Magvel Confidential
I do not own Fire Emblem or any of its characters.
Journalist!Innes AU set in a world that is not quite 1920s New York City. Features mild Innes/Gerik along with consumption of tobacco and alcohol. And organized crime. And glancing references to just about every other game-verse in the FE series.
Innes took a long, deep drag upon his cigarette as he contemplated the pristine blank whiteness that occupied four-fifths of the page in his typewriter.
"Nobody wants to read this, Gerik," he called over his shoulder. "I'm wasting my time."
"You've gotta do it, Boss," came the solidly unperturbed reply from the next room. "You can't keep writing about little kids and baby bunnies forever."
"No," Innes agreed, and after another frustrated drag on his cigarette he placed fingers to keys and banged out an adequate sentence. Merely adequate. It conveyed information and nothing more. "My sense of duty as a journalist will not allow me to bury this story beneath a tide of... smiling young children and bunnies."
"Your conscience won't let you," Gerik replied. Ill-suppressed levity crinkled his eyes as he set down a small tray at Innes's elbow. "But if the prick of conscience isn't enough, here's a picture of her to inspire you."
He'd clipped it from the foul pages of the Rausten Beacon, no doubt. Another picture of her, lit by dazzling floodlights and surrounded by a bristling array of microphones. Arms thrown wide, head back, mouth open to let loose another stream of the ridiculous.
"You tread close to the line, Gerik," Innes said as he reached for the glass that accompanied the image of the most aggravating lady scribbler in Magvel City.
"Yes, boss," Gerik said with minimal deference, and he departed.
Innes held up his pousse-cafe glass to the light. The showy, syrupy cocktail might as well have been created in L'Arachel's honor, he thought. Skillfully made, dazzling in its effect, and utterly noxious on the tongue. Each colorful layer had enough sugar to mask the taste of the inferior liquor. Innes drank it down, and as the hot buzz of bad gin took over his brain, he lit another cigarette and stared at the picture.
"You've managed to have Demon Rum outlawed, and now you're after my smokes, but this story is out of your realm, my lady."
When he placed his fingers on the keys this time a torrent of words flowed out of his methanol-touched brain and were branded on the page. Choppy and unpolished, with details drawn from memory rather than from the dossier of raw material upon his desk, it was nonetheless the rough shape of something that had no relation to "human interest" fluff or society gossip.
"Bring me another L'Arachel, Gerik. It's horrid but it does the trick."
-x-
The other organs of the press- small-time publications like the Renais Journal and Jehanna News-- called them rivals. Even out-state papers like the Elibe Times and Grannvale Chronicle started to run with it, and at first Innes laughed at the idea of the press covering the press as though there were nothing of genuine import going on in the world. He quickly stopped laughing.
It certainly didn't amuse him when he, cognizant that the post-war readers had tired of the "muckracking" on which he'd built his career, filed a captivating piece with the Frelia Sentinel only to have the Beacon chase it with a tale almost identical in outline, more overwrought and sentimental in style, and remarkably lacking in substance. Innes turned in a Sunday serial on how one of Magvel City's favorite war heroes had bonded with and mentored a spunky young girl who herself had stepped up fully for the war effort in the recent crisis. It'd been a nice, solid story with no whiff of scandal or impropriety, a good undercurrent of what the horrors of battle did for stout military men and petite blonde maidens alike, and a perfect ending when the general managed to reunite his protegee with her widowed mother.
And then the Beacon ran with the tale of another general who'd taken in another large-eyed moppet. She'd gone all the way to backwater Thracia to find it and filed in under her one-word byline: L'Arachel.
"Do you believe this, Gerik?" Innes recalled himself fuming. "She might have well as run with Battle-Hardened General Adopts Tiny, Helpless Kitten as the headline."
But it connected with those readers who were craving escapism and happy endings, and there were rather a lot of them out there. Then Innes scored a major success with a profile of a true flying ace who'd lost his brother in the war and hadn't made an easy transition to peacetime- another great piece that had a deeper context, a greater moral weight than just a sob story. And so L'Arachel ran off to forsaken Bern and came back with a yarn about a female flying ace who'd been forced to shoot down her own lover in combat but had rescued her younger brother in the bargain.
