fic: You Call This Archaeology?
recipient: little_missmimi
author: witchling
title: You Call This Archaeology?
pairing: Brad Colbert/Ray Person
rating: R, for all those creative expletives.
word count: 9779
summary/warnings: Indiana Jones!Au. It’s one thing to talk about consulting with someone, but Brad’s not going to be responsible for keeping some wet-behind-the-ears pup in one piece.
author notes: I have to thank my beta. Without her I would be completely lost and this would be shit. little_missmimi, I hope that you like this and that it's close enough to what you wanted.
The neighbourhood is one of those places about two trendy coffee shops and a boutique clothing store away from being totally gentrified. The rent is still cheap enough that the residents are mostly students. If Nate's about to introduce him to some frat boy grad student who thinks that an Honours BA makes him Lara Croft's dream man Brad's going to be pissed. His hair and the shoulders of his coat are dark with rain from just the short dash between Nate's car and the awning near the door to the lobby.
“Would you please just trust me?” Nate says. If Brad didn’t know him so well he might miss the irritation tightening the edges of his words.
Nate jams the button with his thumb and listens to the metallic, canned buzz. Somewhere in the depths of the building its twin is going off. Brad steps back until he is standing beyond the cover of the overhang and he cranes his head up. Nate is huddled in the shelter out of the weather, hands tucked back in his pockets. The wind is bitingly cold but the rain has stopped. The seven story brick building is slick with it, stained dark. In most apartments the blinds are pulled.
“Speak and be recognized puny mortal,” a voice crows through the speakers, tinny in replication.
“It’s me,” Nate says, rolling his eyes. There is a hesitation on the other end of the line and then fuzzy laughter.
He doesn’t need to use his name, his voice is enough. That’s more comforting to Brad than any of Nate’s assurances in the car. It’s one thing to say he’s the best in the business and quite another all together if Nate actually uses him enough to have that sort of familiarity and rapport. Nate curls his fingers around the door handle and waits, shaking rain from his hair like a dog.
“Why the fuck didn’t you just say so, homes?” the voice says and the lock on the door gives the sharp, angry buzz of a hornet. “Come on up.”
They bypass the elevator entirely. Given the state of the small lobby and the smell of the stairwell, Brad doesn’t question it. He’d rather not plummet to his death in a tuna can. He does trust Nate, up to a point. He’s never lead Brad astray and he has an uncanny knack for knowing how to acquire information previously believed to be lost to history. Nate has never brought anyone else in though, not to consult and not as a supposed expert.
When they reach the sixth floor there is already a door open. Nate smiles at the man in the doorway. He’s small, built tight and dark, with sleepless bruises under his eyes. Brad arches an eyebrow and takes in the whole of him. He doesn’t look like Nate’s expert. He looks like he should be slinging beer to a smoky pub crowd. Inside his apartment there are stacks of books on every available flat surface and his lap top is nearly entirely buried under a haphazard pile of papers and books.
A cup of coffee is steaming beside the computer but from the way that Ray’s fingers drum against his own thigh Brad thinks he’s probably had more than enough.
“You must be Colbert,” Ray says. He smiles wide and toothy. It is sharp and lopsided but carves deep dimples into his cheeks. It makes him look very young.
Nate clears the couch of a few sheaves of paper and large, leather bound book, the pages of which have been marked with colour coded sticky notes. Ray just waves him off when he asks where to put them. Nate settles them neatly on the floor to the left of the couch and sinks down onto the batter upholstery. Neither of them asks Brad to sit.
He takes that as an invitation to pace the apartment, sliding papers off stacks and looking at the books that have filled the shelves on the living room walls, and then bred at an alarming rate in order to cover every other surface. A lot of the books aren’t in English and some of them look like first editions. As haphazard as it all seems initially, Brad can see that the colour coding systems has consistency, coinciding with his diligent note taking. Brad finds it heartening.
“If you’re the expert,” Brad says, “why do you need me?”
Ray laughs, lets his leg bounce where he’s perched himself on the edge of the desk. He has watched Brad prowl his apartment, touch his things. He has deep dimples when he grins over the top of his coffee cup.
“My expertise is largely academic, homes. Or entirely academic, whatever. I’m not saying that I’m some kinda pussy, Colbert, but you do get to pop my Indiana Jones cherry,” Ray says around his smile. Nate has propped his feet on the steamer trunk Ray’s re-purposed as a coffee table. He meets Brad’s gaze and holds it unflinchingly. Nate just shrugs and looks back to Ray.
“So you’re saying that you’ve never been in the field before.” Brad pinches the bridge of his nose. It’s one thing to talk about consulting with someone, but he’s not going to be responsible for keeping some wet-behind-the-ears pup in one piece.
“Not since school. But his academic knowledge of the subject at hand is unparalleled,” Nate says. He is mirroring Ray now, both men bracing their hands on their knees. Brad wonders if they even realize they’re doing it.
“There are some goth girls with self esteem issues that probably know a lot more than me, but talking to them is never a good time for anyone involved,” Ray says. Brad can see the hint of some pretty extensive tattoos when Ray pushes his long sleeves up around his elbows.
“I have a line on the personal archives of Sultan Mehmed II,” Nate says “I want you to go with Ray. He’s got the academic grounding you need, and you have the field experience.”
Brad looks between the two of them. They are both levelling him with steady, unflinching stares. Nate’s not the sort of man who offers these sorts of opportunities lightly. He also doesn’t bring idiots into the game if it is even remotely avoidable. He scrubs his hand through his hair. Nate already knows he’s going to say yes.
“Fuck yeah, you Viking motherfucker,” Ray says, eyes dark and shining “we’re talking about finding Dracula, homes.”
-
Nate leaves them alone when Ray starts showing Brad his research. He goes with a shake of his head. Ray hardly notices. He’s busy digging through a stack of first editions beside his couch. Brad stretches out his legs, braces his weight back against the desk. The apartment smells like a used book store, that familiar, comforting scent of ageing paper and old glue.
“Fact of the matter is, homes, monks are full of shit when they start talking about who is buried in their church. It’s like one of those laws of nature. Snagov says that Vlad’s buried there but everyone knows it’s fucking bullshit.” Ray’s been talking, without breathing, for several minutes now. Nate had warned him it was something like Ray’s speciality.
Brad closes his eyes and lets his head fall back. The curtains are closed but beyond them, under the rise and fall of Ray’s voice, he can hear rain on the window pane. Ray’s voice is sort of nice, the way he ramps himself into a rant. It is nice to listen to someone who so clearly knows their topic. His finger finds the edge of a postcard on the desk and he lets it catch under his nail.
“Are you even fucking listening? Because if I’m being nice enough to let you in on all my blood and sweat research, you had best fucking listen. This shit is quality, no one - and I mean no one - has the shit I have,” Ray says, brandishing what looks like a leather bound journal. He is young and fierce, eyes shining.
“I wish I wasn’t, Person, but yes. I’m listening,” Brad says, pouring disdain and exhaustion into his voice. He feels the muscles twitch at the corners of his lips and steels himself against a smile. No need to encourage him.
Ray throws himself dramatically down onto the couch, arms thrown wide. He gives Brad a look like he’s been betrayed. Brad smiles and thumbs a stack of Ray’s notes. They seem to be an extensive account of Vlad the Impaler’ time in the court of Sultan Mehmed II. Ray’s obsessive compulsive highlighting makes the pages brilliantly coloured, but Brad does admit that Ray’s sparing with his highlighter fetish. He highlights important features, leaves bright marks in the margins to tie things together but doesn’t go hog wild.
“So basically the point is that Mehmed II kept a personal archive about dear old Dracula because they were having hate sex, and Hot Lips has found some research that implies that the Order of the Dragon may have hidden a map to his body,” Ray says. His knees bounce and he folds himself down until his elbows are braced on his thighs.
Brad looks back down at the postcard he's been toying with. It's old, the picture on the front faded with age. Deep creases cut across the corners where it's been folded and bent at odd angles. Machu Picchu stares up at him. Without thinking about things like personal privacy and respecting it Brad flips it over. There's nothing written on the back of it. There's no post mark. There is however a bit of left over tape stuck to it. Ray's had it on his wall at some point.
“Machu Picchu?” Brad says, like it has some baring on what's going on here.
“I saw the Indiana Jones movies with my mom when I was sick once and decided that I was going to make Indie look like a pussy little bitch. I read everything I could get from my junior high bullshit library. I collected ancient places like it was cool, homes. Some guys had baseball cards and I had fucking tourist brochures for Stonehenge and Machu Picchu. My big plan was to go there after high school and find El Dorado,” Ray grins. He talks about it as if that sort of thing is the most normal of aspirations for a thirteen year old.
“Machu Picchu and El Dorado-”
“Have fucking nothing to do with each other?” Ray laughs, “yeah. I know that now but at the time I was a pimply face little fuck ant. I was just as likely to think that the Great Wall of China was some how connected to El Dorado. It was mix and match folk lore at it's finest.”
Brad laughs. He gets that. To dedicate your life so completely to history, to the lives and deeds of peoples that died long before you were ever born takes a special sort of devotion. They all have that trigger moment. It's embarrassing how many of the working relic hunters in Brad's age bracket can trace that trigger back to Indiana Jones. Brad imagines Ray keeping a post card from Machu Picchu in his locker when everyone else has calender girls. Brad had the Sphinx.
“So,” Ray says, jittery and hopeful, “so you want to go in with me on this shit? What do you say, partner?”
“I’m in,” Brad says, still thumbing the edge of that postcard
-
The week after Brad meets Ray, he receives an invitation to the private library of a long dead Sultan. Brad has long considered Nate Fick as possessing some kind of mind-warp magic; he has a way of getting whatever he needs. The only other explanation is that Nate might be the bastard son of Prince Phillip or something equally ridiculous. It took Nate six days to get their affairs in order; not only does he have an invitation to the Sultan’s library for Ray and Brad, he has managed to convince the current owner, an English Duke (much to the chagrin of the Turkish government), that it was all his idea to invite them. When the Duke apologized for not being able to get them a private jet, Brad couldn’t tell if he’d been kidding or not.
Despite the fact Nate scored them first class seats, Ray has curled himself into Brad’s space. On all sides, there are luxurious, sprawling seats and Ray is dozing on Brad’s shoulder. Brad keeps telling himself that he is going to wake Ray to shake him off. Any minute now, really. He’s still and silent though, unsettlingly quiet. Brad had been pretty sure that Ray was going to talk in his sleep. He’d never met a person who could fit so many words into one breath.
Brad had assumed it would be no different when he slept. He seems a lot younger in repose, his eyelashes a dusky smudge against the tops of his cheeks. Ray sleeps like all the twitching anxiety has faded out of him, while Brad feels just the opposite. He feels full of energy, like it’s buzzing under his skin.
He has spent the better part of a week playing catch up. Ray’s been seriously working on this research for almost a year and somewhere between his rapid-fire verbal incontinence and his savant-like colour coding he’s found things no one else has. Turns out it was Ray who turned Nate on to the archives of the Sultan who allegedly entertained Dracula. Fucking Dracula; Brad can’t believe this. Ray has a knack for boiling things down to their base coding. It’s made all the catching up a lot easier. But he’s done now. He’s a relic hunter. He wants to get his hands dirty, to do his own research.
Ray shifts in his sleep, curls closer. His breath is hot and wet on Brad’s throat. He’s folded himself into his seat, curled sideways until his knees are crowded halfway in Brad’s lap. His hands slide, trying to figure out how to settle comfortably again, until Brad guides Ray’s hands down to fold over Ray’s abdomen. Ray rubs his cheek on Brad’s shoulder and settles back into a deeper sleep. They have another six hours in the air and Brad lets him lie where he is.
