Arc F1.10 | Chapter 22: We All Think Each Other A Wee Bit Stupid Here

“Majörniel,” Wander said, barely removing his eyes from Fawnreen and her odd little second. “What seems to be the problem?”

In no world did Wander think that Fawnreen could ever be part of some faction that was working against him, or even working to overthrow the position he held, as he sometimes suspected at least one of the groups he knew about wanted. Did the two butt heads occasionally? Yes, but that was nothing new—the two of them had known one another since they were children, after all. While they would never be anything so familiar as friends, they had a long history of being honest with one another—Fawnreen had actually been one of the first people to tell Wander he would be an idiot if he married his now-ex-wife, long before they had been anything more than people introduced by their parents, in order to see where things went.

“That woman is not someone who will ever be supportive. Not to you, and perhaps more importantly, not to any child you may share,” he could remember Fawnreen saying, the woman’s eyes glinting in a way that Wander had only ever been able to think of as some result of womanly instinct. It was always a little odd to see it coming from someone like Fawnreen, who while capable of a soft, womanly and maternal energy, was someone who, physically speaking, screamed butch and brutish, with her height and thick muscles and numerous scars.

Since they were young, the woman had kept her hair shorn, although every so often, she had instead sported tight braids, only the smallest bit of length falling across her neck. Currently, it was shaved in places, an intricate design from the religion the woman—and a large number of her officers—followed barely visible between her deep brown skin and curly black hair. Sometimes, Wander wondered who she was trying to look good for, as he had never seen her express interest in anyone.

Regardless of all that and the fact that he trusted Fawnreen implicitly, this was a delicate situation. Across from him, Majörniel looked one second from launching himself at the pair of officers, while it was clear that Fawnreen’s second was prepared to use his abilities to defend his boss, if needed.

While Wander had heard stories of the young man’s abilities, he had no desire to see them used in person, thank you.

“Nothing I can’t handle,” Majörniel said, his voice a cut of ice that had Fawnreen’s green eyes narrowing.

“I do not need to be handled, Majörniel,” the woman replied, her weight shifting to tuck her second behind her—an indication that she didn’t want Majörniel to realize he was preparing to use his abilities, or a sign to the young man that he should stand down? “As I said, I must speak with Wander.”

“Wander is busy,” his former friend said, and really, did Majörniel really expect that to work on anyone, let alone someone like Fawnreen? Wander would like to say the man’s tone held some sort of warning note within it—some sign to Fawnreen that, if she didn’t leave, things would get bad for her and this was when she should take her leave. Aside from the strangeness of the situation, however, Wander couldn’t say there was anything particularly odd or telling in the man’s words, however—no clear sign that Fawnreen should be reading anything extra into what the man was saying.

What Majörniel was saying was a bit strange—they were words that gave away that something was going on. In no way did they read as anything so obvious as a warning—and really, while Wander was fully aware that Fawnreen was brilliant, Majörniel had never held such opinions himself. Instead, the man tended to think of her as someone who was all muscle and no thoughts; as a result, it was insane that he thought anything subtle would work with the woman. It wouldn’t work, but if Fawnreen had thought something odd happening before, now she knew something was up, and Wander could see the thoughts swimming through her mind, trying to determine what the fuck his second was on about.

For the first time since he had broken free of the bathroom, Fawnreen’s eyes slipped his way. “You don’t look busy to me. Meeting to get to? I can walk and talk, despite Majörniel’s general opinion that I am incapable of doing two things at once.”

The other man had said that, hadn’t he? A little over a decade back, after Fawnreen had blown up a building during a fight—her own abilities had not combined well with those of the criminal she’d been chasing down, nearly killing both of them—Majörniel had made a number of snide comments at Fawnreen’s hospital bedside about how brainless she was. The way her abilities had combined with one of the criminal’s had left her in what they’d originally assumed to be a coma. Only after she had woken had she revealed that, despite the quietude of her brainwaves, she had actually been conscious and listening the whole time—and it had, quite literally, been the whole time. Even now, years later, Fawnreen only ever managed to nap, something within her brain shifting during that fight until she needed only a few hours of sleep every day, her brain only able to shut down for twenty or so minutes at a time.

Emilia had taken to sending the woman things to read after coming to visit Fawnreen, shortly after she properly woke up. The girl had also taken to muttering about how great it would be to need so little sleep, although at the time, the doctors had presumed the side effects would be temporary. Given how little the lack of sleep seemed to bother Fawnreen, Wander had occasionally wondered if Emilia had helped her make it permanent. In a rather terrible twist of fate, Emilia had been sexually assaulted only a little after this, her own ability to sleep now compromised by nightmares.

None of this was relevant, except for the reality that, while Fawnreen and Majörniel had never particularly gotten along, with how much negativity his former friend—who even by this point, several years before he would become Chief Officer, Wander had begun to suspect was part of something—had spouted negative opinion about the seemingly unconscious Fawnreen while standing beside her prone body, none of them sure if she would ever wake up…

Well, to say that Fawnreen had been avoiding being in the same room as the guy this last decade was an understatement. Wander’s only saving grace was that he had told the man off; then, after Fawnreen woke, he had told her that he had his reasons for keeping Majörniel around.

“Believe me, if I could, I would be rid of him,” he had told the woman a few years back, Fawnreen finally asking why he hadn’t gotten rid of Majörniel as a friend, back when he had yet to becoming Chief Officer.

