Author's Note: I bet y'all are like WTY, WTY whyyyy you're writing the Flash and not Snowbarry whyyyyy D:
But like. Guys. Legit. I WATCH THE FLASH FOR SUE AND RALPH NOW. Ok not really but they are so fun and that show needed a new fun ship to spruce it up!
Okay also- can we just have a spinoff show called Ralph Dibny, PI because that'd be the best thing ever ok thanks.
'It had been a long day for Ralph Dibny, PI. The streets were frozen with a stiff Winter wind and the sky was overcast with ominous clouds. The citizens of Central City were being smart, sticking inside on this dreary day.
In truth, every day had been dreary for me since I let Sue Dearbon slip through my grasp. Sue was an eel, but I had thought I had my strongest hooks at the ready to catch her. It turned out that that wasn't true, and it's a reality that I've had to cope with for many weeks.
I'm getting close again, though. My field of vision is narrowing like a tunnel with perspective; closing in on one Sue Dearbon. And when I get her, I'll'
Ralph stopped writing in his diary (journal, it was a journal), partially because he wasn't sure how to finish his sentence and mostly because there had been a knock at the door.
"It's open," he called warily, trapping his pencil in between the two halves of his journal and placing it on his desk.
The door swung open. "Hey Slick," said Sue Dearbon herself, flicking her hair back and putting her hands on her hips. "Miss me much?"
She was wearing black combat boots, black skinny jeans, a black cold-shoulder top and a black choker. Ralph struggled to reign in his shock. "Sue you're- you- what're you doing here?"
Sue shrugged, walking over to his waiting-room couch and slipping herself down onto it. Ralph got to his feet and strode around his desk to stand in front of her. "I could bring you in," he said. "Right now. For thievery at the very least."
"You could," Sue allowed. "But that'd be dull. Besides, don't you want to hear why I'm here?"
Ralph crossed his arms, and possibly, maybe used his cellular-bending abilities to make his bicep muscles a bit more pronounced.
"You're not saying no..." Sue prompted, starting to grin. "So I'm going to take that as a yes." She patted the couch beside her, smiling invitingly up at him. "Come and sit, Slick. Let me tell you a story."
"Okay, mom," Ralph replied with a roll of his eyes, taking a careful seat next to Sue and waiting with raised eyebrows. "Tell me a story, then."
"This story starts about a week ago," Sue began, "when I unknowingly stumbled upon a drug cartel doing business. In my defense, I was just there to camp out a night in the warehouse they had decided to meet in, so technically they interrupted me, not the other way around." She paused, considering. "You know, they should consider putting black market sign up sheets for those warehouses. Their numbers are dwindling with the amount that have been exploded since bad guys decided to use them as their number one hide out."
Ralph coughed.
"Right. Drug cartel." Sue reached up and rubbed at her eye, fixed her bangs, and went on. "So, these beefy guys -and maybe some ladies too; it's so hard to tell with these gang people- caught sight of me, and by the time I could turn tail and run they had seen my face. They all started yelling and shooting and I just barely managed to make it out of the warehouse alive."
She reached into the bag that she'd placed beside the couch when she sat down and pulled out a sweater. Ralph peered forward, squinting a little, and spotted a dime-sized hole in the fabric.
"My proof," Sue explained. "Thankfully I was wearing a loose sweater, so the bullet just went through the fabric and grazed me."
"Grazed you?" Ralph asked, his face darkening with fairly unwanted concern. He reached for the hem of her shirt. "If you're hurt you should let me look at it-"
Sue slapped his hands away. "Handsy handsy handsy!" she scolded, shaking her head at him. "Really Slick, I expected more of you. You can't just take a girl's shirt off in the middle of an office. Even if it is your office."
Ralph made a face and pulled back, crossing his arms again. "I wasn't going to take your shirt off," he mumbled. "I was just going to see if you needed medical attention."
"What, you got a med kit lying around a detective's office?" Sue asked incredulously.
Ralph looked peeved. "Superhero, remember?" he told her, gesturing at himself. "Besides, my best friend is a doctor. Well... her human other-half is a doctor."
"Human other-?" Sue stopped talking and shook her head. "Never mind. Sometimes I forget that your life is really trippy."
"Me too," Ralph sighed. "Anyway: drug cartel. Go on."
Sue nodded. "So, I got out of the warehouse and thought I was free, right? Wrong. Three days later I was pulled into an alley by the same guys who I saw making the drug deal. I fought my way out amidst the shooting..." She pulled another article of clothing out of her bag, this one a sweatshirt. Once again, Ralph saw a distinct bullet hole through the fabric. "But it was another close call."
"Why not call the cops?" Ralph asked. "You could get those guys arrested and they'd stop bothering you."
"Call the cops?" Sue asked, incredulous. "Are you kidding me, Slick? I don't want to be anywhere near the cops. Which... is why I'm here. I need someone to get those guys in jail. And I need... protection, so to speak. Somewhere to rest my little brunette head where I won't have to worry about waking up with a bullet hole in my chest."
Ralph held up his hands. "Let's be real here," he said. "If you had a bullet hole in your chest you probably wouldn't wake up."
