Title: The Broken Mirror
Author: DareDelvil
Disclaimer: It still isn't mine, guys. Not even Kanden, really - first person to tell me where his name comes from gets a cameo in the next chapter.
Rating: PG-13 for the siblings' usual repertoire of expletives.
Spoilers: Whole game spoilers here and there – DON'T READ IT IF YOU HAVEN'T COMPLETELY FINISHED. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
Pearing: Still nothing. I'd like to note here and now that this fic is probably less shippy than shippable and less slashy than slashable. The couples are there if you want them to be.
Words: c. 3,400
Summary: Post-game. The investigation continues. The siblings swap progress reports, and Vallye attempts to get some work done.
Author's Notes: …Let's not even go into where I've been, shall we? XD This chapter is a monster at approximately 9,200 words, and therefore it's being split into three more manageable parts. Hereafter follows the first of these. As the chapter progresses you'll notice I go from curly quotes and apostrophes to non-curly ones – that's because I'm using a different editor for my writing these days, and I turned off the curly quotes for reasons that currently escape me. Can I be bothered to go back and edit them all? No. XD
Dedication: To all the reviewers – Rebbe, Mugzie, Phoenixfire1389, pumpkinchao and TwistedSaffron – and particularly to the last of these for the damn you gave about this old thing.
The Broken Mirror
Chapter Four – Wednesday's Children
Part One
Skeed was late. Much to Vallye's surprise, he was only five minutes late. He didn't apologise - Vallye would probably have ignored him anyway. Sliding awkwardly into the seat opposite his sister, he stared at some mark on the tablecloth. He habitually refused to look at her when he was late, or not eating, or not sleeping, or doing something else that might upset her.
"Well?" Vallye prompted.
Her brother's expression did not change. "Well what?"
"Menu, Skeed. Choose something. Or I'll pick it and you'll have to eat it."
"Do that. It all tastes the same anyway."
She rolled her eyes at him, but began searching the menu. Something with fish in it. He usually finished that. Prawns? Prawns would do. And a coffee. He always drank coffee. It even seemed to make a difference to him if you gave him nice coffee rather than bad coffee. She tapped briefly at the touchpad on the menu before setting it into a slot at the side of the table.
"How did it go?" Skeed asked quietly.
Vallye paused, hand still on the menu. Moving said hand slowly to rest in her lap, she bit her lip. "…Hard to say. She's an odd woman. Very odd."
"Odd as in…oh, psychotic, for instance?"
She frowned. "Honestly, no…just angry, and then expressionless, and then desperate, and then happy, and then expressionless again, and then nervous, and then crying, and then expressionless again, and then frustrated, and then…knowing…all in the space of about…what, ten, fifteen minutes?"
Skeed blinked a couple of times. "Wow."
"Like I said, she's odd."
"She sounds difficult to keep up with."
"That too. And she moves surprisingly quickly for one so small."
"So short, you mean."
"Ha, no. Small is better. But she was able to give me some information I'd otherwise have taken a good while to find." Among other things. "And you? What about your witnesses?"
Skeed's expression changed slightly. Irritated, Vallye's mind supplied automatically. "Nothing," he muttered. "Hardly anything at all from the guards, and not a sodding peep of anything that might be useful. They signed in, they did their jobs, they signed out. That's about it."
"Or so they claim."
"Well, exactly. Part of my problem - or perhaps all of my problem - is that I don't know whether my falling tree really did make no sound, or whether there was just no one around to hear it."
Vallye nodded slowly. "Or no one around who was willing to admit to hearing it."
"Which doesn't necessarily amount to the same situation," Skeed finished, poking at a stray grain of salt on the tablecloth.
"It'd help if we knew more about the weapon," Vallye said, pushing the salt cellar towards him.
Seemingly unconsciously, he pushed it back. One grain of salt was probably enough. "Mm, I've not had a chance to look into that one yet. I'm planning on hitting the testing range as soon as I can get hold of some projectile firearms - got people in every cache in the country looking for specimens."
"And if you don't get any?"
"My next stop's Diadem," Skeed said, a little stiffly. "They have ship cannons, so they might have the technology."
Vallye sighed, slipping into a quiet half-laugh that was mostly a mixture of disbelief and mild hysteria. "Diadem again. Is there one single problem we currently have that the bloody Cirra won't have a hand in solving?"
"Most of this case, if I can help it. What've you done with this Duchess of yours, then?"
