Chapter Text
As a general rule, Brand didn’t hide things from Rune. There were, of course, a few notable exceptions, and every one of them was concealed with his Scion’s safety and happiness in mind.
The incident with Max was one such instance he intended to hide for as long as he could.
It started with the sound of crying in the middle of the night. Brand's first thought was, as always, Rune.
His next was the realization that the bond was quiet—not the radio silence he had come to expect when Rune intentionally closed his side of the bond in some stupid, martyr instinct to protect Brand’s feelings, but the peaceful quiet of his Scion’s dreamless sleep.
There was only one other person it could be.
Their teenage ward had been with them for less than a few weeks, and Brand was still calibrating his brain around the new, constant presence in their lives. The two of them were a bit notorious for keeping their circle small and their perimeter tight; they weren’t exactly drowning in friends and family these days. Still, instinct was instinct, and Brand was no stranger to navigating his way toward the sounds of crying in the middle of the night.
It took a measure of self control not to burst right in. This wasn’t Rune, he reminded himself.
Instead, he knocked, pressing his ear to the door. There was a brief hitch in the sobbing before it picked up again, muffled this time, as if trapped behind a palm.
Brand was done waiting.
When the door burst open, Matthias was alone. The glow of his pale hair and skin painted him like a ghost in the darkness; just the shivering outline of a huddled form where the bed met the wall. He was sitting up, and, if the way his eyes bore directly into Brand’s from across the room was any indication, wide awake.
There was a terrible stillness to him. The sort of tension that wound its way into a coil, ready to spring. It was almost as if he had been expecting Brand’s entrance. Had been waiting for it.
For a moment, neither of them said a word. Now that he knew the kid was not in immediate danger, the wind had gone out of his sails a bit. They had officially stepped out of the realm of Brand’s usefulness and expertise.
Hardly, he could practically hear Rune snort in the back of his mind. And there was some truth to that. At the very least, this certainly wouldn’t be Brand’s first rodeo.
But that was different. This wasn’t his Scion, his partner, his best friend since birth. This was the quiet, shifty kid who skirted around the edges of every room he entered—the one with the shithead family and dubious past—staring up at him, and Brand didn’t know what to do next.
After a few tense seconds, he cleared his throat. “Matthias?”
A pinched sound broke off from behind the hand Matthias had pressed to his mouth.
“It’s just me,” he said stupidly. “Um. Brand.”
Matthias stared back at him, wide eyed. He didn’t drop his hand from his mouth. He didn’t move an inch. Not until Brand took a tentative step inside the room. Then, suddenly, Matthias’s back was pressed flat against the wall. The hand he wasn’t using to conceal the sound of his crying grasped at the blanket, yanking it up his torso.
Brand froze. A vague uneasiness was spreading from the pit of his stomach; one that made him want to retreat. “Maybe,” he started, then cleared his throat and tried again. “Maybe I should go and get Rune—?”
“Wait.”
It was the suddenness of his voice, more than the word itself, that stopped Brand before he could duck out.
With the air of someone attempting to extract their own teeth, Matthias pried his hand away from his face and dropped the duvet from around him. After another moment of hesitation, he shifted up onto his knees. “Wait, no, I— I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “You don’t have to get Rune. I’ll be…” He seemed to choke up again, but quickly settled himself with a hard blink. “I’ll do what you want.”
The world fell out from beneath Brand’s feet. The vague unease began to take a more solid form. Pieces started to click into place that he desperately wanted to look away from, to pretend he didn’t see for what they were.
“What?” he managed to choke out.
At this, Matthias’s expression flickered to betray a glimpse of anger, and good—because Brand could tolerate that more than the honest fucking fear in his eyes.
“I’m not stupid,” Matthias spit. “I know I don’t get to stay in this room, under his protection, for free. It’s not like this is the first time.”
Because apparently all the speech Brand was capable of had been condensed to broken syllables and repetition, he asked, more than a bit frightened by the answer, “First time?”
The anger didn’t leave his expression, even as he cut his eyes away. “Not the first time my grandmother handed me off to someone to make myself useful. I know how this works.”
Brand had to grip the doorframe to keep steady. “Your uncle,” he concluded. The conversation with Rune rushed to the surface. He had been vague and cryptic as hell, but he had made it known what he thought about Matthias’s past with his family. The sinking feeling in his stomach told him Rune had been right.
Matthias’s silence was all the answer he needed.
He was suddenly more out of his depth than ever, but now, especially, bringing Rune into this was no longer an option. Carefully, closing his eyes, he sealed off his side of the bond.
