Chapter 330: Nope Said The Camel

Kael Ashenvale had survived death, a frozen river, and a threesome. Blair Drakencrest redecorating in his absence was the final straw. The camel looked at the new throw pillows and said, "fuck this shit. Put me back in the proverb."

"This isn’t my room. I’m in the wrong room. We passed it. Turn around."

He looked at the door number. Looked at the room. Back at the number.

Maddox walked through the door behind him carrying Guinevere like a bride. His eyes swept the room the way a king’s eyes sweep a room he couldn’t give less of a damn about.

"What? I don’t see anything different."

"You don’t SEE anything DIFFERENT?" Kael’s voice climbed three octaves. He gestured at the room with both arms. The white. The navy. The throw pillow that Kael hadn’t mentioned yet but was absolutely going to mention because it had a goddamn anchor embroidered on it.

"Not really," Maddox replied with a shrug.

"There is an ANCHOR on my PILLOW. An ANCHOR. I am a DRAGON. I FLY. What part of that says ANCHOR? I left brown. I came back to the inside of a goddamn SEASHELL."

"This is all in your head, Kael. One of us needs sleep and it isn’t me."

"Maddox. Look at the walls."

Maddox looked at the walls the way a man looks at walls that have always been white.

"Walls look fine."

"They are WHITE."

"They’ve always been white."

"They were BROWN."

"Were they?"

If the Gods were watching, the award for Best Actor in a Domestic Gaslighting would have gone to Maddox Drakencrest for a performance so dedicated that even the walls started to wonder if they were the problem.

Kael’s face went through a journey that started at outrage, passed through disbelief, took a hard left at betrayal, and parked permanently at homicidal. The veins in his neck were doing cardio.

"Yes. They were. Brown. THIS," he gestured at the room with both arms, "is a premeditated, cold-blooded, sister-executed shitfucking crime scene."

Sterling entered. His eyes moved across the space, taking inventory of his surroundings the way trained officers do.

"Looks clean," Sterling observed.

"Clean," Kael repeated.

"Yes. Organized. Functional."

"You’re describing a DIFFERENT room."

Sterling blinked once. "I’m describing this one."

Ryker walked in with the energy of a tourist who came for round two. Then he glanced around, eyes narrow. "Has this always been white? The curtains are nice."

Ryker’s curtain-complimenting, chaos-condemning, completely-oblivious contribution to the conversation was the final dick-kick. Kael looked at him like he had taken his firstborn.

"No," Kael snapped. "My curtains were beige. My room was beige and brown, Ryker. The walls were. The bed was brown." Kael glanced down at the giant rug with an anchor on it that looked like it belonged in a child’s bedroom. "Where the fuck is Gerald?"

Ryker looked at Sterling. Sterling looked at Ryker. Neither man had the faintest fucking memory of what this room looked like before, because neither man had ever paid attention to Kael’s interior design choices.

"Who’s Gerald?" Griffin asked from the doorway.

The question roundhouse-kicked Kael directly in the grief gland.

"Gerald was my rug, Griffin. A beautiful, loyal, dead animal who never once betrayed me and has apparently been removed from the premises without my consent." The eulogy for Gerald was happening in real time, delivered at a volume that Gerald himself would have found excessive.

Griffin stepped inside and looked around with genuine appreciation. "Honestly, Sir, it looks great in here. I was expecting broken glass and blood stains from the other night. The new setup is a massive upgrade."

Every word of that sentence was a knife wrapped in a compliment and Griffin had zero idea he was holding the blade. The young warrior was being sincere. Painfully, beautifully, catastrophically sincere, the way only a man who had recently headbutted a wall sconce and was working with a mild concussion could be. He meant every word.

"An UPGRADE." Kael looked at Griffin with the expression of a general being told by a cadet that the enemy’s flag was prettier than theirs. "You think THIS is an upgrade."

"The books are organized by color."

"THAT’S THE PROBLEM! I HAD THEM ALPHABETIZED AND CATEGORIZED. I DON’T GIVE A DAMN ABOUT COLOR."

Kael ripped a book off the shelf. Held it up. "This used to be here." He jammed it three shelves down. "And THIS was here." He grabbed another and shoved it sideways. "I had it organized. Now it isn’t organized."

"I can’t tell the difference," Maddox stated, still holding Guinevere, still looking unbothered, still winning the war by refusing to acknowledge it existed.

"Rainbow order. That’s how these are organized," Kael snapped. "What the fuck is this shit."

"Taste the rainbow, Kael," Ryker mused.

Kael processed ’taste the rainbow’ the way a bull processes a red flag: briefly, violently, and then he charged at the next thing, which was his bed.

"WHERE IS THE CHALK LINE?"

"What chalk line?" Maddox asked.

"Do you know how hard it is to get two kings to share a bed without a murder? I do. Because I solved it. With chalk. The simplest tool known to man and it worked perfectly and now it’s GONE and if those two ever need to share again we are starting from SCRATCH."

"I think the cleaning crew probably wiped it," Griffin offered helpfully with the sincerity of a man who had no idea he was poking the dragon.

"The cleaning crew doesn’t WIPE chalk lines, Griffin. The cleaning crew cleans floors. Chalk lines are infrastructure."

The difference between floors and infrastructure was invisible to everyone in the room except Kael, the only man alive who classified chalk as load-bearing and would die on that hill, structurally.

"Sir, with respect, we can draw another one."

The room was white. The room was navy. The room was clean, organized, and color-coded instead of alphabetized. It was everything Blair had intended it to be and nothing Kael had left behind. And somewhere underneath the rage about bookshelves and the eulogy for Gerald and the war over chalk, a man was standing in a room that used to be his and realizing that coming home doesn’t always mean arriving at the place you left.