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Silvia Mercar didn’t remember the day her father first brought her sister home.
She didn’t remember the tension and stress that had supposedly filled the house in the following days. She didn’t remember the terse discussions she knew her parents must have had. She didn’t remember immediately taking to the idea of being an older sibling, despite her parents informing her on multiple different occasions that she’d done exactly that. It certainly sounded like something she would do, even at the tender age of four years old.
What she did remember were all the years since — the precocious and mischievous little girl Valentina had proven to be. Difficult, even at the best of times. Independent, headstrong, and forever frustrated at the world when it failed to meet her exacting standards. The very obvious pain that came to colour everything about her as it all began to wear her down, despite their best efforts to protect her.
More than anything, Silvia remembered her own desperation to reach out, to try to fix things, to give Valentina some small scrap of the validation she clearly craved. She remembered getting so angry on her sister’s behalf when she wasn’t permitted to sit with them for a family portrait — some heinous nonsense about politics that no amount of arguing seemed to change. She remembered the absolute heartbreak in their parents’ expressions as they came to the conclusion that it wasn’t a battle worth fighting.
She remembered being so incensed by all of it that she’d taken it upon herself to learn to paint. She remembered it being the only way she could think to make things better. She remembered ordering Valentina — in the way only a bossy older sister could — to sit for her, so they could make a portrait of their own. She remembered the multiple attempts she’d made. She remembered it becoming something of a painful tradition every year or so as she got better, with her sheer determination constantly warring against Valentina’s impatience and simple inability to keep still.
Times hadn’t changed all that much.
“You have to sit for me,” she declared, not looking up as she sorted through her extensive and eclectic collection of paints.
That earned her a long, tired groan.
“Silvia,” came the exhausted, impatient response — so much deeper than she remembered, to the point it was almost completely unfamiliar, even if the tone was the same. “I don’t have time.”
“You went missing for a year, you owe me this,” she shot back a little snidely, still not looking up. “And you owe yourself an updated portrait. You can spare a few hours.”
“I’m busy. Trying to save the world. I can’t stay that long.”
“Then you should have thought about that beforehand.”
“Silvia…”
Finally, she theatrically echoed the long, tired groan and straightened, whirling around on the spot to face her sister — no, her brother, now. Leaning against the door frame on the far side of the room, looking tired and impatient and exasperated. Wearing exactly the same expression he’d worn every time she’d gotten him to do this as children. Looking so painfully familiar and so utterly different at the same time.
Which meant that her collection of portraits were all now woefully inaccurate and out of date. And she wouldn’t — couldn’t — abide that. He knew that. She could see it in his face as he just stood there, watching her like a hawk with his arms folded across his chest, a slight smirk playing upon his lips almost in spite of himself.
He missed this. She knew he did. Past the front of annoyance, the nostalgia was evident. If he really was serious about not having time, he’d have put his foot down. But he didn’t.
And here they were.
“Val,” she called a little impatiently, all while making no effort at all to hide that she was smiling too. “You can’t expect- …wait. Is Val okay? Are you still Val? Is it weird to call you that?”
“Val’s fine.”
“You didn’t change it?”
“I did change it. But Val’s still fine,” he insisted softly. “I’m just making it short for Valentin.”
“Valentin,” Silvia repeated dryly, a small smirk playing upon her lips. “So you basically didn’t change it at all.”
He arched an eyebrow at her. “I thought that would be easier for everyone.”
“It’s your name. It shouldn’t matter how easy it is for other people.”
Quickly, he looked away and didn’t meet her eye. “Maybe I wanted to keep Val.”
Why was he being so defensive, all of a sudden?
“I’m just surprised,” she insisted, trying to keep her tone soft and gentle as she busied herself with preparing her paints, glancing over to him from behind the blank canvas and the easel between them. “I thought you hated being Val.”
He remained precisely where he was, leaning against the door frame, arms folded across his chest, staring adamantly out the window in what felt like a desperate attempt to avoid meeting her gaze.
He was so different now. Different, but also the same. It was a little odd, talking with him like this, how easily they seemed to slip back into that time-honoured sibling banter. How much they could poke and prod at each other, always with perfectly innocent smiles etched on both their faces. Somehow, it felt more natural now than it had for the past decade.
