Archive of Our Own ^beta

Your brother used to joke about it. "Plan B stands for Bronte," he would say, his teeth flashing, his voice lilting with his laugh. You hated his laugh even more than you hated his jokes. That laugh that everyone called infectious, that smile that your mother would coo over, would praise and encourage, would compare to rays of sunlight and sparkling gemstones. You hated his laugh because he was able to laugh at things you couldn't. He could laugh at your place as his spare, he could laugh at everyone knowing you through your relationship to him, not of your own merit, your own identity.

You know he doesn’t mean to be cruel. He is not malicious. His jokes are surface-level in his mind, teasing between brothers, jabs and needling at scars that have long since healed over, because he cannot fathom a world in which anyone would struggle with being his brother. A world in which you love him and loathe him in equal measures. A world where you hate his laugh and hate his hugs because they feel like he’s mocking you– pitiful, pathetic Bronte, who needs to be coddled and consoled and comforted, because who would ever expect much else from Bronte?

He could laugh because he was First-Son and that gave him privilege, gave him immunity to criticism and disappointment and failure. Everything he did was perfect, simply because he did it. Because he was beautiful and first and you were caught in the ripples of his wake, rocked and sent spinning out, clinging to a raft for dear life.

How could you ever hope to compare? You couldn’t. There was never a chance for you, because there was only one spot in the world that belonged to First-Son and it was filled before you were born. Your existence was one of an eternal game of catch-up that you would never win. Always behind. Always second. Always Bronte.

You grew to hate it– the sound of your own name. It brought back nothing but bad memories, it was the sound that predated disappointment. So as soon as you could, you changed it. You shed it like an old cloak, tattered and dusty and no longer useful, like a crab abandoning a shell that no longer fit it. Bronte no longer fit you, and so you stopped using it and became Dorian instead, because Dorian wasn’t someone’s second son, Dorian wasn’t a less impressive little brother lost in another’s shadow. Dorian stood strong and boldly on his own, he made his own gusts and his own waves, and there was no one to compare him to, no yardstick with which to measure him by.

“You may call me Dorian,” you say, and everyone takes you at your word. No one hears your name and expects you to be something different, they never mention your parents, your brother, because Dorian has none of those things. Dorian is an island to himself, a legacy that starts and ends with a single person, and you have never felt so free.

They call you Dorian and think you are something special.

It’s a farce, you know, and perhaps you feel a little guilty about it. You tell these new friends of yours that your name is Dorian and they don’t bat an eyelid, and why should they, because it isn’t a lie, but it also isn’t the whole truth. Dorian is you, and you are Dorian, but you are also Bronte, deep beneath it all, and you wonder if that half-truth is a whole lie, if you are deceiving them, and if they would hate you if they knew everything about you. You could tell them, see how they react and answer all those questions that linger inside your head.
But you are a coward.

Your brother never knew what fear felt like. Never imagined anything in his life going wrong, anything that he did failing. He was always bolder than you, more confident than you, and he had reason to be. Your brother was brave and beautiful and bold, and you— you were gullible and meek. Talented in some ways but slow to learn in so many others. How many tricks did your brother play on you that you always fell for? How many lies were you told that you always believed?

It made you anxious, the teasing, the pranks. It made you worry that people were always lying to you, always laughing behind your back and you never knew. It made you afraid to trust your own instincts, afraid to believe that people would say what they meant, and mean what they said. You are an honest person by nature, and it seemed as if honesty was a foolish endeavor in a world where people valued it only when it served them to abuse.

You are a coward, and your honesty frightens you.

So you don’t tell them. Not right away. Not for a while. Not until you are fully backed into a corner, until you need to be honest with them or actually make the choice to lie, bold-faced and intentional, and you couldn’t do that. Not to these friends, not to the first that you ever made that saw you, saw Bronte beneath Dorian, and did not find you lacking.

