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greenninjagal-blog · 3 months

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Dead Men Break No Codes pt1

I've been playing too many escape rooms recently. Fic be upon ye :D

Summary: Rookie Fbi agent, Roman is a certified genius who's time to shine is right now, while a serial killer's taken up taunting the police with puzzles leading them to the bodies of their victims! Someone should probably warn him about being so good at his job.

Word Count: 12020

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Read on Ao3 || My General Writing Masterlist

Chapter One: Odd Man Out

The letter found at the latest crime scene isn’t directly addressed to Roman but based on the entire crime scene team’s reaction, it might as well have been.

Roman had barely held onto the card for more than a few minutes, just enough that he could gage the type of paper, the ink color, the number of pages, the smell—all the nitty gritty details that might help them solve the riddles before someone else died—before he sent it off to the labs for further testing. Roman’s notes along with photos of each of the three pages of the banal opinions were displayed through a projector on the wall of the conference room they were in so everyone could see them, but the longer Roman stared at it all, the more he thought that he might have been going slightly stir crazy.

“I stand by what I said,” Virgil says from the corner where he’s strangling a stress ball to the point of it disintegrating in his hands. “Someone needs to get this guy a fucking hobby. Who even uses the word “effulgent” anymore?”

“I think murdering people is his hobby,” Roman comments as he scribbles through yet another code breaking attempt that led nowhere and provided nothing but a hatred for the English alphabet.

It’s obvious there's some type of code in it: previous crime scenes and puzzles aside, no one uses the words Verisimilitude and Brummagem without it being intentional, and certainly not the guy who’s killed ten people in the past three weeks. There are underlined words that spell out "your year of creation is key" and bolded words that read out “From Capitals to Rome” and all of it was tied together with a stunning, swooping bit of calligraphy that's left him with a headache after staring at it so long. Perfect punctuation, no extra doodles or dots: the letter itself talks scathingly about modern adaptations of Sherlock Holmes and detectives and what it means to be a genius in a world that doesn’t appreciate geniuses. Roman’s done the math: thirty-three sentences, averaging ten words across all of them, no direct address, but signed off with a cute “Plex”.

Which was short for “Perplex” because their serial killer thought they were clever.

If Roman had come across this guy in any other situation, he might have grown a grudging respect for him. Might have asked him out for drinks, even! Some of the puzzles that they’d come across are downright dazzling and ingenious and challenging and reminded Roman of his childhood so much they were nostalgic. If Roman ignored the code and read the letter as it was, he was left with a strangely twisted form of sick sympathy: he’d been a genius in a small town where everyone knew everyone else and trying to connect with people there had been like trying to squeeze himself into a pair of shoes he’d outgrown when he was four.

He’d been bored by schoolwork, already outpacing the teachers, too curious to wait until the next class to find answers which left him ahead of his peers. There weren’t thrilling enough mystery books in the library and every movie had ended in the most predictable way ever. He’d received the scorn of his own friends when he breezed through assignments that they struggled with at the same rate he’d received their adoration in any sort of academic competition or group project. Reading the letter in front of him, which was, at its core, someone else’s observations when they rang that close to Roman’s own internal laments, left him with a sour taste in his mouth.

What a horrible thing,—Roman thinks throwing his pen across the room to where the trashcan had been at one point and reaching for another— to have found more fucking kindship with a murderer than with the rest of his team.

He’d only been with this FBI team for a few months, and Roman’s ability to deftly stick his foot in his mouth had already put him at odds with most of the people he was supposed to be working with. The habit of thinking far too fast wasn’t a new thing for Roman to be dealing with, but Roman still forgot that not everyone was aware of just how fast he thought until he was blurting out a harmless comment he forgot could be taken as an insult.

His team leader—a man by the name of Logan Ackroyd—had bluntly told Roman that if he couldn’t keep his mouth in line there wouldn’t be a place for him on the team come the next week and Roman almost quit on the spot to avoid having to go through the utter embarrassment of being fired for his inability to play well with others, when he’d gotten multiple recommendations from high profile FBI agents who’d guaranteed Logan that Roman lived up to the rumors.

Logan had told him that he didn’t bother accepting fresh academy graduates usually, but the sheer volume of letters from colleagues had won Roman a chance to prove he was good enough to stay on permanently. And after six months, Roman is still standing with that Damocles sword over his head, with no sign of Logan changing his mind.

Logan’s right hand, Patton Hart, assures him that Logan means well, even if he doesn’t say it in so many (or any) words.

Patton radiates the gentle air of a tired, but well-meaning father although Roman’s never heard of him having any children and sometimes his existence is all that keeps Roman from crying the moment he home. He’s never been afraid to cut Logan off in the middle of a lecture or remind everyone they’re supposed to be fighting the serial killers not each other…as long as he’s paying attention.

Roman’s no stranger to getting caught up in his thoughts, but Patton is exactly like those cats who meow at dark corners when there’s nothing there; his crystal blue eyes soften with a distant gaze, seeing something that no one else can see for so long that once an actual gunfight broke out around them and Patton didn’t notice at all. Each conversation with Patton left Roman feeling as though he was being seen through instead of being looked at, but that was a small price to pay since Patton won’t take his words the wrong way no matter what he says.

In comparison, Virgil Storm is the person that Roman clashes with the most. Roman had been through enough Psych classes to hazard a guess that Virgil takes Roman’s entire existence as a threat to his own position: Roman is younger, prettier, healthier, smarter, and he had come with heralds of recommendation letters from the FBI academy professors. The only thing Virgil has over him is two years of field experiences that never quite seem to be enough for him to feel secure. Thus, every time Roman disagreed with him, Virgil had bitten back like it was a personal attack. Roman had nearly been written up twice because of their arguments when Virgil got to walk away with barely even a glance.

Janus Ekans, the last member of the team, is approachable in the same way that a live grenade was approachable: he’s a press liaison who sweet-talked reporters and consoled victims and made children laugh with funny faces while the adults talked, and then he turned around threatened to cut Roman’s brakes if he hummed another bar of the catchy pop song that was stuck in his head.

((Jokes on him though, the catchy pop song that had been stuck in his head had been the key to the code for the fourth victim.))

Janus’s brand of kindness always came with strings attached, or a manipulative ulterior motive. Roman had learned a healthy dose of skepticism of early morning coffees and a casual offer of finishing a report for him; the result was not worth having to sit through another workplace conduct seminar for Janus.

But for all of the conflicts with them, Roman wants to be part of this team, wants to be part of this mission, wants to know them and be known by them. It’s just… hard. Roman’s used to the feeling of distance between him and other people, compared it idly to a glass wall that he couldn’t figure out how to break, but something about how Janus and Virgil toast shots at the bar after a case, or how Patton always knows what to say to someone, or how Logan always predicts accurately what route an escaping suspect will take—something about how Roman got shot on his last case with them and woke up to find that the rest of his team had been taking turns watching over him so he wouldn’t wake up alone and it made Roman burn with the desire to be better for them.

And well…since Roman hasn’t been any good at the talkingpart of it, he figured that being a stellar coworker might be a better angle to go for.

((Remus laughed so hard at the idea on a call last month while Roman was working through his physical therapy exercises that Roman had hung up on him.))

It’s been….an attempt. Roman hasn’t exactly had the time to focus on it with the current case going on.

The police had called for help after the very first body, which was rare. Logan had explained on the way to the crime scene that there had been a letter sent to the local police that contained a grid of numbers and a warning that someone would get hurt if the police didn’t solve it in twenty-four hours. An identical copy had appeared at the crime scene, which had linked the two events together in a way that local police didn’t get paid enough for.

Logan had told Roman to focus on photographing details of the scene, but Roman had frozen the moment that his viewfinder had focused on the note, his mind recognizing the pattern from the billions he’d created in middle school.

Roman and Virgil had both spoken the same address at the same time: Roman because he had solved the cipher in the letter after reading it the first time, and Virgil because he’d pulled a long piece of paper with the address written on it out of the victims strangled throat with a pair of tweezers.

The address had ended up being an empty building with a “For Lease” sign in the window a few blocks away, and their arrival had revealed nothing except for another puzzle with a pinned note asking if they were going to actually try this time.

Roman had solved the next one, before Janus had even finished reading it and they had arrived at the next location before the next kidnapped victim had even been aware she’d been kidnapped, dazed and drugged and barely able to tell them her name. The murderer hadn’t been there, and Logan had ordered an evacuation with a posted discrete perimeter, with the hope that they could catch the murderer when they returned to kill their victim, but all ten officers hadn’t reported seeing anyone.

Instead, three days after that, the next letter had been delivered to the precinct via mailman who had no clue where the envelope had come from and hadn’t thought too much of it before making his next delivery. The killer seemed to have taken Roman’s quick solving as an offense or a challenge considering each of the puzzles had gotten harder and harder with the deadlines steady as ever. Roman had run up the clock trying to solve them fast enough to get his team to the scene before the victims were too injured to be saved, forget getting them in time to catch the perpetrator. The last woman had coded in the ambulance on the way to the hospital from her sustained injuries and still they hadn’t gotten any more of an idea who this killer was.

Brown hair, blond hair, long and groomed, a buzz cut, bearded, scarred, mole, green eyes, brown eyes, black eyes—every person that Roman managed to save had a different, conflicting description to offer. Every abduction had happened conveniently on corners were there weren’t cameras and none of the victims seemed to have anything in common: they were mostly young women with two cases of being young men, of various ethnicities and social classes, from all seven nearby counties. Had a gun, had a bat, didn’t see anything before the attack, was drugged, was knocked unconscious—even the corpses that they had recovered didn’t have any more information: there was no sign of fighting back, and every method of death was arbitrarily chosen as if the killer was spinning a wheel to decide how the next victim was going to go out.

Virgil, Patton, and Janus’s working profile was: “knows the area well”, “knows the police and FBI really well”, “easily overlooked”, and “desperate to prove they’re smarter than everyone else”.

Any event hosting riddles, puzzles, or trivia had received a visit from the FBI, but most had never seen anyone sweep the games as outrageously as the profile suggested nor had they had any unhappy customers that had caused a scene as much as a disgruntled, embarrassed genius like this would have. The narrow list of names all had accountable alibis and the team had been shoved back to square one until the next puzzle had appeared.

((They shared a music type, and a fondness for certain poets. Roman wouldn’t have solved half of the puzzles as fast if he hadn’t dabbled into the same extracurriculars of photography and art appreciation. He’d babbled to Virgil about the history of jigsaw puzzles when he put together a fifty-piece puzzle with nineteen pieces missing just so he could use the picture to identify the wharf area where they would find the next victim.))

It had felt like, at first, Roman had been assigned a task that would help, something that he excelled at that would do something to alleviate the stress of the situation and help people. While he’d gone through the programs and passed his tests with flying colors, Roman is still the youngest on the FBI team and his experience with catching serial killers is a laughable compared to the others—but after the third puzzle where Roman’s bizarre wealth of knowledge and prompt, problem-solving processes came in clutch, Logan had assigned the puzzles as Roman’s main task and refocused Janus, Patton, and Virgil on profiling the killer and victims and the area.

Roman thinks there’s a bit more to it as well, but Logan hadn’t deigned to share it with him and Roman just can’t afford to devote any of his brain to things other than finding codes at this point.

He hadn’t actually been back to his apartment in a week. He’d slept in this very room with blankets Virgil had dragged from his car, eaten take-out food grabbed by Patton, forced to shower by Janus with his bag of emergency toiletries until Logan had made the trip to Roman’s to pick up new clothes for his extended stay.

Roman was certain there were rules against all of this, policies and whatnot for the amount of overtime he was pulling and the clearly unhealthy sleep schedule and eating regime, but every time he closed his eyes, he remembered that first crime scene and the bulge of paper being delicately pulled from the strangled throat of a dead woman who deserved better and—

Even if it means his bed is gathering dust, even if he can’t remember what he last watched on TV, even if it means that he’ll been able to charge rent to the new life forms growing out of his fridge when this is over. He’d give up everything just to make sure that no other victims died without hope of being saved. All nine of the people he hadn’t gotten to save in time deserved at least to have their killer stopped.

That being said, the only member of his team keeping pace with his puzzle solving work still is Logan: Patton had run to the lab to check on the results of fingerprints (there hadn’t been any on the letters before, but Patton is an optimist at heart); Janus went to talk to one of the victims family after a call stating they thought they remembered something from the night before the victim went missing, and Virgil had tried his hardest for the first three hours before Roman had to break it to him for the nth time that Roman had already tried the codebreaking technique he was suggesting. He’s nearly jittery with the eager to have something to punch by now.

Logan is sitting primly in the seat across from Roman, his dark eyes tracing the calligraphy of the words looking for patterns that Roman hasn’t already tracked down and tried.

The digital clock at the head of the table is steadily counting down, and every time Roman blinks he sees the bloodied crime scene again: the lifeless eyes, the clinically broken bones, the bruises and the gashes and he thinks of the new missing girl who might be suffering the same fate if Roman doesn’t figure this out.

