Happy New Year!
Many thanks, as per the usual, to my lovely beta-chan paradorx
Lizard was gone.
She had just packed up some time in the night while Will was sleeping like the dead (read: had vivid dreams about a certain police detective and her boyfriend, his shirt unbuttoned nearly down to the navel) and left without a note or forwarding address.
Good for her, Will thought, it was rare to have a getaway that clean and spotless, but he still ditched the apartment for a few days in case anyone would come snooping after answers he didn't have. He spent a few nights in a hostel and then spent some of his grubby hundred dollar bills to get a hotel room with complimentary soap so he could wash. Standard protocol. Better to smell like the age-old sweat of communal sheets than be, well, dead. Or at least wishing you were dead, which Will knew was quite often how the process of finding someone went. Locate nearest possible witness. Rip their fingernails right from the bed, and then, when they're done screaming, ask them what they know. Then move on to molars.
By the time Will was finally comfortable with picking the lock to the apartment again, he was tired, sore, and probably smelled like the aftermath of an anonymous lawyer meeting with a less than anonymous hooker in the Motel 6. He was content, however, because upon inspection his few scattered possessions he had left behind had been frisked, and someone had left his coffee maker on. Bastards. He'd have to fix the wiring and get a new carafe, it was all scorched out.
Will stood in the empty apartment, and, for the first time since coming back to town, felt alone.
He plugged his phone in to charge, having lost use of it only a day into his self-imposed exile, and tried to intimidate the wiring in his coffee maker into suddenly being well again. Once a good enough charge had built up, his phone buzzed on, full of missed calls, Alice and Cyrus's numbers popping up as if they had switched off on who was going to try and get a hold of him. He sat with his back against the wall next to the socket and dialed Alice back, keeping the phone still plugged in.
"Will!" she answered breathlessly, and Will tried to keep that from getting to him as he wedged the phone between his cheek and shoulder so he could figure over the coffee maker with both hands.
"'Ello," he replied, "What's up?"
"You never answer your phone!" she sounded perfectly pleased with the idea of killing him, which really shouldn't have affected him the way it did. Suddenly the coffee maker was the least of his worries, and his hands were big and clumsy.
"My phone was out of commission until recently," he said in a forcefully cool tone. "What's up?"
Alice made a frustrated grunting noise, and Will honestly didn't care about the coffee maker anymore, his full attention was rapt on the sound of her breath coasting into the phone. "There were some cases I wanted you to take a look at. And Cyrus had a question for you—hold on a second."
Oh, shit, he really did land running with this, didn't he? Will steeled himself for having to converse with the second half of his insurmountable crush—lust, or, whatever—without making an even bigger fool of himself. He still held on, like a child being afraid of the dark far into young adulthood, to the irrational fear that somehow, through only his voice, Alice or Cyrus would somehow be able to tell his desire to be with the other. Or both of them. Which, seeing as how they had been dating for as long as he knew them, was undoubtedly a bad thing to reveal to either of them.
"Hey, Will," Cyrus greeted him, and Will could almost hear the small and easy smile he wore.
"Hey." Some passing god blessed Will with a voice that managed to not crack. A good start.
"Remember when I told you at dinner a week ago that I've got a bigger client pool nowadays? Well I actually was contacted by a private company who wants to hire me, and they mentioned a few security breaks and I thought you might want to contact them, you know. Get back on your feet now that you're back." There was a bit of a cold accusation in the last sentence that Will picked up on immediately. He slid down the wall until he was lying down, the crown of his head pressed against the baseboard.
"You… found a job for me?" he asked weakly.
There was some shuffling and whispering on the other end of the line and Will waited patiently.
"Well, you could put it that way, yes," Cyrus replied calmly.
Will chuckled, and covered his eyes with his wrist, face breaking out in a broad and bright smile against his own will. "You guys really want me around, don't you?" he asked, approaching a playful tone.
More shuffling. Alice came on. "So you'll take it?" She sounded so hopeful, and Cyrus was too, Will could tell, and it was all a bit overwhelming. Only one way to fix that.
"I can't hear you!" Will called, making crushing noises with his mouth, "A tunnel or whatever."
"Will, damn it, you are calling me from your apartment!"
"Byeeee," Will held out, and hung up.
Cyrus ended up insisting on giving him a ride to the office building. Which ruined all of Will's plans on nonchalantly showing up, as Cyrus evidently had harassed his druggie landlord to give up Will's apartment number. He knocked like a civilized person and like a paranoid person Will answered the door with a pipe wrench hidden behind his back.
"Ready to go?" Cyrus sounded far too pleased with himself, but he at least had the decency to properly button his shirt this time around, which removed one thing from Will's list of potential problems.
