Author's Note: No, friends, I haven't abandoned Monster, I just hit a rough spot and got annoyed with it and am taking a break from it for a bit. I know, I know, it's been a few months. Life happens, yeah? Anyway, I was talking to my bud, Hell-on-Training-Wheels, and I was suddenly struck with an idea for a story about Kabal and Stryker actually being detectives in between the events of The Curse of the Dragon Medallion and Ascension. It's a love note to Sherlock Holmes, honestly. I hope you enjoy it!

The fluorescent lights buzzed loudly overhead, and one of them flickered only a few feet away, mildly distracting the detective as the man sitting across from him took a sip of water from a styrofoam cup. He was able to tune out the distant shouting of prisoners and the intermittent noise of heavy, automatic doors sliding open and shut with a strong hum. After all, he'd once did time here at Rikers, and tuning out background noise became an imperative survival skill if one ever wanted to get any sleep in Torture Island. Even at night, this place was loud as fuck. But that damn light kept winking at him, drawing his attention. And he wasn't sure why.

Actually, he quickly realized, that wasn't quite true. He was bored. The prisoner sitting across the scratched steel table looked at him with shifty eyes, his problem uninteresting.

Detective Kadeem Kabal inhaled deeply before he dispassionately withdrew his pen and notepad from his trenchcoat's inner pocket and dropped them on the table. "So, why'd you call me, kid?" he opened.

Joey Bezza, a low-level Black Dragon thug from the Bronx, cleared his throat. "Well, Boss, I thought you'd help me out seeing as how youze was one of us."

"Was being the operative word there, Joey," he coolly retorted.

"Hey, don't be frontin' like youze better'an me, Kabal," he snapped. "I knows where youze come from and what youze done. You should be in here with a number on youze chest too."

The detective narrowed his eyes at him from behind his mask. "Just tell me what happened, kid," he said as he opened his notepad and poised to start scribbling things down. "From the beginning."

Joey swallowed hard and then nodded and wiped his mouth before speaking. "We'd been to a bar in the City, me and Molly O'Callaghan."

Kabal raised an eyebrow and looked up at the young thug. "Seamus O'Callaghan's daughter?" He thought of the Irish mob's particularly vicious leader and shook his head in disbelief. "Well, schtupping the daughter of the Westies's leader was your first mistake," he muttered as he jotted the information down.

"Hey, Boss, don't let the name fool you. That girl was ratchet. But I liked her…" he trailed off.

"So you went to the bar," he said, "and then what?"

Joey nodded again. "I got to chatting up one of the waitresses, and Molly weren't too happy about that. She totally spazzed out, Boss. So when we got back to my place, she wouldn't quit bugging on me so I took it there. She was always getting at me. Saying I weren't a real man."

"I wasn't a real man," he corrected, his head beginning to hurt at his temples.

"What?" the kid frowned.

"It's not weren't, it's wasn't."

"Oh."

Kabal sighed. "Go on."

Joey blinked and said, "Well, I don't know how, but suddenly there was a knife in my hands. My dad was a butcher so I know how to handle knives. He learned me how to cut up a beast-"

"Taught."

"What?"

"He taught you how to cut up a beast."

Joey impatiently sighed. Then he said, "And then I done it-"

"Did it," Kabal corrected him again, more than annoyed by this point at the kid's shitty grammar.

"Did it!" he yelled in exasperation as he slammed his fist on the table. "I stabbed her! Over and over and over! And then I looked down and saw she weren't..." He paused when Kabal looked away, then quickly corrected himself. "...wasn't moving no more. God help me, I don't know how it happened but it was an accident. I swear it." And then his face dropped into his palms as he began to sob.

The detective rolled his eyes, knowing bullshit when he heard it, and the "I don't know what happened" excuse wasn't even a novel one at this point. He nodded to the stocky officer watching them like a hawk before he put his notepad and pen back in his pocket and got to his feet. Wordlessly, he walked towards the exit.

"Wait, Kabal, youze gotta help me!" Joey wailed. "Kano said youze the best, even if youze is some lousy cop now. Without you, I'm gonna get ganked in here by one of the Westies goons wanting revenge."

"No, no, no, kid, not at all," he replied before he turned around in the doorway. Joey looked back at him hopefully as he thinly smiled behind his mask. "Killed, yes." Then he turned and left without another word.

Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh! Thud!

Kabal expertly twirled his hookswords as he danced around his tiny Brooklyn apartment and proceeded to attack Kano, the dummy he nicked from the Police Academy a few years prior. Kano had a crumpled tin-foil shield with a red oval drawn in the center of it in marker covering his right eye, and he was dressed in a black wife-beater shirt with the word 'cunt' painted in white across the front. The detective furiously slashed at him as sweat glistened off his shirtless torso, his extensive scars exposed in all their hideous glory, and expertly lopped off the dummy's head before he side-kicked him right in the chest and toppled it onto it's back. But even still he wasn't done. Now he began hacking at the body, imagining it was the real Kano, wishing to all that was holy that it was.

Kabal hadn't heard his partner and roommate, Kurtis Stryker, storm through the front door, but he did hear him when he shouted, "What in the hell are you doing?"

"Bored," the detective replied.

"What?"

"Bored!" he yelled before he took another swing at the rubbery torso. "Bored!" he cried again before hacking into Kano once more. Then he kicked the dummy in frustration and tossed his hookswords in a pile nearby, knowing it would annoy his neat-freak partner. He quickly plopped himself on the couch face down as Stryker predictably began to tidy up the mess. "I'm so bored," he moaned. "This town used to have a better class of criminal. I should know. I was one of them. Good thing for them I'm not one anymore."

"So you take it out on Kano?" Stryker sighed in exasperation as he fixed the dummy's head back on.

"Kano had it coming," he replied as he cuddled one of the cushions.

He had been bored, that's all, bored like most people get, but especially if those people had been criminals in a past life and were addicted to the adrenaline rush of just doing something bad. But his life had taken on much more meaning since he abandoned Kano and the Black Dragon and went straight. Now he was one of the Earthrealm Champions, a title that carried such pride for him, a title he didn't want to muck up with sin. Hence he had made himself a life full of complications and drama, both of which were borne of tedium. Something must happen - and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen, but nothing was.

Now his partner wandered into the kitchen. "What about Joey Bezza?" he called.

"I think your extreme use of proper grammar is rubbing off on me," he groaned. "I couldn't stop correcting him. God, it was so banal and painful to listen to!" he cried. "When did I become a grammar Nazi like you? I never wanted to be that guy."

Stryker emerged with a bottle of water. "It's called being a grown up," he shot back. "And that's really the only thing you took from your visit to your old friend?"

"He was never my friend, Boss, he was more of an acquaintance," he replied. "And no. It was an open and shut case of domestic violence turned tragic. He killed Seamus O'Callaghan's daughter, Molly."

The other detective spat out his water at the news. "Oh, shit."

"Yeah, that's what I said," he replied. "Kano's gonna be lucky if the Westies only decide to take it out on Joey. But I wouldn't be surprised if this escalates into a war. But that's Organized Crime's problem," he dismissively waved.

"When the bodies start to drop, it'll be Homicide's problem," he reminded him.

"But until then…" he trailed off before pointing to Stryker's laptop. "I see you've been working on your latest report on me for Major Pain in My Ass," he opened.

He bitterly scowled behind his mask. It was the condition of Kabal's freedom; Kurtis wrote weekly reports on his bad-turned-good guy partner to keep him on the straight and narrow, and in return, douchebag Special Supervisory Agent Mikhai Walker didn't arrest him for his Black Dragon shenanigans. It didn't hurt that Colonel Blade was in his corner, vouching for all the good he'd done since his ass-roasting by Kintaro and subsequent battles to save Earthrealm from complete annihilation, but Walker was an effete hardass who never let the detective forget who held his leash.

Stryker knew it was a sore point for him, which was why he awkwardly cleared his throat and then sat down in the recliner. "Did you read it?" he asked.

"Yup," was the curt reply.

"How did you know my password?"

Kabal looked at him and said, "Grow up."

"I'm serious," he scowled.

He rolled his eyes and said, "You've been going on and on about RuPaul's Drag Race and some drag queen named Biqtch Puddin for months now, so it wasn't hard to make the leap from there."

