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The first night it happens, Titus hopes it’s just a one-time thing.
It’s Wanheda who fetches him, red in the face and looking ready to throttle the first neck she can reach, and so Titus’ immediate thought is that the Heda must be in danger.
But instead when Clarke leads him to the Heda’s bedchamber, he finds her crumpled up on the floor, head forehead pressed to her knees, with Wanheda’s advisor slumped over, just to her side. Empty bottles litter the floor, filled with what he knows was once the burning drink that sky people use to celebrate.
The Heda gives a pitiful groan, like when she was young, and just coming into her own body. Her stomach would pain her sometimes, and so Titus would have her stretch out on her bed while he rubbed her shoulders, and told her stories of the Old Days, until her pains had passed.
But he gets the feeling that is not what this pain is, as Wanheda nudges her advisor in the stomach, with her boot.
“Wake up, asshole,” she grumbles, and he swats at her leg, trying to roll over. The Heda falls down to the ground completely but doesn’t seem to upset about it. The way she lands puts some of the advisor’s hair in her mouth, but she doesn’t seem upset about that either.
Wanheda’s advisor—Belomi, although he seems to hate the way they say his name—doesn’t like the Heda. Or at least, that’s what Titus had presumed, from the way he constantly glared at her across the table at Coalition meetings, or in the throne room when she and Wanheda were discussing plans.
But Wanheda had refused to stay without him, and he’d refused to leave without her, and so the Heda had been forced to make a room ready for him, just down the hall. Titus had stationed a guard outside the door, in case he tried to assassinate her in her sleep, but so far he seems to prefer narrowed eyes and snide comments under his breath.
And, apparently, drinking together.
“O started it,” he grouses, when Wanheda kicks him again, and this time he tugs at her boot until it comes off, and Wanheda stumbles backwards. “She said Lexa said she can handle her alcohol better than any sky person. Obviously, I proved her wrong.”
“You proved nothing,” Heda grumbles, words muffled by the floor.
“We have a meeting with the Coalition in fifteen minutes!” Wanheda cries, sounding desperate, and they both struggle upright, squinting their eyes, like they can’t take the light.
They share a look Titus can’t decipher, and then the Heda turns, fixing her gaze on him. She looks, well, awful. Worse than any sickness that he’s seen. Her eyes are pink and bloodshot, the skin bruised underneath them, skin pale and slick with sweat. “Stall the others,” she says, voice hoarse. “We will be down in some time.”
Wanheda throws both arms in the air and turns to storm off, but her advisor clicks his tongue, and waves her boot at her. She stomps over to snatch it back.
“They’re all yours,” she snarls to Titus as she passes him, and he isn’t really sure he agrees. Only half of them are his, after all. The better half. The sky man is simply a bad influence, he’s sure.
“Leave us,” Heda orders, and Titus only hesitates a little. But clearly they’d been alone together all night, and he hasn’t harmed her. Yet.
Titus leaves one guard outside the door, just in case.
They both make it downstairs to the meeting only slightly late. The advisor still looks haggard, hair sticking up in every direction, clothes twisted and hastily tugged on. The Heda doesn’t look much better, although at least she fixed her hair a bit. She cuts her eyes at everyone in the room, daring them to say something. Wanheda silently seethes in her seat, glowering when her advisor pinches her cheek, as he sits.
The meeting goes well, with new trade agreements made and old ones fortified, and Titus figures that’s the end of it; his Heda and Wanheda’s advisor just needed a night of strange sky people tradition, to form some sort of bond. That’s all.
The second time, Titus is the one to discover them, and the circumstances are infinitely worse.
The sky people are visiting—not all of them, of course, because the throne room is not big enough to host the entire Skaikru population—but enough to make things chaotic, which is something that Titus never likes.
And they’ve brought with them a game, something they apparently used to play on their metal island in the stars.
They call it bier pong, and it will be the source of all of Titus’ worst dreams.
It involves a table, which the rowdiest, youngest of the bunch have confiscated from somewhere in the palace, which Titus just knows he’ll have to deal with in the morning, and two little balls, and more of the drink that makes his throat burn.
