Mayfair Manor

[Okimiyage]

Rynn gave a little half-shrug, barely raising his shoulders enough to drop them again. “Things did get better. For you, and for Antha. We might still have ended up in an attic, but - “ He raised his eyes, looking around at the dust-covered trunks, the light streaming in soft towers from the faded window-panes above them, the dry wooden floorboards beneath them that smelled of cedar, “ - you cannot tell me that this is worse than what was.” And to some extent, Rynn reflected, as he sat back, his shoulders rolling underneath his shirt, hope was what you built with your own hands. “Hope is expectation,” he said aloud, “It doesn't fulfill itself, but it sets a marker in the distance that you can keep your eyes on. Maybe what you built was because you set those goals, that expectation. If you had resigned yourself to 'this is as good as it gets', we wouldn't be here – now – with one another.” Rynn smiled at that, although his eyes did not return to meet Alistair's for a few moments. He seemed to be looking at something far away, or long ago.
When at last their gazes found alignment again, the smile faded. “It's the only magic I know,” he told Airi. “If I had to compare – “ he slowly lowered his nose to Alistair's neck, breathing in his scent, letting his lips trail across the collarbone beneath his skin, “An ancestor of mine once wrote that the Calais magic is in our bones. This seems apt. It is cold, devoid of real life, and the only thing that's left at the end of time, after everything else has rotted away. But without its structure, its architecture, there would be nothing to act as a frame-work within the body. And while it may endure beyond death, it is of no use to anyone without its casing. The Mayfair magic, then, must be like blood – hot, propelled by the heart, and it is what separated and connected us to the outside world for decades. Your name, the rumors that encircled it, reminded people that witches still exist, and are powerful enough to fear...” He trailed off. They'd kept the power on at the Calais mansion, years after the last electric bill had been declared overdue. The water had kept running, the radiator in winter still grunted and growled, and Rynn had never questioned it, had always assumed they'd be provided for, but in retrospect that seemed foolish. He wondered who must have known – who must have been passed on those directions from their predecessor. What a strange conversation that had to have been. Rynn's mouth tightened, marginally, and he spoke with a snap next, refusing to finish his previous thought. “And like blood, once it is spilled, it's nearly impossible to remove the trace of it.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the chalk outline of the circle wriggle, like a wrist fighting against being cuffed. Light glimmered, sputtered, faded out at the circumference of the circle. “But we don't have time to talk thaumaturgy,” Rynn declared, with quiet intensity, sitting up for a moment long enough to make his intent known. “Help me get this started.”
The circle flared into a ring of light around them.

Antha had dozed off. Cian was preparing to as well – the house was quiet enough for a mid-afternoon nap – when he felt her start to shift underneath his arms, making quiet, unconscious moans of distress that he recognized from his own nightmares. And then she was awake – and there was a pounding in her chest that he could feel beneath his fingertips, clear through her shoulderblades, as her eyes opened. “Shhh,” he murmured, “Shh,” pressing his lips against her forehead, but it was too late to soothe her back into sleep. Whatever she had encountered in her dreams had invoked an instantaneous reaction. He couldn't make sense of her words, although he racked his brain for the context they might have been said in, and she wasn't asking him to. His hands found purchase on her shoulders, turning her towards him, and the confusion must have appeared in his eyes before he even opened his mouth to ask, “Antha, what are y--”
She silenced him before he had a chance to ask the question. Just distract me.
Cian's mouth hardened a little at that request. He wanted to protest – wanted to say, 'Are we not partners? Can you not confide in me like you used to? No, not about this --'
But after a moment of internal conflict, his mouth softened enough to kiss her again, truly and with meaning. His hands wound into her hair, fingers tightening ever so gently at her temples before moving to cup the base of her skull, cradling her head as though those long-fingered hands of his could shield it from everything outside. If she needed a distraction, he could provide that. To be frank, he needed one himself. If he could just focus on the moment, lose himself in the repetition of movement, the sensations that resulted, the inevitable culmination – at least for that time, as long as it lasted, he didn't have to think about what was coming afterwards.
A thought that had drifted across his mind lately – whenever Antha and he had last been intimate, and every time since that they'd kissed or held one another – was that every time might be the last. It was a distressing thought, and he didn't care to entertain it more than a moment, but it had unsettled him enough that there had been no half-hearted embraces since, no parting kiss as she breezed out the door that had been taken for granted. This, again, proved true.
Afterwards, he lowered his face into the crease of flesh where her shoulder joined her neck, and lay with his lips against the carotid arteries of her throat, and kissed the hummingbird-beat of her pulse as it subsided. Cian would have to go check in on the children soon, but he was putting off the moment of leaving her for as long as possible. Even if he didn't know what Antha's earlier outburst had meant to her, he knew what its consequences would be.  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

For a while, Antha laid in silence, her breath deep but even, halfway between calm and panicked. “If I don’t explain,” she began quietly, “It’s because I’m bewildered. Essentially…you’re walking into a giant mess that should’ve been over with, should’ve been completely gone, but just came barreling from the ashes. A wolf in sheep‘s clothing. And you’re coming in far, far too late for us to be partners in this whole mess.” Her fingers gave another fine tremble, her grip on Cian strengthening. “I think it’s important that you see it. I’m sure you’d believe me, but…you can’t even begin to grasp the full picture unless you see it, and more than anything I don’t want you to underestimate him. He’ll destroy you if you underestimate him.”
Her head throbbed, only for a moment, her heartbeat pounding in her chest as the scene replayed, but she pushed it out of mind. “I underestimated him once. I let him fool me, because he does it so well, and---” Her jaw clenched, her face burying against Cian’s shoulder. “…to be honest, I don’t know what he did. My mind blocked it out, buried it down deep so I wouldn’t remember. I’ve been pushing it further down ever since. Whatever it is, if it’s so much worse than anything else I’ve lived through in my life, I don’t want to remember it.” A small shudder ran through her body, barely perceptible.
Finally, she sat up, swinging her legs over the side of the bed as she tried to regain her composure. If ever she needed to be “Antha Mayfair,” this was the moment. But she kept Cian’s hand in hers, her fingers wound desperately with his. “If I’m right---and the more I think about it, the more likely it seems---then we’re saved. The family is saved, when I’m not here to protect it. But the price…the price might be too high.”
Her hand passed once over the back of her eyes, her breath coming in sharply, before she gained control of herself. “Alright…okay. A plan.” Reluctantly, she released Cian’s hand one finger at a time, rising and going over to the closet. “I can’t do it in front of the entire family, that’s asking for a battle to break out. Ah---tea. We’ll take tea in the garden, lure him outside. Rynn and Liesse will have to be there, if they’re going to understand what’s going on. Who else doesn’t know…? Pierce and Lucy, but Lucy doesn’t need the stress in her condition, and Pierce…I think he had a feeling, back then, it should click into place when someone tells him. Dorian, he never figured it out, and out of everyone, he needs to understand what he’s dealing with.”
Finally, she smoothed out the skirt of her green and black plaid dress, straightening it out. “Right, okay. Alistair will bring Rynn. I need you to bring Liesse. Well, more accurately, I need you to warn her. This is probably going to be a terrible, terrible thing. I’ll get everyone else.” Checking the clock, she thought to herself for a split second. “One hour, in the garden. That’ll give them time to get here.” Leaning over the bed, she pressed her lips gently to Cian’s, soft and reassuring. “You’ll understand, darling, I promise. But this has to unfold correctly if it’s going to be at all manageable. If he thinks for one moment that he’s been caught, he might do something drastic.”

