When they reached Meereen's entrance gates, Finn was there to greet them.

Kurt had traveled on Drogon's back once again, forcing him to fly in slow, repetitive circles in the sky to match the pace of the massive khalasar, but he had decided to make him land a couple of miles away from the city to avoid panic among the guards and citizens and to continue on horse, riding side to side with Blaine in his Dothraki clothes as he used to do.

As soon as they got down from their horses, the knight almost lifted Kurt off his feet in an unexpected bone-crushing hug, before taking a sudden step back in an awkward attempt at acting nonchalant after such an evident and (supposedly) inappropriate show of affection.

"Khalees, you're alive!" he exclaimed, his eyes shining with relief. "You're here, you're safe! Gods, I was so worried about you. I thought..."

He trailed off, but Kurt didn't need to hear it out loud.

"I know what you thought, but I'm okay" he reassured Finn, smiling at him. He turned toward Blaine and took his hand in his. "Drogon didn't hurt me. I figured out how to tame him, and he brought me back to my Khal."

They shared a private smile and exchange of intense gazes. Blaine squeezed his hand silently.

"That's- that's great" Finn commented, probably feeling like he was intruding on something. "I... there are some things we should discuss-"

"I have to free my dragons first" Kurt interrupted him, almost bouncing with excitement. He couldn't wait anymore; he wanted to see that wise, knowing look in their eyes, too, and ride each one of them to see if it was different somehow, see how they would react to his orders and how they would twirl in the air as the wind lashed at his careless face.

The lack of an answer from Finn stood out as suspicious in his mind, and the worried expression on his face didn't help, either. Kurt felt his heart beat faster.

Oh Gods, they're dead.

"Finn? Where are they?"

It took merely a second for Finn to reply, but to Kurt it seemed a decade.

"In the dungeon, where you left them" the knight said simply, but his face didn't relax. "It's not about them, khalees. Many things changed while you were gone."

Kurt shifted on his feet uncomfortably, as if that last sentence was an accusation somehow. As if what Finn really meant to say was You should have been here. Still, the dragons were his priority. The longer they stayed closed inside the dungeon, the more they grew angry at him for abandoning them, and the more the bond they felt to him grew thin.

"The dragons first" he insisted. "I'll meet you in the dining room of the pyramid afterwards. Tell Adam to join us as well."

Even though the Meereenese hadn't killed Rhaegal and Viserion, Kurt hadn't liked the way he had shouted at his men to go after Drogon in the pit, without even asking his permission, or at least his opinion – almost as if Kurt didn't matter at all, as if he was a trophy to parade around for the crowd while Adam took the important decisions. He didn't want to leave the city to him, even though their fake marriage had saved it from destruction. He would re-establish the council of the Great Masters and relegate him to a secondary role or something.

"I... as you wish, khalees" Finn replied through gritted teeth, stepping aside to make him pass.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"You're sure it's safe, right?" Blaine whispered as they walked down the stone stair that led to the dungeon.

"I'm immune to fire, my sun-and-stars" Kurt told him with a roll of his eyes, giving him a small smile when he realized Blaine didn't look reassured at all. "Yes, it's safe."

"Are you immune to claws and teeth, too?" Blaine asked him grimly. "What if they hurt you before you can actually give them your blood?"

"I-" Kurt stammered, trying to keep the fear secluded in the back of his mind where he had previously pushed it, "they won't hurt me, I'm their father."

"The more reason to be pissed at you, don't you think?"

"Blaine, you're not helping."

"Sorry. I'm just nervous."

"I know."

They both halted abruptly when they reached the end of the stairs, startled by a pair of thundering roars that echoed through the walls as one. The floor was shaking with it. To Kurt's ear, it sounded different from the way Drogon had screamed in the pit as he looked for him; it was a different kind of anger, driven by hurt and anguish and sorrow.

The iron door guarded by Unsullied had been reinforced with thick chains and bars in his absence, which were melting on top of one another to create a vibrating red-hot semi-liquid layer working its way to the floor. The air was heavy even there, hot and stifling as he breathed it in, and the walls were completely black now. The Unsullied standing there in front of them were sweating profusely, immobile as they tried not to show how much that bothered them, and when he turned to look at Blaine he saw that his breathing was ragged.

