Chapter Text
Part 1: Marc&Steven
Chapter 1: The trail
It all started with a money trail.
Three months had passed since Marc Spector died, got resurrected and helped to defeat an Egyptian goddess. Three months since he'd resigned as Khonshu's avatar and decided to try and repair his marriage with Layla. Three month since his alter Steven Grant moved to London following their mother's death and he'd unexpectedly gained a new best friend in him.
Life was... normal. Which was so alien to Marc. He no longer had any duties patrolling the night and he had earned enough blood money over his career as a merc to never have to work a day in his life ever again. Layla on the other hand was still Taweret's avatar and loved it too much to give it up just yet. She did some crime fighting, sure, but it was mostly just responding to police requests for backup whenever something supernatural showed up. She was a very public superhero, giving interviews and visiting hospitals to tell stories to children and occasionally offering services as a medium to contact souls of the deceased on the other side. So when they didn't happen to have an outing planned, that left Marc with nothing to do for most of the day. Small wonder then that he ended up giving in to Steven's plans. His alter managed barely a week without a job before he got restless and wanted a new one. Not for the money, just for the stability and ideally, for fun. However he didn't feel like having to answer to any boss that would judge him and his productivity. Donna had been quite enough of that for him, thank you very much. He wanted to be his own boss. Steven was too self-conscious to go to university at 30 years of age to try and live his childhood dream of becoming an archaeologist. But he could be the next best thing and be an investor. He could sponsor expeditions and thus gain free access to any that he liked. He liked the idea so much that Marc gave him his bank data, told him to go crazy and have fun.
One month later the Grant Foundation was born, sponsoring excavations around the globe. Steven turned out to have a head for numbers. He worked his way through various shadow companies and fake alias Marc had used to launder his money in such a short time, Marc could only liken it to his own knowledge and skills bleeding into the other, just as his combat abilities had once they stopped actively fighting each other.
A large amount of Marc's capital was gathering interest in bank accounts already and Steven increased said output through a couple of investments. The passive income they earned that way was large enough to keep at least one project of the Grant Foundation afloat, any more and they had to pour extra money in.
It was through this inventory of all of their assets that Steven stumbled over something curious.
"Hey Marc," Steven said aloud one day, sitting at their PC in the new, bigger apartment in London that he now shared with Layla, with a cup of tea at his side, "who is Jake Lockley?"
Marc had lingered in co-consciousness for most of the day, never truly making an attempt to move front. It had been Steven who woke up in their bed, Steven who made breakfast while humming a long to a song in the radio and Steven who kissed Layla goodbye as she left to fly over the rooftops of the city. He'd had a long and boring meeting with their consultant at the bank behind him and a shopping trip for a new pair of shoes and now he was going over bank statements.
It was so normal, so ordinary, so... boring that Marc struggled to pay attention for most of the time. Not that he missed getting shot at. It wasn't even that they didn't do anything useful. Steven was determined to build up his Foundation till it could support its own staff provide jobs and maybe even fund a few scholarships. He also chose to place investments in local businesses rather than big, corrupt companies, building up the economy in the city they lived in. He was using what knowledge, skills and resources he had to do good in a non-violent way. Steven enjoyed it. Marc... didn't. A few numbers on a screen increasing just was not nearly as satisfying as the crunch of a broken nose under his fist from an asshole that needed to be taught a lesson -
Marc pulled himself together and forced himself to pay attention.
"Who?" he asked and settled a bit closer to the front, seeing what Steven saw.
His hand pointed at the name on the screen. "Jake Lockley," he repeated. "There's this sham company you own, a cab driving company that you used to wash cash. It's registered in Spain. Do you remember?"
"Yeah, I do," Marc said. He'd set it up after finished a job years ago while still working as a merc. Many cab drivers were still being paid in cash so it was a good way to wash some of his. "I stole some cars and recruited a few homeless. Maybe six drivers. Paid them a bonus for forging the numbers and they ran a payment I got through within half a year. Afterward I closed the company." It was a strategy he'd employed a lot back then. Get a new job worth a hundred grand or so, recruit a few unfortunate souls that he could easily scare into not screwing him over and let them wash his money for him - or rather whatever alias he used to found a business they worked for. Then close the business and fire all the employees, hand out a bonus as thanks and voila, the money would be legal and clean, owned by an alias of his. It could then be invested back into any of his other sham companies if he wanted to funnel it to a different alias or the Foundation or he could use it for whatever he liked so long as he used the alias of the sham company owner.
