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| Details |
| Author: | Athena |
| Summary: | Finley becomes a Finder for two days. And then he sorts out what he's found, as best he can. 5100~ words. Romance Plot. |
| Rating: | M for Mature 17+ |
February 23rd-25th: His and Hers
The sunrise is a surprise. Finley blinks at the sunlight, and the change of colors.
They’re going to wonder where he’s been all night at the townhouse. He’d had the change of clothes on him, left Levanter at home, just in case the gnome had needed to be tailed after the meet. It had been simple enough to seem to leave the tavern then double back, strip out of the gentleman’s suit, and into the spy’s. He’s been holding the invisibility for hours and hours.
This is exactly why it’s good that he isn’t at the main house anymore. He won’t have to explain these hours gone to the staff at the townhouse. He was out. He had business.
Finley digs around deeper in the bush. The deep gray brown leather meant to help turn a blade repels the branches easily enough.
He found a letter in a bush four hours earlier, and now he’s going to have check every bush in the entire fucking country.
Still hasn’t read the bush letter. Doesn’t know what it says. It’s killing him.
He made a critical mistake of reading the first letter he picked up. Of course, that was important. He had to read at least some of it. He needed to make sure it was the letter.
Dorinda Lane’s house was easy to find. The Lanes were at one point a larger family. Several of them died in various ways. He could tell. There were signs. Familiar signs. But Dorinda’s room was easy. She kept the letter out on a desk with other scattered papers. Her own diary. He didn’t touch that.
He did what he went there to do. Coal in her clean cotton pillowcase, freshly washed, recently mended. Sorry, Dorinda. Rocks in the cheese. Lemon juice in the milk. They had a few paintings in the living room. He set them all crooked for good measure. He swapped salt and sugar in containers. Mischief.
It took him longer to find where they kept a stash of money, but he found it. He slipped in the extra silvers and a lot more coppers that blended in with what was there already, what would easily cover the replacement of the spoiled food. Dropped a few more silvers in the couch cushions, in the hopes Dorinda might catch them, for the pillow. He remembers too well how it feels to live on the edge of things. They’d get the fear of the spoiled food, the sense of something having haunted the place. That’s all that matters for his rumor. They don’t have to actually not be able to replace the damage.
They didn’t seem to keep a ledger of money accounting to alter though, or at least not one he could find. Avrenne would have never been fooled by a trick like this. But, she kept a rigid household that most never did.
When he got to the letter in Dorinda’s room, he should have glanced at the top, and tucked it away.
That’s what he should have done.
There’s nothing in this bush except half a pie someone threw into it. He’s pretty sure. Onto the next bush. Some dog can get the pie.
He had no idea there were so many fucking bushes in Goldshire.
Instead of tucking the Dorinda found letter away, he read it, right there, where he could have been caught.
Dearest Blanque,
I wonder if you think of me, as I do of you. Do you ponder how I am, and wish you could gaze through my window at night to check? I don’t think I could reach yours if I tried. Though I have entertained the idea of leaving my curtains open for you, the risk of someone else peering inside is simply too great.
He’d briefly lost the ability to think, as his blood rushed south, sure that it was imminently necessary.
Light, could she read his mind?
No, if she could read his mind, none of this would be happening.
She just gets close enough that this is happening.
He shudders again anew, one hand on a branch. She wants to look in on him. She wants him to look in on her. She wants to leave her curtains open for him. Not a sip. Drink her down.
Sweet holy fucking Light, sweetheart.
But the ending of the letter had torn out a piece of his chest.
I don’t even know if you would come. Or if you care.
Your A.H.
His A.H., she calls herself.
She doesn’t know if he cares. But she still thinks of herself as his?
“I’m in love with you.”
“I loved you.”
The world had gone briefly gray in that strange bedroom.
He hasn’t read any of the others since. Too dangerous. He has to focus.
Eberhard Tanner’s place received the same treatment as the Lanes, although they kept more gold in their money jar, easier to make up the difference with a few dropped in.
