chasing their tails trying to track us down | Selfie | Henry Higgs & Eliza Dooley
t: chasing their tails trying to track us down
f: Selfie
p: Henry & Eliza; pre Henry/Eliza
ch: fan_flashworks - Amnesty prompt: communication
r/wc: PG/3730
w: It’s an Elementary AU, so mild references to past drug abuse.
s: [Elementary AU] “Did you think that that was an appropriate outfit to wear to a crime scene?” Henry asks.
n: [Title from I Know Places by Taylor Swift.] I… have no idea how this happened! Earlier this evening I was like “…I should probably get around to watching Selfie”, and then I was writing an Elementary AU for it where Henry’s a consulting detective and Eliza’s his sober companion who’s weirdly good at all this, eventually. My dodgy knowledge of certain bits of certain social media is probably showing.
Henry told his father repeatedly that he did not need a sober companion, that the addiction and following rehab stint were mere blips, accidents, on the landscape of his life. And then, to make his point absolutely clear, he left rehab early, alone, and returned home, safe in the knowledge that his status quo was protected.
Except that when he walks into his living room, there’s a leggy redhead on his couch, wearing… a very small amount of something involving tulle, a pair of four-inch heels that his wooden floors will not appreciate, and a pair of cats-eye sunglasses perched on top of her hair, despite the fact it’s raining outside.
“Um,” Henry says. As opening gambits go, it isn’t one of his best.
The redhead holds up one manicured finger while her other hand scrabbles at the screen of her phone for a moment, and then she bounces to her feet and practically prances over, which might be how she normally moves, or might be the only way she can walk in those shoes - Henry isn’t yet sure.
“Hi!” she says, “I’m Eliza Dooley, yes, that Eliza Dooley, and I’m your sober companion!”
The next thing Henry knows, he’s being crushed into her side while she holds her phone at arms’ length and snaps a quick picture of the two of them.
“Cute!” she exclaims. “I’m going Valencia for now, but I know we’ll work out what your best filter is soon. Unless you already know. You look like a Mayfair to me.”
Henry blinks at her, as she blithely trots off, clicking down his hall like she owns the place.
“…is the point of this that I’m driven back to rehab?” he asks the empty room.
-
Eliza Dooley talks a lot - more than Henry can ever remember anyone ever talking before - and documents all parts of her life - and by extension his life - through a never-ending parade of pictures, which she adds emoji-based captions to and then filters the crap out of before she uploads them and then sits, watching, waiting for the internet’s approval to roll in.
It’s all incredibly disturbing. After about twelve hours, Henry calls his dad, in the hope that some kind of bargain can be struck. Besides everything else, there is no way that Eliza can actually be a qualified sober companion.
The call doesn’t go well. Apparently Eliza Dooley is somehow legally allowed to do this job, he is not her first client - and the others haven’t relapsed - and Henry can either accept her presence in his life for the next couple of months, or his parents can move in with him and he can enjoy their presence instead.
“I really like your home,” Eliza tells him when he comes back. Before he can thank her for what he thinks might be a compliment, she adds: “the lighting is, like, super flattering.”
Henry draws up a mental calendar, and circles the day that she leaves in sparkly red.
-
“When you said you had a job I just kind of assumed it was some uptight office thing,” Eliza is saying, sipping a frozen coffee thing that Henry can’t even begin to decipher as she strides alongside him in a pair of strappy gold wedge sandals. It’s February, but Eliza doesn’t seem to have noticed that. “You know, because of how stuffy you are. Except for the whole-” here, she cups her mouth with her hand, the nails painted to match her shoes, “-heroin thing. But this is cool, you know?”
It’s been four days. Henry has sort of gotten used to hearing endless streams of words he will never understand, listened to four rants on how he’s basically an online ghost, what century does he even live in, and is no longer surprised to find Eliza posing provocatively against any and every surface in his home, phone clasped in one hand.
When he was a kid, they had a dog that humped the furniture. He presumes this is much the same thing.
“I told you we were going to a crime scene this morning,” Henry says, ignoring everything Eliza has said up until now because it seems safest.
“Uh-huh,” she says. She’s wearing false eyelashes that she flutters occasionally, and the whole thing is very Bambi. It’s mostly disconcerting.
“Did you think that that was an appropriate outfit to wear to a crime scene?” he asks.
Eliza looks down at her clothes, which, if nothing else, cannot be keeping her warm. Henry resists the urge to offer her his coat, because the last time he did her expression was utterly traumatised and she said some very hurtful things about a jacket that has never done him any wrong.
“Uh, duh,” she says. “I look super cute, which you would know if you knew anything about fashion.”
“I know things about fashion,” Henry hears himself protesting.
Eliza raises a sceptical eyebrow, then looks down at her phone, which she has somehow produced from nowhere.
“Besides,” she adds, “cops are hot. I haven’t dated a cop in like two years, and they are great from getting you off parking tickets.”
