Summer 07 Ficathon: Chasing Snowflakes
Author: Neptunienne/la_dame_du_lac (fka Meg/meg_the_ebmod)
Title: Chasing Snowflakes
Summary: Brass is on an endless and impossible quest.
Prompt: Chicago, IL
Rating: Teen for language and dark themes, I guess.
Pairing: None
Spoilers: Takes place somewhere between S2 and S5. Some vague references to "Ellie".
Disclaimer: None of this belongs to me, I'm just borrowing from the CBS.
Author's Note: this ended up being sort of a prequel/companion piece to my story "Hide and Seek". I foresee a series...

The snow was falling turbulently, flowing in all directions, making patterns in the air. The snowflakes looked like they were tracing a map, destinations and trajectories marked for a few seconds by the white dots before disappearing again. His gaze followed them as he absent-mindedly wished that he could find the right place on that imaginary treasure map.

'J&B double, ice on the side and a napkin.'

Brass sighed wearily and nodded at the barman, gladly pulling the tall glass of ice and the napkin towards him. Funny how these things happened. One minute you were asking a guy questions about your daughter. Next minute, you'd punched him in the face. He emptied the ice onto the napkin and folded it up carefully, before applying it to his throbbing eyebrow. That was going to leave a mark. Good thing he wasn't due back to work for a few days. He hated having to explain this kind of thing.

How could he tell his boss that an ex-colleague from Jersey had been looking out for his estranged daughter and thought that he'd found her new address? That was why Brass was in Chicago. On Christmas Eve, too, very appropriate for family reunions. In movies, people always found their long-estranged children or parents on Christmas, managed to patch things up, and have a heart-warming moment around a Christmas tree. Well the only heart-warming that was going on was the burn of alcohol down his throat. The weather outside was appropriately icy and gloomy, threatening when you thought that your kid might not have any place to go.

He'd found the flat where she'd been purported to live, and the guy living there said he'd had a roommate called Beckie. Well, not such a far step from Rebecca. He'd been a fairly repulsive little junkie, complete with twitching and sweating, but Brass had worked with him, asking him questions as he would have done with any witness. The conversation replayed in snatches in his mind.

'What was your relationship with Beckie?' His voice had been smooth and calm, perfectly professional.

'Hard to tell, man, you know? She was, like, you know?'

'No, I don't,' had answered Brass coolly. He did, though. Easy. That's what the guy meant.

'She relationshipped me and some other guys. We were free, see?' Relationshipped. The word set Brass's teeth on edge.

'Yeah, I see. So, uh, do you happen to know the names of any of these other guys?'

'No way, that was her shit, you know?'

'Uh-huh?'

'Yeah. She was good at it, the relationship thing. Sometimes she didn't even need to get out of bed to pay the rent.' Brass had done a double take, hoping there were other ways to interpret that.

Then the guy let out this dirty little snorting cackle, both contemptuous and deeply sleazy. Something had broken in Brass. His brain barely had time to get in gear before his fist had connected with the guy's face. He'd expected him to crash down on the ground, but surprisingly he'd stayed on his feet and punched him right back. Then Brass had launched himself at him and wrestled him to the floor. Junkies were unpredictable in fights, uncoordinated but sometimes vicious, depending what they were on. Brass had finally grabbed the guy's arm and twisted it back to cause as much pain as he could without doing any real damage.

'Never,' he'd panted, getting his gun out of its holster with his free hand. 'Never speak about my daughter like that again, you little shit.' His voice had been a deep rasp. He nudged the guy's neck with the barrel, making him shriek with terror. 'Now tell me where she went.' Brass's voice had become so low that he wasn't sure the junkie had heard him through his screams.

'Oh my God don't kill me!' the guy was howling over and over.

'Tell me,' had breathed Brass in his ear, causing him to buck under him.

'I don't know! She said Cali! I don't know! She was with a friend!' He said it several times, with more variations of "oh my god please don't kill me" and pathetic wailing injected in between.

When the fury had started to release its grip on Brass, he'd managed to stand up and leave the pathetic excuse for a human being trembling and whining on the floor. He'd walked away as fast as he could, as far as he could, so that he wouldn't be tempted to return and do something unforgivable. The only thing that had calmed him down was the cold, cooling his head, giving him a grip over himself.

