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Whatever other issues Ben Solo might have, he’s damn good at his job, which is a blessing, because if he’d had to come crawling back to his parents, he doesn’t think he could’ve lived with himself. But he made it onto the force, fashioned himself into a decent policeman, then a good one, and now he’s handling one of the bigger cases of organized crime in New Jersey. And that’s saying something, because it is, after all, Jersey. Ben sometimes thinks you can’t turn a corner without running into someone with Family connections around here.
Still, he’d wanted to help bring some order to the world, make up for his father’s shady past and his mother’s rebellious inclinations, and so that’s what he was doing. No better place to make you feel like you were really working for it than right here.
It’s just a shame Ben cannot fucking stand his partner.
“You head in, I’m taking the perimeter,” Hux orders, which is bullshit. Ben does it anyway, but there’s a stream of internal bitching he can’t help, pointing out that Hux may have slight seniority, but Ben has the higher rank, and this was his call.
They’re investigating one of the rare calls that might actually pan out. Around this neighborhood, it’s rare even a dead body gets called in; let alone a crime in progress. Ben’s not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, even if that gift was technically a hysterical old bat reporting shouting and screaming. This apartment building is home to one particular rat that may be useful as a dead body with a smoking gun if nothing else. God knows Unkar Plutt hasn’t given them anything worth the department’s time in months.
Ben remembers where Plutt lives from having previous dealings with the snitch, so he beelines for the third floor, gun drawn but at his side. He can see why Hux would want to take the perimeter. The building isn’t terribly difficult to exit via fire escape, but a runner is going to have a tougher time making a shot if it comes to it. Backed up in the corners of this shitty apartment building, Ben’s a much easier target if whoever was reportedly attacking Plutt is still there.
He contemplates knocking on the door, just in case someone wants to cry unlawful entry, but ultimately decides against it. If Plutt happens to be alive, he won’t press charges and if he’s dead, it’s Ben’s word that has to hold up, and he’s always been a gifted liar.
The door swings open easily when Ben kicks it in, bouncing back off the wall to almost hit him in the face on the rebound. He catches it on the shoulder, gun up and eyes open. The door’s already been broken in once today.
“Police!” he shouts, scanning the narrow hall. “Plutt, if you’re in there, I want hands up and head down!”
Ben turns the corner and Plutt’s here alright, but he’s not breathing. In fact, Ben thinks it’d be generous to say he has a head anymore. Most of it is a splatter of bone and blood. Some of it, in fact, is still dripping off the baseball bat in the girl’s hands.
The girl being someone Ben has never seen before. She’s staring straight at the mess of Plutt’s body on the floor, breathing like she’s coming down, and Ben instinctively wonders if she’s on something.
“Ma’am,” he starts, trying for calming and authoritative at once. “I need you to drop the weapon.”
He’s got his own trained on her, and when she looks up at him, she looks completely clear-headed. She’s pretty, he notes distantly, the idea clashing with the proof that she just bludgeoned a full-grown, rather large man to death in his own home. She’s thin as anything, hair pulled back in a series of messy buns and wearing a jacket over a tank and jogging pants, like she’s just gone out for a run and happened to find herself at the scene of a murder. Maybe she’s touched, he thinks.
She’s certainly not dropping the bat, and she hasn’t broken eye contact with him in the last few tense seconds.
“Put down the bat, miss,” he demands a little more forcefully. She blinks, rapidly like waking up, and the bat falls from her fingers.
She takes a step back a second later, eyes widening and hands flying over her mouth. She staggers backwards a few more steps before seeming to lose her balance and toppling to her knees. Her eyes start welling up, and Ben lets his gun lower slightly.
“Oh god.” It’s more a breath than speech. The girl, whoever she is, slumps further down, gaze locked on Plutt’s body. “I didn’t- He-”
“I need you to stay where you are, ma’am,” Ben says, bringing his gun down and finding the button for his walkie without taking his eyes off her. “Hux, the situation’s handled in here. I’ve got a body and a suspect.”
Her eyes snap to him at the word suspect.
“No, I didn’t-” she starts. “Please, I don’t know what happened. I. You have to help me.”
Ben doesn’t know what her deal is, but she doesn’t appear to have any handle on herself or ability to make sense, so he mentally hunkers down to deal with a gnarly case of hysteria. Judging by how her entire frame is shaking, he’s in for it.
“Ma’am, until I know what happened here, I can’t do anything for you,” he says, holstering his gun and stepping around the body toward her. He keeps his hands visible and posture open, knowing he’s considerably bigger than her and not wanting to trigger some kind of episode. “Can you tell me what happened?”
