Work Text:
The Rust Syndicate had been stretched all too thin lately.
Lumiose was crying, her people broken and betrayed after that man—Corbeau refused to think his name, he couldn't process it, not yet—had nearly shattered her in the name of a more beautiful world.
Those who could run had ran. Those with no choice but to stay were in shambles, and Corbeau had dedicated every resource he had to lift people up from drowning. They'd helped a lot of people lately, and there were always more souls in need of something. A listening ear, something meaningful to do with their lives, a loan with more forgiving interest. Corbeau had taken to the streets right alongside his exhausted grunts and put the hard work in like everybody else. He had an excellent track record for pulling people back from the brink.
That didn't mean he always succeeded.
One second, Corbeau thought he was going to die. There was a struggle—a flash of metal, the pouring rain, the cry of a woman who had nothing left to lose and didn't want to go down alone—and everything had suddenly stopped.
He was alive. And right over there, rolled to the edge of the rooftop, the woman was no longer moving.
They shared the same big puddle, a thick lamination of water now only disturbed by what fell from the sky and not the thrashing of two bodies. Corbeau swallowed. Squeezed the water from his eyes with a scrunch. Blinked again. Like what he was seeing might change between one long look and the next.
The woman's head lolled over the edge. Her heel had fallen off, and there was a dark, dark ooze underneath her getting diluted by the rain before it could sneak into the fabric of Corbeau's slacks.
He was glad he couldn't see her face.
The roar of the downpour swelled in his ears, pelted upon his coat and slicked down his hair and neck and stomach and sprawled legs. His hand clutched something hard and smooth against the submerged tile.
Numb as he was, Corbeau struggled to his feet, clinging idly to his own mind like it just might slip away should he forget to keep a tight enough hold on it. His shoes made little sploshes. His glasses were a mosaic of droplets—a bug's compound eyes, incomprehensible. His body was one big lumpy icicle, and his sodden clothes clung like they didn't want him to rise. Like they wanted him to remain a collapsed pile of pale limbs, just like that person over there.
Corbeau was no stranger to death. He'd been around the dying, the destitute, the bodies who were one bad gasp away from the afterlife. He had seen people die. Hadn't batted an eye when a familiar face had gone still or wouldn't lift from the mud; it was the cold reality of living on the streets that sometimes you lost someone you knew.
Everybody met their end eventually, and some met it sooner than others. He'd seen this all before. Simple fact of life it was, death.
He had just never... not directly, at least, had he ever with his own two hands simply...
Pushed in the knife like this.
The rooftop lurched. Corbeau dropped the blade he must have taken in the struggle—her struggle, its clatter an insignificant splash among the millions striking this block. The downpour was so thick that the small distance gained from staggering back was enough to turn the woman into a formless blob upon the ledge. She could have been a trash bag. Construction debris. A cluster of refuse better housed within a dumpster.
That's what she basically was now, wasn't she? A base lump of disposable meat that now had to be thrown away.
Corbeau's breathing grew ragged, and he forced his legs to move. Just one step. One step closer to what used to be a person, now rendered common trash with a single twist of a—
Something grabbed him from behind. Corbeau whirled in a fury, heart leaping into his throat as if expecting to be attacked again. The hand released him immediately, and Corbeau's hackles lowered just as fast once he recognized who this was.
"Boss! There you are, had me worried. Is this the right spot?" Something rustled. With a snappish boom, an umbrella burst open, and the noise from the deluge got severed just above their heads. Water poured off him anyways. His hair stuck limply to his face and his coat felt heavy enough to drag him all the way down to the earth. "It wouldn't do at all for you to get sick at a time like this. What happened to your umbrella?"
Philippe was right. It wouldn't do at all. Corbeau shuffled in place and cast his gaze around the roof for his umbrella, past the little waterfalls sliding off the edge of Philippe's.
There it was. Knocked aside and forgotten, collecting rainwater like cupped hands. He had tried to give it to her, he remembered now. He'd only wanted to talk, and gift her some shelter as a kind gesture in this horrid weather, making her more susceptible to being helped by the Syndicate longer term.
