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Officer Brad Daniels had seen a lot of horrible things during his twelve years as a cop. He’d always thought divisions involving straight out murder or had the worst of it, but that was before joining Brooklyn’s newly formed missing persons team. With murder it wasn’t a question of where a person was, but merely who and why. Missing persons was a mess of where, who, why, and a toxic level of desperation to get them back alive.
Daniels rubbed his forehead and looked down at the file. Missing omega, supposedly disappeared in the middle of the night from his very bed that he had been sharing with his two newly bonded alphas. Only nineteen years of age. He’d recently had a heat and had been assaulted afterwards, with charges filed. At least that gave a lead.
“In the middle of the night, tucked between his two alphas,” Office Hamilton said with a snort. “Should I just skip them over to homicide? I have a feeling it will end there, anyway.”
“You think so?” Daniels asked. Hamilton was a bit of a spit fire. The new officers always were, when they had room to make mistakes and thought they were at the top of the pile.
“They probably couldn’t handle having to share and things got out of control,” Hamilton said, naturally jumping straight to the worst conclusion. Daniels walked with him around the corner and stopped, watching the two young men waiting at his desk. They were barely more than kids. The taller, larger of the two was pacing behind the other like a caged animal, hands flexing and eyes scanning the room like he had to memorize everything. The other was surprisingly small and nearly vibrating in his seat with untapped rage, probably from feeling he had no control.
“Why’s the little one handcuffed to my desk?” Daniels asked, hoping Hamilton hadn’t done something too stupid.
“Little punk attacked Richardson. Said he was going too slow with the paperwork,” Hamilton replied with a snort. “Quick to violence, that one.”
“Hamilton, are you mated?”
“Sir,” Hamilton said, actually flushing around his collar. “That’s-”
“I’ll take that as a no,” Daniels interrupted. “My mate’s car tire once blew out, back when we lived in Kentucky, and she was stuck off the side of the highway a few miles from the nearest phone. Now, I didn’t worry too much at first. Sarah’s a strong omega with brothers who taught her to protect herself. It’s a strange moment as an alpha when you start to notice just how long since you have scented them near you. She was only a couple hours late, but I could tell just how much her scent had faded around me.”
“Was, uh, she okay?”
“A gentleman, another alpha, picking Sarah up walking on the side of the highway toward town. Now, he could have been the type that would have touched her, but he didn’t. Just brought Sarah home. But I had been panicking for a while by then and I didn’t care that he had helped her, just that he was near her. Sent him to the emergency room, all for helping my omega,” Daniels said, telling the story with an odd calm, like he’d do it all over again. Daniels pointed at the tiny alpha handcuffed to his desk. “That is what that alpha is feeling. Now keep your mouth shut and listen. You’re too green for this.”
Daniels strode over, gestured for Hamilton to sit off to the side and sat down at his desk. He took a moment to open the file, scanning the page one more time. “Now, can I have you confirm your first and last names before we get started?”
“If I have to confirm that I’m Steve fucking Rogers one more time-!” the handcuffed one immediately blew up.
“Hey, hey, Stevie,” the other said, quickly sitting in the second chair and cupping Steve’s face, forcing him to look at him instead. “He’s doing his job. He does his job and we find our Tony, okay? Officer? I’m Bucky - uh, James, but call me Bucky - Barnes and this punk is Steve Rogers.”
“Jerk,” Steve muttered in what appeared to be a reflex.
“Name of the missing and your relation?” Daniels smoothly continued.
Steve’s face was turning red, but stayed silent when Bucky reached over and set a hand on his thin shoulder. Bucky turned back to them and cleared his throat. “He’s our omega. Tony.”
“Buck,” Steve said. “What if?”
“It’s fine, Stevie. Even if his family got him, we have rights over him now,” Bucky reassured. “Last name is Stark.”
“Alright,” Daniels said, not reacting to the name. He owned guns, he knew the Stark name as well as any weapons owner. That didn’t mean anything. A missing person was a missing person, regardless of status. “I need you to talk me through this. Where, how, whatever details you can give me.”
“We already wrote it all down,” Steve growled.
“Talking it out to fresh ears can sometimes trigger extra details,” Hamilton piped up. At Daniels’ glance, he shrugged. “I pay attention to what you say sometimes.”
