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He'd never thought to see Mechanicsburg defenseless. There was a wrongness to it, infinitely more than the ruin of Wulfenbach, for all that that ruin had meant more to him. Wulfenbach had been a horror and a fury, a wild grief, but Klaus had never held any real illusions about his home's defensibility. Mechanicsburg, though ...
It was meant to be impregnable. The fortress town of the most infamous and deadly Spark family for centuries, Mechanicsburg had been designed to hold off the entirety of Europe should it come to it, and it occasionally had. Mechanicsburg had been conditioned to invincibility to the point that it had made attempted invasions into a town sport. Even before Bill and Barry, before it became the strength that bore up a new era of peace in Europa, Mechanicsburg had been the most crazily prepared, over-engineered and outright unassailable fortress on the continent.
And that hadn't saved it. Nothing had. Nothing had saved anyone.
"Overflights two and four have made it back unscathed, Herr Baron," someone murmured beside him. Boris, probably. A semi-recent acquisition, Boris had a knack for understated delivery so unobtrusive that at times it felt less like being informed of something and more like the knowledge had spontaneously resolved itself from the aether. "Either they're being very shy with their aerial defenses, or they've been disabled along with the gun turrets over the plain. It may be a trap, of course, but with the visible damage to the Castle ..."
"Instruct the bridge to stand us off," Klaus interrupted. Too abruptly, perhaps, if the startled silence was anything to go by, but he was still too off-balance to care overmuch. He felt hollow. Like something had emptied and crystallised inside him. "Not over the plain. Bring us behind the town, out over the Dyne. Pull all support craft back aboard and stand ready."
He turned away from the viewport at last, momentarily blotting out the evidence of the opening salvos of the Other War, and found Boris staring at him in half-alarm. To the man's credit, he didn't flinch, for all that Klaus suspected he was being uncomfortably Spark-like right now and towards a man who had suffered badly at the hands of his last 'employer'. But there was steel in Boris, an underlying sense of capability that had drawn Klaus to him in the first place, and he didn't let Klaus' chilliness stay him for long.
"Do you expect a trap, Herr Baron?" the man asked calmly, one hand poised over the radio. "Do we need to deploy defenses?"
"No," Klaus answered, and there was an edge to it, something ragged, that froze Boris' hand in something other than fear. "I don't expect a trap, although it's never wise to assume Mechanicsburg is as defenseless as it looks. Steer clear of the plain, and keep all watches sharp." He shook his head, strangling back something that trembled on the edges of exhaustion and maybe grief, ruthlessly tamped it down beneath the veneer of the Baron. "We're not standing off because of a trap. We're standing off because I'm going down there to negotiate, and I'd like to open with something slightly less than the threat of annihilation for that."
Boris blinked at him. "Going down there," he repeated dubiously, and then, when the implications of the other part of the order struck, with a little bit more than -half- alarm. "You're going down there while Castle Wulfenbach stands off? Sir, I really don't think that's wise."
"We need them," Klaus said, very simply, and hoped it didn't sound as much like 'I need them' to Boris as it did to him. "Even if I can't ... Even if old alliances turn out to have no meaning anymore, they haven't attacked us or done anything that would require our intervention. But they are in our path, and we can't ignore them. Even without its Sparks or the bulk of its defenses, Mechanicsburg is too potent a symbol for that, and it still boasts an army. We need them, and trust me, they tend to have only one response to threats. Lets try this the easy way first, hmm?"
Boris licked his lips, a nervous gesture, but oddly it looked more like concern than fear. There was caution, there was wariness, Boris had a lot of experience with Sparks who were going to do what they pleased regardless of his thoughts on the matter, but to his eternal credit this neither completely cowed him nor immediately made him back down. If his Spark was going to set themselves on fire, at the very least they were going to do it with Boris' dry 'I told you so' ringing in their ears.
"Herr Baron," he started. "There are ... There have been rumours about you. About your disappearance and subsequent reappearance, and about the state of those 'old alliances' you mentioned." Klaus raised an eyebrow, and now Boris did flinch, a little bit, but he ploughed on regardless. "I'm not here to speculate on them, sir. That's not my place, I know that. But I would like to point out that they exist. And that, perhaps, several members of your old alliances ... may have heard them too?"
Klaus felt himself still, felt something stir beneath the hollowness inside him, and saw Boris lift his chin instinctively in readiness. He snarled at himself, bit back down on it, but turned away from the man to be safe. He was too on edge. Mechanicsburg had stripped him too raw.
"You think they'll think I'm the enemy?" he asked, impressively calmly if he didn't say so himself. "They were my friends, once. You think they'll believe I've betrayed them?"
Boris didn't answer for a second. Righting himself, maybe. Considering how to be tactful. Klaus would have to break him of that, maybe. There wasn't much room for tact any more at all, these days, and Klaus had never been its biggest fan in the first place. Better to lance the wound immediately and then see where you stood. The sooner the world learned that, the better.