The buzzing under his skin arcs and cracks like lightening.
-
“Nice,” Ray says.
He is bracing himself against the door frame. Ray’s half in his room, half in the bathroom. There is an expanse of blue and white tiles between them. Brad stands in the centre of his own room. They share a fucking bathroom. Ray presses his weight into his hands and the muscles of his arms tense. Brad turns his attention back to unpacking his clothes.
Ray walks through the bathroom into Brad’s room like it’s no big deal. Brad can hear his bare feet on the tile before his steps are muffled by carpet. He sprawls himself back on Brad’s bed beside his suitcase. He wriggles, getting comfortable. He tucks his hands behind his head, one leg swinging off the edge of the bed. He seems perfectly content to just lay there watching Brad.
“Nate’s got some sick connections, homeskillet, and I’m stoked that our digs are so fucking quality. But when are we meeting our Duke? I don’t need to be sitting around in air conditioning with my dick in my hand,” Ray says, as if this is all somehow news to Brad.
Brad ignores him, giving too much attention to refolding his shirts, but he’s smiling. Ray’s enthusiasm speaks volumes about how young he is, but Brad likes enthusiasm in a relic hunter. Passion for the hunt, not the pay off, is what makes the difference between a relic hunter and a grave-robber. It’s not a flattering comparison, but Brad’s never been one to hold onto illusions for the sake of feeling better about himself. Ray rolls his head to watch Brad put his clothes in the wardrobe. He can see Ray’s duffel lying on the floor in his room, still packed.
“We’re meeting the Duke at his home this afternoon.” Brad leaves his down and dirty tomb diving gear in the bottom of the bag. It’s mid-morning, and the hot sunshine is muffled by the curtains. Brad, for one, is enjoying the air conditioning.
Ray’s whole body is twitching. He has one knee cocked up and is tapping his foot on the comforter. Brad just laughs, shaking his head. He’s going to have to reign in his impatience or this will be torture for him.
“You need to be prepared for this not going anywhere,” Brad says.
Ray watches him with dark eyes. It’s easy to get this close and promptly forget these hunches don’t often go according to plan. Brad’s been there before. He’s not certain that Ray has. He’s not sure that he’s felt the bitter crush of disappointment. Brad tells him that. Knowing it now beats being surprised by it later.
“You’re a fucking Debbie Downer, Bradley. Look, worst case I get my grubby hands all over the archive of Mehmed II, which is pretty fucking choice,” Ray says. He shrugs like it’s no big thing.
-
The Duke Timothy Bryan is striking and stern. He has the sort of gaze that Brad can feel like a physical thing, but his smile is sharp and easy enough. He welcomes them into his home with plain words and asks them to just wait a moment while he gets his coat. Ray turns to snoop through the drawers of the hall table. His tee shirt is soft under Brad’s hand, faded with too many washings. Brad drags Ray back away from the table, hauls him away like a curious puppy. Ray makes a startled squawk and stumbles back into Brad’s chest. He wraps his arm around Ray’s shoulder, pressing across his collar bone and holding him still. No need to piss off their patron by snooping.
“I haven’t moved the archive,” Bryan says, stepping out onto the street with them. He squints up at the sky but doesn’t put on sun glasses. Brad wishes Ray had opted out of sunglasses as well. The gaudy gold things that he’s donned are in equal parts comical and horrifying.
“Has it stayed here in Istanbul since Mehmed started it?” Ray asks, stretching his legs to keep up with Bryan and Brad. He’s not actually a small man but Bryan seems to take up more space than his actual size justifies.
Bryan shakes his head. “After his death it was moved from his palace to the private property of one of his Janissaries. That's the property that my family purchased years ago,” Bryan says. He winds up the side streets without thought or hesitation. Brad thinks he must spend a great deal of time in the archives. “The stories say he set up an elite guard of the Janissaries, and they pledged to stand counter to the Order of the Dragon. It was the grand master of these elite Janissaries that moved the archives. Local folklore says the guard is still around.”
“Secret societies?” Ray grins wide and toothy.
“Don’t get ahead of yourself, Ray,” Brad says, tucking his hands in his pockets. The urge to grab the back of his shirt, tug him back into his side is a physical clench.
“Here we are. You need to put in the code every time the door opens, whether or not anyone’s inside already,” Bryan says. Fishing a key out of his pocket, he unlocked the door and ushered them into the cool semi-darkness of the entry way. There is a persistent, irritating beeping until Bryan enters the security code. The door swings shut behind them and there is a moment of stillness and silence.
“Tim,” a young woman says. Her accent says that she was probably born and raised right there in Istanbul. Her hair is thick and dark and pulled away from her face in a ponytail that swings when she moves.
“Sabiha, this is Brad and Ray.” Bryan touches each of the men on the shoulder, standing between them. “I want you to help them with anything they ask for.”
She nods, her ponytail bouncing. Her hands are tucked into her pockets and she rocks her weight back on her heels. Sabiha has a deep calm about her. It's the calm that Brad has always found in the best sort of librarians. As if maybe she's always been here in the library.
“I’ll get you set up in the stacks and leave you in Sabiha’s capable hands. She works in the library for me for less than she deserves but she is doing her doctoral work at the university here. She may proof as useful a resource as many of the texts we house here,” Bryan says, and she steps out of their way as they follow the narrow, dark corridor through another set of doors. The library opens up before them and Brad forgets to be stoic and unimpressed by the world.
-
The library is brightly lit and clearly well cared for. A table is set up in the centre of the room with stacks spiralling out from it. As far as Brad is concerned - aside from the books - the most notable feature is the bank of windows around the top of the wall. They spill sunlight into the room through the better part of the day. When Ray asks about them, recognising them as an unusual design for the time, Sabiha laughs and leans conspiratorially close.
“Dracula,” she tells them, voice accented and bright with the edge of laughter. Brad can see Ray is something very close to in love with her. She leaves them to peruse a towering column of beginner texts, and Ray flirts loudly and crudely whenever she returns from the depths of the stacks, cradling books in her arms like she would a babe.
Sabiha has a knack for knowing exactly where just the right text is housed. She has the air of someone who probably spends a lot more time in the stacks than her employer is aware of. Brad likes history majors, they have an appropriate respect for original manuscripts. Even so, he can’t bring himself to embrace Sabiha (literally or figuratively) like Ray has. She’s unsettled by the cold reception he gives her and it shows on her face. Part of him feels bad about it. It’s not as if she’s a bad person, and she’s smart enough that he should be at least passingly fond of her.
Every time Ray flirts with her, she laughs and touches his arm. Brad rolls his eyes, hard enough that he’s concerned he might’ve strained something. His mother did once warn him he could get stuck that way. He turns away, buries himself in his research. Brad makes a point of not listening. If Ray wants to waste their time flirting, that’s his problem.
Brad has made a conscious choice not to examine the root of his irritation. It’s safer if he tells himself that he doesn’t like the distraction. Ray never has to know and they can both try to focus on the research. Ray has an irritating fucking habit of clicking his pen when he reads. It should drive Brad up the wall but he finds the steady rhythm calming, expected and misses it when he pauses to write.
“You’re being a cunt,” Ray says eventually, head bent over his notebook. He is clicking the top of his pen, hair sticking up at odd angles. He likes to drag his fingers through it until it’s wild and out of control.
Brad watches the top of his head but Ray doesn’t look up. Ray pauses his reading to write something down, reaching for a highlighter. The library is quiet. Somewhere behind them Sabiha is sitting at her desk, clicking away at her laptop. Until they call for her, she leaves them largely alone. Brad huffs out a sigh and sits back. He stretches his legs out in front of him and his feet bump into Ray’s.
Ray looks up at him, quiet and unusually solemn. Brad feels as though there is a lot being left unsaid. Neither of them pull their feet back. Ray shifts and the sole of his boot presses more solidly against Brad’s calf. Brad knows exactly what Ray’s talking about. He pretends like he doesn’t, arching an eyebrow.
“Sabiha’s great, homes. She’s all sexy smoky eyes and a big ol’ brain chock full of Dewey fucking decimals and original translations,” Ray says, still hunched low over the books in front of him. One nail is tapping out a staccato on the top of a map.
“We need to focus on our research, Ray,” Brad tells him, voice level and reasonable, “we don’t need a distraction.”
“Okay,” Ray says after a long pause.
There is something like a smile in the corners of his lips. He drops his head over his work, pen scratching against the paper. His foot takes over where his hands stopped, tapping that same staccato against Brad’s calf. It’s sort of irritating, and stretching his legs out like that gives him a bad angle to write at. He doesn’t pull his legs back.
-
Brad’s already running late. He told Ray that he’d be back at their hotel almost an hour earlier. He let himself get caught up in discussion with Tim - the Duke, he corrected himself - and time had gotten away from him. His tardiness had one advantage, though: Craig fucking Schwetje is standing in the lobby of their hotel having a jovial conversation with the young man behind the counter. His partner hangs back, hands tucked into his pockets. Griego looks side to side every few moments, scanning for some villain to jump out of the shadows.
He still doesn’t fucking see Brad standing near the door. Between Schwetje and Griego, Brad thinks they might share a brain. But if they were here in Istanbul, in Brad’s hotel, the chances were they were chasing Brad’s relic. Schwetje had a bad habit of waiting for Brad to get a bite, then trying to snake his relic. Brad ducks down the hall to the elevators when Schwetje starts to wrap up his conversation. He doesn’t need Schwetje to know he’s been spotted, it’ll only mean he redoubles his efforts to get ahead of Brad. He jabs his thumb into the button, hunching down into his coat.
The ride up in the elevator gives him plenty of time to devise some worst case scenarios. Maybe Schwetje already knows where they’re staying, maybe he’s already been up to their room. Craig’s a decent enough human being for a fucking asshole, but Griego is a mean son of a bitch. Schwetje might not be inclined to actually hurting anyone to get what he wanted. The same didn’t necessarily go for his guard dog.
By the time he’s unlocking his door, shouldering into his room, he’s almost convinced himself Ray’s choking on his own blood or something equally dramatic. Brad’s room is pristine, just the way he left it. Still, he tries the door on their connected bathroom before he takes a second to settle himself. Steam billows out over him, sticking to his skin and making his clothing feel too heavy. Ray is halfway out of the shower, wrapping a towel around himself. All of his shaggy hair is pushed back from his face, plastered to his head. A bead of water drips from the short hair at the back of his scalp and trails down his spine.
Brad traces the movement until it drips into the grey of Ray’s towel. His mouth is dry and his tongue feels heavy. Ray’s skin is very pink from the shower, and his tattoos stand out, dark and seemingly fresh with his skin wet. Brad has an immediate and visceral urge to reach out and touch them. He wants to press his fingers into the dark lines of the praying mantis on the back of his arm.
“Shit, homes, did you wrestle a fucking bear on the way back?” Ray says and Brad thinks his voice sounds husked out, hollow. He’s half turned now he’s seen Brad’s reflection in the mirror. Both of his hands have fisted in his towel, holding it up. Brad drags his gaze up to Ray’s face. He forces himself to meet and hold his gaze. It’s safer than watching water cling to the dark trail of hair dipping low on his abdomen.