But the mischief was a greater challenge. Four of them were home. Finley had to wait until they were asleep.
He burned some time circling around the Goldshire inn, and that was how he found a letter that had fallen into a crevice behind the mailbox. Above an egg he’s pretty sure is from last year’s Noblegarden. He couldn’t get to the egg. He’s not sure it’s physically possible for anyone to get to that egg. Which would explain why it’s still there.
But the letter was his.
So he took it.
If it had been as difficult as the egg, he’d probably still be there, or back there after the Tanners, fishing for the letter again. Nothing was going to stop him from getting his letters.
Eberhard’s letter was harder to find than Dorinda’s. He’d tucked it into a book on dairy farming techniques. Finley doesn’t want to know why. Eberhard sleeps deeply enough to not notice coal being tucked into his pillowcases, and that’s all that matters.
He didn’t read that letter either.
Finley straightens up from this no-letter bush, breathes. He’s technically invisible to most. Some might vaguely perceive a slight change in the air where his breath comes out in white puffs. Hours and hours holding the invisibility was one of the only things that Finley had managed to outpace experienced assassins and fighters in. Servant training advantage. He knew how to be invisible to most people even without magic tricks and shadows.
It’s freezing cold, and the frost has set in. Because sunrise. He’s been up for almost a full day. Don’t think about that. If he thinks about how tired he is, it will only get worse. He remembers this from running laps. He has to think only of the running. Wait, no. The finding. He’s not running right now. He’s finding. He has to think about finding.
He’s finding.
He’s losing daylight.
When did that happen?
Sunrise went away. Afternoon.
Now? Evening.
He made it into Stormwind City.
He found two more letters. Two. Two and a piece, maybe. He might be seeing things. He isn’t sure.
One, caught by a bush, on the road. Definitely a letter, definitely. Bushes. There are so many bushes between Goldshire and Stormwind. If she wants him to know about bushes, she has succeeded. Tree root? Revenge? These aren’t trees, Hana. Even Hana isn’t so much shorter than him for them to be trees. He thinks. There are no cliffs. Good or bad. He’ll have to check cliffs another time. How many cliffs are there in the kingdom of Stormwind?
Another letter by a bar. Practically a miracle no one found that one. Between two crates. There are so many crates. Not as many as bushes. Some of the crates have people. Finley can’t search those as easily. These bar crates, he wasn’t even going to look, but he thought he saw paper. He did. He saw paper, and it was paper, and there he was. Blanque. Dear Blanque. He didn’t read the rest.
The other. Is either a letter. Or he’s seeing things. It’s not a paper. It’s a piece? It was on a cobblestone. He squinted at it and he could swear he sees Your A.H. but he’s not sure he’s not seeing things.
He might be seeing things.
Finley leans back against a gray stone wall. It’s cold. He coughs. Loses the invisibility for three seconds, and fades back into it before anyone sees him again.
Townhouse close by. He should go in. They’re going to start to go from wondering to worrying soon. They don’t know about the MacBrides. But, security was tightened up. And now, Finley is out all night and all day, without warning.
He’s a grown man. He can do things.
Like sleep.
No, not like sleep. He opens his eyes. When did he close his eyes. He can’t close his eyes. He has to keep moving. If he stops running, he’ll know he’s tired. He’s not running. He’s finding. That’s right. Finding.
Two cities. It’s a lot of ground to cover.
Every second he isn’t looking is a second someone picks up one of his letters.
Finley pushes off the wall with a groan. He wanders, looking for crates. Bushes. Mailboxes. Lights. Everything else. He has found so many wrong things. So many other papers. Some of them might even be useful someday, but they’re not his.
He doesn’t want to go near the harbor. The wave. Geoff. Sophie. The townhouse. But, Hana might have gone near the harbor. He stops at the lion statue. It wasn’t this one in particular. He had to hold onto the statue. Fingers bled. All that stopped him and Isla from being pulled to their deaths. His gut twists. He hates it here.
