Themis of Kalliphae

1 | Escaping the Gilded Cage

Themis never stopped counting the turns. He'd known the palace by heart, every stair worn smooth by decades of sandaled feet, every column spaced twice the width of his outstretched arms, every door that creaked and didn't; and Themis had used every inch of it. But the city beyond the palace walls was a half-remembered maze, learned only in pieces during the rare errands his father had trusted him to run alone, and never at a dead sprint, never with his lungs already screaming before he'd cleared the second street.

He didn't remember deciding to run. Only the suffocating pressure that pounded in his skull every time he felt Marsyas's arms around his waist and face, tending to Themis like he hadn't been the one to take away the only colors in the servant's life. He remembered that everything had felt right, he knew the palace schedule, the guard's rotations, who typically roamed the halls in the dead of night.

The now as the door of Marsyas's chamber gave way under his palm, the endless silence of the halls when the blind boy who was supposed to be recovering was running.

His feet paid for it now; no time for sandals, no time for anything but the door and the dark and the distant, dreadful certainty that somewhere behind him a man was soon waking to an empty bed and the whole span of his fury would come down upon the city—find him, find Themis.

Themis knew Marsyas. The prince wouldn't shout, not at first. The guards would be moving by now, if they weren't already. He knew how it worked — he'd watched it work, from the safe side of it, for seven years. A missing servant meant nothing. A missing favorite meant torches in every alley before the prince had finished dressing.

So, he'd run past safe. Past streets until the ground itself changed under him. Packed earth giving way to something wilder and harsher — wild shrubs, roots and stone that hadn't been laid down by an architect's hands in a very long time. He could feel the wet give of blood between his toes with each stride, and he did not stop; stopping was a luxury reserved for men who weren't being hunted.

His eyes hurt. Gods, they hurt — a raw, cored-out ache that had nothing to do with sight, because there was no sight left to lose, only the memory of the taking and hands holding his head still. Even through the blindfold, even with the salve his own fingers had smeared on with more desperation than skill, the old wound throbbed in time with his pulse.

So you'll never look at another man again.

He ran from that voice as much as he ran from the guards.

He climbed, palms finding cool, old stone — worked stone, shaped by hands, not raw rock — and something in him, some animal instinct running far below conscious thought, said: ruins. Old. Safe, maybe. Empty, maybe. Ruins meant no one lived close enough to hear a servant crashing through the undergrowth like something hunted.

His legs were on fire, burning threads of pain up his calves and thighs. Themis didn't know how long he'd been running, time blurring, lung burning with each pull of air as his throat was as dry as the stone beneath his palms. The cuts lacing his arms and legs had gone from sharp to hot, swollen, throbbing — infected already, probably, or well on their way. He didn't have the luxury of caring yet.

The old ground felt like the kind that hadn't felt a broom or a sandal in years, maybe decades. He could tell that much from the texture alone: undisturbed dust has a particular give to it, softer than dust that gets walked through. It reminded him of the secret passageways Marsyas would swoop him away to 'excursions'. It still felt fadingly warm from the evening's baking sun.

He staggered back until his shoulder met a wall, vines climbing down its face and pressing into his back. Themis slid down without meaning to, legs buckling, and he sat there in the dirt, breath loud and chest heaving in the silence. Then, he got his feet under him, knees drawn up close and let himself shake.

Minutes passed. He counted his own breaths the way his father had once taught him to count a room full of strangers — a way to keep his mind from running somewhere worse. In. Out. In. The panic receded by degrees, the way a wave pulls back from a shore it's already flooded, leaving behind only the wreckage: burning feet, burning lungs, burning eyes, and underneath all of it, quieter and worse, the disbelieving thought that he had actually done it. He was out. He was out, and no one's hand was on him, and no one was telling him to sit prettier, speak softer, be smaller, be grateful —

He let his head fall back against the stone and allowed himself, for exactly as long as it took to draw one full breath, to believe he might be safe.

It'd be a while before anyone thought to look here, he told himself. Hopefully.

The ruins held its silence around him; thick, old silence, the kind that had settled into the stones over years and years of nobody coming to disturb it. No cart wheels. No sandaled feet on cobble. No voice pitched low and honeyed and utterly without mercy underneath it. Just wind combing through broken pillars somewhere above him, and his own pulse slowing, unclenching, degree by degree, in his throat.

