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[cineresis]

Angels in America

It's amazing how fast an evening at your favorite club can be ruined by someone keeling over and frothing at the mouth. The band never quite gets back into the swing of things afterwards.

"Angel," sighed one of the men, or nearest approximants, at the table next to mine, "why is it that I can never go anywhere with you without stumbling across a body?"

"Oh, come now," said his partner, a soft, fluffy confection in caramel and cream, rising hastily to make his way toward the source of the commotion. The first gentleman, dark, lanky, and excruciatingly chic, got up to follow him. "It's hardly every time."

I stayed where I was for now, casting my gaze around the room as I went over my memory of the past twenty or thirty minutes. Too many people passing close enough to slip something into the victim's drink, too many others to watch at the same time, too many more opportunities to poison him outside my field of view. I was a detective, not God.

"Stumbling upon, once. Literally. Do you know what it's like to have to clean up after that sort of thing? It takes a personal toll."

"Hush, Crowley," chided "Angel". "People can hear you, and you know how queer they get about these things. Ooh, yes, that's strychnine, all right," he added cheerfully, pulling a small vial from his vest pocket and tipping it into his handkerchief. "Nasty stuff."

I got up. As I approached, I caught the faint, unmistakable chemical sweetness of ether fumes and gave them a wide berth, choosing instead to inspect the victim's plate and glass before turning to scan the room from this perspective.

"Now, just what might you be doing?" drawled Crowley.

I looked him over, too, while I was at it. In Crowley's case, this involved a lot of looking and not much over; he was easily more than six feet tall, even while slouching rakishly. The snake tattoo on his right temple suggested certain things about him. The dark glasses that he hadn't removed since he'd entered just suggested questions, since I highly doubted he was blind. "I'm a detective," I said, leaving the obviously at the end of that sentence to implication. "What are you doing?"

This response seemed to delight him. "So are we," Crowley answered, and grinned. "But if you want to get specific about it, I'm keeping you distracted while my friend saves this man's life. Let's see your license, then."

As I took it out, keeping at least one eye on him and his partner, Angel called out to the rubbernecking crowd around us, "I need someone here to run and call the nearest hospital, and a couple of strong men to help get this poor fellow someplace dark and quiet to rest. Best use one of the tablecloths for a stretcher," he added to the first volunteer who stepped forward.

Crowley leaned in closer to study my license. "Drake Silas Donovan," he read off. "'Silas', really?"

"What about it?"

"I've just always wondered what kind of parent would name their kid Silas."

"The kind who had a grandfather named Silas," I replied coolly, snagging my license back. "Your turn."

He obliged. Anthony J. Crowley, it read, licensed in London since 1905, the year before mine. I wondered how long he'd been at this; he looked too young for his apparent age, but then I looked too old for mine. "A. J. Crowley," I read his signature aloud. "Get asked if you're any relation every time, or just most?"

There's a certain motion a person's head makes when they roll their eyes. Crowley's was making it. "The man's an embarrassment to the side," he griped. "I made my name legitimately."

"And your friend?" It wasn't as if I couldn't put two and two together. There's a certain type of person who's got both a nose for trouble and the brains to prepare for it; if it walks, talks, and thinks like a dick, it probably is one. It was just that I wasn't in the habit of trusting people, and I'd be a real schmuck to neglect basic due diligence on the guy purportedly surrounded by bodies. 

Detectives are no better or worse than any other person. They just think it's usually more interesting to solve crimes than commit them.

"Oh, he's as legitimate as it gets." Crowley turned to his companion, who was getting to his feet, brushing his clothes off fussily. Beside him, the two volunteers hoisted the unconscious victim onto a tablecloth spread across the floor, momentarily dislodging the ether-soaked cloth before Angel caught it and laid it carefully back in place over the victim's nose and mouth. "Aren't you, Aziraphale?"

Angel — "Aziraphale"? — looked up, startled. "Pardon?"

