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The cells in the prison remained largely empty. Empty enough that Wato’s footsteps echoed from each cell he passed.
Cells in a row, similar to when twelve detectives assembled underground at a certain research facility, wasn’t it?
He shook his head. Morgue was in the past. This was a prison on the mainland, maintained with the help of the government and monitored by the Detective Alliance.
And yet.
Wato shivered, glad his allies had trusted him to do this alone. Jokes, comfort, reassurance, all those attempts at alleviating the tension would be suffocating. Self-serving, even. He knew they would all have been thinking the same thing, had the others been here.
The hallway led to a solid metal door with a grate near the top. An impossibly long hallway.
He was not supposed to be here.
“Incompetent Detective” was ridiculed by just about everyone worldwide. Or, was it “Ideal Detective?” It was a heavy mantle, one he willingly bore. Thrown out of the DA. Disgraced, him and his comrades along with him.
And even then, there were better sleuths, better leaders, better detectives than him who could have taken on this job.
But in the months that had followed his last heated conversation with Vidocq, leading to his banishment from the DA, it seemed that no one in any organization investigating the Quartering Duke deaths, the Detective Alliance or otherwise, had managed to make headway with their prime suspect in all the cases. Which led, of course, to them turning to the only people who had ever made a break in the case, who, in turn, nominated their de facto leader: Wato Hojo.
Wato stopped at the last door.
End of the line.
He knocked.
It was silly. He knew already who would be inside, even though there was no answer.
He knocked again. “Um, hello?”
His voice echoed far louder than his footsteps.
“Hello? It’s me, In-”
The voice that interrupted was quiet, but sharp. “Incompetent. I remember your voice.”
A giggle. A cough. And then, “It hasn’t been that long, you know.”
The Quartering Duke’s voice was dry. As high as ever, but raspy from disuse.
“Can I… come in?” Wato ventured.
Another cough. Another laugh. “Do whatever you want. I’m not capable of hurting you, see?”
A rattle, metal dragging along concrete.
Wato swallowed a gasp.
Hurriedly, he tried to open the door, swearing internally as he fumbled the key, and it clattered against the floor.
“Ahh… Incompetent as ever, aren’t you?” the Duke’s voice drawled mockingly through the grate in the door.
It took a few more tries, but the door finally creaked open.
There he was. The Quartering Duke.
No. Even now, Wato refused to think of him as such. Or maybe he just couldn’t allow himself to think of him as such. “Doleful.”
Doleful rolled his eyes, eyes that gleamed even in the dim light of the prison ward. “Hello, Incompetent.”
He was thinner than Wato remembered, sitting leaned against the wall of his cell. His wrists and ankles were chained together, the cuffs in plain view in his government issued white gown. His blond hair had been cut to chin length, and his scalp revealed dark roots. Even in this state, locked away from anything that might hurt or endanger him, he was covered in bandages.
He looked…
“Pitiful, aren’t I?” Doleful said, as if reading Wato’s mind.
“I didn’t say that.”
“That’s good. I wouldn’t want someone like you to pity me, okay?”
They stared at each other silently. A stand-off, almost. Just like that day - only now, Wato was alone.
Wato broke the silence first.
“You look… um, that is… your hair,” he stammered, searching for the right words.
Doleful touched the bottom of his hair with one hand. “Oh. They cut it every so often. Don’t want it growing out too long in case I try to use my hair to hang myself, or something like that.”
More silence.
Wato cleared his throat.
Another beat.
This time, Doleful spoke.
“Hey, Incompetent, will you help me up? I twisted my ankle the other day just pacing the cell.” He reached out a hand, jangling his chains in the process.
For a moment, with his eyes wide and his brow furrowed, it felt like that first day back on Morgue.
Wato took his hand. Pulled him upright. Doleful was light as a feather.
He wasn’t lying, at least. He favored his right foot as he stood.
“You should get that looked at. It could be broken.”
Doleful leaned on Wato’s shoulder, his grip tight on his arm.
“Someone took a look when I first fell. He said it would be fine, as long as I didn’t walk on it.”
“They should at least take the ankle chains off. You’re injured! That’s cruel.”
