The dining room of the Wykes Manor was quiet this time around, but tonight the silence seemed particularly oppressive.
Otis Vayhur Wykes sat at the head of it, knife and fork moving through his meal. He had a face that had been stern for so long it had just stayed that way. Every line on it looked earned.
Baron sat to his left, not eating, while Lukas sat across from him, poking at his food. He'd been doing that for twenty minutes. Poking. Not eating. His hands weren't entirely steady but nobody mentioned it.
At some point, a maid came and refilled a glass and left. The silence dragged out long enough until Otis set his fork down.
"Do you know what they call that boy?" he said. "Lymur."
Baron looked up. "What?"
"Brightburn."
Another silence, a little longer this time.
"He didn't look like someone with a fire attribute."
Otis picked his fork back up. "Of course he fucking doesn't."
"Then where does the name come from?"
"Hell if I know." He speared a piece of meat and ate it. "Does it matter?"
Baron frowned. "It's an odd name for someone with no obvious — "
"Baron." Otis looked at him flatly. "The name isn't the point."
Baron closed his mouth.
Otis chewed, swallowed, reached for his glass. "I've been doing this for a long time. Forty years I've been watching people come up through the ranks, watching who makes noise and who matters. Most of the ones who make noise don't matter. You learn to tell the difference after a while." He set the glass down. "That boy is different."
"He's erratic," Baron said. "And unpredictable."
"Yes."
"That's not something I'd associate with someone dangerous. It's sloppy."
Otis looked at his son patiently, like he was deciding how to explain something to someone who should already understand it. "The dangerous ones are always the unpredictable ones. The ones you can read, you can prepare for. The ones you can't—" He shook his head slightly. "What did you feel when he looked at that idiot next to you."
Lukas's fork stopped moving.
Baron didn't answer immediately, which was an answer. "He didn't do anything technically — "
"I know what he didn't do," Otis said. "I'm asking you... what did you feel?"
A pause.
"...Awful," Baron said. "And wrong... it felt wrong."
Otis nodded like that was exactly what he expected to hear.
"A man who can make you feel like that without doing anything is a problem. A man who can make YOU feel like that is a serious problem." He said the you without flattery in it, just as a fact. Baron's strength was not in question, which was exactly why the point landed. "He's also walking around this city with no family name, no known origin, no history that anyone can actually verify past three years ago, and an S-class rank he got in under six months. And somehow he's having dinner with the royal family's children and making friends with everyone he meets." He paused. "If that combination of things doesn't concern you, I have no idea what will."
"He's a liability... to anyone near him," Baron said. "His behavior alone — "
"Ah, his behavior is fine."
Baron blinked. "He called me spark boy."
"And you almost started a fight with an S-class in front of the king," Otis said, without raising his voice. "In that situation, one of you was the liability and it wasn't him." He picked up his fork again. "I'm not saying I like him. I'm saying I understand what he is, and I think you should make sure you do too before you decide anything."
"...I can handle him if it comes to that."
Otis put his fork down again as he looked at Baron directly.
"Are you sure?" he said. "Not what you think you should say or what your rank tells you. Deep down, if it actually came to it — are you sure?"
Baron opened his mouth, closed it, and opened it again. "...Yes."
Otis held his gaze for another second. Then he scoffed, picked his fork back up, and said, "Don't do anything."
"Father — "
"Don't do anything," he said again with the same tone. "Not unless you have no choice. Are we clear?"
Baron sat back. "Clear."
Otis turned his attention to Lukas, who had stopped pretending to eat. He was sitting straight, chin up. Otis looked at him like he was a stain on something expensive.
"You."
Lukas said nothing.
"You walked up to an S-class adventurer you know nothing about and called him a fraud. In front of the royal family, no less. What exactly were you trying to accomplish?"
"I was just — "
"I'm not finished." Otis set his cutlery down fully and pushed his plate an inch forward, which in the language of this dining room meant the meal was over and something else had started. "You've spent your whole life acting like the room owes you something. Like your name is a throne you were born sitting on. I've watched you do it for years and I've said nothing because I kept thinking you'd eventually figure out that nobody actually respects a man who needs to belittle people to feel tall." He paused. "And color me surprise, you haven't figured it out at all. No, you weren't even close."
Lukas's jaw tightened.
Otis looked at his son with something that wasn't anger exactly — more like the disappointment of a man who had run out of room to give benefit of the doubt.
"I have made many decisions in my life that I am not proud of. Letting you be born is near the top of that list."
The candles burned.
Lukas said nothing. His hands were flat on the table.
Baron stared at the wall.
Otis picked up his glass, finished what was in it, and stood up.
"Go to bed," he said, to both of them, or to neither of them. "And stay away from that boy."
He left the room.
The candles kept burning. The two brothers sat in the silence their father had left behind, and neither of them said a word for a long time.
◢◣◢◣◢◣
Lymur's eyes snapped open.
He was sitting at a desk.
That was the first thing he saw. A desk, in an office, surrounded by the noise of a working floor. Keyboards, phones going off, two people arguing about something near the printer. His hands themselves were resting on a keyboard. On the screen in front of him was a desktop, files arranged in neat rows, an elf wallpaper he didn't recognize.
Huh? Where...?
Through the floor-to-ceiling windows behind the monitors, there was a vast city under an overcast sky.
