Chapter Text
“ – And that’s how I got my medical license,” said Ludwig.
“Do you still have it? Four cards,” said Seneschal, sliding her throwaways face-down towards Doe. The three of them had pushed a couple of bar tables together and were playing an increasingly-drowsy game of poker – Zhanna was in the back doing inventory and had conscripted the Detective to help her. It hadn’t taken much. If anything, he had seemed relieved to escape the insurmountable burden of polite conversation.
Doe gave her four cards from the deck.
“I don’t think so,” said the Doctor mildly. “It depends on how much Blutarch managed to cover up. Two cards for me, danke.”
Doe passed them over. “Remind me what we’re betting?”
“Are we?” asked Ludwig, at the same time as Seneschal offered, “Blowjobs?”
The Doctor looked at her, alarmed. She put her hands up. “Kidding. I have no idea. Jay-Jay?”
“Real men only bet on what they’ll know they’ll win,” stated Doe confidently. “Hence. I am checking.”
“What, too scared to try some wienerschnitzel?” said Seneschal, gesturing inconspicuously at the Doctor.
“I’m not – Don’t involve me in this,” said Ludwig, visibly flustered.
Doe was saved from having to think of a response by the Detective, who wandered back into the room and leaned over his shoulder to unabashedly peer at his hand. “Straight poker?”
“Five-card draw,” answered Seneschal. “We’re bettin’ favors. Sound familiar?” She drew the word favors out into an unmistakably suggestive purr.
“We are not doing that!” said Doe loudly. “Come on, Sen. It never ends well.” a pause, “Not that I would know. Because I’ve never done it before.”
“Not even with your buddy here?” said Seneschal, gesturing to the Detective. She was visibly pleased that Doe had taken her bait.
“Only when he behaves,” said the Detective cattily before Doe could answer, and slipped into a vacant chair. Doe kicked him under the table, which he was sure didn’t help things, but it did make him feel a bit better.
Ludwig cleared his throat loudly, still brutally flushed. “Bets aside,” he said pointedly, “I’ve got three-of-a-kind,” and put his hand down on the table – three tens, a five and a queen.
Seneschal sighed and threw her cards down unceremoniously. “Fold. I’ve got nothin’.”
“Two-pair,” admitted Doe, and turned to the Doctor, his mischief returned: “Guess I owe you a favor after all. Your pick.”
“I’ll let you know if I think of anything,” the Doctor managed to get out.
Doe almost had half a mind to feel bad for him, but it was pretty funny to see him get so red. Either way, the man would live. He was holding up remarkably well in Dalokohs for a man who hid behind a crucifix like it was a blast-shield. Maybe he was queer after all – or just batshit insane. Doe supposed everybody had their mysteries.
“Darling! Come help me with boxes!” Zhanna yelled from the back room, and Seneschal stood up automatically, saluting with two fingers as she walked off.
“Have fun playing tonsil hockey,” snipped Doe on sheer instinct.
“I’ll think of you, Jane!” hollered Seneschal before she turned the corner, leaving the three men alone at the table.
There was a short silence while Doe gathered up the cards again.
“Are all of your friends like that?” Ludwig asked him uncertainly.
“Like what?” said Doe.
For reasons he couldn’t quite comprehend, the Detective snorted derisively. Instead of adding his own comment, he just swiped Doe’s canteen from the table and took a drink from it.
His face scrunched up. “Your taste in whiskey is deplorable,” he said, wiping his mouth off.
“Maybe you should drink your own,” said Doe. “You playing?”
The Detective sighed deeply. “I don’t suppose I have anything better to do.”
“What is it?”
“Huh?”
“What kind of whiskey is it?” clarified Ludwig. “I’ve always been more of a… a beer person. What makes it bad?”
“It’s cheap,” seethed the Detective, which Doe imagined was the third most scathing insult he could think of, after cowardly and amateur. “It’s far too bitter, and the underlying notes of flavor are nonexistent. It’d be passable on the rocks, maybe, but he drinks it warm.”
“I’ll drink your mother warm!” snapped Doe. “It’s a soldier’s drink. Hardy. Dependable. It keeps your core running hot.”
“That’s a myth, actually,” the Doctor piped up. “Alcohol increases bloodflow to your skin by widening the vessels under the surface. You feel warm, but it actually makes you get cold faster. That’s why so many people get drunk and die outside from hypothermia!”
