Just a little something I whipped up.

Many thanks to my cheery experimental beta-chan paradorx.

"Good morning, detective," Will said as cheerily as he could manage, considering that he was currently handcuffed to a table in a confined space with Detective Alice Kingsley. He wasn't normally one for handcuffs, but it was a hard thing to keep out of his mind.

She didn't seem as upbeat to see him, settling into her chair across the interview table with a barely suppressed sigh. "Do I want to know what you got arrested for?" she asked in a tired voice.

"For being a good citizen," Will replied breezily, leaning as far back in his chair as he could, current manacled hands aside. "I was chasing a purse snatcher. Nearly got him, too. You're welcome."

"You ran four red lights and broke every speeding law this county currently has." Although her voice was even and professional, her eyes sparkled in that entertained way of hers. Will shifted uncomfortably in his seat, the handcuffs elbowing their way to the front of his mind.

He cleared his throat and summoned up a witty remark. "I was also almost hit by a squad car, which I expect an apology for."

She smiled at him then, and Will had a moment of thinking god damn it before she spoke up. "I'm actually glad we caught you. Haven't seen you in awhile, I was beginning to worry."

"You have my number," Will pointed out evasively with a shrug. "You could call me."

"You don't answer," she said bluntly.

"But you have my number." Will smiled as best as he could. Alice squinted at him.

"Is everything alright with you, Will?" she asked gently. "You don't seem… yourself."

Three bloody months and I'm still unable to crack a convincing grin, Will thought to himself. "Like I said, I almost got hit by a squad car. Experience like that shakes a man."

"Are you injured at all?" she asked, suddenly worried, and the tracking of her eyes across his torso made an uncomfortable warmth spread up across the back of his neck.

"Not quite," he managed.

"Well, then." Alice sat back in her seat, precursory undressing of him complete. Or so he hoped. The front of his jeans were starting to feel unfairly snug. "I suppose you're up for a job, then?"

"Payment?" he couldn't stop the knee-jerk reaction to her proposal, but had the good graces to look mildly abashed as she rolled her eyes at him.

"How about I don't let you get arrested for… what was it? Chasing a dog snatcher?"

"Purse snatcher." He mocked deep consideration, tongue in his cheek, before nodding. "Seems a fair trade off." He lifted his silver-bound hands up. "Now, help a mate out?"

"Of course." She procured a set of keys and reached across the interview table, one hand lightly holding his wrist in place while she fiddled with the lock. Her grip was sure, firm. Her hands were warm. Will looked everywhere else in the room than at the image of her fingers intertwining with his for the briefest of moments before the tumblers engaged and the handcuffs dropped to the table with a clatter, freeing him.

She led the way out of the interrogation room, and Will made sure to give a good shit-eating grin (easier to fake than a real grin) to her fellow detectives as he strolled out in her wake. They all brushed him off, too used to his presence to really care. One of the downsides of being a police consultant, Will had learned over the past year, was the inability to cop a rise out of the same cops you drank coffee with.

Will followed Alice to her car and slid into the front seat with ease. "So, what's the job?"

"You'll see when we get there," Alice said lightly as she pulled out of the police station parking lot. "Now, it's my turn to ask the questions."

"I was under the impression that we left the interrogation room," Will protested lightly.

"You disappeared for three months!" Alice exclaimed. "I was worried, Will."

"I'm touched," he said in an acid tone. Honestly, though. Something housed beneath his ribs began to try and flutter away.

Alice was looking at him out of the corner of her eye, and he squirmed in a completely guilty way. "Leave it alone, Alice!" he exclaimed after several minutes of silent scrutiny. "Please."

She made a small noise and focused on the road, pulling off of it in one of the more posh places in town that wasn't a forty story high-rise. Will had experience with the latter, but not the former, and so he asked Alice a silent question as she parked the car on the curb. Happily—surprisingly—she picked up on it and furrowed her eyebrows. "What?" she asked in confusion. They exited the car, and Will noted that all of the other cops had deserted the crime scene, leaving them alone. Better or worse, he couldn't tell.

"I'm not exactly a suburb kind of expert," he explained, and she motioned him to follow her under a barrier of yellow warning tape and up the drive towards the front door. However, just short of it, she turned sharply to her right and ended up standing in a mostly-demolished flower bed beneath a large window.

"The victim was found inside by a couple of kids who dropped their ball in the flowers and peeked in the window," she explained. Will dropped down an eye level and squinted through the filmy lace curtains—of course they're lace, of course—and saw a lovely chalk drawing of a dead body sprawled artistically across the living room floor.

"Poor kids," Will reflected, straightening. "What do I have to do with it?"

"The victim was not the owner of the house—they're off vacationing somewhere without a phone, and so for all intents of purposes, the victim was an intruder. We still don't know how he died. It's almost like his pacemaker just turned itself off once he got inside."

"And you want me to…" he made a vague hand gestured and she didn't deign to speak. "Lovely. Welcome back, Will, have fun crawling around a crime scene." He stripped off his jacket and handed it to Alice, who took it willingly. "I'll give a good scream if my heart stops beating, shall I?" He began to walk around the perimeter of the house, shouting back at Alice, who stood by the window. "What time did he die?"

"Around one in the morning!" she shouted back. Will lost sight of her as he neared the end of the side-yard, where he stripped out of his shoes and expertly maneuvered over the garden wall. One in the morning meant no street watch, which there must have been in a neighborhood that well suited. Will strolled around in the grass. No signs of a dog. He wondered what Alice was doing with his jacket.

Around the back, there was a nice French door opening to a rather rundown patio, cracked up and dried. The door itself was rather well done, however, solidly built. Will knocked skillfully on the glass with one hand, listening to the noise it made.

