Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Zora spat into the shrubby, well kept lawn. It had felt like years since she had last been called back to HQ, after growing accustomed to the bounty hunter life, sleeping in trees, learning to track through the thickest of woods after the dirtiest of rat men. Based on the way her escort’s nose had scrunched up when she came to unlock the front gate, she smelled the part as well.

The massive black walls forced the dark, cold hands of claustrophobia to creep up her spine. She forced herself to brush the feeling off as she made her way inside, following Yoomtah’s oddly timed footsteps. The girl always walked like she was a pixie-stick ridden 8 year old and the word was her hopscotch emporium. It wasn’t necessarily a problem, it just made following her a… challenge, sometimes. She did her best to keep up, down several long halls and up a few elevators until she stopped in front of a door that Zora recognized. Her battered nameplate still brandished proudly from the face of the polished mahogany door.

Zora tipped her hat at her escort, who hopped off gleefully as she opened the lock and stepped into the foreign room. 

She wondered briefly why they had called her back in the first place. Sure, sometimes she had to come back for conferences, meetings, but those only lasted a few hours and then she was free to go. 

Eh, no bother wondering about those things. She’d know soon enough- after all, she suspected the cellphone that Yoomtah had provided her was supposed to be for something. 

She tentatively set it down on her desk, stirring up the thin layer of dust beneath it, then pulled out the first drawer. A sigh of relief escaped the woman's lips as she found the spare gun she had made all those years ago exactly where she had left it. It fit in her leather holster perfectly, taking up the space that had been empty for so long. Well, maybe a month wasn’t that long, but it had felt like it. Life just ain’t the same with only one of your guns.
Reminiscing, she found herself drifting over to the panel of windows on her wall. She must have been 20 stories up- it was quite a view, or might have been considered one by anybody else. The gray smoggy spread of the city, the infinite gray squares below her and the aggravated lines of tiny cars butting against one another, it was disgusting. She hated being in the city. Whatever business the boss had called her in for, she just hoped she could get it over with soon.

Speak of the devil. The phone buzzed at her from her desk with one new text message. 

<3: Zora. I hope the road treated you well?

She swallowed, fumbling out a response. It took her 4 mistaps to finally remove a glove, taking the leather pinky in her teeth. Even with a functional hand, she found the keyboard to be far too small for her fingers.

Yeag

Shit.

* yeah

<3: Fantastic. I trust that you know why I called you back, pertaining to your failed mission and all.

Cocky bastard. She’d never say it to his face, but God, she’d be lying if she said the man didn’t get on every single one of her nerves all the time. It wasn’t her fault that Ramsey had decided to join the goddamned police force of all things and make it nearly impossible for her to track him.

Of course

<3: Good, good. Your assignment is located in the envelope on your bed. Think of it as a rehabilitation mission to get you ready for your next one, to ensure things go smoothly.

She mocked the text with a fake grin that quickly dropped, tossing the thing to the ground where it most definitely broke with a painful crack . Zora honestly couldn’t bring herself to care, instead turning her attention to the little envelope on the foot of the bed. She thumbed it open, scanning the pages, and with each sentence she felt anger well up inside her. She was a bounty hunter, not… whatever this was. She wasn’t good at talking to people, or extracting info, and definitely not staying cool under pressure, and suddenly it hit her why this was the most perfect, awfully unfitting punishment ever. This would force her to show restraint- and if she couldn’t, she’d be stuck until she did.

“Son of a bitch.” She bit her tongue, mentally preparing herself for what was to come.

-

Zora furrowed her brows, kicking a loose pebble across the floor as she navigated the cell system they apparently had at HQ. There must have been hundreds of cells, but luckily it wasn’t hard to find the one she needed to be at- it was the only one with any occupant. 

A lone woman sat passively on the wooden bunk at the end of the corridor. As Zora’s footsteps drew near, she turned her head and met her gaze. 

The woman’s eyes were a piercing blue, her hair a vaguely familiar frock of blonde, her eyebrows-

Oh.

Well, at least there was no need for introductions.