Doleful laughed. A harsh laugh. “When has the Detective Alliance ever cared about cruelty?”
“And anyway,” he said, “the more injured I am, the harder it is to escape, right? That’s the last thing they’d want. Can’t you see the headlines? Quartering Duke: caught at last, escaped. People would riot!”
His fingers dug into Wato’s flesh.
A threat? “I thought about slamming the doctor who examined my ankle into the ground. But then, I thought, what would be the point? I couldn’t run. I didn’t have the keys to the chains themselves. There’d be evidence against me for attacking someone.”
Yet his breathing was labored; his pale face, clammy. “Ah, but this is all hypothetical. You can’t report my thought crimes to the DA.”
He sighed. His breath tickled Wato’s neck. “Do you know what it’s like being stuck in a cell all day? Nothing to do? Not even able to walk around?”
“Doleful…” Wato said, placing a hand on Doleful’s hand.
“Oh, am I hurting you? I’m sorry.”
“No, no, nothing like that!” Wato quickly responded. “I just think you should sit down on your bed or something. You seem to be struggling.”
Doleful made a sound in the back of his throat, like a chuckle. Or a retch. “Still thinking about others, huh? You know how you could really make me comfortable, Incompetent?”
He didn’t finish the thought. He didn’t have to.
“You know I won’t do that.”
“Hm.” Doleful allowed himself to be led to the edge of his cot. He sat gingerly upon it. “I guess it probably wouldn’t work anyway. Someone always comes in to save me at the last second.”
He laid back, his eyes closing as he rested against his pillow. “I haven’t slept in this cot in days.”
“Did they just leave you on the floor after you hurt yourself?”
“Don’t sound so horrified,” said Doleful. “They’re all afraid of me. They should be.”
He let out a small hum as he settled. ”You should be, too.”
“I’m not.”
“I know,” said Doleful, sighing. “That’s what makes you so infuriating, you know, Incompetent.”
“That was inhumane of the DA to leave you in your injured state.”
“When has the DA ever cared about humanity?” Doleful reprised his earlier question.
He turned onto his side, eyes still closed. His handcuffs clinked as he raised his knees up to his chest. “I used to sleep like this. Curled up so I wouldn’t get cold. So I couldn’t get woken up in the middle of the night stabbed in the stomach by an SPX. Better the back than the stomach. Hurts less.”
He sniffled, brow furrowing. “The gown. And the pillow. They still smell the same as back then.”
Doleful opened his eyes, patting a spot at the edge of the cot. “Sit with me.”
Wato obliged. “I wouldn’t have thought you would want my company.”
Doleful gazed at the crack of light seeping under his cell door. “This place is so boring. Any company is better than sitting in silence by myself.”
“The boredom still has to be better than the experiments, though, right?”
Doleful closed his eyes again. “If you don’t remember it, then don’t say anything. Privileged people always say they understand. It pisses me off.”
“I remember. When Saika -”
“No, you don’t.” Doleful’s knee brushed against Wato’s back as he shifted. “They told me about you. How you were the original Ideal. How the chief took your place.”
“But you don’t remember it, really,” he continued. “You got to escape, go back to your family. Forget it all happened.”
“I never forgot.”
Doleful sighed again. When he spoke, his voice was tired. “You never forgot her. That doesn’t mean you remember the things they did.”
His hands reached up, resting on Wato’s back.
“Shizuka - I think that was her name - fell into one of the maze pits. I had barely made it to the other side when she slipped. She reached out.”
Fingers curling in, just enough to scrape fabric against skin.
“That’s what it felt like. And then she slipped. Couldn’t get a grip. She didn’t even have time to scream before her body crunched against the bottom of the pit.”
Wato shuddered. This was like a game he played in grade school, where kids would pretend to have spiders running down their backs. That’s all it was, he tried to assure himself.
“Do you remember now?” Saika, struck down in front of him. Wato hadn’t had that nightmare in months.
“What about this?” Doleful’s hands found their way to Wato’s chin and his ear. His chest was flat and warm against Wato’s back. Two hearts beat in frantic time, one in anticipation, and one in horror.
Cold metal against Wato’s throat.
