Chapter Text
“K ym, it’s literally 6:30 in the morning, can you let me have at least fifteen more minutes of serenity?”
For all William Hawkes knew, Kym never needed coffee to be her usual bubbly, loud, irritating self, even as the chilly autumn air chilled their cheeks while the sun rose sleepily. He couldn’t remember a single occasion in which she needed coffee to stay awake. He couldn’t even imagine what it’d be like if she got high on caffeine. Terrifying, most likely.
“Hurry along, Willame, the citizens of Ardhalis City are counting on us! We still have to get our paperwork approved by Hermann…” Kym hummed, twirling on her spot as she imitated a ballerina. While he had once hoped she would fall onto the hard concrete, he had gradually grown accustomed to her boundless enthusiasm. He now felt guilty for such petty thoughts. “Hopefully, he’s not in the office yet, I hid my watermelon in the fridge last night before we left, and I want it for breakfast...you know how Hermann feels about my love for watermelon.”
As she bounced down the hallway, turning on all the lights as she went, much to the exasperation of her Lieutenant, William tried to force himself to relax and maintain a professionally positive outlook on life when Kym suddenly groaned and skidded to a stop before Hermann’s office. Before he could even ask her what was wrong, she dramatically crumpled to the ground, moaning something about her watermelon babies. Approaching the heap on the floor, he noticed Hermann’s slightly cracked door and flickering light. Hermann was surprisingly frugal for a man who made such a good salary and had insisted on keeping his old, flickering lamp instead of buying a new one.
When Kym finally got up and retrieved the paperwork that needed to be signed from her bag, since Hermann didn’t acknowledge her calls, she nudged the captain’s door open. To say the least, they didn’t expect what they saw. Hermann was sitting with his head tilted back, over the edge of his chair, legs and hands both crossed in an image of peaceful slumber.
“Well, I suppose the citizens of Ardhalis will have to wait until after breakfast,” Kym shrugged. As she turned to leave the room, she discovered that Will had already started padding towards Hermann. The light had flickered off. “Will, I think he’s asleep. We can come back later, and didn’t you mention something about fixing the coffee machine before Lukas got back to the-”
“I...I don’t think he’s asleep. I don’t think he’s asleep, Kym,” panic was creeping into Will’s voice.
Kym huffed and stepped back into the room. “What do you mean he’s not asleep? What else could he be doing? Meditating?”
“His eyes are open, Kym, come look at this. They’re bloodshot as well, and his mouth is gaping-” Will swatted at Kym as she tried to touch Hermann’s face. “What in the world are you doing, Ladell?! Did the Academy not teach you not to contaminate any potential evidence?”
“Well, I’m sorry I spent my time practicing my shooting instead of sitting in your boring lectures Willame, there’s no need to get all unsettled over the fact that I’m the better sh-” Kym halted in her speech as she took, finally, a good look at Hermann. As if illuminating her brain, the lamp on Hermann’s desk flickered back on. “Wait, you’re right, he’s not-”
“He’s dead!” Will gasped, pulling away the hand that had searched for the captain’s pulse. Kym stepped away from the corpse, dread clawing at her heart and squeezing as she realized the man was actually dead.
“Will, Hermann is dead!”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, Kym!”
“We need to call the police-”
A beat of confused silence passed.
Will gaped at her. “Kym, we are the police! Do you realize the gravity of the situation?”
Will could see the embarrassment in Kym’s eyes but decided to let it be. She had her eyes wide and her face, which was naturally rather pale, was white as a paper sheet as the reality of the situation hit her like a truck. Will tried to approach her but stumbled upon something that produced an unsettling thump. Kym looked down.
“Hold on...is that another leg under Hermann?”
When she took a closer look, Lukas Randall was wedged between the legs of Hermann’s chair and his mahogany desk, completely unconscious, and Kym promptly screamed as she bolted outside of the room, followed closely by Will as they hurried towards the forensics department.
