Nicholas woke to pain.

Not unusual. Pain had become less of an inconvenience and more of a recurring companion over the years. His eyes opened slowly.

White ceiling. Steady breathing. Silence.

He frowned. Not his ceiling. Not his silence.

Nicholas lay perfectly still, letting his thoughts catch up. His head spun. Maybe thinking wasn't the best thing to do right now; he felt like he'd been violently stomped on by an elephant.

His fingers drifted to his temple. Bandaged. He felt up his sides. More bandages, wrapped neatly around his ribs. Fresh gauze. Proper compression. Whoever had done it knew enough not to wrap the layers too tightly.

"...Huh."

He looked around. Small room. Unfamiliar walls. Not his room, not his bed. Not dead either, which was nice.

His gaze drifted toward the desk. And froze. There was a figure dozing off on the workspace. Long, dark hair sprawled everywhere, head resting heavily on folded arms. His mouth was slightly open, one hand dangling limply off to the side. He looked quite a bit like his idiotic roommate.

Nicholas squinted. He had definitely seen that cow-dung-green T-shirt before. In fact, he knew the exact feel of the material; he had it fisted in his hand for very obvious reasons.

He carefully pushed his weight onto his elbows and immediately regretted every decision that had led him to this century. The room tilted at a violent forty-five-degree angle. A localized explosion detonated behind his right eye. Every bruise on his skeleton filed an immediate grievance, and his cracked ribs strictly informed him that taking an unmonitored breath was now a premium luxury.

He locked his jaw. Breathed. Waited.

Eventually, the horizon leveled out. He stared back at the sleeping form, his chest tightening with a strange, unfamiliar friction.

Did the idiot pull a straight shift watching me breathe?

"The fuck?"

He tried to remember how he'd got here.

Nothing useful surfaced. Just broken flashes. Running. Falling. The sharp taste of copper and blood. Someone shouting. Blinding pain. Climbing. The slick drainpipe. And... dark hair.

Nicholas closed his eyes. The pressure behind them only worsened.

Wonderful. A head injury, a stab wound, and getting treated to death by an idiot. His evening had been remarkably productive.

And where the hell is my gun?

Nicholas let his gaze travel around the room once more.

His shredded shirt lay in a heap near the bed, stiff with drying blood.

The wastebasket beneath the desk was overflowing with bloodied gauze, cotton pads, and discarded strips of tape.

He looked toward the window. Then the door. No sign of his weapon.

His eyes returned to the desk.

Textbooks lay scattered across the desk, loose sheets of university notes spilling over one another. A half-empty glass of water sat beside an uncapped antiseptic bottle. The sleeping kid looked thoroughly unconscious. But his legs were drawn in beneath the desk, one knee angled toward the drawer unit. 

The top drawer was closed though the second sat slightly ajar, barely enough to reveal a narrow strip of darkness inside. The kid's chair had been pulled close enough that its frame nearly touched the wood. Even asleep, he'd managed to position himself between the drawers and the rest of the room.

Nicholas cocked a brow.

It could have been accidental. The kid was hardly sleeping in a position that suggested any deliberate thought at all. But the rest of the room told a different story. The bloodied supplies had been gathered and discarded. The weapon wasn't lying in plain sight. And the only person who could have moved it was currently using a university assignment as a pillow.

Nicholas frowned. He carefully swung his legs off the bed and stood up. Pain immediately attempted murder. His knees buckled. He caught himself against the frame by a fraction of an inch, waited for the black spots in his vision to clear, and forced himself into a vertical stance. He was definitely in no shape to be walking, but unfortunately, life rarely consulted him on such matters.

Step. Pause. Step. Pause.

A full-length mirror leaned against the closet opposite the bed. Reaching it felt considerably more difficult than mirrors normally warranted, but eventually, he arrived. He frowned at his reflection.

One side of his face looked like it had lost a violent disagreement with a truck. His temple had been meticulously stitched and bandaged. Deep bruises darkened his jaw, and his left eye was rapidly swelling into retirement.

He gingerly checked the dressing around his ribs. Clean. Proper compression. The stitches near his side pulled painfully when he moved, but the wound appeared to have been handled competently.

Very competently, actually.

Nicholas studied the reflection for another moment, then looked over his shoulder at the sleeping figure across the room.

"The idiot did all this?"

The idiot in question gave a soft snore and shifted his cheek against his notes.

Nicholas exhaled through his nose.

The idiot possessed a remarkable ability to look both highly intelligent and profoundly disappointing at the exact same time.

His gaze drifted back to the desk. The kid hadn't moved much, but his arm had slipped farther over the edge. His fingers rested inches from the drawer handle.

Nicholas narrowed his eyes.

That checks out.

If he'd been treating someone bleeding from multiple wounds, he'd have wanted the weapon out of reach. Somewhere secure. Somewhere the patient couldn't get to it, and somewhere it wouldn't be mistaken for another piece of clutter.

