Follow You Down | Chapter 9: Fixing a Hole

Summary: The immediate aftermath of the ill-conceived raid of Formenos.  Mairon
isn’t exactly pleased to have been left out of the heist, let alone have
to try to figure out a way to fix it.  Shockingly, Melkor fails to
grasp the concept of an apology.  (find it on ao3!)

(watch for some mentions of blood)

At the knock on the door, Melkor sunk so low in his seat that his
knees knocked against Thuringwethil’s shins. Thuringwethil reached over
and tugged on his hair, the only part of him still visible over the
back of the chair, and clucked her tongue disapprovingly at him. “Grow
up,” she hissed, giving his ponytail another yank for good measure. He
sullenly pushed himself upright once more.

“Easy for you to say,”
he hissed back, eyes shifting nervously toward the door as Gothmog
pulled back the deadbolt and unlatched the chain. He barely had a chance
to turn the handle before Mairon burst into the apartment, his eyes
finding Melkor almost immediately and fixing him with an angry glare as
he advanced through the living room like the very embodiment of vengeful
rage. “What did you do?” he demanded, spitting out each word like
venom. He paused for only the briefest of seconds beside the table where
Melkor sat, pinned under Thuringwethil’s brutal grip, and glowered
malevolently at him before continuing.

“What do you mean—hey,
where are you going?” Mairon had already disappeared down the hallway,
leaving a chilly silence in his wake. “So that’s how it’s going to be,
huh?” Melkor muttered sulkily.

Thuringwethil inspected the skin of
his cheek, touching it lightly with her fingertips. “Remember the
incident with the staff scientist Mairon hired a few years ago in
programming? The guy who tried to bring him a coffee to get on his good
side?”

The faintest inkling of memory stirred in Melkor’s mind as Thuringwethil reached for the butterfly strips on the table.

“The
one who spilled said coffee all over the prototype Mairon had stayed up
the entire night finishing for the northeast regional tech conference,”
Gothmog added.

“Ah,” said Melkor said, a sinking feeling
accompanying the memory in his mind. “Right. We had to find the kid a
job overseas somewhere because Mairon was so hellbent on insisting he
would never work again.”

“That’s the one,” Gothmog said grimly.

Melkor grimaced. “Are we approaching that level of meltdown?”

Thuringwethil
clucked her tongue. “Oh, you poor thing,” she said patronizingly. “That
was about a six on the Mairon meltdown scale.”

Melkor swallowed nervously. “And what are we at now?”

Thuringwethil
and Gothmog exchanged a look as, from down the hall, they heard a door
slam. “Honestly?” said Thuringwethil, leaning in very close to Melkor’s
face. “I’m not sure the scale goes this high.”

She leaned back as
Mairon returned to the living room bearing a laptop. He kicked out a
chair from the table and settled himself on the very edge of the seat,
positioning the computer neatly in front of him before peeling the thin
screen away from the keyboard and beginning to type furiously.

“The
password is—”Gothmog trailed off at the irritable glare his words
earned him. The room lapsed back into an uneasy silence that was
punctuated only by the angry click of Mairon’s fingers on the keyboard
and the soft rush of Gothmog’s feet over the carpet as he paced
incessantly before the door.

After a few moments that seemed to
stretch an eternity, Mairon let out an exasperated sigh, his fingers
still flying furiously over the keys. “Are there even words,” he
snarled, eyes glued unwaveringly to the screen in front of him, “for
what you were thinking?”

Melkor steeled himself. “I—”

“All the hours, the days, the weeks
that you’ve pissed and moaned about how you just had to get your hands
on this goddamn program, and this is what you do? I practically handed
the thing to you—it was everything short of a silver platter, for
chrissakes! There was nothing, and I mean nothing, left to chance. You
could have had that program sitting here right now, ready for us to
start working on tomorrow morning—hell, we could have started working on
it right now for all I care, but what did you do?”

Melkor stared at him for a moment. “You don’t swear,” he said, more fascinated by Mairon’s rage than affected by its rancor.

“I do,” Mairon said acidly, “when I’m this fucking livid.”

