never stop hoping, need to know where you are Who: Bram Thornton, Theo Finch and Jareth Monaco What: An investigation Where: The sewers When: 8 Aquarius [after this, backdated] Rating: PG-13 Status: Complete
He fucking hated the sewers - worst fucking detail on the books, if you asked him. Not that anyone ever did, which was probably why he was always fucking in them. Except the night Banes disappeared. And he was damn certain she was gone; Siana Banes wasn’t exactly known for being a flake. Fucking Ms Siana Perfect Attendance and Stickler for the Rules Banes? Not a fucking chance.
That Finch and Thornton thought the same thing was comforting, in a way, but not enough. All he knew was that this wasn’t sitting right, and he hadn’t felt this kind of apprehension since he woke up to find Aspel gone. Five years was a long time to shove that kind of attachment down, and he’d done it so damn well he hadn’t even realized he tolerated Banes until suddenly she was gone.
Gone.
His luck? She was a lot more than gone.
Monaco plodded along in the tunnels alongside his colleagues: the three men were all stewing in their respective brooding silences, arms lifted to carry lanterns and glowing magicite, lighting their way down these completely dark tunnels. The sewers were an unfortunate necessity of being working police in Emillion: they needed to be patrolled semi-regularly, undesirables flushed out lest an entire criminal society fester under their noses (as it had last autumn with Cerf).
Even then, there was always something. They never had enough to keep it completely empty. It was a miserable patrol, and Banes should never have done it alone. If only the department wasn’t so understaffed, Thornton thought bleakly, his scarf pulled up and over his mouth and nose. If only the goddamned budget were better.
He glanced over to Finch, who was carrying the map of Banes’ last-known route. (But there was a sickly little twinge in Bram’s chest, the instinct that some called pessimistic but he simply called realistic: there was no good news waiting for them at the end of this road.)
“Are we close?” he asked.
“Aye,” Theo confirmed. Squinting at the map held gingerly in front of him, the berserker extended his other arm, the magicite lantern shedding an ominous light toward their destination. Around the next corner was likely some piece of the answer they were searching for (or so the men likely hoped--or feared).
He had purposefully busied himself with the map along this journey, and whatever his conflicted feelings towards Banes had been over the years, as of now there was only concern. Gesturing to the proper path, Theo grumbled an oath under his breath and allowed Monaco to lead the way--whatever rivalry he might’ve felt toward the man had been kicked aside for now as well, it seemed.
“Over there.”
The area was clean - at least, as clean as a fucking sewer got. Maybe a little more in shape than the rest of the damned tunnel they’d traveled down, and if that wasn’t fucking suspicious, he didn’t know what was. Nothing out of place, at least not on the first pass over. There was a mountain of evidence staring him in the face - he just needed to know what he was looking for.
Jareth crouched down, submerging his hand in the stagnant waste and lazily moving it around, fingers scraping against the floor. Eventually, they grazed against something and he closed his fist around it. It was small and sharp, and he knew exactly what he was pulling from the shallow water, but that didn’t make it any better when he opened his hand to stare at the bullet casing.
Could be from any number of things, he knew. Wasn’t like the sewers in Emillion were safe. And, hell, he’d gotten into scraps down here, had had fucking assholes shooting at him plenty of times.
Still, couldn’t be discounted and he waved Thornton over. The older man plodded to his officer’s side; he made a noise in the back of his throat, tilting the light over Monaco’s palm to inspect the casing.
“Doesn’t look old,” he said quietly. Thornton’s own thoughts had been circling the same drain, it seemed. “If it was old then it’d at least be somewhat rusted. Especially being in the water. Good find, though.”
He now turned his attention to the stone floor, trying to find some sign of Banes’ presence here. It was almost impossible: there was dirt, dust, rubble, tracks that could’ve been from humes or oversized rats, and splinters of wood (what had that come from? nothing informative). Thornton searched alongside Finch and Monaco like a tired bloodhound sniffing out the scene—or perhaps an old man casting about for where he dropped his keys, except the key here was to something much more unpleasant. Had she been here or were they imagining it, simply seeing the things they wanted to see?
“Keep looking,” the inspector said. But even as he did so, the beam of Thornton’s lantern fell across a gleam of colour in the darkness, a small splatter of red that, unless they were imagining it, stood out but barely against the grime of the wall. He went rigid, the light swaying.
Standing near the muck where Monaco had found the casing, Theo’s attention shifted over toward the swaying light beaming on the wall, and to where Thornton had stopped in his tracks. Moving wordlessly to see what had caught the Detective Inspector’s sudden attention, the light from Theo’s lantern joined the other, marking a far wider space for the men to inspect. “Something there?”
The slight stain against the stone could have meant anything to an untrained eye of course—but the years had trained him to note certain patterns in the darkened spatter, and so Theo knelt down to get a closer inspection. His shoulders grew rigid with anxiety as the man reached into his jacket for a sample kit.
Even in the dim lighting, the smear was unmistakable: blood. A tiny part of Jareth wanted to rationalize it - there was dozens of murders a year down here or Banes is too smart to end up a statistic - but the overwhelming circumstantial evidence was too great. There wasn’t enough to convict someone if they had a suspect; fuck, there wasn’t even enough to be conclusive. All he had was a gut feeling and sinking suspicion that Siana Banes wasn’t coming back.
The blood stain had cemented it.
Finch was scraping the dried blood into a vial and Jareth stood there, still and silent. It was his partner they were searching for; his partner that was probably dead and gone. How many had that been now? Liana and Cyllian (though that one hadn’t been regretted a single day). Aspel and Li (though they were alive, what they used to be was gone). Now Banes.
He turned away and punched the nearest wall. Small pieces of rock chipped and crumbled, flaking off and choking the air, drifting to the ground. Thornton watched the display impassively before turning his head slightly, shifting his gaze back to the wall with its morbid little smear, allowing Monaco his privacy and his moment.
Hope tried to struggle its way up with toothless platitudes: perhaps it wasn’t blood, perhaps it wasn’t hers. But as he watched Finch scraping away at the wall, Thornton knew. He knew.
A muttered “Fuck” slipped out plainly, the profanity odd in his gravelly burr. The older man kneaded his brow, bowing his head in thought. “No one patrols alone,” Bram finally said to the air, his voice strange and strangled. “Should never have let her down here alone. Both of you, you don’t go out on call on your own while we’re looking into this. No matter the schedule shortages. And we keep looking into this.”
Done with his work, Theo put the kit and its components back into his jacket. Whether or not anything conclusive might come of it, he had no way to know, but the circumstances hinted enough. He heard the crack of crumbling brick and stood back up, zeroing his attention on Thornton and his terse commands. “Aye,” he said, shrugging his shoulders in weary concession.
Theo similarly kept his gaze from wandering toward Monaco, having no desire to escalate an already dire situation (even now, he didn’t want to consider Banes lost--or dead). And if the two men had any reason to quarrel, it could be done elsewhere. Instead, he raised up his lantern and looked about for any more articles of possible evidence. “No stone unturned.”
The search turned up nothing else, not even a tiny scrap of fabric. Jareth was already running scenarios through his head, and his mood turned darker with each one; if he stayed down here another minute, he was going to snap. “Don’t think we’re going to find anything else,” he said to Thornton and Finch. They nodded in agreement.
Slowly, they picked their way out of the sewer and back to the streets. They didn’t have much to go on, but they at least had something. And that was better than nothing.