Chapter Text
“What have you done?” Crowleyʼs voice was a rough, ragged whisper, both ringing with fury and near too soft to be heard. The dungeon of Castle Araluen was no sacred place, but the circumstances called for silence.
Behind the bars, Halt shrugged as far as his chains and bruises let him. “You have the report of my arrest.”
Crowley did, and it answered all the Hows and not a single “Why?”
“You know why.”
And Crowley knew.
He took a step forward, then gave up pretence and dropped to his knees in front of the bars, his face level with Haltʼs. But Halt looked away, battered and bloody and as serene as Crowley was not.
“Did you have to go this far?” Not even the king could pardon treason.
Halt shrugged again. “You tell me.”
Crowley curled his fingers around the bars, their black, soot-stained metal biting into the skin of his palms. He wanted to scream. He rested his head and bit his lip to hold it back.
“Iʼm tempted to let you rot here,” he said and it was the truth, for both alternatives were worse. “Was it really worth it? All those years for this?”
Halt lifted his head. It was cold in the dungeon, grave-cold, but his eyes were colder still. “You have no right to tell me what my years were for, Crowley.”
“No,” Crowley conceded sadly, dropping his hands to his knees like a chastised child. “I suppose I donʼt.”
Haltʼs gaze slid away again. His face looked terrible, the split lip seeping blood. Crowley had a mind to offer help—he could order the cell be opened—but thought better of it. Halt wouldnʼt want his help. It suited him to look like that, the fallen desperado.
“What do I do without you, Halt?”
Halt actually chuckled. “For starters—” His bloody mouth twisted into a sour grimace. “—you should stop taking all your problems to me.”
Crowley flinched as if struck.
Halt lifted his manacled hands up, shook them to make the irons clink. “I have plenty enough of my own.”
“I canʼt, Halt. I just canʼt anymore.”
A pile of papers lay scattered across the floor of Crowleyʼs office, the newest in the chain of disasters that had been his first week as the Corpsʼ Commandant. The smallest too, perhaps, but itʼs the straw that breaks the proverbial camelʼs back, not a boulder.
And Crowley broke.
He sank to the floor with his unsigned documents, unread agreements and unwritten letters, scattered like casualties on this battlefield of ink and paper he was so inept at leading at.
It was only after much deliberation that heʼd allowed himself to ask Halt for help. But of course he’d forgotten to latch the window on his way out. He knew he should close the window now and pick the papers up, simple as that, but it did not feel simple at all.
He could weather storms and hails of arrows, but bureaucracy had beaten him.
“Itʼs just paperwork,” Halt observed unhelpfully.
Crowley spat out a mirthless laugh. “Itʼs a damn lot of paperwork. I donʼt even know where to start.”
“Exactly where you did.”
Crowley lifted his eyes. Halt had crossed the room, shut the window and set about picking up the fallen papers and arranging them into a neat pile on Crowleyʼs desk. Not so many of them now, it seemed.
The straw was just a straw again, embarrassingly small when someone else had lifted it off his back.
Crowley felt his cheer returning. “I donʼt even know where I started,” he admitted shyly.
Halt helped him up, his hand strong and sure. “You came to me.”
No more. Crowley picked himself up and brushed the memory away like he brushed the grime off his cloak. It was the past now.
“For what itʼs worth, Iʼm sorry,” he said.
Halt nodded. “For what itʼs worth, so am I.”
And just like that, there was nothing left to say between them. Not that there had been much to begin with. But for the same reason one comes to funerals, Crowley had needed to come here: to get a conclusion, however painful it may be.
It didnʼt feel like much of one.
Then Halt spoke up. “Crowley. Wait.”
And Crowley instinctively knew that whatever Halt had to say would make this no easier. But he owed it to his friend to listen. “Iʼm here.”
Halt struggled with the words for a while. “All those years you mentioned,” he began cautiously. Inhaled, mustered his courage. “Iʼve only had the years Iʼve had because someone once refused to give up on me. Because he didnʼt wait. Didnʼt hesitate.”