"Mr. Donovan here wants to see your detective's license," Crowley explained, enunciating his words with malice aforethought.

"Oh! Yes. Of course I always have that with me. Now just where did I..." He started patting down his pockets, stopped suddenly, and took a lovely calfskin card holder out of his coat. "Ah. Here it is."

Beaming, he passed it to Crowley, who passed it to me with the comment, "You'll find everything in order, I'm sure."

I glanced down at the card, then back up at Angel. "Am I supposed to call you A. Z. Fell or Aziraphale?" I asked, pronouncing the Z correctly as zed.

"A. Z. Fell is how 'Aziraphale' is pronounced in the King's English," said Crowley blandly, affecting a cut-glass Oxford accent on the last phrase. His partner seemed pleased by this comment, rather than annoyed.

"I'm afraid my progenitor bestowed me with a rather unwieldy given name," Fell admitted, raising fascinating questions about just how many syllables the British peerage could fit on a birth certificate when they really tried. "Aziraphale just sounds so much more euphonious, don't you think?" Crowley was right; I couldn't tell whether Fell had meant to say A. Z. Fell or the de-accented gloss. He'd lengthened the half-syllable between zed and Fell to a full vowel, but some people said zetta.

"I wouldn't know," I replied, handing the license back to Crowley, who was nearest. When Fell didn't take my bait, I added, "Lucky that you happened to have ether handy. I wouldn't like to imagine what might've happened if you'd decided to stay in tonight." I also lied when I said sorry, and when I swore to tell the whole truth and nothing but. Little white lies are the oil in the gears of civilization.

"Oh, I always carry that, too," Fell explained earnestly. "One gets into the habit after one's first run-in with strychnine, and of course ether has so many useful applica—"

"I wouldn't, angel," Crowley interrupted, sounding very amused. "Mr. Donovan thinks you're the one behind this."

"Oh," said Fell, nonplussed. "Gosh. Well, I — I suppose I can't blame him. He doesn't know me from Adam, after all, and has no reason to trust me — I did warn you about giving people funny ideas, Crowley, honestly. Of course," Fell turned to me, laying an elegant hand across his chest, "if you were to search me, you would find only a small collection of antidotes — oh, but a habitual poisoner would probably carry those, too, especially if he were the sort of voyeur with a penchant for playing the hero. I certainly wouldn't be convinced of my innocence. Yes, I can certainly understand whatever suspicion you might feel towards me, however misplaced it may be."

Crowley watched this thought process with an expression somewhere between fascination and agony. "Well, at least now he probably thinks that if you'd done it, you'd have been caught by now," he remarked, presumably because he was thinking the same thing. "You'll have to excuse my friend," Crowley added to me. "He still believes that the innocent have nothing to fear. Somehow."

"First time visiting?" I guessed.

Fell's bemusement answered my question before he did. "Pardon?"

"Never mind."

[cineresis]

I should probably introduce my partner at this juncture.

I'd met Stella Belmonte when I was fifteen and she was sixteen and I needed to find out who'd beaten up a friend of a friend of a friend who'd been out turning tricks the night before. My contact told me Stella knew everyone working on the docks that he didn't. This was hyperbole, but only by a little. We started a regular gossip circle after that. Stella got into my line of work a few years later when a major strike by the Midwest Longshoremen got broken from the inside by misinformation and infighting  before getting broken from the outside by scabs and batons. She took it personally. Stella on a mission is like an angry avalanche.

And because that resemblance does not stop at mere temperament, people seldom realize the impending danger until she hits them, which is likely to result in burial. People forget to pay attention to big girls.

I may be an idiot, but I take solace in the fact that I was never that much of an idiot.

"I don't know an Oscar Dittmar," Stella told me, "but I might know someone who does. I'll set you two up."

"What kind of person am I looking at?" I asked.

