Chapter Text
In the tiniest church in Saint-Saëns, Twenty Four Men filled it's crooked pews.
It's run down. Abandoned. The pews are stained and smell of cheap alcohol and cigarette smoke. There are rats running under the floorboards, moths in the rafters. Broken windows of a rainbow of colors, leaving the floor a trap of spiked glass, a rainbow stained in the blood of slashed calluses.
In the back, a tall mural of Her Innocence Dolores Dei, Defaced and Repainted a million billion times.
And above it all, a stained glass disco ball, suspended on a thin hair like the sword of Damocles. The rainbow of lights seeping from it, the violets and yellows and reds and blues and pales, all threatening to fall at any second.
Isn't it Perfect, Harry?
Lieutenant-2JF Harrier Du Bois stands at the doorway of this church, looking in. The mural is defaced for the millionth billionth time, Now plus one more. Something ancient has destroyed it again.
"It's Beautiful. And it's horrible. It makes me sad."
"Just like You, Harry! That's why it's perfect." Conceptualization replied with his own voice.
Beside Harry, a great flurry of cloth wrapped around the man speaking to him. A great tide of blue emerging from the eyes of this being, wrapping around his face and over his body, emerging from the small square halos that dot his person and sit upon his palm, draping off of him like a great cloak or cape, dragging on the floor behind him and flowing in the air as if disintegrating into it, filling it with parts of its being.
Like a great king.
Like a wise man.
Like a kid hiding beneath a blanket.
Like a drunken idiot who crashed into his shower curtains.
Like a body covered in a medical tarp.
"I made this for you, Harry. For us! Every part based on you. I made it idealized, yet honest. I made it speak to the sadness within us, and to our broken past. It is-" Conceptualization brings his bare palm to where his lips would be, kissing his fingers and flourishing them. "-my Masterpiece. Every crooked nail represents a part of you, Harry. Every shattered dream and broken promise, the sad state of your mind and body, all lit in the precarious lights of Disco. Magnifique."
Harry took a few steps forward, feeling the crunch of broken glass underneath his green shoes.
"The broken glass isn't just from the windows." Harry observed, crouching down and lifting a particular shard. It was brown, stained red, curved. This belonged to no window.
"Of course not. Bottles were discarded and shattered here, every bottle you ever drank. Be glad I didn't invite Electrochemistry here yet, He'd no doubt make it worse."
He continued to walk forward, smelling the smoke and tell tale vapors of drugs and tobacco. The wood almost seemed stained black with tar in places. Like his lungs, no doubt.
He looked up at the Mural. There was no more face on it, scraped from the wood. Harry couldn't recognize who it was suppose to be as a result. A mercy and a gift from within. He will see her tonight. He doesn't need to see her right now. What he could recognize was the written words at the base. The name of the newest anodic night club in Martinese. The words etch into Harry's heart and soul.
No Truce With The Furies.
It's painted into the wall with a horrid mixture. Harry can smell every ingredient. Heavy fuel. Blood. Alcohol. A particular brand of paint. Apricots.
"Well." Harry had finished his initial walk around, turning and sitting on a nearby pew, trying his best to ignore the feeling of what he could only assume was whiskey soaking into his pants. "This is all disgusting and sad, but why did you make all of this again?"
"Harry Harry Harry. How many of you are there? There's me, there's Logic and Visual Calculus, there's Physical Instrument and Half Light, there's so many of you in that little bone bowl of yours. I have just given you a place to see them. Physically."
"We both know this isn't real."
"Well of course not, It's a mind palace. It's a place to store memories in a spatial environment. It's a place to meet us physically. Congratulations, you've just upgraded from Super Cop to Ultra Cop. Now you're like those impossible detectives in those books and radio dramas, except real."
A quick look around. His mind palace is a shitty run down church used by alcoholics and druggies to light up. That seems about right for him.
"...It's missing something." Harry thought aloud as he looked around. Everything here made sense, it was the absence of something that was messing with him. He looked at the discarded cigarette butts and the broken bottles of commodore red. He looked at the tutti frutti gum wrappers and at the disco ball. What was missing...
"Oh it most certainly is missing something. That's just why I brought you here." Conceptualization spoke quietly and sweetly, almost like a lover, as it circled and wrapped Harry in the blue curtain that was his body. "It's not finished. Perhaps it never will be, a Cadavre Exquis. But it's here, Harry. Somewhere for you to cry and yell at yourself, to scream how much you hate yourself without anyone else knowing. To pray that you'll leave this screaming hell someday. Who knows, maybe I'll have to clean it up if you clean yourself up."
Harry couldn't help but detect the slightest bit of sarcasm and doubt in that statement. "I'll show you! I'll get so cleaned up and straightened out that you'll have to make this place sparkle."
"Oh, Harry...We both know that's not going to happen." Conceptualization bent down, lifting a crushed box of gum. Harry watched as he turned it in his palm, the shape bending until all that remained was a faint outline of a diamond, a flat four sided shape from which something new could be created.
"But we'd both love to be proven wrong, wouldn't we?"
"Detective."
Harry snapped back to reality.
In front of him, through the windshield of the vehicle, were a few other officers of the 41st loitering in front of an alley in Jamrock, waiting for him.
To his side was his partner Kim Kitsuragi, who had just driven the two of them to the crime scene.
"Shit, how long was I out-?"
"Don't worry, we just arrived. You didn't space out any longer then you normally do."
A small sigh of relief then. He was already late when he arrived at the station that day, he didn't need to be seen staring at nothing instead of doing his job. He was thankful Kim was use to him occasionally going quiet. To think, to process, to talk to himself. He must have started on the ride over. He was absent from reality for three minutes.
"Well!" Harry shot his arms up as if stretching from a nap. "Time to see what happened to this poor fucker."
Kim just nodded, silently glad Harry properly cleaned himself up before raising his arms, lest his MC have the air of a landfill.