Chapter Text
“Captain!”
Marasi Colms paused, halfway between the entrance to the bullpen and her desk, and looked over her shoulder. Darna, the Constable-General’s secretary, was the one who’d called out to her, one eyebrow raised above her thick tortoiseshell spectacles.
“He wanted to see you as soon as you were back,” Darna called across the room, raising her voice over the din.
Marasi nodded in acknowledgement and continued on to her desk. She placed the small carrybag that had contained her lunch on top, having just returned from her break, and grabbed the pertinent notes, a pad and a pencil before making her way over to the Constable-General’s office, weaving through the various desks in the pen on her way.
Darna continued to gesture as she approached, making faces towards the slightly-ajar office door behind her. “He’s been getting pretty antsy,” she said as soon as Marasi was close enough, at a volume low enough to not carry past the door.
“Tea?” Marasi asked at the same volume.
Darna wordlessly held up her thumb and first two fingers, and Marasi sighed. “Wonderful.”
“Good luck,” Darna told her sympathetically, and Marasi gave a tired little smile in acknowledgement. The other woman wasn’t technically a member of the constabulary the way Marasi was: like the rest of the typist and secretary roles, she was hired from a civilian pool of talent rather than working her way up through the ranks. Some other constables tended to talk about the civilian staff with resentment or disdain, but personally Marasi was fond of the older woman, and the two of them shared a certain degree of embittered solidarity. Darna being the Constable-General’s secretary, and Marasi having fallen into the unofficial position of his adjutant in the year since his promotion to the position, meant that they were both quite familiar with the man’s moods and quirks.
With a nod from Darna, Marasi straightened her posture, checked her uniform over and made a few small adjustments, then slipped inside the already-ajar door, stopping just beyond the threshold.
Once there, she rapped two knuckles against the inside of the doorframe. “You wanted to see me, sir?”
Constable-General Reddi glanced up from a desk full of paperwork. “Ah, Colms, good. Come in, close the door behind you.”
Marasi did as instructed, then took a seat in one of the chairs in front of his desk, observing her superior in the dim light filtering through the blinds of his office.
Reddi was a slightly older man, maybe late thirties, of average height and slim build. His hair was a dull red-brown, cropped closely to the skull and starting to grey at the temples, and his eyes were thin and deep-set. Back when Aradel had still been in charge of the Fourth, he’d looked relatively hearty, but these days there was a heavy, worn aspect to his face.
Marasi pointedly avoided thinking about whether she’d developed the same thing since her career change.
Reddi sighed, leaning back from the paperwork he’d been hunched over and rubbing at his eyes. “You can relax,” he said wearily. “I’m not going to upbraid you for anything.”
Marasi would’ve sagged with relief, if it had been professional to be as tense as she felt in the first place. “What did you need then, sir?”
"How long has it been now?" Reddi asked, instead of giving an answer. Or maybe that was an answer in and of itself, considering Marasi didn’t need to ask for clarification on what he was talking about.
"Four days," Marasi said, instead of the comment about not being his secretary that she wanted to make.
"And how much longer?"
"Seventeen days."
Wearily, Reddi made the sign of the spear. "I swear, this is taking years off my lifespan, just waiting for something to happen."
“Mm.”
He glanced up at her. “Awfully calm, for the person standing at the bottom of the landslide.”
“I disagree with the presupposition of a landslide, sir,” Marasi replied calmly.
Reddi sighed. “Then you’re a much bigger optimist than I am, Colms.”
Waxillium Ladrian and Steris Ladrian (nee Harms) had been married in a small, private ceremony the night of their return to Elendel via airship. For the most part, it was the formal and legal affirmation of a pre-existing relationship; very little actually changed about their day-to-day lives except for Steris officially moving into Ladrian Manor, and Marasi being forced to have an extremely uncomfortable conversation with her sister about an appropriate level of information-sharing with regards to their… marital activities. Having just arrived back in the city after events of historic proportions, they had mutually and painlessly agreed that they’d take a week or two to get the affairs of their house in order and let things calm down before taking a honeymoon.
