Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

"Good morning, detective," Will said as cheerily as he could manage, considering that he was currently handcuffed to a table in a confined space with Detective Alice Kingsley. He wasn't normally one for handcuffs, but it was a hard thing to keep out of his mind.

She didn't seem as upbeat to see him, settling into her chair across the interview table with a barely suppressed sigh. "Do I want to know what you got arrested for?" she asked in a tired voice.

"For being a good citizen," Will replied breezily, leaning as far back in his chair as he could, current manacled hands aside. "I was chasing a purse snatcher. Nearly got him, too. You're welcome."

"You ran four red lights and broke every speeding law this county currently has." Although her voice was even and professional, her eyes sparkled in that entertained way of hers. Will shifted uncomfortably in his seat, the handcuffs elbowing their way to the front of his mind.

He cleared his throat and summoned up a witty remark. "I was also almost hit by a squad car, which I expect an apology for."

She smiled at him then, and Will had a moment of thinking god damn it before she spoke up. "I'm actually glad we caught you. Haven't seen you in awhile, I was beginning to worry."

"You have my number," Will pointed out evasively with a shrug. "You could call me."

"You don't answer," she said bluntly.

"But you have my number." Will smiled as best as he could. Alice squinted at him.

"Is everything alright with you, Will?" she asked gently. "You don't seem… yourself."

Three bloody months and I'm still unable to crack a convincing grin, Will thought to himself. "Like I said, I almost got hit by a squad car. Experience like that shakes a man."

"Are you injured at all?" she asked, suddenly worried, and the tracking of her eyes across his torso made an uncomfortable warmth spread up across the back of his neck.

"Not quite," he managed.

"Well, then." Alice sat back in her seat, precursory undressing of him complete. Or so he hoped. The front of his jeans were starting to feel unfairly snug. "I suppose you're up for a job, then?"

"Payment?" he couldn't stop the knee-jerk reaction to her proposal, but had the good graces to look mildly abashed as she rolled her eyes at him.

"How about I don't let you get arrested for… what was it? Chasing a dog snatcher?"

"Purse snatcher." He mocked deep consideration, tongue in his cheek, before nodding. "Seems a fair trade off." He lifted his silver-bound hands up. "Now, help a mate out?"

"Of course." She procured a set of keys and reached across the interview table, one hand lightly holding his wrist in place while she fiddled with the lock. Her grip was sure, firm. Her hands were warm. Will looked everywhere else in the room than at the image of her fingers intertwining with his for the briefest of moments before the tumblers engaged and the handcuffs dropped to the table with a clatter, freeing him.

She led the way out of the interrogation room, and Will made sure to give a good shit-eating grin (easier to fake than a real grin) to her fellow detectives as he strolled out in her wake. They all brushed him off, too used to his presence to really care. One of the downsides of being a police consultant, Will had learned over the past year, was the inability to cop a rise out of the same cops you drank coffee with.

Will followed Alice to her car and slid into the front seat with ease. "So, what's the job?"

"You'll see when we get there," Alice said lightly as she pulled out of the police station parking lot. "Now, it's my turn to ask the questions."

"I was under the impression that we left the interrogation room," Will protested lightly.

"You disappeared for three months!" Alice exclaimed. "I was worried, Will."

"I'm touched," he said in an acid tone. Honestly, though. Something housed beneath his ribs began to try and flutter away.

Alice was looking at him out of the corner of her eye, and he squirmed in a completely guilty way. "Leave it alone, Alice!" he exclaimed after several minutes of silent scrutiny. "Please."

She made a small noise and focused on the road, pulling off of it in one of the more posh places in town that wasn't a forty story high-rise. Will had experience with the latter, but not the former, and so he asked Alice a silent question as she parked the car on the curb. Happily—surprisingly—she picked up on it and furrowed her eyebrows. "What?" she asked in confusion. They exited the car, and Will noted that all of the other cops had deserted the crime scene, leaving them alone. Better or worse, he couldn't tell.

"I'm not exactly a suburb kind of expert," he explained, and she motioned him to follow her under a barrier of yellow warning tape and up the drive towards the front door. However, just short of it, she turned sharply to her right and ended up standing in a mostly-demolished flower bed beneath a large window.

"The victim was found inside by a couple of kids who dropped their ball in the flowers and peeked in the window," she explained. Will dropped down an eye level and squinted through the filmy lace curtains—of course they're lace, of course—and saw a lovely chalk drawing of a dead body sprawled artistically across the living room floor.

"Poor kids," Will reflected, straightening. "What do I have to do with it?"

"The victim was not the owner of the house—they're off vacationing somewhere without a phone, and so for all intents of purposes, the victim was an intruder. We still don't know how he died. It's almost like his pacemaker just turned itself off once he got inside."

"And you want me to…" he made a vague hand gestured and she didn't deign to speak. "Lovely. Welcome back, Will, have fun crawling around a crime scene." He stripped off his jacket and handed it to Alice, who took it willingly. "I'll give a good scream if my heart stops beating, shall I?" He began to walk around the perimeter of the house, shouting back at Alice, who stood by the window. "What time did he die?"

