Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

I’d been scared when I’d left Lyle House but as I turned back to the fog filled hallway and stepped up beside my brother, I wasn’t scared any longer.

"Show time,” I told him with a grin.

We had this. Between the two of us… Yeah, we totally had this.

The door closed behind Chloe leaving Derek and I standing together as Davidoff and his team came at us.

As soon as I could see the fainest hint of a figure coming around the far corner I cast another fog spell. The figure immediately disappeared as it grew impossible to see more than a foot or so in front of you. Following my brother’s dim form we made our way down another hallway and away from our pursuers.

Away from the exit too, unfortunately, but there really wasn’t much of a choice there. They’d find it and look out before we could have reached the warehouse where Chloe and Rae were waiting. I just hoped like hell that they would get there in time.

I could hear the people behind us coughing and calling out to each other. I wondered vaguely where they thought the fog was coming from.

Then Davidoff’s voice came from behind us.

“There’s an exit here. Mike? Sue? Go out and take a look around. I’ll—”

We had to draw them away. Derek was ahead of me there, as he usually was.

“Move it, guys!” he said in a kind of stage whisper, loud enough to make sure he was heard while sounding like he was trying to be quiet. “In that room. Go!”

He didn’t have to tell me what to do. As we reached the nearest door Derek opened it and then shut it again while I cast another fog spell to give us just a bit more time before they realized we weren’t in the room. It occurred to me then that our shoes weren’t exactly silent, the slap of heels or the squeak of the soles on the linoleum floor could give us away. We needed to be silent if they were going to fall for it even for the few moments of leeway this ruse would give us. Pulling off my sneakers I nodded to Derek who followed my lead before we dashed down the hall. Our socks made no sound at all and I could hear the searchers behind us stumbling around in the fog, trying to find the room we’d supposedly gone into.

Luckily the place was big, with lots of halls going in just about every direction.

Who had designed this place? Still, it worked in our favor so I wasn’t complaining.

When Derek called out again I realized what his plan was. Pull the trick over and over until they no longer checked, then when they didn’t is when we actually would take cover. A Chicken Little means of confusing our pursuers. Simple and basic, but effective. So I cast another fog spell as Derek opened and closed the nearest door before we dashed off again.

Listening, Derek nodded in satisfaction as we headed down yet another hallway. “They only sent one person in to check while the others kept moving,” he told me softly.

The next time Derek said they only just glanced into the room but even with the fog they didn’t bother doing more than that.

So we pulled the trick one last time. Only this time, for real.

Taking refuge in the room we huddled behind a desk so that if they just glanced in again they wouldn’t see us. We needn’t have bothered, as it turned out. Since Davidoff and his companions went straight past the room without even cracking the door open.

When they were out of earshot we crept out of our hiding place and headed back the way we had come. Only when we reached the end of the hall Derek turned toward the front of the building.

“The exit’s this way,” I said, confused. Derek’s sense of direction was even better than mine. There was no way he could be lost.

“Yeah, and it’s the only one we passed,” he said. “Meaning they’re going to make a beeline for it when they figure out we headed back. We won’t make it to the warehouse before they can look out and see us. There’s no place else we can go once we’re through that door.”

I didn’t like it. I wanted to get out of this building and back to Chloe and Rae. However, if Derek said that we didn’t have time to get to the warehouse before they saw us, he was probably right. I motioned for him to lead the way. He’d have some plan in mind for how to to get us out of here and for now it was probably in both of our best interests for me to go along with it.

So I followed him as he lead us back toward the front and the doors through which we’d entered. However, when we got to the last corner before they came into view, Derek held out his hand to stop me.

He pressed himself to the wall and carefully looked around the corner, making sure not to be seen by whoever was apparently there. Following creeping over I peered cautiously around to see a man and a woman standing by the doors, clearly keeping watch just in case we did exactly what we were doing.

Retreating back a few steps so we were out of earshot, I looked at my brother.

“Can we take them?”

“Maybe if we can separate them,” Derek said, frowning.

No sooner than he’d spoken we heard loud sound of a radio squawking. I could hear the murmur of voices but that was all. Derek’s looked surprised as he listened.

“It’s Davidoff,” he told me. “He wants one of them to stay guarding this entrance while the other guards the one at the back.”

“Perfect timing,” I said, grinning.

Ducking into a room we listened as the woman headed back towards the other entrance while her male companion remained behind.

“I’ll take him,” Derek whispered as we got back to the corner. “You wait here.”

“I can —” I started, but he cut me off.

“No.”

I knew the expression on Derek’s face. He was dead set on being the one to take the risks here, like he always was. Glaring I wondered if it was worth the fight. Still, it was true that it was easier for one person to sneak up on someone that two. However, when he motioned me to go back down the hall a bit I just looked at him and pointedly took up station just on the other side of the corner. I’d be right there, ready to help if needed. I could see him deciding that that was a fight it wasn’t worth having.

Derek peered around the corner for a moment before slipping out from cover. I stepped up to where he had been, watching as Derek moved forward into the open. The man’s back was turned toward us as he scanned the hall to his left.

It was then, as the man turned shifted just a bit that I caught a glimpse of what he held in his right hand and my heart leapt into my throat.

Darting out I grabbed my brother’s t-shirt, tugging him back.

“He has a gun,” I mouthed, pointing.

Derek only nodded, letting me know that he’d seen it before waving me back.

I could only stare at him. He’d seen the gun and was still going to go ahead with his plan? Then I realized that, of course, he hadn’t seen the gun as a reason not to keep going. It was only his own safety that he’d be risking, after all.

Yanking on his shirt, I was sure my expression told him I wasn’t backing down on this.

Masking a slight face he followed back around the corner and far enough down the hall that we couldn’t be heard.

