(no subject)

[evowhisperer]

  

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"Stand aside, please, I'm a doctor!"

 

Chaos. Pure, grainy, cheaply recorded chaos. The cellphone trembles violently with its owner's hands, and frightened shouting in Spanish from all around threatens to drown out the wails of a child. The dirty sidewalk is no place to treat the wounded.

 

The seven people bleeding out on the ground may not be alive to care, soon. The child screaming at a young couple's side is unhurt, but rightfully frightened.

 

Several someones pass in front of the camera. The owner moves to the side, and a loud male voice blares out, 'Are they alright? Are they alright?' when no one answers. The owner continues to move, and a frilly sleeve is pushed out of the way.

 

There's a man in a white labcoat kneeling over one of the bodies, pressing a cloth flat against a puddle of red.

 

'Hey, are they going to survive?'  the phone owner repeats. The doctor snags the cuff of someone standing too close, and orders them to keep pressing down. They step forward with shaking hands and kneel also, and soon the doctor stands and moves on.

 

Someone's voice is rising and falling hysterically. There's shouting about police, and an ambulance. The camera turns to look, but it doesn't seem that either have arrived, and when it looks back several people have begun to grab shirts from the store's open sidewalk display, following the doctor's example. 

 

The doctor is wearing a large woman's hat with a tag sticking out of it, now, conspicuously snatched from a knocked-over shelf. He's facing a direction that would normally let the camera see his profile, but the hat is big enough to hide all but his neck. He slows as he reaches a body that stares vacantly away--it's not the first he would've reached, but it is the first the camera has seen--and moves on.

 

Finally, there's the body that no one seems ready to approach, curled up and with its back to the crowd. Broken glass litters the ground around it, and when the doctor pushes it onto its back, he kicks a gun further out of reach.

 

Someone passes in front of the camera. "Hey..." The owner complains. No response, and the owner moves around. "Hey, why's he helping that fucker when there's people here who need help?"

 

The doctor's back is to the camera. It's impossible to see what he's doing until he glances towards the crowd, loops the hat's strap tightly around his jaw, and starts CPR.

 

No one stops or helps him. The camera continues to watch, eventually panning over the wounded, and the unhurt victims still milling around. Someone shouts about the police again, and more people are kneeling over the wounded victim's bodies, pressing down more cloth. The child has climbed into a sitting woman's lap, face buried in her hair.

One of makeshift medics calls out to the doctor tearfully, but they are ignored.

 

There's an outcry. The camera snaps back to the doctor, who's lifting his head from the shooter's chest, pushing down arms that have begun to move sluggishly. More shouting, with more than a couple of screams. The crowd is starting to shuffle back, and the doctor throws up a blood-soaked hand, shouting urgent assurances. The camera glimpses part of his face, and he's young, and very clearly aware of the new dangers--both from revived shooter, and the crowd.

 

"He's not armed!" Triple checking. The doctor kneels on his wrist, shifting the man to check underneath. Quadruple checking. "He has no more weapons! He's unconscious!"

 

The shooter's eyes are glazed but open, and the confusion in the crowd eddies and swirls. Before anyone can do anything, there's armed men in uniforms of the law shoving through the crowd, taking control of the situation. The crowd's din reaches a new high, and the man with the camera is forced back. It becomes impossible to see anything else, as people move back and shake the camera every which way.

 

There's only a glimpse left of the doctor left in the clip, and it's from one last ditch effort. The phone gets held high in the air, and it shows a white coat turned to one of the uniforms, hands forward, bloody, and earnestly reassuring.

 

The clip cuts out.

 

Comments

[evowhisperer]

Caesar's bland smile is a little pinched at the edges. He doesn't regret making his stance on the matter clear, but he's more than perceptive enough to know it will probably have consequences.

"... Ah... within reason, of course."

What sort of unpleasant person is Ryuzaki already planning to assign to him? That's the biggest possible retribution Caesar can predict, here. He's shown up his boss for being antisocial, so what else would Ryuzaki want to do but make it inconvenient?

The real suggestions that Ryuzaki might have don't occur to him, yet. He's naively innocent that way.

[dead_black_eyes]

L's hand travels toward his mouth, where he gnaws singlemindedly at his cuticles.

"I see. Then... I don't suppose that you're fond of chess? Not that there will be much time to take away from the investigation, but if socializing is so important to you, then I certainly do not need as much sleep as I've been getting."

Not nearly enough, argues literally everything about his appearance.

[evowhisperer]

Ah haha... crap. Caesar stares, counting all the minutes he already didn't have in the shadows of L's eyes.

"... Yes?" he hazards. "I mean, I understand the basic rules." Enough to put up a good fight, but not enough for him to feel confident in this offhand challenge. How did this happen? Is this agent deliberately trying to overload him with his presence, like a poacher in a truck waiting for its prey to collapse from exhaustion? But Caesar isn't even the detective's true target! Why is all this attention centered on him?

"Wouldn't you also want to have drinks with your team sometime? It would be good for morale," he hedges. He's doing an awful job at hiding his apprehension, and the fact that he's trying to dilute the attention is more than obvious.

[dead_black_eyes]

It's fairly clear from the subtle, vaguely recoiling reaction that not a single part of that suggestion appeals to L. Drinking, team, with...

