Hi, I'm back

An apology for the long absence but Fanfiction blocked my account since the last publication and only a week ago I was able to recover it.

I also apologize for not being able to reply to your comments on the last chapter, but I couldn't log in to my account anymore.

I hope you like the chapter; the truth is that I rewrote it three times before I was satisfied with the result because the previous drafts didn't convince me.

As always, a special thanks to Glitterb1234, without her this fic wouldn't be possible.

(Notes at the end of the chapter)

Investigation

Thanksgiving was so close that at first, I thought it was a joke when Gaby asked me at breakfast to invite Vanessa to celebrate at the Swan house, but when I checked the calendar on my phone, it almost hit me. I noticed it was only two weeks away, so I just gave her a vague nod and promised I'd ask her if she wasn't busy on that date.

Gaby left my lunch on the kitchen table, and I gave her a dry "thank you," knowing that there was no point arguing with her about preparing food for me that I could make myself.

I finished my breakfast and washed the dishes that were in the sink. I went up to the bathroom to brush my teeth and finish getting ready to go to work at the police station.

Once ready, I grabbed my lunch and the small backpack I always carried for emergencies and headed for the door, but Charlie called me before leaving.

"Isabella, wait a second please," Charlie said from the living room, while he slowly got his fishing equipment ready.

Apprehensive, I waited patiently until he packed everything into a cooler and walked over.

"Something happened?" I asked, a little worried.

"No, sorry for getting excited," Charlie answered. "An acquaintance's daughter is coming to live with us for a while. Her mother has to go out to fix some things in Seattle and from what I hear, it's going to take a while. They live in La Push, in the reservation by the coast, but she has no family to leave her with and I offered to take care of her while she sorts out her affairs," he quickly explained.

"Oh, okay," I said, not knowing what to say. It was his house after all and I was just a guest. "When will she arrive?"

"Her aunt will bring her over tomorrow afternoon," he answered and then added a little uncertainly, "I hope you don't mind me springing this on you so suddenly."

"No, not at all," I said quickly, and it was true. "What's the girl's name?" I asked, to reassure him.

"Her name is Leah, and she is a very calm and happy girl." Charlie seemed relieved by my easy acceptance. "You don't have to worry about anything, I've already prepared the room above the garage and her belongings will be delivered today at noon. I just wanted to let you know so you wouldn't be surprised by her presence."

"Sounds good to me," I said, as casually as possible. "While I think about it, is there anything I can help with, with your mom, I mean?"

"Honestly, I'm not sure what the problem is. I didn't ask," Charlie answered, evasive. "But I'll pass the message on, thank you," he added, smiling slightly at me.

"There's nothing to be grateful for," I assured him. "I'm leaving or I'll be late, and the boss will make me clean latrines," I joked.

Charlie smiled, amused, and asked me to say hello to Chief Hale.

I drove a little faster than I should have and barely made it in time. The boss was already in his office, judging by the light coming from there. He was about to leave my report on what he asked me to do over the weekend when Vanessa burst into the office with her usual self-confidence.

"Bells, it's good to see you again!" she screamed, hugging me and clinging to me like I was her lifeline.

"It was only three days, Vanessa," I reminded her calmly, now more accustomed to her usual displays of affection.

"Yes, but you only deprive me of your presence one day a week and this time it was three," she grumbled, still clinging to me like a mollusk and pouting.

I rolled my eyes.

My friendship with Vanessa was so unexpected that I often felt like I was exploring uncharted territory. She had never been close with any of the girls in my group, all of us focused on our studies, but the friendship that emerged between us was something I still had to deal with, unsure of the role I should play.

I still remembered when I had finally told her a little about my life story three weeks ago, in a bar in Port Angeles, my head spinning from too many margaritas.

.

"Shit" was the first thing Vanessa said after hearing the pathetic story of my life since my parents died.

"I know," I said, knowing there were no right words for what I had revealed.

The bar was almost empty, despite it being the weekend, so there were only a few solitary people spread around the bar and a few more at the tables in the establishment.

We were at a table in the corner farthest from the door, away from prying eyes and ears. The margaritas and beer had been arriving at our table as if by magic, while my inhibition about sharing the details of my life had long since passed.

"So… You were at your parents' house, alone, severely depressed, and with no one to turn to for a year?" she asked, raising her eyebrows in a way that would have been comical under other circumstances.

