Chapter 4. Nachtflug
There had been another attack. That was all Vanessa really perceived from the information dump Virgil's secretary unleashed on her. That, and something about him being summoned urgently by Her Majesty. Distantly, not quite grasping the situation yet, she wondered why he hadn't sent for her – they'd been taking those business trips to the court together whenever her presence was asked for, he'd even said it was valuable experience in case something happened to him; she'd even developed a feeling of self-importance, as if her tagging along proved that she was more than a tomboyish sister of a respected leader. She'd even felt a nostalgic brush of admiration, seeing him keep his cool in a room full of stinking Terrans pointing fingers at him.
Then it finally hit her.
There had been another attack.
They wouldn't stop at only pointing fingers now.
Not to make the matters better, The Gutter had proven particularly evasive in the couple of weeks following the Kensington Park incident. Leaving aside the culprit behind the botched sunrise schedule – there was nothing to indicate a visit in the gate logs (but those could be botched, too), and there was no proof against a simple system malfunction, - they knew absolute zilch about the terrorist's whereabouts or future plans. There was way too little data, even with what his former accomplices had provided, to make at least an assumption, but the idea that he might carry on with exterminating the dukes had certainly been there.
Now, as Vanessa mindlessly strayed among the halls of the Underground in an admittedly lame attempt to bring her thoughts to order, she wished they'd paid more mind to it.
She hadn't realised that her feet, put under the control of her subconscious, had brought her to the hall leading outside, until Virgil was suddenly right ahead, having returned not too long ago and not a minute too early – it was well past eleven a.m. last time she checked, - and looking downright haggard and even paler than usual, though the hue of the lights might have thrown her for a loop there. He only raised his eyes at her call, already past the capability to be surprised, and in some weird way, like a gut instinct – it might have been the dank, sickening veil over his look, or the unusual bend of his eyebrows, or the invisible twist of his mouth, or her imagination all along, - she felt he was not right, like a stained glass picture with its colours mixed wildly and uncontrollably, and she only saw that because the inconspicuous aura of a leader that he somehow maintained even when wearing a dressing gown over some nightclothes had fled somewhere, perhaps folded into a pocket for safekeeping, perhaps fallen apart like ash flakes, and all that was left for her to see was her brother who was not right, and that just didn't agree with the laws of the universe.
"Vanessa... Good. We are going on a trip," and there was something missing from his voice, calm and collected as always, and yet something, something... And what did he mean by 'we'? 'Trip'? "Please make an announcement; I want everyone lightly packed and ready to depart by dusk. I will be by shortly."
There was a good hive of questions whirring in her head as he strode past, her mumbled assent falling like a stone into a silent pond, but the notion of actually asking those felt alien for once, probably because the person now walking a bit tersely in front of her couldn't be counted on to answer them; the admittedly small rational part of her mind understood that he really could, but there was no saying what state he would plunge into if her deductions got voiced. There was no saying what state she would be in, particularly, if she would be able to hold back from becoming The Gutter: Reprised.
And then there was parting at some crossroads and getting some random guy to sound the termination of all production and a general gathering at the plaza from the broadcast room, and being glad that she hadn't actually thought of delivering the news that way (what she had to say was unsettling enough to instigate a panic attack on its own, and what the broadcast did to voices was not only creepy, but gibberish as hell too), and the frazzled faces of the people as they gathered, many torn out of their beds, some more scared than others. She'd opted to do this in person, hoping to do some damage control should her words be received badly – and they would be, without any doubt. The people didn't live in the fear of getting kicked out into the sun every day, that wouldn't be exactly healthy, and that was entirely the leader's duty. Damn. She'd only done this sort of thing once – to a much smaller audience that expected the news, if not outright thirsted for it. Damage control was so outside her qualifications, she wanted a towel to wipe her hands with. And a pro to take her place at the moment, which was out of question because Virgil was blatantly unavailable. Actually, even Virgil might be stymied in this situation – an announcement of this kind was completely unprecedented.
