Before Kirin, stirring aimlessly on the sofa is his brother, and in some ways, he can see himself reflected there. They have the same light-brown skin, the same dark hair, and if his brother were to open his eyes from his place on the pillow, the same dark-brown eyes. But his brother is clean-shaved, rising every morning to cut off what the evening has brought. And yet, the little lines of age have crept in against his insistence on an unchanging permanence, tracing along the corner of his mouth, under his eyes.
Perhaps this is a map of how Kirin himself will age, perhaps not. They are only half brothers—another father never known, another reminder that other people and their motives existed long before Kirin ever did.
Tomorrow morning, his brother will get up at the same hour as he does everyday, nauseous and shaking and his head pounding, and collect the bottles from this week of drinking. They will go into a cardboard box that he will carry down to a recycling center in Morley. Even in this excess, he is good. There is nothing else for him to be.
As Kirin gazes down at at his brother, an image of his childhood comes, unbidden: the dark wood paneling; three large, south-facing windows, the largest one—the middle one—with its 24 square panes, and the two supporting it, these neatly divided into 10 square panels each (Kirin measured them once, out of curiosity, using a step stool to reach them, but the precise dimensions elude him now); the pale light that filtered through them and sprawled against the floor; the tree outside, branches open and empty against the cloudy winter day.
From the very corner of the doorway, he'd watch his mother endlessly, carefully fold her patterned paper into precise shapes and set them on the shelves. One night, when he was very young, he'd waited until the clock sounded out the midnight hour, and had crept down from the bedroom he shared with his brother down the stairs to his mother's workshop. He'd taken the most beautiful one down, an intricate praying mantis, with legs that bent and moved under gentle pressure, and had placed it on the wooden floor, trying to figure it out.
He'd tapped on the floral green paper as he tried to figure out how it was all put together, how it could move even.
He'd forgotten that she rarely slept those days.
The greasy light from the whale oil lamp had thrown his shadow over his own hands, so that, for a moment, he couldn't see anything anymore. And then he'd known he'd been caught.
She'd yanked him up sharply by the arm. "What are you doing?" she'd demanded. "I told you not to touch them. Why don't you listen?" Then, the long way up the stairs again, as she dragged him up, gripping his arm so tightly that it whitened from the pressure.
"Don't you dare try to take this away from me too," she'd told him. "You've taken everything else. But you like this, don't you? You like hurting me."
Halfway up the stairs, she'd paused, holding her other hand to her forehead, suddenly weary again, in a gesture that Kirin would come to recognize later, on an intellectual level at least, as pain. "I should beat you," she'd said, half to herself. "I should beat you. You deserve it. It's what your father would have done."
But the beating never comes. Instead, she drags him back to the shared bedroom and hits the side of the pillow that his brother was sleeping on. He'd woken up in a groggy haze, blinking back the exhaustion.
"Look what he did without you," she'd said. "He'd gone and touched my art. What have I done to deserve such horrible children?"
His brother had only given him a weary look, and that was the part that'd stuck with him through the years. His brother had been disappointed. It was not the fact that his brother had been disappointed that bothered him so—that was irrelevant to Kirin—but rather the understanding that there had been a way that Kirin was supposed to act, and he'd failed to do it.
Looking around the apartment, Kirin can't remember why he came here now. Perhaps it had been a very old part of himself that had brought him here, from very early in his life when he thought his older brother could fix everything and Kirin hadn't yet grown to resent and loathe and belittle him for not being able to understand him in the way he wanted to be understood.
His brother stirs. Those dark eyes open, survey him with resignation, and then close again. "Again?" he says wearily. "You're back again. At least you're trying something different now." He turns on his side, facing the back of the sofa now, away from Kirin. "I appreciate that my grey cells want to give me a good show tonight."
"I'm... real," Kirin manages.
"All unreal things insist on their own validity," his brother retorts as he adjusts the pillow. "And you are only the product of a particularly vile bottle of wine."