"Yes, but being alone was partly my fault," I admitted, taking a big sip of my drink. "Some of my classmates and teachers offered to help me, but I pushed them away by being quite rude to them and in the end, they gave up."

That episode in my life still gnawed at my conscience with shame for having been so rude to people who had only wanted to help.

"That's no excuse," Vanessa repeated, annoyed.

"No, but I understand," I said, to calm her down. "We weren't friends, we weren't even close. My colleagues were just that, colleagues, we worked together on research and projects, but outside of the academic field we had no relationship whatsoever," I explained.

"What kind of university did you go to, CERN?" she asked sarcastically.

"No, I studied at Caltech," I answered.

Vanessa stared at me with her eyes wide with surprise.

"I got a perfect grade in high school and was selected for a full scholarship to study in Pasadena," I explained, as Vanessa kept looking at me as if I had suddenly grown a second head.

"Wow," she said with great amazement. She took a long drink of her beer and asked, "Are you a genius or some kind of gifted? Like Einstein or something?"

"Something like that," I responded, laughing at the comparison.

"But then I don't understand why you didn't have friends," Vanessa muttered. "I would have killed to be friends with a genius when I was in school."

"I've always had trouble making friends," I confessed quietly, my voice tinged with nostalgia for something I had long ago accepted. "When I was younger, I tended to be very controlling and abrasive with the people around me, which made a lot of them walk away, and the few that stayed… well, let's just say they weren't looking for a genuine friendship from me." I fidgeted uncomfortably; those memories still hurt to this day.

"Damn, that must have sucked," she said sympathetically.

"It did," I answered sadly. "When I discovered that they only used me to get good grades, I was the one who completely distanced myself from people, hanging out alone with a very peculiar group of misfits, whose ambition and quest for power was such that there was no room for friendship in their daily schedule."

"It sounds like some kind of cult," she joked, but she became serious when she saw my expression. "Don't fuck with me, you joined a cult?!" She was way too loud for my liking, but fortunately, no one paid attention to us.

"The most pretentious of the group liked to believe that they would start a world order or similar nonsense, but most of them were only there because, like me, they were a failure at relating to others," I answered. "When I entered the ninth grade, I had already given up on any attempt to make friends, so being in the company of people who were just like me was liberating."

"That's horrible," she muttered quietly, looking at me with pity.

"It wasn't, really," I told her and was honest. I took a big sip of my drink to mitigate the melancholy of those difficult times. "There were no false pretensions or hypocrisies there. If you wanted a favor, you had to offer something in return to get it," I explained.

"And I guess you were at the top of the chain of favors," she ventured, smiling slyly at me.

"Yes, I was," I responded, trying not to sound too arrogant. "I was the best student in the entire school, homework and projects were a joke to me, there was nothing I didn't excel at. The power I exercised in the group was intoxicating during those three years of my life." I smiled wistfully as I remembered.

"Sounds like something of a dictator to me," Vanessa said half-jokingly, giving me a playfully severe look. The pity had disappeared, fortunately.

"I never took direct control of the group, but I was the one everyone turned to when they had problems and sometimes, I refused just for the pleasure of it," I admitted, unable to hide the smug smile at the memory.

"The lack of friends turned you into a cold, heartless bitch," Vanessa assured, but from the amused smile she gave me, I knew she didn't completely mean it.

I couldn't help it; I let out a loud laugh that attracted a few glances from nearby patrons.

"I changed a lot when I went to university and I largely suppressed that part of my personality, but that cold bitch isn't far away," I said, smiling. "My depression and my first boyfriend have overshadowed her a bit, but she's always lurking." I kept my tone joking, softening the warning somewhat.

"Wow, so there was a boyfriend," she said, smiling mischievously at me.

I laughed again and proceeded to tell her about my disastrous first relationship.

.

The next day, after a hearty breakfast and some headache pills courtesy of Gaby, I felt completely horrified by all the things I had shared in my drunken state and didn't really know how to treat Vanessa after my inhibitions had returned.

Fortunately, Vanessa decided that from that moment on I was the coolest person in the world and declared in front of everyone in the office that I was her new best friend and that none of them should mess with me.

It was all very strange for me, but I didn't complain about finally having someone to call 'friend'.