The Mayfair cousins were suspicious.
Well, the few of them gathered, anyways.
Alistair alone was his usual, endlessly unburdened self, sitting calmly in his seat at the wrought iron table in the garden and sipping his tea. Courtland and Jack were suspiciously glancing around themselves as if waiting for something unknown to happen, Lawrence was tense and knotted and uncertain, and Malakai focused his attention nervously on the plate of teatime fare in front of him, picking listlessly at the bread of a cucumber sandwich. Even Melody, bewildered from the moment she’d been summoned, couldn’t carry off her usual carefree nonchalance.
Antha was normal only at first glance. She maintained her queenly bearing, fixing a cup of tea with all of her steadfast elegant manners, but a more accustomed eye could easily detect that she was guarded and quiet, her movements too perfectly prim to be natural. She hadn’t taken a single shot at Melody yet, and if nothing else, that was a red flag. She had to have some idea that something was going to happen.
Besides the aforementioned, she’d summoned Rynn, Dorian, and Liesse to join them for tea, pointedly not giving them the option to refuse. But since then, there had been no indication of what was going on in her mind. So, the Mayfairs attempted to carry on as usual, as much as they could, chatting quietly over the tea and small plates of delicate food to fill the silence with more than the chittering of insects and birdsong in the garden.
“You’re not lovely at all,” Courtland sighed at his husband, sipping his tea with all the same well-drilled elegance as Antha.
“Roses are pretty, they’re meant for looking at,” Jack muttered, pouting as he took a reluctant sip, “Not drinking. I just never liked it.”
“Not lovely at all,” Courtland hummed with finality, polishing off his cup and setting it delicately back on its saucer.
“Roses are a well-versed bloom,” Antha chimed in, breaking an unusually long silence, “Sight, taste, smell…” Reaching out, she plucked one of the small pink roses from the centerpiece, turning it once in her fingers to study it before crushing it in her palm. When she opened her hand, the scent wafted unmistakably around the table, sweet and heady. She held it out for a moment, regarding it coolly, before moving her hand to the side and casting the shreds of petals into the grass. Taking her cup back up, she said nothing more and the rest of the party returned to their own tea.
But she was paying attention now. Alistair didn’t need to look to know it, but Courtland realized quickly that her gaze was quite firmly pointed across from herself, observing. He’d barely begun to wonder if there was a Talamascan lurking in the bushes before she sighed to herself, leaning a little less primly back in her seat. “It’s interesting, isn’t it? The things we don’t notice we do.”
“Is it?” Lawrence asked, his voice small. He was all confusion and alarm.
“Quite interesting,” she confirmed, sitting back with her eyes closed in thought, “Simply because we don’t realize we do them. Those around us take them for granted, they’re used to seeing them. But the trick is---” She opened her eyes, now sharp and focused, and kept her gaze steadfast across from herself at Malakai. “---if someone can’t see us, we can’t tell them that we do it, so they never know.”
Malakai perked up slightly, meeting her gaze with curiosity and uncertainty, flashing his usual little sheepish smile that could mean any number of things, responding because he seemed to be expected to. “Is that so?”
“Yes,” his sister answered easily, her head tilting several degrees as she watched him with the intensity of a hawk, “Facial expressions in particular. Malakai always had the most miserable expression on his face when someone destroyed a flower.” She paused, sipping her tea, her eyes as she watched her brother taking on a hint of something like accusation. “You never had any particular reaction, though.”
There was silence for several moments, nothing particularly altering between the siblings. Jack, glancing wildly between them, ventured to ask, “Who didn’t, now?”
Neither answered him. Instead, Malakai put down his cucumber sandwich, delicately dabbing his mouth with a napkin before the first hint of a sly grin stretched his lips. “Entrapment, is it? What a rotten trick.”
Antha gave little reaction, still sipping her tea as if she hadn’t a care in the world, though the cousins were all visibly a little taken aback at the uncharacteristic tone of Malakai’s voice. “Shouldn’t I be saying that to you?”
It was Courtland who realized what was going on first, it showed in the sudden frantic alarm in his eyes less than a second before he attempted to bolt. But he’d no sooner gotten to his feet than Malakai was out of his seat, lunging across Jack and seizing Courtland, bringing the three of them all to the ground. By the time Jack had recovered his senses after the shock, Malakai and Courtland were in the grass nearby, the former sitting on the latter, his fingers wrapped around his throat with the apparent intent to do him serious physical harm. Courtland clawed weakly at his arms, his legs thrashing beneath his slight cousin, but apparently could not hope to compete with the force of his animosity.
“Airi---” Antha called just as Jack threw himself forward, trying to wrestle Malakai off of Courtland to little avail.
“Yeah, yeah,” her brother sighed before she’d even finished, setting his cup down and going over to take one of Malakai’s arms as Jack yanked the other, and between them they managed to pull him off of his cousin and to his feet.
Courtland gave a great, strained rasp for air the moment he was released, erupting into a fit of dry coughs as he rolled over, desperately grasping his throat, and then another series of shaking rasps. At the table, Melody was half out of her seat before she gave a gasp of realization, dropping back down into her chair. “<********>” she said in one breath, going limp as she put a hand to her forehead, looking very much like she was ashamed of herself, “Of course Malakai wouldn’t say that. Not even to Dorian.”
Malakai, shaking his cousin and brother off of him, threw her one contemptuous glance over his shoulder. “Of course he ******** wouldn’t.” Casting a fleeting glance at Courtland, weak and vulnerable on the ground, as if he’d very much like to continue where he’d left off, he gave a tsk of irritation before turning and dropping unceremoniously back in his seat, narrowing his eyes briefly at Melody. “Don’t blame me that you’re too ******** stupid to realize it.”
In the blink of an eye, Malakai didn’t seem like Malakai. His expression had changed, shifting to something cool and imperious, his body language altogether transforming to something that fundamentally was not Malakai. There was something haughty and self-assured about him, his movements less languid. Without looking at her, only taking up his tea with confidence of movement that Malakai never possessed, he said to Antha, “I used to be able to fool you for so much longer.” He leaned back in his seat, carelessly, pushing it onto the back two legs, and let out a loud, dragging sigh. “But you’re older now, eh? Sharper.”
While Alistair returned to his seat, unruffled, Jack stayed on the ground, his hand on Courtland’s back as he struggled to regain his breath, eyes wide and terrified, finally exclaiming, “Can someone please ******** explain to me what’s going on?”
The Not-Malakai didn’t deign to acknowledge him, but Antha cast her cousin a pointedly derisive glance. “Don’t you recognize Robin?”
Immediately, Jack as well as Lawrence went so pale that their complexions threatened never to recover. “…but you’re dead,” Jack whispered, low and terrified.
Not-Malakai shrugged, carelessly. “Was. Should’ve been. Now I’m not. Who knows.”
“This whole time?” Lawrence visibly struggled to understand it, gripping the side of the table, “All these days you’ve been staying at my apartment…it was you the whole time?”
“I couldn’t risk anyone realizing it was me while I sorted Mousy’s mess out,” he explained simply, “Your apartment was a convenient hiding spot.”
“Do you not think,” Antha began, invoking a tone of quiet authority, “That you’ve been rude enough already? Dorian and the Calais siblings are quite out of the loop. Do you want to explain, or shall I?” Her eyes narrowed. “But my explanation will not be nearly as kind as your own, I think.”
Not-Malakai gave a dramatic roll of his eyes, a heavy sigh rolling from his lips. He seemed to think it over for a moment, not quite long enough for Antha to decide to explain for him, before pointing to the right side of his head. “Malakai,” he said, withdrawing his hand and pointing then to the left side of his head, “Me.” And then he shrugged, as if that was all the explanation required.
“What my brother is attempting---quite poorly---to say,” Antha sighed, finally setting her teacup on the table before her, “Is that he suffers from multiple personality disorder. One is Malakai, the other is Robrecht.”
“You were supposed to be dead,” Jack repeated quietly, dumbfounded and alarmed, “You were gone, all this time.”
“Oh, was I supposed to be dead?” Robin said suddenly, sharp and mocking, “I guess I’m dead then, if Jacques says so. I must be Mousy, then. Come on, let’s test that theory, shall we? Step closer.”
Jack scrambled on the other ide of Courtland, trying to drag him further away with him, into the safety of the rose bushes.
In all of this, Antha only gave a heavy sigh, pinching the bridge of her nose between her fingers. Glancing around from Dorian to Cian to Rynn to Liesse, she said in a wisp of a suggestion, “I imagine you have questions.”
“That’s a gross understatement,” Lawrence hissed, unusually riled up, “I have questions. They have no earthly idea what’s going on right now.”
Meanwhile, Melody's brow knitted curiously. “Wait...Dorian didn't know? How is that possible? Even I knew.”
A trickle of laughter came from Robin's lips, slowly at first but gaining volume, cold and cruel. “If you're expecting Dorian to notice something that's not about himself, you're going to be gravely disappointed.” He leaned forward over the table, his eyes giving a dark glimmer of amusement. “I was accidentally myself the other day, just for a moment, and he never even questioned that something might be wrong. He thought Mousy was talking so fondly of his murder!”  

[Okimiyage]

Dorian had arrived late, as per usual, and was barely in his chair before tea was being poured. Rynn had scantly preceded him, with his hair mussed, hand-in-hand with Alistair, and - Dorian grinned to see, young love was so adorable, after all – out-of-breath. When Cian caught sight of his younger brother, he gestured him over. The older Calais had taken to standing, a few feet away from the dainty iron-wrought patio furniture on which tea was being conducted, his hands tucked deeply into his pockets and a pensive look on his face as he watched the windows of the house.
He was keeping an eye out for Liesse. When he found her, she'd been in the parlor, sitting by the window in a rather stiff old leather armchair. She didn't appear to have been doing anything – there was a book by her side, but her hands were crossed underneath her chin and her eyes were fixed on the window – but it nevertheless took her a moment to notice that anyone had entered the room. He told her the news, sparing detail perhaps, but he'd felt the need for urgency had been expressed to some degree, at least. “Your sister still isn't here,” he murmured to Rynn, as the other drew near enough for Cian to clasp him around the shoulders. Rynn looked to the side and then behind him, as though expecting Liesse to spring out of the rose-bushes, dryad-like, and waved his free hand in a carefree way. “She's around. Sure she'll turn up.” Normally he would have said she wouldn't miss the opportunity to spend time with Malakai, but at the moment, it was safe to say they were going through a rough patch. “Although I'm still not sure why we're all here. I know everything is stressful but...tea parties? At a time like this?” Rynn cocked an eye at Cian, who had remained carefully expressionless while he spoke. With someone as normally animated as his brother, that meant something was up. “Alistair seemed very eager to attend, anyways.” Cian's straight face failed, and his lips split in a grin as he clapped his little brother on the shoulder. “The things we do for the people we love, right? Well – I was hoping to get the whole family out to spend time, but two out of three ain't bad. And the Mayfairs never pass up an opportunity for scheming dramatics, even if they take place at tea-parties. You should know this by now.” His light-hearted tone was belied by the worried glance he gave back at the house once more, which no-one but Rynn was close enough to catch. It gave Rynn pause, because Cian was usually never one to worry.
Cian was remembering “Well, more accurately, I need you to warn her.”
He hadn't known what to warn her about. He remembered in the library, saying with a laugh - “Antha said to warn you, it's going to be terrible. Well, terrible, terrible, which is twice as terrible, which is already worse than bad – look, I won't force you, but if it comes to it, though, we can always summon a rainstorm and run away, alright?” - and Liesse had given him her obligatory light-hearted laugh and a smile which did not reach her eyes and said she'd think about it.
Rynn, seeing the look on Cian's face, sighed and untangled himself from underneath his brother's arm. Casting his mind out, he sensed her perspective, and found that he was looking through her eyes at his own body and that of his brother's, perhaps twenty feet away, from behind a pair of lace curtains at one of the first-floor windows. He blinked, and was in his own body again. From across the rose-garden, a pair of curtains twitched. Liesse, will you stop pouting and come out, already? In the body-which-was-not-his, he felt a stirring of fabric as arms lifted and crossed across Liesse's chest.
I'll drag you out by your ear, I swear to it. You're upsetting Cian, you can abstain from being a brat for one afternoon--
He felt something in his head then, a sensation that was as close to being the physical equivalent of the noise of an amp disconnecting, and he blinked in surprise as Rynn realized that Liesse had cut him off. She'd never done that before – up until this moment, Rynn hadn't thought that she could do it, or at least neither of them had ever tried.
But at least his berating had done the job. A door to the house swung open, and Liesse stepped out in what Rynn recognized as a nigh-imperceptible foul mood. Her shoulders had a certain set to them that indicated a concrete desire to slug her brother, despite wearing a superficially beatific smile on her face.
There'd be time for that later. Besides, if she was going to bloody his nose, she might as well do it in something that would stain less visibly than the lacy white summer frock she was currently wearing.
This did not go unnoticed by Cian. He didn't remember what she'd been wearing in the library, but it had been decidedly grey and high-necked and long-sleeved and nun-ish. So that's what she'd been doing. “You look lovely,” he noted, as she drew closer, and took a moment as she paused next to her brothers to straighten the white bow in her hair. “Glad you decided to attend.”
“It wasn't like I could really stay away with you putting on your mystery-theatrics act, could I?” she answered lightly.
“You were planning on spying on us from the window like some kind of stalker,” Rynn pointed out.
“I was observing the situation. That is basic battle strategy, dear brother, have Alistair teach you chess or go or something of the sort so you can at least cope with the idea. Checkers might be more your level.”
Cian chuckled at the look of outrage on Rynn's face. He wasn't used to seeing Liesse snap back at her twin like this. Whatever Rynn had said to her must have really struck a nerve.
“Come on, go get your tea. You're going to miss whatever we're actually here for if you two keep bickering like this.”

The three of them took their places at the table, with Rynn and Cian finding seats adjacent to their partners and Liesse taking her place next to Dolly Jean and across the table from Malakai, whom she made a point of not looking at. This decision clearly, over the next few minutes, starting with Antha's crushing of the rose blossoms, did not last.

