The Pretender

I'm back! This chapter was a tough one, the talk that's here is one I've been building up to for a long time so I was very worried about getting it right. Also, canon states that Liam pretty much never gets drunk but I've taken a small deviation from that because… well, magic whiskey. That probably would get anyone drunk.

Chapter 10

It was less than a week before Liam was back at his desk and he appeared, much to Break's surprise, completely unharmed by the hunt he'd been on. If Break was honest with himself he'd expected to find Lunettes in the infirmary instead of at his desk and though he was glad Liam was alright it was somewhat startling to see him sitting there as if nothing had happened. With that much time alone with Nightray Break had feared the worst.

"Are you going to keep staring or are you going to finally ask me how my hunt went?" Lunettes had apparently mastered the art of appearing absorbed in the scroll he was writing while being anything but. He glanced up at him now, pushing his glasses further up his nose. The smile on his lips was tired, but that was to be expected when one had just returned from hunting down a Death Eater.

Break came to sit on the edge of Lunettes' desk as he often did, his own best approximation of a smile fully in place. "I thought I'd let you offer before I asked. From the look of you you didn't find too much trouble."

"We didn't find anything." Liam said quietly. "The trail had gone completely cold."

He shook his head. "Disappointing. By the way, where's that partner of yours? I would think he'd be here to scowl away his failure."

"He took the evening shift." Lunettes shrugged. "There were things he wanted to do before returning for work."

"Looking for leads?"

"No," then he seemed to hesitate, "Well, maybe, I honestly don't know what he gets up to sometimes." The sour twist to his mouth was perhaps a little too sour even for a neglected lover.

Break took handful of candies and offered several to Liam as there wasn't much about that matter that he could say out loud without annoying the other man. At this point, annoying him was no fun, although flustering Lunettes had yet to loose it's charm.

But clearly today all Liam was interested in was catching up on the paperwork that had piled up in his absence so Break made himself scarce, spending the rest of the shift idly flicking hard candy over the dividing wall between his and Vessalius' desks. The other man clearly wasn't there that day or he would have heard some amount of protest but Break was looking forward to hearing the reaction he would have when he found his desk littered with candy.

At least he had managed to avoid doing anything resembling work.

No one could have been more surprised than him when there was a knock on the door of his apartment that night. He didn't exactly have a lot of visitors -he usually didn't have any- especially not at three in the morning.

It wasn't as if he'd been asleep, this had been another night where he'd been unable to ignore the ache in his eye socket, but he came to the door with wand in hand all the same. Caution was a good plan when one was a Auror.

But a look through the peephole showed someone he hadn't expected at his door.

Disabling the locks and wards he opened the door, leaning nonchalantly on the doorjamb. "I wasn't aware you knew where I lived."

Lunettes, who spored a nasty black eye and a cut that looked worryingly clean on his cheekbone, gave him a tired smile. "I looked up a while back. Look, I'm sorry to show up out of the blue." He nodded to the two bottles he was holding in the crook of an arm, "I brought a peace offering. It's Fire Whisky."

"Oh, well, in that case," Break stood back to let him in. He used the opportunity to run his eyes over the other man as he passed, checking for less obvious injuries. Apart from the facial wounds he seemed to have something wrong with his left shoulder, if the way he deliberately kept it on the opposite side from him and lowered it a little was any indication. So Break made a mental note to get a look at that shoulder at the first chance he had and closed the door. It took a few minutes for him to throw all the locks, physical and magical, and by the time he had turned back to the room that served him as front hall and living room in one Liam had already cleared the table.

"Sit down." Break told him. "I'm pretty sure guests aren't supposed to help."

Lunettes snorted. "As if you cared how things are usually done. Where do you keep your glasses?"

"Kitchen, upper cabinet to the left," he said and watched out of the corner of his eye as Lunettes disappeared into the kitchen. His hand dipped under the table and touched one of the bottles that had been secured there. Any Auror worth his salt kept potions on hand, most importantly a strong truth potion. And it was just his luck that combined with alcohol this particular potion would make the drinker very unsure of what exactly they'd said under the influence of it. He had been loth to use this option before but Lunettes was obviously in something much deeper than he'd previously thought and Break couldn't help him until he knew what exactly that was.

And if this was the only way he could get that information… well, it was fortunate he had these few moments along with the bottles, wasn't it?