"There's thicker ink on the word Capital," Logan says, drawing Roman’s attention back to the first page of the letter. Roman had noted it briefly on his fourth review, even written down a list of capitals in the states and used the date of their establishments, their "year of creation" to identify words in the letter but nothing had come of it. Roman had moved off from it hours ago hoping that something else in the letter would circle back to it with more directions on what it meant.

"Let’s return to the concept that it refers to the capital letters," Logan says.

"Which spell out nothing, forward or backward or anagrammed," Virgil says from his chair in the corner towards the back of the room where he’d insisted he was sitting to get a better look at the “whole picture.”

"And we tried all possible Caesar shifts?” Logan says.

"I’ve run them through every Caesar shift 1 through 26. Then I tried the established years of all capitals in the States." Roman says combing through his papers to find his work. "It came up with nothing. So, I tossed them through a Trimethius Tableau, which also got me nothing, so then I tried the Trimethius Tableau with a key word, and uhm…”

Roman trails off as he scrambles through the stack of papers next to him and then gives up and offers the entire stack to Logan.

“You tried it with the word Capital?” Logan says.

“I tried it with every word that appears in the letter,” Roman says. “I didn’t bother writing down half of them so please don’t ask for proof. When that didn’t work, I tried all the Capitals from the entire world and then I tried the missing woman’s name first and last, the killers self-proclaimed name, and the spelled-out number of all our individual ages including the victim’s and the age range that the profile suggests for the killer and Sherlock Holmes. Nothing.”

Logan accepts the papers to analyze it himself or double check the numbers and letters, which Roman would find offensive if he had the energy to feel anything other than dread and defeat. Theres a girl’s life on the line and Roman’s matched wits with a piece of paper and failed at the only thing he’s been good at recently. The clock hits hour twenty-two on the killer’s timetable and Roman feels a burn in his eyes as he rubs them so hard he witnesses undiscovered colors on the back of his eyelids.

“Patton just texted,” Virgil said, waving his phone. “The ink is Speedball India Ink which you can get at any art supply but it’s for those fancy calligraphy pens. The techs think the nib was a… Bruase Steno, whatever the fuck that means.”

“Beginner’s nib,” Roman says, tiredly. “It holds a lot of ink in it, pretty sturdy, and good for downstrokes. Allows for a bigger font size than some others.”

“Is there anything you don’t know about?” Virgil says blandly. “He also says the paper from one of those Canson Mix Media sketchbooks you can buy at basically any retail store. I doubt by now that has any bearing on anything, but I figured I pass it along.”

Logan and Roman both nod to show they heard it. Roman predicted as much in his notes, although he’d been more of the idea the nib was a Nikko G based on the size of the font. It’s been a while since he had the time to work on his calligraphy, since Remus “borrowed” his pen set last year.

“I checked for a Rail Fence and a Playfair," Roman says. “Tried both Horizontal and Vertical Two-Squares.”

“I mapped out all of the ‘I’s in the letter to see if they spelled out something in dot-only morse code,” Virgil says.

“Did they?” Logan asks with the tone of a very tired parent.

“No, but you’re welcome that I at least tried it.”

Roman tunes out Logan’s responding sigh-and-lecture bit. There’s a girl missing probably already fighting for her life against injuries that had killed ten others before. Roman could be the only spot of hope for her, and he’s staring at the word ‘Mélange’, wondering if “year of creation” refers to the year that the word first came to use.

Janus had sniffed distastefully at the letter when he’d first read it, claiming that the murderer’s vocabulary was just another attempt to show them that he was smarter than all of them. Janus, who’d studied language profiling and had two papers published on the topic, had begrudgingly affirmed that all the words were being used in a sensible way.

Roman twirls his pen between his fingers reading over his notes again.

He’d been so sure on his second read of the letter that Sherlock Holmes was going to be part of the answer. “Your year of creation” had sounded so much like a bid for the year of publication, which had meant he only needed to figure out what media form it was based on. “From Capitals to Rome” hadn’t spurred anything exciting in his memory: he didn’t recall any of Author Canon Doyle’s original writings putting Holmes in Rome, although he’d jolted down a few books he knew of by other authors, and none of the TV show or movies had been filmed in the iconic city.

If it meant the distance between a capital and Rome, well, London was the only place that Roman was confident in writing down, but 1873km didn’t even match up with any other years and certainly nothing further in the letter that would give an address.

But then Rome could refer to a Caesar Cipher, like Logan had said. Which had inspired a whole other rabbit hole of possibilities and Roman had fallen down it with much less fun than Alice.

Why use words that no one else does conversationally? Roman, as a certified genius, already struggles with having those around him keep up with a conversation so throwing in uncommon words was a waste of breath or, in this case, paper. So why is their killer risking the message of the letter not being understood? Is it really just to prove that this mystery killer was smarter than them? Or is the meaning of the letter as of little value to the killer as the lives of the victims they were snuffing out?

Roman had studied killers with a superiority complex. Most of them could have continued killing for decades and never been caught if they hadn’t felt compelled to have others be aware of how much smarter they were.

But then Roman stares at this letter talking about Sherlock Holmes and he doesn’t see someone who was overconfident and riding the high of the chase. They’re creative and clever enough that each of his letters are multitasking: sharing (supposedly inconsequential) knowledge about himself as well as acting as a code to lead them to where the missing girl is. But Roman’s decently sure that Logan’s already figured that one out. After all, how much help is the fact that the killer likes Sherlock Holmes going to be in finding out their real identity?

It isn’t Roman’s task to profile the serial killer. It’s not his problem and it shouldn’t be his worry and Roman doesn’t have the time to focus on the undertone of loneliness and isolation when there’s a girl’s life on the line.

“I see things here are going admirably,” Janus says as he flounces into the room. He’s dressed in black dress pants and a pale-yellow button down that looks tasteful and elegant. His usual grace accompanies his movements as he drops into a vacant chair and helps himself to a coffee cup that someone left on the table hours ago. He has a ring on his fourth finger, although he’d confessed in a drunken stupor after their first case that he’d never even kissed a prospective partner. ((And then the following day Janus had cornered Roman in the station bathroom and told him that if he told anyone about that Roman’s body would never be recovered, but whatever. Drama Queen.))

“Have you cracked the code yet? Solved all our problems?” Janus asks.

“Oh, yes,” Virgil answers him. “We were waiting for you to get back in order to figure out world hunger, though.”

“Eat the Rich,” the man wearing a $900 suit says without a trace of hesitation.

“Did the victim’s sister give you anything?” Logan asks, pushing away Roman’s stack of failed attempts.

Janus clicks his tongue. “I’m going to assume you remember that the sister told us previously that she’d been communicating to her sister via SnapChat the night she disappeared. She said that she saw someone in the background of the pictures that she didn’t think too much of it at the time, but now she’s wondering if it was our killer stalking his victim through the store. I made a pit stop to the grocery store and took another look through their footage, and found the person in question—black hoodie, black face mask—but it was just another shopper. According to timestamps, he checked out before our victim and went straight to his car and left.”

“Presumably to go home,” Virgil extrapolates, extremely helpfully.

“And we suspect that the killer grabbed her before she got to her car,” Logan hums affirmatively. Which Roman guessed was about as close as he got to announcing his approval.

Janus picks up one of Roman’s papers and scans it with faked interest. “So? How is Encyclopedia Brown doing? Has he come up for air in the past hour?”

“Do you even know what an encyclopedia is?” Roman asks, distractedly.

“Of course,” Janus says. “I found reading them to be quite riveting in my childhood. Didn’t you?”

“I was more of a phonebook, yellow pages type of kid,” Roman says.

“What’s a phone book?” Virgil cuts in.

“It’s a phone directory with the phone numbers of everyone in a certain area. The yellow pages were reserved for businesses, listed by category rather than alphabetical. Why don’t you know that?” Logan says. Then he frowned and turned back to Roman. “Why were you reading those as a child?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know, old man.”

"I turned 49 this year, Roman," Logan says blandly.

Roman had a really good response to that, he did. Something snippety about how Logan acted like a professor double his age, or asking how his birthday party of birdwatchers went, or if he's picked out an adult day care he wants to be sent to once he reaches the big five-oh. Just for the sick pleasure of seeing Logan physically leave the room to go print out the official papers to fire Roman on the spot.

"What’s going on at 15 Maple Street?"

Virgil startles like a cat, nearly flipping out of his chair at the voice right behind him.

Remus—dressed in a biker jacket, spiked boots, and gunmetal piercings—grins with all his teeth unflinching even when Virgil’s fist brushes by his cheek in an aborted attempt at throat-punching Roman's twin brother.

“Is it some kind of orgy? Y’all gonna invite me?” he asks, raising a Slurpee cup to his mouth and taking a sip.

“Who the fuck?!” Virgil says, snapping his neck to look at Roman as if he thought Roman had gotten up put on a fake mustache and then tried to jump scare him. “Wh-wha…?”

When they were younger, Roman had described Remus as his funhouse mirror reflection: they shared the same nose, the same face structure, the same dark brown eyes and the same untamable brown hair; but where their appearances had been identical inverses of each other—Remus’s cowlick rolled to the left and Roman’s went to the right—their personalities had a drastic split. Remus is also a certified genius, same as Roman, but where Roman had gotten banned from the local escape rooms for solving them in under five minutes, Remus had gotten banned from them for brute forcing answers until something clicked.

If Remus had to break something to get the answer, he was having fun. Replay-ability was never a thought in his mind growing up and turned their childhood home’s game closet into a graveyard. He talked faster than he thought, often blurting out answers or questions or impulsive thoughts before someone else had finished talking.

Nine-year-old Roman had loathed most of these things about Remus, but it had only taken a year for Roman to realize that in their small town, Remus was the only one who could possibly keep up with his wits. Remus had been the one to tell him to take up the codebreaking classes hosted by an ex-FBI agent who had ended up being so impressed with Roman that the man had sponsored him through all his subsequent courses and written him three recommendation letters personally to Logan to get him his current job.

The job had taken Roman nine states away, but Remus and him had kept near weekly calls where Remus offered him feedback on Roman’s newest attempt at writing a novel, and Roman play tested the clues for puzzles in Remus’s escape room games.

Near weekly had turned into a stretch of silence though, when cases came up. Remus had just told him to call him whenever the cases were over instead of stressing over finding time to talk. His schedule was always more flexible.

But it shouldn’t have been flexible enough for Remus to be standing in the FBI headquarters.

“Remus,” Roman says, standing before Virgil decides to enact his shapeshifting alien emergency plan. “What are you doing here?”

“Learn to pick up your phone sometime, asshole,” Remus says, flicking his neon yellow visitor badge to the left of Virgil’s body for everyone to see. “If I had known that you were going to leave me at an airport for three fucking hours, I would have just canceled my flight and spent my vacation mapping out the sewers back home.”

“Vacation?” Roman repeats. “OH FUCK! What day is it?!”

Roman dives for his phone, only realizing when he frantically taps the screen that it’s dead and probably has been dead for a while. Remus rolls his eyes flicking a lazy salute at Logan and Janus and welcoming himself into the room.

“Name’s Remus,” Remus says, “I’m this dipshit’s twin brother. Currently single, but I charge five for a hand job if you want one.”

“Charming,” Janus says, running a finger around the rim off his coffee cup.

“You mentioned Maple Street.” Logan says. “Ignoring that you are not supposed to be in here and this is confidential work, where did you come up with that?”

"I mean, I assumed it’s a Maple Street," Remus says. "Every state has a Maple Street, right? I stopped doing the conversion at the P."

“Elaborate.”

“Buy me dinner first, Daddy,” Remus says and Janus chokes on his coffee so hard it almost comes out of his nose and Roman can feel his employee termination paperwork being drafted up mentally in Logan’s mind.

Still Remus shrugs, waves a hand towards the projector, and obliges. “The letter is about Sherlock Holmes, right? Its pretentious as all shit so the writer is only going to care about the original Arthor Canon Doyle characterizations. “The year of your creation” is a snob’s way of saying publishing date. So, you’re looking for a Sherlock Holmes book and you’re going to care about the year it originally came out. Still with me? I can walk you back if you got lost, old timer.”

“Remus,” Roman says, which sounds remarkably like please shut up before you get me fired.

“Damn, you got boring in FBI school. Fine. You care about ciphers, right? There’s only four from the original books that actually appear, even though Holmes is said to be a gifted codebreaker. This ain’t the Dancing Man code, and it’s not the flashing lights from Red Circle. Your other two options are The Book Code from Valley of Fear in which you’d be fucked six ways to Saturday with an unlubed corkscrew and not in a way that you’d enjoy or—”

Virgil makes a sharp disgusted noise form the back of the room, and Remus grins with satisfaction at getting a reaction out of him. He tilts his head back to look the agents, mouth open to make things as bad as he can.

“Wait! Gloria Scott,” Roman says catching on to what he did. “Fuck! You’re right! It’s Gloria Scott. But not whole words. Did you go by letters?”

Remus tsks and swirls his drink. “You’re a genius, Ro. You tell me.”

“That’s why it says to go ‘From the Capitals!’”

“Tell me you didn’t think it meant actual capitals. Did you list them all out? I’m disowning you.”

“Get bent,” Roman says on instinct as he scribbles out the letters of importance.

“Get laid.”

