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ninety6tears[See Master Post]
Danek was cleaning.
I woke with my head crammed into the corner of the couch to the varied but constant noises of shifting, scraping, tossing. It didn't immediately occur to me that it could be Danek just from hearing it; it had a stuttered slight rush to it. But I made my eyes open long enough to see Ken and Gaila curled clumsily together on the long futon, and Toni, who'd obviously knocked over into sleep wrapped in a blanket on the floor while trying to stay up watching something on the screen.
I wondered briefly if Will was the type to be irritable enough while hungover to tell him to keep it down, but something in me recoiled with an instinct that it would be a bad idea to engage with him right now. My head was kicking me with every sharp noise, whining from all the light coming in the windows, and it was accompanied by the vague morning-after panic that something had gotten unsettled but it wasn't in my coherence to realize what it was.
I was only half-awake for the first few minutes, but everything was sharpening once I heard whispering, first between Ken and Toni and then all three of them. It was hard to pick up words but there was something stilted and hushed, much more cautious than them just keeping their voices down because they thought I was sleeping. One thing I picked up was in Ken's more faintly audible timbre: "How long has he been up?" and both of them replying that they didn't know with some undertone of incredulity.
A couple minutes later they'd all stirred themselves up; Toni saw that I was awake and gave me a tired smile, motioning for me to hitch my legs up so she could sit on the couch. When she was drawing the blanket tighter around her shoulders she looked at me again and just knocked her glance towards the noise in the kitchen with a general look of What the hell?
I shrugged, going wide-eyed to sympathize with the confusion, and mouthed, I don't know.
It was hard to put a finger on what felt almost angry about what Danek was doing, but undoubtedly everyone had gotten the impression he was in some kind of mood. He eventually appeared in the living room with a neutrally stony expression. The one thing he said was to Gaila, impatiently asking her to hike up the blanket so that he could see under the futon. As he retrieved a drink glass that had rolled underneath and added it to the others he was collecting, Gaila exchanged a tense look with Toni.
The three of them all looked at me.
My voice was thinned with the morning when I gently uttered, "Danek?..."
He ignored me. In the minute it took him to gather up the few things and leave the room, he didn't look in my direction. It was apparent that this had the rest of them concerned more than anything else, but it also made them speculate less openly and cool their curiosity under some measure of pretense. Toni complained that she needed a cigarette; she still hadn't found hers, so I told her I'd left my pack under the bird bath, I thought, and she yawned her way out the back door.
Gaila and Ken headed upstairs together, I wasn't sure whether to get back into bed or get dressed. Once I was alone, I stood up, and in a slow but dutiful way, followed Danek into the kitchen.
I took the counter opposite the sink and leaned against it, in about the same place I'd been standing the night before after the lights went out. Outside it had gone overcast and the room was less offending to my head but also less familiar in the dark tint, unwelcoming.
I stood there, waiting, having nothing to say while Danek swished out the glasses and clanked them into the wash compartment. Once he kicked the door shut, he ran the water over his rag and wrung it out hard, flung it around the faucet, and then turned to face me.
For a moment we were just looking at each other, his demeanor almost businesslike as he leaned back and crossed his arms. I didn't know why, but my heart had started racing. All around us the house was pulled to a quiet.
Only loudly enough for me to hear, Danek said, "It's strange to look at you now. See, now that I know, it's so obvious. You don't move like him. I'm almost sure you don't even talk like him, not really."
For a second, my biggest panic was to wonder what Chris was going to do, but then I seemed to remember for the first time that morning. No one was listening in. I stood there unable to form any response, wondering what even Danek could possibly be expecting me to do. There was very little established protocol for this kind of thing besides doing what we needed to do to stay alive, and Danek may have been about to do his worst, but he was hardly going to kill me. Even with that, I doubt I could have acted by the book in that moment if my life had depended on it.
"The amount of dedication required to convincingly imitate him must have been exhausting. You studied well, you had us all thoroughly fooled. Job very well done," Danek said, his voice heavily bitter. "Who the hell are you?"
I finally cracked out, "How long have you known?"
"Am I not entitled to some questions of my own?"
"Yes. You are. I'm sorry." I swallowed. "My name is James T. Kirk. I'm a detective."
"...Why did you pick the name?"
"What?" I stammered.
"William. It was an alias of yours, if I'm understanding correctly. I'm curious to know if there was some particular reason you chose that name."
He knew that too. My mind was about to explode, but I managed to reply, "I don't know if I remember...I guess I thought I kind of looked like a Will."
Danek's look was focused with an uncomfortable intensity, looking me over more like I was a painting than a person. "What are you here to investigate?"
I hesitated.
"If the police department is aware of the existence of unregistered clones, they would want to know who made them. I'm asking you whether you're conducting a cloning investigation or a murder investigation."
I understood, after a second, that Danek was asking me whether or not Will was dead. I should have assumed he'd be holding out that small hope: that the entire assault had never even happened, that Will had been discovered some other way and we had him somewhere in custody. I felt like my throat was closing up at first when I tried to speak. "I'm sorry," was all I said.
I didn't even see much of his reaction before the back door bumped open and then Toni was crossing into the kitchen in a seeming flurry of indecently normal movement, Danek turning away and leaning his hands into the edge of the sink. She was opening the fridge, asking me before she bothered to look if I'd eaten all of the yogurt, apparently tossing aside the tension from earlier after deciding she wouldn't concern herself with it.
I might as well have forgotten she'd said anything a second after she asked; it felt almost impossible to pull myself together, but she looked over, cocking an eyebrow at me. I probably only seemed irritable: "Sorry, I don't know."
I thought she was about to mildly huff out of the room, but Danek had turned back around. "Toni, come here."
"Hmm?" She'd grabbed a carrot and crunched a bite off of it as she walked over in response to Danek's casual beaconing gesture. At the moment he was doing better at this than I was, his expression softened completely as he took her by one arm with a slight frown.
"Did this happen in the pool?" He was pointing out a long deep scrape on her arm, brushing his finger along it faintly.
"Oh. Yeah. I slipped when we were getting out."
"Did you put something on it?"
She sighed. "No. I'll take care of it in a minute." I couldn't see her face, but there was something that hesitated, wondering about him. I had the impression she was slightly surprised by the concern, maybe almost touched. Danek brushed his hand along her arm and then shook it in a brief little gesture of affection before she turned and walked out, only shrugging in my direction.
Danek and I moved downstairs. It was rare that anyone was ever in the basement for more than half a minute and the rest would more quickly assume we'd gone for a walk than think to check down there if they were looking for us. There was one little rickety chair that seemed to only be there because they didn't want it anywhere else, but neither of us sat down, opting to lean against the books.
I was the first to speak, finally. "The chip?..."
Danek's brow lowered. "You don't know what it is, do you?"
He seemed extremely troubled by the idea that I might somehow know. I quickly shook my head. "All I know is what you said after the Nichols meeting. I just assumed it was...maybe something he needed you to look at but only in the event of his death or maybe being seriously injured..."
"You presumed correctly," Danek said, but didn't yet show any eagerness to go on.
After a long moment I said, "So Will knew."
"I've hidden the chip," Danek suddenly offered. "You won't find it. If you want to know its contents, there are some things you will have to do for me."
I was about to mull that over, but he didn't care to give me a chance to talk.
"First of all, I presume there is some exit strategy you had planned to keep all of this very clean? Did you plan on staging some sudden death for Will?"
It gave me a weirdly chagrined feeling, just standing there and nodding. "He was supposed to switch antibiotics and have some severe reaction..."
