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theladywandererIsaac Lahey is an international art thief, forger, and con man extraordinaire. Scott McCall is an FBI agent. Allison Argent is a security consultant. Together they...fight crime?
[White Collar AU]
Also posted to AO3
Paris, France
March, 2009
The Louvre is the last straw.
Scott’s over in the Musée d’Orsay, surveying the spot where a Van Gogh had hung until about six hours ago, give or take, the very finest of Parisian police and the occasional Interpol agent milling through the gallery behind him when his phone rings. It’s Danny Mahealani, calling on his personal line, the one only for emergencies and Allison.
“McCall,” he says absently after picking up, attention still focused on the origami wolf’s head tacked to the slightly lighter square of wall in front of him.
“He’s done it again,” Danny says, and there’s that hint of begrudging admiration that they’re all starting to sport.
“Who?” Scott asks, turning away and starting to weave his way through the crowd, heading towards the street outside. He already knows who, because there’s only one person that’d get Danny—or any of his team, really—to call on his emergency line, but he wants him to say it.
“Kuryakin,” Danny says after a second, and Scott takes that as his cue to curse for as long as it takes him to finish exiting the Musée, the sounds of rapid and annoyed gutter Spanish echoing off the vaulted ceilings.
“Right,” he says, switching back to English as he hits the doors, “Where’d he hit this time?”
Danny pauses for a second and Scott can feel the headache coming on, no words necessary.
“The Louvre,” he finally says, and Scott drops right back into Spanish.
~~~
He’d first hit about three—maybe four, they’re not sure, which is infuriating—years ago, the man they’re now calling Kuryakin. A vault in Lisbon had turned up empty when it was supposed to be full of gold bullion, with nothing but a small origami crown left behind.
Scott knew there had been others before the Lisbon heist, including an impressive long con involving land deals in mainland China, Japanese bearer bonds, and a Romanian real estate investor, but the Lisbon job was the one that put him officially on the FBI’s—and therefore Scott’s—radar.
Kuryakin had been Midas at first—for the gold, let no one ever say that the FBI are particularly inventive—but then he lifted a set of Matroyshka dolls from the Hermitage, a section of the Parthenon frieze from the British Museum, a shipment of security filaments from the U.S. Mint in California, anything and everything, for no other reason, seemingly, than because he could.
They didn’t even have a real name for him, which was doubly frustrating, just an out-of-focus black and white photo of him with another man, both of them in profile and shadowed heavily enough that Scott wasn’t even sure it was people he was looking at when he first saw it.
It was Vernon Boyd who’d named him, after he’d accidentally left the photos lying out where his wife could see them, and Erica had commented on how much the two of them—one light, one dark, both mysterious—resembled the basic outlines of The Man From U.N.C.L.E.’s Ilya Kuryakin and Napoleon Solo. Aside from a moniker borrowed from a sixties television show and a growing list of thefts, forgeries, and general confidence schemes attributed to him, Scott and the rest of his team knew nothing about Kuryakin except that he liked origami.
A year or so after they started chasing Kuryakin, with two of them on permanent rotating standby to go to the location of his last job and scrub the scene for even a hint of a suggestion of a clue, Scott had been home in New York, standing in line at the Portuguese bakery on sixteenth street, one eye on the crowd as he talked to Allison about dinner and her parents’ upcoming visit when someone bumped into him from behind.
He’d turned slightly, looked the guy in the eye and gave the sheepish half-smile that meant ‘no big deal’, then turned back to the front of the line. It wasn’t until Allison hung up and he’d collected the box full of malasadas and cavacas that it had hit him, and he’d nearly dropped the box and run a man over sprinting to the door, firm in the belief that he’d just seen Kuryakin, and, more importantly, Kuryakin knew enough about the FBI investigation into him to know who Scott was.
He hadn’t seen him on the street that day, but surveillance footage from the pastry shop gave them their first clear image of Kuryakin, smiling shyly at Scott, whose face was turned towards him. It wasn’t a lot—hell, it wasn’t anything where the courts were concerned—but it was enough to run facial recognition and get a name: Isaac Lahey, formerly of the California foster care system, now off the—official—grid for more than ten years.
He still had that picture; Allison had magneted it to the front of the fridge the night he’d brought it home.
“He’s important,” she’d explained, when he’d asked why, “And important stuff goes on the fridge, whether we like it or not.”
It’s the reason, he knew, why her grandfather’s death certificate—signed and witnessed by three separate doctors and the former Commissioner of the Yankees—hangs on the fridge in her father’s house, so he didn’t—and doesn’t—question it.
They still have no idea who Solo is.
~~~
Scott gets to the Louvre as fast as he possibly can in a city that doesn’t care one whit that two—at least—pieces of priceless art have been stolen in the last twelve hours, so long as it doesn’t bother them. The language is a bit of a hindrance as well, but Allison’s been teaching him—“All the better to talk to my mother, honey, she’s much less scary in French”—add his Spanish, and it’s enough to hail him a cab and get the driver to drop him off in front of the museum at at least European rates, instead of the usual Parisian drag that seems to be reserved especially for Americans.
He pulls his cell phone—the work one; the emergency line stays in his pocket—out after he pays the cab driver, dialing Danny as he takes the steps two at a time.
Danny picks up on the second ring. “Hey, boss, where’re you at?”
“Front entrance,” Scott says, dodging a group of German schoolchildren. “Doing my best to thread the needle. You?”
“In front of that headless lady, you know the one,” Danny says, effortlessly disregarding the Winged Victory in the way only he can.
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Scott says, then hangs up.
Getting to Danny is the work of a few minutes, getting to the scene of the crime is a whole different matter.
“Near as I can tell,” Danny says, taking them both up the stairs, “It’s like he went on a shopping spree. We’ve got two Raphael’s tagged, a Vermeer, possibly a Da Vinci, a Manet—which he’s welcome to, by the way, it’s ugly—and a Gauguin. All stolen, all replaced with forgeries, all have origami figures hidden in the frames.”
“Do we know when?” Scott is…well. Scott is impressed despite of himself. That’s a pretty long list of art, art that’s watched day and night by some of the tightest security museums have to offer. For all of it to both go missing and be replaced, Kuryakin had to have planned for months, if not years.
It’s incredible, it’s amazing, it’s a beautiful crime, and Scott is more than aware that he’ll probably never see its like again.
Danny shakes his head as they reach the top of the stairs and turn left, walking briskly down the corridors of the old palace. “No idea on the timetable. One of them—the Manet, I think—was taken down for cleaning this morning, and the art restorer found an origami frog on the back of the canvas. She called security, they emptied out the museum, did a full sweep, came up with the list I just gave you.”
“She sure it’s a fake, not just him messing with us, pulling us away from the Musée d’Orsay, or somewhere else?” Scott’s damn sure Kuryakin had actually done it, but he’s got to ask all the questions, make sure that everyone else is on the same page as him. Going straight on assumptions is a good way to get obsessed, not to mention the fact that even though he’s the Senior Special Agent, he’s still human, and he’s still wrong.
Not often, but often enough.
“Yep,” Danny says. “She’s sure, her friend’s sure, her friend’s old professor at the University—who, she assures me, helped re-authenticate half of these after World War II—is sure, everyone.”
“Motherfucker,” Scott says, and that’s when they reach the first huddle of crime scene techs.
There’s a table set up in this room, a plastic and metal affair that looks out of place amongst all the art and gilt. Bags and bright orange containers are strewn across the top, but there’s a section towards the end that’s cleared off, with nothing but a few pieces of brightly coloured paper scattered across it.
Scott walks up to it, still half listening to Danny give him the rundown of events. There are six origami shapes there: the frog Danny had already mentioned, a unicorn, a sword, a star, a rose, and another wolf’s head.
The star is folded a little sloppier that the others, so maybe that’s why he sees it, but when he bends down, there’s just the faintest line of pencil grey peeking through the bright yellow of the paper.
“Hey, Mahealani,” he says, interrupting Danny, and points down at the star. “You see that?”
Danny bends down, does his own inspection. “Yeah. Yeah, I do. What do you think it is?”
“No fucking clue,” Scott says, waving an evidence tech over. “He’s never left, uh, notes before.”
When the tech arrives, he asks her—in his best French; this is still, technically, the Parisian Metropolitan Police’s crime scene—if she has anyone who could unfold the star for them. There’s a question as to why; he points out the pencil marks, and she goes in search of someone with more authority and job security.
Twenty minutes later, after all the shapes have been photographed, swabbed, scanned, and finally unfolded, Scott and Danny just rock back on their heels and stare.
“Hiya, Special Agent McCall,” reads the one from the rose, “what’s doing?”
The sword had revealed “Gotta catch ‘em all”, which Scott is sure is just Kuryakin fucking with them, even if it’s on a higher level than usual.
The ones from the star, unicorn, frog, and wolf had flowed into a short letter, the longest communication anyone’s ever had with Kuryakin since Scott had absently smiled at him in a bakery two years ago.
“Hallo,” the note said. “It’s me, clearly. Don’t bother with the handwriting, it’s not mine. I just wanted to say: the d’Orsay wasn’t me. I’ve nothing against it, no one should, but I haven’t robbed it. Impersonated a docent, maybe—calm down, McCall—but never stolen. I got what I wanted from Paris a while back, I’ve no need to repeat myself. Look for the Dutchman instead (there’s a name for you), follow the Van Goghs. Say hi to Melly for me. Kuryakin.”
There’s an overly cheerful looking smiley face drawn after the name, which is written on the paper that had previously been the star. Danny and Scott are silent, still absorbing what’s in front of them.
“Who’s Melly?” Danny asks after a minute, turning to look questioningly at Scott.
“Black lab puppy,” Scott says, reading over the note for what seems like the thousandth time, but is really more like the fourth. “Allison just picked her up yesterday, we’ve been thinking about it for a while, just decided on the name this morning.”
“No fucking way did he do this this morning,” Danny says, sweeping an arm out to indicate the rest of the Louvre.
Scott hums, eyebrows furrowing a bit. “The theft, no, I don’t think so, but….the notes? Yeah, I think he did these this morning.”
“So,” Danny says, and now his eyebrows are crinkling up as well, “He steals all this stuff who knows when, gets away scot-free—pun unintentional, I assure you—then comes back however much time later to, what? Leave you notes so you won’t blame him for something he didn’t do?”
