Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“He would be happier with you whole than he would be with a hundred thrones,” Murdoch says to Clive.

Joshua crouches outside the armory where Clive and Murdoch disappeared an hour ago. Clive doesn't keep secrets unless they're the bad kind and never for long. Needs must. Around the door he can see Clive looking at his sword propped against the wall, and at nothing. A single glove is held in his hand, gripped tight, and his oilcloth in the other, both forgotten. 

“He only needs the one,” Clive says. “If we lose Rosalith…”

“We will not lose Rosalith,” Murdoch is quick to say. “We could send for Shiva, if needs must.”

“No. The last thing we need is the Ironblood getting their hands on a Dominant. If I could send Joshua from the city, I would.” But Rosalith is safer than Eastpool. They’ve been over this. “Without Drake’s Breath, these attacks will be endless.” 

Clive looks to Murdoch. A conversation happens, unspoken. Murdoch shakes his head. “It is suicide, my lord. And we haven’t the men.”

“And the Ironblood haven’t an Eikon.”

“You may hand them one if you do not take care.” Murdoch flexes his right arm. The left is in a sling, still. In three years since the Night of Flames, it’s gotten no better. The guilt for the wound is shared; they will never know if it was the fires Sanbreque set or the flames of their shared Eikons that took it. “I could ride out with you. I’m not so decrepit.”

“No. I need you here. Joshua—”

“Yes. I know.” 

There is no one he trusts with Joshua’s keeping. He’s wary of all, even of the Undying. In three years, they’ve succeeded in weeding out most of those who would have taken their chance to dethrone the Rosfields, but that memory sits heavier in Clive’s heart than it does in Joshua’s. There are days Joshua doesn’t wonder if Clive distrusts even the walls of the castle. 

Murdoch stands. “Swear to me you will not try to take Drake’s Breath.”

Clive does nothing of the sort. “I will do what I must. They wreak havoc. Uncle can barely hold Isolde as it is.” And trade. Trade has dried up. Nothing comes from Sanbreque by decree, and less and less from Dhalmek overland as the years pass. His tutors do not tell him this. Even the Undying obscure their situation. It’s Clive who explains these things. 

For three years now, they’ve been clawing back from the brink they almost fell over on that night. Clive’s been holding them back from the edge, but only just. A tickle starts in the back of his throat and he knows it’ll be a cough, one of those uncontrollable ones that only in the last few months stopped being accompanied by the tang of blood in the back of his mouth and a week of bed rest. He ducks back away, out of the hall and toward the yard.

The day is bright and the garden is in bloom. Torgal rests in the sun on the white stone. Joshua joins him and prays no one will come across him sitting with a hound when he ought to be doing anything useful. He likes work—likes being useful. But it never feels enough when he’s meting out decrees and practicing handwriting while Clive is off making war for both their lives. Father left them a list, and this was the exchange, they decided. Clive decided. 

This is how we’ll honor him, he said, with a hand on Joshua’s shoulder. You look after Rosalith and I’ll— 

And you’ll look after me. 

A month, this time. He's been home a month. Joshua can smell it on him now the cagey way he gets when he knows he’ll be leaving soon and cannot bear to ruin what remains of their time together. He can't keep a secret and can't tell a lie. Of course, he was going to leave again.

Clive finds him before the next bell. He squats down and ruffles Torgal’s ears and Joshua’s hair both at the same time, and Joshua pretends he did not have his face buried in the dog’s fur a moment before. 

“You're leaving me again.”

Clive stares over at him. “No,” he starts, stops, and then shifts. “Not right away. The Ironblood are…”

Joshua wipes at his eye and pretends its sleep there and not something else. “I know.” 

If they lose Isolde, they lose Rosalith in a fortnight—if they’re lucky. If they aren’t, then Sanbreque will see its chance, and Dhalmek will start pecking away at the south again. Rosaria will become a feasting table for three hungry nations. He is, it seems, always playing a game that no one taught him the rules to. As soon as they’ve put out one fire, another starts on the other side of the country. The roads wind; the weather is difficult. He’s memorized the distances, the times it will take Clive and his men to traverse Rosalith from one end to the other and back again. Weeks that become months. He’ll be lucky to see Clive again before winter. 

“I know,” Joshua repeats, as Clive’s fingers settle deeper in his hair, carding out the apology he can’t make. “I know you have to go. If we lose Rosalith, we lose—” Rosaria, he means to say, but Clive interrupts him.

“—I lose you. There isn’t a place I could send you on Storm safer than this city.” He smiles. “Allow me to do my duty, lord marquess.” The title sounds funny on his lips. 

Joshua rises and sorts himself. “I can order you to stay.” He won’t, and he wouldn’t. 

Clive’s smile tugs to one side. “You can try.”

Heat burns behind his eyes, but he will not cry. It's ridiculous that he would even think to.

“I’ll write you every day," Clive goes on, trying hard to make amends for something he hasn't done wrong. 

“No, you won’t.” He wipes at his eyes again. “That’s a waste. Write when you can, and I will write you in kind.”

“When you can,” Clive says. He lets his hand slide to Joshua’s shoulder. He dreads the moment he’ll pull it away; would like to reach up and hold it there and hang onto it and let him go not at all. “I have Ifrit. And I have your fire. Don’t worry so.”

He always worries so. It’s all he can do for Clive, it seems. "I won't." 

Clive makes to pull away, but Joshua stills him. “Come here,” he orders, but Clive is already right there. He frowns and it scrunches between his brow. Joshua beckons him closer still, as if to whisper something in his ear and then catches his face between both hands. He’s started shaving and he’s bad at it. His face is scratchy. Joshua thinks about it only for a moment, and then kisses his cheek. 

With a laugh, Clive pulls away. “What was that for?”

“For me.”

He rides in the morning, at first light with all his men behind him, Lord Commander. Joshua’s other Shields stay. Torgal stays. Murdoch will go with them as far as needed, but his place in the city now. Clive would trust his safety with no one else, as Murdoch trusts his army with no else. The Undying stay, too. They worship him, but they don’t follow his orders, or he would order them to his brother’s side. 

At the gate, Joshua gives the band his blessing. His people look on him as if he's become a thing holy. They cling to that faith now, and Joshua can’t begrudge them that much. Clive and he aren’t men to them anymore. They can’t be. They’re gods, and so they share a nod across the plaza and nothing more before Clive rides off. 

The first letter is a surprise. He can’t afford to send away a stolas, so this comes by way of a merchant. It’s only a few words. Please remember not to give Torgal food off the table, it will make him sick no matter what he says. Lord So-and-so cannot be trusted as far Clive could throw him let alone far as Joshua could and one of the men told him the man has been keeping a mistress in Martha’s Rest. Please remember to send flowers to Jill for her birthday, and yes, Joshua remembers what kind she prefers. All his letters are like this. Little reminders, gossip of the kind he would once have shared beneath the sheets late at night when it was the only time they could share anything with one another without someone disapproving.

Sometimes, he sends gifts. A little book no larger than Joshua’s palm full of fables and little illustrations. A flower as yellow as Joshua’s hair pressed between the pages of a letter, the color run over onto the paper. A necklace, once, an iridescent shell tied to a cord of string that he wears beneath his clothes until it starts to fray. 

Joshua keeps busy. Lessons take most of his day, and training the rest, so long as he’s well enough to. It’s not lost on him that at his age Clive was already on his way to becoming one of the most skilled fighters on the continent. 

He will find his own strength. He must. And he’s right, in the end. He doesn’t see Clive again before winter.

Joshua doesn’t see him again that year. By then, his last letter is months stale and creased over from the innumerable times Joshua has reread it. The whole thing only four lines that amount to no more than eat well, I miss you, give my hellos. 

It’s Byron who comes at last, in person. He meets Joshua in the throne room, Joshua seated in the chair that still does not fit him and is not yet Joshua’s to sit in, and kneels before it to say that Clive sailed for Drake’s Breath with four ships and a half of a bedraggled company. A desperate, foolish move. He recalls the conversation he overheard. Swear to me you will not try. Murdoch at his shoulder curses with a depth Joshua has never heard before from the man. There is a grief in it that he cannot—cannot take in. Byron has the grace to meet his eyes when he tells them it’s been a month since they had word in Isolde. 

But of course, there would be no letters, with no ships to carry them. 

It’s the turn of spring before Clive comes home. The last of the snow has melted off the ground, but it’s still muddy enough that when his band rides in, they’re a day later than their runner said they would be and they are all of them and their chocobos spattered with grime up to their necks. 

He picks Clive from the crowd by the white of Ambrosia—or what’s left of her that’s still white. Clive himself is hooded and cloaked and indiscernible except by the longsword strapped to his shoulder. Joshua assumed he’d ride in at the head of a victory parade but, of course, Clive was never that type.

The runner brought another piece of news. Clive took Drake’s Breath for Rosaria. It took him only eight weeks, and five days.

His head is bowed over Ambrosia’s saddle when Joshua flies down the steps to him. He hurls himself into Clive’s back, heedless of the mud and the crowd of soldiers around them. No one is focused on them in the middle of their raucous greetings and the trilling of their mounts. “Clive,” he says breathlessly and presses his face into the center of his shoulder blades—higher, he notes, than he could have reached before. 

“Joshua,” he says, the way he always says it, but only that. Clive doesn’t turn to look at him. He stays facing Ambrosia, patting her beak and setting his fingers to loosening the straps of her saddle. Joshua releases him, brought up short. 

“Clive,” he chides, as if his brother hasn’t seen him. Joshua is too old to beg for a hug and almost too proud, but only almost.

Clive pauses, but doesn’t turn. “Let me get her settled,” he says, but his voice is peculiar. “And go back inside. It’s too cold for you to be out here.”

“It’s not cold,” he says, and laughs. “Come, Clive, won’t you look at me?” Joshua takes his hand in his own and tugs him around. He gets half of Clive’s face, still hooded. His eyes are no less blue but there’s a black hollow about them that shouldn’t be there. It steals his breath. “What’s happened?”

Clive sets his jaw, and then turns in full, and Joshua sees why he was hiding. The side of his face looks as if it’s been painted red. For a moment, it’s a shadow, a trick of the torchlight because the sun has already set and it’s all they have to see by. The mark is too terrible to be what it is: a scar, lines of ruined skin crossed over his cheek and jaw. It's not fresh, but it still looks raw and angry, as if it were treated too late and too poorly. Joshua puts a hand in front of his mouth before he can stop himself. Clive's eyes go wide. 

He turns away again, back to the saddle. “It's nothing,” he says.

Joshua pulls him back. “Let me see?” 

Clive turns again, and lets Joshua reach up to push the hood off. “It looks worse than it is,” he says.

It looks bad enough. It looks like a burn, but not like the one that stretches up from Murdoch’s shoulder and over his neck. This one is too precise, the edges too certain. “How?”

“Ask me again later.”

Joshua considers him and then reaches up again to push the hair off Clive’s forehead, grateful for the inches he gained that let him do it without Clive having to lean down the way he would have in years past. “It only makes you more handsome, I’m afraid,” he says, trying to make light of it. He is still handsome. More handsome. It’s a thing he always thinks he’s made up in his head until he sees Clive again. 

Clive snorts. Finally, a bit of the dark leaves his eyes. “Sure.”

Joshua rocks back on his heels. “You must be tired. We have a feast prepared,” he offers, trying to play the consummate host rather than the delighted little brother.

“A feast?” Clive frowns at him. The expression looks odd with the scar. “We don't need all that.”

Joshua takes his hand and pulls him toward the castle. They’ll let the grooms take care of Ambrosia. “We had a good harvest last season. What’s the point if we can't enjoy it?” He knocks his shoulder into Clive's side. “Let me spoil my big brother now and then.”

“That's my job.” Clive squeezes the hand in his. Joshua pretends, for both of them, that it isn’t shaking.

The feast starts quiet and then gets louder and louder and Clive may not be one for cakes and ale but tonight he eats. He had the cooks serve up honey cakes and roast meat and for a moment Joshua thinks he'll be scolded for the indulgence but Clive has nothing to say about it. He has nothing to say at all. He sets into his food like it’s his first time eating. He consumes everything on his plate, lets it be refilled, and eats everything on that, too. When Joshua offers him thirds, he hesitates before he shakes his head. 

Joshua orders his own plate refilled and pushes it between them. Clive doesn't argue.

It's lonely to sit at the front on his own as he does most nights, so today he sits with the rest, tucked between Clive and Murdoch down in the ranks, trying to remember not to kick his feet in delight. His station dictates distance, but Clive is right there, for the first time in months and months. 

Clive is alive. He never doubted, truly. Not with their shared blessing beating behind his ribs. He never doubted, but he worried. Murdoch, on Clive’s other side, is quiet. Joshua doesn’t envy Clive the apologies he’ll have to make to the man.

“We have new hatchlings in the stables, if you’d like to see them tomorrow,” Joshua offers to break the silence.

Clive turns to him. “I would. Have you named them yet?”

“No… Why don't you name them?”

“All of them? I’m terrible at naming things.”

“I don't know, I think Ambrosia is a—a lovely name—” But he can't keep a straight face and almost snorts into his soup.

Clive rolls his eyes and forks something green left on his plate over to Joshua’s. Joshua grimaces. “I hate those.”

“You don't even know what it is.”

Joshua picks it up with his bare fingers and gives Clive his most beseeching look. “Clive,” he whines. “It’s green.”

Clive grabs his hand and brings it to his mouth and eats the offending bite. His lips brush Joshua’s fingers; their touch tickles. Joshua giggles and finds another bite of something that looks dangerously healthy and holds it out for Clive who’s grinning now, for the first time since he arrived home. Under the table, Joshua knocks their knees together, and Clive knocks back. He takes that bite, too, and licks Joshua’s fingers in the doing. Joshua giggles again and Clive’s smile at last is real and full despite the new, ragged scar over his cheek. They share each other’s space, and Clive has gotten bigger in his serial absences but so has Joshua. He feels almost giddy with the closeness, as if he’ll start laughing and not be able to stop.

All at once, Murdoch stands from the table beside them. “This old man is tired. You,” he says to Clive specifically, “I’ll talk to you in the morning, Lord Commander.” 

Clive ducks his head, suddenly shamefaced. “Good night, sir.” 

He lingers, and then bumps Clive’s shoulder with his fist the way he does with no one else. “Take your ease, Clive. You’ve earned it.” 

Clive stares after him, as if he doesn’t believe what he’s heard. When he’s gone, he says, “He must be in a good mood.”

“We’re all in a good mood when you’re here.” Joshua bumps into his shoulder, and then leans on it, leans into it him and rests his head there. 

“You’re in a good mood, you mean. What’s gotten into you?” Clive pushes at him. “You wanted seconds. Eat your dinner.” Joshua leans harder, using his new weight to push into him. Clive buckles to the side dramatically, laughing. “Eat. Eat!” 

That’s all he needed, Joshua thinks. Good food, and to smile. 

When Clive is in Rosalith, they share a bed. This is a rule. Joshua feels no guilt about it because Clive is the one who started it in those first days after the Night of Flames when he was still broken in body and Clive was broken in a different way and trusted no one and nothing with their safety but his own blade and his own fire.

He slips into Clive’s room when the last of his duties are done. It’s past midnight and he expected to have to sneak his way into bed without waking Clive, but Clive is still awake and standing beside his bed. He’s oddly still, staring, it seems, at nothing but the window on the far wall. Joshua slips in the door and closes it after him, and only then does he realize what he's looking at: Clive, half bared. He's much too thin for the amount of muscle he's put on. His skin is smooth, a figure carved and far better built than Joshua’s will ever be. At the juncture of his shoulder and arm, a vein stands out. There’s a new ridge of muscle spanning from his shoulder to his neck, but at the top of his spine, bone juts out like a point of vulnerability. 

This… This is new. Joshua’s stomach feels odd, almost queasy. Perhaps he ate too much.

Clive turns at his entrance and smiles, but the expression tugs at the scar on his cheek and it falls. Joshua greets him quietly and sits beside the open rucksack on the bed. “Do you want to tell me about your journey now?”

“Journey,” he quotes. The smile is gone now. “My letters weren’t enough?”

Never enough. And the letters didn’t mention a wound. The letters mentioned nothing at all for weeks and weeks. There’s another new scar on his shoulder, now that he’s turned. An odd indignance rises him him—no one asked him if they could put marks on his Shield in this way. But it’s a silly thought. “It’s okay. If you don’t want to.” 

Finally, a smile for him, or the shadow of one. “Tomorrow, maybe.” It dies again. He’s staring at the bed and not at Joshua. Again, it’s as if he’s staring at nothing at all. 

Joshua shifts uncomfortably. Clive looks young this way. He looks scared. Wounded, somewhere that can’t be seen or fixed. He feels again like the child he cannot be anymore, and wants to tug at Clive’s arm and poke at his cheeks until he forces a smile onto his lips and into his eyes. He doesn’t know how to fix this. Perhaps, it cannot be. He opens his arms instead, and summons, “Clive.” 

Clive steps into the embrace. It’s awkward, with Joshua seated, but this way he can rest his head against Clive’s chest and hear his heartbeat. Clive’s arms come up around him. They’re muscled now—they always were, but not so much, and not so hard. Clive’s grip is tight, and then tighter still. His breaths deepen, and then get rough. He jerks in place, almost like a hiccup. 

Something hits Joshua’s cheek. Something wet. Clive’s hand is on the back of his head, keeping him pressed in close, so he can’t look up, but he knows what it is. He knows, and it can’t be. Even when father died. Even at the funeral. He never—

Heat spikes behind Joshua’s eyes and he feels like he might cry, too. He’s scared. Seconds pass into minutes. 

“I’m sorry,” Clive mutters and pulls away all at once. “Sorry, it’s nothing.” He busies his hands with folding the clothes he took off, though they’ll have to be washed anyway.

“It’s okay,” Joshua says, though it isn’t. Even Clive never said that. Never lied to him like that. He never said it would be all right when it wouldn't be. And it hasn't been, not for years. “Can I sleep in here tonight?” he asks, knowing what the answer will be.

“Yes,” Clive nearly gasps, still staring at his mud-stained shirt. 

At least he can still do this. At least he can still guess what his brother needs. At least Joshua can be that useful. 

Clive sleeps curled on the very edge of the bed. Joshua fills the rest of the space as best he can, tucked in behind him. He keeps a hand on Clive at all times. Clive jerks when Joshua worms his hand under the drawstring of his sleeping pants to cup at the jut of bone on his hip. He needs it, this touch of skin to skin, to feel his brother’s heat. Clive won't deny him that, and he doesn’t. He puts his hand over Joshua’s on the outside, his hand hot through the layer of thin cloth between them. 

Joshua has begun to understand: no one else does this. No one else will understand this, but this is everything between them. He’s starved for it. There is no one else who would dare to share touch with him this way, and no one else he would want it from. 

Clive is his the way nothing and no one else is. 

All night long, Clive is restless and Joshua with him. By dawn Joshua is still tired, but settled at last, and the sun is coming in through the windows hot. The bed is hotter still with the two of them entwined so. 

Joshua relishes it. The sheets smell again like Clive. When he’s gone for too long, the room loses its appeal. He watches the sun slide across the window as he drifts in and out to the sound of Clive’s breathing against the pillow.

He’s woken in full by a tentative knock on the door. Joshua sits up without jostling Clive and yawns. “Come in,” he says, though it isn’t his room to give the order. But then—maybe all the rooms are his.

The door opens, and a maidservant pauses there with a basket on her hip already half full of clothes to be washed. In her other hand is a carafe of water for washing with. When she sees him, she pauses. Her eyes take in the lines of them beneath the sheets, the way Joshua has only bothered to sit halfway up with his leg folded under him, Clive’s head pillowed in his lap. Her mouth opens, as if she’ll say something.

Joshua meets her eyes. She bows, low. The silence is tense as she fills the wash basin and picks up the muddy clothes Clive wasted time folding the night before. “Excuse my interruption, lord marquess,” she says at the door, and sees herself out.

He thinks then of making an excuse, even to himself, but if Rosaria wants him to be their god, they can at least allow him this much. He picks at Clive’s hair, dark as their father’s was. Clive belongs to him. It cannot be odd to be as they are. Everything else is for Rosaria, so can he not have this one thing for his own?

He tugs too hard, and Clive snorts in his sleep. Joshua stills, too late. 

Without opening his eyes, Clive reaches up to take his hand. “What time is it?” he mumbles. He blinks blearily and winces at the brightness of the room. “We should be up.” The sun is still moving across the window, making the room yet warmer still with the fire still going in the hearth.

“No,” he says. 

“Joshua…

He wiggles himself on top of Clive. Clive rolls onto his back and then Joshua is seated on his chest. “Oof. You really have grown.”

“Have I?” He knows he has, and by exactly how much. 

“Yes. And you need a haircut.” He tugs at Joshua's hair as Joshua tugged at his.

Joshua grimaces. “Why? Mother isn't here to make me cut it now. And you've grown yours out.” Only a little. It touches Clive’s neck now and spills over his forehead.

“Not on purpose.” Clive closes his eyes and presses his head back into the pillows Joshua had restuffed and fluffed before his arrival. In daylight, the scar looks less scary than it did in the dark—and still terrible. What does that? he wonders. Not a sword. But then, would a sword get so close to his face? Is it possible that Clive would allow it? 

He finds himself reaching out before logic intercedes and draws the tips of his fingers over the inflamed skin, trying to be tender. Clive twitches and opens his other eye, the one not nearly taken by the mark. It looks like a Bearer’s brand, he thinks.

Clive doesn't stop him, but sighs. “Come on. We need to be up. Murdoch will tan my hide.”

“I think he’s going to do that anyway.” But Joshua rolls off him. Clive rises slower, with an affected groan. 

He slept without a night shirt and the pants have slipped low over his hips. Joshua blinks at him, still dozy and over-warm with something queasy rising in the pit of his stomach again. 

Clive waves him off. “Go. Go on. Unless you want to watch me get dressed.”

He would like to, he finds, with a little thrill. He wants to see how Clive’s legs look bared—if they’re long and lithe or muscled, and if his own will ever be so. If he’ll ever run so fast or be so strong as his brother. 

“Promise you'll eat breakfast,” Joshua says.

Clive laughs. “Are you my keeper now?”

“I must look after my Shield.”

“Yes. Yes, I’ll eat breakfast.”

The servant from that morning is the one who's set his clothes out in his room. She bows to him and still will not meet his eyes. As a child, they helped him dress, but they don't have the manpower for that nor the money to pay that many servants fair wage for their time. War is expensive, his father said once. That's why we avoid it.

But for all father’s graces, he was never successful at that particular endeavor. He led them to at least two wars, and now they are in another they cannot avoid. 

It’s expensive in more than money, in more that resources, in more than life, but they have no choice and so it hurts less. Rosaria’s people are loyal to a fault. They give too much of themselves for no better reason than the Eikon he holds, and so he tries to give back what he can. 

If he could give less of Clive, it would be easier.

Clive isn’t at breakfast when he gets down to the hall, but no one is at a bell past ten. The cook sets him a plate of biscuits and leftovers from the night before. He almost orders them to send a plate to his brother’s room, but knowing Clive, he’s already off and busy being half flayed by Murdoch. What they both know but will not say is that the man loves him like a son. In the days after Phoenix Gate, it was the two of them. He passed the title of Lord Commander to Clive with grace. He remembers, too, those days in childhood when Clive was set apart from all others. Bastard, or disgrace. A lord of House Rosfield with none of the honors. When mother was cruel, when father did not defend him as he ought, Murdoch always had a place for him. It seems odd now that the commander of their army spent his days training a child, but Joshua is grateful for it now.

When he looks in the barracks, Clive isn’t there. The few men that are tell him that Murdoch let him go half past the bell, with only a slight dressing down. When he looks in the stables, he finds Torgal keeping Ambrosia company, but again no sign of his brother. 

On his way back upstairs, he’s stopped in the hallway by Tyler, who was already in bed when Clive’s rode in the night before and is playing emissary for the other Shields’ questions about their commander and his exploits. And Joshua realizes that of course, they would have questions. Since Clive has returned, Joshua has spent every hour but this one monopolizing his time. 

Here, Clive’s first moment to breathe without him, and what is he doing but searching the castle for him. 

With a blush, he recalls dinner the night before. His childishness. Clive had not even a moment to talk to his men.  

Shame wriggles through him, a dark twin to the queasiness that rises in his gut whenever he recalls Clive’s back bared before him that morning in the sun, and the maid at the door watching him with Clive’s head in his lap. Still, that small voice at the back of his mind insists: Clive is his. Everything else, everything all of them have to give, is for Rosaria. 

They can have this. Surely, he can have this much. 

He sends Tyler off, with an apology. When he finally runs into Clive, it’s by pure accident, in a hallway in the lower portion of the castle, off the servants’ quarters. Clive has his head down, walking slowly, as if in thought. “Where have you been?” Joshua asks, too excitedly.

Clive looks—mortified, for a moment. Terrified. Joshua stops short, and then the expression is gone, schooled back to the placid calm he always wears for Joshua. “Sorry. Were you looking for me?”

“No,” he lies. Joshua looks past him, down the hallway, and he knows suddenly where Clive has been, because it’s the place he was sent more times than he could count as a child: the infirmary, with its wall of nasty tonics and mean old medic. 

“Are you ill?” he asks. 

“No, of course not. Do I look ill?” He’s a terrible liar. 

“But—”

Clive comes to him and half-kneels before him, though he doesn’t need to anymore to meet Joshua’s eyes. “I swear, I’m fine.” He looks Joshua over. “Gods, you really are growing like a weed.” He tugs at Joshua’s sleeve, where it’s trying valiantly to cover his wrist and failing. “Do you need new clothes? At this rate you really will be taller than me.”

“I won’t,” he argues, for the sake of arguing, though the thought is one he’s had before and enough to make him dizzy. He looks again past Clive, up the hallway. “Why were you in the infirmary? Is someone else sick?”

“I left the wounded in Isolde. I only had a question or two. Nothing to worry over.” 

“Clive,” he starts, but Clive will have no more of it. He’s tugged up, into Clive’s arms, and then he’s being carried as if he were no more than a sack of vegetables. Joshua laughs despite himself, helplessly, as he’s hefted over a shoulder. “Clive wait, you can't—wait—what if someone sees?”

His grousing falls on deaf ears. Clive carries him toward the stairs. “I’ll tell them you’re helping me with my exercise.”

“Clive," he whines, wiggling in place. "I'm too big now. And your shoulder is too bony." 

It's been years since Clive carried him anywhere. He grew out of it when Clive started training to become a Shield, for it would be too undignified for him to beg his Shield for a piggyback ride.

He missed it, though. 

Clive hefts him higher. "Too bony? This from the boy who had his knee in my gut this morning?" But he changes his grip and lets Joshua slide back to the floor. “Come. I think my old clothes will fit you. If we wait any longer, I’m worried you’ll grow out of that shirt right in front of me."

It is, to Clive’s credit, a brilliant distraction. Clive never had to wear the red and lace and frock coats the way Joshua had to—only because mother never cared enough to make sure he was properly clothed to his station. Left to a soldier’s care, all his clothes were in muted tones and then, after he joined the ranks, made of supple leather that clung to his long figure and cast him like a hero out of one of his plays. He looked more the young duke than Joshua ever could. The allure of trying on his clothes is too attractive.

In his room, he hands Joshua one of his red shirts with the tied front and then helps fit one of his old white and black leather overshirts across it. Joshua may be taller than Clive was at thirteen, but he’s still more slight. The leather doesn’t pull across his chest in the same way. 

“I don’t look half as good as you did,” Joshua whines, tugging at the collar and arching his neck as he inspects himself in the mirror. “Are you sure we're brothers?” He realizes what he’s said only after the fact and turns to Clive in a panic. “No, I didn’t mean…” That old rumor, that Clive was a bastard of Anabella’s poor decisions—what truth anyone found in it died that night, and in the years since when Clive all but carried the duchy on his back. He would rather cut out his tongue than remind Clive of those days before.

But Clive is smiling. “Yes, I’m sure.” 

“Good,” Joshua says. He turns back to the mirror. “I’m sure, too. You look so much like father.” He tries to tug the leather back over his head, but it gets stuck around his arms. How did Clive wear this every day? With Clive’s help, it comes off, leaving Joshua in the red undershirt. It’s far more humble than anything Joshua was given to wear. “I look nothing like him.”

“Yes, you do,” Clive says, looking up from where he’s folding the leather and setting it back in its box. “It’s in your eyes. I suppose one day we’ll have to put you in his clothes, too.” Clive at Joshua, and then quickly away. “They’d suit you.”

“Then what will you wear? We still have mother’s dresses stashed away somewhere…” Clive has the waist for it, but maybe his shoulders are too wide. 

Clive’s mouth falls open. “You’d better not be imagining that.”

“Imagining what? I think the blue would match your eyes. Or maybe the purple.” 

“That’s it—” Clive makes a wild grab for him. Joshua dodges out of reach.

“But really, don’t you think—” Joshua backs away from him, hands outstretched to keep him at bay, “—with those little gloves she used to wear—finally your turn for some lace!” And then he’s laughing too hard to keep standing. Clive gives up his attack and sits on the carpet, leaning back against the seat of the couch set at the center of the room. He rests his arm on his knee and watches as Joshua rolls onto his back in a sprawl to catch his breath. 

“Can I tell you something?” Joshua asks. 

“Always.”

“I’m glad she’s gone.”

Clive doesn't reply. They don't talk about mother, not really. The Undying keep track of her, monitoring her movements as she hides away in the emperor's court. Favored, but disgraced. He wonders what they would do if she did come back, if she tried for forgiveness or made some lie of the whole thing. For a time, he was sure she would, but it didn't matter. When the anger after that night settled out, when all he had were days and weeks of lying in bed healing and thinking, he decided he was happy that she was gone. He would never have to be kept inside the castle like a porcelain doll for her to play dress up with again. The last person who would order him away from Clive was gone. 

 “She was terrible to you,” he says.

“Joshua…”

“Well, she was. And she didn't love me. She loved the idea of me. The Phoenix.” He eyes Clive from his position on the floor, watching him from upside down. “If you had the Phoenix, they would never have had me.” 

Clive considers this, and then asks, “Can I tell you something?” Joshua nods. “I’m glad,” Clive says. “I’m glad the Phoenix passed me over. I’m glad I got to meet you.”

Joshua looks away, and down, to fiddle with the strings across his chest. The red cloth is loose on him even without them tied, the way it never was over Clive’s chest. “But it didn’t pass you over. You had Ifrit, or it would have chosen you.”

“That’s not how it works. The Phoenix chose you, before you were even born. It knew you would be perfect, the way I could never be.” 

Upside down, he looks different. It lets him pretend they’re two different people, and so Joshua finds it in him to ask the question that has plagued him since Clive became his First Shield: “And what if it hadn’t chosen me?”

“It would make no matter to me. You know that.” He does. Clive’s throat bobs, and when he speaks again, his voice is rough. “...But I will always be grateful that the fire is yours. It saved you that night, and so saved us all.”

“You saved us, you mean. You would have survived.”

“No.” Clive tips his head back against the couch and eyes him from under his lashes, his eyes dark with something he doesn’t know how to name. “No, I wouldn’t have. Not without you.”

It makes no sense, because Joshua did nothing at all in those first days but lie in bed and suffer through whatever medicines the Undying foisted on him beneath Clive’s watchful eye. Yet, a warm fluttering heat beats in his chest at Clive’s admission. It’s like finding a pearl in the sand outside Isolde, something to keep all his own. They share a silence, their gazes caught fast in one another. 

No. The scar hasn’t marred his face at all. He’s as beautiful as he was the day he kneeled for Joshua in the throne room. At the memory, the queasiness comes back, and a cough tickles the back of his throat.

He smothers it in his hand, but too late; Clive sees. 

“Were you ill while I was gone?” he asks. 

