If there is one thing you can count on, it is the surgical sense a certain whisper has. His mother has broken into his head so often he can almost feel in return when something is disturbing the blissfully cold peace she has when things go her way.

He notices that the sense of safety awry this evening. She forces a smile on her face, one half tugged up the corner of her thin mouth, but as soon as he is distracted, it disappears.

The next indication is always the swarm of security and other occasional guests popping into the rooms they inhabit at that time of day.

It happens for the whole evening. She tries her best to conceal it.

"What do you mean he is nowhere to be found?" His mother asks quietly. More of a strategic question than true care, leaning backwards and keeping the people around her at a close look.

"I mean what I say, your Highness." His voice is regretting to say that. Understandably. "He jumped in the water, easily over a hundred feet. There has been a search party for his body, but it is like he has vanished."

"A corpse doesn't just vanish."

Well, Maven thinks, unless you make it.

But that is the end of that discussion when the man disappears with some respectful nod again. The topic about whoever's corpse needing to be retrieved does eventually return again to his ears, even though she tries her best to disguise it.

His mind and thoughts may be occupied, but she didn't break him down again and again to create an idiot. The continued hushed words and almost nervous looks only serve to her discredit for keeping it away.

The next time it does come into his presence again, she is sitting on her chair, behind the long desk, hair pulled back into a tight knot.

"We processed all the information we could find about him. He's on very few cameras. He was careful." Eyes wander over the crown along with his head and trail down. "Your Majesty." A courteous and respectful slight bow to his right, a salute on heels to his left. They are pale. They should know what failure does bring them. And they do.

"A moment, please." She asks of him, before turning around to the dark uniformed man in front again. "Of course he was careful."

"As I said, we are doing everything as you ordered as to."

"He used a security breach. He escaped and you failed to capture him or retrieve his body. What does that say about your work, Captain?"

There is clearly some hurry and something that has crawled enough into her skin to pester her.

"I want to be immediately informed about any news."

"Of course." The Captain nods again.

"You are dismissed." His mother says.

The man disappears but the artful doubt about what exactly is triggering another rigged alarm in his head and hers as well does stay.

"Something bothering you?" He asks this time.

She doesn't answer, a statue made of marble and ice in grey and white light, not even attempting to smile or lie it away.

"Mother."

If they were anything but themselves, he may would demand an answer. But she wouldn't give it anyway.

Something cracks and dies between them a moment in the silence.

"Don't let it distract you." A warning. Another warning and advice after all the shielded attempts to get a grasp. her hands are flat on the desk, smooth white fingers half stretched over a photograph."You are easily distracted sometimes."

Call it a distraction, call it anything, we both know you despise it when I do things my own way.

He simply sits down, hands folded. Tries to get a better look at the image. A face, a frame, a hood. "I am more distracted by the way you try to hide this from me."

She crosses her legs, moving on her chair, spine straight and face blank. "There was an attempt that threatened our lives, but I didn't want you to be concerned."

Another one. What is different about it that she is trying to quieten it, and not use it to any kind of advantage?

"He was smart about it. And patient. He almost shot me, I suppose he didn't take into account I could recognize he was there." Disgust curls her lip just a little bit. And still, something under the exterior that is not to his liking as well.

Her hand moves up and away. Slide over the picture.

The image is a convoluted mess of shadows and truths, fluid motions of something that creeps up at night and leaves you muttering and restless.

The scars have faded over the years, but they are still visible enough. On his face, one sneering, half molten kiss, mocking Maven when he looks at it. Stealing innocence and youth. They are a ruined puzzle over his cheek, along with his eyes, tugging on side of his lips.

The smell of burning flesh rises from some buried memory, the way he leans away and vomits the first time he remembers.

But then there is also his eyes, dead set in his face, with both too much and too little life, dark pits half cloaked in shadows, bearing little semblance to any kind of twinkling smile and surprise he remembers.

One breath and one silent name in it, just like the firmament of a dazzling dizzy night sky, falling down and smashing, exploding. Leaving the memory of something awoken that once was whole and then broke down and got lost in the ether.

His mother watches him very closely. He half expects her presence in this very moment in his thoughts.

He still stares at the half-concealed face under the hood, one monstrously disfigured side of a face, and another smooth, indicating the face is so very young. It is the hands that irritate him the most. They cling to a backpack in the image. As burned and ruined as the rest of his visible face. They seem rough, not small, not fragile or shaking, twitching.

