Poor Unfortunate Souls, Chapter Two: Illuminating Nothing
Title: Poor Unfortunate Souls
Author: scribal_goddess
Fandom(s):Fifty Shades Trilogy
Rating: R
Word Count: This Chapter: 2,865, Everything: Lots.
Inspiration: Blame gehayi, people. She mentioned in the comments way back around chapter 4 ofFifty Shades Darker that she'd love to see a) Grey properly prosecuted for his crimes, b) some kickass ladies taking him down, c) Grey pitted against an awesome wizard, or d) all of the above. This is option d.
Warnings: For the whole fanfic: Discussions of: rape, stalking, emotional abuse, psychological abuse, gaslighting, financial abuse, and identity theft. Mentions of possible child abuse, and malpracticing doctors and psychiatrists, domestic abuse, and wrongful imprisonment. Christian Grey demonstrates signs of either being a malignant narcissist or having antisocial personality disorder. Elena Lincoln is the same pedophile that she is in canon. Nearly everyone else in this story has PTSD. Discussions of other mental illnesses. Offscreen Violence. Sexual acts native to the Fifty Shades canon.For this chapter specifically: none.
Summary: Kate decides to hire a pair of detectives to investigate Christian Grey, in the vain hope that she can find a way to keep Ana safe from him. The detectives have no idea what a mess they've just signed up for, but it's not just Grey they'll end up investigating.
Author's Note Allie and Lindsay belong to me, Fifty Shades does not, and this is an urban fantasy AU.
Contents and Warnings
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Esclava looked like a beauty salon - a stupidly expensive beauty salon, which conjured up images both of hot towels and of the concentrated stare of people who were paid to think you had to be “fixed up,” - and I looked like a bimbo. It was part of the plan: we would have gone in together, but Allie in a beauty salon wouldn’t have been believable. Even with my considerable bias towards her features, “beautiful,” was a word which, for her, took second place to “striking,” “concentrated,” and “determined.” Her job was to case the area for any evidence that the businesses were protected by any form of magic, and to keep an ear open as she blended into the crowd on second street.
That, and I think she was afraid they’d try and cut her hair.
I gave her a last look as I stepped up towards the door, then pasted what I hoped was a self-conscious smile on my face and entered. No one was waiting, so the receptionist was able to receive me immediately. My first thought was oh shit, this is the kind of place where they expect you to make appointments.
“Hi,” I said, vapidly twirling a strand of hair around my finger, “My friend, like, recommended that I come here, and I was hoping to make an appointment, because I heard you were, like, totally approved by Christian Grey.”
Between the vacant act and the name-dropping of a man who I had come to dislike more intensely the more I researched him, I already wanted to barf - and then I noticed that there were no prices anywhere visible, and I actually thought there was a possibility that I would. Dear God, how much could a simple haircut even cost? It didn’t matter, since I didn’t actually intend to get my hair cut, but I had a feeling that if they could, they’d charge me a nickel per breath for actually breathing their air.
I must have looked - or acted - as young as the receptionist, because she suddenly broke into a wider-than professional smile.
“Oh, Christian Grey is dreamy,” she said, “He has such great taste too, but he hasn’t been in here in, oh, nearly six months. I’d just die to be one of the girls he brings in, he buys them the works.”
“He is mega-hot,” I churned out as an agreement while I filed away that fact and hoped that the receptionist was completely sarcasm blind, deaf, and dumb. What was with these people? Ever since I’d taken my research on Grey to less business-oriented forums, I’d come across the startling realization that the man with reddish hair and grey eyes was generally considered to be one of the best-looking young CEO’s in Washington… which baffled me. I guess money will make anyone attractive, but I certainly didn’t run away with Allie for money or looks, and I sort of treasured the idea that she’d asked me to because I dazzled her with my sharp wit.
“Speaking of Grey, he was going to bring someone in next week,” the receptionist said as she bent over her shiny, smudgeless computer, “but he’s canceled, so we have an opening on Wednesday at one for our all-over-package, and if you can’t do that, we can get you in on Friday at twelve.”
