It wasn't. Holland March and Jackson Healy get captured by the men they were surveiling, they quickly find an easy way to get the information they need. Don't touch him. Touch the other one instead.
Word count: 2.9k
Warnings: None
A/N: This fanfic is based on this fanart I saw on tumblr by @spleenster1889 , they asked for a fanfic so here I am. It also isn't as tortury as I originally planned but eh yk my mind has been a mess lately lmao
I don't know if I really like it, but I hope you do so enjoy !! <33
ao3 link | playlist | discord server
fic under the cut !!
The job was supposed to be simple.
Holland had said it himself, approximately forty minutes before everything went wrong – this one’s straightforward, Healy, in and out, we’re not even going inside – and Healy had given him the look he reserved for statements that were going to age badly and said nothing, because saying nothing was more efficient than saying nothing involving you is ever straightforward, March, not once, not ever, in the history of our association.
The target was a man named Reeves. Mid-level, the kind of operator who existed in the greasy middle space between legitimate business and the people who ran things in Los Angeles in 1977 – moving money for people who needed money moved, keeping records that certain parties would prefer didn’t exist. Holland had been hired by a nervous lawyer named Carver to document a paper trail. All they needed was evidence of the meetings. Photographs, times, faces. The kind of work that was genuinely boring if you were the kind of people boring things happened to.
They were not those kinds of people.
The men came out of the side entrance four at a time, which suggested they’d been waiting, which suggested someone had told them. The math on that – who knew, who talked – was something Holland would have liked to work through but the back of his introduced an argument that temporarily closed the discussion.
—
He woke up in a chair.
The specific experience of waking up restrained was not entirely new to Holland March. His life had taken him to enough rooms with enough bad men that he had a working familiarity with zip ties, with rope, with the particular disorientation of consciousness returning to a situation that was already bad. He did a rapid inventory; wrists bound behind him, ankles to the chair legs, the chair itself metal and heavy.
Something solid at his back.
He turned his head as far as it would go, which was not far enough. He could see the edge of a shoulder. Dark jacket. The specific breadth of it.
“Healy,” he said.
A breath. Then “Yeah.”
The relief of that syllable was something Holland catalogued and set aside. “You okay.”
“I’m upright.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“It’s what I’ve got right now,” Healy said. His voice had a quality Holland didn’t like – controlled in the way things were controlled when being controlled was costing something.
Holland looked at the room. Concrete floor, a single bulb, the smell of industrial grease and something older underneath. Two men near the door, unhurried. The specific posture of people who had done this before and weren’t concerned about how it ended.
A third man came through a door at the far end. Medium height, unremarkable, wearing a jacket that was too nice for the room. He had the organized patience of someone who managed other people’s violence rather than performing it himself and had made his peace with that arrangement.
He stopped in front of Holland. Looked at him. Then he walked around behind Holland – behind both of them, where he couldn’t see – and he heard him stop.
“Mr. March,” the man said, from behind him. “I understand you’ve been documenting Mr. Reeves’ business arrangements.”
“I document lots of things,” Holland said. “I’m a visual person. Sunsets, architecture, the interesting-”
“Who is your client?”
“That’s confidential. Professional ethics. I have a code.”
A pause.
“I’m going to explain how this works,” the man said, still from behind, still with the patient voice. “You’re going to tell me what I need to know. The question is only how long it takes. I find people cooperate faster when the cost isn’t theirs personally.” Another pause. “Your partner here is going to help me make that point.”
Holland went very still.
“Hey,” he said, sharply. “Hey, whatever you’re-”
The sound that came from behind him stopped the sentence.
Not loud. That was the thing. Holland had expected loud. He’d expected something that announced itself. This was quiet and close and it turned his stomach in a way that loud wouldn’t have.
“Who is your client,” the man said, from behind Holland's left shoulder now, moving, staying where he couldn’t see.
“Stop,” Holland said. “Stop, I’ll-”
“The name.”
