#earth-2

The next week dragged in an endless gauntlet of stupidity. Allen's painfully genuine concern, Captain West's incessant micromanaging, and the rest of the CCPD's general fuckery almost made Hartley wish he was in Iron Heights interrogating Singh.

Then, the day arrived.

Even with Hartley's new dampening hearing aids, Iron Heights was louder than before, almost to the point of distraction. The inmates' voices echoed off of the grey concrete walls, making their crude comments as he passed near impossible to ignore. The rustle of cards being shuffled felt like knives in his temples. He could hear someone screaming obscenities all the way from solitary. The guard let him into Singh's cell where, at least, the voices were muffled. Singh didn't look up from his newspaper.

"Back so soon, Mr. Rathaway?"

Singh's voice was smooth, clipped, as if they'd just spoken yesterday - which they hadn't. It had been six days, fourteen hours, and twenty-two minutes. Hartley had counted.

Hartley stepped in without responding and waited for the door to latch behind him. The room was small. Clean in the way that only utter control could produce. Singh sat at the table like it was a throne.

Singh folded the paper and set it aside. "So, what is it today? More maps?"

"Nine men." Hartley's voice was dry, surgical. "Sandhu. Reed. Zatouri. Manesh. Malloy. Reyes. Savchenko. Browne. DeSoto. All formerly yours. All butchered."

"I'm the bad guy, Rathaway. What the fuck do I care about sacrificing a few pawns?" Singh said, leaning forward to meet Hartley's eyes.

Hartley's mouth curled, cold and sharp. "More like bishops and knights, weren't they?" He leaned forward, voice soft as silk dragged over glass. "They made it pretty high up in your ranks. Rumor has it one of them might've even been more to you."

That landed. Singh's jaw clenched. Still, he held steady eye contact.

"What's it matter to you who a mob boss fucks on his downtime?" Singh grinned. "'Less of course, you're jealous?"

"Don't flatter yourself," Hartley said, tone brittle. "You're not my type."

"No?" Singh leaned back, draping one arm across the back of his chair. "Pity. You're exactly mine. Cold. Beautiful. Dangerous when cornered." His eyes glinted. "But not quite dangerous enough."

Hartley took a slow step forward. Then another.

The silence stretched between them like a drawn bowstring.

"Do you always deflect when someone strikes a nerve? It was Sandhu, wasn't it?"

"I told you, CSI. He was just a nice fuck, that's all."

"Guess Nimbus got the wrong idea too, then, considering he murdered him in your bed and left a message on your mirror."

Singh didn't do anything as obvious as flinch but his weight shifted, ever so slightly. He disguised the motion by crossing his legs - Hartley saw through it. 

"Nimbus is a fucking moron." Singh sneered as though the name itself put a bad taste in his mouth. "He gets a lot of things wrong."

Hartley leaned back in his chair. "Guess it won't bother you to explain how you found him, then, will it? You were the one who found him, right?"

"I was," Singh drawled, looking almost bored. "What I did or didn't do after is none of your fucking business, pretty boy." 

"Again, with the flattery. I think you just don't want to remember what you saw." Hartley responded, matching Singh's uninterested tone. "Strangulation's an ugly way to go, isn't it? Purple in the face, eyes bulging, with your tongue protruding like a bloated worm-"

"Enough." Singh hadn't yelled but the authority in his voice stopped Hartley mid-sentence anyway. "If you're still trying to get me to talk you'll stop talking about Sandhu. Now."

"What was he to you?" Hartley pressed. "Forensics report says you cleaned and dressed him post-mortem. One might think you were trying to hide evidence."

A flicker in the corner of Singh's eye. That flash of something unmoored. Loss, maybe. Guilt. Rage. Hartley wasn't sure which.

He tapped the file against the metal table. Let the images slide free: autopsy photos, time of death estimates, fingerprint analysis. "You washed him, Singh. Closed his eyes. Dressed him nicely. Brought him back to the bedroom and laid him out on the bed like he was sleeping instead of brutally murdered."

Singh reached for the folder slowly, flipped it shut, and set it aside like it bored him. "You done with your performance?"

"This isn't theatre," Hartley said flatly. "It's evidence."

Singh's voice was low, measured, lethal. "Then you tell me, Mr. Rathaway - what do you think it shows? That I mourned a mistake? That I wept over a boy who should've known better than to crawl into bed with a man like me?"

"You loved him."

"No," Singh said. "I dragged him from the gutter, trained him like a dog, and let him think he mattered. I ruined him."

Hartley didn't respond immediately. He watched Singh, trying to decide where the armor ended and the fracture began. "Nimbus didn't just kill him. He desecrated him. You felt that, didn't you? That rage. That grief."

"I don't grieve pawns."

"That's why you hate the Darbinyans." It wasn't a question.

"I had twenty men die under my command before I was thirty," Singh said flatly, but there was something off in the delivery. Too precise. Too practiced. "You think one body concerns me?"

"I think Harvik Sandhu wasn't just a body."

A flicker crossed Singh's face. Barely there. But Hartley's eyes were trained for detail. Singh wasn't as practiced at loss as he liked to pretend. Hartley continued:

"I think you want vengeance so bad it's choking you." Hartley slid another photo across. The mirror from Singh's penthouse. See you soon, lover boy, scrawled in Sandhu's blood. "You lay out the plans of the hideout, we catch Nimbus. If we catch him because of your intel, I'll see what I can do about getting him in here with you. Maybe even somewhere with...slightly more lax security."

Another beat of silence passed. Then Singh laughed. Low. Bitter.

"You think this makes us allies, Rathaway? You think you can bribe me with the chance to break his fucking jaw?"

"No." Hartley answered breezily. "But I think I can bribe you with the chance to kill him with your own two hands."

Singh raked his eyes over Hartley's slight form, surveying him quietly for several moments. He pushed the folder towards Hartley.

"And you'll 'look the other way'? Is that the deal?"

Hartley's lips curved faintly, thin and sharp. "You're in prison. What you do with the guests once they're dropped off...isn't really my jurisdiction."

Singh studied him, expression unreadable, but something about it almost seemed...impressed by Hartley's ruthlessness. Still, he was silent for so long that Hartley began packing his things, certain Singh wasn't going to give an inch and he'd have to go back to the drawing board. Singh spoke before he could rise to leave.