Revachol Parle

by LolthWoven

Summary:

THOUGHT CABINET - REVACHOL PARLE
The city speaks to those who work in its wounds - paramedics and police, the civil servants of catastrophe. It whispers through radio static, through the silence after sirens, through the space between heartbeats. Some fight the voices. Some embrace them.
But everyone who stays long enough learns the truth: Revachol doesn't just contain stories - it tells them.

Notes:

Thank you, laurelnose, for this amazing Work Skin: Disco Elysium!

My eternal gratitude to This_One_Bites, my lightning-fast beta-reader - you shattered my doubts at exactly the right meltdown moment 💖

And D.A. - for hounding me to start this fic like I owed you a debt from a past life. CHOKE on it, you feral hot-bastard-enjoyer 🫰

Chapter 1: TEN FLOORS UP

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 2: THE FINAL WATCH

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 3: THE FROZEN SCREAM

Summary:

(Some moments stretch across time and space, connecting all the places where people stand at the edge of revelation.)

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 4: THE HIERARCHY OF HUMAN WASTE

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 5: THE SERVANT CLASS

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 6: THE LINGUISTIC APOCALYPSE

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 7: THE APPOINTMENT WITH OBLIVION

Notes:

Thanks KoalaBiscuits! Our lovely chat reminded me why I even started writing this fic in the first place and gave me the fuel to keep going 🖤

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 8: THE DANCE OF THE LIVING

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 9: THE DOG'S KISS

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.