Sorry for the short chapter this time, but not a lot really happens outside of Mustang reflecting on her life and summarizing what's been going on during the one-week timeskip between Chapters 21 and 22.
Chapter 23: Sins of the Father:
Hyperion
Luna
March 24th, 2841
Mustang sighed as she leaned back in her chair in what had once been the private offices of Octavia au Lune. It had been a week since they arrived on Luna, and the moon was still in turmoil. Thanks to a combination of Theodora's contacts, the Reformers, and a few sympathetic children of the Moon Lords, they had managed to take control of the Citadel in a matter of hours. But even now, fires burned across the lunar capital as the Sons of Ares fought to secure the city. The Nakamuras had rendezvoused with Trigg's fiancé, Ephraim, and were leading Rising strike teams in hunting down loyalist Peerless Scarred.
In the aftermath of her speech to the Senate, dozens of Gold ships defected, forcing the remaining ships of the Scepter Armada left to guard the moon in the Ash Lord's absence to retreat towards the ArchImperator's main fleet. Meanwhile Roque and Quinn, who had come along from Mars with some of the crew from their own ships, had used the newly defected ships to seize naval control of Luna. On the surface, Darrow and Cassius were out in the streets of Hyperion leading their forces, accompanied by as many Golds from her and Darrow's Institute army as they could fit into Octavia's shuttle. That left Mustang back at the Citadel working to restore order and implement the framework of the Solar Republic's new government.
With the Ash Lord off-planet, Mustang had secured the cooperation of most of the military, particularly the Gray Legions and Obsidian slave knights. She had used this political muscle to begin the first steps of dismantling the color hierarchy and the Gold grip on military power. The Board of Quality Control had been dissolved, and the members who had been apprehended now faced trial for their crimes. The senate was being rebuilt from the ground up, with the low- and midColor leaders of local resistance cells had been appointed to fill seats until proper elections could be held for each Color, with many Golds who were neutral or against the dismantling of the hierarchy being dismissed from office to open seats. The only Aureate to retain their positions in the senate were the Reformers.
There remained some grumbling among the mid- and lowColors, who remained largely distrustful of Golds in general. They felt that having another Gold as Sovereign would simply lead to more of the same rather than any lasting change. Fortunately, her continued appointment of lowColors to positions of authority and repealing legislation that denied them rights kept the complainers, if not silent, then certainly outnumbered. This ensured that Mustang had enough energy and patience to focus on more important priorities like restructuring the legal system.
Back on Mars, things were progressing more smoothly than they were here on Luna. With the Rising in control of the fourth planet's surface, Dancer and the Sons of Ares had begun the long process of liberating lowReds from their enslavement in the mines beneath the Martian surface. Victra was using the prominence of her mother's company on Phobos to facilitate drastic economic changes, raising the wages for the lowColor workers, covering the cost of transit for workers who had migrated up from Mars on contract work, providing flesh work and prosthetics for employees who'd been dismissed after losing limbs on the job.
Ragnar had lead a mixed Color team in seizing control of Asgard Station at Mars' South Pole and had taken the first steps towards freeing his people from bondage in the polar ice wastes. It would be a long road for the Prince of the Valkyrie Spires. The Obsidians were deeply superstitious after centuries of being told that Golds were gods. He'd managed to browbeat his mother into supporting their cause, but it would take weeks for word of his return to the Spires to spread to the other tribes. Weeks more to begin migrating everyone away from the poles to protect them from orbital bombardment when the Ash Lord arrived.
According to intelligence Theodora had received from Quicksilver's spy network, ArchImperator Grimmus was continuing towards Mars in spite of news of Octavia's demise. While Mustang knew the man wanted back the home they had stolen from him, she also respected that he would attack the more tactically convenient target. In all honesty, the Ash Lord was caught between a rock and a hard place. If he attacked Mars, hoping to take revenge by attacking the locus of the rebel movement, and it bought time for the Rising to conquer Luna and send reinforcements after him. But if he turned around and tried to retake Luna, that left him vulnerable to fresh rebel ships from Mars. Since the Ash Lord appeared to be targeting Mars, it appeared that he considered a planet full of well rested rebels to be a greater threat than a moon's worth of desperate and weary conquerors.