"You weren't here, sir," Boris said, very softly, and Klaus heard an odd note of compassion in it. Strange, alongside the man's obvious lingering fear. "I don't mean that as an attack against you. But the Other's attacks ... it felt like the world collapsed. You've seen the aftermath. You've fought it, more than anyone I've ever seen, and we're grateful for that. But you weren't here. You didn't feel everything change. You didn't watch the world fall. I think that means something, to the people who did see it. I don't know what your friends believe. Maybe I don't have the right to speculate. But they watched their town destroyed, Herr Baron, and you weren't there, and now you are, with a fleet and an expanding empire, and you're here to tell them they're in the way. Maybe that would be enough to shake the strongest trust. Enough to put you in danger because of it."
"... Maybe," Klaus answered, distantly. An impregnable fortress torn open, twenty years of painstaking peace vanished as if they'd never been. The ruins of a home, being picked over by vultures in war clanks. Yes. Maybe trust was broken. Maybe trust was a thing long gone, he could imagine that. But all that meant ... "I'm going down there anyway. If it's a trap, we'll deal with that. As we have dealt with everyone else who didn't listen the first time. But we will talk to them first. We will give them the chance first, and if there is trust to be broken, we won't be the ones to break it. I owe them that much, for not being here in time."
He looked back, chanced his temper to look at Boris again, and found the man looking at him with open sympathy and something else, something new and strange, that looked oddly like pride. Or belief, maybe. Something that reminded him, briefly and absurdly, of Bill and Barry. Of the way people had looked at them, the Heterodyne Boys come to save the town. It was only brief, Boris had better control and a better idea of propriety than that, but for a second it was there, and for a second Klaus felt something he hadn't felt in years, and only more ironic for where, and why, he had apparently inspired it.
For a world in ruins, apparently even a tyrant would do in lieu of a hero. But fair enough. A tyrant was all they had left, so he supposed they might as well make the best of it.
"Ready one of the landing-capable ships and an escort," he said quietly, feeling a burst of dark humour, one that almost seemed to steady him. "We'll set down on the bridge, head in the trade entrance. Might as well make a statement. I suspect we'll be greeted before the gate. If we are, and it doesn't immediately devolve into a firefight, I'll head in alone. Standard checks on the half hour. I can survive Mechanicsburg that long." He smiled wryly. "I've tested that one. They weren't exactly trying to kill me at the time, but the aim was to test reflexes. Keep the escort above the gate, but not inside town airspace. If I need an extraction, you'll know about it."
Boris snapped to attention, quite possibly instinctively, and nodded sharply. He still looked dubious, he very obviously didn't approve of this, but he'd said his piece and it had been listened to, and now all that was left was the experiment itself and the I Told You Sos afterwards. One way or another, they were committed now.
Mechanicsburg was historically the maker and breaker of empires. Even friendly ones. It was time, Klaus thought, to see how much of that was still true, even now.
---
He hadn't been wrong about the greeting. As soon as whoever was left in charge had registered that Castle Wulfenbach had pulled back across the Dyne, well before they'd seen the smaller ships descending, they'd realised that he was headed for the Dyne gate instead of the Black Gate typically reserved for invaders. Hopefully, they'd taken that as he'd intended, a statement of gentler intent than the plainward approach or simply having himself air-dropped in would have signified. Even if the Wulfenbach sigil no longer held true now that it had been slightly altered, hopefully nobody would fire until he'd had a chance to get a word in.
His stomach still clenched when he saw the party waiting for him just inside the gate. Not because it was armed, although it was. Not because it consisted largely of jägers, and jäger generals at that, although it did. It was what it didn't consist of that almost put a stagger in his step, that froze his breath briefly within him. It was the missing faces that struck him, and threatened his already unstable calm.
No Heterodynes. No Bill or Barry. No Lucrezia, though that perhaps hadn't been a face he'd been hoping to see. But no Punch or Judy, either. Not even Carson. Aside from a scattering of town elders in the background, it was just the jägers.
As if ... as if the jägers were all that was left. Or all that he was trusted with. Bill and Barry had vanished, and Lucrezia had apparently been kidnapped, but the others? Was this honestly all that Mechanicsburg had left?
"... Klaus," Gkika said, walking forward ahead of the other generals, looking warily at him as he waved his escort back aboard ship and came to meet her. "Or should hy be sayink 'Herr Baron'? It's been a long time, sveetie. Hyu iz comink up in de vurld since last ve saw hyu, hmm?"
Klaus stared at her, his thoughts oddly empty, and then heard himself say, rather distantly: "I'm sorry for not being here. I didn't mean to be late."
She stopped. Her expression changed, wariness to sudden evaluation as she studied him, and then ...