She still needed it, didn't she. She looked so, so cold over there. Then again, a lump of garbage had no need to be kept warm or dry. Those were privileges reserved for people who were seen as people.
"Boss...?"
Philippe followed his gaze to the edge of the roof and squinted. Corbeau's heart went still as stone.
"Shit," Philippe hissed under his breath. "You were too late, huh?"
...What?
"Too late for what?" he asked, voice a whole dusty mile away.
"Been seeing too much of this lately," Philippe muttered. "Either somebody got to her first, or she tried to end it. I assume you already checked for a pulse?"
Corbeau's mouth hung mid-fall. "No," he answered. "No need for that."
Something about him must have seemed off, because Philippe suddenly scrutinized him under a heavy brow. His grey eyes flickered to the corpse and back again, and crawled lower, down to Corbeau's chest.
He looked down, too.
His tie was slashed. Slowly, like his limbs were trapped in molasses, he touched the partially severed fabric. His fingers poked clumsily at the sodden shirt beneath and found a hole where he could poke his bare stomach. No cut. No blood. He was fine. He was perfectly okay. But the lady—the body—that heap over there...
Philippe seemed to swell before his very eyes. His head scanned the rooftop—zeroed in on one tile out of many. Philippe passed him the handle to hold, and darted out to pick up not just Corbeau's umbrella, but the switchblade he'd spotted. It was a dark thing, reflecting the lack of light around it.
Philippe folded and pocketed the weapon (evidence, Corbeau weakly thought, from the scene of the crime), and thrust an umbrella back into Corbeau's numb hands. He began to say something—Corbeau strained to listen—only to shake his head and rub a hand down his broad face.
He looked angry. Angrier than Corbeau usually saw him outside of when his boss had been insulted.
"This shouldn't have happened," Philippe intoned, solemn as a grave, a grimace tearing his expression in two. "Dirty work is supposed to be my job, damn it. I should have been here. I'm so sorry, boss."
Only one word stood out: work.
This could be considered work. Couldn't it.
He was simply on the job, playing the hero. Trying to help the people of Lumiose who felt they had nowhere else to turn. And this was... what? An accident? A workplace accident?
Just a part of the job.
A bitter laugh-like sound tripped past his cold lips. Philippe must have interpreted it far differently from what it was, because he startled, and all traces of frustration vanished in favor of a cold determination. It was reassuring, somehow. Philippe always knew how to make problems disappear for his sake.
"I'll make sure this all goes away," Philippe swore right on cue, over the drum of the rain. "None of this was your fault, you hear me?"
The words? Sure he heard them. The sounds had reached his ears. Their meaning, now, that was still up for debate.
He really was soaked head to toe. Water in his hair, water in his ears, water in his shoes that squished with every step. He really might get sick at this rate, for he felt as cold as a corpse.
Corbeau blinked, and they were in the car. No internal lights on; even the headlights were shut off where Philippe had parked behind the building before finding him.
The rain pelted the vehicle like it was trying to break in. The heat was on full blast. Corbeau had shed his drenched jacket and piled it on the other seat along with his ruined tie. His shirt, he'd unbuttoned, and left wide open so his chest could dry and he could confirm again—mostly for Philippe's sake—that he hadn't been stabbed. His shoes were kicked off, and his socks stripped, leaving him barefoot in the back seat. His hair still dripped and trickled down his face. The hot air blasting from the aircon was doing its simple best.
Philippe watched him in the rearview mirror. His hands were clenched to the wheel. Corbeau wasn't sure what he was so stressed about—he'd declared that everything would be handled, and already made the right steps. A phone call to a nearby squad about a mess needing cleanup. His own cursory inspection of the aftermath, rolling the body over and confirming her death while Corbeau forced himself to watch. Philippe had even left his Scizor stationed up there to greet the grunts and guard the body. It would be treated as a simple accident.
That's what this was. A simple, unfortunate accident.
