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blessed-but-distressed · 6 years

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Cross My Heart (3/31)

All Sheriff Emma Swan wanted was a bit of the quiet life. Why else would she take a job in Storybrooke, Maine, where deer outnumber people? But when a local woman turns up murdered, Emma quickly realizes she might be out of her depth. Enter Killian Jones, 17th century buccaneer turned vampire, who might just have the kind of unique perspective on the crime she is looking for. It’s a shaky alliance, but when Emma’s past comes back to bite her, she might just discover how handy having a vampire around can be.

A Captain Swan Supernatural Summer AU.

also on ff.net and ao3

Rated M for Mature Readers. Trigger warnings for blood, gore, violence, sexual references, blood sharing, mental manipulation and major character deaths.

This here is a murder mystery with vampires in it, and it plays out accordingly. You get what you pay for.

This is my contribution to the Captain Swan Supernatural Summer event. Many thanks to my pseudo-attorney @distant-rose for her art, her positivity, and her commitment to getting the gross details just about right. A big thank you also to @kmomof4 for putting the @cssns together, and for asking me to take part. And thanks to Eric Northman, for some inspiration.

Chapter Three

On the whole, Emma tried to avoid spending too much time in morgues.

It wasn’t just the cloying smell of formaldehyde, which clung to her clothes for the rest of the day. Or the thermostat set at a chilly 40 degrees. It wasn’t even the idea of being trapped in a windowless basement with a whole bunch of dead people. Though, gross.

For your garden variety deaths, your heart attacks and car accidents, the body was usually farmed out to the funeral parlor the next town over, who would handle everything. For the more interesting cases though, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner would get involved, transferring the body down South for an autopsy.

Kathryn Nolan’s was an interesting case.

Which meant if Emma didn’t want to wait a month for the official autopsy report, she would have to get in good with the Medical Examiner. The Medical Examiner who was currently dodging her calls.

“I’ll flip you for it?” she pleaded, as Graham rummaged in the break room cabinet in search of more coffee filters.

“You already owe me for the press conference,” he pointed out, emerging from the cabinet empty handed and scowling. “Do we still have that paper towel in the storage closet?”

“They have a Dunks in Augusta…” Emma cajoled.

She sensed a flicker of interest from him, but only a flicker. In the end, his principles won out, and he shook his head defiantly. “I’ve been pulling doubles for you all week. I’m not driving to Augusta and back just because you want to avoid seeing one of your old hook ups.”

She really needed to stop telling him things.

She held his gaze for a long moment, but his resolve didn’t break. Son of a bitch.

“Fine!” Emma relented, reaching over to grab the keys for the patrol car off their hook. “I’ll go. But don’t think I’m bringing you back any Boston Kremes. You’ve shown where your loyalties really lie.”

Graham seemed to realize his grave error then, face contorting in pain at the very mention of his favorite treat.

“Nuh, uh,” Emma warned, waggling a finger in front of his face. “You had your chance. I hope you like jelly, you traitor.”

To call Dr Victor Whale an old hook up was pushing it. It was a one time thing, ages ago. A darkened bar, two counties from home. He was just a charming smile after a long line of shots. It wasn’t her fault he worked at the State Police Crime Lab. It wasn’t like he’d volunteered that information at the time. There hadn’t been a whole lot of talking, from what she remembered. Though if she was being honest, that wasn’t a lot.

He must’ve remembered at least a little, though, because a definite look of panic crossed his face when he saw her standing by the door to the laboratory, file in hand.

“Relax, Doctor,” she said with a roll of her eyes. “I’m not here for a paternity suit.”

He chuckled, but the way his shoulders relaxed underneath his lab coat convinced Emma she’d been right on the money with that one.

“Emma Swan,” she said, reaching over to shake his hand, saving him the trouble of having to remember her name. “I’m actually here about a dead woman.”

“No shortage of those here,” Whale said, breaking contact to stretch his arms wide. “We’ve got every make and model. Cheerleaders. Housewives. Grandmas. Society queens. Or if you’re looking for something a touch more exotic, our night time receptionist is of the walking, talking, bloodsucking variety. So, what can I do you for, Sheriff?”

