Work Text:
██████/█████████/ 2086
It's not so much a pain in her head as it is an ache in her body.
She has enough experience chasing people and tackling them to the ground to remember the kind of fatigue that comes with particularly rigorous movement. Let nobody say she does things by halves. Today was not an exception.
Oh, but she does remember. It would be a lot easier if she didn't. Perhaps feigning ignorance could only get her so far, but there could be a certain degree of detachment that would indicate more of a blip than a trend. If she could forget about it, so could everyone else, and nothing would have to change. Whatever came next would feel like too much work, which isn't the part she objects to, but it would be far easier to stagnate, wouldn't it, for all the good it would do? She can get away with being asleep for a little while longer, to prolong the inevitable. Far easier if they can't see her face.
She has enough space here to stretch out, so she does, buries her head further into the blanket. See if she can't fit her whole body in there. Chrysalise into a superior form. She knows this isn't her bed. It's too big. It's too quiet. Still, she's tired enough not to care.
There's a sort of mechanical swishing noise, which she knows very well as the sound that datapads make when you interact with them, and as soon as she moves, it stops. Clearly one can still get away with exactly jack shit in the police force.
Opening her eyes would give the jig up, so she doesn't. She stays where she is and listens for any indication that her acolyte was no longer distracted from their generic paperwork by any further sign of life.
She's not expecting them to touch her, move a hand over her shoulder. That complicates things.
"I won't bug you if you want to sleep." he says. That complicates things further.
She might have preferred a stranger. Reyes cracks open the eye that works. She does want to sleep, but she's driven by curiosity. What the fuck is he doing here?? At least now they're most likely as confused as each other.
"It's fine."
It probably isn't. He's not looking at her like it is. Her voice is raw, and speaking hurts. London puts the pad down, and she's almost irritated by the gesture. It feels clingy and fake. Don’t stop on her account, detective. Does he not prefer paper? He always seems to have tons of it laying around whenever she doesn't get bored and file it for him. Never got the point of that. Or was he so worried about working light that--
- --he's working from home, because-
- --is this his bed?
That’s worse, somehow. She didn’t think it could get worse.
Even if she has better things to worry about, psychologically, her biology disagrees, and any further attempt to move or speak leaves a wave of nausea crashing to the front of her throat. So that's good. Laying around in his bed and looking at him like he's intruding in her space is probably incredibly rude, but if he's not used to her being insufferable by now, he's got a good few years left of being thoroughly fucking surprised. Shit, if they are even partners still. If she still has a job.
London tilts his head.
"You're fine?"
"Didn't say that." She can barely say anything. She can look somewhere else. Not often her eyes aren't the part giving her trouble. This time, the circuitry seems to be content, enough that she can stare at the ceiling without any other part of her threatening to rebel.
"I'd be concerned if you did." He's still touching her. It makes her feel crazy. "I– more concerned. I mean." He does this thing where he closes his eyes whenever he needs to change the subject. Like he has to manually pivot himself over. Like the trolley problem for weird old men or whatever. "You don’t want that talk right now, right? We can talk about something else. Or you can sleep. It’s–" Still not fine. "Whatever you– need."
Reyes doesn’t tell him what she needs because she has a fairly certain feeling it’ll cause an argument. She doesn't want to talk about what he wants to talk about, either, but the conversation would have to happen at some point. Might as well get it over with, and they can both go back to not caring until the sun explodes and swallows them both up.
"Is this your house?" She says, first. It feels less personal than asking about his bed directly.
The corners of London's mouth twitch a bit. "I'd like a house." Apropos of nothing. "I do live here, if that's what you're asking."
"Not bad." Better than where she lives, anyway. You can take the girl off the beat, sure, but you can’t take the girl out of the standard issue police dormitory without a substantial payrise. Sometimes she thinks she might be better off sleeping under her desk, especially after the promotion.
She wants to ask why, his place and not hers, but he answers her before she can, like the world's shittest magic trick.
"I'd imagine it's more private. Correct me if I'm wrong. I didn't think you'd want an audience." She doesn't. "And I need to keep an eye on you." She doesn't want that either.
"Okay." Not okay, either, but it’ll have to do. Reyes tries to stretch again. Her elbows protest as she pushes herself up with her arms, and she still feels horribly sick, but the alternative is staying here and that’s not going to happen. Bad enough she was here in the first place. He straightens up as she does, and when she moves to slide from the bed, the hand that was on her shoulder moves to her wrist.
"Well, I didn't--" Spontaneously combust, or-- "I'm fine now, so, whatever. Thanks for the--" The what, sleep? Fucking stupid. The hand on her arm becomes less a comforting gesture and more a tight hold.
"Can you sit down?" He asks like he's desperate. She wants to kick it out of him. Show him who she really is. Fuck up his stupid desperate face and walk right out of his stupid nice apartment and do it all again. She doesn't. She sits down. She’d love to say it was involuntary. Her legs can’t do the work of holding her up. She’d omit any idea of feeling like she has to do what he says.
"What, am I being detained?"
She snaps, instead, like a handbag dog far better at negging than teeth, and settles back against the pillows, like a handbag dog that’s also a fucking hypocrite.
"If I have to."
That gets her attention. "For what?"
London breathes out, slowly, and it occurs to Reyes that he never let go of her
- hand.
- When did it become her hand, actually?
- It was her wrist a minute ago, but -- now he's got both her hands in one of his.
- Both of her hands fit in one of his.
"I’ll think of something. If I have to."
His voice is thick, but he’s smiling - a weird stretched sort of affair, more like he's doing it for her sake. Like he's painted it over something. What the fuck is his problem? Frankly, she hates looking at it, so she goes back to staring at the ceiling instead.
"You know, it is… illegal, technically. I guess intent to commit would buy me enough time to ask you a couple questions."
- (The Offenses Against The Self Act of 2061*. She’s aware.)
She doesn’t think he sees her roll her eyes.
- (*The irony does not escape her. Maybe they need to invent some kind of horoscope for laws that came out in your birth year. She vaguely recalls something else about water filtration.)