“I ate without you, homes. I was gonna wait but I getting all grouchy and shit. It's bad enough that you're an antisocial motherfucker who's barely fit to speak to people. Can't have me getting all low blood sugar up in this bitch. Next thing you know it'll be all Dashboard Confessionals and tragic hair. Then you wont want to be my friend anymore, ” Ray says, shaking his head like a dog. It spatters across Brad's face and the front of his shirt.
“Craig Schwetje’s in town,” Brad tells him, like it’s the most normal thing in the world to talk to Ray in a towel. Ray, who is dripping water and flushed with the heat of his shower. Brad swallows heavily. “He’s a rival relic hunter - he’s a grave robber.”
“Then we better not let him jack our shit, homes,” Ray says.
He smiles wide and broad, hands on his hips. He looks a lot more certain and determined than anyone in a towel has any right to. Brad shakes his head and turns away. His attention refocuses places other. There is water on Ray’s skin, collected in the hollow of his collar bone. Brad wants to taste it. He wants to map the tattoos with his mouth. Instead he bumps his knuckles against the door jamb and turns away. Behind him Ray is singing to himself as he gets dressed.
-
Sabiha makes coffee like no one Brad’s ever met. He’s had Turkish coffee before. Relic hunters liked to make themselves seem as worldly as possible; they like to smoke hand rolled cigarettes with tobacco imported from whatever small, forgotten fragment of the world seems the most obscure and use thousand year old Chinese remedies for the common cold. Brad would previously have said that he was pretty well versed in Turkish coffee. Temporarily putting aside any distaste for her flirting with Ray, Brad has no problem admitting she is the greatest thing that has ever happened to coffee in his world. He told her as much, watched her cheeks redden.
She is adamant it’s nothing special. That it’s the cardamom, a common Lebanese recipe, but each cup is spectacularly dark, a thick smooth head of foam floating on every cup. She tries to keep them both happy and splits the difference between Brad taking his coffee straight and black, and Ray’s constant need for sugar, but Brad knows she mixes extra sugar into Ray’s cup when she thinks no one is watching.
“Flame. It’s a candle, see?” Sabiha says, tipping the white china mug so that Ray can examine the bottom. His arm is stretched across the back of her chair. Sunlight streams through the high windows and illuminates the small spaces in the library.
It makes Ray lazy. He likes to bask in it, stretch back and soak in the sun. Sabiha entertains him for those moments when Brad can't force him to refocus. The coffee makes him jittery. He vibrates around the edges enough as it is. Brad watches them hunch low around his coffee cup. Sabiha is teaching him to tell fortunes in the grounds left at the bottom. Brad's actually all right with it. It makes Ray's smile wide and boyish. It's a good look on him.
“Is it because I'm so hot?” Ray asks and then stops, and re-frames because the colloquialism is lost in the translation. “Is it because I'm so sexy, I make your blood run hot?”
Ray's better with people than Brad is. He re-frames things in a way that people understand. Brad just sounds like a thesaurus when he tries. Ray's words are his gift, though. Not just the sheer number of them he can manage in a breath, but also how well he can use them. Under a truly spectacular command of the word “fuck”, he hides a delicate touch with words. Sabiha just laughs and shakes her head.
“It means illumination, Ray. New understanding,” she says.
Brad's still thinking about Ray and his words. It's clicking things together in his head. The complexities of translations have stalled out better relic hunters than him. He turns quickly, riffles through his research until he finds the right sheaf of ancient paper. The paper is browned and the ink is very faded. Folded around it is his own translation - meticulously taken down. The coffee cup rattles when he slams his hands down on the table before them. Sabiha's eyes go wide and startled.
“All right, Bradley, let's not get our panties in a pinch. I'm researching. I'm researching,” Ray says mildly. He puts his hands up as if in surrender.
“No, it's not that,” Brad's watching Sabiha, “I did this translation but I'm not as good with languages as either of you. I know that the key is here. That this letter has that last piece the context is all there but I'm missing the finer details. My translation might be off.”
“Of course,” Sabiha says and reaches for both pieces of paper. She plucks a pen from the bun at the base of her skull.
Sabiha has neater writing than either of them. Her letters are well formed, tight and small. Brad imagines that Nate's writing must look like that. Brad translated every word twice. Sabiha doesn't bother. She goes directly to English with a certainty that Brad both admires and envies. She does it by memory.
“Oh,” Sabiha says.
Both men look at her as one. She blinks up at them and Brad can concede that they must be a lot to deal with at times. She spins her pen, a habit that Brad has seen in hundreds of grad students.
“Your translation is off,” she says, like she's embarrassed to have to tell him.
“This doesn't mean where the sun is ruined, not exactly. It has nautical implications. It's where the sun sinks,” she says, watching the understanding dawn in their eyes.
“Where the sun sinks,” Brad says.
“Sunsets,” Ray grins, watches Brad's face.
Brad can feel his palms itching. He always feels this rush when a hunt comes together. He can feel they're on the right path. All his instincts are primed to this.
“Chindia tower at Tagoviste. The sunset tower,” Ray says, harsh and breathless.
“The Impaler built it,” Brad says. He can feel Ray's excitement like ants on his skin.
“The town even had a sunset curfew, no one went out after dark,” Ray says. His smile is very wide. “Pesky vampires.”
-
“I feel like Indiana Jones,” Ray tells him as they descend the steps into Chindia's basement.
It's not a popular tourist season and the chances are that Chindia Tower would have been pretty empty no matter what. Brad didn't take that chance. Nate Fick may be the king of the connection but Brad knows people. Knows enough that they have the tower to themselves for the time being. It hardly matters that it's the dead of night. The whole basement is lit up by work lights, giving it a bright, false warmth.
The walls are sandy, local stone. Every slow, measured foot fall echoes around the corridors. Brad sweeps his flashlight in regular, smooth swings back and forth across the walls. The basement is open and empty and largely uninteresting. But Vlad the Impaler - fucking Dracula, Brad’s still not quite over it - set these foundations, so there must be something here. They’ve already checked the upstairs floors, which had proven to be just as uninteresting and entirely unfruitful. This is their last hope to find some clue here. Brad's steeling himself to tell Ray that whatever might have been in Tagoviste are long gone, lost to history and time.
“I'm definitely Indy,” Brad says, his voice rebounding off the stone walls oddly. Ray has let himself wander into the next portion of hall. His laugh comes back distorted and distant.
“Does that make me Marian then?” Ray calls. Brad can hear him pacing in measured, steady steps. Ray doesn't have field experience, but he's the sort of academic who can apply what he knows to the world. Questionable sexual tension aside, he likes having Ray with him.
Brad values intelligence very highly.
“Brad,” Ray says, breaking Brad's concentration.
Ray's voice holds a sharp edge of excitement. Brad knows what that excitement tastes like on his tongue; he's felt it before and he is struck by the echo of it now. He's not sure if he runs to join Ray but in the space between moments he's made his way to Ray's side. Ray’s considering a crest on the wall. It's the Tagoviste coat of arms.
But not quite. Brad can't quite put his finger on it.
“That should be an eagle,” Ray says, tracing the outer edge of the crest with one calloused fingertip.
He's right. Ray's ability to remember minutiae is astounding. Especially since it seems like he's often too wired and jittery to remember his own name. The coat of arms is almost right. The blue is just so and the bronze figure of a man and a woman standing together is the same as it always has been. The white tree between their outstretched hands does not have an eagle perched above it. Between the sun and the moon on the blue sky is a dragon, wings outstretched and serpentine tail curling down around the branches of the tree. The dragon's mouth is open, teeth carved in exquisite, horrible detail.
“It's a bit on the nose, don't you think?” Brad says, flashlight lifted high to focus on the crest. Ray's already tucked his flashlight away into his bag.
“You're not appreciating how tongue in cheek dear old Fang Face can be, apparently,” Ray says and skims his hand across the dragon's body. It shifts minutely under his fingers and they both go instantly alive with tension. When Ray looks back at him - looking at once young and very unsure - Brad just nods.
Secret passages. He should have fucking known. The crest gives under gentle pressure, and the sure click turning cogs echoes in the still and silent basement. The wall seems to shudder, and swings towards them. Ray smacks into Brad's chest when he stumbles over his own feet to get out of the way. Brad’s arm reflexively curls around Ray's waist, holding him upright. Beyond the yawning doorway is shadowy darkness and a short hallway.
Ray is eager as a puppy as he digs his flashlight out again and heads into the dark. Brad follows more carefully, reaching out for the back of Ray's shirt. There's no need to get themselves killed because they didn't see the tripwire; that's sloppy and embarrassing. Brad refuses to die embarrassingly. However, the hallway is blessedly short and trap-free. Apparently the Order of the Dragon wasn't too concerned anyone would ever find it.
The short hall leads to a small, rough hewn room. Under the sweep of their flashlights it seems unimpressive, carved right into the rock under the earth. It's what's in the hidden crypt that is so interesting. A sarcophagus stands propped against the far wall, surrounded by tables bearing the weight of ancient tributes. Dragons and swords scatter them, along with brooches with the crest of Vlad the Impaler' house. Brad can't believe it was this easy, though he's not naive enough to believe Dracula is housed in the great carved sarcophagus on the wall. The dimensions aren't right to be holding a body; it's too wide, big enough for two men to lay in it shoulder to shoulder quite comfortably. A proper sarcophagus of the time would be rested on a dais, and would be treated with more reverence than being stacked against a wall. It’s there for show. Above it someone has carved deep ornate letters into the rock face.
“He who walks with the dead walks free,” Ray translates, flashlight following the dark letters. His nose wrinkles. “Well that's cheery.”
Ray looks at him with such hope that Brad's at least a little sorry to shake his head.
Their search is only just starting. This is one step on the way to finding Vlad the Impaler, Brad feels very certain of that. Ray's shoulders slump and Brad can see it in the light of their flashlights. He reaches out and curls his fingers Ray's neck. He's cradling the back of his throat in the palm of his hand. He bends low, bumps their foreheads together for a moment because he feels like he can leave that here when they go; he can seal this moment up inside the crypt to be ignored and forgotten, decaying with the rest of the second-rate treasure. Ray's body vibrates under his touch. Brad can feel Ray stretching up towards him, straining for him and Brad pulls away.
“We have a lot of reading to do,” Brad says, instead. The look Ray gives him is withering.
“What the actual fuck,” Ray hisses between his teeth and watches Brad go. There is a tense moment when Brad fully expects Ray to launch into a tirade, but he just frowns, deep creases forming in his brow, and he lets the moment pass without further comment.
For a few minutes Ray bustles around loudly, puts things down too hard, and generally acts like a petulant little shit. It eases though. He grips his flashlight between his lips and sorts through stacks of papers - scrolls and letters mostly. They settle into a quiet rhythm, solitary as they work their way through centuries-old accounts of tortures, torments and tributes. There's something comforting about being surround by dust and history that takes a certain sort of person to appreciate. Typically the sort of person who better understands the lives and choices of long dead royalty than the people in their life, but that might just be Brad projecting.
-
Ray makes a noise that might be Brad's name. He can't tell around the flashlight. Ray's chin is shiny with spit because he can't actually swallow with the flashlight in his mouth like that. Brad just shakes his head and reaches out to take it from him. As soon as his hand closes around it he grimaces. Part of him wants to drop it right then and there but he manfully resists the urge. It's slick with spit and Brad should probably find that a lot more disgusting than it is. It's still almost too much to deal with. No matter how often he's been thinking about Ray's mouth he didn't really need a handful of slobber. Ray seems blissfully unaware that he's fairly gross. He just gives Brad a grateful smile, brandishing a faded letter like a sword.
