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9
"Do you feel alive?"
He feels close to death actually, the pain of having walked up the stairs on broken bones overwhelming his other senses, almost blinding.
His eyes throb-his vision on the verge of being double or triple vision- and the whine in his ears has yet to go away. If he survives the night- and he doubts that very much right now- this will be a career ending injury.
He readies his gun anyways. He has a job to do, and he will do it in style.
His body screams in protest as he shoots the tracker, and then it's hard to hear anything as his gun is fired at him.
It's up to Jowd now.
2.
Lynne is dead.
It loops through his mind on repeat as he stares at her body.
Lynne is dead.
How could he have failed her like this? Could he have prevented it?
Maybe if he hadn't tampered with her exam score she would be alive and well away from this.. this pointless death in a junkyard.
Why was she here? She was supposed to be having her celebration dinner, not getting shot in a graveyard. So why..?
They are questions that she can never answer now.
Why?
He doesn't know how long he stays there, but the body is long gone when he pays attention to the world again.
He really shouldn't have gotten that distracted, but it's Lynne. She's dead.
But maybe other people don't have to be.
He thinks of Kamila in Lynne's apartment, waiting for a guardian who will never come home. He has to make sure she has someone go home to her.
There's still time. He has to track the body down, and he has to do it tonight.
If he doesn't move fast, he won't be able to save anyone tonight.
There's still time.
A shot rings through the air.
Red bleeds through the white of his suit, staining his hands as he tries to press down on the wound.
Not now. Please notnow.
He has to- has to finish this
But his body betrays him, giving out.
5.
There is a lot to deal with in the Chicken Kitchen fiasco. One of his detectives drove through the window of a restaurant, killing Lynne, who is on the run for a murder he knows she didn't commit. Lynne spent her last moments saving the detective undercover as a waitress.
How had this become such a fiasco? How does rescue Lynne become drive through the window of a restaurant! What was she even doing at the restaurant! The lady likes her chicken, but tonight of all nights!
What was she doing in the graveyard for that matter, while getting framed for the murder of a dead man? She was meant to be at her celebration dinner!
He had so many questions for her, when he caught up to her, that he didn't know where to start. And now he will never get the chance.
He wants to cry and scream, and have a messy and unflattering meltdown, but he can't do that. He has to maintain some level of professionalism. There is still work to do tonight.
The opp is ruined, he has funerals to plan, an accident and a PR nightmare to manage, and his best friend is scheduled to be executed tonight.
The manipulator is probably laughing his ass off at this. He wonders if there is a way to stick them with the bill.
He's running out of time. He's never been more aware of that than he is tonight, with the time ticking down to the execution in hours instead of days. He's counting the minutes now.
And no matter where he looks or how hard he tries, he can't seem to find the key.
He knows Jowd is innocent. Jowd doesn't want it proven, and is willing to die to cover it up.
He doesn't want him to. He's been trying everything in his power but there's not enough time. Not enough evidence.
He doesn't want to give up.
So he can put off dealing with the PR disaster until tomorrow at least. If he starts now, it will eat up all his remaining time. He has enough disasters going on tonight without starting in on that one.
That's when the phone rings.
He answers it with a cheerful hello that he doesn't feel.
"Cabanela! Just the man I was hoping to speak to!"
"Who am I speaking to?"
"Who I am doesn't matter. Who she is, matters more to you, I think."
"Cabanela?" Another voice calls out. His heart stops in his chest. He knows that voice.
"Kamila!" He cries out.
"If you want her back safe and sound, meet me at Temsik Park. Alone. I know the men you have watching the place are gone. Keep it empty."
"When?"
"Half an hour Inspector. See you then."
The phone clicks. He's left alone with his thoughts and the dial tone.
The man said to meet alone, and he will. It's Jowd's daughter. He doesn't imagine the man will forgive him if anything happened to Kamila.
He put her with Lynne to try to keep them safer. Long nights in the office, and extracurricular hours to try to save her father wouldn't leave him the time she would need for him to raise her. Lynne's parents work overseas and she has the apartment to herself, so she was happy to have Kamila in the house. And the extra money didn't hurt either.