"How does that work if you’re dead? They scrape you off the ground and wheelbarrow you in?"
"That wouldn’t be intent, then, ‘cause you’ve done it."
London clearly realises this is useless to talk about. She’s not looking at him, but she sees him cast a look upwards as he stops himself, like he’s pleading to some sort of deity to get her to stop pissing him off. Maybe he’s smiling because he won’t have to field this sort of bullshit any more.
"I'm not pressing charges, if that's what you're thinking." He says, instead. "Still got a clean record."
Well, that's good. At least the next time she dies she'll get into Heaven.
"….I'm not angry with you, either."
"What, just disappointed?"
London looks away again. As the bluster peters out, she finds herself more sad. Still detached, but with a growing sense of unease. Is she upsetting him, instead?
"Sorry."
"I'm worried," he manages, eventually, "About you, and I really don't want you walking out of here until we've ironed all of that out. I think--"
"Fuck do you have to worry about?" The bluster is back. She snatches her hand back and he flinches, actually, when she does, and suddenly it’s gone again and replaced with a fat lump of guilt. Figures. Still, she can try to reason with him.
"I’m alive, aren’t I?"
She puts her hand back. It’s an open invitation, slightly desperate. She does feel, weirdly, like she has to make him feel better.
"Nothing’s broken." Or, "Nothing’s more broken than it was, anyway."
Fixes her gaze firmly upwards.
"Just drank too much. That’s all."
"It's not something you do when you're drunk," says London. Still with the voice. He can’t be that sad. "Unless you already wanted to."
- She wonders how they do that thing with ceilings where the paint is raised, like it was in the middle of dripping off when it dried.
"Who cares?"
Reyes can't tell what sort of noise London makes at that, because she's deliberately not looking at him.
"I do."
- It could be that simple.
"And whoever called in when they saw you up there, and, I'd love to imagine, however many guys it took to get you down."
- But if that was how they did it, surely it would make a mess of the floor.
"You know they had to sedate you?"
"I wouldn’t know." says Reyes. "I was asleep."
- She had liked it up there, though.
- She could have got a car, but she'd wanted to walk. She'd wandered down a highway, she thinks, to an overpass, and when she looked over she could see the rest of the city below her, roads trailing into wires trailing into tramlines and people and their houses and their lives dotted below like bacteria growing under a microscope.
- And she'd finally felt big enough.
- She's not sure how long she'd stayed there. Taking it in. Maybe too long. She'd reached her arms over, first, dangled them over. Just to test it. Just to see a part of her inhabit that space.
- All looked so easy. From here, everything was smaller than her hands. She'd lined up a lorry between her finger and thumb and marvelled at the thought of picking it up. She must have had a toy like that, once. She'd always wondered how the tiny people inside would have felt.
- Whisked away, out of their control, by something they couldn't even comprehend.
- And then she'd climbed over the fence, to the barest space on the other side, just wide enough for her heel. And she'd leant back against the railing, looped an arm around it- she didn't want to fall off, just then, of course. But something in the scale felt correct. It all felt like it needed to happen.
- (Why hadn't her gun worked? She'd needed her other hand for that. She had been up there a while, so maybe her old colleagues had turned up and disabled it by the time she'd actually got around to trying to shoot herself.)
- (They probably found it funny. Not a lot else exciting to talk about.)
"Wasn't you that swooped in, then."
"No. I got there later." He closes his eyes again. "Glad I kept my radio on. When I got there I didn’t think you were asleep."
Reyes looks at him, for a minute. He’s all lines and tousles and something that indicates he hadn't slept much himself since. Seems kind of selfish that she has, in comparison.
"Hospital wouldn't do anything. I called everyone I could think of, but they all said if your vitals were fine, maybe you just needed to sleep it off-- I just." London’s voice catches. "I thought someone should be there. So-- I couldn’t just-- leave you by yourself."
She has half a thought, or maybe half a memory, of him trying to drag her around. She tries to piece it together as she looks at him now. Maybe she could have enjoyed it more if she was conscious.
He looks comfortable. Warm. She's so tired. She feels insane. She presses the butt of her free hand into her eye as if that would help. It helpfully throws out some floaty things she usually only gets during migraines.
"...Don’t you have work to do?" she manages, when she can see again.
"Nothing important."
It’s never anything fucking important. Everything is a thin and superficial veneer over an otherwise all encompassing rot. Someone made it all up as a distraction, and only the equally superficial want to believe in any of it. She can still see it decaying at the edges whenever she turns her head.
Sometimes, she wonders what would happen if someone peeled it off.
--But she still needs to function in society, as specious as it might be, so her next question is "Do I have work to do?" and he raises his eyebrows for that, and somehow frowns at the same time.
"Well. No. Of course not. I called you in sick. At least until next Monday. We can think about it more then." So she still has a job. She can work out how she feels about that later.
She goes back to not looking at him.
"You think I’d drag you out to-- a room full of dead bodies right now?"
- If she tries hard enough, she can make out constellations in the ceiling. She hasn’t seen a lot of real stars, but she’s sure they’re nothing to write home about.
- She supposes they just stay up there and do nothing, until you tilt your head the right way to make the picture look bigger than it is.
"I don’t get a lot of sick days."
"Depending on who’s watching, you get as many as I sign off on." London squeezes her hand, like he knows she’s barely listening. "You know I can do that?"
- She had a book about this as a kid, she thinks. Was it Perseus?
- She tries to remember what it looked like, but the more she looks at it the more it all blurs together.
"Monday’s fine."
London lets go. He moves away, slightly, like he’s worried he’d done something to upset her. It’s probably unfair to say that he has.
"Okay." He drums his hands against his knees like an old man about to do something. "Alright. Listen. If you want me to—"
"Why did you go?"
She can look at him now. Barely sees him blink at her, like he’s dumber than she thought.
"What?"
"They called you? Really?"
She shouldn’t be angry with him. The more Reyes understands that - really detaches from her body and watches all of this, objectively, a trapped spectator in a hell of her own making - the angrier it makes her - more at herself. The more she tries to calm down, the more she can’t.
