Chapter Text
After almost a week of being left largely on their own or at most in the care of older children like Imogen's sister, Garrick was finally starting to feel like he had a handle on being seven years old again. He and Imogen had spent most of that week glued together, constantly whispering or making notes of things they remembered, making plans and arguing about them and throwing them aside.
He was sad when the meetings ended and the council members packed up to return home. He hung around underfoot while goodbyes were said and carriages were packed up.
"Be careful," Imogen told him, all of her adult scorn present and accounted for. He was sitting on the stones outside Riorson House, leaning against the wheel of her family's carriage and her mother had just nearly tripped over him.
"There you are!" Garrick jumped up to meet her and threw his arms around her. "I don't like separating." He mumbled this into her hair, as if that might stop her from hearing him.
He kept telling himself that it was fine, this was different, they would be fine… but none of his goodbyes with Imogen had been easy in years and she was so young. Last time he hadn't seen her again for two years, but it hadn't meant anything because he hadn't even been in love with her until that time. Right now she looked more like the sixteen year old girl who'd gotten sent off alone to a foster home than the woman he met after she crossed the parapet.
As much as he didn't want to think about a future they were determined wouldn't happen, he couldn't help it.
"I'm fine, idiot, I'm just going home," she grumbled in his ear. A little ways away, he could hear his father and Imogen's dad talking about how inseparable they'd been, and he tried not to listen too hard.
"Here, I brought you something." he said, pressing a little paper packet into her hands. "I know the cooks packed lunch for everybody but there were extra of those butterscotches you like so I begged a favor to get the last of them for you."
Imogen's scowl softened a little for him. "Thanks," she said after a minute. "I gotta go." And then she was on the steps and in the doorway in the side of the carriage, and then she was gone.
"Let's get you to where you ought to be, hm?" his father said, catching him by the shoulder and escorting him into Riorson House. He sighed to see the blue sky disappear behind the front doors, but then he remembered where he was going. It was late enough that he'd missed morning lessons, so that meant—
"Yay! Auntie Morag!" Garrick slipped out of his father's grip and ran ahead to the courtyard training grounds where his aunt waited. Morag Tavis was the weaponsmaster of Riorson House, the only person who could reliably put Fen Riorson on his ass, and Garrick's favorite aunt. She greeted him with a hug and then shooed him to get the practice swords and dummy out since Xaden and Bodhi weren't there yet.
"Don't worry," he heard her say to his father as he came out of the weapons storage dragging a straw-stuffed. humanoid dummy. "I'll keep him busy and wear him out." He set the dummy upright where he remembered it going and then went back to get the wooden swords.
It started out simply, at least in Garrick's mind. Xaden and Bodhi turned up a few minutes later, and Morag sent Xaden and Garrick to spar while she worked on forms with Bodhi. Garrick hadn't yet gotten used to how young Xaden looked, and his first instinct was to go easy since he was fighting a kid.
The fact that he was also a kid didn't quite make it to the surface before Xaden got him hard in the stomach with the flat of his wooden practice sword.
"Fuck," Garrick hissed. Fortunately there was enough wind knocked out of him that it wasn't loud enough for Morag to hear. He stood back up, trying to drag his attention back to what he was doing. Even though he mostly stopped thinking of himself as an adult fighting a kid, the sparring didn't get any less embarassing. Half of his muscle memory was missing and the other half was accustomed to a lot more reach and a very different center of gravity.
Garrick tripped over his own feet more than once, hitting the dirt due to his own movements at least as often as Xaden put him there.
"Are you okay?" Xaden finally asked, after he'd gone down again. He added quietly, "Is this because of the future?"
"Yeah," Garrick said, brushing dust off his trousers. "Again?"
"Take a break, lads," Morag called, answering Garrick's question for them. "Xaden, I want you to come spar with your cousin, I think wee Garrick's forgotten himself after a week without lessons."
"Auntie Morag!" Garrick shouted, both embarassed and loving having her here to chide him again.
"Don't worry, lad, I know you'd not betray me like that. Go ahead and practice some until you remember which end's the pointy bit, eh?"
By the time the first bell rang for dinner, Garrick was starting to feel like himself again with the sword in his hands. He'd worked his way through the forms Morag had taught him as a kid until he felt like he knew his limbs and what they were going to do, and at the bell he stopped to put away the equipment the infantry squad had been practicing with.
He carried the bundle of spears into the storage room and stacked them against the wall, though he held the last one for a long minute. It was taller than he was, but he remembered how it had felt to swing a staff or halberd. Maybe it would make him feel better about his lack of reach now that he wouldn't be over six feet tall for a number of years.
Instead of taking himself to clean up for dinner like he should have, Garrick hung back. Once the courtyard was quiet, he found a staff a little shorter thn the rest, a better match for his current height. He gave it a twist in his hands and then fell into a ready stance for fighting.
