That night wasn't nearly as chaotic as the previous one had been, but there were still little oddities that popped up here and there regarding where people ended up spending the night due to the early curfew. There weren't any people of their group who got trapped outside of the hotels in bizarre places, and other than Claude being at the hotel with Ingrid and Mercedes missing her ride back to the hotel for the same reason he'd gotten stuck there, everyone was in the building they belonged in.
Except for Lysithea and Felix, at any rate, even if they did start in the right place. It was a couple of hours post-curfew when they met down in the lobby, both looking well-rested compared to how they'd shown up that morning. "You ready to go back and do it all again?" she asked in a whisper, watching as he slowly shook his head. "Come on, you came down here, didn't you? You're so ready!"
"I'm only here to tell you that this is a horrible idea. You shouldn't be going out and fraternizing with the emperor and her boyfriend over illegal drinks," Felix replied, despite having enjoyed himself very much the previous night. "If anything, you should be using this connection to tell the emperor she needs to meet with the boar so we can get out of this goddess-forsaken place."
"Don't be such a sourpuss!" Stomping her feet into the ground, Lysithea looked like she was about to start throwing a tantrum when she heard footsteps coming from somewhere else in the lobby. That was when she began running for the mall area, waving for Felix to follow her. Even though he wanted nothing more with what she was doing he followed anyway, assuming that they were just going to keep discussing all of his reasons why he had no interest in going for a second time.
That was a poor idea, as Lysithea's running did not stop until she'd gotten to an entrance and exit from the mall that was on the other side, where there wasn't a shuttle stop or guard waiting to turn them around. She looked out the glass doors when she reached them, and when she spotted a dark car parked outside she opened the door—and promptly set the alarms off, spooking her and Felix both into running for their lives outside. The car she'd seen was the same unmarked black car as the night before, with the same man behind the wheel who drove them off towards Edelgard's home without question. "They're going to know we got out," Felix lamented, leaning against the door and wishing he could bang his head through the glass. "They're going to realize it was us and we're going to both lose privileges within our companies, and it's all your fault."
"I'll take responsibility for setting the alarms off, but I didn't choose that door, this guy—" she pointed toward the driver, who grunted, "—was the one who told me to meet there when we were ready to go. Something about less chances of being seen getting in the car when we left."
"And you weren't seen, were you?" he asked, sounding completely unamused. "They can deal with the alarms on their own time, you wanted to get to the emperor's estate in secret and that's what I'm doing for you."
Lysithea didn't respond, giving a loud hmph and sinking into her seat, while Felix shook his head at the rather disappointing behavior he was being witness to. He'd barely gotten over the previous night and yet he was back at it, almost like he was a glutton for punishment or something. It hadn't even been that great of an experience, yet there he was going back for seconds despite knowing it was in his best interest to firmly stay out of things.
Getting into Edelgard's home was much less daunting a task the second time, since they were familiar with the way in and the library wasn't as much of an obstacle they needed to surmount. Linhardt was there again, looking just as tired as he had the previous night, and he greeted them with a halfhearted wave when he saw it was them. "Back for more, I see," he yawned, shaking his long hair out of his face. "Edelgard should be with us soon, she invited a few friends of hers to the festivities tonight."
"Friends? The emperor has friends?" Felix asked, almost in shock to hear such a thing with all of the other stuff he'd heard about her over the years. "Color me surprised."
"Yes, yes, it's quite unusual for an attractive woman in a high position of power to be flocked to by all sorts of people she likes, what a surprise indeed." Sounding bored with the conversation despite it having just started, Linhardt made it obvious that he wasn't planning on sitting around waiting for anyone else to show up; without so much as a warning he was starting for the hidden room where his treats were stored, leaving Lysithea and Felix to have to rush after him. There was nobody in the room when they got there, which seemed reasonable enough given the level of secrecy around it, but right around the time Linhardt had grabbed some glasses and was beginning to pour a round of drinks, several others came bustling in, led by Edelgard herself.
"Oh, I wasn't aware the rest of our company had snuck in under my nose," she joked, a playful statement that felt almost wrong to hear coming from her. "I suppose now's as good a time as any to introduce our foreign friends to my closer-to-home ones."
Stopping his pour to look at who had been brought into the room, Linhardt sighed and grabbed a few more glasses while Edelgard went through the introductions, short and sweet so they could move right along. She introduced Lysithea as a friend from her past and Felix as her plus-one for the evening, then went right to her own guests with gusto. "This here is the princess of Brigid, Petra Macneary," she started, gesturing to a lovely woman with deeply tanned skin and colorful hair that she wore pulled back out of her face. "She's here in Enbarr for…personal reasons."
"I have gratitude for this invitation, and for meeting new friends," Petra said, crinkling her eyes as she smiled at the two people she wasn't familiar with. "I have heard many things about the drinks created here and sharing spirits is best with friends."
"We also have Ferdinand von Aegir, a member of Adrestian political circles that shall not be discussed in the presence of outsiders," Edelgard continued, this time gesturing to the man with the long red hair that stood beside her, grinning from ear to ear at the sight of the other two. "I'm sure it'll be quite the challenge for you, but I think you can manage for one night."
"No promises shall be made," Ferdinand teased, before rushing to take Lysithea's hand, giving it a gentle kiss once he had it in his own. "If you are a friend of Edelgard's then you must be a friend of mine as well, so that you can compare us to our hearts' content!"
Her eyes widening at this strange man grabbing her, Lysithea loudly whispered toward Felix, "I think I prefer the princess over this guy, she's at least not so forward with her intentions."