"You should go back up" Kurt told him, fixing him with a worried look. "You're going to have a coughing fit."

"No" Blaine replied, clearing his throat when it came out sort of croaked. "I'm not going anywhere until I know you're okay."

Kurt stared at him a moment longer, then sighed.

"Fine" he conceded, defeated. "But you're not going in with me."

"But-"

"You're not. I won't argue with you over this. I was alone with Drogon in the desert, and nothing happened. This isn't different."

It was, actually, but Blaine didn't need to know it. Because Rhaegal and Viserion hadn't seen the sky nor hunted nor flown in weeks. It was his fault, and they knew it.

They must hate me, he couldn't help but think.

"Just... be careful" Blaine concluded after a moment of scorching hot silence, leaning in to kiss Kurt fully on the lips. "I'm not ready to lose you. I need the moon to ride through the nights of the world."

Despite the situation, Kurt laughed against his lips. Only Dothraki managed to be rough and profoundly poetical at the same time; in all the cultures of the East they had had the chance to meet, there was always something pretentious and artificial that made romantic declarations like that sound fake instead.

"You're so cheesy" he commented, bumping his nose with the khal's. "What about when you left the city? You didn't ride at night anyway?"

It was meant to be playful and lighten the mood, but Blaine grew serious instead, in a way that always managed to make him look as if he bore all the troubles and sadness of the world on his shoulders. It gave him a quiet, contemplative, almost tragic beauty that Kurt, to that day, hadn't found in any other man.

"I did, because I knew where to look" he said. "Even if we were miles apart, I would know that you're out there somewhere. But in a world where you don't exist at all, I would be lost, surrounded by darkness, and my dreams would all be nightmares. So don't die in there, moon of my life. Don't take the light away from my existence."

"I really love you" Kurt simply told him, because what else could he say to that? Those same words, coming out of his mouth, would have sounded false and well-prepared in advance.

It was a struggle to get the Unsullied to open the door – they had to cut through the layer of melting iron with their swords before it could solidify around the door and fuse it with the wall surrounding it. When they did, Blaine handed him a whip and – quite reluctantly – a knife he would have to cut himself with. They parted with a long look that spoke louder than a thousand words.

It was like entering a furnace, way hotter than it was the last time he had been there. And way darker, too; there had been torches all along the walls once, but now he could only glimpse one here and there, so the very center of the pit looked pitch black to him. As he approached it, though, his eyes adjusted to the semi-darkness, and he saw that the chains that should have been attached to the dragons' collars were broken, leaving only some five or six rings linked to the main one in the center.

They must have ripped them, and knocked down the torches, too.

Behind him, in front of him, all around him, he could hear things moving, crawling, hissing, but he could not see them. What he could see, though, were the corpses scattered around him, but they weren't animals. They were human.

The three Sons of the Harpy, he thought, but as he narrowed his eyes to try and distinguish the other shapes he was seeing on the ground, he realized there were more than three – ten, at least. Slowly, he walked until he reached one of them and crouched down to look at it. It was so recent that he could almost make out the man's features if he really tried – which he didn't, because the smell of burnt flesh invading his nostrils and the sight of the blackened and blistered skin were enough to make him pull back in silent horror.

Who are these men?, he wondered, but the answer came to him together with the question itself.

He tried. He sent them down here.

Closing his fists around the whip and the knife he was holding, he felt a wave of implacable anger crash against him.

Fuck the secondary role. He's dead.

His heartbeat sped up at the thought, making his blood rush faster through his veins, and that was when two pairs of eyes appeared from the darkness. Rhaegal, whose eyes were yellow, was right in front of him, hiding in the shadows a few feet away. Viserion's red eyes, instead, were much higher in the air, but they were not moving, which meant he wasn't flying. The tremulous light of a torch illuminated where he was for an instant, revealing a huge hole in the wall where he was nestled, the broken chain still dangling from his neck as he lay there, coiled around himself like an enormous white snake.

They both stared at him with deep, hateful resentment in their eyes, grumbling noisily as their stomachs filled with fire. Kurt could see the red contours of the scales covering their bellies, inside which the flames were born. Flames they wanted to direct at him. He had imagined them wilder than that, maybe trying to attack him as soon as he got inside the pit, but perhaps that was worse; it was a silent, almost resigned accusation, like something they had come to accept and cherish as they waited for the time to find revenge for it. The last time he had visited them, they had screamed and cried, pleading for him to free them. It looked like they didn't hope for it anymore.