Scott rubs the back of his neck, almost embarrassed for reasons he can’t explain. “Yes? I’m not sure why he’s telling us like this—because he definitely knows who we are and how to get in touch with us, there’s no need to blow a job for a warning—but he must think it’s important.”
Danny sighs, and scrubs his face with his hands. “This is the last thing we need,” he says, voice still a bit muffled. “A thief with honor who wants proper credit and will give up other thieves if they try to frame him because he cares what you think about him.”
“Not me,” Scott says, protesting, “The FBI. We’re all—all of us in white collar crime—after him. I’m not Batman.”
Danny grins. “Sure about that, McCall? You did, after all, marry Catwoman.”
Scott rolls his eyes. “Allison know you call her that?”
“Yep,” Danny says, grin widening. “She said she was more of a Huntress than Catwoman, but she’d take what she could get.”
“Unbelievable,” Scott mutters, thinking that if he’s Batman, then Kuryakin is the Joker minus—so far—the homicidal mania.
~~~
New York City, New York, USA
September, 2009
Six months later
Six months later, Scott and his team are no closer to finding out when Kuryakin pulled the Louvre job, or who did the d’Orsay heist.
All they’ve got—thanks to Kuryakin, which rankles—is the name Dutchman and the Van Gogh connection, a lead which is frustratingly hard to follow up on, seeing as no judge in the world will give them any sort of warrant based on the supposed word of a known criminal.
At least—and Scott gives thanks every day for this—he, along with the rest of his team, are back stateside, and will be staying there for the foreseeable future. Melly’s grown bigger than he thinks any dog has a right to in the city, a dervish of dark fur and excitement that bounces around the house like a mad hatter.
Allison’s business—a security firm she co-owns with Lydia Martin, a friend from college—is starting to pick up, her client list starting to expand beyond those who talk about Chris Argent in nothing but the most reverent of whispers.
Work—aside from the ongoing Kuryakin situation, which Scott honestly thinks will last for the rest of his life—even slows down enough for him to remember that he’s got friends, people who like talking to him for reasons other than he’s their boss.
Admittedly, he reconnects by way of a petty smash-and-grab that just so happens to involve a federal fugitive, and spends the first couple minutes of their renewed interaction by stomping all over any and all jurisdictional boundaries he and the brightest minds at the New York field office can think of, but whatever. Stiles will get over it.
Later that night, after four rounds of beer at O’Hallighan’s—paid for by Scott; he’s a fed, not a complete asshole—Stiles does get over it. It’s an improvement on the last time Scott and his team rolled up on something local that turned out to be a bit more, during which Stiles had taken full advantage of the fact that it had been nickel shot night—which, lamentably, is tonight as well—and nearly drunk himself and half the NYPD into cheap booze induced oblivion.
“Dude,” Stiles says, indicating with his half full glass, “I’m not even sure how this keeps happening.”
“You have no self-control?” Danny suggests from where he’s sitting on Scott’s other side, Boyd and Erica’s drinks left under his watchful gaze as they do their best to turn the corner by the jukebox—free plays on nickel shot night, thanks so much, Ethan—into a functioning dancefloor.
Stiles points an accusing finger at Danny. “You, shut up. I have amazing self-control. Legendary self-control. Ask anyone.”
Scott sees Danny’s eyes sliding to him and puts his hands up as fast as he can. “Don’t ask me, I am not part of this particular conversation, and I never want to be. Ever.”
Stiles laughs, then leans in, beer still in hand. “No, but really,” he says, suddenly serious. “Why the hell do you keep showing up at crime scenes? I’m homicide, I’m not even supposed to be near smash-and-grabs or any other kind of robbery unless Castiglioni’s off on leave, and you’re white collar, big money crime.”
He takes a drink, continues. “Neither of us should have been at that bodega, even if there was a fugitive involved—he was narcotics’ problem on both fronts, and you and I both know it—so why the fuck do I keep getting pulled in as FBI liaison on cases I sure as hell shouldn’t be liaising on, at least not with you?”
Scott has no answer.
No, scratch that, he’s got an answer, he’s got over three years’ worth of an answer, a filing cabinet in his office devoted to Kuryakin, a shelf in his home office, an unofficial rule at the house that he’s not allowed to speak of the man or the case on weekends, and a growing sense that Kuryakin is somehow…watching him.
Waiting for something, maybe.
Definitely driving him and, by extension, his team insane.
Stiles doesn’t know, because Scott and him haven’t talked about work related stuff outside of work in months, about Kuryakin at all, ever, and none of the cases Scott keeps involving himself in have had anything to do with Kuryakin, no matter how much he thinks that this time, this time he’ll get something.
Which, damn it, that’s unhealthy, and unfair, and maybe a little rude. If he’d done it to Allison—and he’d tried, the first few months they’d known each other, before she’d shown him she could just as easily dropkick him into next week as hire somebody else to do it—she’d have his head for it, right now, and maybe a bit more if he kept fucking with her when she knew something was up.
So Scott looks at Danny, Danny gets the hint and gets up, going over to where Erica and Boyd are doing the smoothest version of the electric slide he’s ever seen, and Scott turns to his best friend in the whole wide world, excluding the woman he married.
“So, there’s a guy,” he starts, and he can almost see the echo of ‘there’s always a guy’ flit across Stiles’ face. He ignores it, and plows on.
~~~
Grant County, Nebraska, USA
May, 2010
Eight months later
So far as Scott can tell, there’s nothing in Grant County.
Nothing in Nebraska, truth be told—or, at least, nothing that would interest an international art thief, forger, and con man extraordinaire—but here he is, staring at security footage from a small local airport and watching Kuryakin stroll from the single entrance gate to the exit doors off-screen.
No sign of Solo, but, then again, aside from that one picture they’d gotten lucky with, there never was.
The airport car rental agency had him taking a black mid-model Volkswagen sedan—one that had actually left the lot, not been switched around for another—and various traffic cameras had him driving to a motel off the highway.
After that…nothing. He hadn’t moved, hadn’t sneaked away, hadn’t made any sort of effort to hide himself from anyone who was looking for him. It was worse than strange, it was worrying, and Scott was halfway on his way to being mad that a criminal he’d never spoken to—and had only once, unknowingly, seen face to face—had managed to get him concerned for his wellbeing.
“What do we do?” he finally asks, once he’s read over all their information one last time, looking up to survey the tiny conference-slash-breakroom they’d been given for the duration of whatever the hell this turned out to be. Danny’s there, and Boyd, the both of them with similar folders in front of them. The police chief for Grant County, Maran Shelk, is there as well, leaning against the wall behind Danny.
“It’s almost too neat,” Boyd says.
“Like he wants us to find him,” Maran adds.
“Like the Louvre,” Danny says, and Scott nods. Over a year later, and they still haven’t figured out when Kuryakin had done that particular job, and the staff of the preservation office keeps sending him newly discovered bits of origami by express mail.
“There’s no way this is on accident,” he concludes, “And yet we’re going to go after him anyway. Hopefully, maybe, if we’re lucky, he’ll tell us why he suddenly decided to just roll over.”
Scott’s not looking forward to that last part, none of them are. They’ve been chasing Kuryakin on-and-off for over four years, always a step behind, yet always there. They didn’t have to get calls about another one of his jobs—be it theft, forgery, or graft—because they were already there because they knew him, and were the only team that did.
Most of that was Scott, banging his head against the wall that was their general lack of information on him—the name Isaac Lahey is there, but there’s only so much a name can give when the man who owns it doesn’t use it.
Even Stiles—and, more begrudgingly, Allison—had gotten caught up in the mix, their weekly meet-ups for dinner at Scott and Allison’s somehow, after he’d told Stiles everything that night at O’Hallighan’s, turning into long discussions of just what the fuck was going on. Scott’s good at his job, damn good, but Stiles and Allison are a tad trickier in their thinking than he’s ever been, their wild leaps of logic fitting in with the more sensible progression that Scott had already mapped out. He had known the how, the when, and maybe the where next, but they’d given him the why, which was just as important as the other three combined.
Now, though, there wasn’t any strategizing, any planning. There wasn’t a long night spent at the Federal Building with Boyd, Danny, and whatever other poor schlub he managed to pull in to bounce things off of, or an equally long session with Stiles, Allison, and Melly on the balcony at his place.
There was just Grant County, Nebraska, and a clear as hell trail pointing to a rundown no-tell motel.
“Alright,” he says, quietly. “Let’s go get the bastard.”
~~~
United States Penitentiary, Florence ADX
Florence, Colorado
June, 2010
Sixteen days later
Isaac Lahey is nothing like Kuryakin.
Scott’s in a viewing room, on the other side of a two-way mirror, staring at the man he intends to give a permanent bunk in this concrete hellhole.
He’s tall, lanky, with a crop of brown hair that’s more than a little too long. His eyes are nervous, his hands twist when he thinks no one’s looking, and his shoulders hunch visibly in the bright prison orange of his jumpsuit. His voice even shakes when he’s talking to Deaton, who’d flown in special from the New York City field office to have a chat with him. There’s no sign of suave smoothness, of a master thief who’d robbed the Louvre blind and then come back and put a neon sign on the bits he’d touched just to send a message.
Scott’s not sure if this is who Lahey is, when he’s not playing the role of Kuryakin from a distance, or if he’s trying to pull one over on the whole of the FBI and the FBP.
It’s not going to work, mainly because Scott’s told the warden, the warden’s boss, Deaton, and anyone else who’ll listen that Lahey’s the worst kind of flight risk, because he spent most of his criminal career breaking into shit that was supposed to be unbreakable. Doing it in reverse and in handcuffs isn’t going to be that much of a challenge, even in the Alcatraz of the Rockies, and especially not if Lahey manages to swing a transfer to a min-sec white collar crime facility.
He’s broken out of his reverie—one he’s been falling into more and more these past couple days, trying to figure out the why of everything—when Deaton stands up. He looks through the two-way mirror—straight at Scott, it feels like—and gives the slightest of nods.
Scott sighs, shoves a hand through his hair—it’s getting ridiculous, almost as long as Lahey’s—and pushes himself off the wall from where he’s been standing before going to meet Deaton in the hall.
“Well?” He asks, as soon as he’s in earshot and certain that the door to the interrogation room is closed.
Deaton looks faintly amused. “He’s definitely playing us. Not to his advantage, though, which is interesting.”
“He could be in there saying he’s no idea what we’re talking about, we’ve got the wrong guy,” Scott says, agreeing. “Instead he’s, he’s…twitching.”
