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The issue with most Noxians, Talon resolves, is that they want to be rich.
It’s not that he doesn’t. He wants to be as far away from homelessness as he can, too. From that strength-sapping gnaw of hunger in his stomach and that hard-to-shake fear that if he closes his eyes to sleep, his throat will be cut before the morning rises—they are worries that Talon can’t wait to be rid of forever.
He shakes little droplets off his cloak, watches the spray of white beads rejoin the rainfall, walks onto dry stone, and continues to muse.
There is such a thing as too rich, he thinks, and therein laid General Du Couteau. It wouldn’t have made sense for the epitome of Noxian strength to be defeated, otherwise. Plus Talon can see how it happened. When you sit so high above the crowd, in wealth and in physical prowess and in admirers, it leaves your head sticking out. For anyone who likes to slant their knives a little skywards to see your neck ripe for the slitting—and in Noxus, that means everyone.
Talon won’t follow those footsteps, then.
All that you’d get for your trouble is a fancy resting place. Although. It really is a rarity to see the name of any of his or Katarina’s targets carved in stone, despite how many of them think themselves important.
He hasn’t found the time to thank her for buying Father’s tomb, yet. Funny, that.
The corpse lies not four blocks away from the Du Couteau estate, in a quaint mausoleum fit with four coffins, two of them filled by another family. The little building is fashioned from stone but made to look like grandiose white marble, with stripes in the pillars that keep the ceiling slab in place and excessive swirls in the archways where the segments meet. The architect couldn’t have been Noxian. It’s certainly impressive; the value of the cemetery land it lies in is in itself more expensive than the sum of all property Talon owns, and the corpse is better sheltered than the best hovels he had snuck in before his fateful meeting with the General.
Talon steps over the low stone slab delineating the doorway, and marvels. There the corpse lies, inside a rectangular crypt of limestone, cut in sharp and hard edges. Above it, a grave marker reads to Talon as acknowledgment—that this existence, among the sea of dead he has ordained, is uniquely deserving of post-mortem respect.
Leaning above the tomb, besides the carved writing, is a bust portrait of the man. His expression is severe and unsatisfied; he looks down upon even himself. Did Katarina hand the artist the portrait in the foyer to serve as reference, with Father and his wife, or one of the four—then two-member family paintings documenting the growth of their daughters, hidden in the closet in Father’s office that Talon has no business knowing about?
A pang of longing. It doesn’t matter; he never does.
Talon stands in the graveyard for the third time this month. He wipes off the light layer of dust over the curve of the tomb with the side of his palm and flicks away the dirt stuck in the sharp gouges that produce the chiseled lettering with his fingernails. He wonders if the woman he owes the title of Mother to has seen it yet.
Katarina tells him that Marcus does not deserve anything more from Talon, so he has not brought offerings. He doesn’t know what he would offer, anyway. It wouldn’t be flowers. Maybe he should leave his broken knives—the debris would symbolize something, vaguely. The beloved perfect state that Father has always impressed upon him to aspire to, now unachievable to his mentor. A mockery, overall. Or the mess of a state he’s left his son in.
Marcus called him a blade but Talon thinks that’s a lie. If he were a knife he would be functional, at the moment. Coveted. Bereft of his creator, it wouldn’t take long for somebody to pick him up and keep him fulfilled.
He’s always seen himself as a sheath, instead. Shaped by the same maker, but in truth, only existing as a complement to serve the actual heir. If he is realistic, he is not even a sheath but a prototype scribbled in parchment margins, a design blueprint to show the heir what she is to train towards. Like the first plans the General makes in his war room to learn where his schemes are most likely to fail. But a sheath retains some semblance of dignity—he is at least a finished product that Father can be proud of—and so he prefers to think of himself as such.
He does not mind the favoritism. He has the whole of Noxus to resent for the privilege of the position they were born in before he would reach Katarina. And his strength has allowed him to claw himself into this position above the majority of them, so none of that matters anymore.
He only wishes to know, sometimes, why Father never gave up on her. It would have saved his life.
Talon clenches and unclenches his fist. Instead of platitudes and flowers he merely holds in his hand a lamb meatball skewer. He had bought it fairly, sizzling, from a little tent on the way, using silver coins he had taken unfairly—silently—from the pockets of a lady two blocks earlier. One was eaten on the way, and now he eats the second of the four meatballs, and minds the stick’s sharp point. It would, at worst, poke him in the cheek, but he’s always been told to mind it, perhaps because you forget to expect danger from the mundane even though you should be expecting it from everywhere.