"She's not my Duchess, Skeed," Vallye murmured, her gaze fixed upon the anxious looking serving-boy who was bringing their meals. "And she's back - that's mine - no, the eggs - thank you - she's back at the house, hopefully staying out of trouble this time."
Skeed looked from the retreating waiter to the dish in front of him to his sister. "Prawns, Vallye?"
"It's something you usually eat. Don't complain."
"With coffee?"
"Something you usually drink. You should have ordered it yourself." But then she saw the creeping grin. "If you're going to laugh at me, you can stop right now - Skeed, stop it!" He was chuckling. "Skeed! I've had a difficult morning, and I didn't devote much time to deciding what I was going to make you eat!"
"Calm down, Vallye," Skeed said good-naturedly, plucking one of the prawns from the salad and examining it. "You're right on all counts. Especially about the difficult morning. When can we expect to be rid of your odd foreign Duchess?"
"Not 'my Duchess', Skeed, I keep telling you. And I honestly don't know, but though she's clearly as troublesome as we feared I think she might be more useful than we originally expected."
Skeed was chewing the prawn with some small hint of enjoyment. "Usheful?"
"Mouthful, Skeed." But at least he was eating.
A twisted smile. "Complainin' ol' baggage." He swallowed. "Useful, you said?"
"Mm. She's acting very strangely, though, considering the circumstances - took her down to the morgue to see the body, she insisted, and she barely even cried. We were only there a minute or two. I thought there'd be histrionics for sure, especially after she smacked Kanden around for saying she couldn't go down there - "
Skeed swallowed another prawn. "She got into a fight with Kanden?"
Vallye rolled her eyes. "Not so much a fight as a slaughter, apparently - she knocked him silly. I found him flat on his back behind the overturned table, legs in the air, all over the remains of a smashed chair and with an impressive bruise across his face."
"Ha! Good for her. Wish I'd seen it. Do go on."
"…yes, where was I - oh, morgue, right - yes, she hardly cried at all. I found that odd, considering what seems to be her usual penchant for expressing everything she feels in its entirety."
"Violently emotional, but doesn't cry…" Skeed mused. "Hm. …You think she was acting?"
Vallye resisted the urge to put her elbows on the table. Her head felt remarkably heavy, and her neck was protesting at having to hold it upright. "Acting bloody well if she was," she sighed. "But damn, Skeed, he was all she had left and I swear, not one sob. She didn't even look ill, and there was a great bloody hole in his chest. She's no soldier or medic to stomach that so easily, whether she loved him or not. What are we dealing with here?"
"Did she see the damage?"
"Not sure. But still…"
Skeed nodded slowly. "Mm. Yes. Odd. Anything else?"
Vallye finished her mouthful of poached egg and toast, taking a drink of her orange juice before answering the question. "Now you mention it, yes - she left something in his hand. In the Duke's hand. In the morgue."
"Oh?"
"Yes. Perfect piece of cut glass - hexagons everywhere. Always the same six-sided figure, same proportions no matter how you looked at it. Red. Three foreign words carved into it: A V E space A T Q U E space V A L E. Skies know what that means."
Skeed frowned. "…That's not the sort of thing one casually carries around, is it?"
"Exactly. I know she's weird, but that's a little too weird."
"Follow it up," Skeed said, stabbing another two prawns with his fork. "Could mean something. After all, it's no secret that our little Duchess loves power, and in the absence of the Duke…she has rather a lot of that, does she not?"
"She's not our Duchess either," Vallye reminded him. "And that's as may be, but I maintain - as I did say earlier - that she could be useful to us. I suggest we keep her around for a while."
Her brother paused, skewered prawns half way to his mouth. Slowly, he lowered his fork and laid it at the side of his plate. "…Vallye, how long is 'a while' likely to be?"
And to think she'd hoped he wasn't going to be difficult about it. Bugger. "Until she's of no further use to the investigation, or we crack the case. Whichever is sooner."
Skeed's eyes narrowed. "Oh, no. I am not having that foreign witch hanging around and peering over my shoulder every five minutes. This is my damn investigation. And besides, she could very well be our greatest suspect."
"Her alibi's airtight - she was a Whale away…"
"But her influence might not have been," Skeed pointed out, a little too triumphantly for Vallye's liking. She wasn't sure why she cared. "She's got the money to hire someone to do it, and hiring someone to do it here means there'd be no word of it around Mira."
Vallye had to admit he was right. "And it drops the blame in our laps, too. …We're going to have to be careful. But still, she might be useful if we appear to play into her hand - if she's not the one, she might well have some idea of where we should start looking, and if she is…she might slip up."