He lifted the hand he was holding the knife with to his other arm, right below the shoulder, and made a swift, superficial but long cut through his skin, hissing as the blade sliced the tissue.

"I'm here" he announced in High Valyrian, reaching the wounded arm out in front of him to make them sense the scent. "I came back for you. Please, forgive me. I'm so sorry."

Now that his eyes had completely adjusted, he could actually see their reactions. Rhaegal puffed smoke out of his nostrils and narrowed his eyes, while Viserion uncoiled from inside his nest and crawled down the wall to join his brother. Without so much as a warning, he opened his mouth wide and spit fire in Kurt's face, so sudden and shocking that he fell to the ground on his back, his clothes shriveling and blackening and falling away from his body, his eyes watering as smoke and ashes clouded his vision. Viserion kept going, soon joined by his green brother, and as immune as Kurt was he couldn't help but feel suffocated by the heat.

It reminded him of the fire of the khalasar in which their eggs had hatched, but that had been different, because he had shielded them with his body to protect them from normal fire. Dragonfire was just more, in size, shape and heat of the flames, as if coming directly from the deepest and darkest of the Seven Hells. And the fire of two dragons combined was unbearable. If he was another man, his skin would have already peeled off his bones by now.

"Please, stop, stop!" he screamed at them, protecting his eyes with his good arm. He realized dully that he'd lost the whip in the fall, and when he looked around him to find it, he saw nothing but flames. "I'm here now, I'm sorry, I'm sorry!"

Sitting up on the ground, he slashed at his other arm with the knife, feeling his head spin. With the strong, burning smell of the fire in the air, though, he figured they couldn't even feel it. Maybe they didn't even hear him. They never would, if they didn't stop spitting fire, and they were still doing it. Their roars echoed in his ears, drowning his own cries and pleas, and he wondered if that was the sound he was bound to hear for the rest of his life as his punishment, his personal kind of living damnation.

And then, out of the blue, they stopped.

He didn't have the time to feel grateful for it, because he immediately understood why. He heard the entrance door closing somewhere behind him, and when he turned around, his heart sank.

"NO!" he cried as loud as he could, jumping up to his feet. "Blaine, get out, get out!"

The dragons lost their interest in him and crawled around him to reach their new prey, their tails miraculously missing Kurt's body as they lashed left and right. And Blaine was just standing there, without so much as a weapon in his hand, just to distract them from him. He must have heard the continuous roar from outside.

His hands trembling with maniacal panic, Kurt scrambled in the sand until he found the whip once again, leaving shaky drops of blood on the ground. He stood up and ran toward the entrance of the pit. The first slash of the whip hit Rhaegal's tail; the second, Viserion's back. They both turned around again before they could attack Blaine, who crouched down to avoid the unpredictable movement of their tails as they did.

"Don't you fucking dare!" Kurt yelled at them, cutting the air with the whip right between their faces, making them shrink back and flap their wings angrily, stomachs grumbling all over again. "Don't you fucking dare! This is what you want, it's here, right here!"

They could be angry at him all they wanted, they could try and roast him for all eternity if they felt like it; Kurt owned them. But if they killed Blaine, or just hurt him, it was Kurt who would never find it in himself to forgive them. No matter what he'd done to them, that was a punishment he didn't deserve. He just had to get them to really look at him, see the blood flowing down his skin, breathe in its scent. Unlike the Dothraki Sea, where the air had been clear and bright, the cramped, suffocating dungeon made it difficult to distinguish sights and smells.

So maybe they just needed more blood.

He made another cut on his upper arm, creating a twin to the first red gash, and then another, and another, and various more only to stop above his wrist. He felt his left arm go numb and his fingers weaken around the whip's handle. He dropped it without even realizing it, his arm completely coated in red now.

It got Rhaegal and Viserion's attention. Their eyes fixed on Kurt's blood, they slowly crawled toward him, only to stop and snap at each other's faces with their jaws, hissing threateningly.

