This is a Dark Is Rising story, and so everyone in it belongs to Susan Cooper. The story, though, belongs to kestrelsan.

alignment
by Pares

It could have been no one else.

The pub was smoky, dark and crowded but Bran glimmered at the bar like the moon on dark water.

His hair was still white, close at the nape, with a long fringe falling over his eyes. He had grown very tall. Broad shouldered, lean as a racehorse, he was staring into a pint with hungry intent when Will edged through the crush to stand beside him.

"I'll have the same," he told the harassed looking barmaid, and she nodded curtly and set the one she'd just drawn next to Bran's.

"I should be surprised to see you," Bran said, taking Will's pint as well as his own and lifting them both above the crowd so they wouldn't be elbowed. Will followed him to a distant table in a gloomy corner, eyes on the back of Bran's once-white sweater.

When Bran set their drinks on the scarred table top, he turned to give Will a long look, his face serious, judging. Then he laughed and took Will's shoulder.

"You still look a lad!"

And it was true. For a man of twenty-one, Will knew he still had a boy's round face, and he'd never grown very tall. He was solid though, with or without the deathless strength of an Old One. Of the two of them, Will, small and dark, had more the look of a Welsh shepherd, though neither had claim to either of those terms.

"You look well, yourself."

"Ah. Taller now, is all." He gave a dismissive one shouldered shrug that spoke of slight unease. "It's good to see you, Will. Been years."

"Yes. How's your father?"

"Very well, thanks. He and John Rowlands get on so well without a wife between them that all the other husbands are fair jealous." He tilted his head and the sweep of his hair nearly touched his rakish grin.

"Where is John, then?"

Bran's smile grew fond.

"Still living on your uncle's hill with my dad, actually."

"Is he," said Will. He was watching Bran very closely now.

"He moved in not long after-- After his Blodwen got knocked down by that car. What a strange summer." He ruffled his hair absently and then his eyes found Will's. "But of course, you remember. You helped us build the addition. It's a right bachelor household, now. The two of them with the sheep all day and at night my dad cooks and John at his harp. It took the two of them together to steer me into University, though."

Bran settled on the low bench and took a thoughtful draught of his bitter.

"What are you studying?" Will sat beside him and drew idle patterns in the condensation on his glass.

"It was a music scholarship, originally." Shifting a bit, Bran continued. "But I've been thinking of going on to be a barrister."

Will smiled at him.

"A little education isn't enough for you. You must have highers!"

"Well. It's not just a new love of books. English developers have been eating up the countryside, and there's no industry but sheep where we are. Your uncle's had a hard time of it."

"I know," Will said softly. "My mum gets letters from Aunt Jen."

There was a not uncomfortable silence as the two of them applied themselves to their drink.

"And are you at school, as well?"

"Do you think the Stantons would let their youngest lie fallow? Tch. I'm the only one in a 'proper University', my dad says."

"You had a flock of sibs, if I recall. Are they all in jail, then?" Bran's eyes were sharp with interest.

Will knocked him companionably with a shoulder.

"I can't have you slander the family name. Let's see, James is to be head chef at a new spot in north London. It's got a mad name, but I can't think of it. It's always changing. Max works in the shop with Dad, and he had another gallery show last season. He'll be the famous one of us, yet. Mary, married now, and to an American. He sells kayaks and such, and she manages accounts. They've two and another on the way. Paul is with the symphony. Robin was with Citroen, designing things, but it's a hard time for cars and he's between work at the moment."

"Lord, that's a herd of you! How many all together?"

"Nine. That leaves Gwen, she's at Scotland Yard. We're all very proud. Barbara, she runs a groomer's and makes loads, and Stephen, married to a Cornwall girl, with his own ship under him now."

"I'd have liked a brother or two, I think."

"They're overrated, believe me," said Will equably, taking another drink.

"Maybe I have one out there, that I haven't met. I don't suppose you've seen anyone else like me around?" He gestured at his milk-white face and silvery hair, giving Will an unexpectedly magnetic look, his owl-eyes wild gold in his pale head.