"Samuel Flynn," she said, "with the Wobblies." That'd be the International Workers of the World: your radicals' radicals, the kind that ain't interested in stopping at fair hours for fair pay. "If he doesn't know your man, he'll know who does. You know the type — knows something about everyone and everything."

I was that type. "The whole Samuel, huh?"

"When you don't know him yet, which you don't, yeah," said Stella in her alpine way, rock-solid and irrefutable. "You'll see what I mean. Not that it's his real name, and he's not a card-carrying member, either. But he helps out when he can. Legal, like." 

"And you trust him?" I asked dubiously.

"I think he honestly wants to help," Stella replied. "And I'm a damned sight surer that his hands are tied from doing anything that could get back to the wrong people. He's wise to me, though. Sharp."

Stella was the best judge of character I'd ever met, and that's including myself. If she didn't know quite what to think of him... "You want I should make inquiries?'

Stella responded, with a lupine grin, "Nothing would give me more pleasure than to watch you try."

traditional fic-writing: fluff. smut. coffeeshops. missing episodes. original characters. cross-genre AUs.

traditional copingfic: major archive warnings. graphic torture. crises of faith. mental illness. long tangents on the fundamental injustice of reality.

me writing fic: major archive warnings. graphic torture. crises of faith. mental illness. long tangents on the fundamental injustice of reality.

me writing copingfic: it’s original fiction about detectives for some reason

[cineresis]

"Geez," said Clay, in exactly the same tone as Shiv or Stella would have uttered the word fuck. "What's going on, Drake? Need me to call in backup?" "Not yet." I hesitated. "I'm…not sure precisely what I'm looking at. It could be nothing, or some elaborate scam. If it's not, it's most likely a matter of life and death." "Um," Clay responded. "I know this isn't my area, but that really sounds like a situation that could use backup to me."

So the universe is infinitely more mysterious than human science can yet explain. Drake knows how to handle mystery.

Read Chapter 8.

The Man and the Moon

The twenties are roaring. The twenties are screaming. The twenties are whirling through a world grown increasingly incomprehensible in the wake of the Great War and the tide of shifting morals crashing against the dam of Prohibition.

For Drake Donovan, making sense of the incomprehensible is his life’s work. He knows what it is to defy comprehension, and what it takes to chip away at the problem until it fits into everyday reality. But when a client goes missing and a new one threatens to upend his carefully-constructed view of the world, it’s starting to look more and more like comprehension might be impossible — or worse, unconscionable.

Read from the beginning.

[cineresis]

w. would you like to change that

because i have literally written that scene for my other WIP in that series:

Approximately two years into our acquaintanceship, Drake Donovan offered to kill my mother. "No," I'd responded urgently. While this is not an atypical reaction to meeting my mother, I'd seen Donovan without the mask enough times by then to know that when he said things like that, he not only meant it but wouldn't consider it a great inconvenience. "Jesus, Dee. No. You are not allowed to kill her, harm her, tarnish her reputation, arrange for any of these things to come to pass, or any other loophole I've forgotten in the heat of the moment, though I would not be averse to turning her life into an endless series of aggravations if you're in the mood." "Would that in any way improve her delightful demeanor?" "I sincerely doubt it." "Then I won't go to the trouble." Drake sighed, slipping his hands into his pockets. "Seriously, Shiv. All the women in the world you could love, and you had to choose her?"