"Around one in the morning!" she shouted back. Will lost sight of her as he neared the end of the side-yard, where he stripped out of his shoes and expertly maneuvered over the garden wall. One in the morning meant no street watch, which there must have been in a neighborhood that well suited. Will strolled around in the grass. No signs of a dog. He wondered what Alice was doing with his jacket.

Around the back, there was a nice French door opening to a rather rundown patio, cracked up and dried. The door itself was rather well done, however, solidly built. Will knocked skillfully on the glass with one hand, listening to the noise it made.

Bullet-proof, he noted, interesting. He jiggled the doorknob experimentally; locked. It undoubtedly would have been locked that night as well. Will took a step back. Don't see the locks, see the openings, he reminded himself. Where were the gaps?

He jumped up and caught a hold of the ledge of the second story window directly above the French doors and pulled himself up, gripping edges with his fingertips and pressing his weight where he thought it would hold. He crouched at the second-story window and jiggled the frame in a practiced way. With a loud groaning of wood, it creaked upwards, and he noted inner scratching on the screen, and he mimicked what would have caused the scratches, gently popping out the screen. He climbed inside what looked like a guest room and rolled his neck. Nothing like a good, lock-pick-free break-in to start your day.

Will slid down the stair bannister and landed with a socked thump on the wood floors, which sprung lightly back. Water damage? Will headed to the window, keeping low, and then yanked the curtains open while making a loud noise and a demonic face. Alice, just on the other side, jumped and he could hear her cursing at him while he laughed. She had his jacket draped over her shoulders. He tried not to let that distract him as he strolled easily around the room, checking it out. Sparsely decorated, but that was more clear on the inside than it had been on the outside. The only thing that really stood out among average IKEA furniture was a large framed photograph hanging where a normal, average person would put a big television. It was cubist. Not Will's thing. He stood on the chalk lines and squinted at it, and he noticed that the painting lacked a pin gap on the upper left side, a space separating the frame and the wall to indicate that there was a pin behind it, securing it in place. The right side, however, did put out, the frame warped slightly.

"Well, well, well," Will muttered, and placed a hand on the left side of the painting, swinging it to the right. It opened on perfectly oiled hinges, and underneath was the most gorgeous wall safe Will had ever seen. "Ooh," he sighed, "oh, baby." Alice was tapping on the glass of the window, trying to get his attention. He ignored her, and placed his hand on the dial.

"He seems… fine."

"He's out cold!"

"Stop shouting," Will mumbled, and blearily opened his eyes. Alice was almost inches from his face, her eyes wide with worry, and one curl of blonde hair falling over the curve of her shoulder. It took all of Will's diminished strength not to made a loud noise of some embarrassing nature.

His quest failed when he felt long, tapering fingers, cold and smooth, touching at the skin of his neck, over his pulse point, and he let out a pitiful moan. Alice moved out of his sight and was replaced by a familiar face with long, dark eyelashes and a mouth naturally smiling. Cyrus finished taking his pulse and turned to Alice. "What happened?"

"Shock," Will said shortly, pointing over his head at the wall. "Water damage," he pointed down at the floor he was currently sprawled across. "What are you doing here?" He struggled to sit up, and Cyrus made the action worse by spreading one hand across Will's chest and bracing the other on his lower back, nearly burning through Will's thin shirt. Alice clung by, still fretting.

Alice and Cyrus shared a look, and a long moment of something unsaid passed between them; it made Will's chest do that annoying thing where all he wanted was to read their minds. Three months. Three months and he was already knee-deep in what he left behind.

"Alice called me," Cyrus explained, "I arrived just as you passed out." His dark eyes flicked up above Will's head, at the still closed safe. "I wonder what's in there." Will could hear the evasion in his voice, the intent on cutting Will off before he could ask why Alice had decided to call her boyfriend while he checked out a murder scene for a point of entry.

"Don't care," Will cut out, standing, leaning mostly on Alice and Cyrus. "I just want to go home." There was something plaintive in his voice that made Cyrus and Alice share another look.

"Okay," Alice said, and draped his jacket over his shoulders after picking it up off of the floor, where it had fallen as she had kneeled next to him. It smelled like her perfume, and Will would blame any color that came to his face on vertigo.

He warded off Alice's attempts to get him to a hospital ("no insurance") and managed to get out of the car without saying or doing something he might regret, no easy feat with his head buzzing like it had been filled with a hornet's nest.

Three flights of stairs. Definitely not something he had missed over the past three months. He had no key (no key existed for this particular apartment) and he was too tired to pick the lock like he usually did, so he leaned against it and knocked loudly.

Lizard answered it, and paused, looking him up and down. "You look like hell," she reported, and let him into the apartment. He slumped after her with a muttered word of thanks. He had never considered the scrappy, dusty place as home, and three months of separation didn't stop that opinion from continuing.

"You were gone for a while," she commented, curling up pretty on the moldy couch with a magazine. "I thought you'd run off for another three months."