“Which means one of very many possibilities,” Deaton says. “He’s either protecting someone, hiding from someone, or this is exactly where he wants to be for some other, unfathomable reason.”
“A mix of the first two, I’m betting,” Scott replies, a bit distantly, the scene of the arrest going back through his head. It had been stupidly easy, just assemble strike team, knock on door, and hey, presto! International fugitive, all tied up.
“We haven’t heard hide nor hair of Solo,” he continues, “Which means that either he’s fickler than we thought, or he’s hiding as well, somewhere other than the intimate clutches of Uncle Sam. They’re both—at least to the criminal element, since no one knows Lahey’s here but the feds, and no one knows Lahey’s Kuryakin but us—in the wind, and neither are making any sort of effort to get him back to freedom. So…”
“They’re in hiding,” Deaton finishes thoughtfully. “Lord knows why Lahey chose the FBI to be his bushel, but he must trust us more than whatever the hell is gunning for him out there.”
Scott grimaces. “Either they’re not as good as Lahey—because, like I’ve said again and again, he could twist his way out of here if he wants—or they don’t want the attention that would come from getting into a place like this, even by proxy.”
Deaton nods. “No matter what the case is, they’re certainly persistent—and dangerous—enough that both Lahey and Solo chose this as their best bet.
“Which means,” and here he smiles, and Scott gets a hell of a lot more nervous than he was before. Heads of state have gone an unhealthy sort of pale when Alan Deaton smiles, and Scott’s no different. “You’re going to have to go in there, and talk to him.”
Scott tries very, very hard not to flinch.
He’d been avoiding being alone with Lahey—and it was Lahey, now, Kuryakin put away now that the FBI had him in custody—ever since the arrest.
Scott wanted to say that it was because of professionalism, that no one was ever supposed to be alone with prisoners, or that he was doing it so Allison wouldn’t worry, which was complete and utter bullshit. Allison could take care of herself, and had made sure that Scott was at least to the Chris Argent standard of resting badassery within the first year of their relationship, and people—FBI agents, prison guards, lawyers—were alone with prisoners all the time, the watchful single eye of the surveillance camera in the corner keeping the civil niceties at least mostly in play.
Instead, Scott kept remembering the day at the bakery, the quick and breezy look he’d gotten at Lahey—back when he was still only Kuryakin—and the easy smile that had come natural as breathing. From both of them. Lahey hadn’t done anything then, just showed up, made sure Scott saw him, and left, like all he’d wanted was to see him.
The damn picture’s still on his fridge; he and Allison see it every day.
It’s a level of focus—of obsession, if he’s being honest with himself—that worries him with its intensity. Deaton’s looking at him expectantly, though, and he’s not about to tell the Assistant Special Agent In Charge of the New York City FBI Field Office’s white collar crime division that he doesn’t want to talk to the suspect that he’s been chasing for over four years because he’s got…Scott doesn’t even know what the hell he’s got, but he doesn’t want to tell Deaton a damn thing about it.
“Yeah, okay,” he finally says, which, while not stellar, allows him to slide by his boss’ boss and open the interrogation room door.
~~~
The first time Isaac Lahey saw Special Agent Scott McCall was in London.
He’d just lifted a bit of the Parthenon—heavy bugger, all jagged edges and marble slipperiness—and sent it on a winding journey back to where it’d come from. He’d been resting from all the heavy lifting in a café across from the British Museum, hot coffee in hand and scarf secure around his neck, the image of a university student complete and unassuming.
It was raining out, one of the deluges the Isles were so famous for, and he’d taken another bracing sip, glad that his hair had dried fast enough so that he—and his timestamped receipt—could easily say that he’d been here since before it began, right in the middle of the time he was supposed to have been nicking antiquities. Not that he thought they’d pull him in for this one, but it never hurt to be prepared.
A taxi had pulled up then, disgorging two men dressed to federal nines, complete with wrinkled trenchcoats and umbrellas that looked a tad too new to belong to anyone who lived in London full time.
He smiled, took a sip of his coffee. Americans, then, it had to be, or Interpol.
They went into the Museum, and Isaac stayed where he was, waiting for the rain to stop.
Twenty minutes later, the rain was still going full force, but the Americans-maybe-Interpol were on their way out again. They stopped near the curb, the taller of the two under an umbrella and chatting on a mobile while the other one stood next to him, out of the umbrella’s reach, slowly getting drenched in the steady downpour, his face turned up to the grey sky.
And then he smiled, like he’d just figured something out, something important, and just kept on looking up.
He’d had Derek find out who he was as soon as he’d gotten back to where he was staying.
He left the first origami for him—for Special Agent Scott McCall—in California a few weeks later.
A year later, he’d been in New York City for one reason or another, and happened to chance upon McCall going into a padaria. Isaac hadn’t been able to help himself, found himself wending his way inside just to get a closer look at him, dry and in his element. He’d gotten a smile out of that, and a flutter in his chest that was almost worth the reaming Derek gave him once he found out that he’d not only touched an FBI agent but had also had the bad graces to get caught on camera doing it.
Two years, and a whole hell of a lot of near misses later—McCall was almost getting eerie, with the way he was always there, no matter how much Isaac tried to mix it up, throw him off—Isaac found himself wandering the halls of the Louvre in the early morning, tucking tiny bits of folded paper into various works of his—and others’, it didn’t hurt to keep them on their toes—art as he listened to the sirens head in the opposite direction, towards the Musée d’Orsay.
Now, four years out, with something a hell of a lot stronger than a flutter beating about just behind his breastbone, he’s facing McCall opposite the wrong side of an interrogation table.
He’s been doing his best with the others who’ve been in here, giving the right mix of fear (all too real), nervousness (only half faked), and mildly sycophantic pleading (reverse psychology at its finest). He doesn’t particularly want to be here, he imagines no one pictures Florence ADX when they think of a place they’d like to spend any significant amount of time, but he also doesn’t want to be out there, where nasty things like Peter are lurking in the dark, waiting for him to let his guard down.
(It has occurred to him that that’s exactly what McCall and the FBI have been doing as well, but somehow their attention feels…benevolent when compared to Peter’s. Familial, even.
Less psychotic, certainly.)
McCall, though…he doesn’t think he can do it. He’s trying right now, maybe a little too hard, but he doesn’t think he can make it stick. He wants McCall to see him, to recognize the opponent he’s chased across continents, to know that, yeah, the guy who wrote him notes in the Louvre and sent him running across the globe only half-a-step behind him is sitting right here.
He, to quote Derek in one of his more vocal moods, is so fucked.
“The last job we have you on is Bogotá,” McCall says abruptly, pulling Isaac back to the present. “That was, what, three months ago? Where’ve you been, Lahey?”
Shit.
It’s not the first time McCall’s said his name—that was when he’d been reading Isaac his Miranda Rights; “Isaac Lahey, you have the right to remain silent”—but it’s the first time he’s not in the middle of being arrested, and motherfucking shit.
It’s doing things to him.
(Mental Derek has escalated from vocal outbursts to loud, disgusted sighs.)
“Oh, you know,” and god fucking damn it his voice is more Hackney than Anaheim, he might as well just roll over right now and tell McCall and his scary-as-fuck boss everything—“Around.” He smiles, all the way to the eyes, happy even as his brain—assisted by Mental Derek—castigates him for being so stupid.
McCall’s eyes visibly sharpen at the accent, and when Isaac smiles, man.
He comes alive.
Whatever nerves or misgivings he might have had—and he had something, Isaac was sure of it—were gone, and he’s left facing the best the FBI—or any agency—has ever been able to throw at him. His smile widens.
“Around like Paris?” McCall asks. “Or have you been back in New York City, lurking around the paderias on the off chance you might run into an FBI agent?”
“Oh, no,” Isaac leans forward across the table, ignoring the drag of his chains against the metal surface, and drops his voice. “I only make time for one fed in particular. Maybe you’ve heard of him? Senior Special Agent Scott McCall, out of New York, a real firecracker, nearly caught some guy called Kuryakin dead to rights in Milan last year.”
“Did he now?” McCall’s leaning in, too, his face just the other side of way too damn close for any sort of professionalism. “Because he was pretty certain they were already in Zaragoza by the time he even got to Italy.”
Isaac’s not really clear on how eyes are supposed to twinkle, but he’s pretty damn sure his are fit to rival the White House Christmas Tree. “Maybe, just maybe, Kuryakin was actually just across the street, grabbing coffee, and he got damn lucky that he’d know that jawline anywhere, even when he’s not expecting it.”
McCall huffs out a laugh, leans back—finally, thank you Jesus for some modicum of…something—and just sits there for a minute, considering him.
Isaac settles back himself, arranging his chains in as comfortable a way as he possibly can. McCall is…not what he expected, not really. He’d been drawn to him sure, but there’s only so much that background checks and the occasional spying mission can do, especially when he’d been doing his damndest to run in the opposite direction of McCall for the last four years or so.
It wasn’t like he could send Derek either—not that Derek got sent anywhere he hadn’t already decided he wanted to go. They may only have one photo of him, but that was one more photo than any other agency in the entire world had managed in the decade or so Derek had been active, and he refused to get any closer than he absolutely had to.
So they’d had the barebones facts—FBI agent, white collar crime, married, lives in New York, raised by a single mother—and some pretty solid physical evidence that the man did not give up. Steadfast and determined did not a fun person usually make, even if Isaac was continuously tempted to add ‘cute’ to the list of descriptors.
Now he’s in jail, however, and McCall’s...McCall’s...McCall’s…flirting with him.
Or something.
So fucked, Mental Derek repeats, and Isaac groans internally.
“Here’s the thing,” McCall says, obviously oblivious to—or just politely ignoring—Isaac’s current personal crisis. “We’ve got almost nothing on you.”
At that, he looks up. Facts like ‘we have little to no hard evidence you’ve committed the crime you’re imprisoned for committing’ is not the kind of thing people just go around saying. Prosecuting lawyers are practically trained from day one to skirt around that fact as much as possible, and obfuscation is literally the name of the game in jury trials.
“There’s maybe twenty jobs you’ve pulled, in the last four years or so?” McCall continues, watching Isaac closely enough that he can feel the sweat start beading on the back of his neck.
“Closer to thirty,” he says, voice hoarse, the Hackney stronger than ever. “Allegedly.”
McCall hums in agreement. “Allegedly. We’ve got evidence you were there for maybe ten of them, circumstantial mostly, a whole evidence locker full of origami—thanks, by the way, you’ve gotten Boyd into it—and solid, hard proof that you were in Memphis last year, dishing out counterfeit Old Masters with the guy we’re calling the Dutchman, the guy you say pulled the Musée d’Orsay heist over a year ago.”
