![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Title: The Lies You Live
Author: alyse
Fandom: Blade: Trinity
Pairing: Abigail Whistler/Hannibal King
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Highlight to read: violence, implications of past torture and sexual abuse, potential triggers for suicidal thoughts and actions.
Notes: This is the extended, higher rated director's cut version of the story, being posted in parts over the next week or so. If you'd prefer not to wait, a complete (non-sexy, rated 15!) version can be found here. Also, there is fabulous art by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
skylar0grace here.
Summary: Hunting is in her blood and in her bones, but when Abigail Whistler's path crosses that of a smart-mouthed vampire who seems perfectly happy to die, she's left questioning everything she thought she knew. While her team work to cure Hannibal King of his vampirism with an experimental antivirus, she finds herself warming to their captive in spite of her reservations, and when their actions turn out to have devastating consequences, Abby's loyalties are left torn.
Masterlist: dreamwidth :: livejournal :: insanejournal
-o-
Part 07: dreamwidth :: livejournal :: insanejournal
-o-
The Yavaris' workshop was down one of the many foetid alleys that populated the poorer parts of the city. In their shoes, Abby would have chosen somewhere without nooks and crannies, no dark corners that could hide the kind of things Abby hunted. But presumably the rent was cheap, and so, come to that, was Firouzeh Yavari.
Firouzeh was small and neat, with dark, doe like eyes that managed to mask a mind like a steel trap. She gave every appearance of being demure and agreeable, from her neatly wrapped hijab to the soft slippers she wore and the soft timbre of her voice, but Abby knew better than anyone how appearances could be deceptive. Certainly she wasn't going to make the mistake of underestimating Firouzeh.
"You pay upfront," Firouzeh insisted, fingers snapping impatiently. "You tell Frank Reilly that."
Abby bit back on her impatience. Not everyone they dealt with had the same motivations when it came to the war against vamps, but their options were limited and Aref Yavari, whatever his motivations, was a good gunsmith, especially since most of his business wasn't of the legal kind.
And his wife was an incredibly sharp businesswoman.
"Half upfront," Abby said. "The rest on delivery."
Firouzeh treated her to a shrewd, searching look. "The price has gone up," she said. "Fifty percent."
They were barely going to be able to afford Yavari's prices as it was. No way could they afford a price hike of that extent, but Abby tried hard not to let any of that show on her face. Instead, she tilted her head, given Firouzeh a look just as sharp, just as searching as the one Firouzeh had given her.
"You're not the only suppliers," she said calmly, trying to keep her voice even and unflustered. "If you're planning to price yourself out of the market, we'll go elsewhere."
Firouzeh's smile took on a predatory edge. "Ah, but where will you go, Abigail? I hear you've dropped most of your... alternative sources." She made little quote marks, and for that alone Abby was tempted to turn on her heel and walkout. But Firouzeh was right in one respect - their sources were limited now, largely because of Abby. She was the one who'd finally persuaded Frank that those they dealt with knew far too much about their operations and that the smart thing to do would be to build up their network of connections again, one by one, cautiously and ready for any sign of betrayal.
Frank hadn't argued much. He'd aged considerably in the wake of Velasquez and Mick's deaths, growing icy and remote. Sometimes she thought he was humouring her, except that Frank had never humoured anyone. She should have known it would come back to bite them on the ass.
She considered her options carefully, meeting Firouzeh's eyes as she sorted through them, dismissing those she knew weren't going to work. "It's a temporary measure," she said. "While we figure out who can trust and who we can't." Firouzeh gave her a keen look, obviously putting together the titbits of information that Abby was giving her to come up with a picture that probably wasn't too far from the truth.
Their world operated as much on rumours and gossip as the surface world did. She'd be surprised if Firouzeh hadn't already picked up a hint here or there, and Abby was willing to take a calculated risk.
"Someone tried to sell us out." She hardened her expression, not missing the way that Firouzeh's eyes narrowed. "As you can tell, it didn't work. We're still here, but I'm not about to let some bastard screw us over again. Be thankful that your name, at least, isn't on my personal shit list." Of course, that was largely because Firouzeh kept things so strictly business that neither she nor Aref knew anything about Frank's team beyond the colour of their money, but there was no reason to share that little fact with Firouzeh.
She didn't elaborate, but Firouzeh was scarily smart. She heard the rest of the implied threat in Abby's words and her look became even more assessing as she weighed up the risks to Aref and herself versus the possibility for profit. But before she could speak again, Aref interrupted them.
"That why you send him to us?" he rumbled, busy wiping his hands on an old rag. There was still oil underneath his fingernails and lining the creases in his palms. "Your man?"
Abby stared at him for a long moment, her mind whirring, examining all of the possibilities and dismissing them one by one. Eventually, when she was none the wiser, she was left with no choice but to ask, "Who?
Aref stopped wiping his hands, frowning at her, his expression confused. "Big guy - what was his name again?" He directed the question at Firouzeh, who was also frowning, but her expression was edging towards concerned rather than confused.
"King," she said because Firouzeh never forgot a face or a name. "Hannibal King, that was it." She gave Abby another sharp look, but there was no missing the fear that lay underneath it, something sour and jagged. "He gave your name or we wouldn't have dealt with him."
"My name?" For a second, Abby thought she'd misheard. There was no doubt that Whistler's name opened a lot of doors in some places that he travelled, even if his focus was on Blade and only Blade, but Abby's...
Aref nodded slowly, concern slowly blossoming on his face as well. "We weren't sure," he rumbled, glancing at his wife. "And when we found out he had a tattoo..." He shrugged, but his eyes were as sharp as Firouzeh's. "We check," he added. "We always check."
Firouzeh stepped closer to him, eyeing Abby suspiciously. "He explained," she said. "He said you saved him." Her tone was accusing, as though it was Abby's fault that they'd bought into King's stories. "With the tattoo, I didn't want to..." Her lips compressed into a narrow line as she bit back whatever she was about to say. "But you say that you don't know him?"
"No, I know him," Abby confirmed quietly. "What did he want?"
Any relief on Firouzeh's part was short lived as her look turned calculating again. "Weapons, like you. Silver, like you. He paid upfront."
King was hunting. Abby supposed that answered the question of where he'd gone and what he was up to. She'd thought - feared - that he'd gone back to Danica, that even if he hadn't been the one responsible for what had happened to Velasquez and Mick, they'd left him with no choice.
But he was turning out to be more stubborn than even she'd expected. And either smarter or sneakier, depending on how you looked at it.
"Should we worry?" Aref asked, a frown between his eyes. "He's a good guy?"
She should say something, even if she didn't owe the Yavaris anything more than the agreed price. She certainly didn't owe King anything, but when it came to King she'd always been stupid. She couldn't quite bring herself to tell the Yavaris no, not when it was still this raw, and Abby wasn't the only one with contacts - the Yavaris had their own networks. A word from her, and King's name would be mud. Worse than mud: no one willing to sell him weapons and maybe a knife in his ribs in a dark alley for his troubles.
No wonder he'd used her name. It was the only in he'd had. And if Frank hadn't seen fit to share King's name - and what he thought King had done - more widely, then Abby wasn't going to start.
"If he paid upfront, what have you got to worry about?"
Aref snorted out a laugh, something that shook his belly. "True," he said, but Firouzeh was less easily appeased.
"He had a tattoo," she said stubbornly, folding her arms across her chest. The look on her face was pinched, something shrewish in the tension in her eyes. "If you saved him - if you know him - how did you not know he was coming here, to us?"
Again, the truth hovered on the tip of her tongue, but she settled for, "I haven't seen him... for months." Almost four months, in fact, not that Abby was counting. "I thought he'd head home not... not hunt."
