Rose's POV
The moment Dimitri and I stepped into the archive, I realised we might very well not leave here before dawn. The records kept at the guardians' headquarters had been meticulously organised, but what I saw here was an entirely different story. Boxes upon boxes filled with documents were scattered around the room, and the filing cabinets were anything but tidy.
I'd never thought I'd ever say this, but I really missed the alphabetized filing system the guardians at Court had used right about now. What I was looking at here, it seemed, was completely random. "Who the hell is in charge of cataloguing this shit around here?"
"We've got more important things to worry about than maintaining this place," Dimitri reminded me. A sly smile spread across his lips. "Unless, of course, you volunteer yourself. I'm sure I could assign you a few shifts down here between classes."
I frowned at him. Yeah, if there was anything worse than front gate duty, it would be being stuck in this dusty basement. "Point taken."
"Copies of these files are sent to HQ, anyway, we only keep the originals here because we're legally obligated to," Dimitri explained with a shrug. "Not to mention that we've gone digital some time ago."
I'd figured as much, but I also knew incident reports like the ones I was looking for would have had to have been filled out by hand. They may have been scanned and digitized, but there would always be a physical version to be found somewhere. With what I was looking for, that version would be the only one. Anything that might have been uploaded to a cloud – or however that worked, I had no idea – would have made its way to the guardians' offices at Court, so there was no way to simplify this. Instead of searching a database online, we would be going through all of the stuff in this room today, and I hoped to God that my hunch had been right. Otherwise, we would be wasting a hell of a lot of time. "Let's get to work, then."
It was slow-going at first, but Dimitri and I had always worked well together when we weren't fighting, and we found a method that worked for us quickly enough. Though method may have been the wrong word for what it was, really. We'd started on opposite sides of the room, each picking a box or a shelf to go through file by file. Whenever I found a stack of the type of files I was looking for, I yelled the dates at the top of them out to Dimitri for him to check against the dates on his phone. We found a few discrepancies here and there, and I put the ones we couldn't match to any of those at Court on a separate pile. That pile was growing surprisingly fast, and though nothing had immediately stuck out to me, it painted a pretty good picture of just how many things must have been going on at the academy that no one on the outside was aware of. Dimitri's pile was growing at a similar pace.
After several hours, we had made decent progress, basically sitting back-to-back in the middle of the room now. Dimitri made a strange sound at one point, and I figured he'd made another discovery.
"Found something?" I asked, still sorting through the box in front of me. It didn't seem like anything useful could be found in that one, though.
Dimitri didn't answer, giving me the impression that he'd found something particularly interesting and was reading it now. I turned around to do the same, but realised it wasn't an incident report. He noticed I was watching him, and tried to hide what it was that he held in his hands, but it was too late. What he had been studying so intently was my final trials report. I'd known someone would have had to have taken notes at the trials so they could properly score us, but I'd had no idea they kept those. It made sense, though. A guardian's performance in those trials could make or break one's career – they were a pretty big deal.
I'd done very well in those trials myself – highest score in my class by far, thank you very much – but I barely remembered them. They had happened some weeks after my trip to Siberia, and they'd been nothing compared to what I'd gone through there. Memories of nights spent hunting down and torturing Stirgoi flooded my mind, and then there were the other memories. Of him. I looked over at Dimitri, knowing full well his mind was going to the same places.
"Yeah, I was pretty badass, huh?" I said, trying to lighten the mood.
It didn't work. Dimitri turned around to look at me, not even bothering to conceal the pain behind his eyes. "I wish I could have seen it."
A flippant response about how he was too busy planning my excruciating death at the time wouldn't help either of us, so I turned my attention back to the box of files in front of me. "Well, the report's right there, so I'm sure you can get a pretty good picture."
"That's not what I meant," he said, and didn't I know it. "I should have been there."
He should have been at my trials, my graduation, my promise mark ceremony. But, for all intents and purposes, he had been dead, and not even the letters his Strigoi-self had sent me could have changed anything about that. We'd both spent some time working through these issues – together as well as by ourselves – after I had finally been cleared of treason, but trauma was a complicated thing. Just because Dimitri had forgiven himself, and I'd never blamed him in the first place, that didn't mean the pain wasn't still there. To this day, it was, and I could only assume that was the case for both of us.