"There's no one like you," Will told him, and he heard the resonance in his own voice and was confused by it.

Bran gave him a curious glance and after a pause that hummed like a harp string, he said, "Could be. You never know."

"I know," but this time Will made it a cheerful go along rather than the ringing truth.

"Ah, but how's this then? I found an adoption certificate looking through my dad's papers while I was filling out forms for school."

"Adoption," Will said slowly. He'd thought that Bran had memory of Owen Davies telling how Bran had come to him, but this was proof otherwise.

"The raven boy is a cuckoo, it seems." Bran drained his glass and touched the back of his hand to his full lower lip, wet and pink and almost shocking against his bone white skin. "John Rowlands told me that my mother, she left me and my dad, and that I was born to her before ever my dad laid eyes on us."

Will had nothing to say to that, knowing there was more to it that could never be said. Instead he rested his hand on the shabby weave of Bran's sweater and squeezed his shoulder.

It occurred to him, suddenly, unpleasantly, that this had not been Bran's first pint of the evening.

Bran shook his head and gave an odd, raucous little half cry.

"I think I'll have another. Are you in?"

"Actually-- it's a bit close in here, have a walk with me? Some air. Some quiet. I don't like to shout at you," he smiled.

"Sad to say, but there's no air in London, friend." Will was grateful when he stood up and continued, "I expect we can try and find some anyway."

Will left some notes on the table and followed Bran out the pub's narrow door.

*

Bran Davies was still a motherless boy in white sweater and black jeans, if the shambled cubby he lived in said anything at all. "I'm not much for housekeeping, mind," Bran had warned, but his little student garret wasn't really so much worse than Will's own.

Darker maybe.

"'A sheepman who doesn't brown in the sun has no business working under it'. That's what John said. And so I came to school. Wait, I'm a brute, I never asked you-- what do you study?"

Bran handed Will a take away box of leftover vegetable curry and a fork. Will sniffed it cautiously and looked up to grin at his tall white companion.

"Curious coincidence, but I'll be to law as well."

Bran laughed, a single merry bark, and fell back on the little sprung couch beside Will.

"Solicitors. Fine upstanding men we'll be."

"We already are," Will promised.

"If you say so." He leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees and gave Will a shrewd look.

"You know, for someone with so many at home, Will Stanton, you struck me as fair lonesome when we first met. As you do now."

"I was sick with the hepatitis then. And now... Exams," he murmured vaguely. But Bran's face was set, and so Will added, "You were the loneliest boy I'd ever seen. And the proudest."

"Well. Like calls to like, they say." And the hunting expression left his friend's face. Instead, he pushed his hair off his forehead and stretched his legs. He looked suddenly worn and Will let himself lean against Bran's arm.

"Am I such a bad friend to have?" Even as he said it, he felt a sort of self-reproof. He had not written, nor visited after that summer. He had thought it best to give Bran time and distance, and he hadn't trusted himself not to test Bran's memory.

Indeed, he still didn't.

But a small, curving smile lit Bran's face.

"Not at all. The only better friend to me was my Cafall."

Will felt his throat tighten; that such a faithful dog should die with such a mark against his brave name. Did Bran remember the milgwn? Or had The Light left him with the false, damning memory of Cafall gone mad at the end, a sheep-killer?

"John Rowlands, surely," Will demurred, his voice husky.

"John is a father to me. Your good Aunt Jen a mother. In my experience, an orphan has a lot of parents, but few friends."

He gave Will's knee a slap and pressed himself up off the couch, holding out an arm to Will.

"I'm restless yet and there's a chip shop around the corner open 'til all hours. I'll treat you."

Will took Bran's arm in a sort of Roman hold, his palm to Bran's forearm, and Bran's to his. In the reaching, his sleeve slid back, at the same time his hand caught Bran's sweater up along his right arm. Where their skin was in contact, there was a flash of heat like the brief flare of a match and the two of them sprang apart and goggled at one another.

"It can't--"

"What--"

Will stepped forward and took Bran's unresisting arm, shoving the frayed sleeve back until it crowded the crook of his elbow.

