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Nero’s world narrows down to the smell of crackling magic in the air and the shouts of his comrades, desperation coiling around his heart like a cold fist—colder than the icy Northern air—as he grimly races towards their planned escape route.
Because that’s easier to process than the now all-too familiar feeling of Bradley’s weight entrusted completely onto his body, the wet seep of hot blood soaking through Nero’s clothes. He tries not to think about how it wasn’t his blood, tries not to calculate how much blood Bradley is losing.
It was supposed to be just another raid; a Northern noble demanding offerings of human children from the villages under his control as sport for a murderous hunting game on his lands. What’s the fun of killing swiftly with magic compared to the thrill of stalking down and killing your helpless, struggling prey the old-fashioned way? Bradley had gotten wind of this piece of rumour when he dropped by a pub in one of his villages, and decided that it was high time someone parted a bastard like that from his riches—and his head from his body. It wasn't supposed to be difficult, but as usual, even the best laid plans had a way of going wrong.
Nero turns around and hurls his magical cutlery at the Northern noble’s armies chasing at their heels — his weapons fly out in a straight arc, their aim true and steady even as grief wraps a tighter fist around his heart at the sight of their fallen comrades crumpled and lying broken on the ground. He tamps down an anguished sob at the sight of Conrad, who joined only a few years ago, who looked up to Brad like he hung the goddamn moon in the Northern sky. Oh no, not Jasper: he was still only a child. But he had pestered Bradley endlessly to be allowed to tag along the raid, and Bradley had laughed and ruffled his hair, saying that he liked a kid who showed a bit of spunk and to “do your best to surprise me, kiddo.” Now Jasper is stone on the ground left behind, and all Nero can remember is him smiling sheepishly up at Nero as he tells him that the stew Nero made tastes as good as the one his ma used to make for him. Not anymore.
How many times have they gone through this? A few paces behind him, Gorman slams his fists down onto the frozen ground, sending a concentrated blast of power that rips open the ground beneath their pursuers’ feet, giving them the distance they need to get away. Nero shifts the weight of Bradley against his shoulder and attacks again, just to be sure, blankness filling his mind as he adjusts his grip on his cutlery. Their party has almost reached the borders that mark the edge of the Cavern of Time, but they’re not out of the woods yet. Home is still a ways ahead, and Nero can already feel his comrades’ spirits—and their magic—flagging. It’s bad enough that the force of Bradley’s personality alone would have been enough to inspire their entire gang of bandits to walk into sure death and back again, but being in the sphere of his reinforcement magic makes you feel like you can do anything, take on any goddamn wizard. It sharpens the edges of their magic, sends adrenaline searing through their blood. Without him, they would’ve long gone down like a flame being extinguished. Does he even know how much every single person in this gang relies on him? Of course he fucking doesn’t: eyes on the prize, everything else be damned, his own life and all. Damn you, Bradley.
They stagger bloodily into their hideout. Nero carefully lays Bradley down on the leather couch in his room, gritting his teeth against the anguished cry that threatens to erupt at sight of the bloody gash that runs deep and wide from Bradley’s shoulder to his hip. Crimson moonlight floods in and paints every curve and corner of the cavern, draping over his still form like a shroud. Nero sucks in a ragged breath, trying to ignore the uncomfortable stickiness of the blood-soaked clothes clinging to his side as he desperately works the healing spells that he’s grown painfully familiar with.
It was supposed to be an easy job, but someone must have tipped off the Northern noble, because a group of hunters had descended on them the second they crossed over the periphery. At the press of cold silver against the back of his throat, an avalanche of images had flashed through Nero’s mind. Bradley tearing into Nero’s fried chicken with a low hum of contented satisfaction; the way he crooks a fond smile at Nero and says he wants to eat his cooking for the rest of his life. Late nights running over strategies in the empty kitchen, moonlight spilling across the floor, their heads bent close over maps together. Bradley’s smile, whiskey-warm and burning with life, the corners of his eyes crinkled with amusement.
He had thought then, not for the first time, that what if this time they didn’t make it out alive. That there wouldn’t be any more nights in the home they’d carved out in the icy North, Bradley’s lazy smirk meeting his own across the room filled with their comrades sharing drinks and cracking jokes, drunk on the feeling that they all had a place to belong to. Of Bradley’s hands spreading open against Nero’s back as he peers over his shoulder in the kitchen. Of the shit-eating grin Bradley wears whenever he announces another one of his heists, and the hooting laughs that Nero’s exasperated eye-rolling draws out of their bemused comrades used to this charade between their boss and his number two.