He sounded notably enthusiastic about the concept. Doe tried valiantly not to think about it very hard.
Four rounds of poker (all four of which he had lost, to his chagrin) and a generous portion of alcohol later, he wasn’t having to try very valiantly at all. In fact, he was having a fair bit of trouble thinking about anything at all.
Seneschal and Zhanna had gone off who-knows-where to do who-knows-what – in their house it was better not to ask – and the only light left on in the place was an orange side-table lamp that flickered on and off as it damn well pleased. The Detective had gotten drunk enough to stomach Doe’s whiskey, apparently, and had commandeered the flask from him with no sign of remorse (though surprisingly he did offer it to the Doctor for one or two sips, who seemed to agree, after all, that it was too bitter).
Doe himself was sitting with his head cushioned on top of his folded arms, his eyelids heavy as bullet-casings. He was fighting to keep them open, as he was deeply fascinated in his drunken state by the sight of the Detective without his hat or even his coat, his sleeves rolled up and his salt-and-pepper hair half-fallen into his face while he passionately debated the Doctor on something or other about the nature of some old novel that Doe couldn’t hope to follow along with.
The Detective caught him looking, and swiveled his gaze onto Doe, completely misinterpreting his stare. “Don’t tell me you think he’s right,” he said, aghast.
Doe blinked out of his absent smile and glanced over at Ludwig, whose pale blue eyes remained disturbingly sharp and lucid, even though he was clearly also drunk. “It was an allegory,” he protested, his German accent rather thicker than usual. “Shelley’s intention – “
“The intention of the author was irrelevant! It – “
“Doctor’s right,” interrupted Doe.
“You Judas,” hissed the Detective with hotly passionate conviction. “How could you agree with that imbecilic analysis? How could you – you side with him?”
Doe mumbled something. His face was very warm from the alcohol.
“What was that?”
“I like his eyes.” And, as an afterthought, “Numbskull.”
The Detective blinked several times in rapid succession, abruptly speechless.
“What’s the matter with my eyes?” frowned Ludwig. He seemed genuinely concerned.
“Nothing’s the matter with your eyes,” snapped the Detective immediately. “They’re eyes. They’re rather cold and boring, if you ask me. And flat. And… uninteresting.”
“You already said ‘boring’” Ludwig pointed out.
“Go jump off a bridge, why don’t you,” growled the Detective, and then put his head in his hands and groaned exhaustedly.
Doe yawned in sympathy. “They… They are cold. Y’r eyes. But I like ‘em like that.”
“Oh,” managed Ludwig, beet-red. He kept finding ways to get more flustered just when Doe was convinced he was done. It put a slug of warmth in Doe’s stomach that he was too drunk to avoid acknowledging. He licked around the inside of his mouth lazily, watching the Doctor fiddle with his silver necklace.
“So, Fritz,” started Doe, “Have you ever – “
Just then the Detective slapped his hands down on the table and stood up with a heavy screech from his chair, startling both of the other men. “I am going upstairs,” he announced, rubbing his forehead and squinting as though his hangover had managed to set in preemptively. “When you idiots join me I implore you to be quiet.”
Doe waved him off ambivalently, which the Detective wholeheartedly ignored as he stomped upstairs, or maybe he was just preoccupied with his headache.
“He didn’t seem very happy,” said Ludwig slowly.
“Well, he may or may not think that, uh…” Doe trailed off, trying and failing to flag down his own train of thought. “That, well, you know. Us. Bonding. You know.”
“I know?”
“You know.” Doe paused. “Hey, Fritz?”
“Yes, Soldier?”
“Have you ever had your dick sucked?”
Ludwig choked on the dregs of his drink. Doe watched while he coughed and sputtered, his owlish glasses barely hanging onto the tip of his nose. “Excuse me?”
“What? Too much of a prude for some good ol’ cocksucking?”
“I – My personal affairs are none of – not that I – “ Ludwig cleared his throat, agitated. “Why – are you asking?”
Doe shrugged honestly. He was too drunk to know why he was saying much of anything. “Just wanted to know.”
They sat in silence for a long time, long enough that Doe started to idly wonder if the Doctor had fallen asleep with his eyes open. It seemed like something he would do. Kind of fit in with all the skeletons and blood-wall-writing in his office. And the needles. And the –
“Maybe,” huffed Ludwig, shaking Doe out of his thoughts.
