Epilogue #2
His words were quiet, as if he didn’t want anyone else to hear. Or perhaps the air was too fragile, filled with disquietude neither of them was willing to break, and he lowered his voice to match.
Rain felt the edge of her lips tip up. “I know. I researched it once. It was… an interesting choice, but I never doubted your judgment for a second.”
Kay let out a short, huffed laugh. “You never found it… arrogant?”
Rain met his eyes. “No. You’re important, I could say to people, but as long as you’re important to yourself, that is all that matters. That you put yourself first, your happiness, your health, your safety—I’m satisfied.”
Kay let a brow quirk up. “Well, I did it out of arrogance, but here you go, finding a deeper meaning to things.”
Rain smiled and gently nudged her shoulder against his. Again, they settled into silence. But it was the comfortable sort. The one that reminded them of what it felt like to sit here together, talking well into the hours of the night.
“You know…” Rain begins, and she doesn’t know why, but she thinks it’s something Kay would like to hear. “I have… peers that I am almost constantly surrounded with at Castle Hill.”
Kay turned his head, and a grin began to slowly grow upon his lips, easily reading between the lines. “You have friends.”
“Peers.”
“Is that a new word for friends?”
“Shut up.” Rain playfully tugged on a strand of his hair, but that only seemed to egg him on.
“The serious Atty has friends.”
Rain huffed. “Well, anyway, there are six of us.” She shook her head. “God, Kay, how we hated each other at the start of term. I always felt that it was my responsibility to bring us all together. It was my burden to bear alone because I am student body president, and it is my job.”
Confusion pulled his brows together. “Why were you forced to surround yourself with them to begin with?”
“The Founder’s Society.”
Kay blinked as realization filled his eyes. “It’s twenty years this year.”
Rain only nodded. The implication itself brought forth a mental library of information from their youth. Stories, however vague, that their grandmother would tell them, away from the rest of the Jett family.
She never did speak so freely around their parents and the twins.
“Well… How did it go?”
“Thaddeus Saltford-Windsor is our mentor, and a small part of me feels exceptional sympathy for him.”
“Why?” He laughed.
“They drive him mad.” Rain tilted her head with a barely-there smirk. In those moments, she never did consider how thrilling it was to work as a team, no matter how small and childish their activities may have appeared.
But talking about them with Kay, reminiscing, made her smile despite herself. “August, Sasha always calls him bigmouth.” She pauses. “It’s an American term.”
He nodded along. “I’m quite knowledgeable in American English, thank you very much. Carry on.”
She rolled her eyes. “Alright, August convinced Thaddeus that he was imagining things and losing his mind after he’d walked in on us doing something completely mundane. I think we all just like the thrill. It makes camaraderie come easier.”
Kay hummed.
“Sasha… He’s new and of the secretive sort, always plotting something behind those eerie eyes of his. Doesn’t like anyone riffling through his past, but I know that he’s an orphan who comes from poverty. I guess that’s where he gets all the grit from.”
Now that she thinks of it, “Sasha reminds me so much of you.”
“Huh, and here I thought I was special. So, what is it, devilishly good looks? Intelligence beyond conceivability?" Kay said with bouncing brows and a very pompous smirk.
Rain placed a hand against the side of his head and shoved lightly.
“No. I was going for personality. At first, I thought it was August because he couldn’t stop blabbering even if it would save his life.
And then I thought of Paris, with her big grins and passion for grandiose.
And yes, Sasha is on the quieter side, but I think his tough upbringing made him so hard on the outside; he doesn’t think people notice when that weak part of him comes out. Kind of like you.”
Kay waved her off. Rain could tell it was partly out of bashfulness. “That is not me.”
“I’m being as honest as a saint. He has a temper that he always takes out on anyone in a position of authority, and this straightforward attitude that sometimes even I envy.”
“Oh? I’m beginning to like this new me. Tell me more.”
At that, Rain began to ramble. She always did with Kay.
“Sometimes I’m relieved when he’s around.
I used to hate his presence, but then I realized…
I don’t have to carry it all. For the first time, I don’t feel like it’s an attack on my own authority.
In those moments, it feels like even I have someone that I can rely on.
Someone who knows what to do next when everyone expects all the answers from me.