On the couch, Bradley takes in a shuddering breath, slowly opening his eyes to look at Nero. “Hey. Don’t look like that. This—,” Pain momentarily distorts his features. “......This kind of injury isn’t enough to kill me. I…...I said I wouldn’t turn into stone as long as I have you.”
Nero’s clasp on Bradley’s hand tightens, bile burning at the back of his throat. He thinks he hears a choked sob of relief from Gorman standing next to him. What’s the tally now? How many more times must he be witness to Bradley getting himself half-killed? Back there, Nero’s thoughts had come to a grinding halt when Bradley lunged at the guy with an axe held against Nero’s neck. They had been outnumbered, and the bloody fool had gone and put Nero’s life above his own, pulling Nero behind him and taking on the brunt of the attack. Again. One day it’s not going to be enough, and Nero doesn’t know if he can live with the guilt of knowing that he didn't do enough to stop it.
Above them, the bats' eyes glitter and flicker in the darkness.
.
“I’ll be all right as long as I have you. I’m counting on you, buddy.”
Again and again over the years, Bradley told Nero this.
The first time Bradley said it to him, Nero felt a spark light up in his chest. It wasn’t a promise—never a promise—but he had sworn then and there that he would be someone worthy of standing by Brad’s side, a man Brad wouldn’t be ashamed to call his partner.
Over time, these words became like a silent language they didn’t need to voice. Bradley said it in a myriad of glances, each slightly different from one another but with the same truth burning at their core. And Nero’s answering nod, a half tilt of his head. I got your back, Brad. You can count on it. The glances they exchanged when they fought back to back in a battle, shots ringing in their ears and magic overwhelming their senses. Whenever they stayed up on an all-night stake out together, huddled behind a boulder waiting for Bradley’s signal to action. When Bradley returned alone from a raid gone badly wrong, a haunted look in his eyes and their party returning with less people than they set out with, Nero knew what had happened without him having to say it.
As long as they had each other, they were invincible.
.
Hunger, the cold, violence: those are the first things you learn when you’re born in the North. It is a place which strips everything bare, where there’s nothing to protect you and nowhere to hide. The North has no time for those who don’t have the hunger to survive — or the pride to face death. It is a fact commonly accepted that the weak die, and only the strong attain freedom.
Nero never really minded the cold. He remembers huddling in the corner of a dilapidated shack when he was young, wondering if he was going to freeze to death. He wasn't sure if all the children he grew up with were his siblings or not, but he remembers vividly the fear of using magic to light a spark—even as a child, he knew instinctively that the adults didn’t like it when people are wizards. It’s always cold in the North, and the violent blizzards that rage depending on the demon king’s moods are as unpredictable and incomprehensible as the man himself. The adults used to say that feeling cold is a good thing: the biting cold that settles under your skin means that you’re still alive, that blood is still coursing through your veins.
All his life, Nero felt like he had a gaping hole filled with shifting sands instead of where his sense of self would be, but Bradley was the first person who said he needed Nero, and gave him a role to fulfill. Sometimes it feels like Bradley has a pit in him that burns hot where Nero’s feels empty, cold.
Where the cold had numbed and hollowed out any desires Nero might have had, Bradley reveled in it, the harsh iciness of the North only serving all the more to stoke the flames of his hunger for power, riches, and everything life had to offer. He burned with a ferocity that Nero has never understood, with a conviction that he can seize all his heart's desires with his own two hands. Nero would’ve been content with the stability of running a business, somewhere far away from the relentless grind of the North, where he could live in peace, but when he had brought the idea up with Bradley, the other man had only laughed and scoffed at his fanciful idea (“You know the only thing I can dish out are fights, right?”) and Nero had never mentioned it again.
He's seen the way the other bandits are drawn towards the warmth that radiates off of Bradley, and he doesn't blame them: in the North, Bradley Bain stands out like a flame. When they first met, he used to think Bradley was just a hot-headed idiot, all arrogance and mercurial temperament. But despite being a Northern wizard, Bradley chose to see something in each person he gathered to him, kindling a spark in them that made them feel like they could be something—be someone. That their weak self was something they could take pride in, and fate something they could change with their own two hands. No wonder then, how he managed to inspire such loyalty in the people of the North when none had done so before him. It is a dangerous thing, the heady warmth of Bradley’s trust: before you know it, the spark is an ember is a flame. He was a leader who looked after his people and who would’ve put his life on the line for any one of them; Nero hated and loved him in equal measure for it. Bradley’s warmth dulled Nero's edges, the unshakeable sureness of Bradley’s own belief in himself—and in Nero—made him feel like he could almost forget his own emptiness within. It filled his head and pooled in his chest, until he almost forgot how the cold felt.