Stryker blushed even as he scowled, clearly embarrassed to be so obvious. He usually liked to keep his homosexuality in the closet, and for good reason. Gay cops didn't have an easy time of it when they came out. Vulgar jokes weren't even the half of it. But Kabal didn't give a shit which team his partner played for. In some ways, it made it easier for him, like when he felt the very sudden need to break into his best friend's laptop…

"So you named your report 'The Yellow Face'?" he mocked him. "Very creative."

His partner bristled self-consciously. "It's a working title," he retorted. "I mean, the girl wore a yellow mask, it seemed obvious." He frowned again. "But did you like how I wrote it?"

"Um, no."

Once more, Stryker recoiled self-consciously. "Why not? I thought you'd be flattered!"

"Flattered?" Kabal incredulously replied. He glanced over at the screen and began to quote one of the most infuriating lines from the report. "Kabal sees through anyone and everyone in seconds, and trusts his instincts - which are eerily accurate most of the time - better than any other officer I've had the privilege of working with. He's truly as quick of mind as he is of foot. What's incredible, though, is how ignorant he can be when it comes to some aspects of life."

"Now, hang on, Kadeem, I didn't mean that in a bad way-"

"Oh, you meant 'ignorant' in a nice way?" he challenged before he sighed. "Look, I don't care about who's sleeping with who or who our vice president is."

"Or where Iran is on a map," Stryker muttered under his breath as he picked up the newspaper.

"Christ, not this again! What the hell does it matter?" he demanded to know. "It's not important!"

"Not important?" his partner yelled back in exasperation, rekindling one of their common arguments. "It's where your family is from! Besides which, it's grade school stuff! How can you not know this? And don't blame the American school system this time because we both grew up in Brooklyn and I learned it."

"I reserve my brain for the shit that actually matters, Kurtis!"

The other detective paused and for a moment, Kabal thought he actually won. But then his partner yelled, "But it's your father's homeland!"

The detective growled in annoyance. "What does it matter?" he yelled. "So it's where my father was from. Who cares? If he was from Japan or...or the magical land of Narnia, it wouldn't make any difference to my life. I don't need to know where Iran is on some arbitrary piece of paper to do my job. Focusing on shit like that makes my brain rot. Put that in your report to das Führer. Or better still, stop spying for him altogether!" Petulantly, he rolled away from his friend.

Stryker sat there fuming for several long moments, glaring at his partner, silently murdering him with his stare. But finally, wordlessly, he got to his feet and headed for the door.

"Where are you going?" Kabal demanded to know as he flopped onto his back.

"Out," he barked back. "I need some air." He stormed out and bumped shoulders with the elderly Chinese widow, Mrs. Huang, a retired nurse who often came to help the detective disinfect his mask and change his oxygen tanks.

"I'm sorry, Kurtis," she apologized to him with a thick accent, even though he'd been the one to run into her.

"Sorry," he dismissively apologized back, and then he was gone down the stairs, his silhouette fading into darkness.

Mrs. Huang watched him go and then turned her attention to Kabal as she closed the door. "Did you two have another argument?" she asked.

The detective leapt to his feet and stomped to the window in time to see Stryker briskly walking across the empty street to grab the lone taxi on the other side. He was going to see his new love interest, he knew. Noah, he thought he was called. A pediatrician and fussy like Kurtis. Kabal didn't see it lasting for more than six months. Between the two of them, they had more emotional mood swings than a pregnant woman in her third trimester.

"Look outside, Mrs. Huang," he thoughtfully remarked as the taxi sped off and the street was now completely empty of life. "Quiet. Calm. Peaceful. Isn't it awful? I wish something would just happen. I'm so bored."

"It is bad luck to hope for terrible things to happen, Kadeem," she reprimanded him. "Bad things will happen again soon enough."

"'Soon enough' can't come too soon," he lamented, still looking out the window.

"You have too much of that wicked dragon left in you," she said as she wandered into the kitchen to get the things she needed to flush his mask. "Maybe you should start doing yoga."

Her comment brought a little smile to his face and he turned and began to follow her. Suddenly, a loud explosion abruptly shattered the street's peace as well as his apartment's windows when a blooming orange fireball slammed into the building. The shockwave violently threw him to the carpet. He bit his tongue as he landed. Blood filled his mouth as a shrill whine swelled through his ears, drowning out the sound of car alarms blaring in the distance.