"Can't say I care for either," Felix replied, being brutally honest with his perspective. This was already something he didn't want to be doing, now with two extra people to keep track of he was going to have an even worse time. "If I had to be here, I expected it to be a night much like last with the drinking and the socializing, but this? This seems like it's bound to get to becoming something bigger."
"Nah, there's no need to worry about that," Linhardt cut in, offering Felix a glass of bubbling drink. "Petra wouldn't offend a fly and Ferdinand gets so wrapped up in preserving his title that he won't do anything to anger Edelgard, which means heeding her warning. It'll be just like last night, guaranteed."
The statement was hopeful, and it was one that Felix wished had been able to be true, but the fact of the matter was that the second night there in the illegal drink cellar became more raucous and intense than the first. By the time the first person (Linhardt, naturally) decided to call it a night, entire novels had been spoken on why certain members of the Adrestian political sphere needed to be disposed of, why there were people outside of the sphere that were given top-secret intelligence, and why strangers from outside of Adrestia were allowed to attend these drinking sessions in the first place.
Edelgard spent a lot of time harping on her ex-boyfriend and his influence he still had over her day-to-day life, which made Lysithea think about Claude and how he still answered to Hilda despite their relationship having fallen apart a while back. Ferdinand talked a lot about a sweet opera singer that he had a very casual relationship with, going so far as to start talking about their attempts at intimate moments before he was shut up. Petra didn't speak too much, but when she did it was about the hostility she felt while outside of Brigid's borders and how she couldn't feel like she was welcome even there in the liquor cellar, despite being around people she now considered her friends. Before he went to sleep, Linhardt had talked at length about his other illegal prospects and endeavors and how he used his status as current relationship piece with Edelgard to circumvent a lot of laws that everyone else had to abide by.
When Felix was given the floor to speak, he was already several drinks in and didn't know what to say that would have been completely honest, and despite his slight inebriation he knew better than to talk about his position with Dimitri. That was how he ended up waxing poetic about his friendship with Sylvain, a train of thought abruptly cut off when he realized he didn't know what his friend was currently up to. "He'd love this sort of thing, especially with a pretty woman who's single here to ogle," he said, looking at Petra who seemed taken aback by the comment. "He's obsessed with the ladies. Bet he's hit on Lysithea here a time or two since they've met."
"Can't say that he has, actually, and I'm sure I know why." That set the stage for Lysithea to go on a tirade about how she was always mistaken for much younger than she was, and even working as a guard for a well-known security company didn't do her any favors. When she mentioned her actual age, everyone outside of Edelgard seemed shocked at it, which only illustrated her point further. "It's just stupid that I can be the best me I want to be and no one cares because I look half my age! I hate everything about it, I wish I could walk up to a bar and not get carded again and again because they swear my ID's illegal!"
"It's a good thing you don't get carded here then, hm?" Edelgard asked her, sounding amused as she watched Lysithea grow more frustrated. "I mean here in my home, not here in Adrestia, that is."
"You'd be disappointed if you found out the people in your country were failing that one simple task, wouldn't you?" Felix asked, completely missing the point of the discussion the ladies were having as he took it upon himself to remind everyone there that he did not like Adrestia and all it had to offer. "What a shame, you never have to worry about that sort of thing in Faerghus."
"Because everyone there is a barely-functional alcoholic who doesn't need their ID checked, since the government doesn't care who's getting drunk and who isn't." Losing her temper just a little to reply to him with a barbed tongue full of fire, Edelgard finished her statement by downing the rest of her drink and looking around for something to refill her glass with. "Good thing that what we're doing here is only slightly illegal, because of the kinds of substances used to create these beverages, not because of their alcohol content or our ages while enjoying them."
It was the reminder that Linhardt's special drinks were all brewed using some sort of dubious concoction that may or may not have included drugs that made Felix put his own glass down and cease drinking for the night. He couldn't risk his life and his job doing this sort of thing, especially if word got back to Dimitri that he was fraternizing with the emperor over drugged drinks. He let his drink get snatched up by one of the others, while he headed for the back corner of the alcohol cellar, just to keep his distance from the rest of them.
Ferdinand ended up following him and trying to break into conversation, and while he was ultimately successful in getting Felix to talk, it wasn't for long and nothing too important came out of their talk. In fact, when morning came and they were stumbling back into the hotel lobby, the only thing Felix could remember from the conversation was that Ferdinand kept making comments about an opera singer he was close friends with, who knew more about Edelgard's intentions than almost anyone else.
Not that he felt that was very relevant to anything, because he didn't know what was meant by such a strange statement. All he knew was that he'd been out all night again, sneaking out past curfew and staying awake until sunrise, and he was going to have to skip out on his guard duties yet again. Dimitri would just have to understand that he wasn't up for the work, and that he'd be back at it the next day—barring anything else going on with Lysithea and her desire to socialize with the wrong kind of people.
Overall, the night had gone well for everyone who'd been in their correct place, and decently well for those who hadn't been, Felix being the only real exception to that rule. There were no cases of someone getting locked in someone else's bedroom, although Sylvain did try his luck at getting lightning to strike twice and have him end up in another girl's room. Leonie was too wise to let him in, speaking to him through a locked door that he couldn't pry open no matter how hard he tried, simply because she'd heard about how he'd behaved himself when locked with Hilda and Marianne. Mercedes, despite being unable to sleep in her own bed, was able to do like she'd done the previous night and stay in the royal suite as another body to keep them safe. And, of course, Claude had quite the night with Ingrid that had them waking up entangled with each other.
