abraxaslogs | [closed] they told me all of my cages were mental

The change is subtle, but after going through these same steps a hundred times — positioning himself, correcting his stance, Kyle pushing at different points — he can feel the difference. A tiny grin flickers across his lips. His delicate pride is as easy to buoy as it is to break.

"I think so."

Wilhelm had begun to regret agreeing to Kyle's suggestion that they meet every day to train, after dipping his toes in with semi-weekly sessions. But it could be that taking the plunge is the only way to make any real progress. That's bad news for his hopes of ever sleeping in again, but better news for his self-confidence.

"So...now what?"

He smiles back. Confidence is good. He'll need it in a moment.

Ideally, Kahlil would have a second student at the same level as Wilhelm, have them practice against each other. But the only person that comes to mind is Jack and that seems like a bad idea. Also, ideally, they'd be doing this in the training area with equipment, but that would've been too public for Wilhelm.

He straightens where he stands.

"Now, I want you to try to hit me."

It doesn't occur to Wilhelm that Kyle has chosen this corner of the castle grounds to cater to him. He just figured it was what Kyle wanted, for whatever mysterious reason. Maybe practicing outside in the cold is supposed to sharpen Wilhelm's alertness. Maybe he just likes the quiet. Wilhelm would be equal amounts touched and embarrassed to learn that Kyle has correctly assessed his discomfort with having eyes on him.

The next instruction doesn't exactly surprise him — he's supposed to be learning how to fight. But he balks at it anyway. He's thrown a real punch — not play fighting — exactly once in his life. He knows there are all kinds of things he's supposed to assess in his opponent before he makes a move, but he has no clue what any of those things are.

"Okay," he finally answers, eyeing Kyle with the intense focus of someone cramming the night before a test.

Then, collecting himself with a steady breath, he lunges forward with his fist swinging.

Dayyid would batter and humiliate a boy like Wilhelm in front of an audience, and maybe he might eventually mold him into a warrior if he didn't kill him first. Kahlil doesn't wish to emulate his teacher in that way. He'd rather be the teacher he wished he'd had, back then.

Wilhelm swings and Kahlil sidesteps, catching his forearm.

"Good, you passed the first test," he grins. "I worried you might argue more than that."

About even throwing a real punch.

He releases Wilhelm's arm.

"Now, pay attention too where you've just shifted your weight... feet, knees, hips, shoulders, forearm, fist..."

He starts launching into an explanation of how that balance and equilibrium he's been learning the past couple of days applies here, how it translates into more power behind the swing.

At Kyle's prompting, he looks down to study his own body. Slowly he resets his stance, his growing familiarity making the position easier to shape himself to now. Then he tries again. And again. Punch, catch. Swing, block. After — actually, Wilhelm doesn't know how much time has passed, or how many punches he's tried, but — a while, he's started to build an understanding of why he's not landing a hit. That's something.

When Kyle releases his arm this time, Wilhelm just sags out of position. His cheeks are pink with exertion, his shirt damp in patches with sweat.

"Can I just...take a break for, like, a minute?" he asks, pushing his hair back.

Kahlil gives him a look over before nodding.

"Of course."

Along with everything he's learning, it's good to recognize his limits. Kyle releases him with a step back toward the base of the tree. There sits a little pack, and from inside he pulls a waterskin.

"Here."

He gives it an underhand toss in Wilhelm's direction.

He catches the waterskin with only a bit of fumbling, his limbs tired from the long drills.

"Thanks."

Plopping himself down in the grass, he brings the waterskin to his lips and tilts his head back to take a long draught. When he's done, he contemplates Kyle for a moment. After all this time, the man remains more mystery than not.

"Kyle...how old were you when you started training?"

After a moment he sits down next to Wilhelm, one knee propped up and the other stretched out. He leans back and looks up at the morning sky. Soon it will be much colder and darker at this hour.

He tilts his head toward Wilhelm at the question.

"A few years younger than you." Might not be entirely accurate, but close enough. He doesn't want Wilhelm to bad for him, or imply anything that might make him think progress will be impossible since he's starting older. But maybe that's not why he's asking. He picks at some of the neatly cut grass, plucking a blade of it out of the dirt.

"I didn't get along with any of the other acolytes, or my teacher. I ran away a lot."