“I can’t-” She swallows hard and shakes her head, gasping, before she speaks again. “He was…I knew him, from when I was younger, and I’m new in town, I thought. Oh god.”
“It’s alright.” Ben crouched in front of her now, ignoring Hux’s voice over the walkie, telling him he’s on his way and calling the station. “Just take a breath and tell me what happened.”
She nods a few times, eyes squeezed shut where she’s started crying in earnest.
“I was visiting to get some contacts about housing, and he… He started...touching. He said I had to…”
The way she’s clutching at herself, wrapping her arms all the way around her body, and unable to finish the implication tells Ben enough. He’d known Plutt was scum, but he hates having it confirmed like this. If it weren’t his job to uphold the law, he’d love to tell this girl to go, forget everything that happened, and he’d deal with the body. But it is his job, and self-defense or not, Plutt’s death has to be dealt with through the proper channels.
“It’s alright,” he says again. “If you can stay calm and try to get a hold of yourself, someone at the station can talk to you about it, but I will need to take you in.”
She turns wide eyes up at him from where she’d been staring a hole in the floor.
“Can you, um, can you help me up?” she asks finally. “I don’t want to look at it.”
Ben offers her a hand up and watches her gaze skip over Plutt’s body, and then, all of a sudden, she’s pressed right up against his chest, face buried in his shirt and weeping.
For a moment, he freezes and has absolutely no idea what to do. She crying on him and mumbling repeated I’m so sorrys and Ben has never been good with crying women in his life, let alone while he’s standing in a crime scene. Against his better judgment, and because she’s just so small and shaking like a leaf, he puts one hand up over her shoulder in an approximation of a comforting gesture.
“Ma’am, you-” he starts before she cuts him off.
“I didn’t mean to,” she gasps into his chest, hands fisted in his shirt. “I was just so scared and then the bat was there and I…oh god, I killed him.”
It’s the strangest, most uncomfortable confession Ben’s ever received, and he desperately doesn’t want to have heard it. It’s a slithery, disquieting feeling to want someone to get away with a crime for once, especially since Ben could never muster up this kind of sympathy for his own parents, but there it is. He wants her to be let off, even though he literally saw blood dripping from the weapon in her hands not ten minutes ago.
That makes it doubly terrible when a few things happen all at once. The first thing is his hand moves all on its own so that he’s doing something more like hugging her, entirely without his consent. The second is that she slips his gun out of its holster and has it turned under his chin faster than he can react. And thirdly, she stops crying, just switches it off like a light, and there’s still tears clumping her eyelashes together when she pulls back and grins up at him.
“Thank you for your kindness, officer,” she says, voice smooth as silk, like she hadn’t been sobbing into his shirt a moment ago. He can still feel the tearstains.
“What,” Ben croaks intelligently, past the barrel against his windpipe, and a second later, more enthusiastically, “Bitch.”
“Now, don’t call names.” She frowns, and presses the gun tighter to his throat. “If you’d been a little slower, I wouldn’t have had to do this.”
Her eyes narrow, teeth bared, and she looks genuinely angry as she hisses, “You never give me time to work.”
Ben is sure he’s supposed to try to diffuse the situation, or overpower her, and he’s positive he’s gone through training on that, but it all goes flying out of his head. He’s suddenly fifteen again and pissed off that he got played.
“You psychotic bitch,” he bites out, furious. The gun slips a bit so it’s resting just under where his jaw meets his neck, and she turns it ever so carefully to match the new angle without losing her leverage.
“You said that already,” she tells him, sounding disappointed. “Here’s the deal-” she pauses to duck slightly and read his badge “-Solo, I’m not a cop killer, not if they don’t deserve it. I don’t intend to start with you. So you’re going to let me go.”
“Good fucking luck with that,” he snaps instantly. She’s all kinds of crazy, apparently, but he can’t see how she thinks he’s just going to let her walk away.
“I admire your dedication,” she says, “but I do have plans that don’t involve jail time, so I’m really going to have to insist.”
She doesn’t pause in her speech before she makes her move. There’s no facial tick or tell, so when she swings the gun up to crash against his temple, Ben doesn’t see it coming. He sways for a moment, dizzy and fighting the rush of blackness coming to the forefront of his mind, but he starts to fall. For some reason, she catches him. Ben’s eyes are swimming, a struggle for consciousness that he knows he’s going to lose, so he can barely see her when she leans over him, and the memory is so fuzzy he can hardly recall it later.
“Men,” she huffs out, squatting so she can peer down at him on the floor. “You’re so easy.”
Ben finally gives up the fight, and he thinks he feels the ghost of lips on his closed eyelid before darkness swallows him.