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Claude’s first memory is, like most people’s first memories, a fickle thing. Like a fingerprint on glass. It wavers, upon recollection, as if seen through the haze and smoke above a fire.
He is sitting on a carpet of fine make, his small hands picking clumsily at the hand-loomed artworks below his fingers, detailed in red and yellow and green. He is in a room in his childhood home, where sunlight streams through arching windows, illuminating the intricate tiling and lush fabric around him in gleaming gold. It is summer, maybe. The air is fresh with the smell of flowers.
The memory wavers, like flames and like water, and he remembers looking up at eyes like his. Shahid pulls him forward, small-hand-in-smaller-hand, his scuffed knees pressed into the beautiful carpet. “I will carry you if you are tired,” Shahid says. His green eyes flash and the golden clasp of his braid winks in the sun. “You must come, Khalid. It’s late.”
This is where the memory hangs and sticks, like dew on a leaf or like ash on a tongue. He is on Shahid’s back as they walk through a hallway lined with fine carpet and tile and gold. Archways of pale marble line one side of their route, and low shafts of sunlight shine through each one, slipping over the brothers in a predictable rhythm as they pass by. One, two, three. It loops forever, their silent trek.
He does not remember where they were going that day, nor what had happened beforehand. He doesn’t even remember where in their sprawling home the memory takes place. He simply remembers the moment itself; his cheek pressed to the nape of Shahid’s neck, his nose tickled by his brother’s sun-drenched hair, and their steady pace.
It’s funny how memory works sometimes.
They linger on the battlefield for a short while, the Locket looming behind them. It doesn’t give Claude nearly enough time to think, but it gives him time to unstring his bow. Failnaught is a strange thing and Claude is not sure it even needs to be cared for in the typical way, but the task is methodical and mindless, a habit ingrained in him since childhood—more for his benefit than the benefit of the bow.
The sun is sinking lower by the time he runs his gloved fingers over the arm of the bow, feeling every smooth gnarl and knot through the thin fabric. When he pulls back, there are streaks of sticky red-brown on the palmar side. His heart stutters.
Archers do not see very much blood in combat. It is simply a side effect of their placement on the field. They are rarely close enough to their targets to see the whites of their eyes, let alone their blood. But sometimes things slip through the cracks. Norms are broken.
This is not the first time Claude has exited a battle with bloodstains on his clothes or on his weapon. There is blood on Failnaught and it could be anyone’s. He fought many people today. It could be anyone’s. It’s not necessarily—
“Do I have blood on my—my face? Me—Anywhere?” He asks in a rush. His voice is low but not a whisper; he is no sinner in a church, though he is panicking not unlike one.
Shez looks up from where he’s piling swords into a cart. There’s a brief flash of emotion in his visible eye, something like pity, which causes nothing but a sharp pang of fear—fear and tight anger —to stab through Claude’s insides like a nail.
Because Shez was there. Shez knows, or at least suspects, the true breadth of what Claude has done today. Shez understands what it is—who it is—that Claude really sent tumbling off that cliff. Shez is reading something into Claude’s clumsy words that he himself does not want to acknowledge.
Shez makes a motion, from his collarbone up to his cheek. Once he points it out, Claude swears he can feel it. “A little here,” he says. “Just a little. It’s not yours, I think.”
That hadn’t been what he was worried about.
Claude grips Failnaught tighter, until the ivory creaks and the seams of his gloves tighten too.
“I… Claude,” Shez begins, “do you—”
Claude slings Failnaught back into its holster with an unceremonious clatter and Shez falls silent. After a moment, he goes back to packing. Claude glances down at his palms. Tacky, brown blood now stains both gloves where he’d gripped the bow. Old blood, fresh enough to still be wet, has seeped into the weave of the fabric. It smells of iron.
He takes off his gloves and tucks them away. He turns his palms away at his sides. He doesn’t want to see what he’ll find if he looks at them now.
Dusk has fallen by the time their promised feast starts in earnest. It had been his idea, hadn’t it? But the more Claude thinks about it, and the more he watches their men congregate where the promise of hot food and good company shines like a small sun, the more he feels his stomach turn at the thought.
So he stands apart, letting the cold mountain air caress him.
