your childhood home is just powder white bone

[dissono]

“Em,” he says. Sees a mirror of how strange it is to hear his voice in Emeric's face, in the way his hand rubs over his mouth and he turns away, leaving Gervais to stare fixedly at the back of his shoulders, taut with strain he may yet buckle under. Something should follow; frustration and unfamiliarity have him at a loss, no measured distance of edited words. No gloss and polish to make palatable the mess that Emeric's made, either, nothing to soften the blow or muffle the sound of its landing. Another man, probably, would already be shouting—

and for what, for what good.

He's come home and it's quicksand.

“I know,” Emeric says, as if any of that had been aloud. He can't suppose he's any more expressive than he was an hour ago, and must conclude instead that there's very little at this point he could say that his brother hasn't thought of already. “I know, but what else was I to do?”

Fucking breathtaking in its sincerity, he thinks.

He puts a hand over Emeric's on the sideboard. They lean there for a moment, shipwrecked and adrift, and then Gervais leads him away from the decanters with an arm around his shoulders.

“Em,” he says, with feeling, “y-y-y-y-you great fool.”

The steward—he is unclear on Guilfoyle's purpose, but very clear on the wisdom of asking after it—looks in, once, while Emeric weeps into his shoulder. Hardly time for it to become uncomfortable; the door closes, so soft Emeric never notices, and it settles, unsettling, the awareness of how much to which he was not privy. How different normal has long looked to the way he imagined, how he'd seen shadows between the lines and never known how deep, how dark. How stained.

He remembers: tears, not his, his brother's shaking hands pressed to his cheeks, how Em had said don't be frightened and he'd said I'm not and had not been, suddenly, when it became abruptly necessary that one of them not be.

I'm not, any more, he thinks. He has been afraid so long it has crystallized into something else entirely, and he thinks: at least something has, knowing his own stillness too well.

Emeric has never been still; he sees that, now. Has always been afraid.

He wants to say—something comforting. Something reassuring. This, too, a lifetime in the Circle has taken.

Emeric says, “I've made a dreadful mess of your shirt, Ger—” and he says in turn, “for pity's sake,” with unexpected, exasperated clarity, and the conversation they should have slips away like smoke. He stays until Emeric sleeps. He talks quietly with Guilfoyle about supplies, about the Vauquelin finances and what to expect in Kirkwall and what he can and cannot promise his niece her father can do for her.

He almost leaves with the dawn; lingers. Presses his hands to his brother's face in farewell, doesn't tell him anything but wills him steady, and leaves the way he did as a child: without looking back.