#ingridlake

2: Do you ever get “good morning” texts from anyone?

yes indeedy doo have i mentioned that i’m dating someone

3: If your significant other smoked pot, would you care?

uh maybe a little bit but i certainly wouldn’t say anything

5: What were you doing at 11PM last night?

hanging out on skype with eliza even though i should’ve been sleeping

7: What would you do if you found out you had been cheated on?

answered

11: You can only drink ONE liquid for the rest of your life - what is it?

seltzer

13: What time do you go to bed?

usually sometime between 11:30 and 1:30? 

17: Do you hate the person you fell the hardest for?

nope but also i’m not sure i ever really have

19: Is there someone that makes you happy every time you see them?

answered

23: Were you happier four months ago than you are now?

lmao yeah but probably only because i can tell i’m sinking into a bit of a Depression Episode right now and i’m not looking forward to it. four months ago was almost march? that was a good time

29: Do you have a best friend?

i’m lucky enough to have a couple, actually

31: Who was your last call/text message from?

eliza, but pretty much at the exact same time as one of my friends from high school

37: Do you have any good friends of the opposite sex?

what’s the opposite of “gender is a lie”? if this is asking if i have guy friends, then yes I do

41: Do you think age matters in relationships?

uh yeah?

43: How many people have you had real, strong feelings for since high school ended?

three

47: Honestly, what’s on your mind right now?

i’m very tired and kinda sad and i can feel myself zoning out but i’m supposed to be paying attention to something right now i feel bad about it

53: What was the last thing you ate?

dry frosted flakes (depression meals)

59: When was the last time you took a long drive?

answered

61: Have you ever TPd someone’s house?

that’s not a thing

67: Do you curse around your parents?

oh my god absolutely my mother is where i got my potty mouth from

71: Have you ever been dumped?

not yet!

73: Have you ever casually made out with someone who you weren’t seriously involved with?

just a couple times, but i wasn’t really into it

79: What makes your heart flutter and brings a big cheesy smile to your face?

tbh, knowing that someone was thinking about me. the concept of “this reminded me of you” is a Lot

83: Do you miss your last sweetie?

the last time i dated someone was the tenth grade so... no.

89: Do you cook?

not in the least

97: Are you a tease?

i definitely don’t think so?

101: Hugs or Kisses?

i’m not always up for kissing but i’m almost always up for hugs

103: The first thing you notice about the opposite sex?

what the fuck is an opposite

107: Your last kiss?

Very Nice

109: Have you kissed anyone in the past month?

yeppppp

113: Do you currently have feelings for anyone?

all of these questions presume that i’m single which i’m sorta not? so like yeah

When Peter climbs through the window, Juno’s slumped on the couch, watching the last few ounces of gin swirl around the bottom of the bottle. He kneels before Juno, gently tugging the bottle out of his hand.

Juno looks up, his bleary eyes so very sad that Peter wants to wrap his arms around him. “What’s wrong?”

“I…” Juno swallows, pulling back at the bottle like he plans to drain the rest.

He smooths Juno’s hair.“You can tell me, love. It’s alright.”

“I’m sorry.” Juno bites his lip. “I… I can’t remember your name.”

“Is that what’s worrying you?” He strokes Juno’s hair again. “You haven’t forgotten. I’m afraid I don’t tell anyone my name. It would take someone very special for me to tell it now.”

He’s far too drunk to hide the twinge of disappointment on his face. Perhaps that’s deserved. After all, who in all the galaxy is more singular than my soulmate?

Besides, in the state he’s in, he’ll never remember past morning.

Peter leans in just enough to press his lips to Juno’s forehead. “It’s Peter, love. You can call me Peter.”

Peter.

It shouldn’t make Juno’s heart skip a beat, but it does. It’s just a name, after all. Just a pair of syllables. But after years of wondering, of fantasizing about a face with nothing to call him, this feels like everything.

Peter’s tucking Juno into bed when a pair of arms wrap around his neck, tugging him closer.

“Juno,” he warns gently.

“Don’t want you to leave yet,” his detective mumbles, already half asleep. “Stay a little longer.”

Peter glances at the open window. There are still a few hours yet until dawn. It couldn’t hurt to stay a little while longer.

“Alright,” he says softly. “Just a little while.”

He slips out of his shoes and on top of the covers, and immediately Juno rolls closer against him.

It’s a lovely sight, Juno drifting off beside him, making little unintelligible noises as he slips into a dream.

It would be an even better sight to wake up to.

It’s easier to play drunk late at night, when Juno’s too tired to be coherent even on purpose. Even easier with this new arrangement, when he’s half asleep and Peter’s warm and cozy beside him.

“The first time I saw you, I think I stared at the mirror for hours. I couldn’t stop looking at you.”

Peter’s hand pauses on his hip. “I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner.”

