Ch 192 – An Intervention Between Brothers
"The hell are you on about?" Deacon frowned across the fire at him.
"You've been acting like a child for the past almost two months," Bonehead answered, holding up his left hand and counting off his fingers, starting from his pinky, pointing each one with his right index finger as he listed them. "You don't answer any of your calls, messages, hell, I even sent you a goddamn fucking email, and you still didn't answer that."
"I've been busy training," Deacon retorted. "And I do read them."
"Yeah, I get that, but reading ain't fucking answering them," Bonehead shot back, "and none of what you've been doing are the actions of an adult, they're the actions of a pissy, crying child."
"How the fuck am I a crying child when all I'm doing is training and researching?" Deacon rose from where he sat, the log creaking beneath him as he pushed off it, and he turned and pointed directly at Esmerelda's Soul Bottle, sitting on the ground beside where he'd been, its gold-and-green light pulsing quietly, indifferent to the argument around it.
"How is pushing myself to my absolute limits, so that we have a chance of being able to build a body capable of holding Esmerelda's soul, how is that acting childish?" He turned back to face Bonehead fully.
"Tell me, Bonehead, how in the name of fuck is any of that me acting like a child? We need to get stronger to "
"Because all you've done since our meeting with Sam and Jass's parents is slam the fucking door on everyone and punch a wall," Bonehead retorted, pushing himself up off his log and onto his feet with enough force that the log scraped backward. "You know how I know that's childish behavior? Because I have younger brothers who do that exact same shit whenever they don't get what they want and don't know how to deal with it."
Deacon scoffed at that.
"What else am I supposed to do?" Deacon said, and some of the heat bled out of his voice despite trying to rein in as much as he could.
"I haven't seen my uncle in almost two months, and before you try and spin this all back onto me," he said, jabbing his index finger downward in front of him as though pressing a point physically into the ground between them, "this very meetup we're having right now is because you asked for it, not me."
Taking a step forward, he spread his arms out wide in exasperation. "And I do read every message I receive, I just haven't responded to them, as you well know, because I have more important things to do than sit there typing out responses to condolences and the rage bait being sent my way as a result of my fuck ups."
"Then why haven't you responded to my messages?" Bonehead pressed. "I didn't send you any of that shit, Deacon. I didn't send you condolences or rage bait or any other shit like that.”
"I asked how you were doing. I asked what I could do to help you. I asked if you needed any top-ups on potions or needed someone to talk to or anything at all." His voice had been climbing steadily as he spoke.
"But all I got in return were my messages left on read, like I'm some random jackoff you don't know and not your friend. Not your own fucking brother!"
"Because what the fuck can I say!" Deacon shouted back, and the words came out of him with a force that surprised even him. His voice echoed out across the surrounding forest and faded away before dying entirely.
When he continued, his voice was still raised but rougher, stripped of the defensive edge and left with something underneath that was considerably uglier and considerably more honest. "I killed the people we love."
"Every single waking moment, hell, even in my sleep, I think about them," Deacon continued, his jaw tight. "I hear them shouting at me, cursing me out, asking me why I wasn't faster or stronger, and I watch them die seconds before they do it while I'm standing right there and can't do a single goddamn thing about it." His hands had closed into fists at his sides without him noticing.
"So tell me what the fuck I'm supposed to write back to you when that's what's going on inside my head every time I try to sit down and do anything that isn't training."
"Them dying was not your fault alone!" Bonehead retorted, stepping closer. "We all agreed to—"
"It doesn't matter if you all agreed—" Deacon interrupted.
"Because you're Party Leader, I get that!" Bonehead cut straight back over him before Deacon could finish the sentence, his voice cracking like a whip.
"You've been shouting that at yourself and me since day one. But news flash," he said, and his tone dropped from sharp to something harder and more deliberate, "I don't give a fuck about that, and nobody else in the Party gave a fuck about that."
He wasn't done.
"Blame is not on you alone. This ain’t some cringe ass cuck-fuck shit where everything is always all your fault. This is reality, where every single person in the world makes their own choices, and every one of those choices has its own consequences that have nothing to do with you." He took another step closer to Deacon.
"No one listened to you when you were screaming at all of us to rip our Leave Tickets. Jass didn't listen because she wanted to avenge Esmerelda, and she wanted to protect Sam and me and buy you time to get yourself free from the ceiling, and that was her choice to make, not yours.”
