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The palace of the kingdom of Corona was dark in a way that it had not been in decades. Riots in the streets and inconsistent guerilla warfare had done what years of economic instability and debt could not: the royals were no longer promoting the illusion of wealth and had instead hunkered down in the dark to lick their wounds. The riots had finally been suppressed this morning, and the ringleaders of the guerilla fighters arrested and slated for execution by hanging, but this victory had been costly for the crown. They did not have the funds to post soldiers inside the palace; furthermore, there had been quite the embarrassing revelation that the second prince and his wife had in fact been involved with the rebellion and, as if to add insult to injury, had not desired to wed at all, not in the slightest.
The crown had achieved a pyrrhic victory here, too: some months prior, there had been a slight incident with the theft of the lost prince’s crown; in exchange for accepting his story about the crown’s recovery, the second prince had given up the fight against his marriage. The wedding had come about as the crown wished, but the second prince had been bedridden ever since, mind and body destroyed by an illness he had concealed for far too long. They had claimed that the second prince was still capable of fulfilling his marital duties despite this; whether or not that was true was anyone’s guess, but the fact that the princess consort was presently under house arrest for attempted regicide painted a certain terrible picture for those who knew both the second prince and the princess consort.
Despite this, however, there was no rescue mission planned for either. The solid majority of their allies had already been killed or arrested for treason; those who remained were rational enough to know that such a rescue was a fool’s game. The king and queen had enough sense to keep a tight hold on any heir, even a dying one, even one as yet unborn. The princess consort especially would be kept under lock and key, both for her attempted treason and in order to ensure that an heir was born properly; though the second prince, severely ill and having fulfilled his duty as a royal, would be less stringently guarded, any rescue attempt for him carried its own dangers. Odds were that the second prince was in no condition to be moved, and having a body on their hands would be bad enough—the fact that the body would belong to royalty would be worse. Rescuing him would be a burden, nothing more; the only good it would do would allow him a death with dignity, surrounded by those who loved him. And no matter how worth it that may have felt, it would do nothing for the country.
But as slim as the benefits of an enemy’s pyrrhic victory were, those benefits still existed, and here they were manifest in the current state of the palace. Dark, improperly guarded, and silent, the palace was almost a gift to intruders—particularly intruders who knew the lay of the land, and who had a reasonable expectation for what they might face on the inside, such as the surviving former allies of the princess consort and second prince. On the night before the execution of the rebel ringleaders, two hooded figures slipped into the palace like fish down a waterfall, picking their silent way towards the royal chambers like inevitability, like time. They did not look at each other, and they did not speak, but they walked as one, in single file, and not one living soul saw their entry.
The first cloaked intruder was tall and bony, completely hidden in the dark fabric of his robe. He wore boots, well-made and well-worn, whose soles did not make a sound on the marble floors. He walked as though he could navigate the castle blindfolded, though he carried himself with a sense of purpose totally anathema to any courtier who might have once navigated these walls. In contract, the second hooded figure looked like even more of an outsider; his feet were bare and dirty, and the end of a thick braid was visible underneath the hem of his cloak, brushing against the floor, dust obscuring what was once a very pale pink. His posture was wary and stiff, but this did not stop him from carrying himself with every iota of the grace his compatriot lacked. Were it not for the identical cloaks, an observer might have sworn that the two came from entirely different worlds, and they would have been right.
The intruders entered a side hallway, one without any windows or lights. The first paused for a moment, the second took a breath and began to chant quietly under his breath. Something down his back began to glow; the end of his braid shone with a pink light that illuminated every inch of ground around him. It was, without a doubt, far brighter than the intruders had expected; the first swore under his breath, picking up the pace, as the second yanked the tail end of his glowing hair out of sight, following hot on the first’s heels. They stopped about halfway down, in front of a tapestry; the first intruder ran his fingers over the colorful threads, searching, until the second shoved him out of the way and made quick work of the thing, tugging at seven embroidered threads and then ducking underneath it and through the now-revealed hidden door. The first intruder followed, and in the light from the second’s hair one could just barely make out his expression underneath his hood, lips twisted in displeasure. They waited.
“Where next?” whispered the second intruder.
“What, you don’t know?” the first shot back.
“No. Obviously not. Why would I?”