“Halt—”
“Each day I wasted, I was betraying them both, Pritchard and Will.” He met Crowleyʼs eyes, unrepentant. “I was betraying myself.”
Crowley had been right. It made nothing easier.
“So instead youʼve gone and betrayed your country, your king, your duty—” Betrayed me. Crowley bit his tongue on the last one, tasted blood. This wasnʼt about him. “You really think Pritchard would have done this?”
The answer was obvious. He would have not. Araluen had been everything for Pritchard.
But Halt only smiled, the rare expression grisly on his battered face.
Crowley shut the dungeon door on him and didnʼt look back.
Next time Crowley saw Halt, it was at the trial. He watched his friendʼs mockery of a defence with muted horror and a suffocating sense of inevitability, grateful to the cowl of his cloak for hiding his face.
Then he thanked it for hiding his oh so inappropriate joy.
Halt only met Crowleyʼs eyes as they were leading him out of the courtroom, convicted yet victorious. Banished, but only for a year. “Be seeing you,” he mouthed at the Ranger Commandant. His idea of a joke, perhaps. But to Crowley it felt like a slap to the face. A deserved one.
Halt had been right. Their mentor would have been proud of him. Furious, but proud.
He wouldnʼt have been proud of Crowley.
“Be seeing you,” Crowley muttered under his breath. A poor choice of words between two men who were never going to see each other again. But then, Halt had said it first.
Crowley was missing him already.
He gave Cropper the cue and set off into the summer-green woods at a gallop. Going fast because he had plans to make and places to be, a kingdom to pull to its feet by the strings of a dozen Rangers. Going fast because doubts and regrets were chasing him, and he had no time nor heart to entertain them.
Cropper sped up even more, sensing his Rangerʼs mood, and for a while everything was so simple and perfect, all worries streaming away with his cloak and the whistling of the wind.
Then Cropper stumbled and Crowley flew out of the saddle. Even as he turned in the air to amortise the fall, one thought rattled his mind: Ranger horses didnʼt just stumble. Not on even roads in the middle of the day.
He hit the ground rolling, already flipping out the saxe knife to block the incoming blow. It jarred his hand to the elbow, but he blocked it. Still alive.
He dove forward as another blade swung at his back, missing narrowly. Crowleyʼs knife didn't miss, slicing through the side of the first attackerʼs neck. Still alive, but even as he bolted for the perceived safety of the woods, he knew it wouldnʼt be long.
Three more men stood in his way, eyes hard, their blades sharp and glinting.
Alone against four, Crowley gave it his best, but soon they had him backed into a tree and surrounded, breathing hard and bleeding from a gash on his forehead.
Crowley realised two things as his back hit the rough surface of the tree. First, that he was truly, unavoidably and irrevocably going to die here. And somehow even worse than that was the second thought, that he was really never going to see Halt again.
No sooner did he think that than two arrows fell from the sky to prove him wrong. On both accounts.
“I’ll be seeing you,” Crowley whispered into the wind, watching the hunched silhouette of his friend fade into the misty morning.
He should have just let him go. Instead he curled his fingers around Haltʼs silver oakleaf, a petty victory already turning sour. Heʼd expected to find consolation in integrity, but the rules and regulations heʼd sacrificed so much for were nothing but cold words in this cold morning. He couldnʼt decide whether he hated them more than he hated himself.
He should have just let Halt go.
Instead he was left with a silver trinket, a soulful of guilt and the faded words of their long-ago promise. A promise that had never been meant to be kept, but keep it they did.
“Iʼll be seeing you, Halt.”
He tried to believe it.
Crowley lasted two days. Two days of strained optimism and fake smiles, of Duncanʼs hopefulness and his well-meaning reassurances. Two days was what it took to reassign positions in Haltʼs absence and wrap up the urgent paperwork, and to set young Gilan on Foldarʼs trail like he should have done to begin with.
