Work Text:
Carl had discovered, through the unusual opportunity of having Rachel invade his home turf, that he actually could stand to have her as his therapist, as long as he didn’t think of her as his therapist. She had, of course, rolled her eyes at him. They had spent a long evening in the sitting room after Martin and Jasper had both gone to bed, during which she had said she didn’t want to date him, but that she was happy to continue being his therapist as long as he participated. And when he told her he would participate if he could pretend they were dating, the eye roll had been long and pronounced.
“So, what, we go to the pub? Have you air your unmentionables in a public setting?”
“No, just.” He stared at his hands folded in his lap. “Just not anywhere it feels clinical.”
“So you agree to keep it professional?” she said, sounding a bit skeptical. He looked up at her, where she regarded him from curled up in his armchair, her head in her hand, still squeezing one of the tennis balls.
“Yes. I’ll keep it professional.”
Which is how they started to have sessions on a park bench in whichever area they could both get to on short notice. It was nice, even in the rain and cold, to be able to face the same direction, so that Carl didn’t have to look at her while he opened up to her about whatever area she wanted to explore that day. He didn’t have a clue how she decided on each session’s focus, since they seemed to bounce around from one area of his life to another, but on one particular day, after he’d been bemoaning the fact that Akram had once again chosen a case without any input from him and then proceeded to uncover lead after lead through his annoying competency, she put her finger right in the pie of his subconscious without even knowing she was doing it.
“Why did you throw yourself in the line of fire, that day?” she said.
Carl had been staring at a far off duck that had been swimming alone across the pond from where they sat, and her question made him cough, his mouth suddenly dry. “I wouldn’t say I threw myself. God. You make it sound like I’m some kind of World War II hero.” Oh, look at that duck paddle along, ripples following in a V.
“Well. Why did you put yourself in front of Akram when the shot was fired, then? I mean, was it a conscious decision?”
“Yes.” His eyes flickered to her and away again. Duck, duck, duck. “I just....I thought....”
“You thought what?”
“All right, I didn’t think.” He stared down at his hands, now, the grimy tennis ball rolling between them over and over. “I just didn’t want my friend to be hurt.”
“That’s understandable, I suppose. You’re good friends, then?”
“Sure.” He didn’t know what to say about Akram. Were they friends? It felt like more than that, even if the idea of being more than friends with Akram made him shy away from something deep in his soul, some truth he didn’t want to look at. Which is of course when Rachel shone her goddamn therapist flashlight on it.
“Maybe something better, deeper, than friends?”
Carl barked out a laugh. “Doubt he’d say so.” Akram was a widowed man with two daughters who had just become a DI through Carl’s nefarious means. He probably would call Carl an acquaintance, if a close one.
“What do you say?”
“What do I say? I say this line of questioning is pointless. Can we get back to something that’s not a complete fantasy?”
“So you being more than friends with Akram is a fantasy of yours, then?”
“Fuck off!” Carl growled. Shit. That’s done it. She’d never let it go now.
“Interesting.” Yep. Now she was writing it down in that little notebook she always brought out when he exploded. Like clockwork, really. It didn’t happen every time, but often enough that he considered taking anger management classes to fend off the scritching of her pen. “I know that you don’t want to talk about this, but I do think it would make you feel better if you would, perhaps, open up to the possibility that you might, and I only mean ‘might’, have romantic feelings for your partner.”
Carl closed his eyes and thumped the tennis ball into his temple. “I do not, Akram is straight, and you are treading on very thin ice with this.” He kept his eyes shut, taking some deep breaths as he listened to her putting away her annoying little notebook.
“Everything we talk about puts me on thin ice with you, Carl. I’m just trying to show you that the water is actually quite warm, and you could swim if you wanted to. The ice, that’s all you. But it doesn’t have to be.”
“Well, as delightful as this metaphor is, I believe that’s our time for this week,” said Carl, standing and walking away from the bench as quickly as he could, not looking back at her, never looking back at her.
“Till next week then. I’ll pack a swimming costume.”