Dorian was the first to speak after Robrecht – Robin, although he had never liked that name, it made him sound far too harmless – finished his diatribe. He'd had to set down his teacup half-way through the dramatic tableaux for fear that he'd crush the bone china under his grip, but he'd managed to keep his voice measured when he spoke now. “Oh, darling, you shouldn't be proud of that. That doesn't mean you're a good actor in the slightest.” His chin tipped back, exposing the pearlescent white skin of his throat, almost as a challenge to the little strangling b*****d. “It just means my opinion of you is so low that it didn't even strike me as worth commenting on. Thought you were trying to be a little more edgy to impress me.” His eyes were slitted, unblinking, as he watched Robrecht, or Malakai, or whatever combination thereof that was sitting at the end of the table. He knew of Malakai's split personality's propensity for violence, and some part of him wished that the smaller, weaker man would make some attempt at physical retribution, if only for the opportunity for Dorian to knock him down. If Dorian's track record was anything to go by, pissing people off was not just one of his many varied skills, it was his speciality.

Cian was starting to wish he'd brought along his butterfly knife – not as a weapon, killing a witch with your average knife would have been like trying to butcher a dragon with a letter opener – but as something to do with his hands. He should have picked up some of those decorative sandwiches or something at least. Instead, he settled for cracking his knuckles and then placing his hands, fingers neatly laced, behind his head as he leaned back in his chair. “I'm going to see if I've got this right. Malakai's had a split personality all this time – who apparently was supposed to be dead all this time – but has been secretly lying in wait in order for the opportunity to strangle Courtland and insult Dorian, which is completely understandable. Is this a twin thing again, by the way? Because I think we've proved,” waving his hand in a generously vague way about the table, “that all of this connected-eternally-via-bound-souls thing is a hell of a lot more tenacious than I personally ever expected it to be. So now we've got dearly no-longer-departed Robbie here, whom I would be very surprised to hear died of natural causes, and what I'm assuming is a rather suffocated Malakai stuffed into the same body with him.” He turned to Robin, then, asking in a genuinely interested tone, “Is that not uncomfortable at the very least? I mean, there are people who get claustrophobic in elevators, sharing a body seems like it'd be a blood-curdling nightmare for those types.”

Liesse, Rynn noticed, had gone stark white except for two very high patches of color in her cheeks, and was gripping the utensils of her plate with the sort of energy that made one think that butter knives could in fact be very fatal when applied directly to one's eye. When she spoke, her voice was high and clear, pitched to carry to Robin's side of the table without distortion.
“You mean to say that you've trapped him in there, or that he just doesn't want to come out?”  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

Robin chuckled, lowly and with an almost cruel amusement. Almost. Shrugging his shoulders like he didn’t really care, he answered to Liesse, “Both.” His arms leaning on the back of his chair, he kept chuckling to himself, answering in that same drawl, “When two people live in one brain, only one can be on the outside, the other must necessarily be on the inside. And before you get any ideas, kitten---” His eyes cut sidelong at her, giving a gaze that was second in terror only to Antha’s, even Courtland was shaken by it. “---as we do share a body, and a brain, my injuries are his injuries. And since I’ve been on the inside for the better part of a decade now, I’d frankly rather risk killing us both than handing my body back over just yet.” Narrowing his eyes, he said lowly and seriously, “Don’t assume you have the faintest ******** idea what’s going on.”
“He does like to bring that up,” Antha sighed, hurrying to shift the tone, “That any harm to his person is harm to Malakai as well.”
“Facts are facts, Young Blood.”
“Don’t let him fool you,” Lawrence whispered, suddenly dire, “He’ll make physical threats all day, but they’re a deflection. Robin is a psychological terrorist. Once he’s gotten a good look at you, he knows everything about you---your weak points, your fears, your insecurities---and he always knows just the precisely perfect way to use them to completely tear you down to nothing. Worse than nothing.”
“And don’t let him fool you into thinking he’s as harmless as Malakai,” Alistair added, finishing his tea like he didn’t have a care in the world, “He and Malakai somehow share a completely different set of powers. Malakai’s power is passive, non-threatening. Robin is as dangerous as Nicolae. Maybe more.”
“Don’t---” Robin cut in very suddenly, his hand slamming down on the table and curling around a knife, the hiss wrenching from his throat, “---<******** mention his goddamn name.”
The table fell silent in sudden anxiety, even Antha, her eyes a little wide. Maybe especially Antha, because she knew this particular reckoning had her at its core.
“We should explain the ‘murdered’ part, I think,” Alistair said in a rapid change of subject.
When Robin seemed wholly unconcerned, only glaring Courtland down, Antha sighed and explained in his place. “It’s nothing to do with twins. Malakai and Robrecht are genuinely two personalities split from a single person. As best we can tell, it was the trauma of our mother abandoning him. The boy he was then, the original Malakai, ceased to exist. His mind ripped itself into pieces and sorted them out, the ‘weak’---anything that cared, anything that could be hurt---and the ‘strong’. The soul and the shield, Uncle Michael called them, rather generously. They became two distinct personalities, two different people with two completely separate sets of memories and abilities, one always on the outside and one always on the inside, to balance one another out. So Malakai has no ability to guard himself, no guile, no malice, no falsehood, and Robin has no ability to, well---”
“He has the ******** emotional range of a tree frog,” Lawrence hissed, his hands clenched at his temples and elbows down on the table “He has the sense of right and wrong of a ceramic garden gnome.”
“Rude, Lawrence,” Robin murmured, sipping his tea and not attempting to deny it, “Very rude.”
“Right, well---” Tellingly, neither did Antha. “Long story short, Courtland thought he could put one of them into another body. He meant it to be a surprise, so no one could warn him what a disastrous idea it was. We were young and he didn’t understand, he treated them like two spirits. But because they are a single being, one spirit with two minds, the attempt upon their soul all but obliterated the one in control at the time. Which was Robin, as luck would have it. We assumed, since there was no trace of him left, that he was in fact dead, that the parts of their brain that made him up were all cut short. Even Malakai thought so---he barely survived it, and he spent years trying to draw Robin back out, but couldn’t find any trace of him. He was completely devastated.”
“To be fair, I was also under the impression I was dead.” Robin’s lips curled, his hand raking back through his hair. “There’s never any real awareness when you’re on the inside, but there’s a sense of being at least. I don’t remember being for the last eight years. One day I just opened my eyes and here I was, nearly a ******** decade later.” He shook his head, scoffing. “And then I had to be Mousy, until I could sort this ******** mess out. You know, funny thing---” Pulling one side of his jacket open, he thumped a notebook nestled in an inside pocket. “Mousy’s notes really start to degrade in quality once he accepted that I was dead.”
“Let’s say what we mean here, Robin,” Alistair purred, “You wanted to hide behind Malakai’s sweet face while you plotted.”
Robin only smiled, coy and sharp, leaning forward with his arms on the table. “You’re saucy when you’re a real person, little brother. You should watch that.”
“Right. That.” Antha sighed, watching the journal vanish back in his jacket.
“They hid it from us,” Lawrence scowled.
“They were afraid,” Antha interjected, “Well…Malakai was afraid. Robin was being shrewd. When they woke up one morning as two people, they knew just how deeply abnormal it was, and they didn’t want to be locked up in an asylum, or risk getting erased in favor of a single, unified mind.”
“People get locked up for less than being two people,” Robin purred.
“So they pretended to be one person. Since Malakai had no hope of pretending he was Robin, Robin pretended he was Malakai. They kept everything they did, everything that happened, everything they knew in journals, so that one could seamlessly resume the life of the other when they shifted over. Malakai took their original name, since he was their public face, and Robin named himself what Michael had wanted to name one of his sons before our mother inevitably got her way, Robrecht Adelard Mayfair.”
Lawrence spoke then in a low, heated whisper, “Broke Michael’s ******** heart when he found those journals shoved in the mattress, with notes to each other. Years they’d gotten away with it---three, if I recall.”
Robin’s lips twisted in a satisfied grin. “Four.” Putting his hand down on the table, he rose to his feet and ran a hand back through his hair. “If you’re going to do something boring like discuss me, I’ll take the opportunity to change out of these clothes, because what the actual ******** is with these grass stains, Mousy?”
“Tell your father you’re alive,” Antha called after him, but he only gave a little wave, purring, "We'll see, Young Blood," and vanishing into the rose bushes in the direction of the house. To the Calais she said, quietly, “I thought you should see it before I explained. It’s difficult to wrap your mind around it without seeing it first. It's wild enough in essence, but they're so, so different, and Robin defies belief all on his own.”
“They would have tipped it,” Lawrence muttered, his face flat down on the table as if he’d given up, “If anyone but you had revealed him,'Young Blood,' there’s no telling what he’d do. He turns so vicious when things don’t go his way---the few times that’s ever happened. And he'd know as soon as anyone knew he wasn't Malakai.”
“While we have the chance,” Antha cut in, while Lawrence busied himself giving up on life, “I should warn you properly about Robin. He’s a sociopath, even amongst our family, even by my standards. He’s…” A sigh escaped her lips, her fingers touching her forehead as she struggled to put it into words, “He’s my brother, I love him, and he may be the salvation of this family when I’m gone. But he’s dangerous, in a lot of ways. If life is a game of chess, Robin is a grandmaster bar none, playing an evolution of the game that we have no hope of understanding, and we’re his pieces. We don’t know the rules of the game, we don’t know the opponent, or what the board looks like, what pieces we are. Anything I ever learned about scheming and manipulation, I learned at Robin’s knee when he was fourteen, and even then he was better at it than I am now. Armand used to have a quaint way of putting it, that even when I was the brat princess and Nicolae the little golden prince, Robin was the king. Medieval, Divine Right of Kings style, and Machiavelli rolled into the mix.”
“He’s Jim Jones,” Lawrence hissed suddenly through his teeth, bolting straight up again with a spark of new life, “He’s Charles Manson, he’s Marshall ******** Applewhite. Once he’s gotten a good look at you, he knows everything about you, and he knows how to bring you down to nothing. He can make anyone do anything---he doesn’t even kill his obstacles with his own hands, he makes an offhand comment about some outlandish way they might commit suicide, which we used to think was funny, but then they kept doing it. He can reprogram people’s brains, make them think the way he wants them to think, and you never know it’s happening until he’s gotten you, brainwashed you.”
“Curiously though, he never lies. He’s a master of deflecting and obfuscating the truth, but he’s not a liar. He doesn’t believe in it.”
“But he does change,” Jack added, a grim expression taking over his face.
“Robin and Malakai work on a sort of sliding scale,” Antha said with a little nod, “There is a small part of their brain that oversees both of them, a sort of middle ground that controls their general collected knowledge and the switch from one to the other. Their mind sort of…passes through that middle ground, when one turns into the other. When the switch is fresh, one retains some small semblance of the other. But the longer one of them remains in control, the less grasp he has on the attributes of the other. Malakai becomes more vulnerable the longer he stays in control, but Robin…Robin loses his humanity almost entirely.”
“He was in control for an entire month once.” The color drained out of Jack’s face, his voice a low, haunted little whisper. “I remember it like yesterday. He was acting odd, that was all, until he was making a sandwich one day and all the butter knives were dirty, so he grabbed a steak knife. Courtland told him to be careful because he could hurt himself, and he got this strange look on his face and he looked at the knife and…he just stabbed it straight through his hand. Didn’t make a sound, his expression barely even changed. And when Michael and Julien were screaming and trying to bandage him up afterwards and asked him what he was doing, he said…” Something flashed in the boy’s eyes as he hesitated. “…he said he couldn’t remember ‘which one pain is,’ so he tried to jog his memory.”
“They still have the scar,” Lawrence sighed, “It’s one of the reasons why Malakai’s always pulling his sleeves down over his hands.”
“You can’t force them,” Courtland chipped in at long last in a hoarse croak, his throat red and purple, “From one to the other. Only they control when they’re Robin and when they’re Malakai. Trying to force it damages them both.”
“I don’t think you should be particularly worried about your lives,” Antha mused wearily, “Robin only really cares about two things: science, and the family. You’re all mixed into the Mayfair family now, in one way or another. Cian is father to my children, Liesse is in a Mayfair body, and Rynn…well, there’s no telling what Airi would do if something happened to Rynn.” The boy in question just smiled, as sunnily as ever, something in his eyes promising that no one wanted to find out just what he’d do. “Robin doesn’t like troublesome things, he’d have to have a very compelling reason to target you. And he would have shown it if he wanted any of you out of the way. But Dorian is another matter.”
While Antha’s eyes narrowed on the boy in question, Melody gave a sudden frown, irritably twisting her necklace in her fingers. “It was him, wasn’t it?” she asked suddenly, more to herself than anyone, “I apologized to that b*****d yesterday, not Malakai. It drives me crazy when he does that, he’s so much like him, I can’t even tell! And now he’s going to kill Dorian, isn’t he?”
“I’m sure it’s quite high on his list of priorities,” Antha murmured, “Since Robin does literally exist to protect Malakai. But let’s not forget the reason he lives and breathes, the bane of his existence, his archenemy---”
The Mayfairs all finished simultaneously, in strained sighs, “Nicolae.”
“Don’t ever mention Nicolae around Robin. He goes absolutely wild, completely livid, and he lashes out. Pretend he doesn’t exist. And if Nicolae shows up, run. You take your life into your own hands when you’re in the same room as Nicolae and Robin, they’re determined to be the end of one another, and anyone who gets in the way.”
“And then there's Antha,” Lawrence murmured, deep in thought, “He was always so deeply fixated on Antha, in a way none of us really understood, always taking her into some quiet corner to teach her...I don't even know what. Always kept her beside him, always focused the core of his brainwashing on her. Any time they switched over, the first thing he did was find Antha and make sure his hold on her was as strong as it had been. That was the best way to tell when it was Robin sometimes, when he came looking intently for Antha. It wasn't jealousy, but...I don't know what it was. He used physics terms to describe her---a supernova, mostly. Robin tends to see everything through physics.”
“We have a very rough road ahead of us,” was all Antha murmured, subconsciously reaching out and taking Cian’s hand. “If I’m a hurricane, Robin is a tsunami. By the time you see it, it’s already too late. He washes over everything.” Her head pulsed, the image of the garden flickering before her in blinding color, Robin’s voice whispering in her ear. But as always, Antha pushed it back with all her might, squeezing Cian’s fingers in her own.  