Sue raised her eyebrow at him and he sighed. "Which is all the more reason why you need my help, huh?"
"I don't need your help," Sue scoffed. "I don't need anyone's help."
It was Ralph's turn to raise an eyebrow, and he did, extra-high because that was something stretching let him do.
"Fine," Sue relented. "I need your help. You gonna give it to me? Because that was pretty dang hard to admit and I'm not going to admit it to anyone else."
"Oh, so there are others in your life, huh?" Ralph teased. "You have a long list of private-detective-superheroes that you can call on to come to your aid and get you out of your own mess?"
Sue looked unamused. "Yes, or no?" she demanded. "You gonna help me, or are you going to throw me out on the street and let me die?"
"Well when you put it that way of course I'll help you," Ralph grumbled. "I wouldn't be much of a superhero if I let an innocent- well... you're not really innocent. If I let a someone go back into a dangerous situation when I could have helped."
"No, you wouldn't," Sue agreed, getting to her feet. "So where's your place? I need a shower and a change of clothes and we need to make a plan on how we're going to nab these guys."
linebreaker
'Things have certainly turned around for Ralph Dibny, PI. One minute, I was trapped in my office by what was more a cage around my heart than one around my body; the next, I'm set lose into the person who made my cage in the first place.
Of course, there's no way for me to know if I should trust Sue Dearbon. She is, as I said earlier, an eel of the slipperiest kind and with a complicated, un-trackable migratory pattern. She's played me for my superhero morals before... there's no doubt that she could do it again. So why is she in my house, ready to lead me down another treacherous slope of dubious legality?
Because she's Sue Dearbon, of course. And, try as I might, I just can't say no to her.'
Ralph closed his journal at the sound of footsteps in the hallway and glanced up in time to see Sue walking into his living room. She was wrapped in one of his 5-dollar towels, which was about the size of two large napkins at best, and her hair was still dripping.
He was speechless. It wasn't just the endless stretch of toned legs poking out from the hem of the towel or the muscle definition in her smooth, pale, surprisingly freckled shoulders. It wasn't just the light flush to her cheeks from the heat of her recent shower, or the wet tendril of hair that stuck to her forehead that was just begging to be brushed aside by someone (him. By him, definitely him).
No, it was the way she was watching him with a completely open, relaxed gaze, like she hadn't been running from him for months and it was a completely normal thing that she would be showering in his apartment and walking into his living room dressed only in a towel.
"I don't have clothes," Sue said. "I need them. Or I don't think that we'll be able to plan anything because clearly you can't function when I'm this scantily clad."
Ralph made a face. "Way to ruin the moment," he muttered, walking past her into his bedroom. "I don't have any clothes for women in here," he called over his shoulder. "I don't think any of my pants will fit you."
"Just get me the biggest shirt you've got and one of those belts. We'll make something work," Sue instructed, leaning across the doorframe of his bedroom.
The towel was riding up at the bottom- not that it had very far left to go. Ralph looked steadfastly away and tossed her the clothing she'd requested.
Sue moseyed back into the bathroom and when she came out she was dressed in a checkered collared shirt that managed to fall all the way down to mid-thigh, the middle belted loosely to form a sort of tunic-dress. Ralph felt a surge of protectiveness that was almost certainly cliché, but honestly- how had he never realized she was this small? He knew he was more torso than legs but his shirt dwarfed her.
"What?" Sue snapped, crossing her arms over her chest. She looked annoyed, but Ralph wondered if she was really just using that to cover up her self-consciousness.
"Nothing," Ralph said quickly, floundering a little. He realized his jaw had dropped and quickly closed his mouth, turning towards the living room with a sense of purpose. "We should probably... plan."
"Right," Sue said, following him into the living room and perching herself on his futon. Oh thank God he had gotten a new one recently- the original Dibny Futon really was a horror. "So... the plan. Any ideas?"
"I've been brainstorming a little," Ralph said. "The only thing I can think of is we use you as bait. I mean, what else do we have in connection to these guys? You saw them at a warehouse but you probably couldn't get their faces good enough for facial recognition."
Sue reached for a notebook and pen he had lying on the coffee table and pulled it into her lap. She uncapped the pen and raised her eyebrow at him to keep going.
"So, you don't have their faces. You don't have their names. You don't know what gang they're apart of. You don't know their plans, and you don't know where they'll hit next. So the only thing we have is you. They clearly want to get rid of you because you are probably one of the only living people who knows what they're up to, so if we use you as bait they'll come running and bam! We've got our guys."
Sue nodded absently. "So, what? Drop me in an alley and hope they happen to mosey along? This is a big city, Slick. I don't even know how they found me last time."
"Well, do you have any ideas?" Ralph asked with a deep sigh, already getting used to her habit of shutting down his ideas even after only a few hours of being reunited.
Sue flipped the notepad over. On the paper, drawn rough but realistic, was the face of a heavy man with a thick neck and deep set eyes.
