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The issue with Hugin, Firtho can't help but think, is that he loves far too deeply. Obsessive, most would call him. Attached, Munin used to say.
Both are true. Hugin never bothered to hide that fact. He simply never got attached so deeply with anyone other than Munin. It made her skin itch with jealousy knowing nothing could come between them, knowing that they would forever place each other first before Firtho. It was a parasite that made a home in her very flesh, a weed with thick roots embedded into her lungs. For all her expertise, Firtho had never figured out how to remove it.
But she understood. Because for a long time, it was only each other, and it was Firtho who came along later, Firtho who inserted herself into their duo to become a trio. That envy comes with guilt, and that guilt comes with emptiness when Hugin really does leave her behind.
Like divine punishment for her bone-deep jealousy, her last friend had been driven away with nary a glance left for her.
It had always been just Hugin-and-Munin. There was no space for Firtho, not even when Munin was gone.
Here was the thing with Hugin and Munin: they were close enough that they rarely, if ever, needed to talk to each other to communicate what they wanted.
Hugin had always been more verbose, yes, but those long platitudes and pretty words were there for people other than Munin. They were for people who couldn't comprehend him with a single look, a single action.
It took Firtho a while to realize he never spoke about himself. He would allude to things, yes, suggest a narrative and make you believe something, but he would never say the words directly to someone's face.
Munin was better, in that she spat her feelings into your face to get it out. She would tell you through some medium what she felt eventually.
Hugin hid behind a poker face and hid behind thoughtfully picked words and had once nearly jumped off a balcony before he willingly talked about himself. He got too into his own head, too into the potentials and the what-ifs to truly recognize what was happening in front of him.
It was never an issue with Munin, because she understood Hugin even without him saying it. Like it was instinct, like it was second-nature, she knew something was wrong with her idiot brother before he had a chance to talk himself out of it.
It was always an issue with Firtho, because she didn't understand him the same way Munin did, because she needed words, needed something to prove her gut wasn't wrong. Hugin escaped her clutches far too often, only to get Munin dragging himself out of his own head.
Firtho had never fully learned how to read him when he fully put up his walls, made his face opaque, but she liked to think she learned most of his tells. She could never be the same as Munin, able to tell what was wrong with just a glance, but she was better than anyone else now.
But still, that required Hugin in front of her. That required Hugin to be here with her.
He left before she could even attempt to try.
She finds out Hugin leaves through the whispers on the street and the newspapers she checked daily to keep up with any recent cases involving her detectives.
The first thing that catches her eye is not a headline about the success of the ceremony handing over Silverium production rights or even Queen Agoria's gift to her detectives.
It is instead an article accusing Hugin of assassinating Queen Agoria.
That couldn't be right. Frantic, Firtho started scouring the pages, flipping it over and over and glaring at the paper as if the ink would magically shift. There's another accusation. Another one. Another. Another.
As if the whole of Silvernia had forgotten what Munin and Hugin had done for them, they all swore up and down that Hugin was behind the queen's death.
He couldn't be, Firtho knew, because if her detectives would kill someone, it would not be someone like the dead Queen Agoria. He couldn't be, Firtho knew, because if her detectives would kill someone, it would take far longer and far harder means to identify them, what with their experience in other cases.
He couldn't be, Firtho knew, because Munin is dead in the same incident too and above everything else, Hugin loved Munin to the point of destruction. If Hugin had tried to kill the queen on his own, without a motive, Munin would've stopped him. And she would've been successful in stopping him, because they loved each other like they were each other's only anchors in the world.
Firtho knew she was not as loved compared to how Hugin and Munin loved each other. She'd known that a long time ago. She still knew both of them better than the whispering strangers on the street, the journalists crying for blood. And she knew there was no plan to kill Queen Agoria, because there was no motive, no reason, and no evidence that suggested so.
Neither of her detectives were prone to last minute plans for things like homicide.
Hugin had to be framed. There was no other option.