“Sam had more than enough time to rip his Leave Ticket before the Antlion Prince ever got close enough to touch him, and he chose not to because he chose to give his life protecting Jass and me instead of saving himself, and that was his choice to make, not yours." Bonehead pressed, taking another step closer to Deacon. "I didn't rip my Leave Ticket either, because I wanted to stay and help, and that was my choice."
He stopped maybe two feet away from Deacon on the opposite side of the campfire, close enough that the flames between them lit the angles of both their faces from below.
"This isn't all just on you, you self-hating bastard."
The words echoed within the surrounding forest as the both of them stood there glowering at each other across the campfire with neither willing to be the first to look away.
Though after a time, it was Bonehead who moved first, though not in the way of backing down, stepping back and dropping himself onto his log, his elbows coming to rest on his knees and his skull tilting slightly downward, and Deacon remained standing exactly where he was, still chewing on Bonehead's words.
"Did you know," Bonehead said after a while, quieter than anything he'd said since sitting down that evening, "that when Esmerelda pushed me away just before she died, somehow in that push of hers she managed to move my core from my sternum into my left eye socket?" He paused. "The only part of my skeleton that was left after everything."
Deacon’s mind snapped back, recalling the very last few seconds before the Antlion Prince speared his hand through her heart.
Now that Bonehead was saying it out loud, he did recall something weird Esmerelda did to Bonehead when she pushed him away — a brief flash of pale blue light arcing from Bonehead’s shoulder at the exact moment Esmerelda had shoved him away from her, something he’d registered at the time without giving it much thought amid the chaos of everything else that had been happening.
"I didn't even realize she'd done it until we watched the memories back," Bonehead said. “In her last moments alive, she chose to save me, using that future sense of hers, over herself…”
"Jass could have lived," Bonehead said then, even quieter than before, making it clear he'd been holding them for a long time. “And not even if I hadn’t rolled Sam one of my water barrels.”
"If I had just concocted Health Pills early instead of wasting my time on my stupid experiments, she would have had something to stabilize her long enough for Deacon to reach her." He didn't look up. "I can't even think straight without having to down Calming Brews just to keep myself from—"
He stopped and didn't finish.
Deacon stared at the fire, and somewhere during Bonehead's words he realized his shoulders had come up without him deciding to do it, squared and tense like he was bracing for something.
He let them drop with a breath that came out longer than he meant it to and sat back down on his log.
Neither of them spoke for a while after that, just the fire crackling between them and the forest making its night sounds around their camp.
"I'm sorry," Deacon said finally, still looking at the flames. "I didn't—" He stopped and started again. "Leaving you alone with all that for as long as I did, letting it sit and fester without even checking in..." He looked at the fire. "I shouldn’t have done that; there is no excuse I have for having done that to you."
"It's fine," Bonehead accepted, fidgeting with his fingers, finding them to be quite interesting at the moment. “Just let me get back to watching a couple hundred hours of goth mommy streams in the background while I do some alchemy, and I’ll be back to normal.”
A few more seconds of quiet passed before Bonehead shifted slightly on his log and said, with a note of something almost sheepish that sounded genuinely strange coming from him, "I'm also sorry for telling you I'd kick the chair out from under you if you didn't agree to meet up with me."
Despite himself, the corner of Deacon's lips pulled up very slightly.
"It was the only thing I could think of that would actually make you do something other than leave me on read," Bonehead finished.
The silence that followed that was different from all the previous silences, less loaded, less fraught, just two people sitting on opposite sides of a campfire in a forest on Floor Ten with nowhere else they needed to be and nothing pressing that needed to be said, and the insects chirped and the branches creaked in the wind and the fireflies drifted through the camp around them in lazy looping patterns that paid no attention to either of them.
Then two cans dropped from the sky without any warning whatsoever.
One landed in the grass beside Deacon with a soft thud that had his hand moving toward Echoform Reliquary before his brain had even caught up with the motion, and the other landed with the same soft thud beside Bonehead, and both of them looked up into the dark sky above the treeline simultaneously with expressions that were mirror images of each other despite one of them having a face and the other having a skull.
"God?" Bonehead asked aloud, genuinely and completely seriously, craning his skull back to peer up into the night sky above him as though expecting some kind of divine entity to be hovering up there waiting to be acknowledged.
Deacon stared at the chilled can sitting in the grass beside his boot for a long moment, the last of the tension in his shoulders bleeding out of him as he took in the brand printed across the side of it, the same one he'd seen sitting on the desk in his uncle's room every single time he'd been in there, the only brand Bjorn had ever been seen with in his hand.
"No," Deacon answered, reaching down and picking up the can before cracking it open. “Just a nosey uncle.”