“Fuck you!” He heard her bell-like laugh as he continued to trudge to his car. Fucking therapists. Worst kinds of meddlers.
Monday brought with it more of Akram’s annoying competency, and sent them all over town interviewing people who had been interviewed ten years before and could barely remember the time in question. Of course, Akram’s annoying competency being what it was (re: annoying but competent) they eventually collected enough scraps that they could assemble back at Q headquarters (Q-HQ, as Rose now said) into a patchwork of evidence that spanned two whiteboards. Carl stared at it, chewing on his marker with malicious intent.
“Please, have mercy on the office supplies,” murmured Akram from just behind him. Carl managed to suppress any shivers or flinches or other indications that having his very straight, very male, coworker practically whispering directly into his ear was giving him any kind of reaction at all. He looked over his shoulder to find Akram staring at him bemusedly. Shit. Must not have succeeded. He took the marker out of his mouth.
“I’ll offer mercy if the office supplies can help us unravel this—” He gestured at the two boards angled, string arrows crossing from one to the other, “—utterly tangled web of confusion.”
“Hmmm. I’m sure the pens have many, many opinions,” said Akram, stepping even closer and plucking the slightly damp marker from Carl’s clutching hand. Carl spun back around to the boards as Akram drew closer still, his shoulder touching Carl’s, his sleeves rolled up and arms crossed, “My opinion is, we should look more closely here,” he said, putting the point of the marker directly on the crux of the whole problem, in Carl’s opinion. Carl swallowed. Of course he spotted it as well. Annoying. Competent. Smells amazing. Carl whirled and stomped to his desk to keep from sweeping the man into his arms.
“I suppose that’s as good a place as any,” he said, sitting and propping his feet on the desk, legs crossed at the ankles. “So its off to interview the father, again?”
“Yes,” said Akram, and then the irritating git actually went to get his coat.
“What, now?!” said Carl. Alone? In a car? With the man/coworker/crush he was currently ignoring having romantic feelings for? He wasn’t sure he could take this right now.
“Do you have another engagement?” said Akram, with that faux innocent lilt he always got when he knew he was in the right, his eyebrow lifting and his cheek peaking like he was smiling, even though he wasn’t.
“No,” grumbled Carl, and stood to throw on his own coat. Damn, damn, damn.
The car ride was exactly as torturous as Carl expected. He tried to keep his eyes on the road, but they kept drifting to Akram in the driver’s seat, his dark intense gaze and perfectly loose posture at odds with each other, his square, neat hands and groomed mustache, his shiny black hair and the lightest scent of lemon which always seemed to exude from him. At one point Akram caught his eye, and he gave Carl a considering look.
He suddenly reached into his pocket, pulling out a tin and tossing it to Carl. “Go ahead. Have one.”
Carl looked down at the round container of lemon travel candy, and barked a laugh. “Of course,” he said under his breath.
“Hm?” said Akram, signalling a turn.
“Nothing.” He took a piece, and tucked the tin into his own pocket. “So why do you think the trail leads back here? I’d like to hear your reasoning.”
Akram nodded, giving him an approving glance. “All of the people we interviewed kept talking about what a ‘nice man’ Mr. Glasby is. Always with those words. ‘Nice man’.”
“Yes,” said Carl.
“And yet the remaining family never said that. The difference was very...obvious.”
“Yes,” said Carl again, grim. “A ‘nice man’ to others is sometimes not so nice at home.”
“Exactly,” said Akram, his eyes flashing to Carl’s once more, his gaze somber. “It is also not so nice to suspect a man of killing his own child. But sometimes the world is not so nice.”
“You don’t think that Virginia is still alive?” said Carl.
“No. And neither do you,” said Akram, stopping the car in front of the modest home where Alan Glasby had lived since the 90s, and where Virginia Glasby, age 10, had last been seen. Carl really hated these kinds of cases, and he knew Akram must feel that even more keenly, considering he had daughters of his own. But the rest of the Glasby family deserved to know the truth, even if it was painful.
He stepped out of the car as Akram closed his door, and they both stood a moment in front of the house, soaking in the neat but charged quiet, the last moment before everything would become very loud, and messy, and bloody. Carl looked at Akram, who was already looking at him.
