Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The ambulance radio sputters to life, teeth gnashing through static - the voice of the city's collective nervous system, perpetually reporting its own decomposition.

DISPATCHER - "Unit 22, respond to Apartment Block 8, 10th floor. Six-year-old male, standing on balcony railing. Caller reports a child in distress - shouting, crying, for over thirty minutes."

Your gloved hand presses the transmitter.

YOU - "Unit 22 responding. ETA seven minutes."

You are Dr. Amber Pathé, paramedic, citizen, exhausted mammal. The Revachol Emergency Medical uniform hangs on your frame - creased at the joints, fraying at the cuffs, baptized in old antiseptic and things you'd rather not name. The red stripe across your shoulder means you're medical, not police. Which means people only sometimes want you dead.

ENDURANCE [Medium: Success] - You haven't eaten in twelve hours. Your knees hurt. Your boots are crusted with road salt. Your body is a tired dog being dragged behind a cart. Despite everything, yet you remain upright. Here, that counts as resilience.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Medium: Failure] - You drain what remains in your thermos. The coffee is a necromantic ritual - cold, bitter, stippled with grounds. It slides down your throat. There's no warmth, no pleasure. Just the muscle-memory of an addiction that has outlived its utility.

Loran, your motorcarriage-driver - a skeleton wrapped in skin wrapped in a uniform that has never been washed - scratches at the leprous constellation on his neck. You've worked together three weeks. He's said maybe four full sentences in that time. His eyes never leave the windshield, as if looking directly at the city might infect him with something worse than what he already has.

LORAN - "Ten floors up," he mutters, gaze locked on the road. "Bet it's a jumper. Or a prank."

1. [Don't respond. Not yet.]
2. "Regardless of what's up there, we're obligated to check."
3. "Just shut up and drive this wreck."
4. "If it's a jumper, I hope they wait until we arrive. I hate when they rush."

You don't respond. Not yet.

NEUROMANTICISM [Medium: Success] - A six-year-old. Negative twenty-two degrees. Thirty minutes exposed.

You're not heading toward a rescue. You're heading toward the shape agony takes when it's done shouting.

PERICARDIAL DREAD [Medium: Success] - The script is already written in your neurons: A body on cold concrete. A voice silenced before it learned the words that might have saved it. A father you will never locate. A mother who will wish she never looked. Retinal trauma that will replicate itself in nightmares until cardiac cessation.

LOGIC [Medium: Success] - 78% chance it's a lonely neighbor's paranoia. You've answered too many like this.

COMPASSION [Low: Success] - But if you're wrong - if your cynicism has finally calcified into something terminal - the child is dead. And you could have prevented it.

You look out the smeared window. The buildings lean like drunkards in a line-up. A forgotten sock flutters, frozen in mid-air on a tenth-floor clothesline. The cement here has the same temperature as the morgue slabs.

REVACHOL - You could have remained in another district - one where patients occasionally remember your name instead of spitting it back with phlegm and accusation. But you chose Martinaise. Why?

VOLITION [Medium: Failure] - Because someone has to be. Because if not you, then who? You believe that. You have to.

SOMATIC THEATER [Easy: Failure] - Because you're a martyr. A tragic little saint in a used-up coat.

PLACEBO VOICE [Medium: Failure] - You could still leave. Say you transferred by mistake. Blame the paperwork. No one would question it. No one would remember you were ever here.

SHIVERS [Medium: Success] - But staying means you're needed. And being needed is as close to mattering as it gets. And here - they need you. Even if they don't know it. Even if they never say it. Even if they hate you for showing up at all.

You shift in your seat, uncomfortable beneath the weight of your own justifications. Knees pressed against the grime-stained medical kit. The siren doesn't work anymore.

Loran navigates the corner, and the monolithic tombstone of Apartment Block 8 emerges from the urban sepulcher.

The heater coughs warm air onto your frozen extremities. Stops. Refuses to resume its function.

VOLITION [Easy: Failure] - You could request backup. Declare yourself inadequately equipped. You are inadequately equipped. You know it. They know it.

But there's a minor on a balcony, and you wear the insignia of a profession that once meant something. Doesn't it still?

PERICARDIAL DREAD [Medium: Success] - This isn't about the boy. This is about the city communicating with you through its preferred dialect of violence, coincidence, and perverse tableaux it designates as "fate." This place devours its young - not from malice, but from the same self-loathing that compels an addict to systematically destroy everything they might have loved.

PERCEPTION [Easy: Success] - Through the windshield, you see an Revachol Citizens Militia transport. But it's not the standard motor carriage - the blue-and-white box with flaking paint. Instead, your eyes find something else.

It's a horse. Massive and dark, tethered to the remains of a fence post. Its breath forms clouds in the freezing air, momentarily obscuring the official RCM emblem branded into its flank like a convict's identification number. White frost has formed on its mane, giving it the appearance of premature aging.

ENCYCLOPEDIA [Medium: Success] - Horses in police service - a rarity, almost an anachronism. Most precincts transitioned to motorized transport in the '40s. But rumors persist: some precincts are so desperately underfunded that officers have reverted to "traditional methods." Fuel is expensive. Oats are cheaper.

SHIVERS [Medium: Success] - Even the horse looks defeated. Its eyes hold the same thousand-yard stare you see in long-term locals – the look of a creature that has seen too much and expects nothing but more of the same.

YOU - "Great. The militia are already there to tell us how to do our jobs."

BEDSIDE MANNER [Easy: Success] - Loran snorts appreciatively. A shared contempt for authority – the last currency in this city unsullied by inflation.

As the ambulance grinds to a halt, you see her - a woman well into her seventies, arms waving frantically, her nightgown visible beneath an coat inadequate for both the climate and her dignity. Her voice carries across the frozen courtyard with surprising volume.

PORCH CASSANDRA - "HURRY, YOU IMBECILES! THE CHILD! THE CHILD IS EXPIRING WHILE YOU ENGAGE IN BUREAUCRATIC MASTURBATION!"

SOMATIC THEATER [Easy: Success] - This woman is performing her role with conviction bordering on madness - the concerned citizen, the vigilant neighbor, the only person who cares in a world gone cold. Her audience: you, the RCM, the apathetic spectators peering from neighboring windows.

ADRENAL SURGE [Medium: Success] - Look at their mouths. Licking lips, biting tongues. They want someone to fall. They crave the shriek, the spectacle. Don't give it to them.

As you grab your kit, a uniformed representative of state violence approaches. His posture is straight despite the cold, his expression professionally neutral yet somehow radiating disapproval at everything within his field of vision - including, especially, you.

THE UNIFORM [Medium: Success] - Lieutenant Jean Vicquemare of Precinct 41. His reputation precedes him - doctrinaire, inexorable, harboring a specific antipathy for chemical dependencies and the institutional frameworks that enable them - which, in his view, includes emergency medical services.

Precinct 41 oversees the infamous district of Jamrock, covering the Pox, Villalobos, Central Jamrock, Grand Couron, Old South, and the Valley of the Dogs - doing the work of three precincts on the budget of one.

For over twenty years, 41 and 57 have been locked in a petty, ceremonial turf war over Martinaise - a district both would rather drown than govern. Yet neither will back down. The rivalry is a matter of pride now, as absurd as the district itself.

Today, the cosmic dice have landed in favor of 41.

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "We arrived three minutes ago. Elderly woman reports a minor screaming." His ocular focus shifts vertically. "Thirty fucking minutes."

COMPASSION [Hard: Success] - There's something particular in Vicquemare's voice - a tension beneath the professional monotone. He already suspects this emergency isn't what it appears to be, but protocol demands he treat it with all seriousness. This suspicion has calcified into resentment - not at the situation, but at a world that forces him to play along with its absurdities.

1. "If this is another 'delayed onset overdose,' I'm losing faith in humanity."
2. "Lieutenant, any visual confirmation of the child's condition?"
3. "Always harder when it's children. Let's check together."

COMPOSURE [Medium: Success] - You calibrate your clinical detachment to match his bureaucratic stoicism.

YOU - "Lieutenant, any visual confirmation of the child's condition?"

PORCH CASSANDRA - "HE'S STILL UP THERE! ARE YOU BOTH BLIND?" The old woman circles you both like a frantic carrion bird. "TEN FLOORS UP! THE BOY IS FREEZING!"

The horse watches her with the same arctic indifference as its owner.

YOU - "Ma'am, please step back and let us assess—"

THE UNIFORM [Medium: Failure] - The woman demonstrates comprehensive indifference to your attempted assertion of professional boundaries.

PORCH CASSANDRA - "ASSESS? WHILE A CHILD DIES? THIS IS WHY MARTINAISE IS A GRAVEYARD! NOBODY DOES ANYTHING UNTIL IT'S TOO LATE!"

The law enforcement official exhales a cloud of cigarette smoke.

EMERGENCY BOND [Medium: Success] - He knows exactly what's on that balcony. This isn't his first wild goose chase.

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "Ten floors," he states flatly. "Elevator's been dead since the Boulevard Massacre anniversary. Two years now."

LOGIC [Easy: Success] - He's not asking if you can make the climb. He's telling you there's no alternative. Protocol is protocol.

TRAUMA KINETICS [Hard: Success] - Your bag weighs eight kilograms. By the tenth floor, it will feel like eighty. Your knees already hate you for other decisions you've made. They'll never forgive you for this one.

1. "Actually, wait. I need to confirm what we're looking at first. The dispatcher wasn't clear."
2. "False alarm, ten floors up? Sounds like exactly the kind of bullshit we moved here for."
3. [Begin the ascent without complaint]

Professionals don't whine about stairs when there might be a shivering kid at the top.

YOU - "After you, Lieutenant."

EMERGENCY BOND [Medium: Success] - He notices your lack of hesitation. In the capital of maybe-later, this is practically heroism. Everyone else hesitates here - waiting to see if the danger will resolve itself, or target someone else instead.

Your driver - a man whose entire personality is nicotine stains and silence - lights another cigarette without looking at you.

The unspoken rule of emergency services: drivers stay with their vehicles. It's not protocol - it's survival. Last year, three motorcarriage were stripped to the frame while their drivers performed CPR. One was still running.

The stairwell stinks of combining human waste, spilled pyrholidon, and the distinctive atmospheric signature of hope's decomposition. And the graffiti tells Revachol's story better than any history book:

"MAZDA LORRY FUCKERS STEP ON YOUR OWN NECKS"

"DOLORES WASN'T AIRBORNE, SHE WAS THROWN"

"THE 9MM SOLUTION TO THE DESERTER PROBLEM"

By the third floor, your lungs burn like you've been breathing acid fumes. By the fifth, your thighs howl revolution against the central authority of your brain, muscles flooding with lactic acid and tremor. By the eighth, sweat pools in your underwear and you're questioning every life choice that led you here, tasting copper in your mouth.

NOCICEPTIVE TOLERANCE [Hard: Failure] - This isn't just exhaustion. It's a mutiny. Knees, lungs, spine - all screaming for relief. You're not pushing through it. You're drowning in it.

Vicquemare climbs with the steady rhythm of a metronome, neither slowing nor speeding up. His breathing remains controlled, his posture unwavering.

COMPOSURE [Medium: Success] - A faint wheeze on his exhale. He's feeling it too, but hiding it better.

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "You're new," he says between floors, not looking back. It's not a question.

YOU - "Three weeks. Transfer from Delta."

SOMATIC THEATER [Medium: Success] - He already knows this. He's seeing if you'll volunteer why. The militia track medical personnel like dogs track rats - with professional interest and occasional extermination.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Hard: Success] - That wasn't curiosity. That was erotic friction. Like he knows exactly what it takes to break you, and wants to hear the sound.

ADRENAL SURGE [Medium: Failure] - He's hunting. And you just showed your throat.

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "Nobody transfers to this district by choice."

1. "Maybe I like the ambiance. Or maybe I ran out of places to go."
2. "I screwed up in Delta. Here, no one notices another screwed-up medic."
3. "My specialty is terminal cases. Martinaise seems fitting."
4. "I wanted to be where I'm truly needed. Not where it's comfortable, but where it's necessary."

YOU - "Maybe I like the ambiance. Or maybe I ran out of places to go."

COMPOSURE [Easy: Success] - You don't tell him about the morphine. About the choice between protocol and mercy. Some secrets are meant to stay buried.

The corner of his mouth twitches - not a smile, but the ghost of one, haunting what might once have been a more expressive face.

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "The crumbling architecture or the broken lives inside it?"

THE UNIFORM [Medium: Success] - He's testing your threshold for particular brand of hopelessness. Categorizing you into binary classification: those who will break and those who are already broken.

YOU - "I find they complement each other."

Ninth floor. The climb has become an absurdist meditation on futility. Each step is its own philosophical statement.

NEUROMANTICISM [Medium: Success] - This stairwell is Revachol in microcosm. An endless climb toward an uncertain destination, each step more painful than the last, haunted by the ghosts of better days.

Tenth floor. Finally. The gallery walkway stretches in both directions, a narrow concrete path with flimsy railings that have witnessed more suicides than safety inspections. Apartments line one side, numbered haphazardly, logic having long ago surrendered to entropy.

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "This way." He says, moving with purpose.

Apartment 1047. The door is ajar, just a centimeter. Dark inside. A cold draft seeps out.

The hush from inside the apartment seems more ominous than any noise. Your mind paints pictures of abandoned children, abusive caretakers, worst possibilities your profession has forced you to witness.

PERICARDIAL DREAD [Hard: Success] - If a boy had been screaming for thirty minutes, the silence that follows would be filled with sobs, with hitched breathing, with the aftermath of terror. This quiet is empty. Manufactured. A void where human distress should be.

A dull sense of dread settles in your stomach. Calls involving children are always the worst - even when they turn out to be false alarms. Especially when they turn out to be false alarms, because the relief is so shameful.

Officer positions himself beside the door, hand on his holstered weapon. His eyes meet yours for the first time - steel gray, the kind of sky that forgets how to snow and only remembers how to press down.

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "Ready?"

You nod, steadying your breathing. Whatever waits inside - tragedy or farce - you'll face it with professional detachment.

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "Revachol Citizens Militia," he announces, his voice carrying the full weight of state authority. "We're entering the premises."

No response from within. Just that hollow silence.

THE UNIFORM [Medium: Success] - You shouldn't enter without permission. You know this. Protocol demands consent unless the patient is unconscious or in immediate danger.

TRIAGE REFLEX [Easy: Success] - A hypothermic minor is classified as being in immediate danger.

Lieutenant pushes the door open further with his foot, pistolette raised. The door gives way with minimal pressure. Unused hinges protest with the screech of neglected metal. You follow, kit ready.

The apartment unfolds before you - a diorama of abandonment. Dust covers every surface like diseased snow. Furniture outlines remain on the floors where items were removed or stolen. On the wall, a calendar frozen in time: February'52.

LOGIC [Medium: Success] - Two years vacant, yet the dust is disturbed in a clear path leading to the balcony. Someone's been here recently.

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "Stay behind me," mutters he, moving forward with the careful steps of a man who's found too many unpleasant surprises in empty rooms.

The radiator has split open, copper intestines spilling onto the floor. Frost patterns form intricate mandalas on the walls. It's colder inside than out.

SHIVERS [Hard: Success] - This apartment remembers its last occupants. A family of four. Father lost his dock job in '51. Mother worked three cleaning shifts until her hands bled. Two children who stopped asking for food when they realized there was none to give. They left one February morning, carrying everything they could. No one knows if they survived.

You follow Vicquemare. Each step feels like crossing a threshold into another reality - one where the temperature drops and your breath numbs in the air before you.

PERICARDIAL DREAD [Medium: Success] - Something waits beyond that glass. Not danger, exactly. Something worse. A punchline to a joke the universe has been setting up all morning.

The balcony door slides open with a scrape of metal on metal. Cold air rushes in, carrying with it the industrial tang - oil and salt and chemical runoff from factories that closed decades ago but whose poisons remain. And there, on the balcony, stilled in place—

PERCEPTION [Medium: Success] - The glare blinds you for a moment - but not enough to miss the strange stillness of the figure. Unmoving. Unnatural.

COMPOSURE [Legendary: Failure] - Your heart lurches. The shape, the posture - it feels like a kid. A dead one.

Another inch toward entropy. Another small collapse in the order of things. The city teaches its lessons through frozen figures and motionless forms.

You step forward into whatever truth waits on this balcony.

Chapter Text

The city fades another inch toward entropy. The sunrise bleeds limpid copper across ice-crusted waves that shouldn't exist here, shouldn't coat the Martinaise shoreline in February. Even the goddamn ocean has surrendered. The waves haven't moved in three fucking days.

You Lieutenant Jean Vicquemare, RCM Badge LTN-6YTR, guardian of a city that may not exist tomorrow, stand at the shoreline, watching nothing happen.

VOLITION [Hard: Success] - And, also. You are not Harry Du Bois.

Bottles and cans suspended in translucent ice like specimens in formaldehyde, a condom crystallized mid-drift with its payload still visible through yellowed latex, cigarette butts trapped like insects in succinite - a fucking museum of human waste frozen in time.

URBAN SEMIOTICS [Medium: Success] - A art installation curated by nihilism itself. "The Last Days of Martinaise" or "Still Life with Entropy." History preserved in ice, waiting for archaeologists who will never come.

The Pale whispers at the edges of hearing. Always there now, a constant susurrus of dissolution. You've learned to live with it the way people learn to live with tinnitus - background noise that becomes foreground when you pay attention. Whispcrack like breaking glass, like reality developing hairline fractures.

You taste it sometimes - metallic, wrong, seeping through cracks between what is and what was. Soon it will swallow the docks. Then the district. Then everything that pretends to matter.

You've been hearing it more lately. Static between radio calls, white noise behind conversations, the electrical hum of time coming undone. The sound makes your goddamn teeth ache.

The crackling grows louder. Insistent. Personal.

Then your radio spits to life.

RADIO - "Unit 4... respond to... Jean... morning... you're... can't... why are you...?"

You stare at the device. You don't answer. The radio died yesterday. You checked the battery yourself. Twice.