Two days. Then he pulled out the wine bottle he kept for official meetings and plucked out the cork with his teeth. Gilan wasnʼt there to stop him, Halt even less so, and everyone else was welcome to try. Duncan especially.
Much as Crowley loved his king for bending the law for Halt, he couldnʼt look at Duncan without remembering his own failure to do the same. He tried to remind himself instead that Duncanʼs daughter was missing together with that boy Halt seemed to love like a son, but misery fit Crowley better than self-righteousness. In righteousness, a man was too often alone. In the bottle, never.
And so Crowley drank to the lonely bastards. He drank and wondered where Halt was now. Where he was headed. Whether he could succeed, against all odds. Crowley took a deeper sip. Whether he was coming back home.
He wondered where Haltʼs home even was, now. Where it had been before Araluen. All those years, and heʼd never mustered the courage to ask.
And there, like a man picking at a freshly scabbed wound, his guilt finally found purchase. He knew this was a wrong and dangerous thought to follow. He knew it would only make him bleed, make matters worse between him and Halt.
But guilt was also like wine. The more he drank the sicker of it he became, and yet he couldnʼt help himself.
He had always wanted to know.
Crowley rapped his knuckles on the tree to which Pritchardʼs tarp was fixed and asked tentatively, “Anyone home?”
Pritchard, who sat with his back to the aforementioned tree doing nothing in particular except ignoring his former student, replied, “Heʼs busy.”
“That so?”
Pritchard sighed, but gestured for Crowley to join him on the ground. It was strange to travel with him again. At times it felt like nothing had changed, when everything had.
“Well?” the old Ranger prompted.
Crowley needed no further encouragement. “Who is he really?”
“You mean Halt?”
“Who else?”
Pritchard hesitated, looping his finger around the chain on which his oakleaf hung. Crowley remembered the nervous gesture from his apprenticeship years. He would be ashamed to admit it, but his mentorʼs reluctance to discuss the matter only made him more curious.
“Heʼs a Ranger like you, Crowley. My former apprentice and friend. What else do you need to know?”
The redhead took a moment to consider how to frame his thoughts as something deeper than prying. “Do you know how we met?” he said at last.
“My sources may have mentioned some bones picked with Baron Morgarath?”
Crowley nodded. “I ran into a few of his soldiers misbehaving in an inn. They decided to pick a fight and, well, it was going rather badly for me until Halt stepped in.”
“Colour me surprised,” Pritchard muttered in a remarkably unsurprised tone. “Any survivors?”
“All three, mostly in one piece.” Crowley smiled at the memory. “But they attacked a Kingʼs Ranger, so I decided to bring them back to Gorlan and request an audience with the Baron, and Halt decided to tag along.”
“And?”
“And I donʼt know how to explain this but for a moment there I wondered who was having that audience with who.”
“Whom.”
Right into his trap. Crowley grinned. “Oh, so he corrupted you too? I noticed he quite likes his grammar.”
“You could learn from him, then,” Pritchard scoffed. “And much as Baron Morgarath likes to pretend otherwise, he doesnʼt outrank you—”
“You see, hereʼs the thing: I donʼt think he outranks Halt either.” Pritchard abandoned whatever he meant to say next and looked away, but both of them knew Crowley didnʼt mean a Rangerʼs rank. “That, and Iʼve seen him tip in gold.”
“Where are you headed with this?”
“Heʼs highborn, isnʼt he?”
“Only Halt himself can tell you this, Crowley. But my advice, no, my heartfelt request is: donʼt ask. If you value his friendship, donʼt ask. Let his past stay buried.”
“But—”
“Crowley. Promise me.”
Crowley hung his head low, disappointed. But he promised.
But Halt had promised too.
It was a lovely summer day. The sky was blue and cloudless, the air sweet with the promise of summer. Birds warbled in the trees and Crowley whistled along with them, enjoying the warmth of sun on his face and feeling simply, strangely happy.
