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Scar is going to kill him.
He knows that like he knows to breathe air. Scar is going to kill him. He is going to die.
It’s an icy tendril-terror, clawing its way up his throat from the innards of his chest; he’s already started choking on the panic of it, hands trembling, fingers flexing uncontrollably.
He is going to die. He hadn’t done enough to appease him, gods, not enough in the slightest , and all he can do now is sit here by the edge of the ravine, his body wracked with fear, legs about to give way from the sudden, overwhelming horror of insurmountable, inevitable death. He doesn’t want to die. He’s not ready to face it, not like Scar already has.
His breathing is coming thin, and he doesn’t even really realise it, not with the horrible, uncontrollable feeling taking hold of him, like a chasm opening up in his bones, marrow leaking out onto the sand; a sense of self, gone, pliable under the pressing of the breeze and his desire to live, live, to not die yet, I can’t.
When Scar shows, he doesn’t look murderous. He looks ashamed, and scared, and Grian’s breath hiccups, short and confused, because Scar is going to kill him, but he doesn’t look like it. And if he somehow doesn’t die here, beaten or maimed to a bloody pulp, then he knows he will, later, at some point down the line, and that suddenly strikes him as even worse, and he doesn’t know what to do.
Scar gifts him sanguine poppies and lilacs, and it feels like a false promise, a perfidious omen. Can we still be friends? when all Grian knows is that they’re standing on a knife’s edge, and he doesn’t know how many steps are left behind him before he falls. I can’t trust you and I don’t know you and You have the power to hurt me and I don’t know what to do.
I still owe you, is what he says, I am still important, is what he doesn’t. Scar smiles, eyes bright, happy and relieved, and there is a stone, the size of his fist, lodged in his stomach, pebbles in the linen. Don’t kill me yet. Wait. It is worse, but wait.
The green of his eyes is both a prison and a boon. He lives it, as long as the shining blade tip will let him.
His marrow is staining the sand. It drips out behind him, slow and steady from the wounds in his flesh, gently carving him out, leaving him empty and skittish and scared.
Electrons spark and shudder beneath his skin like beetles; he feels them there, crawling, creeping, never letting him rest. His sleep is fitful, and jagged, and every new sun cycle leaves him giddier, dizzier, as alert as a hare, feeling as small one. The desert sky drinks up the vulnerable; it is full of eagles.
Tell me what to do and One more look and I’ll kill you and Watch out, watch out, watch out and If I crush your windpipe beneath my hands, maybe that’ll spare me.
He should have given in, killed Scar in his cadaver-sleep like he’d been tempted to so many times before, diamond sword sweat-gripped in his hand above his moonlit cot; but he hadn’t then, and still wouldn’t now, and he’s always snapped back, biting, at the mere insinuation that he’s a fool, but he’s undoubtedly feeling like one now.
It should be easy to kill; it is easy to kill. He lets his grip loosen, anyway.
By now, he’s done so over and over; an explosion here, a trap there, and the deaths come rolling in like rain clouds, steady and impending. He’s a murderer, an easy title, one he wears with a wolf-tooth grin and an offhand shrug. He’d known what he was getting into, and the more chaos he spurs on the more alive he feels, blood pounding eagerly through his heart and ears.
But he doesn’t feel alive; not really. Not with the looming, ever-presence of Scar’s grey, crimson-eyed form. Not with the Reaper himself by his side, always a salesman’s smile away, a cold, clammy hand on his shoulder. Every moment he spends here in the desert, in the castle home Grian painstakingly built for them with bruised and bloody hands, is another where he feels his nerves grow, his panic flutter and chitter like a pinned Lepus, paranoia sinking its claws deeper into his psyche.
He’ll die. Obviously, he will, no matter what happens. People die. That’s the point of the game. But Scar will be the one to do it. He can feel the just irony just around the corner, the poetic beauty of it all, searching out its prey. It’d make less sense if Scar didn’t kill him, and so Grian’s just anticipating the obvious. Nothing more to it. It’s so clear in his mind that this constant deliberating is driving him mad, tongue-bitingly mad, the taste of iron plentiful in his mouth. He sips on it, chokes on it, the salt of his own faults heavy, heavy, punishing.