That was still not something either of them wanted to let anyone else know about, Ingrid worrying too much about it ruining her chances at finally getting the respect she deserved and Claude not wanting the prodding by some of his fellow guards. "We can't even leave this room together, you realize that?" she asked him after they'd gotten out of bed, assured each other the cuddling meant nothing, and freshened up for the day. "If Ashe sees us, he'll run his mouth to everyone he can without knowing the damage he's causing. That's nothing compared to if Mercie happens to come back while we're out there, she'll dote on us and then tell the queen all about what she saw."
"Trust me, I'm all too familiar with not being able to trust people with a secret," Claude replied with a chuckle, thinking first and foremost about Hilda but Lorenz as well. "But, like they say, two people can keep a secret if one of them's dead."
"We're two people who will be keeping this secret until we're dead."
Claude gave a small head bounce as he pondered how two people being directly implicated in the secret applied to that saying, before shrugging it off. "Guess that means one of us'll be the one to spill the beans, since we're both alive and plan on staying that way, I think."
"Trust me, if this secret about our sleeping together gets out, it isn't going to be on me," Ingrid insisted, puffing her chest and shoulders up to prove her seriousness. "Unlike others, I don't really care about my romantic prospects and I wouldn't ever use that sort of thing as leverage for anything."
"Who said anything about this being romantic?" His head whipping around so that he could stare at Ingrid when she'd said that part, Claude could feel himself starting to get confrontational, even if he didn't want to be. "It's nothing but us getting stuck together two nights in a row. If it was romantic, don't you think there'd have been a confession already, or even a kiss that we swear's platonic? It's almost like you're not aware of what romance—"
He was promptly cut off by Ingrid blowing him a kiss, which she did with such a look of disdain in her eyes that it shocked Claude into his silence. "There, now you can argue it's romantic even though it really isn't. We're strangers to each other, even though we've slept together twice now."
"Sharing a bed isn't the same as sleeping together to most people, we're doing it without getting touchy-feely so that wouldn't exactly…count." He didn't want to have to correct her on that, but it was irking Claude that she continued insisting their nightly arrangement was something that it wasn't. "Now, if you're saying that because you want to be sleeping together, well, I'm up for making that happen if you want."
Those were words, an entire thought, that weren't supposed to be spoken, and Ingrid's immediate reaction was to run into her room's bathroom and lock herself in, her face going bright red in the seconds Claude was able to see her before she was gone. He thought about explaining how it was a joke and that he didn't want to actually sleep with her, but the damage had already been done and he wasn't going to be able to talk himself out of that one. So, despite having already been told the problem with him being seen with Ingrid in the first place, he left her room unattended and headed for the lobby, almost wishing that one of her fellow royal guard members saw him around and began to question why he was there.
On the lonely shuttle ride over to the main hotel, Claude began questioning his whole approach to this convenient sharing of a room with the girl he sort of had the hots for; he wasn't being upfront about anything and knew that was quite the problem when it came to how he was being perceived. He wasn't going to be getting anywhere with Ingrid if he wasn't stating his intentions outright, but at the same time he wasn't sure what he wanted his intentions with her to be. He couldn't say that he was actually interested in pursuing her romantically, but he found her incredibly attractive and would at least like to know her better, even if she seemed fully content on keeping him at a distance.
When he arrived back at the hotel, there was quite the group gathered in the shuttle drop-off area, seemingly all tourists but clogging up the whole route into the building. No amount of saying excuse me and trying to squeeze through their human roadblock seemed to work, so Claude took matters into his own hands and walked out in the road instead, intending on going through the front entrance of the hotel to get inside. That ended up not working, as the doors were blocked by an armed security guard who directly pointed his gun at Claude when he approached. "What are you doing out here?" the guard asked, lowering his weapon when he saw who he was speaking to. "I was told that you were inside, prince."
Sighing as he hadn't ever wanted to be referred to in such a way, especially by someone who he didn't know or care to know, Claude thought fast on his feet to explain how he wasn't inside after all. "Took the first shuttle out this morning, just got back now, would be inside if there wasn't a mass gathering blocking the other doors inside. Mind letting me in?"
The guard scanned the area, then stepped aside and allowed for the doors to open just long enough for Claude to slip inside. "And stay in there," the guard bellowed as the doors closed, Claude silently muttering that he planned on it. There wasn't anything unusual about the scene inside of the hotel, minus the lack of regular citizens milling around, which must have meant that something was going on regarding the political guests. He knew exactly how to investigate that for himself, and so he went right up to the second floor with the boardrooms and figured he would get his answers in there.
He was met by Sylvain and Marianne, sitting on opposite sides of the large table that the room held. "Where were you, Claude?" Marianne asked, her voice perfectly conveying her worry. "We tried getting you this morning but you weren't here."
"Who's we, huh?"
"The two of us," Sylvain replied, a strange pair to have been given such a task but one that made sense given that they were both staying there. "We dropped by not long after curfew ended and you didn't answer no matter how loud we banged on your door."
"I called you, too, and you didn't answer that." Tracing a circle on the table, Marianne's eyes flickered toward the ceiling, likely in prayer to thank the goddess that her boss was okay. "You had us worried, and now you're here like nothing happened."
Knowing that it would be best to keep telling the same lie to keep his story straight, Claude found himself looking over at Sylvain in specific, debating whether or not lying was the best way to get himself out of the situation. The chances of Ingrid telling Sylvain what she'd been up to, and therefore ratting Claude out, were slim, but they weren't a zero, and he could only wonder if Sylvain would take that information up to Dimitri. "I went over to the other hotels to see if everything was going well over at them, but I forgot the card keys to the guys' rooms so that was a bust and it's not like I know where your Faerghus folks are staying in their hotel and they weren't in the lobby so…kind of a waste all around."
