Chapter Text
When Terence is seven, his mother walks out. She sits on the side of his bed when she thinks he's asleep and tells him that trying to save her marriage by having him was a mistake. By morning, she's gone, and not a word of her remains except for the note on the dining table telling his father that he is never to contact her.
Terence's brothers are almost ten years his senior. The younger is broken up but hides it well, and the eldest had seen it all coming, probably since Terence was born in the first place. He knows as well as Terence does why their mother left, though Terence admits in the privacy of midnight that their knowledge comes from utterly different places with a gap between them so insurmountable that he couldn't possibly try to explain it.
He can't quite recall if he was five or six when the dreams started. Nightmares, too, that refused to wash away with the morning as all dreams should. At first, they merely scared him and he would run to his parents' bed. He'd spend the rest of the night trying to get back to sleep on the couch, curled against his mother's side. He'd forget after a day or two, but then the same visions would come back and they'd be clearer, and when they came back like that they never left.
A year on and the dreams still come and Terence wonders who he might have grown into had fate left him alone.
If, perhaps, Clive Rosfield hadn't done what he'd done a long, long time ago.
That's the best Terence can guess at, the most probable hypothesis in a sea of impossibilities. He'd never met Clive personally. He'd only met his brother very briefly, only read the words Joshua had penned after—after everything, desperate for a sign.
There hadn't been one. And instead of anything that would soothe that grief, he has… this. An old life, an old self, and whatever it is he's been set out for in this place. This Valisthea that has all but forgotten what she used to be.
It makes for a crowded mind at seven years old. He struggles to compartmentalize. His mother wonders at making a doctor's appointment about his sudden bouts of quietness and eeriness. Terence doesn't mean to appear so, but when the memories are so clear in his head he finds it exceedingly difficult to pretend that he is who he is and not who he was. He prefers seeming eerie rather than mad.
His mother forgets and muses about it in turns for six months, and in the end, she leaves without bringing him anywhere. Terence is too old for his bones and knows why she leaves. He can't blame her for being unable to stand his father's suffocating thumb, though the part of him that is most certainly still a child wails at the gaping hole left behind.
Seven is a hard year.
It's his father who finally brings Terence to a doctor after he spends too many consecutive days crying in the schoolhouse for no particular reason. Mostly so that the teacher will stop broaching the topic, because Terence refuses to even attempt to convey the mixture of confusion and grief, especially not to just anyone about town. The doctor tells them quite plainly that Terence is too young to lose a parent. His brothers might be fine—they hardly are, but they don't cry so much—but Terence needs help adjusting.
They all need help, he thinks one night, sunk into one of the small pockets of peace that he occasionally manages to grasp.
Had his memories come to him later in life, he might have had an easier time of it. It's impossible to know, though. The books in the schoolhouse don't cover topics such as reincarnation and how to cope. All he has are these small moments when he knows that somehow, the hardship will either pass or become tolerable.
He knows that much. He lived it before. The grief never really did go away.
Of all the dreams and nightmares that come to him, filling in the tattered gaps of his once-life, Dion's eyes haunt him the most.
—
Terence's father's idea of adjustment is to declare that their home is no longer livable—it isn't; his mother's absence is like a rotting gap between the teeth where one was harshly yanked out—and then relocate them immediately upon the advent of summer. Terence's brothers, old enough to strike out on their own, do so with only a regretful look back at Terence. Were Terence not outwardly a child on the cusp of eight years old, he would have words about how all of this is the opposite of the recommended adjustment, but as things are, his only option is to continue waiting things out. He understands, just like before, why his brothers leave as soon as they can, even if he chafes at the decision to leave him behind.
He and his father move several hours away, to the outskirts of a city whose heart was once a Fallen airship.
Centuries upon those that had already passed, the Fallen still persist, repurposed as their creations have been. Terence is almost in awe. Mostly, he's still just trying to tread water as best he can.
Their new neighbourhood is quiet. Each house is farther and farther away from each other, a bid at privacy and wealth in the abundant gardens and copses of pine and maple. There are more schools, but they're in the city proper; Terence will have to take a bus when classes begin again. To top everything off, they seem to be the only family with a child.
Separated from everything they knew, Terence's brothers have nothing for it but to make new friends and new lives wherever it is they've wound up. Terence, left alone, gets lucky.