It makes no sense that he doesn’t kill Scar. That he— won’t. That he struggles to drive his blade through his throat, cutting red ribbons into delicate, fragile skin. It’d be easy. So, so easy. He wants to rip out his hair every time he catches a glimpse of his sword and sees its unblemished diamond. Kill, kill, kill. This is no different.
He doesn’t. He never does. The moonlight is a mockery, and the stars Scar’s victory.
Maybe it’s silly, but he wonders if he won’t kill Scar because he knows that it’ll kill him, too. At this point, he’s naught but an empty, shackled soul; to kill Scar would be to doom the life he owes him, the one he promised to him as penance. And he knows that above all he wants to live. That he’ll subject himself to anything, to any slow, strident terror, if it means he gets to survive.
He continues to tell himself this, even as the war rages on, worsening and worsening; he tells himself this even as it eventually claims his first life, the one he’d sworn away out of his crushing guilt, and when he stays, anyway, despite the breaking of his bonds, the shattering of its silver. His eyes are a sickly yellow, fear-diseased, and yet still he stays, quiet and watching and burning, bursting with terror, with the epinephrine he hangs onto to keep himself alive.
Scar will kill him. He knows it; that much is certain. He’s like some foolish Cassandra at this point, muttering prophecies he knows to be true but that the suspenseful in between of present and future seems to reject. But he also knows that the rest of the world will kill him just as easily, if he ventures out there, takes a step out of the desert and its arid, stifling air. They all hate him just as much as he hates himself for staying here, because he is a murderer, and a chaosbringer, and someone they will slay without a moment of hesitation just to breathe a brief sigh of relief. So he stays here, by Scar’s side, breaching this fine line between life and death, putting himself at that eventual, certain risk, but he has no other choice. He has to fucking live.
It is the only thread that makes any shred of sense to him, anymore. He knows that he isn’t thinking straight, that he’s lost and clueless and clinging onto anything that shines, even if the fire has already burned him, made him choke on its smoke and made rivers stream from his eyes. It doesn’t matter. He needs it. He doesn’t care what’s left of him as long as he gets to live to see it.
In the end, Scar doesn’t kill him himself. Bdubs does, at his orders. The impersonality almost feels more insulting than the betrayal: I have bled raw for you; at least tear me asunder with your own two hands.
But it doesn’t matter; it doesn’t matter, because Scar has finally, finally killed him.
I knew he’d betray me, he spits, vindicated, coasting on pounding adrenaline, and it’s true , he’d guessed it, figured it aaaaall out, but he doesn’t feel any better for knowing it. He feels horrible, really, shaken that he’d been right, horrified that the sinking, all-consuming anxiety had had basis.
The other shoe has dropped, technically, the death he’s been waiting for finally upon him, and in a certain respect he feels freer for it; but he is still shaking all over, body cold-hot, running on live-wire autopilot and he feels stuck, so, so stuck, with only one way out. The aching, spiralling paranoia is still there, pinprick-present in his mind, and nothing is better, and all he can think to do to soothe his pain is to kill, kill, kill.
In the end, he does try to kill Scar; he tries to kill him in a pool full of knee-deep bloody water, and Scar lets him, death’s saccharine grin on his thin lips, but Grian can’t. He just can’t. He can’t.
Scar’s skin is cold as he takes Grian’s nail-bitten hands in his, as he guides them to grip the handle of his sword firmer, as he points the blade to his throat. He smiles; he smiles, and Grian’s mouth tastes like iron and salt, and his body is broken, and he can’t. Scar can’t make him.
But Scar does make him, in the end. And Grian does kill Scar, in the end, and the crimson red leftover on his hands is far too bitter a parting kiss. It feels cruel; it feels cowardly, too, and unfair, that he’s the one who’s left behind, in a wreck of his own shell, his mind, gripping at his own shoulders for a comfort that other hands should be giving him. He is alone.
He is alone. He is alone, and he doesn’t feel good, and he can’t do this anymore. He is nothing, anymore.