“Your handcuff chain isn’t long enough to strangle anyone,” he reasoned. And the Denouement would have shown me that outcome if you were going to try it, he didn’t add.
“I’m just showing you an example,” said Doleful. “Do you know what it feels like to be choked with metal chains? To pass out and wake up in a pile of corpses all wearing the same white gown that you are?”
“Ritsu, Hana, Mikan, Mariko, Yuuto - there were so many of us, I’ve forgotten most of their names by now.” He pressed down gently, not enough to cause pain or leave an imprint. Just enough that Wato could feel the links on his throat as he swallowed. “Their faces were so… mangled. Their mouths open, their eyes rolled back in their heads so you could just see the whites.”
Doleful pressed down harder. “So many faces belonging to so many corpses, you’d swear you could pick out your own face among them if you looked for long enough.”
His mouth was so close to Wato’s ear that Wato could feel how chapped his lips were. “It’s enough to give a demon nightmares, isn’t it? Someone who’s gone through something like that, could you really blame them for wanting to die?”
“There’s still a way out,” Wato’s voice was weak.
“How many times do I have to tell you, Incompetent? There’s only one way out that promises relief, and that’s not possible for me.”
He loosened his grip, raising his hands above Wato’s head.
A thumping sound as he fell back on the bed. “You’re so stubborn. So selfish. So caught up in your own privilege that you refuse to acknowledge others’ circumstances.”
“I mean it,” Wato pressed.
He had been sent here on a mission, he reminded himself as his heart rate slowed back down. He might as well follow through.
“Confess your crimes as the Quartering Duke.” Even saying it out loud sent a pang through his chest because even now, how could he possibly believe that Doleful and the Duke were one and the same?
Wato turned to look at the man curled up behind him. The boy, really. Doleful was always frail, always looked so young. He held himself now in a fetal position. His big, golden eyes regarded Wato.
Like beams from a car on a dark road at night, shining in the shadow of the cell. Wato’s heart thumped. Hope.
“You can be so stupid, Incompetent.” No trace of a smile on his face now. “You have no proof that I’m the Quartering Duke. How many times do we have to go around before you get it?”
“You can still fix it!” Wato stood, facing Doleful again.
“What, confess to being the Quartering Duke? Throw away the dignity of all those people the Duke helped?” Doleful blinked up at Wato, not moving from his bed. “I warned you already, didn’t I? I heard about the stir you made, by the way. You got thrown out of the DA for publicly turning suffering suicidal victims into heartless killers. And you want me to be a part of that?”
He clutched his knees, shivering. “And then what? They keep me in a cell like this forever? They poke and prod and find what makes me tick? Or just leave me in here until I die naturally?”
“We can work out a deal! I’ll talk to Vidocq, you can use your connections as the Quartering Duke and genuinely help people!”
“Genuinely help people,” Doleful mumbled. “It’s a nice sentiment.”
“It is, isn’t it?”
“But I think it’s probably too late for me, anyway.”
Wato paused. It was true, the Duke had done a great many awful things, and had brought about hundreds of tragedies. It was also true that Doleful had been Wato’s friend, and that it was his job as a detective to reverse tragedies.
At last, he said, “You’re only seventeen.”
“What’s today’s date?”
Puzzled, Wato replied, “The fifth of November?”
“Eighteen.”
“What?”
Doleful gave him a weak smile. “My birthday is the second of November. Looks like I’m eighteen now.”
“Oh.”
And then, because he didn’t know what else to say, “Happy birthday.”
“I don’t suppose you brought cake for me?” Doleful said with a sideways longing glance, and then burst into that dry laugh again. “A cake with a little candle might be too dangerous, though. You could try to poison me, or we could set the cell on fire if we weren’t careful. Everyone knows I’m clumsy enough to.”
“Not,” said Doleful when he was done giggling, “that I would mind it, if you tried to poison the cake.”
“Stop it.” The words came out more forcefully than Wato intended.
“I’m tired of hearing about how you would be better off if you died. You already know you can’t die, so why do you bother wallowing in it?”
“What else do I have to live for at this point?” Doleful held his hands up in front of him, slender fingers splayed.
