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The second Bren vanishes around the corner, Astrid is already shaking with rage. “Was it everything you wanted?” she asks, spitefully, and turns on her heel. She does not wait for Wulf to catch up.
It was nothing like he wanted. It never will be again, not if Bren runs and disappears for good or if he comes back and Wulf is forced to be his end. At least his old lover’s blood running over Wulf’s hands would be an ending. At least then he could rot. But Wulf was the one who stepped forward and spoke, made their decisions tonight, and so he will have to live with them. It is always harder to be the magnanimous one; Astrid got to carve out conditions in the same way she amputates, brutal and sure, got to be angry as she liked. He still hasn’t figured out how he feels. He’ll live with it.
The crowds gathered for Harvest’s Close are still scattered from Astrid’s little show earlier, and Wulf does not have to shoulder through civilians to dog at her heels. They reach their temporary lodgings easily enough; the Hall of Erudition has apartments for visiting lecturers, and even Master Ikithon is not so paranoid as to have them sleep with the Beacon.
Astrid still will not speak to him.
It’s a lost cause for now; Wulf takes off his cloak and chest armor and goes to make tea. She will come back, hissing and spitting like a fire fed on green logs, when she is ready.
His tea is made, and drunk, and dregs at the bottom of the cup, before she comes back into the main room. Astrid is stripped from the waist up, her scars and tattoos on full display. She crooks her fingers - to me, and urgent - like she’s still on the battlefield. Her lips are chapped, and Wulf can feel the faint resonance of the ink in her arms. She is still on the battlefield tonight, in every way that matters. No time to ignore orders, then. He goes to her.
“I hate him,” she says. Her voice shakes. The vitriol in it hits Wulf like a physical blow.
Astrid grabs his shoulder, and digs her nails in hard, and tugs him down into a kiss.
She does this, turns the only intimacy between them into a battle to be won or lost, takes all the softness out of it when she can’t bear the thought of him being kind. These nights, violence is the only thing she understands as an act of love. Wulf obliges.
The next time she goes for his lip with her teeth, Wulf snarls his hand in the back of her hair and tugs. It’s uneven, pulls her a little to the right, and Astrid digs both of her hands into his forearm until his residuum marks are joined by sharp little half-moons from her blunt fingernails and Wulf lets go. She jabs her knee upward in return, still trying to pull him off-balance, and Wulf catches it the second before it hits his gut. He forces the joint out of its harsh bend and hooks her heel around the back of his legs. Astrid tries to tug her leg back, close her hips, but he steps back against the wall and pins her calf behind him.
She bucks a little helplessly against his thigh, grinding herself into him as she fights. “I hate him,” she repeats, like it will come out different this time. It does not; Wulf can still hear the longing behind the rage. “The way he looked at us - like we were some kind of monsters! - like -”
Like Bren pitied us, he finishes in the space of his own mind, because she will never make the connection herself. Sure, Wulf saw the hatred in his eyes. But he has spent too many hours staring into still water and the tacky reflection of himself in a pool of blood to be misled by the hate alone. Bren pitied them tonight, and it is that which Astrid cannot stand. Wulf can handle it; he pities Bren, too.
It wasn’t even a good suicide attempt. A monster should be more resolute.
“All my fault,” Astrid mocks, “like he still matters.” She tears the quote out of their native language. Astrid rarely lets Zemnian sit in her mouth, used to practice in front of the mirror until her accent blurred away. It would be an intimacy. For the words Bren gave them tonight, it is one he knows she cannot bear. Instead, she punches Wulf in the gut, and it winds him; he staggers forward for a moment, and she pulls herself free. Her heel clips his hip as she goes. “Like he still matters to me. Like he understands what we have done since.”