Holland thought about Carver. Nervous lawyer, two kids, had come to their office with shaking hands and a folder of documents and the look of a man who’d stumbled into something and couldn’t find his way back out. He thought about what happened to Carver if Holland gave him up. He thought about the folder and the documents and the people the documents implicated.
He thought about Healy being hurt because of him.
“Carver,” he said. “His name is Carver, he’s a lawyer, he hired us three weeks ago-”
“The documentation. What have you given him.”
“Nothing yet. We were still – the photographs aren’t developed, we haven’t-”
Another hit. Holland's hands, bound behind his back, found Healy’s hands in the space between their chairs without deciding to, and Healy’s fingers closed around his in a grip that was tight and immediate and said several things at once, none of which were okey, all of which were I’m here, I’m still here.
“The full scope of the documentation,” the man said. “Everything you have and everything you’ve given to anyone. Every copy.”
—
The back-to-back arrangement was its own specific cruelty.
Holland understood this as the thing it was – tactical, deliberate. He could hear everything happening behind him. He could feel it, through the chair, through Healy’s hands when Healy kept a hold of them, the information that transmitted through contact that he could not have borne receiving through sight. He couldn’t see Healy’s face. He couldn’t see the stripped expression, the no-machinery expression, couldn’t look at it and draw strength from it or offer anything back. But he could also not see the damage that was inflicted upon Healy.
He could only face forward and listen and feel the grip of Healy’s hands and answer the question or not answer them, and every time he didn’t answer-
“Stop,” Holland said. Again. For the fourth time. “Stop, I told you, I don’t have copies off-site, everything in in the car-”
“The developed photographs are not in the car,” the man said, patient and final. “We looked. The negatives are also not in the car. The contact sheet was but is incomplete. You’re a cautious man, Mr. March. Cautious men make backups.”
Holland said nothing.
“Where are the backups,” he said.
The man made a sound that wasn’t quite a sigh. More like a conclusion. He moved, Holland heard him move, and the sound of what happened next was something he was going to carry for a long time, the cracking sound of something breaking would be catalogued in the part of his memory that stored things he couldn’t process and couldn’t discard.
“Healy,” Holland said, loudly, and hated himself for how his voice came out. “Healy, talk to me.”
Nothing.
“Healy, you mother- you answer me right now!” The grip of his hands was searching, urgent, pressing Healy's fingers. “Healy-”
A breath. Ragged, slower than it should be. The grip returned, weakly, and Holland held on with both hands and closed his eyes.
“Good,” Holland said, and his voice was wrong, cracked somewhere in the middle of the word. “You stay there. You hear me? You stay right there and awake or something.”
“Don’t say and something,” Healy said, trying to reassure his partner.
—
He gave them the post office box.
Not everything – he gave them the location and held back the key, which was in his jacket pocket and which he described as being in his car, and he ran the calculation that they would go to check and that would buy time, and time was the only currency available now and he was going to spend every cent of it.
The man in the jacket received the information with the same patient nod and left with one of the men from the door and the other one stayed and Holland sat in his chair and breathed.
“Hey,” he said, quietly.
Healy’s hands were still in his. The grip was different now – less deliberate, more like weight.
“I gave them the PO box,” Holland said. “Not the key. Bought us time.”
A silence. Them rough and low “Smart.”
“Don’t sound so surprised.
“Wasn’t surprised.” A careful breath. “You think she called it in by now?”
Holland thought about Holly. About the habit they’d built, the in-case habit, the just so you know, Holls of every job since October. He’d told her the address. He’d told her the expected time back.
It was – he didn’t know what time it was. He had no idea how long he’d been out.
“If she didn’t,” Holland said, “she will.”
Healy was quiet. Holland felt him breathe. In and out, slower than he wanted, with an unevenness that he was documenting and not examining directly.
“Healy?”
“Still here.”
“I know. I can feel you.” He tightened his grip briefly. “I need you to stay that way.”