He'd finally escaped the frigid weather by entering the first quiet bar he'd found, but ironically, instead of warming himself up, he was pressing ice to his face. It was because the numbness was fading. Punching someone in the mouth definitely had a calming effect, and getting punched back and getting into a good old-fashioned brawl sometimes provided a much-needed release, too. But that didn't last very long. The guy's words had echoed through his skull all the way to the bar and they were still there now, relentlessly ringing in his ears. Brass didn't believe him, but the words obsessed him. If only he could find Ellie and ask her, make sure, once and for all, that it was just a nasty lie from a junkie's dirty fantasies.

But it was impossible to find her, she was as elusive as a snowflake in a gust of wind, lost among others, gone within instants. Huh. If there had to be a heartwarming Christmas story in there, she would have still been there, miraculously. She'd have entered this bar, looking for shelter. Then he would have made sure she was okay, got the answers to all those questions that rang in his head all the time, and then... and then maybe he would have convinced her to come home with him, to that spare room that had been empty since the last time she'd deigned spend a week with him in Vegas. How long ago was that? Seven, eight years, at the very least, when Ellie was still in her early teens.

She'd been a different person then. He'd lost track of her, and the person she'd become after that... he could barely fathom it. The question kept returning, a maddening obsession: what had happened to her? What had her Mom done, her boyfriends, Nancy's boyfriends, her school, her junkie friends -- what had he done to her -- to make her so twisted? Had it been one event? Or had it been a chain of classical Brass bad luck that had made her like this?

Nancy had called him in a panic when Ellie was sixteen and hanging out with a senior in her High School. She'd read Ellie's diary and found out about her relationship with him, and their experiments with drugs. Then she'd faxed him copies. Nancy always knew how to get the most out of a situation. She'd managed to devastate him, and to get him to come over to Jersey to fix a situation that had completely escaped her control.

So, asking a few of his ex-colleagues to help probably hadn't been his brightest moment. He'd been stuck in Vegas by a belated flight, and he really wanted Ellie to be kept away from that sonofabitch until the situation was sorted. Ah, it got sorted. They picked them up high as kites, coming out of his Prom, barely minutes before Brass's plane had landed.

And then he came to fetch her at the Newark police station. It had been such a shock. He'd last seen her as a gangly, slightly awkward but generally loveable 13 year-old, and she'd metamorphosed into this... junkie. Crazed eyes popping out of her head, voice cracking after hours of screaming. She'd spat on him and called him names even scum in the streets didn't dare call him. Now he knew how the mother in the Exorcist had felt when the demon had got into her little girl. There wasn't anything he could do, though. She wouldn't let him help, or let him in. It had been too late.

And then Ellie had come to Vegas. Brass kept on wondering if she'd planned that -- "look at what you've done to me, Daddy"? -- or if she'd been forced there by her friends with a scam plan. She definitely seemed to want to rub his face in it, to mock him... humiliate him in front of his colleagues maybe? She didn't realize that he didn't care about that. All he cared about was getting her out of that mess. He swallowed hard when he remembered that brief moment of hope, when he'd thought that she may reach out to him and let him back in. A good mouthful of Scotch burnt away some of the tightness in his throat.

Well, at least he'd had hope when she'd gone home to her Mom, if not for his relationship with her, at least for her future. She wasn't a rebellious teenager anymore, maybe she'd get along better with Nancy. She could get a job and straighten herself out. Ha. That hope lasted a few precious months, until Nancy called to say Ellie had left for God knew where. New-York, Trenton, Philly... it was anyone's guess. Until he'd found out about Chicago.

Brass looked at the falling snow again. Time to leave. He'd finished his Scotch, and the ice in the napkin had mostly melted. He'd been too late, she'd skipped town yet again. A few weeks earlier and perhaps he'd have managed to see her, to reason with her. But she was right. He could have great timing on the job, he could anticipate the moves of serial killers, be at the airport just when the suspect was about to cross security, but when it came to Ellie... he was always too late.

The only hope he clung to now was that he would be able to defy fate and find her while there was still something left of her to save.