A woman had tried to stab someone and failed. Her target was just a little too quick for her. He was always a tiny step ahead of those who wished to do him harm—just ask Philippe about every past failed attempt at capturing or punishing or hurting him, before they'd finally joined hands and set all that aside; water under the bridge, of course, when there was profit to be made. Corbeau was a merciful type after all.
(Could he still say that after tonight?)
He pressed his eyes closed and endured the prickle of his clothes drying against his skin.
The only difference, between this time and those times, was that usually Corbeau's plan involved running away until nothing could touch him anymore. Why hadn't he disappeared this time?
He supposed she managed to take him by surprise. The rain and the dark made it difficult to see or suspect much of anything of a woman standing on the edge of a building, clearly intending to jump.
He had pushed in the knife, yes, but it was irrefutably self-defense.
Really, all things considered, the incident fell short of mere accident—it was simply an unfortunate alignment of poor circumstances whose intersection resulted in a single unplanned casualty.
(And besides—she was trying to die anyways, wasn't she?)
Corbeau's hand twitched around empty air. He swallowed nothing.
There was no need at all to feel guilty about a thing. Think—in their line of work, dangers like this were a given, a hazard of the job. In fact, statistically? Statistically, this was bound to happen eventually. His time had just come sooner than he was prepared for. And wasn't it better, to get things like this over with sooner? Better now, than later down the line when he might have so much more to lose. He should feel lucky it happened the way it did. The weather would make it harder to obtain evidence. She had already wanted to die. With Lumiose so unstable, her disappearance might not even go noticed. How ideal this was, as if the stage had been set explicitly for him to wander to center and push in the knife. No props.
A net positive against the loss of a human life, and it would all be erased by morning.
(He was going to be sick.)
Corbeau sucked in a deeper breath, and took note of the fact that the car was still idling. That wouldn't do. There were places to be. People to help. But first, he needed to change. He couldn't wear these ruined clothes even if hardly anybody was traipsing through Lumiose in this godawful weather to see him.
"Why aren't you driving, Philippe?" he asked, perfectly calm, as he should be. He buckled himself in in preparation for the drive.
Philippe's fingers twitched around the wheel. "Are... you sure you want to go home, boss?"
"Where else would I want to be?" He crossed his legs, laced his fingers in his lap. A common pose for him. "It's been a long night, as you can clearly tell. I wish to go home and rest."
Corbeau waited for the gear shift to budge, the twist of the wheel, anything. Had Philippe not heard him?
"I said drive," he repeated with pressure, a warning.
The silence weighed like a stockade.
Before Corbeau could lash out with a harsher order, the driver's side door suddenly shoved open and the rain became that much louder. The vehicle leaned as Philippe's weight exited. The door thudded shut. He wasn't left alone for more than a second—the passenger door jerked open, and Philippe crowded into the backseat, freshly wet and gathering the bundle of Corbeau's shed clothes out of the way.
"What are you doing?" Corbeau's tone frosted into a blade. He didn't like this. He didn't like this at all. "Don't make me ask you again. Get back up there and take me home."
Philippe struggled to remove his wet suit jacket. Corbeau watched with full offense as he tossed the thing into the front seat along with Corbeau's wet clothes, leaving him clad in a significantly drier vest and an uncharacteristic shroud of tension.
"Sorry, boss." Corbeau's vein nearly popped from his forehead—Philippe had the gall to apologize unprompted after disobeying so blatantly? "I just... had a nasty feeling all of a sudden that I couldn't ignore."
A feeling.
"You're not on my payroll to feel, Philippe. You're here to do as I say. But since you brought it up as so important, I'd like to know what feeling, exactly, has you keeping me out here in the middle of the night, cold and tired and forced to deal with a man who doesn't know how to listen to me!"
Philippe's mouth snapped shut and chewed on potential answers like gristle. He looked profoundly uncomfortable, and a little bit afraid, and Corbeau bit into that fear and relished in it.
