I didn't write this one with a ship in mind, but feel free to interpret it however you want. Apologies for vagueness... I wrote this at five in the morning.
I.
Time slows. He watches the dying figure fall in the distance: a smudge of cerulean against a drab stone wall. He could have easily mistaken it for a dislodged piece of the stark blue sky if it weren't for the slightest hint of black hair.
That god awful mullet, he thinks absently. He had silently hated it.
II.
He can't remember what the other man had said. The memory is like smoke from a fire long since died; time has softened its edges. His only certainty is the smirk that followed. He knows it was a mask, a futile attempt to conceal wariness. Years in a prison cell would temper trust - not that the other man ever had any.
"I can make it happen."
The promise had not been empty; the other man knew it. He remembers the consideration in those cold, narrow eyes.
III.
The scarred man is not the only murderer in Lior, he thinks. But it's a fact his troops don't know. He wishes he could be as ignorant as them.
IV.
Red Lotus, Crimson - he used to wonder what inspired the names.
Perhaps it was the sanguine bolts of power that surged from those tattooed palms, for the other man had always indulged in raw, destructive abilities.
Or perhaps it was the blood that bloomed like roses from open gashes of the nameless Other, the result of a rogue alchemist's sanctioned slaughter. In his mind's eye he saw them: malformed flesh and gore entwined with tattered remains of fabric.
It was almost poetic, the way the crimson liquid fanned out out from the torn-open cavities underneath.
Morbid petals of a red lotus.