Firouzeh was still watching her closely, but at Abby's words her face cleared, some small sense of satisfaction showing in her expression. "Ah," she said, and her voice held a smug tone that instantly set Abby's teeth on edge. "Bad break up, yes?"
Abby fought down the instinct to respond in kind. Better the Yavaris believe that than know the truth. King had fucked her over, not fucked somebody else.
"We stick to the agreed price," she said and Firouzeh raised an eyebrow at her. "And you get twenty-five percent upfront, no more." When it looked as though Firouzeh was about to argue, Abby folded her own arms, no longer caring that her expression was less than friendly. "I think the fact that I've referred more business your way - and business willing to pay a hundred percent upfront - counts for something."
Aref chuckled again, although what was amusing him this time, Abby couldn't tell. He slid his arm around his wife's shoulders, giving Firouzeh a gentle shake and ignoring the look she sent him. "For you, since you are such a good customer, we will agree to that deal." He smirked, the look incongruous on his normally placid face - perhaps he and Firouzeh were more alike than Abby had suspected. "This man of yours? He buys a lot of weapons, and pays lots of money. You refer more like him, and for you we may only insist on twenty percent upfront."
"He's one-of-a-kind," Abby said dryly before steering the conversation back towards safer ground. "Hedges has sent some sketches over, something he wants to try. I'll leave them with you."
Aref nodded, suddenly all business again. "He has a mind, that one. I will do my best to keep him happy." He shot her a shrewd look, resembling his wife more than ever. "For the other seventy-five percent, of course."
-o-
Frank and Hedges were clustered around Hedges' laptop when Abby got back to their new base of operations, staring at the screen as though it was going to answer all of their questions. She hesitated for a moment, all too aware of how much smaller and more cramped their current base was than their previous location. Frank was already looming too close to Hedges for Hedges' comfort, peering over his shoulder at the laptop and making Hedges twitch nervously. Adding Abby into the mix wasn't going to make Hedges any more comfortable.
She was about to move away when Hedges gave her a pleading look, relief sliding onto his face when she gave in and slipped through the doorway, dumping her messenger bag on the desk.
"How'd it go?" Hedges asked, clearly eager to change the subject from whatever Frank had been talking about.
Abby treated him to a one shouldered shrug. She didn't blame him for being uncomfortable around Frank these days. Frank had never been one to crack a joke, but he'd also never been this intense or closed off. Velasquez and Mick's deaths had affected all of them, but they'd hit Frank the hardest. "Yavari is going to do his best," she said as she played with the strap of her bag, sliding the rough material through her fingers. "They wanted paying upfront."
Frank frowned, his eyes growing slightly unfocused as he did the sums in his head. "We don't have the funds to pay them upfront," he said flatly.
"I know. I got them down to twenty-five percent." When Frank opened his mouth to argue, she added, "I dealt with it, Frank. They know we've lost most of our usual sources."
He shut his mouth, giving her a long, steady look. There was no accusation in his expression, but she felt the weight of it anyway, the guilt dragging her down.
It was starting to become familiar.
If she'd been stronger, she'd have held his eyes, giving as good as she got. Instead, she glanced away, staring back out through the doorway towards the smaller room that Dex had co-opted as their gym. It was too small and cramped for Abby's work out of choice, but it reflected the rest of their lives.
"Dex working with the new guy?" she asked, hoping for distraction. She couldn't see them from where she was standing, but she could hear the sounds as Dex put Estevez through his paces.
Frank grunted, his eyes never leaving her face. "What else do I need to know about that you're not telling me?"
She was a hell of a lot better at lying to herself than she was at lying to Frank, but she didn't want to go there, not when Frank had been so unpredictable recently. "There's a new hunter in town," she said, hesitating when Frank shot her a keen look, showing the first interest in anything she'd said that he'd shown for months. It was too tempting to leave it there but there was no point in putting off the inevitable and Frank was not going to let this drop. "It's King."
All of the expression disappeared from Frank's face, draining away to leave something cold and hard as diamonds behind. "You're sure?"
"Yeah." She didn't give him anything else. There was nothing left to give, no matter what Frank thought about it.
"Why the hell are the Yavaris happy to deal with him?"
Abby shrugged. She could have said something to make the Yavaris sound less gullible, and less like Abby hadn't warned them when she should have done: they knew he was ex-Talos and didn't care; his cash was as good as, if not better, than Frank's; that King had paid upfront.
The one thing she couldn't - wouldn't - say was that he'd used Abby's name to get his foot in the door.
Instead she turned her attention to Hedges, not willing to poke at things that were still too raw. "Yavari thinks he should have the prototype ready for you in a couple of weeks," she said quietly.
"What's King up to?" Frank growled, leaving no doubt that he expected her to have the answer. He should have known better - she had no answers as far as King was concerned. His motivations were a mystery to her, and it was a mystery she had no interest in solving.
She'd grieved for Mick and Velasquez; she didn't grieve for King. Maybe she'd grieved for who she thought he'd been, but that person had obviously never existed. The fact that she'd fallen so easily for him still had her twisting in shame in those quiet moments when she dropped her guard, keeping her awake in the still of the night and leaving her unable to meet Frank's eyes now. She didn't need to revisit it.
Frank was still waiting for an answer, and when she shrugged again it simply irritated him. "Whistler..." he growled.
"He's hunting," she said simply, still not looking at him and concentrating on breathing, just breathing, through the hurt. "He bought silver weapons from the Yavaris."
"He could still be working for Danica Talos. I wouldn't put it past her to have her lackeys take out the competition with silver."
Frank was probably right, but just thinking about it made her head - and her heart - hurt. She didn't understand any of them, not Danica, not King, and sometimes not even Frank with his wounded eyes and his stony expression.
"I don't know," she admitted, still refusing to meet Frank's gaze. "All I know is that the Yavaris are supplying him with silver weapons. I don't know anything else."
"No?"
She stilled, her fingers resting on the strap of her bag. "No," she said, and the lie tasted bitter in her mouth. "King isn't my problem any more." That didn't feel like the truth either. "Is that all?"
Frank's eyes stayed on her, fierce and steady, but now she could meet them, letting her anger at King keep her focused. It helped, a little. It helped even more when he nodded, finally seeming satisfied to let the matter drop, but she should have known better than to let down her guard.
"I want him shot on sight, understood?"
"I understand," she said, still meeting Frank's eyes calmly when she was anything but calm inside. She had no intention of shooting King, no matter what he'd done, and hopefully King was smart enough to stay out of Frank's way.
Frank must have known that on some level, but he didn't call her on it, and since he didn't make it an issue, it wasn't going to become one. Instead, he nodded slowly and then changed the subject, asking, "You want to give Dex a hand training Estevez? Could do with a fresh pair of eyes."
She didn't. She couldn't bear it, not after King, but she knew Frank well enough to know she wasn't going to get a choice in the matter. "I need to talk to Sommerfield," she said. "I'll check in with Dex later." By then she would have had a chance to put her game face on.
Frank nodded again, turning back to Hedges and obviously dismissing her from his thoughts as soon as she turned on her heel and left the room.
Sommerfield was crouched over her keyboard in her cramped workspace when Abby found her. The pictures from the modelling she was doing swirled on the screen even though Sommerfield couldn't possibly see them. She twitched nervously when Abby walked through the door, and Abby couldn't blame her for that one, not after what had happened to Mick and Velasquez.
"It's me," she said quietly, another surge of guilt going through her as she watched Sommerfield relax, a smile finally forming on the other woman's face.