The stark question catches him off guard. “No. Not really.” A sore throat, a bloody nose. Nothing severe. “Is that what you were asking in the infirmary? I’m not lying.”

“I know you’re not. I did ask. I’m glad you’ve been better.” Clive stretches his long arms. “It’s all that sun,” he says with a yawn. “No more of those stuffy audiences and galas.”

“I still do audiences,” Joshua says, almost offended that Clive would think he’s anything but suffering in his absence.

“Yes, but I’m sure you don’t make them take three hours. Gods, that woman could talk.”

“You didn’t even have to go to most of them.”

“Can’t argue with that.” 

He still looks tired. It’s around his eyes. His skin is pale. And the way he’s sitting is tense, as if he’s in pain—but he only had the one mark on his back. Joshua rolls and scoots over on his hands and knees. Clive watches his approach, and he’s smiling when he says, “Doesn’t the archduke have work to do today?”

“I’m not the archduke,” Joshua says, “yet,” as he reaches out and touches Clive’s face to feel the heat of his skin. “It’s scratchy,” he exclaims.

“Yes. I forgot to shave because someone wouldn’t let me out of bed this morning.”

Joshua slides his finger over Clive’s cheek, and the scar. “Does it hurt?”

“No.” 

“How old is it?” 

“A few weeks. They treated it in Port Isolde.” 

“Is that the reason you were in the infirmary?” he asks, for the last time.

This time, Clive answers him. “Part of it.”

He doesn’t know what that means, but he can see the edges of it. Something bad. Something Clive doesn’t want to share with him, for the depth of it. “I can heal it for you,” he offers, summoning the flame to his hand even as he says it. 

Clive catches his hand and shakes his head. “No. I’ve made my peace with it.” And of course, he knows what to say. He knows that his peace is the one thing Joshua wants most for him, and could not bear to take from him.

“It looks like a Bearer’s brand,” Joshua says, voicing the thought that’s been with him since Clive first turned to him down in the yard, mud-spattered and hollow-eyed. 

“That’s the point they were trying to make, I think.”

Joshua swallows. He knew that. He knew someone did it—someone made that mark. It had to be so. “Will you tell me what happened?” Joshua rises, and braces himself above Clive, straddling his lap. “Was it Imreann?”

“No. His men, I think. I was caught out; they had their fun, and I came out of it in one piece. And then,” he leans close, and imparts as if it’s a secret, “I took Drake’s Breath from them.” 

This seems to mean something to him, this, as if it were a fair exchange, or the exacting of some justice. Joshua’s world tilts, and the breath he tries to draw into his lungs to speak won’t come. Caught out. Caught out, the way Joshua was caught out at Phoenix Gate, with father’s blood on his face and a sword through his chest before he could summon Phoenix. But Clive is a soldier, a warrior—he would never be caught by surprise. He would be caught only if he were too exhausted to call on Ifrit, too tired to lift his blade. 

And he—he was their prisoner, and they didn’t kill him outright, only because he was too valuable to keep alive. No. Fun, he said. 

They had their fun. 

Their cruelty is the only reason Clive is still here. Had they been any smarter they would have killed him while he was weak. Perhaps they intended to. No; of course, they intended to. Ifrit isn’t an Eikon to be tamed or used. 

“Joshua,” Clive is saying, voice steady. “Look at me.”

He scrambles to suck air into his lungs. Clive presses a palm to the center of his chest. “Easy,” he murmurs. “I’m here.” 

He is. He is there, right there, warm beneath him, warm against him, breathing softly against Joshua’s cheek as if to show him how it’s done. When he was very young and first trying to learn his way around the Phoenix’s power, Clive would do this for him, when he needed it, anchoring him. 

It takes him a minute to gather himself. “This is why you didn’t want to tell me,” he says when he’s caught enough breath to get the words out. “They—they did—to you—”

Clive shushes him, but he won’t meet Joshua’s eyes. He says only, “I would never have let them take me from you.”

He means it. That’s the worst part—Clive believes it. “You promise,” Joshua says, though it’s not a question. He knows Clive will promise him this. 

“I promise.”

It’s hollow, because Clive has no say in keeping it. There isn’t an enemy he won’t throw himself at if he thinks it will preserve Rosaria, will preserve the throne and the Phoenix both. Joshua rests his head against Clive’s shoulder, suddenly exhausted. One day, he’ll be too big to do this, he thinks, if they’re both lucky. Maybe then Clive will have to rest on him instead. 

He swallows and asks what he has not wanted to ask since Clive arrived. “When are you going back?”

Clive tenses. “Soon,” he says after a time.

Joshua knew, somewhere in the back of his mind. It was a hard-won victory, and it will be harder still to keep. He feels hollow already, as if there is something within him tied to Clive that he tugs out the gate after him when he goes, stretching to the point of agony. 

“I must do my duty,” Clive says. There is perhaps no word he hates more than duty, but he sits back and studies Clive’s face. “I know,” he says.

And I must do mine by you.

Chapter Text

The letter from Sanbreque arrives late in the season in the hands of a boy who can be no older than Joshua. He’s garbed in the traditional white that Sanbreque is so fond of and so scared that he stutters when he states his purpose and hands over his missive. Joshua watches all this far back from the action, up on the steps, at his Shields’ insistence—as if the boy and chocobo both might be assassins or Eikon-thieves sent to spirit him away. He’s fourteen now; not small or delicate as he was and yet still they defend him as if he’s made of glass. Clive has rubbed off on them all.

He mutters something to this effect and Wade laughs. “Count it our luck he’s not here,” Wade assures him. “If he were, that boy and the bird both would be ash.”

“Clive would not,” Joshua argues for his brother’s honor. “Well. Chase them, maybe.” 

Wade looks ill at the prospect. “You’re right, of course. Apologies.”

He’s stopped counting the days since Clive left. A month’s worth of days, at least. Frost settles over the ground in the mornings now. When he last saw his brother, the first leaves on the trees around the castle were only beginning to change. Sometimes it feels that the ice is growing inside him, too. 

His eyes meet the messenger’s across the yard. He has reddish hair, a shade darker than Joshua’s own. 

“Why did they pick someone so young?” he wonders to himself. 

“I can guess,” Wade says beneath his breath.

“Can you?” Joshua turns to him.

It’s only a question, yet Wade dips his head and for a moment, it looks as if he’d rather be anywhere else, say anything else. “My lord,” he says at last, “he looks like you.”

Joshua looks back to the boy. He’s the same age, and as pale as the face that stares back at him in the mirror. There might be a dusting of freckles on his cheeks but at a distance, it’s hard to tell. “Whatever for?”

“Has Clive—has Commander Rosfield told you what happened to the last emissary Sanbreque sent?”

They don’t speak of that time. As the distance between now and then grows, his curiosity grows with it, but he hasn’t the first words of how to ask Clive what happened then—how he held them together despite his grief, despite being so young. A year from now, he’ll be no older than Clive was at that time. Sometimes, he tries to imagine their ages in reverse, and he with all the burden on his shoulders instead. An impossible task, and yet Clive rises to it. 

He does know this: they had no need of Sanbreque then, and they have no need of Sanbreque now. 

“No,” he replies. “He has not.” 

Wade is doing his best not to meet Joshua’s inquisitive gaze. “It was a different time. He was—Lord Rosfield, that is—well.” He can’t seem to find the right words. “Do you remember?” How he was. 

“Only a little.” It’s polite of him to ask, as if he and all the rest of Rosalith aren’t aware that he was little better than catatonic for all that time. Then again, they may not know. Clive was—and this he remembers in flashes and shadows—fiercely protective then.

“‘Twas Lord Murdoch who stopped him. They sent a dragoon with the contingent, to render aid, they claimed. Too bold. Clive sent them back smoking and their pretty words all in ash.” 

“Brother did? I can hardly believe it.”

“I hardly could. The words he said could have curled a chocobo’s feathers.”

“But Clive never gets angry.” The thought of it sends an odd shiver up his spine.

Wade turns a smile on him, knowing, kind. “Not in front of you, lord.” 

And this, Joshua realizes, as he watches the boy below them, is exactly the point. All this politicking, and he's already out of his depth. 

The Undying inspect the letter below, as if its edges will be lined in poison, the paper dusted in sneezing powder, or the very ink itself made of some foulness that will make him sicker than he is already. This season has seen him more days in bed than out of it, with Clive torn away from the west each time beating a path back to the castle as if Joshua were on his deathbed. The maids complain about him tracking mud in the castle in his haste and worry. Whatever Sanbreque could come up with, it could be no worse than Joshua’s body manages all on its own.

Cyril nods to him from down below; that’s their inspecting done, then. His people, he notes, have grown paranoid in Rosaria’s isolation. They bring the scroll and the boy both up to him. Joshua spares the messenger a glance but leaves him there in the care of the guard as he leads Wade and Cyril both inside, to the wide book-lined room where Father once kept his correspondence. 

The chair inside, Joshua notes as he sits, is still too big for him by an inch. The toes of his boots but brush the thick carpet below as he spreads the letter out on the wide desk before him. The room is cold and his sleeves are too short again; the words swim before him a moment and he no longer is glad for Clive’s absence. He cannot read this on his own, he cannot know what to say in reply—he will ruin this, somehow, and all of it will come down on Clive first and last. 

For a moment, the words blur before his eyes.

A ghost hides there in the words—a familiar script, a familiar cadence. Mother could be standing right behind him praising his handwriting during his lessons. Or, he’s seeing things, and it’s only that she was so skilled at saying something without saying it and this letter is naught but air. The Emperor sends his regret to Rosaria’s prince, in singular. He uses Sanbreque’s titling,  rather than Rosaria’s, and he addresses Joshua alone. The disrespect is clear: far better to speak to Joshua than with his unreasonable brother, who sent their offers for aid back as no more than ash not ten days after their father died.

His body grows numb as he reads, a buzzing rising in his ears. By the time he’s finished, his fingers have begun to stain the edges in sweat. He hands it off to Wade quickly and counts his breaths in his head to make sure they still come.

Wade’s eyes scan it at a slower pace, the lines between his brows deepening as he goes. “Proposal of peace, extends his deepest regrets for—it’s horseshit, is what it is,” Wade informs him, red-faced, and then he gets to the end of the page and stands up straighter still. “They can’t be serious.” 

Cyril takes it from him without asking and looks it from top to bottom with his impassive face revealing nothing, and hands it back to Joshua. “Will you reply?”

“I must.” Joshua lowers his head. “Mustn’t I?” Father, in his day, had a small council of advisors, of people who knew what to do and when to do it and all the right words to use. Joshua has Clive, and Clive has left him this task. This is all he can do. “They would offer us ships,” he murmurs. “They would offer us men.”

Wade’s hand cuts the air and his voice with it. “In exchange for—” 

“Sir Wade,” Cyril murmurs. 

Wade stops short, but he doesn’t apologize, and he doesn’t bow, but shakes his head. “It’s shit.”

“The offer itself is an insult,” Cyril agrees. “The Phoenix is Rosaria’s. That they would presume to take it for their own…” 

“Surely they cannot.” But they can, for this is Sanbreque’s offer to him: an alliance, ships and men, dragoons and even the service of their own Eikon, the Emperor’s grace and the Emperor’s love, for a price no greater than his hand. Or, they add at the bottom as if no more than an afterthought, his brother’s. An alliance by marriage should be no shock, and the offer is a generous one. Everything in exchange for a thing so small he had hardly considered it before that moment. 

At his silence Cyril says, “They seek the heirs you will one day bring forth. You, and your brother. The line that bore two Eikons too valuable to let go unsought. Only now they realize their error."

Because of Clive. Because of what he is and the power he's brought to bear, and they might have thought to annex Rosaria in a night but now Rosaria holds Drake's Breath and its own borders. All of it, every inch of Rosaria’s power, rests on Clive's back. Cyril is right for the wrong reason: the offer is an insult, for Clive is worth more than anything Sanbreque could offer. 

He asks then, "Do you think Mother had a part in writing this?"

A hush falls. They don't speak of her. No one but Clive would dare to with him, and only if Joshua asks first. The Undying, when they bring news of her, won't use her name. 

Cyril says, with as much gentleness as his voice allows, "I would not exclude the possibility."

He knows. He knows she did. In ten years he never heard Clive’s name pass her lips and yet there it is in spidery lines of black ink, plain and short and un-titled. Only now is Clive worth something to her—and, a voice small and cruel reminds him, worth something to the rest of Rosaria. Now that he’s manifested an Eikon, taken Drake’s Breath, fended off every challenger to Joshua’s throne and saved Joshua’s life as well, he’s a prize, and all the fifteen years before that mean naught. They have no care for all the nights by Joshua’s sickbed that Clive spent cooling his fevered brow with a wet cloth. They don’t know that Clive has had calluses on his fingers since he started his training at ten, that they scrape against Joshua’s scalp when Clive ruffles his hair. They will put no value in Clive’s laugh, the helpless sound of it. They will not know that Clive still wakes at night sometimes with his breath short in his chest and sweat on his brow and panic in his eyes and what he needs most in that moment is Joshua’s hand over his heart to remind him where he is. 

He feels an odd lump in his throat, almost painful, like a cough that won't come. 

"Will you reply?" Cyril asks again.

Joshua's fingers are trembling. The letter shakes in his grip and then he knows what the lump is because it's rising and rising and he ought to have known: the Phoenix is always close to the surface of late. He lets her come and watches, as the paper begins to smoke and curl between his fingers. It doesn't burn; it crumbles instead, to ash like dust. It lands in a small pile on the polished wood desk; two drips of black wax that were the Emperor's seal join the ruin. No one speaks.

It’s all the reply Rosaria owes them.

They feed the messenger boy and let him stay the night under guard. Joshua cannot recall what the protocol was for honored guests under his father, but not this. There is no more protocol. His teachers are few; his lessons are determined by their relevance and need, and everyone knows: Rosaria does not receive guests. Not anymore. In the morning, they send the boy off with an escort they don't bother pretending is an honor guard.

Joshua's reply goes with him, ashes neatly gathered and sealed. At least this time they'll know it's from him and not Clive. In this they are a united front.

He feels good about right until the moment the boy and escort are out of sight, and then the guilt seeps in.

When the rapture of his rage leaves him, the breadth of what he’s done begins to weigh on him like someone dutifully stacking cobbles on his chest as he lies in bed that night. He clutches the pillow that no longer smells of his brother to his chest and chases shadows across the ceiling. Perhaps at that moment Clive is doing the same, but it’s more likely he's on watch or on patrol. Maybe it's raining there. They say Drustanus has terrible weather, to match the ire of the volcano that sits within it. He knows so little about what Clive spends his days doing now. The letters still come, sparse and joyous and he wonders each time what hasn’t been said more than what has. 

If he were a better leader, he could that moment be instead writing to Clive of all the ships he won them, of all the fresh soldiers at his command, of a second Eikon to fight at his side far stronger than Joshua will ever be. 

But no. His brother is fighting far, far from home, and Joshua is alone.

Selfish, the dark calls him. He would rather see Clive suffer than see him safe in someone else's court and the worst part is that even as the dark presses in about him, even as the guilt sits like a lump at the center of him, he would decide the same over and over again.

The next day finds him exhausted, with a tickle at the back of his throat that no amount of water can quench. When the servants offer him honeyed tea at breakfast, he knows he hasn't been as clever at hiding it as he thought. If Clive were there he would settle a hand at the middle of Joshua’s back and rub the soreness out of his lungs, up and down with his wide, warm hand. It helped, though it had no reason to. 

Weak, the stone walls inform him. Weak and selfish, both. 

His lessons on sums are in the afternoon. He takes them downstairs by the Vaults, where they keep the account books in a whole wall of dusty old leather bound volumes, but the Keeper takes one look at him and suggests they try for the courtyard instead, in the private garden that catches the afternoon sun. The heat will help, she says, and sits him down under a tree. Joshua pats the grass beside him and she joins him there.

Almost as soon as he's settled, a stray breeze crosses him wrong and sends him into a small fit of coughs

She considers him a moment, worry creasing her brow. “We can forgo lessons for a day, my lord, if need be.’

“No. I’m well enough.” He must be well enough for this. If not, what is he worth?

She nods and hands him his work book, a blank volume roughly bound where she writes out sums and questions for his practice, for all the minutiae the Archduke might one day need to know. Taxes and prices and the worth of a sack of potatoes over a bushel of strawberries. To him, it seems like ridiculous work. Not for its content, but for its ease when Clive is off doing only the Founder knows what. 

This is nothing, and yet, today the numbers refuse to put themselves in the right order or multiply the way he wants them to. He tries the same division four times without success and then almost breaks the quill between his fingers over the frustration of it all.  

“I can’t do it,” he says. “Even this. I cannot do even this.”

“My lord…” She seems for a time as if she has no answer for him, but then she reaches over and takes the book from his hands and the quill, too. He balls his hands into fists at his side, until he can feel his nails biting his palms. 

“Mother was good at sums,” he says. Even Mother could do this. 

In three days he's spoken of her more than in the last three years. The Keeper blinks in surprise.  “Yes, she was. She kept the account books well,” she agrees, but adds, “for a time."

Until she hadn’t. Until they’d had to go back and tear apart the household accounts for every gil she’d fettered away and run off with. 

“It's important you have the knowledge to do it yourself, but you will always have people to do this for you, my lord. And should you ever marry, your wife will help. You mustn’t push yourself.”

Should he marry. No. If he was, he's thrown away his best chance at making it worthwhile. Clive will get nothing out of Joshua marrying some Rosarian heiress.

“No," he says. "I must be able to do it myself.” He holds his hand out for the booklet.

She doesn't hand it back. “But not today.  It’ll keep.” She sits back against the tree they are both against, her hands folded over the sheaf of papers in her lap, and considers him. "You've too much on your mind. It happens to us all, time to time."

“There was a letter,” he whispers. “From Sanbreque.” 

She spreads her hands over her skirts. “I heard.”

“My reply was not fitting of my station.”

She’s quiet. “I heard. I also heard a proposal was made, though forgive me if it’s forward to say.”

The tight thing within his stomach coils further. He cannot say it, cannot articulate why that, more than anything else, brought him low.

“I expect its the first of many. Your blood is unimpeachable—yours, and your brother’s. If I may say, you both are two of the finest heirs House Rosfield has seen in a long while.” She smiles to herself. “That brother of yours will break hearts before he’s through, I suspect.”

“He wouldn’t!” he says, aghast at the thought.

She barks a laugh. “Not on purpose. Not that he’ll have any say in the matter. Had your mother her way, he’d have been married off long since.” Joshua feels his jaw unhinge inappropriately.  “Don’t look so scandalized, my lord! Then again, your father was a soft touch; I’m certain if either of you had objections, he would have honored them.”

“But Clive is so young!” 

“Not so young. Older now than your father was when he married.” 

He knew this, perhaps, at the periphery of his mind. The reality of it is something else. His chest feels tight and hot with something more than his cough. Clive any day could find someone, could fall in with them, could leave—

But Clive would never leave him. 

“Anabella was after him, you know,” the Keeper continues, “anything to keep the blood. And of course, they were cousins, so she was given priority. If your Uncle had any daughters, no doubt you would have been promised to one.”

At his cinched brow she nods. “Oh yes. To keep the Eikon in the family line.

He shifts uncomfortably. “Do siblings ever…”

“What a question!” She sets her work aside. “Come. I think I still have that old tome lying around.” 

Evening finds him utterly engrossed; the book weighs on his lap like a rock, the pages yellowed at the edges and the red leather of the cover so worn with age that it’s begun to crack in places. For some reason, the reading of it feels illicit, and so he sequestered himself away down in the bailey for the practice, with a promise he would bring the book back in one piece and the careless wave of Goditha’s hand. It’s yours, my lord. Everything is.

"Reading a book in my yard?" Murdoch asks as he sets a saddle on the rack a few feet away.

Joshua flips it shut, face burning. “Yes. Evening, Lord Murdoch.” 

Murdoch raises a brow. “Evening, Lord Marquess.” For a moment, it seems he won’t ask, but he sighs to himself. “What are we reading, then?” Murdoch comes to him and looks over the cover. “Lineage of the Phoenix. Ah.” 

“Mother and Father, they were…” 

“Cousins? You knew that. It’s not so odd. Especially in Eikonic lines.”

“...But father didn’t want to marry her, did he.”

Something complicated and swift passes over Murdoch’s expression like a shadow. “He was prepared to do his duty. And he did. Soon as he had Clive—soon as he had you—he was happy enough.” 

Duty. A duty he will be expected to complete one day, too. Or Clive will. Or both of them. “But they didn’t love each other,” he says, frustration building. “He didn’t love her.”

Murdoch, perhaps realizing he wont easily escape this conversation, finds a seat on a box beside the stable door. “I’m not sure I’m the best person to be asking.”

“You are the last servant of my house that father counted among his friends. I only wish to know more.” Murdoch gives him a look that sees right through to the heart of him, and Joshua’s thoughts grow strange. The night around him and the book in his hands make it seem a place for speaking secrets, but if he has one, he isn’t sure how to say it. “Uncle never married.”

“He’s an eccentric.” Murdoch shrugs his shoulder, and adds under his breath, “I believe there was talk about his manservant some years back.” 

“Should you be telling me that?”

“Perhaps not. But I tire of beating ‘round the bush. What is it you truly want to ask me?”

He doesn’t know. His thoughts are a morass, his brother at the center, and duty the muck about him. “Who was Mother going to give Clive to?”

“Your mother had the idea Clive might least be useful if they paired him to the Dominant of the North, when they were children.”

“Jill! Our Jill?”

“Yes, the very same.”

But Jill is almost of an age with him, and almost a sister, too. What, he wonders, if Clive had been born as she was—as a woman? What if Joshua had? The Phoenix is not always borne by a man. Would they then have been promised to one another? But this question is too embarrassing to ask. 

“Of course,” Murdoch continues, “he ruined that for her.”

“Ruined it? How?”

“By becoming your Shield. I pity whatever poor soul he falls in with. His duty—you—will always be first in his mind.” 

“What if he does want to marry one day?”

“Then it will be up to you to bless the union. It isn’t forbidden for you to do so. But no. I don’t think it likely. I’ve never seen a woman turn his head.”

Joshua fiddles with the corner of the book. “Or a man?” he asks in  small voice. The question is very bold. Too bold. He has no one else to ask. 

Murdoch sits back and his expression becomes cryptic, unreadable. “We may be beyond my station. What is your worry, my Lord?”

“Goditha told me he will break hearts.”

Murdoch laughs as if he cannot help it and then says beneath his breath, “He already is.”

“But not mine.”

The look leveled at Joshua is no less piercing than the point of a practice sword pressed to his sternum. “No. Not yours.” He stands and brushes his pants with his one arm. “If you’re down here, you best be training. Save the reading for your studies.”

He hadn't intended to tell Clive about the letter, but word gets back to him all the same. He's not due back for three days but mid-lesson on a morning a week later, the door to Joshua’s study opens and the sun rises all at once: Clive is standing there, sweat at his temple from the ride and mud on his boots. 

Joshua almost knocks over the inkpot and chair both in his haste to get to the door. Clive catches him. He's become a solid weight; whatever of himself Joshua throws at him, he catches all the same and so they've made a game of it. Or, he has, and Clive has learned to tolerate it with no more than a soft sound. His hand comes up to cup the back of Joshua’s neck and the other finds his hip and draws him in tight so they are pressed against one another from flank to cheek. Joshua works a hand beneath Clive’s cloak at the back, to find his heat. 

“We didn’t expect you back so soon, brother,” he says, drawing back an inch. 

“We made good time.”

“Better than good,” Joshua says with a laugh. 

Clive looks past him to the tutor standing awkwardly in their wake. “Can I pry you away?”

Joshua dismisses the man with a wave.

Little has changed since Clive was last home, but the view from the castle walls in autumn is beautiful. They take a turn around the yard together. Clive has so little time lately, it seems barely enough to breathe. Their only interruption is one of the Branded who offers an awkward bow as she passes. 

“How’s that going,” Clive asks him, when the woman is off and out of sight. His brow pinches as his gaze follows her.

Joshua sighs and lets himself slump over the wall for a moment. “Poorly. No one wants to give up the labor.”

“I thought having Drake’s Breath would help.” For so long as they cannot part with magic, having a steady supply of crystals is at least better than using Bearers. But—

“They prefer what’s easy,” Joshua tells him.

“They prefer what’s free.” Clive sets his hands on the wall. Joshua can see his scar from this angle, still red, a year past.

“Does it upset you?” 

Clive looks at him in surprise, and then his mouth draws to the side. “I suppose it does. If we were not heirs and yet still had our Eikons, I wonder how we would be treated. It was Father’s last wish that we end it.”

But Father wanted many things.  A university, an aqueduct and bridge to cross the country, and more still. He won’t press this. Father, for Clive, is an open wound, still. Yet Joshua remembers that night at Phoenix Gate better than Clive does and Father’s reaction to Clive’s insistence that he would hold the line—that he would protect them both with his life. For Father, there was never a question. Of course, Clive would give his life for them. Between the two of them, Clive was the disposable one. 

Not to him. Never to him. And of the two of them, Clive is the only one who's made any of Father's plans a reality.

"One day," Clive says wistfully, as he rocks back on his heels, staring off at the setting sun. 

"Actually, speaking of Father, we had word out of the south. A griffin has been spotted. We might might make right one of his desires, at least." He chances a look at Clive. "I thought we might go together, if you have the time.”

Clive’s jaw tenses, as if he needs to chew on his words, or his worry. “That’s a distance.”

He can count the times Clive has let him leave the city since that night one hand. It shouldn’t shock him that Clive would deny him this, but it still bites. “If you’re busy I can ask Wade and—” 

“No. No, I’ll go. But it’s a long way, Joshua.” 

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed but I have grown, just a bit. There can be nowhere safer for me on Storm than at your side.” In this light, Clive’s scar is redder, angrier. It makes him look older, too, when his face is drawn in this way, with worry in this way.

All at once, Clive turns to him, and the light catches the blue of his pretty eyes. Joshua’s breath is stolen for a moment, and then a moment more when Clive reaches a hand out to him and cups his face. He hadn’t realized they were so close as that. 

“What?” Joshua asks as heat rises in his face.

Clive wipes a thumb over his cheekbone. He’s still wearing his gloves, and the leather is hot to touch—as hot as Clive’s skin must be beneath it. "Nothing. You have grown into a fine man. Don’t think I haven’t noticed.”

"Oh." He swallows; the sound clicks his throat. 

Clive releases him and turns back to the view. Joshua must be imagining the dusting of red beneath the stubble on his cheeks. “I heard you were offered terms by the empire.”

This, the conversation he didn’t want to have. “Yes,” he replies, tepid.

“And you…”

“I refused.”

“Those won’t be the last.” Clive settles his arms on edge of the stone wall and peers off over the city. He looks particularly windswept after his travels and the sun now is making his black hair glow with red. The queasy thing comes back to Joshua, but he knows it for what it is now and has known for some time. It’s something wrong, in him, some quirk of the blood they share. This is how he reasons it. Their line is full of cousins and half-siblings and, in the far reaches back, full-blood siblings. All to keep the Phoenix—but that cannot be his excuse. It’s not as though Clive would bear him any children and even that thought, that simple thing, is so dark he feels he has to keep it tucked away somewhere behind his ribs. Maybe he does have a secret, then. The first he’s ever kept from Clive.

The feeling gains teeth, in moments like this. It seems sometimes as if it will eat him from the inside out. 

“I wasn’t polite in my reply,” he admits.

“No?” Clive gives him half a smile. “Good.”

“They would have given us ships, I’m sure.”

Clive laughs. It’s bleak. “At the cost of what—our dignity? Our sovereignty? You?”

“Or you. The proposal was for you, also.” 

It takes Clive a full breath to reply. His jaw clenches so hard the muscle twitches.  “Proposal? They proposed a marriage—to you? They dared?”

“I should have at least considered it. There might have been some other way. You need—” 

“No. No,” he says. “I need nothing from them. You make these choices for your own sake or for Rosaria’s. Not for me. I chose my duty.”

Duty, again. Clive cloaks himself in it, eats and breathes and sleeps with it. One day he may hang himself with it. And that brings him to what he wanted to say. What he told himself he would say in this moment, and practiced in a mirror even when the words soured in his mouth. “If you did want,” he starts, keeping his voice steady, “to wed one day, I would allow it.” It comes out all wrong though. He sounds like he’s lording it over Clive, and that isn’t how he meant it. “Your duty is no reason to deny yourself something you desire,” he tries to explain.

He’s holding his breath, he realizes, only when Clive replies with certainty, “I have all I desire.” 

The thing in Joshua’s chest loosens, at last, and then Clive turns to him and smiles. “I have my brother, alive.” Clive’s gaze falls to Joshua’s chest, where the scar he was given at Phoenix Gate sits hidden behind a red shirt he stole out of Clive’s closet. His clothes are still too big on Joshua, but the sleeves are long enough, and they’re comfortable in ways his own clothes never are. “It wouldn’t do to be greedy,” Clive murmurs, as if to himself.

Greed. Joshua wonders what could bring Clive to greed. He wonders what his brother would want, if he let himself want anything at all.

Chapter Text

Clive: there and gone. Only a short patrol, he said, to make ready for their trip south. The days draw long without him. Being fourteen isn't so different from thirteen, Joshua decides. He measures his height against the post in the stables where Clive first took his measure and carved the day with a J beside it, and then let Joshua find a footstool so he could climb up and measure Clive’s height and add his to the post, too. 

I’m not including your hair, Clive. It isn't fair if I do. 

And Clive, softly, always, However you like.

It’s hard to measure himself without Clive’s help. He does his best, carves the line, and steps away. Taller, again, but he feels no older. Perhaps adulthood is sneaking up on him and he’ll wake one day with it fully grown in—all the maturity, all the grace, and the wisdom. Three years until he's crowned. Maybe then, it will come to him. Maybe on that day he’ll awake and know what it is to be as Clive is.

“Lord Marquess, if you spend any more time in the stables, I’m afraid you’ll turn into a chocobo.” Murdoch pauses in the door, a saddle under his good arm. “With your hair, you’re more than halfway there.” 

Joshua moves to take his burden. “I would make a fine chocobo. I welcome it.”

“And what would I tell your brother?”

“I expect he’d take it in stride.” He laughs, and sets the saddle away on one of the racks. It’s mid-morning, but the stables and yard are quiet. There’s a chill on the air, as if it might rain. 

“It wouldn’t get you out of training. Speaking of, so long as you’re here…” Murdoch looks at him and then nods to the yard, where a training sword is still leaned against the rail fence.

“Oh—” Joshua feigns a cough against his shoulder. “Oh dear, I think I feel a fever coming on.”

“That so? I’ll be sure to inform the Lord Commander when he returns. Best not to travel, I would think.”

He hasn’t been sick—truly sick—in some time, and the last time he was, Clive beat his way back to Rosalith in the middle of a mid-winter storm to tend his bedside for two weeks. He was twelve and Clive only just come of age with ever more responsibility on his shoulders than it seemed he could bear. “Do not say that, even in jest. He only just left.” Joshua leans back against the same beam that has his measures. “If I got ill again, he would lock me in the Keep until I came of age. This is the first time he’s agreed to let me leave the city in a god’s age.”

Murdoch's brow raises at that. “He would let you leave more, if you asked.”

He's right and it's unfair. That he's tied to the city is less burden and more luxury. Clive fought for him to keep it, tooth and nail, blood and sweat. “I know.” He raises his shoulders and hands as if to say, what can you do? “Yet I fear the stress of it would do irreparable damage to him.”

Murdoch's expression sours as if he's imagining the reckoning that would come down, and he's like Joshua in this: they both fear Clive's anger less than his worry and tears. Not that he would cry. Probably, he wouldn’t.  He wipes his hand on his coat. “Come. If you’re not ill and you have time to bother me and the poor birds you might as well be useful. If you muck the stables, I’ll listen to your troubles.” 

