Chapter Text
“No. No way. No way in hell, my love. Absolutely not.”
Caleb Wittebane, still tender around the midsection from the knife wound his wife had managed to haphazardly close up before he bled out from it, cut an almost pitiful figure where he lay on the bed. He looked up at the aforementioned wife with eyes that would melt the heart of even the most calloused, cruel man on the Isles (and probably had, given the whole… thing, with Philip)… and pouted.
“So… should I take that as a maybe?”
His tone was half-jesting, but Amelia balked anyways. “Absolutely not, I said, Caleb! I forbid it!”
“I can get through to him. I know I can, he’s my little brother. He deserves better than… being locked in a room alone for God knows how long!”
“Does he?”
Caleb recoiled, slightly, at her harsh tone, flinching as he did so – stab wound – and Amelia, bleeding heart as she was, sighed. She didn’t want to upset her husband, but the situation was what it was, and what it was was a massive sign hoisted up above them all, reading something along the lines of Philip Wittebane is a fratricidal maniac. Benefit of the doubt? That was for people who didn’t attempt murder. What Caleb was exhibiting was denial.
“Look, Caleb. Love. I understand that he’s your brother, and I understand that you care for him, but he tried to kill you. I’m not sure that if we let you in a room to speak with him, that he won’t try it again.”
“There are ways around that! Come in with me. Have someone watching. Tie his hands behind his back with rope. Tie his hands behind his back with magical rope-”
“Why do you want to talk to him so badly?”
Caleb shifted, stifling a groan as he jostled the stab wound that Amelia hadn’t quite managed to properly heal for him. His expression was as pained and serious as Amelia had ever seen it.
“I know he seems… unstable, but Philip and I- we- look. I really do think it’s a problem of communication, here.”
“Love, a communication failure rarely results in both parties bleeding out from stab wounds.”
“Well,” Caleb groused, a sliver of his usual humorous disposition peeking through from behind his frown, “that was a communication failure in that he failed to communicate that he was carrying a knife he intended on sticking me with.”
“I’ve yet to hear why I should let you in a room with the ma… man… alone, Caleb.”
He chuckled. “Nice save. But, to the point, what I was trying to say is that I know Philip. We grew up together- God, Amelia, I practically raised him. I like to think that I know at least a little of how his mind works, and- Philip, he’s never been the best at just communicating his feelings, he’ll ruminate on a problem and try and solve it himself-”
“By stabbing you, Wittebane, that goes beyond your general human consternation for emotional constipation-”
“So,” Caleb said, loudly pretending that he hadn’t heard her, “he’s gone and jumped to some wild conclusion-”
“The conclusion that murdering you is a good idea-”
“-and because I know him, I can bet that he probably thought he was doing the only thing he could do in the situation, especially if he felt cut off. I’m confident in saying that the whole incident was… I don’t know, him lashing out because he didn’t know how to communicate – see, Amelia! – his issues with me! He doesn’t need to be locked in a cell like a common criminal, Milly, he needs help. My help. Let me talk to him.”
A pause.
“Please.”
Amelia pursed her lips and nodded, one hand on her hip and the other stroking her chin thoughtfully. “Well, love, that’s a striking analysis of the situation.”
“But?”
“But,” Amelia continued, “Philip isn’t a toddler having a tantrum because he can’t verbalise his complex emotional needs, he’s a grown man who, even if he was under some sort of misconception that this was the best way to solve all his problems, pulled a knife on you without provocation, and summarily tried to kill you with it.”
Caleb winced.
“I cannot stress enough that he thought the solution to whatever problem he made up for himself was stabbing you.”
“You know…”
Amelia grimaced, the shit-eating grin on her husband’s face an all too familiar sight. Lord – or whoever it was that the brothers prayed to so fervently – help her with this reckless fool of a man.
“…If you let me talk to him, I could just ask him what led him to-”
“He tried to kill you.”
“So come with me,” Caleb pressed. “You’ve got him in what, a warded room, he can’t leave, he’s got no weapons on him… if you sit beside me and make menacing gestures, and he keeps his hands where you can see them, there’d be no way he could hurt me.”
Sighing, Amelia rubbed her forehead. “Caleb, you were stabbed last night. You should be resting.”
“Pip- Philip was also stabbed last night. If anything, it might ensure that he’s disinclined to pick a fight with you, being the only non-stabbed person in the house.”
“Fine. But just know, I don’t support this idea, and I support you only very reluctantly, and only because I love you.”
Caleb grinned at her, all light-hearted cheek and rogueish subversion of the correct procedures of detainment. He was, truly, so innocently cheerful, that one might even misinterpret completely – unless they happened to be familiar with the many faces of Caleb Wittebane specifically – his current expression as something other than the shit-eating smugness it was.
