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aeoris4lovers · 1 year

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Angstpril 2023 Day One: Liar

There were very few things in life that Eadwulf insisted upon without any chance of compromise. Choosing battles was a matter of survival under the tutelage of Master Ikithon; incurring punishment was easy enough to do even without the added risk that stubbornness presented. To resist bending only made it inevitable that one would eventually have to break, and as far as Eadwulf was concerned, the world offered little of great enough importance to justify tempting that fate.

It was not an oath made lightly, then, when he promised that he would return every day that he was able to one particular cell in the depths of Vergesson Sanatorium.

Astrid refused to speak to him for weeks after the incident, after what he did that night to save her from a fate far worse than a scar. So, with no one there to swear it to, he made his promise to the gods themselves.

He knelt on the floor of his bedroom, hands clasped together in his lap. Outside the small window above his bed, the cool light of the nearly-full moon fanned out across the skies, setting the shadowed room aglow with the night’s ghostly haze. His gaze settled on the nearest mountain peaks; ancient and immense and unmoving, he thought they must be the closest things to gods he would ever lay his eyes on. When thoughts of his past, of his people, of his own actions that night threatened to creep to the front of his mind, he pressed them back into the darkness of memory. They were gone now; there was nothing more to be done for them. Instead, he turned his thoughts again to Bren, to bright red hair and wild eyes and roaring flames and the crack of rock against bone.

“If I condemned him to this fate,” he whispered, so quiet it was more thought than speech, “let me be the one to see him through it.”

Only a moment later, the soft moonlight was eclipsed by the silhouettes of two ravens coming to rest on the windowsill, and he knew somewhere deep within him that his oath had been sealed.

The next morning, he rose earlier than usual and ate his breakfast as quickly as he could manage to hold it down. The sun still hadn’t even begun to show itself in the young day’s sky when he slipped past the guards at the sanatorium, giving each of them a look which told them not to stand in his way if they valued their lives. They had no way of knowing that, in truth, he wasn’t sure if he would have the courage to make good on that threat; they only saw the determination in his eyes and stepped aside.

As he pushed through hall after hall, he wasted no time looking at anything other than the faces in each cell, searching for blue eyes and red hair. Any strange looks that may have been aimed his way were lost in the blur of stone and bars and wrong faces.

When he finally turned a corner and saw a short-cropped burst of orange in the nearest cell, he was just in time to stop the guard who was preparing to enter with whatever sad excuse for a breakfast they had prepared for the day. He caught the guard by the arm, stooping down to look her in the eye, and pressed a few coins into her hand.

All he said was, “Let me.”

She stared at him for a long few seconds, head tilted to one side, before shrugging.

“If you insist.”

Handing him the tray of oatmeal and water, she unlocked the door of Bren’s cell and started off toward the next one down, leaving Eadwulf there alone. He slipped through the door, closed it behind him, and crouched down next to Bren, truly taking in his current state for the first time.

Perhaps the most noticeable thing should have been how beat up he was – the dark bruises, the blood that no one had bothered to wash from his skin. But instead, all Eadwulf could see was how empty he looked. There was always such a fire behind his eyes, a kind of passion and life there, like his mind was working so feverishly to puzzle the world together that you could watch it happening from the outside, and now? That fire had been all but doused. His eyes were glazed over, wandering helplessly around the space, looking through it all and not truly seeing any of it. There was a slight strain on his face, a clench to his brow that Eadwulf knew his resting face didn’t possess, which betrayed some process of thought, no doubt an unpleasant one. It was distant, though, and passive, as though the thoughts had taken on a life of their own within his mind and he, in this clouded state, was helpless to resist or engage them at all. When his gaze finally fell on Eadwulf, there was a soft spark of recognition that sent Eadwulf’s heart into his throat.

Eadwulf returned every morning after that, and again every night, so long as he wasn’t off on a mission or locked away for the sake of some punishment. Each morning, he fed Bren whatever breakfast the guards had prepared, careful to make it a far more gentle process than the other meals likely involved. As Bren’s hair grew longer with time, Eadwulf took to brushing it, and trimming it when the ends began to fray. A few times, he considered cutting it short again; surely, it would be more comfortable for Bren to have less of it. But there was no ignoring how his eyes fluttered closed at the feeling of it being brushed, or how he hummed in a way that almost seemed to approach contentment — better to keep it long, Eadwulf always ultimately decided.

