Fic: Names and Truths in Photographs; Tim Drake/Michael Holt; NC-17; Part 10/12
Title: Names and Truths in Photographs
Author: Aravis Tarkheena
Part: 10/12
Pairing: Tim Drake/Michael Holt
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Violence. Grief. Angst. Smut. Also, I feel compelled to mention, this story also discusses Michael's suicide attempt. It's not a major plot point, but it's there.
Disclaimer: Not mine, everyone's legal.
Word Count: 31,000ish
Author's Notes: Written for scifibigbang. Thanks for darkdanc3r for the beta and to lyanth for the fan art. You guys are awesome. <3
Summary: Elijah Steinmen, a friend of Michael Holt's, has run into some trouble. While trying to help Eli out of a bind, Michael runs into a bit of trouble himself. Trouble by the name of The Dark Hunter. AU, future fic. Slash.
Index Post
Chapter Ten
Michael Holt was trying very hard not to think about kinky cyclists. Tim, however, was making this very hard for him in ways that Michael would have never expected. It would have made him uncomfortable if his libido didn't have him firmly distracted.
Tim was pacing around Michael's small hotel room in his tights and Michael's sweat shirt. He was radiating excitement and Michael was wishing, rather fervently, that his sweater was a little shorter because he could just see the beginnings of the swell of Tim's ass but no more.
It was the ultimate tease.
Though Michael had to admit he liked the way Tim looked in his sweater. A little possessive swell of pride lit in Michael's chest and he had to work to tamp it down.
It was entirely possible that the flirting he and Tim had been doing over the past week was going a little too far. When Michael had spent the twenty minutes after Tim had mentioned kinky cyclists wondering if Tim really did blow men on the roofs of hotels, he knew he was in a bit too deep. He had been so distracted he had thoughtlessly let loose with the bedroom hair comment.
It had clearly made Tim uncomfortable and that was the last thing Michael wanted. Well, second last, anyway. The very last thing he wanted was for Tim to cut his hair. It did look a little overgrown but it curled around the edges and gave him a 'just rolled out of bed' look that made something hot clench in Michael's gut.
Tim lifted his left arm and gesticulated wildly to whoever was on the other end of the line and the sweatshirt rode up a little in the back. Michael fought down a groan and made himself close his eyes. This was neither the time, nor the place, nor the person for these thoughts.
He was in San Diego in the middle of a case thinking about someone fifteen years younger than himself naked. It was not a good precedent.
Though, Michael reflected, had Tim been a woman fifteen years younger than he was, no one would bat an eye. It was a double standard but a standard nonetheless. Michael was torn between justification and chagrin.
Tim came back into the room then, looking adorable and triumphant.
"Guess who just stole 2.3 million dollars from a Japanese cooperation and needs it laundered?" Tim asked brightly.
"Um, you?" Michael asked feeling like he was a few steps behind in this conversation. He really, really, really needed to stop thinking of what Tim would look like in just his sweatshirt.
"Nope. Mark Aoi has, however," Tim informed him with a grin.
"Mark Aoi?" Michael asked?
"Yes," Tim replied with faux sadness in his tone. "My American mother re-married when I was very young. She tragically died when I was fourteen and I was left with my unforgiving Japanese step-father." Tim grinned at Michael suddenly. "And now I'm sticking it to him."
"That's a decent cover--" Michael began but Tim cut him off.
"It's an excellent cover," Tim said proudly. "Babs set up O'Tou-san's business for me and Toy Man's going to play the irate father on my trail. It's perfect and a great excuse to get a meeting with this guy in a hurry. I'll need clean money to disappear properly."
"Don't you need a contact to give you an in?" Michael asked and Tim shook his head.
"Nope, I'm international with the paper trail to prove it. All this guy is going to do make sure my story checks out and that I have the cash. I'll mention a shady uncle of mine who used to do deals with his teacher back in Gotham and I'll be all set," Tim explained and sat on the arm of the sofa.
Underneath Tim's eyes were bruise like smudges from lack of sleep and he was looking slightly pale. Michael's sweater made Tim seem too thin but Tim's eyes and posture radiated energy.
"So what do we need to do?" Michael asked wondering when the last time Tim had gotten more than an hour or two of sleep at a time.