"Then you weren't here when it happened," Marianne said, her voice shaking with each word, "and that means it could have been so much worse than it was. Oh Goddess, please don't let this happen again…"
His eyes still fixated on Sylvain, he gave a look to the man that wordlessly asked for further explanation. "Oh, just one of the emperor's nuts getting in here and starting to cause a huge ruckus. You must have just missed it if you left right when curfew broke, because that was when he was in here."
"I thought our location was supposed to be secure? How are her people getting in here and starting shit if we're supposed to be safe here?" Claude hoped that his feigned surprise was believable, because he knew that the emperor fully intended for this visit to end in bloodshed, not diplomacy, and her men knowing where they were staying played right into that. "If that's what's happening, why doesn't Dimitri get his head out of his ass about all this and take us home? He's not getting his diplomatic meeting at that rate."
"When they restrained the man and got him out, Dimitri went right to reaching out to the emperor's ministers to see if he could arrange for this trip to get cut short, but they insisted that they'll have the meeting tomorrow so he has to stay at least through then." Giving a sustained eyeroll that showed his lack of faith in that statement, Sylvain continued, "And then, after that, we realized that Felix and one of your ladies weren't here again last night and they're now facing being locked in their rooms tonight if they don't promise to stay on their own. That Hilda of yours, she really tore into the one who was missing."
Marianne looked over to Claude at that statement, watching the way his face contorted at having Hilda attached to him. "Um, Sylvain, I don't think that was the most appropriate way you could have said that," she told him. "Claude and Hilda have a bit of a history between them that they'd both like to forget about."
"While that is very much true, it's fine that he said it. Dude didn't know, but now he knows for the future." Letting his face relax, Claude watched as Sylvain nodded in understanding of what he'd been told. "But anyway, doesn't surprise me even slightly about Hilda tearing into Lysithea about going missing. She was probably worried sick that she wasn't going to be coming back, she looks far too young and innocent to be out on the streets like that."
"That's not the only thing she was doing," Sylvain stated, before slowly backing out of where he was leading the conversation. "Not like I really know specifics, I haven't actually spoken to Felix about it and he hasn't told anyone who's then told me about his whereabouts."
"Maybe he'll tell Mercedes or Annette and you can get the information from them?" Marianne suggested, only to give a soft chirp at her own idea. "Actually, that would be brilliant, wouldn't it? They seem like such lovely ladies, it only makes sense that they'd be his confidants, but then they could share what they know with everyone else."
After giving it some thought, Sylvain said, "Sounds great, except getting Felix to actually talk to one of them about anything isn't happening. If he's going to tell anyone what he's been up to, it'll be me or Ingrid, and I don't think he'll be doing that while we're here."
"Okay, so I'm gonna just recap what you've told me and then see what I can go do to…I don't know, fix things with security or something?" Claude took a deep breath, looking between the two he'd been speaking with and trying to best sum up what he'd learned. "Building's on lockdown because one of the emperor's cronies got in and caused chaos, your guy Felix and our gal Lysithea keep sneaking out and getting in trouble, and that's what I missed by leaving as soon as I could this morning. Sound right?" Neither of them had anything to argue with that, so he thanked them for their time and left the room, feeling satisfied that he'd gotten information he was missing and there wasn't a lick of suspicion about what he'd really been up to the night before to have him outside of his room right as curfew was lifted.
When he got up to his room, he noticed that the door was slightly dented in a place he couldn't recall there being a mark, which he figured probably had to do with Sylvain and Marianne trying to get him out earlier. Being in there by himself felt almost wrong, but the moment he'd thought about how many times he'd had visitors in there with him there was a knock at his door; after peeking through the peephole he saw that it was Leonie with a grim expression, which couldn't be good news. "Hey, what's going on?" he asked her as he opened the door to let her in. "Someone die or something?"
"No, it's all of this stupid stuff that's going on with this whole group here, I thought this was going to be an easy guard job and it's turning out to be anything but." She waited until Claude closed the door to slide against the wall, falling into a rather awkward wall sit. "I got locked in my room overnight and no matter what I did, I couldn't get the door open, and it was just late enough that knocking on walls would have been a disturbance, except it wouldn't have mattered anyway because no one would've been in either of those rooms to hear it!"
"How did you get locked in your room?" Claude's eyes were narrowing, trying to deduce if Leonie was taking him on a ride or if she was being genuine, but her body language screamed that she was speaking the truth.
"Someone stuck a door stopper in the handle out in the hallway, so that when I tried to wiggle the doorknob it just wouldn't move!" She huffed, pounding a fist into her other, wide-open hand. "It makes me wonder if this happened the night before, too, and that someone here has a vendetta against me and doesn't want me finding out something."
"That wouldn't make any sense…" Trailing off, Claude thought about how it could only make sense if it was Lysithea doing it to make sure that she wasn't caught in the act, but then it wouldn't make sense if it wasn't happening to his door as well. "How'd you manage to get out if that's the case?"
She looked at him with an unamused expression. "Sylvain let me out, him and Marianne were going door-to-door trying to get everyone rallied to take care of something, but I kind of ignored what it was that he was telling me because it didn't make sense."
