Chapter Text
Jacob read the wall above the cup one last time, translating the warning to the rest of the team. “Whatever it shows will be painful and personal but it will be true. The point of the vision isn’t to trick anyone, it’s to show something real that the drinker might otherwise never learn. This section here,” he gestured at the carved inscriptions, “talks about casting out the shadows of secrets with the light of truth, but it talks about cleansing fire.”
“The cleansing part doesn’t sound too bad,” said Cassandra.
“It’s more the fire part I’m focused on,” said Ezekiel.
But Jacob thought Cassandra had the right of it. Whatever the potion showed would be painful, the inscription was perfectly clear about that, but there was something about the phrasing that seemed to imply it was a good sort of painful. It would reveal a truth that would hurt but leave the drinker better off in the end, like someone discovering their partner was cheating on them. The revelation would be painful but it would be better than continuing to be deceived.
“I’ll drink it,” he said.
“You’re sure?” asked Eve.
“Yeah. I mean, we defeated a trickster spirit by acknowledging truth and I said I’d stop hiding from myself. I’ll do it.”
“Well, if you’re sure mate,” said Ezekiel. He patted him on the shoulder. “Rather you than me.”
“Just be ready to grab the artefact. I don’t know how long this will last.”
“I’ll stay with Jacob,” Cassandra said. “You two go for the artefact.”
The way to the artefact was opened by the truth. It would stay open only so long as Jacob was caught up in the vision the potion offered. He picked up the cup and glanced at the others. They were ready. He took a breath to brace himself for fire and drank. The potion tasted like beer, but subtly different from any brand he knew. There was a richer taste to it, layered with details he couldn’t quite identify. It was surprisingly nice. Why couldn’t Jenkins make potions taste like this?
He got to the bottom of the cup and set it down on the pedestal again.
“Are you alright?” Cassandra asked.
Eve was more practical, asking, “Why isn’t the way opening?”
Then the world shifted out of focus, the text on the wall blurring, his friends’ faces swimming. He heard the grinding of stone moving over stone but the shifting of the wall was less important than the fact the whole world was now wavering. He was aware of Cassandra’s hands on him and the hard floor hitting his back, and then the physical sensations slipped away and it was like he was floating, no physical sensations, no body. Just existence.
The blurs around him resolved and he saw a face in front of him, a face he saw every day in the mirror, but this face was framed with hair that hung down past his cheeks. He was sat at a table with a black guy but the room around him was blurred still, hazy and muted. The room didn’t matter. These two men and this conversation was what mattered, what Jacob needed to see.
Jacob looked at the face that was identical to his own and a mix of grief and anger surged through him, because Eliot wouldn’t have looked like that, not Eliot as he knew him. Eliot had died at eighteen while the man here looked about the same age as Jacob. But the potion couldn’t lie. If this was the truth, it meant that Eliot was still alive. He was still alive and he’d let them think he was dead. The hurt burned through him with the promised fire as Jacob realised what this meant. What it meant his brother had done.
“You can’t put ‘family-run’ on the menu, Hardison,” Eliot was saying, and Jacob knew it was Eliot. Maybe that was something in the potion, driving home the truth of the situation, refusing to let him hide from the idea or try to come up with excuses or explanations beyond the obvious.
“Why not?” the black guy, Hardison asked. “We’re a family: you, me, Parker. A little unconventional maybe, but still a family.”
“Not in a way a random person looking at the menu will understand.”
“Yeah, but it will look good on the marketing materials and who cares if the people reading it don’t understand it the same way we do?”
“I care! You can’t put family-run on the menu.” Eliot glared at Hardison like he was willing to murder the man over it.
“What’s this really about? It’s not like you to care how we advertise the brewpub.”
“I don’t want to be reminded about my family every time I look at the menu!” Eliot snapped. He took a breath and looked away. He took another breath.
“Look, man,” said Hardison. “I know you and your dad didn’t have a great relationship…”
“This isn’t about my dad.” Eliot took another breath. He had the look of someone bracing themselves to do something they knew would be painful. “It’s about my brother.”
“Your… what? You don’t have… How didn’t I know you have a brother?”
“He thinks I’m dead.”