[Okimiyage]

Dorian started with a scoff that grew into a chuckle, and then outright open-mouthed, gaping laughter. “You--” he managed finally, when his fit of humor had subsided, “--you think Robrecht wants to kill me? Oh, darlings, that doesn't make any sense at all.” He shook his head in a mimicry of regret. “I've been around for years. In and out, yes, certainly I've taken my leave when all of this grew to be too...too much for me. Too much for anyone, really, but we all have that dreadful streak of family masochism – or loyalty, or whatever you'd like to call it – that prevails on us to do our penance here.”
He purposefully did not look at Melody. He did not want to draw attention to her while he felt it - wasn't it so appropriate that as lovely and unpocked a soul as Malakai's could only exist with a monster to manage it? - while he still felt its presence. It didn't matter what Robrecht did to Dorian. But if Dorian knew anything about Robrecht, it was that he wouldn't try to get to Dorian first.
He drew a hand-rolled cigarette - clove and white sage - out of his breast-pocket, stood, and lit it while facing away from the table. He needed something to draw in air, to breathe out, to pretend that he was conducting the act of exhaling and inhaling normally. A cigarette would serve. “No, I don't think I'm the catalyst here. If our little robin-red-breast had wanted to kill me, he would have done it long ago. I've never been hard to find.” Smoke fled his lips in a tide-like current. “But she's new.”
He turned round, indicating with the lit tip of his cigarette in two directions: towards both Melody, and Liesse. White, cleansing smoke, smelling of sage, escaped his lips.
“Malakai hasn't had an episode like this in years,” he said, this time speaking with his eyes like a lead weight on Antha. “Has he? That's why it took you this long to realize it. We weren't expecting him. So what brought him out?”
A second drag on the cigarette, and Dorian stepped back, snuffing out the smoke in a heady tower via a tea-cup that had been abandoned by Courtland. He exhaled. “You could argue that it was me. That I pushed him too far, that I said the wrong things, but I think it's far more likely that Malakai retreated. Like you said, he's always been the...passive aspect. It's much easier, when someone like that encounters a conflict, to avoid it altogether.”
Rynn had been neglecting his tea. Now he looked to Alistair, his eyes flashing briefly as they skimmed to the side. “They called Robin a 'shield'.” he said, as if to himself, murmuring briefly afterwards: “Aedan would have known this.” His fingertips pressed into the skin around his eyes as they shut. “If Robin was truly formed as a defense mechanism, the 'shield' wouldn't become active unless a threat was present. Or at least, that's how I was taught. Wards don't become hostile until an outside force threatens to penetrate them.” He slitted his gaze, casting it first towards Cian and Antha for confirmation – Cian gave a wayward shrug – and then toward Airi.
Liesse had let go of her teacup, and now had both hands folded quietly – tensely – in her lace-enshrouded lap. “If they're both in control, if there's a way to just persuade Malakai to take his body back - “
Dorian's eyes drifted languidly to her. “How well d'you think that would work, darling?” he asked, quietly. “You're talking about walking into a room with man whose mind is that of a serial killer's, and asking him to set aside his wicked ways and just dig into the purity of his heart and go back to how he was, go back to loving you. How well d'you think that would go?”
Cian half-rose out of his chair, the color high in his cheeks, looking for all the world like he was ready to knock half Dorian's teeth into the rosebushes. “She's not your darling,” he said, his voice cold and bladed. “And she'll do what she thinks is right with or without your advice, might it be asked for.”
Liesse looked shaken, despite Cian's defense. She put both hands on the arms of her lawn-chair to rise up, and then smiled wanly at Dorian. “Your cousins already gave away too much. At some point in the past, some appeal to his humanity – to the soul – must have gotten past the shield. Otherwise I would never have met the Malakai that I have.”
Rynn wanted to reach out for her – was too far – but instead she felt a phantom hand on hers, steadying it ever-so-slightly over the wicker arms of the rattan sunchair, and his voice was inside of her head. Take what you need from me. From us. You're...owed it.
The last sensation she felt from Rynn was a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth, a grim smile. Her brother slumped over in her seat, and without warning she was infused by something she could not describe. Rynn, she said, without her lips moving, and it came into the minds of both Cian, and Antha, and Alistair, without conscious will. “He's breathing,” Cian said, who had already moved without even knowing it to check both pulse and airflow.
He was breathing, and without either sibling knowing it, he was reaching out, running a search through the mental signatures of the Mayfair family as though he was trying to decipher a certain perfume among hundreds. There it was - unmistakable as the fragrance on the neck of a lover.
Nicolae. That made it through, he was certain. The next word, as his consciousness faded, and his hand within Cian's went limp, was less clear: Bring reinforcements. Robrecht.  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

