hhhhhhh feelings how do they work
Over the next few days, everyone's nerves wind a hair tighter with every hour that Ronan doesn't make a move. Morgan, Mime, and Elizabeth have been working nonstop on protective wards to put up around Quinn's shop—apparently, the ingredients for such wards have to be prepared in a very precise manner that requires several days of preparation, especially to make enough to cover an entire building.
Ann keeps tinkering away with the locket and Kaidan's sword in the hopes of creating something strong enough to close the seal in the mines. Meanwhile, Victoria has found herself at the library more and more often with none other than Michael. Usually, it's to either bring him food at mealtimes, drag him out of the library for sustenance, or remind him that no, he cannot, in fact, sleep in the library even though there are dorm-like chambers down there.
Sometimes they're joined by the others. With her academic background, Ann can decipher so much more magical jargon in many of those dusty old pages than any of them can, and Kaidan is a huge nerd for history. Michael is more than happy to show them around, explaining roughly the organization of the library and showering them with book recommendations.
They've gradually shifted from cleaning up the place to actually browsing the material. Michael has been amassing a book fort of history dating back as far as he can find, while Victoria has even found a few books and journals on the inception of the Demon Hunters as an organization.
The more and more time she spends in the library with him, the more she realizes that the library itself is magic. It treats him like a favorite child, like a prince. Whenever he needs a light, a lantern floats eagerly to his side, hovering just at the right height for him. As he walks along the shelves, rolling ladders and stepstools trail in his wake, like eager servants hoping to be needed. Whenever he wants to scribble something on a blackboard, there's always a stick of chalk within reach. He treats the library fondly as well, murmuring his gratitude to his assistants, never once taking them for granted.
It also tries to warn them as they venture down a previously unexplored corridor. The flames flicker despite the lack of wind, as if shivering in anticipation.
Coming this way had been Michael's idea. He'd approached her, holding an old, leatherbound journal in his hand with a grim look on his face, and told her that they needed to do some more exploring.
The first few doors in this particular wing open up to strange, undecorated, box-like rooms with metal floors, soundproof and incredibly sturdy-looking. They look like testing chambers, perhaps for more volatile experiments. Some of them are larger, with simple, lumpy targets on one end, almost like an archery range.
Near the end of the corridor, the flames in the brackets on either side of the door they've just approached extinguish entirely for a split second, then reignite, as if apologetic. Michael frowns, glancing at Victoria, who loosens her sword in its scabbard.
"You know what's in here, don't you?" she asks quietly. "It's written in that journal."
Micheal's expression is grim, but gives nothing away as he looks down at the journal in his hand. "It should be nothing dangerous, at this point."
"At this point?" she echoes, her pulse starting to accelerate. "Michael, what's back here?"
Taking a deep breath, he murmurs softly, "Something unfinished."
Without another word, he reaches for the doorknob and opens it. It's the same kind of insulated room like all the others. But this one isn't empty, and she hears Michael inhale sharply next to her, uttering something shaky under his breath even as she has to hang onto the doorframe for support.
Crumpled in the corner of the room is a human skeleton, its flesh and organs long since decayed. The body itself is…not the worst part about this. She's seen enough of the deceased to have become more or less desensitized to it by now, especially without any blood or the stench of rotting bodies.
Her reaction has more to do with the fact that they found the body here. In what appears to be a testing chamber for the Archivists' experiments. Victoria feels her breath quicken at the thought.
"A test subject?" she whispers, her stomach rolling with nausea as she voices the horrible thought. Using imprisoned demons for testing is bad enough, but real humans?
But Michael shakes his head definitively. "No," he says, something mournful in his voice. "Not a test subject."
Her gaze travels back to the body, taking in the tattered fabric still hanging in strips from the scaffolding of bones. The color has dulled, the fabric moth-eaten and almost beyond recognizable. Almost.
"A prisoner," Michael whispers as the dead eye sockets of the Alethean Knight stares unseeingly back at them.
According to the journal, it went like this. The Archivists had begun to catch wind of the Empire's sentiment towards them, and they were starting to read the writing on the wall. Already, archives were going into lockdown, even as the Empire began sending out feelers, prodding at the Archivists' defenses, searching for the libraries they were trying so hard to conceal.