~
Talon is sixteen, and he is behind the closet door of his first mark. It is the first mission that the General—not yet Father—entrusts him to carry out alone. He learns later that the victim had a history of leaving some of the enemies he catches alive, and that he had a sixteen-year old son. He learns it when he overhears one of the General’s business partners scorn the late man’s softness, and he knows brief thankfulness before he is viciously resentful that his accomplishment is devalued.
“You monster,” are the first words the mark says after he is done screaming. “She had nothing to do with this.”
The man holds his wife’s body to his chest, and her warm blood pools all over his clothes. Talon wants to frown at the sight, instinctively—he knows how blood clings frustratingly to clothing—but he cannot. To stay hidden is to stay unmoving, and it takes most of his concentration to breathe motionlessly in the way his lessons demanded him to. Under the few years of the General’s harsh tutelage, he knows his skills have been beautifully honed. On his own, he would not have been able to sneak into this house before he would be caught and killed. If he keeps proving his worth, he will keep receiving the invaluable lessons.
The mark is only there because he arrived home sooner than usual, and Talon resents that he had not had time to reposition to the front door to kill him a minute ago.
The General tells him later that he is supposed to consider the worst-case scenarios when he plans his timings, not the most likely ones. Then he sends Talon on seven training missions in a row to track down the complete schedule of various Noxians, and it’s so tedious Talon considers begging his way out of the fifth one, and he doesn’t make the mistake again.
“Which of you,” the mark says, staring forwards with his wife’s head leaned on his cheek. “It’s Thomas, isn’t it? You have to know there’s no point to it.”
Of course there’s a purpose to it. To kill is to—to elevate above your station, to prove them wrong, to prove yourself right and to make them proud. To kill is to take control, to kill is to assert perfect submission. It’s straightforward and makes sense. He can’t explain why he can’t risk thinking about it.
“I’ll pay, damn you, you can have it all, the damn manuscripts too. It’s been a long time since I’ve wanted to be in this rat race anyway. I’ll go to Bilgewater. But you have to realize how useless this is. All this is. You’re doing no one favours, least of all yourself. If you kill their enemies it means they’ll close you in until there’s no way out for ya. So,” he rasps, breathier by the second, desperate. “Tell me. What’s in it for you?”
Talon stands deathly still in his shadows.
The lack of context is apparent and Talon knows it is unnecessary for him to know, but it is frustrating regardless that he fails to have answers to any of the questions. He hasn’t learned, yet, of how many things he is not to know, and how marks will say all sorts of things when they know they’re about to die and you can’t listen to any of it, if you want to stay loyal.
The man drops his wife’s body and reaches towards his desk.
The mark, Talon reminds himself. Everyone who the General points to is a mark, a target with a red circle over it.
Talon cannot risk waiting for a better angle anymore.
He kicks down the door and runs in. The mark is ready, and dodges the first swipe of the blade.
“You’re just a child!” he exclaims.
I’m your executor, and I will make the General proud.
The mark has no weapon, but he hasn’t survived untold identical situations to fall easily. Talon swings two daggers, expecting one to land in an eye and the other to slice between the cape through the chest, and both swipe empty air instead. His enemy is three steps back, and does not underestimate him. Talon lunges with his armblade and is met by a swinging chair. There is a crunch as the blade shatters two of its legs and bites deep in the wood that makes up the seat.
“Are you their slave? Swain? Du Couteau?”
Talon hates whatever he lets slip on his face because the mark stops asking at that name. Talon kicks the broken chair off his armblade, and his forearm comes up, automatic, to deflect the chair leg that his opponent uses like a club to try to slam his head in.
“You may not believe it. But there’s more to life than their torture. You can afford to hear me out.”
“I’m his,” Talon hisses out. “I want to be.”
He sees the mounds of gold implicit in the General and his daughter’s every careless indulgence. He hears the promise in the General’s lessons, not yet meant for him. He knows he needs to get closer, knows he has to be more perfect to deserve more of his attention.
“And when you’re rich, and you don’t want their orders no more, will you continue to be? Ask them if they’ll ever let you go.”
The mark knows his words are worthless drivel to a man as determined as Talon, because he doesn’t finish before he tries to slam the makeshift club into Talon’s legs. Close quarters, but it’s enough. Talon takes the risk and a dagger leaves his fingers, unbalanced at the angle he threw it at, but succeeding in stabbing into the back of the man’s dominant hand.