"You know that's not how it works. Why do you care? She likes you." "I saw your face when she was talking to you. You've looked happier with a gun pointed at you." "Thank you so very much for that little nugget of self-awareness," I said bitterly. "And?" He gave me an odd look. "You do know that you're my friend, right?" "No? Everyone you want on your side thinks you're their friend." "I've told you, more than once, that I consider you a friend. I've told you the reasons I consider you a friend. I don't make friends often, Shiv." "You also told my mother it was a pleasure meeting her," I pointed out. "Fair point." We walked half a block in leaden silence before he went on, "You know, I always thought you were exaggerating about her? I mean, the nagging Jewish mother's an old joke, and there's your people's proud tradition of kvetching to consider. And you're always on a hair trigger the day or two after you've talked to her, but you are not, I'm afraid, known for your coolness of temper." "Yeah," I growled, "people usually think that." "I don't like when you're in a bad temper," Drake said dispassionately. "You get on our case for pointless minutiae, you break things, you make reckless decisions. It's not pleasant to be around, Shiv. I have to take time out of my day to calm you down instead of doing something more constructive. I also don't get to enjoy your presence, because, and I want this on the record, I actually like you, Shiv, and it's not easy for me to be honest about that kind of thing. The only reason I trusted you enough to tell you in the first place was that you stuck your neck out for me when it wouldn't do you any good and would most likely do you a whole load of harm, for no reason I can fathom except that you don't leave your people behind because you are, strangely enough, a good person, and I'd like to keep you around. So yes, it troubles me that you'd rather face the wrong end of a gun than a bimonthly conversation with the woman who raised you." Which is just about the most touching thing it is possible for someone to say.

If there's one interesting character type I don't think I've actually seen anywhere in fiction, it's a non-hostile psychopath/sociopath. Just some otherwise completely regular person who can only theoretically grasp that other people do actually feel things like empathy or remorse, it's not just a thought experiment or something you're socially expected to politely pretend to have.

Someone who's got friends and a social life, who doesn't have a criminal record or indulge in actually acting upon violent urges because being in prison would be inconvenient. Living like other people do is simply more comfortable - even if they'd be perfectly capable of doing things other people couldn't stomach, there's nothing to be gained from doing something like that.

I could imagine a scene of a character like that actually explaining themselves to a friend - the reason why they act the way they do, what happened when their social mask accidentally slipped, and having the friend awkwardly laugh, trying to lighten the situation with a joke, like "hahah, what if you don't actually like any of us and you've only manipulated us into liking you because having people around makes your life easier."

And have them - just this once - opt to not fake a laugh, and instead just calmly say, "I mean yeah, I have literally done that, but I wouldn't tell you this if we weren't friends, now would I."

And the friend shrugs like "well, fuck, alright, fair enough."

[cineresis]

"Lionel? It's Drake Donovan," I said. "How much do you like me?"

There was silence over the line for several seconds. Then Lionel Harker said, "Why?"

"I fought off an aspiring murderer and was promptly arrested for it," I said. "He sexually assaulted the victim first, so I sincerely doubt the cops here will be inclined to do me any favors. I'm in New Hampshire, maybe fifty miles north of Concord."

"In that case, it doesn't matter how much I like you," said Lionel. "I'm not licensed to practice in New Hampshire."

"No, but you know people who know people," I replied. "I would like to think that some of those people are from New Hampshire."

(more)

[cineresis]

Chapters: 1/1 Words: 2600 Rating: Teen Archive warnings: Graphic depictions of violence Fandoms: Original work Additional tags: Detective Noir, 1920s, Attempted Kidnapping, Combat Pragmatism, Whump, Drake Donovan’s inimitable habit of making people want to kill him, More Pulp Than Usual, Oneshot

He should probably turn back now. He should probably have turned around and called the cops as soon as he saw the car he was tailing take a left into the waterfront district. He was here only a few nights ago; he knows what pier his target will be at, and the kinds of things they’ll be unloading there.

But he doesn’t know that it’ll be the same one this time, or the same kind of transaction, or with the same people, and if he calls in details that don’t match up with the evidence, there will be very pointed questions about why do you think that might be, Mr. Donovan?

He doesn’t have enough of a reputation in this city to risk losing it.

He idles in the shadow of the Metropolitan Shipping Company depot until he can no longer hear the car ahead of him over the sound of his own engine, then follows.