They all love Kamila. Cabanela doesn't know how to be a parent and save her father, so he prioritized saving her father and found a compromise that everyone seemed happy with. Maybe they were not as happy as he assumed.
Jowd is dying tonight to cover up an accident he suspects was engineered by his daughter. Getting proof for that is the hard part.
He's almost out of time to get the proof.
And if he is saving Kamila he won't be able to get it.
But Jowd wants his daughter to live free.
Cabanela can give him that, at least. Lynne would be mad at him too, if he didn't prioritize her little sister.
He has fifteen minutes to make phone calls, write notes, and last words.
After all, there is every chance this is a trap.
He picks up the phone to call the professor. He almost calls Lynne next, and remembers part way through dialing that she is dead. He hangs up, and goes to call the chief instead.
It feels too soon, before he is riding his bike into the park. But the calls are made,the letters are written,and multiple people have called him a lunatic.
He's still going to do this.
His doubts build as he waits standing in the park.
He saw Missile's body on the ground on the way over here. That's not a good sign.
He didn't stop to investigate, but makes a note to do so when he leaves with Kamilia.
Then he hears footsteps. Someone small.
He turns and there she is.
"Kamila!" He calls out. Something is off.
He runs to her.
And no one else comes out to stop him, negotiate hostages, or terms, or anything. He stops running.
Something is very wrong.
Then she pulls out a gun.
He holds up her hands.
"Let her go" He demands of the manipulator. "If you need a hostage, take me! Just, please let her go!"
"I'm not looking for a hostage."
The statement is made quietly, chillingly, in the voice of a little girl.
"Don't make her a murderer" He begs.
He takes a step closer, hoping if he can close the distance, he can get control of the gun.
"She already is." The manipulator tells him, with the voice of the child he watched grow up. "Just like you. Aren't you proud?"
"What are you!" He demands. There have been a lot of theories about the nature of the manipulator ranging from foreigners, to actual space Aliens.
If he can get the manipulator to keep talking, maybe he can get close enough.
"Desperate." The manipulator answers. "Hopeless. Just like you wanted me to be."
The gun fires, and Cabanela falls to the ground, white suit stained red, hands pressing against the wound as if he could keep the blood in. Kamila slumps to the ground like a puppet with her wings cut.
He tries to move closer, but his body isn't listening, his vision blurred. He's having trouble keeping his eyes open.
In the background, he thinks he sees something small and furry, before his eyes close for the last time.
8.
He's waiting with the Minister and Jowd for a prison van, when he turns to his old friend, and asks.
"What did you send Lynne to get?" He drawls. "She went running out of the room, it must be important."
"The evidence for my innocence. The gun."
The what! He had it hidden the whole time! With Lynne!
After spending years looking for proof, to hear that Jowd had deliberately sabotaged that too makes him want to break something.
His friend's nose perhaps.
He walks closer to the man. He wants to shake him.
Then he stills.
"Did you ever think how cruel that was?" He asks in a low tone. "Leaving that evidence with Lynne, who adores you."
Jowd sucks in air, an expression of pain.
"How about your daughter? Dead mother, and a father who chose to be executed, rather than live in hopes of seeing her again one day. You didn't even want to see her while in prison. "
He does not air the ways Jowd has been cruel to him with this action. Not until he has made up his mind for how to best sharpen them into a blade, into something that will stick. Something that wounds and will make him think before trying to pull this kind of stunt again.
Jowd comes up behind him. Grabs something from his pocket.
"Rude" he scolds his friend, only to realize it's his gun."
Jowd shoots the minister with the tracking bullet.
He tackles his friend.
"What are you doing?"
"You can't say that he didn't kill someone now." Jowd's voice tells him.
The manipulator!
"Not that you will be around to argue. "
They are fighting on the floor, and Cabenela is a good fighter, but none of his hits seem to affect the manipulator.
