in technicolor

Sam Wilson, that Sam Wilson was waiting for Brett when he came in on Tuesday and Maynard and Ellen stared at him like sharks.

He did not need to meet Sam Wilson that badly.

That said, his nephew would lose his goddamn mind. And Brett might be able to steal back the “coolest uncle” title from his brother-in-law.

Might.

The question was: was it worth the blood?

He didn’t have a chance to give that question the focus it deserved because Sam Wilson was suddenly standing up and moving towards him, despite Maynard’s obvious mental commands for him to sit right the fuck back down.

“Detective Mahoney?” Sam Wilson asked.

“Yes, Mr.--uh, Tech Sergeant--?” He tried. Sam Wilson smiled.

“Let’s go ahead and skip that,” he said amiably, “Turns out rank doesn’t matter when you’re chasing an idiot. The guys in Brooklyn said that you’re the point person on these kind of things.”

On--?

Oh, no.

“Please tell me Captain America isn’t missing,” Brett begged. He did not have the time or the resources to track down Captain America. His nephew might die if he had to track down Captain America. He really would die if Brett couldn’t find him.

Sam sighed and rubbed at his face.

“I wish that was my only goddamn idiot,” he finally said.

It wasn’t?

“He’s not missing,” Captain America hissed at Brett and his officers from the staircase. He refused to enter the room properly. He seemed more than happy to squint at them from behind the enormous houseplant framing the stairs. All Brett could see of him was one blue eye and the bottom of his jeans. It had taken Sam Wilson an inordinate amount of time to drag him even that close to them.

Brett found himself slapped with a flashback to Spidey telling the captain that Captain America didn’t trust cops for love or money. He hadn’t realized quite the extent of that animosity.

“Steve,” Wilson said, pressing his fingers into his temples, “He’s been gone a week.”

“So? He used to do that all the time.”

“Yeah, when y’all didn’t have phon—what the fuck do you mean he did that all the time? He just? Up and gone? For a week, Steven? And you didn’t do anything?”

The one eye Brett could see squinted harder at them. How could one man contain that much suspicion? It was almost impressive.

“He always comes home. He’ll come home this time, too.”

Wilson sighed.

“Baby, just—just come here, alright? Ten minutes, no being weird for ten minutes, and then you can have as many delusions as you want.”

It was a fucking trip to hear someone called Captain America ‘baby,’ but it was also kind of sweet. Especially since Cap was evidently unable to refuse such sweet-nothings. He edged out and proved himself half as threatening in a huge black sweatshirt and jeans. He smelled of cigarettes when he passed by to perch as little of his ass-cheek as humanly possible on the arm of the couch Wilson was occupying and Brett was confused.

As far as he knew, Cap didn’t smoke. Maybe it was a way to gain some rapport here.

“Wouldn’t have picked you out for a smoking habit, Captain,” he noted evenly.

 “Still a free fucking country, ain’t it?”

O-kay, so let’s just trash that one and start over.

Wilson wrapped an entirely indiscreet arm around Cap’s waist and gave him a none-so-gentle squeeze as if to say “I will murder you as soon as these nice men leave if you don’t behave,” but Cap remained as tense as ever. Damn. Okay, how the fuck do you build rapport with a 100 year-old white guy?

He surveyed the house. One of these guys was trying to fill all the available wall space with foliage. There were vines snaking their merry way across the top of the walls, and someone had lovingly suspended little pots of soil in a few places so that they might have a place to put down some roots.

“Y’all into plants?” he asked. Wilson hummed.

“JB’ll bleach all your clothes if you so much as touch ‘em. They’re his children,” he said.

Cap did not stop glaring at Brett and his team. Brett could practically feel the other two squirming in discomfort. Man knew exactly what he was doing.

Brett decided that he wasn’t going to play that game.

“What’ve you got against cops, big guy?” he asked Steve. Think of him as Steve. He’s just a witness that way.

Steve said nothing. He didn’t want to chat. He wasn’t half as friendly as he pretended to be on TV.

“They tried to deport his mama, on uh, multiple occasions,” Sam explained patiently.

Ah.

Yeah, that would fucking do it.

“Gotten any better since then?” he asked, looking Steve directly in the eye.

