[pm] Ha, right? [..] I know [del: I'm scared] I don't know how things will be [del:if] when I wake up. I shouldn't be alone for very long. I, uh, have been wearing an air tag so a friend can come find me when I go down. It's how they found me last time. You should go help people who can actually be helped, babysitting a corpse doesn't use your skills appropriately
[pm] So did this person that gave you the heads up give any other details by chance? Like was this a "Btw this is what's happening in town and we know this and because we know this we can predict when its going to happen and here's how you can prepare" kinda vibe or more like a "welp this is gonna happen good luck" sorta vibe? I do have a preference for the record.
Okay... I hate admitting that you make sense here because I'd much rather stick by you, but I get your point. And at least you have someone. Maybe you should give them my info. Just in case something is different or goes wrong. I can be there quick.
TIMING: 1982-ish
LOCATION: The University of Oxford, England
PARTIES: Siobhan (@banisheed) & Oliver (known as Atticus at the time) (@oliver--fox)
SUMMARY: Atticus gets accepted into the doctoral program, Siobhan is not happy. She's especially not happy about having been "broken-up" with.
CONTENT WARNING: None!
It all led back to Atticus Branch and his stupid face and his stupid name. His face: horribly symmetrical, horribly pretty, Siobhan hated to admit that it was his eyelashes that she liked best. Long, the flutter of them falling over eyes—the sort of thing you could expect to notice if you spent a lot of time looking into them. Which Siobhan did. In argument, of course. His smug, stupid smile. And the name! Fates, the idiotic name. Atticus Branch: there was no way that was the name he was born with, but whatever stupid tree pun the other fae had come out of the bark with, he wouldn’t tell her. Atticus Branch was the sort of fae that Siobhan despised. One that was not at all like her and yet, had everything she didn’t. While she curled the humans to her charm, he did nothing of the sort. While she bound them to do her tiresome school work, it seemed he did his own. And now, had taken something that should have been hers.
She stormed across campus, the spring sun bright above her as the grass cowered to her charge. She found Atticus with ease, having memorized his routine locations. For arguments, of course. He sat amongst nature, effortless, like a typical fae—not at all like Siobhan, who enjoyed with a hedonistic thrill the entrapings of human life. “Fucking explain this,” she said, shoving the paper into his face. Oxford would like to congratulate Atticus Branch on his continued pursuit for…, it read; a bunch of nonsense to dress the fact. “The doctoral program,” she spat. “You!” She shoved the paper into his face again, as if it might portray the anger burning through her body. “You conniving—” While Atticus owed her nothing, Siobhan was of the traditional belief that she was entitled to everything, and certainly that a fellow fae would never undercut her like this.
—
With the amount of time Atticus spent within the walls of Oxford, he found that blocking out time to be outside, to feel the grass beneath him and the wind on his face, to be important. He was partial to the Wellingtonias that were littered around the area, but any could do in a pinch. There weren’t any Dusk Trees around, unfortunately. The soil wasn’t exactly what he needed, but he also had a feeling Mr.Wilkers, the groundskeeper, would throw a fit if a new random tree started growing. Atticus was leaning against one of the trees, flipping through a draft of one of his final papers, red pen held between his teeth like the cigarette he wanted but refused to smoke anywhere that could lead to accidental fires. His Walkman lay next to him, cycling through a cassette that his roommate, Joey, had given to him. At the pulsation in his chest, Atticus glanced up to spot the only other fae he had found on campus.
It had been a bit of a shock to run into Siobhan in the first few weeks of his graduate program at Oxford. She had been one of the first fae that he had run into since coming back to Europe, and their differences had helped to create a solid academic rivalry between the two. Atticus loved learning and thus couldn’t help but be slightly disappointed in the fact that Siobhan leaned on her abilities to have others do her work for her. “Hello to you too.” Atticus said, taking his headphones off, allowing notes of I Will Survive to play between them before he reached down to hit stop as he moved his focus onto the paper that she was thrusting at him. “Oh! They finally posted the department's congratulations on the bulletin board, hm?” He had found out about his acceptance a few weeks ago, receiving a large envelope through the post with information about his stipend and the like. Atticus had heard that there would be a list of all the doctoral recipients for the department, but as the school year neared the end, he had stopped paying as much attention to the bulletin board.
Atticus blinked at the others' poorly contained rage. “I applied for the program?” He tilted his head to the side slightly, putting his papers down and capping his pen. He had a feeling this wouldn’t be a quick conversation. “Sammy was finally graduating, which meant a new spot was opening under Dr.Parse. I told you I was planning to apply, didn’t I?” Atticus frowned before his eyes widened a fraction. “Did you end up applying for it too?” She had said she was going to, but Atticus hadn’t thought she would have been able to get through the whole application. It was a tedious process, and one thing he had learned over the last two years was that Siobhan didn’t like tedious things. That didn’t stop Atticus from mentally adding a tally to his side of his wins vs losses to the other, making it so he had again pulled ahead. “I wouldn’t say I did anything conniving, just that plain-old hard work” Atticus added with a grin.
—
Hard work, he had tossed out so simply. Plain old. Siobhan could choke his smooth, long neck. She could hear the barb hidden under the gentle curl of his voice: she hadn’t done work. Of course she hadn’t, she never did. And, anyway, even if she had, it wouldn’t have been good enough. Not like his work, his plain-old hard work. Atticus Branch (the name was still stupid) who seemed to love learning, loved to prance (he didn’t really prance) with the humans and roll in their muck. Metaphorically—Fates, she could smell his horrid cologne from here, soft lavender and citrus notes. When she got close to him (for the sake of argument) she could pick out the faint, earthy musk of dirt as if the grains were between her fingers, under her nails, clumping at the back of her throat. She hated everything about him.