"Oh sveetie," she murmured, and for a second there was naked grief on her face, a monster who had seen a thousand wars looking at a child who'd only truly started on his first, and Klaus had no idea what must have passed across his face at the sight of it, but it must have been as naked to her as she had been to him. She moved to him, stepped right into his space despite the stirs of alarm from his forces, and gently touched his cheek. "Iz gud to see hyu, dollink. Even if hyu iz tryink sometink schtupid, hmm? Iz nize to see hyu alive. Ve missed hyu."
He closed his eyes, a strained chuckle breaking free of him, and reached up to catch her hand gently. It was small enough in his, though strong enough to snap his arm in two. It was so very familiar.
"I don't think I'm doing anything stupid," he said, opening his eyes again, granting her a small and rather rueful smile. "Though you're not the first to disagree with me even just today. But I'd like to talk to you about that. The Jäger Generals. The town elders. Carson, if he's here?"
She went still, her expression freezing a bit, and Klaus felt the bottom drop out of his stomach again. She stepped back, shaking her head a little bit, and he watched her go, already knowing what she was going to say.
"Carson iz ..." she started, and then stopped. Shook herself, and began again. "Vhen de Kestle vas attacked, ve lost a lot, Klaus. Ve lost pipple. Hyu can tok to uz. But de rest ..."
"I understand," he said, and he knew what he was feeling again. He remembered it, the same buzzing inside his head that had come with his first sight of a shattered Wulfenbach, the slow seep of rage that could be throttled down and reshaped into purpose. It was good, in its way. It was usable, and familiar. "Is there somewhere we can go? I have a lot of questions, and I think you do too. I'd like to answer them before we get to, shall we say, less pleasant matters?"
She smiled darkly, a gleam of fangs. "Dot depends on hyu definition of 'pleasant', hy tink," she murmured, and yes, Mechanicsburg really only had one response to threats. "Ve iz not schtupid, Klaus. Ve haz been listenink, and hyu haz not exactly been secret about tings. Ve know vhy hyu iz here now, und vhy hyu haz dat nize floating kestle over dere. Ve iz in hyu vay, yes?"
He met her eyes squarely, bald honesty the only thing he had left to offer her. "You are," he agreed. "I'm not expanding without a reason. I'm not doing this because I want to. But I am doing it, and I can't afford to stop and leave it half-done. Someone has to stop this madness. Someone has to make people stand down, or there won't be anything left of Europa before they're done. But I'm not here to threaten you. I can help you, if you let me. And I'd like if you could help me."
She tilted her head, the other generals shifting slightly behind her, and suddenly it was extremely obvious that she was a centuries-old science-enhanced warrior, with more experience of violence than he could ever dream of. Klaus felt his spine straighten without his input, felt himself draw up and tilt his chin and let his expression congeal in the face of her.
"Und if ve iz sayink no?" she asked, very softly, and that black bubble of humour burst through him again, that knowledge of a bumbling sidekick pretending to be a tyrant because there weren't any heroes anymore, the knowledge that despite himself he could be very good at tyranny. He'd proved it, again and again, because he didn't have a choice anymore. He couldn't stop. The heroes were gone, and he couldn't let himself stop.
"... I really hope you don't," he answered simply. "I don't want to fight you. I don't want to fight anyone, and especially not you. But I can. If I have to, I will. And I will win, because right now I can't afford to do anything else."
They glanced at each other and somehow, for all that he had just threatened their town, for all that he had stood on the remains of their friendship and threatened to smash it to irreparable pieces, he half-thought there was a flash of what looked like approval sent between them. Anticipation, hunger, appreciation. But then, they were jägers. Europe's oldest and most deadly surviving soldiers.
They always had liked a good enemy. Maybe more so than a good friend.
"Vell den," Goomblast rumbled from behind Gkika, smiling with all of his very, very many teeth. "Hy guess ve better gets to tokking, den. Don't hyu tink?"
They boxed him in, the four of them gathering in a loose formation around him, with extraneous jägers and a couple of the more stubborn elders around them, and Klaus reflected absently that perhaps Boris was, in fact, going to get the chance for an 'I told you so' after this. Though the crowd of townspeople seemed to be happy enough to see him. He waved a hand up to the airship escort in a calming gesture, tapped the portable transmitter at his side for visual reassurance. Half an hour check-ins, counting from now.
So. Lets see how much he could cram into that half-hour, and what kind of state he'd be in by the end of it.
---
They gathered in one of the upper rooms at Gkika's, rather than any of the more official locations. Well, obviously the Castle was out, but still. Klaus wondered if the informality was a good sign or not. He was inclined to think so, though. The table was round and the chairs comfortable, the tea service was excellent if mildly explosive, and it had a certain homey touch that the more elaborate Heterodyne spaces usually lacked. It was a room designed for meeting equals, and for all that was not necessarily the relationship he was aiming for here, it was still better than, say, 'deadly enemies' or 'rebels with tyrant' or 'warlords with prisoner'. All of which would not historically have been ruled out as options.