He shouts, and when he is done shouting, Talon’s left fist is through his ribs, his armblade and glove soaking in his blood. Its heart stops beating and unlike the questions he posed, the fact is clear-cut.
The mark gasps and rasps and contorts his dying throes around Talon’s arm, and his words are loud despite the agony and rage in them. “You’ll never be him.”
I don’t want to.
The rage drains all out before the blood and life does. Talon wishes he aimed to cut his throat instead, so he wouldn’t be able to say the last words.
“I hope I won’t see you soon,” the mark says, a bizarre mix of pain and pity. He is thankful he never sees that pity in anybody again.
The legs give way and the body slides down, further split by the blade. Talon withdraws it and starts to find and clean the blood off his thrown knives.
To kill is to cull the weak and the traitors. To kill is, in the grand schemes at nation-scale, to decide who is in charge, even though the outcome matters little to him, as long as it is someone he respects. To kill is to obtain, and to be rid of inconveniences in his way. There are reasons to kill, and he knows them, and they benefit him or they are stepping stones that one day will.
Talon is the General’s pawn, and he’s never been more proud of it.
~
You have to know there’s no point to it. Those are the words the mark says that later lace themselves unbidden in his mind, stuck like a freshly spun spiderweb.
Talon is ever so much older than sixteen, and he is surrounded by death. Rows of gravestones are visible past the mausoleum’s open entrance. On the tomb besides the General, flowers cut at the stem and arranged in bouquets and wreaths are left to rot delicately. The air is serene, and if the dead are not content with the lives they have led, they can at least be at peace that their stories are complete.
Talon stands surrounded by them, and tries to ask them: what about me?
The pitter-patter of rain lessens. There is no reply.
He eats the third meatball. It is made of meat and spices macerated in such a pulp that there are no traces of their original consistency and traits, save for their flavour.
~
“Father does not want us going in the basement,” Talon says, but Katarina picks the lock of the door anyway. He plants his feet for six seconds and then he follows her inside because he can’t compromise the mission.
“What, you scared there’s gonna be a monster hiding in the dark?”
“Father does not want us to.”
“Yeah. Keep up, that’s half the reason why we should go. He tries to hide a lot from us, y'know? Stuff he says aren't important and it's really just because it contradicts his teachings.”
“I’ve never broken his orders.”
"It wasn't a bloody order, Tal. It was, like, a strongly insinuated suggestion.”
Talon stares at her, unimpressed.
“Look, he’ll probably just get annoyed. But y’know what the worst thing that could happen to us is? No,” Katarina catches herself, switching tactics. “You don’t, cause you still think he has our best interests at heart but he really doesn’t.”
“It’s in his benefit that we live,” Talon says.
“Until it isn’t, and he’s not gonna be the one to tell you when that is. See, last time he took me to Bilgewater, he left out that the captain we were targeting has a wife who was the best swordswoman in the country. I guess he didn't like that she was stronger in combat yet remained her subordinate, and I was just supposed to not be seen by her, apparently. But yeah, point is, you never know what Father could be hiding.”
Talon squares his jaw. Of course he can’t win that argument now, because the General will take Katarina aside for private conversations and it turns out it’s a trip to Bilgewater, and the General will take Talon aside for one-on-ones and it’ll be a stack of documents written in their private code that he has three days to decipher. There won’t be a reward if he succeeds, but if he fails the General will mention by name all the other assassins he could have spent time teaching the code to instead, and Talon will feel so bad he'll regret he didn't spend more time working on it when he had that opportunity rather than sleeping to solve the documents in time.
They search the basement and there is correspondence to a rival guild, even though they were assured this group's crimes were acted on alone. To reach the incriminating letters, Katarina has to open a lockbox, and Talon swears the lock gives a couple more clicks after the lockpicks were done with their job.
“That bastard,” she grins, glancing through the written contents. “I told you so, Tal.”
“Katarina.”
“Right, that was kinda rude of me. Sorry.”
“Katarina, that was a trap. The mark is coming with guards,” Talon says tersely.
The cadence of clinging metal plates some two blocks away increases in volume with every presumed footstep. It permeates through the basement's window, left ajar. It passes through passerby conversations and rustling leaves. It’s so faint, but to Talon it’s the same as a discordant screech, an omen of failure when the mission could have been flawless.
