Chapter Text
Will creeps closer to the doorway, peering in through the cracks. An abandoned warehouse, really? Bad guys just couldn’t be any more cliché. It appears to be unoccupied, but recent experience tells him it’s not that simple. He can’t enter through the door anyway, not with it boarded up like so. He scans the area and, sure enough, there’s a busted-out window twenty feet up.
Scaling a shipping container and rolling into a creepy warehouse isn’t exactly how he wanted to spend his Saturday night. But the situation is, admittedly, curious. Just before he’d left the hospital yesterday, he’d overheard two physicians chatting in hushed tones.
“Did you hear the lab got robbed this morning? Someone stole thirty units of blood.”
“How’d they get past security? Think it was an inside job?”
“Don’t know. The security cameras don’t show anyone going in or out, and cameras inside the storeroom went out at the time of the robbery. They’ll be launching a full investigation, though.”
And of course, that had sent Will on a goose chase after any information that would lead him to the thief– who needed to steal blood, anyway? Using some not-quite-legal methods that he wasn’t entirely proud of (thanks, Cecil), he’d spent the last twenty-four hours gathering copies of all the evidence the police had acquired so far and going over it with a fine-tooth comb.
The criminal was thorough, Will had to admit. The police were baffled with the near-complete lack of evidence left behind. Will had been, too, until he watched the security footage for the 284th time– no, he wasn’t counting, shut up– and finally zeroed in on what had been bothering him all along.
Twenty seconds of a storeroom, unoccupied and orderly. Twenty seconds of static. Twenty seconds of the storeroom again, with the door to the blood bank fridge ajar and decidedly less full.
The difference was found on a box of empty vials, stored on the shelf beside the ransacked fridge. It was tiny, not even the size of a fingernail, but a symbol had been burned onto the box near the bottom, so inconspicuous as to be mistaken for a speck of dirt had Will not inspected that box the first 283 times and knew there was no such speck before. He zoomed in on the image and cleared the quality (Cecil really deserved a phenomenal Christmas present for showing Will how to do all this nonsense), revealing the impression of a lotus flower.
A few more hours of digging and several false leads later, he had a name: Lotus Investments, LLC. A shell corporation with no significant assets save for a single address in the Bronx.
Hence the warehouse.
Will rolls in through the open window and lands on a metal catwalk with hardly a sound, mentally applauding himself for retaining his stealth training. He rises to a crouch, moving noiselessly to the stairs and slipping down to the ground floor.
The warehouse is dark save for a single overhead light near the back of the building. Will sticks to the shadows along the walls, watching his steps to avoid tripping on anything that might give him away. Not that anyone is around to hear him if he disturbs something, but nonetheless, he creeps onward.
It's a scene out of a movie, Will thinks, the way the single light flickers ominously, spotlighting the only objects in the whole building: a table, what looks like several boxes sitting on top of it, and a white sheet covering it all. Will checks to make sure he's alone once more, then reaches out to remove the covering.
Before his fingers can make contact, a voice says from behind him, “Can I help you?”
He jumps and turns, tugging on the hood of his cape-cloak-thing that Lou Ellen had given him, making sure his face was appropriately shadowed (“If you're going to keep up the superhero gig, you gotta make sure no one sees your face. It's Superhero 101, Will.”). He comes face to face with a guy dressed similarly to him: an all-black ensemble including a hooded cape and leather combat boots, except where Will has a bow and quiver slung across his back, the other guy wears a sheathed sword at his side. The stranger also wears some kind of ski mask that only covers half of his face, leaving everything above his nose uncovered, and the hood of his cape is pushed back to his shoulders.
The way he came out of nowhere, like he’d melted out of the shadows, makes Will think of Batman, but he doesn’t have the feeling that this guy is the benevolent sort. He’s more like a grim reaper, or something equally as dark.
The new guy tilts his head at Will, arms crossed over his chest nonchalantly, as if Will is a riddle he can't quite solve. “Well?” he asks.
“I... ah...” Will stammers, glancing behind him for a second.
The other guy– damn, there’s got to be some name for him– follows his gaze, humming in recognition. “Well, go on then. Don't let me stop you.” A faint accent wraps around the words.
