Falls

It had always been difficult to think about his childhood. The memories stung even years after the event that had exiled his brother, but now they burned with a new ferocity. Oberyn could not bring himself to look back on his past when he woke up to find Damascus standing watch over him, even though his brother’s face sent him tumbling back into his memories and crashing into the lands of his home.

Damascus was awake, gold eyes boring into Oberyn’s own. The sky was lightening with dawn above them, but the air was still cool and still with night. Dew rested on the blades of grass around the pine trees, and on the needles beneath them where the grass stopped growing. Oberyn wondered if his brother had slept as poorly as he did, if he slept at all.

“Rough night?” he asked, but knew the answer. It was like looking into a mirror, down to the tortured souls behind the identical golden eyes. He wondered, not for the first time, how different the twins actually were. In the years past, after Damascus left, Oberyn’s perception of him in comparison to himself were night and day. There was a monster living in his brother’s body, and a tormented child living in his own. But now, looking at his brother for the first time in years, all Oberyn could see was another broken colt.

It shook him in a way he couldn’t describe. It went against all the beliefs he and his family had held for so long. There was no way they could be wrong — that would mean that his twin was innocent, and that he had spent all this time grieving for not only his father, but his entire family.

The thought was poisonous. It made Oberyn sick, so he shoved it away to ponder over another time.

(When would he ever find the right time to think about it? It was always the wrong time.)

The dark stallion shook himself out. Pine needles had sprinkled softly over his back in the night, and they scattered silently to the ground as he pulled away from the trunk of the tree. His leg was still tender, but not nearly as broken-feeling. He suspected he had pulled a muscle. It would be sore for a few days, but nothing disastrous. He stepped stiffly into the grass toward Damascus and then stopped, watching him curiously once again.

Oberyn had no idea how to navigate this situation. He had no idea how to treat his brother after everything that had happened, both recent events and the ones preceding Damascus’s exile. This was new territory for him entirely, and to an extent it was refreshing. He did not have his mother crying over his shoulders, demanding justice, not caring about Oberyn’s grief (which, in Mother’s defense, was quiet and buried so far in denial that he seemed calm). The tragedy, though never healed, was not nearly so raw.

It was not yet the right time to rethink everything that had happened, but it was no longer so wrong. Oberyn heaved a sigh and cast his gaze, tired more with emotion than physical strain, around the Falls. “Care to show me around?” he asked. His voice was flat, but it had lost the cruel sneer it had held the night before.