The Power of Guilt
Contains vague references to sexual content.
The change in his little brother was...startling.
Darragh was certainly still as bloodthirsty as he had been months before Gnaea's arrival but now there was a...tempering of it. He was just as eager as he had been, but there were moments of hesitance. Malloy had watched during one hunt as his brother had obviously wanted to go after a girl fleeing while he drained the blood from her unfortunate lover but he had stilled himself. He had stopped, when Malloy had feared that he would never get him to.
It was quite astonishing.
He kept watching for months to be sure of what he was seeing and then he knocked on Gnaea's door one evening. As she opened it, Malloy glanced at her lover who was lounging shirtless and flushed on the bed behind her, and then asked, "May I speak with you, sister? Alone?"
Her eyes narrowed at him - and he noted the smeared cosmetics on her lips that were mirrored on her lover's - and then she nodded. Turning away, Gnaea walked over to the bed and leaned down over it, kissing her mortal lover deeply before she said, "I should be back soon. Then we shall continue our conversation."
"I look forward to it, beloved," Malloy heard him murmur and then she was at the door again, crowding him out into the hall as she closed the door behind her.
"Where do you want to speak, brother?" she asked.
Gesturing down the hall, he replied, "We can speak in the kitchen. With no staff in the house at most hours, it will be empty." When she nodded, Malloy turned and led the way into the depths of the house. He had very rarely been into the kitchen himself, having no desire to consume food since the first few years after Mother had turned him. The hired help had once used it to prepare their own meals but the ones who had survived his brother - and himself, as he had killed the two who had tried to run - now lived in a smaller house at the edge of the property. So the kitchen had sat empty, only kept cleaned when he had Darragh out of the house so it would be safe for them to come and do work.
As he entered, Malloy gestured at the large and heavy oak table in the center of the room and pulled out a chair. Gnaea looked at him in amusement as she walked to the other side, pulling out a chair to sit down as she commented, "The mannered of this decade would be appalled that you did not pull out the chair for a lady before seating yourself, good sir."
He just grinned at her and shot back, "You're my sister. The manners don't exactly matter in that case."
She inclined her head slightly in acceptance of that and then folded her hands on the table, leaning forward onto her elbows. "So," Gnaea began evenly, "what is it you wanted to talk about, little brother? I was well on my way to having Pietro begging for me to do such delicious things to him when you interrupted."
Malloy glanced at her mouth, still bearing cosmetic that was half smeared onto her cheek, and stated, "I apologize, sister, but I have been wondering about something for more than a few months since you arrived and I find I need to know the answer before it drives me mad."
"Speak, brother. I am an open book."
He looked at her and then lowered his voice, as if they would be overhead here - as if this was a secret meeting. "How did you tame him?" Malloy asked, watching her face closely for her response. "Darragh has been better behaved for you these past few months than he has been since we left Ireland with him."
The corner of her mouth twitched into a smirk and she leaned forward, as if conspiratorally. "Our brother is like any beast, Itztli," she said quietly. "If you prove your dominance over him, he will follow."
"Malloy," he corrected, narrowing his eyes at her.
"I am aware of what you want to be called, little brother, but I call not upon the hunter you are now. I want the warrior you were before, when Mother pulled you from the ruins of Tenochtitlan." He glared at her but she shrugged it off with a smile and a wave of her hand. "Do you think that she didn't write to me after she found you? Her warrior son?" she asked. "She was so proud in that letter."
Huffing, Malloy asked, "What do you want of a man who declared that he was no longer of his people after they betrayed him and all others? He died in those streets."
Gnaea lifted a finger from her folded hands, saying, "Ah, but the lessons he learned did not die with him. I have stalked you and our little brother while you hunt. I have seen Itztli in the shadow of Malloy."
"Is there a point, sister?"
She sighed and replied, "When you were a warrior amongst other warriors, you were trained, yes? How to fight, when to fight, when to retreat. The tactics you would need for attack and defense. These are the skills you need to deal with our little brother, not the bloodlust and hunger of what our mother made you."
Malloy grunted at that, not entirely following her meaning. It had been a few hundred years since he had been anything other than the killer he had become after Tenochtitlan fell. "Explain.
"Very well." Gnaea folded her hands together on the table and began, "You cannot treat Darragh entirely as if he is a person, brother. There is too much lust for blood in him, too much of him close to the animal. Moreover, he is not capable of rationality. Therefore, we must become the rationality for him and do such through some of the oldest means: blackmail and bribery."
"It was easy for me," she commented. "I am a new face, one who wishes to help him. I also gave him truths that no one else would gift him. Alongside asserting my dominance as being better than him as well as faster, I earned his respect. You cannot do this."
Scoffing, Malloy growled, "I am both faster and stronger than he is."
She held up a finger and stated, "But you are his partner. Not as a lover but his partner in shedding blood. The one who has been by his side in all of his hunts, who has participated in all of them willingly. Not Mother. Not Xiang. You. Asserting dominance now would be a fool's error and he would never bend to you because you are his equal in this."
As he started to open his mouth, Gnaea quickly said, "This is where your past comes in line, brother. You must be a tactician around him. Watch him. Learn his moods and when his temperament shifts. These will be the things you need when I am gone."
"How exactly do you propose I do that?" he asked.