“You knew how to open the passageway.”
“I thank you kindly for noticing, Captain Obvious, I wasn’t quite sure,” hissed the second intruder. “Just because I can open one secret passageway doesn’t mean I have the entire floorplan memorized. You’re the one who led us here.”
“Because it’s the only secret passageway I know, and you lit us up like a bonfire!” The first intruder sighed, gritted his teeth, pushed back his hood and tugged his fingers through his own hair, dark blue and short. “I know it leads to multiple places, including the Hall of Mirrors, but I only know one path through it, and that path doesn’t end anywhere near the Hall. Unfortunately.”
“Well, where does it lead?”
The first intruder bit his lip, looked away, cheeks flushing. He did not say a word.
“Izumi Iori. Where—”
“To his room.”
“What on earth were you doing in—?” The second intruder thought better of the question, the hate in his eyes palpable as he looked at his companion. Izumi Iori—petty thief, folk hero, dirty traitor, loyal knight. At one time, he and the second prince had been completely inseparable; even after Iori had stolen the crown of the lost prince and wracked up his first treason charge, the second prince had believed in him, stood firmly in his corner, sacrificed himself for Iori’s freedom. The second intruder knew this well—he had been in the room when it happened, tied up next to Iori for the same charges (though he’d stolen the crown not from the palace but from Izumi Iori), and had seen the sacrifice the second prince had made. For Izumi Iori’s sake—because it had to be, because if he’d done it for the second intruder, then the second intruder would have to return to his tower, the highest thing he knew, specifically in order to jump off the top of it and die. “Never mind. Would he know how to get to the Hall of Mirrors from here?”
“Of course he would, he’s a member of the royal family,” said Iori. “But—”
“Then we ask him.”
“He won’t be awake.”
“We’ll wake him up. He won’t call the guards.”
“He’s not going to wake up, Kujo-san.”
The second intruder—Kujo Tenn—glared at Iori. “He will. He isn’t dead yet.”
“Not yet, ” Iori conceded, “but soon. He wasn’t doing well even before you got us caught by the castle guards, and his condition has only gotten worse since. He won’t wake up. I don’t think he can anymore.”
Tenn reached into his own cloak, held up his braid, massive and long and thick and dirtier than it had ever been in his life. “He will,” he said. “Temporarily.”
“Don’t your powers not work on him?”
“They can’t cure him,” said Tenn. “They can’t save him. That’s entirely different from them not working on him. He’ll be awake long enough to tell us how to get to the Hall of Mirrors, at least.”
“Fine,” Iori spat, and turned on his heel and started walking again. Tenn followed, repeating his incantation to light their way every time the light from his hair began to dim. It didn’t take them long to reach the exit Iori knew, and Tenn stood still and watched judgementally as Iori opened this secret door with far more skill than he had the last.
The door swung easily open, and they stood at the threshold of the second prince’s bedroom—a large, warm room, lit only by the light of the moon through the window. There were no guards, no doctors. Iori took a breath, pushed back the hood of his cloak, and walked across the floor as though it were his own room, and Tenn followed suit, though somewhat more cautiously, his eyes scanning every silvery shadow for threats that weren’t anywhere nearby. Iori reached the second prince’s bed and sat on the edge of it as though he’d sat like that a hundred times before and then leaned over the sleeping prince, cupped his face in his hand, ran his fingers along his hollow cheekbones. He sat up straight, though, when Tenn neared, taking only the prince’s bony hand and clasping it in his lap. The hand was cold—not corpse-cold, not rigor mortis, but still icy, and Iori massaged it between his palms, trying his best to warm it up, as he watched his companion.
“Well?” he said.
“I’m trying to find a cleaner section. You wouldn’t believe how much trouble it takes to wash this—”
“Don’t bother, it doesn’t matter,” said Iori. “Either you undo it all with the Hall of Mirrors tonight or he dies within the month.”
“The month?” said Tenn. “In this condition?”
“A month could have been propaganda, to provide a less disgusting explanation for what they’ve done to Tsumugi,” Iori admitted. “Either way, a little dirt won’t make any difference.”