"In about..." Tim glanced down at the clock on his communicator, "two hours, I'm going to make the call for a meeting this afternoon. Stores open at nine, yeah?" he asked and when Michael nodded he went on. "I'll go grab the right clothes."
Tim pulled at Michael's sweater and tilted his head in wry amusement. "We have already established that this does not make me look like a panicked businessman."
Michael laughed and Tim grinned at him.
"He's going to want to meet me in a public place. I'm going to convince him to give me a long detailed explanation of his security features. Distract him for a while," Tim went on and Michael interrupted.
"Distract him why??" he asked curiously.
"These guys pride themselves on their security. It's practically impenetrable. It was why we couldn't get any info on this guy from the usual means. He'll want to show me. He'll want to reassure me. That's when you break into his place," Tim explained.
"Alright, then what?"
"That's where you come in," Tim said and pointed at him. "If this guy is anything like his teacher, and we've already established that he is. Then he does not keep an electronic file of all his clients. Electronic files can be hacked remotely and without a means to trace the culprit. He keeps it all on paper, somewhere in his house in a coded document. While I distract the hell out of this guy, you go in and find that paper. Our guy will be on that list. When we decode it, it'll lead us to our mastermind."
"What if we can't decode it?" Michael asked.
Tim gave him disbelieving look. "You're the third smartest man in the world and you're worried about breaking a code made by a common criminal?"
Michael grinned. "Wow, a compliment about my brain from a kinky cyclist? I think I'm flattered."
Tim rolled his eyes.
"Alright, it's almost light. I need to crawl down your hotel wall and head back to my place to change so I can shop," Tim said and pulled the sweater over his head. He tossed it to Michael and quickly reapplied his mask.
"If anyone asks, I was interrogating you," Tim said in the most lascivious tone of voice Michael had ever heard. Michael shivered as Tim slipped out the door.
The sweater in his hands was still warm from Tim's body heat and Michael had to fight the urge to press it to his face.
That would definitely be a little creepy.
Tim texted him around noon to say that their launderer had shown up for the lunch meeting. Michael input the address to the man's home into his GPS and headed out. It took Michael about twenty minutes to drive to the small house in a suburban area where the man had set up shop.
He parked in the street and used his T-spheres to scan the house for signs of life. The Spheres didn't pick anything up and Michael was relieved. He wasn't sure what he would have done had there been someone inside. Tim had suggested luring them outside and drugging them, but that wasn't Michael style.
And he wasn't entirely sure Tim had been serious about it.
Michael wasn't in uniform because there is nothing more conspicuous than a man in a mask lurking around a nice neighborhood at noon on a Sunday. He was dressed in a pair of khakis and a polo shirt. He plastered a benign smile on his face before he slipped out of his car with his T-spheres in a fabric shopping bag.
He walked around to the back of the house and used his T-spheres to disengage the security systems. Then he picked the lock to the back door and slipped inside. No nosy neighbors asked what he was doing and Michael felt much calmer when he was behind the closed door.
The house was sparsely furnished and thankfully did not contain a dog. He opened the shopping bags and the T-sphere's floated out and assumed their usual spot, gently hovering around his head. They fed him information about the house as he walked further in.
Michael made a quick pass through to find potential hiding spots. The bottom floor only had a living area, a kitchen and a mud room. Michael ignored all three. He headed upstairs to find a bedroom, a study and a bathroom.
His T-spheres informed him that there was a safe in the bedroom and several filing cabinets in the study. Both had the best potential. Michael started with the study.
It was a small room. There were two cases of file cabinets, a desk that held a computer and a bookshelf full of paperbacks and cooperate law text books. It was very dusty and there were several old mugs scattered around the messy work station.
Michael started with the computer. He turned it on and then left his T-spheres to upload the data from the drives. They scanned it for anything that looked like finical work.
Tim had said that the document he was looking for was a sort of key. This launderer worked off a sort of code. Only he knew the name of the business that would lead directly back to the client. All they needed was to find and decode the key so they could see who in the client list was paying off their Tradesmen with via the shell cooperations.
Michael walked over to the file cabinets to, for the sake of thoroughness, begin his search. It took almost not effort to pick the small locks. However, it took a great deal of effort to go through all the files. He was halfway through the first drawer when his T-sphere's informed him that he had a call from Tim.
