Chapter Text
By the third day, Jean had stopped pretending she was going to eat regular meals.
She kept a plate of something Noelle brought her at the edge of her desk, untouched until it went cold, and worked through reports and maps and every scrap of information the search parties brought back. None of it amounted to much. A trail of blood that ended abruptly at the tree line. A boot print in soft ground that matched no known Mondstadt patrol. Silence from every informant Kaeya had ever cultivated, which was its own kind of information, since Kaeya's informants didn't usually go quiet unless something had made them afraid.
Mika had taken to bringing her updates every few hours whether there was news or not, mostly because she'd started snapping at people when she went too long without one, and he'd apparently decided a small, steady stream of information was better than letting her imagination fill the gaps herself. He hovered in her doorway now, a folder tucked under one arm, clearly wishing he were anywhere else.
"Nothing new from the eastern patrol," he said. "They're expanding the search radius, but it's slow going with the terrain out there..."
"And the western patrol?"
"Same as this morning." He hesitated. "Ah... You should eat something, Master Jean..."
"I will."
"You said that this morning too."
She didn't have an answer for that, so she didn't give him one, and after a moment Mika retreated without pushing further. Pushing Jean when she'd made up her mind about something rarely worked, and he knew it better than most.
"You should sleep," Kaeya said from the doorway, arms crossed, watching her carefully without letting it show on his face.
"I'll sleep when we find him."
"That's not how sleep works, Jean."
"I'm aware of how sleep works." She didn't look up from the map. "I sent him on that errand."
"You send people on errands every day. That's the job."
"I sent him on that errand, and something took him off the western road, and I didn't know until dinner." Her pen stopped moving. "That's four hours where nobody was looking for him."
Kaeya crossed the room and set a hand flat on the desk, not quite touching her. "You want me to tell you it's not your fault."
"I want you to help me find him."
"I'm doing both." He pulled the extra chair around and sat, close enough that she'd have to actively ignore him to keep working. "Varka's back. He got in an hour ago."
That got her attention. She finally looked up. "And?"
"And he wants to talk to you himself. He's downstairs."
Varka looked older than he had a month ago, though Jean suspected that had less to do with time and more to do with the ride he'd apparently made without stopping to rest. He didn't sit when he came into her office. He stood with his hands braced on the back of the chair Kaeya had vacated, not quite ready to sit.
"I heard rumors on my way back," he said. "Fatui movement near the western border, more organized than the usual smuggling routes. I didn't think much of it until I heard about Lohen."
"You think they're connected?"
"I think it's worth finding out." He rubbed a hand over his face. "There's a name that came up more than once. Il Dottore. One of the Fatui Harbingers."
Jean had heard the name before, in reports that came through from Snezhnaya, always attached to something unpleasant. "What would a Harbinger want with a vice captain of the Knights of Favonius?"
"I don't know. But if it's him, this isn't a ransom situation. Dottore doesn't take hostages for money." Varka's jaw tightened. "He takes them for research."
The word sat heavy in the room, cold and unwelcome. Jean thought of Lohen's easy grin, of how he threw himself into every fight because it was the one place he was ever fully comfortable, and made herself keep her expression steady because falling apart wouldn't get him back any faster.
"Varka, you've dealt with the Fatui before," she said. "More than any of us."
"I have." Varka's expression darkened further, some old memory surfacing behind his eyes that he clearly had no intention of sharing. "And I can tell you, if Dottore has him, waiting is the worst thing we can do. The longer this drags on, the less certain I am of what we'll find when we get there."
"Don't say that..."
"I'm not trying to frighten you, Jean. I'm trying to make sure you understand the timeline we're working with." He softened, just slightly. "Lohen's tough. Tougher than most people give him credit for. But tough only gets a person so far against something like this."
Jean nodded sharply and pushed the thought aside because she couldn't afford to sit with it, not yet, not while there was still work to do.
"Then we need to find out where," she said. "Kaeya, your informants."
"Already working on it. Nobody's talking, which either means they don't know anything, or they're too scared to say."
"Find out which."
Klee had stopped bringing new rocks to the front steps somewhere around day five, though she still sat there most afternoons, arranging the ones she already had into shapes that changed every time someone walked past and asked what she was building.
"...It's a map," she told Albedo, the one time he asked. "So Lohen can find his way back easier."
Albedo crouched down beside her, studying the arrangement with the same careful attention he gave any of his research. "That's a clever idea. Though I imagine he'll find his way back regardless, map or no map."
