For the too-many-th time that week, Baz awoke to his phone vibrating.
The sun was already beating through the curtains and for a long, drawn-out moment, he couldn't remember where the hell he was. He'd woken up in too many beds recently, from Gwen's luxurious canopied one to Diego's pull-out couch. He sat up stiffly, his muscles protesting everything he'd put them through.
Baz fumbled for the source of the electronic buzzing, finding it lying on a side table. Rei Collingwood's side table. His hand closed around his phone, charger trailing from it to the wall.
He didn't remember plugging it in, but then, he didn't remember falling asleep on the couch either.
Diego's name popped up on the screen. The time did, too. It was a little after ten.
"Hello?" Baz answered tentatively, not dissimilar to how he might answer the phone if his father was calling him after his curfew.
"Oh, good. You are still alive," Diego said, which wasn't the most comforting opener. A chill ran up Baz's spine.
As his senses came alive again, he looked around the room, hunting for movement. Rei's bed was empty, the sheets mussed. Somewhere, there was the soft hiss of a shower running. It took Baz a moment to realize the panic rising in his chest came from the fear that Rei had disappeared once again, finding another hiding place to escape him.
"As near as I can tell," Baz replied, "is there a particular reason I shouldn't be?"
Diego paused. "You weren't answering your phone, for one. I couldn't assume it just died while you're out who knows where probably getting your damn self killed," he said.
That was fair. Baz really had no argument against that logic. The good news was he wasn't dead and he got to sleep on a couch instead of a park bench or fire escape. He found Rei, albeit without the results he was hoping for. All in all, the night had not fallen into his worst-case scenario.
Nor did it fall into Diego's, which was apparently Baz dead in a dumpster somewhere.
"Pretty sure my phone did die," Baz said.
There was a moment of silence. The water shut off in the bathroom, leaving just the dull hum of a fan running.
"A couple of guys also went into your apartment this morning," Diego added.
Baz sat up a little straighter. That was a development he hadn't expected. It was unnerving to be on the other side of the fence, knowing someone waltzed uninvited into his space. Even while he knew that his efforts to keep Jasper away from the warehouse weren't foolproof, Baz hadn't planned for his own vulnerability in this way.
"What did they look like? What did they do?" Baz stood up, unplugging his phone, too restless to sit still in Rei's studio apartment. He slid open the door he let himself in the night before and stepped onto the balcony.
"Suits, but not FBI or detective types. I don't know what they were doing. I walked in after to feed the cat and everything looked fine. Freaked me out, man. Were they looking for something?" Diego asked.
Baz bristled. Diego didn't openly admit that things bothered him. Worse, Baz didn't know the answer. Were they looking for something? What did he have that anyone could want?
"I don't know..." he admitted, leaning against the railing. Temperance pulsed below him, traffic stopping and starting, people strolling up and down the streets and through the park paths.
He would have to investigate, whether or not he decided to take Rei's offer. At the very least, he needed to scoop Cali and consider what to do with her.
"How much trouble are you really in, Baz?" Diego asked.
Baz had a sneaking suspicion that he only knew the tip of the iceberg.
"I'll have to slip by my place and tell you after," Baz said. The sinking feeling in his stomach didn't match the easygoing tone he was trying for.
"What happened to you last night?" Diego asked.
Baz hesitated. "I'll tell you all about it in a bit. There's just some stuff I have to sort out. I'm okay for the time being."
"The time being?" Diego echoed. Baz could practically hear the incredulous twist of Diego's face over the phone.
"I don't want to make any assumptions at the moment," Baz replied, "I gotta go, though."
He hung up before Diego could protest or offer any of the sage advice or telling off that Baz probably needed. He studied the distant life happening below, the easy amble of students on the way to late classes, the lunch dates happening at the little cafe tables outside of the bakery.
If only he hadn't screwed up that life for himself.
"What was that about?"