Break quickly opened one and slipped the potion from it's slot under the table. It was the work of a moment to pour it into one of the bottles and stow the empty vial back out of sight. Only moments later Liam reentered, carrying glasses and raised an eyebrow at Break. "No wonder you never cook. It's a disaster in there."

"I eat out. Or order in." Break took one chair and nodded at Lunettes to take the other, which he did. "Cooking isn't something I ever got the hang of."

"Are you the type to burn water?" Liam's hand went right for the whiskey and he poured himself a generous amount before pouring Break substantially less.

"Yes, yes I am." Break picked up his glass and eyed the liquid within. "Well, I think someone's night was worse than mine. Lovely shiner you have." He set his glass back down.

Immediately Lunettes' face went careful and unreadable,"I don't want to talk about it. Besides, you're on medical leave, I shouldn't be giving you alcohol in the first place." He lifted his glasses and gulped down what had to be a painful amount of Fire Whiskey with only the barest of winces. Immediately he took the bottle and refilled.

As Break had suspected because he'd been the one to pour it Lunettes hadn't checked his glass for tampering. Was that a sign of carelessness or a gesture of trust that Break didn't deserve in the slightest because he was currently drugging him? His guilt made him inclined to think it was the latter.

In any case there really was something wrong here because Break hadn't touched his glass at all and Liam didn't even appear to have noticed. Even a normal person, never mind a highly trained Auror, would wonder why the person who had been gifted the alcohol had yet to even sip it as he watched the one who had brought it consume it at an alarming rate.

He was mildly impressed that Lunettes could even drink that much alcohol without vomiting but he'd made his way halfway through the bottle already, that meant the potion definitely in his system.

"I won't be on medical leave much longer." Break said, as if the long silence between them hadn't occurred. "It's not as if they can claim that once it's healed the lack of an eye keeps me from doing my duty. All I have to worry about is depth perception and I'm already leaning to correct for that."

"Healed? But if it's gone… what's to heal?" Lunettes was looking at him curiously and definitely a little blearily. Would he have asked that without the potion in his blood? It was a little blunter than he usually was.

Break's hand went up to cover his eye, palm resting protectively over the empty cavity. "It was ripped out." Lunettes frowned but Break was relieved to see no pity in his eyes. "We got caught in a bad place and the Death Eater we were hunting trapped us. Tamara took a hex that laid her out and the witch and I fought-" He had to stop, he always has to stop at this point. It's where the report leaves off too.

The silence comes back, waiting, Liam's eyes on him making it heavy.

"I would understand if you didn't want to finish that story." Lunettes said finally. "I have a few stories that I can only tell up to a point."

"Do they all involve Vincent Nightray?" Break tried to keep the bitterness from his voice but suspects that it didn't work. At least Lunettes is probably too drunk to notice. In fact, he seems to be giving the question some thought -the potion's work, no doubt.

"A lot of them." He admits and his eyes hold shadows as he looks down at his glass. "Not all. I've been in… some bad places. Made some calls that keep me awake at nights. Held secrets that… are weighing on me to keep."

There had been nothing in Lunettes' records to indicate that he'd gotten himself into trouble in Ireland and no note that he had a partner before Nightray. Break added another detail to his growing theory as he tried his luck again.

"What if you don't have to keep those secrets by yourself?" Break asked tentatively.

Liam chuckled and his voice had picked a suggestion of the Irish accent he only shown the once. "I think ye need to look up the definition of secret."

"They wouldn't be half as heavy." He pointed out, the soul of reasonableness. "I mean, really, what would you have do if someone knew them?" Because Sharon had hinted, but Break rather wanted to know.

"I…" Lunettes trailed off and looked down again, rolling his glass between his hands, rather dexterously for a man half into a bottle of whiskey though from the way he watches his hands do it it took some amount of concentration. When he went on he spoke in such a slow, thoughtful way the Break had no doubt the potion has more than a little hand in bringing the words out. "If someone found out… I would hav' ta go away. Far away. I'd probably be given another post… after all this work, after all I've given up… it would be a slap inna face."

"What did you give up?" Break asked, almost breathless with anticipation.

That made Lunettes look up and his eyes were glazed, half lidded and not just from the alcohol. "… I gave up my family." It was a whisper.

"You told me they died." He was very careful to keep his tone even, wanting nothing to jolt Liam back to reality.

"No." He looked confused, lost even. "No, that was me. I died. They told me family I didn' make it through the trainin' alive. Accident. Happens sometimes."

