Chapter Text
The corridor swells with bleach. The orange-tinted halo of light yawns wide and agitated across the floor - like a noose flapping languidly in the wind.
"Up ye get."
The first man, the smaller, calloused one, is in the doorway. "It's yer lucky day, pal. Ye must huv friends in high places."
I do not answer. My throat, a strip of wilting leather; my limbs slow with the weight of memory. But my body complies, as bodies do–hauling itself upright, bones grinding against the permeating silence with the dull, practised resignation of a thing that has performed this particular motion more times than it has the vocabulary to count.
The man gives me a look that sits somewhere between pity and boredom, and jerks his chin. Move.
We stop before a room I have stood outside before, in this version and the versions that preceded it and the versions that will follow with the same carpentry of inevitability. The door opens with a hiss, and there, sitting in a hard-backed chair beneath a light aged yellow, is a man. No badge. No uniform. Just a face shovel-deep, and eyes that have stopped reflecting light.
He gestures without words. I take three steps inside. The door clicks shut.
"It's been a long time," he begins, low and steady. "Do you know who I am?"
"Aye."
"You see, there are things in this world that you can outrun, but I am not one of them." His words are gentle. As seductive as a posthumous lullaby.
He leans forward, the room tightening around us.
"Come now," he whispers, his fingers tapping against the left leg of the chair with the idle, unhurried rhythm of a man who has nowhere else to be, and never has, and never will. "How did you kill him, this time?"