Chapter Text
There was rarely ever time. Even with the addition of two new reapers to Her court, the flow of paperwork was eternal, as people still insisted on muddling with death. And with all of his accumulated vacation time saved for his soon-to-be wedding and honeymoon, Kravitz didn’t have much left to spare.
But he only needed an hour or two. His to-do pile had been tamed for now, his Stone of Farspeech was muted just in case, and his private quarters were so heavily locked and warded that only the Queen herself would be able to enter. Certainly not Lup or Barry, though they were still new enough that they may not have known that he had private quarters at all, not just his office. The rest of the court already knew not to bother him off-duty.
Neither of them could know. Barry was relatively safe, not prone to holding grudges as far as Kravitz knew, but anything he learned would surely reach back to Lup. She would probably realize what he was doing at a glance, and he had no doubt that she would hate him for it. After all, she had seen his brother and knew the story—Lup could connect the dots.
It would be the end of everything for Kravitz. Taako would hate him. It wasn’t that the twins were lockstep in all of their opinions, but even if he miraculously didn’t find Kravitz’s behavior repugnant, it was unlikely that he would keep a lover that his twin didn’t approve of.
The wedding would be called off. All of the people who Kravitz had been tentatively calling friends would leave, once Taako was done with him. He would be stuck with two hostile coworkers, because they couldn’t just quit now. All because he couldn’t control a shameful, strange urge. He hadn’t done this much after meeting Taako (even more so after learning what an insult this was to him), but something in him had to do this. He missed them so badly, and this was the one way he could think to express it.
With shaking hands, he started to unbutton his suit jacket. His clothing was an extension of his form, so he could have let it vanish instead, but the physical motion of it was distracting. When he was down to merely his dress pants, shirtless and barefoot and all of his jewelry carefully set aside, he let himself survey the clothing he had gathered for himself.
It was still difficult for him to know exactly what it should have looked like. Fashions had changed in the centuries since his death, and it wouldn’t do to lag behind. Maybe, if they had seen him now, they would have laughed at that, mocking but kind. They would tease at how drab he had become, their serious little brother, and it would be as if nothing had changed—
Sometimes, he missed having the bodily responses of a corpse. Yes, it was beautiful and miraculous to feel a heartbeat where it had been otherwise still, or to flush at a kiss, but he could have gone without the tightness in his throat, his eyes watering.
(He knew faintly that the remains of their souls, what little had survived, had finally been contained in the Eternal Stockade, down some side hall he had no reason to visit. Perhaps he could have petitioned the Raven Queen to visit them, to see if they were all right now that they had been reunited and given the mercy of sharing a cell. After going through that much soul degradation, would they still remember him?
But he had the feeling the Raven Queen wouldn’t approve of that request. She probably didn’t want her supposedly favorite reaper emotionally compromised.)
All he had was faded memories, bits from other reapers’ reports, and now the anecdotes that he managed to wrench from Taako and his friends, while trying to seem ignorant and a quarter as curious as he really was. The Raven Queen, in Her strict kindness, had always forbidden him from pursuing his siblings’ case, even as lesser reapers failed to retrieve them. Maybe She thought he wouldn’t be able to bear what they had become.
But he refused to believe that their lichdom would have changed this part of them. No matter the style, his older siblings had always dressed in as much color as possible, and back when he was alive, they had encouraged him to do the same. Now, the neon fabric seemed like an intrusion into his dim room, but it was a welcome one, a tangle of skirts and blouses and ostentatious jewels. It all seemed like things they could have worn, bright golds and greens and coppers, beading and sequins, a far cry from his suits.
If he hadn’t known better, he would have said that it resembled Taako’s clothing. What was the difference? His lover’s clothing was similarly bright and attention-grabbing, wasn’t it? Theoretically, he could have even used some of Taako’s clothing for this purpose, but despite how he had insisted that his home was now Kravitz’s home, and thus most of the things inside it could be borrowed, he wouldn’t have felt right doing it. His siblings had tortured Taako, he couldn’t just steal Taako’s things to honor such atrocities. It was bad enough that he felt compelled to do this in the first place.
Slowly, he separated out one of the shirts, a deep royal purple with gold threading. It might have been too simple for their liking, not exciting enough, but it would be an easier start for him.
It felt childish outside of the act, but he had to make a process out of it. He imagined that jumping to the brightest, most accurate pieces of clothing would be like a living body diving into an icy lake. Soon he was acclimated enough that he could trade the purple shirt for something brighter in pink and green, and then slipping off a longer, plain skirt for one that was tight and beaded, lining his arms with bangles that chimed with each movement...
He was unnecessarily breathless when he finally finished with what was almost the final look, what Edward and Lydia might have gushed over or at least deemed acceptable. Crystals hanging from his ears, golden ribbons woven into his braid (the feathers carefully removed beforehand, to keep from tainting them with these memories), every bit of fabric on him almost offensively bright. A pair of heeled boots that his ‘body,’ however changed, had not forgotten to walk in.