“Yes, I’m aware. The files should be on the left side of my desk. Correct. Alright, I’ll see you in a bit.”
After she hung up, Lauren Sinclair dropped her head and groaned, kneading her eyes as if she could erase the evidence of her sleepless night from them. How had sleep managed to evade her the entire night? Since she had started working at the District Attorney’s office, she couldn’t remember a singular night where she had truly rested without either being disturbed by her unending supply of work or her troubling dreams. It wasn’t as if she was unfamiliar with the feeling. Ever since her parents died, and Dylan shortly after, she had rarely ever had the chance to sleep a whole night. No, she knew the feeling. One didn’t graduate early from law school without pulling multiple all-nighters.
Before she could ponder her insomnia any longer, however, her uncle knocked gently on her half-open door, a plate of blueberry pancakes in hand and a comforting smile on his face.
“Good morning, Uncle Tristan, it’s incredibly kind of you to bring me breakfast to my office,” she mumbled, still rather tired, but smiled and accepted the offer of breakfast.
“Well, even the busiest of us need their nutrition. Remember to take care of yourself, dear, we wouldn’t want you coming down with something from lack of sleep, either.”
Tristan Sinclair, the District Attorney of Ardhalis City proper, was a soft-spoken man with eyes and hair of equally soft browns. Despite it all, he was imposing. His stance, his gestures while talking, and the way he raised his voice only when necessary made him someone who could silence a revolt with his words only. It was no surprise that he held the title of District Attorney. And though he had a schedule busier than Lauren’s, he still found the time to make sure that his niece was well-fed before heading to work every morning.
As she chewed gratefully on the fluffy pancakes, Tristan handed her a clean, fresh-pressed blouse that Lucy had just washed the previous night before stepping out of Lauren’s office. Striding down the hallway, he called out that he likely wouldn’t see her today due to the multiple meetings in his schedule that would eventually run late into the evening. Lauren yelled her farewells as he retreated. Since both uncle and niece were incredibly busy with their work, Lucy and the other maids had become their household support, cleaning, washing the laundry, and cooking Lauren’s favorite pancakes three times a week. They simply refused to cook them more than that, claiming that the sugary treats would be bad for Lauren’s health if she had them any more than that. Lucy had practically become Lauren’s godmother, having been part of the staff since Lauren’s childhood, which made her particularly concerned at Lauren’s apparent disregard for her own well-being.
As she shut the door to change for work, Lauren sighed and breathed in the soothing smell of blueberries that continued to linger in the room. She loved it. Scanning her room for her heels while slipping on the blouse, she sighed at the mess. While Lauren had the neatest office anyone could find, her bedroom was far from pristine, and drove even Lauren herself mad. She mentally apologized to the poor maid who’d have to clean it today. What was the point of cleaning an area that she barely ever used? She didn’t even have time these days to sleep in her bed, spending most of her nights slumped over her desk. That won’t be changing anytime soon.
“Work-life balance, they say,” she grumbled to no one in particular. Lauren couldn’t recall the last time she could distinguish the end of the workday and the start of her weekend.
After slipping on a dark grey pencil skirt that was ironed and laid out near her chair, she snatched her coat off the hanger and hurried out the front door, auburn hair whipping behind her in the cool autumn air. If she stayed any longer, she wouldn’t get to the office early enough to give the secretary those files on her desk. Hailing a cab, she slipped into the backseat and gave the driver directions to the district attorney’s office downtown. She exchanged smiles with the driver through the rearview mirror. With no further interaction, they were off to the streets of Ardhalis Main that grew increasingly congested as the morning progressed.
As she took a rattling tin of bobby pins out of her purse, she started combing her messy hair into a low bun with her hands. Surrendering to the fiery locks that had a personality no weaker than their owner’s, she tugged a mini comb that she always kept in her bag to smooth out the lumps in her hair. Pinning her bun in place with one hand, she dug around her surprisingly organized purse to look for a tube of lipstick.
