his coughing fit. The elf hadn't exactly planned to seek him out after leaving Eragon and Saphira to rest at the house they now occupied as the Varden secured Feinster, instead looking for a place to sleep in the sacked city. But the steady trail of smoke from behind the corner of a half collapsed stone building had drawn her eye.
"The pipe? That's fine! I could live with that! You sourced your own stock. But this shit?" Arya plucked the smoldering stick from his fingers as Brom began to raise his hands in defense. "For fucks sake, you know what's in them! Enough's enough!" She threw the cigarette to the sandy gutter beside the house and ground it out with her heel.
Brom finally managed a handful of words edgewise. "I'm out of pipe weed. The whole city is out." Grumbling to himself as stepped back to lean against the wall, he began fishing his hands in the pockets of his coat. Arya's eyes narrowed when his hands reappeared holding a beaten, half empty pack of Talon Filtereds and a squashed box of matches. "Don't start with me again, girl. I'm not in the mood."
As usual, his former student ignored him. "You're chain smoking again?" Her words were sharp, almost accusing, but beneath it all edged a hint of worry.
Brom snorted, pale smoke venting from his nostrils as the cigarette caught and held. He took a deep inhale, let the feeling circulate in his lungs, before releasing a stream of grief and anger with the acrid vapor. "Would you rather I drink?"
Arya growled quietly and fell back against the wall next to him. This wasn't a battle she could win, and she knew it. That didn't change the way she felt. "No, I want you to deal with your fucking emotions in a healthy way."
At that the Rider let out harsh bark of laughter and a cloud of white. "Look who's talking, girl! Wait, what's that?" He held up a hand and sniffed the nicotine laden air theatrically. "Do you smell that? Suddenly it reeks of hypocrisy here!"
The elf gave a wry grin, the pain behind her own bottled up grief and night terrors tugging at her lips. "...Touché."
They stood together in silence for a handful of minutes, haloed by smoke and the dim glow of the lanterns that replaced shattered street lights.
The previous battle was unique for them. It had reopened old wounds that had just started to scab over, gashed a fresh one right across their hearts. She had faced the horrors of her nightmares brought back to life. He had watched helpless as his son and the boy's partner of heart and mind nearly died. Both had lost the man that practically raised them, the one person they assumed they would never need to expect would die.
Brom broke the thick silence. He took a short pull of his cigarette and tilted his head to regard the woman beside him. "Are you holding up?"
He hid his grimace by lifting the stick back to his face when Arya dropped her gaze and refused to look at him. That was never a good sign. And she had been doing so well before Feinster.
"I'm fine." The elf flicked her eyes in Brom's direction when he moved, and scoffed when she saw the pointed, rather familiar expression he now gave her. "Oh, what?" Brom didn't answer, merely put the cigarette to his lips again and raised his eyebrows even further. "Everything right now is just…. It's fucked up, Brom. There isn't time for me to...I don't know, vent?" She scowled and pushed stray hair back from her forehead, trying to gather her thoughts. "Fall apart? Sort through it. You know that."
The elder Rider let out a grunt of acknowledgement around the dull orange of the tipping paper before gesturing to Arya's neck. "Not enough time for healing that, then?"
Arya's hand came up to touch her throat subconsciously, the dark marks under her jaw giving a light twinge at the contact. Eragon had healed the internal damage to her throat and muscles, but battlefield healing and exhaustion had let the surface injuries remain.
"They're just bruises." Still, her fingers lingered there, testing the injured flesh. Trying to chase away the feeling of cold hands around her throat and the smell of blood and concrete, the face and triumphant, gleeful snarl of another man-shaped monster.
Brom watched her out of the corner of his eye. When Arya abandoned the bruises to rub the back of her neck, that telltale tic that she had used for well over a year now, he ashed his cigarette and gently tapped her shoulder with the back of his free hand. "It wasn't him. He's dead and gone. Eragon saw to that."
Arya let out a shaky stream of breath and dropped her hand from where she had been smoothing over the scars that slashed above the edge of her tank top. "Yeah, I know." Sliding to the ground, the elf balanced on the balls of her feet and plucked a pebble from the earth before mumbling, "Doesn't change how my brain sees it though."
She looked up at her mentor, doing all she could to hide her desperation for a distraction as the old scenes loomed in her mind. "What about you, old man? Hanging in there?"
Brom's lip twitched in a sudden snarl, the cigarette bobbing with the motion. "I'm going to kill that demon's spawn."
The change in his voice sent a sudden chill down Arya's spine, chasing away the lingering sparks that raced across her scars. This wasn't the voice of the man who had lived the last seventeen years. This was the voice of the man Arya had met on the trails of Ellesméra, a walking embodiment of rage, betrayal and anguish that could burn all in his path. "You mean Murtagh?"