Siobhan was of the traditional fae variety: why do anything yourself when you could force a sobbing human to do it for you? Shunned as she was—a temporary predicament, any day now she would be welcomed home and forget every curve of Atticus’s face—she was still a fae. And despite Atticus’s foolish desires to play educational pretend, he was still a fae too. Siobhan wouldn’t be fooled by the tilt of his head, the way the soft strands of his hair fell to one side, or the swell of his pink lips angling into a grin. “Yes, I applied, you imbecilic shrub. I—” Siobhan stopped herself. Yes, she did apply. Yes, she had wanted it—not for any task, but for herself. Dr. Siobhan Dolan…didn’t it have an attractive ring to it? Didn’t it make her sound dignified? Worthy of something? She had wanted it, that was her first mistake.
Siobhan dropped her hand but the fury still burned red on her face, prickling her cheeks. “You’re saying my hard work is lesser than yours then?” she sneered. “What trickery did you employ, hm? A bind? A promise? Bat your long—Fates, why are your eyelashes so lush?” She shook her head. Focus. “You’re a fae, you ought to act like it, Twig.”
—
“Huh, interesting.” Atticus hummed quietly at her admission. Siobhan barely attended class as it was; why on earth would she go for something that would be even harder than the graduate program? Even if she didn’t intend to complete any of the work that would be required, she would still need to find other people to do it for her. The higher you went, the harder it was to find people who could complete the work to the required level. Atticus wondered if this would be a blessing in disguise for her in the end.
He held his hands up in surrender as she continued on her rant, “No, but I know I did the work. Did you?” Atticus asked, sitting up slightly so his back was no longer resting on the tree. He laughed, shaking his head when she demanded to know what kind of trickery he had employed. “None! You know I’ve never been very good at binds and all that jazz.” He said with a shrug. He had never been all that interested in doing it in the first place. He technically knew how to do one, but that was more for an absolute emergency. Atticus wouldn’t even be able to tell her the last time he had even attempted one. He opened his mouth to add something, but raised an eyebrow at the hidden compliment. “All natural.” Atticus grinned slyly at the other while he fluttered his eyes at the other.
Atticus raised an eyebrow at her insult, “Aw, a pet name? I’m touched Si.” He placed a hand over his chest. Atticus’s eyes shifted to the area around them, one that was luckily empty of any passerbys. “And how should I be acting, hm?” He asked, turning his attention back towards her. “What’s so bad about what I’m doing currently?”
—
“Si.” Siobhan repeated, voice rattling up in pitch. “Si?” She was shrill now, red in the face. “Si?” Her fists shook at her sides but her anger kept pinging off of his beauty. Why did his face have to be so symmetrical? Couldn’t find a valley to lay an insult in at all. “You couldn’t think of a proper nickname? You just took the front part of my name! You— You twig! You shrub! You smooth-faced, symmetrical weed!” She huffed. “And at least name name isn’t a half-rate pun. Imagine if I had been named Bone O’Skeleton. You ought to be embarrassed about calling yourself Branch.”
He continued to flutter his long, infuriating eyelashes. She needed to calm down, Atticus appeared to be feasting off of her frustration. "Not very good or not very interested?" she countered. She plopped down beside him on the grass. "You think you're better than me, don't you?" Her lips curled. That was what all this was about, wasn't it? She'd wanted something, and he had told her she wasn't good enough to want it, to get it. Of course, one fae thinking they were better than another fae was standard fae behaviour, but Siobhan was a little sensitive at the moment. Temporarily sensitive; any day now, she'd saunter back home. And wouldn't it be all the better if she could go back to Saol Eile with a new title? Dr. Siobhan Dolan, didn't it sound so nice?
Her fist curled in the grass, pulling a few strands up from the earth. "Pay reverence to your fellow fae," she said through clenched teeth. "Stop acting like human society is anything worth participating in. 'All natural'? Doesn't it disgust you to play in their games? You and your"—Siobhan jerked her finger towards his headphones—"Walkman."
—
Atticus blinked, biting the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling. Was he riling her up for fun? A little. In his defense, she made it too easy. “It’s part of your name, how is that not a nickname?” His eyebrow raised, allowing his lips to turn upwards as she rattled off a list of insults. “Oh, hey, you called me perfectly symmetrical that time! That’s nice of you.” He laughed. “Unfortunately, the rest of those insults don’t really land since they all surround height, and I’m not particularly short.” Atticus added with a shrug. “Would you rather your nickname be Skelly?” He asked, jumping on the name she had given out “Doesn’t roll off the tongue as nicely as Si, though.” He tapped his chin thoughtfully. “If you want to blame someone for my name, blame the officer who asked for my information at immigration. It’s his fault that he had a painting of a bird on a branch on his wall. But why would I be ashamed of it? If anything, I think it’s funny.”
He hummed quietly as she sat down next to him. “A bit of both.” Atticus replied as he ran a hand through his hair before tilting his head to the side. “Do I think I’m better than you? No.” He shifted so his ankles were crossed in front of him. “Do I think I’m smarter than you? Yeah, probably. But intelligence isn’t everything.” Atticus said with a small smile. “Your abilities of trickery far exceed mine afterall.” He couldn’t imagine the concentration it took to build binds throughout the school, to have multiple people under her control at any one time.
Atticus’ smile dropped, replaced by a slight frown. “Why wouldn’t I participate in it?” He asked, confusion apparent in his tone. “Staying isolated sounds pretty dreadful, no? Isn’t that why you’re also here on campus?” Atticus challenged, eyes following hers to his walkman. “We are going to be around for hundreds of years; I don’t really want to spend all that time in silence. Plus, these things-” Atticus picks up the walkman “make it easy to have it while walking around, which can be nice.” He added with a roll of his eyes. Reaching into his jacket pocket, Atticus brought out a seed. His eyes glowed gold for a moment, and the seed transformed into a bright red rose. It was a party trick that Atticus liked to partake in when everyone at a party was at the point of being drunk enough that they’d believe his stories of a magic trick. Atticus held it out to Siobhan. “Take a second to smell the roses, and maybe you’ll remember why this whole thing can be kinda fun.”
—
“Yes,” she said. “I would rather be Skelly.” But that was hardly the point. Still, it was worth saying, lest he think up some other atrocious name. She hated his nonchalance almost as much as she hated how pretty he was.