And this was the problem. It was as though they already worked as one, already as in tune with each other as long-time partners, despite only knowing each other for a double handful of months. Carl had never felt this way about another person. Was it any wonder that he longed for it to deepen into something more, whatever shape that might be? If only he knew what Akram was feeling. He thought this ease could only come through mutual understanding, but what if it was only his own, bruised mind creating this synergy from delusion? He couldn’t stand the uncertainty. So he ignored, and obfuscated to Rachel, and went on squeezing his tennis ball, and the status continued to quo.
“Shall we?” said Akram, jerking his chin towards the door.
“I guess we must,” said Carl. And Akram gazed at him, and nodded, once, resolutely, and there it was again. That synergy. He knew, knew, exactly what Akram was thinking. And that terrified him.
The confrontation with Alan Glasby went about as well as could be expected. That is, he was nice, and grief-filled, and cordial, until they started to drill down into his story of the night his daughter disappeared, when he said his wife and he had gone to bed and then never seen her again. Akram kept pressing on the facts of the locked house, the upstairs bedroom with the open window despite it being a chilly October night, the lack of physical evidence in the room where the girl had ostensibly been kidnapped from her bed. He asked about the window locks, and about how there was no easy way to reach the window, and about the relationship between Mr. Glasby and the local cops.
As they progressed, Carl watched Alan Glasby change from “nice man” to a man suffused with frustrated rage, and possibly fear. Carl kept what he felt was the smoking gun to the last possible moment, when Glasby was red-faced and obviously trying desperately not to hit one of them. Glasby finally made a crack about Akram being “a filthy foreign meddler” and Carl had had enough, standing up from the miserably uncomfortable couch to loom over the man where he sat, hands perched white-knuckled on his knees.
“I think that’s quite enough,” said Carl, pulling the paper from his pocket and opening it out, showing it to the livid Glasby, “so if you wouldn’t mind giving us the key to the storage locker you rented in November of 2015, we can be on our way.”
He hadn’t thought about back-up, but he probably should have, since Alan Glasby, nice man that he was, stood suddenly with far more agility then he had showed until then, and pulled back his fist. Akram, of course, beautiful Akram, frustrating Akram, annoyingly competent Akram, stood just in time to catch the fist on his left cheek bone, absorbing the blow before toppling Glasby at the same time, his movements fluid and sure, swiftly capturing his hands behind his back, pulling a pair of handcuffs from what seemed like thin air and restraining the bellowing man.
“Well, at least we have him for assault, now,” he said, smirking over his shoulder at Carl, his cheek already darkening with bruise blood. Carl stared, still in shock, still caught in breath and action, until he leaned forward, clutched Akram’s face in both hands, and kissed him on the lips, hard and quick.
Carl stood back up and felt the air leave his body in a rush. What on earth had he just done? Akram was staring at him, his mouth slightly open, his face even more reserved than usual. “I, uh, I’m sorry, I’ll just—” Carl spun on his heel and trooped out the door, miserably embarrassed, and pulled his phone from his pocket to call for the backup he should have planned for, but was desperately glad wasn’t there at the moment. After it was done, he held his phone to his chest and quietly had a panic attack staring up at the cloud-filled sky. He heard the door open and close at his back.
“Called the locals, should be here in a mo’,” he said, his voice bright and false.
“That is good. Should we leave them the warrant for the storage locker? Or do you want to investigate it ourselves?” His voice was gentle, but his voice was always gentle. Carl had no idea what he was thinking, and he was too terrified to turn around and see anything like rejection on his face. Or pity. Or disgust. He was such a coward.
“I think they can handle it from here,” said Carl, hearing the sirens in the distance. Once they arrived and were handed the man and the warrant, he managed to drive them both back to Q-HQ without looking at Akram once, which had to be some kind of record.