He does not want to be alone, truly. Being alone means thinking about today. Thinking about today means…
Well, it’s no matter, because the only thing he’d like to do less than be alone right now is celebrate, so he walks away.
He makes his way out into the empty streets of the Locket’s castle town, tight alleys and darkened residences closed-up for the celebrations. The sun still shines long shafts of muted gold through the gaps in the buildings, but the place is dim and cold in the shadows.
Claude feels the silence press in on him, and suddenly he wants to be anywhere else but here, with his thoughts. Maybe he should go back to the party, ask around and find out where he can take a bath in these parts because he still hasn’t taken one, has he? He’s still in his clothes from the battle, still covered in grime and dust and that splatter of blood on his collar he doesn’t want to think about. He still hasn’t looked at his hands.
Arterial spray, his brain supplies unhelpfully. That might be the source of the blood. He can’t remember where he’d hit him in the end. The chest? But if he’d snagged an artery that would explain the spray on his collar. He’d been standing close enough to Shahid when he’d killed him to be hit with something like that, hadn’t he?
Oh. There it is, he thinks. That’s it, isn’t it.
The world seems to tunnel around him, going dark and cold at the edges. Claude stops walking, stock-still where he stands in the silent streets. He feels the blood on his collar and his neck burn like desert sand. The blood he knows is on his hands—the blood he will not look at—aches and burns and cuts.
He killed Shahid. He killed his brother.
He looks at his hands. They’re clean, he’d been wearing gloves so of course they are, but the blood on them still burns, and there is nothing left to distract him from the reality that he’s just killed—
His fucking brother.
The thing about Claude’s brothers is that there had been a time in his life where he had actually gotten along with them. His earliest memories are hazy, soft recollections of the palace walls in summer, playing with brothers only a few staggered years his senior in the hanging gardens and cold-tiled halls of their shared home…
Then they’d grown up, one after another, and the reality of the world and the hierarchy they’d been born into had settled over them one by one like fog from the sea, heavy and obscuring. Almyra’s seat of power is inherited competitively. Young, soft Khalid has every bit as much right to the crown as his eldest brothers, already tall and strong and far ahead of him by the time he’d learned this fact. How cruel, some might say, for a system to count on brothers becoming rivals, on the hunting of kith and kin in pursuit of a father’s approval.
From a young age, there was an acknowledgement that they would not all live to see the next king of Almyra crowned.
Despite this—despite… everything—Claude knows he’d loved Shahid at one point, as brief as that time had been. He’d loved him very much, because he was a few years older than him and spoke confidently and was good at playing the hero in their games. Oh… he’d certainly loved him, and maybe Shahid had loved him too, in the scant years before their circumstances soured any other emotion into hot resentment. The point seems moot now.
Now, Claude wonders if he’d ever stopped loving Shahid at all. He’s always been a little weak like that—a little too protective, a little too possessive, of the things that are his. It doesn't feel worth dwelling on, with one of his things lying broken at the bottom of a ravine, but he dwells anyway. He never thought he was much of a dweller. It figures he’d simply not found the right thing to let stick in his brain and burn through his synapses until he felt like vomiting.
His hands are shaking. They’re so clean, but they’re still shaking. Why?
Claude staggers further into the empty streets, down a side road where pale, starchy sheets flutter in the cool mountain breeze. It smells fresh here, and the animal recesses of his mind cling to the airborne sterility. Anything to be clean , to wash away this oppressive feeling of filth that seems to cling to his skin like sweat and oil. There’s a small awning by a washhouse, and a squat, wide basin pressed up against the wall under it. He makes his way over, feeling the way the day-old water chills the nearby air as he approaches. He kneels in the street.
His bare hands come up to grip the sides of the washbasin.
He looks down at his wavering reflection, waiting for it to settle. His own eyes look back at him, haggard and shadowed. His braid slips from behind his ear to hang over the darkened water like a noose. His teeth are clenched. The whites of his eyes are visible.
He and Shahid… they have—or, had, now—the same light freckling on their upper lip, the same heavy lashes, the same hereditary little tremor in their fingers that made bows so hard to handle when they’d first started training with them. It’s why Shahid had always favoured axes, why Claude had become addicted to proving points so early in life.