He’d clocked her badge at her hip, then. Always a good sign to have a medical examiner who noticed the little details.

“You’ll remember mine. Kathryn Nolan? She had her heart missing. I heard you were the one who did the autopsy?”

It was almost comical, how fast his devil-may-care grin slid into a grimace.

“Kathryn,” he nodded solemnly. “Of course.”

“Great. Feel like answering some of my questions?”

He hesitated, running a hand through his short platinum hair. “I feel like I should warn you my full report won’t be ready for a couple weeks. The labs are still backed up from Christmas, and…”

“And I’ve got someone in my town who likes to carve out women's hearts,” Emma interrupted. “I’ll take your work-in-progress.”

He blinked. Just once.

“Alright then. She’s down in the freezer. Follow me.”

The building was labyrinthine, and Emma quickly lost her bearings amidst the institutional grey speckled walls, and rows of identical white doors. But as they descended the stairs down into the sub-basement, she came to understand why they called it “the freezer.” She hugged her arms more tightly around herself as the good doctor led her into a pristine white examination room that had never known the joys of central heating.

Probably for the best, all things considered.

“Kathryn Nolan,” Whale repeated to himself, picking up a clipboard and running his finger down the page. “Seems to be behind door number 3. You want a look at her?”

In Emma’s mind, want didn’t really come into it. Fighting her better instincts, she nodded, then stood back as Whale tucked the clipboard under his arm and pulled open the nearest cold storage locker. With a small grunt of effort he slid the steel drawer free until the figure under the white sheet lay between them.

Dragging her eyes from the shape beneath the sheet, Emma looked up to see Whale watching her. Waiting for some sign of distress, maybe. She figured this was probably the juncture where most people would start with the hyperventilating and the vomiting. Fortunately, Emma was not most people. This wasn’t her first rodeo. And even it is had been, she would never give him the satisfaction.

She held his gaze firmly as he pulled back the sheet.

“This your girl?”

Kathryn looked better than the last time Emma had seen her. Not that that was all that hard. But someone had definitely cleaned her up, removed all the river debris and brushed her hair out.

“I’m guessing you’ve established cause of death, Doctor?”

His grin was wry. “Well, I might’ve gone to a State School, but even I couldn’t miss the gaping hole in her chest where her heart used to be.”

Emma blanched. “They took out the heart while she was still alive?”

“That’s my working theory. Massive chest trauma. She was definitely dead before she hit the water, anyway. The condition she arrived in made it a little hard to determine whether her other injuries were sustained before or after her swim in the river, but I didn’t spot anything else that looked particularly lethal.”

Seeing the look on Emma’s face, Whale hurriedly continued.

“Of course, there’s every chance she wasn’t conscious at the time. We’re still waiting on the toxicology to come back, but she might’ve been drugged. There weren’t any ligature marks on her wrists or ankles, and that’s rather telling. I doubt your girl would’ve just kept still while someone hacked into her.”

Emma remembered the woman who outpaced her on the treadmill, week after week. No, that didn’t seem like Kathryn’s MO.

“So they used a knife? Like a hunting knife?”

“That’s probably a good bet. I’ve taken some moulds of the grooves left in the ribs. I might be able to narrow that down for you. But my best guess at the moment is you’re looking at a substantial blade. 10 inches maybe. They weren’t fucking around.”

Emma wondered if that was the medically appropriate term.

“Good news is,” Whale pointed out, “whoever your killer is, they probably aren’t too smart, and they’re definitely not medically trained. I did some reading about this. It isn’t easy to rip out a human heart directly from the chest. There’s the sternum and the ribs to contend with. It takes a lot of strength to cut or break through them, and a lot of time. It’s messy. The victim doesn’t die right away. Compare that with, say, the Aztecs, who practised heart-extraction as part of some rituals. They’d slice below the ribs with a sharp rock, and rip the heart out from below. It’s fast, efficient, and relatively easy to accomplish with little more than a scalpel and your hand.”