She remembered feeling like she was losing her sister. She remembered the snarling rage that had dictated every interaction they had in those last few years. She remembered the pervasive feeling that her head was going to get bitten off at any moment every time they tried to exchange words. Now that the initial shock of seeing him back — seeing that he was a him now — was gone, she was left with the inescapable feeling that she really had lost her sister. But she’d gained a brother too, and that was already shaping up to be a radical improvement.
It was an odd feeling. Sad and happy at the same time, somehow.
“…Rook,” he muttered finally. “It’s- my name’s Rook.”
Her eyebrows immediately rose. “Seriously?”
“Don’t start-”
“You named yourself after a chess piece? Because twenty years of playing chess against our mother wasn’t enough?”
“I didn’t-”
“No, sorry. It’s your name, I shouldn’t tease,” she muttered, mostly to herself, though she knew he could hear her. “It’s just… not what I expected.”
But what had she been expecting? Certainly none of this. Her sister — brother, he was her brother, his name was Rook and he was her little brother — had been missing for over a year. He’d almost destroyed Nessus and made himself a target of the Magisterium in doing so. He was never supposed to come back at all, for his own safety. The last thing Silvia had ever expected was to come home to any of this.
“I didn’t come up with it,” he insisted quietly. “A friend started calling me Rook as a nickname. It stuck.”
“Not very creative of your friend.”
“Yeah. Well. Not his fault. And I’m used to it now.”
Silvia let out a sigh, but nodded, returning her attention to organising her things, glancing from where her brother stood at the far side of the room, to the blank canvas before her, and back again several times. Her fingers hovering over a stick of charcoal as she silently debated with herself how exactly she planned to do this. If she wanted to simply start sketching now, or try to maybe coax him into a specific pose.
“You may want to sit down,” she all but ordered. “Because once I start, you aren’t allowed to move.”
He screwed up his face slightly at her tone, but didn’t bother to argue. They both knew there was no point in trying. Instead, he let out a long, loud, massively exaggerated sigh, making a show of just how tired he was and how much he was definitely humouring her as he crossed the room, all but collapsing onto the lounge, still very much in all the layers of padded clothes and hardened leather armour he’d first arrived in. Still half-hiding in that heavy purple mantle.
“Armour and all, huh?” she observed quietly.
“What, too difficult for you?”
“No, no, I like it. Really helps the dark and brooding tired mercenary look you seem to be going for,” she snarked back in his direction. “Very fitting for someone calling themselves a Shadow Dragon.”
Something briefly flickered across his expression at that. Something almost akin to pain, or regret, as he shifted ever so slightly. Suddenly confronted with the one thing they were all desperately avoiding, and unable to escape now that it was staring him in the face.
They hadn’t talked about it.
Evidently, he’d been hoping that they wouldn’t try.
“…right,” he managed to choke out, his voice hoarse and unsure as he refused to meet Silvia’s eye. “That.”
“Yes,” she said, still staring directly at him. “That.”
There was silence.
One long, terrible, utterly excruciating moment as he sat there and kept his focus anywhere other than on her, and she kept shifting her gaze from him to the canvas where she was sketching out his rough likeness and back again. Tracing out shapes that were both entirely too familiar to her, and also not at all. There was something ever so slightly different about his face, now. Something about his features seemed just that little bit sharper than before.
A physical change? Or had she just forgotten what he looked like in the year he’d been away? She’d drawn him so many times now, practised sketching his face over and over again, carefully capturing every part of it for well over a decade. She can’t have lost sight of him that quickly. And yet-
He was different. It wasn’t just his features. There was something in his expression, in how he held himself. For a moment, there was distinct pain in his eyes, in the way he still refused to so much as look in her direction. Something that might’ve been better described as guilt.
And then, just as quickly as it came, it was gone. Suddenly, that smiling, joking, kind little brother she’d been getting to know was gone. Replaced with the snarling fury of the younger sister she remembered. Suddenly, he seemed to regress right before her eyes.