“M—muck them out.” 

“Aye. It’ll build character.” 

Joshua laughs. “Do you not think I have enough of that already?” 

But he’s game for it. Murdoch instructs him. The few guards milling about stop by with comments fresh on their tongue. You missed a bit there, my lord. Lift with the legs! Joshua doesn’t mind. They treat him more like a man than anyone else in the city dares to. Perhaps serving beside a Dominant inures them to the presence of the Phoenix. Or perhaps being subjected to Clive’s stories about him is what’s done it. He takes their comments in good humor.

Once he’s set into a rhythm, Murdoch sits on a barrel and says, “Well?”

“Why do you think me troubled, sir?” Joshua keeps a smile on his face as he picks through the straw with the pitchfork. It is dirty work, and hard, but there’s something to it. 

“My soldier’s intuition, call it. So speak.”

Murdoch tries to catch his gaze, but Joshua cannot meet it. His troubles are miniscule—nothing compared to Clive’s. How arrogant would be be to whine from the confines of warm, dry stable? Discounting smell, at least. “Did you make Clive do this?”

“Make! Founder, no. He begged to.” 

Joshua stops at that, leans against the handle of the pitchfork. “Why?” 

“Back to work,” Murdoch says, motioning to a particularly onerous pile Joshua had been hoping to avoid for the moment. “He wanted to be useful. But more, he wanted out of that castle. There was no place for him there, though your father tried.”

“I was there,” Joshua mutters.

“And bless you for it. How much do you remember of that time?”

“Not enough.” 

He was then so wrapped in his own insecurities. It seemed the most desperate joke that he was the one with the Phoenix, sickly and incapable, while Clive was not. Had he been able, he would have gifted to Phoenix to Clive then. Now, it seems yet one more burden, and Clive has enough of those. 

“That woman,” Murdoch starts, and there can be only one he’s referring to, “truly loathed him. Not at first, but the rumors after the Phoenix denied him were vicious. And she was young—obsessed with the blood, you understand. When you were born and it was clear you had a bond with him that she would never share with either of you… It didn’t endear him to her. She wanted him nowhere near you.”

He frowns and gives up the pretense of mucking. “But Clive was with me all the time.” His first memory is of Clive. His first five or so are of Clive. Blue eyes and his big smile. Being carried about in his arms. Sitting in his lap for lessons. Chasing after him, falling on the stone, scraping his knee—Clive kissing it better, blowing on his bruises, wiping his tears. 

Murdoch scrapes a weary hand through his hair and then hunkers into a soldier’s sit with his knees spread and his arm braced, as if he's giving a mission brief and not family gossip. “Because you were incorrigible. You would do nothing when told to unless Clive were the one to tell you to do it. It was your first brilliant political move, I believe.”

“Surely I wasn’t so terrible.”

“Oh, worse.” 

His face heats. “I never meant to put all that on Clive.”

“You were a child. You both were. Do not apologize for that. And Clive adored you. Still does.” He gives what in his repertoire passes for a smile. “If Elwin were here to see you both, he would be nothing but proud. Seeing you both together was his greatest joy.” 

Joshua worries his lip between his teeth. “Why then did Father never stop her?” This. This is the question that has raged in him. This is the question he would have raged at their father had he ever had the chance, but it’s a black thought, a cruel one. For Clive, the sun rose and set on Father’s shoulders.

Murdoch takes a long time to answer, and when he does, his words come quiet. “He chose his battles, as we all must. As you must.”

“And Clive,” he starts, but the thought is incomplete—only the nebulous existence of his brother and all his oddities and the immovable rock of duty he has set himself to pushing up a hill that needs no conquering. 

“Yes. A battle if ever I saw one.”

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“No. No,” Murdoch cards his hand through his hair again. It’s grown since he passed on his title to Clive, but only a bit. “That boy is a land war, and I’m happy to leave him to your care, Lord Marquess.”

Joshua resists the urge to roll his eyes at the title. “A land war. I will tell him you said that.”

“You will not!” 

“No, I won’t. He changed after that night, didn’t he.”

It is cruel to ask him about this, about that night. Murdoch has never spoken about it to him willingly. Almost all his memories of that time have been pieced together by context, as if learning a story only in paintings half burned, half worn away by time. But he answers, bold. “Yes. It would kill him to think you knew.”

Yet, how could he not? He is sheltered, not oblivious. There is a part of Clive he keeps for Joshua alone, where no pain seems to touch him, where no time seems to have passed since they were young. It isn’t a lie, but it isn’t all of him. 

Joshua has seen all of him. “I remember, you know.”

Father’s death. The sword that entered his breast. Of the rest of that day, he has but one memory of his own: waking in a bed to Clive screaming at someone in a flush of rage, his face in a rictus of fury. There was blood on his mouth and soot on his face, sweat in his hair, clothes a ruin. And then those eyes turned to him and all the violence had slid out of them and left them empty. The memory is one he cherishes only because it’s the only one he has of Clive then. It reminds him of Clive a year past, standing in his room after he took Drake’s Breath, gone still and slack with a pain he has never spoken of and perhaps never will. He wants someone to tell him it will be okay, but not Clive. They did something to him, he wants to tell Murdoch, and Phoenix Gate did something to him, and I cannot fix any of it. 

Perhaps, one day he will be able to. 

Their once-Commander stares at him, expression strange. “You remember?” 

“That night. I remember that night.” He swallows. “And the day after, or… a bit of it.”

A shadow passes between them, it seems, something dark and lumbering. Murdoch says again, “Joshua. It would kill him.” 

This, too, he knows. Clive keeps all of it those dark days for himself, holds it all within him, and pretends it is no burden at all. Joshua nods to the floor, and Murdoch slaps his leg with his hand and stands all at once. 

“These are dark things to speak of, and it’s a nice day,” he says as he makes to go.

“Wait. Lord Murdoch. One moment more.”

Murdoch pauses, and Joshua bows to him—only a little, a sketch of a thing. “Thank you, for all you did for him then.” 

He stares. His fair brow wrinkles. He’s never had an expressive face, and Joshua cannot read it now any better than he could when they were children and he was as likely to tell Clive he was proud of him as he was to toss a bucket of water over his head. “Don’t thank me for that. That boy is your problem now, and you won’t come running to me when he starts driving you mad.”

“But he does that already.”

Murdoch points to the remaining three stalls and the half of one he’s only part way finished cleaning. “Finish mucking. You owe me.”

A week later finds him five miles down the road pretending as best he can that he isn’t listening to the men gossip behind where he’s riding at the head of their small band. He pretends also he knows where he’s going, which is the harder sell. Once already Clive has had to ride ahead of him at a fork in the road—ostensibly to check for danger, but more likely to save Joshua the trouble of having to ask which road to take. 

Now, he’s riding back with the rest of the Shields. It’s a rarity they’re all together like this, and rarer still that they’re outside of Rosalith to do so. This occasion is a special one. He hadn’t expected to leave the city so soon, but griffins move fast, and if they’re to catch this one, they will have to move fast, too. 

The voices behind him rise. One of them is telling a story, loudly. With a small sting of betrayal, Joshua recognizes it as Wade. “She says to him then, she says, What’s a pretty thing like you muckin’ a stable for? ” Wade says in a mock falsetto. “There’s plenty inns down in the valley that would pay you for your service.”

A second man chimes in, “And my lord says, Oh, no ma’am, I’m no good at cooking. ”

Wade again: “And she says, We wasn’t going to ask you to cook! ”

Laughs all around. Joshua straightens his back and pretends the entire thing is about someone else, though he ought to be used to hearing it by now. The story has been the talk of the barracks for a days. It's his fault probably for mucking stables and almost certainly for keeping his hair so long that strangers start offering to pay him for his, ah, other services.

But then Clive’s laughter joins theirs, and that’s quite enough of that. Joshua wheels his bird around and says in the most calm and controlled voice he can muster, “How was I supposed to know what she meant!”

The whole band comes to a stop, the men’s eyes wide. Even Clive comes up short, his expression innocent, and then he tosses his head back. “Forgive me, brother. Had I known they were putting you to work in the stables—”

Joshua turns his mount back to the road and checks his posture once more. “Lord Murdoch told me that it would build character.”

A round of groans sound behind him. “He tells that to all the new blood!” someone informs him. 

Clive adds, “We must keep the stables immaculate, for this is Rosalith, the crowning jewel of the Grand Duchy—” His voice takes on a certain air and Joshua realizes he’s quoting Murdoch, and this sends them all into a round of lines as if they’re training for a play where each and every one of them will play their former Lord Commander. Clive’s impression is terrible, but Tyler’s is spot on.

Joshua decides to ignore them once more. He isn’t actually mad, only a little stung in the pride, and this is the first time he’s been allowed beyond the gates barring a few day trips for his sanity, and Father’s funeral. The country has changed. There are scars here and there, ruined buildings from the first days when the Ironblood nearly overran them, but these places are few and far between. 

Mostly, it’s beautiful. An odd pride surges up in him. All of this is Clive’s doing. Travelers who pass them greet them first with a wave, well used to seeing his brother. Joshua is a new sight to them, or at least one four years absent, though they must recognize him by his hair. For him, they bow. Sometimes, they whisper, but never with malice. Their eyes hold only reverence, which he does not know how to be worthy of. Clive deserves such. Joshua has done nothing to earn it but live. 

And he has managed that much only by his brother’s strength. With Rosaria in its hard-won peace, he has no excuse not to do what he can for his people. It’s not as though Father didn’t leave him a list. He has no excuse not to do what he can for his people.

Someone rides up beside him. When Joshua looks over, it’s Clive, but of course it is. He’s particularly dashing like this, with the sun on his brow and the wind in his hair, and the smile on his mouth. It’s been a long time since Clive has been so happy for so long. 

“Are you well?” Clive asks.

“Fine.” He means it, but Clive reins closer with the half-grin still tugging at his mouth.

“Don’t put on an act. I can tell when something’s on your mind, Joshua.”

Of course, he can. “‘Tis nothing. I was only thinking on all the instructions Father left for us.” It seems as if he might have done somewhat more of it while he was still alive, in their years of peace, but perhaps he tried. And perhaps the throne was as burdensome for him as Joshua once feared it would be for him.

“He left them for us to give us a path to follow, but it’s you who will be the arbiter of his will. You can still make your own choices.”

“I don’t know if I’m much for giving grand orders, Clive.”

He laughs. “They need not be grand. You’ve already done much.”

Joshua turns in his saddle and gives Clive the most dignified version of a glare as he can muster. “I have not. There is still the aqueduct and the university. The Bearers. I hardly know where to start.” Or how.

Clive reins in front of him. “I am sorry—are you, at fourteen, feeling guilty for not building a university in the midst of a war?”

“No. Not really.” He feels his face heat.

“No. Good, then.”

He rides on; Joshua follows, slower. Clive slows after a moment to allow him to catch up and then rides closer. Much closer. “You have something else on your mind, don’t you. Sometimes getting in your head feels like trying to peel an onion one-handed.” 

“An onion! Clive.” 

“No? Then tell me.” 

There was a time when no worry passed through his mind that did not end up on his tongue for Clive’s ears only. Now, to add to Clive’s burdens seems a high sin. “The Undying wish for me to attend the rites at last,” he lies smoothly. Not a lie outright, for the Undying do wish this, but better than the truth gnawing at him. If he tells Clive he does not feel worthy of his throne, it will be only be begging for his praise.

Clive grunts, and his nose wrinkles. His opinion of the Undying has ever been low, for reasons Joshua has long since given up at puzzling at. “Will you?”

Will he! It hadn’t occurred to him he had a choice, in any of this. Nor does he. “I do intend to, but,” he starts, but how to admit returning to Phoenix Gate makes his fingers sweat and his breath ache in his chest. He searches for words pretty enough to obscure this and comes up empty. 

Clive’s gaze softens. “I wouldn’t send you back there alone.”

“But you’re so busy.”

“Never too busy for you. Joshua, you know that, don’t you? If you ever have need of me, I’m yours.”

For some reason, the words change between Clive’s lips and Joshua’s ears and gain something delicate and sensual and sweet that has him, in an instant, red from his toes to his ears, his stomach clenching. He looks away, suddenly unable to find a single word or coherent thought except that Clive’s shirt exposes too much of his collarbone and chest. In fact, it is the only thought he has ever had and may ever have again. 

Riding becomes almost impossible. Clive cocks his head. “Are you sure you’re well?”

Joshua’s mouth works. Somewhere, in the least addled corner of his mind, he finds the word, “Yes,” and tosses it out.

Clive glances back to the rest of the men, who he hadn’t noticed were on about something new. Their laughter comes down hard, as if they might, impossibly, know what his thoughts are and be laughing at him. “I’ll tell them to ease up,” Clive assures him, “though I don’t promise not to tease you about it now and then.”

Tease. But gods, Clive cannot use that word—he cannot. “It’s fine,” Joshua says, not sure what he’s excusing. 

For a time, Clive is quiet. They ride side by side in silence, Joshua’s heart hammering in his chest, and then Clive murmurs, “You know not to accept any invitations to inns, yes?”

“Yes!” He reddens yet further.

“Father ought to have had this sort of talk with you, I suppose," Clive starts, and then visibly struggles to find his next words.

Joshua preempts him, hand raised to fend off his words. Joshua may have survived the Night of Flames and they both may have scraped their way through the last four years against every odd, but he will not live through Clive explaining that to him. He cannot even imagine the shape of those sorts of words on Clive’s lips—except, quite suddenly, he can, and it is ruinous. 

“It’s fine,” he says in a voice too high. “I’ve already heard it.” 

“What?” Clive turns to him. “From whom?”

“Cyril.”

“Cyril! Oh, Founder, Cyril?” Clive yells, and then realizes he’s yelling and drops his voice an octave in a simmering rage. “What did he speak to you of? You know, I never wanted him near you. I never trusted him—I never trusted any of them.”

Joshua’s face is burning and now the men have quieted to listen to whatever conversation has Clive so heated. “Clive, please.”

What’s worse is that in the past weeks, Joshua’s voice has begun to do an odd something where the words creak as they come out sometimes. He cannot, for the life of him, recall Clive being forced to live through that same indignity when he was Joshua’s age, but he was always soft spoken and sweet-voiced.  It’s as if his voice simply slid down a register from quiet to deep and rough and adult. Joshua’s seems intent on tripping its way wherever it’s headed. 

Clive takes a settling breath. “Fine. We’ll talk about it later.” 

“We won’t,” he assures Clive. 

A day, a night, and a day, they knew it would take. Joshua is forbidden from helping the men collect firewood that night when they stop to make camp. He’s also forbidden from helping set the tent for lack of experience, from standing guard—You’re the thing we’re guarding, lord!—and when he offers to get dinner set, Clive gives him a particularly pained look and promises they’ll handle it without him just fine. At last, for lack of anything else to do, Clive promises they’ll let him light the campfire—Ha ha.—and so Joshua finds a rock to sit on while he watches everyone else do work. 

It is a treat at least to watch Clive so relaxed. On castle grounds, he has a formality about him, almost a tenseness at times, as if Mother is about to walk around any blind corner. That worry seems to lift from him the longer they ride together. It’s not Clive at full ease, not the Clive who rests against him in the big chairs in the library or drools against his shoulder his sleep, but it’s closer.

So Joshua sits, and waits, and watches his brother. Every once and a while, between the myriad little jobs he’s busied himself with, Clive finds time to pause and check on him. Joshua gives him always a little wave. In the castle, he has duties aplenty and lessons to attend and nobles to appease and petitions to review. Out here, what is he? The men are amicable about it, and Clive, too, but it’s the same creeping sense he’s had for a year now: he is less than these men are. And yet, each and every one of these men would give their life for him. What could he possibly offer in return?

What has he to offer Clive? 

As if summoned by the Joshua’s dark thoughts, Clive comes to sit beside him and hands him a bowl of soup, hot and steaming. “You’re quiet.”

Joshua spoons at the soup, hunting for anything unsavory.

“Don’t worry. I picked out all the orange stuff.” He raises his own spoon, with a massive chunk of something that looks fibrous and sweet and disgusting, and pops it in his mouth all at once. “Go on,” he says, around his mouthful. “Talk.”

“It’s—”

“If you say it is nothing, I’ll put every bite of this back in your bowl. Come, brooding is an unattractive feature.”

“Clive, you brood all the time.”

He frowns. “I do not. I think about things.”

“And what do you think about?”

Clive looks into his bowl for a moment, as if the answer will be in there, and then at Joshua very suddenly. “You.”

It’s lucky in the low-light of the fire, Clive won’t be able to see his blush. But this, again, is the issue. He isn’t worth thinking about. Not worth this sacrifice of time and worry and all the rest.

“You ought not worry for me.”

“I’ll be the one who decides that. Eat. I won’t have you going to bed hungry.” 

Joshua complies, eating by spoonfuls instead of raising the bowl to his lips like the rest of the men are. Clive joins him in this, but then, he always had impeccable manners. Joshua watches him out the corner of his eye. Was it for Father, he wonders, or for Mother? Or perhaps it’s simply something innate in Clive. He’s good, in ways Joshua can neither understand nor hope to emulate.

Their tent is to the side of the rest, backed by the forest, with Torgal on guard outside. These lodgings are rustic—far more than those during their yearly tour of the duchy once were. On those outings, they lodged at inns and with minor lords or whoever would house them. The last time he was in a tent, it was after convincing Father that it would be worth it to set one up in the gardens for he and Clive to play pretend, and that one had been well appointed with down pillows taken from their rooms and silks provided by the housekeepers. Joshua stares at he dirt floor a moment, trying to assess its softness. There is a small table set to the side, with a wash basin and their packs set beside it. 

“Is this how it is on the road?” he asks, thinking of Clive in tents like this at the edge of the world. 

“Most days,” Clive says, hovering over the wash basin with a dripping cloth in hand. “Some days it’s wetter. Here, come. Wash up. We have no bath and I won’t subject you to a dip in the river.”

Joshua comes close and Clive makes as if to begin wiping at his face, before Joshua takes the washcloth from his hand. “I can bathe myself, thank you, Clive.” 

“Fine then.”

He gives himself the most cursory bath while Clive sets out their bedrolls, one next to the other. When he braves a look, Clive is facing away from him, undressing. His boots are off already. He steps out of his pants with his legs long and lithe and built beautifully. Joshua’s limbs are like branches shooting up in spring. His features and body both are nothing like Clive. And then Clive hooks his thumbs in his underclothes and—Joshua turns away and dips his head into the water to cool his brow, and comes up sputtering.

“What did you do that for?” Clive asks. Joshua will not look at him. 

“I’m not sure.”

Clive tsks at him. “You’ll catch cold that way. Come here.” 

Joshua does not want to, most especially when it will mean being faced with his brother’s bared body, but when he turns, Clive already has at least his sleeping pants on. He towels dry Joshua’s face and then attempts the same with his wet locks, tugging on them gently. “You have the softest hair,” he says.

A new scar strikes across his shoulder, Joshua notes. Not a deep one. He focuses on it and not lower, not elsewhere, as he hears the pop of a cork and a sweet smell fills the room. It’s the same oil the servants used to use on his hair, at Mother’s insistence. Only the Founder knows where Clive got it. It’s yet another small luxury he couldn’t justify clinging to when so many in Rosaria had so little. “That’s not necessary. It’s a waste.”

Clive doesn’t listen. He turns Joshua from him, and then his fingers find Joshua’s hair, carding through it gently. “We can afford to take some pleasures. And you were never meant to live like a pauper. I know it’s been hard.” 

“Hard?” he laughs and his voice cracks again in the bitterness of the sound. Clive means the dismissal of their servants, the end of feasts and parties and new clothes for every occasion. With little trade, they have only what their people make, and little of that. “I am still marquess. That's hardly difficult.” 

“But still. The change in our situation... You weathered it with grace. Don’t think your people haven’t noticed. Don’t think I haven’t.” 

The blush is back, against his most desperate attempts to quell it. Praise from Clive, even be it for nothing, is praise all the same. “I quite enjoy bathing myself. And dressing myself.”

Clive grunts. “Yes. I can see that.” He tugs on the shirt Joshua is wearing. It’s one of Clive’s, again, but black this time and passably formal for wearing under the ducal garb they insisted he wear for this endeavor. It nearly fits, too, though again the shoulders are too loose even with the tie done up tight as it will go.

“You told me I could wear your old things.”

“I did. Wear what you like.” But there is still something in his gaze, something heavy, as he traces over it. 

“These are comfortable,” Joshua argues, turning back away. He can some days even delude himself that the cloth still smells of Clive. The scent is indefinable. He knows it only when he’s near it, and when it’s gone he mourns its loss. 

Perhaps this, too, makes him odd. 

“Did you bring a sleeping shirt?” Clive asks. 

“I don’t know…”

It’s a bad lie. They packed one for him, but then Clive says, “Take mine,” and the lie perhaps was worth it. Clive spends a moment rustling around in his pack and comes up with something soft and white that on Clive would reach only his hip. 

“But what will you sleep in?” Joshua asks.

“I’ll be fine. You know I run hot.”

He does. The sheets with him between them are blistering in summer and perfection in winter, but they make a fair match. Joshua is always cold, despite the Phoenix. Or, perhaps, because of her. “All right,” he agrees, and takes it. He slips it on over his head and wiggles out of his pants beneath without looking at Clive. The chill of the night has started to set in, in earnest and his legs prickle instantly with goosebumps. The bed is already turned down; he slips himself beneath the covers and pulls them up to his nose.

Clive watches him, a smile tugging at his mouth again. In silence, he puts out the candles and joins him. As soon as he’s in, Joshua tucks in close, and then Clive turns to face him and settle a a loose arm around him. Outside, the rest of the men are still up and talking. It must be like a holiday for them, after all they’ve seen. 

“Clive… They won’t think me odd for not having my own tent, will they?”

“This is your own tent. First Shield always guards the Phoenix thus.”

He might have learned this, had they had the chance to be together as a First Shield and Phoenix ought before that night. Had father lived and peace reigned and they were made to busy themselves as lordlings ought to by touring about and slaying beasts and going on adventures like those in his books. 

“I could pitch up with the others, if you’d prefer.” Clive offers after a time.

“No. No, please. Stay.” He sticks his cold toes against Clive’s calf and Clive flinches. Joshua moves closer, until their faces are but inches apart. Even in the dark, he can catch the gleam of Clive’s gaze as he’s watched. “We could stay up and tell each other tales.”

“You and Jill,” Clive mutters with rue, knowing exactly the kind of story Joshua means. Those ones about ghosts and the meaner sort of fae. When Jill lived with them in Rosalith, she and Joshua loved those stories and loved them all the more for how much they bothered Clive. 

“It was just for fun. You didn’t really think the castle was haunted, did you?” Joshua asks.

“No,” Clive says with a bit too much intensity, “and if it was, I would prefer not to know. Ghosts can’t be kind.” 

Such a ridiculous thing to say, and with such a straight face. Joshua bites his lip to hide his smile. “Are you sure you’re not scared?”

“I’m not,” he says, with even more surety, and then after a breath, “Look, I don’t have a big brother I can go hide with when I stay up too late reading about ghouls and fairies.” 

Joshua giggles into his chest. “You can always come to me. I’ll do my best.”

“Why don’t you try doing your best to get to sleep then, my lord. We’ve a long day tomorrow.”

Joshua yawns and watches the light from the campfire flicking against the tent wall. An itch of something is sitting at the pit of his stomach like he’s a child again anticipating some special occasion in the morning. It’s an odd feeling. He tries not to twitch with it, and fails. 

Clive sighs. “Turn on your stomach,” he orders. 

After a moment, Joshua does. With his face pressed into his brother’s arm, Clive draws his fingers up in a gentle scratch up and down his spine, between his shoulder blades, down to his tailbone and the soreness there after their long ride. He used to do this when they were younger, when Joshua couldn’t sleep or when his coughing kept him up. 

It feels unaccountably good. But then, to be around Clive always does.

Their travel goes easy. There are no ambushes, no disasters, no grand betrayals. Joshua had not realized he was waiting for one until the chance for it is past. Scouts find the griffin on the second day. It’s noon by the time they reach it, and the sun is hot and high in the sky above them despite the season. The beast stands like a statue in the sun, yet it moves, and it seems a shame to kill something so lovely. 

We both of us have wings, he thinks.

But the griffin  will die anyway, and Joshua already has the once. Even if their blades never find it, its heart is already turning to crystal, as Bearers do, as Dominants who exhaust their power do. How much, he wonders has Clive summoned his Eikon? How much has it cost him?

“Stay back,” Clive orders, peering ahead. 

“No. We do this together,” Joshua argues back in a whisper. 

Clive casts him a look of near-panic. “No.”

“Yes. I can fight as well as—” But he can’t fight as well as Clive and he never could. In likelihood, he never will.  “Not as well as you, but I can fight. Let me help.”

“No,” Clive says again, more firmly. 

There is between them no battle of wills Joshua cannot win, and Clive knows this. He takes Clive’s hand in his own. “Father wanted this for us both. Let me help.” 

Clive folds, as wet paper would. “Fine. But you listen to me.”

“I will.” It isn’t a lie. The closer they get, the bigger the beast gets, and he’d not thought it quite so big from afar. A frisson of apprehension steels his spine. 

Clive draws his sword first. At the sound, the beast rounds on him, but it keeps to ground instead of fleeing. It’s a prideful thing, it seems. And then Clive is gone.

Joshua blinks at the space where he was, and then at the griffin, and there is Clive. 

That is how fast he moves, Joshua realizes. He’s seen it in the training yard; he ought to have known. He did know. And yet he’s taller than he was then and bigger in other ways, and he moves faster. 

Any hope he had of being useful dies within his breast. Clive is not merely a good soldier. To watch him fight is to try to catch the shape of a flame in a breeze. He wields his blade as if its a piece of him, his arm lengthened. In his hand, the honed steel seems to weigh less than their wood training blades do. Blades like his are meant to be handled with two hands, yet he spins his with one. It is Invictus. Murdoch’s once-blade.

Joshua breaks himself from his staring to cast at least a shield on his brother as the beast rears up on its hindlegs and buffets him with wind. He’s unmoved. Clive casts an eye back to him. “Come,” he says, “and stay behind me."

Fire limns his brother’s form, then, tracing his hair in red and his eyes in blue like the heart of a fire. It is like looking at a god.

Joshua has seen Ifrit. No one knows this, though perhaps now Murdoch has put two and two together.  At times, he’s unsure if it was more than a dream. The rest of the memory is dark and red and full of pain, but Clive is clear. He recalls it thus: Clive, standing above him, and then far, far above him. Not his brother but a beast in all ways, more grotesque than the griffin by far. He had such terrible claws, such strange horns. The making of his body looked like fire trapped in stone.

Ifrit burned everything—even him. But it hadn’t mattered. Joshua was burning already. Clive cannot know this. He will take this knowledge to his grave. 

It would kill him, Murdoch said, and it would.

This is the secret he keeps from them both. Clive changed that day, yes, but Clive changed for him. Then and now Joshua has found him no more or less than he is: beautiful enough to break his heart.

The griffin’s blood ends up on Clive’s face, and across his forehead and his unscarred cheek when he beheads the beast, at last. Joshua stands back and watches as his brother reaches an armored hand into the beasts chest afterward. Viscera paints him red to the shoulder when he pulls the stone free. He wipes it on his cloak and hands it to Joshua only when it’s as close to immaculate as he can make it—as if Joshua would shy from blood when he's bled so much of it. 

Sometimes, he thinks, Clive forgets that. If he has, it's only for the better.

Joshua takes it in hand with care. It’s heavy, dense as iron, and hot either from the fire or because hearts almost always are. As he looks at it, it seems to light from within. “Keep it safe,” Clive says, standing so close that Joshua is half hidden from the sun against his body. 

“I will.” The bracelets that were intended to hold the heart stone are made already, he’s told, but for a moment he imagines otherwise. A pair of rings, or a pendant to wear over his heart. The notion sits in his chest like a stone as hot as the one in his hand. 

“When you come of age, we’ll do with it as Father wanted.”

Joshua looks up at him, not so far a distance as it once was. “But you’re already of age.” 

Clive’s clean hand folds over his, and over the stone. “I’ll wait for you.” 

Chapter Text

“He said he’d be back by now,” Murdoch says when he joins Joshua’s vigil on the balcony. It’s at least less embarrassing than waiting on the walls; from the castle, Joshua can convince himself that it looks as if he might be watching the city and not the road. The veneer is a poor one. Everyone who knows him knows what he’s waiting for, or rather, who.

Joshua stifles a sigh and tries to sound light when he asks, “Should we send someone out?”

He wants to send someone out. No; what he wants is a string tied to Clive that he might use to tug him back to Rosalith on days like this. 

“We have scouts out.” Murdoch, kindly, does not remind him that Joshua is the one who sent them out. 

Rosaria is peppered with outposts now, far more than when their father still lived. By necessity less than desire; no one from without Rosaria comes around anymore who means well. Occasional merchants, a traveler here and there who thinks he might catch a glimpse of the Rosalith of old. 

Clive sent a stolas, anyway. He’ll be back before the day is out. He hoped to return early, but Joshua surely cannot worry that he isn’t back by luncheon or even by dinner on the day of. Waiting like this, sometimes, feels as if it’s half of everything he does. 

“I could go out to meet him, could I not?”

“No. Not and let me keep my head.” 

Joshua laughs. “He would not be so cruel. Maybe more—” he lowers his voice an octave, “Joshua, how could you? I’m not angry. Just disappointed. ” It’s a fair imitation of his brother. 

Murdoch raises both brows at him and shakes his head. “He’ll be back soon enough. We needn’t give that boy more grey hairs than he’s already got.” 

“Ooh. I’ll tell him you said that.”

“Do, my lord. He’s not so vain as you.”

Joshua has been keeping his hair long. Long enough, now, to twist up and pin to the side when he can’t bear to keep it around his shoulders. That, and his choice in clothing have given him a reputation for prettiness—but privately, he’s happy they have something to say about him now that isn’t Phoenix. 

Pretty isn’t so bad a thing to be, if he’s to be anything. “Did you worry so much at his age?” Joshua asks. 

“All young men burdened with purpose do.”

Joshua cocks his head. 

“No,” Murdoch says, and claps him on the shoulder and turns to go. “I didn’t have a thought in my head then. You might try it sometime. Much as I’d love to stay and listen to you moon, some of us have work that needs doing.” 

Joshua waves him off and ignores the dig. He’s hardly been idle. A stack of papers tall as a chocobo sit on his desk downstairs. On a whim, he had an office arranged for himself, one not weighed down in memories of crawling around father’s feet and sitting on his lap while he worked. He understands now that it was not always work. That Elwin was not much older than Clive is now in those memories, and that a life spent in waiting for toddler to take his duty from him might have been a weight too great to bear at times. A man of grand plans, indeed. 

Joshua will see them done, and he will make his own. Rosaria will not languish in Clive’s sacrifice, nor in father’s. 

He turns back to the road and scans it again, from end to end. Sometimes he thinks he can feel it when Clive draws close, a little itch behind his ribs, as if he does have that string and it’s tied to his center. More likely, it’s that feeling he will not let himself think about, though not thinking about it is also thinking about it. Even that simple thought brings it to the fore and his face heats along with his chest and every other part of him that’s decided Clive and Clive’s face and Clive’s arms and Clive’s hands are oh-so-very interesting. 

At first it’s a trick of the light, but there are specks of black on the distant road now, and they grow as they move closer, glittering now and then when the sun catches their armor. 

Joshua is off the railing and down the stairs in his next breath, taking them faster than dignity allows. Torgal barks and joins him as he hits the steps outside, and then the two guards at the gate make small talk with him while they all of them wait. Once, Clive’s coming was regarded as a celebration. Now, he gets his share of waves and greetings but people are well used to the sight of him going hither and yon. 