“Use your words, Ray,” Brad says, as if Ray somehow needs coaching.
“I found a guide to the final resting place of the Impaler! Looks like his homeboys jacked his head back from the Sultan and reunited it with his body. Only they didn't trust that Mehmed wouldn't come looking for it again - which is reasonable really, homes had a whole thing about the head of Dracula. Probably because he's a vampire. Either way, they built Dracula a hidden tomb to keep his earthly remains together for all time or what the fuck ever.” Ray’s voice inflects upward on “earthly remains”, as if he’s using mental air quotes. His face crinkles with excitement, and Brad meets his eyes for a beat, waiting for the next part. The information is useful, but what Brad really needs is a place. If they don't have a name, they're going to have to go back to research, spending interminable hours looking at each and every place the Order of the Dragon might have considered important enough to house Vlad the Impaler's remains. It’s tedious and exhausting just thinking about it. Ray cocks his head to the side, not understanding the hesitation in Brad's face.
“Oh!” Ray says, putting the pieces together, “he's at Comana. This letter details how to find his tomb with new landmarks since the destruction of the original church. But guys like Vlad the Impaler were always buried in churches that they built and this letter is dated to 1589 and the only church that the Impaler had any part of building which was destroyed that year is Comana! It was rebuilt that year.”
“Well that's good to know,” Craig says.
Brad turns sharply. Beside him, Ray's whole body fills with tension. Craig Schwetje and fucking Griego are filling the mouth of the passage way. Griego is even holding a gun; the whole thing is so fucking action movie that Brad wants to be ill. Sure, Schwetje is a snake in the grass, but he plays by his idea of the rules. He has no compunctions about stealing a relic or poaching Brad's hunt, but he's not out to hurt people. Griego, on the other hand, is the reason Brad carries a gun. Unfortunately, he can't go for it faster than Griego and get off a shot.
“It seems that there is nothing you can possess which I cannot take away, Brad,” Craig says solemnly. He looks sad about the whole thing, as if taking Brad’s hard-earned prize for himself hurts him in some deep, karmic way. Griego's eyes are hard.
“Ho. Ly. Shit,” Ray says. He makes it three words and he's laughing. Brad's pretty confident Ray's completely cracked.
“I'm sorry,” Ray wheezes, “but did you just quote Raiders of the Lost Ark?”
Brad grins then, toothy and sharp. Craig probably has no idea the line is right out of a movie, and that only makes it better. The whole situation is pretty dire and Brad will take any amusement he can out of it. Schwetje takes a step forward and reaches for the map. Ray flinches back. He curves his shoulders in around it, clutching it tight to his chest. Suddenly his face is hard, dangerous.
He looks to Brad for instruction for what to do next. Brad feels the bottom of his stomach fall away. Ray trusts him implicitly.
Apparently he hesitates too long. Brad's never seen anyone pistol whipped when he wasn't holding the gun. He's been pistol whipped, but this is an entirely different pain. Ray goes down on one knee, and Brad feels helpless, incontinent. It is only his iron clad grip on his emotions that keeps him still. In the bob of their flashlights, the blood dripping from Ray's mouth seems black. Schwetje looks pinched and he fixes his flashlight on Ray's face. Ray holds up his empty hand to shade his eyes and bares his teeth at Griego. His teeth are pink and one is badly chipped.
“It's not worth it, Ray,” Brad says. It feels like he's betraying Ray's trust. “Give him the letter.”
“I hope Drac is a vampire and he eats your fucking face,” Ray says. He hands over the map but stays crouched where he is.
Tension stretches quiet and thick in the small room. It feels choking. Brad is watching gears grind in Craig's head. They all know that no amount of promising or threatening will actually keep Brad and Ray from pursuing them. Brad’s track record shows he doesn’t give up easily; Schwetje may be a dumb motherfucker, but he knows that much at least. It's a kiss of death and they all know it. Ray pushes himself to his feet, wiping his chin with the back of his hand.
“Sorry, Colbert,” Schwetje says. He probably means it too. He holds the map very close to his chest, and Griego watches intently, never letting his gun waver. It's a snub-nosed civilian thing, but Brad's certain he knows how to use it. He's a mean son of a bitch.
“You are fucking kidding me you pedantic, hackneyed piece of shit Hollywood knock off,” Ray says and there is as much disbelief in his voice as anger.
Neither Brad nor Ray make any move to follow when Griego trails after Schwetje. The sound of the stone slab of a door closing is ominous and echoing. Even though they know it's useless, Brad and Ray pound on the inside of the door. It doesn’t do anything but rub the skin off their fists.
“Way to be on the fucking nose. You can't just be a relic stealing son of a bitch who fucking quotes Raiders. Oh no, you have to employ a fucking deathtrap gimmick. Shit, I'm amazed you didn't throw in a villainous monologue about how fucking tragic it was going to be that you had to find another worthy opponent. Did you fuckasses miss that day in Bond Villain 101?” Ray rants. It seems to help him keep his spirits up. When ranting about the cliches of having a gun and not using it runs dry Ray switches it up and cheers himself up by letting loose a spectacular running monologue on the suspect character of Griego's mother.
The inside of the door is a smooth bare slab, devoid of markings or seams. There is no sign of whatever mechanism operates the door. Eventually running out of words, Ray slumps dejectedly against the stone, and for a second Brad lets himself wallow. He's going to die here, trapped like a rat. Brad mirrors Ray, letting his head thump back against the wall. He tries to remind himself that he's the goddamn Iceman, claw his way up from the yawning pit of helplessness he feels in his gut. If there's a light at the end of the tunnel Brad's missing it and fear is tight in his throat. He doesn't want to die. If Ray was at the top of his game he'd say something about fear being the little death. Brad thinks for a second that maybe he should say it in Ray's stead. He only thinks about it for a second. It's a start, though, a reminder for Brad that let himself be consumed by fear definitely isn't going to get them out of this mess. The hopelessness is at least tempered if he doesn't feel simultaneously useless. Brad pushes up from the wall, claps his hands together.
“Giving up?” Brad asks, tossing Ray's flashlight back. He catches it out of the air, brow furrowed skeptically. Brad snorts, but it’s half false bravado. “Secret societies, Ray. There's always a -”
“- secret passage!” Ray scrambles to his feet. His grin looks awful with blood on his teeth but at least he's smiling.
Brad hopes it's not an empty promise.
-
Ray stands in the centre of the room for a long time. He's facing the sarcophagus. Brad stopped trying to talk to him fifteen minutes ago; they're trapped in a tomb so if Ray wants some time to sulk, Brad thinks he's entitled. Brad's flashlight sweeps the walls systematically. He wasn't just cheering Ray up. There is often a second entrance, and Brad's personal history tells them that there's always at least a weak wall. Of course, these walls do seem pretty solid.
He turns when he hears Ray fucking with the sarcophagus. If Ray's in the middle of some Josh Ray Poe, morbid death-related meltdown, Brad's going to fucking slap him. The lid of the sarcophagus gets away from him, falls against the floor with a thunderous crash. Brad feels the floor tremble beneath their feet. Brad expects a skeleton or several to tumble down on Ray. Instead, the inside is bare, the back made of smooth wood. No one bothered to hide the seams of the panel or the hinges. Ray presses his thumb against the keyhole and leaves a smudge of blood.
“He who walks with the dead walks free,” Ray says. The faint light of predawn is seeping through the keyhole and around the edges of the door.
He's looking up at Brad and the light from his flashlight is trembling. His whole body is shaking, and Brad is struck again by how young he is. He's never seen anything he wants more than Ray in that moment. The combination of impossibly dark eyes and the brain in his sharp little head is more than Brad can bear. He catches Ray's head in one hand, long fingers digging into the hair at the back of his scalp. For a second he thinks that Ray will fight him. He regrets the gesture instantly. Brad doesn't do physical affection but he doesn't know how to say I wouldn't let you die like this or you're so smart I want to lick your teeth until I can taste the words in your head . Brad doesn't have the words for it. Instead, they breathe the same air and Ray lets him stay close, almost touching nose to nose.
Ray presses his finger tips against Brad's mouth. When Brad doesn't push him away Ray huffs out a hot breath that might have been intended as laughter. Brad can feel it against his mouth and he wants more of it. It makes all the sense in the world to Brad. This is Ray. Ray, whose hair stands up at gravity defying angles and a smug mouth. Brad presses closer, until his forehead is pressed into Ray's. They stay that way for a minute, and Brad lets his eyes close. Ray's other hand is very gentle on his cheek.
“I could -” Brad starts and cuts himself off, “I could kiss you just now.”
“Did that hurt? Admitting that? I could taste your warrior spirit just cringing,” Ray smiles. He's definitely laughing at Brad. Instead of pulling away - which Brad half expected - he presses his fingers forward, pushes at Brad's mouth. Ray's fingers find his hair, tangle in the short strands at the base of his skull.
Ray's whole body is tight, every part of him straining up into Brad. For his mouth. When Brad refuses to give in he scowls. Brad feels it where their foreheads are pressed together. He licks his own lips and tastes Ray's fingers instead. Ray's fingers and a fine layer of history in the form of dust. Apparently tired of letting Brad drive, Ray cups his hand around the back of Brad's neck, pulls him down. He's small but built wiry. Ray's stronger than he looks and Brad's not really invested in fighting him. When Brad kisses him it's around Ray's fingers and it's probably the most chaste thing he's done to anyone's mouth since his ex-fiance left him years ago. Ray wriggles after what feels like an age of men, but is probably a space between heartbeats. Brad lets himself be pushed back, Ray’s fingers leaving a wet streak along his lips. Two fingers on his right hand are notably cleaner around the finger nails and Brad's sort of disgusted by what that means he now has in his mouth.
Worth it though.
“Do I look like a fucking girl? Jesus, Bradley, I know you're a delicate fucking princess, but how about you have some ovarian fortitude and pull up your big girl panties. We can get all snugly wuggly once your Viking sex god ass kicks down that door for us,” Ray says, crosses his arms against his chest.
He waits a beat. Then:
“Well, we can get all snugly wuggly after your freakishly giant, Viking sex god ass kicks down that door for us and we catch up with those inbred motherfuckers to take our map back. And after I give Schwetje's little purse dog a fat fucking lip to match mine,” he adds. He speaks like he's laying out the invasion of Normandy.
“You have a problem with your mouth, Person. When it flaps you try to communicate like a human, but your trailer park inhabiting, NASCAR enthusiast, goat molesting species hasn't evolved to the point of language yet,” Brad tells him. He digs a set of needle fine tools out of his bag. While kicking down the door might get Ray hot under the collar, it might also fuck up his foot.
Brad smiles when the lock clicks into place. No matter how many times he successfully picks a lock it is always immensely satisfying. He can feel Ray anxious and vibrating behind him. He's standing close enough that when he shifts his weight from foot to foot his legs brush Brad's hip. Part of Brad feels like this was too easy. The door swings open with the push of Ray's hand. Brad's on his knees in the dust of centuries. On the distant horizon the sun is just starting to crest. It's a new day.
“Come on,” Ray says, “miles to go before we sleep on this one.”
