Chapter Text
The warehouse was fucking freezing.
Dyn hadn’t expected an abandoned harbor warehouse in February to be warm and toasty, but the coating of frost covering the metal around him wasn’t exactly a great omen for how he expected tonight to go. Seattle in winter already sucked, and getting called out of bed at two in the morning for an impromptu drug bust only made the level of (figurative) ice in police detective Dyn Jarren’s veins worse. It wasn’t like he could tell Commissioner Karga to fuck off and roll back over in his bed, so there he was, standing in old combat boots and a surf shop hoodie over three layers of insulation as he picked through the broken remains of what used to be an oil processing plant. Not exactly senior detective attire, but you do what you can to catch the bad guys.
The floor was freezing too, even through his boots. Stepping gingerly on it as he picked his way through one of a number of identical-looking rooms felt like stepping on solid ice, fear of falling and all. There was so much shit covering the floors that he tripped on something with every other step in the pitch blackness despite the flashlight he held next to his gun. He, mercifully, was on backup, dealing only with whatever trouble the jackasses who were dealing decided to cause, not the jackasses themselves, but he didn’t exactly want to end up with a needle jammed into the bottom of his foot or a shard of dirty glass cutting his arm open. Then he’d really have a reason to tell Karga to go fuck himself.
Not that he wasn’t doing that already, picking his way through the room and listening through his earpiece for any sign of danger. There was no way this couldn’t have waited until morning to deal with - and even if it couldn’t have, there was surely some cocksure young officer with limbs that weren’t starting to creak with old age who was better suited to pick through junkie-infested rubble while hoisting a gun like it was the head of a compass. Unfortunately, they weren’t who Seattle’s best police commissioner had on speed dial.
Really ought to change my number one of these days. Just to spite him.
Obviously people had been squatting here before, Dyn thought as his sweep made its way toward the far wall. Maybe not living, but definitely dealing, and definitely getting up to some shit. Dyn wasn’t surprised - even with the city’s bustling commerce, these old warehouses were easy fodder for squatters, with the city too lazy to demolish them and nobody wanting to buy property that permanently smelled of oil and salmon guts. His foot collided with a worn out mattress every ten feet or so, and he couldn’t even begin to imagine what his coworkers were surrounded by in the adjacent rooms.
To make things worse, the place was dead silent. Dyn hadn’t expected to hear much, what with concrete walls thicker than car bodies blocking out the sounds of the harbor around them, but it was oddly disconcerting. Usually these kinds of busts came coupled with the noise of occupation - mumbling, soft music, maybe a TV playing somewhere. But this warehouse was as silent as a funeral, and nothing put the fear of God into Dyn more than when he couldn’t hear if he was headed in the right direction.
His feet continued to shuffle across the floor, the crackle of his teammates’ voices in his earpiece the only sign of life keeping his head in check. There wasn’t much to do as backup, given that he clearly had chosen the only room that didn’t house a single living thing (or at least, a single human thing), and all he could hope for was a clean scan that could give him an excuse to escape back to the cruiser and call it a quick and easy--
The sound didn’t so much startle Dyn, as much as it caused him to whip around so quickly that he nearly ended up with a sharp piece of wood jammed into his forearm. (Not his proudest moment, he’d admit that.) It came from behind him, a shuffling that most certainly indicated life and was about the first interesting thing that had happened to him all night. His initial thought was to blow it off as rats nesting in the building (or even raccoons), but given the context of the assignment, his nerves remained on edge as he froze, left foot gingerly placed beside a nasty-looking broken bottle. He waited, gun still lifted, for another sign of life in the dark, icy room, wondering whether he actually wanted something to happen or not.
He’d very nearly decided that he was okay blowing it off as rats when he heard it again: a soft shuffling, like something was trying to settle down but couldn’t. It was louder this time, more pronounced, and luckily for Dyn, accompanied by—
Was that crying ?
Dyn’s muscles tensed immediately, freezing him in place as his eyes searched for the source of the sound. The paranoid half of him thought that it might be junkies trying to weed him out with some kind of recording, but it was too soft for that, and based on the profile he’d read in a haze on the way down to the docks, they were too stupid to do something that clever. He could easily be hallucinating, given the complete lack of sleep he was running on, but who hallucinates crying sounds on the job?
The sniffles sounded close, alternating with the shuffling noise that he’d heard until he could place where they were both coming from. They only got louder as his feet crunched over glass and dead leaves and twenty years of rotting debris, drawing him towards the corner of the room closest to him until he’d discovered the source.
Fucking hell. The bastards had brought their baby with them to a drug deal.
The kid was stuffed in what looked like a dilapidated old crate, the swaddling around him clearly half-assed as he shivered amongst a pile of ratty fabric that Dyn supposed had once been blankets. He couldn’t be more than a year old, maybe even younger than that, and he was definitely crying — Dyn could see the tears in his big brown eyes before he’d even sidled up to the crate. He was as upset as a poor, helpless baby could be, and it stirred something deep in Dyn that he couldn’t quite identify as the boy stared up at him.
He’d seen a lot of things on drug busts. Pet alligators, apartments so dingy they had holes in the floor, some of the weirdest sex positions he’d ever seen. But never, upon rolling out of his bed in the middle of the night, did he expect to be greeted with a crying baby in the middle of a call.
Academy training never exactly prepared Dyn for this. He could handle any kind of violence thrown at him, any kind of threat or gunshot like it was nothing. Fifteen years in the force had hardened him into one of the best cops Seattle had ever seen. He was practically invincible, and it certainly seemed that way to everyone he knew.