"If you have some special motive for your disobedience I suggest you abandon it now. Your only concern should be getting back behind the wheel while I still have the grace to let this insubordination slide." He finished in a vitriolic hiss, "Or I'll think you're trying to upset me on purpose, Philippe."
Philippe finally cracked—the set of his jaw shifted and his thick neck went rigid. The water droplets on the shaved parts of his head gave the illusion of feverish sweat—amplified by the shadow of all the runny bullets cast slithering from the window.
"You know I'd never do that to you, boss."
"Do I? I'm not sure what else this is supposed to be, then. If you won't explain yourself, the only reality that'll matter is mine, and right now it's not a very favorable one for you." Corbeau scoffed and set his elbow on the car door, gazing out his own window at all the nothing there was to see. "The shit I have to deal with at a time like this..."
A rustle behind him. Philippe sighed through his nose slightly, and Corbeau imagined the resigned set to his brow. Something told him this conversation wasn't done, and sure enough...
"Pardon my insubordination, sir, but I had the feeling that if I let you slip away now you would never let me bring this up again." Corbeau rolled his eyes to the window. If he rolled it down and stuck his head out, maybe the water would flood his brain and wash everything away. "I'm referring to what happened on the roof."
He twitched. Corbeau turned slowly, just enough to check on how Philippe was looking at him.
...That face. He didn't like the implications of that face at all.
In response to whatever reaction was jolting Corbeau's features out of place, Philippe turned to face him more directly, hands clenched in tight fists over his cramped knees and staring right into Corbeau's eyes, not a trace of fear tarnishing that silver. He wasn't afraid at all—there was a resolve there that raised Corbeau's hackles and made him seriously consider unlocking the car door and spilling right out to disappear into the nearest storm drain.
"Respectfully, sir," Philippe rumbled, voice carrying perfectly over the deluge rattling their metal cage. "As someone with the Rust Syndicate's best interests in mind, it's my responsibility to take action when it benefits you. Which is why I can't take you home just yet. Not when I can clearly see that..."
Corbeau's temper speared through the roof when Philippe trailed off like that.
"Enlighten me," he hissed. "See what exactly?"
"The obvious." Philippe's voice dialed softer. "Pretend all you want, boss, but this is really eating you alive. You think I can't tell?"
He felt like he'd been slapped.
He must look like it, too, because Philippe's large frame fidgeted in place. His knees were angled and smushed to the back of the driver's seat. No leg room on that side, because Philippe didn't belong back here. He belonged up there. In the driver's seat. Facing forward and serving his purpose in taking him away from all this. Not trapping him here, just a block away from the body.
(Had it already been cleaned up? Disposed of how? Cut to pieces maybe, or dissolved. The usual.)
Philippe's voice snapped him out of himself again.
"Listen. Boss. Whatever transpired up there..." Philippe's knee began to bounce, and he kept speaking in spite of Corbeau's growing agitation. "I know it wasn't what you wanted to happen."
He sounded so sure of himself that Corbeau wanted to grab him by the vest and interrogate him as to why.
Philippe continued, "Nobody could have possibly desired or predicted that this would happen. I'm sure you had no choice—"
"I'm pretty sure I did, Philippe. There's always a choice."
And he had chosen to kill when he didn't have to.
"That's only easy to say after everything's already done," Philippe insisted, bordering on harsh—growing more intense the more he spoke. "Pardon me sir, but—I know you. Corbeau, I know you. You never would have wanted to hurt her."
The usage of his name stunned him. And again, Philippe sounded so sure of himself—how did Philippe know he hadn't done it just to be cruel?
"What's your point," he asked, almost on autopilot while his heart began to race in an echo of the panic he'd felt in those short, fateful seconds. The flash of metal, her weight tackling him down, the snarl of her teeth right in front of his nose.
"Are you looking for remorse? An apology? You'll find those fields empty, I'm afraid. If I start regretting my choices now of all times, the Syndicate will suffer, and so will all of Lumiose."
