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 Posted: Sat Mar 08, 2025 4:18 pm
Liesel couldn’t sleep.
He wandered the halls of Valhalla, his way lit by green crystal and the golden flicker of a candle. A ferocious storm battered the mighty fortress. Rain lashed at sturdy windows of translucent stone. Thunder rolled overhead at regular intervals. Lightning struck alarmingly close, sending all but the most foolish of the fortress’ occupants running for cover. Liesel paused at a door that led out onto the ramparts, tempted by the cool rain and blustering wind, but he knew better than to risk it.
A heavy, aching stillness seemed to have settled over the fortress. Once jovial soldiers saw to their duties with tense frowns and shadowed eyes. Servants drifted from one task to the next, quiet and downcast. The storm stifled their whispers. Misfortune stole their joy and diminished their pride.
Liesel strolled on. He roamed long familiar halls, scaled empty stairwells, pausing here and there whenever memory took hold. The last several years weighed on him, each new loss as arduous as the last. Dread clung to him like a shroud. Time seemed to slip away, lost to the encroaching darkness.
He stopped at Serge’s office. Even in the frantic, hopeless rush in which Serge last left it, he’d still had the forethought to lock the door against the probing eyes and clumsy hands of inquisitive children. Liesel pulled a key from the folds of his dressing gown. The lock clicked out of place. The latch gave way. The door creaked softly, heavy wood on old hinges. Liesel slipped inside and let it swing shut behind him.
He lit a few more candles, then set his own aside once he had enough light to see by. Serge’s desk, once scrupulously organized, sat in disarray. Papers, scrolls and books had been stacked along the edge or carelessly tossed to the floor. Labeled jars of otherwise unidentifiable substances cluttered much of the surface. Vials and flasks gleamed in the candlelight, interspersed with satchels of herbs and other plant clippings.
Liesel found an old wooden chest and began to pack it all away.
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Posted: Sat Mar 08, 2025 4:29 pm
“Be careful not to touch any of the open vials,” came a gruff, emotionally drained voice from the darkened corner of the room. Serge had been sitting in one of the armchairs, an almost empty bottle in his hand as he sat with one leg over one of the armrests and leaned heavily against the opposite back wing, his free hand resting over his face.
He hadn’t taken care of himself in three weeks and it showed. His usually well kept facial hair had been left to grow on its own. His hair hadn’t been brushed, or washed, and barely pulled back into a messy ponytail. His clothes were disheveled, and quite possibly the only thing he’d worn for weeks.
Whether he’d slept was questionable too. Although it would have been physically impossible to not sleep, it was clear that he had foregone most of it.
Not that it had mattered. Or maybe if he hadn’t slept at all then another outcome could have occurred. If he’d spent his time researching something else. Or sending more delegates to seek even more assistance than they had. Had he sent them all? He thought he had, but surely he could have recruited others. Had their father done all he could? Did he instead say good riddance and not try?
“I’ll clean it up later. You don’t have to--” he said in an uncharacteristically shaky voice, which was decidedly drowned out with another swig from the bottle he held.
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Posted: Sat Mar 08, 2025 4:30 pm
Liesel gave a start. He fumbled with a small vial of delicate blue glass, knocking it from one hand to the other in his attempts to stop its fall. It nearly slipped through his fingers, its smooth curves cool to the touch. He caught it between both hands before it could crash onto the desk. Liesel held it still, took a steadying breath, then slipped it into the wooden chest as carefully as his trembling hands would allow.
His heart fluttered and ached. His shoulders, perfectly set though they often were, rolled into an anxious hunch. Years removed from his life on Ganymede, Liesel nonetheless expected anger from those who caught him where he didn’t belong.
He didn’t have the strength to be obstinate about it anymore.
“I’m sorry,” he said, closing a jar of fine grey powder. “I thought I’d save you the trouble.”
The mess was a reminder Serge had no need for—the books that offered no answers; the correspondence that offered no hope; the attempts at deconstruction and replication that led him nowhere. Liesel had no cure for Serge’s anger or sadness, but he could pack away the evidence of a hopeless pursuit that no longer had any purpose.
“You should be resting,” Liesel told him, his voice as careful as his hands, as strained as the tense curl of his shoulders. “Have you been here all night?”
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Posted: Sat Mar 08, 2025 4:30 pm
“I am resting,” Serge grunted as he lowered the bottle back down. He didn’t deserve to rest, so he didn’t respond to Liesel’s question. What good would that do? Nothing could change what happened.
He watched Liesel with wary concern, but didn’t stop him from cleaning anything else up if that was what he had in mind. He just didn’t want him to think that he had to. After all, it was Serge’s burden to bear, not Liesel’s.
“Devyn buried him on Alastor,” he scoffed quietly, sounding offended by the decision. In his heart, he knew it was what Percy would have wanted. He was as much Sessrumnir’s Knight as he was Devyn’s husband.