"Or she might not, and she might feed us false information." Skeed was getting frustrated. It was a slight change of tone, but after years of practice Vallye recognised it at once. "She could interfere with the witnesses - could already be doing so - "
"But she knows when the mirror was broken," Vallye said insistently, leaning over the table and speaking so that only Skeed could hear. "Just knows. Something about a twin in…somewhere with a Mirai name."
Skeed blinked a few times, utterly blindsided. "That's…either incriminating or just severely weird."
Vallye sat back. "I'm going for the latter," she said, cutting another morsel of toast free from one of the slices on her plate. "And before you say anything, no, she hasn't bewitched me. I don't blame you for suspecting her. She's as odd as the murder, no doubt about it. But then again, if she isn't the one…she might be just odd enough to help us crack this case."
Her brother shook his head. "You're mad."
"Maybe that's how we need to think, Skeed - if you're right, there's no rational, sensible, logical reason for killing Candyman Calbren. If we're going to think like the killer, we'll have to be mad." And madness, desperate solution though it might be, was at least a respite from the monotony of everyday existence. Not that this was one of her motivations, of course.
Skeed gave her a suspicious glance. "…Vallye, why do you want Duchess Calbren on this case?"
"I don't," Vallye said simply. "She knows next to nothing about investigations like this. But what she does know is magic. I don't mean the kind you can code into a magnus and toss out any old where, I mean the whole shooting match. Mumbo-jumbo. Voodoo, talking to spirits, illusions, telekinesis, mind magic, blood magic, mirror magic. And that's why I want her help. She knows something about that mirror, and not just when it was broken." She reached down and pulled a book out of the small bag at her side. "…I've been doing some reading since I left her at the house, in between trying to hold things together at the office. I think she might be able to use the mirror to tell us what was happening just before Calbren died."
"…Okay, now I know you're mad," Skeed scoffed. "Reconstruct the scene from a broken mirror? That's not mumbo-jumbo, that's nonsense. She's an irritating barbarian who might have wanted him dead, and that's all there is to it."
Vallye dropped the book on to his side of the table. "She's a barbarian with the know-how, Skeed, and we haven't enough other sources of evidence to piece this thing together. Face it: there are things they know that we don't. Things they can do that we can't. This is one of them. This whole damn case is steeped in weird, broken mirror and bullets and all, and she's an expert in the field. Like it or not, we need her in on this case."
Skeed examined the cover of the book, still seeming unconvinced. "…This stuff actually works?" When Vallye nodded, he raised an eyebrow. "No magnus involved?"
"No magnus involved."
"…Well - " And he tucked the book into his own bag. " - if nothing else, it'll be something to see. All right. She stays. But only for as long as absolutely necessary."
Vallye relaxed visibly. "Thank you."
"And since it seems so important to you."
She glowered at him. "I just want to get the damn case solved, Skeed. That's all there is to it."
"Yes, Vallye."
"And don't you Yes Vallye me in that tone of voice."
"Yes, Vallye." He smirked behind a lettuce leaf.
"Argh. Infuriating bugger."
They finished the rest of the meal in relative silence. Skeed took a subdued kind of delight in examining each prawn before he ate it. Watching him in between mouthfuls of egg and toast, Vallye wondered for the umpteenth time whether he felt as much as she did - certainly if he did, he did not show it. The air of stoicism that hung about her brother was almost impenetrable. Perhaps this was his way of coping: where she got angry with the world, he retreated from it.
"What's this afternoon?"
His question cut short Vallye's train of thought, forcing her to take another - "More background reading. Looking into the Duke's magical history, see if there's anything there that might better explain the mirror. Attacking the note spike, of course. …Taking the shard to the Duchess, that too. By four o'clock."
"You'd already prepared to do it before you asked me, hadn't you?"
"Mm, just in case you said no."
He raised an eyebrow. "I'm never sure if I can pull rank on you or not."
"Don't even try it." She finished her glass of orange juice. "What about you?"
"Two left to question - the two in the towers," Skeed answered, stirring his coffee idly. "They've been…difficult to track down. And then it's back to the dusty old books in the desperate hope of finding my murder weapon."
"Hurrah. Better you than me."
"I could say the very same about you and your Duchess."
Vallye mentally recited the alphabet backwards. It helped. "…For the last time, Skeed…"
Skeed waved her off with a sigh. "I know, I know. Not your Duchess. It just sounds better than calling her your problem."
For some reason, that was exactly what she had needed to hear. She almost managed to swallow the grin. "Hm. I suppose so."
