Page 169 of Envious Of Fire
“Is it finally hitting you?” asks Kyle, his voice suddenly soft. “That you’ve lost me for good? That you and I are over? That in a world full of things you seem not to care about at all, in all your carefree indifference … the one thing … the one and only thing you may have actually loved … now despises you? You said my eyes never lie, right? Look in my eyes. LOOK IN MY EYES!” His fist squeezes Tristan’s shirt at the collar, nearly choking him. “All I feel … for you anymore … Tristan … ‘my love’ … ishatred.”
Tristan’s nostrils flare with emotion.
Tears fill his eyes.
Kyle… His lips quiver. He can’t in any way pretend not to be affected by those words, to play it cool, to make a joke.Don’t you realize…Don’t you realize by now that I’d…that I would set my whole world on fire…to make up for what I’ve done to you…?
“Yes.” Kyle grows closer, quieter. “And it still wouldn’t be enough.”
The words are another punch, right across the face, worse than the real one. Tristan chokes, sucking in a gasp through his clenched teeth, shaking. His eyes shatter right in front of Kyle, despite his efforts to hold back, and tears begin to fall.
Kyle stares into his melting eyes, hating that the first thing he realizes is how beautiful Tristan looks when he’s crying.
He also realizes one other thing.
He has never seen Tristan cry. Truly cry.
His spirit, broken before his eyes.
It’s almost enough to dislodge Kyle from his anger entirely.
He lets go of Tristan’s shirt, stands, wipes tears out of his own eyes, turns away. To the sound of Tristan’s soft sobbing, tothe tiny rasps of his breath, to the music of his quiet weeping that Kyle has never heard, he makes the decision to continue on alone. He must seek out his brother on his own, even if it takes searching every room and hallway in this place. The more the illusions fall apart, surely the easier it will become, no more lies of the architecture itself to hinder his way.
But as soon as Kyle starts to go, he hears a voice.
“K-Kyle …”
He stops.
His Reach is arrested by something brighter than sorrow, sharp enough to cut through—something from Tristan. It’s just like bravery, nearly identical, yet cloaked in childlike fear.
Like the terror of a ghost in the night. A monster under the bed. Something primal and innocent and untouched by ego.
Something as naked as a baby’s cry.
It’s Tristan’s voice.
His real voice.
Kyle turns, faces him.
Tristan is still on the ground. Blood dresses the corner of his nose and lip where Kyle hit him. His cheek smarts, red and bright. Eyes shimmering, a tear resting on his cheek like a tiny diamond, hanging on. “K-Kyle …” he says again, with his real voice, not his words from the mind. It takes him great effort to speak the normal way. It sounds different than Kyle expected, too. Raw. Dusty. In a way huskier, yet still somehow carrying Tristan’s familiar loftiness.
Kyle can’t help feeling moved by the use of his true voice.
Another thing he’s never known before. Not once in all the years he was with Tristan, never once has he known the sound of it, let it touch his ears, let it touch his heart.
When was the last time Tristan even spoke?
It could have been decades ago. A century.
“Do … Do not … forgive me,” says Tristan. The difficultyof his speech seems to draw Kyle all the more to his words. Tristan, still leaning against the foot of the statue of a monster, holding his chest, lips hanging between his words, bloodied in one corner. “If it … If it is easier for you, then hate me as well. I … I deserve it. But please know … know deep in your heart, somewhere in your big, beautiful heart … know that I …” Tristan fights through tears, clenches his teeth, sucks in a breath. “I would have allowed myself to turn to ash in the sun that one morning … if it would have made right all the wrongs I have done to you.”
Kyle swallows, staring back at him, wordless.
It’s impossible to be angry anymore. All Kyle feels is a dull stinging in his chest. Despite all his fight to resist it, all he can see before him is the old Tristan. The one he believed to his core loved him. The one he believed would bend worlds in half to make him happy.
That’s what makes it even more excruciating to say goodbye.
