Tano poured the rest of the water over his head before going back to the rooming house to use his landlady's baths instead. When he was finished, he paid her an extra silver to interrupt her usual routine and press one of his uniforms. "I want to be able to shave with the creases," he rumbled.
She nodded. And it seemed like she must have heard about what had happened with the Captains too, given the way that she was looking at him like an avenging folk hero from a ballad. "You give them hell, son."
He wanted to argue, but the fact that this was clearly personal for her made him hold his tongue and silently accept the weight of her belief in him as yet another burden he'd have to carry. It wasn't justified, but that belief wasn't for him - it was for her. "I will."
He put on the medal the Duke had given him before he left. He'd sworn to never wear it in public, but fuck those stupid bastards. He was going to use every bit of leverage he had to rub their fucking noses in the dirt.
Tano called each of the Captains into his office one by one, made each of them explain their plans, and was pleased that most of them had taken the assignment seriously. He laid into the two that hadn't and gave them a choice - accept a demotion and train their own replacement, or quit. One accepted, the other told him to go fuck himself.
Tano added a note to his mental to-do list: make sure he never worked in this town again.
He left Captain Veren - the fucking idiot whose precinct the tragedy had happened in - for last. And the fucking idiot that Tano had hired. Tano had been fooled by Veren's service record in the war overseas, thinking that a record of care for the soldiers under his command meant that he'd show equal care for the citizens under his protection. But talking to him, it became all too clear that Veren didn't see the poor as people. Not really.
Tano tasted bile as he took pleasure in emotionally eviscerating the man.
He didn't scream. He did something much worse. He marched Veren into the lobby, where he assembled all of the available officers before reading Veren's "plan" out loud, with lots of interruptions for cruel, mocking commentary. Another man would have stopped when his point was made, but Tano kept going, aiming for nothing short of complete and total verbal annihilation, because he was here to make a fucking point.
If what it took to keep this from ever happening again was turning himself into an avenging folk hero straight out of a ballad, then by the gods he'd play the part. He'd let the people turn him into a fucking hero, and he'd hate himself for it later, because right now he was too busy getting drunk on his enjoyment of the man's anger and humiliation.
Finally, Tano tore Veren's report into tiny pieces, which he dropped into a waste basket. "Take off that fucking uniform. You're done here."
Veren's face was almost purple as he took off his jacket and angrily shoved it at Tano.
"All of it," Tano said coldly.
Veren looked taken aback. "All of it?"
"Uniforms are Watch property, and you're not part of the Watch anymore."
All of the blood drained from Veren's face. "You can't be fucking serious."
Tano spread his hands. "If you want to commit theft in front of a station full of Watch officers, be my fucking guest." He was almost disappointed when the former Captain wisely decided not to call his bluff.
Veren glared daggers at Tano as he removed his shirt. He had to take off his boots before he could get his pants off, but Tano stopped him as he started pulling his footwear back on.
"Boots too."
Veren audibly ground his teeth. "They're my boots."
Tano made a show of looking them over, even though they were clearly too fine to be common issue. "Keep the boots then, and get the fuck out."
The sound of laughter followed him out into the street.
Tano stomped back into his office and bleakly stared out the window for the rest of the morning.
⚔ ⚔ ⚔
He slept on the tiny couch in his office the next two nights, unable to bear the thought of seeing anything like approval from Karchak. The thought of kindness from Eldreth was equally intolerable.
Finally, Eldreth came to see him.
"Wh-what are you doing here?" Tano stammered as she walked into his office unannounced and shut the door.
"Captain Ennrian told me you haven't been home in a couple of nights, so I brought you some tea and one of your favorite meat pies."
Tano felt ashamed at the reminder of yet another thing he'd screwed up. They'd fucked, promised to be friends, and then he'd abandoned her. "I'm sorry. I didn't..." He trailed off, unsure of how to finish the sentence.
Finally, Eldreth crossed her arms. "You're not getting rid of me that easily. I stayed with my husband for fifteen years, and I didn't even like him."
Tano grappled with himself, torn between wanting support and not wanting to show weakness. He wasn't a man who lowered his guard easily - for a reason. He saw the depths of human depravity on a daily basis. But... Eldreth had said they were friends, and it wouldn't be fair to refuse her gesture when he'd already all but bared his heart to Karchak.
"I didn't feel like I deserved to be with you," Tano said in a small voice. "Because it's nice, and I don't..." Tano swallowed hard. He'd been about to say he didn't deserve nice things, but really it was worse than that. "You make me happy, and I don't deserve to be happy."
"Tano." Eldreth's voice was impossibly gentle. "Everyone deserves happiness."
Her statement was a near-echo of why he'd been so furious with Veren. The truth of that hurt as Tano was forced to confront the fact that he believed it to be true... for everyone but himself. "I wish I could be the person I am when we're fucking all the time, but I can't. And right now it hurts to even think about trying to be that person."
It was a testament to Eldreth's patience that she didn't treat his argument like the drivel that it was. "So we won't fuck. And I can stay, and we can talk, and I can still be your friend. Because you look like you could use one."
Tano felt lost. Everything she said made sense, but it somehow felt too easy.
Eldreth tilted her head, and her eyes twinkled with some of her usual mischief. "You can even cry on me if you want, and I promise not to fall in love with you."
The outrageous statement surprised a laugh out of Tano.
"Good," she said, as if that was proof that she had won the argument. (Which it was, because she had.)
Tano sat awkwardly next to Eldreth on the couch, which really wasn't meant to accommodate two people of their size, fretting as he did so that he didn't know how close to sit, or what to do with his hands. Eldreth solved the problem in typically Eldreth fashion by putting her arm around his shoulders and pulling him sideways so that his head was resting on her breasts. "No sense in having pillowy breasts if you can't use them to console a man who's already fucked you silly," she teased.
Tano felt like he should be sobbing into her shoulder by now, but it was like there was a wall between him and his emotions, and he no longer remembered how. "I don't know what I should be doing," he said at last.
"How about you talk to me about what you're thinking, and how you're feeling?"
So he did.
⚔ ⚔ ⚔
Tano slowly put himself back together over the course of the next week.
He resumed going to Eldreth's for breakfast most mornings, but didn't see her apart from that.
He avoided Karchak entirely, even sending Ennrian in his place instead of going to gloat himself when he got a tip about a shipment of smuggled goods that would be changing hands at The Drunken Lord.
Finally, he woke up one morning feeling as if a fever had broken.
He needed Eldreth - the why of that was obvious even to him. But the time apart had made it clear that he also... needed... Karchak. And the why of that was much less obvious.
Tano turned the problem over and over as he went to work, waving at Eldreth without stopping. He continued mulling it over as he tried to read through a stack of intelligence reports before giving it up as a lost cause and staring out the window.
He... needed to hurt people. The reason wasn't anything as simple as a 'dark heritage' or 'evil shifter nature', just some unfathomable combination of upbringing, trauma, and defects in his personality. Yet at the same time, he found the idea of hurting people deeply, morally repugnant.
Being with Karchak let him scratch the itch of all of his darkest impulses, allowing him to safely indulge in his desire to hurt people, because the only person he was hurting was someone who deserved it, and who craved being hurt by him because of his own fucking damage. The sex was a confusing complication, but if Tano had learned anything these past two weeks, it was that humans were little more than very confusing collections of meat driven by baffling chemical reactions.
He'd seen enough in his career to know that hating someone and wanting to fuck them was far from abnormal. And sure it was fucked up, but really... that was part of the appeal.
Tano sighed, feeling a lightness that he hadn't felt since before he'd gone on that damnable mission. He knew what he had to do.