Chapter Text
You settle in to the cream-coloured ‘burbs of Metropolis Central after exile. It’s a glittering desert haven, where Dersites and Prospitians live side by peaceful side; where any carapace who’s willing to work hard and be a useful member of the Metropolis can eke out a comfortable living for themselves. So they say.
You are the Watchful Cannoneer. You have been fighting the war for so long that you are always craning to hear the familiar, terrible sound of a Dersite warship opening its deployment hatches. One time you hear the screech of artillery and you run outside in panic, looking around for the bomb; it’s only when you see the kid with the portable radio that you realize how much of you the war replaced.
In a city full of exiles there are places for people like you. The Dersite Veteran’s Association. The Support Group for Retired Artillerymen. Her Royal Majesty’s Retired Airman’s League. You meet the Conscientious Videographer at one of them; he is doling out coffee and biscuits from behind a rickety folding table. You nearly trip on the table leg, sending the whole rig crashing down, and he waves off your frantic apologies and laughs it off with, “We needed a new table anyway.”
It takes you eight months to gather up the courage to ask if he would be amenable to a meal, maybe even coffee that isn’t served in a pink-and-green paper cup. It takes him half a second to say yes.
It seems like he is the oil your propulsion assembly had been lacking, all this time. Two weeks after your awkward, clumsy dinner date - where you tried a lot of ways of saying that you liked seeing him, lots, and that you would be really quite amenable to continuing to see him, lots - you get a job as a editor at your council office. Four perigees later, CV moves in, where you can find even more ways of saying that you like him a lot and you want to see him all the time, at all hours of the day, even some hours of the night (if he is amenable to that).
You leave scraps of paper around the office by accident, bits and pieces you scribble down in between madly transcribing and arranging council newsletters. It’s a habit you kept from your artillery days - just thoughts, nothing too special, something to keep your mind from crashing while you listen to the rattle of the artillery housing and waited for the captain to give the signal. It’s nothing, at least until your boss fires Magnanimous Speechwriter.
MS is leaving in tears, her latest work in red-splashed tatters clutched to her chest. You comfort her near the water cooler and ask, very gently if you can take a look - she practically shoves it at you in her haste to get it out of her hands. Career poison. Or not, you think critically, squinting at it - it could do with some polishing, but it’s not so bad.
“He’s an idiot,” you tell her, and she looks at you with huge eyes like you’ve just been prototyped.
The two of you work together all through the night on that speech, with CV cheering you on and providing biscuits. You drop it on the boss’s desk at the crack of dawn the next morning, your fingers still shaking from the coffee and the frantic typing, and he frowns at it and looks at you and demands if you wrote this - you nod, point at MS, take care to mention that it’s a group effort -
And suddenly, just like that, you’re climbing the ranks. People seem to like you, seem to like the way you give credit where credit’s due and your professional, military bearing. CV’s the one that puts the idea in your head, after four sweeps of seeing the inside of a campaign office: why not try it out for yourself?
“I think you’d make a great councillor,” he says fondly, smiling at you through the steam from his hot chocolate. “Wonderful Campaigner. Doesn’t it sound nice?” You tell him, in between laughter, that you’d take the city by storm if he ran your ad campaign.
You make City Council four sweeps later, on your cloning day. You and CV pose for a gaggle of cameras in front of your cream-painted house on your cream-painted street and you tell them how great you’re going to make this city; how much you love this city already.
You marry CV that year, and promise him that no matter how much you love the city, you’ll love him even more.
But climbing a ladder isn’t the same as walking the tightrope, and you are showing the strain of it four perigees later. The power plant you had hopes to build is blocked by lobbyists, losing you one electorate; your attempts at compromise come across as being ‘soft’, the newspaper tells you, and your civil service cluck their tongues at your efforts to salvage the situation. Your attitude to crime is too soft, always too soft, and the media savages you viciously for a month over your decision to stand down the latest police chief on his failure to capture Notorious Trafficker (or, indeed, any notorious felons at all).
It takes you any number of media conferences, and any number of scars on your reputation, but you think you have finally learned their game.
1. Don’t give an inch;
2. Feign ignorance - ignorance is better than compromise;
3. Reputation is better than action;
4. Nothing is a disaster as long as it results in good PR.
CV stands by you through all this, fielding calls, evicting journalists from your property. He brings you lunch at your office every week but you don’t notice when it becomes every perigee, and then every so often, and you only realise you haven’t had a home-cooked lunch in a sweep when it becomes never. Some nights you go home and he’s already asleep, curled up in front of the TV; always on the news channel for some reason.
Some nights you don’t come home at all.