"Alice got me on another job," he said shortly, pacing to clear the stiffness from his legs. Lizard looked up from her magazine with a raised eyebrow.

"You jump back fast," she noted. "You were totally jonesing for her when you left, right?"

He gave her a look and she shut up with a smile. "Jumped back even faster than you'd think," he replied, and paused. "Cyrus was there. God, Lizard, it's horrible. Like I never left the two of them—" his voice just kept going after he was aware that he was talking, and that horrible colored heat was rising in his face again.

"Wait, wait, wait," Lizard cut him off, to his relief, "you've got a hard-on for the boyfriend, too? Really?"

"I can't even begin to explain how I feel about that."

With a load groan and a muttered curse aimed at every deity in existence, Will collapsed into a battered armchair, hands over his face.

Lizard reached over patted his knee comfortingly. "You're fucked," she said.

"I know," Will sighed, and dragged his hands down his face. "Trust me, I know."

She considered him for a moment. Lizard, like Will, had never been very good at the talking part of a friendship, and so all she said was "Welcome back," before getting up and going into her room and shutting the door.

"Thanks," Will said shortly to the empty room. Three months. Lizard wasn't the kind to ask, and he was grateful for it, but he had expected a little more time to adjust before having to face down Alice. Or Cyrus. Or both of them. The way they smiled at each other…

Will curled over, and groaned into the back cushion of the armchair. Three months. Only time would tell how this was going to end up.

Chapter Text

Will woke up to the ringing of his cell phone, and he groaned, willing the unwanted noise to just get up and walk away, preferably off of a large cliff. It did not heed his wishes and continued. With a groan, he swept his thumb across the screen, barely registering that it was the police station calling.

"I didn't do it, I've been asleep, I swear," he slurred.

"I don't doubt it," Alice replied in a clipped tone. "How do you feel?"

"Like I just woke up." Not the most clever of responses, but there it was. Will sat up and stretched, feeling sore joints pop. "What's up?"

"If you want, you can come by the station during lunch and sign a report about what you discovered at the crime scene yesterday. It seems like the shock you went through short-circuited the intruder's pacemaker, killing him."

"Glad to know I touched it," Will grumbled, swinging out of bed and making audible Sad Puppy Noises as his bare feet made contact with the cold wood floors. Alice seemed to find that funny, and giggled across the line at him. "So, lunch, then?"

"Do you have anything to do then?" Alice asked, and then quickly backtracked, "not that I don't think you have anything to do, you only just got back into town and all…"

"I'll be there," Will assured her quickly, "No problem. You come—work comes first right now. I need coffee. Bye." He shut the phone off and made another noise, this one at his own stupidity and the fact that first thing in the morning he had next to no filter on his mouth. The time to pine was not now, obviously. Better do something productive first. Like coffee. Coffee was productive. Or at least it led one into something akin to productiveness.

Lizard was already gone, Will discovered upon exiting his room, which was, like it had been three months ago, stripped of everything other than a mattress on the floor with thrift store sheets. Whatever it was she was doing—a hit or a score or something—was beyond his realm of knowledge, and curiosity rose, unwanted. Will forced it back down, strongly aware that in their—her—line of work, curiosity not only killed the cat, it killed all of the cat's loved ones after psychologically torturing the cat and making it wish that it had never been curious in the first place.

Coffee. Coffee was needed.

The old coffee maker was still there; the one constant thing, it seemed, to outlast his three-month retreat. He suspected that the old beast could outlast a nuclear war, and it hadn't disappointed him thus far in his relationship with it.

First cup of coffee nearly chugged, Will fully buttoned his jeans and pulled on an old grey hoodie, heading down to the shady corner store where he tilted his head to avoid the cameras (another constant, as their angle had not been altered since he has left) and bought a prepaid phone, which he used once outside to call in his work answering machine. Most of the older ones he deleted right away, but once he got to more recent requests he began to thumb numbers into his other phone. Finally, he put his main phone away and, with a stabilizing breath, called in a number that seemed tattooed into the front of his mind.

"Yes, this is Mr. Scarlet, I'm calling for… for a cleaning request. Name of 'Scarlet', yes. No, only a few months ago… yes, thank you. It was a big loss for everyone. Thank you. It's all good? Okay, I'd like some, uh, flowers placed there, if you can do that. Do you have anything red? No, that's perfect. Look, mate, I've got to go. Important business. Yes, thank you, cheers." He hung up with a release of nervous breath, and tossed the burner phone into a nearby garbage can, shoving his hands into the pocket of his sweatshirt as he walked, fishing out his main phone and hitting a few saved numbers before answering with what he hoped was casual assurance.

"Red Knave Enterprises, you called wanting to discuss a meeting? Well, I'm free until lunch. Got an address? No, I don't need anyone to meet me. I'll meet you."

Ten minutes before lunch, a very rich man in a very rich suit let himself into his private offices—the entire twentieth story of the grandest high-rise in the entire city, and froze in the doorway after entering his password and allowing his thumb to be scanned. A young man with big ears and a grey hoodie was sitting at his desk, feet propped up leisurely on the dark teak wood. There was a moment of shocked, frozen silence.

