Work Text:
Day 2: “You’ve got a lot of nerve to dredge up all my fears.”
Prophecy | sewer | taking accountability
Alice considered herself many things, but she had never allowed stupid to be one of them.
She knew what others thought about her.
Ambitious, the kinder ones would say. She’s going places, that one. Competent and married to her future, no time for anything or anyone else.
Bossy, other people would proclaim. She’s endlessly bossy, and can’t stand being wrong.
She’s a killjoy, others muttered when her back turned. Can’t stand the sight of fun, aye? She must be allergic, doesn’t know what it even is to have fun, they’d say, and others would snort. Oh, there you’re wrong, because clearly she has some amount of fun, taking it from us!
She’s practically unfeeling, she doesn’t care about anyone but herself.
Don’t you try to talk to her! Don’t you know what she’ll do?
Why’d you even bother trying to invite her? All she ever does is study and study and study!
Nothing gets past her, nothing and no one. And it’s best you avoid getting her attention.
Just stay out of her way.
She’s too loud,
Too aggressive,
Too fiery,
Too cold,
Too annoying,
Too-
Well.
It was safe to say, Alice had heard it all.
She knew- oh how she knew- what others thought of her. But that was the price one paid, she had found. She needed- and yes, it was needed- to be taken seriously, to have something to do, something to fight for, a purpose and rules to follow and enforce and for there to be a reason she was like this.
She did perfect in class, got top marks on all her assignments, and she wasn’t afraid of the sweat and tears it took to get there. She treated her ambition like it was some kind of alchemical spell, turning her skin to iron, as the teachers whispered about her, such a good student, yes, but perhaps not the most pleasant, but perhaps that would come with time, and when her fellow students turned from her, either laughing at her or fighting her or being too intimidated to even try to be her friend.
And that was fine.
She didn’t need them.
She would go places they wouldn’t even dream of, and then it would all be worth it, she was sure of it.
And she was right.
She did everything she set her mind to, with the highest regards of those she worked under, nevermind the complaints of those she worked with- if they couldn’t handle working with her, she had no problem doing it herself. And she got herself a position, somewhere underneath the most amazing girlboss she had ever met, the woman she dreamed of one day being like.
DCS Carol Shaw.
Now that was a woman to aspire to be.
Valiant, extraordinarily competent, stern without being unfeeling, and of a similar mind to Alice.
Alice was not ashamed to admit she fangirled over DCS Shaw, just a smidge.
And Alice was willing to do anything to impress her, though she was certain that now she had lost the chance.
And of course she had! How is it that DCI James Taylor was replaced without her even noticing?
She had worked with that man for years.
Sure, they had never gotten on well, and their relationship was strained at the best of times and limited exclusively to work, but it should have been frankly obvious that Mr. John Taylor was not the same man as DCI James Taylor.
The first clue was in the outfit.
Never once had DCI Taylor changed his uniform- he never even had a hair out of place. The pens should have been the very first sign, because she had never once seen DCI Taylor with pens as his accessory, but it must have been second nature for a puzzle setter to keep the main tool of his trade on hand.
Then there were all the other details that cried out in her memory as she scoured it for answers now. The veritable panic attack he had seemed to have on what she realized now was probably his first case, and had he ever seen a dead body before? Had he even realized he would see one, that first day? (Those who thought she lacked compassion were obviously wrong, because she truly did feel for John Taylor, there. That must have been horrific. She hoped he didn’t get nightmares- not then, or from any of those cases he had solved as easy as breathing. This clearly wasn’t his idea, and he seemed the type to be hard-pressed to say no.)
She should have realized when he stared at her blankly, looking utterly distraught and panicking, and she had an urge to ask if he was alright, but they’d never been that close before and she certainly wouldn’t be the one to reach out then, not after so long, so she had held her tongue and not thought anything of it, even when he seemed frankly rather frightened of her at first.
Above even that, he had always been respectful, as much as he was with anyone else.
Which wasn’t to say that DCI Taylor was disrespectful, but she had always understood that he thought she was too uptight to say the least, too abrasive, too annoying, and hardly more than a silly girl with an obsession with the rules. (Was she projecting? Oh, no, certainly not.)
(Well, maybe just a little. But that feeling went away entirely with John, so clearly she got that feeling from somewhere.)
John Taylor treated her as if she had belonged. Which likely was because, in his mind, she did.
He didn’t know any better.
He didn’t know a time before her, and also, he was too busy thinking about how he didn’t belong to worry about anything or anyone else. To him, she was an integral part of the team, not a glorified secretary or just someone to fetch coffee. (Oh, she had been grateful to pass that humiliating task down to Simon. She had always rankled under such jobs, whereas Simon just took it as par for the course. Which was fair- fetching coffee wasn’t necessarily a shameful task, it just felt like it, felt like she’d never amount to more, like that was all she would be. But it wasn’t, and she’d proved it, now. To herself and to everyone else.)