His father is a man of principle despite everything else he is, taking appearances with great seriousness. He leaves his son to unpack while he makes his rounds about the neighbourhood. Those who aren't home receive a brief note of introduction. Somewhere along the way, though, his pilgrimage ends early. He returns to their new home to interrupt Terence in the middle of unpacking his bedroom and informs him that there is a man two roads down with a son his age.
Terence would honestly prefer more time alone—more time to come to terms with the changes, more time to prepare to pretend that he's halfway normal for the stranger who is the only other person his age here—but his father is a man of his word, even if that means dragging everyone else with him. On top of that, or hand in hand with it, Terence can no longer rely on his mother's presence to distract his father from making a target out of his apparent strangeness. Whenever possible, he stands and does as he is told, unable to use a still-growing body to defend himself otherwise.
Two roads down is a forty-five-minute walk, perhaps thirty without the additional stops made to the doors his father hadn't visited previously, perhaps fifteen with a bicycle. Two roads down is a long gravel road marked by a hidden driveway sign that has been half-eaten by overgrowth. Terence worries only briefly; as they walk down the driveway, he sees that the overgrowth by the road is clearly a farce. The land is tended to with careful hands where the road has fallen out of sight, likely left to its own devices to deter solicitors from thinking that they're still in a neighbourhood of wealth. The trees are old and tall and the garden paths that Terence can see are labyrinthine. It's as if he's entered another realm, a true bubble of privacy.
A two-storey home greets them at the end of the gravel road, an old but well-kept house. A shaded porch wraps around one side from the front to the back, the foundation masked by pretty beds of white and yellow lilies and the columns decorated with artfully tended ivy. The front door is open, waiting, and when a man who must be the owner of the property steps out of it, Terence nearly stops in his tracks.
The man has lines on his face from stress and kindness, but mostly stress. He has some grey in his blond hair, but it's hardly visible at his age, an age carried with pride in his shoulders. Terence only knows it from memory—memory he shouldn't have if not for—
It's not the mouth and cadence of an emperor, but it's not far, either. He still commands a certain respect, still carries a certain height of class in his appearance. He's not the same man, and yet.
Terence doesn't hear him at first. He's caught on the realization that the man he once knew as emperor, the man who is nothing more than Sylvestre here, doesn't recognize him at all. He looks down at Terence with the cordial eyes and smile of a man first meeting any child.
He's caught on the realization that if he's here, and Sylvestre is here, then—
There is a shadow in the still-open doorway, a pale figure lurking in the dimness within. Terence can only catch a sleeve, a shoulder belonging to a child. Sylvestre's son.
Terence turns his attention back to the conversation as best he can, heart in his throat.
"You'll have to forgive my son if he seems… rude," Sylvestre says. He sounds tired, reluctant to voice what comes next after a faint sigh. "He recently lost his mother, you see."
Terence can feel his father's eye on the crown of his head. The hand that comes down on his shoulder is firm.
"My condolences for your loss," his father says, some heaviness in his own words. "What a terrible thing to have in common."
The men pity each other for a moment, wondering equally at the chances. Terence doesn't linger long on Sylvestre's son losing a mother whilst not seeming to have lost a wife, himself. The revelation has another outcome, one far more important to Terence.
Sylvestre's son finally shifts just enough to peek out of the doorway. He does look Terence's age, though he's shorter, thinner, paler, and his eyes are more tired. Dion's eyes—
For one breathless moment, Terence is hot with anger. He still doesn't know what has brought them here, nor how, but they are here nonetheless, and yet—he'd thought, once, that perhaps Clive Rosfield had bestowed some additional blessing upon Valisthea. Some byproduct of saving it that was capable of dragging their souls from the aether. Perhaps, if Terence allowed himself some wishfulness, as a gift. A reward for the roles they'd played.
But if this is a reward, then why does Dion still suffer even here? For this is Dion; as much as they loved each other as men, they knew each other just as well as boys, and his golden eyes never ceased their haunting.
He hadn't looked at Terence in the end, not directly. So rare were the moments that Dion could not face what was before him that Terence still wonders if there was anything he could have done at all to change things, even if he had thought of something at the time.
Dion doesn't look at him now, either. He doesn't seem to look at anything, though his eyes draw toward his father as he gestures toward Terence.