“What?”
“Maybe I have,” repeated the Doctor, crossing his arms, fidgeting. He was still bright red. “What does it matter? It was a long time ago. It didn’t mean anything.”
“So you aren’t just pretty for nothin’! I knew you had it in you, Doc. I told you.” crowed Doe triumphantly, before another yawn overtook him. “I’m going upstairs. To the couch room. Where he went. You coming?”
“Well, I hardly want to sleep down here,” said Ludwig, getting to his feet unsteadily. “Come… come on. I’ll help you.”
Doe looked at the cards and empty glasses haphazardly scattered around the table, decided it wasn’t worth trying, and shuffled around to stand by Ludwig’s side. The Doctor threw an arm over his shoulder with a lack of hesitation than Doe didn’t think he’d be capable of, leaning Doe’s weight against him like he was escorting a wounded comrade off of a battlefield.
Though Doe had seen the man shirtless just the prior day, he was still taken aback by the developed muscle he felt when Ludwig pressed up against him. He may have purely been a healer in name, but he was hardly a weak man.
Doe’s throat went a bit dry. Ludwig almost seemed like he could have been a match for himself; maybe in some other life they could have been… he didn’t know. Sparring buddies? Boxing partners? Something competitive and physical. Something sweaty.
The Doctor’s breath was hot near his cheek, and he made a funny, endearing little noise of shock when he stumbled on a creaky stair. Doe decided to stop thinking about being shirtless in near proximity to him. There was a distinct, uncomfortable reason why pursuing that would be a bad idea, but he was neither sober nor awake enough to quite remember what it was.
They did, in fact, make a non-insignificant amount of noise when they finally made it into the storeroom upstairs, enough that the Detective spat several vehement French curses at them from the couch where he had, according to him, previously been asleep. Doe mumbled some half-hearted retort about real American men not needing to sleep and collapsed onto the blanket in the corner he’d slept on the previous couple of nights, pulling Ludwig right down with him.
He put his head against something, and almost, almost managed to think of what he’d been trying to remember on the stairs – about the Doctor, and his body, and a feverish hot wrist he’d grasped a lifetime ago… it fluttered like a moth around the side of his head, slipping in and out of his fingers.
And then sleep dragged shut his eyes.
—
When he opened them again, the world was fuzzy, drifting, and agonizingly bright.
Doe groaned and scrubbed a hand over his face, memories of the previous day coming back to him in filtered fragments. Ice? Poker. Drinking. More drinking. His head was resting on something soft and warm. There was a shadow over him, blocking the painful sun from his vision. He sighed in relief.
“Get up, idiot,” said the shadow, and kicked him in the shoulder.
Awareness hit Doe like an armored tank. He scrabbled to his feet before he had time to think about it, shaking the lightheadedness out of himself – old war instincts. The Detective was standing in front of him, a sour, pinched expression on his face. Doe followed his gaze, and saw –
– Ludwig, dozing on the floor. Doe’s pillow was under his head, which meant… that Doe had been using him as a pillow. His stomach, by the looks of it, still drifting peacefully up and down under a layer of rumpled white cotton. It actually hadn’t been half uncomfortable.
“We weren’t exactly gonna fit on the couch,” said Doe by way of explanation.
The Detective gave him a deeply disparaging look. “It is of no concern to me. Look at this,” he snapped, and held up a newspaper that Doe hadn’t realized he’d been holding. The Albuquerque Journal.
Doe squinted at the page, deep in concentration, and then said, “Fourteen down is ‘grenade’.”
“Not the crossword, you imbecile. The article! On top!”
“Oh,” said Doe, and looked at the headline: Fugitive Funeral Killer Spotted Near Kingston, Police Still Searching. He frowned. “Woulda thought they’d name him after the slaughterhouse.”
“He’s a liability,” said the Detective. “Half the state is looking for the man, god damnit, and we’ve been sitting around in a public bar with him every night! If someone recognizes him, they’ll take all of us in and do God knows what to us!”
“If nobody’s ratted us out by now, I doubt they will,” Doe pointed out. “We’re not exactly standing in the town square asking to be hanged.”
“Semantics,” the Detective snapped. “I know how these men work. As soon as we let our guards down, they’ll find us.” He leaned closer, hissed under his breath: “How far does your charity reach, Soldier?”