“Oh. Eyebrows. Heya.” She chewed the inside of her cheek. Interrogating a stranger would have been a lot easier, but the officer didn't necessarily seem like one to rub salt into an open wound.

“Zora. I would like to politely request for my release.” She blinked.

“Are… are you being serious?”

“Why would I be anything but?” A throaty laugh escaped her lips. 

“Oh my God, you’re serious. I need a minute. No. I don’t.” She straightened her posture. “I’m here to get information on the location of the amulet. Then we can talk.”

“So you’re consenting to conversing casually with a prisoner?” Her bright eyes scanned her figure, but just as she opened her mouth to say more, Zora groaned loudly.
“You really don’t want out of here, do ya?”
“Of course I do, I just believe it is a miracle that Bliss Ocean still stands to this day if these so called ‘protocols’ of casual conversation are actually integrated into-”
“Will you shut up?” Percy stopped her monologue, hand still raised in a disciplining position. “Shit. I didn’t come here for you to lecture me about our protocols. If it means anything to you, I am-” she widely gestured to her attire, “-clearly not our usual interrogator. So just answer my questions and make this all the less painful for us both.” The tension was almost tangible between them, and as she watched the officer sit back down it was almost as if it were in slow motion, like how the dry, wilted petals of a desert rose flitted to the ground after having been forsaken for too long.

“I would agree to those terms, but it is against my dignity as a police officer to betray my country and organization and reveal that information.” Zora chewed the inside of her cheek, almost immediately tasting silvery red on her tongue. Of all of her destructive habits, that one needed to go first, but there were more pressing matters at hand. Of course she was going to make this difficult. She snatched the file from off the wall beside the cell, flitting through the pages for some kind of protocol to get answers out of someone, anything that would get this over faster, and a few pages in she found it, identifying the… unique visuals as distinctly torture. 

She grimaced, peeling through page after page of torture diagrams, only to realize that was the entire file, save the first few pages which seemed to be basic information about the cop, such as age, height, weight, et cetra. 

“Good graces.” She put the thing back into its sheath on the wall, taking a deep breath in through her nose, out through her mouth. 

So maybe she was a killer and a bounty hunter that couldn’t bring herself to ever resort to torture. What of it? Dragging out somebody's pain was just exploitative and dishonorable- any self respecting person who had an ounce of humanity in them knew that putting somebody out of it quickly was the only decent way of doing it.
So.

She was going to have to get creative. It had never been an issue for her before, seeking out a solution between the pines, a dusty floor and two revolvers- how different could applying it to this rocky prison be?

She let her pride inflate her chest for a moment, and then two, and suddenly Zora realized she had no idea how the hell she was going to do this.

“Are you..?” She vaguely registered Percy's voice when she realized she had probably been staring at that wall for a few minutes now, a valid reason to brew concern, but she brushed the comment off and exited the floor as fast as her feet would carry her to her nearest source of information.

-

“You won’t use torture? I dunno, that sounds like a bit of a personal problem.” Mera lamented at her question, filling her plastic lunch tray with salad mix from the lunch bar. The HQ cafeteria practically buzzed with activity, leather soled shoes squeaking across the waxy vinyl floors and muffled chatter between little clusters of employees as it always did at peak lunch hour. She grabbed a bowl of chicken tortilla soup from the end of the lineup to go with her four singular pieces of pineapple and followed the woman to where she sat. The table was mostly empty, save for one huge ass dude who hadn’t noticed either of their arrivals due to his infatuation with an ant crawling across the gray speckled surface. The woman nonchalantly flicked a baby carrot at his head, which finally seemed to get his attention.

“Oh! Lady Mera!” He looked across the table, to where Zora had awkwardly sat herself down. “And a friend of Lady Mera!” She forced a grin and a meek wave. 

“Howdy.” Just as he looked like he was about to say more, Mera moved her hands decisively in a pinching motion.
“Cut it out, Indus. I have important matters to discuss-” He opened this mouth, and she pressed her other finger to it. “-that don’t involve you. So please, just. Quiet down.” The woman took a deep breath and closed her eyes briefly, seemingly to collect herself again. Zora could never have the restraint. It's why she’d never been assigned to any mission that required her to cooperate with others, at least it was until a few days ago. That was probably- no, definitely- the reason things were already turning sour.

