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While Thisbe was glad to have Alex back in her life, there were certainly times when she remembered why his presence had been so grating her entire childhood.
All she wanted was a quiet day in the castle. She was still acclimating to her new life as the princess of Grimere, and all the things that entailed: constantly checking in with Maiven, endless organization, watching as the world they’d stitched back together healed, trying not to pick too much at the scab that formed...the list went on and on, down the mountainside.
Everyone was trying to get used to it, not just her. Dev had been scarce these days, hiding mostly in his room, though every now and then he’d join in discussions surrounding Ashguard’s Palace. He knew Adhira for his mother by this point, and Asha for his sister, and Ashguard for his grandfather—and while he was overjoyed at the reunion, they were still altogether strangers to him, so he still took most of his meals and days alone, trying to process it all.
She understood the feeling, somewhat. She’d known her family much longer than he’d known his, but still, she struggled to fully connect with Maiven now that she was heir to the throne. The only times they really got to talk were as queen and princess, never as grandmother and granddaughter.
And Fifer? Forget it. They’d had a few good adventures together, but she wasn’t very good at hiding her contempt for Thisbe’s position. Thisbe almost wanted to offer her the crown and run off, but she didn’t. That would be letting Fifer win, and, well...family game nights had never gone particularly well between the two of them for a reason.
Aaron was fine; overjoyed, even, now that everyone was safe and things were in order and Thisbe was not actually evil. She missed him and his cooking, honestly, even though he was just a few buttons away. But he deserved peace and quiet and a happy ending, at least for a little while, and a few too many hours spent with him often turned into him attempting to solve every problem ever invented his way, and a fight was just about the last thing Thisbe was in the mood for. This was easily enough solved with a little bit of distance.
Alex was the one that was still really difficult.
Of course she loved him. He’d raised her. He was her older brother. But she was still struggling to get herself to like him, after a childhood spent annoyed and restless. She still found herself feeling the same way, exhausted as she was. She was starting to feel caged here, even after only a few weeks, and the smiles and the formalities were feeling a little too much like an act for her to be really comfortable.
So she was not in the mood for him pointing and poking and picking at her new life, but she knew she could only avoid him for so long.
“How are you settling in?” she asked Rohan, kicking her feet. She’d perched herself on a railing in a quiet hallway, overlooking gardens a floor below them. It was a vain attempt at getting herself more used to heights; she’d twisted her foot around one of the supporting beams to keep her balance, and her fingers ached as she held on for dear life. She chose to focus on Rohan’s face instead of the greenery below.
He was looking down, though, arms folded across the railing as he leaned forward onto it. “Alright. I mean, it’s tough, having to keep track of all the others...and all the formalities...and the magic. I’m still not used to the tubes.” He leaned back, wiping a hand over his face, then wincing with a hiss of pain. He rolled his shoulder a few times, muttering, “I feel ancient. All my joints hurt like I’m still hauling bones down there.”
Thisbe snorted. “You sound like my brother. I feel that, though.” She stretched her own arms over her head, almost falling off the railing and catching herself with a start and a curse.
Rohan just laughed. “How is this the same girl that helped me climb down a mountain?”
She stuck her tongue out at him, then cautiously lowered herself from the railing, her stomach lurching when she actually dropped, even though it was less than a foot before she was back on the ground.
She offered a hand and Rohan took it, then followed her along the hallways of the castle. He knew them less well than she did; Taveer blood and the ancestor broth memories still giving her headaches had helped her learn her way around, but finding quiet places to hide away from her new responsibilities made it so that she could probably walk around this place with her eyes closed and still find her way back to her room.
She didn’t always hide from her responsibilities. Most of the time she didn’t. She knew how much it meant to Maiven, saw the strain and the exhaustion on her face. She wasn’t young, and there was a lot of fixing to do, and she’d just spent decades of her life locked in a cell underground. Thisbe was honestly shocked that she still stood on two feet, let alone that she wanted the job of queen again.
But today, all she wanted to do was avoid it all. She dragged Rohan down a hallway when she saw a few of the more important advisors, pulling him into a shadowed corner flanked by a few statues. Once they’d passed, loudly complaining about dragons that still had yet to be returned home and Drock’s unfriendliness, the two continued walking.