They all knew when Percy had passed. Sessrumnir basically shut down. It was still functional, but anything that required a Knight to work was just… dark. He’d already known by the time he arrived there.
Devyn told him, of course. Needlessly, by that point. That didn’t mean Serge hadn’t been furious. Heartbroken. And now? He was trying not to feel anything at all.
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Posted: Sat Mar 08, 2025 4:30 pm
Again, Liesel said, “I’m sorry.”
Soft as a whisper, light as air, so insubstantial, so insufficient as to be almost meaningless. Apologies made no difference. Nothing he said, nothing he did would bring Percy back, or make his passing easier to bear. Liesel felt ill equipped to fill the void of his absence. Serge had lost a brother. Liesel could neither change it nor ease Serge’s pain.
So Liesel collected flasks. He stoppered jars. He tied off loose satchels and placed them, one by one, into the wooden chest. What they were or what they might do to a person mattered less than their eventual disappearance. Serge had no more need for them now. He shouldn’t have to look, and know, and deal with it all in the aftermath. This was one burden Liesel could manage, the only task he felt any semblance of readiness for. The rest was beyond him.
There was no cure for grief.
Liesel knew that well.
“I’m glad he—” Inadequate. Poorly worded. There was no sense of gladness. Liesel tried again. “—That he could be where his heart—”
A tightening throat cut him off. Liesel swallowed. He snatched papers off Serge’s desk, tried to read through them to determine whether or not they should be kept or discarded, but couldn’t make out the words through his own building pain.
There had been too much death already.
“I’m sorry,” he said, ineffectual. “I’m sorry.”
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Posted: Sat Mar 08, 2025 4:31 pm
Serge was not unaware that Liesel was trying to offer him comfort. There was just so much that had happened. So much that he didn’t want to feel. So much that he failed at doing.
He was the oldest sibling. He wasn’t supposed to outlive the younger. Maybe if he had been able to tell people that it was Percy’s life on the line, they would have been able to help more. But he understood (at the time) Devyn’s need for discretion. They didn’t want to cause panic, or let it be known that Sessrumnir was weakened. Or draw in Alastor’s enemies while their Senshi was distracted.
There was too much to think about. And Liesel was there, being kind and gentle as always. Serge wished he could say it was okay, that he didn’t need to apologise. He didn’t. But if he said anything -- he if acknowledged any of it -- it would make it all too real.
It was real.
He didn’t want it to be.
“I’m going to hunt down the b*****d who did this,” he decided, ignoring the slight slur to his words. It was likely not the first bottle he’d downed without food that evening.
As Liesel was packing things up, Serge finally pushed himself out of the chair. He held onto the back of one of the couches as he made his way around it to the desk, and fumbled open one of the drawers for another vial. He rolled it onto the surface towards Liesel. Maybe just to look at. Maybe to include it in the chest with everything else.
It was a glass vial that contained a red crystal with dozens of needle sharp points in every direction. Serge didn’t say anything about what it was, but it was labeled P.D.. Percy had changed his last name to Devyn’s after they’d married.
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Posted: Sat Mar 08, 2025 4:31 pm
The vial rolled too close to the edge of the desk. Liesel caught it before it could crash to the floor. He smoothed a thumb over the label, slow and careful, holding the vial in both hands like it was something sacred.
For a moment, Liesel thought not of Percy, but of the caves of Altamira—of Magnus and his workshop, and the jewelry he crafted out of metal and stone and blood. The caves themselves used to scare Liesel as a child, but the workshop had been such a wondrous place, where the essence of life could be made into something beautiful.
This shard of crystal labeled with Percy’s initials was anything but.
Liesel packed it away with the rest of the vials. He swallowed hard, throat constricting. Tears sprang into his eyes, but Liesel ignored them. The grief of Percy’s passing mingled with everything Liesel had already lost. Percy had been his friend, but he had been Serge’s brother first. He had been Devyn’s husband. He had been Celia’s uncle. Their pain would be greater. Liesel knew his place in this. He could not yield to the fragility that always accompanied the worst parts of his life. He must steel himself to bear the burdens of others.
“I wish you wouldn’t,” he said, soft and tremulous, and then felt guilty for it. “I couldn’t bear it if the same happened to you.”
A pale gaze, neither blue nor purple, rose to Serge’s face. Though lined by grief and age, and framed by untidy hair, one look at him was enough to take Liesel back eighteen years, to the surly boy who became both his dearest friend and his greatest love.
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Posted: Sat Mar 08, 2025 4:32 pm
Serge was silent. The look from Liesel was enough to stay his thoughts and plans of revenge. At least for now.
The universe was changing. There was a darkness on the horizon that he couldn’t prove, but he felt with every fiber of his being. Or maybe he was paranoid. Maybe the grief of loss was telling him things were more dire than they truly were.
