FicWad

By the time Chris got to the pet shop, the circus had been in and moved out. He'd been kept busy until forensics had finished - although Chris could have told them exactly what they'd find. He'd read Leon's and Agent Howell's files enough times that he could recite them without thinking.

(Building empty of animals and traces. The back room that customers reported containing a maze of corridors actually being a five-by-five metre concrete room, completely empty. Incense completely harmless, containing no hallucagenics at all. Fingerprints and hair match exactly to those filed for a Count D that studied at S.U.N.Y, Albany, forty-four years ago and those found in the pet shop in Los Angeles twenty years ago. No witnesses of the occupant's departure, no witnesses reporting seeing them since.)

Still, it hurt a little when they finally let him in. The pet shop was empty, winding corridors reduced to one room, and the incense fading all ready. He didn't - couldn't - stay for long, because if he did he'd take the place apart looking for something forensics had missed, something that hadn't been there all the times Leon had called him from a pet shop and told him that he'd missed D again and he was going to try somewhere else. He couldn't do that. One Orcot going AWOL was bad enough.

(That didn't stop him thinking the whole drive home of what he would say when - if - he called Leon, what advice Leon might give him if he could stop laughing long enough. The alternative was wondering why D hadn't said anything, why he hadn't told him he was leaving.)

When Chris got back to his apartment, he had his coat hung up - living with Leon had pretty much killed his desire to live like a slob before he even got it - and his holster half-way off before he noticed it. A faint, familiar scent - like baking, like the incense that had been burning at the pet shop when he last dropped in two weeks ago.

Chris nearly knocked the living room door off its hinges when he burst in, and D looked up from his seat with his expression as serene and hands clasped as demurely in his lap as though he was at the pet shop instead of tucked away on a chair he must've have dragged out of sight of the window.

"I think we should visit your brother," D said, as though he was just carrying on with a conversation they'd already started. "I'm sure your fellow agents haven't left the pet shop in any sort of habitable condition." Chris stared at him, trying to think about that - he was being invited to visit the brother he hadn't seen in twenty years by a wanted man - then gave up and started to laugh. He dropped down on his knees by D's chair and wrapped his arms around D's waist, still laughing.

"Sure, why not?" Apart from the one thousand and one problems that came with it - starting with the fact that the FBI were watching the airports for D, and moving through to I don't even know where Leon is anymore. But at that moment, with his arms wrapped around D and one of D's hands coming to rest tentatively on Chris' head, he was just so grateful D hadn't left him that he couldn't really care.