“I have. Jealous? And then a Caesar with 1-8-9-3?”

“Did you know that off the top of your head? Fucking nerd.”

“That’s an E, V, I—”

“It’s faster to start it from the end,” Remus sings.

“Did they screw up on the eighth sentence or am I doing math wrong?”

“I told you go from the end.”

“I don’t like going backwards!”

“It’s already backwards, bitch.”

“Dick.”

“Geek. You used to be good at this. Why is it taking you so long?”

“Shut up. Did you get Mom gaudy heels she wanted for her birthday?”

“The ones with the cat faces on them? Fuck no! I got her a candle like I do every year.”

“Son of the year award.”

“They were over a hundred fucking dollars! —That’s an F, dumbass, not a G.— And I can gift her a whole litter of cats for that amount!”

“Agreed. I’ll get the accessories; you get the cats?”

“Deal. I want naming rights.”

“PG-13 rated at the max. Mom will kill us otherwise. So, it was a mistake on the eighth sentence.”

“Yeah! A goddamn embarrassment. This is already a cringe ass attempt to seem good at encoding—”

A humming uhhhh? cuts through the rest of Remus’s statement and Roman is relieved to see Remus also does a mental reset as he remembers where they are. Namely, standing in the conference room in the FBI headquarters shooting comments back and forth at each other in front of Roman’s team.

Virgil is staring at both of them, head on a swivel that leaves him looking hopelessly horrified, as if he just watched them give birth. The last time Roman saw Virgil look so nauseated, he’d gotten a major concussion after being jumped by three gang members in the back of warehouse they had thought a bioterrorist was renting.

There had been a bubbling excitement in Roman’s chest that felt right in the way that all his conversations with Remus always feel so right. He didn’t have to slow down or reword or even watch his wording because it was Remus and Remus always knew exactly how to take anything Roman said. Twin Telepathy and all that.

But the moment he sees the utter bafflement on Logan and Janus’s faces that part of him shrivels up and dies, an embarrassed, awful death.

Virgil, however, finds his voice before Roman can apologize. “Hardy Boys! Wanna explain that in English? Where are you getting Maple Street from?”

“Fifteen Maple Street,” Roman corrects. “Come to Fifteen Maple Street, Detective.”

“Do-tective,” Remus says. “I’ve met kids with better spelling!”

Roman doesn’t outright elbow him in the side but it’s a close thing. “Doesn’t matter. The point is, I know where that is. Its two blocks from my—”

“Is the Gloria Scott referring to The Adventures of the Gloria Scott?” Janus cuts him off sharply and Roman blinks. Remus frowns and takes another sip of his Slurpee, until the resulting slorpppp nearly drowns out Roman’s response if Roman hadn’t reached out and snapped it out of his hand.

“Yeah,” Roman says. “Published in 1893. It’s the short story where Holmes claims to have first realized that his deduction hobby could be used professionally. The code in it—spoilers—is that every third word is taken and spells out its own sentence. But in this case ‘From Capitals’ is referring to the third word of the sentence instead of every third word. Then if you take the first letter of each of the word and put it in a Caesar shift, with the first one being a one-shift, the second letter being an eight-shift, then nine-shift, then three, then back to one….”

Roman holds up the paper where he wrote down the final product. “And then you read it backwards.”

The Conference room is slightly too quiet for Roman’s taste, but his hands are shaking with nerves he didn’t know he had. The clock in the corner still reads an hour and thirty minutes and Roman feels like he’s taken his first actual breath for the first time in years.

"Did you do that in your head?" Logan says, looking at Remus. "As you walked in here?"

“Well, not really,” Remus says, casually swinging his badge around one of his fingers. “I’m not wearing my glasses, so I didn’t see it until I got halfway across the floor. And I had to look up the year of publish for it because I’m not the type of freak who knows years like that.”

Roman flips him the bird under the table where Logan won’t see it.

"Holy shit,” Virgil says. “You both are fucking insane. Actually, fucking insane. How did you even think to do that?”

Remus laughs. "That’s just a party trick. We used more advanced ciphers when selling test answers in seventh grade."

"There was no "we" in that!" Roman says quickly. "I was not involved in that!"

Remus glances at the papers next to Virgil raising an eyebrow at the penmanship. "Did you try to map out the dots over the I's like it’s a dot only morse code? That’s so cute!"

Virgil crumples his paper into a ball and throws it across the room. "Can I punch him for real this time? I’m going to punch him."

Roman doesn’t bother explain that comments like that just fuel Remus on. The bullies in their small town had learned to leave both of them alone, because Remus laughed when they broke his arm. Remus liked the sharp taste of pain and the metallic smell of blood and the way that his vision blurred and blacked out.

Instead, Roman reaches for his jacket. “Come on. There’s still two hours on the clock. We can beat rush out traffic and make it there in ten minutes!”

“No,” Logan says and Roman mentally stumbles over a chair and then down a flight of stairs. “I want you to stay here. If for some reason this location ends up being wrong, I want you and your brother both to be here already looking for another answer. Do not argue with me on this.”

Roman’s voice dies a little in his throat, shriveling up and itching like a cough that he doesn’t want to admit to having. Logan doesn’t even grace him with an actual full glance, as if Roman’s compliance is expected just as much as his acceptance. Janus and Virgil share a look that Roman can’t quite read, although from the pursing of Virgil’s lips something about Logan’s decision doesn’t sit right with him.

Janus, however, looks relieved before he can school his features into a neutral expression.

“I’m certain this is the location,” Roman says tentatively. “Sir.”

“I do not like placing all of my figurative eggs in one figurative basket,” Logan says, already halfway out the door. “Safety is my priority. Virgil, Janus: with me.”

Both of the other two agents scramble after Logan; Virgil not even bothering to put his jacket back on as he bolts out the door and Janus clicking his tongue in that way that speaks of his loathing for being told what to do.

Roman drops his coat back on the chair and flops back down. Remus frowns at the doors for a second longer, but Roman can’t imagine what he’s thinking—or if it’s anything different from what Roman himself has already thought about this FBI gig.

Roman can appreciate how Logan is looking at the bigger picture, covering all his bases, leaving little room for the killer to add to their kill count, but at the end of the day those words still sound a lot more like “You’re still not good enough, Roman, and I’m still considering if you deserve a place with this team.”

***

“You’re seriously still not going to tell him?” Virgil hisses as soon as the elevator doors close. “He deserves to know at this point! We’re seven incidents into this!”

“There’s actually only been six that can’t simple coincidence,” Janus corrects, even though that is not the fucking point that Virgil meant and he knows it. Six is still Six-Too-Fucking-Many and the fact that Janus is even making the argument has Virgil’s skin crawling. He meets Virgil’s eyes in the reflection of the stainless-steel elevator wall and Virgil sneers at him while Janus raises an elegant middle finger.

Logan, although he must have seen it, doesn’t bother to reprimand either of them. He stares at the ticking digital screen detailing the floors as they race towards the garage and keeps his face in a stern neutral expression. Virgil isn’t trained in micro expressions, so the fact that he notices the crease in the corner of Logan’s lip is probably very telling for how stressed he is about all of this.

“Call Patton. I want him to meet us at the location with whatever police he has contact with. No sirens. If this killer is there, I don’t want to alert him anymore than we already have.”

“You’re changing the topic,” Virgil says. “Sir.”

“Agent Storm. As of right now, his best use is solving the puzzles where we can keep an eye on him. He doesn’t need to know; it will only cause him to panic, and we cannot afford that at this stage. He’s too… instrumental.”

Instrumental. Virgil almost laughs at Logan’s fucking audacity. Instrumental.

“Are you going to tell his brother?” Janus says, boredly, scrolling through his phone for Patton’s number. “Twin brother. Did anyone know he was a twin? I didn’t and I believe I’m offended.”

Virgil did know. Although knowing is an entirely different beast from seeing Roman’s face with a mustache and his body with a grunge aesthetic and his voice with a proficiency for the absolute worse strings of words in the human language. He almost looked like Roman-in-a-Halloween-Costume, expect for the part where he opened his mouth. But the worst part of it was how when Remus and Roman had been standing next to each other shooting back and forth completely at ease, Virgil had felt as though he was seeing doubles and neither version of his friend was the right one.

Something about Roman so easily relaxed into the conversation, a lightness to his words, a brightness to his eyes—something about how Roman looked comfortable as if a huge burden had been lifted from his shoulders when his twin had shown up….

It threw him off and Virgil doesn’t think he’s found his balance again yet. And the whole “Unspoken Agreement” was not helping matters at-fucking-all.

“I want a background check on him, emphasis on his whereabouts in the past three weeks. If he’s not involved, then I’ll consider reading him in. Although, there’s a high probability he already suspects it,” Logan says. “You were not subtle about cutting Roman off at all.”

Janus feigns an offended scoff, as he puts his phone to his ear and the line starts ringing. “I didn’t see you saying anything.”

Virgil digs his nails into the strap of his bag. “If Roman were a civilian, you wouldn’t be treating him like this. You know you wouldn’t. You would have read him in and—”

“Virgil,” Logan says sharply.

“How long are you going to keep punishing him for something that wasn’t his fault?!”

Logan’s hand snaps out and he knocks the safety switch into activation. The elevator jerks to a stop so suddenly that Janus fumbles his phone, and Virgil has to grab the railing to keep himself steady. When he looks up again Logan’s eyes are trained on him with a fury that Virgil’s never seen before.

Still, he forces himself to raise his chin in defiance, meeting that gaze head on even with his brain shrieking at him to backdown.

“Do not accuse me of confusing the safety of my agents for a petty grudge,” Logan says. “I will have your badge, Virgil. My reluctance to tell him comes from the need to have our smartest agent focused on these deranged puzzles instead of whether or not the rest of us are capable of doing out jobs, not from my irritation over being blackmailed into taking him onto my team. He will do his job, and you will do yours and when this is over, I will personally debrief him. Am I clear?”

Virgil’s jaw creaks from how tightly he’s clenching his jaw, but he nods.

For a second, barely a blink, Logan’s expression softens again. “Thank you, Virgil, for being concerned about him. I know you don’t appreciate withholding information from your teammates.”

It’s hard to feel like he’s doing anything good when they all saw how Roman’s face dropped earlier. Logan turns back to the doors and flips the safety switch again, allowing the elevator to continue its descent. Virgil lets out the quietest breath he can manage, but based on Janus’s uneasy glance back at him, it wasn’t quiet enough.

“Well! I guess that means that Roman solved the letter!” Patton’s voice chirps from the phone in Janus’s hand.

“Yes,” Logan says loud enough for Patton to hear him. “Janus will fill you in.”

“Aye-Aye Captain!”

The elevator dings and the mechanical voice reads out the basement floor, but Logan doesn’t wait for it to finish speaking. He’s already shoving his way out of the elevator to the BMW registered to their team, with all the confidence and authority of someone who would leave them both behind if Virgil and Janus didn’t rush after him.

Virgil turns to Janus, but Janus is greeting Patton with his particular brand of waspish backhanded compliments that Patton likes to laugh at. He pretends he doesn’t see Virgil’s look at all, stubbornly facing forward marching after Logan. His voice bounces off the underground parking lot concrete, updating their other senior agent on the details and plan and the request for a background check as if Virgil’s very real concerns about Roman was just another instance of him blowing the situation out of proportion. Virgil lets out a shaky breath as the elevator doors roll close behind him.

“He can handle it. He’s Roman. Of course, he can handle it,” he repeats as a mantra and hitches his bag over his shoulder.

Despite that, Virgil sends a soft, silent prayer to whatever might be out there watching, that they aren’t running into as much of a trap as it feels like they are.

***

When the call comes Roman nearly lunges across the table to accept it.

Remus is, per usual, a very interesting and ambitious conversation partner: he does not and has not ever required an actual person to respond to him. Roman tested it once when they were younger and he wanted to have a whole ten minutes of silence—put a hoodie over a pile of clothes while Remus is speed running a video game, gradually stop answering with more than a few hums, and then dip out. It had been hours later when Remus woke him by jumping on his bed in revenge.

That’s not to say that Roman isn’t thrilled to talk with him! But Roman is the type of person who would rather catch up with his brother’s endless thrilling tales of research and experimentation in the comfort of his own home, take out on the coffee table and a stream of true crime YouTube episodes on his TV in the background. Roman had been excited to ask him about where he’d gotten his inspirations for his 1920’s speakeasy parlor escape room because Remus had never really dipped into history themes when he could have haunted houses and murder movies instead.

The oppressive atmosphere in the FBI headquarters, with empty conference room chairs, stacks of papers to recycled, and a projector showing the ramblings of serial killer, paled in comparison to the thought of Roman’s crappy couch and greasy pizza from across town.

And now small part of Roman is worried that maybe they did miss something in the letter. As certain as he is about this, there is a part of him that keeps whispering Logan’s right to hold you back, you failed, you were helpless until Remus showed up—

So, when the call comes, Roman is nearly vaulting the table to answer it via the conference call.

“You would have told me just to shut up!” Remus says with no real heat.