I never realized it until our last dinner, when everyone just seemed to…
gravitate around him. And yet, in a strange way, I’m not envious.
“He's become quite close with Wolf, too. They’re always whispering in corners or passing a cigarette in Sasha’s dorm.”
Rain was so giddy, she wondered what the rest of her club members would think if they saw her now. But with her younger brother, Rain could admit that she sounded like two different people. As if she only saved her opinions for him. Everyone else got the calculated information.
It had always been like that. Kay and Rain were hand in glove, and nothing could ever separate them growing up. Well, except for their parents.
“Are you going to replace me now?” It had been a simple question, a playful question. But Rain could hear the fear hidden under all those layers of cool and amusement.
She sighed and wrapped her arm around his shoulders; they’d gotten wider.
It was hard to reach the other end, an awkward position that made her arm ache quickly, before pulling him against her.
“Nothing, no one in this entire world, could ever replace you. You have no idea how much I’ve missed you, Kay.
You have no idea how good it is to see you. ”
He remained quiet, deep in thought; she could always tell what each moment of silence meant with her brother. Whether he was enjoying the peace or pondering within it. When he was worrying and when he was brooding.
His lips set in a helpless line, his brows flattening in simmering frustration, eyes dark with the remnants of resentful memories of the life they’d been forced to endure.
“I missed you so much, Rain. You’ve no idea.”
“Ditto.”
Kay’s laugh was a mix of a scoff and a wet sniffle. “I want to meet this Sasha.”
Rain ran her hand up and down his back in a soothing manner. “Maybe one day.”
They both knew it was unlikely. They didn’t know what Alistair and Emmeliana had in store for their youngest son, and they learned a long time ago not to foster false hope.
“Tell me more about this band of misfits you’re now a part of,” Kay said.
And tell, Rain did. She recounted her first impressions of everyone, every detail of their dinners, their arguments, all their jokes (word for word).
She tells Kay about Ajax calling Thaddeus an old man, Paris breaking into Sasha’s room (an occurrence that August had spotted), Marigold falling over the back of a couch, and August’s timeouts.
“And Wolf?” The name was spoken so abruptly that her heart stuttered at the intrusion of memories she tried keeping away from the forefront of her mind.
“... What about him?”
Kay straightened and tilted his head at her, so eerily similar to Sasha, she noted. “Still in the doghouse?”
Rain shoved him a little harder than a nudge this time. “I am not in the doghouse. We… talk.”
He didn’t speak, waiting for her to continue talking, because who was she kidding?
There always was more to say about Wolf.
“We talk, or whatever you could call the stilted words we exchange. I know he doesn’t hate me…
He just wishes I didn’t resort to the only option possible.
He’s better now, and I think he realizes that. ”
“Better how?”
Rain’s gaze latched on the wall in front of her and remained there. “Well, he’s sobered. And undoubtedly not off his rocker. Sasha keeps him aware, I think.”
Rain, despite Sasha’s weak attempt at distraction, remembered Paris’s short slip back into intoxicants. She also remembered him putting out cigarettes whenever he could bring himself to let go of his own addiction.
A small part of her was glad he was by Wolf’s side, not that she didn’t trust the boy to return to his old ways.
Wolf, once upon a time, was worse than Paris. Drowning himself in anything that could bring him closer to hallucinating a real enough version of his missing brother.
Rain never thought of herself as someone who would do what she’d done, but when she walked in on her best friend choking on his own vomit in his knocked-out state, she knew that the only way she could ever help him change was by telling his father.
She was only sixteen, and no sixteen-year-old could handle that on her own, no matter how capable she believed herself to be.
There was a naive part of her that hoped Wolf would pull himself out. That he would see how much he was hurting himself, and her in turn, and stop.
He couldn’t do that if he were dead.
The last time they’d spoken, truly spoken, he looked at her with betrayal in his eyes and hatred spewed out of his mouth in the form of words.
She didn’t mind. It hurt, of course. But if that ensured his survival, she would do it again.
He was so much better now, and she was glad he realized it, too.
She didn’t think he would ever return to his old ways, but it comforted her further that Sasha was by his side. She thinks Sasha hates that stuff too because of memories from his past. Perhaps his father or mother.
Or perhaps a friend taken from him by the same stuff Paris and Wolf once cherished.