There, stark against the moon-bright skin, was a simple black tattoo about the width of Will's palm: a black circle quartered by a cross.

"When did you get this? Why?" Apprehension made him curt, and Bran's eyes went wide at the command in Will's tone.

"I-- I don't remember. I dreamt it, I think. After I found the certificate, I had strange dreams. The kind anyone might have, if they find they're adopted. You dream your real parents are rich, powerful. That you're the lost son of kings."

Will felt a wave of unease, and a strange, unwelcome, but not unfamiliar look came to Bran's face. It spoke of arrogance and of hidden pain. Will thought suddenly, I will take it away, unwittingly echoing a thought he'd had the first day he'd met Bran all those years ago. One day I will take that look away from you.

"And when I turned 18, I took Devin Renfroe the design I'd penned and he marked me." Bran's mouth hardened then, and Will's wrist was in a grip like iron. "But who marked you?"

Will could have broken Bran's hold without harm or movement, but he did not.

"I was visiting the farrier and he'd set an ornament to cool," he said calmly. "I stumbled and fell against it. It hurt like anything. Took ages to heal," he added.

"I want to believe you." Bran's voice was soft and halting. "But I don't. I feel at once that you'd never lie to me, and that you're lying now. I know it. Why?" He let Will's arm go and clasped the back of Will's neck instead, bending his head to search Will's eyes.

"I don't know." And he didn't. He didn't know how Bran knew he was lying, or why Bran could remember one of the Signs, but not that he'd been adopted. Will had never been sure why The Light had deemed it kinder to take the memories of the mortals who had turned The Dark forever. Surely Bran deserved to know he was The Pendragon, even if he was no longer heir to that throne. And with Merriman and the other Old Ones gone, and Will the last of them on the Earth, and the only one with memory of The Rising, it seemed to him a curious and lonely reward for helping save mankind. "But I can't explain it, so please don't ask me to."

"Then tell me, how did you find me? Even your Aunt Jen couldn't have known I'd be at Gillan's."

Will gave him a warm look.

"I didn't know you would be there. But I'm glad that you were. I've missed you, Bran Davies."

"So much that I never heard from you." And the bitterness was only a thread in the fondness of his tone.

"I--"

Bran gave his neck a friendly squeeze and shook his head.

"You asked me not to ask, and so I won't."

Will closed his hand around Bran's forearm and skimmed the tattoo there with his thumb. Bran's face was calm, but watchful. His hand relaxed on Will's neck and Will took the opportunity to link their fingers, while pushing up the left sleeve of his own navy cableknit. He raised Bran's hand until their forearms touched, the tender skin and swimming seagreen veins there warm and alive, and where the Signs met, there was again a flare of heat, but this time their hands tightened, and the burn faded to a cool electric buzz that sang all along Will's nerves, 'til the hair on the back of his neck rose.

Bran's golden eyes were very wide, but his hand was steady.

"I don't know," Will said in answer to Bran's unasked question.

And he reached up to press his mouth to Bran's. It was warm, open, and Will could taste the dark beer and the fine prickle of beard under the heavy softness of Bran's lower lip.

He was startled by the sudden sweep of Bran's tongue but leaned close when Bran's arm stole about his waist.

Will had never yet had this with another. The people he knew were simple and kind, and he loved them, but he knew better than to hope for some spark of recognition, for some connection. But the world seemed full of sleepers who would never know him, never see the man he was behind his own round face, and now he realized that he had had no other because he had been waiting for this one.

And Will knew that Bran was thinking fleetingly of women he'd known, and of other men, but those memories fled his mind in a flurry of feathery white, and Bran thought of Will alone.

Do you know me, he asked in the Old Speech, and Bran answered, in Welsh, Fi adnabod ti, Will bach. Hen un.

I know you, Will. Old One.

Will didn't know if this had come to him by accident or design, and at the moment he fiercely refused to care. They would learn the consequences of Bran's regained memory, and the significance of his tattoo, in time. Most likely sooner than Will would wish it.

Now there was Bran, who knew him, who shared his past, and in this time of locus, of alignment, they were not alone.

END