The gun ends up in the manipulator's hands again, and this time it is pressed against his forehead.
Two shots ring out.
3. The window smashes, and Lynne is dead before he even has time to react.
Bright and alive in one moment, warmth fading with her lifeblood in the next.
"I'm sorry." He tells her. "I'm so sorry"
His hands are pressed against the wound, as she takes her last breaths.
He calls for the nearest doctor, even though he knows it's no good, that the doctor is fake, and even the best of doctors couldn't fix this.
Fix her.
She's dead and she died right next to him, and he couldn't stop it, couldn't stop anything.
Lynne died tonight, and Jowd is going to die tonight and he can't save anyone.
It's been long days and longer nights to climb this high, in hopes of saving Jowd, of proving his innocence by finding the culprit. Lynne is dead, and he wonders if any of it is worth it.
He can't- he doesn't. He wants to give up.
But he must continue.
Jowd isn't dead, yet. And he has a little girl who will lose her father if he gives up now.
A little girl who lives in Lynne's apartment. Jowd's little girl.
Kamila.
He has to go tell her.
He doesn't know if he has any space in his apartment yet. Maybe he will have to get a new one. Until then, he can sleep on the couch and give her the bed.
He goes home, and spends some time readying his bed and the couch, as well as some light tidying up. It's going to be hard enough on her to change locations, he might as well not make it more complicated.
And if he is avoiding facing her and his own grief, that is between him and the house.
When he feels like his smile in the mirror doesn't look too fake, he decides he should go tell her.
He walks in to find an empty apartment, and signs that something isn't right.
The phone is in the water. And there are muddied boot prints bigger than Lynne's on the carpet.
Was she abducted?
He takes a shortcut through the park on his way back.
He finds a body on his way back.
It's Lynne's cute little dog, his body broken from a vehicle.
He- He hadn't even thought about the dog. What would happen to it with Lynne dead.
And Missile is dead too now.
That's not the only body.
He can't tell who it is, crushed as it is by the Mino statue. He just knows there is a body there.
Please let it not be her.
But if Missile is dead then there is that cha- no! No- no- no!
They are going to find her, and when they do he will go home and bring her home too.
After all, getting Jowd out of prison won't happen overnight, and she is going to need someone to stay with her.
He doesn't have long left to save Jowd. He should be getting back.
If only he can find the manipulator.
A shot rings out through the air, and he crumples to the ground. His knee is screaming. He feels cold, even as his heart feels like it's beating out of his chest.
"Do you feel alone now? There is no one left to come for you." That voice. He knows that voi-
Another shot breaks the quiet of the night as it moves through his other knee.
"Do you feel despair?"
"No." He whimpers. It can't be! That man has been dead for years!
"You will."
He cries out as a boot drives into his side.
He curls up the best he can to weather the assault, but it doesn't last long.
Instead he stands up.
That should be impossible, his knees are shot through, but he walks against his will, not in control of his body.
He comes across Detective Rindge, and pulls out his gun.
"Please no" he begs inside his head.
"Begging won't work." His voice tells him, before firing the gun. "Now let's go find your friend, the professor."
The night gets worse from there. Friends and colleagues die to surprise and his gun, and although they fire in return, none of their shots can kill him.
He is in pain for every second of it. Aware, but not in control. The manipulator laughs with his voice.
When his body is his own again, it is a relief to die.
0.5
Lynne asked Inspector Cabanela to watch Kamila tonight.
Before he can go into the apartment, he is distracted.
And then a phone rings.
The concierge answers it. She asks if he is Inspector Cabanela. When he confirms yes, she passes him the phone.
Duty calls again.
He walks away from the apartment unaware that killers are waiting behind a door, that a brave little doggy was unable to save his little mistress, but succeeded in saving him.
He walks away from the dangers in the apartment and towards the uncertain safety of the night.
With some timely interventions, he becomes the last one still standing.
But that was in a different timeline, who only one remembers now.
6. He is out of time to save Jowd.
He goes to the prison courtyard to mourn alone.
