77. Round One End
The first time Isaac realized his brother enjoyed art was one month after he died.
He’d put off going through his things as long as possible, using the excuse of funeral proceedings, paperwork, and the newly discovered Underside to leave Lloyd’s room untouched. He could barely bring himself to look at the shut door, as if, by staring at it for too long, he might catch a lingering trace of Lloyd’s presence slinking on the other side. As if the door would swing open and his brother would step out like nothing had happened. The longer he stared at that rusty handle, the greater the guilt grew. Guilt for what happened, and guilt for leaving the place to rot.
Finally, on a rainy evening when the shadows of the apartment crept long and engulfed the grey walls and floors, he’d finally taken a deep breath, stepped up to the door, and pushed it open.
He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting. Logically he knew the inside of the room wouldn’t have changed much in a single month, but a part of him hadn’t been able to shake the fear that he’d step inside and find the space withered and rotted away. The opposite turned out to be true. While a thin layer of dust had gathered on the desk, for the most part, the room looked pristine. The bed was perfectly made, not a wrinkle in sight, and thick books lay stacked into neat piles and arranged in alphabetical order across a tall bookshelf. It looked like a hotel room—sterile and generic.
The thought made a shudder run up his spine, and Isaac had gripped the duster in his hand a little harder and quickly began to work his way around the furniture in mechanical, even motions.
He’d spent so long avoiding the place in silent fear of Lloyd’s ghost, but now that he was inside, he couldn’t help but think how foolish he’d been. The lack of personalized features in the room, the fact that it looked like anyone could have lived there, the quiet chill and the utter stillness—that, Isaac realized, was far more terrifying.
Without thinking, he dropped the duster and yanked open one of the desk drawers, suddenly desperate to find something, anything, to prove that Lloyd had ever existed there at all.
In that drawer, tugged crooked by the movement, he’d found a neat stack of spiral bound sketchbooks and a pile of loose papers tucked beside them, their surfaces covered in pencil sketches.
They weren’t of anything in particular, those sketches, just patterns and designs swirled loosely across the pages. They looked like the sort of doodles a bored student might fill their notes with, albeit taken to a much higher level of detail and precision and separated into their own corner of focus. It was as if Lloyd had managed to separate out the distracted part of his brain, remove it, and only indulged it there, on those sketchbooks and papers, tucked away in the drawer beneath a desk of books.
As Isaac had stared at those drawings, scanning the penciled loops, he’d felt an old memory surfacing in his mind. It was from many years ago, back when they all lived in that small apartment with the flickering lights. Lloyd had been up late again, and Isaac himself had gotten up to use the restroom and to see if their parents had returned yet, not that he would consciously admit to the latter.
Lloyd had been sitting by the window. Its blinds were still open, and the moonlight had filtered through in thin horizontal strips that faintly illuminated the closest lines of the room. Lloyd had a pencil in hand and was bent over something, arm moving rapidly. That in itself wasn’t an unusual sight, but that night had been different, because Isaac distinctly remembered a small smile on his face, a light giddiness in his eyes that made him look like a stranger. Lloyd always acted older than he was, but at that moment, the gap in years between them had felt like the smallest it had ever been. Isaac, weary with exhaustion, hadn’t known what to make of it at the time, so he’d slipped away and gone back to bed, pushing the image out of his mind.
Isaac slammed the drawer shut, picked up the fallen duster, and resumed cleaning again. Maybe it wasn’t that the room was impersonal, he’d thought distantly to himself. Maybe it was that he was the one who couldn’t recognize the personal touches. He hadn’t been able to recognize joy on Lloyd’s face all those years ago, and one month later he was still learning new things about him. He had died a stranger, and Isaac didn’t know if that was for better or for worse.
—
“May I sit here?”
Isaac blinked and looked up to see Seaton smiling down at him. He had no visible injuries from the spar, which was to be expected. The red tint of the barrier cast an odd hue on the merfolk’s otherwise blue and green coloring, making him look out of place.
Isaac’s eyes darted about, verifying that the rest of the stands were, indeed, full. He hadn’t even noticed the merfolk approach; he’d been too busy watching Igor disappear behind Rosalinde’s healing area. Logically he knew the man was fine, but he kept his eyes trained on the exit, waiting for him to reappear.
Realizing that he still hadn’t responded, Isaac nodded, turning his eyes back towards the healer’s area. The next few matches had passed by in a blur. He hadn’t recognized any of the names, and quite a few had gone on for a long time thanks to level and stat similarities. Sharil’s match was coming up, though. Hopefully Igor would have left the healing area before then.
As if on cue, a familiar dull gleam of metal armor caught his attention. Leaning forward a little, Isaac watched as Igor stepped back into view and headed towards the opposite side of the stands, walking in his usual clunky, slightly stiff way. He had no visible injuries, nor did he look particularly upset from what he could tell. If anything, the man looked rather satisfied. Isaac felt his shoulders relax. When he turned around again, he nearly jumped back when he saw Seaton watching him curiously, much closer than earlier.
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“Are the two of you friends?” he asked. His voice had gone back to that higher, more melodic register.
Isaac shifted in his seat. “Something like that.” His eyes darted over to the merfolk, and he blurted out, “I’m surprised you took the fight seriously.” The second the words left his mouth, he realized they probably sounded much more insulting than he’d intended, and he quickly cleared his throat. “Not that I thought you’d make fun of Igor or something, just—“ Isaac cut himself off before he could dig a deeper hole for himself. He wasn’t the most socially adept person on a good day, but it felt like he’d been especially bad lately. He blamed the stress of the tournament.
