Stripped
Chapter Three: The Rat in the Morgue
Disclaimer: I don't own No. 6.
Author's Note: Alright, first of all thanks to everyone who reviewed, alerted and favourited! To the wonderful Anano, not to worry I'm not abandoning this story at all! Now on to the story!
As Shion made his way down to the basement of the West District Police Department Headquarters he reflected that he was more than a little messed up if he was more comfortable in the cool concrete, stainless steel and shatterproof glass of the morgue with only the dead for company than he was in his mother's homey boisterous kitchen.
The dead though, they had no expectations beyond that he perform his job to the best of his ability. They didn't need him to remember who he had been before. They were simply empty shells of people who had been.
In that sometimes Shion felt he better resembled a corpse than a living person because what was he if not a living breathing shell of the Shion that had been lost that night?
He might as well be dead.
Shion shook his head to clear it of those thoughts. He had more important things to focus on than the memories he would probably never regain and the weight of his mother's emotional expectations.
Taking his ID card out of his pocket Shion swiped it to open his office door. He grimaced when he saw that paperwork was piling up again. He kept all of his detailed personal records on audio files but he still needed to file hard copies of the autopsy reports for the DA's office and the police.
He carefully wedged his mother's cake into the mini-fridge under his desk next to the dinner he'd never eaten from two nights ago.
With a sigh Shion moved out of his office and poked his nose into the break room.
"Hey Doc," greeted Mona, an autopsy technician from No. 5 with a freckled nose and a morbid sense of humour, looking up from a case file she was making notes on.
"Have you seen Ryuichi?" he asked.
"Yeah, he got you set up in room three and then headed out. He said to message him if you needed anything else,"
"Thank you Mona, if Detective Lin comes looking for me just send her in,"
"Will do," she agreed before turning back to her notes.
Shion continued down the hall and into the locker room.
Another swipe of his ID card opened his locker, and Shion quickly shucked out of his street clothes and into a pair of dark blue scrubs, scraping his unruly hair back from his face. He then set about scrubbing all the skin off his hands and forearms and calling it washing.
Once he felt that all microbial life had probably been scoured from his skin, Shion left the locker room and went and had a quick look at autopsy room three.
Everything was perfect, not that Shion had expected anything less from his meticulous assistant. His tools were laid out just as he liked them and a few quick taps with his stylus showed Shion that the embedded com was prepped and set up for holo-imaging and audio.
He slid the stylus into his pants pocket, and made a mental note to return it to its rightful place before he left, since he didn't really want to explain to Joi, the WDPD quartermaster, that he'd sent another one through the wash.
As Shion moved from the autopsy room to the cold storage area, he reflected, not for the first time, that it was really too bad Ryuichi was so squeamish about the actual corpses because he would make a wonderful autopsy technician. As it was Mona would have washed and tagged the body and sent the runoff up to the crime lab in case it revealed anything useful.
With another quick swipe of his ID card Shion entered the cold room. The lights were off and Shion cursed under his breath when the door slid shut behind him with a hiss, plunging him into darkness. He continued moving forward and groped blindly for the light switch wishing that when they'd built this place someone had decided to spring for motion sensing lights.
He paused as he thought he, not heard, more like felt something moving in the deep shadow of the cold room.
Shion had never been one to be spooked by the dark or the presence of the dead like some of his more fanciful colleagues but he was sure there was something there lurking in the shadows.
While his hand trailed over smooth concrete of the wall next to him searching out the bulge of the light switch he peered into the darkness in front of him trying to see what it was he was sensing.
Finally his fingers encountered the smooth plate of the light switch and with a relieved breath he moved to turn on the lights and learn what had sent skitters of wary sensation crawling up his spine.
The press of cold steel against his throat froze him mid-action.
"Don't touch it," ordered a cold male voice.
Obediently Shion let his hand fall from the wall back to his side.
As if his words had activated some sort of supersensory perception Shion could suddenly feel the warm weight of the human presence behind him.
Taller, he decided after a long moment, his attacker was taller than him but not really bigger. No muscle bound thug, he would be lean, but strong. He was used to this kind of thing, Shion thought. The knife didn't tremble in his steady grip and the man himself was still.
Shion's mind raced, taking in the danger that made his stomach clench, and formulating plans to escape and survive, each as unlikely as the next without some kind of weapon.
The weight of the stylus in his pocket was suddenly all he could feel. The actual point of the stylus was blunt, capped with sensors embedded in a firm malleable gel, and it wouldn't do much damage but the body of the stylus was shaped a bit like a paint brush, stainless steel, heavy and tapered to a wicked point.