"You know," Orym says in his small voice, small only because he's so low, because he's beneath the usual barrier in which you listen for someone to speak to you, "You've got a great smile."

It surprises you to hear that. It doesn't seem like something that should be said to you, something said to Second-Son, Plan B for Bronte. Your smile has always been a little crooked, and your mother always scolded you for showing too much of your gums. "Look at Cyrus," she'd say, shaking her head and clicking her tongue, "He looks so handsome when he smiles. You should smile like that."

You can't be handsome like Cyrus. You can't be funny or likable. You can't be first. You tell Orym as much, in much fewer words when you say, "You needn't try to flatter me, I know you don't mean it."

Orym looks up at you but somehow it doesn't feel like he's smaller than you. It doesn't feel like you're imbalanced, at least not in the way people might think. When he looks at you, his brows furrowed, his mouth pulled down, it's you who feels three feet tall. "Why would I lie to you about that?" he asks.

You don't have an answer.

You just think about your father, and how he never said anything to you without it being laced with some sort of criticism. You think about your mother and her love of Cyrus. You think of your brother, how he loves you, but can never see beyond his nose, can never imagine any hardship or struggle, because he had never known it.

Though, perhaps to call being Second-Son and the ‘spare’ is a rather privileged sort of struggle to most. You criticize Cyrus for never knowing your pain, but is it quite as painful as you always thought? Could you die from it? Your ego would, certainly, but anything else? A wound of the flesh is worse, isn’t it? The risk of death is a far more harrowing fate than to exist in your brother’s shadow every day of your life.

You never used to think of it as quite superficial, in the grand scheme of things, but you also never used to have to live hand to mouth, you never had to sing for your dinner, to find a place to lay your head and ask someone to watch your back while you peed. Bronte never considered those things. Bronte existed in a world of silk sheets, gilded china plates, small salad forks, and crystal decanters. Bronte was a byproduct of selective breeding, a child of generational wealth that went back centuries. Power, authority, and respect were as much a part of his makeup as the color of his hair and the shape of his eyes.

Dorian is none of the things Bronte was, but to say that he was entirely different was incorrect. Dorian was made entirely of spare parts, put together from pieces of stories that you liked as a child and ideas you had in your head about what you would be if you could be first. Dorian Storm is charming and friendly and everyone knows who he is. Not because of his brother, not because of his family, but because Dorian is funny, Dorian is quick with a blade and quicker with his fingers, able to play ballads and write songs that everyone wants to know. Dorian doesn’t wonder who people see when they’re talking to him, because Dorian knows he is the only thing that can possibly be on their mind, because of how dashing and clever he is.

Dorian is not Bronte, and you’re proud of that. But, the truth is, there are times when you wonder if you’re either of them.

Dariax never questions that you are who you insist you are. You like Dariax. You like him quite a bit. He smiles at you as if the world spins at your command, as if the sun shines from behind you, wreathed in glow and glory and purpose. He calls you a leader and no one ever has before. He laughs at your jokes even when he doesn’t understand them and he thinks you can do no wrong.

Orym isn’t like Dariax, but you like him too. He knows you are bad at jokes and that you shake and tremble when people look to you. He knows you’re no sun god, no divine master of the universe who bends the earth to his whims. He knows you’re just Dorian, awkward and jittery and full of bad ideas. You have never been expected to lead but you try your best to do so, because surely there’s something about you, whether it nature or nurture, that lends itself to leadership.

But he encourages you anyway. He trusts you regardless. He lets you try, he tells you that you can do things if you’d like, which no one would ever say to you before.

You like it when Orym speaks up in agreement with you. Not just because it’s nice to know someone has faith in your ideas, but because it’s Orym. Orym who is steady, and sure, Orym who seems to know everything when it comes to being an adventurer, despite insisting he’s never done this before either. You like him because he’s sure. Stable. He doesn’t second guess himself or lie awake at night, wondering if he’s done something wrong, if he’s inadvertently caused horrific consequences by making a single rash decision.

