Chapter Text
Vector had done some pretty good things.
He’d moved out at seventeen. That felt important to remember. Started a detective agency at nineteen. That was pretty cool, too. Paperwork for those things was a nightmare. He. . . had good music taste. Lots of people didn’t have good music taste. And he made sure that people knew that, too. That’s why he wore his headphones all the time. Just in case somebody someday asked him, ‘What are you listening to?’ and then he could go, ‘Oh, y’know, underground rap, hardcore rock. Pretty gnarly stuff.’
Nobody had asked him that, yet.
Maybe someday one of his clients would. If he could get any clients.
He’d had one case since the agency had opened a couple weeks ago. Some lady had seen footprints in her garden and gotten worried about potential burglars casing her house. Vector had staked out from the alley across the street for a couple nights, but seen nothing. Eventually, he’d had to admit that if there was someone sniffing around, they’d probably seen him and avoided the place.
Subtlety was not his strong suit.
He trudged inside and collapsed into the big, ratty chair behind his desk with a groan. He massaged his temple and winced at the sun rising through the windows. He was still young. Shouldn’t he still be able to pull all-nighters? He’d thought he wasn’t supposed to get old and lame until he was. . . well, older. Thirty at least.
Maybe it was just a stress headache, more than exhaustion. It turned out ‘Open a detective agency’ was a completely different mark off his bucket list than ‘Get clients for aforementioned agency,’ as well as ‘Keep aforementioned agency open with money from aforementioned clients.’
Aforementioned. Fun word. He should find a way to work it into conversation. That was fun, when he randomly remembered a big word he could stick into a sentence. Nobody expected him to use anything longer than five-letter words, so it was always nice to see them fumble a little when he used something even moderately complex. Everyone always looked at him like he’d just grown a second head.
A second head might be nice. Then one could sleep while the other worked on finding clients.
He watched the ceiling fan spin lazily and wondered how much power that was taking up.
“Success!”
Vector jumped with a rather undignified yelp at the sudden new voice, practically launching himself from his chair. He scrambled to his feet.
“Geez, can you knock?” he snapped, gaze flitting about the room to find the offender.
“But that would defeat the entire purpose of the exercise,” came the smug reply. From. . . somewhere.
“Where the hell are you, anyways?” Vector demanded, fists balling by his sides. “I’m not in the mood for games right about now!”
It was a strange experience, seeing someone materialize before his very eyes. Vector blinked and rubbed his eyes a few times and wondered if just a couple nights of bad sleep was making him crazy.
But, no. There, on the dusty rug right in front of his desk, arms crossed and smile triumphant, stood a kid.
“Allow me to introduce myself,” he began with a little bow. “I am Espio the chameleon.”
Huh. Vector had never seen a chameleon before. He looked. . . small.
“And I am here with an offer that I think will be mutually beneficial.”
Quite a vocabulary for. . . what, ten? Eleven? Maybe twelve at the absolute oldest. Too young for whatever he was about to say.
“I have been observing you and your investigative endeavors for a few days now.”
Were chameleons supposed to be that skinny? He was really skinny.
“How have you not noticed me, you ask?”
Dirty, too. Was that blood on his arm?
“Well, because of my powers of invisibility, of course!”
Again, the kid — Espio, apparently — blinked in and out of view once or twice, as though he were swallowed by the air.
Yeah, that was definitely blood.
“I believe I could be a valuable asset as a business partner to Chaotix Detective Agency,” Espio continued. Looked like he was wrapping up now. “In exchange for some of the fee for each case, I will assist you in solving your cases using my superior stealth and martial arts training, which I have just demonstrated by infiltrating your headquarters without detection. For example, I could hide much more effectively during stakeouts, such as the one you were on last night —”
Vector stiffened. “How do you know about that?”
“And I —” Espio paused and scowled at him, clearly annoyed at having his well-practiced speech interrupted. “I just told you, I’ve been observing.”
“Following me?”
“Watching.”
“Stalking.”
“Researching.” He flicked a hand and continued on the memorized spiel. “And I can spy and gather evidence without anyone even knowing I’m there.” He straightened up once more. “I believe this could be a partnership that would mark this detective agency as one of the most successful in the city. But, I leave that up to you.”
With that, Espio took a deep breath and rested his hands on his hips, smiling proudly. He gave Vector an expectant look. Vector stared back at him, baffled. With so many questions running through his head, he asked the only one that took clear form.
“Where are your parents?”
