Sorry for the delay in getting this chapter up. Between getting back from spring break and the chaos of the first two weeks of classes, I fell behind on my writing. It also took me a few tries to come up with a version of Cassius and Mustang's conversation that I was happy with.

Chapter 11: Two Houses

Deja Thoris medBay

Mars

March 16th, 2841

Mustang kept herself impassioned as she moved through the medBay. Bed after bed of injured rebels from Phobos and other operations across Mars filled the infirmary. Cassius was handcuffed to the side rails of a bed in the back, positioned so that he could be watch and be watched by the lowColors and feel the weight of this war the same way that they did. While the infirmary aboard the Deja Thoris had been fully stocked when the battle first broke out, the medical supplies they had on board quickly proved insufficient to the demand placed on the Yellows by the influx of wounded troops. When she dropped Cassius off, the Yellows had informed her that priority for painkillers and other hard meds was given to burn victims and amputees.

It was easy to spot the Bellona family's trademark curly hair as Mustang walked into the room. She moved towards the back of the room until she stopped at the foot of his bed. All things considered, Cassius looked perfectly healthy. She hadn't touched his jugular, and the ship's medical staff had patched him in a couple of hours. He looked up at the sound of her approach, and she kept her face neutral as she saw the heartbreak in his eyes. She tapped her datapad and activated a jamfield around his bed. Her brother's spies had been purged from the rebel fleet thanks to Quicksilver's intel, but she didn't want the average soldier overhearing their conversation.

"I guess I should have known better," he began sadly. "Mother had been telling me since before the Summit how foolish I was to court you. But part of me still believed that what we had was real." Mustang bit her lip. She had told Darrow after they'd fled Luna how horrible she'd felt about sleeping with a man she didn't love. But as Darrow had reminded her, she'd done it to protect the people she did love, whether her father and brother deserved it.

"I'm sorry that I played you like that Cassius," she replied. "I really am. I told Darrow how much I hated myself for it. But I don't regret the lengths I went to protect my family."

"And yet you still stand with Darrow even though he was never a Gold, and had been sent by the Sons of Ares to destroy our society, something that would inevitably end with your family's deaths?" She knew he didn't mean for it to come out as an accusation, but that was how it sounded just the same.

"You forget that my twin was the one who killed my father," she answered. "If Adrius hadn't done that, I would have done what I could to ensure that they be captured alive. You need to stop living in the past, Cassius, and look at the big picture."

"He killed my brother," Cassius snapped.

"This coming from the man who bragged about breaking the trachea of Nexus au Celintus with his fingers," Mustang retorted sarcastically. "The man who tried to make a game of who killed who in the Passage. Every one of us in our year had to kill someone at the Institute. Roque. Sevro. Quinn. Me. You killed someone's relative in the Passage, but I haven't heard the family Celintus demanding your head. SubGovernor Priscilla au Caan didn't declare a blood feud with House Barca for Priam's death. So why are you still blaming Darrow for being used for my father's dirty work?"

Cassius was silent for several moments.

"It wasn't just that," the Morning Knight replied sullenly, his golden curls swinging from side to side as he shook his head. "I gave Nexus a quick, clean death. Any pain he would have felt would have been over quickly. But Darrow bludgeoned my brother in a darkened room until he died."

"Sevro stomped on Priam's trachea, but Priscilla au Caan didn't declare a blood feud with House Barca for it," Mustang retorted. "Not everyone was trained to kill as efficiently as you, Cassius."

"Well at least Darrow could have been honest with me!" Cassius snapped, his eyes moist with tears. "I could tell from the first day how broken up he was over having to kill in the Passage. If he'd just come to me and told me he'd been thrown in with Julian I'd have been able to forgive him. But instead I had to find out from a holocube that the man I was falling in love with killed my brother and had been lying about it so I would suspect Titus instead of him." Mustang froze. She had suspected Cassius's admiration of Darrow prior to their falling out had been deeper than just friendship. But he was clearly worked up over revealing something so private, so she decided to wait until he continued before she commented.

"Goryhell," the Bellona whispered, his eyes moist with tears. "That's the first time I've ever actually said that out loud. Mustang's thoughts were racing as she methodically analyzed this new information and its implications. She knew that Cassius had loved to brag to Darrow about how he'd "stolen his girl". She'd suspected Cassius had motivations of his own for entering a relationship with her, even if he did genuinely care for her. She'd initially thought Cassius bragging about their relationship was a means to say how much better than Darrow he was. But if Cassius had been in love with Darrow as well…

"You always saw our relationship as finding happiness with someone else who loved Darrow and been pushed away, didn't you?" she asked rhetorically as she finished his sentence for him. Cassius winced.

"I sound so pathetic when you put it like that," he mumbled. "Like a lovesick puppy." Mustang chuckled in amusement.

"Well I can't exactly blame you for being in love with him," she said with a smirk. "You'd hardly be the first Institute graduate to fall for him. Honestly, Tactus told me part of the reason he and Roque were intimate with each other at the Academy was because they both knew Darrow only had eyes for me. I haven't seen Adrius very often, even after we left Luna. But if I found out today that my brother was secretly attracted to Darrow I would hardly be surprised. He has that magnetic quality that attracts people to him in more ways than one." That managed to lift Cassius's spirit, and the last scion of House Bellona let out a warm chuckle.

