#there's grumm there if you squint

[rukafais]

da capo

(meaning: from the beginning)

In scattered interludes and encounters along the long and winding road, Divine imparts bits and pieces of her past.

[ao3 mirror]

The days are hot; the nights are cold. This dry land is full of broken structures that dominate the landscape in their desolate forms; they cast long shadows with the sun and moon alike.

Divine leaves her usual spot to breathe in the arid air. Even as night falls (it comes so fast here), she stays outside. Her breath forms clouds in the chilling air as her eye lingers on sandy, rolling hills.

“It shouldn’t be this empty,” she says. Brumm glances at her, and notices her distant look, and doesn’t ask.

He plays a song, old and low and soothing. A rumbling lullaby from a storm-crushed land.

She eventually goes back inside, when she can stand the cold no longer. But she smiles a little, and thanks him (squishes his face gently and tells him he’s dear for it, which he doesn’t mind).

Later, he checks on her, and the lamps in her tent are dim, and she is curled up asleep. She looks more weary than he has ever seen her.

Grimm just shakes his head at Brumm’s unspoken question. He’s made himself a cosy nest of blankets and pillows, while they await their summoner in this realm; he’s reading one of the many books he’s collected on their travels together.

“That is something she must tell you herself, my dear musician,” he says, turning rough pages with careful fingers. “It would be a breach of trust to say anything else.”

Brumm just nods. Rather than practice and disturb the silence, he simply lingers, unwilling to be away from him. Grimm doesn’t invite him, exactly, but his master certainly doesn’t mind when Brumm eventually curls up by his side.

His musician plays idly with his fingers after a while, to distract him from his reading, and though he blushes when Grimm laughs quietly and tells him he likes this new, bold step, neither of them feel the need to stop it happening.

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Here and there, in their journeys, Divine has requests. She hums snatches of old songs, things he’s never heard before even in all their travels - he’s heard similar, but not the exact same. They come from a distant time and place - he suspects that it’s somewhere that no longer exists.

He plays them all, or tries to. Divine corrects him, now and then, but mostly she seems content to listen. Her eye is closed; if not, it’s distant, as if she looks at something far away.

They’re often loud, energetic, almost vicious in their intensity, these songs. They tell stories of a place he’s never seen and, he suspects, will never be able to. She tells him their names, if she can remember them; they are often very long, or very short, and there is no in-between. They describe mythical figures and grand journeys, great hunts and world-shaping events.

Some of them are about her, she says. He’s not sure how true that is, but he’s not one to question, only to listen.

“You’re very good at understanding them, lovely,” she says, once. “You have a talent.”

“It’s just practice,” Brumm says. Divine waves it off with a smile.

“Practice is one thing! I’ve heard many musicians. Only some of them have a spark, like you. You breathe life into the songs. You make them live again, like little memories. Little stories in the music, lovely.”

When she explains it like that, he thinks he almost understands. But he’s not certain, even so, and he says as much.

“You’ll understand someday. Or maybe you won’t. It doesn’t matter that much, lovely. All you need to know is that you’re very, very skilled. Master was right to choose you as the musician. Music is very important, you know.”

He knows. Or, at least, he thinks so. Divine gets like this, sometimes, and he has to admit he’s not particularly used to her being philosophical - or maybe it’s just because she’s intensely focused on him, and while he knows she wouldn’t hurt him, that level of intensity is still a little much to have on you all at once.

------------

“I was an adventurer myself, once,” she says, out of nowhere.

Brumm squints, because Divine tells stories all the time, and a lot of them aren’t true.

(Not that this is a bad thing. She’s a wonderful storyteller, and she loves to exaggerate to make things interesting. She and Grimm make a constant game of it, picking out each other’s falsehoods; telling bigger and more ridiculous tales, finding more elaborate, silly reasons to discount them.

It’s something that Brumm has only ever watched, not taken part in. He’s not good at making things up, except when it comes to music. But he does like to listen, and Grimm or Divine will ask for him to compose a song, and he provides.)

She meets his doubting expression with a laugh and a grin. “So suspicious, lovely! So harsh to me, so cruel!” She pats his cheek; Brumm just huffs, because she knows why he acts that way about the things she says.

“And maybe you’d be right, lovely! Speaking little and watching much, you do see a lot, don’t you? But I’m telling the truth. No tall tales here, I promise.”

She settles into a more comfortable position, curling so she can recline on, essentially, herself.

“I was all sorts of things, lovely. A bodyguard, a warrior, even a hunter! It was fun, very fun. I wasn’t always this shape, either. Much more nimble.”

Brumm sort of hums thoughtfully at that, because while he doesn’t doubt that Divine might have looked different once, she was still entirely capable of sudden and swift violence. It’s one of the roles she still plays for the Troupe, after all.

She laughs, as if reading his mind (she’s unnervingly good at guessing his thoughts, and that makes him wonder, too).

“Yes, lovely, even faster than I am now! I didn’t carry a weapon, no, but I didn’t need one.”

The laugh peters out, her normally wicked grin receding a little. She leans on a forelimb, her visible eye thoughtful and dim, not sharp and bright as usual; she’s thinking about something long past and far away.

“But all things come to an end, lovely, even exciting journeys like that. I was supposed to find someone to settle down with, to start a nest, a stronghold. I had my pick, of course! And I found a mate that I liked, who wasn’t boring, who was my equal in combat - and who liked me very much.”

She sighs, wistfully, shaking her head. “But sometimes, it doesn’t work out. You know how it is, lovely. Things happen. A kingdom dies, collapses, takes what you knew with it. Scars you.” (He thinks about the mask that Divine never removes; whatever is beneath that aches during bad weather). “Crumbling into ruins...and then, there was Master, and now, here I am.”

Brumm simply nods. That, too, had been the way he had met Grimm’s predecessor; when all else was gone, when the ruin of everything he’d known lay before him, there was the Troupe. And he could have stayed in a dead land, tended it, told his stories of the bugs who lived there before to those who would come after - to be part of its rebirth - but he was a child, then, and all his life was gone, and any future he could possibly envision only held emptiness.

The Troupe had promised a family and companionship for him, a shield against loneliness, a warmth that would always last. It was better than anything a dying land had to offer him.

(He still feels the ache of that loss, of the master who had come before; he remembers a soft voice and scarred hands and a quiet lullaby. A weary, gentle voice. Grimm doesn’t speak of it, but he doesn’t have to; it’s a pain they both understand without words.)

“Do you miss it?” he ventures, after a moment. “Mrm. Your old life, your old home...”

“No,” Divine says, shaking her head with a slight smile. “Home is where people are, lovely. You know that, I think. It would be easy to leave, even if I wasn’t injured like I was. Nothing left, not even a morsel of what I wanted and loved.”

Love isn’t a word Divine uses often. Brumm has always wondered about it (but some bugs are just like that, and there’s nothing wrong with it, so he hadn’t wondered too much), but he thinks he understands.

Love means something different to her, something deep and quiet and soft, a remnant of the past. And if he knows anything about Divine, it’s not that she dislikes being soft, but it simply doesn’t occur to her to show it.

He plays a song for her that she’s requested before. It tells a simple story about rivers running past arid places to the sea, finding each other, meeting again, and she listens gladly.

“Come again, lovely,” she says, after it’s done, and he thinks that’s something of a thank you.

#hollow knight #togetherslapping words #divine #brumm #grimm #there's grumm there if you squint