“So.” She took a bite of her salad, a perpetually tired gaze plastered to her face. “You need to get information out of this prisoner. She won’t be persuade by money or the guise of her release because she is a self proclaimed officer of the law above such rewards, and you refuse to use torture because..?”
“Personal moral code.”
“That’s right, your stupid little moral code. So, because of that, you refuse to use torture, and now you don’t know what to do because clearly that was going to lead to a dead end.” Zora nodded.
“Sums it about up.”
“Have you not considered just… ya know, seducing the information out of her?” Zora accidentally dropped a chunk of her fruit into her soup cup in shock, her cheeks flushing red.
“Why would I ever think of seducing a prisoner, Mera? Past all the difficulties that would prove, and the fact that I sincerely doubt that would help me get answers from her, that’s just unprofessional.” The cowgirl picked up another piece of pineapple and gnawed on it thoughtfully and decisively not directly above her soup.

“Oh, don’t give me the ‘unprofessional’ schtick. I can name at least five people off the top of my head that I personally know in this office that you’ve managed to wrangle into your bedroom.” As a look of indignance punctuated her face, Mera smirked as if she knew she had won. “Oh, did I strike a nerve? Is it because I’m right?”
“What, you trying to be next or something..? I’m always up to add to my body count.” It was supposed to sound menacing, but her voice cracked halfway through her sentence, giving it probably the least intimidating feel ever. She attempted one of her smug half-smiled to try and fix the burning trash pile of a comment she had made.
“Oh, which one? Am I being threatened right now?” She laughed throatily, as if Zora’s ghost of a threat was even remotely scary to her. As a ranking corporate member of Bliss Ocean, even if she was below her, Mera knew for a fact that if she actually tried to kill her she’d be in deep trouble with their Boss.

“Who knows. Try me if you’re feeling lucky.”
“I think I’ll pass.” Her plastic fork clattered noiselessly to her tray as she stood to get up. “But if you seriously are that insistent on being all… ‘hands off’ with the prisoner, I say try getting closer to her as a person, peeling away her layers. Physical or metaphorical, whichever you care for.” Indus followed her close behind, and before the swinging cafeteria doors closed she heard a faint laugh. “See you around, Zora.”

“Hmph." She pushed the last piece of fruit around on her plate disdainfully. Building relationships was far more complicated and difficult than the… activities she’d participated in years past. And even then, she had been younger, dumb, unaware of the things that had truly brought her happiness. She had changed- whatever smooth-talking kid she once existed as was gone.

Left with nobody else to consult, Zora shoveled down the rest of her soup and started back towards her room, mentally preparing herself for the things she was going to have to do later on.

-

Zora wasn't nervous about the situation at all. She justified her gentle emotional breakdown in the bathroom after she got back from lunch as a necessary adjustment period between leaving the wilderness and being forced to stay in a cramped office building. She justified the next six hours of not working while anxiously pacing by the front of her bed as an extension of that.

So what if she didn't get anything done on day 1? There wasn't a time limit or anything.

And that's where Zora found herself, hours into the night, still unable to sleep.

Plagued with cold sweats, she curled up within herself on the bed, feeling slight shivers wrack her frame. She never got sick, never felt quite off when she was in her element- maybe the city smog was clogging her sinuses.
Silently, Zora rolled onto her back, kicking off her sheets, when suddenly she saw a shadowy flash of movement in the corner of her eye dart across the room near the bathroom. She couldn’t see it, but felt its eyes watching her as she shakily reached out and grabbed a gun off her nightstand. 

“Don’t move! I’ll shoot! I’ll-” She suddenly choked when she saw the figure emerge, still very much a shadow, but in detail- a bun primly atop her head, hands folded in front of her as she hauntingly walked closer to the bed.
“You-!” Her hand was shaking so much she knew there was no way she’d be able to get a hit, and even if she did, her epithet wasn’t even on to freeze or destroy it. “You aren’t real- GO!” She pulled the trigger, missing by a great deal, or maybe passing through the thing itself, because it paused in consideration once it was stopped at the side of her bed.

