For milliways_bar.

[milkbonesoldier]

When Wells went off today, it wasn't to work. He'd earned some time away from the forge, and he was taking it. The farrier didn't care where or why, but Zuko knew. It'd been two months since Wells and Annie last met.

... funny, then, that a man who hadn't seen his wife in so long should suddenly sound as if he's on his way back so very soon.

Comments

[princeinexile]

Yaeh. Shouldn't right now, they be rattling the headboards? (Oh, that one nightmarish night they had to share a hotel suite. Oh, oh, the nightmares... It was enough that it nearly put him off sex.)

But they're not. So Zuko gets the dog up and roused, and is sitting there, waiting.

"So what happened?"

[milkbonesoldier]

Wells looks like a man who's just swallowed a mouthful of glass, metaphorically speaking. Someone more familiar with cartoons would expect to see smoke from his ears, or flame from his nostrils. Zuko knows Wells is no Firebender, though. What he sees, more likely, is something he should not, because it won't be full moon again for a good two weeks. Wells looks as if he's just this side of shifting, and only holding back by force of will.

"She's gone, Zuko," he snaps. "She's not there. It's not an abort- she was there and I followed her trail up to her room and it stopped. They'd just got finished dosing the room with those cleansers that make me sneeze and there was no sign she'd ever been there."

Someone is going to pay for this.

[princeinexile]

Oh. Oh fuck -- Zuko's mouth opens and close; he knows very well there are just some things you don't toy with. A man's family is one of them. "Where do we go from here, then?" he asks darkly.

[milkbonesoldier]

"The last thing I saw on the way in," Wells says, starting to pace rapidly in the small space available to him, "was the laundry truck pulling away. Bet you a fiver that was no laundry they were going to. We're finding the son of a bitch who was behind the wheel, finding out where the fuck he drove her to, and giving him something to remember us by before we get her back."