A/N Thank you Sarah! You are the best beta ever.

This was written for the February challenge on the Tamora Pierce Experiment: Writing Challenges forum Sarah and I created! The idea is that every month, a challenge will be posted. If you sign up and submit your link before the deadline, you can be entered into the poll. Plus, the forum offers you publicity, a place to discuss the challenge and your writing, a rent-a-beta section and lots more! Interested in expanding your writing world?

www dot fanfiction .net/forum/The_Tamora_Pierce_Experiment_Writing_Challenges/70302/

George was standing at the window in his office, looking down at the grounds of the Swoop's courtyard. His flag was being raised above the walls, its snapping shadow falling directly in the middle of the dusty grounds.

A door opened into the courtyard and a small red-headed boy ran out into the summer air, his mouth opened in joyful laughter that George couldn't hear from his office. Maude followed close behind, watching the boy play as she stayed in the shadows of the Swoop, out of the sun. The twins would be in the nursery, napping if their nurses had managed it.

George sighed and turned his back to the window. He dropped his pack and rubbed his shoulder tenderly. He will have to see his healer before the children, again. There was a nasty bruise along his temple and blood along the sleeve of his coat. But first he had to sit by himself and think.

He dropped into his chair heavily, and leaned his head back against the wood. His face was smooth and he could have been napping had there not been a slight twist to the way he held his mouth.

Idiot, he thought. Fool noble who walks into a trap, just beggin' to be picked off.

Once upon a time, he would have seen the ambush coming from the phrasing of his agent's letter. The Rogue would have known and he would have had the upper hand. He would have been the one with the trap planted, getting what he wanted and leaving his enemies much worse for the experience of it.

But, then, the Rogue was dead.

George got up and paced his office, ignoring the dizziness and the dots which spread across his vision. No, he was the Rogue. Some title bestowed on him by some boy king did not mean he was a different man. It didn't.

He had opened his office door almost before he realized his pacing had changed direction and had gained a purpose. He walked quickly down the long hallways and down twisted stone staircases, trying to avoid the servants who moved purposefully through the hallways. He knew where he was going and he didn't want anyone to see him on the way, though they wouldn't begin to imagine anything off about his movements through his own keep.

"Morning, Baron," he heard as he rounded a corner.

A smile flashed across unwilling features, the role played almost without him having to think about it. "And good morning to you, Reena," he said to the smiling chambermaid. "How is Theo? Recovered from his cold, yet?"

"Oh, yes, my Lord. Thank you for the time to spend with him."

Another smile, another reassurance as she curtsied and George was back to his walk, the Baron put away into his mind. Or, at least, George wished he was. This was part of the whole problem, after all.

It was cold and damp under the Swoop, and George shivered as he descended further into the heart of the keep. He ridiculed himself for the shiver. It wasn't as if he hadn't gone down there before, many times, for a variety of important reasons. Storable foods were kept down here, as were a majority of the weapons they kept in the Swoop, but he was not headed down here for storage and his body seemed to know it.

He never lit a torch on these trips, instead running his hand along the increasingly moist walls as the light faded away. The lack of light made little difference, truly, since he knew the path so well, and did nothing except make the trip seem more furtive. He wondered why he bothered.

The hallway was lined with heavy doors, and by memory George pulled open the correct one and slipped into the room. If anything, it was a deeper dark in here, but he walked into the small room steadily, putting out a hand to catch the corner of an oak chest, ducking under the metal rods balancing off a wardrobe hideously carved with a pheasant design, and sliding between two old chairs until he was settled in the furthest corner. Sinking to the floor, he counted out bricks and slipped fingers between loose stones to pull away a block from the wall. Reaching inside, George pulled out an old, plain wooden box that he set upon his lap.

He sighed, tapping his forehead thoughtfully as he rested one hand on the top of the cold lid. He had been coming here often and slipped right into his thoughts from all the times before. The Whisper Man was a job, and all of the men he became to do his duty to Jonathan were shells; well-developed shells, surely, but shells just the same. George wasn't to be found there.