"I know... I just wanted to help." She moved a small red stone to the edge of the pattern, considering it, then moved it back to where it had been. "Everyone else is helping. Master Jean's making plans, and Captain Kaeya's talking to scary people in taverns, and Grandmaster Varka rode really far really fast. I wanted to do something too..."
"You're doing great, Klee." Albedo said it simply, without the gentle condescension adults sometimes used with her. "You're keeping his spot warm. That matters more than you might think."
Klee considered this, then nodded, satisfied enough with the answer to go back to her rocks, though she glanced at the western gate every few minutes anyway, same as she had every day since Lohen hadn't come home for dinner.
The room's whiteness made his eyes ache when he opened them, a brightness with no source he could find no matter how hard he searched the ceiling.
Lohen tested the restraints at his wrists first out of habit. Thick leather cuffs, buckled tight enough that he couldn't work a finger underneath them, anchored to a metal frame that ran the length of the table beneath him. He tried his ankles next, found the same result, and a wider strap across his chest besides, pinning his shoulders flat. He forced himself to breathe slowly instead of panicking, since panic would only waste energy he might need later.
The absence of his Vision sat in his chest like a held breath he couldn't release. He'd never gone this long without it, and the hollow space where it should have been kept drawing his attention back no matter how many times he told himself to focus on something useful instead.
He catalogued what he could reach with his senses. The hum of something mechanical, distant but constant. The particular sting of antiseptic in the air, sharp enough to make his eyes water. A tray somewhere out of sight, metal against metal, the sound of instruments being arranged with deliberate care.
Footsteps. The doctor again, unhurried, trailing a faint smell of something antiseptic that clung to every surface in the room.
"Comfortable?" the doctor asked, in a tone that suggested he already knew the answer and found it entertaining anyway.
"Let me guess. You're not actually going to untie me if I say no."
"Clever." The doctor pulled a tray closer, metal instruments arranged with a precision that made Lohen's stomach turn even before he understood what most of them were for. Needles of varying lengths. Small vials filled with something dark and viscous. A set of calipers he had no immediate use for, except that Lohen suspected it wasn't calipers for measuring cloth. "I do appreciate a subject with a sense of humor. It tends not to last."
"Bold of you to assume I have one to lose..."
The doctor didn't answer that directly. Instead he ran a gloved hand along Lohen's forearm, pressing here and there with clinical detachment, checking for something Lohen couldn't guess at. When he reached the crook of his elbow, he paused, tapping twice against the vein.
"We'll start with baseline measurements. Pain threshold, primarily. Nothing you haven't already survived, I'd imagine, given your service record." He picked up the first needle, holding it to the light for a moment before setting it against Lohen's skin. "Try not to move too much. It only makes it worse."
The first prick was almost nothing, a small, sharp sting that Lohen had felt a hundred times before in a hundred less clinical settings. It was the second injection, minutes later, that made the muscles in his arm seize without warning, a deep, aching burn that spread up past his elbow before he could brace against it. He didn't scream. He bit down on it, hard, and the doctor made a note of that too.
"Impressive control," the doctor said, sounding genuinely pleased. "Let's see how long that lasts."
Kaeya's informants stayed quiet for two more days. On the third, one of them finally agreed to meet, and only in the middle of the night, in the back room of a tavern that didn't ask questions about who came and went after hours.
The man was younger than Kaeya expected, nervous enough that he kept glancing at the door. "I don't know much! I want that understood before I say anything."
"Understood." Kaeya kept his voice easy, unthreatening, the same tone he used on skittish horses and skittish people alike. "Whatever you've got."
"T-there's a facility! Old mining tunnels, repurposed, somewhere northeast, past the Stormbearer Mountains... Fatui convoys have been running supplies there for months. Uhm, medical supplies, mostly. And guards. A lot of guards, for tunnels nobody's supposed to care about."
"You've seen it yourself?"
"Once...! From a distance, of course. I wasn't stupid enough to get closer..." The man's hands were shaking slightly around his cup. "There were sounds coming from underground. I don't want to talk about what kind of sounds."
Kaeya kept his expression neutral through sheer effort. "Anything else?"
"There was... a symbol on some of the crates. I've seen it before on Fatui shipments. It means someone important is... overseeing whatever's happening there." The man finally looked up, meeting Kaeya's eyes directly for the first time. "If your vice captain is in those tunnels, I hope you get to him soon. I don't think anyone lasts long down there."
"Why tell me all this? You could have said nothing."