He arrives in minutes. He’s well ahead of the rest of his men, with his hood already down and an easy smile on his soft face.

Joshua forces himself not to run to his brother’s side like some war-wife whose been waiting for his return for two seasons. Clive rides right up to him and stares down from his perch with a grin. “Waiting, were we?” 

Torgal barks at him; Joshua keeps his dignity and rolls his eyes. “How was the ride?”

“Good.” Clive swings down and tugs him into his arms. "Gods, I think you've grown again," he says against Joshua's temple. "Are you taller than me yet?"

"You were only gone a week. I'm not growing that fast." Would that he were.

Clive steps back from him. He’s got only got a handful of inches on Joshua now. If Joshua stood on tiptoes he wouldn't have even that. If he wanted, had he wanted, and he’s quite sure in the moment that he does, he could touch his forehead to Clive's that way. He could look into Clive’s eyes that way.

Heat courses through him, no longer a surprise, but inconvenient. 

“I have something for you.” Clive reaches for his pack and pulls free something heavy and wrapped in brown cloth. He lets Joshua unwrap it, revealing a stack of books three high and bound in twine. They’re pristine, unlike Clive and Ambrosia. 

Joshua laughs. “Clive, you should not have. Poor Ambrosia, carrying all that.” At her name, she reaches over and picks her beak through his hair. “Watch out, Clive. If you keep on like this, she may decide I’m a better bet.” 

“Because you give her treats. Don’t think I haven’t noticed.” 

“Because she deserves them.” Joshua scratches the soft feathers on her cheek. “You keep Clive safe for me, do you not?”

Torgal butts his head against Joshua’s hip. “And you,” Joshua says, bending to rub at Torgal’s ears. He and Clive are too dignified for this sort of thing these days; it’s up to Joshua to spoil them both. “You keep us all safe, don’t you, boy?”

Clive sighs. “No one would know it’s me that’s meant to look after you and not the other way round.”

“Hmm.” Joshua stands and eyes Clive. He’s won himself a new scar above his brow, so faint that at any greater distance it would be unnoticeable. “I would know.” 

The four of them, bird and beast and brothers both make a little square there, a small family no bigger than he could hold almost within his arms if he had to. Clive catches his eye with a question. Something new is there, past the edge of his awareness, new and growing still. A helpless smile breaks across his own face, as if Clive has shared some secret simply by being there and being close. This must answer Clive’s question because his cheeks gain color. He has an innocence about him that belies the scar and the stubble. 

“Welcome home,” Joshua says. And Clive smiles. 

He’s home often now, riding patrols a week on and a week off. No one is actively trying to take Rosaria from them and it’s been at least a full turn of the seasons since any overly confident assassins or would-be Eikon thieves tried their hand in Rosalith. It’s nearly a holiday for them all, compared to what it once was—but only nearly so. Clive switches out his men often but never himself, and when he’s home, it’s with the specter of his leaving always hanging over Joshua’s head. He’s begun to feel like a character in some fable with a sword dangling above him. 

The closer he keeps Clive, the better he feels, and so long as Clive is in the city, they find their way together. They dine together. They attend court together. 

And, still, they sleep together. 

It makes sense. Saves time and saves laundry. Saves candles and firewood. Saves on guard shifts—no need for any Shield to lose sleep guarding his door when he has the best of them in his bed. Murdoch had been less than amused when he explained all this, and Wade had offered him merely an indulgent smile and not a single word. The logic, he’s sure, is sound. Even were it not, no one questions him. Clive is the only one who could. 

He doesn’t. He could.  Joshua readies himself for it—that each night be the one where Clive lays down the law at last and moves back to his own room. He had a dream about it once, more a nightmare. Clive with a woman bedecked in wedding garb hanging off his arm and a farewell on his lips and really, aren't you old enough to sleep on your own, Joshua?

Clive never says it. That evening, when Joshua has finished all his reading, Clive is waiting for him, sitting over top of the sheets with a book in his lap. He looks horribly domestic this way. 

Joshua orders his body to settle itself at the sight. It doesn’t listen, but then, it never does these days. 

“What are you reading?”

Clive looks up at him. “Ah… One of the books I brought for you.” He closes it and sets it aside.

Joshua watches him a moment longer. One of his legs is crooked oddly. “Come over here,” Joshua orders, motioning to the end of the bed. 

Clive frowns, but scoots his way there and hangs his legs over the edge at Joshua’s motioning. Joshua nods to his leg. “I saw you limping.”

“Limping,” he scoffs. “Hardly. It’s my ankle. It’s only sore.”

“Getting old?” 

“You wish.” He rolls the pant leg up for Joshua’s examination, leaning over as he does so that his head is bowed and his shirt falls away enough to expose his collarbone and his chest which has expanded with the width of his shoulders. He cannot get bigger, surely. Joshua hasn't a hope of catching up, now, not even if he spent all the rest of his days beating his body against the rails in the training yard. 

Clive’s ankle, however, is delicate. The confidence with which Joshua ordered him over escapes him and his mouth grows dry as Clive raises his foot. It is swollen, a little, and red. Joshua cups a hand over it to feel if it's hot, and it is, but he's no medic. "What happened?"

"I don't know. Twisted it, maybe. Seems I remember only half my bruises these days." 

"Your memory is going too? Oh, Clive, you are getting old, aren't you?"

Clive kicks at him and Joshua catches his foot gently, cups around the ankle and presses in with the tips of his fingers. A shiver runs through Clive. "You don't need to do that."

"No?" 

“No,” he groans, “but don’t stop.” 

Joshua’s stomach lurches at the sound, at the sight of Clive so relaxed. He ought to be so, always, and pampered, too. Joshua kneads his fingers into the arch of Clive’s foot and leaves it, draws his fingers up and over the bone and swell of his ankle, to his calf, pressing gently all the while. No sores, now, no bruises from wearing his armor weeks at a time. Joshua edges his fingers beneath the rolled hem of Clive’s loose breaches and up to his knee—

Clive jerks out of stupor. “I’m not injured there.”

“Fine.” But before he lets go, Joshua pulls the heat already simmering beneath his skin to the fore. He slips his power beneath Clive’s skin to sooth his bruises before Clive has a chance to note the play of light between his fingers and scold him against it.

Clive feels it instead, and shivers. “A waste,” he says in a scraped out voice.

“It isn’t.” In this, they have agreed to disagree. 

Joshua holds his ankle a moment longer and then forces himself to release his brother. He wasn’t hard touching Clive’s leg, but healing him has done it. 

He makes a weak excuse and relieves himself in the washroom. He does not think of Clive. He thinks of—someone else, in his leather, with his hair, with his callouses and his hidden softness and his smile.

When he returns, Clive is passed out right where Joshua left him, sprawled spread-eagle with his legs still hanging off the end. He’ll fall off the bed that way. Joshua tuts to himself and then tries his best to pull Clive up the bed and leaves him where he is with a spare blanket thrown across him. 

It’s better for his sanity, this way. Better if he has some distance. 

His dreams come strange and heavy. The air in their room is hot when he wakes but he cannot tell if it’s his doing or the fire that’s settled to embers in the hearth. His cock between his legs is hard, again. Clive is already gone, but Joshua is on his own side of the bed and curled away from the middle, so there’s a chance Clive didn’t note it. 

Not for the first time, he wonders if Clive went through this. It seems unlikely, his ever-so-poised brother going through anything so base. Or maybe that’s why he spent so much time breaking himself in the training yard. 

Well. If it was good enough for Clive, it’s good enough for Joshua. 

The yard is busy when he gets down; without the constant threat of doom and defeat looming over Rosalith’s head, the city is lively and so are the soldiers milling about. He gets a few waves and several more bows when they see him coming. He isn’t Archduke yet but the older he gets, the more they hold to ceremony, especially when Clive is lurking about somewhere. If Joshua does not intimidate them, Clive’s presence will. They all know how he is about Joshua, or so he’s been told. He has only the faintest idea what that might mean. 

He sets into his drills like his life depends on them. Only his dignity might. 

With summer around the corner, the weather has shifted from mostly cold most of the time to reasonably pleasant at midday, bordering on hot. In a half hour, he’s untied the lacing at the front of his shift and dropped the gloves. Something about the repetition is soothing. It takes his mind off things. 

It’s a flawless plan, really, until the moment Clive walks by.

He’s busy in conversation but his mouth hangs when he locks eyes with Joshua. He is, Joshua notes as dispassionately as he can, not wearing a shirt. 

Whatever he’s been up to, it’s had him sweating. The sheen of it has his skin glowing his muscles catching the light. His body is sculpted, and no one else looks like that. Joshua has seen other men, has seen women, too, and none of them are this. Clive’s eyes are bluer than the sky, and he must not have shaved that morning for his two days of stubble accent his jaw line. 

A bead of sweat drops from his neck to his chest and down before it’s caught against his waistband. He has hair, there, a faint line of it, descending.

Joshua’s mouth runs too dry and too wet all at once. He swallows. Clive nods at him and looks back to his companion, mopping the sweat on his brow with his balled up shirt as he does. The dimple of his hips and the curve of his back are not unfamiliar sights to him after years of sharing a room, but to see his body in sunlight is devastating.

Tearing himself out of his trance is a physical thing. He bows his head and swallows again. His body is both shaking and tense, as if he’s run a long way.  Not more than a moment have passed, and yet it seems someone ought to have noticed. 

No one has. Everyone is looking elsewhere. Everyone is looking at Clive. 

“Bit of late training?” a familiar voice remarks. 

Joshua doesn't look at Murdoch too busy chasing the eyes chasing his brother. “You should tell your men to stare less,” he suggests.

Murdoch is silent. When Joshua turns to him, his eyes are cold and full with an understanding—someone noticed his slip, then. Someone saw him. “You order them, your lordship. They’re your men.” 

Of course, he can’t. Murdoch knows this. He adds, “They aren’t staring at your brother. They’re looking at the Dominant of Ifrit and their Commander. You, though.” Murdoch points at him with the training sword he’s holding. “You’re staring.”

He isn’t amused. The accusation is bald, and he means it. 

“He’s my brother,” Joshua says, explanation and denial both.

“Yes. He is.” 

There is no start, and there is no end. 

The library is full of books of love, of courtly devotion, of monsters and maidens falling in love, of love transforming, and love forbidden. Yet not one of the stories is about two princes, made of fire, as they are. He’s strange, but for as long as he’s loved anything, he’s loved Clive. When he was young, all he wanted was to catch up to his brother, to keep him safe, to prove Clive’s love was not wasted on him.

Now his wants are dark and heady. He wants to be closer to Clive, and closer, still. To see how close Clive would allow him, test the line, and drag them both over it—but every time he tests it, Clive gives ground. 

He’s begun to wonder if there is a line there to cross.

It sounds mad. He thinks of the servants who walk in on them if they stay in bed too late in the mornings—the way they pause, the set of their mouths. He thinks of Murdoch who trained both sons of Rosaria and the sting of his sword against Joshua’s shoulder when he lets his mind stray too far.

His mind, it seems, is always straying these days. Even in his dreams. 

Where once he dreamed only of his worries, now he finds heat. Warm hands around him. And then, because of a tome in the library that must have been put there by mistake and its several salacious chapters that could only in the loosest definition be called romance, his mind starts filling in gaps. Clive’s lips are soft, and how soft would they be on him, around him? The scratch of stubble that sometimes brushes his cheek when they hug—how would it feel against his thigh instead? His dreams become soft and sweet as honey and when he wakes, that heat is still with him. 

It isn’t an issue, so long as he isn’t sharing a brother with Clive. 

He isn’t so lucky. When he comes to himself, it’s already too late. He has a leg hooked over Clive’s hip and his fingers at Clive’s chest. 

Clive shifts back against him, and says, voice muddled still with sleep, “Fuck’s sake.”

Joshua’s mortification is so wide and profound that it threatens to open the bed beneath him and swallow him whole. He jerks away and freezes there with his sweat running cold on his body. In his dream, Clive was saying something, almost in that sleep husked voice and—

“It’s fine,” Clive says in a clearer voice. “Normal at your age. Just take care of it somewhere not in my bed.”

“I would not!” he stammers out. His brother’s shoulders shake. Joshua snaps, “Are you laughing? Is this funny to you?”

“Only a little.”

Murdoch spots him from across the yard. For a moment, it seems he’ll pretend he hasn’t, and then with an almost visible slump of his shoulders he comes to where Joshua has been hacking away at one of the wood and straw dummies propped in the yard for what feels like hours and might be. 

“Did the poor thing offend you, my lord?” Murdoch asks.

Joshua pauses to wipe his sweat. For once, he’d rather not whine away his problems to this man who saw them both raised. The heat under his skin is shame now, and anger now, and frustration, and still, persistently, desire.

“You’ve about killed the poor thing. You been at it all morning?”

“Yes.”

“Unlike you.”

Joshua does not look at him, but wills his body to stillness. “I hear in some nations it’s normal to rise with the sun and not hours before it.”

“Yes, well. They aren’t Rosaria, are they? We serve the Firebird—”

“The Firebird thinks getting up at dawn is more humane.” 

Murdoch laughs. “Well then. Out with it. What’s wrong? Brother kick you out of bed? Lover’s spat?”

The yard blurs around him as his stomach drops and his face blazes red anew. This man can be so crude. He heard enough of it when Clive started training and it felt so bold then, like he was getting away with something by being in the presence of that kind of talk. “Don’t speak of it like that. Like we’re—we’re not. ‘Tis vile to suggest it. He would never do such a thing.”

“And you would?”

“That’s not how I meant it! Gods.” 

“If it angers you, good. Use it. You’ll hear worse, one day. He has.”

Joshua’s mouth grows dry. Clive has? He swallows. “About me?” With a lopsided frown, Murdoch nods, short and tight, which means yes, and he wishes to say no more. “What have they said?”

He waves his hand. “Rosaria’s enemies will say what they can of you and your brother. Put it from your mind.” 

He lowers his voice, grateful it no longer is intent on breaking with every other word. “ What have they said of us?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes, if it isn’t true.” 

Murdoch grunts. “And if it was? You are both of you Eikons. Let the Ironblood say what they wish of you both. No power on this continent can hold candle to you both.” 

“Lord Murdoch.” It is the closest to an order he’ll get, and they both know it. 

His face is kind as he says, “Your brother loves you. That’s all. Tis easy enough to call it something it isn’t.”

Oh. He sees, clear as sun spearing through clouds. Love. It’s so simple a word and it burns through him now with all that it isn’t. With all it shouldn’t be, and is. Every terrible thing they have said of his brother would be true if they put it to him. 

“I ought not have said it if I thought it would bother you so.” 

His breath shakes in him. The sweat he worked up is ice now on his skin. “He is my brother,” he enunciates carefully, and Murdoch’s eyes grow dark. 

“Aye,” Murdoch says. The word is a question, worded as one he thought he had an answer for and is now unsure.

Clive would not. But Joshua wants his brother as a child wants something he cannot have: more, immediately, and without consequence. If Murdoch were not here he would get on the ground and press his face to the dirt and summer grass. He would scream into his hands. He would set the dummy on fire. 

“How long have they said this of him?” Joshua asks, looking for anything to be angry with that isn’t his own thoughts. 

“Long enough for it not to bother anyone. Joshua—” 

“And it doesn’t anger him?”

Murdoch says softly, “As you said, he would never do such a thing. No. It does not anger him.”

The set of Joshua’s jaw is so tight that he can feel his teeth creaking with the effort. He would not. He would not. “I could not stand for it. …He is truly my better in all ways, is he not?” It isn’t a true question. 

He gets an answer, anyway. 

"He doesn't think that." Murdoch he steps forward as if he wants to put a hand on Joshua’s shoulder. No one else is about; it’s still early. It would be no shame but Joshua finds the idea repulsive that he should need to be coddled through his shame. 

“Perhaps not, but it is no less true.”

“It is not .” Murdoch cuts the air with his hand. “Not one man here thinks that. Not a soul in Rosalith would be else but honored to give their life for you, my lord.”

Joshua cannot make him understand. He shakes his head, and says, “I know that! And my brother among them, but I haven’t earned that.”

“Joshua, you are fifteen.” But they both know another man who was fifteen not so long ago, who did more for Rosaria, for them both. As if reading his mind, Murdoch says in a softer way, as if soothing some riled beast, “Clive is a good man, but he is just a man. He hides his failings well, but he has many as you do. As anyone does.”

“You know that isn’t true.”

Murdoch shakes his head. His eyes are elsewhere, and then they are on Joshua and looking straight through him it seems. “It is.”

He leans back in his chair, tired of signing missives and tearing apart overtures from nations unworthy of his brother’s time and regard. When he stretches, his back cracks. His bones ache, and other parts of him, too, as he grows. It’ll pass, in time. It must.

One of the letters before him is not a letter but a proposal, and this one is not from Sanbreque. This one he has no earthly reason to refuse. It comes by way of the east, a minor lord he remembers seeing in his youth when their father took them on tours of the duchy. He sends with his offer a picture of his daughter painted in fine detail. She is only a year or two older than Clive and strong and lovely, her hair the same crow’s wing black of Clive’s own. Clive would do his duty, if Joshua asked it—the continuation of the line of the Phoenix. Or Joshua could. Her resemblance to Clive is passing, and yet.

His stomach curdles at the thought. She isn’t Clive. She would not hold him the way Clive does. Were she wedded to Clive, she wouldn’t know what to do when his brother wakes in the night with his breath coming fast. She would not know how to stroke his hair, press her face to the back of his neck, murmur the right words in the right way. The thought of it, of some woman being led across the dancefloor by his brother, spinning in her dresses—it makes him more ill still and the thought reshapes itself into a memory of spinning Clive across the floor, Clive ducking under his arm to do so, and nearly falling backward for his effort.

No. She would know none of this about them.

And Clive can never know of her. Of any of them. He was happy to refuse Sanbreque but he may be happy to do his duty to father’s legacy, too, and continue their line. Better he never know.

The next morning he does get up early as any Rosarian would, and well before the sun. He takes care of himself in the washroom and then makes the mistake of staring at Clive’s sleeping form when he comes back in—the rise of his hip beneath the sheets, the lank of his arm resting on the white cloth. His shirt has come open enough to show his neck with its dusting of stubble. His collarbone is still delicate, no matter how hard the rest of him becomes. He has a softness to him. One of his pectorals is nearly fully exposed.

The sight is obscene. Joshua returns to the washroom, and does what needs doing.

Outside, the day is warm. The heat without matches the heat within him. It grows with each passing hour, until the ache is a dull and constant annoyance.

He is going mad. He must be. This is a sickness specific to him. And if father were alive to know—

From the height of the rookery where the stolas keep to themselves, he spots Clive, a figure no more than black hair and black shirt, but his mind and memory fill in the gaps for him. The long leather boots he wears when he’s out of his armor, the creak of them when he moves.

Joshua sends the refusal of the lord’s offer by bird himself. No need to burn anything this time, and no need to shame himself in front of the others.

Noon finds him still there, with his face pressed to the stone of the wall of the stairwell.

“I,” he announces to the wall, “am going for a ride.”

Father meant to be buried far to the south, but the way of their world after the night of flames was chaos. They held his funeral months after his passing, when Joshua was still too weak to walk on his own and Clive told him father would forgive them both for choosing a place all their own. And so they had, the two of them, on a hill that gets the best of the sun in the afternoon. 

The delay was allowable. There was nothing left of him to bury, anyway.

Joshua was the only one to see his body. When they found him, they found only ash around him. The image of his death still plays behind Joshua’s eyes if he lets it. 

Because of his health at the time, the ride is a mercifully short one—an hour’s hard ride in good weather and a full half day under worse conditions. Joshua makes it before the sun has begun to sink from its height. The two Shields he brings with him are newer blood, less likely to know the unofficial chain of command that is Clive first, before all others in the matter of Joshua’s care. His care has never felt restrictive more than protective but it’s hard to forget that at his age, Clive was tearing across the country killing monsters with one hand tied behind his back, manifesting new Eikons, and taking on armies. 

He snuck them out the back gate, while Clive was off doing goodness knows what. With luck, Clive will never know he’s gone.  And, surely, Joshua can be excused for wanting to visit his father’s grave.

He leaves his men at the bottom of the trail. There are no beasts here and no bandits; he has his sword and his fire, too. The walk is a short one and the path well-tended, and the grave is left exactly as he saw it last, the stone monument kept clean of moss and debris. The sun has baked the ground around it dry, but for the few persistent shoots of grass. Someone has been by recently and left flowers tied with twine in a bunch, their petals red and a soft yellow. 

This surely, none of it, is as father would have wanted. Were e alive, he would be able to scent Joshua’s disgrace from meters off. He would have seen Clive married, as befitted his station. It’s Joshua who has changed this, wrapped them both up in his own want and called it right, and pretended it to be duty. 

“Hello,” he murmurs to the stone. “I haven’t been a very good son, have I?”

There is no answer. Not even in his head, and he’s sure: Father have seen in him his desire and known it for a sickness. 

Clive was his firstborn, and more like him than Joshua. Father loved him, loved them both, but Clive he liked . The sun overhead is making him sweat and yet Clive is all his mind is full of. How much of him can be occupied by one obsession, by one man? It is a dizzy giddy thing. He sits beside the monument in the grass and in the dirt and hugs his knees. Father married someone he did not love. He suffered that for their house and Joshua cannot do even that. He will not do even that. He hugs his legs tighter and runs a hand through his hair. For what, will he give up his duty? For a thing that can never be. 

Time passes. He will not cry; it’s been a very long time since he has. Even if he were to cry, it wouldn’t be for father. It would be for Clive. By the time he hears footsteps, the sun is starting to roll down behind the scrubby trees that arc up around the clearing. Time to go, and well past it—he makes to stand, but then the footsteps speed and these are not the steps of his timid guards. These are heavy and familiar and then they are fast.

He's barely turned when a figure in black skids down next to him and gathers him up. 

Clive pulls back from him and relief strikes across his face. He’s sweating, hard, and he’s not changed from what he was wearing that morning, not even to change into proper riding clothes. His black shirt and his tall boots are covered in dust. 

“You’re not hurt?” He looks between Joshua and the grave and the dirt he’s sitting in, with confusion and no small amount of panic. 

“I was only out for a ride,” Joshua says, feeling his face heat. 

Clive’s expression twists. “I thought something’d happened.”

“It didn’t.” What could? 

“Then you—Why didn’t you tell me? I would have accompanied you.” He glances again at the grave of their father, but to him this place is a holy sight. Joshua realizes in an instant that he’s the one who’s left flowers. He must, often. He must come here all the time and think of father and legacy and his thrice damned duty.

Joshua looks from him and allows himself a sigh. “And should I ask for your permission when I visit the washroom as well?”

“Permission,” Clive repeats. His brow darkens. He’s almost never angry, and it makes him all the more beautiful. “You left on purpose?" Joshua rolls his eyes—could he have managed it by accident?—but Clive skips ahead. Do you have any idea how irresponsible that is? How dangerous?” 

“Do not lecture me!” Joshua stands to move away from him. His head goes fuzzy as all his blood rushes back into his legs and then, stubbornly, elsewhere, because he is still too close to Clive who seems only to be more beautiful the less he tries. A hand comes down on his shoulder and Joshua jerks from under it with a rise of his hands as if to banish even the ghost of his brother's touch.

It's a mistake. He might have slapped Clive and shocked him less. 

His brother stands, face gone dumb in shock, hand still outstretched. He drops it. His expression is eclipsed by stillness. “I see. Fine then. Wade will escort you back to the city.” He turns to go.

Joshua steps after him. “Escort me?” 

“Yes.”

“I will not have you treating me like I’m still a child.”

The half of Clive’s gaze that he gets over his brother’s shoulder is no less sharp, and the words no less cutting. “I will when you act like one.”

The Phoenix ripples under his skin. With a breath, he could summon her. They have never fought thus, the two of them, and he will not be the one to start it. Not in front of father’s grave, at least. 

In two years, I will have the throne, he wants to shout. And what then? Will I be a child to you still? Always?

But he cannot ask this. He lets Clive walk away and follows only when he can no longer see his brother’s back. At the bottom of the hill, seven men are waiting for him, and Wade among them, with his face doing something terrible and complicated that Joshua has nothing to say to. 

His brother, and the two Shields who accompanied Joshua beyond the city, are gone. 

Clive is not waiting for him when he gets back to Rosalith, and for the first time in his life, he’s grateful for his absence. The two Shields are, with hangdog looks, but Clive could not really be angry with them for following Joshua's orders. 

And Joshua did nothing wrong. Nothing but worry his brother. Nothing but prove his own unworthiness. 

A painting hangs in the upper wing of the castle, where their rooms were as children. It is one of a hundred that line the walls, all of them previous Dukes and Duchesses. All portraits are painted by decree in the first year of one’s reign. Each portrait is of a figure, solitary, on a dour background of black or brown, most of them fresh-faced and serious, attempting at dignity and fearlessness. All of them, save one. 

The painting shows a woman wrinkled and grey haired. She stares down the painter with an expression of pure ire, as if she would like to be anywhere else and cannot believe she is being made to suffer the indignity of being immortalized in this way. Joshua looked her up when they were young. Archduchess Morwyn was not of the ducal line at all, and he can see nothing of himself or Clive in her black eyes and severe features. The circumstances that sent her in her seventieth year to the throne were ridiculous—her brother’s son’s son, the Phoenix of that generation, abdicated the throne in favor of living out the rest of his days in the company of two of his Shields, in perhaps an innocent attempt at escaping duty. It’s one he can appreciate. 

It left the throne to her. Eventually, a younger cousin of the line came of age and she happily passed the throne to him. Yet for five years, the rule of Rosaria was hers. By all counts, she was a fair ruler, in her time.

“I want this painting brought to my rooms,” he says to one of the attendants at his shoulder. It is rare he calls for them, and they await his orders with a level of reverence that makes his skin itch.

“My Lord.” The man bows. 

“And bring me wine,” he adds, on a whim. 

They share a look, the two of them standing there. “My… Lord? For what occasion?”

“For drinking.” It’s not forbidden of someone his age, not even discouraged or odd, but it never seemed a good idea. There is, he supposes, no better time to start. “Something sweet.”

They hurry to obey.

Three hours later, he is the happiest he has ever been, and perhaps also the smartest. The carafe they brought him has been emptied once and refilled, and the wine tastes nothing like the stuff father let him try sips of on feast days. This is sweet and cool and his stomach is warm with it. Bless whoever thought to chill it. Bless all who reside in the castle.

He and Morwyn have been discussing the vagaries of the world. Mostly him to her, though he pauses now and then to imagine an appropriate reply. 

This is how Clive finds him, later, well after night fall when the headiness of the wine has set into his veins and the heat from the fire in the hearth is in him, too.

“What are you doing?” Clive asks when he walks in. Joshua hadn’t heard him knock, or the door open. “You weren’t at dinner,” he adds. 

Dinner! It takes a moment for him to find his tongue again, blinking as he does to force Clive’s form to a single body. Two of him is an appealing thought, but he has too many of those of late. Would that something about Clive were less appealing. “I’m not hungry,” he says after a moment, because it’s true.

It seems Clive wants to say something about this, but he will not have out with it. He frowns and turns his gaze from Joshua to the fire burning high, and then to the table, where the portrait is propped against it. 

“Is that the old lady from down the hall?” he asks when he spots her.

“She has a name,” Joshua tells him, though it escapes him in that moment. 

Clive looks at him, again, longer, and then walks to the table and hefts the carafe in one hand. He smells it and then his eyes do something very strange. “Was this full?”

"It was. So was the first,” Joshua informs him, and Clive takes a deep and audible breath.  Joshua raises his glass to his brother. "I am drinking."

"Drunk, I think. You ought not."

"Why? It's my wine. These are my rooms. This is my castle. You are my Shield."

"Are we naming things now? This is my sword. That's my shirt you're wearing, again. And you are my brother." His brow is dark and his expression grim, but nothing is worth so much seriousness and Clive looks so much better when he smiles. “I upset you today, and you have my apology for it but—”

“But?” Joshua asks archly.  

Clive’s brow wrinkles when he closes his eyes. “ But I do not apologize for being worried.” 

"I'm not mad," he says softly, “about that.”

Clive flounders. “You aren’t a child. I should never have said it, and I don’t think it. I was scared.” He makes as if he will come over to Joshua then, and make his apology close. Joshua can see it, his hands on Joshua’s knees, his head bowed before the chair where he’s seated.

“Stop,” he orders, and Clive stops on the word. It is so easy to order him. What else could he order his brother to do? What wouldn’t Clive do for him?

“Joshua,” he pleads. 

“No. You were correct. At my age, you’d already won the ducal tourney and made a name for yourself. And what am I?”

The question is rhetorical, but Clive answers, “You are the Archduke in waiting of a country you have held together against every odd.”

“ You’ve held together.”

“No. No, I have not. You are the beating heart of this place, and you could have been a hundred things, but you have grown with grace into a man father would have been proud to see throned.” 

They are so many and such pretty words. The hot, drunken heat in Joshua’s chest has at least pushed out the other heat. It is so much easier to speak the truth in its absence. “He should have given you the throne. I could.”

Ice comes into the room out of season. Clive does take a step closer then, against orders. “You will not,” he says in his low voice. 

“They like you best anyway.”

“They don’t. Joshua you are beloved , and rightly so. Self pity doesn’t suit you.” 

“Beloved? For what? My people hardly know who I am.” To date, his greatest claim to his fame is one he did nothing to earn, and even the Phoenix he cannot put to use to protect his brother who still thinks him a child. 

It is not more or less than what he is. 

But these are silly, bitter worries, and he is so very warm. A laugh threatens at the back of his throat, but if he lets it spring forth, it will bring with it all its friends and he will not be able to speak another coherent thing. Even so, words are coming slower and harder. The shapes of them are all wrong. 

“Father toured the duchy each year, and I have never done. I could go now. It’s safe, is it not?” 

“No,” Clive says on reflex. 

“No?” Joshua repeats. He stands, and the room tilts terribly. “You cannot give me orders, but I can order you.”

Clive’s expression is indiscernible as there are now three of him. Joshua tilts his head and they tilt with him and the room as well. Clive’s voice comes from both too close and too far away. “And what are your orders, my lord?”

Leave, he thinks, and come to me. Prove to me you love me, but not like that, not because you must but because you want to. The queasy beating pulse of his need could undo him, but he still has sense, and still has reason. “Tell me how to be your equal.”

“You were born my equal. My better.”

“I am not.” The frustration in him burns at the corner of his eyes. It would be easier to scream. 

Clive’s three faces become two and then one, and he says fatally from very close, “I have seen you grown into a man I am honored to call my brother.”

The scream comes out. “Fuck your grown! You didn’t raise me! We raised each other! What is five years, Clive? What does it matter? When we are fifty five and fifty, we will both be old and no one will remember which of us is the younger and the older. No one will care—”

Clive catches his flailing hand. “Fifty isn’t old. Where is this coming from?”

“I ordered you not to move,” Joshua pleads, but does not pull his hand away. “You have to… You have to let me do something. I have to do something.” 

“What do you want? What can I do?”

“Let me go with you when you leave.”

Clive’s eyes are too bright by half, but Joshua can’t tell if it’s the haze in his own or if Clive is truly on the verge of tears. “No,” he says then. “Anything but that.” He squeezes Joshua’s hand. 

He knew that would be his answer. That will be his answer, always. There is no end where Clive doesn’t leave him.

Unless Joshua leaves first. “Then let me do the tour. The one that father did yearly.” 

The no is so close to the tip of Clive’s tongue, Joshua imagines he can see it there, waiting to spring forth. “That would be reckless,” he says instead. 

Reckless, Joshua tries to repeats, but the word is too strange for his slow, thick tongue. 

“One day it will be safe,” Clive promises him. 