"Uh," Will answered cleverly. "Sure. Just let me…" He turned around and chucked the pipe wrench onto the floor behind him with a loud crash.
He looked to Cyrus, who's eyes were bugging out slightly. "Uh…"
"I thought I saw a spider," Will shrugged, and Cyrus figured it was better to let the subject drop.
The car ride was pleasant enough. Will was capable of not totally losing his mind and Cyrus seemed comfortable keeping his silence. There was no looming threat of Will screwing up and saying "Hey, I want to have sex with you. And your girlfriend. Preferably at the same time," which was nice.
The high-rise was just as high and shiny as any other high-rise Will was likely to enter, and the offices they headed too were several stories up.
Will caught Cyrus looking uneasily at the elevator, and immediately connected it to the throw-away mentioning of claustrophobia.
"Do you mind if we take the stairs?" Will spoke up, "I've got a New Years Resolution to work on."
Cyrus's grateful smile was enough to keep Will floating up all twenty fucking flights of stairs.
Cyrus was instructed to sit down and wait for Human Resources to grab him for his interview. Will, upon introduction as a representative of Knave Enterprises, was immediately buzzed through the partition from waiting area to offices for his meeting with the CEO, who had a vaguely familiar name, but Will was too busy scoping out the schematics of the tech conglomerate to really worry over it. They had a sick setup, he had to admit. Whoever had been stealing from them was probably helped along by some inside man or woman.
Something shifted in the CEO's gaze as he stood and walked around his desk to greet Will, alone in his office. Will waited, and didn't have to do so for long.
"I know who you are," the man said, and stood up in full threatening posture. Will decided that he was already done here.
"I'm flattered," Will replied dryly, "but if you're interested in a private lap dance you'll have to call my madam and fix it up with her, okay big guy?"
The man sputtered and Will stretched his lips into a bared smile, all exposed canines and smugly angled eyebrows.
"I mean," the man recovered, "that I know who you were, what you did."
"Care to elaborate for our home viewers who missed last night's episode," Will kept evading. He didn't deal in ambiguity when he was working. He only had to make it past this conversation before he could run along home and find something else to waste his time with.
Wordlessly, the man pulled out a card from his inside breast pocket and handed it over. Will took it with a raised eyebrow, but as soon as he identified what it was, his expression became frozen, wooden. He swallowed heavily and the man studied him silently. Will knew now who he was. Mr. Dodgeson. Will's last job with any kind of crew, and he had almost been caught, half of his face shadowed in a security image that their hacker had later scrubbed from record. But not, it seemed, before Mr. Dodgeson had studied it, grown bitter over it.
Will licked his lips and handed over the Jack of Hearts card warily. "Why do you carry around a playing card?" he asked, but his voice was strained and both of them could see through his lie.
"I traded for this card," Mr. Dodgeson said tersely, "three priceless works of art."
"A pity," Will said coldly. He didn't add that the Da Vinci sketch had been a forgery. "Well, we've finished our transaction, and I'm afraid I have other business to attend to today. It was nice to meet you, Mr., ah, what was it?"
"Dodgeson," his voice was like acid, and all of Will's instincts were telling him to get the hell out.
He nodded and did as he was told.
As he passed by the receptionists area, he tried to create a mask of indifference but he still wasn't firing on all lie cylinders, it would seem, because after just one look at his face Cyrus leapt up from his waiting seat indignantly.
"What happened?" he demanded, in a voice that implied impending violence, a tone Will hadn't heard Cyrus adopt, well, ever. It would have panicked him if he wasn't already in a state of considerable panic. Cyrus evidently picked up on that too, because his eyebrows drew together in quiet and careful curiosity of the source.
"I don't think you want to work here," Will finally choked out, standing close to Cyrus and wanting nothing more than to pull him in for a kiss and a muttered apology for probably ruining his chances of getting hired because, hey, he had robbed the CEO blind of seemingly priceless works of art a few years ago when he ran with a crew and left a taunting playing card behind to fill the gaps he had made.
Instead of doing that, Will shouldered past him rather rudely and tossed over his shoulder, "Shitty severance package."
He hit the street and kept on walking, feeling the money nestled deep in his hoodie pocket.
Misery loves bodily injury, as it turns out.
Will was lucky that the first hit didn't knock him out; God above knows how it all would have ended if he had immediately slumped on the ground when the swarm came. All that the first hit did, crashing into his jaw with perfect timing as he passed by the alleyway, was send him reeling. Will's head erupted in a bright flashes and he keeled over sideways, knocking painfully into a parked car, but unfortunately for him the alarm didn't go off as he slammed into it, crushing his shoulder and straining his wrist as he attempted to brace it against unforgiving metal.