Silvia had to resist the urge to sigh at the sight of it.
There you are.
“It’s not-”
“If you’re about to tell me that it somehow isn’t what I think, I’m going to throttle you,” she cut across him harshly, not having the patience for any of it.
Immediately, his mouth snapped closed as whatever retort he’d been trying to say suddenly died in his throat, and he was left to simply swallow uncomfortably. And Silvia found herself extremely close to wanting to throttle him anyway.
“Are you going to tell me I was wrong to do it?” he asked finally, his voice low and terse as his eyebrows raised, all but daring her to challenge him.
Silvia pursed her lips, thoroughly unimpressed by the question. “Don’t make this about that.”
“What else could it be about?”
For so long, Silvia just stared at him, disbelief plastered across every inch of her expression.
“Think about it. For two seconds,” she told him impatiently, summoning all her self-control just to keep from pitching her stick of charcoal at his head. “Maker, you cannot be this stupid.”
The indignant expression on his face told her one thing — he had absolutely no idea what she was trying to get at, and didn’t seem to be willing to even try to figure it out. Too hung up on the idea that she was, somehow, trying to tell him that abolition was wrong.
Anger and frustration rose up within her at that. When had she ever given him that impression? What had she done for him to think so genuinely little of her? Why had he decided that anyone who pushed back against him even slightly was an enemy?
“Do you really think I can’t put together how exactly this works?” she demanded impatiently, when he predictably failed to respond in any meaningful way. “That I don’t know how one lone elf would be able to get inside a Venatori slaving operation long enough to instigate a rebellion? That I don’t know you did this multiple times?”
There was a flicker of recognition in his face, and for a moment, she thought he genuinely paled as he realised exactly what she was insinuating. But, just as soon as it came, that worry and fear was gone, replaced only with an all too familiar aggression.
“I know what I’m doing,” he snapped back at her.
Silvia didn’t so much as flinch at his tone. She’d heard it a thousand times before, after all. It was nothing new. She was intimately familiar with these walls he threw up at a moment’s notice, the instant he felt like he was being attacked. And maybe she was attacking him. But someone needed to say something. Their parents certainly wouldn’t do it.
That left her.
She’d lived this already. And she had absolutely no desire to live it again.
“Say that to me again,” she told him flatly. “And maybe try to listen to the words coming out of your mouth this time.”
His lip immediately curled at that, and he quickly turned away, electing to ignore her rather than answer. Which, in her experience, meant he didn’t have one. Because he hadn’t thought about it.
Of course he hadn’t.
When does he ever?
“No, please,” she dared in a thoroughly scathing tone, using his silence to reinforce her point. “Enlighten me. Explain how detailing your extensive experience in repeatedly getting yourself trafficked on purpose is supposed to somehow reassure me. Tell me how any of this is supposed to help in any way.”
She didn’t know exactly how long he’d been doing it for, though now she was pretty sure she could make an educated guess. To his credit, he’d successfully kept his career with the Shadow Dragons carefully hidden from everyone, until Nessus. Suddenly, all the compulsive lying, the theft, the extended disappearances, the unexplained injuries, it all made a disturbing amount of sense. And the way he talked, he made it sound like it was something he’d been doing for years. He must have been doing this pretty much since he graduated from the Circle three years ago.
Which would make sense, wouldn’t it? It all lined up so perfectly. Silvia wanted to kick herself for not seeing it at the time. How could she have been so blind? But who looks at their little sister acting out and thinks maybe she’s joined a terrorist cell? Who has that as their immediate reaction?
He would’ve been… what, seventeen when this started? When he started making himself a target for slavers on purpose? When he started to put himself in situations so absurdly dangerous, it was a wonder he was even still alive?
She couldn’t stand the thought. She felt sick just thinking about it.
Still, he didn’t respond. Because of course he didn’t.
And the silence was deafening.
“Do you understand what this past year has been like?” she asked, throwing her arm out in a wide gesture at their surroundings. “Or did you somehow think no one would connect your actions to your own damned family?! We’re not laetan, Val! We’re soporati! The only thing we have protecting us is Dad’s position — which he nearly lost because you can’t seem to fathom that your actions have consequences!”
