Gone

[madimpossibledreamer]

(I’m going with the UK meanings of ‘disappointment and rejection’ for the flower I found, because Jacob does reject his father’s mere existence, and yet he’s still disappointed he’s dead.  Jacob is a very complex ball of feelings concealed beneath a devil-may-care attitude.
I also HC that’s he’s ADHD.  He’s not unintelligent, just a little…distractable.
I included the food thing with no evidence, but many of the other types of child abuse—beating, for example—were perfectly acceptable at the time.  I’m not sure how many people would even care about the starvation, but it’s something Evie wouldn’t dismiss, so it’s what I decided to go with.)
~Dreamer~

 

Main Points:
Assassin's Creed Syndicate
Summary: Jacob doesn't attend his father's funeral.
Word Count: 2025
Rating: Teen
Warning: Very short you might almost miss it mention of abuse.  Because I don't read Ethan Frye as a good father.

 

           Evelyn Teresa Frye is equal parts furious and devastated.  She’ll miss her father and try to live up to his example, but even worse, her twin hadn’t attended the funeral.  He’d always rebelled against him, but couldn’t he put away his childish feud for his own father’s death?
           She finally begins to worry when night falls and she has yet to see him.  Jacob may be many things, but he always makes sure to at least check in with her if he’s going to be sleep elsewhere, or in some cases, not sleep at all.  One more hour, and she begins to look for her wayward brother, hoping that he hasn’t gotten drunk and gone out to kill Templars or something.  She knows he thinks she’s the strong one, but if she has to deal with her brother’s death as well as her father’s, it will break her.  She checks everywhere—the factories, the gambling dens, the taverns, the rooftops, every known Templar stronghold.  Nothing.  They haven’t even seen him today.  It starts to rain, and Evie shivers, pulling up the Assassin’s cowl.  Had he not attended because he’d stopped existing?  Where could Jacob be?
           She begins walking aimlessly, with no sight of anyone, never mind a wayward Frye.  Eventually, she realizes she’s wandered back out toward the cemetery, perhaps to ask Ethan for his advice.  It’s strange to think she’ll be speaking to a gravestone, not a living person, but it had always helped her before…
           She knows that silhouette, walking toward the grave.  It’s missing a single thing—his signature hat, the only thing he’s ever received from Father and loves.  It looks like Jacob is confident, but there’s something wrong.  Obviously.
           She swings herself over the fence and pulls herself into a tree.  Jacob doesn’t notice—the sound of the rain covers her movements, and he’s not being very observant right now.
           He kneels and places a single yellow carnation before the grave.  And then does nothing.  He doesn’t move, doesn’t speak, and of course he can’t mourn the same way as them; he never does anything that’s expected of him.
           And then he screams.  Loud and unearthly and pained.  It doesn’t sound like a human made that noise.  It sounds like his heart’s being torn forcibly from his chest.  He punches the gravestone, and it chips, just a little.  When he pulls his hand back, it’s bloody.  Evie muffles her gasp behind her sleeve.  Jacob doesn’t notice.
           “By God, I hated you,” he states conversationally, rainwater mingling with his blood and dropping onto the grave.
           It’s a shock.  She’d known, of course, but still.  She’d thought it was rules, a silly teenaged rebellion, but he’s twenty-one now, far too old for silly theatrics like this.  Far too old for them to just be silly theatrics, she corrects herself.
           “You’re dead.  You’d think that would make me feel better, but no.  Your judgement still manages to follow me, even in death.  I’m sure I will not hear the end of it, on account of having missed your funeral and all.”  His voice is bitter and lost.  “But if I went, they would expect me to say kind words, to lie and say that I missed you, that you were a good father, that you—you were everything Evie I’m sure said you were.  And perhaps, to her, you were a loving father, everything they all believed you to be.”
           …What?
           “But she was the only one you’d have wanted or needed there, if you’d had your choice.  I was always the disappointment, the failure.  You never loved me.  You hated me, and what could I do but respond in kind?”  Her precious twin wipes at his face with a rain-drenched sleeve.  It does nothing to remove the tears from his face.  He’s weeping openly, brokenly.  “It wasn’t for your feelings that I stayed away.  I would’ve liked to spit on the casket.  I would’ve liked for all those people who believed Ethan Frye was the newest anointed saint to hear how you starved me to try to ensure my obedience, how you told others that Mother died in childbirth but when I asked you merely stared at me with hateful eyes, how you told me that I would never once achieve anything worth pride.”
           It takes everything in Evie not to fall out of the tree the moment she hears the word ‘starved’.  And unfortunately as an Assassin-in-training, this new information has her reexamining a dozen incidents—no, more—that at the time had had a very different meaning.  Jacob’s theft of food—met with a beating, of course, he’d been greedy, and a further instruction for her not to share any sweets she’d been given, because of course only good children, not greedy ones, would be rewarded for their behavior.  His hatred, well, that was obvious.  The way he’d pulled away from her, when they’d been inseparable, virtually the same person, when they’d lived with their grandmother.  How he’d seemed hurt when she took so well to Father, to their Assassin training.  How he’d either flinched or picked a fight every single time she’d quoted Father’s lessons at him.  How he was always sneaking out and never wanted to be in the same place as Father, especially if he was to be left alone with the man.  How guilty he looked whenever Mother was mentioned.  His lack of interest in everything she’d overheard about the Assassins.  How could he have loved her, trusted her, when she was, as he’d snapped once, all but become the man?  How could one man be such a different person to his children?