“Ten years since I’ve had my last birthday cake.” With a clink, he folded his hands over his chest and exhaled. “I mean, I’ve gotten used to it. Hey, how many more birthdays do you think I’ll have in here? Think I’ll die of boredom before my nineteenth? More likely I’ll live to be super old and will rot in this cell covered in cobwebs until someone finally remembers me, right?”
“That sounds like a horrible way to go.”
“Yeah,” Doleful agreed. “I had at least hoped I could die in some big, flashy way, so that everyone could be entertained by it.”
He turned his face to Wato once again. “Hey, Incompetent. Remember me when I die, okay? If you outlive me, then remember me when I’m decomposing in this cell. Remember the way you felt when you discovered I was the Quartering Duke, and I’ll have something to live for, okay?”
“You should live for more than that.”
Doleful scoffed. “Should. There’s that word you detectives love so much.”
“You’re a detective, too.”
Sitting up, Doleful shook his head. His hair hung loose around his face. “It was a ruse. What do I have to say to convince you?”
“Your logic is all wrong - you keep saying you’re not the Quartering Duke, but then when I say you’re a detective, you deny that, too. Which one is it then, Doleful?”
Doleful yelped, caught.
Wato charged on. “Our first night on Morgue, you told me your real name. You said you were afraid your life would always be as gray and dull as your name.”
He regarded the boy in front of him. His big eyes, the way his hair hung in a curtain in front of his sharp chin, always separating himself from the world around him.
A world that had never reached out to him.
“I can’t help but think - no, that’s not quite right.” Wato held out his hand. His cape slid over his shoulders as he did so. “I can’t help but believe that you meant what you said. That using your ability to help others gave you purpose. That you trusted me.”
“Please,” Wato continued. “Reo.”
Such big, blinking eyes, shadowed by his bangs. His long eyelashes brushed his cheeks. “Huh. No one has called me that in a really long time.”
He smiled. A sad smile, Wato wanted to believe. A wistful smile.
“I think… I think you wouldn’t have told it to me if there wasn’t some part of you that wanted me to call you by that name. If there wasn’t some part of you that was still… still Doleful Detective. Still Reo Gray.”
A small shake of the head, brown hair falling over blond. “I think Reo Gray was luckier than me. He died over a decade ago.”
The lingering sad smile was neither the Quartering Duke’s, nor Doleful’s. For a moment, with half his face hidden, Wato thought he could see another person. Someone he had never met.
Someone sincere.
“When he escaped the Secret Police, Reo hid out for days. He was starving, and covered in scars, and he got an infection from one of his open wounds, and he would have died, but a kind doctor found him instead.”
The boy’s hands were clasped in his lap. “Someone always came to his rescue, even back then.” Bitterness, creeping in at the edges of his words.
He continued, his tone level, “He was so scared of the Secret Police finding him that he ran away as soon as he was better. The kind doctor who helped him out got hit by a truck trying to chase after him, can you believe it?”
A sardonic laugh. “And then, he found a back alley surgeon who was willing to operate on a seven year old with no money. Out of pity, or out of sadism, maybe. Who knows? Maybe he just found it entertaining.”
He raised his head then, and the Quartering Duke had returned. His smirk was filled with contempt, his voice eking out in sing-song the way it always did when the Duke spoke of “entertainment.”
His eyes, though, thought Wato, those were still Doleful’s eyes. Morose eyes, behind which tears threatened to spill.
“His face was wrapped up for months - you ever see one of those old movie mummies? Just like that.”
He placed his face in his hands, as if feeling subconsciously for the jaw he had before the surgery. “When the bandages came off and he looked in the mirror again… could he really still call that person Reo Gray?”
Wato was stunned.
“Wh - ” the gasp slipped from his lips.
“You see, don’t you, Incompetent? You have no right to call me that name.”
“How horrible.” Wato’s legs were weak beneath him. He let himself fall, sinking until he was kneeling in front of Doleful, his face level with Doleful’s chest.
He repeated, “How horrible.”
“... I told you already, I don’t want someone like you to pity me.”
