An alternate scene set in, with spoilers up through, The Adventure Zone: Graduation Episode 22 Open and Shut (don't think I've ever posted an episode-based fic the same day it dropped, what is this)
Much of the beginning dialogue is taken directly from canon
Cross-posted to Archive of Our Own, where I am also sapphireswimming
Here at the Turning of the Tide
August 20, 2020
Ramos is nodding in approval under one of the hoods off to the side, along with several other members of the Tribunal, but as soon as Fitzroy finishes speaking The Commodore just smiles.
Fitzroy catches it immediately, and can trace the silver-fingered shiver that runs down his spine in response. It has nothing to do with the chill of the night air in this underground room below the Forge — his hackles have been rising further and further with every word the great naval hero has said since he was first introduced during the school's morning announcements and the man's smile now is too cold, too wide to mean anything good.
Not that there was much question about that, what with him sitting in the seat of judgment at the head of the Tribunal of the Unbroken Chain, poised to decide the fates of him and Argo and the Firbolg.
"Well, yes," The Commodore says, leaning forward to latch onto this next topic as if he had been biding his time throughout the entire proceedings for the moment it was mentioned. "That would go along with another report we have from the… centaur camp."
"Oh," Fitzroy startles. "Oh, the—"
"Where you," The Commodore continues, as if Fitzroy hadn't said anything, pausing to scan the document in his hands. He deliberately lets the moment linger, waiting for Fitzroy to start squirming with uncertainty, but Fitzroy refuses to give him the pleasure of seeing it.
"I believe, violently, tore the hand off of wizard named Calhain and used magic and intimidation to cow a large group of centaurs. And basically got your way through blood and fire."
Fitzroy purses his lips, realizing that it all sounds so much worse than it was when this man details their escapades in such a controlled tone that it sounds like nails are being hammered into their proverbial coffins.
"Is that correct?" The Commodore pauses again, the shadow of a smile falling across his words as he amends, "Or, rather, would you call that a correct assessment of those events?"
Argo takes half a step forward then, head canted. "Well, when you say 'you,' you mean all three of us? Because I believe…" he says, looking between his two roommates, "I believe I'm the one who initiated the hand removal."
And, bless him — not only has the rogue repeatedly decided not to lie, but now apparently, he doesn't withhold pertinent information either.
"Yes," Fitzroy admits, turning toward Argo for a moment, "you loosened the lid on that particular pickle jar."
"But," The Commodore immediately counters, a piercing eye trained directly on Fitzroy, "as previously stated, I believe you are the leader of The Thundermen, are you not?"
Fitzroy turns his full attention back toward their proverbial jury, judge, and executioner and gets the distinct impression that The Commodore is as pleased with the proceedings as if they were progressing according to a script he'd written himself.
Well. He looks straight into the man's eyes with gritted teeth and determines that he simply can't allow that to continue.
"Yes, I am," he says, a moment later with a quirked lip. "Although, I actually prefer the title CEO."
"Ah," an ocean's depth of disappointment clear in the single syllable.
"I mean," Fitzroy said, taking a deep breath, "you have to use the tools you've got. We were in a thorny situation and sometimes you just have to assert yourself. Surely, you would know something about that, Commodore of The Seas? Surely, you know something about leadership through force, occasionally, yes?"
This time, he isn't rewarded with a frustrated twitch of the eye, but Fitzroy still savors the barb, still chalks another point up on his side of the scoreboard in this silent stink-eye stare-down they've got going.
"Yes, but that is in my public role as leader of our naval forces," The Commodore says evenly, letting his sense of total control hang heavy from each word. "In my private role, as a member of the Unbroken Chain, I operate in secrecy. I operate with restraint. Can you tell the Tribunal here that you have shown restraint in your operations, in your dealings?"
Fitzroy stares at him.
"I think," he finally says, "I'm showing a bit at this exact junction. Don't you?" he asks, not breaking eye contact.