And the other advantage, he admitted, was that a room that was so very obviously a jäger space did not quite remind of him missing faces and how much he was currently spitting on their memory as strongly as some of the other areas might have.
He didn't wait to be asked to sit down, or wait for them to arrange themselves either. He moved straight to the chair that backed onto the window, and dropped himself into it as though his strings had been cut, letting visible exhaustion disguise his quick check for booby traps and available escape routes. It did no harm to be prepared. Even here. Especially here. They grinned at him, entirely too knowingly, and settled themselves more ponderously into their own seats. Only four. Gkika, Zog, Goomblast and Khrizhan. Out of everyone he'd known, out of everyone in charge of what had once been his second home, only four remained.
He stood back up abruptly, ignoring the way they watched him, the appraising stares on his back as he turned hastily to the window and stared out over the town again. He couldn't ... he couldn't pretend. He hadn't been thinking right since the first sight of the damage to the Castle, and there was no point trying to keep the pretense that this was a normal meeting, a normal take-over, or that he was in a normal frame of mind right now.
There was no point being the Baron. At least not until after he'd finished being Klaus.
Götterdämmerung.
"... I wasn't here," he said, flat and careful while he stared out over the town and carefully didn't look anywhere that might trip him up all over again. "I ... It's a long story, but I wasn't in Europe. I didn't know, until after I'd returned and found Wulfenbach in ruins. Found Europe in ruins. And I have heard rumours, and I have seen consequences, and I have gone to war to fix them, but I wasn't here. I don't know what happened. Only that almost everyone I knew appears to be either missing or dead, and at times it seems like there's no-one left."
There was silence for a second, and then, very gently, Gkika spoke up. "Ve dunt know dot dey iz dead. Bill und Barry. Dey iz missink. Dey vent to hunt de Other. But ve iz not tinking dey iz dead."
Klaus felt his mouth twist. Not really a smile. "No, probably not," he murmured. "There must be a reason the Other didn't immediately move to capitalise on what they'd done. Europe is in no state to fight anyone right now, but it's still a free for all, rather than a single power picking up the pieces. Odds are pretty good that the Boys had something to do with that." He reached out and gripped the windowsill, and noted idly that they didn't comment on his burgeoning attempts to be that single power. Or not yet, at least. "But everyone else? I thought ... No-one contacted me. No-one even sent a message to let me know that they were alive. And now I'm here, and the Castle appears stricken, the town seems near defenseless, and you seem to be the only ones left to face me."
He stopped and turned to them, and somewhere in his head he noted that his hands were shaking, and it wasn't really grief, it didn't feel like grief, it felt like fury. Hollow and distant, almost detached from him. Not the madness place. Too still and tranquil for that. But something on the edges of it, perhaps. Something very close.
"Why," he asked softly, "is there no-one left? Why will no-one tell me what happened?"
"... Hyu veren't here," Khrizhan explained, equally quiet and considerably more calm. Not even an accusation. "Ve did not know vhere hyu vas, or vhat had happened to hyu. Ve had to defend de town. Ve are all it haz left. De others ... Ve lost a lot of pipple vhen de Kestle vas hit. De Kestle itself iz broken und insane, de Mistress vas taken, her keed und de seneschal vas killed in de explosion---"
"Kid?" Klaus interrupted, stunned backwards from his rage. "There was a child? What child?"
Their expressions changed again, confusion and then comprehension and then something desperately like pity filling the glances they shot each other, and Gkika stood, carefully, and came over to him. Not to touch. Just to be near. He had the sudden impression that they thought he might be fragile, and he didn't know why, and he wasn't sure he wanted to.
"Klaus," Gkika said gently. "Bill und Lucrezia, hyu know dey vas married vhile hyu vas gone, yes?" He nodded, an odd little surge of bitterness flooding through him. Yes, he knew. He'd been there when she'd decided on it, after all. "Vell, dey vas ... De had a keed. A leedle boy. Vhen de Kestle vas hit, he vas killed. It vas vhy ... vell. Ve tink it vas vhy Bill und Barry vere zo determined. Dey vanted de Mistress beck, but alzo ... Bill did not take de death of his child vell."
... No, Klaus thought, and this was more than a distant fury, this was a deep and echoing shock, this was a blow right through his heart. A child's death. He understood that. He understood the horror of that. A little boy, a child in his arms. A force from on high that wanted to break that tiny form, that wanted to shatter it for the crime and the misfortune of existing. He knew. He knew.