"They captured him about a week before everything went to ruin," Michael recounts, his tone low and somber. "They didn't know what to do with him, and didn't have time to figure it out either. Then, when everyone had to flee…"
"They left him behind," Victoria finishes hollowly, staring at the long deceased Knight, at the insignia on collar, identical to hers. "They sealed up the library and never returned." A hot lump of something ugly rises in her throat, presses behind her eyes, as she struggles to keep her breathing even. "He died of dehydration, slowly and painfully. The Archivists didn't even leave him with any means to end it quickly."
Michael opens his mouth, then closes it. For a while, they both stare at the corpse even as it stares back, lifeless and empty. Victoria knows that if let free, this man would've brought information on the library to his higher-ups. She also knows that the Archivists might not have intentionally left him here. In the panic, it's very possible that no one thought to or had the time to deal with him.
It's still a horrible way to die. She'd once had a mission that went badly wrong, leaving her and some others stranded in a desert with dwindling resources. She herself came close to dying of thirst, and after being rescued, when she came to, they heard that one of their comrades had perished. That kind of death, torturous and long, is one that she wouldn't wish on anyone.
Blinking hard, she takes a fortifying breath. Later, she can think herself into a spiral about this man's fate. Right now, she doesn't want to think about anything at all.
A hand touches her arm, and she nearly jumps out of her own skin. Michael stares at her with a steady expression.
"We should bury him," he offers, his voice soft, and she finds it in her to nod slowly.
They cobble together a makeshift stretcher out of some spare wood and cloth. Victoria puts on some work gloves that she found laying around and moves the body onto the stretcher, and they carry the skeleton out of the library, all the way to the withered forest. Together, they dig a small grave and lay the man to rest. The woods are still dead and silent, save for the occasional breeze.
"I think I'm done with the library for today," Victoria finally says.
To her mild surprise, Michael says, "Me too."
He turns to her with a surface smile; it's not a fully genuine smile—she's somewhat surprised to realize that she knows what that looks like now—but it's familiar, at least, this mask of his. For once, she doesn't feel the urge to pry it away.
"Let's head back to town."
o0o0o
Their trip back to town is mostly silent. Michael can't lie and say that he's as bothered as Victoria was by the corpse. He's no stranger to death either, having traveled and wandered the world for over two decades, but unlike her, he has no fondness for the Knights.
Her reticence in itself is nothing out of the ordinary. When there's nothing important to say, she doesn't fill the silence with small talk. That's been long since established. There's a weight to her silence now, though, and though her ruby eyes are still clear and alert as they walk the streets, her broad shoulders droop a little more than usual.
She's about to turn down their usual path to the alchemy shop when Michael cuts in front of her down a different street. "Let's go this way."
Following him reluctantly, she asks, "What are you up to?"
He grins back at her. "Me, up to something?" he gasps, laying a hand on his chest. "Perish the thought. I just think we could both use a pick-me-up."
An annoyed grumble drifts up to where he's walking, but she follows him without further complaint to a small cafe that he's been meaning to visit. With a tinkle of a bell, he opens and holds the door for her. She lingers at the threshold before letting out a put-upon sigh and walking in after him.
When they reach the front of the queue, Michael cheerfully orders whatever the barista recommends, along with a muffin. Victoria picks a lavender tea and, after a moment of visibly struggling with temptation, a small piece of cake on display in one of the glass cases. Although Michael doesn't think he could ever tire of the library and the endless treasure trove of information that it holds, the aroma of the cafe and the low, lively babble of voices is a soothing change. In the cold, dusty silence of that testing chamber, the only two living souls were theirs.
Victoria is distracted enough to not notice him paying for both of them until the barista is handing change back to him. "Michael-"
"It's fine, I've got it," he says confidently.
Bewildered, she points out, "You do know that I get paid by the commander for being here in Anemone, right?"
He does know that. Truth be told, he's not sure why he did it; she is certainly better off than him, financially speaking. He's not going to take it back now, though.
Breezing right past her to a quieter corner of the cafe to wait, he says over his shoulder, "I said it's fine, Victoria."
She narrows her eyes, following after him again. "Are you trying to bribe me for my silence?"
He lets out a bark of laughter; it feels good, after the sobering events of earlier. "Did it work?" Receiving an unimpressed, nonverbal no, he leans back against the wall, giving her a lazy smile. "If you could be bribed that easily, I'd have baked you a hundred batches of gingersnaps myself by now."
Once they get their drinks, they venture outside and find a small table for two. The sun is bright and fierce today, and Michael watches her take her jacket off, drape it neatly over her seat, and push her sleeves up to the elbows. Under the sunlight, the thin, pale scar disappearing up into her sleeve is more prominent than it was in the tavern.
