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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
New York City, New York
August, 2015
The first month of working with Lahey is almost impossible.
Scott had known, from the minute he’d shown up at their apartment—for the first time, and didn’t that rankle—that things were going to be hard. Which was fine, he was good at hard, and Allison’s family had practically invented the concept of endurance, but Lahey seems to be going out of his way to make things as difficult as humanly—or perhaps criminally—possible.
“You do know why he came, right?” Allison had asked him after the first time. They’d been in line for the food truck a few blocks down from the Federal Building that had the queso he liked, the sun doing its best to melt the people of New York into gelatinous puddles where they stood, and, if that failed, to simply make them miserable.
“Four minutes, thirty-five seconds,” Scott had said, shifting over to block the sun from shining directly into Allison’s eyes. She’d forgotten her sunglasses, as she always did when she wasn’t working, and she hated squinting. So Scott had done what he could, as he always did. “That’s how long it took for someone—either at the Marshal’s Service or the FBI or the goddamn Weather Channel, whatever—to remember that they’re supposed to call me when something like this happens.”
“They’ll get better,” she’d said, as they’d moved up in line. “Not by all that much; this is New York City, and you guys are feds—sorry, Scott—but they’ll get better.”
She’d been right: Lahey had broken perimeter six more times in the next week, twice for idiotic reasons, and four so he could come and bum breakfast off of them again. Scott had ended up having to call the Marshal’s Service and say that he’d set up a specific route for Lahey to follow if he was going to come to see them, and that only if he left the perimeter and deviated from that—or took too long getting there, because really, if Lahey didn’t take as much leeway as he could get, even Scott would be disappointed in him—were they to call him.
Adding those stipulations cut down on the morning calls from Chernow and Stapleton—whoever was working the Lahey detail that day, or even that hour—but it did nothing to stop the fact that he was having breakfast with Lahey five days out of seven.
Which wasn’t to say that he didn’t like it.
Or that Allison didn’t like it.
(Lahey was a given, he was the one who kept showing up.)
Stiles had laughed when he’d told him. “You chase this guy for years, put him in prison twice, and now you’re complaining that you always know where he is?”
“I’m not complaining that I know where he is—half of which, have I told you, is spent at my mother’s because he’s renting from her—I’m complaining that I always know where he is because he’s with me. With us.” Scott had waved his beer around—they were at O’Hallighan’s, Ethan was using them to test some new micro-brew he’d gotten from Wisconsin—to indicate the complexities of the…whatever it was…between him and Allison and now Lahey.
“Melissa? Renting to him?” Stiles had grinned. “Does he know?”
“No,” Scott had said. “Though I don’t know how. The man is an international criminal, you’d think he could figure out that he’s living with my mother without me telling him.”
It was one very small thing in the ridiculous list of contradictions that made up Isaac Lahey, but still. Sometimes Scott wondered how much of Kuryakin had been both Lahey and Solo together, and how much of it—aside from the art portion, they had that one confirmed beyond a doubt—had been just Lahey alone.
“Lemme know when he’s coming over next,” Stiles had said over the rim of his glass. “I wanna meet the guy.”
“I would,” Scott had groused, “If he’d actually let us know when that was.”
Now it was August, and two and a half months had…smoothed things.
A little.
Breakfast had been simple this morning, just eggs and fruit. Allison was in the Hamptons with Lydia, doing a security check for a Tajikistani businesswoman who was concerned about a series of death threats she’d received in the last month. They’d been silent, for the most part, the two of them, Scott doing what he needed to do to get ready for the day—dress, set up Melly’s food and water, check the plants on the balcony—and Lahey staying out of his way.
Lahey had been just as silent on the car ride over, alternating between eerily still and irritatingly twitchy, a habit he’d kept up once they get inside.
“I still can’t believe this is your office,” he says as they go through the door of the same, and Scott has to resist the urge to roll his eyes and point at the panel of frosted glass that said ‘Scott McCall, Special Agent In Charge, White Collar Crime’, which clearly indicates, besides that fact that his job title is way too damn long, that this is, in fact, his office.
He settles, instead, for the much more boring, but much less passive aggressively bitchy, ‘Hmm’.
Lahey sits in his desk chair, gives it a whirl.
“Really, Scott?” he says as it slowly spins around, his long legs pulled up like a kid’s to keep them from banging against the desk itself. “You find boring criminals—present company and their alleged crimes excluded—from the most boring office in the world?”
Scott sighs, the internal war between snark and professionalism leaning heavily towards the latter. As it usually does, where Lahey’s concerned. Goddamn it. “No, Lahey, I didn’t find anyone from this office, because for five years I was chasing your ass all over the damn planet.”
Just like that, the war’s lost, the McCall Snark-O-Meter firmly set to stunning.
Or whatever.
(There’s a reason he usually sticks to getting progressively more willing to swear in front of authority figures and children: Allison and Stiles harbor enough sarcasm in their little fingers to cover for him, and he’s pretty sure Lydia’s made of the stuff.)
Lahey rolls his eyes. “I said I was sorry for Bhutan. And Qatar. And Paraguay. And Bosnia and Herzegovina.”
“Years—literal years, Lahey, I am not exaggerating—later, and on birthday cards.” Scott finally gives up on being able to sit at his own desk—even when Lahey was in the States, was right in fucking front of him, he still can’t use the damn thing—and just starts shuffling through the folders that seem to both magically appear and multiply like tree-pulp rabbits in his inbox.
“What?” Lahey sounds hurt, offended even. “You didn’t like them?”
Scott just grunts.
There’s the Dutchman folder, thick and battered, that goes to the left—as it does every morning—for Shit He Was Probably Going To Be Working On Until He Died, a pile that had gotten significantly shorter about five years ago when Lahey had taken up semi-permanent residency at Florence ADX.
A couple more—petty thefts, a request from the Guggenheim to go over some security measures, an invitation to speak at some charity benefit for one of the many offshoots of the MoMA—get put in the middle, for immediate shuffling off to someone else.
One, though, one catches his eye.
“Hey,” he says in place of a response to Lahey’s question (which was stupid, of course he likes the cards, both he and Allison like the cards, they’re on the fridge, for God’s sake), “You ever heard of a Harris? Adrian Harris?”
Lahey stops the chair and sits up at that, looking thoughtful. “Chemist, right? At least he was when I went in. Specialized in—”
“Counterfeiting,” Scott finishes, flipping through the file.
Harris is low level, local stuff, nothing that should have kicked him up to Scott’s desk over a local fraud cop. There are a couple of charges from a few years ago, but nothing serious, and nothing related to his specialty. All that is cloaked in so many ‘allegedly’s and ‘suspected’s that he knows whoever started putting this thing together must have been grinding their teeth in frustration the whole time.
He’d settled down, it seems, stopped bouncing all over the southern part of the state and set up shop—quite literally, he’d taken over management of a dry cleaner’s, could you get any more clichéd—in Brooklyn a little over six months ago, and hadn’t done anything noteworthy since.
Except…
“You ever do anything with those security strips? The ones from California?” Scott asks, still looking over Harris’ expense records, noting multiple trips to a Szczepanski’s Rare and Used Books up in the Bronx.
“Allegedly,” Lahey says, and Scott has come to hate that word more than he hates the Red Sox, which is impressive, “I may have sold them.”
“To Harris?” Scott raises an eyebrow. There’s coincidence, as Stiles’ dad says, and then there’s coincidence.
Lahey snorts.
“No, Adrian hates me. Something to do with, uh…” He trails off, flaps a hand. “Never mind why, but, if I had them, which I’m not saying I did, and I sold them, which I’m not saying I did either, then I would’ve, hypothetically, dealt with a middleman.”
Scott looks at him for a long moment, waiting.
Lahey rolls his eyes. “Fine, fine, and maybe that middleman—if he exists, and I’m not saying he does—doesn’t have quite the same beef with Adrian as I did—do.”
“Hmm.” Scott flips the folder around, puts it on the desk in front of Lahey, tapping the expenditure sheet. “What does that look like to you?”