It is a little discouraging to hear, but he already knew that he was behind from the start. By many measures, he's lived a softer life than — it seems to him — all the other Summoned. What does it say about him, that he couldn't handle even the easy life he was dealt? Wilhelm tries not to think about it, so naturally that means he thinks about it all the time.

As he passes the waterskin back to Kyle, surprise colors his expression.

"Really? I have a hard time picturing that."

Unintentionally mirroring him, he starts picking at the grass too, twirling a faded green blade between thumb and forefinger.

"You're just so...I don't know, even-tempered."

Even-tempered? There's a flicker of surprise from him too, then he ducks his chin and laughs, shaking his head after.

"Maybe now. Back then I was proud, and selfish, and took every slight to heart. My teacher wanted to strangle me most of the time," he says this with grin, like a joke and not the actual fact that it is: Dayyid would have murdered him for his sins and defiance had he not desperately needed Kahlil. From this distance of space and time he can laugh at it now, though.

"I used to think the other students were jealous that I was better than them, but really I was probably just a jerk."

He shrugs at that. This might be the first time he's had the time and access to his memories to self-reflect on this. He glances over at Wilhelm.

"What about you? Did you enjoy your school?"

As Kyle denounces his younger self as a jerk, Wilhelm shakes his head with a chuckle. He tries to imagine a teenage Kyle as his classmate and wonders if they would have gotten along. Hillerska was full of egos jostling against each other, but Wilhelm had learned the exhausting art of getting along with people you don't necessarily like, of laughing with someone at a party even if nothing they say is especially funny.

Of course, his posh boarding school must be a very different world from what Kyle describes. It sounds like some kind of military academy. In answer to his question, he nods.

"I didn't want to go there at all at first, but...it grew on me. I met some good friends there."

Wistfulness creeps into his voice, bitter and sweet.

"The actual school part was okay. It was just math, literature, history, all of that." A pause, in which he peels his blade of grass apart down the center. "Is it weird that sometimes I miss just...going to class?"

He can better imagine Wilhelm's school experience than he might've the first time they met. Every conversation he has with the Summoned from Nayeshi have brought forth more memories. He sees a blonde-haired young man of Wilhelm's age, hunched over a small desk in a room full of other teenagers seated the same in rows, colorful maps and posters on the walls.

A different education than what he'd been given at Rathal'pesha, sure, but the topics are all the same: he learned to count and multiply, to understand and navigate from maps, to read and write for purpose of studying scripture.

He watches Wilhelm strip the blade of grass. They have the same little habits, too.

"No, not weird." It's missing the familiar, isn't it? No matter how much your other feelings about it. Missing the mundane. He tilts his head back to, letting out an exhale to watch his breath form to mist in the early autumn air.

"I miss my home sometimes too, even though I would never want to go back."

Even if he could.

That's exactly what it is. Wilhelm had never been an especially enthusiastic student. He put in the requisite amount of effort to pull decent grades, because his parents expected success, but how he did in school never really mattered. His whole life was already mapped out for him — a B minus in Algebra II wasn't going to change anything about his future. He misses the ordinary. The old ordinary.

There are lessons to attend in the castle, yes, but they all revolve around magic — a festering wound for Wilhelm.

"You wouldn't?"

It's not surprise that crosses his countenance this time, but contemplation. Having finished shredding the grass, he plucks another blade.

"I guess...I'm not sure. I don't think I really belong here." A confession he quickly stumbles on from. "But I actually have more freedom now than I did at home. If given the choice..."

The unknown end of the sentence stretches into silence as he winds the fresh blade of grass around his finger.

"I don't know. It's easy to stay when you have no choice, but I'd probably feel guilty if I didn't go back."

To that last part he just nods in understanding. Wilhelm lost his brother, but he still must have other family back home. The friends that he mentioned just a moment ago. Connections that aren't easy to leave behind.

And it's more than fair to say that Wilhelm's been noticeably unhappy here for a while now.

"Are your teachers and family strict?" It's a strange thing to say that he has more freedom in the castle of all places than he did back home. All Kahlil constantly sees around himself are wards and barriers stopping him from accessing the Gray Space and the ease of travel. Eyes on them constantly, too. The only real freedom of a kind they have is in Horizon.

