i never miss

Three hours later, your eyes are burning. You’ve made two kettles of boiling water that you keep pouring into the same mug with a tea bag that’s begging to be thrown away.

Dex is on your loveseat, but now he’s got your laptop on his knees— the work one, the Thinkpad you lug around in a backpack when you feel the extremely rare urge to work outside your office. He’s scrolling through a ping list of potential matches to his general appearance while you work on the main rig. It’s nothing you think will yield results like Rankin’s search, but it’s something for him to do instead of staring over your shoulder.

You also have the suspicion he’s playing solitaire in a browser, the way you hear the touchpad clicking and dragging whenever you lift a headphone cup to check in. 

You look at Rankin, David. Not just the FBI stuff, but the life stuff that can’t be gleaned from his work’s database. Born at Elmhurst Hospital Center. Married in 2010 to an Elena Marchetti, now Elena Rankin. Catholic wedding. Big crowd. The photograph was a family-friend who runs a studio in Jersey. An Eleanor Rankin was born on February 14th, 2014. A Valentine’s Day gift. Cute.

From where you’re looking, David and Elena Rankin have clean records, clean finances, and very clean lives. Donate-to-the-church and volunteer-at-the-soup-kitchen lives. This originally made you suspicious until you dug deeper and realized that they were all just boring. A bureaucrat in a fed suit who does his job, goes home to his family, and has elaborate tea parties with his daughter that his wife posts on a public Facebook account. Dangerous to do, but cute.

Someone this boring wouldn’t be curious about Dex. 

You got through the Rankins’ cell logs. Nothing but people in their contacts or spam callers, so nothing that indicates criminal activity. You go to the joint bank account— wow, these people really trusted each other— and look at their purchases. No burner phones. You look at cash withdrawals. Always from the ATM by the FBI office, or directly from the Bank of America branch by their apartment. That doesn’t mean that there’s nothing, but you’re coming to the conclusion that someone figured out his password, or accessed a terminal he forgot to log off of.

You tell this to Dex, who nods without looking up from the laptop you’ve given him. “Fisk still has people inside. If he wanted someone to check on me, he’d use someone he owns.”

“Rankin doesn’t come off as owned, but he could be someone who wouldn’t notice his credentials being used because he’s busy being home with his family.” It’s… kind of sweet, you suppose. A real, modern family man. Who would’ve thought those still existed.

You pull up the terminal access logs again. The query was submitted at 7:01 PM— usually family time for a couple with a second grader. Rankin’s office ID hadn’t been used since 5:24 PM at the parking lot that day. He’d left. You find the CCTV footage. Car with Rankin’s plate pulling out and driving home.

Someone else had stayed.

“Can you trace the physical access inside the building?” Dex asks as you blink at a second monitor, one that’s running Saberfind for a girl who thinks her boyfriend is selling drugs. “Who else was in the building at that hour?”

“Maybe,” you sip your weak tea. “Gimme an bit.”

Dex nods. He goes back to the laptop. You look back to the main rig. The rain stopped at some point, leaving your windows streaked and your apartment feeling stuffy. 

“You mind cracking a window open?” You ask Dex. He nods. You can see him in your peripheral, walking to the window at the side of your office and managing to push open the window you swore was sealed shut. 

“Thanks.” You say. 

He grunts in response. 

☆☆☆☆☆

At 2:47 AM, you find something.

“There’s a gap in the security footage.” You say behind a yawn. You pull up the building’s internal camera system. “It’s not deletion, but it looks like someone looped twenty minutes of footage from the hallway outside organized crime. Same people walking past, same timestamp, same everything. If you weren’t looking for it, you’d miss it.”

Dex is behind you now, leaning over your shoulder to look at the two feed windows you’ve placed side by side. You can feel the warmth of him, smell the combination of laundry detergent and Old Spice. It’s extremely generic, which makes you wonder if he picks this on purpose. 

“Can you break the loop?”

“Already working on it. It’ll be a while.” You lean back.

Dex doesn’t move. You’re acutely aware of him standing there, of his breathing, of the way his eyes track your work with an intensity that would be unnerving if you weren’t so tired. “Aren’t you going to start hacking?”

“The code does the work. We just have to let it sit for a bit.” You stretch out your worse knee with a wince. “I don’t think it’ll take more than two hours.”

“I’ll stick around.”

You don’t know how you feel about that, but you land on accepting it. People around you. A person, really, but someone who isn’t a doctor or a service worker helping you out with something. This is… something new.

Your entire lower body cracks with both pain and satisfaction as you limp-walk to your shelving unit, where your books and DVDs and the small flatscreen you own sits. Your hand hovers over movie spines, but you see the Blu-ray of Stop Making Sense sitting there, and think about your unfinished movie.