Melkor supposed it was as good a reason as any. “I just—”

“You
took my beautiful, perfectly crafted plans, and you gave them to some
two-bit contract hacker you found on the fucking internet? Jesus Christ,
Melkor. And Ungoliant! Of all the people you could have found…I mean,
I know you’ve worked with some shady individuals over the course of
what I will condescend to call your career, but honest to God. She
should have set off some alarms, even for you.”

“Yeah, well,” said Melkor, managing at last to squeeze in a retort. “You ought to know, right?”

“What’s
that supposed to mean?” asked Mairon sharply, his eyes glinting in the
glow of the backlighting as he glared at the screen in Melkor’s stead.

“She certainly seemed to know you, Mairon,” Melkor needled. “Or do you prefer ‘the Admirable’?”

“If you’ve got a point, then make it, because I don’t have time—”

“Are you some kind of hacker?”

Mairon
shot him a look of pure irritation. “Of course I am,” he said shortly.
“How the hell do you think I knew how to do all this?”

Melkor looked impressed. “So all that stuff Ungoliant said about—”

“Is
irrelevant,” he said shortly. “We need to focus on the problem at hand,
not some rumors that were never officially connected to me in any
capacity whatsoever.” He sat back and watched something on the screen
for a moment, running a hand over his hair, which was tied
ever-so-slightly less neatly than usual at the nape of his neck. “You
had to go for Ungoliant, didn’t you,” he muttered darkly, tugging
absently at a strand of hair that had escaped.

“Well—”

“And
you,” said Mairon, letting his anger shift to Gothmog for a moment.
“What the hell is the matter with you? You’re supposed to know better.”

“I
disagreed with this from the beginning,” Gothmog said defensively,
turning his head to scowl at him but still pacing his persistent path
before the door. “I said we should have just let you do it, so don’t
take it out on me.”

“I don’t care what you said,” Mairon said dismissively. “You still let him do it.”

“No one lets me do anything,” Melkor interjected sullenly. “I’m in charge here, in case you forgot.”

“Let him, my ass,” said Gothmog simultaneously, annoyed. “I was just along for the ride. What else was I supposed to do?”

“You should have called me,” Mairon said.

“Some people still have loyalty,” Melkor sniffed.

“Fat
lot of good that does us,” Mairon retorted. “This is the
fall-on-your-sword kind of loyalty, except Gothmog’s not the only one
who’s going to end up skewered. He’s going to go ahead drag the rest of
us down with him.” He looked up and shot Gothmog a nasty scowl. “Thanks
for that, by the way.”

“How is this my fault?” Gothmog demanded.

“You’re
supposed to watch him,” Mairon said, leaning forward and beginning to
type furiously once more. “You’re supposed to stop him from doing stupid
things that could get us in trouble. Here’s a hint for you, Gothmog:
you missed your shot.”

“Excuse me,” Melkor said loudly, drowning
out Gothmog’s angry protests. Gothmog stopped talking, though Mairon
simply continued to work. “I don’t need looking after,” Melkor said
testily. “I am not a child.”

“Could’ve fooled me,” Mairon muttered.

“Watch it,” Melkor said.

“There
are a lot of things I’d love to watch,” Mairon fumed, his anger
building the longer he vented his frustration. “I’d love to watch this
company succeed. I’d love to watch the four of us communicate like
reasonable, mentally-stable adults. I’d love to watch a plan that I made
actually get accomplished for once without any catastrophic
malfunctions, but apparently—”

“You’re treading on thin ice here,” Melkor warned him.

“Oh,
I’m treading on thin ice?” Mairon spat, too angry to recognize either
the threat in Melkor’s voice or the cautionary glance that Thuringwethil
threw towards him. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but did you not involve an
outside entity in a plan that was already perfectly fine the way it
was? Did she not completely screw us over because you let her in? Could
you not have just asked me—”

“I didn’t fucking want you!”
Melkor half-shouted, eyes flashing angrily. Gothmog stopped pacing.
Thuringwethil leaned away, more from surprise than from fright, and
regarded Melkor warily. Melkor and Mairon stared at one another across
the table for a few tense, strained seconds. Melkor breathed heavily,
trying to reign in his anger; Mairon simply stared in open-mouthed
shock, his fingers stilling at last on the keys. Then, abruptly, Mairon
focused his eyes once more on the screen and continued his work,
carefully arranging his features into the look of impassive disregard
that only he could manage. Melkor dropped his gaze sullenly into his
lap, crossing his arms over his chest.

