Work Text:
5.
It starts on a Friday afternoon. School is out for the weekend, and the sorry state of Laurence’s wallet tells him that it’s time to drop by the bank to withdraw some living expenses. So of course that’s the exact time his neighbourhood friendly bank robbers decide to drop in for a visit.
In retrospect, Laurence realises, if he had gone to the ATM at the grocery store instead, he probably could have skipped this entire mess.
Instead, he sighs, closes his eyes, and gets down on the floor.
“Nobody needs to get hurt,” the masked robber—a ski mask, really, what is Laurence’s life coming to—warns, brandishing his pistol at the crowds. “Nobody gets hurt if everybody cooperates.”
“Took the words right out of my mouth,” someone drawls.
Laurence turns as much as his crouched position allows him to, craning his neck to catch a glimpse of the speaker.
The newcomer is a man in brown leather, the hood over his face obscuring most of his features. There’s a somewhat sardonic air to the tilt of his head and the jut of his hips.
Laurence’s heart swells suddenly with hope. The Kestrel.
No one can really pinpoint the exact moment the Kestrel first appeared. They had been super-less one day, and the next they’d had a masked hero in brown apprehending criminals and taking out gangsters left right and centre. Just as well that he arrived when he did, really, because it turned out that the local police force was not at all equipped for dealing with metahumans, and they’d been having a lot of those recently.
A sudden murmur rises throughout the bank as people notice the Kestrel’s arrival. The oppressive, fearful atmosphere gives way to sharp relief.
“Oh thank god,” one middle-aged woman mutters, slumping slightly. “A super’s here. We’re going to be alright.”
“It’s the Kestrel!” an excitable little boy whispers, craning his neck to peer over the back of the bench his mother has hidden them behind. “Mama, Mama, look—the Kestrel’s here! He’s gonna save us!”
Perhaps cognisant of how easily he’s lost control of the situation, a muscle in the lead-robber’s face twitches.
“Shut up,” he shouts, wildly brandishing his pistol. “All of you, shut up!”
“We both know you’re not stupid enough to try firing at me,” The Kestrel coaxes. “What if you hit a civilian? Your sentences would be so much worse.”
“Shit, Rob,” one of the other masked men whispers. “He’s right.”
“Oh, will you just shut up, shit-for-brains?” ‘Rob’ growls back, but even he can see that his accomplices have lost their motivation.
“Here’s what you’ll do,” the Kestrel offers. “The police are already here. You’re going to go out, one by one, hands in the air, and surrender your weapons to them. It will look much better for you if I do not get involved.”
And that, after several more minutes of a tense and silent stand-off, is exactly what happens.
The last robber steps out of the bank, and suddenly Laurence can breathe freely again.
All around the bank, people stagger to their feet, wincing as the feeling rushes back into their legs.
“Thank goodness you were here!” an elderly lady cries, and that starts the whole bank off.
“Wait here, and don’t talk to each other about the robbers,” the Kestrel instructs them, raising his voice to be heard over the din. “The police will want to take your eye-witness testimonies, even if they’ve already arrested them.”
The fervent clamouring quiets down to excited chatter and then to a low murmur as people split off to sit with their family and friends. The Kestrel stays where he is, but a little of the plucky, stalwart resolve goes out of his frame. Like this, standing alone and surveying the room, he seems almost… lonely.
Well, he reasons, the Kestrel only said not to talk about the attempted robbery. He never said they couldn’t talk about other things.
Plucking up his courage, he sidles up to the hero.
“Hi,” he says, for lack of a better icebreaker.
The Kestrel turns to regard him. “Yes?”
This close, Laurence can see that the Kestrel has black hair, that he is wearing a black domino mask beneath his brown leather hood, that what skin is exposed to the light is tanned and smooth, and that the Kestrel has very nice cheekbones and eyes like warm chocolate. (He will accept Granby’s eye rolls and complaints that he’s only poetic when he’s feeling gay later.)
“I just wanted to thank you,” he stammers, “for all that you do for the city. Heaven knows you’ve made it a much safer place since you’ve arrived. So. Thank you.”
“… Ah,” says the Kestrel, clearly taken aback. “I see. You’re, um. You’re welcome.”
Silence fills the air.
“I should get going,” he says, with a soft smile. “There are some on the police force who… do not approve of vigilantes like me. It was nice talking to you.”
Then he is gone, almost as quickly and mysteriously as he arrived, leaving Laurence to stare after him as police officers finally start to file into the building.
*
4.