A weapon.
"What do you want?" asked Shion.
His voice was steady but sounded husky and foreign to Shion's own ears, his throat clogged by the adrenaline rushing through his veins. He swallowed hard to try and clear it as slowly he reached into his pocket and took hold of the stylus. He drew it out slowly, taking care to make sure the man couldn't discern that his movements were anything more than nervous shifting.
"I'm looking for a body," answered the man.
There was something about his voice that made Shion pause as he flipped the stylus in his grip so that the point was facing back towards the man.
There was no grief, no inflection of any kind in that voice. It was too cold, too smooth.
Still waters run deep, Shion thought to himself.
"Whose?"
The question was quiet, barely above a whisper.
Shion expected a response along the lines of Mother, Father, Brother, Sister, Lover, the response he got was clinical and unsettling.
"Male, early twenties, five foot six, approximately one hundred and ten pounds, white hair, red eyes,"
Shion started and the edge of the blade bit into his flesh warningly. He let out a shaky, disbelieving laugh.
"Is this some kind of joke? Or is this your messed up way of telling me you're going to kill me?"
"Shion?"
The knife fell away from his neck abruptly and was replaced with one calloused but elegantly long-fingered hand tracing the raised discoloured mark that wrapped around his neck the other slipping under the back of the loose shirt of his scrubs to follow the snaking line down from his one shoulder to his opposite hip.
Another little shiver made its way down Shion's spine and his skin turned to gooseflesh.
How? Shion thought wonderingly. How does he know, the exact path of that stripe?
"It is you, Shion," said the man relief colouring his voice as he dropped his hands from Shion's bare skin and pulled him into an embrace.
Not sure how to react, Shion tentatively put his arms around the other man.
"That fucking bitch-mutt, I could cheerfully kill her right now, 'have you checked the morgue—'" he snapped suddenly pulling away.
"Who are you?" Shion interrupted.
"Don't tell me so many people put knives to your throat nowadays that you've forgotten all about me, Your Majesty?" said the man his voice taking on a teasing lilt.
Shion hummed, considering.
"You know me, but I've never met you before," he observed, moving so that he was leaning against the wall.
There was a sudden thud as a fist slammed into the wall next to his head and Shion flinched, blinking furiously as the lights flicked on. When he could see properly again he was looking into a pair of stormy silver eyes.
"Look," said the man apparently fighting to keep his voice even, "You're pissed, I get it, I would be angry at me too, but, and I can't believe I'm the one saying this, don't you dare pretend that we're strangers, not after everything,"
Shion cocked his head to the side, a bird-like motion he'd picked up from Lili, and used the pause to examine the man before him.
His initial hypotheses were correct, the man was taller than Shion, though they were about the same age, and though slender and almost delicately shaped he was made primarily of hard muscle stretched over bone. He had a pretty face set with those extraordinary eyes and framed by a long fringe of blue-black hair, the bulk of it tied back.
He was wearing tan coloured cargo pants tucked into boots that looked like they'd seen hard use since the day they were made. The grey-green canvas jacket and the black scarf wrapped around his neck seemed too thick for the warm weather but the man wore them as comfortably as he held the wicked looking hunting knife in his right hand.
"I'm not angry with you. I'm not pretending. I don't know you."
Shion said the words bluntly, clinically. He found that that was best when informing people from before the incident what had happened.
The man bared his teeth, a silent angry snarl. Eyes flashing warningly.
"Don't take it personally. It took me a year to get used to recognizing my own mother," he added with a self-depreciating smile.
"What are you talking about?" the silver-eyed stranger demanded.
Shion tried to gather his thoughts; this was always the hardest part.
"Shion!" snapped the man.
Shion sighed.
"Two years ago there was a…an incident,"
"What kind of incident?"
"I was walking home from work late one night, there were these muggers…I never saw their faces but they hit me with a pipe or a metal bat across the back of the head, knocked me out, took what they wanted and left me in the middle of the street. When they hit me they fractured my skull and I started bleeding into my brain, by the time I was found the damage had been done and I'd lost all my memories,"
Shion paused to gauge the man's reaction. Those impossible eyes roiled with emotions but nothing showed in his expression. Not receiving any response Shion plunged ahead.
"I regained my technical skills fairly quickly, as well as things like song lyrics, passages from books I'd read, but nothing about specific people or events, and I do mean nothing, not a passing recognition, not a hint of familiarity," Shion warned, "I don't remember you. I don't recognize you. I don't know you."