Baz jumped, twisting around to find Rei leaning against the sliding door. She ruffled her damp hair in a towel. A second one wrapped around her body, droplets of water still speckling her shoulders and collarbone, and Baz lost all concentration, fumbling between whether or not to look at her. Towel or not, her face drew his attention, dramatically expressive. Her dark eyebrow rose up. Her eyes emphasized the question.
"I just... I need to swing by my place and check some things out," Baz said.
"Pack, perhaps?" Rei tilted her head, her half smile teasing.
Baz swallowed. The offer still hung between them, but what did it really mean if Baz accepted it?
"It'd be nice to have some clothes that weren't all suspiciously black," Baz replied, "I should go."
Rei stepped back to let him through, but reached out a hand to his shoulder as he passed her. Her touch was so gentle, featherlight against him.
"Give me ten minutes. I'll come with you," Rei said.
Baz raised an eyebrow at her, not sure whether he was truly surprised. After spending days holed up in a studio apartment, she wanted to finally leave to accompany him to his warehouse home? Her eyes searched him for something and Baz couldn't be sure that she found what she was looking for.
"Why?" he asked, breaking eye contact to gather up his things. His cowl, his phone charger, things to distract him from letting the elegant line of her neck draw his eye down her body.
"I can't be sure you'll come back," Rei replied. "Did you drive?"
"I walked," Baz replied. Well, sprinted, but the principle was the same. He gathered up his handful of things: his phone, the bundle that was his cowl, sleeves, and gloves.
Rei shot him a decoding look, but said nothing. He could shoot her a similar one, a look that might dissect why she was truly interested in keeping him further company. She wasn't as complacent as she seemed. Her face gave her away. Where Gwen perfected the distant, apathetic look, Rei's thoughts appeared in brief flashes across her face, her forehead quick to wrinkle and her lips quick to purse into a thoughtful line.
Baz convinced himself that the only reason he nodded was because there was something unbearably defeated about walking or taking the bus back to his violated warehouse. That, on top of the fact he was presently dressed to slip unnoticed through shadows and, in the unyielding blaze of the sun, he looked like an over-exhausted ninja wannabe.
Rei pulled her hair into a ponytail, the length of it whipping around her shoulders as she got appropriately dressed in jeans and a tank top, throwing a denim jacket on top.
It was difficult to imagine the two girls from the photo in Angelo Ferrero's sitting room growing up to become Gwen and Rei. It was hard to imagine them ever being in the same place at the same time, their sensibilities so far removed from one another, powerful and opposite.
"Let's go, then," Rei said, fishing keys off their hook.
In the underground parking garage of the apartment building, it was immediately obvious which car belonged to Rei. It looked like a Jeep, sporty and rugged, but it bore the Mercedes logo in its grill.
The thing beeped, lights flashing as they approached, and Baz climbed into the passenger seat, the leather still new and aromatic.
"How the hell did the police not GPS track this thing to find you?" Baz asked, blinking at the array of displays and lights that blinked back at him as Rei started the car.
"It's not registered in my name," Rei said, "it was a gift."
Baz didn't need to crack open the glove compartment to dig for confirmation on the registration. Undoubtedly, Angelo had gifted her the Mercedes, just like he had the apartment high above them. Baz vaguely recalled the conversation he overheard outside the theatre. Rei came from a family that gifted her and her brother a company when they turned twenty-one. A car didn't seem quite as extravagant a present when he looked at it like that.
What a world to live in, and yet, none of these people appeared to be especially happy.
Rei peeled out of the parking garage, taking advantage of the car's make and horsepower through the streets of Temperance.
"So..." Rei trailed and Baz realized only he knew where they were going. He shrank into his seat as he gave her directions, somehow ashamed of the warehouse apartment. Even Rei's secret second home brimmed full of fine art prints, of pricey granite in the countertops and Egyptian cotton sheets.
"You should... we need to go around the back, in case anyone is watching the place," Baz said. The white Mercedes did not belong in his neighborhood. As soon as it rolled in, someone would notice it.
"Okay," Rei nodded, finding an alley to roll into a block or two from Baz's home. His hand slipped beneath his cowl, finding the cool band of the ring on its chain. He braced himself for toppled bookshelves, for shattered glass and debris, the way he and Gwen had found Rei's room after her disappearance.
