Swiftcurrent Creek i brought you my bullets; you brought me your love

Grief was a funny thing. Some wallowed in it. Some stuffed it down.

Some stuffed it down their throats and wallowed in it;

And some let that choking mass sit and fester in their stomach, all the while the rest of them turning cold and dead to the world.

Some, all of the above.

He had a complicated relationship with grief. He'd always had. As he approached the lands of his birth, the steady murmur of the stream brought to mind his mother, and he wanted to flinch away. Just as she had, in her cowardice or engimatic nature or whatever the fuck it'd been.

He was both coward and enigma, born and built in her image.

And yet here he stood, silent upon the banks of Swiftcurrent Creek, watching the late spring current move along the rocks and whorls of the old waterway.

He sought her here;

He knew she would not come.

But someone did come.

Not his mother; only a girl, a blind girl who would always and forever know her brother all the same — by his scent, by his footsteps, by his shadowed presence so like her own. They had been children together once, a whole lifetime ago. Or so it felt.

Now Mae stood trembling on the creek banks, nose lifted to take in what her sightless eyes could not. It was him. Just across the water, it was him.

She couldn't bring herself to speak.

The ragged shadow that faced him across the water was a stranger for a while—at least until he found her scent. Smell linking them forever, despite the miles and the missed memories, the wounds—

Mae, he croaked, his voice like gravel underfoot. His gaze was trained upon her scarred face, mouth slightly slack in taking it in. 

He'd come here feeling sorry for himself. His sister's tattered visage put everything into a new perspective.

Mae. She heard the grief in his voice, the shock to see his sister a tattered shell of the girl from his childhood. But they weren't children anymore. Not really.

This was what life had to offer them.

Jakub, Her own voice was nearly a whisper. She took a step forward, then hesitated, remembering that the water still rushed between them. Where have you been? All this time — had his absence given him more than the life she'd found by staying?

Where have you been?

Everywhere. Nowhere. All at once. He struggled to answer, sought in vain to come up with the words—and then came up short, anyway, after several silent moments passed between them.

Doesn't matter, he eventually replied. His cool gold gaze landed upon her scars. Who did that?

And were the wounds she held inside just as bad as his? 

Of course they were. 

No one could look like that, the boy thought, without suffering to the marrow of their being for it.

Heat rose in her cheeks, her ears, her throat. For a moment Mae wanted to yell at him. She wanted to leap across the water and sink her teeth into his scruff and shake him. She wanted to drag him back to her father and say look, look at your idiot son, look at how alive and unhurt and fucking infuriating he is.

Then she took in a shaky breath.

Doesn't matter, She shot back after a moment, ears flattening. Not like you cared enough to stick around for it. The fuck do you want, anyway? You come here just to make sure we know you left on purpose?

The harsh words bounced off him like feathers against a brick wall. After the pain he'd endured, nothing would hurt as much, least of all a verbal excoriation from his estranged sister.

Still, he was not without at least a modicum of shame.

I came to see who still was here, Hex answered mildly. To see, perhaps, if. . .mother had returned. But I don't smell her here. How's our brother? 

Goddamned if he could not remember their sibling's name.

Who did that? he said again, nodding toward her scars.