“Just, maybe start with yesterday,” Daniels encouraged.
“Well, the day had been great. Steve and I worked, so Tony did the shopping. Tony had picked up a potential temp job at that hand-crafts and antique market a few blocks from our house. They gave him this gorgeous quilted blanket in exchange for him fixing some things,” Bucky said, his voice careful like he was trying to remember if there was anything bad to mention, anything suspicious, but couldn’t. “We went to bed, like usual. He was always between us.”
“When did you realize he was missing?” Daniels asked, taking notes.
“At first I thought he’d gone to the bathroom,” Steve said. “It was too early for breakfast. He’d had a heat recently so the bedroom still smelled strongly of him. I figured since I was already awake I’d get something to drink.”
Bucky’s hand reached out and rubbed Steve’s back. Steve, for his part, had seemed to deflate. All of that righteous, furious determination had fallen away to reveal an alpha who was finally, truly realizing the situation.
“He wasn’t in the bathroom, he wasn’t anywhere. His scent…it was still on the couch and his preferred spot at the table, but otherwise…it smelled like he should have still been in bed…” Steve trailed off.
“Steve woke me up and I searched everywhere. But the door and the window to the fire escape were both still locked from the inside. It was like he vanished,” Bucky said, eyebrows coming together. “We tried to catch his scent on the street and asked the neighbor he knew to keep an eye out. But…he’s just…gone.”
“We came here immediately after that,” Steve finished.
“How long have you been together?” Daniels asked.
“Uh, two weeks,” Steve said, looking awkward at the question. Daniels glanced between them, watching how Bucky pulled his hand away from Steve’s back with careful determination. It wasn’t hard to see they had their own connection and he hoped Hamilton hadn’t noticed, Daniels really wasn’t in the mood for the paperwork on an alpha-alpha relationship.
“Our relationship with Tony went fast, but that doesn’t negate it,” Bucky said, his face hardening, showing a hint of solid strength that had Daniels nodding along.
“How did you meet?”
“Is this necessary?” Steve demanded. Daniels raised an eyebrow. “Right, it is. Fuck. He was getting hassled by a group of knotheads so we kind of…jumped them.”
“You jumped them, I calmed Tony down. Though, it turned out he was more scared because had nowhere to go. His parents were trying to hand him off to some alpha like a business move,” Bucky explained. “Pretty sure he could have handled himself otherwise. He was…once that shyness went away, he had quite the spark.”
“He still has it,” Steve growled.
“Yeah,” Bucky agreed, sounding a little choked.
“We’ll get back to what you know of his past in a minute. What time was it you woke up, Mr Rogers?” Daniels asked.
“About four, I think,” Steve replied.
“That’s right,” Bucky nodded.
“Well, the good news is that he’s only been missing for five hours. Those are very good odds for us,” Daniels reassured. “Very good odds.”
Daniels always regretted those words later. He regretted them when the boys came to the station routinely to check on any news, see if they could help. He regretted it when a couple years later it was only Steve, as the other had given up and went to find some self-imagined punishment in the army.
It was custom for police to bring work home. Daniels had files from missing persons cases ranging a few months to a decade old, stacked here and there despite his omega’s complaints about clutter. Ironically, he was sitting in his lounge chair with the Rogers-Barnes file the day his grandson turned the television on.
“Grandpa!”
“Honey, your grandpa is doing paperwork,” Sarah scolded, even though she knew he wasn’t. She knew there were some cases that just could not leave him and always tried to give him space as needed. He couldn’t imagine just surviving without her like they had their own omega.
“But it’s what I was telling you about! It’s Captain America!”
Daniels glanced up, body stilling at the sight of Steve Rogers on the screen. Not as tiny as the last time Daniels had seen him, which brought up questions for another time, but he was larger and healthier. But not happier. Even with a subdued Bucky Barnes standing off to the side, Steve Rogers was not a happy alpha. Neither of them were.
And there Daniels was, holding the file that explained why. He glanced at his wife, his beautiful omega with graying hair, and wondered how many times he could see that level of heartbreak. Of another broken down alpha looking for their missing partner or child and adding yet another file to the cases that haunt his home.
He put his resignation in the next day.