He's unhappy here, but he was unhappy back home too. They're different kinds of unhappy, maybe, but rooted in the same ground: loneliness. Despite the friends he spoke of, there was only one he felt he could actually talk to. That was Simon, whom he'd lost because of the sharp wedge of his duty dividing them. I hope you have a nice Christmas. And despite the friends he's made here, he can't shake the feeling that he's fundamentally on his own. His problems are a burden nobody else can carry; his feelings are alien.

Realizing that it's a strange thing to claim, Wilhelm tries to explain:

"My mom basically has my whole life planned out for me. If I go off-script even a little bit, she freaks out. I have to meet her expectations. I have to do it, because there's nobody else. Because Erik..."

It's still hard to say. That his brother is dead. Slowly, he gathers a breath and lets it go. The bit of grass he's been twisting and untwisting from his fingers falls back to the earth. Against his chest presses the weight that often comes chained to thoughts of the future, even now, with all his mother's expectations worlds away.

"Here at least I have some choice about what I do."

But that's overwhelming in its own way. Once, deep in an evening at the pub, he'd giddily proclaimed to Rhy that he could be anybody, anything. So far, he hasn't made much of that.

A mother having that much control over a son would be considered strange in Basawar. It'd be the father putting that pressure on his male children, especially the oldest. He wonders what it is that Wilhelm has unwillingly become heir to within his family. A replacement for the brother he's still grieving.

He watches Wilhelm's hands as he gives up on fidgeting with the blade of grass.

"What would you choose to do with your life, if it wasn't in your mother's hands?"

Not the impossibility of his brother returning to life but - what would he do if he returned and found his responsibilities gone?

At first, he has no answer. When people talk about what you do with your life, they invariably mean career, ambitions, passions. None of which he possesses the vaguest idea about.

"I don't know," Wilhelm admits. He just knows that he doesn't want to be king.

Now that he's no longer in motion, the cold sinks in, and he curls his hands up into his sleeves a bit. For a moment, he studies Kyle with a guarded expression, measuring if he's someone safe to confide in. Then his eyes settle on the grass beside him, as his fingers fidget at the edges of his sleeves.

"There was...someone important to me. We couldn't be together, because everything got in the way. So..." He shakes his head with a little shrug. "I don't really care about anything else. I'd just want to be with them."

There are markers in the language of his answer that Kahlil recognizes. Someone important to me. Them instead of her. It reminds him of one of his last conversations with Yu'mir, about how easily she assumed his own someone was a woman, a prostitute no less. That couldn't be further from the truth, but he couldn't tell her that the note he'd left earlier for that day was for a man, even if his intentions weren't romantic. It would have been suspicious in an already precarious situation.

The other truth was, though, that he did feel something for the man he worked for. And to confide in Yu'mir... he doesn't know what would have gone over worse: that he was reporting to a rival gaunsho's captain, or that he's attracted to men.

It was always, always better to let people assume what they naturally wanted to, in both parts of his life. In Basawar, in Nayeshi -

Here, it's different.

There was...someone important to me. We couldn't be together, because everything got in the way.

"I was roommates with someone for almost a year," he starts, meeting Wilhelm's guarded gaze. His own expression is regretful, and his brow pinches slightly. He glances up at the bare tree branches.

"He was very handsome, and kind, and smart. Sometimes I wondered what it might have been like if we met under different circumstances - I think he thought I was very strange, and I... didn't want to make things more awkward."

It's not Alidas he means, but John.

Jahn, Jath'ibaye. The Rifter. Kahlil's whole reason for being. The god he failed to kill, the god gave his life to. But for almost a year, on those nights and mornings they sometimes spent watching baseball or eating breakfast, he wasn't the Kahlil. He could pretend to be only Kyle, and John was just John - a graduate student obsessed with environmental sciences and a sports team that never seemed to win anything.

He looks up when Kyle describes his erstwhile roommate as very handsome, and the walls comes down to reveal a look of stark recognition. Wilhelm knows all too well the ache of what could have been, which is only sharpened by the glimpses he got of it. A collage of stolen moments with Simon.

Even now, he hardly ever frames the what ifs in terms of what he could have done differently. In his mind, he had no choice but to make the statement denying his involvement in the video — one of those stolen moments that got taken from him and passed around online. Something tender that got twisted into a scandal.

He frames them in terms of his circumstances, to which he was helpless. Because he's a prince, he couldn't be himself. Because he's a prince, he couldn't be with Simon.

"What...ended up happening?"

