Warning: Spoilers for Dark Clouds!

Author's Note: The reason I gave you 'Running with Scissors' and its comparative light-heartedness is, well, the honeymoon is over.

Story Notes: I'm altering a few scenes from Dark Clouds to make space for Donna, but I think it's a fairly minor change and just something I wanted to do. This kicks off right after Aiden's patched up by Morrsky.

I think Dark Cloud's supposed to take place immediately after Bad Blood and is meant to segue into Watch Dogs 2. For Brilliancy, I've dated it to autumn/winter 2015 (several months after Running with Scissors, which takes place in summer.)

[summary: there's a side of aiden pearce donna doesn't really know.]

[takes place in late 2015]

_Nightcall: Riptide

Donna had parked the car across the street, like Aiden's text had told her to. She waited with badly concealed impatience, fingers clenching and unclenching on the wheel. Down the street, a lamp kept flickering, setting her nerves on edge. Aiden had been monosyllabic in his text, just asked her to come. He had offered no explanation. He hadn't asked her to, either, but she'd elected to take her gun with her anyway.

She was a good shot, it was Iraq who had shown her how to use a gun and the memory of him was strangely mellow now. She could barely summon much anger towards him anymore. He'd fucked up her life, but unlike him, she was still there, still alive. She had won.

The gun helped only a little.

She scanned the street, picked out the ctOS cameras as they surveilled the empty street, but she still startled when Aiden stepped out of the darkness of an alleyway. He stopped briefly, then crossed the street, stepped around the car and got in the passenger seat.

The lamp came on, cast its murky light into the car, crawled across Aiden's face and tense body.

There was blood. Aiden had got most of it out of his hair, but he must have bled like a pig all over the collar of his coat and into the sweater beneath. More blood had seeped through the bandage on his head, but it seemed to have stopped. He looked pale and tired, his face a slowly cracking stone mask, gaze cast down on his phone, watching some video feed Donna couldn't make sense of from this angle.

He barely acknowledged her for a full minute, when he looked up, his expression didn't change. This was the look he had reserved for his enemies, frosty and penetrating. You could break yourself on that gaze, pleading for mercy.

Donna looked back at him, steadily, waited for the moment to pass.

He blinked, let those eyes fall closed and leaned his shoulders into the seat.

"Where do we need to go?" she asked.

Aiden exhaled slowly. He brought his phone up, tapped something and the GPS in the car changed its destination. Something a good twenty minutes away, by the device's estimate.

She started the car, drove it along the path the GPS dictated her, trying hard not to glance at him every opportunity she got, at every traffic light or stop sign. She wanted to know what had happened, but it didn't seem like the moment to ask. He'd lowered the phone, sunk even deeper in his seat. He was rubbing the temple on the uninjured side of his head, then moved down to massage his neck.

The GPS led into a rundown neighbourhood. It had once been nice, Donna could tell even in the darkness, working class families fulfilling their dream of their own house, but since then, several bouts of financial crises had swept through the place and the gangs had moved in their wake. They passed some groups of them, roaming their neighbourhood like packs of wolves.

She turned into a overgrown driveway, she missed the move Aiden made on his phone, but the garage door opened on its own under the glare of the headlights, chattering metal uncomfortably loud in the night.

She drove in, stopped the car and killed the engine.

"Can you close the garden gate?" Aiden asked. He opened his door and pulled himself out, his movements were slow and heavy, but it was only a momentary lapse. Donna saw him tense again, square his shoulders before he slammed the car's door closed with slightly more force than necessary. "Use only the door from the garage," he said. "Others are rigged."

He didn't wait for her answer, but walked to the door, already peeling off the blood-crusted coat as he went.

She was fairly sure the garage door was also rigged, but he probably had diffused it with his phone, the same swift motion that had opened the garage door for them.

She went outside, crossed the driveway and closed the gate. She lingered, stared up and down the street, spotted a group of gang-bangers, but they weren't paying her or the house at her back any attention.