They arrived at the door to her room, and she pushed it open silently. She opened the blinds while Rohan took off his shoes, and then she took off her shoes and they both flopped down on her bed on their backs, Rohan's legs dangling off the foot while Thisbe's were kicked up on her bedside table, staring up at the ceiling together, listening to nothing but the faint sound of birdsong outside and the faraway shouting of the people restoring pieces of the castle.
Surprisingly, getting the people of Grimere back on board with having black-eyed rulers had been quite easy, once the King had been removed. Maybe an army of dragons overhead had helped that, in some way; she wasn't sure. Then again, it had only been a few weeks. There was always time for that to change. She tried to push that thought away. It hadn't been quite as easy to find people to rebuild the castle, high on the mountain as it was, but Maiven still had lots of power and money to make up for it, and now renovations were in full swing. Thisbe tried her best to ignore the noise most of the time, but when it was far enough away on a sunny day, she didn't mind it too much.
She couldn't tell if she was getting better with noise or not. As a child, too much movement or noise bothered her to no end—it was part of why she despised Fifer's damned birds so much—and that was still the case, but it was hard to tell if the annoyance was at the same level or not. Especially when that annoyance was justified. For example: Fifer's birds. Self-reflection was still not her strong suit. Regret and guilt? Sure thing! Coming right up, whether she wanted it or not! Genuinely knowing herself? …Still working on it.
Being with Rohan was sometimes a nice distraction, though it depended on the day. They'd had to set a few rules, of course. They did not discuss Thisbe’s acting. They did not discuss whether Thisbe was evil or not. They did not discuss the dragon scales littering their skin. After a few too many conversations on each topic, usually ending with one of them in tears or refusing to speak to the other, they’d decided that whatever revelations laid behind those trains of thought were simply not worth it. But adventures were fair game. Memories, too.
Thisbe finally broke the silence. "We should go to Glen Freer, on the next market day."
"Oh, yeah?" Rohan replied. "Why Glen Freer?"
"Seth and Fifer and I passed through it when we first came here. That's where we met Dev." And Shanti, she did not add. She started picking at her nails absentmindedly. "I'd like to see it when I'm not behind prison bars or anything. It looked like a cute little town. I wonder if they'd recognize me."
"Your hair's longer now," Rohan pointed out, "so maybe that would make a difference."
"Hmm." She replayed the scene in her head. "But Fig had long hair, and she didn't have scars back then. I think they'd just think I was her."
Rohan hummed an agreement, and they fell back into their peaceful silence for a while.
Simply knowing he was there was enough to slow Thisbe's thoughts down to a manageable pace. She found herself getting caught up in possibilities and paranoia far too often; her brain tried to juggle a thousand different pieces of information all at once, and it left her sick to her stomach a lot of the time. There was just so much to worry about, now, as a princess. But with Rohan next to her, it didn't feel so overwhelming. He would hold her hand and support her in any way he could. They'd been through a lot together; this now, this present, this moment they were in? They could handle that together, no problem.
Until there was a tentative knock on her door.
"I'll get it," Rohan said, hopping up and running over. Thisbe quickly righted herself as he opened the door, sitting on the edge of her bed like a normal person.
She wasn't sure who she'd expected to be at the door, in all honesty, but it wasn't Alex.
Maybe she should've anticipated that he would come to visit at some point. They hadn't gotten much time to speak to each other quite yet, what with him settling back into life in Artimé and her moving in all the way over here in Grimere. Aaron installing the tube had been a life saver, but it'd only been a few weeks, so neither of them could really be blamed for avoiding the inevitable.
The inevitable that was now standing, quite literally, at her doorstep, looking between her and Rohan with confusion. He'd clearly been expecting just Thisbe to answer the door, if she'd even been here at all.
"Is this a bad time?" he finally asked. "Sorry, I just figured it'd been long enough, so I'd finally…come visit…I can go. I'll go."
"No, no, it's okay," Thisbe said. "That's Rohan. I told you about him. Rohan, this is Alex."
"You really look like Aaron," was all Rohan could say, stepping away so he wasn't directly between Thisbe and Alex. She didn't make a move to get up from the bed, and he didn't make a move to step inside the doorway, though. Rohan added, "I mean, I knew that, of course, I just…wasn't really expecting it?"
Alex awkwardly nodded, then cleared his throat. "Nice to meet you, Rohan."
"Nice to meet you, too," Rohan echoed. He fiddled with the doorknob, the latch clicking in and out. "I can leave you two alone for some brother-sister time. I really should go check in with Queen Maiven anyways, I think she wanted me to help Prindi with something." He grabbed his shoes and gave a nod and a little wave and hurried out of the door past Alex.