“Please tell me no one has given you a license to drive anything,” Henry says, horrified.
Eliza pouts a little. “Well, no,” she says. “But I’m working on it!”
“That’s a relief, anyway,” Henry mutters, and speeds up a little so Eliza has to hop to keep up.
-
Sam Saperstein is an old acquaintance of Henry’s, and one who was happy to take him back even after what he’s awkwardly referring to as The Unfortunate Heroin Period, mostly because Henry still solved crimes flawlessly even when not exactly in his right mind. Now cleaned up and settled in at home, he’s ready to return to his beloved career: that of a consulting detective.
It’s a robbery - “something nice and simple to get you back into the swing of things” Captain Saperstein says cheerfully, and Henry grits his teeth behind his smile - and Henry gets into examining the supposedly uncrackable safe, door hanging open, and lets other members of the NYPD handle telling Eliza that she can’t take pictures in here. Eliza’s attracting a lot of attention, unsurprisingly: she’s wearing what basically amounts to a small handful of garments, loudly clicky shoes, and is feeling up the arm muscles of any police officer who comes near her. None of them seem to mind.
“Who’s that?” Sam asks, as Henry crouches down to get a better look at the safe door - did the thief already have the code or did they have to calculate it as they went? - and Eliza lets out a peal of sharp laughter.
“My personal assistant,” Henry murmurs dryly, easing a magnifier out of his coat pocket.
“He wishes,” Eliza’s voice trills over, and Sam laughs. Henry refuses to look up, and decides just to focus on the job in hand: that’s what matters.
-
“So,” Eliza says, mouth full of chow mein, “do you know who did it yet?”
Henry has been sitting in quiet contemplation for the last hour with his phrenology bust and some Chopin on vinyl and everything has been absolutely blissful and very productive. Now Eliza’s apparently gotten bored of whatever she was doing upstairs, and he presumes the peace is over.
Henry cracks an eye open to look at her. “Well, I- Are you wearing a unicorn onesie?”
“Cute, huh?” Eliza does a twirl, and then returns to eating cold takeout from the box. “So? Who’s the thief?”
Henry pinches the bridge of his nose. “I don’t know, yet,” he says. “I’m working.”
Eliza screws up her face at him. “Fine,” she says. “Whatevs. Once you’re being less of a grouchy bitch, there’s dinner in the kitchen.”
She pads off. Henry sighs, and closes his eyes again. All he can see behind his lids are unicorns.
-
A few days later, Henry’s cracked the safe code himself - it’s amazing how many uncrackable safes just involve the Fibonacci sequence and a numerical cross-referencing of Friends episodes - figured out who originally cracked it, helped Sam track down the thief, and gotten a not insubstantial reward. Throughout all of this, Eliza has followed him while wearing a range of impractical footwear, increasingly small hotpants, and kitten sweaters, and has documented all the parts the police will let her document in snapchats and instagrams and tweets and probably other forms of social media that Henry has never heard of and never wants to hear of.
He no longer issues caveats for what he thinks Eliza should wear to crime scenes, because she doesn’t listen anyway, and anyway he’s starting to develop a tolerance for Eliza’s great love of things in various kinds of sparkly, clingy, and neon (“I’m so on point right now”). In fact, Eliza’s giving him a lecture on how great today’s hotpants are when they walk into the house and there’s broken glass and blood everywhere.
“You can wait here if you want,” Henry offers, because Eliza’s chatter has cut off abruptly and she’s looking pale under her Burberry Light Glow blush.
Eliza sets her jaw, and shakes her head. “No,” she says, “I’m your sober companion, where you go, I go.”
It’s Henry’s first murder since coming back; part of him feels a little guilty that he didn’t mention to Eliza that there would be an actual corpse here, but he’s gotten used to Eliza being impervious to everything around her, and he kind of assumed that the most he’d have to deal with today would be stopping her from taking photos (“hashtag: RIP”). But she’s quiet as they walk up the stairs to be greeted by Captain Saperstein, who immediately takes Henry’s elbow to talk him through what they already know.
When he looks back, Eliza has her arms folded protectively across her chest, and is looking miserably at the corpse spread-eagled across their living room floor. Henry feels a weird mixture of hey, I’ve finally found what makes Eliza put her phone away, and the urge to go over and put an arm around her. He tamps ruthlessly down on both urges, and calls across: “you okay?”
Eliza raises her gaze to his, and nods. Henry suddenly feels very sharply and unexpectedly proud.
-
They have to go to a support group meeting at least once a week; it’s in the terms of agreement Henry and his parents drew up. Henry tries to listen and usually doesn’t, instead lamenting the time wasted here when there are so many things he could be doing instead, and Eliza usually spends the time doing something complex involving her cuticles, plucking her eyebrows, or tapping away at her phone.
“I have a case to solve,” Henry mutters, under the woman at the front’s unhappy sobbing. “This is a waste of time.”