Slowly, thankfully, the image of her mother melted away, replaced by someone she couldn’t quite place. 

Click.

She had only put one bullet in the barrel. Cussing, she discarded the weapon, rolling over to reach for her other, when suddenly it grasped her hand. She turned to yank it free, but was instead almost crushed under the cold, dead weight of the figure, knees splayed over her waist as its other open hand reached out and grabbed her spare pistol. Not a moment later, the barrel was aggressively shoved down her throat. Zora met its eyes, shining golden just like hers, and in a moment of silence once she had given up struggling, she heard her own voice from the figure above.
“Weak.” 

Click.

She woke up screaming, heart beating out of her chest. 

Her throat was dry, too dry, and she stood up to go drink some water from the bathroom sink, trying her best to ignore the gun strewn on her floor that she hadn’t left there last night.

That was the last night she slept in that bed.

Chapter Text

“Ow… the fuck..?” Zora groaned, stirring awake. As her memories of the night before came back to her, so did the conclusion that she thought it prudent to lock herself in the bathroom with the lights on and fall asleep in the bathtub, which she had just accidentally bashed her temple against.

Of course.

She reached over the rim weakly and grasped her phone, which she scarcely remembers grabbing off the floor along with a blanket the night before, to check the time.

1:04 PM

Below that, a text from the Boss. Somehow, seeing just the notification gave her the sensation of an oncoming hangover headache. The phone was stupid. The whole situation she had been forced into by him was stupid. She resisted the urge to throw the device again, fearful that if she broke it she would have to ask Yoomtah for a new one. She would never say it out loud but the girl gave her the creeps.

<3: Any progress to report, Zora?

After several more suppressed groans, a handful of curses, and an attempt to get out of the tub that definitely didn’t send Zora nearly spiraling to the floor, she brushed herself off and prepared a response.

Not yet

Im workin on it

<3: Good, Good. Please do keep in mind that I am expecting some sort of progress by the end of this week. Don’t disappoint me.

-

Still groggy, mildly annoyed, and with a crick in her neck from sleeping in a bathtub, Zora stopped by the cafeteria to pick up some coffee and a ham sandwich on her way back down to the prison.

It had only taken around 30 seconds of consideration for Zora to be confused by the integration of prison cells of all things into their headquarters. As she descended the stairwell that lead to the damp, rocky structure, she mentally listed off all of the potential hazards that came with it- what if there was a police raid on the building? It was certainly very incriminating, also a giant waste of budget funds, and probably a risk to the structural stability of the skyscraper because it took up the entire foundation, but whatever. 

When she reached Percy’s holding cell, the woman appeared to be asleep, facing the wall and lying on her side. Zora struck the bars a few times to get her attention.

“Yoo-hoo? Sleepyhead? Ready to talk yet?”

It takes a few moments for the officer to fully wake up and turn to face her. The expression on her face is worn; she already has a pair of light purple eye bags and a defeated slouch to show for it.

Zora can’t help but feel kind of bad for her, awkwardly chewing her cheek and kicking at the floor aimlessly as she waited for the officer to say something, anything . That moment never came. Zora’s frustration grew.

“You know that you ain’t getting out of here until you give me some answers, right? Don’t make this any more difficult than it has to be.” 

Percy said nothing but nodded slowly. Her stomach then growled so loudly that Zora could hear it a full 10 feet away from the prisoner. 

“Breakfast here not good enough for you, eh?” She bit into her sandwich and took a sip of her coffee. “You cops wouldn’t last a day outside the city.”

“Apologies. I have not been fed anything since yesterday morning.”

Zora forgot to chew for a second, choking on the bread, deli meat, and coffee all at once. She thumped her fist against her chest and cleared her throat.

“Since yesterday mornin..?” 

Shit. Shit. There was no way Yoomtah neglected to tell her the fact that she would be responsible for feeding the prisoner on top of everything else… right? 

