Chapter Text
What if you believed that you knew better than anyone else? Because, unlike you, they can’t see the lies. Yet ironically, for the past ten years, you had been the blindest of all...
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With the exception of a nocturnal few, the Ardhalis City Square would have been subdued on such a weekday night. Once the sun hit its peak in the sky, the masses would surely rush to work, basking in the dichotomy of their successes and their everyday discontent. Children would gallop through the streets, laughing as they dirtied their shoes on their way to school. None of them would have any knowledge of the horrors that lurked just outside of their waking hours.
As the clock tower began its slow crawl into the hours past midnight, the only figures present were the members of the Ardhalis Police Department. The Eleventh Precinct stood in a carefully guarded line, their shadows cast parallel onto the pavement in a discordant pattern. With lamplight in their eyes and the darkness slatted over their faces, it couldn’t be denied that the officers were primed for their work, utterly prepared. It did nothing to siphon the panic from their voices, from their gaits.
“Krist Schaeffer!” The edge in the man’s harsh voice was quickly lost to the roaring winds that whipped past all of their faces, mocking their efforts. “You are under arrest for planting a bomb in the Homston’s Theater!” The heavy rain weighed down on the spirits of both parties. The cool bath dulled the sharp edge of defiance radiating from a single man.
He was maybe forty feet shy of the nearest officer, and justice. In spite of the foul weather, his eyes held a feral flame that seemed to be everburning. He was bright enough to realize that his rebellious campaign had lurched to a standstill. Despite his impending doom, Krist Schaeffer smiled.
“Hey, you pigs! You think you can stop the Phantom Scythe? You’re nothing compared to them! To us! ” He raked his eyes across each hidden face, his gaze penetrating each officer’s mask, meant to conceal identities and symbolize unity. Schaeffer’s movements were frantic, each word from his mouth spiked with harsh intonation, slurred together in his desperation. He seemed to be drunk on his motives alone.
“Officers… Do you value this city? Do you value your lives ?” His fingers, hysterically shaking, fell deep into a pocket of his trenchcoat. “One more step… and you all will die.”
A grenade. The collective energy pulsing through the officers halted, their bodies turning to stone.
“IT’S A GRENADE! EVERYBODY BACK! NOW!”
Training and fear. The two embraced, amalgamating within the police - pulling them back, slowly and surely. Each of them had long since had the protocol for bomb threats drilled into their minds, etched and branded. They intended to follow through.
Most of them.
A lone figure stood slightly wayward from the line, a phantom with sapphire eyes trained on the criminal. In the midst of the chaos, he was sure. He was deathly calm.
As if operating under some signal that nobody else could see, the man ran against the tide of his precinct.
“Officer! What the hell do you-” Without time to be scolded, much less think, he persisted on his course. The familiar hum of adrenaline through his veins sent him flying. Any picometer of doubt pulsing through his system would only slow him down. Even so, it would’ve been too late.
The pin had been pulled. Krist Schaeffer’s face was contorted into the grin of a child, one who then dropped the grenade like a toy he no longer wanted to play with. The phantom man heard his comrades shouting in the distance.
“Officer!”
“Kieran!”
“Don’t!”
“It’s too late!”
They formed a sickening melody within his mind.
Too late. He knew that such a notion was the worst and most damning excuse a man could give to do nothing at all.
BOOM.
Smoke enveloped the masses, the acrid smell of metal and sulfur filling the air. It could be noted that the smell of death was undoubtedly absent.
“It was fake! The bomb was fake!” Disdain filled the precinct as they charged forward once more. Death wouldn’t wait for the smoke to clear to claim the dozens of lives on the line.
Krist Schaeffer was a tall specimen, similar in stature to the officer. Whatever the case, a mix of vigorous training and superior genetics had given Kieran a body that was able to pin the malefactor to the city street with ease. A knee pressed into his spine and strong fingers encircling his head were enough from Kieran to knock the wind out of the scum sprawled helplessly on the city square beneath him.
Kieran leisurely bent down to Schaeffer’s level, with a slowness that suggested that the officer had all the time in the world, could torment the man for infinity. But that was a lie that Kieran himself wouldn’t buy, had he not been in possession of his ability. Lives were on the line.
“Red,” Kieran breathed, “or Blue?” His grip tightened on the man.
“Foolish,” Schaeffer laughed, even in the midst of his defeat. “You can’t win a game of chess by picking on the pawns. Too bad the APD is being bested! It all seems to be a game!” His words were choked by a demonic sort of laughter, taunting the officer still.
“Your figurative language moves me, Schaeffer. But the timing is not ideal.” Kieran slammed the man’s face into the asphalt below. He took bitter rapture in the inevitable sound of rocks kissing his flesh.
“ Red ,” He repeated, “or Blue ?” Kieran’s face betrayed none of the ghosts lingering just beyond his lips. Even still, his voice shuddered with a dry sort of contempt as he whispered. He himself was the wind chilling the air on that night, the wraith present in the lingering smoke. “Keep it to yourself, then… but don’t expect any sympathy when your blood spills onto these streets.”
“Blue…” The blonde man whimpered. Were his eyes watering from the smoke, or from pain? The look of maniacal fanaticism on his face was unmistakable, despite any torment he had experienced, on the inside or otherwise.
Kieran’s transceiver crackled as he raised the device to his lips. “Officer White! How-”
“Cut the red wire.”
Schaeffer gasped, outraged. “ How-”
Kieran silenced him quickly, pressing his knee further into the man’s back. His transceiver piped up once more.
