Chapter Text
“How exactly is that my problem?”
Tara doesn’t look at him when she says it. She’s leaning against the hangar wall, one boot braced behind her, rolling a cigarette between her fingers she doesn’t intend to light. The smell of jet fuel hangs in the air like something metallic and impatient.
Brion steps closer.
“Markovia is under attack.”
He speaks too fast, consonants harder when he’s agitated. His accent thickens, vowels sharpening around the edges. He looks like a man delivering a verdict rather than news.
Tara bites the inside of her cheek. Old habit from childhood. “And?”
“And Gregor is fighting. Alone.” His jaw tightens. “We need to go.”
“I don’t need to do anything.”
Brion pinches the bridge of his nose. A slow, deliberate gesture, as though pressing down the surge of heat rising behind his eyes.
“Tara… this is not about pride. This is our country.”
Her laugh is short and humorless.
“Our country?”
She finally looks at him. Her teal eyes are sharp as cut glass. But there’s something coiled in them, something defensive.
“Even if I wanted to,” she continues, flicking imaginary ash from the unlit cigarette, “and I think it’s pretty obvious I don’t, I can’t set foot on Markovian soil.” A bitter half-smirk. “You can thank dear Papa for that.”
He flinches visibly.
He knows.
He knows very well.
He remembers the decree. The formal words. It was exile, without the courage to name it that.
Tara stood too straight while Gregor read the papers, her hands shaking at her sides. Their father hadn’t even looked at her.
Brion had been furious and powerless all at once, nobody asked him what he thought of the matter. He was the spare, no need for his opinion on anything.
She was thirteen and had just got her powers.
“Our father is dead,” Brion says quietly. “Gregor is king now.”
“And Gregor signed the papers too,” she shoots back. “Or you don’t remember that part?”
The wind shifts, carrying the distant thrum of the jet’s engines being tested. The sound vibrates through the floor, through bone.
Brion inhales. Holds it. Releases it slowly.
“Baron Bedlam has occupied the western provinces,” he says. “He has already seized the military bases. If the palace falls—”
“Bedlam?” She squints. “Didn’t you throw him out a window or something?”
“Down a balcony,” Brion corrects stiffly. “For the people to dispose of him.”
She arches a brow. “Guess you should’ve aimed better.”
For a moment, something almost like shame flickers across his face. Not for the choice he made back then. For not finishing it himself.
“It appears,” he says carefully, “that it was not sufficient.”
Silence stretches between them.
Tara stares at him now. The rigid posture. The clenched fists. The way his shoulders are already braced for battle. He looks older when he’s like this. Less like her brother, more like Geo-Force, leader of the Outsiders, crown prince of a kingdom he never wanted but will always defend.
He can see the calculation in her eyes. The way she weighs distance against blood. Freedom against obligation.
She shakes her head. Small. Final.
He feels it like a crack in stone.
“He is our brother,” Brion says, and now his voice drops lower, rougher. “If he is captured, he will not be spared. He may be facing execution as we speak.”
“He’s not gonna die, Brion. You’re gonna fly in there, punch some rocks around, save his ass.” She crosses her arms tightly across her chest. “Like you always do.”
There it is.
Not indifference.
Expectation.
He sees it suddenly. She’s already decided the ending of this story. In her mind, he’s indestructible. He’s the one who stays and saves the day. The one who absorbs impact. The one who survives.
He’s so tired of being the unbreakable one.
“Very well,” he says at last, and now the restraint fractures. His voice hardens, edges of granite finally exposed. “You are correct. I will go. I will save our brother and our country.”
He turns toward the jet.
“Or I will die trying.”
That gets her attention.
Her arms drop.
“Brion—”
He’s already walking away, long strides, back rigid. The hangar lights catch the faint golden highlights of his red hair.
He doesn’t look back. Because if he does, he might stay. And if he stays, Gregor stands alone.
Tara watches him reach the aircraft. Watches the pilot salute. Watches the boarding ramp lower with a hydraulic sigh. She can feel the restless hum of the earth answering his pulse.
Her throat feels tight, though she would rather choke than admit it.
She hates Markovia.
She hates palace corridors that smelled of wax and politics.
Hates the way people bowed to Gregor, nodded respectfully to Brion, and avoided her entirely.
Hates the word bastard whispered behind closed doors. Hates the memory of her father’s voice when he said the word scandal.
But she doesn’t hate Brion.
That’s the problem.
She loves her big brother more than she likes to admit.
The jet engines grow louder.
Tara swears under her breath.
“Doamne.”
She pushes off the wall and strides forward.
“Brion!” she calls, irritation laced over something far more fragile. “If you get yourself killed, I’m gonna dig you up and kill you again.”
He stops at the base of the ramp and turns slowly. There’s relief in his eyes. And something like gratitude.
Just for a moment, the hangar dissolves. They are children again, skipping stones by the pond, climbing trees and getting mud on their clothes, dirt under their nails, conspiring against the old nanny.
He opens his arms. She hesitates only a fraction of a second before stepping into him. He kisses the crown of her head, grounding himself in the familiar scent of tobacco and wind.
Tara exhales into his jacket. “I’m gonna regret this. I already do.”
She walks past him and up the ramp. He allows himself the smallest smile.
The war rages in Markovia.
Baron Bedlam believes he’s facing a divided kingdom.
He’s not. He’s about to face the entire Markov family.
And the earth remembers its own.