Since I didn’t plan to attend the appointment, I was going to be as picky as was humanly possible in the hopes she’d chatter more. “Oh,” I said, “I was really hoping to get some of the same things done as - oh, I’m so bad with names, but she’s a friend of my friend Hannah, you know - who came here about five months ago with Christian Grey. She said she felt like a new woman.”
“Oh, you mean Sophia,” the receptionist said, without even having to check her computer “She had the seaweed facial, her eyebrows threaded, a Brazilian wax… the whole all-over package. I’m glad she liked it.” Then she frowned, “I’m not authorized to give out client information, you know -”
“Oh, don’t worry!” I chirped, “All you did was save me a text.” Her brow smoothed over. “If that’s what she had, I’d like that on Friday, but - what’s a Brazilian wax?”
The receptionist raised a pencil-darkened eyebrow a fraction at me, then explained.
“Any luck?” Allie asked me as I hit the street outside.
“Grey had an appointment there for next Wednesday that he canceled, probably because Ana dumped him,” I said, as I adjusted my stride to her own, longer one. “The last girl he brought there was called Sophia, he brings different girls in fairly regularly, and buys them a hugely expensive full-body spa treatment, including a waxing treatment that I’d genuinely like to un-hear. I - well, assuming my name is Angelique O’Claire - have an appointment there next Friday, and since I gave them the number of last night’s Chinese take-out, will be persona non-grata there quite shortly.”
“Well, there’s a start,” Allie said. “Meanwhile, neither Esclava nor any other building on this block is protected by any form of magic, and that’s not just my judgment, but the judgment of our infallible little gadget here.” She patted her pocket where I knew she’d stowed the highly magic-sensitive tuning fork she’d set out to scan the streets with. Judging by the lack of any more noise coming from it than a low buzz that crept in on the edges of the subconscious, it wasn’t sensing anything other than Allie’s own aura.
“Looks like he’s not a mage,” I said.
“Or not trained enough to use magic in an organized fashion to protect his own business interests, or not actually that invested in Esclava,” Allie replied, “Meanwhile, I put down the papers, so we should know if any magic happens on this street in the next few days.”
I nodded. Magical litmus paper was yet another of the most useful minor spells she’d ever adapted for detective work. There was no fighting entropy, so some energy was always wasted in a spell, and it would trigger the energy-hungry inactive spells on the pieces of newspaper that Allie had tucked into planters and the nooks and crannies of streetlights. Assuming that any mage preformed any magic there in the next couple of days, before the spell started to disintegrate along with the newspaper, that is. I was beginning to think that, aside from having a new name to add to the list of potential clues, Esclava was a dead end.
“So, I take it it’s time to take a stroll around Grey’s Ego Incorporated like good little pedestrians?” I asked lightly.
“How could you guess?” Allie asked, offering me her arm as we headed Southwest down Second Avenue towards Downtown Seattle. It was a quick walk, and although the sky threatened rain, we didn’t need my umbrella.
When we reached the main offices of Grey’s company, I realized that I’d been right: the building was indeed a testament to ego, though a slightly pitiful one. At about twenty stories tall, the building was straining to be taller than the one next to it with the addition of a decorative-looking roof. We stopped across the way to form a plan, since Allie insisted it was her turn to try her hand at information-gathering, now that the threat of a haircut or waxed eyebrows was safely behind us.
“It’ll be easy, Linds,” she said, “I’ll pretend to be applying for a job as a secretary or something.”
I looked at her doubtfully. Allie is about five eight and, even on good days, gets chucked out of places of legitimate business for looking disreputable, and asking too many questions. It’s not her fault; she seems to have her own sub-clause of Murphy’s law that dictates that, if an investigation continues for long enough, she will be dragged through a sewer, have a vegetable cart explode on her, have to crawl through an oil-slicked machine, or otherwise become absolutely filthy. Between that and the fact that people with any sort of sensitivity to magic are often put off by her sheer intensity, and that people who actually can do magic know she’s miles beyond their league, she gets labeled dangerous and disreputable far more than is strictly fair.