"Bookcase safe," Will said, pointing towards it casually, "Approximately 20,000 in crisp new 100 dollar bills, all in a suitcase with a thumbprint scanner—very impressive. Hidden room behind the fake Picasso," he shifted his arm to point behind him, "with some of the finest fake Matisse's I've ever seen inside along with what looks like normal sentimental stuff, some old jewelry and documents, including one with all of your current bank information. But then again, you'd only know to grab that if you knew what it was for—very clever encoding. Have I missed anything?"

The man's mouth opened and closed like a fish. Finally, he seemed to gather his thoughts. Will stepped in again.

"Excluding, of course, your fake Rolex collection hidden underneath your very real scotch set. Well, at least it was real, until a little while ago." He grinned and took his feet off of the desk, which sported an empty snifter of what had previously been the aforementioned scotch, standing and approaching the still slack-jawed man. "Name's Will Scarlet, Red Knave Enterprises." He offered his hand, and it was only by instinct that the man shook it. "We had an appointment," he added helpfully.

"How did you get in here?" the man finally was capable of speech.

Will shrugged and couldn't keep a smug grin off of his face. "We had an appointment," he said simply.

As Will entered the upscale high-rise downtown, he lifted his phone up like he was checking a message at eye-level, the silver back of his phone reflecting a sharp triangle of light right onto the only security camera with the proper angle to see his face. Once he was under it he dropped his phone back down and pushed it into his pants pocket, knocking into a woman in a business suit on her way out to lunch. "Sorry," he apologized, one hand touching her elbow to steady her slightly, hiding how his other hand lightly unclipped her ID badge from the pocket of her suit. She nodded at him, not paying any real attention, and without breaking stride Will tapped her ID card on the turnstile to allow him to pass from the lobby and into the elevator area. He turned towards the stairs, dropping the ID badge on the floor and kicking it towards a corner. Once inside the stairwell Will spotted a large red fire alarm and paused beneath it, considering. Up or down? The basement seemed promising, but his gut told him to go up. Some of the older, private buildings had storage areas in the basement, but this building was newer, more singularly based. He left the fire alarm alone. For now.

Twenty flights of fucking stairs. Kill him.

Will panted, hands on his knees on the twentieth story, sputtering a bit as he checked his phone for the time. Nearly lunch, and lunch meant Alice. Better to get this over with now. The doorway leading onto the twentieth story was marked as alarmed, and Will flared his lighter underneath the fire alarm for a few seconds before leaning into the door and ducking inside the Spartan hallway, listening closely. Inside the stairwell, a man was heard checking the alarm, and noting something about a false positive before echoing back downstairs.

Will headed down the hallway until he came to the proper door. Private offices of the CEO. Will crouched down, steeled himself, and licked the thumb scanner before taking a thin piece of receipt paper from his wallet and holding it over the scanner, spitting to clear his mouth of the taste of Other People's Thumbs. It beeped its approval. Now, onto the input board, nine numbers looking serenely out at Will as he got out his phone and an appropriate wire. He didn't actually attach it; only attached one end to the ground metal of the keypad and typed the order in on his phone to override the circuits, allowing the door to unlock for him with a click and a small amount of sparks.

Will slipped inside, and let the door close behind him.

"Anyway, here's how this works," Will continued, checking the time on his phone and spying a few missed calls and texts from Alice. "I found the flaws in your security, I hook you up with vendors—not guys you can find in the yellow pages—and they pay me for finding them clients. I'm the middle man."

"Th-thank you!" the man stuttered.

Will started past him, tossing out an "I'll send your secretary the contact info," before the man stopped him again with another question.

"But, what do I pay you?" the man asked.

Will dug around in one of his pockets. "I helped myself to your suitcase full of hundreds. Grabbed myself a few of the real bills. Fair?" he didn't leave the man time to answer as he strolled out, sliding apps around on his phone. Better to steamroll than be talked to death, in Will's opinion, and so he handled all of his consultations that way. Break in, make a summary of their shit, get out with a few hundred in his pocket. Easy money.

"You look smug about something," Alice noted, eyes glancing up over her computer screen to where Will stood, grinning through his nervousness.

"That's just my face, love," he replied, sitting down in the chair next to her desk and crossing one leg across the other, trying to look roguishly casual. He managed to look lazy as hell.

Alice, he noted happily, didn't refute him, still typing. "You never answer your phone," she observed instead.

"I answered this morning," he felt the need to point out. "Which is why I'm here. Lunch date, that is. I mean, not a date. Lunch meeting."

"I've called you at least five times since then."

For lack of a better retort, he shrugged. "You should be more concerned," she said, with a final precise tapping of her keyboard, "because I just finished the report."

"What?" he asked, nearly jumping out of his seat to peer at her computer screen, "even my parts?"