"They gave me a different task than the others," I said after several moments of silence. It was one of the few things I remembered about that day, and I recalled being so outraged when I'd found out. I'd thought it was unfair but, in retrospect, they were right. After my Strigoi-hunting days, I did have a substantial advantage over the other novices.
"That's what it says here, yes," Dimitri said.
I glared at him. "Do you or do you not want to hear about it?"
He threw his hands up in apology, and I told him all that I remembered. I did add some embellishments for dramatic effect here and there, but if he wanted a boring story with only the facts, he could just read the report in front of him. Dimitri laughed and shook his head, raised an eyebrow when a detail didn't quite seem to add up, and it all felt just like old times. I wondered if maybe it could ever be like that again permanently, but our trip into the past was cut short when Dimitri's phone chimed. Whatever he saw when he looked at it seemed to irritate him.
"Everything all right?" I asked.
"Yes," he immediately lied, but corrected himself before I could even remind him of our agreement. "No, but it's just… guardian business."
I huffed. "You do realise that I am a guardian, right? Have been for ten years."
"Not that kind of guardian business." I eyed him sceptically, and he let out a sigh. "Some of the staff on vacation are having trouble getting back to the academy. With the current weather conditions on the East Coast, flights are delayed and cancelled left and right."
That was odd. Why would that be a problem for Dimitri? Some of the Moroi teachers occasionally went away over the summer, but guardians rarely left, so this should have been Kirova's problem to deal with. I racked my brain for other reasons he could be concerned with this, when I remembered what the guardians in the lounge had been talking about on my second day here. Alberta had finally taken her first vacation in over two decades after Dimitri had taken on her role as Captain, and I supposed her absence might have been cause for irritation. "Any info on when they might get here?"
"No," Dimitri shook his head. "I'm assuming not before Tuesday. This is a nightmare, I've already changed that stupid schedule a dozen times just to make it work, and now I'm short one instructor and I don't—" He stopped abruptly, looking at me as if he'd just had a genius idea. I didn't like that look at all. "Rose. How would—"
"Absolutely not," I interrupted him. "Nuh-uh. You said Alberta teaches theory classes. I don't do theory. Like, at all."
"You'd be qualified," he argued. "And you were hired as an instructor."
Yeah, which was something I was still pissed about. First, my mother had neglected to tell me I would be teaching combat classes, which was bad enough, but now Dimitri wanted to talk me into doing theory classes? No way.
"I really don't think I'm qualified. In case you forgot, I don't ever do things by the book."
Dimitri looked far too amused for my liking. Like he had a trump card up his sleeve and I just didn't know it yet. "It would be one class. Two, at most."
"No."
"You said you wanted to help me," he reminded me.
And there it was. He knew damn well that wasn't what I had meant, but it seemed he wasn't above using my own words against me. It wasn't fair, and neither was the pleading look he was giving me. Damn him and those big brown eyes.
"Fine," I agreed begrudgingly. "But no more front gate shifts, are we clear?"
He smiled triumphantly. "I'll see what I can do."
We continued working in silence after that, and it was another two or so hours until we finally realised we'd gone through every single file in that entire archive. We put all the potentially relevant reports into one folder.
"Lots of shady stuff going on here," I remarked upon realising the folder was about as thick as my index and middle finger combined. Dimitri agreed.
What he didn't agree with, though, was when I shoved the folder under my shirt so I could take it with me to examine later. "What exactly do you think you're doing?"
"Um… hiding these so no one sees we're stealing files?"
Dimitri stepped in front of me. "You don't need to do that because we're not stealing anything."
"My next shift is in, like, five hours. I'm tired. We'll have to look at these later so, yes, I'm taking these."
He didn't budge. "If anyone notices these are gone—"
"Dimitri, look around. It's a mess in here. Unless someone is specifically looking for these, no one's going to notice shit," I said exasperatedly. "And if someone is looking for them, we've got a lot bigger problems to worry about."
There was a moment of hesitation but he eventually had to concede that I was right. "Fair enough." He held out his hand. "But I will be taking them."
So much for trust and respect, huh? I knew I had no ground to stand on, though, so I gave him the files. If he wasn't going to trust me, I would just have to trust him enough for both of us. I had to believe he wouldn't just take these and run. We were in this together… right?
Author's Note:
Sorry I didn't manage to update sooner, I was visiting family yesterday, which was so mentally exhausting that I promptly went to bed and slept 15 hours once I got home lol