"Did it go okay?" Sommerfield asked, her eyes tracking towards the door as she tried to pinpoint Abby's position.
"It went fine." There was still a tight, tense, twisted feeling in the pit of her stomach, left after her discussion with Frank, but she'd work around it if she had to. For the moment she took several deep, even breaths, forcing herself to relax and not think about King or Frank or anything else.
Sommerfield tilted her head, her expression showing clearly that she'd caught something in Abby's voice and was trying to decide whether or not to pursue it. If she did, there was no way that Abby wasn't going to end up spilling; Sommerfield was too damned good at getting inside Abby's head. Much better than Frank, for all that Frank could be scarier. It was time to try distraction.
"I picked up something for Zoë. Some colouring books and some crayons. It's nothing much..."
"Thank you. What do you say, Zoë?"
"Thank you," Zoë parroted, taking them from Abby's outstretched grasp. Her small face was solemn, as it usually was these days, and Abby felt another twinge of grief.
"Why don't you take them into the kitchen, Zoë?" Sommerfield asked. "I need to talk to Abby, okay?"
Abby watched Zoë go. If she kept quiet, maybe Sommerfield would forget she was there and go back to her viral modelling.
"Is everything okay?" Sommerfield asked again, and this time her expression was worried.
"It's fine."
Sommerfield tapped her fingers on the bench, her fingernails clacking against the wood. "No, it's not," she said impatiently. "Don't try to bullshit me, Whistler. I know you too damned well. Frank giving you a hard time?"
"No more than usual these days."
"Okay, since apparently you don't want to talk about it, how about I remind you that I'm blind, not stupid?" Sommerfield's face creased into an expression of irritation, which didn't help with Abby's guilt. But then Sommerfield sighed, obviously taking Abby's guilty silence as offence.
"Talk about it or don't talk about it, it's your call, Whistler." The irritation faded from Sommerfield's face, replaced by something as close to sympathy as the other woman ever got. "If it's any help, I've already guessed what it's about. King."
"What makes you think it's about King?"
"Lately everything with you has been about King."
The words stung and Abby shifted uncomfortably. "I'm sorry..."
Sommerfield huffed under her breath, and her expression heading back towards irritated. "Did I say I was complaining? I'm worried about you, Abby. You've been quiet, even for you, ever since..."
"Ever since King sold us out," Abby completed quietly.
Sommerfield tilted her head, her expression thoughtful. She'd obviously caught something in Abby's voice again, but this time it was something that Abby herself wasn't even aware of. Certainly, Abby couldn't think of anything in her tone - or her voice - that would be interesting enough to garner that much attention.
"Huh," Sommerfield said. "You don't actually believe that."
The blood rushed to Abby's face, leaving her flushed with mingled shame and anger. "I'm not stupid either," she said heatedly, trying not to think about how it was a lie. "I know what he did."
"You know or Frank knows?"
Abby bit her tongue. It took some effort, but it was pointless. Silence had never stopped Sommerfield before. The other woman's expression stayed thoughtful, as though Abby was one of her biological conundrums, one that Sommerfield intended to solve.
"Frank's seldom wrong when it comes to vamps," Sommerfield said, sounding like she was simply exercising her intellectual curiosity instead of talking about someone whose actions had killed two of their friends. "Of course, he's missing something important."
"What's that?" Abby kicked herself as soon as the words were out of her mouth, but by then it was too late; Sommerfield's lips curled up in a small but triumphant smile.
"King's not a vampire anymore, is he?"
It didn't make King's betrayal any easier to bear, at least not as far as Abby was concerned.
"He sold us out," she repeated, hoping that this time there was more conviction in her voice.
Sommerfield clicked her tongue against her teeth, her expression still considering, as though she was weighing up Abby, considering all of the angles and all of the options the way that she did in her work.
"Okay," Sommerfield continued cautiously. "But you know... if you need a sounding board..." A brief spasm of something close to grief crossed her face only to fade away again. "I used to bounce ideas off Selena all of the time. It helps."
Maybe it was the mention of Velasquez that cut through Abby's silence. "I trusted him," she said quietly, and the words hung in the space between them. "I shouldn't have. I know that now and I'm not about to make the same mistake again."
Sommerfield shrugged. "Hindsight's always twenty-twenty, Whistler. You weren't the only one King took in."
Maybe not, but he'd made the call on her watch, hadn't he?
"It's just..."
"Yes?" Sommerfield turned her head in Abby's direction again. "Abby?"
"I can't make it make sense." The words came out in a rush, because if she stopped to think about it, she'd bite them back again, hold them deep inside her and never let them out, just let them continue to fester. "Why let us cure him if he was just going to go back to Danica? Familiars are only in it for the immortality, and he already had that."
Sommerfield shrugged dismissively. "He figured being human is better than being dead. And then somewhere along the way he decided he didn't like being human that much. Put in a call to his psycho ex-girlfriend."
That didn't make sense either, not from what King had said about Danica, unless every single thing he'd told her was a lie. It had to have been, but she couldn't let it go. He'd ripped her fucking heart out of her chest and some part of her needed to make sense of it.
"What if it was a setup from the start?" she asked, feeling her way through it.
"But if that was the case, someone had to know we were looking to test a cure. And they had to know about it before King had a chance to sell us out." Sommerfield frowned, something obviously falling into place for her. "That's why you've limited our supply pool," she hazarded. "You think it was a setup."
"Maybe there's another explanation," Abby said quietly, reluctantly. She didn't need to elaborate because Sommerfield nodded again.
"You still think that maybe King wasn't the one who betrayed us," she said, a pitying expression on her face. The sight of it twisted unpleasantly in Abby's stomach, leaving something like grief and like hate behind, something too big to pull out into the light of day and look at. "There's another explanation, you know," Sommerfield continued. "Something you haven't thought of."
She shouldn't ask. Velasquez and Mick were dead, and King was gone. Poking at the wounds wasn't going to help them heal, but she just kept being stupid.
"What?"
"Maybe no one sold us out. Danica was looking for him, did you know that? That's one of the little bits of intel your father fed to Frank." She aimed a considering look in Abby's general direction. "I'm guessing that's one of the little bits of intel Frank didn't see fit to share with you."
No, he hadn't.
"Your third option is that he didn't sell us out, but she found him anyway." Sommerfield shrugged again, obviously losing interest as the siren call of her viral research exerted itself. "That would explain the clan mark."
She said it so calmly, as if it didn't mean anything. As if it really was just an intellectual exercise as far as she was concerned.
"If that's true," Abby said quietly, "then we left him there for Danica Talos to find."
"If that's true," Sommerfield said pointedly, "then it's water under the goddamned bridge and there's nothing we can do about it. Either she has him or she doesn't. Either way, he's not our problem anymore."
Except Danica didn't have him yet, and he was never going to stop being Abby's problem. But Abby stayed silent, trying not to cling to the hope that Sommerfield had given her. It was hard, so fucking hard not to reach out and grasp it with both hands.
"It wasn't your fault, Abby," Sommerfield said eventually, obviously aware on some level that she was still standing there. There was a weird kind of gentleness in Sommerfield's voice, so different from her normal brisk demeanour with everyone but Zoë, and it was almost unbearable, sliding through all of the chinks in Abby's armour until she couldn't breathe with it. "No one blames you, not me and certainly not Frank."
No one else needed to blame her, not when she was perfectly capable of blaming herself.
-o-
Estevez wasn't working out, but it seemed like Frank was the only one who couldn't see it.
Even Abby found dealing with the man frustrating, especially coming after King's focus and dedication. Estevez wasn't willing to listen to Abby when she pointed out where he needed to improve. He barely even listened to Dex, and Dex had wells of patience that Abby had never seen plumbed until now.