Strangely, because a bait for a pack of two dozen bloodthirsty bandits wasn’t supposed to be happy. He should have been terrified, but, strange thing, he wasnʼt even afraid.
“Itʼs all your fault,” he called to Halt, who turned in his saddle to look at him questioningly.
“My bravery. Or recklessness. I just canʼt help myself with you around.” Crowley cleared his throat, suddenly embarrassed. That’d sounded better in his head. “Thanks for being my friend, is what I mean. Iʼm a better man for it.”
Halt regarded him in silence. “Thatʼs very touching,” he said after a while, “but could you please quit the dying manʼs talk?”
"I might very well die. Thought you should know. Remember me, I guess.”
“Find someone else for the job. If weʼre going down, weʼre going down together.”
There was a bout of silence in which Crowley considered the probability he was being mocked for his earlier sappy comment. Halt seemed serious, but that he always did.
“Thatʼs very touching, Halt,” he finally dared, “but in the event it goes badly for me, could you please refrain from doing anything stupid?”
Almost inaudibly, Halt replied, “Can’t help myself with you around.”
And if that wasn’t quite the summary of the two of them.
“Iʼm glad itʼs you at my back,” Crowley said, smiling.
“Always.”
The foreign affairs archives held as many cobwebs as documents. It was dark and chilly, the flickering light of Crowleyʼs candle attracting more shadows than it scattered. There was not a soul here in the middle of the night, and even drunk as he was, Crowley felt the archives preferred it so.
That was his voice of reason speaking. Crowley normally listened to it studiously, but for the time being, they were estranged.
If he backed off, he was never going to try this again.
He stopped in the centre of the room, unsure of where to start. The candle sputtered, spewing out a plum of smoke.
With the smoke came the memory.
It had been so long ago.
Crowley slipped between shadows in the forest, from a trunk to bush to thicket, soundless, unseen. Around him, the forest bustled with life. Insects buzzed in the air, rodents and other small animals scurrying through the undergrowth. A tawny owl perched in a tree hollow above hooted its eerie call. Crowley paid no heed to its uncalled-for interest and the bad luck it was said to bring.
He was following a softer sound still, one he’d never expected and never wanted to hear. His ears were baffled but his heart knew it. Fifty Rangers had come to the Gathering, yet the one that had slipped away from the bonfires and song, the one with a crumpled letter in his hand and traces of tears glistening on his cheeks—Crowley would have known him anywhere.
And now Halt was crying, a heartbreaking, hollow sound. Just a few paces away, but Crowley hesitated. What right did he have to follow when Halt seeked solitude? What right did he have to eavesdrop when Halt was clearly sobbing into the fabric of his cloak, trying not to be heard?
He was Crowley’s subordinate and colleague, his closest friend, his brother and more. The Ranger Commandant exhaled and forced his footsteps to be audible as he approached the old oak tree behind which his friend was hiding. Halt knew him well enough to recognise the pattern of his footfalls on summer grass, just as Crowley would always know his. Many a road they have travelled together, hiding from dangers uncountable but never from each other.
As years went by their paths had diverged, running parallel yet not always close enough to touch. And at times they did cross, like tonight, Halt and he were such hopeless fools about it.
Halt didn’t bother to lift his head at Crowley’s approach. “Leave me,” he mumbled into his arms wrapped around his knees. He was sitting curled against an old oak tree, the cowl of his cloak hiding his face and muffling his words further.
Crowley ignored the dismissal and huddled down next to him in the hollow between the oak’s protruding roots. And if he had to jostle Halt a little so Halt would make space for him, so be it. His friend seemed in no spirit to put up a decent fight anyway.
The bark was rough behind his back, the ground hard and uncomfortable and littered with roots and rocks. Crowley fidgeted, trying to find a position that would offer at least a modicum of comfort. Halt shot him a death glare from under the hood, his eyes promising to kick Crowley out if he didn’t stop moving in that very second.
