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| Details |
| Author: | Athena |
| Summary: | Finley continues to investigate into the oddity of Quinn MacBride, while he also looks after Hana Levesworth, from afar. Personal/Romance Plot. 3400~ words. |
| Rating: | M for Mature 17+ |
Arc: The Bride Will Fall
February 19th - Tess and Sen
Finley kisses the sweet gloss off her lips, and lets her pull him closer onto her, her warm, bare arms around his neck. The scent of lilies mixes with the lotus lotion on her hands with their harp and bow calluses dragging over the skin of his back. Her lavender sheets are soft and cool against their bodies as he presses against her, fitting her beautiful curved arch to him. Her song for him plays next to them, and she hums the dark notes into his mouth, straight to his heart. He has everything, as he runs his hand down her long braid –
No.
Finley breaks the kiss, lurching backwards, to see Quinn MacBride's face where Hana’s should be for a second before he's gasping awake into the darkness of his room in the Stormwind townhouse.
He groans and puts a hand over his face. “Fuckin’ hell.” His heart wants out of his chest and he can't blame it. There's a strange, unsettled feeling in him after that, hard to explain. Almost as if he's somehow been unknowingly unfaithful. Which doesn't make sense. She’s not his, not in any way. He can’t truly say that he’s hers, as if she’s claimed him and holds him. But there's no arguing apparently with some part of him that says she has, and he knows it.
Other parts of him also want a say, but he's used to ignoring those.
He’s not touching that at all. Not after that nightmare. Finley reaches over for his watch. Six hours of sleep. Or near enough. That's plenty. Might as well wake up.
He spares a brief moment to regret that he won't really dream about Hana. Not that he deserves to. He doesn’t. But, it doesn't stop him from hoping. He hasn't stopped thinking about her before he falls asleep, every night, and he knows he isn't going to.
He shouldn't have thought about that, not right now, waking up. It's half out before he can stop it, to wonder – does she still think about him in the mornings when she wakes up, is she thinking about him right now –
Don't. Please.
She doesn't. She won't. She won't think of Finley anymore. She'll remember the Painter, and his casual dismissiveness, how cruel he was even in his politeness, the silky painted Liar, and she'll despise him, and if she thinks about him in the morning it will be to spite him. And that he will deserve.
The best thing he can do now is get up and get back to work.
Finley drags the pencil over the canvas again, straightening the line of the building he’s technically looking at, and supposedly drawing. The graphite breaks and chips, dusting and catching on the miniscule squares of the texture below it. The February wind blows it across into a softer touch of barely visible gray.
Hana’s harp notes ping against it, curved from around all the winding stone Stormwind streets, and into this wide alley, where she couldn’t possibly know or see him, and where he can hear her.
He's not even listening to the music really. He's trying to hear something else entirely, to catch the way her fingers touch the strings, pluck out the notes. Are they too slow? Is she cold? Tired? Sad? Did she speed up? Is she rushing through it because she's nervous? Has someone made her uncomfortable? Or is it something else, a different sort of thrill, a light catching her attention with a new fan or someone she –
It's torture.
It’s also nothing a gentleman would do. Not a real one. Skulking around the corner, out of her sight, keeping tabs on her like this? He’s spying on her. That’s what it is. It’s lowly and he can tell himself he’s protecting her, watching out for her, and that’s true. But if that was all he wanted, he could assign a guard. Someone she doesn’t know. He could have her win a contest for a free vassal for a year. Something, anything. But then he wouldn’t be standing here, listening to her, would he? That’s what he really wants. He wants this. He’s sneaking a sip of her. He tells himself he’ll stop.
He can’t.
Actually, the physical torture was easier than this.
He has a feeling that if he told his old trainer Sir about any of this, he’d probably end up in some windowless white room with a long lecture about deception and weaknesses. He’s doing everything he shouldn’t. Every night, when he thinks about her, and he always does, he’s keeping her as that pressure point, that forbidden thought that leaks into his dreams and sneaks into his thoughts. When he does this, follows her around to listen for her harping, he makes it impossible for himself to let her go.