She shakes. The rot spills out. Perhaps it was part of her all along.
She did this.
"Or you heard my-- badge number or whatever and came running? What was your plan? You think anyone would give a shit that you did that? Anyone would have missed me? Or you’d be the hero of the fucking hour with your smirky little-lady bullshit you p- pull every time there’s a-- Th--" Loses it. "That I can’t look after myself? "
- If she’d been Perseus, she’s not sure she wouldn’t have let Andromeda get eaten by the fucking whale.
"Why the fuck did you go? What the fuck were you trying to do?"
"Don’t ask me that."
Finally, he shouts back. Right over the top of her. She was getting sick of the creepy sympathy shit.
"You think I didn’t care? You think I wasn’t worried sick about you?"
"No!"
There’s some sort of horrendous noise rattling in the back of her skull. He needs to get his pipes fixed, or something. Not in a fun way.
- Why can’t she see anything?
- Where is she, really?
There’s a hand on her shoulder. It hurts. She tears away in favour of curling up into a little ball. Not good enough. Now there’s two hands. She wants to tell it to leave her alone, but--
Is this noise her? Horrific. She can’t--
- She could have picked it up quicker. It’s just that the first few lessons, she spent too much time with her head underwater. Couldn’t hear a word he said.
- Too young to take it seriously.
- They never got to go back. But she thinks she could figure it out, now, if she had to.
- (If someone threw her in.)
The hands pull. No thank you. She hits, because she’s not safe and everything good is gone forever. Whatever’s trying to grab her from under here does a fantastic job of tanking it. Maybe she’s not hitting hard enough.
- Should have swam away. Stupid girl.
Undeterred, it pulls. She goes with it. Nothing else she can do.
- crashes into something
- soft?
- oh
Suddenly, she comes up for air.
Her arms are pinned. It’s a tight hold. Her fists are sort of smushed against her shoulders in a fossilised relic of when she tried to fight her way out. It’s not comfortable. It can’t be. She has something else soft to wrap her hands around, though, so that’ll have to do.
Something soft to bury her face in, so she does.
(He is warm, some distant part of her mind remarks. She was right about that.)
She’s not cute. It’s not cute when she cries. She’s leaking some sort of horrendous shit all over him. She clearly hadn’t been paying enough attention earlier, when she could like-- see, but this can’t be the usual sweater. It’s a far more welcoming fabric. Whatever it is, she’s going to have to get it fucking dry cleaned, when all this is over.
"Oh fuck." she gasps, without meaning to. One of the arms around her moves to become a hand in her hair. What fingernails he has scratch against her scalp in a way that isn’t entirely unpleasant.
Maybe–
- it’s okay?
--Finally, Reyes can hear.
"It’s okay." he says, again. "It’s alright, I’m here now." Oh, he is crying. He sniffles and it twists something in her. "It’s-- We can fix this. It’s you and me now, yeah? You’re not alone any more. I’m-- I’m not going anywhere. "
"m sorry." It’s the most she can manage. London tucks his head down a little further.
"…Neither are you." He could have laughed, or it could be a sob. She’s not sure. "I didn’t mean to shout at you. I.. was worried. Scared the shit out of me, Sunshine. I’ve never ran that fast in my life." His hold might have loosened while he was moving his arms around, but he squeezes tighter again, now. She might be twisted in a weird way, and her arm is getting a little numb, but it feels good, anyway. It feels safe.
"It's fine. It's fine. You're right here. You're safe. I've got you. Shit." Is he still talking to her? "I-- Of course I’d care. Of course I’d miss you." His voice cracks again. "We’re a team now, aren’t we?"
"I’m sorry--"
She gives up and wails. Fists her hands tighter into his nice soft whatever the fuck he’s wearing and all but screams into his shoulder.
- can’t even take herself out right.
- She knows she can’t go on like this. Pissing everybody off. Embarrassing him. She always sees it a second after she opens her stupid mouth. Hard for him to be seen with her.
- must have pulled her name out of a fucking hat for this gig or something
"I’m sorry!"
"I know--"
- didn’t think it would upset him but of course it would.
- how many people has he seen die?
- she’d wanted to pick somewhere nobody would have found her when she hit the ground. would that be worse?
- gone without a trace. ridiculous
- (She mumbles half consciously into his shoulder.)
- (sorry sorry sorry i’m sorry i’m sorry i’m sorry)
- clearly, he hasn’t worked out how little it matters yet.
- he deserves better
- that's all she can do, then.
- be better, stupid.
"--I know." says London. He sounds calmer. "I get it."
Reyes is congested enough at this point that it makes her cough, and then she retches, and then immediately worries about ruining him more. She needs to go. Bad enough she was here in the first place. He’s holding her too tightly and she’s too exhausted to wriggle out of it, so that culminates in vaguely kicking her legs for a couple seconds before bursting into tears again. God, shut the fuck up.
London doesn’t seem to care how loud she’s being, or how disgusting she’s made him. He rocks her back and forth, makes little shushing noises against her ear. She’s too tired to pretend it doesn’t help. She doesn’t want it to. It feels obscenely decadent.
"Hey." The hand on her back moves in circles. "It’s alright. Can you take a deep breath for me? Just give it your best shot?" She tries. It’s not particularly successful. No way in hell she’s breathing through her nose any time soon, and through her mouth agitates the congestion into redirecting down her throat. Ugh. "Good. That’s good. And again?" Again is a little less dramatic, but warrants the same results. She gets a gentle pat on the back for her efforts.
"There we go. Great job, kid. Keep it going." Cool. Maybe they can give her a little medal that says "good at breathing" that she can put next to her other medal that says "bad at killing herself". London pats her a little more like the world’s daintiest iron lung. It shouldn’t help. It does.
"I do get it. It’s…. not your fault." He sighs. Reyes wonders who else’s fault it could be. "You-- I think-- You must have thought you had a good reason, right?"
