InsaneJournal

“Tragos. Tragos Tragos Tragos Tragos-” Kaden grabbed at his brother’s ankles, and Tragos, snapping awake, only failed to kick him off because his legs were tangled in blankets.

“The fuck-”

“Tragos,” said Kaden again, crawling up the bed as Tragos sat up, frowning at him. “Gods can’t leave the country.”

That statement clarified nothing. Tragos blinked a heavy blanket of exhaustion out of his eyes. Kaden wasn’t likely to wake him up for anything less than an emergency and this – Tragos didn’t know what it was. There was definitely something urgent about Kaden, more urgent perhaps than catching up on the sleep Tragos hadn’t gotten last night. Arriving home from a job in the middle of the afternoon when you left home at dusk was a bitch of a thing.

“They can’t leave the country. At least not for long. Did you know that?”

“How do you know that?”

“Okay–” said Kaden carefully. “So, don’t panic-”

“Kaden-”

“I said don't - ugh,” Kaden rolled his eyes, and passed over his phone. “Just look-” The conversation with Qebhet was open on the screen. Tragos shot him a suspicious glare, but to his credit read it all the way through, though there were a couple of times he fought his urge to demand Kaden simply tell him what the hell was going on. Kaden jiggled impatiently; it wasn't that Tragos was a particularly slow reader, he just wasn't as fast as Kaden, and definitely wasn't as fast as Kaden wanted him to be.

There were guarded tones, worried and suspicious and armed tones in his voice when he spoke. “Who is she and how did you get her number?”

“She’s the one who left the little eye thing at the grave,” he explained, deliberately vague as if he hadn't been up reading about Eyes of Horus and other charms late into the night. “She left her number too. She said I could text if I had questions and… I had questions.”

He figured Qebhet had actually meant ‘questions about the job’ but a little creative misunderstanding hadn’t gone awry, and she’d seemed happy enough to talk to him about this instead.

“Getting involved with another goddess is a shit-stupid thing to do-”

“I’m not getting involved,” Kaden protested. “I’m asking questions, that’s all. Nothing else.”

“Nothing else except a good luck charm that could be any fuckin’ thing-”

Kaden twisted the corner of his mouth up in a dig of a smile. “Thought you didn’t believe in luck?”

“I don’t.”

“Then what’s your beef? Hey, and Marcie knows her.” This time Tragos didn’t say the fuck but his narrowed eyes spoke volumes. “Yeah,” Kaden said, figuring he’d hit on the magic word with Marcie’s name. “She said she helped her, when Marcie was sick.”

“Mm.” Tragos remained unconvinced that any of this was a good idea. “So did Aphrodite and Hecate, and who knows what their game plans are.” At least Athena had been upfront about wanting a truce, but Tragos still didn’t trust (or like) her. She was as clever as Hecate was mysterious, and both were dangerous.

As for Aphrodite, Tragos didn’t trust charity and he didn’t trust gifts. Kaden was indebted to her now and he dreaded to think what she’d ask for in return. It’ll be better than the shit you do for Ares Kaden had said, which made Tragos’ heart harden in anger. Kaden shouldn’t be forced into anything.

“Look I’m not trusting her, okay?” Kaden said. “I’m just asking questions. See? She says she barely has any power left. If she’s right about where they get power from, anyway. I don’t think she’s that dangerous, but I’m not counting on it. I’m being smart.”

Tragos frowned and read over the conversation again, but there was nothing there he could pick out to prove Kaden wasn’t being smart.

Kaden watched his face, watched him thinking, and leaned forward. “Can we circle back to the bit where their power ends at the borders?” he asked. “The bit that says like, all you gotta do is leave the country to-”

Tragos’ hand shot forward and covered his mouth completely. “Don’t say it,” he hissed, his fingers firm in Kaden’s cheeks. “Fucking hell, Kaden, shut it.”

He released his wide-eyed brother and hauled himself out of bed, quickly pulling on some warmer clothes. He threw an extra hoodie at Kaden and cracked open his window, and Kaden pulled it on and followed him out. Silence pricked at both of them, Kaden looking over his shoulder every other moment, Tragos just leading the way through the swamp to the old bus.

“I don’t even know if Cy was home,” Kaden said, as they climbed in.