The man was quiet for a moment, turning his cup between his hands. "Because I've heard stories about that facility for months now, and nobody's done anything about it. Maybe your vice captain being taken is the reason someone finally will..." He stood, pulling his hood back up. "I'd rather sleep at night knowing I did something, even something small."
Kaeya slid a small pouch of Mora across the table, though the man had already made it clear the information wasn't for sale. "Take it anyway. And thank you."
The man pocketed it without comment and left through the back door, disappearing into the dark before Kaeya had finished his own drink. He sat there a moment longer, turning over everything he'd just heard, before he pushed back his chair and headed for headquarters. Jean would want to hear this immediately, whatever hour it was.
Days blurred together until Lohen couldn't track them anymore. There was no window, no change in light, nothing to mark the difference between morning and evening except the doctor's visits, which came at intervals Lohen couldn't predict and stopped trying to.
He'd learned some things in the gaps between procedures, mostly by listening to the doctor talk to himself. The man seemed to enjoy narrating his own work whether or not his subject was conscious enough to hear it. He'd learned the word Omega more than once, spoken with the kind of fondness other people reserved for pets. He'd learned there was something involving Ursa, whatever that meant, something the doctor kept referring back to like it was the whole point of everything happening to him.
There were other subjects too, somewhere else in the facility. He never saw them, but he heard things sometimes, through walls that weren't as thick as they should have been. Voices, some of them. Other sounds he tried not to think about too hard. Thinking about them meant imagining what might eventually happen to him too, and he needed to save what focus he had left for staying alive rather than borrowing trouble from elsewhere in the building.
The restraints changed depending on what the doctor had planned for the day. Some mornings it was just the wrist cuffs and the chest strap. Other times there was more: a band across his forehead that kept his skull pinned flat to the table, cold metal clamps fitted to his temples that hummed faintly when active, wires trailing off to some machine he couldn't see and didn't want to. Those were the days that left the worst gaps in his memory afterward, hours he couldn't account for no matter how hard he tried to piece them back together.
He fought at first. Every restraint, every needle, every moment he had even a fraction of control over his own body, he used it to resist. Giving up wasn't something that occurred to him as an option. The doctor found this delightful rather than frustrating, which was somehow worse than if he'd been angry about it.
"Most subjects stop fighting by now," the doctor commented once, adjusting something Lohen couldn't see, a needle sliding beneath the skin of his collarbone with a precision that felt almost surgical. "You haven't. I find that quite promising."
"Glad I could disappoint your expectations, I guess..."
"You haven't disappointed anything. You've exceeded them." The doctor's voice carried genuine warmth, the kind that made Lohen's skin crawl worse than any of the actual procedures had. "Do you know how rare that is? Most people break within the first week. You're going on two, and you're still making jokes."
He tightened the last strap across Lohen's chest, checking it twice for give, and reached for a fresh vial from the tray, holding it up to catch what little light the room offered.
"This next one will hurt more than the others. I want you to know that going in. Most subjects lose consciousness at this stage, and I'd rather you understood what was happening to you while you still could."
Lohen didn't answer that one. He was too busy focusing on breathing through whatever had just been injected into his arm, a cold burn spreading up toward his shoulder that made his vision swim at the edges. His fingers curled uselessly against the cuffs, nails digging into his own palms, the only part of his body he still had any control over.
"There we go," the doctor murmured, watching his face with open fascination. "That's the interesting part. Right there."
The Knights moved fast once they had a location, faster than protocol technically allowed, though nobody stopped to argue procedure with Jean when her expression made it clear that arguing wasn't an option she'd entertain.
"We'll need more than a raiding party," Varka said, spreading a rough map across the table in the war room. "If there are as many guards as the informant claims, we go in loud, we lose the element of surprise, and we potentially lose people we can't afford to lose."
"If we go in quiet and it takes too long, we might lose Lohen instead," Kaeya said.
"I'm aware of the trade-off, Kaeya."
"Then you're aware we don't actually have time to debate this at length."
Jean held up a hand before it could turn into something sharper. "We split the difference. A small team goes in first, quiet, to locate him and assess the layout. A larger force stays back, ready to move the moment we have eyes inside." She looked between them. "Kaeya, you're on the first team. You're the fastest and the quietest of anyone we've got."
"Obviously."
"Varka, you're leading the second wave. I want overwhelming force ready the second we call for it."
"And you?" Varka asked, though he clearly already suspected the answer.
"I'm going in with the first team." Her tone left no room for argument. "He's the Vice Captain of the 5th Company. I'm not sitting this one out." Nobody tried to talk her out of it.
