Summary: If he could go back. If he could change the past. If he could fix the ultimate wrong he'd committed, it would all be better. Wouldn't it?
That was what Damen had thought. It was what he'd hoped, what he'd sought, what he'd struggled desperately to discover could have been. The reality, however, was nothing if not brutally honest.
Sometimes, fate plays forth for a reason. Damen realises that such reasons made a mess of a whole lot of things - but it could have been so much worse.

Rating: T

Tags: Damen/Laurent, Canon Era, THIS IS NOT A FIXER, Oracles, War Violence, Canon Implied Child Abuse, Regrets, So Much Regrets

Chapter 1

"Hold out your hand."

He did. He did in a heartbeat, without a second thought. Damen had to know.

"Speak your query, Akielos King. What is it you long to know?"

Damen had questions. So many questions. How to become a greater king; what he could do for his people; how he should best approach the delegation from the Vask empire when their party arrived come spring; where he should pool his resources for the drought prophesised for three years hence.

He didn't ask. Damen didn't ask any of that. There was one question that he longed to know the answer to, and that answer lay not in the future but in the past.

Squeezing the oracle's pale, thin hand, he took a deep breath and sighed out his words in a choked gasp. "How? How could it have been different?"

A crash drew his eyes snapping open, and just in time. In the confusion around him, the chaos that assaulted him, the incomprehension of just where he was, Damen only just managed to raise his sword to stop the descending blow. He blocked, parried, then flung his attacker away from him. A second later, his arcing slice split the man in two to topple to the ground.

An instant later and another was upon him, a savage roar preceding his enemy's attack before it was lost between the crash of blade on blade.

Then another.

And another.

Damen felled them all. He fought in an instinctive frenzy, the smell of blood metallic and sharp in his nostrils, the echoes of cries resounding amidst the cries of pain and battle fury and terror. The blur of splattered armour and grimacing faces and flailing limbs as they fought in what was more a desperate attempt to survive than to achieve victory was a riot of terror.

Damen knew that feeling. He'd known it long ago, before the experience of leadership forbade such thoughts and cast them into negligibility. When he downed another foe, when the man in grimed armour rapidly staining with ruddy spurts of his life gushing forth from the wound at his chin, Damen paused. That was the way of battle: a furious, exhausting, seemingly endless fight of confrontation after confrontation, and then a sudden reprieve. A pause as though the world was taking a breath, and though the battle still raged around him Damen had a moment to pause himself.

He looked. He observed his own men in their familiar leather skirts and sleeveless breastplates, helmets firmly strapped onto heads pouring torrents of sweat. He saw the swing of his men's gladius', the whirl of the iron swords streaked with filth and blood as they slashed through the air. He saw the more slender xiphos of the hoplites, their weapons drawn when the cumbersome dory of their initial charge became impractical for close combat. Damen could even see discarded spears simply dropped in favour of the blades; there was little use in carrying them in such circumstances.

But more than that, he saw them. He saw their opponents, their foes, the familiar, sleek, fitted, and more wholly covering armour of the Veretians that battled his men. And he knew. He knew then exactly where he was.

Damen would never forget the battle of Marlas. Never.

He didn't know when it was. He didn't know how long they'd been fighting, though his body told him it had been long. His nineteen-year-old body, he realised, and was struck dumb for a moment before forcibly drawn from his stupor and back into the fighting. He hadn't the time for this. He hadn't the time to consider how he'd gotten here, how it was possible, how… how…

The dry, wrinkled hand squeezed his fingers tightly, urging, forcing, and he couldn't look away from the dark pits of her gaze. She was pushing him, drawing him towards…

He couldn't remember, but Damen knew now wasn't the time to try. He had a battle to win. No, not to win. To survive. He could think of the how later.

Swinging his own gladius, Damen stuck at the skull of his enemy and had to bite back on the sharp pain that speared through his chest as he did so. The Veretians. They were enemies once, but now… they hadn't been his enemies for years. The Veretians were as much his people as those of Akielos were. Or almost as much, anyway. They were Laurent's people, and that was as good as.

Laurent was…

Damen swung and ducked, coming up sharply and ramming his sword into his opponent's gut. He spun as some sixth sense within him screamed at him to defend his back and caught the assault just in time, flinging the soldier to the ground. Damen saw his elites spread just behind him, each engaged in their own fierce battle, faces twisted into concentration and almost anger. He saw the momentary fear on a Veretian's face as he slaughtered him where he stood. He saw the wave of his enemy who weren't his enemy anymore, they weren't, and fell to mowing them down alongside his men.

And then he saw Kastor.

His brother, like the majority of their troops, had been bereft of his horse. He was bedecked more richly in bloody reds than the worked leather of armour or the deep grey of iron, his scarlet cape torn and tattered yet still flapping like a flag from his shoulders. His own troops roiled around him as he fought barely fifty paces from Damen, slicing through the Veretians that steadfastly maintained their resistance. Not that they would win. Not against Damen's men, against Kastor's.