For The Merry Whump of May – Day 6: “Who died and left you in charge?” Rope | Surprise | Warehouse

@themerrywhumpofmay

[cineresis]

Chapters: 1/1 Words: 2600 Rating: Teen Archive warnings: Graphic depictions of violence Fandoms: Original work Additional tags: Detective Noir, 1920s, Attempted Kidnapping, Combat Pragmatism, Whump, Drake Donovan's inimitable habit of making people want to kill him, More Pulp Than Usual, Oneshot

He should probably turn back now. He should probably have turned around and called the cops as soon as he saw the car he was tailing take a left into the waterfront district. He was here only a few nights ago; he knows what pier his target will be at, and the kinds of things they'll be unloading there.

But he doesn't know that it'll be the same one this time, or the same kind of transaction, or with the same people, and if he calls in details that don't match up with the evidence, there will be very pointed questions about why do you think that might be, Mr. Donovan?

He doesn't have enough of a reputation in this city to risk losing it.

He idles in the shadow of the Metropolitan Shipping Company depot until he can no longer hear the car ahead of him over the sound of his own engine, then follows.

For The Merry Whump of May – Day 6: "Who died and left you in charge?" Rope | Surprise | Warehouse

@themerrywhumpofmay

[cineresis]

Shit gets weird.

"Miss Scott," I said with barely a pause, and without even the slightest scintilla of guilt. I rarely smile, but this time that fact held professional weight. "May I ask what you're doing at the site of an attempted burglary this late at night?" With a bright, puckish smile, she said, "Would you believe me if I said I was in the area?" "I would not."

Read Chapter 7.

The Man and the Moon

The twenties are roaring. The twenties are screaming. The twenties are whirling through a world grown increasingly incomprehensible in the wake of the Great War and the tide of shifting morals crashing against the dam of Prohibition.

For Drake Donovan, making sense of the incomprehensible is his job. He knows what it is to defy comprehension, and what it takes to chip away at the problem until it fits into everyday reality. But when a client goes missing and a new one threatens to upend his carefully-constructed view of the world, it’s starting to look more and more like comprehension might be impossible — or worse, unconscionable.

Read Chapter 1.

[cineresis]

The Man and the Moon

The twenties are roaring. The twenties are screaming. The twenties are whirling through a world grown increasingly incomprehensible in the wake of the Great War and the tide of shifting morals crashing against the dam of Prohibition.

For Drake Donovan, making sense of the incomprehensible is his job. He knows what it is to defy comprehension, and what it takes to chip away at the problem until it fits into everyday reality. But when a client goes missing and a new one threatens to upend his carefully-constructed view of the world, it’s starting to look more and more like comprehension might be impossible — or worse, unconscionable.

Read Chapter 1.

[cineresis]

They fucking rhyme.

Read Chapter 6.

The Man and the Moon

The twenties are roaring. The twenties are screaming. The twenties are whirling through a world grown increasingly incomprehensible in the wake of the Great War and the tide of shifting morals crashing against the dam of Prohibition.

For Drake Donovan, making sense of the incomprehensible is his job. He knows what it is to defy comprehension, and what it takes to chip away at the problem until it fits into everyday reality. But when a client goes missing and a new one threatens to upend his carefully-constructed view of the world, it’s starting to look more and more like comprehension might be impossible — or worse, unconscionable.

Read Chapter 1.

[cineresis]

The Man and the Moon

The twenties are roaring. The twenties are screaming. The twenties are whirling through a world grown increasingly incomprehensible in the wake of the Great War and the tide of shifting morals crashing against the dam of Prohibition.

For Drake Donovan, making sense of the incomprehensible is his job. He knows what it is to defy comprehension, and what it takes to chip away at the problem until it fits into everyday reality. But when a client goes missing and a new one threatens to upend his carefully-constructed view of the world, it’s starting to look more and more like comprehension might be impossible — or worse, unconscionable.

Read Chapter 1.

[cineresis]

Drake finds answers. And maybe – just maybe – the right question.

