Chapter Text
Doc’s office was boiling hot.
It was probably some kind of trick that he did to get people to talk, and Etho would be lying if he said it wouldn’t work. He was a lawyer, kind of, and so he knew all the dirty tricks that cops used to get people to tell them the truth. This was one of them, and as Etho shrugged his jacket off and rested it on the chair beside him, he hated the fact that he knew what was happening. It was hot, the chair he was sitting in was uncomfortable, the lights were bright, and Doc was behind his desk with his feet up and staring at him like he was some kind of criminal. If Etho didn’t know any better, he would think he was the one under investigation, not helping it.
“How was the meeting?” Doc asked eventually, his hand cupped in front of him carrying a handful of some kind of trail mix.
Etho shifted in his seat, his palms sweaty as he played with his fingers. “Enlightening.” he said eventually, embarrassed with how long it actually took him to respond.
Doc just hummed, smacking his lips together and making the hairs on the back of Etho’s neck stand up. Could he at least chew quietly… this wasn’t helping matters. “It would be helpful if you elaborate.”
Etho stared down at the recorder, watching the tape whirl around the little box. Maybe he was under investigation. Maybe he wasn’t doing a good enough job, and Doc was starting to suspect him. He sighed, looking out the window onto the street below. Doc’s office was on one of the taller floors, and it was difficult to not feel like you could fall out of the window at any moment. He suspected this was intentional, although whether or not Doc interviewed suspects in his office was… questionable.
“Well..” he began, letting his shoulder slump as he tried to relax. “It started early in the morning…”
~~
Etho jolted awake by the sound of his phone on the nightstand. His ringtone wasn’t the same nice melody that his alarm was, and so waking up to it made his heart pound inside of his throat. When the sound didn’t go away immediately, he reached over and grabbed it, quinting into the bright light only to come face to face with an unknown number. He groaned, angry at the World for waking him up because of a spam call before pressing decline and shutting his eyes again.
His ears still rang slightly, and that coupled with the way his heart was pounding made it harder to realize that his phone was ringing a second time. He looked at it to find the same unknown caller, and after a moment of consideration, answered it and put it on speaker. “Hello?”
“Etho?” the voice on the other end asked, before coughing violently.
Etho sat up in his seat. “Uh… yes?”
The caller didn’t answer for a moment, instead seemingly drinking something. “It’s Grian.”
Oh. “.. Hello, Grian.” he said, moving the phone away from his face and yawning.
There was bustling from the other end of the phone, and a ding of a bell. It was instantly clear to Etho that Grian had been awake for a while. He turned to check the clock on his desk: 5:30AM. “I didn’t wake you, did I?”
Etho laughed despite himself, running a hand over his face to try and wake himself up. “Yes, but it’s fine.” Lie, if his calculations are correct he only got just a few hours of sleep. “How can I help you?”
A pause, and the only way Etho knew the call didn’t drop was because of the huffed mumbling on the end of the phone. He heard the words Bet and Security, but otherwise it was too muffled to hear. “No need to be so formal, dude. We’re friends!” Etho was suspicious of this. “I was just calling about your meeting with Scar today. About the Thing.”
Etho blinked. Did Grian know about Scar helping him? “The Thing.” he repeated, trying to see if Grian would admit to knowing it.
He didn’t. “Yes, the Thing. With Scar, about the Thing that you’re supposed to meet about.”
There was silence on the phone for a long time. “Right. The… Thing.” Etho frowned, stopping when he realized Grian couldn’t actually see it. He had totally forgotten about his meeting with Scar today, but he wasn’t about to go to Grian about that fact. He moved on from the suspicious thinging for now. “What about it? I thought it was after lunch.”
Grian sucked in a breath through the other end of the phone. “Right.. So about that… Do you think you could meet for dinner? We have an event tonight and it’s turning out to be a bit more difficult to plan than we anticipated.” there was more mumbling on the other side of the phone, but Etho couldn’t make it out.
“Um.” Etho said lamely, looking up at the ceiling fan. It really was dusty, he would have to clean it soon. “Yeah, that works.” not like he had anything else to do today, anyway. “Where do you want to meet?”
“Scar can text you, I won’t be able to come.” he heard the ding of the shop door again, and Grian cursed under his breath. “I gotta go, I just wanted to check- bye!” Etho opened his mouth to answer, but the phone had already gone silent on the other end.