That was when Claude was able to tell her exactly what he'd heard just a little while before, catching her up to speed on everything wild that was going on there at the hotel right under their noses, and by the time he'd wrapped up, Leonie was grabbing her hair tugging on it in frustration. "What's that reaction for?" he asked, unsure of why she was so bothered—beyond feeling like a failure at her job for not being present to stop such a thing.
"I just don't get it, that's all! Why am I being locked in my room, why are people aware of where we all are, why is this even still happening if it's this unsafe around here?" The frustration was only growing in Leonie's voice with every word, but before Claude could admit he was starting to think the same sorts of things she was sliding back up the wall, standing at full height. "I'm not going to just sit around and let this sort of stuff happen, though, that'd be ridiculous. I'm finding somewhere else to stay tonight. You think the guys will let me crash in their rooms for the night?"
"I'm sure they won't mind it, but what good will that do you? Getting stuck at the other hotel isn't going to solve any of the problems at this one." Although, if Leonie was confirmed to be elsewhere…gears were beginning to turn in Claude's mind for other plans. "I won't stop you, though, if you want to ask them if you can bunk with one of them I'm sure they'll be happy to allow it. Might I suggest Lorenz's room as an excellent place to sleep?"
"Ha, thanks Claude but I can't exactly say I'm interested in him like that."
"Didn't mean anything by it." He was glad to get her to laugh in such a moment of tension, and they were soon leaving his room, Leonie going to check on her newest plan and Claude ready to pop down to the royal suite to see what they were plotting in there. Much to his surprise, Hilda was at the door waiting to be let in as well, and when he started standing beside her she rolled her eyes but didn't say anything. "Good morning to you too," he greeted, giving the door a quick knock to alert the occupants to someone else's presence. "You wake up on the wrong side of the bed or something this morning?"
"Please, in this place it'd be a treat if I could wake up in my bed at my own pace, but nope, had to get awoken by the sound of the alarm going off over my bed, and my bed alone. Can't a girl get her beauty sleep?" Hilda sounded grumpy, and Claude knew better than to keep prodding her for more information, although he was curious about why she was seemingly targeted in such a way. "Anyway, why are you here right now? Got something you need to talk to the royals about?"
"Why does that matter to you?" he asked, before adding, "And if you're so curious about why I'm here, I'll just turn that right on you. Why are you here?"
Rolling her eyes again, Hilda looked at Claude with animosity plastered over her face, and if looks could kill he would certainly have been on his knees in pain. "I was trying to have a conversation with Annette about something interesting I heard her mentioning about something really, and I mean really, big that people would hate getting out. But when I brought it up with her, she turned red and ran in here to hide! Like, what a bother, right?"
"What kind of interesting was it?" Now Claude was curious about the gossip trail, just in case it was something that he could work with. "Girly interesting or political disaster interesting?"
She froze, her face completely relaxing before she began to have the slyest of grins on her lips. "The former, definitely, but maybe you'd know something about it. She was telling the person serving breakfast this morning about how she's trying to play matchmaker while she's here, and she mentioned that it's between one of our guards and one of the Faerghus ones, and this was right after the whole 'Lysithea shows up after a night out with a jerk' situation so I was seeing if she was responsible for that."
If he could somehow convince Hilda that it was indeed the case, Claude knew that she would then completely forget all about how he had a thing for one of the other guards and never suspect that it was them getting pushed together. "Oh, definitely, if she was running from you to avoid answering the question then that's got to be it. Can you really picture our little, sweet Lysithea getting with someone that jerk-y on her own? She was absolutely convinced to do it by someone else, and if Annette's out here putting people together then it's got to be those two."
"Or, big brain moment, you're trying to pull a fast one on me and it's actually you and that Ingrid girl." Her grin growing all the bigger, her cheeks pushing her eyes into cat-like slits that stared Claude down and made him shiver in fear, Hilda moved closer into him until she was forcing her chest again his body. "I'm totally onto you and her, but I don't know if Annette would need to get her hands involved in that mess. You've got it down bad for her, you can't even deny it."
"If it'll get you to get off of me, then yeah, I've got it down bad for her. She's hot, she's competent at her job, she clearly needs a big, strong man in her life to complement her skills." Admitting that, to Hilda of all people, felt dirty and wrong, but he needed to get her to back off both physically and socially. He didn't need her suspecting what he was up to, and if she'd heard parts about Annette playing matchmaker by keeping people out past curfew that was something he didn't want attached to his name. "And, best part of all, she knows me for the person I want to be, not the person everyone tries to make me be."
"I can change that," Hilda reminded him, before taking a step back from both Claude and the door, "but I'll save that for another day. Maybe when you get her to Derdriu to visit, that's when I can drop all of your dirty secrets into her lap, get her rethinking her interest in you."
He barked out a laugh, leaning against the door as he watched Hilda. "As if she has interest in me, it's certainly not a mutual feeling. I'm interested in her, she's interested in getting her guard job done correctly, it's not really something that's going to go anywhere."
Her sly look remaining firm on her face, Hilda said one last thing before heading down the hall toward the elevator, her need to get into the royal suite erased by Claude's apparent insider knowledge. "Well, as much as it kills me to say it, I'll help you get the girl however I can, if just to scare her off later. Let me know if you want me talking you up to her, I'm down to highlight your okay parts before telling her your less-than-great ones."
"Uh, thanks Hilda, I'll keep that in mind." He was friendly enough to wave goodbye at her when she left, before knocking on the door again for Annette to open it, staring at him in confusion. "Heard you got chased in here by my ex-girlfriend, how'd that go for you?"
"I didn't know she could hear me," Annette admitted, before doing a double take and looking at Claude in confusion. "She's your ex? How'd the two of you break up? Because of her craziness, or was it something else?"