Once Rohan had left, Alex stepped in and closed the door behind him. He scrunched up his nose and immediately said, “I don’t like him.”
Thisbe almost laughed. Leave it to Alex to immediately spark a fight. “Did I ask?”
“Excuse you. And I’ve seen more in this world than you have and I can tell you right now, that boy is trouble for you. You two should call it quits now while you’re ahead.”
“Excuse you. I’m not a kid anymore, Alex. Besides, you’ve hardly even met the guy.”
“I’ve seen enough."
Whatever. If he didn’t like Rohan, that was his problem. She’d been through enough with him... Whatever. She liked him. He liked her. It was none of Alex’s business.
“Can you not criticize me for five seconds? For once?” Thisbe snapped. “I’m not the little kid I was, Alex. Can you just trust me to make my own decisions? I’m basically an adult now. I’m in charge of a kingdom. Leave me alone.”
“If you don’t want me to look out for you then that’s fine, I can leave right now. Just never ask for my opinion ever again. Not like I was in charge of a whole nation or raising you or anything.” He threw his one good hand in the air and turned to leave.
And all she could think of was the fight over dinner, the last time she’d really, properly seen him, and if she’d ever see him walk through that door again. Thisbe uncurled herself, throwing her legs back to the floor. “No, no, I’m sorry. That was rude of me. You can stay.”
He glanced back at her, and the same thought must’ve run through his mind, too, because his expression softened and he sighed. “I’m sorry too,” he said with a sigh, his hand going to the edges of his hair, looping around the end of a curl. He stood there awkwardly for a minute, before finally saying, “I missed out on a lot. I just...I don’t know. I don’t know! That’s the problem. I don’t know what happened and I don’t know what I missed or what’s going on. And I feel like I don't know you, anymore."
Thisbe nodded, then finally stood up and walked over to hug him. She was taller than he was, now; not by much, but it was noticeable now that her arms were wrapped around his shoulders.
The shoulders without his signature head mage hood. She’d never hugged him around the shoulders before, only ever around his ribcage, and it was weird. Like she was the one looking after him, now; that he was the one who needed to be looked after.
“Tell me about him,” Alex said.
“Rohan?”
“Yeah.”
Thisbe pulled out of the hug, her skin crawling only a little bit. “C’mon. You haven’t seen a lot of the castle yet, have you? We can walk.”
So she threw on her shoes and they went wandering down the vast hallways together, Alex admiring the paintings and sculptures on the ceilings, stopping Thisbe every now and then simply to gaze at it all high above. Whatever anger or sorrow he'd felt before was gone, and now he looked excitedly at everything, leaning over balcony edges and pointing down hallways to ask where they led to. Thisbe wandered along behind him so he wouldn't get too lost. It was a while before they actually spoke about anything of substance, but it was a nice distraction from it all.
And, truly, Thisbe hadn't had much time to study this place, either. She knew her way around, sure, but a lifetime spent in Artimé's mansion had served only to teach her to tune out the artwork around her, rather than to pay more attention to it. Alex had the opposite view of the world. So here they were, Alex asking about secret passages (Thisbe didn't know of any, though she was certain they likely existed) and about the subjects of paintings (perhaps that was an ancestor of theirs, but who could really say) and all sorts of other details that Thisbe simply didn't know yet.
She could've gone on like that for hours, though. As much as Alex tended to annoy her, seeing him like this—running around like a little kid, getting to look around a new place without being in danger, asking her questions that weren't laced with condescension or disappointment—cast him in a light she was entirely unfamiliar with, and she felt herself warming up to having him around.
But these things never lasted, and in hindsight, Thisbe should've prepared herself for when things took a turn for the worse. The feeling of finally liking Alex and then being disappointed all over again was hardly anything new. She had just...hoped, maybe, that they'd finally grown past that.
Alex had been wandering a few steps ahead of her for a while now, looking out of the windows of this hallway, towards the vast chasm between worlds and the mountains falling off into nothingness. Finally he stopped dead in his tracks and turned to her in the middle a lonesome hallway. "So, were you going to tell me about Rohan, or…?"
Right. Thisbe's smile immediately fell as she scrambled to find the words. How was she meant to describe her boyfriend to the brother who raised her? "We were in the catacombs together dragging bones, and he was the only one who spoke the language of the dragons. At the time, at least." She ran a hand over her arm, feeling the dragon scales slightly rising below her fingertips. She smoothed them down. "And we discovered that his room was behind mine, so we'd tap with the bones on the walls between us. For a little bit of comfort. Someone else was there, you know?"