Break felt the breath freeze in his lungs. For a moment he couldn't seem to convince them to move at all. Liam's family had been told- they thought that- but of corse, what easier way to turn William Callaghan into Liam Lunettes than to kill William in some way that would explain an unrecoverable body?

This was big, so big he couldn't have even imagined.

Maybe he really was getting into something too deep for him. The kind of people with the resources to do something like that… those were some very power people.

Before he could speak he had to take a breath, in and out, freeing his lungs and trying to steady himself. He had to careful now, a misstep could ruin everything if Liam realized that he had said too much. "You shouldn't have to live like this. You should be able to tell your family alive, you should be allowed to get away from someone who hurts you, I don't know why this is going on but it isn't right."

Lunettes narrowed his eyes at him and Break mentally winced, "Stop trying to save me!" He staggered to his feet, seeming to forget the glass he'd been holding and letting to fall to the floor where it spilled whisky onto the hardwood. His eyes were still half lidded, glazed with the potion's influence and maybe as well as from drinking so much so quickly. He leveled a finger at him that wavered back and forth unsteadily. "Ye don't know what ye're doin' and it's puttin' it all at risk! I've been workin' too long for ye to make a mess of this now on account of not knowin' enough te keep out!"

Reaching out Break steadied his hand with both of his own. "Do you need saving, William? Are you really alright?"

There was something raw and broken on Lunettes' face for a moment, like Break had reached in and put a hand to a bleeding wound. "I-I don't… I donna know anymor-" and he collapsed forward so suddenly that Break had to jump up to catch him.

Carefully he eased the man back into his chair, settling his lolling head on the headrest with some amount of care. It didn't much surprise Break that he'd passed out, he was more surprised that vomiting hadn't happened first. He certainly couldn't have drunk that much alcohol straight in so little time and he had a very good tolerance.

That had been more enlightening than Break had dared hope it would be.

For the time being he ignored the whiskey spilled across the floor and summoned the first aid kit to him. It was the work of a moment the spread a cream on that black eye that would take away most of the bruising by morning, Lunettes could thank him for the avoided awkward questions later. The cut would heal better with balm on it, though it would still be visible for at least another day.

Completely unrepentant at the invasion of privacy he unbuttoned Lunettes' shirt to get a look at that shoulder he'd been favoring. He wasn't much surprised to find that it had a few gauze pads taped to it, though when he pulled them away to look at the wound he found the slice underneath that was as alarmingly straight and clean as the one on his face. They looked ;ike the marks a scissor blade might make in the skin.

Break had to step away for a moment at the thought, his hands were shaking too hard for him to clean the wound properly. The man had done that to his partner, and not just his partner but his lover. What lowlife prayed on those closest to them?

And then there was the even more unsettling thought that Liam's shirt didn't have any blood on it. Considering that they'd probably been fighting before Lunettes walked out Break doubted that he would have had time to change a cut shirt, which implied the cut had taken place while he didn't have a shirt on.

Just when Break thought he could suppress the urge to snap Vincent Nightray's neck he had to go and think of that.

He had to take several deep breaths before his hands were steady enough to clean and dress the slice, even then he had to concentrate hard on the tape to make sure it went on the gauze straight.

That task accomplished Break carries the unconscious Lunettes to his bed, with some amount of effort because Lunettes was heavier than he looked, to tuck him in to sleep off both the alcohol and the potion. If everything went as planned he'd wake with a handover and no memory of what he said the night before. Break settled himself on the couch with the unopened bottle of Fire Whiskey -which he then opened- and mulled over what he'd just learned.

Liam Lunettes was actually William Callaghan and had been born to an Irish family. That family now thought he was dead in a training accident -probably during his Auror training- and he himself had been transfered to this Ministry of Magic. He was definitely here for a reason, Break had trouble believing one bad egg Auror warranted importing a dead man to be his partner.

So there was something about Nightray that was special and not in a good way.

Then there was Sharon, who claimed to have known Lunettes growing up. Unless she was lying that meant she knew he was William as well. Yes, that definitely fit with her warnings earlier.

And whatever Liam was doing, she knew about it as well. Break had to learn it, had to find out what meant so much to Liam that he let himself be the victim of a bully for years just to accomplish it.

But this meant he was going to have to act soon, before everything fell apart and directly onto Liam's head.

I'm finished making sense

Done pleading ignorance

That whole defense

(The Pretender)

TBC