“For the love of god---” If nothing else, it was significant that Antha said the words in English, when they were usually uttered in French. But even without that, there was tension enough in her face to crush most souls, her fingers laced to the point of nearly breaking each other and pressed to her forehead. “---for once in your life, Dorian, just shut up and listen!”
“Evie,” Alistair said, lowly, keenly, “Breathe.”
She took pains to do so, swallowing the lump in her throat. “Two things set Robin off and make him contemplate murder: harm to Malakai, and threats to the family. You are both of those things to him, Dorian. You said Malakai had to have a trigger, as if it was one thing, but think of all he’s had to deal with lately. First you came back, unrepentant, and then Melody came back---with your child---and all of this on top of facing my imminent death, which he is not handling well. He already lives an anxious existence, but I think everything overwhelmed him, wore him thin enough for Robin to spring back to life. And if anyone’s ever riled Robin up, you must have. You hurt Malakai, much more than I think you realize, and concluding that it must have been Robin last night, based on what he said to you, he considers you a threat to the family. So please, for you children’s sakes if not your own, can you keep your mouth shut and lay low until I can convince him otherwise?”
“Robin works slowly,” Lawrence murmured, “He takes his time, patiently. But he works with lethal precision.”
“But I won’t abide any of this war talk,” Antha said then, very abruptly, her voice a little high, “Robin is dangerous, but he isn’t the enemy. Even if he was, once again, he and Malakai are two equal parts of one whole. He isn’t a defense mechanism for Malakai, he isn’t an anomaly, he isn’t secondary, he’s not an ‘episode’ Malakai is having, he’s not a goddamn ward. He and Malakai came into existence in the same moment, dependent on one another, equally valid people---or invalid. I’ll remind you that Malakai is not the original Malakai, he was invented just as Robin was. They have to remain balanced, to switch over when their mind deems it time. If you force them, the balance will shift and they will spiral. If harm comes to Robin, it will come to Malakai. And if anything happens to Robin, we risk losing Malakai as well because their own sense of self each depend on the other. We thought it would be alright, because he held it together, however narrowly, but it turns out Robin was never gone only wounded, comatose, so it’s likely that his actual destruction would take Malakai down with him. When they’re Robin, they’re Robin, we just have to accept and deal with it.”
Antha barely had a moment to try to get her nerves under control before Rynn slumped over, Alistair bolting up to attend to him, and then that whisper, calling out for the absolute last person they needed at that moment, who she was desperate to keep away. There was a moment in which the commotion around her pulsed, her head throbbing, struggling to get her breath. She was having a panic attack.
The colors seared around her, the phantoms of plum trees mixing into the roses, blood and dirt on her fingers as they flexed uncertainly on the table. There was a high-pitched noise in the air that she didn’t think really existed, the sound of blood rushing in her ears.
Courtland saw it, clear as day, the moment that Antha snapped. She sat with her head in her hands while Dorian and the Calais and Alistair carried on around her, her elbows on the table, a sudden trickle of laughter on her lips. “I can’t anymore,” she whispered, and he could detect an edge of hysteria, and years of residual weariness. “******** it. If no one can ******** trust me to do what’s best, if everyone’s just going to do whatever the hell they want anyways, why bother?” Her chair scraped as she stood up, her fingers white-knuckled on the back. She swayed slightly on her feet, only for a moment, but Courtland had sharp eyes. “Deal with it your goddamn selves, I quit.”
“Antha---” Lawrence exclaimed, at a loss, but she shook her head, making a gesture for him to be silent.
“No. I’m sick of this---I’m ******** over it, Laurie. What have I done for you people, for every single person at this table? What did I give up to save Melody, just last night, what did I face for someone else’s sake, just to be <******** told off for doing it?” From the corner of her eye, Melody gave Dorian a glare when she realized he still hadn’t apologized. “And now I’m expected to, what, to fight with you all to protect you again? With my last few ******** days of life, you want me to struggle against you for your own good, because you all think you know better? No, ******** that. You think you know what’s happening, you think you know how to handle this? Fine. Do it. Deal with it yourselves. Get yourselves killed, get Robin and Malakai killed, I don’t care. Summon Nicolae, he and Robin can level the house, murder one another, and you can live on the ******** streets, that’s not my problem. My children are my concern, and Cian. I don’t need this from the rest of you. I quit.”
“Evie!” Jack squeaked, on his feet in alarm, but she shook her head, turning and vanishing behind the rose bushes towards the house.
“Don’t go after her,” Alistair said hastily before Cian could, his face grave, “Not just yet. I don’t think she could take it. Let her have a moment of quiet.”
“Was she serious?” Lawrence asked gravely, “Because she’s right, we’ll all get ourselves killed. We’re not ready to run things ourselves, not yet.”
“Quite serious,” he murmured, his brows knitting, “Worryingly so. She’s been shoved to the brink. But it’s too early to say for sure, she might still be able to climb back down. Or at least, Cian should be able to ease her back down again, once she’s calmed down.”
“I told you to apologize to her,” Melody whispered angrily to Dorian, a look of discontent on her face, “How could you not? I hate that---the ingratitude on my behalf, when she saved me.”
“Well she is right,” Courtland croaked, tenderly massaging his throat, “About Robin. You’re not the first people to talk like he’s secondary to Malakai, since he hid in the shadows, but he’s not. Honestly…” A strangled sound came from his lips that was probably meant to be a sigh. “Robin is the more dominant personality, he has most of the power, he uses more of their brain, and he’s more like the original Malakai than current Malakai is. If either of them were an interloper…it would probably be Malakai.”
“He’s terrifying,” Jack sighed begrudgingly, “And psycho. But he’s family, every bit as much as Malakai is.”
“And Malakai would never forgive anyone who plotted against Robin,” Lawrence added, speaking with the authority of a best friend, “God, how he used to pray he’d come back. He’s been so lost since he vanished.” Glancing at the Calais he whispered ruefully, "You don't know what it was like, having them in harmony. Malakai was so happy---he was protected, unconditionally supported, he hardly had any worries, with Robin looking after him. He sheltered him. Malakai was a fragile little ship bobbing along in the world's best-fortified harbor. In the years since, he's been nothing but anxiety and loneliness."
“Malakai was never meant to exist without Robin,” Alistair pointed out in a gentle reminder, “Literally, they were tailor made to coexist, with no provisions for either one surviving without the other. And he can’t, not really. Antha’s done what she could to protect him in Robin’s place, but even she’s a poor substitute, and no one else could ever do even just that little bit.”
“I was such a little ******** fool,” Courtland whispered, a look of genuine anguish flashing across his face, “Trying to separate them. I thought I was helping, really I did. But god, the damage I did. I wish I’d understood them better, how they work. We’re lucky it didn’t kill them both.”
“But he’s going to absolutely wreck Nicolae,” Jack muttered, “Christ, I don’t want to think about it. Everything he used to do to keep him away from Antha…what’s he going to do now that everything he feared, and everything he expressly forbid, has come and gone?”
The bushes rustled. “So you broke Young Blood.”
It was difficult, looking at Robin when he had determined to be himself instead of masquerading as Malakai, to quite believe they shared the very same physical body, because Robin bore little resemblance to Malakai. They had the same face, but Robin’s face set into different lines with his cool, imperious expression, inexplicably a great deal more devilishly handsome than Malakai’s soft, hesitant face. Their eyes were the same but Robin’s were sharp and complex, nearly hypnotic, where Malakai’s were open and reassuring (boring, some of the cousins would have thought but never said). Their raven curls were wild and unruly on Malakai, soft, usually hanging in his face, where Robin wore his hair mostly smoothed out and swept to the side, gently curling ends all brushing one ear, clear of his face. The dark beauty mark on their cheek, between the jaw and cheek bone, usually hidden by Malakai’s hair or the way he ducked his head, was pronounced on Robin. Even their bodies were not the same, Malakai’s posture limp and meek beneath baggy shirts and cardigans, his worn jeans and too-long sleeves covered in careless grass stains, while Robin stood firm and lithe in form-fitted black jeans and a gray V-neck cashmere sweater, a stylish black jacket mantled on his shoulders. Malakai shuffled about in converses, if not barefoot in the garden, while Robin strode purposefully in designer boots.
They hadn’t acted anything alike to begin with, but when Robin was himself, they didn’t even look like the same creature at all.
His movements were, as before, markedly different from Malakai. Robin moved with purpose and elegance, if none of the frivolous Mayfair flourish the cousins were known for, retaking his seat at the table and lifting his cup in a smooth series of motions. “Not that I didn’t expect it. There’s no need for her to be me now that I’m back, and the strain the gang of you have put on her shoulders over the years is ******** staggering.”
“It doesn’t help, I’m sure, when she’s fighting off a repressed memory,” Lawrence muttered lowly in indirect accusation.
“Yeah, hi,” Melody called abruptly, waving from the other side of the table, “So sorry, pardon me, but what the ********>? Like, as someone with a daughter who’s going to be running around this house, I can’t really just let that one slide, you know? It’s shady as hell. I mean, what did you do to her?”
Robin said nothing for a while, only drank his coffee. The cousins bandied uncomfortable glances, none of them with proper words to explain, Alistair’s face going a little pale, but none of them said anything. Melody remained intent, looking between each of them, waiting for an answer. “He took her out to the garden one day,” Courtland finally whispered, his words barely decipherable through his hoarse throat, “Told her all the usual things---her place in the family, in the universe, how special she was---and then he…he…”
“And then I explained to her,” Robin said casually, “That I’d buried Nicolae four feet beneath us and he’d run out of air in an hour.”
Silence again, Melody’s golden tan going a little sickly pale as a look of alarm washed over her face. “…you didn’t.”
“Of course I ******** did.”
“Antha lost it,” Alistair, the only other person present for the event, whispered, “She could hardly string a thought together. She just started digging, with her bare hands, screaming and crying. She dug until she hit the box, barely scraping in under the hour, but when she got it open…” His blood ran cold just remembering it. “…Nicolae was bloody and still. No pulse, no breath, very much as if he were dead. And Antha…just…lost it. And he just leaned forward and whispered in her ear, ‘You see, sometimes, if someone tells you something is wrong, it’s already too late. You have to know before the bad thing happens, or there’s nothing you can do to stop it.’”
“He was only poisoned,” Robin scoffed, “He woke up a few hours later, confused but hardly the worse for wear. He wasn’t even in danger of suffocating, that’s a lot ******** kinder than I could have been.”
“It’s not Nicolae you hurt,” Alistair hissed, his switch flipped, face contorting with fine rage, “You ******** destroyed her, Robin.”
“We found her out there, in a hole in the ground, screaming her lungs out. She screamed for three straight days,” Lawrence concluded, “Every moment, until her throat gave out and she crumpled unconscious on the floor for a few hours, then woke up and started screaming all over again. She cried until we had to have her hospitalized for it. And then one day she woke up and it was just gone. Her mind had just pushed it down and she forgot completely. She was horribly confused about what she was doing in a hospital bed, blind and mute.”
Robin’s lips pursed in consideration, his head tilting, before he concluded casually as a matter of fact, “It’s probably the worst thing I ever did. That, or the Talamascan I had throw himself on a pyre.”
“You went too goddamn far.”
“I miscalculated. I forgot sometimes, how young she really was. Only ten at the time. And all those pesky feelings---I don’t see why you people put up with them, I wish she was quite beyond them.”
“There’s no use trying to reason with him,” Courtland sighed, now rubbing his temple as Antha and Lawrence before him, “Just keep it from Antha. That’s the last thing she needs.”
“You’re really the worst,” Melody mumbled, glaring at Robin. Glancing around her, she took up her napkin just to throw it down on the table.
“The worst,” he corrected her sharply, “Is vampires, or rival witches, or some brand of angry mob storming this house and slaughtering us the moment Antha is gone. She’s protected this family while I was gone, whatever it cost her, because none of you ******** could. She wanted so badly to believe you could handle yourselves without her, but let’s be honest, you’d all be dead in a year, our assets divided as spoils of war amongst different tribes.” His eyes narrowed dangerously. “You don’t have to like me, Melody. I ******** despise you, as it happens. But your collective survival depends on me and there’s not much of a bloodline without the rest of you, so we’re stuck with each other.” He scoffed, taking a single sip of his coffee. “Calais included, for better or worse. Their blood is in ours now.” He returned his cup to the table, a grin creeping across his lips that wasn't safe. “Your lover is a little overeager to lure prey into a slaughter though, little brother.”
“A foolish mistake,” Alistair sighed, his fingers fluttering against Rynn's hand, “But I don't intend to let you make him regret it, no matter how hotheaded you and Nicolae are.”  

[Okimiyage]

Cian stared after his wife's retreating back as she marched through the immaculate lawn and towards the rose garden. His hands were still on the veins of Rynn's wrist, as though he wanted to make sure that the pulse he felt was real. Slowly, he stood, and let go. He'd never seen Antha like this before, even during the collapse of the Calais house, he'd never seen her lose control like this, or felt the sensation of her wild panic as closely or intensely.
Cian took a moment to give Courtland an incredulous sidelong look. “Of all the people in your family – good grief – did not one of you not think investing in an education in family counselling might be advantageous?” He said it as though he did not expect an answer. The Calais siblings certainly hadn't tried it, although in part that was due to being as isolated and mistrustful as they had been raised to be. “Antha said it already. Figure this out by yourselves – although I doubt she really meant the 'or die trying' part. Alistair - ” he gestured to his brother's limp body. “Keep an eye on Rynn. This isn't my fight. Antha - “ his head turned again, towards the rose bushes into which she had retreated. “I'll go find her.”