Wulf straightens back up and throws a punch back at her. Astrid darts out of the way, and he snags her with a Slow at the last second so that he can unfold a hand and drag it across her naked breast. She bares her teeth at him in slow motion. “Apparently,” Wulf says, draws it out in his mouth, “you have forgotten how to counterspell. Did you need to kick the fire out of his hand?” He drops the spell a second later, and Astrid’s honey-slow dagger of a hand regains its speed, miscalculates his trajectory, and misses him entirely. She slams into him shoulder-first, and Wulf wraps his arms around her to pull their bodies together. His blood is moving fast, now, the adrenaline of a good fight instead of the vertiginous feeling of earlier tonight, and when he ventures a hand up to grasp her tit Astrid doesn’t slap him away.
“Yes,” she hisses out, an answer to both his questions. Not gentle, tonight, not kind; but his.
Wulf rolls the bud of her nipple between his fingers, hard. Astrid growls deep in her throat. She snakes a hand down between their bodies and looses the tie at the front of his leggings. She has always been clever with her hands, Wulf thinks, and then his conscious mind is overtaken by feeling. The perfect knife-callus on her thumb curls around his shaft, and she drags it upward, the sensation caught between pain and exquisite pleasure. Wulf shudders as she takes him in hand. If nothing else, the last fifteen years have taught her all about the way his body works, and him every part of hers; it’s like handing over a diagram, carefully labeled cut here.
Before he can make a proper fool of himself, Astrid lets him go and pulls him in hard for one more kiss. Her teeth clack against his, still moving too fast and fiercely, and Wulf revels a little in the sound, at the forceful press of her tongue. “Stay,” she says, and he freezes; they’re still in ops time, tonight, so when she says heel he heels.
Astrid takes two steps back and starts circling him, just far enough away that her outstretched hand can trace a careful line around his biceps and chest. He can feel it burn a line into his skin.
She mutters something, and halfway around the circle the sound of her steps changes.
Wulf turns around, and Bren is standing in front of him. Not their Bren, golden boy with all his flame; the Bren of tonight, the ragged hair lank around his face, stubble on his hollow cheeks and hard lines around his mouth that speak to pain unshared. Only his eyes are still recognizable. Astrid’s eyes, even when she has magicked them blue, never lose their sharpness.
“Astrid,” he says. “There is no need.”
She bares Bren’s teeth at him. “I saw you give him your hand, Wulf. Clearly there is still something for you to work out.”
Fifteen years of love buried but undecayed; fifteen years of pushing him aside and focusing on the fate before the two of them who kept the path. There will always be something to work out. Wulf does not point out that, of the two of them, Astrid is the one who has tried and failed to scry Bren every month since he fled the asylum. “What do you want,” he says instead, both what do you want from me and what do you want to do to him?
She tosses her head imperiously, like Bren once would have, and her eyes lock with Wulf’s. It comes off wrong from the new face, the smudged dirt and deep circles. The way he had shifted, tonight, and never given them a proper look at his face; always avoidant, always trying to misdirect. It hits Wulf now, as it had not then - the man on his knees tonight, in some deep way, was not Bren. He will never be Bren again, not the boy they knew.
“Astrid,” he tries again. “I do not think -”
“Don’t call me that,” she snaps. “Do not put my name in your mouth, Wulf. Don’t make it share space with his.”
“Don’t make me,” he says, and it comes out as a plea.
Astrid, as Bren, steps forward and sets her hand under his jaw, pushes his head up to expose his throat. “You gave him a chance to fucking run away. You gave him a hand. You gave him a fucking life, a life none of us deserve. Without you -” She’s hurting, burning in a way Wulf has not seen since the night Bren was reported missing from Vergesson. “You took that from me tonight, Eadwulf Grieve. You can take this.”
It was a mutual decision, actually, crosses his mind. He doesn’t interject. It would be a weak riposte to her putting her mouth to his throat. Bren’s stubble presses against Wulf’s neck as Astrid sucks a mark into his skin. She is never gentle, but tonight he feels the teeth. She tears into his jugular like a panther seizing prey - for a moment, he expects the kill-bite to come next, for her to turn her head and snap his neck and finish him in Bren’s place.
