Who: Luke and Thea What: Officer Henry to the 'rescue'. Where: Some seedy club → Thea's apartment. When: Recently, but before Gotham madness. Warnings/Rating: Some swearing, I think.
Luke was looking forward to going home. At least, he had been, until the phone rang the sixth time that night from a nervous club owner who spoke broken English and just wouldn’t quit. Some people pounded 9-1-1 for everything, little things and annoyances and then they got circled back to the police department, to people who were used to seeing horrible things and hopelessness and didn’t have much patience for stupidity. But it happened, and sometimes it was a relief, strange as it sounded, to deal with a noise complaint or a drunk and disorderly in comparison to an ugly domestic dispute or a murder or a missing baby still missing as the clocked ticked down, down, down.
Tonight, though, it wasn’t a relief. He was tired, damn it, and he hadn’t seen Wren or Gus all day save for a half hour on his lunch that had gone by far too quickly. The panicked guy on the phone wanted them to send an officer over, said there was going to be trouble, though he wouldn’t specify when or what kind of trouble was looming over his head. Five times he’d been dismissed, and the sixth was the last straw. “Henry,” his captain growled, frustrated and holding the phone out away from his ear as though it might bite him, “this one’s yours. Check it out.”
And what could he say? He looked around, saw the sympathetic looks of his fellow brothers and sisters in blue but none were willing to step up and take the burden from him. So he sighed, and he nodded. “Yes, sir.” Dutiful, because that was his job and he didn’t have a choice. No uniform, not on this, he went out as a plainclothes officer to avoid detection and potentially riling up an already tumultuous situation, but his badge was in his pocket for I.D. and his gun was tucked in the back of his jeans, hidden by an oversized shirt and a jacket that had seen better days.
The club was nothing fancy, though it tried to be. Garish neon signs and bright paint that had begun to peel, loud music and flashing lights beckoning from within. There was no bouncer out front, which set off the first warning bell, and people staggered in and out at will. Right. Luke sighed, and he checked his watch before ducking inside. Maybe this would be a false alarm, and then he could go home.
Thea liked trouble. She liked to hold hands, take it home and she wasn’t planning on making it breakfast the next morning, but short-term loving, that was fine. The club wasn’t big and it wasn’t fancy. It hadn’t had a makeover in years and after the initial flash of muscle to let everyone in the neighborhood know that, like all other bars, they served alcohol, the bartenders went back to bartending instead of standing out front in awkward postures with their arms folded like they were pondering the writings of Sartre instead of just getting paid to do nothing temporarily. It was well known, even if the paint was peeling and the music was decibels above public health warnings, but Thea liked that part. She liked the way the music moved inside her, like each jacked-up thud of the bass line was an electric pulse in the water of her chest, until it beat beneath and around her heart, inside her rib-cage, until her breath in shuddered with the wave of the music. It was well-known because you didn’t need a good fake ID even if you had one and the alcohol behind the bar was cheap.
No one was ordering Shirley Temples, here.
Matilda hadn’t been home (shocker, newsflash, sudden broadcast update, we interrupt this show with something absolutely static and normal) and Thea didn’t feel like a bitch for prying out the nail that kept her bedroom window shut on the outside; ingenuity in action, outside the box thinking, the consolation prize when your aunt has finally ceded to the family theme of not actually wanting to be around you. Lin hadn’t been around for the five seconds she’d given him to say something moderately objecting in the two liner text message, font face=”courier new”>hey, going out, if they find my body in a ditch I want my nails purple for the funeral k?</font> and bases squared, all those little PSAs about notifying someone where you were, what you intended to do, Thea tossed the phone in the bottom of her bag and she set about what she’d actually intended to do. Which was forget.
There was drinking cued up but this wasn’t courting-alcoholism-I-want-to-be-a-novel-case-of-juvenile-cirrhosis drinking, this was ‘I remember what it feels like to die’, fun memories that wouldn’t go away to share with the family forgetting and that could come in all shades. Thea’s eyes slid over someone good and objectionable stood leaning at the end of the bar like maybe he wanted to order but maybe he was just doing his duty as moody scenery. She looked like jailbait and she knew it, the heeled boots bought somewhere outside Berlin that ended at the knee and nothing up top to fill out the skimpy shirt. But she slid off the seat, her head warm and pleasantly buzzing and her glass empty and abandoned on the bar top and headed for trouble like she planned on getting familiar with an old friend.