Seeing Skeed almost grin back was the best thing that had happened to her all day.
They went their separate ways a few minutes later, Skeed to the Fortress and Vallye to her desk. Thankfully no one troubled her as she made her way through the main room to the office she shared with her brother - despite the none too small victory of having made the aforementioned stubborn bugger eat something substantial, she was still in an unpredictable mood. Somehow she had managed to work herself back into the same train of thought that had so frustrated her yesterday. Thinking about life, she considered as she dropped into her chair and afforded the towering pile of documents in the in-tray a weary glance, was dangerous. It always gave her the same feeling, this dull ache that she could only call a mixture of resentment and apathy: hating where she was, what she was, who she was, but lacking the strength of will to change any of it.
What would she change, anyway? Her job? No - even if she cared nothing for Alfard, Skeed would still need her here. Her appearance? Definitely not, for that was one of the few things she was just about content to keep. Even Skeed admitted that she possessed some degree of beauty, though the phrase "too sharp" was frequently applied to more than her wit (and she wasn't sure whether or not the part about the deathly pallor had been complimentary either). Her situation? Would it be any better at the bottom of the metaphorical heap? Given that most of the thieves she encountered in the ruined quarter of Mintaka were more desperate than villainous, she suspected not. Every thread of questioning, in fact, seemed to lead her to the same wretched conclusion: that the life she led, while deeply unsatisfying, was the least of countless evils.
Resigned for the time being, she pointedly ignored the paperwork and pulled the note spike out of its holder. Two or three nondescript morsels of paper dropped off the bottom end - that ought to do for now - and she returned the spike to the slot. Clever idea of Skeed's, this: queues were infinitely safer than stacks. Search files for miscreant of description recorded on the twenty-ninth (of last month - damn, she was going to have to speed things up a little), arrange meeting with Cirran authorities re. aura magnus tech (ah, she'd been wondering when that would turn up), and -
If you're reading this, you've reached your birthday.
Here's hoping it's the one for this year.
- S
She was going to bloody kill him, but she couldn't help grinning all the same. It was the one for this year. Two and a half weeks ago. She fingered the inside pocket of her jacket, feeling the by now familiar shape of the spoon he had cast for her out of some carefully requisitioned wire, and remembered him dropping it gently into her soup bowl as he passed by her chair at dinner. The sentimental sod had remembered her complaining about soup spoons, specifically how they all seemed to be made for folk with mouths the size of major interdimensional rifts, and he'd gone away and made her a smaller one. It was at that kind of moment, she thought with a wistful air, that she was glad for Skeed. Despite his chilly demeanour and semblance of emotional aridity, he did know when to show that he was listening to her. Touching though it seemed that she now carried the spoon with her everywhere, her family's cold but practical way of thinking was once again to blame: she already had her own well kept coffee mug at the office, and having been forced to borrow spoons for years she was not willing to place any more trust than she had to in Kanden's idea of washing up.
Finding a list of possible identities for the troublemaker took a while (Vallye cursed the lack of a sane filing system), and she left that on Skeed's desk for follow-up. Organising the meeting took longer, because though Skeed was better at writing letters he didn't deal with barbarians unless he absolutely had to - Vallye found letters more difficult, but at least she didn't feel the urge to slip an insult into every other sentence. By the time she had finished the final draft the clock on the wall read 15:45, and she had to leave it at that. Checking and signing and sealing could happen tomorrow.
She snatched the mirror shard from downstairs - several of them were being examined by some of the team - before hurrying home to pass it on to the Duchess. Well, at least she'd managed to get something done this afternoon. Better than running around after troublemakers and not actually getting anywhere. Skies bleeding, she needed a cup of coffee. Spending the rest of the afternoon in the sitting room with those books and a cup of coffee sounded remarkably appealing. Of course, that also meant she'd have the quietest cooling fan in the house. It wasn't evening yet. She'd lived in Mintaka all her life, but that didn't mean she didn't feel the heat.
The Duchess met her at the door. Vallye offered the small shiny object to her without a word, and similarly silently Melodia took it. She turned and headed towards the back of the house a moment later. Not a word of a thank you.
"Where are you going?" Vallye asked, clearly without much interest.
The foreigner did not spare her a glance as she left. "The living room," she said simply. "Spacious enough."
…And that put an end to Vallye's hopes of a nice sit down. She sighed, without a trace of patience, and made for the stairs.
To be continued in Part Two…
If anyone's still reading this thing, let's hear you!