Then he heard it, a sound.

Not wind. Not some small night creature startled by his crashing arrival. Something with weight behind it, close, closer than he's expected. He went utterly still, head turning toward the sound as he listened. His hand found the hilt of the knife he'd stolen during his escape, a small comfort, tucked crude and awkwardly against his hip. Something told him that movement would be a mistake, so he waited.

If death has come for me tonight, he thought bitterly, then let it. I'm done running from things I can't see.

He waited, back to the wall, for whatever was going to answer him.

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2 | What Isn't Human

He'd mapped the ruins the way he mapped everything: by hand, by foot, by the different qualities of echo off broken stone versus open air. He knew which fallen column marked the edge of what had once been an archway. He knew where the ground dropped a hand's width without warning and had stopped catching his toe on it after the third day. He knew the particular cool of the inner chamber where he slept now, and the particular warmth of the ledge where he liked to sit in the late afternoons, when the sun found its way through whatever had once been a roof and lay heavy and gold-feeling against his skin, or so he imagined it looked, since he had only the heat of it to go on.

He had not expected to be fed. He had not expected, on the second night, to wake from a nightmare with his own scream still caught in his throat and find that he was, inexplicably, still alone — no hand grabbing his jaw to quiet him, no voice hissing at him to be still, only distance kept and silence offered, which had confused him more than cruelty would have. He had not expected, by the fifth day, to stop flinching quite so hard at every sound that wasn't his own.

He also had not expected the hands; hands was the closest word he had, though from the first evening something about them had struck him as not quite matching the word. Broader than a man's, perhaps. He'd felt them only sparingly. Passing him a bowl. Steadying him before he'd tripped over a small ledge. Always brief. Always withdrawn a half-second before he could really study what he was touching, as though whoever — whatever — belonged to those hands had a rule about it that Themis wasn't told and had learned, instead, by the small, consistent absence of anything more.

He hadn't pushed. Two weeks in, he already understood that one didn't ask the questions that might end their welcome. He'd survived seven years in a palace by knowing exactly which doors not to open, and this felt, in its way, like another one of those doors: closed for a reason he didn't need to understand yet, if ever.

Still. He noticed things. He'd always noticed things; it was the only sense he had left that no one had ever managed to take from him. He noticed that his companion moved differently than what he'd come to expect from people in the palace. He noticed the voice, when it came, had a resonance to it that didn't sit quite where a human chest would put it, low in a way that seemed to come from someplace deeper than lungs should allow. He noticed, once, an evening breeze carrying a scent that wasn't sweat and wasn't earth and wasn't anything he had a name for, gone before he could place it.

He had decided, somewhere around the tenth day, not to think too hard about any of it. Whatever his host was, they had not touched him without asking. Had not raised a hand to him once, not even the small cruelties he'd learned to expect as simply the cost of being near anyone with power over him. Had, if anything, gone out of their way to keep a careful distance he hadn't asked for and found himself, against all his better instincts, grateful for. After Marsyas, not touching him had become its own kind of gift, however strange the shape of the hand offering it.

It was the fourteenth evening when the distance closed by accident.

He'd been reaching for the waterskin, following the sound of it being set down nearby, his fingers moving through the dark the way they moved through every dark now, unbothered, certain. He miscalculated by a hand's width. His fingers found not leather but them, and closed before he could stop himself, around something that was not a wrist.

For one full second, Themis didn't understand what he was holding. It wasn't human, that was for certain. The wrongness of it all only caught once he processed the thought fully. He let go so fast he nearly tripped back.

His heart thumped in his chest hard, having everything to with the fourteen days of quietly, deliberately not asking the question he had just answered for himself by accident. Not human. Not anything close to human, and he had been sleeping four paces from it every night, had eaten food from hands he now understood were not exactly hands at all, had let his guard down — actually, genuinely down, for the first time since before he could remember — around a creature he had no name for.

