Delaney's apartment at 2 AM. Insomnia again.
She sat on her couch, laptop casting blue light across her face, scrolling through interview footage of The Fighter. Press conference from last month. That smile. That deflection when asked about his training methods :"The ring doesn't define you, you define the ring." The journalists had eaten it up, scribbling it down like gospel.
She rewound it. Watched again. That tilt of his head when he laughed at a reporter's question. The way his eyes held the camera—direct, challenging, impossible to look away from.
Her chest tightened with something she refused to name.
On the wall behind her laptop, Jim Morrison stared down from a vintage concert poster—shirtless, microphone in hand, 1969. She'd had that poster since college. Moved it through seven different apartments. Sometimes she forgot it was there.
She glanced up at it now, then back at The Fighter's frozen smile.
But something in the geometry of their faces...
She shook her head, closing the laptop. Professional interest. Investigation. That's all this was.
Her phone sat on the coffee table next to a stack of files—surveillance photos, interview transcripts, social media archives. Marshall's latest delivery: The Fighter leaving his gym at dawn, Elena beside him. In the photo, he had his arm around his sister's shoulders. Protective. That carefully constructed image of the devoted brother.
Delaney picked up the photo, studying his profile.
She'd been twenty-three. He'd been a musician. Brooding, self-destructive, magnetic in that dangerous way that made you want to fix him. It had lasted six months before she realized there was nothing to fix—just emptiness wrapped in a good jawline and some Rimbaud quotes.
That was thirty-three years ago.
Delaney set the photo down, rubbing her eyes. The bruises on her face had faded to yellow-green, barely visible in the dim light. Three weeks since the incident. Three weeks of surveillance operations, team meetings, building the case.
Three weeks of watching The Fighter's every move.
Her gaze drifted back to Morrison's poster. Those eyes. That presence.
She'd been fifeteen when she first heard "Light My Fire." It had felt like revelation. Like someone finally understood the restlessness clawing inside her chest. She'd collected every album after that, memorized every lyric, filled journals trying to decode what made him him.
Forty years later, the posters were still on her walls.
Delaney typed back: Good. Find out about the '09 incident.
She stood, moving to the window. The city sprawled below, lights scattered like fallen stars. Somewhere out there, The Fighter was probably asleep. Elena too. Both of them unaware that six people were documenting their every movement, building a file that would crack their perfect image wide open.
On her desk, half-hidden under investigation notes, was her worn copy of No One Here Gets Out Alive—Morrison's biography, spine cracked from repeated readings. She'd bought it at nineteen. Sometimes, late at night, she still pulled it out. Looking for... what? Answers? Understanding?
She picked up the book, thumbs finding familiar pages by muscle memory. Morrison in Paris. Morrison in Miami. Morrison self-destructing in real-time while the world watched and worshiped.
Delaney smiled, setting the book down.
She returned to the couch, opened her laptop, pulled up The Fighter's face again. Studied it like a map to somewhere she'd been trying to reach for forty years.
But Morrison stared down from the wall, knowing better.
And Delaney kept watching, kept collecting, kept chasing something she couldn't quite name.
She hit play on the interview footage one more time.
Outside, the city hummed. Inside, surrounded by posters and files and decades of accumulated longing, Delaney Schulz told herself she was hunting for truth.
And almost believed it.