Alex nodded, looking back off into the hazy fog ahead.
"And then E— The Revinir, she, uh, found out, I guess. Or, she wanted me to start working making the bone broths, with Dev, and she didn't like that Rohan and I were able to talk, so she separated us. But our rooms were still back-to-back, so I used my magic and I blasted open a little tunnel in the wall and…I guess the rest is history. We escaped. We found Sky." She shrugged.
"Have I met Dev?"
"Uhh, probably? Kinda tall, thin. Adhira's son."
"Ari?"
"I don't know what name he's chosen to go by, these days," Thisbe admitted. "He's been scarce lately."
"Hm." Alex turned on his heel and continued wandering down the hallway, seemingly bored with looking out towards the Seven Islands. They weren't visible in the fog anyways. "Is he nice? Rohan, I mean."
Thisbe followed along. "Yeah. He's understanding, and has a heart of gold, and he's intelligent and kind and he's just…always there when I need him, you know? We went through a lot together, and he still chose to trust me, through and after all of it."
The heels of his boots clicked along the floor. Thisbe's were dulled, the rhythm a little slower than Alex's, so their steps didn't quite line up. A slight breeze wafted in from somewhere; one of the windows was probably broken a ways down the hallway. Thisbe found herself thinking, not for the first time today, that she should have brought a notepad and pen with her to take note of these kinds of things. But she hadn't, so she was forced to walk by and do nothing.
"It's like…when he's there, the world's a little easier to handle, a little more in focus, I guess," Thisbe continued, trying to fill the silence between them.
"Is the world hard to handle, for you?" Alex asked. There was no malice in it, for once—just genuine curiosity.
"I think the world's hard to handle for everybody. I hardly have it the worst. At least I have family, you know, and a job, and a place to sleep at night. There's a lot to be said for that."
"I suppose." He finally turned back to her, looking her up and down, then said, "How about we find somewhere to sit? Maybe in that garden?"
She hadn't wanted to mention how much her leg had been complaining for the past half hour, and internally she sighed with relief. "Yes, please." She reached for his hand, and Alex took it in his good one, and finally let her lead the way.
They found a secluded bench in one of the castle gardens, as far from the construction as Thisbe could think of.
The castle had plenty of little gardens, all on various floors, filled with fruit trees and lovely-smelling flowers and all sorts of sculptures and fountains and tables. Most had bird baths and feeders, but this one was, quite thankfully, free of both. There was an intricately carved stone railing, over which the entirety of the Land of the Dragons spread out below them. Even with her fear of heights, Thisbe loved this view, so unlike anything she knew back home.
Alex seemed similarly enraptured, and so she left him to look as she sat down at a little table and tried not to grimace. She really needed to take a trip back into Artimé one of these days to see if Henry might know how to fix whatever she'd done to her leg, because it had started keeping her up at night more and more, and she was starting to get sick and tired of it. She hesitated to ask for his help, since she knew it wasn't broken or sprained or anything of the sort, so she wasn't sure if he could really do anything. Besides, he was busy enough. Maybe asking Carina would have been a better bet, then. Yeah, maybe she'd do that.
There was other business to attend to in Artimé, too. She'd moved about half of her things here to the castle, but had focused mainly on trying to make a space for herself in a place that hadn't been cleared out, and still contained mountains of things belonging to people long since gone.
Not to mention that she was finding it difficult living in a room all her own. There was a gaping hole in her chest where Fifer used to live. Her sister wasn't gone, she knew that, but Thisbe was still finding it very hard to adjust to not having her there every day when she woke up and went to bed.
But that was a job to tackle another day, and she had a different sibling with her here, now. He was leaning over the railing ever-so-slightly, the wind gently running through his hair. The sun was beginning to set over the rest of Grimere, painting him in gentle golds, framed by bushes of flowers and clouds far above.
"It's a pretty view, isn't it?" she asked.
He nodded, taking one last look at it before turning back to her. "It's a nice place to call home."
"Yeah." She could see herself living here—maybe not forever, but for a long, long time. It was certainly big enough to avoid her feeling claustrophobic, and that was about all she needed. And she could get lost in those hallways for years before she finally knew them all.