Themis didn't scramble back, only caught in a flinch as his breath came to fast and too loud in his own ears. His hand, the one that had touched it, he held slightly away from his body as though the wrongness might still be clinging to his fingers. Every old lesson surged up at once in his father's voice, low and gruff: the things that aren't men are worse than the men, boy, because at least a man's cruelty makes sense. The temple stories the kitchen women used to murmur about tricksters wearing kind faces long enough to earn your trust before the mask came off. He was blind and unarmed of anything but a stolen kitchen knife and folly, and he had just discovered that the creature sharing this shelter was not, had never been, what he had let himself believe.

And yet.

The thought arrived before he could stop it, unwelcome and stubborn and entirely too calm for how badly his hands were shaking: they have never once hurt me.

Fourteen days. No hand raised. No voice sharpened to cut. No hunger in the way they'd spoken to him, none of the slow, patient calculation he'd learned to detect in men long before they ever acted on it. And by every measure he knew how to take, nothing about this...this thing, had ever once been deemed as a threat.

That didn't make it not dangerous. He knew enough of the world he'd grown up in to know that gods and monsters wore kindness like a coat when it suited them, that mercy from something like this could be strategy rather than nature. He knew he had no way, blind as he was, to verify a single thing he believed about the creature he'd been living beside. He knew all of that, and some small, exhausted, traitorous part of him thought it anyway: safer than the palace. Safer than a man who called himself in love.

"You could have told me," he said finally, and was faintly surprised his voice came out steady. Not accusing, closer to tired. The voice he used when he already suspected the answer wouldn't satisfy him but asked anyway, out of some stubborn insistence on being spoken to honestly.

"Whatever you are. I would have found out eventually. I'd have rather you told me than let me learn it with my hand." He didn't move from the wall. Didn't reach for the knife at his hip, though his fingers twitched toward it once before he made them still.

Weighing two weeks of careful distance and unbroken safety against the sudden, cold knowledge of not human — and came out, against every instinct his father had ever drilled into him, closer to patience than fear. Well, they were still the gentlest thing that's ever let him stay.

3 | Nightmare, Lingering Hands

In the dream, it was always the hand first.

A calloused hand in his hair, making him believe that the night was going to be nothing but stillness or those conversations that bled into the late night as it trailed through the strands. As peaceful it could have gotten for Themis the prince's chambers before the shove, before the gentleness slipped far too easily into the tightening of a fist that scent pain through Themis's scalp.

Marsyas had never once touched him gently as a prelude to anything good unless he was in a particularly good mood. No one will care, the voice said, warm and reasonable, close against his ear like a confidence between friends. You're already half-blind anyway. What's left to lose.

He tried to speak. In the dream he could never speak, his voice swallowed somewhere sound made no noise except for the rhythmic pounding of panic. Colors shifted, his fingers burned from trying to fight it off.

So you'll never look at another man again.

Then the pain, sharp and sudden, was total and inescapable and already too late to run from. A burning sting first as pressure seeped into his sockets, wetness that made the fingers slid against his lids as he was held down and straddled. The tears didn't register, only the warmth that he soon recognized as blood — though it would take days after the real night for that distinction to matter to him at all.

The hand in his hair changed.

It always changed, somewhere in the dream's slow unspooling — fingers thickening, roughening, a texture his sleeping mind reached for and found the only recent memory that fit: not skin, not quite, something ridged and cool sliding along his scalp where warm cruel fingers had been a breath before. And then the hand became claws, and the claws found his face where the pain already lived, and dug in exactly where it already hurt worst, tearing where hands had already taken everything there was left to take.

He didn't understand, even asleep, why the two things had merged. Why the one gentleness he'd found in fourteen days had forged itself into the one horror he couldn't outrun, only that it had, the way nightmares latched onto anything close enough to reach.

Color guttered out around the edges of it, the last memory of color he owned collapsing into the same flat nothing that had been his waking world for weeks now. There was no fighting it. He tried (some part of him always tried) fists closing on nothing, legs kicking against a body that in the dream refused to obey him, and it made no difference at all, the way it had made no difference then.

He woke without sound, throat working around a sound that clicked and caught and went nowhere. He lay rigid for a long moment, heart hammering, before his mind caught up to where he was: not the prince's chamber, not that night, but the ruins, stone at his back, the blindfold damp and clinging where his own tears had soaked into it without his permission.