They’d finally managed to leave for their trip four days ago, nearly a full six months after the ceremony. During those first weeks of planned delay, a rash of extravagant metal robberies had sprung up, which had set the tone: from there, it had been a non-stop cavalcade of one thing after another - if it wasn’t a pressing case, there was some issue with House finances or an important session of Parliament.
Marasi, having front-row seats to the continual pushback for obvious reasons, had initially worried that it might cause some friction between them (a theory that she was absolutely not basing on romance novels she’d read, no matter what Wayne accused otherwise), but her worries had been unfounded. It didn’t exactly need saying that Wax and Steris were both eminently practical people, and the newlywed glow stayed strong around the two of them whenever she saw them.
Marasi had found herself busier with work after realising that, and therefore unable to spend much time with them.
The pertinence of the Ladrian honeymoon to Marasi’s work, well…
It was well past midnight when the three of them returned to Ladrian Manor, bone-weary and still dripping from the unexpected storm that had blown through earlier. After a harrowing week, the Coppercloud Cutter was safely in police custody, and like the end of most serious cases, there was a sense of sudden pressure being released. Marasi knew she would probably sleep most of the next day, but with the storm still raging outside, spending the night in one of the manor’s spare rooms was rather more appealing than trying to make her way back to her own flat.
Wayne had wandered off the instant they’d crossed the threshold, and so Wax and Marasi both retired to a small sitting room - the very same, in fact, where VenDell had briefed them on the Bands, what seemed like a lifetime ago.
“Drink?” Wax asked her, pulling a small bottle of amber liquid out of the cabinet and offering it up for her approval.
Marasi barely even bothered to inspect it before nodding her approval. “Gods,” she groaned, collapsing into an armchair. “Next time, Wayne can be backup. Not all of us can just heal away four hours crammed into a tiny crate, you know.”
Wax laughed as he joined her, ice clinking against the glasses he held. He handed one over before taking a seat in the adjacent chair, letting out a quiet sigh of relief. “You explain to me how Wayne would’ve fit in there, and we’ll go with your plan next time.”
“Cut off a limb or two,” Marasi suggested sourly.
Wax raised an eyebrow, the slight twitching of his mustache giving away his efforts to keep a straight face.
“What? They’d grow back.” She took a sip of her drink, then immediately blinked in surprise and took a second, longer one.
“Good, isn’t it?” Wax asked. “Honey and spices, they tell me.”
It was good. Marasi wasn’t usually fond of spirits, but it had a pleasant sweetness to it that offset most of the harsh edges of the rum.
“Can’t go wrong with sweets,” she acknowledged, before taking another sip and realising she’d almost finished the glass. “Okay,” she amended, realising just how easy it would be to get absolutely apocalyptically drunk on the honeyed concoction, “maybe you can.”
“Beats getting plastered on rotgut some idiot brewed in the cellar underneath his house,” Wax countered.
Marasi made a face. “Oh, I don’t like that I know you’re speaking from experience. Please don’t tell me that’s part of the honeymoon agenda.” Part of their upcoming trip was going to be to the Roughs; out of an apparently-mutual desire for Steris to see where Wax had spent his formative years.
“Not unless Steris wants to.” They both paused, silently acknowledging the very real possibility of that happening. “Actually, I wanted to talk to you about that.”
“About Steris?”
“The trip.”
“If you want me to convince Steris to let you bring more guns,” Marasi said dryly, “don’t bother.”
He let out a spluttered snort at that. “Harmony, no. Not that. Steris is perfectly content to let me bring as many guns as I think necessary.”
Marasi would’ve laughed, if not for the fond smile that crossed his face at the words.
So ridiculously sappy.
“No, I wanted to ask you a favour,” he continued, growing more serious. “I know I’m not some… lynchpin holding the city together. But it’d be a weight off my mind if there was someone keeping an eye on things all the same.”
Marasi took a second to process his words and the implications behind them, brain slightly slow from the exhaustion and alcohol. “...what are you saying?”
“I’m saying… if something big happens, obviously I’ll come back. The Set, something like L- like Bleeder, anything like that. But otherwise… I’d feel better if you were keeping an eye on things in the interim.”
