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The first thing Cassandra thought about when Whitestone was freed from the Briarwoods’ control wasn’t what comes next?
She thought about several other things first, really. Some things she didn’t have the time to think about; some things she didn’t have the conscious mind to think about; some things she just couldn’t let her mind reach for. She thought about her family -- her parents, her siblings, the ones whose bodies she had sealed away, whose fates only their epitaphs would record. She thought about the one who was still alive – Percy, Percy, Percy – what he said, what he didn’t say, what she needed to hear. She thought about her guilt, the people she had failed, her people, her home, she had hurt them – when does it become your own fault that things went wrong? Percy didn’t blame her, Percy didn’t think what happened to their home was her fault, Percy – wasn’t there, he didn’t know, he didn’t see what she did those five years, didn’t see Delilah make a mockery of the dead when she paraded them around the streets in their bloodstained clothes, didn’t see Sylas pick his victims like names from a hat and drag them down the ruined carpeting of the entry hall, didn’t save her, he left her, he left her–
Percy didn’t know what he was talking about.
Eighteen, barely beyond the label of a child, and now the city’s eyes were all on her. Half of Whitestone’s remaining population hated her – not that she could blame them, it was her fault anyway – and the other half were so broken and traumatized that she wasn’t sure there was anything anyone could do for them, least of all the person who may as well have stabbed her own family in the back for all the good she did their city. She didn’t even try to fight the instructions her captives gave her, she lied and tricked and ruined the lives of their people, she betrayed them… and still, they waited for her instruction. Her, not Percy, who at least was the elder of the two of them, who at least had actually done some measurable amount of good, who at least had tried to drive out the people who killed their family. Not Percy, who for all his foolish choices, his pact with a demon, his trusting people who he shouldn’t have, his hurting people he shouldn’t have, still stopped them, where she stood idly by at best and actively tried to get in the way at worst. Not Percy, who was smarter than her, stronger than her, a better fighter, a better friend, he had become so much more than he was before and she had become nothing at all–
“Cass?”
Her thoughts were interrupted by a voice, low and tired but tinged with concern she didn’t want or deserve.
“Oh… Percy.”
“Are you alright?”
Of course not. How can you even ask me that? How can you think for even a second that after everything I’ve been through, everything I’ve seen and done and lost, that I could possibly be alright? Do you hear yourself? You left me, you left me there alone, and now all of this is my fault, all these lives, all this loss, this grief, and you ask me if I’m alright? Why don’t you go ask someone who actually matters in all this? Why don’t you go talk to your people? Why don’t you go talk to your friends? Why are you talking to me–
“Cass?”
“Sorry, I was… lost in thought.”
“I could tell.” He meant to laugh, she thought, but it crackled and died in his throat, the stale, dry air of the upstairs hallway suffocating any attempt at humor. “I asked if you were alright.”
“I’m fine,” was all she could say.
“I… am not certain I believe that,” he responded. And really, she couldn’t have expected otherwise – she wouldn’t have believed it if someone else said it like she said it. Even in her tired, lonely haze she could hear the distinct lack of honesty in her tone, the weight of both the last few days and the last five years dragging her voice down in each of their own thousand-pound ways.
“I am,” she said, trying in vain to lift that weight. “I promise.” Not that my promises mean anything anymore.
“You don’t need to lie to me, you know. I want to help you.”
“I don’t need help,” her voice snapped harder than she’d like, an angry edge cutting her tone. She breathed, trying to recover. “I’m sure there are people who need you a lot more than I do right now.”
“I don’t want to talk to those people,” he said, and he crossed the hallway, holding a hand out halfway to touching her. Hesitating, asking for permission.
She turned away.
“Well, they need talking to. So if you’re not going to do it, I suppose I’ll have to.” She tried, perhaps in vain, to mask the pain in her voice. “After all, you’re leaving again, right?”
“I… I don’t want to.”
He meant it, and that made it worse.
“But you have to.”
“Yes. My friends and I have work to be done, and I… I don’t think that I am what Whitestone needs now.”
“Do you think I am?”
She wasn’t sure how she wanted him to interpret that. Angry? Bitter? Sad? Afraid?
“I think you will be much better at this than me,” he said, and let his hand drop to his side.
“They hate me, Percy. And after everything I’ve done, I don’t blame them.Do you really think I’m better equipped for this than you?”
“You’re better with people,” he offered, “you’ve always been better with people.”