He’s about to take another step when he sees paper.
Paper.
Letter?
There, in a small crevice by the lion paw. He opens it. My Dear Blanque.
He exhales. Stops reading. Letter to his lips. His letter. It’s his letter.
He’s finding. He found. He can’t stop. This is why he can’t stop. He has to find. She put them. Who knows how many there are?
Sunrise. Light.
Can’t. No more finding.
Townhouse.
No explanation. Business.
Finding.
Bed.
Curtains? Open? Why–
Hana.
Arms around. Pull down. Look at him again. Love.
Hana.
Six hours later and he wakes up with a pounding headache. He slept in his clothes. He smells like he slept in some of the crates and bushes he looked through. Worse.
Light have fucking mercy.
A shower, food, an unholy amount of coffee, and Finley returns to his room.
Rationally, he knows he can’t keep searching both places endlessly. She went into way too many random places, or the letters ended up in them somehow through wind or mischief. He has no idea what pattern she was going for so far. The letters themselves might hold clues.
He lays each letter out on his bed, in the order he found them, for lack of a better one yet, waiting for more information to put them in proper order as best he can. He didn’t see any date on any of the letters at the glance he’d given them, or the one he read. That’s something. He has no idea what.
The first one he makes himself read again. In the light of a new day, with sleep and coffee, he looks harder. Ponder? Do you ponder how I am.
The word rings differently on a second read. His Hana doesn’t talk like that. This doesn’t even seem like her handwriting. In fact, now he’s sure of it.
A touch of doubt rises in his gut. Logically, it could be that someone else wrote them. If they could get the names out of Hana. There’s nothing in the letter that’s specific to them except the names.
The MacBrides?
That makes the hair on his neck stand up.
“There is the chance you are being led.”
This would be a hell of a trap.
He doesn’t know if he hopes that it is, or not. If it is, then at least it would mean Hana isn’t writing to him, throwing the letters into the wild. But if it is – then. His chest goes cold. If they’ve done something to Hana. If they pulled her into their schemes. If they know what she means to him. If they’re using her. Rage so thick that it chokes him pulses through his entire body. House Esprit Fallon is a fortress. Avrenne will be safe. But Hana. She would have no protection. Nothing. Except him.
He breathes out. He doesn’t know that’s what this is. He’s jumping at shadows. If he’s about to point Avrenne at an all out war with the MacBrides, he better have more than one fucking letter and a suspicion they’re using Hana against him.
The mailbox letter. No date. Impossible to tell if it’s older or newer than the other one. Left outside, it’s aged differently than the one snatched up from an indoor table.
Dear Blanque,
I hate you. I hate you for making me feel this way. I hate the tone you spoke to me with that day. I hate you for using music against me. I hate feeling miserable. I hate writing this. I hate saying that I hate you. I hate feeling like I hate you but knowing that I don’t. I’m sorry. I’ll stop.
Still your A.H.
The rage bleeds out of him so fast he feels even colder without it.
Unless she’s fed exactly what to say to the MacBrides, or joined forces with them, this isn’t a trap. This one feels more like Hana. The closer he looks, the more he can see it. She’s disguising her handwriting, but she’s not professionally trained. There. That’s hers.
The ponder, the wording. The handwriting. The vagueness. The code names. She’s obscuring the details.
He has a feeling it isn’t because he’s meant to find them. This is a different kind of cleverness. It’s because if someone does, they won’t know that it’s Finley Boutille and Hana Levesworth. She’s protecting his reputation, not trying to lure him into a trap.
That’s worse.
She should hate him. She almost did. He brushes a finger over the apology.
Don’t. Don’t apologize. Don’t ever forgive me.
She’s too sweet, too good for someone like him. She always was. He had no right to ever make her feel something for him, and he is a damned man for what he’s done.
He doesn’t know which order the letters belong in. He puts it earlier. Changes his mind.
