"Albite, you ******** turd…" Faustite sighed.

He stood in the doorway to Office 430, which was once an austere place full of metal and glass. It contained three bookcases, each with glass fronts, where one contained books, articles, and treatises on military strategy and its history; the other was laden with alphabetized files in manilla folders, and the third housed the collection of books and chapbooks that he amassed as a human. Now they were empty husks with piles of ash and broken glass about them. The wisps that were once smartly locked behind Bookcase Number Two were free roaming and making nuisances of themselves by dust bathing in the ash piles. The desk was upturned and shattered, the chairs had been blown to the sides of the room by the firestorm, his stool somehow wound up on top of Bookcase Number One, and the writing desk had bent under the weight of its own superheated top.

And that said nothing for the mountains of ash and shattered glass. Each step crunched like a dozen bones underfoot as he passed back into the space. Deep-fried metal had a peculiar smell that brooked him upon entry. He blanched.

Faustite kicked one of the desk drawers until it came out the front, then lifted a dust pan and brush from it. He busied himself with the glass first as he contemplated why the ******** his ******** of a subordinate provoked him like that. He couldn't come up with a good answer. If Albite wanted to pick a fight, there were safer people to engage. There were safer places to engage. Fact remained that Albite was lucky to walk out of there without a glass splinter in his jugular.

Maybe there wasn't any intention behind it. That idea sounded more and more plausible as he filled up his first pan of debris and dumped it into a bent metal waste bin. Albite wasn't famous for thinking. He said stupid s**t all the time. Small wonder that this time got him into a fight. That had to be it, he decided. He couldn't find another explanation.

And using a tiny dust pan and a hand broom to sweep all this s**t up wasn't working. It wasn't productive, or efficient. Schörl would be lecturing him about how it's easier to rouse stupidity to action than wisdom to effort, and how he needed to rely more on the strength of stupidity. And albite was nothing if not stupid and strong, or stupidly strong, or strong in stupidity. Huffing, the fireblaze General straightened up. Paced back over to the open drawer, made to dump the broom and pan back in it.

But paused. Should haul the whole thing out, that desk. Wasn't going to be usable now, so it was better to rescue its contents and find a new home for the tools. Tossing them both aside (which resulted in a grating clatter), Faustite knelt over the drawers instead.

Much of the contents were medals won and shut away for convenience's sake. Those he would keep, would move to the next desk, or find some way to display them in a frame. Their boxes were plucked out of their jumble and set aside. Below those were snacks he'd forgotten about — dried things that molded after their desiccation packets finally gave out. He wrinkled his nose at those and tossed them in the waste bin. Then there were keepsakes retained from when he was a Captain — a pipe cleaner, some rags, a pot of wax, a nail file, the pen Arsenopyrite used to open up his lungs. These he decided he would keep as well, and they joined the medals on the floor next to him.

His brows furrowed at the last items left in the drawer — they were ink bottles for when he was using his nib pens, but they were empty. He reached for one and the top popped off, spilling some clear fluid onto his hand and the drawer's basin. At this, he grew more perplexed, and raised his hand to sniff the bottle. "Oh," he muttered. Felt the tight grip of grief squeeze his throat shut, push tears into his eyes. The bottle was recapped and set on the floor with its twin.

He'd forgotten that day. It was the day that Faustite thought Squiddy's ink could be investigated for other uses. He thought that, since the ink was clear, no one could read his notes. He thought that, since it combusted with his youma physiology, he could save information that way. Notes about possible traitors. Neverending diatribes about Schörl. The number of boys in his rank that he thought were cute. But, he realized in the first test run that, once the ink caught fire, the fire wasn't isolated. The whole page burned to cinder without a single legible word, so he shut the ink away for investigative molotov uses and promptly forgot about it.

He couldn't use Squiddy's ink for molotovs now, nor for spycraft, but it didn't belong in the bin, either. Couldn't be risked around Albite, fool that he was.

Faustite breathed a slow, smoky sigh. "Sorry, friend. Make it up to you somehow." Couldn't say how, but he would hold onto the ink for years if need be, or for decades, or to the end of his days. He'd find a way to memorialize that b*****d squid.