Hadn’t they had this conversation already? How many times was the Detective going to make them do this, trapped in his own burnt-out rage, stiff with rigor mortis? How long until he did something about it himself, one way or the other?
“You saying we should kick him out?” asked Doe, beginning to get angry.
“I’d prefer it if you didn’t,” slurred Ludwig from the floor.
Doe recovered from his surprise that the Doctor was awake in time to offer him a hand up, which he took gratefully. The Detective, meanwhile, flushed and looked away, apparently ashamed to have been caught in his criticisms.
Ludwig, when he was upright, let go of Doe’s hand to scrub over his forehead, groaning in objection to his own hangover headache. “I appreciate your concern, but I’m sure I wouldn’t get far if you tossed me to the side of the road now, Detective,” he said mildly. “They would probably just sweep the whole town. What is that newspaper?”
The Detective showed him, sullenly. Ludwig squinted through his glasses. “We must be fifty miles from Kingston,” he said. “If this is from today, I doubt we’re in trouble.”
“Can I have the crossword when you’re done?” Doe asked.
The Detective sighed heavily and handed the paper over.
“You really aren’t concerned in the slightest that they might find us?” He asked Ludwig after Doe had taken it. “Not after they had you pinned down to the building? It’s a miracle you’ve survived this long, if that’s the kind of foresight you’re working with.”
Something in the Doctor’s face twisted. “What makes you think I have?” He said quietly. “This could be hell, Detective. I wouldn’t know either way.”
“It would certainly explain why I can’t seem to avoid you,” snapped the Detective.
Ludwig was silent.
“Don’t worry, Fritz,” said Doe, consoling. “If this was hell, there wouldn’t be any booze.”
—
Doe didn’t see him for a few hours after that.
Zhanna had put them to work cleaning again, and had gotten the Doctor to help her move boxes into the pantry – knowing her, Doe assumed it was an excuse to give him unasked-for advice about something or other; and sure enough, when Ludwig emerged he had a strange, frustrated look about him and was pink around his eyes, like he’d been rubbing at them or trying not to cry. Doe honestly couldn’t tell whether Zhanna had been comforting him or making things worse. Ludwig clearly had his own demons to fight, with or without someone else’s intervention, and Doe didn’t care to ask either way.
“Hey, Fritz,” he said later on, apropos of a vested need for levity after the Doctor had set a chair down a bit too harshly for the third time in a row, “Say we get out of here, you know, sweep the whole thing under the rug. Where do you wanna go?”
Ludwig paused, frowning. “Where do I want to go?”
“Sure. Me, I’d get up and go to Ohio.” It was true enough. He’d want to know where the Detective was going first, just to be sure.
“What’s in Ohio?”
Doe shrugged. “Not much, really. Grass. Corn. Some horses. It’s where I’m from, though.”
“Oh,” said Ludwig, and moved another chair. “Do you have family there?”
Doe’s face twisted involuntarily. “Not any that I talk to. I figure I’d get a little house or something. Somewhere quiet. With plenty of raccoons.”
“...Raccoons?”
“They’re admirable creatures!” snapped Doe, offended at the Doctor’s tone. “Name one animal more noble than the raccoon. And don’t say eagle.”
Ludwig huffed an almost-laugh. “I’m partial to primates, myself. Their inner anatomy is fascinating. People these days really don’t recognize the depths of their potential in experimental medicine.”
“Figures you’d like stabbing around in somethin’s guts,” mumbled Doe, wiping down a bar stool.
The Doctor’s good humor dissipated immediately. “What is that supposed to mean?”
Doe gestured to him. “Because you’re a doctor! Don’t give me that look!” He returned to the stool. “Everybody needs a hobby. I used to make cardboard cutouts in my spare time, you make vivisections…”
“I think your partner’s sense of humor is rubbing off on you,” said Ludwig unkindly.
Doe cleaned for a few more moments before a belated sense of guilt started to set in. He shifted awkwardly, wanting to right the bitter atmosphere he had created but not sure if he should apologize outright, or how to, in any case. I’m sorry that I might have accidentally joked about your occasional – involuntary? – axe-murdering tendencies did not sit very well in his head.
He opened his mouth to say something that he hoped was going to make things slightly better, but what came out instead was, “I didn’t see him for two months after the funeral.”
Ludwig stopped moving chairs and looked over at him.