He may have tried some. A little. Enough to know that anything involving it must be a terrible idea.
When the sky people first arrived for the festival, Titus had wrongly assumed Belomi might be like him. A shepherd, barking orders at his people whenever they strayed too far into the crowd, and he nearly lost sight of them. Wanheda fondly called him a mother hen and, having kept chickens in his village as a child, Titus could see the resemblance.
But that resemblance is long gone, as Belomi and Heda face each other with matching grim expressions, on either side of the game table. Someone tries to explain the rules to the Heda, but she waves them off, always too proud for her own good. Belomi smirks, already smug.
Titus is really too old for shepherding these days, but he keeps having to fuss at the sky children whenever they touch something they shouldn’t, or try to sit in the throne, or dance on a surface that was not made for dancing. The sky people, he's beginning to think, are probably the worst thing to ever happen to him. And he's been stabbed with a spear, before. By the time Titus returns to the game, even his own people have begun to crowd around, cheering their leader on as she squints an eye shut, taking aim before chucking the little ball towards one of the cups filled with murky liquid.
She misses, and Belomi boos as she drinks. He misses his turn as well, and she cheers.
Wanheda comes up to stand beside Titus, shaking her head at them both.
“They’re a mess,” she says, but she sounds affectionate at least, and Titus frowns.
“Your advisor is a terrible influence.”
Wanheda glares up at him, all trace of fondness gone. “He’s the best,” she argues, voice slurred around the edges, betraying her. She scrunches her nose in distaste. “And he’s not my advisor.”
Titus looks at her, bemused in spite of himself. He’s too tired to feel irritated anymore; he just wants the night to be over so he can retire to sleep. “I thought that’s what you called him, when you demanded that he stay.”
“Well, yes, but just so you would let him. He’s not really my advisor. He’s my partner. Advisor makes him sound—like a sidekick, but he’s not.”
“You said you made no decisions without him,” Titus muses. “And that he helped you take the mountain.”
Wanheda falters, and Titus is reminded that even now, in spite of everything, she’s still so young. Just a child. The Heda lets out a whoop of delight and he looks over to find her waving a cup at Belomi, liquid splashing out over the sides as she grins. He can’t remember the last time he saw her so happy—for once, she looks her age.
“Well, okay, yes,” Wanheda admits, faltering.
“That is what advisors do,” Titus says. “They help make decisions. They help.”
“Then we advise each other,” she decides, nodding to herself, like that’s the end of it. Titus lets it go for now.
There’s another shout and he glances over to see two of the sky boys, standing on each other’s shoulders perilously, looking too much like a tower ready to topple. Titus sighs and runs over, reprimands on the tip of his tongue.
He knows he should probably put a stop to the game, knows there is too much to do in the morning and that the longer he lets the Heda drink, the worse she will feel, but.
He turns as Wanheda finally joins in, goading the both of them and refusing to take sides even as each of them bribes her. He watches their people pumping fists in the air, sharing jokes and laughs, dancing together even as no music plays. And he can’t really bring himself to end that.
He knows he’ll probably regret it in the morning.
(He absolutely does.)
The third time, Titus almost doesn’t even notice.
It’s been one month since Wanheda and her advisor have come to live in the palace, and they’ve since consolidated two rooms into one. It saves on space, but Titus has still found himself in the mortifying position of walking in on something he’d really rather not have, more than once.
The Heda seems, if not pleased by it, then at least somewhat bemused. She likes to mock Belomi in Trigedasleng—he understands just enough to feel insulted, while Wanheda usually just goes bright red. The drinking games, at least for now, seem to be a thing of the past.
Or at least, he’d thought so.
They’re at a Coalition meeting—hardly the first since Skaikru has joined, and as there has been no war or pressing issue lately, they’ve mostly become droll hour-long talks about agriculture, while everyone tries not to fall asleep, and Belomi tugs at Wanheda’s hair. She’s recently cut it, so it hangs in light golden curls, and her advisor likes to play with it, like a child, or a small pet. It just furthers Titus’ suspicions that he isn’t a real man after all, and is instead an overgrown toddler, who really likes guns.