In many ways, they had balanced each other out: Bradley’s passion countering Nero’s reticence, and Nero's advice helping to keep Bradley’s searing impulses in check. Sometimes, it felt like there was no end to what Bradley set his sights on, that he would never be satisfied. Bradley lived each day ablaze, the magnitude of his desires and ambition burning like a wildfire that doesn’t have an end in sight, bent on consuming everything in its path—even his own life.
.
Nero keeps watch over Bradley’s bedside, Bradley’s hand warm in his own, still shaking from the nearness of losing Bradley again. Bradley stirs, shifting his weight closer towards Nero and nudging his cheek sleepily against their intertwined hands. “Don’t know what I’d do without you, Nero. I would've turned into stone a long time ago,” Bradley had said once. Right now, the truth of that strikes ice through Nero’s gut. Bradley’s breathing turns to the even, heavy rhythm of sleep, but Nero stays awake through the night, waves of yet-unnamed emotions washing over his heart.
Sometimes they joke about the day that they first met. That day Nero met Bradley, who reached out a hand to him and gave him a role—a place to belong, his life changed. And since then, he’s stood by Bradley’s side: his subordinate, his partner, his friend. If promises were something they could make, he thinks that back then he would have promised to follow Brad until the ends of the earth.
If they could travel into the past and redo their choices, Nero has no doubt that Bradley would offer him the same hand. But would Nero still choose to take it, if he knew that standing by Bradley's side meant being witness to his reckless disregard for his own life, to being endlessly caught in the blink-of-an-eye between life and death?
Hey, Bradley. If you want to die so badly, I’ll kill you myself.
.
(In prison, Bradley would wonder.
Hey, partner. What did our days together mean to you?
What changed? Where did we go wrong? Was I wrong?
The silence never answers him.)
.
There was a point, Nero noticed dully, where you stopped counting. Where numbers cease to hold any more meaning. The tenth time Bradley almost died, the twentieth, then the thirtieth. A hundred mana stones. A million gold coins. A hundred million stars. Somewhere along the line, the numbers dissolve into each other.
And yet every time, it still feels like Nero's heart is being torn to pieces.
As long as they had each other, they were invincible. That was all it took for them to be happy—or so Nero had thought. But evidently, it wasn't enough for Bradley. Instead, Nero had become fluent in the history of Bradley's scars mapped across his body, each and every one like a footnote he would rather forget. Each time he saw Bradley off on a raid without him, he spent the entire time until Bradley returned with a blank darkness settled over his thoughts, a nameless terror keeping his hands balled into fists. Every meal he cooked, Nero wondered if it would be the last one they shared together; every time Bradley pushed himself too far, he wondered if that was the final straw. The next time, it would be the same all over again. And there was always, always a next time. Sometimes Nero thought any chance he had of being content to stay in the North had ended that very first time he saw Bradley almost die right in front of his eyes. He should have asked Bradley to stop then, had asked him to stop, but asking Bradley Bain to stop was the same as asking him to die.
Nero stopped counting a long time ago. But when Bradley says, “I’m counting on you, buddy” for that final time, his grin arrogant and sure, Nero feels something in him gives way with a quiet finality.
He’d spend his entire life watching Bradley Bain die, and lose his own heart along with the way.
He was going to end this even if it was the last thing he ever did.
.
Later, he’ll dream of Bradley being tortured in prison, his screams ricocheting off the walls—gossip, brought to his ears by traders who stop by his newly set up shop in Eastern Country—and wake up, the same scream torn from his own throat.
No matter how hard Nero tries, there are wounds that will never heal, and memories that he’ll never be able to forget.
And wizards live forever.
.
(As he betrays the location of the leader of the death bandits to one Figaro Garcia, Nero remembers. He hopes that at last, those words will have lost their truth, that after all this, Bradley will no longer need Nero by his side. Or perhaps Nero’s carrying out his end of that truth, by trapping Bradley into a prison where he’ll finally stop putting himself at death’s door at every opportunity. How cruel of him to shackle Bradley into a fate that he finds even worse than turning into stone, but if this is the price he has to pay for Bradley to stay alive, then Nero thinks it’s worth any cost.
“I’ll be all right as long as I have you. I’m counting on you, buddy.”)
.
(Even now, Nero doesn’t think he’d change anything about the day they met.)