There’s this thing about Laurence you probably should know. Riley and Edith both have him in their phones as British Steve Rogers. They’d done it after the screening of Captain America: The First Avenger, following their immense amusement at the portrayal of pre-serum Steve Rogers. He remembers it clearly; they’d crowded into the cinema, watched the movie for all of fifteen minutes, and had gotten kicked out after Riley dissolved into a fit of hysterics.
“If I’d wanted to watch a film about your childhood, Laurence,” he had recovered enough to say, afterwards, “then I would’ve built a time machine. Goodness knows I’ve spent enough time watching you go chasing off after berks for slights on Edith’s honour.”
“Does this make you his Bucky, then?” Edith had teased.
“Oh, yes,” Riley had agreed amiably, until they had returned another day to catch another screening of the film. It seemed he had no desire to follow his counterpart in falling off a train.
Laurence does not know why this memory chose this particular time and place to resurface, but seeing as he’s just punched out a man in a back alley for being a creep, and said man is now on fire, it’s not like he has the time to ponder the specifics.
The man howls something unintelligible, on account of his being on fire, which Laurence is too freaked out to try and decipher. At least the girl got away, he thinks, backing slowly towards the main street.
“You,” Man-On-Fire howls, and okay, Laurence understood that, he definitely understood that.
“Me?”
“You punched me,” he howls again. Man-On-Fire doesn’t seem to be able to communicate any other way besides howling.
“Oh, yes, so I did,” says Laurence faintly. Man-On-Fire snarls and punches a wall. The dent he leaves behind sizzles.
“You are going to pay,” he snarls, taking a menacing step forward.
Laurence takes another step backwards as Man-On-Fire advances. Does he have time to make a break for it? Can this man shoot fire from his hands or does he need direct contact for the burny-bit? Is there any scenario where he gets out of this alive?
As it turns out, yes, there is. A brown blur drops down from the rooftops, rolls deftly to his feet, and takes out his would-be assailant with a quick roundhouse kick to the back of his head. Man-On-Fire drops to the floor like a sack of potatoes, leaving Laurence to stare, speechless, at his saviour.
“You again?” says the Kestrel, smiling wryly. The domino mask about his eyes does little to hide his mirth.
“Hi,” says Laurence, in a fit of eloquence.
“Leave the heroics to supers next time,” he advises, nudging the pyrokinetic’s unconscious body with his foot. “And look out for yourself—I’ve saved you twice now. I’d hate for that to go to waste.”
*
3.
It is not his fault this time. He swears it isn’t. Rankin had seemed like a perfectly decent fellow. All he had done was offer to buy him a beer. A friendly, platonic beer. He hadn’t meant for it to be taken any other way.
How was he supposed to know the Rankins were tied up with the mafia? He hadn’t even known there was a mafia where he lived.
In his desperate bid to escape the vengeance of the scorned caporegime, Laurence somehow finds himself hurtling through Chinatown (how did he even end up here??? Laurence sure as hell doesn’t know), weaving through a mess of stalls and shopkeepers closing up for the night. Something crashes to the ground behind him, and he feels bad for the poor shopkeeper for maybe half a second before remembering, oh, right, running for my life here.
Laurence can only keep sprinting for so long, and the stream of multiple suited men of ambiguous ethnicity out for his blood doesn’t seem likely to end. He’s contemplating skipping the other four stages in the Kübler-Ross Model and just laying down and accepting his imminent death when someone swoops down on the lead thug from above. Thank the Heavens—it’s the Kestrel.
“Did I not say to keep your head down?” his hero asks, casually throwing a bottle into another man’s face.
“I tried!” Laurence ducks a random projectile that barely misses his head by a few inches.
“Pissing off the mafia,” huffs the Kestrel, breaking a nearby bamboo pole over yet another lackey’s head, “is not trying.”
The brawling continues for another minute or so, Laurence safe behind his one-man barricade. If he hadn’t had previous proof of the super’s reflexes and strength, the way Kestrel swiftly and casually dispatches his adversaries would have left him breathless.
*
“All things considered,” says the Kestrel drily, shooing Laurence down a dimly-lit back alley, “I have to question your taste in men.”
“It’s not like I knew,” he sighs, ducking to avoid a clothesline. “I was just trying to be friendly.”
“Friendly,” he mutters. “You bought him a drink in a bar.” Abruptly, the super lays a hand on his shoulder and turns him down a side alley. “Last I was aware, buying people drinks definitely has romantic connotations.”
Laurence tries not to think too much about how the warmth of his hand burns through the thin fabric of his coat, and instead asks, “Where are you taking me?”
“To a safe house,” comes the amused reply. “Then I’m going to go have a chat with this Rankin fellow, and then the police. Possibly I may recommend a therapist to him; this cannot be a healthy way to handle his relationship problems.”