"I thought it was ridiculous, the antibiotics, that you were taking them at all," he said in a quick irritable way, as if only to himself. "It's only for certain allergies that it even becomes necessary anymore...I assume this would have given you necessity to leave very soon?"
I sighed. "There hasn't been a very frank discussion of it yet, but I have a feeling my boss doesn't think this is leading anywhere all that useful. All he wants is one lead, really, but..." I shrugged.
"If there's anything you can do about it, I want you to remain in the house for at least...four days more," Danek decided. "And I want you to protect the pretense that you are in fact Will. I don't want the others to know that they have been living with an impostor."
"If you tell me everything you can," I said, "I will try."
He looked me up and down again in a way I chose to interpret as dubious.
"Really," I said firmly.
Danek went on in an almost bored manner. If it wasn't for the fact that he had a bit of vitriol against me, he'd remind me of the best kinds of interviewees, the ones who are grateful enough just to be kept talking so that they can dwell on the hard technical facts rather than their emotional states. "Will gave me the chip...I believe it was last summer. He said that it contained a video note from him and that only in the event of his death was I to ever look at it. I was obviously unable to be entirely certain that Will was gone, so I suppose I broke my promise, but once I watched it I...understood that my suspicions were very likely to be correct."
"Did the others know about it?"
"No." Danek considered something for a while, carefully. "I presume now it's possible he thought he could trust me better than any of the others not to let my curiosity get the best of me. I don't think he ever asked me to keep it a secret, but I thought we had an understanding. It's meant to be my prerogative whether I keep it all a secret just as he did, now that I've inherited the truth."
He looked down for a moment, long enough for me to wonder if I should press him on, but then continued.
"What Will told me in the recording is that we are all genetic copies of living individuals...I didn't at first understand that it was possible his source would appear to be the same age, but apparently there are artificial aspects to us too. 'Cyborgs,' as Will's book collection might call us," he said with a strange smile. "So many of his interests make sense to me in a different way now...Will did not say where we came from, or who created us. You must understand, we don't remember."
Danek didn't seem to expect me to grasp this, but I nodded.
"But he did. As he told it, we were able to access the technology that had given us the information our minds were too young to have naturally gathered, and we...used it subversively."
Wait. "...You chose to alter your own memories?"
"Apparently our experiences had been so terrible as to be unbearable to carry. Our treatment at whatever place produced us, as Will put it vaguely, was 'a redefinition of inhumane.' When we had access to the ability to make ourselves forget, we apparently decided it had to be done. That the only way for us to ever be free was to not only forget where we'd come from but to have no idea that we were anything but normal. It sounds very foolish, doesn't it? And yet..."
He paused for a while, and his next words came from a different place.
"The worst thing that I can remember is the day I told my father I wanted nothing to do with Vulcan's values and that I was leaving to come live here. He told me that if I did so I would no longer be his son. It is my most painful memory, and it never even happened. And I'm to understand I inflicted this onto myself, we all did this, so that we would never want to go home again. We needed to be oblivious to the fact that we had no homes, except for with each other.
"That was the other thing...We would have rather lost each other than been unable to be normal; we did believe, Will said, that we could find other people to befriend. We could be happy. But then, what if something began to seem strange, and one of us began to catch on to being different? Or someone outside started to suspect one of us, and we weren't even together? He said that was the absolute worst fear for some of us. And it apparently seemed the natural decision, that one of us would have to 'stay behind,' as he put it. Even if that person could only watch over the others from afar, it would be better than nothing. So, he remembered. He always remembered everything. He was responsible for bringing us together. And I assure you..."
He shook his head for a few seconds, incredulous.
"That part probably seems as impossible to you as it does to me. I always knew he was brilliant with computers, but think about it: The documentation for our identities was already there, but he would have had to submit all of our applications, tamper with orientation schedules, fake his own qualifications as a second-year student and somehow, without the advantage of quite as much fabricated intelligence as the rest of us have, been accordingly passable as a history student. And in addition to that, he was...I'm willing to say, as instinctive with people as you apparently are. There was definitely a certain grasp he seemed to have with other people, but I never would have imagined that he already knew us. Much of our coming together again must have been pure dumb luck, but at the same time, it could have happened drastically differently with a less clever man."
"And you're absolutely certain," I asked, "that he was the only one who knew?...Did Will mention all of you by name?"
Danek looked directly at me for the first time in a long moment. "Why do you ask?"
I wasn't sure whether this would be bad news for him or not, and felt hesitant, letting out a sigh before I said, "We have documentation proving that everyone in this house was named under a false identity that was used as an undercover alias. Except for Gaila."
He looked like he didn't understand why this should matter to him.
"We don't know if she's anyone's copy."
"Gaila is one of us," he said. The certainty was immediate, unwielding.
"Are you sure? Did he mention her by name in the recording? Did he say how many of you there were from the start?..."
Danek wouldn't reply. I sighed again in agitation.
"Can I see the chip?"
"I did not promise you that," he pointed out. "That's a different deal."
I shoved my hands into the pockets of my sweats, exasperated.
"If you arrest the man who killed Will," Danek said, "I'll give you anything you want."
I raised my hands apart in the air, and my voice kept rising higher in frustration. "You need to help me. I feel like there's got to be something related to all of this, with what happened to him, but we've got nothing. Is there anything that none of you would have told the police, anything suspicious, anything at all?...There has to be someone in this house who has some idea of who might want him dead, and I have a feeling if someone does it would have to be you."
I looked hard into Danek's eyes as, for the moment, there was something dark and very sad there. It was a long moment before he slowly shook his head. "I have no idea."
After a silence, I saw his wheels turning, and decided not to interrupt even when it took him almost a minute to speak again.
"The only thing that might be of use to you...One of the stranger things about Will was that he was extremely distrusting of...superiors, is how I used to think of it, but now I think it was specifically the law. We once had the car broken into and he wouldn't hear anything about it when I wanted to report it to the police. It was one of the few things that could make him considerably bad-tempered. I think we were all confused by it, but it was against our rules to ask about it."
I nodded. "Now you're thinking he was afraid of all of you being discovered?"
"Yes. Perhaps this was even the reason we wanted us to stay here rather than attempting to emigrate out of the city...Too many concerns about customs, the fear that having officials pore over our records might make somebody sense that something was amiss about us. It all makes sense if, after all, his experiences had taught him that we would only be treated as if we were contraband, once someone suspected us." Danek was frowning, his eyes distantly fixed towards the small amount of light from the sliver of a high window. "Considering your actions, Detective Kirk, I wonder if he had a point."
That was completely fair, and I shouldn't have felt like somebody might as well have punched me in the gut. "Listen, you can hate me all you want, but understand that we still would have done this even if all of you weren't...if you were regular citizens."
"It's difficult to take your word for it," he said coldly. "You have to admit that there is some contradiction, after all, between the interests of trying to find a person who would create us and trying to punish the one who would end our supposedly illicitly produced lives."
"I don't think it's a contradiction at all, actually," I protested, but my voice was flat, like I didn't think I could really get anywhere with him. "Why did you ask me to stay for four more days?"
"Because," he said, almost shrugging, "I want to see if there is any way it can help. Perhaps I share your hunch, in a way. It should be easier to pry when you don't have to worry about fooling one of us."
I thought about it a second. "You should probably know that I'm usually geared with a surveillance mic. I don't have one on now, but..."
"Hmm." He considered that with a neutral look of calculation. After a moment, he turned the subject back. "I'm assuming there's a more external investigation as well?"
"Yes," I said with a sigh. "There's a possibility, you should realize, that the person who killed him is some criminal with a grudge against me rather than him. But if they'd turned up any big leads on that, I would've been told by now."