Kirin can barely follow this line of thought. Some of the blood has already dried on his face, but some of it falls onto the floor, little oxidizing droplets darkening the floorboards. Perhaps it's his own, mingling with the dead men's. It's impossible to tell now.
"Well, come on then," his brother continues. "Tell me what a horrible brother I am. Tell me how I've driven you to take after mother dearest. Tell me that I should have been there and how I've betraying my duty, like you've ever known what duty is to begin with. Tell me what a miserable, boorish cretin I am. I'm all ears."
His brother's anger spills out, caustic and relentless. Fifteen years of raising his younger brother—his only brother—has left him a hollowed-out man, waiting on other people to tell him what to do and what to bear. He's angry because his goodness did not protect him from this internal erosion. He was good, and it did not matter. He'd borne his duty as a shield against reproach, and it did not save him, because it could not save him.
And those empty moments that belong to him alone, in those moments he doesn't want to feel. But the bottle brings its own whispers of why and why not and why couldn't you at the very bottom.
Kirin doesn't know how to respond. There's something horrible in knowing that his own brother, the one whose inferior intellect he was so sure of, could confuse him too now. "I'm afraid," he says. "I'm very afraid." His throat hurts for some reason now. It's painful to talk now.
"Afraid? " his brother snorts. "Afraid? What are you afraid of? You found out the hard way that being brilliant but insufferable gets you nowhere once the brilliance goes. And now you come here night after night to haunt me. Well, go on. Go live with yourself now. You're good at that."
There it is—that note of bitterness.
Kirin left him in the end too. He'd needed him right until he didn't. And then there'd been nothing left for him.
And what had he done in his loneliness, having done his duty only to be left with himself? A twelve-year-long career as an accounting clerk for a shipping firm. A small flat he'd finally paid off last year. On the kitchen counter, in the very corner, just enough to have a presence is a stack of copies of the Silver Spike—one of the few foreign subscriptions outside the island—because nothing hurt him as much as to see what his home has been doing in his absence. It was the pain that remained in the end, he'd decided.
Kirin does not yet understand this, and in that fumbling silence as Kirin twists his fingers in worried thought, his brother hears an accusation.
'What do I care what happens to you?" his brother replies defensively. "You got what you deserved. I'm sure it's nice in Addermire now. They've made it humane. I'm sure you never shut up, even now."
Anger lines his voice—latent anger and resentment, but also a tenderness. How could he not still feel a tenderness for his only brother? The one who flickers in between the gaps in his thoughts, even now? The mixture of dependency and hurt that binds them forever. How could he have spent fifteen years of his own childhood and then adolescence with Kirin first on his mind without ever thinking of him again? He'd been made to give up his own childhood to watch over Kirin. He'd watched Kirin grow up and become a person: all those little moments of childhood were theirs alone. He remembers the stones they'd pick up in the park and sort later, the dark sea full of dragging seaweed and dying fish, the quiet rooms of their childhood home.
How could he not help but speculate on who Kirin might have become, even now?
But this, too, is painful. Unable to bear this, his brother closes his eyes again. "You don't need me," he says, a muffled reassurance against his doubts.
Kirin does not understand what has just happened, only that his brother has known about his condition this whole time and has chosen not to help. His heart sinks. He hadn't thought this would happen.
And the city carries on around them, past the darkened windows; the Void flows below the surface, murky and veinlike. And as Kirin returns home, his only thought is how badly he's misjudged this day.
He's in his bedroom again, and as always, he's forgotten how he's got there.
Everything keeps slipping away from him, but that's just the nature of things. He fumbles in the dark, and as he opens the door, he startles the maid.
"Oh," she says, and for a minute, that's all she can say in her alarm. "What happened?" she manages, clasping him by his arms. "What happened to you?"
He frowns, unable to remember the first question now. "I don't know," he tells her, not understanding why she's upset. His throat keeps hurting for some reason. He's weary now from being a collection of mysterious pains. "I... saw my bastard brother." He doesn't pronounce bastard derisively, though: this is simply how the cards have fallen. His brother is illegitimate, a product of emotions Kirin himself doesn't understand and probably never will.
