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Necessary Sins - Chapter 3
Letting Adalind stay in the loft had seemed great in theory (on the tail of killing a couple of skalengecks and such a nice dinner) but in reality it was a logistical nightmare that found him carless at a coffee shop a block over from the station waiting on an order of coffee to take with him to work.
It kind of voided the safety of a safe house if you kept calling a cab to come and get you and because the only way Adalind was going to be able to afford anything of her own was to actually work, he'd ended up picking her up Friday, she'd dropped him off a block from the station and borrowed his car for the day. He was pretty sure he'd lost his sanity that morning they had sex (twice!). That was the only explanation for how this stuff just kept happening.
He thought about giving her Marie's old car but selling it for the cash would serve him better in the long run and so he figured, if his car was just going to sit in the parking garage at work all day it may as well be of some use to Adalind. She didn't just need to stop by her new job, she needed to fill the fridge in the loft and buy actual bed linens because he hadn't actually gotten that far before their strange little dinner.
As long as he focused on work he wouldn't have to think about the fact that he'd given her all of the cash he'd had hidden in the back of his closet in his gun safe. He'd justified that little moment of insanity by reminding himself that anything she bought would be for his loft and so he would sure as hell be keeping it when she finally got her own place.
See, if he looked at it that way then he didn't have to feel like he had completely lost his grasp on his sanity.
Luckily, they had a case to solve, unluckily it involved a woman who seemed to be losing her mind. Nick was not unaware of the irony. Still, solving the crime and learning that the woman's husband was a triplet and intentionally causing her to lose her mind kept him nicely entrenched in work so he only had to think about Adalind once over the entire weekend and that was when she collected him from work and they exchanged a very awkward conversation about the things she'd bought for the loft.
Funny how even though it was still his loft, he didn't much care what she did with it as long as he didn't have to hear about it and no one found out where it was. At least it didn't sound like she'd bought much, just some basic necessities to see her through until her own pay started to come through.
'I'm going to have to buy a car before anything else,' she pointed out with some annoyance as he pulled the Land Cruiser into the garage of the loft. 'I can't keep borrowing yours.'
Buying a car also sounded great in theory but it was going to cost a bit more than she could really afford to spend and, because that was the kind of thing he thought about around her, she was going to need something reliable with some decent safety features just in case one of the people after her tried to run her off the road.
It was why he said, 'You can use the loft as long as you like,' before he could stop himself.
The words tasted bitter on his tongue and something of that must have shown on his face because Adalind laughed at him. He'd known Adalind for years, that might have been true, but the entire time they'd known each other (excluding the last month or so) they'd been trying to kill each other. This whole being nice thing made his skin crawl but he couldn't seem to help it. It was like something in him was reacting to something in her and he was helpless to stop it.
If he didn't think she was experiencing the same thing, he might have accused her of using another love spell on him.
Unfortunately, it seemed as though he had no one to blame for his weird behaviour but himself.
'I'll pick you up for work on Monday and you can have the car again.'
He considered it a weird sort of victory that he reigned in the urge to follow her into the elevator and up to the loft. He didn't even know where that goddamn urge was coming from. He'd managed to ignore it and gone home to have dinner with Juliette and Trubel.
His weekend had been blissfully Adalind free even if it had been full of work and wesen weirdness but then Monday rolled around and he left the house much earlier than he usually would have to pick up Adalind. If he stopped for coffee on the way it was only because he wanted some. He didn't even realise he'd bought a second one until he'd already paid and was walking away from the barista.
So, interesting question, when had he learned Adalind's coffee preference? The idea that the few hours they'd spent together had been enough that he'd picked up on that little fact made him want to throw up. He'd just blame it on his excellent observational skills and his training as a detective.
Adalind smiled in surprise when he handed her the to-go cup and he refused to acknowledge the weird feeling he got when she did. He coughed to clear the awkwardness and asked her if she was nervous about her first day.
She shrugged and sipped her coffee. She was dressed much more casually than he'd ever seen her at work before but he supposed there wasn't much call for Armani on a college campus. That wasn't to say she didn't look nice. She was wearing lighter coloured jeans this time with an oversized white button down shirt and a pale grey sweater.
Not that he noticed. His eyes were definitely focused forward on the road. Jesus, what the hell was wrong with him?
There was no silence in the car this time, she asked him about his weekend and he ended up telling her all about the triplets and their plan to steal the family fortune. Her weekend hadn't been nearly as enjoyable, that was how she put it. She actually used the word enjoyable to describe hunting down wesen and solving the crime.
