“Sevro?” Dancer’s voice calls, and a moment later his face swings around the door’s threshold. “There’s something you should see.”
His voice is strained and tight, pulled taut like a singing violin string. Dread blooms, inexplicably, in Sevro’s chest, as he turns from his review of their next planned assault on Mars’ surface, to turn and look.
Dancer is old, his face worn and wrinkled in a way Golds try so desperately to combat. He wears it well, the peppering of white hair and the crinkled crows feet, but there is a paleness about him that immediately sets Sevro on edge.
He stands. “What?”
Dancer glances astray. “I think it’s better if I just show you,” he mumbles. Sevro glowers at him for another moment, but when it does not look like Dancer will relent, Sevro just sighs, shakes out his shoulders, and motions for Dancer to guide him.
In the bowls of Mars, their labyrinthian hallways stretch long and winding. They’re structured in such a way to not cause total collapse if ever the structural integrity was challenged, but the cavernous hallways stretch out like a death sentence, constricting like a snake’s throat.
When Dancer leads him into the control room, everything is dark aside from the large HC screen on the far wall. Its contents are bright, casting a wash of sterile paleness over the control panels and illuminating the Sons’ faces like white moons.
They all turn to look at him when he enters, like there is a collective intake of breath. Tension rises into his shoulders like boiling magma. Sevro glowers at them, unnerved at their silence, as Dancer makes his way towards the screen.
He turns his attention towards it. It’s video footage, somewhere on Lune if he judges the design well. A long, open hall of marble and sandstone pillars, with what could potentially be hundreds or thousands of people watching in the crowded pews. They are all standing.
“What is this?” Sevro growls. No one answers, but Dancer inhales a sharp breath. His hand moves over a panel, and the recording starts to play. It zooms in on a face Sevro has stamped into his memory and burned into the backs of his eyes — Adrius au Augustus. Jackal. His lip curls up involuntarily as he watches the man prowl up and onto the leveled apse.
“What is this?” Sevro repeats, taking a step forward. The door slides closed behind him. His hackles are rising, and he cannot shake the distinct feeling of wrongness that clings to every inch of his skin.
The sound isn’t on. Sevro is glad — he doesn’t know if he could stand that sh*teater’s low, smug purr. The control room is filled with thick, choking silence like the stench of thick storm clouds as they watch the Jackal’s lips move, tugged into a thin, pleased smile as he addresses the throngs of the crowd.
Sevro crosses his arms. “If you dragged me here just to show me this pisshead’s PR work…” the venomous words dry up in his throat when movement catches on the edge of the camera. A figure is dragged out from the left, between two hulking Obsidian guards.
He’s thin and weak, his legs dragging over the steps as he yanked up them, giving no fight. His arms are bound tightly behind his back. He has a black bag over his head, but the stretch of his limbs and the weight of his shoulders is recognisable to Sevro, even after so long apart, even without any solid tendrils of recognition.
The Obsidians dump him on his knees in front of the Jackal, facing the crowd on the podium, and it looks as though it takes all of the prisoner’s energy not to collapse. He’s trembling, detectable even in the camera’s lens.
The Jackal is still speaking, circling around him like an experienced hunter, but Sevro only has eyes for the prisoner. He knows who he is, what is about to happen, and he cannot look away. The Jackal stands behind the man, fists his hand in the hood, and tears it off.
It’s Darrow. Of course it’s Darrow. Even with the black blindfold over his eyes, Sevro would recognise the narrowness of his cheeks, the tilt of his neck, the spun gold of his hair. He’s himself, but not. He’s thinner, gaunter, with skin like wax pulled over his cheekbones. His head bows. He’s kneeling. Darrow would never kneel.
Have they broken him?
Sevro’s hands close into fists. He takes unwilling steps forward until he’s standing in the center of the room, watching the close-up of Darrow’s face.