With a violent jab of his hand Brom stabbed out remnants of his first smoke on the wall behind him. He ignored the pinpricks of blood that welled up from his fingers as he yanked a fresh stick out of the box and clamped it in his teeth to light as he growled, "He doesn't get a name anymore. He's dead when I see him, dragon or no dragon. I've done it before and I'll do it again." The first match he struck snapped in half and fizzled out. Brom swore and threw the shattered bits away and broke his cardinal rule to light the soothing cigarette with a spark of magic at his fingers, angrily puffing as it took.
Arya regarded him steadily, hearing the pain that edged the fury like so many razors. It would do no good to remind the Rider that Galbatorix had been in control when he struck the final blow against Oromis and Glaedr, nor would he want to hear that the young man and the red dragon were not Morzan and his twisted mount.
"...You really wanted them to be different, didn't you?" The moment the words left her mouth Arya felt the folly of letting them loose.
Brom's brilliant blue eyes turned to her, nostrils flared in rage as they jetted twin streaks of smoke. His hand lifted slightly, hovering near head height where Arya crouched beside him. The elf tensed, ready to take the blow if he struck.
He stopped. His fingers flexed, as though they could not make up their mind. At his lips the cigarette trembled, the trail of smog from its end wavering. For the briefest of moments, Arya saw a blazing flash of...failure...in his eyes. That was failure, failure and agony at the lives lost, though two still walked among the living. And then it was gone, replaced by an intense but controlled anger.
Brom lowered his trembling hand. "...Just let me smoke, dammit."
"Fair enough."
Another ten minutes passed, the only sounds being the Varden watch patrols calling out to each other in the sleeping city. Brom let his somewhat crumpled cigarette burn down to the mashed filter before grinding it out. His shaking had calmed, the enraged light in his eyes dimmed.
He cleared his throat as he shook another snout from the dwindling box. "...You had a shift watching Eragon and Saphira earlier?" Arya nodded, rolling the pebble she had picked up in her palm and shifting her balance in accordance with its movements. "And how are they doing with all of this?"
Another wry grin tilted the corner of the elf's lips, though she did not raise her gaze. "Exceptionally better than we are." The two shared a short laugh before she spoke again, almost hesitant. "Eragon is...having trouble. With something that happened while he was helping clear out Feinster."
"What happened?"
Arya rocked back onto her heels and recounted Eragon's telling of the boy that had startled him inside one of Feinster's homes. The sheer shock he felt when he saw the youth, his pang of recognition, and, later, the horror he felt when he realized just how close he had come to killing an innocent civilian. "It's been eating him up inside. Saphira's told him over and over that he didn't actually kill the kid, that it all worked out, but he's still thinking about it." She sighed, and with a flick of her wrist threw the pebble down like a dart. It gouged a crater into the compacted, sandy soil, the quiet thud and depth of the impact betraying her unearthly strength. "I told him to stop and just forget about it when he asked me how I would handle it."
Brom paused. "...That's unlike you."
The elf rubbed her temples and shifted back to the balls of her feet, agitated and indecisive. "Yeah, well...I shut down a bit when he mentioned it. He wanted to try and get me to open up again, seeing as it's gone well the last few times." She shook her head, braid swaying. "I couldn't. Not to them. Not about that."
Realization dawned on the older Rider, and he pinched his cigarette between his pointer and thumb as he drew a long, deep pull and gathered his thoughts. He exhaled slowly, a heavy sigh of memories that were only partly repressed by the nicotine's taste in his mouth, before slipping a hand into his pocket and peering up at the half concealed stars above. "Right. Thornwell." He flicked the ashes away. "...Now that's something I'd rather forget."
"Fuck off. The day we forget Thornwell we better be fuckin' dead." Arya's tone was harsh, laced with the bitterness of failure and a vehement streak of self-hatred that the elf rarely let out into the open. "We're the only ones left to remember it, and it was our fucking fault. Don't you dare try to brush it off."
"I'm not." With a soft pat, Brom dropped his free hand onto Arya's head. The touch was sudden, so much so that the elf nearly jerked away until she felt the tension in the man's muscles, the miniscule tremors that the cigarettes couldn't suppress.
He knew. The memories still hurt plenty. He couldn't let them go either.
Arya sighed and ducked her head, breaking the contact. "Good." Her voice wasn't as sharp now. Just...tired.
The taste of rich dirt, acrid smoke from a magic fueled fire and burning plastics rushed her senses with the memory of Thornwell's resurgence. Uncaring if any of Eragon's guards were in sight, she spat to the side, trying to rid herself of the shame laced flavor. Again she found herself resentful of her mind's sensory recall, bitterly wishing elves memories could fade to washed out images and sounds as humans did.