Lauren rarely applied any makeup other than lipstick and concealer, making for a relatively easy beauty process compared to some of her other coworkers. Kym always told her she didn’t need much aside from that, seeing as her eyes, of a pensive aureate (she loved to tease Lauren about it) looked even better without the common distractor of eyeliner or mascara.
When she had already gotten halfway to the office, she discovered that she was so busy this morning she hadn’t even had the time to grab a coffee. Sighing, she tucked her scarf into her bag to escape the stuffiness of the cab. Coffee shop, then. Lauren glanced down at her watch, which was running ahead by a couple minutes. I’ll have to adjust that during today’s meeting later. She, thankfully, had enough time to grab a hot latte before heading into the office for the day.
“Thank you, sir, please keep the change,” she smiled to the driver, who thanked her and drove off after leaving her in front of the office. She strode for the nearest coffee shop, a quaint little place on the same block, and ordered the first drink she found with the word “latte” at the end. Lauren would never understand why coffeeshops insisted on creating drinks with near-incomprehensible names. She didn’t really know much about coffee, but heaven forbid someone tried to get on her nerves before the first shot of her daily caffeine.
When Detective March finally arrived at the scene, Kym had already lost all her appetite for watermelon and was scrutinizing the unconscious form of Officer Lukas Randall, who was sprawled underneath the captain’s desk, thankfully, alive. As the forensic examiner gingerly removed the glass vial that was clutched in Lukas’ hand, Detective March slipped on his gloves and badge, and carefully stepped around Hermann’s desk and asked the forensic examiner already at the scene what he had found.
The nurse interrupted as she barged inside the room, clutching her medical briefcase as the investigation unit worked to move Lukas to the hallway where the nurse would thoroughly examine the fallen officer.
Grace stepped closer to March as her companion, Andrew, took a sample of the foam dripping from the Captain’s mouth and poured it into a vial.
“Poison,” Grace declared, fidgeting with her sleeves as she glanced back at the corpse. “From the symptoms and approximate death time I can narrow it down, but I couldn’t tell so easily.”
Andrew drew back with a scrunched nose. “There are no open wounds of any sort. The captain choked to death without being able to fight back. Probably had convulsions, based on the state of his desk.”
“We found a syringe,” one of the detectives piped up, Holding the aforementioned already inside a plastic bag. Grace frowned at it and returned to her spot next to Hermann, examining him again. She pressed a finger to the side of his neck. A tiny droplet of blood stained her gloves, and upon closer examination, she discovered the place where he had been injected.
“Directly to the bloodstream,” she declared. “Must have been potent enough for it to act in a matter of a couple hours.”
“There are fingerprints here,” March claimed, examining the syringe.
“There are fingerprints in the vial as well, the one we found in Officer Randall’s hand,” another detective said.
Kym, standing with Will right outside the office and listening to the examination, covered her mouth to fight the urge to gag. Will noticed and turned to her. She had yet to fully recover the color of her cheeks.
“Are you alright?”
Kym shook her head. “This is horrible. How could this happen within the precinct? In the captain’s office, of all places,” she shuddered. “Harvey two months ago, with the viper venom; now Hermann… You know, I never liked him much, but to see him dead, in such a horrible way…”
Will placed a comforting hand on her shoulder. After the discovery of Harvey Wood’s bloody corpse in a janitor closet two months prior, he had noticed that the Sergeant was actually as sensible to death scenes as any other sane person; while she didn’t run off this time, seeing her react like any other person terrified him more than her usual dark humor or terrible jokes in murders that’d make him question her sanity. Her words of that day still lingered on his head:
Superheroes die too.
Lukas jolted awake from his spot on the hallway floor, startling the poor nurse into oblivion. The usually brooding officer looked unusually awake as he looked around the area, like searching for something or someone. March rushed outside at the gasp of the nurse.
