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Sleuth is sitting at your piano. This is surprising, but not nearly as surprising as finding him hunched over it, long fingers splayed wide against the white and ebony. He hums to himself, fingers twitching as if he’s playing it inside his head.
Maybe he is. Maybe this is another one of those Imagination things. You consider that for a time, because you’ve felt firsthand the cloying grey static of that half-real world. But the bottle that stands beside the piano’s stool is still mostly full, so you have to rule that out. He sits like that for a while, and it seems so natural for him to be there you find it difficult to break the silence that wreaths him.
“Th’ fuck are you doing.” As soon as the words leave your lips he flinches, then cracks his eyes to find you. He grins, running one hand through his hair while the other snatched up the bottle at his side.
“Just wondering how you haven’t broken this one yet.” He’s so goddamn infuriating sometimes. He knows how to get into your head and he’s got a way with words that makes them seem like weapons. You bristle, baring your teeth at him in what some would call a smile. Sleuth knows the differences, and his grin turns a little sharper in the dusky light, a little more challenging. You fall into the routine easily enough.
It’s two weeks before you see Sleuth at a piano again, this time at the club. It’s past closing, far past, and you’re sure dawn is about to rear its ugly head. He just sits there, though, just stares down at the keys for the longest damn while. You go through another four glasses of good scotch before he looks up at you. There’s some distance between you, but you don’t miss the way his green eyes burn with something you don’t recognise. He looks very far away, almost watery in the darkness, but his eyes bore into yours. You watch his smile grow there until it spreads to the rest of his face, and you’re drunk enough to match it.
You remember that look later, when you’re dozing against him. You have to try three times until you’re finally able to slur into the pillow “D’you play?” He stirs slightly, mumbles something you can’t decipher. You find it hard to care beyond the sleep-grey that clouds your mind.
You forget about it for another week, until you stumble into his apartment and catch yourself against something that looks suspiciously like a small piano. You whirl to face him, ready to ask him just what the fuck is going on, but he presses against you and then you’re too busy trying to shove him against the nearby wall to remember.
The next day, you remember it in the middle of a heist. “Fuck!” You punctuate your sentiment in one of the many guards trying (unsuccessfully) to stop Boxcars tearing the safe a part. The question burns in your mind for the rest of the day, and not even a perfect getaway distracts you. You find yourself pacing for hours, and the rest of the Crew know well enough by now to leave you alone. Eventually everyone filters out, and then you’re left alone. You’re broken from your incessant pacing by the sound of a gunshot. And then, Sleuth’s voice.
“Son of a-” He mutters as he pushes the door open. You groan, because of course he just blew out the lock in his efforts to get in. Of course. You’re honestly surprised you expected a different outcome.
“What the fuck are you doing here.” You snarl at him, and he laughs in that stupidly real way of his, whole body hurled into the action.
“Wanted to make sure you got away okay.” He says once he’s done laughing.
“It was a simple fucking job, Sleuth, Deuce could have handled it.” Your snarl is back now, and the pounding in your blood is back.
You both manage to get to your nearest residence before falling together, all fists and elbows. It takes the edge off, leaves you comfortable and lax. He wipes blood from his lips and grins across the lounge room at you. You light a cigarette and revel in the fading rush of adrenaline, and you toss him the packet when he quirks a brow at you.
He lights one and you watch his hands. You never really payed attention before, you guess. It’s pretty fucking obvious now. “Why didn’t you ever say you could play the piano?” He looks at you for a long while, and you think maybe he’s not going to answer. He gets in right before you tell him to forget it.
“I don’t, really.” He says it with that bitter edge to his words that clearly signal that this is a topic that he doesn’t want to talk about. You’ve never been good at doing what people want, but you think maybe you shouldn’t have asked when you press him about it. He frowns, and the way he slumps back makes you feel as if you just stepped onto hallowed ground. A chill races up your spine, makes you hunch against a chill wind that doesn’t exist.