She remembered it. The fear, the confusion, and the paranoia that ensued in those days, weeks, and months. Their father utterly broken. Their mother too overwhelmed to speak. The gnawing dread every time she walked down the street, never sure if that would be the day she would be confronted with the sight of her sister’s corpse strung up. Never sure if one day, she’d find herself there, too.
“We didn’t know what happened. We didn’t know if you were even alive,” she told him, softer this time as the memories threatened to overwhelm her.
Someone had to tell him. Someone had to.
“I wrote a letter,” he murmured, his voice so low she almost didn’t hear it, as he still stared adamantly in the opposite direction, apparently unable to meet her eye anymore. “The Shadows should’ve gotten it to you.”
“Ah yes,” Silvia couldn’t help but drawl back, the coldness creeping back into her tone with each word. “Your letter. The one that consisted mostly of a vague apology and told us approximately nothing. We did get that. And nothing else. For a year.”
The letter they’d all read so many times, Silvia was pretty sure they could all recite it word for word. The letter she knew was still carefully hidden away in a locked drawer of their father’s desk, because he could never bring himself to destroy it, despite the risk having it posed. Because for so long, that letter was the only thing they had.
“Dad had to publicly disown you,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “Did you know that? He was forced to, in order to protect us and keep his position. Do you realise how much that broke him?”
Even a year later, their father hadn’t recovered from that. Even now, Silvia wasn’t sure he ever would.
“So no, Val. I don’t think you were wrong to do it,” she sighed tiredly. “I just wish you’d think.”
Therein lay the issue, didn’t it?
At least he seemed to understand that too, as he didn’t bother trying to argue with her. Silvia could only hope that meant she’d gotten her point across. There didn’t seem to be anything to say, after that.
So she didn’t. And he didn’t, either.
They both sat in a somewhat uncomfortable silence, him trying to make himself as small as possible on the lounge while looking pained, and her sitting with far too much tension, her eyes focused solely on her sketch as she teased out the finer details of his face. Trying to capture the happiness and confidence from before. Trying to ignore the gnawing sense of guilt over the fact that she’d just taken that from him.
But he had to know. He had to understand. She’d learned long ago that if she wanted him to change, she had to just come out and say it. He didn’t naturally pick up on these things. He didn’t know. And it was unfair of her to expect him to know. Their parents were just happy to have him back. Happy to see that he was happy. And she was too, but…
Well.
She was the one with an excuse to trap him in a room with her for hours on end. She was the one who was willing to pick at this. She was the one who couldn’t — wouldn’t — bring herself to ignore it, and pretend everything was fine. She was in the best position to force this conversation that needed to happen, but none of them wanted to have.
It had to be her.
And the silence went on.
It went on for what felt like years.
“You know you’re Dad’s favourite,” she murmured after what felt like and might’ve been an utterly excruciating eternity, still never taking her eyes off the canvas.
That earned her a quiet scoff. “Dad doesn’t have favourites.”
“He tries not to,” she said with a small nod. “And he doesn’t mean it maliciously. But it’s you. It’s always been you.”
She’d known that for a long time. Their father hadn’t been the same after everything happened. Most of it had been put down to stress. But Silvia knew what it really was. She recognised heartbreak when she saw it.
Valentina had always been their father’s baby. His little girl that he’d rescued from the battlefield. The child the universe had bestowed upon him. He’d always felt responsible for her, like it was his duty to give her the best life he could manage. He felt that way with them all, of course, but Valentina especially so.
Silvia remembered being a little resentful of that, when she was young. But as she got older and she saw the things her sister was subjected to, she’d come to understand why. And then, she’d started to do the same. That protectiveness had bled through to their entire family, as they all did everything they could to mitigate the damage. It was that same attitude that had led to all those portraits, after all.
And now that he was Rook…
Rook wasn’t any different.
“Nothing is more important to any of us than this family. And that includes you,” she told him softly, her eyes finally flicking over to meet his. “It’s always included you. I don’t know why you act like it doesn’t.”
He didn’t respond. She wasn’t sure why she expected him to.
And the silence went on.