PB&J
Ian was sitting dazedly at his desk, staring down listlessly at yet another uneaten sandwich that Albert had brought him in the hopes that the officer would at least try to eat something.
It was a simple gesture, and while he wasn't close with Albert, the quarky Tenctonese Janitor, some distant part of his brain appreciated it, even if it was only a PB&J that he barely touched. His fellow officers had kept their distance. Either through respect or discomfort around those who lose a partner, or those who had been around for a time and had a certain developed ingrained gut instinct that Ian was a tickling time bomb that they did not want to risk triggering and seeing just how much damage resulted.
Ian poked the bread, humming with vague approval that Albert knew to layer a bit of peanut butter on each side of the bread before adding the jam, thereby forestalling any decent sandwich pet peeve, soggy bread. His breath hitched as he remembered lecturing an amused Henry about perfect sandwich techniques a few years back, the two of them laughing at Henry's rather poor cooking skills as they bemoaned their soggy, sticky lunches.
Henry thought Ian was being picky, and he had exclaimed rather primly that he should learn from his elders, a mysterious smile curling his lips when his friend gave him one of those exasperated eye-rolls over his "mysteriousness" that he was well used to by that point when the human said something strange.
Ian picked up the sandwich on his desk and took a bite, a sad little smile around the bite.
ooo ooo ooo
The day that Ian learned that Henry's fate had not been a tragic accident, it had been while he was walking down a hallway and by pure happenstance, witnessed the bevy of suspects being brought in handcuffs, and upon asking Dobbs about all the activity, the detective had uncomfortably related the investigation that George and Matt had conducted on the sly about Henry's death, there suspicions, Matt getting dragged in by his old school chum, the surgeries, all a case of tragic, exploitative murder.
Dobbs would swear later, in private with the investigators from internal affairs who had been brought in after the following incident, that Officer Ian Freely had not moved from his side when the skies darkened at high noon over Los Angeles, and several highly affluent people waiting in custody for their expensive lawyers to work there well paid wiles and get them free, disappeared.
No one knew what precisely happened. One minute, several people that had been part of, or knowingly benefited from, stealing parts from Tenctonese victims for eternal youth and vitality simply vanished in the 30 seconds that the entire police station went pitch black, and were gone when the lights returned.
Ian had been standing beside Dobbs when the lights came on alright, but what Dobbs decided to leave out of his report, unsure himself if it had been a figment of his imagination induced by the strangeness of the situation, was that officer Freely had smiled. Not a happy smile, or a funny ha ha smile, but more something unhealthy and sinister, something that gleamed, for just a moment, inhuman, in the shadows of the flickering florescent lights before they solidified, revealing a blank expression in the harshness of the light, calmly eating a PB&J sandwich, the gleam of red jam dripping onto the floor from between the dry crusts.