“You’d… trust me with that?”
He actually stared at her, a little surprised, before chuckling ruefully. “Sorry, I’m still not used to… saying things like this. But I’ve trusted you to have my back for a while now, Marasi. In my head, I guess I just assumed you’d know what that meant.”
“...which is?” Marasi asked after a second.
“Give me a second,” he joked. “I’m still not good at this.” The words ‘but I’m trying’ hovered unspoken in the space between them. “I do trust you, Marasi. Quite literally with my life.”
And she had known, in a way. They’d been in enough gunfights that trust was pretty much a prerequisite. Hearing it out loud, though, still sent an unexpected thrill up her spine.
Wax mistook her silence for hesitation. “...was that too far?”
“No,” she said quickly, “I’m not… I’m not sure that I trust me with that, is all.”
“I won’t respect you less if you say no,” Wax offered. “But for what it’s worth… you’re a damn good detective. Far better than I was at your age.”
Where once she would’ve flushed, she now allowed herself to preen, just a little. It came in little snatches, infrequent and growing even more so as time passed, but every now and then Marasi remembered why she’d convinced herself she loved him.
“...okay.”
“Okay?” Wax asked
“Okay,” Marasi confirmed. “I’ll do it.”
And that was that.
A month later, and if it was going to come back to bite her in the ass, it hasn’t done so yet. Well, a month and four days, and it was the latter part that actually mattered. Still, it wasn’t something she was worried about, not in the same way as Reddi. Something she was keeping an eye on, certainly, but it felt a bit distant; an abstract consideration rather than something looming, pressing.
“Well then,” Reddi said, with the world-weary knowing of someone who is convinced they’re right but has magnanimously decided to concede the point anyway. “The floor is yours, captain.”
Under normal circumstances, a captain was the highest authority in a precinct, concerned more with the high-level operations than the day-to-day management. Despite the presence of the Octant’s Constable-General at the main precinct, the captain there operated in a similar role, handling the precinct’s duties as a precinct, while the Constable-General and their staff dealt with the management of law enforcement in the Octant as a whole.
Technically speaking, this was the rank Marasi held, but in truth she was something of a unique case. Her connection to Lord Waxillium made her the obvious choice to liaison between him and more official forms of law enforcement, and when not occupied with that, her day-to-day mostly consisted of operating as something of an assistant to the Constable-General. Her captaincy was more of an honour rank than anything else - it gave her the authority to command most other officers of the constabulary should it become necessary in a so-called ‘Dawnshot Case’, but she held no command, and it had been made clear to her that if she tried to exercise said rank under normal circumstances, she held none of its protections either.
Which was perfectly fine by Marasi; she had little interest in ordering other people around anyway.
Even while unofficially filling the Lord Ladrian’s Special Constable status, she was still subordinate to Reddi, and he had decided that the best use of her for the time being was keeping watch for any sort of developing situations that might turn into something requiring Wax’s unique brand of justice.
Personally, she thought it was busywork, but never let it be said that Marasi Colms didn’t give her work its due diligence.
“Once again,” Marasi began, assembling her notes, “nothing of note to report, sir. The Seventh Octant is reporting a large uptick in lost pets, but unless animal negligence has suddenly become a much more severe crime, I doubt we have anything to worry about on that front."
"Hardly," Reddi snorted.
“Six ice factories have reported robberies of ice shipments,” Marasi continued, “but that’s hardly a surprise with Proposition 18. The respective task forces can deal with that. Three metal shop robberies in the last week, but no apparent connection: three different octants, one cleared out the whole store, one set off an alarm before making in, and one stole nothing but steel.”
“Ice thefts? Missing pets?” Reddi muttered. “That’s it?”
Marasi shrugged one shoulder, a gesture she’d unconsciously found herself using more and more. “Like I said, sir, I disagree with the presupposition of a landslide. Business as usual.”
Reddi pursed his lips, then sighed. “Let’s hope you’re right,” he said, glancing down at his paperwork again. "I swear, Colms, him leaving like this is practically baiting the cosmere to drop something on us."