"Okay, folks," she began as soon as the congregation a foot below her impromptu podium started to resemble an approximate hundred, and was half gratified and half relieved when the faces turned to her displayed no contempt or even mild aggravation, only faint anxiety. In such a small community, it would be no wonder if most of them knew her face at least, but she rarely, if ever, bothered with administrative stuff: the wonder here was how someone as uninvolved was being received so relatively positively. "First of all, don't panic," and the anxiety instantly became much more pronounced. She filed the reaction for future reference. "Nobody is being exiled." She wasn't all that sure about that part, but something had to be done. "There has been a bit of trouble with the fugitive – I'm sure you've heard about it, - and now the top brass is spitting mad." She could imagine, really. Virgil had said nothing of the sort, but it seemed like the logical conclusion. "So until it all blows over, we're all going away for a while. Everyone needs to be packed by a little before dusk – so by six in the evening it is. No heavy stuff, just clothes and necessities."
Confused murmurs rose in intensity with every sentence she spoke, and when questions began to be voiced, questions like "Where?" or "How long?" that she couldn't answer, that, she could still handle. All that peeking into her brother's documents had been more out of curiosity than an actual want to learn the way things functioned, but it was certainly proving useful – it had educated her well enough in the ways of evading the responsibility. Really, that was all those people ever did.
"Brother is busy with preparations right now, and he hasn't told me everything, but he'll be round with the details in a bit," she said, feeling a weird kind of adrenaline tingle her spine – she didn't have the foggiest what he was doing, but there was no way around a convenient excuse when dealing with a distressed crowd, however much it went against her straightforward nature. "I know that this is all very short-notice, and that we're all losing a day of sleep, but it wasn't a happy decision on our part, either. Please make sure that everyone who isn't here at the moment gets the message too," her protectiveness butted in unexpectedly, and suddenly her discomfort receded into the background, stubborn determination and loyalty surging to pull her face into a no-nonsense scowl. "We are not leaving anyone behind."
The congregation kept mumbling, notes of apprehension flitting over their heads like disturbed bees, but receded from her pedestal just enough to let her back on the ground. Not a few seconds later, though, the commotion reached the 'agitated' mark once more, and before she could figure anything out over the dozens of heads still swarming the space, her brother's voice filled the air to the very last molecule despite the moderate strength of the sound, steady and nothing if not an anchor in the stormy confusion that the prospects of the 'trip' had rocked up.
There was some strangely fitting familiarity about the way the people reacted to him, some definite trust on their end, and it seemed so much easier for him to explain that he didn't really know how long they would be staying in the Empire, could be anything from a couple of weeks to a few months, and she knew there was nothing really strange about that after all – with only a hundred under you, it was a bit difficult to stay too high above it all, to put it lightly. He was only being a proper leader, something that was simply outside her qualifications and not her cup of tea, that left her out of her depth most of the time. A proper leader, not an hour after coming back like that. Like a cracked glass holding together on a wing and a prayer.
He was faking it.
From the moment she heard him start another sentence, she suspected. From the moment she managed to get a clear look at him through the throng, she knew. The conclusion wasn't logical or conscious by any stretch, and yet she'd absorbed the tiny, unnoticeable hints, minuscule details that didn't quite register but were still lumped together into an understanding, almost like intuition, that left her baffled how no one else seemed to notice. He was faking it, and all that cracked glass was still there, and she didn't have a clue what to feel and how to deal. If she'd thought she felt out of her depth speaking to her brother's people, this sort of helplessness was missing a term.
The crowd dispersed eventually, but Virgil stayed there, discussing something with one of the lab guys, and she dithered between apathy, pity and anger, but stalked over anyway, never really deciding what she felt about his fake assertive calmness. He was doing the right thing, he was prioritizing the right way, and she really, really shouldn't have been so irked about it, and she wouldn't hate him, not now, not never, and she ended up blaming the undefined, collective everything for forcing that on him. She wasn't sure he so much as got a whiff of that sentiment during the moment when he took stock of her presence, the Virgil that could read her moods like an open book, and she wanted him to be done with the pretend-normal for the day, because pretence and lies were revolting, and looking at him right now made her sick.
"Virgil," she started, having only a vague inclination to rant him into the ground, but she wasn't given time to get even a word in, because this dimly, politely smiling Virgil was a complete stranger who had too much on the agenda to waste time on trigger-happy siblings. She just wanted her brother back.
"Ah, Vanessa, great timing," he smiled at her for a diplomatic second, and then returned to the exemplary blank concentration she'd spotted from across the plaza. "Would you be so kind as to pack my belongings? I'm afraid I just might not have enough time."