But after Ganymede… Now Sessrumnir? In an attempt to take out Alastor -- another powerful Senshi in his own right.
Were there others? Had there not been enough time for word to spread of Worlds and Wonders collapsing, or was it merely a coincidence that two incredibly close to him had fallen?
There was still the question about the weapon used to kill Percy. Where did it come from? It hadn’t been completely unique; there had been snippets of information about what happened to victims, but in all of the research he’d done, and that which Devyn’s people had done, and that which Sessrumnir’s teams of researchers had done -- no one could come up with a solution or a cure?
Maybe if Percy had been able to help with that research…
Unable to look at Liesel with those tears in his eyes, Serge carefully set the bottle down on the desk and reached out so he could draw Liesel close to him.
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Posted: Sat Mar 08, 2025 4:32 pm
Liesel went to him, stubbornly tense when all he wanted to do was sink into Serge’s arms and place his head on Serge’s shoulder, bury his face into the side of Serge’s neck and let himself cry.
He couldn’t. Not now. Not when Serge was hurting, when the loss was so fresh it drove him to drink and brood in the dark, plotting a revenge that might never come. If Liesel fell to pieces Serge would bury his own pain to take care of him, let it fester somewhere Liesel would never be able to reach. Then it would be his doom.
Liesel put his hands to Serge’s face. He looked into Serge’s eyes and let himself be grateful for him. The last four years had not been kind to them. The next may be worse. Darkness stirred along the edge of everything, but they still had one another. When his exile had been new, Liesel had thought he would spend the rest of his life in shame, lamenting his failures and mourning all he’d lost. Perhaps he would. Percy’s death had reopened those wounds, which had only just begun to heal.
His only solace through it all was that he was not alone.
Liesel drew Serge’s head down to his shoulder instead. He wrapped an arm around Serge and pulled him close, put a hand over his unkempt hair and smoothed it down.
“I love you,” he said—in a voice made brittle by misery, but unwavering despite that.
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Posted: Sat Mar 08, 2025 4:33 pm
It would have been easier if Liesel had buried himself against him. If Liesel had broken down into tears. Serge was ready to hold him, to reassure him, to rub his back and tell him whatever he could to help ease the pain.
It would have been easier to brush aside his own heartbreak.
In many ways, Serge felt responsible for Percy’s death. Maybe if he’d done something better. Maybe if he’d gotten there sooner. Maybe if he somehow convinced someone as stubborn as Percy to not be a Knight.
He’d been so excited when he was chosen as the new Knight of Sessrumnir. Serge could still remember the smile that lit up all of Valhalla when he met him before officially taking the oath. But Sessrumnir was supposed to be safe. And yet, there had been so many times Serge had to stop by and take care of things.
He would have done it every day for a million years if it meant Percy was still with them.
It took a moment to realize that Liesel had drawn him to him. That he’d been the one to wrap an arm around him, and brushed at his messy hair. For another moment, Serge tensed. He didn’t know what to do. Of course the emotions he kept holding back wanted to overflow. He wanted to scream and rage and mourn for his little brother. They’d been suffering so much. How much more could they handle?
So he pressed his face against Liesel’s neck and wrapped his arm around him as though Liesel was his only anchor in the storm that continued to rage outside.
“I love you too,” he said quietly, trying not to choke on the words.
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Posted: Sat Mar 08, 2025 4:33 pm
Liesel held him—sorrowfully; gratefully; fearfully. He tightened his arms, as if by keeping Serge close he might never lose him.
They stood together in the flickering candlelight, never quite in sync with one another but persistent in the effort all the same. Liesel let memory take him back—to his private garden at the castle on Ganymede, the great splash as he’d pushed Serge into the fountain; to the high, painted ceiling of the throne room, and Serge’s tense, scowling face among the staring figures around him; to the years of heartache and misery, longing and fear, willfully buried beneath denial and duty; to the secrecy and solitude of his room, where Serge’s bleeding palm had pressed to his own.
Love hadn’t always come easily to them, but it had been worth fighting for.
The years hadn’t changed that.
Death wouldn’t either.
Liesel held Serge until he felt some of the tension leave him, when the shaking eased and Serge’s hands gentled. He stroked Serge’s hair and kissed the side of Serge’s face, but gave no other reassurances, made no empty promises. Though he desperately wished to, Liesel couldn’t take Serge’s pain away. He couldn’t promise more wouldn’t follow. The future had never been more uncertain. Liesel’s only remaining comfort was that they would face it together.
Soon, Liesel eased Serge into his desk chair. Under Serge’s tired, mournful gaze, Liesel finished packing the scattered remains of Serge’s research into the wooden chest, which he then locked up and shut away into a cabinet…
…where it remained for the next thousand years.
Fin!
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