"Yes, surely," Danek said, nodding. There was a subtle sarcasm in it, but I didn't immediately understand what he might be getting at. Then, not-so-subtle: "The search has clearly been arduous, in fact, I did find myself marveling at how often Will had been leaving the house lately. It felt very out of character, but I imagine one has to make of their operations what they can."
Something from his eyes, ill-willing, shifted right into me with a shake. I wasn't about to try to tell him that all it was was that I had a protective guy running my job. "If you're trying to say we haven't been putting as much effort into finding the killer..."
"All I'm saying, Detective Kirk," he said, "is that your superior officer may believe he already has his 'big lead.' After all, if your presence here is to work as a snare for potential murderers, it's obvious you've done little with that potential, assuming the options haven't already been narrowed down."
"So that's your problem. I haven't thrown up the bait quite enough?"
Danek, his face so cleared of any obvious emotion that it was like a curt dismissal, shrugged again. There was a long moment, and then he quietly said, "I can imagine you find my lack of obvious shock to this entire situation a bit suspicious."
After a second I only mildly shook my head. "I wouldn't say suspicious."
"Are you sure?" he responded dryly. "Because I am probably a criminal, even if everything I'm saying is true. From what I told you of Will's message, don't you think the natural conclusion is that one of us had to kill someone to be able to escape from our captivity? And there's the question of where all the money came from. We must have stolen it. And then, you may not believe me anyway, because I'm a man who supposedly only found out last night that he is a robotically implemented genetic clone, that his entire life up until less than two years ago is a falsehood, and that one of the very few people he has ever cared about is dead. A lot of people who meet me believe that I react unnaturally to some things; I can hardly imagine this would be an exception."
"I don't," I said, and then cocked a brow, mumbling, "Hell, for a Vulcan, you could almost tone it down a little."
"For a Vulcan." For a second, his eyes looked at me piercingly, and I almost wondered if he was seeing something I hadn't meant to let on. He gave a thoughtful hum and continued slowly. "In any case, what I'm trying to make you understand is that in some way, I already knew. I think there's always been a feeling among the house that there's something different about us. It doesn't quite have the impact for me that it probably would for you, learning that so many of my memories aren't real. They never felt as genuine to me as I imagine memories are supposed to; for much of the time I assumed that was simply what it was like, to hate your own life up to a point so deeply, but at other times I did wonder if it could mean something else. The reason I'm telling you this is because I can only hope, if you find some reason to haul me into a courtroom or in for some interrogation, that some understanding will be applied to my general affect. It's hard to say, but I don't believe...the emotional control would be quite the same for the others, which is why I must keep this from them, at least until they have less to deal with."
There was a long pause before I could only nod a quiet promise, and after that, a pensive hesitation thickened in the air. Danek sounded quite different when he spoke next, more reflective and careful.
"I knew that he was dead," he said, along something too sad to be a sigh. "I only needed to be shown."
I didn't know then, and still don't, what it was that gave me away to Danek. I wanted badly to know but I wouldn't dare ask; it seemed like something too private, too sacred even. I thought that the answer had to be something buried so far inside of Will that no amount of information or observation could ever make me understand it. It may not have even been only one thing, really; Danek had seemed to think there was something strange going on a couple times, after all.
From the beginning we'd had the uncanny on our side, the fact that even if I'd seemed out of the ordinary, no one oblivious to the truth would think to assume that Will was acting differently because Will wasn't Will. But at the end I realized one of the most glaring features that made Danek so different from Spock: His mind had no inclination for denial. I had contorted too far and one too many times, and it had somehow become impossible for him to accept that I was Will, even before he'd watched what was on the chip, before he'd had anything more than a wicked little hunch to make him suspect what it could possibly be.
Now, you're thinking that it had to be the kiss. I think I was almost sure at first that that was it, and I can't say with any certainty that it wasn't that, but then I have to ask myself: Was it the way I'd done it? Was it the fact that I'd stopped, or that I'd started in the first place? In my most affectionate interpretation, I wonder if Danek already had me pegged then, and was just fucking around with me. To that I'd have to smirk and say that screwing with my head was perfectly fair game. But I don't know.
Much later, later enough that I have to suspect it was partly me beginning to project myself and my own life onto the situation, I couldn't stop thinking about that last moment before I moved from the counter. When his hand reached automatically to find mine slipping away, no longer waiting for him.
I cannot for the life of me describe even from speculation what Danek and Will's relationship was like, if they'd ever kissed before or how many times, if they'd even done more than that; I think it's hard for me to shake the idea that once Will was gone it was all just as fragmented to Danek, that it was something just as much more rooted in feeling than in actions. But while I don't think the way that someone kisses makes for much of a thumbprint, I think about how I couldn't see Danek's expression when his hand reached to where he expected my hand to still be, and I wonder if that had been the jolt, if I'd appeared to him like something so starkly mutated in that moment that the truth was undeniable. I've wondered many, many times, if that was it.
At long last, I'd put the mic back on. I had an angry and somewhat frantic message waiting for me from Chris, but I couldn't reply to it. I had to get my head together and figure out what the hell I was going to say to him when we got the chance to talk, and as much as it made me feel guilty to think of it this way, I knew he had to be pissed I'd made him worry late into the morning and that giving him several hours to cool off would be a lot kinder to myself. I was suddenly getting levels of jitters like I'd never even had my first month on the job; I didn't know how much I could deal with at once.
The day passed. Most of the residents had a good deal of work to catch up on, but looking around me I wasn't sure much of them were getting all that much accomplished. The tension that the rest had probably explained away as some exclusive spat between me and Danek had tinged the air more thoroughly than I expected. It was like the ideal peace that usually hung between everyone had been thrown off by the one little imbalance.
At one point Danek went to sit on the couch where Gaila had stretched out; she was making to sit up, but he just lifted up the bottoms of her legs and sat, letting her feet rest on his lap as he opened up his reader. Just after she got back to her reading, he gave a rub and squeeze to one of her feet. She put her book down for a second to give him some teasingly suspicious expression, but then he gave a warm smile and she just laughed softly and got back to work. I saw it differently: I saw the look on Danek's face, genuinely sweet but edged with a kind of grave desperation that only I would have thought to watch for. I knew that the others had to be the only thing holding him down. It only seemed natural that he would be reaching to touch them more than usual.
Everyone was a bit more talkative once we put on some documentary Toni had been assigned and Ken was doing some imitations of the narrator's odd choices of diction. For once I didn't have much of anything better to do than work on some reading as convincingly as possible; the company had tapered down to Gaila and Danek and me, and since Gaila was doing the same Civil Wars reading, we kept quoting to each other the very self-congratulating memoirs of the "warlord" Tuk-Hon. Before, joking with the others had come easy, but that night it felt like pulling a complicated stunt.
When it was late and Gaila made her exit, I felt like I was catching my breath. Danek, not even looking my way, slapped his reader closed and retired to his room, leaving me alone.
"What the fuck happened last night?!"
Chris had not cooled down as much as I'd stupidly hoped; he'd no sooner picked up the phone than was snapping about protocol and "For all I'd known you could have been stabbed by somebody."
"Jesus, you still had the room bug, you had to know it was no big deal." I pulled my best blasé, hoping to hell I could actually fool Chris on this one. "I was about to change up last night and then they wanted to jump in the pool, so it's kind of a good thing I didn't have it. After that I went right to bed. I'm sorry I didn't check in."
"You're sorry," he said back in huffy sarcasm. "Anything happen I should know about?"
"I don't think so."
