Thalassa City stinks like rotting fish.

Hiran crinkles his perfect nose against it, wrinkling the handsome line of his mouth in distaste as he picks his way delicately between a minefield of rotting carcasses and cannon fodder. Battle would be so much more appealing if one didn't have to deal with the aftermath.

Tara is a few paces ahead, plopped squarely on the hump of a dead body. She's stringing a thick longbow and her hawk is perched on her shoulder, its narrow, feathered head twitching and turning this way and that. It gives him a long stare as he approaches, one beady eye fixed on him, and its feathers ruffle in a vague, half-formed threat.

He thinks half-heartedly of all the ways to roast feathered game, but this is about as serious as the bird's posturing and he directs his words to its keeper instead:

"What's a girl like you doing in a place like this?"

She looks up, through a tangle of frizzed, pale blonde hair, a knowing smile on her face.

"Causing mayhem," she answers in turn, returning to her work. "You look to be all in one piece."

"No thanks to you."

"I didn't know you needed assistance."

"I don't, but the company would have been nice," he grumbles.

She smiles, stretching the gut string taut.

"Have you seen Finn?"

Hiran looks up, around at the crumpling wreckage that, he thinks, might have been a street at some point.

"Nope. Haven't seen the little nutball anywhere."

Plucking the newly-strung bowstring with a satisfying thrum, she vaults to her feet and the hawk takes off, springing up into the gray sky. She throws him a rare smile, one not weaseled out by clever words or feigned archness—a smile made of its own accord.

"Let's go get him," she says.

They pick and weave through the rubble and Hiran satisfied to follow Tara's lead until they come to a widening in the street—the entryway to some desiccated square. They can see the object of their conversation in the distance, the only small, moving thing in the center of this space, balanced precariously on a jut of collapsed bedrock, hands outstretched, reaching—no, pointing, he's definitely pointing—at a flock of seagulls overhead. Hiran turns his gaze to the side and sees, a short distance off and set firmly on solid ground, Ruben, looking on in mild alarm.

Finn sees the hawk first, his head turning in a quick, uncanny way, spotting the soaring bird high above, but it's only when his gaze lands on them that his face splits into a smile.

"You're alive!" he greets cheerfully.

"Such a tone of surprise," Hiran answers, though he smiles too as Tara, reaching the boy first, pulls Finn into a hug. "Have you been enjoying yourself?"

"Master Ruben and I have been surveying the city," Finn answers from over Tara's shoulder. "I've been looking for mole tricks."

"Finn has been very helpful identifying potential traps and buried explosives," Ruben translates as he reaches the trio. "He's done very well with the local wildlife."

"I found a crab," Finn tells Tara very seriously.

"Run into any trouble?" Hiran throws out to Ruben.

"Very little," he answers, just as light. "Nothing to have concern over."

It's dark, almost twilight, except for the pervading glow of dimly-lit lamps. It's all silent but for the boy in the bed across the tent. He's whimpering, sweating, and when he wakes up his eyes are wide and shadowed.

"They're all burning in my dreams," he tells Hiran. "They're all burning and I can't make them go away anymore."

"Good," Hiran says, watching as Tara lets Finn go but keeps a hand on his shoulder, a tether, or maybe a lifeline.

"It's time to meet up with the Paragon," the old Skill master says now, and a frown curls along his mouth as his gaze flits northward. "She should have made her way down here this morning."

"Think she had better luck than us?" Hiran suggests, casual as he plucks a clump of dirt out of Finn's hair.

The old Nature-caller purses his lips and only hums noncommittally in return.

Perhaps you would not call it luck, Hiran thinks to himself, watching Ruben out of the corner of his eye. Hiran can't decide if he would call it that either; there doesn't seem to be anything very lucky about capturing one of those creatures.

"Tara and I can go ahead and see what the holdup is about," he suggests then, nonchalant.

But Finn turns back.

"But I want to come too," he argues, eyes wide and brows furrowing. A bad sign. "I want to see Allayria  and Lei too."

"We'll all go," Ruben says smoothly.

It is a motley caravan of oddities that makes its way northward through the ruined city. There's the old Skill master, plump, bearded, and clothed in worn, pedestrian-like robes. Then Marshal Marron, all angles and alertness in her sleek armor; she looks, perhaps, the most reasonable amongst all this rubble and destruction. Then there's Tara, tanned and garbed in furs and leathers, rough and looking like rolling plains of wheatgrass and stretching horizons, not salt-caked cliffs and seawater. And always, Finn, small and gangly, head turning this way and that, some kind of doe-eyed mammal made human. And, of course, Hiran, who's much too handsome to fit in here at all.

"What are you smiling at?" Tara asks suspiciously, but he just waggles his eyebrows at her and, as always, this makes her smile.

Once they find Allayria Hiran is going to have to send back another report to Solveig; he doesn't relish the thought. More time spent awaiting the Paragon's input—more time spent parsing out how much she's having him not tell Feuilles, and further still how much she's not telling Hiran.

Enough, he thinks, not for the first time. And Lei Chaudri, for all their bickering, is a mulish fortress of her secrets.

"Do you think they have killed each other yet?" Hiran asks Tara conversationally and she doesn't need to ask who "they" are.

She only shrugs. "If she did, she'll just claim it was the Jarles."

Hiran laughs.

Their party turns another corner and he notices her hang back, slowly, subtly, and he follows suit. When there's enough space between them and the soldiers and the other three she asks, quietly:

"Do you think we'll finally head out after this?"

Hiran looks out ahead of them, toward the smoking tower and the glistening seawall.

"It's difficult to say," he murmurs. "But I can't see how it can be delayed any further."

She glances at him, her brown eyes searching, but she seems to accept that he's being honest. And then she asks the harder question:

"What are we going to do about Finn?"

A/N: How do you solve a problem like a 16-year old body-controlling cinnamon roll with PTSD—

Wait, that's not how that goes.

Speaking of music, I was totally jamming to the Bladerunner 2049 soundtrack when I wrote this part. Here's to Elvis and to Ryan Gosling for BREAKING MY HEART.