Amelia didn’t know why he ever let him get his way – it made him so unbearably puffed-up that one could fastidiously mistake the man for a robin in midwinter. (They were, for the uninitiated, notable also for puffing up in order to trap air underneath their feathers – Amelia considered herself somewhat ornithologically inclined).
“Say, Amelia, dear,” Caleb said, suddenly, interrupting the lull in conversation. “I don’t suppose you could do a favour for your poor invalid of a husband?”
“I have my doubts that apple blood would do any favours to a stomach that has been stabbed.”
Her husband pouted at her, and Amelia rolled her eyes. “I’ll get you a drink once I check on Philip. If he’s staying in the house, I need to make sure he’s not found some sort of way to burn it down from the inside, despite my precautions.”
For a moment, there, the habitual defence of Philip’s general disposition almost followed the wry declaration, but Caleb seemingly thought the better of it, opening and closing his mouth before ever uttering a word. Instead, he settled on a far more innocuous statement.
“I love you, Milly.”
“You’d better, Wittebane.”
There was, Philip had expertly deduced, a ward, a devilish spell, a vile trick of the hellspawn that infested this wretched dimension, afflicting the room.
Undoubtedly, it was the witch’s work – what else were they good for, beyond sorcery, and seducing God-fearing older brothers from the path of righteousness and ruining Philip’s life specifically?
It made him wonder why he’d ever raised a knife against Caleb, his brother, his flesh and blood (sinner as he was) when he could have instead strangled the life out of that infernal woman instead, and dragged his big brother, who was old enough to know better, far enough away from this wretched house until he repented and found himself back on the path that God had laid out for him – a path which did not include fornicating with creatures of the devil.
Truth be told, that knife had been meant for that wretch of a witch – but Caleb seemed so intent on shielding her from him, seemingly unconsciously, that pragmatism had taken over before someone noticed the damn knife and magicked him to the ground on principle.
It wasn’t a decision he’d been happy to make, not by any metric – Philip loved his brother, he loved Caleb more than he loved life itself, no matter what people were going to try to claim after… all this. By all means, burying a dagger in his brother’s gut hadn’t been his first choice for handling the situation – nor, truth be told, had it really made the top five best courses of action – but the situation had gotten somewhat out of hand.
It had been pragmatism, really. Deciding that putting Caleb out of his misery here and now was perhaps vastly preferable to letting him live out his days here and damning himself to hell even more than the thousands of damnations he had already wrought upon himself – Philip wasn’t doing this out of hatred, he was doing it out of love (for his brother, and also hatred for witchcraft, so maybe he was doing it a little bit out of hatred, but it was the good, sanctioned kind of God-pleasing hatred-) and damn this vile world for twisting everything so!
Caleb was practically immersed in witchcraft these days, anyways – as if Philip hadn’t seen that thrice-damned cardinal – and thus the plan, if anything, had been too lax, when all was said and done. Philip was (traitorously) glad that Caleb had survived, that they’d both survived- if this was still Gravesfield, he’d have been investigated, then hanged… if anything, death at Philip’s hands would have been a mercy!
He didn’t want Caleb dead. He didn’t, he loved him, but Caleb made it so difficult, and Philip- Philip did what needed to be done. He’d do anything to protect humanity, and if Caleb would get in the way of that-
It wasn’t like Philip was selfish enough that he didn’t recognise that sacrifices needed to be made.
His side twinged, a throbbing pain from where Caleb, in the struggle, had managed to turn his own knife on him- there was a ward around the thrice-damned room, and Philip couldn’t get out.
The door, naturally, was blocked – because of course a pursuer of the arcane arts would know spells for making doors impassably solid, the knob an immovable statue mocking him as it stood there and, under his sweating palms, reliably refused to budge even an inch.
The window, too, had fallen prey to whatever charm the witch had placed on the room. It hadn’t been his proudest moment, by any metric, but Philip was still reasonably certain that in a head-to-head battle of force between a static, fragile, thin glass window, and the full weight of a grown man flung at considerable force towards a target, the window was not supposed to come out the unsullied victor.
Then again, one could never be quite sure when stuck in the Demon Realm itself.
Philip had, by the time the knock on the door came, tried a multitude of methods to escape the infernal room – opening the door, beating down the door, beating down the door with a fist made of palistrom ooze, the whole undignified mess with the window, carving a single glyph onto any surface (somehow more undignified with the window thing, when you think about it), beating down the wall, beating down the wall with a fist of palistrom ooze, beating down the wall with the one item of furniture he’d been deemed worthy to sit in the presence of (a chair), tearing up the floorboards, tearing up the floorboards with-
Well. One got the idea at some point.