Steve pursed his lips and shook his head back and forth, slowly, purposefully.

Well, fuck, alright. Rapport, what rapport? We don’t need rapport.

“When was the last time you saw Sergeant Barnes?” he asked.

“8 days ago, he went to work at something like 7:30, didn’t come back that afternoon,” Sam Wilson explained.

“He always come back?”

“Always. If he’s planning to be gone for more than a few days, he leaves a note.”

“Where does he work?”

“Couple places. There’s a shelter on—Steven, get your ass back here.”

Steve was done. He wasn’t having it, Brett could see it all over his everything.

“It’s alright,” he said, as the guy trekked up the stairs, “Let him go. We can talk later if we need to.”

Sam Wilson was pained by this, he looked after his guy and rubbed at his jaw.

“I’m sorry, he’s not usually so stubborn about this kind of thing. I don’t know what’s gotten into him.”

Huh. Interesting. Brett made a note of it.

“He doesn’t know where Sergeant Barnes is?”

“No,” Wilson sighed. He rubbed a hand over the outside of his thigh.

“That’s unusual?” Brett prodded.

Sam Wilson cocked his head, thinking to himself. Brett hadn’t realized it was a complicated question, but what the fuck did he know about superhero relationships.

“I guess it’s not that unusual. The length of time and lack of notification is mostly the issue here. Buck goes out a lot, especially at night. He’s got kind of a weird sleep schedule; he’ll go down at around four and get up at midnight and go out for a while.”

“Does Cap sleep with him?”

“No, not at four anyways. Steve’s about 2% less weird and sleeps like a normal person. JB’ll usually leave a note before he goes out so we usually have a vague idea where he’s gone.”

“Can I see the notes?”

The notes were in code, that’s the only way Brett could describe it. Barnes’s handwriting was the kind of loopy, early century shit that Brett hadn’t realized he despised until just now. And even when that layer of code was overcome, they said shit like “bread” and “pier” and “labels.” All just one-word suggestions.

Brett wondered if all spies transferred this level of cryptic messaging to their everyday lives or if Barnes was just permanently stuck in it.

He asked Wilson if he could see other parts of the house to see if Barnes had left any signs or reasons for his disappearance or if he had willfully disappeared. Chances were that if there were no signs of foul play, they’d have to just let the guy come back when he was going to come back. Wilson accepted this explanation and welcomed him to look wherever he wanted, but he also told him without batting an eye that he was going to need a lockpick or a saw to get into the guy’s room.

Comforting.

There was literally no reason to have that many deadbolts on his damn door, didn’t matter how paranoid you were. If the first six ain’t gonna do the job you need them to, the next 4 ain’t either.

And it wasn’t like there was even anything to hide, really. Barnes apparently didn’t do too much of his sleeping in the room, given that he allegedly needed to lay all over every inch of the bed and the floor in the shared bedroom in order to catch some ‘z’s.

There was a collection of sci-fi novels which were more post-it note than novel in one corner and a long table covered in precious seedlings across the window. The upside was that the plants really helped counteract the stench of a pack-a-day habit. Barnes had three ashtrays in his room and two had been emptied.

It dawned on Brett that Cap wasn’t a smoker himself, he’d just stolen one of his boo’s sweatshirts to make himself feel better.

It was kind of cute.

A little.

Okay, maybe a lot. The guy was worried sick and scared and, in his experience, cops weren’t exactly the good guys in this situation. Brett could understand that.

It was slightly strange house to be in, he couldn’t help but think. No TVs anywhere. No laptops out in view. Barnes had a pad of paper by his primary ashtray and his plants which was filled with more indecipherable loopy notes.

“Can you read any of this?” he asked Wilson. He shrugged hard.

“I can’t read anything JB writes, Steve’s the only one who can.”

Steve’s door closed abruptly across the hall.

Uh-huh. Yeah, that’s about what he figured.

“He’s really not about us,” he muttered quietly. Wilson was apologetic. It wasn’t really his fault, though, and Brett told him so.

“Alright, let’s take a couple pictures and we’ll get the paperwork sorted and let you know what the next steps are, that fair?” he said.

It was fair.

Fogs was falling asleep with his head smashed up against the wall adjacent to the courtroom door.