"Jim." I heard some hesitant breathing. "I'm thinking you should be done soon."
I stupidly froze right in my steps. "What."
"You've done good work, but I think we've got everything we're going to get. Tomorrow, I want you to get a serious stomachache and have somebody take you to the hospital, we'll wait till—"
"No," I protested, my voice flat with shock. "No, no no no, what, you're giving up now? We've got practically fuck-all!"
"And I don't think we're going to get anything else, and I'm getting increasingly anxious about hanging you out to dry when there isn't good enough reason for it."
"Look, just give me a few more days, Chris. That's it."
"Jim," he said steadily, and there was something grimly authoritative that hadn't been there a second ago, "unless there's something you're not telling me about, I don't see how something could suddenly turn up in less than a week."
I looked back towards the house, at the little window to Danek's bedroom where the lamplight was still glowing. I turned back and walked farther into the trees. I said nothing.
"That's what I thought," Chris said. "I want you out, Jim. I'm sorry."
I had to count back from three before I said it. "No."
Undercovers don't get to call any of the shots, not really, but when it comes down to it, there's very little that they can make you do once you're in. There could be hell to pay once I walked out willingly, and yeah, there were ways I could be forcibly removed, but I was hauling a pretty confident gamble that Chris wouldn't be willing to do that. It would probably involve rather theatrically endangering my cover, and try as he might to be a hardass, I knew that with at least some of the residents, putting them through all that really wasn't something he wanted to do.
After a few seconds, Chris repeated back, "No?"
I didn't respond.
"You're disobeying a direct order. I could have your badge taken away in a minute if I gave this recording to someone else. Just so we're clear, this is what you're doing."
"Crystal."
After that was just a long pause, Chris rising to fuming levels of frustration and finally barking, "Dammit. What the hell is going on in there?!"
Even though I was outright refusing to leave, explaining things to him wouldn't have made things any prettier. The idea that I was in collaboration with one of the residents would have Chris uneasily questioning my objectivity if not my sanity, and keeping him in the dark could make the difference between it being both of us or just me in trouble with the higher-ups farther down the road if this wound up getting messy. "It's nothing you need to worry about. Just trust me on this one."
"'Nothing to worry about.' Go screw something. If you're not telling me, that means it's something dangerous, and you're telling me not to worry about it?"
"As if there's any way I can convince you it's not dangerous," I complained in an angered growl. "You think that Gaila killed Will."
Now that that had landed, Chris took a deep breath. He slowly drawled, "I'm going to go out on a limb here, and guess that you don't."
The worst thing was that I could see the whole line of logic very clearly from his end: the Orion blood in the alleyway, the fact that she hadn't been home until late the night he was murdered, the fact that no one could prove she wasn't hundred percent humanoid. From the viewpoint that she was some lonely troubled outcast who'd decided to turn to the black market and collect herself a family, it was a plain motive: Will somehow coming upon something about her that she couldn't have him telling anyone else and her desperately having to waste him. I could imagine the dramatization through Pike's suspicions, with her making up some reason to have him come with her out there that night, waiting until there was no one around. The ineffectual resistance of a victim too confused to really fight back against Orion muscle, getting him easily square in the gut, finding somewhere to dispose of the weapon, and then going on home. Even the nightmares made some kind of sense: Particularly if somebody's never killed before it can shake them up badly, and it all smacked of the kind of sneaking guilt somebody might have after killing somebody they'd been trying to convince themselves wasn't really a person. Even when I couldn't possibly believe it was true, the whole idea of it made me feel sick.
"You can't twist this like I've been holding out on you, Jim," Chris said. "Any detective worth a damn would feel edgy about this, and you may not want to believe it, but you know exactly why I do."
"It's just different from my end, okay? You don't see all the things that I see, she's—"
"Wake up, Jim. I know you're a softy for the girl but you have to seriously consider the possibility that she may be willing to kill you. That night you caught her off guard in the yard her heart was doing light speed, she was way too antsy around you to not be—"
"She's not antsy, she's traumatized." I was yelling so loudly I checked back toward the house to make extra sure no one was outside. "I don't know why. But I'd bet my life on it."
"Well, congratulations. You're betting your job on this."
"Fine. I want four days." I heard a vague grunt, and went on, "I'll keep my gun on me as often as possible, even in the house, if it makes you feel better."
"Four days. Fine," he said after a moment. "But if you pull anything again like your slack-off last night, I will come in there and drag you out myself."
A second later Chris had hung up. I flipped my comm shut and then kept meandering numbly through the park, and tried to will my hands to stop shaking. The wind had picked up to a chill and I wasn't sure if I was shivering from the cold or some weak variant of anger. I'd gone head to head with superiors before without really sweating it, but with Chris it was different. I had no idea if things could be okay with us if I ended up somehow tarnishing his reputation or forcing him to have me sacked.
It was a few minutes before I took Will's comm back out of my pocket and punched the number in to call Bones, thankful I'd entered it manually enough times to have it memorized. I knew that he'd probably be sleeping around this time, but on the off-chance that I woke him up I figured this was worth the bother.
I had no idea what I was going to say if he picked up. It would have made a lot of sense if I wanted to pour my heart out about how the entire damn operation was looking to end up being a total waste, but I really felt at that moment like I would have given up a limb just to sit and talk about nothing in particular with someone who really knew me. I'd only been in the house for weeks, but it felt way longer than that. This is the kind of thing that makes or breaks you in UCD: Time gets stretched out by the exhaustion of being constantly on your game, and after months to years of it it's almost worse than being literally alone, that you spend so much time with other people and none of them know who you are. You get homesick for yourself.
I don't know how many times it beeped before I made myself accept that Bones wasn't going to pick up. I rocked tiredly backwards until I was tucked in with my back against a tree trunk, and stared down the comm with a blank look.
Before I could really let myself think about it I had started dialing another number. When the alert started beeping I was hunched over in the wind, my eyes trained on the raspy movement of the leaves on the ground.
I had the comm pressed tight at my ear and my left knuckles clamped firmly against my lips as if I was afraid to so much as open my mouth. When the answer came, I don't think I even breathed.
"Detective Spock." His voice was perfectly neutral; it was impossible to tell if he'd been sleeping. My grip around my comm tightened in even more. It was like I thought that if I could only hear the background static a little better I would somehow be able to visualize him, in his open sterile kitchen with the steam aroma of tea from the kettle, or sitting up attentively on his bed looking one notch too formal for a man in his pajamas. I wanted to smell his laundry soap. "Hello?..."
His tone was a little more offhand; I knew any second now he was going to end the call. But then there was some shift of air: I could almost feel him stilling, and the word was low and urgent, his voice smaller now:
"Jim?"
I hung up in a rush, as if I'd been spooked.
After finally tucking the comm back into my pocket, I crossed my arms, walked back up through the yard and around to the front of the house and just went up and down the block.
Arriving back at the driveway later, I saw movement up at the window of the loft. Danek was in there sitting across from Ken on his bed, their heads bowed over something and Ken smirking in response to a comment from Gaila who had her back leaned into the edge of the window. A vague motion in the background must have been Toni putting some things away.
For a minute I had the strongest, impossible urge to just walk away from the house forever, as if I could pull the last weeks out of the bedrock with my departure and leave them to each other. It reminded me of that irrational desire even an experienced cop will get sometimes when they see a dead body, to just lay the blankets over and give them their last peace instead of doing all the poking and prodding. We hadn't had the decency to let Will lie, and at that moment I felt like I would have done almost anything to take that back and leave the rest of them alone.
But I had made a promise. After some minutes I somehow got myself put back together, shoved my hands into my jacket pockets, and went back inside.
