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Marlowe was always asking too many questions. He was too bold and too straightforward and too a lot of things that had no place in their society. He pushed too hard.
Rumor had it that he had driven his last two partners to demotion, though there was no proof of it. Hitch had never been able to get the whole story; how could she when it was all tangled up in little more than hearsay? Not knowing was, perhaps, for the best.
The last thing she wanted to worry about was being demoted—or worse, ending up in an isolation facility for the rest of her natural existence. She’d much rather be dead—had told Jean as much when they had been forced to work together. “If anything like that happens you’ve gotta just kill me.” She thought maybe Jean understood it, would rather the same for himself though he didn’t dare say so. He only nodded. The last year of work had changed him—had changed her, too. She wondered if he would do it—if any of them would kill her if she asked them to, if she begged.
Probably not. Nobody had the guts to do anything Sibyl didn’t tell them to do. If Sibyl wouldn’t kill her, then she was just shit outta luck. It was really her own fault for signing on with the MWPSB in the first place—not that she’d had much of a choice.
Marlowe fidgeted at his desk, pen tip hitting the desk every half-second. “Your hue will get clouded,” she reminded him when she saw how his forehead was creasing in that way she’d already learned to recognize as him thinking too hard about something best left alone. It was almost a joke to tease him about his hue, now, having worked with him for three months, and she could get away with it. Nobody else wanted to work with him; they were afraid of their own hues clouding up from the questions he asked. All the whys and the what-ifs and the way he enacted his own brand of justice with no regard for the rules.
Hitch had never cared overmuch about the rules, so long as she was paid properly and the work was finished, so she hadn’t minded the transfer suggestion. Sibyl said they were a good match—a good inspector-partner match. She supposed she trusted Sibyl’s judgment about such things.
“I don’t care,” came Marlowe’s delayed response. The office was empty but for the two of them; the enforcers hadn’t arrived yet, nor would they for at least an hour.
“Yes you do,” she said.
He stopped fiddling with his pen. “Don’t you ever think about it?” he asked. “What we’re doing? Why it’s done this way?”
“That’s the kinda thinking that’ll cloud you up,” she told him, pulling out a compact mirror to look at her hair. It looked fine, but she fixed it anyway. “Could be worse, y’know.”
“Willful ignorance is the worst kind,” he said. When she glanced over to him, he looked disgusted and disappointed in equal parts.
She shrugged dramatically, pulling out her tablet. “It keeps me out of isolation,” she said. “You could’ve picked just about any job you wanted, yet you picked this one.”
“So did you,” he pointed out.
“I only had two choices,” she said, “and I’m too delicate to do manual labor the rest of my life.”
He snorted, hands raking back through his hair. “You’re the opposite of delicate.”
She grinned, lifting an arm to flex at him. “I am pretty badass, it’s true. But I have reports to finish.” She kept her gaze trained on him even as she started up her computer, fingers tapping lightly against the surface while she waited. “You do, too, right?” The question was lighthearted and meaningless—practically rhetorical. Of course he did. There was never an end to the paperwork.
Marlowe only sighed, leaning over to start up his own system. They hadn’t worked together long, but Hitch had a feeling that her partner was still feeling guilty about the latent criminal they’d subdued the day before. He’d never walk free again. Maybe in some little crevice in Marlowe’s mind, he really believed the guy didn’t deserve the isolation facility.
She didn’t really want to think about it too hard. For God’s sake, even children could be dumped into an isolation facility.
She watched Marlowe type for a long time before she leaned forward, tilting her chair toward him. “Say, Marlowe?”
He paused in his work. “What?”
“Did you always think the way you do? Y’know…all about your own brand of justice and everything?”
He continued to stare at his monitor. “No,” he admitted after a moment. “Things used to be different.”
Her curiosity soared. She had known there was a story; there always was with Marlowe. Her now-vague memories of training brought forward faded recollections of him; he really had seemed different back then. Maybe this story was the root cause of his previous partners’ demotions. She shifted forward in her seat, knees pointed in his direction. “Well,” she encouraged, eyes wide, “you can’t leave it like that—you gotta tell me!”
He swallowed hard. “Hitch,” he started to say, but stopped as the door to their office slid open. It was Enforcer Eren from Division Two. Her previous division.
“Hey guys,” he said, holding out a folder. “As of today Division Three is in charge of Special Case #79. Mikasa would have come herself, but she’s upset the case was taken away from us. Jean’s…uh—consoling her.” He gave them both an apologetic smile.
Hitch knew that meant that Jean was mad about it, too, and was no doubt ranting about it to a silently furious Mikasa. “Thanks,” she said, plucking the folder from his hand. Truthfully, she didn’t want it–didn’t want anything to do with it. But when an order was handed down she wasn’t exactly given a choice in the matter, now was she? Marlowe would probably eat it up—probably already had at least fifteen conspiracy theories stacked up and ordered alphabetically in his head. Division Two had been drowning in that case for weeks, and he’d been greedy to get his mitts on it for reasons she’d never understand.
Eren saluted, a little sloppily, and left.
Hitch didn’t even open the folder. She stood up and walked over to dump it on Marlowe’s desk. “Here ya go, Senior Inspector,” she said, a little surprised he hadn’t leapt out of his chair to grill Eren on the details while he had a chance. “You’d better really watch your hue, now. There’s not a lot of good you can do from the heart of an isolation facility, y’know.”