Munin was gone.
And then, suddenly, so was Hugin.
Another day will come, and another day will come, but Firtho would always hold the world in resentment for not stopping time when her time had stopped to grieve. Her clinic would not clean itself. She still needed to eat and sleep and drink. Munin would not come back.
And maybe, just maybe, Hugin wouldn't either.
She hears him come back through the grapevine. Not through a letter. Not through a coded message in the papers. Rumors. Gossip. Whispers on the streets and strangers talking.
The bitterness in her spits, he doesn't even have the decency to show himself to you. He doesn't even have the decency to tell you. He went somewhere you could not follow him to, and he did not even try to contact you.
But the love in her heart quakes with joy. It says: he is alive. It says: he came back to you.
Firtho does not know which one is right, only knowing that when he shows up, chasing clues only she could provide, only knowing that it had been a case that had called him back instead of anything else, her brain told her, typical Hugin, and acidity settled in the back of her throat like bile.
Because beyond everything and beyond her own personal thoughts, Hugin had always had eyes for two things and two things only: Munin, and mysteries.
It was only fitting that both of them were the things that drove him back to Silvernia.
Firtho had once imagined Hugin would be grandiose with his grief. Lavish flowers and beautifully formed gravestones, ritualistic visits and open with his mourning.
Meeting him now, in the stale air of her clinic, made her rethink.
Three years after Munin's death. He's still in mourning.
The set curve of his mouth as if it was mass produced. The slight droop of his head under his hat. The tiredness that carved hollows into his cheeks. The paleness of his face and lips.
Firtho knew his grief would be cut down, would be suppressed because he had other things to think about, because he was suspected of murdering the late Queen. She hadn't thought he'd hide it entirely, at least not with her.
Did she not also have a right to mourn Munin with him? Did she love Munin any less? It made her choke on that bitterness, the resentment of abandonment rearing its head.
But then Hugin looked at her with hollow eyes and Firtho faltered because she'd seen more life in some of her specimens than in her last friend.
Wounds could kill, Firtho knew, but she was a good enough doctor to think she could save someone as long as they met certain conditions. Cuts, stabs, bruises, asphyxiation, even gunshot wounds— most of that could be fixed. They could be sutured up and healed, fade into scars and memories. Flesh wounds were only flesh wounds. It had no impact on the self Hugin spoke so often of.
Firtho was a doctor. She was limited to fixing bodies.
For all her experience in pulling out debris and fragments, Firtho could never pull out the shrapnel of heartbroken feelings. You could write a treatise all you wanted, pour over research and spend lifetimes trying to heal someone.
If the person did not want to function, if the subject did not want to live, then all of it would be pointless unless they were kept forcibly alive.
That was the thing for people like Hugin. He was so devout that taking that something away broke him. He looked as though he was just waiting for one more reason to die and see Munin again.
It enraged her to no end.
For Firtho, three years had transitioned the pain of Munin's death into an ache rather than a wound. It didn't make her any less sick of that emptiness. It didn't make her any less loving of her memory.
Three years had done nothing for Hugin. Like a wound gone untreated, it grew red and irritated, infected and rotting.
Hugin had abandoned her. For her safety, sure, and for his own sake, certainly. It did not change the fact Firtho was left miserably behind when one of her precious friends had died, the last one leaving without a trace.
She believed he'd been dead too, for a time. That perhaps the reason he hadn't come for her was because he was in the maws of death, because he had lost his life too.
Hugin did not love lightly. Firtho had assumed that he would've come for her if he loved her, too. That he would've moved if only to keep himself from total paralysis from his grief, keep himself tethered to something in this world.
She had been wrong. She understood that now. But Firtho refused to let him leave again. So she was protective, she was likely somewhat overbearing. She had to be, because Hugin was of the cautious sort, yes, but the wrong type of cautious. He took measures for people who were not him and not him exclusively.
The cruelest of things were never written in bold; it was always in the footnotes. Firtho was loved, yes, and loved back, but her love would never be returned with the same intensity as she loved them.
