War Makes Beasts of us All
by bakedpotatocat

==> be Jane Crocker.

It’s a fucking madhouse down here. Military, forensics, paparazzi, police trying to keep back the students from the scene of the crime. A tiny little bit of you, deep down, gets excited at doing some detective work, although you already have an inkling who is responsible. It's those damn terrorists, of course, the ‘troll rights activists’ that have been preparing to wage a guerilla war for some time now. Not a day after open hostilities break out, they kill your lover and kidnap your only child from school. You told Tavros to stay away from that troll girl, her heritage is absolutely rotten. Your hovercraft descends to park at the edge of the scene, and you push yourself through the throngs of onlookers to the crime.

A six-man team, slaughtered to the man, and a third-generation drone destroyed. The men will be fine, in time, between your power and some mandated therapy, and while the drone is a loss, it can be replaced. Five of them are covered in white sheets, while a medic is zipping up the fifth into a body bag.


Oh. You swallow.


Your assistant nods.


He unzips the body bag.

It isn’t pretty. His head is gone, and a pulpy mess of meat in its place. You try and remember if you’ve met him before, piece together what he could have looked like, what the leader of one of the special forces teams under your command was like. You can’t. There are just too many to count.

You can feel the ghost of a life force still clinging to his body, but not enough to save. It’s a shame, but you even if it would be politically advantageous to shed a tear of grief, you aren’t able to. There’s too many to get attached.


Where the bodies were found has been marked with chalk, for the ones that they moved. There’s blood and guts everywhere, and you can feel the pulse of life where blood has been spilled. It was a massacre.

Six of your finest troops and a drone killed in under a minute, from the way the blood pools pulse. There are very few people who could have done this.

You look at the bodies. Puncture wounds in neck and chest suggest bladed weapons, but they are mostly clean, so that rules out Maryam’s chainsaw. Two men died to headshots from a high-caliber rifle, one more to friendly fire, which suggests shock-and-awe tactics. Mix of ranged and close combat suggests extreme pragmatism, and with the clean neck snap of the squad’s youngest member, no predisposition towards toying with their prey, which rules out the Peixes. Could be Rose, but she doesn’t often get her hands dirty. Dave is a possibility, but he sticks to swords. Jade is more likely, especially with the high explosives that detonated the ship, but with her power she wouldn’t need to fight her way out, and wouldn’t have.

There is only one man that could have done this, that would have done this as efficiently as he did.

One man that could in the span of an hour kill and kidnap her closest loved ones, and brutally murder six men in front of her son.

One man who she viscerally despises more than anyone else on the planet, because at least with Maryam Jane understands the maternal instincts that drive her to protect her species. Kanaya doesn’t understand that trolls are inherently a threat to society, what with their instincts and population and all, but that can be forgiven, and once upon a time she believed Rose would see logic and come around to the side of right. She was wrong, at least for now, but there was hope there, especially if Roxy could get through to her. Meenah had always been rotten, so it was a very professional disgust that Jane felt. But Vantas… he exemplified everything wrong with trolls. Had once been a good man, if a little shouty. And yet, eventually, his baser nature took over. Bloodthirsty, violent, killed without a second thought, tore his way through hordes of men no matter the measures put in place. They’d only managed to even seriously wound him once, taking an eye and a hand in the process. The scariest thing about him was that he seemed to instinctively understand the relationships her men shared with one other, and who to take out first to cause the most chaos. Every battle he fought, officers and team leaders and linchpins were prioritized, even after they stopped wearing insignia.

The only reason he hadn’t torn a bloody swath through her forces was because he had politics of his own to attend to.

Nathan got her attention. There was something she needed to see, apparently, before she started the process of resurrecting the fallen.

Painted on the rear window of Tavros’s car, in all-too familiar purple blood, was a warning. She felt her own blood rise, and stalked closer, wanting to get a closer look.


The car exploded, knocking Jane backwards, and shredding her pantsuit with shards of glass. Not high enough grade to kill a god, just enough to ruin her day. A perfect media stunt to make her look like a fool in front of the photographers.

God damn, did she hate Karkat Vantas.