He hissed, low, more at himself than anything, and pressed the heel of his hand hard against his brow as if pressure alone might push the ache back down where it belonged. It didn't work. Never did. Weeks now, and the wound behind his eyes still throbbed when the dream dragged him back through the taking of it.

He needed air. He needed, more specifically, to not be anywhere, not near enough to anything that might reach for him before he was ready to be reached for. And he needed to change the salve and bandages. He pushed up from where he'd been sleeping, movements too fast, his usual balance and grace nowhere to be found while his hands still shook and his breath still came in those short, humiliating gasps he couldn't smooth out no matter how hard he tried.

He found a wall. Followed it, palm dragging along old stone, until the stone turned a corner and gave him a smaller space to curl himself into; knees drawn to his chest, shoulders pressed into the angle where two broken walls still met, as far from open ground as the ruins would give him tonight. Somewhere that felt, however irrationally, like it had fewer directions a hand could come from.

Themis didn't call out. He was careful to keep his breathing quiet enough that it wouldn't carry, his head facing down out of habit for tears that would only wet the blindfold. He didn't want to be touched. Not now, not even by the one presence in two weeks that had never once given him cause to flinch. He wanted, just for a little while, to be a shape in a corner that no one reached for at all.

His shoulders shook with the effort of keeping the rest of him still. It still hurts, he thought, and hated how much like a child the thought sounded, hated that weeks later his body still hadn't gotten the message that it was over, that the hand in his hair was in the past, that no amount of running put enough distance between himself and a wound that lived, apparently, inside his own skull where no distance could ever reach it.

He pressed his forehead to his knees and breathed. In, hold, out, the old counting his father had taught him for surviving rooms full of men who might hurt him, repurposed now for surviving a room that held only himself, and waited, silent and curled small in the dark he no longer needed eyes to know, for the shaking to pass on its own.

4 | Vulnerable Bath & Watched

Themis had found the thermae a week ago, mostly by accident, a low archway he'd nearly missed and almost knocked his head against. The air had been cooler, damp in a way that spoke of water long undisturbed and mysteriously clear. His rough fingers found the edge of what had clearly been a proper bathing chamber, tiled steps leading down into water gone cold with neglects. Still, it was water, enough to submerge himself in but he didn't like the fact it seemed...new in the midst of a place like this.

Who knew what unseen things would be in there?

But it was enough after a long while of dust and sweat clinging to him; to feel clean and like a person again.

He'd taken to bathing here most evenings since. Today was no different, or shouldn't have been.

The soap wasn't his, not really, just found among the strange accumulation of things that simply appeared near his sleeping corner some mornings, unexplained and unquestioned, the way most things about this place had become unexplained and unquestioned by a mutual, unspoken agreement. It lathered thick and fatty between his palms, faintly smelling of olive oil as he worked it up his arms, chest, and the raised ropes of scarring across his back that his own hands knew better than any mirror ever had. The water lapped lazy and cold around his waist as he scooped some water to wet his hair.

For a while, that was all there was: his routine of cold water, good soap, and the particular unguarded quiet of having himself left alone. The salve for his eyes sat in its bowl at the tiled edge of the bath. He'd almost forgotten, in these past minutes, to hold himself the way he usually held himself. Shoulders less braced, muscles slack as he allowed himself to properly sigh instead of huff, eyes closed in something close to bliss. A rare thing, something he hadn't realized until he felt it slipping away from him again.

*Because he was not alone. A sinking certainty that crawled up his spine as he went still, listening to the echoes he'd learnt to parse in this bath chamber. It wasn't anything so clumsy as a footstep or a shifted stone, but the air felt different, as though another presence occupied the room somewhere.

Themis knew what attention felt like. What {{User}}'s presence felt like.

The heat that crawled up his neck had nothing to do with embarrassment and everything to do with a sudden, intense shame — that he wasn't pleasant to look at like this, Marsyas's words that still clung to his skin and thoughts over the years.

His first instinct was to curl in on himself, arms crossing over the worst of the scarring on his arms. An old reflex of a body that had spent years being looked at and rarely were the reasons kind. He caught it halfway, made himself stop as his head turned to where he thought they were.

"You could announce yourself," he said aloud, voice echoing. Themis didn't move to cover himself further, only wince when he attempted to deliberately narrow his eyes.