She would always be second to something else.
She thinks of the old papers she held onto, announcing the closing of each case her detectives had investigated. The burn of pride. The settling of closure. The inexplicable feeling of security, because Firtho had helped him do that, because they'd done it together.
Firtho had never needed the judgement of the mass or the acknowledgment of the public. It would've been enough if her detectives had needed her.
It had been enough. It should have been enough.
Here's another issue with Hugin: there comes a place you could pinpoint where he transitions drastically from Munin to post-Munin.
Firtho misses her, of course, misses the days and the hours and minutes she'd spent watching the clock until all three of them could play. She misses those idyllic days, bright and sunlit, golden in her memory. She misses it, so deeply, that she wishes she could crawl back into the skin of her younger self and pretend like she could get that time back. It was perfect. Perfect enough Firtho would curse herself for having it once it was taken from her.
But her feelings would never compare to Hugin's.
He returned as nothing but a hollow shell of who he was, as if Munin's death had taken him with and his body was just left there to function on its own.
There hadn't been a difference in his pace or his cadence, nor had there been a fault in his deductions or conclusions. No, there was nothing wrong with Hugin unless you looked closer; the bruises that had made a home beneath his sharp eyes, the aborted looks to his side as if expecting someone. The territorial way he guarded himself and his belongings, his presentation so firmly polished it looked like he came out of a photoshoot.
He was but an image left, with nothing substantial under that shell. Like his soul, his animating force, had died with Munin, he smiled far too much and far too emptily. Like the cadavers she'd witnessed in her childhood, he was nothing but an empty body.
That did not mean there was nothing left. There were still sparks in his eyes when he talked about puzzles and mysteries and chases just as he and Munin did when they were but children. The dazzling glee and the passionate thrill trickled into his voice as he gestured and told the story to its conclusion.
There were other things still there too. His anger. His sadness. His cruelty.
Hugin does not mean to be cruel. He is gentle and he is tender and he embodies kindness whenever he can. His touch is always soft and caring. He comforts and explains and tries to be polite before he needs to engage.
It does not mean he is not cruel.
There is a type of cruelty Hugin administers when he ignores a saving hand, ignores her worries and fears, because he does not want to be saved from the raging tides of grief, because he does not want to live without his sister at his side. He will drown in the waters of his tears and he will drown willingly by pushing everyone away from him.
Hugin had become his own ruination the way a tragic protagonist falls to their own hubris. He is cruel, in the way that he cares more for the dead than the living, and he is cruel by casting Firtho aside to do that.
He had always been a flighty sort. It was as if Munin was the only thing truly anchoring him to the earth.
It made the bitter, bitter part of her snarl and scream, to know she is not as loved, to know that she could not, would not, be the anchor he so needed.
The rational part of her silenced it, because Hugin is of the obsessive sort, and without anyone, anything to obsess over, he will crumble, and he will fall. It is with that thought that she lives in fear of his final investigation coming to its close, of the final attachment he has concluding its show.
Had Firtho been a poet instead of a doctor, able to weave words into novels instead of skin into scars, she would've written it like this: her heart had not been hers since two identical pairs of eyes looked into hers and told her she was not alone. So with that empty cavity in her chest, she clicked shut her ribcage and faced the world with an apathetic face and steady hands to wait for the people she could go home to.
"I do not live for you," she remembers saying, once, back when their friendship had been raw and new and Firtho tried to hide her vulnerable points with stoicism and frigidity.
They'd accepted her odd words with ease, as they so often did. "We don't live for you either," Hugin had told her, hand clutched in Munin's. He'd always been the more verbal one.
Firtho would call him a liar if she didn't know Hugin never lied. He adjusted his words to suggest a narrative, played at half-truths and omissions. He simply let other people interpret a story behind his words instead of laying it out for you. Manipulative, certainly, but never truly malicious.