“Doesn’t matter. Never ever talk about leaving in that house. And never ever talk about the possibility of me leaving. You got it? Cy gets a whiff of it, he goes to Ares, and I’m dead. Dead. Got it?”

Kaden nodded, worry squirming in his stomach. Tragos at his most serious was a frightening thing.

“No one leaves the War Dogs,” Tragos said, making sure it all sank in.

“I got it, I got it, okay,” Kaden said, sinking down in one of the seats that still had most of its covering. He was miserable about it though.

Tragos sat back too, thinking that the jobs up to Winnipeg did make a little more sense in the context of Ares being tied to the land. If he couldn’t go himself… yeah that was interesting.

But...

There was one story of a man who’d left the War Dogs, a few years ago, to join a rival gang in the city. It was a very short story; he, and his new gang, were found in pieces. If there was concrete evidence of the War Dogs involvement it was ‘lost’ at the police station. The Dogs extended their territory into the blocks the dead gang had covered and for a long time their borders were the most secure and unthreatened they’d ever been. Fear made a goddamn powerful border.

It’d been Cy’s first mission after his initiation, and the things he’d done that night cemented his reputation pretty damn firmly.

No one left the War Dogs.

“It’s not fair,” Kaden’s shoulders slumped, his foot sideways on the seat in front of him as he flicked a dead leaf off his shoe. “Why should I be the only one who gets a future away from all of this shit?”

The words burrowed into Tragos’ mind. A future away from New York for more than just Kaden? It was risky, daring, bordering on impossible. Dangerous and stupid and reckless. “World’s not fair,” Tragos said, trying to pry the idea out of his brain. He was feeling every minute of his sleepless night and it was making him stupid, that’s all this was. He reached out his own foot and gave Kaden’s shoe a sympathetic kick. “In case you missed that.”

“Yeah and nothing’s ever gonna be fair if all we do is keep talking about how unfair it all is!” Kaden hissed, still keeping his voice low enough that it didn’t escape the bus.

Tragos tapped his fingers on the back of a cracked seat, and he shook his head slowly, lips tight, like he was talking himself out of an idea and failing.

Looking over at his brother when he talked about fair, Tragos could see the way he carried every one of those long, hard fifteen years. And worse, he could see every one of the four years that Tragos had on him hovering above his head like a load of lead pipes in a net waiting to fall.

It all weighed so hard on Tragos’ mind. Had been weighing harder and harder, of late.

Barak wasn’t around any more to try and drag Kaden into this life but Kaden was being dragged into something anyway, all these unknown quantities of goddess swirling around him like sharks. Aphrodite’s money indebted him to her but it also gave him an out, a launchpad to break away from this life entirely and land somewhere else where the gods couldn’t touch him (Canada? Mexico? Was Kaden right?) Someplace where no one was going to put a gun in his hand and tell him to shoot, or whatever the goddess equivalent was going to turn out to be. Someplace where he could make his own choices, someplace where it was going to be easier to get out of the rut of a life that their father had started digging, that Barak had made deeper, and Cy deeper still. Even Tragos had made it worse, following in their footsteps, though he was always looking behind him, trying to figure a way to keep Kaden from following too close.

And if Tragos did try to leave too (and this if was still too dangerous a thing to speak out loud, Tragos felt a rush of fear even thinking it) then… at least he wouldn’t have to pave the way for Melpomene’s kid to follow the same path. The conversation between Ares and Melpomene stuck in his mind, but he kept trying to bury it down with every other thought he needed to bury to survive.

There was an art to it. He knew that. A study in survival Melpomene had called him. He’d made it this far, sometimes with blessings, sometimes on his own, sometimes so deeply out of favour it almost killed him. He walked a narrow path, ruin waiting to claim him if he put a foot wrong.

There was an art to survival. He’d done everything he could to perfect this art, so that Kaden wouldn’t have to.

"It won't be just talk," he said, and pushed himself back to his feet. Kaden watched him stand; from where Kaden was slouching, he looked taller than usual. "Do you know why Barak's coup failed?" Tragos asked.

"Uh… cos he went up against a god and is an idiot?"

"Yeah, cos he was an idiot. He wanted too much and moved too fast. We're not gonna make the same mistakes, are we?"

Kaden shook his head, a terrified excitement brewing in his stomach.

"No," Tragos confirmed it out loud, a promise for the both of them to hold to: No stupid mistakes.