You tell him that one night, when the fire is low, mostly embers, your stomach is full, and your breath is thick with sweet wine. You tell him how you admire him, how you wish you could go through your day without fear and regret like he does.

“That isn’t true,” he says, his lashes cast low over his eyes (moss green, you described them as once, in a poem you’ve been writing in your head), shielding them from the firelight, and something about his voice, his frown, makes your chest hurt, and you don’t know why.

“What do you mean?” you ask, though you’re afraid to. Afraid to learn the truth, because it will shatter this image you’ve created of Orym within your mind. This beacon of confidence and security and ability, all attached to him. All carried on those small, narrow shoulders.

Orym is quiet for a long time after that. You both sit in silence. It feels fragile, like a piece of string pulled too tight, so taunt that the wrong movement will cause it to snap, and whip back onto you. That’s happened with your lute, and you don’t want it to happen with Orym. Steady, strong, safe Orym.

He tells you about Will. He tells you about the man he loved, the man who he shared his life with, the man who he had planned to be together with forever. He tells you about his laugh, his freckles, his strong arms. Big moon, little moon, he tells you in a solemn whisper, reverent and devout in a way you’ve never heard him speak before. You hear the love in his words, the adoration, the joy. But his eyes are full of sorrow, his lips tremble, and it takes time for him to tell you about his loss. A night he can’t forget, a love lost, two lives cut short. The life of Will, and the life Orym shared with Will, all gone in the blink of an eye.

“I know how quickly things can change,” he says without looking at you, and you know that what you see reflected in his eyes is undoubtedly Will’s last breath, “One wrong move, and just– Everything, everything is different. You lose everything.”

You want to reach out towards him, to take that small that is shaking where it rests against his chest, and hold it between yours. You want to cup his cheek, you want to tell him that it wasn’t his fault, that he surely did everything he could, that no one blames him for that horrible night. But you don’t. You lie there, and watch him, and feel something sharp lodge itself in your chest.

“I know a lot about regret,” Orym murmurs, and you hear how his voice sags with the burden carried within those words.

You could never be half as strong as Orym is.

Your brother used to compare you to a bird. Preening, pretty to look at, always making noise, hollow-boned, flighty. You took offense to half of those things, and couldn’t argue the others. You did preen, but so did he, you were pretty to look at but Cyrus was even more so, you made noise because that was the only way you could get people to look at you sometimes, you had to squawk and dance and sing and hope that was enough to turn a few heads. It was the hollow-boned comment that bothered you most, really, because while certainly you weren’t blessed with your brother’s sleek bulk or strength you were hardly fragile by any means, you could certainly take your share of blows and it wasn’t quite as easy to knock you down as Cyrus made it out to be.

When you meet Orym, you learn what real strength is. When you embrace him for the first time, you feel the corded musculature of his back, you feel the ripples of firm, taunt flesh over his bones, hard and unyielding. When you watch him move during fights, it’s fluid and precise, not like a dance, but like a machine. You see how his body pistons and grinds and just keeps moving, how it doesn’t stop because it’s not made to stop, how he has built himself into a weapon, from the tip of his sword to the crown of his head to the balls of his feet.

Orym embraces you, and you feel your bones creak with the force. You feel yourself knocked back and you stumble because you aren’t so perfectly balanced like he is, you haven’t trained yourself to brace for impact within a second’s notice. Orym is strong and solid and oh-so-real to you, more real than you’ve felt in your own skin for a while now, and you’re losing your breath again for an entirely different reason.