Etho groaned, throwing his phone to the other side of the bed and rubbing his face. Great, now he would be up thinking about his meeting with Scar all day, no doubt making himself all tired and anxious in the process. After a moment of consideration, he turned to grab his phone again, hoping the bright light would somehow wake him up enough to get out of bed.
He went to twitter, of course, because where else would he doom scroll to stop himself from thinking about something important. He smiled when he opened the app, Bdubs had posted on Twitter about his-
~~
“X.” Doc corrected him, and Etho blinked back to reality and stared at Doc with a confused expression. “It’s X now, remember?”
Etho just stared at Doc with a blank expression. “I don’t use it that often. I didn’t know.” he said, feeling once again embarrassed. “Bdubs- Bo got it for me.”
Doc just hummed, unimpressed. “Clearly.” he moved his hand in Etho’s general direction. “Please continue, no need to lament about Bdubs.”
Etho coughed, shifting in his chair. He wouldn’t say he was going to lament about Bdubs, he had just mentioned them once! “Right… where was I?”
~~
The store seemed to be busier than usual when he got in, people coming in and out, boxes moving, Scar talking loudly. At first Etho thought that they must be moving or something to warrant this kind of hustle, but then he remembered what Grian had said on the phone. Not moving, just… still getting ready for the event, he guessed. He checked his watch and realized that there was only fifteen minutes till, which meant either they hadn’t done a very good job of planning, or they just had a lot to get done.
He waited off to the side next to a large collection of animal heads while Scar finished talking to two men with a very large box, watching as they went into the back before Scar rolled around the desk and towards him. “Hey, Scar.”
“Hello hello!” the other said, happy as ever. “Thank you for meeting late. You know, we just have so much to do with the event and the moving and cleaning.” Scar clicked his tongue and shook his head, waving his hands around like a wild man. “It’s all so much, Etho! But now you’re here, and that’s what matters.” He seemed all over the place, but Etho had a feeling it was all a ruse.
“What did you want to meet about?” Etho said instead, trying to get to the point. It was already starting to get dark, and Etho had a feeling he had just stepped into something far larger than he expected.
Scar just smiled, noticing Etho’s anxiety with a little chuckle. That didn’t help matters for Etho, but he pushed it down as he listened to what the man had to say. “Come with me. I want to show you something.” he said, grabbing the wheels of his wheelchair and maneuvering it back behind the counter. “I usually only let employees through this way, but I think you’ll appreciate the view.”
Etho didn’t quite have time to think about what that meant before he was following Etho to the back of the shop. When they reached an unmarked door at the back of the shop, Scar pressed a hidden button, and a small elevator opened. It creaked in a way that made Etho’s teeth shake, but he ignored it for now as he just tried to process the ridiculousness of this situation. He watched as Scar got into the elevator, and hurried in after him when the man coughed and gestured for him to hurry. The inside of the thing was rough, obviously, and clearly some kind of service elevator that looked like it hadn’t been checked in a century. He held his breath as the thing went down and down, seemingly taking forever until eventually it stopped with halt, making Etho grip one of the hand rails on the side for stability.
When the door opened, Etho had a hard time adjusting to the dark lights in the space. There was music playing, so loud that Etho was surprised he hadn’t been able to hear it from upstairs, and people were screaming and shouting somewhere that Etho couldn’t actually see. Scar made his way out of the elevator first, rolling up what appeared to be a balcony above the chaos. Etho followed, and when he looked down, he had to grip the railing to stop himself from feeling like he was going to fall off.
What was under them both was… a ring. It took Etho a moment to figure out what was going on, but he soon realized the floor beneath them was lowered in steps, the middle of the room practically 2 stories below them, and circular like a colosseum. There were hundreds of people down there, sitting on the steps, all shouting and drinking and clapping. All of them were looking down at two people, two women, who were walking around each other in the middle of the room. Etho recognized them instantly, of course, as Cleo and Gem.
Etho opened his mouth to speak, to say something, but Scar got to it first. “Just watch,” he said, pointing up at the large screen that was taking up half of the wall. “Look at the bets.”
Etho frowned, looking over to the board and watching the numbers skyrocket. It wasn’t even though, not by a mile. The numbers were insane on both ends, but Gem’s was clearly almost double Cleo’s. People obviously expected her to win, and it made his stomach churn. How could Gem do something like this? She was- she was their *therapist*! Now here she is participating in some kind of… what? Illegal underground fight club? Run in Scar’s basement? Why hadn’t Cleo told him that this was something she was doing?
