'Til Kingdom Come
Title: 'Til Kingdom Come, Part One
Author: Rissy James
Index: Table of Contents here.
Characters: Everyone ever. Major and minor series characters. OCs, some new, some appearing from my Emerald 'verse.
Pairings: It's complicated. Past Cain/Adora, eventual Cain/DG, canon Lavender/Ahamo.
Rating: 16+
Summary: Being a somewhat fabricated, but mostly accurate, history of the Outer Zone, therein concerning the aftermath of the Emerald War and the restoration of the House of Gale.
'Til Kingdom Come
Chapter Three
Cain
Twenty-seven days.
Wyatt Cain was a free man, and had been for twenty-seven days.
So why the hell did it feel like his iron prison was closing in on him again?
It had been creeping on him for weeks, lurking in the shadows as it were. Can't shrug off a shadow. He wasn't one to let personal troubles interfere with what had to be done. That wasn't to say that the past few weeks had been a shining example of his control of character, but there it was again. The suit, affecting him in ways that were not easy to ignore or elude, let alone overcome.
Moving on meant walking forward, one damn step at a time, and he'd done that, was doing that, and still that shadow dogged him, pestered and plagued him. The dreams were bad enough, pale and stained with bloody memories, night after night, those faces, always those faces, but he'd wake to sunlight and room to stretch, and the dreams would fade to nothing as he filled his time, his every waking minute, with substance and purpose.
Idle hands, or something; he had thought the work would distract him. He had thought being useful would help. By the gods, it had to be better than doing nothing.
Now, he wasn't so sure.
It was Jeb that had been the deciding factor, that final push that had made up Wyatt's own mind to stay in Central City to do what he could, though that seemed to be little enough as it was - aside from keeping his mouth shut. With the guilds divided and fighting amongst themselves and no standing army to speak of, Jeb's meagre company was all the O.Z. had in the way of white knights, protectors of all that was good and pure, the kittens, the daisies, and the light.
The resistance, damaged men and broken women and hungry children. It was enough to make a man want to close his eyes and never hope to open them again. Sometimes Cain thought he could become that man, turn his head and let it all pass him by, but then the dreams would come on him in the darkness and he'd wake to more sunlight, more substance and purpose, and his cycle would begin again.
That first night after the tower had fallen, though - no, he hadn't been prepared for that.
It hadn't started to itch at him until second sundown, hadn't started to twist inside of him like some serpent coiling around his tender, beating heart. He'd felt strangely empty, that much he remembered clearly, even if the rest was fogged with the fondness of memory. Hollow was a good word for it, he supposed, all hollow. Each damned heartbeat had echoed loudly in his ears.
He'd taken refuge with his son, one tent among dozens sprung up at the base of the tower since the fighting had come to its tentative standstill. Something about the canvas had put him at ease, where the oppressive marble opulence of the tower rooms had left him cold and wanting.
Outside, the air should have been ringing with celebration but was instead heavy with loss, and every heart was filled with questions and no answers. The dead were still being recovered from inside the tower, and the field medics were barely coping. His own son had been called on to identify the dead, and he'd returned to his tent wide-eyed and pale, and what remained of Cain's heart had broken a bit then, for a past he could not mend and a future he could not give, for a son who was no son and all he had left in the world.
Reports from the scouts were trickling in: near to half the enemy force had fled, the lines broken the very moment the suns had come back out. Even the resistance was not without deserters, men who'd gone back to homes in the bordertowns, or what little remained of them, gone home to families and farms, gone home to forget.
It was meant to be victory. The men and women who surrounded the fires blazoning in the night, these resistance fighters had set out to overthrow an wicked witch, a tyrant. None yet knew they'd saved a princess from an evil spell. He remembered wondering if any of them would ever truly believe.
And so he'd sat with his son amongst the trappings of the meagre existence of life on the run. The talk had been all business, talk of tactics and supplies and casualties. So many casualties, and the greatest of all lingered over them as a ghost. It had been remarkably easy to avoid such matters of the heart as existed between them; there among the maps and the men was where both excelled. If either had admitted to taking comfort in the presence of the other, it wasn't said aloud.
They had spoken on the resistance. They had spoken on the men, on scouts and generals alike. They had spoken on the weather, the state of the Old Road. They had not spoken on Adora, nor on the suit that held the man who had killed her, somewhere in the southern wilds, waiting for salvation or justice or death.
"Can we expect reinforcements?" he remembered asking, and too remembered how the fleeting look of worry that crossed his son's face had unsettled him deeply.
"Can't say," Jeb had said heavily. "Most of them will probably just drop arms and go home. Only ones you can expect to head this way are the ones without a home left to go to."
Wyatt had stared down at the map spread open on the table, the most recent that Jeb had to offer. He remembered how much it had saddened him to see how the lines had changed since he'd last laid eyes on them. The guild boundaries had been redefined in all five realms, the towns he remembered - including the one he'd been born in - had been wiped away as if they'd never existed. The northern and southern palaces were missing as well.
It could almost have been an entirely different world, but even then in the wake of the battle, Wyatt Cain had known better. Lines of ink were just that, nothing more than an observer's depiction, heavily biased by the weight of the Sorceress' regime. He had imagined then there would only be a few weeks of respite before fighting picked up between the guilds over territory claims.
It had been a generous estimation, proven wrong within only a few days, and the weeks since had not been any kinder.
Necessity had found the royal family moving to the safety of the city, but it wasn't necessity that had found him moving with them. It was his son, those heavy duties he'd taken on from a man he refused to speak of - and that was what Cain kept telling himself, all these weeks later. It was his son, it was for his son, for the cause, for the future of his homeland.
