Title: Hindsight
Character(s): Rose, Dart, Albert, Shana, Lavitz
Summary: Rose reflects on Lavitz's death after the events at Hellena Prison.

The grimy stone wall of the basement was uncomfortable against her back. She didn't move. Her feet inside her mismatched boots were slick and slimy with sweat. She didn't grimace. For all outward appearances, she was a statue—a hard faced, navy bedecked statue with oddly fashioned armor and a wicked rapier at the hip. She was Rose. Rose was stoic. Rose had few facial expressions beyond 'frown' and 'glare.'

As such, her position was not noted as out of the ordinary, and the rest of her companions continued their silent pondering below. It left her to her thoughts, loud and obtrusive little things like memories and conversations.

"So, do you want to—"

"No."

"How abo—"

"No."

"…are you always such a stick in the mud?"

"…"

She almost shook her head, almost, and she managed to slow her exhale enough that her sigh went unnoticed. Her head tilted back with a quiet rustle of black hair and her eyes drifted shut a moment. Sharp ears picked up the shuffling of leather, the scuffing of boots on a dusty floor, and the discordant clangor of shifting armor. Dart was repositioning himself, awkwardly, and Rose opened an eye to observe his discomfort. The king was still hunched over, unkempt hair frizzing away from him in a wholly undignified manner, and his face was pressed hard into hands propped up on his shaking thighs. The Red-Eyed Dragoon was at a loss for words, same as Shana. Rose herself simply had nothing to say to them. The silence was palpable, outside of her head.

"Hey Dart. Here is the plan. Why don't you go around the arena just with Shana? Then, I can go out with Rose."

"What? Why do I have to go with you?"

"Just pretending. Really."

She tried closing her eyes, briefly, before remembering that the darkness behind her eyelids would only encourage the images, and reopened them. She tried not to think of pain, consciously. It had become her unwavering companion for ten thousand years, and the worst of it had faded into a faint twinge in the very back of her heart. It tried to erupt now, employing Lavitz's demise as a catalyst. Rose forced it to recede. She—they didn't have time at the present. Ears, tuned from millennia of experience, fed her the conversation that was taking place below. Straightening, she entered it.

"He was out of luck. I didn't know he had the Dragon Buster. If I had known it, I would have stopped Lavitz."

She would have tried but, remembering the righteous fury that had twisted his face into a snarling, determined visage, she wondered whether she would have actually succeeded. He was a knight whose king was captured, on the verge of being executed by a gluttonous beast of a man that he himself had only just recently escaped. He was a knight who had felt responsible for the state of his king; regarding his absence from the castle as a failure to protect and serve.

In light of that, could she have saved him?

Looking back, the answer to that was… no.

She couldn't have. There was nothing she could have done. He was a stubborn man, more obstinate than a tired mule faced with a tedious trail, and she couldn't have stopped him, no matter how much she wished she could have.

But to say that in front of these people, her comrades, was inappropriate. She knew that… from the way that Shana had thrown herself on her shoulder at the moment of impact, unable to watch. From Dart's desperate pleading as he grasped Lavitz's hand. From the king's quiet thanks as he received the jade dragoon stone…

They all looked at her now, in varying degrees of obviousness in their observations. She stared back, inky eyes carefully going over their postures, their expressions, and the looks in their eyes and knew then that it really was an unnecessary thing to say.

They all already knew.