triskehale | [for reid, dated 3/17]

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[for reid, dated 3/17]

This can't be happening again. It was so stupid to think that Barry would be safe with Derek, that old patterns wouldn't repeat themselves. How could he have been so foolish as to think that he could open his heart up to someone like that again, and they wouldn't get hurt?

He rushes through a darkened alley, eyes red and fangs extended, and remembers what it was like to fight that copy of himself in that other Darrow. Your love is a curse, Derek.

The scent of Barry's blood stings his nostrils, and Derek thinks about finding it smeared across brick. All he found was that and Barry's scent, thick with anxiety and pain. Fear. Derek followed the trail until it ended, vanished into thin air.

It's horrible, so horrible to think, but at least the blood told him that Barry is most likely still here somewhere in the city. He may be somewhere that Derek can still reach him. Maybe he can fix this.

He needs Luke, and he needs Oliver. He needs anyone who could help, but first on his list is someone with a nose nearly as good as his. He's on his way to Luke's when he runs right past Reid, who smells like anger and grief, and Derek skids to a stop. Whirling around to face him, fangs and claws extended with eyes glowing red in the darkness, Derek feels his heart drop into his stomach. Reid looks awful, like he just lost his whole world.

"Reid," he rasps out around his fangs. "I was just going to get-- is Luke gone too?"

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It's nearly too much.

Luke has been missing for two days now, two days, and Reid has spent the last forty-eight hours tracking down every possible lead but coming up empty each time. There's no giving up, of course not, not as long as every time he calls his boyfriend's cell phone, it still goes to voicemail. Since Luke has gone missing, Reid has called it both for that reason, to make sure Luke hasn't disappeared completely, and just to hear Luke's voice.

Sleeping alone for the first time in months is even more miserable when it's not by choice, and Reid has missed people before but never quite so desperately as he misses the man he loves. His eyes, he's sure, are bloodshot from his lack of sleep and his hair a mess because he hasn't bothered to do more than run his hands through it, but Reid hasn't cared. All of his focus has been on trying to get Luke and Magnus back, and others he knows have also been taken, though to what end, Reid still isn't sure.

The vampires aren't involved, not directly, he's certain of that now; but they also don't have much useful information for him that will help Reid find out where Luke is being held. The inventory that'd been knocked over at the store does little more than tell Reid that whoever had taken Luke was either stronger or simply prepared, though he isn't sure whether either one of those options would really be preferable.

These are all the things running through his mind when Derek calls out to him and when Reid looks up to to see him with those fangs out, it nearly makes him stumble in his grief. His boyfriend is a werewolf, nobody's supposed to be able to touch him, nobody's supposed to be able to hurt him and now, Luke is gone. He's gone.

"He's gone," Reid whispers, blinking slowly, as if he's saying the words aloud for the first time. "I-- I've been looking, I've been looking for two days, but I haven't been able to find anything." He pauses, frowning as what Derek had asked really registers with him. "What do you mean is he gone, too?"

"Fuck," Derek growls, throwing his fist out against a nearby brick wall hard enough to make a small dent and send red dust flying. He takes a heaving breath and swallows hard, doing his best to stay calm. First Barry and now Luke, a man who may as well be his brother.

"Two days?" Derek asks, feeling dismayed that he hadn't known. Someone should have told him, or he should have sensed that something was wrong. He should have known. Reid asks him a question and Derek swallows hard, red eyes full of terror. "Barry. Uh-- my boyfriend."

Funny how this is the first time that Derek calls him that, here where Barry isn't even around to hear it, or give Derek some endearing sort of look. "He's gone."

Reid flinches when Derek hits the wall, though he remains standing still and stiff, with the exception of subtly moving his left hand behind his back to hide the bandage wrapped around it. The reaction Derek has had is one Reid understands perfectly well, though that may not show in his grim expression, and he hadn't exactly held back himself when he and Alec had gone to visit his unwilling vampire informant the day Luke had disappeared. He's fractured his knuckles, the swelling is still considerable, but Alec had patched him up and there'd been no sense in going to the hospital for it when they wouldn't have been able to done much else for him.

He can't take any narcotic paid medication, after all; and besides, the pain helps to keep him focused. It reminds him that somewhere out in this city, someone could be hurting the love of his life even worse, and even thinking that now makes Reid chest uncomfortably tight.

"I'm sorry about your boyfriend," he says softly, eyes downcast. "I'll help you, if I can. But so far, all of my leads have gone cold. I was heading back to the apartment to try to piece some things together, gather my thoughts. Just for a little bit."

Derek is so on edge with his senses so heightened that the movement of Reid's hand, subtle as it is, still catches Derek's eye. He can smell the blood and the pain and the healing flesh, and he swallows hard. His own knuckles are bloody, but the skin is already knitting back together where they split.