And if she'd killed him back there—it had been so close, so close, the tip of her knife hovering just above his gut—he'd barely been strong enough to resist her weight bearing down to sink that silver fang into his stomach and twist. Her eyes were jet black, he suddenly recalled. Blown wide and crazed, staring at him so close he could almost see his panicked reflection in her pupils.
If she'd killed him back there, things would be so much worse for everybody. So no, he didn't regret a thing. He couldn't regret a thing. Silver linings, all around, waiting to be traced into existence. Give him enough time and he could start to believe in the net positive.
"I'm not looking for anything from you." Philippe's brows were twisted with a frustrated sympathy that made Corbeau want to climb out of the goddamn car as if the whole thing had suddenly set ablaze. "I'm just—damn it, boss, you know this isn't what I'm good at."
"Then stick to what you are good at and do something actually useful," he commanded with enough force to hide the tremor in his chest. "I'm waiting, Philippe!"
Corbeau was crushed against a large, dry chest before he could process Philippe having moved at all. The seatbelt nearly strangled him, and he could hardly breathe with his face smashed into so much muscle, but it was warm, and— it was warm.
He hadn't noticed how cold he still was.
"I'm trying, boss," Philippe whispered into his wet hair, arms a comforting tomb. "You can blame me for everything. I shouldn't have let you slip away to operate on your own—this was all the result of my negligence. I should have been right there with you, boss, this is my responsibility."
Corbeau could almost laugh at the absurdity. Responsibility? Really? Philippe wasn't the one who approached her up there. Philippe didn't let himself get tackled flat and nearly gutted like some kind of naive moron. Philippe didn't wrestle for control of the knife and plunge it straight up the first chance he got. How dare he think he could possibly snatch the blame all for himself. How comical.
His shoulders must've been laughing a little, because the body beneath him shifted. Philippe squeezed him tighter, and sounded ever more fervent.
"Corbeau, listen to me. Listen."
He was trying. It was just hard to take seriously when everything Philippe said was so absurd—
"You never should have had to make that choice without me there."
Corbeau's mouth opened, and shut uselessly. His thoughts were slipping away like strings of balloons. There were three roars from all sides—the rain, the aircon, his own blood in his ears. His hands fumbled for the buckle and unclicked it only to escape being strangled, but once it had torn out of the way and he could fall forward, into a safe chest, into Philippe, who was saying it was tragic that this had to have happened at all...
The next breath Corbeau sucked through his open mouth scorched like air from the desert. His heart beat against his rib cage like a guilty prisoner—he realized belatedly that it hadn't once calmed its frenzy since he'd gotten into the car. His hands formed claws into whatever part of Philippe they'd landed on, and the rain was so loud, so unendingly loud and incessant he wanted to scream at the top of his lungs.
So he did. Loud enough to drown it all out. It felt like something ugly was escaping him, and he couldn't bear to allow a single trace to remain, so he poured and poured and almost choked when there was nothing more in his lungs to give.
The arms around him crushed him closer, knocked a gasp into his chest that felt like broken glass broken smaller on its shaky way out. It burned, this tangled knot in his chest, and wouldn't go away no matter how he senselessly screamed.
"I've got you," Philippe said voicelessly, pressing it into his hair, cupping the back of his head. Corbeau packed his face into the warm dark of Philippe as if trying to bury himself alive. "I've got you. I'm sorry, boss. It's okay."
Corbeau's eyes squeezed shut as tightly as his jaw was clenched. They were dry, dry, dry as a bone. No tears had he to shed for someone who never should have had to die tonight. Corbeau snarled into Philippe's chest, beat a weak fist against it, furious at himself for not being able to spare a single tear. If he couldn't do that much, what good would any expressed remorse of his be worth?
He shook in a bundle of taut muscle and bone. His breath sawed through his clenched teeth as forcefully as if he'd been at full sprint. His head was spinning—he couldn't breathe deeply anymore, and the body he was trying to bury himself in was too bulky an obstacle to sink into and fully disappear. If he held his breath for long enough, surely his eyes could squeeze out at least one pathetic drop, and he could prove he carried any guilt at all—
It was only when a hard fist struck him soundly between the shoulder blades that he coughed and gasped again. His body collapsed without moving an inch. His head still spun. The car felt stiflingly hot, and the hands—they were all over him.