He scrubs his fingers through Brad's hair. Ray waits until Brad takes his hand, pulls himself up to his feet and they step out into the cold, pre-dawn air. Brad can feel the dust through his blue jeans, working it's way through the weave to itch his skin. Ray's hand is warm and dirty in Brad's and for a moment they just stand there. Ray's right off course: miles to go. They need to start by catching up with Schwetje but for just a second this is working for him. The sun is coming up in a spectacular show of colour and they can handle whatever's next.
author: witchling
title: You Call This Archaeology?
pairing: Brad Colbert/Ray Person
rating: R, for all those creative expletives.
word count: 9779
summary/warnings: Indiana Jones!Au. It’s one thing to talk about consulting with someone, but Brad’s not going to be responsible for keeping some wet-behind-the-ears pup in one piece.
author notes: I have to thank my beta. Without her I would be completely lost and this would be shit. little_missmimi, I hope that you like this and that it's close enough to what you wanted.
The neighbourhood is one of those places about two trendy coffee shops and a boutique clothing store away from being totally gentrified. The rent is still cheap enough that the residents are mostly students. If Nate's about to introduce him to some frat boy grad student who thinks that an Honours BA makes him Lara Croft's dream man Brad's going to be pissed. His hair and the shoulders of his coat are dark with rain from just the short dash between Nate's car and the awning near the door to the lobby.
“Would you please just trust me?” Nate says. If Brad didn’t know him so well he might miss the irritation tightening the edges of his words.
Nate jams the button with his thumb and listens to the metallic, canned buzz. Somewhere in the depths of the building its twin is going off. Brad steps back until he is standing beyond the cover of the overhang and he cranes his head up. Nate is huddled in the shelter out of the weather, hands tucked back in his pockets. The wind is bitingly cold but the rain has stopped. The seven story brick building is slick with it, stained dark. In most apartments the blinds are pulled.
“Speak and be recognized puny mortal,” a voice crows through the speakers, tinny in replication.
“It’s me,” Nate says, rolling his eyes. There is a hesitation on the other end of the line and then fuzzy laughter.
He doesn’t need to use his name, his voice is enough. That’s more comforting to Brad than any of Nate’s assurances in the car. It’s one thing to say he’s the best in the business and quite another all together if Nate actually uses him enough to have that sort of familiarity and rapport. Nate curls his fingers around the door handle and waits, shaking rain from his hair like a dog.
“Why the fuck didn’t you just say so, homes?” the voice says and the lock on the door gives the sharp, angry buzz of a hornet. “Come on up.”
They bypass the elevator entirely. Given the state of the small lobby and the smell of the stairwell, Brad doesn’t question it. He’d rather not plummet to his death in a tuna can. He does trust Nate, up to a point. He’s never lead Brad astray and he has an uncanny knack for knowing how to acquire information previously believed to be lost to history. Nate has never brought anyone else in though, not to consult and not as a supposed expert.
When they reach the sixth floor there is already a door open. Nate smiles at the man in the doorway. He’s small, built tight and dark, with sleepless bruises under his eyes. Brad arches an eyebrow and takes in the whole of him. He doesn’t look like Nate’s expert. He looks like he should be slinging beer to a smoky pub crowd. Inside his apartment there are stacks of books on every available flat surface and his lap top is nearly entirely buried under a haphazard pile of papers and books.
A cup of coffee is steaming beside the computer but from the way that Ray’s fingers drum against his own thigh Brad thinks he’s probably had more than enough.
“You must be Colbert,” Ray says. He smiles wide and toothy. It is sharp and lopsided but carves deep dimples into his cheeks. It makes him look very young.
Nate clears the couch of a few sheaves of paper and large, leather bound book, the pages of which have been marked with colour coded sticky notes. Ray just waves him off when he asks where to put them. Nate settles them neatly on the floor to the left of the couch and sinks down onto the batter upholstery. Neither of them asks Brad to sit.
He takes that as an invitation to pace the apartment, sliding papers off stacks and looking at the books that have filled the shelves on the living room walls, and then bred at an alarming rate in order to cover every other surface. A lot of the books aren’t in English and some of them look like first editions. As haphazard as it all seems initially, Brad can see that the colour coding systems has consistency, coinciding with his diligent note taking. Brad finds it heartening.
“If you’re the expert,” Brad says, “why do you need me?”
Ray laughs, lets his leg bounce where he’s perched himself on the edge of the desk. He has watched Brad prowl his apartment, touch his things. He has deep dimples when he grins over the top of his coffee cup.
“My expertise is largely academic, homes. Or entirely academic, whatever. I’m not saying that I’m some kinda pussy, Colbert, but you do get to pop my Indiana Jones cherry,” Ray says around his smile. Nate has propped his feet on the steamer trunk Ray’s re-purposed as a coffee table. He meets Brad’s gaze and holds it unflinchingly. Nate just shrugs and looks back to Ray.
“So you’re saying that you’ve never been in the field before.” Brad pinches the bridge of his nose. It’s one thing to talk about consulting with someone, but he’s not going to be responsible for keeping some wet-behind-the-ears pup in one piece.
“Not since school. But his academic knowledge of the subject at hand is unparalleled,” Nate says. He is mirroring Ray now, both men bracing their hands on their knees. Brad wonders if they even realize they’re doing it.
“There are some goth girls with self esteem issues that probably know a lot more than me, but talking to them is never a good time for anyone involved,” Ray says. Brad can see the hint of some pretty extensive tattoos when Ray pushes his long sleeves up around his elbows.
“I have a line on the personal archives of Sultan Mehmed II,” Nate says “I want you to go with Ray. He’s got the academic grounding you need, and you have the field experience.”
Brad looks between the two of them. They are both levelling him with steady, unflinching stares. Nate’s not the sort of man who offers these sorts of opportunities lightly. He also doesn’t bring idiots into the game if it is even remotely avoidable. He scrubs his hand through his hair. Nate already knows he’s going to say yes.
“Fuck yeah, you Viking motherfucker,” Ray says, eyes dark and shining “we’re talking about finding Dracula, homes.”
-
Nate leaves them alone when Ray starts showing Brad his research. He goes with a shake of his head. Ray hardly notices. He’s busy digging through a stack of first editions beside his couch. Brad stretches out his legs, braces his weight back against the desk. The apartment smells like a used book store, that familiar, comforting scent of ageing paper and old glue.
“Fact of the matter is, homes, monks are full of shit when they start talking about who is buried in their church. It’s like one of those laws of nature. Snagov says that Vlad’s buried there but everyone knows it’s fucking bullshit.” Ray’s been talking, without breathing, for several minutes now. Nate had warned him it was something like Ray’s speciality.
Brad closes his eyes and lets his head fall back. The curtains are closed but beyond them, under the rise and fall of Ray’s voice, he can hear rain on the window pane. Ray’s voice is sort of nice, the way he ramps himself into a rant. It is nice to listen to someone who so clearly knows their topic. His finger finds the edge of a postcard on the desk and he lets it catch under his nail.
“Are you even fucking listening? Because if I’m being nice enough to let you in on all my blood and sweat research, you had best fucking listen. This shit is quality, no one - and I mean no one - has the shit I have,” Ray says, brandishing what looks like a leather bound journal. He is young and fierce, eyes shining.
“I wish I wasn’t, Person, but yes. I’m listening,” Brad says, pouring disdain and exhaustion into his voice. He feels the muscles twitch at the corners of his lips and steels himself against a smile. No need to encourage him.
Ray throws himself dramatically down onto the couch, arms thrown wide. He gives Brad a look like he’s been betrayed. Brad smiles and thumbs a stack of Ray’s notes. They seem to be an extensive account of Vlad the Impaler’ time in the court of Sultan Mehmed II. Ray’s obsessive compulsive highlighting makes the pages brilliantly coloured, but Brad does admit that Ray’s sparing with his highlighter fetish. He highlights important features, leaves bright marks in the margins to tie things together but doesn’t go hog wild.
“So basically the point is that Mehmed II kept a personal archive about dear old Dracula because they were having hate sex, and Hot Lips has found some research that implies that the Order of the Dragon may have hidden a map to his body,” Ray says. His knees bounce and he folds himself down until his elbows are braced on his thighs.
Brad looks back down at the postcard he's been toying with. It's old, the picture on the front faded with age. Deep creases cut across the corners where it's been folded and bent at odd angles. Machu Picchu stares up at him. Without thinking about things like personal privacy and respecting it Brad flips it over. There's nothing written on the back of it. There's no post mark. There is however a bit of left over tape stuck to it. Ray's had it on his wall at some point.
“Machu Picchu?” Brad says, like it has some baring on what's going on here.
“I saw the Indiana Jones movies with my mom when I was sick once and decided that I was going to make Indie look like a pussy little bitch. I read everything I could get from my junior high bullshit library. I collected ancient places like it was cool, homes. Some guys had baseball cards and I had fucking tourist brochures for Stonehenge and Machu Picchu. My big plan was to go there after high school and find El Dorado,” Ray grins. He talks about it as if that sort of thing is the most normal of aspirations for a thirteen year old.
“Machu Picchu and El Dorado-”
“Have fucking nothing to do with each other?” Ray laughs, “yeah. I know that now but at the time I was a pimply face little fuck ant. I was just as likely to think that the Great Wall of China was some how connected to El Dorado. It was mix and match folk lore at it's finest.”
Brad laughs. He gets that. To dedicate your life so completely to history, to the lives and deeds of peoples that died long before you were ever born takes a special sort of devotion. They all have that trigger moment. It's embarrassing how many of the working relic hunters in Brad's age bracket can trace that trigger back to Indiana Jones. Brad imagines Ray keeping a post card from Machu Picchu in his locker when everyone else has calender girls. Brad had the Sphinx.
“So,” Ray says, jittery and hopeful, “so you want to go in with me on this shit? What do you say, partner?”
“I’m in,” Brad says, still thumbing the edge of that postcard
-
The week after Brad meets Ray, he receives an invitation to the private library of a long dead Sultan. Brad has long considered Nate Fick as possessing some kind of mind-warp magic; he has a way of getting whatever he needs. The only other explanation is that Nate might be the bastard son of Prince Phillip or something equally ridiculous. It took Nate six days to get their affairs in order; not only does he have an invitation to the Sultan’s library for Ray and Brad, he has managed to convince the current owner, an English Duke (much to the chagrin of the Turkish government), that it was all his idea to invite them. When the Duke apologized for not being able to get them a private jet, Brad couldn’t tell if he’d been kidding or not.
Despite the fact Nate scored them first class seats, Ray has curled himself into Brad’s space. On all sides, there are luxurious, sprawling seats and Ray is dozing on Brad’s shoulder. Brad keeps telling himself that he is going to wake Ray to shake him off. Any minute now, really. He’s still and silent though, unsettlingly quiet. Brad had been pretty sure that Ray was going to talk in his sleep. He’d never met a person who could fit so many words into one breath.
Brad had assumed it would be no different when he slept. He seems a lot younger in repose, his eyelashes a dusky smudge against the tops of his cheeks. Ray sleeps like all the twitching anxiety has faded out of him, while Brad feels just the opposite. He feels full of energy, like it’s buzzing under his skin.
He has spent the better part of a week playing catch up. Ray’s been seriously working on this research for almost a year and somewhere between his rapid-fire verbal incontinence and his savant-like colour coding he’s found things no one else has. Turns out it was Ray who turned Nate on to the archives of the Sultan who allegedly entertained Dracula. Fucking Dracula; Brad can’t believe this. Ray has a knack for boiling things down to their base coding. It’s made all the catching up a lot easier. But he’s done now. He’s a relic hunter. He wants to get his hands dirty, to do his own research.
Ray shifts in his sleep, curls closer. His breath is hot and wet on Brad’s throat. He’s folded himself into his seat, curled sideways until his knees are crowded halfway in Brad’s lap. His hands slide, trying to figure out how to settle comfortably again, until Brad guides Ray’s hands down to fold over Ray’s abdomen. Ray rubs his cheek on Brad’s shoulder and settles back into a deeper sleep. They have another six hours in the air and Brad lets him lie where he is.