Kastor caught sight of him. Just for a moment, across the distance between them, and it was as though none of what Damen knew had happened. As though Kastor hadn't betrayed him, hadn't sold him into slavery, hadn't tried to kill him time and time again. The fierce light in his dark eyes was radiant even though Damen could barely meet his gaze across the battlefield and the soldiers between them.

"Damen!" Kastor cried, and with a jab of his own gladius pointed him in the direction before them both.

Damen sliced down an opponent, throwing him to the ground before he could spare a moment to turn to where his brother directed. When he did, his heart seized in his chest for a moment, horror rising to freeze it solidly.

Gold. Gold armour and a windmilling sword. The Veretian swordsman danced and spun through his foes, weaving intricate arcs that raked through his opponents like a knife through butter. Damen had the terror, the mind-numbing moment of fear in which he thought nothing but No, he can't be here, he can't, before reality slammed into him with the force of a charging horse.

Not Laurent. Auguste.

Damen knew in that moment what Kastor had meant. What he'd directed with that single barked word. "Damen!" meant attack. It meant fulfilling the commitment that he'd spoken of only to Kastor, had barely mentioned to ground himself further in his resolution. "Damen!" meant 'spear the hydra through the heart and regardless of how many heads have spawned the body will fail.

"Damen!" meant kill Auguste. Kill him like Damen had so many years ago. As he was supposed to now.

Damen knew he wouldn't. He couldn't. It didn't matter that it would mean victory for his men. It didn't matter that not doing so would leave Kastor gaping and furious, likely resulting in a duel between brothers as he demanded recompense for the slight against his honour. If they won, that was. If they would win without the loss of the Veretian prince.

But Prince and King – both Auguste and Aleron – were still alive. They were still alive, and it was a reality that Damen had longed for more times than he could count. For years he had felt nothing but regret for killing Auguste, for the part he'd played in causing Laurent unprecedented pain. Regret for forcing him to endure all that had followed as a result.

He couldn't, he wouldn't, do so again. He didn't even truly understand where he was, didn't understand how he was here, but he wouldn't do it. Not this time.

So Damen turned from his brother. He wouldn't lower his sword but neither would he charge the golden prince to tear him from the world in a fierce battle that would leave the Veretians with their knees cut from beneath them. He wouldn't do that.

Damen fought. He fought and he killed, but he didn't charge at Auguste. He grit his teeth as he heard his brother's sharp, demanding cry once more, but he didn't glance his way. Damen swept those around him to the ground and fought the urge to flinch at each gurgling cry of those who would, in years to come, be his people as much as they were Laurent's.

He couldn't take their prince away from them. Not from the Veretians. Not from the thirteen year old boy who Damen hadn't even met yet.

But it didn't matter. Damen should have known that the fates had decided, that he was little more than an instrument in their malicious hands. Damen fought, but he still managed to catch sight of Kastor. He saw over the shoulder of an opponent speared on his gladius that Kastor had broken from the cocoon of his own men and charged across the battlefield. He saw him tear through the Veretians as though they were stalks of wheat before his scythe. He saw him throw himself at the golden prince.

Damen struggled. He fought so hard that it was a miracle any of the Veretians that surrounded him even had the nerve to hold their stance. Damen barely considered cutting through them – his shoulder as he charged in Kastor's wake was weapon enough. And yet still he was too slow. The distance was too far. Damen stumbled in his flight, barely pausing to sweep a slicing cut, to block with a whirling parry, but still he was too slow.

The fight was fierce, as fierce and furious as that Damen had fought against Auguste years before. And yet just as had happened the first time, it was short. In the midst of battle, duels never lasted long. Damen pleaded, silently and perhaps aloud, for his brother to stop, that he didn't realise what he was doing, that he couldn't possibly imagine the disaster that would result from such a death.

Kastor didn't hear him. He didn't hear, or perhaps he didn't care.

Before Damen's eyes, barely twenty paces away, for the second time he saw Auguste of Vere topple to the ground. He was a good fighter. A great fighter, even. But Kastor… he was better.

Damen stumbled to a halt in his charge. It was likely only Kastor's men that swarmed around him, racing to reinforce their triumphant prince, that saved him from losing his head to a heartbroken Veretian blade. Cries of horror, of fury, of overwhelming grief arose as the Veretians saw their idol fall. Damen silently added his own mourning to theirs.

This… it should never have happened. Not the first time and certainly not this time.