His fingers felt stiff and stubby at first when he tried to spin it properly and he dropped it several times, but by the time the second dinner bell got his attention, he felt like he'd made a solid start on recovering the forms he knew.
When he turned to put the staff away, he realized Morag had been watching him.
"You shouldn't be doing that yet," she said, more confusion than anything in her voice, and that was when he remembered. He hadn't leared to fight with a staff until he was a year or so older, once they'd started using metal swords and Morag wouldn't let them spar with them until they mastered them.
Garrick panicked and dropped the staff in the dust. "I'm sorry." He said it like he'd been caught goofing around with weaponry, something he'd learned not to do within weeks of being brough to Aretia for the first time. Maybe she hadn't seen much? "I know I shouldn't play with them, Auntie. I'll put them away."
Instead of reminding him he needed to be careful, she just rested a hand on his shoulder. "Where'd you learn that, Garrick?"
From you in a few seasons wasn't going to be a reasonable answer. He rushed to think of a lie, but Imogen hadn't been wrong when she said he was bad at it.
"I probably saw the infantry squads practice," he tried, and forced himself to grin.
"You know as well as I do what weapons come out for infantry practice," she said, raising an eyebrow at him.
"I don't know. Maybe I saw you with it?" Garrick shrugged.
"So you say, Garrioch," she said quietly, and he swallowed hard, because nobody used the formal version of his name unless something was really wrong. He waited for his aunt to say something else, but in the end she just frowned and pointed him toward the house. "Off to dinner with you, boyo."
She didn't bring it up again the day after, or the day after that, and Garrick assumed it must be fine. He started getting up early to practice with weapons before breakfast. He'd never liked having to get up early, but if he was doing it for his own reasons, it felt easier.
"Caught you!" The shout startled him and one of the batons he was using slipped out of his hand and went flying. "Hey!" Garrick panicked before realizing two things: first, it was Xaden who had caught him, and second, he hadn't hit his friend with the baton.
"You okay?" Garrick asked, jogging over to pick up the weapon.
"What are you doing?" Xaden demanded, hands on his hips. "You're already getting lots better than me by being from the future and now you're practicing so you're even more better?"
"I've gotta be good enough to protect you and Bodhi and everybody," Garrick shrugged.
"Maybe I wanna protect you and everybody too," Xaden answered, and somehow the asshole was implied even though Xaden didn't yet swear most of the time. "Besides, Dad says teaching's best for learning, so teach me too."
Garrick stared, tonguetied. Of course Xaden wanted to protect everybody. That was what he'd done.
"Fine, but no telling anybody, this is secret."
"Sure," Xaden agreed immediately.
"Not even Bodhi."
That made Xaden hesitate. "How come?"
"His mom always knows when he's got a secret, Xade."
"Yeah, okay, fine. But only for now, we both have to teach him soon, okay?"
"For now," Garrick gave in. Xaden crowded in close and Garrick started drawing out the first few basic moves in the dust with the end of the baton, then showed him how to hold them.
Teaching had its own flashes of memories to go with it, of working with the younger marked ones in the quadrant. Xaden, though? He'd never taught Xaden, not really. He liked the idea that he would actually get the chance to take care of Xaden for a change. And this time when they were at Basgiath… well, he tried not to think too hard about what the future was going to look like, there were too many things to change, but he'd sure loved his collection of weapons patches.
The weapons patches he'd earned at Basgiath had always felt like another kind of armor. Every time he added another weapon to his toolbox, he was a little less likely to be caught unarmed or off-guard. Each one was a little bit of additional fuck you to the cadets who wanted to kill him and the leadership who wanted to let it happen.
While he was slowly relaxing in the knowledge that he didn't need that armor right now, as a kid in Aretia, he still wanted to have it back sooner rather than later. People were depending on him and Imogen, even if those people didn't know it. And so he worked his way though practice forms and training dummies, keeping a mental list of which he could be proficient with already and which he needed more strength to use: swords, daggers, staves, archery with both traditional bows and crossbows, maces, flails, short scythes, battle axes, morningstars…
The day he pulled out the morningstar, he thought about Tairn. How old would Tairn's first rider be now? He couldn't recall.
He wondered how Chradh was doing.
Garrick was surprised how often he felt alone in his head. He missed the power sometimes, sure—he'd taken for granted the ability to make the air move on a hot, sticky day, not to mention how much easier this would be if he could just walk to Imogen instead of writing a letter and waiting for a reply. But what he really missed was the company. Even when Chradh had been busy, even when there had been a solid wall between them, he'd known the dragon was there.
Sometimes at night he climbed into his older brother's bed, not because he was scared but because he was lonely, and listening to Dom's breathing was a little bit like knowing Chradh was there. The older boys teased him about it in the morning.
He didn't mind much. Teasing meant they were there to tease him, after all.
Though that didn't stop him from waxing the bottoms of Dom's shoes and laughing his ass off when his brother went flying.