Sue smiled at the expression on Ralph's face. "How good would you say that facial recognition is?"
linebreaker
'It's an interesting phenomenon to be working with the woman I've spent the last year-plus trying to find. I suppose it is true that a bug is less likely to fly into a spider's web when she knows it's there... but if she wants to she can still make a 10-point landing.
Sue raided Caitlin's adult-coloring supplies to try and perfect her drawing. I'm dubious about whether or not facial recognition will actually accept something hand-drawn, but I suppose it's worth a shot.
I still have a gnawing feeling that there's something off about this whole situation. Maybe that's just because of Sue and I's history. It's hard to let my guard down around someone who has previously stabbed me in the back, no matter how stretchy my skin might be. She-'
"What're you doing?" Sue asked, looking at him quizzically.
Ralph hurriedly closed the book in his hands. It wasn't exactly that he was ashamed of his journaling, but he had a feeling that Sue would basically never let it go and would tease him about it for all eternity. "Nothing. Did you finish your drawing?"
She held it up for him to admire and he had to admit that it was pretty realistic. "Where'd you learn how to draw like that?" Ralph asked as he took a picture of the drawing and put it through their city-wide facial recognition. Cisco wasn't there (in fact, STAR Labs was completely deserted at the moment), but he figured he had watched the techy work the computers enough times that he would be able to do it himself.
Sue walked over to peep over his shoulder. "Art classes in college. My teacher said I had a gift but I thought drawing was kind of boring."
"Of course you did," Ralph sighed. "Do you know how many people would kill to have the sheer amount of talents you throw so blithely away?"
Sue just smirked. "So," she prompted. "Is this facial recognition gonna work or not?"
"You have to give it a second," Ralph replied, tapping absently at the space bar to see if it would speed things along. Sue's drawing slowly flashed on the left side of the screen, headshots zipping along at a remarkable speed on the right. "It's trying to make a match with a picture from police databases all over the state. Then we'll plug that picture into our facial recognition algorithm that searches traffic cams and the internet and everything."
"You realize how much of an invasion of privacy this is, right?" Sue deadpanned, raising her eyebrow.
"You're worried about invading the privacy of the man who tried to shoot at you?" Ralph rejoined, raising his eyebrows right back.
"Fair point," Sue admitted, turning back to the screen. She bumped Ralph's hand out of the way and took her turn pressing on the space bar. "How long is this going to take?"
Ralph let out a deep sigh. "It might not work at all," he warned her. "I don't think we've ever tried this off of a drawing before. Even one as good as yours."
He turned away from the computer, knowing it would alert them when it was finished, and wandered over to Caitlin's desk. Sue followed him after a moment, taking the chance to look around. "I never thought about you working for the Flash," she admitted, before sending him a grin. "So. Do you know who he is?"
"Of course I know who he is," Ralph replied stiffly, straightening his spine so he could look down his nose at her.
"Then who is he?" Sue asked. Her usual coy tone was gone and she sounded genuinely excited, but Ralph had fallen for her acting before. "Tell me."
"No chance," he huffed. "For all I know, you're still eagerly awaiting your next opportunity to take advantage of my generous and hero-like behavior so that you can double cross me for your own gain once again."
"If you're that distrustful of me, then why are you helping me?" Sue questioned softly. Her head tilted to one side, hair falling in front of one eye for a moment before she brushed it behind one ear.
Ralph felt his chest tighten. "I don't know," he admitted, a little more harshly than he'd meant to. "Just... don't make me regret it. Okay?"
Sue's lips pursed for a second before she took a step forward, opening her mouth to speak.
Then the computer let out a ping. The facial recognition had found a match.
"Wonderful," Ralph muttered, unsure of whether he was being sarcastic or not. He strode around the side of the desk again and peered forward. On the screen was an almost perfect match to Sue's drawing, an image of a man with very dark, deep-set eyes and a glowering expression.
"That's him," Sue confirmed.
Ralph let out a short, incredulous laugh. "I'm honestly a little surprised that worked," he admitted. "So we're looking for a Mr. Vayden Marx. He was arrested for drug dealing and harassment but got of with only a few years in jail. Now it appears he's back on the streets, continuing his old crimes."
"I'm surprised he wasn't charged with murder, too," Sue muttered, glaring at the picture. "What's next?"
"Now we see if he's anywhere in the city," Ralph explained, dragging the photo into the next piece of software and getting it started with a few clicks. "If his face shows up anywhere where there's a camera, we'll know soon enough."
"How long is this going to take?" Sue asked.
Ralph shot her a glance. "Why're you so impatient?" he asked, suddenly suspicious. "You're safe at STAR Labs. You're safe with me. What does it matter if we don't catch him right this second?"
Sue hesitated, and the niggling doubt that been bothering Ralph suddenly became clear. "Why do you want this guy put away so much?" he demanded, taking a step forward.
Sue, to his surprise, actually took a step back. "Who says I do?" she asked cagily.
Ralph squinted at her suspiciously. "Sue Dearbon... what are you hiding?"
Author's Note: YES! This is going to be multi-chap! I'm so excited :D
Lol sorry if that last line was unnecessarily and cringily dramatic. I need to end with a OOOOH WHAT'S GONNA HAPPEN NEXT kinda feeling.