Instead she moves downward, rucking up Wulf’s undershirt with Bren’s hands. Her fingers are no longer boyish, slim and unscarred; he’s not sure when she got in the look, but several joints are knobbly and a little uneven, like Bren’s hand has been severely broken and badly set. Maybe it is just an extrapolation from when she kicked it. Maybe Astrid's eyes are still sharper than his. She drags his hands through the hair that curls on Wulf’s chest, rubs one of Bren’s perfectly talented thumbs over his nipple. It’s different enough from Astrid’s usual touch to send new sparks crackling beneath his skin, close enough to Bren’s to relight an old flame. Wulf bites back a curse.
“You still like him,” she says, ghosting Bren’s fingers over the hard line of his cock. “Is this what you wanted him to do tonight, instead of running away?”
Astrid was the one to give him a good fight tonight, to put her hands where he wanted them and remind him of the heat between their bodies. She’s the one Wulf wants, he reminds himself. Not Bren. He is not allowed to want Bren any longer. But she is also the one asking, and Wulf’s a good boy; he was not the fastest student, but he knows the answer. “Yes,” he lies. It’s unsurprising that it sounds more like a truth.
“Would you have gone with him, if he offered all this?”
“No,” Wulf says, because he won’t lie about that. “Astrid, I would never leave you.”
She pulls Bren’s hand back and slaps him across the face with it. He is nearly ready for the blow. It stings, but he hardly flinches. “I am not Astrid,” Astrid insists, as though he doesn’t know the smell of her. She didn’t copy that; he wonders if it’s because the new Bren, whoever he is, reeked faintly of shit. Wulf can still hear her satisfaction beneath. He answered correctly.
“He is a coward,” Astrid says, and gestures to herself, the long limbs and too-thin body. Her chest is very nearly concave, and there are hollows between her ribs that speak to long deprivation writ across Bren’s body; that, Wulf hopes she is making up. As thin as Bren’s arms were tonight, he’s afraid she is simply telling the truth. “He is weak.”
“Not like us,” Wulf promises, and steps forward.
He wraps his hand around her neck, meets Bren on a nearly-equal plane and kisses her hard. Astrid doesn’t bite back like she did earlier; she melts into it, the same way Bren used to melt into them. He does not think the Bren on his knees tonight would have melted so easily. It does not matter - whatever he pretends, Wulf has missed it. “You and I, we’re strong. We do what it takes.”
He walks Bren backwards until she’s pressed up against the rickety little table in the center of the room. It’s easy enough to lay a hand on his chest. He can pretend that she’s Astrid, or a Bren who did not leave. Wulf very nearly reaches his hand down in between them, and then he remembers that the slight man standing in front of him is both, and neither, and that Bren took his hand tonight when Wulf offered but did not reach for him at all. He aborts the motion, and takes a step back. Shakes his head as if that will clear it. Astrid is as true and fair as hefting a blade, and Wulf can handle her even at her sharpest. This is something else entirely. It feels wrong, in some twisted way that he cannot name. His body is still responding, but all he can feel is an encroaching vertigo, a sense that the delicate balance they have found these last many years has gone irrevocably askew.
“Come on,” she says with Bren’s voice, and tries to give Wulf the old innocent look. He shakes his head; it doesn’t work on the new face. It makes him look pathetic and aged, not like a little minx begging for his punishment.
Astrid lets the face go blank, and curls her shoulders forward. She gives him the hard look Bren did tonight, the cold certainty in his eyes that death was before him. It is convincing. It’s a new expression for him. Wulf wishes it weren’t so likely to be the last new thing of Bren he will ever see.
“Would you have finished the cast?” Her voice is hard and sharp as a blade. “Finished it properly?”
