Pathos - A Duskwood Fanfiction

Chapter 7

And that's when she started to cry.

Over the past two weeks, she had grown accustomed to seeing her brother through a very specific lens. It was a lens that he had cultivated extremely well, and although it was engineered with calculating precision to obtain a specific result, she knew that it wasn't through deceit or facade - he was all of the things that he projected himself as. She knew beyond a doubt that he was disturbingly intelligent, she had now witnessed firsthand how extremely intimidating he could be, and the rescue of Hannah had unquestionably proven that he was highly skilled at what he did.

There were other facets to the lens as well. Ones that were much less palatable, but that were also not without truth. She had come to see very quickly that he was extremely mistrustful, aloof, and offputtingly intense. He had a severely low threshold for tolerating anyone that did not immediately ask how high when he ordered them to jump, and he'd had a commanding and cold arrogance to him whenever he had deigned to interact with her group of friends.

Again, not facetious; he absolutely was all of those things, but she had slowly come to realize that his way of navigating the others around him was not to fabricate qualities about himself, but rather to only bring to the forefront the qualities that he wanted them to see.

And the qualities that he wanted them to see were ones that commanded complete and total respect. In this way, he had often reminded her of a lone wolf - one that was alone by choice because it would brook no competition or insolence, and one that others shied away from because it had made it very clear that it preferred the dominance and control that solitude afforded it.

But the final week of the search for Hannah had also shown her a very different side to his abrasive exterior.

When her phone had rung on the first day of that week - one full day after her YouTube video went live - she knew immediately that the unknown number moniker that was displayed on her screen could only be him. She had answered the call in a state of instant and burning fury, ready and waiting to spit her rage at him for as long as the call would last, but then had ended the call in complete silence, staring into space as angry and confused tears began to slide down her cheeks.

She had not wanted it to be true. She simply could not tolerate it being true. He was just such a pretentious asshole. There was no way that someone so staggeringly unlikeable could be her brother. Could there?

So she had spent the next two days in a state of rigid refusal of the things that he had told her, even though there was a small and hidden and terrified part of her that knew that it was true. Jake was many things, but a liar was becoming increasingly unlikely.

He had promised her proof though, and she had hissed at him through her tears that he had exactly one day to produce said proof, but by the time that deadline had come and gone, her video had done its damage and he had simply disappeared.

During his disappearance however, she had been begrudgingly forced, through the virtue of time only, to reevaluate her assessment of her pretentious, asshole brother.

First and foremost, his loyalty to Hannah had been demonstrably unquestionable. The lengths that he was willing to go - and eventually did go - to find and rescue their sister despite the potential for his own life-altering ramifications were almost inhuman. Certainly, she knew that no-one else could have done what he did. And she wasn't sure that anyone else would have.

Well. That wasn't quite true.

The stranger that Hannah had pulled out of the ether with a single, inexplicable text - Lilly knew now that this person would have done everything that Jake had done and more, if Jake had not come down hard with icy authority and put Thomas punishingly back into his place after Thomas had asked her to go into the Ironsplinter mine.