Chapter Text
March, 1207, Remote Town of Alster, Northern Erebonia
Lechter, quite deliberately, is late arriving in Alster. It ensures two essential outcomes—first, it allows him to make a sweeping entrance into the town square atop his quite delightful newest toy. Second, and more importantly, it pisses Claire off.
Pissed off is a thousand times better than the blank-eyed exhaustion she’s shown every time he’s seen her in the last six months. Pissed off is an achievement worthy of record in the history books. Pissed off is, quite indisputably, a victory.
And she’s definitely pissed off.
“I told you this was time sensitive,” she snaps at him.
Lechter fans the flames, leaning back in his seat and pushing his sunglasses up to hold back his hair. “Ah, but how was I to resist the lure of the open road and the wind in my hair?”
“Quite easily, if you’d wanted to. How much did that thing cost you?”
Ah, frugal Claire. He can work with frugal Claire. He lifts his hands in an elaborate shrug. “Mira is mira. I have all these bank accounts—some of them even in the same name—and mira just keeps appearing in them. I might as well spend it.”
An eye roll. Yes! He hasn’t had an eye roll since—
Well, since before.
“I’m a police officer, idiot. Don’t tell me about your nefarious income.”
Lechter mimes looking back, forth, up, around, peeking glances at her to see if he’s getting a reaction. “Are we on a train? I don’t see a train. You can’t arrest me if we’re not on a train, right?”
“The RMP has jurisdiction outside—” she begins and then stops, rubbing her hand across her forehead. “You’re trying to distract me from that ridiculous bike.”
Lechter claps his hand to his chest. “Oh, Claire, you’ll hurt her feelings. She’s my precious girl and I adore her. I’ve decided to call her Lulu. I knew a Lulu once—”
“Major Arundel.”
Aha. That’s Claire’s Serious Voice.
He heaves a sigh. “I suppose you’re going to want to tell me why we’re here.”
“We need to go into the basin.”
Of course they do. Oh, yay, let’s run around the Osgiliath Basin and pretend the end of the world wasn’t looming over it half a year ago. Just what he wanted when he rolled out of bed this morning.
Or maybe that was yesterday morning. Had he actually got round to sleeping last night? Sometimes it all gets a bit fuzzy.
“I’ve had a team surveying the area since the Tuatha vanished. There was…debris. They found an artifact.”
“Isn’t that a problem for the church?”
Claire stares at him. “Not if we get there first.”
Ah. Time sensitive. The idea is intriguing—a nice little Ancient artifact of their very own. There are, well, possibilities.
But he’s meant to be resisting that sort of thinking now. Cautiously, he asks, “And when we find it?”
“I’m going to shoot it into little bits. Then the church can have it.”
“A solution lacking in your usual elegance.” He can see her point, though. If it fell from that place, survived the end of so many dreams and nightmares, he doesn’t trust anyone with it, not even the church. He glances up at the sky, still surprised and relieved to see it isn’t still floating above them like it floats in his nightmares.
Alster feels quiet. Lechter isn’t sure what would happen if they went into the shops. Alster’s one of those places that prides itself on being honourable. They probably would get served, but it might be in silence.
He’s getting sick of those silences, of all the places that go quiet the moment he steps over the threshold. He’s not meant to be recognisable at all, let alone notorious.
“Do you need supplies?” he asks.
Claire shakes her head. “I always make sure I’m fully stocked before I leave.”
So does he, these days. Luck is a little harder to come by when you’re widely despised.
He pats the seat behind him. Claire gives him a Look.
“I have a car. Or perfectly serviceable legs.”
“I have a high-speed off-road vehicle with more style in its smallest gear than—”
“Style,” Claire repeats flatly. “It’s an orbal bike with a truly garish paint-job.”
“Ssh. Lulu’s a sensitive soul. Don’t hurt her feelings. Come on. There are monsters out there and priests to beat to the punch. I’ll drive, you shoot.”
“This is a terrible idea,” she mutters but swings up behind him anyway.
“All my ideas seem terrible at first. That’s the genius of them.”
Her response is lost in the noise of the engine. The trail down to the heart of the basin would have been pure fun if it were anywhere else, especially when all the foolish monsters left in their wake come chasing after them at once and Claire goes from taking pot shots to standing behind him, knees braced against his shoulders as she lays down mathematically precise cover fire in every direction, monsters popping out of existence like fireworks. By the time they hit the bottom of the basin, Lechter is laughing too hard to hear her clearly expressed opinion of him. He pulls up in a flare of dust and lays his head against the wheel in time to avoid a kick to the back of the head.
