Coming full circle to face his younger brother, Hudson couldn’t have truly expected anything less than the mild panic that seemed to blossom on Luc’s features. Contorted and mottle with a breed of anxious confusion that should have met any such Tallis in the face of the darkness that Hudson quite literally lived in. It didn’t take much for him to feel the waves of uncertainty wash over the other, the very shift in the air around him just enough for him to cave so willingly to being okay with what he was surrounded by, though he knew that it wasn’t truly possible for any other to feel such a way without finding some sense of familiarity within it. The rough of his hand pulled slowly across the expanse of his mouth and jaw. There was no real way to explain it, truly, showing any single one of his family was something that he knew would be the only way to get his point across.
The Tallis coven were renowned for their striking sense of power, all of which was used for the very opposite of everything that lay within the confines of Hudson’s home. He’d held such little care and now that he’d quite literally exposed such a harrowing piece of himself, he didn’t exactly know how to back it up with some sense of explanation that might have stuck well enough. Telling any single one of them that he happened to enjoy the feeling of drawing the powers of another witch right out of their life source, nor could he claim his affinity for the stark premise of death that clung to such an art form. Those, he intended to remain as ominous as possible where his craft was concerned. “Freshman year.” He nodded slowly, offering some pinpoint within a timeline. “Screwed around with some things that.. very clearly I shouldn’t have and it just kind of….” Blossomed from there, an addiction that he knew there was such little cure for. He paused, eyeing his brother carefully, trying to gauge some sense of thought or reaction from him, but finding little more than the same uncertainty and confusion, he pressed on. “When I left a few years back I was.. out of control.” By anyone else standards at least, by his own? He had more power than any Tallis trip might have given him. “At first I had every intention of just.. doing my job, finding something dark that could point me in the direction of something useful.” At least until he’d found something much sweeter. “Didn’t really go to plan, but.. what I did find wasn’t exactly discouraging either.”
The lowly steps he’d taken were without destination it intention, something to occupy the silence that fell between Hudson’s voice. Rubbing the back of his neck as if it might have sparked something else he could say, he knew that there was little else than the truth that mattered now. “I told you once before that it wasn’t my choice to come back, and if I’d had any say in the matter, I’d still be gone.” Teeth caught the inside of his cheek, nodding slowly in some attempt to steel himself for what came next. “I uh.– hurt a lot of people, stole a lot of things that were never meant to be taken. By the time someone was there to stop me, I’d almost killed myself by using too much and the coven dragged me back here to..– detox.”
“They dragged you back.” Lucian repeated, trying to process it. That was the real kicker that shattered the new perception of his eldest sibling. Hudson leaving had been shitty, everyone had spent so much time resenting him for it and it’d been the one thing he hadn’t really blamed him for. Hudson had wanted independence, that was still true. What he’d done with that freedom hadn’t been questionable, it crossed any moral ambiguity. He said he’d hurt people and the way he was holding himself, the general discomfort, the look in his eye, had Lucian thinking it wasn’t just some emotional shit.
He wanted to ask about it.
“I don’t…” Know what to do with this. At all. He let the sentence hang in the air as he clasped his hands together in front of him, fingernails biting lightly at his skin. Everything was right there out in the open now. Months prior, he’d pointed out how he didn’t feel so different from Hudson. In a weird way, he’d found some comfort in knowing that they’d both just accepted that they had things they were hiding. Were they having some kind of goddamn confession now? Was Hudson baiting him? Or was he just tired of pretending?
Some childish part of him wanted to give himself a pat on the back for not caving first but it was a feeling quickly snuffed out by more questions that left him feeling….Disappointed? Guilty? Worried for where the fuck his brother’s soul was going to go? The conflict went deeper than that. Before this, he had been hellbent on not judging Hudson, because he sure as hell wasn’t the most morally sound Tallis at times but this was well beyond anything he’d ever done.
“What the fuck do you want me say here? Am I supposed to be asking for details?” The scoff Lucian gave was out of sheer frustration and he found himself gesturing vaguely around the room before putting his hands together again. Elaboration on the entire situation was something he wanted and yet, he had no idea if he could handle it. As far as he was concerned, he’d just got Hudson back.
He wondered who else knew, aside from their parents. Obviously not their siblings. There was no way they’d still be on speaking terms with him. An idea which added more fuel to the tangle of things he was feeling. Hudson trusted him with this and despite its severity, he couldn’t help but feel a little touched he’d been told at all.
“Who else knows?” Their parents, definitely not their siblings. Members of the Tallis coven were probably sworn to secrecy. Leaning back, Lucian sank down in the couch cushions and crossed his arms over his chest, eyes set on the stone table. Nixon, he wanted to ask if Nixon knew. If the vampire had been keeping their secrets from each other this whole time.