Work Text:
I Wish I Had the Strength to Lie
The doorbell rang again.
And then again.
Stopping the previous ringtone prematurely in a brutal glitching noise,
as if the man on the other side of that door is here for some *pressing* matter.
Rieux knows he isn’t.
The doctor shed his blood-stained surgical gloves hurriedly, and dragged a hand down his face in frustration.
He didn’t like being interrupted in the middle of his work, especially if it was such small matters as what that *man* surely had brought to his door at such an hour.
Dragging his scuffed dress shoes across the spotless ceramic floor tiling, Rieux thought of a million ways to murder the man standing at his door right now, but ended upon the conclusion that he still needed that smug bastard to get their office up and running again.
The man currently tempted to press the doorbell a few more times unknowingly gets his death sentence moved back a few more weeks.
The heavy reinforced steel door cracked open a seam, finally giving the doctor a good look at the very familiar(and punchable) face bathed in the dingy yellow light of the one remaining lightbulb in the dilapidated stairway.
“Good evening, Monsieur Longface! It’s been an eternity out here in the *snowy winter wonderland*. How *cruel* of you to let a *colleague* freeze to death on your doorstep, isn’t it?”
“What stick has gotten itself wedged up your ass today, Cottard.”
The doctor let out a long-suffering sigh, and opened the heavy door just a little bit more to let the redhead into the clinic.
“No poking around.”
“Oh, trust me, I *will* be poking around.”
“I would say make yourself at home but you seem to already have fitted yourself in.”
He paused a little, seeming to only take in the other man’s sorry state just now.
“Now what have you gotten yourself into this time.”
Forcefully sitting Cottard down on the operating theatre, Rieux examined the man’s multitudes of still bleeding wounds.
“You just ended a contract and came straight here. My medical services are *not* free as you might believe. ”
“I know, I know, just that I had some urgent matter and the sweepers were a pain in the arse as always.”
“What urgent matter?”
Cottard deflected his inquiring gaze and stared off instead to the doctor’s chipped coffee mug.
‘Best Doctor The City Had Ever Seen’
He seemed to be preparing some sarcastic quip, but decided otherwise when he had the words right on his tongue.
“Cat got your tongue, I see.”
They whiled through the process of disinfecting, cleaning and bandaging in extremely uncomfortable and tense silence.
Finally, the doctor piped up.
“The shower is upstairs to the right. Get yourself cleaned up before you dirty my pristine floors more.”
“Clean freak as always, huh?”
“I will not dignify you with a response. At least recover a little from your last gig a little before you tell me what brought you here at-“
Rieux checked his wrist watch.
“-3:47 AM”
The other man smirked and marched off towards the bathroom.
‘This is going to be a long day’
———————————————————
The doctor deliberated whether to throw Cottard’s battered and blood-stained shirt away or into the laundry basket.
After way too long spent staring at it, he decided to let the other man run around shirtless for now and throw this absolute piece of crap away.
Outside, the pained last dying screams of a man being dissolved by sweepers is muffled by a torn blue shirt falling from above.
———————————————————
He wasn’t *totally* opposed to the plan, Rieux tried to convince himself.
It was stupid, sure.
But it had the chance to get everything back.
The Count Office will be up and running again. Just imagine it.
And most importantly, *he* would carry on Tarrou’s wish and make the Count Office truly a prestigious fixer office like they always put in their papers.
Cottard was looking expectantly at him again.
Fuck it.
“I’ll close shop on Friday this week, and you better be at this door at 5 PM straight.”
The redhead cheered and spun around in a triumphant circle in the tiny enclosed break area.
…knocking a couple of clean plates down from the precariously placed cupboard.
*Cottard* didn’t really care about their office, the doctor knew deep down.
Cottard was a businessman through and through. The only thing he cared about is personal gain.
For now they have a common purpose, but that doesn’t mean the bastard wouldn’t possibly screw him over when it gets to reaping the fruits of their labor.
For *now* the doctor just grimaced and went to fetch a broom to clean the mess up.
———————————————————
Time flied by in the daily tedium of treating patients and sometimes needing to scrape the remains of botched surgeries off his floors.
Friday rolled by quickly and he posted a little announcement in the local pub to make it clear that he is temporarily away and out of business, and yes, he did buy an auto-defense system for his clinic that didn’t discriminate between potential customers and thieves.
The weary old bartender didn’t even lift his eyes to look at the doctor this time as Rieux stepped out of the door into the musky sunset.