Estevez needed to listen: he was clumsy, arrogant, and much slower at picking things up than King had been. Even when he listened to Dex, he still managed to screw things up nine times out of ten, almost as though he thought that most of what they were trying to teach him was an unnecessary distraction from his real purpose.
The only thing he was interested in was guns, and he spent hours on the range, firing shot after shot into the targets until he could hit them dead centre, his face set and his eyes burning.
His attitude stunk and, more than that, it worried her. It worried her more that Frank either couldn't or didn't want to see what was right in front of him. But Abby knew her limitations, and that meant that she ended up avoiding Estevez as much as possible, leaving Dex to bear the brunt of his training. She told Dex it was because Estevez had some old-fashioned notions about women, despite being only a couple of years older than she was, and Abby had had enough of dealing with that kind of bullshit for one lifetime. In reality, it was the rawness of Estevez's grief that drove her out of their base as much as humanly possible.
She had her own grief to work through, and she did it with a blade, not a gun. There was something viscerally satisfying about sliding her sharp, silver knife into some vamp's torso and watching them explode into dust and ash around her. It probably wasn't healthy, but it had been a long time since she'd given a fuck about that.
She spent most of the time she wasn't killing vamps slowly building up their network of contacts, spiralling out from the Yavaris and building up a web of trust. Frank had his own network, but some twitchy little feeling in the back of her brain told Abby she'd be better off not relying on it. None of them were immortal, not even Frank, and if he died, the chances were that his network would die with him. Plus, it gave her the chance to put her feelers out, find out a little more about Danica Talos, ferret out all of the stuff that Frank didn't know or wasn't willing to share. Asking about King was just about putting the Talos clan into perspective, not about whether or not he was still breathing, that was all.
Even she wasn't buying into that lie, but it was easy to compartmentalise it: anything she found out about vampire activities, particularly about the Talos clan, she passed to Frank; any information she found out about King she kept to herself, hoarding every little piece greedily. It wasn't much, but each little snippet, each sighting or rumour, told her that King was still alive.
Frank listened to her intel and nodded in all the right places, but she was pretty sure that she wasn't imagining how tense he grew or how distracted he became with every little piece of information she fed him about Danica. She thought she got it; it wasn't that she didn't understand what he was saying about the Talos clan being too big for them, too dangerous for them to tackle. It was that she didn't agree with him.
After all, King was out there somewhere, and he seemed determined to take Danica Talos down all on his own.
-o-
"Whistler." Frank's voice caught her attention, stopping her in her tracks. "You got plans tonight?"
Once she might have tried to crack a joke, even if jokes weren't her forte. Now she simply kept her silence, weighing up her answer before she finally said, "I was planning on hitting the warehouse district. There's been some vamp activity down there. Dead bodies turning up. Cops think it's a drugs turf war."
She didn't know why she was elaborating; it felt too much like she had to explain herself to Frank, and Frank was seldom interested in her explanations these days, too distracted and weighed down by the past.
"Put it on hold," he said, scrubbing his hand across his face tiredly. "I've got some intel on another mobile blood bank, somewhere around East Fifty-First and Broadway." He gave her a wry look. "I've also got dead bodies turning up, but this op moves about regularly. May not be there tomorrow so we need to hit it while our information is fresh."
She nodded, already mentally adjusting that night's plan of attack. "What do you need me to do?"
Frank treated her to a relieved look, and the brief flash of gratitude on his face left her shifting uncomfortably. "We need to canvass the area," he said. "Make sure we find it. Which means we need to double up." He paused for a moment before adding, "That means we need to take Estevez out with us."
"Are you sure that's a good idea?"
She regretted the words as soon as they were out of her mouth, but it was too late. Frank's eyes suddenly hardened into flinty agate, all of the camaraderie between them disappearing as rapidly as it had arisen.
"And you're such a good judge of when someone's ready."
It shouldn't have hurt - she'd had months to get used to the idea, to learn to live with the guilt - but the words burned anyway. But then she'd also had months to get used to the pain. It didn't stop her any longer. It barely even slowed her down.
"Estevez is a loose cannon, Frank," she said, keeping her voice low and urgent. "He barely listens to Dex, he sure as hell doesn't listen to me. He just wants to kill vamps -"
"And that's a bad thing now?" Frank interrupted.
"If he's more concerned about that than whether or not he gets anyone else killed, yes."
The look in Frank's eyes was rancorous, but he didn't bring up King. He didn't need to; King's name hung in the air between them anyway, something that pushed them even further apart.
"We take Estevez anyway," he said, his tone making it clear that there was to be no more argument. "He either shapes up, or he ships out. We can't coddle him any longer. We haven't got the resources to counsel him past his trauma, or whatever the fuck you think is going on with him. Understood?"
She nodded, her eyes never leaving his face. "Understood. And he's going to get himself or one of us killed. Do you understand that, Frank?"
His nostrils flared dangerously. "Chain of command, Whistler. You do as you're told or you find another crew."
He'd never dished out that threat before. In fact, it was the first time he'd threatened Abby at all. But she didn't let any of her dismay show on her face. Instead, she held his eyes for long moments before barking, "Yes, sir." She didn't snap off a salute - that was what King would have done - but it was a close thing and she doubted Frank missed that.
He took a step back, but there was no anger in his eyes, not this time; instead there was a strange kind of grief, something that wasn't bitter but bottomless. But he still didn't back down. He simply nodded, once, sharp and full of things she couldn't measure. "If he doesn't listen to you, Whistler, then you need to make him listen. You're not shy about sharing your opinions, and you're sure as hell not shy about arguing your corner." There was a hard and harsh kind of respect in Frank's voice, something uncompromising. "So man up, and kick his ass if you need to."
She nodded, unwilling to push the point any further. There was going to be no changing Frank's mind, not on this.
"What's the plan?" she asked instead, and for a second she thought she'd overstepped that boundary there, too, judging by the way that Frank's eyes narrowed. She was tired of walking on eggshells around him, wishing that things would just get back to normal.
"I need you out there with Estevez," he said and then, when she started to object, he cut her off. "You've got a hell of a better chance of reining him than Dex or me. He won't pull any macho bullshit with you; he's got nothing to prove and..."
"You're saying that me being female is going to work in my favour?" She didn't bother to hide her scepticism. "Me being female is the problem, Frank."
"You don't know that. He'll... Look, Whistler, we both know what happened to Estevez. You think he won't feel the need to watch out for you?"
"I think I don't need looking after."
Frank nodded. "I'm sure you don't. But maybe he does and if he's partnered with you, there's a better chance he'll hang back."
She still wasn't happy with it and it wasn't like she was hiding it, but it seemed that Frank wasn't in the mood to listen to any of her objections, which was pretty much status quo. "Fine," she bit out, keeping her irritation in check as far as she could.
The ever-present tension around his eyes eased fractionally. "We'll split into two teams so we can cover more ground, see if we can't find these fuckers and take them out. They're not clan - shouldn't prove too difficult, taking out some low level leeches." He paused then added, "You may not even get to see any action tonight." It felt like a peace offering, and she took it gratefully.
"If I don't get any action tonight," she groused, "I'm hitting the warehouse district. On my own."
That earned her a reluctant smile from Frank, which was better than she'd hoped for. "Count on it," he said. "We leave at twenty-two hundred. Be ready."
She'd have to be, since it didn't seem like she had a choice.
-o-
Part 09: dreamwidth :: livejournal :: insanejournal
Author: alyse
Fandom: Blade: Trinity
Pairing: Abigail Whistler/Hannibal King
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Highlight to read: violence, implications of past torture and sexual abuse, potential triggers for suicidal thoughts and actions.