In the uncomfortable
silence that stretched between them, Thuringwethil began to collect the
bloody detritus from the table into a manageable pile. Gothmog paced
over to the table and sunk at last into a chair, heaving an exhausted
sigh. “What are we going to do, boss?” he asked quietly, breaking the
silence at last as Thuringwethil gathered the garbage into her hands and
disappeared into the kitchen.

Melkor ran his hands distractedly through his hair. “I don’t know,” he said wearily.

Gothmog
ran a heavy hand roughly over the stubble that shadowed his wide jaw.
“We need to cover our tracks,” he said wearily. He moved his hand to the
crown of his head and dug the heel of his hand into his scalp. “I don’t
even know where to start.”

“We probably need to start at
Formenos,” Melkor said, tipping his head back and letting his long hair
fall over the back of the chair. “I don’t trust that bitch Ungoliant to
have wiped us from the systems. We need to make sure that place is
clean.”

“We need to go now, then,” Gothmog said, passing his hands
at last over his bloodshot eyes. “We’ll have to get back in before the
morning crew comes in if we’re going to take out security manually.”

“Won’t work,” Mairon interjected softly.

“Why not?” Gothmog said, setting a heavy elbow on the table and leaning his temple into his palm.

“All their security data is downloaded to offsite servers,” he said.

“Great,” Gothmog muttered, closing his eyes for a minute. “What are we supposed to do about that?”

“Why are you asking me?”

Gothmog cracked an eye open to glare at Mairon. “Because you’re the expert,” he said sourly.

“Really?” Mairon said acidly. “My expertise didn’t seem to matter two hours ago.”

“Ignore
him,” Melkor said, closing his eyes and letting his head settle tiredly
against the back of the chair. “Let him sulk. We have bigger fish to
fry. Like how to find that bitch Ungoliant. I swear to God, when I find
her, I’m going to—”

“It won’t matter if you do find her,” Mairon
interrupted savagely, “if traces of you are sitting all over the inside
of Formenos.”

“If there’s any trace of you in Formenos,”
Thuringwethil warned, coming back into the living room at last, “then
we’re finished.”

“We’ve got to go back there,” Gothmog said. “We’re going to have to find some way to destroy whatever traces you left.”

“And
what exactly do you intend to do, Gothmog?” Mairon said nastily. “Break
a few cameras, smash some computers? The evidence is in the system,
exactly where she left it. That’s what she does, you idiot. She sets
people up. She’s a backstabber—that’s her thing. Which,” he said
viciously, tracing a finger intently along the computer screen, “you
might have known if you had bothered to ask me.”

“Ungoliant is our
biggest concern,” Melkor insisted, ignoring him. “She’s got my damn
program, and she wants to sell it. We need to track her down before she
gets the chance.”

“You need to iron out your priorities,” Gothmog
told him. “There’s no point in even trying to track down Ungoliant if we
don’t get this Formenos thing under control. If she did leave evidence
back there, then Finwion will know where to start looking when he
figures out the program is gone, and then I guarantee you he’ll have the
feds on us like flies on shit. So forget about your stupid program for a
while, because it’s no good trying to find it unless we’re damn sure we
can keep it.”

“Do you have any actual suggestions, or are you
just going to sit around and shoot mine down all night?” Melkor demanded
irritably, trying to shift away from Thuringwethil, who was inspecting
the butterfly strips on his face with a critical eye.

“Don’t you think you two have done enough?” Mairon needled.

“Easy,” Gothmog said.

“Yeah,” said Melkor, twitching impatiently under Thuringwethil’s fingers. “Don’t you think you should—”

“No,”
said Mairon, shutting the computer with a decisive snap. “I’ve had
about enough of your plans for one night.” He pushed his chair back from
the table and stood up, arms folded across his chest as he leveled a
glare at Melkor. “You listen to me, Melkor, because I’m only saying this
once. You are going to go home, and you are going to go to bed. You are
going to stay there all night. Maybe in the morning, you’ll go to work
like a normal, responsible adult, but I won’t get my hopes up on that
front. What you will not do is anything that involves the mess you made
tonight. You will not set foot on Formenos property. You will not look
for Ungoliant, either in person or online. You will go home and do
absolutely nothing until you hear back from me. Do you understand?”