“Have you ever seen Stop Making Sense?”

Dex’s footsteps from the office to your living room. “The concert film?”

“You know it?”

“I’ve heard of it.” A pause. “Never seen it.”

“I’m thinking about putting it on,” you’re forcing yourself through this. Be friendly. Be friendly. Be friendly. “If you want to watch it with me.”

Dex doesn’t answer, but he does move to your living room couch and settle on one end. You take the other.

David Byrne walks onto an empty stage with a boombox and a guitar, says “Hi. I have a tape I want to play,” and his birdlike head movements begin as he strums.

Dex watches in silence. You watch him watching, curious despite yourself.

By the time Thank You for Sending Me an Angel, ends and the full band kicks in for Found a Job, something has shifted in his posture. His shoulders have dropped half an inch. His hands rest loosely on his thighs instead of gripping them. When you glance over, his eyes are on the screen, but they’re not hollow anymore. They’re... following. Engaged.

“He’s weird,” Dex says midway through Found a Job. Not in a mean way, just flat affect and fact. And you laugh— a real laugh. It’s not the nose-exhale you’ve been doing for ages now. Something with a noise. “That’s the point.”

Dex looks at you, and for a moment his expression is open in a way you’ve never seen. Curious.

“The big suit,” he says. “I’ve seen pictures. When does that happen?”

“Be patient,” you say. You’re smiling, runoff from the laugh. It’s… different. “It’s a journey.”

☆☆☆☆☆

The loop breaks about an hour after Stop Making Sense, when you’re playing solitaire on the Zenbook and Dex is playing solitaire on the Thinkpad. You both squint at your main monitor when footage stutters at the cut and smooths out. A man walks down the hallway at 6:58 PM. He’s wearing a suit, carrying a briefcase, walking with the easy confidence of someone who belongs there. He stops at a door, swipes a card, enters.

“Can you zoom on his face?”

You do. The image resolves— grainy, slightly off-angle, but clear enough to make Dex goes still with recognition.

“Who is it?” you ask.

When he doesn’t answer, you turn to look at him. His face has gone pale under the five o’clock shadow, his jaw tight, his eyes fixed on the screen like it might explode.

“That’s not possible,” he says quietly. “He’s dead.”

“Who?”

Dex’s hand moves to his side— that reaching motion again, for something that isn’t there. When he speaks, his voice is different. Rougher. Almost human in its disturbance.

“His name is Vincent Greco. He was one of Fisk’s enforcers.” Dex is frowning. “I killed him the night of Fisk’s wedding.”

The words hang in the air. Outside, a car passes somewhere, tires splashing through puddles. Your computer hums. The footage loops, Vincent Greco walking toward a door he should be too dead to walk toward.

You look at Dex. Dex looks at the screen. Neither of you says anything for a very long time.

Then: “You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.” His voice is still rough, still strange. “I put a round right in his chest. He dropped. He didn’t get up.”

“People survive gunshots.”

“Not those. Not at that range, and not with the gun I used.” Dex finally looks away from the screen. Your eyes meet for a moment before he looks back at the screen.

You don’t know what to say. You’re an information broker (yes, hacker, whatever), not a grief counselor for someone potentially hallucinating a victim, not a friend who can feel out a mood. You’re barely a human being. But being the only person who knows he’s alive thrusts you into a role like that anyway, and now you’re one of two people to know that a dead man is walking around an FBI office.

“I need to sleep.” You decide. “And so do you. I can check for A.I alterations when I wake up, but the footage looks clean to me.”

“Someone’s playing a game,” Dex straightens as he steps back from your chair. The mask is back in place— hollow eyes, rigid posture, the ghost in a human suit. But you saw underneath it, just for a moment. You saw whatever lives under his skin. 

“I’ll need more from you.” Dex continues. “Everything on Vincent Greco. Where he’s been, who he’s seen, what he’s doing. If he’s alive, I need to know why. If he’s not—” A pause. “If he’s not, I need to know who’s wearing his face.”

“Double.”

For a moment, something flickers in his eyes. You think it’s amusement. This is the most you’ve been around each other. He nods.

You nod. “I’ll start now.”

Dex moves toward the exit— your actual door, not the window. He pauses with his hand on the knob.

“The buzzer code,” he says. “1024.”

“A power of two. Easy to remember.”

He looks back at you. That almost-smile is there again, faint but present. “Goodnight.”

“Night.”

The door closes behind him. You listen to his footsteps fade down the hallway, then lean back in your chair again. 5:13 in the morning. You hope you can get to sleep again.

a/n reply to any reach out, touch faith post to get put on the taglist!

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