And then there was the rest of it. Siobhan couldn’t hold it; his words hit her ears and the ringing started in an instant, like her blood had been set to boil. She took the rose, jamming her finger into a thorn, delighting in the sting of pain and the trickle of her blood down her palm. Then she took that bloody palm and laid it over the petals. “Smarter than me,” she repeated, her voice was frosted over; an anger so hot it turned glacial. “Staying isolated… is that what you think I do?” Her fingers closed over the flower. “‘Fun?’ Was I ‘fun’ for you?” She crushed the flower, blood-stained petals floating down between them. “Was it fun when you left me?”
She’d avoided saying it. She’d avoided thinking it. But it was the thorn between them: once upon a time—so long ago it seemed—they’d slept together. And then again. And again. And then, no more. It seemed to her to happen like a coin flip; she was familiar with his body, and then she wasn’t. He was hers, and then he wasn’t. Siobhan didn’t care for Atticus in that sense, but when things were hers she expected them to stay that way. But even then, it wasn’t so much being robbed that bothered her, but that he’d done it at all. Why? Was she so detestable? Would he take a human over her? Was she that lowly? Her back stung and she felt the absence of her wings throb against her nerves. Why was she never good enough?
With a growl, Siobhan threw the rose aside and lunged at him, tackling him to the grass. She clutched the front of his shirt in her fists, looking down at him. “I don’t want to smell the roses. I want what I’m owed! Respect!” She pressed her nose against his. “You wouldn’t understand. You move through life like a fucking leaf; all this way and then that. Like you don’t have a care at all. Don’t you understand the sort of things that you do? The effect that you have? The marks you leave?” She leaned down and her breath coiled over his face, hot and insistent. “Take some fucking responsibility for once, twig.”
—
“Alright, Skelly it is then.” Atticus used two of his fingers to give her a salute of sorts, though his eyes widened when she grabbed the flower with her full hand. His eyes tracked the blood that trickled down her palm. His own hands, previously resting by his side, face down in the grass, curled up into fists; fighting the urge to reach out and pluck the rose from her hand; to lead her to somewhere where the blood could be washed away, and the cuts could be cleaned and covered. “You wouldn’t be here if you were planning to stay isolated.” Atticus states, tone even. He knew of fae who were completely removed from any interaction with mortals; content to live within their aos sí and allow the world to change around them but wary of ever leaving their safe little circle. It always made him feel bad for them. Sure, being around humans had its downsides, but there were so many upsides that he could never imagine hiding away from them.
At Siobhan’s accusing tone, Atticus sighed deeply and shook his head. “We were never together, so I didn’t leave you.” Their tension, something born out of their differences, had fueled a sexual relationship that had left both of them breathless. The flip from loud arguments in the library to secret make-outs in the janitor's closets; how test scores became a form of foreplay, and how they would each try to trip the other up during presentations with deliberate eye-fucking. Being with a fae was always a different experience for Atticus; perhaps rooted in the fact that just being around each other made it so the other knew a deep secret. The hook-ups had been fun, even exciting at times, but Atticus had never seen them as something that would lead to an actual relationship.
Perhaps part of it came from the fact that they were both fae. How, technically, they could have a long-term relationship that wouldn’t be marred by the progression of time. However, Atticus didn’t think he wanted one with Siobhan. She leaned far further into the fae world, while Atticus leaned further into the human one. It had always been a simple hook-up for him, and he had figured she had felt the same until she had practically screamed at him outside a club after he had made out with someone else in front of her. That had been his clue that perhaps he needed to end things sooner than he had expected.
There’s a moment, just before she ends up on top of him, in the second between launching herself and landing, that Atticus has the opportunity to stop her. He could strike her in the stomach, or just roll out of the way, or even send up a trunk of a tree from a seed he can feel hidden under the surface of the grass. However, he allows himself to be taken. Partly because he doesn’t want to start an actual fight with her, and partly because he doesn’t mind being touched by her. He’s not afraid that she’ll actually harm. Atticus knows how to read her movements at this point.
“I respect you, Skelly.” Atticus says softly, bringing his hand up to move a piece of her hair out of her face and behind her ear. At her accusation, he hummed quietly, “That’s part of being a fae, no? To float from one life to the next?” Surely she must have experienced this kind of situation before, right? Atticus doesn’t believe that he could truly be this special to her. “I’m sorry that you had a different idea of what we were doing, and I’m sorry if I hurt you.” Atticus says honestly. A thought entered his mind then, and a faint smile tugs at his lips. “You’re leaving after graduation, right?” He was pretty sure he had heard her loudly talk about that with someone recently, having turned at the sound of her voice only to be met with an icy glare. “If you want…closure, we could have one last night together? A proper goodbye?”
—
Siobhan was not used to tenderness. When Atticus touched her, every scar on her body burned. She was used to anger, to cold precision, to reverence twisted almost to the shape of affection, but not to tenderness. He was a beautiful man, it was the first thing she’d noticed about him, and the observation that possessed her mind every time she looked at him. She could hate him all she wanted—and she was very sure that she hated him—but she couldn’t stop thinking about how pretty he was. How could he blame her for wanting to possess that beauty when her own had been cut out from her? The differences between them were a canyon; Siobhan would have an easier time relating to a human than to this smug arsehole.
But Atticus liked fun, and Siobhan would chew like a trapped rat for any glimpse of the other side—out of her own body. He might float from one life to the next and certainly there was nothing so finely hinged as the fluttering wings of a butterfly—Atticus, then, like both the butterfly and the gale it travels on. To settle and begin his life cycle again: chrysalis and all. Siobhan, then, imprisoned forever in suspended metamorphosis—never to change, never to emerge, never to curl back into the innocent shape of a nymph. Unless she could return home. And she would. Eventually. Everything would be fixed when she returned home to her wings and her family.
Siobhan had just her one life, unable to be reinvented. She was not like Atticus. “Not a different idea,” Siobhan said softly. Then, remembering she needed to be mad at him, she pressed her mouth harshly to his. She raked her teeth against the soft curves of his lips. “Fine,” she said roughly. “Fine. One last night, twig. And then I am forgetting your face, and everything about you.” She grinned. “But I am going to make you pay for robbing the spot from me.” Which of course meant the sex would be as it tended to be between them: like someone tipped over a box of burning dynamite into their chasm of differences. Siobhan was not used to tenderness and she had no plans to be tender to Atticus.