“There’s no way I’m going to work tomorrow, is there?” says Laurence mournfully.
He shrugs. “Not unless you want your colleagues to die.”
*
The ‘safe house’ he’s ushered into is a tiny two-room flat in the backstreets of Chinatown, untidy but clean. There are clothes strewn over the back of the couch—casual clothes, jackets and the odd tee—Laurence tries to picture the Kestrel in the rumpled band tee-shirt he spies lying forgotten on the floor. He fails, horribly.
“Stay out of the bedroom,” says the Kestrel cheerfully, “and mind the cat, he’ll shed all over you and beg for food, but he’s harmless.”
Said cat comes trotting out of the kitchen, mewing hopefully as his—her? Its? Laurence is going to go with its—fluffy black tail curls up behind it.
“No, you greedy creature, no food for you. Now behave, and don’t bother—”
“Laurence,” supplies Laurence. “Uh. William Laurence.”
“Don’t bother Laurence,” Kestrel finishes.
The cat meows and promptly moves to wind between his legs, purring like a motor engine. Laurence reaches down to scratch between its ears as the front door closes again, wondering all the while if he should be worried that Kestrel just tried to reason with a cat.
*
2.
An alarm rings, and smoke billows out of the classroom on the topmost floor. Laurence doesn’t know if he should be surprised anymore. The projectors in this school are old and faulty, anyway. It wouldn’t be the first time a projector has kicked the bucket during a presentation.
He turns his attention to evacuating his students, ushering them out into the hallways and down to the open-air field just across from the school. Their last fire drill, thankfully, is still fresh in their minds. As the other classes start to file into the field, Laurence busies himself with a headcount.
“… Thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine,” he mutters, and draws to a stop, puzzled. Thirty-nine?
Confusion quickly turns to panic as he counts his students again and again and the issue of his missing student doesn’t resolve itself.
“Who’s missing?” he calls, frantically going over his students’ faces in his mind. “Can you check if your buddy is here, please?”
“Mr. Laurence, sir,” Dyer stammers out, pushing his way to the front of the line, “Morgan went to the bathroom before the alarm rang.”
Well, shit.
“I want you to wait right here,” he tells his monitor, a young, responsible girl called Emily Roland, who enrolled in the school only last year. “If anyone asks, I’ve gone to look for Morgan. Go to Mr. Granby if anything happens. You’re in charge of the class while I’m gone, okay?”
“Yes sir, Mr. Laurence, sir,” she nods, resolute.
Laurence darts back towards the school, doing his best to ignore the smoke billowing out the windows.
“Laurence, no, you’re not supposed to go back insi—Laurence—the firefighters—Laurence!”
*
The wing of the building housing his class’s homeroom is thankfully fire-free. Smoke is wafting in from the corridor appending the Science wing, though—Laurence presses his handkerchief to his mouth.
“Morgan?” he calls, coughing. “Morgan, where are you?”
But his lost charge is nowhere to be found. Pressing on, he climbs up the stairs furthest from the fire and closest to his homeroom, hoping to find Morgan there.
Save for their abandoned belongings, the room is empty, to his dismay. Where on earth could that boy have gone?
Laurence turns, meaning to check the restrooms to see if Morgan hasn’t squirreled himself away inside an empty cubicle, only to find that his path is blocked by a man with oddly familiar features, of average height and build.
“Finally,” the man intones, a sinister smile warping his otherwise average features. “We meet again. I’ve been waiting a very long time for this.”
“Who are you?” Laurence asks blankly.
The man howls and bursts into flames and oh, okay, this guy.
Laurence considers his options as Man-On-Fire kicks out at a nearby table, causing it and its neighbouring chair to burst into flame.
(It’s probably telling that Laurence is actually considering jumping out the window.)
“Vengeance will be mine!” he crows, and this is when the Kestrel suddenly appears, a folding chair in his hand.
“Yeah, I don’t think so,” he deadpans, and swings the chair down on the pyrokinetic’s head.
“How did you know to find me?” Laurence stammers.
“Your friend Granby,” the Kestrel offers by way of explanation. “He was swearing quite creatively at you, last I heard.”
Ah, yes. Granby. Laurence feels vaguely guilty.
“Morgan—” he remembers with a jolt. “My student—do you know if they’ve found him?”
“… Yes,” says the Kestrel. “He joined his classmates not long after you ran back in here. You’re not supposed to re-enter a burning building. You do know that, right?”
“Um,” says Laurence, shamefaced.