Eberhard’s letter gives him at least one single definitive point.
Dearest Blanque,
I went back to work today, but I fear it was a mistake.
He knows exactly where this letter goes. This is the 16th. That was the day she started back on the harp.
Every time I saw a couple, I could only see you with her, and it hurt more than you could know. The hours dragged on and sapped away my strength as surely as climbing a mountain would, and the air felt thinner for it all.
The air in the room goes thin. Her drooping pony tail. The exhaustion in every note she played. He knew it had been his fault. But it’s even worse in the details of the words. Hurting her over and over. A mad urge to try to find a way to make sure no couples walk by her seizes him. That’s not a solution.
But I don’t mean to cause you any worry. Tomorrow will be better. Tomorrow has to be better.
Your A.H.
Why is she worried about worrying him at all?
A frisson goes through him. Something about it.
She shouldn’t think the Painter would care. That’s the thing. She shouldn’t think Finley would care. She’s doubting the illusion, and that means something. It especially means something depending on when it started, and if it’s getting stronger or weaker with time.
Finley picks up the Curtains letter, and rereads it. He puts it behind the 16th letter. He picks up the Hate letter. He puts it between the Curtains and the 16th for now.
Next is the letter that began the world’s worst bushes hunt.
Dearest Blanque,
I went to the party the other night, but I didn’t see you. The naive side of me had wished desperately for your presence, that I might catch a stray smile or a wink to give me strength. Instead I was alone, but I thought I’d be okay. I wasn’t. I fought for you, against women saying things that I will never repeat, and even now I have no regrets for it, only that I miss you. I miss you. Please come back.
Your A.H.
The faded ink isn’t only from its outdoor placement. This is the first letter. He’s sure of it. The party.
His chest rises and falls with each hard breath. When did she write this? Right after? Or after the next day? He can’t tell.
I didn’t see you. I miss you. Please come back.
That frisson again, stronger than before. He should have known. He did know. He has known. She didn’t see him. Not because she didn’t see someone who looks like Finley Boutille at that party. She did.
Because she didn’t see Finley.
She knows. She knows about the Painter.
Not exactly, not entirely. She doesn’t understand the whole of it, or they’d be having a whole conversation right now, he’s sure of it, because she’d be knocking on his door with either cleaning supplies or… or something.
But some part of her knows there’s something wrong about the identity. That it’s more than a social mask of service or choices, she’s aware that there is a Finley underneath, the one she wasn’t supposed to see, and she’s been reaching for that one, just that one. Not Finley Boutille, not the Painter, not the Butler, but Finley himself, buried under them all. That’s Blanque, to her. The notes in the song.
That’s who she’s writing to.
It’s why she can’t send the letters to him. Because they would go to Finley Boutille, where the Painter or the Butler might intercept them. She has no idea how to reach Finley, but she knows he exists, somewhere.
Finley puts his hand over his face.
His archer. His seeker. She’s done this, from the start.
She always saw him.
Until he put everything he had into making himself invisible behind the masks. It had taken every ounce of training he possessed. And in the end, the Painter had shattered. He’d been left with the Butler as his sole remaining shield, held so shakily in place he had no idea what he would have done if she had –
She knows she didn’t see him there that night. But he was there.
He runs his hand over the wrong handwriting. He hadn’t thought she would need him there. His Hana, strong and bright, confident and capable, with her independent nature. Someone like him wasn’t necessary, he’d told himself. Except, it had been so much more overwhelming for her. He’d seen her legs shaking with each curtsey. She must have practiced over and over. She’d been exhausted the next day. The cutting remarks she must have heard. Something about him?
The music that had turned angry, and sharp.
Oh, my sweet harper. No.
He shouldn’t be claiming her. Not even in his thoughts. But, what’s the point in denying it? Does he really believe it’ll change anything if he doesn’t acknowledge it? He knows what thoughts rule him when he doesn’t leash them, what he lets himself indulge in it and pretend he doesn’t later. He doesn’t have a single right to the claim, not one. He surrendered every single shred of it.