"Brother?" the maid repeats. "Where?"
It's difficult to follow along with her questions. "In his apartment." He concentrates hard. Thinking for him now is like trying to imprison sunlight. The name eludes him now. "In... in... I don't know where."
She only stares at him, uncomprehending. This is probably another of his vivid dreams, she quietly decides. "Why are you covered in blood then?" she asks, though not unkindly, yet confused. She cups the side of his face gently, trying to bring him back down from these odd dreams to her.
Oh. That's what she meant by happened. "I saw the wires," he tells her brightly. The stiffened blood cracks as he tries to brush it off. "They were so interesting. They went into the walls and—" He spills into a haphazard, though enthusiastic recounting of the room with the wires in it, as she only watches him with a growing horror.
"Dr. Hypatia stopped by, like she said she would," she manages, putting her calmest voice on and reaching for his hand. "Let's go see her."
She guides him to the living room, where Lucia and Hypatia have been talking amongst themselves.
Lucia swears at the sight of the drying blood on Kirin. "I don't think that's his blood," she says abruptly. "What the hell has he been doing out there?"
"Let me find out," Hypatia says to her. "Come over here," she tells him gently, beckoning towards herself. He misses the momentary flicker of fear of what she might find there.
He complies, and she brushes some his hair back in what he has come to recognize as a sympathetic gesture. "Let's start at the beginning. What happened?"
The maid brings towels: one to place between him and the sofa and a few dampened wash towels. As she folds the towel onto the sofa and gently guides him there, Hypatia sets the wash towels on her lap and takes the topmost one. With firm yet soft stokes, she re-wets the dried blood on his face and begins to remove it as he tells her enthusiastically about the wires.
"You made a picture of the room?" Hypatia asks. She's still not sure how the wires fit into the story, but she's been his physician long enough to know that his stories are simply nonlinear now and that if there's any structure to it, she'll have to find it.
"Yes," he replies, missing the way Lucia watches him over Hypatia's shoulder, warily. "It's in the notebook."
"Could you show it to me?" she asks.
As he searches for the notebook, Lucia reaches for her lover's arm. "Alex," she whispers. "Alex, do you think he's the Crown Killer? They never caught him, and the sprees died down around the same time he got—"
"Lucy," Hypatia begins, more sharply than she intends, pausing as she rifles through her medicinal bag for some salve for a cut on his forehead. Kirin glances back at her at this, confused, his attention diverted. "You were looking for the notebook," she reminds him softly. Then, as he returns to his task, she composes herself. "I don't think so," she tells Lucia.
"Are you sure?" Lucia continues in that same hushed voice. "It makes more sense than the Crown Killer just quitting and returning to regular life like those murders never happened. I saw some of the silvergraphs of the last few ones printed in the Silver Spike. Gruesome stuff."
Hypatia swallows back her memories. Her heart is loud, and her fingers tremble on the small glass jar of salve in her bag. "The Empress has taken care of the Crown Killer," she replies quietly. "It won't happen again."
Lucia watches her with those dark eyes that tell Hypatia that decades of living in Karnaca have taught her not to count on the Empress for anything. "The Empress thinks a lot of things," Lucia says carefully. "But Dunwall is a long way from here." She pauses. "Who was it then, if not him?"
Hypatia pauses, pale, the truth on the tip of her tongue, as she considers the ramifications of honesty with the woman she loves. And then she backs down from that precipice, unable to live with it. "It doesn't matter," she replies lightly, clasping the bag shut. "It's not relevant here."
Hurt moves across Lucia's face. "Why would you hide this from me?" she asks. "Are you treating him too? The Crown Killer?"
But her words are just loud enough to disrupt Kirin's thoughts again as he moves to hand the open notebook to Hypatia.
"The Crown Killer?" Kirin repeats. There's a vagueness to his expression that Hypatia is praying doesn't resolve itself. In her terror of being found out, she thinks he glances at her, but in truth, he can barely remember who's in the room with him right now. "I remember her. She... brought me Sokolov. We were going to build more—"
"She?" Lucia says, surprised. "A woman?"