Dorian was regretting snuffing out the cigarette before it was finished. His fingertips curled around air, tightening into a fist. “I'm tired of being the villain.” he said, with an oddly quiet air that lent the statement a strange gravity. “Why do you think I went away in the first place? Because nobody likes being a scapegoat. Nobody likes being told it's their fault when Malakai snaps, when Antha loses her grip, when Courtland drinks too much or says too much or puts a geas like this on you without consulting anyone else...Years ago, I thought – thought that if I just went away, then it would all stop happening like this. I blamed myself – for so long – for the state of this household, and the relationships between the people therein, and I thought if I just left then it would all be done with, and finally the people around me could have a normal, happy family. Except it didn't." It only made things worse. "We still aren't a happy family. It feels like we will never be. Happy families are all alike – unhappy families are all unhappy in their own way. Our way, I suppose, must be witchcraft." And he was sorry, in a way, despite his love for her - for bringing Melody into such an ugly obligation of joining them. There was a part of him that wanted to take her aside now, by the hand, tell her they could change their names, he could find work as an actor or barkeep, she didn't have to be part of this, put up with this, nor did Magdalena -
He looked up at the sky briefly – cloudless, dusk dying the turquoise field with violet, the wind rushing through the trees above with a disquieting sussurus. “We're not stuck here, Robrecht, we're not children who aren't allowed to leave the house without reprimand or being leashed to an adult. We choose to stay here, all of us, even you. Maybe because we think we couldn't make it on our own, maybe because of the solidarity that occurs when outside threat invades, maybe because we've all just been playing the game so long that we wouldn't know what to do with ourselves when it stopped. Maybe because some of us still enjoy playing that game, intentionally, like when you buried Nicolae because you wanted to see Antha cry.” He lowered his eyes, glassy from the dying sun's reflection. “I wanted to be honest when I came back here. I wanted people to accept that honesty. I can admit that I've ******** up, that I'm still ******** up, but I'm not doing it on purpose. That's the difference between you and me. I say what hurts people, even when it hurts people, because it's the truth. You? You ******** with people just to watch how they react. You should have been a prince among the Red Crayon Aristocrats.”
His fingers uncurled, slowly, and relaxed. “I suppose that's the only way you can entertain yourself. You've never known anything else. It's a bit pitiful, to be truthful.” A sarcastic smile, and a quirk of his brow, met Robin's eyes as Dorian turned around. His arms raised to expose his chest, clad unarmored in a long and untucked silken shirt, a brocade vest in white. Blood would have looked splendid upon it. “So - ready to kill me now? Or try your best?”

Rynn's voice was in Liesse's head as the teacups on the table started to tremble. She was watching Malakai warily, watching every little micro-expression that crept across his face, watching the quirk in his mouth that formed when he was smiling to himself, laughing silently to himself, listening to how his voice had changed. Cursing herself for never noticing the difference.
Her hands raised from her lap, lay flat on the table, and the clinking of china rocking against saucers increased. She could feel Rynn's talent in her, like lava leaking through a sieve, and she knew she'd only have it for a few minutes longer before her body could no longer hold it. The ancestors had never appeared outside the maze, but for a few moments she felt them – what Rynn must feel every day – the horde of their eyes on her back. She could hear a roar of whispers behind her. Familiar hands on her shoulders.
Many of them were telling her to kill him. It made sense, in a way. The Calais clan would never have tolerated a member of their bloodline that had been born disfigured, as the neatly annotated family records in their library had attested to. All had conveniently 'died at birth', most likely upon the altar of the crypts below the maze.
She opened her mouth – for a moment it felt like all those whispers would spew out of her like vomit, but she swallowed them back and said one word instead. “Malakai.” It was a whisper that echoed with the sound of a hundred voices behind it. “If you're in there, if you can hear us, please - “ Desperation tinged her voice. “Please come back. You don't want to be like this. I know you don't. The worst thing that could happen to this family isn't vampires, or rival witches, it's...this.”
Her eyes stung with the salt of tears, and the clattering of china stopped as the final syllables left her mouth, as did the breeze in the air around them. For one moment, everything was still, as still as her heart, holding her breath while she awaited a response.

When Cian found Antha in the rose garden, he didn't approach her immediately. His wrists and the sleeves of his cuffs were torn and scratched from pushing through thorns. Instead, a sense of relief flooded him - the relief of simply knowing where she was, and unhurt - escaped from him, and he dropped back on his knees and pushed one blood-streaked hand through his hair.
"Antha," he said, softly beckoning for her with her name.
There was nothing but hollow silence in response, and so he took a deep breath and continued.
"I know you're upset. I know we could have handled things...better. We're - not even myself, but you - you're always taking care of other people. Your family. Your children. Even Rynn, and Liesse, and me."
His hand reached out, pushing aside a branch to see her all the better.
"It might be hard to hear, but Antha - you can't control every situation. No matter how much - how much you've done for your family, no matter how much you might want to make it right. You have to let them figure it out for themselves." He paused - a thorn brushed against his hand as his grip on the branch relaxed, and left a wide angry streak of red against his skin as he said, <********>, under his breath, and then put his hand against his mouth for a moment. When it lowered, finally, he continued. "I know how much you want to fix things. Whenever something - or someone - comes along who's corrupted, broken, even intends deadly harm to you, you've never given up. You always try to make it right again." His wan smile showed through the leaves of a brilliantly blooming white rose. He knew she was waiting for the 'but' and - finally, reluctantly - he gave it to her. "But you...you're weren't wrong, what you said. You don't have that much time left, and the time you do have - I can't imagine that you wanted to spend it like this." He thought briefly, and added. "Rynn might understand - being the head of a family - responsible for their well-being - but Antha, you remember what he was like back then, don't you? Aedan, Aleric," He hated how clumsy their names felt on his tongue, after all this time not speaking them aloud, "- and myself - we all thought of him as a child tyrant. You're not like that, and...I don't want you to ever be like that, to try to control the outcome in the same way he did. You have to trust that your family is going to hold together after all of this passes. You have to have some faith in us."  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

Melody gave a long, groaning sigh, rolling her eyes. Her hands briefly fluttered, looking for something, but not finding anything appropriate, she simply turned and flicked Dorian soundly in the forehead. “You realize Maggie sounds more mature when you talk like that, right?” she reprimanded him, huffing slightly, “You were supposed to apologize, Dorian. That’s on you. That was a bad choice. Now if you don’t have anything nice to say---” She flashed him a threatening gaze, which didn’t actually carry any weight behind it because Melody wasn’t an even slightly threatening presence.
But Robin was. Without even changing his posture, without saying a word, just the faintest sharp grin curling his lips, he absolutely oozed danger. “Robin’s never done anything cruel for the pleasure of it, Dorian,” Lawrence conceded quietly when Robin was unconcerned with defending himself, “He’s not an antagonist, he’s an antihero. There’s always a purpose to his actions. Even when the result doesn’t end up justifying the means---”
“It would have worked quite well if someone hadn’t nearly destroyed me,” Robin hissed, a rare true flash of fury sweeping across his face that could only mean he was talking about Nicolae even as he threw Courtland a threatening look. “I took a calculated risk. It would have worked out if I were here to enforce my rules.”
“You never did explain,” Alistair said quietly, his fingers smoothing down Rynn’s hair as he nudged into his mind, coaxing out his consciousness, “Why you were so opposed to Nicolae being remotely near Antha. Why you thought it was necessary to threaten his life, or bury him in the yard just to create a negative association.”
Robin moved at the speed of light, banging his hands down on the table, his face contorted in absolute fury. “How did no one else ******** see it, is the question,” he hissed, a cup shattering into shards in his fingers, “I should’ve thought it was fairly obvious, considering it’s exactly what happened. Nicolae is my twin, I know him better than anyone, and I saw exactly what was going to happen the moment he clapped eyes on Antha. It wasn’t going to be love, it was always going to be obsession---hysterical, fanatical, destructive obsession, and it would ruin her. I took a calculated risk keeping them apart, knowing that if they ever disobeyed me, it would be even worse. But Antha never would have disobeyed me, even if Nicolae was desperate to do so. It would have been fine, if I were here to keep them in line. But when I vanished, so did any hope of keeping them apart. So, just as I feared, that <******** savage beast set upon, seduced, and defiled our goddamn little sister, tried to knowingly destroy the family by taking her away, and then he ******** around and completely ruined and twisted her, exactly as I predicted, until her psyche had to be rebuilt like ******** Frankenstein.” He grimaced, furiously. “All that work I poured into her, the pains I took to mold her, to make her self-sufficient and capable, and he ruined it in the course of a ******** hour with Vera. Vera. As if it wasn’t ******** disgraceful enough on its own, he went full Oedipal Complex with it.”
“You created a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Alistair sighed in rueful revelation, “By trying to keep them apart, once nothing stood in Nicolae’s way, it created the kind of intense, fanatical relationship between them that you’d always feared, Nicolae keeping her so jealousy close to him in case you ever reappeared, which in turn led to the total ruin that you predicted.”
“She was clever, I’ll give her that,” he muttered, the rage seeping away back into his cold, shrewd demeanor again, sitting back in his seat with his arms folded, “She was always the cleverest of you lot by half, I shouldn’t be surprised she found a way to keep me from killing him. But there are things far worse than death, little brother.” He laughed, just barely, beneath his breath, giving an indicatory nod at Rynn. “He seems to imagine he was calling the beast for help. All he did was warn him. But he can’t hide from me for long.”
Casting a fleeting glance at Dorian, he gave a dismissive little flick of his fingers. “Sit down, flower boy, you look painfully foolish. I’ll be rid of you when I’m good and ready, and I sure as hell won’t resort to stabbing you. It’s artless. I’d honestly rather you left for good, it would save me so much effort that I just do not want to bother with, it’ll sort itself out once you’re out on your own. And you---” His gaze narrowed then at Liesse, with condescending pity. “Jesus ******** Christ, do you just not listen? He can’t hear you, and even if he could, he won’t be back until it’s his turn. And the ******** nerve of you trying to tell him how he feels. Christ, I hate listening to people be wrong so intently. Mousy is fond of you, I’d ******** prefer it if you didn’t make me hurt you, alright? It’s a pain to deal with. But even my loyalty to Mousy’s feelings has limits.” For the first time since he’d been outed, Robin’s power flared, and even Alistair had to admit to a smidge of shock, because Robin’s power didn’t really fall short of his own. He wasn’t as strong as Antha of course, no one was, but Robin and Alistair were running a close race for second. “Annoying,” the boy scoffed, back to his usual drawl now, “My power has gone slack while I was away. I’ll have to work that back up to scratch.”
Taking up the few scattered petals Antha had crushed and let fall on the table, he stirred them in his hand, gazing down at them with an eerie concentration. “How limited your powers of comprehension must be,” he sighed as if it were tedious, droplets of water pooling up on the petals as they began to shrivel beneath them. “I wonder that no one ever questions why I’ve never once called him Malakai.” When the petals were dry as bone, the water from them pooling in his palm, the pigment likewise began to seep away, manifesting in fine powder as the petals crumpled in on themselves. “Because he’s not. Neither of us is. We remember him---Malakai, the little boy who was normal but couldn’t cope, who broke down and couldn’t function when his mother decided she didn’t care to keep him---but neither of us is him. We were born that night, Mousy and I, when that woman patted his head and left forever.” The last shriveled bits of the petals separated in his palm, into powders of various hues and textures, until there was nothing left of the petals, only various elements isolated into their purest forms in the palm of his hand. “We only exist because Malakai died and gave way to the two of us. Without one of us, neither of us exists. Mousy knew that---that’s why he kept writing me, why he never conceded I was dead, because there’s no him without me, so if he was here, so must I still exist.” His fingers spread, scattering the droplets and powders that collectively made flower petals. “Our brain only lets Mousy out when things are calm, when he doesn’t need protection. So the more you piss me off, the longer I’ll be here.”
“It’s unusually helpful of you to warn us,” Lawrence mumbled, somewhat suspiciously.
But Robin just looked at him, flatly, holding his left hand up and flexing his fingers so the long, clean line of white scar caught the light. “If I am aware enough to tell you that we cannot exist without one another, don’t you think I acknowledge the need of it? Without Mousy, I have the irritating habit of forgetting what anything feels like, just as without me, Mousy tends to stand by the edge of the pool and contemplate what a relief it would be to drown himself.”
“It was you, wasn’t it?” Lawrence asked very abruptly, his eyes trained unblinking on the deconstructed rose petals, “Alistair…that was your doing. You planned it.”
Robin pursed his lips, maddeningly vague, and shrugged his shoulders. “‘Planned’ is a bit of an overstatement. I knew how to do it, I knew what she’d do with the knowledge, and I taught her how.” Narrowing his eyes at Lawrence, he scoffed tauntingly, “How easily you forget I taught Antha everything she knows.”
“Including how to kill people.”
That brought Robin instantly into a fit of subdued laughter, suggesting that something stupid had been said. “You’re all still ******** ridiculous,” he sighed, almost endearingly, tilting back his head with a little sigh, “Knowing exactly what kind of deranged s**t it takes to keep this family alive and well, the kind of ******** insanity we’ve been doing since Deborah was alive and well, and still trying to judge it even as you’re constantly begging someone to save you when something big and scary pops up.”
“That doesn’t mean you have to---”
“Jesus ******** Christ, Laurie, even the Calais ate and sacrificed people, and nobody even knew who the hell they were. Are you expecting the Mayfairs to get away with doing less when we’re in the center of everything?” He shrugged, carelessly. “But hey, the ******** do I care? Take your chances alone in the world, it makes literally no difference to me.” Lawrence’s jaw clenched at that and Robin laughed. “You’re making that face because you know a Mayfair’s never left the family and survived. You’re such ******** easy targets by yourselves, it’s ridiculous. Safety in numbers, eh?”
“What do we do about Antha?” Courtland cut in hoarsely, narrowing his gaze.
He was rewarded with a particularly flat, condescending look from Robin. “Do? We don’t do anything. You’re ungrateful ******** bastards and she’s given up on you. Leave her alone. It’s not even her job to protect you.” Jack had hardly opened his mouth before Robin cut him off expectantly. “The Designee of the Legacy is supposed to be protected by the family, at all costs, like I protect Mousy. But somehow you all ended up such useless ******** that she had to protect all of you. Shut up and accept your ******** fate.”
“You’re ******** Spartan, you know that?”
Robin sat back, grinning with that perverse pleasure, and responded thickly, “I am a beacon of harsh, truthful reality.” And then, briefly pursing his lips and tilting his head in consideration, added casually, “And maybe the devil. Who knows.”
Finding the faintest hint of his courage, Courtland pouted and, after a moment, stood up and announced as he headed towards the house, “I’m telling Tori you’re alive.”
That, at long last, provoked a reaction, Robin giving an irritated grimace and groaning, “Seriously? He’s so ******** clingy, it’s a pain.”
“If it helps make him less intimidating,” Lawrence said to the rest of the table, somewhat emboldened by Courtland, “Picture Stefan washing his mouth out with soap. He used to do it about once a week, Robin cursed like this even as a child.”
“The ******** nerve of that old relic…” Robin grumbled, irritably plopping his feet up on the table, one over the other.
“There’s very little filtering going on in his brain,” Lawrence said, quietly, mockingly as if he was divulging a shameful secret as he pointed at his head, “He basically just spouts off whatever comes to mind.”
“Never understood why any of you gave a ********,” he said with a shrug.
“We have empathy. You have…well, not none, but next to none.”