Thankfully, Seaton had only raised an eyebrow during his rambling. He smiled in amusement. “I was certainly surprised, of course, but I respect his drive. Willingly facing a stronger opponent is a hard thing to do.”
“You sound like you have experience with that yourself.” Ah shit, there he went again.
The merfolk hummed thoughtfully. “Something like that.” He chuckled. “I was in a similar position in the past, though I wasn’t able to handle the taunting with nearly so much grace.”
Isaac’s eyes shifted over to the man’s spear, stored away and strapped to his back. It looked perfectly solid like this, bone dry and without a trace of water in sight. He opened his mouth to respond, but the sound of cheers made him pause. He turned around just in time to see Sharil’s name disappear from the screen before her stat sheet was pulled up next to an opponent 10 levels below her.
The bettors, after a string of close and stressful matches, looked relieved to once again have an easy choice. Voices rang out across the stands, all betting on “the demon.”
For her part, Sharil was the picture of refined grace as she flew down to the platform. Her wings cast large shadows over the smooth surface, and her opponent, a human, was utterly dwarfed in size. Said human seemed to be rethinking their life decisions, much more visibly unnerved than Sharil was. This would be a quick match, Isaac thought.
“Isn’t she friends with that small demon from earlier?” Seaton’s voice broke Isaac out of his thoughts.
“…Do you mean Olzu?”
“Is he the one who fell during the flight competition?”
Isaac frowned and turned to face the man fully, eyes narrowing. “Yeah, he is. Why?”
“Is he alright?”
Isaac’s jaw clicked shut mid word. He blinked a few times, processing. “…Yeah, he’s fine,” he finally said. His eyes scanned the merfolk’s face, but there was no hostility there. He was being unreasonable, he scolded himself. Seaton didn’t deserve to be on the end of his inexplicable belligerence, not when the merfolk hadn’t actually done anything wrong, had even been kind to Igor. He cleared his throat and made a conscious effort to relax his shoulders. “Lucius came by earlier to bring him back to the Inferno.”
Seaton’s eyes widened. “The Inferno’s king?”
“I mean, I don’t think it’s official, but yeah, basically.”
The look of utter shock on the merfolk’s face nearly made Isaac laugh. It was nice to not be the surprised one in the Underside, for once. “To be fair,” he said, grinning slightly, “Lucius isn’t a very normal king.”
“Certainly not!” Seaton chuckled in disbelief. “I can’t imagine the Wavelands king doing anything like that.” He shook his head. “Well, it’s good to hear that—Olzu, I believe it was—is alright. His friend seems strong.”
Isaac nodded. “Yeah, she is.”
As if to prove his point, down on the platform, Sharil gave a fierce flap of her wings, and the ensuing blast of wind forced him to grip the edges of the bench to stay upright. It wasn’t too far off from what Azure, the wind elemental, had been able to do.
Her opponent was barely able to stay in the arena, and Isaac noted a faint glow enveloping their entire body, seemingly holding them in place against the wind pressure. This was the telekinetic from the opening, Isaac remembered.
For all the versatility that their magic gave them, however, it didn’t seem particularly helpful in this case. The human stumbled, steadying themself after the wind finally died down. Beads of sweat dripped down their forehead. With a furious shout, they raised a hand, light swirling towards the center of their palm as a similar shroud of glowing light fell around Sharil. The human took a step forward, and in the screens, Isaac could practically see their veins popping with exertion.
In contrast, Sharil looked utterly unperturbed; only the slightest tremor in her wings indicated that she felt the force of the magic at all. There was a weight limit to the human’s telekinesis, it seemed, and the demon was past it.
Sharil must have known it too, based on how calm she was. She hadn’t even extended her claws. Finally, after what felt like minutes of struggling, the glow died out and the human slumped down, chest heaving. Not missing a beat, the demon flew forward, staying low enough that her serpentine tail dragged along the platform. Her wings fanned out, and in a single motion, a second blast of wind was sent towards her opponent, only this time the flickering, dim glow around them wasn’t enough to keep them from being knocked out of bounds. Sharil nodded to herself, satisfied.
The screen rippled gold. [VICTOR: SHARIL] was displayed, and Isaac clapped along with the ensuing cheers. It felt nice, to feel certain about someone’s victory. It had been the opposite with Igor, and he knew which feeling he preferred.
“She’ll be a tough opponent,” Seaton remarked once the yells had died down.
Isaac frowned, glancing over at the man. “You sound awfully confident you’ll end up fighting her. How do you know this next round will—“ he paused, remembering the bracket, “…will go so well.”
The slip didn’t escape the merfolk’s notice. Seaton smiled reassuringly. “It will be a difficult match, but I believe I can win,” he said. He stood, carefully patting off his clothes, and nodded at Isaac. “I should get ready for the next round. Thank you for keeping me company.” He extended a hand, slightly hesitant. “I believe this is what humans do?”
Isaac raised an eyebrow, but stood to shake his hand, finding it cool to the touch. The merfolk seemed to be actively trying to piece together how the gesture worked (and failing, given the awkwardness of said handshake). It was unexpectedly endearing.
Releasing Seaton’s hand and sitting back down, Isaac gave the man a final nod. “Good luck,” he said.