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You are shot.
You are not dead.
You open your eyes. Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi stands leaning over you. His face is closer than usual. His glasses are flecked with blood.
You lie on your back on an uneven mattress. Every muscle in your body hurts.
Outside, it snows: light gray specks framed by mid-gray sky. That gray will blanket, then swallow, this sagging hostel; Martinaise; Revachol; the World. This sagging hostel is the world.
You were shot. You are not dead.
Kim blinks. His eyebrows furrow the slightest bit. “Lieutenant, are you with me?”
You wait.
Nothing comes.
Are you with him? Yes.
Are they with you? No.
What now?
The air outside is still, despite the steady fall of snow. The cold is too sharp for the air to settle into a musty dryness, though it tries its best. The cool soothes your aching joints. Your lungs struggle to take in air.
“Where to now?” the Lieutenant asks, standing close enough that you can feel his warmth. Nothing comes.
First you threw away your memory, and now you have lost your guides.
You stand in the middle of the square, staring blankly at the twisting sea. It, too, is falling to the gray now working to swallow the world.
You cannot speak. The voices that led you *are* your voice. Your voice is gone now too.
How do you speak freely, without limited choice? How can you say anything at all?
You’ve been playing easy, coddled, and didn’t even know it. You didn't remember true freedom, and now that you have it, it is the most foreign thing in the world.
Kim coughs lightly into his fist. He shifts his weight and stills. The snow continues to settle, covering your footprints and covering you.
You walk on.
Martinaise is silent. The snow muffles everything it hasn’t swallowed whole.
You couldn’t cross the waterway. Your legs would not carry you across the bridge. Eventually Kim put his arm around your shoulders and turned you around, gently steering you back to the Whirling.
“It’s been a hard couple of days, Lieutenant. Your fatigue is understandable. Do not worry: we can afford another day’s rest.”
Can you?
Kim buys you stew from Garte. It is warm, and little else. This is the first time you have sat and eaten a meal in the cafeteria. Your fingers twitch, itching for a throw of the dice to tell them what to do. None come.
You eat the stew.
Kim had been hurt too. He still is. He has cared for you despite his own injuries.
You should care for him back. You do not know how.
No voices appear to share their secrets.
All you can do is watch.
Silence has fallen on Revachol, thicker than snow. It will engulf everything before the Pale even has a chance.
The city waits with bated breath, frozen in place, unsure of what’s next. A city mourns in silence for its new dead.
You sit on the sofa bed.
Kim has been too understanding. He asked once, just after your second rebirth from the ashes of pain, about your silence. You shook your head, confused, apologetic, afraid. “Take your time,” he had said, hand halfway to your shoulder before he froze and pulled it back.
Now he lays asleep next to you. When he moved to leave, before, you grabbed his arm and pulled him down next to you. You must’ve looked pretty sorry for him to stay, but he did.
You feared for him. He is still hurt, still unhealed. He needs rest just as much as you do, if not more.
His breaths come light and steady, minute raisings of his breast beneath that thin white shirt. He is still wearing his jacket. You want to remove it for him, as well as unlace his boots and take off his glasses.
You don’t know if you can manage the first two right now, but the glasses should be doable. They’re thin and firm, like him. In your hands they feel small, and you must resist the urge to try them on. What buffs and debuffs would they give you? Success is hard when there’s nothing to depend on but yourself.
The clack from the frames meeting the table rings around the room.
After that you lean back. You pull your legs to your chest, set chin on knees, and wrap your arms around your legs.
Once settled, your attention returns to the sleeping man before you. He is unfailingly composed. Always standing solidly, with feet firmly placed and back straight. He does not stutter or mince his words. He… steps back to let you lead, when needed, and takes charge when you are unsure. When the two of you work something out, and you let him say that final part, his eyes shine. When you leave room for him to take charge despite needing no guide, he holds back a smile. He observes; he understands.
Oh, how unlike him you are. You who rushes in headfirst. You who vomited at the scent of a corpse. You don’t even remember your own age. You are a glass cannon, rattling around and almost crashing to the ground. He is a tank, a constant, a fortification against the world.
Except… lying here now asleep, bright orange jacket swallowing his arms and torso, he doesn’t seem so big or strong. He seems small and fragile, like you. Stripped of the walls he’s built around himself, Kim isn’t so godly after all. He’s just a person, too.
Room X at the Whirling-in-Rags is the whole of the world. Here you sit as half the population of a tiny land for two. This sofa bed is a raft floating in a pale void. Untethered and unmoored, you drift: two broken, breaking men faced with the insurmountable task of saving the world.
But isn’t that just saving yourselves?
You are in the belly of the slumbering beast of Martinaise.
With sleep the only respite from this heaving, caustic hell, you slip into a doze with ease.
Your dreams are far-away voices struggling to be heard; they fail.
You wake to the sharp light of reflected snow against the soft light of almost-dawn.
You lie on your back on an uneven mattress. Every muscle in your body hurts.
Kim is beside you, but sleeping still. You are a void, an absence, an empty chill. But he is warm, warm, warm, and you feel it against your side. Heat seeping into you from the man who has given you so much already.
Good thing you took his glasses off earlier, because he turned over in his sleep and now his back is to you. Seeing the back of his shoulders and his curved spine feels voyeuristic; this is a man who has faced you head-on since the beginning, and stealing a look at his unconscious form means stealing the one thing he has left: control.