Somewhere very deep inside of him a little bit more of the hatred he felt for her evaporated. It was so much easier to hate Adalind when she wasn't a person, just the angry hexenbiest fighting against him. The more time he spent with her, the more he was realising that the woman he'd been dealing with all those years only really came out to play when she felt threatened or wanted something.
'The guy who had the job before me left things a complete mess,' she informed him. 'I spent the whole weekend trying to make sense of his projects, emailing back and forth between the different professors and some of the grad students trying to sort out what he was working on and why.'
'Did you sort it out?'
'Of course,' Adalind answered. 'I don't know why he'd turned it into such a mess, it's really not that hard to follow. Basically I answer to the head of the Law Department but I'll also be working with all of the faculty, just essentially picking up the slack, helping with research and fact checking and grading papers. I might be able to pick up some other things once I've established myself.'
Nick had no trouble imaging Adalind running the department if she set her mind to it. 'You like the work so far?'
'It's different,' she said once again. 'Sometimes different is good.'
He didn't know why, but those words stuck with him and he found himself thinking on them at the strangest times. Like when he and Juliette were sitting down and watching television, just relaxing after work and spending time with each other. He'd tried to have a conversation with her about their future but every time he tried to bring it up, every time he tried to test the waters to see if she was ready to take that next step, something came up.
The first time, it had been Juliette who'd gotten called away. She was the vet on call and a dog had been brought in suffering from two broken legs and a possible spinal injury after being hit by a car. The second time, it had been Trubel who'd interrupted their conversation wanting to ask him a million and one questions about his encounters with the Verrat.
The third time both Juliette and Trubel had gotten involved in one of his cases (he actually wasn't clear how that had happened, only that it had) and so he was beginning to think they'd never get the chance to talk. He could have proposed without talking about it first but he got the feeling Juliette would have a dozen reasons why getting married just then was a bad idea.
He'd never felt so insecure in his relationship with her before and he really didn't like it. It didn't help that he was keeping so much from her, from all of his friends. He hadn't told anyone that Adalind was still in town, hadn't told them he was letting her live in his loft (which he hadn't told them about buying). He didn't even know how to begin telling them about having dinner with her, lending her his car or all of the times they'd had coffee and talked on the drive to work.
He really had no idea how he would even begin to explain what happened between them on the day of Monroe and Rosalee's wedding. It kind of felt like the time to tell anyone had passed and now if he even tried it would be a lot harder to convince everyone it had genuinely been a mistake and that he hadn't known who he was sleeping with (the first time).
When Monroe and Rosalee had their front lawn set alight in the sign of the wesenrien something in his relationship with Juliette shifted.
It took them a while to put the fire out and assure the cops who responded to a neighbour's call that they had it all under control. By the time they got home they were both pretty ready to just crawl right into bed. It bothered Nick that his friends were being persecuted for being in love but he could also just view it as another annoyance of being a Grimm. His days were always filled with this kind of thing and while it didn't normally touch so close to home – and he sure as hell was angry about that – in a resigned way it was just another day.
He was most of the way to being asleep when Juliette started talking to him. 'Do you ever think about what it would be like if you'd never become a Grimm?'
He rolled onto his side so he was looking at her and frowned. She was sitting up in bed, the lamp still on, staring off into the distance as she considered her words. 'What?' he asked, confused by the sudden question.
'Do you ever think about it?'
He wanted to say yes, of course he did, but thinking about it and wanting it were two very different things and he got the feeling that was what Juliette was really asking. 'I guess.'
It wasn't much of an answer, he hadn't intended it to be, he was hoping it would prompt her to say what she really wanted to say. And it did, in a way. 'I think about it all the time.'
She said it like it was a confession, like he didn't already know that some days she hated what he was. He'd seen it at Monroe and Rosalee's wedding but at the time he'd been a little preoccupied with thoughts of Adalind (and whether or not he should have just killed her) to pay as much attention to Juliette as he probably should have. That didn't mean he hadn't noticed the way she looked at Rosalee, the sadness that lurked behind the near-blinding happiness. Just because he'd been too preoccupied to say anything, to ask her about it, didn't mean he didn't know that she was thinking about their own future, their own possible wedding.
Unfortunately, thinking about the sex you'd just had with your enemy just wasn't the right frame of mind to be in for that kind of conversation.
'Do you think we'd be married now?' she asked. 'If you hadn't become a Grimm?'