That draws Juno back into awareness, but he keeps his voice soft. “Why didn’t you?”

“You were engaged. You had a good job. A bright future. I didn’t want to ruin that for you.” 

He tries not to tense as all the drowsiness drains from him.

Because that can’t be right. That can’t.

“I--” It takes a moment to force sleep back into his voice. “I think I did that just fine on my own.” 

Peter sighs into Juno’s hair. “My life isn’t the kind you would want to be a part of.”

“Don’t I get some say in that? I mean, I don’t exactly have room to be picky.”

“Shh,” Peter murmurs. “No need to get yourself excited. You’re...” He pauses. Frowns. Leans in and inhales. And suddenly Juno’s regretting filling the liquor bottles completely with water this past week, because there’s no booze to smell on his breath. “You’re not really drunk, are you?”

In a time like this, a detective only really has one of two options: he can come clean or he can double down.

“I...was drunk,” he says carefully.

Peter sits up, stony-faced. “How long ago, exactly?”

Juno would much rather be having sleepy confessions wrapped up in bed, but that’s not going to happen, is it? He sits up as well, too aware of the space between them. “Two weeks ago, maybe?”

“Two weeks.” Peter takes off his glasses to pinch the bridge of his nose. “You’ve been lying about this for two weeks.”

“Remind me, how long have you been sneaking in through my window?”

“And this was the natural response? It didn’t occur to you to say something to me?”

Okay, so maybe Juno’s been wondering the same thing for a while. “Well... yeah,” he says slowly. Weeks ago, it would have been impossible for him to get the words out, but he’s had a whole lot of practice at making humiliating confessions lately. “I didn’t want you to stop coming by.”

“Of course not.” He still hasn’t put his glasses back on. He’s still pinching the bridge of his nose, his hand obscuring most of his face. “I was getting worried for the state of your liver, you know.”

“It’s probably not in the best shape,” Juno admits.

“Then perhaps this is a habit we should break.”

Juno swallows. He knew he couldn’t keep this up forever. He’s trying to find the right words to say when he hears the click of Peter’s glasses being set on the bedside table.

When Sasha and Mick find him, he’s quiet. The blood and snot and tears have all dried; he’s even stopped shaking. All he does is stare straight ahead. The only sign he can see them at all is the way that he flinches when they approach. He doesn’t answer when Mick demands to know if somebody hurt him. He doesn’t resist when Sasha searches him for injuries.

She’s the one who figures it out first. “Juno–”

He can sense the question she’s going to ask, and he curls into himself like he can hide from the answer. She grabs him by the shoulders and forces him to face her.

“Juno, whose blood is this?”

It takes him a long time to form the words. In the end, only one of them makes it out.

“Ben.” He looks like he might cry again, if there was anything left in him. His voice is faint and raw. “He’s dead, Sasha. I killed him.”

It’s Mick who sits with him for the next several hours while Sasha collects herself. It’s too soon after what happened to Annie, her nerves are too raw, it hurts too much.

In the end, though, that’s why she comes back: because she still doesn’t know exactly what happened to Annie. And goddammit, she can’t go the rest of her life not knowing what happened to Ben.

There’s no crime scene, no line of police tape to cross. Juno carried his brother’s body to the hospital long after it had gone cold, but it’s too soon for the cops to have found the right place– and that’s assuming they’d even look. After all, people die in Oldtown all the time. Some of them are kids. And when they’re already past saving…

She swallows back bile.

It happened at an abandoned house not too far from Juno’s place, one with heavy chains over the boarded up windows and doors. During Juno’s cycle, one of the sets of chains is held together with an old-school combination lock, so she and Mick can sleep without having to worry about anyone getting in there while Juno’s feral… at least, that was the idea. But the chains over the side door hang limp, and the lock lies in the dust beside them.

It was Ben’s lock, from back when he was in his retro tech phase. He would have known the combination to open it.

The irony hits her like a punch in the gut. She has to take a minute to steady herself.

She can do this. She has to do this. For Juno’s sake. For Ben’s. For Annie’s.

She takes a deep breath and pulls open the door.

This is one of the old buildings, back when they were made to last, with plaster over concrete walls. It looks like Juno found that out the hard way: the rotting carpet and imitation hardwood is ripped to shreds, and the walls are scored with clawmarks from months of frantic digging. Every flat surface is covered by several months’ worth of thick red dust, interrupted only last night.

There are multiple sets of tracks here, but it’s not hard to pick out Ben’s from Juno’s human footsteps. His feet are– were– too big for him, so much that he skipped right past wearing Juno’s hand-me-down shoes and started having to wear their mothers’. Sasha follows the footsteps carefully.

He was running, that much is clear. The tracks turn sharply to the left, and then zag to the right, toward the basement door.