“Officer Randall! You’re awake! Did you-”
“Is he dead?” Lukas muttered, something dark clouding his gaze. He usually had a dark cloud hovering over him, but what filled his eyes... Kym shuddered. Lukas coughed a bit before asking again: “Is Hermann dead?”
The place fell silent for a second, and then March asked, frowning:
“What were you even doing in the crime scene, Officer?”
Lukas stared, but otherwise said and did nothing. Will exchanged a look with March, his lips twisting into a worried expression as realization slowly poured upon Kym. Really, what was Lukas doing in the office, with the vial in his hand? No, scratch that. She wanted to forget it. She wanted to ignore the signals; for what she knew, it could be a mistake, a red herring.
But as the APD, they couldn’t take any risks.
“Officer Lukas Randall, you’re under arrest,” Will began, whispering the words as if it hurt him to say them any louder. Lukas seemed to be expecting it as he stood up and turned around for Will to handcuff him. “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be held against you in a court-”
“I didn’t do it, Hawkes,” Lukas muttered, but put up no resistance.
Interrupting his obligatory recitation of the Miranda warning, Will swallowed. “Well, then there’s nothing to worry about, Lukas.”
Kym stepped back against the wall as Will stated Lukas’ rights and watched as her fellow officer was led away. The situation had escalated beyond what she could’ve imagined. Not only was the Captain of her Precinct dead, but one of her officers was suspected to be the murderer.
Yes, superheroes die.
But superheroes can become villains too.
Kieran White was horrible at time management. Or so his secretary liked to say. Which was, mind you, also the very reason he had a secretary, to begin with.
When he had woken up that morning, hair as tangled as the sheets he was in, he was greeted by the sound of his phone ringing off of its stand. He groggily reached over to murmur a husky “good morning, Kieran White speaking” into the receiver, and was greeted with his ears vibrating at the sound of Lila Desroses’ annoyed, yet somehow still bubbly, voice.
“Well, Mr. White, it sounds like someone was able to have his beauty sleep,” quipped Lila sarcastically. Oddly, her sarcasm still sounded like a legitimate and kind greeting to someone.
“How kind of you Ms. Desroses, to give me such a pleasant wake-up call,” Kieran sat up, rubbing his eyes. “May I ask why you’re calling me this early in the morning? I just got to bed three hours ago.”
“Kieran, what are you babbling about?” What could I possibly have forgotten this time around? “It’s already seven o’clock. Did you forget that you had to be at the courthouse by 8:30 this morning for the first case? Please tell me you’ve at least gotten out of bed-”
Oh. That’s what I forgot. Suddenly jolted into complete consciousness, Kieran swung his legs off the side of the bed and tucked his feet into his soft robin’s egg-colored slippers. Rubbing his eyes and ruffling his hair, he assured Lila that he was indeed out of bed.
“Just about ready to leave the apartment, in fact,” he attempted to convince her while hurriedly rifling through his closet for his dark blue suit, straining the cord of the telephone as he dragged with him the receiver. His white button-down had thankfully been ironed last night, but he could not find his blasted navy tie anywhere.
Lila, used to his antics, sighed through the phone and reminded him to hurry and to not waste more time brewing his own tea as she had already bought him a cup. It seemed he had apparently complained about the tie out loud since she murmured: “It’s in the bottom right drawer, behind the grey striped one and the maroon one,” before hanging up with a delicate click.
What would I ever do without Lila, Kieran wondered as he quickly combed through his hair and slipped on his watch. Kieran always opted for a simple white ribbon to keep his hair at bay. After a while, he stopped bothering with the bangs that would eventually make their way to his eyes. Running his hands through his hair in frustration would eventually pull them all out of whatever he put his hair in anyway. While this didn’t make the strongest impression on new judges, those who knew him slowly gained a begrudging admiration for the suave defense attorney who was always impeccably dressed with a silk ribbon, often of white or black, in his hair.