“He just showed up one day. Like it hadn’t happened. God knows how he found me. And you want to know the worst part?” Doe scrubbed at a spot that was already thoroughly polished. “The worst part was, back in that godless church – I would have done it if you hadn’t. Had the damn pin in my palm and everything. And he knows it. And he still puts up with me.”
Ludwig had taken a step closer. Doe could see the shadow covering his hands on the wood.
“I don’t even know his name,” he said, quieter than he usually did.
Ludwig did nothing and said nothing. For a fleeting moment Doe began to feel cold dread coil
down his spine, like the man was a stalking predator about to try for a lunge.
And then the Doctor said, in an odd, faint, strained voice: “I hear San Francisco is very nice this time of year.”
“You don’t strike me as the big city type.”
“Well… I’m not,” said Ludwig. “I’m not at all, not really. But I hear it’s nice.”
Doe turned and didn’t quite meet the Doctor’s eyes. He was still down on his knees and they were starting to ache. “Sorry,” he said, “For the…”
“It’s fine,” sighed Ludwig. “I deserved it. I probably deserve a lot worse.” He huffed again, and that time there was no humor in it. “I suppose I may never know.”
Pain spiked in Doe’s heart for him. Just when the Doctor was about to turn away, he started, “Fritz – “
Lugwig turned back, his face open, curious.
“...Never mind,” said Doe, and shook his head.
Silently, they went back to cleaning.
—
A fragile routine began to settle down upon Dalokohs and its occupants. Morning ‘til afternoon they helped with the bar, cleaned, did as directed. Doe liked the monotony of it. Whatever reservations Zhanna and Seneschal had about the sudden intrusion were slowly beginning to fade: The Detective fidgeted and groused but did his work well enough, and Ludwig was quiet and watchful for the most part, though Doe would often catch him fixing his thousand-yard-stare on any mirrored surface around the place; whether it was for sake of his own haunted reflection or for something else entirely, he didn’t know. The Doctor rarely slept well, when he slept at all – outside of the night after their drunken rounds of poker, Doe wasn’t sure he’d ever seen the man get more than two or three hours at a time.
Whenever he woke it was with strangled gasps at best and hoarse screams at worst; he’d woken the whole house up the first time that had happened, to his own embarrassment and to Doe’s begrudging sympathy. He refused any kind of sleep aid or other comforts.
Ludwig only wanted caffeine and lamplight in the wake of his night-terrors, or occasionally alcohol when they got into the real kind of bad; he quickly took to perching alone in an uncomfortable wooden chair dragged into the corner of the room, exhausted but determined to stay awake as long as he could. The Detective complained about the light, of course, but his options were the couch or the storage closet, and his pride won out over pettiness with very little contest.
Ludwig never spoke about his dreams in any detail. There would be a mutter here, a strained fragment there: The slaughterhouse, of course, always. A coffin. A furnace. A red console. A white bathroom. In sleep, he’d call out for the boy from the house, sometimes, or for his old coworkers, his teammates; names Doe recognised only from police reports and newspapers.
Sometimes it would even be, Soldier. Soldier, help me, please. Keep him away from me. I didn’t do it. I swear I didn’t.
(The Detective didn’t look Ludwig in the eye much anymore.)
It was on one of those nights that Doe awoke to a strange sound: wobblier than the begging or screaming, ragged, so quiet that it was almost covered by the chair squeaking as the Doctor shifted around upright, stuck deep in his unwilling slumber.
He was sobbing.
Doe sat up. The Detective was asleep, or otherwise doing a good job of pretending to be. A floorboard or two joined the ambient creaking as Doe crossed the room to the chair and, after a moment of hesitation, put his hand on the Doctor’s shoulder and shook him gently.
“Fritz,” he said, “You’re dreaming – “
And then he was looking at the ceiling, his breath punched out of his chest.
The world spun dizzyingly around him while his brain caught up, and he realized there was a weight pressing him to the floor, and then he realized it was Ludwig. One of his fists was pulled back, the other crushing Doe’s collar, the Doctor’s knee jammed into his sternum. The dim lamplight illuminated half of Ludwig’s face in a sickly orange, like glowing embers; the other half was cast in deep blue-black shadow.
“Fritz,” wheezed Doe, fighting to fill his lungs back up with air. Ludwig said nothing, frozen in place. He could have been made from stone if not for his heaving chest, for the feverish heat radiating off of him in waves.