Bizarrely, the act of contemplating that seems to give her brain something else to focus on, apart from convulsing and expelling as much fluid as humanly possible. Now she’s… relatively calmer, just clinging to him like they’re still bobbing around in the ocean somewhere. Shivering like it too.
She feels scared. (Why?)
"…Felt like the right thing to do." she mumbles, eventually, though that does nothing to convey the totality of it.
London sits with that for a minute. Reyes sits with him, too, because she can’t do much else.
"Alright. Let’s talk about that." He pats her shoulder. "Do you mind if we move?"
Reyes doesn't mind, obviously. She does feel an additional fleeting moment of panic at not being held any more, which is fairly pathetic, but it's just long enough for London to shift them both backwards. She wasn’t sure how they were sitting before, but now he’s leant back against the headboard* and she’s curled up in his lap. She’d been almost on top of him before, chest to chest, but now it’s more like chest to side, her head leant against his shoulder.
- *Which makes sense. His back must have been killing him.
- He does take off his sweatshirt before putting her head back there. Just as well. This might have been devastating were he not also wearing something with sleeves underneath.
The downside of this position is that she can see his face now, which means he can see hers, and she must look utterly fucking gross. But he's smiling like he thinks she’s cute. It still looks strained. Whatever.
"Okay?" Reyes doesn’t know how to answer that. London doesn’t seem to expect her to. Maybe he just wanted to know if she was comfortable. She is. "Hold on. Let me get that." He reaches over somewhere she can’t see and magically comes back with tissues like a fucking wizard.
And-- actually wipes her face.
"There we go. Is that better?" Now that he’s not crying (also her fault) he seems to have moved on to gentler pastures. Weird sort of psuedo-baby-talk. Nobody has spoken to her like that for years, and the whole thing makes her feel embarrassed and a little sick. Is it nice, in a weird way? Part of her wants to hide in him and embrace the whatever it is and the other part feels debased that the whatever it is even exists.
"Okay." He brushes her fringe out of her eyes for good measure. "Alright. I... think I get that. Sure. But..." He stops, like he’s trying to pick the words. "Why would that be right?"
Seems obvious enough, but he doesn’t live in her head. If he did, he might not be holding her like that. Reyes goes to bite her nails. She ends up nibbling a sliver of her cuticle that was already threatening to flake off.
"--I feel like. I don’t help." Tamping it down into language is hard. It feels universal. " ‘s all I wanted to do. ‘s the whole reason I came here, and the more I try it just— pisses me off. I’m angry all the time. It’s like everything is fucked and nobody else cares or sees it or-- I really thought I could-- do something. Every time, I can’t. Every good thing I try to do is either bad or it doesn’t matter. It’s not worth me being here if I can’t fix anything. Like. This space is too big for me-- to… not. I guess--" Eugh. Now she has a headache. Took its sweet time getting here, but inevitable regardless. She rubs across her eyes with her sleeve.
"I have to try so hard to be a good person, and everyone else already is." She can feel it welling up again. London pulls her hair back out of her face. She wasn’t aware it had moved. "Like you." she mumbles, vaguely coherently, which she would probably never do in her right mind. "I wish I was more like you."
"No, you don’t." says London.
- She’s really not sure how long she hasn’t been in her right mind, actually. All of this feels fairly normal.
"Farah." She can count on her fingers how many times he’s used her name. She only realises as he’s talking, as his hand cups her face, tilts her head to look at him.
"I need you to understand," he says, "You are the last good person we have left."
████████/█████████/ 2086
Ended up being the Tuesday. Crafty son of a bitch.
She spends a lot of that time sleeping, which she hadn’t spent a lot of time on before. Apparently (bafflingly) the good detective likes her enough that he’d set her up on his couch in the intervening time, which sounds rough on paper, but he’s a tall bastard and she is… not, so it was honestly pretty comfortable.
Better than her bed. Quieter.
It's a nice apartment. The kind of nice apartment she wouldn't have minded as a kid. She'd been so sure that whatever she ended up doing would have paid enough that she could have moved into some massive lofty place the moment she turned eighteen. Seems unrealistic, now. She'd been so sure that the dorms were just a stopgap -especially after she'd been promoted, but recently she'd started to wonder if she'd be there forever. How would that work? God, a bunch of fortysomethings in bunkbeds menopausing at each other.
- Firstly because she hadn't even made it to eighteen. She'd been the only residential student at the Young Police Academy. Her mother had had to sign papers.
- The new guy blowing up her phone at 3am drunk and looking for a fight had been distressing at the time, perhaps, but the inadvertent part of cutting off contact had been that she didn't need to send home backdated rent anymore.
- She'd spent her newfound fortune responsibly.
There's room for them both, anyway. Kitchen tucked out of the way around the corner from the main sort of space. Dining table inaccessible in a corner, covered in paper, that he never actually seems to eat from. Bunch of cupboards and things that probably aren't worth investigating. She tries not to go into his bedroom. She's already been in there, obviously, but it feels a little personal.
- She'd passed the fuck out again after they'd finished talking. Like, on him. Embarassing. She'd woken up tucked in. When she'd trundled into the kitchen for the first time, she'd been greeted with a glass of water and a bowl of pasta. It had some kind of courgette/tomato thing going on which had definitely come from a bag out the freezer, but she'd appreciated it, nonetheless.
Anyway, she'd gone back to work that day expecting to be swamped. Half afraid that their guy had cloned himself and shot another twelve women for fun. No such luck. It’s not like London has any jurisdiction on how often people get shot around here, but Reyes does feel that if he could have planned it, he would have. Maybe he'd just solved all the murders himself while she wasn't looking. Wouldn't surprise her. Whatever the case, it's left her with, mostly, a lot of desk work.
She taps the table and tries to conjure all of this information into making sense.
Desk work was probably for the best, anyway. She doesn't have her holster - it now lives a fairly quiet life on the coat rack in the corner, and her gun - and, in fact, all of her weaponry - had been confiscated away into his locker.
Which she’d argued about, at the time.
"To do my job?" Why the fuck is he asking? "They don’t hand them out for fun, Qaz."