"He vas ... Dey named him Klaus Barry," Gkika went on, trying to be gentle, and Klaus had no idea how to classify the sound that came from his throat then. She moved to him, she caught him around the shoulders and tugged him close, but he didn't think she understood. She couldn't, of course. She didn't know. Not where he'd been, not what he'd gained, not what he'd almost lost, not what he'd fled to save, not what he'd come home to a world in ruins to preserve. She didn't know about Gil, she didn't know about dead children, about lost wives, about watching everything fall around you, and god, god, Bill had named his child for Klaus. Klaus had run to keep Gilgamesh alive, and Bill had named his dead son in Klaus' honour.
He didn't cry. He'd forgotten how, maybe, if he'd ever been good at it. The sounds weren't sobs. More a roar, he thought. A deep, rumbling fury, well strangled. He wrapped his arms around her, the blue of her hair so close to another woman's green, her strength a match for the queen who'd captured Klaus, who'd given him children to love while a world away, a war away, another child had died, and a world after him. The wounds in the Castle meant something different now, they meant something infinitely more terrible that just a fundamental certainty ripped away, and Klaus felt something finally break inside him. He felt something shift, something catalyse, and make itself anew.
He'd felt the madness place before. It had never affected him quite the way it seemed to affect other Sparks, never the way it had affected Bill or Barry or Lu. He'd always been able to control it to an extent, to see it coming and waylay it, redirect it, subsume it. The Spark fascinated him, the sensation of it, the reality of it, the way it was expressed in creation and destruction and the myriad forms he had witnessed and studied of it, but his own Spark, his own madness, had never felt to him the way the Spark of other scientists had looked. It was distant, analytical. It was beautiful, but it lacked much of the passion that seemed to drive others. Even his deepest furies, standing over the ruin of his home, standing with his almost-murdered child in his arms, had never called that raw rush of world-bending focus from him. He had been angry, enough to attack everyone in range, but he had not been mad.
Perhaps the reaction was cumulative in effect, he thought absently, feeling the new energy flood through him, feeling that thing inside him shift and transmute and become more. Breakthrough events were almost always traumatic. Perhaps they set a benchmark, and subsequent descents into the madness place might require a similar or greater level of distress. Rage was erratic, inspiration was uncontrolled, too uneven a fuel source to provide a proper basis for transmutation. It would have to build. Loss on loss, rage on rage, controlled and refined until they could power something big enough to bend the world. Then a trigger, then a transmutation, and suddenly here was something he could use.
"I have a son," he whispered, feeling her stiffen in his arms, sensing the sudden looming silence around them. He hadn't told anyone else. Not even Gil, who didn't remember him. He hadn't dared. "You can't tell anyone, but it's why I was ... Lucrezia had me sent away. I was going to come back, to find a way, but I found a woman instead. A queen. She was ... I fell in love. There was a child. Two children. But they were the wrong kind of children, some of her people thought that, and they planned to kill my son. They almost succeeded. So I took him. And I ran. And when I came back ... when I came back, there was nothing left. There was war everywhere, and everything we built is destroyed, and everyone I knew has gone away, and nowhere is safe. I came here to keep him alive, to keep him safe, and there's no such thing."
"Klaus," she said, and there was pain in it, and pity, but no false reassurances. No pretty lies, no gentle tact. He'd always liked that about them. The jägers. He'd always known where he stood with them.
"I need your help," he said, and he'd tightened his arms instinctively, he'd used more strength than he should have done, but Gkika was strong enough. More than strong enough. She could break him if she wanted to. "I have to make it stop. I'm going to make it stop. I can't do it the way Bill and Barry would have done, the way they would have wanted, but that doesn't matter anymore. I don't have a choice. I won't let my son ... I won't let him ..."
Die as Bill's son had. He didn't say it. He had enough sense, enough compassion, not to say it. But they heard it nonetheless. They couldn't avoid it.
"Ve vant to help hyu," Khrizhan said gently, and it was mildly amusing to see one of the most fearsome creatures ever made be so gentle, it was maybe a little odd to know they were being so careful with him, except for the part where it wasn't. "Ve vant dot, Klaus. Ve vants to do sumtink, to fight sumvun, instead of sittink here doink nutink. But ve iz Heterodyne monsters. Und vhat hyu haz been doink, takink tings over, ve tink mebbe de masters vuldn't haff liked dot. Dey vanted uz to be diff'rent. Dey vanted uz not to be de monsters effryvun remembers. If ve help hyu, hy izn't sure ve vuld be able to honour dot."
He stood back. He let Gkika go. Carefully. Detached himself and set her gently back a pace. She caught his arms before he went, kept him near with hands that were as strong or stronger than his. He grimaced, managed to stop the growl, and met her eyes. Looked at all of them, held all their stares.
"I can protect your town," he said, and there was too much of the madness in it, there was too great an echo of what had broken inside him, but he couldn't help that. Not now. "You have no defenses, or next to none. I can fix that. I can bring you under the fleet auspices, I can bring you under my peace, and I can make it stick. That's what I'm doing. I'm building a peace, I'll keep building it until it covers everything that matters or until someone stops me, and I can build it here. I can keep you safe."