You see him less and less often; he’s busy with the veterans work again, helping people get settled in just like he helped you. You miss him. You tell him that one night, one of those rare nights you get home early, and he looks at you with real irritation and it feels like a punch in the gut.
It’s election season for the second time when he tells you that he’s leaving.
“Why?” you say, dry-mouthed, and he looks at you like you turned into a horrorterror.
“You can’t,” you plead, and then you order and threaten, you tell him how this will turn into a media fiasco with your ratings already borderline, you tell him how he’ll be damaged goods. He looks at you through all this with genuine horror and you can’t stand seeing it on his face, not when it’s directed at you.
One perigee, you say. Just one more perigee and you’ll try and turn things around. After three hours of arguing he finally gives you assent, weary and tight-lipped, and you lie sleepless in bed next to him -- not touching -- for the rest of the night.
One perigee later, and you’ve nearly run yourself into the ground trying to make him stay. It’s two perigees to the election and the media is already whispering poisonously about how your marriage is on the rocks, how a politician who can’t keep his own relationships together shouldn’t be trusted to run a city. You’re at a nice restaurant on Little Cubes St where you ask him -- half hopeful and half wary -- if he’s staying, and he sighs and says no.
You don’t argue. You change the subject, and it’s only once you leave the restaurant that you drag him into a side alleyway and scream at him behind a dumpster.
You can’t do this to me, you say, you say it over and over again, and it’s only once you are crying do you know what the media will say that you realise he’s blacked out.
There’s blood on your hands, and blood on the wall from where you pushed him and shook him and -- and slammed him, there’s so much blood, and you cry out in shock.
For the first time in sweeps, you think you can hear bombs falling.
“That’s one hell of a mess,” says a voice from the shadows, sort of admiringly, and you almost leap out of your suit.
“Who’s there?” You stumble to your feet. There’s too much darkness; you can’t see them. You scrub at your watery eyes frantically and blunder forward, flailing around, trying to grab them; they can’t talk, they mustn’t.
“Aw, no one, boss,” says the voice, poisonously friendly. “Just a witness! Murder would sure be rough on your career, wouldn’t it?”
“Who are you?” you say, dry-mouthed. “I didn’t kill him. Whatever you saw, it was a mistake-”
“A mistake that ended up with this guy’s blood all over your nice suit! Sure is a nice suit,” and the voice is now behind you, and you whirl around. Your shoes are expensive, but they’ve got poor grip; you slide on something wet and land butt-first in a pile of plastic bags and refuse.
Perched over poor CV’s crumpled body is a Dersite in a long black trenchcoat and a fedora, and you think dimly, I’ve seen you. His face turned up in a newspaper once, a front-pager about some fellow who swept into a bank and got the tellers to hand over all the cash without a single gun in sight. Never seen again. You wonder his next front-pager is going to be about a politician found murdered in an alleyway.
“Don’t worry, I’m not about to kill you,” he says brightly, springing to his feet. His grin somehow makes the air feel colder, thin and clammy underneath your suit. There is sweat on your collar. Grey dirt clouds your vision; screaming fills your ears. “I wouldn’t go about wiping out upstanding politicians! Lowlife politicians, though,” he whistles. “Them’s a different matter. But you’re not one of those fellas, are you?” In three quick strides he’s crossed the alley and planted a foot on your chest, and you can’t breathe.
“What are you going to do?” you croak breathlessly.
“First of all-” He leans over and sticks out a hand. You stare blankly at it, and he huffs an annoyed sigh. “Shake, boss.” Numbly, you do. He brightens. “I’m Peccant Scofflaw. I think we’re both in a unique position where we can do a favour to one another!”
“You’re blackmailing me,” you say thinly. You can’t think over the rush of cold churning through your ears.
“Yes!” he practically bounces on his heels, and you wish he wouldn’t, not when he has a heel on your sternum. “Glad you get the gist of it. Now, it seems to me we have a dead body on our hands, and unlike you, boss, I find myself knowing a bit about how to get rid of dead bodies.”
“He’s not dead!” It bubbles out of you from somewhere crusty and rusted, somewhere that remembers cuddling on the couch and homemade hot chocolate and a warm smile from the opposite of a refreshments bench.
The gunshot is unexpectedly loud, and you nearly crack your head against the wall trying to scramble away. Peccant Scofflaw presses you down and you gasp, seeing stars, as all the air is ground out of your lungs under one sharp black sole.
“Is now,” Scofflaw says casually, waving the smoke away from the barrel of the gun, and you can’t help but let out a muffled sound of terror.
“You shot him,” you gasp, half in tears. He just grins.