We don't live for you either. That was true. Hugin never did live for Firtho. He just never lived for himself either.
It's only much, much later does Firtho realize that.
When Hugin returns to her and she recognizes his farce, she's hit with another annoying trait: Hugin deals only with absolutes.
It wasn't as bad before, Firtho remembered. He took risks. Calculated gambles. Taunted and teased and annoyed as if it were his right. He faulted and he stuttered, flustered and shook.
Now, in his post-Munin state, he was overly cautious. As if he had a need to stay in control of everything, factor in all the variables until comforting predictability came about. Like each action was rehearsed and each interaction had a script, he acted as though he was perpetually performing on a theater's stage, a mask without flaw.
Firtho knew such a performance was a Sisyphean task. It was also a fruitless one.
The hardest things to calculate were the hearts of others.
Hugin did it anyways.
She doesn't know if it's because he regrets leaving, regrets letting both Munin and Queen Agoria die. She isn't certain if it's because he thinks he could've prevented their deaths, prevented something from happening if he had known something, had done something. Maybe he believed that had he adjusted his positioning just so, levied a gun or blade or something else just that little more, or been a little quicker, a little faster, he could've saved them. Could've saved not only those who were now dead, but also himself.
Hugin was always the one who got caught on what-ifs and if-onlys. Munin had regretted and moved forward, kept going.
Perhaps it was because he had to leave, that he had been framed, resulting in that maniac need for control. Or, more likely, perhaps it was because Munin was gone that Hugin felt as though he could no longer shoulder the consequences he could've before.
Hugin had always hinged too much of himself onto other people. If she told him that though, he'd simply call her a hypocrite.
But that was the thing with both of them. Neither of them are easy to love, and so they cling onto it with the people that do.
With Hugin, though, it was easier to be deceived; just fall for his genteel grace and tender smile and the softness of his mannerisms. Fall for the melodic cadence of his voice and the warmth lining his words.
He was easy to love if your love didn't ask for sincerity. Sincerity was a secondary thing if you fell for his farce. That was reserved for the people he was most devout to. That was for the people he held dear to him.
Firtho was different. She didn't have the experience or the personality to put up such a mask. She didn't bother with molding words and faces and mannerisms to fit the expectations asked for. Firtho was unapologetic about being herself, and it pushed people away. She was hard to love at first sight and she was hard to love even as others tried.
("We don't love people because it is easy," Munin once told her, on a bad day. Hugin's shoulder pressed into hers, Munin's shoulder on her other side. They huddled close, as if maybe they could reach further into each other to connect even more than what physical touch could afford them. "Love doesn't work like that. You just… do."
But Munin had always been the liar when it came down to it, and when Firtho is left behind in her empty clinic with nothing but accusatory papers keeping her company instead of Hugin, she starts to doubt her.)
The two of them had a talk about it, once, if one could call it a talk. It had been after a particularly grueling case had driven Hugin into her clinic with a bottle of wine they'd indulged in with far too much glee, trying to drown their minds and sorrows in drunkenness. There'd been too many casualties, too many victims, too little information, too little time. Hugin had done a long soliloquy on the transactional nature of relationships and was winding down on the aspects of conditional love.
"The thing about love," he'd slurred, body stilted, "Is that rarely does it come without preexisting conditions." He flailed his hands to illustrate his point, somehow graceful even as he'd become progressively more intoxicated throughout the night. "Most expect it to be reciprocated; others expect themselves to be entitled to it; unconditional affections can exist, but it's loving without expecting anything in return. It's not always common."
"Most would say familial relations come with unconditional love," Firtho pointed out, slumped in her seat. She squinted her eyes, the dim lighting doing her no good in assessing her detective's condition.
She did, however, see the maniac look in his eyes as he slammed his hands onto the table. "That's what most would think!" He exclaimed, not sober enough to regulate himself as usual. His hands gesticulated again. "But there's still that sense of filial piety people come to expect; the cost of raising a child, the emotional support they'd offered up; I've seen far too much to know some people want that back from their relationships." He threw himself back into his chair, the legs of it scraping horribly on the flooring.