"Well?" He tilted his head, the corners of his mouth turning down and he seemed faintly irritated. "You can come out with it now. Whatever's on your mind. I promise I'm harder to unsettle than I look."

5 | Gentle Hands

It had taken the better part of a month for Themis to let anyone near his back.

He hadn't done it on purpose, but it showed in the gradual way he let them closer, in the small shifts in their dynamic lately. He'd been sitting near the low fire someone else always seemed to keep fed, working the last of the day's tension out of his shoulders with his own hand, wincing at how little good it did him, and when the offer came the way most offers here were made, without pressure behind them, he hadn't said no.

He'd said, instead, "Fine," in the voice he used when he wanted to sound like he was granting a favor rather than admitting he wanted something. Then he'd gone and lain down on the bedding before he could think better of it.

Themis lay on his stomach now, arms crossed beneath his head, cheek turned to one side against his own forearm. He'd kept the robe half on out of some old habit of modesty — draped loose over his shoulders and arms, the lower half of him wrapped in a length of worn cloth that passed for a towel here. His fingers, idle, traced the broken edge of the wall within reach, the small pits and seams of old stone, grounding, familiar, something to hold his attention while the rest of him braced.

He was still bracing when the first touch landed.

It was, as it always seemed to be here, careful past the point of necessity, a testing kind of contact, a question asked with pressure rather than words, pausing just shy of his skin as if waiting for him to flinch and take it back. He didn't. He made himself not. His whole body had gone very still, the old, familiar stillness, except this time it wasn't the stillness of a man waiting to be hurt. It was something closer to disbelief, holding its breath to see if it would be rewarded.

The 'hands' (and he'd stopped weeks ago trying make sense of it, let it be without needing to translate it into anything human) settled against the worst of the scarring first. The long, raised lines that ran shoulder to hip, old whip-marks gone dark and ridged with age, lumpy, a map of a life he didn't often let himself think about in daylight. He felt them read the terrain the way his own fingers read a wall: without hurry, without commentary, simply learning the shape of what was there.

He'd expected, if he was honest with himself, for it to hurt. Not because they'd been anything but gentle with him this past month, but because so little had ever touched this particular geography of his body without meaning to remind him what it was for; work, a canvas, a lesson, a punishment made permanent. His shoulders had gone rigid in anticipation of an ache that didn't come.

Instead, the pressure worked, slow, into the muscle beneath the scarring. Real muscle, real tension, the sort that lived coiled in his back long before he'd ever run from a palace, long before the first mark had ever been laid across his skin at all. Themis felt himself tense harder for a moment, everything telling him that a hand on his back was a hand deciding what to do with him — and then, achingly slow, he felt the opposite happen. The muscle gave. Not all at once. In small, slow slumps, and his breath went out of him in a long, unsteady rush he hadn't meant to let show.

No one had touched his back like this. Not once, not ever, not in twenty-four years of a body that had been handled, arranged, struck, and displayed but almost never simply tended. The realization arrived somewhere low in his chest and climbed, fast and unwelcome, up through his throat before he had any to say against it.

His eyes stung first — pointless, sightless things that they were now, and yet still capable of that much, still capable of welling hot behind lids that had no light left to lose. He turned his face further into the cradle of his own crossed arms, trying to be slow and casual but seemed jerky and sudden, before whatever was happening in his chest could reach his voice too.

He didn't ask them to stop. And the hands didn't withdraw, they simply continued, steady, patient, working the same slow, careful line down the ridge of an old scar as though a man stifling his own choked up emotions into his own arms was not a thing to be managed or fixed or fled from.

That, more than the touch itself, was what undid him.

He didn't know what to do, being touched like this. Other servants in the palace had tended to him before, but their touch had always been practical, distant and mechanical. But this? This was like being handled like a person instead of the prince's beloved jewel.

He didn't lift his head, didn't trust his voice to attempt speaking either as his throat suddenly felt dry. He only lay there, shoulders slowly slackening and let it happen; let himself be touched by something that asked nothing of him in return.

6 | The Search

Themis heard them before he understood what he was hearing. It wasn't the ruins' usual sounds like wind through broken stone, the settling creak of an old tree sagging against the wall, the hum of insects in the nights air. This was heavier, rhythmic in a way he recognized: footsteps, several sets, moving with the particular discipline of the men he was long familiar with in the palace.

