Lore theory/wishful thinking: Marcus du Couteau is alive and currently he's gathering forces.

OP you can't just make an entire post about your silly fanfiction that will absolutely never come to be real in any precent whatsoever! Watch me do it. Also, rude.

Forgive me for any spelling mistakes, I'm writing this while still half asleep.

First, quick recap on the wherabouts of du couteau family. Talon: Edgy dude looking around for his foster parent. Kat: Edgy dudette going around the world killing people for Noxian goverment. Cass: Edgy snake, currently running around Noxus forcing people into staring contests. Mama du Couteau: Unknown, most likely busy manipulating friendly nobles to defeat boredom Papa/General/Marcus du Couteau: Unknown, missing in action, most likely dead, also probably an enemy of the state.

Generally everyone's walking around doing god knows what.

To explain my prediction regarding Marcus' current state of being I first need to present to you a shortened version of what I assume was his life like before the "missing" thing happened. Bear in mind that I have absolutely no proof to back up any of this. All of it is just a gut feeling.

Marcus and Swain get to know each other at some point before Ionian Invasion (they could even be childhood friends for all i know, it's irrelevant to this post so i'll ignore it). Marcus fails to protect Swain and other leaders of the invasion from "crazy wood witch with swords" who cut them to pieces. This resulted in Swain losing his favorite arm. and that in turn made our future leader of the country salty about life and the entire invasion, finally realising that attacking bush people in bushes is a bad idea (usa should know something about it, dunno).

Swain talks Marcus into joining his glorious revolution against current rulling class. As we know, it ended succesfully for them.

Now, from Swain's in-game quote towards Kat we know that he "wasn't the one who ordered to kill her father" (or something like that). This makes me assume that the one(s) who ordered to make it happen were Noxian nobles who for sure aided Swain in his revolution (one man can't turn the kingdom upside down, let's be realistic here. This also shows how childish Sylas' dreams are but let's not go off-topic too much). I'd assume that their decision to shorten Marcus by a couple important centimeters came from the fact that having two people of immense political power (At that point in time, Marcus was already a leader of assassins who also had a lot of political influence thanks not only to his position but also due to mama du couteau most likely pulling a lot of string to make the entire thing happen) would not be a good idea in a king-less noxus. And getting rid of an assassin is definitely easier than getting rid of an all-powerful wizard with demon magic

If we assume that Marcus didn't feel nicely about getting his head chopped off, we can safely say that he managed to run away from Noxus (hence why he's still officially considered "missing" and not "dead").

Now let's pretend that we're in Marcus' skin and we just barely managed to get somewhat unscathed from multiple hired assassins who just waited for us to make a simplest mistake. Since we're awesome, we didn't give them an upper hand and probably murdered each and every one of them for good measure. How would you feel in his place?

Your country hates you and want's you dead. Your friend betrayed you and generally surrounds himself with crazy people Your first daughter went into permament edge phase Your other daughter turned into a freakish monstrocity and is more busy stoning people than helping her old man. Your foster son can't tie his shoelaces without you around Your wife is too important for the country and is forced to sit in place by nobility.

What do you do? Give yourself away for the glory of Noxus? No, because you realise that whatever Swain turned Noxus into, it's still going to be held back by sleezy nobility who only care about themselves. It's not true strenght Noxus needs to survive. Is Swain a bad leader? No, probably not. But he still needs weak people to hold his rule. We don't need weak people in Noxus.

I imagine that, in current time in lore, Marcus is currently out in the fields gathering power to make Noxus go through yet another revolution. Perhaps not as grand as the earlier one. Perhaps only thing that will be needed is just a bunch of heads rolling on the floor, without country-wide bloodshed.

Whatever would be the case, Marcus needs power. And allies. Preferably ones that listen to his every order. Noxus doesn't need unwanting soldiers, and Marcus needs the best of the best.

As we know, he already has experience training the best of the best. His assassin school was exactly that. Where do we look for such people tho? Noxus is a nono, for obvious reasons. Demacia is busy dealing with Sylas going wild. Not-vikings are fighting each other on a daily basis and Shurima is literally sand and 5 meter tall animal dudes. We're left with a place quite known by Marcus, Ionia.

In a place where every second child is born with an ancient magic or is naturally gifted with magi-dancing with swords an shit, Marcus will most likely very easily find quite a large group of students. Between war infants and literal crazy people, he probably wont have to search long. Also, there's a chance of finding a cute vastayan catgirl to raise team's morale which is always nice.

This entire post wouldn't happen if not for Riot teasing soon-to-come assassin champion and mentioning and future story about assassins in Ionia. I combined this with my personal visions as to who Marcus is and what he's currently doing and came up with the idea of making this post.

To be fair I just want Riot to give some attention to best dad.

Presented in the picture, random red haired dude who apperead after i googled "guy red hair anime". Made by 日輪 on pixiv. https://my.mixtape.moe/kdrnar.png