black_sluggard (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
black_sluggard) wrote2011-10-13 01:43 pm
black_sluggard) wrote2011-10-13 01:43 pm
Entry tags:
(Fic) Black Edelweiss—Chapter Nine: Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
Title: Black Edelweiss
Series: Zeitgeist
Follows: One Giant Leap
Wordcount: 2,059
Summary: Two weeks after Claire Bennet's televised leap from the Ferris wheel, the 12th handles it's first case delving into the strange world of specials. Evidence points the investigation toward a former Company Agent, a man Noah Bennet would swear up and down doesn't exist.
Details: Minimal details due to inflation. Full warnings and details in main post.
PREV: Chapter Eight // MAIN // NEXT: Interlude Five
Chapter Nine: Beyond A Reasonable Doubt
"No matter how cleverly you sneak up on a mirror, your reflection always looks you straight in the eye."
—Angel Heart (1987)
They weren't silent after that—that just wasn't them—though the talk that followed was a strange, meandering thing of sporadic, random starts and sudden stops. Whole exchanges were begun and then abandoned, sentences trailing into nothing when they came up against something too painful or irrational to bear thinking about. They would fall into silence then, but only for a time before their scattered thoughts realigned themselves enough to start again.
"Christ, Javi," Kevin said suddenly, after another long silence. "I pulled a gun on you. What the hell was I thinking?"
It felt almost like an apology, and from the fresh horror on his face, one would think it had just happened. As far as Javier was concerned, the act was easy to forgive. Given the sheer volume of shit his partner had been forced to process in the last few hours, the lateness of it even more so.
"You were scared, and you were confused," Javier excused—weakly, he thought, since neither of those words even began to cover it. "And you didn't actually draw on me, you drew on that shady asshole, Bennet. I was just stupid enough to get in the way."
Kevin managed an anemic smile.
"Yeah, I noticed you're not exactly a fan of his," he observed softly. "Why is—"
They were both startled by a light tapping. Turning in his seat, Javier saw Kate and Castle through the window beside the door. What he saw in their faces...wasn't good. He felt Kevin tense beside him.
"Bro," Javier turned back to his partner, "you gonna be okay if I talk to Kate for a minute?"
Kevin took a slow, deep breath, steadying himself, then nodded tiredly. Javier slapped his arm lightly as he stood, stepping out into the hallway. Kate's eyes were somewhat guarded, and Castle's expression anxious. Javier greeted them with a nod, feeling oddly calm himself. Numb perhaps, resigned.
"The prints and DNA were a match," Kate told him, voice and eyes betraying how at odds she was with the whole idea, "but Lanie also found another hit in the database, a deceased officer named Richard Conway."
She handed him a folder. Opening it with a frown, Javier wasn't surprised at the image staring back at him from the photograph inside. Or, not as surprised as he probably should be. It was still jarring how, in police blues, it was that much easier to see his partner in Reichardt's face.
"It fits with what Kaito Nakamura's letter describes of Konrad's past," Kate continued, handing him a copy of the letter, apparently translated by the man's son while they waited on Lanie's results. "His presence at the riot, and his reluctance to abandon his life, until it ended in a bank robbery in 1968."
Javier skimmed the letter. He vaguely remembered mention of Nakamura and the riots, Kevin repeating the details of Kate's interview with Mrs. Petrelli on their way back to the station. That had been... God, it couldn't even have been four hours ago. It felt like days.
"Even Bennet doesn't believe Kevin was aware of any of this," Kate told him, carefully. "At least not—"
She paused, shaking her head. There was a dark emotion behind her eyes that Javier wasn't sure he wanted to put a name to.
"Anyway, that's... It's not much, but it's something. Right now Bennet is trying to find someone who can help us untangle things. And I know it stinks," Kate told him, softly, "but the captain's taking you off the case."
"Nah, it's cool," Javier managed, dully.
Which was completely inaccurate. Things were just so savagely screwed up at this point that the case was the last thing on Javier's mind. He understood what she wasn't saying, though. Looking over, Javier saw Castle looking in through the window. Looking at Kevin who sat with his back to the glass, tension written in the lines of his shoulders. All of the excitement the writer had felt about the case seemed to have left him completely, and the expression on his face was painfully sympathetic, and serious in a way Javier very rarely saw.
"I don't even know how to feel about any of this," Castle said. "It's just way too strange..."
He turned around, looking at Kate with a lost, helpless light of hurt in his eyes that Javier felt reflected his own feelings very closely.
"What are we going to tell him?" Castle asked her quietly.
Kate's lips pressed in a tight line. She appeared uncertain. Javier took it upon himself to answer the writer's question as definitely as he could.
