There was a murmur of agreement and a few of the assembled personnel practically ran for the door, eager to get away from Fiearius or Arsen or both before they decided to rip each other’s heads off. Fortunately, Arsen didn’t seem interested in disobeying his commanding officer and without another word or even glance in their direction, exited the chambers. Slowly they all filed out until it was only Fiearius, Leta and Gates remaining. Fiearius was looking down at his hand, prickled by a hundred cuts from the table’s glass. Gates was watching Leta patiently.

She said what he knew she was going to say. “We’re not satisfied with your answers. Good people died. Your excuses aren’t enough.”

“I know,” was his somber response. “Regrettable was the word my colleague chose, but unforgivable is how I would describe what happened to the Dionysian. I can’t make it up to either of you, the time for that has already passed. But I would like to discuss what can be done. Tomorrow morning, before the council meets, please come to my office. We should talk through our next steps, just the three of us.”

Leta looked to Fiearius, still nursing his hand and glaring over at Gates in silence. He didn’t seem eager to respond so she did so in his stead. She nodded. “Alright. We’ll be there.”

“Good.” Gates crossed his arms behind his back and headed for the door. “Get some rest,” he called before disappearing out into the Carthian dreadnought’s hallway. “You’ll need it.”

Leta waited a moment after he left before she turned back to Fiearius and took his injured hand in hers. He flinched as she turned it over and examined the wounds. There were still specks of shimmering glass winking out at her beneath the light. “I need to clean these. And you’ll need stitches on a few of them,” she told him quietly.

He let out a heavy sigh. “Let it rot, I don’t care.”

Leta gave him a short glare of annoyance, but it was hard to be annoyed at a man so clearly suffering. It was hard to be annoyed when she herself was suffering along with him. “Hey–” she began to say but he spoke over her.

“Thank you, by the way.” He met her eyes and she felt herself soften at once. “For holding me back.”

“Yeah of course.” She searched over his face. “Threatening them isn’t going to do anyone any good.”

“I know.” He took his hand from her and ran it through his hair, an act that made her wince. Surely that had to hurt, but he didn’t seem to notice. He just stared at the broken table and growled, “I just hate them. I hate them so much.”

Leta couldn’t exactly argue. Still, she murmured, “Fiear…”

“I’m so sick of this,” he growled, grasping the edge of the table with both hands and leaning over it. “I’m sick of being used. By the Society, Dez, Aela, gods, and Carthis? They might just well be the worst of ‘em all. I’m just their little pawn to do their dirty work and draw the media’s attention and prove to the Span that they’re not the assholes they really are. They talk a lot about how important I am, how significant my opinion is, but fuck them, Leta. Fuck them.” He slammed his palm down on the table and Leta couldn’t help but glance up at the cameras she knew were in every corner of this room, recording this entire conversation. “What good is an ally if at the first sign of dissent, they try to off you?”

“You don’t seriously believe that,” she stated rather than asked. “You can’t believe that they were really trying to kill you on Satieri.”

“Is it that hard to believe?” Fiearius growled. “Think about what a story that would be, spun the right way. Beloved war admiral killed on his own home planet. Satieri clearly a cesspool. Better off destroyed.”

“But they need you alive. They need your fleet if they’re gonna win any of the battles still to come.”

Fiearius made a pfft sound and shook his head. “Right, they need my fleet, they don’t need me. I’m just a thorn in their side.”

“But your fleet wouldn’t follow them without you,” Leta argued. Having met most of Fiearius’ captains throughout the years, that much at least seemed true.

“Under Quin, you’re right, it wouldn’t. She would take over and abandon them,” he looked up at her and frowned. “But Quin’s not second in command anymore is she?”

“So you think this whole thing was a giant conspiracy against you?” she clarified, crossing her arms over her chest. “Fiear–”

“No, I don’t–” He groaned and dropped his head again. “I just don’t buy their shit, okay? I don’t trust Carthis. I don’t trust their motivations. And I don’t trust them to not stab me in the back.”

“Well if this war is going to end, they need you and you need them,” Leta pointed out. “What’s your alternative?”

He cast her a serious look. “You know what my alternative is.”

Dez’s alternative, she realized. The dead man’s insane plan for Fiearius to take over the Society. “That’s not an alternative. That’s just more manipulation and lies that’ll end with you dead on some altar in the middle of Paradiex.”