"Come now, Dion," Sylvestre urges him, gentle if not also stilted. "Why not say hello?"
Dion shuffles onto the porch. He appears cared for enough, the paleness no child should have notwithstanding. He waves toward Terence, eyes pinned somewhere below Terence's face instead of meeting him directly. A stone forms in Terence's belly, sinking and sinking.
Conversation drifts on between their fathers, but Terence recognizes this silence—he has it himself. Dion doesn't want to be here; he'd rather be alone, unbothered by strangers asking things of him.
Worst of all, Dion doesn't recognize him.
–
They are still staged to be friends—or playmates at best—regardless of who would like to be close to the other. Classes may not yet be in session, but their fathers have work in the city and time they'd prefer to spend without the potential ruckus of children.
Not that there is any potential ruckus to begin with. Terence no longer has his brothers to mock-fight, and Dion seems reluctant to open his mouth at all.
He's willing to look at Terence now, at least, if only from the corners of his eyes. It still isn't right, though. Terence doesn't know what to do about that, yet. They've only just met again, he can't possibly ask what troubles Dion so.
They're told to familiarize themselves with the neighbourhood; Terence is barely allowed the time to take heed of the fact that Dion may have only recently landed here as well before they're sent on their way, left to spend the working days with each other.
Mostly, they bike around the area in relative silence, mapping out the hidden driveways and the edges of the densely wooded wilderness. Terence tries to pry answers out of Dion about life in this place, but Dion confirms that he is no more familiar with it or the city nearby than Terence is. Beyond the bounds of his home, he only knows of a creek that runs behind it. Otherwise, he only nods or murmurs an answer to Terence's questions that Terence feels too awkward to admit he cannot hear.
It's a dead-end. Terence lets his feeble first attempt at reaching out fall apart altogether. They return to silence as they find the most straightforward route from Dion's home to Terence's, and then set about a winding path back, merely following an order as they learn the turns. Terence lets Dion decide which way they go and resolves to think of better ways to connect—to remember how to be a child again.
It's to his surprise, then, that the silence breaks differently.
"What happened to your mother?" Dion asks while they're only somewhat lost on the way back to his hidden home.
He only sounds somewhat reluctant to ask, too. He evidently understands the question to be intimate, but it's a matter of curiosity toward their single shared commonality. Terence can imagine the puzzle in his mind—I know what happened to mine, but what about yours?
Terence tries not to sound bitter about sharing this.
"She left," he says matter-of-factly. "They, um, got divorced."
He doesn't think his parents ever did truly divorce, or that one would have ever been granted to her whilst his father's front was so well put together, but it sounds better like that. Less pitiable.
"It's just my father and I," Terence continues. He wonders only briefly if he should have reversed his grammar. He keeps forgetting, but surely eight is a fine enough age to be well-spoken.
He's probably close to seeming eerie again.
"What about you?"
Dion turns his gaze fully to the ground. Instead of pedaling, he starts pushing his bicycle forward with his feet on the ground, and Terence has to slow down with him to catch his thin, quiet response. "She got sick. Nothing helped, and then I had to come here. I don't—I'm new here, too."
There is no perfect world, Terence remembers. Not even in rebirth. Or whatever this truly is. Perhaps he's reliving hopelessness in his death.
"I'm sorry," he says.
"At least—you have brothers, right?" Dion asks with a there and gone again look from his peripherals.
Terence doesn't remember his brothers being mentioned before, but half of their introduction is a blur in his mind anyway. He shakes his head. "They moved away; they were old enough, and…"
And neither of them wanted to take him with them.
He shakes his head again. "I don't have anyone else."
"Oh," Dion mutters, barely making any sound at all. He comes to a stop, then, and looks at Terence almost surreptitiously, hands flexing around the handlebars of his bicycle.
Terence tries not to hold his breath, tries not to imagine a crack prying open.
But then Dion says, slowly, cautiously, and painfully optimistically, "You can have me, if you want."
His words, the childlike hope, could bring Terence to his knees were he not already seated with his feet balanced firmly on the ground. A place long, long gone flickers through his mind, a glowing hall filled with soft conversation and whispers as a young prince sets about making his first friends among the court. He was lonely then, too. A great many had returned home disappointed that evening.
Terence had gotten lucky.
