Post

by xbritomartx

Summary:

Following Leviathan’s attack, Director Piggot is replaced—not by Thomas Calvert, veteran PRT officer turned supervillain, but by Malory Archer, veteran intelligence agent turned PRT bureaucrat. Unfortunately for the mental health (and operating costs of all the bars) of Brockton Bay, Director Archer arranges for the transfer of her son, the greatest PRT agent in the world.

Chapter 1

Disaster. Unparalleled, unprecedented, unmitigated disaster.

Malory Archer surveyed her new domain: the flooded, crumbling, and literally stinking city of Brockton Bay, and drained her bourbon. She'd made it neat because their generators couldn't cover heating and an ice machine.

"Ms. Archer," Carol said through the water-stained hole that passed for her intercom, "someone's here to see you."

A metal teenager opened her door before she could consent to any such imposition.

"And what do you want?" she demanded.

"Ma'am, it's me." He seemed nonplussed, like he thought she'd know or/and care. Typical adolescent, so self-centered. Sterling had been the same, with his it's been years, why can't you come to one measly lacrosse game this and blah blah graduation ceremony blah that, and oh, Tinman was still talking. "Weld?" he offered.

"Do I look like I do manual labor?" she snarled.

"Weld's my name," he said hesitantly. "Because I'm metal and other metal sticks to me? I'm the new head of your Wards team?"

"Why didn't you say so?"

"I just did," he said. Another idiot this heartless world had cruelly inflicted on her.

"Don't get snotty with me, you subnormal smattering of sharpened slag, or I'll ship you off to Eagleton before you can say 'scrap,'" she retorted.

He left, apologizing. Her doorknob left with him, and he apologized for that, too.

By God, his angels, and all else that was or might be holy, Malory Archer would get out of this dump before the month was over.

Chapter 2

"See, you say that," Archer said.

"I do," responded Faultline, the steely-eyed mercenary and entirely heterosexual owner of the Palanquin. "This—"

Archer held up a finger as he drank. 

"Don't shush me in my own bar!"

Whatever Archer might have had for that was choked off as Lana grabbed his turtleneck and dragged him back to their sports car.

"I can't believe you're getting drunk on duty," she hissed.

"You can't? It's not exactly something that pushes the bounds of probability, Lana."

"Didn't you listen to Malory? We're supposed to investigate those murder scenes. She entrusted that responsibility to us. Not the established teams on the ground, not the Protectorate, not the Wards. Us."

"Oh, that." He took a turn down an alley at forty-five miles an hour. "The Slaughterhouse Nine is here."

"I—You knew?"

"Duh and/or hello? The files we got had three crime scenes with three bodies, like some kind of, of…Murder Sudoku?"

"You read the files?"

"I listened to you complain about them."

“You’d think Malory would have noticed that and briefed us, or—" Lana suddenly gasped. "Oh my God, she knows!”

“What?” 

"Malory! She already knew the Slaughterhouse Nine were here, she just wanted us out of the office so she could screw that consultant!"

"What?” Archer exclaimed. 

"Screw! Shag! Schtupp! Fuck! Your mom! Is hot! For Thomas! Calvert!"

Archer vomited, and was so busy vomiting he collided head-on with a moving van.

“Uh, so, yeah," he said, wiping his mouth off. "That was rhetorical."

Chapter 3

"You are the most desperate attention whore since—" Lana broke off. She'd had something for this, but her head injury stopped her from locating the perfect pop culture reference. "Since—"

"Since Alex Forrest went into petcare?"

"Damn it, yes." She glared at Archer's smirk. "You are so pathetic, you totaled a car and killed someone—"

"I killed a hobo, Lana. A hobo." 

"Because your mother had a date! I have a concussion—" 

"That's, like, super bad for you."

"I," snarled Lana, "Know. I have a concussion because your mother has a date and you have an Electra complex! We need to hunt down the Nine before Shatterbird sings and you're hospitalizing us so your mom won't get lucky."

"Oh, she's still getting lucky," Pam said. She and Ray had been dispatched to make sure that Archer and Lana had gotten to the hospital, which was really more of a damp tent. "If you know what I mean. And Calvert was receptive, if you know what I mean."

"Ugh," everyone said.

"I mean sex."

"Look, Lana, nobody got hurt," Ray said, trying to forestall any further clarification.

Lana pointed to her head. "Concussion!"

"Nobody important," Ray muttered.

"Hey!" Lana said. "Not to mention that poor man."

"The hobo," Archer corrected. 

Nobody took him up on that.

"They aren't people," he added. "And he was totally a pedophile anyway."

"Uh, point of order?" Krieger said. "Not everyone with a windowless white van is a pedophile!"

“Yeah!” Mitsuko Miyazumi said, before glitching out.