“You could share your feelings,” Eliza offers, not taking her eyes off her phone.
“Like you are?” Henry mutters.
“We’re not here for me,” Eliza says, serene, and swipes decisively left. Henry leans into her shoulder to look at the screen.
“What are you even playing?” he asks.
“Candy Crush Soda Saga,” Eliza replies, and then twitches happily when a bunch of candies onscreen explode.
Henry isn’t as out of touch as Eliza would claim he is, so he knows about the existence of Candy Crush Saga; he even downloaded it, played it incessantly for a couple of months, and then couldn’t get past level thirty-five and gave up in a fashion that involved deleting it from his phone and sulking profusely for a couple of weeks. He wasn’t aware there was another version, but it doesn’t surprise him; the damn thing is infuriatingly addictive, after all.
“What level are you on?” he asks, because when he’s faced with someone’s deeply uncomfortable tale of drug-addicted woe and Eliza’s brightly-coloured iPhone game, he knows which he’d rather know more about.
“Four hundred and six,” Eliza replies, poking at the screen.
“What?” Henry demands, because there is no way that Eliza can be so much better at this than he was. No way.
He’s forgotten to keep his voice down, and the man chairing the session is frowning at him and Eliza now. “Perhaps you’d like to share?” he suggests, but he’s looking at Eliza as he says it.
Eliza’s head pops up when Henry elbows her. “Oh,” she says, “I’m just his sober companion, this guy’s the one who needs to do sharing.”
Henry doesn’t know if he’s relieved or embarrassed at the fact clearly no one believes her. “Uh,” he says, “she’s right, I’m the, uh, recovering addict here. But I don’t want to share. Sorry. Carry on.”
After a moment, the support group session continues, and Henry slumps in his seat. He’s still pressed close enough to Eliza that he can carry on watching her playing her game, though, so he spends the rest of the hour watching her swiping brightly-coloured fish around the screen; it’s surprisingly soothing.
-
Two days later, Henry’s had too much coffee and not enough sleep and they seem to have too many leads and not enough concrete actual murderers.
“I have to call someone if it looks like you’re relapsing,” Eliza says. She’s wearing pyjamas decorated with what Henry thinks might be an internet meme of some kind, and her hair is in pigtails. She looks adorable, and while he can tune her out when she’s prancing around his kitchen in underwear-revealing leather miniskirts, it’s somehow more difficult to do it when she’s curled up on his couch with her powder blue mac and a mug of tea.
“I’m not relapsing,” Henry snaps, “I’m trying to sort out data here.”
He’s got various police reports and crime scene photos and handwritten notes pinned up on the wall above his fireplace; he keeps moving them around, but a clear picture hasn’t been formed yet, and he thinks he might just be driving himself a little crazy.
“I thought you knew the husband did it,” Eliza says.
It takes Henry a moment to realise what she’s said, and he spins around. “I know you like to watch those crime dramas so you can tweet about them with the crying face emojis, Eliza, but-”
“No, I mean, he clearly did it for her family’s money,” Eliza says. “She insisted on separate bank accounts, so he could only get access to her funds to cover up his embezzling if he gained it from her will. Also, he’s been banging his secretary for months, she looks like the golddigging type.”
Henry frowns at her. “How are you- where are you even getting all this from?”
Eliza turns her laptop screen around to face him. “He really needs to get himself a private Instagram if he’s going to post the whole affair online in some pretty dubious pics. None of these were no filter occasions, ugh.”
Henry looks at the images she’s pulled up, and then looks at Eliza. “…and if I wanted to go talk to him about this new evidence…?”
“He’s just checked in on foursquare at JFK,” Eliza replies. “I got you an uber, it’ll be outside in like two minutes.”
Henry stares at her for a long moment, and then realises he should probably get some shoes on. “Eliza-” he begins.
“Go stop him,” she says. “I’ll make a list of ways you can thank me.”
-
A few days later, Henry is planning a restful evening involving a complicated salad and a collection of ostensibly unpickable locks - ha, he’ll see about that - but it feels like it’s going to be derailed if Eliza doesn’t keep stomping up and down the stairs in different pairs of boots.
“Is there a problem?” he asks.
Eliza stops mid-stomp, one heel dangling. “Stupid Brit,” she says, waving her phone at him. “She’s having a total like-spike since that nip-slip last week, and I’m going to end up looking like a loser if I don’t fix this.”
Henry understands more of those words than he would’ve done before meeting Eliza, but it’s still a mostly incomprehensible shriek. “Do I need to promise I will sit very still in the house and not take any drugs at all so you can go out for the night?”
Eliza regards him with thoughtful, big dark eyes, and he tries to look trustworthy and sensible and like maybe he knows what the hell she’s going on about.
“Oh, Henry, thanks,” she says, and bounces upstairs. The bouncing isn’t any quieter than the stomping was, but Henry’s pretty sure he’s done a good thing.