“You kept the name,” Isaac says, smiling.
“Couldn’t think of anything better,” McCall says, shrugging. “Anyway, that’s one hard example of fraud and bunch of other felonies, plus a strong hint that you’ve done a hell of a lot more. The most that’ll get you, with the way you look? Five years, maybe six, probably in minimum security, maybe medium if you show yourself to be a flight risk.”
“Nothing more?” Isaac asks, and damn it, he almost sounds disappointed.
“Juries love stories like yours,” McCall says with a lopsided grin, before his face settles into a more serious expression. “Five years, and you’re out, Lahey. Five years, and whoever you’re running from is gonna snatch you up as fast as they can.”
“I’m not running from anyone.” He’s proud of that one, his voice doesn’t wobble at all, the sincerity is hitting all the right marks.
McCall doesn’t buy it for a second. “You say that, but here you are. You saw us coming in Milan, in Tokyo, in half-a-dozen other places, and you rabbited so fast I’ve found coffee that’s still steaming, and no trace of you or any of the crimes we’ve been chasing you for.
“Grant County, though?” McCall leans forward again, eyes steady on Isaac’s. “Grant County’s got nothing. No art, no land developments, no out of the way buildings, nothing to rob, nowhere to headquarter a con, nowhere to run a con. There’s no reason for you to be there, and yet there we found you anyway.
“It was too damn easy, Lahey.” McCall’s voice is shaking in something very much like anger, which is impossible. He’d caught him, Isaac was in handcuffs and facing several long years of dreadful food and abysmal company, and McCall was angry about it. It made no sense.
“Too damn easy,” he repeats. “But if here’s where you want to be, here’s where I’ll keep you.”
And then he stands up, turns around, and walks away.
~~~
New York City, New York
May, 2015
Four years, ten months, and six days later
The day, no the moment Scott brought home the picture of Isaac Lahey, the con artist formerly known as Kuryakin, Allison had known they were in trouble.
It wasn’t the first time she’d heard of the man, or his exploits, but it was the first time she’d seen him. Young, thin, looking more like a street rat than someone who routinely treated the art houses of the world as personal shopping malls, and looking at her husband like he hung the moon.
Which, okay, so had Allison when they first started dating, but she’d gotten over that. Mostly. Didn’t make the fact that this man, this…kid—because Scott had finally been able to get an ID a couple days later, Isaac Lahey, twenty-five-ish, from seemingly nowhere at all—was making the same face she had the first time she’d run into Scott on the UC Berkeley campus.
Scott didn’t see it, though, none of his team did. Where she saw a man in the full throes of a crush that was doomed to go absolutely nowhere, her husband and the whole of the FBI saw a criminal who’d had the chance to taunt one of their own and taken it.
Lydia, when Allison first showed her the picture—now magneted to her and Scott’s fridge—and told her about it, laughed for a solid minute, almost knocking over her drink.
“Oh, honey,” she’d said, once she’d regained control of herself. “You look at him the same way, the both of you.”
~~~
Allison had drunk an entire bottle of Jameson that night, and refused to talk about it ever again. Not Lahey—she could never call him Kuryakin—because that was both stupid and unavoidable. The fact that she and Scott might be just as inexplicably…drawn to Lahey as he was to Scott, though, that she could shove into the black box in her head marked Gerard & Other Fucked Up Things and never think of it again.
Definitely never.
God damn it.
And then, two years or so after the worst hangover of Allison’s life, the asshole had to go and hit the Louvre.
Scott came home from Paris with a sparkle in his eyes, a grin for Melly, a full on smile and sweep-you-off-your-feet kiss for Allison, and a bag of origami notes from Lahey in his carry on.
(She read them while Scott was in the shower, washing off the dust of France and the chemicals of airplane travel, and came to the conclusion that Lahey, for all of his other crimes, has also got a mouth on him.
Allison most assuredly does not like that about him.
Not one whit.)
It had settled, a little, after that. Lydia still snickered every time she saw the picture on their fridge, and had even brought Erica, the wife of Scott’s Boyd into the mix, the both of them taking sips of various types of hard liquor and sighing disappointedly at her. (If Scott noticed how much of the coconut rum she went through when they visited, he never mentioned it.)
Eventually, Scott pulled his head out of his (very occasionally) surprisingly uncommunicative ass and told Stiles about Lahey, which made their weekly dinners a lot less about avoiding the subject entirely and a lot more about dissecting the hell out of it, to the point that she was pretty sure that both she and Stiles, a New York security expert and NYPD homicide detective respectively, could point at the next place Lahey was likely to hit as well as the best the FBI had to offer.
Which was why she, as well as everyone else, had been surprised as hell about Grant County, though both she and Scott had expected the lighter sentence that eventually got handed down. Five years wasn’t an especially long time, not in the grand scheme of things, but Allison knew she’d very literally go insane if she were penned in on place that long, particularly if it were in Supermax.
She worried, those first couple months, and she could tell Scott worried as well. Oh, he did it in ways like doing paperwork at home instead of the office, or making sure he was available for dinners with her parents, but he was worried.
Which made her angry.
“Why couldn’t Lahey have stayed loose?” she’d complained one Friday night, her shoes kicked off, legs hanging over the side of Lydia’s couch, a frozen strawberry margarita melting its way back to liquid sitting on the floor next to her. Lydia was dating a bartender, had been for months, which, at the time, had made it the longest relationship she’d had since before Jackson had his gay freakout in sophomore year of college.
Lydia had raised one eyebrow, which Allison had hated her for. Allison couldn’t do that. Allison also had had too much to drink, but whatever. “You want your husband’s arch-nemesis-with-a-crush to still be running all over the world and pulling Scott to, I don’t know, what was it on your anniversary two years ago? Bhutan? You want Scott to be in Bhutan?”
“Nooooooo,” Allison had said. “I want him to be…” And here she’d trailed off, staring at the ceiling. She had a nice ceiling, did Lydia. All sorts of swirls in the paint; fancy, understated stuff that Allison didn’t have any patience to do herself and she knew Lydia had done herself. “I want him to be happy,” she’d finally said.
Lydia’s other eyebrow had gone up, and honestly, that was just not fair. No one should have that much control over their own eyebrows. “Having Lahey locked up doesn’t make Scott happy? Is he insane? Are you insane? Has Stiles been ‘baking’ again?”
“It’s not that he’s not happy, so much,” Allison had said, tilting her head to send the swirls…swirling. “It’s that he’s bored. I’m bored. It’s like Sherlock Holmes, you know? This was his Moriarty.”
“Just be glad it wasn’t his Reichenbach,” Lydia had said, and that was the end of that.
~~~
A month later, though, Scott got the first card.
“Morning, McCall (& Argent),” it had read, in a blocky, all-caps script that Allison realized must be his own. “Guess what? They finally trust me with a pen. Today, (and by ‘today’ I mean the day I posted this) is a monumental day in our history. Take a guess as to what. Say hi to Melly for me. Isaac Lahey.”
On the front, drawn in ballpoint pen, was a malasada.
“That,” Scott had said after a moment. “That motherfucker.”
“Who remembers this shit?” Allison had been rereading the card, searching for something, anything that would make this whole thing make at least a tiny bit of sense. (Nothing had been forthcoming.)
“Him, apparently,” Scott had said, then: “Fridge?”
“Fridge.”
After that, they had come like clockwork. One on Scott’s birthday, one on Allison’s, one on Melly’s, and one on the anniversary of the day Isaac had bumped into Scott in the padaria on Sixteenth. Their fridge is getting to be an art museum all on its own, covered in five-by-seven masterworks done in ballpoint pen by a prisoner they’re both, to some extent, responsible for putting away.
It’s an odd specialization, but it is what it is.
Allison sends something back—the mailing address to Florence ADX carefully typed, printed, and taped to the box by her when Scott’s out at the Federal Building—after the second card. She’s not sure security will let it through, but she stuffs enough things inside it that she’s sure he’ll get something, and that’s got to be worth it.
The next card—the one for Melly’s birthday—comes drawn in colour, which is confirmation enough.
Lahey never mentions the packages, Allison keeps sending them, Scott pretends he doesn’t know about them, everything is…not fine, exactly, but okay.
Everything is okay.
~~~
The phone is ringing.
It’s two in the goddamn morning, and Allison just got back from an overseas consultation—which, although a major win for her and Lydia, was also hell on her internal clock—so it feels even worse, and the phone just will not stop ringing. She finally rolls over, flops her hand around on the nightstand until she picks up the correct phone—the one that’s lit up like Satan’s Hell Carnival and vibrating itself half to pieces—taps whatever the hell it is that’ll make it shut up, puts it up to her ear, and snarls, “What.”
“Uh,” says Danny Mahealani. “Hi, Allison. Is Scott there?”
“You better have a damn good reason for this, Mahealani,” she says, gently shaking Scott the rest of the way awake. She might be tired, and more than a tad bit annoyed, but she’s not an asshole.
“The very fucking best,” he promises, and she passes the phone over to Scott.
“McCall,” he says, not sounding at all like he was asleep less than two seconds ago. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. They’re positive? You sure? Because he’s never—Yeah, I know. Okay. Boyd coming? Okay. I’ll be there in thirty.”
He hangs up, breathes. Doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then, “Isaac Lahey broke out of Florence ADX sometime tonight, they’re not sure when, or how. Boyd and Danny are waiting for me at the Federal Building. We’ve got a flight out of JFK in a couple hours.”
“But he’s out in less than two months,” Allison says after a moment. “Why the fuck would he break out if he’s going to be out, fair and square, no one chasing him?”
Scott sighs, shoves his hands through his hair. It’s getting long again, floppy, like it was when they first met. “I don’t know, Ally, I just—” He rubs at his face, his voice heavy with more than sleep. “I don’t know.”
“You’ll get him, okay?” Allison says, twisting so that she’s looking at him head on, instead of from the side. “You’ll get him, you’ll bring him back, and you’ll ask him what the fuck he thought he was doing.”
Scott smiles. “I should take you with me, we’d have him before we even cleared baggage claim.”
“Damn straight,” she says, leaning in to kiss him. It’s slow, still sleepy, with an edge that Allison knows she could turn into more, if only they had the time. They don’t, though, so she breaks it off with a reluctance that she knows Scott’s feeling as well, which makes it somewhat better.