Notes: This is the extended, higher rated director's cut version of the story, being posted in parts over the next week or so. If you'd prefer not to wait, a complete (non-sexy, rated 15!) version can be found here. Also, there is fabulous art by
skylar0grace here.Summary: Hunting is in her blood and in her bones, but when Abigail Whistler's path crosses that of a smart-mouthed vampire who seems perfectly happy to die, she's left questioning everything she thought she knew. While her team work to cure Hannibal King of his vampirism with an experimental antivirus, she finds herself warming to their captive in spite of her reservations, and when their actions turn out to have devastating consequences, Abby's loyalties are left torn.
Masterlist: dreamwidth :: livejournal :: insanejournal
-o-
Part 07: dreamwidth :: livejournal :: insanejournal
-o-
The Yavaris' workshop was down one of the many foetid alleys that populated the poorer parts of the city. In their shoes, Abby would have chosen somewhere without nooks and crannies, no dark corners that could hide the kind of things Abby hunted. But presumably the rent was cheap, and so, come to that, was Firouzeh Yavari.
Firouzeh was small and neat, with dark, doe like eyes that managed to mask a mind like a steel trap. She gave every appearance of being demure and agreeable, from her neatly wrapped hijab to the soft slippers she wore and the soft timbre of her voice, but Abby knew better than anyone how appearances could be deceptive. Certainly she wasn't going to make the mistake of underestimating Firouzeh.
"You pay upfront," Firouzeh insisted, fingers snapping impatiently. "You tell Frank Reilly that."
Abby bit back on her impatience. Not everyone they dealt with had the same motivations when it came to the war against vamps, but their options were limited and Aref Yavari, whatever his motivations, was a good gunsmith, especially since most of his business wasn't of the legal kind.
And his wife was an incredibly sharp businesswoman.
"Half upfront," Abby said. "The rest on delivery."
Firouzeh treated her to a shrewd, searching look. "The price has gone up," she said. "Fifty percent."
They were barely going to be able to afford Yavari's prices as it was. No way could they afford a price hike of that extent, but Abby tried hard not to let any of that show on her face. Instead, she tilted her head, given Firouzeh a look just as sharp, just as searching as the one Firouzeh had given her.
"You're not the only suppliers," she said calmly, trying to keep her voice even and unflustered. "If you're planning to price yourself out of the market, we'll go elsewhere."
Firouzeh's smile took on a predatory edge. "Ah, but where will you go, Abigail? I hear you've dropped most of your... alternative sources." She made little quote marks, and for that alone Abby was tempted to turn on her heel and walkout. But Firouzeh was right in one respect - their sources were limited now, largely because of Abby. She was the one who'd finally persuaded Frank that those they dealt with knew far too much about their operations and that the smart thing to do would be to build up their network of connections again, one by one, cautiously and ready for any sign of betrayal.
Frank hadn't argued much. He'd aged considerably in the wake of Velasquez and Mick's deaths, growing icy and remote. Sometimes she thought he was humouring her, except that Frank had never humoured anyone. She should have known it would come back to bite them on the ass.
She considered her options carefully, meeting Firouzeh's eyes as she sorted through them, dismissing those she knew weren't going to work. "It's a temporary measure," she said. "While we figure out who can trust and who we can't." Firouzeh gave her a keen look, obviously putting together the titbits of information that Abby was giving her to come up with a picture that probably wasn't too far from the truth.
Their world operated as much on rumours and gossip as the surface world did. She'd be surprised if Firouzeh hadn't already picked up a hint here or there, and Abby was willing to take a calculated risk.
"Someone tried to sell us out." She hardened her expression, not missing the way that Firouzeh's eyes narrowed. "As you can tell, it didn't work. We're still here, but I'm not about to let some bastard screw us over again. Be thankful that your name, at least, isn't on my personal shit list." Of course, that was largely because Firouzeh kept things so strictly business that neither she nor Aref knew anything about Frank's team beyond the colour of their money, but there was no reason to share that little fact with Firouzeh.
She didn't elaborate, but Firouzeh was scarily smart. She heard the rest of the implied threat in Abby's words and her look became even more assessing as she weighed up the risks to Aref and herself versus the possibility for profit. But before she could speak again, Aref interrupted them.
"That why you send him to us?" he rumbled, busy wiping his hands on an old rag. There was still oil underneath his fingernails and lining the creases in his palms. "Your man?"
Abby stared at him for a long moment, her mind whirring, examining all of the possibilities and dismissing them one by one. Eventually, when she was none the wiser, she was left with no choice but to ask, "Who?
Aref stopped wiping his hands, frowning at her, his expression confused. "Big guy - what was his name again?" He directed the question at Firouzeh, who was also frowning, but her expression was edging towards concerned rather than confused.
"King," she said because Firouzeh never forgot a face or a name. "Hannibal King, that was it." She gave Abby another sharp look, but there was no missing the fear that lay underneath it, something sour and jagged. "He gave your name or we wouldn't have dealt with him."
"My name?" For a second, Abby thought she'd misheard. There was no doubt that Whistler's name opened a lot of doors in some places that he travelled, even if his focus was on Blade and only Blade, but Abby's...
Aref nodded slowly, concern slowly blossoming on his face as well. "We weren't sure," he rumbled, glancing at his wife. "And when we found out he had a tattoo..." He shrugged, but his eyes were as sharp as Firouzeh's. "We check," he added. "We always check."
Firouzeh stepped closer to him, eyeing Abby suspiciously. "He explained," she said. "He said you saved him." Her tone was accusing, as though it was Abby's fault that they'd bought into King's stories. "With the tattoo, I didn't want to..." Her lips compressed into a narrow line as she bit back whatever she was about to say. "But you say that you don't know him?"
"No, I know him," Abby confirmed quietly. "What did he want?"
Any relief on Firouzeh's part was short lived as her look turned calculating again. "Weapons, like you. Silver, like you. He paid upfront."
King was hunting. Abby supposed that answered the question of where he'd gone and what he was up to. She'd thought - feared - that he'd gone back to Danica, that even if he hadn't been the one responsible for what had happened to Velasquez and Mick, they'd left him with no choice.
But he was turning out to be more stubborn than even she'd expected. And either smarter or sneakier, depending on how you looked at it.
"Should we worry?" Aref asked, a frown between his eyes. "He's a good guy?"
She should say something, even if she didn't owe the Yavaris anything more than the agreed price. She certainly didn't owe King anything, but when it came to King she'd always been stupid. She couldn't quite bring herself to tell the Yavaris no, not when it was still this raw, and Abby wasn't the only one with contacts - the Yavaris had their own networks. A word from her, and King's name would be mud. Worse than mud: no one willing to sell him weapons and maybe a knife in his ribs in a dark alley for his troubles.
No wonder he'd used her name. It was the only in he'd had. And if Frank hadn't seen fit to share King's name - and what he thought King had done - more widely, then Abby wasn't going to start.
"If he paid upfront, what have you got to worry about?"
Aref snorted out a laugh, something that shook his belly. "True," he said, but Firouzeh was less easily appeased.
"He had a tattoo," she said stubbornly, folding her arms across her chest. The look on her face was pinched, something shrewish in the tension in her eyes. "If you saved him - if you know him - how did you not know he was coming here, to us?"
Again, the truth hovered on the tip of her tongue, but she settled for, "I haven't seen him... for months." Almost four months, in fact, not that Abby was counting. "I thought he'd head home not... not hunt."