Normally, Virgil would have said something about her willingly jumping out of her depth for the sake of that little performance earlier, and perceptive as he was, he'd have realised she hadn't had a clue how she should have gone about that speech thing, and in his trademark kindness probably said something like "Good job" or "You did well" or any other reassuring nonsense; he'd have tipped the formalities away from his face like a mask for a moment, and it would have been another token of kinship dropped along the line. That, that last request, was unprecedented and strange and foreboding, because it went against the expected and Virgil was nothing of not a creature of habit. She didn't know what to make of it, and there was only some much time left until departure, and it was all such a mess, both close-up and from a distance.
She was afraid for him.
"Sure," she said weakly, suddenly lost and alone in the middle of a tangled, thorny mess, and before she could lose the last of her backbone, he walked away and right into the fray of preparation, saving her from seeing that fake face for another moment.
ꕂꕻ ꕂ ꔹꕮꔺꕥꔺꕮꔹ ꕂꕻꕂ
Afterwards, once the airship hatch had closed, hissing like a wounded beast barricading itself in its den, the memory of the last hours promptly tangled itself into a chaotic pretzel of disjointed scenes and feelings in Vanessa's head. The kids had all but driven her up the wall: those old enough to have a solid understanding of what was going on had, blessedly, stuck by their parents or guardians, but the younger ones, instead of being sleep-deprived and whiny like any normal brat, alternated between bouts of overwhelmed sleepiness, unrestrained excitement and boundless curiosity that had them slipping away from their parents' arms with formidable sneakiness; good thing her position in the rear of the procession made for a clear view of anyone straying off, and there could only be so many escape attempts over the half an hour to the dock field. Half an hour full of uneasy marching and unspent anger at all those Terrans that stared from the adjacent streets with varying degrees of many different emotions, all within the 'neutral-negative' range. The Queen had had the procession's way blocked off from the rest of the city, but that hadn't stopped the Terrans from ogling and whispering among themselves; the way they shut up upon being passed and then resumed their hushed mumbling barely moments after was nothing if not infuriatingly disgusting, and she didn't even have an excuse to lash out: it was nor the time, neither the place for a showdown, no matter what kinds of dirty rumours were leaving their mouths. That had been the last she'd be seeing of them for a while, if she had any luck to spare, and good riddance. Even now, trying to locate her brother on the ship, a year's worth of humiliation was prickling her gut.
Virgil had vanished from sight, not unlike one of those children she'd been shepherding earlier, moments after making sure the people were all on board, and was now proving difficult as all hell to find; she swore he'd never been so much trouble at hide-and-seek back in the day. That in mind, he probably wasn't even doing this on purpose: that uneasy feeling of an error in a computer code she got whenever he made himself prominent had never left, and worry kept churning in the very back of her mind. Its front was on the issue at hand, and she ambled on tired feet across the crowded lounge, people parting before her with curious glances as much as their bags would allow, the kids attempting to snatch her for a game. Her brother was still nowhere to be seen, but by now, she would bet a year's supply of blood that he wasn't anywhere even near the commotion. He had a tendency to seek out quiet places when upset.
One of his aides caught up to her at the stairs, as calm as they got in the midst of this mayhem; she didn't pay it much mind. She didn't normally attract much attention unless it concerned the kids, and this was most likely just accidental.
"Erm... Miss Vanessa," he spoke a bit meekly, and she froze, brain hard at work trying to hurdle at once being addressed as a 'lady' of sorts and being addressed at all when she'd been expecting the opposite.
"What is it?" she turned to face the man, unintended surprise-born hostility seeping into her voice, and witnessed a smidge of anxious discomfort flit across his face. Damn. He'd been sort of fidgety from the beginning, was he afraid of her or something? They didn't ask her opinion often, maybe that was the case.
"The cabin arrangements need to be sorted out," he said, redeeming some of his confidence at wading back into familiar waters; she almost said 'Can't you figure it out yourself?', because if that was the average level of competence among his colleagues, she might just be one of the more valuable assets in Virgil's arsenal of assistants, comparatively speaking, but then, everything – the man's pretty poor composure, the pisspoor problem he needed help with – just sort of clicked into place. None of them, understandably, had any sort of experience with this kind of mess, and they all felt as out of their depth as she had last morning, and in a situation where no one had a solid idea of what to actually do, they needed an authority to watch over the whole thing and take at least some responsibility off their shoulders.
She sighed, ribs heavy as if made of steel.
