Take It To The Grave, tag: ada!

Everything was covered in cat hair.

That was, ultimately, the price he paid for locking himself in his house for the past week. Never mind the missed calls. The lost writers running around The London Pulse like headless chickens. The slow dimming of Landon Turnbull from the public eye. The cat hair was really Landon's biggest problem. He was accustomed to sending his clothes out to the dry cleaners, where some Asian with a sharp, quick tone would whip his shirts and pants back into shape.

Ever since the incident with Arran Santiago--the bribery on Landon's part, the argument over the phone, and ultimately, Arran's untimely and violent demise--Landon had been on a nail's edge. He would be able to handle the consequences when they were doled at him. He fully expecting the police to show up at his door, warrant and handcuffs in hand, replaying the tape where Landon attempted to blackmail Arran into giving him a little extra safety within the cross section of the Families. And if it wasn't the police, it would be the hit men who took down Arran, whoever they were, Legion or otherwise, dragging him out and putting a bullet through his head in the same way they did the Santiago leader. Arran had body guards. He had protection. What did Landon have? A plethora of locks on his door, heavy shades, and a couple sharp-clawed cats.

The cats. Right. He'd stocked up on enough cat food for the next apocalypse and ordered in when he had to. But the problem with not leaving home for days on end was the constant barrage of cat fur. Landon loved his cats. As much as someone like Landon could love anything other than himself. They got the best cat food, the best toys, a small kitty jungle-gym which they (the spoiled brats they were) spent more time sleeping in than playing. That wasn't the problem. The problem was in the fact that his food, his drinks, his furniture, and his bed was covered in cat fur. And Landon spent much too much time pacing, peaking out slits in the windows, and drinking himself stupid to be bothered to clean any of it up.

But Landon could only hide with his tail between his legs for so long. Because after he'd drunk his place dry and started finding cat fur in his vomit like the rest of his feline friends, he was still nowhere near finding the answers to his questions. Which meant one thing. He had to leave his house and search for them himself.

And so he unlocked every lock he had installed in his door and finally made his way to the Scotland Yard. He wasn't exactly unfamiliar with the place; on more than one occasion, he would stop by and try to wring one of the on-duty officers dry so he'd have something nice and scandalous to put in his paper. The Scotland Yard was a great place to find trinkets of rumors to start. And, more often than not, the object of his wringing was none other than Ada Auberon. Ada worked the blood lab, which meant she didn't stonewall him like the other detectives did, but it did give her a unique spot to get the latest on who died and what happened. Which meant she might very well have a clue about Arran Santiago's death or give him a heads up in case his name was on some sort of "Wanted" list. Plus, a little human interaction could do him some good, and he'd had a soft spot for the girl.

Honestly, he half-expected the alarms to go off the second he stepped in the Scotland Yard. Followed by the swift pinch of handcuffs right before they threw him in some cage. Instead, he offered Ada's name and walked right through, as though nothing was out of the ordinary. He felt like he was wearing a target on his chest, yet no one even bothered to look up at him. Then again. He was covered in cat fur and probably looked like he'd been drinking for the past week (all truths). They probably took him for some wandering homeless person. So this was what it felt like to be ordinary. How depressing.

Ada wasn't hard to find. She had a surprisingly nice figure for a scientists and a bad habit of looking cute in men's clothes. All things that, normally, would have had Landon attracted to the young woman and looking for a way into her lab coat (and subsequently her case files). However, Landon's affection for Ada was something else entirely. He liked her bluntness. Her bullish attitude. She reminded her of him. No, not of him. She had a little too much heart to be him. Of...someone. Of someone he did his damnedest not to think about. Of someone who had been small and impressionable when he had left, who would take his phone and hide it just to get him to chase her, tackle her, and linger those extra couple minutes wrestling it from her. The brief reprieve for the rowdy and uncivilized Cogney orphans before he straightened his spine and folded himself back into his clean and pressed three-piece suit.

Ada. Right. She seemed so busy pouring over her latest crime scene photo, Landon was able to sneak up behind her and snatch the photograph out from under her nose, lifting it up to examine it himself. No one he recognized, but it was hard to recognize anyone with that many lacerations criss-crossing their body. "Your latest boyfriend?" Landon quipped, "When is anyone going to teach you how to put a bow in your hair and play nice like all the good little girls?" Taunting. It came naturally to Landon. Goodnatured, clearly, but all the same, he hoped it would at very least distract from his unkempt appearance and his desperate attempt to keep composure when he felt like he was standing on hot rocks.
------------------------------------------
Note: Pre-Rhapsody, methinks?