She was absolutely sure that she hated him and his pretty, pretty face.
TIMING: Current
LOCATION: The ME's Office
PARTIES: Oliver and Regan
SUMMARY: Ollie approached Regan online to ask about what was supposed to be his mother's autopsy file. Regan agreed they should meet to discuss it. But as they delve into the findings, things only get stranger, and the answers may lie in the lake instead of the morgue's file cabinets.
CONTENT: Parental death
He’d been early. Which was a mistake, because now, now Ollie had to sit in the waiting room of a morgue. (Which was a ninth grade attempt at metaphor if he’d ever heard one. Which he had.) And pretend not to notice Marcy, the secretary, absolutely and unabashedly eyeballing him in some sort of way. As if he might keel over himself, and, by doing so, impose even more on her no doubt very difficult day. He should have brought coffee. But then he’d have to bring coffee for Dr. Kavanagh. Only he hadn’t thought to ask what she’d like, and to check last minute would seem unprepared, and he was already so, so unprepared, despite the notebook and pen and questions currently tucked tight against his side as he sat, and sat, and sat.
Not for that long. It wasn’t. Just felt that way. At precisely seven, those doors down the hall swung open. Ollie sat taller - regretted it, immediately, as his back twinged - and stood, head cocked, notebook and pen hanging in his much-battered, mid-”renovation” fingers. Until he shuffled his notes to the other side, quickly, politely, to offer a handshake to… who he’d presume was the medical examiner.
“Dr. Kavanagh? Hi, hello. Good morning.” Ollie managed a parent-teacher night sort of smile. That tired. Maybe more. “Thank you. Again. For your time. I hope I won’t be keeping you too long.” He really, really did.
Deirdre Eileen O'Rourke’s file was saturated with the name of another woman: Willa O'Rourke. The autopsy report was focused entirely on the decedent, of course, but Willa had left a trail of communications with the Medical Examiner’s Office, and was one of those next of kin who Regan would diplomatically refer to as “highly involved”. She was grateful she hadn’t personally dealt with the woman, though it looked like Dr. Green had not done so adeptly, letting her walk all over him. That didn’t mean there was anything wrong with the findings. Family dynamics could be more rotten than cadavers, and they could taint one’s grief. She had yet to determine whether Oliver had a true basis for his concerns.
Whatever the case, though, this would be interesting. Marcy had texted her saying an anxious man was waiting for her in the lobby, looking like he was lost in a grocery store. Looking at Oliver, Regan agreed with that assessment. She stared at his hand for a moment, and decided, after obvious deliberation, to give it a quick, polite shake. “Yes, good morning. Oliver O’Rourke, correct? You may come with me.” She started walking toward the door and did not look back to see if she was being followed. When she carded them through, she expected him to be behind her. “I have your mother’s file,” she said, pushing into her office. She waved him toward the chairs. “Seeing as you are next of kin, you may have access to the whole thing. I will hand it to you. But…” She frowned, a hint of actual sympathy crossing her face for a moment, before vanishing back to where it had crawled out from. “It may disturb you. Not the findings, in particular. The descriptions, and especially the photos.” She picked the file up, offering it, but hesitantly. “If you prefer I go through it with you, I will. Or you can read it and ask questions as you go. Your choice. But I take no responsibility for your reaction.”
He’d nodded, and an incredibly pale and unsettlingly cool hand had snaked out to meet his - lightly freckled, scratched, and scraped from all that work on the roof, and in the garden, and, and, and. (Could only moisturize so much of that away.) It was a very precise shake, Ollie would’ve said. Like her timing. Her overall everything. A very measured sort of person. It was a spectacularly good thing that she hadn’t dealt with Willa; his grandmother, with her dash-of-this and fashionably-late ways, would almost certainly have driven Dr. Kavanagh not just up the wall, but straight through the ceiling tiles. And out the other side, perhaps.
But Ollie simply kept pace, trailing after Dr. Kavanagh. This place only got colder, it seemed, and by the time he’d taken a seat across from her, he was very much regretting coming to the morgue in his shirtsleeves. This should be quick, though. Shouldn’t it? He did hesitate, though, as the actual folder appeared. Descriptions. Photos. His stomach - already coiled in on itself, for… a while - took another twist. Even an accident, or an accidental manner of death, as Dr. Kavanagh had emphasized, could be disturbing. Obviously. They hadn’t visited since… New Year’s? Just before. As awful as it was, his last picture of her had to be better than whatever was waiting in that file; it was unfair to her, to the both of them, but familiar. Not her fluttering around the kitchen with him, or delighted to show off her newest finds for the Museum - lovely candlestick holders she was tempted to keep, as if they needed more. (Sitting on the kitchen table, now. Not gone to the Museum, and not kept, either, not really. Seeing as it was all going.) No. The image stuck in his head, horribly, was the usual frenetic, circular not-talk they had every time he left town: roiling with that directionless dread, her eyes fearfully bright, her fidgeting hands laced tight enough together to stop her reaching.
Like his were, now. Ollie unwove his fingers, schooled his reaction. “Oh, of course not,” he half-laughed, or something like that. And swallowed, hard, jaw tight. “I would, yes, prefer you - please.”
Though part of Regan always thought those who couldn’t stomach what she did were weak-willed, it also took an impressive amount of self-awareness to know when to be deferential. When to not look. As the years stretched on, she was often leaning more toward it being better not to know certain things. Allow humans to be stupid and blissful in their ignorance like she herself could no longer be. But Oliver had lived ignorance for months and was deciding, now, that it was not so blissful. So Regan would oblige.
“Alright, then,” She said, pulling the report back closer to herself. It was probably the better call for Oliver’s mental state, though she made no indication that she was relieved by the decision. Regan began promptly. “Deirdre O’Rourke was a fifty-three year old woman. Cause of death was acute myocardial infarction, due to atherosclerotic coronary artery disease, in the context of essential hypertension. Manner of death was ‘natural’.” She turned the page. The death certificate was not especially interesting. Quite vanilla. “She ended up a patient here because she died in her home.” Regan explained, “We see many natural deaths. An autopsy does not mean there was any wrongdoing or that the death was unusual in nature. Often, it simply means someone died while not under the care of a physician or in the presence of others.” She looked thoughtfully at the report and then offered Oliver a glance. “This is a quick cause of death, in case you were wondering.” Regan didn’t even need to lie through her teeth and suffer the stomachache.