“Bunch of grocery runs, does the man not know how to budget?” The tone is flippant, but Lahey’s looking, one long finger going down the items line by line as the fingers of his other hand tap in a rhythmic pattern that’s too steady to be random.
He does it all the time, when he’s not paying attention, usually with both hands. Scott’s not sure what it is, not yet, but he has an idea.
“Books,” Lahey mutters after a moment. “There’s a hell of a lot of books, and from this one place. Old books, too. What’s Adrian doing with a bunch of old books?” He looks up at Scott, head cocked to the side. “It is the books, right?”
“Yeah,” Scott says, and Lahey beams. It’s disgusting, it’s unnecessary, and Scott wants him to stop right now because something in his chest flips over—the way it’s been doing a lot lately, the way Scott’s been steadfastly ignoring since Florence—and Jesus Christ he wishes Allison were here to see it.
“Books, chemist, maybe some security fibers I’m maybe responsible for, a literal dry cleaners.” Lahey ticks them all off on his fingers. “Add them all together, what do you get?”
Scott grins, tries not to notice the way Lahey’s eyes snap back to his face from his fingers. “You said Harris’ specialty was counterfeiting, right?”
“I did, didn’t I?” Lahey says, and if he sounds a little distracted, well.
He’s not the only one.
~~~
New York City, New York
August, 2015
Four days later
“This…this is ridiculous,” Isaac pants, running full out down an alley in Brooklyn that looks like it had last seen a trash truck circa the New Amsterdam years.
The rat that’s running next to him squeaks in agreement, before veering off to do whatever it is that rats do when they’re not mocking thirty-one year old ex-cons with shitty cardio. He’s joined a moment later by another, larger rat, like the rodent population is handing off the responsibility of shadowing him as he chases Adrian Harris through a part of town that can best be described—aside from the literal ‘trashy’—as seedy.
McCall’s supposed to be out here, too, with Mahealani, Boyd, and at least four other agents scooped up from the operations floor, but Isaac hasn’t seen hide nor hair of them since Harris bolted through the window onto the fire escape, and he—like an idiot—had followed.
There’s a screech of brakes up ahead, which tells him that he’s still on the right track, and he bursts out of the mouth of the alley to see Harris’ dark head and ugly polyester suit jacket head west, towards the river.
Which, shit, if he disappears into the Hudson, then Isaac is not following, not for love or money. Harris can drown or swim to Mexico or get picked up by Russian pirates, for all he cares. He’s had bad experiences with water before, both in prison and before, and he’s not eager to repeat them in a body of water that makes the puddle of sludge and goose shit in the park by Melissa’s building look like a baptismal font.
Luckily—or unluckily, depending on how prominently navigating narrow and disgusting alleyways figures into one’s life plan—Harris ducks into another after a block and a half. Isaac’s still got him in sight, for the most part, relying on fabric and back of head recognition, and he only half feels like he wants to lay down and die.
Only half.
The other half is fully aware of what’s squelching underneath his thrift store tennis shoes, and has no intention of getting any closer to it.
He’s halfway down this new alley—curiously rat-less—and dodging the half-decomposed remains of a sofa, before he realizes that it dead ends in a brick wall. A brick wall that is at once disgusting and at least six stories high. There is no sign, after Isaac’s done trying his best to halt without throwing himself into the sludge that seems to be actively crawling up the brick, of Harris.
“Fuck,” Isaac says, staring up at the sliver of sky that’s just visible between the two buildings.
There’s a rustle behind him that sounds a lot like a rat getting comfortable in whatever mix of muck and detritus they happen to find themselves in. He turns to see Harris rise from behind the sofa, an honest-to-god revolver in his hand, one that’s pointing pretty unwaveringly at Isaac.
So. Not a rat, but close enough.
“Adrian,” he says, smiling and shoving his hands into his pockets. “Fancy meeting you here.”
Harris snorts, and pulls the hammer back. “Be a lot fancier if you’d managed to do it naturally, instead of chasing me all the way from my apartment.”
Isaac shrugs, still smiling. “Please, I just wanted to chat. Bit hard to do that, you know, when one half of the conversation bolts before I’ve even got the chance to say hello.”
“Most people,” Harris says, gun distressingly steady, “Knock before entering someone’s place of residence.”
“I did knock,” Isaac says, then corrects himself. “Well, we knocked. Didn’t you hear it? I admit, the first couple efforts were a little lackluster, but you must have heard it when the door fell in.”
“And, why, precisely, were you knocking my door in?” Harris asks. “You’re not stupid enough to run a con on the FBI, which means that when they were yelling things about arrests and warrants and arrest warrants, they weren’t yelling it at you, because you’re with them.”
Isaac shrugs, smile not slipping. “What’s that saying? You can choose your family, but you can’t choose your friends?”
Harris rolls his eyes. “It’s not that at all. It’s literally the opposite of that. Honestly, how you and D—”
“Uh-uh,” Isaac says, stepping forward and cutting him off. “You don’t say that name. You don’t ever say that name, remember? Not after Kate.”
Harris’ lips tighten, but he shuts up. About that, at least. Other subjects—like Isaac’s impending bullet wound and possible death—are still up for discussion.
Or gloating.
Adrian’s never really been picky.
“On your knees,” he says, waving the gun in what Isaac assumes—for those in the world with a functioning sense of self-preservation—is a threatening manner.
“In this?” Isaac’s voice is scandalized. He’s scandalized. This is Grade-A New York muck he’s standing in. It could probably strip a car and put it up on blocks all by itself, no chop shop necessary. “First of all, that’s disgusting, second of all, isn’t that a little too cliché? Like, the dry cleaner’s was bad enough but this—“
Harris snarls, and steps forward, the barrel of the gun settling somewhere around the area of Isaac’s chest, and Isaac shuts up faster than he thinks he ever has in his life.
Which, of course, because his life is a goddamn movie, is when Harris gets hit with a perfect flying tackle—some assistance provided by the couch, which promptly collapses the rest of the way immediately afterwards—by a blur in blue.
“Holy shit,” he says, staring down at the tangle of limbs and bad fashion statements at his feet. Harris caught air on that hit, at least a foot and a half under his feet before he dropped again, landing underneath a mountain in an FBI windbreaker.
“Boyd played football in college,” says a voice from the mouth of the alley, and oh, there’s Mahealani, cool as ever, not even a sheen of sweat to show that he, too, had to have run at least six blocks through midday traffic to get here. “He keeps with it.”
Boyd snorts from where he’s currently sitting, which happens to be the lower half of Adrian Harris. “I have to, Danny, otherwise you would just try and run them down, and we haven’t got the time for that.”
Harris, his face half buried in grime, gurgles.
“I surfed,” Mahealani confides, moving to stand next to Isaac, all of them looking at Harris consideringly. “And played lacrosse. Boyd doesn’t think it’s a real sport.”
“What, surfing or lacrosse?” Isaac says, taking a break from enjoying the sight of Harris gasping for breath to look around for McCall, of which there is still no sign of.
“Lacrosse,” Boyd says, finally leveraging himself off of Harris. He slaps a pair of cuffs around his wrists, and then stands back with Isaac and Mahealani, the three of them staring like they’re taking in a piece of sludge and old piece-of-something-that-may-have-once-been-paper covered modern art. “Sure, it’s old as hell, with tradition and all that, but when it comes down to it, it’s a bunch of dudes chasing a ball with too many rules.”
Mahealani raises an eyebrow. “And that doesn’t describe football, how?”
Boyd grins. “It’s not all what you see on television.”
“Oh my god,” Harris gasps from the ground. “Shut up.”
~
McCall, it turns out, had gotten held up by the fact that a van had pulled up right after Harris had bolted, a van that was full of—Surprise!—bags of counterfeit money, fresh from their previous lives as books.
“Wow,” Isaac says, looking around the processing table that’s just outside of the cage in the evidence lockup. He’s surrounded by enough fake cash to buy him a fake country if he wanted, especially if that fake country took American money and wasn’t too picky about the criminal history of its leader. “If this were real, we’d be rich.”