Jacob felt the weight of that silence. Hardison let the silence hang there, didn’t push for details. He waited to see what else Eliot would say. Jacob dragged his attention away from his brother’s face to look at the draft of the menu, the logo burning itself into his memory. It was clear and vivid in a way the table beneath it wasn’t, as though the vision wanted him to notice this, wanted him to remember this. The logo of the place where he could find his brother.
“When I was captured the first time,” Eliot said, “there was such a mess of bodies left behind that it was assumed there were no survivors. My dad was sent a notice that I was killed in action. No one was coming to rescue me. The things I did to get out… I made a lot of dangerous people very angry. They wouldn’t have hesitated to hurt my family to get to me.”
“So you stayed away to protect them,” Hardison said. Jacob felt a rush of anger that Eliot would do something like that, wouldn’t even give him a choice to know the truth. If he had a physical body in that moment, he might have punched him.
Eliot started to nod, but then shook his head. “That was the excuse I gave myself.”
“Then why didn’t you go back?”
There was another long, heavy silence. The room seemed to fade further, disappearing, until the two men were floating a void. They were all that mattered, these two men and the truth being laid out between them.
“I did things to survive in there, I did things to get away, things that I don’t like to think about. I wasn’t the naïve kid who signed up for service thinking he was serving his country. I didn’t want my brother to look at me and see the monster I saw when I looked in the mirror.”
The anger melted away and Jacob longed to reach out, to lay a hand on his brother’s shoulder, to tell him that it would be alright. He had never imagined he could see such pain on Eliot’s face. Eliot had always been the strong one, the fighter, the one who had never been scared to stand up to Dad, but in that moment he looked broken. It shocked Jacob to the core. He couldn’t imagine what might have happened to make his brother look so hurt. He couldn't dream of what would make his kind brother think of himself as a monster.
It was Hardison who reached out, putting a hand on Eliot's arm, a touch Eliot didn't even seem to notice.
"Things are different now though," Hardison said. "The person you are now, the good that you do, surely your brother would be proud of you now. Why don't you try to find him again?"
"Helping people now doesn't undo all the hurting I did. Besides, it's not like we go about helping in a way most people would understand. No, it's better this way. He buried his brother a long time ago. He's mourned and moved on. He doesn't need to know the truth of how I spent the years after he got that message. No. It's best for everyone if Eliot Stone stays dead."
The last thing Jacob saw was the expression on his brother's face, the determination laced with grief, as though he were the one in mourning. Jacob thought his heart was breaking from the sight of it.
"Stone?" The voice drifted through the darkness, faint but getting clearer with every moment. "Stone, can you hear me? Are you alright?"
He knew that voice. Eve Baird. At the thought of the name his awareness grew of the cold beneath his back, of the awkward angle of his neck because his head was resting somewhere warm. Someone's lap? He noticed the dull ache of bruising from where he'd fallen. And the chill of air moving over the tear tracks on his face.
He blinked and brought his hand to his eyes, wiping away the water and letting his friends' faced swim back into focus.
"Stone?" Eve asked again.
"I'm okay," he said.
"You were out a lot longer than we expected."
"It's over now. Did you get the artefact?"
“Yeah, we have it.”
“Let’s get out of here then.”
He pushed himself upright. There was nothing wrong with his body, nothing to stop himself getting to his feet. He wasn't the one who had been captured in a war zone and put through whatever physical and psychological torment led someone like Eliot to look so damaged. Still, he wobbled a bit on his way upright and both Cassandra and Eve steadied him.
“What did you see?” Cassandra asked. Jacob wasn’t prepared to answer that, wasn’t done processing the revelation.
Thankfully he was saved from having to answer by Jones. “With the way he was crying he was probably forced to hear all his ex girlfriends complaining about how terrible he was in bed.”
Jacob gave him a grateful smile but shot back with, “I had to hear all your exes saying how you were. It was traumatising.”
"Only because they were so full of praise you know you'll never compete."
No one asked again about his real vision on the walk back to the door. Jacob was glad of that because he wasn't sure how he could explain what he'd seen. The knowledge that had been revealed was so enormous he felt like he'd barely wrapped his head around the concept. His dead brother was alive. He'd been through some unknown hell and now worked in a restaurant of some sort. And he thought Jacob was better off believing him dead.
Jacob knew that Eliot was wrong about that. The vision had been as painful as promised, but Jacob was glad he'd seen it. He would rather know the truth about his brother's lies. He just wasn't sure what he should do now that he knew.