He traces the details, trying to find any slip up, any tiny characteristic they might have missed. It’s his freckles, his thin scar over his cheek, the mottled of old burns across his collarbone, his sigils burnt into the backs of his hands.
“Put the sound on,” Sevro barks to one of the sons, a nervous looking Red. She hesitates for just a moment before flicking a switch.
There’s a glitch of static, and then the Jackal’s voice pours in through the speakers. Just the sight of him set Sevro to anger. The sound of him makes some long-slumbering beast rear up in his gut.
Behind the Jackal, he spots Aja and the other Furies, and finds Octavia, the bitch, hiding in a fleet of Peerless Golds. His blood is boiling.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the Jackal says. “I stand here before you as a bringer of justice and peace. I am the hand of the Sovereign, of her Grace, Octavia au Lune, here to correct a mighty miscarriage of justice that has befallen our people.”
On the ground, Darrow hardly looks to be breathing.
He’s quiet and still, but not in that usual predatory way of his, a stillness born from the fact that he knows he has his enemy cornered. This is— something else. It’s similar to the way he was still when Fitchner took him down from Octavia’s starcraft during the Iron Rain, bloody and torn and bruised, but not quite the same. This is a softer kind of quiet. Something so unsuited to Darrow’s skin that it sets Sevro’s teeth on edge.
“Here kneels Darrow au Augustus. The Reaper of Mars, some might call him. The man who has claimed to conquer Mars, but did so for less than a week.” The Jackal laughs, and his hand closes in Darrow’s hair, the strands so matted and dirty they are more copper than gold. He yanks his head back, exposing the long, vulnerable line of Darrow’s throat.
Sevro is clenching his hands so tight his nails split into his palms. His eyes continue to search Darrow’s form, not daring to look away from him, searching for any kind of weakness that might tell him that this is not Darrow, that all of his searching has not been in vain.
The Jackal’s hand rests possessively around Darrow’s throat, long slender fingers like a restrictive collar as Darrow’s throat bobs instinctively.
“This man is nothing but a treasonous coward. He has sown seeds of weakness across Mars, across the Galaxy, and this society will not stand for such deceit. We must cut away the rot.”
Sevro tears his eyes away, turning to Dancer. “Is there any way we can disrupt the signal?” he asks tersely, his voice somewhere between a beg and a snarl. “Get this sh*t off the HC.”
Dancer’s breath quivers. “This isn’t live, Ares,” he mutters.
Sevro looks between them, these Sons that look to him for leadership, to step into the vacuum left in Darrow’s abduction. They watch him with forlorn eyes. Someone in the back is crying. More than one, he notices now, but they do so silently, tears falling down thin cheeks.
They have seen this before. That is why Dancer brought him here. They know what is coming, and Sevro does too.
“Get out,” he snarls.
Dancer takes a sympathetic step forward, his hand outstretched, “Sevro—”
“I said get out.”
Dancer withdraws his hand, frightened by the whetted edge to Sevro’s words, like a razor sharpened to a perfect knife-point. He looks over to the other Sons and nods, and they all depart in a swift softness that makes Sevro want to hurt something, hurt someone.
Hurt the Jackal. He returns his eyes to the screen.
The Jackal is still talking, still spewing nonsense. Sevro wants to take out his throat with his teeth, see how smug the bastard would look with Sevro’s canines ripping through his jugular, watching the light fade from his pale eyes.
There’s another gold beside him, carrying a scroll. It looks as though it is made of paper, an outdated invention, like this is some traditional, archaic ceremony, and not a murder.
A murder, because Sevro is not an idiot. He knows what is coming.
“For his crimes against the Sovereign, the Society, and the people he claimed to protect,” the Jackal says. He still has his hand around Darrow’s throat. Thin, still, wrong Darrow. But Darrow nonetheless.
