This story is a sequel to Odds of Survival. I do not suggest reading it independently; there are many characters, references, and events that will be very confusing for anyone who has not read the prior story in the trilogy. You can probably get away with skipping the first story in this trilogy, Deus Ex Machina, if you don't care for more character-study type stories.
At the very least, read the epilogue for Odds.
As a disclaimer (given the MC): If the frankly stupid amount of words I've written about him don't make it clear, I find canon Adam to be a poorly-written character that could've been executed better. That said, this story - and this trilogy as a whole - is not an attempt to excuse or downplay his abusive behavior in canon. If you're looking for a story where Adam and Blake get back together and his behavior towards her is justified, you're looking in the wrong place. And if you've read the previous two installments and didn't realize that already, then clearly, I have failed as a writer.
On a lighter note, I've really been looking forward to posting this installment because of a few scenes I've had written since partway through Odds of Survival. If you can pick out which scenes those are as they appear, you won't get anything, but I'll be impressed. I'm also trying my hand at a kind of plot I've never attempted before, which was fun to flesh out. Time will tell how compellingly I wrote/paced it. Enjoy!
Chapter One: A Bland Entrance
The townhouse was supposed to be empty. All of Adam's (albeit outdated) intelligence indicated that it should have been so: the White Fang, crippled in Vale even more than in the rest of the world, had lost most of its assets, including its safehouses. Adding to that, the ongoing reconstruction in Vale rendered large amounts of real estate empty due to casualties or because the naively hopeful had packed into shelters, waiting for their homes to be rebuilt. And yet, despite all of that, the lights were on in this particular building. Shadows moved beyond the windows. A glance at the plate over the door confirmed that he didn't have the wrong address.
Aching and swaying on his feet, Adam still found the energy to scowl. Reaching Vale had been a pain. Finding an intact and unattended tunnel had been a pain. Sneaking through the streets to find this safehouse had been a pain. Whoever these unexpected residents were, they were interlopers, and they were in the way of Adam getting some actual thrice-damned rest for the first time in weeks.
His hand dropped to Wilt. Next to him, Besh, whose torn and stained uniform showed every mile of their hellish journey across Anima, sighed and glanced up at the fiery streaks sent across the clouds by the setting sun. "We need to look somewhere else, don't we?"
When Adam didn't respond, Besh glanced over at Wilt's blade, a thin sliver of which was now visible out of its sheath.
"No," Adam replied, anger smothering his exhaustion, "we don't."
Dragging a body through the streets of Vale at night was not a good way to conserve his energy. It was, however,a good way to drain his anger so he could think straight, and it doubled as an effective way to break through the expensive sliding doors leading into Junior's club. The groaning goon skidded to a stop amid a tide of gleaming shards while Adam strode through the broken doors somehow still intact enough to slide out of his way. Besh, decidedly less comfortable walking into a gang's base of operations, trailed behind him with one hand nervously stuck on the grip of his holstered—and void of ammunition—pistol. He'd be better off with his knife.
Their entrance earned them the attention of every other black-clad and red-glasses-wearing thug in the place. A hundred safeties clicked off. Adam ignored them all, seeking the man who would be set apart from the rest. The goons that had been at the safehouse had been very liberal with the details once Adam made clear the consequences of not cooperating.
His gaze landed on the man with close-cropped black hair, beard, and no jacket standing by the bar. Hei Xiong, more commonly known by his moniker Junior. Though the Vale branch of the White Fang had done some business with him—he had been the premier source of intelligence in the city—they had tended to rely on their own networks whenever possible. Adam himself had always delegated meetings with the man to someone else. He'd had no interest in being the one to ask a human for help, and there had always been more rewarding tasks for him to handle personally.
Junior met his eyes and spoke in a growl that he still managed to pitch loudly enough to carry across the empty club. "You'd better have one hell of an explanation for this, and you'd better say it fast."
"Your men have set up camp where they don't belong," Adam said, stepping over the goon and taking the stairs down to Junior's level as though every gun in the place wasn't tracking his every move. Though the gashes in his left leg from where a beowolf had clawed him throbbed with each step, he gave no sign of it as he stopped several paces away from where Junior stood. He crossed his arms, ignoring the other collection of wounds on his arms and shoulders from the creep that had nearly taken his life.
Junior's eyes flicked from Wilt's obvious shape at Adam's side to the fresh blood spattered on the exposed half of Adam's face, and his fury grew. "What did you do?"
"Most of them live." All save the one who had seen him before he appropriated one of the black hats from the rack by the door. His risk of recognition in that case had been too high. And the one goon out of whom he'd made an example would most likely live assuming his remaining friends got him to the hospital in time. They had been pretty far down the street by the time Adam and Besh finished cleaning themselves up on a superficial level in the townhouse's bathroom. The one that had still been moaning by the entrance was fine save for a heavy concussion and some new cuts.
"Riiiight," Junior drawled. "Tell me why I shouldn't have you and your friend back there shot full of holes and thrown in the harbor. You both look half dead already."
Adam's smile formed from razor wire. "You could try that. Whether you want to or not depends on how many of your men you're willing to bet on just how half-dead we really are."
Junior glanced over Adam's shoulder to where some of his men were helping the injured goon off to the side. His frown deepened as he returned his attention to Adam and the blood staining his clothes. For a moment, he seemed tempted to call Adam's bluff, but then he sighed. "Fine. What do you want?"
"A place to stay."
Junior's eyebrow ticked up, and then both came down low as his mouth fell back into a scowl. "You attacked my men, broke into my club, and then threatened me just so you could get a place to stay?"
