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On Faith

Summary: "A good judge of character," Adrean murmurs, bitter. "Funny. I thought I was one, too." Chapter(s): 1/1 Word Count: 4,810 Note(s): Set-Act 3. Deconstructing the Death's Maw chapter. Adrean's at his stringboard coming to all the wrong conclusions, but he's trying his best. Simon is presumed dead. Also available on AO3!

“His name was Kris,” Casimiro says, voice distant and hopeful as he relives an old memory. Adrean’s heart drops into a freefall, and then it keeps going, long after it should have hit the ground. “Do you know of him?”

“No,” Adrean says, too fast. There is a deep weighty pause as he struggles to fish out more words from the murky depths of his thoughts.

“He reminds me of a dear friend,” he says at last, looking straight into Casimiro’s milky eyes. He can barely see his own reflection in them, and the thought that he might lose himself is so visceral that he almost crumples to his knees.

“I have faith in him.”

The words are a shining beacon of truth, but saying them aloud feels like coughing up a hairball. His heart thuds to a stop somewhere unreachable, and he wonders if this is where he’ll finally drown: thousands of miles from home in a hostile maze of canyons, surrounded by lies.

.

Adrean finally stirs when he hears the deliberate crunch of gravel under heavy boots. His entire body aches as he unfolds himself, startled to see that it was now deep twilight given that the sun had barely started to set when he’d first sat down. The apology for getting lost in his head, however, dies on his lips when he turns and finds himself facing Corbin, of all people. There's a wry smile on the other man’s face that has Adrean’s own instantly blazing with embarrassment.

“Up for some company?” Corbin asks, holding up two steaming mugs. Adrean considers him for a moment, before ultimately jerking his head at the empty spot next to him on his lonely and dusty ledge. He’s rewarded with a grin, and then Corbin drops down with startlingly more grace than his usual bumbling would suggest.

“Courtesy of the princess,” he says cheerily, passing one of the mugs over. “She didn’t want you to keep brooding all on your lonesome with nothing warm in your hands.”

“…wasn’t brooding,” Adrean lies, petulant even as his hands fold gratefully over the warmed wood. His sigh of relief as the steam hits his face further betrays him, though at least Corbin does him the courtesy of letting him off easy with just an amused little chuckle.

They slip into comfortable silence afterwards, sipping at Eleanor's tea while they watch Death’s Maw settle down fully for the night. It’s beautiful out, balmy with hundreds of stars splashed across an ink-black sky. Every now and again, in the distant dark, there’d be little flickers of flame lashing out, sometimes even catching on the golden gleam of a rare den. “Probably Rachnoids on the hunt,” Corbin muses around a long pull from his mug.

Adrean hums low in his throat, happy enough to just sit and listen to the chirping of the desert crickets. But beneath their pleasant chorus was a faint scratching sound, a muffled and steady scritch screech. In fact, it sounded a lot like—

“Odogaron,” Corbin says, eyes closed and head tipped back. “Doing claw maintenance. Probably a few miles out, but this is a pretty secure campsite and you’ve got good defenses, so it shouldn’t be a problem.” Adrean rolls the words over in his head, spoken so matter-of-factly that he can’t even scrounge up the energy to be offended at the insinuation that he might allow his Rangers to camp in an unsafe zone.

“You’re sharper than you let on,” is what he says instead, tone deliberately neutral.

Corbin shrugs, affecting nonchalance. “Takes one to know one,” he shoots back, eyes cracking open just in time to catch the wry twitch his remark pulls out from the prince. “Why? Does it bother you?”

Adrean mulls this over as his thumb traces along the mug’s rim. When he finally speaks, it’s simply to say: “Ena claimed you had an honest heart, regardless of your outward appearance.”

This draws a genuine laugh out of Corbin. “High praise indeed!” he says brightly, though he’s quick to sober when he notices that Adrean’s still frowning out into the dark of the canyons. “Look, whatever it is your Palico has to say about me, fact is that my family’s worked with the Councilor for over three generations now. She’s not one to tolerate lies. And she’s a good judge of character to boot. If you’re going to trust anyone’s word, hers is a good bet.”