Danek was cleaning.
I woke with my head crammed into the corner of the couch to the varied but constant noises of shifting, scraping, tossing. It didn't immediately occur to me that it could be Danek just from hearing it; it had a stuttered slight rush to it. But I made my eyes open long enough to see Ken and Gaila curled clumsily together on the long futon, and Toni, who'd obviously knocked over into sleep wrapped in a blanket on the floor while trying to stay up watching something on the screen.
I wondered briefly if Will was the type to be irritable enough while hungover to tell him to keep it down, but something in me recoiled with an instinct that it would be a bad idea to engage with him right now. My head was kicking me with every sharp noise, whining from all the light coming in the windows, and it was accompanied by the vague morning-after panic that something had gotten unsettled but it wasn't in my coherence to realize what it was.
I was only half-awake for the first few minutes, but everything was sharpening once I heard whispering, first between Ken and Toni and then all three of them. It was hard to pick up words but there was something stilted and hushed, much more cautious than them just keeping their voices down because they thought I was sleeping. One thing I picked up was in Ken's more faintly audible timbre: "How long has he been up?" and both of them replying that they didn't know with some undertone of incredulity.
A couple minutes later they'd all stirred themselves up; Toni saw that I was awake and gave me a tired smile, motioning for me to hitch my legs up so she could sit on the couch. When she was drawing the blanket tighter around her shoulders she looked at me again and just knocked her glance towards the noise in the kitchen with a general look of What the hell?
I shrugged, going wide-eyed to sympathize with the confusion, and mouthed, I don't know.
It was hard to put a finger on what felt almost angry about what Danek was doing, but undoubtedly everyone had gotten the impression he was in some kind of mood. He eventually appeared in the living room with a neutrally stony expression. The one thing he said was to Gaila, impatiently asking her to hike up the blanket so that he could see under the futon. As he retrieved a drink glass that had rolled underneath and added it to the others he was collecting, Gaila exchanged a tense look with Toni.
The three of them all looked at me.
My voice was thinned with the morning when I gently uttered, "Danek?..."
He ignored me. In the minute it took him to gather up the few things and leave the room, he didn't look in my direction. It was apparent that this had the rest of them concerned more than anything else, but it also made them speculate less openly and cool their curiosity under some measure of pretense. Toni complained that she needed a cigarette; she still hadn't found hers, so I told her I'd left my pack under the bird bath, I thought, and she yawned her way out the back door.
Gaila and Ken headed upstairs together, I wasn't sure whether to get back into bed or get dressed. Once I was alone, I stood up, and in a slow but dutiful way, followed Danek into the kitchen.
I took the counter opposite the sink and leaned against it, in about the same place I'd been standing the night before after the lights went out. Outside it had gone overcast and the room was less offending to my head but also less familiar in the dark tint, unwelcoming.
I stood there, waiting, having nothing to say while Danek swished out the glasses and clanked them into the wash compartment. Once he kicked the door shut, he ran the water over his rag and wrung it out hard, flung it around the faucet, and then turned to face me.
For a moment we were just looking at each other, his demeanor almost businesslike as he leaned back and crossed his arms. I didn't know why, but my heart had started racing. All around us the house was pulled to a quiet.
Only loudly enough for me to hear, Danek said, "It's strange to look at you now. See, now that I know, it's so obvious. You don't move like him. I'm almost sure you don't even talk like him, not really."
For a second, my biggest panic was to wonder what Chris was going to do, but then I seemed to remember for the first time that morning. No one was listening in. I stood there unable to form any response, wondering what even Danek could possibly be expecting me to do. There was very little established protocol for this kind of thing besides doing what we needed to do to stay alive, and Danek may have been about to do his worst, but he was hardly going to kill me. Even with that, I doubt I could have acted by the book in that moment if my life had depended on it.
"The amount of dedication required to convincingly imitate him must have been exhausting. You studied well, you had us all thoroughly fooled. Job very well done," Danek said, his voice heavily bitter. "Who the hell are you?"
I finally cracked out, "How long have you known?"
"Am I not entitled to some questions of my own?"
"Yes. You are. I'm sorry." I swallowed. "My name is James T. Kirk. I'm a detective."
"...Why did you pick the name?"
"What?" I stammered.
"William. It was an alias of yours, if I'm understanding correctly. I'm curious to know if there was some particular reason you chose that name."
He knew that too. My mind was about to explode, but I managed to reply, "I don't know if I remember...I guess I thought I kind of looked like a Will."
Danek's look was focused with an uncomfortable intensity, looking me over more like I was a painting than a person. "What are you here to investigate?"
I hesitated.
"If the police department is aware of the existence of unregistered clones, they would want to know who made them. I'm asking you whether you're conducting a cloning investigation or a murder investigation."
I understood, after a second, that Danek was asking me whether or not Will was dead. I should have assumed he'd be holding out that small hope: that the entire assault had never even happened, that Will had been discovered some other way and we had him somewhere in custody. I felt like my throat was closing up at first when I tried to speak. "I'm sorry," was all I said.
I didn't even see much of his reaction before the back door bumped open and then Toni was crossing into the kitchen in a seeming flurry of indecently normal movement, Danek turning away and leaning his hands into the edge of the sink. She was opening the fridge, asking me before she bothered to look if I'd eaten all of the yogurt, apparently tossing aside the tension from earlier after deciding she wouldn't concern herself with it.
I might as well have forgotten she'd said anything a second after she asked; it felt almost impossible to pull myself together, but she looked over, cocking an eyebrow at me. I probably only seemed irritable: "Sorry, I don't know."
I thought she was about to mildly huff out of the room, but Danek had turned back around. "Toni, come here."
"Hmm?" She'd grabbed a carrot and crunched a bite off of it as she walked over in response to Danek's casual beaconing gesture. At the moment he was doing better at this than I was, his expression softened completely as he took her by one arm with a slight frown.
"Did this happen in the pool?" He was pointing out a long deep scrape on her arm, brushing his finger along it faintly.
"Oh. Yeah. I slipped when we were getting out."
"Did you put something on it?"
She sighed. "No. I'll take care of it in a minute." I couldn't see her face, but there was something that hesitated, wondering about him. I had the impression she was slightly surprised by the concern, maybe almost touched. Danek brushed his hand along her arm and then shook it in a brief little gesture of affection before she turned and walked out, only shrugging in my direction.
Danek and I moved downstairs. It was rare that anyone was ever in the basement for more than half a minute and the rest would more quickly assume we'd gone for a walk than think to check down there if they were looking for us. There was one little rickety chair that seemed to only be there because they didn't want it anywhere else, but neither of us sat down, opting to lean against the books.
I was the first to speak, finally. "The chip?..."
Danek's brow lowered. "You don't know what it is, do you?"
He seemed extremely troubled by the idea that I might somehow know. I quickly shook my head. "All I know is what you said after the Nichols meeting. I just assumed it was...maybe something he needed you to look at but only in the event of his death or maybe being seriously injured..."
"You presumed correctly," Danek said, but didn't yet show any eagerness to go on.
After a long moment I said, "So Will knew."
"I've hidden the chip," Danek suddenly offered. "You won't find it. If you want to know its contents, there are some things you will have to do for me."
I was about to mull that over, but he didn't care to give me a chance to talk.
"First of all, I presume there is some exit strategy you had planned to keep all of this very clean? Did you plan on staging some sudden death for Will?"
It gave me a weirdly chagrined feeling, just standing there and nodding. "He was supposed to switch antibiotics and have some severe reaction..."
