Chapter Text
They have been together for nearly a year.
Nearly a year spent piecing back together their lives, healing for years spent running and fighting. Except that it isn’t really their lives that they’re healing, but Myrrine’s, and Kassandra is growing tired of pretending otherwise. She knows Alexios is too.
She’s tired, but then she looks at Myrrine and calls her mater, and she goes and stands in the center of the city watching, and sometimes the whole world fades around her and everyone’s voices become an unreasonable din, and she sits on the edge of the wall with her head in her hands, her ears ringing, her heart racing in her chest.
She is trapped, and she has nowhere else to go.
She has not cared about Sparta in years. She should have faced that long ago.
But instead she let herself fall. Ensnared. Trapped. Trapped. Trapped. No way out.
“We’re much the same,” Alexios had told her once, when the gold-white rage of Deimos had still blazed in his eyes, when he’d held his whole body tight to keep from snapping.
She hadn’t seen it then. She sees it now.
Something inside her snaps, and Kassandra of Sparta, Kassandra of house Agiad, stands from the wall a mercenary once more. No loyalty. No tied. A mercenary. A mercenary.
She leaves the polis in a day and does the only thing will truly break her chains.
She takes a contract.
~
The reality of her situation is this– for seventeen years she grew up on an island after being thrown off a mountain by her pater, who had placed his nation over his family, as was their way.
And her mother, grieving and shattered, had traveled endlessly with an infant’s broken body in her arms, had traveled to the ends of the Aegean to reforge a life for herself, but had changed and grown calloused in the process.
And Kassandra had traveled too.
And she’d seen, time and time again, how different Sparta was from the rest of the world, how some families grew and loved and changed with only kindness in their hearts, no drachmae in their pockets, compassion she’d never known–
She’s angry and maybe it’s weak to want all of those things, to want love without bounds, but she’s past the point of caring. She wants to be free.
The contract is of Athenian origin.
And it isn’t the hardest thing she’s done, not really, she’s taken out forts before. But this is different– this fort is Lakonian, and maybe she’s an idiot, but she’s so so so tired–
“You’ve Deimos in you too,” Alexios had told her, and she hadn’t seen it then, but she does now.
She takes a deep breath and folds the contract into one of Phobos’ saddlebags, her gaze flickering toward the horizon. Her breath hitches. She’s suddenly freezing cold. She–
“Kassandra!”
Alexios.
“Quiet,” she hisses, knowing damn well that he can hear her. “You want the whole valley to know we’re here?”
He laughs at her. “Who’s going to hear us? The wolves?”
Kassandra growls, her hands curling into fists around the straps of the bags hanging over Phobos’ flank. “Laugh if you want,” she mutters, “I was trying to focus.”
“On?” He questions, crossing his arms. “You’ve been gone for more than a day, Kassandra. Myrrine is worried.”
Kassandra’s lip curls. She doesn’t say anything, but that seems like it’s answer enough.
“Oh,” Alexios says, humming, contemplating. “That’s the problem, isn’t it.”
Kassandra grunts.
And her brother, calmer now, but still just as capable of snapping back into his rage, into Deimos, looks at her straight in the face and says, “you’re mad at Myrrine.”
And she answers, “no shit.”
If only it was that simple.
“I am tired,” she says, looking up at the sky, at Ikaros, “of pretending to be the Spartan child she wants me to be.”
“You’re not a child,” Alexios begins, but she cuts him off.
“I’m not,” she snarls, “I haven’t been for years. And yet she looks at me as if I’m the same girl I was when they threw me off the mountain. ”
She snarls, letting her temper flare, and kicks up and over onto Phobos’ saddle with a soft growl.
“Tell her I’ve left,” she tells Alexios without so much as a glance in his direction. “Tell her I’m not coming back.”
“I won’t, ” he growls, just as furious, “because I’m coming with you.”
She stares at him.
He stares back.
“No,” she says, shaking her head. “Absolutely not. I won’t be the one who puts a target on your back. Not when you just got rid of the last one.”
He growls again, low and deep, the fury in his eyes burning with a heat that snaps the air around him. “You’re not leaving me.”
She’d traveled to the ends of the Aegean to find Myrrine, once. She’s the one who landed herself in this mess. She’s the one who forged the ties of her own trap. She wanted her family, now she has it. Now she has it. Now she has it.
Alexios is part of that too.
He deserves to make his own decisions. He deserves that much. He deserves so much more.
So she swallows the lump in her throat and quiets the thoughts in the back of her mind, the ones screaming at her to protect him, protect Alexios, protect her baby brother–
–and she slides off Phobos’ flank, her eyes on the horizon again, her hands shaking as she clenches them into trembling fists.
She looks toward the path stretching forward in front of them.
“Let’s go.”
~
Later, as the day stretches into evening, the woman Sparta knows as Myrrine– Myrrine, once-known as Phoenix, the woman who wept and survived the deaths of two children– will glare up at a smoky sky and hear word that the Fort of Praisai is burning, wrecked to ashes, crumbled by demigods who threw lightning and fire from the skies. She will turn to her home in tears, her jaw tight with the force of holding back her despair, and slam the door shut behind her, letting herself crumble only when she knows she is truly alone.
And she will turn toward the emptiness of her home, toward the empty table, dinner-set and smelling of lamb, with a stiff upper lip and a fire in her chest.
She will not forget this, not for a long time. And she will never, ever understand.
~
All is not lost.
In the end, Kassandra learns that this is what Alexios has craved– that they’ve both been suffering behind Sparta’s walls, playing parts that neither of them understand, and that this, the life with bounties on their hands and daggers at each side, is what they’ve both wanted since coming together again, safety and danger be damned.
She is not alone. Not with him. Alexios is her brother, and that is something she will not soon forget.
Around the fire, full of meat and wine, Kassandra tilts her head back and
laughs.