The buzzing under his skin arcs and cracks like lightening.
-
“Nice,” Ray says.
He is bracing himself against the door frame. Ray’s half in his room, half in the bathroom. There is an expanse of blue and white tiles between them. Brad stands in the centre of his own room. They share a fucking bathroom. Ray presses his weight into his hands and the muscles of his arms tense. Brad turns his attention back to unpacking his clothes.
Ray walks through the bathroom into Brad’s room like it’s no big deal. Brad can hear his bare feet on the tile before his steps are muffled by carpet. He sprawls himself back on Brad’s bed beside his suitcase. He wriggles, getting comfortable. He tucks his hands behind his head, one leg swinging off the edge of the bed. He seems perfectly content to just lay there watching Brad.
“Nate’s got some sick connections, homeskillet, and I’m stoked that our digs are so fucking quality. But when are we meeting our Duke? I don’t need to be sitting around in air conditioning with my dick in my hand,” Ray says, as if this is all somehow news to Brad.
Brad ignores him, giving too much attention to refolding his shirts, but he’s smiling. Ray’s enthusiasm speaks volumes about how young he is, but Brad likes enthusiasm in a relic hunter. Passion for the hunt, not the pay off, is what makes the difference between a relic hunter and a grave-robber. It’s not a flattering comparison, but Brad’s never been one to hold onto illusions for the sake of feeling better about himself. Ray rolls his head to watch Brad put his clothes in the wardrobe. He can see Ray’s duffel lying on the floor in his room, still packed.
“We’re meeting the Duke at his home this afternoon.” Brad leaves his down and dirty tomb diving gear in the bottom of the bag. It’s mid-morning, and the hot sunshine is muffled by the curtains. Brad, for one, is enjoying the air conditioning.
Ray’s whole body is twitching. He has one knee cocked up and is tapping his foot on the comforter. Brad just laughs, shaking his head. He’s going to have to reign in his impatience or this will be torture for him.
“You need to be prepared for this not going anywhere,” Brad says.
Ray watches him with dark eyes. It’s easy to get this close and promptly forget these hunches don’t often go according to plan. Brad’s been there before. He’s not certain that Ray has. He’s not sure that he’s felt the bitter crush of disappointment. Brad tells him that. Knowing it now beats being surprised by it later.
“You’re a fucking Debbie Downer, Bradley. Look, worst case I get my grubby hands all over the archive of Mehmed II, which is pretty fucking choice,” Ray says. He shrugs like it’s no big thing.
-
The Duke Timothy Bryan is striking and stern. He has the sort of gaze that Brad can feel like a physical thing, but his smile is sharp and easy enough. He welcomes them into his home with plain words and asks them to just wait a moment while he gets his coat. Ray turns to snoop through the drawers of the hall table. His tee shirt is soft under Brad’s hand, faded with too many washings. Brad drags Ray back away from the table, hauls him away like a curious puppy. Ray makes a startled squawk and stumbles back into Brad’s chest. He wraps his arm around Ray’s shoulder, pressing across his collar bone and holding him still. No need to piss off their patron by snooping.
“I haven’t moved the archive,” Bryan says, stepping out onto the street with them. He squints up at the sky but doesn’t put on sun glasses. Brad wishes Ray had opted out of sunglasses as well. The gaudy gold things that he’s donned are in equal parts comical and horrifying.
“Has it stayed here in Istanbul since Mehmed started it?” Ray asks, stretching his legs to keep up with Bryan and Brad. He’s not actually a small man but Bryan seems to take up more space than his actual size justifies.
Bryan shakes his head. “After his death it was moved from his palace to the private property of one of his Janissaries. That's the property that my family purchased years ago,” Bryan says. He winds up the side streets without thought or hesitation. Brad thinks he must spend a great deal of time in the archives. “The stories say he set up an elite guard of the Janissaries, and they pledged to stand counter to the Order of the Dragon. It was the grand master of these elite Janissaries that moved the archives. Local folklore says the guard is still around.”
“Secret societies?” Ray grins wide and toothy.
“Don’t get ahead of yourself, Ray,” Brad says, tucking his hands in his pockets. The urge to grab the back of his shirt, tug him back into his side is a physical clench.
“Here we are. You need to put in the code every time the door opens, whether or not anyone’s inside already,” Bryan says. Fishing a key out of his pocket, he unlocked the door and ushered them into the cool semi-darkness of the entry way. There is a persistent, irritating beeping until Bryan enters the security code. The door swings shut behind them and there is a moment of stillness and silence.
“Tim,” a young woman says. Her accent says that she was probably born and raised right there in Istanbul. Her hair is thick and dark and pulled away from her face in a ponytail that swings when she moves.
“Sabiha, this is Brad and Ray.” Bryan touches each of the men on the shoulder, standing between them. “I want you to help them with anything they ask for.”
She nods, her ponytail bouncing. Her hands are tucked into her pockets and she rocks her weight back on her heels. Sabiha has a deep calm about her. It's the calm that Brad has always found in the best sort of librarians. As if maybe she's always been here in the library.
“I’ll get you set up in the stacks and leave you in Sabiha’s capable hands. She works in the library for me for less than she deserves but she is doing her doctoral work at the university here. She may proof as useful a resource as many of the texts we house here,” Bryan says, and she steps out of their way as they follow the narrow, dark corridor through another set of doors. The library opens up before them and Brad forgets to be stoic and unimpressed by the world.
-
The library is brightly lit and clearly well cared for. A table is set up in the centre of the room with stacks spiralling out from it. As far as Brad is concerned - aside from the books - the most notable feature is the bank of windows around the top of the wall. They spill sunlight into the room through the better part of the day. When Ray asks about them, recognising them as an unusual design for the time, Sabiha laughs and leans conspiratorially close.
“Dracula,” she tells them, voice accented and bright with the edge of laughter. Brad can see Ray is something very close to in love with her. She leaves them to peruse a towering column of beginner texts, and Ray flirts loudly and crudely whenever she returns from the depths of the stacks, cradling books in her arms like she would a babe.
Sabiha has a knack for knowing exactly where just the right text is housed. She has the air of someone who probably spends a lot more time in the stacks than her employer is aware of. Brad likes history majors, they have an appropriate respect for original manuscripts. Even so, he can’t bring himself to embrace Sabiha (literally or figuratively) like Ray has. She’s unsettled by the cold reception he gives her and it shows on her face. Part of him feels bad about it. It’s not as if she’s a bad person, and she’s smart enough that he should be at least passingly fond of her.
Every time Ray flirts with her, she laughs and touches his arm. Brad rolls his eyes, hard enough that he’s concerned he might’ve strained something. His mother did once warn him he could get stuck that way. He turns away, buries himself in his research. Brad makes a point of not listening. If Ray wants to waste their time flirting, that’s his problem.
Brad has made a conscious choice not to examine the root of his irritation. It’s safer if he tells himself that he doesn’t like the distraction. Ray never has to know and they can both try to focus on the research. Ray has an irritating fucking habit of clicking his pen when he reads. It should drive Brad up the wall but he finds the steady rhythm calming, expected and misses it when he pauses to write.
“You’re being a cunt,” Ray says eventually, head bent over his notebook. He is clicking the top of his pen, hair sticking up at odd angles. He likes to drag his fingers through it until it’s wild and out of control.
Brad watches the top of his head but Ray doesn’t look up. Ray pauses his reading to write something down, reaching for a highlighter. The library is quiet. Somewhere behind them Sabiha is sitting at her desk, clicking away at her laptop. Until they call for her, she leaves them largely alone. Brad huffs out a sigh and sits back. He stretches his legs out in front of him and his feet bump into Ray’s.
Ray looks up at him, quiet and unusually solemn. Brad feels as though there is a lot being left unsaid. Neither of them pull their feet back. Ray shifts and the sole of his boot presses more solidly against Brad’s calf. Brad knows exactly what Ray’s talking about. He pretends like he doesn’t, arching an eyebrow.
“Sabiha’s great, homes. She’s all sexy smoky eyes and a big ol’ brain chock full of Dewey fucking decimals and original translations,” Ray says, still hunched low over the books in front of him. One nail is tapping out a staccato on the top of a map.
“We need to focus on our research, Ray,” Brad tells him, voice level and reasonable, “we don’t need a distraction.”
“Okay,” Ray says after a long pause.
There is something like a smile in the corners of his lips. He drops his head over his work, pen scratching against the paper. His foot takes over where his hands stopped, tapping that same staccato against Brad’s calf. It’s sort of irritating, and stretching his legs out like that gives him a bad angle to write at. He doesn’t pull his legs back.
-
Brad’s already running late. He told Ray that he’d be back at their hotel almost an hour earlier. He let himself get caught up in discussion with Tim - the Duke, he corrected himself - and time had gotten away from him. His tardiness had one advantage, though: Craig fucking Schwetje is standing in the lobby of their hotel having a jovial conversation with the young man behind the counter. His partner hangs back, hands tucked into his pockets. Griego looks side to side every few moments, scanning for some villain to jump out of the shadows.
He still doesn’t fucking see Brad standing near the door. Between Schwetje and Griego, Brad thinks they might share a brain. But if they were here in Istanbul, in Brad’s hotel, the chances were they were chasing Brad’s relic. Schwetje had a bad habit of waiting for Brad to get a bite, then trying to snake his relic. Brad ducks down the hall to the elevators when Schwetje starts to wrap up his conversation. He doesn’t need Schwetje to know he’s been spotted, it’ll only mean he redoubles his efforts to get ahead of Brad. He jabs his thumb into the button, hunching down into his coat.
The ride up in the elevator gives him plenty of time to devise some worst case scenarios. Maybe Schwetje already knows where they’re staying, maybe he’s already been up to their room. Craig’s a decent enough human being for a fucking asshole, but Griego is a mean son of a bitch. Schwetje might not be inclined to actually hurting anyone to get what he wanted. The same didn’t necessarily go for his guard dog.
By the time he’s unlocking his door, shouldering into his room, he’s almost convinced himself Ray’s choking on his own blood or something equally dramatic. Brad’s room is pristine, just the way he left it. Still, he tries the door on their connected bathroom before he takes a second to settle himself. Steam billows out over him, sticking to his skin and making his clothing feel too heavy. Ray is halfway out of the shower, wrapping a towel around himself. All of his shaggy hair is pushed back from his face, plastered to his head. A bead of water drips from the short hair at the back of his scalp and trails down his spine.
Brad traces the movement until it drips into the grey of Ray’s towel. His mouth is dry and his tongue feels heavy. Ray’s skin is very pink from the shower, and his tattoos stand out, dark and seemingly fresh with his skin wet. Brad has an immediate and visceral urge to reach out and touch them. He wants to press his fingers into the dark lines of the praying mantis on the back of his arm.
“Shit, homes, did you wrestle a fucking bear on the way back?” Ray says and Brad thinks his voice sounds husked out, hollow. He’s half turned now he’s seen Brad’s reflection in the mirror. Both of his hands have fisted in his towel, holding it up. Brad drags his gaze up to Ray’s face. He forces himself to meet and hold his gaze. It’s safer than watching water cling to the dark trail of hair dipping low on his abdomen.