Kat finds an unexpected ally. Also a knife. Again.

Clay may be the only one here who hasn't killed someone.

Read Chapter 5.

The Man and the Moon

The twenties are roaring. The twenties are screaming. The twenties are whirling through a world grown increasingly incomprehensible in the wake of the Great War and the tide of shifting morals crashing against the dam of Prohibition.

For Drake Donovan, making sense of the incomprehensible is his job. He knows what it is to defy comprehension, and what it takes to chip away at the problem until it fits into everyday reality. But when a client goes missing and a new one threatens to upend his carefully-constructed view of the world, it’s starting to look more and more like comprehension might be impossible — or worse, unconscionable.

Read Chapter 1.

[cineresis]

The Man and the Moon

The twenties are roaring. The twenties are screaming. The twenties are whirling through a world grown increasingly incomprehensible in the wake of the Great War and the tide of shifting morals crashing against the dam of Prohibition.

For Drake Donovan, making sense of the incomprehensible is his job. He knows what it is to defy comprehension, and what it takes to chip away at the problem until it fits into everyday reality. But when a client goes missing and a new one threatens to upend his carefully-constructed view of the world, it’s starting to look more and more like comprehension might be impossible — or worse, unconscionable.

Read Chapter 1.

[cineresis]

Drake follows a lead, and finds another. In the meantime, he gets a thing or two off his chest.

Read Chapter 4.

The Man and the Moon

The twenties are roaring. The twenties are screaming. The twenties are whirling through a world grown increasingly incomprehensible in the wake of the Great War and the tide of shifting morals crashing against the dam of Prohibition.

For Drake Donovan, making sense of the incomprehensible is his job. He knows what it is to defy comprehension, and what it takes to chip away at the problem until it fits into everyday reality. But when a client goes missing and a new one threatens to upend his carefully-constructed view of the world, it’s starting to look more and more like comprehension might be impossible — or worse, unconscionable.

Read Chapter 1.

[cineresis]

My usual police contact shut me out, and made it clear that further inquiries regarding the recent raids would be met with significantly more pressing inquiries in the opposite direction. My contact in the forensics department, who was nicer, told me that whatever was going on, it wasn't going through him, but he'd check around with the hospitals and morgues to rule out alternate causes of disappearance. My records request at the courthouse was met with a rote apology that all records related to this week's raids were sealed from public view. My acquaintance at the Chicago Daily News told me that officialdom at large was doing everything in its power to keep information on the raids from getting out. I told her I'd sort of noticed. She told me that if I didn't need to hear what she had to say then maybe I should stop calling her when she had deadlines to meet. I pointed out that I didn't know she didn't have anything to tell me until I'd asked. She hung up on me at that point. 

traditional fic-writing: fluff. smut. coffeeshops. missing episodes. original characters. cross-genre AUs.

traditional copingfic: major archive warnings. graphic torture. crises of faith. mental illness. long tangents on the fundamental injustice of reality.

me writing fic: major archive warnings. graphic torture. crises of faith. mental illness. long tangents on the fundamental injustice of reality.

me writing copingfic: it’s original fiction about detectives for some reason

[cineresis]

This had been — along with the kinds of people I do talk to, my poor romantic prospects, the ache in her own stony breast for another generation of grandchildren to nurture into fine young alcoholics, and the accomplishments of my more upstanding and less sufferable peers — the subject of our most recent conversation. It was a little less than a week after the Christian New Year, a little less than two before I'd have to hear my mother's voice again, and nobody was feeling too happy about either one. In my case, this was because I am morally opposed to matricide. In the case of many others, whose moral stances regarding matricide I am not qualified to remark upon, this was because the dragnet government raids of the past few months had recently resulted in over a hundred arrests of, reportedly, anyone who happened to be in or near the building in question during the local Communist chapter's weekly kaffeeklatsch. In the case of my client, Mrs. Liese Dittmar, 39, of 1526 South Homan Avenue, this was more specifically because her husband Oscar had been attending a union meeting on the evening of that same raid, and had not been seen or heard from since.