Maybe it was ridiculous to draw it out, but his movements were slow as he turned towards the tall mirror that waited in the corner of his room, which he had been studiously ignoring. He finally had a chance to look at himself in full.
How was it that Taako had yet to figure it out, for all the time they had spent memorizing each other’s faces? Couldn’t he look at Kravitz and see the people who had hurt him so deeply? He may have been their half-brother, but they had always looked like family. Or maybe Lydia and Edward had strayed so far from him that they no longer shared a resemblance. They were liches, but he couldn’t believe for a moment that they would let themselves be seen without layers of glamour. Had they experimented with it until they no longer resembled like their original, mortal selves? Had he become so inconsequential to them?
But he looked so much like his memory of them that he could have assumed for a second that it was one of them standing in front of the mirror, interchangeable in their androgyny. That soon the other would lean into view of the mirror and say—
That he had forgotten something. It wasn’t done yet, and he needed the mirror for this part. His face was too plain in comparison to the rest of it; where was the glitter, the shine? He could have manifested makeup straight onto himself, but he liked the motions of brushes and powders, and by now he had watched Taako do it himself often enough he could do a passable job. When he had been alive, had the twins done this for him? It’d be like them to mask his increasing gauntness with blush and foundation, denying his sickness until they couldn’t any longer.
And that had to be bright too. Pink and green on his eyelids, and iridescent glitter brushed along his cheeks, and his suddenly dry lips outlined in a gold shine...
Makeup made of ghostly energy couldn’t run under tears, but they would have scolded him for it anyway, had they been there. This wasn’t Kravitz, beloved reaper of the Raven Queen. This was Keats, young and dying and eventually betrayed, but when he had looked like this, hadn’t he been blessed and happy? The naive baby brother, violin in hand, always trailing behind. An fainter reflection of his more vibrant siblings.
Maybe it had been so long and he had changed so much that they wouldn’t have been able to recognize him anymore.
He shook his head, rubbing at his eyes and then glancing, uselessly, to see if he had smudged off any eyeshadow. There was no use in speculating. Maybe someday he would be allowed to seek them out, and he’d see if the centuries had erased him from their minds. But for now...
It always felt a bit odd, reaching into the void where his scythe waited and removing his violin instead. Was it possible that they were made of the same energy? He’d never had both summoned at the same time, and they somehow felt the same to hold, tied to his soul. It could have just a faint holdover from being a bard such a long time ago, or maybe everything that the Raven Queen made had that sort of energy.
He took a seat on the bed he rarely used, still within sight of the mirror. His opportunities to play were sparse, especially now that the Court had a dedicated bard. The Raven Queen insisted that She enjoyed hearing him play as well, but it was embarrassing to compare his skill with someone who could drive a room full of hardened, worldwise reapers to sobbing. He hadn’t played for anyone but himself in months.
When he was dressed like this, he could imagine he was playing that high-paced tune for his older siblings while they put on a practice run of a complicated show of illusory magic, one of the sharpest memories he had managed to retain. Had it been a hobby, or were they trying to become performers in their own right? Surely they couldn’t have been buskers with such extravagant clothing and the piano (his piano) sitting in the corner. Who was supposed to be their audience? Were they merely entertaining each other?
Maybe they had just been acting out against a staid higher class that would have looked down on such antics as gaudy and inappropriate. Hadn’t it been the three of them against the world? As much as he strained against the fog of his memories, he couldn’t recall the rest of their family, if there had been anyone else at all. Why wasn’t Keats a full elf like his siblings, and where was his father? What was there aside from hazy evenings sitting by the fire as Edward and Lydia danced and cast bursts of fire and petals around them?
(Where had their parents been when he was so ill he couldn’t hold his violin, let alone play it? When the twins stole away his dying body for their rituals? When they threw away their mortality for necromantic magic?)
Soon the song trailed off as his hands began to shake and stumble over notes. That wouldn’t have been good enough when he was alive, so it definitely wasn’t acceptable now. Nothing less than perfection, for Lydia and Edward. Even if they weren’t there...
No crying. From what he could remember, they hated seeing him cry, both back in the day when it was merely over a string snapping or something similarly trivial, and when he couldn’t help the frustrated tears from being unable to sit up or walk, let alone perform. And when one or both of them left him alone for hours at a time, no doubt searching out anyone who would teach them necromancy. Of course they would leave him water and bowls of soup carefully charmed to stay warm, and there must have been clerics to tend to him, but none of that could replace his siblings wiping down his feverish forehead and trying to sing badly, one bit of performance they couldn’t master.
(“You can’t leave us, so stop this and snap out of it. Who told you you were allowed to go, Keats?”
Even if he hadn’t gotten sick, he had been a half-elf, with a much shorter lifespan. They would have lost him anyway, always too soon—he couldn’t think of any circumstance that wouldn’t have ended in necromancy. There was nothing he could have done to keep them on the right path. So in a way, wasn’t it his fault that any of this had happened?)