But it’s still there.
It was there when he threw that footman against the wall. What Ilanya saw that Finley couldn’t twist or turn into some faint obligation through Elle.
Hana had her own fight, for the same reason, heard by so many more.
It was much too late to tell her that there was nothing anyone could say that would have bothered him. Most of the time, he was behind half of his own gossip. Scandals and notoriety served him. He learned that a long time ago. Hell, Milady Moth was always waiting in the wings in case he ever needed a new infamy boost.
Not that he could have told her that even then. That’s the problem.
The first letter goes at the start of the chain.
He opens the next. None of these so far have had any clues for where they were left. If there’s a pattern here, some deep bush and crate knowledge, he can’t see it.
Dear Blanque,
I don’t know what I did. Please tell me what I did to make you hate me. Everything was fine until the party. I studied the rules you sent every day. I practiced my curtsy until I could barely stand. Where did I go wrong? Did I embarrass you with that first song? So much that you could scarcely admit association? It was for you, but if I hurt you with it, I can only beg your forgiveness. Please forgive me. Please talk to me the way you used to.
Your A.H.
Finley has to resist the urge to crumple the letter to himself. His chest is so tight it’s hard to breathe. He would rather her rage at him. Call him every name under the sun. Throw his lineage in his face. This pleading, asking for his forgiveness, sends that tremor through him. That urge to do something to himself. How could someone do this to her? How could he have made her feel like this? Feel like she has to ask him for forgiveness?
Don’t ever forgive me.
Thank the Light no one found this one but him. Even without a single possible clue for context, knowing that someone else had seen her like this would have done something to him. He can leave it be that some people think of her with scandalous thoughts. That’s no worse than the romance novels that people peddle around and Isla loves to write like. He can even leave the sorrow of the exhaustion of work and the pain of jealousy. It’s harder for someone to know she was like that.
But this one?
He doesn’t know what he would have done to make them erase the knowledge from their mind. No one is allowed to see her like this.
Except for him.
She doesn’t know that he’s right here. Or she does. Or she hopes.
The reasoning tugs at something in his head and he can tell he’s pulling something together. A thought, a pattern of some other sort starting to form of hers. She has something she’s following. A path. He has a feeling about it that he can’t shake off, something that keeps giving him a shiver.
Finley puts the letter after the first one. It’s early. He can tell.
Light, he has no idea if that one thing he found was a letter or not. What it might have said.
Only two more.
The bar with the crates.
Dear Blanque,
I didn’t know that you could be so cruel. That you could let me believe, only to toss me aside. Part of me wants to hurt you, the way that you hurt me, but a greater part screams the opposite. I fear this dissonance is more than I can bear. It tears at me from the inside, and sleep is a distant memory. Do you know this feeling? This ache that reaches deeper than physical pain ever could? I hope you don’t. I hope you never do.
Your A.H.
The dissonance is in not knowing how to stop it from striking something in his chest so hard he staggers. She doesn’t want him to feel it. He wants to give her that. He should be able to give her the one fucking thing she wants of him that he can give.
He can’t.
He can’t any more than he can tell her the truth, just because he wants to tell her.
Let her believe. Toss her aside.
She knows that Finley did it. Even if it was the Painter’s face he wore, the only person who could have decided it was Finley. Of course she knows that.
But she still signs it Your A.H., at the end of all that.
He puts the letter third in the order. It has to be early. And despite the early anger, she keeps going.
Party, Forgiveness, Dissonance, Curtains, Hate, the 16th.
He hovers over Hate again, and thinks about that Too Much day, when she’d been pushing herself so hard to seem like everything was all right. The pressure it would build. How it would have felt playing music like that. He moves Hate to after the 16th.
One more letter. The lion statue. It brings out a shudder he can’t repress.
