There was a special sort of art, Florian thought, in actively putting yourself through a situation in which the only result was the strain of being fucked over in every sense of the word. Forwards, backwards, and side-to-side. He currently sat amongst the weedy middleground, already pelted with the upwards and downwards of it all. The rest would come sooner than he'd know it, certainly.

It was a really specific sort of art, the more he thought about it. Less special, more particular. This was an art that picked and prodded. This was an art most unwelcome.

He could relate to such an art, though, for he, too, had become the invader. They'd taken him by the shoulders and shoved him against the wall, whispering, "Traitor." At some point they'd gone away, all of them, but Florian wouldn't have been able to tell if he was alone or at the bottom of a silent crowd because his head was shoved against his knees anyhow. His arms were wrapped about them, and every now and then he felt the sting of a small newborn gash, but not once did he lift his head. Not once. Not even half, or a third.

He burrowed. It wasn't hard, either. The walls around him were textured roughly, something more brittle and harsh than brick, and they were of a reddish brown color. It reminded him of a hidey hole, of someplace only some secretive rascal would take to because of the sheer grime of it all. Any windows were pushed to the wall behind him, high to the ceiling but level with the sidewalks outside. If Florian'd been able to stand without his legs quaking out from under him, he might've been able to peer through the bars. The only other exit was a grated door. Y'know, the typical dungeon scenery.

He must've really been trying to find a distraction if he'd just gone and recalled every little fact about the place he was to be executed in. How depressing. Woe is me. Insert dreadfully poetic line of distress here. Woe.

He wasn't even supposed to go it alone, not initially. Taliesin had come with him, or at least, they'd been in the underground for the first few minutes of arrival. They were to go it side by side, stuck in that burrow. Not the prettiest of places, but at least it wouldn't have been so quiet. Or maybe it would've. He wouldn't know. The very moment questioning began, Tal had gone and flashed a pretty little thing from his pocket, a free pass. He now walked free and unburdened while Florian slumped, slouched, some other "s" word he couldn't think of.

A dick move, really. He did not want to think scorn for the man. It came naturally. It came as it shouldn't've.

And he had a right mind to force himself away from the bitterness, but a cluster of noises travelling down the hall just outside made his ears rattle, made them ring. Florian kept his eyes situated on the grate, kept them open despite the swells blossoming over the large expanse of his face. Silhouettes passed through the hall, blocked out the light in a flickering line of unidentifiable figures.

The line slowed as one specific man paused to peer through the bars, to observe what criminal sat caged. The face was pretty, strong, recognizable. Florian held eye contact with this man for quite some time, all the way up until the door allowed him to see the man no more. There was no doubt within him - not that he could muster it along with the rest of his usual demeanors - that Tal saw the angled brows upon him, the deeply set frown. Florian made the betrayal very clear throughout his features. He felt it, he felt it incredibly at that moment, and he wanted to make sure Tal saw, that he knew, that he felt guilty.

And Tal saw it.

He might've tried to say something, but a blurriness had passed from one temple to the other, and once his vision had cleared once more, Tal had left.

And that was that.

"We strippers gotta stick together," Florian muttered weakly. That statement - it tired him. He rolled his head upon his shoulders, let the wince, not of pain, but of full-fledged realization, cross his face, and dropped it right back upon his knees. At first he thought the ringing in his ears was from the banging of his forehead against bone, but then it took up a rhythm, and his body simply caved.

Music. Faint and thumping, but present. The noise made his surroundings feel bare and quiet.

He wondered; would anyone hear the gunshot?

Hell, he barely even heard the jangle of keys in the lock, or the squeaking of the door on its hinges, or the heavy footsteps that stepped into the clustered realm. Some of it registered, but he cared not, and kept his forehead glued to his knee. He blinked scarcely. Under other circumstances, someone might've labelled this position as a crotch-staring reverie.

He could've laughed. Didn't particularly want to. That sort of thing was only funny when you were either really desperate or really drunk.

I know which of the two I am, and which of the two I'd rather be.

The man that'd entered coughed roughly into his elbow and took a stance beside Florian. He saw the tips of the man's boots, but that was all. He allowed himself only a wary glance through the corner of his eye. He would not look up, he would not look up, he would not look up.

"So," the man began, "I know you haven't been too pleasant to work with for any of the others. I want to make this as painless as possible, I really do, but I need you to cooperate. Is that alright?"

Florian cupped his silence and sipped at it.