“A good judge of character,” Adrean murmurs, bitter. “Funny. I thought I was one, too.”

Corbin settles himself more comfortably into the dirt and waits. Adrean’s eyes slant over to him, assessing, before he sighs. “How much have you heard?” he asks. When Corbin makes a questioning sound, he waves it away impatiently. “Don’t play coy with me. I know you gossip with my Rangers like hawkers on market day. So? How much exactly do you know of why we crossed the Meridian?”

Corbin is silent for a long while before he speaks. “Your rookie kicks up a massive fuss whenever I go to sit in a certain seat,” he says slowly, “and I’d have to be deaf not to hear anything from Eleanor about a war brewing on your side of the Shelf. The others—they keep a tighter lid on it all, certainly, but it wasn't too hard to figure out that you lost one of your own in the midst of it all.”

A harsh bark of a laugh escaped Adrean at that. “His name was Simon,” he says, shoulders curled inwards as though his chest had caved in from a fatal blow. Corbin’s eyes narrow thoughtfully at this unexpected concession. “He died protecting me.” Adrean’s knuckles are white around his mug. “He died lying to me.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Corbin says, made all the worse because he truly sounded like he meant it. Adrean has to shut his eyes against the fresh wave of outraged grief it dredges up, unable to guard himself against the sheer finality of the loss, now that he was getting condolences from someone outside of the Rangers. It takes him an embarrassing amount of time to realize that Corbin was still speaking:

“Don’t think I’d have chosen to cross the Shelf if one of my friends snuffed it, but I guess grief makes us do funny things.”

There was nothing amusing about Corbin’s words. His tone had also been stripped of all joviality. Adrean finds himself snorting anyway. “Don’t think I would’ve done it either, if I really had a choice,” he mutters. He swallows miserably past the lump in his throat. “He begged me to go to the Sacrosanctum.”

“Ah,” Corbin says faintly. “This Simon of yours sure had a pretty bold dying wish.”

There’s nothing that either of them can say to that for several long moments. Finally, Corbin tentatively speaks up again: “Still seems a bit rude to call a guy who spent his dying breath asking you to go on a wild road trip a liar, though. I mean—ah, heck—not that I want to pry or anything—”

“He knew my mother, apparently,” Adrean says shortly, as though he was suddenly incapable of keeping the words shut up inside now that an opportunity to release the pressure was being offered. Corbin’s mouth shuts with an audible click. “He knew her well enough to have received her pendant. I’ve never once seen her take it off—she always said it was a family heirloom.” He takes an angry sip of his tea, swallowing so hard that it looked painful even to Corbin. “I met Simon barely a year after she’d disappeared. Not once in all the years since has he ever mentioned their connection. And then he just—he just pulls it out after he got shot out of the sky. Who the fuck even does that!?” He sounds more baffled than angry, which clearly frustrated him to no end. Corbin politely does not remark on his rapidly blinking eyes, or how overbright they were in the starlight.

Adrean pulls himself together with a suspiciously ragged intake of breath. “It was a loud night and he was very weak,” he says faintly, gaze faraway. “I figured I had just misunderstood him. And since he was—since he was gone, after, my next best shot of correcting that misunderstanding was by going to the Sacrosanctum. But then we met Casimiro, and—”

He trails off, winded. Corbin has a very real fear that the mug in Adrean’s hands will crack from how hard he’s squeezing it. The Hunter crashes back through their earlier conversation with the near-crystallized elder, digging rapidly through the frankly staggering amount of information thrown at them, trying to find something to anchor himself on. “Kris?” he tries finally, after finding and discarding several other possible leads.

Adrean’s lips thin into a tight, unhappy line. He couldn’t have been more obvious than if he had shouted from the top of his lungs and let the canyons replay it endlessly in echo.

“It rattled you something fierce, to hear about someone so similar to your dead friend so far from home?”