"How is your hand?"
He starts in his seat, feeling a twinge of embarrassment for having been staring at her arms. "My—oh." To be fair, they are objectively nice arms.
Turning his hand palm up to show off the new scar, he wiggles the fingers. "All better. I've been taking good care of it, as per the doctor's orders."
Without warning, she pulls his hand closer to inspect it. Heat courses through him, a bolt of something not quite magic but impossible to pin down nonetheless.
"Looks like you are," she sighs, letting him go.
His fingers curl at nothing for a half second before he lets his hand drop back to the table, still a bit lightheaded. He takes a sip of his latte, in an effort to ground himself.
"How's yours?" he asks to fill the silence.
Victoria blinks at him in confusion. "My…?"
"Your hand. From the fairy."
She blinks again—she must be really out of it after finding that body—then her face clears. "Oh. That." She turns her palm up to show him the scar, much fainter than his by now. "It's fine. I'd forgotten, honestly."
"I'm not surprised," he says aloud. "I think you get injured the most out of all of us, except perhaps Kaidan."
In the mines, when they first met Kaidan, she'd held off Ronan on her own and didn't quite walk away unscathed, while Michael and Ann kept the other demon at a comfortable distance with their magic. Then there was the fairy, of course. After that, Ronan had attacked again in the library, and again, Michael stood at a distance while she fought up close.
Every time, she'd been injured protecting someone else.
The Knight rolls her eyes. "My fighting style more or less requires me to take that risk. And Kaidan is a trouble magnet."
"That he is," he agrees absently.
Then, before he can stop himself, he extends his own scarred hand, pressing it lightly over hers with a grin. "But hey, we match now."
Almost immediately, his face burns, and something comes to life in his stomach like a flock of butterflies, or one of the library's lanterns leaping with fire as he walks past. Except this time, he's not the one in control.
It's almost a bigger surprise that Victoria takes it in stride, or perhaps is too tired to care. "I suppose we do," she says, her tone low and oddly contemplative.
Time passes in a weird, hazy blur as the pedestrians passing by them seem to fade from existence; he sits frozen, the tips of his fingers brushing against her skin, and wonders if she can feel his hand shaking.
Then she pushes his hand away and say flatly, "I still think you're an idiot for doing that."
He recoils like she'd burned him with a hot poker, scrambling to regain some semblance of composure.
"Right, right, as you've been kind enough to mention before," he says, waving a hand airily to dismiss her nagging with a lazy smirk even as his mind goes on a loop of screaming at itself to justify doing…whatever that was just now.
Victoria, halfway through her slice of cake, looks unbothered and completely unaware of the fact that he feels like he's burning from the inside out. He sips his drink again and searches desperately for something to talk about; for the love of god, anything will do.
"What happened to your arm?"
The moment he says it, he wants to take it back, again; there's been a lot of that recently. Last time he tried asking about her scar, she'd refused to answer. Why would bringing it up now do any good?
Victoria stares at him, then looks down at her arm, turning it so that the soft, paler underside with the scar is facing up. Michael wonders if she genuinely didn't know what he was talking about for a moment, not just because her mind was still on the body they found, but because she has so many of those scars. For a seasoned fighter like herself, he wouldn't be surprised if it was simply one out of many, just like her hand.
"You…don't have to answer that," he offers quietly, surprising himself yet again.
Her ruby eyes lift to meet his gaze, as if assessing whether he means it. Something regretful shifts in her expression, and she flips her arm back over to a natural resting position with a sigh.
"It was from the first person I ever killed," she says bluntly. "A bandit woman, leading a group of them to attack a village. I never learned her name." Pausing, she adds like an afterthought, "I was sixteen."
The short, frank delivery sends several thoughts through his mind in quick succession.
First, he thinks back to the night they'd rescued Kaidan from the mines—rather, the early morning after. Somehow, they'd gotten onto the topic of the lives they'd both taken, at some point or another. He probably started it.
"I remember them all," she said then. He hadn't exactly doubted her—even then, he did not doubt her sincerity, as misplaced as it may be sometimes—but he knows now that she truly meant it.
Second, just like all the times she's gotten injured in the time that he's known her, it happened in the act of protecting someone else.