It was one arm, and they were two. They were fighting over it. Forcing his eyelids not to drop, Kurt switched the knife to his left hand, the one that had dropped the whip. His grip was loose and trembling, but he made the effort and lifted his arm to make new cuts on the other one, whimpering when the movement made the bleeding muscles contract.

Even if it doesn't work, at least he'll be alright.

His head spinning, he managed to make five before collapsing to the ground.

The last thing he heard was the sound of his own name.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"...my fault, I shouldn't have let him..."

"...couldn't know they were..."

"-at if he lost too much..."

"...be alright..."

"...pale as a fucking sheet!"

"Calm down, he's waking up."

He blinked his eyes open, the words floating around him until they made some sort of sense. He stared up at the impossibly high ceiling of his chambers, narrowing his eyes to make them adjust to the light of day once again after the darkness of the pit and the period of unconsciousness. After the first seconds of fuzzy confusion, it all came back to him in an instant, but when he tried to sit up on the bed his weak body didn't seem to cooperate and a myriad of stabbing jolts of pain cut through his bandaged arms like a storm of piercing needles.

"Easy, easy there" a familiar voice said soothingly, and only then Kurt realized there was someone squeezing his hand. "Stay down."

He slowly turned his head toward the sound, finding Blaine sitting on a chair at the edge of the bed with an haunted expression on his face, his eyes puffy and red-rimmed.

"Have you been crying?" Kurt asked, too weak to worry about how the question would make Blaine uncomfortable – since apparently there was someone else in the room he was talking to.

"What? Of course not" Blaine replied too quickly, rubbing his free hand over one of his eyes self-consciously (and making it even more puffy in the process). Kurt gave him a fond smile, deciding to drop the subject.

"Where are they?" he whispered. "It worked, didn't it?"

If they were both alive, that was the only possible explanation.

"Yes, it worked" another familiar voice said from the other side of the bed, and when Kurt turned, he saw Finn standing there. "We're having a tunnel made, to get them out of the dungeon from underground. They can't pass through the door anymore, and we can't risk the pyramid collapsing on itself by making them burst through it. I think it will take all day and most of the night."

"So- so they're alright? They drank the blood?"

"For fuck's sake, Kurt!" Blaine exclaimed, his loud voice booming like thunder inside his head. "I had to drag you away before you could bleed to death on the ground, and you're worried about them? Yes, they're alright!"

"Gods, don't yell" Kurt complained, closing his eyes against the sound.

"Fuck, sorry" Blaine whispered, squeezing his hand as an apology. "I just- I saw you fainting like that, with them standing in the way, and I thought... just... just don't do this to me again."

"I'm sorry you got so scared" Kurt told him, opening his eyes slowly. Blaine pressed his face against their joined hands, and Kurt couldn't help but lift his and pet his curls tenderly.

Watching the movement of his fingers through Blaine's dark hair, he remembered there was something else they needed to talk about.

"Where is Adam?" he asked Finn, his tone flat and sharp. "I really need to have a talk with him. I saw corpses in the dungeon – too many corpses."

Finn shifted uncomfortably on his feet.

"That's- that's what I wanted to talk to you about" he said, approaching slowly until he could sit at the end of the bed, close to Kurt's feet. "He's... he's locked in a cell, khalees."

Kurt blinked in surprise, shifting up a little bit against the pillows. Blaine lifted his head from their entwined hands as well.

"What? Who put him there?"

"I did" Finn admitted, in a tone halfway between secret pride and worry.

"Is it because of the dragons? Because he tried to kill them?"

It was flattering, on one hand, that Finn had taken such a drastic decision against Adam to protect Kurt's dragons while he wasn't there to do it; on the other hand, he felt as if he should have had a say in it. But he hadn't been there, and he wasn't going to reproach Finn for it. Everything the knight did was for his own good, always.

"He did, but that's not the reason" Finn replied, his expression growing somber as he spoke. "After... after Drogon took flight from the pit, he ran back here to the pyramid. When I arrived, he had already sent his men down to the dungeon. I begged him to call them back, I told him you'd hate him if he went through with it, but he said... he said you were dead. He said he had seen you fall."

"What?! That's a lie! I never fell!" Kurt rushed to say, keeping himself from gesturing wildly with his hands as his instincts told him to do. "Why would he say that?"