He looked closer at the names, and it didn’t take long for him to find Joe Hill’s name, a rather large sum of money next to it for… Cleo. Etho frowned, it made sense that he would bet on Cleo, they were best friends. So why…
“Why would Joe Hills bet on a losing woman?” Scar asked next to him, leaning back in his chair.
Etho looked down at the arena, flinching every time Gem or Cleo landed a blow on the other. They really were fighting, and it looked so real that Etho wanted to jump in and stop it. “Joe’s her friend…” he said, looking away and to Scar. “What does this have to do with anything?”
Scar hummed, shrugging his shoulders. “Not sure, that’s why I’ve come to watch this myself.” he admitted, leaning a bit to smirk a bit as the first timeout was called. “Joe usually bets on Gem, same as anyone else. She’s our winner.” He leaned back in his chair and smiled, leaving Etho with nothing else to do than stand there and watch.
He flinched every time a punch landed, his heart pounding as he watched the two fight. Every time he thought Cleo had landed a punch or two that Etho thought would end the fight, Gem would give it back ten fold. It became clear to Etho about halfway through that they might be dramatizing it, but when Gem landed a punch that should have been just a graze and Cleo almost fell over completely, he knew it was. The crowd was cheering loudly in a way that made it difficult to hear his own thoughts, and it only got louder when one of them seemed to be winning.
The end of the fight happened so fast that if Etho blinked, he would have missed it. All at once, Gem was on the ground, and Cleo was on top of her and raising her fists in the air. The crowd all went quiet, and then the… noise started. At first he thought it was cheering, but he realized quickly it wasn’t for Cleo. It was for Gem, begging her to get up and fight, but she just stayed down.
“Should someone go help her?” he asked, looking down at Scar. “She looks hurt.”
Scar just shooed the thought away, pointing down at the ring. “Look.”
He watched as Cleo kneeled down, and made a pained face as she got close to Gem and raised her fist. When she let it drop, the crowd went up in arms again, but from where Scar and Etho were standing above it all, it was clear that Cleo had just hit the concrete next to Gem’s head instead. That didn’t stop Gem from pretending she did get hit, and all but acted like she had passed out while some refs came into the circle to announce Cleo the winner.
“They rigged the fight,” he said, speaking more to himself than to Scar. He looked up at the board with all the bets, Cleo’s side turning green in victory which only caused a bit more of a ruckus down below. “Why would they do that?” Why would any of this even be happening at all? The questions that were flowing through his head were all far too sensitive to ask now that Etho couldn’t even hear himself think.
“I suspect it’s the same reason that Joe switched his bet.” Scar said over the crowd, moving backwards in his chair to seemingly leave the balcony. Etho stood there with his mouth open as he tried to process what was happening, watching one of the referees raise Cleo’s hand in victory before following Scar away from the railing. “I figured you would want to see why Cleo might not be the most truthful.” he said, as if he had done Etho some kind of favor. If anything the man had made things infinitely more complicated. Scar pressed the button on the elevator to go back up, and Etho just stared at it, watching the lights move through the crack in the door as it came down to get them.
~~
“Wait, that’s it?” Doc asked, after a long pause after Etho’s final words. “You just left?”
Etho shifted in his seat, not quite expecting Doc to sound so mad after he just exposed an underground fighting ring and possible illegal betting manipulation. “I mean… yeah, he walked me out, I couldn’t exactly stick around.”
Doc sighed, taking his feet off of his desk and resting his face in the palms of his hands. “You didn’t try to get back in there?” he asked again.
Etho stuttered, sitting on the edge of the seat. “I had just gotten a lot of information!” he said, as if that was an excuse. “And I’ve been dealing with a lot with my friends and my Dad and-”
Doc made a noise that was quite close to a grunt or a growl, and Etho shut up fast. “I don’t need your life story.” he said, and Etho tried to make the same annoyed noise that Doc had, failing miserably. “You can go now, I’ve recorded the statement.”
Etho didn’t move. “... That’s it?”
Doc managed a smile, and somehow that smile was worse than the glares he had gotten all day from the man. “Don’t like it when it happens to you now, do you?”