Michael picked it up.
"You turned off his alarm?" Tim asked him in Japanese.
Michael wasn't sure how Tim knew Japanese or how Tim that he knew Japanese, but Michael went with it.
"I did," he replied. "Why?"
"He has an application on his phone that apparently lets him know if his alarm is disengaged or set off," Tim hissed at him.
"Damn those I-phones," Michael said and Tim agreed.
"What now?" Michael asked.
"You hurry. We're heading over to you now," Tim told him.
"We?" Michael asked.
"Apparently he got suspicious of me and if he finds anything he doesn't like in his house, he will shoot me. He seemed very earnest about the whole thing so don't really want to test him on it," Tim replied.
"He has a gun with him?" Michael asked.
"And a knife as far as I can tell. Do me a favor? Don't leave a trace and don't be there when the car pulls up," Tim said.
"What's your ETA?"
"Twenty minutes give or take. I'll try to stall him but he's already on edge. It might not work," Tim told him and he sounded distracted.
"We should have had a plan B," Michael said half to himself. "We moved on this too fast."
"This is plan B," Tim informed him. "Now get the goods and get the hell out of there."
Tim hung up and Michael felt his heartbeat accelerate.
He abandoned the filing cabinets and ran straight for the safe in the bedroom. It was where Michael had suspected Kenmore had hidden the document in the first place but Michael had wanted to see what other evidence he could find before he went in for the target.
The safe was in the back of a closet on the right side of the room. Michael threw open the door and dropped to his knees in the closet. The safe was rather small as far as safes went. It was grey, had thick walls and was fire resistant. It also had a manual lock, not an electronic one. Michael spared a moment to swear aloud before he beckoned his T-Spheres into the closet and set about cracking the safe.
It took him almost ten minutes to come up with the combination, even with the help of his Spheres. He was covered in sweat and his hands were shaking slightly from the adrenaline rush as he pulled the door open. There was a pile of cash and some jewelry stashed in the safe. The file folders were behind it all.
Michael grabbed the stack and started to sort through them. There were birth, death and marriage certificates, tax forms, deeds to three houses and some bonds. Michael pushed all of them aside as he moved from folder to folder, skimming each paper furiously.
He found what he was looking for in the fifth folder. It was a series of names and numbers with no discernible significance. While the purpose of everything else in the safe was axiomatic, these were ambiguous.
One of these things does not belong.
Michael sifted through every single page of the document, allowing a quick moment for one of his Spheres to snap a picture. The collection of the pictures took another few precious moments and Michael was all but twitching as he knelt on the floor.
When all the pages were properly recorded, Michael put everything back into the safe just as he had found it. He closed and locked it and rushed out of the room and down the hall to the study. He slammed the file cabinet shut and locked it. Then he moved towards the computer and just as he was shutting it off, he heard a car door slam shut just outside the house.
Michael felt his stomach drop out and he swore. He sent one of his Spheres to the window. It relayed back an image of Tim and another man walking towards the house. The man's strides were quick and purposeful and Tim looked grim as he followed stalwartly behind. He was talking to the man about something. Michael couldn't tell what. Probably Tim was just trying to distract him.
The man was going around to the back door and Michael swore as he realized there was no way in hell he was getting out of there without being seen.
Michael instructed the Spheres to get into the alarm system in the house and fake a power outage. Then he quietly opened a window on the far side of the house from the door Tim and his companion were heading for. He summoned his T Spheres, jumped out the window, shut it behind him and took off into the air.
While it wasn't the most subtle thing Michael could have done, it was the only thing he could think of to get out of the house without being spotted. He hoped he had flown off fast enough that he hadn't been spotted but that wasn't a sure thing. He was almost certain no one would call the police though.
Michael was pretty sure that 'I saw a guy flying out of a window' would not be taken seriously. He ordered his Spheres to monitor 911 calls coming from the area just in case.
Michael flew up high enough that he wouldn't be recognizable as a human to people below. The chill air, as he ascended, cooled the sweat on his hot and nervous skin. Michael couldn't fight down a shiver and he wished fervently for his jacket.
Tim had promised Micheal he would put his communicator in his ear before he left for his meeting that afternoon. He flicked it on transmit now and Michael began to hear the conversation taking place in the house below him.