Quickly, he turned, bracing his back against the car and using it as support as his attacker rushed at him again. He used the leverage of the car to kick out right at the center of the man's chest, actually managing to knock him away. Will was prepping to run, releasing himself from the cover of the car, when his arms were trapped against him from behind. Instinctively he swung his head back and felt cartilage snap against the back of his head, eerily warm blood squelching all over the back of his neck. The attacker released him, but then the first man was back and ready to drag Will by his hoodie into the alleyway.
He struggled; better to stay on the sidewalk. People got beaten to death in alleyways—on the sidewalk there was the constant threat of someone witnessing, which was all Will could really hope for as one of the attackers—were there three? He was having a hard time keeping count—drove his knee right into Will's abdomen, knocking all of the air out of him and leaving him reeling, off-balance. He hit the ground with a loud crack emanating from somewhere behind his head. Now that he was on the ground, it became less of a fight and more of an outright pummeling. Will would have nightmares of steel-tipped shoes for weeks. They came, again and again, and something warm and wet was trickling down Will's chin and he could only see from one eye.
He groaned weakly as the abuse paused, and rough hands patted him down, finding the thick wad of bills and pocketing it. Something fluttered down and rested against the damp front of Will's shirt. He was collapsed, legs between two parked cars, and head resting on the cold hard cement sidewalk. It took him some time, but he stood up, using both hands to support himself as he turned over. The bloodstained Jack of Hearts hit the sidewalk like a taunt, and Will squeezed his eyes shut, counting backwards from ten. At one he pushed himself onto his knees, and then brought first his right, then his left leg underneath him. Every move was a massive effort, and once on his knees he knew that he had to go somewhere before an ambulance picked him up. He couldn't go to the hospital. The apartment was too far away. Who did he know who was close enough, that he trusted?
The answer normally would have unnerved him, but as he seemed to be bleeding from several normally not-bleeding places, he didn't let it bother him. He aimed his feet towards Alice and Cyrus's building.
For a second Will was afraid that he had the wrong door, but then it opened and he couldn't even attempt a smile because Alice and Cyrus stood in the doorway, twin looks of shock and fear and something else that Will attributed to both his head injury and the fact that he was bleeding all over their respectable apartment entryway.
Together they supported him, warmth on either side of his rather sticky and tender chest, and helped him around to the couch, where he fell with a whimper onto the cushions.
Without waiting for any kind of consent or even informing Will of his intent, Cyrus put his hands underneath the bottom of his shirt and brought it up over his head to expose the damage. His hands. Will's bare skin. His shirt cleared his head, leaving him half-naked and out of his right mind on Alice and Cyrus's couch, with Cyrus putting his unholy hands all over him. This situation would have been preferable, except that, well. It wasn't.
Will found a particularly raw section of cheek and pinched it between his teeth, washing pain up and down his body as a preventative measure, taking his mind off of everything else because now was not the proper time to pitch a tent, euphemistically speaking. Cyrus continued his examination, and Will wished for unconsciousness or at least incontinence as his fingers dipped low on his abdomen, skimming the top of his jeans. Thankfully—or unfortunately, the jury seemed to be taking their sweet time on that verdict—for Will, Cyrus refrained from taking those off as well.
"A concussion, probably," Cyrus reported to Alice, who stood by, worrying. "Bruised ribs, definitely."
"We need to get him to a hospital," Alice decided, and Cyrus nodded his agreement.
"No hospital," Will wheezed, "no insurance."
"I'll cover the bills," Alice snapped, leaving, in her opinion, no room for argument.
Will clutched at her arm as she moved away from him, and she stopped, looking at him in surprise. He realized, lately, that it was the first time since being back that he had initiated any kind of contact with her beyond a polite handshake. Her skin was smooth beneath his slightly numbed fingers.
"No hospital," he said quietly, "please."
How could he explain, without crossing an unspoken line within himself, that warring crews watched the hospital lists for injuries that implicated a fresh score, or for missing members, or for people they simply wanted gone? Something in his face said something he couldn't, and after a tense moment Alice sucked in her lips and assented with a nod. Will dizzily released her arm and sunk back onto the couch, breathing rather high-pitched and sounding as painful as it felt.
Over him, Cyrus and Alice shared the same worried look that melted down in the air.
"You'll stay here tonight," Cyrus said gently, resting one hand on Will's shoulder. He nodded in reply, eyes squeezed shut with concentration on not bursting into unmanly and unattractive tears in front of them. He could barely feel the soft touch of a blanket being tossed over him, but the bright sensation of Cyrus and Alice's hands working in tandem to smooth it over him carried on, into dreams where everything was red.
He saw a pair of red lips, smiling at him slyly as he stormed out of the CEO's office, watching him from his periphery. A hacker.
Review, please?