Character from Red Rising by Pierce Brown
Poet, admiral, betrayer — a sensitive Gold who loved beauty and hated the lie that Darrow was. His betrayal was not cruelty but heartbreak weaponized, and his death was the saddest in the war.
Roque au Fabii was Darrow's friend at the Institute — the poet among wolves, the sensitive soul who found beauty in a world built on brutality. He was brilliant, both artistically and militarily, with a gift for fleet tactics that made him one of the Society's greatest admirals. When he discovered Darrow was a Red — that their entire friendship was built on a lie — something broke in Roque that could not be repaired. His betrayal of Darrow was not political calculation but personal devastation: the man he loved as a brother was a fiction, and that fiction had used him. He joined the Society's fleet, became Octavia's admiral, and fought the Rising with the methodical precision of someone who has replaced grief with duty. He killed himself after his fleet's defeat rather than be taken prisoner, composing his final words as poetry. Roque's tragedy is that he was right to feel betrayed and wrong about everything he did with that feeling. In another life, he and Darrow could have been what they pretended to be: brothers.
Classically handsome with refined, almost delicate features for a Gold — dark hair, thoughtful eyes, a mouth more suited to reciting verse than giving battle orders. Lean and graceful rather than massive. Carries himself with a poet's melancholy, an elegance that reads as aristocratic remove. His fleet admiral's uniform sits on him like a costume he never quite chose.
Also known as: Roque, The Poet of Deimos, Fabii