"I thought it was ridiculous, the antibiotics, that you were taking them at all," he said in a quick irritable way, as if only to himself. "It's only for certain allergies that it even becomes necessary anymore...I assume this would have given you necessity to leave very soon?"
I sighed. "There hasn't been a very frank discussion of it yet, but I have a feeling my boss doesn't think this is leading anywhere all that useful. All he wants is one lead, really, but..." I shrugged.
"If there's anything you can do about it, I want you to remain in the house for at least...four days more," Danek decided. "And I want you to protect the pretense that you are in fact Will. I don't want the others to know that they have been living with an impostor."
"If you tell me everything you can," I said, "I will try."
He looked me up and down again in a way I chose to interpret as dubious.
"Really," I said firmly.
Danek went on in an almost bored manner. If it wasn't for the fact that he had a bit of vitriol against me, he'd remind me of the best kinds of interviewees, the ones who are grateful enough just to be kept talking so that they can dwell on the hard technical facts rather than their emotional states. "Will gave me the chip...I believe it was last summer. He said that it contained a video note from him and that only in the event of his death was I to ever look at it. I was obviously unable to be entirely certain that Will was gone, so I suppose I broke my promise, but once I watched it I...understood that my suspicions were very likely to be correct."
"Did the others know about it?"
"No." Danek considered something for a while, carefully. "I presume now it's possible he thought he could trust me better than any of the others not to let my curiosity get the best of me. I don't think he ever asked me to keep it a secret, but I thought we had an understanding. It's meant to be my prerogative whether I keep it all a secret just as he did, now that I've inherited the truth."
He looked down for a moment, long enough for me to wonder if I should press him on, but then continued.
"What Will told me in the recording is that we are all genetic copies of living individuals...I didn't at first understand that it was possible his source would appear to be the same age, but apparently there are artificial aspects to us too. 'Cyborgs,' as Will's book collection might call us," he said with a strange smile. "So many of his interests make sense to me in a different way now...Will did not say where we came from, or who created us. You must understand, we don't remember."
Danek didn't seem to expect me to grasp this, but I nodded.
"But he did. As he told it, we were able to access the technology that had given us the information our minds were too young to have naturally gathered, and we...used it subversively."
Wait. "...You chose to alter your own memories?"
"Apparently our experiences had been so terrible as to be unbearable to carry. Our treatment at whatever place produced us, as Will put it vaguely, was 'a redefinition of inhumane.' When we had access to the ability to make ourselves forget, we apparently decided it had to be done. That the only way for us to ever be free was to not only forget where we'd come from but to have no idea that we were anything but normal. It sounds very foolish, doesn't it? And yet..."
He paused for a while, and his next words came from a different place.
"The worst thing that I can remember is the day I told my father I wanted nothing to do with Vulcan's values and that I was leaving to come live here. He told me that if I did so I would no longer be his son. It is my most painful memory, and it never even happened. And I'm to understand I inflicted this onto myself, we all did this, so that we would never want to go home again. We needed to be oblivious to the fact that we had no homes, except for with each other.
"That was the other thing...We would have rather lost each other than been unable to be normal; we did believe, Will said, that we could find other people to befriend. We could be happy. But then, what if something began to seem strange, and one of us began to catch on to being different? Or someone outside started to suspect one of us, and we weren't even together? He said that was the absolute worst fear for some of us. And it apparently seemed the natural decision, that one of us would have to 'stay behind,' as he put it. Even if that person could only watch over the others from afar, it would be better than nothing. So, he remembered. He always remembered everything. He was responsible for bringing us together. And I assure you..."
He shook his head for a few seconds, incredulous.
"That part probably seems as impossible to you as it does to me. I always knew he was brilliant with computers, but think about it: The documentation for our identities was already there, but he would have had to submit all of our applications, tamper with orientation schedules, fake his own qualifications as a second-year student and somehow, without the advantage of quite as much fabricated intelligence as the rest of us have, been accordingly passable as a history student. And in addition to that, he was...I'm willing to say, as instinctive with people as you apparently are. There was definitely a certain grasp he seemed to have with other people, but I never would have imagined that he already knew us. Much of our coming together again must have been pure dumb luck, but at the same time, it could have happened drastically differently with a less clever man."
"And you're absolutely certain," I asked, "that he was the only one who knew?...Did Will mention all of you by name?"
Danek looked directly at me for the first time in a long moment. "Why do you ask?"
I wasn't sure whether this would be bad news for him or not, and felt hesitant, letting out a sigh before I said, "We have documentation proving that everyone in this house was named under a false identity that was used as an undercover alias. Except for Gaila."
He looked like he didn't understand why this should matter to him.
"We don't know if she's anyone's copy."
"Gaila is one of us," he said. The certainty was immediate, unwielding.
"Are you sure? Did he mention her by name in the recording? Did he say how many of you there were from the start?..."
Danek wouldn't reply. I sighed again in agitation.
"Can I see the chip?"
"I did not promise you that," he pointed out. "That's a different deal."
I shoved my hands into the pockets of my sweats, exasperated.
"If you arrest the man who killed Will," Danek said, "I'll give you anything you want."
I raised my hands apart in the air, and my voice kept rising higher in frustration. "You need to help me. I feel like there's got to be something related to all of this, with what happened to him, but we've got nothing. Is there anything that none of you would have told the police, anything suspicious, anything at all?...There has to be someone in this house who has some idea of who might want him dead, and I have a feeling if someone does it would have to be you."
I looked hard into Danek's eyes as, for the moment, there was something dark and very sad there. It was a long moment before he slowly shook his head. "I have no idea."
After a silence, I saw his wheels turning, and decided not to interrupt even when it took him almost a minute to speak again.
"The only thing that might be of use to you...One of the stranger things about Will was that he was extremely distrusting of...superiors, is how I used to think of it, but now I think it was specifically the law. We once had the car broken into and he wouldn't hear anything about it when I wanted to report it to the police. It was one of the few things that could make him considerably bad-tempered. I think we were all confused by it, but it was against our rules to ask about it."
I nodded. "Now you're thinking he was afraid of all of you being discovered?"
"Yes. Perhaps this was even the reason we wanted us to stay here rather than attempting to emigrate out of the city...Too many concerns about customs, the fear that having officials pore over our records might make somebody sense that something was amiss about us. It all makes sense if, after all, his experiences had taught him that we would only be treated as if we were contraband, once someone suspected us." Danek was frowning, his eyes distantly fixed towards the small amount of light from the sliver of a high window. "Considering your actions, Detective Kirk, I wonder if he had a point."
That was completely fair, and I shouldn't have felt like somebody might as well have punched me in the gut. "Listen, you can hate me all you want, but understand that we still would have done this even if all of you weren't...if you were regular citizens."
"It's difficult to take your word for it," he said coldly. "You have to admit that there is some contradiction, after all, between the interests of trying to find a person who would create us and trying to punish the one who would end our supposedly illicitly produced lives."
"I don't think it's a contradiction at all, actually," I protested, but my voice was flat, like I didn't think I could really get anywhere with him. "Why did you ask me to stay for four more days?"
"Because," he said, almost shrugging, "I want to see if there is any way it can help. Perhaps I share your hunch, in a way. It should be easier to pry when you don't have to worry about fooling one of us."
I thought about it a second. "You should probably know that I'm usually geared with a surveillance mic. I don't have one on now, but..."
"Hmm." He considered that with a neutral look of calculation. After a moment, he turned the subject back. "I'm assuming there's a more external investigation as well?"
"Yes," I said with a sigh. "There's a possibility, you should realize, that the person who killed him is some criminal with a grudge against me rather than him. But if they'd turned up any big leads on that, I would've been told by now."