I couldn’t see her as a secretary. For one thing, she doesn’t even use all of her fingers to type.
“Yeah, but you don’t have a résumé on hand,” I told her, mentally adding fake resumes to the list of useful legal-but-dishonest paperwork we ought to keep around.
“How were you going to start asking around?” she asked, “It’s not like the salon, where people just walk in.”
“Pretend to be applying for a job,” I replied immediately and without irony, “which I am dressed for, while you’re not.” Given that I’d worn flats that were going to hurt my feet if I kept wandering around Seattle in them, a pencil skirt, and a shiny blouse, while she’d worn jeans, sneakers and a T-shirt, it was fairly obvious.
“Where were you planning to get a résumé?” Allie replied.
“The library,” I said promptly. “We passed one on our way down, a couple blocks before the Columbia Center.” I pointed towards the quarter-circle shaped tower of the Columbia Center to the north. “They’ll have computers that are free to use and quarter printing, most likely.”
In the end, it took us about twenty minutes to type and print the fake résumé, which was accomplished by agreeing that it should look as average as possible, inventing four fake companies with four fake phone numbers to approximate eight to ten years of employment, brainstorming a bland list of personal accomplishments and a generic college name, and spending ninety cents on printing three copies at fifteen cents a page. Then we left, after making some very necessary adjustments and going through the necessity of acquiring a library card.
After that little detour, I was left standing on the sidewalk in Allie’s t-shirt, with the magic litmus, the tuning fork, and the two extra copies of the résumé as a slightly less scruffy version of Allie, wearing my blouse and some hastily-applied makeup, disappeared into the jaws of the corporate behemoth.
I pulled the tuning fork out of my pocket, struck it on my thigh to tune it to my own aura, and headed on a slow circuit around the block, stuffing scraps of magic litmus into every crack and crevice I could find, glancing occasionally over my glasses for the lingering aura of any spell as I went. I didn’t see anything but the blur of distance on the surrounding world, but that didn’t exactly prove anything, and I shouldn’t have needed the tuning fork anyway.
As I had fully expected, it was an uneventful walk. Once or twice, I thought I saw the fork twitch, but when I doubled back, it was nothing. People who saw me must have thought I was hunting for a cell signal.
I’d only made one circuit of the building when I saw the doors swing open and Allie step out, entirely disgusted. I hurried down the sidewalk to catch up to her.
“That was quick.”
“Tell me about it,” she said, “all of their job applications are submitted online. Are you done?”
“No magic, papers distributed,” I said, “Though, I did have a thought: the fork doesn’t really sense far into walls, so how far does it sense upward?”
Allie looked up. “I’m willing to bet not twenty stories,” she said. “And speaking of that, let’s get out of this street.”
We went home by bus, both steeped in the silence that came from not yet holding all the threads of a mystery. Once there, we heated up last night’s Chinese and ate while performing our respective tasks: Allie drawing up and refreshing spells, both the defensive sort and ones for gathering information, while I hit the internet once more to search for the full name of Sophia.
Naturally enough, I started with Facebook, checking for posts within the last six months that referenced Esclava. This lead to a lot of scrolling through advertisements and badly-typed comments sent from phones. At the end of two hours, I’d gone back six months, and made a list of every woman named Sophia or Sophie who had commented on Esclava’s page, followed the links back to their profile page, and checked their pictures. I had four brunettes, one redhead, an Asian-looking girl with black hair, three blondes, two girls with rainbow-streaked hair, and a handful of cosplayers, anime characters, landscapes or still life photos, and pokemon. Given that I couldn’t even be sure anyone’s profile picture was actually of them, they were all still possibilities, though the five whose age - as listed on their profile - was over forty were admittedly unlikely. I gave up for the time being and started pouring over the photos that I had bookmarked last night.
“I feel like a stalker,” I grumbled after a long time spent staring at tabloid-quality photographs, mostly of Christian alone, but sometimes with dark-haired young women, his family, other businessmen, or, in one case, posing with an unamused-looking dean from a local college on a graduation stage. I pushed my glasses up and rubbed my tired eyes.