“Are you positive? Lives are on the line here!”
His voice grew heavier, more desperate. “Yes, I’m positive! Cut it!”
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“Bomb Disposal Unit Reporting. The threat has been successfully neutralized.”
A collective sigh of relief broke the grave silence that had been suffocating the city square. Each officer’s icy demeanor began to thaw, and their identities were regained.
Once Schaeffer’s wrists were cuffed by metal, Kieran’s job was done. Shaking the rain from his uniform and pressing some of the water from his hair, he shuddered as he recalled his actions. A hand on the man’s head, a knee in his back - Kieran didn’t savor violence, as much as he believed that those extra measures had been the turning point towards justice only a few minutes prior.
“Kie- Officer White!” A frantic voice called, followed by awkward, hurried footsteps. Harvey Wood, the Eleventh Precinct’s newest member and freshest face. “God, you really scared us back there! When you started running towards it, I-”
“It’s okay, Harvey! Really,” Kieran clapped his partner on the shoulder, steadying the quiver in his hand. “The striker head was modified. The lever was a lot shorter than a regular grenade, too. Frags tend to have longer heads for… safety purposes.”
He couldn’t help but question the concern that the people who manufactured grenades had towards the well-being of their users. Their smoke betrayed no sympathies, the sounds no concern. They hadn’t, even then.
No. Kieran deepened his breaths, focusing on Harvey’s words with a new reverence.
He didn’t seem to notice. “Ah… how in the world did you catch all that? Officer, you make the rest of us in the department seem lethargic.”
“Now, I know my talents are an object of desire, but I got lucky! Really.” Kieran pulled his coat tighter around his shoulders. “I’ll take my leave now, I’ve got some paperwork calling my name back at the station. And it’s ‘Kieran’ to you. Don’t be a stranger.”
“Sure, alright!” Harvey’s face melted into an easy smile. Kieran hadn’t stuck around to see it. “Wait… Kieran, isn’t- isn’t the station down that street?”
Once he was freed from the stifling gazes of his peers, it embraced him.
It was never more than one, two, ten steps behind. He saw it in the shadows over his shoulder in the cover of the night. He recognized it in the way he breathed, the places he looked. He could only ignore the darkness for so long.
“Damn it… ”
The wind was swept from his lungs, and he sought support from the nearest building. It was a sturdy brick one at the lip of an alleyway that Kieran had likely strolled down countless times before, but he didn’t take notice. Grief was his blindfold.
It was times like these where Kieran couldn’t pacify his conscience. Any praise he recieved was another finger coiled around his windpipe - choking him, draining him. Kieran knew it was only a matter of time until he wouldn’t be able to find it within himself to breathe anymore. He was not one to chase death, or to covet it. But he could only bring himself to accept the kindness of others in small quantities. Each helping of sugar that he ingested had to be taken with a grain of salt. On his worst days, a spoonful.
Sometimes, he fell to a point when any more praise would physically hurt to hear.
He was often the only one to recognize a mouth’s elaborate fabrication, or a slippery promise. But it sometimes seemed that Kieran was the only one who could comprehend the truth, too. That he wasn’t brave or particularly praiseworthy at all. He was a coward. A-
“Kieran? Is that you?” The face, illuminated by the streetlamps that flickered lazily at every block, was familiar to Kieran despite the ivory mask concealing the young man’s eyes. He took a bit of comfort in knowing that the blonde would recognize him from under his mask likewise.
He often found himself wearing two masks, one of cloth and the other of lies. He plastered the second over his first.
“Stalking me, Lieutenant?” Kieran flashed a sly grin at his comrade. “Perhaps I should call the police.”
The lieutenant retorted with a look that Kieran shared. The questioning of the officer’s sanity was a mutual one.
“Too much? Understood, Lieutenant Hawkes .”
“Don’t start.” Will scoffed. “Putting me on a fake pedestal like some boy-prince makes both of us feel sick. And I heard what you were saying to Harvey before - hypocrite.”
Kieran sighed. “What can I do for you, old friend?”
“I just wanted to say that you did good today, Kieran. As always…” Will raised his hand to the back of his neck, uncomfortable. “Look… you didn’t really seem like yourself today. Not since we were called in this afternoon to patrol for Schaeffer. Just know… that if you need to talk, I’m here. Always have been, always will be.”
A rueful smile worked its way onto Kieran’s lips. “Right. Thanks.”
The two parted, and each made their own way home. There were only a couple of hours until the sun would rise once again, and duty would call once more.
Kieran appreciated the solace Will offered, he really did. But his companion would be incapable of offering much reprieve from his worries. Kieran hadn’t been himself, not for as long as Will had known him. Certain situations would break a floodgate within his mind, after which his phantoms would consume him. They would force themselves down his throat and into his very core.
This was at no fault of Will’s; there was no possible way for him to gain any sort of understanding as long as he remained oblivious to the numbness within his friend. That was exactly the way that Kieran planned to keep it.
Kieran couldn’t take back the past. He couldn’t say words that had gone unspoken, couldn’t resuscitate the dead.
All he could do was be alive, stay alive. Step forward, take a breath, get home every night safe. Relatively.
And try not to be the monster that he knew, deep down, he became thousands of suns ago.
It took all of the remaining fight in his mind to convince himself that it wasn’t already too late. That he could still claim what was his, who he was. But, it had been so long that Kieran wasn’t even sure that he ever could really know himself again.
He could only try.
He just didn't think that in his attempts, he would ever, under any circumstance, team up with her...