"Here." The combat liaison looked up to see Brom offering his still smoldering cigarette down to her. She stared at it for a long moment before gingerly accepting the roll between two fingers and shot a wary, questioning look to her mentor. "I don't just smoke them for nicotine. It's the only thing keeping the tastes out of my mouth."
A moment later saw Arya coughing and gagging as she thrust the cigarette back. "That's awful!" She spat again, choking on what felt like burning fumes. "Fuck!"
"But it worked, didn't it?"
"I'll tell you when I stop feeling like there's acid in my throat!"
The old man was right, though. The acrid, vile taste had drowned out the pervading scents and flavors of that one day so many decades ago.
As the elf took a sip from the canteen off her belt, Brom turned his gaze back to the clouded stars. "...That was the day you broke my jaw, wasn't it?"
Arya snorted into the neck of the canteen before muttering, "I cracked your cheekbone. I was…" She paused, screwing the cap back on and trying to choose the words that would cause the least pain for both of them. "We both were fucked up in that moment. You just wouldn't realize it. I had to do something."
"...I was like that a lot back then."
"Yeah." Arya clipped the canteen back on her belt. Rubbed her hands together.
She couldn't bring herself to admit just how scared of him she had been that day, even before the accident. Brom carried within him a level of intensity at times that transcended rage. Thornwell was an incident where that blind fury led them both to ruin, at the cost of innocent lives.
Brom cleared his throat, drawing the elf's eye back to him. "You know...we should start easing Eragon and Saphira into the notion that...that there's going to be collateral someday." The words left his mouth with a grimace and puffs of smoke. "Prepare them for it. Eragon's so empathetic, I'm worried that–"
"No!" The Rider jerked, startled by the sharp, nearly shouted dismissal. Soft flecks of ashes scattered down, drifting to land cool and harmless onto the fists Arya held clenched at her knees.
Her refusal shocked him. Arya, of all people, knew that the right preparation could help lessen the acute effects of war. Her upbringing, like Eragon's, had done little to prepare her for taking lives, losing comrades, and the burning senses of shame, self-hatred and anguish that could all accompany a prolonged conflict. As naïve as she had been when she joined the Varden, with only the surface understanding of her eventual role, it all had left a lasting impact on the elf.
Brom frowned. His former student's body was ridgid, knuckles white. "Arya, you know it's going to happen sooner or later–"
Arya cut him off again, her voice softer yet edged with a firm, pained conviction. "Brom...we both know it's already happened." And she pointed out towards the city around them. "You can't tell me there weren't people here."
Some of the buildings were collapsed inward on themselves. Shopfronts, family businesses with living quarters above, stood half charred or half destroyed. Behind them, towards the towering keep, the building that Saphira had torn apart tooth and claw was abandoned besides smears of gore.
A nagging, grim understanding began creeping into Brom's mind.
"I know he's your son, and I know you have more of a say in what you tell him." Arya continued. "But I can't let you put the idea in his head. He's so...he feels so much, Brom. He feels for others as much as he feels for himself. Saphira tries to help him through it but through him, she feels it too." Tiny tremors shook her fists, nails biting into her palms. "If you start trying to prepare him, they're going to realize that it's probably already happened. They're going to start wondering when. Why they didn't notice it before. How many.
"That spiral doesn't stop. It's so hard to shut out, and…." She stopped, just short of her voice breaking. "I don't want that to happen to them. Just...let them have this, Brom. Let me worry about it. Okay?"
Brom dragged the last trails of smoke from his cigarette and reached down. Placed his hand on the elf's head and gently ran his thumb over her hair as he had always done with Eragon when the boy was frightened by his stories years ago. She tensed for a moment, before he felt the pent up stress ease. "Okay." The older Rider tapped out the end of his smoke on the wall. "I see your point, kid." With a gentle shift he pushed her to lean a shoulder against his leg in a comforting gesture of support and understanding. "But when it happens, you tell me. They'll need both of us."
"I will."
They stayed like that for a long moment, supporting each other as the night's words swirled through their minds.
"...I'm not going to be able to sleep tonight." Arya muttered suddenly.
Brom let out a soft scoff. "Join the club."
It brought another grim smile to the elf's face. "Walk with me? Patrolling tends to help."
"Fine." Brom reached into his coat as Arya stood and stretched. He swore quietly when he found that the box of Talons was empty.
Realizing that Arya was watching him, Brom gave the box one last longing look before crumpling it in his fist and dropping it into his pocket. "Lead the way, kid."