Tenn scoffed, but he leaned over the second prince anyway and draped his braid over his sleeping form. He began to chant the same spell from earlier, though a longer version; his hair glowed again, lighting up the room, and still nobody came. About halfway through the spell, the second prince began to cough, harder and harder, wracking his entire body; Iori leaned over, adjusted him so that he was laying in a more upright position, took his handkerchief and wiped the prince’s mouth.
The spell ended; the glow faded from Tenn’s hair. The second prince’s eyes slowly blinked open, once, twice, confused, sightless.
“…Tenn…-nii…?” he rasped.
Iori turned back to the body in the bed, squeezing the second prince’s bony hand tight and leaning over him.
“Nanase-san,” he said quietly, “it’s me. Kujo-san and I are trying to find the Hall of Mirrors, we’re—we’re trying to fix this. Can you tell us where to find it?”
“Tenn-nii…?” whispered the dying prince again. It was obvious that he had not heard anything, or if he had, he had not comprehended it, and as he sat up the poison in the glance Iori shot Tenn could have killed an elephant.
Tenn swallowed, looking none too happy with the situation himself, but he didn’t pick a fight. “Riku,” he said softly—the first time he had spoken the name in nearly a decade. His voice broke, but he swallowed his tears and continued on. “Riku, I need you to do something for me.”
Iori clung to Riku’s hand and hated Tenn and hated Tenn and hoped; Tenn waited until he got an affirmative noise and spoke again.
“I need to find the Hall of Mirrors,” he said. “I need you to tell me where it is, how to get there from here through the castle walls. You can tell me that, can’t you? It isn’t hard.”
Except it was hard, for Riku at least—he could barely breathe enough to cough, let alone speak, and it was anyone’s guess whether or not he knew what was going on, who was in the room with him, what he had been asked.
Still, he tried. His voice was low—barely a mumble—Tenn could only make out some of the words when he leaned over with his ear just up against Riku’s mouth, but he was able to make out enough to know where to go—hopefully. He stood back up, smiled down at Riku.
“Thank you,” he said. “You’re a good boy, Riku. Sleep now, okay? Go back to sleep, and get plenty of rest, and—and everything will be better in the morning. I promise. Everything will be better in the morning.”
“Tenn-nii…Tenn-nii, don’t go…don’t leave me, please…”
Tenn turned away and started across the room. It was only when he reached the hidden door once more that he realized he had not been followed. He turned back to see Izumi Iori still seated on the second prince’s bed, his forehead pressed to their clasped hands, lips moving in a lullaby or assurance, Tenn couldn’t tell.
“Izumi Iori, we need to go,” he said, his voice cold and hard once more. “We don’t have time to waste here.”
“Give me a minute,” said Iori.
“No.”
“Just until he falls asleep.”
“Are you stupid?”
“I won’t leave him like you did.”
“He doesn’t want you,” said Tenn, the cruelest lie he could think of, and knew his words struck true when Iori flinched as though he had been slapped. “Let’s go.”
“I already know that,” Iori whispered. “I’m still not leaving him.”
“But—”
“I promised I wouldn’t leave him!”
Tenn gritted his teeth, holding back a curse—Iori’s anguished shout had been loud enough to alert any guards that may or may not have been in the hallway, and he stalked back across the room and yanked Iori from the bed.
“We’re leaving.”
“I can’t.”
“You can. You said it yourself, he’s dying. The only thing we can do for him now is in the Hall of Mirrors, so let’s go.”
Iori shoved Tenn away from him, and Tenn could feel his hands trembling as he did so. “You don’t need me for that,” he said. “I’m not royalty and I don’t hold the powers of the sun. You know where it is, so go on your own.”
“If anyone finds you in here, you’ll be executed,” said Tenn.
“I don’t care.”
“They’ll do it in here, on the spot. Do you really want Riku to see that ?”
This had been another lie—Tenn had no clue how the kingdom conducted its executions and didn’t care to learn—but just like the last one, it struck true, and unlike the last one, it got the result he needed. Iori’s shoulders slumped, and he stopped fighting against Tenn.
“Fine,” he said, voice quavering. “Just—just let me say goodbye.”
Tenn folded his arms and pretended his own hands weren’t shaking too. “Make it quick.”