"You were unconscious for most of your parts, and I have a deadline to meet." He made a face at her, and she smiled like a cat that got the cream. How quickly his smugness deserted him for fairer shores.

With a sigh, Will leaned back. "Your loss, I was treating for lunch."

"You got a job?" Alice asked as she was packing up, avoiding his comment in her perfectly casual way. Will felt like kissing her. Shoved it down.

"Old consultation business got some pings while I was away," he said, and seeing her latch onto that phrase, while I was away, he spoke up again. "So I've got a few big ones tucked away, thought I'd pay for whatever order-in you wanted. But." He gestured towards her computer.

"Oh, I wasn't planning on ordering in anything," she said easily, crushing his heart casually beneath her heels.

"You weren't?" he tried not to sound like all of his dreams had been crushed, but it was hard, because all of his dreams had been crushed.

"No," Alice replied, picking up her purse and jacket, "I was planning on going out. Cyrus and I wanted to show you the new sushi place that moved in while you were gone."

Suddenly Will's day was looking both better and worse. "Sushi place?" he stuttered.

Alice smiled past his nervousness like a beacon and held out her hand for him to take.

Cyrus's neck. Alice's hands.

The glowing way they looked at each other.

Will leaned heavily against the wall outside of his apartment and dragged his hands down his face. He'd managed not to make a complete and total idiot of himself (whether he had made himself out as somewhat of a total idiot was up for debate) but it had been a struggle. There was something in the air around Cyrus and Alice that made him feel like he was drunk. Drunk on something finer than wine, harder than vodka.

At one point, Alice left to go to the ladies room, leaving Will alone at the table with Cyrus, who had more than a fair amount of buttons undone, damn him.

"So," Will tried, "You still working out of home?" Lame. Lame. Lame. Will wanted to smash his head through the table.

Cyrus laughed, melting Will's heart at once. It was so easy for him… laughing was as natural as breathing and smiling to Cyrus. He had a definite air around him that made the whole world seem that much brighter.

"Yeah," he answered, "work's picked up though. No more 'I'm at your beck and call' for stubborn clients. I've got more a pool to pick from."

Will nodded, searching for a witty remark and failing. "Good," he said. Lame. Lame. Lame. Please assume the head-smashing position.

Alice returned from the restroom, and as she was sitting back down she leaned over and kissed Cyrus. Will could see subtle movements of tongue and busied himself with adding an unholy amount of wasabi to his dish of soy sauce and stirring madly with his chopsticks.

When he thought it was safe, he glanced at them, and they were both looking at him serenely, as if nothing had happened. God, Will was so tense he could be used to break down doors. He coughed self-consciously.

"Will?" Alice asked, and he knew that no matter what the question was, he would do whatever she wanted.

"Yeah?" he asked, swallowing heavily.

"I'm really glad that you're back, and I don't want to push you for what you were doing." He nodded appreciatively. "And I want to know if I can set you up as an on-call consultant for the police department again. It'll be like old times." The light in her eyes was encouraging.

Will was about to answer, but hesitated. Hello, this is Mr. Scarlet… I'm calling for a cleaning request.

Cyrus and Alice both noticed his pause, and something unsaid but incredibly real passed between them like electricity; Will could taste ozone on his tongue… and he wanted to taste more of it.

"Absolutely," Will said as easily as he could manage, drawing the syllables out. "Anything for you. For the department."

The look Alice gave him had him falling through the floor.

Alice gave him a ride—again—and dropped him off at the front of his shitty apartment, making his cheeks burn. He really had to get a place less slummy. He sagged tiredly against the wall and scrubbed his face with his hands. Three months, and he was already face-deep in Alice and Cyrus.

His face burned. Wrong choice of words.

He pushed his weight off of the wall, tiredly, like he was coming down from a high, and staggered up the stairs to his apartment. Too many fucking stairs today. He was kneeling down, picking the lock, when he heard something crash inside, and he froze in fear.

Hello, this is Mr. Scarlet, I'm calling for a cleaning request.

Finally, after the sound had died off, Will got control of his fingers again and made the lock moan for him, swinging it open and preparing to bolt.

He stood up in surprise and concern.

"Liz?" Will asked, letting the door shut behind him. "What the bloody hell?"

She looked up at him briefly, mascara running down her cheeks—since when did she wear mascara? She hadn't worn any kind of makeup three months ago—and then resumed her work, digging wholeheartedly into the pillows on the couch with a switchblade.

"Look, Liz…" Will continued in a gentle but wary tone, edging his way inside with his hands out in front of him. "I hate that couch too, but there's no need for violence."

"Fuck you." Her voice was small and tinny with tears, and her hands raked through discolored stuffing.

Slowly, Will kneeled down next to her and placed his hand over hers, keeping her still. She sniffed loudly.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"Fucking tip turned out sideways," she told him. "Most of the crew got nabbed and now I owe Walrus… I owe him a lot, Will. I thought maybe I'd left some hidden up here, but…" she kneaded at the twisted fibers fruitlessly. "But it's gone now. What am I going to do, Will?"