“They’re similar because they’re one and same,” Adrean says quietly. “A hundred years could pass and I’d still know him anywhere.”

Corbin gapes at him. “You really believe a nine-year-old made it all the way to the Shelf and beyond?” he asks dubiously. “That’s not a distance to sneeze at, even with a monster at your side. You know that.”

“By sea, then,” Adrean shoots back. It had been little more than a glimmering sliver hidden far off in the distance, but he’d been able to spy the ocean from the zenith of the highest canyon updrafts earlier that day. Simon had to have gone that route, he tells himself, even as doubt bubbles up again when he remembers Ratha’s strength at that time. At the cusp of ten, they’d been barely able to handle Mirror Lake. An ocean crossing was so far outside the realm of possibility that it was laughable. But if Simon had traced their current route back, why wouldn’t he have stopped to see Casimiro again? Mother surely wouldn’t have prevented him from doing so under normal circumstances, so they must have been forced to hastily flee the Sacrosanctum for some reason.

The urge to drop his head into his hands and scream is nearly all-encompassing, kept firmly in check only because he doesn’t want to wake anyone in the tent. There’s just something in the middle of all this speculation that Adrean can’t quite piece together. His mother’s Legiana was strong, so perhaps it wouldn’t have mattered if the other Rathalos had been a similarly clumsy flier at that age. He could have just used the upwash to maintain lift. It probably wouldn’t have made the journey any easier, but at least it could have been done. But then why had only Simon been there at the Loop? Why hadn’t Mother come home, if they’d already made it that far? Why abandon Simon when they’d been that close to the end?

Adrean pauses in his tirade only for lack of breath. His stomach feels queasy. Eleanor had spoken of Vermeil’s Rathalos as though it had been there for quite some time, so: “Maybe Mother didn’t want to come back because she was afraid of Father’s wrath or the priests trying again,” he mutters. “But I just don’t see why she would have chosen Vermeil as the better place to hide the other Rathalos. She knew that our countries weren’t on good terms. She’s not a—” His voice cracks and fails. A traitor, his mind supplies helpfully where his mouth cannot. A turncoat.

Mother wouldn’t do that to him. Adrean had to believe that she wouldn’t be that cruel. He’d said as much to Simon, that day in the stables at Azuria Castle in what now feels like forever ago. He had to keep believing, because the alternative was—

Was that why Simon knew Clarissa? For all that it was a fairly rare occurrence to find him and Simon apart in their youth, they hadn’t actually been attached at the hip. If Simon had taken one of those times to cross the border in an attempt to find Mother again, was that when he’d met Vermeil’s new queen? But Eleanor didn’t have a single lying bone in her body, and if Mother had been at Vermeil’s court, surely she would have seen her. Did they somehow meet tangentially, then?

When Simon finally found Mother, did she allow him to keep in contact so long as he promised to never tell Adrean about it? Or did she rebuff him again? Still, none of that explained the pendant, though.

“I just don’t understand,” he says miserably. “Everything was simpler before Casimiro.” Losing Simon might have been crippling, but in the grand scheme of things it had only been one thing, so he’d still managed to hobble along somehow. He doesn’t know if he can keep doing that while also carrying this new knowledge that his mother had effectively abandoned him twice on top of all that. Does he pity Simon for sharing this same fate with him? Or should he resent him instead, because even though he too had been abandoned, Simon at least knew how to reach her afterwards?

He finally collects himself enough to remember Corbin’s presence. The other man had been silent throughout his frenzied theorizing, simply nodding along and uttering a rare hum here or there as Adrean talked. Adrean feels wrung-out and embarrassed to have subjected him to all that, even as a familiar sort of heartache settles underneath the ingrained mortification. Only Simon had ever truly let Adrean just talk at him, and even then, the last time they’d done that was well before Thea had joined them. Besides, Corbin and Simon were so different that it feels like a slap to the face to find any similarities between the two of them.

“I apologize,” he mumbles, more into the dregs of his tea than to Corbin himself. “I truly didn’t mean to make you sit through everything.”