DCI Taylor, also, hadn’t suddenly hit his stride however-many-years he’d been working there, so soon after his depression of losing DI Neville. (And couldn’t he stop with the moping, already? He wasn’t the only one who missed Neville, but one wouldn’t catch Alice complaining, no ma’am. Alice also wasn’t holding it against anyone, unlike DCI Taylor. [Well, she may or may not be holding it against DCI Taylor, but she, frankly, had a laundry list of reasons why.])
And in all honesty, she was rather insulted that he’d taken to replacing his brother- and doing his brother’s job better, even- so easily, so quickly, so seamlessly, though she was sure that John Taylor would be the first to protest that, which she supposed was fair as it likely was anything but seamless from his perspective, but he definitely had no idea how impossible it was for anyone else. Alice had worked her butt off to get where she was, everyone at the station had. It was the one true thing that united them all- the suffering it took to get them there. It wasn’t easy, and Alice honestly thought that if John had to go through the same routes they did, he’d have been weeded out early on.
Instead, he completely skipped that, and took to solving cases like they were nothing more than the puzzles he wrote for his own pleasure.
She was jealous, and she was willing to admit that.
(At least that explains why his methods were unconventional, even for DCI James Taylor, who’d always had a penchant for puzzles himself, even if it was nowhere near to the same extent. [And was John the reason DCI Taylor was so passionate about puzzles? She thought she remembered him working in a Ludwig puzzle book similar to the one Simon just had to get signed, once. If DCI Taylor was so good and so fond of puzzles for the sake of his brother… Well, she kind of hoped that was the reasoning, because it would probably become her favorite thing about her missing boss, because that was kind of absurdly sweet. If it wasn’t true, then at least no one should tell her, because she ought to have at least one good takeaway from her literal boss that hasn’t been far outshone by the brother who replaced him.] John didn’t follow the rules because he didn’t know the rules. He even seemed the time to follow rules more religiously than even she- which should have possibly been another thing that tipped her off. DCI Taylor certainly did not care to check if he was allowed to do something before he did.)
It also explained why he was suddenly incompetent at driving, which should have been another major tip off. DCI Taylor had perhaps seemed the time to park over the lines just to be a jerk, to protect his car or whatever little snide comment he could come up with, but he’d certainly have reacted differently when she tried to call him out on it after a little while of letting it go on, unwilling to start another petty fight.
In all honesty, she was looking back at John’s driving skills- or lack thereof- and counting her blessings that he didn’t end up in a car wreck and, oh, die or something. That would have been less than stellar, to say the least.
There were so many signs.
She’d noticed them- oh, but she had- and yet, she hadn’t put the pieces together.
She wasn’t a stupid girl, and yet.
And yet!
Out of everyone, she should have been the one to put it together.
Not to mention her perception and skills of reading others and her refusal to discount any possibility, no matter how improbable, which should have been a strength in this area, but also because she had the most time with DCI Taylor.
She knew him better than Simon, and they both knew him better than DI Carter. DCS Shaw was an eternally busy lady, but she had even more to do as of late, there was no way that her hero could have noticed in such a short amount of time.
How was it that Holly had noticed, and Alice had not? (And how had Alice never noticed that Holly wasn’t-
It was bad to speak ill of the dead, Alice knew.)
Alice wasn’t stupid.
She was perceptive, and she always found the correct answer, no matter how long it took, and she never needed anyone's help to get there, even if it would have been easier if she’d just asked for help. She wouldn’t, she couldn’t, and she never did. She always figured it out, on her own, it was what she was good at.
No one was better, except maybe her bos- well, except maybe John Taylor.
She-
“Are you still brooding?”
Alice scowled even before she turned to see who had dared interrupt her.
“Am I what now?” she asked, letting the sound of danger seep into her voice, and watching it go right over Simon’s head in real time.
That idiot boy. He never seemed put out- at least not for long- no matter what she said and did. She just couldn’t seem to scare him off. (She was more grateful for it than she’d admit, even to herself.)
“Oh, you know,” Simon said, waving a pale hand through the air. “Overanalyzing your every past move, his every past move, cursing yourself for not putting it together earlier, for not knowing, for failing, and so obviously too, and how are you going to impress DCS Shaw now? Or even finally win over DCI Taylor, since he’s gone and you didn’t even notice? Do you even deserve to be here, now, if you couldn’t figure that out without being spoonfed it by the one who pulled the wool over your eyes in the first place? All your fears, you know.”
His tone, so callous, so casual, as if this as just another moment of banter between the two of them, and not a career shattering catastrophic failure.
“You’ve got a lot of nerve,” she hissed, narrowing her eyes, “to dredge up ‘all my fears’, as you say.”