“I ate without you, homes. I was gonna wait but I getting all grouchy and shit. It's bad enough that you're an antisocial motherfucker who's barely fit to speak to people. Can't have me getting all low blood sugar up in this bitch. Next thing you know it'll be all Dashboard Confessionals and tragic hair. Then you wont want to be my friend anymore, ” Ray says, shaking his head like a dog. It spatters across Brad's face and the front of his shirt.
“Craig Schwetje’s in town,” Brad tells him, like it’s the most normal thing in the world to talk to Ray in a towel. Ray, who is dripping water and flushed with the heat of his shower. Brad swallows heavily. “He’s a rival relic hunter - he’s a grave robber.”
“Then we better not let him jack our shit, homes,” Ray says.
He smiles wide and broad, hands on his hips. He looks a lot more certain and determined than anyone in a towel has any right to. Brad shakes his head and turns away. His attention refocuses places other. There is water on Ray’s skin, collected in the hollow of his collar bone. Brad wants to taste it. He wants to map the tattoos with his mouth. Instead he bumps his knuckles against the door jamb and turns away. Behind him Ray is singing to himself as he gets dressed.
-
Sabiha makes coffee like no one Brad’s ever met. He’s had Turkish coffee before. Relic hunters liked to make themselves seem as worldly as possible; they like to smoke hand rolled cigarettes with tobacco imported from whatever small, forgotten fragment of the world seems the most obscure and use thousand year old Chinese remedies for the common cold. Brad would previously have said that he was pretty well versed in Turkish coffee. Temporarily putting aside any distaste for her flirting with Ray, Brad has no problem admitting she is the greatest thing that has ever happened to coffee in his world. He told her as much, watched her cheeks redden.
She is adamant it’s nothing special. That it’s the cardamom, a common Lebanese recipe, but each cup is spectacularly dark, a thick smooth head of foam floating on every cup. She tries to keep them both happy and splits the difference between Brad taking his coffee straight and black, and Ray’s constant need for sugar, but Brad knows she mixes extra sugar into Ray’s cup when she thinks no one is watching.
“Flame. It’s a candle, see?” Sabiha says, tipping the white china mug so that Ray can examine the bottom. His arm is stretched across the back of her chair. Sunlight streams through the high windows and illuminates the small spaces in the library.
It makes Ray lazy. He likes to bask in it, stretch back and soak in the sun. Sabiha entertains him for those moments when Brad can't force him to refocus. The coffee makes him jittery. He vibrates around the edges enough as it is. Brad watches them hunch low around his coffee cup. Sabiha is teaching him to tell fortunes in the grounds left at the bottom. Brad's actually all right with it. It makes Ray's smile wide and boyish. It's a good look on him.
“Is it because I'm so hot?” Ray asks and then stops, and re-frames because the colloquialism is lost in the translation. “Is it because I'm so sexy, I make your blood run hot?”
Ray's better with people than Brad is. He re-frames things in a way that people understand. Brad just sounds like a thesaurus when he tries. Ray's words are his gift, though. Not just the sheer number of them he can manage in a breath, but also how well he can use them. Under a truly spectacular command of the word “fuck”, he hides a delicate touch with words. Sabiha just laughs and shakes her head.
“It means illumination, Ray. New understanding,” she says.
Brad's still thinking about Ray and his words. It's clicking things together in his head. The complexities of translations have stalled out better relic hunters than him. He turns quickly, riffles through his research until he finds the right sheaf of ancient paper. The paper is browned and the ink is very faded. Folded around it is his own translation - meticulously taken down. The coffee cup rattles when he slams his hands down on the table before them. Sabiha's eyes go wide and startled.
“All right, Bradley, let's not get our panties in a pinch. I'm researching. I'm researching,” Ray says mildly. He puts his hands up as if in surrender.
“No, it's not that,” Brad's watching Sabiha, “I did this translation but I'm not as good with languages as either of you. I know that the key is here. That this letter has that last piece the context is all there but I'm missing the finer details. My translation might be off.”
“Of course,” Sabiha says and reaches for both pieces of paper. She plucks a pen from the bun at the base of her skull.
Sabiha has neater writing than either of them. Her letters are well formed, tight and small. Brad imagines that Nate's writing must look like that. Brad translated every word twice. Sabiha doesn't bother. She goes directly to English with a certainty that Brad both admires and envies. She does it by memory.
“Oh,” Sabiha says.
Both men look at her as one. She blinks up at them and Brad can concede that they must be a lot to deal with at times. She spins her pen, a habit that Brad has seen in hundreds of grad students.
“Your translation is off,” she says, like she's embarrassed to have to tell him.
“This doesn't mean where the sun is ruined, not exactly. It has nautical implications. It's where the sun sinks,” she says, watching the understanding dawn in their eyes.
“Where the sun sinks,” Brad says.
“Sunsets,” Ray grins, watches Brad's face.
Brad can feel his palms itching. He always feels this rush when a hunt comes together. He can feel they're on the right path. All his instincts are primed to this.
“Chindia tower at Tagoviste. The sunset tower,” Ray says, harsh and breathless.
“The Impaler built it,” Brad says. He can feel Ray's excitement like ants on his skin.
“The town even had a sunset curfew, no one went out after dark,” Ray says. His smile is very wide. “Pesky vampires.”
-
“I feel like Indiana Jones,” Ray tells him as they descend the steps into Chindia's basement.
It's not a popular tourist season and the chances are that Chindia Tower would have been pretty empty no matter what. Brad didn't take that chance. Nate Fick may be the king of the connection but Brad knows people. Knows enough that they have the tower to themselves for the time being. It hardly matters that it's the dead of night. The whole basement is lit up by work lights, giving it a bright, false warmth.
The walls are sandy, local stone. Every slow, measured foot fall echoes around the corridors. Brad sweeps his flashlight in regular, smooth swings back and forth across the walls. The basement is open and empty and largely uninteresting. But Vlad the Impaler - fucking Dracula, Brad’s still not quite over it - set these foundations, so there must be something here. They’ve already checked the upstairs floors, which had proven to be just as uninteresting and entirely unfruitful. This is their last hope to find some clue here. Brad's steeling himself to tell Ray that whatever might have been in Tagoviste are long gone, lost to history and time.
“I'm definitely Indy,” Brad says, his voice rebounding off the stone walls oddly. Ray has let himself wander into the next portion of hall. His laugh comes back distorted and distant.
“Does that make me Marian then?” Ray calls. Brad can hear him pacing in measured, steady steps. Ray doesn't have field experience, but he's the sort of academic who can apply what he knows to the world. Questionable sexual tension aside, he likes having Ray with him.
Brad values intelligence very highly.
“Brad,” Ray says, breaking Brad's concentration.
Ray's voice holds a sharp edge of excitement. Brad knows what that excitement tastes like on his tongue; he's felt it before and he is struck by the echo of it now. He's not sure if he runs to join Ray but in the space between moments he's made his way to Ray's side. Ray’s considering a crest on the wall. It's the Tagoviste coat of arms.
But not quite. Brad can't quite put his finger on it.
“That should be an eagle,” Ray says, tracing the outer edge of the crest with one calloused fingertip.
He's right. Ray's ability to remember minutiae is astounding. Especially since it seems like he's often too wired and jittery to remember his own name. The coat of arms is almost right. The blue is just so and the bronze figure of a man and a woman standing together is the same as it always has been. The white tree between their outstretched hands does not have an eagle perched above it. Between the sun and the moon on the blue sky is a dragon, wings outstretched and serpentine tail curling down around the branches of the tree. The dragon's mouth is open, teeth carved in exquisite, horrible detail.
“It's a bit on the nose, don't you think?” Brad says, flashlight lifted high to focus on the crest. Ray's already tucked his flashlight away into his bag.
“You're not appreciating how tongue in cheek dear old Fang Face can be, apparently,” Ray says and skims his hand across the dragon's body. It shifts minutely under his fingers and they both go instantly alive with tension. When Ray looks back at him - looking at once young and very unsure - Brad just nods.
Secret passages. He should have fucking known. The crest gives under gentle pressure, and the sure click turning cogs echoes in the still and silent basement. The wall seems to shudder, and swings towards them. Ray smacks into Brad's chest when he stumbles over his own feet to get out of the way. Brad’s arm reflexively curls around Ray's waist, holding him upright. Beyond the yawning doorway is shadowy darkness and a short hallway.
Ray is eager as a puppy as he digs his flashlight out again and heads into the dark. Brad follows more carefully, reaching out for the back of Ray's shirt. There's no need to get themselves killed because they didn't see the tripwire; that's sloppy and embarrassing. Brad refuses to die embarrassingly. However, the hallway is blessedly short and trap-free. Apparently the Order of the Dragon wasn't too concerned anyone would ever find it.
The short hall leads to a small, rough hewn room. Under the sweep of their flashlights it seems unimpressive, carved right into the rock under the earth. It's what's in the hidden crypt that is so interesting. A sarcophagus stands propped against the far wall, surrounded by tables bearing the weight of ancient tributes. Dragons and swords scatter them, along with brooches with the crest of Vlad the Impaler' house. Brad can't believe it was this easy, though he's not naive enough to believe Dracula is housed in the great carved sarcophagus on the wall. The dimensions aren't right to be holding a body; it's too wide, big enough for two men to lay in it shoulder to shoulder quite comfortably. A proper sarcophagus of the time would be rested on a dais, and would be treated with more reverence than being stacked against a wall. It’s there for show. Above it someone has carved deep ornate letters into the rock face.
“He who walks with the dead walks free,” Ray translates, flashlight following the dark letters. His nose wrinkles. “Well that's cheery.”
Ray looks at him with such hope that Brad's at least a little sorry to shake his head.
Their search is only just starting. This is one step on the way to finding Vlad the Impaler, Brad feels very certain of that. Ray's shoulders slump and Brad can see it in the light of their flashlights. He reaches out and curls his fingers Ray's neck. He's cradling the back of his throat in the palm of his hand. He bends low, bumps their foreheads together for a moment because he feels like he can leave that here when they go; he can seal this moment up inside the crypt to be ignored and forgotten, decaying with the rest of the second-rate treasure. Ray's body vibrates under his touch. Brad can feel Ray stretching up towards him, straining for him and Brad pulls away.
“We have a lot of reading to do,” Brad says, instead. The look Ray gives him is withering.
“What the actual fuck,” Ray hisses between his teeth and watches Brad go. There is a tense moment when Brad fully expects Ray to launch into a tirade, but he just frowns, deep creases forming in his brow, and he lets the moment pass without further comment.
For a few minutes Ray bustles around loudly, puts things down too hard, and generally acts like a petulant little shit. It eases though. He grips his flashlight between his lips and sorts through stacks of papers - scrolls and letters mostly. They settle into a quiet rhythm, solitary as they work their way through centuries-old accounts of tortures, torments and tributes. There's something comforting about being surround by dust and history that takes a certain sort of person to appreciate. Typically the sort of person who better understands the lives and choices of long dead royalty than the people in their life, but that might just be Brad projecting.
-
Ray makes a noise that might be Brad's name. He can't tell around the flashlight. Ray's chin is shiny with spit because he can't actually swallow with the flashlight in his mouth like that. Brad just shakes his head and reaches out to take it from him. As soon as his hand closes around it he grimaces. Part of him wants to drop it right then and there but he manfully resists the urge. It's slick with spit and Brad should probably find that a lot more disgusting than it is. It's still almost too much to deal with. No matter how often he's been thinking about Ray's mouth he didn't really need a handful of slobber. Ray seems blissfully unaware that he's fairly gross. He just gives Brad a grateful smile, brandishing a faded letter like a sword.
“Use your words, Ray,” Brad says, as if Ray somehow needs coaching.