Things were not going well.
Chapter Eleven
Author: Aravis Tarkheena
Part: 10/12
Pairing: Tim Drake/Michael Holt
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Violence. Grief. Angst. Smut. Also, I feel compelled to mention, this story also discusses Michael's suicide attempt. It's not a major plot point, but it's there.
Disclaimer: Not mine, everyone's legal.
Word Count: 31,000ish
Author's Notes: Written for scifibigbang. Thanks for darkdanc3r for the beta and to lyanth for the fan art. You guys are awesome. <3
Summary: Elijah Steinmen, a friend of Michael Holt's, has run into some trouble. While trying to help Eli out of a bind, Michael runs into a bit of trouble himself. Trouble by the name of The Dark Hunter. AU, future fic. Slash.
Index Post
Chapter Ten
Michael Holt was trying very hard not to think about kinky cyclists. Tim, however, was making this very hard for him in ways that Michael would have never expected. It would have made him uncomfortable if his libido didn't have him firmly distracted.
Tim was pacing around Michael's small hotel room in his tights and Michael's sweat shirt. He was radiating excitement and Michael was wishing, rather fervently, that his sweater was a little shorter because he could just see the beginnings of the swell of Tim's ass but no more.
It was the ultimate tease.
Though Michael had to admit he liked the way Tim looked in his sweater. A little possessive swell of pride lit in Michael's chest and he had to work to tamp it down.
It was entirely possible that the flirting he and Tim had been doing over the past week was going a little too far. When Michael had spent the twenty minutes after Tim had mentioned kinky cyclists wondering if Tim really did blow men on the roofs of hotels, he knew he was in a bit too deep. He had been so distracted he had thoughtlessly let loose with the bedroom hair comment.
It had clearly made Tim uncomfortable and that was the last thing Michael wanted. Well, second last, anyway. The very last thing he wanted was for Tim to cut his hair. It did look a little overgrown but it curled around the edges and gave him a 'just rolled out of bed' look that made something hot clench in Michael's gut.
Tim lifted his left arm and gesticulated wildly to whoever was on the other end of the line and the sweatshirt rode up a little in the back. Michael fought down a groan and made himself close his eyes. This was neither the time, nor the place, nor the person for these thoughts.
He was in San Diego in the middle of a case thinking about someone fifteen years younger than himself naked. It was not a good precedent.
Though, Michael reflected, had Tim been a woman fifteen years younger than he was, no one would bat an eye. It was a double standard but a standard nonetheless. Michael was torn between justification and chagrin.
Tim came back into the room then, looking adorable and triumphant.
"Guess who just stole 2.3 million dollars from a Japanese cooperation and needs it laundered?" Tim asked brightly.
"Um, you?" Michael asked feeling like he was a few steps behind in this conversation. He really, really, really needed to stop thinking of what Tim would look like in just his sweatshirt.
"Nope. Mark Aoi has, however," Tim informed him with a grin.
"Mark Aoi?" Michael asked?
"Yes," Tim replied with faux sadness in his tone. "My American mother re-married when I was very young. She tragically died when I was fourteen and I was left with my unforgiving Japanese step-father." Tim grinned at Michael suddenly. "And now I'm sticking it to him."
"That's a decent cover--" Michael began but Tim cut him off.
"It's an excellent cover," Tim said proudly. "Babs set up O'Tou-san's business for me and Toy Man's going to play the irate father on my trail. It's perfect and a great excuse to get a meeting with this guy in a hurry. I'll need clean money to disappear properly."
"Don't you need a contact to give you an in?" Michael asked and Tim shook his head.
"Nope, I'm international with the paper trail to prove it. All this guy is going to do make sure my story checks out and that I have the cash. I'll mention a shady uncle of mine who used to do deals with his teacher back in Gotham and I'll be all set," Tim explained and sat on the arm of the sofa.
Underneath Tim's eyes were bruise like smudges from lack of sleep and he was looking slightly pale. Michael's sweater made Tim seem too thin but Tim's eyes and posture radiated energy.
"So what do we need to do?" Michael asked wondering when the last time Tim had gotten more than an hour or two of sleep at a time.