"Long story, not explaining it where others could hear me." A pause, before Claude sighed at a realization he wish he hadn't had. "Actually, if you let me in the room, I can tell you in there because I'm sure everyone inside's already heard it."
Annette nodded excitedly, almost like she enjoyed being in the loop on juicy drama, but she wasn't expecting what she heard when she closed the door with Claude now inside the royal suite. The moment he mentioned his former prince status, she blanched and had to sit down in the nearest chair, while Claude was faced with immediate regret at telling her. "Look, I don't associate with that life and I'm fine with you treating me however you want, but don't start acting like you need to revere me or something like that. It's not really my thing."
"I can't believe someone would break things off with you because you're a secret prince," she mumbled, shaking her head in a daze. "That'd be such a huge draw to a relationship if I found out there's royal blood involved. And you know who would love knowing that?"
"Don't say it."
"Ingrid. She'd be over the moon if she found out that you're a prince and could give her status in life she's clearly not getting here." That was in reference to her obvious lack of respect in her job, which Claude understood but didn't want to comment on given where they currently were. "I'll have to tell her next time I—"
He cut her off with a loud No! that caught not just Annette's attention, but the attention of the royal couple from their bedroom, both Dimitri and Byleth coming out to see what was happening. "Sorry, you two, Annette here just learned about me being the Almyran prince and I'm telling her not to share that news with everyone."
"Yes, that needs to stay here in this room." Dimitri, despite having used that exact piece of information for hiring the Leicester Alliance Security Company in the first place, seemed to understand the gravity of the situation and Claude's desire to not let it get out. "If too many people here in Adrestia find out that we brought a foreign prince along to the diplomacy talks, it could seem like we are proclaiming an alliance with Almyra to conspire against their empire and war could break out yet again."
"I'm sorry, I didn't realize how big of a deal it would be if I told others about it, I thought it was pretty interesting and exciting but I guess it's not just that." Sheepishly, Annette apologized for creating such a stir, and it seemed like that portion of the conversation was over for the most part.
But now that the king and queen were involved, talks turned to guard work itself. "The talks themselves have been rescheduled to tomorrow, after this morning's events with an apparent close friend of Edelgard coming in and trying to find where I'm located. I don't want to risk our lives, as well as the lives of the people here to serve us, by staying longer than needed." Dimitri reached over to Byleth, who offered him her hand to hold in his own. "Her minister that I was put through to, von Aegir, didn't seem to be fully coherent in the early hour but he promised he would arrange things for us."
What Ingrid had told him the day before, about that very minister and how he'd had the intel about the attempted attack, flashed back to Claude's mind, but he chose to not mention it again for fear of drumming up more concerns than necessary. "That's great to hear, but we've got our flights booked for a few days out from now, so we'll be stuck here without a king and queen to guard until it's time for us to go."
"Enbarr will be a much nicer place when the curfew is abolished, and that will happen upon our departure. You and your company will have all the time to do the sightseeing you want in those days." Byleth sounded as flat as always, even though she was actively giving a small smile in her husband's direction. "We considered trying to reschedule your flights but upon looking at the departure schedule it would have been impossible without directing you to Fhirdiad first, given the limited flights to outside of Adrestian lands."
"You know what, that makes a lot of sense," Claude remarked, although he did wish they were diverted to Fhirdiad so that he'd get a little while longer with Ingrid, even if it wasn't going to be time spent in a way worth desiring. "Thanks for at least considering it, even if it didn't work out."
"We want what's best for the team that stepped in to assist us when we needed it," Dimitri said, "and with everything that has gone wrong so far, there has been a lot of assisting your team has needed to provide."
Claude could only think that the level of protection, care, and assistance they'd be providing would be growing with the now-abbreviated trip, but he didn't dare say anything about it. "I can say that we deeply appreciate it. All of us that have been here with the intentions of actually doing our jobs, that is," he added, thinking about Lysithea and how she'd turned her time in Enbarr into a moment of freedom and law-breaking.
"On that note, for tomorrow's meeting I would like if you would accompany us, just as a backup in case something goes awry." Dimitri looked straight at Claude with a commanding glare, making him stand just a tad straighter. "I would hope that bringing you in wouldn't be necessary, but having you there to call on if needed…it would bring us both peace of mind in such a stressful time."
"As long as you want me there as a guard and not as a prince, I think I can manage that."
When eight-thirty hit that night and there was no sign of an early curfew descending upon the city, everyone breathed a sigh of relief and felt comfortable waiting until the last shuttle left the main hotel to go back to their own locations. They had all gathered for a late dinner and a debriefing on what the next day's meeting was going to look like in terms of people being stationed places, keeping it in the boardroom so that if they did get locked in by a surprise change in curfew they would all know where they were. As the time ticked closer to the moment those who would need to disperse needed to leave, there was a definite air of anxiousness beginning to smother their otherwise upbeat attitudes.
Lorenz, predictably, was the first one to crack under the pressure, glancing at the time on his phone over and over until he couldn't bear it any longer. "I would hate to have to sleep on the floor for a second night this trip," he spat, jumping from his chair at the table and scurrying toward the door. "I shall take my leave now and see you all in the morning. Ignatz, Raphael, are you joining me or are you to tempt fate?"
Looking at Ignatz with a shrug, Raphael chose to stand up as well and head for the door. "I don't see any problem with going now, better to be safe than sorry and all that. Besides, I don't think anyone here would be cool with me sleeping on their floor."