"Yes, surely," Danek said, nodding. There was a subtle sarcasm in it, but I didn't immediately understand what he might be getting at. Then, not-so-subtle: "The search has clearly been arduous, in fact, I did find myself marveling at how often Will had been leaving the house lately. It felt very out of character, but I imagine one has to make of their operations what they can."
Something from his eyes, ill-willing, shifted right into me with a shake. I wasn't about to try to tell him that all it was was that I had a protective guy running my job. "If you're trying to say we haven't been putting as much effort into finding the killer..."
"All I'm saying, Detective Kirk," he said, "is that your superior officer may believe he already has his 'big lead.' After all, if your presence here is to work as a snare for potential murderers, it's obvious you've done little with that potential, assuming the options haven't already been narrowed down."
"So that's your problem. I haven't thrown up the bait quite enough?"
Danek, his face so cleared of any obvious emotion that it was like a curt dismissal, shrugged again. There was a long moment, and then he quietly said, "I can imagine you find my lack of obvious shock to this entire situation a bit suspicious."
After a second I only mildly shook my head. "I wouldn't say suspicious."
"Are you sure?" he responded dryly. "Because I am probably a criminal, even if everything I'm saying is true. From what I told you of Will's message, don't you think the natural conclusion is that one of us had to kill someone to be able to escape from our captivity? And there's the question of where all the money came from. We must have stolen it. And then, you may not believe me anyway, because I'm a man who supposedly only found out last night that he is a robotically implemented genetic clone, that his entire life up until less than two years ago is a falsehood, and that one of the very few people he has ever cared about is dead. A lot of people who meet me believe that I react unnaturally to some things; I can hardly imagine this would be an exception."
"I don't," I said, and then cocked a brow, mumbling, "Hell, for a Vulcan, you could almost tone it down a little."
"For a Vulcan." For a second, his eyes looked at me piercingly, and I almost wondered if he was seeing something I hadn't meant to let on. He gave a thoughtful hum and continued slowly. "In any case, what I'm trying to make you understand is that in some way, I already knew. I think there's always been a feeling among the house that there's something different about us. It doesn't quite have the impact for me that it probably would for you, learning that so many of my memories aren't real. They never felt as genuine to me as I imagine memories are supposed to; for much of the time I assumed that was simply what it was like, to hate your own life up to a point so deeply, but at other times I did wonder if it could mean something else. The reason I'm telling you this is because I can only hope, if you find some reason to haul me into a courtroom or in for some interrogation, that some understanding will be applied to my general affect. It's hard to say, but I don't believe...the emotional control would be quite the same for the others, which is why I must keep this from them, at least until they have less to deal with."
There was a long pause before I could only nod a quiet promise, and after that, a pensive hesitation thickened in the air. Danek sounded quite different when he spoke next, more reflective and careful.
"I knew that he was dead," he said, along something too sad to be a sigh. "I only needed to be shown."
I didn't know then, and still don't, what it was that gave me away to Danek. I wanted badly to know but I wouldn't dare ask; it seemed like something too private, too sacred even. I thought that the answer had to be something buried so far inside of Will that no amount of information or observation could ever make me understand it. It may not have even been only one thing, really; Danek had seemed to think there was something strange going on a couple times, after all.
From the beginning we'd had the uncanny on our side, the fact that even if I'd seemed out of the ordinary, no one oblivious to the truth would think to assume that Will was acting differently because Will wasn't Will. But at the end I realized one of the most glaring features that made Danek so different from Spock: His mind had no inclination for denial. I had contorted too far and one too many times, and it had somehow become impossible for him to accept that I was Will, even before he'd watched what was on the chip, before he'd had anything more than a wicked little hunch to make him suspect what it could possibly be.
Now, you're thinking that it had to be the kiss. I think I was almost sure at first that that was it, and I can't say with any certainty that it wasn't that, but then I have to ask myself: Was it the way I'd done it? Was it the fact that I'd stopped, or that I'd started in the first place? In my most affectionate interpretation, I wonder if Danek already had me pegged then, and was just fucking around with me. To that I'd have to smirk and say that screwing with my head was perfectly fair game. But I don't know.
Much later, later enough that I have to suspect it was partly me beginning to project myself and my own life onto the situation, I couldn't stop thinking about that last moment before I moved from the counter. When his hand reached automatically to find mine slipping away, no longer waiting for him.
I cannot for the life of me describe even from speculation what Danek and Will's relationship was like, if they'd ever kissed before or how many times, if they'd even done more than that; I think it's hard for me to shake the idea that once Will was gone it was all just as fragmented to Danek, that it was something just as much more rooted in feeling than in actions. But while I don't think the way that someone kisses makes for much of a thumbprint, I think about how I couldn't see Danek's expression when his hand reached to where he expected my hand to still be, and I wonder if that had been the jolt, if I'd appeared to him like something so starkly mutated in that moment that the truth was undeniable. I've wondered many, many times, if that was it.
At long last, I'd put the mic back on. I had an angry and somewhat frantic message waiting for me from Chris, but I couldn't reply to it. I had to get my head together and figure out what the hell I was going to say to him when we got the chance to talk, and as much as it made me feel guilty to think of it this way, I knew he had to be pissed I'd made him worry late into the morning and that giving him several hours to cool off would be a lot kinder to myself. I was suddenly getting levels of jitters like I'd never even had my first month on the job; I didn't know how much I could deal with at once.
The day passed. Most of the residents had a good deal of work to catch up on, but looking around me I wasn't sure much of them were getting all that much accomplished. The tension that the rest had probably explained away as some exclusive spat between me and Danek had tinged the air more thoroughly than I expected. It was like the ideal peace that usually hung between everyone had been thrown off by the one little imbalance.
At one point Danek went to sit on the couch where Gaila had stretched out; she was making to sit up, but he just lifted up the bottoms of her legs and sat, letting her feet rest on his lap as he opened up his reader. Just after she got back to her reading, he gave a rub and squeeze to one of her feet. She put her book down for a second to give him some teasingly suspicious expression, but then he gave a warm smile and she just laughed softly and got back to work. I saw it differently: I saw the look on Danek's face, genuinely sweet but edged with a kind of grave desperation that only I would have thought to watch for. I knew that the others had to be the only thing holding him down. It only seemed natural that he would be reaching to touch them more than usual.
Everyone was a bit more talkative once we put on some documentary Toni had been assigned and Ken was doing some imitations of the narrator's odd choices of diction. For once I didn't have much of anything better to do than work on some reading as convincingly as possible; the company had tapered down to Gaila and Danek and me, and since Gaila was doing the same Civil Wars reading, we kept quoting to each other the very self-congratulating memoirs of the "warlord" Tuk-Hon. Before, joking with the others had come easy, but that night it felt like pulling a complicated stunt.
When it was late and Gaila made her exit, I felt like I was catching my breath. Danek, not even looking my way, slapped his reader closed and retired to his room, leaving me alone.
"What the fuck happened last night?!"
Chris had not cooled down as much as I'd stupidly hoped; he'd no sooner picked up the phone than was snapping about protocol and "For all I'd known you could have been stabbed by somebody."
"Jesus, you still had the room bug, you had to know it was no big deal." I pulled my best blasé, hoping to hell I could actually fool Chris on this one. "I was about to change up last night and then they wanted to jump in the pool, so it's kind of a good thing I didn't have it. After that I went right to bed. I'm sorry I didn't check in."
"You're sorry," he said back in huffy sarcasm. "Anything happen I should know about?"
"I don't think so."
"Jim." I heard some hesitant breathing. "I'm thinking you should be done soon."