Firouzeh was still watching her closely, but at Abby's words her face cleared, some small sense of satisfaction showing in her expression. "Ah," she said, and her voice held a smug tone that instantly set Abby's teeth on edge. "Bad break up, yes?"
Abby fought down the instinct to respond in kind. Better the Yavaris believe that than know the truth. King had fucked her over, not fucked somebody else.
"We stick to the agreed price," she said and Firouzeh raised an eyebrow at her. "And you get twenty-five percent upfront, no more." When it looked as though Firouzeh was about to argue, Abby folded her own arms, no longer caring that her expression was less than friendly. "I think the fact that I've referred more business your way - and business willing to pay a hundred percent upfront - counts for something."
Aref chuckled again, although what was amusing him this time, Abby couldn't tell. He slid his arm around his wife's shoulders, giving Firouzeh a gentle shake and ignoring the look she sent him. "For you, since you are such a good customer, we will agree to that deal." He smirked, the look incongruous on his normally placid face - perhaps he and Firouzeh were more alike than Abby had suspected. "This man of yours? He buys a lot of weapons, and pays lots of money. You refer more like him, and for you we may only insist on twenty percent upfront."
"He's one-of-a-kind," Abby said dryly before steering the conversation back towards safer ground. "Hedges has sent some sketches over, something he wants to try. I'll leave them with you."
Aref nodded, suddenly all business again. "He has a mind, that one. I will do my best to keep him happy." He shot her a shrewd look, resembling his wife more than ever. "For the other seventy-five percent, of course."
-o-
Frank and Hedges were clustered around Hedges' laptop when Abby got back to their new base of operations, staring at the screen as though it was going to answer all of their questions. She hesitated for a moment, all too aware of how much smaller and more cramped their current base was than their previous location. Frank was already looming too close to Hedges for Hedges' comfort, peering over his shoulder at the laptop and making Hedges twitch nervously. Adding Abby into the mix wasn't going to make Hedges any more comfortable.
She was about to move away when Hedges gave her a pleading look, relief sliding onto his face when she gave in and slipped through the doorway, dumping her messenger bag on the desk.
"How'd it go?" Hedges asked, clearly eager to change the subject from whatever Frank had been talking about.
Abby treated him to a one shouldered shrug. She didn't blame him for being uncomfortable around Frank these days. Frank had never been one to crack a joke, but he'd also never been this intense or closed off. Velasquez and Mick's deaths had affected all of them, but they'd hit Frank the hardest. "Yavari is going to do his best," she said as she played with the strap of her bag, sliding the rough material through her fingers. "They wanted paying upfront."
Frank frowned, his eyes growing slightly unfocused as he did the sums in his head. "We don't have the funds to pay them upfront," he said flatly.
"I know. I got them down to twenty-five percent." When Frank opened his mouth to argue, she added, "I dealt with it, Frank. They know we've lost most of our usual sources."
He shut his mouth, giving her a long, steady look. There was no accusation in his expression, but she felt the weight of it anyway, the guilt dragging her down.
It was starting to become familiar.
If she'd been stronger, she'd have held his eyes, giving as good as she got. Instead, she glanced away, staring back out through the doorway towards the smaller room that Dex had co-opted as their gym. It was too small and cramped for Abby's work out of choice, but it reflected the rest of their lives.
"Dex working with the new guy?" she asked, hoping for distraction. She couldn't see them from where she was standing, but she could hear the sounds as Dex put Estevez through his paces.
Frank grunted, his eyes never leaving her face. "What else do I need to know about that you're not telling me?"
She was a hell of a lot better at lying to herself than she was at lying to Frank, but she didn't want to go there, not when Frank had been so unpredictable recently. "There's a new hunter in town," she said, hesitating when Frank shot her a keen look, showing the first interest in anything she'd said that he'd shown for months. It was too tempting to leave it there but there was no point in putting off the inevitable and Frank was not going to let this drop. "It's King."
All of the expression disappeared from Frank's face, draining away to leave something cold and hard as diamonds behind. "You're sure?"
"Yeah." She didn't give him anything else. There was nothing left to give, no matter what Frank thought about it.
"Why the hell are the Yavaris happy to deal with him?"
Abby shrugged. She could have said something to make the Yavaris sound less gullible, and less like Abby hadn't warned them when she should have done: they knew he was ex-Talos and didn't care; his cash was as good as, if not better, than Frank's; that King had paid upfront.
The one thing she couldn't - wouldn't - say was that he'd used Abby's name to get his foot in the door.
Instead she turned her attention to Hedges, not willing to poke at things that were still too raw. "Yavari thinks he should have the prototype ready for you in a couple of weeks," she said quietly.
"What's King up to?" Frank growled, leaving no doubt that he expected her to have the answer. He should have known better - she had no answers as far as King was concerned. His motivations were a mystery to her, and it was a mystery she had no interest in solving.
She'd grieved for Mick and Velasquez; she didn't grieve for King. Maybe she'd grieved for who she thought he'd been, but that person had obviously never existed. The fact that she'd fallen so easily for him still had her twisting in shame in those quiet moments when she dropped her guard, keeping her awake in the still of the night and leaving her unable to meet Frank's eyes now. She didn't need to revisit it.
Frank was still waiting for an answer, and when she shrugged again it simply irritated him. "Whistler..." he growled.
"He's hunting," she said simply, still not looking at him and concentrating on breathing, just breathing, through the hurt. "He bought silver weapons from the Yavaris."
"He could still be working for Danica Talos. I wouldn't put it past her to have her lackeys take out the competition with silver."
Frank was probably right, but just thinking about it made her head - and her heart - hurt. She didn't understand any of them, not Danica, not King, and sometimes not even Frank with his wounded eyes and his stony expression.
"I don't know," she admitted, still refusing to meet Frank's gaze. "All I know is that the Yavaris are supplying him with silver weapons. I don't know anything else."
"No?"
She stilled, her fingers resting on the strap of her bag. "No," she said, and the lie tasted bitter in her mouth. "King isn't my problem any more." That didn't feel like the truth either. "Is that all?"
Frank's eyes stayed on her, fierce and steady, but now she could meet them, letting her anger at King keep her focused. It helped, a little. It helped even more when he nodded, finally seeming satisfied to let the matter drop, but she should have known better than to let down her guard.
"I want him shot on sight, understood?"
"I understand," she said, still meeting Frank's eyes calmly when she was anything but calm inside. She had no intention of shooting King, no matter what he'd done, and hopefully King was smart enough to stay out of Frank's way.
Frank must have known that on some level, but he didn't call her on it, and since he didn't make it an issue, it wasn't going to become one. Instead, he nodded slowly and then changed the subject, asking, "You want to give Dex a hand training Estevez? Could do with a fresh pair of eyes."
She didn't. She couldn't bear it, not after King, but she knew Frank well enough to know she wasn't going to get a choice in the matter. "I need to talk to Sommerfield," she said. "I'll check in with Dex later." By then she would have had a chance to put her game face on.
Frank nodded again, turning back to Hedges and obviously dismissing her from his thoughts as soon as she turned on her heel and left the room.
Sommerfield was crouched over her keyboard in her cramped workspace when Abby found her. The pictures from the modelling she was doing swirled on the screen even though Sommerfield couldn't possibly see them. She twitched nervously when Abby walked through the door, and Abby couldn't blame her for that one, not after what had happened to Mick and Velasquez.
"It's me," she said quietly, another surge of guilt going through her as she watched Sommerfield relax, a smile finally forming on the other woman's face.
"Did it go okay?" Sommerfield asked, her eyes tracking towards the door as she tried to pinpoint Abby's position.