But they were here to look for inconsistencies, weren’t they? “Any history of cardiovascular disease in your family?” Regan asked, though an affirmative answer wouldn’t mean much. Common things were common. She turned her attention back to the report and continued. “Identity was confirmed via DNA analysis.” That was pretty good. Biological forms of identification were always preferable than just relying on next of kin. What would have been better was two forms of confirmation, like using dentistry or prosthetics. But that was not always feasible. “A toothbrush, apparently.” That was less good. Regan skimmed to other details, things Oliver may be able to verify. Or not. “No surgical implants, unfortunately, but a scar from a cesarean section. No occupational stigmata. A large number of moles on the upper arms, benign.” She paused, looking up from the file. Was Oliver handling all of this fine so far? More importantly… “Does any of that interest you?”
And there they went. Into the depths of a rather slim stack of papers, which was only what the story of this particular loss ought to be. Ollie had unfolded that notebook, laid it atop one of his knees, pen loosely in hand. As if there’d be anything to write down. Anything out of the ordinary. It’d give his fidgety fingers something vaguely useful to do, at least.
The pen tapped to the paper, but didn’t move, as Dr. Kavanagh recited the cause of death. An infarction; he’d watched enough Grey’s Anatomy reruns to dust off what that meant. Just a heart attack. Related to some sort of heart disease, which… he’d heard nothing about. Not the hypertension, either. Would she - no. She’d have said. Probably couldn’t have helped herself, fretting down the line on one of those calls, like she’d spun out that time she had to redo that blood panel because of “irregularities” that just couldn’t be a simple mistake, on the hospital’s part, obviously - anyway. People died of heart attacks. His mom had died, naturally, quickly, of a heart attack. His own, on the defense for months, sunk a little lower in his chest.
An accident, Willa had said, and, ridiculously, horribly, an image of something almost as awful as the “truth” she’d eventually told him had churned to mind: shattering, crushing, suffering. But people died naturally and quickly of heart attacks, at home. And his mother had been that lucky, at least. Hearing it, in the medical examiner’s perfectly even tones, was… well, the sensation wasn’t relief, exactly. Not only that, at least. It just - ached. A little. Less than it should and more than he’d expected, all at once. Like the smack of a not-too-full file folder, maybe, against a deep, still-purple bruise.
Ollie shook his head, slightly, when she asked about history. There wasn’t any; none of the O’Rourkes he’d ever heard of, and he’d heard of plenty. All that family he’d never got to meet, suffocated in mineshafts, lungs failing, cars skidded off the road, entirely-average-for-Wicked’s-Rest disappearances, and so on. Really, his mom was sounding like the least remarkable of all of them.
Not that this was sounding like his mom, anymore. At all. Ollie had started to stare, at some point, head tilting, that pen dragging a dark, directionless line into the note paper. He blinked. Did it interest him? “No, it’s - I mean, yes, but…” Because. Because, he lifted the pen off the page, clenched tight. “It’s wrong? She never had a c-section, for one thing, and - occupational stigmata, that’s…” so grim, if it meant what he was imagining. He’d looked to his own hands, slivered and jammed and paint-thinnered and over-washed, every lotion he’d ever tried in a losing battle with the art room. “Her hands were always a mess,” he began, quietly. “She worked at the museum, in conservation. Couldn’t stand gloves when she was fixing up anything too small. Too delicate. Which, well, that was most of the time, really...” Made her too clumsy for them, she’d insisted. All because of that one time, when she’d dropped a porcelain… not-bird, a Gripwing, she’d supposed, and it’d shattered entirely. She hadn’t ever forgiven herself, had she? Probably not. But. None of that was relevant, was it? Had to be efficient. Move right along, towards the next step, the next office, the next appointment. Towards that closure she’d hoped to give him. Even if it hurt.
It did. He could feel it, hurting, in the tight clench of his jaw.
“And she had freckles,” Ollie forced out, abruptly refocusing on the thing, the awful thing, at hand. On the details of it. All of the wrong, wrong details. “Like -” him. Dr. Kavanagh could see. No need to waste time pointing out the obvious, not when there was this to deal with. Quickly. Naturally. He could feel his heart, again; stuttering, now, slinking up the walls of his chest. “It’s wrong,” he insisted, entirely. “So, what, ah - what do I do, about that? Exactly. Please.” Please.
Regan didn’t have time to process her dad’s death before she had been whisked away by her grandmother. But even so, she had seen and understood just about every possible reaction to such a loss through next of kin. Disbelief, sorrow, rage. Faces flicked through each emotion in a matter of seconds sometimes and despite Regan being practically allergic to emotions, she had gotten pretty good at predicting just where people would land. Oliver had quickly moved from a deep despair to a curious disbelief. One Regan didn’t encounter very often. This wasn’t the type of denial that came with that nagging knowledge that behind it all, when everything was peeled away, reality was waiting to be confronted. This was different. He was suspicious. Not of her, Regan thought, but of something she’d said. And, indeed, he seemed to have good reason.
She listened, head cocked as she tried to wrap her mind around how any of this could have been mistaken on either side. She looked at the photo of the c-section scar. There was no doubt about what it was. There were internal photos, too. And the decedent’s hands were clean, manicured; signs of an easy life free of manual labor. “Very few freckles,” Regan mumbled, flipping through more photos. But it was unnecessary to keep going. She had already made up her mind.
She held the file stiffly in her hands and looked up from it, meeting Oliver’s eyes. She wasn’t sure what he had been expecting to uncover here, but it was not this. Regan sighed, which was about the best display of sympathy she could provide, though inside her chest, something ached for Oliver. Regan wrote it off as indigestion.
