He doesn't have to stay to watch this. Ought not to. There are more pressing matters calling him, like the girl in the holding cells or the serial killer at large, yet still it doesn't feel like Ronan has been given the choice.
Digging forceps, seven times prying for the remnants of a bullet. Shrapnel slivers extracted from devastated flesh, two splintered ribs and shattered vertebra, a ricochet from the cobblestones where an exit wound bloomed and then reversed its wrath back within him. Clatter of cold, unfeeling steel in a stoic tray. The remnants of a magazine that hours before had claimed his life, loaded by his own hand.
Ronan stands and watches it all.
Only when the forceps are laid aside, coated in a cloying sheen of red he still can't quite believe belongs to him, does he feel the first flicker of nausea; the living sensation warped into a ghostly mimicry no more real than the quickening of his phantom breath. The medical examiner picks up a scalpel and chooses where to divide the tattoos that had painted Ronan's life.
The motion is efficient. Professional. Impersonal. The first incision undoes the spider web, separates the roses that once tangled he and Julia together till death do them part, and Ronan watches it all with the passivity of a shy student afraid to question his master's work.
(Why keep staring? Is it because they've left his eyes open? Why did they open them when he watched Rex gently press them closed…?)
No. It isn't that.
He'd asked the girl sat by her own corpse a few slabs down why she would choose to watch this. Now he thinks he understands.
The body on the slab used to be him. The same body that once lived, once breathed, once felt; the same hands that knew equally the violence of bleeding knuckles, the pleasure-pain of an ink-tipped needle, the tenderness of caressing Julia's skin. Just a used canvas soon to rot now. Hollow flesh incapable of even acknowledging the presence of his soul.
(He'd stirred his own death rattle with a ghostly brush of his cheek. Ronan doesn't dare touch again.)
The creak of the bone cutters as they pry away the front of his ribcage draws no flinch, yet were Ronan still living he's certain he'd hear the blood pounding in his ears. (There's none left for that. All drained into the cobblestones several blocks away.)
Then a soft squelch, a hunk of bone and cartilage lifted away to rest instead in a metal tray, and the damage wrought on his lungs is revealed. The right one mangled, seven times punctured, as expected. Flecks of black from a decades-long smoking habit in both, not so expected, yet upon reflection blindingly obvious.
And between them nestles his heart. Still. Silent.
Whole.
The sight stirs within him an ache that feels like the bruise left by the hopelessness of his first attempt to climb back into his body. With a gesture of his hand he can send electronics into overdrive, summon ghostly structures into existence, or even leash an unsuspecting demon to banish it. Yet he can't command his own heart to beat.
Ronan bows his head and doesn't know if he feels anger or humility.
The examiner and his assistant talk. The words aren't illuminating. Cause of death is obvious, embellished with words like trauma and haemothorax and hypovolemic shock, but putting a name to the wounds seems to matter less than naming the man who caused them.
They empty him out. Piecemeal, organs on the scales. Turn him over, at last breaking the vacant stare of his sightless eyes. Livid bruises stain his back, bleeding over the bullet-broken lines of his tattooed mural as though painted by a careless child. Blood crusts at the back of his skull.
They're going to open it, Ronan realises, when the bone saw comes out again. Check for bleeding in his brain from impact.
He's never seen the back of his own head so closely before. Isn't sure that he cares to.
Wrenching his spectral eyes from the corpse, Ronan looks back in the direction of the holding cells. He's borne witness to his own autopsy long enough. He has his own witness to find.