Well, that wasn't necessarily true—there was a liquid in her veins that did know every inch of this place. "I get, uh…memories, about it, from the ancestor broth." Quietly, she said, "Some of them are from our mother."
"Oh." Alex pushed himself off of the railing, and busied himself with wandering through the flowers, studying each as he went.
"I don't know how to feel about her, either," Thisbe admitted.
"I never said that," her brother mumbled. "Just…still strange, having a grandmother. I mean, logically I knew that our parents had parents, but it was never something I cared about. And for Mother to be a princess…" He carefully plucked an orange flower from its stem, holding it to the dying golden-hour sunset so it seemed to turn to flame in his hand. "I guess you're right. I don't know how to feel."
After a moment he dropped the flower and wandered over to sit down across the table from her. "You grew your hair out?"
"You didn't notice?" Thisbe awkwardly ran a hand through it, the curls just now reaching her shoulders.
He grinned and shrugged. "Fifer always had hers long, so I guess it didn't really register until just now… You know, when you first cut it short, you were so insistent that you would never grow it out long ever again."
"Yeah, well," Thisbe grumbled, "things change. It has to be long here, anyways. 'Cause of the law."
"Aren't you the one in charge around here? Can't you just change the law now?"
Thisbe shook her head, trying hard not to roll her eyes or snap at him. It was a harmless line of questioning, but she still felt like slamming a door in his face. She didn't have one to slam, though, so she swallowed the venom and tried to continue patiently. “It’s culture, Al, it’s baked into everything here. You can’t change centuries of tradition at the drop of a hat.”
"True enough," he relented. "We sure tried with Quill, and look where that got us. At least they have water now."
Thisbe absentmindedly tapped the heels of her boots together. She'd always shied away from any mention of Quill from her brothers especially, and she found herself falling into the same old habit again. Them being raised there and her being raised in Artimé always felt like a sore subject, highlighting the disconnect that would always be between them. No matter what, she would never understand what they went through there, and Alex had made that clear many times. Fifer was more willing to discuss it, but Thisbe would've preferred to pretend that it didn't exist. Of course, the whole revelation that their mother hadn't been born there was bringing it up quite a bit more than Thisbe really wanted, but at least she had ground to stand on, being the one out of the four of them with the most connection to Grimere.
"Are you liking it here? Being princess?" he asked.
"'S'alright," Thisbe said with a shrug. "Maiven's keeping me busy."
Alex grimaced a bit at that, but he tried not to make it obvious. "And Maiven? How is she?"
"I mean, I can't really blame her for being so…I don't know what word to use. She's always running from place to place, coordinating this, doing that. But the former king left Grimere in a really bad spot, and she doesn't have all the time in the world, so it makes sense that she's so…frazzled, maybe. But not frazzled. She's taking it all in stride, of course, she's been queen and she knows how to deal with it all."
"Just promise me you won't let her take every bit of your life from you. Don't let being princess consume you, alright?"
"Sure, Alex. Sure." That was a tough request. A weird one, too, but she didn't say that.
"I'm just saying, if you ever need somebody on your side…I'm here for you, you know that, right?"
"Yes, Alex."
"No more running off with dragons to unknown lands in the middle of the night?"
That, admittedly, got her laughing. "No, never again. Not unless I have to, at least, and hopefully it won't come to that again."
"Good, good. I mean, I'd trust your judgement on it now, but…" He fiddled with the sleeve of his sweater. "Ugh. I just…I still can't believe the things you did. I'm so, so sorry, Thisbe. I should've been there to help you."
She didn't really know what to say to that, so she just nodded.
"I mean it. I'm always here for you if you need me."
Thisbe did want to believe that. She wanted to believe it so badly it made her heart ache. She tried not to argue that him trying to be there for her had gotten him stuck in that palace in the middle of nowhere. At least he wasn't dead, but if he had been, it would've been her own fault. But pointing it out was meaningless. Here he was, alive in front of her, the happiest she'd ever seen him.
She didn't really feel that way. She knew she should've, now that everything was okay again, but…
“Do you, umm...” Thisbe stared down at her hands, beginning to pick at her nails, even though she'd bitten them down to the point where there was hardly anything left. She couldn’t get herself to look at Alex. “Do your thoughts ever get, like, stuck? In your head?”
“What kinda thoughts?”