Kirin startles at the abrupt questions that interrupt the haphazard flow of his memory. "Yes," he manages, struggling to regain his hold on his own mind. "She—"
Hypatia places a hand on his shoulder. "It's late," she says gently, as she takes the notebook from him. "Did anyone hurt you in the room with the wires?" She's both thankful that his thoughts can be derailed so easily and shamed by that realization. Oh, this is proof of her inner rot, she fears. She studies the pages before her as Kirin struggles to remember.
"There were dead bodies," he says haltingly, his gaze drifting up to the ceiling, unaware that he now has Lucia's undivided attention. "Yes, there were dead bodies."
Hypatia blanches and closes her eyes for a moment, her heart heavy as she puts together the pieces. How long has this been going on? How many people had already died? She feels as thought she's trying to drain the sea with a bucket. What a foolish woman she's been, thinking her efforts changed anything. She's been worried about the bloodflies and an entire death cult has sprung up in Delilah's absence. The city keeps tearing itself apart, with or without her help. How many corpses, she almost asks, but thinks better of it. If I'd known earlier, I could have saved them. How could I have missed this?
Instead, she sets the notebook and its horrors aside with a restrained grace and focuses back on Kirin. "Was there someone else in the room with the wires?" she asks, trying her question again from a different angle.
He struggles to remember. "There was... a man on the bed." The maid gives him a worried glance and squeezes his hand in a brief moment of reassurance, but he misses this in his effort to remember. "And the bodies... and the... the..."
Hypatia nods. "It's alright," she says, resuming her task of cleaning him. "You hurt your head on the left side. Did you hit something?"
"I saw the bodies there," he replies simply.
"And that was afterwards?" she asks, beginning to understand his unusual narrative progression. She gently rubs some on the salve, and when he flinches from the sudden and unfamiliar pressure, she pauses. "I'm sorry," she says softly. "Does it hurt badly?"
He's forgotten the first question already. This evening's barrage of questions has left him unnerved and reminded that other people simply live in a different world. He puts his hands on his head and turns away from her. He doesn't know if his head in particular hurts. Everything hurts. Everything hurts, and he doesn't really understand what's going on. He wants to be by himself now, somewhere dark and quiet.
"It's... very loud," he replies.
Hypatia frowns a moment as she struggles to interpret this, and then, realization dawns on her. "Oh, of course. It's too loud. Would you like—what would help?"
She's trying to remember to give him the space to make his own decisions, small as they are. She's beginning to suspect that having the ability to make his own choices about his own body is just as important as being tended to, and perhaps it's her own way of trying to mitigate the damage from this newest occurrence that he can't fully articulate.
He's lost momentarily by this concession, but resolves to gather himself as best he can. He doesn't particularly like the stiffness of the dried blood against his skin, and what would make it go away would be—
"A bath?" he suggests.
Hypatia smiles back at him, a tired but bright smile. "That sounds good." She's hesitant to give this part of their relationship up, but she knows deep down that this is far better in the long term.
The maid rises to help him there, holding his hand as she guides him to the bathroom. There are dark circles under her eyes, a weariness from what she's seen. She cannot protect him from anything, it seems. So instead, she's careful to speak gently with him as she prepares a hot bath. The soiled clothes she soaks in cold water to remove the bloodstains, and when he's in the bath, she steadies herself.
He only watches the shadows as they flicker across the wallpaper, and she washes away the last of the blood from him, uncovering the tenderness in his throat.
"I'm sorry," she says to the gasps of pain and surprise, but he only stares at her with that expression of open hurt and she fears that he's in a place now where he doesn't understand that she doesn't mean to hurt him.
She sets down the washcloth and reaches for his hand.
"I'm tired," he tells her. That's the only word he can come up with now for the sheer exhaustion he feels from everything that's happened.
She squeezes it in reassurance. "Would you like to go to bed afterwards?"