As expected, the locals had found the girl’s remains in the “newly discovered” storage locker (which Carl was certain one of the investigators had intentionally left off the report at the time, but didn’t have enough proof for his conviction) and Alan Glasby was arrested for the murder of his own daughter. Department Q was once again hailed for their excellent work, and Carl was once again shoved in front of a bunch of cameras with a wrinkled shirt and Hardy laughing after at his terrible people skills.
“You do it next time, then,” said Carl, darkly.
“Oh, nae, yer doin’ just fine, couldn’t possibly.” Hardy cackled as he hobbled away.
Back at Q-HQ, Rose and Akram were conspiring over something at her desk that they both looked guiltily away from as he and Hardy returned, which made Carl’s stomach twist unpleasantly. “You two having a good time?” he said, sarcasm turned to eleven.
“Ach, well, it isn’t every day we get to see the great Carl Morck answering the reporter from the Beeb with his shirt mis-buttoned,” said Rose with a little laugh, holding up her phone, which indeed had a shot of him at the podium with, yes, his shirt mis-buttoned, the gape clearly visible beside his tie. Carl turned to glare at Hardy as he thumped down the ramp from the elevator. He was still cackling.
“You absolute prick,” said Carl, looking down and rebuttoning the shirt, throwing his balled up tie at the laughing man
“Told ya you should’ve asked Akram to shadow you for the press thing,” said Hardy, spreading his hands in a “what can you do” gesture that was about as sincere as a politician’s smile.
“Don’t worry, Carl,” said Akram. “I’m sure no one noticed.” His eyes were warm and dancing with mirth. Carl managed to smile at him, with one side of his mouth, anyway.
“Thanks, Akram, my only friend in this basement,” he said, turning before his reddening cheeks would betray him.
“Cold, Morck. Cold,” said Hardy, dropping into his ergonomic desk chair with a sigh.
Rose came up to Carl and handed him a slip of paper. “Rachel called for ya, said you have an appointment at ‘the bench, he’ll know the one’,” she read off the paper, pointing at the words as she did. “Whatever the hell that means.”
“It means, mind your business, Rose,” grumbled Carl, grabbing his coat and heading for the elevator. “I’ll be back at 3.” He ignored the various goodbyes from his coworkers, except for Akram’s quiet “See you then” which sent his heart quickening.
He found her on the bench as indicated, the one across from a sprawling oak tree that had a drooping limb that the children liked to climb on in packs. He sat down next to her and looked over at the tree, currently hosting only one child, a rosy-cheeked little boy terrorizing his harried mother.
“So,” said Rachel, but Carl couldn’t wait for it. He couldn’t wait another second.
“I kissed Akram,” he blurted out, too loud. He propped his elbows on his knees and put his hand over his mouth, staring at the little boy climbing up on the limb, slipping over too far and being caught by his mother, laughing like a clear brook over stones, and then again. The silence grew from the other side of the bench. “Are you not going to say a single goddamn thing?” he said, finally growing impatient with her patience.
“I don’t know, Carl. Is there something you want me to say?”
“Oh don’t give me that.” He turned to her, angry already. “You’re the one who wanted me to admit this shite, and now I have, and now you’re, what, keeping your own counsel? That’s crap and you know it!” His voice had grown a little too much in volume and he saw the mother under the tree glare at him. He held up a hand in apology before slumping over, head hanging over his clasped hands. “Just tell me what to do,” he said, and he hated the note of pleading in his voice. But he was. Pleading.
“I can’t do that. You know I can’t do that, Carl.”
“What about all of that, ‘the water is warm, Carl, the ice is all in your head, Carl, let’s go swimming, Carl’?” He ran a hand through his hair, and turned to look at her, something he tended to avoid, but he needed to know. “Have I fucked up everything? Have I ruined—” He choked to a stop, and had to look back at the ground.
“I can’t possibly know. How did he react, when you did that?”
Carl stared back at the little boy. Up on the branch, slipping off, bright stream of laughter, mother’s admonishment. Over and over again. “I don’t know. I..I ran away.”
“You ran away.”
“Yes, all right? I ran away. Like the absolute coward I’ve always been.”
“Not the word anyone would choose to describe you, I think,” said Rachel.
“Well, then you’re all deluded.”