“Like I’ve thought about carving these scales out of my skin every single day for the past month.” She pulled her hands apart, staring instead at the scales dotting her skin, shimmering in iridescent crimsons and golds as she moved her arm back and forth ever so slightly. “I’d take a knife and just...wedge it right underneath, find the root and pull each one out. And it’s such a vivid image and it won’t leave my head. Every day, multiple times a day, just...”
She waved her free hand, leaning over her arm a little bit and looking away off to the side of the table. “And it’s not like bad or anything, like, it’d feel nice to just have them be gone and for my arm to be smooth, you know? And I know it doesn’t work that way and that it’d hurt and I wouldn’t actually do it but my brain can’t stop trying to convince me that it’d be a fun thing to do. I know it’s awful and it still just comes up again and again and again.”
There was more, but she didn’t mention the more visceral images that plagued her mind. She didn’t talk about the thoughts of cutting into her flesh, hollowing out her chest, scraping along the insides of her ribs until all that was left was bone. She didn't mention the worries that she'd collapse in another seizure, split her head open on the side of a table or on the floor, or worse, set fire to something and be swallowed by the ensuing blaze. She didn’t bring up the ever-present weight around her heart, the wish to go home or to run away or to just stop existing altogether. Shameful, that’s what the thoughts were, and she tried to push them away, to no avail.
Alex was silent across the table from her.
She tried to course-correct, make it seem less bad than it really was. “I mean, it might just be the combination of the dragon and ancestor bone broths having a bad reaction, you know? Memories resurfacing, and all that.” It wasn’t true, but now she wished she could just take all of it back. What had she been thinking, telling him about this? It was her burden to bear; he didn’t need to know all of this.
"Oh, Thisbe…"
And there it was, that disappointment all over again. Like she'd broken something, or mentioned wanting to learn magic again, or told him that she wished she'd been raised by their parents or never been saved from Quill or never been born at all. The sorrow in his voice that warned of the incoming lecture on how privileged she was and how cruel it was to him that she wasn't appreciative. How he would've killed to have had this kind of childhood, while she tried time and time again to throw it away. How he was trying so, so hard every day to give her and Fifer the life he never had, how it was eating away at him, and couldn't she just sit down and accept it? Why did she have to be so difficult? But he'd take all the blame for all her bad feelings and just make her feel worse about it all.
But for once she wasn't really mad at him, just at herself. He'd just come back, and she was already making him worried again. She still couldn't meet his eyes.
Which is why she didn't see the spell coming until she was already wrapped in a thick layer of bubble wrap.
Both she and Alex seemed startled by it, at least, and that gave her enough time to spit out a "Release" and a "What the fuck?"
He quickly said, "I'm sorry, I— I don't know what I was thinking—"
Thisbe stood up, the chair squealing against the ground behind her, and she almost tripped over it as she backed away. Alex, at least, had the decency to stay sitting. At least he knew not to make it any worse.
Her heart was beating so fast it felt like it might simply stop, every sense in her body telling her to kick as fast and bite as hard and scream as loud as she could, even though she knew that was probably unreasonable considering the situation at hand. She could feel the familiar magic at her fingertips, her scales standing on end and making her skin ache. She refused to turn her back on him—every survival instinct in her body told her that it would be a dumb idea—gods, this was her brother, why in the world was she so panicked—so she simply backed away towards the stairs, but she didn't try to walk down them, just hovered at the edge. Alex simply watched her go, frozen there as though he was nothing more than a statue, too.
And so: a stalemate. Thisbe wanted nothing more than to yell at him, but it wouldn't have helped. She didn't want to abandon him—he didn't know his way back to the tube—but she felt sick to her stomach now. So she swallowed and said, "I think I need to be alone," and then she turned and raced down the stairs about as fast as her feet would take her.
Alex followed a little ways, but didn't chase her. "Thisbe, wait, I'm sorry, I just— Don't want you hurting yourself—"
But she'd already slipped down another hallway and into the shadows, chest burning, and she dug her fingertips into her skin to try and calm herself down. As always: things got better, then they got worse again. She and Alex were simply destined to end every conversation in conflict.
Alex's boots clicked down the stairs, and he paused at the bottom of them for a heavy moment, then continued walking down another way. She listened to his footsteps fade, the panic turning to dread and then to malice. She didn't want to hate Alex. She was sick of hating Alex. But it was clearly going to take a lot more effort for both of them to be a happy family again.
And she didn't even have Fifer there to complain to. New territory was oh so lovely to tread when she was still standing there shaking like some little animal. So much for her quiet day in the castle.