Iori leaned over the bed, where the second prince was asleep once more. He pulled him into his arms, hugged him tightly with a freedom of affection Tenn found himself jealous of, murmured something to him quietly and then tucked him back in, leaving him propped up on pillows higher than he had been when they came in in the hopes of easing his breathing. Then he left unwillingly, following Tenn across the carpet and back through the hidden door. This time as they walked through the passageway, Tenn was in the lead. They were silent once more, though Iori’s breath was louder now, squeaking and gasping with suppressed sobs.
“This was the best thing you could have done for him, you know,” Tenn said after a few minutes of this.
“I know.”
“You were the one who approached me with this plan.”
“I know! And I’ll see it through. It’s just—” Iori took a breath, loud and shaky and miserable and furious. “You weren’t here. You were never here. Except then suddenly you fucking were, and at least I’d been the one to find you, but—then it turned out that you’d never been kidnapped in the first place, you just left, the king and the queen and Lord Kujo were all in on it and you didn’t want to come back, you didn’t even want to speak to him! You wouldn’t even look him in the eye when it all came out! And so instead of letting it all come out and showing the people the corruption of the crown he surrendered and left the rebellion so that you could go free and do whatever it is you wanted to do, and you still didn’t even acknowledge his existence. He—he killed himself for you, Kujo Tenn, and you didn’t even care—”
“That’s not true!” Tenn whirled on his heel to face Iori. “And besides, you were the one he sacrificed himself for!”
Iori laughed, brash and wild and broken. “Don’t be ridiculous!” he said. “For me? Seriously? If Nanase-san had done nothing and everyone realized you were the crown prince and that Lord Kujo and the king and queen were all involved in some massive child-trafficking money-laundering scheme, then you’d have been locked up and killed to cover their tracks and I would be raised up as a hero! If he’d just kept his mouth shut and didn’t help you get away then he would never have had to give in to the marriage, we’d have gotten our coup done successfully, Tsumugi-sama would be on the throne, and he would be alive and healthy today! It was only to save you that he gave in to them, and now everything’s ruined. If you’d never been found then we’d all be happy now!”
This time it was Tenn’s turn to flinch back from Iori’s words. “You can’t know that for sure,” he said.
“I can guess,” Iori shot back. “You should have just stayed up there in that tower.”
“I’ll keep that under consideration in the Hall of Mirrors,” Tenn said coldly, turning on his heel and continuing down the passage. Iori was right, though; if he hadn’t wanted so badly to figure out the truth behind the floating lights (lanterns) and to see the outside world, if he hadn’t blackmailed Iori and snuck out behind Father’s back and explored the kingdom, then none of this ever would have happened. He never should have gone out. He never should have learned who he was. He never should have seen Riku again.
The Hall of Mirrors was the kingdom’s greatest treasure. Like the sunstones and the sundrop flower, it had been created through a celestial rain. If you looked in the mirrors, you could see layers upon layers of other lives; legend held that if you utilized the power of the sun, you could travel through time and make another life with your own hands. The plan Iori had approached Tenn with was a simple one: break into the palace when everyone was distracted, find the Hall of Mirrors, and go back in time to fix the kingdom. Nobody would die—nobody would be forced to marry and bear children—no revolution would be killed dead in the streets. It was Tenn’s power that the plan rested on, since Iori could not activate the Hall of Mirrors on his own; Tenn suspected that, if there had been literally any other option, Iori would never have approached him.
“You hate me, don’t you?” he said. “When did that happen? We seemed to be getting along quite well the last time we met. Which is impressive, since that encounter began when I knocked you out, robbed you, and blackmailed you. What changed?”
Iori was quiet for a moment. “What changed is that I learned Kujo Tenn is Crown Prince Nanase Tenn,” he said.
“How immature.”
“Well, maybe in the new timeline I’ll feel differently.”
“I would have to know why you hate me now for that to change,” Tenn pointed out.
“I thought you already knew.”
“Obviously I don’t. I can heal wounds and reverse aging, not read minds.”
“But you said—” Iori sighed. “Nevermind.”
“What did I say? I’ve said a lot of things.”
“Tonight, you said—” Iori swallowed, suddenly choked up again. “You said that Nanase-san doesn’t want me around. With the obvious implication being that he doesn’t want me because I’m not you.”
“You hated me before I said that.”
