“That's not my decision to make.” With nicotine clarity, he crushes the smoldering remains of his cigarette in his palm before it reaches an inevitable conclusion. The familiar burn neither absolves him of the question of guilt or the bitter taste of vague regret, ashes on the tongue like the medicine his mother made him take with a spoonful of sugar as a boy, where he could cling to his blissful ignorance and feel comforted in the thought that innocence would always be protected as it's meant. But that's not how the world works. He'd like to leave before the smoke clears and the blood edges any closer in plumes of scarlet and iron that the collar of his coat doesn't block out. So why's he still standing here, shackled like two prisoners locked in a stalemate, attempting to see eye-to-eye and waiting for his vision to adjust? “You shouldn't spend too much time with the dead.” He says, a hypocrite, having carried every corpse on his back from the innocent to the guilty, and finding that once measured both perpetuator and victim held similar weight in death. In memory. No one's born with a knife in their hands, or standing over a body, or doomed to be the body for someone else to stand over. A choir of ghosts sing and roar to life, as if commanded by devil conductor whose own soles were chained to the stage, baton swinging in a frenzy like an anxious metronome, or the pendulum of fate behind the scales that decide it all. “Too much sympathy can drive you insane, or closer to death.” And yet, despite himself and the cast, he begins to narrate his own story to the passing winter fairy standing over the corpse that becomes an afterthought. The snow begins to fall, gentle. He's not sure if it's real. But he's glad it's not raining like it was that night he arrived too late to the same scene that keeps playing over and over and over in his mind, until he resonates with both the victim and the killer and understands everything and nothing, until he learns again how to burn with hate to numbness, and he fills up that void again with self-lacerating rage that folds into itself like an origami crane he's not sure if he should crush in his hands to feel the moment when something changes before he's the last to know or set free away from his judgement. “If I look, I'll know.” And no choir or jury could argue otherwise, and no one would be forgiven, least of all him. The other should get that snowball's chance in hell, so he doesn't examine the corpse the autopsy team will pick up before the sun rises on metropolitan paradise promised to everyone but them. “I wanted to protect people. To help them. There's no crime in that, until the business of the law started deciding who deserves to be protected and helped, and I couldn't do anything about it. Then I must've lost my mind, debating justice in my head while my hands were empty, and no one was saved.” It's not a very good story. He hopes the play was better. He hopes it explains enough, and the past could carry the present with grace instead of haunt it. His eyes, having adjusted to the darkness that spills into the city from crevices gone unlooked for too long, catch how the other gingerly touches his own face. “You're not the one I'm looking for.” He leaves it at that. There's no resignation in the next decision he executes. “If you won't come out, then I'm going in. Alright? I'm taking the first step now. Just to take a closer look at you, see if you're real. If you're hurt anywhere. Don't be scared. If you run, I'll chase you until I catch you.”