Crowley hid his smile and settled. He didn’t mind the discomfort, not really. Sometimes Halt just needed a distraction and a target to aim his glares at. He seemed calmer already.
“Which part of ‘leave me’ escapes your understanding, Crowley?” he asked, his voice quavering only a bit.
“The one where you think that’s a good idea,” Crowley replied softly.
Halt considered for a while, then nodded his consent. Crowley wrapped his arm around Halt’s shoulder and breathed a sigh of relief when Halt leaned into the embrace without further protest. He would bite Crowley’s head off if he tried this in public, of course, but between the two of them, Halt was not as averse to touch as he pretended to be.
And so they sat side by side, pressed close together in the cramped space, the night around calm and dark and balmy. A sprinkling of stars smeared across the sky peeked through the gaps in foliage, as curious as Crowley was. But neither would pry until Halt was ready to speak about it himself.
It would begin with a lie, Crowley knew from experience, the most blatant lie of them all.
“Iʼm all right, friend,” Halt told him eventually, as Crowley guessed he would.
Crowley elbowed him in the ribs. He knew these lies of Haltʼs, of course he did. It was not Crowley who they were meant to deceive, and so he didnʼt mind, not really. But the elbow was deserved. Halt ignored it, as usual.
“I—” A pause. His friend lifted his head and breathed out, searching in the stars for words to describe what couldnʼt be voiced. Crowley hugged him closer, wishing he could do more to lighten his burden. “I just have a bit of the past to bury,” Halt managed after a while.
Crowley nodded as if he understood, not because he did but because Halt was hurting, because thatʼs what Halt needed right now. His friend gave up on pretending and rested his head on Crowleyʼs shoulder. He was crying again.
And so they huddled in silence broken only by a rare sob, Crowley rubbing soothing circles into Halt’s shoulder and sharing his warmth until the sky started to brighten.
By then Halt’s tears had run dry and the brittleness in his dark eyes was contained once again. Not gone—no. Crowley doubted it would ever be. He carried a few of those wounds himself, memories of things and people lost, carved into his soul forever. They twinged with pain sometimes, but they scarred him no more than they made him who he was.
Remembering hurt, but he wanted to remember.
“Does the past have a name?” he asked when Halt brushed his tears away and began to rise.
His friend froze for a charged second, then turned to face him. Slowly, hesitantly, with morning light underlining the trails of tears on his cheeks. He bit his lip, his eyes shut tight, and for a heartbeat, Crowley thought he had gone too far, demanded too much too soon, tore open a wound that had barely stopped bleeding.
But then Halt collected himself and nodded. Crowley watched him as he said the name, a whisper, a sob, a prayer on his lips.
“Caitlyn.”
“Caitlyn.”
Crowley wrote it down and paused. Seemed like sacrilege to put it on paper, but then he was a broken heart and two bottles removed from sanctity. He brushed his thumb across the ink, smudging the already sloppy letters.
A woman ten years dead. She could have been anyone, or no one at all, except that whoever Halt had been before his flight from Hibernia, he’d loved her.
Crowley set down the candle and spent the next hour writing down every bit, every memory, every hint he could dig out of his wine-addled brain. Halt’s outright lies, Pritchard’s offhand remarks. He pulled out a map and vandalised it, crossing out cities and kingdoms. It was guesswork and conjecture all, but he wanted to believe he was onto something, and so he worked on.
Halt’s distaste for royalty that’d taken so long to thaw. The phrases he’d tried to unlearn and those he’d let be. The sack of gold that had lasted him years, what had been the engraving on them?
Crowley straightened up, massaged his hurting back, and looked around the archives. Took in the overflowing ledgers, the loose papers folded into every nook and cranny. It was a haystack of information and he didn’t even know if his needle was there, but it didn’t matter.
He had time. Plenty of it. A year.
Or a lifetime.