“One day,” Joshua repeats. These syllables are easier. “It will never be safe,” he argues with his clumsy mouth. “You will keep fighting my wars for me, alone, until you have nothing left to give and I can do nothing to stop you. It will never be safe, and I will never be worthy.”

Clive begs, “You are worthy of everything —”

“But not of you.”

With great clarity it comes to him. He will do what he must to be worthy of Clive, even if it breaks them, and it must break. It must break before Clive does, and there is so little of him left already. Better that Clive should live, and hate him a little. 

He puts his fingers on Clive’s cheek. “You cannot stop me,” he tells Clive. 

Clive closes his eyes. The scar on his cheek is a part of him, and the raised skin feels hot beneath Joshua’s fingers. He has other scars, hidden scars, ones Joshua wants to cover with his fingers and with his mouth until Clive forgets who gave to them, because surely, no one could give Clive anything that Joshua could not. But it’s nonsense. He would never cause his brother pain.

Except now. 

He kisses Clive then, on his brow, and then on the closed lid of his eye, and then his mouth is there and soft, and Joshua does not know what he’s doing except that his brother is sweet to taste. He licks as if to taste and Clive gasps but remains where he is, frozen in place, in time, as Joshua moves into him.

And then Clive is not still at all. A hand finds Joshua’s jaw and moves his face, grips his hair. The moment is better than the first hour with the wine, and twice as intoxicating. He hadn’t realized so much of him could be so close to Clive at once. If he tried, he might crawl into Clive his way and stay there, tucked behind his ribs. Then Clive could never leave him again. He bites at Clive’s lip, hardly knowing what he’s doing, but that it draws a low sound from Clive. The sound travels through him. He shifts closer, and his knee finds its way between Clive’s legs.

The fingers in his hair grow painful, and as soon as it’s started, Clive rips them apart. Joshua stares at him dumbly, his head too stuffed with cotton to make sense of anything but that he was warm and his mouth is wet and should be so again. Clive’s breath on his cheek is hot. He tries to move in again, but Clive catches the hand on his cheek and pulls it away. 

His blue eyes are dark this close. As he moves away, they blur and become four eyes, and then six. 

Joshua stares after him as Clive returns to the table and sets both his hands upon it. He’s shaking. After a moment, he lifts the carafe and tests its weight before he raises it to his own mouth. 

When he’s done, he brings Joshua the other carafe the servants brought him, which is full with water.

“Drink.”

Joshua meets his eyes and parts his legs to ease the aching hardness between them. “No.” 

Clive shakes his head. His mouth is still wet, with wine or something else. “Fine.” He turns and then he’s walking to the door, which is the wrong direction entirely.

Joshua rises to follow him, and nearly trips over his own feet. The floor does not want to stay flat and the walls do not want to stay upright. Clive watches him with something complicated—too complicated for Joshua, now. “Where are you going?”

“I’ll be outside,” he says cryptically, when there are so many better places for him to be. 

With some effort, Joshua finds his way to Clive and steps into his space. He takes one of his brother’s hands, less out of affection than a need to hold onto something that isn’t spinning the way the rest of the world is. “Are you really going to leave?” he asks.

Clive swallows. He searches Joshua’s face, and then pulls free of his hand. “I don’t sleep with drunks.”

He wakes to stomach trying to expel its contents over the edge of the bed. Only by luck does he make it to the bedpan, and then throws up once, and twice again after Clive hears and gives up his vigil outside the door to hold Joshua’s hair out of his face gently. He presses his hand to the middle of Joshua’s back and says nothing at all. It would be so easy to tease, but he doesn’t, not even when Joshua turns from the pot he’s been sick into and crawls into his open arms, shaking like a leaf. 

He lets himself be carried to bed, drinks the water he’s given, and then eats the salty soup he’s brought, though it seems for a moment it will come up, too. All the while, Clive is quiet and with him. 

“Wine gives a bad hangover… Especially the sweet stuff,” Clive tells him, petting his hair.

“I didn’t think you drank,” Joshua replies, when he trusts himself to bring up only words. 

“Just once.”

“Once is enough,” he croaks, and, “I don’t remember that.”

“You were sick. It was when you were eight. You came ill after you snuck out with me.”

“I was always ill.” 

“Not always.” He’s subdued. All morning, he has been, and on any other day Joshua would tease him for brooding, but he has some hazed memory of a fight—a second one, and two more in a day than they’ve had in memory. “We spent the night in the snow because Uncle brought you some book about a bear in the north and a girl who fell in love with him. You decided you ought to be the bear, and we ought to make a snow castle in the courtyard as they had in the story. I was old enough to better, but not old enough to know when to deny you.”

“I was sick all the time, Clive,” he repeats. 

“...But that was the first time it was my fault. It was serious. You were with fever three days. They say Murdoch found me in the stables with Ambrosia. Of course, he told father straight away, and the two of them had a good laugh about it.”

Joshua tests his tongue. “I don’t think this is funny.”

“No. But you’ll never do it again.”

“Why does anyone?”

Clive at last smiles at him. “Less is more, I think.”

Joshua sniffs. Clive drew the curtains for him already, but the room is still too bright. He shivers against what must be a draft. “Clive. Can you hold me.” 

He already is, but Clive pulls a blanket around him and wraps his arms after. “You aren’t dying. I promise.” 

“I felt better the last time I did.”

Clive’s arms around him go tighter, but he laughs a little. “Let’s not make a habit out of it.”

Little worry about that. “I never want to see wine again. What did I say last night?”

It takes Clive a long time to answer, and then he says only, “You were excited about being an old man of fifty.”

“...Oh.”

“And you told me you want to tour the duchy.” 

“...We can afford it. We’re actually doing quite well.”

“My brother, doing budgets.” He can’t see Clive’s face.

“And I haven’t been sick. I mean. Not on purpose.” 

“That makes no sense.”

“You know what I meant.” 

“Joshua…” Clive unhinges his arm from around Joshua’s torso to tug a hand through his hair. “You don’t need to make explanations to me. If you want to tour your duchy, do so. We can make time for that.” 

Joshua pulls back to look at him. “But you cannot. You’re needed elsewhere, and you are not my only Shield.” 

Clive tenses against him. “That’s your wish, then.” He pulls back, too, to leave enough space between them to look at him fully. “I was always frustrated by the duty your position forced upon you. I won’t be another cage for you.”

“You are no cage.” He wonders if it’s the other way round, and that’s how Clive sees him. No—walls, perhaps. He is a castle no better than Rosalith and no less easy to defend. But he is safe, and one day he will convince Clive of this. They are the both of them safe, from all but the stirring in his gut, perhaps. “Can I have more soup?”

Clive shakes his head. “You may try to outgrow me but I see you’re still content to have me feeding you.”

He watches Clive bring the spoon to his own mouth and blow it cool before he holds it for Joshua’s open mouth. It reminds him of the time when he was still too weak to feed himself and Clive would give him his medicine by mouth. And that thought stirs him. Something else waits there just beyond the edges. His brother tasted like medicine then and now he tastes… "Is that all we spoke of?"

Clive’s eyes jump low, to his mouth, and back to his eyes. His face reddens and he draws back yet further. “Yes,” he lies, so very poorly. 

Joshua feels like a hawk on prey. Were he less sick, he would press it, but he settles instead against Clive again and sighs. “You could accompany me to Isolde, at least, if you like.” 

Clive presses his face to Joshua’s hair and murmurs, “I would like that.”

He never gets the chance. A week later, Dhalmek attacks a southern outpost. Clive is gone within that same day. Joshua doesn't see him again for a long, long while.

Chapter Text

The fortress of Phoenix Gate takes a night and a day to burn. They find the children in the ashes.

The fire takes all. It leaves no stone untouched, no blade of grass in its wake, no scrap of cloth unruined. As it goes, it spreads. When it becomes clear in the early hours that no building will be left standing, Rodney's men drag him to the outskirts to await dawn before they begin their search for the bodies of the Archduke and his sons. 

Rodney will return them to Rosalith and hold the city for as long as he can. At least until the bodies are buried. 

Elwin’s brother must be told, but they have no stolas left to send and no riders to take word. If Rodney had sense, he’d flee. Rosaria will be a ripe for taking now by a thousand hungry vultures from across Storm, but it matters not. The Phoenix and its line are dead and Rosaria with it. 

All that's left to him is this last duty. To find Elwin and his sons, if there is anything left to find.

As they pick through the ruins, the Fortress is unrecognizable. Elwin and he lived here for what felt like years when they were fighting the North, but the fire was thorough in its duty. Unnaturally so. The fire that touched his arm burnt through cloth and melted chainmail and the flesh beneath it. In places, the stone of the very walls around him has melted, too. 

Clive’s mount joins him in the search, with her one good eye, only because she would not stay where he left her. Stupid, loyal thing, he thinks, but in that, the two of them make a pair. 

When he stops to pause against a wall, the stone still hot to the touch. The bird picks at his clothes. Around them, the air is still hazed with smoke like an acrid fog. In the distance, through the haze, he can hear the sounds of the other men looking. All of them are hushed, all of them quiet. What few bodies of the Imperials they’ve found are naught but piles of ash identifiable by the melt of armor around them.

The last he remembers is Clive’s screaming his brother’s name, at a distance, the sound of it still ringing in his ears with its shrillness. The last order he received from the boy was to take his chocobo to safety, as if Rodney would see to a beast before he would see to the two princes he saw born and trained and grown. But the men say they saw a monster in the fire. Rodney knows it for what it was: the Phoenix’s last gasp before the end.

“Lord Murdoch.”

He looks up and finds one of the newer recruits watching him. Tyler, maybe. He’ll have to memorize these few names now, so long as they decide to remain with him until the end.

The man swallows, and says, “We found them, sir.” 

The chocobo chitters as he drags himself up, clutching his arm. Ambrosia. Fool thing. How they laughed behind their hands when Clive named her, after some character from some or other book or play, but gods was he good. He was good with a blade, and good with his brother, and good with the men. Good through and through. Nothing in him is ready to see the body of that boy, or his brother, a child so sweet he hardly seemed real.

Tyler puts a hand under his good arm, but Rodney waves him off. As if the man didn't have a blade through his own gut the night before. Murdoch allows himself to be led through the shell of what was once a door, down through to what he hardly recognizes as the once-courtyard of the fortress, and then he sees them.

He’d prepared himself for two bodies, charred beyond recognizability. It’s somehow worse that they’re still whole. Mostly.

Where Clive is not black with soot, he’s black with blood—his brother’s, or his. Joshua’s body is set in his lap and tucked against his shoulder, almost as if they were children again, caught out sleeping in the garden after an afternoon hard at play. They are children, still. The little one’s clothes are gone; tatters of his white underclothes cling around his arms, stained to grey and red. Part of one leather boot hangs off his foot. He is covered, from gold head to bare toe, in blood and grime. The worst is his chest. Rodney knows a killing wound. He knows what a blow made with force looks like, and why bother so with someone so small? The blood that has dried black on his pale skin is more than a body of his size has to give. Where it’s not on him, it’s on Clive. 

Clive's mouth is red with it.

“Fuck,” he says and stumbles his way to them. 

Wade is there already, hovering a few feet away. “How are they not…” 

Burned? The fire of the Phoenix, protecting them still, even in death, he assumes. The soldier in him bends when he reaches Clive and uses his one good hand to push aside Clive’s collar and press his thumb to the spot below his jaw in search of a pulse, knowing what he’ll find. But Rodney’s body is too tired and his fingers too numb, for he feels his own heartbeat there instead, and the body is still warm. 

He kneels to press in further, and so he is right there and close when Clive’s eyes come open, wide and red.

Behind him, one of the men gasps a prayer. “Is he? Bloody hell…”

But he is. Clive’s mouth works uselessly; he swallows and closes his eyes again. Rodney stares, waiting for his madness to pass, for the corpse before him to be a corpse once again. The body in Clive's arms shifts as Clive hugs it closer. A passing breeze moves the ash in his hair. 

Hope, or something like it, lodges itself in Rodney's throat. If anyone were to survive this, it would be this boy. Reason kicks in at last. He looks back at the handful of assembled soldiers, who look as dumbstruck as he feels. “Gather everyone, and any mounts you can. We ride, now.” 

He was never given to religious fervor, or to belief in miracles. Difficult to, when their local god was a boy drooling on his brother’s shoulder or pouting outside the stables in waiting. This—this is as close as they’ll get to luck, and this is his duty. Keeping this boy alive is the last scrap of honor left to him. “Run a perimeter. If there are still Imperials about—“

“Joshua,” Clive says then.

Rodney ignores him. He cannot face it yet. Cannot look, even, at the body. In one of the piles of ash lying around them there will be gold clasps and a ring and Elwin’s sword, too, but they've not lost everything. They've not lost Clive. "Can you stand? We must move," Rodney says, gently as his smoke-roughed voice can manage.

But Clive was ever fixated on this one thing, and once his eyes are open, they will look nowhere else. “Joshua?” he repeats, and then bends his cheek to the ruin of his brother’s chest. 

“I’m sorry,” Rodney says.

Clive isn’t listening. He cups his brother’s cheek, and wipes at the blood dried about his eyes. And then he bends and presses his mouth to his brother’s, as if to breathe life into him—as if he were the Phoenix, after all. This is how the blood got on him, Rodney realizes. This is why there’s blood on his mouth.

He looks away and bows his head. “My lord. Clive.”

The men will not look. There is a low sound, a weak one, from Clive, as if in pain, and then a cough that is not his. 

It’s a deep, bloody thing. Nothing that should be coming out of a human, and not one of Joshua’s size. For a moment he thinks it some macabre death rattle from the breath Clive forced into his brother’s body, but when Rodney looks, Clive is wiping at his brother's face. Joshua’s eyes flutter, rolling white, seeing nothing. 

The boy is alive. They are, both of them, alive.

“The Phoenix,” one of them murmurs in a prayer that sounds more like horror.

Rodney sees no Phoenix. All he can see are two filthy children, broken and mourning. It’s a miracle either of them still have enough life left in their bodies to draw breath, and it’ll take another to keep them so. Rodney will have to see it done.

“We must move. Get—" he fumbles his words when his injured arm reminds him it exists with a piercing pain straight through to the bone, "—get water. Spare clothes. The Imperials may still be about." 

The men scramble at his command, tearing their eyes from the bloody child and his brother—their archduke, now.

Clive’s voice comes again, rasping and quiet. “They’re gone,” he murmurs, dizzily.

“We don’t know that.”

“I killed them,” he says in the same way, still staring down at his brother. “I burned them.”

Rodney’s voice leaves him. He wets his lips. “What?"

The boy turns to him at last. His eyes are not merely bloodshot but red where they ought be white, as if he’s been struck with a great blow, or struck one himself. “I burned them.”

Rodney casts his eyes back to the ash. To the piles of it that can only be bodies. To the rock walls that have crumbled. “...With the Phoenix?” he whispers.

Clive holds his brother, barely breathing, closer to his chest and says, as close to scared as he's ever sounded, 

“Ifrit.”

This, the first time he hears that name. Not the last. Clive will not explain, or cannot, and Rodney doesn't ask. He's shaken; in his place Rodney would be babbling far worse. The last five men left to them cobble together mounts and a cloak to wrap their Archduke in. Clive carries him. It seems all he's capable of doing and when, five miles into their ride toward Eastpool, he tilts over in his saddle in a dead faint, Rodney is ready for it. He catches Clive with one arm and Wade steadies their mount on his other side. Then Rodney takes Joshua and Wade takes Clive, and the men get to talking.

It wasn't the Phoenix they saw, they say. It was a beast. A devil, with horns. A dragon without wings. A demon. That’s what they settle on and Rodney can't order them to stop because they say it with awe. 

There cannot be two Eikons of fire. But then, a boy with a cleaving wound still open on his chest cannot be alive, and yet there he is, breathing against Rodney’s neck as they ride. Two impossible things.

It shouldn’t surprise him there’s a darkness in the boy. No star so bright could burn without casting its share of shadows. Rodney saw it during Clive’s training, the way he’d drill until his fingers bled and keep going even then, as if the wet on the hilt of his blade was no more than sweat. The boy never made a sound about it. He was never anything but lordly, even to his mother, even when she loathed him, even when she was cruel. Rodney thought it grace, then, but the boy would have to be a saint for it to not leave a mark. 

So, he counts it his fault when they make a mistake in Eastpool. 

Rodney is too tired to catch it time, and too hurt. Night is well on by the time they make it to town. He hasn’t the words to explain to his wife when they arrive, but Hanna greets them with a look on her face that says she’s figured out the worst of it. The flame and smoke rising from Phoenix Gate over the horizon was omen enough. 

They eat. They rest, when they cannot keep their eyes open a moment longer. He tells his wife in short words what happened. She sees to settling the boys: Joshua in one room and Clive down the hall from him. The Undying join them as Hanna is tending Rodney’s wound. Elwin spoke of them a time or two and his father used them well. Rodney trusts them, as far as he can trust anyone. They bring dark news and with them a woman from the city who speaks of the archduchess’s flight from the city and other nonsense until the words begin to make terrible sense. They have been betrayed. 

A dark rage comes to Rodney then, that not even Hanna can soothe, and a darker grief on its heels. 

Medicine and relief from his pain put him to rest until he’s shook awake in the early hours to his wife’s pale face and screaming.

“Don’t touch him!” Clive shrieks. He sounds more banshee than boy. He’s lost most of his voice, but what he manages with is high and hurt and terrible.

The cloaked woman beside Joshua’s bed cowers from him. In her hands are a pile of white bandages and a vial of liquid. “He needs tending, my lord,” she pleads. 

“I’ll do it. Get out.” He points to the door. His hand is shaking and his eyes are wide like a spooked animal—and still red. They roll in their sockets to everyone else in the room, unseeing: one Shield Rodney doesn’t recognize, two more cloaked Undying who ought to know better, and Hanna who is the only one who looks sad rather than scared. 

“But sir—” The woman, who must be one of the Undying too, tries to hand the vial over. Clive looks at it like it’s a snake ready to bite. He snarls and his form starts to brighten. Rodney has seen this before, after he got his Blessing, when he closed a gap in their sparring with a speed too fast to see or summoned fire to his blade. It’s the same, except this fire is not the friendly bright of the Phoenix. This is red and dark. The edges of his figure haze and then Rodney realizes it’s because there’s heat rolling off him and distorting the air. 

The woman jerks away from him. Rodney shakes out of his shock and says, “Clive. You’re putting your brother in danger.” 

All that violence turns on him, but there must be some muscle memory there for obedience. He looks at his brother next, and a collective gasp goes through the room: the boy’s eyes are open in a slit.

Whatever power was in Clive extinguishes itself in a breath. He falls to his brother’s side like he’s falling on his sword, knees to the floor. No one thought to clean the blood off him, or they haven’t had time or been able to get close enough. He looks a mess. Both of them do. “Joshua? Joshua?” he repeats madly.

Rodney takes the vial from the woman and holds it out to him. Clive twitches like he might lash out, but he takes it, and then they watch as he brings it to his own lips instead of his brother’s and draws deep. 

The suspicion of poison is warranted. What follows is not. 

They watch, in poleaxed silence as the boy turns and then bends to his brother. It’s like a lover’s kiss, in the way he makes it delicate, the way he holds Joshua’s jaw gently, and what a mad thought that is. The whole of it is mad. They live in madness now, he thinks.

“Oh,” Hanna says from behind him. 

Joshua swallows, with Clive’s fingers on his throat gently. Rodney can't watch any longer. It will help him, or it won’t. Clive's desperation is too hard to see all at once. To protect his brother, to care for him, or to die with him. 

They banish everyone from the room, then. Hanna stays with a roll of bandages and shows Clive how to coat the wound in liniment and wrap it in gauze. They won't stitch it yet. It isn't bleeding now and there isn't enough skin on the boy to manage it. 

Clive tends his brother carefully, with his shaking hands. Joshua's eyes don't open again. 

When he's finished, he cleans himself. Hanna goes, but Rodney stays, not sure if there will be some twin wound on the Clive’s back or a slow bleeding puncture he didn't think to tell anyone about. But no. His skin is spotless beneath the crusting of grime. The washbasin dirties to rust so fast they have to send for another, and then he dirties that one, too. 

Rodney stands by the door, guard and observer both. He tries not to wonder how much of the blood is Elwin’s. 

When at last Clive is done, he settles into the bed beside Joshua with an arm over his brother's thin torso, as if to keep his spirit from floating free of his ruined body in the night. Rodney cannot find it in himself to do ought but pray it works.

He doesn’t leave his brother again. Not that day, and not that night, and not the following morning when they all make for Rosalith with speed.

Whatever Sanbreque meant to do, they ought to have tried harder at it. They took Elwin but left the Phoenix and whatever Clive is now. Dominant, it seems. Demon, maybe. Rodney wonders if it was always in him, or if it was some deep grief that brought it about. If seeing his family ruined broke something so deep in him. Something has changed. His gaze is black, with more than the blood in his eyes and more than the shadows around them. Everywhere he looks, he sees darkness. 

His brother is the only sight that seems to bring him any solace. He holds Joshua on the whole of the long ride to the city and on through the gates, though it must tire his arms. People line the streets, and for the first time since the night, the archduke’s death seems real. Rosalith’s people are quiet and disbelieving, tear-streaked. Clive hides his burden from them all, so only the top of Joshua’s head is visible. All the better. To see their youngest prince made almost a corpse will not ease any minds. 

When at last they’re within the castle and Joshua has been settled into clean sheets, Clive stays there, hovering, saying nothing.

The men who accompanied him up wait, awkwardly, perhaps expecting an order from the last authority left to them. The dull pain in Rodney's arm gets worse the longer he stands. Then Clive’s shoulders shake and he realizes their lordship is crying. Rodney waves the men out with a tired hand. 

“You've saved him,” Rodney says when the three of them are alone. “Be proud of that.”

“Barely.” Clive looks only at Joshua. “Not Father.” The tears drip thick as rain off his nose, wetting Joshua's sheets as he stands above his brother’s bed. 

“You two are alive.” He's surprised at his own voice, strong despite the smoke still caught up in his throat. “That's all that mattered to him—you boys.”

A knock on the door comes. Rodney opens it, and the Undying woman who met them at Eastpool comes in. She has another vial in her hand, and says nothing when confronted with her former opponent reduced to a crying boy.

Clive doesn’t make a scene of it this time. He eyes the medicine before he takes it in hand and does what he did the first time. He tosses it back and lowers his head and presses the hinge of his brother’s jaw open at the corner and then Joshua’s face is hidden behind his brother’s head of black hair. The moment lingers, longer, perhaps, than it should. Rodney looks away. The woman is already gone.

Clive’s logic, he supposes, is that if it is a poison, it’ll kill them both. He cannot be faulted for it.

This will be the way it is now. Rodney doesn’t know it then, but something has changed. Something in the boy has gone to pieces. He's all edges now, all jagged. Something between him and his brother has thickened past blood.

The thing of it, the damn thing of it, is that Clive is a good soldier. He takes to his duty like he was born to it. With the help of the Undying, they find the few men paid off by Sanbreque and bold enough to not flee Rosaria when they had the chance. Five men go to the block. Five heads are parted from five bodies and Clive watches each with the same dispassion. 

He looks grown in his black clothes, with the sword strapped to his back perpetually now, as if ready to met out justice himself or fight the very stone of the walls around them should the need call for it. Nothing in him seems to take joy in the act. But then, he takes joy in nothing now unless it’s the time he spends with his brother. 

Duty has gathered itself around him like a shroud. A father dead and a brother broken. The men revered him for his strength and his grace before. Now, they revere him for his loss and for the blood he’s spilled.

When Rodney fought in the North, it was a war of attrition. Both sides knew they fought not for territory but for survival. Sometimes green recruits, when pushed to the edge too fast, fell right off it. It's different, watching it happen to the boy he raised at the end of his sword. 

They're saved at least the indignity of dealing with the Archduchess’s staff. Her handmaids are found on the road to Sanbreque, divested of their heads. Clive orders the road closed and patrolled, no one objects. Rodney can find no fault in his commands. except that there’s a spot of his brother's blood at the corner of his mouth when he gives them.

Days pass like this in haze, as they wait for the sword hanging above all their heads to fall at last. What’s left of Rodney’s sword arm aches. Hanna tends it, and frets. If Clive sleeps, he never sees it. Joshua wakes only to cough up blood his small body doesn't have enough of to waste.

News, when it comes, is bad.

Clive bears it as he bears all things now. “Father knew this was coming,” he says over Joshua’s bed. “He was ready for war with the Ironblood.”

“Your father knew it was inevitable, but…” But their Commander can no longer wield a sword. Their forces have been stripped bare. The city is on edge. The man who was supposed to lead them is dead; his heir is a dying child. 

Rodney has done the fast math already. Days for the Ironblood to have word of Rosaria’s misfortune, days more to decide their move and muster, a week more for the sail. Yes. Of course, the Ironblood would do this. If Sanbreque was bold enough to try, the Iron Kingdom will make the same calculation. Their only luck is that the Iron Kingdom would never ally itself with the Imperials. Not for the first time, he wonders where they went wrong, what part of Rosaria’s belly they showed unwittingly. Or if it was all that woman. Gods, they still haven’t spoken to Clive about it. He wouldn’t know how to bring it up. He knows—of course, Clive knows, but to talk about it? No. 

When he looks up, Clive is doing the same math he was, and has come to the same conclusion. “They cannot take Isolde. We can’t allow it.” 

A fool’s notion, that what they would and wouldn’t allow has any bearing now. It’s what they can do and what they cannot. It’s what Clive can and cannot. Everything rests on those shoulders now. Rosalith, and Rosaria, and his brother’s life. 

Rodney makes the decision easily. “You’ll take your brother. Somewhere south. Hide, the two of you. You can do that.”

Clive looks to his brother’s sleeping form. “He won’t survive a trip like that.” 

One of the two Undying Clive has deigned to allow into the room only by the grace of the fact they were the ones who brought news of the Ironblood making their move, steps forward. “We have an outpost in Tabor,” the man says, with a voice younger than his face. Gods, they’re all young here. “We could take him—take you both.”

If Clive notes the near-slip it doesn’t show on his face. “No,” he says after a shivered intake of breath. “This is his city. He stays.”

“My Lord,” the Undying starts, “we will be overrun. The city hasn’t the defenses.” 

Clive looks up at him with his blue eyes gone dark and doleful. The skin around them is near blue still—worse, even, than it was in the height of his training, when he worked himself to exhaustion as a way of existence. The low light of the room is not kind to him. His expression, on any other youngblood fifteen-year-old recruit, would have had Rodney laughing, but this boy is not a boy any longer. 

“What if we send an Eikon to stop them?” Clive says. The third person wording is so distant. For a moment, Rodney thinks he means to send Jill. But no. “I must be useful for something.”

A pain far worse than the dull ache of his arm takes Rodney at his chest. "No. We'll find another way."

"Lord Murdoch, with all respect—I was not asking. And you'll stay, won't you. You'll not leave his side." Clive’s gaze levels with him.

Rodney opens his mouth to disagree but none comes; the boy has an Eikon and with enough prayer it may be enough to protect him. And yet, he sees it as a vision plain: the Eikon burning him out, the shell of him left behind no better than some overused Bearer's corpse. "I'll stay with him," Rodney promises, "until you return."

His gaze, as ever, drifts to the body ensconced in sheets on the bed. A breeze drifts in through the half open window and stirs Joshua’s golden hair. “I will. I will return.”

“If you break that promise, I will go to the halls of your forefathers to hunt you down myself.” 

They outfit him in new armor. The men, at least, do not need to be told to follow Clive. The legend of what he’s become, of what he did at Phoenix Gate, precedes him. He was well liked before, and well loved. His devotion to his brother, his diligent work, his quiet demeanor, even in the face of a mother who hated him so obviously—they like an underdog, and his story is a good one. Murdoch prays with the breath left to him that it won’t end a tragic tale. Hanna joins him in this. 

She finds him quieted away in their makeshift room, small and meant for servants, but close enough to Joshua and now Clive’s rooms that either of them can be by the brothers’ side in a moment if need be. 

When she sees him polishing Invictus to a mirror shine, she pauses at the door. “Do you mean to go with him?” She must know it would mean his death, but she’s a stoic. Her bright eyes are her only tell. 

“No. He wants me here with his brother.” 

She comes to him and sets a hand on his shoulder.

“You should leave,” he says, knowing she’ll hear it for the order it is and not the suggestion. Not his order. Never his. “Take the girl to Eastpool with you.”

“I’d as soon stay.”

But he looks at her, and she sees his meaning. “Ah.”

Clive said it was to keep Jill Warrick safe. This is a lie. It’s the reason Clive gave him, to be sure, and maybe the one he believes himself. It is true only in that it will, in all likelihood, keep Jill safe. It will also spread the attention of anyone seeking a child Eikon for easy picking. It will make Joshua not the only attractive target. Clive is growing strategic.

“I’m going to give him Invictus,” he says, to change the subject. 

Her hand slides down his arm, and her arms come about his shoulders. “That’s well done.” 

She does not say, and he’s grateful she doesn’t, what he’s lost. Not this sword, not his arm, not even Elwin, but his duty. It isn’t a loss worth dwelling on. He turns his face to softness of her sleeve and breathes.

Clive is gone a week before there is word, and another before he returns. His last words are, I don’t want to leave him. As Rodney watches their parting, Clive presses a kiss to his brother’s forehead, and then pulls a knife from the sheath around his thigh. Rodney watches at first in fear, and then in fascination as he loops a long lock of his brother’s hair around the knife and cuts it free. It’s long enough to tie in a knot, and Clive does, before he slips it inside his shirt, against his breast. 

He says not another word, and doesn’t look back as he leaves. The act is both sentimental, childish, and solemn. 

At fifteen, he’s whip thin. In his mourning black, he looks skinnier still. Invictus is massive on his shoulders as he rides away, but when Rodney granted him the blade that mourning, he held it with ease. A whole Eikon lives inside that boy, he reminds himself, even if he’s never seen it. 

In a way, he’s glad. Clive will become legend enough. To Rodney, at least, Clive’ll always be himself. 

In big brother’s absence, he’s left to care for Joshua, as the only one Clive trusted in touching distance of his brother. His dedication is no less, but when it comes time to give his medicine, Rodney goes the more traditional route. Hanna would be better suited to caring for the boy, but they sent her off the day before with Jill in hand. 

It’s left to Rodney to figure out how to keep their archduke-in-waiting alive until hs brother’s return. It’s clear right off how much Clive was doing for him. The boy’s body works only in the barest terms—it breathes, the heart within his wounded breast beats. All else is left to Rodney to tend. He thinks of it as tending a sickly chocobo chick or something equivalent. In war, he’s seen worse than an ill boy or a wound that needs cleaned and bandaged.

Yet Clive did all this without note. Clive took this duty as if were nothing. 

How easy it would have been to flee with his brother, to build a new life. It would have been the easier road, and likely the happier one. He’s happiest with his brother. But Clive has pride enough to win the tourney, to ask for no more or less than the right to be First Shield to his brother. Duty, he thought it once. Loyalty to Rosaria, to his father. 

Now he sees it for what it was: no more and no less than love. 

On a night somewhat more than a week since Clive left, Rodney waits beside Joshua’s bedside with a book in his good hand, waiting for a sign of life from either of the brothers. Elwin was always a reader—lordling’s privilege, Rodney called it. This one was one if his favorites, and he sees now why, since it’s full from top to bottom with historical minutiae. He wishes Elwin were alive again if only so Rodney could prod him about his taste in reading. 

When he goes to rub the dust from his eyes, he finds Elwin’s looking back at him from Joshua’s face. 

He starts, and then his mouth works uselessly for anything to say. Joshua beats him to it. 

“Clive?” he asks, weakly. 

Rodney fumbles for an answer. “He’s well,” he assures, trying to think what answer will soothe first. “He’ll return soon.”

“...Father?”

He shakes his head. 

“Mother?”