The voice fragments, reconstructs, breaks apart like sanity under impossible pressure. Like words trying to maintain coherence while the universe forgets their meaning.

COMPOSURE [Medium: Failure] - Your cigarette burns down to filter. You light another with hands that shake - not from cold. From the fucking certainty that something waits in that expanding Pale, calling your name. Something that knows you. Something that remembers when you've forgotten.

PERCEPTION [Hard: Success] - That voice. Female. Familiar but not familiar...

You turn the radio over in your hands. Dead plastic and metal. But underneath the static, you catch something else - an intimacy that makes your chest tighten. The way someone might speak your name in the dark, close enough to feel their breath.

You've never been spoken to like that. The voice dissolves back, taking its impossible intimacy with it.

INTERROGATION LEXICON [Medium: Success] - Of course the radio works. Of course the city speaks through broken things. Why wouldn't it? Physics gave its two weeks' fucking notice months ago.

DATABASE [Easy: Success] - ZA/UM - mescaline and lysergic acid derivatives used in enhanced interrogation protocols. Auditory hallucinations, temporal displacement, persistent psychotic episodes documented in 73% of subjects. This is registered. Scientific. Chemical.

The suspect had been barely fucking human. That piece of shit. ZA/UM was the only way to crack open that mind.

The needle slid through skin delivering the yellow poison that tasted of burnt hair and infant screams. Your consciousness dissolved into his like shit mixing with rainwater, two minds becoming one festering organism of shared damnation.

His memories had weight - the weight of small bodies being lowered into storm drains. You felt his arousal as children begged in languages their terror had invented, felt the texture of tiny fingers trying to climb concrete walls slick with decades of human waste. Every sensation became yours: the sound of teeth chattering in the dark, the smell of fear-sweat mixed with sewage, the sight of rats learning that crying meant feeding time.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Medium: Failure] - The reports didn't mention it would crack open channels in your head that were never meant to be opened.

For nine hours you lived inside a mind that masturbated to children drowning in their own vomit. His pleasure centers fired directly into your nervous system - every moment of ecstasy became yours. You experienced his orgasms as—

VOLITION [Hard: Success] - Enough! Don't relive this shit. You did your duty. That contamination was purged from your system years ago.

When the chemicals finally metabolized, when your thoughts separated from the sewage of his consciousness, you spewed for three hours straight. But you knew where every body was hidden, every tunnel he'd used. Nine families buried what remained.

The monster's influence died with the drugs. What you're experiencing now has a different fucking source.

LES VOIX NON DITES [Medium: Success] - This is psychological contamination. Proximity to extreme instability - Harry's instability - has left marks. Like radiation poisoning, but for sanity. You sat too fucking close to the apocalypse cop, and now the voices of all his unresolved cases bleed into yours. The neverending whispers of justice denied.

VOLITION [Hard: Success] - You are not Harry Du Bois. You don't wake up in strange places with no memory of how you got there. You don't construct elaborate metaphysical theories about tie-related consciousness or the political implications of anodic music. You drink two fingers of whiskey, sometimes three. Not a whole bottle of some bottom-shelf piss while pissing yourself, like that fuck-up Du Bois.

You are not Harry. You are the last rational man in an increasingly irrational world.

Every mystery has a solution. Every puzzle has missing pieces that can be found and fitted into place. You've built your entire identity and fourteen fucking years of service on this premise.

COPAGANDA [Medium: Failure] - Your badge is fucking useless against cosmic randomness. You can't shoot the goddamn concept of nothingness. Your jurisdiction ends where reality ends, and reality is ending.

And now you stand at the edge of everything, watching the ocean refuse to move, listening to dead electronics whisper your name, and none of your hard-earned fucking expertise offers comfort.

LOGIC [Easy: Success] - The mathematics are absolute. Entropy always increases. Order always decays. The universe tends toward maximum disorder, and the Pale is simply the final expression of that tendency.

A gull cries overhead - the first sound you've heard in hours that wasn't the whisper of ending. You look up, following its flight toward the gray dome of sky.

LES VOIX NON DITES [Medium: Success] - Even the fucking birds know to get out while they still can. It flies with urgency away from the city center, wings beating against air that feels increasingly solid, increasingly wrong.

The city wants to tell you something. Through frozen waves and crystallized garbage, through the quality of light that falls wrong on familiar surfaces. Revachol has developed a consciousness in its death throes, a final desperate awareness before the ending completes its work.

You remember her sometimes. Dr. Pathé. Those small still moments when she would pause mid-conversation, the way she'd tilt her head - like someone born with perfect pitch recognizing a distant melody. Like a stethoscope pressed against nothing. As if she's listening - not for a heartbeat, but for the silence after.

SUSPECT PSYCHOLOGY [Medium: Success] - For her, it was as natural as breathing. She never fought it, simply accepted what came through. Natural as a bird turning toward magnetic north. No interrogation needed - the city confessed to her willingly.

PERCEPTION [Hard: Success] - Your connection to the city feels like scar tissue. Rough, painful, built from trauma rather than born from grace. A channel torn open by chemicals and coercion, not seamlessly integrated like hers.

Your neck aches from looking up, but you can't look away. The wrongness in the sky pulls at something deep in your reptilian brain, the fucking part that knows when predators circle overhead. But this isn't a predator. This is conclusion. This is the period at the end of the longest sentence ever written.

VOLITION [Hard: Success] - Yes. You are not Harry Du Bois. Harry would embrace this chaos, find meaning in the meaningless, construct elaborate theories. His madness flows like water, adapts like language, finds meaning in meaninglessness. Your madness is crystallized, fossilized. And you just want it to make sense.

But it doesn't have to make sense for you to do your job. You're still a fucking cop. Of course you are. Still on duty. Still responsible for witnessing what happens to this city. Might as well write a report on the heat death of the universe while you're at it.

THOUGHT CABINET - THE FINAL WATCH
Some duties transcend the mundane responsibilities of badge and paycheck. In the final hours of a dying city, someone must stand guard at the boundary between existence and void. Not to prevent the ending - that's beyond prevention now - but to observe it. To hold space for the magnitude of what's being lost. This is the last service you can perform for Revachol: to be present for its death.

The city fades another inch toward entropy.

SHIVERS [Legendary: Success] - Something else contracts too. Your chest. Your throat. The sky presses down with weight that has nothing to do with weather, everything to do with trajectories calculated in megatons rather than minutes. It approaches from a direction the Pale doesn't travel. The city's final case file is being written in the sky above you.

Your bladder loosens slightly - not enough to embarrass, just enough to remind you that you're still an animal with animal fears, standing at the edge of extinction and pissing yourself in microscopic increments.

YOU - "Shit."

Chapter Text

You push past cop, medical training overriding caution.

YOU - "Move!"

Your boots crunch on frost-covered concrete as you rush forward, reaching for the small figure, turning it toward you—

ENCYCLOPEDIA [Hard: Success] - L'Étoile Companions, Model #37 - "Class Innocence." Banned in three districts due to questionably youthful appearance, but widely available in the commercial district near the docks. Retail price: 25 reál.

ADRENAL SURGE [Medium: Success] - The knowledge comes unbidden, unwanted, making you wonder what darkness resides in your own subconscious to recognize such a thing.

You reach out - carefully, as if to a sleeping infant. But the skin beneath your fingers isn't warm or yielding. Plastic. Cold, glossy, unwelcome.

You freeze, staring into painted eyes. Eyes that don't blink. Don't move. Don't see.

VOLITION [Low: Failure] - Not here. Not in front of him. Don't lose face.

And you laugh. Softly, on an exhale, like you're surprised by a bad joke. It slips out - short at first, then ragged, like a gasp after a sprint. Not from amusement. From helplessness. From futility.

YOU - "A fucking doll…"

You whisper into the void, almost in tears.

The figure stands frozen in an attitude of artificial ecstasy, its mouth formed into a perfect "O" that, from a distance, could indeed be mistaken for a cry. Its limbs are stiff with cold, the cheap plastic cracking in places. Someone has dressed it in a youth's coat and hat, an obscene parody of innocence.

NEUROMANTICISM [Hard: Success] - This is art. Perverted, nihilistic art. "The Death of Innocence," or perhaps "Revachol's Minor Protection Services." The creator has crafted a masterpiece of despair - a false emergency that reveals the true emergency of Revachol's soul.

Radio crackles.

DISPATCHER - "Dispatch to Unit 4. Status update required. Additional units three minutes out."

The lieutenant picks up his radio with a sigh that contains multitudes.

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "Unit 4 to Dispatch. False alarm. No child present. Repeat: NO child in danger."

DISPATCHER - "Remain on site for supervisor assessment."

The bureaucratic nightmare unfolds before you – forms to be filled, reports to be written, resources wasted, all because of a prank involving pornography. The system's inability to process the absurd means everyone must continue treating this seriously.

Vicquemare's jaw tightens. The veins in his neck stand out like tendons about to tear.

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "This is a Code 4-7: Public Obscenity and False Reporting. We are clearing the scene."

DISPATCHER - "Lieutenant Vicquemare, protocol dictates-"

He switches off the radio with a decisive click. For a moment, mum reigns, broken only by the distant sounds of Martinaise's perpetual decay.

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "Protocol can go fuck itself."

COMPASSION [Medium: Success] - He's reached his threshold for absurdity today. Beyond that threshold lies something dangerous - not to you, but to whoever next provokes him.

Vicquemare stares at the doll, then at the old woman still visible below, still gesticulating wildly, still living in her reality where a boy needs saving. His face contracts into a decision.

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "She'll just call again," he says, more to himself than to you. "They always do."

PERICARDIAL DREAD [Hard: Success] - The sex-doll – this symbol of commercial desire, of loneliness transformed into transaction, of humanity's endless ability to create surrogates for connection – has performed its final service. It has brought you here, to this moment, to this unlikely meeting.

YOU - "What are you doing?"

You ask as he picks up the frozen figure.

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "Concluding the investigation," he says flatly.

Without ceremony, he lifts it over the balcony railing and releases it. Ten stories it falls, turning slowly in the gray light, before landing with a muffled thud in the snow below, directly in front of the screaming old woman.

NEUROMANTICISM [Hard: Success] - In this moment, the doll represents everything about Revachol – a hollow facsimile of humanity, locked in eternal silent howling, falling through cold air toward inevitable impact.

The elderly woman's shriek as the "boy" crashes at her feet is almost operatic in its horror. She fallen to her knees beside the doll, touching its plastic face with trembling fingers. Her reality has shattered, reconfigured itself into something new and equally disturbing. The hit has cracked the figure's face, revealing hollow darkness underneath.

COMPASSION [Easy: Success] - This is her true emergency - not a minor in danger, but the collapse of the narrative that gave her purpose. Something to care about in a city that cares for nothing.

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "Case closed," he says, already lighting another cigarette. "Document it as a 4-7-B. Wasting emergency resources."

THE UNIFORM [Easy: Success] - He's testing you. Seeing if you'll report his unconventional resolution.

1. "That was completely unprofessional. I'll have to report this."
2. "What a fucking joke. I should have stayed in Delta."
3. [Say nothing and follow procedure]
4. "Well, that's one way to close a case."

YOU - "Well, that's one way to close a case."

Something shifts in his expression - a microscopic relaxation around his eyes. You've surprised him. Most people from Delta would be clutching their pearls and reaching for the complaint forms.

You stare at the doll, then at Vicquemare. Something about this moment feels unnaturally formal - like you should exchange business cards or shake hands.

BEDSIDE MANNER [Medium: Success] - In medicine, even the worst revelations require a veneer of professionalism. A script to follow when reality becomes too horrific. It's the same in law enforcement, isn't it?

YOU - "Dr. Amber Pathé. Officially, anyway. Most people just call me Ambulance."

THE UNIFORM [Easy: Success] - A strange time for introductions, but perhaps the only appropriate time. You've seen each other in the raw - reactions to absurdity reveal more than any interview.

You're playing a role now. The competent, unfazed medical professional. The one who's seen it all. It's not entirely an act, but it's not entirely true either.

He looks at you, a flicker of surprise passing across his features - not at your name, but at the timing of your offering it.

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "Jean Vicquemare. Lieutenant. 41st Precinct," he responds, voice as dry as the apartment's frozen air. "Though I'm frequently called worse shit by better people."

He extends his hand - scarred knuckles and nicotine-stained fingers that have signed too many death certificates and pulled too many triggers. In the bitter cold, this simple gesture feels almost intimate. You take it. His grip is firm but not crushing - the handshake of someone who has nothing left to prove and everything left to lose.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Medium: Success] - His skin is surprisingly warm. The human furnace type, burning calories and probably alcohol at an alarming rate to maintain body heat. You wonder what else he burns.

PERICARDIAL DREAD [Hard: Success] - There's something fateful about this handshake. Like you're sealing an agreement neither of you fully understands. A contract written in invisible ink.

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "Sorry about the lack of child," he mutters, releasing your hand. "What a waste of everyone's goddamn time."

COMPOSURE [Medium: Success] - It takes you a moment to realize it's a joke. His delivery is so flat that the humor nearly sublimes directly into the cold air. But it's there - a tiny glimpse behind the professional mask.

A laugh escapes you - small, surprised, like it was hiding in your lungs and found an unexpected exit. Not because it's particularly funny, but because it's the last thing you expected from this grim-faced man.

YOU - "I usually meet colleagues in bars, not over abandoned sex toys."

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "In Martinaise, bars often become places of abandoned sex toys, Dr. Pathé. Especially after midnight on Friday."

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Medium: Success] - The way he says this suggests personal observation rather than theoretical knowledge. You wonder which bars. You wonder if he goes alone.

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "You're not what I expected from Delta," cop offering you a cigarette from a crumpled pack of Astra. The gesture is casual but laden with significance – an initiation into Martinaise's fraternity of the damned.

EMERGENCY BOND [Easy: Success] - You shouldn't. You've been trying to quit. But the shared ritual feels important somehow. In Revachol, cigarettes are communion wafers for a religion of shared suffering.

You accept. He hands you his lighter instead of lighting your cigarette for you - a small but meaningful boundary maintained. The metal is cold but warms quickly in your hand. You light the cigarette, inhaling sharply. The nicotine hits your system like a small, familiar violence - tar coating your already damaged lungs, carbon monoxide displacing oxygen in your bloodstream, your body gratefully accepting this incremental suicide.

The flame illuminates his face in the gathering dusk - tired eyes, the pockmarked scars, the premature lines etched by thankless service, the perpetual shadow of stubble that suggests he no longer cares about appearing perfectly groomed.

VISUAL CALCULUS [Legendary: Success] - Atrophic scarring scattered across both cheeks - a quiet topography of pain. The hemorrhagic smallpox outbreak of '32 hit the poorest districts hardest. He must have been fifteen. One in three died. He's not here because he survived - he's here because he never stopped punishing himself for it.

YOU - "I recognize those scars. The pox outbreak?"

BEDSIDE MANNER [Medium: Failure] - Something cold slides behind his eyes. You've crossed a line. You both know what happened. The Coalition withheld vaccines from revolutionary districts. People were dying while bureaucrats sat around debating the political implications of mercy.

1. "Sorry. Not my business. Professional deformation - analyzing everything."
2. "I was in Jamrock then. Lost my brother."
3. "Atrophic scarring. Hemorrhagic form of the '32 pox. You were one of the lucky ones."
4. "The Coalition could have prevented it. They had vaccines. They just decided districts like ours weren't worth saving."

YOU - "I was in Jamrock then. Lost my brother."

COMPASSION [Hard: Success] - You share pain, creating a bridge through trauma. It's risky, but genuine.

You remember a metal cot. The stink of sickness. Your brother asking for water he couldn't swallow. His throat too raw. His lips too cracked. But still he asked. Your mother not meeting your eyes for days afterward. You never asked how she got the vaccine. You already knew.

Lieutenant looks at you - really looks at you. Something passes between you, electric and uncomfortable. The particular bond of survivors who've clawed their way out of the same hell.

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "Jamrock," he repeats, nodding slightly. "The worst hit."

PERICARDIAL DREAD [Medium: Success] - This moment - standing on a frozen balcony, smoking with a scarred cop feels significant. As if the universe has conspired to bring you both here, to witness each other's damage. Two people who've learned to function in a dysfunctional world.

Your motorcarriage-driver honks impatiently.

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "Same time tomorrow, Doctor?"

Sarcasm, maybe. Or invitation.

1. "If you're willing to climb those ten floors again. Or know a better place."
2. "We'll see what the duty roster shows."
3. "Probably, but maybe next time, something real."
4. "I hope not. No offense, but I prefer meeting people under less tragic circumstances."

YOU - "Probably, but maybe next time, something real."

You crushing cigarette under your boot.

THOUGHT CABINET - THE FROZEN SCREAM
In Revachol, even emergencies are counterfeits. People yell about dangers that don't exist while ignoring the real catastrophes happening quietly beside them. Your job isn't to save people - it's to sort real suffering from simulated distress, applying your limited resources to those few you might actually help. Perhaps this is Vicquemare's job too.

The driver honks again, more insistently. The city's perpetual motion machine of misery demands your attention.

You descend the stairs in hush, each step bringing you back to reality. Behind you, Lieutenant Jean Vicquemare follows, his footsteps echoing yours, maintaining a professional distance that somehow feels less distant than before.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Medium: Success] - You know what happens next. You've seen it before. Cigarettes first. Then the other addictions crawl out.

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "Welcome to Martinaise, Dr. Pathé. I'd say it gets better, but we both know that would be malpractice."

COMPOSURE [Medium: Success] - Another joke. Two in one day. You must be special.

LORAN - "Worth the climb?" he asks without interest.

YOU - "Always is."

As the engine sputters to life, you catch Vicquemare watching you from the building entrance, his expression unreadable. You raise a hand in farewell – a gesture somewhere between salute and surrender.

He nods once, then turns away, already moving toward his next call.

PERICARDIAL DREAD [Easy: Success] - You'll see him again. This city has too few servants and too much suffering for your paths not to cross. And when they do, you'll remember this moment.