While he picks his locks and half-watches a documentary on woodworking he was saving for a time when Eliza wasn’t around to mock him, Henry can’t stop himself occasionally bringing up Eliza’s social media pages on his laptop. Pictures flood in; initially taken only by Eliza, but then she’s tagged in dozens of facebook photos, mentioned in hundreds of tweets. Henry clicks through the useless blurs of pictures but there are a handful that are decent shots; Eliza dancing with her arms in the air, red hair highlighted in a halo of gold and pink lights. He smiles to himself, and then forces himself to close the window.
Eliza literally falls out of a cab at four-thirty the next morning. Henry’s been dozing, keeping half an ear open for this eventuality - it seemed inevitable after the third picture of Eliza doing bodyshots off a scantily clad young man who was possibly an underwear model - and he comes downstairs just in time to catch her as she tumbles through the front door.
“Henry?” she says thickly, fingers digging into his arms as he helps her upright.
“You’re home,” he replies, “let’s just get you to bed.”
“Mmmm,” Eliza agrees sleepily, and then her legs give under her and she stares up at him from the hallway floor in something like bemusement. “Hashtag: epic fail,” she says sagely.
“Come on,” Henry says, pulling her upright and then bending to hook an arm under her knees. Eliza makes a surprised noise as he picks her up, and then her head drops to his shoulder as he starts to carry her up the stairs. She smells like perfume and alcohol and stale nightclub air, and her mascara is bleeding into her skin.
“I don’t usually do this on assignment,” she says softly, when Henry lays her down on her bed. “I’m the worst sober companion.”
“I’m still sober,” Henry says, instead of agreeing with her, “you can’t be doing that bad a job.”
Eliza smiles and then falls abruptly asleep. Henry puts her purse on her nightstand, hearing her phone buzzing away to itself inside, and then moves to see if he can take off her stilettos. It turns out that he can’t.
“Who the hell wears shoes with locks on them?” he demands, but Eliza says nothing. He sighs, and covers her with a blanket, and leaves her to it.
-
“I can’t believe you have a website,” Eliza says. Her eyes are alight with a worrying look Henry can’t calculate. “Like, it’s a terrible website, but, you! You have a website!”
“This is why I didn’t tell you before,” Henry mutters. “Anyway, it’s just so people can read the words consulting detective and ask for help in their boring cases that they could solve themselves if they wanted to.”
“Ooh!” Eliza exclaims, and clicks over to the messages tab. “Oh, Henry, you got one today! And you have an out-of-office autoreply, which is lame b-t-dubs, and anyway is a lie because we’ve been here all day.”
“I told you-” Henry begins, but Eliza holds up a shocking-pink-manicured hand to shut him up.
“Awww, this guy wants to know if his wife is cheating on him. Don’t you want to help maybe save their marriage?”
“No,” Henry replies. “Because it’s a bunch of low-paid stakeout work and it takes days and it’s really boring and a waste of my time and you have to have really good long-distance photography skills and-”
“Oh, she is,” Eliza says. “But with his secretary: that’s pretty cool. Like, novelty value, right?”
She slides the laptop over to him; Henry’s presented with pictures of the woman whose photo was attached to the original message, only wearing about eighty-seven percent less clothing than she was in the one her husband sent.
“People forget that snapchat can be screencapped,” Eliza says sombrely, shaking her head. “I think the secretary’s probably going try and blackmail her; what a bitch. I’ve never trusted a woman with a Brazilian wax.”
“Oh my god,” Henry says, and pushes the laptop back to Eliza.
“So?” Eliza looks expectant. “Are you gonna email him back, or what?”
Henry considers it for a moment. “Why don’t you do it?” he says.
“Okay!” Eliza starts typing, and Henry wonders if he’ll regret this; he has a funny feeling, like maybe he won’t.
-
With a week to go before Henry gets his life back to himself, he realises that maybe he’s not ready. Oh, he’s completely sure that he’s not going to backslide into addiction, that that phase of his life was inadvertent and over now, but he’s not sure that he’s ready to let Eliza drift off back to her life of social media likes and occasional addict rehabilitation to pay the bills. He’s gotten used to her and her noise and her constant changes of footwear and her inability to wear anything suitable for the occasion or weather.
Besides, she’s turning out to be surprisingly good at helping with his cases.
“Have you considered that you’re a vaguely terrible sober companion?” he asks Eliza, when they’re supposedly out for brunch, and Eliza’s spent at least twenty minutes adjusting her scone and coffee to the most aesthetic angle, attention on her phone screen.
Eliza turns quick, surprisingly hurt, eyes to him.
“And have you considered that you might not be a completely awful consulting detective?” he adds.
Eliza actually puts her phone down on the table.
“Are you serious?” she asks.
“I am,” Henry says. “What do you think?”
