Chapter Text
Ty walked briskly through the hallways, Anush right on his heels. Ty was muttering their room number to himself under his breath, using the repetitive rhythm as a point of focus, something to soothe the dull ache in his head. The noise of the crowded halls felt like glass in his head, and he was eager to relax on his bunk in their quiet room and go over his case notes. Nothing cleared his head quite like a mystery.
When they finally found their room, Ty breathed a silent sigh of relief. Then cringed inwardly when he saw two other men already in the room. Ty was used to crowded living spaces, being from a family of eight, (which, admittedly, he didn’t mind since they were his brothers and sisters, and he was comfortable with them) but that didn’t mean he had to like it. But, he reminded himself that the arrangement wasn’t for long.
While Ty immediately steered clear of the other men, Anush introduced himself to them, then threw himself on the top bunk. Ty set his bag down on the bottom mattress and playfully poked Anush in the stomach.
“Who says you get the top bunk, huh?” he teased. Anush just squirmed and laughed.
There weren’t a lot of people Ty was comfortable enough with for casual physical contact, his brothers and sisters -Julian and Livvy, especially- being the few. But Anush was practically another brother to him now. Ty had met the other boy when he had finally made it to Punjab in January, the year before. He had quickly enlisted Anush, who was, at the time, a bookstore clerk in-training, to help him with a missing persons case. Over the course of that month-long mystery, Anush and Ty had gotten quite close. After the case was closed, Anush followed Ty everywhere, helping with cases and keeping him company.
With Anush passed out for a cat nap and their roommates quickly shuffling from the cabin, Ty tucked himself onto his bed, pulling from his bag a small, leather-bound black notebook. Livvy had gotten it for him, working odd jobs around the city to afford the small luxury. He flipped to the pages with his most recent notes.
About a month and a half earlier, the body of a young pregnant woman had been found in a warehouse in the East End. She was found gagged and bound to a chair, a clean bullet wound through her head. Ty whispered inaudibly to himself as he went down the list he had made; broken nails, bruises and cuts, all signs of a struggle. A black eye, split lip and three broken ribs suggested a minor beating. It was cruel, and harsh, and obviously planned.
Her name was Elizabeth Cooper, newly married in the winter to a man named Edward Cooper. One thing was clear about the situation: Elizabeth was either murdered as revenge against her husband, or as motivation. It was all very obviously rooted in something darker, so either scenario was plausible, but Ty was steadfast in his belief that it was revenge.
Edward Cooper had been known around his neighborhood to be secretive, gone for long periods of time and never speaking to neighbors and acquaintances longer than necessary. He had no other family than his wife and future child, and killing the last remaining people in his life was unlikely to motivate him to do anything, making the revenge theory most plausible. The only consistent thing that came up in his research on Edward was a name: Beausejours.
The Beausejours family was, apparently, known for heading one of the biggest and most successful steel businesses in America, based out of Pennsylvania. They were wealthy, absolutely drowning in dirty money, known in the underground for opium deals and prostitution. The head of the business (and the family), Charles, had died two years before, and his wife Mary had quickly followed. That left one last person - their son and heir to the business, Joseph Beausejours. And rumor had it that the man would be on the maiden voyage of the Titanic , from England, back to America.
There was no doubt in Ty’s mind that Joseph had killed Elizabeth Cooper as revenge for her husband crossing him.
Ty had all the pieces of the puzzle clicked into place, now he just needed to figure out how to prove it.
**********
Kit shuffled through the crowded room, dodging maids and butlers to rifle through the canvases that sat in various trunks around the room.
“This one?” asked Trudy. She held up a smaller canvas covered in muted tones. Kit shook his head, continuing his search.
“No. It had a lot of faces on it.” Kit pulled a large canvas out of a trunk with a triumphant noise. “ This is the one!”
“Would you like all of them out, sir?” Trudy asked politely.
“Yes, please.” Kit didn’t look up from the painting to answer. “This room needs a little color.”
The private deck Joseph had purchased was one of the grandest things Kit had ever seen. A bathroom, two bedrooms, a wardrobe, and a sitting room, all decorated with rich dark brown wood walls overlaid with ornate gold fixtures, thick patterned rugs and porcelain vases on oak tables. Kit in equal parts admired and hated it. It was beautiful, but it carried with it a cold feeling of detachment and indifference that things influenced by unnecessary wealth often did.
“God, not those finger paintings again,” Joseph scoffed from the doorway to the deck. Kit’s body immediately tensed, as it usually did in Joseph’s presence. But Kit managed to ignore his fiancé in favor of trading canvases with Trudy. “They certainly were a waste of money.”
Joseph Beausejours was the picture of insufferability, leaning against the doorway in a cream-colored vest and striped shirtsleeves, glass of champagne dangling from his hand. Kit was not exaggerating when he said he hated Joseph. He had to admit the man was attractive, with dark brown hair and bright green eyes that stood out against his tan skin. He was tall and muscular, and had the slightest French accent. But that’s where the redeeming qualities ended. He was obnoxious and arrogant, and Kit wondered for the hundredth time that day why he hadn’t run off and exposed the man for what he really was to the public.
Then Kit remembered that an action like that would have dire consequences, and quickly abandoned the idea.
Joseph may have been a dunce in most situations, but he was also cunning, manipulative, and controlling. He was filthy rich, and had gotten his fortune through blackmail and shady deals involving drugs. Of course, Joseph would have never told Kit any of that himself, but Kit had never been opposed to eavesdropping. Kit had “overheard” many of his conversations that way, and some things Kit wished he’d never heard in the first place.
On top of all that, Joseph had one of the most abhorrent personalities Kit had ever come across, and that was saying something, since he had grown up surrounded by status-obsessed socialites.