But he doesn’t have time for that, because the Kestrel is hauling the man’s unconscious body over his back and nudging him towards the window. Then there are firemen pulling him down the ladder and Granby shouting hysterically at him all the way to the ambulance, and the Kestrel is gone.
*
1.
“You,” the Kestrel deadpans, chest heaving from exertion, “are the actual, real life equivalent of Bella Swan.”
Laurence tries his best not to be offended.
“How do you not notice these things?” the masked super demands, gesturing wildly at the sky. Above them, two vaguely draconic figures are fighting it out with loud screeches and gusts of wind. Said gusts of wind can be quite destructive, as Laurence now knows from the pile of crumbled debris that had once been a stone gargoyle. If the Kestrel hadn’t pulled him out of the way in time—well, Laurence shudders to think about it.
“I wish I knew,” he says mournfully, still staring at the rubble. He’d been running late to lunch with Granby and his boyfriend, but even that didn’t explain not noticing dragons fighting in the sky.
“Here I was, all prepared to just let them fight it out and keep an eye on things,” the Kestrel rants, “and who should come along but you! Running right smack into the thick of it! William Laurence, do you not own a radio? Or a TV? Do you not listen to the news? Do you not have eyes?”
“You remember my name?” he asks, chest fluttering dizzily. Somewhere somewhen, his shoulder Granby is poking him with a paintbrush and complaining about priorities, but here in the now, all he can think about is how this man has saved his life time and time again, and he remembers his name.
“Laurence,” he huffs, “I have lost ten years of my life trying to keep you alive. Of course I remember your name.”
“Oh,” says Laurence.
Shoulder Granby starts yelling about concussions.
Another howl issues forth from the epicentre of the conflict as the paler—whiter? Pinker?—dragon of the two writhes in pain. The ground trembles beneath them, and the Kestrel sighs.
“I should go,” he says, pulling Laurence to his feet. “Go straight home. Call your friend, or whoever it is you’re meeting. They’ll understand. Can you walk?”
He can, but the Kestrel’s hands linger on his arms for a second more. They are warm; so, so warm.
“Be safe,” he says again, gently, and then he is gone, leaving Laurence to unsteadily make his way home.
*
+1.
Laurence doesn’t see the Kestrel again for some time after that, mainly because several other supers set up shop in their city. The black dragon from the fight, for one, turns out to be a shapeshifter; the media dubs him Temeraire, for some reason or another, and the name sticks. How they wrangled a French name for a Chinese hero, Laurence will never know.
Among the other heroes is a super from the big city, a stocky brunette who wears no mask to hide her face. They call her the Admiral, and she flies and has super strength and a host of other abilities that sound like she flew right out of the pages of a comic book. The Admiral seems to have taken over the Kestrel’s role as local super, for she soon begins to dominate every newspaper and tabloid. Not that Laurence minds. Not that he resents her, or any of the other supers; he just wants to see the Kestrel again.
“This is the most disgustingly cheesy thing I have ever witnessed,” Granby groans one afternoon. “You’re pining after a superhero. It’s like a scene from a comic book.”
Laurence thinks darkly of glass houses and boyfriend-shaped stones being thrown at them; if Laurence lives in a comic book, then Granby is the star of a chart-topping romcom.
*
Laurence is a faithful practitioner of traffic safety. He swears. He always, always looks both ways before he crosses the street, and he never ever jaywalks. That doesn’t account for the truck that comes careening around the corner the moment he steps off the curb.
‘Oh,’ he thinks, staring into the blinding headlights. He has survived pyromaniac metahumans and offended mafia captains, and this is it. A truck. This is how it will end.
“Laurence!” someone shouts. Then there’s a hand on his arm and someone is yanking him roughly back onto the pavement and Laurence stumbles as he regains his footing—
The truck passes harmlessly by.
“Fucking hell,” the stranger wheezes, “do you never learn? How do you attract these things?”
There’s something awfully familiar about the man still grasping almost desperately at his arm, Laurence muses, the adrenaline coursing through his blood still muddling his thoughts. His features are distinctly Asian, with a bit of a Western slant to his deep brown eyes, and he has never seen this face before—but Laurence knows, knows, that he could never forget this voice, or the warmth of his hand.
He knows who this is.
“I’m sorry,” he decides finally to say, “but have we met?”
He looks up at him, startled; presently, he relaxes and huffs out a laugh.
“Tharkay,” he drawls, smirking. “Tenzing Tharkay.”
*
In the future, when people ask them how they met, Laurence will smile and say, “He saved my life.”
Tharkay will roll his eyes, and add, “I pulled him out of the way of a speeding truck.”
That is enough for both of them.