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"Tactus."
Three corpses lay at his feet, their blood reflecting back to him the ruined creature he's become. The cries of children fill his ears. His bloodstained razor dips slightly, then falters. Although Tactus has his back turned, he could recognize that voice anywhere.
He says Tactus's name like nothing changed.
Darrow. The Reaper. His voice is plaintive, imploring. As if Tactus is one of those crying children, inconsolable and petulant, and he is attempting to talk sense back into a man he both pities and knows he must stop. In that moment, there is nothing Tactus thinks he loathes more than that pity.
"Tactus, remember your brothers."
Tactus's shoulders stiffen instinctively as he realizes, again, how little Darrow knows about his life. Mercy was certainly not the first instinct provoked when he thought of his memories with his family. It's that thought that gouges a wretched laugh from the doomed man.
"My brothers are shits," Tactus sneers. His hand trembles. "Said I should get out of your shadow. Mother calls me the Mighty Servant. Did you know that?"
Darrow says something about the evil that he's about to commit, that the Sovereign's orders are wrong. But the Lune is the farthest thing from his mind right now.
A Valii-Rath does not beg for scraps from the table of a low-bred mongrel.
Tactus remembers their first meeting. It was back in the Institute, before Darrow had shaken the game to its very foundations and become hailed as an Iron Gold by Peers and lowColors alike. When they met, Darrow was no more than an arrogant upstart from the bloody butcher house, destined to burn out and take the rest of his cohort with him. Not even a proper Primus, really. Just a braggadocious boy with more mouth than sense, with that murderous little pygmy in tow.
However, he had not been entirely without redeeming qualities. He had been beautiful, and well-groomed, too, a far cry from the bloodstained brute they all told stories about. By then, Tactus had learned exactly how much appearances could decieve.
"So, you're who they call the Reaper." He had let his gaze make a slow, insolent journey up the length of him- a visual caress, a lingering assessment. But the infamous Reaper was either too laser-focused on his goal or too stupid to realize when someone was making advances on him, which Tactus came to know were qualities that were impossible for him to shed.
For a genius, it was incredible how blind Darrow could be to the reality of things. He was like no one Tactus had ever encountered in Gold society. Tactus thinks it has something to do with something he was never taught, something Gold never valued.
Empathy. He could have sympathy for the greatest of enemies, yet drive friends away with his vagueness and persistent aversion to intimacy. He could rise to become a prince of Golds, yet treat lowColors with a familiarity he never afforded his peers. Darrow was an inscrutable enigma, but unlike others, Tactus wasn't interested in puzzling out his mind. He only wished to remain in Darrow's orbit, revolving around the sun even as it scorched his skin and blinded his sight. Even as he was forced to remain in his shadow.
There was nothing Tactus wanted more than for Darrow to look at him with those burning eyes and see more than an ally, or a pawn, or a nuisance. He realized only too late that he wanted something Darrow could never give.
A cocktail of emotions heated his blood- sharp, sweet, and bitter all at once. Infatuation, a magnetic pull toward that terrible temptation. Tactus wanted to poke it, prod it, see if that stoic expression could waver, and he ached to be the one to make it happen. Envy, curdling hot and sharp in his stomach. This was not a man who had been given his power; he had taken it. He had none of the polished manners, the careful rhetoric Golds had been bred with. Darrow simply was, and the world bent around him. It was utterly, breathtakingly unfair.
In the present, Tactus's jaw tightens. Darrow walks toward him like an Iron Gold of the myths, not the low-born, grasping rebel those who had never known him scorned him as. And yet here Tactus is, the one with the bloodline, the breeding, the training… standing like a boy caught stealing wine from the cellar. In plainclothes, Darrow seems more imposing than Tactus ever was in his armor.
Tactus wants to sneer. He wants to scoff and ask the Reaper if he thinks he can collect his debt before Tactus kills the children he's been ordered by the Sovereign to dispose of.
But all he can manage is, “Would you kill them, if Augustus told you to?”
Darrow stops a few paces away. No fear in him. No hesitation.
"No. I'd rather die."
Of course. He's so much better than Tactus. Than the decadent, power-hungry age he represents. Before he could walk, Tactus had been taught that power was the only way to ensure survival. And if power meant the culling and degradation of the weak, that was the way of things. If he ever had the potential to be anything different, his chance had passed long ago.
"I didn't think so. She was right. I am the Mighty Servant." Tactus's voice is edged with bitterness. He nods toward Darrow, and Lorn au Arcos looming behind him. An acceptance of his fate. "I'm not sorry I took Lysander, you know."
Because he would do it again. Take the gorydamn heir and hand him to the Bellona like a coward, like a thief in the night. And he told himself he had no choice. Told himself he'd rather be a traitor than a servant.
Tactus looks at Darrow and feels it again- the rage, cold and bitter. The envy. Because he has what Tactus craves.
Darrow makes them follow him- Roque, Sevro, Victra, Mustang, his army at the Institute. Even the Rage Knight himself. He speaks and they listen. He bleeds and they bandage him. He falters, and they hold him up like some messiah. When Darrow had Tactus whip him at the Institute, he saw the awe in the eyes of everyone present. He felt it in himself, and spent countless hours wondering if that was just another sign of his inferiority, his inability to live up to his name.
"I don't think you're ever sorry for much." And there was that wryness again, just like back when he asked the leader of House Diana whether Tactus was flirting with him.
Tactus chuckles, a wet and strangled sound. "But I still think I shouldn't have done it. I was testing you at the institute. But... I wanted to see what you'd do. If you were worth following."
"Was I?" Darrow's voice is soft. His golden eyes light on Tactus if his word still matters.
"You know that answer."
"Am I still?" The answer comes boiling up, twisted and pathetic and ugly and true. The truth he knew all along, that tormented him for long days and nights, echoed in the voice of a dead man.
Always.