Five minutes later, he’s watching Eliza watch a selfie of the two of them - Eliza ecstatic and he managing a slanted smile for the camera - captioned omg!!! career change! as the likes clamber up. It doesn’t irritate him the way it used to.
f: Selfie
p: Henry & Eliza; pre Henry/Eliza
ch: fan_flashworks - Amnesty prompt: communication
r/wc: PG/3730
w: It’s an Elementary AU, so mild references to past drug abuse.
s: [Elementary AU] “Did you think that that was an appropriate outfit to wear to a crime scene?” Henry asks.
n: [Title from I Know Places by Taylor Swift.] I… have no idea how this happened! Earlier this evening I was like “…I should probably get around to watching Selfie”, and then I was writing an Elementary AU for it where Henry’s a consulting detective and Eliza’s his sober companion who’s weirdly good at all this, eventually. My dodgy knowledge of certain bits of certain social media is probably showing.
Henry told his father repeatedly that he did not need a sober companion, that the addiction and following rehab stint were mere blips, accidents, on the landscape of his life. And then, to make his point absolutely clear, he left rehab early, alone, and returned home, safe in the knowledge that his status quo was protected.
Except that when he walks into his living room, there’s a leggy redhead on his couch, wearing… a very small amount of something involving tulle, a pair of four-inch heels that his wooden floors will not appreciate, and a pair of cats-eye sunglasses perched on top of her hair, despite the fact it’s raining outside.
“Um,” Henry says. As opening gambits go, it isn’t one of his best.
The redhead holds up one manicured finger while her other hand scrabbles at the screen of her phone for a moment, and then she bounces to her feet and practically prances over, which might be how she normally moves, or might be the only way she can walk in those shoes - Henry isn’t yet sure.
“Hi!” she says, “I’m Eliza Dooley, yes, that Eliza Dooley, and I’m your sober companion!”
The next thing Henry knows, he’s being crushed into her side while she holds her phone at arms’ length and snaps a quick picture of the two of them.
“Cute!” she exclaims. “I’m going Valencia for now, but I know we’ll work out what your best filter is soon. Unless you already know. You look like a Mayfair to me.”
Henry blinks at her, as she blithely trots off, clicking down his hall like she owns the place.
“…is the point of this that I’m driven back to rehab?” he asks the empty room.
-
Eliza Dooley talks a lot - more than Henry can ever remember anyone ever talking before - and documents all parts of her life - and by extension his life - through a never-ending parade of pictures, which she adds emoji-based captions to and then filters the crap out of before she uploads them and then sits, watching, waiting for the internet’s approval to roll in.
It’s all incredibly disturbing. After about twelve hours, Henry calls his dad, in the hope that some kind of bargain can be struck. Besides everything else, there is no way that Eliza can actually be a qualified sober companion.
The call doesn’t go well. Apparently Eliza Dooley is somehow legally allowed to do this job, he is not her first client - and the others haven’t relapsed - and Henry can either accept her presence in his life for the next couple of months, or his parents can move in with him and he can enjoy their presence instead.
“I really like your home,” Eliza tells him when he comes back. Before he can thank her for what he thinks might be a compliment, she adds: “the lighting is, like, super flattering.”
Henry draws up a mental calendar, and circles the day that she leaves in sparkly red.
-
“When you said you had a job I just kind of assumed it was some uptight office thing,” Eliza is saying, sipping a frozen coffee thing that Henry can’t even begin to decipher as she strides alongside him in a pair of strappy gold wedge sandals. It’s February, but Eliza doesn’t seem to have noticed that. “You know, because of how stuffy you are. Except for the whole-” here, she cups her mouth with her hand, the nails painted to match her shoes, “-heroin thing. But this is cool, you know?”
It’s been four days. Henry has sort of gotten used to hearing endless streams of words he will never understand, listened to four rants on how he’s basically an online ghost, what century does he even live in, and is no longer surprised to find Eliza posing provocatively against any and every surface in his home, phone clasped in one hand.
When he was a kid, they had a dog that humped the furniture. He presumes this is much the same thing.
“I told you we were going to a crime scene this morning,” Henry says, ignoring everything Eliza has said up until now because it seems safest.
“Uh-huh,” she says. She’s wearing false eyelashes that she flutters occasionally, and the whole thing is very Bambi. It’s mostly disconcerting.
“Did you think that that was an appropriate outfit to wear to a crime scene?” he asks.
Eliza looks down at her clothes, which, if nothing else, cannot be keeping her warm. Henry resists the urge to offer her his coat, because the last time he did her expression was utterly traumatised and she said some very hurtful things about a jacket that has never done him any wrong.
“Uh, duh,” she says. “I look super cute, which you would know if you knew anything about fashion.”
“I know things about fashion,” Henry hears himself protesting.
Eliza raises a sceptical eyebrow, then looks down at her phone, which she has somehow produced from nowhere.
“Besides,” she adds, “cops are hot. I haven’t dated a cop in like two years, and they are great from getting you off parking tickets.”
“Please tell me no one has given you a license to drive anything,” Henry says, horrified.