Doleful’s hands shook. The soap from his gown smelled like disinfectant, like the halls of a hospital. The gleam of his handcuffs winked at Wato. “You were a child. Who would do plastic surgery on a child?”
“Can you really say that’s worse than the people that child was trying to hide from in the first place?” Doleful leaned in. His chin rested just above Wato’s hair.
Wato didn’t dare shake his head. He stared instead at the chest moving in even time, expelling warm breath on Wato’s hair. “Help me, Reo.”
“What? I told you not to call me -”
He fell silent, stunned, as Wato grabbed his hands. Without getting up, Wato continued, “Help me take them all down.”
“Weren’t you all chummy with the DA?” His voice was muffled. He was slumped now, his lips moving directly against Wato’s scalp. “You believed more than anyone in that detective bullshit.”
“I still do. I want to reverse all the tragedies in this world.” Wato gripped the pale hands in front of him tight, as if he could channel conviction through physical touch.
Saika would have been better at this. The Ideal Detective.
But this particular task had been assigned not to Ideal Detective, but to Wato Hojo.
“I want to create a world where there are no tragedies; where no one will peel off a seven year old’s face, or be stabbed by SPXs or fall in pits - a world where detectives are obsolete.”
The hands he held were cold, almost corpselike. “You keep asking how many times we have to go through this, but you already know the answer, right? As long as you’re alive, there’s always a chance things will change for the better.”
He held the hands tight as they attempted to pull away. “And you said it yourself: you can’t die.”
A cool spot of air on Wato’s head as the lips resting on his hair drew back. “And I’ll say it again - you have no right -”
“I have every right.” Wato stood, still not letting go of the other boy’s hands. “As your friend, I’m claiming my right not to turn my back on you when you need my help.”
Incredulous eyes stared back at him.
“I promised to bring the Duke’s crimes to light. But that’s just the beginning, right? There are more murderers out there, more people who hurt others, and more people who need help.”
He smiled. Staring down those eyes. “If you can’t die, isn’t it better to live? It doesn’t even have to be as Invincible or Doleful Detective. Why not just live as Reo Gray?”
Letting go at last, Wato let his hands fall to his sides. “A fresh start. Just like the one I was given.”
For a moment, the boy just wrung his hands. Like a cat, grooming itself after an unwanted touch. Or a penitent, rubbing the beads of a rosary.
The cuffs around his ankles clinked as he fidgeted, one foot in front of the other, and then in reverse. He winced as they brushed against his injured ankle.
“I hate privileged people like you. You only got your fresh start because of luck to begin with.”
Wato cocked his head to the side. “But aren’t I offering you that same luck and opportunity, now?”
“Well,” came the dry reply, “I always did think I was scum.”
You shouldn’t think such things of yourself, Wato almost said.
You did bad things while you were suffering, was another thought he had shared with others in similar situations in the past.
But seeing the ugly smile that he had grown to know and perhaps even hate, he could only say, “That isn’t a rejection of my offer.”
“Trash like me doesn’t deserve to live. But I can’t die. What a conundrum…”
Hurt, like poison gas, like knives, like wire, cut through Wato’s heart. Like the Quartering Duke refusing to cut himself in front of the SPX. “I hoped,” Wato choked out as evenly as he could, “that you would change your mind.”
“Hmm?” With his head tilted to the side like that, he looked almost childlike. “The best interrogators in the government and the FBI and the Detective Alliance have already tried, right? What makes you think a conversation like this would be any different?”
“Besides,” and the boy became small, hunched over, his face nervous. Doleful, as Wato had originally known him. “I’m innocent, see? Like I’ve said again and again and again, there’s absolutely nothing that ties me to the Quartering Duke’s victims.”
“... I understand.”
Like being crushed against a pit. Do you remember how it feels, Incompetent?
No, not exactly. The memories of the Secret Police’s maze were hazy, but each betrayal from this boy he’d thought a friend cut sharp.
He was at the door, one foot out of the cell, when he heard, “Incompetent?”
Wato turned back to look over his shoulder.
From the cot, big, golden eyes like twin suns rising over the horizon regarded him.
“Stay with me just a little longer? It gets boring in this cell all by myself.”