Kit didn’t want to think about what Joseph would do to him if he caught up with a runaway Kit. Being shot and left alone in an alleyway to bleed out would be the best-case scenario.
“The difference between Joseph’s taste in art and mine is that I have some.” Kit hid his smirk behind a canvas when he heard Joseph splutter indignantly. Kit gave him no chance to retaliate.
“They’re fascinating. Like being inside a dream or something.” Kit could almost hear his father’s cynical remark and thanked the angels that Johnny wasn’t in the room. “There’s truth but no logic,” he continued, a bit wistfully.
Kit’s mother, Rosemary, had been a practical and realistic woman. She had died when Kit was nine, so he didn’t remember much, especially not about her life before she had him. But from the little he had heard from their (limited) family friends or bits Johnny or Rosemary had let slip, she had been a very wild and free-spirited teenager. She’d carried that bit of stubbornness and rebellion into adulthood, always in charge and leading the pack. She was goal-oriented and protective, but there were two things she’d slow down for; one was her family, especially her son, and the other was art.
She had collected paintings and frequented art galleries, attended ballets and operas. She loved to sing, and one of Kit’s clearest memories of her was when she’d hum to herself as she went about her day. It had been important to her that Kit also appreciated the beauty of song, so she taught Kit how to play the piano. She herself wasn’t supposed to know the instrument, as her parents came from a time when music was thought to be too passionate of a hobby for a woman to pursue, but she paid the restriction no mind. Every day, she sat with Kit at the piano and taught him to play, and how to sing her favorite lullabies. Kit treasured both of the abilities.
Kit had grown up to adopt his mother's love of the arts. Dance, painting and sculpture all fascinated him, and music had been a part of his life for as long as he could remember. Maybe the fascination came from the fact that somebody was able to create something so beautiful out of nothing was wondrous to him. Maybe it was because it provided a dearly needed escape from his own bleak existence. Kit avoided thinking about it too much.
Trudy placed another painting on the sofa. “What’s the artist’s name?”
“Something… Picasso,” Kit answered distractedly, pulling more pieces out of trunks.
“‘Something Picasso’ ,” Joseph repeated mockingly. “He won’t amount to a thing. He won’t, trust me!” he said to Kit, even as he ignored him and beckoned Trudy to follow him to the next room.
When Kit returned to the sitting room to snatch up a forgotten canvas, he stopped briefly to lay his free hand on his fiancé's chest.
“Really, Joseph, if you believe that someone so expressive and talented won’t be successful, then you shouldn’t have any hope for your own subpar goals and abilities.” Kit patted the other man’s cheek in the same mocking manner Joseph had used moments ago, then bustled back into the bedroom, leaving Joseph to glare at Kit’s back.
In the bedroom, Kit positioned the painting on the dresser as Trudy hung up Kit’s clothes.
“It smells so new. Like they built it all just for us.” Trudy hurried over to unbutton the cuffs of Kit’s jacket, even though Kit had told her several times that Kit could handle that himself. “I mean… just to think that tonight, when I crawl between the sheets, I’ll be the first!”
Kit laughed. Trudy and him were about the same age, and Kit considered Trudy to be his best friend. She was one of the kindest people in all the world, he thought. She was beautiful, too, with dark brown hair and hopeful, innocent hazel eyes. In all the times Kit was lonely, or grieving for his mother, or scared of his future with Joseph, Trudy was there for him, drying his tears and whispering kind words to him. He tried to do his best to support Trudy as well, always feeling terrible after crying on her shoulder for hours, knowing that she had it much harder than him. Kit truly did not know what he would be doing if he didn’t have Trudy.
“Tonight when I crawl between the sheets I’ll still be the first.”
Kit’s smile died, his stomach dropping. Joseph was leaning against the doorway, sipping his champagne with a slimy smile on his face. He gestured towards the door with his head, a silent command.
Trudy’s cheeks reddened at the innuendo. “S’cuse me, sir,” she said to Kit, practically running from the room. Kit turned away towards the dresser as soon as she left, not wanting to be left alone to stare at Joseph’s smug face. He could hear Joseph close the door and lock it, cold dread settling in his stomach. Kit barely refrained from recoiling in disgust when Joseph stepped behind him, pressing his chest to Kit’s back and wrapping his arms around Kit’s waist and arms.
To any outsider it would look like an act of intimacy between two lovers. But only Kit could feel the way Joseph squeezed his waist warningly, the way he pressed against Kit until he was trapped between the dresser and Joseph. It was an act of possession, not love.
“The first and only.” Kit almost jerked away at the touch of Joseph’s lips against his neck. “Forever.”
The words made Kit’s heart speed up, but not in the way he had always dreamed about. When he was younger, his mother sang love songs, read him words of sweet romance from books in the night, the only time she really showed any vulnerability. After she died, he kept reading the books, kept singing love songs, kept dreaming of one day finding the person who made his heart race and butterflies erupt in his stomach.
But Joseph was not that person. Joseph would never be that person. And Kit knew better now, that that person didn’t exist.
The thought that Joseph was the person he would be married to, stuck with for life, after they landed in America and got off this ship, made him want to cry. It made him want to rush to the captain and beg him on his knees to slow the ship, change the course, do anything . But he could do none of those things. He couldn’t beg to stop the ship. He couldn’t ruin the lives of the hundreds of other people sailing towards a new home. He couldn’t cry, as all his tears had already been shed and dried.
Instead, he steeled himself and planted a kiss on Joseph’s cheek, hopefully convincing enough so he wouldn’t be suspicious, hopefully not conveying how his skin crawled at the way Joseph was placing kisses up Kit’s neck. Kit turned back towards the dresser, taking a look at his tired, drawn eyes in the mirror, at the fake smile plastered on his face, and resigned himself to his fate.