The car stopped and Rei turned to Baz expectantly. For instructions. The universe had truly been turned on its head because Baz never in a million years imagined Rei Collingwood giving him that look, awaiting his assessment.
"I don't want to risk going in the front. There's a back door, but it's got a different lock that I don't even have a key for. If you wait outside it, I'll just jimmy open a window and let you in," Baz said. Breaking into his own apartment hadn't been on any list of things he thought he might do in his lifetime, and there they were anyway.
Rei nodded and they both jumped out of the car, leaving it in the alley where it hopefully wouldn't attract too much attention to itself. They walked silently the rest of the distance to the old clothier warehouse to where the old back door faced the alley, probably where former workers came out to smoke when it was a workplace and not Baz's miniature library.
Rei stared up at the building, her gaze falling on the second story windows. If she was mentally calculating the distance from the sills to the ground, she didn't say anything. What was there to say? Her balcony was much higher.
"It should only take a minute or two," Baz said. He only needed to reach the goosenecked light fixed above the door. That would be sturdy enough to get him the rest of the way to the sill.
He stepped backward, putting space between himself and the wall.
"What are you doing?" Rei asked, incredulous.
Baz didn't answer. Instead, he took a running start at the wall and launched up it in practiced motion. One foot against the brick was enough to push himself up high enough to firmly grasp the gooseneck light. He liked the French name for the move, the passe muraille. Passer-through-walls sounded more elegant than wall run.
Baz pulled himself up. Under it, then chin height, then a slight adjustment of his grip before he pushed his body higher, the bar at his hips. Baz twisted to sit on the light, glancing downward enough to see Rei staring up at him. She folded her hands over her chest. It was the first time Baz ever had a true audience, aside from maybe a Rottweiler.
From his position on top of the light, Baz carefully raised himself up to stand on it, gripping the wall the best he could to stabilize himself. It felt a bit like being a tightrope walker, his feet delicately positioned to give him the best balance far off the ground. Even he was tall enough to reach the window sill from there, pulling himself up to it in much the same way he had to the light.
At the sill, he curled into it, shoulder pressed into the left side of the window, feet held tightly against the right so his hands could be free to pry at the old window without, or at least with less, fear of falling. The tension held him steady. The window opened too easily, the lock having failed long ago, too fragile to do its job. The window slid up and Baz slipped inside, careful not to knock over his nightstand.
The nightstand, and everything else, stood exactly where he'd left him. His bed was disheveled, but that was from Baz's own hasty and groggy departure from it. A chill ran up his spine, the sameness of it somehow worse than the destruction he expected.
Baz tip-toed through the apartment, finding everything equally untouched on his way to the old service door. He flipped the lock and swung it open, finding Rei exactly where he'd left her as well.
"Incredible," she mumbled. Baz flashed her a sheepish smile.
Letting Rei in was a different kind of uneasiness, but she didn't comment as she stepped in. It seemed like she was taking in the space.
The kitchen looked equally untouched, aside from where Diego had moved Cali's food. As soon as Baz touched it, the cat reappeared from her hiding place. Rei scooped her up. Cali purred in her arms. It must've been a lonely few days for her, slinking around the apartment by herself, the solitude interrupted only by Diego's visit and whoever Diego saw.
Baz was beginning to wonder if Diego's eyewitness account wasn't anything to worry about.
"Do they even pay you?" Rei asked. Baz blinked at her, finding Rei's expression serious, oblivious to the implication. Baz lived like this because he was poor, barely scraping by or something. That was what she imagined.
"Yeah," Baz replied, "is there something wrong with this?" He gestured around the warehouse. His bookshelves and plentiful windows.
Rei's face flooded red. "That's not..." She didn't bother finishing the sentence. She hadn't meant to, she just didn't know any better. "What do you spend money on, then?"
Baz shrugged. "Gym memberships, I guess. Paid off student loans, mine and Diego's. My landlady needed to get hearing aids, so I paid the rest of the year's rent up front."