Bullet-proof, he noted, interesting. He jiggled the doorknob experimentally; locked. It undoubtedly would have been locked that night as well. Will took a step back. Don't see the locks, see the openings, he reminded himself. Where were the gaps?

He jumped up and caught a hold of the ledge of the second story window directly above the French doors and pulled himself up, gripping edges with his fingertips and pressing his weight where he thought it would hold. He crouched at the second-story window and jiggled the frame in a practiced way. With a loud groaning of wood, it creaked upwards, and he noted inner scratching on the screen, and he mimicked what would have caused the scratches, gently popping out the screen. He climbed inside what looked like a guest room and rolled his neck. Nothing like a good, lock-pick-free break-in to start your day.

Will slid down the stair bannister and landed with a socked thump on the wood floors, which sprung lightly back. Water damage? Will headed to the window, keeping low, and then yanked the curtains open while making a loud noise and a demonic face. Alice, just on the other side, jumped and he could hear her cursing at him while he laughed. She had his jacket draped over her shoulders. He tried not to let that distract him as he strolled easily around the room, checking it out. Sparsely decorated, but that was more clear on the inside than it had been on the outside. The only thing that really stood out among average IKEA furniture was a large framed photograph hanging where a normal, average person would put a big television. It was cubist. Not Will's thing. He stood on the chalk lines and squinted at it, and he noticed that the painting lacked a pin gap on the upper left side, a space separating the frame and the wall to indicate that there was a pin behind it, securing it in place. The right side, however, did put out, the frame warped slightly.

"Well, well, well," Will muttered, and placed a hand on the left side of the painting, swinging it to the right. It opened on perfectly oiled hinges, and underneath was the most gorgeous wall safe Will had ever seen. "Ooh," he sighed, "oh, baby." Alice was tapping on the glass of the window, trying to get his attention. He ignored her, and placed his hand on the dial.

"He seems… fine."

"He's out cold!"

"Stop shouting," Will mumbled, and blearily opened his eyes. Alice was almost inches from his face, her eyes wide with worry, and one curl of blonde hair falling over the curve of her shoulder. It took all of Will's diminished strength not to made a loud noise of some embarrassing nature.

His quest failed when he felt long, tapering fingers, cold and smooth, touching at the skin of his neck, over his pulse point, and he let out a pitiful moan. Alice moved out of his sight and was replaced by a familiar face with long, dark eyelashes and a mouth naturally smiling. Cyrus finished taking his pulse and turned to Alice. "What happened?"

"Shock," Will said shortly, pointing over his head at the wall. "Water damage," he pointed down at the floor he was currently sprawled across. "What are you doing here?" He struggled to sit up, and Cyrus made the action worse by spreading one hand across Will's chest and bracing the other on his lower back, nearly burning through Will's thin shirt. Alice clung by, still fretting.

Alice and Cyrus shared a look, and a long moment of something unsaid passed between them; it made Will's chest do that annoying thing where all he wanted was to read their minds. Three months. Three months and he was already knee-deep in what he left behind.

"Alice called me," Cyrus explained, "I arrived just as you passed out." His dark eyes flicked up above Will's head, at the still closed safe. "I wonder what's in there." Will could hear the evasion in his voice, the intent on cutting Will off before he could ask why Alice had decided to call her boyfriend while he checked out a murder scene for a point of entry.

"Don't care," Will cut out, standing, leaning mostly on Alice and Cyrus. "I just want to go home." There was something plaintive in his voice that made Cyrus and Alice share another look.

"Okay," Alice said, and draped his jacket over his shoulders after picking it up off of the floor, where it had fallen as she had kneeled next to him. It smelled like her perfume, and Will would blame any color that came to his face on vertigo.

He warded off Alice's attempts to get him to a hospital ("no insurance") and managed to get out of the car without saying or doing something he might regret, no easy feat with his head buzzing like it had been filled with a hornet's nest.

Three flights of stairs. Definitely not something he had missed over the past three months. He had no key (no key existed for this particular apartment) and he was too tired to pick the lock like he usually did, so he leaned against it and knocked loudly.

Lizard answered it, and paused, looking him up and down. "You look like hell," she reported, and let him into the apartment. He slumped after her with a muttered word of thanks. He had never considered the scrappy, dusty place as home, and three months of separation didn't stop that opinion from continuing.

"You were gone for a while," she commented, curling up pretty on the moldy couch with a magazine. "I thought you'd run off for another three months."

"Alice got me on another job," he said shortly, pacing to clear the stiffness from his legs. Lizard looked up from her magazine with a raised eyebrow.

"You jump back fast," she noted. "You were totally jonesing for her when you left, right?"

He gave her a look and she shut up with a smile. "Jumped back even faster than you'd think," he replied, and paused. "Cyrus was there. God, Lizard, it's horrible. Like I never left the two of them—" his voice just kept going after he was aware that he was talking, and that horrible colored heat was rising in his face again.

"Wait, wait, wait," Lizard cut him off, to his relief, "you've got a hard-on for the boyfriend, too? Really?"

"I can't even begin to explain how I feel about that."

With a load groan and a muttered curse aimed at every deity in existence, Will collapsed into a battered armchair, hands over his face.

Lizard reached over patted his knee comfortingly. "You're fucked," she said.

"I know," Will sighed, and dragged his hands down his face. "Trust me, I know."

She considered him for a moment. Lizard, like Will, had never been very good at the talking part of a friendship, and so all she said was "Welcome back," before getting up and going into her room and shutting the door.

"Thanks," Will said shortly to the empty room. Three months. Lizard wasn't the kind to ask, and he was grateful for it, but he had expected a little more time to adjust before having to face down Alice. Or Cyrus. Or both of them. The way they smiled at each other…

Will curled over, and groaned into the back cushion of the armchair. Three months. Only time would tell how this was going to end up.

More to come. Review?