"Okay." London’s hands are in his pockets. Annoyingly calm. She’d almost say smug if it wasn’t accompanied by enough… unspoken pensive concern. "If we go somewhere, I’ll give it to you."
"But you’re still with me here, right? Like I’m going to sneak off and--"
"You don’t need it in here." He cuts her off. "If we’re out of here, you've got it for a good reason. And no, I really don’t want you sneaking off with it, if that’s what you’re asking."
Like he doesn’t believe she’s not crazy enough to blow her head off in the toilets or something. Fine. It’s not like she can sneak anywhere these days, either. Watches her like a fucking hawk. Tries really hard to pretend he doesn’t.
She’d objected to the taser, too. "You think I’m going to tase myself?"
- She had, in fact, tased herself on a number of occasions. How effective it was as a method of self harm really depended on one’s criteria.
And London had said "I don’t want you alone with anything dangerous right now."
She hated to admit it made sense. Still, his definition of dangerous was far wider than her own. Had also apparently included her keys. Not her actual keys, as such, but he had taken off the Fidgetubbie keyring with the bottle opener. It had been misprinted, so one of Dangguen’s eyes was slightly higher than the other. It gave the little spirals more of a disorientated sort of look.
London had hooked his finger through the hole where the bottlecap went and sort of spun it around in his hands.
"What’s this guy’s deal? Too much carrot juice?"
Which Reyes thought was a little racist.
"Can you even ferment carrots?"
"No clue." London does it again. "Look at his face. Maybe he’s more of an absinthe kind of rabbit."
"Maybe he’s dizzy because you keep fucking spinning him around."
"I’ll spin you around."
Thanks, detective. Utterly pointless. She'd tried to see if there was anything in London's face, give her some indication of how he was feeling. Nothing detectable. Either he's way better at it than she is (to be fair, he'd been at this longer than she'd been alive) (don't think about that) or she's a lot more transparent. Either way, she kind of hates it.
"Fuck do you think I’m going to do with a bottle opener, anyway?"
"I dunno. Break your fingers?" He'd given Dangguen one last ride, then, before shoving him back in his pocket. "Alright. I think bunny needs a nap."
- Shit, she'd thought, me too. And then she'd had to stop thinking about that because it made her feel weird.
She’d assume all of this stuff goes home with him (or she’d hope it would) but she has no idea where she puts it and never identifies an opportunity. Maybe he is a wizard.
Right now, any magic would be appreciated.
"Did they move the body?" she says.
London doesn't have to lean over to look at her. She can just about see him through their screens, though he is a bit yellowed and blurred. He does it anyway. "Huh?" Reyes could almost assume that he was working on something just as engrossing, but from what she can see she's pretty sure he was just doing a crossword.
"I don’t get how she was shot, from like, over here," and she taps on the screen, for good measure. "But the angle of the blood splatter is wrong. And the body was over here. She’s not going to fall like that if she was shot there. The angle's off." Out of her peripheral, she sees him get up. "And I don't get why you'd bother dragging the body around in the same room. Like he's not hiding it."
London has a perfectly serviceable computer that he can also access ARCS data on. For whatever reason, he chooses to stand behind her and stoop down to peek at her screen instead. Maybe it's for the same reason that he doesn't talk to her through their screens. Maybe it’s an excuse to put his hand on her shoulder.
- There’s a lot of that, lately. Like she’s gonna float away if he doesn’t tether her down.
He has to look at it first. "No." he says, eventually. "You’re right. What does that tell you?"
Reyes blinks at him. "You asking me because you want to know, or you already know and this is a teaching moment?"
The hand on her shoulder has turned into an arm around her, somehow. "I'm asking you because I want to hear what you think."
- ding
The soft sound registers vaguely from her pocket. One chime was enough. She can program alarms into the Osiris, but it rattles her skull something fucking horrendous and she’s never used the feature since. Phone is fine.
"Huh." Clearly not for London, who takes a moment to check the actual physical watch he wears for some fucking reason. "That came around quick." He pats her shoulder as he straightens up. "Did you bring anything? I can go get you something instead. Could really do with a coffee, anyway."
"It's fine. Thanks." She goes back to studying the screen. "I'm not hungry."
She's not absorbed enough that she doesn't see London's shoulders drop slightly out of the corner of her vision.
"You said that this morning. Look, it doesn’t have to be a lot. Just… something."
- It would make him happy, she supposes. Lately, she’s started to get some sort of sick satisfaction out of it. It doesn’t necessarily feel unreasonable to want someone close to her - someone she likes - to be happy, of course.
- It’s just that every time he tells her she’s doing a good job she feels it shredding her stomach lining.
"Can we take a look at this first?" she says, instead. London looks at his watch again.
"….Alright. Five minutes." Never mind! Clearly it’s anything he says nowadays that makes her feel weird. The hand on her shoulder comes back. That doesn’t help. London nestles in beside her and she turns her attention back to the screen.
"I think--" But she can see him out of her peripheral, and a cursory look catches his eye for a millisecond before he looks away again. "Uh." What was she thinking about, again? “Yeah. So obviously her body was moved, but I don’t know why. What’s the point?”
"Yeah?" London tilts his head. Was he even looking at the screen at all? "You're right." he says. "That doesn't make sense."
He gives her shoulder a pat. Weird. And then he does move, back over to his own desk, but only for long enough to take a few sheets of actual paper before he comes back and leaves it on her desk. Reyes looks at him, blankly, watches as he looks up at her screen and down at his paper and draws a bunch of lines.
"You know you can do that on the computer?"
"I know." says London, and keeps doing it anyway. Reyes looks over, rests her head in her hands. He’s drawing a seashell. He's putting a lot of effort into the guidelines. Very precise. But then he stares at it, concerned, like he wasn’t sure why he was drawing a seashell in the first place. Not a question she can answer, Qasim.
"What the fuck is he doing?" Like the seashell has given him some horrific insight into the mind of a killer.
"I don’t know." says Reyes. "What the fuck are you doing?" London looks back up at her, back down at the page, taps his pencil on the table a few times.