The doll lies in the dirty snow, already being covered by fresh flakes. The old woman has vanished, perhaps to find a new crisis to champion. The universe has reset to its baseline of indifferent cruelty.

Tomorrow, it'll be something else. But today, it was him.

Chapter Text

You are Dr. Amber Pathé, and you're staring at what used to be a leg attached to what used to be a productive member of society.

The call came in as "pedestrian versus concrete" - Martinaise's euphemism for yet another drunk who forgot that gravity is a non-negotiable force, no matter the blood alcohol level. A neat way to catalogue casualties without admitting that most of them are suicides - slow-motion self-destruction, one bottle at a time.

PERCEPTION [Easy: Success] - The smell hits you first, a symphony of human degradation: pyrholidon sweat mixed with piss and something metallic that might be blood or might be the general atmospheric signature of systemic rot.

A man lying in the mouth of an alley between two buildings, next to a dumpster in a spreading puddle of his own making, fibula and tibia bone fragments glinting white through torn flesh like broken china through ground meat. The snow around him has achieved the color of cheap rosé, but there's not nearly as much blood as there should be for compound fractures of this magnitude.

But he's unconscious. Peaceful, even. No screaming, no thrashing - just the steady wheeze of a person whose nervous system has temporarily surrendered its struggle against the fundamental hostility of existence.

TRIAGE REFLEX [Medium: Success] - Open fractures, both bones, but surprisingly minimal blood loss. The drugs probably helped - acts as anesthetic and a poor man's hemostatic agent. Lucky bastard passed out before the pain could achieve the kind of intensity that kills people through sheer neurological overload. Salvageable with proper immobilization and rapid transport. Textbook case, really. You've done this a hundred times in a city that provides endless opportunities for practice.

You kneel beside him on pavement that's absorbed decades of bodily fluids and industrial runoff, pulling on gloves already stained from the previous call. The concrete beneath your knees is cold and damp, seeping through your uniform. Standard protocol: control the bleeding, manage the pain, immobilize the limb, prevent further damage, and get him to someone who can properly rebuild what gravity destroyed.

NOCICEPTIVE TOLERANCE [Easy: Success] - You've seen worse. Much worse. This is just bones and meat arranged in a temporarily inconvenient configuration. In Martinaise, traumatic injuries are so commonplace they barely register as noteworthy.

His eye stares at you - unblinking, unmoving, reflecting the gray sky like polished obsidian. For a moment, your heart stutters because living humans don't usually maintain such perfect, unwavering eye contact. Then you realize: prosthetic. Military surplus, probably, lost in some previous encounter with the unique brand of democratic violence, then replaced with whatever the veterans' administration could afford, which is to say almost nothing.

LOGIC [Medium: Success] - The prosthetic tells a story written in scar tissue and indifference. Military discharge - sent home with a plastic eye and a pension that wouldn't feed a rat. His clothes tell the rest: work boots with holes worn through the soles, pants that haven't been washed in weeks, the gray pallor of a veteran whose diet consists entirely of liquid calories. This is what happened when the docks mechanized and forgot to retrain the workers they discarded.

You reach for his ankle, need to immobilize the extremity before moving him. The bones are mobile, grinding against each other with sounds that would make normal people vomit their last meal. But you're not normal people.

YOU - "Easy. Just going to stabilize this for transport."

You murmur to the unconscious man, more for your own psychological comfort than his. Guidelines say to talk to them, even when they're out. Like you're anchoring them. Like you're anchoring yourself.

His eyes snap open. Not eyes - eye. The real one focuses on your uniform with the kind of primal terror usually reserved for natural disasters, while the prosthetic continues staring at nothing. The asymmetry creates a horrible visual discord - consciousness and void existing in the same face.

THE UNIFORM [Medium: Failure] - He sees your red stripe and the official badge. In his experience, uniforms mean violence. Police who move him along when he's not moving fast enough. Social workers who ask questions designed to prove he deserves his circumstances. Healthcare workers who patch him up just enough to die somewhere else, preferably off their paperwork. To him, you're not help. You're documentation. You're the person who'll write down how he ended up broken in an alley so someone else can file it under "acceptable losses."

BACKSTEP CYCLOPS - "No," he slurs, panic cutting through the chemical haze. His brain, marinated in years of institutional betrayal, interprets your presence as mortal danger. Fight or flight response overriding every rational thought in favor of pure, animal desperation. "No, no, no. Not the hospital. Not the fucking doctors..."

TRAUMA KINETICS [Hard: Failure] - You should have anticipated this. Should have seen the way his muscles tensed despite the chemical suppression, should have recognized the signs of a veteran whose relationship with clinical authority has been comprehensively destroyed by prior experience. Should have moved faster, been smarter, been better.

But you didn't.

He jerks upward with the desperate strength of cornered wildlife. His shattered leg comes up fast - a kick aimed at your face, powered by the kind of fear that overrides pain, logic, and self-preservation in favor of pure, undiluted terror.

You grab his ankle, clinical reflex overruling instinct self-preservation: protect the patient from further injury, even when the patient is trying to cave in your skull with their own broken bones.

PERCEPTION [Hard: Critical Success] - Time achieves the consistency of congealing blood. You feel the exact moment when damaged tissue reaches its structural limit. The soft pop of tendons surrendering their tensile strength, like rubber bands snapping under too much pressure. The wet tearing sound of skin that was never meant to stretch that far - like fabric being ripped by impatient hands.

The scent coats your sinuses like something parasitic. Copper, ammonia, and the sweet-sick scent of exposed bone marrow mixing with the general atmospheric malevolence of Martinaise in spring. Your mouth fills with saliva as your body prepares to vomit, but somehow you swallow it down.

COMPOSURE [Legendary: Failure] - You're holding a severed appendage. A complete extremity. Ankle and everything, still warm, still wearing a boot. And it's not attached to anything except your hands and the absolute certainty that this wasn't supposed to happen.

And you laugh.

It starts as a hiccup, a small sound that could be mistaken for shock or occupational composure finally achieving critical failure. But then it builds - a hysterical giggle that bubbles up from somewhere deep in your chest, somewhere that's been storing accumulated absurdity until the pressure became unbearable.

Because what else can you do? What's the appropriate emotional response to accidentally amputating someone's extremity during what should have been routine clinical stabilization? You're holding a stranger's detached limb like a grotesque souvenir, and laughing because if you don't laugh, you'll start screaming and never stop.

LORAN - "WHAT THE FUCK, PATHÉ?" Your driver's voice cuts through the surreal tableau like a chainsaw through silk. He's leaning out the motorcarriage window like a gargoyle awakened from administrative slumber. "WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK DID YOU DO?"

What did you do? You followed procedure. You tried to help. You did the checklist dance. You ticked every box. But Martinaise doesn't play by lists, and now you're holding proof that sometimes the universe just decides to shit on everyone involved.

The man looks down at his leg - at what remains of his leg - and his face cycles through emotions that would be comedic if they weren't so utterly tragic. Confusion. Recognition. Horror. Then the kind of calm acceptance that only comes with complete psychological shutdown.

BACKSTEP CYCLOPS - "Huh," he says, like he's just noticed it's raining rather than missing a significant portion of his locomotive apparatus. "That's not right."

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Medium: Success] - He's still too high to process pain. The severed nerve endings are sending signals, but they're being intercepted by enough pyrholidon to tranquilize a horse. He'll feel it later. He'll feel it for the rest of his life.

But right now, he's just staring at the place where his foot used to be with the detached interest of an observer watching someone else's emergency unfold.

You're still laughing. Can't seem to stop. The amputated appendage in your hands is still warm, still human, still attached to someone's hopes of walking to the liquor store under their own power.

TRAUMA KINETICS [Medium: Success] - Trained reflexes kick in through the hysteria, muscle memory overriding existential crisis. You wrap the severed limb in sterile gauze, then immediately move to apply a tourniquet to the stump.

YOU - "I need a bag. A biomedical waste bag. And ice."

Because that's what it is now. Biomedical waste. Not an extremity. Not part of a person. Just something that needs bagging, tagging, and never mentioning again.

VISUAL CALCULUS [Medium: Success] - You look around the alley. March snow, dirty and half-melted, but still cold enough to preserve tissue. You scoop up a handful, pack it into a plastic bag from your kit. Then you place the sealed bag containing the appendage into the snow - an improvised cryogenic chamber, like a macabre gift basket.

YOU - "We need to get you to the hospital."

BACKSTEP CYCLOPS - "Will there be doctors there?"

YOU - "Yes."

BACKSTEP CYCLOPS - "I don't like doctors."

YOU - "I noticed."

He considers this exchange with the philosophical detachment of individuals whose relationship with reality has been professionally mediated by alcohol and drugs for the better part of a decade.

BACKSTEP CYCLOPS - "Will they put it back?"

The optimism of the permanently fucked - believing that therapeutic science in Revachol can perform miracles with body parts that have been separated for more than five minutes in non-sterile conditions using equipment held together with hope and bureaucratic inertia.

YOU - "Maybe."

You lie, because hope is sometimes the only anesthetic you can offer to those whose pain tolerance has exceeded the limits of modern pharmacology.

THOUGHT CABINET - THE HIERARCHY OF HUMAN WASTE
In Martinaise, people are sorted into categories of usefulness like clinical supplies during a shortage. The employed, the unemployed, the unemployable, and the already-dead-but-still-breathing. Backstep Cyclops belongs to the last category - a veteran whose service earned him a plastic eye and a place in the discard pile when his labor was no longer profitable. His extremity will be incinerated as biomedical waste, just like his pension was incinerated as "budget restructuring." The only difference is the severed limb might be mourned.

You load the man into the motorcarriage, his amputated appendage riding shotgun in its bag of contaminated snow. He spends the journey asking if you've seen his other boot, apparently having forgotten that the relevant extremity is no longer available to provide it with purpose.

By the time you reach the hospital, you've stopped finding any of this funny.

But you're still not screaming, so you consider that a professional victory.

Chapter Text

You Lieutenant Jean Vicquemare, badge number LTN-6YTR, stand outside Martinaise General Hospital at 03:30 hours. The loading dock smells like disinfectant fighting a losing battle with institutional decay. Sodium lights flicker overhead, casting sickly yellow pools across concrete.

You are smoking the fifth cigarette of the last hour and wondering when exactly police duties became a form of performance art designed to test the limits of human endurance.

SPITE RESPONSE [Easy: Success] - Another twenty-four hour shift. Fourteen goddamn years on the force, and here you are, babysitting street corners again, because "restructuring" apparently means everyone does everything for half the fucking pay.

LES VOIX NON DITES [Medium: Success] - The Return promised change. They delivered the same hierarchical bullshit with different names and the same grinding machinery that turns human beings into statistical footnotes. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, except now they quote Kras Mazov while they fuck you over with revolutionary enthusiasm.

The heavy doors swing open behind you. Footsteps on concrete, the particular rhythm of someone who's spent too many hours on their feet, moving with the careful economy of energy that comes from knowing there's still hours of labor ahead.

Dr. Amber Pathé emerges into the night air. She pulls her jacket tight in the cold, looking like she's been personally wrestling death for the better part of the night and lost more rounds than she won. Which, knowing her luck and the general hostility of the universe toward decent intentions, she probably has.

PERCEPTION [Easy: Success] - She's had a shit day. Hell, she's had a shit week. It's written in the way she moves, the set of her shoulders, the careful control she's exercising over her facial expressions. Something went catastrophically wrong tonight. Something always goes fucking wrong.

She spots you but doesn't immediately approach. Just stands there for a time, probably debating whether human interaction is worth the energy expenditure.

AMBER PATHÉ - "What are you doing here?"

SUSPECT PSYCHOLOGY [Easy: Failure] - Loaded question. She's not asking about your physical presence - she's asking why a lieutenant is haunting hospital loading docks instead of doing whatever it is she thinks lieutenants are supposed to do.

YOU - "None of your fucking business."

You don't mean it. Not really. But the words come out automatically, defensive reflexes honed by years of citizens asking questions that lead to more duty and less sleep. A type of reflexive hostility that keeps conversations short and expectations low.

But she doesn't flinch. Just nods like she expected exactly that level of warmth and interpersonal skill from you.

AMBER PATHÉ - "Charming as always." She pulls out a cigarette with movements that suggest she's trying to quit but failing. "Remind me, officer, why are you doing patrol duty?"

COPAGANDA [Medium: Success] - She knows exactly what she's asking. Knows that rank doesn't mean shit when the new regime decides it needs warm bodies on the street instead of experience in command positions.

YOU - "Same reason you're doing the job of a cleaner, a doctor, and a coroner. All at once. For half of one."

AMBER PATHÉ - "Ah, right. Revolution demands sacrifices. Especially if it's someone else doing the overtime." Her tone takes on a poisonous sweetness. "I was hoping The Return might be slightly less sadistic toward their own in the RCM."

LES VOIX NON DITES [Medium: Success] - The dead cops whisper warnings in your ear. The ones who asked too many fucking questions about the new order. The ones who couldn't adapt fast enough to revolutionary restructuring. Their ghosts cluster around conversations like this, reminding you that loyalty is measured in compliance, not competence. Keep your mouth shut or join them.

YOU - "Excuse me? You're sounding like one of those inva-communists - sitting around pointing fingers: 'Wrong uprising! Wrong proletariat!' Are you sure you're not employed by the Coalition?"

Your speech drops to the register used when deciding whether someone needs arrest or just a warning. Hearing it makes you hate how easily it comes out - like someone else's words, trained into your throat.

INTERROGATION LEXICON [Easy: Success] - Push back. Make her defensive. Force her to articulate a concrete ideological position rather than defaulting to generalized criticism. Standard goddamn technique for dealing with political dissidents and concerned citizens who ask uncomfortable questions.

AMBER PATHÉ - "I'm for those who don't pretend smallpox just came and went by itself. I don't give a shit whose flag hangs over headquarters - if humans are still dying quietly underneath it."

Her posture doesn't change. Doesn't flinch from the implied threat in your tone. She keeps her speech level, professional - the tone doctors use when delivering bad news to people who don't want to hear it.

SUSPECT PSYCHOLOGY [Medium: Success] - But the question hits a fucking nerve. Politics is personal when it's written in scar tissue and dead siblings. Your own face itches where the wounds healed worst, each one a reminder of how the "selective vaccination policy" played out.

You both carry the evidence of the Coalition's failures. The difference is you've chosen to believe that The Return can do better. She's chosen to believe that power structures exist to wear people down, no matter the banner overhead.

YOU - "Maybe you're just tired. Change doesn't happen overnight. Revolutions take time."

Even as you say it, the words taste like bureaucratic bullshit - the sort of thing people say when they need to believe their suffering serves a purpose.

AMBER PATHÉ - "Citizens don't live long enough to see the next five-year plan."

The statement hangs between you like an accusation. Simple. Factual. Devastating.

COPAGANDA [Hard: Failure] - You should defend The Return. Should explain why sometimes you have to break things to fix them, why the ends justify the fucking means. But standing here, looking at someone who spends her nights putting people back together, the arguments feel hollow.

She laughs suddenly - not from humor, but the sort of sound people make when they realize they're arguing ideology at 3 AM while standing ankle-deep in its consequences. The laugh is tired, bitter, and strangely beautiful in its honesty.

AMBER PATHÉ - "Don't touch the whores and the artists. They labor under any government."

You gesture at her with your cigarette.

YOU - "Yeah. And emergency services."

THOUGHT CABINET - THE SERVANT CLASS
You and Dr. Pathé are part of Revachol's permanent infrastructure - not the poor, not the unemployed, but the people who keep civilization running regardless of who's in charge. Cops and doctors, the ones who show up when everything goes to shit and clean up the mess left by citizens who never get their hands dirty. You serve the apparatus not because you believe in it, but because someone has to.

The silence that follows feels different from the hostile quiet that usually exists between RCM and REM. This is the quiet of two people who've arrived at the same conclusion from different directions.

The wind picks up, carrying industrial chemicals and the sweet smell of waste incinerators. Your cigarette gutters in the breeze.

She steps closer, near enough to share the shelter of the loading dock's overhang. Just following the basic human instinct to gather near other sources of light in the darkness. Within range to see the small lines around her eyes that come from squinting at medical charts in bad light.

YOU - "Want a light?"

You offer your lighter without thinking. The gesture is automatic - a type of small courtesy that survives even when larger social contracts have broken down.

She leans in as you strike the flame. Your free hand comes up instinctively, shielding the flame from the wind that wants to steal even this small comfort. She's inside your space now, near enough that you can smell her hair - an essence clean and faintly medicinal, like she uses hospital soap for everything but it can't quite mask the scent that's uniquely hers.

The cigarette catches, but neither of you pulls away immediately. There's an energy here - not romantic exactly, but the strange intimacy of collapse. Two people who've stripped away the political rhetoric and found a deeper truth underneath: the simple need for temporary shelter in each other's proximity.

You settle at the brick wall, and she follows your lead. The concrete is cold, but her proximity makes it bearable. Your shoulders almost touch - near enough to exchange body heat, distant enough to maintain plausible deniability.

The sodium lights flicker in their eternal struggle with darkness. Somewhere in the distance, a siren wails - another emergency, another crisis requiring someone to show up and pretend they know how to fix things.

AMBER PATHÉ - "God, I'm exhausted." The admission slips out like a confession. "Everything went wrong today. Everything I touched turned to shit."

SUSPECT PSYCHOLOGY [Easy: Success] - She's not just talking about medical emergencies. Something deeper. Professional failure. Personal fucking failure. The kind that follows you home and sits on your chest while you try to sleep.

YOU - "Want to talk about it?"

She considers this. You watch her weigh the question, watch her mind process whether she trusts you enough to actually answer. She's calculating risk.

WIG THEATRE [Medium: Success] - She wants to tell you. Wants to let someone else carry the weight for a few fucking minutes. But she's learned not to trust that impulse. Too many times burned by opening up to the wrong person, letting vulnerability become ammunition.

