For a while, Rain had been furious with Cassiel.
He'd stopped playing with the twins, but that didn't alter the nature of their work, which required teamwork at every level.
And one of the many rules of survival against titans was to leave drama at the base.
The first time he tried to talk to Cassiel, he'd barely gotten four words out.
"We need to talk-"
"I have a meeting with Auric and the other squad leaders in ten minutes, can it wait?"
That meeting was followed by an immediate deployment back to the east, where their former quarry - the titan dragon - had evidently gotten into a fight with every titan whose territory had bordered his.
They found a dead titan roc - weirdly stone-aspected - with its heartstone ripped out, and quarrying the dead bird for its veins was deemed too difficult to be worthwhile.
The second time he tried to talk to Cassiel was in the lull while waiting for a teleport back.