“I am not disintegrating you.” She hasn’t backed down one whit. Like she’s really asking for it, wants to see his arms light and flash and turn the Bren in front of him to dust. “Not even as a sex thing.”
“Would you have done it to him?”
Of course not: she watched Wulf help Bren up and let him go. She stayed quiet as he gave him a life. Astrid does not want the real answer. He gives the right one instead. “I would not have used so strong a magic on a kneeling man. It would be a waste of power.”
“So economical,” Astrid says. Flexes Bren’s hand, the one Wulf touched. “Would you have broken this, then, to keep him from casting? It is standard practice, for a mage so restrained.” She sets it on the table between them. “You have your hammers. He is an enemy. Go ahead,” she cajoles, “and strike.”
“No,” Wulf tells her. Any arousal left in him curdles, leaves an awful queasiness in his stomach. “No. I will not shatter your hand so you can feel better about him. This is the fucking line, Astrid.”
She bares Bren’s teeth. “Do you want me to disintegrate you instead?”
“If that’s what it takes,” Wulf answers. It’s a surprise when he realizes he means it. He won’t do it, even for her. He will not raise a hand meant to kill if he is not forced to. He has done enough. The impasse won’t break, not without help, so he swallows his pride and his care and his humanity and gives her the next best thing. “We are in Zadash on a mission. In case you forgot. We are here to guard the beacon, and if I break your hand, you will not be able to serve your master and your country. Bren is not worth that.” He takes a deep breath. “I will hurt you, hurt him, but nothing we cannot heal ourselves.”
“We cannot heal any of it ourselves,” Astrid says, and means far more than the wounds she wants tonight. “Fine.” She has always cared for her duty. She conjures a dagger, instead, and tosses it in Wulf’s direction; it shimmers away before it hits him. “I can handle the cuts from a fucking knife.”
He wishes it did not feel like a benediction to conjure his own and take the blade into his hands. Wulf presses his eyelids shut, and hates himself a little more, and takes a deep breath. “Okay,” he resolves. “Sure. Sit down.”
Bren’s body settles into the chair, perfect posture holding him perpendicular to gravity until Astrid remembers who he really is. She slumps a little forward, and grasps the ends of the arms hard, and her next exhalation shakes with an only somewhat faked fear.
Wulf points the dagger at her chest. There’s no safe place to cut, with as little body fat as she has. “We used to do this on his command,” he says, and means their master. Bren, in the chair, is like something out of a faded nightmare. Astrid has filled in rough residuum stones in his arms, instead of the tattoos they both bear; it makes him look strangely out of time. “We used to be soft with each other.” Only before Bren betrayed them, and they rarely speak of it, but looking into his face Wulf thinks he can be forgiven for a little sentimentality tonight.
Astrid gives him Bren’s grin. That expression still fits, strange as it is in the older man’s face. “I will not follow forever,” she says. He knows the meaning. If one of them must wield the knife, it should not be on Ikithon’s orders.
It will be on hers, Wulf concedes. He lowers the blade to her forearm.
He applies the pressure carefully, steady hands to avoid striking an artery, and makes a short slit just below one of the crystal sites. Astrid writhes in the chair as her blood spatters the ground. Wulf steps back and watches her steel herself, grit Bren’s teeth. She lifts her left hand, and presses her thumb just next to the wound. The chunk of stone shifts under Bren’s skin. Astrid pants, hard, breath ragged and fast as if he’s been fucking her for an hour. Wulf joins her, and presses his hand down.
A bloodied shard of green emerges from the wound. It skitters across the floor, leaving a tiny blood trail, and disappears into nothingness. No magic to it, no lasting effect; it is only for show, to make what is in her mind come to reality for a heartbeat.
“Is this what you wanted to do to him?” He has to ask. To strip the rocks from his arms, to take the last commonality beneath their skin and cut it free. It is, in the end, what they offered.
