Chapter Text
It’s easier, when the boys are younger.
Delilah is the first woman Matthias ever loved. She was gentle and good, everything he was not, and she listened to his stumbling poetry and she took him by the hand and told him he would be good for his people, because he had such a giving heart. And Mathias made the mistake of loving her for her goodness, for the goodness she saw in him that he thought nobody else could, and he took her home and he married her, and doing so, damned her.
Matthias will never forget the sight of her broken body when they brought her before him, his soldiers unable to look him in the eye, like they were waiting for the hammer about to fall. Matthias can remember getting up, running his hands through Delilah’s oh so lovely honey brown locks, reaching with trembling hands towards where she was just beginning to show, and felt a misery wide enough to swallow the world.
Matthias will admit, he lost time after that. He remembers another woman, one chosen by his chamberlain, one he loved much less than he’d loved Delilah, and how she walks with her eyes on the ground, her hands clenched bone-white on her folded fan, how she meets him in the bedroom like she’s bracing herself for the oncoming squall. And Matthias wonders, of course he does, but wondering is dangerous, so he stops that thought in its tracks.
He barely remembers Miklan as a child. He has better memories of Miklan as a baby: crying, his tiny face bright red, quietening only when Matthias held him against his chest, the night breeze swirling the light green gauze curtains they’d used in the nursery, breathing in tandem, skin to skin.
And Matthias has since forgotten how they celebrated Miklan’s fifth birthday, still no Crest in sight, an itching feeling growing in him that maybe he was being punished for marrying a commoner, but he’ll never forget Delilah singing to their first child in the moonlight, words sinking into him like they were made for him, carving new ruts in his heart, turning him into the man he wanted to believe he could be, with Deliliah by his side.
And then Delilah was dead and the dream died with her and Matthias spent a good ten years hunting down her killers, punishing the Sreng for daring to draw so near, taking his anger out on any Sreng. He didn’t know her killer’s clan colors, hadn’t been able to get to her fast enough to know. They left her as a message, as a taunt, and Matthias has been chasing after them ever since, a bull charging headlong after a red flag.
Matthias remembers a little bit more of Sylvain as a child. He remembers the routine check-ups, finding out Sylvain had a minor Crest just like him, and the relief that had flooded through his veins. That was it, he’d done his duty, he would not sully his oaths no further, he would no longer lay with anyone. If his duty had not demanded it of him, Matthias thinks he never would’ve married again. And now, the heavens send him Sylvain, like kissing a wound long after the wound had scabbed over and turned into hard scar tissue.
Sylvain as a child had been curious, adventurous, always getting into trouble. Matthias told Miklan he was supposed to look out for his brother right before a big campaign up north, the Sreng back to bat at his barricades, answering every strike of his own with twice of their own. And then, when he’d returned, his boys were on their way to adulthood.
Big strapping boys, long lean limbs and eating fit to feed twenty people, squabbling about dumb things and Matthias didn’t have the heart to tell Miklan that he had his mother’s eyes, that the shape of his face was all Matthias, but his eyes, a shade more honey than gold, were piercing, angry, demanding, and Matthias didn’t have the heart to stare at him for too long, too wrapped up an answering anger of his own, wondering why the Sreng hated so badly they had to kill his wife before they had a chance to see what more they could be, if given half a chance.
Matthias will admit, if he’d been paying closer attention, maybe he would’ve seen the signs, but he’d split his time between managing the border, attacks continuing to pelt them as regularly as the summer rains, and the capital, answering to Lambert’s brother and trying to sneer at the way he cringed his way through their appointments. Matthias finished those meetings as quickly as he possibly could, driven to the border by something next to holy.
Sylvain tries to tell him something, once, something twisted up in his caramel brown eyes, something tired about his wan smile, but Matthias doesn’t have time for this, he’s due for the border in an hour, they won’t be able to hold the Wall without him, and he brushes him off. After, he wonders if that’s why Sylvain never tells him anything, if that’s why Sylvain smiles even when the poor boy looks like he’s about to cry.
When anyone else in his place, besides Matthias, would be bawling.
His chamberlain breaks it to him delicately that Miklan has become a thieving brigand, terrorizing the countryside and making mockery of what their house should stand for. Matthias refuses to believe it at first. Not Delilah’s son. Delilah’s son would love poetry and smile like the sun and get himself killed doing something insane, like visiting the border and trying to invite the Sreng over for peace talks. Goddess grant him patience.
But it’s all true, and it stings, it sticks to the back of his throat. Matthias feels angry, in a way he can’t justify to himself. He feels betrayed. The last memory he has of Delilah, and he has to discard with his own hands.
The evidence keeps mounting and eventually, with a heavy heart, Matthias signs the paperwork that Miklan is no son of his.
It’s the hardest thing he’s had to do in a good long while. It tastes like saying goodbye, this time for a final time.
And Matthias is angry, so angry, that Miklan made him do this.