"You want me to show you?"
- oh, she doesn't like the way he says that either
"So it is a teaching moment." She doesn't quite have the presence of mind to roll her eyes about it. London pulls his chair over, having clearly decided the Authoritive Stoop approach was putting his back out.
"Lot of those out here, Sunshine. Glad you noticed." Quirks a little smile from the corners of his mouth, and moves the paper back between them. "Ever heard of the golden ratio?"
"No." Reyes raises her eyebrows. "Sounds pretentious."
"Depends on your point of view. It's a mathematical construct. Kind of art, too, depending on how you look at it. It's like--" He taps the paper again, gesturing like he wants Reyes to look at it. She peers over. "If you split up this shape into a big part and a small part--" which he gestures to, "--the ratio of the difference of the big part and the whole thing is the same as from the big part to the small part. That makes sense?"
Sure, she can buy that. Still, she's more aware of how close they are. For some reason, sitting like this feels more intimate. Her shoulder is kind of brushing against his. As he moves his hand around the paper, his arm brushes against hers a few times. There's something fulfilling about it.
"It's a pattern that keeps coming up in nature." London hasn't noticed. "Plants want to grow and spread out by putting, I don't know. Leaves? Somewhere they're not gonna overlap, but also not gonna waste space. Like-- here." On the screen, now, he pulls up a picture of a sunflower. Turns on the pen overlay, and Reyes watches as he starts mapping out the same squares over the top. "You count the lines going this way, over the lines going this way, and when you divide them, it comes out to about, uh, one point six. Which is the same as this square to this square--" He taps the paper again. "Or this one to this one. Do you understand?"
"Sure." says Reyes.
"You use it in art, I guess you get a more satisfying picture."
She's not sure what the face she just pulled looks like. "And if you use it in a murder?"
"Then I guess we build a better profile."
"Of... someone really fucking pretentious?"
London has the nerve to look affronted. "Hey, I just told you about it. You think I'm pretentious?"
Reyes doesn't say yes. Instead, she says "You're not the one that moved the crime scene around."
"I'd hope not." London looks at his watch again. "That'd put both of us in a bad position." He straightens up, leans on the armrests to pull himself out of the chair. "Think it's time to get you some lunch. Same as usual?"
"Fine." He looks at her from the corner of his eye, and she huffs, leans back in her chair. "Yes, sir."
"Great." And London pats her on the head. Reyes makes an incredibly undignified noise, her hands moving up to stop him, and he ruffles her hair, instead, a smirk spreading across his face.
"Ugh!" He's pushing her head down, almost, with the force of it. She succeeds in batting him off (or maybe he just relents) and glares up at him, through her fringe and all the other flyaway bits now sticking up everywhere. "You are so fucking weird!"
"Hey, what happened to "yes sir"? I liked that better." He's doing the smug thing again. He's always doing the fucking smug thing and
- it has no effect on her at all, actually.
- Maybe it's him. He's the killer. Clearly he's pretentious enough.
Reyes tries to put her hair back where it was. It doesn't look much different. "Yeah, I fucking bet you do."
There's a split second where she wonders if that was a weird thing to say to her boss. She does forget he's her boss, sometimes. The corners of London's mouth twitch.
"What does that mean?"
"I don't know. Didn't have time to think of anything better."
London stares at Reyes. Reyes stares back. Somehow, she can't help but smile. It feels like losing her composure, but she wasn't aware of the urge until now. He laughs first, though, covers his mouth, and then Reyes laughs too. Sits there giggling at him like a fucking idiot. London clearly decides he needs to cover his eyes, instead, ring finger and thumb pressing into his head like she's giving him a migraine.
“Jesus Christ. Alright. I’m getting a coffee.”
“Okay.” says Reyes, and then “Honestly, I’m good. I don’t want anything.”
“Sure.” says London, and salutes her with two of his fingers, for some reason, before he trundles off. Reyes watches him leave. She can't really make fun of him for his bihourly vending machine visits. She's a little more conscious about not annoying him, now.
Doesn't mean anything.
- London comes back with a coffee for him, a coffee for her, and a carton full of rice and vegetables and fluffy pieces of egg. She can’t say no to that.
- At some point - a couple hours later - some sort of synthetic flapjack manifests onto her desk. Its caramel frosting is disturbingly uniform.
- Crafty son of a bitch.
███████/████████/ 2086
Typically, their hours are a little more sporadic than the average person's, which is both a blessing and a curse depending on the time.
It was one advantage of living in the dorms. At least it was close enough that she could just walk back, let herself in and pass out. Depending on the time, the rest of her roommates would either all be in or all be out. If they were in, she'd have the courtesy to try not to disturb them, at least. She's not uncongenial enough that she doesn't remember the hell of a 12 hour beat.
If they were out, she'd be alone. Seems obvious. But sometimes she wouldn't even bother pulling the curtain around her bed, or closing the blinds at the window. (There's one of them, always wants the blinds fucking closed. Most of the time, Reyes doesn't mind.) With them open, she could see the rest of the city winding itself around her. Hear the trains. She could look at the sky and imagine herself in any other place. She could look at the sky and think of how high up
- No point in trying it. Not like there were bars on the window, but there was a thin sort of metal grate. The official line was that it kept them safe from the outside.
- Reyes knows they mean from other people. The glass is bulletproof.
- Still.
- She's still paying her rent there. She's been living with London for long enough that she gets the sense he's not going to kick her out any time soon, but moving out entirely feels presumptuous. She tries to contribute, where she can, but she usually eats at work* and when she’s at his place things mostly appear around her.
- *This is also, to be fair, at his behest. She can only estimate how much to pay him back. Sometimes she’s not entirely sure whether it goes through.
Anyway, it's too fucking late to be up, but maybe that means they'd look the other way if she didn't go in for five in the fucking morning. (First she'd heard of working from home, either. She doesn't feel quite confident enough to pull that, yet.)
The car chugs merrily along its path and Reyes wonders if she might fall asleep before it gets there.
