Work Text:
She wanted to be a cop.
It’s not something that she goes about broadcasting to anyone now; you don’t tell people that you wanted to be a cop if you don’t end up being a cop. It’s just something that you think is cool as a kid, watching all those crime shows with simple, clear-cut villains, and then you grow up and learn that cops aren’t all that the telly made them out to be because there’s no one putting pen to paper on who the bad guys are, so you keep that bit about childhood ignorance to yourself. It’s not like Alice wants to be a cop now, anyway. It’s just something that she thinks about from time to time — what it’d have been like if she didn’t have a bad back from that childhood injury and had chosen a different path, traded in her baton for a gun. Alice doesn’t think she’d like carrying a gun. Too noisy and too messy, from what people who have actually shot one say, and she’s much happier when things are quiet and uncomplicated.
So: Alice Tonner isn’t a cop, even if she may have wanted to be one a long time ago, and that’s fine by her because her current job has unlimited paid leave and her coworkers aren’t too nosy as to get on her bad side. Most of the time she doesn’t see them at all, being the number one choice for night shifts, but they still invite her out to drink even though she never gets drunk, and she still goes along because she doesn’t have anything better to do. Mostly, she just goes along to see Basira. There’s something about her that just intrigues Alice; every time she goes home for the night, she tells herself she ought to talk to Basira more when they aren’t squeezed in some dingy bar, and then she never does. But she’ll do it next time. She just has to remember.
The point is, Alice isn’t a cop, so the email she gets addressed to “Detective Tonner” stands out like a sore thumb in her inbox, to the point that she almost thinks it’s spam.
She’s not even sure why she opens it instead of deleting it immediately. The address doesn’t offer any sort of identifying features — doesn’t even have a name attached to the handle, just “js” with a string of seemingly random numbers behind it, and c’mon now, Alice isn’t stupid. She did all that pain-in-the-ass phishing training when she got hired, and if this is one of those “exercises” her boss thinks will teach his employees the dangers of technology when all it really does is just royally piss everyone off, then it’s doing a very, very poor job at it.
But it doesn’t seem like that, is the thing. There are no links, no flashing lights. No strange fonts or misspellings or promiscuous language. There’s not even the promise of millions from a nigerian prince if only she’ll send her credit card information — it’s just...a letter. Addressed to one Detective Tonner. Asking if she’s available for work, and offering to pay for her time, and apologizing for wasting it if she isn’t. It’s not like Alice isn’t a stranger to freelance work, dealing security at some rich tosser’s birthday party or standing outside a concert for six hours just to make sure no one decides to climb the fence. Simple work. Straightforward. Most of the time, the job is easy and the pay is good. Most of the time, she takes the check without asking questions.
This doesn’t feel like most of the time.
...She really should delete it.
So instead, she goes to her fridge, grabs a beer, and then replies, asking where to meet.
Funnily enough, the mysterious stranger decides on a bar.
It’s a bar that Alice knows even. Sorta. The owner, Calvin Benchley, is a boy she went to school with, though she doesn’t think he’d remember her all those years later. Probably for the best, if she’s being honest with herself. Always was a bit of an arsehole.
There’s only a handful of people inside when she arrives — easy enough to pick through, if needed — though the stranger she’s looking for zeros in on her immediately. In fact, she’d reckon that she frightened him, the way he’d jumped up when he’d seen her. Looked just like he’d seen a ghost as he looked her over from head to toe, then shuffled out from the booth he’d been seated at. Meandered over with his hands close to his chest. Looked up at her with these big, wide eyes that look more like a sad animal’s than a man’s, and hell, Alice almost feels bad about the way she towers over him. Like he didn’t even get a chance, as scrawny as he is.
“D— er, Miss Tonner?”
“That’s me,” Alice tells him, “though Alice is just fine.”
The man nods, wrings his hands together, then sticks one out in a belated sense of politeness. “J-Jonathan. Jon. Uh, Sims. Just Jon is fine.”
“Pleasure to meet you, ‘just Jon,’” she says wryly as she takes his hand. The texture of his palm is strange, she notices, and glancing down she can see that it’s scarred over. Huh.
The nervous energy flitting around him eases slightly at this, and he even manages the smallest of smiles beneath all that painted-on worry. “Right,” he says softly, then clears his throat, and repeats louder, “Right. Shall we sit down then?”
Alice shrugs, but doesn’t argue as he leads her back to the booth.