Melkor
ignored the sting of being scolded in favor of appreciating Mairon’s
audacity. “Why?” he asked, intrigued. “What are you going to do?”

“You
weren’t interested in my help two hours ago,” said Mairon, walking
around the table. “You don’t get to be interested in it now.” He leaned
down next to Thuringwethil, his face close to hers, and fixed a critical
eye upon the wound at Melkor’s temple. He reached out toward the
bandages, but he pulled up just short, fingers curling back toward his
palm. “Did you check for concussion?” he asked Thuringwethil softly,
ignoring Melkor completely.

“Yes,” she said, reaching out where he
had stopped and pressing lightly once more along the edges of the
butterfly strips. “He looks alright to me, but he really ought to see a
doctor, which, of course, he refuses to do. I told him he deserves
whatever brain damage he gets.”

Mairon snorted softly. “Like
you’ll be able to tell a difference from what was there already,” he
muttered. He straightened up once more.

“I’m right here,” Melkor complained, glaring at each of them in turn.

“I
know,” Mairon said dismissively, reaching up to drag the elastic out of
his hair and shaking the strands out to fall around his face before
gathering them deftly in his hands once more, sweeping them up and back
into their usual place. Smoothing a few flyaway pieces away from his
face, Mairon looked around once more at the room, mentally taking stock.
His gaze settled on Gothmog. “Keep an eye on him,” he said tersely,
starting for the door. “For real, this time.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Gothmog grumbled. “I’ll never hear the end of this one.”

“And remember,” said Mairon, frowning over his shoulder at them. “Don’t do anything. Not a blessed thing. Do you hear me?”

“Hey,” Melkor called after him. “Where are you going?”

Mairon
stopped in the doorway, turning back slightly and shaking his head.
“Someone has to clean up your mess,” he said. He squared his shoulders
and disappeared out into the hall, shutting the door behind him and
leaving the others behind to wonder what, exactly, he meant.

***

“Are you sure the phone is working?” Melkor demanded.

“I’m sure sir.”

Melkor leaned over to consider it, his skepticism written across his face. “How can you be sure?”

“Look,” said Gelmir, pointing to the display. “It’s on. All lines are free. If anyone calls us, it’ll come through.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes,
sir.” Melkor leaned a little further toward the phone, looking
unconvinced. “Sir?” Gelmir ventured tentatively, leaning away.

“What?” Melkor snapped.

“Is
there a particular reason I need to stay?” Melkor shifted his now
incredulous gaze to the unfortunate receptionist. “It’s just that I was
supposed to meet my brother—”

“Your brother,” Melkor said flatly.

“Yes, sir, and he was expecting me an hour and half ago.”

“Yeah, well, we were expecting Mairon ten hours ago, kid,” he said sourly.

“My name is Gelmir, sir,” he said reproachfully, “and—”

“What if the phone rings, kid?” Melkor said pointedly. “Who’s going to answer it?”

“Sir, I would be happy to show you—”

“Oh, I’m sure you would,” Melkor said dangerously. “But that’s your job, isn’t it? To answer the phone?”

Gelmir blinked at him. “Yes, sir,” he said carefully.

“Good,”
said Melkor. “Now that’s been established, how about you just do your
damn job until I tell you it’s time for you to leave?”

Gelmir bit back a sigh. “Yes, sir,” he said resignedly.

“Wonderful,”
Melkor muttered. He leaned further toward Gelmir, making the unhappy
receptionist lean so far to the side it was a wonder he didn’t fall from
his chair.

“When are we supposed to start worrying?” Gothmog asked, leaning on the desk beside Melkor.

“Mairon said he’d take care of it,” said Thuringwethil, but she didn’t sound entiretly convinced.

“Right,” said Gothmog, “but at what point do we assume something went wrong?”

“It’s Mairon,” Melkor said, though he too sounded worried.

“That’s my point,” said Gothmog. “It’s seven o’clock at night, and he hasn’t been in yet. Has he ever missed a day of work?”