The truth was he did think they'd be married and probably happily so and that didn't sit as easily as it once would have. If he'd never become a Grimm would he have even known his aunt was dead? Would his mother ever have felt the need to return to Portland? What would have happened to all of his wesen cases? The ones where he'd had to use his Grimm nature to push confessions, the ones where that was the only reason he'd known where to look for the culprit?
What about Monroe? If he'd never met Nick, never gotten involved in his work would he have ever met Rosalee? Or would he have wound up back with the terrible influence that was Angelina? What about Hank? Wu? What about, and he couldn't believe she was even a factor here, but what about Adalind? Would she still be the lawyer wearing designer suits and making lots of money? Or would she have seen the truth about her mother and Renard and had no way of getting out?
It was easy for Juliette to imagine what their life would be like without wesen but he couldn't. Whenever he thought about their future together his being a Grimm didn't change. He'd had the chance to be normal and he hadn't taken it. He wasn't sure he'd ever be able to tell Juliette that now, not if she was thinking about what it would have been like to be normal.
The hardest thing, though, was knowing that Juliette could still have that normal life. The only thing tying her to the wesen world was her relationship with him. Yes, she was friends with Rosalee and Monroe, but if she really wanted to cut ties with wesen she could. He was the only thing holding her back and more and more often these days he was wondering why.
Was it worth it? Was it worth seeing the look of disappointment on her face when he cancelled another dinner or called to say he wouldn't be home because he and Hank were setting off into the forest with Monroe to track down something deadly? She helped out as much as she could but did she feel like she couldn't be any help those times when he, Monroe and Rosalee went off to deal with the more dangerous wesen?
He wanted to ask her all of those questions but he couldn't, all he could do was answer her honestly and see where the conversation went from there.
'Yeah, I think we would be.'
'And we'd be happy,' Juliette told him. 'We'd be going to parties and dinner with friends, maybe we'd even be thinking about starting a family.'
Juliette had always been the more social of the two of them, it hadn't occurred to him until she mentioned it but they didn't do any of those things any more. Sure, most of those dinners and parties were with her friends but he'd always got along well with them, managing to find someone to fill the time with at those things. He didn't miss those parties. He didn't miss the dinners.
He didn't miss normal.
Juliette so obviously did. He didn't see why they couldn't have those things now, not really. There was no reason why they couldn't still get married, still start a family. It wasn't like he'd had the safest job before. He worked robbery homicide (homicide more often than not these days) and that carried risks just as much as his work as a Grimm did. He didn't dare ask if she'd thought of things that way, it really wasn't the time to be poking holes in her fantasy.
'We could still have that,' he ventured, sounding more hesitant than he'd really meant to. He loved her but he didn't want her to feel like she couldn't have those things. He didn't want to hold her back from something else that might fit better with how she saw her future.
He was never going to be that normal guy, not the one he'd been when they'd met.
'I don't know that I want to bring children into a world where even your own home isn't safe. Do you think Monroe and Rosalee will ever be able to have children? Do you think it'll ever be safe for them?'
They'd talked about kids once before, a long time ago, when they were first getting serious and testing the waters to see what they each wanted in the future. They'd both wanted kids – Nick still did – but if Juliette was having doubts, if she thought his life was too dangerous for kids to be an option, then did they even still want the same things?
Nick's life was never going to be normal, it was never going to be as safe as those first years with Juliette, but he wouldn't let that stop him from having the life he wanted. He knew it wouldn't stop Monroe and Rosalee and they were the ones being persecuted for loving each other.
Juliette didn't seem to want an answer, she seemed to think she knew what he would say. 'It'll never be safe, for them or for us.'
She turned off the lamp and slipped down, turning onto her side and facing away from him. He'd been tired when they first climbed into bed but now he was wide awake. She may not have been aware of it, but Juliette had just placed the first proper wedge between them.
He'd like to think it wasn't a conscious choice, to be out of the house before she woke the next morning, but after struggling to fall asleep he'd found it easier to be up and out of the house than to face her. He drove by Monroe and Rosalee's to check on them, stopping only briefly to check in with the cop parked out front before he kept driving.
He arrived at the loft a lot earlier than he usually did and so instead of just waiting in the car, he parked in the garage and rode the elevator up. Adalind was standing in the kitchen when he slid the grate up, still in her pyjamas with her hair falling untidily out of the knot she'd put it in. She was in the middle of pouring coffee into a mug and she reached for a second when she saw him. She didn't look surprised to see him, his arrival would have shown up on the security monitors he'd installed, she just seemed surprised to see him so early.
'Hey,' she greeted, walking out from behind the counter to meet him halfway and offering him one of the mugs. 'Why so early?'