Third…
Sixteen. That was how old he was when he left his magi family to search for his heritage. He'd seen death, he'd even seen some of his older mentors kill to defend the guild, but he definitely hadn't had to carry that burden when he was sixteen. Over the next few years, yes, but not then.
Taking extra care to keep his voice level, he says, "I was under the impression that Demon Hunters hunted demons…not criminals."
"We—they're supposed to," she agrees; he pretends he didn't notice her stumble. "We were cadets in training, sent to the area to track down a demon. The bandits were aware of its presence. They attacked and brought with it the demon, who was lured there by the people's fear." One hand presses absently over the scar. "I took down the leader, but the rest got away in the moment. Luckily, the Knights were able to come in soon after and round up most of the stragglers before they could flee the area."
Her hand squeezes tighter, the look in her eyes far away, and he keeps quiet, sensing that there might be more that she has to say.
Finally, she continues, "But you're right. We were trained to fight demons. We weren't trained to fight people." This time, she doesn't correct her use of 'we', too caught up in the memories. "Cases of possessed individuals aren't impossible, but we were rarely assigned those as cadets, and even then, they fought without human intelligence.
"That woman killed two cadets that I'd known for the last five years of my life. I ate with them, bunked with them, trained alongside them." Her shoulders rise and fall with a short, terse sigh. "And then they were gone, and I just…" With a sardonic upward twist of her lips, she says dryly, "I blacked out for a moment there, because all I remember is looking down at the body after it was done. It definitely wasn't what you might call self defense."
"No," he finds himself saying, "but I would definitely call that defense of others."
Her gaze flickers up to him in surprise, before she closes her eyes tiredly. "Yes, well, it wasn't the last time that I…lost my rational thinking to emotion on the job. It was just a different time that the consequences actually mattered." Distaste tugs at her expression. "And even then, they didn't. Not really."
He tilts his head, deeply curious now. "Oh?" She gives him a warning look, though, and he raises his hands. "Fine, fine…You can't just say things like that and not expect me to ask, though."
Victoria rolls her eyes, spearing the last piece of her cake with her fork. "Of course not. You always have been nosy." She finishes off the cake. Her voice is surprisingly gentle, perhaps softened by memories, as she says, "Maybe another time."
Intrigued, he files that away for future reference as he delicately peels away the paper wrapping of his muffin.
"Sixteen is awfully young for something that heavy," he murmurs, studying her carefully.
She draws in a sharp breath, and remains frozen like that for a moment. Then she exhales slowly.
"I became a cadet younger than most," she explains. "The typical recruitment age is thirteen or fourteen. I was tall and strong for my age, so I was admitted at eleven." Lifting her head to stare blankly into the street traffic, she says aloud, "I suppose I might've been a little hasty. Between the two Hunters who recruited me, one of them made the offer, but the other was reluctant. I was persuasive enough to get them to let me accept, though."
"Having second thoughts now?"
He hadn't meant it as a jab, though it sort of came out that way, and she bristles for a second. Then she seems to deflate, broad shoulders slumping.
"No," she says, weighing the word with great care. "I don't regret it, if that's what you're asking. There was…" She sets her fork down on the empty plate. "Good, along with the bad. A lot of good. And I don't think I can bring myself to wish that the good never happened, even if it means undoing the bad."
Having been through both highs and lows himself, Michael knows just how much resolve it takes to say that. And he's never known Victoria, earnest sometimes to a fault, to say something she doesn't mean—unlike himself.
"Well," he says bracingly, "that's how you know you've had a good adventure."
Lifting an eyebrow, she hums skeptically. "That's…debatable. Lately, though, I've been wondering how I'll remember this one."
So has he. "Whatever happens, I'm certain that it'll be memorable," he says; that much, he's confident in. "You've got me here, after all!"
"Oh yes, I'm sure I'll have the gray hairs to prove it," she retorts, though without any heat.
They'll remember the tense first meetings, the fights, the groundbreaking discoveries. Those will be the stories they tell, the details that will matter to anyone listening.
But the moments in between, the late night conversations over tea, the hours spent fixing up the shop with amateur carpentry, the friendly bickering and debates in between other tasks, the small discoveries of everyone's favorite drinks and their nervous tics and their minorly infuriating bad habits, the moments where someone yawns and suddenly the whole group starts falling asleep on their feet…
They'll remember those, too.
Love that Michael's response to finding a dead body is to just. double down on the flirting or whatever that was LMAO
(to be fair to him, Victoria must have objectively nice arms. I don't make the rules.)