Ferguson entered the police station and gave me a funny look when he saw that Vanessa wasn't letting me go; I had stopped resisting and resigned myself to being hugged until she got tired.

Luckily, Brown's arrival saved me.

"Smith, let go of Dwyer and get your ass here, we have work," barked Officer Brown, entering the office in a hurry, carelessly dropping a backpack with climbing gear.

"What happened?" Vanessa asked, finally detaching herself from me.

"The usual, some campers who got lost in the park," he grumbled, while throwing some protein bars and water bottles into his backpack.

Vanessa cursed, but quickly grabbed her climbing gear from the storage room and followed him out of the office.

Johnson arrived shortly after they left, carrying a heavy box full of files and random papers. My heart leaped into my throat; they had to be the files from the guy that had been the Police Chief before Charlie.

"The boss wants to see us in his office," he wheezed as he passed me.

Trembling with excitement, I followed Johnson to the office, ignoring the curious look from Ferguson who suspected the meetings were going on, but had too much respect for the boss to ask.

"Good morning, Isabella," the boss greeted me without taking his eyes off his computer when I entered the office, closing the door behind me.

"Good morning," I responded in an overly cheerful tone.

"I guess your little research trip was successful," the boss said, looking away from the computer and fixing his beautiful blue eyes on me.

"Successful to say the least," I replied, elated, although a little nervous because of his penetrating gaze.

Johnson finished arranging the box of files in the corner and waited for the boss to start our weekly meeting.

When he had asked me to help him investigate the case, I never imagined that I was going to fulfill the function of a database.

As Johnson explained, what we were doing was very dangerous. Just as he put it, powerful people had ensured that the murders - after all there was no longer any doubt that they were murders - were covered up as soon as possible without going through all the filters that they should have when seeing the state in which the corpse was found.

Starting from that point, our task, or more specifically my task, was to memorize every ounce of information we could collect related to the case of the man who appeared in the Calawah River, doing everything possible to leave no physical or digital evidence in case those same powerful people would somehow find out what we were doing.

There were thousands and thousands of pages full of information that at first it was completely overwhelming. From more recent cases such as what had happened in Seattle at the beginning of the millennium, to information as old as dating back to the year 1850, when a cavalry officer reported to his headquarters a grave full of decomposing corpses belonging to the Quileute tribe and some local settlers, missing inhabitants of the small settlement of Forks, long before the town was recognized.

Most of the reports and evidence agreed on at least three things: the bodies had been extremely mistreated, with bones literally pulverized inside the body, fractures of all kinds and a peculiar wound in the neck similar to a bite.

The last thing was what worried me most of all.

I was of course aware of the depravity of those they called "Serial Killers" and their cruel methods of mutilating their victims, but I had never heard of anyone causing such a violent wound to the neck.

Not to mention there was still that uncertainty because I was entering very dangerous territories, but the part of my brain where my scientific curiosity had taken root since I was a child pushed me to investigate more and more, to delve into the depths of that unknown and to do everything possible to discover the truth. Ignoring that the other rational part of my mind was screaming at me to abandon that nonsense and dedicate myself to sorting out my own screwed up brain before the investigation led to something I would not like at all.

"Did you read all of Chief Hobbs' files?" Chief Hale asked Johnson, who nodded curtly.

"I did, but nothing in there has anything to do with the case," Johnson mumbled, grimacing.

"I asked Charlie a little about his boss, but the only positive thing he could say about him was that he never missed work," I huffed, a little amused at remembering how Charlie gritted his teeth when telling me about his boss.

"Well, with this we can rule out that there were no attacks by our killer, or killers, in the decades from 1950 to 1990, when Hobbs retired and left his position to Charlie," the boss said thoughtfully.

"Or if there were, they weren't recorded in the file," Johnson replied, to which I agreed.

"T us what you discovered in Seattle and why you were so excited about it," the boss said, looking at me with great attention, as did Johnson. "Did it open up any other options for us to investigate?"

Without being able to help it, a smug look appeared on my face.

"I infiltrated the database files at Police Headquarters in Seattle," I said, very proud of myself.

Both men stood still like statues, staring at me with a level of surprise that was almost insulting.

"You did what?" Johnson asks quietly, incredulous.

"Not physically, of course," I quickly clarified, "but I found a digital backdoor into the system and was able to access all the information that is classified and related to the case."