"Because he wanted everyone to believe it" Finn explained, his features sharp and angry all of a sudden. "And at first, I... I wondered. There were people saying they had seen you fall as well, others saying Drogon had eaten you or crushed you under his body. There was so much smoke around you that I didn't even see you on his back when he left the pit."

Kurt stared at him in muted horror. It was worse than what he'd thought.

"Oh Gods, Finn, you really thought I was dead" he realized out loud. Finn nodded silently, staring down at his hands for a moment.

"I'm sorry" Kurt felt the need to say, but Finn replied immediately.

"No, no, it's not your fault" he said with a heartfelt wave of his hand. "It was his fault. And I realized it was lie, when... when I found out the rest."

The air was filled with worry and anxious anticipation. Even though his eyes were set on Finn, Kurt could feel Blaine's body get rigid.

"Do you remember the honeyed locusts he kept offering to you?" the knight went on, his tone gentle in a way that scared Kurt somehow. The question didn't make sense to him, though. It was such a small, unimportant detail after everything that had happened since, that the answer wasn't immediate.

"I... I guess. What does that have to do with anything?"

Finn fixed him with a grave, solemn stare.

"They were poisoned."

It was so unexpected that he didn't know what to say. It was so absurd to think that such a stupid thing, the choice between eating or not eating something, could have cost him his own life. And it was absurd to think that Adam had tried to murder him after everything Kurt had granted him, after marrying him.

Blaine, as always, was faster at recovering from a shock.

"They were what?" he asked angrily, almost jumping from his sitting position.

"Miklaz, the cupbearer who offered the khalees the plate, snatched two or three of them while we were not looking to eat them himself" Finn explained, his voice tinged with a sadness that made him look incredibly old all of a sudden. "He died the following day."

Kurt remembered Miklaz; he had been a bright, enthusiastic boy, always happy to carry out the orders Kurt gave him. He lacked the innate feeling of superiority other noble Meereenese children seemed to have, and he had always looked at Kurt with awe and respect despite the fact that he had basically kidnapped him from his family. He couldn't have been more than ten years old.

"This isn't happening" Kurt whispered, trying uselessly to process it all. "I- are you absolutely sure it was Adam? I mean, what if he didn't know it?"

Could it be the Sons of the Harpy all over again? He clang to the possibility, hoping he hadn't been that wrong in judging a person, refusing the humiliation that would entail. But as he thought it, he remembered the way Adam had insisted, more than once, only to refuse eating the locusts himself when Kurt had told him to do it, since he liked them so much. And after all, wouldn't it be perfect for him if Kurt died? He would pass from being a fake companion, a political fa�ade, to being the only king of the city.

"I wasn't sure at first. It was just... a feeling in my gut, like the one I had at the market in the Dothraki Sea" Finn answered him, pausing to heave a long breath. "I just couldn't shake it off. So I... I may have kidnapped him from his bed and dragged him down to the dungeon to see if he would confess."

"Finn, are you crazy?!" Kurt couldn't help but tell him, sharper than intended – flinching at the sound of his own voice. "What if his guards caught you? You could have been killed!"

"I know, but I needed to know the truth" Finn justified himself hurriedly, before slowing down again in his storytelling. "He managed to deny it quite convincingly all along the way down. When I told the Unsullied to open the door, he fell to his knees and wept like a baby. The first roar coming from beyond the door got me the confession I expected."

A heavy blanket of silence fell over them. Kurt gaped at Finn wordlessly.

How had he managed to be so stupid?

"I'm going to pull out his intestines and choke him with them" Blaine announced with ice-cold bluntness, emphasized by the fact that Kurt knew he was actually going to. As accustomed as he was to Blaine's imaginative threats, the mental picture caused him a brief sense of nausea.

When he looked back at Finn, he realized the tale wasn't over yet. There was something more, something worse, that the knight was keeping from them.

"What is it that you're not saying?" Kurt prompted gently, bracing himself for whatever revelation was coming next. And even before hearing it out loud, he knew what it was. Deep down, subconsciously, he knew it couldn't be nothing but that.

"He was the Harpy, khalees" Finn said indeed, his words echoing through Kurt's mind a thousand times over. "Once he started babbling, there was no stopping him. He confessed everything."

He was the Harpy. He was the Harpy. He was the Harpy.