They spent the rest of the night going over the layout as best they understood it from the informant's description, marking likely entrances and exits, discussing contingencies for every version of what they might find inside. Kaeya sharpened his knives with a focus he usually reserved for actual missions rather than preparation, the blades not really needing it. Varka reviewed troop assignments twice, then a third time, muttering under his breath about supply lines and fallback positions until Jean finally told him to get some rest before the mission. Of course he didn't.
He'd stopped counting the days somewhere around what he thought might be week three, though without sunlight or any real marker of time, the number felt more like a guess than a fact.
The procedures had changed. Less exploratory now, more deliberate, like the doctor had moved past figuring out what Lohen could survive and into figuring out what he could be made to become. There were new substances that he was quite familiar with, something derived from what the doctor kept calling Ursa's 'altered' remains. It was injected in careful, measured doses that left Lohen's whole body feeling wrong in ways he didn't have words for.
Some days brought exercises instead of injections, tests of strength and endurance that the doctor recorded with meticulous notes, timing how long it took Lohen's body to recover from exertion that would have flattened an ordinary person for days. For these, the restraints came off his wrists but stayed on his ankles, a length of chain giving him just enough room to move within a marked section of the room while still keeping him from reaching the door.
He caught glimpses of those notes sometimes, numbers and diagrams he couldn't fully make sense of through the haze most procedures left him in, though the doctor never seemed concerned about him seeing them. If anything, he seemed to want an audience for his own findings.
Other days were worse. There was a chair now, wheeled in for procedures that required him upright rather than flat, fitted with restraints at his wrists, his ankles, and a wide band across his throat that didn't quite choke him but made him aware of exactly how easily it could. The doctor used this one for the nerve testing, methodical passes with a thin metal probe along points Lohen hadn't known his body kept track of until each one lit up white-hot under the contact.
He still fought when he had the strength for it. It came out smaller now, less of an act of defiance and more a reflex his body hadn't yet learned to give up on, twitching against the restraints even when his mind was too far under to fully understand why.
"You're adapting quite wonderfully," the doctor said one day, sounding pleased in that particular clinical way that made Lohen's teeth clench even through the haze. "Most subjects show organ failure by this stage. You're not just surviving the treatments. Your body is learning to compensate for them."
"Lucky me..."
"Very lucky, actually. You have no idea how rare this is." The doctor made a note on something, unseen, then reached for a fresh set of restraints, wider than the last, fitted with small metal contacts along the inside that made Lohen's stomach drop the moment he saw them. "I've started to wonder what you'll be capable of, once we're finished."
Lohen wanted to respond to that and throw something sharp at the doctor, but the words wouldn't come together right, sliding apart somewhere between his mind and his mouth, and all that came out was a small, broken sound he didn't recognize as his own.
The doctor's expression shifted into something almost gentle. He tightened the last buckle, checked it twice, and rested a hand briefly against Lohen's shoulder, a gesture that might have passed for comfort from anyone else.
"There, there," he said. "You're doing wonderfully."
The first team moved out under cover of night, three days after Varka's informant gave up the location. Kaeya walked point, senses stretched thin and alert for anything that didn't belong, with Jean close behind him and four of their most trusted knights spread out in careful formation.
The tunnels came into view an hour before dawn, half-hidden behind a rockfall that had clearly been arranged rather than natural. Guards patrolled the entrance in a rotation loose enough to suggest complacency, the kind of carelessness that came from a place nobody expected to be found.
Kaeya studied the pattern for several minutes, timing the gaps, mapping the guards' movements against the shifting moonlight. Two at the main entrance, rotating out every ten minutes. A third somewhere up on the ridge, half-hidden, easy to miss unless you were looking for exactly that. He filed each detail away, methodical as always, until the whole rhythm of the place sat clear in his mind.
"That's our way in," Kaeya murmured, watching the pattern of the rotation. "Give it four minutes."
Beside him, Jean's breathing had gone quiet and controlled, the same measured calm she brought to every mission, though her hand hadn't left the hilt of her sword since they'd left Mondstadt. The rest of the team held position behind them, waiting, weapons ready, none of them speaking beyond what the mission required.
Jean's hand tightened on the hilt of her sword. Somewhere beneath their feet, in tunnels that had swallowed her vice captain whole, whatever was left of him was waiting.
"Four minutes," she agreed. "Then we move."
She didn't let herself think beyond that, not yet. Four minutes, and then whatever they found on the other side of that rockfall, they'd deal with it together.