“Well, normally we would exhume the decedent to investigate further. Except… in this case, she was cremated.” Mistaken identification was a black mark against any medical examiner’s office – among the upper echelons of the most disgraceful mistakes such an esteemed entity could make. Despite that, it happened sometimes. Usually when decedents were too disfigured to visually identify with ease and there were no other, better indications that could be used. This was unique in that sense: they had done DNA testing. Was Oliver positive? Regan knew she couldn’t avoid showing him photos now. Perhaps he’d be more eager to view them if he held conviction that the woman in them would not be his mother.
She held the photos up, sparing him the ones of the woman’s organs. He wouldn’t be able to identify one heart from another anyway. “You should know that visual identification is relatively unreliable. People look different after they die. But if you say that this woman looks nothing like your mother – really nothing like her – I will believe you.” And that, of course, led the two of them down a trail of other questions, more difficult ones. Regan knew that as much as seeing a deceased loved one pained next of kin, that closure meant something. She was upending that for Oliver. “Dr. Green, the pathologist who did this autopsy, no longer works here. We cannot ask him anything about this autopsy.” That was kind of true – he had actually gone missing a couple of months after Regan started, but depending on how familiar Oliver was with Wicked’s Rest, he might even assume that. “There are two problems here. More, I suppose, from a legal perspective.” Like who was responsible for this. Regan had her own suspicions. “We need to find your mother, and we need to figure out just who this is.”
Exhume. A shiver crept up Ollie’s spine, but not far, at least. After all, awful as the idea was, quick as his imagination might be to unbury a barely-weathered coffin for him, nowhere-near-full of his mom, her nervous, worn hands gone bonier than ever, clutched tight in some state of lately-embalmed rot… well, neither of the stories he’d been handed had ever involved the option.
There was no grave, in the first one. When Deirde had died in an accident, she’d been cremated, too. So he’d had nowhere to go, to find her. Except that old house, in the way that old houses seemed to hold onto the echoes of their people: her rare laugh, the whistle of that stovetop kettle for tea, even her hardly-there footsteps, like she’d hate to do the floorboards any discomfort.
In the second? There was only the water.
He had those photographs in hand before he properly realized he’d even stretched out to take them. Before he could think his way into knots, coiling away from this. Ollie slid one aside, and another, eyes darting over the cold, morgue-lit details. Of an absolute stranger.
(The same sort of silhouette, maybe, the artist in him might’ve remarked; the same height, roughly the same weight, or close enough, presumably, and a smoker, too, with some familiar lines on her face. For the sake of matching whatever at-a-glance features Dr. Green might spy on any records he’d bothered to, well, glance at. He’d guess.)
But Ollie didn’t say any of that. He simply shook his head, again. Well, not simply. He was moving through rust, every joint stiff with it by the time he handed the thin pile back. As if he’d needed them all to know. Dr. Kavanagh clearly appreciated thoroughness, though. And just despised the lack of it. That might have been a flicker of comforting, if she hadn’t started to consider a legal perspective. Any legal perspective at all. His head tilted, like the medical examiner’s. Maybe too much? He blinked, and straightened, over-corrected the other way. Then looked down, at his somewhat scrawled-over notebook, the inky smudges gathering on his fingers. The pen tapped, counting out how far past way too long this probably sliver-sized pause felt. There was nothing else for it, was there? Nothing but wasting time, and more lies of his own to stumble through, more doubtful, more dangerous, by the minute.
“Please, believe me…” Ollie began, because that sounded believable, God. Seemed polite, at least. The pen tapped. “... when I say that I have no idea, at all, about - her.” Those photos got a jittery gesture. “I’m very sorry, for wasting your time. I didn’t think I would be, it should’ve…” Made sense. A different, more sensible sense. Too bad. That pen was clenched tight in his hand, curled off the paper. “I haven’t been exactly honest with you. I don’t know where she is. But I was told.” There was a difference, between knowing and being told. Especially here, when he knew so many reasons to doubt what Willa had been telling him. Very reasonable reasons. “I just, I wasn’t sure what to think?” He almost laughed, but the sound did some dying of its own, curling up quiet someplace high and sore in his chest. “My grandmother, she’s always had a way for, ah - making more of a story out of something.” It was her job, really. To look at the Flat and the freakishness of Wicked’s Rest and find something worth embroidering. “And she was old. And sick. And mourning. She keened, she had me take her to Hanging Rock, to… do that.” Alone. The way she’d looked at him, sadder than he’d ever seen her as he hung back, stayed silent, left some windblown space gaping between them. Just looked at him, like he should be joining in. Like he should know how. Willa never needed to know how to do anything.
Cover up a murder, for instance.
“She - the body might be in Silver Lake,” he rasped, suddenly. Far from sure that any of this had been a good idea, and unable to put it so bluntly as his mom, his mom might’ve been dumped in a lake. “Somewhere.” Or not. Then - Jesus. Best not to borrow any trouble. He was already in enough, just about writhing in the medical examiner’s office.
“You did not waste my time. I wouldn’t be a very good medical examiner if I wasn’t willing to discuss a case with next of kin.” But there was something else, wasn’t there? Some other reason why Oliver seemed to think he had something wrong. And there it was: he had withheld information. He looked too jumpy, too much like he might jump out of his skin like the degloved hands of her decedents, for Regan to be irritated. This was a curiosity more than anything else. A strange case about to get stranger. She listened with rapt attention, her eyes focused and intense while Oliver’s darted around the room like a frightened school of fish.
That was not information someone just conjectured. But even so, Oliver seemed uncertain. Or maybe the uncertainty was coming from the fact he was telling her at all. That he had reserved this information up until now, kept it locked up inside where even he might not have believed it.
“It sounds like we’re going to the lake.” Though Regan spoke with conviction, she was wavering. There were a number of logistical issues. First being how they would extract the body, if they found it (which, if it was there to be found, she would find it). The diving equipment, the boat, the machinery needed. Then there was the matter of her office and the police. Someone needed to be informed of this, but was it premature? All she had to go on was the word of a man who claimed this autopsy could not have been for his mother. She was inclined to believe him, because of the nature of the inconsistencies. However, next of kin made claims like that all the time.