And suddenly all the pieces seemed to fit. It had been a lie all along. The bargain of the fighting pits, to get exactly what he wanted: reopen his lucrative business and simultaneously earn Kurt's favor by stopping the massacre. Killing their child to force them apart, hoping the Yunkai'i would request a marriage to sign the peace, so Kurt would be more inclined to accept without Blaine standing in the way. He could have killed Blaine in the first place, Kurt thought, but it was obvious why he hadn't: Kurt would never have married another man while in grief for his lost love; he would have, instead, if driven by anger and resentment toward Blaine for taking it out on him. And as a matter of fact, he had.

"I've married the man who murdered my son" he realized, his voice hollow and empty of emotion – he was feeling so many things at the same time that it was impossible for him to voice one of them.

"And I've butchered an innocent family for it" Blaine added, his tone just as numb and distant from reality.

The Loraq family. He hadn't even thought about that. He hoped it wouldn't get worse, because it seemed to him that was the last straw he could actually handle. Because that made him – and there was no other word for it – a murderer as well. He would have been one anyway, even if they had been really guilty, but it was different. It just was. He remembered Blaine coming back to the pyramid drenched in human blood, innocent blood, and his hands scrubbing it off his skin with a wet cloth.

"I'm going to be sick" he announced, before getting out of Blaine's grip to lean over the opposite edge of the bed and retch inside the chamber pot. As he emptied his stomach of its few contents, he felt a gentle hand rubbing between his shoulder-blades soothingly.

The act left him more drained than he already was, and the sudden movement made his arms tingle and ache. He heaved a ragged breath and settled back against the pillows, closing his eyes tiredly. Someone wiped his lips and chin with a wet cloth, and when he opened his eyes slowly, he saw that it was Blaine. Finn was still sitting at the end of the bed, staring silently at the two of them.

"We should get you something to eat now, to give you some strength" Blaine whispered, discarding the cloth on the bedside table to stroke Kurt's cheek. Kurt was still stuck on what they had just heard, though, and that seemed the last of his problems.

"Gods, Blaine, what have I done? I made you do that, I-"

"We couldn't know it was a lie" Blaine told him sternly, fixing him with a look that accepted no reply, his hand finding Kurt's again over the mattress. "The prisoners confessed."

That set his brain to work. There was something missing. Despite the weakness, he forced himself to think as clearly as he could.

"Wait," he said, narrowing his eyes toward Finn, "they did. They said it was Loraq. Why would they tell a lie and die for it? And Tina died on the terrace. The Crawford pyramid is too far from this one."

Finn crushed his last string of hope with his answer.

"He paid those three men to give a false confession. They were starving, and their families with them, so I guess they decided to sacrifice themselves for them. About Tina's death... turns out Adam has been infiltrating spies among the other slaver families' guards for years, to be one step ahead of them in the slave trade and stuff like that. It was one of these spies who shot the arrows from the Loraq pyramid. If it's of any consolation to you, khalees, the families didn't know it, either. It was impossible for you to find out."

It wasn't a great consolation, actually. He felt so utterly cheated and betrayed.

"Such an intricate plan," he reflected, speaking mostly to himself, "and then he goes and spoils it like this."

"Thank your dragons for that" Blaine told him, his dark sarcasm breaking the heavy atmosphere for a moment. "The thought of standing in the same room with them is enough to make an evil mastermind cry for his mother's breast. So, can I kill him now or what?"

"The Meereenese families insist on doing it their way" Finn put in reluctantly, probably worried of becoming the new object of Blaine's anger. "It's been a struggle to convince them to keep him alive and wait for your return. They gave me ten days. In the meantime, they have been taking care of the true Sons of the Harpy, among their own guards and in the streets."

"Their way? You mean they want him dead as well?" Kurt asked him, baffled.

"Of course they do" Finn replied matter-of-factly. "The Merreqs – Miklaz's family – want his head most of all, but they're all angry beyond belief because of the spies, and the set-up against the Loraqs. They don't blame you for it. I thought they would, but they... they seemed genuinely sorry for your loss, khalees. Some of them went as far as telling me they would have done the same."

That was good news at least. He couldn't deal with the anger of the whole Meereenese aristocracy on top of everything else.

"So you really had a talk with them?"

Finn looked hesitant, as if Kurt had just caught him while doing something he shouldn't.