Ada liked her job. It gave her the freedom to work without interruption while doing something that helped society. She liked the detectives and the other people who worked in the lab, for the most part, and appreciated that they kept people from harassing her. They were like her knights in shining armour, preventing her from having to deal with catcalls in the vicinity of the building. When she was working, she gave her entire focus to the task at hand. Today, it meant that she was trying to figure out how the blood spatter on the victim had three different contributors. It was a puzzle, and she loved puzzles. She would be content to work on this all day - and indeed had already been poring over the photograph and her results for the better part of the morning and early afternoon.

Inhaling sharply when the photograph was snatched away from her, she immediately scowled, pivoting on her lab stool to berate whomever had crossed through her invisible barriers to disturb her work. Seeing that it wasn't a coworker at all, but Landon, her scowl only deepened. "I don't sleep with dead guys." She grumbled, snatching her photograph right back. "And I don't wear bows." Smoothing it against the lab bench, she turned back to face him, arms crossed over her chest. "You look like hell."

Honestly, she'd never seen him quite like this before. If she were the type to worry, she might worry that he had gone into some deep depression or something, and no longer had the will to live...or at least shower. "Haven't I told you that facial hair doesn't work on men with fair complexions?" She could have sworn that she'd mentioned that to him at least once before. Anyway, the grand sum of his appearance indicated to her that the apocalypse must have come, as she had never seen him this unpresentable before in her life. Of course, presentability was entirely relative in her mind, and everything she'd learned on the topic, she'd learned from him. So really he'd just shot himself in the foot with that whole lecture. After giving him the once (or thrice) over, she finally asked the question his appearance begged. "So what happened?"

Ada huffed when he took her photograph from her and snatched it back, quickly pressing it against the desk as though his mere fingerprints had damaged it. He couldn't help it, really. He was amused. It was that older brother in him--that nagging need to make a girl irritable enough to pout. I mean, it was just so hard to take them seriously when they got flustered and agitated over something so small and pointless. And when it was so easy to annoy...all the better. Ada really didn't have a chance in hell.

But Landon didn't get very long to enjoy the benefits of playful Ada before she turned on him, her lips pressed in a thin line. Worry didn't quite fit the description. No, everything was analytical behind those eyes. She sensed some variable in Landon was off-kilter, and now she was hunting down the culprit. A detective to the core, really--why had Landon thought he could hide his ulterior motives in the Scotland Yard, of all places? Because Landon more often than not relied on the human weakness of unfiltered emotion that blocked everyone's good sense. Everyone but Ada, that is. That was one of the reasons why he liked her in the first place. Only now it was most inconvenient, because he had a couple secrets he wanted to hold in his pocket for a little while longer and she was narrowing her inquisitive eyes at him and stating the obvious truth: "You look like hell."

Now it was Landon's turn to purse his lips together as he rubbed his fingers over his chin, feeling the scruff there. "What, you don't think I can pull this off? I thought it'd make me look more cultured. Worldly. Like Mark Twain or...Bono."

Landon's classical references only went so far. Pop culture always won out. Still, Ada pressed, asking him: "So what happened?"

Time to weave her a nice story. "The usual," he said. "Doomed love. Broken hearts. Nights in pajamas eating ice cream out of the carton." Clearly, Landon was being facetious. As always. But since he was so rarely truly serious, he figured he could get away with it. Either way, he leaned against her desk, palm propping him up as he pressed on with, "I'm looking for a distraction--got anything good in the books?" His eyes scanned over her desk as though he would find something juicy just waiting there for him. Casually, he added, "Say...something about that whole Arran Santiago situation. Any breaks in that case?" Trying very hard to be flippant about it. Praying his poker face was as good as he thought it was and she wouldn't notice just how desperate he was to hear that his named was cleared from Arran's files.

Ada, of course, was Landon's opposite in many ways. While he thrived on the beating heart of the city - the pulse, the gossip, the rumours, the drama, the lies - she lived for the dead, cold, silence of space and laboratories. So when he referenced someone like Bono, she simply blinked at him, figuring that he was making some point that wasn't relevant to the conversation anyhow. So while he babbled on and on, changing the subject, she considered what might be wrong with him. Perhaps it was just a difficult deadline...though she'd never known him to get flustered by a deadline before. When he didn't have the material, he just made something up. Such was the joy of being Landon.