I stupidly froze right in my steps. "What."
"You've done good work, but I think we've got everything we're going to get. Tomorrow, I want you to get a serious stomachache and have somebody take you to the hospital, we'll wait till—"
"No," I protested, my voice flat with shock. "No, no no no, what, you're giving up now? We've got practically fuck-all!"
"And I don't think we're going to get anything else, and I'm getting increasingly anxious about hanging you out to dry when there isn't good enough reason for it."
"Look, just give me a few more days, Chris. That's it."
"Jim," he said steadily, and there was something grimly authoritative that hadn't been there a second ago, "unless there's something you're not telling me about, I don't see how something could suddenly turn up in less than a week."
I looked back towards the house, at the little window to Danek's bedroom where the lamplight was still glowing. I turned back and walked farther into the trees. I said nothing.
"That's what I thought," Chris said. "I want you out, Jim. I'm sorry."
I had to count back from three before I said it. "No."
Undercovers don't get to call any of the shots, not really, but when it comes down to it, there's very little that they can make you do once you're in. There could be hell to pay once I walked out willingly, and yeah, there were ways I could be forcibly removed, but I was hauling a pretty confident gamble that Chris wouldn't be willing to do that. It would probably involve rather theatrically endangering my cover, and try as he might to be a hardass, I knew that with at least some of the residents, putting them through all that really wasn't something he wanted to do.
After a few seconds, Chris repeated back, "No?"
I didn't respond.
"You're disobeying a direct order. I could have your badge taken away in a minute if I gave this recording to someone else. Just so we're clear, this is what you're doing."
"Crystal."
After that was just a long pause, Chris rising to fuming levels of frustration and finally barking, "Dammit. What the hell is going on in there?!"
Even though I was outright refusing to leave, explaining things to him wouldn't have made things any prettier. The idea that I was in collaboration with one of the residents would have Chris uneasily questioning my objectivity if not my sanity, and keeping him in the dark could make the difference between it being both of us or just me in trouble with the higher-ups farther down the road if this wound up getting messy. "It's nothing you need to worry about. Just trust me on this one."
"'Nothing to worry about.' Go screw something. If you're not telling me, that means it's something dangerous, and you're telling me not to worry about it?"
"As if there's any way I can convince you it's not dangerous," I complained in an angered growl. "You think that Gaila killed Will."
Now that that had landed, Chris took a deep breath. He slowly drawled, "I'm going to go out on a limb here, and guess that you don't."
The worst thing was that I could see the whole line of logic very clearly from his end: the Orion blood in the alleyway, the fact that she hadn't been home until late the night he was murdered, the fact that no one could prove she wasn't hundred percent humanoid. From the viewpoint that she was some lonely troubled outcast who'd decided to turn to the black market and collect herself a family, it was a plain motive: Will somehow coming upon something about her that she couldn't have him telling anyone else and her desperately having to waste him. I could imagine the dramatization through Pike's suspicions, with her making up some reason to have him come with her out there that night, waiting until there was no one around. The ineffectual resistance of a victim too confused to really fight back against Orion muscle, getting him easily square in the gut, finding somewhere to dispose of the weapon, and then going on home. Even the nightmares made some kind of sense: Particularly if somebody's never killed before it can shake them up badly, and it all smacked of the kind of sneaking guilt somebody might have after killing somebody they'd been trying to convince themselves wasn't really a person. Even when I couldn't possibly believe it was true, the whole idea of it made me feel sick.
"You can't twist this like I've been holding out on you, Jim," Chris said. "Any detective worth a damn would feel edgy about this, and you may not want to believe it, but you know exactly why I do."
"It's just different from my end, okay? You don't see all the things that I see, she's—"
"Wake up, Jim. I know you're a softy for the girl but you have to seriously consider the possibility that she may be willing to kill you. That night you caught her off guard in the yard her heart was doing light speed, she was way too antsy around you to not be—"
"She's not antsy, she's traumatized." I was yelling so loudly I checked back toward the house to make extra sure no one was outside. "I don't know why. But I'd bet my life on it."
"Well, congratulations. You're betting your job on this."
"Fine. I want four days." I heard a vague grunt, and went on, "I'll keep my gun on me as often as possible, even in the house, if it makes you feel better."
"Four days. Fine," he said after a moment. "But if you pull anything again like your slack-off last night, I will come in there and drag you out myself."
A second later Chris had hung up. I flipped my comm shut and then kept meandering numbly through the park, and tried to will my hands to stop shaking. The wind had picked up to a chill and I wasn't sure if I was shivering from the cold or some weak variant of anger. I'd gone head to head with superiors before without really sweating it, but with Chris it was different. I had no idea if things could be okay with us if I ended up somehow tarnishing his reputation or forcing him to have me sacked.
It was a few minutes before I took Will's comm back out of my pocket and punched the number in to call Bones, thankful I'd entered it manually enough times to have it memorized. I knew that he'd probably be sleeping around this time, but on the off-chance that I woke him up I figured this was worth the bother.
I had no idea what I was going to say if he picked up. It would have made a lot of sense if I wanted to pour my heart out about how the entire damn operation was looking to end up being a total waste, but I really felt at that moment like I would have given up a limb just to sit and talk about nothing in particular with someone who really knew me. I'd only been in the house for weeks, but it felt way longer than that. This is the kind of thing that makes or breaks you in UCD: Time gets stretched out by the exhaustion of being constantly on your game, and after months to years of it it's almost worse than being literally alone, that you spend so much time with other people and none of them know who you are. You get homesick for yourself.
I don't know how many times it beeped before I made myself accept that Bones wasn't going to pick up. I rocked tiredly backwards until I was tucked in with my back against a tree trunk, and stared down the comm with a blank look.
Before I could really let myself think about it I had started dialing another number. When the alert started beeping I was hunched over in the wind, my eyes trained on the raspy movement of the leaves on the ground.
I had the comm pressed tight at my ear and my left knuckles clamped firmly against my lips as if I was afraid to so much as open my mouth. When the answer came, I don't think I even breathed.
"Detective Spock." His voice was perfectly neutral; it was impossible to tell if he'd been sleeping. My grip around my comm tightened in even more. It was like I thought that if I could only hear the background static a little better I would somehow be able to visualize him, in his open sterile kitchen with the steam aroma of tea from the kettle, or sitting up attentively on his bed looking one notch too formal for a man in his pajamas. I wanted to smell his laundry soap. "Hello?..."
His tone was a little more offhand; I knew any second now he was going to end the call. But then there was some shift of air: I could almost feel him stilling, and the word was low and urgent, his voice smaller now:
"Jim?"
I hung up in a rush, as if I'd been spooked.
After finally tucking the comm back into my pocket, I crossed my arms, walked back up through the yard and around to the front of the house and just went up and down the block.
Arriving back at the driveway later, I saw movement up at the window of the loft. Danek was in there sitting across from Ken on his bed, their heads bowed over something and Ken smirking in response to a comment from Gaila who had her back leaned into the edge of the window. A vague motion in the background must have been Toni putting some things away.
For a minute I had the strongest, impossible urge to just walk away from the house forever, as if I could pull the last weeks out of the bedrock with my departure and leave them to each other. It reminded me of that irrational desire even an experienced cop will get sometimes when they see a dead body, to just lay the blankets over and give them their last peace instead of doing all the poking and prodding. We hadn't had the decency to let Will lie, and at that moment I felt like I would have done almost anything to take that back and leave the rest of them alone.
But I had made a promise. After some minutes I somehow got myself put back together, shoved my hands into my jacket pockets, and went back inside.