The doorknob is free from dust where it was recently grabbed.

The moment she opens the door, the smell hits her, coppery and thick enough to make her stomach turn. 

She runs away. It’s a secret that she’ll take to her grave, but she’s out the door and vomiting in the alley before she knows what happened. She stays there until she stops crying, until her heart stops trying to ram its way out of her ribcage, until she can actually breathe again.

And then she spits out the taste of acid and marches back into the house.

Because it’s awful– it will never stop being awful– but she has to know. Juno has to know. And if this gives her even more nightmares… well, the old ones could use some company.

And so she marches down the hall and into the basement.

It’s strange. There’s so much blood– and so little. There should be more– or there shouldn’t be any at all, but if the universe has to take someone like Ben out of this world, then at least it should have the decency to give him the kind of sendoff he would have gotten excited about. Instead it’s just there, a single pool, cracking and curling as it dries, interrupted by a few smears and a handful of bloody paw prints. 

She feels queasy again, but there’s nothing left in her to throw up, and so she looks harder. Once she gets over the initial wrongness, a new kind of wrongness sets in.

Because she remembers what happened to that poor rabbit that ran into Juno in the sewer. She found traces of blood everywhere– on the walls, on the ceiling. This is too clean. Even if Ben had died in one bite, it would still be too clean.

She turns on the flashlight of her comms and looks again, and this time she spots what she missed before: the dust on the stairs looks strange, wiped away in patterns that are too unsteady to be deliberate. On the edge of one step, two thirds of the way down, there’s a small splash of blood.

And the puzzle pieces click into place.

Ben running, going through the door– maybe he didn’t even realize it led to a flight of stairs– and then he fell. He hit his– with all that blood, it must have been his head. That’s where he landed. That’s where Juno circled him once, as a wolf, and then… laid down next to him?

God, Juno.

The human footprints leading up the stairs are incomplete, the blood clinging to the soles already half-dried.

But that can’t be right. Because Ben was obviously running from something, and so fast that he didn’t bother to look where he was going. What, though?

She climbs the stairs again, looking more closely at the footprints. There’s her trail, going to the basement and back and back again. There’s Juno, with the holes in his sole where he used his shoes to climb over razor wire. There’s Juno’s paw prints. And there’s Ben, running to the stairs and doubling back before–

No. Wait.

The footprints are the same size, the same brand, but they’re different. One of them has the tread mostly worn off the sole, while the other looks fairly new.

The worn shoes only go one way. The newer ones make it as far as the basement, then back up to the wall and go back the way they came.

Ben was chased.

And Sasha knows who did it.

Sasha climbs in through Juno’s window, her feet bare to avoid making a sound on the cheap linoleum. There’s no need to be so careful, though. Sarah Steel is passed out over the kitchen table, an overturned bottle of scotch in her hand, her dust-stained shoes still on her feet.

She leaves her there.

“Peter...” Juno said very slowly. It was the kind of tone that you didn’t want to hear from a lady who was that good with a gun. “What’s this?”

Peter, though, was not one to be intimidated. “It looks like a shopping bag.”

Snake-fast, Juno’s hand darted into the bag and dragged out a synth-leather collar. “What the hell is this, Nureyev? I swear to God, if you’re trying to be cute--”

“Really, Juno. Do I even need to try?” Peter turned off the tablet he was reading and set it on the table beside him. “I just thought I’d take you for a little walk next week.”

Juno’s words said “Peter”. His tone said ‘I love you, but I may have to murder you.’ “I am not a dog. I am a werewolf. You can’t just take me outside into the city where people are, because I might kill somebody.”

“So far the bigger issue has been you running into traffic, actually.” He crossed one leg over the other, entirely unperturbed by the look of growing horror on Juno’s face as he continued. “I’m sure you must have realized by now, but the ability to use flush toilets doesn’t exactly carry over when you don a fur coat, so to speak.”

“Oh God--” 

“I tried to improvise with one of your belts, but you managed to slip out and made a break for it.”

“Wait, is that what happened to that belt--”

“If I’m going to be making a habit of this, I’d rather be properly prepared. Also, dog biscuits were on sale.” 

Juno flopped onto the couch with an aggravated sigh. There really was no winning this for him, and they both knew it.

“Dammit, Peter. If I hurt someone...”

Peter leaned closer to him, gently running his nails over Juno’s scalp. Juno didn’t like to admit it, but it felt really, really nice.

“You aren’t some bloodthirsty killer on your nights off,” Peter said softly. “You’re just a dog. A particularly large dog, but no more ferocious than any other that I’ve seen. One that gets anxious when locked in a small dark room for hours on end. Or that might fight back if he’s cornered by a pack of murderous gangsters.” 

“You don’t know that,” Juno muttered, but he leaned in closer against Peter. “Not for sure.”