"We're going to ask you once more what you know of any final plans these Nixes've been putting together recently. You tell us of this, and any bases you may be aware of, and we let you off quick and easy."

Something in Florian brought forth a squaring up of his own shoulders, and, after cracking his neck by tossing it from one side to the other, he calmly set a look upon the man above him. "If by 'letting me off' you mean bringing the queen in so she can say 'off with his head', I'll pass, thanks." He followed up with a sweet smile, even cocking his head for added effect. Let them taste a little bit of that so long as he was there.

Though prompted, the stubbly man kept his cool, merely sighing and proceeding. "See, they told me you'd be like this. Her Majesty is offering a deal, a negotiation. We-"

"No."

"Not even-"

"No. I do not care."

The guard's features remained tight as he nodded curtly. "Right. Well, that seems to be about it. We need to have you packed up by the time Queen Elaine arrives. We haven't the time to coerce it out of you any longer." To some other entity waiting outside the cell, he called. "It's time. C'mere."

The man turned back to Florian, and though they'd shared plenty of glances before, this was the one that brought the traces of panic back into his stomach. They wormed and nested there, wriggling and repopulating faster than he could fully account for their growth. A breath became a hitch when the guard hooked a hand under his elbow, and a blink became a refusal to close his eyes once he was hoisted to his feet. His legs were too rigid, too flooded with adrenaline to break out from under him. Standing felt good, standing felt nice. But it scared him.

He squeezed his eyes tightly, whispered some nonsense to himself, and then opened them again. By then, the guard with the gun had entered. But by then, Florian had found reason to be more frightened by her presence than the gun's.

See, she had a thick tan to her, black hair pulled tightly into a bun, a small nose and lips that sort of just puckered all on their own. She had taken a namesake she wasn't meant to behold, and he'd given it to her shamelessly.

A tongue ran over his busted lower lip before he spoke. The coppery taste acted as a soporific, one that leaked into his voice far too heavily for spreading real impact.

"I hope the service was well-received."

Athena's chin lifted, eyes scanning to dig past the occasional crafty bruise on his cheek. She looked him over once, twice, three times before the ambers crawled away in favor of the other guard, in favor of exchanging a handgun for an empty palm. She avoided his gaze afterwards, but Florian had caught the recognition.

He knew that she knew. She knew that he knew that she knew. He knew that she knew that he knew that she knew.

"Against the wall."

They made him press his back to the wall beneath the windows, and though the moisture permeating his shirt brought a bout of shivering, only once did he break away from staring.

It was to look left. It was to look right. No one stood to his left. No one stood to his right.

He pressed the back of his head to the wall and swallowed. Finally, finally the sweat broke loose. "Oh, fuck me."

The guard with the gun offered nothing beyond a consoling shrug. "We expected to have more of you down here at once. That way we could sorta just go in a neat line and get it over with. Sorry you're on your own with this, mate."

Florian had stayed rather collected for the majority of his time there, but the breaking point arrived the moment he gave the gun acknowledgement. Heavy breathing veiled him, squeezed and rinsed the sweat out of him so that a glistening sheen skimmed over his forehead. He could feel it, wet and warm, and it was this he focused on as he cast his eyes to the ceiling and said, very clearly, "I want her to do it."

A twisted noise came of the guard with the gun, but Florian kept his eyes raised. He heard steps, an exchange, a clack of metal falling into small hands. They'd be smooth. There was a groove at the back of her right hand, some sort of scarring. He remembered. He remembered.

There were footsteps, slow, steady. Then they stopped. Heat radiated between inches, a warmth that spread to everywhere that wasn't his forehead - that was where the silver halo rested. It dug in deep, an imprint of raw frigidity. He heard a click. His Adams' apple bobbed when he swallowed. This was his execution. This was what he got in return for leaving on a whim, a whim developed for weeks until it hit a climax the night he found himself done with the sex and the redundancies and the constant fucking regret for taking his brother out for ice cream the same hour one criminal had decided to dart through a crowd and spell out the crosshairs at the corner of his head.

This was what he got in return for acting as the scales of equilibrium. A bit of a passing glance and a crack of lead in the skull.

Had it been worth it?

Frankly, he wasn't fond of the ceiling being equivalent to that of his last sight. To Athena he looked; the navy saw an upheaval in the brows, a concerned furrowing. A ways away from the pair, a voice commanded hurrying.