“But…” Regan started. He knew there would be a but, surely. “You’re going to need to be honest with me, tell me everything you know. And we’re going to… scope out the lake, first, before we launch a full investigation.” Regan had a sinking feeling the lake held multiple bodies. “Let’s start with, why do you think she’s in the lake? Why believe your grandmother about this, after everything you’ve told me about her? And why is her name all over this file if she knows – why would she lie, orchestrate this?” Because that would need to be the case, would it not? If his grandmother knew the truth, then had interfaced with the Office of Medical Examiner about another decedent entirely, it was a casket full of lies. The word keen percolated through her mind. No, not a banshee. Right? “In my experience, there is only one reason someone would do something like this. And I think you know what that is.”
No, she wouldn’t be; still. What kind of a case even was this? What the hell had Willa done? There was a whole other body involved, now, a person who was missing from someone and somewhere, and… they were going to the lake. Ollie wasn’t spinning that ring on his thumb so much as ticking it back and forth, a quick quarter-turn, fast as the patter of his heartbeat.
(If anyone in his family - nevermind his mom - had actually died of a heart attack, he might’ve been worried. More worried.)
The thin, thankful smile he’d put together for Dr. Kavanagh’s kindish words faded fast at that but. Did he need to be entirely honest? Tell her everything? No; no, absolutely not. That’d be an even bigger mistake than all of this, so far. He was already shaking his head, fast. “Willa didn’t kill her. If you’re - no. Whatever went on, it wasn’t that.” Something a medical examiner had definitely never heard anyone be wrong about, before. “She - what she said, was -” he tried, paused, paring the so-called facts down into something sensible. “She said my mom was stalked.” Sounded more… human, than hunted. People had stalkers. “By somebody. Willa wasn’t sure who. Or how many of them. And Deirdre didn’t have enemies, or anything. Really.” That was honest. Everything, so far. “She was stalked, and attacked. At Lyssa’s Peak, while she was out -” being a giant snake monster, which she’d apparently become, “- and,” Ollie faltered, that ring held too tight to turn, “that’s - how she died. Out there.” Hiding away from whoever had killed her, like an animal curling up someplace soft and quiet to fade. In pain. Alone.
He blinked, quickly, throat working and not, jaw clicking aside and back. Christ. Ollie looked up, into the glare of the fluorescents overhead. Looked down, into the tight tangle of his fingers, with all their freckles and occupational stigmata.
“Then, well,” Ollie sniffed, and half-shook his head again, disbelieving, spitting out this story he just couldn’t swallow. “My grandmother decided the thing to do was wrap her daughter’s body in chicken wire and throw her in the lake! Right! Instead of tell the police, or me, or anyone. Because it was close to home. Because my mom had always liked it there. Because,” he took a lean in, the uneasy edge on his voice gone serrated, the craziness of it all catching on his tongue. “If whoever murdered her came back, they’d skin her. They would cut her skin off and -” rip out her teeth and her eyes and other things, Willa had said, with a seriousness he’d never heard, with all that certainty she usually saved for PSAs about vampires being compulsive counters and keeping homemade bread in your pockets so the fairies wouldn’t steal you, and other crap that didn’t deserve it. Unlike what had happened to his mom. What - taking a breath, a deep one, Ollie half-laughed into the next damn thing Willa had said. “And if they found out who she was, that she had a family, a kid, they’d do the same to me. For some reason.” Like being a giant, huntable snake monster. Obviously.
With that, Ollie… flickered some jazz hands into the dead-silent, empty air, with a grin as absurd as everything that’d brought the two of them together, today. The frantic energy of that not-quite-confession burnt out like touchpaper, though. Abruptly. Completely. He sat back, ashen. “I don’t believe her. I don’t want to. But now there’s this, and…” Ollie’s tired eyes fell to that folder, that wrong folder for the wrong body. “I - I have to solve what I can, here.” Which probably wasn’t much. And what would it mean, anyway? No amount of knowing would change any of what mattered. What mattered here. “Before I leave,” he tacked on. Like a promise, to himself. As if he needed the reminder. (As if he didn’t.)
Regan’s eyes narrowed into slits, and she had to buck back her mounting annoyance. Not only had Oliver come in obfuscating what he knew, he was as full of “facts” as a bloating cadaver was of gas. And, like that bloated cadaver, Regan wondered how much of it was putrid hot air. She had seen plenty of cases that had tested the bounds of what she thought humankind was capable of, but few were as complicated as this. TV loved a good murder mystery; the reality was that most of the time, homicides were straightforward, the only complicated bits being in the hands of the courtroom.
Now that Oliver was talking, however, he would not stop. And he struck Regan as the type who would ramble to his very death if no one intervened. So she would not (though she wasn’t eager to add a third dead O’Rourke to her plate). Finally, though, he seemed to burn himself out. Or thought he concluded. But Regan didn’t find it to be much of a conclusion at all. She rubbed at her temples and closed her eyes and when she sighed she half expected to take out a lightbulb, but the glass – and her sanity – held. “Alright.” She looked at him as he wriggled around in the chair, waving his hands around like he was ushering a plane in for landing. She’d match his frenetic energy with cool competence, which was sorely needed here. “What are you doing with your h– never mind. Alright,” she repeated, having processed… however much of that was in a form to be digested. “Correct me if I have misunderstood. You’re saying that your mother was being stalked, possibly by multiple perpetrators. Your family has no reason to have been targeted, as far as you know. They killed your mother on Lyssa’s Peak.” Okay. That part was… bizarre, but she could swallow it.
Regan continued. “Your feeble, moribund grandmother managed to wrap your mother up in chicken wire and dump the body in the lake, but was not responsible for the circumstances of her death. She neglected to tell the authorities but told all of this to you. Because your grandmother, who was perhaps senile, thought that your mother’s murderers would skin the cadaver. And you.” Oliver’s family was as twisted as this case. And Regan, despite how much all of this stank, was compelled by curiosity and compassion to investigate. And by the reputation of the Office. Which she cared about, stupidly, despite the fact she, too, was leaving. Speaking of… “When are you leaving?” She looked at Oliver, head turned like a whip, her brow furrowed. “I can’t allow you to leave town while this is ongoing, you understand.” It wasn’t official. Not even close. She had no authority to hold anyone. The police wouldn’t even be able to detain him like that, and he was so far from a suspect. But he was the only source of information Regan had, however unreliable he might be. So she needed him here, and if she needed to rattle him, she would. “You know details about this I wouldn’t expect. The chicken wire. The location. Do you know exactly where in the lake the body was dumped?” Her eyes locked onto his, determined. Regan wasn’t sure how much of Oliver’s story she believed, if any of it, but bodies did not lie.