“I’m not better with people. I just don’t know when to shut up.”
“People need someone to listen to,” and he raised his hand to her again. She didn’t turn away this time, but she didn’t reach for him, letting him choose whether she was worth coming closer to. “You’re better prepared for this than I am, and that’s considering four and a half years’ worth of etiquette lessons that I have and you don’t.”
“Delilah was big on etiquette, you know.”
“I wouldn’t,” he said, and that hung there for a moment. The air felt drier in her mouth.
“No. I guess not.”
“Cass… I want you to know that I’m sorry.” He gently, cautiously placed a hand on her shoulder.
“I know.”
“I’m sorry for leaving. If I had known, if I had had the chance, I would have come back for you. You know that, right?”
“I know.”
“I want you to be okay,” he said, and she felt his hand shake a little. He left the other part unsaid – and I know you’re not right now.
“I will be,” she offered as a reply, weak and defeated.
“I know,” it was his turn to say. But he had more to say than she did, she supposed, because he followed with “but I want you to be okay now.”
“That’s a little unrealistic.”
“Maybe so. But I came to try anyway.” He smiled at her, and as she looked at his face she could see the same exhaustion she felt mirrored in the way his eyes sank, the dark bags beneath them a clear indicator of just how tired he was.
“I wanted to hate you.”
“For leaving?”
“Yes. I wanted to be angry. I wanted to blame you for leaving me here to suffer.”
“Do you?”
“I tried,” she said, and her voice cracked. He stepped closer to her, not quite confident enough in either of their mental states to pull her in but desperate to close the distance.
“It has burned a hole in my chest since well before I knew you were alive,” he said, and made eye contact with her. “I wanted nothing more than to have had you with me. All those years alone, culminating in the idea that I would rot in a cell hundreds of miles from here without ever having avenged you or them… I would have done anything to have you by my side.”
“But you’re still leaving,” she muttered, and his face fell.
“I… yes. I am still leaving.”
“Do they make you happy?” She asked, and she did want to hear a yes. She did want him to be happy… even if she wasn’t going to be there to see it.
“Yes,” he answered, quick and confident enough that she knew immediately that he meant it. “Yes, they very much do.”
There was a pause, and then: “Good.”
“But you do too, Cass. I want-”
“You want me to be happy. I know. You want me to be happy, you want me to be okay, you want me to be safe. I know, Percy. You don’t need to keep saying it.”
“But you need to keep hearing it.”
His words cut through the invisible barrier she had wrapped around herself, straight to the center of the problem, the heart of everything swirling around in her head.
Nobody had said that to her and meant it for five years.
He was trying to make up for lost time.
She didn’t realize there were tears in her eyes until they began to roll down her cheeks, dripping off her chin and onto the dark fabric of her blouse, leaving tiny stains that did nothing to stand out against the blood drying on her clothes. She tried to blink them back, but it only made them fall with more force, and before she knew it she was trying not to openly wail in the hallways that she knew the echoes of all too well. Then Percy was there, wrapping his arms around her and holding her against his chest, and then she was balling her fists in the back of his coat, trying to muffle the noises of her chest-heaving sobs in the stiff fabric of his dress shirt.
It could have been three minutes or three hours before she let go, she wouldn’t have known the difference. She cried until she could regulate herself well enough to pull away and let go of him, swallowing hard around the lump in her throat and trying to wipe the tear tracks off her face.
“I love you,” he said, hesitant in the face of such raw emotion, and that was the Percy she knew – a little awkward, a little stilted, but ultimately genuine, ultimately kind.
“I love you too,” she responded, voice quiet but purposeful. “And I will be okay. I really will.”
“I know you will,” he pulled her back in for a hug and it was all she could do not to break down again. “You are right for these people. What happened was not your fault, and they will understand that. I promise I will come home, and everything will be okay, but in the meantime Whitestone needs you. And honestly, Cass… I know you do better when you have something to keep you busy.”
“It runs in the family,” she cracked a smile.
“It certainly does,” and he wiped a stray tear from her cheek and looked her in the eye. “You will be okay.”
“You promise?” All of a sudden she was back in the halls of the castle ten years ago, a child asking for the comfort of someone she could trust. Asking the twins to wait up for her, asking Vesper to keep a secret.
“I promise,” he said.
And despite every lie and every broken promise she had heard for the last five years, she believed him.
There was only one thing left to think about.
What comes next?