“No,”
Thuringwethil said. “Not once. Not even when he was so sick he was
practically dying and so contagious I could have killed him.”

“Exactly,” Gothmog said. “But today’s the day?”

“He
did go to…you know,” Melkor said, arching his eyebrows pointedly and
turning slightly away from Gelmir, “at two in the morning. Maybe it’s
just taking a while.”

“It shouldn’t take that long,” said Gothmog. “Should it?”

“How are we supposed to know?” Thuringwethil said, exasperated. “We don’t even know what the hell he’s doing.”

“Maybe you should call him again,” Gothmog suggested.

“I’ve
called him twelve times,” Thuringwethil said, irritably scrolling
through the call log on her phone. “Maybe one of you should try.”

“I’m pretty sure you’re the only one he’s talking to,” Gothmog said gloomily.

“Fair
point,” she said. She pressed the green button on her phone and held
the console up to her ear, listening to the familiar ringing droning
through the speaker until Mairon’s voicemail picked up, urging her to
leave a message. She hung up once more, frowning. “I wouldn’t even know
where to begin looking,” she said, sighing.

“What about—”Melkor began. Gothmog elbowed him into silence.

“That is the last place we need to be seen,” Thuringwethil added sharply.

“Look,”
said Melkor,” if it’s between getting asked some weird questions by the
cops and getting any kind of clue where he is, then I say we—”

A
blast of icy wind rustled the papers on the desk at the front doors
swung suddenly inward, and Mairon walked into the front lobby, carefully
extricating his headphones from his ears as he warily met four sets of
eyes that tracked his progress across the marbled floor. Taking a sip
from the coffee in his hand, he approached the desk and stopped before
Thuringwethil, turning his back to Gothmog and Melkor. “What are you
still doing here?” he asked, taking another sip of his coffee.

“Where have you been?” Thuringwethil demanded.

He shrugged. “Working.”

“You didn’t come in today,” she reminded him.

He waved vaguely with his free hand. “Working from home,” he amended.

“You
have never,” she said suspiciously, “in your life worked from home. Not
during business hours, anyway. What were you up to?”

“Can we have this discussion elsewhere?” he asked, glancing toward Gelmir. “Or maybe never, if that’s an option?”

“Did you sleep last night?” Gothmog interjected, ignoring him. “You look awful.”

Thuringwethil
shot him a look of irritation, but she had to admit that he was right.
Mairon’s skin was paler than usual, worryingly ashen under the
winter-faded splotches of freckles on his wind-reddened cheeks. The skin
beneath his amber eyes was haunted by blue-black shadows, almost
bruise-like in their persistent depth, and though he blinked under her
scrutiny, she could see the bloodshot veins that ringed his irises. “He
does have a point,” she ventured at last.

Mairon scowled at her.
“Why do I bother,” he muttered, turning away from them and heading to
the elevator. Almost as one, the three of them moved to follow him,
crowding around him as he pressed the button to go up.

“Are you going to tell us where you’ve been?” Melkor demanded.

“No,” Mairon said flatly.

“But—”

Mairon
turned suddenly and pushed between Gothmog and Thuringwethil,
disappearing into the stairwell. The three of them exchanged glances
that ranged from worry to affront and hurried after him. Melkor and
Gothmog badgered him the whole way up the stairs as Mairon managed to
stay half a flight ahead of them, slotting his headphones back into his
ears and continuing as though they weren’t there. Thuringwethil simply
trailed the three of them, shaking her head.

They reached the
sixth floor at last, and Mairon made for his office, pausing only to
unlock the door before sweeping inside. He set the coffee carefully on
his desk before shrugging off his coat and hanging it on the rack in the
corner, settling finally into his chair with a heavy sigh as his
friends crowded around his desk. He pulled the headphones out of his
ears at last and winced as the sound of Gothmog and Melkor
simultaneously hounding him fell upon his sleep-deprived brain. He laid
his forehead down on the desk with a loud, drawn-out groan.

The
room fell silent. “Can I please,” said Mairon, his voice muffled by the
wood pressing against his lips, “enjoy the first cup of coffee I’ve had
in thirty-six hours in peace?”

