Here is my new chapter! I wrote this while listening to Tchaikovsky's Valse Sentimentale. It gave me the boost to write and also created the right atmosphere.

Sometimes I liked to stand by the shore and stare into the sea. I imagined my parents leaving home, crammed with dozens of people in the ship that brought them here. They had been staring at the very same waters, the very same stars, with hope in their eyes and a vision of a new, brighter future. At the time I was nothing but a thought in their minds, but my parents had left their home, their misery, their life for me, for the child they had been dreaming to have. In the end, how had I repaid them? By becoming a thief, a murderer, an assassin. But a man with an aim nonetheless.

"What shall we do with the Morrigan?" asked me Hope. It was sunset and I had been leaning on the fence for the last couple of hours, staring into the void.

"I don't know" I plainly said.

"It is harboured in New York right now. I think it is useless to keep it there, especially if there is a crew to pay"

"I thought you had found better occupation for the crew" I observed.

A small smile appeared on one side of her mouth "I have" then it was gone.

"A ship is a 'she', Hope" I said in the end, turning away from her, praying that she would take it as a sign of the end of the conversation. But she didn't.

"He's not coming back, Liam" she said after a short while, "you should move on. We all should"

"You don't seem to have gotten over it yet, either. You have no right to lecture me"

Slowly, she walked to the fence and sat next to me.

"Shay was my friend, too" she said at last.

"You weren't the one to lick his wounds when he was sad. You weren't the one to rescue him from the streets, to-"

"Is this what you are feeding yourself?" she interrupted me, and shook her head in disbelief. "We are all mourning his loss. On different degrees, but we all are. We should be used to it after all, our brothers dying around us. It will be worse with the war raging just a few miles from home" her gaze was lost in an indefinite space in front of her, but there was a sort of interior peace in it, as if she had given up.

This was too much. I could not bear it.

"Don't you see it?" I exclaimed, jumping up and staring at her with anger burning in my eyes, "We do not even have a body to bury!" I snapped venomously. I took a deep, trembling breath.

She did not answer.

"God knows for how long he must have laid in the freezing water, regretting his choice, even begging for us to come. He will have thought we have abandoned him. That I have abandoned him. And if you hadn't stopped me, I swear to God I would have thrown myself in the waters and swam after him!" my voice had risen as we spoke until I was screaming like a wounded animal. With a silent gasp I stepped back, slowly regaining control, praying that no tear would escape my eyes.

"This is where you are wrong. You think you are the only one to have had a bond with him. To have cared. To have cried when he disappeared. Don't you know we all did?"

I raised my eyes to meet hers. Her facial expression was wrinkled in pain, and to my great surprise she did not show strength, but tiredness.

"I have not slept for days. Weeks, even" I quietly replied.

"Nor have I. We were all close to him, Liam. Some of us were friends with him. You might have looked at him as a brother. Someone else might even have loved him in an entirely different way"

After pronouncing these words, she jumped down from the fence and run away.

I looked at her as she disappeared from my sight,

'Hope is right' I thought simply. The anger I had been feeling until a few minutes before had gone now, replaced by a dull sense of emptiness. I had always known that Shay looked at our friend with more than simple admiration. His eyes shone with a different light as she looked at Hope: not the usual interest she reserved for his occasional lovers, and not even lust. It was love. As simple as that. On the other hand, I had never been sure his feeling had been corresponded. Not until that day, and it struck me.

I was not the only one to suffer my friend's absence. I should have gone on from that moment on bestowing my burden on my own shoulders.

There had been no peace for me after I had escorted Hope back in safe hands. I had begun to run towards the harbour as fast as I could, with snow and wind slapping my face and making my eyes sore with the freezing cold they brought with each gush.

I had arrived just in time to see the research party dock sadly in the harbour.

I felt my blood froze in my veins.

"No..." I said out aloud as a foreign force dragged me forward. Slowly, I moved towards the rowboat, and then leaned to see its inside.

It was empty.

"Where is Shay?" I asked simply, as if it were the most normal thing in the world not to see him around.

A young recruit, Olivier, looked up at me from the boat with red eyes. His fearsome gaze was full of grief. If I hadn't been out of myself, I would have felt pity for him.

"He is gone" he simply replied.

Maybe it was his simplicity that triggered my reaction.

"What do you mean, gone?" I screamed, filling the distance between us with a single leap. In a moment, I had the collar of his shirt balled in my hand, my nose only inches away from his.

"You bastard" I growled, and God knows what I would have done if a friendly hand wouldn't have stopped my blind rage.

"Liam. Come away" said Achilles' voice. He sounded so calm. So calm, yet so afraid. So upset. Yet, he was not showing any feeling. His face remained a mask. Only his eyes looked pained.

"How can you tell me to calm down?" I screamed, throwing myself against him.

"I will drown you in the waters! It is all your fault!" I screamed, my voice so loud that my throat felt sore.

I pushed myself against his limp body, but he did not fall. He just stood there, motionless.

" It's all your damned fault if I got into this blasted brotherhood, if I am so unhappy... if Shay was dragged into this!"

I threw myself again, with more force than the last, but this time I fell to my knees and burst into sobs.

I did not oppose resistance to his soft touch, and as he stroked my short hair I hugged his lower body. I just stood there, crying into his lap, like if I still was the little kid he had brought to the Manor for the first time. But I wasn't. Everything was so different now, so much more complicated. Things were never going back the way they had been once. I knew that, but it was impossible to accept the crude reality of facts.

I felt the cold penetrating my knees and then right into my heart. I had never been worse. Never had my head ached so much, my thoughts been so negative and torn by grief.

It had been years, if not decades, that I had cried like that. At least now there was my Mentor holding me, a frail support to hold my pieces in place. When I looked up, his expression looked unfazed, yet I knew that he was hiding so much more. His eyes were deeply pained. I accepted his hand and stood up, drying my tears up with my sleeve as I looked around, fearing the reactions of my students and my brothers. But here, they were all gone. They had respected my sentiment and let me be.

Right then, just when I was looking around, I heard a voice coming from being my shoulders.

"Come now. It is not worth it to cry for that empty-headed idiot. We'll all be better off without him."

"Chevalier"I growled, and I went blind. Without waiting for any kind of restriction or encouragement, I stepped right in front of him and punched him on his nose as hard as I could.

I hope you enjoyed reading this! Have a good week!