"We tell him the truth," he told them both simply. "Everything."
There was no anger in it. Javier knew they were thinking of Kevin too. Kate hesitated.
"Javier, I don't know—"
"I do," he interrupted firmly, looking through the window at his partner. His fingers flexed on the folder in his hands. "Don't worry, Kate. I got this."
For a moment he thought she might argue, but finally she gave a slight nod.
Steeling himself for what had to happen next, Javier stepped back into the side office. Kevin turned around to look at him, anxious and wary. Javier saw the moment his partner read the expression in his eyes—the answer in them—face twisting distressingly with God alone even knew what emotions as he wrestled with the idea in his head. When his face finally stilled, whether Kevin had tamed those emotions or whether they had defeated him was impossible to tell.
Javier sank back into the seat beside his partner, sliding the file in front of him. He watched Kevin's hesitation carefully as the other man reached out and flipped it open. Watched as his partner's breath caught, released slowly in a soft moan as he read.
"Oh God..." Kevin's voice was a broken, wrung out thing, the words barely audible.
Kevin was silent for a moment, staring down at the image staring back or at the letter, eyes occasionally jumping to some detail or another, erratically as though refusing to see the whole. Then he looked away, pushing back from the table to stand. He looked around, almost aimlessly as though looking for something to hang his thoughts on. Dragging a hand through his hair he paced a few slow steps, finally stopping with a shaking breath.
"Kate said that loft where Zimmerman was killed was owned by the Company, right?" Kevin asked suddenly.
His voice was strung with a perilous tension, and the question caught Javier off guard. Fortunately for him, Kevin didn't seem to require his answer, as he quickly plowed on.
"That gives—" Kevin hesitated with a sick swallow. "That gives Reichardt a connection to both the victim and the scene, a clear cut motive... He's—"
He broke off with an odd, breathless laugh that was a little disturbing under the circumstances, and more than a little hysterical.
"I'm the only suspect we've got," Kevin concluded deslolately.
"Don't forget Barbara," Javier argued, standing to face him. Because Javier would let Kevin believe that about himself when he was goddamned dead and buried. "She attacked us. She ran."
"No. No, Javi..." Kevin said, shaking his head. "She attacked me. She ran from me. Because she recognized me, because she thought I'd killed her father—she probably thought she was next! That has to be—"
His voice cracked and he fell silent, running both hands over his face.
"Jesus Christ, Javi," Kevin choked out, hands pushing back to fist themselves lightly in his hair. "What if it's true? What if I am our killer?"
Javier stepped forward, grabbing a gentle hold of Kevin's wrists and pulling them down between them. The move commanded his partner's startled attention, and for a moment Kevin just stared.
"Come on, Kev," Javier said once he had his eyes. "Do you remember killing the guy?"
"Of course not," Kevin allowed, eyes wide and terrified, "but if I don't even know who I am, how can I know anything else? Know it for sure?"
Javier opened his mouth to argue, but Kevin stopped him.
"Javier..." The name that left his partner's lips was a devastated croak. "If I'm— If it's true it means...it means my entire life is a lie. That none of what I remember is real. It means that my family..."
Kevin trailed off, and Javier could feel him shaking through the grip he still held on the other man's wrists.
"My entire family—if they even existed the way I remember them—they've been dead for more than sixty years. I—" Kevin's voice broke, his eyes filled with grief and panic and the beginning of tears. "How? How? Just how the hell am I supposed to live with that?"
Kevin's breathing had already been alarmingly uneven. Now it had become more rapid, but shallow like the air wasn't really entering his lungs. His eyes were locked in hopeless terror on some invisible point past Javier, almost unseeing, and his whole body was shaking. Javier felt him begin to sag, and he slid his hands up Kevin's arms to grip his shoulders and keep him on his feet.
"Don't you flip out on me again. Don't you dare," he said, squeezing Kevin's shoulder's tightly, almost painfully to get through to him. "C'mon, Kev, focus on me. Breathe. Slowly."
Javier had to repeat those words a couple times before his partner managed to respond to them. Eventually Kevin's breathing did slow, though the tremors still occasionally shook his frame. Kevin stood—barely—supporting himself with fingers tangled deeply in the fabric of Javier's sleeves. His head was bowed, face turned down toward the floor between them. Whether his eyes were closed or open it was impossible to tell.