Clubs and bars had never been his thing, and even in the dark days when he’d wanted trouble and had gone looking for it places like this were hunting ground, a means to an end, nothing akin to enjoyment or pleasure. In a sense he’d come full circle, back in the underbelly of Vegas looking for trouble, but albeit with different intentions. The problem was that trouble was a broad term and could mean anything from a brewing barfight to something more sinister, and Luke wasn’t particularly inclined to reveal himself by asking the bartenders about the cryptic call that’d brought him here. But even if he didn’t know what it was, he could feel it in the air, a palpable tension like a storm brewing just before it came to fruition and exploded. On the surface everything was fine, flashing lights and pulsating music and drunken laughter overlain it all, but aside from the bartenders behind the bar and a couple of miniskirt-clad waitresses mingling in the crowd, there was no one else on the floor who worked for the place. No security. No bouncers.
He didn’t get a good feeling about that.
Making his way to the bar, he ordered a beer he had no intention of drinking and instead passed it from hand to hand as he surveyed the scene. His gaze fell on a girl who looked too young to be in a place like this, much less drinking, and a frown marred his features. Maybe she was a year or two shy of being legal, but still, underage. She shouldn’t have even gotten one foot through the damn door, much less served alcohol. And, after a few moments, he realized she wasn’t the only girl there who looked too young, dressed too old, teenagers who couldn’t get in anywhere else but for some reason were allowed in here. Something slimy crawled along his spine, and there was a difference between a cursory glance at jailbait and staring that went on too long, when looking wasn’t enough and intentions began to take shape.
Keeping his eye on the first girl, the one in the knee-high heeled boots and a thirst for trouble, Luke left his beer at the bar and slipped into the crowd. There was a man at the end, moody and dark and the kind of bad boy girls who didn’t know any better would go googly-eyed for, but he eyed the girl like some kind of predator as she slipped off her seat and smiled like she was a particularly tasty morsel he’d developed a taste for. For a second his gaze went over her head, deep into the crowd, a barely perceptible nod given to someone else before his attention was back on her, slow drawl and compliments. And Luke, Luke’s gaze narrowed but he hung back and watched; he hated waiting, was better at impulsiveness than patience, but he’d come here for more than just dragging out some underage kid and he was pretty sure that trouble he’d been warned about had some merit.
Thea didn’t look for nods, for communications cast out like a weighted net to drag along the shadowy bottom, scudding for bad news and young girls. The guy stood at the end of the bar was tall enough to be interesting, the frame of his shoulders solid enough to put a dent in nightmares and offputting memory and the look in his eyes was coolly interested. This wasn’t promises and untruths to be picked apart with a pint of ice-cream and someone else’s toes curled close on your thigh (Lin; a skitter of guilt beating like a secondary heartbeat, Lin who was locked up like a princess in a tower but Lin was marshmallow and pastel nail-varnish, the bright, hard artifice of happy music and she wanted none of it, melancholia pulsed ecstatic). He leaned his head down, the spun-silk of soft curls bouncing against her back as he pushed a glass cool with condensation up against her fingers, vodka sharp like a bite against the back of her throat. And then his hand was fastened around her elbow, a tug in a direction like a fishing line - toward the urine-tang and cold porcelain of something quick and dirty and anchored, the hard reality of something that was nothing.
There wasn’t security in the club. There wasn’t security because they made money on people like these, on alcohol that burned a path down her throat, blistered tears at the backs of her eyes and she tugged at the hem of her skirt as his fingers slid up; glass in her hand and the crawl of unfamiliar finger and thumb between inner thigh and that was how it worked, no security to turn blind eyes to ten dollar drinks and a man with someone too young to drink but old enough to fuck in a bathroom stall. Thea glanced around, whispers of itchy-discomfort beneath the skin; his hand was tight on her forearm, “I can get there,” impatient, the acidic slide of the vodka not yet quick enough to lick away the fuzzy haze of adrenaline beneath the drink.
There was some guy, across the room - young, Thea thought, without the irony of youth-calling-youth-young, young enough that it looked like he didn’t need to shave every day or maybe he was just clean-cut like that, better suited to books and libraries and the kind of bar where they served wings along with the beer, sports a forever-accompaniment rather than the beat and pulse of something not-quite-trance, not-quite-techno. He was staring; pervert, maybe, why else here, why else would he be getting his rocks off without something in hand to lubricate the night? She let her hand ghost into that of her would-be dance partner, the heels steady on sticky-slick floor.
