Beast Gacha System: All Mine

The main chamber was filled with guards standing in postures that suggested they had forgotten their training. Their spears held at angles that would not defend against anything, their eyes tracking movement without comprehending it.

Servants pressed against walls, some weeping, some praying, all waiting for someone to tell them what had already happened.

The Emperor’s body had been quarantined. Damon noted this without noting it.

Adjacent, through doors that had been forced open and now hung crooked on their hinges, came the sound of grief without dignity.

Vera, the Emperor’s concubine, had collapsed against a divan, her hair unpinned and wild, and her hands clawing at her own face, wailing, rising and falling without pattern or pause.

"My son, my son, my son—"

And there was Jove. The youngest prince. Now lay on a table that had been cleared of its decorative objects, his neck a mess of red that the healers’ compresses could not staunch.

He was conscious. His eyes were open, fixed on the ceiling, blinking slowly as if trying to remember something important. The blood pulsed from between the healers’ fingers in rhythm with his heartbeat.

"Step aside," Damon said, and his voice was not the voice of the difficult prince or the performing monster anymore. It was of command.

Vera’s wail caught. She saw Damon, entering with Ivy Cassia at his elbow and her face contorted into fury.

"You—" She launched herself from the divan, would have reached him if guards had not caught her arms, if her own legs had not betrayed her.

"You sent them! You sent them to kill him, to kill my son, you wanted him dead, you wanted them all dead so you could—" The words dissolved into screaming, raw and directionless.

Damon did not look at her. He moved to Jove’s side, pushing through the healers who parted for him without decision, their hands still pressing, still failing.

The boy’s eyes found his, and in them Damon saw recognition, then fear, resigned, and perhaps believed the words his mother spat. Perhaps he had always known. He had always known that his brother’s world would eventually consume him.

"The Dragon’s Physician," Damon said, not to Jove but to the room, to anyone who could execute. "Her elixir. The miracle potion. Now."

Silence. The healers looked at each other, at their own bloody hands.

"Qinryc Lukas!" Damon turned, roared, and found the Cassian Prime Minister standing at the chamber’s edge, his face composed still. Even now, he was a man who had spent his life preparing for moments of catastrophe.

"You are the largest distributor of Lady Sees’ compounds in the continent. You should have it here."

Qinryc stepped forward, reached into his robes, and produced a beautiful glowing vial. "Yes, my Prince, I have it here."

The healers’ hands hesitated. The light caught the blood on their fingers and transformed it into something almost beautiful.

"No—" Vera’s scream cut through. "No! Unknown potions! Unknown witchcraft! He will not be poisoned by your schemes, Damon, you will not kill him with your—"

SLAP!

Damon moved. His hand connected with her face with a loud crack. Vera’s head snapped back, her screaming stopped, her eyes wide with the shock of violence intruding upon her hysteria.

The guards held her now limp in their arms and the chamber held its breath.

"Administer it," Damon said to Qinryc, his voice steady and his hand still raised, his eyes on his brother’s fading consciousness. "Now."

Qinryc stepped to the table. The vial’s glow intensified as he unstoppered it, as the scent of something impossibly clean filled the space where blood had been the only smell.

Jove’s eyes remained open, fixed now on Damon, asking questions that could not be answered, trusting answers that had not yet been given.

Damon stood over them both, the Saintess’s prophecy fulfilled in the room where he had not been and his father’s blood already cooling. All chaos and he needed to stay firm.

For now, his brother’s life was still suspended in the light of a miracle he had purchased without knowing its price.

But so be it.

The potion worked perfectly.

The wound closed immediately, the flesh knitting together. The bleeding stopped, letting the healers in the room exhale in relief.

Jove remained pale, the color of old parchment, of shock, of blood loss that could not be replaced by miracles alone. But he breathed. The pulse in his neck, where moments ago there had been only red, beat steady and human and present.

The teen boy immediately burst into tears.

It was raw. The heaving sobs after feeling death’s breath on his skin and being pulled back by forces he did not understand. His body shook. His hands, rising instinctively, found Damon’s shoulders and clutched as if he was drowning.

Damon immediately clutched him to his embrace.

But even as he held his brother, even as he felt the warmth returning to the body that had been cooling beneath his eyes, Damon’s own panic demanded an outlet.

He pulled back, just enough, his hands moving to Jove’s face, clamping it between his palms with a pressure that was almost violence. He needed to make sure his brother was truly still present.

"Tell me your name." His voice cracked, the command stripped to its foundations. "Tell me where you are. Answer, brother!"

Jove’s eyes, swimming with tears, found his. The boy hiccuped, sobbed, tried to speak through the obstruction of his own terror.

"Jove, Elder Brother, I’m Jove..." The words emerged broken, childish, stripped of the careful articulation princes were taught. "Uuuh..."

Damon’s thumbs traced the bones of his brother’s face, checking for temperature, for coherence and the persistence of a self that might have wandered too close to departure. "Where?"

"I’m with my Brother, in Father’s Chamber."

The answer was insufficient and geographically confused, yet exactly right. Damon’s breath escaped him in a sound that was almost laughter, almost relief.

"Good job," he said, and hugged him back, pulling Jove’s head to his shoulder, feeling the wet of tears through his tunic. "Good job."

Reginald and Gertrude were finally allowed to enter.

They had been held somewhere, Damon understood distantly, in the antechambers of catastrophe, prevented from witnessing what might have been the death of their brother and the transformation of their world.

Now they saw, the miracle of the closed wound, the glow fading from the vial Qinryc still held, their elder brother’s stern and strong approach to order and at the same time, his silent panic exposed in the tremor of his hands, the desperation of his questioning.

Reginald reached them first, control cracking around his eyes, and his arms found both Damon and Jove, adding his weight to the embrace.

Gertrude followed, her sobs already begun, her smaller frame pressing against the tangle of her brothers as the smallest, the most vulnerable and the most aware of what loss meant.

After one or two sobs from his other siblings... after he had counted them, after he had confirmed that Reginald’s hands were whole, that Gertrude’s breath was steady, that Jove’s pulse continued its miracle, Damon took a deep breath.

His father’s body still waited, quarantined.

He pulled back from the embrace, gently, firmly, extricating himself from the clutch of his siblings with the same hands that had just held them together.

He wiped his face with the back of his hand, a gesture that smeared blood he had not noticed acquiring, and turned.

The captain of the guards stood at attention near the chamber’s entrance, his face grey after witnessing too much in too short a time. He had been waiting for someone to tell him which protocol applied now.

And Damon met his eyes.

"Show me my father."