Three months into the term, letters from home had become a small, reliable rhythm across the dormitories, arriving twice weekly with the academy's regular post, and most students had long since settled into whatever relationship they held with the particular weight of news from provinces they'd left behind. Corin received his in the privacy of his own room, as he always did. He read the first lines standing, still in his day clothes, the letter having arrived just as he'd returned from evening lessons, and by the third line he had sat down without quite deciding to, the chair meeting him rather than the other way around.
Your father was wounded three weeks ago, at the northern line, the letter explained, in his mother's careful, formal hand, the particular controlled prose of someone determined not to let grief blur the facts she needed her son to have clearly. He will live. The medics are certain of that much. But something struck his spine during the retreat, and he will not walk again. I did not want you to hear this secondhand, though I fear this letter will already have taken longer to reach you than I would like.
Corin read it through twice more, sitting very still at his desk, a single candle burning low beside him, the room around him gone dim and quiet as the evening deepened outside his window. He did not move for a long while. When it finally arrived, it came silently, the way the worst grief often did, no sound escaping him, simply a slow, uncontrollable trembling that started somewhere in his chest and spread outward until his whole body shook with the effort of containing something too large to properly contain, tears sliding down his face in a steady, silent stream that he made no attempt to wipe away, his hands pressed flat against the desk on either side of the letter as though bracing against something that might otherwise knock him entirely from his chair. He cried for a long time, entirely without sound, the particular devastating silence of someone who had learned, somewhere along the way, that grief witnessed was grief that could be used against him, and even now, alone in his own locked room with no one else present to witness any of it, could not quite bring himself to abandon the habit. He thought of his father the way he had last seen him, upright, composed, sending his only son away to safety with a formality that had felt, at the time, like rejection rather than protection. He thought of every letter since, brief and dutiful, neither of them ever quite finding the words to bridge the distance properly. He thought of the northern line, the border he had never once seen with his own eyes, only imagined, night after night, in increasingly specific and increasingly unbearable detail. He thought, mostly, of how far away he was, and how little that distance had actually protected anyone.
When it finally passed, he sat for a while longer in the candle's dim, guttering light, breathing slowly, deliberately, until the trembling stilled entirely. Then he drew a fresh sheet of paper toward him, and began to write.
Father. I received Mother's letter this evening. I am glad, more than I can properly say here, that you survived what happened at the line, and I am sorry, more than I can say either, for what it has cost you. I do not have words adequate to the moment, and I will not pretend otherwise. I intend to return home for winter recess, as planned, but I want you to know I would return sooner if it were permitted. I will help however I am able, whatever that ends up meaning in practice. I do not yet know what a household adjusts to, in circumstances like this, but I intend to learn quickly, and to be useful in whatever capacity you'll allow. I am well here. My studies continue. I have made, against my own expectations, something like friends, and something like a rival, and I find both have taught me things I did not anticipate needing to learn. I will see you in winter. Please write again before then, if you're able. I would rather hear from you directly than continue receiving news secondhand, three weeks delayed, filtered through whatever the household staff decides I'm prepared to hear. Your son, Corin.
He read it over once, folded it carefully, and set it aside for the morning post, and began, methodically, to rebuild his composure, the particular careful reconstruction he had performed many times before, until nothing remained visible of what had happened in the hour before. He did not hear the door.
Finn had been cutting across the courtyard on his way back from the library, later than he'd meant to be out, the evening gone properly dark and cold around him, and had taken the shortcut past the Year 1 dormitory halls without much thought, the particular unremarkable route he took most nights without once considering who might be on the other side of which window. He nearly missed it entirely.
It was the quality of the silence that caught him, oddly enough, a faint, careful stillness audible even through a partially open window on the ground floor, the specific hush of someone trying very hard not to be heard, and Finn, slowing without quite meaning to, recognized Corin's voice a moment later, low and unsteady, reading something aloud to himself in a fractured half-whisper, the particular broken cadence of someone speaking through tears they were doing everything possible to keep silent.
He caught only fragments. He will not walk again. I did not want you to hear this secondhand. A long stretch of nothing but ragged, careful breathing, held so tightly it barely qualified as breathing at all.
Finn stood frozen in the cold courtyard for a long moment, uncertain whether to move closer or retreat entirely, and in the end did neither, simply standing very still in the dark, listening to something he had never been meant to hear, his usual restless energy gone completely, entirely still for perhaps the first time since arriving at Solmere.
He thought of Corin at the Sunspire Gardens weeks before, composed and rigid even watching a sunset. He thought of every meal since where Corin had seemed, if anyone had bothered to look closely enough, very slightly diminished in some way none of them had properly named. He had not looked closely enough. He understood that now, standing alone in the dark courtyard with the cold settling into his shoulders.
FNN: ...oh.
He said it very quietly, to no one, the particular small, solemn sound of someone recalibrating, and made himself move on at last, walking the rest of the way to his own dormitory with none of his usual noise, already turning over, in his own restless, well-meaning way, exactly what, if anything, a person was supposed to do with a piece of someone else's grief they'd never been meant to overhear.