At night, Eadwulf would clean him — easy enough to do with a simple spell, but most nights Eadwulf wiped his face and hands the mundane way first, probably more for his own sake than for Bren’s — and tended to whatever wounds may have been sustained since the last visit. Then, he would take out whatever books he had been able to find that day, sit by Bren’s side, and read. Bren’s favorite of the books, judging by the way his eyes brightened ever so slightly at the sight of its cover, was an old children's story about a young boy and a cat prince, so they always started and finished with that one. In between, they cycled through as many of the other books as Eadwulf thought they safely had time for, and by the time he closed the fairytale for the final time, Bren was almost always slumped against his side, asleep.

Eventually, once the rifts between them had been repaired, Astrid joined him for some of his visits, though she was quickly given more responsibilities than him and often found it more difficult to get away. On those days, Astrid would braid Bren’s hair once he had brushed it in the mornings, and alternated reading with him at night.

And after every nighttime visit, he would sit in his bed and write a few lines in a journal: how the day’s visits had gone, what had gone on in the outside world that day or over the past few days, what he and Astrid were doing in their own lives. Someday, he told himself, Bren would have his mind back. Someday, he would hand over the journal, a meticulous record of the days Bren was locked away. Someday, Bren would be able to read it, and it would be as if he hadn’t missed a thing at all.

In all that time spent in Bren’s cell, Eadwulf never feared being discovered by Master Ikithon — not out of carelessness or apathy toward the consequences he would inevitably incur, but because he knew it was foolish to assume he hadn’t already been discovered at the very start. The archmage’s gaze took immense care to avoid, and nowhere was it more omnipresent than in the halls of the sanatorium. The chances that he had gone unnoticed were laughably slim — it was better to assume Master Ikithon was well aware, that a confrontation would come soon enough.

And come it did.

One morning, nearly two years into his visits, Eadwulf arrived at Bren’s cell to see his teacher standing there, calmly watching him approach. Inside the cell, he could see Bren’s eyes wide and his face held more tensely than usual. He was shifting slightly where he sat, as though his own body were the walls of a prison preventing him from running away.

All at once, Eadwulf was overcome with the urge to run forward, to lunge at Ikithon, to scream, because how dare he come here and strike that kind of fear into someone so helpless, hasn’t Bren been through enough? But he pushed the urge down and kept calm as he walked in spite of it. It was him that the archmage was angry with, it was him who would face the consequences of his actions; Bren had no reason to be afraid.

As it turned out, neither did he. Master Ikithon wasn’t angry, not at Eadwulf nor Bren; he never said or even suggested that Eadwulf would be punished, and the calm smile never fell from his face. He seemed entirely unfazed — pleased, even — by Eadwulf’s actions.

“You are welcome to visit our dear Bren whenever you wish, Eadwulf,” he said in a tone that could almost be mistaken for good-natured, “as is Miss Becke. In fact, I think it’s wonderful that you three have grown to care so much for each other, even after all this time. By all means, do continue to come visit him if it pleases you.” Moving closer, he added in a lower tone, “I would only urge you to remember that it is for you, yes? As much as it pains me to say this, Bren is — how shall I put this? — absent, by all accounts. You are a smart boy, I have no doubt you’ve noticed. Each time you leave this place, it is to him as if you were never here at all; he won’t remember. The sharp young man we knew is, I’m afraid, no longer with us.”

And every night since then, as silence fell over the sanatorium’s halls, Eadwulf would look down at Bren, tucked against his side the same way they had once grown used to laying in their beds, and ask himself: how could that possibly be true?

How, when he still squirmed at the mere sight of his old teacher standing nearby, when his eyes still sparked at the sight of his favorite fairytale’s cover, when he still remembered how to fall asleep next to Eadwulf like it was as simple as breathing, could Bren be gone? How could it be possible that such a sharp mind, so full of passion and of life, simply slipped away? Even if he remembered none of it, even if each day felt to him like the first time, Bren seemed in his own way to welcome their company far more than any other’s, to relax in some small way at their presence; did that not count for something?

It would take him many more years to truly make sense of it, to fully understand the weight of what it meant, but the simple fact remained: that Bren was gone was the first of Trent Ikithon’s lies that Eadwulf ever saw through.

#yes this is a day late. no i don't know if its good or not. yes im posting it anyway because these are my babies #im deep in an Eadwulf My Beloved Who The Fuck Are You kick rn so most of my entries will probably be centered around Him™️#i want to peel him open like an onion and see what's going on inside. yknow #*slaps eadwulf* this baby can hold so much love shown through acts of service inside of it #angstpril2023 #criticalrole #fanfiction #day1 #liar #cr fic #critical role fic #eadwulf grieve #bren aldric ermendrud #caleb widogast #trent ikithon #<- literally my number one parasocial enemy tbh. and hes not even real #i would tag astrid but she's only very briefly mentioned so it feels wrong #this will eventually be on ao3 but for now i'm just slapping it here and getting the FUCK to bed

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