Rei didn't really look like she believed him, like it didn't make sense to her. Without further comment, she drifted to the bookcases, reading the titles on the spines.
"Don't touch anything," Baz said, "you're supposed to be kidnapped." The last thing he needed was more evidence stacked against him, such as incontestable evidence of Rei in his home.
Rei pursed her lips, nodding in understanding. "I hadn't pegged you as a Romantic," she said slyly.
"What? Did you think I took art history for l'art pour l'art? Art for art's sake is a great for Aestheticism and appreciators. Not great for historians," Baz quipped, not looking up at her. She said nothing until he did, finding her wearing an amused smile.
"That's exactly the kind of thing you used to say in class," Rei said.
Baz shrugged off what may have been a compliment. "My parents read a lot." And they gravitated toward tragic endings.
Clearly the intruders hadn't tampered with his books. It was still organized the way he left it: roughly categorized by language and by period. He liked to see how the themes shifted by era.
"And... of all the paintings in the world, you chose this one?" Rei asked, stroking Cali's back as she studied the three arches of the painting by the door. Baz had it in three abnormally shaped canvases. He didn't even need to look up to know that was the art in question.
"Henri Matisse," Baz said, "The Dance II, actually a mural in Pennsylvania at the Barnes Foundation. I had to go there for a family reunion and it's the only thing I remember about the whole trip. It was so crazy to me that Matisse prepared it in Nice, that he made his first set of canvases half a meter too narrow for the arches, that Matisse saw it installed and never saw it again. I liked the idea of learning how and why artists decided to do things. Of all the things in the world to paint, why choose dancers?"
It was easier not to look at her as he explained. Rei had probably not driven an equivalent distance between Iowa and Pennsylvania to see an art museum for the first time. For all Baz knew, Rei grew up with a Matisse in her front hall.
She watched him, though. It was hard to not feel her watching, smile playing on her lips, and not the teasing smirk. She wasn't laughing at him.
"I suppose that's the kind of answer I should've expected," Rei replied, reaching up.
"Don't touch anything," he turned, finding Rei frozen and about to correct the crooked center canvas. Baz's heart leapt. That was not how he left it.
Maybe his landlord was having the place assessed for something or... some other task that would require men in suits to stop by. It could've been that his paranoia wanted to leap to conclusions like how Baz had leapt to Rei's apartment building.
Other signs became more obvious. The mat in front of the front door was backwards, the Bienvenue reading upside right toward him, instead of toward a guest who might enter.
So, why come? Why turn up at his apartment and do nothing but skew a picture and a welcome mat? Were they looking for something? Did they come by to hunt for clues to find him the same way he and Gwen had let themselves back into Rei's penthouse to find clues from her?
Baz stepped away uneasily, turning up the stairs to his bed and the old storage room that served as his closet. At the very least, he still had to change into something less... profilable.
Rei patiently drifted around, her hands occupied by the cat, an easy reminder to not drag her fingerprints over the surfaces, the books, the art. She didn't say a word. She looked somehow appropriate in the space. She suited the bricks and the arched windows.
Baz ducked into the closet, immediately faced with the real reason suits had stepped into the warehouse.
"Oh, shit," he said out loud. The figures embossed into the cylinder seal stared back at him. They weren't alone, either.
"What is it?" Rei said, her footsteps reverberating off the stairs.
The cylinder seal kept the other artifacts company, all objects Baz found painfully familiar. The seal, the ivory statuette, the winged phallus wind chime, and the damn Nebra sky disc knock-off. Each one represented a crime, a house that Baz had broken into through second story windows and sliding balcony doors.
Behind him, Rei stopped in the doorway, her gaze following his to the shelves of stolen goods.
"You keep them all?" Rei said, "I thought Cheng returned them so he could be the hero."
If Baz paid more attention to the news, he may have known that. If only he'd invested in a TV.