God. He’d tried to make it even vaguely sensible. But it wasn’t. It just wasn’t. Ollie laced his offending hands back together, over-aware of the heat in his cheeks as Dr. Kavanagh ran the whole, ridiculous thing back at him. Mortifying. Like his family always was, even now. “I’m not saying,” he clarified, abruptly. A little desperately, maybe. “That’s - all of that, it’s just… what Willa thought. And she wasn’t feeble.” There was a half-beat, then, even quieter: “Not until she was.” At the end. So close to the end that it’d come as a surprise, somehow, when his grandmother had started to actually seem to be dying, at all. “Or senile. At least, I didn’t think - she seemed the same.” Which wasn’t necessarily saying much, but. What could he say? “You didn’t know her.” That was all the explanation Ollie could, or cared, to give. If you hadn’t known Willa O’Rourke, well. There was simply no explaining her. He couldn’t, not without saying things he might hate her and his mother and himself for. And things that would just fucking hurt.
And he couldn’t explain any of this. Not in any real sort of way. Willa and Deirdre, they’d never felt much need to offer real explanations.
“The rest is - yes.” The medical examiner had listened more than he’d let himself hope for, really. As for getting out of town anytime soon… he’d expected that. Only made sense. Better than arresting him for being an absolute pain in her ass, or a murder suspect! Really! Still, Ollie’s heart found somewhere even lower to sink to. When was he leaving? When, Christ, when was he finally going to get to put Wicked’s Rest in the rearview, for good? “As soon as possible. When this is dealt with, and the house is gone, and… everything else.” He bridged those laced fingers, half-nodding. Yes, he understood. Yes, he knew - not exactly. But. “The north end. Deepest part,” Ollie added, then: “There’s a gradient current, to the southeast. So I would expect there to have been some drifting, if -” She hadn’t got tangled up in who knew what? If it? What did you call your mother’s - God. “If nothing got in the way,” he settled on, flatly, cracking his knuckles one after another. Until he realized he was, at which point he wrapped them around the edge of that notebook. And closed it. “Is there anything else I can help you with, here? Or…” Could he leave this horrible, white-walled room, at least? Could he get that far away from this?
The way Oliver spoke of his grandmother combined with the heavy, needling hand Willa played all throughout the file sitting in front of her, lent Regan some understanding into the O’Rourke family dynamics. He couldn’t see such a woman as feeble or senile. It did not mean she wasn’t. But some women had an effortless way of wielding power, the figurehead of the family with wiles for each wrinkle who cast a shadow down the long trunk of their family tree. She knew someone like that. Exactly like that. And for a moment, she wondered if maybe, maybe, there had been some merit to her earlier thought. That she’d rejected it too quickly. Oliver could not be a banshee. But his mother, his grandmother? Willa’s grip continued past her death; Cliodhna’s reached far outside of Saol Eile. The stalkers could have been maoir. The death, a frantic scramble to hide what ought to stay hidden. “I think I understand your grandmother better than you assume I do,” Regan said, finally, nodding.
“I can’t blame you for wanting to leave. I’m not long for the town, either…” She twisted her lips. Every day, it seemed like there was more she added to her pile, more things she needed to finish before letting Siobhan take her. How long could she put off her departure? She wasn’t sure. So best not to dawdle. Fortunately, Oliver knew far more than he’d initially let on. Down to the part of the lake. Regan would have been stunned if it wasn’t already obvious this whole obfuscated mess was covered in O’Rourke fingerprints. Three lofa generations. “Alright,” She sighed through grit teeth. “From now on, you tell me everything. Understood? Before I even ask. Anticipate what I will ask. And then tell me the information I need to know.” Her eyes glinted. His sweat glinted more.
Was there anything else here?
“Not here,” Regan said, head tilted, knowing confidence on her lips, trying to drag Oliver toward the conclusion she craved and he needed. “At the lake”.
The holidays were not fancied by Estelle, if anything avoided. Memories of her childhood were brought back inevitably and not appreciated. Arguments were a daily struggle at home, more than ever. Estelle was hiding out and on the way to the center of Ashton. Anywhere was fine but home. Her insta was being checked and updated when she walked down the main street. Her thoughts were focused on the display until her body was hit by another. "Ah! Sorry! I didn't pay attention where I was walking. Are you okay?" Her eyes were looking the handsome guy over and a smile was shot at him.
@softinspirit said:‘ i think we, as a people, just need to have a glass of water. '
Liu recognized all of those words, but... what an odd order. They supposed it made sense, with the context of the two people fighting loudly across the street from the cafe (such ugly sounds; Liu hoped they would stop soon). They nodded. “That’s a good way to put it. We need to take a break and just be sometimes.”
[pm] Hey, I got intel that another blackout is coming soon. Apparently, it might last a full 24 hours this time. [...] If you're not able to track me down after it happens, chances are a friend picked me up and took me somewhere. So just focus on keeping yourself safe.
[pm] These things can be predicted now? Fuck, I wish we knew that two months ago.
24 hours... shit, Ollie. That's a long time to be out. We saw what it did to you last time.
What if I came with you? I can call out, perch up and keep an eye on you to make sure everything is good? I don't like the idea of you being alone.
[A large basket is left at Xóchitl’s door. Within it is a bottle of expensive red wine and a bottle of vodka, as well as a $50 gift card to a local liquor store. There are several snacks of all varieties and a journal that’s cover states “Give a Sh*T”. There is also a prepaid massage appointment to be used at any time at one of the nearby spas. A note is attached, but it is unsigned: Happy Holidays! From your gift exchange giver]