A locked drawer would do nicely.

Again, he started across the room.

Step. Pause. Step. Pause.

The floorboards creaked beneath his weight. Nicholas stopped dead, holding his breath.

The kid didn't stir.

He tried again, shifting his weight toward the wall where the boards looked more firmly supported. It was an old habit, one he'd acquired long before becoming a detective. In his current condition, it was considerably harder to execute without pulling off a particularly disgruntled corpse.

He crouched slightly, then immediately regretted it. Pain knifed through his flank. He caught the edge of the desk, teeth clamped together until the worst of it passed.

Very carefully, he reached around the chair, keeping his injured side as far from the desk as he could. His fingers found the drawer handle. It wouldn't budge.

"You've got to be kidding me," he breathed.

He tested the other drawers as well, easing each one open just enough to inspect the contents. Pens. Receipts. Charging cables. A tangle of miscellaneous junk that seemed to have multiplied in the dark. No weapon.

The locked drawer remained.

Nicholas looked around the desk once more. A small key lay half-hidden beneath a stack of notes, attached to a plain metal ring.

He stared at, a smile blooming on his lips.

"Found you."

Getting the key without waking the kid required a degree of patience Nicholas had never particularly enjoyed exercising. He slid the notes aside a fraction at a time, pinched the ring between two fingers, and eased it free.

The kid shifted.

Nicholas stopped moving.

"D'you know..."

Nicholas's pulse spiked. His hand instinctively dropped toward a defensive stance.

The kid's mouth was moving against his sleeve, his eyes still completely shut.

"...you're pretty..."

Nicholas didn't breathe.

A heavy, agonizing beat hung in the air.

"...fucking annoying."

Nicholas waited for the eyes to snap open, for the trap to spring. But the kid merely let out a wet, rhythmic snore and turned his face deeper into his university notes.

False alarm.

Nicholas let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding. He waited another few seconds before turning the key.

The lock clicked.

He eased the drawer open.

His pistol lay inside, the magazine detached. Three cartridges sat neatly beside it, separate from the rest of the ammunition.

He stared at the arrangement.

The kid had actually disarmed him. Removed the magazine, cleared the chamber, and made sure the weapon couldn't be used straight out of the drawer.

"Paranoid little bastard."

He put the weapon back together, pocketed the three cartridges, and tucked the pistol beneath his waistband, settling it at the small of his back where it usually sat.

He closed the drawer without a sound.

His eyes wandered back to the sleeping man.

"Idiot."

Nicholas blinked.

Idiot. He kept calling him that, but the idiot must have an actual name.

Interesting thought.

He glanced over the desk. University notes. Textbooks. Pens scattered between half-finished assignments. A mess, but an oddly organised one; the papers were stacked in loose piles rather than scattered across the entire surface.

Something plastic peeked out from beneath a notebook.

Nicholas leaned closer.

A lanyard.

Bingo.

He eased the notebook aside, revealing the student ID attached to the end of it. The photograph faced down, its plastic sleeve caught beneath a tangle of charging cables.

"Let's see."

He freed the card carefully, making sure not to disturb the sleeping idiot's arm hanging over the edge of the desk.

Avinash Vyas. Nineteen. Social Sciences.

The photograph featured a face that looked highly insulted by the physical reality of being digitized. Nicholas looked up, measuring the ID against the sleeping profile, then looked back down.

"...Unfortunate."

Same sharp jaw, same messy hair, same general expression that suggested he'd recently given a bouncer a piece of his mind.

Avinash.

Interesting.

Nicholas slowly extended one finger and poked Avinash's shoulder. Nothing. He poked again.

Avinash made a disgruntled noise. "Mmrf."

"Avinash."

Zero compliance. Another deliberate poke to the collarbone.

"Whah—" Avinash mumbled, his voice thick with sleep.

"Wake up."

"Noooo—" the kid protested, actively rolling his torso away from the intrusion like a disgruntled hedgehog.

Nicholas stared at him, unimpressed. "Avinash."

Avinash swatted vaguely in his direction. "Five more minutes, Mum." Then he immediately went right back to sleep.

Nicholas stood there in absolute silence. A minute passed. Another. Finally, he let out a heavy sigh, which hurt immensely. His gaze drifted back toward the desk drawer.

The idiot had disarmed him, then gone right back to sleep beside the evidence. Either Avinash trusted him not to do anything stupid, or he hadn't considered what might happen if Nicholas woke up and decided to be a problem.

Honestly, with how he had behaved for the past three days, Nicholas couldn't tell.

Moving with measured care, Nicholas crossed the room towards the door, turned the handle, and paused. He looked back one last time. Avinash remained fondly asleep. Nicholas frowned faintly, then quietly stepped out into the hallway, closing the door behind him without making a single sound.