"The sickening thing is it all checks out, Gerik."
"Better luck next time, Boss."
"Not luck, Gerik, work. Walking the beat, following leads, checking and double-checking. Verifying. Does this creature from the Beacon do any of this, or do these remarkable scoops fall from Heaven into her lap?"
"I can't say, Boss. You don't pay me for that."
But Innes really didn't know how L'Arachel did what she did, or how she found the people she found, and it made her suspect to him as a journalist. His own tipsters and informants never noticed her on the beat, and with her high-pitched voice and fair curling hair she couldn't possibly escape notice.
Innes didn't even want to remember how Gerik's reference to "baby bunnies" had come about. He'd managed to get a searing interview with a reservation-bound Taguel woman known as the last of her tribe, and then L'Arachel popped up with a child dressed in rabbit skins that she passed off as the very last Taguel baby. Innes and the Sentinel stood by their story, but then the Taguel woman went and adopted the spurious baby and claimed him as a true Taguel (or at least a half-breed Taguel) and there wasn't anything for Innes to do but head back to the city in disgust. He wasn't entirely sure where he'd gone wrong on that scoop, or what lesson he ought to learn from it, and it was a needle under his skin.
If that weren't enough, when she wasn't one-upping him L'Arachel was running about on every kind of moral crusade under the sun. Temperance (for). Tobacco (against). Covering up nude statues (for). Bared shoulders (against). Sending in troops wherever and whenever it was necessary to confront the evils in the world outside Magvel's shining citadel and sending in whatever force was necessary to illuminate the hives of villainy in the borough of Grado and the wretched suburbia of Carcino (for, with a bullet). Innes didn't disagree with the last one in principle but in practice it didn't make sense. There weren't enough troops and there weren't enough cops and an acceptable level of corruption did seem to get things done.
Also, he was sore about Prohibition and sore about the attack on his cigarettes.
It was enough to make Innes long for the days when he'd merely been assigned to the metropolitan crime beat- it was more likely to get him killed, even with Gerik watching his back, but ferreting out anarchists' bomb shops and cracking body-parts rings was more useful than being humiliated over the Taguel business.
"There's that young lady from the Renais Journal who's been going into madhouses and prisons to see what it's like on the inside," Gerik pointed out as he rubbed his employer's temples to take away the inevitable headache brought on by too much L'Arachel- the cocktail and the woman alike. "People are eating that up every Sunday between the roast beef and the ice cream."
"They'll eat that up right until the moment she's in genuine peril and then they'll howl for it to stop," he replied. "Wait, are you suggesting I do the same?"
"I don't know that you could pull off posing as a convict or a madman," Gerik said with a gleam of mockery in his eye, "But it'd do some good, right?"
"Good, yes..."
Truth be told, Innes didn't want to chase trademark scoops of the Journal's new star any more than he liked his own being duplicated by the Beacon. Besides, he'd already gotten the sense the public tolerated this new brand of muckraking simply because the muckraker in question wore a skirt. The messenger mattered more than the story.
And then, something had fallen from Heaven into his lap- a chance meeting with a distressed young coroner and a cold-eyed female chemist with a most remarkable story to share.
-x-
Innes had in his hands the scoop that would transform everything- the precious puffs of escapism, the antics of the Beacon's leading lady, the undercover stunts of the Journal.
Mayor Vigarde's son is poisoning the city.
Lyon Vigarde, a chemist by trade, had been handed a post with the National Bureau of Investigation to "defend the city" against the wave of bootleggers brought into being by Prohibition. And young Inspector Vigarde certainly had a novel method of defeating the bootleggers. He'd infiltrated them with his own men and set about brewing poison. Carefully calibrated poison, at that- at least fifty different recipes for bathtub gin developed to disrupt the demand of illegal hooch by killing off consumers. If the government couldn't convince the people of Magvel City that drinking alcohol was sinful, they at least could make the truthful argument that it'd kill you.
