Insurgence [h.s]

twelve

The blade pierces the canvas right above his father's bright blue-grey eyes. The gaze that terrified him so years ago now seems so pathetic, so vacuous, as if the painter's hand was unable to grasp the full strength in those eyes—as if they weren't good enough to. Anyone else would think so, when faced with such a dismal portrait, but Harry knows the truth—the issue wasn't the painter, but his father. No hand, no matter how skilled, can capture what isn't there. Those eyes are empty because they've always been, even in life. If such a thing as a soul exists, his father has never had one.

The throwing knife lets out a gasp when Harry wrenches it out of the backing board, as if shocked by the rough handling. He traces the edge of the blade with a feather-light thumb as he turns his shoulders to the painting, clenching his teeth as he walks back to the desk on the opposite side of the room. It's been months since that night, and still he can't manage a single decent throw. He wasn't aiming for the forehead. A dull ache radiates from his middle, his body complaining for his lack of care.

He spins around. The knife leaves his hand and goes wide. It hits the corner of the painting and clatters to the floor. "Fuck." He grabs another off the desk and throws it. It misses again. Another. Again. And again. "Fuck, fuck!" He swipes the contents off the desk with a shout. "Fuck!" A kick at the corner of the desk. "Fuck," he gasps out, collapsing among the fallen blades. For an instant he can't breathe, and his fingers knot around his tie in an attempt to loosen it, but they're trembling too bad. The back of his head hits the first drawer. "Get yourself together," he mutters, so low he can hardly hear himself in the silence of the room. He can still hear the echo of his shout in his ears. It disturbs him. "Get yourself together, get yourself together."

He's never been good at handling frustration. His father has taught him from an early age the value of shouting, of breaking things—of the way it makes people cower away, of the way it must feel good, since he did it all the time. It doesn't feel good. It feels like becoming unspooled. In truth, lashing out only betrays a lack of control in yourself. If he can't control himself, what authority does he have to control others? For the past few years, he's prided himself in being quiet, in being collected. He's learned that fits of rage might scare others into submission, but that submission is only a passing thing. People can only be pushed so far before they snap. He would know.

Silence is the tool of power. Power is so often misunderstood. It's so often assimilated with strength, or with arrogance. In truth, it isn't any of those things—it's something much more slippery. It's the silence between words, the quietness of the night. It's the moment between lightning and thunder. It is seduction, too—the ability to make others do what you want them to. It isn't what you hear, but what you feel. And so, he's taught himself to be quiet, to rein it in. To know when to strike, and when to wait. To learn the weight of a word and the force of a gaze. To discover the difference between leader and warlord. His is an empire built on control, on careful study. He could never subject his future to the roll of a dice, a river's tempestuous waters between him and his throne.

He doesn't feel like that same person right now. The room around him feels like an illusion. His hand is still clenched around his tie, and he forces himself to let go. You're better than this. His fingers clench harder, smooth metal in his palm. The tip of the knife digs deeper into the cover of the book he knocked to the floor at his side, a jagged white line cutting the title in two. He registers it distantly—he's doing that, it's his hand, but it matters so little in the scheme of things.

From the other side of the room, his father's grey eyes stare at him coldly, as if to say, Look at you, my failure of a son, look at you. Who are you pretending to fool? It's fitting, in a fucked-up way. No matter how much time passes, he always ends up on the floor amongst broken things, with his father looking down at him in faint disgust. No matter how hard he tries to distance himself, he always goes back to being that child too scared to breathe too loud in his own house. That's the thing about power—it is not infinite, nor absolute. It is granted. It's what other people give you, not what you claim for yourself. It's the result of a bargain, voluntary or not. As such, it's a shifty, always evolving thing, never eternal. Harry know this—he built his castle of cards perfectly aware something as simple as a gust of wind could blow it away. A bargain is what separates him from nothingness. It's such a fragile thing to base an entire reality on, and yet it happens all the time, because among all those shifty, always-becoming things that make out the very fabric of the world, power is indeed one of the most influential ones.