Theodore Ira had killed a man with his bare hands before he was seventeen, and the thing that had frightened him afterward was not the killing itself but how little it had cost him to do it — no hesitation, no trembling, no aftermath of horror at what his own hands had proven capable of. He had simply been angry, and the anger had moved through him and out of him and into another person's throat, and when it was finished he had felt, for a brief clean moment, almost nothing at all.
He came from a family that fought. Not the ordinary way families fought, the small frictions of people who loved each other and occasionally said sharp things they regretted — his family fought the way some families breathed, constantly, as the default state of being in a room together, his father's temper a weather system the whole house organized itself around, his older brothers settling every disagreement with fists because fists were the only language the house had ever properly taught them. Theodore had grown up believing anger was simply what living felt like. He did not know, until much later, that other households existed where a raised voice was the exception rather than the baseline.
The man he killed at seventeen had been his father.
The tube gave that back to him with a particular unblinking clarity, the way it gave everything back eventually — his father's hand raised for what would have been, by Theodore's count, the two hundred and eleventh time it had come down on someone in that house, and Theodore's own hand catching the wrist before it landed, and something in him that had been building since before he had memory of it finally, finally, finding a direction to go.
He had not planned it. That was the detail that had frightened him most in the years afterward, in the years before the demon queen found him — that the anger had not required planning, had simply been sitting inside him fully formed and fully capable, waiting only for the moment his hand happened to be strong enough and his father's guard happened to be low enough, and once it had that moment it had used it completely, without any input from the part of Theodore that might have wanted to stop.
He left the house that night. He did not tell his mother what he had done, though he suspected, from the way she never once asked where his father had gone, that she understood well enough and had decided some questions were kinder left unasked.
He spent the years after as a man who fought for money, because it was the only thing he had ever been reliably good at, and because the fighting gave the anger somewhere legitimate to go instead of the illegitimate places it kept finding on its own. He won more than he lost. He told himself the winning meant something, that channeling the anger into a ring with rules and a purse at the end of it was a kind of redemption for a boy who had once let it loose in a house with no rules at all. He was not entirely wrong. But the anger did not diminish with use, the way he had hoped it might, the way a wound is supposed to close a little more each time it's tended. It simply found new shapes. New opponents. New rooms to fill when the fighting rooms weren't enough.
He met a woman, in one of the towns his fighting took him through — a quiet woman named Isolde who ran the tavern where he stayed between matches, who was not afraid of him the way most people eventually became afraid of him, and who told him once, very calmly, over a drink he hadn't asked her to share, that she thought the anger in him was not actually anger at all.
"It's grief," she said. "Wearing anger's clothes because grief never got taught the shape of its own face in that house you grew up in. I've seen it before. Men who lost something enormous long before they had words for loss, and the only feeling the house ever gave them permission to have was the loud one, so the quiet one learned to dress up as the loud one just to get let into the room."
Theodore had not known what to do with that. He had sat with it for a long time, turning it over the way a man turns over a stone he isn't sure is worth the effort of lifting, and he had not fully believed her, not then. But he had gone back to that tavern more than any fighting circuit strictly required, and something in him had started, very slowly, to soften in her presence — not the anger itself, which never fully left, but the certainty that the anger was the only true thing about him.
Isolde died in a fire that took half the tavern with her, three years into whatever the two of them had been quietly building, and the fire had nothing to do with Theodore at all — an overturned lamp, a dry season, the ordinary indifferent cruelty of accidents that happen to people regardless of what they deserve. Theodore had not been there. He had been two towns away, fighting for a purse he no longer remembered the size of, and by the time word reached him there was nothing left to return to but a name on a marker and a town that looked at him, fresh off the road, the way towns looked at strangers who arrived one day too late to matter.
The anger came back after that with a completeness it had never quite managed even in his father's house. Theodore stopped fighting for purses. He fought because the fighting was the only thing that still made sense of the size of what was moving through him, and by the time the demon queen found him he had left a trail of broken men behind him in towns whose names he had also stopped bothering to remember.
"You've spent your whole life trying to make the anger smaller," the demon queen told him, in the ring after a fight he had not particularly cared about winning, standing over the man he had just beaten nearly to death for reasons that had very little to do with the man himself. "Fighting circuits. Purses. All of it an attempt to give the anger somewhere small enough to fit that it wouldn't have to be looked at directly. It never worked, did it. It was never going to work. Some things are not meant to be made small."
"What are you offering."
"The opposite of small," the demon queen said. "I'm offering to let it be exactly the size it actually is. Not just in you — in everyone. You've spent your whole life believing you were uniquely broken, uniquely full of something the rest of the world had somehow learned to keep contained. You weren't wrong that it's in everyone, Theodore. You were only wrong about the containing. Every person alive is one bad night from being the boy who caught his father's wrist. I can give you the gift of proving it. Of reaching into a person and finding the hatred that's already there, waiting the way yours waited, and simply — letting it out."
Theodore had thought of Isolde, of the fire that had nothing to do with anyone's hatred at all and had taken her anyway, of how unfair it had felt that the one accident in his life that owed nothing to anger had been the one that cost him the most. He had thought that if the world was going to insist on being built out of hatred and cruelty regardless of what anyone did to resist it, he might as well stop pretending resistance had ever meant anything.
"Yes," he said.
The tube's liquid began to move.
Theodore opened his eyes into gold light with his hands already curling into the fists they had curled into since he was seventeen, some part of him still, after three hundred years, braced for a blow that was never going to land the way his father's had.
"Third of mine," the demon queen said. "Wake up."
"How long," he said. It was the only question that had ever mattered to him, in either life.
"Long enough that whoever Isolde might have been to you is dust and forgotten," the demon queen said, with the particular precision of someone who had learned exactly which wound to touch first. "Long enough that the world has had three hundred more years to prove you right about what it's actually made of."
Theodore Ira rose from the tube with his fists already curled, and said nothing more, because there was nothing left to say that the demon queen did not already understand better than he did.