“Go get ‘em, tiger,” she says, and Scott goes.
[White Collar AU]
Also posted to AO3
Paris, France
March, 2009
The Louvre is the last straw.
Scott’s over in the Musée d’Orsay, surveying the spot where a Van Gogh had hung until about six hours ago, give or take, the very finest of Parisian police and the occasional Interpol agent milling through the gallery behind him when his phone rings. It’s Danny Mahealani, calling on his personal line, the one only for emergencies and Allison.
“McCall,” he says absently after picking up, attention still focused on the origami wolf’s head tacked to the slightly lighter square of wall in front of him.
“He’s done it again,” Danny says, and there’s that hint of begrudging admiration that they’re all starting to sport.
“Who?” Scott asks, turning away and starting to weave his way through the crowd, heading towards the street outside. He already knows who, because there’s only one person that’d get Danny—or any of his team, really—to call on his emergency line, but he wants him to say it.
“Kuryakin,” Danny says after a second, and Scott takes that as his cue to curse for as long as it takes him to finish exiting the Musée, the sounds of rapid and annoyed gutter Spanish echoing off the vaulted ceilings.
“Right,” he says, switching back to English as he hits the doors, “Where’d he hit this time?”
Danny pauses for a second and Scott can feel the headache coming on, no words necessary.
“The Louvre,” he finally says, and Scott drops right back into Spanish.
~~~
He’d first hit about three—maybe four, they’re not sure, which is infuriating—years ago, the man they’re now calling Kuryakin. A vault in Lisbon had turned up empty when it was supposed to be full of gold bullion, with nothing but a small origami crown left behind.
Scott knew there had been others before the Lisbon heist, including an impressive long con involving land deals in mainland China, Japanese bearer bonds, and a Romanian real estate investor, but the Lisbon job was the one that put him officially on the FBI’s—and therefore Scott’s—radar.
Kuryakin had been Midas at first—for the gold, let no one ever say that the FBI are particularly inventive—but then he lifted a set of Matroyshka dolls from the Hermitage, a section of the Parthenon frieze from the British Museum, a shipment of security filaments from the U.S. Mint in California, anything and everything, for no other reason, seemingly, than because he could.
They didn’t even have a real name for him, which was doubly frustrating, just an out-of-focus black and white photo of him with another man, both of them in profile and shadowed heavily enough that Scott wasn’t even sure it was people he was looking at when he first saw it.
It was Vernon Boyd who’d named him, after he’d accidentally left the photos lying out where his wife could see them, and Erica had commented on how much the two of them—one light, one dark, both mysterious—resembled the basic outlines of The Man From U.N.C.L.E.’s Ilya Kuryakin and Napoleon Solo. Aside from a moniker borrowed from a sixties television show and a growing list of thefts, forgeries, and general confidence schemes attributed to him, Scott and the rest of his team knew nothing about Kuryakin except that he liked origami.
A year or so after they started chasing Kuryakin, with two of them on permanent rotating standby to go to the location of his last job and scrub the scene for even a hint of a suggestion of a clue, Scott had been home in New York, standing in line at the Portuguese bakery on sixteenth street, one eye on the crowd as he talked to Allison about dinner and her parents’ upcoming visit when someone bumped into him from behind.
He’d turned slightly, looked the guy in the eye and gave the sheepish half-smile that meant ‘no big deal’, then turned back to the front of the line. It wasn’t until Allison hung up and he’d collected the box full of malasadas and cavacas that it had hit him, and he’d nearly dropped the box and run a man over sprinting to the door, firm in the belief that he’d just seen Kuryakin, and, more importantly, Kuryakin knew enough about the FBI investigation into him to know who Scott was.
He hadn’t seen him on the street that day, but surveillance footage from the pastry shop gave them their first clear image of Kuryakin, smiling shyly at Scott, whose face was turned towards him. It wasn’t a lot—hell, it wasn’t anything where the courts were concerned—but it was enough to run facial recognition and get a name: Isaac Lahey, formerly of the California foster care system, now off the—official—grid for more than ten years.
He still had that picture; Allison had magneted it to the front of the fridge the night he’d brought it home.
“He’s important,” she’d explained, when he’d asked why, “And important stuff goes on the fridge, whether we like it or not.”
It’s the reason, he knew, why her grandfather’s death certificate—signed and witnessed by three separate doctors and the former Commissioner of the Yankees—hangs on the fridge in her father’s house, so he didn’t—and doesn’t—question it.
They still have no idea who Solo is.
~~~
Scott gets to the Louvre as fast as he possibly can in a city that doesn’t care one whit that two—at least—pieces of priceless art have been stolen in the last twelve hours, so long as it doesn’t bother them. The language is a bit of a hindrance as well, but Allison’s been teaching him—“All the better to talk to my mother, honey, she’s much less scary in French”—add his Spanish, and it’s enough to hail him a cab and get the driver to drop him off in front of the museum at at least European rates, instead of the usual Parisian drag that seems to be reserved especially for Americans.
He pulls his cell phone—the work one; the emergency line stays in his pocket—out after he pays the cab driver, dialing Danny as he takes the steps two at a time.
Danny picks up on the second ring. “Hey, boss, where’re you at?”
“Front entrance,” Scott says, dodging a group of German schoolchildren. “Doing my best to thread the needle. You?”
“In front of that headless lady, you know the one,” Danny says, effortlessly disregarding the Winged Victory in the way only he can.
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Scott says, then hangs up.
Getting to Danny is the work of a few minutes, getting to the scene of the crime is a whole different matter.
“Near as I can tell,” Danny says, taking them both up the stairs, “It’s like he went on a shopping spree. We’ve got two Raphael’s tagged, a Vermeer, possibly a Da Vinci, a Manet—which he’s welcome to, by the way, it’s ugly—and a Gauguin. All stolen, all replaced with forgeries, all have origami figures hidden in the frames.”
“Do we know when?” Scott is…well. Scott is impressed despite of himself. That’s a pretty long list of art, art that’s watched day and night by some of the tightest security museums have to offer. For all of it to both go missing and be replaced, Kuryakin had to have planned for months, if not years.
It’s incredible, it’s amazing, it’s a beautiful crime, and Scott is more than aware that he’ll probably never see its like again.
Danny shakes his head as they reach the top of the stairs and turn left, walking briskly down the corridors of the old palace. “No idea on the timetable. One of them—the Manet, I think—was taken down for cleaning this morning, and the art restorer found an origami frog on the back of the canvas. She called security, they emptied out the museum, did a full sweep, came up with the list I just gave you.”
“She sure it’s a fake, not just him messing with us, pulling us away from the Musée d’Orsay, or somewhere else?” Scott’s damn sure Kuryakin had actually done it, but he’s got to ask all the questions, make sure that everyone else is on the same page as him. Going straight on assumptions is a good way to get obsessed, not to mention the fact that even though he’s the Senior Special Agent, he’s still human, and he’s still wrong.
Not often, but often enough.
“Yep,” Danny says. “She’s sure, her friend’s sure, her friend’s old professor at the University—who, she assures me, helped re-authenticate half of these after World War II—is sure, everyone.”
“Motherfucker,” Scott says, and that’s when they reach the first huddle of crime scene techs.
There’s a table set up in this room, a plastic and metal affair that looks out of place amongst all the art and gilt. Bags and bright orange containers are strewn across the top, but there’s a section towards the end that’s cleared off, with nothing but a few pieces of brightly coloured paper scattered across it.
Scott walks up to it, still half listening to Danny give him the rundown of events. There are six origami shapes there: the frog Danny had already mentioned, a unicorn, a sword, a star, a rose, and another wolf’s head.
The star is folded a little sloppier that the others, so maybe that’s why he sees it, but when he bends down, there’s just the faintest line of pencil grey peeking through the bright yellow of the paper.
“Hey, Mahealani,” he says, interrupting Danny, and points down at the star. “You see that?”
Danny bends down, does his own inspection. “Yeah. Yeah, I do. What do you think it is?”
“No fucking clue,” Scott says, waving an evidence tech over. “He’s never left, uh, notes before.”
When the tech arrives, he asks her—in his best French; this is still, technically, the Parisian Metropolitan Police’s crime scene—if she has anyone who could unfold the star for them. There’s a question as to why; he points out the pencil marks, and she goes in search of someone with more authority and job security.
Twenty minutes later, after all the shapes have been photographed, swabbed, scanned, and finally unfolded, Scott and Danny just rock back on their heels and stare.
“Hiya, Special Agent McCall,” reads the one from the rose, “what’s doing?”
The sword had revealed “Gotta catch ‘em all”, which Scott is sure is just Kuryakin fucking with them, even if it’s on a higher level than usual.
The ones from the star, unicorn, frog, and wolf had flowed into a short letter, the longest communication anyone’s ever had with Kuryakin since Scott had absently smiled at him in a bakery two years ago.
“Hallo,” the note said. “It’s me, clearly. Don’t bother with the handwriting, it’s not mine. I just wanted to say: the d’Orsay wasn’t me. I’ve nothing against it, no one should, but I haven’t robbed it. Impersonated a docent, maybe—calm down, McCall—but never stolen. I got what I wanted from Paris a while back, I’ve no need to repeat myself. Look for the Dutchman instead (there’s a name for you), follow the Van Goghs. Say hi to Melly for me. Kuryakin.”
There’s an overly cheerful looking smiley face drawn after the name, which is written on the paper that had previously been the star. Danny and Scott are silent, still absorbing what’s in front of them.
“Who’s Melly?” Danny asks after a minute, turning to look questioningly at Scott.
“Black lab puppy,” Scott says, reading over the note for what seems like the thousandth time, but is really more like the fourth. “Allison just picked her up yesterday, we’ve been thinking about it for a while, just decided on the name this morning.”
“No fucking way did he do this this morning,” Danny says, sweeping an arm out to indicate the rest of the Louvre.
Scott hums, eyebrows furrowing a bit. “The theft, no, I don’t think so, but….the notes? Yeah, I think he did these this morning.”
“So,” Danny says, and now his eyebrows are crinkling up as well, “He steals all this stuff who knows when, gets away scot-free—pun unintentional, I assure you—then comes back however much time later to, what? Leave you notes so you won’t blame him for something he didn’t do?”
Scott rubs the back of his neck, almost embarrassed for reasons he can’t explain. “Yes? I’m not sure why he’s telling us like this—because he definitely knows who we are and how to get in touch with us, there’s no need to blow a job for a warning—but he must think it’s important.”