"It went fine." There was still a tight, tense, twisted feeling in the pit of her stomach, left after her discussion with Frank, but she'd work around it if she had to. For the moment she took several deep, even breaths, forcing herself to relax and not think about King or Frank or anything else.
Sommerfield tilted her head, her expression showing clearly that she'd caught something in Abby's voice and was trying to decide whether or not to pursue it. If she did, there was no way that Abby wasn't going to end up spilling; Sommerfield was too damned good at getting inside Abby's head. Much better than Frank, for all that Frank could be scarier. It was time to try distraction.
"I picked up something for Zoë. Some colouring books and some crayons. It's nothing much..."
"Thank you. What do you say, Zoë?"
"Thank you," Zoë parroted, taking them from Abby's outstretched grasp. Her small face was solemn, as it usually was these days, and Abby felt another twinge of grief.
"Why don't you take them into the kitchen, Zoë?" Sommerfield asked. "I need to talk to Abby, okay?"
Abby watched Zoë go. If she kept quiet, maybe Sommerfield would forget she was there and go back to her viral modelling.
"Is everything okay?" Sommerfield asked again, and this time her expression was worried.
"It's fine."
Sommerfield tapped her fingers on the bench, her fingernails clacking against the wood. "No, it's not," she said impatiently. "Don't try to bullshit me, Whistler. I know you too damned well. Frank giving you a hard time?"
"No more than usual these days."
"Okay, since apparently you don't want to talk about it, how about I remind you that I'm blind, not stupid?" Sommerfield's face creased into an expression of irritation, which didn't help with Abby's guilt. But then Sommerfield sighed, obviously taking Abby's guilty silence as offence.
"Talk about it or don't talk about it, it's your call, Whistler." The irritation faded from Sommerfield's face, replaced by something as close to sympathy as the other woman ever got. "If it's any help, I've already guessed what it's about. King."
"What makes you think it's about King?"
"Lately everything with you has been about King."
The words stung and Abby shifted uncomfortably. "I'm sorry..."
Sommerfield huffed under her breath, and her expression heading back towards irritated. "Did I say I was complaining? I'm worried about you, Abby. You've been quiet, even for you, ever since..."
"Ever since King sold us out," Abby completed quietly.
Sommerfield tilted her head, her expression thoughtful. She'd obviously caught something in Abby's voice again, but this time it was something that Abby herself wasn't even aware of. Certainly, Abby couldn't think of anything in her tone - or her voice - that would be interesting enough to garner that much attention.
"Huh," Sommerfield said. "You don't actually believe that."
The blood rushed to Abby's face, leaving her flushed with mingled shame and anger. "I'm not stupid either," she said heatedly, trying not to think about how it was a lie. "I know what he did."
"You know or Frank knows?"
Abby bit her tongue. It took some effort, but it was pointless. Silence had never stopped Sommerfield before. The other woman's expression stayed thoughtful, as though Abby was one of her biological conundrums, one that Sommerfield intended to solve.
"Frank's seldom wrong when it comes to vamps," Sommerfield said, sounding like she was simply exercising her intellectual curiosity instead of talking about someone whose actions had killed two of their friends. "Of course, he's missing something important."
"What's that?" Abby kicked herself as soon as the words were out of her mouth, but by then it was too late; Sommerfield's lips curled up in a small but triumphant smile.
"King's not a vampire anymore, is he?"
It didn't make King's betrayal any easier to bear, at least not as far as Abby was concerned.
"He sold us out," she repeated, hoping that this time there was more conviction in her voice.
Sommerfield clicked her tongue against her teeth, her expression still considering, as though she was weighing up Abby, considering all of the angles and all of the options the way that she did in her work.
"Okay," Sommerfield continued cautiously. "But you know... if you need a sounding board..." A brief spasm of something close to grief crossed her face only to fade away again. "I used to bounce ideas off Selena all of the time. It helps."
Maybe it was the mention of Velasquez that cut through Abby's silence. "I trusted him," she said quietly, and the words hung in the space between them. "I shouldn't have. I know that now and I'm not about to make the same mistake again."
Sommerfield shrugged. "Hindsight's always twenty-twenty, Whistler. You weren't the only one King took in."
Maybe not, but he'd made the call on her watch, hadn't he?
"It's just..."
"Yes?" Sommerfield turned her head in Abby's direction again. "Abby?"
"I can't make it make sense." The words came out in a rush, because if she stopped to think about it, she'd bite them back again, hold them deep inside her and never let them out, just let them continue to fester. "Why let us cure him if he was just going to go back to Danica? Familiars are only in it for the immortality, and he already had that."
Sommerfield shrugged dismissively. "He figured being human is better than being dead. And then somewhere along the way he decided he didn't like being human that much. Put in a call to his psycho ex-girlfriend."
That didn't make sense either, not from what King had said about Danica, unless every single thing he'd told her was a lie. It had to have been, but she couldn't let it go. He'd ripped her fucking heart out of her chest and some part of her needed to make sense of it.
"What if it was a setup from the start?" she asked, feeling her way through it.
"But if that was the case, someone had to know we were looking to test a cure. And they had to know about it before King had a chance to sell us out." Sommerfield frowned, something obviously falling into place for her. "That's why you've limited our supply pool," she hazarded. "You think it was a setup."
"Maybe there's another explanation," Abby said quietly, reluctantly. She didn't need to elaborate because Sommerfield nodded again.
"You still think that maybe King wasn't the one who betrayed us," she said, a pitying expression on her face. The sight of it twisted unpleasantly in Abby's stomach, leaving something like grief and like hate behind, something too big to pull out into the light of day and look at. "There's another explanation, you know," Sommerfield continued. "Something you haven't thought of."
She shouldn't ask. Velasquez and Mick were dead, and King was gone. Poking at the wounds wasn't going to help them heal, but she just kept being stupid.
"What?"
"Maybe no one sold us out. Danica was looking for him, did you know that? That's one of the little bits of intel your father fed to Frank." She aimed a considering look in Abby's general direction. "I'm guessing that's one of the little bits of intel Frank didn't see fit to share with you."
No, he hadn't.
"Your third option is that he didn't sell us out, but she found him anyway." Sommerfield shrugged again, obviously losing interest as the siren call of her viral research exerted itself. "That would explain the clan mark."
She said it so calmly, as if it didn't mean anything. As if it really was just an intellectual exercise as far as she was concerned.
"If that's true," Abby said quietly, "then we left him there for Danica Talos to find."
"If that's true," Sommerfield said pointedly, "then it's water under the goddamned bridge and there's nothing we can do about it. Either she has him or she doesn't. Either way, he's not our problem anymore."
Except Danica didn't have him yet, and he was never going to stop being Abby's problem. But Abby stayed silent, trying not to cling to the hope that Sommerfield had given her. It was hard, so fucking hard not to reach out and grasp it with both hands.
"It wasn't your fault, Abby," Sommerfield said eventually, obviously aware on some level that she was still standing there. There was a weird kind of gentleness in Sommerfield's voice, so different from her normal brisk demeanour with everyone but Zoë, and it was almost unbearable, sliding through all of the chinks in Abby's armour until she couldn't breathe with it. "No one blames you, not me and certainly not Frank."
No one else needed to blame her, not when she was perfectly capable of blaming herself.
-o-
Estevez wasn't working out, but it seemed like Frank was the only one who couldn't see it.
Even Abby found dealing with the man frustrating, especially coming after King's focus and dedication. Estevez wasn't willing to listen to Abby when she pointed out where he needed to improve. He barely even listened to Dex, and Dex had wells of patience that Abby had never seen plumbed until now.