He knew there was an alarm wired around those letters, but Katarina wouldn’t glance back and see his signal to halt. He wraps his cloak around him and scales to perch above the bar hanging the clothes in the closet.
Eventually, a sword pokes into the room and the arm holding it shoves the door open, and the Du Couteau heirs fight exactly how they have been forged to. Talon lets three knives out, their deadly whistling only interrupted by the scream of the guards they pierce between the armors of. Katarina stabs through the swordhand of the soldier closest to the mark, leaving their target vulnerable.
“We could have avoided this if we were in the cellar, like Father told us to,” Talon spits out, slitting the mark’s throat.
“Father this, father that. What is wrong with you?” Katarina says, interspaced with grunts as her daggers deflect three guards’ blades. “Who said you even get to call him that?”
Talon’s armblade decapitates the enemies that Katarina has destabilized or disarmed, and a blade on his cape swings across the face of the last guard. His movements are fluid and in utter control. That ugly feeling rearing inside him, far less so. “Maybe I shouldn’t. His real children clearly don’t know how to respect him.”
Katarina’s blade perforates the last fighting man below the chestplate, through the back. They watch as his corpse sinks along her arm and the leathers wrapping around her glove soak in crimson. “You think if you follow his every word, he’ll let you inherit his empire? Because you’re too brittle to be who he wants, Talon. You’re lethal in a thin way. You don't face things, you can't hold your ground the way Father needs. You're as hollow as your namesake's bones are, just a stiff breeze from snapping in half. So stop bloody lecturing me as if following Father is what I wanna do.”
"Maybe I don't understand—"
"No, you don't! And you refuse to learn anything from anyone that's not Father."
"-why you can him fail once and disobey often and yet," Talon lunges, striking his blade out with a single stroke at one of the pair that Katarina wield. His armblade is a refined steel, but its surface is smooth. Katarina’s daggers, in contrast, are intricately crafted, black metal embedded inside like ink to draw the Du Couteau insignia.
And yet you remain undeniably his heir.
They freeze and let the clash made by their blades sing mournfully and linger in the air between them. Talon lifts his gaze and sees that Katarina is glaring at him. They stay stock-still until the note dies down.
Talon bends down and his blade follows his earlier cut to behead the dying mark with his armblade. He is expressionless, his breaths measured such that they are silent, habit born from hours of practice taking its stead over consciousness. He takes out the canvas sack and wraps the head inside. Katarina leaves him in his sullen silence and goes to collect other objects of import in the house.
Talon leaves the house first, and he takes the route above the city to go home. Katarina dislikes that, she says it's unnecessarily risky, and maybe that's part of why he chooses the path with the longest jumps across roofs. It pacifies him, besides, to leap under the evening sky directly under the stars and with so much space around him, nothing but the occasional chimney blocking his path.
“I don’t need the General’s inheritance,” he says, once Katarina manages to catch up to him some five blocks away from home. “I know it’s yours.”
“No you don’t,” Katarina acknowledges. “But that’s not what I’m worried about.”
Talon narrows his eyes. They’ve had a variation of this conversation before, and he can’t figure out the right answer. Not to him, not to Katarina, and not to the General, either.
"You don't know who you want to be either.”
"No, but I know where I want to start."
"So what? You'll abandon—" not us, if Katarina thinks he doesn't belong—"the Du Couteau name?"
"If it comes to it, would your loyalty be to Noxus, or to the General?"
"You want to abandon Father, but you don't even know who you're doing it for!"
They step carefully from windowsill to windowsill, and make it across another two blocks.
"I’m doing it for myself,” Katarina says. “Is that so impossible for you to fathom? That I can make my own decisions because I don't need someone holding me by a leash."
Talon glances back. He sheathes the knife he had kept passing between his fingers as he climbed. He doesn't say a word.
"I hope that neither do you, brother."
~
The issue with becoming the expert assassins that Father drilled into them is that eventually, they no longer had to pay much attention to the execution of the missions. Those questions, those damned questions about purpose and leashes and who it was all being done for, return. Katarina is better at answering them than Talon is.
Talon still doesn’t have an answer.
There’s one last meatball. He bites in it and he knows the taste and shape to expect. He wishes he had stolen a second skewer.
~
“Has she returned home?” Marcus asks. Though in the dead of night Talon can only see the white mortar lines of the brick wall in front of him. The voice comes from a shadow breaking up the pattern in the center of them.
“She has.”