“Well, I feel like a tailor,” Allie replied from the floor, where she was busy chalking defensive spells on the insides of all our clean clothes. Knowing the usual range and efficiency of her spells, I had a feeling that we were both going to be something like magically armored tanks when and if it came time to confront Christian Grey or any mages or nonmagical support he might have. Given the few times we’d had to use those sort of spells to their fullest extent, I could only hope that we were going to be overprepared.
“Not the same thing…” I muttered. Then, the darkness of the room and the lateness of the night struck me. “What time is it?” I asked.
Allie looked up at the clock. “About ten,” she said.
I groaned and glanced back at the computer screen. I’d had my fill of Christian and his “unknown women,” several hours ago, and while I’d gotten through most of the available photos from the past few months, I’d only identified two of them as containing Ana. The only one where her name was mentioned had come from the online edition of her own school paper, and I had half a thousand tabs open in the vague hope that I’d have better luck tracking down the mysterious Sophia or some other girl, giving us somewhere else to start.
For some reason, I strongly suspected that Allie’s new armory of spell-enhanced clothes was going to be more useful than my researches that night.
“Well, at least tell me what you’ve got,” Allie said, finishing with her chalk and draping the last shirt over a laundry basket.
I rapidly marshaled my thoughts. The glare from the computer screen was quite obnoxious, and it wasn’t as if I needed to look at it anyway, so I closed my eyes as I explained. “I’ve got about sixteen results from Esclava: ten are Sophie, six are Sophia. Of the Sophias I have one brunette, but she’s sixteen, and one who is twenty and blonde, and a youngish woman dressed up in a trenchcoat, a rainbow scarf about ten miles too long for her, a fedora, and what is obviously a wig.”
Allie chuckled, and the sound was cheerful and homey over the whirring of the laptop fan and the humming of the refrigerator. “Everyone else?” she asked.
“Fairly old, ages unknown, picture obviously not themselves, or profile locked,” I replied, “I added about five high schools and ten colleges to my page before I friend-requested them.” The great thing about my name, as opposed to Allie’s, is that everybody has known a Lindsay during school, and then more or less completely forgotten what she was actually like. “I’ve also gotten evidence of at least four different girls with Christian Grey in addition to Ana. All of them have brown hair and are fairly slender, and they look quite young. No names yet.”
“And your eyes hurt,” Allie noted.
“Only a bit,” I protested, opening them again. The light from the computer really was quite glaring, but I could have sworn that the ceiling light had gotten yellower as well. Allie was standing in front of me with a mulish expression, mixed with concern, spread across her face.
“You’re going to have to get your prescription checked.”
“I just did.” I very much doubted that the increasing headaches had anything to do with my prescriptions. I also very much didn’t want to talk about what they probably did come from, not when Allie was half-convinced that I shouldn’t be looking for auras right now to begin with.
“Then you’re clearly too tired to think straight,” Allie concluded. “And that doesn’t help anyone, especially if you keep worrying about the case. Come to bed.”
She took my hand and I rose from the chair and followed her.
Chapter 3: Love is not a Panacea[Notes]
* Yup, gabbing about other customers was not a good thing for the receptionist to do.
** I used Google Maps and the approximate location of Spa Noir and the Columbia Center to estimate the distance Allie and Lindsay walk. I’ve walked double the distance through Chicago in about half an hour, so while I don’t know much about the actual route and whether walking there is a great idea, it’s physically not a hugely taxing walk. My headcannon is that Grey’s building is one of the smaller ones on James St, a couple blocks down from the Columbia Center.
*** All information on the Central branch of the Seattle Public Library was gathered here.
**** Given that Ana doesn’t know what the internet is for (fanfiction and kitten videos, why do you ask?) and Grey has a definite type, it’s possible that many of his victims haven’t been very internet savvy, though admittedly Facebook is a low bar when it comes to technological prowess.
***** I’m pretty sure there’s an internet rule that there will always be someone cosplaying, and it’s pretty often some iteration of the Doctor. J