Maybe that’s the point. Maybe this is who he is, after all. He just didn’t know it.
He let go of so many others so easily. The one time he let his guard down at all, years ago just before and after everything changed with House Fallon, and it proved how that would go, he made it thicker. Impossible to get to him through it. He can flirt with anyone, and feel nothing, no matter how he acts, no matter what he says, no matter what his body does. He knows that. It’s why the offer of the Painter Gentleman would work. He can use himself for the House.
But.
Hana.
It didn’t matter what he did. It was like she knew the back way in. Over the wall. She could fire an arrow through the tiniest sliver of a break in his guard. He could build it again and again, and she’d shatter it as many more times. He can’t let her go. He can’t stop. He has no idea how to get her out of him. He doesn’t even know the first place to start trying.
But he can sneak. He can make sure she doesn’t know he’s here. And –
He catches the young woman's eye as she slows on her walk, curious about what he’s doing. Young 20s, dark hair tied up tight because she works for a living, with a fresh sort of look, but not typically considered pretty, and likely to find attention flattering. It won’t take him long to build up a quick rapport. All he needs is a few minutes. A simple excuse of how he can’t move from where he is, but can she hear that music from a little over the way? It’s sweet and pretty, isn’t it? Could she take a circuit down that way, and drop off a tip for him, as an appreciative artist to another? He’ll happily add in a silver or two for the trouble of sending her a little out of her way on his behalf.
Six minutes, no more than that, and she’s on her way, ready to add to Hana’s tips with a smile and a fondness for the Painter.
Sometimes it’s even quicker and easier. The runners and couriers. Servants on the way to market willing to make another quick few silver.
He can never send too much at once, but it will add up. It’s the least he can do. He has a feeling that after what he did, everything from him ended up tainted. She hasn’t acted like she has the funds she should with the commission money she ought to have from Isla’s or from Count Amerith’s patronage, which means she either isn’t touching it, or worse – she gave it away. He can’t blame her. No, it’s not her he blames. Not for any of it.
So, a few silver here, and a few small golds there, as much as he can get away with, every time he can over the days she’s out.
He has to wait for the paperwork he’s requested either way, so he might as well wait here. He’s going to think about her anyway.
It doesn’t do anything to help the roiling itch in the back of his mind that wants to grab her, tell her everything about the MacBrides, and what he’s seen, and hear what she thinks about it. It’s a mad urge. But, Hana knows people. She sees so much more than most people ever do, and patterns under patterns. He’s watched her shoot a straight line of thought through nuances and tricks.
What if she sees through his?
That gut clench again. That frisson under it.
No, she won’t. Not that one. She’ll believe him. In the worst twist of the knife; she trusted him, which means she believed him when he lied, and when it shattered what she thought he was. He made it seem real enough. He covered all the corners. He knew what she trusted, and he ruined it. That’s the other side of knowing how to build rapport. It’s knowing how to tear it down.
Is that all what Quinn is doing, somehow? Using what people expect to build enough trust, make it seem real enough, to get people to believe she’s who she says she is each time? Could it just be a very good lie? Avrenne isn’t infallible, and might not recognize every single face she sees if a person lies well enough. But could Finley have caught it when she didn’t, on so short a meeting each time? He clocked her both times at a glance, less than a second and he was sure of it. Like when he saw her instead of –
Finley doesn’t want to think about the nightmare of the Hana-Quinn, but maybe it was his mind trying out an idea. What if it was that simple? She was wearing a magical disguise over another face? And somehow Finley wasn’t seeing the illusion? Avrenne can detect magic, but usually an active cast, or if she’s looking for it. A low level passive illusion, she could have missed that. But why did it miss Finley? He tries to remember if he felt that itch in the back of his mind each time he saw Quinn, and now he can’t, not really. Maybe he did. He didn’t always pay attention to it, not back then, and he didn’t have a good name for it when he did feel it. He might have only thought of it as an odd feeling, or an unsettled sensation, which he knows he did have at least the second time he saw Qadira.