Fiearius rolled his eyes, turned around and leaned against the table. “Probably.” He glanced towards the door and muttered cynically, “I dunno, sounds better than this.”

Leta preferred to assume he was being sarcastic. She put a hand on his back and rubbed her palm in a slow circle. “Come on, we’ll talk to Gates in the morning, we’ll make a real plan. A good plan that works for everyone. You’ve survived this long working with Carthis, you can survive a little longer.” Fiearius snorted at the statement but didn’t disagree. “Let’s just get back to the Beacon, clean you up a bit and get some rest.”

“Right, the Beacon,” he muttered and Leta felt her heart clench. The Beacon. Not the Dionysian. Because the Dionysian was no more.

“I miss her,” Fiearius said under his breath, the weight of the last twenty four hours heavy in his words.

Leta let her arm rest on his back and leaned her head against his shoulder. “Me too.”

Leta might have cringed had she not been fuming. The rest of the war council didn’t know it yet, but they’d all be recoiling in just a moment. But not from her. Oh, she would gladly tear into Arsen’s entirely short-sighted statement. She would be more than happy to rip him to shreds over it. But she didn’t need to. Sure, it would be satisfying to retaliate herself. But it would be even more satisfying to watch Fiearius do it better.

Beside her, his face had turned to stone. He stared across the table at his opponent, eyes glinting with malice, his knuckles protruding from his fists and his whole body trembling ever so slightly. Leta recognized him instantly. The Fiearius that only came out when a line had been crossed. She’d first seen it in the fighting ring, so long ago now, but still engraved in her memory like it was yesterday. She’d seen it when he fought and killed Ludo. Most recently, she’d seen it with Dez.

Usually, the sight of this particular side of Fiearius, the one that lusted for blood and lost himself in the process, sent a wave of worry straight to her heart, but here, now, for once, she embraced it. She didn’t even flinch when his quiet, poisonous words broke the silence.

“Don’t. You. Dare speak of cost to me.”

Arsen, Leta surmised, had never met this man before. If he had, he wouldn’t have dared to even open his mouth to speak. Not that he got any words out.

“Don’t you fucking dare!”

His fist slammed into the table once more and the room was filled with a horrendous crack. The glass coating the surface shattered beneath his hand and two thick lines extended outward from the impact.

“You want to talk cost?” Fiearius spat, oblivious to the blood speckling his hand. “Let’s forget for a moment that I lost my best captain and commander. And that my own fleet took hits during the battle, just as yours did. That we lost three ships of our own, nearly three hundred women and men. Let’s forget that on that level, at least, we’re even. The cost of war. Unavoidable.”

“But you–” Fiearius’ voice started to crack into a horrible manic laugh. His fist opened and his fingers instead clawed at the shattered glass. “You–” The words choked in his throat and he squeezed the shards against his palm, thick red liquid dripping between his fingers. “I expect to lose people to our enemy. I don’t expect to lose them to our own side.”

Finally, Arsen’s resolve seemed to stumble. His frown didn’t soften, but his shoulders fell ever so slightly and Leta couldn’t help but notice him glance toward the still silent Admiral Gates, perhaps begging for help. Gates, however, never took his eyes off of Fiearius, watching the scene unfold with a guarded interest, but little else.

With no one coming to his aid, Arsen mustered his courage. “The incident on the surface–”

“Incident?” Fiearius snapped, a wild look in his eyes. “Incident?!” And a long, terrible laugh to match. “You fucking destroyed my ship! You killed my crew! Five of the most hard-working, loyal, dedicated people who’ve been part of this cause since day one! And you fucking killed them!”

Arsen’s facade crumbled even further. “As I said, the Society scrambled our tech, what happened was–”

“Oh no, no no no,” Fiearius cut him off. “It wasn’t the Society that killed them, it was you. Or whoever the fuck gave the order to blindly fire full power ship weaponry into a populated city. That person? They took something from me. Something valuable. So I want something valuable of theirs.”

“I’m sure we can discuss proper reparations–” started one particularly brave captain, but Fiearius growled his disinterest.

“Proper reparations, I want their fucking head, you understand me? On a stick. Or a platter, if you fancy fucks prefer. But a head. Now. So who the fuck was it?”

He looked around the room, but unsurprisingly, no one spoke up. “Was it you?” Fiearius demanded of Arsen who lost his nerve and looked away. “You?” He swung towards Gates who blinked back at him, unphased. “I don’t give a shit if it’s your godsdamned president, I want blood for this.”