Eliza pouts a little. “Well, no,” she says. “But I’m working on it!”
“That’s a relief, anyway,” Henry mutters, and speeds up a little so Eliza has to hop to keep up.
-
Sam Saperstein is an old acquaintance of Henry’s, and one who was happy to take him back even after what he’s awkwardly referring to as The Unfortunate Heroin Period, mostly because Henry still solved crimes flawlessly even when not exactly in his right mind. Now cleaned up and settled in at home, he’s ready to return to his beloved career: that of a consulting detective.
It’s a robbery - “something nice and simple to get you back into the swing of things” Captain Saperstein says cheerfully, and Henry grits his teeth behind his smile - and Henry gets into examining the supposedly uncrackable safe, door hanging open, and lets other members of the NYPD handle telling Eliza that she can’t take pictures in here. Eliza’s attracting a lot of attention, unsurprisingly: she’s wearing what basically amounts to a small handful of garments, loudly clicky shoes, and is feeling up the arm muscles of any police officer who comes near her. None of them seem to mind.
“Who’s that?” Sam asks, as Henry crouches down to get a better look at the safe door - did the thief already have the code or did they have to calculate it as they went? - and Eliza lets out a peal of sharp laughter.
“My personal assistant,” Henry murmurs dryly, easing a magnifier out of his coat pocket.
“He wishes,” Eliza’s voice trills over, and Sam laughs. Henry refuses to look up, and decides just to focus on the job in hand: that’s what matters.
-
“So,” Eliza says, mouth full of chow mein, “do you know who did it yet?”
Henry has been sitting in quiet contemplation for the last hour with his phrenology bust and some Chopin on vinyl and everything has been absolutely blissful and very productive. Now Eliza’s apparently gotten bored of whatever she was doing upstairs, and he presumes the peace is over.
Henry cracks an eye open to look at her. “Well, I- Are you wearing a unicorn onesie?”
“Cute, huh?” Eliza does a twirl, and then returns to eating cold takeout from the box. “So? Who’s the thief?”
Henry pinches the bridge of his nose. “I don’t know, yet,” he says. “I’m working.”
Eliza screws up her face at him. “Fine,” she says. “Whatevs. Once you’re being less of a grouchy bitch, there’s dinner in the kitchen.”
She pads off. Henry sighs, and closes his eyes again. All he can see behind his lids are unicorns.
-
A few days later, Henry’s cracked the safe code himself - it’s amazing how many uncrackable safes just involve the Fibonacci sequence and a numerical cross-referencing of Friends episodes - figured out who originally cracked it, helped Sam track down the thief, and gotten a not insubstantial reward. Throughout all of this, Eliza has followed him while wearing a range of impractical footwear, increasingly small hotpants, and kitten sweaters, and has documented all the parts the police will let her document in snapchats and instagrams and tweets and probably other forms of social media that Henry has never heard of and never wants to hear of.
He no longer issues caveats for what he thinks Eliza should wear to crime scenes, because she doesn’t listen anyway, and anyway he’s starting to develop a tolerance for Eliza’s great love of things in various kinds of sparkly, clingy, and neon (“I’m so on point right now”). In fact, Eliza’s giving him a lecture on how great today’s hotpants are when they walk into the house and there’s broken glass and blood everywhere.
“You can wait here if you want,” Henry offers, because Eliza’s chatter has cut off abruptly and she’s looking pale under her Burberry Light Glow blush.
Eliza sets her jaw, and shakes her head. “No,” she says, “I’m your sober companion, where you go, I go.”
It’s Henry’s first murder since coming back; part of him feels a little guilty that he didn’t mention to Eliza that there would be an actual corpse here, but he’s gotten used to Eliza being impervious to everything around her, and he kind of assumed that the most he’d have to deal with today would be stopping her from taking photos (“hashtag: RIP”). But she’s quiet as they walk up the stairs to be greeted by Captain Saperstein, who immediately takes Henry’s elbow to talk him through what they already know.
When he looks back, Eliza has her arms folded protectively across her chest, and is looking miserably at the corpse spread-eagled across their living room floor. Henry feels a weird mixture of hey, I’ve finally found what makes Eliza put her phone away, and the urge to go over and put an arm around her. He tamps ruthlessly down on both urges, and calls across: “you okay?”
Eliza raises her gaze to his, and nods. Henry suddenly feels very sharply and unexpectedly proud.
-
They have to go to a support group meeting at least once a week; it’s in the terms of agreement Henry and his parents drew up. Henry tries to listen and usually doesn’t, instead lamenting the time wasted here when there are so many things he could be doing instead, and Eliza usually spends the time doing something complex involving her cuticles, plucking her eyebrows, or tapping away at her phone.
“I have a case to solve,” Henry mutters, under the woman at the front’s unhappy sobbing. “This is a waste of time.”
“You could share your feelings,” Eliza offers, not taking her eyes off her phone.