“Can’t you drink coffee and tell us where the hell you’ve been at the same time?” Melkor complained.

Mairon
dragged his head up from his desk and pinned them under a mutinous
glare. He pulled his cup close and laid his palm across the lid, letting
his chin rest on his fingers. “I want to talk to Thuringwethil,” he
said flatly. “Alone.”

Melkor looked like he was going to argue,
but Thuringwethil shot him a venomous look, so he shut his mouth.
Instead, he rolled his eyes at Gothmog and begrudgingly trudged out into
the hall, throwing a reproachful glance at the two of them as Gothmog
shut the door. Thuringwethil crossed the office and perched on the edge
of the desk. “Where the hell have you been?” she hissed, surveying him
with concern.

“Working,” he said tiredly, lifting his head and rubbing his eyes.

“The
last time I saw you,” she said reproachfully, “you said something along
the lines of ‘someone needs to clean up this mess’ and then disappeared
for seventeen hours. What the fuck, Mairon? I’ve been calling you all
damn day.”

“Oh,” he said, trying to stifle a yawn. “About that. My phone is gone.”

“Gone? What do you mean, gone?”

“Gone,” he repeated, laying his chin back on his fingers and half-closing his eyes. “I’ll have to get a new one.”

“Mairon, you had better tell me what’s going on, or so help me—”

“Thil,”
he said, straightening up at last, and leaning back in his chair, “I
need you to focus on Formenos. It’s clean, I can promise you that much,
but I’ll guarantee you that they’re still going to come looking at us
first. Probably just as soon as they can get a warrant.”

“What did you do?” she asked softly.

“I’m
going to make sure everything’s up to speed here,” he continued,
oblivious, “because when they come snooping around here—and they
will—I’m certainly not going to give them any—”

“Mairon,” she said sharply. He looked up at her. “What did you do?”

He
shifted in his seat, letting his head rest against the back of the
chair. “I know Ungoliant,” he said quietly, his voice dull. “I know the
way she works. I knew there was no chance she hadn’t left something
incriminating behind at Formenos. She wanted us to get caught. I went
back there last night and cleaned the place out. There’s absolutely no
trace that we—or anyone else, for that matter—were ever there.”

“Right,” said Thuringwethil carefully. “And you still think someone is going to show up here?”

He
shrugged. “I can’t imagine they wouldn’t. Fëanor might be a jerk, but
he isn’t stupid. He’s going to notice that his best program is missing.”

“But,”
said Thuringwethil, trying very quickly to form her question in her
mind, “should anyone come looking around here, it’s not like there would
be anything to find. Right?”

A slight grin twisted Mairon’s lips.
It was not particularly reassuring. “Well,” he said delicately, “they
certainly won’t find anything called Silmaril.”

Thuringwethil
looked him over shrewdly. “You found her,” she said quietly. Mairon
simply reached for his coffee, lifting it to his lips with a smirk that
made her shiver. She frowned. “I only have one question,” she said. He
raised an eyebrow at her. “Should I be preparing a defense for you, just
in case?”

“Thil,” he said reproachfully, cradling the warm cup against his chest. “I was cleaning up a mess, not adding to it.”

She shook her head. “Sometimes I wonder about you,” she said, “and it isn’t always positive.”

He snorted. “Send Gothmog in, would you?”

Thuringwethil
stood up. For a moment, she looked as though she wanted to say
something more, but she simply sighed and headed for the door, casting a
suspicious glance over her shoulder as she went. Mairon closed his eyes
and took a sip of his coffee, ignoring the muffled interrogations from
the hall as Thuringwethil slipped out and Gothmog shouldered his way
into the office.

“You rang?” Gothmog drawled, grinning.

Mairon
rested his cup against his sternum, leaning back in his chair and
looking up at Gothmog, eyes clear and bright despite his obvious
fatigue. “You’re going to need to step up security around here,” Mairon
said, foregoing preamble, a grim look on his face.

“I take it,”
Gothmog said, lowering his voice as he strode further into the room,
“that means a certain program now belongs to us?”

“We have no
programs,” Mairon said, pausing to take another sip of his
rapidly-cooling coffee, “that didn’t originate right here in Angband.”

Gothmog winked. “How do you think it’s going to go down?”

