49. Self and Identity #3
The light of the digital clock on Riley’s bedside table glinted off the glaze of the line of chickens inside the desk. Ciarán reached for one, holding his breath, and held it in the palm of his hand.
Nothing happened.
He cocked his head at it, and my heart hammered.
It was okay if Liam’s memories weren’t here, I told myself. I liked him just how he was.
But it wasn’t me I wanted his memories for. It was him. Ciarán deserved to remember the life he’d lived here.
He suddenly grabbed at the back of the desk chair for support.
“Wren—” He gasped, and the chair fell over when he put too much weight on it.
“What’s wrong?” I demanded, looping an arm under his and helping him sit on his bed.
He kept his eyes on the chicken in his hand.
“Wren,” Ciarán croaked a second time, then doubled over his lap, clutching the chicken and his shoulders shaking as he openly cried.
And then I felt it too.
The sudden flood of days spent in Keel Watch Harbor.
Kicking a soccer ball down the street with Riley and Sabrina. A father’s arms around my shoulders after scraping my knee on pavement. A mother’s kiss on my first day of middle school.
Crying into my soup in Ethel Warrender’s kitchen as I wondered where my parents had gone.
Moving into Riley’s bedroom. My aunt and uncle loving me as best they could.
Getting waitlisted at the university of my dreams. A meeting with an admissions officer with perfectly quaffed hair.
Move-in day into a dorm room that felt both too big and too small.
Ethel Warrender’s granddaughter and the way her brow furrowed in constant, feverish thought. The way her nostrils flared when I annoyed her. The way they flared even more when I was kind.
Her unconscious body on my bedroom floor. Her endless efforts to make me smile when she knew I was at my lowest. Laughing at her jokes because I liked how it made her blush.
And an entire world, marvelous and cruel and unlike anything in Skalterra.
As every memory of his life in Keel Watch Harbor battered both our minds, Ciarán whispered, heartbroken and jubilant, for a third time, “Wren.”
He unfolded himself from his lap to look at me through tear-blurred eyes, and for the first time since I’d held his dying body in the forest outside Von Leer University and I had realized the horrible truth, I felt like I was really looking at him.
Ciarán and Liam. Two sides of the same man. Everything he was, and everything he wanted to be. Everything he could be.
I wondered if it was the memory of his lost parents or maybe of his lost cousin that had tears spilling down his face. Maybe he was just realizing how close he’d been with my grandmother, and now she was gone. Whatever it was, devastation, grief, and loss churned along the tether.
“I had everything,” he finally gasped, “I was so happy.”
That was the difference between Ciarán and Liam. Not his hair color, his height, his eyes, or his demeanor, but the fact that Ciarán was bound by duty and sacrifice while Liam was allowed to live. He’d been brought to Keel Watch as a mercy, to give him a chance at happiness.
While both had suffered the same losses, Liam had still managed to find joy, even while grieving, because he wasn’t a Grimguard. He was a student studying what he wanted and an ice-cream scooper working with people that he loved.
Ciarán dropped his chicken on his bedspread as he composed himself, running shaking fingers through his dark hair.
“Do you feel any different?” I asked. I’d hoped for so long to get Liam back, but now that those memories were returned, I suddenly feared I might lose Ciarán.
However, Ciarán put those fears at ease. He took a deep breath as he composed himself.
“No.” He laughed softly, stood to put one hand around my waist as he used the other to tuck a lock of hair behind my ear. “I’m afraid I’m just the same, Blue. Just sadder, but maybe happier too.”
“Being the same isn’t such a bad thing,” I assured him. “I like you like this.”
“I’m sorry I don’t look more like him.”
“I’m sorry you think you need to,” I said, but then added, “but we do have haircuts and bleach in Keldori if that’s a route you wanted to take.”
To my relief, he laughed. “No, if this is good enough for you, then it’s good enough for me, my Lady.”
I pushed my fingers through his hair and then interlocked them behind his neck.
“It’s perfect,” I promised. “Ciarán, you are perfect.”
I rose on my tip-toes and pulled his mouth against me. He pressed back fervently, as if kissing me for the first time and as if he might never kiss me again.
When we finally drew apart, our noses sliding against each other and our foreheads pressed together, he smirked.
“I have to be honest, Blue. I’m only kissing you because you called me perfect.”
“Shut up.” I grinned, and silenced him with my lips against his.
When we broke apart a second time, he wrapped his arms around the small of my back to hold me close and bury his face in my hair.
“Thank you, Wren, for seeing me.”
We were broken and shaken, but entwined there with him, I thought that maybe there was a chance we might be whole again.