He’d looked Shahid in the eyes when he’d done it and it had been his own eyes he’d seen looking back. Green, like the reeds by the rivers at home. He and Shahid had had the same eyes, though they’d technically been Shahid’s first. They’d had the same family, after all, and it had been the inherited quirk of their father’s jaw and cant of their father’s lips that had snarled last words at Claude on that cliffside.
It was their father’s blood, Claude’s blood, the blood they shared, that had burst from Shahid when Failnaught’s arrow tore through his chest. It is that blood that stains Claude’s hands now—his spotless and calloused palms, drenched and dripping with his brother’s blood.
He can see it. Specks of red, like grout, in the tight edges of his nails. Faint, in the seams where skin meets chipped keratin. Cracked red in the pads of his fingers, the countless tiny valleys of his fingerprints and creases of his skin. Small. Red.
It’s not real, though. There is no blood on his hands. Not in reality. It’s not real. It’s not fucking REAL—
Claude plunges his hands into the water.
He gasps at the cold even as he begins to work his fingers into each other. He washes his hands with no small amount of manic frustration—desperation—scrubbing at imagined blood that only seems to shine brighter, a violent cochineal, beneath the film of the waste-water. He presses the pads of his thumbs to his fingers one at a time, pushing and scrubbing at deep stains he cannot see. He pushes too hard, scratches too firmly, catching on bruised skin and hangnails. It hurts—fuck it hurts—but he can’t stop.
He scratches his palms, harder and faster, a vicious back-and-forth that rubs his skin raw and hot. All it does is make them hurt more. All it does is make them redder.
He splashes the water up to his neck, working it into where he feels crusting blood on his collar and his skin. He scratches and claws and his pulse hammers away like a jackrabbit beneath his fingers. He gasps out in pain as he draws blood—his own this time—and he finds himself falling forward. He grips the side of the basin, the raw skin of his palms stinging where the rough wood digs into them. The pain is anything but grounding, but it stops him. Silence stretches.
Water drips from his arms and his neck into the basin. One, two, three, in an irregular rhythm. Over and over.
His neck feels hot, and he watches mutely as droplets of his blood fall from skin rubbed raw, drifting into the murky water until they fade away completely.
He wonders how many times a single truth can dawn on him in one day. He wonders if it will hurt this much every time.
Shahid is gone, and there is not a thing Claude can do to wash his blood from his hands.
The first sob slips from his clenched jaw like the quiet whine of a dying animal. The second is much the same. Claude feels his throat burn, his eyes sting, his lips tremble. He tries in vain to keep everything inside, to hold it together.
Then he leans over the basin and throws up.
He coughs as he staggers away, falling to his knees somewhere secluded and shadowed. He digs his fingers into the cobbled street beneath him, head bowed almost straight to the floor. He doesn’t know where he is at this point, or how far he is from his people.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers—chokes—voice wet and tired and clenched through trembling teeth. “I’m so sorry.”
He’s not sure who the apology is even for. Shahid? His father? Maybe it’s really just aimed toward himself. How selfish.
He lets out a great and terrible sob, and finally the grief rips itself from his lungs in full force.
“I didn’t want to,” he hisses into the cold stone. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. This isn’t what I wanted…”
In the morning, Claude will wake up and piece himself back together. He will carry what he has done out into the world that has made him what he is and he will reap whatever consequences may come with his head held high.
But for now, he grieves where no one can see him.
He cries with his whole body, great wracking sobs and stuttering breaths. He dare not scream, but the urge claws at his windpipe all the same. What escapes him are, instead, whispered words. pressed tight between his lips and the cold cobblestone like a confession.
It’s so cold here, in the mountains. He hates it. He hates the cold. It’s warm in his home—the home where he grew up. It’s warm in those halls where sun shines brightly through the archways and the world is drenched in gold.
I will carry you if you are tired.
You must come, Khalid.
It’s late.
It’s getting late and someone will come looking for him soon, he knows that. He’ll have to put himself back together before then—pick himself up off the ground and fix his hair and his sash and his smile. He’ll have to lie, maybe say he had a little spill to explain the frigid water soaking through his clothes. He’ll think of something. He always thinks of something.
It’s late.
It’s getting late and he’s so tired. The sun will set soon.
His tears are warm and he is so very alone.