London's not doing much better. He might actually be asleep. What is it with old men and fucking doing that? Sitting down in any chair in the world and nodding out instantly like they owe Morpheus a fucking favour. Reyes watches him, for a moment, and then something about looking at him hurts, so she stops.
Instead, she looks out of the window.
There's enough sunlight to make out silhouettes of detail, but not enough for anything else. Like a shitty clickbait painting where the background's a gradient and everything else is little black shapes. Other cars pass them by, sometimes, intensifying the rumbling grinding noise into a screech as one overtakes the other. She watches this one as it separates from her route and disappears away into the distance. Who the fuck lives down there?
Not down there. She should say over there. So much of this city takes place in the fucking sky. She understands it. Not much point venturing to ground level any more, for most people, and definitely not much point building on it. She wonders if anyone has lived their whole life without touching the ground. Maybe not yet. The architecture isn't old enough.
That'll be a thinkpiece, won't it. 30% of nation's youth have never seen a floor. String all the tiny little bastards up for the crime of their ignorance.
It's like, the further away they get in either direction, the less she understands them. She doesn't get bad people. She doesn't get stealing or murdering or drugs, or-- she knows damn well most drugs are legal, but she doesn't get that, either. Roomies definitely thought she was a prude. Maybe she is?
- She just doesn't get the point of dying by accident.
The other side of the coin are the people who live up. The kind of real ignorance that comes with having too much money. She's never had too much money in her life and never will, short of some collossal governmental fuck up that would somehow affect her specifically. State would have to leave a vat of acid on the floor by her desk or something.
The people who do - in her experience - are people who have never done a day's work in their lives and don't intend to start now. People who would consider it an insult. Maybe that one's birthright should dictate their lifestyle and circumstance, like the money is a status symbol in itself that they inherited through the grace of god because their line is just more special than everyone else. People who have never seen outside their bubble and what they do and what their family does, people who can't concieve of a world outside of waking up and revolving and going to sleep. People who know nothing and believe nothing! People who spend all their time eating shellfish off tiny little plates and talking about stocks.
- People who don't tip their fucking waiters.
Still, the less Reyes understands people - really understands them - there's more an acceptance that it's just as much her as them. She doesn't understand why someone would throw their life away to hurt people, and she doesn't understand why they'd throw their life away to sit around and do fuck all. But she does understand that she's also... really hard to get on with. So whatever side of people she sees is the side that they want her to see. And she doesn't care about the extremists on the spectrum, because there is only one side to them, as far as she's concerned, but--
--Well, everyone that pisses her off also comes with the reminder that they wouldn't be like that if she didn't have her hackles up. Maybe she could do more. Maybe she could help more.
If only she could just....change it all.
Not much she can do like this. She presses her face as far against the window as it'll go and tries to imagine there is nothing down there, just a swirling void, free of the ground entirely. If she just hit it right she could clip through the ground and drift below the earth for all eternity. There'd be nothing bigger than her out there. Nothing she could hurt and nothing that could hurt her either.
- Top 10 Cool New 'Hacks For Circumventing The Cycle Of Life Number One Fall Through The Fucking Floor
She's busy enough trying to manifest herself amidst the yawning gap that she only vaguely feels something touching her.
Suddenly, Reyes is back in the car and she's going home from work. She's going to work tomorrow. She rubs her eyes and finds she's adjusted out of being able to see in the darkness.
"Mn." she says, which is an adequate response to whatever she's responding to.
"Are you okay?" says London. Reyes suddenly remembers he's here too.
"Yeah. Of course. I think--" The most in character thing she could do would be to say something mean about him being asleep, and that would tell him she was fine enough
- to be comfortable, being a bitch
to leave her alone. But her heart isn't in it, so she just shrugs. "I don't know. I'm fine."
She wonders if London is looking at her like he's trying to figure something out. But he reaches over - she's not sure how he can reach her, from over there. Clearly he manages it. He's gone for her shoulder, but she can't feel it?
Only realises what he's doing when she does feel a pull and a click.
Her fucking seatbelt?
"I can do that myself, you know."
"I'm sure you can. You just forgot?"
“I guess.” Reyes goes back to looking out of the window. Maybe London's still looking at her. The back of her neck seems to think so. The gap seems to be gone. She can see more of the world below.
"I'm here." That makes her glance over again. "What are you thinking about?" He's using the same voice from before and it drops dispersible into her chest. Her voice, in contrast, is raw all of a sudden.
"Nothing."
She feels sick. Weirdly scared. She wants to go back to him holding her, but she could never, ever ask for that, and it would be hard to do in the car anyway. It's still hard, while she's strapped in, to curl into herself, but she manages it, in lieu of anything else, brings her knees up to her chest and tucks her shoes into the chair. There's not enough space for her whole foot, just her heel, and the half with her toes dangles off the edge. It's familiar.
It’s not so much a call to the void that she’s feeling, right now.
“...Qaz?” she manages.
“Yeah?” He is looking at her. She can just about tell in the dark. She’d like to see more of him, but it’s enough of a comfort to know he’s there. Her leg hurts a bit.
“I wasn’t that drunk.” she says.
It feels freeing to admit. Weirdly, she’s less scared, of whatever she was scared of before, but now the anxiety has shifted to him, and she does find herself looking at him for some kind of reaction. She doesn’t know why - it’s not like she can see him. He’s barely more than an outline against the chair behind him, like those videos where you can see something move against the static until you pause it and it blends in. For example, she can see London shift in his chair, lean back slightly, not away from her but like he’s settling back in.
“No.” he says, and that surprises her. “I didn’t think you were.”
“You didn’t?”
“You can usually smell it on people. It comes out through their pores. And I’ve seen you drunk.” Unfortunate. “You were… in a bad way, when I got there, but you seemed more…” Like he has to think about the words. He settles, eventually, on “--Tired. And I guess you were, cause you passed out on me twice.”
“Sorry,” says Reyes. She feels something touch her foot, which happens to be the closest part of her that he can reach.
“Don’t be.”