He’s spinning around in his own head again, like he has been since the Custom’s Office.
That urge again, stronger, in his chest. Longing. Hana. If he could talk to her. Hear her voice. Her laughter. He’s there in her room, leaning over her bed, and she’s giving him a code name, imagining them together on a circuit of festivals. The Arched Harp and Blanque. Partners in festival archery crime. Partners in –
He puts a hand on his face. Breathes in the scent of graphite.
Listens to her playing, streets away, where he can’t go, can’t touch, can’t.
That is never going to happen. She is never going to look at him that way again.
His hand shakes. For a moment, he can’t breathe again, and he forces himself to go blank. Let everything go down deep. Become nothing.
He stares at the lines on the canvas. Hears the music. Her hands.
Don’t.
Wait. Hana and her music. The way she left off the notes of his song when she wrote it down the first time. Don’t think about the whole of it, just that. That technique. What if that was what Quinn was doing, somehow, magically? If she was using something that could blur her true notes until people couldn’t hear her whole song, only some parts of it, so that when they tried to remember the song, they never got the right one? Something that made a buzzing sound in Finley’s head around her. An enchantment? Would that be subtle enough for Avrenne to miss? It still wouldn’t explain why it wouldn’t work on Finley. He thinks about Hana, and how her arrows always go right through his armor, cut right through his guard. Maybe he has something that interferes with it. Maybe he sees just right through the wrong crack.
Someone in Dalaran – no, not Dalaran. That’s too fucking shifty for Dalaran. No, this will be dirtier than that. He’ll have to be quieter, and more subtle. The MacBrides are local, still. They probably would have started local. He’ll need to be careful, because this is also his own local turf. But it’s a place to start, finally.
Thanks, sweetheart.
He should go now. He shouldn’t stay here, listening to her, cataloguing it like he’s annotating a log of her. This is barely on the line of looking after her, a dragged line of broken graphite he’s smearing and chipping and blurring every passing day.
It’s all too much today. She’s plucking at the notes like everything’s fine, perfectly fine, everything’s enthusiastic and wonderful, but it’s not her. It’s not right. She isn’t fine. Her hair is up too high. Her smile’s too big. He doesn’t know if this is any better than it was three days ago when she started again, and she sounded like she was dragging every note out from somewhere inside her that exhausted her. Even her ponytail had drooped that day. It had sent a tremor through his hands, that he couldn’t touch her, couldn’t fix it. He can’t fix today’s either.
He can’t ever fix them. Can’t touch her.
The only time he can touch her is in his mind and in his dreams.
He redraws the same line again on the canvas, jaw clenched, stomach tight, knowing he’s going to do exactly that tonight.
Light, he’s such a bastard.
Three years ago, and Finley would have hit nothing but dead ends.
Now, he hits nothing but dead ends, but he knows that it’s wrong. It’s all so fucking wrong.
He has a sick feeling in his gut like it has all been chosen on purpose.
Not a single thing traces back to the MacBrides. The courier service went out of business two years ago, which might have been extremely suspicious and convenient, except that he was able to find the record for the delivery to their house of the exact day and the courier it was under – Sen Quade. As for Sen Quade, her papers show that she came in as a Lordaeron refugee on the same imperfect paperwork as hundreds of thousands, and then she died during the Nightmare when the Sleepers attacked, on the same block where Daisy’s apartment had been.
Finley has to put down the papers he collected from earlier.
As for Tess Qadira, whose financial expertise goes back several years – none of which seems to have any connection to the MacBrides, just like the mining deal and all of the subsequent benefits and influences have nothing to do with them – and who appeared to have not even sneezed within two hundred feet of a MacBride all her life, she’s dead, too. Died in the Cataclysm, in the Shattering, and it also has that same sick joke feel, as if someone’s mocking them, with her cause of death listed as being impaled by a fence due to a significant force.