"It's not like I had anyone I could talk to, really," he commented. "Everyone else in my family was too focused on avenging Julian to understand my own turmoil. My parents were traditionalists enough that they would have preferred for me to end up with a wife even if I had told them I enjoyed the company of both men and women. You weren't interested in going into much more detail about the feud, and the Furies aren't the sort one turns to for love advice." Mustang winced at the reminder of her decision to use Cassius, even as she laughed at his last comment.

"No, they are not," she chuckled. The laughter died as she reminded herself of why she came here. She turned to look at Cassius and knew from his expression that he had guessed her reason for visiting him.

"If you think the Sovereign will barter, you're wrong," Cassius commented. "She won't sacrifice a single thing to save me." He guessed it, Mustang thought, impressed with the Olympic Knight's ability to guess her train of thought. To be completely honest, they hadn't announced Cassius's capture yet. None of the dragoons under his command had survived the Nakamura siblings' betrayal, and they'd kept him covered under a ghostCloak as they escorted him to the infirmary. Mustang had wanted to talk to him first before she decided what to do with him.

"Then why serve her?" Mustang asked. As she stood by his bedside, she reached into her back pocket and pulled out her trump card, rolling it in her hand as she tried to direct the conversation to a point where she could use it.

"Duty," Cassius said the word, but Mustang wondered how deeply he meant them any longer. All the same, she thought to herself. He just gave me the opening I needed.

"And does she deserve your loyalty?" she asked. The Bellona was confused as she leaned forward and forced the holocube into Cassius's palm. Images danced across the surfaces of the thumb-sized triangular prism before floating into the air about the Bellona's hands. The scene of his family dying played, bathing him in blue light. Shadows moved through a hall, becoming men in scarabSkin. They cut down his aunt in a hallway and the men moved through and appeared a moment later dragging children, which they killed with the razors and boots. More bodies were dragged and piled up, then lit on fire so there would be no survivors. More than forty children and non-scarred members of the Bellona family died that night.

"They thought they could heap the sin upon Darrow's shoulders," Mustang said, voice trembling with barely contained rage. "But it was my brother's work. He finished the war between our families once and for all, and the Sovereign's cooperation and silence was his price for last night's massacre. The compact was started with noble intentions. To bring justice to the Society of Man. But we Aureate have all forgotten what that means. That is why this world is broken. I stand with Darrow in the hope that the next one will be better."

"There's something you should know," he said finally, his voice raw with conflicted emotion as he wrestled with the choices before him. "There's an asteroid warehouse. On a minor main belter in the Karin Cluster. Designation S-1988. Silicate-based junk asteroid. If you manage to win here today, you're going to have to destroy it."

"Why?" she inquired, voice growing concerned. "Cassius, what's in the warehouse?" He hesitated, unsure of where to place his loyalty. The fact he'd even told her this much was proof that he no longer cared about the Sovereign. But that didn't necessarily mean he was willing to join their rebellion. After a moment of silence, he let out a breath and continued.

"Five hundred nuclear warheads," he answered darkly.

"What's their yield?" Mustang asked, already piecing together a theory in the back of her mind.

"Thirty megatons each," Cassius replied weakly. Mustang kept expression carefully neutral. Years of training was the only think keeping her from wearing her horror on her sleeve.

"In case the Ash Lord ever had to repeat Rhea," she finished as she deduced the reason the Sovereign would keep warheads of that size in such large quantities stored between the Core and the Rim. Cassius nodded, and Mustang's expression darkened at another reminder of how cancerous and corrupt the Society had become. According to the Compact, planetary armadas were only permitted twenty nuclear warheads in their arsenals for the purposes of ship-to-ship warfare, all under five megatons. The last time atomics had been used in combat had been forty years ago, when Magnus au Grimmus put down the Moon Lords' Rebellion and earned himself the moniker of Ash Lord over the fifteen million souls slaughtered in the nuclear inferno that turned the moon of Rhea to glass.

"You know if Darrow could bring Julian back to you, he would," Mustang said. "But human science has not yet managed to conquer death. So, this war is for him, or men like him. The decent. It's for the quiet and gentle who know how the world should be but can't shout louder than the bastards. I understand that you have a lot on your plate now. Believe me. If not for this gorydamn war I'd lock myself in a stateroom for a week until I'd processed my grief over my father's murder and my brother's betrayal. But we don't have the luxury of dealing with our pain when we want to. I need you to set aside all this talk of blood feuds and revenge and ask yourself what Julian would want you to do in this situation?"

Pierce Brown confirmed on Twitter that Cassius is bisexual, but thus far he's only been seen expressing romantic interest in women during the original trilogy. Then Iron Gold came out and a bunch of fans started speculating about the fact that Cassius got drunk after finding out Darrow and Mustang got married. Given how much homoerotic tension there's been between the two, a bunch of us have theorized that Cassius was in love with Darrow before he started dating Mustang. Right now it's just my headcanon (at least until Pierce says anything for or against it), but i'm including it for the sake of the story.

I borrowed a lot of Cassius' dialogue (and a bit of Mustang's) from his two big conversations with Darrow in Morning Star prior to the final battle. With everything escalating I thought it would fit for certain things in the book to happen sooner.