[Will Chase]

A coffee and a table later, and Will found himself sitting opposite Harry. Roman was off by the door, but to Will his watchful gaze was obvious. It seemed he wasn’t the only one who was paranoid. Harry definitely was confident. Will was only having his initial assumption proven. He had to have scary backers, he was too confident for it to be otherwise. Unless… No, just because he’d seen one impossible thing done by the doctor didn’t mean that this guy had any similar tricks. He was just a normal man, sitting down to have coffee and ask a few questions. They both were. Right? But Harry was speaking, so Will dragged his attention back to the matter at hand. “Will is fine.” Harry continued, and once he’d finished Will sat forward in his chair, his coffee untouched on the table. “Even if I did know anything about this person of interest, why are you after her? Why should I help you? All I’ve heard so far are vague statements and a couple of bad jokes.” The man sitting opposite the investigator clutched his chest as though injured. “You wound me. I always thought my jokes were particularly sharp.” He shrugged, “I would say that ‘after her’ sounds a little too dramatic, but we’ve already been through the Men in Black jokes so let’s move on. The woman you have been in contact with is dangerous, and she has pulled you into something much bigger than you could understand right now. We need to know who else she has been in contact with?” Dangerous? How so? Will wasn’t particularly surprised that she was dangerous - he didn’t think he’d ever be able to forget how confident she’d been even when alone with a man who outweighed her by a significant margin - but he was getting really tired of people being vague. “You say she is dangerous, that she’s pulled me into something much bigger than I could understand. Try me. Because trust me Harry, I’ve been through a lot of shit recently and there’s not much left that could surprise me.” He could still remember the pain, the shock as the metal punched into his gut. No matter what the guy said, Will had a feeling that his near-death and miraculous survival had been significantly more surprising. “Ok Mr Chase, but don’t blame me if you don’t believe me. You’ve heard of ghosts? Impossible stories? Tall tales? Every ghost, werewolf and alien attack you’ve ever heard of. They’re all true, but they’re not aliens. They are simply people who lost control of their abilities. Humanity has convinced itself that there is no such thing as magic, that humans have limits, that we operate within the confines of the laws of physics. You have blinded yourself to the truth far more effectively than any conspiracy ever could have. She wants to change that.” He leaned forward, his face serious, “and we can’t allow that to happen.” Okay… Magic? Super powers? Well, that was a surprise. Will would’ve laughed aloud, except hadn’t he just been thinking about how confident Harry was despite his seeming lack of security. He found himself thinking back on the doctor, that woman with so much control, so much confidence; he recognised it now, thought himself an idiot for not doing so earlier. She wasn’t confident that nothing could hurt her, she knew it for a fact. Then Will processed the rest of what Harry had said, and found himself growing angry. Knowledge had power true, and some knowledge was dangerous. But to hide something of this magnitude, to conceal it from the world? To seek to silence the one person trying to reveal it? It made his blood boil, and for a moment he felt as if the whole world had opened up before his rage. Then it was gone. Will reached across the table and gripped Harry’s wrist, looking the man in the eye. He felt something shift. “Why? Why hide it?” Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom. Will Chase 666 Words

♛

[NoSuchThing]

Written in collaboration with Will Chase

For the first time, Harry felt the conversation slide out of his control.

“Humanity cannot be trusted with the knowledge, the last time it came out… we were burned…”

Burned? The Witch Hunts maybe? But which ones? The ones in Europe Will thought - the way Harry was talking certainly indicated that it had been a long time, and most of the more recent ones were less about magic and more about race or ideology.

But everything the man was saying was just pissing Will off more. The truth was more important than self-righteous justifications. Humanity was fucked up yes, but who the hell did Harry and his fellows think they were to have the right to dictate what people were allowed to know. ‘Humanity cannot be trusted with the knowledge’? Fuck that shit.

You cannot know what will happen, until it does.

“Who are your organisation to dictate what humanity can and cannot know?”

Harry sighed, “no organisation, just a people who want to survive.”

“But if this woman wants to reveal you to the world, then evidently she believes that you can survive without hiding. Why should I believe you over her?”

“What gives her the right to make that decision for the rest of the world?”