"Hmm," The Commodore hums. "So. Threats. Is that what you're going to bring to the Tribunal?"
Fitzroy's mouth makes a strange shape that nearly resembles a smile as he drags the words out from between gritted teeth. "Like I said, Commodore, you use the gifts you got."
"I see. Not quite befitting a potential member of—"
"You'll have to forgive me," Fitzroy cuts in, "that I wasn't aware I needed to act like a potential candidate for a secret society that I didn't even know existed at the time.
"I was there," he explains, "at the Centaur Camp in my public persona, aka The Thunderman, Villain, sent by Wiggenstaff's School for Heroism and Villainy to help prevent an all out war between the Centaurs of the Woods and the Centaurs of the Field. And, let me tell you, that's exactly what we did.
"We," and he gestures between him and Argo and the Firbolg, "prevented a war. A war, orchestrated, by the way, by the Demon Prince Gray that you may have heard us talking about once or twice when we came to you for help, you know, the reason this entire mess get started in the first place?"
He knows that the Unbroken Chain plans to discuss the Demon Prince situation as their second agenda item tonight, but he doesn't want anyone to derail this line of defence before he can finish it, so he plows ahead before anyone can actually answer.
"We were sent there on an assignment — us as the villains and also some heroes from the school — in order to prevent war. And we tried the talking thing," he extends a hand toward Argo, who startles for a moment, then nods.
"And the truth telling thing," he says, gesturing to his other side where the Firbolg stands watching.
"Yes," he agrees in his deep rumbling voice.
"And the reasoning thing — the whole shebang. But it wasn't working. So you know what?" Fitzroy asks, turning back to the hooded figures of the Tribunal.
"Sure," he admits openly, as close to proudly as the gnarled, twisting knot in his chest will allow, "I used threats and intimidation. Like any good villain would.
"And you know what that did? It prevented an all out war between two herds of centaurs who had been just looking, who had been, oooh just looking for an excuse to start layin' down.
"So, sure, if some bravado and some standing up tall and some, you know," he hedges, a shoulder hitching up alongside his voice, "taking of people's hands was what that took, well, then honestly I call that an A+ for us."
He looks to his roommates for their input and they both immediately nod in agreement.
"Oh, yes, absolutely," Argo agrees. "I mean, I hope it's an A+, but I guess they haven't given us back our grades yet, have they?"
"No, I suppose they haven't—"
"Also, isn't our grade for this mission going to be determined by," Argo wobbles his hand in front of him, "you know, Fake Hieronymus? Who had Calhain steal the apple so that a war would break out between the centaurs in the first place? Which means he wanted us to fail."
The Firbolg nods solemnly. "It is what you would call… a conundrum."
"So if you ask me, I'm not so sure he's going to give us a really good grade for messing up his plans, even if we did do exactly what we were supposed to."
"Hmm," Fitzroy hums. "I suppose we'll have to worry about our grades later, then. And maybe talk to Higglemas about them if they do end up being less than satisfactory? But okay, yes," he quickly course corrects, turning back around to point at The Commodore before the man could try to redirect the conversation back to the matter at hand or, more likely, straight to a verdict.
"That reminded me — thank you, Argo," Fitzroy says, starting to unlace the ties of a shirt that is still tragically too-small after he's shot up eight inches practically overnight. "About the whole hand thing. That guy put a curse on me, you know that?" he asks, raising his voice to address the room at large.
Pulling the flap of his shirt aside reveals the sigil marring his chest, still raw and red around the edges where it had been burned into the skin.
"Ooh," Argo winces in sympathy as soon as he catches a glimpse of it. "That looks like it hurts."
"It does," Fitzroy says, turning to him. "Thank- thank you for acknowledging that, yes, this is extremely painful in addition to, you know, marring my otherwise perfect summer bod that I've been working so hard on. And now all of my shirts chafe in the sort of chest area, and you can just forget about any sort of cross-body satchels, do you know how awful that feels against a burn?"