The boss and Johnson were still quite surprised, unable to utter a word.

"You can't imagine how much information I learned in just two days," I told them, beginning to get more excited by the prospect of sharing everything I had learned. "Not only did I find a gold mine regarding the attacks that occurred near the city, but they also had much more detailed forensic reports of corpses with very similar injuries."

"And what did those reports say?" the boss asked, leaning back in his chair with anticipation.

"What I saw in those reports was… honestly shocking," I replied with genuine disbelief. "What I found there is not like the reports we've been reading from previous county police chiefs. These reports were written by professional forensic experts who detailed every aspect of the body and how it might have died."

"AND?" the boss pressed, obviously anxious.

"There were many variations in the way they died, but they mainly coincide with what we have discovered." I took a pen from the holder on the case board in the corner and noted each of the common threads I had found. Pulverized bones, fractures in extremities and a violent wound in the neck. Now, what I discovered in those reports, apart from the three coincidences, is that some bodies actually didn't present with the fractures or any other type of mutilation in the body, but every single one mentioned a fatal wound right at a vital point of blood flow."

"Vital point of blood flow?" Johnson repeated, frowning in confusion.

"Yes, that's what the reports said," I answered and then wrote down 'Vital Point' in the 'Seattle' section of the board. "The wound was generally in the neck, but there were several bodies that were different. Some of them had wounds similar to those in the neck on the wrists, on the arms, one woman even had a similar wound right on the femoral artery in her leg."

"What you mean is that what links all these murders is a wound somewhere with a high blood flow," the boss clarified, frowning with increasing concern.

"Exactly," I answered, smiling, pleased that he had reached the same conclusion as me. "We believed that the coincidences were the mutilations of the body, but we didn't see the significance of the fact that the wounds in the neck are right in the carotid, a…"

"…vital blood flow point." Johnson finished for me.

"And that's not all," I continued, taking a moment to build anticipation. "We know that the body found in the Calawah River, bled to death, like the other bodies reported in the reports" The Chief and Johnson nodded as I paused. Johnson took the pen from me and connected the points on the blackboard, highlighting the word 'Bleeding'. "In Seattle was no exception, but there the forensic experts discovered a type of highly flammable fluid around the wounds on two different bodies that correspond to those missing in the wave of murders in 2005."

"Flammable, you say?" Johnson asked, suddenly very alarmed.

"Yes, why?" I responded, a little confused by his outburst.

"When touching the wound of the corpse in the Calawah River, of course, I wore gloves so as not to contaminate the scene. After verifying that the man was dead, while the chief was talking to the county coroner, I stepped aside to smoke a cigarette," Johnson said with a vacant look, no doubt trying to remember in detail what he wanted to tell us. "I took off my gloves to get my lighter because they had blood stained on them. When I turned on the lighter, I accidentally touched the flame with one of the gloves and that thing practically burned up in less than a second. I didn't even have time to curse before my gloves were ashes."

"Did it give off any smell when it burned?" I asked, my heart pounding in my chest.

"I don't remember it very well, but I think it smelled like something sweet, like when you roast marshmallows over a campfire," Johnson said.

"Why is smell important?" the boss questioned, noticing my alarmed look.

'It can't just be a coincidence,' I thought with sudden excitement.

"They analyzed the liquid that they could collect in the two bodies and logically they did tests," I answered, feeling the same rush of satisfaction that overcame me every time I solved a problem. "The forensic experts suspected that the liquid was the same one that was used to cremate the bodies of the others that are missing. In their notes, they mention that the flash point is lower than gasoline and it gives off a sweet smell at the time of ignition."

The boss and Johnson remain silent for a moment, analyzing every detail of what I had told them.

I also began to analyze in my mind every detail of the reports I had read in Seattle, trying to find something that I had overlooked. I wrote 'Flammable liquid' on the board and linked it to 'Violent injuries', trying to find a clue in the facts in front of me.

"Why wasn't the same liquid found in the other bodies?" Johnson asked, confused.

"The other bodies were practically burned, there was hardly any DNA left," I answered immediately, knowing that they were going to ask me precisely that. "The others were never properly examined. The deaths were marked as 'Animal attack' and the case was closed."

"Just like what happened here," the boss muttered to himself. "God, Dwyer, how many reports did you read in two days?" The look he gave me was one of genuine curiosity.