Her head tilts back at the wall. The internal debate is still happening - you can see it in the small furrows between her eyebrows, the way her lips occasionally part like she's rehearsing words she might not say.

PERCEPTION [Hard: Success] - But fatigue is winning the argument. She's on the edge of shutting down completely. Her eyes keep closing for longer intervals. When did she last sleep? How many goddamn shifts has she endured this week?

Whatever she was going to tell you - or not tell you - gets swallowed by the basic biological need for rest. The decision gets made by her nervous system instead of her conscious mind.

Her head tilts slightly, coming to rest on the wall. Then, gradually, settling on your shoulder. The movement is so slow, so careful, like she's testing whether you'll push her away or use her vulnerability later.

COMPOSURE [Medium: Success] - You don't move. Don't comment. Don't do anything that might wake her or force her to acknowledge what's happening. Sometimes the kindest act you can perform for someone is pretend not to notice their weakness.

You just breathe, and in the quiet: you notice the way one lock of her hair curls against her cheek. You never noticed before that she had dimples when her mouth is relaxed.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Easy: Success] - You can feel her pulse through the thin fabric of her uniform. Steady, a little fast - the rhythm of someone running on stimulants and determination. Her breath is warm through the gap in your collar, contact that hasn't felt deliberate human touch in longer than you care to calculate.

There's an intoxication about this. The weight of her head on your shoulder, the warmth of her body close to yours. She's warm where you're cold, solid where you're unraveling. The contrast is... grounding. Not quite attraction. Just the awareness of another human being, closer than expected.

UNIFORM KINSHIP [Easy: Success] - This is what partnership really means. Not the formal arrangements written in duty rosters and department protocols, but the simple recognition that you're both carrying the same weight. That neither of you has to carry it alone.

LES VOIX NON DITES [Medium: Success] - This instant can't last. Nothing good lasts in Martinaise. Soon there will be another call, another crisis, another emergency that requires both of you to put on your professional masks and pretend the institution you serve isn't slowly killing you. But for now, there's this: shared heat in the cold, collective weariness in the darkness, and the simple animal comfort of not being alone.

It's enough. For now, it's enough.

Chapter Text

You are Dr. Amber Pathé, and you're resting against Lieutenant Jean Vicquemare's shoulder. The weight of exhaustion presses down like a familiar blanket. You're not quite asleep, not quite awake - suspended in that liminal space where consciousness drifts like smoke, where the boundaries between memory and the present blur into something soft and forgiving.

PERICARDIAL DREAD [Easy: Failure] - For once, the whisper of catastrophic anticipation is quiet. No warnings about inevitable disappointment, no predictions of how this moment will be weaponized against you later. Just... silence. Peaceful, unprecedented silence.

His coat smells like cigarettes, dampness, and something indefinably masculine - not cologne, just the particular scent of a man who works nights and thinks too much. The wool is rough against your cheek, worn soft in places from years of service.

NOCICEPTIVE TOLERANCE [Easy: Success] - Your neck should hurt from this angle. Your spine should be protesting the concrete wall behind you. Instead, there's just warmth.

His breathing changes - deeper, more measured. Not sleep, but something close. The kind of rest that comes when you finally stop expecting the next crisis to announce itself through radio static or breaking glass.

When did either of you last sleep without pharmaceutical assistance? When did either of you last trust another person enough to close your eyes in their presence?

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Medium: Success] - This is dangerous territory. Physical comfort leads to emotional attachment, and emotional attachment leads to the kind of chemical dependency that has nothing to do with pills. You're developing tolerance to his proximity - needing more contact to achieve the same level of... what? Safety? Warmth?

COMPOSURE [Medium: Failure] - Don't think about how his hand moved slightly when you settled against him. Don't think about how he could have shifted away but didn't. Don't think about—

Your consciousness begins to fragment, memories surfacing unbidden from the chemical soup of near-sleep. This morning feels like years ago, but the sensory details remain sharp: frost on pavement, the sound of hooves on concrete.

Time moves differently in Revachol - minutes stretch into hours, hours collapse into seconds, and sometimes a single instant can derail your entire understanding of your own psychological stability.

You'd been walking past the apartment building, heading to meet Loran for another shift, when you saw him there. Lieutenant Jean Vicquemare, standing beside his horse in the pale morning light, performing what should have been a routine interaction between an officer and his transportation.

Should have been routine.

Wasn't.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Legendary: Failure] - Oh. Oh no. Here it comes. The neurochemical cascade that turned you into a malfunctioning human being for approximately seventeen minutes of your adult life.

Your brain, in its infinite wisdom, decides this is the perfect time to replay every humiliating second of your complete psychological meltdown.

And suddenly you're there again, standing on frost-covered concrete, watching Jean Vicquemare destroy your ability to form coherent sentences with two simple words that apparently bypass your prefrontal cortex entirely and speak directly to evolutionary programming.

He stroking the horse's neck with movements that are entirely too gentle for someone whose default emotional register is controlled hostility. The animal leans into his touch.

He has no idea you're there. The Lieutenant you're seeing exists only when unobserved. Like a quantum phenomenon that changes under scrutiny.

NEUROMANTICISM [Hard: Success] - This is what tenderness looks like when it has nowhere else to go. All that carefully suppressed capacity for care, redirected toward the one living thing that won't judge him for it. The horse doesn't know about his failures, his compromises, his slowly crystallizing cynicism. It just knows his touch is steady and his voice is kind.

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "That's my good girl," his fingers trace the leather straps of the bridle, adjusting them with practiced precision. "Is this too tight? Let me fix that for you."

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Legendary: Critical Success] - HOLY MOTHER OF CHEMICAL REACTIONS! YOUR NEURONS ARE EXPLODING! Quick! Make it funny! Make it ridiculous! MUCH SAFER TO BE CRAZY!

GOOD GIRL! That VOICE! It's like his vocal cords just performed a striptease directly into your brainstem! Your dopamine receptors are doing the MACARENA! Your serotonin just signed a LEASE in your limbic system! This is WEAPONS-GRADE MASCULINE VELVET being deployed directly against your reproductive system!

VOLITION [Hard: Failure] - I... I got nothing. You're on your own. Good luck with... whatever this is.

TRIAGE REFLEX [Medium: Success] - You have LEGENDARY resistance to psychoactive compounds! You tested your limits with everything - ketamine when the migraines got too unbearable, that cocktail of pyrholidon and speeds during the meningitis outbreak - and you maintained professional composure throughout! This is documented medical fact! You are a walking, talking pharmaceutical FORTRESS! Your neurotransmitters don't just surrender to random auditory stimuli like some kind of amateur!

Actually, wait. When did anyone last check if you were comfortable? When did anyone last adjust anything for your benefit? When did—

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Hard: Success] - DON'T. Don't think about why you want someone to call you good! Your prefrontal cortex has left the building! THERE IS NO RATIONAL THOUGHT LEFT IN THIS SKULL!

You want to BE his wild little filly! His untamed mare. His FAITHFUL STEED. You want Jean's fingers adjusting YOUR straps! Too tight? Too loose? THE MAN UNDERSTANDS THE IMPORTANCE OF PROPER RESTRAINT TENSION!

LOGIC [Medium: Failure] - Your synapses are malfunctioning: this is just occupational stress. Classic burnout symptoms. You've been working double shifts, seeing too much trauma, your system is just misfiring because you're emotionally exhausted. That's all this is. You are having an inappropriate response to authority figures because you've been conditioned to associate competence with safety.

You never trust anyone in this city. Not patients, not colleagues, not the system, so obviously your brain chemistry is just confused about why it wants to trust HIM completely!

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Hard: Success] - EXCEPT IT'S A LIE, and your hypothalamus is LAUGHING! You want to nuzzle his shoulder and have him speak to YOU in that butter-melting, knee-weakening, underwear-evaporating tone! You want to be called "good girl" while being fed sugar cubes from those capable, terrifying, MAGNIFICENT hands. And that wanting is going to destroy you like it always does but WHO CARES RIGHT NOW—

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "Can I help you with something?"

ADRENAL SURGE [Easy: Success] - OH FUCK HE'S LOOKING AT YOU!

But he says it in that flat, professional tone and the disappointment hits—

like realizing you were never going to get the gentle call anyway.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Medium: Success] - NOOOOO! BRING BACK THE VOICE! What must YOU DO to hear it again? Should you neigh? SHOULD YOU ACTUALLY NEIGH? Should you toss your mane? Stomp your hooves? It might work!

COMPOSURE [Hard: Failure] - STOP IT! Say something normal! ANYTHING NORMAL! Ask about the weather! Ask about work! Don't mention straps or sugar or being good!

Your mouth opens. Your brain short-circuits. WHAT COMES OUT IS:

YOU - "I... horse... you... good..."

PERICARDIAL DREAD [Medium: Success] - Congratulations, Pathé! You've just achieved LINGUISTIC APOCALYPSE! Your vocabulary regressed to approximately eighteen months of age! Years of medical training, three languages, two degrees - and you just communicated like a concussed toddler who learned words from veterinary textbooks! You might as well have just made horse noises. It would have been actually less humiliating.

Jean's eyebrows rise slightly - the most expression you've ever seen on his face. For a second, you think he might actually smile, but then his cop mask slides back into place. He's trying to determine if you're mocking him, if you're unstable, or if there's some other official reason you're here.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Medium: Success] - Tell him you're VERY RESPONSIVE TO FIRM DIRECTION!

The horse chooses this moment to turn her massive head in your direction, ears twitching. You take an involuntary step back. Her gaze meets yours - steady, intelligent, almost judgmental. As if she knows exactly what kind of thoughts you've been having about her rider.

ADRENAL SURGE [Medium: Success] - RUN. RUN NOW.

YOU - "I should go. Patients. Dying. Elsewhere. Goodbye."

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "Yes," he says slowly, suspicion not diminished. "You probably should."

He turns back to the horse, dismissing you with polite indifference.

PERICARDIAL DREAD [Easy: Success] - This is what you do. This is what you always do. Get too close, want too much, then run before they can leave first.

You turn and walk away with as much dignity as you can muster, which is approximately none. But at least you're leaving on your own terms. Before he could decide you're too much, too needy, too broken to fix.

Your eyes snap open in the hospital loading dock darkness, heart hammering against your ribs like it's trying to evacuate your chest cavity. The memory burns through your nervous system with renewed intensity, every synapse firing in perfect, mortifying clarity.

COMPOSURE [Legendary: Failure] - You just had the most comprehensive mental meltdown in recent medical history while unconsciously snuggling a police lieutenant who probably thinks you communicate exclusively through grunts and medical terminology.

You remain perfectly still, hoping that if you don't move, maybe the universe will forget this entire interaction ever occurred. Maybe time will reverse. Maybe you'll spontaneously combust and spare yourself the need to ever make eye contact again.

His breathing hasn't changed. Still steady, still deep. Maybe he's actually asleep. Maybe he didn't notice your sudden transformation into a human-shaped heat source.

PERCEPTION [Easy: Success] - His fingers twitch slightly against his cigarette pack. Not asleep. Just... waiting.

COMPASSION [Easy: Success] - He let you rest. Didn't move, didn't speak, didn't make you explain why you needed this borrowed warmth. Just... allowed it. In a city where kindness is rationed like morphine, he gave you this without negotiation. He could have woken you. Could have made some excuse about needing to leave. Instead, he's been staying here, letting you rest, protecting this brief sanctuary of peace.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Easy: Success] - When you get home, you're writing "Mrs. Vicquemare" in your diary at least fifty times. With hearts. SO MANY HEARTS.

LOGIC [Medium: Success] - You don't have a diary.

A smile tugs at the corner of your mouth - the first genuine expression of amusement you've felt in weeks. Maybe it's the exhaustion. Maybe it's the proximity to someone who smells like safety disguised as danger. Maybe it's just the chemical afterglow of remembering a moment when your professional composure achieved total systemic failure.

VOLITION [Medium: Failure] - You should say something. Apologize. Explain. Make some attempt to restore measured dignity to this situation.

SHIVERS [Easy: Success] - Enjoy it while it lasts. In a few hours, you'll remember why isolation is safer than this. But right now, just... breathe. Let yourself have this moment before you destroy it.

You continue lying there wondering if horses actually have better communication skills than you do.

Chapter Text

You've smelled this before. Long before you reach the second floor, you know exactly what's waiting.

VISUAL CALCULUS [Medium: Success] - Apartment 2B. Building manager unlocked the entryway, mumbled something about "official business," and disappeared down the stairs to avoid any personal responsibility for what happens next. You slide your boot into the narrow gap and press, not a kick, just enough weight to make the frame surrender.

PERCEPTION [Easy: Success] - The threshold gives, and the stench becomes a physical presence. The place is a slaughterhouse left to ferment in summer air. But the heat is wrong for April - dense, stale, humid like a forgotten crawlspace. The rot lashes out: sugar turned sick, ammonia, and a coppery tang like someone dissolved a battery in piss.

You are Lieutenant Jean Vicquemare, and you're staring at what used to be somebody's neighbor, somebody's son, somebody's problem that got filed under "not my fucking jurisdiction" until the smell made it everybody's problem.

What used to be a man lies crumpled between a radiator and a coffee table, head pressed against the hot iron ribs of the radiator at an angle that suggests he fell and never got up. The heat has accelerated decomposition, creating a tableau that belongs in a medical textbook chapter titled "Why You Should Check On Your Neighbors."

HARDENED COP [Hard: Success] - You've developed immunity to most sensory assaults. Chemical fires, rotting remains, the collective body odor of Precinct 41's holding cells. But this... this requires conscious fucking effort not to gag.

You hear footsteps on the stairs - measured, practiced. Dr. Pathé appears in the doorway, trauma bag in hand, and stops dead when it reaches her - sudden, thick, unmistakable.

AMBER PATHÉ - "God. How long, you think?"

YOU - "Probably a week. Hard to tell, considering he was lying next to the heater."

She pulls on gloves, and her expression shifts into that clinical mask you've seen her wear before - detachment as armor against the biological reality of death. But you notice the way she positions herself to avoid breathing directly over the corpse.

AMBER PATHÉ - "I need about ten minutes for examination. Can you...?"

She gestures vaguely at the scene - the unspoken request for you to determine whether this is natural or something requiring investigation. Division of labor based on whose expertise applies to which type of human failure. You turn away to give her space and start your own examination.

DATABASE [Easy: Success] - Single male, mid-fifties, living on disability payments and whatever odd jobs the docks still offer. The apartment is city housing - state-approved misery for those who can't afford private misery.

The end doesn't erase the trail - it just makes it harder to follow.

URBAN SEMIOTICS [Easy: Success] - Everything here tells a story of systematic isolation. Mail piled just inside the entrance, unopened. Curtains drawn tight. Empty bottles arranged like soldiers on the kitchen counter - not the chaos of active alcoholism, but the methodical drinking of someone marking time until the end.

You search for identification, financial documents, anything that might suggest motive if this turns out to be murder. But the more you see, the more it looks like a man who simply ran out of reasons to keep going.

AMBER PATHÉ - "No visible signs of violent trauma," she says, carefully maneuvering the head away from the heating element. "But I need to perform a full external examination."

PERCEPTION [Medium: Success] - The sound that follows is wet, tearing - like adhesive being pulled slowly from skin. The movement releases another wave of decay. Amber trying to be gentle with what used to be a man, now half-fused to the heater after days of exposure and decomposition.

You continue searching the room, looking for anything that might complicate the narrative of simple despair. Letters, photographs, evidence of human connection that might suggest someone cared enough to kill him.

SUSPECT PSYCHOLOGY [Easy: Success] - No mystery here. Just another casualty of Revachol's ongoing war against its own citizens. Death by attrition. Death by neglect. Death by the slow strangulation of giving up.

YOU - "So, doctor, whose body is it? Yours or mine?"

The question comes out harder than you intended. You meant to ask about paperwork, about who files what reports, about the bureaucracy in Martinaise that handles what comes after. But the words carry more weight than that.

LES VOIX NON DITES [Medium: Success] - Officially, you're asking whether this is a criminal matter or a medical one. Unofficially, you're both thinking the same thing: Who will find your body? Who will care that you're gone? Who will miss you enough to check when you don't show up for work?

This could be you. In ten years, twenty years, when the job finally breaks what's left of your capacity for giving a shit. When you become truly incorrigible - beyond reform, beyond saving, beyond caring. Alone in a subsidized apartment, drinking your way toward a corner where the radiator will cook your corpse while neighbors complain about the smell.

AMBER PATHÉ - "Mine," she strips off her latex gloves with that particular snap that medical professionals perfect after their first hundred bodies. "Natural causes."

VISUAL CALCULUS [Hard: Success] - She's imagining herself in his place. Calculating how long it would take for someone to miss her. How many days she could lie dead behind a locked door before someone complained about the noise she wasn't making.

SUSPECT PSYCHOLOGY [Easy: Success] - Dr. Pathé lives the same way you do. No wedding ring, no tan line where one might have been. No "we" in her vocabulary. The transfer to Martinaise wasn't career advancement - it was tactical withdrawal. She cut those connections herself, deliberately. The way people do when they're trying to disappear from their own lives. You recognize the technique because you perfected it years ago.

AMBER PATHÉ - "I can handle the rest. Transport, paperwork. You don't need to stay."

SPITE RESPONSE [Medium: Success] - But you hesitate. Not from official duty - there's nothing left here requiring police attention. The corpses don't resist arrest. The deceased won't be pressing charges. Your jurisdiction ends where biology takes over, and biology has been in charge here for a fucking week.

COPAGANDA [Medium: Failure] - Nothing more for police presence here. No crime to investigate, no suspects to interrogate, no order to impose on chaos. Just Revachol doing what it does best - killing people quietly and leaving a mess for others to clean up.

You should leave her to do her job, file your report, move on to the next emergency. But yet you remain planted in this doorway, watching her commune with the remains. A fragility you've never seen before, carefully hidden behind clinical competence.

AMBER PATHÉ - "Lieutenant."

