A/N: I don't know guys—I think I just don't like writing Renard. These last two chapters have been a struggle, but thanks for sticking with me!
"So," the Captain says, glancing over at Nick from the passenger seat of the Land Cruiser, "Adalind?"
Nick grits his teeth—hands gripping the wheel in a stranglehold he can't quite relax—and he does his best not to take the bait. He can't blame Renard for trying to find a crack in Nick's brand new alliance with Adalind, but he's not interested in helping his boss pry any further into his personal life at the moment. Yesterday, the Captain was just a distant superior—a neutral support in the fight against crime in Portland. Today, he's an uneasy ally in the fight against a family with their own personal army and the shitty ex-boyfriend of a woman with a past that Nick suddenly wants to know both absolutely everything and blissfully nothing about.
"She must have outdone herself," Renard says, making a show out of looking casually out of the window. "She really can do magic with that tongue when she wants to—pity about the talking the rest of the time."
Nick lets that one go, too, although he's kissed her enough to realize her tongue probably is magical. He can only imagine the places it could go—the things it could do—but he has no interest in imagining the way she might have used it with Renard, so he shuts down that particular train of thought, tucking it away for later when he doesn't have an audience trying to bait him into a fight that can't possibly end well.
"Of course, all the talking only makes it even better when you finally are able to shut her up—" Renard says, and Nick checks his rearview mirror, and, finding the road clear behind him, slams on the breaks for a yellow light, jerking the Captain forward into the seatbelt hard and knocking the breath right out of him.
"Sorry about that," Nick says evenly while the light finally ticks over to red. "Safety first."
Renard glares at Nick, taking deep breaths and rubbing at his chest where the seat belt cut into him hard.
"She's got you good, then? You're all in—the baby, the council, the witchy girlfriend?"
Girlfriend, Nick thinks, and then—guilty—Juliette.
"No doubts?" Renard continues. "No loose ends? No regrets?"
Nick shrugs. He doesn't actually have many doubts—not about him and Adalind and the baby. It's pretty easy to put your faith in fate when she's staring you straight in the face—when her eyes are clear, fathomless blue, and she just keeps charging forward—onwards, onwards, onwards—carrying him with her in her fearless wake.
So, no, he doesn't have any regrets, but he does have loose ends. Juliette. Where he's going to live once he breaks up with Juliette and has to move out of her house. Where Adalind is going to live once he breaks up with Juliette, and Adalind has to move out of her house. Where they're going to raise their baby. How they're going to raise their baby. When they're going to make their baby, even. Also, his missing Grimm powers, and how he's going to do his day time job or his night time job without them for the next nine months.
There are a lot of loose ends, and the more he thinks about it, the more appear.
"So, you do have regrets," Renard says, eyes narrowing in on Nick like he can see his thoughts churning.
"Not about Adalind," Nick says, signaling to turn into the underground parking garage where Renard arranged to meet Waltz. "We've got some logistics to figure out, but she's kind of an expert when it comes to that, so I'm betting it's all going to work out."
Renard glares at him. "What on earth did she do to you, Burkhardt?"
Nick pulls into a parking space, turns off the engine, and grins—thinking of pine needles and damp, mulchy earth at his back, smelling like spring and the kind of decay that just makes new things grow even better, and then Adalind moving above him—warm and wet and wild—shining bright in the moonlight.
What on earth indeed.
The parking garage is empty—no sign of Waltz or any other citizen of Portland. Nick spends ten minutes waiting in the car while Renard broods audibly before he gives up and gets out to stretch his legs and walk the perimeter. Still nothing. The Captain also gets out and leans against the car, shoulders hunched up to his ears in his stately greatcoat.
"He's late," Nick says, still pacing the perimeter.
"No shit," Renard says, but there's no heat to it. If anything, he sounds bored, which is a little concerning since they are technically here to kill a guy.
Speaking of which—
Nick surveys the parking garage again. It's reminding him of something—what is it?
And then he remembers that case last week—the double homicide of two Austrian nationals in a parking garage much like this one. They still haven't got a lead for that one yet.
Vienna, Nick thinks. That was where Adalind had threatened to send Renard's head—to the Royal's home base.
In Austria.
"Sir—" Nick starts, and then he stops, because it feels weird to treat the man who's been manipulating him for months like an honored superior. "Captain?" he tries again, and Renard sighs.
"Spit it out, Burkhardt."