Either entirely oblivious to how he must have looked, or simply not caring, Luke leaned against the bartop and glowered. There were a lot of things he didn’t like and guys who went after girls just toeing the line of legal consent was one of them. He had the girl pegged at eighteen, maybe nineteen at the most. Seventeen youngest, at least within that three-year gap, but regardless she was too young to be here, too young to be drinking, and too young to be getting mixed up with men who weren’t men at all but wolves instead. He didn’t like the way the guy tugged either, intent in the way he held onto her forearm, the look in his eyes that said no wasn’t going to deter him were it to be spoken. The back of the club and beyond was where he sought to lead, away from people and safety, not that this place was safe to begin with, and Luke didn’t want to actually let him get that far. He pushed away from the bar and finally broke his line of sight, blending into the crowd, looking for all the world like he’d lost interest and had gone to find someone or something that entertained him elsewhere.
To hell with waiting. He’d call in backup, let them deal with this mess; at the very least they could bust the place for serving alcohol to minors. But the girl, well, maybe it was that he remembered being eighteen and stupid, maybe he remembered what men had done to Wren and MK and other girls at that age, but he wasn’t going to let some kid get hurt or worse because she felt like making some bad decisions.
Mere seconds before the man would have gotten his prize where he wanted her, Luke stepped out from the crowd and directly into their path, expression somber, as he looked between the two. “Excuse me, miss, but I’m going to need to see your ID,” he said to the girl, with a sort of perpetual patience that was entirely feigned.
He was young, Thea thought again, distractedly as her boots came to a sticky-sliding stop on the floor, momentum-pressure from the guy with his hand on her arm like she would run (like she would, like he wasn’t bad news dressed up like it was catastrophe. And if she had time, if she didn’t want it brief, effective, no parting words or pretense, she would. Press fingertips to his cheek like it was sweet he didn’t know terror) and the rocking-back to a stop as the guy from across the room put himself in their path. The guy who looked clean-cut, all apple-pie and white-picket-fences. American; he looked like he’d been a freaking boy scout.
Perhaps the man with his hand twisted around her forearm now (and when had that happened? She looked at it, all flinty-gray eyes and amused-cool smile, the flicker of her gaze upwards surprisingly adult for the loose hair, the skirt that fluted around the tops of her thighs) was a wolf. But they hunted wolves, here. She slid her hand into the pocket of her skirt, all intended innocence and wide, heavily-kohled eyes and the breathy sweetness of irony. The laminated card pushed into his hand was a forgery but it was a good one. It had cost enough to fool enough bars, enough clubs where an intimate setting could be induced, where no one cared what you were on or who, so long as you left at the end of the night. It said Althea in full and Wells, because she was exactly that, just skipped forward a couple of years, hazy on the birthdate, and she was nonchalant, all skinny height and the boots, and the man whose name she did not know, the press of his hips against hers at her backside.
“Problem?” Cool-sweet. Sharp as the vodka had been bitter.
Luke had to wonder if the girl was being deliberately blind, or whether she really didn’t understand the kind of trouble men who held on so tightly to girls too young to be in bars could bring in their wake. It occurred to him that maybe she knew, and he didn’t care, but that was fine. He could care enough for the both of them. Had he not been so certain that the girl was under twenty-one, the ID that found its way into his hand for inspection might have fooled him. It looked real enough, no cheap imitation, and he turned it over in his fingers as his gaze skimmed over her name and date of birth. Althea Wells. With his free hand he went for his phone, her name and the number on her ID sent to await confirmation. It occurred to him that he could just send her on her way, let her make whatever mistake she was about to make and hey, if the guy roughed her up or if he had friends waiting, as Luke suspected he did due to the earlier signals to others in the crowd, well, that wouldn’t be his fault. Most people thought that way. They didn’t see other people as their responsibility. But Luke, he wasn’t like most people.
Her question was left unanswered, at least for a moment or two, until he’d seemingly completed his perusal of her identification and lifted his gaze back up to the girl and her companion, who grew more and more impatient the longer they stood. “Might be,” he said, handing the ID back, and then he did a little show and tell of his own. His badge was produced from his pocket, naming who he was and what he did without so much as a word being uttered. “We received some calls,” was his explanation, intentionally vague, and he gestured to the girl. “I’ll need you to come with me.” He didn’t want to drag her out in handcuffs; it would take mere minutes to pull up records on one Althea Wells and find out her real birthdate, but he didn’t intend on actually arresting her. No, he just wanted to get her out, and get her home. He wondered if her parents even knew she was here.
As for the man, well, he earned himself a nice long stare that gave him a choice: let go of the girl, or, well, let go of the girl. One way or another, it was happening.