"I'll go get brother," she promised, and, as she turned back to the stairs without waiting for an answer, spotted from the corner of her eyes as momentary confusion on the man's face seemed to vanish with a terse nod.
Upstairs, ignoring the din torrenting over the railing, she strode down the gallery until her eyes caught on a hallway that looked like somewhere Virgil would go; the plush carpets absorbed her footsteps, and with the noise from the lounge steadily lessening and the dim golden light cast by the lamps over the doors slipping like a soap film over the walls, the surreal sensation of crossing into a completely different world only strengthened.
This was definitely somewhere Virgil would go.
The double doors at the end of the hall, their surface smooth and cool to the touch, gave way soundlessly under her hand; she slipped in just as quietly. This lounge was an observation deck, with full-length windows lining one of the walls, and her eyes skipped over the dim crescent moon loitering behind the clouds to settle on the figure hunched over in one of the armchairs facing the sky.
'Bingo' would have sounded nice, but it didn't feel like luck had much to do with this. She'd known, not guessed.
"Brother?" a tentative, scouting venture into swampy territory, from across the room, just to see if he'd react. He didn't.
A multitude of careful, infirmary-visitor steps, until she's an arm's length away, and a "Virgil," later, he actually raised his eyes to her backlit silhouette and just looked, almost emptily, and it creeped her out into saying something, anything to get things on the right track. She was tired, and tired of everything being so wrong, and if that was a sickness, she wanted to know how to treat it. "They need your help out there."
She thought she heard a sigh, but there'd been no movement to put with the sound.
"I know," he responded at last and closed his eyes, voice breathless and dull and somehow hollow, and she found herself being torn in two. One part was weary frustration and pride and maybe common sense, a part urging her to yell 'Get yourself together, you wuss!' and beat him into shape, because he was a leader and he had no right to be moping around now when everything was still one big mess.
It had occurred to the other part, which was responding to her tingling sense of hidden trouble, that besides the kids who just didn't know any better, she was about the only one who really called him just Virgil now.
In everyone's eyes, he was Lord Walsh, so close to them, seeing them every other day on some business or another, and they looked at him with such reasonably preposterous expectations from such a small distance, she used to wonder on slow days how he never got squashed under all that weight. But he couldn't afford to, especially not with their father gone for good, not with a hundred lives resting on his shoulders; maybe that was why all that had mellowed him out instead of breaking him, though some of the stubbornness had clearly stayed. She had a feeling that people tended to forget he was younger than most of them, that there didn't exist a metaphorical leader figure bestowed with the knowledge to solve every tiny problem that could crop up. As if there wasn't a person behind all that.
Hadn't she believed the same, until a little while before?
Had he wanted them to believe so?
It must have been heavy, a hundred souls as his responsibility for almost thirty years, where for her, a few hours had been enough for a lifetime. It must have been wearing at him, damage and weakness hidden because it seemed like his first response to hide things and bear it all on his own. It must have hit him the hardest out of them all when the trust he'd put in the Queen's protection gave out and backlashed so violently, leaving so few prospects to lean on and so much pitch-black uncertainty in its wake. And now, left with no support, he was crushing under the weight of all those souls in the dead end he'd led them to.
Sometimes things just went to shit. What was next?
Her knees hurt when they hit the floor in front of his shoes, but that didn't seem to matter with that wild pull under sternum splashing right into her throat and urged her arms up and around his neck in sad, emphatic desperation and loneliness, and a desire to help all her own. She felt like she was handling something brittle and already slightly cracked, the hug clumsy and restrained for not knowing how to handle those things, and her chin hovered over his shoulder, stubbornly refusing to touch down in her silly little show of compassion, loyalty, support, whatever the hell she was actually trying to convey, whatever that stormy sea between her ribs and lungs was; it felt like a small victory when there was a shaky sigh on his part, and the weight of his forehead on her shoulder shouted acceptance, obscenely obvious in the empty room.
It was decided, then.
"It's okay. I'll take care of it." She'd had no idea her voice could sound that supportive and still keep its usual sharp edge. He looked like a depressed child, but wasn't really one: a kiss and a cuddle wouldn't cut it. This was on a whole different level. "I'll... stand by you," and good heavens, did she feel like a corny idiot for a second there, but the sentiment was sincere to the last drop, and the notion was summarily discarded, rules of proper conduct be damned. "And in your stead, if so needed."