Estevez needed to listen: he was clumsy, arrogant, and much slower at picking things up than King had been. Even when he listened to Dex, he still managed to screw things up nine times out of ten, almost as though he thought that most of what they were trying to teach him was an unnecessary distraction from his real purpose.
The only thing he was interested in was guns, and he spent hours on the range, firing shot after shot into the targets until he could hit them dead centre, his face set and his eyes burning.
His attitude stunk and, more than that, it worried her. It worried her more that Frank either couldn't or didn't want to see what was right in front of him. But Abby knew her limitations, and that meant that she ended up avoiding Estevez as much as possible, leaving Dex to bear the brunt of his training. She told Dex it was because Estevez had some old-fashioned notions about women, despite being only a couple of years older than she was, and Abby had had enough of dealing with that kind of bullshit for one lifetime. In reality, it was the rawness of Estevez's grief that drove her out of their base as much as humanly possible.
She had her own grief to work through, and she did it with a blade, not a gun. There was something viscerally satisfying about sliding her sharp, silver knife into some vamp's torso and watching them explode into dust and ash around her. It probably wasn't healthy, but it had been a long time since she'd given a fuck about that.
She spent most of the time she wasn't killing vamps slowly building up their network of contacts, spiralling out from the Yavaris and building up a web of trust. Frank had his own network, but some twitchy little feeling in the back of her brain told Abby she'd be better off not relying on it. None of them were immortal, not even Frank, and if he died, the chances were that his network would die with him. Plus, it gave her the chance to put her feelers out, find out a little more about Danica Talos, ferret out all of the stuff that Frank didn't know or wasn't willing to share. Asking about King was just about putting the Talos clan into perspective, not about whether or not he was still breathing, that was all.
Even she wasn't buying into that lie, but it was easy to compartmentalise it: anything she found out about vampire activities, particularly about the Talos clan, she passed to Frank; any information she found out about King she kept to herself, hoarding every little piece greedily. It wasn't much, but each little snippet, each sighting or rumour, told her that King was still alive.
Frank listened to her intel and nodded in all the right places, but she was pretty sure that she wasn't imagining how tense he grew or how distracted he became with every little piece of information she fed him about Danica. She thought she got it; it wasn't that she didn't understand what he was saying about the Talos clan being too big for them, too dangerous for them to tackle. It was that she didn't agree with him.
After all, King was out there somewhere, and he seemed determined to take Danica Talos down all on his own.
-o-
"Whistler." Frank's voice caught her attention, stopping her in her tracks. "You got plans tonight?"
Once she might have tried to crack a joke, even if jokes weren't her forte. Now she simply kept her silence, weighing up her answer before she finally said, "I was planning on hitting the warehouse district. There's been some vamp activity down there. Dead bodies turning up. Cops think it's a drugs turf war."
She didn't know why she was elaborating; it felt too much like she had to explain herself to Frank, and Frank was seldom interested in her explanations these days, too distracted and weighed down by the past.
"Put it on hold," he said, scrubbing his hand across his face tiredly. "I've got some intel on another mobile blood bank, somewhere around East Fifty-First and Broadway." He gave her a wry look. "I've also got dead bodies turning up, but this op moves about regularly. May not be there tomorrow so we need to hit it while our information is fresh."
She nodded, already mentally adjusting that night's plan of attack. "What do you need me to do?"
Frank treated her to a relieved look, and the brief flash of gratitude on his face left her shifting uncomfortably. "We need to canvass the area," he said. "Make sure we find it. Which means we need to double up." He paused for a moment before adding, "That means we need to take Estevez out with us."
"Are you sure that's a good idea?"
She regretted the words as soon as they were out of her mouth, but it was too late. Frank's eyes suddenly hardened into flinty agate, all of the camaraderie between them disappearing as rapidly as it had arisen.
"And you're such a good judge of when someone's ready."
It shouldn't have hurt - she'd had months to get used to the idea, to learn to live with the guilt - but the words burned anyway. But then she'd also had months to get used to the pain. It didn't stop her any longer. It barely even slowed her down.
"Estevez is a loose cannon, Frank," she said, keeping her voice low and urgent. "He barely listens to Dex, he sure as hell doesn't listen to me. He just wants to kill vamps -"
"And that's a bad thing now?" Frank interrupted.
"If he's more concerned about that than whether or not he gets anyone else killed, yes."
The look in Frank's eyes was rancorous, but he didn't bring up King. He didn't need to; King's name hung in the air between them anyway, something that pushed them even further apart.
"We take Estevez anyway," he said, his tone making it clear that there was to be no more argument. "He either shapes up, or he ships out. We can't coddle him any longer. We haven't got the resources to counsel him past his trauma, or whatever the fuck you think is going on with him. Understood?"
She nodded, her eyes never leaving his face. "Understood. And he's going to get himself or one of us killed. Do you understand that, Frank?"
His nostrils flared dangerously. "Chain of command, Whistler. You do as you're told or you find another crew."
He'd never dished out that threat before. In fact, it was the first time he'd threatened Abby at all. But she didn't let any of her dismay show on her face. Instead, she held his eyes for long moments before barking, "Yes, sir." She didn't snap off a salute - that was what King would have done - but it was a close thing and she doubted Frank missed that.
He took a step back, but there was no anger in his eyes, not this time; instead there was a strange kind of grief, something that wasn't bitter but bottomless. But he still didn't back down. He simply nodded, once, sharp and full of things she couldn't measure. "If he doesn't listen to you, Whistler, then you need to make him listen. You're not shy about sharing your opinions, and you're sure as hell not shy about arguing your corner." There was a hard and harsh kind of respect in Frank's voice, something uncompromising. "So man up, and kick his ass if you need to."
She nodded, unwilling to push the point any further. There was going to be no changing Frank's mind, not on this.
"What's the plan?" she asked instead, and for a second she thought she'd overstepped that boundary there, too, judging by the way that Frank's eyes narrowed. She was tired of walking on eggshells around him, wishing that things would just get back to normal.
"I need you out there with Estevez," he said and then, when she started to object, he cut her off. "You've got a hell of a better chance of reining him than Dex or me. He won't pull any macho bullshit with you; he's got nothing to prove and..."
"You're saying that me being female is going to work in my favour?" She didn't bother to hide her scepticism. "Me being female is the problem, Frank."
"You don't know that. He'll... Look, Whistler, we both know what happened to Estevez. You think he won't feel the need to watch out for you?"
"I think I don't need looking after."
Frank nodded. "I'm sure you don't. But maybe he does and if he's partnered with you, there's a better chance he'll hang back."
She still wasn't happy with it and it wasn't like she was hiding it, but it seemed that Frank wasn't in the mood to listen to any of her objections, which was pretty much status quo. "Fine," she bit out, keeping her irritation in check as far as she could.
The ever-present tension around his eyes eased fractionally. "We'll split into two teams so we can cover more ground, see if we can't find these fuckers and take them out. They're not clan - shouldn't prove too difficult, taking out some low level leeches." He paused then added, "You may not even get to see any action tonight." It felt like a peace offering, and she took it gratefully.
"If I don't get any action tonight," she groused, "I'm hitting the warehouse district. On my own."
That earned her a reluctant smile from Frank, which was better than she'd hoped for. "Count on it," he said. "We leave at twenty-two hundred. Be ready."
She'd have to be, since it didn't seem like she had a choice.
-o-
Part 09: dreamwidth :: livejournal :: insanejournal
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I'm...probably not that coherent at this point, but uh, seriously, I WANT TO KNOW.
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Now you know why - apart from the insane length of it - I wanted to post it in parts. There are a lot of twists and turns and things that are foreshadowed and... well, I'm just evil. Cliffhangers are ♥