He blinked for only a moment, like the idea that this was something he shouldn’t have said passed him by without notice or alarm. (And that was probably the reason he never noticed the difference, which just proved further that it fell to her to notice these things, because he certainly wouldn’t)
“Eh,” he said, and sat on the desk, kicking his feet slightly, and she had the insane urge to just… shove him off of it, watch him go careening to the floor, limbs flailing, and see how nonplussed he looked then.
(Knowing Simon, he’d have hardly been bothered, and she wouldn’t have gotten nearly as much satisfaction as she deserved from the act, nevermind the trouble she’d get in.)
“And I would hardly consider it brooding,” she corrected him fiercely. “No, I’m taking accountability, which I know is such a foreign concept to the likes of you, and-”
“Oh, shut up, won’t you?” Simon sighed.
For a moment, all she could do was stare.
No one dared talk to her like that.
Especially when she was being ‘moody’ like this.
“Excuse you?” she said, her voice taking on a frigid quality.
“We all are rethinking everything,” Simon said. “Every one of us- even DCS Shaw. Not a one of us is stupid, Alice. None of us would have gotten this far if we were- even me. We are all caught completely off guard by this- you’re hardly the only one.”
Alice would like to strangle him, please and thank you.
Maybe that would make her feel better.
“No, Simon,” she snarled. “He was my boss-”
“Mine too,” Simon chimed in, an almost sing-song quality to his voice that made her want to punch him so hard he’d be seeing stars for a week.
“And I knew DCI Taylor quite a bit better then you, for quite a bit longer. DCS Shaw hasn’t hardly gotten the chance to say hello to him since our favorite imposter walked through those doors, and DI Carter hardly knew the original guy before he was replaced. You knew him, but not as well as I did. This is something I should have known, not- not Holly, and no one else,” she said, frustratedly waving her hands about, unsure what to do with them, but unable to just sit there prim and still the way everyone wanted her to.
Simon shrugged. “The sun doesn’t rise and set on you, you know?”
“I-” she gaped at him. “Just what does that have to do with anything I just said?!”
“The world isn’t resting solely on your shoulders,” he told her. “Holly was already stalking the guy, I would certainly hope that you were no where near her level, because that was some freaky stuff,” he said, punctuating that with a dramatic shudder that nearly knocked off a piece of paper to the floor. “Theres no reason to expect you’d have figured it out when the rest of us didn’t, and I don’t care how long you knew the guy or whatever you have to say. Not a single person in this department- exempting stalker-Holly- knew something was off. Well, more than there had been, lately. You’re pretty fantastic, don’t get me wrong, but you aren’t better than an entire department. No one is. Well, except maybe one John Taylor, but he seems to be an exception to everything else as well, why not this one too?”
She couldn’t help but snort at that.
“I can’t argue with that,” she agreed.
“Can’t or won’t?” Simon teased, raising an eyebrow, and if he were anyone else, she’d have done something, anything, to wipe that smug grin off his face.
As it was, the desire to do so was increased, but so was her patience. He was what she imagined having a little brother would be like.
Impossibly infuriating, but kind of sweet. Cute enough that she wouldn’t murder him- yet, and entertaining enough she didn’t always want to.
They felt like a family, this past little bit.
Maybe that was what hit her so hard.
They were something a little to the left of a team- so much closer then they’d been before, with DCI James Taylor and DI Matt Neville. Now, it was more like a family then her family had ever been, with DI Carter probably taking the role of ‘mother’, with his greater social skills, and John Taylor almost behaving like one of those batty dads in a cartoon, that walked around in a dream but loved his kids more than anything else, and her little brother, Simon.
Alice had at least a little something against lies destroying families, but that was neither here nor there, and was not the reason she had gone after this job with the fervor she did, no matter what anyone else said, or what they tried to do to prevent her, so she decided to let it rest at last.
Maybe it was an unconventional family, maybe she was insane for hoping it was one, maybe she was pathetic for even trying to compare her coworkers to family, but she liked it and would like it to stay at least somewhat the same, please and thank you.
“Let’s go with the latter,” she said, and Simon grinned.
“Come on, then, up with you,” he said, hopping off the desk and turning to look at her expectantly.
“What?” she blinked at him, but found herself getting to her feet anyways. She could use a break, after all.
“Let’s go watch a murder get solved,” Simon said, an expectant light dancing in his eyes. They were so spoiled now, with John Taylor.
Alice would have to make sure they didn’t start to slack and let him do all the work. That wouldn’t be good at all, and she didn’t care how Simon might protest.
She was older, and smarter, so obviously she was always right and he was always wrong.
“You should have led with that,” she hissed at him, pretending not to smile when he laughed gleefully, hiding her face as she grabbed her favorite notebook.
She wondered what John Taylor would teach them this time.
Either way, she was eager to find out.