No more watching from the sidelines like she could just sit through all the shit going down and leave Virgil alone to it.
He said nothing, but she thought that the fingers digging into her sides were like those of a drowning man clinging to a lifeline, and then that churning sensation in her chest was rushing up in a roaring tidal wave, drowning out all thoughts except one, one that flooded everything in seconds.
I love you. I love you, I love you, IloveyouIloveyouIloveyou... until it was a single messy note, like the murmury grumble of the sea, growing larger than her body could contain.
It felt familiar, like putting a name to an often-seen face. She didn't have the foggiest where the realisation had come from or if the feeling was the same one that had her declaring her love for her nanny when she'd been five. This- This felt way too strong, and way too clear, and she simply knew and couldn't help trying to reach out with everything from limbs to thoughts, and all that pulling energy coursed frantically along the circuit of her arms and through her heart and left intangible tenseness in its wake to seep into every last bit of some ethereal substance filling her body to the brim. His head was heavy on her shoulder, and he needed her, and she felt invincible and omnipotent and the whole big world was at her feet.
For him, she could take on the world.
She walked back with a powerful, unthwartable gait, plunging steadfastly into the clamour, and had her mind halted in its determination for just a moment, she would have felt something like wings stretching skyward behind her back. Something like freedom. Like the ultimate trick of the mind.
ꕂꕻ ꕂ ꔹꕮꔺꕥꔺꕮꔹ ꕂꕻꕂ
"Is everything all right?"
Virgil felt somewhat lucky to have run into an assistant of his not two steps onto the gallery; the sooner he got back on track, the better. Giving in to emotion and exhaustion was a shame like no other.
"Yes, sir, everything's been sorted out," the man responded, relaxed to an acceptable extent, and at Virgil's inquisitive look, elaborated. "Miss Vanessa took over after we'd filled her in on the situation, and it's worked out well enough."
He then dismissed the man with his rather obvious sugar-coating, some blatant relief humming in the back of his mind, and leaned on his elbows upon the railing, distractedly watching the scarcely populated lounge below.
He couldn't say he wasn't surprised: he'd hardly given Vanessa a few minutes, but she'd proved unexpectedly competent, not that he'd known her to dislike ordering people around. Nonetheless, those few minutes had seen rather high level of efficiency from his brain as well, compared to the sluggish state it had fallen into. That staggering, liberating and utterly exhilarating realisation that he was not alone had done well to shock it into activity, albeit it had gone in frenzied circles for a full minute with Vanessa's declaration at the axis; by the time he'd wrapped his mind around it, she'd already gone off, and he could almost hear her barking directions in the lounge.
She'd never expressed a particular desire to get involved in the ghetto's administrative business before, and yet here she was now, sharing his burden. Perhaps he was still missing something; perhaps they weren't quite on the same wavelength yet. But she was so much more under his wing now, and by legitimate reason as well if she was going to make good on that promise, and it was ridiculous that they needed reasons at all, both of them way too prideful and stubborn to make for easy contact so far into adulthood. It would get better, though: if she'd managed to step on that, it should've been nothing he couldn't do. They had time; she'd promised to stay by his side, after all.
The gratitude, coupled with fatigue, was threatening to make him dizzy.
He heard the children before he saw her, popping out from a hallway downstairs with her 'flock' floundering around her legs and messing with her footing, balancing made even more challenging by one of the smaller children getting the ride of honour on her shoulders. The youngsters easily rivalled an emergency alarm in loudness, to his amusement, but he still caught snippets of her voice, the uncommonly cheerful tone reserved for her charges, as she made her way across the room, and he remembered the grin she used to wear from their childhood and its happier moments.
He wished she could smile more often.
Right now, though, when she laughed with the children and gave offhand directions without missing a beat when prompted, she was blossoming, so exquisitely, so splendidly, a myriad of petals spread in all their brilliant glory, and though he'd bloomed much too early to ever boast that snow-white, life-warm brilliance, not something for an underdeveloped, chill-bitten flower opening on the taunt of fake sunlight, her timing couldn't have been more perfect. He hadn't been born a great leader and neither had she, and they could only make it work so well, but, perhaps, she would have an easier time.
The girl on his sister's shoulders pointed him out, and Vanessa looked up at him and smiled just a little wider.
He could only smile back and stoically, like a true knight should, count the necrosis blotches on prematurely opened petals.