“No,” Astrid tells him, in Bren’s deep voice. “But I did want to hear what he sounds like, like this.” Breathy and deep, and hot, and awful; Wulf’s body still responds to it like sex. By the way she is shifting in the chair, Astrid’s does too, no matter the skin she wears. “And I could not bear the thought of touching him any other way.”
Probably a good idea. Wulf’s palm is still burning, nerve endings snapping as they have not done since the first scar Bren left healed. He’s certain it is psychosomatic, but it does not stop the feeling. He drags his finger through the cut edges of her flesh, feels the place where Bren’s body opens until she holds back a curse.
Wulf steps back, assesses the situation. Nothing else easily visible. He opens up another cut, this one as shallow as he can manage, across Astrid’s back, avoids the knobbly protrusions of the spine. Matron, Bren is thin. It’s hardly more than a scratch, just enough so she can feel the skin tear; if she cannot see it, she will not make him cut deeper. Wulf lets the cut bleed a little, and runs his fingers through it, tracing a pattern into her freckled shoulders. Her resemblance to Bren is only superficial when she is like this. The way she turns her head into her shoulder to muffle her cries, the metal scent of her blood; it is all Astrid. Her body might be his, every inch of the skin, but beneath it there is a truth she cannot shed.
Wulf comes back around to the front, extends his hands to show her the blood. “Okay,” he says, “you’re bleeding. Bren is bleeding. Enough?”
“Never,” Astrid replies, and beckons him closer. It’s like approaching a rabid dog, except that of course whatever is wrong with her has been wrong with him for nearly twenty years; so there is no reason to hold back. They are both sick. She leans forward, and wraps Bren’s mouth around the blood on Wulf’s fingers.
He can’t help but shudder as she licks them clean. Bren was always very good with his tongue.
She pulls back, her own blood smeared at the corners of her mouth, and Bren’s haggard face breaks into a purely Astrid grin. “Ah,” she notes, clever as a fox. “That is what you want, then?” She doesn’t even wait for him to answer. Astrid dismounts and kicks away the chair, and falls to her knees on the bare stone. “You did not like what he said. I could hear it, Wulf. You should have shut him up in the way you know best.” She tilts her head. “Second-best, maybe. It would be hard for him to suck your cock with a hammer through his head.”
The hollow feeling in his gut doesn’t stop his cock from taking an interest. She crawls a little closer, hands and knees, until he can feel her fucking breath against his groin. “He was a fucking prisoner,” Wulf says gruffly, like that will stop her, and presses his eyes shut. It does not; the front of his pants is still loose, and he can feel her teeth against the fabric and the rush of cold air as she frees him from them.
“Of course,” Bren’s voice says. “I should have remembered. I suppose I have a way to go before I am him after all.” Wulf opens his eyes just in time to see Astrid’s magic form thorny vines and wrap around her shoulders and knees. Apart from the fact that she has no shirt, and the blood smeared across her back and arms and her lips, she looks exactly like Bren did earlier tonight. Down to the hatred for the restraint and the man in front of her and Bren himself in Astrid’s blue eyes. “Is this better? More like the Bren you remember?”
“I don’t want to,” Wulf says, pathetically, as though it matters. Bren very nearly had an oral fixation, always chewing on a piece of licorice root while he studied or ready to lick a new component to learn what it was. When he went to his knees, Wulf knew it was for his own greed, his own kind of worship. Astrid hates sucking dick. She hates the feeling of being choked off from air, and the taste, and something in her mouth she did not put there. She looks exactly like him. She is not Bren. “You don’t want to.”
It makes her angry, and Wulf knows he’s misstepped before Astrid can say another word.
“You will not be Bren,” she spits back at him, kneeling on the floor tangled in her own restraints. “Even Bren will not be Bren. So I am picking up the fucking slack. If you are too coward to be Wulf, too, tell me, and I will serve for all three of us, and -”
He’s heard enough. Wulf grabs the back of her head and rams his cock down Bren’s throat.