He nods.
It's strangely nice to have his own decisions about his body respected, and as she tucks him in for the night, leaving a fresh cup of mint tea on the bedside table and folding the blankets around him just so, he's not sure what to make of it all. All the same, she makes sure he's cosy in bed, lightly fussing over him and brushing back the hair from his face, before she closes the door with a soft goodnight. And as he falls asleep, his head foggy from the stress of the day, he starts to feel safe there.
Hypatia remains in the living room for a while, intending on asking the maid a few more questions when she returns. She fiddles with the handle of her medicinal bag, uneasy with tonight's revelations and fully aware that her penance will never end. She will be paying the debt of being a killer for the rest of her life. When her impossible task kills her in the end, as it's intended to do, the city will only step over her corpse and carry on as it always has.
Lucia watches her lover, the shadows moving across her face. "Alex," she says at last. "Alex, you're overworking yourself again."
Hypatia smiles weakly. She knows. There's no other option, though. She has to prove herself redeemed for the rest of her life—if only to herself. She cannot bear the thought of putting down her self-appointed task. She cannot tell when things have been set to right, if they ever can be again. Those people had families, and those families were destroyed because of her. How many people would she have to help to cancel that out? Or could it ever be canceled out? People weren't chess pieces, able to be swapped out at will. What if people knew what she was and what she'd done? She'd never be able to atone enough then.
She'd say that helping the victims and their families of the death cult would be her final act of penance, but then again, there's always one more to do. And helping, well, helping others is simply safer that way. It's safer to be a helper.
"I have to do this," she tells Lucia simply, and she means it too.
"It will destroy you," Lucia replies. But maybe you want that goes unvoiced, too painfully to be spoken aloud. "Let me help, at least."
Lucia reaches for her hand, to reassure Hypatia that she will be by her side if only because she loves her so. She's old enough to know that she can't change people, only love them.
Hypatia smiles again, brighter this time. She raises Lucia's hand to her lips and kisses it softly. "You are too good for me," she replies, aware that everything comes to the surface in time.
The early morning rain wakes Kirin up. It taps playfully on the bedroom window, but he only stares at it, trying to put together the pieces of the morning. He's... he's... in a room. It's... raining now, but it's not yet light outside. He peeks behind the curtain to check this.
Everything is dark and silent, save for the rain. He pulls away from the sight and returns to the bed. His fingers find the blanket and twist the soft fabric into different shapes, idly. That soothes him somehow. That's good; he still has that at least.
But something is gone now, and he can't articulate precisely what it is. Some bygone hope, some wish, perhaps.
He's done this before, this fumbling together context from the environment. He just has to be patient: it'll all come back. But as he waits there in the dark, he doesn't feel like part of the world; instead, it's wholly alien to him—something he is learning to live with but not understand.
He doesn't know how long he waits there, hasn't known that for a while now, ever since the minutes and hours ceased to hold any meaning for him. When he gets cold, he curls under the blankets again, not precisely sure what to do in this strange hour. The sky lightens, but the steady rains do not abate. It's slow but insistent—the annual rains of Serkonos. Outside, nothing sings—the birds of Serkonos are not used to rainfall.
Something is gone, and he cannot name it. There is only the absence of it all to mark what had been. Something has been changed, and all he can do is to pick at this gnawing and yawning difference, groping along the outline for a hint of what had been.
The room tells him nothing.
He was afraid of this, is afraid of this. He cannot bear this, not again, not constantly. There's a block in his mind, something he cannot bypass, that keeps him from understanding everything. He can feel it there, that phantom wall, digging into his mind. The longer he thinks about it, the more distressing he finds it. He wants it gone. He wants it out of his head.
He holds his head in his hands, but that's not enough. He can still feel it inside his head. He paces around the room, his gut twisting from the stress. All he wants is just a little peace inside his own head, not this. Beyond the door, the maid is getting ready for the day, proofing the bread and sleepily bustling about the kitchen.