He indicated the angry wound marring Kathryn’s chest. “That’s not the route your killer chose to take. Ergo, not too bright.”

Or maybe they just appreciated the spectacle of it.

“You get anything I could use to find this guy?”

Whale shrugged, lifting the sheet back over Kathryn’s face. “After a couple of days in that river, you’d be lucky to find any useful trace evidence. We sent everything we had off for analysis, but I don’t like your odds. ”

Emma frowned. “You think she was in the water the whole time, then? She was killed the day she disappeared?”

“That’s my opinion. It’s hard to say for sure. The decaying process is delayed when the body is submerged in water, especially when it’s this cold. But the body was already showing signs of putrefaction, so she’d probably been out there the full five days. That’s not forgetting the lack of ligature marks, which suggest she wasn’t held for any length of time. If you’re thinking this was a kidnapping, then I’d say they used some kind of drug to incapacitate her, in the short term. Unfortunately, the condition of the body makes it hard to determine how it might’ve entered her system. You’d have to wait for the tox screen to know what you’re dealing with.”

“So you’re saying it could be anyone?” Emma sighed, rubbing her eyes with the heel of her hand.

“Well,” Whale considered. “Anyone with a hunting knife and a certain amount of patience. They didn’t do this by accident. They meant to rip her heart out. If you consider how much strength it would take to saw through the sternum, you’re probably looking at a male, or especially strong woman. Hard to gauge height by the angle of grooves in the ribs, because she was probably on her back at the time, but the marks definitely skew left. So he was probably right-handed.”

“So he’s strong, right-handed man, then?” Emma summed up.

It didn’t really narrow down the field much, and the apologetic look Whale shot her way said he knew it.

“And he probably knew her,” Whale added. “Or surprised her. I didn’t spot a lot of obvious defensive wounds. So whoever they are, they must’ve gotten pretty close before they incapacitated her.”

A strong, right-handed man, who was familiar to her, then.

As if that didn’t describe nearly the entire male population of Storybrooke to a T.

Swallowing back her disappointment, Emma extended her hand again. “Thanks for your time, Doc. I look forward to your full report.”

He looked at her hand, but he didn’t accept it. Instead he let his lips curve into what could only be described a salacious grin. “I get off in an hour. I don’t suppose you-”

“I think that would be a spectacularly bad idea,” Emma said firmly, snatching her hand back and cutting him off before he could dig himself any further. And then, because she couldn’t help herself, “Do you normally try to seduce the police officers investigating the deaths of your patients?”

“Only the hot ones,” he replied, maybe a little too honestly. “And I seem to remember we had fun together.”

Emma doubted he remembered that much. She certainly didn’t.

“Yeah, I’m not really interested in jeopardizing my murder investigation with a repeat performance.”

Whale held a finger to his lips, letting loose what she was sure someone had once told him was a panty dropping smile. “I won’t tell if you won’t.”

The next time Emma got it into her head to take a man to bed, she was going to make sure she was across state lines first. Hell, maybe even across the border. Anything to ensure she never, ever found herself in this situation again.

“As tempting as that sounds,” she said, with forced sincerity, “I think I’m gonna pass. No,” she said, holding up a hand as he moved closer. “It’s okay. I can see myself out.”

Twenty minutes and a few wrong turns later, Emma was back in the patrol car again, heater blasting, scrolling through her contacts with numb fingers.

“Graham, hey. Bad time?”

“Is there any other time?” he drawled.

Emma stifled her eye roll. “You’re funny, you know that? I knew I kept you around for a reason.”

“That and my charming personality,” he pointed out.

“Of course,” she agreed. “Can’t forget that. Any chance you put those charms to work and got Michael Tillman to open the garage for you?”

“Yeah, but I don’t know what I’m looking for. Didn’t we already dust and bag everything in Kathryn’s car?”

“We thought so, but back then this was just a disappearance. Now it’s a murder. Check again. Especially the backseat.”