Roman doesn’t bother responding to him. He’s sure that Remus already knows what Roman was thinking anyway; it wasn’t like Remus was a fan of a conference rooms after the amount of time he spent in them with Mom and Dad on either side of him as his teachers tried to explain that just because Remus was bored out of his mind in their classes, it didn’t mean he had the right to start dismantling desks or doodling on the walls with sharpies or designing paper airplanes with precision that most aviators couldn’t claim.

“Roman Sanders, speaking,” Roman says, as soon as he hits the answer button. “Remus is in the room.”

“Are you or your brother familiar with one Andy Clupeidae?” Logan’s voice says.

“Uh,” Roman glances towards Remus but he also just shrugs chewing on his straw. “Not that I’m aware of, sir. Would you like me to start a background search on them?”

“Not necessary, I already have Janus on it.”

“Weird ass fucking last name,” Remus comments. “I would have remembered it. What’s their deal? Or are you on Tinder? If he’s got a picture of him holding a fish up, you can guarantee that he’s been lying about length sizes for a whi—”

“It’s the name of a man that we just apprehended in the middle of strangling the victim,” Logan says, dry tone scathing even through the phone speaker. Remus has the rare decency to cringe slightly. “I trust that you can keep that information to yourself, Remus.”

“We got him?” Roman says, hope swelling in his chest like a balloon throttling his voice box. “Like—we actually caught him? Red handed and everything?!”

“We have a suspect in custody,” Logan says. “There are…a few things that don’t settle correctly into the profile. But when we arrived, he was already inside the building, hands on the throat of the victim, and he had in his possession a letter that contains what appears to be the next puzzle for you to solve. The victim is already on the way to the hospital with Janus on standby for when she regains lucidity. Patton will be taking the letter to the labs, and while Virgil and I get ready for the interrogation.”

Roman swears the air tastes ridiculously sweet, too sweet, in a way that’s making it hard to breathe. Remus is staring at him worriedly, but all Roman can think is we did it, we got him, we stopped him.

“There are still several things that need to happen before we can declare this case closed,” Logan warns. “I’ll see you both in half an hour.”

Roman nods although Logan definitely can’t see him. He’d probably be embarrassed if Logan could see him and his stupid dopey grin.

“And Roman? Remus? …you both did a good job.”

Roman doesn’t even hear the telltale click of the call ending. He’s too busy covering his mouth and trying not to scream at the top of his lung. Pure relief washes through him, rushing through his trembling fingers and weak knees until he’s nearly lightheaded with elation.

“Are you okay?” Remus asks steadying Roman with a hand on his arm. “Are you going to orgasm right now?”

“Shut up,” Roman says with half the amount of annoyance he means. He gets a grip of a nearby chair to ground himself and takes a deep breath to refocus. The hope in his chest tastes like a victory, like he’s done something great, even though all he’s done is his job.

Remus is still staring at him suspiciously and no amount of Roman’s smile is reassuring him apparently. His eyes are lined with that brand of eyeliner that he’s been using since they were tweens, making his hickory eyes even darker than usual, and more worried than he’s ever been. He makes one suspicious sweeping look around the room, as if checking for someone else despite the fact it’s been just the two of them for a while now, then he leans in to say something.

But before he can get it out, the conference phone rings again.

“Hardy Boys!” Virgil’s voice calls through the speaker, a little distorted. Roman grimaces at it, tapping his pen on the table a few times.

“Hey, Dark and Stormy,” Roman says, “Heard you caught the guy!”

“Is there anything you don’t know about?” Virgil says blandly.

“Well, I was going to congratulate you, and offer to buy drinks, but if you’re going to be an asshole about it….” Roman says.

Virgil might have responded but there’s a crackling on the line that cuts over whatever thing he’s going to say. Remus fake-gags out of the corner of Roman’s eye.

“Whatever,” Roman says. “Logan called just a minute ago and told me the news.”

“He also says—you’re welcome—to go home—”

“What the fuck type of phone service do you have?” Remus asks. “Dial up? How do you have any type of phone sex with this shit going on?”

“—I’m going to punch him."

Remus grins delightedly. “We’re gonna need to decide a safe word—”

Roman immediately bats the back of his head and Remus yelps, ducking away from the receiver and rubbing the spot that Roman hit with a pout. Roman sends him scowl, and Remus sticks his tongue out and mouths something that looks like its was a joke, dickwad! And Roman returns it with an appropriate middle finger.

“Hardy Boys!” Virgil’s voice says again, and Roman drums his pen on the table.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m sorry about Remus. Please don’t complain to HR again. I don’t want to be written up for this one—”

Remus shoves Roman out of the way to get closer to the speaker again. “Who cares about that! Did Lead Agent DILF actually say it’s cool if Roman and I cut out of here? Cause if so, go ahead and tell him to approve Roman for a week vacation, too, because if you don’t, you’ll have to file for kidnapping. I have a list of places I’m going to make Roman take me to and it requires a minimum of three days off.”

“Remus!” Roman says. “You can’t just—"

“Someone needs to get this guy a fucking hobby— you’re welcome—to go home—”

“Alright, bye, Virgin!” Remus shouts and hits the end call button. He throws most of his weight back in the chair, stretching out his spine and arms in a wild chaotic movement that Roman couldn’t help but fondly roll his eyes at. He’s sure that the Virgin comment will come up again, likely in the form of a summons to the HR to talk about workplace harassment, regardless of the fact that it wasn’t Roman who said it, but all in all he can’t really be all that worried about it at the moment.

Roman sighs out, rubbing his aching neck.

“That was weird right?” Roman says. “You thought that was weird, too?”

Remus yawns so loud that his jaw cracks. “Who cares? I want pizza on your dime, and shitty ghost hunter videos on your TV. Your job is boring as fuck! Come on, I’ll drive! You can micronap in the passenger seat.”

“With you at the wheel? No chance,” Roman says, but he fishes his keys from his jacket and tosses them towards Remus anyway. Remus grins with all his teeth, the exact way that everyone would expect someone who frames all of their speeding tickets to smile. Roman yawns and waves for Remus to follow him towards the office desks where Roman’s stuff would be, pausing only long enough to switch off the projector and the clock and the lights.

Admittedly Roman doesn’t remember a lot of what happens after that. The adrenaline crash comes down pretty hard on him and the exhaustion swirls around him, the moment they get to the lobby and Remus chats up the receptionist and returns his visitor’s badge and compliments her hair. Roman focuses more on keeping his duffle over his shoulder and standing upright as this goes on.

He didn’t recall Logan bringing him all that much stuff from his apartment: he’d scribbled out a list of clothes that he liked and tried his best not to cringe too much at the idea of his superior officer seeing his uncleaned apartment.

Even when Remus was coming over, Roman made an effort to take out the trash and have the sheets in his guest room cleaned and fill the pantry with healthier snacks. Roman had put off doing the cleaning for a few days after he and Remus had confirmed the date, but then the case had come up and Roman had literally forgotten what month it was.

But he wasn’t too concerned with Remus making fun of him. The way that Remus was already side eyeing him and chatting away about the details of their hometown and his trip to visit Mom and Dad last weekend was telling Roman that Remus guessed just how tired Roman was at the moment.

The drive is a blur at best. As far as Roman remembers Remus obeyed the laws and parked legally. They argued over music for a few minutes, and then argued over if Remus could have made a light that he stopped for because Roman yelled at him. Then, on the way into Roman’s apartment building their argument turns into which YouTube ghost hunter series to watch while they ate dinner.

“Race ya!” Remus shouts, as he hits the platform for Roman’s level.

“Remus!” Roman hisses, “Wait, Remus!” He slings his bag over his shoulder and rushes the last few steps and catches the door before it closes but by then Remus is already charging down the hall.

“Remus people can hear into the hallway! Remus!”

“You’re just mad because you owe me ice cream now!” Remus calls and then proceeds to knock on Roman’s door several times over as if Roman is going to magically open it from the other side when he’s slowly trudging his way over.

“What was the point of running all the way down here just to have to wait for me to open the door?” Roman huffs. “You have a key anyway!”

“Had a key,” Remus shrugs, pressing as close as physically possible to Roman as he jiggles his key through the lock until it relents. “I don’t anymore!”

Roman lets Remus push through the door the moment it’s open, rolling his eyes. “Down a sewer grate, off the metro platform, confiscated by the TSA, or forgot it in that dumpster fire you call an apartment?”

“Got knocked overboard on a ferry ride I took a couple months ago! Right along with my house key and my mailbox key. The process to get a new one of both of those was a bitch and a half, by the way. Would not recommend.”

"Wait," Roman says, flicking on the lights to his apartment. It feels a bit like defeat doing it after Remus has made himself at home on the couch with his disgusting shoes up on Roman’s upholstery. But Roman finds himself a bit too tired to care about all the cleaning he has to do. "If you lost the keys to my apartment, what did you do with your bag? I know you didn’t come here empty handed— Please tell me you didn’t pick the locks; I have to pay out of pocket for those repairs."

But even as he says it Roman frowns at the lock. There are signs of tampering: a few scratches on the outside cylinder casing of the deadbolt that are too thick to be from Roman’s own key and exhaustion. But Remus almost sounds surprised by the idea, as if this was the first time, he’d ever thought of breaking into a place he may or may not have half permission to be in and even if it weren’t, Roman’s only mostly whining about the repairs because Remus’s lockpicking skills have been at a master level since they were in middle school.

"I just stood outside your place and hit the buzzers until someone just opened the door,” Remus says stretching out on the couch and cracking his neck with a poppoppop. “And then when I got to your apartment, I just knocked, and your wacko roommate let me in."

Roman laughs sardonically as he closes the door behind himself and tosses his bag at the shoe rack he needs to reorganize later. He’s untying his laces when he realizes that Remus hasn’t congratulated himself on his witty joke and told him the actual truth about how he got in. He glances up at his twin and catches the minimal silhouette of Remus plucking at something from Roman’s mess of a coffee table.

"Remus….I don’t have a roommate."

"Well, she wasn’t your fucking girlfriend, you gay fuck," Remus says. “Hey, what are you doing with one of these? You always said that you hated the way your recorded voice sounds.”

“Huh?”

In response Remus waves whatever it was that he picked up and experimentally clicks a button on the side of it.

“—I’m going to punch him,” Virgil’s unmistakable voice crackles out into the otherwise silent apartment.

Remus’s head snaps to the side looking at the recording in his hand with wild eyes and he scrambles back to his feet. Roman’s heart is pounding in his throat, his blood is rushing in his ears, and a whole lot of things are making sense in a way that Roman really, really did not like them making sense.

“Wha….What did you say that my roommate looked like?” Roman says. “Remus, what did she look like?”

"I don’t know! I wasn’t paying attention! I was pissed off that I had to pay for an uber and demanded to know where you were! She said you were at work and that you would be back soon. I tossed my bag in here and nearly knocked over the laundry she was folding…. My bag’s gone. Fuck, that had my favorite jeans in there. And my Switch!”

“Remus,” Roman says, trying to swallow back the panic in his throat.

“She was wearing your sweatpants,” he says. “Motherfucker, she was wearing your sweatpants and eating one of those personal tubs of Cherry Garcia ice cream that only you like while folding laundry... and she smelled like bleach. A lot of bleach.”

The walls of Roman’s apartment suddenly seem to be closing in on them both.

"Out," Roman says, strangled and pleading and reaching for his sidearm. "Out of my apartment! Wait outside and use my phone to call Logan and tell him everything. I’m going to see what else she touched—"

“Your phone’s dead dumbass andI am not going to leave you alone in this apartment where a serial killer might have been hiding out!” Remus says and it sounds remarkably like he’s also panicking. Roman doesn’t think he’s ever actually seen Remus panic; Remus had always been a little too excited about his own lack of self-preservation, and there hadn’t ever been a situation that Remus hadn’t been able to handle and Roman decides that right here, right now, is a horrible time for him to learn to be scared.

Roman’s mouth opens to say something brilliant and focused, something that would make the dozens of FBI instructors he had proud of how calm he could be and how rational he could think, something that would convince Remus to listen to him and go outside away from possible dangers, something that would slow the rapidly building tidal wave of fear in his chest.

What comes out is a partial scream as one of the shadows in his apartment lunges at Remus from behind and slams solidly against his skull. Remus’s eyes go wide, then unfocused, and then his entire body drops like a concrete block in a pool.

Roman jolts towards him, but the sight of the person standing there stops him short: a young woman in black leggings and a pink Princess Peach T-shirt that Roman recognizes from his own closet, and Roman’s high school letterman over her shoulders. There’s Ruger LCP in her manicured hand, barrel pointed right down at Remus’s unmoving head, and she wedges her boot heel directly on his back, like a cat showing off the baby bird it’s killed.

Except the baby bird is Remus’s twin brother and Roman might be next.

He can’t think straight, can’t think at all; every time he tries to remember what protocol is for this, his brain takes a detour to how Remus crumpled like a soda can. Roman can’t tear his eyes from the gun at his twin’s head, not even to look at the intruder enough to memorize her features to tell someone if he makes it out of this. Remus is still as stone, as concrete, as a corpse and Roman can’t even tell if he’s still breathing, or if Roman’s already lost the person who’d always had his back in everything.