“We’d be more than rich,” McCall says, grunting a bit as he lifts up one of the small pallets he’s been saran-wrapping, grouping the counterfeits in tightly bound stacks of fictional millions. “We’d single-handedly be able to restart NASA’s moon program, and run it for about fifty years.”
Isaac squints at him. “Why do you know that? Wait, no, scratch that, why is the moon program your first thought when presented with literal heaping mounds of cash, fake or not?”
“I like the moon,” McCall says, matter-of-factly.
“He likes the moon,” Isaac says, incredulously. “Unbelievable.”
McCall shrugs. “It was my first choice, going into college. Ask Stiles—have you met Stiles?—he’ll tell you. Or Allison.”
“No, I haven’t met Stiles—which, is that a real name? Like an actual person willingly calls themselves and has others call them that?—and I will ask Allison, and I would have asked her sooner, if you’d let me know you were almost an astronaut.” Isaac is offended. Partly because he didn’t know—thank you, Derek, for not digging up that tidbit—and partly because it hadn’t come up sooner.
Not that he has any delusions of how close he and the McCalls are—that’s a lie, he has plenty of delusions, most of which increasingly (distressingly?) involve both Scott and Allison, possibly in mutual states of undress, possibly with him—but he’d like to think that after nearly a decade of being at least peripherally a part of each other’s lives that he knows something about them.
Even if it’s just something as silly as McCall wanting to go to the moon.
~~~
New York City, New York
September, 2015
Two weeks later
“So, you’re Lahey.” Stiles knows he’s skating the edge of rude, but he can’t help it. This is the dude Scott’s been chasing for a little under a decade, the one who’s got his own special code name and a blurry surveillance photo of himself on Scott and Allison’s fridge.
He’s important, that’s more than obvious, and Stiles is worried about just how important he is, and in what way. Mostly because that’s his job as Childhood Best Friend, but also because Scott has a habit of making deep and lasting connections over the course of five minutes of stilted conversation—ahem, Allison—and there’s a huge difference—or, at least, Stiles hopes and prays there is—between meet cutes at UC Berkley and international games of catch me if you can.
“Uh, yeah,” Lahey says uncertainly, glancing over at Scott, as if he’s looking for some sort of instructions on how to deal with belligerent best friends who also happen to be New York City homicide detectives. Which, great, great, that’s awesome, because apparently Lahey feels like Scott’s important, important enough to maybe want to make nice with his friends (even if said friends are being assholes), and it’s always nice when the people he’s suspicious of seem to reciprocate the feelings he’s suspicious of.
Or whatever.
Stiles takes a drink—because he can, thank you, Ethan, and thank you Martin Blonsky, attempted thief, for earning him free drinks tonight—then sticks out his hand. “Stiles Stilinski, NYPD Homicide, nice to meet you.”
Lahey takes it, and Stiles drags him in for the hug-slap-thump that seems to be par for the course for the bros these days. When Lahey’s close enough, his ear right by Stiles’ mouth, he pauses the motion of the bro embrace to whisper, “If you screw with him, or God help me, screw him, I swear on my mother’s grave, I will find you, and I will put you with Jimmy Hoffa.”
He steps back, smiles the smile that he calls The Soother, and Malia calls The Dahmer, and is weirdly pleased when Lahey just grins back.
Scott, of course, has known Stiles since they were six, and is squinting at him the way that says he knows damn well what Stiles is up to, and is mad that he can’t quite prove it.
“So,” Stiles says brightly, because if someone is going to get this trainwreck started properly, it’s going to be him, “Who’s up for nickel shots? Ethan owes me a night of free drinks—”
“I’m still half convinced you paid Blonsky to try and rob the place,” Scott mutters.
“Hey.” Stiles switches from bright to indignant like a pro, because he is a pro, thank you very much. “Less chatter from the peanuts, yeah?”
Lahey raises a hand. “What about the rest of the legumes?”
Stiles turns his head slowly, eyes narrowing. “Shush, Lahey. The opinion of ex—no! current!—felons is not appreciated at this juncture, even if they know what in the hell a ‘legume’ is.
“The point is,” he continues, raising a hand imperiously, and dear God is he thankful that Danny isn’t here, because he would have never gotten this far if he were, “Is that we are going to get smashed, me for free, and you two for significantly less money than you would anywhere else, and you are going to tell me everything the FBI has managed to rustle up for Grand Theft Art over there to work on.”
~
Three hours later, they are. Sloshed, that is.
Way past sloshed, if Scott’s current activity of sleeping in one of the booths that line the back wall is any indication. Stiles has already called Allison to come get him—she’s back in town, fresh off something or other involving a country he’s almost positive he’s never heard of—and he and Lahey are waiting for a cab.
The lights are up, and the only other people left in O’Hallighan’s are Ethan behind the bar, and two of the bouncers, who’re waiting on cabs of their own. Stiles is sipping water—thank you, Ethan—and watching Lahey, who’s watching Scott.
He’s got this bemused expression on his face, like he isn’t sure what to do with Scott, or even what to do with himself, and it’s scaring Stiles a bit, because that’s exactly the same way Scott looked at Allison when they first met, back when he forgot literally everything around him because she was everything around him.
“You like him,” Stiles says, because he’s drunk, and it’s true.
Lahey’s head whips around so fast he thinks he hears the cartilage crack. “What makes you say that?”
He sounds so defensive, like he’d been trying hard not to let on that he liked anyone, especially not Scott, and he’s mad that Stiles has figured it out and, god forbid, said something about it.
He’d asked a question, though, and Stiles is in an answering mood. “Number one,” he says, ticking it off on his fingers, “you played a game of cat-and-mouse with him for what? Five years? Left him notes—” and here he levels a flat look at Lahey, who’s already looking a bit flustered “—Seriously, dude, notes? Anyway, then you break out of prison, and leave a note there, too, after five years of sending fucking hand-drawn greeting cards, which, let’s be honest? If it were anyone but Scott and Allison getting those cards, you’d have gotten your mail privileges revoked so fast.”
Lahey shrugs. “So what? That doesn’t prove anything, except for maybe that I’m obsessive, and that McCall has a healthy disrespect for basic procedure when it suits him.”
Stiles rolls his eyes. “You’re reaching, my friend, you’re reaching so far you’re about to fall over.”
He almost says, “And besides, what about Allison?”, except that’s when Allison walks in, and Lahey transfers the same look he’s been giving Scott the whole night to her, and oh, fuck.
He doesn’t realize he’s said it out loud until both Allison and Lahey are looking at him with concerned expressions. Stiles waves them off with something about not remembering something he had to do, but shit, how the hell does Scott manage to get himself into these sorts of things, like bad enough he had an international thief á la Sean Connery in Entrapment sending him postcards or whatever, but now said thief is crushing hard on both him and his wife.
If Stiles didn’t know any better—and he does, he does know better, but fuck if this isn’t his life, apparently—he’d say that he was a co-star in some weird, semi-gay Lifetime movie co-produced by Logo and Penthouse, but nope, it’s just Scott, who’s smiling like the sun just came out at both Allison and Lahey as all three of them wobble their way out of O’Hallighan’s towards Allison’s car.
When they’ve finally left, Stiles drops his head onto the table with an audible thump.
“Fuck me,” he says, with feeling.
“Go home,” Ethan says from the bar.
~~~
New York City, New York
September, 2015
Four days later
Isaac Lahey is in the lobby of A&M Security, flirting with their receptionist, and wearing her husband’s clothes.
Allison actually has to take a step back around the corner, regroup, drag her mind back from the place where it desperately wanted to go and stay, and make it stay here instead. The last three months or so, she knows, ever since Lahey showed up on their front step after agreeing to work with Scott instead of slowly driving him out of his mind, haven’t been easy, exactly.
For Lahey and Scott because they aren’t used to being on the same side of things, and for Allison because she’s coming to realize that she’s made space for Lahey, at her breakfast table, in her mind, in her life. He’s no longer just Scott’s white whale, he’s Scott’s quasi-partner, her sort-of friend, the guy who will gently shove her over on Wednesdays and make omelettes and complain that there’s never enough bacon.