"Run," he offered, and it was not a cruel answer. It was what they did. He said "they" because Lizard was the only person he could call a friend of similar situation. He knew the fear of a boss breathing over your shoulder after a job, of the uneasy trust of tips. He knew, god, he knew.

"I can't," her voice cracked. "I can't. This is too big for running."

Will squeezed her hand, mind running a million miles an hour. "… How much?" he asked in a husky voice.

She blinked blurrily at him. "What?"

"How much money do you owe, Lizard?" he asked without looking at her, speaking quickly.

She said a single number, spitting it out like it left a bad taste in her mouth. She watched his expression and he nodded slowly.

"Okay," was all he said.

"What?" she repeated.

"I need to go for a walk. Don't… wail and throw yourself from a high place just yet, okay?" he tried for a playful tone, and it only served to confuse her more. He stood suddenly and walked right back out of the apartment, down to a corner store where the camera angle didn't quite catch his face beneath his hood. He bought a cell phone.

Hello, this is Mr. Scarlet, I'm calling for a cleaning request.

Chapter Text

Lizard was gone.

She had just packed up some time in the night while Will was sleeping like the dead (read: had vivid dreams about a certain police detective and her boyfriend, his shirt unbuttoned nearly down to the navel) and left without a note or forwarding address.

Good for her, Will thought, it was rare to have a getaway that clean and spotless, but he still ditched the apartment for a few days in case anyone would come snooping after answers he didn't have. He spent a few nights in a hostel and then spent some of his grubby hundred dollar bills to get a hotel room with complimentary soap so he could wash. Standard protocol. Better to smell like the age-old sweat of communal sheets than be, well, dead. Or at least wishing you were dead, which Will knew was quite often how the process of finding someone went. Locate nearest possible witness. Rip their fingernails right from the bed, and then, when they're done screaming, ask them what they know. Then move on to molars.

By the time Will was finally comfortable with picking the lock to the apartment again, he was tired, sore, and probably smelled like the aftermath of an anonymous lawyer meeting with a less than anonymous hooker in the Motel 6. He was content, however, because upon inspection his few scattered possessions he had left behind had been frisked, and someone had left his coffee maker on. Bastards. He'd have to fix the wiring and get a new carafe, it was all scorched out.

Will stood in the empty apartment, and, for the first time since coming back to town, felt alone.

He plugged his phone in to charge, having lost use of it only a day into his self-imposed exile, and tried to intimidate the wiring in his coffee maker into suddenly being well again. Once a good enough charge had built up, his phone buzzed on, full of missed calls, Alice and Cyrus's numbers popping up as if they had switched off on who was going to try and get a hold of him. He sat with his back against the wall next to the socket and dialed Alice back, keeping the phone still plugged in.

"Will!" she answered breathlessly, and Will tried to keep that from getting to him as he wedged the phone between his cheek and shoulder so he could figure over the coffee maker with both hands.

"'Ello," he replied, "What's up?"

"You never answer your phone!" she sounded perfectly pleased with the idea of killing him, which really shouldn't have affected him the way it did. Suddenly the coffee maker was the least of his worries, and his hands were big and clumsy.

"My phone was out of commission until recently," he said in a forcefully cool tone. "What's up?"

Alice made a frustrated grunting noise, and Will honestly didn't care about the coffee maker anymore, his full attention was rapt on the sound of her breath coasting into the phone. "There were some cases I wanted you to take a look at. And Cyrus had a question for you—hold on a second."

Oh, shit, he really did land running with this, didn't he? Will steeled himself for having to converse with the second half of his insurmountable crush—lust, or, whatever—without making an even bigger fool of himself. He still held on, like a child being afraid of the dark far into young adulthood, to the irrational fear that somehow, through only his voice, Alice or Cyrus would somehow be able to tell his desire to be with the other. Or both of them. Which, seeing as how they had been dating for as long as he knew them, was undoubtedly a bad thing to reveal to either of them.

"Hey, Will," Cyrus greeted him, and Will could almost hear the small and easy smile he wore.

"Hey." Some passing god blessed Will with a voice that managed to not crack. A good start.

"Remember when I told you at dinner a week ago that I've got a bigger client pool nowadays? Well I actually was contacted by a private company who wants to hire me, and they mentioned a few security breaks and I thought you might want to contact them, you know. Get back on your feet now that you're back." There was a bit of a cold accusation in the last sentence that Will picked up on immediately. He slid down the wall until he was lying down, the crown of his head pressed against the baseboard.

"You… found a job for me?" he asked weakly.

There was some shuffling and whispering on the other end of the line and Will waited patiently.

"Well, you could put it that way, yes," Cyrus replied calmly.

Will chuckled, and covered his eyes with his wrist, face breaking out in a broad and bright smile against his own will. "You guys really want me around, don't you?" he asked, approaching a playful tone.

More shuffling. Alice came on. "So you'll take it?" She sounded so hopeful, and Cyrus was too, Will could tell, and it was all a bit overwhelming. Only one way to fix that.