But the face of a small, defenseless baby who’d been left to freeze by his parents stopped Dyn dead in his tracks like nothing else.
There was no way the kid wasn’t inching toward hypothermia as they stared at each other. It was gone three in the morning, and almost definitely below freezing, and the kid was crying like he hadn’t been fed or changed in ages either. He was shivering so badly that Dyn could see it through the blankets. He was, for lack of a more powerful term, absolutely miserable.
Dyn’s grip on his gun faltered as he leaned over the sad excuse for a crib the child was lying in. A god awful two o’clock wakeup call, a forty-minute drive down to the harbor, and more than one bout of swearing on the way in, and here he was: standing in a warehouse with a tiny, innocent face gazing up at him, imploring him for help by stretching two tiny, chubby arms in his direction.
His first instinct was to put the gun away and answer that call for help.
There was no protocol for finding a kid in a situation like this. Sure, he’d been on domestic abuse calls, and assignments with CPS, but those came with backup, people who knew how to handle kids and take care of them and tell Dyn when to back off and go take care of the real bad guys. He’d never been a fatherly guy - at thirty-eight and single, the closest he’d ever gotten to taking care of kids was the time he’d hung around with Cara while she was babysitting her nephews for the day. He was about the last person he’d pick to handle a poor, sick baby, as much as the sight pained him to see.
So, he did the only thing he could think to do.
The sound of the zipper on his hoodie pulling down was like a gunshot in the quiet space, and it might as well have been for the way Dyn felt as he reached out towards the baby and gathered it in his arms, abandoning his gun in favor of holding the boy close. He was shaking like he was the one who’d been left out in the cold all night, hoping the kid would trust him enough not to start shrieking. Not even the best academy training could’ve prepared him for a situation like this as he rocked the baby enough that it felt calm in his arms, before slowly and carefully tucking it into his hoodie, where he shivered as the kid’s tiny body curled up against his chest for warmth.
Mercifully, there was no screaming, but it was an odd sensation, warm and cold at the same time. The feeling of something unnameable blooming in his chest mixed with the crack of his heart breaking as he heard the kid sniffle at the feeling of being warm for the first time in god knows how long. A small head buried itself in the crook of Dyn’s neck like it belonged there, and some unidentifiable intrusive thought told Dyn that it belonged there more than it did with whoever had left him to freeze.
He could feel the kid grasping at the material of the outermost layer he was wearing, and no sooner had he zipped up the hoodie to cover the kid did he bust ass out of the warehouse as quickly as he could without ruining the operation for the rest of his teammates. It was no easy task, but the second he hit the wet pavement outside he was sprinting, arms cradled around his own chest as his feet carried him towards the squad car staked out in the shadows.
His chest was sore from the effort of breathing in the freezing air by the time he yanked open the passenger door and tumbled into the seat inside. The driver wasn’t exactly thrilled about his Dukes of Hazzard-style entrance, and when Dyn recovered enough to think straight, he was greeted by a glare from his partner that could’ve cut through steel.
“Jarren, what the fuck?” Cara’s voice was louder than was perhaps appropriate for the inside of a tiny Ford Explorer, and Dyn flinched at the sound of it as she turned to face him. “I thought you were supposed to be covering Paz and Corin."
He was, but that wasn’t the point.
“I need an ambulance right now.”
Cara frowned.
“Dyn, this isn’t funny.” Her voice was like the metal on the edge of a knife. “Did something happen, or are you just giving me--”
“Right fucking now, Cara.”
He supposed that the only way to prove his point to one staunch Cara Dune, a woman who could probably get hit by a truck and not lose her balance, was to show her what he’d done.
He unzipped the hoodie, calmly and carefully, until two big brown eyes poked out from the top of his collar to look at Cara. Mercifully, the crying had ceased, and the baby was now tucked into Dyn’s chest, little fists balled into the material of his flannel as his head snuggled itself right into the gap between his hidden Kevlar and his neck. He was still shivering, and Dyn subconsciously brought a hand up to rub against the kid’s back as Cara processed the sight before her.
“Christ on a goddamn bike.”
The expression that crossed her face was about as close to shock as he’d ever seen on Cara, and perhaps the only reason that her eyes hadn’t completely bugged out of her head was to keep from scaring the shit out of the kid, who was still visibly upset. Dyn sighed, unable to do much but agree with her.
"On a fucking unicycle, more like.”
He continued to rub the kid’s back as he looked at his partner, then down at the tiny bundle on his chest. The boy was almost tragically small, the most fragile thing he’d ever seen in ten-odd years of police work. He barely weighed a thing as he sat on Dyn’s chest, and the detective could feel his heart slowly breaking as the boy adjusted himself under the jacket fabric still wrapped around him.
“Yeah.” The word was strained coming out of Cara’s mouth, her hand moving to crank up the heat in the car to do what she could for the moment. Her eyes never left the kid’s. “I’ll get the ambulance.”
Dyn heard the words as his partner moved to radio for medical assistance, but he barely processed them as he stared at the kid sitting on his chest. Tiny brown eyes looked from Cara to him, and the hand moving up and down on the baby’s back stilled, frozen in place by the oddly perceptive look on its face. It was like he could read Dyn like a book, one of those older-than-his-years stares Dyn didn’t think a baby could have.
“Don’t worry, kid.” He couldn’t think of anything else to say, hoping that the kid understood his intentions well enough. “I’ve got you.”