“—and I will shove that Scent quartz of yours so far up your right nostril it will spend the next decade rattling around in the empty space where your brain is supposed to be,” Claire finishes. Lechter still can’t stop laughing, even though his eyes are starting to sting with it. Since the age of thirteen, he has devoted a significant proportion of his life to getting a reaction—any reaction—out of Claire Rieveldt. He prefers laughter, but murderous rage is satisfying in its own way.
There are two RMP officers standing to attention by a car a few metres away and they both have that look on their face—the one he hasn’t seen for a while—which proclaims they’re now ready to throw themselves in front of a speeding train to defend Major Rieveldt’s honour. Excellent. Claire deserves acclaim. He has no illusions about himself—he is, at best, ridiculous, at worst, treacherous. He deserves all the consequences which will eventually catch up with him. But Claire—well, Claire is better than him. She’s spent so long living up to other people’s expectations that she doesn’t know how to stop and he just wants to see her live without doubt or reservation.
“I apologise for Major Arundel,” Claire rolls out and he doesn’t need to look up to hear that she’s switching into bland military mode. It’s not the first time he’s heard that phrase, after all. One of his proudest achievements was when Millium told him that Claire sometimes says it in her sleep.
He hopes Millium’s okay. She’s in Bareahard still, he thinks. He and Claire both received very formal missives from the office of Duke Albarea to inform them of her resurrection—made less formal by the messy comments scrawled across the bottom and the bags of crumbling rainbow cookies that came with them. She’ll find them when she’s ready, he’s sure. He doesn’t know when that will be.
Okay, maybe he won’t look up yet, not until his eyes are less damp.
“Come on, Lechter. We can walk the rest of the way.”
The RMP officers are getting back into their car. Claire shrugs at his curious look.
“Just in case we do end up fighting a dominion.”
“No witnesses, no crime. Finally, she learns from my wisdom.”
“Just hope we get there first. If I have to face Gaius being disappointed at me, I will shoot you.”
“Why me? Shoot him.”
Claire sighs. “Could you really shoot Gaius? In cold blood? Knowing that Aidios was watching?”
“I’m sure I could find some other way to distract him. I could—oh, I could lick him.”
Claire drops her face into her palm. “Lechter, we do not lick Class VII.”
He waggles his eyebrows at her. “Unless they’re Rean, right? You would happily lick Rean.”
“I do not want to lick Rean Schwarzer.”
“You totally did.” One of the only entertaining aspects of the last few months has been watching the Rean Effect fade to little more than residual embarrassment for so many people. Maybe it’s the loss of Valimar, maybe it’s that the kid obviously finally got laid and the aura of unattainability has faded. Whatever the cause, Lechter’s going to be able to tease Claire about it forever.
“At least I’m not having an early midlife crisis,” Claire says, which is a valiant attempt to change the subject.
Lechter points at himself. “Me?”
“Purple. Orbal. Bike.”
“I like to think of her as a delicate shade of orchid.”
“Doesn’t change the point. You never spend excessively.”
Lechter shrugged. “Well, I mean, what was I saving it for?”
“The rest of your life?”
The words sit in the heavy air for a moment. Then they both laugh, bitter and honest.
“Where’s this artifact, then?”
Claire glances down at her ARCUS. “It should be right over there—I’ve never seen readings like this. It should be obvious—”
“Or glowing?” Lechter adds, staring ahead at the distinctly sparkling item that’s just come into view ahead of them. “Did you notice there are no monsters here?”
“Yes.”
Of course she did. He’s seen Claire drunk, despairing, broken-hearted, but never less than competent.
The sparkling thing is an rounded metallic object, its sides elaborately decorated. It looks both very old and very active.
“I feel like shooting that might just provoke it,” Lechter comments warily.
“They told me it was inactive.”
“Either they were wrong or it just woke up.” He draws his sword and Claire’s got her gun in her hand, pointed at the sparkling thing. Carefully, they both edge closer.
There’s a noise, a sharp reverberating chime. He’s got his ARCUS in his hand before it fades away and Claire’s already punching in a number to hers.
“Rean, I’m sorry for calling without notice but do you have Gaius’ number? We’re in a rather urgent…”
The artifact is opening, its sides peeling away like petals. As it does, a cube rises up, arcs of light flashing up around it.
Shit. He’s read the reports from Liberl, and he’s got a nasty feeling he know what this is. He’s really wishing he’d made the effort to save a few more numbers out of the database, but he’s never been devout enough to want a priest on speed dial. Maybe someone in the SSS might be able to put him in touch with Wazy, assuming they don’t end the call the moment they hear his voice.
Claire’s snapping information. “Active artifact in the Osgiliath Basin. Resembles Intelligence Division photographs of Liberlian Recluse Cube. Lechter and I—some RMP soldiers on the rim. Don’t come yourself—get someone from the Grals—”
The artifact chimes again and with the sound, the world twists, blurring sidewards and around into darkness.