Titus blinks to clear his vision and turns just in time to see Belomi pass something silver to the Heda, sitting just on his left.
She takes it, and waits until the Valley ambassador’s attention is elsewhere, to bring it to her lips.
It’s a type of metal bottle, he thinks, and Titus is fairly sure that it does not hold water.
It still takes him a moment to realize it’s a game. They only pass it to drink whenever the ambassador mentions the glistening leaves of their village, or the quiet strength of their people, which they mention quite a bit. The ambassador clearly enjoys his imagery.
As the meeting goes on, the pair sink lower and lower in their chairs, beginning to lean towards each other like wilting flowers, until they’re essentially propping each other up. Titus waits until the meeting ends, before taking the Heda aside by her elbow, the way he used to when she was a girl.
“Heda,” he says, quite, but firm enough that she knows he isn’t pleased. “That is no way for you to behave in front of the Coalition.”
She just tugs her arm gently from his grip, and pats his cheek three times. She winks at him.
“Lighten up, Titus,” she says, and Titus can’t keep his jaw from dropping. “Try and have some fun,” she drawls the last word, stretching it out like she’s playing with the sound, and then turns on her heel and walks off.
He catches them again in the next week’s meeting, and honestly, he doesn’t care what Wanheda says about her advisor; the sky man has got to go.
The Heda gets hiccups in the middle of her speech, and Belomi turns to smother his laughter in Wanheda's hair while Titus glowers. He really is the worst influence.
It’s King Roan, of all people, who ends up changing his mind.
He’s marrying his mother’s second, the angry-looking Nightblood girl. By all rights, she should have entered this year’s conclave, but the Heda had refused to allow it. Just another law she was breaking, for the good of her people, and Titus still isn’t sure how to feel. He knows she’s right, of course he does. He raised her to be the leader she’s turned into, the one that isn’t afraid to step away from tradition and forge her own path.
But it still makes him anxious, whenever she lays down the stones for a new road. He worries the wrong people will want to cross it.
The whole Coalition has shown up, to pay their respects to the Ice Nation, for the first time in nearly fifty years. It feels like the start of something new, as Titus watches Trikru and Skaikru and Azgeda merging together. There is music this time, and proper dancing, even if so many people don’t know the right steps. They’re learning.
King Roan steps up beside Titus, where he stands off to the side, always watching, always waiting, just in case. He never knows when he’ll be needed.
Lexa was not the only one who gave her life up for her position, but Titus has never minded. Not when it means this is what they have; a life knowing peace, and dancing.
“I thought they’d kill each other when they met,” Roan says, and Titus follows his gaze, to where Belomi and the Heda are clinking their cups together. Titus isn’t sure what it means, but they both nod and tip their drinks back, swallowing in a rush. “Or at least hate each other. But I’ve never seen your commander look so carefree.”
Roan still says your commander, like he hasn’t bent to his knees and taken the oath, like he still doesn’t consider her his leader, but Titus doesn’t mention it this time. He’s too busy watching her, grinning like something unrecognizable as Belomi lets Wanheda drag him out on the floor and whirl around.
They finish after two songs, and he jogs back over to where the Heda has taken up conversation with a Delphi medicine woman. Belomi doesn’t seem to care that he’s interrupting—just takes Heda’s hand and pulls her into the fray.
She’s still wearing her paint, her mark of the Commander, her formal gown made of heavy leather and cloth.
But she laughs, like it’s an accident, when he spins her around in a circle, and Titus feels his breath catch, because—how did he not notice? Belomi, for all his faults, makes her feel like she can play drinking games, and dance like a child that doesn’t care who’s looking, and make fun of her friends about their relationship.
“It’s a lot to think about,” Roan says, like he can tell what Titus is thinking.
“Yes, it is.” So the sky man may not be the worst influence, after all.
(Half an hour later, Titus finds them both emptying their stomachs in the woods, with an exasperated Wanheda lecturing them both, and he takes it back. The sky people are the worst of all time.)