So I press play and we fall back into the boys we were in the Institute. It’s awkward at first, but soon the whisky dispels that and the laughs come easier, the silences stretch deeper. We watch the nights when our tribe cooked lamb in the northern gulch. When we scouted the highlands, listening to Quinn’s stories by the campfire. “We kissed that night,” Cassius says when Quinn finishes a story about her grandmother’s fourth attempt to build a house in a mountain valley a hundred kilometers from civilization without an architect.
“She was climbing into her sleeping roll. I told her I heard a noise. We investigated. When she found out I was just throwing rocks into the dark to get her alone, she knew what I wanted. That smile.” He laughs. “Those legs. The kind meant to be wrapped around someone, you know what I mean?” He laughs. “But the lady did protest. Put her hand in my face, shoved me away.”
“Well, she wasn’t an easy one,” I say.
“No. But she did wake me up near morning to give me a kiss or two. On her terms, of course.”
“And that is the first time throwing stones has ever worked on a woman.”
“You’d be surprised.”
There’s moments I never knew existed. Roque and Cassius try to catch fish together only for Quinn to push Cassius in from behind. He takes a deep drink beside me now as his younger self splashes in the water and tries to pull Quinn in. We watch private moments where Roque fell in love with Lea, where they scouted the highlands in the dark. Their hands brushing innocently together as they stop for water. Fitchner surveying them from a copse of trees, taking notes on his datapad. We watch the first time they sleep snuggled under the same blankets in the gate’s keep, and as Roque takes her off to the highlands to steal his first kiss only to hear boots on rocks and see Antonia and Vixus emerge from the mist, eyes glowing with optics.
They took Lea and when Roque fought, threw him off a cliff. He broke his arm and was swept down the river. By the time he returned, after three days of walking, I was supposedly dead by the Jackal’s hand. Roque mourned for me and visited the cairn I built atop Lea only to find that wolves dug in and had stolen the body. He wept there by himself. Cassius grows somber witnessing this, reminding me of the distress on his face when he returned with Sevro to discover what had happened to Lea and Roque. And perhaps feeling guilty for ever allying himself with Antonia.
There’s more videos, more little truths I discover. But the one viewed the most according to the holodeck was the time Cassius said he’d found two new brothers and offered us places as lancers to House Bellona. He looked so hopeful then. So happy to be alive. We all did, even I, despite what I felt inside. My betrayal feels all the more monstrous watching it from afar.
I refill Cassius’s tumbler. He’s quiet under the glow of the hologram. Roque’s riding his dappled gray mare away from us, looking pensively down at his reins. “We killed him,” he says after a moment. “It was our war.”
“Was it?” I ask. “We didn’t make this world. And we’re not even fighting for ourselves. Neither was Roque. He was fighting for Octavia. For a Society that won’t even notice his sacrifice. They’ll play politics with his death. Blame him. He died for them and he’ll just be a punch line.” Cassius feels the disgust I intended. That’s his greatest fear. That no one will care that he goes. This noble idea of honor, of a good death…that was for the old world. Not this one.
“How long do you think this goes on?” He asks pensively. “This war.”
“Between us or everyone?”
“Us.”
“Till one heart beats no more. Isn’t that what you said?”
“You remembered.” He grunts. “And everyone?”
“Until there are no Colors.”
He laughs. “Well, good. You’ve aimed low.”
I watch him tilt the liquor around in his glass. “If Augustus did not put me with Julian, what do you think would have happened?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Say it does.”
“I don’t know,” he says sharply. He downs his whisky and pours himself another, surprisingly agile in in his cuffs. He considers the glass in irritation. “You and I aren’t like Roque or Virginia. We’re not nuanced creatures. All you have is thunder. All I have, lightning. Remember that dumb shit we used to say when we would paint our faces and ride about like idiots? It’s the deepspine truth. We can only obey what we are. Without a storm, you and I? We’re just men. But give us this. Give us conflict…how we rattle and roar.” He mocks his own grandiloquence, a dark irony staining his smile.
“You really think that’s true?” I ask. “That we’re stuck being one thing or another.”
“You don’t?”
“Victra says that about herself.” I shrug. “I’m betting a hell of a lot that she’s not. That we’re not.” Cassius leans forward and pours me a drink this time. “You know, Lorn always talked about being trapped by himself, by the choice he made, till it felt like he wasn’t living his own life. Like something was behind him beating him on, something to the sides winnowing his path. In the end, all his love, all his kindness, family, it didn’t matter. He died as he lived.”
Cassius sees more than just the doubt in my own theory. He knows I could talk about Mustang, or Sevro, or Victra changing. Being different, but he sees the undercurrent because in many ways his thread in life is the most like my own. “You think you’re going to die,” he says.
“As Lorn used to say, the bill comes at the end. And the end is on its way.”
He watches me gently, his whisky forgotten, the intimacy deeper than I intended. I’ve touched a part of his own mind. Maybe he too has felt like he’s marching toward his own burial. “I never thought about the weight on you,” he says carefully. “All that time among us. Years. You couldn’t talk to anyone, could you?”
“No. Too risky. Kind of a conversation killer. Hello, I’m a Red spy.”
He doesn’t laugh. “You still can’t. And that’s what kills you. You’re among your own people and you feel a stranger.”
“There it is,” I say, raising a glass. I hesitate, wondering how much to confide in him. Then whisky talks for me. “It’s hard to talk to anyone. Everyone is so fragile. Sevro with his father, with the weight of a people he hardly knows. Victra thinks she’s wicked and keeps pretending like she just wants revenge. Like she’s full of poison. They think I know the path here. That I’ve had a vision of the future because of my wife. But I don’t feel her like I used to. And Mustang—” I stop awkwardly.
“Go on. What about her? Come on, man. You killed my brothers. I killed Fitchner. It’s already awkward.”
I grimace at the weirdness of this little moment.
“She’s always watching me,” I say. “Judging. Like she’s keeping a tally of my worth. Whether I’m fit.”
“For what?”
“For her? For this? I don’t know. I felt like I proved myself on the ice, but it hasn’t gone away.” I shrug. “It’s the same for you, isn’t it? Serving at the Sovereign’s pleasure when Aja killed Quinn. Your mother’s…expectations. Sitting here with the man who took two brothers from you.”
“You can have Karnus.”
“He must have been a treat at home.”
“He was actually fond of me as a child,” Cassius says. “I know. Hard to believe, but he was my champion. Included me in sports. Took me on trips. Taught me about girls, in his way. He was not so kind to Julian, though.”
“I have an older brother. His name’s Kieran.”
“Is he alive?”
“He’s a mechanic with the Sons. Got four kids.”
“Wait. You’re an uncle?” Cassius says in surprise.
“Several times over. Kieran married Eo’s sister.”
“Did he? I was an uncle once. I was good at that.” His eyes go distant, smile fading, and I know the suspicions that rest heavy on his soul. “I’m tired of this war, Darrow.”
“So am I. And If I could bring Julian back to you, I would. But this war is for him, or men like him. The decent. It’s for the quiet and gentle who know how the world should be, but can’t shout louder than the bastards.”
“Aren’t you afraid you’re going to break everything and not be able to put it back together?” he asks sincerely.
“Yes,” I say, understanding myself better than I have for a long time. “That’s why I have Mustang.”