Thea looked at him from behind the long tangle-toss of dark hair and the knife-blade of her profile was bitter-amusement as she glanced upward at the man (name? Who needed a name? It was far easier to pretend things were blunt and short and throwaway if there were no remnants) and the arch kind of arrogance that was young, young and money and aware of the length of bare thigh on display beneath the skirt. She handed over her ID in full confidence that it would pass and she shifted her weight from one hip to another as deterant as her new-found friend took the static lack of motion invitation to slide one glass-cool hand up the apex of her thighs.
And then the badge. Officer Do-Gooder, who had to be barely out of college himself, Thea squinted at the name with kohl-rimmed eyes but the badge was there and it was gone, and apparently Do-Gooder hadn’t picked up manners enough to give his name as he stepped in to ruin fun.
“What calls?” Places like this didn’t have calls, it was how they did business. Thea looked deliberately at the corners of the room, the sleight-of-hand deals and the tiny baggies out in plain sight, at the loose and free debauchery of the unconcerned - the slide of gray-blue eyes up to his face and the tiny smile that floated on her lips said exactly what it was meant to; there were bigger problems than a teenager trying to cut loose. “Are you arresting me?” But they were doing some male thing, all eyes and stance and squared shoulders, and the hand on her forearm squeezed painfully tight - Thea made a sharp sound - and then went slack as fun-for-the-night melted away.
It would have made this a lot easier had she just agreed, but the girl was all attitude and defiance and neither added up to compliance. Inwardly, Luke sighed, even though he had no intention of backing down after having come this far. Mr. Handsy was really starting to piss him off, and his badge was real enough, authentic, and maybe there was a bigger picture to look at here but backup could take care of that. He was a scout sent ahead to report back which was what he would do, but first, first he was getting this girl home and maybe in the morning she’d look back and realize how monumentally stupid this had been.
“I can’t disclose that information,” he said, a polite avoidance that all officers used at one point or another. Something like a frown darkened his features when the man tightened his hold on her arm, and he took a step forward which spoke of his willingness to use force if need be; he was young, yes, but no less capable than a forty-year veteran. “You can come willingly, or I can arrest you, yes.” He watched the man go, mouth in a tight line but no attempt made to stop him. His posture relaxed a little then, almost imperceptibly so, as he waited for her response.
Thea had been arrested before. It had been Germany, Berlin club all smoke and dirt and the drip-drip-drip of moisture down the brick wall behind her as the lights had flared up the side of the shadowed wall and the heavy weight of the bracelets had been silvery-cold on her wrists. She had laughed, folded herself inside the car with the cottony-thick buzz still humming inside her head and thought complacently of diplomatic immunity as she sat back on plastic seat. There was no diplomatic immunity, living on your aunt’s futon and there was no call to the embassy and her dad useful the only way he knew how.
The sharp jut of her hip was a pale curve beneath the flat of her belly; Thea wore clothes that were probably designed to tease but on a girl angles instead of convex, rounded slopes, they were somehow more innocent, less provocative and more bland statement of intent. Handsy had left a reddening mark on the line of her forearm, but Thea was looking right at Officer Do-Gooder, kohl-smeared skepticism and folded arms and the tiniest, slipperiest of smiles. “You’ll arrest me for not leaving a club. Where I have a valid I.D. Is that in the manual? Have you read the manual? You don’t look old enough to even be a police officer - did you pass or are you playing dress-up?”
Luke knew he didn’t exactly look like a cop; at best he could be picked out as a rookie, easy, at worst he still looked like he was in school. But he didn’t need some teenager giving him attitude about it and the badge made his looks irrelevant. “I passed. Officer Henry, at your service,” he said dryly. “Didn’t anybody ever teach you not to judge a book by it’s cover?” He raised his eyebrows just as his phone emitted a series of bleeps from within his pocket, and he gave her a look before averting his gaze; he was quick, but the phone didn’t look like anything on the market and it was sleek black, nothing a cop should’ve been carrying around. “A valid I.D.,” he repeated, and then the phone was gone and he looked back up at her. “See, Ms. Wells, if that were true we wouldn’t have a problem. But what you showed me is not valid identification. You’re not even of age.” He gestured to the door. “One last time. You can come with me, or I can handcuff you. Your choice.”