In the garden, Antha was pacing wildly, furiously, her fingers clenched in her skirt just short of ripping it. She didn’t appear surprised to see Cian, or displeased, but made no indication of being pleased either. “Cian,” she said when he’d spoken, through gritted teeth, “I really, really need you not to make the same mistakes as them right now. It’s bad enough having them jump to conclusions and go on and on under false assumptions, but I really can’t take it from you right now.”
Turning, she put a hand to her forehead, trying to soothe her wildly pulsing head. “You know, I’ve been trying to teach them how to take care of themselves since I was nine years old. They’ve never picked it up, so I kept having to step in. You’d think they would have learned, at the absolute least, to just trust my ******** judgment. And the moment something happens---” She made a furious gesture back the way they’d come, her eyes livid. “That’s all I’m ******** asking for, for them to trust my judgment for one goddamn moment before Dorian mouths off like---” She struggled for a moment, looking for the words. “---like a ******** Shakespearean jackass about how everything is clearly about him, and your sister throws a goddamn temper tantrum, and Rynn does something so colossally stupid I can’t even---” For the first time in a long time, words failed her.
“No. I’m done, Cian. I’m done trying to steer them the right way, much less outright saving them. I’ve driven myself to the absolute brink for them, again and again---I’ve done things I never imagined in my worst nightmares, for them, and they can’t even trust me, and they haven’t even learned to take a single second to assess a situation. No. Let them murder to save themselves. Let them face their own nightmares. Let them try to face themselves in the mirror afterwards.”
Taking a deep breath, she gained just enough control of herself to say, suddenly as if she’d just thought of it, “Robin’s not evil, Cian. He’s aggressively neutral---utilitarian. Compared to you and your siblings when I met you, or any of my cousins just a year ago---less, even---Robin comes off favorably. And how ******** long did it take them to set into battle mode against him? Your sister is over there right now basically threatening to attack him. Which, besides risking her own life, is colossally foolish because Malakai is never going to forgive her for what just happened. I didn’t even do that when I knew you were trying to kill me, I played along for so ******** long just to get the measure of the situation before I did anything. Why is it so much to ask for them not to rush in ******** headfirst when they literally do not know one single thing about what they’re trying to attack?”
Again, she shook her head, taking a hissing breath through her teeth. “You asked me to have faith in all of you. I did, until about half an hour ago. I’m angry because they just proved to me that my faith was misplaced. This isn’t me trying to control anything, this is me giving up on all of it because I literally cannot even process how ******** badly they’ve handled something that really should not have been that difficult. And, on top of everything, once again, after everything I've done for them, they dismissed me in about a second flat.”  

[Okimiyage]

“I didn't come here to fight with you. But this is what I'm talking about, Antha.”
The gardens were normally never this quiet. Even the birds had stopped singing their evening hymns. Cian let his legs fold underneath him, sitting back on his knees on the grass as he watched her pace.
“You hate it when you lose control of the situation.” He didn't have to make it a question. He'd watched it happen before now. He'd watched it happen to Rynn, too, after the collapse of Llyr's Court. He spread his hands wide, palms open to the sky. There was a sort of earnestness to the gesture that felt strange to assume. “I've never had the kind of talent you, or Alistair, or Rynn have. I don't know what it's like to be able to level a house to the foundation, to bring the dead back to life, to even have those options available to me. I've always just been good at...reading people, putting thoughts in their heads, persuading them they'd come up with the ideas that I'd planted when they weren't looking. I know enough to know that I'm not the right person to say that I completely understand what you're feeling right now, even if I can recognize why and what it's for.”
The conversation wasn't going well. The air around them felt heavy, saturated with Antha's anger like elecrticity before the roll of thunder. What he said next would either clear the air or it would result in a lightning strike. “Antha, you've been protecting your family, this whole time, from the repercussions of their actions; but people don't learn from their mistakes until they feel those repercussions. Everyone out there - “ he waved his hand behind them vaguely, at the small entrance into the crown of roses that he'd made his way through, indicating everything that lay at the tea-table beyond, “ - everyone out there is acting, for what may well be the first time in years, in the best way they know how to handle the situation. Let them try. Let them make mistakes, even if the repercussions hurt, but let them learn from those mistakes. Don't expect them to be perfect. Rynn and Liesse are still sixteen, for ******** sake, and I know like hell I wouldn't trust myself not to panic when I was that age, if I was in their shoes right now.”
He watched Antha's heels ruffle through the lawn, still pacing, accumulating grass stains.
“So let them. We walked away, both of us. What happens next – you said yourself, you're letting them handle it alone. Hands-off. But even though you said that, you're still over here twisting yourself into knots over that decision.” Cian put one foot up to kneel, then stood to his full height, brushing blades of grass off his trousers. “Courtland told me not to go after you, but I did anyways. People don't always do what you tell them to, even if – probably - “ he laughed drily, under his breath, “Courtland knew you wouldn't be happy about it. But I couldn't leave you alone, for better or for worse.” Involuntarily, the following promise came to mind: For richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish until death do we part.
“Antha.”
He stepped forward, closing the gap between them, and put out his hand, palm still open and upturned. “I need you to trust your family, and their potential to manage without your direction, now more than ever. It's been weighing on my mind for the past – well, ever since you told me.” He didn't have to specify what he was referencing. “The only thing that's been keeping me going is the thought that I didn't have to do this alone, that I had my family and yours to – keep it together, whatever it ends up entailing. But trust goes both ways; both their faith in you, and your faith in them. If this isn't a test of that trust, then what is?”

Liesse had been leaning forward in her seat, as if she had expected some kind of -
Oh god, it didn't matter what she'd been expecting. The skies to open up in beams of sunshine, and bluebirds singing Disney themes as Malakai somehow miraculously pulled himself together at the sound of her voice. This wasn't true love, this was fondness, in Robrecht's own words. True fondness wasn't what awakened princesses from their curses in fairy-tales. Whether she herself had expected it to work, she didn't know. She didn't know what else to try. She could admit as much.
“I don't know who you are, Robin.” she said, quietly. Her fingertips inched into the white tablecloth, ruching it by centimeters while spreading wrinkles throughout the entirety of the surface. “All I know is that you went from being the kindest person I've ever met, to being like this, and it took less than the span of a single day. And so, before anybody takes another move - ” and her words had the echo behind them again, hundreds of voices both male and female vibrating in unison through her vocal chords, “ - we need to understand why.” She leaned back against the wicker frame of her chair, breathing in deeply. Her lungs felt hot, and again she thought of a sieve through which lava dripped, dissolving the metal bit by molten bit. Liesse didn't have to ask why Rynn had given her this to hold. He had given it to her because he thought she could make a difference, because he had thought if anyone at the table could make a difference, it would be her. “There must be something - “ her voice rasped – her lungs felt like they were burning, and she couldn't imagine that this was what Rynn held inside him all of this time, “ - there must be something that you want. Just – tell us – so we can talk about it.”