"...You seemed to think I was." she ventures. “Drunk, I mean.”
"I think what I said was, it's not something you do drunk unless you already wanted to." He leans back again. "So either something got you mad enough to drink, and drunk enough to--"
- Like he can't even say it? Come on man. You've killed people yourself.
"--or, what I'm thinking, is something upset you first. And you just wanted to make sure you didn't back out. Liquid courage or whatever. So--" He softens his voice again. "What happened?"
If she can't look out of the window, her shoes will have to do. She can sort of see them, from the vague light through the window. Better than she can see him, anyway. Until the eye surgery, they were the most expensive thing she'd ever bought herself. Good thing they still hold up. She'd have sure felt like an idiot paying through the socket for something that didn't work properly.
"You know what happened, Qaz."
- It wasn't the same day. She'd gone home that night too tired to think.
- It was a couple days later, when the DA had toddled on in all dishevelled, like she hadn't slept herself, cornered London for notes, and hadn’t looked at her the entire god damn time.
- She hadn't immediately gone wandering off to find an overpass, as strong as the urge had been, but had sat for her shift in silent contemplation of the thought until it was time to clock out. Hadn’t slept much then either. The day after that, she’d spent the day ticking over, waited for a reasonable hour for everyone to be in bed before she’d slipped out.
- She’d stopped at the nearest bar on the way. She didn’t need much. It all already felt like it needed to happen.
- Right time.
- Right thing to do.
"Just that?" says London. "Or was that just the last in a long line of things that happened?" Reyes looks up at him, briefly, through her hair. He doesn't sound like he's judging her. He doesn't look angry. She tries to tell that to whatever is currently fizzing around in her gut.
“I guess?”
"Would you do it again?"
She has to think about that. Maybe there’s too much of a pause between him asking and her answering, because he reaches out and pats her on the ankle again.
Eventually, she settles on, "I don't know."
"Well, it's better than yes. Little victories." There's a despondent sort of fatigue about it. "How long were you thinking about it?"
“Like, actively?”
“I don’t know. At all?”
Despite their hardiness, there is a strip of leather coming off, just enough for her to fiddle with, so she busies herself with that.
“In the back of my mind? Pretty much as long as I can remember. Only really… thought about it then. Couple of days before.” And London doesn’t say anything, to that, so Reyes keeps going, for the sake of filling the silence.
"I gave myself a lot of chances." she mumbles, tugs at her shoe. "To do something. And I really thought, when they promoted me, this was it. First big thing I got. And I blew it."
“You didn’t blow anything.” She might have found that funny if he’d said it at literally any other time. "You did your job. Case you got stuck with was... convoluted, and I'm sorry about that. I was-- If you hadn't called the DA I would have called her myself. Seemed pretty open and shut to me too."
Reyes doesn’t say anything. London pats her leg.
“Why tell me this now?” he asks. “What are you thinking about?”
Try as she might, her voice cracks, a little. “Because I don’t know what to do.”
“You do what you can.” says London. “We all do. That’s all you can do.” If he’s touching her leg, that must mean his hand is around here somewhere. Reyes reaches for it. They bump fingers a few times before London finds her, and as soon as they interlock he squeezes, just enough. It solidifies whatever’s in her gut and she’s not sure if that’s better or worse.
“The world,” he says, “Is not your responsibility to fix. I know how much you care. I know–” he says, more quickly, thinking doubtless she might cut him off or argue. “You do a damn good job of pretending you don’t. I know you’re angry because you care. And you’re right. There’s a lot wrong with the world and not a lot of people doing anything about it. Frankly--” he squeezes her hand. “Sunshine, they don’t have the balls. Lot of crime is cowardice. You’re brave enough to care about it. And you do a damn better job of it than anyone else I’ve met.”
Reyes shakes. She uses her free hand to scrub across her face. Her eyepatch is damp. London takes both of her hands in his again, and again she’s reminded of their disparity.
“You spend enough time here,” he says, “You start seeing cases and statistics. I don’t want you to ever stop seeing people.”
“I’m not very good with people.” she croaks. She thinks London might have laughed, or at least exhaled in a vaguely humorous manner.
“You don’t gotta talk to them much to help them.” he says. “Grin and bear it.” He squeezes her hand again. “You do have to be alive. I’m serious. You can’t fix anything if you’re dead. Not even your own corner.”
She feels the autocar slow down. It stutters a little before it glides to a stop. London doesn’t seem to notice. He still has hold of both of her hands.
“...Okay.” Reyes has to give him that, begrudgingly. She scrubs her hand across her face again. London unbuckles his seatbelt. She doesn't object, this time, when he leans over to unbuckle hers too.
“And,” he says, “You have to help yourself be better, too.”
He helps pull her up and out of the seat, as he says it. She doesn’t think much of it.
"I don't know how to be better.” she points out, instead. “If I did, I'd have done it already."
"I didn't mean better as in good." says London. "I meant better as in well."
- Which is an angle she hadn't considered before.
- She's not sure how long she hasn't been well. All this seems fairly normal.
London's still holding her hand. He puts his other arm around her, and she knows it's really just to help her up from the platform (and it's not like she needs help with that, anyway) but still, she can't help but lean into it.
"It's okay if you don't know. What to do or how to do it. We'll figure it out." There’s more light out here, now they’re in a residential area, but looking at him would require her to move her head, so she still doesn't. There's something nice about letting him lead her away. Still overly indulgent.
"It's not your responsibility to fix me either." she points out.
"Well," says London. "It's easier to solve with two of us." It does worry Reyes a little when he lets go of her hand, but it's only for long enough to rummage in his pocket. He returns with Dangguen, looking no less worse for wear for being in his pocket.
"Here's your bunny back." And he smiles. It's supposed to be reassuring, and it is, but it settles something else in her stomach, too.
"What," she says, "Not worried about me breaking my fingers?"
"He wouldn't let you. He's under strict orders."
Reyes takes the bottle opener. She turns it around in her hand. She feels London squeeze her shoulders in return.
“And anyway.” he says. “He’s glad you’re here.”