Zog snorted, a flash of genuine anger. "Hyu tink ve iz afraid of hyu?" he growled, looming forward furiously. "Hyu tink hyu can bribe uz, that hyu can force uz de vay hyu haff---"
"No," Klaus growled back, and took a step forward without much noticing. Gkika moved with him, the fluid step of a warrior that half broke him all over again for its familiarity. "No, I-- No. I didn't mean that. I don't ask that of anyone. I want ..."
He stopped. He closed his eyes, tried to pull his arms uselessly from Gkika's grasp for a second, and then simply stopped and grabbed his madness by the throat to force it into deeper channels, into useful channels. It did him no good unless he could control it. This madness could be used, it could be shaped. A monomaniacal focus need not be detrimental, but only if it was spread wide enough, only if it was calibrated well enough, only if it was kept controlled. This flashfire brightness to his thoughts couldn't be allowed to unbalance him any more.
He had an Empire to build. He had to build a peace, he had to force all the power and madness of his Spark into building something that would last and would stay strong and would challenge whatever powers came against it, whether Sparks or Others or the Goddess on high that had condemned his son. That was all that mattered. That was all that could be allowed to.
"I have two rules," he said slowly, when he opened his eyes again. More calmly, more controlled, though the hint of madness hadn't vanished. Wouldn't, maybe, for a while yet. "All I'm asking. If you don't want to help me, if you want to stay here. Agree to join me, and I'll protect Mechanicsburg anyway. All I ask of the towns under my protection is that they don't go to war, and that they reveal anything left by the Other to me. I'm going to destroy those. I'm going to wipe all trace of them from the face of Europa. If the Other comes back, if they find some way to ... to avoid Bill and Barry, to beat them, whichever. If they come back, they will find none of their weapons waiting for them, and none of their control left intact. They broke everything that matters to me, save one thing. I intend to return the favour. I will repair the peace Bill and Barry wanted, if not the way they wanted. I will make Europe safe, and you ..."
He paused, shaking his head, and tugged a little on his arms again. Gkika let him go this time. She let him step back, an odd expression on her face. On all their faces. They weren't stupid. People forgot that. They had seen generations of Sparks come and go, from the worst to near the best. They had seen kings rise and fall as many times as the Muses had. They had seen any number of conquerors in the grip of the madness place, ready to storm out across Europe.
He wondered, just a little, what they saw in him.
"You wouldn't be the monsters," he said softly. Ruefully. His humour was growing increasingly dark these days. Though at least he still had it. There was that. "I'll be the monster. I can't be the hero. I'm not ... I'm not Bill or Barry, I'm not one of the Heterodyne Boys. I don't have twenty years to work with anymore. So I'll be the tyrant, I'll be the monster, I'll build a peace by brute force because at this point I don't think I've got many choices. It won't be you they're afraid of before I'm through. You'll be no worse than anyone else I've hired, and I'm hiring a lot. Monsters all, most of them. They're in good company. We're going to keep the peace. We're going to make things safe. In the middle of that, the jägers won't be any more monstrous than the rest of us."
They looked away from him. Looked at each other, speaking glances that said volumes, though of what genre he couldn't quite tell. They could fight him. He hoped they wouldn't. They could fight for him, and oh, how very much he wanted that. He wanted them. He wanted their help. They were the last thing left of who he'd been, and somehow he thought that maybe he needed that. Even that much. Madness needed a control, and for what he intended to be, few places outside of Mechanicsburg would have the strength for that, and none that he would trust.
He knew where he stood with the jägers. He always had, he always would. If the bright-dark edge to his thoughts had any hope of being tempered down the line, maybe that would be the only thing that saved them.
"... Ve vuld be fightink de bogz?" Khrizhan asked finally, turning back to him. "Ve vuld be fightink de Other's tings, und de Sparks dot vont schtop fightink? Like de masters vanted?"
His eyes fluttered closed, his heart leaping in his chest. Too soon, too soon, but he felt it anyway. Hope. He hadn't had much lately.
"They wouldn't want it done this way," he said, knowing it was necessary, knowing they weren't stupid, no matter how much they wanted to fight. "When they come back, they may well want you to hit me upside the head and lock me somewhere safe for a while. But yes. The enemies we'll be fighting are the same. And the goals we're fighting for aren't so far away either."
Zog scratched at his chin, grimacing ruefully. "Ve needs de defenses," he said, and it was such a one-eighty from his previous anger that Klaus blinked at him. Zog saw it, and shrugged amiably. "Ve dunt vant hyu to tink hyu can force uz. Hyu iz not de masters. Hyu dunt gets to expect dot. But hyu haz a point, ve iz all knowink dot. And hyu iz beink preedy polite, as invaders go."