Espio’s expression curdled like lemon juice into cream. He looked away. “I hardly see how that’s a relevant question,” he muttered.
“Well, try to see how I see it,” Vector huffed. He sat back down and pulled his chair up to the desk. They were almost eye-level now. Vector was still a bit taller. “I don’t get many kids in here asking for jobs.”
“A business partnership.”
Vector raised an eyebrow at him. “Yeah, money in exchange for working for me? That’s a job, kid.”
Espio scowled at the carpet but said nothing.
Vector sighed and pinched his brow. “Are you in trouble or something, kid? Because I got a few numbers when I started this, people in social services, I can —”
“No!” Espio stiffened suddenly. “No, I just — I just need some money. A job. I need a job.”
Vector frowned at him. “Why?”
Again, nothing.
He massaged his temple. “Alright, you wanna be a detective?” he challenged. “Follow my line of thinking here, alright? Usually, adults are the ones working jobs to make money for kids, right?”
Espio shuffled his feet. “Ideally.”
“Ideally. So, kids don’t usually need jobs, right?”
“Ideally.”
“Ideally. So, when a kid —”
“Stop calling me that.”
“. . . When a person your age comes in asking for a job, that implies to me that they don’t have any adults to take care of them.” He raised his eyebrows. “Am I right? If I’m not, tell me where my logic went wrong.”
Espio stared intently at a rip in the wallpaper, just over Vector’s shoulder. “My family is not in the picture,” he muttered, his voice barely audible.
Vector nodded slowly. “So you do need help.”
“I need a job,” Espio repeated, slowly, firmly. “I just — I just need an income, a steady income, and I’ll — I’ll be able to work something out.” He looked up anxiously. “Anyways, this is good, right?” he persisted. “This is something good I can do? This will help people. I can help people doing this.”
Vector sighed again and rubbed the back of his neck. He couldn’t hire a kid, the thought was crazy. But Espio looked so earnest, so desperate. What was going on with him? What got this little verbose knock-kneed kid filthy and underfed and begging for jobs from strangers? Vector was a detective. He knew the darker sides of stories, what happened to kids left to fend for themselves on the streets. Hell, where he’d come from it hadn’t been safe for him or any of his brothers to be out alone after dark, even as crocodiles. If he turned this kid down now, he’d end up back in the gutter, alone, and then what? Vector knew what. He couldn’t let that happen on his watch.
Maybe he could do a little investigating himself. Poke around, find out where he’d come from, what had happened to drive him out here.
And a bit more selfishly. . . in the meantime, maybe having a detective with invisibility powers wouldn’t be the worst for business.
He leaned back and studied Espio intently. Espio studied him right back.
“I wouldn’t exactly call this a steady income,” Vector warned.
“Well,” Espio shrugged, “it’s something, isn’t it?”
Vector chuckled weakly. “Ideally.”
Espio grinned in relief. “Ideally.”
They shook on it — though Vector still wasn’t entirely sure what ‘it’ was — and when he sat back, Espio rocked back on his heels and glanced about uncertainly.
“So. . . shall I help you stake out that house?” he suggested.
“Later tonight,” Vector replied, pushing himself from his chair. “First priority is getting you a damn shower.”
“Excuse me!”
That night, Espio waited in the alley while Vector parked two streets away. He spent the whole night clutching a radio, waiting for any word of trouble or danger to come barging in. He heard nothing until just before sunrise. A brief, simple, ‘Got him.’ Vector came to find the perpetrator tied down, Espio sitting on his back with a blade to his neck. He looked at Vector expectantly. Vector had nothing to say but, “Uh. . . Wow.”
And suddenly, Chaotix Detective Agency was in business.
Espio slept on the couch in the office for a couple weeks, until they managed to get a rickety secondhand bed into the second bedroom, in the apartment above the office. Vector had wanted to use it as a music room or home gym or something. Now it was Espio’s room. That was fine, too, he decided.
Espio was a strange kid. Very serious. He listened intently to everything he was told and worked hard with a fervent dedication. He hardly spoke, spent long hours training every morning with a concerning collection of sharp objects, more hours meditating every evening, and his idea of fun genuinely seemed to be balancing the logbook. That, Vector didn’t mind much. He could run an agency and file paperwork, but there was nothing he hated more than math. Espio, on the other hand, could run through it very quickly and very efficiently. Which meant that he was in charge of the logbook now. Which also meant he suddenly had a lot of opinions about how the money was spent.