She’s talked about it, with Lydia, who’d laughed, poured her another whisky, and told her to come back when she knew how Lahey was in the sack.
Allison had not spoken to Lydia for a week after that.
Erica Reyes, whose husband worked with Scott, had been a little more circumspect.
“He’s like, you know, an ex-boyfriend,” she’d said, panting a little.
They’d been running in Central Park, something Lydia had started, dragged all of her acquaintances who hadn’t currently been suffering from fatal diseases to, and then abandoned as soon as it became something close to habit. Erica and Allison—along with Kira, Jordan, Malia, and Aiden on weekends—were all that were left of the original herd.
“What?” Allison had said, thanking whoever was listening or even vaguely paying attention that she was already flushed from the exercise.
Erica had waved a hand. “You know, like you hear all about them, you feel like you know them, you know they were important in your significant other’s life, but that’s all, like, mental, until you meet them, and suddenly your brain’s like ‘oh, shit, how do I do this’?”
“I’ve met Scott’s exes, though,” Allison had pointed out, “And I’ve never had this problem with them.”
Erica had snorted. “He’s not really Scott’s, though, is he?”
“Excuse me?” Allison had almost tripped, but managed to catch herself before she fell, or worse, gave something away. Whatever that something might be.
“I’ve seen your fridge, okay,” Erica had pointed out. Which, the fact that nearly everyone brought that up probably meant something, but Allison couldn’t, for the life of her, figure out what. “And,” she’d continued, “although I know you’re not talking to her right now—what are you guys, twelve?—I’ve talked to Lydia. It’s both of you guys, both of you and Lahey.”
Which, when all was said and done, was supremely unhelpful, but unless Allison wanted to listen to Erica—or Christ, Lydia—elaborate, that was all she was going to get.
It didn’t help, it really didn’t, that Lahey was living with Melissa—he still hadn’t given any sign that he knew she was Scott’s mother, even though none of them were trying to hide it—and now, apparently, wearing the clothes Scott had left there for when he stayed over, instead of the vast collection of shabby, but painfully chic clothing he seemed to have picked up from every thrift store and second hand shop he could reach without setting off the alarm and sending the Marshals after him.
Lahey also looks really, really good in Scott’s old jeans, and Scott’s half of the faded grey UC Berkley t-shirts they’d gotten from rushing ΛΕΩ in their sophomore year.
“Fuck,” Allison breathes, and then, borrowing from Scott, “Motherfucker.”
Which is pathetic, because this is her place of work, and Kate would absolutely be howling with laughter—god damn it, Allison, lock that damn box up.
She takes a deep breath, puts on a face that she hope says ‘I am not having an existential crisis, and if, by some chance, I were, it definitely doesn’t involve you’, and walks back around the corner.
Lahey turns at the sound of her heels, a grin breaking across his face as he catches sight of her.
“Allison,” he says, waving. Heather, the receptionist, looks a bit like she does when Stiles comes in to ask Lydia for something on the downest of lows: appreciative, just a little bit wistful, and willing to let them flirt, but no more.
Heather, it must be said, is a damn good receptionist, and one of their best field testers.
“Hey, Lahey,” she says, giving him a once over, even though she’s already had her freak out, because she’s human, god damn it, and she’ll look where she likes. “What are you doing here?”
Lahey rocks back on his heels, thumbs hooked onto the edge of his pockets. “I can’t come in, wish my boss’ wife a good day, catch up?”
“No, you saw me at breakfast—” and boom, there goes Heather’s eyebrow, it’s like Lydia has ‘freakish control over facial muscles’ on their job applications “—and we’ve got nothing to catch up on, all your work’s with Scott.”
“See, that’s where you’re wrong,” Lahey says, starting to walk backwards towards the doors. Allison follows because, well, that’d been where she was going anyway. “We’ve got tons to catch up on, boatloads, oodles—” they hit the door, and are now out on the pavement “—and McCall and I need your help on a job.”
Ah. Allison grins. There it is.
~
It’s the Dutchman, Allison learns, after she gets to the Federal Building, and she and Scott have a very intense conversation involving absolutely zero words about the fact that yes, Lahey’s wearing your clothes, Scott and what am I supposed to do about this guy, Allison.
She knows—or is supposed to know—absolutely nothing about the Dutchman, except for the fact that Lahey named him, Scott’s been keeping an eye out for him, and that he likes Van Gogh. The last one is an assumption, based off of what he’d nicked from the Musée d’Orsay back in 2009, but it seems a good a guess as any.
“But why do you need me?” she asks, about twenty minutes into the briefing, and that’s when Lahey turns to her with what can only be described a look of glee, and her internal alarm bells start going off like they should have all the way back in A&M’s lobby.
Con man, Argent, she reminds herself. Don’t ever let yourself forget that.
“There’s a Dutch Masters exhibit they’re putting on at the Met,” Scott says, reluctantly.
Allison blinks. “So? There’s whole galleries of Dutch Masters, I’ve walked through them a thousand times with Ka—I’ve walked through them a thousand times.”
Lahey gives her a funny look. She ignores it.
“Yeah, but this one’s special,” Mahealani says, twirling a pen between his fingers. “They’re having a reception, some bloke is going to give a speech, and—”
“And,” Lahey says, cutting him off, “They’ve got about twenty pieces on loan from the British Museum and the Van Gogh Gallery in the Netherlands.”
Allison taps her fingers against the table. “So the Met’s got more art, and a special outing, you all are trying to catch the Dutchman, I still don’t see why you—Oh.” She looks at Scott, eyes wide. “Oh, Scott, no. No.”
Scott grimaces, but he says it anyway. “A&M Security did the last round of improvements for the Met, you’ve got the most up to date details on how they operate.”
“And the reason you can’t just, I don’t know, ask them?” She really, really should have stayed at work.
Boyd sighs. “We think the Dutchman is working on the museum staff, or at least has an in with them. So if we go to the museum…”
“They know you’re coming, and rabbit,” Allison finishes. “And how do you know he’s even coming?”
Mahealani, Boyd, and Lahey all look at Scott, who rolls his eyes.
“Partially, I have a hunch,” he says. “And partially, I’ve got an alias of his coming into LaGuardia, security cam footage that matches the two details we know about the guy, this fits what we know of his profile, and it fits what Lahey knows of his profile.”
“Some seriously shaky shit,” Allison says, because it is, and her family didn’t get to where they are now by going off of intel that sounds better suited to a cable network show.
“Sound enough for a judge to sign off on it,” Scott says, and damn if he isn’t smug about it, too.
“So you’ve got a warrant, or whatever this is called,” Allison says, ticking them off on her fingers, “An international thief to stop, a museum you can’t tell about said international thief, and a hunch. Where does that leave you?”
Lahey, she can see, is almost bouncing in his seat.
“We’ve got to get solid evidence against him,” Mahealani says. “That means catching him in the act, which will be almost impossible, or getting him on possession of stolen art.”
“You’d have to know where he was, and where he put the art,” Allison points out.
“I know,” Lahey says, and there’s that faint trace of…something in his voice. “Which means we’ve got to put some sort of tracker on the art, and since McCall refuses to let the Dutchman take any actual art—”
“If we lost it, Yukimura would kill us,” Scott says, in the weary tones of someone who has had to say the same thing far too many times. “And after she was done, she’d hand us back to Deaton, and we’d wish she’d killed us deader.”
Lahey shudders at the mention of Deaton. “Right, well, personal funeral plans aside, since we’re not allowed to let the bad guy get away with the real art, we have to replace it with fake art.”
“And the museum can’t know,” Allison says. “Please tell me you’re not—”
“Pre-heist heist,” Lahey says gleefully. “We go in, we replace anything the Dutchman might be interested in with a copy that’s got a tracker in it, and we wait for one of them to start moving.”
“Unfuckingreal,” Allison mutters, then, louder, “And where are we gonna get all these fakes?”
Lahey, still grinning like a maniac, raises his hand.
“Motherfucker,” she and Scott say, in unison.
