Chapter Text
It’s been twenty four years, and Roman Kingsley still hated the rain.
Twenty four years with Florida summers, no less, so he’d grown well accustomed to watching the rain fall outside his window, but he never once enjoyed it (give or take a few times where he got to collect rainwater in mini mason jars with his mom, but that was the only exception). It was dreary and lifeless and the exact opposite of everything he would rather watch from a window - fireworks, for instance, were one of his favorite spectacles, and he’d take them over falling water any day.
It didn’t help, of course, that he was also not behind a window at that exact moment, but stuck sprinting down the hallways of a cavernous warehouse on the outskirts of Miami, where the rain managed to snake through every crack in the ceiling (which there were quite a lot of) and, somehow, into his boots; running through a warehouse was uncomfortable enough. Running through a warehouse with socks wetter than a drunk sailor and his sirenic lover was indubitably worse.
The rain in his shoes was far from his biggest problem at the moment, but he did like focusing on complaining instead of the actual issue. It kept his heart rate lower.
A bang echoed somewhere else in the building, somewhere far off; Roman put a hand to his headset, muttering a quick, “We good?” into the mic, his eyes tracing the air as he waited, his footsteps still thudding relentlessly against the wet cement.
“Yeah,” a small voice pierced the static after a moment. “Just some old boxes on a belt. Sorry for the scare.”
Roman didn’t bother to respond as he turned down yet another empty hallway; he peeked into each open room - nothing, nothing, nothing . He was getting real tired of nothing.
Then, at the end of the hallway, a door was locked.
His stomach jumped as he saw it, a beacon of… well, of something , and that was enough for him. He approached the door, slowing his steps to a tread and pressing his ear to the metal; he couldn’t hear anything over the pounding of rain against the roof, but it was the only lead he’d found in the metal hellhole so far, and he was more than willing to follow it.
Taking a step back, he eyed the doorknob, and he kicked.
The door wasn’t as sturdy as it seemed; it swung open immediately, leading Roman to question whether or not it had actually even been locked, but the contents of the room evaporated any doubts he had as soon as he stepped in.
On the ground was a single, motionless body.
It was a girl in her early twenties, dressed in a simple black t-shirt and leggings - no shoes, no accessories. Her eyes were closed, her face on full display by the blunt-ended haircut splayed out around her head. Her right arm and exposed feet were covered in red sores and peeling skin with spots of black, branching all the way up to the bottom of her face, gnarled and flaking.
“Damn it,” Roman muttered. “ Damn it.” He strode towards the body, lowering himself to one knee at its side and studying the girl, reaching his hand out to graze his fingertips across her eyelids. He pulled gently at the skin to see her irises.
Pure white.
Roman yanked his hand back and stood, resisting the urge to kick something, to yell into the buzzing air of the room. Instead, he jammed his finger into the button on his headset. “Cinci. Get Pops out here, now.”
The static crackled and stopped. “What’d you find?” a deeper voice called into his ear; Roman squeezed his eyes shut.
“Not what we wanted.”
“What did you find , Blueblood?”
“A body.” The voice on the other end stopped suddenly, and Roman was almost happy that he had managed to dislodge their authority, even for just a moment. “A girl, alone. Looks like frostbite.”
Another pause. “And the eyes?”
“All white.”
A sigh echoed in his ears. “I’m sending Pops now.”
“Got it.” Roman took his hand away from the ear piece and stared at the body at his feet. She was young, and Roman could see lines in her face from smiling, the makeup smudged under eyes from who-knows-how-long ago, freckles dotting her arms in between the patches of black and red.
He kneeled down again, his eyes caught by a glimmer on her blistered hand; it was a gold band on her ring finger, set under a single, sparkling diamond, a real one that glinted under the merciless fluorescent lighting that loomed above them. Roman collapsed from his crouched position - how long had this girl been missing? Who had been left in her wake?
His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of two pairs of footsteps carrying to the doorway behind him.
“Roman?” the same small voice from earlier called into the room. “We didn’t see the group in the west win- oh.”
Roman’s shoulders fell, and he squeezed his eyes shut again, turning away from the body to take a deep breath and regard the lanky teenager in the doorway. He could just see the identical boy at his side, right past the doorjamb. “There’s no group, Missy. Just another dupe.”
“She’s dead,” Missy said; not a question, but a forced observation as the boy’s tan skin went pale and he ran a hand through already-messy brown curls. “They’re really not here?”
