Chapter Text
Pushing his head upwards from the desk, Riz squints into the darkness of his office, he must've fallen asleep while working on a case again. Sighing blearily, Riz pushes the chair outwards, wincing as the wheels scrape across the deep gashes in the floor. Frowning, he rubs the sleep from his eyes as he reaches for the mug of coffee on his desk, long since cooled. Running his hand through his hair in a futile attempt at fixing the mess it had most definitely become, he tries and fails to remember what he was doing the night before. Trying to kick start his brain, he takes a sip from the mug, grimacing as the coffee, now more of a sludge than a liquid, meets his tongue.
Blinking as his eyes adjust to the dark, he looks at the bright green text of the digital clock on his desk. 1:34 AM, spectacular. He begins to pace the room, falling into familiar habits once more, shoes tip-tapping against the hardwood floor. Stretching like a cat, he looks down at his desk, maybe he can figure out what he was doing before he fell asleep. Papers were scattered all over the wooden surface, with one photo in particular lying in the center of the desk, likely his previous area of attention, circled in angry red ink.
Grabbing the photograph, he stares at the picture, squinting lightly. The tabaxi woman in the photo is grinning as Pok throws his arm around her, raising a toast. Didn't tabaxi typically look like big cats, like a tiger or something? There are a few other people in the background, but he can't make them out, the dull lights in the ceiling blocking out any hope of ever identifying any of them. The woman in the photo is raising an empty paw as she grins, mimicking Pok's toast. Why was this hidden away in Pok's office? As a reminder of his coworker, or as a clue of some sort? Grimacing, he finishes the rest of the coffee. The sun damage to the photo hasn’t even affected her, that doesn't even make sense.
Moving over towards the coffee maker, Riz looks over towards the mirror in the back, pressed against the wall. He keeps forgetting (He usually never forgets, what are you trying to forget Riz Gukga-) to get rid of it, and hasn’t truly gotten the chance. As he turns back towards his coffee, something dances in the edges of his peripheral vision. Like lightning, fear fills his veins for a split second, slowly fading away as it meshes into one massive blob of nerves in the back of his brain. Slowly, he turns back towards the mirror at the other end of the room.
Riz knows, remembers (Even though he tries so, so hard to forget, he never succeeds, at anything really.), that when he shot the mirror (Why did you shoot it, why didn't you think, like you do for everything else in your life? Always overthinking, never satisfied with any performance, but never this one.) the shards had exploded across the room as Baron stepped out of it. There were no shards of glass left behind when the bullet connected with the glass of the mirror. When he got back, he had swept all of the shards up and threw them out. He had done that earlier yesterday, and the shards of glass still shined ever so slightly in the trash can by his desk.
Looking at the mirror, he sees it. At the very bottom left of the mirror, there is a single piece of glass, as though everything but it was affected when he put a bullet through the glass. Numbly, he hums, that shouldn't be there. In a small, primal, part of his brain, he feels a spark of fear. Frowning, he moves forward in the dark towards (Move away, move away, move away, move away, move aw-) the standing mirror. There are no cracks in the piece of glass, as though it was kept with only sheer willpower, unaffected by the force of the bullet shooting from his arquebus, his father's arquebus.
At the rumbling of the coffee maker, he turns back around, jumping ever so slightly at the sound (Never calm now, Riz Gukgak.), and walks the distance of the room back towards it. Filling his mug back up with what is almost pure caffeine, he goes back to his desk. Grabbing a singular vibrant yellow post-it, he grabs one of the many ballpoint pens and scribbles out a reminder to get rid of the standing mirror. Pausing slightly, he grabs another and starts scratching in a reminder to throw out the shards of glass, they can't just sit there forever.
Sitting back down, he takes a sip of coffee and winces, just a little, as the wheels of the chair drag across the claw marks in the floor (The marks he left, thrashing in the dark of the room, trying to scream but unable to even dream of it. Baron's hands on his neck, working meticulously towards rearranging the vertebrae of his spine.), he really needs to get that fixed. Sorting the papers into a neat little stack, he goes back to the photo once more, yellow eyes forever staring, unflinching in the shadows of his office. In the darkness of the room, the singular glass shard shines in the edges of his vision.