Sorry about your boyfriend. Derek has heard that before. Almost a year ago to a day, even. A shudder runs through him, grief and agony and the desire to shift, but he manages to keep it at bay. Barry hasn't disappeared. If he had, there would be no trace of him. That blood wouldn't have been on the brick. The stench of fear wouldn't have been there. Barry is here somewhere. He has to be.

"I'll come with you," Derek finally says, nodding a bit. He can smell Luke on Reid, on his clothes and his skin, and he has to breathe through his mouth. "Was there any sign of a struggle? There was-- I tracked Barry's scent and found blood. Not a lot of it, but enough."

Reid almost tells Derek no, that he'd rather be alone, that the mention of going home hadn't been an invitation for company, but he stops himself because he understands. He understands Derek's need to do something, anything at all, as long as he's not being idle while someone he cares about is missing.

In Reid's case, it's not only Luke, but Luke and Magnus who have been taken, and he thinks that in the end, it can only be a good thing to get as much as help as he can get. He wouldn't have been able to function properly without the help of his teammates when Maeve had been kidnapped by Diane Turner, and Reid doesn't let himself dwell on how tragically that had ended. This isn't like that, Luke isn't going to end up dead and neither is Magnus, neither is Derek's boyfriend, Reid won't let it happen. It can't happen.

"Okay," he finally says, gesturing for Derek to follow as he heads for the store. "Come on. The only sign of struggle was some inventory that'd been knocked over. No blood. Whoever did this used different means to get Luke out of the store, they must have known they wouldn't be able to take him on themselves, which means they also know what he is. I think he was being watched, he mentioned an attack about a week ago, but the assailants ran as soon as he showed his claws without even doing anything."

None of that is particularly helpful, he knows, but it's something. There's a connection somewhere, Reid knows there is, especially with reports of other people being kidnapped over the past couples days, too; he just have to figure out what it is.

"I'm not sure how they would have caught Barry either," Derek admits. He looks over at Reid and bites his lip, not wanting to betray Barry's trust even now. "He's special, more than human. And uh, very hard to pin down."

They walk towards the store and it's a path that Derek has taken so many times, on so many different days, but never with his heart pounding like this. God, Barry and Luke. Maybe even others.

"Barry called me just before he was taken. He said that something felt off, and he was on his way to me," Derek says, swallowing hard to try to keep his voice from wobbling. Barry was so close to him, a few more seconds and maybe Derek could have protected him. He blinks a few times and then reaches out to open the door to the store before looking at Reid, irises glowing red for a moment as he composes himself. "We'll find them."

The door to the store is locked because Luke hasn't been here to open it, because Reid hadn't been able to find the strength to let Hild run the store herself when she's worried about Luke, too. Instead, he beckons for Derek to follow him around the corner of the store so they can head up the stairs to the apartment, to the home he's supposed to be sharing with his boyfriend right now, to the one place he's always felt entirely safe until now. Knowing that someone out in this city can get to Luke, it's terrifying, it's filled him with an anxiety he knows he won't be rid of even after he gets Luke because because Derek is right, they will find them. There's no other satisfactory option.

What Derek has said about Barry being special, though, has Reid thinking.

"When you say he's more than human, what do you mean, exactly? Magnus was taken, too, and one of the vampires I interrogated the night Luke disappeared mentioned one of their own was gone. A werewolf, a vampire, a warlock, now Barry. Seeing a pattern there?"

Russell and Mister Purrkins slink into the room as soon as the door is closed behind Reid, both of them rubbing against his leg before peering up at Derek curiously, and Reid can hardly take seeing them in those little sweaters his boyfriend had bought for their cats just the week before. So he steps forward, heading toward the kitchen and glancing over his shoulder at Derek as he does.

"I'll make us some coffee. In the meantime, can you tell me if you know of anyone else who's been taken?"

Derek follows Reid into the apartment and can't even spare a smile for the dumb sweaters on the cats, as plagued with panic as he is. He frowns thoughtfully at Reid's question about Barry, wondering just how much he should say, when he's distracted by another bombshell. "Magnus too? Jesus. So they're taking supers."

But Reid does make a good point. There's definitely something of a pattern here, and Derek winces slightly when Reid asks him if he knows of anyone else that's been taken. He doesn't, and he feels the urge to shift and run out the door to check on the rest of his pack, but he forces himself to stay put. If it is supers that are being taken, most of his pack will be safe. Most of them are human.

"Uh, no. I've been a little distracted, I guess," Derek admits, reaching up to rub at the back of his neck. He's been wrapped up in his new relationship, and hasn't been paying as much attention to what's going on around him. He feels the familiar swarm of guilt wrap around his insides, like he could have prevented this somehow.

"So, supers are being taken," Derek says out loud. That means he could also potentially be a target, but that doesn't matter to him right now. They can come for him all they want. "My first instinct is to say that it's the city's doing. Or something the city brought here. It has to be someone or something incredibly powerful to have taken Luke and Barry. And Magnus, for fuck's sake."