“I found a guide to the final resting place of the Impaler! Looks like his homeboys jacked his head back from the Sultan and reunited it with his body. Only they didn't trust that Mehmed wouldn't come looking for it again - which is reasonable really, homes had a whole thing about the head of Dracula. Probably because he's a vampire. Either way, they built Dracula a hidden tomb to keep his earthly remains together for all time or what the fuck ever.” Ray’s voice inflects upward on “earthly remains”, as if he’s using mental air quotes. His face crinkles with excitement, and Brad meets his eyes for a beat, waiting for the next part. The information is useful, but what Brad really needs is a place. If they don't have a name, they're going to have to go back to research, spending interminable hours looking at each and every place the Order of the Dragon might have considered important enough to house Vlad the Impaler's remains. It’s tedious and exhausting just thinking about it. Ray cocks his head to the side, not understanding the hesitation in Brad's face.
“Oh!” Ray says, putting the pieces together, “he's at Comana. This letter details how to find his tomb with new landmarks since the destruction of the original church. But guys like Vlad the Impaler were always buried in churches that they built and this letter is dated to 1589 and the only church that the Impaler had any part of building which was destroyed that year is Comana! It was rebuilt that year.”
“Well that's good to know,” Craig says.
Brad turns sharply. Beside him, Ray's whole body fills with tension. Craig Schwetje and fucking Griego are filling the mouth of the passage way. Griego is even holding a gun; the whole thing is so fucking action movie that Brad wants to be ill. Sure, Schwetje is a snake in the grass, but he plays by his idea of the rules. He has no compunctions about stealing a relic or poaching Brad's hunt, but he's not out to hurt people. Griego, on the other hand, is the reason Brad carries a gun. Unfortunately, he can't go for it faster than Griego and get off a shot.
“It seems that there is nothing you can possess which I cannot take away, Brad,” Craig says solemnly. He looks sad about the whole thing, as if taking Brad’s hard-earned prize for himself hurts him in some deep, karmic way. Griego's eyes are hard.
“Ho. Ly. Shit,” Ray says. He makes it three words and he's laughing. Brad's pretty confident Ray's completely cracked.
“I'm sorry,” Ray wheezes, “but did you just quote Raiders of the Lost Ark?”
Brad grins then, toothy and sharp. Craig probably has no idea the line is right out of a movie, and that only makes it better. The whole situation is pretty dire and Brad will take any amusement he can out of it. Schwetje takes a step forward and reaches for the map. Ray flinches back. He curves his shoulders in around it, clutching it tight to his chest. Suddenly his face is hard, dangerous.
He looks to Brad for instruction for what to do next. Brad feels the bottom of his stomach fall away. Ray trusts him implicitly.
Apparently he hesitates too long. Brad's never seen anyone pistol whipped when he wasn't holding the gun. He's been pistol whipped, but this is an entirely different pain. Ray goes down on one knee, and Brad feels helpless, incontinent. It is only his iron clad grip on his emotions that keeps him still. In the bob of their flashlights, the blood dripping from Ray's mouth seems black. Schwetje looks pinched and he fixes his flashlight on Ray's face. Ray holds up his empty hand to shade his eyes and bares his teeth at Griego. His teeth are pink and one is badly chipped.
“It's not worth it, Ray,” Brad says. It feels like he's betraying Ray's trust. “Give him the letter.”
“I hope Drac is a vampire and he eats your fucking face,” Ray says. He hands over the map but stays crouched where he is.
Tension stretches quiet and thick in the small room. It feels choking. Brad is watching gears grind in Craig's head. They all know that no amount of promising or threatening will actually keep Brad and Ray from pursuing them. Brad’s track record shows he doesn’t give up easily; Schwetje may be a dumb motherfucker, but he knows that much at least. It's a kiss of death and they all know it. Ray pushes himself to his feet, wiping his chin with the back of his hand.
“Sorry, Colbert,” Schwetje says. He probably means it too. He holds the map very close to his chest, and Griego watches intently, never letting his gun waver. It's a snub-nosed civilian thing, but Brad's certain he knows how to use it. He's a mean son of a bitch.
“You are fucking kidding me you pedantic, hackneyed piece of shit Hollywood knock off,” Ray says and there is as much disbelief in his voice as anger.
Neither Brad nor Ray make any move to follow when Griego trails after Schwetje. The sound of the stone slab of a door closing is ominous and echoing. Even though they know it's useless, Brad and Ray pound on the inside of the door. It doesn’t do anything but rub the skin off their fists.
“Way to be on the fucking nose. You can't just be a relic stealing son of a bitch who fucking quotes Raiders. Oh no, you have to employ a fucking deathtrap gimmick. Shit, I'm amazed you didn't throw in a villainous monologue about how fucking tragic it was going to be that you had to find another worthy opponent. Did you fuckasses miss that day in Bond Villain 101?” Ray rants. It seems to help him keep his spirits up. When ranting about the cliches of having a gun and not using it runs dry Ray switches it up and cheers himself up by letting loose a spectacular running monologue on the suspect character of Griego's mother.
The inside of the door is a smooth bare slab, devoid of markings or seams. There is no sign of whatever mechanism operates the door. Eventually running out of words, Ray slumps dejectedly against the stone, and for a second Brad lets himself wallow. He's going to die here, trapped like a rat. Brad mirrors Ray, letting his head thump back against the wall. He tries to remind himself that he's the goddamn Iceman, claw his way up from the yawning pit of helplessness he feels in his gut. If there's a light at the end of the tunnel Brad's missing it and fear is tight in his throat. He doesn't want to die. If Ray was at the top of his game he'd say something about fear being the little death. Brad thinks for a second that maybe he should say it in Ray's stead. He only thinks about it for a second. It's a start, though, a reminder for Brad that let himself be consumed by fear definitely isn't going to get them out of this mess. The hopelessness is at least tempered if he doesn't feel simultaneously useless. Brad pushes up from the wall, claps his hands together.
“Giving up?” Brad asks, tossing Ray's flashlight back. He catches it out of the air, brow furrowed skeptically. Brad snorts, but it’s half false bravado. “Secret societies, Ray. There's always a -”
“- secret passage!” Ray scrambles to his feet. His grin looks awful with blood on his teeth but at least he's smiling.
Brad hopes it's not an empty promise.
-
Ray stands in the centre of the room for a long time. He's facing the sarcophagus. Brad stopped trying to talk to him fifteen minutes ago; they're trapped in a tomb so if Ray wants some time to sulk, Brad thinks he's entitled. Brad's flashlight sweeps the walls systematically. He wasn't just cheering Ray up. There is often a second entrance, and Brad's personal history tells them that there's always at least a weak wall. Of course, these walls do seem pretty solid.
He turns when he hears Ray fucking with the sarcophagus. If Ray's in the middle of some Josh Ray Poe, morbid death-related meltdown, Brad's going to fucking slap him. The lid of the sarcophagus gets away from him, falls against the floor with a thunderous crash. Brad feels the floor tremble beneath their feet. Brad expects a skeleton or several to tumble down on Ray. Instead, the inside is bare, the back made of smooth wood. No one bothered to hide the seams of the panel or the hinges. Ray presses his thumb against the keyhole and leaves a smudge of blood.
“He who walks with the dead walks free,” Ray says. The faint light of predawn is seeping through the keyhole and around the edges of the door.
He's looking up at Brad and the light from his flashlight is trembling. His whole body is shaking, and Brad is struck again by how young he is. He's never seen anything he wants more than Ray in that moment. The combination of impossibly dark eyes and the brain in his sharp little head is more than Brad can bear. He catches Ray's head in one hand, long fingers digging into the hair at the back of his scalp. For a second he thinks that Ray will fight him. He regrets the gesture instantly. Brad doesn't do physical affection but he doesn't know how to say I wouldn't let you die like this or you're so smart I want to lick your teeth until I can taste the words in your head . Brad doesn't have the words for it. Instead, they breathe the same air and Ray lets him stay close, almost touching nose to nose.
Ray presses his finger tips against Brad's mouth. When Brad doesn't push him away Ray huffs out a hot breath that might have been intended as laughter. Brad can feel it against his mouth and he wants more of it. It makes all the sense in the world to Brad. This is Ray. Ray, whose hair stands up at gravity defying angles and a smug mouth. Brad presses closer, until his forehead is pressed into Ray's. They stay that way for a minute, and Brad lets his eyes close. Ray's other hand is very gentle on his cheek.
“I could -” Brad starts and cuts himself off, “I could kiss you just now.”
“Did that hurt? Admitting that? I could taste your warrior spirit just cringing,” Ray smiles. He's definitely laughing at Brad. Instead of pulling away - which Brad half expected - he presses his fingers forward, pushes at Brad's mouth. Ray's fingers find his hair, tangle in the short strands at the base of his skull.
Ray's whole body is tight, every part of him straining up into Brad. For his mouth. When Brad refuses to give in he scowls. Brad feels it where their foreheads are pressed together. He licks his own lips and tastes Ray's fingers instead. Ray's fingers and a fine layer of history in the form of dust. Apparently tired of letting Brad drive, Ray cups his hand around the back of Brad's neck, pulls him down. He's small but built wiry. Ray's stronger than he looks and Brad's not really invested in fighting him. When Brad kisses him it's around Ray's fingers and it's probably the most chaste thing he's done to anyone's mouth since his ex-fiance left him years ago. Ray wriggles after what feels like an age of men, but is probably a space between heartbeats. Brad lets himself be pushed back, Ray’s fingers leaving a wet streak along his lips. Two fingers on his right hand are notably cleaner around the finger nails and Brad's sort of disgusted by what that means he now has in his mouth.
Worth it though.
“Do I look like a fucking girl? Jesus, Bradley, I know you're a delicate fucking princess, but how about you have some ovarian fortitude and pull up your big girl panties. We can get all snugly wuggly once your Viking sex god ass kicks down that door for us,” Ray says, crosses his arms against his chest.
He waits a beat. Then:
“Well, we can get all snugly wuggly after your freakishly giant, Viking sex god ass kicks down that door for us and we catch up with those inbred motherfuckers to take our map back. And after I give Schwetje's little purse dog a fat fucking lip to match mine,” he adds. He speaks like he's laying out the invasion of Normandy.
“You have a problem with your mouth, Person. When it flaps you try to communicate like a human, but your trailer park inhabiting, NASCAR enthusiast, goat molesting species hasn't evolved to the point of language yet,” Brad tells him. He digs a set of needle fine tools out of his bag. While kicking down the door might get Ray hot under the collar, it might also fuck up his foot.
Brad smiles when the lock clicks into place. No matter how many times he successfully picks a lock it is always immensely satisfying. He can feel Ray anxious and vibrating behind him. He's standing close enough that when he shifts his weight from foot to foot his legs brush Brad's hip. Part of Brad feels like this was too easy. The door swings open with the push of Ray's hand. Brad's on his knees in the dust of centuries. On the distant horizon the sun is just starting to crest. It's a new day.
“Come on,” Ray says, “miles to go before we sleep on this one.”
He scrubs his fingers through Brad's hair. Ray waits until Brad takes his hand, pulls himself up to his feet and they step out into the cold, pre-dawn air. Brad can feel the dust through his blue jeans, working it's way through the weave to itch his skin. Ray's hand is warm and dirty in Brad's and for a moment they just stand there. Ray's right off course: miles to go. They need to start by catching up with Schwetje but for just a second this is working for him. The sun is coming up in a spectacular show of colour and they can handle whatever's next.