Corbin shrugs in the corner of Adrean’s eye. “Don’t worry about it,” he says affably. “You looked like you needed it. If anything, I’m thinking that I should be honored that I’ve been deemed worthy enough to hear the troubles of a prince.”

Adrean frowns at the jest, and Corbin’s teasing smile softens at the edges into something more empathetic. “Look,” he says, “nevermind what PK says—I’ve been in this profession long enough to know that there’s plenty of things that can happen with barely a moment’s notice that’ll mess you up good for months to come. Years, even. It won’t fix everything, and it’ll feel like pulling nails out of your throat, but talking through even some of it takes a huge load off the chest.”

He gestures vaguely at the vast expanse of night around them with his empty mug. “Hell, it might even help you sleep a little better at night. Your dog always paces around when you’re tossing and turning.”

“I don’t need you fussing over me—” Adrean starts, though he’s cut off before he can get very far.

“No,” Corbin says, firm but not unkind. “You don’t want me sticking my nose into your business. But you need it, otherwise you wouldn’t even be here entertaining me in the first place.” He looks Adrean straight in the eyes as he says this, gaze clear and knowing. “We’re essentially strangers, after all. If I overstep my welcome, you can get angry at me without feeling guilty. If you fumble something real bad, you don’t need to worry about me pitying you. Because you’re the type who hates to be pitied. It’s why you only give up token protests when your Rangers get up to their little antics on the road. Too many idle hands in the tent means too many eyes on you, and you can’t hide from them, not all at once. Except then you got to Casimiro’s house and there was nowhere left to hide, and you almost blew it, and now you're one foot deeper into a hole of your own making and you’re rapidly running out of rope.”

Adrean’s face had lost its look of sad resignation and was instead slowly flushing with rage. Wasn’t that something to see on the usually placid prince? Corbin flashes him a cheeky little grin, triumphant. “Got it in one, didn’t I? That’s a new Corbin record, if I do say so myself.” And Adrean tries to hold onto the anger—truly, he does—but there was something about Corbin’s sheer audacity and self-assuredness that just turned it all to smoke in an instant. It leaves him shuddering in its wake, raw like an exposed nerve, so unused to being seen like this by a person who wasn’t Simon.

“You’re being absurd,” he gasps out, voice shaking so much that it wasn’t an actual rebuttal.

Corbin’s infuriating grin only grows exponentially wider. “Camp is right there,” he says cheerily, gesturing with a thumb. “You can always just get up and leave.” Tellingly, neither one of them makes any effort to move.

Adrean chews on his lower lip, looking anywhere but at Corbin directly. “After the transgressors business in Shepherdan, I thought I was prepared for anything,” he finally says. “I was wrong though. I couldn’t bear to hear about Mother or Simon from Casimiro, not after all this time. I’d loved them both dearly, so it stung to have a complete stranger illustrate exactly how naive I was about our relationship, especially in front of everyone.”

Corbin opens his mouth to interject, but Adrean just shakes his head, smiling bitterly. “I know they loved me, too,” he says, because if he says it often enough one day he’ll believe it with the same surety he’d had even a year ago, “but I’m starting to finally realize that they never trusted me the same way I did them. Simon knew how I felt about Mother leaving. He’d heard all the things the court said about me. If Mother hadn’t wanted to see me after she returned, I—”

He would have been crushed, in all honesty, but he thinks that would have still been better than spending ten years not knowing anything. Maybe he would have stopped being friends with Simon, though he doubts it. The crippling loneliness of having no one by his side would have been a hundred times worse than the jealousy sitting rancid on his tongue every time he looked at Simon. He would have learned to deal with it—would have forced himself to deal with it—and eventually he would have stopped wondering what it was exactly that Simon had that he didn’t.

If Simon had been Mother’s son, would she have taken him with her, that night she’d stolen the second Rathalos? The thought was actually more devastating than he was prepared for. He hastily shakes it away before its roots can grow too deep.