The City takes its toll on everyone no matter where you placed yourself on the social hierarchy.
It is a cruel place after all.
No.
Not cruel.
Cruel would mean that it has half a mind to hurt you.
The City doesn’t even care to acknowledge your existence.
Your suffering does not have meaning.
It is no punishment.
It is no trial of a fickle god.
It just is.
Everyone suffers equally. A product of the right environment and the right time.
Slow, unhurried clacking footsteps of dress shoes on bare concrete announced his arrival to the empty clinic.
There’s nothing he really should bring.
What help would there be in a few medical supplies?
It is not like the man could use them on himself.
Mechanical augmentation does have a price after all.
After putting a few weapons and the K Corp ampules that he usually keeps stashed away in the closet into a small carrying pack, Rieux poured himself a cup of leftover coffee from the coffee pot that had been sitting on his desk for god knows how long.
And he patiently waited for the man who planned this whole mission out to ring the doorbell.
———————————————————
The invitations were plain yet elegant things, wrapping their murderous intent in fine typography and the faint smell of candle wax from the old-fashioned stamped seal.
Crimson in color, otherwise totally unremarkable artifacts that are the essence of that library that had been making the rounds recently.
The doctor wasn’t quite sure what to think of this flimsy piece of paper.
It might spell certain doom for him and his *associate*.
It might just also spell out everything he had ever wanted, right here in his hands.
“So, from what I’ve heard, writing down your name here will just teleport you immediately into the library, *whoosh*, like that. Simple, isn’t it?”
“Not doing fixer work does *not* mean that I’m mal-informed, Jackass.”
Rieux was just plain unimpressed by now.
“I’ve heard of the library, and well, lost a few clients to it too. Just not anyone important.”
“I know what I’m getting myself into.”
Cottard clearly was at a loss of words and just wanted to get on with his *master plan*.
“Just. Follow the plan, and I am 90% sure that we’ll be a-okay.”
The doctor picked up the pen.
And signed the invitation.
In flourishing lazy loops sits,
Dr. Bernard Rieux
In chicken-scratchy font sits,
“Cottard”
Samuel Cott
So the man does have the ability to tell truths once in a while.
———————————————————
Rieux stared up at the ceiling comprised of a million worn book covers, his gaze catching a familiar leather bound spine.
> But, you know, I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints. Heroism and sanctity don't really appeal to me, I imagine. What interests me is being a man. -Albert Camus
But his vision was too blurry to read anything anymore.
He imagined what he probably looked like right then, sprawled on the floor of the library, snapped wires pouring out of him.
‘It must look very silly indeed, like a broken toy’
He erupted into delirious giggles that ended in large hacking coughs.
Soon, that wouldn’t even happen anymore.
A man in a black suit was talking to a women in lavish clothing.
What were their names?
He didn’t know anything anymore.
———————————————————
When he finally had eyes to open again, he was standing in an oddly familiar office, with an oddly familiar man beside him.
The man was grinning ear to ear.
And the doctor was too.
The Count Office was back in business.
“Tarrou! Oh you bastard, I’ll hate you for this. From now on, no leaving us here to fend for ourselves.”
“Of course, Bernie.”
The next weeks were a blur of scheduling renovations, buying supplies, and fetching the old office memorabilia out from the dusty second-hand wardrobe that the doctor keeps all his “souvenirs” in.
Ever since Rambert had the *bright* idea to investigate that *fucking* library and brought Tarrou with him, life had not been this normal.
He was satisfied with doing what he could.
The first night he came home to his empty, dusty clinic, kicking a few corpses of people dumb enough to try their luck on lock-picking his *flimsy* doors out of the way, and sank down on his office chair, bursting into hysterical laughter at his overwhelmingly good luck.
The library has been banished into the Outskirts, putting everything into its supposed place again.
Tarrou was back, along with the scaredy cat Rambert, ending their misfortunate expedition into the library on a good note, except they didn’t get the hefty amount of rewards their client had promised.
No big deal, as the client was dead by now and didn’t have anything to give them that they couldn’t take themselves.
Nest V itself has pretty much returned to normalcy after the Crying Children Incident, bringing livelihood back into District 22, with the hustle of daily life replacing the former rubble and bloodshed.
He poured himself another cup of stale coffee from the pot sitting on his desk.
On that last note, Cottard was never seen again even though the rest of the people consumed by the library had came back in one piece.
Rieux wondered what might have happened to him.
The doorbell rings.