17. Alexander
ALEXANDER
By three in the morning, Alexander is ready to leave.
It took him several minutes to make it out of the dog pile of teenagers after today’s Trial, and by the time he emerged Kallias was already gone. Alexander brushed it off without thinking twice. He figured he’d see Kallias in the Library tonight.
But now he is in the Library and Kallias is not and Alexander is thinking twice and thrice, looking back on every instant between his shoving match with Kleitos to get to the exit and his last glimpse of Kallias by the bleachers.
It’s been hours since he picked the lock and took a seat, and at this point, he doesn’t know why he’s waiting anymore. Kallias clearly isn’t coming.
He sighs, shouldering his bag, and the loud screech of his chair scraping across the floor almost disguises a clicking noise of the lock outside being picked.
“Kallias?” he calls out from their table.
The person doesn’t reply, but Alexander’s question is answered when pearly moonlight from the windows sets their hair alight.
He wouldn’t be surprised if Kallias were a star in a previous life. He shines so bright it almost feels impossible.
Kallias approaches further, still silent, and drops into a chair without ceremony, so Alexander falls back into his own. Maybe it’s concerning how quickly he decides to stay, but God knows Kallias is half the reason he comes here in the first place.
Alexander waits for Kallias to talk—to offer an explanation or an excuse—but he doesn’t. He won’t even look him in the eye.
“Kallias,” he half-whispers. He doesn’t really know why he says it. If Kallias wanted to speak he would. But his face is so hollow. Like he needs a reminder to exist in his own body.
Kallias tilts his head until they make eye contact, and now that they’re less than a foot apart and staring into each other’s eyes Alexander realizes that he was wrong.
Hollow was the wrong word to describe Kallias’ expression. The boy in front of him is haunted. It’s a look he’s never seen on Kallias’ face before—one he’s never seen on anyone’s face before.
It’s the look of someone held at gunpoint and told to smile. The look of someone on their knees, begging to nobody. The look of someone with nothing to lose, too scared to gain.
And, oh.
Oh no.
Something is wrong.
Something has been, he thinks, the whole time. Whatever it is that Kallias has been hiding hasn’t just been weighing on him, it’s been killing him.
And now Alexander can see it in those beautiful onyx eyes framed by shining lashes, those golden brows furrowed in something far more tender than a scowl. There are bruises on his throat. Why are there bruises on his throat?
It’s not until Alexander exhales that he realizes he’s been holding his breath.
And just that puff of air is enough to release the pent-up energy. Kallias’ eyes go back to the stacks and take his secrets with them. The tension in the room dissipates until it’s just two twenty-two-year-old boys sitting at a table wondering what to do.
“Sorry I was so late,” Kallias sighs, still turned away.
Alexander hums.
“I got held up and I wasn’t watching the clock and I just—well I came down anyway. Because I thought maybe—because I needed to…” Kallias trails off with a frustrated exhale.
“Needed to what?” Alexander asks gently.
“I don’t—” Kallias shakes his head. “Nothing.”
“What does that—”
“I think it’s time to go to sleep,” Kallias interrupts in a mockery of his normal tone. It’s a surprise that Alexander’s not sure what to do with. Kallias just got here, and now he’s leaving? He finally looked at Alexander without his mask and he wants him to forget?
“Kallias.”
“I’m just tired. You should be too, after today.”
He watches Kallias sling his bag back over his shoulder and tries to smile when Kallias gives him a two-finger salute. As Kallias walks away, Alexander notices his gait is strange.
And then something comes over him. Something that combines all the cryptic secrets and guarded glances and strange habits. Something that shouts, I need to protect him and I can’t bear to leave him at the same time.
Call it an instinct, a need, a moment of clarity. But before Alexander can think about it he blurts, “Come with me.”
Kallias stops in front of the door, the torches in the stairway rendering him entirely in shadow. Alexander’s not sure if he’s even breathing.
“When I leave,” he continues, “come with me.”
Moments pass—seconds that could be hours that could be days that could be seconds again.
In the end, Kallias doesn’t say anything.
He walks away and closes the door behind him.
And Alexander doesn’t follow. He knows Kallias doesn’t want him to.
When Alexander stumbles down the spiral stairs at twelve thirty the next night, he expects the bottom step to be empty, Kallias scared away for good.
But there he is, back to Alexander, blond head bent over a book in his lap.