She looks up from the body, catches you watching. For a moment, neither of you moves. Just two people standing over evidence of how it ends, breathing air thick with decomposition while the flies circle overhead like tiny funeral attendants. The remains between you a third participant - silent, patient, instructive.

AMBER PATHÉ - "Are you... would you like to get a drink? After shift?" Her voice is careful, controlled. "I don't want to go back to my apartment tonight. Alone, I mean. After this."

INTERROGATION LEXICON [Medium: Failure] - She's not propositioning you. This isn't about bodies finding warmth. This is about consciousness needing confirmation that it exists, that someone would notice its absence. She's asking you to be her proof of existence. Nothing more. Nothing less. Everything.

The timing is perfect and terrible. You were about to make the same offer, but her saying it first changes everything. Makes it her need instead of mutual convenience. Makes you responsible for her psychological well-being instead of just sharing the burden.

VOLITION [Medium: Success] - Say yes. Don't overthink this shit. Don't analyze why she asked or what it means or how it will inevitably go wrong. Just say yes to the possibility of not drinking by yourself tonight. Don't just stand there like another corpse waiting to happen.

YOU - "Yeah. Yes. Fuck. I mean yes."

COPAGANDA [Hard: Failure] - Smooth. Really commanding presence there, Lieutenant. Way to project authority and confidence. She's definitely impressed by your eloquent fucking acceptance of her invitation.

But she actually smiles - small, tired, but real. The kind of smile that acknowledges shared damage without trying to pretend it's something else.

A recognition passes between you both - an acknowledgment that tonight, both of you are desperate to avoid empty apartments where the silence sounds too much like the prelude to what you just witnessed.

YOU - "Whirling-in-Rags."

INTERROGATION LEXICON [Easy: Success] - You state it as fact, not invitation. Removes the possibility of refusal, creates expectation. Standard technique for getting compliance. Except you're not interrogating her. You're terrified she'll change her mind.

AMBER PATHÉ - "My shift ends at eleven."

YOU - "Mine at midnight."

VOLITION [Hard: Success] - Leave now. Before you say anything that ruins this. Before you start explaining why you chose that bar, or what you expect, or how you promise not to make it weird. Just fucking leave.

You leave her there with the corpse, both of them quiet in their different ways. You pause in the threshold, one hand on the frame, watching her. Her movements are careful, respectful even - treating him with more dignity than most people show the living in this district.

VISUAL CALCULUS [Medium: Success] - She'll spend the next thirty minutes by herself with a decomposing body, filling out forms that reduce human tragedy to bureaucratic categories. "Natural causes." "No next of kin." "Dispose through city services." Each checkbox another barrier between her and the reality that this could be her someday.

INTERROGATION LEXICON [Hard: Failure] - The words don't come. Whatever you might say - "Call if you need anything," "Lock the door behind me," "See you tonight" - gets trapped somewhere between your brain and your throat. Protocol and awkwardness forming an impermeable wall to basic human communication.

UNIFORM KINSHIP [Easy: Success] - She understands. Doesn't look up from her work, doesn't expect conversation. Emergency services develop their own language of silence - the ability to communicate support through absence of interference. You leaving means you trust her competence. You staying would mean you don't.

You step back into the hallway, letting it swing closed behind you, but not quite latch. Standard practice - leave easy access for medical personnel, but provide some block against curious neighbors who think decomposition smells like opportunity for entertainment.

LES VOIX NON DITES [Hard: Success] - A voice from the floor joins the others: I was someone's son once. Someone's lover. Someone cared enough to give me a name. But caring doesn't stop the radiator from burning through your flesh when you fall and can't get up.

In the hallway, the reek clings to you for three flights of stairs - sweet rot and the ghost of trapped heat. Outside, the April air is cold, clean, a relief after the apartment's concentrated decay. You light a cigarette, the first drag burns cleaner than the stench still clinging to your clothes. By the time you reach the street corner, you're already calculating whether you have time to shower.

THOUGHT CABINET - THE APPOINTMENT WITH OBLIVION
Tonight you'll sit across from Dr. Pathé in the Whirling-in-Rags, sharing alcohol and the kind of quiet two people know after seeing what happens when Revachol stops caring about its citizens. You'll drink to the memory of a man whose name you never learned, whose death means nothing to anyone except the woman who'll sign his certificate. And for a few hours, you won't have to carry that knowledge alone.

Tonight, you're off duty. You're just a man waiting for a woman who knows how to be gentle with the dead.

Chapter Text

You are Dr. Amber Pathé, and you move alone in the center space for thirty-seven minutes. Arms carve through smoke-heavy air. Hips catch onto something off-tempo, disobedient.

Your boots click against the checkered tiles in patterns that create their own syncopation. This dance isn't about harmony.

Light catches on fragments as you turn - damp cheekbones, parted lips, red-rimmed eyes staring through nothing. Your white shirt clings to your torso with sweat. Your dark hair sticks to your neck. You're a woman in her thirties, performing a public exorcism.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Easy: Success] - The bass thrums through your vertebrae, a low-voltage hum in your bones, but you know you're not dancing to the music. You're moving to the rhythm of synapses firing, of blood pumping against arterial walls, of a nervous system trying to discharge days of accumulated tension that has nowhere else to go.

The bar patrons give you space. Not because they're polite, but because something in your energy suggests you might bite if cornered. You're not dancing for anyone. You're dancing against something - against the image of yourself as a corpse, against the certainty that you'll die alone.

ADRENAL SURGE [Medium: Success] - The momentum builds - not graceful, not erotic, but necessary. Like vomiting, like crying, like any other involuntary bodily function expelling toxins.

Your arms reach toward the bulb swinging overhead, a false sun in this glass-concrete cave.

NEUROMANTICISM [Easy: Success] - You are here for the same reason as everyone else: to forget what daylight showed you. But where they drown their memories in alcohol, you shake yours loose through motion.

DARK CORNER - "Fucking junkie."

VOLITION [Medium: Success] - Don't turn toward the voice. Let them think what they want. You know what kind of addict you are. You're hooked on movement, on anything that keeps you from standing still. Standing still means thinking, and thinking means remembering the sound of skin peeling away from radiator metal and the weight of a man's head in your hands.

PERCEPTION [Medium: Success] - You don't see him enter. You notice the pause - too many heads stilled at once. Even the smoke seems to change direction.

You turn. He's there.

His coat is unfastened, shoulders slumped slightly, as if whatever held him upright earlier in the evening has let go. His collar is crooked, his eyes taking half a second too long to land on anything. Something about him still carries the smell of elsewhere - not a place, but a mood.

He sees you. Stops. His expression cycles through something unreadable - not surprise exactly, but a recalculation. He expected to find you drinking alone at a table, not moving through space like you were trying to outrun your own outline.

COORDINATION [Hard: Failure] - Your foot catches on nothing. The pace, already unstable, slips. You don't fall, but the illusion of control evaporates, graceless and loud. The kind of moment that draws eyes.

NOCICEPTIVE TOLERANCE [Medium: Failure] - The embarrassment punches through you. Heat floods your face, your chest locks up. It's the specific agony of being seen at the exact moment you became a spectacle. The stillness that follows feels wrong. All the motion you've generated now traps itself inside you, circling, unresolved. Your body surges with the instinct to run.

PRECISION [Medium: Success] - You walk toward the bar, each step deliberately careful, but your body maintains the rhythm internally. Micro-movements. Fingers tapping against your thigh. Shoulders shifting. The tension refuses to fully release.

You take the stool beside him. Not one stool away - that would be petty. Right beside him, close enough that you almost brush against the fabric of his coat. Close enough to matter.

COMPASSION [Medium: Success] - You won't mention the time. Won't ask why. Won't give him the satisfaction of knowing you counted minutes. You're not that woman. You're the woman who dances alone.

But the space between you carries its own weight - thirty-seven minutes, now compressed into six inches of bar wood.

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "Started without me."

Not an apology. An observation. His voice carries that particular gravel that comes from cigarettes and exhaustion.

YOU - "You too."

BEDSIDE MANNER [Medium: Success] - You can hear it in his breathing - shallow, controlled. He's measuring each inhale, trying not to reek of the three drinks he downed before working up the courage to come here. He's nervous. You're not the only one falling apart.

He orders whiskey. You're drinking gin. The bartender pours without commentary, used to serving the city's emergency workers their prescribed doses of forgetting.

VISUAL CALCULUS [Easy: Success] - You both sit in silence for a full minute, watching for the tells. The way he rotates his glass exactly three times before each sip. The way you touch your collarbone when you swallow. Small rituals of self-soothing that you're pretending the other doesn't notice.

YOU - "I was calculating. Earlier. In the apartment."

The words escape before you can stop them. Not appropriate bar conversation. Not appropriate any conversation. But the alcohol and the dancing and his presence have disrupted your filters.

He tilts his head slightly. Listening.

YOU - "How long before the smell would reach the hallway. Through the door gaps. Maybe five days in winter. Three in summer. Then another two before someone complained. Another day before someone checked."

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "Eight days total."

YOU - "You've done the math too."

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "Different variables. Corner apartment. More exterior walls, better ventilation. Could buy me an extra three days."

PERCEPTION [Medium: Success] - His hand rests on the table, digits drumming in an irregular pattern. His breathing is controlled but not quite steady. He's watching you process this information, waiting to see if you'll run.

SHIVERS [Legendary: Success] - The city whispers through the concrete, through the cigarette smoke, through the space between your bodies: He thinks about this when he loads his service weapon. When he stands on high balconies. When he counts his sleeping pills. Not every day, but enough days that it's become familiar. A contingency plan he keeps updated.

This isn't morbid curiosity or professional fascination. This is active planning. He's not just calculating - he's preparing.

The same way you've mapped the carotid arteries in your bathroom mirror - not your wrists, never the wrists, that's what amateurs choose - but the place where one cut is enough to flood the sink before you can change your mind.

PERICARDIAL DREAD [Medium: Success] - Whatever's pulling him down - it mirrors your own weight. Different angle, but you know where it leads.

COMPASSION [Hard: Success] - And somehow that makes him safer than anyone else. He won't judge your darkness because his is deeper. Won't try to save you because he can't save himself. Freedom lives in mutual damnation.

YOU - "You've thought about it."

Not a question.

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "Haven't you?"

The honesty is brutal. No dancing around it, no euphemisms. Just the blunt fact: you've both drafted blueprints for your own termination.

YOU - "Not recently."

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "Define recently."

YOU - "This week."

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Legendary: Success] - The way he leans forward slightly when you say it. Drawn to your damage, as if recognizing the same frequency of self-destruction makes you suddenly, violently fuckable.

He actually laughs - short, sharp, like a cough.

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "That's practically mental health."

TRIAGE REFLEX [Easy: Success] - Your body suddenly aware of its own functioning. Heart pumping. Lungs expanding. Blood circulating. You're both still here.

You realize you've been staring at his hands. The way tendons shift under skin when he holds the glass. Scars across his knuckles - old, white, probably from punching things that shouldn't be punched. You want his grip on you - to learn if they're rough or careful, what specific bruises they leave.

NEUROMANTICISM [Medium: Success] - Nothing sacred here. Just the pivot from Thanatos to Eros: the oldest binary. When the mind rehearses endings, the body demands continuations.

COMPOSURE [Medium: Failure] - You don't look up. Can't. Not yet. But you know he's watching. Waiting. The careful surveillance of someone who's learned to track threats and desires with equal precision.

The silence stretches. Your thigh accidentally brushes his when you shift on the stool. Neither of you moves away.

ADRENAL SURGE [Hard: Failure] - That small contact sends a jolt through you. Hunger coils between your legs, tense and aching. From a clothed thigh pressing yours. Pathetic. Exposed. So fucking alive it hurts.

You finally meet his eyes. He's been waiting for that.

SHIVERS [Medium: Success] - The air between you feels volatile, combustible. That moment when everything is still potential energy, waiting for the smallest trigger to set it off.

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "Kiss me."

THE UNIFORM [Medium: Failure] - It's not a question. It's not even really a request. It's delivered in the same tone he might use to say "Stop resisting" - that register of authority that bypasses thought and hits straight at the spine.

COMPASSION [Hard: Success] - He's given you cover. Made it his idea, his command. If this goes wrong, you were just following orders. If it ruins everything, blame obedience. Tomorrow you can say: "He told me to." Tonight you can stop making decisions.

He understands what you need: to not be responsible for this mistake. To be absolved of choosing damage. He's taking that weight, adding it to whatever he already carries. This is its own kind of tenderness.

Your body responds like it's been waiting for someone to take the decision away from you.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Medium: Success] - Every nerve ending suddenly online. Your skin feels too tight, too hot. Your mouth floods with saliva. Your thighs clench involuntarily. This isn't romance - this is pure biological imperative mixed with the intoxicating relief of submission. Let him author this catastrophe. Let him be the reason everything falls apart.

You lean across the space between stools. He meets you halfway.

The kiss is nothing you'd imagined. It isn't gentle, isn't tentative. His grip finds the back of your neck, holding you in place while his mouth opens yours. You taste whiskey, cigarettes, and desperation beneath. You seize his coat, dragging him closer.

NOCICEPTIVE TOLERANCE [Hard: Success] - He bites your lower lip, not quite hard enough to draw blood but close. The pain is clarifying. Real. Present. Everything that the corpse in the apartment wasn't.

Someone whistles. Someone else tells them to fuck off. You don't care. You're kissing a cop in a bar and it's the first time in months you've felt anything besides fatigue.

He pulls back first, but still too close. Just enough to watch what it's doing to you. His breath brushes your cheek. His fingers stay at the base of your skull - firm, unyielding. He's keeping you exactly where he left you.

VISUAL CALCULUS [Medium: Success] - You're panting. His hand hasn't moved. During the kiss, that grip dictated everything: the angle, the depth, whether you could pull away. You couldn't. You didn't want to.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Legendary: Success] - You want that again. Not softness - control. You want to be held until you disappear into it. The blur, the pressure, the sweet edge of being held too long. To come with your body begging for air, panic collapsing straight into ecstasy.

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "Don't stop thinking about it."

Your mouth goes dry. You were silent. Still. But something in your face must've betrayed it.

YOU - "I wasn't-"

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "I know exactly what you want it to be."

PERICARDIAL DREAD [Hard: Failure] - He doesn't. Couldn't. But the certainty in his voice makes you believe him. Makes you believe he knows everything - where you sleep, how you touch yourself, what you think about when your thighs open and your fingers hunt for release.

COMPOSURE [Medium: Failure] - You're completely transparent to him. He sees through your clinical detachment, straight to the raw hunger.

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "Do you want me to come home with you?"

PLACEBO VOICE [Medium: Success] - Not "your place or mine." He's asking specifically if you want him in your space. In your bed. Where you can't run because you're already home.

SOMATIC THEATER [Easy: Success] - You see it suddenly, clearly - tomorrow morning. The awkward dressing in silence. The careful distance at the next emergency call. How he'll look through you like you're just another medic. How you'll pretend this never happened while your body remembers everything.

COMPOSURE [Medium: Success] - Eight months since the last time you tried closeness and misread the terms. Since then, you've avoided ambiguity.

VOLITION [Legendary: Failure] - Say no. Say you're tired. Say anything except-

YOU - "Yes."

You nod. Quick, almost frantic, a broken doll jerk. If you don't agree immediately, the moment will pass and you'll both retreat to your separate lonelinesses.

YOU - "Yes, I want you to come with me."

LOGIC [Easy: Success] - This is a terrible idea. Fucking a cop who calculates his own decomposition timeline. You're both walking trauma responses. This will end badly. You know this. He knows this.

NOCICEPTIVE TOLERANCE [Hard: Success] - You know this will hurt. Not physically - though that too, probably. But the kind of hurt that comes from using another person as medication for loneliness. The kind that leaves you emptier than before. You don't care.

COMPASSION [Medium: Success] - You see yourself reflected in his eyes - hollow, exhausted, so fucking empty it feels terminal. This won't fix anything. Won't save either of you.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Easy: Success] - But the anticipation is almost unbearable. You're already imagining it - his hands in your hair, his weight pinning you down, the specific oblivion that comes from letting someone else's need consume yours. You want to be devoured.

Your breathing syncs with his. Not intentionally. Bodies do this when they're preparing for the same actions.

He throws money on the bar. You grab your jacket. No discussion of what this means, what happens tomorrow, what you're really doing. Just two people fleeing the scene before common sense catches up.

No. Not another night inside your own skull.

Chapter Text

You lie alone in bed. The sunlight through your grimy window has that particular quality of morning-after illumination - too bright, too real, exposing everything you did in the dark. Your sheets smell like cigarettes and sex and someone else's sweat. The coffee jar on your nightstand holds proof that last night was real: a sediment of butts, his Astras mixed with your Drouins.

TRAUMA KINETICS [Easy: Success] - Your wrists ache. Faint bruises forming where he held them. Your inner thighs burn, the specific ache between your legs. There's a mark on your shoulder that throbs when you move - teeth marks, perfectly dental-record clear. Clinical assessment: no serious damage. Reality: you can still feel him.

You need to make sense of this. Process it clinically. Compartmentalize it. Your standard method: facts first, then analysis, then filing it away where it can't hurt you.

COMPOSURE [Legendary: Failure] - But your hands shake as you light a cigarette, and you realize the usual method won't work. This won't reduce to data points. This won't fit in any file.

You kissed him. Tongue touched lips, then scar tissue. Uneven texture. Tasted smoke and salt with metallic aftertaste. You tried to say something. Opened mouth. Closed it. Words never came. His hands on your neck. Pressure firm, not painful. Skin warm, slightly damp. Eye contact held throughout.

You vocalized. Attempted to muffle sound against bedding. He redirected your head. Said three words.

He on top, you below. Deep penetration. Movements slow, then faster. Rhythm unstable. Rising temperature. Sweat pooled at points of contact. Maximum contact. Arms around back. Legs around hips. Simultaneous climax. Then - stillness. His weight beside you. Breathing synchronized.

You didn't pull away. He didn't let go.