Supers.

That's the first time Reid has heard that phrase, but he supposes it's as good a term as any, whether the people being taken are superpowered or supernatural or one and the same. Ultimately, the most sickening thing is that if these supers are being collected for what they can do, one has to wonder what the ultimate goal is in the whole operation. To build an army? To find a genetic answer for how their powers work? To discover some way to replicate those powers in humans?

The thought of Luke being experimented on, being tortured in any way, brings him dangerously close to the now-familiar bout of nausea he's experienced so many times since he'd realized his boyfriend was gone. At the very least, though, once he's passed that initial point of thinking he might be sick, Reid frowns as something clicks within his mind.

"A couple weeks ago, there was a blackout, do you remember that? Had to do with these people who supposedly broke into the power plant, someone trying to-- to steal energy but caused himself to self-implode instead. Burned himself to a crisp, along with a few others, all of them missing IDs. A friend at the morgue told me they managed to figure out who most of them were, though, and they all worked at the same place." Pacing now, with Mister Purrkins following him back and forth while Russell merely stares at him with unbridled curiosity, Reid abandons the idea of coffee to track this sudden thread. "Same day, a member of the Seo syndicate was taken to the hospital, burns all over his body, like-- like maybe he was trying to take on whatever power that victim obviously had."

He has no idea whether Derek is understanding any of this, though he's talking aloud more for his own benefit than anything else as he attempts to piece together this puzzle, but Reid stops suddenly and looks at Derek with wide eyes.

"It had to be connected. All of it. Luke, Barry, Magnus, they were taken because someone wants to replicate their gifts. That has to be it."

"I remember the blackout," Derek says, eyes shining for a moment before he squeezes them shut. "That was-- it was a good night for me."

It was actually one of the best nights that he's ever had. It was Barry's first time staying over for the night, and Derek's throat constricts at the memory. They had been so wrapped up in each other, and Derek convinced himself that it was just a fluke.

Of course they're connected. But to this day, Derek still turns away from any news about fire-related deaths. He doesn't want to hear about charred remains and unidentifiable corpses. He doesn't want to hear about what his family looked like after the fire.

"I heard about it," is all Derek says after Reid's done talking. Derek just stands there for a long moment, awash in grief and guilt all these all too familiar emotions that Barry overshadowed. He thinks of Barry's bright smile, his easy laugh, and feels sick to his stomach.

You're a curse, Derek.

"Sounds like a plot from a comic book," Derek says in a hollow voice. "But I'm pretty sure my boyfriend is actually from a comic book, so that isn't so strange."

He looks down at the cat and then up at Reid, doing his best to think through the thick haze of negative emotions trying to drag him down. "You said the victims all worked at the same place. Do you know what place it was?"

Reid wants to think more about good night. He wishes he could focus on that instead, nights like the one before Luke had been taken, when they'd read out of a book of poetry together before locking eyes and bring to life the words they'd been reciting to one another. Love is a place, cummings had written, and Reid has known for a long time where that place is for him. It's at Luke's side, it has been from the start, and without his boyfriend next to him, Reid is lost. He's drifting. Nothing feels right, and nothing will be until Luke is found.

"The KIRIN facility," Reid answers, pushing those thoughts from his mind. If he thinks about it, about how much he misses Luke, how much his heart aches for the man he loves, he knows he won't be able to focus the way he should. He hadn't been able to function properly when Maeve had gone missing but this is different. There's no BAU team to rely on, and Reid has never felt more alone.

"'Knowledge and Inspiration Reducing Inequality in our Nation,' are you familiar with it? They're very meticulous with their record-keeping, we've been trying to find any holes that might give us a reason to go in with a warrant but..." But they haven't found anything, and Reid wonders how it is that they've made such an enormous misstep now. "It makes sense that they'd be responsible for the disappearances, they're interested in people with powers from outside of Darrow but up until now, they've never given anyone a reason to suspect they'd take their research to this level."

"I've never heard of it," Derek says with a shake of his head. Reid seems to be wanting to do things by the book, which Derek supposes makes sense in his line of work, but Derek doesn't have the patience for that. "Do you know where this place is? If, say, someone who doesn't necessarily need a warrant wanted to go check it out?"

Reid blinks at him, momentarily unable to comprehend the question because the answer seems so obvious, but then he lets out a short, humorless laugh. "Well, that's the thing. Derek, there is no getting a warrant, not for this group. Whatever they're doing, they're covering up their tracks, and they're doing it well. Someone has to stop them, and it has to happen before anyone else gets taken." Or worse, he thinks, but he's not going to put a voice to that thought. He can't.

Squaring his shoulders, he nods toward his desk, the one Luke had brought in to make Reid his own little corner of the apartment where he can do his work. "I have a few possible locations. If we work together, we can figure it out."

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[for reid, dated 3/17]

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