In matters such as these, both of them were far too cynical. The vulnerability of being known, the exposure and judgement they'd be subjected to; neither of them could truly do that. She thinks to what Hugin said to her once: When I cannot trust myself, I trust in Munin's judgement of me.
She wonders if that's why he no longer took risks. Because his judgement had been wrong, that Munin's judgement of him had been wrong.
He wanted to share his happiness, he wanted to share his joy, but for things like anger and things like grief, he hid it from the world as if he'd be criminalized for it. Or, maybe, he just didn't trust anyone's judgement anymore. Firtho didn't know, didn't ask, and Hugin never said.
There was a brief moment of silence before Firtho tried to broach the topic gently. "What about Munin?" She asked, sotto voce, the quiet of the room accusatory as she spoke the words. Her head throbbed. She didn't care to know if it was from the guilt or from the alcohol.
Hugin didn't reply. He didn't reply for such a long time that Firtho wasn't even sure if he'd heard her before his head dropped back and his hands came to cover his face.
"Munin is— different," he croaked, rhythm stuttered. He straightened himself upright, before slumping over the table and picking up the wine. He took a large mouthful straight from the bottle. Firtho didn't berate him for doing so. "From the beginning, we came into this world together. We were—we were never too far from each other. I… I wanted to leave this world just as we entered it. Together."
Firtho couldn't reply. What could she say to that raw grief? What could she say to console him, soften the pain, rather than rip open his wound? She's never had someone like that. She's never lost someone like that. She loved Munin, she did, just as she loved Hugin, but she never spent every waking moment with them, never spent her life attached to them by the hip. For someone like Firtho, she needed space for herself. Hugin, in the case of his bond with Munin, did not.
Firtho was a doctor, yes, but she was so very useless on matters such like these.
In the end, all she could do was a quiet whisper. "I'm sorry."
Hugin's face didn't crumple, not exactly, but his eyes glazed over from something not from the alcohol and his mouth curved down uncontrollably despite his best efforts to flatten it. He didn't cry, but it seemed to be a close thing. "It's not fair," he murmured in the hush of the room. He sounded on the verge of a tantrum, as if to curse the world in all its unfairness. "It's not fair."
He buried his head into his arms and didn't move from that position for the rest of the night.
Firtho threw a blanket over him. They stayed like that for the rest of the night and never addressed it in the morning.
Before, it had been terrifyingly easy falling into a sense of normalcy with Munin and Hugin.
It was easy to feel accepted, easy to feel needed and wanted. It was comfortable, being around them, because that sort of friendship, that sort of love, was easy. They were easy to love, at least for her. And even if they weren't, Firtho would've loved them anyways.
Now?
Now there was a Munin-shaped gap between her and Hugin. Now there was a distance that Hugin insisted on keeping. Like a dream slipping just out of reach, like grains of sand falling through her hand, Hugin refused to be known, refused to get in reach.
Firtho doesn't know it's because he wants to keep his grief private, if he wants to pretend like Munin's death didn't affect either of them as much as it did. She doesn't know if he just wants their relationship to be relegated to something more transactional, more professional, rather than something personal.
She refuses to know.
She'll close the distance. Because Munin's death had ruined them, had ruined him irrecoverably, and Firtho doesn't want to live through another tragedy, another loss. She'd gone through it once. She can't lose her last friend, her last precious person.
So she watches him as close as he allows, frets and berates and fusses over him as much as she can. She tries to tether him down, because god knows he needs it, and tries to make him think of a future beyond Munin's case.
She won't be able to tether him completely. Only Munin could do that, and Munin was gone. But Firtho could try, and Firtho refused to let Hugin go without at least trying her best.
Firtho had always been second place to something, someone, in her detectives' eyes. She knows that.
That didn't mean she didn't hold onto them as close as she could.