It was past 9 p.m. Most of the activity in the station would have died down to a trickle. Javier wasn't sure when Kate and Castle had left the two of them alone, but he found himself uncomfortably relieved that they had. The way he and his partner stood was almost an embrace, and Javier felt like he was balanced on the edge of a cliff. Over the edge of that cliff Javier saw the future he had spent so much time being afraid of, and it felt like the slightest breath might push it the rest of the way. In light of everything that had been revealed, that future was far from the worst that Javier could imagine, but it was still a fall he just wasn't ready for.
And Javier didn't even know what he wanted anymore, he just knew he didn't want anything if it meant Kevin lost everything else. Despite Kevin's words eight years from now, Javier couldn't imagine how this was something it was possible to fix.
Javier pushed back gently on his partner's shoulders and Kevin stirred slowly, looking up at him. His eyes were rimmed with red, his face streaked with the evidence of the tears he'd managed to shed in silence. He looked completely exhausted, though a cautious uncertainty showed in his eyes and the creases of his forehead—a nervous, fight-or-flight type of anxiety, as if after all the bumps and bruises to his spirit he was only waiting for the next thing that would hurt him.
Whoever or whatever that inevitably turned out to be, it would answer to Javier first.
"Kevin," Javier said. "I want you to trust me. Can you do that?"
Kevin stared at him for a blank moment before he gave a helpless nod.
"Sure," Kevin said, oddly like he wasn't sure what he was agreeing to. After a few breaths he let out a faint, lifeless laugh, shaking his head. His face was sincere when his eyes met Javier's again. "Of course."
"This...this is going to work out," Javier told him, softly, but firmly enough that his partner would have to listen. "I don't know how—not yet—but... This is going to work itself out, okay? We'll get through this. I promise."
Javier saw his partner hesitate, but Kevin managed a slight nod. As if only now realizing the tight grip he still held, Kevin carefully loosened his fingers from the fabric of Javier's shirtsleeves, smoothing the crazed wrinkles lightly before he let his hands fall away. Seconds ticked by and neither of them spoke, turning over into minutes before Kevin broke the silence again.
"Javi..." Kevin asked, his voice holding a tremulous edge of anxiety that cut straight to Javier's gut. "What are they going to do with me?"
PREV: Chapter Eight // MAIN // NEXT: Interlude Five
Author's Note: I had this one finished pretty soon after I posted Chapter 8, but I wanted to pace it out a little, maybe get 10 finished first. That's hard for me to do, I'm just way too impatient... So, 10's not done, and it might be a while, if I work on something for the Halloween Anonathon.
Because a Halloween-themed ficathon is like handing me a license and saying "Here! Go nuts!"
Series: Zeitgeist
Follows: One Giant Leap
Wordcount: 2,059
Summary: Two weeks after Claire Bennet's televised leap from the Ferris wheel, the 12th handles it's first case delving into the strange world of specials. Evidence points the investigation toward a former Company Agent, a man Noah Bennet would swear up and down doesn't exist.
Details: Minimal details due to inflation. Full warnings and details in main post.
PREV: Chapter Eight // MAIN // NEXT: Interlude Five
Chapter Nine: Beyond A Reasonable Doubt
"No matter how cleverly you sneak up on a mirror, your reflection always looks you straight in the eye."
—Angel Heart (1987)
They weren't silent after that—that just wasn't them—though the talk that followed was a strange, meandering thing of sporadic, random starts and sudden stops. Whole exchanges were begun and then abandoned, sentences trailing into nothing when they came up against something too painful or irrational to bear thinking about. They would fall into silence then, but only for a time before their scattered thoughts realigned themselves enough to start again.
"Christ, Javi," Kevin said suddenly, after another long silence. "I pulled a gun on you. What the hell was I thinking?"
It felt almost like an apology, and from the fresh horror on his face, one would think it had just happened. As far as Javier was concerned, the act was easy to forgive. Given the sheer volume of shit his partner had been forced to process in the last few hours, the lateness of it even more so.
"You were scared, and you were confused," Javier excused—weakly, he thought, since neither of those words even began to cover it. "And you didn't actually draw on me, you drew on that shady asshole, Bennet. I was just stupid enough to get in the way."
Kevin managed an anemic smile.
"Yeah, I noticed you're not exactly a fan of his," he observed softly. "Why is—"
They were both startled by a light tapping. Turning in his seat, Javier saw Kate and Castle through the window beside the door. What he saw in their faces...wasn't good. He felt Kevin tense beside him.
"Bro," Javier turned back to his partner, "you gonna be okay if I talk to Kate for a minute?"
Kevin took a slow, deep breath, steadying himself, then nodded tiredly. Javier slapped his arm lightly as he stood, stepping out into the hallway. Kate's eyes were somewhat guarded, and Castle's expression anxious. Javier greeted them with a nod, feeling oddly calm himself. Numb perhaps, resigned.