"I can't hear you!" Will called, making crushing noises with his mouth, "A tunnel or whatever."

"Will, damn it, you are calling me from your apartment!"

"Byeeee," Will held out, and hung up.

Cyrus ended up insisting on giving him a ride to the office building. Which ruined all of Will's plans on nonchalantly showing up, as Cyrus evidently had harassed his druggie landlord to give up Will's apartment number. He knocked like a civilized person and like a paranoid person Will answered the door with a pipe wrench hidden behind his back.

"Ready to go?" Cyrus sounded far too pleased with himself, but he at least had the decency to properly button his shirt this time around, which removed one thing from Will's list of potential problems.

"Uh," Will answered cleverly. "Sure. Just let me…" He turned around and chucked the pipe wrench onto the floor behind him with a loud crash.

He looked to Cyrus, who's eyes were bugging out slightly. "Uh…"

"I thought I saw a spider," Will shrugged, and Cyrus figured it was better to let the subject drop.

The car ride was pleasant enough. Will was capable of not totally losing his mind and Cyrus seemed comfortable keeping his silence. There was no looming threat of Will screwing up and saying "Hey, I want to have sex with you. And your girlfriend. Preferably at the same time," which was nice.

The high-rise was just as high and shiny as any other high-rise Will was likely to enter, and the offices they headed too were several stories up.

Will caught Cyrus looking uneasily at the elevator, and immediately connected it to the throw-away mentioning of claustrophobia.

"Do you mind if we take the stairs?" Will spoke up, "I've got a New Years Resolution to work on."

Cyrus's grateful smile was enough to keep Will floating up all twenty fucking flights of stairs.

Cyrus was instructed to sit down and wait for Human Resources to grab him for his interview. Will, upon introduction as a representative of Knave Enterprises, was immediately buzzed through the partition from waiting area to offices for his meeting with the CEO, who had a vaguely familiar name, but Will was too busy scoping out the schematics of the tech conglomerate to really worry over it. They had a sick setup, he had to admit. Whoever had been stealing from them was probably helped along by some inside man or woman.

Something shifted in the CEO's gaze as he stood and walked around his desk to greet Will, alone in his office. Will waited, and didn't have to do so for long.

"I know who you are," the man said, and stood up in full threatening posture. Will decided that he was already done here.

"I'm flattered," Will replied dryly, "but if you're interested in a private lap dance you'll have to call my madam and fix it up with her, okay big guy?"

The man sputtered and Will stretched his lips into a bared smile, all exposed canines and smugly angled eyebrows.

"I mean," the man recovered, "that I know who you were, what you did."

"Care to elaborate for our home viewers who missed last night's episode," Will kept evading. He didn't deal in ambiguity when he was working. He only had to make it past this conversation before he could run along home and find something else to waste his time with.

Wordlessly, the man pulled out a card from his inside breast pocket and handed it over. Will took it with a raised eyebrow, but as soon as he identified what it was, his expression became frozen, wooden. He swallowed heavily and the man studied him silently. Will knew now who he was. Mr. Dodgeson. Will's last job with any kind of crew, and he had almost been caught, half of his face shadowed in a security image that their hacker had later scrubbed from record. But not, it seemed, before Mr. Dodgeson had studied it, grown bitter over it.

Will licked his lips and handed over the Jack of Hearts card warily. "Why do you carry around a playing card?" he asked, but his voice was strained and both of them could see through his lie.

"I traded for this card," Mr. Dodgeson said tersely, "three priceless works of art."

"A pity," Will said coldly. He didn't add that the Da Vinci sketch had been a forgery. "Well, we've finished our transaction, and I'm afraid I have other business to attend to today. It was nice to meet you, Mr., ah, what was it?"

"Dodgeson," his voice was like acid, and all of Will's instincts were telling him to get the hell out.

He nodded and did as he was told.

As he passed by the receptionists area, he tried to create a mask of indifference but he still wasn't firing on all lie cylinders, it would seem, because after just one look at his face Cyrus leapt up from his waiting seat indignantly.

"What happened?" he demanded, in a voice that implied impending violence, a tone Will hadn't heard Cyrus adopt, well, ever. It would have panicked him if he wasn't already in a state of considerable panic. Cyrus evidently picked up on that too, because his eyebrows drew together in quiet and careful curiosity of the source.

"I don't think you want to work here," Will finally choked out, standing close to Cyrus and wanting nothing more than to pull him in for a kiss and a muttered apology for probably ruining his chances of getting hired because, hey, he had robbed the CEO blind of seemingly priceless works of art a few years ago when he ran with a crew and left a taunting playing card behind to fill the gaps he had made.

Instead of doing that, Will shouldered past him rather rudely and tossed over his shoulder, "Shitty severance package."

He hit the street and kept on walking, feeling the money nestled deep in his hoodie pocket.

Misery loves bodily injury, as it turns out.