Mairon
sighed, running his fingertips lightly through his hair to push back a
few wayward strands, pulled loose by the wind. “I honestly don’t know,”
he said softly. “In terms of tech, we’re good to go. They won’t be able
to prove a thing. That says nothing, of course, for any physical notes
Fëanor might have, not to mention meetings where they’ve discussed the
thing, other people he might use as witnesses…”Mairon trailed off and
rubbed at his temple with his fingertips.

“So where does that put us?”

Mairon sighed. “That’s going to be Thuringwethil’s game,” he said.

Gothmog nodded. “We ought to be alright, then.”

“We’ll
have as good a shot as we can,” Mairon agreed. “What worries me isn’t
whatever legal carousel we’re about to get on.” He tapped his fingers on
the paper cup. “No. What worries me is Fëanor Finwion.”

“Why’s that?”

“The guy’s nuts, Gothmog.” Mairon shook his head. “I once saw him try to make someone eat a laser pointer at a conference.”

Gothmog almost laughed. “Wait, you’re serious? Why?”

“The
guy suggested a method he thought might be better than the one Fëanor
was giving a presentation about,” Mairon said, shrugging. “Look, Melkor
met him at community service, Gothmog, and do you know why? He tried to
stab his brother with a steak knife, all because of some ridiculous
dispute over shares of their company. He’s not stable. I don’t want to
know what he’s going to do if he thinks we have his program.”

“I will make sure,” Gothmog said firmly, “that this place is locked up tight. No Finwion assholes allowed.”

Mairon nodded tiredly. “I have a few suggestions for you on that front, but they can wait for tomorrow.”

“Alright,” said Gothmog. He hesitated. “Anything else?”

“Yes,” said Mairon, leaning his head back against the chair and looking up at Gothmog though half-closed eyes. “Last night was—”

“An absolute fucking disaster?” Gothmog supplied.

A tired smile crept onto Mairon’s lips, and he nodded. “I shouldn’t have said the things I did. I’m sorry.”

Gothmog waved the apology away. “Things were a little tense last night.”

“Still—”

“Kid,”
said Gothmog, “you were the only one who had a goddamn clue how to dig
us out of the mess he made. If not for you, we might be sitting in a
much less comfortable office right about now.” Gothmog sighed. “Look,
you did the right thing, and we owe you big time—don’t get me wrong. But
if I can give you some advice?” Mairon shrugged. “Don’t hold onto it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Mai,
I love you, but you have a tendency to hold onto slights in the worst
way. You can nurse a grudge like no one else I know, and I’m counting
Melkor. All I’m saying is let this one go.”

Mairon sat up at last,
eyes narrowed in annoyance as he squared himself behind his desk. “I
don’t know what you mean,” he sniffed, moving his coffee to one side and
straightening a few papers that were already meticulously organized.

Gothmog sighed. “Of course not,” he muttered. “We done?”

“I’m done,” Mairon said pointedly.

Gothmog merely rolled his eyes. “You want me to send in Melkor?”

Despite
Mairon’s insistent, iron grip on composure, Gothmog could see the
slight flicker that eddied across his face at the inquiry. When he
spoke, however, his voice was as steady as ever. “Yes,” he said, sitting
perfectly straight in his chair. “Send him in.”

As Gothmog opened
the door, Melkor pulled back so fast he nearly fell. Gothmog snorted
and brushed past him, disappearing around the doorframe and down the
hall. Melkor declined to look sheepish, instead striding into the room
in more-or-less his usual brash manner. He pulled out a chair and
sprawled into it, as relaxed as Mairon was rigid. For a moment, the two
of them simply regarded one another across the desk.

“Everything we discussed last night,” Mairon said carefully, “is taken care of.”

Melkor blinked. “Everything?”

Mairon raised his chin. “Everything,” he repeated. “Formenos is clean. They won’t find a trace of you or anyone else there.”

Melkor couldn’t help himself. “And Silmaril?”

A short sigh escaped through Mairon’s nose. “You really ought to think of a better name for it,” he said tiredly.

“So it’s here?” he pressed eagerly, sitting forward in his chair.

Mairon nodded. “It’s here.”

Melkor sat back, letting his astonishment sit plainly on his face. “What did you do?”