“I didn’t think you would be so quiet,” the killer says. Her tone is soft and warm and all the things that serial killers shouldn’t be. Oh, is that why all the victims had been younger and smaller? So that she could get control of them easily if they fought back? “Are you just so happy to see me? Surprised?”

"But….Andy Clupeidae," Roman says, voice trembling, his hand hovering over his gun holster, still not close enough to draw before she would get a chance to fire. "Clupeidae…. Fuck, that’s—That’s a family of fish, right? That’s why it sounded familiar.”

“Sardines, shads, and…herrings," the murderer says, wistfully proud of Roman. "The fact that he was wearing red today was just luck. Isn’t that funny?"

Roman chokes on his urge to laugh because it’s not and his wheezing, twisted, cramped lungs are fighting off hysteria. For someone who was a genius, who thought faster than most people could imagine, who passed every test the FBI threw at him with perfection, Roman can’t remember what he’s supposed to do.

He’s not even sure of what he can do.

His phone hesitates in back pocket, long dead, and as far as he knows no one would even think to check on them tonight. Even if he yelled for help, what would his neighbors do? Call the police? Come running to save him? Get murdered by the person in front of him who’s taken ten other lives like it was a game? Even if Roman ran, what would she do? Chase him? Or just kill Remus and make Roman live out the worst version of his life that he can imagine?

“I’ve been waiting for a long time to meet you, Roman,” the killer says, before he can get a handle of any of his thoughts. “Your team is so annoying, don’t you think? Every time I thought I would have gotten to talk to you alone, one of them always appeared….and then that awful man Logan Ackroyd made you stay at your office! I knew if I tried to visit you there, they wouldn’t understand! They would convince you I was wrong just like how everyone has always said I was wrong and bad!

“So, I stayed here, waiting for you the whole time…thinking you would be able to sneak back here and meet me like you’re supposed to! But your terrible team couldn’t even let you do that!”

((“Is the Gloria Scott referring to The Adventures of the Gloria Scott?” Janus cuts him off right before he says where he lives.))

((“No,” Logan said, “I want you to stay here.”))

((The look that Virgil and Janus shared before they left.))

“They knew.” Roman swallows hard. “They fucking knew and didn’t tell me—”

“It’s okay! I know it wasn’t your fault….” She says mistaking his horror for some other emotion Roman doesn’t even think he can fake. “I realized they just needed a reason to let you come home to me! You did so good solving my code! Even after this bitch showed up and started making fun of you and it!” She presses her boot down on Remus’s spine and Roman jerks reflectively forward before he can stop himself.

“Remus wasn’t—he didn’t—!” Roman stutters. “He wasn’t doing it maliciously! He’s just like that! Okay? You don’t have to hurt him!”

His eyes flick up to her face, hoping that maybe if Roman stops looking at him, Remus will shake off the hit to the head the same way he shook off water after Roman shoved him into the pool when they were kids: miraculously unhurt and smug in his movements, you really thought that could get me to shut up? HA!

“Don’t worry, you don’t have to defend him anymore. You’re never going to have to worry about anyone not taking you seriously ever again. I won’t let them, my detective.” She smiles at him, softly, so softly, as if she really believes she’s doing him a kindness.

Roman takes a step backwards, his back bumping against the closed door. The killer crowds forward, humming happily. “I’m so, so happy to finally meet someone just like me, Detective,” she says. “We’re going to be so happy together. Just you wait.”

[Chapter 2]

#sanders sides #remus sanders #roman sanders #logan sanders #virgil sanders #janus sanders #patton sanders #fbi agent #serial killers #Remus and Roman are good Brothers #Everyone actually adores Roman agenda #tw: guns #Kidnappings #The twins should get to be geniuses #because I said so

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greenninjagal-blog · 11 months

Text

Screaming Six Feet Under (ch2)

2 years ago I started a story about Virgil being kidnapped by a serial killer. Now I bring you the next chapter!

Summary: FBI Logan Ackroyd is chasing after a serial killer, but... why does he feel like he’s already failed to save the latest victim?

Words: 10292

Quick Taglist: @alias290 @chelsvans @coyboi300 @dwbh888 @glitchybina @faithfulcat111 @felicianoromano @holliberries @jemthebookworm @killerfangirl3 @mrbubbajones @musical-nerd18 @nonasficcollection @penguins-penguins @stricken-with-clairvoyancy @the-sunshine-dims @themagicheartmailman @thenaiads @treasureofpriam @vianadraws

Read on A03 || My General Writing Masterlist

“This place?” Remy Alyan asks. “You sure, babes?”

Logan’s nose twitches as Remy comes around the hood to stand next to him while clicking the button on his keychain that activates the locking mechanism in the car with a chirp. He’s still wearing sunglasses- those ridiculous, unprofessional aviators- despite the fact that it’s overcast and showing signs of quickly becoming a rainy day, and he’s finishing some caramel iced coffee concoction topped with so much whipped cream that the globs of it had overflowed the dome lid and he’d had to lick it off while navigating the mid afternoon traffic.

Logan does not believe in miracles, but he finds himself wondering every day how Remy has not managed to get himself brutally murdered in a horrific accident that would have been completely avoidable if he’d just had one single ounce of self control.

“Yes,” He says, in response to Remy’s unnecessary question. Logan would not have directed them to the wrong building. Not when time was of the essence now and he had wasted three hours with the less-than-helpful landlady who refused to come out here and then instead mailed him the keys to the building which had taken three more days to arrive.

Remy swirls the dregs of his drink in thought-- or at least Logan hopes it’s in thought. Sometimes he can’t tell if Remy actually thinks at all. He has a table in the back of his pocket notebook where he complies evidence for and against the argument: he was thinking when he managed identify the serial bank robbers they were chasing after, but he most definitely was not thinking when he announced that information to Logan as he was cashing a check and the bank robbers were directly behind them.

“Woulda thought that the heir to a billion dollar corporation would have picked a place a little less….” Remy says, “...ravaged.”

“He’s not the heir,” Logan responds, starting for the door to the apartment complex. “Come on, if this is a lead, we’ve already wasted enough time.”

He hears Remy hum something under his breath, a mutter that could have been anything from a complaint to a prayer, but by the time that Logan reached the green faded door Remy was right behind him again, eyeing the sidewalk and surrounding buildings like he was expecting them both to be gunned down and wanted to protect Logan until he could make it into the building.

Which, Logan thinks, should not have his heart fluttering. It’s utterly ridiculous: both the notion of them being gunned down in this neighborhood and the idea that Remy is doing anything that he wouldn’t do for any other member of the FBI. It doesn’t matter if it’s Logan inserting the key the landlady had given them, or if it was Kai, or Mitchell, or Elliot; Remy would have all their backs because that is who Remy is and Logan would do much better remembering that at his age.

Inside the building is just as dismal as the outside appearance, which Logan is not exactly surprised about. He’d shown up at the landlady’s house waving his badge and the woman had barely looked away from her TV. If a literal FBI investigation couldn’t get her attention, he doubted that the complaints of her tenants rated very high on her To-Do list. There’s an elevator but Logan and Remy share a single look and both head for the creaking wooden stairs instead.

They pass a few people in the narrowness: a woman with her teenage daughter, a young man on the phone, a few kids laughing at a joke and who stare after Remy with ogling eyes that makes Remy wink at them despite Remy being twice their ages. Logan tugs him by his sleeve up another flight before he can stop to chat while he’s on the clock, as helpful as any information gleaned about the person they're about to visit might be.

“You think there’s any reality where this is a totally unrelated thing?” Remy asks, conversationally, using the railing to help him up another step.

Logan crinkles his nose.

Remy snorts, teasing his straw between his teeth. “Yeah,” he says, like Logan had humored him with an actual answer. “I thought as much, too.”

“You’re welcome to stay in the car,” Logan says, and it’s not… he doesn’t mean it to come out as cold as it does. Remy stutter-steps so quickly Logan almost misses it entirely, but the other man covers it up quickly with faux laughter and a smile that he’s practiced in every mirrored surface he’s come across.

“What, and leave you to do all the work?” Remy swirls his drink in the air and darts forward the last several steps ahead of Logan. Their arms brush in the movement and Logan’s whole limb tingles in a way it definitely should not. Remy turns back to face him, offering a honey-sweet grin, and Logan stops two steps short of him. He can’t see Remy’s eyes because of the glasses, but he imagines the deep coffee brown of them are harboring the mist of memories he prefers to pretend don’t exist.

Logan is acutely aware that he never liked coffee before he met Remy, that he never paid attention to the amount of sugar and cream he takes until Remy was asking what he wanted because he was stopping at a place before work, that he never appreciated the bitter taste or the short bursts of energy it gave until he was sitting at his desk beside Remy at three in the morning finishing that paperwork in a comfortable silence. He knows that the smell should have made him nauseous, but whenever he’s close to Remy he finds the scent of roasted beans comforting and real and familiar. He knows he needs to stop taking these facts of his and shoving them in a box in the back of his mind to deal with never, but for now he counts the inches between them, inhales the aroma of coffee, and thinks of those allusive brown irises he’s only gotten to see thrice before.

“You can handle the kid,” Remy says, because he’s not the one distracted by eyes of all things. “I’ll go routing through the bedrooms and find all the fun stuff, okay babes?”

He leans back and pushes open the door before Logan can remind him that Remy doesn’t have the authority to make those calls between the two of them.

If it were anyone else…

Logan sighs to himself and follows after his partner. The third floor of the apartment building is decent, the floorboards creak and it’s more narrow than Logan would have settled for in an optimal location for a home. They can hear bits and pieces of the separate lives behind the doors as they walk towards the door they need: music playing, kids screeching, the hum of an extremely loud vacuum, laughter, loud arguments--

Remy jerks his head towards their target, where there’s nothing but cold empty silence behind it. Logan rolls his shoulders, steps up to the door, and knocks thrice on it.

“Ekans residency?” Logan Ackroyd asks the moment that the door opens. He’s wrong, of course; the apartment, even on the lease, is still Ekans and Storm, and still effective until next week. Logan had learned early on that getting one fact wrong about the case could tell a lot about the people he was dealing with.

The person at the door is Janus Dante Ethan Ekans, who looks less like his yearbook photo than Logan would have thought he might: where the file has him with bright golden hair and a dangerously coy smirk, the real thing has dyed black stripes along his layers and a weary expression that makes him appear several years older than he actually is. There are shadows under his eyes that speak to his recent lack of sleep, and a hollowness to his face that whispers of his new diet of just not eating things.

Logan also guesses that he’s wearing the same outfit that he has for the past three days, based on the wrinkles and the casualness of it. His cheeks are a light pink, still raw from tears, which Logan would have thought he’d stop shedding by now. Curious.

“It’s Ekans and Storm,” Ekans says in a tone that Logan believes is supposed to be haughty but it comes out as more tired. “What do you want?”

Behind Logan he can hear his partner slurp on the last dregs of his whipped cream monstrosity, and he does his best to keep his face clear of his personal annoyance. He holds up his badge for the young man in the doorway to see and hopes that Remy is doing the same, so that they might appear at least a little coordinated.

“FBI, wow,” Ekans says unimpressed. He leans against the door as if to hide his exhaustion but it only furthers Logan’s assessment of him: he hasn’t been sleeping, barely been functioning since the start of the process. “What can I do for you, agents?”

The politeness is fake. Their presence makes him upset. Although Logan thinks if they traded proverbial shoes, he would also be upset at the FBIs presence at his door slightly after four in the afternoon on a Saturday.

“I'm Agent Ackroyd and this is my partner Agent Alyan. We have some questions regarding the Missing Person’s report you filed. I was wondering if we might come in for a moment,” Logan says.

Ekans snorts, “What, you think I tied him up and am keeping him under my bed as we speak?”

Remy shifts to lower his aviators and look the guy over. “Babes, I don’t think you could keep a pet rock under your bed right now, with how little you’ve been taking care of yourself.” Ekans stiffens and glares at him, but Remy just swishes his empty plastic cup and straw at him. “Come on, cutie. Let’s have a little talk.”

Logan wants to be infuriated with his lack of professionalism, but Remy just has that magic touch. He can see the moment that Ekans gives in, where he accepts that they aren’t going to go away and let him be miserable in peace, the way his guarded expression flickers and gives hints of the hurricane of anger-fear-worry. Ekans stands back in the hall and opens the door for them to come in.

Perhaps that is why he and Remy have been paired together so often, Logan muses to himself. His own steady adherence to the rules makes him unapproachable to the common person and Remy’s utter inability to hold himself accountable makes him dismissible to their superiors. Together they managed to work out a balance, a Rosetta Stone of sorts: They learned enough of each other’s languages to be interpreters in their respective worlds.

Logan wonders if he will ever stop feeling like an alien race when talking to Remy. Three years sounds like a long time in theory, but Logan still finds Remy entirely perplexing.

The inside of the apartment is tidy and neat. Logan can appreciate the calming pale tones of the walls and the order of the place even if it makes it appear as if it hasn’t been lived in at all. There are picture hooks in the front hall but no pictures in sight, the front closet is partially open and has too many hangers for the two jackets hanging in it. Ekans closes the door behind them before herding them further in.