"In about..." Tim glanced down at the clock on his communicator, "two hours, I'm going to make the call for a meeting this afternoon. Stores open at nine, yeah?" he asked and when Michael nodded he went on. "I'll go grab the right clothes."
Tim pulled at Michael's sweater and tilted his head in wry amusement. "We have already established that this does not make me look like a panicked businessman."
Michael laughed and Tim grinned at him.
"He's going to want to meet me in a public place. I'm going to convince him to give me a long detailed explanation of his security features. Distract him for a while," Tim went on and Michael interrupted.
"Distract him why??" he asked curiously.
"These guys pride themselves on their security. It's practically impenetrable. It was why we couldn't get any info on this guy from the usual means. He'll want to show me. He'll want to reassure me. That's when you break into his place," Tim explained.
"Alright, then what?"
"That's where you come in," Tim said and pointed at him. "If this guy is anything like his teacher, and we've already established that he is. Then he does not keep an electronic file of all his clients. Electronic files can be hacked remotely and without a means to trace the culprit. He keeps it all on paper, somewhere in his house in a coded document. While I distract the hell out of this guy, you go in and find that paper. Our guy will be on that list. When we decode it, it'll lead us to our mastermind."
"What if we can't decode it?" Michael asked.
Tim gave him disbelieving look. "You're the third smartest man in the world and you're worried about breaking a code made by a common criminal?"
Michael grinned. "Wow, a compliment about my brain from a kinky cyclist? I think I'm flattered."
Tim rolled his eyes.
"Alright, it's almost light. I need to crawl down your hotel wall and head back to my place to change so I can shop," Tim said and pulled the sweater over his head. He tossed it to Michael and quickly reapplied his mask.
"If anyone asks, I was interrogating you," Tim said in the most lascivious tone of voice Michael had ever heard. Michael shivered as Tim slipped out the door.
The sweater in his hands was still warm from Tim's body heat and Michael had to fight the urge to press it to his face.
That would definitely be a little creepy.
Tim texted him around noon to say that their launderer had shown up for the lunch meeting. Michael input the address to the man's home into his GPS and headed out. It took Michael about twenty minutes to drive to the small house in a suburban area where the man had set up shop.
He parked in the street and used his T-spheres to scan the house for signs of life. The Spheres didn't pick anything up and Michael was relieved. He wasn't sure what he would have done had there been someone inside. Tim had suggested luring them outside and drugging them, but that wasn't Michael style.
And he wasn't entirely sure Tim had been serious about it.
Michael wasn't in uniform because there is nothing more conspicuous than a man in a mask lurking around a nice neighborhood at noon on a Sunday. He was dressed in a pair of khakis and a polo shirt. He plastered a benign smile on his face before he slipped out of his car with his T-spheres in a fabric shopping bag.
He walked around to the back of the house and used his T-spheres to disengage the security systems. Then he picked the lock to the back door and slipped inside. No nosy neighbors asked what he was doing and Michael felt much calmer when he was behind the closed door.
The house was sparsely furnished and thankfully did not contain a dog. He opened the shopping bags and the T-sphere's floated out and assumed their usual spot, gently hovering around his head. They fed him information about the house as he walked further in.
Michael made a quick pass through to find potential hiding spots. The bottom floor only had a living area, a kitchen and a mud room. Michael ignored all three. He headed upstairs to find a bedroom, a study and a bathroom.
His T-spheres informed him that there was a safe in the bedroom and several filing cabinets in the study. Both had the best potential. Michael started with the study.
It was a small room. There were two cases of file cabinets, a desk that held a computer and a bookshelf full of paperbacks and cooperate law text books. It was very dusty and there were several old mugs scattered around the messy work station.
Michael started with the computer. He turned it on and then left his T-spheres to upload the data from the drives. They scanned it for anything that looked like finical work.
Tim had said that the document he was looking for was a sort of key. This launderer worked off a sort of code. Only he knew the name of the business that would lead directly back to the client. All they needed was to find and decode the key so they could see who in the client list was paying off their Tradesmen with via the shell cooperations.
Michael walked over to the file cabinets to, for the sake of thoroughness, begin his search. It took almost not effort to pick the small locks. However, it took a great deal of effort to go through all the files. He was halfway through the first drawer when his T-sphere's informed him that he had a call from Tim.
Michael picked it up.