Rodney repeats the gesture, and feels that no spar in the courtyard has asked more of him than that movement. Joshua closes his eyes, and for a moment, Rodney thinks he might have fallen back to sleep. But then Joshua whispers, his voice thin and raspy as a breeze sneaking between windowpanes, “He’s supposed to be here. My Shield.”

“He will be.” Rodney’s voice is rougher than he intends.

Joshua’s eyes open again, and deplore him, as if he’s been denied some indulgence.

“He’s patrolling the border,” Rodney adds. It’s true, in a sense. 

“Help him?” Joshua rasps. His hand finds the bed and then presses on the sheets as he tries to rise. “I must help him—” He cuts off in a horrid cough. Blood splatters into his hand, into the sheets. 

Rodney eases him back with the smallest force he can exert. “No, your brother—he’s fine. Rest. That’s what you can do for him now. You heal.”

“Clive,” he says again, voice fading as his eyes start to roll and close. He’s weak. So weak it’s a wonder he can move at all. 

After a moment’s hesitation, Rodney takes his hand. Sentimental, but no one’s here to see. “Soon,” he promises. “He’ll come back soon.”

If Joshua hears, he shows no sign. He slips back into sleep.

He’s not made a liar. Clive does come back to them, but the thing that returns is not the thing that left. It was a great victory, they say, and the men who went with him return, to a man, with awe in their eyes. A new reverence.

Rodney cannot see it. The Clive that rides through the gates is gaunter than the one that left. Sweat and soot have worked their way into the hollows of his cheeks and the nape of his neck. “They’ll be back before the season is out,” he says, all in a rush as soon as he dismounts, and his voice has changed. It’s deepened, rough from yelling or from the smoke he’s inhaled. 

Yet, what was there to set fire to? Rodney wonders this, only so long as it takes his mind to supply him with answer. Bodies. No longer is Clive an untried soldier. 

In his next breath, he says only, “Joshua?”

At this, at least, Rodney can smile. “He’s well. He asked after you.”

Relief lightens his face back to youth. He sighs out with it, and then he’s pushing past Rodney and his men and into the open gates of the castle. 

By the time Rodney makes it to the prince’s room, Clive is already there and kneeled beside the bed still in his armor. “Joshua? Will you wake for me?”

Joshua does. He blinks and though he’s barely lucid, he manages a small smile. Clive stays curiously distant, as if afraid to sully the bed with the dirt of his armor. Rodney leaves them. When he comes back to check on them past nightfall, the scene is the same, but Clive’s face is pressed down into the bedding. His hair splayed out on top in ragged strands of black in bad need of washing. Set on top of his head is his brother’s small, pale hand. 

Three months pass before they can bury the Archduke, and then another at Clive’s insistence, to wait for the snows to pass. 

Joshua must attend, and Clive won’t have him in the cold for any length of time. Their Phoenix is lucid now, most of the time. He sits now on the saddle in front of his brother, astride Ambrosia. His small body is wrapped in at least three jackets, a cloak, and an additional blanket. Only the top of his little gold head is visible, and a peek of his red nose. 

Rodney had witnessed some of the preparation, and commented only, “You’re not dressing him in that.” 

In answer, Clive had done what a misbehaving dog is apt to do and turned his head as if he could not hear if he could not see. And Joshua had supplied, from within his shroud, “It’s fine.” 

He’s gotten good at conceding to Clive’s will, as they all have. As he watches the pair riding ahead of him, Joshua’s head rises out of his mass of clothes to whisper something to his brother, and Clive, in evident answer, wraps him tighter in his arms. 

Rodney snorts to himself. They are a pair. 

At his sound, Hanna rides close enough to tap his arm. Jill is with her, hair braided up with a skill he hadn’t known his wife possessed. Both of them are dressed in black. 

“What is it?” she asks. 

He shakes his head. 

A small fever in midwinter took their little lord under for three days and three nights, and for each of them, he watched Clive descend into a deep sort of madness. He stayed at his brother’s side as if anchored there—as if Joshua was all that anchored him to the land at all. After the Night of Flames, it was excusable and understood. Half a year on, he sleeps still in his brother’s room, in his brother’s bed. The only moments Clive does not spend in his brother’s company are those unhappy days when duty calls him away. 

Rodney cannot begrudge him that. He cannot, surely.

“It’s something,” Hanna murmurs, seeing through him. Jill is asleep, he realizes, her head bobbing against Hanna’s chest. 

He resolves to himself to say nothing of his thoughts, and in the next moment finds them falling from his mouth. “They still share a bed, you know.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t you think people will gossip?”

“What’s to gossip about?” she asks in her sure way of hers. 

“I’m not the one gossiping.” 

She arches a brow at him. “Oh, are you not?”

Rodney sweeps his hand out in an aborted motion, in Clive’s general direction. “He’s fifteen. He ought to be—enjoying himself.”

“I think he is.”

“I mean with people his age.” Women, he means. And if Clive did not want a woman, he might find any dozen men in the barracks absolutely besotted with him. 

She frowns at this, as if at least seeing his point. “Has he ever?

And this is true. He has never. For all that he’s friendly, for all that he enjoys the company of the other men and makes easy talk with everyone in the castle, he’s reserved. Even to Joshua, he was once aloof, if gentle.

They watch as Clive smiles at some unheard comment his brother must have made, because no one else is close enough to have his ear. 

“I don’t think it’s so simple for him,” she says. 

Rumor is a terrible thing, though. It broke their mother. Broke what wasn’t already twisted up in her about blood. Those old rumors about Clive loathing his brother in secret had died off in most part by the time he became Shield, but what if something worse replaces them. 

“Do you worry for him?” 

He barks a laugh of his own. “Only every day.” 

She sees through him. Clive is the closest thing he will have to a son, as Jill now is the closest thing she will have to a daughter. 

“For what they will say of him, or for what he is?” 

Anyone will think they’re speaking of his Eikon. Yet this is a dangerous conversation to have. His jaw works in silence. 

“You needn’t worry so,” she says lightly. “If it’s the former, he’s a god to his men now. They imagine he could walk the way from Isolde to Drake’s Breath, on water every step.”

“And if it’s the latter?”

She shakes her head. No answer for him, then. He must come to this on his own, it seems. 

The gravesite is not the one Elwin wished to be buried at. Joshua swore he could make the ride, but that would have meant days in the wilderness and cold. Clive forbade it, and Rodney thought he was right to. Elwin would have wanted no great to-do about it anyway. 

The spot they come to is quiet, beneath trees. It’s warm there despite the season, with the way the sun hits the little hill. The ground has already been prepared. In lieu of remains to bury, they have his trappings. His dagger, salvaged unwittingly on their flight from Phoenix Gate by Wade who thought it only an easy weapon to grab. Rodney absolved him from guilt on the reveal; Elwin was a practical man. He would have been happy to see it put to such good use. A ring set in red, wet with Byron’s tears when he sets it on the red cloth they’ve set out for the doing. Jill adds a snow daisy that she kept somehow pristine, even through the long ride. Clive sets his father’s helmet next. 

When Joshua steps forward with Clive’s help, he opens the middle of his palm and reveals a small flame: a Phoenix feather.

Rodney swallows. It will have cost him to make it. And if confirms what he’d been too afraid to ask, what all of them had wondered. The Phoenix lives still inside that small body. In a few brief years, he will wear the crown that waits for him in Rosalith’s vaults. 

It seems too great a task for one still so small.

Before they fold the cloth closed, Rodney adds his own contribution: a gold clasp, melted at one edge. Clive’s breath draws at the sight. Rodney’s voice is still stopped up in his throat, so he can offer no comfort. If Clive carries guilt for the cremation of his father’s body, he need not. Elwin would have applauded the expediency. He would have laughed at their great sorrow over all this. He never wanted to be Archduke, truly. His happiest moments were with his sons. No sorrow for him in this, Rodney thinks—only that he had so little time with his sons, and it’s some comfort. He clasps Clive’s shoulder instead. 

It takes only this for Clive to break. At least his tears are quiet. “I should have protected him,” he says, managing more words than Rodney can. 

“That was my duty,” Joshua says. “You gave it to me.”

“But—” Clive chokes. It wasn’t a real duty given. Pablum, to comfort the child neither of them can be any longer. He bows his head. 

Joshua looks down at him as if his tears are a weather phenomenon out of season. 

“Clive,” Byron says, “you did your duty, son.” 

He wipes his face hurriedly. “You needn’t comfort me. Any of you.”

Joshua, still hanging off his hand, pulls at him until Clive goes to a half-kneel before him. It’s a struggle for Joshua to stand at all, and Rodney can see the shake in his body as he tries to stay up. He wants to reach out to steady him, but resists. Clive ducks his head before his brother, as if at prayer. Joshua takes Clive’s face in his small hands. They’ve gone to bone in his sickness. “I’ll take care of you now, too,” Joshua promises. 

Clive presses his brother’s hands to his cheeks. “I know you will.”

The castle gardens that next spring are magnificent. They show no care for what Rosaria has lost, no sign of the now constant incursions that Rosaria weathers, or the sacrifices they’ve all had to make. With luck, they never will. Clive allows none of it past their borders. He rides himself ragged to be three places at once. He returns, each time, more wolfish, harder-faced. His hair now is a shag of black around his shoulders and if he’s out of armor, it’s only in the privacy of his brother’s room. 

“I can,” Joshua is saying in his reedy way. “I’m sure I can. Hold my arms, please, Clive.”

He’s seated on a bench between the bare trees. Rodney pauses out of sight trying to meld into the landscaping and only half-hiding behind a column. These gardens are the safest place in the whole of the city, a courtyard for the family’s use with a single access point. This is the only reason Joshua is here without his full guard—and yet, it’s unlike him still. This moment is a private one.

Clive is already stood before him. He reaches out and holds Joshua’s arms, as ordered. Joshua’s legs quiver as he stands from the low stone bench he was seated upon, but he does stand, and under his own power it seems. He’s grown, despite his illness. When he heals, he’ll shoot up like a sapling. Clive moves back a step before him, and another, and Joshua manages to walk half the small courtyard this way before his legs give out at last. 

In a sweeping motion, Clive catches him with an arm beneath his bottom, and hauls Joshua up into in his arms with an exclamation. “Incredible!”

“I only walked,” Joshua says. “It’s not so impressive. Clive, really,” he whines, as Clive laughs. 

He laughs. Rodney tries to recall the last time he heard the sound of it and comes up blank. 

Clive’s hold is high, with Joshua near perched on his shoulder, almost in the way of those old Northern dances Elwin and Hanna and he would try when they were young and drunk. 

He shakes the thought from his head. The guards outside the door were watching when Rodney walked up. They must be bored with it. Funny now, to think how many of them thought the brother’s estranged. Gone now the rumors of Clive’s feigned affection. Gone now the quiet talk of his true attentions toward the throne. It’s clear now, to anyone with eyes: Clive does not merely adore his brother. The sun rises and sets for him on Joshua’s brow. 

And Rodney cannot begrudge him this, his only joy. 

“You did walk,” Clive says with a conspiratorial smile. “You’re so special, you get to learn how twice,” he teases. 

“I already know how!” Joshua whines. 

“Yes. You do. So it’ll be easier this time, won’t it? You’ll be running about in a week. And you took to it so fast the first time.” A stare passes between them. “You will,” he says, softer, reading a worry on Joshua’s face that Rodney couldn’t. 

“But it’s taken so long. I’m still so weak. What if I…”

Clive shakes his head. “You will get better. I won’t hear a word against my brother, not even from his own lips.” Clive lowers him into a more proper hold, so their eyes are on the level. His arms are thick now from carrying about sixty pounds of princeling. He’ll let no one else do it, and Joshua has asked no one else.

His shoulders, too, have thickened. Joshua wraps his arms around them, and something is said. Clive hums a low answer. Joshua’s hand finds his cheek, first gentle and then poking a smile onto his brother’s dour face. Clive does smile, with rare mischief, and then bends his face into Joshua’s neck to blow a loud sound there or a sloppy kiss, nuzzling his nearly stubbled face back and forth as Joshua giggles helplessly. 

It’s like they’re children again. Though they were never this way before, and they are nearly children still. 

It strikes him then, he’s never seen the two of them so happy. He’s never seen Clive so happy.

It warms him. Makes him ache, too, for their father never saw them so. Under their mother's scrutiny Clive acted like a dog and Joshua was treated as a doll. Elwin will never see his sons happy now, like this. Never see them at such ease in each other's presence. No mother now to part them, no ill rumors of parentage clawing at Clive's heels. He has a lightness about him in that moment.

He looks like a boy in love. 

Rodney has to look away, eyes settling on some dewy branch laden with blossoms fit to bloom at any time. More and more, watching them is intruding on something private. 

Whatever he had to say to Clive, it can wait, he decides. He bows out of the gardens and leaves them to their joy.

Chapter Text

Torgal sees him before Clive does. 

The dog raises his head and Joshua puts a finger to his lips to keep him from giving away the game, and he is as good a hound as Clive said. He sets his head back on his paws without a sound. It gives Joshua more time to look. How rare it is to catch Clive unawares, and how wonderful. He has his arms folded and set on the marble railing of the balcony he's posted himself on, his eyes set on the distant horizon beyond Port Isolde—off, toward Drustanus. The afternoon sun and sea breeze catch in his hair.

Three months, it's been. And two before that. Joshua’s breath stills in his throat at nothing more than the sight of him. His long lines, his wild hair, the wide span of his back. He missed that. Missed having it. Missed rolling over in the night and hugging around Clive and all his heat. 

When he can stand it no more, Joshua moves toward him on quiet feet. Clive hears him, then, but hasn't time to do more than catch Joshua in his arms when he turns. Clive’s muscle memory works faster than his head; the embrace is desperate, and then Clive asks, “Joshua? Can it be?” 

He holds Clive tighter, arms curved almost all the way around his waist. “Founder, I’ve missed you,” he murmurs into Clive’s chest, and he has. 

Clive’s hand sets at the middle of his back, holding him in. “Not as much as I’ve missed you.” With the other, he cups Joshua’s cheek. Clive pushes him back only far enough to look at him. Joshua steps back to let him, rising to full height and rocking back on his heels.

He can look Clive in the eye now. “I’m tall as you, at last.”

“I don’t believe it.” Clive turns his face this way and that and tuts. “Still skinny as a whip, though,” he says softly. A sorrow sits in his eyes, strange on a face so young—for that's what he is. Young. Only, Joshua had never realized how much so.

“Don’t tease.” 

“I’m not teasing.” His smile is too big though. “Don’t forget, you’re still my little brother, even if you’ve outstripped me.” Joshua ducks his head, to hide his smile, which is also too big. “What are you doing here?” Clive asks then. 

Joshua folds his hands behind his back to stop himself from taking Clive in his arms again. “You know Isolde is my final stop on my tour, and when I heard you were north—well.” In truth, he’d ridden them all to exhaustion to catch Clive here. Through the night, in fact, but his escort was nearly as thrilled as he at the chance of seeing their commander in the flesh. 

“I would have caught you on the road,” Clive says with a laugh. “But I’m glad. I’ve never seen a more welcome sight.” 

He ought to have hugged Clive again, he decides. Too late now. 

Torgal noses between them then. Joshua takes a knee to ruffle his ears. “Have you grown, too, boy?”

“Only in width. And me as well, I’m afraid.” 

Joshua glances back at him, a quick toe-to-top onceover, eyes tracing the new ridge of muscle on his hip, his ever-widening shoulders. His mouth goes dry. 

“Oh? What's that look? Is it that bad?” Clive laughs again. 

“No,” he says. Not bad at all, in fact. Clive is still, almost stubbornly, perfect. 

The moment hangs in the air between them, too weighty for a simple reunion. A thing they’ve done a hundred times, this leaving and returning and now he doesn’t know what to do with himself, or with this man before him. Evidently, he’s not the only one. Clive swallows, and his gaze strays to Torgal, to the floor, to anything that is not Joshua. 

“Come,” he says at last. “If you’ve only just arrived, we can escape Uncle a bit longer. Take a walk with me.”

The three of them make their way down the set of stairs that will take them down to the shore. In the late afternoon sun, the shore glitters. Isolde’s beaches are nothing like those far to the south that he’s seen paintings of in his picture books, the ones he imagines are composed only of white sand and perfect weather. The shore is rocky and fierce; it fits his mood. 

“I must say, seeing you there in your tower awaiting my return… It was a rather appealing sight. I suppose I get why you like it so much—having me wait for you.” Joshua murmurs, kicking over a little rock in the sand. 

“I don’t like it. Not like that.”

“Oh.”

“I’d prefer if I never had to leave you at all. You know that, don't you?”

“O—oh. Yes.” And now he feels a cad. “Did you miss me terribly then?” 

“Everything but your cold toes and elbows at night.”

“You cannot fool me.”

“No. Never could.” Clive’s mouth works in seeming uselessness. If he has more to say, it doesn’t come forth in time. He says instead, “So, the end of your tour. And how did you find it?”

Exhilarating. Beautiful. Lonely. It was good to be gone from the city and the walls that had begun to feel like the bars of a cage. Meeting people, being with them, seeing what his duty as archduke would mean from more than the distance of his high, pale towers in Rosalith. Every moment of it was good, and hard, and wonderful, and he missed Clive every night, every morning, and most of the hours in between. It was harder than waiting at home for Clive. Homesickness, his Shields had joked and called it in those first weeks, but it was no joke.

He simply hadn’t expected to be homesick for a person more than a place.

“It was worthy,” he says, after a long time. He bends to the sand, rubbing the coarse grains between his fingers. The closer he looks, the more colors there are. “Rosaria is so… vast. I'd forgotten.” He’s sure Clive will tease him again, but he doesn’t. 

“And will you return home now?”

Joshua picks at one of the reddish shells littering the beach and wipes it clean. It’s almost the same color as the ruddy sunset across the water. “I believe I’m already there,” he mutters to the sand.

But Clive's ears are sharp. “Isolde?” Clive asks. “I didn’t realize you were so fond of Uncle.”

Joshua sighs. “You’re remarkably dense sometimes.” He stands, and presses the shell into Clive’s palm. “Remember, you sent me one of these, a long time ago.”

Clive turns it over in the light. “Whittled a hole in it with the tip of my sword and strung it on twine. I thought I was being very artistic.” He smiles at Joshua. “The men teased me mercilessly for it. They all thought I had some sweetheart back at home. I suppose I did.”

Joshua hates his face for the blush he feels rising there. “Why did you send me it? I still have it.” The cord has worn almost through. It waits, nestled in a box, between Clive's numerous letters. He has a stolas now. Far more convenient. Far less allowance for sentimentality.

Clive shrugs. “Saw it. Thought of you. In those days I wasn’t thinking much about anything but the Ironblood, and you.”

It seems remarkable now. Clive, holding all of Rosaria together at no older than fifteen, and doing it all with a sick brother at home, needing things from him he didn’t have time to give. And yet, he did hold them together. Somehow, he never questioned that Clive would. “How did you do it? I wonder sometimes. How did you keep us whole?”

A darkness passes over his face. He wraps his fist about the shell. Joshua doesn’t see it again. “I did what needed doing.” 

“Yet many do not.”

“I had—motivation.” Clive shoots him half a look, and his eyes are wild in that moment with a rare flash of fire that must be the sunset catching in his gaze. There, and gone. “And I did us no favors, I’m afraid. I haven’t won us any friends.” He only half-stifles his sigh.

When one's only tool is a towering beast of flame, all of ones problems begin to look rather flammable, Joshua supposes. But no one would have negotiated in good faith with them then. Not with a fifteen year old boy. Not with plump Rosaria and her three child dominants simply begging to be taken. That Clive was able to sustain them at all is some mythic feat. 

Every soul in Rosaria owes him their life, one way or another. And Joshua, too. Joshua most of all.

“You did well. Anyway, making us friends is my job now.” 

“Soon,” Clive reminds him. Not yet, in other words. “And I don’t doubt your skill, but I’ll do my duty all the same.”

“And I will do mine,” Joshua sing-songs. It has the cadence of a nursery rhyme by now in his head. “The Phoenix looks after Rosaria and you look after me. Don’t forget that. You are still my Shield first.”

Now, Clive looks at him. “How could I?”

A burn rises from the pit of his stomach. He’s grown fond of telling himself it’s the Phoenix beating at his insides—but that’s only a theory. More than that, it’s this: Clive belongs to him, and Clive chose that. Clive fought to the blood for the honor of being his, body and soul, for all the rest of his days. It’s up to Joshua to ensure they will be long and many. He traces the scar on Clive’s cheek with his eyes and reflects that so far, he’s not done a good job of it, or any sort of job at all.

That must change. It will, and soon, exactly as Clive said. “I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I’m having a bit of party soon, if you can find the time to come.”

“A party…” Clive feigns ignorance and does a terrible job of it—so terrible, it circles back round to charming. “What’s the occasion?”

Joshua sighs. ”Just my birthday. I think they mean to put a crown on my head.”

“That old thing.” Clive smiles in that way that wrinkles his nose. 

“Yes, that old thing.”

Clive barks a laugh. “Bold of you to invite me to a party you’ve left me to plan for the last month. Do you know, they’ve been running me ragged? I had to pick plate settings. Seating arrangements. Flowers.” 

“I cannot wait to see your selections. I’m sure they’ll be adequate.”

“Adequate,” Clive quotes, and rolls his eyes. “Come, have you eaten yet?”

“No. We only just arrived. I left poor Uncle to deal with my escort.” 

Clive claps him on the shoulder. “You all must be starving then. Let’s see if we can’t get you a proper meal before you float away.” 

Inside, they find Byron exactly as Joshua left him, regaling Joshua’s retinue with some story or another. As soon as he sets eyes on Joshua, he gathers both him and Clive into a massive hug. “I see you found your brother. Founder, look at you!” Byron says with his usual gusto, and a brightness to his gaze. “You’ll give Clive here a run for his money on looks, soon.”

Clive sputters. Joshua hides his smile behind his hand. “Brother still has me beat there. I doubt I could ever pull off so much scruff.” Clive’s stubble is fetching on him, as is his shag of hair. Joshua has grown to look so much like Mother that he sees her reflection in the mirror sometimes when he catches himself in the wrong light. His body is long and his appearance fey and wispy where Clive is severe and dark and so, so much like father. If Joshua lets his hair go unbrushed for more than a morning, it looks like he’s let an animal nest on his head.

Clive eyes him. “I’d pay good money to see you with a bit of scruff actually.”

“Trust me, you would not.” And little risk of that. What does grow in is blond and thin and easily taken care of. He won’t embarrass himself by attempting anything more. 

Clive reaches for his face. “Wait, now that you mention it, I think I see a bit of—” 

Joshua dodges his hand. “Please!”

Byron watches them both with a particular look on his face that Joshua has come to know means he’s thinking of their father. The loss still aches for him, and for the first time Joshua finds himself wondering at it. Would he survive Clive’s loss with so much grace? No. No, of course he wouldn’t. It’s Clive who sets a hand on Uncle’s shoulder and gives the right look at the right time. Perhaps he understands something of this that Joshua cannot, some quirk of maturity that still eludes him. The sorrow leaves Byron’s face, and then he’s boisterous again, pushing them both toward his study and and calling for Rutherford to have something sent from the kitchen. 

Byron’s manor is several magnitudes smaller than the castle in Rosalith, and warmer for it. The wood walls and odd touches that he’s added make it feel more a family dinner than those Joshua took on the road—more so than any he’s had in Clive’s absence. When the food is at last set in front of them, he realizes he’s starving. The meal Byron has set out for them is fit for a king more than for two wayward nephews. Joshua finagles the spot beside Clive and scoots in a tad closer on the couch than he ought—and with Byron there, it’s almost as if Father could be on his way, just down the hall, a moment late.

“Nice to see your appetite back,” Byron says when he sees Clive fill his plate. 

Joshua cocks his head, in between filling his own plate, happy for the notable lack of anything orange, and for the platter set with fresh baked rolls. The road is no place for freshly baked anything. “Has he been giving you trouble?” Joshua asks. 

“Well he hasn’t been here long enough to—”

“No, I have not,” Clive says with the edge of a growl. “The south’s been quiet. I think there’s dissension in the Republic.” He cuts a precise bite out of the corner of a meat pie, and has the utter gall to pretend he’s not changed the subject with all the deftness of an axe blow. 

“Good news for us?”

“We may hope.”

“And how has Isolde fared, uncle?” The unspoken question being the obvious one: is Drake’s Breath safe, has the Iron Kingdom tried their hand again at what Clive won for him? Even as he asks it, he dreads the answer. But Byron’s mouth tightens and Clive’s eyes fall, and he knows then what they will not tell him. 

“All quiet here,” Byron says, a touch too loud. “But don’t let me get started, unless you want an old man boring you.” 

“I would like nothing more.” 

Byron takes the invitation. His booming voice fills the room, and Joshua settles into it, happy to not be the one entertaining for once. On the road, he felt constantly at attention, as if a single slip of his manners or posture or mood might spread. He took to it, but now his manners relax moment by moment. As he listens, he leans a bit closer into Clive’s space, until their thighs touch, and he can feel Clive’s heat. And Clive must have missed him at least half as much as he missed Clive, because he does the same, until their shoulders knock every time one of them reaches for their plate. If he wanted to, he could lean his head on Clive’s shoulder and make a real annoyance out of himself. 

“I cannot believe you have no stories from your tour, Joshua,” Clive murmurs in a lull. “It’s been, what, three months?” 

“I wrote to you about all the interesting parts.” 

Clive barks a laugh. “I don’t believe that for a second. Probably trying to save me grey hairs,” he mutters.

“Truly, nothing happened. It’s been perfectly wonderful and eminently safe.” And it has, by the grace of the dozen Shields that travel with him, his concession to Clive’s worry at having him out of sight for so long. “I’d rather hear of what you’ve been up to.” 

“I’m not as exciting as all that.” 

Joshua sighs, with only a little more drama than needed. “Truly, it is like pulling teeth from you at times, Clive.” 

Clive blanches, probably remembering when Joshua was losing his baby teeth, and how he’d very much wanted to impress Clive by being brave about the whole thing—and learned in doing so that while Clive may be unafraid of blood in the general sense, he's less aim when it's Joshua's. Even less so when presented with a bloody tooth as a bed time gift.

Joshua taps him knee to knee, and leans his head on Clive’s shoulder. “Sorry. Poor wording?”

“Yes, leave me out of your teeth pulling, if you would.” Clive looks at him from his inches away, his gaze fond and lovely.

Across the table, Byron clears his throat, and Joshua realizes then that their conversation has been low and close and rudely private. He extricates himself. “Apologies, I think the road took more a toll than I thought it would.” 

Byron laughs, waving them off. “Go, go, then. Both of you. I see you long for each other’s company more than mine. Rutherford with have to console me in your absence.” His manservant is standing by the door with the same impenetrable look he wears all the time. “Go!” Byron repeats to them. 

Joshua takes the out for what it is. Before they leave, he pauses by Byron to give him a kiss on the cheek before he grabs Clive’s hand and drags more than leads him out the door and to the living quarters down the hall. Clive lets himself be tugged, though it really is like tugging at a brick wall. “Where are you taking us?” he asks after a bemused moment. 

“I’ve been on the road for two days, Clive. I need a bath. And, as I recall, the best ones are this way.”

“But my room is—” Clive gestures vaguely behind them, down a smaller hallway, toward what must be the guards’ quarters. Ever the ascetic, his brother, and Joshua will have none of it.

“I need a bath, Clive.”

“Yes, fine.” He does them both the favor of not asking why Clive must join him. “You do smell a bit like chocobo. Didn’t want to say anything. Thought you might be finally—”

“Do not say it.” 

“—turning into a—” 

“Clive! On my life, at least I don’t smell of dog. Has Torgal been sleeping on your bed?”

Clive shrugs. “I get lonely.”

“I’m a better bedwarmer by far, and I promise I don’t drool.” This earns him a withering look. “Well, I drool less.”

The big room he leads them to is one of the ones he and Clive were allowed to share as children on their rare visits to Isolde. Mother hated leaving the city, and so those trips always had the air of a proper vacation. Father cared little if they bedded together. The bathtub he finds in the washroom there is not quite as big as the one in his quarters in Rosalith, but it’ll serve. He starts the water and sets his hand in it, summoning a small fire to his palm to heat it. Clive gives him a look for this, but it comes second nature to Joshua now, easy as breathing. Sometimes he finds a flame over his shoulder as he reads late at night, or brings one to his fingertips when he must dig around the dustier parts of the library. He does not need to summon his power to have it hand; the Phoenix beats strong in him. 

Still, he tries not to do it around Clive. No need to cause him more grey hairs, as he said.

When the water is steaming, he rises and slips out of his thin leather armor, and then his clothes. Clive was right—he’s a wisp of a thing, and he’ll never have Clive’s body, but he’s proud of the lean muscle he’s earned himself. “Can I tempt you?” he asks over his shoulder as he slips into the bath. It would be a tight fit, but not improper.

Clive’s jaw works, his gaze watching something out the window with rapt attention. “I already bathed.”

Joshua closes his eyes as he slips under the water. The warmth is divine on his sore body. A frisson of heat runs up his spine as weeks’ worth of tension slips out of him in minutes. “I missed this,” he says.

“Bathing?”

He rolls his head to eye Clive. “That, too.” 

Clive comes to him with a bar of soap in hand, sleeves rolled past his elbows. “Here.”

“You’ll spoil me,” Joshua groans, but they both know that’s a lost cause. 

Clive wets the soap and lathers it through Joshua’s hair, but goes no further. Beneath the water, Joshua folds his legs one over the other to hide how interested his traitor body is in the innocent touch. He’s used to it by now, but it’s no less inconvenient. In his travels, he’d managed to convince himself that the anonymous figure he imagined alone at night in his tent was someone different. The dark hair, the armor, the firm muscle that would slide beneath his fingers... He fooled himself, for a time, but of course it was this touch, this man. Clive. 

He lets his brother's fingers sort through his hair, tugging through tangles, cupping water to rinse, until he fears he will give himself away entirely. “E—enough,” Joshua says then, hating his voice for the way it breaks.

Clive’s fingers stop at the top of his spine. For a moment, he moves not at all, and then the touch is gone. Joshua dunks himself under the water all at once and rolls, so he comes up facing Clive, his shame more or less hidden. When the water clears from his eyes, he sees his brother kneeling with soap still in hand and his blue eyes gone dark in the poor light. 

“Is there anything else I can do for his grace?” Clive asks. 

“Hmm.” Joshua folds his arms over the edge, his head pillowed on them. “No.” And then, “Wait. Come here.” He crooks a finger.

But Clive is already so very close. Unwitting, he comes closer. Joshua reaches across the remaining distance and uses his wet hand to drag Clive’s fly-away hair down over his face, so it looks like the worst kind of bedhead.

Clive jerks back, sputtering. “Oi, what’s that for?”

“Nothing,” Joshua says, feeling capricious, like a child with too much energy and nowhere good to put it. The heat between his legs has graduated to aching. Everything about Clive, every single thing, is an enticement to something he cannot do. To someone he cannot be. “Will you go fetch me something to eat?” he begs. 

“You just ate.” Clive frowns at him, and Joshua makes his eyes wide and innocent. 

“I know, but I’m still hungry enough to eat a chocobo and chase the rider. Please, Clive. Something sweet?”

He stands, and sighs, wiping his fingers dry on the towel. “Of course. Anything to drink?” 

Joshua’s eyes skip down Clive’s body. Perfect lines, perfect grace, and a hunger takes him then. How terrible of Joshua to look. How terrible of him to think this. How terrible of him to be this way. He closes his eyes. “Anything but wine.”