“Did he kiss you back?”
“Did he—are you deranged?”
“No. Did he?”
“He did not!” shouted Carl, raising a hand at the harried mother once again. “He did not, but it wasn’t that long of a kiss.”
“So, you just, what, kissed him out of nowhere like a slap and expected him to react positively?”
“Yes? No? I don’t know. I wasn’t really thinking. He was just so....”
“So what?”
“Akram,” said Carl, his head dropping. “He was just so himself. I couldn’t help myself.”
“And how has he been since then? Any different?”
“No?” Was he? Carl couldn’t remember. “He seems the same.”
“And what does that tell you?”
“That it meant nothing and I should go bury myself in a hole somewhere.”
“Carl.”
“I know, I know, I know what you’re going to say.”
“See? Therapy’s working.”
Carl laughed. “Yes. It’s working. Is that what you do, as a therapist? Try to put yourself out of a job?”
“That’s exactly what I’m trying to do,” she said, and Carl looked at her, seeing the sincerity there. “Go talk to Akram. You know you have to. To whatever end.”
Carl nodded, looking back at the little boy, who had graduated to trying to run away from his mother, legs pumping and laugh spilling like water. Godspeed, little guy. “Yes. To whatever end.”
Despite this dramatic pronouncement, Carl managed to keep avoiding Akram for the next three days, by the simple expedient of walking out of any room he walked into. They had yet to pick a case, and he was a bit busy still talking to various members of the press and the higher ups in the Edinburgh precinct, so it had worked so far. But he had a feeling Akram was actively getting pissed off, which he hadn’t thought could actually happen, which made him feel even more guilty, which meant he tried even harder to avoid him. And so it went.
Akram ran him down finally in the motor pool, when he went to pick up the shit box after its most recent oil change and tune-up. He was just walking down the dimly lighted rows of police cars, trying to spot its distinctive profile, when he heard his name called.
“Yeah?” he said, squinting around in the really, really atrocious lighting. Seriously. How did anyone manage to pick up the correct car in here?
“Carl,” said the voice again, and Akram suddenly appeared in the gloom, his head tilted diffidently.
“Shit,” said Carl under his breath, which Akram must have heard, because he suddenly looked stung.
“I see. You have been avoiding me,” he said.
“I haven’t been avoiding—you misunderstood my—seriously, it isn’t that....” Carl ran down at the look on Akram’s face, a mixture of hurt and that terrifying intensity he used to such a useful end when he was questioning witnesses. “I mean, yes, yes I have.” He might as well admit it. Akram was far too intelligent to lie to, really.
Akram nodded. “I thought so. Because you kissed me. At Mr. Glasby’s house.”
“Oh, I haven’t forgotten,” said Carl.
“Did you think I would?”
“Would what?”
“Forget.”
Carl ran a hand through his hair and leaned against the nearest squad car, which was thankfully clean. “No? I mean, I kind of hoped you would ignore it. I guess.”
“Ignore it.”
“Yes? You are my partner, and we work together, and you are obviously straight, and I don’t want to ruin our work relationship by adding any undue...tension....” Carl ran down as Akram moved into his space, standing practically between his legs as he leaned back further against the car.
Akram leaned forward, placing one hand on the roof of the car next to Carl. “You are moving too quickly without enough evidence. It’s a common mistake you make.”
“Is it,” said Carl, his voice cracking. Akram’s face was inches from his own, his brown eyes deep wells in the dim light.
“It is. For instance, how do you know what I thought about the kiss? Have you asked me?”
“Well. No.”
“No. And we work together, yes, and you are my partner, but how do you know I am straight? Again, have you asked me?” His eyes, speckled with amber like tiny stars, flickered down and back up again, making something thrum deep in Carl’s body. Holy shit.
“No,” he said, his voice husky.
“No,” said Akram, deeper as well. He ran a hand along the lapel of Carl’s coat, following his hand with his eyes, patting it smooth on Carl’s chest, before moving his hand inward to lay over Carl’s heart. His eyes came up once more. “So. Ask me.”