He was vulnerable.

He knew better than that.

It wasn’t Brett’s fault, he had to be punished.

One dead arm later, he remembered that Fogs was Barnes’s lawyer for most things.

“You heard your client’s up and disappeared?” he asked.

Foggy’s brain took a second to determine which missing client he was talking about.

“Ah. Yeah, JB,” he said. “He does that sometimes. Usually comes back within three or four days, though.”

Brett leaned against the wall with him.

“We’re looking at nine, going on ten. Cap’s not being very compliant with the investigation.”

“I’m not surprised. He plays nice for the cameras, but that grudge runs deep, man.”

“I take it Barnes ain’t hot on us either.”

Foggy hummed.

“You filing him as a missing person?” he asked.

“I don’t think we can. Not really enough to go on. Does seem kind of suspicious, though. Guy just vanishes out of the blue. Might be nothing. But he also might be having some kind of episode or something; we wouldn’t want him out in the cold doing that.”

Foggy pursed his lips and digested this for a moment.

“Got anything of his?” he asked.

What.

“You heard me.”

Well, yeah.

“Cool. Ask Daredevil to find him. Or have Sam do it.”

Sam Wilson stared at him in supreme suspicion when he asked if he would be alright with Brett taking a slightly unconventional approach to this case.

“What’s unconventional mean?” Wilson asked in the tone of a man who had been burned before.

“Well, there’s no easy way to say this,” he said.

“Jesus fuck, not you again,” Wilson groaned as Daredevil leaned dangerously far out over them on a fire-escape.

Guy was grinning like it was Christmas.

“Awww,” he said sweetly, “And here I missed you.”

Wilson could not bear to look at that smirk. Brett empathized with his entire heart. He, too, would sleep better if Daredevil vanished permanently from the face of the earth.

DD was at least willing to give it a shot, although he clarified that he might not be as good at tracking outside of Hell’s Kitchen. He wouldn’t say why, but not two minutes after sending the guy off into Brooklyn, Brett watched as he literally clotheslined himself and learned a hard and fast lesson about gravity.

At first, Brett thought it was a fluke, and Wilson did too, but ten minutes later saw Wilson throwing himself into an alley to catch the man after a fumbled hold. Double D was startled to be caught, safe and sound in Sam Wilson’s arms, but once he’d recovered from the shock, he startled squirming like Sam’s grip burned him.

Wilson dropped him with a cocked eyebrow, and he threw himself up and dusted himself off and scampered up and away from them, as high as possible.

Anyone else would have swooned if Sam Wilson had caught them like that. Brett would have fucking swooned. That was movie shit.

But DD?

No, not interested. Masculinity vastly more important. Must retain dumbass, holier-than-thou reputation.

Unbelievable.

The thing about having DD track someone was that he was fucking nuts about it. He had zero boundaries and no discernable method, although, apparently, judging by the way he was practically huffing the sweatshirt Wilson had offered him, he had an insane sense of smell.

He was like a human sniffer dog. A couple whiffs of the sweatshirt and he was off like a rocket. The first thing he did was break into poor Cap’s window and scare the shit out of him. By the time Brett and Wilson made it upstairs, back in the house, Steve had flattened himself against the open door and was observing Double D squirming himself into the closet like he needed a quick dip back into the shadows before he could do anything productive.

Steve was understandably freaked right the fuck out and had a furiously whispered conversation with Wilson about just how fucking invasive and unnecessary this shit was when Daredevil burst back out of the closet to scramble out onto the fire-escape and sniff around again. And then he was off, crashing down into the space between the brownstones and leaping over a backwall.

They all shared a dumbstruck moment of quiet.

And then Cap went rocketing right after the fucker. Jumped right out the window and everything.

Wilson considered this with unsettling thoughtfulness.

“Well, that’s one way to get a guy invested,” he said.

What.

They found Cap before they found Daredevil. Found him panting with his hands on his knees outside a bodega.

Wilson was even more interested in this development.

“Met your match, there, buddy?” he asked. Steve stared at him in shock and concern and threw out a few vague gestures in what must have been the general direction Daredevil had run off in.