"I guess I'll go too," Ignatz said after much hesitation, not wanting to leave the conversation he'd been having with Mercedes, Annette, and Ashe but knowing that going was best for him. "We'll have to find time to continue this discussion some other time."
"Noted," Mercedes replied with a smile, waving Ignatz farewell as he and the others left the room, visible as they walked right past the windows on their way to the elevator. She then looked at the other two who'd been in the conversation and shook her head. "I suppose, if they're making that choice, that the rest of us need to do it as well."
"Aw, come on Mercie, you can just sleep here again, it'll be fine!" Annette, having grown rather used to her best friend staying with her rather than where she belonged, gave Mercedes' arm a quick tug. "I don't want you to go!"
"But Annie, if I stay here with you, I leave the other hotel to having only two of its three rooms being used." Pointing that out had Mercedes glancing at Ashe, who was slowly nodding. "But, I think if I leave it in the capable hands of the other two, it should be fine. Last night went well, didn't it?"
His nod picked up a bit of speed as Ashe answered, "It sure did, Ingrid and I were both there all night and nothing too out of the ordinary happened. Just some strange voices coming from her room, but I figured they were probably a phone call or even her TV being on."
"Strange voices?" Tilting her head to the side, Mercedes pulled her arm out of Annette's grasp and brought both hands up to her face, cupping her jaw as she tapped her cheeks in thought. "That seems so unlike Ingrid to invite someone into her room, but I have no idea who she would have been calling or what she would have been watching."
"It was past curfew so perhaps she was calling the restaurant in the lobby asking if they were open? She does like to eat at late times." With a shrug as he threw his best theory into the world, Ashe rose from his seat and headed toward the door. "I'm going to go now too, just in case the shuttles stop running earlier than we expect. I think it'd be fine if you stayed here though, I really do."
As he left, Mercedes slowly lifted her head back straight before looking at Annette, whose shining eyes were giving away her excitement at the prospect of having another night spent with her dear friend. "Let's go up and check with the royal couple before I commit to staying here, I feel there'll be one last shuttle drop-off before curfew is enacted."
Those words were all Annette needed to hear to scramble to her feet and charge to the door, waving for Mercedes to follow her, and soon enough they were on their way up to the floor with the majority of the group's rooms, just to get the clearance on their plan. When the elevator doors came open on the upper floor, Ingrid was waiting on the other side, looking surprised to see who was coming out. "Hey, aren't you supposed to be going back to your room?" she asked as they passed by each other, effectively switching places. "Dimitri just told me I needed to get out of here and back to where I belong."
"I have one thing I need to ask him before I go, nothing big," Mercedes said, giving Ingrid a wave as the elevator doors closed between them. Once she heard the elevator making its descent, she and Annette headed down the hall to the royal suite, where the door was still open as Sylvain was standing in the doorway, also surprised to see who was there. When he opened his mouth to speak, Mercedes gently cut him off with, "I'm here to ask Dimitri one little question and then I'll be on my way."
"Oh man, is that Mercedes talking?" a voice she wasn't familiar with asked, but when they entered the room she was able to see that it was Hilda speaking, her arms crossed over her chest with Marianne standing behind her. "It totally is, neat! Are you coming to replace us as room buddies with your king and queen?"
Mercedes' whole face scrunched as she heard the question, something that was not helped when Annette said, "Yeah! That's definitely why we're here, we're going to keep them safe overnight so you don't have to!"
"I doubt that's true," Sylvain added, closing the door so that all of them were now standing in the front half of the room without any interference from the hallway. "Mercedes isn't even supposed to be staying at this hotel, she can't be here to keep them safe."
"It's what I'm here to ask about, actually."
"Huh, how about that." Sylvain's reaction was matched with a shoulder-raising chuckle at the perfect timing of their arrival, but before anything was able to be asked to make things official, the lights flickered, followed by a complete shutdown of everything, making the entire room pitch black. "What in the—"
The next several moments were filled with scrambling as everyone reached for their phones to provide light, followed by the king and queen themselves coming out of their part of the room to see what was going on. "Why are there so many of you in here right now?" Dimitri barked, seeing everyone's silhouettes due to the phone lights but not able to exactly tell who was really there. "Go, get out and make sure this isn't an ambush on our floor!"
Sylvain, by virtue of being closest to the door, reached and tried to turn the knob, but it wouldn't budge. His mind flashing back to the night he'd been locked in the room with just Hilda and Marianne, he kept grabbing the handle with all his might in an attempt to move it, but something had it stuck firmly in place. "Great idea, but we're not leaving this room. Seems we're locked in right now."
Everyone who was present made their way over to the door to try opening it for themselves, but no one was able to get it to even begin to move; as panic began to set in a new problem reared its head, that being phones going off for seconds at a time as people on the outside tried contacting them. It became clear that the power outage was not just limited to their hotel, as it seemed that a good portion of the downtown area of Enbarr was currently in the dark, but that was no reason to find solace in everything. "Make sure that everyone's accounted for, last thing we need is for our guards to have snuck out into the night before this happened," Dimitri spat, clearly speaking about some people in particular.
Getting everyone to answer their phones was difficult, but slowly they were able to get the answers they were looking for. Predictably, Lysithea never answered the calls that were given to her, meaning that she was off doing something on her own, but Felix did answer when Sylvain called him and told him that he was still in his room, the door to which seemed to be jammed closed. "Leonie says her door's stuck too," Hilda relayed after getting off the phone with the other woman whose room was on that floor. "Seems the power outage has really gotten everyone trapped."