My Dear Blanque,
Today someone showed me a painting and I cried. I had to lie and tell them it was because the artwork moved me, and not because of the way my heart ached thinking of you. I hope you are still painting. Sometimes, when I feel desperately alone, I look upon the one you gave me and imagine myself there, with you at my side. I know I shouldn’t. I know it only makes reality all the more cruel. I know you would be upset.
He swallows. Had he hoped more that she would throw the painting away? Toss it? Burn it? Put it behind a curtain?
Why, why does it do that to him to read those words that she has it. That she looks at it. That she sees herself there, in his private studio, where no one but those of the House and closest to it are ever allowed, with him? He’s dizzy with it. He wants to paint her this one. He can’t ever do that.
He can’t tell her how many times he nearly painted the broom against his bedroom window.
The rest of the words sink in.
How does she know it would upset him?
She’s figuring it out.
That frisson is growing stronger.
She knows something, even if she doesn’t know it. The Painter wouldn’t be upset. He showed her that. Mild concern, light confusion, slight chagrin. That’s how the Painter Gentleman reacts to the rare confession or proposition that comes his way. He’s always disappointed that he must decline, terribly sorry to have caused any impression that he was more available, but he never seems heartsore and torn. He can’t be. He’s detached, even though he’s fond enough. He wouldn’t be upset over a painting fantasy, or terribly upset to cause such deep feelings, though of course he would have a mild pang of regret.
But she knows.
She somehow knows Finley can’t stand the thought of her in pain. That Finley doesn’t want her crying over him, her heart aching. He doesn’t want her to think of them together, only to wake to the cruel reality.
He shouldn’t have kept reading.
He couldn’t have stopped himself if his life depended on it.
I love you.
Your A.H.
His knees hit the floor.
Present tense.
Why, Hana?
“Who doesn’t love a cute little crab?”
So many people. It’s the easiest thing in the world. Even all three of his parents managed it against all inclination of nature, apparently.
It should be so easy for her to stop. It should have been easy for her to never start. It shouldn’t be like this. This shouldn’t be happening.
Seven letters. Maybe eight. Maybe more still out there.
I love you.
No.
No, no, no.
He desperately wants to put the letter at the start. When she might have still had hope. Before he crushed it.
He knows it doesn’t belong there.
She should be hating him more with every passing day. It should be fading. He should already be something behind her. Her eyes on the future. He shouldn’t be anything to her.
If anything, the more time passes, the clearer she sees, and the more she looks straight at him, and she loves him. Still.
I didn’t see you there.
The letters are all to Finley. To Blanque. When he showed her the Painter, she was supposed to understand that Finley was the liar. Capable of cruelty in his social climbing, capricious in his affections because he didn’t want love, he wanted power and he was clever enough to get it. It all fit the narrative he showed her. She was meant to see it as a whole, a twisted whole of a man she couldn’t possibly care for, and move on.
Instead, she’s been sorting the chaff from the wheat. The only thing that he has succeeded in is that she doesn’t understand why he’s done it. Only understood that Finley has. She knows he has a reason. That’s what’s keeping her away. She believes that Finley doesn’t want her. That’s what the other letters say, why she’s so apologetic, so unsure what it was she did. If he came to her, right now, as only a man who had been scared shy by his feelings, led astray by the lure of a Social Game, to beg for her forgiveness in his error, confess his true desires –
“I wanted to know you.”
She still does.
She calls herself his.
Finley braces himself against the mattress. His whole life, only one person ever claimed him completely. Ever looked straight at him, and accepted every single part of who he is. There is nothing he can do or be or become that will alter that. Avrenne will see him. Her claim on him will never waver. Hers.
No one has ever declared herself as his before. Looked into him, past the masks, into what lives under them, and accepted that. That he could be cold and cruel in a calculation. Seem capricious, and cowardly amongst everything else he’s ever shown her of himself to be. And still said, yes. I’m his. Until now. His.
Finley’s heart tears itself in half, and he sets the pieces in order as best he can.