"In total, I read 2,711 reports in the two days," I answered, ignoring the stunned look of the two officers. "About 90% were for explainable deaths, which were not related to the case, but there was no way to apply a filter, so I had to read each one of them and discard the ones that didn't work," I explained. "I ended up with about 270 that seemed to tie back to our body in the river."

"There are 270 related reports?!" exclaimed the boss with alarm.

"No, in fact, of those 270, only 25 match the case, the others were deaths that were genuinely due to animal attacks or another type of murder," I answered.

Chief Hale and Johnson breathed a bit of relief.

"2,711 reports," Johnson muttered in disbelief. "You're impressive, Dwyer," he said with a look of absolute respect.

"Thank you," I said with a cocky look.

The boss was also looking at me. Those intense hypnotic blue eyes had frozen me for a second, until I was able to look away with rosy cheeks and an annoying palpitation in my stomach.

'It's just because of his eyes' I told myself, but that excuse was working less and less every time.

"You know, something very curious happened while I was investigating," I said casually, to change the subject and ignore the feeling in my stomach.

"What happened?" the two asked at the same time.

"Someone tried to prevent me from entering the police server," I replied.

As expected, this caused concern in both men.

"An acquaintance of mine from school specializes in this kind of thing," I said as he poured me a coffee. "For a price, that guy can go anywhere he wants. On a company server, on a private computer, on a telephone, and there are even rumors that he once managed to hack a car from his home," I added with a slight note of envy. "Infiltrating the police server is a trivial thing in reality compared to his other abilities, so whoever tried to stop him from doing that…"

Johnson interrupted me.

"I thought you were the one who infiltrated the server," he blurted with alarm.

"I'm good at IT, but infiltrating a government server is beyond my abilities," I defended, annoyed by the interruption. "This guy has been hacking since he was in Pre-K. His fame and trustworthiness are well known in the digital underworld."

Johnson didn't seem convinced, but he didn't object to anything else.

"How much did it cost to hire his services?" the boss asked, very uncomfortable.

"Nothing, he owed me a favor from a long time ago," I lied naturally.

If I told them what I had to pay for that 'small favor' I had no doubt that they would faint or at least insist on wanting to pay a portion, which they could never do with what they earned. But there was no point in revealing the information. Money was no problem for me.

"The point here is that whoever it was is better than that guy, which I seriously doubt. Or he was next to me while we were getting into the server," I said without being able to avoid remembering the annoyance he had caused us.

"Is your friend that good?" the boss questioned with a frown.

"The bastard can program as fast as he breathes," I replied with a snort.

Envy was not the most dignified emotion, but I couldn't help it.

"Leaving that aside, there is one last thing I want to tell you," I continued, pushing away that annoying emotion. "In one report, the coroner scribbled the words 'Related to Sangre de Cristo case', but when I wanted to investigate that file, I discovered that it was classified like something top secret in a branch of the army. I thought that was very strange, but there wasn't any way I could follow the thread further."

"That name sounds familiar to me," Johnson murmured, surprised. "I don't remember exactly where I heard it, but I'm sure it was while I was living in Arizona."

"If you remember anything else, it will be very useful for me to ask that guy for the file," I said, very excited by the coincidence. "I'm going to give you two USBs with the information I collected in Seattle. Read them, remember them, and then destroy them." I passed them the little memory sticks. "Remember not to let anything be saved in the cloud and you must always work on them without an Internet connection," I ordered in an imperious voice.

"We already know, we're not that clumsy," Johnson replied, raising an eyebrow.

My colors rose because of the reprimand.

Just as I had told Vanessa weeks ago, that cold heartless bitch from high school had been in the shadows for a long time, but she was always lurking.

After that, the meeting ended, and everyone went about their duties.

Johnson and the chief went on patrol, and I stayed in the office with Ferguson, where I helped him write up his pending reports and finish uploading the files into the system that I'd missed in the two days I wasn't in the office.

Despite the euphoria I felt when I read all those reports in Seattle, my mind couldn't help but feel a certain melancholy when remembering that other matter for which I went to the city and that I had been putting off for a long time.

My parents' house had been sold by the real estate company I hired, but I had to personally go to the city to sign the transfer of the property.

I never knew to what extent the issue of my old house had been eating away at my soul, but signing that document where it legally stopped being my property and passed into the hands of others was remarkably liberating. Something I had to discuss with my psychologist in the next session.