“I hate you because it’s true.” Iori’s voice broke again. “You don’t believe me but it’s true. No matter what I do, no matter how long I’m here and you aren’t. No matter how much I love him.”
“You love him?”
“Of course I love him! And he—doesn’t love me. Not like he loves you.”
“Well, I should fucking hope not, after what I caught you two doing in an alleyway at our birthday festival,” said Tenn. “We’d have a million more problems if Riku loved me like that. ”
“That wasn’t love, that was just— I don’t know. I don’t know what it was. But it wasn’t—he doesn’t want me. He doesn’t ask for me like he asks for you.”
“Of course not,” Tenn said, exasperated. “He doesn’t have to. For goodness sake, you didn’t want to leave his bedside to save his and your and everyone else’s life! Why on earth would he ask for someone who’s always there ? That doesn’t mean he doesn’t care about you, it means—”
“Oh, go on,” said Iori. “I would love to hear exactly what Nanase-san means from someone who hasn’t had a conversation with him since they were seven.”
Tenn scoffed. He almost said, I had no control over that! but knew that if he gave an inch they would both be sitting there in that bedroom until Riku’s corpse had rotted entirely away, so instead he said, “That’s because I had better things to do with my time—just like we have better things to do with ours now.”
“Are you serious?”
“Of course I am,” Tenn said. “Once we utilize the Hall of Mirrors, all of this will be undone. Riku won’t be dying. He’ll never have been dying. None of this will ever become anyone’s problem—and you will have your lovely world where I never left my tower.”
“That won’t fix anything,” Iori snapped, “either politically speaking or in Nanase-san’s mental state. In fact, if you’re still trapped there, then he and I will take the exact same actions we did this time around—”
“Except,” Tenn said, “I’ll act differently. You can’t say you wouldn’t have immediately left my tower the moment you realized it was inhabited in order to continue your search for—well, me, can you?”
“I can’t,” Iori admitted after a moment. “I would likely have tried to make you touch the crown, though—at which point it wouldn’t matter anymore, because I would know—”
“And if you knew that I caused Riku’s death in another timeline?”
“Nanase-san wouldn’t care about that,” Iori said quietly, “and so—”
“And so you wouldn’t consider what was best for him, outside of what he wants?”
“That isn’t fair.”
“Of course it’s fair. —Stop here, there’s a connecting passage we need to get to.”
Iori stopped. “It’s not fair and you know it! Everything would be better for Nanase-san if you did the bare minimum of telling him hello once a month! I have an older brother too—”
This was news to Tenn; it made him a little sick to his stomach.
“—so I understand how Nanase-san feels. If my parents sold Nii-san off to pay their debts and after that he didn’t even want to speak to me, I would wish I were dead. There is no actual interaction that you could possibly have with Nanase-san that wouldn’t be a thousand times better for him than being ignored by you!”
Tenn felt a lot sick to his stomach. He thought that he must have eaten something bad, whenever it was that he had last eaten.
“I never made Riku wish he was dead,” he said.
“You did.”
“I would never.”
“That day, when we all realized who you were, and you didn’t say anything to him—you made him wish he was dead. And he thought that that was what you wanted too!”
“He didn’t!”
“What would you know?” said Iori. “You weren’t there. You never spoke to him. I did, he told me —”
“Oh, are we getting jealous again?” Tenn said, his tone acid. “How immature of you. Don’t read into my relationship with Riku—”
“What relationship?” Iori muttered.
“—as it’s none of your business and never was.” He got the door open. “Let’s keep moving.”
They did. Thankfully, Iori didn’t say anything else after this, though Tenn was sure that he was still furious with him. On a certain level it was deserved. On another level, it was annoying. If Iori hated him, he should be glad about the existence of a timeline where Tenn didn’t have any sort of relationship with Riku. He shouldn’t be trying to argue against it. He had been the one who had revealed that Riku’s current condition was Tenn’s fault from start to finish—why did he want to pretend now that there was any good at all that could come to Riku from a relationship with Tenn? The second prince was dying only a wing away, dying because Tenn could not be a brother if a life depended on it; wouldn’t it be better if he had been an only child from the start? Would he be happier that way—the second prince, and everyone else? He would get to live with those who loved him. He and the princess consort would not be treated like bloodstock. He wouldn’t be dying alone, used up and thrown out! How could Iori possibly want Tenn to be involved with him, knowing how that turned out?