Oh, if only they saw him once he was back home. He’d yank off the tie and pop the buttons open as soon as he stepped inside.
Briefcase swinging in hand, he patted his pockets for his keys and wallet. Following the unfortunate event where he was locked out of his apartment in the meek hours of the morning after a long evening at the firm, he had always kept three sets of keys: one in his pockets, one in his briefcase, and one which he gave to Lila. He figured that with so many sets of keys, one was bound to end up letting him into the place that lovingly contained his bed.
Due to his long nights at work, Kieran had chosen to live near the building of the firm, which allowed him to conveniently collect a few files that he had left on his office desk the night before. Locking the office door behind him, he started descending along the marble staircase that winded around the building. Waving a simple goodbye at the doorman, he cursed when a blast of chilly air coursed through him, wrapping his scarf around in a hurry as he gestured wildly for a cab.
Luckily for him, the Ardhalis Superior Court was less than fifteen minutes away. While Lila didn’t believe his proximity to his secondary workplace was an adequate excuse for refusing to get out of bed before she would call him, it certainly prevented him from missing his court dates. He bounded up the stairs of the courthouse (in a very unprofessional manner, mind you, but desperate times call for desperate measures), and managed to slip through the rapidly growing security line filled with attorneys and citizens alike.
Stepping into the courthouse’s main lobby, Kieran was all but attacked by a short-haired woman who smelled of cinnamon. His secretary always had perfectly styled curls, a pressed long-sleeved blouse with a ribbon tied in the front, and a pleated tea-length skirt, which on this day happened to be black. Thrusting his tea into his hand, which he gratefully received, she began to lecture him on the importance of punctuality as they stepped into an elevator.
“Kieran, the hearing literally starts in ten minutes, how do you manage to make the worst impression on the judge and jury every single time? Does punctuality not have a place in your dictionary? For a man who insists on a spotless apartment and office, you sure have interesting priorities,” scolded Lila. Luckily, his secretary’s voice was always soft and bubbly even at her angriest, and she kept a nice smile as she whispered her lecture to Kieran. Nobody in the stuffy elevator was aware of the attorney currently being lectured like a petulant child who had forgotten to do the dishes.
“I’m here Ms. Desroses, do you truly enjoy my presence to this degree?”
“We still have to check in with the clerk and get situated,” stated Lila as they stepped out of the elevator.
“We are but 30 seconds from the door of the room, Lila. If the judge isn’t there yet, we’re early!”
“Luckily for you, Kieran, you only have misdemeanor cases today until after lunch. There is also no jury for any of these, which I am sure you already know,” Lila recited from her notebook, glancing around the courtroom every few minutes as Kieran checked in with the clerk before sitting down at the counsel table. Lila waved over his first client to where she sat in the audience seating area directly behind Kieran’s chair. He turned around to remind his first client what they would be doing today, then spun back around as the judge rose to the bench.
Standing up and leaning backward towards Lila in a manner suggesting that he was simply stretching, he whispered: “Lila, I’m out of loose leaf earl grey...would you kindly order some more?”
The size of Kieran White’s tea obsession gave his ego a run for its money. The defense attorney was simply incapable of being productive without drinking his favorite earl grey tea latte. He wasn’t the fondest of the bitter taste of coffee, which meant that he had to acquire his daily dose of caffeine from tea. According to Lila, he became extremely irritable and snappish when he was deprived of it. Thank goodness she had remembered to bring him a cup this morning. There was no time to brew his own at home, and he wouldn’t put it past himself to simply refuse to enter the courtroom without having his tea first.
Shaking her head in exasperation about the attorney who was so sure of his abilities he’d rather discuss his stock of favorite beverage rather than the case at hand, she simply shrugged her delicate shoulders in indifference, mouthing an I’ll think about it at him.
As the hearing began, Kieran was forced to put his aromatic obsession aside. Cracking his knuckles underneath the worn oak table and putting on a charming mask, Kieran was ready to face the judge. It was go time.