"And yet," Marasi countered, "he is just a single man, who has no more responsibility to the city's safety than anyone else. Honestly, after everything he's been through, he deserves this honeymoon thrice over."
He waved her off. “I know, I know. This city survived before Dawnshot, it’ll survive after him.” Marasi thought about how it very nearly hadn’t, but decided to refrain from saying as much. “Moving on, then. I could use an extra set of eyes on this month’s report before I present it to the Governor. Can you stay back this evening, double-check a few figures?”
The request was a perfunctory one, made more out of instinctually defaulting to the form rather than a genuine question. Reddi fully expected her to stay and assist - after all, she always had in the past.
“Actually,” she said, trying not to let her reticence show, “I’m afraid I won’t.”
“Great,” Reddi replied, attention already returning to the paperwork in front of him. “Always nice to-” He paused, brain catching up with his ears. “You won’t?”
He didn’t sound angry so much as confused, but Marasi still had to suppress the urge to flinch.
“Can’t, rather,” she said. “I have plans.”
He glanced up at her, raising an eyebrow. “Plans? You?”
“I’m trying something new,” she said dryly.
“Well,” Reddi replied, “best of luck with that. Maybe I’ll give it a try, one of these days.”
“I’m sure Edmee would appreciate it, at least.” Edmee, Reddi’s wife of three years, was someone Marasi had come to know quite well purely through second-hand information, simply from how often her superior mentioned her. Not in a negative manner for the most part, nothing that made Marasi worried; just very frequently.
“Survivor, she probably would. Never get married, Colms,” he said, sounding exhausted. “Once you’re in, you never get out again.”
The spike of bitter resentment that washed up at his words took Marasi by surprise, and she had to take a second to push it back down. “I’ll keep that in mind,” she said, as neutrally as possible. “Anything else, sir?”
He shook his head. “Enjoy your weekend, Colms. Let me know how the whole ‘social life’ thing goes.”
“Of course,” Marasi said dryly.
“Colms! Hey, Colms.”
Marasi glanced over her shoulder to see a tall, thin woman in a detective’s uniform approaching her.
“Josette,” Marasi greeted her. “Is it urgent? I was just leaving.”
“Oh, no,” the detective said, “nothing work related. Me ‘n the others were having another poker night; thought you might want in?”
‘The others’ in this case referred to a small group of ten-ish women from various departments of the precinct, a mix of constabulary officers and civilian staff who had conglomerated into something of a social bloc in response to the shared struggle of being women in a male-dominated profession.
“Thanks,” Marasi said, as sincerely as she could, “but I already have plans.”
“Oh, sure,” Josette responded easily. “How about next Thursday, then?”
“Afraid not, sorry.” Marasi actually was free that evening, but, well… she didn’t particularly want to spend time with the group or with Josette.
She was… not a friend, exactly. Friendly, but not anything more. Marasi had made an effort to change that a little while back, when she’d returned to her day-to-day after the Bands of Mourning incident. As it turned out, though, beyond the aforementioned common struggle, they really didn’t have much in common - if nothing else, Josette had a husband, while Marasi was… private.
“Oh, alright, then,” Josette replied, nonplussed. “Well, just let me know if you’re ever free. It’d be nice to have you along again.”
“I’ll do that,” Marasi agreed, with no intention of doing so.
She would’ve ended the conversation there, but Josette took a step forward, clearly not done.
“Hey.” The tone of her voice had grown more serious. “I hope it’s not overstepping, but is everything okay? You seem a bit down. Reddi’s not breathing down your neck, is he?”
“Not Reddi, no,” Marasi responded, trying not to be curt. “I’m fine.”
“Okay,” Josette responded, clearly not believing her. “Well… enjoy your weekend, then.”
“You too.”
Like she’d said, the other woman wasn’t a friend. Maybe if she was, Marasi might’ve shared what was on her mind, what was weighing down her thoughts.
That it was exactly six months and four days since she'd held the Bands of Mourning and tasted the power of the Lord Ruler
Six months and one day since they'd returned to Elendel on the captured Hunter airship.
And six months to the day since she'd last seen MeLaan.