"You have the resources, don't you? Your goons were very loose with the details."
"Okay, yeah, most of those places I bought out aren't being used. Thought I'd have the chance to make a couple new locations out of some of 'em, but never got around to it for the same reason this place isn't open Monday to Thursday these days. Not enough business. But," he gestured, and the guns came back up, "I'm not in the business of handing them out to any moron who comes barging in here with threats and a bad attitude."
Before Adam could respond in kind, a different voice entered the mix: "We actually have an offer."
Besh stepped up next to Adam, his impeccable poker face revealing nothing. Junior, losing patience, narrowed his eyes. "Explain."
"How much business do you do with Dust?"
Adam frowned. Was he going to pretend that they still had access to the Mariner Dust shipment that had all been blown to hell when their ship crashed? That wouldn't hold any water, but Besh had to know that, so where was he going with this?
"Some," Junior said vaguely, "not as much as I used to. Why?"
"But you would be interested in finding more business, wouldn't you?"
"Depends. Get to the point."
"We know where an untapped Dust mine with Hard Light Dust is located. We can give you, and only you, its location in exchange for one of the old White Fang safehouses. Your collateral will be that, if we're lying to you, you'll know where we are. Just as ours is that, if we're attacked, we'll know where you are."
Adam hid a raised eyebrow. "You seem like a man of your word, Junior," he said instead, drawing the leader's attention, "and I'm one of mine. Give us one of the safehouses and leave us alone, and we tell no one else about that unclaimed Dust. You will be free to do with it what you want."
"You two realize that no one in Vale has the resources or manpower to set up a mining operation right now, don't you?"
"Demand is high. Whoever claims it and mines it would turn an incredible profit. You would easily make up the initial investment—but the steps needed to do so are none of my concern. Do you want it or not?"
Junior tsked and looked over at his bar, brows knitted in thought. After a long moment, he sighed and glanced back at them. "Hard light Dust. You're sure?"
Besh nodded.
He sighed again, shook his head, grumbled something, and then stood straight. "All right, fine. Your intel better be good." He waved a goon over. "Get the keys to the place on Sycamore. Pretty sure no one's been there since the Fang cleared out of it. Can't say if anyone else has moved in; haven't checked on it in years."
"The White Fang abandoned all of its safehouses?" Adam asked. He'd been under the impression that Junior's men and those like them had forced them out of most of them in retaliation for Beacon's fall. Just how many had fled Vale or abandoned their affiliation?
"Not all of them," Junior said. "A few are still in operation. I only got the ones I did because I got my hands on a partial list of 'em."
Adam narrowed his eyes. "Is anyone else likely to have that list?"
"At this point? Probably. That was years ago, though. If anyone wanted to do something with it, they would've by now."
The goon that Junior had sent away returned. He passed the keys to Junior, who spared them a glance before tossing them over. Adam caught them and examined them. They certainly looked like housekeys. He tucked them into his pocket. "Get us a map of the area just past the mountains, and we'll show you where the mine is."
"You're quite the negotiator, aren't you?"
Besh jumped a little at the sound of Adam's voice. Their walk through Vale's empty nighttime streets up to this point had been silent. For Adam, starting up a conversation was the only thing he could think of to keep himself awake. Each time he blinked, he wasn't sure his eyes would open again.
"I…was in the room for a lot of talks," Besh said.
Ah. A bodyguard for the Mariner Dust Company heiresses would be around for negotiations. A closed door wouldn't completely block out faunus hearing. Even those faunus without animal ear traits had better hearing than humans, though it manifested to a lesser degree.
Part of their journey required crossing one of the bridges over the southern fork of Vale's river. Although they were exposed for its entire duration, the late hour meant they passed unobserved.
They turned the corner on the other side, saw the cop car on patrol cruising down the street, and swiftly backtracked into an alley that would still get them where they needed to go before they could be spotted.
"Besides," Besh continued when they were in the clear, "if he really does go to the mine, or he gets someone else to it, maybe they'll—" he hunched his shoulders "—maybe they find her body. Maybe they'll be able to give her a proper burial."
So that was why he had been so eager to offer up Autumn Mariner's final resting place. Adam chose not to point out that the Grimm often didn't leave enough behind to allow identification, much less burial.
When they arrived at their new base of operations, they found it to be rather underwhelming. Packed towards the end of a row of nearly identical clones, it was a gray-faced affair with few decorative flairs and trim done in a color a scant few shades lighter than the rest.
They were on the southwestern edge of the commercial district—back across the river was the industrial district that Junior called home. Unofficially, this section of the residential district was the faunus district. Unlikely that this particular reputation had changed over the years; the humans left the homes closest to the industrial and agricultural districts to the faunus while taking the ones nearest to the commercial district for themselves.
"It's very…nondescript," Besh noted.
"How diplomatic."
That said, nondescript was good. Nondescript was a shield against prying eyes.
Adam strode up the steps and slipped the key into the lock. He ended up having to shoulder the stuck door open and crossed the threshold with more of a stagger than a step. His lips thinned at the sight of the dust-covered space beyond. At least it was a sign that no one else had been here in a while. Flipping the lights on got him a better look at the interior.
The first floor was loosely split into a small mudroom-type space in front of the door, a living room taking up most of the space beyond that, and a kitchen in the back-right corner. The bedrooms must have been upstairs on the second and third floors. Everything under the dust was some variant of a neutral brown, gray, or white shade. There was no sign of anyone else having moved in while Junior's attention was directed elsewhere.
"It'll serve."
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