[White Collar AU]
Also posted to AO3
New York City, New York
August, 2015
The first month of working with Lahey is almost impossible.
Scott had known, from the minute he’d shown up at their apartment—for the first time, and didn’t that rankle—that things were going to be hard. Which was fine, he was good at hard, and Allison’s family had practically invented the concept of endurance, but Lahey seems to be going out of his way to make things as difficult as humanly—or perhaps criminally—possible.
“You do know why he came, right?” Allison had asked him after the first time. They’d been in line for the food truck a few blocks down from the Federal Building that had the queso he liked, the sun doing its best to melt the people of New York into gelatinous puddles where they stood, and, if that failed, to simply make them miserable.
“Four minutes, thirty-five seconds,” Scott had said, shifting over to block the sun from shining directly into Allison’s eyes. She’d forgotten her sunglasses, as she always did when she wasn’t working, and she hated squinting. So Scott had done what he could, as he always did. “That’s how long it took for someone—either at the Marshal’s Service or the FBI or the goddamn Weather Channel, whatever—to remember that they’re supposed to call me when something like this happens.”
“They’ll get better,” she’d said, as they’d moved up in line. “Not by all that much; this is New York City, and you guys are feds—sorry, Scott—but they’ll get better.”
She’d been right: Lahey had broken perimeter six more times in the next week, twice for idiotic reasons, and four so he could come and bum breakfast off of them again. Scott had ended up having to call the Marshal’s Service and say that he’d set up a specific route for Lahey to follow if he was going to come to see them, and that only if he left the perimeter and deviated from that—or took too long getting there, because really, if Lahey didn’t take as much leeway as he could get, even Scott would be disappointed in him—were they to call him.
Adding those stipulations cut down on the morning calls from Chernow and Stapleton—whoever was working the Lahey detail that day, or even that hour—but it did nothing to stop the fact that he was having breakfast with Lahey five days out of seven.
Which wasn’t to say that he didn’t like it.
Or that Allison didn’t like it.
(Lahey was a given, he was the one who kept showing up.)
Stiles had laughed when he’d told him. “You chase this guy for years, put him in prison twice, and now you’re complaining that you always know where he is?”
“I’m not complaining that I know where he is—half of which, have I told you, is spent at my mother’s because he’s renting from her—I’m complaining that I always know where he is because he’s with me. With us.” Scott had waved his beer around—they were at O’Hallighan’s, Ethan was using them to test some new micro-brew he’d gotten from Wisconsin—to indicate the complexities of the…whatever it was…between him and Allison and now Lahey.
“Melissa? Renting to him?” Stiles had grinned. “Does he know?”
“No,” Scott had said. “Though I don’t know how. The man is an international criminal, you’d think he could figure out that he’s living with my mother without me telling him.”
It was one very small thing in the ridiculous list of contradictions that made up Isaac Lahey, but still. Sometimes Scott wondered how much of Kuryakin had been both Lahey and Solo together, and how much of it—aside from the art portion, they had that one confirmed beyond a doubt—had been just Lahey alone.
“Lemme know when he’s coming over next,” Stiles had said over the rim of his glass. “I wanna meet the guy.”
“I would,” Scott had groused, “If he’d actually let us know when that was.”
Now it was August, and two and a half months had…smoothed things.
A little.
Breakfast had been simple this morning, just eggs and fruit. Allison was in the Hamptons with Lydia, doing a security check for a Tajikistani businesswoman who was concerned about a series of death threats she’d received in the last month. They’d been silent, for the most part, the two of them, Scott doing what he needed to do to get ready for the day—dress, set up Melly’s food and water, check the plants on the balcony—and Lahey staying out of his way.
Lahey had been just as silent on the car ride over, alternating between eerily still and irritatingly twitchy, a habit he’d kept up once they get inside.
“I still can’t believe this is your office,” he says as they go through the door of the same, and Scott has to resist the urge to roll his eyes and point at the panel of frosted glass that said ‘Scott McCall, Special Agent In Charge, White Collar Crime’, which clearly indicates, besides that fact that his job title is way too damn long, that this is, in fact, his office.
He settles, instead, for the much more boring, but much less passive aggressively bitchy, ‘Hmm’.
Lahey sits in his desk chair, gives it a whirl.
“Really, Scott?” he says as it slowly spins around, his long legs pulled up like a kid’s to keep them from banging against the desk itself. “You find boring criminals—present company and their alleged crimes excluded—from the most boring office in the world?”
Scott sighs, the internal war between snark and professionalism leaning heavily towards the latter. As it usually does, where Lahey’s concerned. Goddamn it. “No, Lahey, I didn’t find anyone from this office, because for five years I was chasing your ass all over the damn planet.”
Just like that, the war’s lost, the McCall Snark-O-Meter firmly set to stunning.
Or whatever.
(There’s a reason he usually sticks to getting progressively more willing to swear in front of authority figures and children: Allison and Stiles harbor enough sarcasm in their little fingers to cover for him, and he’s pretty sure Lydia’s made of the stuff.)
Lahey rolls his eyes. “I said I was sorry for Bhutan. And Qatar. And Paraguay. And Bosnia and Herzegovina.”
“Years—literal years, Lahey, I am not exaggerating—later, and on birthday cards.” Scott finally gives up on being able to sit at his own desk—even when Lahey was in the States, was right in fucking front of him, he still can’t use the damn thing—and just starts shuffling through the folders that seem to both magically appear and multiply like tree-pulp rabbits in his inbox.
“What?” Lahey sounds hurt, offended even. “You didn’t like them?”
Scott just grunts.
There’s the Dutchman folder, thick and battered, that goes to the left—as it does every morning—for Shit He Was Probably Going To Be Working On Until He Died, a pile that had gotten significantly shorter about five years ago when Lahey had taken up semi-permanent residency at Florence ADX.
A couple more—petty thefts, a request from the Guggenheim to go over some security measures, an invitation to speak at some charity benefit for one of the many offshoots of the MoMA—get put in the middle, for immediate shuffling off to someone else.
One, though, one catches his eye.
“Hey,” he says in place of a response to Lahey’s question (which was stupid, of course he likes the cards, both he and Allison like the cards, they’re on the fridge, for God’s sake), “You ever heard of a Harris? Adrian Harris?”
Lahey stops the chair and sits up at that, looking thoughtful. “Chemist, right? At least he was when I went in. Specialized in—”
“Counterfeiting,” Scott finishes, flipping through the file.
Harris is low level, local stuff, nothing that should have kicked him up to Scott’s desk over a local fraud cop. There are a couple of charges from a few years ago, but nothing serious, and nothing related to his specialty. All that is cloaked in so many ‘allegedly’s and ‘suspected’s that he knows whoever started putting this thing together must have been grinding their teeth in frustration the whole time.
He’d settled down, it seems, stopped bouncing all over the southern part of the state and set up shop—quite literally, he’d taken over management of a dry cleaner’s, could you get any more clichéd—in Brooklyn a little over six months ago, and hadn’t done anything noteworthy since.
Except…
“You ever do anything with those security strips? The ones from California?” Scott asks, still looking over Harris’ expense records, noting multiple trips to a Szczepanski’s Rare and Used Books up in the Bronx.
“Allegedly,” Lahey says, and Scott has come to hate that word more than he hates the Red Sox, which is impressive, “I may have sold them.”
“To Harris?” Scott raises an eyebrow. There’s coincidence, as Stiles’ dad says, and then there’s coincidence.
Lahey snorts.
“No, Adrian hates me. Something to do with, uh…” He trails off, flaps a hand. “Never mind why, but, if I had them, which I’m not saying I did, and I sold them, which I’m not saying I did either, then I would’ve, hypothetically, dealt with a middleman.”
Scott looks at him for a long moment, waiting.
Lahey rolls his eyes. “Fine, fine, and maybe that middleman—if he exists, and I’m not saying he does—doesn’t have quite the same beef with Adrian as I did—do.”
“Hmm.” Scott flips the folder around, puts it on the desk in front of Lahey, tapping the expenditure sheet. “What does that look like to you?”