Will took his hand from Harry’s wrist, leaning back and averting his eyes. There was another shift. “I’m sorry. This is evidently very important to you and there’s obviously a lot that I don’t know. I shouldn’t have been talking to you like that. In regards to your question, I don’t know. I don’t know her motivations. She was annoyingly cryptic, talking about changes and birthrights and expecting me to know what she meant.”

The Asian-American leaned back warily, “So why are you helping her?”

“I haven’t helped her, not that I know of. We’ve spoken only once, and she asked nothing of me. My reticence is because she saved my life, and I find it difficult to think ill of someone who would do such a thing and ask for nothing in return. That you have lied to the world for so long is, admittedly, another reason for my poor attitude; I despise deceit in all of its forms, even where others would see it as the best or even the only choice.”

“Private eye was the wrong career for you, you should have been a priest.”

Harry chuckled at his own joke, then grew serious again. “I don’t pretend to have all the answers, or even to understand the ones I do have, but I trust the people who do. I have to. It is a hard choice, but we have never pretended to be superior because of it, we hide because we feel we must. We know that our current course of action is the safest. Who knows what might happen should we change now?”

“Didn’t I just say I hated lying? Priests do it all the time.” Will snarked, but he was too busy focussing on the rest of what Harry had said to worry about the poor jokes they were both making. It made sense; it pissed him off to admit it, but he could understand why people would prefer to continue doing as they had always done rather than risk something going wrong. It was only human nature.

“But to answer your initial question, I don’t know of anyone else the doctor has been in contact with for certain, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she met with one of the other survivors of the crash.”

“Shit…”

Harry looked concerned, “then we need to talk to them, and now…”

“What will you do if they’ve spoken with her, and are less willing to hear you out than I was? She may have been annoyingly cryptic with me, but that may be because she knew you were near, and didn’t want to risk me giving away anything incriminating. But them? Well, they’ll only have her side of the story. I know very well what can happen when you make decisions based on only half the evidence.” Will took another sip of his coffee before continuing.

“You seem willing to talk Harry. I think you believe that what you’re doing is right, but as you said earlier you don’t know everything. And I obviously know almost nothing about this whole situation. So here’s my question. How far do you think your fellows would go to keep this secret?”

The smaller, dark-haired man glanced towards his companion, who was still sipping his absurdly complicated drink. The taller, bulkier man returned the glance, though what it said was a mystery.

“I think you’re confusing us with the CIA again. We are not mindless killers. Besides, people would ask more questions than they already are if you died so suddenly after your miraculous recovery.”

“I never said you were mindless, but people can do terrifying things when they’re frightened, and few things cause more fear than change. Besides, who said anything about killing. I’d be surprised if you don’t have a way to make sure we don’t say anything without needing to resort to that. A telepath maybe, or something similar. And even if you don’t, questions are much easier to brush aside than people actively trying to reveal your secret.”

“But anyway, there were six of us. Six survivors. Dominic, Mason and myself, as well as Persephone, Alice and Claire.”

“I don’t know any of them particularly well, so I’m afraid I probably won’t be much help.” Will deliberately ignored the fact that Dominic had given him his number, ‘accidentally’ omitted that he was fairly certain Persephone wouldn’t be revealing anything any time soon unless actively pushed into it and just generally was totally ignorant of a lot of things he’d worked out about his fellow survivors.

“Mhmmm…”

The response did not sound convinced, after all, Will had already proven himself to have something of a penchant for knowledge.

“True telepaths are rare, those who can affect memories rarer still.”

He slipped a business card across the table, a plain white card with a number stamped in black across one side. There was no other information on the card.

“If you see them you need to call me.”

Will smiled as he took the card. “I’ll make sure to do so. It was a pleasure meeting you Harry, even if I could’ve done with a few less mind-blowing revelations.”

He wasn’t lying. Will genuinely liked the man. He was honest, forthright and blunt in a way that was too rare in the world. It was ironic, considering that he was involved in hiding the biggest secret Will had ever found out about.

Will stood, finishing his coffee. “I’ll see you around.”

Harry watched him leave, before standing and joining Roman by the exit. He didn’t look pleased.

“He’s contacting them right now…”

---

Will was halfway back to his office, checking all around the whole way, by the time he pulled out his phone and dialled a number.

“Dominic, it’s Will. We need to talk.”

Will Chase

MADE BY VEL OF GS