Across the room there was a stirring shuffle, and Doe’s blood froze at the notion of what the Detective would think seeing them – like this – but he just mumbled something indiscernible in his sleep and went still again.
Small, small mercies.
Doe looked up at the Doctor again. “Fritz,” he started a third time, and put his hand on the Doctor’s straining wrist. “It was a nightmare. Nothing is happening.”
He saw recognition begin to slowly breach through Ludwig’s hollow, frostbitten stare. “Soldier,” he gasped after a long moment. “It’s your lung – You have to – “ and then he stopped himself, and blinked rapidly several times, slivers of himself filling in the shell of his face again.
A hanging pause –
“Soldier,” Ludwig said again. “I – I’m sorry. I didn’t – “
“Get off me,” rasped Doe, and the Doctor put up no resistance as he was grappled away from the points where his touch burnt Doe’s skin.
Doe let him go and stood up. Ludwig sat listlessly back on the floor. Doe watched, unblinking, as the present room gradually came back to him: the quiet light, the chair, the blanket. It was an eerily familiar process to witness from the outside.
“Oh, Gott,” breathed Ludwig finally, and put his face in his shaking hands. “What did I do?”
Doe knew with pitying certainty that Ludwig was not speaking about pushing him to the ground.
Doe was not a subtle man, and he did not feel things subtly either: his emotions were gunfire and pop-rocks and they filled his chest up to bursting whether he goddamn liked it or not – Right now, though, whatever feeling sat behind his sternum was slipping through his fingers like satin; the smooth tendrils of a jellyfish, translucent and indiscernible. It was hard to be sure that it was there at all.
He took a knee next to the Doctor and put a hand between his shoulderblades, trying to come up with anything useful to say.
He didn’t have to.
“You were a soldier,” said Fritz in a broken whisper. “You have killed men before. Without Respawn – Without anything.” A ragged breath. “Does it – it ever get better?”
Doe was quiet for a long time, helpless, listening to the Doctor fight for control of his breathing.
“No,” he said eventually. “But you learn how to deal with it.” And then, “It wasn’t your fault, Fritz. I mean that.”
“It doesn’t matter,” weeped Fritz openly into his hands. “It doesn’t matter. They’re still dead. Oh, God. They’re still dead.”
Doe had no idea how to respond. He shuffled closer, and put his arms sideways around the Doctor’s shoulders and pulled him in, letting the other man curl against him. Fritz smelled like borrowed shampoo and stale beer and misery. He felt like something Doe had never had. Over on the couch, the Detective had began to softly snore.
Doe’s knees were killing him, he thought.
He stayed there until Fritz’s breathing was even again, and then for a long while more.
—
“Hey, pretty-boy. I am talking to you.”
A nudge on his shoulder, and Doe startled upright, looking into Zhanna’s wide staring face. He belatedly recalled she had been asking if he wanted a drink, and said, “No, I’m fine,” into the stretching silence.
Zhanna’s brow creased, but Doe waved her off before she could even start. “‘M fine, I mean it. Just tired.”
“You tell me if you need something,” said Zhanna, decisively but not unkindly, and with a firm pat on the shoulder she went away.
Doe let out a breath. It’s not that he begrudged Zhanna her company – if anything he was fond of her, even moreso for her continued hospitality – but he had been distracted because he had been thinking of the Doctor, and the Detective, and all that they entailed, and day by day the thing moving in his chest felt less like a heart and more like a ticking time-bomb.
Pussying around about it wasn’t doing him any good; but more and more Dalokohs had begun to seem like a strange fever-dream that he doubted he would ever really wake up from, and he was hesitating to pinch himself and find out.
As if on cue, Ludwig appeared at his shoulder, holding a beer and seeming a little drunk to match. “I needed to thank you,” he said, in a strange rush that implied he might have been drinking to build courage, “For the other night. It meant – it was helpful.”
“‘S nothing,” Doe said gruffly, looking down. He felt uncharacteristically abashed to hear it, and deeply moreso that the Doctor had been nervous to say it to him. It was almost flattering, in a weird confectionery kind of way.
“But, Doe, there is something I have to tell you – “ Ludwig went on, and his hand was on Doe’s shoulder now, and Doe glanced past him and saw the Detective across the club, toplit and shining in the lamplight, scowling blackly at the pair of them like they were the only ones in the room.