I turned on Derek. “He has a gun. What the hell were you thinking? That your odds were decent enough to give it a shot?”

His silence was answer enough and I wanted to shout at him.

See, this was exactly the reason I’d been so afraid to leave my brother behind. He just didn’t seem to care about himself at all. When it was my safety on the line he lost his head, but when it was his own he decided that jumping a guy with a gun in his hand was perfectly reasonable. Probably thought that even if the guy did spot him before Derek got to him that any first shot would likely go wild since hitting a moving target is actually a lot harder than it looks in the movies.

If I’d pulled something like that, he’d have had my head.

I didn’t understand, would never understand, why he seemed to value himself so little. To be honest, for all his self-confidence he had never placed any great value on himself. It wasn’t that he doubted his abilities, just his worth. Something that I’d watch get worse while we were stuck in Lyle House and they poured their poison into his ears.

There wasn’t time to try hashing anything out at this point, though. Swallowing back all the words I wanted to say, I followed as Derek lead us on another retreat.

“There have to be windows in here somewhere or possibly even another door,” he said. “We’ll have check each room as we pass.”

He didn’t sound thrilled about that and I didn’t blame him. The longer we kept wandering around inside this building the more likely it would be that we’d run straight into our pursuers. This was taking a long longer than I’d thought it would.

I could tell that Derek was worried, going faster and searching in a less systematic way then I was used to. Who he was more worried about, us or the girls, I didn’t know. Both probably. How worried he actually was only became apparent, however, when he glanced around another room and almost left it before I stopped him.

“Uh, bro?” When he looked back I pointed at the hatch in the ceiling. It wasn’t the way out we needed since it went up instead of out, but at least checking seemed like a good idea.

I could see Derek scowl, annoyed with himself for not spotting it.

He boosted me up into the darkness above before using his own much more developed upper body strength to lift himself up.

Yeah, okay, I could admit to being a bit envious when he did things like that.

Closing the hatch after him, he plunged us into what looked to me like absolute blackness. Blackness than really stank as well as being hot and airless. Mostly, though, it just stank. Bad.

“Guano,” Derek told me softly. I could hear him shifting around and I realized he was putting his shoes back on. “This place us completely full of bat shit. That’s what that smell is.”

“That’s good, right?” I said, pulling my sneakers back on as well. I sure as hell didn’t want to be walking around in an area full of bat shit without shoes on.

He grunted by way of answer. “If you can stand the smell, we should stay up here.”

Stay here? “Um, why?” I asked, confused.

“Its the best hiding place we’ve…”

I interrupted him. “Guano, bro? Bat shit means bats. Bats mean there’s a way out.” I slapped him on the back. I’d met to slap him upside the head but in the dark I missed. “You’re the science guy, aren’t you?”

The annoyance in his voice was clear when he spoke. “Yeah, I’m just—”

“Freaked out and not thinking straight,” I said, cutting him off again. “And, yes, just because a bat can get in, doesn’t mean we can get out. Still, a lot of bat shit means a lot of bats.”

A whole colony of bats weren’t likely to make their home someplace hard to get into. So, there was a good chance that there was something more than a small crack in the ceiling in here somewhere. Finding it in this blackness though wasn’t going to be easy.

However, Derek got up and started walking away with apparent confidence.

“Wait! You can see?” I demanded, grabbing his arm.

“Yeah,” he said, before he seemed to realize what that meant. Derek’s night vision was a hell of a lot better than mine but even he couldn’t see in as complete darkness. “Which means there’s some source of light up here,” he grumbled, his irritation with himself clear in his tone.

Damn, he was more upset than I’d realized. What the hell had happened tonight?

“Hold on to my shirt,” he told me and I grabbed on, allowing him to guide me through the pitch black of the attic. We were careful to step lightly. While the floor up here didn’t squeak, thank God, we still had to be careful about not alerting the searchers below that this space was even up here. After a little while though my eyes began to adjust enough that I could at least see him in front of him, allowing me to follow without having to hold on.

As we headed farther through the heat and smell I found it slowly getting easier to see. We were clearly heading in the right direction.

It wasn’t until we passed under several support beams that we finally found what we’d been looking for.

By now, I could see well enough to clearly see the vent in the ceiling that had long ago been broken. It was only half attached and around it a good amount of light was coming in. Light that was gray rather than silver. Was that dawn?

Derek was scowling up at the vent, clearly unhappy.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Think you can you get through that?”

Deciding again that this wasn’t the time for explanations, I examined the hole and nodded. I was pretty sure it would be large enough for me to shimmy through. Which was when I realized what must have had Derek scowling. It was going to be a squeeze for me, meaning it would be way too small for him.

Still, that wasn’t a huge issue. It was already broken, it wouldn’t be hard to break it further. Although, I did worry, as I’m sure he did, about how much noise he might make doing so.

Luckily, when we climbed the support beams to get to the vent we could see that it was only barely attached any more It took little effort for someone of Derek’s strength to pull it off entirely and it didn’t actually make that much sound.

Shifting himself upward, Derek poked his head through and scanned the roof outside.

Then he motioned me over and gave me a boost up through the new hole in the ceiling.

“Don’t —” he started, but I cut him off.

“— stand up and call attention to myself. I know.” I glared at him. Did he really think I was that stupid? I could tell he was as irritated by the look I gave him as I’d been by his suggestion that I was stupid enough to let us be seen. Yes, part of me knew that he was just being overly careful as always. That it wasn’t personal. Still, it was annoying as hell for him keep snapping orders at me when I knew what I was doing.

Dad had taught both of us how to avoid detection, not just him.

Giving him one last dark look, I pulled myself up onto the roof and into the gray pre-dawn light.