Avi clutched at his pearl like he was going to rip it from his own neck. Silently he begged with Kirian: argue with me. Yell at me. Tell me I’m wrong, tell me you’re right. Tell me you’re better than this, than me, than all of the Kumaras put together. Give me something to hate and resent about you.
Instead, when Kirian finally spoke, it was impossibly quiet but not indistinguishable. Through the magical pearl, Avi heard him as if Kirian was speaking right against his ear.
“They who?” Avi said roughly, even though he knew full well who Kirian meant. Despite it all, despite what Aman Kumara had put Avi through - all of it so benign and passive and microaggressive that the emotionally unsophisticated Avi could never pinpoint it - he still rejected Kirian’s accusation.
Accusing the Solgards - yes. Of course. They were unequivocally warped. Maybe they had treated Kirian more like an object for glory, than their child. Maybe Kirian didn’t agree with it, even if he complied to the point of betraying Avi. The Solgards were a complicated mess of a family that Avi had only begun to understand, when he’d hunted them down. All those memories making sense: how Avi felt weird around them, even if he didn’t know why. How they kowtowed to the Archduke but with a disturbing, confusing edge.
Most importantly: how Kirian’s behaviour shifted drastically around them, or when they were mentioned.
They were complicated, and recently Avi accepted that it wasn’t just his own paranoia, there was indeed something rotten about the Solgards. Before Glasswater, Avi believed that rot had extended into Kirian as well. After hearing Josefin’s and Keeva’s glowing report of Kirian’s goodness, now Avi wondered if perhaps the son was nothing like the parents.
Well, maybe just a bit; but that was to be expected. He was only a child.
And the Solgards were rotted.
After Avi confessed to Kirian that he’d killed Kirian’s parents, this was the first time Kirian mentioned them. Perhaps he hadn’t known how to bring it up, or perhaps he didn’t care. Avi was fascinated - particularly because Kirian didn’t seem angry the learn that they were cut down, dead and inglorious.
But for Avi to reproach his own parents along with the Solgards? To admit that Aman Kumara had mistreated or misguided him in some way, in any way? It was impossible. Avi rejected the idea immediately, and he rejected Kirian for saying it.
Avi wanted to be exactly like his parents, dammit. That was all he wanted.
“You took that choice away from us, Kirian. It’s easy to blame yourself until you die - and if you come to Rajayer then I will make sure you die.” Avi took a breath, and closed his eyes.
‘We don’t have to stay that way.’
“But if you want things to change, then damn it all and take control of your godforsaken life, for once.” Biting his lip, Avi asked, “Does the idea scare you? Living a life where you have no one to blame, not even yourself?”
The ironic dissonance that Avi possessed, saying this. He demanded Kirian change and grow for himself, when Avi had yet to step out of his own father’s shadow.
Kirian faltered in his steps, at Avi’s question, the roughness in his voice. How familiar it sounded. His fist clenched around the pearl in a flash of anger at Avi’s questioning, at how easily, how instinctively he rejected all responsibility, deflected all blame to Kirian.
“Our parents. My father and yours,” Kirian clarified, with an anger as slow but unstoppable as a glacier and far, far colder.
There was only one thing more terrifying than Avi being like him. It was Avi being like them.
And by Kata, by Ivar, by Yarra, did he sound like them. So eager to let Kirian shoulder all the blame, so willing to look only at him and ignoring all else, to find only in him a reason for anguish. So ready to pick him apart like a vulture, to stab a rapier between the ribs and pretend their hands were clean.
So ready to shape him into whatever shape they needed to fill the hole they dug. To let him pick up the pieces of a life they shattered.
“You”, he said, each word tranquil with fury, “may not wish to talk about taking someone’s choice. You never gave me one. Have you ever asked what I wanted, Avi? What choice did I have, shipped off like a hostage? What choice did I have, when one wrong word could take away my family. When it did. What choice did you ever give me? You still don’t know what I want.”
No, even now, even on the verge of all this, Avi still wanted things to be simple. He still wanted love to be love and hatred to be hatred. But they were as connected as the damp parts of the shore, the ocean always washing away the sand, delivering it anew.
He just wanted to blame Kirian.
And Kirian would have let him, were it not for the sudden, crystal clear image of Josefin biting back tears, the way her shoulders stuttered themselves into position to stay poised, the delicate warmth of her skin on his.
I know I’m going to lose you.
She had looked so sad, so inconsolable at the thought. And he knew, as absurd and as incomprehensible as the thought was to him, that he could break her heart. That if he left and he died, he would break her heart. And if he were to hurt Josefin, there could only ever be one reason: that it must be done for the greater good. That it was the only way for things to be better.
Not even Avitej Kumara would take that from him.
“No, it isn’t something as petty as blame, Avitej. It’s responsibility. Does that scare you? That I will come home and you may need to take responsibility for what we have both become? That soon you will learn that even if you give my head on a silver platter to your father, he will still not love you the way he should. Go ahead, Avi. Give him the world. He’ll just ask you for the stars. Do not let him.”
Kirian knew. Kirian had given them everything, he had bled himself dry for everyone he ever met, he had given the best parts of him to people who wanted the worst of him. They would have never loved him. They couldn’t.
Maybe he was stupid hold out hope that Avi could. That Avi wouldn’t march down the same path as he did.
“You want to know what I choose? I choose to return to you. I choose justice. And if it can only be bought with my life, I shall pay it willingly.”
He thought of Josefin, so gentle, so hopeful that Kirian could be more that the horror left in his wake. He thought of Keeva, so kind, so convinced that they could repair what had never been whole. He thought of Elena, asking for stories. He thought of Valarr, apologizing, wanting to fix things.
He thought of Avi and the way his eyes had lit up as they danced.
“But I will not let you take my life in vengeance, abaha.”
There were too many people still believing it was too important for that.
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