"The prints and DNA were a match," Kate told him, voice and eyes betraying how at odds she was with the whole idea, "but Lanie also found another hit in the database, a deceased officer named Richard Conway."
She handed him a folder. Opening it with a frown, Javier wasn't surprised at the image staring back at him from the photograph inside. Or, not as surprised as he probably should be. It was still jarring how, in police blues, it was that much easier to see his partner in Reichardt's face.
"It fits with what Kaito Nakamura's letter describes of Konrad's past," Kate continued, handing him a copy of the letter, apparently translated by the man's son while they waited on Lanie's results. "His presence at the riot, and his reluctance to abandon his life, until it ended in a bank robbery in 1968."
Javier skimmed the letter. He vaguely remembered mention of Nakamura and the riots, Kevin repeating the details of Kate's interview with Mrs. Petrelli on their way back to the station. That had been... God, it couldn't even have been four hours ago. It felt like days.
"Even Bennet doesn't believe Kevin was aware of any of this," Kate told him, carefully. "At least not—"
She paused, shaking her head. There was a dark emotion behind her eyes that Javier wasn't sure he wanted to put a name to.
"Anyway, that's... It's not much, but it's something. Right now Bennet is trying to find someone who can help us untangle things. And I know it stinks," Kate told him, softly, "but the captain's taking you off the case."
"Nah, it's cool," Javier managed, dully.
Which was completely inaccurate. Things were just so savagely screwed up at this point that the case was the last thing on Javier's mind. He understood what she wasn't saying, though. Looking over, Javier saw Castle looking in through the window. Looking at Kevin who sat with his back to the glass, tension written in the lines of his shoulders. All of the excitement the writer had felt about the case seemed to have left him completely, and the expression on his face was painfully sympathetic, and serious in a way Javier very rarely saw.
"I don't even know how to feel about any of this," Castle said. "It's just way too strange..."
He turned around, looking at Kate with a lost, helpless light of hurt in his eyes that Javier felt reflected his own feelings very closely.
"What are we going to tell him?" Castle asked her quietly.
Kate's lips pressed in a tight line. She appeared uncertain. Javier took it upon himself to answer the writer's question as definitely as he could.
"We tell him the truth," he told them both simply. "Everything."
There was no anger in it. Javier knew they were thinking of Kevin too. Kate hesitated.
"Javier, I don't know—"
"I do," he interrupted firmly, looking through the window at his partner. His fingers flexed on the folder in his hands. "Don't worry, Kate. I got this."
For a moment he thought she might argue, but finally she gave a slight nod.
Steeling himself for what had to happen next, Javier stepped back into the side office. Kevin turned around to look at him, anxious and wary. Javier saw the moment his partner read the expression in his eyes—the answer in them—face twisting distressingly with God alone even knew what emotions as he wrestled with the idea in his head. When his face finally stilled, whether Kevin had tamed those emotions or whether they had defeated him was impossible to tell.
Javier sank back into the seat beside his partner, sliding the file in front of him. He watched Kevin's hesitation carefully as the other man reached out and flipped it open. Watched as his partner's breath caught, released slowly in a soft moan as he read.
"Oh God..." Kevin's voice was a broken, wrung out thing, the words barely audible.
Kevin was silent for a moment, staring down at the image staring back or at the letter, eyes occasionally jumping to some detail or another, erratically as though refusing to see the whole. Then he looked away, pushing back from the table to stand. He looked around, almost aimlessly as though looking for something to hang his thoughts on. Dragging a hand through his hair he paced a few slow steps, finally stopping with a shaking breath.
"Kate said that loft where Zimmerman was killed was owned by the Company, right?" Kevin asked suddenly.
His voice was strung with a perilous tension, and the question caught Javier off guard. Fortunately for him, Kevin didn't seem to require his answer, as he quickly plowed on.
"That gives—" Kevin hesitated with a sick swallow. "That gives Reichardt a connection to both the victim and the scene, a clear cut motive... He's—"
He broke off with an odd, breathless laugh that was a little disturbing under the circumstances, and more than a little hysterical.
"I'm the only suspect we've got," Kevin concluded deslolately.
"Don't forget Barbara," Javier argued, standing to face him. Because Javier would let Kevin believe that about himself when he was goddamned dead and buried. "She attacked us. She ran."
"No. No, Javi..." Kevin said, shaking his head. "She attacked me. She ran from me. Because she recognized me, because she thought I'd killed her father—she probably thought she was next! That has to be—"
His voice cracked and he fell silent, running both hands over his face.