She must have been zoned out in thought again because she could feel the officer’s gaze on her cheek as she mentally scolded herself for being so neglectful.

“Uh… if it is not too much trouble, I would like something to eat.” Her voice was firm but ever so slightly wavering, one of the few remaining seemingly collected things about the woman. The entire facade reminded of a broken pot held together with a few pieces of packaging tape. She was toughing it out but clearly had never been in any situation that had required her to spend the night on a hard plywood bunk in a cold stony prison, and Zora could tell the lack of food sincerely wasn’t helping. The cracks were beginning to show.

“Fuck. I’m- I’ll be right back.” Zora put down her food and blew out of the prison as fast as she could manage. She had someone she needed to talk to.

-

Precisely .5 seconds after the thought of confronting Yoomtah crossed her mind, she decided against it. She could take some of Zora’s angry ranting out of context and rat her out to the boss and get her in trouble, though she was sure of all the things Yoomtah was capable of, that was at the very bottom of her convoluted and fucked up psychological torture pyramid. She wasn’t willing to go through all of that just to get some slight gratification that she was right.

So instead, she made another stop at the cafeteria and loaded her plate with every food and drink item she could fit. Ignoring the odd looks was a part of her job at that point, given the costume, reputation, et Cetra, so she found it easy to brush past all her raised eyebrow coworkers with unprecedented swiftness to reach the odd corner that the stairwell to the prison was.

-

“Sorry, I just kind of grabbed some of everything, because I figured you’d be hungry and I don’t know what you like. So, uh, here.”

She pushed the tray under the food slot of the bars, semi-awkwardly setting herself down on the floor in front of the officer who was now picking her way through the tray, eating with the poise and restraint you’d expect from perhaps a colleague at a fancy dinner party and not a starving prisoner in a mafia fortress. How she didn’t just completely obliterate the tray, Zora wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure of what to say or do either.

Zora had never been the best people person. Sure, she had her magnificent speeches of glory, her diplomatic exchanges with coworkers, her… not so diplomatic exchanges with others(in her defense, Zora would hardly qualify it as a thing that had to do with being good with people and more of a thing that had to do with the fact that she was hot and knew how to use her tongue) and enough romantic themed scenarios in her head to satiate the hungriest diehard wild west movie fanatic, but she worked alone for a reason. When she was alone, she lived without the fear of being judged or hurt, or worse, hurting someone she had grown attached to. Alone was one of the only states she had felt comfortable in ever since her mother had… 

She choked down the thought by stuffing her face with her ham sandwich. To an outside viewer, the scene must have looked quite silly. The notorious bounty hunter and Bliss Ocean corporate officer Zora Salazar, unable to conjure anything worthwhile to say, reduced to sitting cross-legged on the floor of a prison across from a police officer as they ate lunch together while neither would make eye contact with the other party.

Zora finished her sandwich and stared at her boots. By the sound of it, Percy was about done too. She looked up to see the officer dabbing the corner of her mouth with a napkin.

"Thank you." It was said with that similar firmness that made Zora feel like the officer could be speaking to a brick wall and it wouldn't change a thing.

"Mhm." She sort of twiddled her thumbs and stood back up. "So, you've been fed." The officer nodded slowly. "Now tell me where the necklace is."

She was silent for another few agonizing counts, staring up at Zora with that same blank slate sort of expression. It put her on edge. She didn't like to be analyzed, and the officer staring at her made her feel like she was stuck in an unwanted therapy appointment. 

"You aren't so bad, you know. There is always a place for people willing to change their ways of crime on the side of justice." 

Zora laughed. "You flatter me." Right as she began to say something akin to a scathing 'no, I'm like totally evil', she bit her tongue. Mera's words popped back into her head. 

"But if you seriously are that insistent on being all… ‘hands off’ with the prisoner, I say try getting closer to her as a person, peeling away her layers." 

That couldn't be too difficult, to at least try to be friendly, could it?

"Uhhhhh." was all that really came out as Zora tried to locate a single kind bone in her body. 

"You have pretty hair..?" 

