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Kassandra woke with a start, sitting bolt upright with her spear in hand, scanning her room for a threat. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she could see a figure—Alexios her still-foggy brain supplied and she exhaled in relief—lingering at the threshold. He looked strangely small despite his size, standing in the shadows where the moonlight couldn’t reach, his shoulders hunched in on himself like he was trying to become invisible.
“Alexios?” she whispered, her voice sleep-rough and scratchy, putting her spear away.
There was no response and he seemed to sway on the spot.
“Alexios, what’s wrong?” Kassandra asked, disentangling herself from her blanket and coming to stand in front of her brother, her chest tight with worry. She wanted to check for injuries, but hesitated; Alexios was still wary of them all and his moods were changeable. Kassandra had found herself on the wrong side of his fist more than once for bothering to give him a friendly pat on the shoulder. Good thing she was stubborn.
“I—” he started but stopped, dropping his head and avoiding Kassandra’s eyes. She followed the motion and sucked in a breath when she noticed his upturned hands.
“Is that blood?”
Slowly, giving him the chance to pull away, she reached out and cradled his bloodied hands in hers. Gently, she turned his hands over to examine them, noting the scratches and small cuts.
“It’s not my blood. Mostly,” Alexios said in an eerily quiet voice. He was right, his bloody knuckles spoke of a fist fight more than anything and there wasn’t a wound on him that could have bled enough to leave his palms as bloody as they were. Kassandra nodded absently to herself, satisfied with her conclusion. She left him for a moment to wet a rag in the water basin. When she returned, he hadn’t moved in the handful of seconds she'd been gone, nor did he even seem to breathe as she gently wiped his hands clean.
The silence that descended on the room wasn’t comfortable, but at least it wasn’t thick with tension like silences between them were all too often.
“I,” Alexios started to say and Kassandra paused in her task, glancing at her brother’s face. Alexios’ mouth was working, but no words were coming out. He closed his eyes and took a breath. “I don’t remember,” he said, his eyes still closed. “How it happened.”
Kassandra’s hands resumed their work as she took in this new information. She was no healer, but she’d been around fighters and mercenaries all her life and she’d heard rumors of something similar. Men returning from war, mistaking their families for the enemy, butchering them in a stupor, and then waking up to devastation. With a voice much lighter than she felt, she smiled tightly and said, “Well, your knuckles are the worst of it. I’d say some maláka said something rude and you punched them. I know the impulse.”
Alexios shook his head and Kassandra didn’t know if he was disagreeing with her or trying to quiet the thoughts rattling around his head.
“But. What if—”
His voice trailed off and Kassandra didn’t press, however much she was tempted. This space between them, without the Cult or either of their pasts’ interfering, where the two of them could just be was so new, and she was scared of upsetting it. There was fear in Alexios that hurt Kassandra to see; she’d almost prefer to have Deimos and all his bluster back, than to see her little brother so afraid.
She found herself humming a half-forgotten lullaby under her breath and finished cleaning Alexios’ bloodied knuckles.
Kassandra was sitting on the stoop in front of their house, sharpening her spear, letting the familiar rhythmic sound of the whetstone against steel soothe her, when a shadow fell across her. She looked up to see three men standing in front of her. Bringing up a hand to shield her eyes from the morning sun, Kassandra waited for them to speak.
The short one with a nose that had been broken—and recently too, if the dried blood that caked his nostrils was anything to go by—and clearly the ringleader stepped forward and asked, “Is this where Alexios lives?”
On Kephallonia, and indeed most of the Greek world Kassandra had visited, that tone of voice meant someone was spoiling for a fight. Kassandra glanced at the two burly men that stood behind the short one, who were trying to appear intimidating mostly by being large, before languidly standing up, drawing her shoulders back, and replacing her spear in its holster on her back.
“Who’s looking for him?” she asked, pretending to focus more on cleaning her hands with the oil rag. There was a flash of a shadow overhead and Kassandra knew Ikaros was close by if she needed him.
“You can tell him it’s Thibron—he should remember me, he broke my fucking nose last night,” the short man spat.
“He does live here. But he’s sleeping and I don’t want to wake him just to deal with you.”
Thibron rolled his eyes and stepped towards the house. “Alexios! Shit-head! Come out and face me, coward!” he shouted.
Kassandra darted out a hand and gripped Thibron by the neck, her thumb digging into the flesh beside his windpipe and dragging him forward none too gently. Up close he was no more imposing than he had been posturing like a cock, but she could now see the unmistakable glimmer of fear in his eyes.
“I said, he’s sleeping.”
Kassandra kept her tone level, bored even, but emphasized each word by steadily adding more pressure to her grip until she felt the muscle under her fingers begin to give and Thibron turned a violent shade of red. When he started grasping at her fingers, self-preservation winning out over dignity, she gave a final squeeze before releasing him.
Free, Thibron stumbled back and hunched over trying to cough and draw breath at the same time. Kassandra looked placidly between the two thugs.
“Now, if you two are good for more than just show, I’d be happy to give you a nose to match your friend’s here.”
Clearly not interested in an actual fight, one shook his head while the other gathered Thibron under his arm, supporting his weight and the three left as unceremoniously as they’d come.
“Spartans,” Kassandra huffed under her breath, resisting the urge to punctuate her annoyance by spitting on the ground they had just been occupying; it was already a hot morning and they weren't worth the bother.
Turning, Kassandra paused as she caught Alexios standing in the shadow of the doorway, just out sight unless you knew what you were looking for. Suddenly apprehensive, Kassandra waited for her brother to break the silence.
They stood staring at each other for a beat longer than was comfortable, before Alexios ground out, “I don’t need you to fight my battles for me.”
Kassandra snorted. “Some battle,” she muttered under her breath, a joke about Spartan egos on the tip of her tongue before she caught sight of Alexios’ narrowed expression. Of course the instinctive urge to protect her brother would feel like nothing so much as manipulation to him. Tamping down on a fresh surge of hatred for the Cult as well as the desire to reach out and pull Alexios into a hug, Kassandra rolled her eyes and put on her best put-upon face that she'd honed after all her dealings with Markos. “Okay, next time, I promise I’ll come get you myself and you can waste your time on idiots like those. There's no shortage of them.”
Alexios watched her like he expected to catch her in a lie, but Kassandra met his gaze steadily. She could see his throat work like there were words he didn’t want to say threatening to force their way out. Then, all of a sudden, he grunted and walked forward. Drawing level with her shoulders, out of the corner of her eye she saw Alexios reach out, but stopped himself almost as quickly. Whatever it was going to be, he turned the aborted motion into a forceful clap on her shoulder.
“Just remember. You promised.”
Kassandra tried not to read anything into Alexios’ gruff statement, but felt hope bloom in her chest and turned away to hide her small, pleased smile.