"It's not registered as closed though," Steven said.
"What?" Marc looked closer and indeed. Steven had opened a website to 'Coastal Cars` that was advertising prices and routes as any normal cab service would. The website claimed to have been updated last only seven months ago. The company itself was nearly seven years old.
"I did some digging," Steven went on, "and the website is actually an almost exact copy of 'Coastal Cabs', a real transportation service in Gibraltar. The prices, pictures, even the telephone numbers are all from there. The only difference is a special party service where you can rent a limousine." He clicked on a link that lead to an ad of a long, white limousine that was apparently for rent with a chauffeur provided for a frankly ridiculous price.
"I mean, it's obviously a scam but it's still supposedly open and there's even an employee listed. One employee, mind you. Only one," Steven said. "Jake Lockley. I dug up the paperwork from back then and this guy has apparently drawn a monthly salary for the last seven years from this company."
"That can't be," Marc said with a scowl. "I withdrew all funds from it when I closed it."
"All funds were withdrawn," Steven confirmed, switching the window back to bank statements. "But so was the dissolvement of the company. And then you - or Diego Serrano, the alias you used as business owner - reinvested 20 grand into it. And then again a few months later. A year after that half a million euros was invested into the company by another alias account of yours." Steven's gaze moved from looking at the numbers to gazing at his reflection in the glass of the monitor. "This looks suspiciously like someone leeching off of us, mate."
"Wait a moment. Let me try something," Marc said and moved further front. Steven made room for him and Marc settled into the body with only a minor headache. He started typing quickly and within a few minutes had hacked his way into the Spanish traffic agency. Sure enough Jake Lockley was registered as a citizen and he was able to pull up a driver's license.
Their own face stared back at them.
"Oh," Steven made and chuckled. "So it's just another alias after all. The name wasn't in the file you showed me so I missed it."
"I don't remember making an alias with that name," Marc said with a scowl.
"Mate, you have over three dozen fake identities. You probably just forgot," Steven teased him. "I bet when we draw up his account details there will be a suspicious amount of money sitting in it that no actual human ever spend. We'll have to think of something like declare him dead and forge a will that grants all of his money to the Foundation."
"I don't just forget my alias," Marc replied annoyed. "It's not that hard to keep track of. I had exactly one Spanish alias: Diego Serenno. I used it for Coastal Cars back then and again in 2023 when I had him immigrate to Norway and used him for another job. That was it. There's a veteran meetup that takes place in Gibraltar once a year that I visit when I can but other than that, I don't have any connection to that place. Even when I do go there, I don’t need that much cash. Besides, if I had made another alias there I would've picked one with a Spanish last name."
"So... You don't remember your username and password at Gibintbank?" Steven asked.
"I don't have an account there," Marc protested.
"Jake Lockley does," Steven pointed out, nodding at the information in the bank statements.
"I don't believe this," Marc said frustrated and started typing again. Now he was starting to doubt his own memory. Had he created another Spanish alias? He really, really didn't think so and he surely would remember. Marc was fluent in Spanish as it was his mother's native tongue, whose family was originally from Mexico. This was a nationality he could easily pull off under an alias. However Marc never really liked using the language. It reminded him too much of harsh lessons taught to him way back then at home. His mother had raised Randall and him bilingual when they were young. But after his brother's death, after the abuse started, Wendy had become intent on making sure to present the image of a perfectly happy family to the outside even as she turned her house into hell for her son. Part of that included constantly correcting Marc's speech till me sounded like a real American. They could not change the darker tone of their skin but they could do everything else to try and fit on with the upper middle class of their Chicago neighborhood. Nothing bad ever happened in a cozy house with a white picket fence.
If course Marc was sure that this whole upholding of the upper class image was only a flimsy excuse for his mother to punish Marc harshly for using the speech she herself had raised him with.
"You got it!" Steven exclaimed happily when Marc's third password attempt opened the next page. Marc blinked. With as many accounts as he had, he did re-use passwords for his less important accounts and he changed what he used only once a year. So he'd typed in the passwords he faintly remembered using in that particular year. It wasn't BlueSe@18, the same as the one he used for Serenno. It wasn't FreddyKr?eger3, after the name of the family dog of his old merc partner Frenchie. Instead it was... What had been the third password Marc had just typed in?