“Bunch of grocery runs, does the man not know how to budget?” The tone is flippant, but Lahey’s looking, one long finger going down the items line by line as the fingers of his other hand tap in a rhythmic pattern that’s too steady to be random.
He does it all the time, when he’s not paying attention, usually with both hands. Scott’s not sure what it is, not yet, but he has an idea.
“Books,” Lahey mutters after a moment. “There’s a hell of a lot of books, and from this one place. Old books, too. What’s Adrian doing with a bunch of old books?” He looks up at Scott, head cocked to the side. “It is the books, right?”
“Yeah,” Scott says, and Lahey beams. It’s disgusting, it’s unnecessary, and Scott wants him to stop right now because something in his chest flips over—the way it’s been doing a lot lately, the way Scott’s been steadfastly ignoring since Florence—and Jesus Christ he wishes Allison were here to see it.
“Books, chemist, maybe some security fibers I’m maybe responsible for, a literal dry cleaners.” Lahey ticks them all off on his fingers. “Add them all together, what do you get?”
Scott grins, tries not to notice the way Lahey’s eyes snap back to his face from his fingers. “You said Harris’ specialty was counterfeiting, right?”
“I did, didn’t I?” Lahey says, and if he sounds a little distracted, well.
He’s not the only one.
~~~
New York City, New York
August, 2015
Four days later
“This…this is ridiculous,” Isaac pants, running full out down an alley in Brooklyn that looks like it had last seen a trash truck circa the New Amsterdam years.
The rat that’s running next to him squeaks in agreement, before veering off to do whatever it is that rats do when they’re not mocking thirty-one year old ex-cons with shitty cardio. He’s joined a moment later by another, larger rat, like the rodent population is handing off the responsibility of shadowing him as he chases Adrian Harris through a part of town that can best be described—aside from the literal ‘trashy’—as seedy.
McCall’s supposed to be out here, too, with Mahealani, Boyd, and at least four other agents scooped up from the operations floor, but Isaac hasn’t seen hide nor hair of them since Harris bolted through the window onto the fire escape, and he—like an idiot—had followed.
There’s a screech of brakes up ahead, which tells him that he’s still on the right track, and he bursts out of the mouth of the alley to see Harris’ dark head and ugly polyester suit jacket head west, towards the river.
Which, shit, if he disappears into the Hudson, then Isaac is not following, not for love or money. Harris can drown or swim to Mexico or get picked up by Russian pirates, for all he cares. He’s had bad experiences with water before, both in prison and before, and he’s not eager to repeat them in a body of water that makes the puddle of sludge and goose shit in the park by Melissa’s building look like a baptismal font.
Luckily—or unluckily, depending on how prominently navigating narrow and disgusting alleyways figures into one’s life plan—Harris ducks into another after a block and a half. Isaac’s still got him in sight, for the most part, relying on fabric and back of head recognition, and he only half feels like he wants to lay down and die.
Only half.
The other half is fully aware of what’s squelching underneath his thrift store tennis shoes, and has no intention of getting any closer to it.
He’s halfway down this new alley—curiously rat-less—and dodging the half-decomposed remains of a sofa, before he realizes that it dead ends in a brick wall. A brick wall that is at once disgusting and at least six stories high. There is no sign, after Isaac’s done trying his best to halt without throwing himself into the sludge that seems to be actively crawling up the brick, of Harris.
“Fuck,” Isaac says, staring up at the sliver of sky that’s just visible between the two buildings.
There’s a rustle behind him that sounds a lot like a rat getting comfortable in whatever mix of muck and detritus they happen to find themselves in. He turns to see Harris rise from behind the sofa, an honest-to-god revolver in his hand, one that’s pointing pretty unwaveringly at Isaac.
So. Not a rat, but close enough.
“Adrian,” he says, smiling and shoving his hands into his pockets. “Fancy meeting you here.”
Harris snorts, and pulls the hammer back. “Be a lot fancier if you’d managed to do it naturally, instead of chasing me all the way from my apartment.”
Isaac shrugs, still smiling. “Please, I just wanted to chat. Bit hard to do that, you know, when one half of the conversation bolts before I’ve even got the chance to say hello.”
“Most people,” Harris says, gun distressingly steady, “Knock before entering someone’s place of residence.”
“I did knock,” Isaac says, then corrects himself. “Well, we knocked. Didn’t you hear it? I admit, the first couple efforts were a little lackluster, but you must have heard it when the door fell in.”
“And, why, precisely, were you knocking my door in?” Harris asks. “You’re not stupid enough to run a con on the FBI, which means that when they were yelling things about arrests and warrants and arrest warrants, they weren’t yelling it at you, because you’re with them.”
Isaac shrugs, smile not slipping. “What’s that saying? You can choose your family, but you can’t choose your friends?”
Harris rolls his eyes. “It’s not that at all. It’s literally the opposite of that. Honestly, how you and D—”
“Uh-uh,” Isaac says, stepping forward and cutting him off. “You don’t say that name. You don’t ever say that name, remember? Not after Kate.”
Harris’ lips tighten, but he shuts up. About that, at least. Other subjects—like Isaac’s impending bullet wound and possible death—are still up for discussion.
Or gloating.
Adrian’s never really been picky.
“On your knees,” he says, waving the gun in what Isaac assumes—for those in the world with a functioning sense of self-preservation—is a threatening manner.
“In this?” Isaac’s voice is scandalized. He’s scandalized. This is Grade-A New York muck he’s standing in. It could probably strip a car and put it up on blocks all by itself, no chop shop necessary. “First of all, that’s disgusting, second of all, isn’t that a little too cliché? Like, the dry cleaner’s was bad enough but this—“
Harris snarls, and steps forward, the barrel of the gun settling somewhere around the area of Isaac’s chest, and Isaac shuts up faster than he thinks he ever has in his life.
Which, of course, because his life is a goddamn movie, is when Harris gets hit with a perfect flying tackle—some assistance provided by the couch, which promptly collapses the rest of the way immediately afterwards—by a blur in blue.
“Holy shit,” he says, staring down at the tangle of limbs and bad fashion statements at his feet. Harris caught air on that hit, at least a foot and a half under his feet before he dropped again, landing underneath a mountain in an FBI windbreaker.
“Boyd played football in college,” says a voice from the mouth of the alley, and oh, there’s Mahealani, cool as ever, not even a sheen of sweat to show that he, too, had to have run at least six blocks through midday traffic to get here. “He keeps with it.”
Boyd snorts from where he’s currently sitting, which happens to be the lower half of Adrian Harris. “I have to, Danny, otherwise you would just try and run them down, and we haven’t got the time for that.”
Harris, his face half buried in grime, gurgles.
“I surfed,” Mahealani confides, moving to stand next to Isaac, all of them looking at Harris consideringly. “And played lacrosse. Boyd doesn’t think it’s a real sport.”
“What, surfing or lacrosse?” Isaac says, taking a break from enjoying the sight of Harris gasping for breath to look around for McCall, of which there is still no sign of.
“Lacrosse,” Boyd says, finally leveraging himself off of Harris. He slaps a pair of cuffs around his wrists, and then stands back with Isaac and Mahealani, the three of them staring like they’re taking in a piece of sludge and old piece-of-something-that-may-have-once-been-paper covered modern art. “Sure, it’s old as hell, with tradition and all that, but when it comes down to it, it’s a bunch of dudes chasing a ball with too many rules.”
Mahealani raises an eyebrow. “And that doesn’t describe football, how?”
Boyd grins. “It’s not all what you see on television.”
“Oh my god,” Harris gasps from the ground. “Shut up.”
~
McCall, it turns out, had gotten held up by the fact that a van had pulled up right after Harris had bolted, a van that was full of—Surprise!—bags of counterfeit money, fresh from their previous lives as books.
“Wow,” Isaac says, looking around the processing table that’s just outside of the cage in the evidence lockup. He’s surrounded by enough fake cash to buy him a fake country if he wanted, especially if that fake country took American money and wasn’t too picky about the criminal history of its leader. “If this were real, we’d be rich.”