“Matthias,” he said slowly. “Whatever your uncle did to you, whatever he made you do…” He paused at the slight flinch, letting them both breathe through it. “This is not that. We are nothing like that. We would never…”
The kid’s eyes flashed back to him, then retreated just as quickly. “What are you doing here then?” Matthias looked pointedly out into the darkened hallways behind him. Brand was going to be sick at the implication of what Matthias thought he was doing in the middle of the night. He shuffled back half a step, desperate to put some space between them.
“I heard crying,” he whispered.
His mind was spinning, frantically backtracking through every step and misstep that had possibly led to this moment. Had he and Rune given Matthias any reason to believe that they would… That they were even capable of…?
He stopped dead, a memory bobbing to the surface: of his own fingers wrapped around the back of a thin, pale neck. The feeble resistance felt like almost nothing pushing back against the force of Brand’s hand shoving his head underwater. The way the teenager went limp after only a few bare attempts at a struggle.
He had to question, suddenly, if Matthias sometimes remembered the weight of Brand’s hand on the back of his neck, too.
“It was just one sigil.” Matthias’s voice was so quiet it almost wasn’t enough to pull Brand from his internal spiral. When Brand only blinked up at him, the kid pressed on. “I mean— It’s… You don’t expect me to believe you would do all of this for a single sigil and nothing else.”
Somehow, he managed a snort. “You clearly underestimate the value of a single sigil to someone who had everything stolen from them.”
Regret wasn’t an emotion Brand normally lent much credence to, but he wished he could take the words back as soon as they left his mouth. Staring down into the face of a kid who had just lost everything himself, Brand realized that Matthias would soon have to learn the value of such things. And, in particular, he would learn the weight of their absence.
He suddenly knew in his heart that he and Rune would do anything and everything in their power to lessen the impact of that loss for their young ward. They would not let him feel that blow as deeply as they had when they were in his shoes.
“Matthias,” Brand said firmly, finally calling his eyes back to his own. “I know that the people in your past haven’t given you reason to believe me when I say this, so you’re entitled to your skepticism for as long as you have any. But Rune and I? We will never, never, hurt you like that. And I'm sorry for anything I've done to make you think otherwise. You will never be expected to”—he clenched his jaw—“compensate us for your stay here. And if anyone—inside of this house or out of it—tries to make you feel otherwise, they will answer to me. That is a promise. And a promise. And a promise.”
There was no swirl of magic that followed his words, no prickle along his skin to seal the vow in place, but Brand had been a part of this world his whole life, and he knew the weight that these sacred promises held for New Atlanteans.
It took a few seconds for the words to wash over him, but slowly, Brand watched the tension drain from his posture. In its place, a soft swirl of color filled his cheeks.
“I’m sorry,” he said finally. “For… For assuming that you… And for waking you. I’m just. Sorry.”
“I was already up,” Brand lied. He was tempted to tell him that it wasn’t the first or last time he would be awoken by nightmare induced tears in this house, but that wasn’t really his story to tell. And he was quite sure the two of them had exchanged enough heavy emotions for the night.
He should check, though. Just in case.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Brand offered. Matthias was already shaking his head before he could get the sentence out.
“No,” he said. “Thank you.”
Brand nodded, taking the dismissal for what it was. But before he could back out of the room, an idea struck. He may not be totally useless after all.
“Give me one second,” Brand said, holding up a finger as he retreated from the doorway.
He crept silently through Half House, expertly avoiding every creaky floorboard on his route to the kitchen. The light from the refrigerator glowed into the darkness. He went straight for the bottom right drawer. In the back, behind the containers of fresh produce that only existed in their home at Brand’s insistence, was a bag of lemons. He grabbed the one on top and turned back toward the guest room.
Matthias was waiting for him in the same position as before, though with considerably less rigidity to his narrow frame.
“Catch,” Brand said.
His lanky limbs scrambled in the air, but just managed to catch it before it tumbled behind the bed. He blinked down at it for a long moment, then up at Brand again. “It’s a lemon,” he said blankly.
“Nothing gets past you, MacGyver.” When this earned him yet another blank stare, Brand sighed. It was his turn to cast his gaze aside. “It’s for the nightmares,” he said. “When you wake up and can’t remember where you are, bite down on it, peel and all. Tastes like shit but shocks you back to the moment. It…” He paused, clearing his throat. “It helps.”
Matthias didn’t need to know that Rune wasn’t the only one who had tested this method.
The coloring in the teenager’s face changed slightly then, before he got control of himself and faded back to pale porcelain.
“Oh,” he said. At least he didn’t waste time trying to deny the problem.
Brand nodded once, stepping one foot back into the hallway and grasping the doorknob. “Keep it in your nightstand drawer and let me know when you need a replacement. Don’t let it go moldy in here or Queenie will kick both our asses.”
Brand started to close the door, ready to put the angst of the night behind them, when he heard Matthias’s small voice one more time.
“Thank you,” he said.
Brand nodded once. “Goodnight,” he said.