Aiden had safe-houses everywhere in the city, small bolt-holes and entire apartments, like the posh place he kept in Mad Mile. She had been to barely a handful of them and this house was new to her.

The inside of the house was thinly furnished, a rickety kitchen table with two mismatched chairs, a low hanging lamp shedding sickly yellow light. A kitchenette was behind it, from the 1980s and apparently never properly cleaned since then. There was a threadbare couch against the other wall, hidden in shadows.

A desk stood beside the couch, packed with a computer rig, though much smaller than Aiden's usual setup, just one monitor and a laptop backed by several stacked towers.

Aiden's coat lay on the floor by the door, she picked it up as she walked past, felt the stiffness where the blood had caked to it. A little further in, he'd dropped his sweater. She picked that up, too as she walked to the kitchenette and hung both over the back of a chair. The leather of Aiden's gun holster curled on the table, but it had been dropped with the same carelessness as the clothes.

The hissing of water from the sink was the only sound, Aiden stood bent over the counter, wiped at the blood on his back and neck with what seemed to be the T-shirt he'd worn. He didn't look up when she entered, didn't seem to acknowledge her at all. A thin sheen of sweat caught the light, emphasised the hard set of his muscles down his back as he moved.

Donna looked away from him, studied the coat and vaguely wondered how difficult it was to get blood out of the leather. Not too hard, she supposed, it couldn't be the first time.

"Can you stay?" Aiden asked unexpectedly. He turned the water off, dropped the soiled shirt into the sink and watched her, seemed to really see her for the first time that night and remembered to soften his icy expression.

"Of course I can stay," she said, somewhat irritably at the implication she might refuse to be there for him.

He pushed himself away from the counter, his movements were slower, heavier than she'd ever seen him, it took real effort just to stand there, she thought, he had to force himself to do it.

He would have walked past her, but Donna snatched his hand before he could and he stopped, let himself be pulled into an embrace, though he held himself rigid in her arms. In nothing but an afterthought, he placed a quick kiss to her forehead, then stepped out of her hold.

"Thanks," he said.

She watched as he crossed the room, turned on the computer and sat down in front of it, pulling his phone from his back-pocket. He flexed his shoulders, but he didn't seem to remember how to relax. He wiped at the edge of the phone, then tapped something on it. The recording of a surveillance video appeared on the larger screen and he put the phone away.

Donna narrowed her eyes.

"What happened?" she asked quietly.

At first, she thought he wasn't going to answer at all, but then he said, "I was stupid. Took a stupid risk and paid for it. Should've known better."

Donna hesitated, as if she'd been nailed to the floorboards in that one spot. Aiden's tension had filled every corner of the room and it was seeping into her own bones. "You were shot," she observed.

Aiden sucked in a deep breath, leaned back in his chair and pointed at the screen with his chin. "Watch," he said.

So she did. She walked forward until she stood behind him. She put a hand to his back, very carefully, but when he didn't flinch or brush her off, she pressed her fingers into the knotted muscles as his neck. Her attention, however, was on the video. It showed some industrial waterfront street, badly lit in the oncoming gloom of the evening. It was easy to identify Aiden inside the bubble of pixellation surrounding him on the recording. He walked along the street with a leisurely stride and although his posture was hidden from sight, she knew he was ready to spring at the first sign of trouble. Not that it was going to do him much good.

Donna immediately spotted the van as it turned the corner behind him, but Aiden seemed to have missed it, or noticed it too late, or took too long to identify it as a threat at all. He was distracted by someone else, a man just barely visible on the edge of the screen, ten paces away from Aiden and looking back at him.

The silence of the video was eerie, made the scene as it played out surreal and far more frightening, despite the assurance that he was not dead, that he was right there. But the video told a different story, told of a man shot down in the street, lying there without moving and a rapidly growing puddle of blood spread out where his head had hit the concrete.

"Who's the man?" Donna asked. He hurried to Aiden's side, crouched down then pulled out his phone.