Doe turned red and looked away, but before he could hear whatever Ludwig said next, a wailing shriek pierced the air: the fire alarm.
The regular din of the bar slowly transformed into an uncertain murmur. In the absence of external direction, some patrons started heading for the doors; most kept drinking. Doe, for his part, frowned deeply, shook the Doctor off, and started to make a beeline for the back room — or, he would have, except Ludwig had taken his arm in a vice grip.
“Doe,” he said, a note of desperation in it that Doe hadn’t heard in weeks. “I need to – I have to – Don’t go in there. Please.”
Zhanna was back there. Seneschal too, maybe. Doe turned back to Ludwig, looked at his eyes, felt the burn of his embrace, and very stubbornly wrenched his arm away.
He pushed through the chattering crowd to the staff door and shoved it open, blinking in the sudden quiet. “Zhanna!” He called. “Zhanna, report! What’s going on?”
Nothing. Nothing again.
Finally, a faint clatter in the distance, something so muffled that Doe might well have imagined it – but it was enough for him. He crept forward, his shoulders low and his breathing soft.
“Hello?” he tried, but –
CLANG!
“Jesus!” yelped Doe, sunk halfway down the wall to avoid the distinctly pipe-wrench shaped dent where his head had just been.
“No, it’s me,” said Zhanna, helpfully. “You scared me.”
“What the hell’s going on?”
“Not sure,” said Zhanna. “I thought you might be able to tell me, Jane. Someone is here. Looking for you and your friends. I told him to fuck off. He didn’t listen.”
Doe’s blood went cold. “Well,” he said. “Did you at least knock him out?”
“I tried,” said Zhanna ruefully. “He got away. I think there might be more than one of them. Where is Seneschal?”
“I thought she was with you.”
“Hm.”
A foreboding crack from the front room – it might have been a gunshot or a door slamming open. Doe and Zhanna looked at each other.
“I will go see,” said Zhanna, in a tone that Doe had known her far too long to argue with. “You find Sen.”
—
Seneschal was in the tiny hall between the back room and the lot.
She was bleeding from somewhere. One of her shoes was gone. There was a man standing over her, holding a pistol and a pipe-wrench.
White-hot anger welled in Doe’s chest until he almost stopped breathing. This wasn’t her fight to lose. Those brainless maggots wanted to get themselves killed coming after Doe? After the Detective, even Ludwig, for all he’d been through? Fine, goddamn it. They were elbow-deep in this bullshit and they knew damn well what they’d gotten themselves into.
But Seneschal. Sen. His idiot sister, his second-oldest friend. She’d known him back before he was anything. Before he was a soldier or a hero or even a fighter, and he’d been a fighter all his life. She’d known him back when he was a broad-shouldered short-haired freak of a girl from a backwater farm, alone, the village idiot, who didn’t know how to shut up when it suited him – he’d known her when she was a queen from down South who’d gotten her nose broken for dressing too much like a fag, or whatever else her daddy had said to her before she hit him in the head with a candleabra and ran up northways – he hadn’t died, she’d told him after, almost sulking about it, he’d been yelling after her all down the road, but when she was done crying she said she still loved him anyway. And Jane told her he understood, and he didn’t, not really, because there had been nobody left for him to love.
And they had survived all that. They’d survived all that, together, and this nobody idiot thought Jane Doe would let him kill her in front of him?
Apparently, to his credit, the idiot did not, because as soon as he saw Doe he pointed the pistol upwards, at his head, and in a move ingrained into him by years of close-quarters combat, Doe dived underneath his aim and tackled him right at the knees.
After that it was child’s play getting the wrench off him, and the gun – Doe’s head went fuzzy and he tasted sand in his mouth. The spike of pain up his knuckles drowned out the present. He felt his chest burning with exertion and shook the outermost layer or stifling rage off of himself like a dog, enough to realize that he’d twisted both of the man’s arms out of place, and that the man wasn’t even screaming, rather he was making an unnatural, inhuman boiling kind of screech, like a whistling teakettle or an incoming bomb, and one of his newly-empty hands was clenching and unclenching sporadically.
Doe had been punching his face too, but there was no blood – none except Doe’s own. He had split his knuckles on the too-pale flesh. The pale dented flesh.
Except it wasn’t flesh, was it?