"Jesus Christ, Javi," Kevin choked out, hands pushing back to fist themselves lightly in his hair. "What if it's true? What if I am our killer?"
Javier stepped forward, grabbing a gentle hold of Kevin's wrists and pulling them down between them. The move commanded his partner's startled attention, and for a moment Kevin just stared.
"Come on, Kev," Javier said once he had his eyes. "Do you remember killing the guy?"
"Of course not," Kevin allowed, eyes wide and terrified, "but if I don't even know who I am, how can I know anything else? Know it for sure?"
Javier opened his mouth to argue, but Kevin stopped him.
"Javier..." The name that left his partner's lips was a devastated croak. "If I'm— If it's true it means...it means my entire life is a lie. That none of what I remember is real. It means that my family..."
Kevin trailed off, and Javier could feel him shaking through the grip he still held on the other man's wrists.
"My entire family—if they even existed the way I remember them—they've been dead for more than sixty years. I—" Kevin's voice broke, his eyes filled with grief and panic and the beginning of tears. "How? How? Just how the hell am I supposed to live with that?"
Kevin's breathing had already been alarmingly uneven. Now it had become more rapid, but shallow like the air wasn't really entering his lungs. His eyes were locked in hopeless terror on some invisible point past Javier, almost unseeing, and his whole body was shaking. Javier felt him begin to sag, and he slid his hands up Kevin's arms to grip his shoulders and keep him on his feet.
"Don't you flip out on me again. Don't you dare," he said, squeezing Kevin's shoulder's tightly, almost painfully to get through to him. "C'mon, Kev, focus on me. Breathe. Slowly."
Javier had to repeat those words a couple times before his partner managed to respond to them. Eventually Kevin's breathing did slow, though the tremors still occasionally shook his frame. Kevin stood—barely—supporting himself with fingers tangled deeply in the fabric of Javier's sleeves. His head was bowed, face turned down toward the floor between them. Whether his eyes were closed or open it was impossible to tell.
It was past 9 p.m. Most of the activity in the station would have died down to a trickle. Javier wasn't sure when Kate and Castle had left the two of them alone, but he found himself uncomfortably relieved that they had. The way he and his partner stood was almost an embrace, and Javier felt like he was balanced on the edge of a cliff. Over the edge of that cliff Javier saw the future he had spent so much time being afraid of, and it felt like the slightest breath might push it the rest of the way. In light of everything that had been revealed, that future was far from the worst that Javier could imagine, but it was still a fall he just wasn't ready for.
And Javier didn't even know what he wanted anymore, he just knew he didn't want anything if it meant Kevin lost everything else. Despite Kevin's words eight years from now, Javier couldn't imagine how this was something it was possible to fix.
Javier pushed back gently on his partner's shoulders and Kevin stirred slowly, looking up at him. His eyes were rimmed with red, his face streaked with the evidence of the tears he'd managed to shed in silence. He looked completely exhausted, though a cautious uncertainty showed in his eyes and the creases of his forehead—a nervous, fight-or-flight type of anxiety, as if after all the bumps and bruises to his spirit he was only waiting for the next thing that would hurt him.
Whoever or whatever that inevitably turned out to be, it would answer to Javier first.
"Kevin," Javier said. "I want you to trust me. Can you do that?"
Kevin stared at him for a blank moment before he gave a helpless nod.
"Sure," Kevin said, oddly like he wasn't sure what he was agreeing to. After a few breaths he let out a faint, lifeless laugh, shaking his head. His face was sincere when his eyes met Javier's again. "Of course."
"This...this is going to work out," Javier told him, softly, but firmly enough that his partner would have to listen. "I don't know how—not yet—but... This is going to work itself out, okay? We'll get through this. I promise."
Javier saw his partner hesitate, but Kevin managed a slight nod. As if only now realizing the tight grip he still held, Kevin carefully loosened his fingers from the fabric of Javier's shirtsleeves, smoothing the crazed wrinkles lightly before he let his hands fall away. Seconds ticked by and neither of them spoke, turning over into minutes before Kevin broke the silence again.
"Javi..." Kevin asked, his voice holding a tremulous edge of anxiety that cut straight to Javier's gut. "What are they going to do with me?"
PREV: Chapter Eight // MAIN // NEXT: Interlude Five
Author's Note: I had this one finished pretty soon after I posted Chapter 8, but I wanted to pace it out a little, maybe get 10 finished first. That's hard for me to do, I'm just way too impatient... So, 10's not done, and it might be a while, if I work on something for the Halloween Anonathon.
Because a Halloween-themed ficathon is like handing me a license and saying "Here! Go nuts!"