The question stumbles out hesitantly, because Wilhelm supposes Kyle wouldn't be telling this story at all if it had a happy ending. There would be no what might have been.

He reads Wilhelm's expression, and his heart hurts for the young man. Basawar might be more extreme in its ways, but Nayeshi has its own flaws and cruelness.

At the question, he just shakes his head again.

"Nothing. We separated and I lost track of him. When we met again... we were both different people."

It's a version of the truth. John got away from him, and thirty years passed in the White Space. Two more years of not realizing that the Rifter and Jath'ibaye were the same person. And when they met again he couldn't recognize the young man he'd grown to love in the warlord that held him by the throat and threatened to kill him.

It was only fair, he supposed. There's something wistful in his expression.

"How did you two meet?"

"Oh," is all Wilhelm can say, more exhalation than solid word. The thought that somebody you love, somebody with whom your own sense of self has become intertwined, could one day become a stranger pinches in his chest.

"It was at school. I saw him singing with the choir. He just looked so happy up there, and...I don't know, free."

Like he was floating on top of the music he was creating. Peacefulness momentarily alights on Wilhelm's expression as he remembers it. With a quiet sigh, he sinks back into pensiveness.

"After that...I looked for every excuse I could find to talk to him."

Fussing with a strand of hair that hangs in his eyes, he sneaks Kyle a glance. Then his gaze floats up to the sky, which at this hour is filling in blue. Though it's still hard to share what he'd held in the deepest privacy for so long, he feels safe opening up to the man beside him.

"I didn't really understand it at first."

The enormity of his feelings. How a brief conversation or a shared laugh could make his whole day, and somebody else beating him to the seat nearest Simon could ruin it.

He remembers what it was like to be Wilhelm's age, the intensity of his own feelings the first time he met the gaze of another young man in town and recognized the same wanting that he'd tried to ignore. His face is blurred by years, but at the time he could recall every detail, and at night he could play back every conversation and every small touch they shared.

How it could make him feel whole and hollow at the same time.

There are those other memories, too. The ones that don't fit, that make no sense. The ones where he watched John from a distance in Rathal'pesha, not Nayeshi. Where they went months without being able to talk and it was maddening. There's more, so many more intimate details that he tries not to fixate on. Especially now, here. He makes Wilhelm his focus again, watching him as he seems incapable of sitting still - or meeting his gaze for too long.

"Your mother didn't approve?"

Wilhelm shakes his head, fingers tightening on his knees.

"It was...complicated."

Which is why he spends a moment sorting out how to explain without forfeiting any details about his title, which he prefers to leave behind him as much as possible.

"I don't think she would've cared that I'm...you know, except that I'm supposed to get married and have kids someday. Carry on the family legacy. That's all that matters to her, legacy and tradition."

And in those narrow confines, there was no room for a crown prince who loves another boy. Bitterness bites in his voice. He had tried to balance both, his duty to his family — to Erik's memory — and his own desires. If he denied the video, the heat of the media circus would cool down, and he could continue seeing Simon in secret.

Except it hadn't worked that way. I don't want to be anyone's secret.

Even if Wilhelm speaks around the details, what he says makes Kahlil think of the gaun'im. Blood and power meant something different to the nobles than it did the church.

And Wilhelm's older brother.

"That's a heavy burden to carry." Even without being the way that they are. He lets out a breath and closes his eyes for a moment.

"I can see what you mean about having more freedom here."

No one in Thorne cares if they're with a man or a woman. They can be with whomever they want, without fear - to a degree. There's no promises that Thorne might someday use those relationships against them.

He keeps that to himself, though. Wilhelm has enough to worry about.

It's a heavy burden to carry, and yet he feels that it shouldn't be so hard. He should be capable. Erik was capable. Inside of him tangle so many things. Relief that he can set aside the weight of the crown looming over his head. Guilt for that relief, for failing his brother. Frustration that his newfound freedom comes at the cost of losing any chance he had to be with Simon.

Wilhelm hums in acknowledgement of Kyle's words, which feel something like forgiveness, then settles into silence. It's the sort of silence that follows after you've pulled yourself open for someone else, and you both sit there in your shifted perspectives of one another. You take a minute to get used to being a more honest version of yourself.

Hauling himself back up to his feet, he stretches his limbs and releases a breath.

"I think...I'm ready to try again, Kyle."

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ushiri - 2023-01-06 21:41 (UTC) - Expand