The woman waited. Other voices joined the background, rising steadily above the thump of distant music. One was of heavy resolve, and the other, a light sophistication. The queen, perhaps, having visited before the party to see that he was disposed of properly. Traitor, she called him. They'd called the crowd-runner that, too.

Lay me down by the river, lay me down, lay me down, lay me down as he was...

A trigger, pulled; a crack, delivered.

It was only human of him to flinch before the entrance of anything between the eyes. He expected a sharp, sick pain to fill out the gaps between brain and bone, but only lightheadedness came as he thought she missed she missed and she has to do it all over again and they're going to put me through hell before this is over with-

But the halo and the goddess still stood before him.

More popping sounded, and it was here that he realized these emanated from outside the cell. Someone had actively subjected themselves to what could've possibly fucked them over in every sense of the word.

Forwards, backwards, and side-to-side alike. What an art form to dabble in.

"Bloody hell," the stubbly guard said. He approached the bars softly and soundly. Florian, though, he was still basically urinating through his pores, and so he refused to look anywhere other than Athena, whose face had hardened over like a plaster mold within a matter of seconds. Swiftly and silently, she whisked the gun from Florian's forehead and swept it behind her, firing off a bullet the very second it fell within range of the guard.

It happened too rapidly for processing, really. The execution had been for Flo, but the vermillion spilled free of a bearded man's socket. He knew that much. He kept his eyes on the eyes even as Athena scurried over and unhooked whatever-this from whatever-that and returned. "Sorry you had to see that," she said while kneeling to his wrists. A weight left him, but he did not raise his arms. They were stuck, they were stuck, they were stuck.

He needed a drink. Coming from someone who abhorred the consumption of alcohol, he needed a drink.

Florian thought he might've said something along the lines of, "I need to sit the fuck down," but he couldn't really recall anything word for word; Athena had her arms on his shoulders, that's all he knew. A pat here, a pat there. Eventually focus returned and he was able to zero in on phrases.

"Are you going to be okay to follow me out?"

Florian's brows arched dramatically as he shook his head. "I don't know." His palms made a squelch as they met his temples. He thought maybe this would help, but he could barely formulate a single tangent to follow. "I don't know."

"Take a moment."

He took it heartily. "Let me just get this straight," he said firstly, removing one hand to point at Athena. "You're not some stone cold Caeruleus guard that was just about to shoot me for treason?"

Athena nodded in satisfaction. She smiled. "I'm from Candidus. It's a wonder what nursing can get you into."

Though he was taken aback, he let her explanation ease him, and he managed to swallow down a breathing rate that wouldn't send him into cardiac arrest. With this ease, however, came an overwhelming sense of vertigo as the adrenaline cooled and the blood grew hot. He continuously moved a finger between the two of them as he tried to shape his mouth around proper words. "And you...we? That, ah, there was a thing, and-" He inhaled strongly. "Did you know?"

Athena blinked, but nonetheless grabbed him by the arm and worked on subtly guiding him to the exit. Did she think him too much of a dumbass to find the door himself? "Let's not talk about that now. And no, I didn't know."

They left it at that. There wasn't much of a choice, really, for when they left the cell, both Esme and Will stood in the hall, various firearms shared between the both of them. Genuinely, for a moment he thought they freed him merely to chastise his earlier decision, but they mentioned it not.

Instead, they explained their aims to removing him from the premises. Before he even knew they were making their way out, they'd started down the hall that rose up into the rest of the palace. The shift from cement to tile crept through his feet in a thrill of cold, and, though he knew they'd try to catch him, he hopped backwards, away from their little group. "Wait a minute. They took something of mine and I need to get it back."

It was a lazy gesture that Esme employed herself with to toss those markered shoes to his chest, but the gratitude that spread through him as he slipped his torn feet into the soles was of great intensity. Such great intensity that, when he moved to straighten himself out again, he began to see dots in his vision. Beyond these charred spots, he could see the bursting open of a door, and the quick reaction with which the princess had removed some sort of gun from her fiance's back - a shotgun, it seemed - and turned.

There was yelling, plenty of it, but it all came through corrupted and muddled. His knees dragged, his shoulders felt as though they were back in the cell - just an overall disorienting experience. Bile rose somewhere along the line but he had no recollection of whether he'd staved it off or not. Other things followed. A stumble, a catch, not particularly in that order.

Ah. Turns out that was the forwards, backwards, and side-to-side of things.