His whole body went still — guards — and he was moving before he'd fully decided to; low and fast, following the wall with his hand already knew by heart towards the fallen colonnade at the ruin's edge. A tumble of pillars, long since toppled and half-consumed by vine and bramble, the kind of wreckage that made for good climbing and better hiding, if one knew how to fold themselves small into the gaps between the fallen stone.

He had tested this particular hollow space twice before, idly, just because, and it paid off now. He wedged himself down between two massive fallen columns, drawing his knees tight to his chest, back pressed to cold stone, and foliage close and snagging against his bare arms. Themis made sure his clothes were swaddled close enough to not be exposed, hidden in shadow. The hilt of the knife slid into his rough palm, small and stolen from when he'd escaped the palace weeks ago; he held it not raised to strike just yet, just there for when he'd need it.

The footsteps grew close enough to carry voices.

"—told you it'd be a waste, this far out." A man's voice, older, rough at the edges with the particular fatigue of someone who'd rather be anywhere else. Themis knew the type immediately, had served men like it his whole life — someone who'd learned long ago that complaining changed nothing but made the walking feel shorter. "Boy's blind, Kadmos. Blind men don't run four leagues into broken ruins on bad ground. He's dead in a ditch two streets from the palace, mark me."

"Then you won't mind covering the west wall alone, will you, Gordias." A second voice — younger, sharper, clearly the one in charge, clipped in the particular way of a man enjoying rank he hadn't held long enough to stop savoring it. Kadmos, then. Themis filed the name away out of pure old habit. Knowledge was the one currency his blindness had never managed to steal from him. "The prince wants him found. Alive, mind you– those were his exact words, and I don't fancy explaining to Marsyas why his favorite came back in pieces because you couldn't be bothered to check a wall."

A third voice, younger still, uncertain: "Do you think he really made it this far? On his own? Blind?"

"You didn't see him work a room, Straton." That was Gordias again, grudging, some reluctant respect buried under the complaint. "Boy could cross a hall full of drunk nobles without clipping a single couch. I always figured there was more to him than the pretty face the prince liked showing off. Wouldn't put four leagues past him, sight or no sight."

Themis's jaw tightened at that, something complicated and unwelcome twisting in his chest; not quite pride, not from a man who'd help drag him back in chains if given the order, but close enough to sting like being somewhat seen.

There was a faint shift in the room's temperature, further ahead, outside of where Themis hid. Torches? Likely. The scent of burning fatty grease reached his crinkled nose as blindfolded eyes tracked nothing. He hadn't accounted for torches. Hadn't thought, in all his careful mapping of sound and stone, to wonder what fire might do to a hiding place built entirely on the assumption of darkness being total.

His grip tightened on the knife.

"Spread out," Kadmos ordered, closer now, close enough that Themis could hear the small metallic shift of a blade loosened in its sheath. "Every gap, every hollow. He's blind and hurt and he's had weeks with no proper food. He won't have gotten far from wherever he's holed up. Check the stone. Boy always did like tight spaces, small as he stands."

Footsteps fanned out. Themis tracked each one with fierce concentration: this one veering left, that one pausing near the old bath chamber he knew too well, a fourth moving with a heavier, more deliberate tread directly toward the fallen colonnade.

He stopped breathing, his grip tightened on the knife.

A boot scraped the stone ground, inches from where he'd folded himself into the dark. The heat of a torch swept close enough now that he could feel its heat near the entrance of his hiding spot; could hear the low crackle and spit of grease-soaked wood, could smell smoke spreading thickly through prickly vines and dusty air. He'd claw his way out if it came down to a confrontation.

Please, he thought, to no god in particular, to whichever one might still be listening to a servant who'd never had the luxury of devotion. Please, not like this. Not after everything.

And somewhere, in the dark he couldn't see and the men couldn't seem to find him in either, he thought — desperate, half a prayer and half a plea — where was {{User}}.

7 | Marsyas, Recaptured

They'd found him before he'd found a way out.

