Work Text:
When Cordelia Carstairs was a girl, her brother taught her quite a fun game. He called it the Closet Game, where she waited in the closet until he came back. She was scared of the dark, so he pressed his witchlight into her hands. "Count until 1,000," he would say, just to give her something to do, and she would.
When she began to become bored with the game, her brother added a small chess set to the closet. She would illuminate it with her witchlight and move the pieces around, strategizing against herself. Her best friend was her reflection in the mirror; surely she could manage this. Eventually, when her brother came back, she would ask if he wanted to play chess. He would look exhausted, with crescents underneath his eyes, but he would smile slightly. Cordelia noticed that sometimes his voice would break or he would stammer, but she did not say anything. To do so would be unseemly.
The Closet Game became odder and odder to Cordelia as time went on. Her brother would always come back for her within the hour, and she no longer felt scared of the dark. She would feel scared of her brother's haunted eyes, the ones that he so deeply tried to hide underneath a smirk that he did not know was bitter.
She would become scared as the Closet Game became less frequent because her brother pulled away too much to play it anymore. She would be scared when her mother pulled away. Scared to be alone, alone with her reflection and ink on paper from a best friend who lived far, far away.
Cordelia would be shocked to know that the Closet Game was not universal, but she would find out when she was too old for such games anyway. But eventually...
Eventually her brother would smile. Tell her that the new baby would never play the Closet Game. And then she understood.
Alastair held her.
And that was how it was.