The mention of the Carthian president sent a ripple through the room. Arsen found his guts again. “Soliveré–”

“If you’re not about to give me a name, you can shut your fucking mouth,” Fiearius barked.

“What happened was regrettable, but–”

“Regrettable?!”

“But it was an accident and we will not be resorting to thuggish violence–”

The words seemed to land somewhere volatile in Fiearius’ brain. Leta saw him visibly twinge, like someone had reached inside him and flipped a switch. Reason was replaced entirely with his grief. For the first time since this conversation started, Leta felt more nervous than appeased. “You piece of–”

“We would be happy to provide you a new ship and a new crew and any other reasonable requests you might have.”

Leta watched as Fiearius bared his teeth and tensed every muscle in his body. “Fiear–” she ventured hesitantly. This could turn very bad very quickly. Leta could see it all playing out before her eyes. Fiearius would leap across the table and fix his hands around Arsen’s throat, throwing him to the floor. They would wrestle, the larger man clawing at the other like an animal. Like he’d done to Dez. Then someone, a few people, would seize him and drag him away, kicking and screaming in a frenzy. Any moment now.

And then Arsen sealed the deal. “Until that time, I ask that you yield the floor to rational discussion regarding next steps.”

Fiearius’ breathing went from being jagged and heavy to slow, measured and smooth. Leta saw his stance change. She’d known, walking into this room, that his rage would get the better of him at some point. It was inevitable. But not like this. She knew now she had a half second to act just as Fiearius growled, “I’ll show you rational.” A half second to put an end to this before it began, as only she could.

Leta still wore the bruise on her eye from when she’d gotten involved the day before. A bruise Fiearius had apologized for in every cognizant moment since. A bruise she prayed would be enough to pull him back just as he readied himself to lunge.

Holding her breath, she reached out and grasped his shoulder. “Fiearius.”

For just a flash of a moment, Leta felt his muscles tense and she nearly flinched, expecting to be brushed out of the way, but his eyes flung to hers, demanding explanation and then — then he stopped. His face fell. She swore she saw yet another apology behind his stare. The switch, thank the gods, was turned off.

Across the room, Arsen barked, “Admiral, if you continue to threaten violence on this council, I’ll be forced to restrain you.”

Fiearius spun back towards him. “I’d like to see you fucking try.” But as angry as he sounded, it was different now. More snippy than outright fury. Leta let out a deep breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

Before Arsen could respond, finally, at long last, the one person in this room who hadn’t reacted to a single thing spoke up. “Council, yesterday was a difficult operation for all of us. I suggest we adjourn this meeting and allow some time for heads to cool off. We can reconvene first thing tomorrow to discuss what comes next.”

Dez steeled himself and stuck to his story. “Well I did. I didn’t like what she was doing, but I didn’t try to kill her, Fiearius. It was a–”

“An accident?” Fiearius finished for him, feeling a spike of madness run through him. His knuckles were white and his fingernails, curled into his palm, were starting to draw blood. “Was it an accident? Did you not mean to fuck everything up?!”

“Fiearius–”

“You were just looking out for me, is that it?” He heard himself laughing in a voice that wasn’t his own. “Just trying to act in my best interest?”

Dez took a slow step back.

Fiearius followed him. “It’s not your fault, it was the will of the dov’ha that they die! Was that it?!”

“Fiearius–” it was Leta this time, hesitant and worried, but Fiearius couldn’t bring himself to hear her. His blood boiled and his vision narrowed and all he could see was an image of Aela and Denarian, standing side by side and dripping blood onto the dirty floorboards. And he couldn’t hold it back any longer.

Pride be damned.

The noise that erupted from his mouth as he flung himself at Desophyles Cordova was barely human. It could be identified as many things: fury most of all, grief, pain, despair, vengeance, but sanity was not among them. There was nothing conscious about the way Fiearius attacked, trying all at once to seize Dez’s arms, pummel his fist into his face and rip the flesh from his neck with his fingernails. He wanted blood. He craved the feeling of its warmth on the palms of his hands, the dirt that clung to it, scraping against his skin and riding down the lines of his sweat.