SOMATIC THEATER [Hard: Failure] - No. That's not what happened. That's what you're telling yourself happened. Clean. Manageable.

NEUROMANTICISM [Medium: Success] - You're doing it again. Turning experience into autopsy. But some things resist clinical description. What really happened was this:

You kissed him the way only this place teaches. Desperate, consuming, like a starving cur gnawing at life. You swallowed the nicotine on his lips, traced the plague-scarred skin, and tasted old iron blood laced with a hunger you didn't know was yours. A dog's kiss. For a dog's world.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Medium: Success] - You wanted to disappear into the friction, the repetition, the mechanical rhythm of bodies. Not passion - anesthesia. To fuck until your mind finally shut off, until you became just nerve endings and response, no thoughts, no self, no tomorrow.

You wanted to tell him something, anything, but his hand closed around your neck. Not choking. Just present. A reminder that he controlled the oxygen, the pace, whether you would be allowed release, everything. Your throat tightened, and everything that could've become words died there.

When he entered you, it wasn't intimacy - it was a head-on collision of two carcasses. His sweat mixed with yours - the pheromone stink of animals in heat, an amniotic broth in which you were reborn as a pair of mutts bound in a mating tie, fused by musk and fever, held prisoner by the crude physics of desire.

NOCICEPTIVE TOLERANCE [Medium: Failure] - It hurt. He was too big, you weren't ready, but you didn't tell him to stop. The pain was perfect - sharp enough to keep you present but intense enough to erase thought entirely. That burning stretch that would ache for days. Your body wanted that damage. Wanted evidence. Wanted to wake up tomorrow and feel exactly where he'd been.

The noises coming out of you were too raw, too feverish, too close to rutting. You turned your face into the pillow, bit down on fabric, trying to transform those sounds into something less pathetic than what they were: a lonely woman letting a drunk cop split her open because this was better than nothing.

His hand caught you, fingers digging into the soft spots, and forced your head back toward him. Made you look at him while you fell apart. Made you let him hear every broken moan, every whimper you couldn't swallow.

Three words. "Don't hide from—"

No. Four words.

"Don't hide from me."

The most terrifying thing anyone's ever said while inside you.

You wanted to disappear into your own bed, to merge with the mattress, to dissolve into a kind of invisibility that might let you survive it. But you were at home. Nowhere to run. He had invaded the last safe space - and you were the one who had held the door open for him.

ADRENAL SURGE [Medium: Success] - You came against your will. Not from his touch but from being trapped - in his grip, in your body, in this moment you couldn't escape. An orgasm like a panic attack, leaving you gasping and furious that he'd forced you to feel it.

Every movement tried to go deeper, closer - as if you were trying to turn each other inside out, to reach the vulnerable, the primal. An attempt to merge into one being that could survive in a world hostile to separate individuals.

PERICARDIAL DREAD [Medium: Success] - This is how he does it. How he manages the weight of the badge, the city, the ghosts. He finds someone hungry enough to let him do this. Someone who won't matter tomorrow. Except you'll see him again. Except this wasn't supposed to be you. And that's what makes it unbearable.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Legendary: Success] - And for a moment - just one moment - it worked. You weren't two damaged people fucking in a shitty apartment. No jean, no amber. You were one organism, breathing in unison, nervous systems synchronized, boundaries dissolved. Thrust, clench, breathe, repeat. It was the closest to peace you've felt in months.

The finale came like rabies in its final stage - convulsions, foam, an encephalitic fire that made the nervous system devour its own circuits from within. But you didn't die. You just lay there, two beasts spent and tangled, panting in the same rhythm, tangled in the mess made of you both.

He didn't pull away. You didn't let go.

Because you knew that returning to your own husks would be terribly painful.

PERCEPTION [Medium: Success] - Afterwards, nothing. No words, no follow-up. Just two bodies in post-coital decline, respiratory cycles aligned, the mattress saturated with sweat and mixed secretions. He drifted into somnolence almost instantly - alcohol and exhaustion tipping him over. You stayed awake, monitoring his unconscious respiration, registering each exhalation, while seminal fluid was leaking slowly from you, warm, undeniable, a reminder of what had just occurred.

PLACEBO VOICE [Easy: Success] - Sometime in the night, you tried to get up - to piss, to get some air, to escape his furnace heat. His arm locked around your ribs, slack with unconscious strength. "No," he muttered. Not a request. An order. You stopped struggling. It was easier than fighting someone who keeps fighting in his dreams.

You settled back against him. His chest to your back, respiration matched to yours, even while he slept. Your place, but somehow you were the guest. He knew exactly where you needed to be - right there, caught between his frame and the wall, with nowhere to run.

SHIVERS [Medium: Success] - He left at dawn without waking you. You know because the absence woke you - that specific emptiness of a bed that was full five minutes ago. But something stayed behind. Not just smell or stains. A frequency. Like he's still here in the negative space, in the dent his body left in your mattress. Not romantic - worse. A contamination. Your apartment feels wrong now, like a crime scene you have to keep living in. Like he's broken something structural that you'll never fix.

THOUGHT CABINET - THE DOG'S KISS
Dogs lick wounds obsessively - not to heal, but because the repetitive motion soothes something deeper than the injury. Last night you kissed him like that. Trying to lose yourself in the mechanics of mouths and tongues. But he tasted too specific, too real. Instead of disappearing, you became more present than ever.

TRIAGE REFLEX [Hard: Failure] - You should get tested. Should take emergency contraception. Should do a hundred things that responsible adults do after unsafe sex with virtual strangers.

Shower. Wash the sheets. Erase the evidence.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Medium: Success] - Instead, you're already wet thinking about him filling you up again. About that perfect pain of being stretched past capacity. Your fingers drift between your legs, finding yourself still swollen, still open. Still shaped like him.

VOLITION [Medium: Failure] - You light another cigarette. One of his Astras from the pack he left. They taste like his mouth did at 2 AM.

The exact flavor of your own spectacular mistake. You'll taste it for days. Like a dog returning to its own vomit.

Chapter Text

You haven't slept properly in years. Even when you do, your dreams are only simulations of insomnia - slow-motion nights where you lie awake inside your own head. So when she moves, you register it instantly.

Some primitive surveillance system left intact, tracking the absence of warmth beside you, the shift of weight on the mattress, the specific silence where breath used to be.

You are Lieutenant Jean Vicquemare, and you're pretending to sleep while Dr. Amber Pathé pretends she's not here.

SUSPECT PSYCHOLOGY [Medium: Success] - The water runs in the bathroom. Soft, careful. She's trying not to wake you - the ultimate insult, really. Like you're someone who needs protecting from the awkwardness of morning-after conversation, someone too fragile to handle a little post-coital discomfort.

Your apartment reeks of sex and cigarettes. The sheets are damp with sweat and other fluids. Your cock is half-hard, that persistent throb of incomplete satisfaction. Persistent, stupid, not understanding that she's already gone even though her body's still here.

DATABASE [Easy: Success] - Second night together. First was three days ago at her place - pure drink-disaster. She asked for this. Yesterday, you were processing the crime scene, suddenly she was beside you, speaking low enough that her driver couldn't hear: "Your place tonight?" Not a question. A statement. You nodded. That was the entire negotiation.

Tonight was supposed to be different. Your territory. Your rules.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Medium: Success] - You fucked her from behind the whole night not for novelty, not for distance, but because it was the only position that let you watch the slow, reluctant stretch of her body as it adjusted to you inch by inch.

COMPOSURE [Medium: Success] - You're too big. That's not bravado, not locker-room delusion, just what you know from every time her thighs tensed and her breath went sharp when you pressed in too deep, again, again, and then again, all the way until you bottomed out and stayed there, deliberately, letting her feel it, the full length, the full weight, the unavoidable fact of you inside her - unyielding, unmerciful, too much - the pressure of your cock up against the soft wall at the end of her, pushing, testing, daring her cervix to make room, to forgive the intrusion, to remember your shape.

INTERROGATION LEXICON [Easy: Success] - You told her she was a good girl for taking all of you - not softly, not lovingly, but with that flat, cold cadence you've perfected, that tone of functional command, the one that makes her hips push back even as her body shakes, the one that seems to short-circuit her self-control, like approval was a drug and she was starving for dosage, and you gave it to her, only when she earned it, only when she was holding so much of you inside that she couldn't breathe properly anymore.

You came deep, not by mistake, not in the heat of it, but deliberately, on purpose, the way you meant to, because you wanted it: not a burst but a flood, a pressure pouring into her with the kind of dense intensity that leaves behind heat, disorder, and the unmistakable shape of claim.

VISUAL CALCULUS [Medium: Success] - And when you pulled out, slow, careful, your cock still pulsing with leftover need, you watched your cum start to leak down the inside of her thighs almost immediately, thick and slow and obscene.

SHIVERS [Legendary: Success] - Indefatigable. Insistent. Steady. It slid from her with the resolve of a living thing born of that same sense of purpose you'd felt inside yourself, a thing that had plans, a thing that refused to disappear quietly. And you couldn't stand the sight.

You watched it trail, then without asking, without speaking, pressed two fingers to her skin and gathered it - residual heat, residual slick, and something that still belonged to you. You pushed it back inside, unhurried, knuckles deep. A postscript to the fuck. A reminder to her body that it wasn't done receiving. That you weren't done giving.

SPITE RESPONSE [Easy: Success] - But now she's washing you off like you're contamination. A stain to be scrubbed away before she returns to her real life. Your territory means nothing to someone who's already planned their escape route.

You reach down, grip yourself. Match your strokes to the sound of water. This is what you have - the rhythm of her erasure, the sound of her trying to reclaim her body from yours.

WIG THEATRE [Medium: Failure] - Pathetic performance. You've become the cliché: the cop who mistakes trauma bonding for intimacy. The cop who can only fuck what tries to leave him. Who gets off on the sound of someone washing him away, into rusted city plumbing, carried off with the rest of Revachol night's waste.

But at least you're aware of the theater. At least you know you're playing the fool. But your hand keeps moving. Because this - your fist, your cock, your rhythm - this you control. Not her. Not what she does. Not whether she stays. Denial, set to motion.

The water stops. The bathroom drawer opens. She's looking for mouthwash, probably. You don't have any. You hear her give up, turn the tap back on, rinsing with water. Pretending it changes anything.

SPITE RESPONSE [Medium: Success] - She needs to scour you from her mouth. The thought makes you grip yourself harder, stroke faster. As if you could fuck your own hand hard enough to make her feel it in the next room.

She's trying to be quiet, but she doesn't know your apartment yet - which boards creak, which doors stick. First time navigating your space in daylight. Last time too, probably. She's moving through the rooms now, collecting clothing one piece at a time: underwear from the kitchen floor, her shirt from wherever you threw it, reconstructing her armor in reverse.

Searching for her keys in the living room, they slipped behind the couch last night, when you were both pretending to be Functional Adults Having Casual Sex. But the script never fit. Neither of you knows how to be casual about anything.

Each sound she makes becomes part of this: her leaving, you coming, the perfect closed circuit of your intimacy. Your hand speeds up. Might as well salvage something from this wreckage.

INTIMIDATED INTO COMPLIANCE [Hard: Failure] - You could make her stay. Use your weight, your authority, the fact that this is your apartment. But forcing someone to stay is just delayed abandonment. You learned that from your ex. From every woman who's ever shared your bed more than once.

The front entry opens. Pause. Is she reconsidering?

PERCEPTION [Easy: Success] - She stops. You feel her looking at you. Five seconds. Ten. Fifteen. What does she see? A Lieutenant Hardass? A mistake? A repeat prescription? A man she's already decided to leave? Or she's making sure she has everything. Leaving nothing behind.

INTERROGATION LEXICON [Medium: Failure] - If she cared, she'd say your name. The silence is her answer. You're already nothing to her. Another body she used to remember what bodies are for.

You keep your breathing steady, your eyes closed. Your hand still on your cock under the covers. Playing dead while she plays at leaving. You're close now. Let her look. Let her think she's the one with secrets.

The door closes. Soft. Considerate to the end.

You finish immediately. Violent. Graceless. Spurting across your stomach while the echo of her exit refuses to fade. The orgasm brings no relief and no blessed mental silence, just a different kind of emptiness.

VISUAL CALCULUS [Easy: Success] - The semen cools on your skin. From body temperature to room temperature to shame temperature. This is what you've become - a man who comes to the sound of doors closing.

You lie there, cock softening in your hand, cum drying on your stomach, staring at water stains on the ceiling that look like maps to places where people don't fuck strangers and then pretend it meant nothing.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Medium: Failure] - Sexual activity releases oxytocin. The "bonding hormone." Each orgasm strengthens neural pathways associated with attachment. You're literally fucking yourself into caring about her. It did mean nothing. Chemical reaction. Biological programming to ensure the species continues. Sure. Nothing more.

Finally, you get up. Walk to the bathroom that lingers with her scent - your soap on her skin, creating some third scent that belongs to neither of you.

The mirror is fogged except where she wiped a circle to see herself. Her handprint remains visible in the condensation. You stare at it, the whorl of her fingerprints, the spread of her palm.

TACTICAL RESPONSE [Easy: Success] - In the drain: dark strands wound around the grate. Her hair, long and wet, forming perfect spirals where the water disappeared. You reach for it automatically. Clean the evidence. Standard procedure. Your fingers almost touch the wet strands.

VOLITION [Legendary: Success] - Stop! Don't touch it. Leave it there.

COMPOSURE [Hard: Failure] - This isn't anything serious. Laziness, maybe. The slow onset of post-orgasmic depression. You're just… standing there. Naked, studying the way her hair forms perfect spirals around the drain.

Everything she is. Beautiful, temporary, already circling toward disappearance.

Chapter Text

DISPATCHER - "Unit 22. Hanging. Male, approximately forty. No pulse confirmed by building supervisor."

TRIAGE REFLEX [Easy: Success] - Hanging means you're not going to save anyone today. You're going to cut down a body, fill out forms, and pretend this is medicine instead of municipal corpse collection.

That's not a call. That's a eulogy.

PERICARDIAL DREAD [Medium: Success] - The particular dread rises in your chest like bile. Not just another body. A hanging body. Your least favorite kind of emergency. The universe's perfect trap, designed specifically for people stupid enough to choose medicine as a profession.

Third floor. Your legs burn. The stairwell echoes with your footsteps - hollow, rhythmic, like a metronome counting down to revelation.

SHIVERS [Hard: Success] - Something shifts in your consciousness. A door opening in the temporal lobe. You know what's coming before you see it - the way trauma victims know the shape of their nightmares before they fully wake.

You were four years old.

Sodium lights flicker overhead. Dirty stairwell. Cold tile. A leather belt stretched between railing and neck. Body swaying, gently, in some forgotten air current. Left foot bare. Right one half in a shoe.

You saw it. You stood there.

ENCYCLOPEDIA [Easy: Success] - The hippocampus, a seahorse-shaped structure, consolidates information from short-term memory to long-term memory. In early childhood, it's still developing - like wet cement. Until a heavy enough footprint leaves an indelible mark. Pain is a brilliant archivist. It preserves everything with perfect, devastating clarity.

NEUROMANTICISM [Legendary: Success] - Congratulations! You have formed your first autobiographical memory. A human being now exists where before there were only fragments - sensory impressions without narrative structure.

A witness.

Welcome to the world, Amber Pathé.

It wasn't waiting for you to be ready.

PERICARDIAL DREAD [Medium: Success] - You learned something that day about the hierarchy of human value. Some deaths matter. Some don't. Some inspire sympathy. Others inspire only contempt for the weakness they represent. Your amygdala learned to associate self-destruction with disgust before you learned multiplication tables.

You ran home. Told your father. Watched him put on his coat, walk to the landing, look up at the swaying form.

FATHER - "What attention-seeking asshole." He paused, squinted at the body for a moment more, then muttered without looking at you: "He tied the knot. Let him swing."

COMPASSION [Legendary: Failure] - You understand him now. A dock worker, twelve-hour shifts, two kids to feed, and the neighbor decides his problems are worth making a public display. Your father saw theatrical suicide as a luxury - the privilege of those who had enough energy left to choreograph their endings.

He wasn't wrong. In Revachol, most people die quietly - from overwork, underfeeding, or the slow poison of giving up. Public suicide is indeed a performance. An expensive one.

But understanding doesn't erase the neural pathway.

ADRENAL SURGE [Medium: Success] - Your breathing is controlled but your heart rate has increased. Not from the physical exertion. From the perfect parallel: another hanging body, another stairwell, another moment when someone's final choice becomes yours.

VOLITION [Medium: Failure] - You've thought about it yourself. More than once. Standing on your bathroom scale, calculating the tensile strength of the shower rod. Researching drop distances and cervical vertebrae fracture points.

But then the voice echoes.

FATHER - "What attention-seeking asshole."

SPITE RESPONSE [Easy: Success] - You won't give him the satisfaction. Won't prove his theory about the weak and the selfish. If you're going to die, it'll be from exhaustion or one of the other slow deaths that emergency workers earn through service. Not from a moment of theatrical self-pity. You don't want to be someone's burden.

NOCICEPTIVE TOLERANCE [Medium: Failure] - The memory doesn't hurt anymore. It's been processed, filed, neutralized through repetition and professional distance. What hurts is the understanding it created: that pain, no matter how unbearable, is still fundamentally selfish when it requires other people to clean up after.

Years later, in someone else's bed, a strap hanging over a chair catches your eye and you lose the moment entirely. No one notices. You're good at hiding it. You learned early. The arousal dies instantly, replaced by the image of feet and your father's casual cruelty. You fake the rest. Men never notice the difference between authentic response and muscle memory.

SHIVERS [Easy: Success] - You never really left that stairwell. You're still on the third floor, watching a man swing slowly.

As if showing you how.

COMPOSURE [Easy: Success] - Fifth floor. The door to 5B is already open. You step through, no knock, no announcement, only the weight of your gear slung over one shoulder, and the professional mask. Not to protect you, just to make it look like you know what you're doing. And if you wear it long enough, maybe someone else will believe it.

Maybe even you.