Will was lucky that the first hit didn't knock him out; God above knows how it all would have ended if he had immediately slumped on the ground when the swarm came. All that the first hit did, crashing into his jaw with perfect timing as he passed by the alleyway, was send him reeling. Will's head erupted in a bright flashes and he keeled over sideways, knocking painfully into a parked car, but unfortunately for him the alarm didn't go off as he slammed into it, crushing his shoulder and straining his wrist as he attempted to brace it against unforgiving metal.

Quickly, he turned, bracing his back against the car and using it as support as his attacker rushed at him again. He used the leverage of the car to kick out right at the center of the man's chest, actually managing to knock him away. Will was prepping to run, releasing himself from the cover of the car, when his arms were trapped against him from behind. Instinctively he swung his head back and felt cartilage snap against the back of his head, eerily warm blood squelching all over the back of his neck. The attacker released him, but then the first man was back and ready to drag Will by his hoodie into the alleyway.

He struggled; better to stay on the sidewalk. People got beaten to death in alleyways—on the sidewalk there was the constant threat of someone witnessing, which was all Will could really hope for as one of the attackers—were there three? He was having a hard time keeping count—drove his knee right into Will's abdomen, knocking all of the air out of him and leaving him reeling, off-balance. He hit the ground with a loud crack emanating from somewhere behind his head. Now that he was on the ground, it became less of a fight and more of an outright pummeling. Will would have nightmares of steel-tipped shoes for weeks. They came, again and again, and something warm and wet was trickling down Will's chin and he could only see from one eye.

He groaned weakly as the abuse paused, and rough hands patted him down, finding the thick wad of bills and pocketing it. Something fluttered down and rested against the damp front of Will's shirt. He was collapsed, legs between two parked cars, and head resting on the cold hard cement sidewalk. It took him some time, but he stood up, using both hands to support himself as he turned over. The bloodstained Jack of Hearts hit the sidewalk like a taunt, and Will squeezed his eyes shut, counting backwards from ten. At one he pushed himself onto his knees, and then brought first his right, then his left leg underneath him. Every move was a massive effort, and once on his knees he knew that he had to go somewhere before an ambulance picked him up. He couldn't go to the hospital. The apartment was too far away. Who did he know who was close enough, that he trusted?

The answer normally would have unnerved him, but as he seemed to be bleeding from several normally not-bleeding places, he didn't let it bother him. He aimed his feet towards Alice and Cyrus's building.

For a second Will was afraid that he had the wrong door, but then it opened and he couldn't even attempt a smile because Alice and Cyrus stood in the doorway, twin looks of shock and fear and something else that Will attributed to both his head injury and the fact that he was bleeding all over their respectable apartment entryway.

Together they supported him, warmth on either side of his rather sticky and tender chest, and helped him around to the couch, where he fell with a whimper onto the cushions.

Without waiting for any kind of consent or even informing Will of his intent, Cyrus put his hands underneath the bottom of his shirt and brought it up over his head to expose the damage. His hands. Will's bare skin. His shirt cleared his head, leaving him half-naked and out of his right mind on Alice and Cyrus's couch, with Cyrus putting his unholy hands all over him. This situation would have been preferable, except that, well. It wasn't.

Will found a particularly raw section of cheek and pinched it between his teeth, washing pain up and down his body as a preventative measure, taking his mind off of everything else because now was not the proper time to pitch a tent, euphemistically speaking. Cyrus continued his examination, and Will wished for unconsciousness or at least incontinence as his fingers dipped low on his abdomen, skimming the top of his jeans. Thankfully—or unfortunately, the jury seemed to be taking their sweet time on that verdict—for Will, Cyrus refrained from taking those off as well.

"A concussion, probably," Cyrus reported to Alice, who stood by, worrying. "Bruised ribs, definitely."

"We need to get him to a hospital," Alice decided, and Cyrus nodded his agreement.

"No hospital," Will wheezed, "no insurance."

"I'll cover the bills," Alice snapped, leaving, in her opinion, no room for argument.

Will clutched at her arm as she moved away from him, and she stopped, looking at him in surprise. He realized, lately, that it was the first time since being back that he had initiated any kind of contact with her beyond a polite handshake. Her skin was smooth beneath his slightly numbed fingers.

"No hospital," he said quietly, "please."

How could he explain, without crossing an unspoken line within himself, that warring crews watched the hospital lists for injuries that implicated a fresh score, or for missing members, or for people they simply wanted gone? Something in his face said something he couldn't, and after a tense moment Alice sucked in her lips and assented with a nod. Will dizzily released her arm and sunk back onto the couch, breathing rather high-pitched and sounding as painful as it felt.

Over him, Cyrus and Alice shared the same worried look that melted down in the air.

"You'll stay here tonight," Cyrus said gently, resting one hand on Will's shoulder. He nodded in reply, eyes squeezed shut with concentration on not bursting into unmanly and unattractive tears in front of them. He could barely feel the soft touch of a blanket being tossed over him, but the bright sensation of Cyrus and Alice's hands working in tandem to smooth it over him carried on, into dreams where everything was red.

He saw a pair of red lips, smiling at him slyly as he stormed out of the CEO's office, watching him from his periphery. A hacker.