"I--" he tried, and honestly didn't know how to finish. "Thank you?"
"Hah!" Goomblast barked, and leaned over to clap Klaus on the shoulder. He didn't even have to move to do it. "Ve like hyu! Ve alvays have. Hyu iz keepink up vit de masters, und hyu iz tryink hyu best to keep dem safe, und ve like dot. But tings have changed. Hyu haz changed. Hyu iz goink all Sparky und tryink to take over de vurld. Iz not like hyu, so ve haz to be sure, yes? Vhy hyu iz doink vhat hyu iz doink. Ve needs de defenses, but ve iz not goink to betray de masters for dem. Zo ve test hyu a leedle. Hyu dont mind?"
Klaus opened his mouth. He wasn't sure what he'd intended to say, but what actually came out was a slightly plaintive: "I don't want to take over the world. I don't want to be doing any of this. I want to be with my wife. I want to be with my son. I didn't want to have to come back and pick up the pieces and fight half of Europe and spend the rest of my days putting out fires set by idiot Sparks, but nobody gives me a choice! Nobody ever ... nobody ever listens."
And it was very obvious why he hadn't premeditated that one, it was immediately obvious why that wasn't something one would intend to say out loud, because there was nothing so illustrative of one's failing dignity than the sight of four centuries-old monsters visibly resisting the urge to pat you gently on the head.
Before it could come to that, though, before he had to try and recover from that, there was a loud and rather strident knock on the door. He blinked, startled, and raised an inquiring eyebrow at the jägers.
"Did you send for anyone?" he asked, lightly enough, and they shook their heads, looking as baffled as he did. Not alarmed, of course, jägers didn't generally do alarmed, but certainly a bit confused. So not theirs then, or not anything they'd been expecting, which left ...
"Herr Baron?" called a very familiar and rather aggravated voice, and Klaus found himself wincing automatically, sending a guilty look across at his long forgotten chair and the transmitter he'd left on top of it. Half an hour check-ins. Right. Yes.
Oops?
"Let him in?" Klaus asked Gkika, rather sheepishly. "And, ah, if you could tell whoever's got him to leave him in as many pieces as he came in? This one really isn't his fault."
She raised her own eyebrow at him, and if he'd been feeling like a child in front of her before, it was nothing to what he was feeling now. But she smiled sweetly, and stalked over to the door to oblige him.
Boris didn't look happy at all, when three jägers hustled him through the door. Not even a little bit. But he did look surprisingly intact, and even more surprisingly determined, and met the stares from the four generals with nothing more than a lifted chin and slight sniff of annoyance. Klaus felt more than saw them straighten a bit in approval, and felt an entirely unwarranted flash of pride.
He'd been hiring a great many people, yes, some rather more forcefully than others, but the very best of them, the ones with steel in, those ones he kept close. And Boris had all the steel in the world.
"Herr Baron?" the man asked him, shrugging himself out of the jägers grasp and irritably straightening his clothing. "You missed your check-in, sir. I came to see if you were alright."
Klaus stilled his expression carefully. Smiling would not be wise right now, he understood that. "Alone?" he asked, very lightly, and Boris' head snapped up to look at him, to stare narrow-eyed into his expression and evaluate it. A touch of fear, maybe, Boris was still used to a different sort of Spark than Klaus, and more than a touch of defiance, and a little bit of personal, bitter anger.
"You wanted to do this peacefully," the man said. Not quite a snap, but close to it. "I thought bringing down the troops in a blind panic would be detrimental to that. And you were ... less focused than usual. I thought you might simply have lost track of time, and thought it better to check before engaging a previously non-aggressive town in battle for no good reason. I have troops standing by behind me, sir. I am not a complete idiot."
Unlike you, his expression said, and very defiantly too. He was standing in a room full of jägers and one potentially volatile Spark, and apparently at some point after his previous 'master' had decided to outfit him with several extraneous limbs and a new and thoroughly demeaning job, Boris had decided that that sort of thing wasn't going to stop him anymore.
It was perfect. The sight of it, the sight of one previously terrorised man choosing to do that, being able to do that, filled Klaus with a dark and fierce sort of glee. If he was going to rebuild Europa from a standing start, if he was going to pick it up by the neck and stand it on its feet to live in peace whether it wanted to or not, then this was exactly the sort of person he needed for the job.
And he had him. He had him, and by gods, it was going to work.
"Klaus?" someone murmured, rich and amused beside him. He glanced sideways at Gkika, and found her grinning at him. "Hyu iz doink de Sparky starink ting again. Focus, dollink. Hyu can tell de boy hyu iz proud of him later. For now, mebbe hyu iz tellink him hyu iz safe, first? Und him as vell, of course."