He is wonderful. Breathtaking. Gorgeous. A dozen different adjectives linger on the tip of your tongue, all of Orym, all to describe the way light catches the soft bronze tone of his skin, how the color of his eyes brings forth the smell of rich earth and summer grass to your nostrils. He is beautiful in the way a sunset is beautiful, a work of nature, humble, commonplace, something everyone sees but not everyone can appreciate. How many have looked past those shy smiles, those little jokes, the tinkling bells of his laugh? How many have grown used to seeing his strong, unyielding silhouette at their side, and stopped appreciating the power there, the safety that little body brings? How many times have you taken Orym and his beauty for granted yourself, simply because it was so freely given, so openly shared, a beauty that wasn’t locked away in towers or hidden under magic spells?

You had spent your entire life searching for a story. A ballad, a play, a fairytale that needed a hero, a role that you could fill. You had imagined it would involve many more dragons, perhaps a king or two, you had prepared for princes and knights and masquerade balls and grand halls to be the stage for this story of yours to unfold.

But you did not fall in love with a princess locked away in a tower, or rescue a prince from a toad-faced curse. You were not granted wishes from a djinn or given a magic sword by a powerful fairy. You made friends, and you and those friends brought great evil into the world. You lost your brother, you made mistakes, all your friends left you at least once, and you don’t ever blame them. You fell in love with the little knight at your side, the one that, in any proper poem would be your sidekick, or perhaps your guide. But he is the prince of your fairytale, the one who brought you safety, lent you his strength. He is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen, and you will write a dozen songs, a hundred sonnets, and not even scratch the surface of how much you love him.

And you do love him, you realize, when it is far too late.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, they say, and you know it is true. Because the opposite of love isn’t hate, but the absence of it entirely.

When you left, you missed him, and you knew you would. He has been your friend for so long, you have endured so much with him, you have faced gods and beasts and death with him at your side, and so grew attached to him. You laughed and cried and even shouted at each other, but there he was, always present, always reliable, and you grew comfortable with the presence of him, complacent. You forgot what the world was like before he was there beside you, which should be silly, insane even, that you grew so bonded to him so quickly, but it was second nature, it came as a surprise, so much so that you didn’t even realize the depth of it until you put that distance between you.

There was so much expected of you, when it came to your brother. A problem to solve, a mess to clean up that was not your own, but you were responsible for, because you love your brother. You do love Cyrus, you genuinely do, but you find yourself exasperated with him, shorter tempered with him, more so than you remember being when you were children. Sibling squabbles were always a part of your dynamic, and your brother was ever so fond of driving you to the point of frustration and anger, but there is a different feeling between you two now, unlike any of the bitterness and jealousy that existed before. You are not merely pouting because of his behavior, but waspish and clipped. Cyrus apologizes for getting you into his mess, and you know you should accept it and forgive him, but there is a part of you that can’t. You are with Cyrus, and not with Orym, and he is so thoughtless and callous and selfish, and you had never realized how very blind he is to his own faults. You are used to someone who has learned hard lessons, who has accepted his mistakes and matured from them, and Cyrus has never done any of those things. He has skated through life by the skin of his teeth, and now by the skin of yours, and because of that you are here solving his problem, and you wish you weren’t.

You hold that stone in your hand every night, you debate whispering words into it. You shouldn’t– you musn’t– but you want to. You miss him so desperately that it leaves you aching and breathless. You hear a sound on the wind and you mistake it for his voice, you see a shape in the crowd and subconsciously impose his image over it, you ache and ache and ache, and you know you need to be here, but you want to be beside him. Your brother needs you, for the first time you are needed, but it is meaningless to you, because you have moved beyond Second-Son Bronte, you have broken the shackles of your name and your family and you have found something far more precious in the face of a man only waist high.

You long for him, you not only desire him but you need him, you need Orym like you need the sun and air to breathe. You can survive without those things, for a little while, you can deprive yourself for some time and make do, but eventually, you need to take a breath, you need to see the sky, and you need to be beside Orym again. You can survive, but you don’t want to, not without him. Not without him there.