"You turned off his alarm?" Tim asked him in Japanese.
Michael wasn't sure how Tim knew Japanese or how Tim that he knew Japanese, but Michael went with it.
"I did," he replied. "Why?"
"He has an application on his phone that apparently lets him know if his alarm is disengaged or set off," Tim hissed at him.
"Damn those I-phones," Michael said and Tim agreed.
"What now?" Michael asked.
"You hurry. We're heading over to you now," Tim told him.
"We?" Michael asked.
"Apparently he got suspicious of me and if he finds anything he doesn't like in his house, he will shoot me. He seemed very earnest about the whole thing so don't really want to test him on it," Tim replied.
"He has a gun with him?" Michael asked.
"And a knife as far as I can tell. Do me a favor? Don't leave a trace and don't be there when the car pulls up," Tim said.
"What's your ETA?"
"Twenty minutes give or take. I'll try to stall him but he's already on edge. It might not work," Tim told him and he sounded distracted.
"We should have had a plan B," Michael said half to himself. "We moved on this too fast."
"This is plan B," Tim informed him. "Now get the goods and get the hell out of there."
Tim hung up and Michael felt his heartbeat accelerate.
He abandoned the filing cabinets and ran straight for the safe in the bedroom. It was where Michael had suspected Kenmore had hidden the document in the first place but Michael had wanted to see what other evidence he could find before he went in for the target.
The safe was in the back of a closet on the right side of the room. Michael threw open the door and dropped to his knees in the closet. The safe was rather small as far as safes went. It was grey, had thick walls and was fire resistant. It also had a manual lock, not an electronic one. Michael spared a moment to swear aloud before he beckoned his T-Spheres into the closet and set about cracking the safe.
It took him almost ten minutes to come up with the combination, even with the help of his Spheres. He was covered in sweat and his hands were shaking slightly from the adrenaline rush as he pulled the door open. There was a pile of cash and some jewelry stashed in the safe. The file folders were behind it all.
Michael grabbed the stack and started to sort through them. There were birth, death and marriage certificates, tax forms, deeds to three houses and some bonds. Michael pushed all of them aside as he moved from folder to folder, skimming each paper furiously.
He found what he was looking for in the fifth folder. It was a series of names and numbers with no discernible significance. While the purpose of everything else in the safe was axiomatic, these were ambiguous.
One of these things does not belong.
Michael sifted through every single page of the document, allowing a quick moment for one of his Spheres to snap a picture. The collection of the pictures took another few precious moments and Michael was all but twitching as he knelt on the floor.
When all the pages were properly recorded, Michael put everything back into the safe just as he had found it. He closed and locked it and rushed out of the room and down the hall to the study. He slammed the file cabinet shut and locked it. Then he moved towards the computer and just as he was shutting it off, he heard a car door slam shut just outside the house.
Michael felt his stomach drop out and he swore. He sent one of his Spheres to the window. It relayed back an image of Tim and another man walking towards the house. The man's strides were quick and purposeful and Tim looked grim as he followed stalwartly behind. He was talking to the man about something. Michael couldn't tell what. Probably Tim was just trying to distract him.
The man was going around to the back door and Michael swore as he realized there was no way in hell he was getting out of there without being seen.
Michael instructed the Spheres to get into the alarm system in the house and fake a power outage. Then he quietly opened a window on the far side of the house from the door Tim and his companion were heading for. He summoned his T Spheres, jumped out the window, shut it behind him and took off into the air.
While it wasn't the most subtle thing Michael could have done, it was the only thing he could think of to get out of the house without being spotted. He hoped he had flown off fast enough that he hadn't been spotted but that wasn't a sure thing. He was almost certain no one would call the police though.
Michael was pretty sure that 'I saw a guy flying out of a window' would not be taken seriously. He ordered his Spheres to monitor 911 calls coming from the area just in case.
Michael flew up high enough that he wouldn't be recognizable as a human to people below. The chill air, as he ascended, cooled the sweat on his hot and nervous skin. Michael couldn't fight down a shiver and he wished fervently for his jacket.
Tim had promised Micheal he would put his communicator in his ear before he left for his meeting that afternoon. He flicked it on transmit now and Michael began to hear the conversation taking place in the house below him.
Things were not going well.
Chapter Eleven