It had nothing to do with a pair of sky blue eyes. It continued to have nothing to do with that, either, even as she turned those eyes on him and stared him down, daring him, daring him to do something and damn it, he had yet to figure that part out.
"You don't have any idea what she wanted?" DG asked him then, her jaw set to determined.
She wanted to know about her mother, and the council meeting she'd skipped. Playing hooky was exactly the kind of thing he would have chalked up to the kid before the tower, before reality had set in and made her a bit more serious and sad.
"Not a mind reader," he said, a simple passing remark, but it wasn't until he'd glanced over his shoulder that he saw he'd touched on a sore spot. "Listen, kid, I'm just here to deliver you to your mother, not to play at guessin' games." He didn't like the look on her face, that look she got, the one that made him think his heart just might split in two for the sweet sorrow of it.
They continued on in silence after that, her tromping along in the lead, all pluck and spine. If it had been any other moment in time, the absence of conversation would have been a welcome change, if only because it put an end to her incessant grilling of her mother's intentions. What vexed him was that of the council meeting itself, she'd asked very little, and now it seemed she'd ask no more at all. He had never expected her to have much of an interest in supplies and skirmishes - he himself sometimes had trouble forcing the concern at the council table. Under any other circumstance, he'd expect her to be brimming with questions. Her sudden quiet was just disquieting, because when it came to DG, one never knew what wheels were turning beneath that crown of tumbledown curls, and that could be a downright dangerous thing.
The twist of dreary passages she led him down played tricks on his mind. A lifetime before, there'd been a time or two he'd set foot in the royal palace, accompanying the old man whether the call had been business or leisure. He remembered a more vibrant place, unending opulence, lush colour and rich fabrics, full of glass and greenery and enough mirrors to give just about anyone a fixation. He remembered a young queen, a doting consort. The princesses, he'd never laid eyes on in those days, but for the rare picture appearing in the newspaper, grainy and unflattering, two pale cherubs with wide, sombre eyes.
And now, all these annuals later, here he was again in this faded place, barely reminiscent of old glories, and here beside him walked his princess, grown up pretty but still pale, still sombre. The girl trusted him, looked up to him, called him friend.
But in those sky eyes, he sawwhat she tried so damn hard to hide, he saw and he knew better. It was why he'd grown accustomed to her sudden silences, and why they bothered him so. As to what to do about it, he was at a loss. Ignoring it seemed the only tried and true method, and so to this he adhered, day in and day out while the kid drifted farther and farther away from him.
If things were different...
He looked down at DG walking beside him, and he was both distracted and distraught by her intense interest in her shoelaces.
"Deege," he finally tried, and she glanced up to give him a crooked grin, and he couldn't tell if she was trying to throw him off with a feigned calm or if she'd truly wrestled free of whatever had been eating at her.
"It's okay, Cain," she said, and if her smile was not genuine, she was fooling him just fine. "I'm sure she'll understand if I just explain to her why I missed council."
"If you're sure," he said, all the while knowing she wasn't.
It wasn't long before they came upon her mother's residence, a set of heavy doors at the end of a wide, empty, echoing hall, flanked by a pair of young men of an age with the princess at his side. Both wore woollen scarves knotted round their necks, faded and frayed but still clinging to the red of their cause.
"Thanks, Cain," she said, stopping to smile at him once more, eyes flickering indecisively across his face. "Will I see you tomorrow?" she asked, giving him a prompting little nod.
"'Course you will," he said, because what could he say other than the truth, to reassure her he wouldn't up and leave, no one would up and disappear, that even if she woke up tomorrow with a head full of fog in a bed in an attic on the other side of the rainbow, she would still know she hadn't been left or forgotten, that it all hadn't been some awful, wonderful dream.
And because there were guards in the hall, he kept his hand off her shoulder, off her elbow or her back or wherever it had become his custom to extend that gesture of comfort and friendship, and his fingers curled into his palm to stop the twitch and the itch. If she noticed, she kept it to herself, though that overlong look she gave him was enough to tighten his fists and force him to turn before - well, just before, and he left it at that, left her there, and walked away.
It was no good, and it was getting worse.
He'd never intended to go down this road - that was how the argument began in his head, every damn time. It was familiar to him, this back and forth over heavy truth and bitter reality and that consistent pull of want and can't that was never, ever satisfied.
At times, it shamed him, other times intrigued him, left him daydreaming, left him laying awake at night. Then, his dreams would come over him, as dreams were meant to do, and he'd wake twisted and uncertain and sick with guilt and the prospect of carrying the weight of it around his neck for the rest of his days. Because, really, what was one more weight to one such as him.
Old arguments, easily put aside. These were his thoughts when he heard his name called, and he stopped trying to find his way back to his own quarters and turned toward the voice.
The man chasing after him was Carver Lindsey, a young field captain of the Sorceress' army who'd been there during the resistance siege. A man who had very recently found himself in command of the few remaining units, gaining with it a seat on Lavender's council and far too many problems. He was a handful of annuals older than Jeb, and like most of the young men who'd joined the war late, he seemed to have more balls than sense.
"Something I can do for you?" he asked, biting off the courtesy of addressing the man by rank. Even with the war over, and with the man in front of him never having done him a wrong, he was still grievously bitter.
"The princess is requesting a moment of your time," said Captain Lindsey, with the wry smile that said it was not a request.
"I just came from DG not ten minutes ago," Cain said, making no attempt to mask his impatience. "Whatever it is, it can't be that important that she didn't tell me then."
"Princess Azkadellia is requesting a moment of your time," the young captain corrected.
"She making it a habit to send you with her messages?" Cain asked, raising an eyebrow.
Lindsey scowled at him. "I carry out my orders without question, sir. I suggest you do the same."
Chapter Two | Chapter Four
Complete Chapter Index