More pertinently, there was knocking at the door now, which was entirely unprecedented (inasmuch as he’d had the past – sixteen? Seventeen? – hours to establish any sort of precedents for his current situation), but not entirely unwelcome.
Namely, perhaps he could be persuaded this one time to tolerate the presence of a witch, and ask her to help him fix his side-wound again, because the dark stain bleeding through to his good coat was giving him strong hints that he may have reopened the damn thing during his escape attempts.
It wasn’t hypocrisy, damn it, it was cold, hard pragmatism – how was Philip to pursue any agenda if he bled out here and now? He had loftier goals than the dogmatic observance of nit-picky norms. The best tacticians out there could pontificate on the merits of throwing a battle to win the war – or something. He’d only really ever experienced military tactics in passing – different spheres of influence, and all that.
The witch on the other side of the door had grown impatient.
“I’m going to come in now, Philip,” she called through the door, “and rest assured, if you try throwing the chair at me, I will throw it right back with twice the force.”
Philip pointedly draped his bloodstained coat over the back of the chair as she pushed the door open, the picture of lightly stabbed, perfectly calm innocence. He wouldn’t have thrown a chair at her – it would have irritated his gaoler, and strained his side. He wasn’t stupid – it figured a high-and-mighty witch would looked down on him.
The witch – Amelia Clawthorne, a name Philip would never waste his breath on – strode into the room with purposeful authority, and Philip carefully kept his face studiously blank, as he stood beside the chair. She looked, to her credit, every bit as innocuously infuriating as she always did.
Philip would have liked nothing more than to strangle her there and then, but alas, his predicament was a little more complicated than anything that would allow for such a crass solution. He’d just pissed away a great deal of the goodwill Caleb had ever held for him – if he didn’t play this right, he’d only tip his brother further towards the clutches of evil.
Possibly, there would be nobody to drop the wards on the room if Clawthorne died, anyways, so Philip politely refrained from the second bout of righteous attempted murder in as many days.
“Your brother wants to talk to you,” the witch said, her stony glare betraying exactly what she thought of that idea... or at least, Philip assumed it did. The truth was that the human face was a lot less good at expressing specific emotion than people liked to collectively pretend it was, but he had just taken a knife to Caleb in front of her, and he’d quite frankly have been surprised if she’d been supportive of Caleb coming anywhere near him after that.
(Possibly, it was a sense of demonic possessiveness that compelled her to be so protective.)
“How fortuitous,” Philip replied, mildly. And it was fortuitous – swaying his brother back to his side was a grand plan, but one doomed to failure from the start without the participation of Caleb himself.
“Indeed,” the hellspawn said, eyes fixed on Philip with a quite frankly uncomfortable intensity. “Are you sane enough to hold a civil conversation with him, or are you going to try and kill him again?”
The audacity – well, he supposed, that was witches for you. Was he sane? Was he sane? Why, he ought to-
“I assure you, I’m very much capable of having a sensible discussion with Caleb. He could assure you that it’s happened many times in the past.”
“What, you trying to kill him?”
“Civil, brotherly conversations between the two of us,” Philip corrected, narrowing his eyes at the wench’s glib demeanour and pointedly not considering how likely it was that he could off her without Caleb finding out he was responsible (regrettably, extremely unlikely, after last night).
Clawthorne raised an eyebrow. “If you say so, Philip Wittebane.”
And how was one supposed to respond to that? Philip stayed silent, waiting for her to continue, and continue, she did.
“Caleb,” she said, “seems to be convinced that your attempted fratricide is some sort of misguided cry for help, and is convinced that it would do the both of you good to… talk about it.”
Her general demeanour made it abundantly clear what she thought of this idea.
“I would be happy to converse with my brother,” Philip said, politely. “I can only hope that he is in good health, in the meantime.”
This was, evidently, the wrong thing to say, because Clawthorne scoffed at him and swept out of the door, slamming it shut behind him, and Philip hadn’t the faintest idea why. He did hope Caleb was in good health – he loved his brother, he didn’t want him dead, despite what the witch may have thought. Possibly, it was the duplicitous nature of a witch causing her to read his statement as a lie – an interesting hypothesis, if so.
Well. He had ample time to workshop it. His main concern was ensuring that Caleb returned to his rightful place by Philip’s side, and he was willing to go to any length to do so.
The eradication of witchcraft, the salvation of humanity; the scuppering of this disgusting illusion of domesticity and his – their, his and Caleb’s return to the human realm… Plans changed. Priorities got rearranged. Even the currently in-motion nature of his own destiny was not immutable – the future was not written in stone.
No, his current goal – effectively, his only goal, at least until he succeeded – was ensuring that Caleb chose humanity over the temptations of witchcraft… chose Philip, over the temptations of witchcraft.
This was his priority.
Everything else could wait.