Realizing that he'd asked her a question, she snapped out of her little sleuthing reverie to give him the once over, once more. "You know I can't tell you that." She smirked, knowing that he did know and that it drove him batty. "Suffice it to say that it wasn't anyone whose name you'd know." It wasn't anyone whose name they knew. The prints weren't in the system, the evidence was scant, and therefore the case would likely run cold sooner than later. The only reason it was still open now was because the man had held so much power in this city. If it were up to the detectives, they would have thrown in the towel weeks ago. So instead, they left it to her and the other lab rats to see if they could find something - anything - that might serve as a lead.

Cocking her head to the side, she swiveled on her stool. "Want me to take a break? We could have tea." It was an abnormal offer, but this was an abnormal situation. She almost didn't know what to do, as social convention wasn't exactly her forte. But Landon looked like he needed a hug, and that much she could do well. Sliding down to the floor, she wrapped her arms around his waist snugly, leaning against his chest and just holding him for a moment. Landon, she was quite certain, didn't know how to ask for what he needed. That was why he had her.

His attempts at being coy seemed to have paid off. Unkempt appearance aside, she was brushing passed his snide, ridiculous remarks, knowing well enough to leave them alone. She wasn't exactly buying it--she was a detective for a reason, after all--but she wasn't pressing the matter either, and for that, Landon was grateful. Instead, she flashed him a quick smirk. "You know I can't tell you that. Suffice it to say that it wasn't anyone whose name you'd know."

It wasn't much, but it was enough for Landon's heart to return to its normal beat. He wasn't any closer to figuring out who killed Arran, but he didn't have to be--all Landon wanted was his name cleared of this whole fucking mess. And the playful smirk on Ada's mouth and the casual way she spoke about it said all he needed to know: they had no idea Landon was involved. With that, a weight was lifted off of Landon's shoulders. Not much--there was still so much to think about. The fact that Arran's killers were still very much out there. The fact that they could very easily have their eyes and ears on Landon. The fact that he could become the next unsolved murder. But, for now, Landon wasn't going to find himself locked behind cold bars, and that was as much of a relief as he was going to get. He knew Ada well enough to know that her face would have betrayed that much by now.

His shoulders had just begun to drop down from his ears when Ada swiveled around in her chair to face him. "Want me to take a break?" She asked. "We could have tea."

Landon couldn't help but let out a breath of a laugh. Tea. Of course. Tea was the answer to all life's ills, clearly. Even though Landon's name had just been cleared from the Scotland Yard, that didn't make him any less paranoid about being outside. He was about to decline her offer so he could crawl back into the cave of his house when Ada did something...well. Very Ada. Without warning, she slipped out of her stool and wrapped her arms around him.

Let one thing be clear: Landon was not a touchy-feely person. Neither his birth parents nor his "adopted" parents had been very physically affectionate--if anything, Uncle Perry had kept Landon a good couple feet away at all times. His little sister had been the only one who had really managed to obtain some sort of cling gene and had no qualms hugging or smacking or wrestling. But as Landon grew up, his spine stiffened at anyone close enough to touch him and he was quicker to pry someone off than he was to reciprocate. Even fucking was a game best played with as little intimacy as possible--best to get a girl on her hands and knees, or on her stomach, anything to keep her from grabbing him, kissing him, clinging to him. If they could get in and out without their lips touching once, all the better. Intimacy was sloppy and weak.

And yet, here was Ada, taking the initiative with a simple hug. Any normal, well-adjusted person might've easily fell into it, hugged her back, accepted the embrace. And there was something to it--the warmth of another body, her head by his shoulder, something...irrationally comforting here. But still, Landon felt his body stiffen, rejecting the closeness like a poorly attempted implant. He let out a light breath, his hands falling to her hips--both keeping her in place and keeping her distance--and he murmured, with a note of finality, "Okay." And with that, he gave her side a little, awkward pat before pressing a quick, familial kiss to side of her head and prying himself out of her arms, taking a step back. "Tea sounds great," he said, finally yielding. Suddenly much more pliable and docile. But, not to be completely tamed, he flashed her a quick grin. "You can fill me in on all the Scotland Yard gossip."