Aiden paused the video.

"Someone I haven't seen in a long time," he said. "He's been looking for me, but I don't know…"

"He set you up?"

"I don't know," Aiden said. "Doesn't make sense. He called out, he warned me. Things might not have gone down so harmlessly without him."

Donna pulled her gaze away from the screen and looked down at Aiden, still looking ready to snap, dark rings had began to form under his eyes and his skin an unhealthy pallor. He needed to lie down, rest and gather his thoughts instead of staring at that screen. But there was an angry edge in his expression, she didn't have a name for. It wasn't just that he was unwilling to relax and rest, she didn't think he even could.

"But someone set me up," he said. "Maybe not Mick Wolfe, but someone who knew I was meeting with him. That's not a lot of people, unless someone was listening in. Either way, they'll have left traces, just need to find them."

Donna still looked down at him with a strained calm of her own, unsure what she should say, what he expected her to say or whether, in that moment, she was just convenient to let him vocalise his own thoughts.

He minimised the video, pulled up some data feed. "Can't let that go," he said and she wasn't sure if it was meant as some kind of apology for the sake of her sensibilities. "Sets a dangerous precedent."

She took a step back from him.

"You've got a concussion, that's why you asked me to stay," she said. "When you pass out, who do I call?"

"I won't pass out," he said, indignant growl in his voice, but quieter, he added. "Says 'Doc' on my phone. He'll bitch at you and demand advance payment. There's some cash in the kitchen cabinet, taped to the underside on the left. If you need more, check the power sockets in the bedroom. They're wired up, be careful."

Donna spent the better part of the night staving off her own tiredness and watching Aiden like a hawk, though she couldn't tell if he was struggling or not. He was focussed on his work, an unyielding intensity as he dug through the vast pool of knowledge ctOS amassed, unravelling whatever web was supposed to be spun around him.

It got cold as the night dragged on and she must have dozed off after all. It was a mistake to pick the couch over a chair, she thought, too comfortable despite the springs digging into her flesh. She woke because Aiden touched her shoulder and then stuffed a folded sweater into her hands before she had a chance to even sit up straight.

He himself wore some scratchy looking cardigan. Wordlessly, he zipped it only halfway up his chest, then sat back down in front of the computer. He wasn't actually doing anything, just watching he data change on his screen.

"Do you have anything to eat?"

"Tap water."

"Not even beer?" she asked in an effort to lighten the mood, but it felt like a stillbirth before she'd even finished the question.

He scowled, "Well, there's a packet of aspirin I'm also not allowed to touch, so don't remind me."

He glanced over his shoulder at her. "Order something if you want. I'm not hungry."

"Maybe you should sleep," she said. She pulled the sweater on, it was one of his and too big, smelling faintly of dust, but it gave her a chance to huddle in it. She pulled her knees up against her chest.

She expected denial, some puffed up posturing which might be faked all the way through, but could just as easily be the truth of how he felt and thought.

Aiden said, "Yeah."

He gave his chair a slight shove, let his head drop down and to the side, so he could give her a sidelong glance. "You should, too. Take the bed, I'll stay here."

"Is there a reason we can't both take the bed?"

For the first time, he cracked a faint smile. It made him look even more tired. "You overestimate my self-control."

"You overestimate your health," she responded, but regretted it immediately when it wiped the smile from his face as if it had never been. She could only guess why. Perhaps the reminder of his own failure, though she didn't think his ego bruised so easily. No, far more likely, it was the reminder that he was on the hunt. Someone out there was responsible, someone else he could make hurt far worse than he was.

"Probably," he agreed and turned away from her again, concentrated on the screen and said nothing more.

In the unflattering glare of the screen, his face was set in stern concentration, as if the exchange between them hadn't happened and she couldn't think of a way to reverse it.