No one had taught Thea about books and covers beyond how apt they were for judgment. Madeline had been all pearls and sleek, well-cut suits in colors no one considered colors at all. If she had had a choice, Thea thought darkly, Madeline would have made her walk around the houses they’d lived in with a book on her head, so how was that for covers on books? He didn’t look like a cop even if he was one - the badge was too shiny for anything other than the real thing, Officer Do Gooder so proud he probably polished it with the corner of his pyjamas. Thea snorted at the thought of it, all snicker-laughter in the back of throat and maybe a little bit of scorn for the kid cop who looked like he didn’t shave yet. He was quick with the phone in his hands but it was the kind of quick that was all evasive, and the gleam in Thea’s eyes was acquisitive, keen like something feral seeing a weak spot.
“They don’t dole those out at LVPD,” she said with all the certainty of a maddeningly self-righteous teenager, “And the ID worked fine.” She shook back the long hair, shot him a look that worked beautifully on adults who were slightly terrified of young people close enough to adulthood that they were moody about not being there yet. “If you want to be alone with me officer, all you have to do is ask.” Deliberate, provocative bat of eyelashes, the hip cocked once again with the slither of bare skin beneath so much barely-there clothing.
Years ago, Luke had been a teenager struggling to be taken seriously by adults. Now, it seemed, he’d fallen into a reversal of roles; here he was, an adult failing miserably at being taken seriously by a teenager. Her attitude wasn’t foreign and he’d known girls like her, girls who would’ve eaten him alive when he was awkward and young and got tongue-tied too easily. But he wasn’t a kid anymore and he’d lost a lot of his social ineptitude, and he wasn’t going to let some girl with a fake I.D. trip him up.
“No,” he said, guarded. Explaining why he had a phone with technology that didn’t actually exist on this side was too complicated, so he didn’t elaborate further. “That’s because it’s a good fake. Good enough to get you in here, where no one cares or would know better even if they did.” And maybe he wasn’t the best with young people, but he wasn’t that old yet and that look of hers didn’t work on him; he hid any discomfort he might have felt well. All that deliberate provocativeness, the bat of eyelashes and cock of her hips, just made him roll his eyes down at her. “You’re not my type, and besides, I’m married,” he told her. “Come on. Fun’s over.” He took hold of her arm, though his grip was gentler and less forceful than her former companion’s, and began to move towards the door.
Thea would have laughed at being tagged as one of the girls who had the appetite for kids who were awkward and young and odd. She would have laughed and she would have shaken back that hair again and she would have looked as if she were being given a present and slapped across the face at the same minute. She had been awkward and she had been odd, in the same way but Thea found that if you wore something hiked high enough and down low enough in front, no one gave a damn and if you got a reputation for sleeping around, no one called you awkward anymore and no one made your life so miserable you wanted to die.
She laughed right then at married, because he looked old enough maybe to shave but not enough to drink, and who the hell got married when you were young enough to be anything else? “A third of marriages end in divorce,” she reminded him, all snotty-nosed air of self-possession as she was steered and towed toward the exit, “What were you, a child-bride? Do you have to be so grabby?” Thea complained loudly enough that someone might (might chip in and help).
God, she sounded like Max with her statistics about marriage and divorce. “Thanks, Mom,” he said, sarcasm slipping out without thought, an instinctive response more than anything. Immediately afterward Luke tightened his mouth into a firm line because yeah, that was unprofessional, and he frowned down at her when her volume rose like someone might come to her rescue if she was loud enough. “No, I wasn’t a child-bride, and I gave you the chance to come with me willingly more than once. You refused.” A couple of patrons looked their way, most preferring to stick to their booze or their dancing or whatever random stranger they’d picked up that night. Just to be safe, though, he used his free hand to free his badge and flash it around again so everyone got the message, heading off any drunken Good Samaritans who might try to get in his way.
No one wanted a cop in that place and they were more than happy to see him leave; Luke didn’t know if backup would ever follow up but the possibility made him chuckle inwardly. He pushed open the door for her, after you, the night air a relief from the music and scent of bodies and booze within the club. “You shouldn’t be in a place like this,” he told her, unable to help himself. “It’s bad news and so are the people inside, like your friend.”
“Thanks Dad,” it came immediately, the riff comfortable even if Officer Do-Gooder looked like he was busting with that Boy-Scout wisdom of his and if Thea had smirked (eyebrows high and her lips thinned down with oh-so-obvious surprise) at that snap-back that said maybe he had graduated police-academy but he was still young enough to think of snark. Thea thought maybe he hadn’t been a child-bride but maybe he was a Mormon. Mormons believed in marrying young, right? He looked like didn’t have ten years, maybe five on her, and she made that sizing up obvious, even if his hand was on her arm still. The tilt of her head was confident, and the sly smile slid from one corner of her mouth to the other in slow assessment. Thea had gotten in trouble enough times to know when trouble really meant it.
