Chapter Text
Am I going to have to kill him?
The thought settled hollow and cold in Garen’s stomach as Jarvan turned away from him, shifting smoothly from his rant to the next order of business, paying little concern to the way Garen was looking at him. This newest, heaviest horror settled in beside a pile of other uncomfortable questions Garen found himself asking before he could stop himself. Questions like was Jarvan always like this? Had Garen just missed it, somehow? The prince— now, king— had always voiced sympathy for the plight of the mages, of magicborn. He counted Shyvana, a dragon, as one of his dearest friends, and while Jarvan had never pushed especially hard on any policy to change much, Garen had thought, perhaps, once he was king, it would be different. But now, king he was, and— this was what he was doing? This was how Jarvan behaved? To be destroyed with grief at his father’s death, yes, such a thing was understandable. They were, all of them, wracked with the horror and loss of it, to lose a man so well-loved by his family. To want to see the man responsible brought to justice, too, they all wanted that (but then— an inconvenient little side-trail of questioning— was Sylas responsible for the king’s death? He was far from the only possible suspect, he’d told them he hadn’t done it with no reason to lie about it, what justice was there is chasing a scapegoat?) and to put down a rebellion that threatened his reign was simply an unpleasant necessity of rulership, at times, wasn’t it?
But were Jarvan’s sympathies so loosely held that they were easily thrown aside entirely? To paint every mage with the same brush for the sins of a small number, to order them all rounded up and imprisoned, even those who had committed no crime at all save trying to live peacefully— no, no that wasn’t quite true either, when Garen had asked about Lux, if Jarvan intended to imprison her as well, Jarvan had said no, of course not, Lux would be exempt from such a decree, and that had been a kind of sickening to hear, too. Was that not one of the things the so-called Kingslayer was angry about? The ease with which the privileged were protected from the law, that such laws only applied to the poor and easily-forgotten?
How was that justice?
How was this the first thing Jarvan had decided to do as king?
Why was he doing this? Why was he being allowed to do this?
Was Garen going to allow this?
Xin Zhao had been a grey-faced, hollow-eyed ghost in the weeks since the king’s death, barely speaking and just as ravaged by grief as all who had been close to the late monarch. But now, Garen wondered, what must he be thinking of the king’s son now, after helping raise the man, assuring him of his path. You will be king one day, and you will be a good king, I know it.
And thus far, Xin Zhao had been wrong.
Shyvana, too, had joined them in horror and confusion, her own discomfort increasingly obvious to the point that Garen boggled at the prince’s— king’s inability to notice it. Her loyalty, like Xin Zhao’s, appeared unshaken, even as they grew more and more harrowed by the realization that they were perhaps loyal to a crueler man than they thought.
Garen’s loyalty, meanwhile, was—
It was not shaken. It wasn’t. Garen had sworn oaths to his king, yes, but also to his country, a loophole that Xin Zhao and Shyvana were denied. It would break his heart to kill Jarvan, he didn’t want to kill him, but it would not be the first time Garen had killed someone he did not want to for the sake of Demacia’s wellbeing. It would, of course, be the last— his life would be forfeit after such an act, but then. Well. Let it be the last, if it came to it.
In Nockmirch, Garen had been ready enough to execute an ill-suited king to make way for a better future. The laws had barred his daughter from succeeding him, but what use were laws when they were so foolish as that? It had not come to such violence, thankfully, but if Garen had been willing to so intervene in the matters of a neighboring kingdom for the sake of all who lived there and beyond, should he not be ready to do such things at home, as well? Even if it would mean the end of his life, the eternal shame of his family, how was Garen supposed to allow this?
The mageseekers were suggesting a genocide, or at the very least a situation that would make a genocide incredibly easy to enact whenever they so chose. Garen could not call himself ever a friend to mages and magicborn— he’d obediently raised his sword against them when ordered, he’d pushed his own sister into a tight little box for something he called her safety but had always had just as much to do with his own comfort, he’d consoled himself with rationalizations and justifications and convinced himself of all sorts of comfortable lies (he’d not questioned why Tianna wanted Sylas executed, he’d not even bothered to look at the records, not looked at when Sylas had been imprisoned or how old he’d been at the time, and the shame of incuriosity would haunt him to his grave), but even he could scarcely believe the things Eldred proposed, to say nothing of his second-in-command, a mage herself so consumed with hatred for her own people that every conversation left Garen a new level or horrified (was this what Lux had been told to think of herself?). And Jarvan was listening to them. Eagerly. While Shyvana, magicborn herself, and Garen, brother to a mage, stood right beside him.
If this was who Jarvan was to become— or who he always was, maybe, underneath it all (which was worse? Garen didn’t know) — then Garen would have to kill him.
The realization was an ugly, hollow sort of numbness, something that swallowed every other emotion like a void, but once it fell, Garen knew the horrid truth of it was fact:
If the king continued down this path, if this was the sort of king Jarvan was going to be, then Garen could not allow him to be king.