“I can accept that he lied to me at the very end,” Adrean sighs out. “I have to, because it’s the truth. But I just can’t accept that it extends to everything we had over the ten years that we knew each other. He was my best friend. I want to believe that that was real, at least.”

It sounds pathetic when he says it out loud, but Corbin isn’t laughing. That, at least, emboldens Adrean to continue haltingly: “The more I learn, the less I know who I’m even mourning anymore. What if I finally get to the truth, and that destroys them entirely? I know the conflict between Azuria and Vermeil is larger than Mother or Simon, but if at the end of this journey I realize that I was immortalizing frauds, I’m afraid I’m going to think that it was all for nothing.”

His eyes close tiredly. “I don’t want that,” he says, voice pitched like a prayer. “I don’t want to give up on them like that.”

Corbin’s hand lands on his shoulder. Adrean doesn’t jump, but it’s a near thing, even though all Corbin does is give him a reassuring squeeze. “I think it’s impressive that you’re still holding out this much faith. Most people would have probably found it easier to try to wash their hands of it all after the first few hurdles.”

“Would they have?” Adrean asks, puzzled. “I think this is the easier path, though. If it was the other way around, then I’d have to accept that I had nothing for the last ten years. I can’t do that.” He grimaces as the words fly free. “That makes me sound like a coward.”

“Not at all,” Corbin says earnestly. A pause, and then he adds: “Look, it’s going to be a thankless task and you’re going to hate it most of the time, but you should keep holding onto the image of them that you want to immortalize. Carry it as far as you can. Then keep going, so long as you can still live with yourself by doing so.” A flash of a smile flickers across Corbin’s face, there and gone again. “See? It’s a miserable undertaking, but at least this way it becomes bearable.”

“Oh,” Adrean says, considering. It didn’t feel like anything he wasn’t doing currently, was the only problem. When exactly was it supposed to become easier to bear?

“Couldn’t tell ya,” Corbin says, clapping Adrean on the back. It’s light by Hunter standards, but still packs enough force to send him swaying forward with a small yelp. “The only thing I can say is this: don’t go overthinking it all on your own. Don’t want your Rangers to know? I think it’s a wasted effort, personally, but PK complains that we’re off the job often enough that you can probably find us in Galyad easy as you can throw a shard of Egg Quartz. And don’t you go politely refusing,” he says, wagging a finger in Adrean’s face when he opens his mouth to do just that. “I wouldn’t be offering if it was a bother. Besides, folk like you are rare.”

Adrean arches a brow, unimpressed. “Why? Because we’re Riders?”

Corbin waves his skepticism away. “No, it’s because you trust so much,” he says simply. “You wouldn’t be having half the problems you are if you didn’t so desperately want to believe in your Simon.” He pillows his chin in his hand and grins lazily. “Got it in one again, didn’t I?”

“Yes, yes, I’m easy to read. I understand,” Adrean mutters, but his words lack bite now. He heaves a world-weary sigh, rubbing at his eyes. “Sometimes I wonder if I would’ve been happier if I didn’t want to believe in them,” he finally confesses. “Maybe it would’ve been easier if I could have just taken Casimiro’s words at face value.”

“And maybe that old crystallized dragon in the middle of the Wastes will suddenly wake up and walk again.”

Adrean huffs out a laugh, the lightest one he’d had that evening. “You’re right. What’s the point in all that?” he asks. Because the truth of the matter was that he did love Mother and Simon. He loved them enough to trust that they wouldn’t have wanted to maliciously burden him with cruel intentions. That alone was worth protecting, he thought, even if learning the truth about the Skyscales and battlebinding had caused him to stumble.

Even if Simon had hid an entire identity from him. Adrean had poured ten years of love into a friendship that he wasn’t even sure that Simon truly reciprocated now. Yet it had all been real from Adrean’s side. It had given him a Simon that he wanted to remember forever: a Simon who caught him when he went flying straight into his arms; a Simon who always let him lean against his shoulder with little warning; a Simon who was Adrean’s first real human friend.