“Do you really have nothing better to do?” Outside smelled better than inside, but inside held booze and ways of forgetting problems for under ten bucks, and outside had Officer Do-Gooder, who had that badge out like a kid with a toy from the dollar-store, all proud about the shine. “Doesn’t your wife want you home, instead of picking up girls in bars?” Eyebrow.
Maybe, Luke thought, he wouldn’t mind another boy after all. Dealing with a daughter at this age scared the shit out of him and, not for the first time that night, he wondered where Althea Wells’ parents were. He knew he was being sized up, could tell by the way she looked at him, and he gave her a sidelong Look like the sort Thomas had given him when he was younger and had just done something particularly exasperating. “Look-- Althea, right? I’d rather be home with my wife and kid right now, trust me. And I bet you don’t want to be stuck with me any longer than you have to,” he told her. “So here’s what’s going to happen. I won’t bring you down to the station, but I am bringing you home in one piece. You keep coming to places like this and letting strangers drag you off, though, and one of these nights you might not be so lucky.” He was lecturing, he knew, but he couldn’t help it; he’d seen too many girls hurt and too many bastards who left them strewn like broken dolls in their wake. The cop car was parked a few spots down and around the corner, which was where he led her, because like hell was he letting her run off and get herself into trouble all over again.
Althea Wells’s parents were split across Europe like a postcard torn down the middle. Thea would have struggled to say exactly where Madeline was - she thought maybe Matilda knew where Madeline was, in the conversations Thea imagined them occasionally having if only so that the checks that got sent had some kind of stilted, abbreviated covering note. She had last seen her father on the inside cover of one of his books, shiny-new on a bookstore table, and Thea had noticed only that it had ceased to hurt, not knowing things until they were out in the world.
“It’s Thea,” she informed Do-Gooder, because Althea sounded awkward and awful in his mouth, but if he’d knocked someone up, it made sense someone so Boy Scout-y was married young enough to remember high school. Thea’s eyes shone beneath smudged eyeliner, all contempt for that Look attempted and failed even as they headed in jerky two-step toward that car. Thea breathed in plastic and urine and the disinfectant smell particular to those shitty Crown Vics, and she rolled her eyes at a lecture that didn’t seem to end. “How do you know he wasn’t my childhood best friend?” flippant enough to fuck him off, because Thea thought pissing off Officer Do-Gooder until he was good and wound up would be the only entertainment available for a night. “I know what I’m doing.”
For a second, just one, the name Thea tugged on a string of familiarity in the back of his mind. He mulled it over but came up with nothing concrete and so dismissed it, thinking it nothing. A fluke, maybe. “Thea, then,” he repeated, an adult humoring the preference of someone younger who wanted to be called something other than their given name. As for the suggestion that the asshole inside had been her childhood friend, well, he’d have to have been pretty stupid to buy that. “That won’t work with me. You and I both know he wasn’t your childhood best friend. He was a stranger, and for all you know he could’ve left you for dead in an alley once he got what he wanted.” Oh, she knew what she was doing, did she? He shook his head, exasperated. “Sure you do. What would you have done if he got you in the back and attacked you? What if something happened? You have to be smart, okay? I see girls like you end up hurt or worse all the time,” he said, and the earnestness in his voice bordered on something akin to actual concern before he pulled himself back. “Look, just-- I’m taking you home.” Reaching the patrol car, he unlocked the back door and pulled it open. “After you.”
“You don’t have to sound like an asshole,” Thea managed to sound both pained and condescending, the particular combination peculiar to youth and the elbows jutted, just enough to make it absolutely painful to get in close, ready to be impaled. She inspected her nails during his little PSA moment, all would-be protection and honesty and it was adorable, really, it was but Vegas hadn’t come with boundaries, it had come with a little book instead. “He wouldn’t have attacked me,” they didn’t. Not if you went down willingly, sticky tile floor hard beneath her knees and the underside of the sink tacky with dirt. No one cleaned a club bathroom, no one thought to. She wondered if Officer Do-Gooder had ever been blown in the back of a club, the walls sticky with long-ago posters, concerts that had never happened, tours that would never come. Thea didn’t think so; his badge was too shiny.
She slid into the seat, knees together, ankles neat - debutante style, except she’d fucked off instead of going to an ‘event’, long white dress ruined at the edge, blackened with the floor of a night in a club in Germany, lipstick and cigarette stains and laughter, until she was sick. They’d not noticed; Madeline and Frederick. They’d skipped, same as she had. Thea rested her head against the almost-cool of the window’s glass. “Do they seriously pay you to taxi around girls like me? Clearly our fiduciary priorities are in order.” Sarcasm. The mascara-heavy eyelashes were lowered.
