49. Alexander
ALEXANDER
“Oh, Forms, not again,” Kallias groans as fog rolls in from both sides of the path they’re on.
Alexander whines, still catching his breath from the last three booby traps they’ve faced, not to mention the two people they’ve had to knock out.
“Do you think everyone is getting it this hard or does someone have it out for us specifically?”
Kallias just lifts his crossbow in the direction they came from and Alexander turns so they’re back to back.
“Is that… a mirror?” Kallias asks, and Alexander cautiously glances over his shoulder to see what he’s looking at. “But why are you in it and not me?”
He turns all the way around and gasps.
“Dad?”
His father smiles at him and shoots him a wink. “Hello, my little lion.”
He can barely hear Kallias behind him. “What do you see? Do you see something else?”
“It’s my dad,” Alexander says, disbelieving. Did Cain send him away too? Has he been here the whole time?
He steps forward, and his mother and brother materialize next to his father.
“Meu menino,” his mother says gently in her native tongue. She looks so much brighter than when he last saw her, so much happier. She and his father are hand in hand.
“Mam?e?”
“I have missed you, Alexander. Meu filho lindo.”
“Whatever you’re seeing, it isn’t real,” Kallias says at his back.
Alexander ignores him, even though he knows Kallias is right. What’s in front of him is impossible. But he wants to believe more than he wants to admit it, so he lets the doubts go and approaches his beautiful family, all together again.
“Cain, senti sua falta,” Alexander whispers, scared to shatter whatever peace they’ve reached.
“Eu também. You’ll always be my brother, no matter what.”
Kallias yanks both of his shoulders and Alexander thrashes until he lets go, refusing to turn around in case, when he looks back, his family is gone.
“Alexander, you know this can’t be real,” he hears from behind him.
Who’s back there again? He can’t quite remember. He can only remember his family and the joy they’ve shared. The joy they’ll keep sharing when he reaches them.
“Come here, my son. My lion,” his father says.
“I’m coming, Dad,” Alexander replies, and he does. That is, until someone fully takes hold of him and shoves him against the wall, putting his family nearly out of sight. The golden hair is familiar, but only from the corner of his eye. “What are you doing? That’s my dad! Let go of me.”
“It’s a siren. A booby trap. And you’re falling into it.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I know better than to believe it,” the boy says, gazing into the fog like looking costs him something. His voice is a string pulled too taut and, somehow, Alexander knows that it’s not what he’s supposed to sound like.
Then his father calls, “Alexander?” and he remembers that he doesn’t have time for this. He needs to go right now.
Alexander seethes. “Just because you can’t get what you want doesn’t mean you need to take it from me, Kallias,” he yells, attempting to push the boy—Kallias, he’d called him—away so he can get back to his parents.
After an unsuccessful few seconds of struggle—of Kallias getting in the way of him hugging his father for the first time in months—Alexander can’t take it anymore.
He’s been trying not to hurt this boy, as Kallias is clearly trying not to hurt him, but he’s not going to let his family leave him behind again.
He balls his hand into a fist and launches a right hook that hits the boy in the cheekbone and throws him far enough away for Alexander to scramble back into the fog.
“Alexander, what the fu—No, wait! You have to listen to me!”
His parents hold out their hands to him, and he reaches to join them. Before he can, a voice shouts from somewhere in the fog.
“Your mother killed herself when you were seventeen,” it says, and, oh, yes, Alexander remembers that now. A razor and a fancy settee and a room drowned in morning light. But how could that be? She’s right there.
“She beat you when you taught yourself her native tongue. It was the language she used with her lover when everyone was around.”
His mother smiles at him, sickly sweet. He can’t recall ever seeing that expression on her face.
“Your father is dead. Not in battle, not by poison. Just the heart attack of a healthy man whose body betrayed him. He left you in a mess, pitting brother against brother in a struggle for the crown that should have been assigned at birth.”
His father’s eyes are placid and dull, no spark of intelligence running through them, none of the quickness Alexander could never keep up with.
“And Cain? He put you on a ship and sent you to die at sea. He loved your power more than he loved you.”
Cain’s shoulders are relaxed, all the tension he’s been carrying since they were children completely unfurled.
This is not his family.
The realization doesn’t hit him like a sudden wave. It feels more like he’s remembering something that’s always been true.
“Where are you going, meu menino?” his mother asks, stretching out her arm farther when Alexander takes a step back.
“Little lion, we miss you. Don’t leave us behind,” his father pleads.
“Come on, Alexander. Let’s be brothers again,” Cain says.
Alexander stumbles a few more feet backwards, his family hurling increasingly frantic and cruel things after him.
“You are nothing without us, boy!”
“You think you can survive on your own? You need me.”
“Little lion, please.”
He turns his back on them despite how unnervingly desperate he still is to succumb to the illusion.
“I never loved you, lion,” he hears behind him.
I’ll always love you, Dad.
Alexander runs, letting the voices blend into the fog. He sprints for seconds or days or years, only stopping when he bumps into someone and they both tumble to the ground.
The fog whooshes out of the pathways and Kallias sighs in relief, dropping his face into his hands. “I thought they got you. I thought… Oh, Forms, Alexander, don’t do that again.”
Kallias. He half recognized him in the fog. But not enough, it seems, to stop from hurting him.
“I hit you” is the only thing Alexander can say. A bruise is blooming where his punch landed.
Kallias tilts his head. “Yeah. But you barely even remembered me. I know you didn’t mean to.”
“But I still did it,” Alexander shouts. He shoves his fake family into the back of his mind, and now he’s just angry—at Kallias and himself. “You should be pissed at me. You should hit me back.”
Kallias scowls. “I don’t want to.”
How many hits has Kallias taken without fighting back? Why doesn’t he feel like he deserves to?
“How come you didn’t get hypnotized by the stupid thing?”
Kallias bites his lip. “I stopped believing in ‘dreams coming true’ a long time ago.”
“What did you see?” he asks.
Kallias’ eyes linger on where the fog used to be. “Something I shouldn’t have.”
Alexander wants to ask, but they don’t have the time. This is something to unpack on the boat when they’re finally off this God-forsaken island.
“Let’s go,” Alexander says on a sigh, affixing a mirror to the wall and motioning for Kallias to check its angle. “We’re almost there, right?”
“Almost there.”