As for Mother—even if he had known about her plans, she still could have refused to take him with her. Maybe, if he had begged, she would have tried to let him down gently, saying that it was too dangerous and that she’d see him again soon. It mattered little, though. At the end of the day, the Mother he actually wanted to memorialize was the one who had hugged him tight that night, who’d let him bury his face into the soft fabric of her dress as she’d stroked his hair, surrounded by the comforting scent of her perfume. She’d loved him once, just as he loved her now. That had to be worth something.

Adrean would make it worth something, even if he had to break himself apart to do so.

Corbin pulls himself back up to his feet with an exaggerated groan, stretching lazily as he shakes out his stiff limbs. Adrean follows at a more sedate pace. He doesn’t feel happier per se, but an hour with Corbin had settled him in a way that all that time on his own hadn’t managed to come even close. He doesn’t know how he feels about it exactly, and judging from Corbin’s knowing smile, the other man can tell, though all he does is pluck Adrean’s mug from his loose grip.

“Did you want to stop by Casimiro’s again tomorrow morning, before we head for the ship?” Corbin asks, when he notices Adrean staring thoughtfully down the path leading towards the village of cliff dwellings. Adrean considers it for a moment, but ultimately shakes his head. A small part of him did want to know more about Kris, now that Simon wasn’t here to tell him about it, but the bigger part of him just didn’t want to hear any more insinuations that Simon had sold out battlebinding to Vermeil, no matter how logical that conclusion seemed.

“We’ll go back to Galyad once we break camp,” he decides, turning his back to the road. “Then it’ll be straight onto the Sacrosanctum once we resupply.”

.

Adrean feels like he’s barely settled into bed before Windie finds him. His Canyne flops all over him, tail thumping happily out of sight. One golden eye is trained curiously onto the pendant dangling from Adrean’s fingers, watching as the crystal catches the dim lamplight scattering from the main table. Adrean’s reflection is distorted on the pendant’s rough-cut facade, and he twists the leather string around his fingers, lost in thought.

A wet nose nudges insistently at his cheek. Adrean tugs the pendant up into his hand, tucking it into his palm as he buries a laugh into Windie’s thick fur. “Sorry, sorry—I’ll pay attention to you now,” he murmurs, smiling as he catches Windie’s ear pricking up. The oversized dog licks at the tip of his nose, then curiously nudges at his fist, sniffing eagerly when Adrean uncurls his fingers.

“This is special,” he tells him, scratching behind Windie’s ear. “It used to be Mother’s. Then it was Simon’s for a while, though I still don’t know how.”

Windie whines softly as Adrean stows the pendant safely away. “You would have liked them,” he says. “Simon especially. He used to keep treats in his pockets because he always wanted to be smug about all the monsties running to him. Not Ratha, though—it used to drive him mad.” He grins as he catches one of Windie’s paws, shaking it lightly. “Not you either? You won’t be won over by treats? Even though you’re a little glutton?” As payback for his cheek, Windie yawns right into his face.

Adrean wraps his arms snugly around the Canyne. “Indulge me for a second,” he murmurs sleepily. Windie just huffs, which is as much an affirmative as he’s ever going to get.

In the quiet of the camp, he presses childhood secrets into Windie’s soft fur, until Simon comes back to life again between each lazy thump of Windie’s tail. In one instance, he’s a boy holding a rock hammer aloft, a look of deep dismay on his face as he stared down at the crumbled pieces scattered around his feet. In another, he’s shaking like a leaf next to Gaul, both of them being stared down by Legia as she looms over her clutch of eggs. Adrean falls asleep halfway through a confession of the first time they’d gotten lost in one of the many vineyards around the castle town, and how they’d ate themselves sick with grapes in an effort to distract each other from the scolding they were sure to get from their minders when they were finally discovered.

Aenshin and the Skyscales. Battlebinding and Vermeil. The hundred little doubts and insecurities that he’d picked up all throughout the journey across the Meridian. For once, all of that was far away.

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