He faltered a little, unsure whether he’d actually, albeit unintentionally, ventured into asshole territory or if she’d said it simply because she had to throw something back at him. For a few moments he didn’t respond, disgruntled frustration bubbling beneath the surface before he sighed. “I’m not trying to sound like an asshole,” he relented, belatedly. He knew good cops and he was starting to know some not-so-good-ones, and he didn’t want to be like the assholes who got too cocky and let the badge get to their head. “You don’t know that.” Maybe the guy wouldn’t have, but maybe there would have been one who did, and besides, he’d spent his entire life telling Wren that she deserved more than to be used by men; the same went for this girl, and everyone else for that matter. “And, I mean, come on. He had creep written all over him.”
Somehow, in the span of minutes, he’d gone from cop to chauffeur. He shut the back door with a sigh and slid into the driver’s seat, turning the key in the ignition and pulling away from the curb; he didn’t need to ask for the address, fortunately, since he wasn’t all that sure she’d give him her real one if she asked. When she spoke, he glanced in the rearview mirror and shrugged. “No. I’m not a taxi driver,” he said. “But I figure getting you home safe falls under serving and protecting.”
Thea tipped her head and let her forehead roll against the sticky glass of the window. Pink and crimson seeped through her peripheral vision, like Christmas lights through water. He sounded like she’d carved close to getting there, all on-the-job frustration. Thea settled her elbows in against her sides, the pinching hunch of her shoulders made her both smaller and shorter; she was thin enough to look angular already and the effect was one unintentionally pathetic. “You sound like one anyway,” she lifted her head briefly enough to inform him disinterestedly, because he did, sanctimonious and all-knowing even if he was young enough that he couldn’t have met many. The man in the club, Thea knew what it would have been without knowing. “You don’t know anything.” She slid back on the seat, hips hard against the solid, plastic back of the seat and this was apparently it, finite, conversation closed.
She allowed her head to slide onto her left shoulder, the pale eyes filtered over traffic, excluded Luke from the backseat as effectively as slamming shut a door. She ignored serve and protect, laid out like they were words for readaptation, reinterpretation. Thea had met cops. Sometimes, you sucked them off in the bathroom stall for shits and giggles. She picked at the silvery nail-varnish with the slide of her thumb and wondered if Lin even thought about going out these days. He was vanished, ether and remembered home-warmth. If she had listed off a home on a form, government indication of where one Althea Wells lived, it would have been there. Ashes, dust but the kind of blanket-wrapped warmth that felt like it could have been a Place To Live.
Again Luke regarded her in the rearview mirror, wondering what this girl would think if she told him just how much he really knew. At eighteen he’d been forced to grow up, before he was ready, the only parental figure in his life a man who should never have been allowed to mold someone so impressionable into what he wanted. He’d known terrible people, evil that was long since dead now. There was no way to open her eyes and tell her any of what he knew, though, without betraying secrets better left buried, and so he shook his head instead. “I know more than you think,” he told her, but that was all, no elaboration before he fell silent again and returned his attention to the road.
He was going by official documentation, by what records showed was her last listed address, and he had no way of knowing if it was or wasn’t actually hers. Maybe he should have asked where she wanted him to drop her off, but he didn’t think he’d end up liking her answer if he did. He drove steadily and smooth without the need for external direction, and when he reached the address indicated he slowed to a stop beside the building and, this time, looked over his shoulder at her. “Is anyone home to let you in, or can you get in yourself?”
Thea sat with her shoulders hunched in and her wrists folded between her thighs. She was still looking out the glass of the window and the streetlight softened the hard smears of eyeliner and the glitter along her collarbone, smoothing over sharp features and the blurred line between youth and adulthood. She didn’t look like she was attached to the building, and looking at it from the outside, it could have been anywhere in Vegas. She shrugged now, a jerky little movement from within her clothes as if she couldn’t have cared less about whether anyone was home or not. She tilted her head; the window wasn’t lit. That meant ‘not there’ at this hour. If Matilda was home, she would have been awake, but she wasn’t.
“Aren’t you meant to ask that before you try leaving me on the side of the street?” Her voice was husky, perhaps because the deliberate defiance was gone. There were traces, but most of what clung to thin shoulders was absolute lack of interest. Officer Do-Gooder had done his bit, spoiled her fun but he had a badge to prove why. She could go out the next night, and there could be an Officer Do-Gooder or there could be someone behind a door. What did it matter?