Maybe it is those thoughts that end up being your undoing. Maybe it is your fixation on the absence you feel that distracts you from what is beside you, from your brother, and his moment of need. Maybe it is because your eyes are always searching a distant horizon, hoping to see a familiar little shape, maybe it is because you hold that stone to your heart every night and hope to hear his voice coming from it that you were blind to what was unfolding right in front of you until it was too late.

Cyrus is dead. You are brotherless, and you have never been without a brother before. You had come into a world with Cyrus already in it, and now, he no longer exists in the world, yet you remain. You are Second-Son no longer, Bronte is now First-Son, and your family’s spare has an unprecedented promotion in rank. First-Son Bronte sounds like the shattering of glass to your ears, like the sick, wet thud of a body impacting the earth. It sounds like a nightmare come to life, a deal made in bad faith, and a soul sold for an impossible price. It is not your fault, not alone, but you know you played a part.

Every night you dream of your teeth falling out.

You are alone and afraid. The darkness encircles you, you feel the bile rising in your throat. You choke on it, gag and heave and spit, but it just fills your mouth again. Except it’s not your bile that you are choking on, but evil, temptation and hunger and greed. It’s power that chokes you, threatens to pull you under, and you feel so weak, so desperate and needy. You think that it might be easier if you gave in, it might stop the hurting and the fear.

And you know why darkness calls for you. Because you consider it an option. You are fickle and useless and evil only reaches out for you because you are powerless against it.

Every night you swallow your teeth and hear spiders skittering in your ears.

So you avoid sleep when you can. You distract yourself, exhaust yourself, find whatever way you can to keep the dreams at bay, to avoid thinking about your brother’s corpse and Opal’s empty eyes and the knowledge that so much of what you love is twisted and broken and out of reach.

You find something to help. A simple, filthy thing.

At least, that was how it started. It started as nothing more than primal instinct, a way to put your mind far away from spiders and death and mistakes. You are a simple creature, despite your family crest and your breeding. You have urges, you have learned what they mean, even if you never fully explored them– not with anyone else, at the very least. You know your body because it is an instrument and every proper musician makes himself familiar with the tools of his trade, and you are nothing if not curious. You know how to make your mind go blank for a short while, how to shut out guilt and regret and grief, centering your thoughts entirely on sensation. It works for a while, this mindless touching, this quick and dirty chase of release, a way to empty your mind of anything that hurts too much to think about.

Until just your hand is not enough, and you must get creative.

Short, coarse hairs slicked flush against the sweaty nape of a neck. Scarred fingers pressing into the crease of your hips, the place where your thigh meets your groin. Soft green eyes looking up at you as a hot mouth wraps around your dick, velvety soft and wet, gods so wet, and you want to stay in that mouth forever. A low voice calling your name, affectionate and encouraging, giving you all the praise you need, the approval and direction you yearn for.

Your grip tightens. Your blood pounds in your ears, your breath is high in your throat and you are reaching for something, grasping, straining. You are hyper-aware of every pore, each hair, you can smell your own sweat and you taste the underside of your tongue and there’s a howling in your ears, like the wind is shaking the foundation of your entire soul— until finally, the thread snaps.

You lie there, your body feeling hollowed out until you are nothing but an empty husk, only seconds from crumbling away into dust. The wetness on your belly cools too quickly and the sticky mess is a reminder that your pleasure has gone, you are filthy, and most prominently, you are alone.

What would your mother think?

What would Orym think?

He would be disgusted with you, surely. After all, what you’re doing is shameful, crude, a misuse of the trust that you built between the two of you. He treated you so kindly, he protected you, he comforted you, and now you use those special moments, those conversations and smiles, to seek base physical pleasure. You want to satisfy your own selfish urges and so you use the memory of his strong hand gently taking yours, you recall the smell of his skin when he would lie next to you at night, you think of the sound of his voice when he’d call your name while you touch yourself, imagining all of those things warped into something else, something sexual, something that should only be taken when willingly offered, but you hoard greedily, without his knowledge, without his consent.