He wants to smash his head against the wall. Maybe that will make the constriction go away. But that's a bad thing to do. He would make other people afraid if he did that. He wouldn't particularly care if they're afraid of him or not, if not for the unpleasant reality that he gets treated much more harshly if they're afraid. And if he's honest, he doesn't particularly like seeing other people afraid now.
He sits down on the floor. It's cool against his hands. That's a start, he decides. Experimentally, he begins to rock himself. There's something in the motion that slowly soothes him. His breathing steadies.
A little while later, the maid comes in with her tea tray to collect the remnants of last night's tea and bring him a new one. She's confused at first that he's not still in bed, but finding him in that corner, she sets the tray down on the table and sits beside him. Still a little heart-weary from last night, she pulls him close to her as she rocks him gently, matching his earlier pace. She hums an old song as they stay there, together.
He can't remember what he was upset about now, and that's less of a relief that he'd thought it would be. "I lost something," he tells her, muffled. "It's gone now."
The maid reaches for his hand, and clasping it, says, "Would you like to look for it?"
"I don't know. There's a… there's a wall in my head, and I can't think anymore," he confesses. She's going to think he's really stupid now after that, he fears, that he's really not fit for anything, but she stays quiet considering this.
"Like yesterday?"
Perhaps. He doesn't consciously remember much of yesterday now. But something has changed between now and then. Something important has been irrevocably lost, and he can't understand what it is. It's so close, but it still eludes him.
She gives him time to sort things out in his head, rubbing his back gently. "It sounds painful," she offers at last. "To not be able to think as you'd like to."
"It wasn't always like this. I don't remember how it was before, but it wasn't like this." He knows just enough to know that this is unusual, abnormal even, but it's also the first time he's ever really shared what it feels like for him.
She pulls him closer to her. "I'm here," she says.
They lapse into a silence, as the rain continues to tap against the window. She smooths his hair periodically and rests his head on her shoulder. The low light gradually illuminates the room in a soft haze.
She considers the way his gaze keeps returning to the window. "Would you like to feel the rain?" she asks on a hunch. "It can be nice sometimes."
He hesitates, but she only smiles.
"I'll be there too, don't worry," she tells him, rising to her feet.
She guides him out of the cottage, but when it comes time to step into the rain, he lets go, unsure of it all. Unbothered by this, she stands in the rain to let him know it's safe and offers him her hand. Slowly, carefully, he ventures out to meet her, marveling at the change in sensation as the cool raindrops brush against him.
"It's beautiful," she says, holding his hand and shielding her face with her other. "You can see the way the clouds come in from the north during the rainy season." She points vaguely in the northern direction to illustrate this, but Kirin doesn't notice.
Instead, he's completely lost in this new experience. It's not that he hasn't stood in the rain before, far from it, but now, it simply feels so immediate, so inviting that he can't really focus on anything else. As he stands there, with the raindrops rolling along his skin, the world seems to say, how impossibly, terrifying wide this all is. The snow that drifts down from Tyvia turns into rain in Serkonos. Nothing is ever really extinguished; it only changes form. How could he not also be a part of the world too?
Instinctively he glances up towards the source of the rain, but only blinks when the rain splashes onto his face.
It's so strange to be a part of the world, still, after everything, but perhaps that's only because he'd let himself believe that he was somehow above it all. The view from the balcony of the Clockwork Mansion may have been the finest in Karnaca, but it didn't lend itself so well to really seeing everything—just the illusion of it.
Eventually they head back inside.
"There we go," she says, gently drying him off with a clean kitchen towel. "You did so well. Did you like the rain?"
He's not sure if he likes it or not. It was a departure from the early, dry days, and it was nice to feel something different for a change. Yes, he likes it on those grounds.
The maid smiles at him before leaving to check on the mail for the day. It's rare he gets any mail, but she likes to keep on top of it, just in case. This time, however, she retrieves a pale envelope with a red wax seal. She doesn't recognize the indentation left in the seal: very few officials in Karnaca would, and even fewer citizens.
It's a summons from the Empress.