That shrug wasn’t very reassuring, and Luke frowned as he ran through the options left to him if no one was home and she was essentially locked out of her own home. “I’m not leaving you on the side of the street,” he pointed out mildly. “If I was going to do that, I wouldn’t care whether or not anyone was home or if you had a way in. I intend on making sure you get inside safely.” And oh, god, maybe that did sound a little cringe-worthy even to his own ears, but the sentiment was genuine. He wasn’t going to just drop her off on the sidewalk and drive away with the assumption that she’d be just fine once he was gone. He seemed to be mulling something over for a few seconds before pushing open the driver’s side door and sliding out, rounding around to the other side and pulling open the back door. “Come on,” he said, with a slight, faintly amused smile. “I’ll walk you up.”
Inside safely? Her aunt’s neighborhood wasn’t Summerlin, fancy houses and gated gardens but it wasn’t exactly unsafe. Thea’s expression shifted like clouds before a storm, mutinous-sulky and incredulous, like Officer Do-Gooder was trying to make himself an assignment out of nothing at all. “I have a key. I’m not five years old,” she said, sliding across the plastic crackle of the backseat, legs first and then the rest of her, all skinny angles and petulance. “Look,” she said, turning toward the door, and her arms folded against the light fabric of her jacket, and there was something adult about the tone, business-like, as if Thea were used to dissuading adults from things, regularly and had discovered this was how, “I totally see how there could be a million things to non-consensually fuck me on the way between my external door and the apartment, but how about you find a real assignment?” Blink-blink,smile. “Somewhere that is not here.”
In truth, it was very tempting to just let the girl handle herself and finally head on home. There were a million ways he could justify it to himself, and really, the likelihood of something happening to her between the sidewalk and her apartment was slim. But Luke figured he’d committed this much, why not see it the rest of the way through? “I know you’re not five years old, Ms. Wells,” he said, with a world-weary sort of patience that he was too young to possess. He stood by, keeping the door open, as she slid out of the backseat, and his expression didn’t change all that much as she spoke. “After this, I’m going home,” he said, bluntly honest. “Now, the sooner you get up to your place, the sooner I can leave and you won’t have to put up with me anymore.” He smiled again, brighter this time. “Lead the way.”
Okay, so that part was fair. Thea thought that if she had someone in the back-seat who was over the age of ‘scaring straight’ then she wouldn’t bother, but Officer Do-Gooder was so plainly set on being a righteous ass that he wasn’t being deterred. She slid over plastic, bare thighs squeaking on the tacky surface, and she was boots clicking on the cement, and without a backward look beyond the flick of long, dark hair. The lock was scraped, like all places someone had maybe-kinda-not-almost tried to break in, and it took a little bit and a shove to actually get the door open. The hallway beyond was flickering florescence and if it wasn’t upscale hotels and embassy stays, it wasn’t people pissing in corners gross quite yet. The flight of stairs Thea took two at a time, hand didn’t touch the rail once like maybe something gross would be stuck there, and the door she stopped at looked perfectly normal, except the shiny, shiny, triple locks.
“See. Perfectly capable. No boogyman out to get me.” Thea’s keys jangled in her palm. The typical, bored-teenager cadence to her voice; would Matilda even come home tonight? It wasn’t exactly pre-determined.
With all the dutifulness of one who had committed himself to seeing his task through to the bitter end, Luke followed the girl inside, his expression giving nothing away in terms of what his opinion of the building was. He’d lived in worse places than this in the past, and it wasn’t as though the living conditions here seemed tolerable. Of course, he only had the interior of the building to observe, but usually if the hallways and stairs weren’t crumbling or streaked with graffiti then the apartments themselves would be of similar standards.
He hadn’t actually expected some psychopath to leap out and try to stab either of them with a knife, but he still felt more at ease with himself for having seen with his own eyes that she’d reached her apartment safely. As for the triple locks, well, he approved of those; in this mind you could never have too much security, only too little. He nodded once they came to a halt, as though agreeing with her assessment. No boogeyman here. “You’re right,” he said, and god, he could finally go home. “Have a good night, Ms. Wells.”
His duty completed, Luke turned to descend the stairs, but paused just before taking that first step. He hesitated, turning to look over his shoulder with an almost thoughtful expression. “If you need anything, my name is Luke. Luke Henry.” He highly doubted she would ever reach out for help even if she did need it, but if by chance she did, at least she’d have a name to give if she called the station. “Try to stay out of trouble,” he added, and then he turned back and disappeared down the stairs.