"Exactly as you have currently been doing these last months, little brother," she replied with a smile. "Watching how he acts. How he pulls back and stops himself. When he doesn't. Learn when to push and when to pull. More often than not, the answer will be to pull him back from the edge. Others...it may be push or, more accurately, simply letting him go. To use a comparison to an animal, allow him to slip the leash occasionally."
Malloy blinked at her in surprise at the suggestion and stated, "I beg your pardon? Wasn't that our problem in the first place?"
Gnaea tipped her head back and laughed before teasingly saying, "Careful, brother, you're picking up the phrasing of the English from living here so long." She then sobered and continued, "The habits I am building in him will hopefully be enough to keep him in check, even after I am gone. My main goal is pushing him more towards the desire to be a good son more than anything, which is working by all accounts. I reward good behavior and punish bad, though not with violence. Violence will turn him away. Merely words of disappointment."
"When I am done, you cannot allow him to fully be comfortable, it will end up driving him in the opposite direction," she went on, laying her hands flat on the table. "An occasional lapse allowed for him to unleash his violence in a controlled sort of capacity should reset his efforts to be a good son. In anyone with a semblance of normalcy it would be guilt but he does not feel guilt as we go. But it is essentially guilt, nonetheless."
He stared at her for a long moment and then hissed, "You're training him. Like a dog."
Shrugging, she replied, "Like a hunting hound, but yes."
"You are cold, sister."
Gnaea's smile was thin at that comment and she merely stated, "I was the daughter of a Senator of Rome, little brother. There was marble in me from the moment that I was born, bloody and squalling."
Malloy sighed and then leaned forward, crossing his arms on the table. "So," he began, "your sage advice is that I have to learn what makes him tick. Besides the fact that he always wants to kill something."
"Ah, but now he is controlling the urge, brother. Why?"
"Because he wants to be a good son."
Frowning, he locked eyes with his sister and asked, "Do you really think that this will save him? Will it save Mother?"
With a nod, she replied, "I think this is the only thing that will save her." Gnaea then sighed and raised a hand to gently touch her forehead before she spoke again. "I do not enjoy framing our brother as an animal and treating him like one but it is the only thing we have, Malloy. You have tried keeping him at the end of a leash with very little rules to keep him in check and he almost entirely slipped the leash from both you and Mother."
"How long do you think this will take?" Malloy asked.
"Years, no doubt," she answered.
Sighing, he said, "Very well. I will watch, sister."
"Good," Gnaea said with a sharp nod before rising from her chair. She then paused and leaned onto the table, moving so far forward that her nose was nearly touching his. "And don't worry, brother," she purred with a hardness to her dark eyes, her mouth bent in a grim line, "I will not tell Mother that you were doing little to attempt to tame our brother as she asked, in the hopes that it would get him killed."
"I..."
Suddenly there was a vice-like grip on his chin and Malloy's lip curled as she snarled, "Do not lie to me. I have spoken with our brother enough of how you have urged him forward to greater and greater lusts. He is partly like this because of himself, partly because of Mother, and more so because of your mishandling. So I am going to fix it."
Gnaea then bared her fangs and whispered menacingly, "And if you cause damage to him after I am finished and Mother ends up killed because of it, I will hunt you to the ends of this earth, brother or not. She has not been my love for many years but I do still love her and I will not allow either of you to get her killed. Do you understand, little brother?"
Despite her slight appearance, Malloy did fear Gnaea. She was thirteen hundred years his senior and had seen and done more than he had in his nearly two hundred years of life. And she had done a great deal of it alone, while he had yet to leave their mother's side to stretch his wings on his own.
Nodding, he breathed, "I understand, sister."
"Good." Gnaea released him then and straightened up, looking down her nose at him imperiously - every inch of the Senator's daughter that she had been. "Now, I am going to go back to bed with my lover. If you disturb us again, I may very well throw you out the window."
With that she swept out of the kitchen and Malloy just sat there, arms still folded on the table. He then sighed heavily and pushed himself up to slide the chair back underneath it neatly. Gnaea was right, he had not been trying very hard since they had left Ireland to actually control his brother. At first he had been but then he had given up and had stopped, hoping that his lack of intervention would eventually force Mother to look at Darragh as what he was. A liability.
Twenty years hadn't quite been enough to his brother to slip his leash and run rampant. Only enough to make Mother worry and bring in their sister, who was determined above all else to keep their mother alive.
In terms of sons...he hadn't been a very good one himself.
Perhaps he too needed a little guilt to force him to actually bend the knee.
Timeframe: 1684
Location: London, England
Event: Malloy observes the changes happening in his brother and goes to Gnaea to ask how she managed it. She reveals what she has done as well as what will need to be done moving forward...as well as one thing that Malloy didn't think she knew.
Consequences: After the discussion with Gnaea, Malloy becomes better at observing the movements of their little brother and slowly becomes an expert on how to handle Darragh.
Once a proud warrior amongst his people, Itztli was dying in the streets of Tenochtitlan when Ebio came upon him. There he became her second child and intensely loyal to her when she helped him slaughter the Spaniards that had ruined his people. For centuries, he and his child Yen Xiang Jun remained at his sire's side until she told them to go live their lives.
The daughter of a Roman senator, she and her mother were forced to sell themselves into slavery after her father was killed and his reputation ruined. That was where Ebio found her, buying her and eventually turning her into her first child. Though the pair were lovers for years, they eventually grew apart due to Ebio's bloodthirsty nature. Gnaea continued to aid her sire, however, both helping to temper her younger bloodbrother and taking him in after he regained his memories.
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