“We’d be more than rich,” McCall says, grunting a bit as he lifts up one of the small pallets he’s been saran-wrapping, grouping the counterfeits in tightly bound stacks of fictional millions. “We’d single-handedly be able to restart NASA’s moon program, and run it for about fifty years.”
Isaac squints at him. “Why do you know that? Wait, no, scratch that, why is the moon program your first thought when presented with literal heaping mounds of cash, fake or not?”
“I like the moon,” McCall says, matter-of-factly.
“He likes the moon,” Isaac says, incredulously. “Unbelievable.”
McCall shrugs. “It was my first choice, going into college. Ask Stiles—have you met Stiles?—he’ll tell you. Or Allison.”
“No, I haven’t met Stiles—which, is that a real name? Like an actual person willingly calls themselves and has others call them that?—and I will ask Allison, and I would have asked her sooner, if you’d let me know you were almost an astronaut.” Isaac is offended. Partly because he didn’t know—thank you, Derek, for not digging up that tidbit—and partly because it hadn’t come up sooner.
Not that he has any delusions of how close he and the McCalls are—that’s a lie, he has plenty of delusions, most of which increasingly (distressingly?) involve both Scott and Allison, possibly in mutual states of undress, possibly with him—but he’d like to think that after nearly a decade of being at least peripherally a part of each other’s lives that he knows something about them.
Even if it’s just something as silly as McCall wanting to go to the moon.
~~~
New York City, New York
September, 2015
Two weeks later
“So, you’re Lahey.” Stiles knows he’s skating the edge of rude, but he can’t help it. This is the dude Scott’s been chasing for a little under a decade, the one who’s got his own special code name and a blurry surveillance photo of himself on Scott and Allison’s fridge.
He’s important, that’s more than obvious, and Stiles is worried about just how important he is, and in what way. Mostly because that’s his job as Childhood Best Friend, but also because Scott has a habit of making deep and lasting connections over the course of five minutes of stilted conversation—ahem, Allison—and there’s a huge difference—or, at least, Stiles hopes and prays there is—between meet cutes at UC Berkley and international games of catch me if you can.
“Uh, yeah,” Lahey says uncertainly, glancing over at Scott, as if he’s looking for some sort of instructions on how to deal with belligerent best friends who also happen to be New York City homicide detectives. Which, great, great, that’s awesome, because apparently Lahey feels like Scott’s important, important enough to maybe want to make nice with his friends (even if said friends are being assholes), and it’s always nice when the people he’s suspicious of seem to reciprocate the feelings he’s suspicious of.
Or whatever.
Stiles takes a drink—because he can, thank you, Ethan, and thank you Martin Blonsky, attempted thief, for earning him free drinks tonight—then sticks out his hand. “Stiles Stilinski, NYPD Homicide, nice to meet you.”
Lahey takes it, and Stiles drags him in for the hug-slap-thump that seems to be par for the course for the bros these days. When Lahey’s close enough, his ear right by Stiles’ mouth, he pauses the motion of the bro embrace to whisper, “If you screw with him, or God help me, screw him, I swear on my mother’s grave, I will find you, and I will put you with Jimmy Hoffa.”
He steps back, smiles the smile that he calls The Soother, and Malia calls The Dahmer, and is weirdly pleased when Lahey just grins back.
Scott, of course, has known Stiles since they were six, and is squinting at him the way that says he knows damn well what Stiles is up to, and is mad that he can’t quite prove it.
“So,” Stiles says brightly, because if someone is going to get this trainwreck started properly, it’s going to be him, “Who’s up for nickel shots? Ethan owes me a night of free drinks—”
“I’m still half convinced you paid Blonsky to try and rob the place,” Scott mutters.
“Hey.” Stiles switches from bright to indignant like a pro, because he is a pro, thank you very much. “Less chatter from the peanuts, yeah?”
Lahey raises a hand. “What about the rest of the legumes?”
Stiles turns his head slowly, eyes narrowing. “Shush, Lahey. The opinion of ex—no! current!—felons is not appreciated at this juncture, even if they know what in the hell a ‘legume’ is.
“The point is,” he continues, raising a hand imperiously, and dear God is he thankful that Danny isn’t here, because he would have never gotten this far if he were, “Is that we are going to get smashed, me for free, and you two for significantly less money than you would anywhere else, and you are going to tell me everything the FBI has managed to rustle up for Grand Theft Art over there to work on.”
~
Three hours later, they are. Sloshed, that is.
Way past sloshed, if Scott’s current activity of sleeping in one of the booths that line the back wall is any indication. Stiles has already called Allison to come get him—she’s back in town, fresh off something or other involving a country he’s almost positive he’s never heard of—and he and Lahey are waiting for a cab.
The lights are up, and the only other people left in O’Hallighan’s are Ethan behind the bar, and two of the bouncers, who’re waiting on cabs of their own. Stiles is sipping water—thank you, Ethan—and watching Lahey, who’s watching Scott.
He’s got this bemused expression on his face, like he isn’t sure what to do with Scott, or even what to do with himself, and it’s scaring Stiles a bit, because that’s exactly the same way Scott looked at Allison when they first met, back when he forgot literally everything around him because she was everything around him.
“You like him,” Stiles says, because he’s drunk, and it’s true.
Lahey’s head whips around so fast he thinks he hears the cartilage crack. “What makes you say that?”
He sounds so defensive, like he’d been trying hard not to let on that he liked anyone, especially not Scott, and he’s mad that Stiles has figured it out and, god forbid, said something about it.
He’d asked a question, though, and Stiles is in an answering mood. “Number one,” he says, ticking it off on his fingers, “you played a game of cat-and-mouse with him for what? Five years? Left him notes—” and here he levels a flat look at Lahey, who’s already looking a bit flustered “—Seriously, dude, notes? Anyway, then you break out of prison, and leave a note there, too, after five years of sending fucking hand-drawn greeting cards, which, let’s be honest? If it were anyone but Scott and Allison getting those cards, you’d have gotten your mail privileges revoked so fast.”
Lahey shrugs. “So what? That doesn’t prove anything, except for maybe that I’m obsessive, and that McCall has a healthy disrespect for basic procedure when it suits him.”
Stiles rolls his eyes. “You’re reaching, my friend, you’re reaching so far you’re about to fall over.”
He almost says, “And besides, what about Allison?”, except that’s when Allison walks in, and Lahey transfers the same look he’s been giving Scott the whole night to her, and oh, fuck.
He doesn’t realize he’s said it out loud until both Allison and Lahey are looking at him with concerned expressions. Stiles waves them off with something about not remembering something he had to do, but shit, how the hell does Scott manage to get himself into these sorts of things, like bad enough he had an international thief á la Sean Connery in Entrapment sending him postcards or whatever, but now said thief is crushing hard on both him and his wife.
If Stiles didn’t know any better—and he does, he does know better, but fuck if this isn’t his life, apparently—he’d say that he was a co-star in some weird, semi-gay Lifetime movie co-produced by Logo and Penthouse, but nope, it’s just Scott, who’s smiling like the sun just came out at both Allison and Lahey as all three of them wobble their way out of O’Hallighan’s towards Allison’s car.
When they’ve finally left, Stiles drops his head onto the table with an audible thump.
“Fuck me,” he says, with feeling.
“Go home,” Ethan says from the bar.
~~~
New York City, New York
September, 2015
Four days later
Isaac Lahey is in the lobby of A&M Security, flirting with their receptionist, and wearing her husband’s clothes.
Allison actually has to take a step back around the corner, regroup, drag her mind back from the place where it desperately wanted to go and stay, and make it stay here instead. The last three months or so, she knows, ever since Lahey showed up on their front step after agreeing to work with Scott instead of slowly driving him out of his mind, haven’t been easy, exactly.
For Lahey and Scott because they aren’t used to being on the same side of things, and for Allison because she’s coming to realize that she’s made space for Lahey, at her breakfast table, in her mind, in her life. He’s no longer just Scott’s white whale, he’s Scott’s quasi-partner, her sort-of friend, the guy who will gently shove her over on Wednesdays and make omelettes and complain that there’s never enough bacon.