It’s a nice apartment. At least, it’s nicer than Logan had had when he was in his last year of college: the kitchen has a stove, a sink, a refrigerator and a microwave. The counter has a coffee machine that has seen better days and a toaster that Logan doubts is up to fire code. The sink is full of dirty dishes, and there are sticky notes on the fridge door and a few that have fallen to the ground, a single cabinet is still open showing an empty pantry except for what looks like a generic store brand of granola. But there’s no sign of pests or leakage and that in itself makes it better than what Logan had ever had in college. Past the kitchen is a long hall with a door on either side and ending in what Logan assumes is a bathroom.

More presently, Ekans points them to the living room. There’s a grey sofa that doubles as a pull out bed facing a TV that has the news playing at a volume so low it might as well have been muted. There are a handful of blankets thrown in a mess on one end of the couch, with a pillow on the other and an empty bowl on the coffee table next to three separate mugs with varying levels of tea in them that don’t look like they’ve been touched in a while. There’s an empty vodka bottle hiding around the foot of the couch, just out of sight and it’s gone entirely when Ekans manages a flick of his toe. There are three separate bookshelves in the room, filled with novels and manuscripts and binders marked in the same penmanship and Remy gravitates towards them immediately without more than a glance towards Logan, flicking his aviator glasses up to settle in his dusty blond curls. His hand goes out to rub on the spines of a few of the novels, but--

“Don’t,” Ekans says almost desperately and Remy tosses a casual look back at him with a questioning raised eyebrow, and in the same motion he flicks the glasses back over his eyes.

“These yours, babe?”

Ekans’s nose crinkles before he can smooth out his expression. His eyes flick towards Logan, like he’s calculating how much information he is willing to give up. Curious, yet again. Logan expected it, predicted it really, from the files they had on Ekans and his short yet considerably reckless run-ins with the police as a younger man.

“No, they’re Virgil’s,” Ekans says finally, with a sour note in his tone. “He doesn’t like anyone touching them.” He picks up a blanket from the couch and folds it in half and then in half again just to have something to do with his hands. “His room is the door on the left.”

Remy glances towards Logan, and he nods. The other man slips back from the bookshelf and heads in the direction that Ekans had pointed out, pausing only when Ekans snakes an arm out and snags Remy’s upper arm, to hold him in place and letting the blanket in his other hand drop unceremoniously to the floor.

Remy’s eyes flick from the grip to Ekans’s face. “Problem?”

“Cup,” Ekans says shortly.

The plastic coffee cup with the straw hovers in Remy’s hand, looking mostly like Remy himself had forgotten he was holding it. Logan recalls dozens of crime scenes where he had picked up after the other man, who tended to leave his cups on desk, tables, the floors, and even once in an unlit fireplace while he was investigating a lead-- on two separate occasions he’s had to stop one of the forensic scientists from collecting it as part of the evidence.

Still Remy with coffee was better than a Remy without: he was surly when he didn’t have caffeine, prone to headaches, and got reckless with his decisions. Logan tolerates his atrocious habits in the name of keeping the sanity of everyone else, and has long since decided he isn’t thanked enough for it.

Neither of Ekans nor Remy says anything for a solid minute; Logan waits quietly as they talk with everything but words. A tilt of Remy’s head, a flick of Ekans’s lips, a shift of weight, and a clench of fingers and then something flickers in both of their expressions for a moment, something more vulnerable than Logan thinks either of them mean it to be. Like ripples in a puddle, gone before anyone is there to realize how significant it is.

Remy lets him take the coffee cup and Ekans stares at the spot Remy had been for another twenty seconds after the man has disappeared down the hall and into the room that supposedly belongs to the victim, whistling a made up tune as he does.

((Logan thinks the whistling oversells the bit; Remy has a habit of trying too hard to act like he’s not bothered, not affected, not emotionally compassionate, not caring at all and every time Logan thinks about telling Remy about his tell, his stomach twists with a fluttering feeling he resolutely won’t name.))

Logan lets Ekans have his moment, at least, before he clears his throat. Ekans’s head snaps up and he sets his piercing gaze on Logan.

“I didn’t kill him,” Ekans says immediately.

Logan blinks at him, slightly disconnected. “Was I supposed to believe you had?”

“That’s what the rest of your people believe,” Ekans says. He kicks the blanket by his feet back behind him with the empty vodka bottle and heads into the kitchen where he opens the floor corner cabinet to reveal a trash can and throws down the plastic coffee cup with more force than is strictly necessary. It bounces and nearly falls back out on account of how full the can is already, but Ekans’s pretends he doesn’t see as he kicks the cabinet closed again.

“Curious,” Logan says, adjusting his glasses to get a better look at the young man in the glare of the artificial light. “My people?”

Ekans waves a hand in the air, possibly dismissive as he grabs a rag from a dish next to the sink and runs it under water. “Your people, the police, the FBI, the CIA if they decide to drop in as well. They questioned me.”

“It's standard procedure to question the families and friends of a missing person.”

Ekans snorts, turning off the water and wringing the rag. He wipes down a counter with his back pointedly to Logan, and Logan can’t decide if it’s because he doesn’t want to look at Logan, or if he’s trying to hide his own expression.

“They weren’t really asking questions. They already decided that I killed Vir….” Ekans trails off and clears his throat as he makes a large swipe with his rag. “That I killed Virgil. Needless to say, they weren’t exactly the most helpful this past week, Agent Ackroyd. What reassurance do I have that this won’t be another round of ‘Pin It On The Roommate’?”

Logan watches him scrub at a spot on the counter, “I see. I apologize on their behalf. I’m sure that was quite frustrating for you.”

Ekans freezes. Logan watches as he folds at the elbows and leans over the counter, with his head bowed and lets out an audible shaky breath. “I don’t want your half hearted apologies.”

What do you want? Logan doesn’t ask the question, but then again, he doesn’t exactly need to. He might not be approachable like Remy, and certainly never anyone’s first pick for casual conversation, but he can see the poetic hollowness to Ekans’s movements, the clipped tension in his words, the sorrow swelling in the things Ekans doesn’t say.

And even if Logan couldn’t see it from Ekans himself, he’d only have to look around the apartment made for two and lived in by one.

Logan takes a few steps so that he’s inside the kitchen area as well. Ekans doesn’t turn to look at him, doesn’t pick up his rag, doesn’t breathe at all.

“Ask your questions and get out of my apartment,” he says in a voice that is too empty to be fooling anyone, much less Logan. An agent of twenty years and a fool for none of them-- or perhaps a fool for all of them, he supposes when he still caught himself pacing after Remy took a bullet to the shoulder, the gut, the calf, and he had to remind himself that the placings were non-lethal and Remy was going to be fine and there was no reason to feel disappointed when he had to learn about Remy’s discharge from an agent on another team who found out before him.

“Very well,” Logan says, clearing his throat, and waving away memories of Remy’s scream piercing the air. “In your report, Mr. Ekans, you mentioned that you’re unsure of the time of his disappearance. Why?”

“As stated in my report, agent, because I hadn’t seen him for nearly twenty four hours before I realized he was missing. It took another three hours to collaboratively work out that no one knew his whereabouts, and who exactly talked to him last.”

“Ah yes,” Logan says calmly. “Anton Diemos. A close friend of Storm’s. Good Kid.”

“Sure.”

Logan watches over Ekans’s frame for a moment. “You don’t sound to be in agreement.”

“Anton and I didn’t hang out. I only ever heard about him when Virgil was complaining about something he did.”

“Was that often?”

“I’m not going to incriminate someone just because I didn’t enjoy his bland lifestyle choices and misguided declarative actions of loyalty.” Ekans says with a huff, “He took an hour to get back to me when I had texted him, and the first thing he did was threaten to block me. That’s all.”

“That was because of the argument?”

Ekans freezes, “What argument?”

“The one that had you running to spend the night somewhere that wasn’t your own apartment,” Logan says.

“I didn’t say anything about an argument. Here or in my report, agent,” Ekans says, coldly.

“But you had one.”

“How could you possibly know that?”

Which is the admission Logan had been waiting for: an opening that he latches on to with all the ferocity he’s known for. He settles back on his heels and folds his arms behind himself. “What was the argument about?”

“It’s unrelated to the case.”

“Is it?”

“Yes,” Ekans spits whirling around, Logan thinks he knows why the police thought that they had been looking at a murderer. “It is, agent. We were roommates. We get into tiffs and occasionally one of us leaves for the night and doesn’t return for twenty four fucking hours.”

He’s shaking, Logan notes. His expression is promoting all the anger he can, but underneath it, his hands are wringing the washcloth in a motion that speaks only of regret and fear. It makes him feel old, Logan realizes. Ekans is so young, barely starting out his life, barely knowing what he wants to do, barely done anything and yet their paths have crossed and Logan’s line of work very rarely follows with a happy ending.

Ekans must have realized that when he saw the badges, or perhaps even before that when he saw them at the door and realized it wasn’t Virgil coming back with some type of apology on his lips.

“Your lease was expiring,” Logan says and Ekans flinches so hard his leg slams into the cabinet under him with a bang. Logan pretends he doesn’t notice. “I talked to your landlord. Storm renewed; you did not.”

“His name is Virgil, agent.”

“Was your argument about the lease?”

Ekans snarls, “what do you think?”

“I think that you and Storm did not discuss your lack of renewal beforehand, thus leading to an explosive argument that incorporated dozens of other aspects of your time living together. When you got tired of arguing you left for the night, and Storm was alone for most of an evening in a location that reminded him of you to the point where he drove himself to leave it. From there he went to a location that was less likely to remind him of you, met someone who looked and acted nothing like you, and then proceeded to make an unfortunate, but entirely understandable misjudgement.”

Logan tilts his head slightly watching Ekans’s expression crumble to bits and pieces, shattering like glass when a bullet hits it, falling to so many pieces that there’s no chance of putting that facade of his back together.

“Is that the conclusion you also came to, Mr. Ekans?”

The air figuratively simmers between them, hot to the point where Logan suspects Ekans finds it hard to breathe. His calm and tired personality is gone and Logan finds himself face to face with the true Janus Dante Ethan Ekans: the juvenile delinquent whose rich parents cut him off and sent him away to school at the ripe thirteen years old, and who had since taken his anger at the world out on everything. Three accounts of driving while intoxicated, another two from loitering and littering, and records of being difficult and foul mouthed with the police for every instance he could; Logan had read over the report on his phone the entire drive and still suspected that several details and instances had been omitted from written record.

“Why did you come here to ask me questions you already know the answers to?” Ekans hisses. “Is this a joke to you, Agent Ackroyd? Are you finding this funny?”

“On the contrary,” Logan says. “I’m finding it informative.”

Predictably, Ekans throws the rag at him. Logan barely moves to get out of the way and it lands with a wet flop on the carpet of the living area.

"Wow, new record, Lo," Remy calls from the doorway to Virgil Storm's room, gently pulling off his white surgical gloves. "Usually it takes them ten minutes to start throwing things at you."

"I'd hardly call that an achievement," Logan says. "How's the room?"

"Looks like my college dorm from back in the day."

"When was that? Seventy years ago?" Ekans says acidly. Logan is almost surprised he doesn’t start frothing at the mouth.

"Ouch, kid," Remy says flippantly, because he’s always been the sort to brush off insults and digs and backhanded compliments like water off a duck’s back.

((That was the reason why they had been paired together to start off: their superiors had hoped that Logan’s stiff adherence to the rules would make Remy wilter under their scoldings, and instead Logan’s heart had learned to jumping jacks at the sound of Remy’s brash dismissals.))

“Mr. Ekans,” Logan says.

“Get out of my house.”

Remy leans against the wall stretching his used gloves in his hands, until they snap. “Babes,” he says, and Logan ponders for a second if he’s talking to their host or to him.

“I said get out!” Ekans yells.

“You really don’t want us to do that, cutie,” Remy says. “You think anyone else is gonna stop by with the answers to all the questions you have?”

“Is that what you’re claiming to have?” Ekans shoots back. He grips the counter behind him so hard that his knuckles turn white. Logan would be impressed with his self control to keep himself from launching at Remy and ripping out his throat, but instead he can see the shaking of Ekans’s legs, his buckled knees, his short sharp breaths and makes a note that the only thing between Ekans’s and the floor is that grip on the counter.

“Answers?” Ekans laughs, before Remy says anything. His smile is sharp and lethal and Logan thinks that for a child that grew up hundreds of miles from his parents, he sure seemed to have picked up their shark-like smiles. “No, that’s not what you have. You’re here to tell me he’s dead, aren’t you? He’s dead or good as dead now. You’re here, in my home, in his room, and you have the gall to tell me you have answers when all you have are half baked assumptions and shiny little badges! Get out of my house and don’t come back until you have Virgil Raiden Storm.”

The room hums and buzzes with emotions, something watery and angry and heavy enough that Logan feels it settle over his own skin. It’s cold and oppressive, strangling and familiar, so very different from the sizzling heat and not different at all: Ekans radiates with grief so strong that it flavors the air and makes it hard to breathe for any of the three of them.