There’s no way it's a coincidence.
Except, on paper, everything adds up to make it look like it is. The math works out. They had lives, and other things they did before and after. If they’re fake, then SI:7 wants their work. The only way Finley can figure out how they do it is the same way some of the spies in SI:7 do theirs – they make it real. Sometimes, that’s part of Finley’s job, to be the person who knows the truth who sells the lie. It’s like he told Hana – introductions are how Society gives credentials, and how it controls the flow of information. Finley, as a gentleman now, can be used to give false information and make it truth. Someone who needs an airtight identity can only really make one if they’re willing to put in the time to actually do it.
Which would make the MacBrides both insane and insanely dangerous.
It would mean that this Quinn MacBride had not one, but two entire identities she had spent years building and then maintaining, and she burned two of them, for the sole purpose – as far as he can tell – of forcing Avrenne into a corner to ensure she would need to send Joran Green to Northrend in her place. Put him on the boat, and give Brigitte MacBride the opportunity to lure him away, and marry him outside of any potential reach.
How could they have possibly fucking known?
And what are they doing now? Was it a coincidence that they were there at the Custom's Office on the same day? Did she know he was going to be there? Had she recognized him? He didn’t look at her after that moment, and he doesn’t know for sure if she did see him. It’s nearly impossible to do any real digging into what the MacBrides might be up to, but what little he’s been able to get appears to be entirely legitimate, of applications for trading contracts and business imports and exports, exactly the same as what Avrenne has been doing.
He remembers how he kept running into that strange phrase, over and over. Just a lucky family. It still sends a shiver through him, as the hair on the back of his neck stands up, and turns something over in his stomach.
But, on paper, he has nothing.
He remembers seeing a woman, from years ago, each time less than a few minutes, that he’s sure is the same woman using different names. Avrenne doesn’t remember her, and doesn’t think she’s the same woman. According to the papers, they’re not the same woman, and both of those women are dead. But the deaths are strange, and seem like they’re mocking House Esprit Fallon’s personal pains in a weird way. The woman is actually a MacBride, and now she’s in Pandaria. As far as he can tell she’s doing everything legitimately, and legally.
In the end, all he has is a bad feeling.
Avrenne won’t even let him get past a first sentence at this rate.
Finley puts a hand over his face and drags it down.
“If you have a concern on anything, Finley, you can bring it to me, aye? Ever.”
He straightens, setting his hands flat on the table, staring at the meaningless papers. Maybe it will sound like a bunch of nonsense and superstitious gut feelings with nothing to substantiate it, but Fallon will still hear him out.
There still won’t be a thing to do about it, but maybe if something does happen, or there’s a shift in the wind, there will be some sort of warning this time. It won’t be only Finley watching for it. Fallon at least is in Pandaria right now, where one or more of the MacBrides might be or will be, so if for any reason they had their eye on something wrong, Fallon could have his eye on them in turn.
Not that the MacBrides ever seem to get caught at doing anything wrong no matter how hard anyone looks.
Maybe that’s part of whatever magic they’re using. Maybe that’s why they use it. How many identities has this family made up and used because they have ways of making some of them have unremarkable faces that slip out of people’s memories? It can’t be all of them. This kind of thing would be risky. People would get suspicious if they couldn’t remember someone important. But Finley, as a servant, knows how often unimportant people easily slip into the background.
If they were only a strange family, maybe Finley would leave it well enough alone. Fallon has enough to worry about. But they made it personal when they came after Joran Green, when they set their “luck” of acquisitions on something Avrenne already had. Not that they hadn’t done her a favor in the long run. If Finley had known how it would have turned out, trading Green for Fallon, he can’t honestly say he’d go back and interfere. He can't truly say he wouldn't have helped the MacBrides.
But, they did hurt her. Stole from her. Humiliated her and aired her secret feelings to the world.
No, for that, he’ll make sure she has her vengeance, and her successes over them.
And protection from further meddling, however Finley has to make sure that happens. Whatever it takes.