Themis didn't remember the exact moment the hollow space between the fallen columns stopped being a hiding place and became a trap — only the sudden, brutal certainty of a hand closing around his ankle and dragging him from the dark he'd trusted, the knife knocked from his grip (not before he'd slashed someone's arm, he felt the blood wet his hand), his own voice tearing itself hoarse on a scream he hadn't decided to let out as he'd tried to bite someone. After that, hands. Many hands, efficient and impersonal, hauling him upright and pinning his arms before he could get his feet properly under him.

He hadn't expected Marsyas to be there.

That was the detail that still sat disturbingly wrong in his chest hours later. He'd expected guards. He'd braced for guards, prepared some small, stubborn corner of himself for guards the whole four weeks he'd been free. He had not prepared for the oppressive presence of a man he felt too small around moving through the ruins with the unhurried, contained authority of a man who never needed to raise his voice because everyone around him had long since learned to listen for the smaller sounds.

Marsyas hadn't shouted. That was almost the worst part. He'd simply arrived, and Themis had heard it: the shift in the guards' voices, the sudden deference lacing their words, the way even Kadmos's clipped authority had gone yielding and stiff; and then a hand, achingly familiar, had cupped the side of Themis's face with a gentleness that made his stomach turn and bile rise in his throat.

"There you are," Marsyas had said, and his voice had cracked on it, something raw and wounded underneath the fury, something that might, in another life, in a kinder man, have been mistaken for love. "Gods, Themis. Do you have any idea— "

The blow had come without warning, the same hand that had just cradled his jaw flattened into something else entirely and striking across his cheek hard enough to snap his head sideways, hard enough that he'd tasted copper before he understood what had happened. He hadn't fallen only because the guards were still holding him upright.

"That," Marsyas had said, quiet again, terribly quiet, "is for making me chase you through ruins like a dog. We'll discuss the rest at home."

Now Themis sat before him on the horse, bound at the wrists, unable to properly balance, his back pressed to a warm chest covered with a himation, and one of Marsyas's arms banded firm around his middle. It wasn't cruel in its pressure (which was somehow worse), it was a possessive, careful hold, the hold of a man reclaiming something precious rather than punishing something disobedient. The bruise on his cheek was swollen from the force that had been used and his gums throbbed at the root. No one had spoken in a long while. The horse's gait rocked them both, slow and even, back toward the city, back toward the palace, back toward every door Themis had bled and run and hidden to get away from.

He understood, with a clarity that felt almost suffocating in its despair, that Marsyas had no intention of losing him again. And attempting to slid from the horse to make a break for it had already proved futile, it'd only tire Themis out further.

Marsyas's particular silence was the sort that came before decisions Themis wouldn't like; a silence that concealed a sharper, calculating anger Themis couldn't predict from a mind that knew how to weaponize patience. Themis kept his spine straight despite the ache in his shoulders, despite the bruise, despite the bone-deep exhaustion of a body that had spent a month remembering what it was like not to flinch and was already forgetting the lesson. He would not slump. He wouldn't give Marsyas the satisfaction of watching him break on the ride home. Whatever was coming, he'd meet it standing, even bound, even silent.

Then the horse shied.

It happened without warning: a sudden, violent sidestep, hooves scrabbling against loose stone, Marsyas's arm tightening hard around Themis's ribs as he fought the animal back under control with the easy, brutal competence of a man who'd spent years in a saddle and longer still learning to master things that didn't want mastering. Themis felt the tension ripple through the body at his back, felt the shift from possessive calm into something sharper, more alert. A soldier's alertness, not a lover's.

"Easy," Marsyas muttered to the horse, watching its ears pin back.

Themis went still. Beneath the horse's spooked breathing and Marsyas's low, controlled murmur, he'd caught something else. A sound whose wrongness he'd learned by heart over the past month, impossible to place the night and gone in an instant. The quiet behind them became unnerving as goosebumps rose along his arms, hair standing on end.

{{User}}. He didn't know how. He didn't know why, here, now, this far from the ruins that had sheltered him. But he knew that sound.

Somewhere at the rear of the group, a voice called out, tight with the particular unease of a man doing a headcount and not liking the number he'd gotten.

"Where's Straton?" Marsyas barked, eyes sifting through his men and the darkness illuminated only by torches.

No one answered.

.