Dez didn’t go down without a fight. When the two men hit the floor with a heavy thump, he tried in vain to hold off Fiearius’ wild thrashing from above him. But there was no force that could stop him now. He felt a fist crack across his cheek and the hot metallic tang of blood spreading through his mouth, but it hardly registered. He was pure energy and adrenaline, a hurricane, a tornado, nothing could stand in his way.

Not that nothing tried.

“Fiearius, stop!” said a voice behind him he couldn’t place as he managed to get his hands around Dez’s throat and squeezed.

“I know you’re mad, but this isn’t the time!” the voice went on. Wasn’t the time? This was the perfect time. There was no place more fitting for an end. Dez was clawing at his wrists, leaving lines of red as he gasped for breath. His legs kicked out beneath him, trying to sway Fiearius’ balance, but it was all useless. Fiearius’ throat laughed a laugh that wasn’t his. Nothing could stop this. It was inevitable.

But then something grabbed his arm and pulled, catching him off-guard. He was so surprised, he didn’t even know anyone else was there, that he let go without resistance, releasing Dez from his hold. Furious, he threw that arm out behind him, feeling it hit flesh and bone just before Dez took his shot and pushed. Fiearius didn’t have the balance anymore to fight it. He was flipped onto his back and pinned down.

“That’s enough,” said Dez through heavy breaths as Fiearius flailed madly under his grip, desperate to get out. But he had the disadvantage now. Dez was bigger, stronger. He was stuck.

“You okay?” he asked someone else and when Fiearius tilted his head to look up at the other presence in the room, he wasn’t shocked to see the wild red hair and dark freckled face of Aela looking back at him.

“I’m fine,” said Aela before focusing on Fiearius. Her eyes were sad, but stern. “Fiear, you need to calm down. We need to leave.”

But Fiearius shook his head, a little and then a lot. “You–” he breathed slowly, grimacing as he still tried to struggle away from Dez. “–You don’t get to tell me what to do anymore. Never again.”

Aela looked briefly confused. “Fiear–”

“Why didn’t you fucking tell me?! What the hell were you doing?!” He finally got a fist out of Dez’s grip and into his ribcage. The man flinched but didn’t let up.

Aela still seemed lost. She glanced at Dez who muttered, “He thinks you’re her,” which made no sense and only served to make Fiearius angrier.

But now she looked at him not with confusion, but pity. She crouched down above his head and carefully put a hand on his temple, but he shook it off immediately. Her touch was poison, she was just as bad as all the rest. She had used him, betrayed him. She was vile. And then she said, “Let him go.”

“You’re fucking kidding,” said Dez.

“I’m not, let him up.” She got to her feet and waited as, understandably reluctant, Dez did as she said, one by one releasing his hold on Fiearius’ limbs. He was right to not want to. The moment Fiearius was free, he leapt to his feet and raised his blood-stained fist to pick up where he’d left off, but a small hand seized his wrist and held it back.

He turned to find Aela looking up at him, stern and serious. “Fiearius. You need to come back to me now.”

He stared at her for a moment, his mind racing. Hadn’t she died? What was she doing here? How dare she show up and order him around? He grit his teeth and ripped his wrist from her grasp. “Fuck you.”

She was unphased. “Fiear.” Both her hands reached up and grasped his face. Her palms were soft and warm and made his skin crawl. He wrapped his fingers around her wrists and was about to push her from him when she gave him pause. “You’re having an episode. You need to come back.”

The words didn’t compute inside his head. Episode? What was she talking about? He wasn’t having an episode, he had an obligation. His son had been killed, he needed to avenge him. His son, Denarian, he–

–was standing in the doorway, his hands shaking, tears starting to well in his eyes. He took a step backwards when Fiearius looked at him, afraid, like he’d been caught where he shouldn’t have been. He shouldn’t have been here. He shouldn’t have seen this.

“Both of you, honestly,” Aela was saying. She didn’t know he was standing there yet. “How many times does this have to happen? Do you not have enough violence in your lives already without bringing it home? Next time maybe I’ll just let you two rip each other to shreds.”

Fiearius didn’t listen to her. His eyes were locked on Denarian’s, trying to apologize without words. The last thing he wanted was for the boy to see him like this. At his worst. But he had. I’m so sorry, he willed across the room. I’m so so sorry.

I’m so sorry I let them kill you.

“Come back to me.”