There was a side of him he was careful not to show her. Yet, tonight, he'd been too cornered — and perhaps too drained — to care. If she had to, she could understand it as a gesture of trust. He'd turned to her in a moment of weakness. But if she didn't have to, it was just another calculation he'd made, perhaps literally, on the run. Who, of all his acquaintances, was least likely to capitalise on his vulnerability?

She stayed on the couch, but the cold was persistent. If the house had any heating, it certainly wasn't turned on. The computer took precedence over any human comfort and Aiden didn't even seem to notice.

Eventually, she got up and walked to his side, slid a hand along his shoulders. He tensed under her fingers, but turned his head toward her and his expression seemed to have mellowed in the last hour.

"I got a few good leads," he said. "Still don't know how it all fits together."

She smiled a little. "Do you think they'll vanish if you don't stare at them constantly?"

"That's not…" he started, but didn't finish the entirely predictable line.

"That's exactly what you do," she pointed out. "And you're getting nowhere."

"It's there," he insisted. "Someone put out a hit on me. It's been almost a year since some fixer tried to cash in on the bounty. It can't be that. I don't think it's just a freelancer. This is somebody with connections and money. I'm not letting him get away with this, playing me, playing Wolfe— and I still don't know where Wolfe fits. "

"And all of that will still be there in a couple of hours," Donna pointed out. "Come on, we both know this place is safe. It's a bit of an eyesore, I'm afraid, but that's not danger."

She felt him strain under her fingers, but he said nothing, eyes still fixed on the collected data on the screen, opened windows piled on top of each other, a mess of information and somewhere within it, the name of whoever had almost got him killed today. She spotted the scans of bad photocopies, military personnel files, assessment reports of Blume staff, private email correspondences. Was there anything he couldn't access if he wanted to?

"Well," she finally said. She leaned down over him and placed a kiss on the corner of his mouth, coaxing until he at least relaxed his lips and started to respond. He drew back from her immediately as if he suspected some kind of trick.

"I'm going to bed," she said as neutrally as she could. "If you need me, you know where to find me."

The house had just one story and though the unrelenting light of the monitors didn't find its way there, it took some time until her sleepiness returned. Curled up under the sheets, she listened to the faint, occasional yapping of a keyboard, the creak of Aiden's chair. She supposed she'd hear the thud if he fell and she didn't think she could sleep deep enough to miss it.

She drifted in and out of sleep until the first light of dawn pushed through the shoddy blinds and began outlining the room around her. She heard Aiden get up from the chair, heard him make a call and then she heard his slow steps as he came to the bedroom.

She rolled to her back, watched his darker shape against the doorway.

"Changed your mind?" she asked quietly.

He sat down on the edge of the bed, rubbed his forehead and tucked slightly on the bandage.

"Can't see straight," he said after a moment. He pulled off the cardigan, tossed it aside, then bent down to get rid of his boots. A low groan escaped him as he sat back up. He glanced over his shoulder at her and slowly leaned down until his head came to rest on her belly.

"Couple of hours," he said, making a concession to her and his own body. "Something's going down, can't let it out of my sight too long."

She said nothing, afraid she would accidentally prompt him to pick himself back up despite everything. He did anyway, but only so he could take off the rest of his clothes and crawl under the blanket.

She listened to his breathing, the sigh on the edge of pain he tried to suppress. He forced himself to relax, one cramped muscle at a time and his breathing began to even out. After a little while, she rolled over to him, slung a leg and an arm over him, pinning him in place, just in case.

The alarm on his phone went off barely three hours later. There was nothing she could do to hold him back after that.

End of _Nightcall: Riptide

In Other News: I read up on concussions and Aiden's lifestyle consists almost exclusively of things he isn't supposed to do with a concussion (you know, like driving, fighting and using a computer… and I gave him this penchant for — expensive — beer, just to round things up.)

For those of you who haven't read Dark Clouds: Trying to shoot Aiden Pearce's head off and missing isn't a very bright idea. He got a little creative with the payback.

Revised on 05/June/2015 and 10/May/2017