"Goddess, please don't let this last all night," Marianne prayed, her phone in her trembling hands as she pressed in the number to call another one of her team's members. Lorenz, Ignatz, and Raphael were all on their way over to their hotel, she'd gotten that from a text Lorenz sent her immediately after the power had gone out. Leonie was down the hall in her room, Lysithea was missing yet again, and obviously she and Hilda were there in the royal suite. That meant that the only person they hadn't contacted was Claude, and Marianne knew that she'd need to be the one to do that, not Hilda.
Her call wasn't answered, but not because Claude didn't want to answer it. He was perfectly interested in picking up the line and letting whoever was calling know where he was (in his room) and that he was stuck in there because the door seemed to be jammed. However, when Marianne was calling him, the other person in his room was getting a call herself, and she'd answered it before he'd had a chance to tell her not to. How he'd ended up getting himself locked in a dark room with Ingrid, he'd rather not think about, but the bad luck that it had happened was beyond obvious. Now when things calmed down and they could get out, everyone would know they were spending time together, whether they'd actively been seeking it out or not.
This hadn't been actively seeking anything out, it had been Ingrid realizing that she didn't want to leave the hotel and go back over to the other one, to get trapped over there for the night and miss out on the inevitable need to fill in for another guard. She'd stopped the elevator on a lower floor and brought it right back up with the intention of going down to the royal suite and asking if she could stay there that night, but when she'd passed by Claude's door she'd noticed that it was being held open by the deadbolt. She'd taken it upon herself to chide him on how unsafe that was, going inside and beginning to chew him out, much to his surprise, and right as she'd pushed the lock away the power had flickered and she'd screamed, running further into the room as the power shut off and the door locked at the same time.
Always one to take advantage of any opportunity he was given, Claude was looking forward to a third night in a row getting to sleep with Ingrid, but she was clearly not having it on the phone with Sylvain. "I'm fine, really," she insisted, the light of her phone dim and barely casting a shadow against her face. "I was heading back to my room when all this happened, I'll be perfectly fine where I am."
Whatever he said in response didn't matter, because Ingrid had just lied to him about her location for some reason, probably to protect her image from being tainted. "Yes, Sylvain, I promise that I'll be at the hotel in the morning if it's possible, I don't plan on sneaking off and disappearing into the night like certain others we know."
"You just lied," Claude said when she'd hung up and deflated with a heavy sigh. "Why didn't you tell him you're on the same floor he is, presumably. He doesn't need to be lied to, he can handle you ducking into a strange man's room for the night, I'm sure."
"Just because he can handle it doesn't mean he will," she snappishly replied, using the light of her phone to guide her feet safely to the edge of Claude's bed, where she sat down. "Trust me, there are some things that it's better to not mention to Sylvain if you can help it, and the possibility of sharing a bed with someone is one of them."
Claude nodded sagely, even though Ingrid couldn't see him doing it, but before he could reply out loud his phone started ringing again and he quickly answered the incoming call from Marianne. "What's up? Is it about the power outage?"
"It is," she timidly told him, nerves obvious in her voice. "Are you somewhere safe? A lot of us are still in the king's room, we never got the chance to leave before we were trapped in here together."
"Oh, I'm safely in my own room, if that answers your question." Casting a glance in Ingrid's general direction, Claude hoped that she would show the same courtesy to him that he had to her when she'd been speaking to someone, and she didn't seem interested in saying anything at all. "My door won't move even a little bit, guess it's locked by the power outage, unless someone's actively out there keeping our doors locked."
"I would certainly hope not!" That put more of a fear in Marianne's heart and she quickly ended the call, allowing for Claude to find a bit of peace in the fact that he didn't tell a single lie about where he was, unlike Ingrid. He went to sit next to her on the edge of the bed, finding that she was tense when he brushed up against her.
Before he had a chance to ask her what was wrong, she answered his inquiry. "I'm worried that this isn't just an accident, that it's completely intentional and it's part of what we were warned about. Part of them trying to kill Dimitri and Byleth. And if that's the case, I'm the world's worst guard if I'm locked in here with you."
"From the sounds of it, they've got a million hands in that mess, yours would just add to the chaos." Turning his phone's flashlight on and letting it shine upward between them, Claude could see the concern painted across Ingrid's furrowed brow. "Besides, where would you rather be, in that room with all of those bozos, or here…with me?"
Her eyebrows relaxing, Ingrid seemed to be taking his question seriously before she leaned into him, resting her head against his collarbone. "After the past couple of nights, I can't believe I'd say this, but with you. With you time and time again." She had to have been able to hear how his heart was pounding with her every word, something made worse by his idle hands reaching into her hair and wrapping strands around fingers that had never felt hair quite so soft in their life.
"You've come a long way from not wanting to sleep in the same room as me to, you know, getting close like this," he mumbled, feeling her taking small breaths as she held herself close to him. "Almost like you've had a change of heart or something like that."
Ingrid didn't respond for a long time, but when she did it was barely a whisper only heard in the completely dark and still room because of how little noise was around them. "It was definitely, one-hundred percent a change of heart," she whispered, nudging his collarbone a bit with her forehead before she adjusted herself so that her lips were right along the sensitive skin. "Or maybe just a realization that being a good guard isn't getting me anywhere, so maybe I need to loosen up a little."
Flinching at the feeling of her breath along his neck, Claude gave a breathy laugh before tugging her hair tighter around his fingers. "I may not look it, but I'm pretty good at getting girls to loosen up. Whatever you want to do in here tonight, I'm game."
"I want you to hold me like this for a while, then."
"Sounds easy, I'm in."