Logan is well acquainted with the emotion: a victim by proxy of it. How many families had he had to break the news too? How many tears had he seen shed, fists raised, mouths spitting with angry denial? How many times had he been required to tell someone that they person they had been clinging to desperately to, the person that Logan was supposed to save, the person that never deserved it, the person that was always gone too soon, too young, too violently-- how many times had Logan had to say that their beloved wasn’t coming back to them?

Too many times. Logan is too old, and he feels his bones ache in a way that can’t be fixed with vitamins and posture stretches.

“Please,” Ekans says, in a tone so raw it feels like something that Logan should not be hearing. “Get out. Let me hold on to my hope a little longer.”

“Gurl,” Remy says, utterly unmoved, utterly unimpressed, utterly Remy-like. “Hope is dimestore temporary replacement shit. You hold on to that all you want; we don’t want it. We’ll get you the real thing soon enough.”

Ekans wobbles. His expression is lost. His head swivels between Remy and Logan stiffly, robotically, hesitantly and he doesn’t blink as if he’s under the ridiculous notion that blinking will make either of both of them disappear from his house the same way that Storm had. Or perhaps he’s waiting for Logan’s refute-- a correction maybe? If he’s waiting for Logan to say they don’t intend on getting Virgil Storm back to Ekans’s mundane apartment, he’s going to be waiting for a long time.

A long time that they don’t have.

“You have questions,” Logan says. “As do we. I propose a short game: You ask one question and Agent Alyan or myself will answer as honestly and accurately as we are allowed, and in turn we will ask a question and you will answer as honestly and accurately as you can.”

Ekans blinks slowly, swallows harder, squeezes the counter with his left hand and uses the right to rub his neck down to his collarbone.

“Will this…” He says, softly. “Will this help you find him?”

“Undoubtedly,” Logan says. “I’m not in the habit of wasting time when there are cases to be solved.”

“I’ll say,” Remy mutters with a crooked smile that doesn’t match his tone. Logan thinks for a moment he imagined the words slipping out of the other man’s mouth at all, but Remy waves his fingers in a dismissal at Logan’s confused look.

Ekans is quiet for a second longer. Then he exhales explosively, and his other hand lets go of the counter. He teeters on his feet uneven and out of place in his own kitchen. He looks around like he’s not sure what he’s doing at all, but then he meets Logan’s gaze again and steels himself.

“Okay,” He says. “Okay.”

Remy offers a smile, and Logan thinks if he were any less better at reading Remy’s expressions he’d believe it was genuine. Not that Remy isn’t being genuine, that he doesn’t care, that he’s just humoring them both, but Logan picks out the tension in his body even from a room away.

“Couch, babes,” Remy says, in a way that should have been a suggestion if it hadn’t nearly sent Ekans to the floor. “All the best secrets come out on the couch.”

((It’s not often that Logan wonders what he missed in college, when all his friends were going to parties, getting drunk, and making the most of their lives without their parents breathing down their necks, but Remy certainly makes him think about it. What secrets had Remy’s alcohol laden tongue told while sitting on a couch long before he’d become the man he was today? What secrets would Logan have been willing to tell him if they had met all those years ago?))

Ekans swallows and nods at them both, waving a hand in the direction of the living area again and waiting patiently for Remy to saunter down the hall, and Logan to mercifully turn his back. He pretends that he doesn’t hear Ekans’s sharp inhale or the wobbling two steps that it takes him to find his balance after all this.

Logan situates himself on the floor, with his back to the TV, and the door to the apartment in the corner of his vision. His knees whine and groan with his age, because he’s old now, and his body is withering much faster than he’d been told it would. Remy plops on the couch, throwing his arms up and leaning casually back in a motion that has Logan’s traitorous eyes following the arc of his biceps and the tug of his shirt teasing out of the tuck. His glasses reflect back the TV screen up until Ekans plucks the remote from another cushion and turns off the TV altogether.

The silence that follows is as close to oppressive as Logan thinks silences could be. The buzz of the TV hadn’t been noticeable, but the lack of it was impossible to ignore.

“Well?” Ekans asks, sitting delicately on the sofa opposite of Remy, with a generous amount of space and a dozen blankets in a pile between them. He looks small, young, hurt as he curls up and pretends not to be small, young or hurt. Logan wonders who he’s pretending for. “Who goes first?”

“Our turn first,” Remy replies easily. “Who else knew about your lease disagreement?”

Ekans’s fingers wring again without anything solid to hold onto. Logan’s eyes flick to the abandoned wet rag on the floor to their left, before settling back on the young man.

“I don’t know.”

Remy’s mouth opens back up, but Ekans shoots him a glare. “I truly don’t. The only person I told was an acquaintance of mine, Missy, who I was… am… planning on staying with when the lease expires. She was the one that I stayed with the entire night that Virgil went missing, and she had been the one that drove me to the apartment to help me pick up my stuff when we realized that Virgil wasn’t there. If you want to throw around technical terms, she’s my alibi and she’s not above spitting in the face of detectives who keep trying to accuse me of murder.” He doesn’t look at either of them, instead finding the bland carpet interesting. “Virgil didn’t know until that day, and when I contacted his friends, they knew that we had gotten into a row, but not what it was about, but that doesn’t mean that Virgil hadn’t told them, or that Virgil hadn’t shouted it at the rooftops at some point.”

Logan watches Ekans curl and uncurl his fingers for a moment in thought, but when he opens his mouth what comes out is not more information.

“You said you’d answer my questions completely honestly,” the younger man notes.

“I said I would answer to the best of my ability, yes,” Logan says, because it’s not the same thing, and Ekans is aware of that. He feels ridiculously like for a moment he’s on the stand in front of a jury presenting his evidence for court-- which he’s managed to avoid having to do personally for a whole year now. Curious.

“Why is the FBI interested in Virgil?” Ekans asks.

Remy raises an eyebrow, mouthing out a series of words that Logan recognizes as a meme but not enough to make any sense of it. Remy crosses his slender legs in smooth motion and settles back like he’s debating napping.

“I don’t suppose you’ve been following the news recently Mr. Ekans,” Logan says back straight, waiting for the miniscule shake of his host’s head before he continues on. “About a year ago there was a report of a girl missing without a trace two towns over. Young, scholarly, she’d been out with friends at a bar and when her friends were wrapping up to go home, they couldn’t find her. Several months later, a young man in the physics department at the local community college also went missing without a trace from a bar, one town over. Three months ago another young man interning with the historians society in this town went missing without a trace. From a bar in town. One month ago another girl from--”

“Jericho,” Ekans whispers, faintly. Logan thinks that is a good thing he’s sitting down now because he doesn’t look like he would be able to hold himself up much longer. “She was the TA for a psychology class I took freshman year. She graduated last year. I...She was....”

Logan meets Ekans gaze, mulling over his next words. “Do you recall the rainstorm from two weeks ago?”

Ekans’s jaw clenches so tightly Logan doubts they’ll get him to speak another word the entire night, but he nods all the same.

“The bodies of the first two victims were found in a shallow grave along the hiking paths two hours outside of this city, when the rains half washed the top layer away. The third victim was found a little deeper a few yards away. The fourth, Jericho Kale, hasn’t been found yet.”

“Y…you,” Ekans croaks, “You think whoever took them… took Virgil.”

Logan glances at Remy in a rare moment of weakness he wishes he didn’t have to take. Remy’s eyes are focused on the shelves of books intently rather than the conversation.

“We don’t think,” Remy says, reaching up to assure his glasses are still in place. “Ackroyd and I are part of a specialized team of FBI profilers. Not to brag or anything but we tend to be decently good at our jobs, sweetheart. We’ve been working on this case since the bodies were discovered and we’ve built this nifty little thing called a geographic profile of our kidnapper. This apartment is right in the sweet spot of this creep’s comfort zone. There is some good news, though.”

“Which is?” Ekans croaks.

Remy flicks a hand at Logan instead of answering and Logan almost feels apologetic. But they’re low on time already thanks to the police taking their time notifying Logan’s team of the abduction and the landlady’s inability to take her eyes from her TV. Virgil Storm’s life was on the line and Logan unfortunately has a habit of choosing to save a life over comforting a witness.

“In your best estimation,” Logan says, “how would Storm react when his life is threatened?”

Ekans blinks at him, and Logan wonders for a moment if he’s about to launch across the coffee table and send them both tumbling into the TV. He’s sure that will look excellent in his report later; perhaps Remy might even help him wipe off the blood once he’s done laughing at them both.

But the moment passes and the burning in Ekans’s eyes hollows out to an exhaustion that’s even more fierce. He sucks on his lip for a second, breathing in and then exhaling before he manages to get the words to come out.

“He…” Ekans hesitates. “Virgil has generalized anxiety. There are often times when I wake up in the middle of the night and have to coax him from his own head when his fears block out his perception of reality and leave him immobile. But... There was a time, last halloween, we went to a haunted house together and instead of freezing up he fought back. Left a killer clown with a deep black eye and we’re now banned from that haunted house.” Ekans lets out a shuddering breath and wraps his arms around himself.

“If someone kidnapped him… I can’t see him not fighting back once he realized what was happening. Whoever it was would not have gotten out of it without visible bruises.”

Logan nods. He expected as much, and from a glance at Remy, he must have picked up on most of it as well from when he had glanced around in Storm’s bedroom; it wouldn’t have been the first time that they had seen similar victims in their line of work.

That, however, left them with a precarious situation.

“What’s the good news?” Ekans asks in a whisper. It sounds foolishly like he doesn’t want to know the answer, but can’t help asking it.

Logan steeples his fingers. “You are aware of the statistics on adults being kidnapped, yes?”

Ekans’s sharp inhale is just as telling as his expletive.

“According to the analysis of the bodies we’ve found, this guy doesn’t adhere to the usual 24 hours and done,” Remy says. “He keeps his victims alive-”

“For how long?” Ekans asks almost before Remy has finished his piece. “I know it’s not my turn but please. How long?” He swivels so he’s completely facing Logan, leaning forward so that his knees hit the coffee table. “Am I holding onto hope for a corpse, Agent Ackroyd?”

Curious, Logan thinks. It's not often that the families of the victims trust him over Remy’s honey-ed casual tone. Logan, despite his best efforts, has always been the one that prompts grisled cold reality. Remy called it “the rain during a funeral” approach once long ago and Logan still finds himself mulling over it. He told them the truth, the most honest answers, the ones that are expected leaving very little room for anything but their acceptance that this was what had happened-- just like rain during a funeral.

“I don’t know,” Logan says. “It depends on Storm at this point.”

He’d seen the bodies-- both he and Remy had seen the physical corpses at the grave site and the medical examiner’s reports once everything had been cleaned up as well as they could. He’d seen the twisted necks, the fragments of bones shattered so thoroughly that the medical examiners needed a second person to help figure out how to put it back together, the dark sludge of the partially liquefied bodies that were well on their way to being just skeletons. Logan had seen a hundred cases like these before, but he still felt his stomach drop when they matched the dental records to the missing kids.

Real, once living, kids. Who’d barely started their lives. Who had families and friends and dreams. Who hadn’t had a chance to be someone to remember and who were unrecognizable by the time that Logan and Remy were alerted to the case.

“We have time,” Logan tells Ekans. “Not a lot. The examiner’s reports say that our unsub keeps his victims for weeks.”

Ekans opens his mouth and then very smartly closes it again. He looks down at the shag carpet miserably, and Logan thinks that both him and Remy let out silent sighs of relief. He didn’t ask what happened to those kids in those weeks and Logan in his honesty didn’t have to answer with what they knew.

“Hey, doll,” Remy says to Ekans. “Tell us about him.”

Ekans looks a bit like he doesn’t know who Remy is talking about so Remy waves a finger around in a circle.

“What is he? A nerd?” Remy asks. “I haven’t seen this many books outside of a library ever.”

“You’ve been in a library before?” Ekans bites, and Logan wonders if Remy is also remembering that case from three years ago with the serial arsonist who targeted locations on her school campus where her ex boyfriend liked to hang out, and Remy almost died in the fire set in the school library while saving a student. The scent of smoke wafts through the room for a moment but Remy just smiles, like he doesn’t smell it at all.

Ekans lets out a breath and stares at the floor again. “He’s a history major. He collects books in his free time.” Ekans nods to the corner where Remy had stood when they first walked in. “He keeps the first editions over there, signed copies to the left, accurate renditions of history over there and books he always says he wants to burn for their content are under there. He hates when people… when anyone but him touches them. I’m not sure where he keeps getting more, but every other week it feels like he got a new one that he was bringing everywhere.”

Logan hadn’t noticed Ekans’s small smile until it was fading again.

“He… he’s always reading. Would have read straight through lunch and dinner if I didn’t threaten to set any of them on fire. Even when I got him to put the book down he would spend anytime we were together just… talking about whatever he was reading. He spent more time paying attention to those damn books than to….” Ekans blinks hard, fast and he runs his tongue over his teeth so hard Logan is surprised he doesn’t cut himself when he looks at the ceiling.

“He’s smart,” Ekans says. “One of the smartest people I know. But he’s such a stupid dumbass.

“Aren’t they all?” Remy muses with him. “They’re so busy using 100% of their brains that us 10%-ers go basically unnoticed.”