He was nearly running by the time he reached the Hall of Mirrors; crossing the threshold, he found himself arrested, immobile, stopped so suddenly he stumbled and fell to his hands and knees. His knuckles were bruised and dirty, and stood out like knobs of wood on the backs of his hands, but they weren’t anywhere near as apparent as each and every one of the second prince’s bones had been when illuminated by the light of his hair, so Tenn told himself it didn’t matter and climbed to his feet. Izumi Iori took his arm and helped steady him, the bastard; Tenn shook his arm off and continued into the room.
“Do that for Riku, not for me,” he snapped, continuing towards the mirrors. At first, they showed no reflection at all; after a moment, though, once he was standing face to face with the glass, his reflection stepped in. They were about the same age, which was maybe a relief, maybe wasn’t; strangely enough, that was about where their similarities ended. His reflection’s hair was short and choppy, and he held himself like Sisyphus must have before he met his rock. He wasn’t alone, either—he was with Yaotome Gaku and Tsunashi Ryuunosuke, which was a major shock; Tenn had sworn to himself when they met that he wouldn’t drag either of the two into his problems no matter how hard they tried to get involved, but there they were on the other side of the mirror, by his side, one with a hand on his shoulder, smiling at him.
Tenn must have been weaker, in that other universe. But it was still another universe—a world, hopefully, in which the second prince was not dying, was not trapped, was not broken and afraid and alone but was rather happy and confident and free in a world where he had never known that he had a brother, because what use was a brother if at the end of the day you were still dying?
“Is that…really real?” Izumi Iori asked.
Tenn turned to look at him. Iori had stopped in front of another one of the mirrors and was staring into it, his face open and devastated. Tenn looked at the glass and saw another Iori, wearing the clothing of an off-duty knight and standing next to the second prince, both of them looking at each other and chatting about something with small smiles on each of their faces. Tenn stared at them, his chest a terrible hollow; as he did so, the reflection of the second prince looked back at the mirror and caught Tenn’s eye and his face lit up as he waved excitedly at the glass. The other Iori said something; the reflected second prince replied, laughing, and smiled at Tenn again.
Tenn responded in a completely rational, thought out, and level-headed manner by throwing up all over himself, Izumi Iori, the floor, and the mirror in front of them.
Both of their cloaks were sacrificed to clean up this mess as they bickered over what they did or didn’t see in the mirror. Iori, it seemed, could only see his alternate self; Tenn could see a whole room of people. Deciding that this was likely another exhibition of Tenn’s powers and nothing else to worry about, they piled the dirtied robes in the corner and Tenn returned to the first mirror to meet the extremely judgemental stare of his reflection, who had seen all of this and did not approve. He took a deep breath, and began the chant. It was a different spell this time—similar, but just slightly off, and different too from the spell the second prince had used the one and only time Tenn had ever seen him use his own powers. He and Iori stared as the glass of the mirror began to bubble and crack; it burst open like a waterfall and Tenn fell dead to the floor.
This was the cost of reversing time, a cost that neither Tenn nor Iori had known: the powers of the sun, yes, but also the life of the reverser. Neither of them had had a royal education, and neither had thought to ask the single person who had had a royal education what he knew about the actual workings of the Hall of Mirrors. It was, of course, highly unlikely that they would have gotten any answers had they done so, and even less likely that getting this information would have stopped their plan, but perhaps it would have made the end of Kujo Tenn’s life less of a surprise. Iori nudged the body with his boot; when it didn’t move, he knelt among the shards of glass on the floor and shook it with his hand and found it already cold. Now he remembered the rumors among the townspeople about the Hall of Mirrors—that it was a cursed room, where the kings of old went to die so that they might live on in another world, that touching the mirrors would suck your soul out of you and into a realm of monsters—
Iori looked up, looked over, reached out and spread his palm across the cool unbroken mirror in front of him, standing there reflecting his alternate self as though it had never burst in the first place. The mirror fogged up under his hand; aside from this, nothing else happened. Iori took his hand away; he met eyes with his alternate self, who was watching him critically. When the other him noticed that he was being observed, he ran his finger in a line across his throat; Iori stared uncomprehending, and his self in the mirror yelped soundlessly as someone he couldn’t see smacked him. His alternate timeline reflection turned and started arguing with someone Iori couldn’t see; Iori leaned back on his heels, shaking, reflecting.