"You think I'd like them better if I was drinking?" he asks pointedly. Then he laughs, and it's terrifyingly unnatural to the point where it almost seems like it could be mocking. "...you might be right, but I don't drink when I'm working and it happens that I'm always working, even when I'm not. Therefore, I do not drink."

[evowhisperer]

It's as though someone fitted a Black Pawn with a human face. Caesar stares, feeling a chill creep along his spine, and it occurs to him that even when locking gazes with glowing eyes in faces covered in scales and teeth, he'd never thought to himself that they were inhuman. He'd avoided thinking about the personhood of the victims around him, sure, promising himself in a mental chant that by carrying out his work he was helping them in the greater picture. He'd avoided looking them in the eye, ashamed of himself and unwilling to face it head on. He'd stopped thinking about it at all.

There's something about Ryuzaki that is conspicuous in its absence. It's a void where human connections would usually reside. He's like a malnourished goblin king, controlling everything but taking joy in nothing. He's a creature in his own right; perhaps not one that's mutated outwardly, but he's certainly no longer the same in his mind.

He's trying to reach out to Caesar in his own way, crooked and unaccustomed to compromise.

Caesar pushes the feeling to one side, planning to reexamine it later. For now he frowns slightly, disturbed.

"Surely there must be times when you take some sort of break."

The shadows under Ryuzaki's eyes look permanent, and Caesar doubts.

[dead_black_eyes]

L doesn't blink again. The stare is hollow, ghoulish and unwavering as he considers Caesar's question for longer than it could possibly take him to formulate an answer. He's entertaining potential questions within the question, and numbers crunch behind his glassy eyes as he calculates percentages and risks.

"Have you ever wondered why they call them 'breaks?'" he asks after a moment. "In my native language, anyway, it's the same word as something that's fractured into one or more pieces. It's no longer whole. Some clarity and coherence is lost, surely, when something is broken too many times."

He sits forward, staring intently at the back of Watari's head. The old man says nothing, simply driving in silence.

"When you think about something so much that you dream about it every time you fall asleep, you might be working hard enough."

[evowhisperer]

Nanites. Family. Rex regaining his memories. The knowledge that so much suffering in the world was because of his actions. More than any of these, the constant stream of chemicals, programs, diagrams, and molecular arrays.

Cesar's thoughts show clearly in his eyes, and the fact that he's completely familiar with this degree of obsession is broadcasting for all to see. He doesn't realize it; all he knows is that Lazarus is asking him to return to that level, and he's mildly conflicted by it. On the one hand, he'd hoped to recover more after leaving his home world. On the other, he was probably going to push himself like this from the start.

Caesar crosses his arms. "Too many breaks is detrimental to work, but so is not enough. Mental relaxation replenishes creativity, and allows for more free associations."

[dead_black_eyes]

There's a lot that isn't being spoken aloud, but is informative nevertheless. L notes Cesar's silence and turns back toward him, holding eye contact for longer than is natural or comfortable. What he knows of human nature is cold and sterile and analytical; there's no instinct in the way he reads the subtleties in a man's expressions, but there's knowledge and intuition at work, and it's thorough as hell.

He opens his mouth to say something, but Watari interjects just as the first syllable is starting to creak into existence.

"If I may offer my opinion, Ryuzaki."

"Now isn't the time, Watari," he replies frostily.

"Ryuzaki," the old man says firmly. "It is. I agree with Mr. Salazar, with all due respect. For your wellness, which matters to me, you might consider entertaining his point of view."

[evowhisperer]

Cesar's lips twitch into a small smile. On the one hand, the old man is on his side, and he's more or less winning an argument with this stubborn jackass. On the other? This is literally an argument to spend more time with the man in a social setting. At least this might mean he could share the burden with the rest of the investigation team. More people there will mean less focused attention on him, right?

Cesar nods, glancing forward. "There's no need to make any decisions right now, of course. There's several things that need to be done before scheduling this sort of event, and you may wish to consult with the team itself beforehand."

'Consult' as in get location recommendations, since Caesar can't imagine that this man knows good local places to go.

(Providence is looking for him. If he doesn't get his design built, there might not be an investigation team left to socialize this way.)

[dead_black_eyes]

If L was bristling because he felt ganged-up on, Cesar actually does something fantastically right by reminding of other things that need doing before any such decisions or concrete plans are made.

"There's a lot to do," he confirms, agreeing rigidly with the assertion. He looks like a sulking child for a moment, staring daggers at the back of Watari's headrest, clearly unhappy with the man's frankness in front of Cesar. "And the team consults with me, not vice-versa."

"Perhaps they could help."

"We can all stop pretending right now that any of them want to spend more time with me than they absolutely have to, and save ourselves a lot of time," L suggests, tone over-casual.

[evowhisperer]

Well... Caesar's not going to argue with this. Not only does it feel strangely surreal to be discussing is minder's social life, but he thinks the man might actually be right.

He leans back in his seat, letting any further conversation wash over him. It doesn't last much longer, and soon after it does Caesar lets his mind focus entirely on its main project.

By the time they arrive at the hotel, he's nearly gotten something worked out. There's no time to celebrate: the hotel room they enter is already in the process of being packed up, and Cesar is immediately ushered to an already scoured side room, like a puppy locked in a closet while guests are around.

He sits on the bed, and then lays down, before a harried member of the investigation team walks in, dumps a grocery sack of parts by the door, and strides back out with a distracted explanation. It's the first of the parts he asked for.

Caesar almost makes progress before they have to leave.