Chapter Text
Raindrops fell from leaves and branches in the grove of towering trees. The sky grew faintly lighter.
Another gust shook down fall leaves and chilled Tyki.
Jasdero and Devit had disappeared into the dimness of an Ark doorway and passed from sight. Still Rhode stared into it as if the ordinary boards of a building in some American town transfixed her.
Tyki walked out of the grove to the first ridge of the rolling meadow. Through blurred vision, the Exorcists who’d captured Jasdero were no longer in sight; it had been the Allen Walker boy, of course, with his devastating sword. A burning sensation ran up the massive scar splitting Tyki’s chest.
No chance of a rematch, then, a fight with the enemy that might distract Rhode and himself.
For some reason, an automobile had stalled out in a dip in the meadow, but nothing near it moved save for the plume of smoke rising from the engine.
Tyki returned to the cover of the trees. He couldn’t leave Rhode, wouldn’t leave her.
With his sleeve he wiped his nose (the Earl would have been offended). He tried to ignore the tears leaking from his eyes.
A maelstrom of grief and fury raged inside him, worse than his sadness at Skinn’s death, although at the same time, he felt at a slight remove, as if a very thin piece of glass stood between him and the storm. His whole body seemed like it was on the verge of dissolving into tears, and he hated it. This was Joyd’s grief, wasn’t it? Only Joyd’s, unlike when Skinn had fallen? Why couldn’t he stop feeling it?
The brighter sky felt like a betrayal. Rhode’s eyes narrowed in pain as if she were the one who’d been stabbed.
Jasdero’s blood stained the bark of a mature oak and left copious fresh red at its roots.
Sacrifice. Consecration. What should have been an execution. The passing thought was unlike him, and therefore must have been Joyd’s.
“Are you going to kill us?” Jasdero had asked once as a child, in his human aspect. He hadn’t yet taken to wigs then, and his hair was black and shoulder-length. Jasdero, taking Tyki’s hand. His eyes between trusting and searching.
“Why would I kill you?” Tyki had answered, baffled.
Who could’ve imagined Jasdero would do this? Despite all the pain afflicting Jasdero and Devit, eclipsing Tyki’s own slow recovery, when he’d joined the search for Jasdero, Tyki hadn’t thought he'd run off with a specific goal. Much less this goal.
Their bond was so strong they killed the Noah of Bonds.
Tyki gave a barking cough to cover up a sob. He took off his top hat like he’d just arrived at funeral; it slipped from his fingers and fell to the muddy earth.
The twins had always been little hellions. A couple years into teenagehood, they’d decided their new hobby was antagonizing Tyki. Although it was obnoxious, Tyki didn’t mind too much, because his powers let him evade most pranks.
The twins were also terrible at hiding their feelings, Jasdero especially. So Tyki could tell that on some level, they cared about him too.
Jasdero sidling up to him after he’d opened last year’s Christmas gift (a tie) to say he’d picked out the color (yellow). Devit saying, “Okay, that’s pretty cool,” after Tyki walked out of a blazing church.
The twins in agony, left arms burnt and infected by Innocence. Tyki wrestling Jasdero away from Devit when he attacked his twin’s tainted left arm in his madness.
And, beneath these trees, Devit pleading for his life and Jasdero’s, begging Tyki to free them while Jasdero slumped barely conscious against the tree trunk Rhode had nailed him to.
Tyki wanted to kill them like they deserved for destroying Bondom. The purpose—the urge—welled up from deep inside him like the grief. He would have made it quick, out of consideration for their time together. A small mercy. One the twins didn’t want.
Tears pulsed from his eyes, warm for a moment on his cheeks.
Kill them, kill them, kill them.
A hunt would be more fun than killing trapped prey. Joyd stirred at the thought, forgetting a fraction of its grief. The hunt wouldn’t start for another month, but already Tyki wanted to corner the twins and rip out their matching hearts and end them.
If Tyki was lucky, he’d never catch them.
Tyki shook his head, but failed to clear the confusion. When he looked up again, Rhode had closed the Ark portal. Rhode’s tears hadn’t stopped, not for a moment, not in the real world after a brief respite in a dream of the ancient past, and she did sob, again and again, her thin chest heaving.
“Rhode,” Tyki said, and words left him.
Never mind the outcome of the game of hide-and-seek. Devit’s idea was a gamble, and the chips would fall where they’d fall. Maybe Devit would listen to Tyki’s advice, for once, and tilt the poor odds a little more in his and Jasdero’s favor by lying low.
“Tyki. They’re gone.” Rhode’s voice was stark and unguarded.
“Yeah. Jasdero has some pretty stupid ideas, huh?” And I’ll never underestimate him again.
At this inadequate attempt to cheer her, the sorrow only deepened in Rhode’s eyes. “If only we’d found him before he found Allen, then—then—”
“You started searching for him as soon as you knew,” Tyki said gently. Lacking Tyki’s slight feeling of distance, Rhode’s grief must be even worse, raw and impossible to withstand.
Over ground strewn with acorns, Rhode came to him and wrapped her arms around him. She pressed her face into his ribs and cried into his tuxedo jacket. “Jasdero and Devit are murderers,” she said in a muffled voice. “But I still….”
While Tyki had been recovering from his wound sustained in the Ark battle, tossing and turning in pain, interrupted by the twins’ cries once they’d regained consciousness, he’d had time to think too.
He’d counted himself lucky that Allen hadn’t destroyed his Noah Memory, lucky like a man who’d bet and forfeited his life before winning a final, unexpected, double-or-nothing game. As Rhode had told him afterwards, Joyd had taken control and fought off the Exorcists. Although grateful for the outcome, this brought him a new fear.
Living an ordinary life alongside his Noah life made Tyki complete. If Tyki lost either of those lives, those aspects of himself, life would hardly be worth living.
The Memory devouring his mind, obliterating his human self, and puppeting his body forevermore would be worse.
So despite the close call, Tyki had found it reassuring, in a way, that the Exorcist boy wielded a sword capable of killing a Noah Memory. Tyki would have an exit door if Joyd ever threatened to erase his human side for good.
That choice no longer remained to him. Now Tyki knew he could never, ever do that Rhode.
“Tyki, what’s family?” Rhode whispered into his chest.
Tyki hugged her slim shoulders. After everything he’d just witnessed, the first incarnations of Bonds and Dreams, Devit desperately staunching Jasdero’s blood, Rhode’s tears of unending grief, he couldn’t answer her question. But he found a few words, and meant them more than anything.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he told her, and cried his own human tears for Jasdero and Devit, who had been his family.