They said that this was where the kings of old died, so that they might live on in another world.
They said that if you touched one of the mirrors, your soul would be sucked out of your body, never to return.
They said that the second prince had a month to live; this was a dreadful lie, Iori knew that now.
They said that a broken mirror meant six years of bad luck.
Iori did not think that he or Kujo Tenn had ever had an ounce of good luck in either of their lives.
He stood, feeling suddenly empty and weightless, as though nothing in this world was real and none of his actions had ever mattered in the slightest. And who knew? Maybe that was the case. Maybe Kujo Tenn had succeeded in rewinding everything, and now the world was fraying at the seams outwards from the shards of glass in a halo around Kujo Tenn’s corpse.
His feet carried him back through the hidden passageways, back through the dark palace, back into the second prince’s bedroom, back to Nanase Riku’s bedside. He climbed up onto the bed as he had a thousand times before; he took Nanase Riku into his arms, and held him close, and felt no uneven breathing, no irregular heartbeat, no motion or life at all. The warmth of his life had not yet leeched entirely away from the bed, but it was cooler than it should be; he had been wrong earlier, but now he knew for certain, no natural or supernatural power would wake Riku ever again.
He sat up again, still holding Riku in his arms. It was tough, as Riku was dead weight, but he managed to half-carry, half-drag him out of the room, back through the passage. It was alright. He was sleeping, he was sleeping, he was only sleeping, and in the morning they would wake to a better world, somehow. They wouldn’t even remember the night. Everything would be better. Everything would be better. The world was ending, didn’t you know? The world was ending, and there would be nothing left, only cold shattered glass, and nobody would have to hurt anymore, nobody would have to wake up with the hurt like an animal in their chest and go all about their day, carrying the animal, feeding and watching it, making sure it didn’t go wild from neglect and destroy you from the inside out. The world was ending, the world had ended, the traitors would be hanged in the morning and the princess consort would make good on her threat to jump from the parapets with them and Nanase Riku would never wake again and Izumi Iori and Kujo Tenn would see none of this, because they had ended the world before things could come to that, and Riku was only sleeping, would wake once again in the morning.
Iori paused frozen for an instant in the Hall of Mirrors; he settled Riku down near the body of his twin, just outside the halo of shattered glass. He did not want him to cut himself on the glass when he woke. He pressed a kiss to Riku’s cold forehead and sat backwards, looking at the dead boy in front of him and not any reflection that may or may not be watching him in the glass.
“I’ll be there soon, Nanase-san,” he said quietly, as if trying not to wake him from a good, restful sleep. “I promise I won’t make you wait for me long.”
He stood, carefully walked a radius around the shattered glass until his eyes fell on a particularly large, angular piece. He crouched down, selected it with care; when he stood, his eyes fell entirely on accident on his reflection in the mirror, now far younger, hand clenched on an unseen arm and looking deeply sick. He watched him impassively as the hand tightened, the torso trembled, the other hand reached up to clamp over his mouth. There was a beat, and he shook his head and pulled his arm away and stalked to the other side of the room; Iori watched him go and then returned to Riku, who had not moved from where Iori had left him. He settled in at his side and examined his prize, wondering where to go for first. The throat was a classic, but if he fucked it up this would be a hundred times more miserable; eventually, he decided to go for the even more classic forearms and wrists, and then for the neck later if those didn’t do the job. He sighed, curled against Riku, and settled in to do his work.
He had chosen the right piece of glass. It was sharp enough that nothing even hurt—his arms just itched a little, that was all, and soon enough that was replaced with pins and needles in his arms and in his legs. He was very cold now, as if buried in snow, but that was the extent of his discomfort; he wasn’t even sad anymore, wasn’t worried or afraid or scared. He was just tired, and very cold, and his limbs had fallen asleep before the rest of him, and when he woke in the morning everything would be different.
He pressed his face into Riku’s hair, he closed his eyes. He was so cold, but he was too tired to shiver, too tired to care. He let himself sleep, he drifted away.