A violin made out of soul energy couldn’t be scratched or scuffed, so he was free to cling to it as much as he wanted, with nothing else to ground him. There was no reason to feel alone and abandoned when now he had so many people around him. It was hard to be close to a lot of them, people who either didn’t know who he was or were reasonably uncomfortable with him being a Grim Reaper, but maybe he would settle in and be a part of the group someday. There was no reason to be longing like this.
Neither of his siblings would be able to attend his wedding. If he wanted a wedding, he couldn’t even let on that he had siblings, not when Taako would become curious and pry. He hated lying to his beloved, but wouldn’t it be necessary? Taako had fallen in love with Kravitz, not Keats. He wouldn’t want any of this betrayal.
A shift in the air was all it took to let him know of his Queen’s presence unfolding into the room, with no time to make himself presentable. It wouldn’t do to ignore Her, even while out of uniform and snotty with tears, so Kravitz stood to face her. She sat, for a generous use of ‘sitting,’ in the plush armchair in the corner, the one he kept clear once he realized She favored it. Her form settled from a shifting mass of feathers, the suggestion of a beak, many eyes, into something relatively humanoid. From that, he could assume She was feeling affectionate; oftentimes She didn’t bother manifesting arms unless She wanted to use them.
He tried to press back his shame as he curtsied to Her as best he could in such a tight skirt. Had She sensed his distress so strongly that She needed to come check in on him? “Good evening, my Lady.” Not that there was a standard passage of time in the Astral Plane, but it was evening where Taako was, and so his internal clock had creaked back into use. And being polite never hurt.
She nodded. “To you as well. You look lovely, my dear.” He resisted the urge to fidget, to straighten his hem or bracelets. Was She just saying that to placate him? Even Istus in Her brightest didn’t look garish as he did. “Would you play me a song? As you already have your instrument prepared, I assume this isn’t an imposition. Anything would do, but perhaps not a dirge. Not that there is anything wrong with them, but I hear so many of those from the temples that I long for something else. Something more lively if you pardon my word choice.”
“Of course.” His hands were still shaking, but he wiped his eyes and lifted his violin. She was humoring him, obviously, trying to boost his spirit (er, so to speak), but it was a welcome distraction. If all She wanted was a song, there was Johann for that—She wanted him.
So he played loudly and badly for his Queen, dropping notes and adding in unnecessary ones and at one point making up a whole section that had abruptly fled his mind. Lydia and Edward would have been disappointed in him—he could do better, couldn’t he? It was bizarre to him that She wasn’t frowning or insisting that he start again. He could feel tears begin to well up again, dripping down onto his chinrest.
Kravitz managed a short sonata that stumbled off into most of an upbeat, modern song he had heard once being played in a public garden where he and Taako had taken one of their first post-apocalypse dates. The memory of Taako was enough to crumble his resolve, and both violin and bow tumbled to the floor as he gave himself over to raw weeping.
The reaction wasn’t surprising to Her in the least. She spread Her feathered arms to him, and hesitantly he drew closer. There was room enough on the chair for Her to pull him into Her side, Her plumage cold and soft against him. The Raven Queen didn’t bother with platitudes, merely shushing him and weaving a hand into his hair, carefully unraveling his braids while minding her talons. She piled the gold ribbons in his lap and continued to preen him.
There was no point in trying to suppress the crying, not for Her. Not when She knew every inch of his mind and probably would have scolded him gently for thinking he ever needed to hide anything from Her. “You’re being terribly silly about things, you know that?”
“I’m sorry, my Lady.”
“See, and you’re doing it again,” the Raven Queen sighed, starting to rebraid a tiny section of his hair. She wasn’t particularly good at it. Shouldn’t Istus have taught Her how, in all the time They spent together? “Isn’t love supposed to make you less high-strung, rather than more? Do I need to have a talk with this beau of yours, to make sure he’s not upsetting you about your family?”
“N-no, it’s fine, please—please don’t.” If telling Taako about everything himself would be horrible on its own, the Raven Queen trying to do it on his behalf... It’d be a disaster, not in the least because he doubted She would sugarcoat any of it. “I can handle this, I promise.” He wasn’t sure how, aside from keeping it hidden, but that counted as handling it, right?
“If you insist, but please, my dearest raven. Stop tearing yourself apart over this, won’t you? It wouldn’t do to have you fall apart now, after you’ve survived a literal apocalypse.”
After a minute, he had regained his faculties enough to stop crying. A few centuries ago, Kravitz might have found it embarrassing to sob huddled against his Queen, but She was his self-appointed “bird mom,” and apparently this was in the job description. Once he got his breathing under control, he began to hum, knowing She would appreciate it. She warbled quietly in response and thoroughly knotted his hair into the worst braids that had existed across every plane. He’d probably have to reform his whole body rather than trying to untangle it.
With Her ability to exist in every part of the Astral Plane at once, he didn’t really have to worry about wasting Her time with all of...this. And if he got it out of his system now, surely that meant he wouldn’t end up sobbing all over Taako instead. This practically counted as having all his shit together, right?
For a little while, he didn’t feel so lost.