“Are you? Straight?” said Carl, having to clear his throat to get the sound out.
Akram slowly shook his head from side to side. Carl nodded, feeling that thrum move up into his chest, his heart speeding like a frightened rabbit.
“And, uhhh, what did you think when I kissed you?” He wanted to close his eyes, but Akram had leaned ever closer, and he didn’t want to miss whatever was going on in his face right now.
Akram slowly smiled, his one cheek peaking like it always did. “I hoped you would do it again sometime. Properly.”
“Ah. Properly. Right,” said Carl. He felt his body melt against Akram’s like his limbs were suddenly made of jelly, and he moved both arms over the other man’s shoulders, linking his hands behind his head, pulling him so close he could feel the scratch of his mustache against his lip. “Would now be a good time to—”
“You think too much,” said Akram, and kissed him, pulling Carl in by the waist and pretty much eliminating whatever thoughts Carl might have had by devouring his mouth like he was starving, the kiss immediately flipping from polite to molten. Carl was rather aggrieved to hear the embarrassing noises coming from his own throat. The kiss only stopped when they both heard voices coming from the entrance to the garage, and Akram pulled away from Carl’s mouth with an audible pop.
“We should maybe get to the car,” said Akram, not pulling away from Carl, still running his hands up and down Carl’s back.
“Yeah, that would be a great idea,” said Carl. What car?
“It’s this way,” said Akram, and of course he knew exactly where the car was. Annoyingly competent arsehole.
They had linked hands at some point, and Carl tried not to feel like a giddy schoolgirl being pulled along by her crush, but frankly, what would be the point? He was a giddy schoolgirl being pulled along by her crush. Once in the car, Akram drove them out of the garage and into the evening light.
“Where should we go?” he said, and Carl had to shake himself at the question.
“I think we should go to my place, and that you should take me to bed.”
Akram nodded. “Yes. I can see that would be a good option. You aren’t worried that we might see your son? Your roommate?”
“Not at all. Does that bother you?”
“Not at all.” Akram drove them, swiftly and silently, to Carl’s apartment, and when they arrived, he parked in front and looked over at Carl.
“Shall we?” he said, the question still in his eyes.
“I’m in if you are,” said Carl.
Akram nodded. “Then I’m in, as well.”
They didn’t notice anyone about, but that could have been because he didn’t let go of Akram one time, with lips or hands, on the way up to his door. He fumbled his keys into locks and turned the bare minimum of lights on once they reached his place, but he didn’t even look around to see if his son or Martin were there, simply dragging Akram down the hall to his bedroom and slamming the door once they were inside.
There was a bit of an awkward moment once they were both in the room, breathing hard, looking at Carl’s bed. “So, I haven’t done this in a while,” said Carl finally. “The man thing, I mean.”
“Longer for me, I am sure.”
“Uni, for me.”
“Secondary School. I guess I win.”
“Guess so.” Carl stared at Akram, his lips red and his hair and clothes mussed from Carl’s hands. “Should we...”
“Didn’t I already say you think too much?” said Akram, before stepping forward and yanking off his tie and jacket before pulling Carl in once again by the waist and starting to unbutton his shirt. Yep, that was definitely ok by him.
“I’ll try not to think, then,” said Carl, as Akram succeeded in ridding him of his shirt, and leaned in to run his hand down Carl’s chest, tweaking his nipple on the way by, making him yelp. “Bastard.”
“No name calling,” said Akram with a tsk. And then he pulled off his own shirt and Carl was lost in contemplation of his broad, surprisingly muscled chest. He stepped closer, and they embraced, skin to skin, the sensual shock of it making Carl groan. “I knew you had to be hot under those baggy clothes.”
“You, as well,” said Akram. “You should always be naked,” he said, his eyes travelling avidly over Carl’s too-slender physique.
“Don’t think that’d go over to well with Moira,” said Carl, or he meant to, but Akram had swiftly divested him of his trousers and pants, and the “Moira” got swallowed up by a laugh as he was pushed onto the bed, a gloriously naked Akram crawling in after him. And after that, well, that wasn’t anybody else’s business, really.