“What?” Will asks, taken aback. The other guy nods, gesturing to the table in invitation. He slowly turns, watching as Grim Shady– good enough– follows his movements with an affected ease. He takes the corner of the sheet in one hand and flings it off the table, revealing a box stamped with his hospital’s logo and log numbers, as well as several vials filled with colorful liquids he doesn’t recognize. If it weren’t for patching up gory wounds for a near decade and had he not been in medical school, the sight of all those bags of blood in the box might have made him squeamish. As it stands, all it does is make him scrunch his face in mild disgust at Grim’s actions.
“Knew it,” Will mutters, then louder: “You were the one who broke into the hospital.”
“Oh, well done, Sherlock,” says Grim, but his voice has shifted. He is now much higher up than he should have been able to travel in the last several seconds. Will looks up, squinting in the darkness to make out a figure, finally spotting the thief on the very catwalk Will had used while entering the building, a black shadow against the dark walls. “Now I know what you’re thinking: ‘you won’t get away with this, justice will prevail,’ et cetera, et cetera.”
Will blinks and the figure is no longer there. It comes again from his other side, closest to the left wall. He spins to face Grim, finding him walking along the edge of the warehouse with his hands clasped behind his back. “But I’m here to tell you,” Grim continues, “save your breath. I will get away with this, there is no such thing as justice in this world, get out of my way.” The last part comes out with a sort of irritated edge, like he’s tired of having this conversation with do-gooders like Will.
Frankly, that tone kind of pisses him off. “I wasn’t going to say that.”
Grim freezes, looking at Will curiously. “You weren’t?”
“Nope. I was actually going to ask what the fuck you were doing in my hospital.”
Silence follows his declaration. He hears a huff of laughter, and this time, it’s like he can feel the moment Grim moves, though he still isn’t sure how he’s doing it. When Grim speaks, his voice comes from high above Will again, but when he looks up, he sees the dark figure perched on a crossbeam, one leg dangling over the edge.
“Your hospital, huh?” Grim repeats, tossing a wadded-up piece of paper between his hands casually. “That’s very confident of you. What does it matter, anyway? Wait, wait, hold on.” A chain rattles, and they are face-to-face again, though Grim is hanging upside down like a dark Spider-Man, staring Will in the eyes. He ducks his head, breaking the contact, but Grim seems to have seen what he wanted. He barks a laugh. “Oh gods, I can’t believe this. You’re that doctor, aren’t you?”
Will groans. Without waiting for an answer, Grim laughs again, as giddy as a kid in a candy shop. “You are! I’ve heard about you– very impressive with the way you saved that kid, by the way. No wonder you’re so concerned about a little blood.” He throws the crumpled paper at Will’s face, and Will catches it with an indignant sputter as it ricochets off his cheekbone.
“A little– this is a big deal! Don’t you know there’s a shortage–”
“But if you ask me,” Grim interrupts, “they really did you wrong with that alias. Doctor Justice? I mean, come on. Doctor Sunshine was right there! Ooh, can I call you that?”
“Please don’t.”
Grim grabs onto the chain with one hand, righting himself and looking at Will straight on. “I think I will,” he states cheerily, and gods, Will can just hear the shit-eating grin behind the mask.
“Okay, if that’s all, I’ll just be taking this and leaving,” Will grinds out, reaching for the box. He kicks himself mentally for wasting so much time while Grim Shady waxed poetic about his accomplishments and poked fun at Will’s unfortunate alias.
Two gloved hands slam down on the table just as Will’s hands touch the box. He finds himself looking into deep brown, nearly black eyes. Where before they were crinkled at the corners with laughter, now they are narrowed and drawn beneath a furrowed brow.
“You don’t know what you’re getting into,” Grim warns, and Will doesn’t think he’s ever actually heard someone growl before, but he hears it now. He marvels at how quickly the mood changed. “Listen, Sunshine, you do not want to make me an enemy. If you know what’s good for you, cut your losses and leave.”
Will is frozen. There’s so much he should be doing; he should fight harder, argue more, at least draw an arrow, but he hears the truth in Grim’s words. This is a lot bigger than stopping a bank robbery. Even bigger than diffusing a hostage situation. He fully believes that if he pursues this– at least tonight– he will not live long enough to make the effort count. Fuck.
“Just who are you anyway?” he asks instead, his face still mere centimeters away from Grim’s. “And what could you possibly need with all this?”
Grim tilts his head again, considering. This time, Will sees the shadows churning, writhing like serpents around Grim.
“If you figure it out, find me,” is all he gets in answer, barely breathed out before the shadows consume his companion.
And then he’s standing alone in an empty warehouse in the Bronx, Grim Shady and his loot having disappeared like they were never there at all.