He was perfectly honest when he told her, 'I didn't want to be at home.'
She raised an enquiring brow but he wasn't in the mood to talk about his and Juliette's relationship issues. Especially not with Adalind of all people, he still didn't know what this was they were doing but even if it felt suspiciously like they were becoming friends he wasn't ready to have that kind of conversation with her. Even if she'd probably be able to offer him a different perspective.
Instead he told her about the attacks on Monroe and Rosalee. Adalind didn't much care about his friends (that whole helping kidnap Diana thing being a sore point) but she was unhappy to hear they were being threatened by bigoted idiots who should know better than that. He noticed she wasn't surprised, though.
While they talked, Nick found himself searching the fridge for something to have for breakfast. He'd left the house without grabbing anything and he was starting to realise he was actually starving. Adalind didn't really have any food in her fridge.
'I haven't been to the grocery store yet.'
Nick shrugged. 'Let's go out for breakfast.'
Adalind gave him a searching look over the top of her coffee before she nodded. 'I just need a quick shower. Give me twenty minutes.'
He nodded and while she disappeared into the bathroom (coffee mug still in hand) he wandered around looking at all of the changes she'd been making. When he'd first brought her into the loft she'd looked around it with disdain but she'd understood the necessity of being somewhere hard to find as she was sick and tired of constantly switching motels. Weeks ago it had been an empty shell with nothing but a bare mattress and an empty chest of drawers.
Now though, there were signs the loft was someone's home. There was a dark coloured duvet with light sheets on the bed, a nightstand with a single lamp where Adalind had stacked a number of legal books and a single paperback that came from the campus library. There wasn't any artwork on the walls, no little knickknacks scattered about the place but the furniture was enough. Some of it he'd helped her empty out of her storage locker and he knew she'd sold a lot of what she didn't want from there to pay for things she needed.
Adalind had done a good job with what little she'd had to work with to make the loft feel like a home. The small kitchen table seemed to be functioning as a desk because it was scattered with papers and notes, highlighters and different coloured pens. On one of the chairs was a stack of papers she was in the middle of grading.
A brand new laptop sat in amongst the mess with a post-it note stuck to the top with an address written on it.
'I think I've found a car,' she told him, and he spun around to see she'd come out of the bathroom and noticed where he was looking. She was only wearing a towel but she'd brushed out her hair and her make-up was done. She still had the mug of coffee in her hand. 'It's a little more expensive than I wanted to spend but I think it'll be worth it.'
He nodded and she disappeared into the bedroom to get dressed. He took note of the address to check out when he got in to work. Maybe it was just the cop in him but he wanted to make sure the seller was legit before Adalind went there.
The idea that he was worried about her didn't sit as uncomfortably as it once had.
The fact that he spent the rest of the day thinking about her in that towel was so normal by this point he just went with it. It actually proved to be a nice break from worrying about Monroe and Rosalee. Or the conversation with Juliette he was dreading happening when he got home.
It didn't happen, though, despite walking out of the house before she was even up, and thereby avoiding any rehashing of the previous night's future crushing conversation, Juliette didn't bring it up. He walked into the house expecting tension and things to be awkward and instead it was perfectly normal. She asked him about his day and then she and Trubel started debating what reason wesen could have for kidnapping couples.
Trubel seemed to be on edge about something but didn't want to talk about it but Juliette was fine. It put him on edge because he didn't understand how she could have such an important conversation and then just act as though it hadn't happened. He didn't know if he was hurt or angry at her for carelessly tossing aside the future he wanted to have with her because she didn't think it was going to be safe.
Did she even realise she'd told him that if they stayed together he could never have that family he wanted? Did she even realise the importance of the conversation she'd wanted to have when he was half asleep and worried about their friends? Did it not occur to her that any thought he might have had about proposing again had shrivelled up and died?
The more he thought about it that night, the more he realised he was angry with her. Since she'd learned the truth about what he was he had hidden nothing from her (he wasn't counting Adalind because that whole thing had started after Juliette started pulling away – sort of). He'd made sure she knew where he was, what he was doing and always made the effort to include her when he could. He could admit that sometimes she included herself when he'd much prefer she stayed home where it was safe.
By the time they went up to bed, he'd worked himself up to the point where he didn't think crawling into bed beside her was a good idea. He didn't want to say something he'd regret but he didn't know how to avoid joining her without bringing it all up again and he was too annoyed to have a rational conversation with her.
He climbed into bed beside her anyway and after lying in the dark for thirty minutes staring at the ceiling he got up again. He wished he could talk to Monroe about all of this but his friend had his own problems. He didn't think his reality check really compared to having his life, and that of the woman he loved, being threatened just because of that love.