He waits until Clive’s footsteps have receded, keeping his body still and his breaths shallow to hear for any sign of his return, and waits longer still. Only then does he take himself in hand beneath the water. He sinks, until nothing but his head is submerged and every inch of him is warm and languid. He lets himself add a face to the figure in his head. A voice, and strong hands, a gentle touch. That look Clive gave him on the balcony. That first glance, where he seemed young and alone and like Joshua was dry land after a month at sea. He could be that for Clive, and everything else he needed. A balm. A safe haven. He could press Clive into those rough-spun sheets in the simple guards’ quarters his brother chose for himself down the hall and make sweat bead on his skin and taste it and help them both forget all the troubles of their world.

He comes hard, and faster than usual. It takes him by surprise and sucks the air from his lungs. After, he presses his face to the cool edge of the copper bath. 

“Fuck,” he murmurs to himself, inarticulately. “Fuck.”

He makes sure he’s in bed before Clive returns. He hears his brother sigh, set the food and drink on the small table by the door, and then waits for what feels like an hour for the dip of the bed as Clive settles in behind him. A moment passes, and Clive sets a hand against Joshua’s damp, curling hair, but doesn’t speak. 

This isn’t their childhood room in Rosalith. The breeze coming in the windows is exotic and warm, smelling of the sea. He doesn’t want to see Clive like this, in a place like this. Not when he’s here at the edge of himself and all the reasons he cannot want all that he wants.

Clive settles into the sheets, back to back. The extra distance feels a canyon. Perhaps they’ve grown out of holding each other in the night. Or perhaps Clive was always grown out of it, and it’s Joshua whose cottoned on, late as usual. He might turn over and press himself to Clive's back, but he would give himself away. His body would shame him in seconds with this thing pulsing in his veins. It’s as if a full six months of longing has fermented in his veins and turned him into this love-drunk thing.

After a very long time, Clive asks the silence, “Are you still awake?”

Joshua doesn’t answer.

Back to the city, and back to home. With months of distance behind him, the city no longer looks a cage but a comfort. As soon as he catches sight of the white stone walls trailing with green ivy, the red standards flying from the towers, and the bustling road lined with carts, his heart sets to fluttering. Maybe he was homesick for more than Clive, he concedes. 

 Clive laughs at the expression on his face. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”

“Yes.” And, he realizes with something like horror, she’s soon to be his. Every stone of Rosalith’s walls and every person within them will be his responsibility. No more hiding behind Clive. As they pass inside the gates, a chicken flaps and squawks out of the way of their chocobos. Even that chicken, he thinks. Even that will be his responsibility. 

“Did the bird offend you, Your Grace? You look a bit green.” 

Joshua looks up to see a familiar head of blond hair. “Lord Murdoch!” 

“Welcome back,” he says. The former lord commander looks unaccountably happy for once, and then Joshua spots Lady Hanna behind him and sees why. He dismounts to sweep them both into a hug.

“Is Jill with you?” he asks.

Murdoch snorts. “Here somewhere, I think. Clive left her in charge of preparations while he went off to meet you. She’s taken it on like she’s been sent to war.” 

If anyone could do it, it’s her. “He hasn’t been too terrible about it, has he?”

Murdoch catches Clive’s gaze over Joshua’s shoulder. “Never seen a man bested by textiles before. Shame to see.” 

“I see you have this in hand, Rodney. I’ll leave him in your care,” Clive says too loudly. By the time Joshua’s turned to look at him, he’s gone, only the flap of his cloak left in his wake. 

Joshua stares at his retreating back and then back to Murdoch, who shakes his head. “He was sure he’d miss you. Rode out to Isolde like he had an army on his heels. He’s missed you.” 

For Murdoch to say it means that it’s an understatement. Joshua’s heart flips in his chest. “Is that so.”

“Did he not tell you? No. Of course he wouldn't.” 

“I thought I was riding to meet him.”

“Well. It takes two fools, they say.” 

Joshua covers his laugh. “To do what?” But Murdoch only grunts. “I suppose we are that.”

Murdoch looks him up and down once, and nods to himself, which is as close to approval as he’ll ever get. “Are you ready?”

To be what he was born to be, Murdoch means. Joshua wishes he could order him to take back the question. 

It’s one thing to imagine being archduke in some theoretical future. It’s quite another for the ceremony to be two days away. “I will be,” he answers. And so he will. 

His first hours back are controlled chaos. He finds Jill in the throne room, directing a small group of attendants in the placing of vases he didn’t know the castle had. The whole place is done up, as beautiful as it ever was in father’s time. More so, perhaps. For seven years now they’ve had nothing to their name but survival. Now, with room to breathe, everyone seems eager to get festive and let their city shine. It's more militant now. More walls, more soldiers, more hard-gazes. But no less beautiful a place.

Joshua only wishes he wasn’t the main attraction of the festivities. Everywhere he goes people are bowing and waving and bowing again before asking him questions he only half knows how to answer. When he can first manage it, he sneaks away to the private gardens where Clive and he so often wasted hours together as children and leans himself against one of the cool, mossy walls. He can almost see the shadow of Clive there when he was still small enough to be carried about in Clive’s arms, and the memory is enough to bring his hand to his chest. But Clive is not going to teach him to walk again. He cannot teach Joshua to do this, no matter how he might wish it. Has Clive not done enough for him? 

The man in question is nowhere to be found. At dinner, Clive makes a brief appearance to give a short toast to the assembled shields and courtiers—On the occasion of my brother’s return!—but afterward, he’s gone again, quick as a flash. Joshua is pulled into his office by Cyril and two other Undying who have, much to his horror, an actual book on ceremony that they want him to read and memorize portions of. 

When Joshua finds Clive at last, he wonders why he bothered looking. His brother is sprawled out in their room, on his back in their bed, breathing softly in his sleep.

“You didn’t wait for me,” Joshua sighs, as he takes a seat beside him. “Were you terribly tired?” He pushes Clive’s hair back from his forehead.

At some point in the day, Clive found the time to shave and clean himself up. He’s thinner in the face than he looked with his beard. Something Joshua cannot put his finger on has aged around his eyes. He was wrong. Clive doesn’t look so much like Father as he thought. Mother is there, in the shape of his eyes, and the line of his jaw. Joshua cups it. 

It’s a surprise he’s asleep at all, but maybe planning a coronation is a different kind of exhausting than fighting a battle. Nothing here for Clive to burn his way through. Maybe he’s nervous about Joshua’s new title, too. 

Joshua extracts himself, and then something catches his eye: a single red rose sits in a vase by their bed, on Joshua’s side. Perhaps Clive picked that one for him. It would be like him. He sometimes, very quietly, very secretly, would bring Joshua gifts like that, once upon a time. Only on bad days. Only when mother was particularly cruel, or Joshua particularly sick. Usually something small like a treat from the kitchens, or a book from a high shelf that his tutors deemed too frivolous to be worthy of Joshua’s education. A red rose… is rather something else. 

He draws his gaze back over his brother. Messed clothes. Messed hair. There are red scratch on the back of his hands.

Joshua shakes himself, physically. He has better things to do than sit and watch his brother sleep while he loses himself in romantic notions. If he stays, he’ll only end up waking Clive. With a sigh he rises and wanders his way back downstairs and takes to drifting down the halls like a ghost. 

Two days, the walls seem to say to him from every side. Two days, and this will all be up to you.

The sound of talk draws him back to the dining hall. When he peeks around the corner, most of the tables are empty, but one is still filled with men and women more rough around the edges than his courtiers or his Shields. The table before them is strewn with plates, a makeshift feast of whatever food was leftover from that night. Meat and bread, a tray of sweet pastries, and more than half a dozen bottles of wine—none of them full.

Joshua waits a moment before stepping into the light. It’s a credit to the potency of the wine that only one of them notices. The man stands, with a scrape of his chair. He salutes with one hand, and with the other he raps the man closest to him on the shoulder. And then they all are stumbling to their feet, greeting him with various titles, only some of them correct. Joshua smiles at them and waves them back to their meal.

“I didn’t come to interrupt. I thought I might—” he motions to an empty chair, and the man closest to it jumps to pull it out for him with an excessive bow. 

He smothers his laugh in a cough and takes his seat among them as they settle again, slower than they were to stand, like they aren't quite sure it's proper even with his blessing. When Joshua picks out a pastry and takes a delicate bite, some of the tension breaks. One of the men across from him ventures, “Where’s the Lord Commander?”

“Asleep already. The travel tired him out, I think. You all were with him in the South?”

Joshua is best acquainted with his Shields. The common soldiers, Clive’s soldiers, he knows little of. As he looks around, he’s surprised to find it isn’t all composed of men. A few women have joined them, still in armor, and one older man has the old, faded mark of a Bearer on his cheek. A change from their father’s time, and how pleasant to see Clive taking something of his own initiative. 

The same man who’d asked after Clive wipes his mouth on his sleeve, clearly not prepared for an actual conversation with their impending archduke. Joshua almost feels bad, but his curiosity is greater, and this is a rare chance. “Yes, Your Highness—Your Grace,” he corrects with a wince, though neither are technically correct. 

Joshua smiles beatifically. “Welcome home, all of you. And thank you for returning him to me in one piece.”

“Oh, I—well, I—” the man stutters as his face reddens. His friend kicks him beneath the table. “We didn’t do much. He fights like a demon, your brother.”

“Ifrit!” someone down the table shouts, and that sends up a round of cheers. They are very, very drunk.

And Joshua is not above taking advantage. “I hardly ever hear tales of his exploits...”

It’s an open invitation, and they’re all eager to take him up on it. Wondrous what wine does for loosening lips. Would that Clive partook. 

Most of Joshua’s knowledge of his brother’s fighting comes courtesy of salacious booklets printed Founder-knows-where and sold for a few gil a piece at local markets. He’s made a small collection of them on his tour, and shoved them all in a box that will never see the light of day so long as Clive is about. 

“Lemont was with him when he took Drake’s Breath, weren’t you?”

A particularly ragged looking man nods enthusiastically. His cheeks are red and his eyes blurred, but he's ready for the story. His companions pull in close—this is a story told and heard before “I was, I was." He nods, heavy. "We sailed three days around Drustanus with no landing. A nasty storm took us on the third day and blew us up on the rocks. I remember, we looked around for the Lord Commander to see what his orders were—and there he was! Gone!" He spans his hands out, and then rises one like he's painting a wall with his words. "And then we saw it, this, this thing rising out of the waves, and on my life the water around him were boiling. Made this mist, it did. Ifrit, it was, and he walked right up out of the sea like a beast. Right up to the fortifications and started firing on them.” 

A murmur goes up. Quiet, familiar praise. They’ve heard this story before, as he thought. He thinks of the strangers on the road, his people, looking at him with the same reverence. It sickened him, but to hear them speak of Clive this way makes his blood rush. 

They’re in awe of Clive. And Clive is his. Clive waits for him in their bed. Should he have no more of Clive than that for all their lives, he will at least have that. 

Clive’s soldier isn’t finished. His voice drops. “When he cast off the beast he was near too weak to stand.” He puts a hand to his chest. “But then he found his feet and realized it were bad, that we hadn’t the men to do what we had come to do with the other ships all caught up in the storm, even with the walls taken. A second wind came over him. Never have I seen a man fight so. He cut a man’s head from his body with a single blow of his sword.” He gestures this, acts it out; his friends dodge the wild swing of his arm. “Nearly took another apart at the middle! One swing!" His hand cuts the air as he half rises from his seat. "A demon, that one. A demon."

A demon, Joshua thinks. A demon, and a boy barely older than he.

The soldier sits back down. His voice goes light. “But you’d never know it to talk to him. Quiet as a stone, that one, and gentle as a lamb.” 

Joshua’s gut twists oddly. 

“Tell him about the ships!”

Joshua looks around. Another soldier rises to stand, gesturing with her tankard. “Tell his grace about how he did that spot down the border. They say he turned the sand to glass in places—melted it, like.”

They rush to speak, one over the other. Joshua, overwhelmed and unsure why, stops them with a hand. “Have all of you seen Ifrit?”

“Hard not to! He’s huge!” someone says. They all laugh.

Joshua can do no more than swallow the gorge rising in his throat. “But, surely not all of you?”

Without guile, the man who pulled his chair out says, “His lordship primes often as he can. Keeps everyone running scared. Saved our hides more than a time or two.”

Often as he can.

His expression must go off, because the man closest hurries to say, “But Ifrit is nothing like our Phoenix.”

They think he’s jealous. In his head, Joshua sees only the Curse as it once took Bearers, taking his brother in kind. The greying of his lovely hands and the fading of his dark hair. His blue eyes gone to dust in their sockets. 

The soldier goes on, waxing his philosophy. “Ifrit takes life, and the Phoenix gives it.”

Joshua is not one to be whimsical about their power, but there is a romance to it. Two pieces of one greater whole.

A shame then that his better half seems intent on destroying more than their enemies. “Of course,” Joshua says, coming to a decision. “Thank you for protecting him well. You honor us both with your service.” 

He stands, and they rise and stumble to their feet with once more, with salutes and titles. Joshua goes. He takes the long way back to their quarters, pacing down through the courtyard gardens and then up toward the library through the wide white-stone hallways that catch moonlight in the late hour. He grabbed a pastry on his way out, but his mouth is too sour to eat it now. 

How many times has Clive has watched him use his fire and called it a waste? He has primed before Clive only twice—on the night everything burned, and in the Apodytery. Even that simple moment had Clive in near panic for his safety. He remembers the ducal tournament, and how it ran his brother ragged. The blood on his teeth at the end of a fight, and his careless wave whenever Joshua offered to heal him. He had to wait until Clive was turned away or too exhausted to notice to manage it, and pray he wouldn’t get caught going between their rooms after dark. After Clive became First Shield, it was no better. Don’t waste that on me. Look after yourself.

Words he now would like to shove back into his brother’s pretty mouth. 

Clive is so witless in sleep. When Joshua returns to their room, his brother has rolled onto his side, his breathing slow and deep. Joshua sits on his side of the bed, gently, so as not to wake him, and watches him with what he tries to pretend is only impartial interest. His brother is lovely in his sleep, though. Surely anyone would think so. What did the man call him? Gentle as a lamb? Quiet as a stone? Perhaps. 

He sets a hand to Clive’s shoulder and tips him onto his back. Joshua wets his lips. “Clive.”

Nothing.

“Clive,” he says louder. 

At last, his brother blinks his eyes open. When he sees Joshua hovering two feet above him, he sits up. “What? What’s happened?”

“Nothing. …Your hand is scratched, here.” He sets his fingers against the back of Clive’s hand, where it rests now on the bed. He watches as Clive jumps beneath his touch. The room has darkened as the fire burned low; he can barely see the tiny wound now in this light. “Let me heal you.”

Clive’s brow wrinkles. He looks around. “What hour is it? Have you been drinking?”

Joshua raises his hand and summons a fire to his palm without answering, and all at once Clive comes awake in full. He catches Joshua’s hand in a tight grip. “No. What are you doing? You ought to be in bed.” 

“‘Tis a small thing. Really, it will take nothing.” Heat grows against his palm, where Clive still has it caught fast, the Phoenix at the surface still and ready to beat forth.

“I said no.” 

“Why not?”

“Because it’s wasteful.” Clive releases him, and pulls himself up so he’s sitting properly, awake properly. 

“Is it?”

Clive searches his face. “Using the Phoenix without cause is dangerous, Joshua. Don’t waste it on something like this.”

Joshua pulls his hand back at last. “Wasteful. Dangerous,” he quotes, and breathes a deep breath, letting the smell of Clive and the familiarity of the castle flood his lungs. Neither succeed in calming him. “Then I wonder, how often have you used your eikon, brother?" He forces his voice to stay soft, and light. "How much have you wasted yourself for my cause?”

Clive stares, open-mouthed and then blinks. He tries to raise a hand to brush his hair back, but Joshua catches his wrist and holds him there.

“How many times,” Joshua enunciates, “have you summoned Ifrit, Clive?”

The meaning clicks, and with it Clive’s mouth snaps shut. He wrests his hand from Joshua’s grip and he moves back and away, across the bed.

“Clive,” Joshua threatens.

“As many times as I had cause to.”

“In Dhalmekia?” Joshua’s voice is hard to his own ears. “That’s a petty border dispute! Clive, why?”

“It’s worth it if no one gets hurt.”

“And what if you are hurt?”

Clive looks, genuinely, as if the idea has never occurred to him. “I won’t be,” he scoffs. Pride should look worse on him, but it doesn’t, and this barely qualifies. His confidence is cool and collected. This is why the men adore him. And their enemies, he begins to wonder, what is it they see when they look at his brother on the field? To be on the other side of that gaze… Clive, he’s known for a very long time, is a terror beyond their borders, beyond his sight. But what if he’s terror enough to need putting down? 

“You cannot even recount the number of times you've summoned him, can you?”

The answer, when it comes, is terrible. Clive’s gaze locks on his. In the dark, his eyes are black pits. “I don’t keep count.”

As many times as he’s been away, then. As many times as he’s wanted to keep their people safe, to keep Joshua safe, which is surely every moment he spends outside of Joshua’s sight. “You are wasting yourself,” Joshua accuses in a low, quivering voice. “The toll that takes, the Curse—you don’t care?”

“Fuck the toll. It’s kept you safe. It's kept Rosaria safe.”

The order of his priorities is wrong and yet, that says all it must. 

“What kind of archduke cannot protect even his own brother? Founder damn you Clive!” Joshua rises from their bed. “I forbid it.” 

Clive swings his legs over the side off the bed, but doesn’t stand. “You—” he laughs, “—what?”

“I forbid you to use Ifrit,” Joshua says in a lower voice. It has none of the authority he needs it to. 

“Joshua… It isn’t so hard on me. Do I look as if I’m about to keel over?”

No, he doesn’t. His perfection is audacious, and in the moonlight through the window, he looks better still. Not pretty, but handsome in ways Joshua will never be. In ways no one else could be.

He brings himself to his full height, and says softly, “It’s an order, Clive.”

“You’re not—” 

“In two days, I will be. And if I order you then, will you obey?”

Clive’s gaze rises, but his head does not. “Yes.” 

Joshua expected more of a fight, but then Clive stands, and steps into Joshua’s space—so close Joshua can feel the heat radiating off of him. He leans closer still, voice no more than a whisper. “If you want to start ordering me, then start.”

It’s a dare. Joshua finds his face going red and damn his complexion even in this dark, damn his freckles, damn Clive for never being anything but cool in his confidence. Clive searches his face, finds it wanting. His brow rises. “I took an oath to you, remember.”

“To the Phoenix,” Joshua replies. 

“No. I made my oath to my brother, and I keep it for him. Even when he’s being pig-headed.” 

“Pig-headed?” This close, his voice need be no more than a whisper, as Clive’s is, and that’s all he can manage. Rage burns in him, makes him daring. He rises his hand to Clive’s cheek and sets his fingertips over the scar there. The brand is nothing more now than a faded red. Clive draws a breath; Joshua wants to chase it. “And what happened the last time you exhausted yourself using Ifrit?” Joshua asks softly. The scar on his cheek is not the only one they left on him. He knows that now. “How much did the Ironblood take from you?”

He’s loosed a bolt with no notion where it would hit. It hits dead center. 

Clive’s mouth falls open, and then his expression goes blank. His face shuts, like a door closed. He steps back, almost in a stumble, and then turns away in the same motion. After a moment, he says tonelessly, “If you have an order to give, give it. If not, I’ll keep doing as I’ve done.”

And then he’s moving. He doesn’t go back to the bed, but grabs his book off the table beside it and moves toward the door with speed. 

“Clive, wait.” Joshua scrambles to follow him, but stops short of reaching out to grab him again. “Stop, please.” 

Clive follows his order to the letter, and no further, a still life framed by the open door and the light of the hallway beyond.

He must say something but the only words that come are too honest and too desperate. “If I lose you, I won’t survive it. Let me do my duty now. Let me help you. At least let me go with you next time—”

Clive wheels around and this time the fire in his eyes is not the sunset, nor Joshua’s imagination. He says in a whisper that’s more like to a beast’s snarl, “You have no idea. You have no idea what men do to men in war, and I’ll not have it. Not for you. I will use my eikon as I must.”

With that, he leaves. He does not return to their bed that night.

Chapter Text

Clive is still gone in the morning. He’s not at breakfast, either, and Joshua gets embarrassingly close to a panic before he spots Clive down in the bailey throwing himself at whatever work will have him. Guilt is a terrible thing, Joshua learns. It eats him from the inside out, until his mouth tastes of acid and his empty stomach sours. And yet, he’s too ashamed to seek Clive out, to apologize. He follows Clive’s lead and throws himself into the pile of papers on his desk and at every bit of scheduled minutiae that his aides and Cyril have been badgering him about getting to since his return from tour.

Past noon, a knock on the door of his office sends him into a brief spiral before the door opens and reveals only Byron. 

He looks around the room, anywhere but Joshua, really. “You ought to eat lunch,” he says. “Big day tomorrow, and all.” 

“Apologies. I let time get away from me,” Joshua replies, but returns to the paper he’s been scratching his pen into for the last half hour. He’ll need to recopy it later—typically his penmanship is better than anyone else’s by a mile, but not today. And what a skill to have. His brother has played Lord Commander, Dominant and Eikon, and de-facto Archduke for the last seven years. Joshua has learned penmanship.

“Saw your brother down in the yard. Perhaps you could convince him to eat, while you’re at it? Neither of you were at breakfast.”

“...Clive doesn’t want to see me right now.”

Byron makes no reply. When Joshua chances a look at him, his mouth is open, and one of the Shields outside the door is peeked around it with the same look. Joshua pinches the bridge of his nose between two fingers and sets down his work. Nothing will get done like this, and the guilt is starting to press at his insides in a way that makes him think he might be sick. 

He stands. “I could use a walk. If you would join me.”

Byron follows him up the hall and down the wide passage lined with portraits of former archdukes, and to the balcony that’s widest and highest in that part of the castle. High enough for those below to not notice if they’re being watched. It’s set with a table and chairs; a late lunch is brought. Joshua pecks at an apple slice and pokes at some fish while Byron studies him. 

“I don’t believe I’ve seen you two fight since you were still in swaddling clothes,” he says, stark and to the point.

Joshua pauses. They’ve had small tête-à-têtes but nothing that wasn’t solved in the same breath it was started. Nothing that would have Clive avoiding him like a meal gone bad. “What did we fight about then?” he asks.

“I couldn’t tell you. You were in your terrible twos, I think, and Elwin was beside himself laughing over the whole thing. He couldn’t get enough of you, so mad you had smoke pouring out your ears. I thought Clive was going to lose a few hairs!”

He separates the smallest bite of fish he can from the whole and chews it. “...But we resolved it.”

“Oh, I don't think it was as serious as all that. I suspect you cried and all was forgiven. That boy has had a soft spot for you a mile wide from the day he met you, you know.”

Of course, he knows. This makes him feel no better. He’s always been this for Clive, a safe haven, an easy smile, and how carelessly has he handled that trust now?

“Oh, don’t pout,” Byron says. “What was the fight about?”

Joshua pushes the plate away, tired of having it close enough even to smell when he’s sick to his stomach. “Ifrit.” 

“Ah. His curse.” 

“His what?” Joshua turns to him, breath stopped in his throat, mind swimming with images of greyed skin and decay.

“Not that curse. He called Ifrit a curse once. His words, not mine.”

“A curse?” he murmurs. “Why would Ifrit be a curse?”

“Perhaps he thinks he’s done something worth being cursed over.” Byron looks off across the city, and not at Joshua, not anywhere near him. HIs jaw clicks. “Who knows. We rarely understand the ones we love as much as we’d like to. But your fight—it couldn’t only have been only about Ifrit.” 

A deft change of subject, as subtle as the axe uncle is so fond of wielding. “No. Not only. He uses Ifrit recklessly, and I reminded him of the last time that happened. When Imraenn’s men got ahold of him.”

Byron is silent for a long while. “Ah,” he says, articulately. 

“Don’t. You will make me feel worse.” Joshua puts his head in his hands. A coronation in the morning and he’s gone and ruined it. He can see Clive on the dais before him, Father’s throne set behind him, still stone-faced, setting a crown on his head without a glance, a word, a smile. “I have to apologize,” he says into his hand, “but I don’t know how.”

Byron shakes his head. “It’s my fault. All of that. I should never have let him go to Drake’s Breath without me, but I thought, oh, the lad never comes to any harm. He seemed so mythic then. Larger than life. No, it was my fault,” he repeats, dusting a hand through his hair, which is starting to go silver at the temples. “I should have kept him longer once we got him back, but he so wanted to see you.”

The guilt now is a sort of constant pain at the pit of his stomach, so it’s fine, really. “You should have made him stay if he was hurt.”

“It would have been crueler to keep him. You must know how he is about you.” The words how he is seem to be carrying more than their share of water, but Joshua cannot figure out why. Byron says it as if it’s a flaw in Clive, one that needs excusing. Yet Joshua cannot imagine who his brother would be if he loved any less. “Before you came along, he was such a sad child. Elwin and I tried, Flame rest him. Theater and toys and pretty pets, any excuse to put a smile on his face, but they were rarer than hen’s teeth in those days. It seemed we could go a whole season without hearing him laugh. And then you came along and you liked him better than anyone. And he liked you, better than anything.”

Byron catches his eye. “You’re his world. You must know.”

“And he’s—” mine, he wants to say, but it’s not becoming of the man about to inherit a throne to admit that his entire world is the man who will be standing beside him rather than the land he’ll be protector of, “—precious to me,” he says instead. “I should not have pushed him so.”

“It was bound to happen eventually. Growing pains, I suppose. You’re both headstrong, as Elwin was.”

“What can I do?”

Byron stares at him, poleaxed. “Well. Well, I don’t know. Oh,” he roughs his hair again. “I’m not cut out for this sort of thing. You’re clever, and Founder help him but that boy’s not got a bit of guile in him. If I know him, he’s already forgiven you.”

Being already forgiven makes him feel no better, and no surer of what to do. But only one man has the answers he needs. As the shadows begin to lengthen and the heat of the day sets in, Joshua makes his way down to the bailey where he saw his brother haunting the training grounds. 

“Your Grace!” he’s greeted as he makes his way down the gravel path. He’s not that yet, but they keep calling him so. 

There are all manner of people training there, not all men, not all adults. With a start, he realizes one of the boys is younger than he is, by a mile. He pauses. “What’s your name?”

“Jaren,” the boy says in a pitchy voice. His, “Your Grace,” comes after, with red coloring his cheeks.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you.” He must be new. Green, new. He knows what this is, because he’s let Clive do it: Rosaria’s soldiers are her pride, but it’s also a means of giving a home to those who have none now, men, women, and children scathed by the years of squabbling at Rosaria’s borders. They hardly have the means to support a military at all, but if he’s made it work thus far he can keep it working a little longer. After all, he’s the one who was made to be good at sums while Clive got to have his hours slapping swords around.

“What are you doing here?” a voice asks from behind him. Only one man in the city would be so daring as to ask him that.

Joshua doesn’t turn to face Clive, but smiles at the boy, instead. “I hope my brother isn’t too hard on you.”

The boy blushes. “No. Lord Commander Rosfield is kind.” 

Joshua raises a brow. “Is that true, Clive?” At last, he turns, and Clive is looking not at his face but at the strip of cloth he’s wrapping around his palm. He doesn’t reply. Joshua wants so badly to make a comment, but doesn’t. If Clive’s been at this long enough to need a wrap on his hand, then Joshua hurt him more deeply than he feared. 

“We’re doing drills,” Clive says in lieu of an answer. “Give me an hour, Your Grace.”

Joshua’s teeth grind. The men and women and boys around them have stopped. “I see,” he says, and sees only that Clive’s shirt is sticking to his chest with the sweat there. The worst of it is that Clive isn’t being coy—he really means to make Joshua wait. He never has before. Suddenly all the times Clive dropped whatever he was doing to come tend to Joshua’s whims seem precious as pearls.

He comes to an easy decision. “I’ll wait, then.”

Clive hesitates before he nods and returns to his smitten trainees, who are looking between them with evident confusion. They seem unsure where to stand at attention or who to stand for.

Joshua turns away to dismiss them from their confusion and walks to the side of the arena and begins undoing his belt. He sets it to the side, hanging it over the railing, along with his sword in its scabbard. He keeps it with him always now, at Murdoch’s insistence that now he knew how to wield a blade, he ought to start keeping one around lest he be murdered in the most embarrassing fashion. His outer shirt joins the belt, leaving him only in the soft red one below. Another of Clive’s castoffs, though Clive was closer to fifteen when it fit him and it still hangs loose on Joshua.

“What are you doing?”

“Joining you.”

“You—for what?”

“Training?” Joshua says. His tone levels Clive, who has no natural defense against him even at the best of times. 

“That won’t be necessary,” Clive says quickly and waves to his troop of trainees, only a few of which have pretended to not be watching. “You all know your drills. Remember to keep your feet under you. It’s okay to be slow if you’re not being sloppy.”

“Lord Commander, please. I would not dare tear you away from your work. It would be my honor to join you all.” Joshua raises his voice. “I so rarely get to see any of you in action. Please, allow me this indulgence.” 

Clive looks as if he wants to pick Joshua up by the back of his shirt and carry him out the yard, so Joshua turns to him gamely and asks, “Perhaps you and I could…?”

“No.” His answer comes fast and with all the authority of an older brother, and Joshua raises a brow at him. It’s one thing to deny Joshua something in privacy, and quite another here. “Ah…” Clive seems to come to himself. “Right. If you’d like.”

He would. In all his memories, he cannot recall a time he and Clive stood head to head in this place, with metal between them. What was a whim a minute ago transforms in his chest to a voracious thing. Parts of him are interested that ought not be, but at last he has something to scratch the itch he can never rid himself of in full. 

“Who will judge?” He casts his gaze around the yard; the recruits seem to shrink back, and then he spots a familiar head of blond hair as Murdoch rounds the corner from the stables. And then he takes one look at the two of them and turns around, walking back the way he came. 

Clive rolls his shoulders. “You don’t trust me to make it a fair fight?” 

“I trust you.” Joshua smiles at him. 

He draws his sword from its scabbard and takes position, spreading his feet the way Murdoch nearly beat into him to, and evens his breath. Clive looks down at his own blade as if it's suddenly a stranger to him, and he can see the doubt there, how much Clive does not want to actually fight him. If Joshua waits for him to make the first move, he’ll be waiting a lifetime. 

Joshua takes the choice from him, and comes in fast with a downward strike, the one they teach all new students first, the one that’s easiest to block. Clive brings his sword up half-heartedly, almost too late. Their blades ring against each other. Clive follows it with an even weaker swipe with his longsword, one that Joshua turns away with pathetic ease, and no, they cannot have that. Joshua snorts under his breath, a sound only Clive will hear, and then twirls his sword in one hand, to see Clive’s eyes narrow. And then he moves. 

Clive breathes, “Wait—” 

Joshua does not. He comes at Clive with the blade again, the same move, opposite side, but this time when Clive blocks, Joshua follows it with a kick aimed for his shoulder. Clive dodges at the last second, eyes wide. Joshua pulls his blade off Clive’s with a wicked scrape of metal against metal and brings the blade in a slash, as if to cut the the shirt from his brother’s chest. Of course, he won’t. Can’t. Drawing Clive’s blood will be a sorry way to begin his apology—but the fear is short-lived. Clive is fast, even if his cumbersome blade isn’t.

He twists away, and moves back, his feet sliding in the sand. In the space of a single breath, the fight changes. Clive changes. He grips his sword so hard Joshua swears he hears the leather on the grip creak, and then he lunges. He comes in hard, and fast, with a blow meant to tap Joshua’s right arm. Joshua dodges it but Clive adjusts in the span of a blink, and brings the blade under, as if to sweep his legs out from under him. Joshua dodges this, too, but has to move awkwardly to block the strike aimed vaguely for his neck. 

Clive is fast, yes, but more than that, he’s strong. Every strike meets Joshua’s sword with a sound like a ringing bell, his bones rattling with each successful block. The blows aren’t meant to hurt but to subdue and the power behind them is incredible. 