The thing is, once she settles in and gets a proper look at her date, Alice realizes he’s nothing like she had expected him to be. Something about the bar being in Chelsea had her picturing an old bastard in a stuffy sweater vest and dress pants — in truth, Jon’s wearing jeans and draped in a jumper about two sizes too big for him that can’t possibly be his own. His hair is long and braided, looking as if it took the brunt of the morning’s humidity, and while the hand had been the first abnormality to notice, she now can see that his skin is peppered in small, circular pockmarks, spread in clusters all over. Not like acne, exactly, more like cigarette burns. They don’t fit him at all, she thinks to herself.
“Would you like a drink?” he finally asks once he’s squirmed enough under her scrutiny.
Alice half shrugs, half nods. It’s only noon, but she doesn’t have to work until nine. “Sure. Get me—”
Jon’s already risen and wandered over to the bar before she can finish, and a moment later he returns with a beer for her and a glass of water for himself. The strange thing is, it’s the brand she typically drinks anyway. The even stranger thing is, Jon doesn’t seem to find this strange at all.
“...Right,” Alice says as she takes it from him. The lid pops off with barely a flick of her thumb. “So then. Business.”
“Business,” he echoes.
“What kind of gig are we looking at then? Office party? Concert? I don’t really like dealing with things that are too private, so—”
"What?" Jon cuts her off, brow furrowed in genuine confusion. "It's— I didn't contact you about a security job."
That makes Alice pause. She stares down the neck of her bottle at him, trying hard to parse his tone. If he’s cracking a joke. Jon doesn’t look like the type of guy to make jokes, if she’s being realistic, but if not a security job, then what? Something that requires knowledge of one? "...No?"
"No," he says agreeably. And then he takes a long sip of his water and says, "I lost someone recently."
“Oh,” Alice replies. She doesn’t know quite what to say to that, but the sense of finality is so palpable that all she can think to respond with is, “Sorry.”
"O-oh, no he isn't— ah. Well, thank you," Jon ends up settling on, smiling at her in a way that feels as if he's the one consoling her. “I um. See, the reason I contacted you is...I’d like your help in finding him.”
Alice blinks. That is...not what she’d been expecting. Slowly, as if the moment might crack like an egg at any misstep, she asks, “Find...him?”
“Um. Yes.”
“You...do realize I work security, right?”
Jon flushes. “W-well, yes, I know, I’ve seen your work history — um, very impressive, by the way — I just thought...”
“You’ve seen my work history?” Alice asks, face neutral. She sets down her bottle as softly as possible. “Where?”
“It...was on your employer’s website.”
“And I take it that’s where you found my email?”
“...Y-yes.”
Liar, Alice thinks, and a poor one at that. She knows her personal email isn’t listed anywhere online, and that’d been the one that he contacted her with. Enough of a lead to snag him with, surely. but she sets aside as she presses on.
“So this,” she begins slowly, folding her hands in front of her, “‘person,’ you’re looking for—”
“Martin,” Jon supplies. “Martin Blackwood.”
“He’s...what to you? Friend? Family?”
Jon’s mouth twitches into a mournful sort of smile. “My partner.”
“Hm.” She nods. “Lover’s quarrel drove him off?”
Jon laughs a little, and Alice catches another scar in the light, just across his neck as his adam’s apple bobs. Deeper than the rest, she reckons by the color. Cleaner too. Like it was intentional. “If only it were that simple.”
“So why not go to the police?” she asks, genuinely, “or hell, even a P.I. Seems like you have a case for a missing person.”
Jon swallows visibly, shifting in his seat. “Ah—” he starts, “we, er, w-we were sort of living off grid...”
“Huh. Legal troubles?”
“Not...not quite legal.”
“You don’t so sure.”
Jon snorts at this. “I’m not sure of much of anything around here, to be honest,” he explains. “I-I mean I know he’s...he’s here, somewhere— i-in the U.K., at least, but it’s...difficult to see clearly here. Suppose it’s to be expected...”
Alice glances up at the tacky light fixture overhead, a horrid myriad of colored glass that was probably the cheapest in the catalogue. She isn’t exactly sure what he means by that; it seems bright enough for her, anyway. Passively, she chooses to ignore the comment.
“So you lose your boyfriend, you can’t go to the police, so you hire...a security guard to find him?” Alice muses, not maliciously, just trying to put things together. Trying to find the line of thought in a seemingly random string of actions.