"Okay, so someone's been using this account," Steven said, taking over their hand and scrolling though the transactions listed. Indeed money had been withdrawn from this account at seemingly random intervals and from places all over the world. Often times it was just smaller cash withdrawals. A card was used much less often, mostly for gas, convenience stores and sometimes hotels. Lockley had even gotten a raise on his salary at some point. It really did look rather a lot like one of the accounts Marc would use when he traveled under an alias. Except there was only a handful he actually used regularly and this was definitely not one of them.
"What are these payments?" Steven wondered, pointing out the one number that got send out by the account at the beginning of every month. Marc clicked on it. Jake Lockley did not pay gas nor electricity nor insurance. But he did send a significant amount of his cab driver salary to what appeared to be another private account under the name of Julienne Sanchez.
"Is it rent?" Steven guessed. "Did you misplace a whole safehouse somewhere?"
"My memory isn't that bad!" Marc protested.
"You had to hack yourself three times just this week," Steven reminded him. "Organizing your finances, I feel like a squirrel looking for its nuts in winter."
"Like you're any better," Marc snapped. "Shall I remind of last week when you met with our lawyer and only realized ten minutes into the conversation that you had in fact met with that man multiple times, and it wasn't a complete stranger?"
Steven’s faint reflection in the monitor glass went a little red. Of course he remembered. That had been the second major project he'd been working on for the last three months, gather evidence and to clear Marc's name of that massacre five years ago that he'd been blamed for and get rid of that international arrest warrant. Fortunately, if you could call it that, the leader of the merc group that had killed all those archaeologists including Layla's father, Raoul Bushman, had since committed several other major crimes in different countries. That made it easy to convince police that he was the true culprit once Steven pointed them in his direction. Unfortunately Bushman's trail ran cold about a year after the incident as the man vanished from the face of the earth.
"That wasn't me forgetting things. I just have poor face recognition. He was wearing a different haircut," Steven defended himself.
"Keep telling yourself that," Marc muttered. "I'm telling you I didn't create the Lockley identity. I mean, come on," he clicked back to the driver's license, "look at that, he photo shopped a mustache on our face. It looks ridiculous. Why don't you add glasses and a big nose on top?"
"He?" Steven echoed questioningly.
"You know. Whoever did this. I think you're right, someone is leeching off of us. We've been hacked, simple as that, probably by this Sanchez person," Marc replied.
"So we pin her with a lawsuit," Steven decided.
"We can't. Not unless we want the Serenno identity to be looked too closely at and since that one connects to my real name over only two other corners, I'd like to avoid that," Marc replied.
Steven let out a chuckle.
"What? What's so funny?"
"Nothing, just - your identity got stolen. Well, your face anyway. You made up thirty something fake ones and someone thought hey, he won't notice just one more. And you didn't. That's kinda funny."
"It's your face too," Marc reminded him sternly. "And our money."
"Oh. Right." That put a damper on Steven's amusement.
"He stole almost 100 grand of us over the last 7 years," Marc mused, scrolling through the bank statements. "Most of it went to that Sanchez person."
"It's not that large of a sum, given what else you've stored away," Steven reassured them.
"I'm not concerned about what he spend, I'm concerned about him being able to access the Serenno accounts and shift even more money into Coastal Cars," Marc said. "It means he's got access to my whole network of identities. We have to check all of them to see if he leeched off anywhere else."
"Well first things first, let's close this account to make sure we don't loose any more money," Steven said and moved their hand to click his way through the page. However, half way through his hand started to shake and he lost control of it. Steven sighed and drew further back. He didn't want to risk more switching headaches that came from Marc and him struggling for control. A feeling of wrongness slowly grew in his stomach that wasn't entirely rational. It wasn't like he was truly fighting with Marc, in fact they were more in sync today than most days.
Their hand stilled for a moment before Marc moved it forward a few more clicks... and then it abruptly jerked to the right, almost throwing the mouse off the desk.
Marc and Steven both stared at their hand, a feeling of panic spreading in them. The hand moved on its own - and closed the browser window.
"Wha-" Steven said before the entire world began to swim before him. The edges of their vision grew dark, the front disappearing in the distance like a window racing away from them.
They blinked and then they were gone.
Jake Lockely stared at the monitor.
"Mierda," he cursed.