           “I didn’t attend, not as a favor to you, but to Evie.  Knowing what you really were would break her.”  He’s not wrong, but she also has a grievous mistake to rectify.  Listening is probably a terrible idea, and he’s going to be betrayed and defensive if she approaches this incorrectly and perhaps even if she approaches this correctly, but how could she be expected to fix something if she didn’t even know there was something wrong?  “And—” he speaks thickly, voice choked and hardly recognizable.  “And you were entirely right.”
           God, does Jacob really think that?
           “I can’t sit still.  I’ve tried.  Oh, it’s easy enough if I’m interested, if I don’t have to worry about you critiquing every move I make, but I’m inconsiderate.  I interrupt others, finish their sentences.  Maybe growing up with Evie I thought, for a little while, that was normal.  I want to just walk away from conversations if I’m not invested.  And even if your words were fueled by hate of Mother’s killer, Evie’s weren’t, and she was right.  Most of the time, I can’t stop myself from following every impulse that comes into my mind.  I did manage not to attend the funeral, but there’s no pattern of the times that I manage to behave like anyone else.  And you believed it was all willful, as did Evie, and—”  He sobs again, the caring, cheerful little brother she remembered.  “—you never understood how terrifying it is to not be able to control yourself, to feel like you’re trapped in your own body, sometimes.  Am I possessed?  Did you know?”
           He mumbles a little more through the loud weeping, but he’s soon crying hard enough that his body shakes and he can manage no more words.  It’s not like there’s anything more she needs to hear, anyway.
           She half falls, half leaps out of the tree, running on quiet feet to her brother, her brother who more than anything needs her.  “You’re not possessed.  You’re just my little brother,” she manages, a little breathless, and he starts to turn to her, beautiful, broken brown eyes wide with astonishment and swimming in tears, hair plastered to his head.  He looks half-drowned.  Maybe he’s been drowning for a while now.  But she’s going to pull him to shore.
           She pulls him into a hug, and he flinches and sobs louder into her shoulder.
           “We are getting out of the rain and into a nice, warm bath.  You’ll catch your cold like this.”  She hasn’t fussed over him like this in a while, but it’s easy to slip back into the habit.  Into the thought that their twin’s body is just an extension of themselves.
           “Serve me right.”  It’s closer to his normal voice, amused sarcasm, like he’s not taking this seriously, but there’s something empty and hollow in the tone.
           “Stop that, Jacob.  If anyone killed Mother it was both of us, and you should have told me about Fa—about Ethan Frye.  I’m your older sister.  I’m supposed to protect you.”  She pulls him to his feet.  He feels like a dead weight.  The comparison is heartbreaking.
           “I didn’t want you to have to choose.  Because we both know what you would choose.”  His voice is matter-of-fact, helpless.
           She can’t help but snap.  It’s not his fault, but it hurts and she failed and it’ll take her a while to figure out what to do about her memories of Father.  “Jacob Edward Frye, if you think I would have sided with Father, a man I met when I was six, to my twin who is practically a part of me, then we really have failed each other as siblings.”  He’s blessedly silent against the falling of the rain.  She thinks through the statement and realizes it’s probably important she be entirely honest, particularly when she’d been eavesdropping on his private conversation with a grave.  “True, I might have believed you to be lying at first, but—especially if you’d mentioned at first, or had proof—damn it, it’s not my fault that I didn’t realize what he was, that he’d been grooming me to think like him, not when he was orchestrating the whole thing.”
           Jacob huffs a laugh and starts helping just a little with his forceful removal back to their home, even if his footsteps have all the strength of a newborn foal.  “I also didn’t want to run the risk of you calling me a liar.  Better I’d had you as a possible ally than to say anything and have that hope disappear before my very eyes.”
           “Well, you had better believe that I’m going to feed you like a prize pig once you’re warm.  And I would be honored to have you to watch my back—Templars will tremble in fear at our names.  You did master the Eagle Vision, at least?”
           He nods faintly, trembling in her arms, expression bewildered.  It’s hard to tell whether the shaking is due to the shock or the cold.
           “That’s a type of focus.  If you can manage that—”
           She’s treated to the faintest hint of a grin at the left side of his lips out of the corner of her vision.  It’s lucky that it’s raining, because Jacob can’t point out the tears on the outside edge of her own eyes.  It’s the most beautiful sight she thinks she's ever seen, because even if her father had been taken from her, her twin’s still here—no, more than that, finally been returned to her, and the world rights itself, as if it’s really that easy.  “The world,” he corrects, sobs easing.
           “Excuse me?”  She had slightly forgotten how conversations with Jacob could go, him getting distracted by something and repeat it for hours, rephrased as he played with the concept, jumping to something that seems entirely unrelated, or fail to follow the conversation at all.
           “We’ll take the world by storm,” he promises.
           She rolls her eyes.  “And there’s the melodramatics I expected from Jacob Frye.”
           He nudges her shoulder with his head, voice breaking slightly with the insecurity, “Admit it, you missed me, dear sister.”
           “You’re ridiculous.”  She’s going to make this an exception.  “Of course I did.  You’re my twin.”
           This time, when he’s stricken speechless, it’s for good reasons.  She pretends not to notice him weeping anew into her soaked overcoat, though she does notice—and react—as he slips one hand into hers and she squeezes back.