Danny sighs, and scrubs his face with his hands. “This is the last thing we need,” he says, voice still a bit muffled. “A thief with honor who wants proper credit and will give up other thieves if they try to frame him because he cares what you think about him.”
“Not me,” Scott says, protesting, “The FBI. We’re all—all of us in white collar crime—after him. I’m not Batman.”
Danny grins. “Sure about that, McCall? You did, after all, marry Catwoman.”
Scott rolls his eyes. “Allison know you call her that?”
“Yep,” Danny says, grin widening. “She said she was more of a Huntress than Catwoman, but she’d take what she could get.”
“Unbelievable,” Scott mutters, thinking that if he’s Batman, then Kuryakin is the Joker minus—so far—the homicidal mania.
~~~
New York City, New York, USA
September, 2009
Six months later
Six months later, Scott and his team are no closer to finding out when Kuryakin pulled the Louvre job, or who did the d’Orsay heist.
All they’ve got—thanks to Kuryakin, which rankles—is the name Dutchman and the Van Gogh connection, a lead which is frustratingly hard to follow up on, seeing as no judge in the world will give them any sort of warrant based on the supposed word of a known criminal.
At least—and Scott gives thanks every day for this—he, along with the rest of his team, are back stateside, and will be staying there for the foreseeable future. Melly’s grown bigger than he thinks any dog has a right to in the city, a dervish of dark fur and excitement that bounces around the house like a mad hatter.
Allison’s business—a security firm she co-owns with Lydia Martin, a friend from college—is starting to pick up, her client list starting to expand beyond those who talk about Chris Argent in nothing but the most reverent of whispers.
Work—aside from the ongoing Kuryakin situation, which Scott honestly thinks will last for the rest of his life—even slows down enough for him to remember that he’s got friends, people who like talking to him for reasons other than he’s their boss.
Admittedly, he reconnects by way of a petty smash-and-grab that just so happens to involve a federal fugitive, and spends the first couple minutes of their renewed interaction by stomping all over any and all jurisdictional boundaries he and the brightest minds at the New York field office can think of, but whatever. Stiles will get over it.
Later that night, after four rounds of beer at O’Hallighan’s—paid for by Scott; he’s a fed, not a complete asshole—Stiles does get over it. It’s an improvement on the last time Scott and his team rolled up on something local that turned out to be a bit more, during which Stiles had taken full advantage of the fact that it had been nickel shot night—which, lamentably, is tonight as well—and nearly drunk himself and half the NYPD into cheap booze induced oblivion.
“Dude,” Stiles says, indicating with his half full glass, “I’m not even sure how this keeps happening.”
“You have no self-control?” Danny suggests from where he’s sitting on Scott’s other side, Boyd and Erica’s drinks left under his watchful gaze as they do their best to turn the corner by the jukebox—free plays on nickel shot night, thanks so much, Ethan—into a functioning dancefloor.
Stiles points an accusing finger at Danny. “You, shut up. I have amazing self-control. Legendary self-control. Ask anyone.”
Scott sees Danny’s eyes sliding to him and puts his hands up as fast as he can. “Don’t ask me, I am not part of this particular conversation, and I never want to be. Ever.”
Stiles laughs, then leans in, beer still in hand. “No, but really,” he says, suddenly serious. “Why the hell do you keep showing up at crime scenes? I’m homicide, I’m not even supposed to be near smash-and-grabs or any other kind of robbery unless Castiglioni’s off on leave, and you’re white collar, big money crime.”
He takes a drink, continues. “Neither of us should have been at that bodega, even if there was a fugitive involved—he was narcotics’ problem on both fronts, and you and I both know it—so why the fuck do I keep getting pulled in as FBI liaison on cases I sure as hell shouldn’t be liaising on, at least not with you?”
Scott has no answer.
No, scratch that, he’s got an answer, he’s got over three years’ worth of an answer, a filing cabinet in his office devoted to Kuryakin, a shelf in his home office, an unofficial rule at the house that he’s not allowed to speak of the man or the case on weekends, and a growing sense that Kuryakin is somehow…watching him.
Waiting for something, maybe.
Definitely driving him and, by extension, his team insane.
Stiles doesn’t know, because Scott and him haven’t talked about work related stuff outside of work in months, about Kuryakin at all, ever, and none of the cases Scott keeps involving himself in have had anything to do with Kuryakin, no matter how much he thinks that this time, this time he’ll get something.
Which, damn it, that’s unhealthy, and unfair, and maybe a little rude. If he’d done it to Allison—and he’d tried, the first few months they’d known each other, before she’d shown him she could just as easily dropkick him into next week as hire somebody else to do it—she’d have his head for it, right now, and maybe a bit more if he kept fucking with her when she knew something was up.
So Scott looks at Danny, Danny gets the hint and gets up, going over to where Erica and Boyd are doing the smoothest version of the electric slide he’s ever seen, and Scott turns to his best friend in the whole wide world, excluding the woman he married.
“So, there’s a guy,” he starts, and he can almost see the echo of ‘there’s always a guy’ flit across Stiles’ face. He ignores it, and plows on.
~~~
Grant County, Nebraska, USA
May, 2010
Eight months later
So far as Scott can tell, there’s nothing in Grant County.
Nothing in Nebraska, truth be told—or, at least, nothing that would interest an international art thief, forger, and con man extraordinaire—but here he is, staring at security footage from a small local airport and watching Kuryakin stroll from the single entrance gate to the exit doors off-screen.
No sign of Solo, but, then again, aside from that one picture they’d gotten lucky with, there never was.
The airport car rental agency had him taking a black mid-model Volkswagen sedan—one that had actually left the lot, not been switched around for another—and various traffic cameras had him driving to a motel off the highway.
After that…nothing. He hadn’t moved, hadn’t sneaked away, hadn’t made any sort of effort to hide himself from anyone who was looking for him. It was worse than strange, it was worrying, and Scott was halfway on his way to being mad that a criminal he’d never spoken to—and had only once, unknowingly, seen face to face—had managed to get him concerned for his wellbeing.
“What do we do?” he finally asks, once he’s read over all their information one last time, looking up to survey the tiny conference-slash-breakroom they’d been given for the duration of whatever the hell this turned out to be. Danny’s there, and Boyd, the both of them with similar folders in front of them. The police chief for Grant County, Maran Shelk, is there as well, leaning against the wall behind Danny.
“It’s almost too neat,” Boyd says.
“Like he wants us to find him,” Maran adds.
“Like the Louvre,” Danny says, and Scott nods. Over a year later, and they still haven’t figured out when Kuryakin had done that particular job, and the staff of the preservation office keeps sending him newly discovered bits of origami by express mail.
“There’s no way this is on accident,” he concludes, “And yet we’re going to go after him anyway. Hopefully, maybe, if we’re lucky, he’ll tell us why he suddenly decided to just roll over.”
Scott’s not looking forward to that last part, none of them are. They’ve been chasing Kuryakin on-and-off for over four years, always a step behind, yet always there. They didn’t have to get calls about another one of his jobs—be it theft, forgery, or graft—because they were already there because they knew him, and were the only team that did.
Most of that was Scott, banging his head against the wall that was their general lack of information on him—the name Isaac Lahey is there, but there’s only so much a name can give when the man who owns it doesn’t use it.
Even Stiles—and, more begrudgingly, Allison—had gotten caught up in the mix, their weekly meet-ups for dinner at Scott and Allison’s somehow, after he’d told Stiles everything that night at O’Hallighan’s, turning into long discussions of just what the fuck was going on. Scott’s good at his job, damn good, but Stiles and Allison are a tad trickier in their thinking than he’s ever been, their wild leaps of logic fitting in with the more sensible progression that Scott had already mapped out. He had known the how, the when, and maybe the where next, but they’d given him the why, which was just as important as the other three combined.
Now, though, there wasn’t any strategizing, any planning. There wasn’t a long night spent at the Federal Building with Boyd, Danny, and whatever other poor schlub he managed to pull in to bounce things off of, or an equally long session with Stiles, Allison, and Melly on the balcony at his place.
There was just Grant County, Nebraska, and a clear as hell trail pointing to a rundown no-tell motel.
“Alright,” he says, quietly. “Let’s go get the bastard.”
~~~
United States Penitentiary, Florence ADX
Florence, Colorado
June, 2010
Sixteen days later
Isaac Lahey is nothing like Kuryakin.
Scott’s in a viewing room, on the other side of a two-way mirror, staring at the man he intends to give a permanent bunk in this concrete hellhole.
He’s tall, lanky, with a crop of brown hair that’s more than a little too long. His eyes are nervous, his hands twist when he thinks no one’s looking, and his shoulders hunch visibly in the bright prison orange of his jumpsuit. His voice even shakes when he’s talking to Deaton, who’d flown in special from the New York City field office to have a chat with him. There’s no sign of suave smoothness, of a master thief who’d robbed the Louvre blind and then come back and put a neon sign on the bits he’d touched just to send a message.
Scott’s not sure if this is who Lahey is, when he’s not playing the role of Kuryakin from a distance, or if he’s trying to pull one over on the whole of the FBI and the FBP.
It’s not going to work, mainly because Scott’s told the warden, the warden’s boss, Deaton, and anyone else who’ll listen that Lahey’s the worst kind of flight risk, because he spent most of his criminal career breaking into shit that was supposed to be unbreakable. Doing it in reverse and in handcuffs isn’t going to be that much of a challenge, even in the Alcatraz of the Rockies, and especially not if Lahey manages to swing a transfer to a min-sec white collar crime facility.
He’s broken out of his reverie—one he’s been falling into more and more these past couple days, trying to figure out the why of everything—when Deaton stands up. He looks through the two-way mirror—straight at Scott, it feels like—and gives the slightest of nods.
Scott sighs, shoves a hand through his hair—it’s getting ridiculous, almost as long as Lahey’s—and pushes himself off the wall from where he’s been standing before going to meet Deaton in the hall.
“Well?” He asks, as soon as he’s in earshot and certain that the door to the interrogation room is closed.
Deaton looks faintly amused. “He’s definitely playing us. Not to his advantage, though, which is interesting.”
“He could be in there saying he’s no idea what we’re talking about, we’ve got the wrong guy,” Scott says, agreeing. “Instead he’s, he’s…twitching.”
“Which means one of very many possibilities,” Deaton says. “He’s either protecting someone, hiding from someone, or this is exactly where he wants to be for some other, unfathomable reason.”