A long pause.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Healy said. Low, and plain, and Holland received it the same way he’d received it on one of those nights where Healy had sat next to him on his bathroom floor while he was wasted to the point of almost no return – as the specific weight of someone meaning what they said.
“Okay,” Holland said.
He held on. Behind him, Healy breathed. Outside, Los Angeles went about its Friday night.
—
Holly called Healy’s apartment at nine-fifteen.
She let it ring eight times. She hung up. She called her father’s office number, which rang to nothing, and then she sat at the kitchen table for ninety seconds with the list of numbers in front of her – the list her father had made her, just in case, Holls, you know how things go – and she did the math.
They were due back at eight-thirty. It was nine-fifteen. Her father was compulsive about calling when he was going to be late, the new version of him, the post-october version who checked in and answered the phone and told her where he was going. He had not called.
She called Detective Anie.
She’d met Anie during the Amelia case and she had filed her under reliable, not stupid, answers the phone. She answered on the third ring and she told her what she knew – address, two men, expected time, no contact – in the concise and organized way she presented information, and Anie, to her credit, did not ask her how old she was or suggest she was overreacting.
“I’ll check it out,” she said. “You stay home.”
“I’ll stay near home,” Holly said.
A pause that acknowledged the distinction without endorsing it. “I’ll call you when I know something.”
She hung up and put on her shoes.
—
Holly was half a block from the warehouse when she heard the voices.
She’d taken the bus – she knew the routes, had memorized them at an age that would probably alarm people if they knew, because her father’s car broke down a lot and you needed to know the routes – and she came around the corner on foot and stopped.
The door was open. Light spilling out onto the street. Two men coming out, moving with the purposeful speed of people executing a plan, and behind them-
Her father. Hands still taped in front of him, which had apparently not stopped him from doing something to someone on the way out, judging by the state of the man behind him. Her father moving under his own power, looking back over his shoulder, saying something to the person behind him in a low urgent voice.
Healy came through the door.
She looked at him and did the rapid inventory she always did – the same inventory she did when her father came home from a job, when Healy came back from something, the check-all-the-parts assessment – and what she saw made her cross the distance between them faster than she’d decided to move.
Her father saw her first. His face did the thing, the relief-guilt-love thing with no clean order.
“Holly-”
“I called Anie,” she said. “She’s on her way.” She looked at Healy, who had stopped moving and was standing with one hand on the doorframe in the way of someone that needed the doorframe more than they were going to say. “You need to sit down.”
“I’m fine,” Healy said.
She looked at him.
He looked back at her.
“You need to sit down,” she said again, in the voice she’d developed that made people feel twelve years old. She’d gotten it from somewhere unknown, some combination of having no other option and needing it badly enough that she’d built it herself.
Healy sat down on the step.
Seven minutes later Anie arrived and took stock of the situation with the resigned expression of a woman who had filed Holland March and Jackson Healy under inevitable paperwork and was working on accepting that.
She called for a car. She looked at the men inside the warehouse – one of whom was zip-tied to a support beam with his own restraints, a development that nobody explained to Anie’s satisfaction – and she made several phone calls and told Holland she was going to need a full statement in the morning.
“Morning’s fine,” Holland said. He was sitting next to Healy on the step and had been since Holly and directed the situation and he’d stopped arguing with the direction.
“The both of you,” Anie said, looking at Healy.
“Morning,” he said.
Anie looked at Holly. “You got here fast for someone who was supposed to stay home.”
“I stayed near home.” she said.
Anie looked at her with the expression of a woman who figured it was best to let that go. “You need a ride?”
“We have a car,” Holland said. “It’s on the street.”
“You’re not driving.”
“He’s not driving,” Holly said, indicating her father. “Healy can drive.”
“I can drive,” Healy confirmed.
Anie looked at Healy’s current state and opened her mouth.
“I’ve driven in worse shape,” he said.
—
They went to the hospital because Holland insisted and Holland insisting on medical attention was new enough that both Holly and Healy treated it with the seriousness it deserved.