Baz only shook his head. Shit. It had to be Jasper ringleading the campaign to saddle as much evidence on Baz as possible. Was the next step to call in an anonymous tip to the police? The would break down the heavy industrial door and find him the guilty party, keeping all the artifacts as trophies or maybe just biding his time before selling them on the black market.
His heart pulsed in a way he hadn't even managed while pulling himself up the gooseneck light outside.
"Maybe Cheng will just forget about me," Baz said, "but Jasper won't."
"Jasper?" Rei said, her tone knowing. It wasn't a new name to her, just one she hadn't connected yet.
"He gives me all the alarm codes," Baz explained. He grabbed a gym bag from the floor, dumping the contents out to repurpose it. He grabbed for the objects of the shelf, wrapping them up in a towel. No matter what he decided to do with them, he could not leave them sitting, obvious and incriminating, in his closet. No anonymous tip to the police would point such a finger at him.
"Jasper programs all of Sundial's security. Cheng hired him after one of our competitors let him go," Rei said.
That easily explained how Jasper could provide Baz entry codes as easily as he did.
"Why did they let him go?" Baz asked, rolling the familiar cylinder seal into a safe bundle. Definitely Babylonian. Jasper wouldn't know what an Egyptian seal looked like if Baz hit him in the face with one and indented the design into his cheekbone.
"He and the board of directors had a difference of opinion and, as I recall, the director found his Bentley keyed and the tires slashed," Rei said.
"Great. A streak for vengeance," Baz said, shoving the last of the closet museum display into the gym bag, "why would I expect anything less?"
He zipped the gym bag, reaching for another backpack. His hands fumbled for clothes off the shelf, frantic at the sudden realization that he might not have another chance to pack anything. Everything he had was in the warehouse and he had to somehow fit everything important into a backpack.
"Can I just... have a second?" he asked, not turning to face Rei. She stepped back, closing the door behind her. Even alone, Baz resisted the urge to crumble into pieces. It wasn't even close to his lowest, but the failure still slammed down on him, fast and hard. For all the work it took to rebuild himself, it was gone again. Maybe it was always inevitable. Baz never had a real chance at pouring a concrete foundation to rebuild on.
He tore off his black layers, shoving them haphazardly into his pack and changing into clean, casual clothes. It helped a little to pull on a fresh shirt. It didn't dull the rhythmic thud of his heart against his ribs over and over again, reminding him that there was something to panic over. Jasper would find some other way to ensure the police stumbled across him. One way or another, if he stayed in Temperance, he'd end up in Temperance's jail.
Baz took a deep breath. In and out. No hyperventilating. No wishing for the temporary ease a little pill might bring him. The bed was made.
He hauled the gym bag onto his shoulder, weighed heavy by the goods within. He grabbed the backpack and stepped out of the closet.
Rei sat on his bed, her hands folded on her lap.
"I'm sorry," she said.
"It's not your fault," Baz said.
She blinked at him, stunned by something.
"I have equal share in Sundial. I'm supposed to hold majority soon," Rei said.
Baz shrugged. He dug through his end table for his passport. It would be smart to grab all his other paperwork, all the things that made a paper trail of his identity. There wouldn't be room for all the other things he wanted to bring. All the books his mother sent in lieu of care packages, the painting by the front door, all the small little bits of clutter that made up his memories. Gifts from friends. Medals from competitions. Baz hadn't thought himself a terribly sentimental person until pressed by the need to condense himself down to the bare essentials.
It had been a lot easier to choose what he could do without in the midst of addiction.
"You're busy. You weren't ever interested in the business, were you?" Baz said. It was a bit of an assumption. Her name was connected to discoveries and digs, not stock worth.
"No. That's the problem. I could've kept Cheng in check," Rei said, "but I didn't."
She stopped looking at him like a charity case, her expression more solemn.
Baz packed up what he could and scooped up Cali and her food.
The old clothier was not a penthouse. It wasn't opulent, but it represented all Baz managed to get back.
It was a heavy price for the opportunity to travel the world next to Rei Collingwood.
________
A/N: A lot of Baz's athletic side has come out, but his art nerd side is really coming out here too.