“Like you are?” Henry mutters.
“We’re not here for me,” Eliza says, serene, and swipes decisively left. Henry leans into her shoulder to look at the screen.
“What are you even playing?” he asks.
“Candy Crush Soda Saga,” Eliza replies, and then twitches happily when a bunch of candies onscreen explode.
Henry isn’t as out of touch as Eliza would claim he is, so he knows about the existence of Candy Crush Saga; he even downloaded it, played it incessantly for a couple of months, and then couldn’t get past level thirty-five and gave up in a fashion that involved deleting it from his phone and sulking profusely for a couple of weeks. He wasn’t aware there was another version, but it doesn’t surprise him; the damn thing is infuriatingly addictive, after all.
“What level are you on?” he asks, because when he’s faced with someone’s deeply uncomfortable tale of drug-addicted woe and Eliza’s brightly-coloured iPhone game, he knows which he’d rather know more about.
“Four hundred and six,” Eliza replies, poking at the screen.
“What?” Henry demands, because there is no way that Eliza can be so much better at this than he was. No way.
He’s forgotten to keep his voice down, and the man chairing the session is frowning at him and Eliza now. “Perhaps you’d like to share?” he suggests, but he’s looking at Eliza as he says it.
Eliza’s head pops up when Henry elbows her. “Oh,” she says, “I’m just his sober companion, this guy’s the one who needs to do sharing.”
Henry doesn’t know if he’s relieved or embarrassed at the fact clearly no one believes her. “Uh,” he says, “she’s right, I’m the, uh, recovering addict here. But I don’t want to share. Sorry. Carry on.”
After a moment, the support group session continues, and Henry slumps in his seat. He’s still pressed close enough to Eliza that he can carry on watching her playing her game, though, so he spends the rest of the hour watching her swiping brightly-coloured fish around the screen; it’s surprisingly soothing.
-
Two days later, Henry’s had too much coffee and not enough sleep and they seem to have too many leads and not enough concrete actual murderers.
“I have to call someone if it looks like you’re relapsing,” Eliza says. She’s wearing pyjamas decorated with what Henry thinks might be an internet meme of some kind, and her hair is in pigtails. She looks adorable, and while he can tune her out when she’s prancing around his kitchen in underwear-revealing leather miniskirts, it’s somehow more difficult to do it when she’s curled up on his couch with her powder blue mac and a mug of tea.
“I’m not relapsing,” Henry snaps, “I’m trying to sort out data here.”
He’s got various police reports and crime scene photos and handwritten notes pinned up on the wall above his fireplace; he keeps moving them around, but a clear picture hasn’t been formed yet, and he thinks he might just be driving himself a little crazy.
“I thought you knew the husband did it,” Eliza says.
It takes Henry a moment to realise what she’s said, and he spins around. “I know you like to watch those crime dramas so you can tweet about them with the crying face emojis, Eliza, but-”
“No, I mean, he clearly did it for her family’s money,” Eliza says. “She insisted on separate bank accounts, so he could only get access to her funds to cover up his embezzling if he gained it from her will. Also, he’s been banging his secretary for months, she looks like the golddigging type.”
Henry frowns at her. “How are you- where are you even getting all this from?”
Eliza turns her laptop screen around to face him. “He really needs to get himself a private Instagram if he’s going to post the whole affair online in some pretty dubious pics. None of these were no filter occasions, ugh.”
Henry looks at the images she’s pulled up, and then looks at Eliza. “…and if I wanted to go talk to him about this new evidence…?”
“He’s just checked in on foursquare at JFK,” Eliza replies. “I got you an uber, it’ll be outside in like two minutes.”
Henry stares at her for a long moment, and then realises he should probably get some shoes on. “Eliza-” he begins.
“Go stop him,” she says. “I’ll make a list of ways you can thank me.”
-
A few days later, Henry is planning a restful evening involving a complicated salad and a collection of ostensibly unpickable locks - ha, he’ll see about that - but it feels like it’s going to be derailed if Eliza doesn’t keep stomping up and down the stairs in different pairs of boots.
“Is there a problem?” he asks.
Eliza stops mid-stomp, one heel dangling. “Stupid Brit,” she says, waving her phone at him. “She’s having a total like-spike since that nip-slip last week, and I’m going to end up looking like a loser if I don’t fix this.”
Henry understands more of those words than he would’ve done before meeting Eliza, but it’s still a mostly incomprehensible shriek. “Do I need to promise I will sit very still in the house and not take any drugs at all so you can go out for the night?”
Eliza regards him with thoughtful, big dark eyes, and he tries to look trustworthy and sensible and like maybe he knows what the hell she’s going on about.
“Oh, Henry, thanks,” she says, and bounces upstairs. The bouncing isn’t any quieter than the stomping was, but Henry’s pretty sure he’s done a good thing.