Someone who sounds suspiciously like Argo clears their throat from across the room.
Fitzroy acknowledges Jackal's warning with the briefest of side glances but otherwise sets his full concentration back to the matter at hand. He can't afford to forget what kind of man is presiding over this Tribunal, after all, or that his patience must be wearing thin.
"Anyway, you see this?" he asks, turning in a slow semi-circle so that every hooded figure can get a good long look at the symbol.
"Calhain and his magic glove are responsible for this. Althea Song from the Heroic Oversight Guild, I'm sure you all remember her, had to brand this sigil onto my chest because it was the only way to save my life from the curse.
"Now, we're all from a magic school here," Fitzroy smiles genially from hooded figure to hooded figure, knowing which professors are under each, "so I'm sure I don't have to tell you how these things work.
"Channeling a curse through a magic glove like that means that the curse doesn't stop until the glove, and hand, come off. If the hand hadn't come off, I would be dead. But neither I nor my friends wanted me to be dead, so his hand had to, shall we say, be violently removed from his person.
"Now, if he didn't want anyone to have a reason to chop off his hand, then he shouldn't have gone around cursing people using a method whose only recourse to break it was to, literally, take his hand."
"I mean, at that point, he was really just asking for it," Argo says.
"He really was. Like, I can't emphasize how much he was asking for it. I honestly don't know why anyone would ever use a curse like that when it means that people are going to need to chop your hand off in order to keep from dying, it's just—"
"He was a, ahhhhhhhhh, a shitty wizard," the Firbolg supplies after a moment.
Fitzroy nods fervently. "He was, he absolutely was a shitty wizard. He should have known that was just the cost of doing that kind of business. And honestly, he was trying to kill me, so I think I would have been justified in killing him as, like, a self-defence thing.
"But I didn't," he emphasizes with a pointed finger. "I didn't take his life or his entire arm or anything, I just took, I just took as much as I needed to stop that spell so I didn't, again, literally die.
"So, like, in terms of pure unrestrained villainy, I'd say that was pretty restrained. Pretty minimal. One hand… for a life," he says, holding outstretched palms like balancing scales.
"And then just sort of, just sort of hold that up as an example to everyone else in the camp. It was a pretty effective deterrent because no one else tried anything. Which meant no fighting," he ticks off on his fingers, "no war, no loss of life. Just one shitty wizard — who was the guy hired to start the war, let's remember — who lost a hand because of his own bad choices."
He turns back to The Commodore, whose expression is veering sharply stormward.
Fitzroy takes a second, then smiles, a little. "I know I'm a Villain, but, I think that moment would have been worthy of a Hero, too. A moment worthy of me in my private role," he says, calling back to what The Commodore had said before. "As Knight, in absentia," he allows, "of the Realm of Goodcastle.
"After all, my friends saved me from a curse, we defeated the bad guy and left him with his life, we completed our assignment with what we all agree were flying colors, stopped a war before it started and, oh right, don't forget, thwarted the machinations of a literal several hundred year old magic Demon Prince that, let me count," he rapidly points a finger between them, "that one, two, three people in this entire school are fighting against so far.
"Even though Gray wants to kill the real Hieronymus, and Higglemas, and wage a war that will kill off pretty much anything that's, you know, good or nice or worth fighting for in this world soooooo… yeah, I mean what's up?
"Sure, we can call that whole sort of escapade a sign of my leadership if you want to because I don't think it's a bad one."
He stares hard at The Commodore, refusing to take his eyes off the man, but in his peripheries, he can see the other hooded figures nodding all around the room. There are murmurs of assent, of approval.
The Commodore frowns at the change in the other members of the Unbroken Chain, and though he tries to mask it quickly, there's no hiding it from Fitzroy.
Another point up on the scoreboard. And another. And another.
The tides are turning in their favor, and The Commodore can sense it as well as he can.
Fitzroy stares at the Commodore and his smile grows a little sharper.