“This terrorist has killed millions, attempted to take the life of our ruler and countless imperial staff, planted bombs, conspired with the Sons of Ares, and launched a coup on his own soil. I say, we will not stand for it.” The Jackal is spitting the words, his eyes light with glee. “There must be consequences, and by the ruling of our Society, the only Punishment severe enough for this criminal’s actions is death. This Reaper is nothing but a violent lawbreaker and a senseless revolutionary. Today, and tomorrow, and from now on, the Society will tolerate no longer rotten men like him. He falls today, his terrorists fall tomorrow.”
He watches Darrow’s lip tighten into a flat line. Sweat beats along his eyebrow. The Jackal lets go of his throat and his head sags forwards, covering the blindfold with his overgrown golden hair. The Jackal accepts a weapon from another assistant and Sevro’s eyes narrow on it.
A swingblade.
Only the Jackal would be so cruel. One of Sevro’s molars cracks under the pressure of how hard he’s gritting his teeth. He feels sick. He wants to turn it off, but feels as though that would be a betrayal. He must live through Darrow’s suffering, must find strength in it.
Someone unties the blindfold. It falls into Darrow’s lap and Sevro’s heart seizes. The man blinks and squeezes his eyes shut, trying to acclimatize to the light. Sevro wonders angrily how long he’s been wearing the damned thing. Then his eyes search up to one of the camera drones above him, and his eyes lock to the lens.
Sevro wonders who he searches for, beyond the electrical drone, beyond the lens. Is it Fitchner, or that bitch Mustang? Two-faced Roque or Dancer or Sevro himself? Is it that wife of his, the family Sevro’s people rescued from the Lykos mines?
Darrow breaks the gaze and looks away. He does not try to get up, does not try to fight or cry any last words of empowerment. He is defeated. Sevro begs him to move, to do something, to show that not all is lost. He doesn’t. It is terrifying.
What have they done to him? A torture so terrible not even the Reaper of Mars could endure it.
The Jackal flexes the blade, tossing it from hand to hand until he’s comfortable. Then he stands to Darrow’s side, closing the distance between them, and holds the blade over Darrow’s neck, tip of the blade pressing a thin, blooded line over the knobs of his spine, so visible even beneath the black uniform.
Darrow’s eyes close. Sevro breathes, “no—” and the Jackal’s arm flexes. The blade catches in the light and comes down in an arc almost too fast, too powerful to watch. There’s a moment of resistance that the Jackal tears through, then the spray of blood and sinew. Darrow’s head falls. The rest of him slumps after, a corpse spilling over the marble podium.
The crowd roars, so deafening it crackles against the holocam’s microphones.
Sevro is numb.
The Jackal lifts the blade, soaked crimson with the Reaper’s blood. Then the footage ends, cuts out and soaks the room in black. Sevro stares at the dark screen. His heart beats a pounding drum in his ears, so loud it is all he can hear, a cry for action and violence. A cry too late.
He goes to the camera and watches the footage again. And again. And again. He sweeps it over and over until Darrow’s death scorches the backs of his eyes, and he could retrace every smear of blood and slight against him until Sevro has a chance to bring that ire down on the Jackal, on the Sovereign, on the Golds themselves.
On his sixth viewing, Sevro finally notes which part of the footage made him so uneasy. Darrow is unblindfolded, and he looks up at the camera. Then looks away. That is what strikes Sevro as so potantly uneasy that it causes him to bristle like the wolves he so mimics. Darrow would not look away. He did not look away when his wife was hanged, he did not look away when the Jackal killed Pax, or when he slaughtered Apollo, or when Quinn bled out.
Sevro always thought the pain gave him strength.
Darrow never looks away.
His resolve hardens like tempered metal, cooling from molten to ice cold. That is not Darrow. They may have fooled Dancer, they will have fooled Mustang and Dancer and the Sons and the rest of the world, but not Sevro.
They used to call Sevro the Reaper’s shadow. Only so close to a man skirting the line between mortal and godhood could allow him to soak in some of that divinity, and notice when it is absent.