While he picks his locks and half-watches a documentary on woodworking he was saving for a time when Eliza wasn’t around to mock him, Henry can’t stop himself occasionally bringing up Eliza’s social media pages on his laptop. Pictures flood in; initially taken only by Eliza, but then she’s tagged in dozens of facebook photos, mentioned in hundreds of tweets. Henry clicks through the useless blurs of pictures but there are a handful that are decent shots; Eliza dancing with her arms in the air, red hair highlighted in a halo of gold and pink lights. He smiles to himself, and then forces himself to close the window.
Eliza literally falls out of a cab at four-thirty the next morning. Henry’s been dozing, keeping half an ear open for this eventuality - it seemed inevitable after the third picture of Eliza doing bodyshots off a scantily clad young man who was possibly an underwear model - and he comes downstairs just in time to catch her as she tumbles through the front door.
“Henry?” she says thickly, fingers digging into his arms as he helps her upright.
“You’re home,” he replies, “let’s just get you to bed.”
“Mmmm,” Eliza agrees sleepily, and then her legs give under her and she stares up at him from the hallway floor in something like bemusement. “Hashtag: epic fail,” she says sagely.
“Come on,” Henry says, pulling her upright and then bending to hook an arm under her knees. Eliza makes a surprised noise as he picks her up, and then her head drops to his shoulder as he starts to carry her up the stairs. She smells like perfume and alcohol and stale nightclub air, and her mascara is bleeding into her skin.
“I don’t usually do this on assignment,” she says softly, when Henry lays her down on her bed. “I’m the worst sober companion.”
“I’m still sober,” Henry says, instead of agreeing with her, “you can’t be doing that bad a job.”
Eliza smiles and then falls abruptly asleep. Henry puts her purse on her nightstand, hearing her phone buzzing away to itself inside, and then moves to see if he can take off her stilettos. It turns out that he can’t.
“Who the hell wears shoes with locks on them?” he demands, but Eliza says nothing. He sighs, and covers her with a blanket, and leaves her to it.
-
“I can’t believe you have a website,” Eliza says. Her eyes are alight with a worrying look Henry can’t calculate. “Like, it’s a terrible website, but, you! You have a website!”
“This is why I didn’t tell you before,” Henry mutters. “Anyway, it’s just so people can read the words consulting detective and ask for help in their boring cases that they could solve themselves if they wanted to.”
“Ooh!” Eliza exclaims, and clicks over to the messages tab. “Oh, Henry, you got one today! And you have an out-of-office autoreply, which is lame b-t-dubs, and anyway is a lie because we’ve been here all day.”
“I told you-” Henry begins, but Eliza holds up a shocking-pink-manicured hand to shut him up.
“Awww, this guy wants to know if his wife is cheating on him. Don’t you want to help maybe save their marriage?”
“No,” Henry replies. “Because it’s a bunch of low-paid stakeout work and it takes days and it’s really boring and a waste of my time and you have to have really good long-distance photography skills and-”
“Oh, she is,” Eliza says. “But with his secretary: that’s pretty cool. Like, novelty value, right?”
She slides the laptop over to him; Henry’s presented with pictures of the woman whose photo was attached to the original message, only wearing about eighty-seven percent less clothing than she was in the one her husband sent.
“People forget that snapchat can be screencapped,” Eliza says sombrely, shaking her head. “I think the secretary’s probably going try and blackmail her; what a bitch. I’ve never trusted a woman with a Brazilian wax.”
“Oh my god,” Henry says, and pushes the laptop back to Eliza.
“So?” Eliza looks expectant. “Are you gonna email him back, or what?”
Henry considers it for a moment. “Why don’t you do it?” he says.
“Okay!” Eliza starts typing, and Henry wonders if he’ll regret this; he has a funny feeling, like maybe he won’t.
-
With a week to go before Henry gets his life back to himself, he realises that maybe he’s not ready. Oh, he’s completely sure that he’s not going to backslide into addiction, that that phase of his life was inadvertent and over now, but he’s not sure that he’s ready to let Eliza drift off back to her life of social media likes and occasional addict rehabilitation to pay the bills. He’s gotten used to her and her noise and her constant changes of footwear and her inability to wear anything suitable for the occasion or weather.
Besides, she’s turning out to be surprisingly good at helping with his cases.
“Have you considered that you’re a vaguely terrible sober companion?” he asks Eliza, when they’re supposedly out for brunch, and Eliza’s spent at least twenty minutes adjusting her scone and coffee to the most aesthetic angle, attention on her phone screen.
Eliza turns quick, surprisingly hurt, eyes to him.
“And have you considered that you might not be a completely awful consulting detective?” he adds.
Eliza actually puts her phone down on the table.
“Are you serious?” she asks.
“I am,” Henry says. “What do you think?”
Five minutes later, he’s watching Eliza watch a selfie of the two of them - Eliza ecstatic and he managing a slanted smile for the camera - captioned omg!!! career change! as the likes clamber up. It doesn’t irritate him the way it used to.