“The backseat?” Graham repeated.

“Kathryn was driving from home to the office when she disappeared. It’s a straight line, and she had no reason to deviate. So either she stopped for someone, or they were already in the car when she got in. Check the backseat.”

“If I find anything, do I earn myself a Boston Kreme?” he asked hopefully.

“You find anything, I’ll buy you a whole box.”

#cssns #cs ff #cs au #cross my heart #cs au ff

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harryandmolly · 6 years

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Pool Party

Warnings: Language, light drug use

Word count: 1400+

She swung her feet through the water, shaking her head and marveling at how badly her facial muscles burned from laughing. She felt a surge of gratefulness when she looked around.

Two of her roommates were on pool floats shaped like a frosted pink donut and a bottle of rosé, respectively. One of their boyfriends was bartending and monitoring the Red Sox game from his phone, calling out cheers and jeers in his thick Boston accent every so often for ambiance. Harrison was sprawled on a pool chair with sunglasses on and mimosa in hand.

And then there was Tom.

Tom, more mimosa than man by that point of the afternoon, was trying to find the best way to launch himself from the edge of the hot tub onto the rosé float that Sammi refused to vacate. He was so easily distractible that every time he climbed up to his perch, crouched like Spider-Man on the stone wall, ready to try to convince Sammi to move and get Harrison ready to film it, he would attempt some other kind of flip and land with a splash and a giggle.

She had trouble looking at anyone else. In Hawaiian printed swim trunks and those fuckboy Ray Ban aviators, homeboy showed up. She was almost annoyed when he arrived. What gave him the right to look so casually fuckable and also like the epitome of boyfriend material all at once? She let out a little huff as he strolled through the gate to the pool area armed with Harrison and two six-packs. Sammi smacked at her arm playfully and cackled at her reaction.

Sammi knew. Sammi didn’t need to ask, really, when Tom and Harrison first started coming around the house more on days off from filming. She could see it in their every interaction – subtle glances, not-so-subtle glances, sharing drinks, sitting away from the group for separate giggle-filled conversations. But she confirmed with her anyway -- is that a thing?

It was, in fact, a thing. Thing was the best word for it. That indefinable stage of somethingness that wasn’t quite “friends with benefits” because of the inklings of stronger feelings from both parties. But solo interaction was still limited. She had her security blanket of her loud, playful roommates and he had Harrison. Mimosas and weed didn’t hurt.

The day wore on warm and breezy, the perfect LA day. Kent made a run to Del Taco around 4 that everyone appreciated. Tom finally gave up his rosé dreams and opted instead to sit next to her, his her, under the canopied pool furniture to dive hard into a bag of soft tacos. They shared hot sauce packets and he sipped her mimosa when he knew she was pretending not to watch him. When she’d turn and wrinkle her nose at him, caught in the act, his heart would pound. He’d reach back to Mike for the joint in an effort to calm down his childlike anxiety around her.

After tacos, Kent dispersed to her room for a weed-induced nap. Harrison migrated from roasting on the pool chair to sunning himself on the donut with a bottle of IPA in his lap. Sammi and Mike eventually gathered up the dead soldiers and excused themselves to her room.

She found herself almost vibrating with excitement to be close to him when their little party thinned out. Tom had stretched out on the long end of the outdoor sofa, his hand thickly rooted in her hair, massaging her scalp as she retold her story about being pretty, like, really sure that she saw Michael Bublé driving a black van on Sunset earlier that week.

“Kids, I’m out,” Harrison announced, grabbing the edge of the pool and hauling himself up and out, shooting Tom a mischievous glance.

“You’re leaving?” she piped up, pulling her head up from Tom’s hard shoulder.

“Don’t sound too disappointed,” Harrison joked, winking at her as he grabbed his bag and headed for her room on the other side of the glass doors to change.

There was comfortable silence for a beat as he ran his fingers through her chlorine-streaked hair and down her freckled arms.

“He has a date,” Tom explained, wiggling his eyebrows.