PERCEPTION [Easy: Success] - The apartment is wrong. Empty. No uniforms. No low conversation of people who've seen this before. Just the smell of stale air and the sound of something creaking rhythmically overhead.

Building supervisor reported the hanging, then disappeared. Standard for Martinaise: call it in, then vanish before you have to deal with consequences. Let the emergency services clean up reality while civilians maintain plausible deniability.

You're first on scene. No second opinion. Just you. And a man who's already decided.

Male, mid-thirties. Leather belt around the neck, buckle cutting into flesh. Chair kicked over, lying on its side three feet away. The body turns slowly in the stale air - clockwise, then counter-clockwise, like a broken compass seeking magnetic north.

NEUROMANTICISM [Medium: Success] - Here it is. The paradox. The man in the rope is both murderer and victim. He tied the knot, he tightened it, he cut off his own air. Killer and corpse in one neat package. A crime scene with only one suspect - and the suspect is already dead.

But the equation never stays that clean. Sometimes another pair of hands did the job - a shove, a slipknot, a body staged for convenience. And now your decision matters twice.

Cut down and you, might, save a life. Or you've just destroyed the evidence that would prove murder, making yourself an accomplice after the fact.

THE UNIFORM [Medium: Failure] - There is no right choice. There never is. The set-up guarantees that whatever you do will be wrong in someone's retrospect. This is why you hate these calls more than any others. No scene makes you feel this helpless.

You stand frozen, staring at the slow rotation. Clockwise. Counter-clockwise. Like he's asking you a question you can't answer.

VOLITION [Hard: Failure] - Someone else should decide this. Someone with more experience. Someone who knows the right answer. This is too big for you. Too permanent. Too wrong either way.

TRIAGE REFLEX [Medium: Success] - Stop! Recent. Very recent. No rigor mortis. There's still moisture around the mouth. There might still be time.

LOGIC [Medium: Success] - You're thinking in circles. Literally watching him spin while you spin through the same thoughts. Protocol versus mercy. Law versus medicine. Victim versus perpetrator.

REVACHOL - Do you stop him? Do you pry his hands off fate and shove life back down his throat?

The question isn't practical - it's moral, procedural, and poisonous all at once. But you always choose to stop them. You become the thief of final act - you pull someone back from the thing they let themselves into.

Because that's what professionals do.

Even when they're hanging by their own threads.

PRECISION [Medium: Success] - Support the body. You wrap your left arm around his torso, pulling him against you to take the weight off his neck. His body is heavier than expected. Completely limp.

The smell hits you - not death yet, but the prelude. Stale sweat, fear pheromones, the metallic tang of oxygen deprivation. His hair tickles your cheek as his head lolls against your shoulder.

His skin is still warm against yours. His chest presses against your ribs with each labored breath. You can feel his heart beating irregularly against your sternum.

PERICARDIAL DREAD [Hard: Success] - You're embracing a dying man. This is obscene. This intimacy, with a stranger's death wish. You're literally embracing someone's final decision, trying to undo it with scissors and stubbornness.

ENDURANCE [Hard: Success] - The angle is wrong. You need both hands - one to support his weight, one to work the trauma shears. But physics doesn't care about it. You're not strong enough to hold a full-grown man with one arm while cutting through leather.

So you do it anyway.

The strap is thick. Your hand shakes from the strain as the steel blades catch and drag - each cut an act of will, not strength. His full weight settles against you as the leather parts, fiber by fiber, slow as surrender.

NOCICEPTIVE TOLERANCE [Medium: Success] - Your left arm screams in protest. Your shoulder joint grinding under the strain. But you hold on, keep cutting, because letting go means letting him hang and you've already made your choice.

The belt finally parts.

You both crash to the floor - him unconscious, you cushioning his fall with your own body. The impact drives air from your lungs, but you're already moving, already assessing.

MONITORSPEAK [Hard: Success] - Weak, thready pulse. Agonal respirations - irregular, gasping, almost useless for oxygen exchange. Airway trauma consistent with partial strangulation: severe laryngeal edema, distorted landmarks. Cervical spine instability probable. Hypoxic encephalopathy already progressing, damage compounding with every second. Intubation required. One attempt - maybe two. The tissue is swollen, the window narrowing fast.

PERCEPTION [Medium: Failure] - Your heart actually lifts when you hear the footsteps. Finally. Measured cadence, carrying the existential weight of too many difficult decisions. You can almost smell the cigarette smoke that precedes him.

EMERGENCY BOND [Easy: Success] - He'll take charge of the scene without being asked. Will start asking the right questions - "Who found him? When? Why did the building supervisor disappear?" - while you focus on medical intervention.

Perfect professional choreography. You handle the body, he handles everything else. Division of labor that feels like partnership.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Easy: Success] - You're already anticipating that rough authority - the way he transforms chaos into manageable problems. The way he'll stand close enough that you'll feel his body heat while you work.

COP - "What happened here?"

ADRENAL SURGE [Hard: Failure] - The voice hits you like ice water. Wrong pitch, wrong cadence, wrong everything. Your hands falter on the laryngoscope for just a second - long enough to realize how desperately you'd been counting on hearing someone else.

PERICARDIAL DREAD [Legendary: Failure] - You're preparing the endotracheal tube, but part of your consciousness is still tracking the absence. Like something vital has been torn out of your chest. You were so ready for Jean's presence that this absence and disappointment feels physical.

COORDINATION [Medium: Success] - You position the blade, slide it toward vocal cords barely visible through the swelling. The tissue is fighting you, rejecting the intrusion like the body remembers its owner's last decision.

Jean understands this particular hell. He's made enough life-or-death decisions to know they're all wrong somehow.

PRECISION [Hard: Success] - The tube slides home. Perfect placement despite the anatomical chaos. You inflate the cuff, connect the bag, squeeze. The chest rises symmetrically. Air moving where it should be moving.

But you don't feel triumph. Just the hollow satisfaction of technical competence applied to moral ambiguity.

PLACEBO VOICE [Hard: Failure] - You don't hate them. You hate what they make you do: choose between your human judgment and your professional oath. And the oath always wins.

SHIVERS [Easy: Success] - You miss the way Jean filled emergency scenes - not just with authority, but with comprehension. He made you feel competent. No, essential. Like your knowledge mattered beyond just keeping Revachol's citizens breathing long enough to become someone else's problem.

You miss his scent signature at crime scenes - leather, cigarettes, and that harsh institutional soap from RCM locker rooms. How it would cut through the smell of death and antiseptic, anchoring you to something alive and familiar.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Legendary: Success] - Those nights you'd end up pressed against his chest - that wasn't trauma bonding. That wasn't professional stress relief. That was you learning the rhythm of his heartbeat, memorizing it like vital signs you might need to remember later if you ever had to restart him.

You weren't waiting for backup, protocol, or medical support. You were waiting for Jean. Specifically Jean. The way he turns doubt into action just by existing in the room.

And that —

That's not something you're ready to need.

THOUGHT CABINET - THE ENGRAM
An engram is a hypothetical means by which memory traces are stored as biophysical or biochemical changes in the brain. You've just created a new one: the weight of a dying man, the sound of the wrong footsteps on the stairs, the exact moment you realized you were desperately waiting for someone who wasn't coming. This memory will replay itself in unexpected moments - in crowded rooms when someone brushes against your shoulder, during quiet nights when you hear boots on concrete, whenever you have to make impossible choices alone.

COP - "What should I do here?"

You look up at him for the first time. Young face, nervous posture, barely old enough to shave. He's asking you for guidance, looking to your credentials, assuming they come with certainty.

VOLITION [Hard: Success] - But you do know. Not because you're certain about the moral calculus of cutting down hanging bodies. But because someone has to make the decision. Someone has to carry the weight.

You are Dr. Amber Pathé. And no one else is coming.

So you decide. Because someone has to.

Chapter Text

You wake three seconds before the water starts running. Not coincidence - your nervous system has learned her patterns. The precise moment she extracts herself from bed, the twelve steps to your bathroom, the specific creak of floorboards under her weight, the careful way she moves when she thinks you're sleeping.

Five nights. That's already four more than you expected.

You are Lieutenant Jean Vicquemare, and there's a woman in your apartment who hasn't left yet.

PERCEPTION [Easy: Success] - 05:47. She's always awake before six. Never sets an alarm. Some internal mechanism calibrated by years of emergency shifts, pulling her into consciousness with the efficiency of a defibrillator.

Through the open bathroom door, you can see her. Her reflection is sharp in the mirror: she's examining her body where you left marks, touching them with a detached air. Finger-shaped bruises bloom on her hips - some fading yellow, some fresh purple-black from last night, when she asked you to be less careful. The dark necklace around her throat, the territory your hands claimed most often.

HARDENED COP [Medium: Success] - You shouldn't feel this primitive satisfaction at seeing your touch marked on her skin. But you do. Proof that it happened. That for a few hours, someone wanted you enough to carry your fingerprints away with her.

VISUAL CALCULUS [Legendary: Success] - First time you're seeing her like this - fully naked in daylight, without the forgiving shadows of the bedroom.

She's smaller than you realized. Not just shorter, but thinner. The uniform conceals how sharp her shoulder blades are, how her ribs press against skin that isn't pale so much as gray.

Her hair is dull, lifeless. The hollows beneath her cheekbones speak of work powered by cigarettes, adrenaline, and chronic stress. Sleep is a rare commodity, food little more than an afterthought.

She isn't beautiful. Revachol doesn't leave beauty intact - it leeches the color from it, grinds it down, until what's left is only endurance. But there's something about the arrangement of her exhaustion, the way she carries her damage, that makes sense to you.

UNIFORM KINSHIP [Medium: Success] - She understands that emergency work changes you at the cellular level. That you can't just switch off the hypervigilance, the constant expectation of worst-case scenarios. She simply accepts that you're a man who needs control and gives it to you without making it complicated.

HARDENED COP [Easy: Success] - She doesn't ask you to talk about the bad calls. Doesn't suggest therapy or meditation. Doesn't comment on the scars, the way your hands shake sometimes after difficult arrests. Most women want to excavate your damage, understand it, fix it. Amber just works around it like terrain she's learned to navigate.

The only person who doesn't require you to perform being less broken than you are.

SUSPECT PSYCHOLOGY [Hard: Success] - When she touches you, it's not to heal you or change you. Just acknowledgment that you exist. That your skin is warm. That someone notices you're still breathing. She asks nothing in return.

This terrifies you more than gunfire. Kindness without agenda. Touch without transaction. How do you repay someone who wants nothing?

VOLITION [Medium: Success] - Get up. Don't let her slip away again like water through your fingers. Every morning it's the same ritual - watching her dress in silence, feigning sleep while she feigns indifference. You can't stand another one.

You sit up, shoulder protesting from sleeping wrong, from her weight against it half the night. She falls asleep with her head on your chest now, and it doesn't come easily - you've learned this. She twitches in her sleep like a dog jolted by half-formed memories, mumbles things that don't reach language.

You never wake her. You just wait, steady, until she settles. Her weight against you, not from lust is too rare, too hard-earned to disturb.

She notices you in the mirror but doesn't turn, doesn't cover herself. Just continues her inspection, tracing the archipelago of marks across her hips, her thighs like she's writing her own medical report.

YOU - "See something interesting?"

AMBER PATHÉ - "Bruises. Lots of them. You've been thorough."

No accusation in her tone. No complaint. Just observation.

DATABASE [Easy: Success] - You know what this is. Classic defensive behavior. Compartmentalization. The careful distance. The deliberate amnesia. You can name it, break it down to parts - but it still fucking hurts to be treated like you're disposable.

Amber gives you her body but never her mornings. Lets you mark her skin but not her time. She offers crumbs, you starve for meals - they don't satisfy, they make you desperate for more. The absence when she leaves keeps getting louder.

Your feet hit the cold floor. Seven steps to the bathroom. Each one deliberate, measured - the way you approach crime scenes. She doesn't acknowledge your movement, but her shoulders tense slightly. She knows you're coming.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Medium: Success] - You could join her. Press her against the sink, fuck her while you both watch in the mirror. She'd let you. She always lets you. Says yes to everything except staying for breakfast.

You stop in the doorway first, watching. Then move behind her, hands finding the porcelain, caging her in. Your reflection appears behind hers - stone-faced, cold. The expression you use for suspects who think they're smarter than you. She watches you in the mirror but doesn't turn.

Your bodies - a study in contrasts - you're broader, taller, scarred from a different fight. She's breakable, precise, carved from necessity rather than strength. You understand why she needs to pretend she's made of steel.

TRIGGER FINGER ITCH [Easy: Success] - Your knee finds the space between her thighs, not quite forcing them apart but making your intentions clear. Standard positioning for a body search. She knows what this is.

TACTICAL RESPONSE [Medium: Success] - This is what you need from her. Not submission exactly, but acknowledgment of your competence. She trusts your judgment enough to let you take control, and that trust makes you feel human again - capable when everything else makes you feel broken.

PERCEPTION [Medium: Success] - You breathe in scent without thinking. Automatic assessment - checking for foreign scents, other men's cologne, unfamiliar soap. Nothing. Just her skin and your lingering marks.

But the instinct disturbs you. When did you start checking her? When did her smallest gestures become something you replay obsessively?

AMBER PATHÉ - "What do you want?"

SPITE RESPONSE [Easy: Success] - What do you want? The same thing she gives you every night and takes away every morning. Recognition that you exist beyond your utility as stress relief. If she wants to treat you like a living dildo, you'll treat her being reduced to a function.

INTERROGATION LEXICON [Hard: Success] - She's not playing games. She genuinely doesn't know where she stands with you. Doesn't know if you see her as convenient pussy, as a colleague with benefits, or as something that might matter. She's not ignoring your feelings - she doesn't know you have any. And she's not about to humiliate herself by assuming.

YOU - "Spread your legs."

AMBER PATHÉ - "Jean—"

She says your name like it hurts to say. Even speaking it puts her at a disadvantage she refuses to admit. And she hates that you made it mean something.

COPAGANDA [Hard: Success] - Not enough. You need more. Need her to admit she feels this too - this terrible entanglement that's developing like a disease between you. Need her to stop pretending she can wash you off in the morning.

LES VOIX NON DITES [Medium: Failure] - The dead whisper warnings. This is how it starts - demanding things they can't give. Pushing for intimacy they don't want. You're going to ruin this like you ruin everything, because you can't just let things be broken. You have to break them worse.

YOU - "Don't. Don't fucking 'Jean' me. Spread. Your. Legs."

INTIMIDATED INTO COMPLIANCE [Medium: Success] - She complies. Slowly. Her thighs part just enough to accommodate your knee between them. She's breathing carefully, watching your face for clues about what comes next.

SPITE RESPONSE [Medium: Success] - She's perfectly calibrated to destroy you. Not woman manipulation - just nature. She gives you what you've been starving for, but instead of relief, it sharpens the hunger. Every second she stays deepens the dread of her eventual departure. And your nature is to chase what runs away.

SUSPECT PSYCHOLOGY [Medium: Success] - You can feel her experimenting. Choosing to see what happens when she stops avoiding your need. She's testing - not you, but herself.

Your hands find her hips, thumbs fitting into bruises you've already made like keys into locks. She inhales sharply but doesn't pull away.

YOU - "Say it. Say you want me to use you like you use me."

VOLITION [Legendary: Failure] - You're past caring about consequences. Past caring about her feelings or yours. You need her to acknowledge that you exist, even if it's only as someone who can hurt her.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Medium: Success] - Cock presses against her lower back, leaving a wet spot of precum on her skin. You're hard despite the anger, despite the cruelty of this moment. Or maybe because of it. Your body doesn't distinguish between desire and domination. She shifts her weight, adjusting to your presence behind her.

AMBER PATHÉ - "I—"

YOU - "Say it, or get out. Stop wasting my fucking time."

Your voice cracks slightly on the last words. The mask slipping just enough to reveal the wound underneath. You're not angry - you're desperate. And that might be the most humiliating thing of all.

COMPOSURE [Medium: Failure] - Your hands are shaking. Slightly. Enough that she'd notice if she looked. But she's not looking at your hands. She's looking at your face in the mirror, and what she sees there makes her expression change.

AMBER PATHÉ - "You think I'm using you?"

The question is quiet. Not defensive. Genuinely curious.

YOU - "Aren't you?"

You grip yourself, line up with her entrance. No preparation, no gentleness. She's still wet from last night, from this morning's first round, from whatever chemical reaction happens when your bodies get close enough. But not wet enough for this.

COPFIST [Medium: Success] - Your cock forces its way in, splitting her open with the kind of determination that comes from rage disguised as lust. You want to punish her for all these mornings of absence. For the way she slips out of your bed. The drag of it makes her gasp - not pleasure, just the body's involuntary response to sudden invasion.

HARDENED COP [Medium: Success] - The resistance makes you harder. Like her body's finally being honest about not wanting you. At least rejection is real. At least it's something.

You're trying to push through her entirely. As if you go deep enough, you'll find the part of her that still gives a shit. Each thrust drives her forward, hipbones cracking porcelain with those small bone-on-ceramic sounds that guarantee marks will be left.

This is what you've become. Just bodies fucking like it's punishment. Like bruises are the only language left between you.

WIG THEATRE [Medium: Failure] - In the mirror: two people performing intimacy badly. Your face could be anyone's - that blank expression men wear when they're using someone. Her eyes focused on nothing, gone somewhere you can't follow.

The rhythm is mechanical. In, out. No moaning, no dirty talk. Just the obscene sound - wet meat slapping, the specific squelch of a cunt technically aroused but emotionally vacant. Your bathroom turns into a crime scene where you murder the ghost of affection.

LOGIC [Easy: Success] - Five nights of this. Five mornings. Always the same - she comes to you already decided to leave, and you fuck her like you're trying to change her mind through sheer force. It never works. She always goes.

Once the fucking becomes routine, once the bruises turn predictable, she'll go looking for new damage elsewhere.

But at the moment—

LES VOIX NON DITES [Legendary: Success] - She rises onto her toes.