"Kerosene, benzene, cadmium, mercury salts, quinine..." Innes recited from the list of adulterants he'd managed to confirm through the coroner's office, evidence gathered from the twelve hundred who'd succumbed to Inspector Vigarde's poison cocktails. "Well, I could believe that the NBI is only trying to cure venereal disease and prevent malaria, but that doesn't explain the kerosene."
Gerik had nothing to say this time as he looked over Innes's shoulder to read in full the report Innes intended to file at the Sentinel. Innes could feel his manservant's body tense as Gerik read the worst of it, but in the end Gerik only snorted, shook his head, and walked away to perform some mundane task that didn't have the fate of the city riding on it.
"Gerik?"
"Yes, Boss?"
"What do you think of it, really? Assuming Father allows me to publish this, won't it tear the city apart?"
In the silence that followed, Innes feared that Gerik would brush it off as being another question above his pay and station. He knew all his own fears too well- Mayor Vigarde's popularity and emphasis on law had kept the five disparate boroughs of Magvel from falling to pieces, well-spoken young Lyon was a hero to the citizens of Magvel for his battles with the crime syndicates. Nobody wanted Lyon Vigarde to be evil right down to his core and capable of cold-blooded murder. Not Lyon, the man who stood on a stage with L'Arachel and spoke of the utopia that Temperance and Abstinence would bring to Magvel City, the man who endorsed the activities of the Journal's Miss Eirika as bringing a shaft of sunlight into halls of corruption.
To tell the world that Lyon Vigarde murdered unsuspecting people and called it the public good was to risk ending up in one of those madhouses. I wouldn't have to pose to get the inside story then, Innes though, and he was about to say something along those lines to his bodyguard.
"I didn't fight in the Great War to come back to a city that kills its own poor and its desperate," said Gerik.
"Bless you, Gerik. I hope my father and the great beast of the public agree."
-x-
His father agreed to run the story; the Frelia Sentinel's gray-browed editor was stunned at the extent of Lyon Vigarde's crimes but convinced to his core by the evidence that Innes laid before him. Innes walked out of his father's office feeling like a real journalist for the first time since completing his investigation into the Yied railroad bombings.
"I'm going to need you now more than ever," Innes said to Gerik that night. "It's not just the moral bigots of our city that'll be after my skin; I'll have the wrath of the Metropolitan Police and the NBI coming down upon me. I won't be able to show my face outside here and the Sentinel office."
"I'll make sure you have protection, Boss," Gerik said against his ear. "You'll have friends all over the city in the low places where Inspector Vigarde doesn't see."
"Will I?"
"Sure. You're a man who could afford to get the best rum out of Valentia all for yourself and forget about the men in the gutters, and instead you take up common cause with the gutter drunks because you know it's wrong to poison human beings like rats."
"You make that sound wonderful, Gerik." Innes was glad for the dark, as he felt he had quite a silly wobbly expression and he didn't want Gerik to see it. "I know it's not just about scoring points off the Beacon any more. You can believe that."
"I do. And I'm going to feel sorry for Miss L'Arachel when she reads your story and sees in black and white what her little crusade's come to."
"Yes. The poisoned fruits of Prohibition." Innes thought of the ridiculous picture of L'Arachel that had been his totem while he turned his terrible scoop into a masterpiece. "I think I feel sorry for her too, Gerik. It's not a bad thing to have ideals. It's just the way she goes about it..."
"I've told you before, Boss. You're a scribbler with a conscience."
"Gerik," Innes said, in a stern voice for all that Gerik had a surprisingly tender hand upon his back. "I am a journalist."
"And that's a fancy word for a scribbler with a conscience."
And since Gerik was a great deal more to Innes than someone to watch his vulnerable back and to mix a fine drink, Innes let that jibe slide until morning broke with a new issue of the Frelia Sentinel's quality journalism.
The End
A/N: The idea of Lyon's activities comes from the very real "chemists' war" the FBI waged against bootleggers. It was very bad and what Lyon is doing is one degree worse. A pousse-cafe is a layered drink that is often very pretty and not very tasty.