Chapter Text
Akram traced the shapes across his ceiling again. He had memorized them his first night in the flat, too keyed up to rest in such an unfamiliar place. A wide slant of buzzing, yellow streetlight, broken by the window panes and the halftone shadows cast by too-thin curtains. He used to liken the lines cut through the light to some thin, gaunt cross staring down at him in some kind of impotent attempt at intimidation. A looming threat. It did not work on him.
As time had gone on, it became just another piece of scenery. Like the coffee table shoved toward the tv each night, so the sagging couch could fold out. Like the peeling skin of the silver birch, or the cold winds or soggy chips. A new piece of furniture in their lives, a new constant.
He traced patterns beyond the too-bright yellow, in the knockdown stippled plaster beneath. Like disorganized patterns in need of translation. Tried to trace out undiscovered constellations and images and creatures, write a story in the cracking ceiling the way his daughters did with the clouds above their heads. He had lost count of the shapes and the stories told over the years, the number exhausted, but he could still pinpoint each and every one. As if he could read his own ceiling like a map.
He shifted, searching out the clock in the darkness, and flinched at the sudden spike of pain.
There were times, late in the night, when he would allow himself to feel the dull, throbbing ache in his shoulder and his chest. It was always there, a constant presence that he would never again be without, always thruming away in the quiet between heartbeats. The kind of pain that eventually turned numb, an absence of feeling where the pain had once been, but could fester the longer he left it alone and ignored.
But there were times that he needed to remind himself of the pain, remind himself not to ignore it. The wound had been cleaned, the bone set, the flesh sewn closed. But he feared, sometimes, that it would boil up beneath the skin if he did not keep close watch on the puckered scars, if he simply let the pain fade into the background.
A pain he wished to forget—that would be so easy to forget—and the lingering fear of what doing so could mean.
But perhaps there was a comfort to be found in that pain, one he could cling to. Constancy. He had lost many things, and there were now many, many more that he could still lose. And there was a cold, yawning fear within him, that everything he had endured that pain for could be taken away between one blink and the next. But the pain would remain.
In those moments, when he allowed himself to ache, he would find himself remembering the ceiling of that house. The patterns in the rough plaster and spotty paint, errant cobwebs and spatters of blood. He would then hear the bloody rasp of Hardy's breaths, his own. A numb, leaking chill where the burn of a bullet should have been. He would swear he could hear the electricity in the walls, hear the distant, tinny whir of Anderson's camera still recording, loud despite the windy shoreline roar of his own blood in his ears. Careful, trained footsteps on the carpet. A face in a mask. Cars on the street. A heavy, tight fear in his chest.
And then the moment would pass, and Leith Park would fall away, and only the dull ache would remain.
Akram gently rubbed at his clavicle, feeling a mosaic of once-shattered bone and implant-grade steel just beneath the skin, and a dull, throbbing pressure. A new constant.
Reading had been one of those things he had lost. Since Leith Park, he had more painful, sleepless nights than not. But time that had once been taken up devouring anything the library would allow him to take, was now taken by something akin to fear. He could not stomach fictions and fairytales any longer, they felt like unnecessary distractions. A buffer to the sorrow of the world outside, and to the pain.
Akram knew well he could not plan ahead for every case, every crime scene, every waiting danger behind every darkened corner. But he could keep his mind sharp. It wasn't as if anyone could stop him from poking about in cold cases. If no one else was worried about them, then no one would even notice him. Or the helpful notes he left in the margins that no one but him would ever read.
If found out, he would blame it on curiosity, or perhaps empathy. Maybe pity. He would say that the number of unsolved cases worried him, and it wouldn't be a lie. That it seemed an oversight, so many going cold.
In reality, he knew how selfish his reasons were. That feeling of preparedness, artificial though it likely was, that came from witnessing where others had gone wrong.
There was a file in his bag, by the door, waiting for him to relent and bury his nose back into its lonely pages. Devour rules and clues the way he had once relished in the beauty of words and stories. A coping mechanism more than anything, he could admit in the quiet of his preparations.
Instead, he had to ready himself for the day ahead. He needed to figure out how to return the file without drawing Hardy's eye—or his ire. The man was far more observant that anyone else he'd met there, save perhaps the young Rose. Perhaps that was her own coping mechanism, bound to her desk as she was.
The loathesome streetlight flickered off, as it did each morning, leaving the living room a dull, but slowly brightening grey.
It was a miserable Monday, his first back to work. Second day as a DI, as officially Hardy's partner. After a week of tagging along at Hardy's heels, sniffing around at the edge of a case that they both knew damn well would never amount to anything more than a stalemate, the man had somehow wrangled a DI promotion for him. He hadn't explained it, but Akram was smart enough to connect the dots.
He had been brushing up against a case of corruption for weeks before he forcibly dragged Akram from the so-called IT department. Something about Graham Finch and his many ties to the Crown Office, a daughter driven off the road, stabbings and conspiracies. Who was to say the man wouldn't have some way to hack into Hardy's own laptop? All the better to have an expert at his side, and better even to have some semblance of backup.
But it hadn't mattered much. A murderer, acquitted, was still a murderer. And an evil man, with reach beyond what either of them could fathom or protect themselves from? It was dangerous, and they were alone.
Akram didn't ask specifics and Hardy didn't offer, but he hoped the man didn't think him too stupid to notice. Hardy knew when to quit, when nothing good would come of fighting, but he wasn't too shrewed to leave with promises and boons. And Stephen Burns had access to many things they might have needed, and a dark secret he would not have wanted out.
But then there were three quick gunshots, searing pain, and a familiar fear he had foolishly hoped hadn't followed him from home.
Thinking of, Hardy told him to be ready at half eight. With the streetlights just off, it was perhaps a quarter to five. Plently of time for prayer, to scrounge some kind of breakfast, divide leftovers into three neatly packed lunches, to see the girls off to the school stop and off into a world he could not save them from. Plenty of time to push down the pain again, numb himself again. It would find him soon enough.