The waiting room was orange plastic chairs and bad fluorescent light and a television mounted high on the wall showing the news with the sound off. Holly had been in this waiting room before, in October, and she sat in the same kind of chair and looked at the same kind of ceiling and felt the specific difference between then and now move through her.
Then, she’d been waiting to find out.
Now she knew. Both of them were here, in chairs on either side of her, present and accounted for and hers in whatever way they were hers, which was not a way she had a clean name for but which was real and specific and tonight had been real and specific in the starkest possible terms.
Her father had his elbow on his knee and his head in his hand. He’d been quiet since the steps outside the warehouse, which was not a condition that occurred naturally in Holland March and suggested he was processing something.
“Dad,” she said.
He looked up.
“You okay?”
He looked at her. He looked at Healy. He looked at his hands, which were still redened from the tape, and he did the thing he’d been doing since he worked the Amelia case where the machinery stayed down and he didn’t reach for the deflection.
“Working on it,” he said.
She nodded. She put her hand over his briefly, the way he did for her, and he turned his palm up and held on.
Healy was looking at the muted television. His face was in profile – the strong, stubborn profile of a man who had been through something and was in the process of deciding how to file it. He had a split lip and the beginning of bruising along his jaw and he was sitting with the careful stillness of someone monitoring their own pain level and not volunteering the results.
She looked at him for a moment.
Then she reached over and wrote something on the back of his hand, small and deliberate, in the pen she kept in her jacket pocket because she was Holly March and she always had a pen.
He looked down at his hand.
You will be okay.
He looked at her. She looked back at him with the plain expression, the one that wasn’t performing anything.
After a moment something shifted in his face. Not much. Healy didn’t do much. But something.
“Probably,” he said, which was not nothing.
“Probably,” she agreed.
Her father looked between them. “What does-” He craned his neck to see Healy’s hand. He read it. He was quiet for a moment. “That’s-”
“Don’t,” Holly said.
He closed his mouth.
The television showed something about the president. Outside the window, Los Angeles did what it did at eleven o’clock at night, the light of it amber and particular through the glass, and the three of them sat in a row in orange plastic chairs and waited for their names to be called.
Holland leaned back in his chair. After a moment Healy leaned back in his. Their shoulders were touching, the way they’d been back to back in the warehouse, but different – the difference between bound and chosen, between force and something else that neither of them was going to name tonight in a hospital waiting room on a friday, but that was there.
Watching the lonely Eridians sleep is a clun activity at this point. We love them all.
No zooms this time maybe later. Just some of my rambling \/
Hear me out.
The concept that cluns or mate having their own song or call to get someone near as they approach sleep sound so cute to me, so get this silly rocks sleeping and singing to one another.
Also first time drawing in depth ixora's other siblings, candle wax (the calico? one) and staircase (the soft blue one). They both not into the family business so I haven't planned much for them and count this small cute comic as my way of apologies or the next two week of possible inactivity.
grace, who has been alone for five minutes: oh my god. an alien! im not alone anymore! i hope he wants to be friends :)
rocky, coming up on 50 years of solitude, imprinting on grace in ways baby ducklings can only dream of: if you leave me to sleep where i can't watch your heart beat i am blowing up this tunnel with us both in it
So, fun fact, I’m apart of my college’s Wind Ensemble. I’ve been playing instruments since I was a toddler, and wind instruments since I was in 6th grade. So, sometimes, I think about what kind of instruments Eridian’s would be.
I feel like this may be a commonly accepted headcanon, but Adrian is wind chimes for SURE. I feel like a lot of older Eridians would be lower instruments, so things like contrabass bassoon or bass clarinet (maybe a little selfishly). The younger Eridians tend to be higher in pitch, so they sound more like piccolos and glockenspiels. And then as they get older and they mature, their sounds mature into deeper more rich sounds
And yeah there’s Eridians that sound like animals (cause that was also proven) but like, let me daydream
kianamaiart
titsay
prguitarman
kaledo-art
janainaart
blakekathryn
annaxmalina
turnnoffyourmind