“Kallias,” Alexander sighs.
“Alexander,” he responds like his normal self, a shine of life in his dark eyes.
When Kallias starts the routine with the tiles and the lock Alexander dawdles behind him like a duckling. The tension in the air is unnervingly one-sided—like Kallias is trying to ignore whatever happened last night.
So it’s a shock when, moments after they sit down, Kallias looks up at him, thinking face on, and says, simply, “I’ll come with you.”
He says it like it doesn’t mean anything; like Alexander might laugh it off or throw it away; like Kallias hasn’t become his entire world in a time so short it scares him.
“What?” he asks, like an idiot.
“I’ll come with you,” Kallias repeats, and then, in a rare moment of hesitation, “If—If you still want me to.”
“What?” he asks again and Kallias’ brows furrow. “Yes! I mean, obviously yes.”
“Right,” Kallias drawls, one brow up.
“Yes. Yes, of course, yes. You just caught me off guard. No hesitation. Yes.”
“Okay.” Kallias half smiles. “You have to keep your promise, though.”
“What promise?” he asks, though he’s certain he already knows.
“I said I’d make you tell me the truth eventually,” Kallias says, walking around to sit on the table next to Alexander’s book.
“I’m Alexander,” he supplies, barreling on before Kallias has the chance to scowl. “Alexander Jameson. Prince of the Holy American Empire.”
For once, Kallias looks surprised.
“Prince?”
“And heir. Or, not anymore, I guess,” he says. He tries to pass it off as sarcasm, but even he can hear its sad tinge.
“So, someone else wanted the throne.”
“I… have a brother.”
It almost hurts to let his brother permeate this space, but if this is what it takes to keep Kallias then he’ll do it. He’s starting to think he’d do anything.
“Cain.”
Kallias stays quiet but his eyes are attentive. It’s comforting, kind of, to know that he can finally, finally tell the truth.
“We share a face, me and him. A birthday, a mother, a father, and that’s about it. He’s my mother’s son more than anything else. She never hit him hard enough to change that. Not like she did with me.” Alexander taps lightly on the slit in his eyebrow, a whispered reminder of his mother’s rage.
He can’t even remember why she did it. Just that he was standing, showered with her love one second, and bleeding on the ground the next.
“I sort of wish she had; maybe then he wouldn’t have measured his worth on her opinion of him. But even then, you’d think the razor in her hand and the pool of blood on the floor would have convinced him not to trust her judgment. I think it just made it worse.”
He pauses when Kallias puts a finger to the scar on his brow, so gentle he has to pay close attention to feel it. This close up, it’s easy to get lost in Kallias’ eyes, dark as night, and keep talking.
“Cain picked the wrong parent to favor. I think he realized that by the end. My dad had the real power, and he wasn’t like my mom.
He loved with every part of himself. An enigma at his most comprehensible.
He never believed in the religious stuff but led a religious country; he filled his days with tinkering but tamped down any technological development; he loved fiercely but showed it rarely.
“And my dad and I, we were… Well, not inseparable—I was a problem child desperate for attention and he was a king with too much on his shoulders—but we knew each other where it mattered.
“Cain, though? We never really knew Cain. Not enough to help him when he fell into his grief. Not enough to keep him from turning into something…” he pauses. Because what did his brother become, by the end?
Detached.
Obsessive.
“Merciless.”
His voice is steady when he says it even though the word comes as a surprise. Has he ever said any of this out loud before? Has he even thought it?
“It hurt me, to know that we weren’t enough to save my mother, but it broke him.
And his grief took the shape of one goal, looming constantly over the both of us: become the perfect heir.
Twins are not very helpful for maintaining a line of succession, so my dad planned to pick one of us when we turned twenty.
And that was fine. I never wanted to be their heir.
I was… I am reckless. I’m not responsible, I’m fickle and a slut and a sodomite.
I’m girl crazy and boy crazy and drunk crazy and— well, you get the point,” he says with a sharp smile as if each syllable doesn’t leave a scar as deep as the one in his brow. His mother never did mince her words.
Kallias speaks for the first time since the beginning of his rant. “Those words don’t sound like your own.”
Alexander’s laugh sounds a lot sadder than he intends. “No. No, they’re not. But they’re true. And if you’re my brother, you’d think the crown was yours. We both did. Then my dad said it was mine and whatever me and Cain had left between us shattered.