The silence stretched for long moments as Shion waited for the man before him to react.
Finally he moved, flicking the knife closed and sliding it into a pocket of his jacket. He moved forward, boot heels clacking sharply on the tile floor, and he grabbed Shion's wrist forcing his hand up under his scarf pressing it against the thin cotton of the shirt he wore underneath his jacket.
"What can you feel?" he demanded.
"Your heartbeat," Shion answered after a moment.
"I am alive and I'm standing here in front of you, that's all you need to know about me,"
Shion cocked his head to the side and quirked a half-smile.
"What about your name?"
"Nezumi,"
Shion raised an eyebrow.
"That's an odd name," he commented, "Nezumi, huh? Nice to meet you again, Nezumi,"
Suddenly Nezumi laughed, and Shion reclaimed his hand.
"What?" he asked frowning.
"You're still the same airhead as ever," Nezumi said chuckling, "Only you would relax and not try to fight back when some stranger put a knife to your throat,"
"Oh, that," Shion suddenly grinned a bit wickedly himself, and held up the stylus so that it was at eye level, "You're lucky you have such a pretty voice because I was going to stab you with this thing and if I'd even nicked your femoral artery you'd bleed out and die in under four minutes,"
Nezumi blinked in surprise, and then smirked.
"Good. I've been trying to bludgeon some sense of self-preservation into that skull of yours for a long time now, glad to know something stuck,"
Shion sighed.
"Nothing stuck," he insisted, "I'm in law enforcement, if I don't know how to protect myself someone is bound to kill me," he explained patiently.
"What are you doing in the morgue anyway?" asked Nezumi.
"I'm the chief medical examiner for this precinct," Shion answered, "I have an autopsy to do. Speaking of which, how the hell did you get in here?"
"The ventilation," Nezumi answered with a laconic shrug.
Shion glanced up at the main vent and sure enough the metal mesh was hanging loose, the lower set of screws having been ripped from the wall.
"Hmm. Tell you what, if you fix the grate, I'll smuggle you out the front way so that you don't get arrested,"
"Hmm," Nezumi grunted in agreement.
Shion moved across the room and rummaged around in the drawers under the industrial sized sink until he came up with a multi-tool, "There should be a screwdriver in there," he said tossing it to Nezumi who snatched it out of midair easily.
Shion turned back to the sink and washed his hands a second time before pulling on a pair of blue nitrile gloves and a smock.
"How did you even get in to this line of work? I never would have pegged you for someone who could stomach working with the dead,"
"Well," Shion said as he made his way over to the cold storage units, "According to my mother, after the Purge there were a lot of bodies just lying in the street, victims of some sort of parasite bee. Anyway obviously we needed to get them out of the streets but nobody wanted to go near them in case they became infected. I joined a clean-up crew and organized for the identification of the bodies and for the remains to be released to the families. Apparently I insisted that no one deserved to spend their days wondering if their loved ones were among the corpses lying in the streets. It was during that process that I met my mentor, and after all the bodies from the Purge were processed I convinced him to help me put together a team and we set about identifying the victims of this mass grave underneath the ruins of the old correctional facility,"
"You actually went back into that hellhole?" Nezumi said surprised.
"Yeah, apparently, wait, what? Back into?"
"Don't worry about it," Nezumi said waving off the question in Shion's voice.
"Well, I guess…I never could figure out how I knew what was underneath the ruins when nobody else seemed to, it makes sense…" Shion shook his head, "I did all of my training in pathology and anatomy, everything, while wading through that sea of bodies. Unearthing that grave really opened the eyes of the Reconstruction Committee to the depravities committed by the former government of No. 6. Most of those victims had their records wiped clean from the database and those were just the ones taken from the city proper. The people born off the grid whether in West Block or wherever didn't even have that much to identify them and no one was looking for them," Shion said a faint note of grief and reproach in his voice.
"Everyone in West Block already knew where their missing people were taken," Nezumi said matter-of-factly as he screwed one of the screws back into the wall.
"Yeah, I guess," Shion said, "Still, it's sad. It took the better part of a year to profile all the bodies, and most of them were left unidentified, cremated, given a number and filed away, just another data point,"
"It was better than being left to rot in that pile,"
Shion said nothing but nodded slightly in agreement as he looked over Mona and Ryuichi's notes on the conditions of the remains of Mai Risako.