This… this shouldn't have happened. Damen hadn't wanted Auguste to die so it shouldn't have…

He was distantly aware that Kastor was straightening from his killing blow. He was aware that his brother drew breath before raising his sword and uttering a fierce cry of victory. Damen saw detachedly that Kastor noticed him, standing frozen within calling distance, and he saw the moment that his brother turned towards him. That he smiled wide and just as fierce as his cry had been, the blood smearing his cheeks affording him an almost manic cast.

Damen saw it all but he couldn't look away from Auguste. He couldn't help but think of what it meant, of what would follow, of Laurent and all that would come as a result of it.

This was never meant to happen. And yet for the second time, Damen hadn't been able to stop it.

"Father, please, if you would only consider –"

"You clearly do not understand, Damnianos," Theomedes said. Damen's full name was spoken as much with exasperation as confusion. Confusion for his persistence or his stance, Damen didn't know. He didn't much care. "One does not submit for surrender nor even accept neutrality when one has the upper ground."

Damen clenched his teeth fiercely to withhold the torrent of objections that threatened to spill forth. Instead of snapping a demand, he pressed his hands only more firmly into the table before him, the round surface in the centre of the low-ceilinged general's tent that depicted maps and figurines carved from wood in representative shapes. The general's tent was wholly minimalistic, including only what was absolutely necessary, and Damen and his father were two of only a few attendants standing within. Damen was the one who monopolised Theomedes' attention, however. Theomedes' and Kastor's both, though a number of Akielon generals were similarly staring at him with fixed frowns and folded arms.

Swallowing, Damen sought to swallow the urge to hiss and spit his frustration. This is not how it should be, his mind longed to voice, and he saw Auguste falling time and time again. He'd never been able to forget it, not after that first time he was nineteen when the Veretian prince had fallen to Damen's own blade, but this time he'd been afforded a different perspective. This time he'd watched it as a spectator and had understood the true horror of what those actions meant.

For hours now, Damen had been able to feel nothing but nausea roiling in his gut, bile creeping sickeningly into the back of his throat. He didn't know how to fix this. He didn't know how to fix any of it, how to make peace with the Veretians, how to end the war, how to stop the killing of those who would be, who should be in years to come, his people too.

He didn't know how… how to… for Laurent…

But he would try. Damen would damn well try, even if it would cause him shame before his father's generals. He didn't cared. The situation was uncanny, and for hours he'd withstood it in confusion, but that didn't matter. Knowing what he did, with years of experience and the backlash of what was to come, it didn't matter. Damen had to make it right.

Curling his fingers onto the polished wood, he swallowed the sharp, bitter taste once more. "It doesn't have to be this way," he ground out, his voice low and little more than a growl. "We don't have to fight them. There should be another way we could –"

Kastor's sharp step towards him silenced Damen immediately. He wasn't intimidated by his brother, but there was none of the awe or hero-worship he'd once held for him years ago. It was wariness as much as anything that stilled Damen's tongue. How long had Kastor seen him as nothing but a rival? Damen loved his brother, had always loved him, even after his death and what he'd done, but how long?

There was nothing to suggest such rivalry in Kastor's frowning gaze as he stepped towards Damen, however. Like the rest of the generals, he wore a mask of confusion and just a little exasperation. "Damen, what are you saying? Are you really suggesting we parley with the Veretians? Surely you understand they're nothing but sneaky, underhanded bastards who strike at the back before the front. You saw what they did at the last parley. They can't be trusted –"

"They're just fighting the war how they can," Damen said. His sharp words immediately cut Kastor off, and he knew how it sounded. He was defending the manipulative methods of the Veretians that so vastly differed to the honourable and direct approach of Damen's people.

Honourable. Damen had thought his people honourable once, and still did for the most part. When he stared at Kastor, though, he wasn't so sure. Ignoring the indignation on the faces of the generals, Damen shifted his gaze from Kastor to Theomedes. "It doesn't need to be this way. If the Veretians are so near to being overwhelmed then they'll accept our terms, they'll accept anything that we pose to them. They must."

"Why would we?" Kastor said. "Why would we when we could just obliterate them? Erase them like a stain beneath a mop?"

Damen fought the urge to growl once more, noting the thoughtful and frowning nods of the generals around him. They have no idea, he thought. And this wasn't working. He needed to be faster than this, before everything else fell to disaster. First Auguste had fallen and then… Damen didn't know at what point expressly King Aleron of Vere would fall, but he knew it was in battle. That the 'stray arrow' would use the cover of an attack to wipe out that king. It hadn't already happened, surely. Surely Damen would have heard of it by now.

Which meant that he had to stop it. Damen had to stop that one, final disaster, and if that meant stemming any further fights then so be it.

"We don't need to fight," he said.

"But we do," Kastor countered. "It's what we always do. Open war is the most honest way to reach an accord."

"Oh, so the most honest way is through mass bloodshed and violence?"

Kastor's frown deepened. "What are you saying?"