Jon winces, grimacing as he sinks back into the booth’s fake leather. “Well, I guess it does sound pretty terrible when you put it like that.”
That barks a laugh out of her. She’s not exactly sure why. In the half-hour she’s known him, Alice can say that Jon Sims is definitely one of the shadier men she’s met in her line of work — and she’s met plenty of corporate arseholes who spend their breaks doing coke in the company bathrooms — but there’s something about him that she finds awfully...genuine? Candid, she supposes. Endearing, even. Maybe it’s just part of getting old. Maybe she’s just going soft.
Alice takes a sip of her beer, then nods to his folded hands. “What happened to your hand?”
“What?” he asks, brow furrowing before following her gaze down to the spider-webbing scar that wraps around his palm. “Oh. The scar?”
“Yeah.”
“It...um, a wax burn.”
“And...” she gestures to the side of her face in a mirror of where the little circles are heavily clustered on his own, “this?”
He looks at her sheepishly. “Uh...worms?”
“Wh— worms ?” she repeats, the bafflement bleeding past her composure into her tone.
“Lots of worms,” Jon agrees, and she gets the feeling that she’s not going to get much more of an answer than that.
“...Right,” she says, swirls her drink, and then— “What about your neck?”
That seems to be where she finally finds the nerve.
Because as soon as she asks, Jon winces, hand reaching up to the line across his throat. Covering it, possibly, as if he doesn’t want her to see. Protecting it, maybe, like she’s going to cut it back open. He opens his mouth slowly, then closes it. Opens it again as he fishes for words. There’s a line there, Alice recognizes, that she’s in danger of stepping over — maybe she should pull back.
She doesn’t want to pull back.
“...Pocket knife,” he finally says, barely above a whisper.
It’s not really an answer, if she’s being honest with herself. Alice decides against pressing further.
Instead, she looks to her bottle and swirls it around. She takes in the sounds of the bar around her — the soft chatter between bartender and patron across the room, the low television hum, the fan ticking above. Jon breathes in, and breathes out. And then he doesn’t breathe anymore. She counts in her head, just how long he holds it, until she loses count and has to start again.
“You know,” she starts slowly, finding his gaze on her hands, “I’m not a detective.”
Jon frowns like she’s saying something trivial. “I know.”
“Or much of a hunter, really.”
“I...yes, I know.”
“Sims,” she begins. That draws his full attention. Good. She can see his eyes better, like this. They’re brown with just the faintest hint of green around the rim, in a way that reminds her of colored contacts; though, something tells her that isn’t the case. “I don’t think I’m the man for your job.”
He’s already small, seated with his shoulders hunched in over him, but she can still see him deflate at the statement. The disappointment as it flickers across his face. The way his mouth twitches and quivers as he swallows, painfully, and he nods before moving to stand, to get away from his discomfort. “R-right. Right. I’m sorry, I don’t know why— I’m wasting your time, I’m very sorry. I’ll—”
“Sit—” Alice snags his arm, giving him a yank back into the booth, “down.”
Jon sits without another word. She’ll give him credit — at least he’s obedient.
Alice downs the rest of her bottle, watching him closely.
Here’s the thing: despite his timid voice, his skittish nature, his eyes that never seem to quite meet her own, Alice Tonner knows without a doubt is that Jonathan Sims is not prey. That much is obvious. Call it intuition. Alice knows the type and she knows how to deal with them, and she could easily put the strange little man sitting adjacent from her in his place with one quick motion, if she cared to.
She isn’t going to, though.
Because the fact that he’s out here asking someone else to hunt for him? Now, that’s the part that she finds interesting. That’s the part she desperately wants to learn more about. She is going to learn more about it, one way or another.
“I think,” she begins, leaning onto her crossed forearms, “that I’m going to give you two options. The first is that you can get up and leave. Get out of my sight, and never contact me again.”
Jon flinches at this. He chews his chapped lip. “...and the second?”
Alice feels a smile tugging at her lips. “The second is that you tell me your story, and I sit here and listen. And then once I say you’re finished, I’ll tell you what I think.”
That gives him pause, clearly taken aback.
“...Everything?” he asks softly after a long moment of thought. She can see the gears in his head spinning. She so desperately wants to stick her fingers in between them.
“From the very beginning,” she answers.
Jon heaves a breath, like he’s just remembering how to, and nods. “Right,” he agrees quietly to himself, “from the very beginning.”
Alice watches as he picks up his glass, takes a long drink, and then proceeds to tell her everything.