The Rogue, though. He had been the Rogue for a long time, longer than he liked to think of, in some ways. It was hard to remain a child long in the Lower City, but he had been hardly more than that when he had taken up that throne, and the man who had reigned there was not the George who had fought the old Rogue with merely a stolen knife and the wits to take it. Being the Rogue had so changed him that it had become him, until the Rogue and George were the same person, and how was he supposed to move on from that when he wasn't the Rogue anymore? Wasn't it losing everything he was to step away from the throne?

The Baron, though, had slipped into his mind in ways George had never expected. He was scared, he knew (and could admit, sitting alone in the dark), scared that he would lose himself completely when he found himself, for days, acting as the Baron without a thought of it being an act. Because he wasn't the Baron, and didn't want to be, and if he lost the Rogue he would be living his entire life as yet another someone he was not.

That was why he thought of himself as George and the Baron, but it became the Rogue and the Baron and he was no longer sure where George was to be found in this mess of people he kept stored in his head.

And so, he found himself sitting in the dark with a box of ears on his lap, trying to find himself again.

It had been his justice, this box. Through fear and pain he had kept the roughest aspects of the Lower City under control, and he knew (well, the Rogue knew) that he had done what he had to do, to keep his city safe in a way that none of the nobles in their castles and on horseback had ever given a damn to do. But then, he also knew (as the Baron, now) that justice was dispensed by a King he cared deeply for, by his wife and her chivalry and codes and by his own work, on the right side of the law, and then the box disgusted him. It all was twisted, somehow, and between the Baron and the Rogue he couldn't make sense of something that had seemed so logical back when he had known who he was. Most of the time.

He couldn't remember what it felt like to be alone and himself inside his own mind. He knuckled his forehead hard and closed his eyes against the lies that surrounded him. When had it become like this? When had he not only drowned out his voice, but lost it so completely?

The truth, which he had to tell himself down here, was that it had begun long before he sat, exhausted and bloody, in the Dancing Dove, this drowning.

Which meant George wasn't to be found in this box, or in the Rogue.

But if he was not the Rogue, and he was not the Baron, who was he?

He ran his hands over the box. Maybe it was just time to let go, to let the Rogue die the way he had always been supposed to, defending his throne. He was holding on to all of these lives, all of these boxes, stored away in the dark, and there was no room for them anymore.

George didn't know just who he was supposed to be, but he supposed it was somewhere between all the contradictions that had made up his life so far. Perhaps it would all one day shatter like glass to reveal the George underneath, but he thought not. There was no George to be found except the one who sat in the dark and tried to sort out his own muddled mind, amongst all the men he pretended to be.

George thought, though, that the fact that there was one voice trying to find who he was, rather than accepting himself as a creation... perhaps that would end up being the real George after all.

His walk back up through the Swoop grew gradually dim, and then bright, and George climbed his way onto the walls that overlooked the cliffs. In the courtyard below him, his child still played. Thom was making a scene of being called inside by Maude, who stood unruffled by his temper. She had cared for far too many children to be fazed by their tricks.

George turned away, just for a moment. He held the box over the wall and dropped it without ceremony. He watched it fall, crashing into the water of high tide far below, hopefully to be washed away forever. Its fate, though, did not really matter. There was a choice here that George had had to make, and should have made long ago; when he first looked into the face of his bride, or heard the cries of a newborn. It wasn't choosing the Baron over the Rogue, after all. It was the present over the past, and not leaving Thom to grow to be heir of a hidden box of the past which had no place in the man George wanted to be for his children.

He walked down the stairs, stepping down into the dust of the courtyard. He may never be able to find the truth in all the lies he fabricated around himself, but the choices he made... they had to tell him something about who he was. Thom ran towards him and George opened his empty arms wide.