“Nope.” Roman’s eyes drifted to his watch, its screen bright with a mission report on a group of missing persons supposedly in the warehouse. He clicked Exit .
“Is Pat on the way?” Roman heard his footsteps start up again, further into the room.
“Go home, Missy.”
“What?” Missy froze, his face pinched with confusion, brow low and mouth a taut line. “Ro, we have-”
“Go home . Take Presley and get back to HQ. Now ,” he added as Missy just stood there with a deep frown.
“Okay,” the boy whispered. He turned on his heel and marched out of the room without another word, grabbing his twin’s arm on the way. Just before he disappeared from Roman’s view, he stopped and glanced over his shoulder. “Be safe, Ro.”
“Can do, Buckaroo,” Roman muttered without much attention, and Missy was gone.
Roman stared at the ground, his hand tracing the uneven grooves of the cement, the scars from years of wear by boots and wheels alike. His eyes kept trailing back to the body in front of him; he was lost, wading through his mind, scenarios running through his head at the speed of light.
The girl going missing.
“Gone,” he heard through the door - it wasn’t really a word, not like that. It was more of a choke, a guttural exhale, filled to the brim with untold horrors.
Her family realizing.
He’d never seen so many people crying in one room. Hell, he’d never seen his father cry at all.
How it could have been stopped.
“I thought you were watching!” The screams had been going on for a few hours. He didn’t fully know what they were arguing about, but he was doing his best to piece the broken shards together. “You promised you’d watch!”
What happened to her after she disappeared.
He didn’t like nighttime. He used to - the stars were so pretty - but then it started to hurt.
What killed her- who killed her.
Roman looked down at her hand again, at the sparkling diamond and glimmering band that told more than she’d ever be able to again, and noticed its position on the floor - or, rather, above the floor; her hand was draped over a small, crumpled paper, her slim fingers covering its edges from first sight. He reached out, slowly, carefully, and pulled it out, grabbing a protruding edge so as not to disturb the lifeless limb from its last position, and unfolded the paper.
It was blank, save for the intricate neon eye drawn in the direct center of the blue lined sheet.
“Oh, for fu-”
“Kiddo? You okay?”
Roman jumped, snapping his attention to the doorway where Patton stood, his gray cardigan pulled tight around his body for once in an effort to shield him from the rain outside. His round glasses were spotted with water, but his hands were too busy lugging around the heavy black case that Roman knew was filled with medical supplies to wipe them off.
“Yeah,” Roman managed, crumpling the paper back into a ball and dropping it onto the ground behind his leg, where Patton couldn’t see. “I’m good.” Patton just watched him for a moment, his round brown eyes sharp; Roman cleared his throat. “This is her,” he said, jerking his head towards the body.
“I figured,” Patton sighed. He shuffled to Roman’s spot beside the girl, dropping the bag with an exaggerated groan. “Jeez, I really gotta put wheels on that thing.” He tried a smile in Roman’s direction, but it collapsed too quickly to really have an effect; instead, he kneeled down beside the body and cocked his head to the side, his eyes shining with pity and his voice hushed as he said, “Poor girl. You didn’t deserve this.”
He reached out and hovered his hand above hers for a second before taking a deep breath, reaching back to the leather case at his hip. He unzipped it and extracted a camera.
“Stage four frostbite on the arms and feet, stage three on the neck,” he muttered from behind the device, standing to snap pictures from different angles. “Some light bruising on the wrists- oh. Um, no, that’s… that’s actually very heavy bruising on the wrists. Probably some kind of metal binding- handcuffs, maybe.” He leaned in and glanced to Roman, his freckled face practically green as he swallowed, and he ducked immediately back behind his camera screen to get more photos. “No lacerations like the last one, though. Can you get her eyes? Gently, please,” he added as Roman leaned towards the girl’s face; Roman pulled again at her eyelids, but he didn’t miss Patton’s flinch. “Right, thank you. All white this time? Huh. I guess that’s still unusual, but it’s awfully plain for them-” He flinched again. “That sounded bad. I’m sorry.”
“You’re fine, Pat.” Roman glanced at the albino irises, his stomach turning; he chided himself internally - he should be used to it now, he should know how to compartmentalize it, but the eyes always made him feel sick. “There’s nothing on her eyes this time, either.”