They got more cases. A few. Enough to pay the rent and keep the fridge stocked with frozen pizzas and the pantry with canned soup and boxed mac-and-cheese. They worked all day and spent the evenings watching old sitcoms on TV or listening to music. Vector liked rock and rap and electro. Espio liked classical and jazz and old, soulful funk. Vector liked to just sit and listen. Espio liked to read while the records played. He would sit on the rug with whatever book he could find open on his lap and painstakingly sound out every word under his breath. He’d get caught up, sometimes, muttering the same few sounds over and over to himself before pushing through and moving on. He seemed to struggle reading anything other than numbers, but insisted that he could figure it out.
“I need to,” he said one night, frowning at the words as he curled up on the rug, leaning back against the couch. “I have to figure out how to read this language eventually.”
Vector had paused on that, then opened his eyes. “This language?”
“Yes.”
“Do you speak another language?”
Espio looked up at him, befuddled. “Where do you think my accent came from?”
“You have an accent?”
He rolled his eyes and turned back to the book. “Everyone has an accent, Vector, it’s part of spoken language.”
“I mean, I don’t.”
“Yes you do!”
“Ugh, whatever.” He frowned, fidgeting with the chain around his neck. “You speak pretty fancy for someone who’s just learning.”
“No, I’ve spoken it conversationally for a few years now,” Espio explained. “I’ve just not learned to read it yet.”
“Ah, I see.” Vector tilted his head. “Still, awful formal.”
“I had a very formal education.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes.”
“What kind?”
“I’m reading.”
Vector sighed and settled back again. “Alright,” he muttered. “Have it your way.”
Espio made no further response. Disappointed but resigned, Vector closed his eyes again. The old-time funk continued playing softly on the crackly record.
After a long pause, Espio tapped his shoulder.
“What’s this word?” he asked, pointing to a line in the book.
Vector opened his eyes again. “‘Rectify.’”
“What does it mean?”
“Make amends. Like, fix a mistake or something.”
“Ah.”
Ten minutes later, again.
“What is this word?”
“‘Contrived.’ Means unnecessarily complicated.”
“I see.”
Vector closed his eyes again.
“And this one?”
He sighed, but answered anyways.
Vector tried to poke around a little bit. He tried to see where this kid may have come from, tried to sniff out any other chameleons in the area. But, for all his prowess as a self-proclaimed detective, all this sleuthing turned up nothing. It seemed like Espio really did just appeared out of thin air in his office that day.
Espio didn’t tell him much of anything, either. The most that Vector managed to get from him was that he was eleven years old and that he’d grown up ‘out of town.’ Vector tried to make the kid comfortable, show that he could be trusted, but Espio seemed to regard him as very little more than a work colleague. A work colleague he could sass, sure — Gaia knew he had to put up with plenty of snippy remarks — but not one to share his life story with. He stonewalled at every attempt to pry, however subtle, and he glared viciously at anyone who asked, ‘Where is your mother?’ Vector understood now why that question had pissed him off so much when he’d asked. After a few months of ‘concerned bystanders’ asking at every opening, it got pretty damn old.
After a few weeks, that dirty, skinny kid who had appeared in Vector’s office became unrecognizable. Espio was growing. He turned twelve and flippantly mentioned it two weeks later, much to Vector’s dismay. He gained some weight. Not much, he was still scrawny and tripping over limbs that seemed to be growing too long, too quickly for him to keep track of. But he didn’t look like he’d blow over at every stiff breeze anymore. The color in his scales grew a touch more vibrant.
Maybe Vector could’ve looked harder. Maybe he should have. Maybe it was irresponsible. Maybe his family was looking for him. But Espio was a good detective, he was clever and observant and brave, and he was a hard worker, and he was learning to read Common Tongue and very proud of it, and he was getting taller, and he was getting better with those throwing knives he carried, and his whole face lit up so much every time they found a clue or solved a case, and Vector had made him laugh — laugh — twice. And. . . well, the kid had good judgment. If he decided that he needed to leave wherever it was that he’d come from, then Vector could trust him in that.
It had been ten days of late nights and too much reading. The entire agency was dark but for the desk lamp on Vector’s big desk and the TV left on upstairs that Espio had forgotten to turn off. If they had been passing on the street, they would’ve seen nothing but a faint flickering in the upstairs window. But they weren’t on the street. They were in the office.
The deadline was closing in and if they didn’t reach a conclusion soon, they wouldn’t get paid another dime. And, given the number of rent reminders that had been pushed through the mail slot, they needed a lot of dimes.