"I'm saying we don't need to do this." Damen pressed a fist into the table, fingers curled. "We've already won, Kastor. The Veretians just haven't realised it. We only need to tell them. There's no need –"

"Prince Damianos, this is unnecessary," one of the generals, Pector, took a step forwards. He was a big man, burly and thick with muscles as all of them were. Not quite as tall as Damen but at nineteen Damen knew he would have once been bowed beneath the weight of years and experience of his elder. Even at such an age, he hadn't been afflicted by youthful bravado; he'd learned long ago that vitality didn't necessary overcome experience. Not at all. Kastor had taught him that, and he wore the scar as a reminder of the lesson. "We will lose few in this final battle, and it will not only boost the morale of the troops but also enforce our position against the Veretians for future conquests."

"This is unnecessary," Damen insisted, jabbing a finger into the table. It was a struggle not to swipe it clear in his frustration. "Why would we waste men and resources when we don't need to?"

"Damianos," his father began.

Damen ploughed through his words. "Have we not fought long enough? The Veretians are already worn by the loss of their prince. Surely you don't believe they'll withstand a further blow."

"My Prince," Pector said sharply.

"Why fight when we don't need to? People will die, and it is unnecessary." Damen didn't realise he was nearly shouting until his fist came down on the table and rocked the figurines positioned on the map from their standing poses. The tent fell into silence, all eyes fastened upon him.

Damen didn't care. It wasn't his men that he was worried about. Not the Akielons. He knew they would win, that there would be minimal losses to their troops.

It was the Veretians that concerned him. It was the life of the king and the future of the prince who was at present no more than a boy that left him cold with fear yet hot-blooded with desperation. Damen would fight with his words as he had never been taught, as he'd learned from Laurent after years of thinly veiled awe for the way that he could twist and dominate a situation with the barest of suggestions. Damen had always been able to rally the troops, had always been capable of inspiring enthusiasm and determination in his men, but dissuading others? Drawing them from their resolutions into an alternate way of thinking?

He'd never been good at that, but he would try. He would damn-well try.

"Damen, what has gotten into you?" Kastor finally said into the temporary hush. His frown was so low that his brows nearly hid his eyes. His jaw was set firmly, an indication that he was not only confused but growing increasingly angry. At Damen, clearly, and at what he was suggesting. Perhaps he'd never been content with listening to the opinions of his younger brother.

Before Damen could speak, there was the sound of the tent flaps being swept aside and running feet skidding to a halt. As one, the generals, Damen, and his brother and father all turned towards the intruder.

It was a runner, a guard from the perimeter, and still carrying his hoplite spear, xiphos sheathed at his belt. He was panting heavily, sweat from the heat of the afternoon dribbling in runnels through the grime on his face. He tipped his head in a slight bow, just long enough to be respectful, before speaking. "Your Majesties, generals, they're moving."

Immediately, all annoyance and confusion was swept from the generals and replaced by sharp attentiveness. Damen could feel it himself, and he knew. He didn't even turn away from the runner as his hands curled into fists at his sides. No…

"Formation?" one of the generals barked. "Pace? Direction? Come, boy give us answers."

The runner flinched slightly beneath the undivided attention of his superiors. He swallowed audibly before replying. "Away, sir. They're going away."

No. No, it can't have been…

"Away? What do you mean away? They're retreating?"

"Yes, sir, they're in retreat. Drawing away fast, they are, like scolded pups with their tails between their legs." The runner gave a smile that was somewhere between smug and nervous, and Damen immediately wanted to slap it off his chin. "They've got their banners raised, general, sir. Their king is dead."

A moment of silence reigned once more before Theomedes stepped towards the runner. His voice was low when he spoke. "King Aleron is dead?"

The runner nodded, his smile widening. "Yes, Your Majesty. He and the prince both. They're dead."

Another moment of stunned surprise ensued. Then it was broken, sharply, cruelly, by an outburst of exuberance. Barks of laughter and murmured delight resounded throughout the tent, and the scuffle of feet was accompanied by the clap of hands onto shoulders. As though they'd won. As though they'd triumphed, and the death of the Veretian king was of their own doing rather than an act of underhanded treachery from the king's own brother himself.

Damen felt his heart seize before sinking into the pit of his belly. He could only stare at the runner, stare as the soldier's smile widened to a grin as his gaze jumped between generals, princes, and king as though proud for what he'd induced.

Damen didn't look over his shoulder. He couldn't even pretend to partake in the merriment. It was all he could do not to close his eyes and sag.

He'd tried. He'd tried to stop it, but it hadn't worked. Somehow, Damen realised he'd already known he wouldn't have been able to change that.

A/N: What did you think? Predictable? Interesting? Totally UNinteresting?
Please let me know with a review! I've got chapter 2 already lined up so hopefully shouldn't take too long to post that one up next. Thanks for reading!