“Ahhhh,” she cooed, “That PA again?”

“Yeah. Think he really likes her.”

“I love that,” she hummed, nuzzling into his cool, goosebumped skin.

Harrison hurried back out to catch his Lyft, doling out quick hugs and leaving them and their donuts and rosé bottles and empty mimosa glasses and an Amazon Alexa crooning Niall Horan’s Flicker album.

While standing, she busied herself by pouring out the last dribbles of orange juice and champagne into her glass, humming along to the music and bouncing on her toes. He watched her affectionately, looking like the human equivalent of the heart eyes emoji.

She turned with her glass to face him. He reached out for her hand and she took it, angling her gaze at her feet shyly and shuffling towards him. He led her to the edge of the pool. They sat there together in the shade, feet in the water, leaning against each other for support.

“I like you,” Tom murmured, turning his head slightly to look down at her.

“I like you,” she responded, nudging him with her shoulder. He beamed.

“We should go on a date.”

“I agree.”

“Can Harrison come?”

She looked at him with alarm. He chuckled. “I’m kidding,” he assured her.

She shook her head, the scent of her shampoo mixed with chlorine enveloping him for a minute. He was still high enough to giggle at the sensation. She put her glass down and slipped feet first into the water, hissing and flapping her arms as it came up around her middle.

“Fuuuuuuuuuck!” she squealed, squinting and hopping up and down.

“’S not that bad,” he teased, pulling himself up to regain his territory on the edge of the hot tub.

“Oh, Tom, not this again. Before when there were people here, fine, but I’m drunk and cannot be trusted to perform CPR properly if you fuck this up.”

“Oh, ye of little faith!” he protested, crouching and eyeing the rosé bottle float like a predator. She sunk to her knees in the shallow end so just her nose and eyes were above water. He grinned down at her mischievously just before he made his leap, crashing successfully onto the bottle until it flipped upon impact, sending him under the water.

When he reemerged, she was floating on her back in hysterics, her laugh loud and snorting and un-self-conscious. He couldn’t help but smile at the sound. He grabbed her foot and yanked her into him, wrapping her legs around his waist and securing her against his torso.

She gazed at him quietly. He flipped wet copper hair out of his eyes. She thumbed over the freckles on his cheekbones.

“I didn’t drown,” he whispered, brushing his nose against hers tenderly. She scooped her hands up his firm arms to thread them into his hair.

“Not yet,” she replied dryly, planting one firm kiss on him before moving her hands to his shoulders to dunk him.

When he popped back up, she was frantically swimming away, giggling like a kid on Christmas. He growled and dove underneath her, grabbing her by the waist and dragging her to the surface. She shrieked with delight, desperately wiggling against his arms for freedom. He hauled her up into his chest, treading water, pretending to look perturbed.

“You owe me another kiss for that.”

She rolled her eyes, tipping her head back to dampen and fix her hair. She opened her mouth to respond when she felt Tom’s lips meet her cool skin, suckling and nibbling along the column of her throat. The words stopped dead with a slur on her tongue. He adjusted them so her legs were back around his hips, this time a little tighter and more insistent. He reveled in it.

“Well, now I’m really glad you didn’t drown,” she groaned, raking a hand up his tight back. He laughed into her neck and swung them in a circle when he reached the shallow end.

He stopped short of leaving a hickey on her neck, uncertain of how she felt about getting marked up (he would soon learn she would be in favor). She continued to cling to him, very satisfied with the feel of his hard body between her legs and his pruney hands roaming her back.

Like a couple of overstimulated kids on summer break, they stayed in the pool until they were cold and starving. They Postmates-ed pizza and finished off the last of the six pack under the canopy. Tom wasn’t sure it technically counted as a date, but he figured it was a pretty fine way to start.

Taglist: @the-claire-bitch-project, @crapri

#tom holland #tom holland fanfic #tom holland fanfiction #tom holland fan fic #tom holland fan fiction #tom holland fluff #tom holland one shot #tom holland blurb #tom holland imagine

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