“That’s a myth actually,” Logan says. “Humans use most of their brains all the time, even for the smallest of actions as shown through positron emission tomography, better known as PET, and fMRIs scans. Scientists have yet to find a piece of the brain that humans don’t use.”

Remy and Ekans both continued to stare at each other, as if he hadn’t said a single word. Logan feels vaguely like he missed something despite having been present and paying attention. The corners of Remy’s lips twitch in a way that Logan has always associated with Remy speaking that private language Logan isn’t yet privy too.

“Oh,” Ekans says.

“Oh,” Remy echoes in what could be confused with embarrassed agreement. “Yeah, I get ya. You still think I won't understand what that argument was really about?”

Logan opens his mouth to say something, but closes it before he can figure out what it is he wants to say, what he should say. He knows that this apartment is not a place that he’s supposed to be, but for the first time he feels like a true intruder: the silence is filled with words that Logan doesn’t understand, spoken through movements that Logan can’t see, and coming rapidly to a conclusion that Logan has no way to prepare for.

Remy is still enough to not give anything away, no clues, no hints, nothing.

“What does he do to them?” Ekans asks in a small voice. What is he doing to Virgil?

Remy double taps his shoe. “I think…. That should stay in the case details, hun.”

Ekans hugs himself around his middle, curling ever so slightly.

“We...“ Ekans starts and stops, “During one of those lunches when I actually got him to put down one of his books and we actually talked, we joked about taking over the world. I grew up speaking Japanese, Chinese, and learned Korean for fun once; he had Spanish, French, and Latin while working on German. I printed out a map of the world and we spent the evening bickering over what parts of the world we would take.”

“Is that the one hanging on the ceiling over his bed?” Remy asks.

Ekans blinks something impossibly soft and vulnerable in his eyes. “He kept it?”

“You thought he wouldn’t?”

Ekans swallows hard, refusing to look at them. “Why would I think otherwise? Really, tell me what I was supposed to think after three years of living with him? Nothing I did ever got his attention in any way that mattered.”

Logan’s mouth opens but Remy does a jerk of his head that tells him to shut it. Logan isn’t exactly sure what Ekans means-- pretty decently sure that they’re no longer talking about the sentimentality of a map-- but Remy seems to be tracking, following the unsaid things in the conversation far better than Logan could ever. He’s in his element, and Logan trusts him to handle it.

Honestly, why had Remy ever insisted on checking out the room instead of talking to Ekans in the beginning?

“Three years is a pretty long time,” Remy says.

Ekans shrugs to himself. “I haven’t talked to my parents in longer.”

“By your choice or theirs?”

“They’re not invited to my graduation if that’s what you’re wondering. I don’t think I could refrain from making it in the tabloids again for punching my mother in the face if that were the case.”

Remy nods, rolling his tongue in his mouth accepting that answer. “Three years, babes… I can’t imagine. I’m only on year two now.”

“I can’t imagine why.”

Remy’s lips flicker. “I’m stubborn. What’s your excuse?”

“He’s an idiot.”

Something about that seems as if it should be humorous, but neither Ekans nor Remy smile. Logan trails his eyes over the books on the shelves closest to him just to have something to focus on that makes sense.

Most of them are novels that Logan never had seen, and never would get a chance to read considering that he’s been stuck on the same book for the past six months even through the hours upon hours of endless cross country traveling he’s done for cases. It seemed that every time he had tried to set himself up to read there was something else that had appeared: a report to catch up on, social media posts to sort through, a new movie that Remy demanded he needed to see…

“He said I was selfish,” Ekans says. “For planning to move out. I should have told him right then. I should have…I almost did. But then he called me ungrateful and there are just some words that…well.”

He looks at his hands. “Well, suddenly I was thirteen again and my parents were shipping me across the country and cutting me out of the family.”

Remy didn’t make a face to show what he thought of that at all: carefully neutral and unjudging. “What did you do?”

“Ran,” Ekans says. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you us Ekanss are all cowards? I left him here in this apartment, sitting right where you are right now, Agent. I left because when I was storming down those stairs it was easier to feel like I hadn’t…fallen short again.”

He rubs his eyes, brushing away the beginning streaks of tears before they could truly form. “Billions of romance novels passed through those hands and you’d think-- you’d think he’d…”

Ah. Logan blinks. He recognizes suddenly, uncomfortably, bits and pieces of the hidden language that Remy and their witnesses speak exclusively. His mind decodes the conversation, playing back the grief on Ekans’s face, made only deeper by the lack of his own personal possessions lining the apartment that was a physical manifestation of his life with Storm.

And if Logan also thinks of the taste of coffee or meaningless tally in the back of his personal notebook, well that is his privately to know about.

Instead he looks back at Ekans. “Are you certain that he does not reciprocate your romantic feelings?”

Ekans’s face pales considerably, almost as if Logan had told him that he had Storm’s body in his trunk right now. He grabs the edge of the couch with a white knuckled grip, squeezing until the cloth fabric covering threatens to split at the seams.

"Christ, Logan," Remy squawks, tossing up his aviators so that Logan might recognize the frustrations in his coffee brown irises and Logan knows immediately that he said the wrong thing. "Shoot him in the foot next time, will you? It'll hurt less."

“What? I would never,” Logan protests. “I’ve sworn an oath to protect--”

But then Ekans is laughing. Sardonically and scraping and sound very much as if he wished he was washing it down with the bottle of vodka under the sofa.

“Agent,” he says. “The only thing that Virgil Storm has had any affection for is writing essays about Revolutionary War submarines. I had three years to try to be more exciting than dead people, and I finally accepted that I was not and will never be.”

Logan is not in the profession of digging graves deeper so he wisely clamps his mouth shut and refrains from offering yet another comment that might trespass some social nicety that no one had ever given him a rulebook about.

“You look like you need a stiff drink,” Remy says gathering the boy’s attention back to him. “And frankly once we get this all sorted out and get your boy back to you, I’ll need one too. Where can I go for that, hon?”

Ekans blinks. “...There’s a Glory Days down the road if you’re just looking for a drink. But there’s a cocktail bar in town called Weekend Habit that has decent prices or Bliss if you want to be over charged but have the option to hop next door to Astro. There’s a liquor store by the shopping plaza called Val’s as well.” He glances towards where his own bottle of vodka is hiding. “I have some friends who like to party.”

“Gurl, if I was a business major, I’d also have some friends who’d like to party,” Remy laughs at his own joke. “But you didn’t mention Luxe or Zion.”

Ekans frowns. “I’ve never heard of a Luxe before, but Zion? That’s the bar nearly on the outside of the city, right? I mean if you wanted to go an extra hour and a half for traffic to it then, go ahead and waste your own gas.”

Logan and Remy share a look out of the corner of their eyes, but unfortunately Ekans is just aware enough to catch it.

“What was that? What’s Zion got to do with anything?”

There’s a twitch of Remy’s fingers that signal he’s giving Logan the decision to reveal more or less information. But frankly Logan is far more baffled to consider not following through with this topic change.

“Are you unaware that Zion was the last location we can concretely place Mr. Storm?” Logan says. “Anton Diemos placed him there at nine pm on the day he went missing.”

Ekans glances towards the hall where Storm’s bedroom resides. “Anton wouldn’t tell me that much. Just that he hadn’t received a message back since. Are you certain it was Zion? Virgil hated going outside, much less so far away from his precious books.” His brows furrow further. “It’s not even a good bar!”

“You’ve been before?”

“I told you, I have friends who like to party,” Ekans says blandly. “It was months ago, and Virgil had insisted on staying home when I went out. I remember being annoyed and complaining about it when I returned.”

Remy shifts. “That bad?”

“It just wasn’t my style. I can’t think of a reason why Virgil would go so far away.”

And well, if that wasn’t intriguing to Logan, Logan wasn’t sure what would be. One of the first things they had insisted they got when they had arrived in the city police station and received their small corner for their work progress was a map. It had taken nearly an hour to procure for them-- the entire precinct was tied up in an emergency "twelve year old wandered away from their parents on a camping trip and was now lost in the woods that spanned into two other states", but once Remy gotten it he had hung it up on the wall and started cataloging the previous victims' living locations and last known places to build his geographical profile. Logan had been putting together a victim profile (searching for traits that their killer was looking for in his victims), occasionally glancing up at Remy’s back, and trying to figure out why it felt like he was crossing a line when he was just… noticing the curve of his work partner’s spine.

He’s decently sure Zion hadn’t come up before in their documents, but there’s something suspicious about how a student that never went out, managed to find a reason to be so far from home and to disappear from it.

Logan turns to detail his thoughts to his partner (abbreviated of course for the sake of the company they were keeping), but Remy already has his phone out looking at something.

“Zion was rebranded,” Remy reports. “A little less than a year ago. And get this, it used to be called Luxe.”

Yes, Logan thinks he has a slight idea of several working pieces now: their first victim had disappeared from a bar called Luxe, and shortly thereafter it had rebranded into Zion where another college student has just gone missing. Whether it is a clever attempt to keep the police blindsided or an unfortunate coincidence, it seems as though they have a very good reason to focus their investigation on the bar now. Logan begins to stand, shaking the aching of his knees and the the numbness of his feet out.

“Thank you, Mr. Ekans, for your cooperation,” Logan says. “I apologize that we impedied on so much of your time…”

But Remy is stalling getting off the couch, shaking his head at Logan, in a clear wait, hold off movement that Logan recognized from several instances where Remy had purposely drawn the attention of a criminal to get them their confession of guilt while they still thought they had the upper hand. It made Logan’s heart seem to beat harder and faster and his vision narrow, although no matter how many times he has gone to the doctor, he’s been assured he’s still in top health.

"Do you have anyone to stay with tonight?" Remy asks Ekans. "We can wait until they come."

Ekans nods slowly, appearing dazed and exhausted at the events. Logan would have more sympathy: showing up, dropping such news, gathering information and fleeing to his investigation was not exactly the more careful way to handle everything, but they had already lost another-- Logan checks his watch-- hour here. Logan tries to tell himself he has time, that Virgil Storm has time, even though there is a creeping feeling along his spine that whispers he’s already too late and it will take a miracle for them to save him now.

Ekans fumbles around for his phone. He stares at the screen for a moment, before he pulls up a contact and presses the call button. It rings three times before the person on the other end picks up with extremely loud pumping music.

"Janus?" The caller says, "hold on--"

The music quiets slightly.

"Sorry. Hey, what's up? Did you change your mind? There's a special on margaritas tonight and I'll even pay for your first--"

Ekans breathes in sharply. "Roman…right sorry, your promotion was the other day."

Logan turns away to analyze the picture hooks in the hall, imagining what photos Storm and Ekans had walked by every day for three years before the worst had occurred. At the very least, Ekans seems to relax at the facade of privacy.

"...what's wrong?" Roman, the caller, presumably says. The voice is distorted slightly, but from what Logan can make out they are probably around the same age as Ekans. "Did you get any news about Virgil?"

Ekans exhales heavily. "Not…quite. The FBI came, and I…Look, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to disturb your night--"

"Well fuck that," Roman says. "That can't be good news. Do you need someone right now?"

"You're having a party."

"I party every Saturday," Roman says flippantly and so very much like a college student that Logan cringes internally for their livers. "I'm coming over. Just uh….let me get Remus. He's my DD tonight, and I probably shouldn't be driving right now. I think he took a step outside, give me a moment to get him--"

"Roman," Ekans says, choked up, "thank you. Really. I know we aren’t even--"

“If you say friends I’m going to find a horribly unflattering picture of you to post online,” The caller sniffs. “Where the fuck did that asshole go? Tch. Just a heads up, it might take us a while to get back to your side of the city. I don’t know what traffic is like right now.”

Ekans frowns, and neither Logan nor Remy can continue to pretend as though they aren’t listening to the conversation at that. “I thought you were bar hopping tonight. You’re not starting in town?”

"Yeah, but Remus found this special going on tonight. Margaritas!” the speaker rolls the R hard and long and then laughs. “You know I’m a weak bitch for--oh motherfuck, did Remus sprint out here to go hook up with som--OH FUCK REMUS!"

Logan frowns as Ekans yanks the phone away from his ear, and the voice on the other end of the phone distorts in panic. His own mouth opens to interrupt, but before anyone can speak there’s the sound of tires screeching, a far distant scream that does not sound like it belongs to the speaker, and a crunch.

Then there is just Roman's voice cursing profusely in a way that has even Remy looking over in concern. “Janus! Fuck! I need--n-need to hang up and call an ambulance. Some assholes just stabbed Remus in the parking lot and then nearly ran him over-- shut up dumbass, I’m trying to stop the bleeding--”

Someone else is talking, choking, gurgling their blood.

“Where are you?” Logan says, although he has a gut feeling he already knows, and from the way that Remy is already grabbing the keys and Ekans is going pale he assumes the others also know.

“The fucking bar on fuck,” Roman says. “Shit, Zion. You know the fucking bar --fuck! Remus stop moving!-- What the fuck is going on?!”

[Next Chapter]

#buried alive au #virgil sanders #janus sanders #logan sanders #remy sanders #FBI Logan #Is bad at recognizing emotions #pour one out for ya boy guys #Rmeus and Roman with a decent relationship? sounds fake #anyway!#sanders sides #anxceit

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