She’s talked about it, with Lydia, who’d laughed, poured her another whisky, and told her to come back when she knew how Lahey was in the sack.
Allison had not spoken to Lydia for a week after that.
Erica Reyes, whose husband worked with Scott, had been a little more circumspect.
“He’s like, you know, an ex-boyfriend,” she’d said, panting a little.
They’d been running in Central Park, something Lydia had started, dragged all of her acquaintances who hadn’t currently been suffering from fatal diseases to, and then abandoned as soon as it became something close to habit. Erica and Allison—along with Kira, Jordan, Malia, and Aiden on weekends—were all that were left of the original herd.
“What?” Allison had said, thanking whoever was listening or even vaguely paying attention that she was already flushed from the exercise.
Erica had waved a hand. “You know, like you hear all about them, you feel like you know them, you know they were important in your significant other’s life, but that’s all, like, mental, until you meet them, and suddenly your brain’s like ‘oh, shit, how do I do this’?”
“I’ve met Scott’s exes, though,” Allison had pointed out, “And I’ve never had this problem with them.”
Erica had snorted. “He’s not really Scott’s, though, is he?”
“Excuse me?” Allison had almost tripped, but managed to catch herself before she fell, or worse, gave something away. Whatever that something might be.
“I’ve seen your fridge, okay,” Erica had pointed out. Which, the fact that nearly everyone brought that up probably meant something, but Allison couldn’t, for the life of her, figure out what. “And,” she’d continued, “although I know you’re not talking to her right now—what are you guys, twelve?—I’ve talked to Lydia. It’s both of you guys, both of you and Lahey.”
Which, when all was said and done, was supremely unhelpful, but unless Allison wanted to listen to Erica—or Christ, Lydia—elaborate, that was all she was going to get.
It didn’t help, it really didn’t, that Lahey was living with Melissa—he still hadn’t given any sign that he knew she was Scott’s mother, even though none of them were trying to hide it—and now, apparently, wearing the clothes Scott had left there for when he stayed over, instead of the vast collection of shabby, but painfully chic clothing he seemed to have picked up from every thrift store and second hand shop he could reach without setting off the alarm and sending the Marshals after him.
Lahey also looks really, really good in Scott’s old jeans, and Scott’s half of the faded grey UC Berkley t-shirts they’d gotten from rushing ΛΕΩ in their sophomore year.
“Fuck,” Allison breathes, and then, borrowing from Scott, “Motherfucker.”
Which is pathetic, because this is her place of work, and Kate would absolutely be howling with laughter—god damn it, Allison, lock that damn box up.
She takes a deep breath, puts on a face that she hope says ‘I am not having an existential crisis, and if, by some chance, I were, it definitely doesn’t involve you’, and walks back around the corner.
Lahey turns at the sound of her heels, a grin breaking across his face as he catches sight of her.
“Allison,” he says, waving. Heather, the receptionist, looks a bit like she does when Stiles comes in to ask Lydia for something on the downest of lows: appreciative, just a little bit wistful, and willing to let them flirt, but no more.
Heather, it must be said, is a damn good receptionist, and one of their best field testers.
“Hey, Lahey,” she says, giving him a once over, even though she’s already had her freak out, because she’s human, god damn it, and she’ll look where she likes. “What are you doing here?”
Lahey rocks back on his heels, thumbs hooked onto the edge of his pockets. “I can’t come in, wish my boss’ wife a good day, catch up?”
“No, you saw me at breakfast—” and boom, there goes Heather’s eyebrow, it’s like Lydia has ‘freakish control over facial muscles’ on their job applications “—and we’ve got nothing to catch up on, all your work’s with Scott.”
“See, that’s where you’re wrong,” Lahey says, starting to walk backwards towards the doors. Allison follows because, well, that’d been where she was going anyway. “We’ve got tons to catch up on, boatloads, oodles—” they hit the door, and are now out on the pavement “—and McCall and I need your help on a job.”
Ah. Allison grins. There it is.
~
It’s the Dutchman, Allison learns, after she gets to the Federal Building, and she and Scott have a very intense conversation involving absolutely zero words about the fact that yes, Lahey’s wearing your clothes, Scott and what am I supposed to do about this guy, Allison.
She knows—or is supposed to know—absolutely nothing about the Dutchman, except for the fact that Lahey named him, Scott’s been keeping an eye out for him, and that he likes Van Gogh. The last one is an assumption, based off of what he’d nicked from the Musée d’Orsay back in 2009, but it seems a good a guess as any.
“But why do you need me?” she asks, about twenty minutes into the briefing, and that’s when Lahey turns to her with what can only be described a look of glee, and her internal alarm bells start going off like they should have all the way back in A&M’s lobby.
Con man, Argent, she reminds herself. Don’t ever let yourself forget that.
“There’s a Dutch Masters exhibit they’re putting on at the Met,” Scott says, reluctantly.
Allison blinks. “So? There’s whole galleries of Dutch Masters, I’ve walked through them a thousand times with Ka—I’ve walked through them a thousand times.”
Lahey gives her a funny look. She ignores it.
“Yeah, but this one’s special,” Mahealani says, twirling a pen between his fingers. “They’re having a reception, some bloke is going to give a speech, and—”
“And,” Lahey says, cutting him off, “They’ve got about twenty pieces on loan from the British Museum and the Van Gogh Gallery in the Netherlands.”
Allison taps her fingers against the table. “So the Met’s got more art, and a special outing, you all are trying to catch the Dutchman, I still don’t see why you—Oh.” She looks at Scott, eyes wide. “Oh, Scott, no. No.”
Scott grimaces, but he says it anyway. “A&M Security did the last round of improvements for the Met, you’ve got the most up to date details on how they operate.”
“And the reason you can’t just, I don’t know, ask them?” She really, really should have stayed at work.
Boyd sighs. “We think the Dutchman is working on the museum staff, or at least has an in with them. So if we go to the museum…”
“They know you’re coming, and rabbit,” Allison finishes. “And how do you know he’s even coming?”
Mahealani, Boyd, and Lahey all look at Scott, who rolls his eyes.
“Partially, I have a hunch,” he says. “And partially, I’ve got an alias of his coming into LaGuardia, security cam footage that matches the two details we know about the guy, this fits what we know of his profile, and it fits what Lahey knows of his profile.”
“Some seriously shaky shit,” Allison says, because it is, and her family didn’t get to where they are now by going off of intel that sounds better suited to a cable network show.
“Sound enough for a judge to sign off on it,” Scott says, and damn if he isn’t smug about it, too.
“So you’ve got a warrant, or whatever this is called,” Allison says, ticking them off on her fingers, “An international thief to stop, a museum you can’t tell about said international thief, and a hunch. Where does that leave you?”
Lahey, she can see, is almost bouncing in his seat.
“We’ve got to get solid evidence against him,” Mahealani says. “That means catching him in the act, which will be almost impossible, or getting him on possession of stolen art.”
“You’d have to know where he was, and where he put the art,” Allison points out.
“I know,” Lahey says, and there’s that faint trace of…something in his voice. “Which means we’ve got to put some sort of tracker on the art, and since McCall refuses to let the Dutchman take any actual art—”
“If we lost it, Yukimura would kill us,” Scott says, in the weary tones of someone who has had to say the same thing far too many times. “And after she was done, she’d hand us back to Deaton, and we’d wish she’d killed us deader.”
Lahey shudders at the mention of Deaton. “Right, well, personal funeral plans aside, since we’re not allowed to let the bad guy get away with the real art, we have to replace it with fake art.”
“And the museum can’t know,” Allison says. “Please tell me you’re not—”
“Pre-heist heist,” Lahey says gleefully. “We go in, we replace anything the Dutchman might be interested in with a copy that’s got a tracker in it, and we wait for one of them to start moving.”
“Unfuckingreal,” Allison mutters, then, louder, “And where are we gonna get all these fakes?”
Lahey, still grinning like a maniac, raises his hand.
“Motherfucker,” she and Scott say, in unison.
