Note: Written for a prompt of "Unexpected Mercy."
The tribunal was over. The judgment was made. Her penance was set.
Hard questions were asked in the wake of the Ninth Crusade's catastrophe and with the men given command of the papal forces and Section Thirteen's advanced guard both amongst the dead, it was Heinkel Wolfe, highest ranking of the scant survivors, who was expected to answer. Still reeling from her own misfortunes, she went straight from the infirmary to a proceeding unlike anything held in centuries and there before the assembled elders of the church she unleashed a harrowing stream of conscious horrorshow testimony that turned faces white. Attempts at examination found her alternately nigh unresponsive and violently argumentative. One particularly snide line of questioning led to her threatening a cardinal's life in open court, another left her screaming.
She'd exited that session's proceedings under heavy sedation and the certainty of a bullet to the brain in a Vatican basement.
The next day began her brothers' turns to bear witness and it was during his that a young priest named Makube performed nothing short of a miracle. He not only turned her ramblings into a coherent, cohesive narrative, but made her sympathetic in the process and he'd done so by throwing the corpses of Maxwell and Anderson under the bus, backing up, and running them over again for good measure. By the time he was done everyone in attendance understood the impossible choices between duty, honor, and family each Iscariot had faced that night in London. His Holiness himself even shed a tear.
Makube's version of events was upheld to a man and the verdict came soon after. There would be no executions, no examples made. None living would shoulder the blame for trespasses of the dead.
Mercy had spared Heinkel yet again. It tasted like salt and ash, like the shame she bore for surviving where others had not, others who would be there still had she but chosen obedience over pride.
Her penance was to live.