It has been three years of having to pretend the General is dead and two and a half years since their last correspondence. Years spent worrying that he really did die somewhere unceremoniously and the news never made it to Talon; years spent searching for hints of what his mission was and signs that it succeeded. And when the General finally shows himself again, of course it is so that the two of them can once again revolve around Katarina.
Father sighs. “An impressive feat. But we shall still succeed. Confront her when she leaves the tea house and explain the plan.”
Talon shifts so that the light wind billows his cloak outwards. His bandaged eye is indiscernible beneath his cowl.
“She won’t listen. She thinks it’s our fault.”
Father sighs again. Displeased. “If you cannot play your part then shadow me until I reach Swain.”
“She wants to kill you.”
“That is for me to handle. You need not be concerned.”
Talon grits his teeth. He is not the General’s child, but when the General speaks, he will always be a child. “Then. What will I do?”
“You will watch me subdue her.”
“And?”
“That is all,” Marcus says gruffly. “I have explained everything you need to know.”
Marcus will put Katarina out of commission and run in and kill Swain and House Du Couteau will move into the palace and after their power is secured he can go back to making Katarina the perfect heir but somehow Talon just realized which part of the puzzle has been left unexplained. His jaw is clenched shut and he has to cast his mind back to the moment Katarina struck him—so lightning-quick he hadn’t stepped back in time and then he couldn’t see anymore and he felt glass-shards stinging as his face split open. The pain galvanizes him back to the present.
He forces his breath out.
“She won’t listen to you either. She hasn’t wanted to for years. She’s hard to kill.”
Marcus pauses. Now Talon hears the fading shift of gravel. The General had started to walk away, convinced the meeting was done.
“And?” Marcus intones slowly.
“Let her go. Just let her go.” The second time is a plea. “Father, you can’t—you can’t leave us for years and expect to continue where you’ve left off. We’re different.”
“You were never able to speak eloquently,” Marcus replies. “Your play for power here is weak. Do not continue trying.”
“It’s not about me, it’s—”
Talon cuts himself off, begins to remember where all the plans in the General’s war room go, once he is done with them. Giant maps and notebooks and letter evidence and books, no matter how long they are poured over and how deadly it was to retrieve them. They are neatly folded together, collected in a box, and, of course, thrown away if they are safe, and burned to ashes if they are not.
He remembers all the people he has passed by, on his way to become the General’s ‘son’. He remembers the few that swore up and down they were still loyal and loved even on their last day. Sometimes in their last words, before Talon’s blade sunders their convulsing throat.
Maybe it is about him. If the General and Katarina engage in their battle, there is no space for him in their future, and there isn’t one in Swain’s either, and Talon didn’t come with one himself. He was born and he was forgotten and then he found a knife and could be acknowledged again. If somebody thought about him it was with fearful respect. He existed in their mind as a threat of how easily he could kill them, not as a person. But he existed, nonetheless, and he didn’t know what else he could be.
Then that life was killed from him and the General promised that the new person he will carve Talon into is more worthy of Noxus. Talon gains a surname and he gains so much more presence that of course he believed him. The General becomes Father and Talon becomes his sheath and that was fine as well. The sheath hooked to a famed leader was admired too. But sheaths are so much easier to replace than the sword they were made for, and if Talon isn’t getting replaced, there is at least something different about how the returned General treats him and it isn’t reassuring.
He can’t hear the other pair of inhales and exhales anymore. The General has left.
~
Talon lowers his skewer and his hands shake. If he is nothing, if there is no point and he is a dog, directionless without a master pulling his leash, then why is he the one here and not the man who had held his leash and had all the reasons and everything else in the world too.
He knows why. He’s had the answer since the morning. What he’s searching for is who else he could be.
He barely knows how to read. Katarina pointed him to language books after the General’s passing.
He knows what the words are on the stone in front of him, though. The first two lines, at least.
Marcus Du Couteau
“May his legacy remain in Noxian history and his soul rest glorious.”
He tilts his head back. Scans instinctively the cobwebbed corners made by the marble supports meeting the roof, and imagines for a moment that there is a person perched there, and Talon doesn’t notice until a knife buries inside his heart and he at last belongs with all the other corpses in these resting grounds. But there isn’t, and the issue is, it’s Talon’s turn to decide who he wants to be now, so as it stands…
Well. As he stands, he leaves the dead resting in peace, checks that all his knives are on him, wraps his cloak tighter around him, throws the thin fire-touched stick to decompose in the grass, and walks into the curtain made by the last drizzles of rain.