"Yes, I... about that..." he trailed off, before continuing the sentence in a quick and uninterrupted rush of words, "they sort of nominated me your regent or something like that."

Kurt raised his eyebrows in surprise.

"They... did?"

Finn scratched at the back of his head nervously.

"They- they said this is how it was done when Meereen had kings. When the sovereign was suspected of a crime – as was Adam's case – or ill or dying or thought to be dead – as was your case – and there were no direct heirs, his captain of guards or pledged knight or whoever had the role immediately under him got to rule until a new election could be organized. I... I'm sorry I accepted, I just- I figured it was better to do it, so at least I could control the situation from the inside. I wasn't, like, stealing the city from you, khalees, I swear, I was-"

"Finn, calm down" Kurt interrupted him, suppressing a laugh in spite of everything. "You did good. I'm... I'm really proud of you."

Finn beamed, a flicker of pureness of heart and light and hope amidst a dark ocean of mischief and evil and betrayal Kurt was sick and tired of swimming in. Meereen may have been his city once, but it wasn't anymore. Nothing he had lived there had been real. No one he had met had been real. They were all actors of a foreign, exotic play on a stage without rules, while he had just been a temporary performer, a na�ve beginner trying to play their game for the sake of their amusement.

Well, maybe he wasn't good at playing the game of thrones. But at least he knew how to dance with dragons.

"I don't care who they elect to rule the city. I want to leave. I want to go home."

Finn nodded silently, and then, "What about Adam? The former slavers want to tie his limbs to four different carts heading in four different directions – they believe their Gods don't accept dismembered men up in heaven, something like that. The Green Grace explained it to me in detail, but I forgot."

"He killed our Cooper, we should be the ones to take care of him" Blaine argued instead. "It's either my arakh or your dragons."

Kurt shifted his gaze between them, feeling like a mother who had to settle a fight between two of his children. If he had to be honest, he didn't even care how they did it. He didn't even want to see him, or ask him why – because the answer was simple: power. Power made people crazy, just like it had happened to Sebastian. It made them do unimaginable things just to sit on big marble chairs men liked to call with the fancy name of thrones.

And Kurt pitied them both, Sebastian and Adam. One was dead, and the other one was going to be soon.

One way or another.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Kurt was nothing if not a man of invention, a master of compromise, and a genius of diplomacy (and a very modest person). In the end, he managed to make everyone happy.

In the middle of the biggest square of Meereen, as the entire city watched in awed silence, Blaine challenged Adam to single combat. It was the Dothraki way when a member of a khalasar committed an unforgivable crime – a definition that applied to a very small number of things, to be honest; mainly steal from another member or rape his wife. The point of the whole affair was: if the Khal wasn't strong enough to take care of it and kill the offender, then the crime was forgiven, cancelled by the accused man's physical superiority.

That wasn't going to be the case, of course. The difference between them was ridiculous. Sipping wine from a silver cup, sitting with his legs elegantly crossed, Kurt enjoyed the show like a true Meereenese nobleman would have done with a fighting in Dazhnak's Pit.

"I finally understand why they like this so much" he mused, raising an eyebrow at Finn, who was sitting next to him. "It's actually kind of funny, when you know exactly how it's going to end."

Blaine took his sweet time, obviously, otherwise it would have ended way too soon. He faked blows that never came, charged from one side only to change it at the last instant to confuse the nobleman, and tortured him with little random slashes that cut through his skin deep enough to hurt, but not enough to kill. Adam looked paler than usual, his hair visibly dirty from having passed his last days inside a cell without the luxury of a bath, and his terrified eyes managed to find Kurt in the crowd from time to time, looking for what, Kurt didn't know.

Forgiveness? Acceptance? Closure? It didn't matter.

Out of his depth, with his clothes stained with sweat and blood and his beard unshaved, he looked like a very common man, almost innocuous. Without his money, his costly garments and charming manners, he was nothing.

And when Blaine eventually made an end to it, opening his belly from hip to hip, Kurt felt nothing.

They brought the carts inside the square and tied his still gurgling, breathing body to them. When that part was done, Kurt ordered the drivers to recollect the various parts and take them to the terrace of the Great Pyramid – his pyramid, for one last day.

It was lunch time, and his children were hungry.