Mairon
shook his head gently. “I did what needed to be done. I’ve already
spoken to Gothmog about some security details, and Thuringwethil knows
we’re going to need to be on the lookout for some legal pushback,
although what that might look like, I can’t even begin to imagine.”

Melkor
was watching him with narrowed eyes, a look of suspicion on his face.
“Are you going to tell me,” he asked, “what happened last night?”

“Right now?” Melkor shrugged, and Mairon shook his head. “No,” Mairon said firmly.

“Why not?” Melkor demanded.

“Are
you serious right now? Melkor, I woke up yesterday at five in the
morning. I got here at six, and I worked until I went to dinner with
Thil at seven. Then I went home, and if you want to know the truth, I
had the sudden paranoid thought that I had done something terribly wrong
in the Glaurung system. So I came back here to start checking all of my
work for mistakes that I’m still not convinced don’t exist. I was still
here when Gothmog called me at two. I’ve been awake all day today. I am
so tired I honestly don’t know how I’m still holding up my end of this
conversation, and I still have hours of work left to do today. So no,
I’m not going to tell you what happened last night, at least not right
now.”

Mairon’s face was still calm, but there was an air of
desperation in his words that bothered Melkor. “Why don’t you take a
break?” he suggested.

Mairon sighed. “They’re coming for us,” he
said tiredly. “They’re coming to look for this thing, and we have no way
of knowing exactly when. There can’t be a single shred of evidence that
this program originated anywhere but my lab, and that’s just going to
take some time to do.” He ran his palm lightly over his hair, absently
smoothing it away from his face.

“Well,” said Melkor carefully,
“time is something we should have, right? They’ll at least need a
warrant to come snooping around private property, and besides, they’ll
need some kind of case before they can get one.”

Mairon’s face was
hard. “We had time,” he said, his voice quiet but sharp. “Or rather, we
should have had time. I don’t know how much of it we lost in tracking
this thing down again. There’s just no way to know. All we can do now is
our best and hope that’s enough when they come looking.”

Melkor
sat quietly for a moment, wrestling with an alien feeling that rose
within him. It was, he thought with no small amount of concern, as
though he had done something wrong; worse yet, some hitherto
unrecognized part of his mind was quietly insisting that he ought to
react in some way to this information. His brain supplied a list of
potential approaches—resistance? contrition? chagrin? some useless
combination of the three?—but they all remained just beyond his grasp.
Instead, Melkor shook them all away and frowned at Mairon. “Are you sure
that’s what you want to do right now?” he asked.

Mairon propped
his cheek on his palm, his head tilted slightly to the side. Melkor
almost winced as the light caught the veins blossoming beneath that pale
skin, the angle of Mairon’s face deepening the shadows beneath his
tired eyes. It was the first sign of real exhaustion that had slipped
through, and it was not a pleasant sight. “What I want,” said Mairon
wearily, “is to sit here for a few minutes and finish my coffee in peace
before I have to pull another all-nighter. That’s all.”

Melkor grinned, trying to break the tension. “You could take the coffee with you, you know. Break the rules, just this once.”

Mairon
sighed. “I think we’ve broken all the rules we can afford to for now,”
he said. He straightened up and let his hand fall to back to his desk,
idly straightening a few impeccably organized papers. Melkor knew the
meeting was over. He stood up from the chair.

“Don’t work too hard,” he said, only half-joking.

“I wish I didn’t have to,” Mairon said, curling his fingers around his cup.

Melkor
paused on his way to the door, scowling at Mairon over his shoulder. He
opened his mouth, a retort ready on his tongue, but he hesitated,
thinking better of it. Shaking his head, he turned and strode from the
office, shutting the door behind him with more force than necessary and
rattling the frames of Mairon’s diplomas on the walls.

Alone at
last, Mairon carefully moved his coffee to the edge of the desk,
clearing a space before gently laying his forehead against the smooth
wood. He stayed like that for a few moments, reveling in the hush as he
felt a leaden weight beginning to seep through his limbs. Warmth that
had nothing to do with the coffee began to spread throughout his body,
and Mairon pushed himself suddenly upright, rubbing irritably at his
eyes as he banished thoughts of sleep from his mind.