“Oh,” Patton said, his eyebrows shooting up, and he leaned close to her face again. “Well, right you are, kiddo-”
“Pat, I’m the same age as you.”
“That’s not important. What’s important is that you have a very good point - no insertion markings or stains on the cornea,” he muttered, snapping a close up of the girl’s eyes. “Interesting.” Patton lowered the camera, and he was faced with a dead girl barely two inches away - he leapt back and stood in a single, fluid motion, rubbing at his cardigan like it had been doused in dirt, his lips pursed. Roman could see the tremor in his wrists, and the smell permeating around them hit him quite suddenly. “Well, me and Logan’ll look over these later. Do you need a ride back to the house?”
“Oh, n-” Roman stopped - that’s right, he sent Missy and Presley back with the car. “Yeah. That’d be great.”
“Perfect!” Patton’s smile was back, suddenly too wide for his round face, and his eyes were trained carefully on Roman instead of the ground beside him. “Could you grab the kit for me? I’m not sure I have the muscles to lug it back to the car.” Roman just nodded, grabbing the bag as Patton wrung his wrists and bounced eagerly on his toes. “Thank youuuu!”
They started out of the room, and Roman made himself face forward the whole time.
Think of the rain, Roman.
HQ was quiet, much to Roman’s surprise; the twins were nowhere in sight as he and Patton walked in, and Logan was sitting on the couch with a book in the living room, his mouth its ever-straight line. Patton brightened.
“Lo, we got the pictures,” he gushed, dragging his bag over to the couch, “and you won’t believe-”
“Roman, can I see you in my office?”
Roman turned to the voice, a single eyebrow raised. “Already? I just got back; I haven’t even broken anything yet.” Thomas looked unamused in the doorway of his office.
“Now, please.”
Roman sent a curious look to Logan, but the man just shrugged as Patton watched with wide eyes. He turned back to the office and blew a tuft of hair out of his eyes, striding through the open door with his shoulders back and head high.
“You said you found a girl at the warehouse,” Thomas said, his voice melting the words into a statement more than a question as soon as Roman stepped into the room and closed the door behind himself.
That was not how Roman expected the conversation to start. “..yes?”
“And I’m assuming the eye was there.”
“Yes,” Roman repeated, thinking back to the crumpled piece of paper with the doodled insignia. Thomas sighed, his head falling into his hands. “Why?”
Thomas didn’t respond for a moment. “There was a bank robbery across town, just thirty minutes ago,” he muttered through his fingers, running his hands back through his feathery brown hair. He must have noticed Roman’s unimpressed expression, because he added in a voice that rang with something so undoubtedly tired , “No money was taken, but a bank teller went missing. They found a drawing of a bright yellow eye on his desk.”
Roman froze in his spot by the door, his boss’s words sinking in, and his hand curled into a fist before he could stop it. “They played us.”
He found a dead body today, and he’d be finding another one very soon.
“Yeah,” Thomas said, his tone acidic. “You could say that.”
Roman stared at the carpeted floor as his fingernails dug into his palm. “Why didn’t the police get there before he disappeared?” he managed through grit teeth.
“I don’t know,” Thomas said honestly. “You know we don’t work with the department, Roman. It’s not our job to question them, it’s our job to find the people they miss.”
“Yeah, and we’re doing so magnificently with that, aren’t we?”
“I don’t need the attitude.”
“It’s true!” Roman yelled, throwing his hands into the air. “We haven’t found one person, Thomas! Not living , anyway. How exactly are we supposed to accomplish anything when we have a success rate of absolutely nothing ?!”
“Calm down-”
“ Don’t tell me that. I’m getting real frustrated with this cat and mouse game-”
“You think I’m not?” Thomas cut in, bracing his palms against the desk top as he stood, meeting Roman’s gaze. “You think I enjoy this? I want to find these people as much as you do, Roman, but we have to be patient. Every failure is a new lead.”
“Every failure is another dead body,” Roman growled.
“We’re getting closer,” Thomas said, and Roman noticed the lilac crescents under his eyes for the first time since he’d entered the office. “I need you to understand that.” Roman just crossed his arms, dropping his burning gaze back to the carpet. “Roman.”
“You got it, captain ,” he spat, turning back to the door without another word. Just as he put a hand on the doorknob, Thomas called out to him.
“I need you to pick up a delivery from Carrigan tomorrow-”
Roman slammed the door.