“A mix of the first two, I’m betting,” Scott replies, a bit distantly, the scene of the arrest going back through his head. It had been stupidly easy, just assemble strike team, knock on door, and hey, presto! International fugitive, all tied up.
“We haven’t heard hide nor hair of Solo,” he continues, “Which means that either he’s fickler than we thought, or he’s hiding as well, somewhere other than the intimate clutches of Uncle Sam. They’re both—at least to the criminal element, since no one knows Lahey’s here but the feds, and no one knows Lahey’s Kuryakin but us—in the wind, and neither are making any sort of effort to get him back to freedom. So…”
“They’re in hiding,” Deaton finishes thoughtfully. “Lord knows why Lahey chose the FBI to be his bushel, but he must trust us more than whatever the hell is gunning for him out there.”
Scott grimaces. “Either they’re not as good as Lahey—because, like I’ve said again and again, he could twist his way out of here if he wants—or they don’t want the attention that would come from getting into a place like this, even by proxy.”
Deaton nods. “No matter what the case is, they’re certainly persistent—and dangerous—enough that both Lahey and Solo chose this as their best bet.
“Which means,” and here he smiles, and Scott gets a hell of a lot more nervous than he was before. Heads of state have gone an unhealthy sort of pale when Alan Deaton smiles, and Scott’s no different. “You’re going to have to go in there, and talk to him.”
Scott tries very, very hard not to flinch.
He’d been avoiding being alone with Lahey—and it was Lahey, now, Kuryakin put away now that the FBI had him in custody—ever since the arrest.
Scott wanted to say that it was because of professionalism, that no one was ever supposed to be alone with prisoners, or that he was doing it so Allison wouldn’t worry, which was complete and utter bullshit. Allison could take care of herself, and had made sure that Scott was at least to the Chris Argent standard of resting badassery within the first year of their relationship, and people—FBI agents, prison guards, lawyers—were alone with prisoners all the time, the watchful single eye of the surveillance camera in the corner keeping the civil niceties at least mostly in play.
Instead, Scott kept remembering the day at the bakery, the quick and breezy look he’d gotten at Lahey—back when he was still only Kuryakin—and the easy smile that had come natural as breathing. From both of them. Lahey hadn’t done anything then, just showed up, made sure Scott saw him, and left, like all he’d wanted was to see him.
The damn picture’s still on his fridge; he and Allison see it every day.
It’s a level of focus—of obsession, if he’s being honest with himself—that worries him with its intensity. Deaton’s looking at him expectantly, though, and he’s not about to tell the Assistant Special Agent In Charge of the New York City FBI Field Office’s white collar crime division that he doesn’t want to talk to the suspect that he’s been chasing for over four years because he’s got…Scott doesn’t even know what the hell he’s got, but he doesn’t want to tell Deaton a damn thing about it.
“Yeah, okay,” he finally says, which, while not stellar, allows him to slide by his boss’ boss and open the interrogation room door.
~~~
The first time Isaac Lahey saw Special Agent Scott McCall was in London.
He’d just lifted a bit of the Parthenon—heavy bugger, all jagged edges and marble slipperiness—and sent it on a winding journey back to where it’d come from. He’d been resting from all the heavy lifting in a café across from the British Museum, hot coffee in hand and scarf secure around his neck, the image of a university student complete and unassuming.
It was raining out, one of the deluges the Isles were so famous for, and he’d taken another bracing sip, glad that his hair had dried fast enough so that he—and his timestamped receipt—could easily say that he’d been here since before it began, right in the middle of the time he was supposed to have been nicking antiquities. Not that he thought they’d pull him in for this one, but it never hurt to be prepared.
A taxi had pulled up then, disgorging two men dressed to federal nines, complete with wrinkled trenchcoats and umbrellas that looked a tad too new to belong to anyone who lived in London full time.
He smiled, took a sip of his coffee. Americans, then, it had to be, or Interpol.
They went into the Museum, and Isaac stayed where he was, waiting for the rain to stop.
Twenty minutes later, the rain was still going full force, but the Americans-maybe-Interpol were on their way out again. They stopped near the curb, the taller of the two under an umbrella and chatting on a mobile while the other one stood next to him, out of the umbrella’s reach, slowly getting drenched in the steady downpour, his face turned up to the grey sky.
And then he smiled, like he’d just figured something out, something important, and just kept on looking up.
He’d had Derek find out who he was as soon as he’d gotten back to where he was staying.
He left the first origami for him—for Special Agent Scott McCall—in California a few weeks later.
A year later, he’d been in New York City for one reason or another, and happened to chance upon McCall going into a padaria. Isaac hadn’t been able to help himself, found himself wending his way inside just to get a closer look at him, dry and in his element. He’d gotten a smile out of that, and a flutter in his chest that was almost worth the reaming Derek gave him once he found out that he’d not only touched an FBI agent but had also had the bad graces to get caught on camera doing it.
Two years, and a whole hell of a lot of near misses later—McCall was almost getting eerie, with the way he was always there, no matter how much Isaac tried to mix it up, throw him off—Isaac found himself wandering the halls of the Louvre in the early morning, tucking tiny bits of folded paper into various works of his—and others’, it didn’t hurt to keep them on their toes—art as he listened to the sirens head in the opposite direction, towards the Musée d’Orsay.
Now, four years out, with something a hell of a lot stronger than a flutter beating about just behind his breastbone, he’s facing McCall opposite the wrong side of an interrogation table.
He’s been doing his best with the others who’ve been in here, giving the right mix of fear (all too real), nervousness (only half faked), and mildly sycophantic pleading (reverse psychology at its finest). He doesn’t particularly want to be here, he imagines no one pictures Florence ADX when they think of a place they’d like to spend any significant amount of time, but he also doesn’t want to be out there, where nasty things like Peter are lurking in the dark, waiting for him to let his guard down.
(It has occurred to him that that’s exactly what McCall and the FBI have been doing as well, but somehow their attention feels…benevolent when compared to Peter’s. Familial, even.
Less psychotic, certainly.)
McCall, though…he doesn’t think he can do it. He’s trying right now, maybe a little too hard, but he doesn’t think he can make it stick. He wants McCall to see him, to recognize the opponent he’s chased across continents, to know that, yeah, the guy who wrote him notes in the Louvre and sent him running across the globe only half-a-step behind him is sitting right here.
He, to quote Derek in one of his more vocal moods, is so fucked.
“The last job we have you on is Bogotá,” McCall says abruptly, pulling Isaac back to the present. “That was, what, three months ago? Where’ve you been, Lahey?”
Shit.
It’s not the first time McCall’s said his name—that was when he’d been reading Isaac his Miranda Rights; “Isaac Lahey, you have the right to remain silent”—but it’s the first time he’s not in the middle of being arrested, and motherfucking shit.
It’s doing things to him.
(Mental Derek has escalated from vocal outbursts to loud, disgusted sighs.)
“Oh, you know,” and god fucking damn it his voice is more Hackney than Anaheim, he might as well just roll over right now and tell McCall and his scary-as-fuck boss everything—“Around.” He smiles, all the way to the eyes, happy even as his brain—assisted by Mental Derek—castigates him for being so stupid.
McCall’s eyes visibly sharpen at the accent, and when Isaac smiles, man.
He comes alive.
Whatever nerves or misgivings he might have had—and he had something, Isaac was sure of it—were gone, and he’s left facing the best the FBI—or any agency—has ever been able to throw at him. His smile widens.
“Around like Paris?” McCall asks. “Or have you been back in New York City, lurking around the paderias on the off chance you might run into an FBI agent?”
“Oh, no,” Isaac leans forward across the table, ignoring the drag of his chains against the metal surface, and drops his voice. “I only make time for one fed in particular. Maybe you’ve heard of him? Senior Special Agent Scott McCall, out of New York, a real firecracker, nearly caught some guy called Kuryakin dead to rights in Milan last year.”
“Did he now?” McCall’s leaning in, too, his face just the other side of way too damn close for any sort of professionalism. “Because he was pretty certain they were already in Zaragoza by the time he even got to Italy.”
Isaac’s not really clear on how eyes are supposed to twinkle, but he’s pretty damn sure his are fit to rival the White House Christmas Tree. “Maybe, just maybe, Kuryakin was actually just across the street, grabbing coffee, and he got damn lucky that he’d know that jawline anywhere, even when he’s not expecting it.”
McCall huffs out a laugh, leans back—finally, thank you Jesus for some modicum of…something—and just sits there for a minute, considering him.
Isaac settles back himself, arranging his chains in as comfortable a way as he possibly can. McCall is…not what he expected, not really. He’d been drawn to him sure, but there’s only so much that background checks and the occasional spying mission can do, especially when he’d been doing his damndest to run in the opposite direction of McCall for the last four years or so.
It wasn’t like he could send Derek either—not that Derek got sent anywhere he hadn’t already decided he wanted to go. They may only have one photo of him, but that was one more photo than any other agency in the entire world had managed in the decade or so Derek had been active, and he refused to get any closer than he absolutely had to.
So they’d had the barebones facts—FBI agent, white collar crime, married, lives in New York, raised by a single mother—and some pretty solid physical evidence that the man did not give up. Steadfast and determined did not a fun person usually make, even if Isaac was continuously tempted to add ‘cute’ to the list of descriptors.
Now he’s in jail, however, and McCall’s...McCall’s...McCall’s…flirting with him.
Or something.
So fucked, Mental Derek repeats, and Isaac groans internally.
“Here’s the thing,” McCall says, obviously oblivious to—or just politely ignoring—Isaac’s current personal crisis. “We’ve got almost nothing on you.”
At that, he looks up. Facts like ‘we have little to no hard evidence you’ve committed the crime you’re imprisoned for committing’ is not the kind of thing people just go around saying. Prosecuting lawyers are practically trained from day one to skirt around that fact as much as possible, and obfuscation is literally the name of the game in jury trials.
“There’s maybe twenty jobs you’ve pulled, in the last four years or so?” McCall continues, watching Isaac closely enough that he can feel the sweat start beading on the back of his neck.
“Closer to thirty,” he says, voice hoarse, the Hackney stronger than ever. “Allegedly.”
McCall hums in agreement. “Allegedly. We’ve got evidence you were there for maybe ten of them, circumstantial mostly, a whole evidence locker full of origami—thanks, by the way, you’ve gotten Boyd into it—and solid, hard proof that you were in Memphis last year, dishing out counterfeit Old Masters with the guy we’re calling the Dutchman, the guy you say pulled the Musée d’Orsay heist over a year ago.”