While her fiancé was relentless in his efforts to lead the conquest of Luna, he did whatever he could to minimize the loss of civilian lives. It helped that she continued to receive reports of Luneborn citizens rising to aid the rebellion wherever they could. As she thought about Darrow's exploits, her hand drifted towards her stomach, reminder herself that in a few months, she and Darrow were going to be parents. Mustang was never one to let herself be nervous worrying about the future, but at the moment, she was wondering what kind of world their child would be born into if Shiro, Keith, and Tactus were unable to secure the Classis Plutus and the war continued to draw out.
Thinking about her unborn child lead her down another train of thought, one that she had tried to avoid thinking about for years. Her eyes welled up with tears as she recalled the memory. She had told Darrow once that he would become like her father if he stayed on his path alone. That had been before she figured out his secret, but looking back, now that she knew the full truth, she realized that despite their similarities, there were enough key differences to recognize that Darrow would never be as cruel as her father.
When she was six, her mother had been pregnant with a little girl. The doctor had said there would be complications with the birth and recommended intervening medically. But her father had refused, saying that if the child wasn't fit to survive birth, then it didn't deserve life. Even all these years later, it still boggled Mustang's mind that humanity could move between the stars and shape planets, but her father let her sister die in her mother's womb. Holiday had been horrified to hear that the night the ex-Legionnaire had joined her, Darrow, and their friends for dinner at the Citadel while she was on leave from the front lines. As the older woman had pointed out, the Augustus family had the money to afford cell therapy for Mustang's mother. But her father had believed in "purity in the product". It was insane, as Holiday rightly said, but it was her family.
Mustang's mother had never been the same after that. Mustang would hear her crying in the middle of the day or find her staring out the window. One night, her mother went out for a walk at their Caragmore estate while her father was in Agea working, and never came home. Her mother's body was found on the rocks beneath the sea cliffs near the edge of the state. Father said she slipped, Mustang reminisced to herself. If he were still alive, he would still say she slipped. I don't think he could have survived thinking of anything else.
Intellectually, she knew she probably shouldn't miss her father. Nero au Augustus had been a cruel man who murdered his first wife and oversaw some of the Board of Quality Control's worst excesses on Mars and found them inadequate. The man would call her, his own daughter, a whore with one breath and then smile when she reclaimed her political power in the room, as during the war meeting aboard the Invictus a month after fleeing Luna following the Gala. Despite all that, she still mourned the man who had taught her how to ride horses and to lift herself up from her own strength when she fell, both physically and metaphorically. But her father was cruel, and he was wrong about a great many things. And if she could be something else, then she would be.
Thinking about her father inevitably sent her thoughts drifting towards the subject of her incarcerated twin brother. When she had heard what Adrius had said and done in the gardens at the Triumph, duty was the only think that kept her from breaking down right there on the bridge of the Deja Thoris. She loved her brother, and he had thrown that away. Despite her grief, She could understand why Adrius had killed their father. After all, she had defended her twin against the man for years. But that ended when she found out that Adrius had been the one to have Claudius killed. She couldn't forgive that. That was her twin's curse, to lose the love he did have chasing the love he would never receive.
And now he was rotting in the Citadel's prison wing, hated and lone. Despite everything he'd done, his treachery against their allies, his torture of Sons of Ares he captured, she still felt sympathy for him. She'd told Darrow once that she was lucky to have been around the Telemanuses growing up. And she was beginning to realize that Kavax had influenced her life in more than just her personal ethics and beliefs. In another life, if she had been in her brother's position, she wondered whether or not she would have turned out the same way.
Right then and there, she resolved to visit her brother in prison at some point in the next week. Part of the Rising's plans for the new government involved abolishing the death penalty, but she knew that wouldn't be enacted until at least after her brother had been put on trial. Because of his role in brutally hunting the rebellion and orchestration of the events leading up to the murder of the original Ares, she knew that any court would demand Adrius' execution. So, if she was going to lose the last of her blood family, then she at least needed to get closer. She needed to talk to her twin brother one last time before the end.
Just then, her thoughts abruptly screeched to a halt as an incoming message chimed on her datapad, reminding her of an upcoming meeting. With a sigh, she pushed herself back up from her chair. The break was soothing while it had lasted, but now it was time to get back to work.
Mustang's next chapter will be her meeting with her brother. I know this chapter was mainly character introspection, but I don't yet trust myself to write scenes of Mustang negotiating with politicians, so I did my best to summarize what's going on and make it sound interesting. Anyway, the next chapter will be up on Monday, and it'll be back to the Rim team for their first encounter with the 11th fleet.