"Right. Those homicides last week—the Austrians in the parking garage? Know anything about it?"
Renard's eyes narrow again—little slits of hard anger.
"Perhaps."
Nick nods, thinking about the other things he's learned about his boss from listening to Adalind for the past few hours.
"One of your brother's men?"
Renard keeps glaring, and then he shrugs his wide shoulders and sighs.
"Cousin."
"Not a happy family reunion, then?"
"No."
"What did he want?"
"What do you think?" Renard asks, tone biting. "Control of Portland—you—the key, not necessarily in that order."
"Me? Why me?"
"Rogue Grimms have the potential to threaten the accepted order of things—it's their specialty actually—so my family prefers to get them on side as quickly as possible."
"You mean they want to hire me?"
Renard shrugs again. "They might start there. Find you a place in the Verrat—train you up to be an enforcer for them. And if that wouldn't appeal to you, well...there are other ways. Torture—brainwashing—maybe even a bit of mind control. They've had their eye on you for a while, and they're running out of patience."
Nick absorbs this along with the realization he doesn't even know what he doesn't know about the wesen world, which leaves him with a sense of dread growing in the pit of his stomach.
"I don't get it." Nick says. "Why not just approach me? Why are they making this your problem?"
"It is my problem," Renard says. "That's the whole point. I'm the second heir to the throne, Nick. A bastard heir, unfortunately, but still an heir, and that means that when I set up shop in Portland, the whole Northwest became my territory. No one passes through here without deferring to me. No one comes to my town and steals artifacts that should be mine by right. And no one poaches a Grimm in my jurisdiction without letting me take the first shot at persuading him to join the good fight."
"And what fight would that be?"
"Officially? My family against the forces of chaos that hope to depose them."
"And unofficially?"
"Me against my family and the authority they want to impose on me and the territory I hold."
"Huh," Nick says. "So, you were hoping to be Switzerland, too?"
Renard rolls his eyes with a long, dramatic sigh. "If I say yes, can we stop having this inane conversation? We don't want the same thing, not really. I didn't plan on sharing control of Portland with anyone—not my family, not Adalind, and certainly not you, so any little ideas you have about being on the same side now would be extremely premature. We're stuck together, and I want to share this town with my family ever so slightly less than I want to share it with you and your new girlfriend. That's as far as we go, Burkhardt."
"Right," Nick says, "Except you're still my boss, and I'm still your detective, and we have actual jobs to do that don't have anything to do with all of this."
"That hasn't been a problem for us so far."
"That's because I didn't know you were out here killing family members in homicides I'd have to investigate, or trying to kill Hank in your spare time!"
"Yes, and wasn't that an excellent example of how to separate the professional from the personal? You'll pick it up in no time."
Nick crosses his arms and glares at Renard. It's his turn, anyway.
"I think I liked you better yesterday," he says.
"Yeah, well, join the club," Renard says.
Another ten minutes pass with no sign of Waltz, and Nick is starting to suspect he's in the wrong place.
"Did you get the address right? Is this a setup? Where is Waltz?"
Renard shrugs and looks at his watch. He frowns at it and then pulls out his phone.
"No service," he says. "The concrete and earth here must be blocking the signal. Ideal for a kill site, not so much for a rendezvous."
Nick looks at his own phone—no bars.
"Should we leave? Find a signal and call Waltz to see what the hold up is?"
"Might as well," Renard says.
They get back in the car and head out—back above ground, back to the street—and Nick's phone starts vibrating with texts immediately, but he's driving so he can't read them. There is one voicemail though, so he uses a voice command to play it over the bluetooth, and Adalind's voice bursts into the car—frantic and breathless and beautiful.
"I'm calling him, okay?" she says, and Nick can hear a grumble in the background that sounds like Hank, which instinctively puts Nick more at ease. "Jeez Louise, were you always this paranoid? I'm calling him—see, it says Nick! Who else would I be calling at a time like this? Oh crap, it went to voicemail. Nick, it's me and Hank. Monroe called, and Waltz has Rosalee at the shop. We're going to help. Meet us there when you get this."
The message clicks off, and Renard's voice fills the void—slick and dark and horrible.
"Well, well, well. Adalind versus the Verrat without her powers. This should be entertaining."
Nick just grits his teeth and pulls a U-turn, hauling ass back to the spice shop.
Nick barely pauses to park when they reach the shop. He's out of the driver's seat as soon as the ignition cuts out, and he's almost at the entrance when he hears the shot—one large caliber round echoing out into the night.