Percy stared at her, mouth half open in confusion. 

"...Thanks?" 

Yep, Zora was going to kill herself. Without another word, she left in a hurry, cheeks flushed pink with embarrassment.

-

"Jesus Christ. When you said you were like, bad with people, I wasn't expecting parasocial sheltered homeschool baby levels of bad with people." Mera lamented after Zora had retold the interaction to her. "How did you even get into Bliss Ocean like this? Sounds like you would have shit yourself then passed out at the thought of an interview."

The bounty hunter threw up her hands in protest. "I'm not usually this bad! She's kind of weird and hard to talk to!"

Somebody behind them shushed her. In front of them, the Fast & Furious 4 was playing on the dining room movie screen(a floor below the cafeteria, used chiefly for group bonding/meetings, but it was always open for cafeteria seating) It was Friday, which meant it was company movie night during dinner, attendance required. Unfortunately, for some reason almost every week it was one of the Fast & Furious movies(at least, that’s what she had heard). A truly tragic fate for a perfectly good movie screen.

"So... she makes you nervous?" A little smirk crept onto Mera’s lips.

"Oh, you can it." Zora retorted snappily.

"Woah there, just an observation. No need to get your assless chaps in a bunch. If you want my help, drop the lone wolf act and listen."

Zora deflated. "Fine."

"Anyways. You like all of those old corny wild west films, right? Well- if it's so easy for you to monologue off of those and act out scenes in them for you, why don't you just try to do that in front of her? I'm sure you could be at least a little charming if you tried." Rubbing her temples with her index and middle finger and staring down at her plate, Mera sighed. "God, this is sounding more and more like dating advice each time I talk to you about this."

Though it was said quickly and under her breath, Zora heard. She felt her cheeks turn pink again.

"Uh… I guess that it's worth a shot."

"Worth a shot sounds a whole lot better than 'ten feet deep in shit with the boss' if you ask me." The woman shrugged and went back to eating her salad. "Go get some sleep before you do that though. Your eye bags are looking almost as bad as mine."

-

She hated how on the walk back up to her room all she could think about was the blonde, looking up at her with a half puzzled and half dumbfounded expression.

"...Thanks?"

God. Stupid Percy and her stupid ability to make Zora unable to have coherent conversations and her stupid pretty hair and pretty face and sparkly eyes were going to drive her crazy.

She closed the door to her room behind her with a soft click.

"It's just you and me right now, buddy." Zora patted the rim of the bathtub affectionately. Her blankets and pillows from the previous night were still in their places, and she tried to ignore how there was still a crick in her neck from sleeping in it as she crawled in and tried to settle herself. 

Around 30 minutes later, Zora was dissatisfied with the fact that staring at the wall of the well-lit bathroom hadn’t lulled her to sleep yet. The paint was white, slightly duller in some patches. There was a small water damage stain on the ceiling that reminded her a little bit of how your skin looks days after receiving a third-degree burn. 

She groaned, attempting to reorient herself in a way that was more comfortable. Despite stacking her neck on top of a pillow, the hard rim of the basin felt as though it were pressed directly against her cervical. She was also far too tall to fit fully extended within the tub. The basin at its longest was probably around 4 and a half feet, though in all fairness it was not constructed with sleeping accommodations in mind. It wasn’t like she had ever used it since she only ever showered, but man was it a sick joke to give one of the tallest people at corporate offices the tiny bathtub.

She briefly considered turning off the lights, but despite the brain fog that came with being uncomfortable and sleep-deprived, she felt that cold creep of the shadow on the back of her neck and shut the idea down instantaneously. 

So there she sat, neck pressed against the lip of the bathtub, trying her best to let the day’s exhaustion settle into her bones.

… 

“Fuck this.”

It didn't really matter if she would come to regret her actions later, that was a tomorrow Zora problem and right now her number one priority was sleep.

So maybe she took her blankets and a pillow under her arm, half aware of herself and groggy, and went back to the prison. And maybe she threw down the pillow and, knowing Percy was there, was able to immediately clock out on the floor the second her head hit the pillow.