“You kept the name,” Isaac says, smiling.
“Couldn’t think of anything better,” McCall says, shrugging. “Anyway, that’s one hard example of fraud and bunch of other felonies, plus a strong hint that you’ve done a hell of a lot more. The most that’ll get you, with the way you look? Five years, maybe six, probably in minimum security, maybe medium if you show yourself to be a flight risk.”
“Nothing more?” Isaac asks, and damn it, he almost sounds disappointed.
“Juries love stories like yours,” McCall says with a lopsided grin, before his face settles into a more serious expression. “Five years, and you’re out, Lahey. Five years, and whoever you’re running from is gonna snatch you up as fast as they can.”
“I’m not running from anyone.” He’s proud of that one, his voice doesn’t wobble at all, the sincerity is hitting all the right marks.
McCall doesn’t buy it for a second. “You say that, but here you are. You saw us coming in Milan, in Tokyo, in half-a-dozen other places, and you rabbited so fast I’ve found coffee that’s still steaming, and no trace of you or any of the crimes we’ve been chasing you for.
“Grant County, though?” McCall leans forward again, eyes steady on Isaac’s. “Grant County’s got nothing. No art, no land developments, no out of the way buildings, nothing to rob, nowhere to headquarter a con, nowhere to run a con. There’s no reason for you to be there, and yet there we found you anyway.
“It was too damn easy, Lahey.” McCall’s voice is shaking in something very much like anger, which is impossible. He’d caught him, Isaac was in handcuffs and facing several long years of dreadful food and abysmal company, and McCall was angry about it. It made no sense.
“Too damn easy,” he repeats. “But if here’s where you want to be, here’s where I’ll keep you.”
And then he stands up, turns around, and walks away.
~~~
New York City, New York
May, 2015
Four years, ten months, and six days later
The day, no the moment Scott brought home the picture of Isaac Lahey, the con artist formerly known as Kuryakin, Allison had known they were in trouble.
It wasn’t the first time she’d heard of the man, or his exploits, but it was the first time she’d seen him. Young, thin, looking more like a street rat than someone who routinely treated the art houses of the world as personal shopping malls, and looking at her husband like he hung the moon.
Which, okay, so had Allison when they first started dating, but she’d gotten over that. Mostly. Didn’t make the fact that this man, this…kid—because Scott had finally been able to get an ID a couple days later, Isaac Lahey, twenty-five-ish, from seemingly nowhere at all—was making the same face she had the first time she’d run into Scott on the UC Berkeley campus.
Scott didn’t see it, though, none of his team did. Where she saw a man in the full throes of a crush that was doomed to go absolutely nowhere, her husband and the whole of the FBI saw a criminal who’d had the chance to taunt one of their own and taken it.
Lydia, when Allison first showed her the picture—now magneted to her and Scott’s fridge—and told her about it, laughed for a solid minute, almost knocking over her drink.
“Oh, honey,” she’d said, once she’d regained control of herself. “You look at him the same way, the both of you.”
~~~
Allison had drunk an entire bottle of Jameson that night, and refused to talk about it ever again. Not Lahey—she could never call him Kuryakin—because that was both stupid and unavoidable. The fact that she and Scott might be just as inexplicably…drawn to Lahey as he was to Scott, though, that she could shove into the black box in her head marked Gerard & Other Fucked Up Things and never think of it again.
Definitely never.
God damn it.
And then, two years or so after the worst hangover of Allison’s life, the asshole had to go and hit the Louvre.
Scott came home from Paris with a sparkle in his eyes, a grin for Melly, a full on smile and sweep-you-off-your-feet kiss for Allison, and a bag of origami notes from Lahey in his carry on.
(She read them while Scott was in the shower, washing off the dust of France and the chemicals of airplane travel, and came to the conclusion that Lahey, for all of his other crimes, has also got a mouth on him.
Allison most assuredly does not like that about him.
Not one whit.)
It had settled, a little, after that. Lydia still snickered every time she saw the picture on their fridge, and had even brought Erica, the wife of Scott’s Boyd into the mix, the both of them taking sips of various types of hard liquor and sighing disappointedly at her. (If Scott noticed how much of the coconut rum she went through when they visited, he never mentioned it.)
Eventually, Scott pulled his head out of his (very occasionally) surprisingly uncommunicative ass and told Stiles about Lahey, which made their weekly dinners a lot less about avoiding the subject entirely and a lot more about dissecting the hell out of it, to the point that she was pretty sure that both she and Stiles, a New York security expert and NYPD homicide detective respectively, could point at the next place Lahey was likely to hit as well as the best the FBI had to offer.
Which was why she, as well as everyone else, had been surprised as hell about Grant County, though both she and Scott had expected the lighter sentence that eventually got handed down. Five years wasn’t an especially long time, not in the grand scheme of things, but Allison knew she’d very literally go insane if she were penned in on place that long, particularly if it were in Supermax.
She worried, those first couple months, and she could tell Scott worried as well. Oh, he did it in ways like doing paperwork at home instead of the office, or making sure he was available for dinners with her parents, but he was worried.
Which made her angry.
“Why couldn’t Lahey have stayed loose?” she’d complained one Friday night, her shoes kicked off, legs hanging over the side of Lydia’s couch, a frozen strawberry margarita melting its way back to liquid sitting on the floor next to her. Lydia was dating a bartender, had been for months, which, at the time, had made it the longest relationship she’d had since before Jackson had his gay freakout in sophomore year of college.
Lydia had raised one eyebrow, which Allison had hated her for. Allison couldn’t do that. Allison also had had too much to drink, but whatever. “You want your husband’s arch-nemesis-with-a-crush to still be running all over the world and pulling Scott to, I don’t know, what was it on your anniversary two years ago? Bhutan? You want Scott to be in Bhutan?”
“Nooooooo,” Allison had said. “I want him to be…” And here she’d trailed off, staring at the ceiling. She had a nice ceiling, did Lydia. All sorts of swirls in the paint; fancy, understated stuff that Allison didn’t have any patience to do herself and she knew Lydia had done herself. “I want him to be happy,” she’d finally said.
Lydia’s other eyebrow had gone up, and honestly, that was just not fair. No one should have that much control over their own eyebrows. “Having Lahey locked up doesn’t make Scott happy? Is he insane? Are you insane? Has Stiles been ‘baking’ again?”
“It’s not that he’s not happy, so much,” Allison had said, tilting her head to send the swirls…swirling. “It’s that he’s bored. I’m bored. It’s like Sherlock Holmes, you know? This was his Moriarty.”
“Just be glad it wasn’t his Reichenbach,” Lydia had said, and that was the end of that.
~~~
A month later, though, Scott got the first card.
“Morning, McCall (& Argent),” it had read, in a blocky, all-caps script that Allison realized must be his own. “Guess what? They finally trust me with a pen. Today, (and by ‘today’ I mean the day I posted this) is a monumental day in our history. Take a guess as to what. Say hi to Melly for me. Isaac Lahey.”
On the front, drawn in ballpoint pen, was a malasada.
“That,” Scott had said after a moment. “That motherfucker.”
“Who remembers this shit?” Allison had been rereading the card, searching for something, anything that would make this whole thing make at least a tiny bit of sense. (Nothing had been forthcoming.)
“Him, apparently,” Scott had said, then: “Fridge?”
“Fridge.”
After that, they had come like clockwork. One on Scott’s birthday, one on Allison’s, one on Melly’s, and one on the anniversary of the day Isaac had bumped into Scott in the padaria on Sixteenth. Their fridge is getting to be an art museum all on its own, covered in five-by-seven masterworks done in ballpoint pen by a prisoner they’re both, to some extent, responsible for putting away.
It’s an odd specialization, but it is what it is.
Allison sends something back—the mailing address to Florence ADX carefully typed, printed, and taped to the box by her when Scott’s out at the Federal Building—after the second card. She’s not sure security will let it through, but she stuffs enough things inside it that she’s sure he’ll get something, and that’s got to be worth it.
The next card—the one for Melly’s birthday—comes drawn in colour, which is confirmation enough.
Lahey never mentions the packages, Allison keeps sending them, Scott pretends he doesn’t know about them, everything is…not fine, exactly, but okay.
Everything is okay.
~~~
The phone is ringing.
It’s two in the goddamn morning, and Allison just got back from an overseas consultation—which, although a major win for her and Lydia, was also hell on her internal clock—so it feels even worse, and the phone just will not stop ringing. She finally rolls over, flops her hand around on the nightstand until she picks up the correct phone—the one that’s lit up like Satan’s Hell Carnival and vibrating itself half to pieces—taps whatever the hell it is that’ll make it shut up, puts it up to her ear, and snarls, “What.”
“Uh,” says Danny Mahealani. “Hi, Allison. Is Scott there?”
“You better have a damn good reason for this, Mahealani,” she says, gently shaking Scott the rest of the way awake. She might be tired, and more than a tad bit annoyed, but she’s not an asshole.
“The very fucking best,” he promises, and she passes the phone over to Scott.
“McCall,” he says, not sounding at all like he was asleep less than two seconds ago. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. They’re positive? You sure? Because he’s never—Yeah, I know. Okay. Boyd coming? Okay. I’ll be there in thirty.”
He hangs up, breathes. Doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then, “Isaac Lahey broke out of Florence ADX sometime tonight, they’re not sure when, or how. Boyd and Danny are waiting for me at the Federal Building. We’ve got a flight out of JFK in a couple hours.”
“But he’s out in less than two months,” Allison says after a moment. “Why the fuck would he break out if he’s going to be out, fair and square, no one chasing him?”
Scott sighs, shoves his hands through his hair. It’s getting long again, floppy, like it was when they first met. “I don’t know, Ally, I just—” He rubs at his face, his voice heavy with more than sleep. “I don’t know.”
“You’ll get him, okay?” Allison says, twisting so that she’s looking at him head on, instead of from the side. “You’ll get him, you’ll bring him back, and you’ll ask him what the fuck he thought he was doing.”
Scott smiles. “I should take you with me, we’d have him before we even cleared baggage claim.”
“Damn straight,” she says, leaning in to kiss him. It’s slow, still sleepy, with an edge that Allison knows she could turn into more, if only they had the time. They don’t, though, so she breaks it off with a reluctance that she knows Scott’s feeling as well, which makes it somewhat better.
“Go get ‘em, tiger,” she says, and Scott goes.