His eyes felt wetter, but still no tears. His regret still wouldn't be worth a damn.
Fuck. Fuck it all—at times like this he hardly felt human.
"Boss. Hey, boss..." Thick fingers pushed into the longer parts of his hair. His head was tugged back. He let himself be manipulated, and his cheek was patted by a huge palm. "Breathe. Look at me."
His own uneven panting filled his ears. His eyes focused on what was in front of him. A familiar face, knit with concern.
"Hey. You're okay. Just keep breathing for me, boss." Philippe's voice remained only gentle. Corbeau flinched from the new touch at his cheekbone, underneath his glasses. Philippe pulled them off his face, thumbed damp hair from his forehead.
The rain and the aircon and the blood in his ears had blurred together and became white noise. There was nothing else to hear if it wasn't Philippe.
"Long as you need, alright boss?" Corbeau might have nodded. His hair was released, and all he could do was slump forward into Philippe again. A subtle pressure at his back held him in place. "Long as you need. Not just tonight, either. This will take time, and it doesn't have to be easy. It wasn't easy my first time, but you have to learn to live with it because there's just no other way forward. I know you can do it, boss."
He nodded weakly. The pressure at his back slid up, down. He wanted to laugh again. Being comforted like a child at his age...
Some leader he was shaking out to be, if he'd seemed so upset over one measly death that it forced a subordinate to comfort him like this.
"Don't hide it if something's got you off-kilter," Philippe requested as if reading his mind. "The Syndicate may depend on you to keep a cool head, but I want you to know you can depend on me to have your back in the times you can't. What am I good for if I can't support my own boss when he falters?"
...When put it like that, it almost sounded reasonable.
Corbeau's throat relinquished some control back to him, and he licked his dry lips. "Suppose I'd have dumped you to the curb if you were that useless."
Philippe's chest jolted with a short sigh, either from his words alone or how godawful his voice sounded saying them.
"It would be deserved. I'd be failing the Syndicate, failing you... hell, even failing Lumiose, if I let something like this bring you down. I know how unacceptable that'd be to you, boss."
Corbeau sat on that for a bit. It was somehow harder to argue when Philippe framed it that way.
"Mm. So you're saying your behavior wasn't insubordination at all, but for the good of the city instead. How noble." He would sound sarcastic if he had the energy left for it.
"If it means you'll let it slide, it can be whatever you want it to be."
The knot of white-hot upset dissipated thread by thread from around his ribs. What it left behind was a hollow kind of calm, encased in a thin veneer of acceptance for what had transpired on the roof. Corbeau allowed his eyes to slip close, and resigned himself to being kept here for a little while longer. Home could wait if he was already resting. Philippe could be pretty comfortable, it turned out. Who knew.
Later, he mumbled an order to find out everything possible about who that woman was. Her name, her address, any kin or friends or pokémon that might need to be taken care of. It didn't feel right to erase her from existence; the least he could do after taking her life was learn about who she had been.
Philippe softly whistled for his phone and forwarded along the message to whoever needed to hear it, and then and only then did Corbeau fully relax. He slid away from Philippe and murmured to him that he didn't have to move. They could stay back here a little longer. It'd be a shame for Philippe to get wet again anyhow. Perhaps they could wait out the rain.
While they sat there getting dry in the back seat, he almost asked an unnecessary question before deciding he already knew the answer: Do you not mind what I've done?
He could hear Philippe's voice already: I've done far worse than you, boss. You'll find no judgement from me.
He didn't have to ask, because the answer had already been proven.
Whatever this was (still insubordination, he'd decided—but one that he could tolerate, just this once, so long as Philippe didn't speak a word of this to anybody) was plenty. What was done was done. There was no other way forward than to learn to live with it, just like Philippe had said.