It's a trick. Some poor sought out scheme to bring him off balance. Because in no possible way the boy on the image is the same one he remembers. Second rate theatre conspicuously brought out, he can only guess what little tells have concluded in this psychological prickling attack.

What about Thomas, the Red boy? Mare Barrow asked me. He's dead, I said.

"This is...well executed, I suppose," He says.

"This is complicating matters farther," She answers.

He is dead, she does not say, but they both know.

The longer he stares, the more the pressure in his stomach gurgles and buckles up. His skin is tingling with something tainted.

"Unexpected." She mutters."The report said there was no survivor. They crossed his name from the list. Killed in action."

"I remember the report about the fire." It was an accident, I lost control, an accident, I swear-

She shuts him off with an abrupt shake of her head. "This is not exactly about the fire."

The muscles on his throat and neck twitch when he grinds his teeth behind his closed tight mouth. "Not exactly?"

"The poor boy was barely alive after the fire, and he was...disfigured. But you thought he was dead, and that was for the best."

It is for the best if you can keep the remainder of pain, a quick and easy heartbreak, it makes you focus.

His stomach cramps. The tenseness creeps up his shoulders first. His hands start to shake. He curls his fingers into fists, bending slowly, knuckles turning white.

"It was for the best?" A rhetorical question without much substance.

"After what happened? Yes."

He forces his eyes down on the image again.

Nothing much is left of the boy he used to be. He wasn't a fighter. He wasn't a soldier. He has grown up into something that's both dead, a memory, something you recall and wish you had kept it closer, and something else. Something making you doubtful, something quiet.

"He did eventually die," she explains. "And if I had told you that, would it have made you feel better? That you didn't do it only to know he was gone anyway?"

"He obviously didn't stay as dead as you thought he would," he does not lash out at her, but he might as well. They are both tense and rigid and they both are watching the line he is walking very carefully, separated by the dark wooden desk and cut into short pieces of anger.

She scoffs softly, one long drawn mocking breath, eyes focused on his face.

"People nowadays do have the uncanny ability to return when you least expect them."

He doesn't answer to the jab in it, the mock or the attempt to keep the upper hand in a discussion unhinging and unsettling him, with a feeling that makes him want to combust.

"But this one is on you as much as it is on me," she continues. In closed quarters alone, she can be very vocal about doubts, or wrongs, or failures. "You begged me for a way to forget it."

As if he's an automaton, an engine, a clockwork that needs maintenance to run.

He is.

There is a weight at his neck, and it only gets worse, tingling and unnerving. It doesn't come from the crown on his head. He is used to the physical weight by now.

"I want him to be found. Alive."

"He pointed a weapon at our heads. If I hadn't stopped him, he would have pulled the trigger on you. He isn't that sweet boy you want to remember."

But neither is he, isn't that right?

"I want him alive," he repeats himself.

"The chances for anyone surviving that fall are slim."

Don't get your hopes up. Is it even hopes? What would you say to someone that was burned alive because of your inability to stay in control?

"I said. I want him alive." He can barely control his voice, gritting his teeth. "Before anyone else can use him."

That is more reasonable than she was probably expecting. "I will share whatever information I can find, as long as you promise me not to senselessly chase after him."

He leaves the accusation behind it unanswered. He is far from being able to address the wound point in their usual discussions, with one name, one memory of betrayal and misplaced trusts.

Not when yet another has returned.

"I want a medical record about the fire." His eyes force hers to look back, blue on blue.

"There is no such thing as a record, but I can arrange for something else to be retrieved." She does waver, not breaking eye contact. "And maybe you want to read about his time in the military positions too. He had a different name back then."

"Your courtesy?"

The courtesy of a liar, one could say.

"A small gift after he refused my other offers," she admits, tilting her head. "Will this distract you again? Or can I count on you to keep your senses?"

He holds the image tightly between his hands. He can feel the hostility cracking through the dead face.

He pointed a weapon at our heads. He would have pulled the trigger.

Alive.

With the intention to take him down.

The paper crumbles in his hands when his fingers claw into it with force. With a flicker of heat at the glimpse of a silver bracelet ,fire springs alive.

The scarred face burns again in his palms with a flurry of ashes and cinder, easy inflammable. He burns again until there is nothing left this time.