“What’s the saying, boss? Dead men don’t talk? And you don’t want him blabbing about how the new mayor beat him half to death in an alleyway, do you?” He twirls the gun. “Now, say if the new mayor - sorry, mayor to be -” and you hate yourself for the way you inhale at that notion, “had his husband of many sweeps shot to death in front of him in an alleyway - muggers, you know how careless they get - now, then, a lot of people might be feeling sorry for the mayor. To be.” His face suddenly fills the whole of your visual field, and you wheeze; his heel is cutting a crescent-shaped mark in your stomach. “Especially not if the mayor says it was the Frog Street Bruisers. Nasty lot, those ones.” Peccant Scofflaw shakes his head. “So sorry for your loss.”
“Are you with the Frog Street Bruisers?” You’re trying to memorise his face, so they can match it to a name and a file, so you can tell them who shot CV. He snorts.
“Would I be telling you to sing that song if I was? Give me some credit! I’m not the most imaginative guy,” he says, looking hurt, “but I’ve got feelings, you know!”
“What do you get? - from this?” You try to struggle out from under his heel and this time he lets you. The gun never leaves his hand, though. You keep hoping that someone, anyone, will walk by and find him pointing a gun at you - but if they do they might find CV, and who knows what Scofflaw will say?
You sag gently against the wall. His smile is the most terrifying thing you have ever seen; you imagine it’s the sort of smile a horrorterror smiles before it engulfs a soul.
“Well, the Bruisers are a clumsy bunch,” he says, shrugging. “Nobody’s going to question it if they were stupid enough to knock over a politician’s partner.” He just grins. “But even if you don’t, there’s always this!” And he flourishes a camera at you, just out of your reach.
There’s no choice, after that. He takes your wallet and gives you a black eye and a nasty bruise on your temple. “Just to make things believable. You don’t want them thinking you’re a liar, do you, boss?” he says, brightly, but there’s a flash of genuine glee in his expression when he hefts the handgun. He also kindly lends you his phone to call the ambulance and make a police report. The paramedics arrive to find you cradling CV’s body, not quite crying; you are too burnt-out, too shaken to cry.
Now when you close your eyes you see black and white, but not in checkerboard: it’s a Dersite face looming close, horrible crescent grin burned into the inside of your retinas. You can wake up gasping, but there’s no one else there to hear you; a tin of hot chocolate sits unopened in your cupboard for perigees, and each time you look at it you think of a pink-and-green paper cup being handed over to you by a carapace with a lovely smile.
The Frog Street Bruisers are caught and trialed. You spend your testimony in a haze, but every time you open your mouth the courtroom vanishes and you’re in that dark alley again and Scofflaw is quizzing you on the sequence of events who what where who had the gun describe his face no, he’s uglier, gee boss, your memory sure is poor. Four of them get a sentence for assault and robbery, one gets a sentence for murder.
You become mayor. The vote for you’s not overwhelming, but it’s a comfortable margin. The papers are devoid of their usual venom; you cut out all the articles that talk about CV, all the tributes and interviews, and you pin them to your fridge and sit on the floor opposite them and stare and wait and wait. People call you, mostly CV’s friends, and offer to talk and send their condolences and one day it becomes too much and you take all the sympathy cards and letters and articles and dump them in a pile and set fire to it in your back yard.
“Nothing like a fire to keep you warm when you’re alone, huh?”
You turn in slow motion. Peccant Scofflaw is sitting on your roof, legs dangling off the edge. He’s nothing more than a faint silhouette against the midnight sky, but there’s no imitating that inimitable grin.
“What are you doing here?” you say, more calmly than you feel.
“Just come along to see how you were coping with your loss. Always a hard time,” he says, propping his chin on one hand. “I’m here for you if you need to talk! I’m a good listener. Always got an ear to spare,” and he tosses something down in front of you.
It’s an ear.
You don’t throw up. You can’t be sick at violence any more, not after that night where Scofflaw shot CV.
“Also wanted to say thanks,” he says cheerfully.
“What for?” You kick the ear into the fire and you’re surprised at how calm you are. Then again, the worst he can do now is shoot you. He won’t shoot you yet.
“Frog Street’s a nice place,” he says casually. “Plenty of nice businesses. Good boost to your economy. Smart owners who’re willing to pay a modest amount to keep their business going smoothly -- interruptions would be bad for business, right?” He waits for some response from you, but you don’t give one. Eventually, he shrugs.
“Anyway,” he says casually, “there is something you could do for me.”
He flicks a photograph down, down; you snatch it out of the air and tuck it into a pocket without looking. You know what it’ll be: CV dazed against the wall and blood on your fists.
“Then let’s talk business, Mr. Scofflaw,” you say, your tone neat and clipped. “Care to come inside?”