My German, despite my mother's best efforts at keeping me American, is just barely passable enough to follow the gist of a conversation; my Hebrew, rote; my Yiddish, fluent in a workmanlike manner, with all the color that choice of words entails; my English, I am told, masterful if also appalling. Mrs. Dittmar's situation wasn't far off, if one switched the positions of German and English. In the politically complex exchange that resulted, what Yiddish we did not already have, we invented, assisted by Mrs. Dittmar's twelve-year-old daughter, Martie, who looked upset to know what we were saying but more upset by the alternative. She took after her mother very much: light brown hair in two braids that had been braided into one, eyes an ambiguous color between blue, green, and gray — grayer than Liese's — and a heart-shaped face that she kept very straight, with middling success. When her two younger brothers peeked into the kitchen where we sat, Martie told them to go ask old Mrs. Feinman next door if she'd lend them a cup of milk in exchange for a slice of cake later. When I tried to put the family at ease, she redirected me ruthlessly back to the topic at hand. I'd known kids like that. I'd been one of them. I warned her that most would consider this a cautionary tale. She said good, and was I hiring?

I wasn't, because her father didn't approve of child labor, but I gave her as many tips as I could think of on the way out and told her I'd send her a list later with anything important I'd forgotten. Assuming I didn't get myself killed first, anyway. I made sure to emphasize that part. She told me I should write a book, or perhaps a periodical, for the sake of efficiency. I could call it How Not to Get Killed So Far. I told her that this was the damn periodical, except I didn't swear, and she'd better have been taking notes because I wasn't going to repeat myself.

"You said I shouldn't take notes where anyone can see unless it's part of the role," Martie objected.

I scowled. "When did I say that?"

"Right after you said I needed a reputation as someone people could talk to more than a reputation as a detective, because people hide things from snoops but go out of their way to tell things to their friends."

"No, I know I wouldn't have told you something like that."

"You did," Martie insisted, "because then you told me to write down everything I could as soon as it was safe, while my memory was still fresh."

"Good," I informed her gruffly. "People will try to confuse you, or just get confused themselves, and then lean on their character when they can't lean on facts. Most of them'll be more subtle than that."

She didn't smile, but she did give me a solemn, determined nod. I told her I'd be checking in on her and her family, and if she got herself into trouble she could have avoided, I'd find out and finish what the other guys hadn't. She told me she wasn't going to give me more work to do while I was looking for her dad. I told her good again.

The job was to find out whether Oscar Dittmar was alive, what had happened, where he was now, and ideally any evidence that could be brought to his defense if he'd been arrested and charged with sedition. All of this was almost certainly more than what someone who needed a union could afford. Then again, I am an idiot.

traditional fic-writing: fluff. smut. coffeeshops. missing episodes. original characters. cross-genre AUs.

traditional copingfic: major archive warnings. graphic torture. crises of faith. mental illness. long tangents on the fundamental injustice of reality.

me writing fic: major archive warnings. graphic torture. crises of faith. mental illness. long tangents on the fundamental injustice of reality.

me writing copingfic: it’s original fiction about detectives for some reason

[cineresis]

Drake searches for answers, or perhaps the right question.

Read Chapter 3.

The Man and the Moon

The twenties are roaring. The twenties are screaming. The twenties are whirling through a world grown increasingly incomprehensible in the wake of the Great War and the tide of shifting morals crashing against the dam of Prohibition.

For Drake Donovan, making sense of the incomprehensible is his job. He knows what it is to defy comprehension, and what it takes to chip away at the problem until it fits into everyday reality. But when a client goes missing and a new one threatens to upend his carefully-constructed view of the world, it’s starting to look more and more like comprehension might be impossible — or worse, unconscionable.

Read Chapter 1.