Ah...
He knew where he was.
That was the strange part. He had never seen this place in his life, had no memory of it, no point of reference for any of it. But he knew anyway.
He was in Tokyo, Japan. More specifically, an office building. And when he looked around the floor at the other people working at their desks, he knew their names too, somehow. He knew the layout of the building or the coffee machine on the third floor that was broken and had been for two weeks.
He stared at his monitor.
What did I do now?
The clock in the corner of the screen read 10:04 AM.
"Mikami-senpai."
Someone dropped onto the corner of his desk like it was their personal property. Lymur looked up to see a young man, mid-twenties maybe, with an easy grin. He had a pen tucked behind one ear and the general energy of being the coworker who treated the office like a social event.
It was Tamura. His junior Tamura whose own desk was only a few steps away. Lymur knew that too, from wherever this knowledge was coming from.
"What are you getting for lunch?" Tamura asked. "Please don't say convenience store again, would you?"
Lymur opened his mouth.
"I was thinking ramen, actually. Over at Tsurugi's."
He heard himself say it before he'd actually decided to say it. It came out naturally in a voice that was his but technically belonged to a name that wasn't — Satoru Mikami — and he sat with that for a second while Tamura's face lit up.
"Oh, okay, okay. I'm coming. Don't leave without me."
"I wasn't going to ask you to come with."
"And I'm coming anyway." Tamura leaned over to look at Lymur's screen. "What are you even working on? You've been staring at that thing for like ten minutes without moving."
"What? I was just thinking."
"About what?"
"Ramen."
Tamura laughed and hopped off the desk and walked back toward his own, still talking about options and toppings as he left, while Lymur watched him go and felt the strangest feeling of belonging in a place that couldn't possibly be real.
He almost went along with it, and that somehow scared him. He'd been two seconds from just nodding and grabbing his coat and going to get ramen, like he hadn't woken up in a forest in another world three years ago with no memories and a name that was absolutely not Satoru Mikami.
He looked at Tamura, who had sat back down and was now typing something with one hand and eating a biscuit with the other.
"Hey." His voice came out flat and serious. "Who are you?"
He thought about it first but then, before he could stop himself, he said it out loud.
Tamura looked up. "...Uh, what?"
"Who are you?"
Tamura put the biscuit down slowly, the grin slowly disappearing. "Mikami-senpai, are you — did you sleep last night? You look — "
"Answer the question."
"I'm Tamura? Tamura Kenji? I've sat four desks away from you for two years?" He did a small gesture like he was presenting himself as evidence. "I was at your birthday thing? I got you that mug you never use?"
Lymur didn't move his eyes, and Tamura twitched in his chair from the discomfort of being looked at too hard.
Then a strong and sudden gust of wind came.
It shouldn't have been possible seeing as they were inside, windows closed, climate-controlled, but it came anyway and Lymur turned toward the direction it came from instinctively.
When he did, he found the office was empty.
Okay, this is scary.
Every desk still had its coffee cup and scattered papers. The phones were still ringing somewhere. But every single person had ceased to exist in the space, and the silence that replaced them was total and very loud.
Lymur's chest pulled tight as he gulped.
Then, very slowly, he looked back at Tamura's desk.
Tamura was still there. Standing now, which Lymur didn't remember him doing. Just standing by his desk with his hands at his sides, facing Lymur, completely still in a way that wasn't how people stood.
Lymur tried to say something but his mouth didn't move. He tried to move but his body stayed exactly where it was, and the horror of that dawned on him in no time when he finally noticed Tamura's eyes had changed.
The easy brown was gone.
In its place, was... gold.
Clear and steady and immaculate gold, looking at Lymur with an expression that was patient and warm and absolutely unreadable all at once.
Those eyes.
Those eyes.
Lymur could never forget those golden eyes. In dreams, in nightmares, in that recurring vision of a glass tube and a laboratory and a person he could never get a face on. Always the same and always watching.
Tamura — or not Tamura — tilted his head.
"I really do see myself a lot in you. Man, what a success you are~."
His voice was different. Still Tamura's voice technically but with something creepy running along its frequency that made it feel like hearing two things at once.
Lymur still couldn't move, still couldn't speak. He was stuck frozen in an empty office in Tokyo looking at a pair of golden eyes that had been following him across three years and whatever came before those three years, and the word familiar wasn't strong enough for what he felt because familiar implied distance and this felt like no distance at all.
He wanted to ask. He had approximately a hundred questions lined up, starting with who are you and ending somewhere he didn't have words for yet.
Nothing came out. His mouth wouldn't move.
The golden eyes stayed on him for one more second, and then —
—he woke up.
The ceiling definitely belonged to his apartment now.
Lymur lay still for a long time.
His heart was going faster than it should've been. He stared upward and waited for it to settle and let the dream fade like they always did. Eventually, he sat up and put his face in his hands and sat there in the silence of his bedroom.
"I really do see myself a lot in you. Man, what a success you are~."
He'd been here three years, and the closest thing he'd ever gotten to an answer was a pair of golden eyes in a dream telling him they saw themselves in him, and that he was apparently a success, which weren't really answers at all. They were the shape of one, though. An answer-shaped nothing.
Then he got up, because there was nothing else to do, and went to make himself coffee.