And his brother is mad now. Well, I wanted to rile him, Joshua thinks. I knew this would. 

Joshua gives him ground, dancing backward out of reach, parrying rather than taking any of the next hits, trying to spare his aching arm the pressure. Clive doesn’t tire at the chase the way Murdoch or his other sparring partners did. His stamina is nearly as incredible as his strength. Joshua finds himself the one fighting for breath. He blocks a succession of blows aimed for his hip, and then his arm, and almost falls back from the strength behind Clive’s blade. For a moment, they’re caught up close to one another.

Clive’s eyes are over-bright in the late-day sun, and only made more so by the tired bruise around them. He hasn't slept. Sweat glistens on his face and neck and the small glimpse of his chest where his shirt has come untied. He is beautiful.

Joshua pushes back from him. His wrist whines at the repeated pressure of warding off Clive’s sword. He almost misses the next dodge when his arm is late to respond, twisting at the last second, so he takes Clive’s blade on low on the grip of his sword instead of his forearm. 

Clive freezes when he sees what he nearly did, as if coming back to his senses. Joshua cannot give him time to think about this, to lose himself in what he ought to do and ought not to do. He steps around Clive and taps the back of his thigh with the flat of his sword, hard enough to leave a bruise. 

“Dirty,” Clive hisses as he turns and slaps the blade away. 

“Don't get distracted, Commander.” 

Clive’s expression darkens. He jabs his sword in a feint at Joshua’s leg; Joshua twists away to do the same move again with his other hand and Clive’s other leg—but this time, Clive is waiting for it. Joshua sees his movement a moment too late; he’s already mid turn, and too late to stop his momentum when Clive wards off his sword and then reaches for him. Clive’s hand closes around Joshua’s hand and sword hilt both. The pressure is unyielding and the command clear. Joshua drops the sword, but the fight isn’t over. Clive has left his other hand free. He's forgotten: the blade is not Joshua’s only weapon, and not the first he learned. All is fair, after all. 

In a heartbeat, he has the Phoenix’s fire in his hand. He lets it grow, lets it bloom, and feels her fire rise in him, too, eager to be free. To make wings, to fly, and Clive is so, so close. 

Clive catches the flicker of light in time to spin Joshua around and wrap a thick arm about his neck, pinning him so his whole back is pressed to Clive’s front. Both of them are breathing hard. He can hear Clive’s breath against his cheek. He can feel it in Clive’s ribs as they strain against him. 

The fire in his palm smothers as Clive closes his other fist over Joshua’s fingers. Joshua laughs, rough. The hold isn’t hard. He could slip free with ease, but why bother? He’s where he wants to be: close, again. And Clive is warmer than the sun above them it seems to him then. Warmer than the fire he conjured. Warmer than the eikon beating in his chest.

Joshua relaxes into him, and lets himself be held up. “I yield,” he gasps. 

They’ve gathered an audience, he realizes, when they start to cheering. 

Clive lowers his head and says against his ear, “You’ve been practicing.” 

“Am I any good?” 

“Almost as good as me. One day, perhaps.” 

Joshua’s coolness evaporates from him as he flushes under the praise. After another moment that seems to him to last far too long, Clive releases him. The loss of his heat is immediate, and he tells himself its the Phoenix beating her disappointment in his chest and only that. He bends to pick up his sword and dust himself, trying to compose himself before he turns to Clive. His brother’s smile is a welcome sight.

“Now can I borrow you?”

Clive swallows, nods, turns to relay orders to his gaggle of wide-eyed students, and then motions Joshua to the side of the yard and the stairs that lead up to the castle walls. Good a place as any for privacy, but Clive does not stop there. He walks them down the wall until they’re well out of earshot or sight of anyone down below, and stops to turn to Joshua. His face closes again, seamless as a slab of stone, and utterly new to Joshua.

He can’t find his words. A bead of sweat drips down his brother’s neck and disappears against his chest. Joshua follows it with his eyes. 

His own cooling sweat makes him shiver in the shadow of the wall.  “I should not have spoken to you as I did, last night.” He folds his hands behind his back to keep them from shaking. “I should not have said any of it. That was cruel and unfair. I will never be able to repay what you've done for us. For me. And I know—well, no, I don’t know what you’ve been through for our sake, but—"

Clive’s face is stone. Joshua would do anything to put a crack in it. 

“—But Clive,” he beseeches, and it's his voice which cracks instead, “you must know how much you’re worth. Not only to me, but to all of us. You must take care.”

A flex of Clive’s jaw, and Joshua seizes on it, stepping closer but coming up short still against the boundary Clive has set between them. “Can you not imagine how it is to see you ride off for weeks and months at a time, never knowing if you’ll return? If it were me, would you not caution me? Would you not worry for me? I cannot lose you—“

Clive smiles, without humor. Joshua recalls those few moments in their childhood when he tested his brother’s patience and found it immense. He steps into Joshua’s space. Joshua gives it, moving back. “I have lost you,” Clive says like a secret, “and you know how I weathered that.” 

His breath catches. This is the closest Clive has gotten to an admission of what they all know: he has changed, since that night. Of course, he has. And yet, this is the first time he’s admitted why. Joshua is out of his depth, utterly. The shadows on Clive’s face turn his eyes to black glass. He is so close, Joshua can feel his heat radiating out, as if to draw him yet closer.

“I lost you at Phoenix Gate. I held your body in my arms and I wept for you and I tasted your—” He stops short, breathing hard. His hand goes to his own mouth at the memory, though Joshua cannot imagine the end of it. “I’ll use Ifrit as I must, and you’re not winning this argument.”

Joshua is breathless, warm, the guilt in his stomach replaced by that queasy fluttering. He’s younger, and it isn’t often he feels that way in Clive’s presence, but he does now. He swallows and forces himself to meet Clive’s gaze. “Not yet.”

“No.” Clive’s gaze falls to his mouth and traces back to his eyes. “Not yet.”

It wasn’t the apology he meant to give, and he doesn’t expect Clive will welcome his presence that night, so he doesn’t test it. Clive’s patience may be infinite, but Joshua isn’t trying to upset him. The bed without him feels very wide. It doesn’t the rest of the time, when Clive is off somewhere, but knowing he’s elsewhere in the castle makes it seem wide as a whole continent. Joshua holds a pillow over his chest. In a few hours, he’ll have a crown, and will Clive come to him then? Or is this how it will be now between them? Was this their ending, and he only sped it along with their quarrel?

He’s left in suspense for only minutes before he hears voices outside, a low conversation, and then the door edges open without a knock. Joshua sits up and finds Clive at his door, already in his sleeping clothes. “You’re here,” Joshua says, dumbly.

“Yes. Why in the hell are you in one of the guest rooms?” Joshua flushes and hugs the pillow closer to his chest. Clive pauses there. “If you’re upset with me still, say so.”

Joshua sits up, pillow still over his chest. “I’m not. I was never—I thought you were. I should not have said half of what I did. I’m sorry. Truly.”

“Enough with your sorrys.” Clive closes the door behind him and comes to the bed, sits beside him on it. His brows wrinkle with concentration in that way that means he's thinking hard about his next words and Joshua waits for them like the fall of an executioner’s blade. But when they come, they are gentle. Clive raises his hand to his own cheek, and the scar there. “It’s been a long time since I got this. I… I hardly think on it now.”

This cannot be true. He still remembers the haunt of his eyes in those weeks after. The demons that chased Clive into his sleep. How in the morning after a bad night, Joshua would wake with Clive gripping him tight and his hair wet and have to piece it all together. But of course, Clive would not say this. Least of all to Joshua. Perhaps not even to himself.

Joshua keeps still, and quiet, almost holding his breath for fear of saying or doing what he shouldn’t. 

“What's done is done,” Clive says. “I don't make mistakes like that anymore. You don't need to worry so much for me. I’m supposed to worry for you, remember?”

“That isn’t your job, you know.” Joshua sits back, all the easier to not look at Clive’s face, still holding the pillow for dear life. “You never let me worry for you, but I have nothing else to do when you’re off somewhere. I’m of little use.”

“Of little use?” Clive scoffs. “Joshua, you've handled Rosaria for years now. All I’ve done is ride around and knock head together to keep them out of your way. You keep selling yourself for spare change. I don’t do all this out of the goodness of my heart, you know.” 

“Actually, I think you do.”

Clive shakes his head. “Sometimes, maybe.’

“But?”

“I love you.”

Joshua is grateful for the pillow blocking his traitorous face and the red rising up his neck. “I know that.”

“Then you should know that sometimes love is selfish. Shove over,” Clive orders. Joshua does, and then Clive settles in beside him. “Are you nervous for tomorrow?”

He picks at the sheets and rolls over, pillow and all, to face Clive. “A little.”

“You’ve been doing the work of an archduke since you were a child. You’ll handle it.”

“Not that. It's just, I don’t feel any older, really.” He sighs and sprawls out wildly, arms wide enough to land a hand on Clive’s face. Clive picks it off and holds it between thumb and forefinger like it’s something Torgal flung at him.

“Trust me, you’re older. You take up twice as much space at least.”

“Oh. Three times as much, I would imagine.” He turns his hand in Clive’s grip to lace their fingers. “But I don’t feel it.”

“You will. There will come a day when you do.”

“Did you?”

“Yes. The day you made me your Shield.”

He flushes again, and swallows. “Not…” 

“No. Not that night. In some ways it’s easier being older. I’ve always known exactly what I had to do and be. I knew that night.” Clive squeezes his hand. “You’ll have to figure it out on your own.“

“Not all alone.”

“No. But sometimes, much as I’d like to keep you tied on a tether.”

The feeling is mutual, though perhaps not in quite the same way. “I don’t know I’ve much choice in what I end up being, Clive.”

“You have. You always have.”

“What if I wanted to run away and become a farmer in, oh, Waloed. Would that be all right with you, then?”

“A farmer…” Clive turns to face him, his brow scrunched prettily. “What put that idea in your head?” Joshua doesn’t reply, waiting for his answer, feeling stubborn and exactly as pig-headed as Clive accused him of being. “Fine,” Clive says at last, rolling his eyes. “Yes. If you want to become a farmer in a faraway land, I won’t stop you.”

“But would you come with me?”

Clive takes the question far too seriously. “I would follow you anywhere. You know that, Joshua.”

He hadn’t. He’d hoped, but he hadn’t known. “I was only joking. Anyway, you’d be a terrible farmer.”

He looks at himself, his muscle, and then at Joshua. “And you’d be any better?” At last, he laughs. 

“Yes. I think I would look rather good in a straw hat, actually. And I’ve learned much in my time away. I have many skills now you know nothing about. I’m practically a new man.” Joshua turns over completely, propping his head on his free hand. “I can bewitch you with facts about soil amenities. Did you know they use manure, Clive? I suppose not. I suppose I’ll have to do the heavy lifting while you sit about and look pretty for a change.”

Clive rolls his eyes. “I don't know about that. I hear farmers have to get up even earlier than archdukes. Sleep, or you’ll be suffering in the morning.” 

“I don’t know if I can.”

“Turn over.” 

Joshua does, and after a moment feels Clive’s fingertips on his back, scratching gently in a soothing circle. It won’t help him sleep the way it did when he was young. The touch is oil on the fire already burning within him, but he could no sooner tell Clive to stop than cut out his own tongue.

By some miracle, he sleeps. He must, because he wakes, with a buzzing in his veins and an empty spot in the bed beside him. Clive is already up, and the bed has gone cold. Outside the room, a gaggle of attendants are waiting to prepare him, and suddenly it’s clear why Clive is nowhere to be seen. Whatever he will go through during the coronation, it can be nothing compared to the preparation. They wash him, oil him, brush his hair within an inch of its life and twist it into some complex thing that they pin to his head. Then they set about dressing him, while he recites the lines he’s spent weeks memorizing over and over. To protect, to keep, to weather all storms and on and on. Cyril reminds him of the proper motions, the proper walk, the proper phrasing and for once he's grateful for the man's obsessive attention to tradition and faith.

A large part of him is aware of who will be overseeing the ceremony. It would be one thing to make a mistake, and another to do so in front of Clive. Clive will say the words with him. Clive will put the crown on his head. A gold ring, he thinks manically, and then catches his own eyes in the mirror and the near glow in them at the thought.

He isn’t ready, but he will have to be. 

As if summoned, a half past noon, Clive knocks on the door of the room where Joshua has been imprisoned for the past hours. The sound is firm, the one-three-one of when they were younger and Joshua thought sneaking into Clive’s rooms to be the height of danger and excitement and in desperate need of a secret knock to herald the occasion. 

“Don’t let him in,” Joshua orders. 

The three—three!—women trying to coral the last few stitches and folds of his overcoat freeze. “Your Grace?”

“Don’t let him—” the door rattles, “—don't come in!” he says louder. “That’s an order!” 

“Joshua, really?” Clive’s voice comes, muffled. The door opens a crack, because of course it does, and Joshua’s orders mean nothing. In an hour, they will, and he may become a dictator after all, if Clive does not stop ignoring him.  

“I said not to come in, Clive!”

Clive flounders for a moment, caught in the small gap of the door. “Are you shy? I see you without your clothes on all the time.” 

One of the attendants closest to him puts a hand over her mouth. “It’s not—not like that,” Joshua says hurriedly. The woman waves her hand, and then the door opens the rest of the way, and Clive is there. 

Joshua refuses to look at him. He doesn't want to see his brother’s reaction to this—him, in clothes a shade from what their father wore for all the days they knew him. “They don't quite fit me, do they?” he says quickly, without looking at Clive, tugging at a his hem. The belt around his waist is lighter and thinner than Father's, the neck piece fashioned of cloth where father’s was leather. Lighter wear for a lighter frame. The clothes have been tailored to fit, but they feel odd on him, both too large and too tight, and the figure in the mirror is a stranger to him. He picks a speck off his sleeve. Clive would have fit Father’s garb without a single new stitch.

“Could I have a moment with his grace,” Clive says to the room at large. Joshua watches the attendants in the mirror as they make their bows and leave him. Clive’s figure fills the space beside him in the reflection. Joshua really is taller now, by a scant inch. It’s one thing to know it, and another to see it. He and Clive look nothing alike. 

“It doesn’t suit me, does it.”

Clive is quiet for so long, he wonders if he’ll say anything at all, and then he turns Joshua to face him with a hand on his shoulder. His eyes fall to Joshua’s chest, covered in the red cloth coat and clasped in silver, and then down to the belt cinched around his slim waist, and to the black boots topping his knees, and then back up. “It suits you,” he says, voice low. “Would that Father could see you.”

“You would look fairer in it.”

“No, I would not.” One day, he decides, he’ll dress Clive in something as fine as this. 

Clive cocks his head to the side, and then pulls off his own gloves and sets to fiddling with Joshua’s hair and the complex braid his attendants spent their hours weaving and pinning it into. Clive picks at it, tugs at it, and brow scrunched with concentration. When he has it as he wants it, he moves to Joshua’s bangs, and only then does he step back to give him room to breathe.

“You’re missing something,” he says then. From his pocket he pulls out a bag of black velvet, cloth far finer than anything they’ve seen in Rosaria in the last seven years. He tips the contents out onto his hand—two bracelets of fire-red leather and a chain thin as a string from which a red stone hangs. “You didn’t think I’d forgotten, did you?”

Joshua allows him to clasp it around his wrist and tighten the strap, but when he goes to do the same for the other around his own wrist, he takes it from Clive and does it himself. They don’t look made for wearing every day, but he knows he won’t be taking his off again. Not until Clive does. 

“Thank you,” he says, catching Clive’s eye.

“Father’s gift—not mine.”

“But still.” 

Clive raises his head to the door. “Are you ready?”

Not remotely. But he inclines his head. “Yes.”

Clive parts from him at the doors of the throne room. Joshua is left to make his long walk alone, through the throne room, up the steps, and to the dais where Father’s throne sits. It isn't until he opens the doors that he sees Clive at last, with clear eyes. He’s wearing his usual blacks. The cloth has been brushed to soot-dark and his leather and metal shined until he has the gleam of oil spilled on water. His cloak and greaves and his soldier’s posture give him length. He appears more as a long shadow than a man.

The crown in Clive’s gloved hands would look better on his dark head than it would on Joshua’s. Father wore it only rarely. It isn’t a showy thing but fashioned of simple gold raised here and there into points. Joshua wants blasphemously to see it on Clive’s head. The intensity of the desire dries his mouth as he walks the last of the way to the steps and goes to his knees before Clive. The crowd to either side of him is a blur. Murdoch is there, and Byron, and a hundred other familiar faces that he cannot yet think of as subjects. Clive planned it all, and so the ceremony is blessedly simple. He wonders as it finishes how fiercely Clive fought for his comfort. For a man so beholden to memory and tradition, it’s a sweet gesture. This has none of the frill that accompanied Father’s ascension, from the accounts Joshua pored over with obsessive detail.

Joshua's ears are buzzing with nerves as he kneels. He hears only half of what's said and recites his part in the speech only by rote memorization and hours of practice.

“Look at me,” Clive whispers, when the words are said. 

Joshua does. Clive moves the hair from his face with a feather-light touch and then sets Father’s—now his—crown on his head, perches it there just above his brows. Clive pauses to look at his handwork. The crown is warm from his touch, and heavy. “Father,” Clive says, for Joshua’s hearing alone, “would be proud of you.”

He wets his lips, and murmurs, “And you? Are you proud?”

Clive's reply is quiet and sure, and his eyes are dark. “Always.”  

The party that follows is as raucous as the ceremony was not. After all the pomp and circumstance, he’s dragged to the main hall where the tables are all set and piled high with food and abundant wine. Speeches are made, and suffered through. Here, the frill that Clive spared him from in the ceremony. His nerves are still with him, still curdling his stomach despite the banquet, and Clive is too busy now to help him through this. He cannot beg Murdoch for answers, nor sit at Uncle’s side and let him take the lead. 

Joshua is archduke now. There will be no one to tell him how to do this ever again. A giddy, nauseating something rises up in him. 

He's glad Clive isn't there hovering over him; he would see it in an instant and drag Joshua off somewhere quiet where he could look concerned and ask how he was feeling and that—that might ruin him. 

Of course it isn't easy, wearing a crown, he tells himself. If it were, it would only mean he was doing it wrong.

It isn't until well past sunset that he's given a chance to take his leave, slipping out in the middle of some song everyone is singing that he only half knows the words to.

Outside of the hall, he pauses, letting the cool air of the castle flood is lungs. Clive isn't waiting for him up in their room, but Joshua hadn't expected him to be. It seems his brother is always busy, making himself useful. How much he’s done already, Joshua can only guess. But for once, he allows himself to be nothing more than grateful for it as he sits on the bed and lets the magnitude of what’s passed settle over him. It seems to him a physical weight. A minute to breathe. That’s all he needs. 

Only then does he notices the box sitting on the bed beside him.

It’s made of some dark wood, with no note attached, and no indication who its from. He picks it up gently, and test the weight. It’s light, and the little clasp on the front done in gold and fashioned almost in the Rosfield crest. Joshua is about to fiddle it open when a voice comes from the door. 

“There you are.” Clive stands there, arms folded over his chest. He nods to the box. “Surely, you didn’t think I’d miss a chance to spoil you.”

Joshua holds it up, ignoring the kick his heart gives in his chest. “But you already gave me something.” 

“The bracers are from Father. This is from me. It’s nothing.” 

Joshua opens it carefully. Inside, on a bed of pale silk, sits a single earring in carbon black with the Rosarian seal set in raised silver. He looks up and finds Clive smiling gently. “I had a new set made. Mine was getting worn out.” Clive touches his ear, and the earring he’s already wearing. 

“Will you put it on me?” Joshua asks.

Clive leaves the wall to come to him and with comical concentration pulls off his gloves and then pushes aside Joshua’s hair to remove the simple stud that’s stood as replacement for years. The weight of the new earring is heavier. It fits well, and the metal is already warm. When he’s finished, Joshua steps back from him; he cannot stand to be this close to him like this, wearing his gifts like this. The bracers, the earring. They are a matched set now, for all that Joshua has never felt less his equal.

“There’s something else,” Clive says after a moment, an odd look on his face.

“No, surely not. Clive, it’s too much already.”

“Please. I missed your birthday last year. Let me do this much.” He reaches out and ruffles Joshua’s hair, as if they’re children again, but it feels different. It feels affectionate in different ways. And Joshua has to look away from him then. 

Clive moves to the door and Joshua follows him as he’s bidden, down the hall and down the stairs, past groups of people still mid-party and quiet guards who drew the short straw, bowing and saluting at their passing. When they’re out of the castle and past the pools of lantern light that mark the doors, he reaches out and lets himself grip the edge of Clive’s cloak the way he wanted to the whole time. 

“Where are you taking me?” he asks as Clive leads him into the bailey. “Not for more training, I hope—I think my arm will fall off.”

Clive laughs. “Did you whine this much for Murdoch?”

“More.” But he’s led past the training yard and down past the rail fence until they reach the wall and the stables. Ambrosia is at the far end; Clive pauses at her stall to to pat her and Joshua says hello. She trills, and then Clive opens the gate of the stall. For a horrific moment, Joshua thinks Clive means to give him Ambrosia, but then he sees that she isn’t alone. A white chocobo chick is inside, tucked into a ball in its sleep. It comes awake at the sound and then jumps up and flap its wings. Joshua takes a knee and holds out a hand and it comes to him, nibbling at his fingers with its too-large beak. 

“One of hers,” Clive explains. “The least well behaved. I know you have your own, but I thought you’d handle him better than anyone else.” 

“He’s perfect,” Joshua says, barely above a whisper, the full magnitude of Clive’s gift sinking in. “Does he have a name?”

“No. You know I’m no good at naming them anyway.” 

“I’ll think of something.” Joshua lets the little chick pull at the bracer on his wrist before he pulls away and stands, dusting himself off. He doesn’t turn, because he can’t look at Clive right now. “Clive,” he says, keeping his voice light and neutral, “this is too much.”

He can hear Clive’s confusion behind him even if he can’t see it, and can imagine the set of his shoulders, the innocent frown. He’s never understood this between them—Clive spoils and spoils without understanding the line he’s toeing over and what Joshua will not be able to stop himself from doing if he crosses it first. “You give me too much.” He turns at last. “I can never thank you for all this.” 

He can, in fact, do exactly nothing that will make him worthy of Clive or his gifts.

And he thinks to himself, perhaps for the first time, I’m in love. 

His eyes sting. He blinks, wishing he could blame the hay dust all around them, knowing he can’t, and knowing he can’t hide it from Clive. He’s crying. There, in the stables, in the garb of archduke with his brother’s earring on his ear and his brother’s bracelet around his wrist, he’s crying. 

Clive’s eyes go comically alarmed. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—I know it’s been a long day,” he trips over his words, both hands up. “I ought to have waited.” 

“Oh, it isn’t that.” Joshua scrubs at his eyes and fights the lump in his throat like it’s a physical thing he’ll be able to overcome. “I don’t think archdukes are supposed to cry.”

“I won't tell anyone.” One of his hands finds Joshua’s shoulder, and Joshua turns into it, laying his head on Clive’s shoulder, but only for a moment. A wall sits between them, one he cannot climb or kick over. His arms he keeps at his side, his fists tensed. If he reaches out, if he touches Clive, he doesn’t trust himself not to stop. Clive takes it in stride, tapping his head against Joshua’s temple, the two of them breathing and sharing space and nothing else. The sounds of the distant party filter into their silence. 

He understands a truth then, one he once knew and had half forgotten: as much as Clive is his world, he’s Clive’s in turn. He learns a second truth, as their touch lingers, as Clive’s hand on his shoulder tenses, as his breath against Joshua's ear deepens. Ambrosia’s livery is sitting there, propped over the side of her stall, freshly polished. Clive’s placid joy, his giving of all these gifts, his absence after the festivities— “You’re leaving again, aren’t you.”

Clive swallows. The sound is loud, so close. “In the morning.”

“Is there aught I can do to convince you to stay?” 

He pulls back to the sight of Clive’s smile, indulgent as always, and a little sad. They both know there isn’t. 

“I am archduke now, I can negotiate with the Republic—”

“No, it’s…” Clive’s smile fades, and his eyes fall. “Joshua, it's not the south. It’s Drake’s Breath.”

Again, again, again. The Ironblood would never negotiate for what they believe to be sacred, and for what they did to Clive, Joshua doesn’t know if he could. He pulls back and lets the stone wall behind him catch him. Joshua braces himself against it, his shoulder blades pressed hard enough that the only thing keeping him from bruising is the thickness of the formalwear he’s clothed in, his arms wrapped tight about himself. 

“We’re spread thin,” Clive says. 

What he means is: it will be a long time, and as Joshua thinks it, he knows he’s too late. Time for them is running out, day by day, week by week. Clive will not use his eikon forever without consequence. He will be caught out again one day, and everyone knows better now than to keep the Demon of Rosaria alive. His brother is too big a threat, too impressive a name, too precious to him and too notorious for it. Joshua has run out of chances to save his brother from himself.

He swallows, feels his eyes prick again with tears, but this time he refuses to show them, even to this man. Especially to this man. “You knew, that day in Isolde,” he says. “You've known this whole time.” That sad cast of his gaze off the balcony, toward the sea. Obvious now, all that Uncle and Clive would not tell him. 

“I’m sorry, I couldn’t tell you. Not before your crowning.”

“No, no. No apologies between us. I only wish it wasn’t so. I want you to stay." He allows himself the selfishness of honesty for this one moment. He holds his arms tighter to his body, gloved fingers digging into the joints of his elbows until they ache. 

Clive swallows, his throat bobbing in the torchlight. “...I could not place a crown on your head one day only to see you lose it the next.” 

How long, he wonders, can it go on like this? How long can they? But he will not rail at Clive. All that he wants to do and say will do neither of them any good now. 

Clive looks not at him but at the night around them, the lights of the castle bright and glassy from their distance, reflecting the red of the Rosarian flags hung all about and casting the night rosy-pink. For the third time in as many days, he thinks how young Clive looks, as if this is some new fact of his brother he’s only now figured out. Twenty and two and sweet-faced and forced to spend so many of those years trapped in duty. It will break him. Eventually, it will. This game of long odds they’ve played over and over will one day come up a loss. 

All of it is closing in about him, as heavy and sure as the crown Clive set on his head, and then Clive is close to him, closer than anything else and filling his sight. “Do you remember what I told you that night at Phoenix Gate?” 

Joshua’s breath catches in his chest. He hadn’t realized Clive remembered any of that night. “When I snuck out to find you? How could I forget. You were always,” he laughs to himself, “smoothing my feathers when I got them ruffled.” Here he is, doing it again.

“I told you I was born to be your Shield, and I meant it.”

“...You were also born to be my brother, then.” A thing far simpler than a Shield. A thing far more needed. 

“And I told you I would never let you down.”

“Clive, you don’t. You never could.” Even if they’d had to flee Rosaria that day and scrape a living from some backwater in Dhalmekia or the slums of Oriflamme or—or a farm in Waloed, they would have been together, and that would have been enough. It’s such a selfish thought, it horrifies him. He can still hear the bustle outside, all the people celebrating him, relying on him, ready to fight for him, and he would leave them all for another day with the man he loves. A man who does not even know it.

Neither of them move to close the distance between them, but there’s so little of it, it hardly matters. Clive is boxing him in, their shared heat making the night warm. 

“It’s your party,” Clive says at last, nodding to the world outside. “You ought to be enjoying it.” 

Joshua pulls himself together, by force of will. A deep breath, and another, and then he can look at Clive and be what Clive needs him to be in that moment. “I cannot,” he says, in forced lightness. “You see, I have this brother who seems to think himself unworthy of good drink and good food. I couldn’t deprive him of good company, too.” 

“He sounds like a troublesome man.” 

“Beyond belief." Joshua laughs, the sound more gasp than humor. "But he’s worth it. You know that, don’t you?” He catches Clive’s gaze, unpins his arms from his body. “You mean the world to me.”

“I know,” Clive says, and Joshua wonders if he’s imagining the red high in his cheeks. He swallows, and scratches at his neck. “Well. I may be a bucket of trouble to you, but at least I’ve given you somewhere to push your vegetables off on, eh?”

Joshua scowls. “It’s only carrots. Founder, will you never let me live that down.”

“The day you eat a full meal, maybe. Is it that you’re worried they’ll make your hair more orange?”

“Clive, if my hair looked as yours did, I would not cast stones.” 

Clive laughs at him, full and loud. “And here I thought you fond of my hair.” 

“Ugh.” Joshua pushes at him, without any real aggression, and Clive laughs again and comes back as if to mess at his hair. Joshua ducks away. “I guess it is quite fetching when you let it get long.” 

Now, he isn’t imagining the red coloring his brother’s cheeks. “Then I suppose all this fighting has all been worth it.”

“For the hair? Certainly.”

“Only that.” 

That's the last he sees of Clive almost until morning. He's busy all night making preparations and Joshua is caught constantly in conversation with drunken courtiers and once pulled into an impromptu dance with Wade and Tyler when he makes the mistake of walking by the barracks. It's well into the early hours before he finds his way back to bed, and back to Clive. But sleep flees from him. They spend their few stolen hours pressed tight together, a hand on his cheek and lips to his temple, their bodies drawn so close he forgets which pieces of him are his and which are Clive’s. In the quiet and the dark, it’s easier. No need to talk his way around it, to justify it. In sleep, all is allowed. By morning, his arm is dead from the pressure of Clive resting on it, and his fingers ache from holding the hem of Clive’s shirt.

“You'll see me off?” Clive asks when the sky starts to grey with dawn. His voice is rough with more than sleep.

He needn’t have asked. But maybe he feels it, too, that something nagging in the back of Joshua’s head that says don’t let him go. 

The mere fact of Clive’s asking makes him want to hold his brother all the tighter. “Of course.” 

And so he does.

The new dress feels strange on him as he stands by the gate, watching Clive and his retinue ready themselves for the ride west. In the uniform, he feels not like a brother watching a brother torn from his side by duty but like what he is: an archduke watching his commander fight a war for him. 

The order he might give, the order for Clive to stay at his side, remains in his throat, where it's sat all morning. Clive would not listen. It would break them for him to try. 

When all is ready, Clive comes to him and hugs him, one-armed, and then mounts Ambrosia. “Don't get into trouble,” Clive orders, and then adds, “Your Grace.”

Joshua manages the ghost of a smile. “I never do.” 

Clive gives the order for his men to depart. Joshua watches, oddly tense, all thought fleeing before the worry that takes him whenever Clive departs like this. I might not see him again. It's a thought so dark that to even think it seems like a curse, yet he has no way to rid himself of it. His breath shortens. 

“Wait!” he orders when Clive is almost through the gate.

Clive does. Joshua comes to his side and beckons him to lean down, as he did when they were young. Under the eyes of all his assembled men, all their attendants, all those giving farewells, he clasps Clive's head between his black leather gloves and draws him close, as if to whisper something in his ear. He presses his lips over Clive's scar, and then to the corner of his mouth, and then to his mouth in full. A proper kiss. Not a blessing. Chaste, yes, but not easily excused. He wishes it were more even as he lingers there. How many times has he imagined the touch of that mouth? When his brother laughs, when he grins across the table, when he looks as he does now... Far more innocent than his years have allowed him to be.

It lasts no more than a heartbeat. He pulls away, and Clive remains there, gaze wide and blank. He touches the spot where Joshua’s mouth was—the spot where Joshua kissed him, and says nothing. No denial, no question, not even in his gaze. Joshua will replay this moment in the weeks to come, over and over again, searching for a sign in the memory of Clive's face.

“You'll come back to me,” Joshua says roughly. “And that is an order.” His first.

Clive is slow to answer, but when he does, its firm, and low, and sure. “Of course, I will. I always do.”

Joshua wishes, desperately, to believe him.