Perhaps he still is lucky.
It takes everything in him to not cry outright, so much that all he can do instead is nod and hope his smile doesn't bear anything more of his swirling emotions than his happiness and relief.
He asks, "What do you want to do first?" And all his efforts to keep himself from breaking on the gravel road are all nearly wasted, smashed into naught but air at the small but very real smile that graces Dion's tired face.
Great Greagor, Terence prays as Dion tells him there is something he'd like to show him, if you still yet look after us, please. Please.
–
They are fast friends despite the beginning. Terence hesitates to say it’s natural; he feels like he is simply falling back into old habits, some long forgotten even before this time and place. Most people are a child only once, after all.
Dion shows him the creek, first. It winds behind his home in a shallow bed that floods during the spring. The grass around it floods then, too, but in the summer—and during that first sunny hour he traverses it with Terence—it’s overrun by sprawling purple wyverntails. Terence wonders at them from a distance while bees and hummingbirds flit to and fro.
He’d only seen them later in his life, before. His years had finally caught up to him and with the repair of the blighted lands had come blossoms he’d never seen in all the decades before. Once extinct in Storm’s wilderness, violet wyverntails had sprouted all along her northeastern coast until hardly any other flower could be spotted.
He has to blink the memory away.
Next is the gardens which Dion’s father inherited with the rest of the house. Gardeners used to tend to the flowerbeds and shrubs in the early morning on weekends, but Dion’s father had given him the responsibility of watering them recently, likely to distract him from his recent loss, Terence believes.
Last is a cabinet in the kitchen which Sylvestre had set aside for Dion during the hours when no one is home to cook. It isn’t large or particularly full, but by Dion’s account it is enough that he doesn’t need to use the stove that he isn’t quite tall enough for yet, and he has no great need of the refrigerator or the ice box.
Dion gladly shares some of that food with Terence. He also tiptoes to the refrigerator as if his father were around to catch him taking the heavy pitcher of lemonade from inside. Terence quietly remembers stealing from the kitchens of their youth countless times, another secret well-kept between them as if Dion would have ever been punished for something so small.
Terence, perhaps, but never Dion.
He wonders if this Sylvestre would do so as the days and weeks go by. By Terence’s reckoning, he doesn’t quite know what to do with his son. Were it not for her illness taking her, Dion would still be living with his mother, leaving Sylvestre free of the responsibilities of a father. As it stands, Sylvestre doesn’t appear to be a hard man. Just distant and uncertain.
Terence’s father would ensure the lesson was never forgotten. Terence doesn’t need to risk it to know it.
Dion’s father, on the other hand, doesn’t tell them to stay out of trouble so much as he muses about whether he should purchase new first aid supplies before his son and his new friend start climbing trees in the woods and not after they suffer an accident.
Terence assures him with confidence that they won’t have such accidents because they know to be careful enough to avoid them. While Sylvestre smiles with what he’s sure is true warmth, Terence sees through it as clearly as he knows the actual root of his confidence.
So much remains the same about Dion. Terence is nearly pained with the knowledge. But if all the rest of Valisthea has changed, then so have they. They won’t be falling from trees because they won’t be climbing them in the first place.
Because Dion is deathly afraid of heights.
Terence had learned of it early on when he’d spotted a small treehouse in the garden, and Dion had explained that his father had meant to build it for him as a way of welcoming him, an attempt to offer somewhere comfortable and private. But the interior is empty, he’d clarified. It had been built shortly before his arrival, and the days after had seen his father relocate his home office to the second storey so that Dion could stand to look out his bedroom window without freezing at even that small height.
Terence had listened in near disbelief when Dion admitted it, his cheeks red with embarrassment.
“You can go up if you want,” he’d said hastily, seeking to repair some self-inflicted slight upon his image. “I… I can’t.”
Dion, of all people, afraid of heights. Terence aches to know the cause, but can’t bring himself to ask. Dion had been sheepish enough just admitting it.
But Sylvestre knows of it and readily accommodates it, too. Perhaps he carries some hope that in coming out of his shell around Terence, Dion will overcome his phobia as well. Perhaps that is the same reason he seems ready to allow them to get into trouble as young boys so often do. Perhaps, this time, his care holds fast in his heart.
If they have truly returned to this world, that, if nothing else, would be a boon.