"I'm taking her out now," he warned, "If you're squeamish, please vomit into the sink," Shion added opening the appropriate unit and pulling out the hover stretcher on which the remains were laid.
Nezumi glanced over and paled at the state of the body.
"Gods," he breathed.
Shion was quick to cover the remains with a drop cloth and he continued to tell his story in order to distract Nezumi.
"By the time we got done with the mass grave, the Reconstruction Committee had set up the skeleton structures for the new City Council, the District councils, and the new police force. As you might have guessed by that point chaos was running rampant, people were scared, and of course there were those who fed on that fear. There was a dramatic increase in crime but all the officials were overly cautious about prosecuting unfairly, given No. 6's track record. They desperately needed people trained in forensics. Since I'd been in the special program when I was younger and I had the most hands on experience they gave me this position and the rest, as they say, is history," Shion finished, scrawling his short-hand signature onto the tablet attached to the cold unit with the stylus.
"That makes a twisted kind of sense," Nezumi commented, "Like I said before, I never would have guessed you would end up here, you were always so uncomfortable around the dead, but when you explain it…"
"It fits my character?" suggested Shion.
Nezumi shrugged philosophically.
"It reminds me a bit of the time you buried Inukashi's mutt. We'd all left you alone and you'd never done anything like it before but you stayed and dug that grave. I don't even think Inukashi paid you for it,"
"Inukashi…why do I know that name?" Shion muttered, "Oh, she breeds and trains the police dogs for our district,"
"She's pissed at you," Nezumi said, testing his handiwork by threading his fingers into the mesh of the grate and giving it a few hard tugs.
It rattled slightly, but held which was really all Shion could ask for.
"Really, why?"
"Probably because she doesn't know about your brain damage and thinks you're turning your nose up at her company now that you're back within the confines of respectability,"
"Oh," said Shion pushing the hover stretcher over to the door and opening it with a swipe of his ID card, "I'd better go apologize to her soon then,"
"Not a bad idea," Nezumi agreed.
"Will you come with me? Seeing as I don't actually know where she lives,"
Nezumi followed him out into the hall.
"I don't know, I'm still pissed at her for making me think you were dead, and it would be kind of inconvenient to have to try and kill her with you there," said Nezumi.
Shion glanced over his shoulder and decided when he caught sight of the other man's thunderous expression that he was only half kidding when he said that.
Shion paused outside the sliding plexiglass doors to autopsy room three.
"Do you have someplace you have to be?" he asked the silver-eyed male hesitantly, chewing on his lower lip, "I'd like to talk to you some more but I'm not going to be done for another couple of hours…"
"I just got back into town, so no,"
"Do you have a place to stay?"
"Why? Are you offering?"
Shion shrugged.
"Yeah, sure, if you want. My place is kind of small but you can bunk on the couch until you find someplace better," he offered.
Nezumi grinned, mostly to himself, Shion suspected, as whatever amusement he derived from the situation was based in memories of events Shion couldn't even remember.
"I'll take you up on that offer, your Majesty,"
"Great," Shion smiled, "You can have free reign of my office, I have a few books in my desk drawer and the couch isn't too bad if you want to take a nap,"
As the door to his office slid shut concealing that piercing silver gaze from Shion, he let out an exasperated sigh leaning heavily against the cool metal of the door.
What was he doing? Hadn't he just been wallowing in self-pity because he didn't want to deal with his mother's emotional expectations? Now he had invited someone from his past, someone who despite his bold words would want Shion to remember him eventually, into his home. The only other place besides the morgue where he felt at ease.
Still, Shion found himself mezmerized by those eyes, and he was curious as to how he had met, and he suspected, come to care for someone like Nezumi.
Questions without answers swam around his brain and Shion shook his head. He wasn't accomplishing anything except giving himself a headache standing in the doorway trying to puzzle out the stranger now safely ensconced within his office.
Resolutely he turned back to the task at hand, the autopsy of Mai Risako.
AN: So, for those of you who might be interested to know, this is my second time writing this chapter because I had my laptop stolen the other day and like the doofus brain that I am I did not have any backup files.
Six months of blood, sweat and tears gone in an instant.
As you guys might know or imagine, it was more than a little depressing. So, the long and the short of it is, I didn't get what I had still in my brain down while it was fresh because I was too sad to write (and also didn't have a computer) and by the time I got back down to business I ended up having to re-write this chapter from scratch. Here's hoping it turned out alright regardless.
Anyway, as always please drop me a review on your way out and let me know what you think!