Doe looked down into the man’s eyes, slowly, and saw gray snakes of wire poking from the sockets like parasite worms.
Huh.
It was only then that he processed that Seneschal, while he had been brawling, had gotten up and started to limp away, calling over her shoulder: “Jane, he’s down, dumbass! C’mon! Leave him!”
“What – but you – “ Doe spared a glance back down at the pale wired man, but he was prone on the floor, shining dully in the light.. A waterwheel slowly began to turn behind his eyes, like when he had been dizzy and drunk on the stairs, trying to fit together a jigsaw puzzle he only had half the pieces of. He needed to tell the Detective, he realized. The Detective was clever – it was right there in his job description. He would be able to put together what Doe hadn’t. The Detective was a stubborn bastard at the best of times, but he wore his self-preservation like a first-place prize metal, cunning and proud – any animosity he’d gained with regards to Doe and Fritz and what wasn’t actually between them, he would set aside in an instant for sight of a fresh lead, tracking the scent like a starved bloodhound.
Doe had the irrepressible, foreboding instinct that this new point – the metal and wires, this man in front of him that wasn’t a man – was very, very important. More important, perhaps, than the gravel fields had ever been.
He just didn’t know why.
“I’m fine,” said Sen, snapping him out of it again. “Fucker just caught my leg, it ain’t nothing. Come on, Jane. There might be more of them, if they know you’re here.”
“Coming,” said Doe, and instead of following her he turned right into the unlit garage, just to make sure it was empty. Old paranoia winning out against his pack instincts. He frowned as he crept silently along the wall sweeping the place for any sign of intrusion, but aside from a dripping drainpipe in the corner there was nothing in the room except dust.
Doe stared into the dark silence, suddenly and illogically reminded of the cold depths of slaughterhouse, and thought, I really need to get back to everyone else. He turned back to the door and realized he had been looking away from it for too long.
But after all was said and done, he saw nothing.
He was three paces from the door when there was a loud noise, like a thunderclap or an explosive blast – Doe registered vaguely a pressing weight by his left shoulder, and took one step more towards the bright hall and fell down.
On the floor he blinked, suddenly feeling very stupid. His whole left side felt like someone had thrown a cinderblock onto it and left it there, or like he was under several feet of water in a swimming pool, heavy and cold; then the cold turned to heat, and the heat turned to aching pain, and the trickle of his heartbeat turned to a torrent in his ear, and he realized that the noise had been a gunshot, and the swimming-pool feeling was because his lung was starting to fill up with blood.
Oh, Christ, he thought, and the whole world burned.
—
Time slipped out from under him. When he managed to blink through the veil of pain his surroundings consisted exclusively of two things: blood, and the Detective. Doe vividly imagined his hoarse irritated voice, saying Doe, you idiot, why didn’t you make sure he was dead?
Fritz was there too, though he wasn’t touching Doe – from the state of his hands he had done that already, and was carelessly wiping them on his white shirt, warning the Detective vehemently to not move him and I have been a doctor for more than twenty years I know a dead man when I see – and something touched his bad shoulder and it all went fuzzy.
But when he woke again the Detective was still there. It was all just him. Doe hadn’t really seen that much of him for days, now that he thought about it, but he was here now – The Detective, the Detective, the Detective and nothing else, nobody else – filling his vision with red on his collar, hissing “You are not dying, Doe, Doe! Listen to me! You will not die!”, furious like Doe actually had been the one to put those bullets in him. He looked half-dead with anger and sickness, his salt-pepper hair hanging in his eyes. Rigor mortis.
He looked beautiful, and Doe opened his mouth to tell him so, but the words just came up in bubbling dark gouts of blood. Something sparked at the edge of Doe’s awareness, writhing helplessly for attention in the depths of his oxygen-deprived brain. There was something he needed to say. Something very very important. But he couldn’t speak, and he couldn’t remember what it had been, anyway.
The Detective just clutched him tighter, and spat “You are not dying!” again – absolutely incandescent with rage – and then, “Listen to me, you imbecile. We have demolished almost every Respawn machine in this entire miserable country. When you wake up – “
And then something in his face shifted viscerally (at what, Doe didn’t know), and he closed his mouth.
The Detective started again: “Doe, my name – “
He hesitated.
And then he stopped entirely, sitting alone on the concrete floor, because there was no one left there to hear him.