“I stopped playing after Kingpin.” That was surprising, certainly. He rarely talks about Kingpin, and never by choice. “We all did - Ace played the trumpet and Inspector the clarinet. We played together in the months leading up to the end of the Kingpin case. It was a … pretty heavy time for all of us, and we found a way to deal with that.” He sighs, and shrugs. “We stopped afterwards. It was different, things felt too strange. Then we pulled out and ended up here. There’s been distractions enough since then.” He finishes with a wide grin and a flippant tone in his voice that tells you that particular conversation is over.
You listen this time.
Three weeks later and you’ve mostly forgotten the conversation until you walk into the club shortly before dawn, in the brief period of pitch darkness that precedes the morning light. You catch the spotlight first, then the figure at the piano. It’s Sleuth, and as you start walking towards him he begins to play. A part of you thinks he must have been waiting here for some time just waiting for you to show up, but that part is small and crowded out by the rest of you that is busy listening to the music.
He plays with his eyes shut, plays with the same fluid grace he fights with. His hands flow high and low on the ivories, left hand maintaining an insistent but smooth series of notes as the right follows suit on the high, sharp and raw. The sound burns its way through your thoughts as you stop beside him, and you say nothing for a long time after the final note sears its way through you.
He turns to you eventually, his smile is a little wistful even though his eyes are dark. He stands, steps away from the baby grand like he’s escaping. Maybe he is, you think drunkenly as he steps close to you, but then his hands are tugging your tie loose and your lips are on his. You don’t care, don’t care if he never plays again because it fucking hurt to listen, the notes stabbed into the parts of your brain not wired for anger and stabbing and just fucking tore them open. It was his, everything that lived under the grin and the eyes like emeralds on fire, dark but honest.
The next time you see him at a piano, it’s at his place after a long night (and a longer day). Dawn is creeping up fast but you don’t really care, because while you much prefer the middle of the night you’re coming to enjoy daybreak, simply because of Sleuth. He grins at you and you grin at him, though yours falters slightly as he lifts the key lid. His hands splay wide across the white and black and then your heart skips a beat when he begins playing. It’s so simple, deceptively so, but somehow it works. You’re so intent on the piano you miss exactly when he starts singing.
“You’ve got suckers’ luck,” he murmurs as his fingers flicker along the keys “have you given up?” He turns his head to you, then, opens his eyes. They’re too green, too full of something you can’t read. “Does it feel like a trial?” He continues, and maybe it does, maybe the piano feels like a judges’ gavel inside your head now. “Does it trouble your mind the way you trouble mine?”
He doesn’t play the piano for a long time after that, and you’re not game to demand him to do so. You fall back into the rhythm of late nights and early, early mornings, of falling together like a fistfight, of his too-real grin and your black laughter. It’s familiar and comforting, something to take refuge in.
You find him at your piano for the second time in some months, and it’s just before dawn, though this time the rest of the Crew is still around. You can hear Boxcars talking to Deuce, simply because the big guys voice carries like a fucking thunderstorm. You slouch deeper into your seat and watch Sleuth run his fingers lightly across the worn (and in some cases almost cracked) keys with a smile on his face. It’s familiar, the one you don’t want to see, the pained and wistful one. Somehow it’s brighter, though, and he doesn’t look for you as he sits. He knows he doesn’t have to.
He plays the first piece he ever played for you, and the pain of it coils around your heart like a vice. He plays with the same liquid grace as always, and you wait for the agonising fade to come as the music swells. It never happens, though, and you lean forward in surprise as the crescendo keeps going and then suddenly he’s hammering the keys like you do, and he’s laughing, and you know the piece he’s leapt to instantly. It’s one of yours, one of the harsh and roaring pieces you play when the rest of the Crew are up there with you. You miss the sound of Droog’s sax, though only barely – with the way Sleuth is playing it’s almost like he doesn’t need anything else. When he smashes out the final chords you find yourself mimicking it, find you can almost feel the ivories beneath your fingers too. He turns just enough to give you an impossibly wide smile, and his eyes aren't the same cloudy darkness from last time.
These days, Sleuth plays whenever you have the presence of mind to bitch at him about it. The nights are yours, always have been, but if the first notes come ‘round dawn you can’t find it in yourself to be irritated.