Klaus blinked at her, and then cursed under his breath. Götterdämmerung. This was why he detested the madness place. Even when it had mostly ebbed again, it was hard to keep track of where you were slipping in it.
"Of course," he muttered, pinching the bridge of his nose irritably. "You're right. I'm sorry, Gkika. And you, Boris. You did the right thing, and I did lose track of time, and a few other things besides. Thank you for coming to remind me."
And risk your life in doing so, he added silently to himself, while Boris gaped at him. He made a note to promote the man when he got back to the fleet. Second in command was looking more likely by the minute. No point wasting that kind of courage and prudence in the lower tiers when they were likely to be bumping into a crisis every second engagement out here. They'd only really just started expanding, and they weren't going to hit the really nasty spots until later. It made sense to start filling out the important posts with loyal and more importantly smart people as rapidly as possible.
And in that cause ...
"I need to go back to the Castle for a while," he said, turning back to Gkika. She blinked in confusion, and he shook himself. "Castle Wulfenbach, not Castle Heterodyne. I need to talk to my staff, and I suspect you need to talk to a few people too. I presume ... I presume that Mechanicsburg will be agreeing to join with us, subject to further clarification of terms? Or at the very least, that you'll be willing to meet with me again, slightly more formally, to discuss it?"
Khrizhan snorted gently from the background. Although, with the amount of jägers filling the room, he mostly was the background. "Iz hyu givink uz a choice?" he asked wryly, but shook his head with a chuckle. "Very polite invaders indeed. Yes. Ve is meetink hyu later, und ve iz needink hyu defenses. Ve need to tok some, but hy tink ve vill be joinink hyu." He tilted his head thoughtfully. "Ve make terms. Trade, protections, in return for de jägers to fight for hyu? Hyu izn't de masters, und ve izn't cheap, Herr Baron. Ve tok about dis, yes?"
Klaus grinned, and while it might not have had the most impressive dentition, given present company, he thought the slight hint of the madness place still in it perhaps made up for that.
"I pay my people fairly," he said, and there was no-one in the room who was unaware of the challenge in it. "But I pay all of them fairly. If you're expecting special treatment just because we're friends, you may be disappointed."
"Ve vuldn't dream of it," Gkika purred, baring all her teeth at him happily. "Hyu iz payink for qvality, dollink. Und ve iz de best hyu iz goink to be seeink for qvite a vhile. Although ..." She tilted her head thoughtfully. "Iz hyu havink de money for qvality? Hyu infrastructure iz still a vork in progress, hy imagine. Hyu haz only been beck a leedle vhile, und hyu haz been fightink de whole time. Mebbe hyu iz needink a leedle help on credit for a vhile?"
Klaus felt both his eyebrows bump upwards. "Maybe asking Mechanicsburg into the Empire isn't the best idea," he noted, "if you intend to attempt to fleece it out from under me. My infrastructure is fine, thank you. I'm not advancing without getting something solid behind me. I do have some sense."
"Not a lot," Boris muttered quietly, and then yelped softly at himself, staring at Klaus in some shock.
Klaus couldn't help it. He'd lost too much control this past hour, been torn too many ways internally. He felt the laugh start before he'd fully realised it, and couldn't quite manage to stop it in time.
"Um," Boris started, looking over at him in alarm. "Is he ... are you sure he's alright? Should I get Dr Sun?"
Gkika smiled softly at him, reaching out to pat him on the shoulder. "He's fine," she told Boris, but it was Klaus she was looking at. It was his eyes she met, his shoulder she curled her hand around and held careful and tight. "He's havink a bad day, iz all. A bad few years, mebbe?"
The laugh died again, as easily as it had come, and Klaus found himself staring at her. Found himself leaning into her hand, and noting distantly how ... how familiar she really was. How much she reminded him, not just of twenty years ago, but of two. Not just of Mechanicsburg, but of Skifander. Of Zantabraxus.
"Ve help hyu," she told him, softly enough that he could pretend no-one else was meant to hear. "Hyu iz havink a bad decade, Klaus. But ve iz helpink hyu. Ve help fix it. Ve keep hyu safe, because ve like hyu, because Bill und Barry liked hyu, und because ve vants to. Ve help hyu keep dem safe. Dose tings that matter to hyu. Hokay?"
Gil. Gilgamesh. And he wanted that, he wanted it so badly. He wanted some remnant of what he'd once had. As much as they did, maybe. He'd always liked the jägers. Bad things happened when you wanted something. Bad things happened when you let yourself hope. The world was too ruined to trust in that. But he wanted to. And the trust wasn't broken yet. He hadn't broken it, and neither had they, and maybe ... maybe he could work with that.
The world had gone wrong. Everything was broken, Europa lay in ruins, not even the might of Mechanicsburg had proven safe. But that was alright. That was what his Empire was for. To make something safe.
And at this point, being perfectly honest, he would take all the help he could get.