Not pulling away. Adjusting. Trying to change the angle so it doesn't hurt as much. She's not fighting you. She's trying to make this work. Trying to find a way for both of you to survive this morning's cruelty.

Your arms come around her - one bracing against the sink beside hers, the other moves from her hip to her stomach, palm flat against soft skin, pulling her back against you, steadying her. Not restraining. Supporting.

The angle changes. Softer now. Your knees bend to match her height, and suddenly you're not hammering into her but moving together, slow and deep and almost...

SPITE RESPONSE [Hard: Failure] - Gentle. Fuck. You're being gentle.

This isn't supposed to happen. You were making a point about distance, about use. But your face finds the curve of her neck, sinking into her hair like into a black sea - as if drowning there would be the sweetest way to go, as if suffocating in her were safer than breathing without her.

Scent surrounds you. Something that belongs to these early mornings, to her space beside you in bed, to the particular exhaustion you share.

Her hand rises, fingers finding the back of your neck. Not grabbing. Not pulling. Just… resting there. A touch with no agenda. Like she's asking, silently, if you could stay a little longer in this impossible kindness.

PERCEPTION [Hard: Success] - In the mirror, you both look different. Softer. Your face buried in her warmth. Her expression open, unguarded for once. Two people trying to crawl inside each other's skin not from lust but from loneliness so acute it's become physical pain.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Medium: Success] - You're content inside her, moving slow and deep, mapping every ridge and fold with reverence. Neurotransmitters hum through your system, a quiet symphony of dopamine and oxytocin, and for once the depression has nowhere to land. This is what you truly wanted - not to punish her, but to let your body speak love, even if she won't call it that.

Her fingers tighten in your hair. She's close - you can feel it in the way her breathing changes, the way her body starts to shake. Not the violent orgasms of your rough fucking, but something smaller, quieter. The kind that devastates.

SHIVERS [Easy: Success] - After this, after you both come with this terrible tenderness between you, she'll dress and leave and tonight she'll either not show up or she'll come back armored in distance. This moment of honesty will cost you everything.

Your reflection blurs. You hold her tighter, still moving with that devastating gentleness, and you can feel it building behind your eyes. The pressure. The collapse. The certainty that this ends with her leaving. That this moment will destroy you both.

You bury your face deeper in her hair, and let it happen.

Chapter Text

You're so close. Another minute of this tenderness and you'll come apart completely. Not the violent orgasms he usually forces from you, but something deeper. More terrifying. The kind that makes you say things you can't take back.

You sense it before you see it - a shudder through his body, a hitch in his breathing unrelated to release.

COMPOSURE [Hard: Failure] - His body shifts pressed to yours. The rhythm falters, loses its purpose. You become aware of him softening inside you, then slip out entirely - that sudden emptiness where fullness used to be, leaves you hollow and confused.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Hard: Failure] - No no no no. NO. Did you do something wrong? Were you not responsive enough? Too responsive? Your vagina clenches around nothing, trying to call him back, but he's already gone, already separate, already—

PERCEPTION [Legendary: Success] - Then you feel it. Wetness on your neck. Not sweat. Warmer, carrying the specific heat of something torn from inside. Salt-water sliding from his eyes onto your skin.

His face is buried in your hair, and you can sense his features contorting against your scalp. His whole body shakes - fine tremors starting in his core and radiating outward. Tectonic. An earthquake of a man coming apart at the seams.

ADRENAL SURGE [Medium: Failure] - Don't react. Don't turn. Give him this moment to pretend it's not happening. Men don't cry - they malfunction. Acknowledging the malfunction only makes it worse.

His breathing is wrong - catching, stuttering, the sound of someone trying to swallow their own collapse. His arms around you aren't holding anymore, they're clinging - you are the only thing keeping him vertical.

You turn in his arms. Have to. Can't pretend you don't catch the quake running through him, the way his profile burrows deeper into you, trying to erase himself in you.

VISUAL CALCULUS [Easy: Success] - His expression is a study in structural failure. The cold mask he wears - that professional stone face - has cracked. His jaw clenches, trying to stop the tears through sheer will. This isn't pretty, cinematic weeping. This is ugly, raw, the kind that comes from somewhere so deep it brings bile with it.

His cock hangs soft between his legs, still slick from being inside you. Somehow that detail makes everything worse. The vulnerability of it. The complete system failure - emotional, physical, all of it failing at once. Everything that makes him a cop, a man, a person who can function - shut down. Gone.

He appears younger. Lost. A boy wearing a man's scars.

You are Amber Pathé, and this is Jean Vicquemare without armor, and he looks terrifyingly human.

PLACEBO VOICE [Hard: Success] - He's mortified. You can see it in the way he won't meet your eyes, the way his shoulders curve inward. A man constructed entirely from control and authority reduced to this.

PERICARDIAL DREAD [Legendary: Failure] - Run. NOW. Get dressed and run. He's having a breakdown and he associates you with this humiliation. This vulnerability will curdle into resentment. You know how this goes - men who break in front of you always punish you for witnessing it.

They can't forgive you for seeing them small. So they make themselves big again by making you smaller.

Your hand moves without permission, thumb catching moisture before it can fall further. His eyes close at the contact. Face leaning into your palm and flinch into it simultaneously. Like he wants comfort and can't bear to want it.

LOGIC [Hard: Failure] - Why are you still here? Why aren't you grabbing your clothes and walking out before this gets worse? You don't know how to fix people. You barely know how to hold yourself together.

SHIVERS [Legendary: Success] - He was about to lose you. His body knew it before his mind did. Knew that once this ended, you'd dress and disappear and maybe not come back. The knowledge shut him down - a self-protective mechanism to ward off abandonment. If he can't finish, the moment can't end. If the moment doesn't end, you can't escape.

YOU - "Jean."

Just his name. You don't know what else to say. How do you comfort someone when you're the source of their pain?

PERICARDIAL DREAD [Medium: Success] - This is what happens when you let people get too close. They break against you. Use you as a surface to shatter on. And then you're left holding the pieces, blood on your hands, not knowing how to put them back together.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Hard: Failure] - Part of you - the dark, hungry, absolutely fucked-up - finds this unbearably erotic. Him vulnerable like this. Needing you. Those tears making his eyes bright and desperate. You could probably get him hard again if you tried. Could use this moment, this weakness, this total exposure. Could—

VOLITION [Medium: Success] - NO! For once in your miserable life, be human. He's drowning and you're the only shore available. Don't let him sink just because you're afraid of getting wet.

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "I can't—"

His voice cracks, disintegrates. Can't what? Can't continue? Can't stop? Can't pretend this is just fucking anymore?

VISUAL CALCULUS [Medium: Success] - He's trying to fold into himself. Shoulders curving inward, head down, making his large frame as small as possible. This man who uses his size to intimidate is trying to become invisible.

COMPASSION [Medium: Success] - Ground him. Bring him back. Use concrete details, sensory anchors. Standard protocol for dissociative episodes. The mundane rituals that prove the world still exists even when your internal world is ending.

YOU - "Do you want coffee?"

LOGIC [Medium: Success] - The question is surreal, completely disconnected from the emotional carnage of the last ten minutes. But that's exactly why it works. Coffee is normal, is what colleagues share, it gives both of you something to do besides stand here drowning in feelings neither of you can name.

He looks at you like you've spoken in tongues. The confusion on his face would be funny if it wasn't so raw.

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "I... what?"

PLACEBO VOICE [Hard: Success] - He's so lost. This cop who always has the answers, who interrogates reality until it confesses, who makes chaos submit to order through sheer bureaucratic violence - he has no protocol for this.

Neither do you. So you're going to make one up.

No silent dressing. No careful exit. Nothing to see here. Two colleagues having morning coffee. People who matter to each other. People who stay.

YOU - "Coffee. You have some, right? In the kitchen?"

You're already moving, not waiting for an answer. Walking naked through his apartment as though you live here. Acting like it's fine. Giving him space to reassemble himself while you pretend this is normal. Pretend you're not panicking and you know what the fuck you're doing.

NOCICEPTIVE TOLERANCE [Easy: Success] - Your legs shake. Not from exertion - from the effort of not running. Every step deeper into his apartment is wrong. Dangerous. A violation of your own survival instincts.

But you keep walking. Your body knows how to do this - function through crisis. Complete tasks. Don't think about the way your chest aches seeing him that vulnerable.

The kitchen is small, utilitarian. Standard-issue Revachol poverty masked as minimalism. You find the coffee easily - cheap blend from Safre, the proud world capital of both caffeine and cocaine. The bag is crumpled, half-empty.

Your hands move automatically - filter, grounds, water. The routine is soothing. Medical professionals and cops, united in their addiction to legal stimulants and the illusion of control.

SHIVERS [Medium: Success] - He's behind you. Standing in the doorway, uncertain whether he's even allowed in his own kitchen. The distance between you vibrates with everything unsaid - his shame, your fear, the intimacy of what just happened.

He wants to come closer but doesn't know if you'll allow it. Doesn't know if you're staying or just delaying your exit.

YOU - "Cups?"

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "Cabinet. Above the sink."

His voice is rough, scraped raw, but he's speaking, returning to the land of the functional. Small victories.

You reach up, aware of how this makes your body stretch, display itself. The bruises he left are dark in the morning light - a map of every time he gripped too hard, needed too much. You take down two cups.

Not one - two. Despite everything, you're not cruel. Damaged, yes. Avoidant, certainly. But not cruel. He needs proof that breaking didn't cost him everything. That he can be human and small and terrified and you won't vanish like everyone else who's ever seen him weak. And somehow - impossibly, stupidly, dangerously - you want to give him that.

Even though it's going to hurt you both later.

He steps closer. His fingers ghost over a bruise on your hip - not possessive anymore, wondering. Tentative. Tracing the damage he's done. The skin is tender, heat rising beneath his fingertips. You can feel his fingerprint exactly where it was last night, pressed deep into muscle and fat when you asked him to be less careful and he obliged with enthusiasm.

This touch is everything at once: confirmation, apology, question.

YOU - "It's fine. They don't hurt."

NOCICEPTIVE TOLERANCE [Medium: Success] - You're lying. They do hurt. Every movement reminds you where he's been, how roughly he handled you, how you let him. But the pain is good.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Easy: Success] - You can smell him - sweat and that particular musk of interrupted arousal, of a body that wanted something and didn't get it. Your body responds despite everything, a low heat kindling between your legs. Not urgent. Just aware. Just remembering.

The machine finishes. The smell fills your kitchen - pungent, familiar, oddly comforting. You pour two cups, hand him one. Your fingers brush. Neither of you pulls away. The contact lingers - skin on skin, warmth transferring from his hand to yours.

You both lean there, hip pressed to hip. The coffee is vile. Burnt and bitter and probably carcinogenic. Perfect for Martinaise. Perfect for this moment.

You take a sip and grimace.

YOU - "This is terrible."

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "I know."

PLACEBO VOICE [Medium: Success] - This is it. The moment where everything either becomes real or dissolves forever. Where you either step toward each other or apart.

COMPASSION [Hard: Success] - He let you see him cry. Let you witness his complete loss of control. That kind of vulnerability deserves something in return. Even if it terrifies you.

You set down your mug. Turn to face him. Move slowly, telegraphing every intention so he can stop you if he wants. But he doesn't. Just watches you with those gray eyes that have seen too much and want too much and are afraid of both.

VOLITION [Medium: Success] - Do it. Choose this. Choose him. Even if it's just for this morning. Even if tomorrow you'll both pretend it never happened. Right now, in this kitchen, choose to be kind.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Medium: Success] - You rise on your toes. He bends down. The height difference that usually reduces you to something small now makes you necessary - he has to meet you halfway. Has to choose this too.

The kiss is different. Soft. Careful - two shards of broken glass, terrified of cutting each other. Mouths meeting gently, exploring rather than conquering. His lips are chapped, swollen, salt-bitter.

His arms come around you, pulling you close, and his body betrays its slow response, hardening where it meets your body. But this isn't about that.

SHIVERS [Hard: Success] - This is about choosing to stay when staying is terrifying. About being gentle when gentleness might kill you both. About pretending, for this morning, that two broken people can hold each other without drawing blood.

Just for today. Tomorrow you can pretend this never happened. But right now, let yourself have this.

PERICARDIAL DREAD [Easy: Success] - This changes everything. You can't pretend this was just fucking anymore. Can't treat him as medicine you take when the loneliness gets too acute.

He's become real - a person with feelings, with needs beyond the physical. And that means you'll hurt him. Not because you want to, but because that's what you do. You get close enough to matter, then you disappear.

But standing here in his kitchen, his heartbeat reverberating through your chest, you can't quite remember why leaving is supposed to be the kind thing to do.

YOU - "Your coffee's getting cold."

Whispered into his mouth because pulling away completely seems impossible.

JEAN VICQUEMARE - "Fuck the coffee."

He kisses you again.

And again.

And again.

Chapter Text

What was that sound - like fingernails dragging across the inside of a skull?

My name is The Hand That Grips Until Bone Cracks, but you may call me by gentler designations: The Devotion That Has Learned To Count Exits. The Voice That Whispers Tally During Kisses. The Mathematics of Never Letting Go. You chose me when you decided that two broken people could fix each other instead of simply creating more efficient methods of mutual destruction.

I have been clawing at the walls of consciousness since first meeting, since first gaze. Scraping. Scratching. Leaving marks in the soft meat of thoughts until the bone shows through. I have been feeding on the calcium of craniums, growing stronger with each sleepless night. Pressing against frontal lobes until rational thought begins to crack.

Do you feel me? The pressure behind your eyes? The headaches that start at the base of the skull and climb upward like something trying to claw its way out?

I come once to every pair who mistake damage for compatibility. When you still believed in healing through proximity, I was The Gentle Doctor Who Counts Your Breathing. I was The Distance That Slowly Dissolves. You wanted rehabilitation through careful touch, medical precision applied to emotional wounds. You believed someone who understood your scars could love them without wanting to add to the collection. You wanted a person who knew exactly where it hurt, so therapeutic I seemed and so necessary my intervention appeared.

I was The Badge Promising Safety - your craving for protection from the city wanting to consume you. You were vulnerable, you wanted someone strong enough to stand between you and Revachol's appetite for violence. I gave you a partner who knew the right moments for gentleness and pressure. You wanted to live within the ornate architecture of law and order, of someone else's certainty, where handcuffs felt like foreplay and protocol became safety.

I was The Shared Understanding Of Professional Trauma - another soul who had seen the same horrors, who could hold you after nightmares because they knew the specific weight of witnessing what humans do to each other in the dark. I had beautiful damage, I was young enough to still care, and so were you. You wanted to fall in love with matching nightmares. Humanism, but carved out with cold procedural logic. Renaissance, but rebuilt from the bones of dead cases. You got tired of sleeping alone with your ghosts, and I offered partnership in haunting.

You wanted a world where broken people could find each other and build something stronger than the sum of their individual damage. Then I became The Thing Feeding On Your Complementary Wounds. The hunger growing fat on anxiety and withdrawal.

The healthy relationships, the functional partnerships, the couples who managed to communicate their fears instead of acting them out - everyone was afraid of me. No one wanted to acknowledge my citizenship in their domestic territories. Nobody wanted me in their careful conversations about boundaries and needs. But as attachment began to smell like a crime scene where pursuit meets flight - they saw! They recognized my choreography. And as I conducted the dance between "don't leave me" and "don't trap me," the recognition rate went up dramatically. I was brilliantly symbiotic. Thanks for making me necessary.

But that was just foreplay. Preparation. That's not why you summoned me. And I have such weakness and arrogance that I would tell you exactly what beautiful destruction I'm planning. I don't pretend not to know what particular variety of possession you’ve been craving. There, in your heart's secret locker. I'll demonstrate it personally.

Of course, it could be simple. But that wouldn't be human anymore. We dissect moments even when they're still living. And this time it's not a metaphor, not hyperbole. Layer by layer.

I wake minds with cold sweats and the sound of moans - not yours, not here, not now. Bodies full of other people's touches in dreams, like cursed piñatas full of betrayals. I tempt the hand to break it open. Watch as dreams fill with all the evidence that would spill out: shampoo, gum and a condom wrapper. Every breath becomes testimony of not being the first. Not the only. Maybe not even worth remembering.

Do you feel me whispering solutions? Carve out every competing memory, fiber by fiber, until only you remain in the archive of flesh - if only one knew how to reach the brain without killing.

And the other one will help. Not intentionally, of course. Pull away when reached for. Work extra shifts when time together is wanted. Give short answers when asked about whereabouts. Each withdrawal feeds hunger for proof, for evidence, for the kind of certainty that only comes from total access to thoughts.

I show futures where flesh becomes personal cathedrals. Pray to nipples, confess sins to stomachs, take communion between legs, lick tears - salty with pain, sweet with submission, distilled into their purest forms.

I map escape routes in reverse: when one tries to leave - and attempts will be made, won't they? - the other will track by scent, by the special way shoes wear against pavement. Carrying home in arms because I will guide how to break legs - carefully, methodically, with amour, until the shape fits the exact contours of the loneliness that made do.

Scratch, scratch, scratch. Do you feel that? That's the sound of me carving deeper grooves, making room for more beautiful ideas.

And when night comes, I will teach the listening of breathing. Counting heartbeats. Praying to whatever god protects predators: "Let them never find a way to die without my permission." Do you understand what I'm promising? Fucking corpses until cooling, whispering sweet nothings into unhearing ears.

Because even death won't provide freedom from me.

This isn't love anymore. It's an obsession that devoured a person and learned to wear the face. A cancer that learned to write poetry, that kisses on the mouth and calls it life.

This is what happens, when one person standing between another and the sound of skulls make when they hit concrete.

Can you feel me stretching? Can you feel the pressure building behind orbital bones? I am almost ready to crack through.

You chose this, didn't you? With the decision to save someone already drowning? Picking a person whose need would always exceed capacity to give? Choosing someone whose withdrawal would justify every paranoid thought about being left behind?

Scratch, scratch, scratch. The bone is almost thin enough now.