He thought about talking to Hank, his partner probably had some useful advice given how many times he'd been married but that wasn't the kind of advice Nick needed. Hank could tell him all the pitfalls of being married to a cop and how the hours could affect things but Nick really just wanted someone to listen and then offer him advice that wasn't tinged with three somewhat bitter divorces.
He went downstairs and called Adalind. He hung up immediately after but the fact was he'd done it. He'd wanted someone to talk to, someone who would understand where he was coming from, and so he'd called Adalind. It didn't matter that he'd hung up before the call could even go through, it mattered that apparently she was someone he felt he could go to.
How the hell had that happened?
Logically, he knew that in this situation Adalind was uniquely qualified to give advice as she had brought a child into this dangerous world. And look how well that had turned out. It wasn't the strongest argument for bringing children into his dangerous world but it wasn't like any future children he and Juliette had would be super powered hexenbiests the Royal family would fight over.
There was a good chance any kids they had wouldn't even be Grimms.
Sure, Adalind's reasons for going through with her pregnancy were actually incredibly selfish but that didn't change the fact that she loved her daughter and wanted nothing more than to see her safe and loved.
That was what he wanted for his children. Yes, he lived a dangerous life but he was taking steps to make sure those dangers never followed him home. Wasn't that the whole point of buying the loft? Of moving the trailer into the woods?
He thought about what Adalind would tell him and then considered why it mattered. His history with Adalind was a mess of what should have been unforgiveable acts but when she'd needed help she'd called him. He could have ignored her plea for help, he probably should have, but even though she had no way of knowing if he'd come she'd still called him.
They'd talked about a lot of things since they'd started carpooling – and that was just a weird thing of its own – so Nick felt like he had a better understanding of why Adalind had done the things she'd done. The first time they'd properly met, when he was protecting her during that case, others (namely Renard) were already dictating her actions.
The first time he'd ever seen her, coming out of that coffee shop, she'd scared the hell out of him. He'd never seen anyone woge before and he'd thought maybe he was seeing things. He'd scared her too; he knew that now, even if it hadn't been noticeable later when she snuck into his aunt's hospital room to kill her. He knew why she'd done that now, too. It didn't excuse her actions, she could have said no, could have told Renard to go to hell, but she hadn't because she hadn't cared about him or his aunt and she'd loved Renard.
Thinking about that made Nick feel slightly sick because the more he'd gotten to know Adalind the angrier he felt at his Captain for using her like that. He had no illusions that Renard had loved Adalind at the time, you don't turn around and sleep with someone's mother if you love them.
Then again, you don't sleep with the man your daughter loves either.
Adalind didn't exactly have a great support network and so he understood why she'd tried to kill his aunt and he grudgingly understood why she'd done what she did to Hank. He didn't like it, didn't like that she was capable of such cold-hearted murder but he couldn't argue that his own act of stripping her of her powers hadn't been just as horrible.
After all, the fact that he had stripped her of the hexenbiest was what had stripped her of what little family she had. Her mother and Renard wanted nothing to do with her once she was no longer any use to them. They'd cast her aside like she was garbage; he understood how that could drive someone to do something like Adalind had eventually done to Juliette. He'd have wanted revenge too if that had been him. To do everything you were asked out of love and then to have that love tossed back in your face had to hurt.
He could relate. Those months while Juliette was struggling to remember him, while she was struggling with feelings for Renard, had left him feeling like that.
Adalind had gotten her revenge and then gone looking for someone who might appreciate what she had to offer; she'd essentially gone over Renard's head to a Royal with actual influence. He understood her reasoning even if he didn't think he'd have done the same thing. He'd grown up with loving parents and then a loving aunt, his life may not have been conventional but he'd been taught to love not manipulate as Adalind had been.
He couldn't imagine how horrible it must have felt, growing up with the knowledge that your own mother viewed you as a tool, something to shape and craft to be useful but not loved and cherished as a child should be.
He imagined being home schooled had only made it worse. Not only had she been on her own at home a great deal of the time but she'd had to do a lot of that learning on her own without the support of friends her own age.
He didn't hate her anymore. It wasn't a comfortable realisation because if he didn't hate her then he had to own up to the realisation that he actually liked her. The woman she was around him, without the pressure of the Royals or the Resistance, without Renard pushing her to make moves, was smart, funny, intelligent and she understood what it meant to be wesen, understood what it meant to be a Grimm.
He gave in and called her.