At the time, before Emilia had accidentally revealed all the corruption within the city, Wander had simply thought his friend being an ass, speaking about Fawnreen that way exceptionally rude, but what could he really do? They had been coworkers, and while Wander could have cut off their friendship, they still would have needed to work together. He had been keeping the peace, all while holding a growing suspicion within his heart that, if he upset Majörniel, whatever something his friend was involved in might become a problem for him, his career, and everyone he cared for.

Sometimes, Wander thought he would have been better off risking whatever blowback he received from the faction Majörniel belonged to, rather than remain friends with him. Certainly, sitting with Fawnreen in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant, where hopefully no one would see them conversing so privately, Wander had wished he had dropped Majörniel as a friend years earlier.

Yet, he had sat there and had the audacity to ask, “Can you trust me on that?” as though by not cutting Majörniel off, back when he had spoken so terribly of her, Wander hadn’t lost all right to ask that Fawnreen trust him.

The woman’s bright-green eyes had been lit up by the mood lighting, flickering in the dingy place. It hadn’t been the sort of place frequented by criminals, as so many similar places were; instead, it was the sort of place where people who had fallen out of their career path gathered. To leave one’s career, either through choice or some sort of scandal or lack of aptitude as time went on, was a highly controversial thing in Lüshan, leaving many of those who fell into that category to gather amongst themselves, seeking to create a community of outsiders where, ironically, everyone was allowed.

During both his own years working the streets, as well as throughout Fawnreen’s career, they had both made a point to never treat such people the way so many officers did: as scapegoats; as people not worth listening to, either as witnesses or as the accused. As a result, they had often used such locations, which would never be frequented by good citizens, as a meeting place. Their friendship was in no way secret, but especially in the years since he had become Chief Officer, there had become something nice about having someone on the outside who knew that something was wrong.

Wander had never told Fawnreen the whole of it, knowing that she was the sort of person to go looking for clues as to what was happening. Mostly, he had never wanted her to be in danger. At the moment, he rather wished that he had told her at least a little of what was happening.

Still, she probably knew enough—knew that Majörniel had long ago ceased being someone Wander trusted, for instance, and that in no world should he be trusted by her.

“Sorry, not possible,” the man in question was saying, still trying to sell some ridiculous story about how Wander was busy and couldn’t even chat while walking back to his office.

It really was quite ridiculous. It was also the perfect example of why, despite the ever-increasing tension of the Stands, Wander had never felt too inclined to worry about what was happening: everyone who was involved in whatever was happening seemed to have no idea what they were doing. There was bumbling ones way through a coup, and then there was… this.

This was embarrassing, honestly, and Wander… wasn’t actually sure what to do. If he pushed, Majörniel might throw a fit or decide, fuck it, and attack them. If he didn’t tell the man off, whatever had brought Fawnreen all the way up there would go unsaid and—

And, actually.

“Majörniel?” Wander asked, tilting his head and eyeing up his second. “I had thought that, with the xphern transmission network down and this, what was it you called it? Potential risk to my safety, or something of the sort, that the entrances to the Stand had been locked down? Didn’t you say you sent someone to shut the entrances up, for the foreseeable future?”

It was a guess that the entrance wasn’t actually shuttered. It would have been perfectly possible for Fawnreen to have brute forced her way through, but the woman’s abilities took a bit of a toll on her. Combined with the total lack of screams or alarms going off, Wander was willing to bet that the entrance was, instead, fully open for people to come and go as necessary.

Part of it was likely that there was no actual risk to his life, and while Majörniel could try to order the entrances closed, it would create a complication as they would be completely shuttered.

No one in.

No one out.

In other words, if people associated with his faction needed to get in and out of the Stand, they would be unable to do so… unless whoever was manning at least one entrance was on their side. As the entrances were manned by a mixture of high-ranking security officers and secretaries, each manning a collection of doors and working with four to six people at any given time…

Well, it would have been possible to organize the schedule to make sure at least one entrance was staffed by people connected to Majörniel’s faction—Wander had been inserting his own spies into the various departments and sectors of the Drinarna for years, seeking to learn as much as he could about the situation, and knew that the faction his former friend had given his allegiance to was one of the more influential amongst the Drinarna. Every department of the Drinarna, save those managed by Fawnreen and Calioprus’, had at least two or three Drinarna who were loyal to Majörniel’s faction within them, and it had been clear for a while that they had been focusing their recruitment efforts into a few specific departments, including the one that managed the secretaries who manned the entrances to the various Stands.

Hence, it should have been possible to make sure people loyal to them were managing ant least one of the entrances—that was, if this situation had been planned. Not for the first time, Wander was left wondering if this had been nothing but a coup of opportunity. Something else had happened—another faction making a move, perhaps—and it had forced the hands of other factions, none of whom were quite prepared for a takeover.

That would explain more than a few things, and as Majörniel sputtered something about sending someone to check on that—and at least he wasn’t stupid enough to try and claim Fawnreen had broken through security without the Stand’s alarm system being triggered—Wander cut him off.

“Majörniel,” Wander said, throwing all the concern and trust he could manage into his voice as he stared into his former friend’s eyes. The good thing about the man thinking him a little daft was the reality that he quite honestly thought Majörniel didn’t realize he knew anything about the factions. As a result, Wander thought the other man a little daft in return, because really? How could he not look at this situation and not know that something was wrong!?

“Yes, Wander?”

“I think… you should go and check the situation with the entrances personally.”