He doesn't think about what he does next—doesn't stop to consider if not being a Grimm might be cause to consider better options for a more tactical response—he's through the door with his gun drawn immediately, sweeping the front room—pivoting to the back—where he comes face to face with Hank and his service pistol.
"Oh, thank God," Hank says, lowering his weapon. "Nick, I am never babysitting Adalind again. That woman is a fucking menace."
"Oh, that's nice," Adalind says, appearing behind Hank with her hands on her hips, looking pissed off and glorious and alive. "And just when we were bonding. I was going to make you a friendship bracelet and everything."
"No," Hank says, "there will be no crafting from you of any kind. No bracelets, no cookies, no fucking cross-stich. I don't even want flowers that you've arranged, woman. You don't need a babysitter, you need an FDA approved safety warning."
Hank is glaring at Adalind, and she's glaring back, and Nick is genuinely starting to worry that this is Hank's final straw—that he's going to lose his partner tonight—but then Adalind starts to laugh—big, gasping belly laughs—and Hank joins her, wheezing a little, hands dropping to his knees, and then they're both cry-laughing and trying to catch their breath while Nick inches forward, gun still out, worried that the relief they're feeling must have come from something even worse than he feared.
He turns the corner in the back room, and the scene is actually better than expected. Sure, there's a dead body, but it's Waltz, so that's as good as it's going to get tonight. Ian sits on a stool next to the body, clutching a Luger and shaking a little. Behind him, Rosalee is in Monroe's arms, and he's running his hands over every inch of her like he's making sure all her parts are still intact. She's still standing, so Nick takes that as a good sign.
First things first—there's a weapon in the room, and Nick would like to remove it from the hands of the man who just shot a Hundjäger in the face.
"Um…" he starts—pausing when he realizes he's never had to ask politely before for someone to hand over their weapon. There's usually a lot more shouting and demanding at this point in an arrest. "Ian, could you give me the gun?"
Ian blinks up at him and then down at the gun as if he's forgotten it was there. He nods absently and holds it out, barrel first, and Nick jumps a little before he steadies himself and takes the gun. Ian just smiles sadly.
"Sorry," he says. "I know you have to arrest me. He was going to tell the Verrat about Rosalee. I couldn't let that happen."
"It's okay," Nick says, putting his own gun away, feeling the deadly weight of the Luger in his hand. "We were going to have to kill him anyway, so you kind of saved us the hassle. What the hell happened here?"
"I don't know much," Ian says. "I was the last one in here, but the first person to grab the gun. It's strange—I've seen no shortage of bloodshed in the Resistance, but this—this was bad. I've never been that scared before. Never."
"That can happen," Nick says, looking back to Monroe and Rosalee, who are just holding each other now without even the pretense of checking for wounds, "when it's not just your life on the line."
"Yeah," Ian says. "Your partner was amazing by the way."
"Yeah? What'd he do?" Nick glances to Hank, who's finally stopped laughing and is talking quietly to the Captain by the door.
"No, your girlfriend," Ian says, and Nick's eyes cut to Adalind, who's sitting on the cot at the front of the room, breathing hard with her eyes closed. "She handled everything—got Monroe and Hank into position—went in first—got Waltz away from Rosalee. All unarmed. She was absolutely fearless."
She doesn't look fearless, not right now. She's shaking, he thinks, or at least the cot is and suddenly he doesn't care much about what happened or how, he just wants to hold her.
"Go," Ian says. "I would, if I could."
Nick glances back at Rosalee—safe in Monroe's arms—then to Ian, pained and sober, sitting over the body of the man he killed to save her—and then to Adalind, the woman who charged into an armed hostage situation with nothing but her powers of persuasion to back her up.
He's going to kill her.
Nick stalks over to the cot, dropping the Luger into Hank's hand on the way, and sinks to the ground to reach her eye level—or what would be her eye level if she would only open her eyes. She's crying—so quietly he can't even hear it—and when he says her name, she just collapses, sliding off the cot and into his arms, burying her face in his neck.
Later, he thinks.
"That sucked," Adalind says, hiccupping a little through the tears damp on his skin. "Guns suck. I never want to do that without you or my powers, ever again."
"It's a deal," Nick says, pressing kisses into her shiny, tangled hair. Ever again is a pretty long time, he thinks.
It sounds wonderful.