“He wants to be in charge.” Dorian's voice, clear and oddly devoid of his usual theatrical lilt. “Of that body. Of this family.” He dropped his arms; clearly Robrecht wasn't interested in going about killing him the good, old-fashioned, way, so he might as well stop giving him the opportunity to make it easy. “It's funny that you say that no Mayfair can survive outside of this family. I suppose you wouldn't remember how long I've been gone, how long Antha and her cohort used to spend outside this house. Or even if you did, you'd make up some elaborate excuse about how it really wasn't us responsible for making our own way out there in the city outside this little – plot of land that we've inherited, this house that we're all tied to like we're trailing umbilical cords behind us. Liesse's right. Tell us what you want, or end this goddamn charade and go wreak havoc wherever else it is that you aren't invited.” He wasn't about to address what Melody had said – it was just another distraction, layered on top of distraction over distraction over distraction. Even if he had been inclined to apologize, the person to apologize to wasn't present, and so what good did it do to harangue him about it? Apologies didn't make a difference to Dorian, it was all lip service until action proved otherwise. Of all people, he knew that all too well.
He leaned forward, bracing his hands on the end of the table, and looked Robin dead in the eye, watching for anything that would give his bluff away. “Everyone else at this table might be scared of you, of what you're going to do to yourself or to one of us, but let's be clear. I've done penance. I've paid the toll between worlds with my own goddamn body. I will do anything to stop someone from hurting my family, and I don't consider you my family, no matter what you look like on the outside, until you call yourself by his name. Right now, you're just a lousy parasite that inhabits the same space as he does. I've been outside the ivory Mayfair towers, I've met people like you, and your brand of cruelty isn't unique, or special. It's the lowest common denominator among sociopaths. You're being a p***k, and you know it, and you're doing it just to rile everyone up.” Dorian released his grasp on the table and lifted himself up by his shoulders. “You think you taught Antha everything she knows, but you don't stop to think that it's been years since you've been around to play tutor. You think everyone here was just playing airship while you were absent? You think none of us were capable of learning anything on our own?”

"Dorian." And this time, although it held the same anger as Melody's reprimand, it was Liesse that reproached him. It did not come without cost; even just getting the next sentence out was painful. "Let him speak. Without, please - any of these interruptions."  

[XCandy and LunacyX]

“Oh my god,” Robin groaned, leaning back in his chair, head lulling back, rolling his eyes, “Who put ten cents in the idiot? It’s talking again.” Sitting straight again, he scoffed his derision.
Lawrence opened his mouth, the strain visible in his face, but was cut off as Melody cleared her throat, rising up out of her seat. Her hand shot out and grasped Dorian’s arm, lifting him up---she was clearly surprised by how effective it was, she was still getting used to her own werewolf strength---and flashing a little dismissive smile. Rather than give excuses, she held her hand up, fingers splayed, and said simply, “Okay, bye!” and ran off dragging Dorian behind her, all the way into the house.
Only there did she stop, sighing with the weight of the world, and turn around to flick Dorian in the forehead all over again. “You were supposed to apologize,” she repeated, cocking her head with another little sigh. “You’re bad at that, you know? Interacting with people like you’re people. A person. I don’t know, I’m so hungry my brain is eating itself. Tea is stupid, you realize that, right? All those stupid tiny foods, I think they just made me hungrier. Come on---” Putting her hands on his back, she shoved him in the direction of the kitchen. “You’re getting me lunch. I don’t care what, I’ll eat a cow whole right now.”
“Not in the house,” Julien ordered, announcing his presence in the corner at the table, newspaper in hand. “Or outside. Farmers still tell tales about werewolves around this city.” Casting a glance at the two of them as Melody directed Dorian to the fridge with authority, he gave a little disgruntled sound and quit the room, rolling his eyes at them. He wanted no part of their deeply awkward courtship.
Sitting down at the counter, she dropped her chin in her palm and pursed her lips, watching Dorian as he moved. “Well,” she said at length, sighing in defeat, “Not like there’s a lot of point in apologizing to Malakai when he’s not here, I guess. And screw Robin, he’s the woooorrrrssssssttt, we didn’t do anything to him. But for real, once he switches out for Malakai, you need to apologize to him. So do I, since it turns out I didn’t. Seriously, the nerve of that guy, taking my apology. That wasn’t meant for him. All these years I’ve wanted to apologize and when I finally get the chance, it was Robin. That jerk! And oh my god, you tried to argue with him!” Throwing her hands down on the counter, she gave a little huff of exasperation. “You can’t argue with Robin! He’s psycho! And he’s smarter than us! What are you trying to do, leave Magdalena an orphan?” She stopped abruptly, her brows knitting thoughtfully. “Oh…I guess I’m not dying anymore, though. That’s really going to take some getting used to. I wonder if I’ll ever get the impulse control part of my brain back…”
“That’s a Tori question,” Courtland answered, wandering into the kitchen to respond to the whistling kettle on the stove. His voice was still hoarse and mangled, difficult to understand. “If you can ever pry him away from Robin. Tori ******** loves Robin, like, until it’s scary.”
“Should you be talking?” she mused, making a gesture down her neck to indicate the black bruises on his. Courtland, pouting slightly, made direct eye contact with her as he poured boiling water into his cup and dunked his teabag in it, putting it to his lips and sipping it. “…you just burned yourself, didn’t you?”
“Shush.” Blowing on the surface of his tea, he shook his head and sighed, continuing, “Whatever, I deserved it. I did more or less murder him. If Malakai hadn’t managed to survive, they’d both be dead. I don’t think he’ll kill me when it comes down to it, it was an honest mistake, and Robin’s…I was going to say he’s not totally heartless, but I’m not sure that’s true. He probably loves Antha and Malakai, but who knows. He’s fair, at any rate, strict and violent but fair.”
“He’s not going to, like…do anything to Maggie, is he? Like what he did to Antha?”
“Nah.” Courtland didn’t hesitate and didn’t show any concern. “Antha was his pet. She’s important---more important than the rest of us, with potential we’ll never have. He wanted to mold her. He never did any of that to the rest of us. And don’t forget, she was his little sister, and an orphan who could really only depend on her brothers. Besides, he hates kids, he says there’s no point in interacting with them until they’re grown. Even when we were kids.” Turning his gaze on Dorian, he said with a note of concern, “He’s going to kill you, you realize that, don’t you? I really think you should be panicking more. Or trying to change his mind, at least. But probably don’t run. Robin’s like a lion, he’s stronger when he’s chasing something down. And he’s really, really into his hair. Doesn’t lick it clean, though. What was I talking about? I took painkillers. Ah, right, lions. No---Robin. Robin lions. Robin would be a fabulous lion…furious lion…wait---”

Visibly, Robin was losing patience. “Here’s the thing, though,” he said to Liesse, now that Dorian was far out of his line of fire, narrowing his gaze at her as that spidery smile crossed his face, lacing his fingers beneath his chin. “See, I owe you ******** all. Didn’t anyone tell you to ask nicely if you want something? Because frankly, you piss me off, so I won’t be answering anything. Even if I was so inclined, you’ve so far refused to comprehend, so why the ******** would I waste my breath? Now put your grave dirt shades back where they belong before you hurt yourself, or worse, before I have to ******** do it for you.”
“Liesse,” Alistair sighed at length, looking away from her brother to cast her a pointed, scolding look, “Seriously. That’s enough, cut it out. Rynn---” Finally, tired of gently coaxing him, he knocked Rynn in the back of the head, “---enough of this, get your ancestors under control. This is spiraling out of control.”
“Do,” Robin grumbled, kicking his feet up on the table, “Because I’ve lost enough ******** time being dead, I have oodles to do before Mousy takes over again.”
Jack just sighed, giving up. “Should we be afraid?”
“Everything’s not about you, jackass. Mousy decommissioned my lab while I was gone, I need a new one. A better one.”
“That’s not as alarming as it sounds,” Lawrence hurriedly assured the Calais, “Robin is a physicist, he’s always kept a science lab. Not to make bombs in. We were very clear about that.”
“Though I could.”
“But won’t.”
“Eh, it’s a waste of research anyways.”

“Cian---” Finally, some of the fight drained out of Antha and she was simply left…tired. “You know what? I can’t even. I can’t handle this right now, Cian, especially not from you. I don’t know what the hell you want from me. I surrendered, I gave up, I handed control over to Robin, or whoever can wrest it from him. What sense does it make to come chasing after me and stop me from storming off to tell me I can’t keep controlling things? I don’t care anymore, Cian. But while we’re on the subject---” For the first time in a long time, and one of the few times altogether, Antha was blatantly angry with her husband. And hurt that he’d given her reason to be, but that was only a small flash in her eyes, buried beneath the anger. “---me controlling everything is the only reason you weren’t burned to death, Cian, and Rynn too. Rynn’s mistakes killed half of you and would have taken all of you down if I hadn’t intervened, because that’s what happens when witches make mistakes. You want to act like this is simple? It’s ******** not. We’re not normal people, Cian. When witches make mistakes, they don’t learn from them because it usually kills them, and sometimes it takes their entire family down with them. But none of that matters anymore, because I give up. I don’t care, I’m dead anyways, so stop telling me how to react, because you don’t know the first thing about what’s going on in my head right now, okay?”
Her breath was coming a little more heavily now, her eyes blinking more than was usual, and neither of them seemed to be voluntary. They gave her an air nearly of mania that she seemed to be staving off, just barely. Tellingly, she was taking pains not to look further into the garden. “Why would I want to control anything anymore?” she whispered finally, nearly a hiss, one hand gripping her waist. She gave the somewhat disconcerting feeling that she was unaware of her own clear struggles. “Robin was the one who controlled everything. He was the one who kept us safe.”
---if someone tells you something is wrong, it’s already too late---
“And then he was gone and they started closing in---the other witches, the Parkers, the vampires, all the companies trying to eat away at ours---and I tried to stop it. But I wasn’t Robin, I couldn’t do what he did. And finally everything went to hell---Nicolae did exactly what Robin said he’d do, and everything started to spiral just like he said it would, and everyone looming at our gates, ready to take us down. Courtland said I was drowning, and he brought me back from the brink, and I thought, ‘******** it. If I can’t be me anymore…somebody has to be Robin. We can’t keep going without Robin, they’ll destroy us.’ So I made myself Robin, as much as I could, but even then…” Her breath was short, her chest moving as if it strained her, nails digging into the fabric of her dress. She didn’t notice any of it, only desperately kept her eyes from straying further into the garden.
---you have to know before the bad thing happens---
“He's always right in the end. When the dust settles, it's always just as Robin said.”