The morning and afternoon passed in a blur. Nobody called the police station, and I practically spent the entire day doing almost nothing, just rearranging my desk and Vanessa's here and there; her space was always messy, and it drove me crazy.

Lunchtime passed without incident and sooner than I expected it was time to leave, which I was grateful for because I was terribly bored and wanted to get to Charlie's house to take a long bath and rest my mind a little after all the information I had recently memorized. I also had to make an appointment with my psychologist for my next day off and buy a welcome gift for the little girl the Swans were going to babysit.

"See you tomorrow, Adrian," I said to Ferguson as I grabbed my bag.

"See you tomorrow, Isabella," Ferguson murmured as he continued making his reports.

"Say goodbye to the boss and the others for me?" I asked him as I left the office, to which he only nodded.

Lost in banal thoughts as I walked towards the parking lot, I didn't realize that in front of my car there was a very tall man with long, very intense red hair, almost as if a bonfire was lit on his head, and that his back was turned to me, but from that distance I could see that he was completely still, as if he were frozen.

I was about to approach him and ask what he wanted when a metallic crash startled me and made me duck instinctively. I turned towards the source of the noise and was shocked when I saw how the boss's car had been crushed on the hood, as if a gigantic rock had fallen on top of it.

Ferguson ran out of the office with his gun in his hands, turning back and forth to look for the source of the noise.

"What happened?" Ferguson asked hastily.

Unable to speak, I pointed to the boss's car, which was beginning to smoke.

Ferguson cursed under his breath and grabbed me tightly by the arm to get up and go into the police station, continuing to look everywhere.

"Wait, there's a man standing there…" My sentence remained unfinished. When I turned to where the man was, there was no one there.

"There's no one, Isabella," Ferguson said grimly. "The parking lot was empty when I came out."

"I thought I saw a man standing in front of my car," I insisted weakly, even though I knew he wouldn't believe me.

"You must have been confused," Ferguson said. Picking up his desk phone, he called the chief to inform him what happened, but got no answer.

I shook my head, but let it go. It didn't matter anyway.

I looked out the window at the parking lot, staring at the dent in the boss's car in perplexity, wondering what the hell had hit it to do such damage. There was nothing around that would indicate the cause, except… I couldn't be sure, but I thought I saw a flash of some kind of movement in the tree line on the other side of the lot.

A chill ran through my body and I instinctively moved away from the glass.

"What's wrong?" Ferguson asked, worried when he saw my reaction.

"I swear there is something watching from the forest," I answered in a low voice, looking from the window at the dark trees that stretched next to the police station.

Ferguson opened his mouth to reply when a loud, deep howl cut through the afternoon air, sending shivers down my spine.

Ferguson and I stood very still, looking uneasily at the forest.

Whatever that howl was, I knew deep down that it wasn't a wolf.

"What the hell…?" Ferguson mumbled, and I followed his gaze to the slumped form of a person which was lying in the street that definitely hadn't been there a moment ago.

"Stay here and call the others. Tell them to hurry," he ordered in a very serious voice as he left the police station with the gun ready.

I did as he asked and quickly dialed Vanessa, praying she had coverage in the mountains. The phone rang while I watched with my heart in my mouth as Ferguson approached what was lying on the floor.

"Isabella, I was just about to call you!" Vanessa said as soon as she picked up, her voice tinged with panic. "I need you to send the boss and the others to Olympic Park, but now! I can't find Brown anywhere!" She sounded utterly terrified, just barely below a scream and heading for hysterics.

I froze in place as Ferguson fell to his knees in front of the person, and from a distance, I clearly saw him start to cry.

"I found Brown," I muttered under my breath.

Vanessa was still screaming into the phone, but I was no longer listening.

I stood motionless, watching Ferguson hugging Brown's lifeless body, while the howling in the woods could be heard further and further away.

A movement in the forest took me out of my state of shock. I turned towards the thick vegetation, and I could clearly see something huge and hairy disappear between the trees.

"Shit," was the only thing I could say.

The inspiration for the Sangre de Cristo case came from a 'found footage' film called 'Savageland'

If you haven't seen it, I recommend it.

Don't forget to leave your comments on the chapter, I promise that this time I will respond to one.

This story was also published in AO3

Regards