The hands holding his face turned him back to their owner, but it wasn’t Aela. The red hair beneath her headscarf was now brown, her skin turned to snow and her green eyes shone up at him sadly. “Come back to me,” she whispered again.

“Leta–” Fiearius finally relaxed against her touch, but as he searched over that familiar face, desperate for it to ground him here in reality, he saw what he’d done to it. There was a circle around her eye, tinged red and the beginnings of purple. Was that from– Had he–

“Shit. I–“

“It’s okay,” she spoke over him, shaking her head. “I’m fine. We need to go, okay?”

He was nodding before he knew what he was agreeing to. “Right,” he said for the second time today. “Let’s–”

Suddenly, a great vwhirr erupted out of the window, leaving a space only long enough to wonder what it had been before everything shook so violently that all three of them lost their footing and fell to the floor.

When Fiearius looked up again, the room was filled with smoke and dust. The screams he’d heard before were closer now, just outside. A woman shrieked a name. A child was sobbing. Someone was shouting out orders, telling people to leave, to run, this whole place was going to come down.

“Are they trying to kill you now?” Dez asked as he got to his feet. He held out his arm to help Fiearius up and he took it, dragging Leta with him.

“They should know where we are,” Leta breathed before coughing into the smoke. “They shouldn’t be firing near us.”

“They shouldn’t be firing at all.” Finally, he started to feel his senses come back to him. They needed to act. Quickly. “Leta, grab what you can fit in your pack.” He pointed to the pile of Aela’s documents. “Dez–” He met the man’s stare. Minutes ago, he’d wanted nothing more than to kill him, but now? Now he just wanted to get out of here alive and with the city not destroyed. Dez wasn’t ideal. Dez was a liar, a traitor, scum. But he’d do. “Come with me, let’s see what we’re dealing with.”

“I’ll be right behind you,” Leta promised as she hurriedly scooped whatever she could into her bag. Fiearius didn’t feel guilty leaving her in the room alone as he and Dez ran from apartment 24, down the stairs and out onto the street. She was probably safer in there anyway.

The street was in chaos. Fiearius couldn’t tell where the blast had landed, but it wasn’t far. Everything was in a haze. He could barely make out the silhouettes of buildings against the clouded light of the suns, he could see people running through the streets, carrying what possessions they couldn’t leave behind, desperately clinging to loved ones and scattering in all directions. Where could they go? Where would they be safe?

It was then that he noticed a pair of eyes on him. They belonged to an older woman, one that at first he didn’t recognize through the smoke and through the years. But slowly her face returned to him, younger than it was now, peering through the crack in his apartment door and demanding he pay his rent. When he’d known her, she’d always been frowning and grumpy, but now she was frightened. Of Carthis? Or of him?

He was still trying to figure out which when Dez nudged him with his elbow. Breaking away from his old landlady, he glanced back to ask what he was gesturing at, but he didn’t need to ask. All around him, the people that had been running and fleeing had stopped to stare. They watched, waited, expectantly, as though at any moment he might burst into flames or light or who knew what.

Well, Fiearius certainly didn’t know what. What the hell did these people want from him? If they were looking for a savior, they were looking in the wrong place. As soon as Leta joined them, they were leaving and these people could figure out what was next on their own.

But as confident as he sounded in his own head, his feet didn’t move and as he realized slowly that he knew more of these faces than he’d like to (the man with the dog across the street, the owner of the store at the corner, a woman he’d went on a few dates with way back when), the reality of this, being home, started to sink in.

These people looking at him now weren’t afraid of him, the supposed nefarious Rogue Verdant. They were curious. Patiently waiting to see what he might do next, this man that they’d once shared a home with. In their eyes he wasn’t a story, he was a person, one from the very same ground as they were. These people were his neighbors, people he’d known, celebrated with, greeted every morning. And now they were in danger because of something he had done. He had brought Carthis here. He had trusted them to do as he asked.

Dez had been right to be angry. What the hell had he done?

The next blast hit a block away. The calm in the street vanished in an instant. Those that weren’t running in the opposite direction as fast as they could, weren’t, only because they had fallen to the rocking ground and couldn’t right themselves.

Choking through the smoke, thick and black and flooding the narrow street, Fiearius hurried to the side of his cranky landlady, Dez meeting him on the other, to help her back to her feet.

“Head to the tunnels on Mari’lea!” he shouted, the first thing that came into his head. She might not be safe there, but she’d damn well be safer than here.