You turn your head away, looking up at the ceiling. Your mind is white noise. Static waiting for a connection to come through. An open seat left for any latecomers to the show. Yesterday there was no seat, no static noise — only nothing. Today is better.
There sits no longer an arguing chorus upon tiered seats inside your skull. Now only a single chair rests upon the foggy stage — the pilot’s seat.
Getting shot was a wake-up call, a gong rung that swept out the cobwebs and dust. Now your mind is as empty and as silent as Martinaise.
It is time to fill it.
You make it across the waterlock. The fishermen shacks are the same as before. They are white and silent and still: stagnant. This white emptiness has migrated over to the waterfront, sneaking in to fill the holes left by those dead. Has the whole world become the ghost of the dead?
Are *you* a ghost, an echo of the past, a shade? Slates are never wiped completely clean, a residue always lingers. You can never escape your past. The things you’ve done will never leave you. A phoenix never truly escapes the ashes.
Look at Kim, the perfect man. He is the epitome of composure and control. He acts without hesitation, without fear. Nothing weighs him down… except you. And you don’t even have the decency to keep ahold of the voices that led your hand. You are a contradiction: anchored in a past you cannot see and frozen when faced with the unknown future.
He keeps doing you well.
Why?
Why would he show you kindness when you are nothing? You are a sorry, sorry excuse for a man. Your touch corrupts all. You couldn’t even live with all the things you had done, drinking and drinking to bleach out the bad. But there’s no running from it. It always catches up, even when you drown your mind with booze.
What can you do? Kim *helps* you, despite all you’ve done. He patched you up after you got *shot,* watched over you when no one else came, when you had driven away anyone who’d care. *He stays by your side.*
You don’t deserve that.
(…)
(Do you?)
Don’t let Kim’s kindness be wasted on you. You’re undeserving of it, and nothing you do will change that, but maybe if you do your best to deserve it, then it won’t go quite as much to waste.
You are here to solve a crime. A man has been murdered, and the RCM was called in. You’ve thrown away your very self through years of neglect. You’ve been given a second chance.
How generous is it? Not very.
Those voices were a prologue, honey. Welcome to the real world.
Detective, do your job.
You question the village folk the best that you can. You let Kim lead. You try to follow what the voices had done in the past. It’s simple, really — you already know what to do.
Aren't there things that feel right? Aren’t there paths starting to appear in your mind’s eye, ones more or less treacherous? The city is still frozen in place, but the fog has lifted. Now that the dizziness of freedom has loosened its grip, you find that the next step doesn't truly have infinite possibilities like it felt it did.
Lilienne’s boat is free to use now. Idiot Doom Spiral seems to notice your lackluster attitude, though doesn’t say anything. The cold numbs your aching limbs. You don’t want to take the boat yet.
You hardly recall anything you’ve learnt the past couple of days. Luckily, Kim’s notes are thorough and to-the-point, just as he is. He expresses mild distress when you ask for his ledger, but hands it over after a moment, after you say, “I’m too tired to accidentally destroy it.”
A man more delusional than even you might call the look on his face sympathy.
You fall back into your rhythm. Now that the voices are gone, you can *think.* Your mind is your own, and you can use it how you want. Just as you can never escape your haunted past, no matter what you do, you will never rid yourself of your instinct and your skills.
Let them guide you.
You go to the Dolorian Church of Humanity. It is the oldest building in Martinaise. It is the beginning of the end.
Dolores Dei was perfection; purity; innocence. The Mother of Humanity cries for us all, captured flash-frozen upon the glass, splintering before our eyes.
She saved us all, The Greatest Innocence did, only the sixth of her kind. She built the Moralintern from scratch. She ventured into the Pale and found the New New World. She did it *all.* She was the best woman *in the world.*
She played with soldiers like chess pieces.
The things she did to the Mesque for wanting independence were horrific.
In her eyes, she was more adept than anyone else. Usually, she was right. The Greatest Innocence was a Subtle Terror, rotten in places she couldn’t see.
If she could do bad, despite all her Good, then can't the opposite be said for you? No person is as simple as they seem — they always have the potential for good and bad. No matter how far their scale tips, they can only ever add more weights.
Outside, it starts to snow: falling, soft white backed by darkness and lit from the church through Dolores Dei. Flakes start to filter in through the broken glass. With the Innocence pierced, the church isn’t closed off anymore; its interior is one with the world.
The whole of the world is this church.
You are haunted by the things you buried when you couldn’t let them go. They must’ve been pretty important for you to keep such a firm grasp on them. Why can't you let them go? They don't deserve to be bound to the disgusting thing that you are.
You’re trying so hard to release them, but their claws are embedded in your heart.
The Greatest Innocence, that Subtle Terror, had her claws wrapped around all. None could escape her grasp. She was good and she was bad, and it didn’t matter what she did because she ruled all.
But then she died, and people didn’t have to bend to her will anymore. They were free of her.
And as she, the woman herself, faded from memory, the knowledge of her cruel acts faded too. If only the scars she left did the same….
We’ll never have only one or the other. Each person does their good and their bad. Do good when you can, and change when you do bad. Acknowledge your flaws and work to distill them. No one person can save the world; not even two can; but they can save themselves.
The Greatest Innocence wasn’t so great or innocent -- the biggest fuckup can't be quite so fucked up, can you? The Greatest Innocence had her flaws, big ones, and she couldn’t even acknowledge them. One-up her; let yourself be a single impure man in a vast, frozen world; let yourself grow.
How?
Don't you know?
You take a fucking stand.
(We are *all* the Innocence.)