Lukos sat against the far wall, legs stretched out before him, one boot crossed over the other. The ground he sat on consisted of dirty cobblestones and scattered straw. He shifted a little, trying to find the comfiest stone to sit on. The hay he’d piled under him was flat and did not offer enough cushion. Bits of straw stuck out from his curly hair, which was currently a rat’s nest from having to sleep on the floor after the fight with Lord Achilleas in the gardens of Aphrodite’s temple. Lukos laughed half heartedly to himself, still finding it amusing. Though it was less amusing when he was sitting in the dark basement of the Order House with only one oil lamp burning at the far end where a guard sat.

He didn’t mind the swath of shadow covering his cell. It shielded him from having to see the piss bucket in the far corner. The guard *still* hadn’t come to get that and Lukos was toying with the idea of pissing outside of the bars to get the man’s attention. He thought about a lot of things. Last night, he and the guard hadn’t exactly been friendly. Apparently the guard didn’t like a metal cup being dragged back and forth across the bars for two hours straight. And when the man had yelled down the corridor for Lukos to ”SHUT IT!”, the man had proved he had no inner serenity at all. Lukos’s bellow of “FUCK OFF I’M PLAYING MUSIC, HERE!” had been met with a chair scraping hard against the stones, heavy boots, the guard slamming the cell door back and literally jerking the cup out of Lukos’s hands. The kick to the ribs had been less than pleasant too.

“That’s going to bruise!” had fallen on deaf ears as the guard retreated back. The man hadn’t given Lukos a drink today and Lukos suspected it might have something to do with the previous cup incident. But that was just a hunch. He cleared his throat a few times, coughed pointedly, then began thudding the heels of his boots together for lack of anything to do. People were always so scared of jail but Lukos just didn’t want to go because it was so fucking boring. There weren’t many other prisoners and the other one that was a few cells down was either still drunk or dead. Lukos was undecided. He knew what drunks smelled like and he knew what dead bodies smelled like but with the buckets of unemptied urine and feces in the different cells, it was hard to be sure. Plus, of course, he couldn’t see the man. He’d merely seen a still form lying on the cell’s floor as he’d passed it coming in here and that other man hadn’t said word one in hours and hours. He was kinda leaning into the dead theory at the moment.

“Hey,” he rasped at the jailor who did not answer him. Lukos sniffed and rubbed his nose with the back of his hand, dropping the hand into his lap like his arm was too heavy to hold up. “Little bit of water? Getting a bit parched.”

”Shut it,” came the distant, distinctly bored echo.

Lukos sighed heavily and stretched out on the floor. In the back of his mind, he cared about the filth, but for the time being, his rump was sore from sitting on stone and he needed a break. Standing would take energy he didn’t actually have. He was still waiting on that doctor Achilleas was supposed to be sending for the slash across his chest, which, credit where credit was due, the Order members had tended to. He had to be fit to stand trial and be executed, after all.