Astrid chokes on it; apparently altering her body does not eliminate the gag reflex. The muscles of her throat contract around him, hot and tight, trying to push back against the intrusion.
He pulls back entirely, watches her lean forward in the bonds and gasp and retch and swallow until Bren’s body is back under her control. It’s what she wants, he reminds himself. It’s also incredibly hot, and now that Wulf has had any his body only wants more. He leaves his hand tangled in Bren’s hair. “Enough slack for you?”
“Fuck you,” she manages, and he can’t help but love Bren’s wrecked voice coming from her mouth. It’s deeper and more settled than it once was, and Wulf wants to hear him beg for his cock in their native tongue. Astrid won’t do it, though, so there is no point in asking. Wulf strokes his hand through her hair, pulling a little at the roots and dragging it long, and her ragged groan sounds like pleasure. “I did not tell you to stop.”
He takes it slow, careful, slipping his head past her lips. Astrid’s teeth are so rarely put away; he can feel the point of her canines, the effort it takes her to wrap her lips around the sharpest fangs and let him weigh down Bren’s tongue.
The bonds around her right hand come undone, and she brings it up to him. Bren has a writing callus on his index and middle fingers, long days of holding a quill between soft fingers, and when Astrid strokes it over his shaft Wulf has to wrap his hands ever more tightly in her red hair and hold her back to keep from coming down her throat. “Bren,” he warns. She hums, and the vibration runs through his whole body, more potent even than their residuum. Magic might be as strong, but it doesn’t have the same spark. It is not a question of lasting. “Bren,” he says again, insistently. “Open your mouth, now.”
Astrid’s jaw drops loose, and Wulf pulls out of her as his cum splatters across Bren’s new stubble, the familiar freckles across his face. Bren’s eyes lock with his, Astrid’s victory and savagery in them, and Wulf feels guilty and sick and more turned on than he’s been for years all at once.
Bren looks good like this, marked and tied up, on his knees and so obviously theirs. Of course, Bren walked away tonight, and did not want to touch Wulf at all. And he is not here now.
Wulf kneels beside Astrid, and rubs her wrist where it has come free from the bond. “Bren,” he tells her, “you were very good. Not good enough to make up for leaving us. Give us another five years of this, and we will see.”
She laughs at that, the rough tone of Bren’s deep voice. No words; they’ve stopped being able to fill his in over the years, the third voice in their trio long fallen silent. It would be wrong to pretend to supply them now. Wulf strokes her hair, still long and red and not shaven on the side.
“Okay,” he says, softly. “You can keep being him, if you want. Or you can rest, and I can bind your wounds.”
The restraints dissolve into nothingness, and Astrid’s hair runs brown and then blonde, and she stops being held like she’s tied up for torture and falls into his arms. “Go ahead,” she says, in her own tattered voice. “After all, tomorrow we have a job to do.”
Wulf presses a kiss into her hair, and goes to get the bandages.
The wound on her back is more of a scratch, and it has already stopped bleeding by the time he returns; he finds Astrid frowning at the one on her arm. It cuts across one of the mazes of her Volstrucker marks, but they have taken wounds there before. In a few days, even the scar will turn black and indistinguishable against her skin. He is careful, rubbing ointment into her skin and then wrapping a bandage. The white cotton overlaps, and he makes sure to turn it so it will be secure as he goes.
She relaxes into it, lets him smear the ointment across her shoulders. They have finally lost some of the tension she’s been carrying the past week. “You know he will not stay away,” she says, finally. “Bren has always been greedy. One life was never enough for him.” He took the better part of three away, the first time he left.
“I know,” Wulf answers. He pauses. “Will we really kill him, when he comes back?”
“I do not know,” Astrid admits, her voice still ragged and rough. “I do not really want to.”
He kisses her lightly between her shoulderblades. “We’ll see,” he promises. “Let him make something of the life we gave him, first. Maybe he will be worth our while when he returns.”