“’S fucking fast,” Steve breathed. “I mean, like. I can do the flats, but the ups and downs—”

He startled backwards because DD had returned to steal back the sweater from Sam’s arms for another good sniff. He snapped his head up and around. Brett tamped down on the urge to ask “watcha hear, boy?”

Then Double D re-noticed Steve and got all up in his space to sniff him, too.

Weird?

Absolutely.

Brett wondered how the fuck the guy was doing this shit. Maybe he was faking it? Like, maybe he saw this whole thing as a joke and was just yanking their chain.

“Man, I appreciate that you are letting the whole freak flag fly today,” he said, “I really do, but can you maybe give us a hint of what exactly the hell you’re doing?”

Daredevil wasn’t paying attention to him, though. He was deeply invested in something Southwest of them. He cocked his head several different ways and then readdressed the three of their dumbstruck expressions before gesturing.

“Something over there,” he explained, taking Brett’s request in the completely wrong way.

He was off before he could be corrected, however, and Steve shook himself out and bounced off after him, refreshed from his short break. Sam watched them both go in amusement now.

“You know, I might actually keep him if he can tire Steve out,” he told Brett. “Think Nelson’ll lend him to me twice a week?”

What the fuck did Fogs have to do with any of this?

So, the way to find a superspy and ruin a secret spy operation was to throw an overexcited Devil at it, Brett now knew. Brett was now filing that shit away for the next drug ring he had to bust.

Barnes was six types of confused at the weird-ass burglar trying to get at his preppy sweater. He was evidently undercover, wearing huge chunky glasses and several fake piercings and he shoved Daredevil away, hissing at him to cut that shit out.

Daredevil hissed back and shoved right back at him until Barnes threw in the towel and threw up his arms to let him have whatever the fuck it was he wanted. He did not expect that to be for the guy to sniff at the armpits and neck of his sweater. Although, to be fair, no one could have expected that.

By the time Barnes looked up in their direction, he was just a little too late, and ended with his arms full of Cap and his back full of gravel. DD was a little shocked that his chewtoy had so suddenly and mysteriously disappeared, but he rapidly lost interest and waited patiently for Brett and Wilson to catch up to the two on the ground.

When Brett got closer, he saw that what he thought had been slightly desperate hugging was, in fact, Cap threatening to suffocate Barnes with his bare fucking hands if he ever pulled this stunt ever again. He’d graduated to growling at Barnes in some other language by the time Wilson got in there to separate the two of them.

DD was pleased at a job well done.

Brett kind of felt like he needed to reward him.

He did not know how to reward him. Food had been good last time, so maybe something sweet?

Sam Wilson, however, lived with every type of crazy under the sun, and seemed to know exactly how to reward this unusually helpful behavior.

“You want caffeine, liquor, or an IOU?” he asked the guy. DD perked up real quick and Brett filed that shit away, too. He needed a notebook or something.

DD wanted caffeine.

Brett could not say he’d seen that one coming. He personally did not think the guy needed any more caffeine, what with how awake he was already. Wilson told him that he could have any coffee he wanted, honey. He said they had a few bags at home that were kind of fancy if he wanted to have a sniff.

He did. Obviously.

The newly recovered and begrudgingly apologetic JB watched this guy huff through all the shit in their cabinet in awe.

“I could use you,” he thought out loud. Wilson sent him such a fucking stormy look that Brett shuddered.

“You will not,” he ordered.

DD was, again, not interested. He asked Wilson if he could have half a pound of some obscure coffee from Ethiopia and both Barnes and Steve hummed as if they approved of this choice. Despite Wilson’s best efforts, Daredevil would not take the whole bag. He wanted a half a pound. That was all.

Wilson foisted the rest of the bag off on Brett.

Brett was not going to let Daredevil take the subway back to Hell’s Kitchen. It was his civic duty to spare everyone on that carriage the awkwardness of that ride. He wrangled the guy into his car and left him to break every road safety law in the backseat, all curled up around his bag of joe.

He released the demon back into the wild at the corner dividing Hell’s Kitchen’s from the Upper West Side and didn’t even get to say thanks before the guy was out and off in the wind once again.

He shook his head and went back to work to close Barnes’s half-finished missing person case.

The coffee was unfairly good.