Vector was hunched over the desk, reading and rereading the expense reports that he knew had discrepancies that he just couldn’t see. The words and numbers were all starting to blur together. He sighed and sat back, rubbing a crick out of the back of his neck.
“Es, you got anything in the bank statements?” he mumbled.
When he received no response, he turned back to the couch. Espio was lying on his side, one arm tucked under his head, the other hanging off the couch, the bank statements slipping from his grip. Fast asleep.
Vector could resist a small smile. It had been a long week. Espio had been putting in a lot of work, pulling nights just as late as Vector. They needed to wrap this up soon, but he’d earned a little rest. Vector stood, grabbed the blanket from the back of the couch, and pulled it over him, before gently sliding the bank statements from his hand. He sat back and continued reading. He wondered if he should carry Espio up to his room. Then he discarded the thought.
It was quiet. Even in the heart of the city, there was always a few minutes a night that the entire world went soft and still. Brief snatched of silence before a car would rumble past or someone would shout on the street and the world kept turning again. It was peaceful. It was the one thing Vector liked about these late nights, those seconds of peace in such a hectic world.
After half an hour of this silence, Espio whimpered.
Vector blinked, uncertain of the noise at first. At another, he turned back to the couch.
“Es?”
Espio was still asleep, but his face was twisted, his mouth pressed into a thin line.
Vector hesitantly reached towards him. “Kid?”
Espio’s hand twitched, a leg kicked out, and, with a sharp, stifled gasp, he was awake. He didn’t sit up, didn’t make any noise more than that. Just laid there, stiff as a board, breath hissing rapidly in and out, fingers digging into the couch cushion, as his eyes flickered about. Like he was waiting to be attacked.
Vector cautiously leaned into his line of vision. “Espio?” he ventured. “You alright there, bud?”
Espio just recoiled and stared blankly at him, his wide eyes full of fear and void of recognition.
“Es, kid, it’s me. Vector? Your. . . boss?”
The young chameleon blinked. Once. Twice. He exhaled slowly and averted his gaze to the blanket around his shoulders, blinking at it in soft bewilderment. He tugged on the hem, as though confused as to where it had come from.
Slowly, Vector leaned back. “You alright?” he repeated.
“I apologize,” Espio mumbled instead of answering. He sat up. The blanket fell around his tail. “I should not have been slacking on my duties. Forgive me.”
Vector’s brow knit. Every apology from this kid sounded so concerningly formal. “It’s fine, bud, don’t worry about it.”
Espio rubbed his eyes and yawned. When he slid off the couch, he swayed dangerously on his feet. “Where did the bank statements go?” he mumbled, stifling another yawn. “I was almost finished with them.”
Vector waved a hand dismissively. “I got it, kid,” he assured him. “You go get some sleep.”
Espio hesitated. “I did not mean to leave the work unfinished.”
“I told you, it’s fine. You go on up to bed, okay? You’ve earned it. I’ll finish up here.”
Espio frowned uncertainly at him, as though he didn’t fully trust the offer. But then he yawned again and, try as he might to stifle it, he couldn’t. And for just a moment, in his sleepy haze, Vector saw his mask slip, heard a few words that were too sincere to be intentional.
“Promise you’re not angry?” he mumbled.
Vector paused. Espio had never asked something like that so straightforwardly before. He tilted his head. “No, Es, I’m not mad. I just. . .” His voice died in his throat, all his questions about the nightmare and the fear and the mistrust, when Espio looked at him with that trepidation again. “No, I’m not mad. Go get some sleep.”
Espio watched him for a moment more, trying to puzzle out some hidden resentment or disappointment in Vector’s expression. Finding none, he looked away and nodded.
“Goodnight, then.”
“Night, kid.”
He took the blanket with him. He didn’t seem to notice.
“What is this word?”
“Um. . . os. . . ostensibly?”
“What does it mean?”
“Mmmm, actually not sure.”
“Hmph. Where’s your dictionary?”
“Don’t have one.”
“What kind of person doesn’t have a dictionary?”
“The one who’s signing your paychecks!”
“Is this blackmail?”
“The word you’re looking for is extortion.”
“No, it’s not. Extortion implies that you gain something.”
“I’m gaining your respect.”
“My tolerance, maybe.”
“Gaia — just skip the word. We’ll go to the library tomorrow or something and you can look it up.”
“Tch. Fine. I’ll write it down so I don’t forget it.”
“Fantastic. Now shut up, this is my favorite song.”