But maybe he wouldn’t hate it. He is so thoughtful, so gentle, so understanding, that perhaps if you explained it, he might forgive you. If you told him that it was more than just lust, more than just an animalistic need to appease the tightness you feel, the ache in the pit of your loins, he would believe you, and absolve you. Because this isn’t about carnal desires, it’s about how you slept better with him beside you, you felt safer with him at your side, knowing that you need only to turn your head and see him there, strong and sure. It’s about how his voice drew you out of the darkest moments you can remember, how it was the strength of his conviction, his trust in you that made you push past the temptation and hunger that the Spider Queen had drawn out of you. It is about how he delights in your singing, and encouraged your music, how he looked at you like you were the greatest composer in Exandria, that you could hang the moon and stars with your songs. It’s about how you miss him even when he is standing next to you, because you fear the moment that you might have to part.

If you told him, he might understand. He might forgive you, might excuse your lapse of judgment– one committed over and over and over and over. He might laugh it off, might tease you, but never shame you, never spurn you, because he is the kindest man you have ever known.

If you told him, perhaps he might– No, you shouldn’t think that. Mustn’t, because then you would be getting your hopes up too high, and you know already that you are doomed to fall, fated to come crashing down to earth once reality hits, and you are left alone with your thoughts and your feelings and your unreciprocated love. So you carry on, you bury it all down inside of you, and you square your shoulders and put on the smile he once told you was beautiful, ready to see him once again.

He is so different when you finally do.

Your mind goes back to the night around the fire, the night he told you about Will. He was sad, somber, but he wasn’t broken. He is broken now.

There is still a fight burning within him, there is no question of that. You still see blood flecked on his cheeks when he draws his sword, you still see how he never lets his eyes wander from a target for more than a minute. He still jumps in front of you with his shield raised, and he still keeps moving his feet, forever marching onward, never hesitant, never defeated.

But the weight he bears truly oppresses him, you see his small body sagging beneath it. There is a wildness in his eyes that you did not see before, and there is an emptiness to his movements, a heartless sort of effort when it comes to monitoring his own needs.

He has lost something in your time apart. You have too. There is a wound in him that you do not have any medicine for, no spells to help it heal, and you think that perhaps it is a wound you have begun to know well. He is not who he was when you left him. You are no longer who he was asking for in the middle of the night, all those months ago. You are both irrevocably changed, yet you still see him, still see Orym, beautiful and kind and strong and steady Orym, beneath all of those differences.

You want so much. You want to be the song he sings in the morning, hummed under his breath as he readies for the day. You want to be the smile that appears on his face when he makes a joke, the laugh that comes out through his nose when his own cleverness catches him by surprise. You want to be the grip that he has on his shield— not his sword— because it is steady and sure, it is an intention to protect, an action of self-sacrifice and love rather than aggression. You want to be the moonlight that reflects in his eyes, beautiful and shining and lonely and broken, facets of him but not all of him, just pieces that each have their moment on the surface.

You want to be next to him, because it is there that you feel…whole. You feel like so many loose ends and half-finished parts, but with Orym, he ties them up, closes the gaps, and when you are with him, you are complete. You are whole, not because he completes you, but because he lets you know that you, as you are, are whole, that you don’t need to be anyone’s son or anyone’s leader or anything at all, because what you are is a fully realized person.

You love him, you know this like you know how to play your lute, you know this like you know the sun will rise in the east and set to the west. You love him, and you want to be beside him. You want to kiss him, and make love with him, you want to hear his laugh and wipe away his tears. You want to hold him in your arms, just be close to him, let him feel your warmth and hear your heart, be the one who brings him comfort when all he’s known for so long is grief. You want to stand back to back with him as the world collapses around you, you want to spare him whatever hurt you can, whether it be with your sword or your spells or your self, and you want to imagine that there might be a dawn afterwards, that there might be a night after it all too, a night where you can look up with him and see those twin moons.

“You’ve always been the reason I’m here.”