Maybe he would have brought Lynne, but it's safer for her to stay on the run.
Besides, she has a different relationship to Jowd.
"I'm sorry." He apologizes to a dead friend. "I couldn't do it. Not fast enough. "
"Kamila deserves better. "
He doesn't know how long he spends crying, only that once he starts, it feels impossible to stop.
Time stretches like honey, trapping him in that moment, in the grief, in the despair.
After this, he has to pick himself up, get back to work with a smile, but right now he needs this moment.
He must have spent too long there. He hears someone creeping up on him. He turns around, and the answer surprises him.
"Lynne! Aren't you supposed to be on the run?"
"You made me waste a lot of time tonight, inspector. "
There's something wrong with her voice, with how she holds herself.
"Look at you, pretending to be sad, when inside I'm sure all you feel is relief. A shame covered up, bleached out for the sake of the stark white you keep your suit."
"Who are you!" He demands.
It's not Lynne. It's the Manipulator.
"Oh. I thought I had been memorable." It laughs. "But then again, you did try so hard to forget. Perhaps this will jog your memory. "
Lynne is now holding a gun to her head. The hand is shaking.
"Is this familiar? Of course, it would be more familiar to him-" Lynne's head nods towards the prison. "-but I'm sure you have heard the story."
"Yomiel!" Lynne's head nods. "You died years ago! Why are you doing this?"
"You took everything from me. I came back to return the favor. They say revenge is a dish best served cold."
"Let her go" He demands of the vengeful ghost. "If you need a hostage, take me, not my baby! Just, please let her go!"
"She's still not a very cooperative hostage. But I can make use with her. GET in the car. "
They walk over to the parking lot with the gun pointed to Lynne's head. The car is opened, and Cabanela gets into the driver's seat.
Lynne gets into the passenger's seat and slumps.
Cabanela tries to reach out to her, but his body puts his hands on the steering wheel.
"You did offer yourself as hostage Baaaby." His voice mocks. "Begged me to let her go. "
The car is started, his foot taken off the brake pedal.
He tried to take control back, tries to put his foot back on the brake pedal.
His foot shakes. It's not much, but it's something.
"I should have hurt you first. Maybe you would be more cooperative. "
His hands are shaking. He turns his head under heavy resistance to look at Lynne.
Thank goodness. She's still breathing.
He smiles involuntarily.
"I did have different plans." His voice tells him. "But you are being so uncooperative, I think I should change them. "
The car speeds up. He can't turn the wheel fast enough. He wishes he could scream.
There's a crash.
tiresshriekingspinningthepressofairbagswhiplashbrokenwindow,andLynne'sbodycrashingintohis.
10.
He waits all night for news from the Yonoa at the hospital.
He is in so much pain. But that doesn't stop him from calling people to try to get a rescue mission to happen. To send down something to look for them.
In between surgeries, he organizes a deep-water search, from the coordinates of the watch. To give Jowd a tracking device without keeping track of said device would be absurd. He also hires people to clean and fix up Jowd's old house. A welcome home, that puts a deep dent in his savings.
As long as they come home, it will be worth it.
The Minister of Justice has come to visit. He has helped with connections and paying some of the bills, which is nice.
All he can do is wait. To pass time, he does his best to keep on top of the paperwork. It's not like he can do fieldwork without rehab.
He keeps hoping. Wishing. Expecting.
He keeps faith until the news comes back. The Professor breaks it to him.
"The Yonoa was sunk, There were no survivors."
Everything in him goes numb. It is worse than walking on broken bones.
The professor keeps talking, but he can't hear him over the crushing weight in his head.
He thinks back to what Yomiel angrily told him on the stairs.
" I want you to suffer what I suffered. I want you to know what it is like to lose everything you care about."
He doesn't know if the vengeful ghost is listening. Before he was determined not to give the manipulator the satisfaction of a reaction. But right now he feels too burned to try that.
"I hope you're happy, Yomiel." He tells a ghost who may or may not be listening.
"I finally understand where you are coming from."
They leave a bitter taste in his throat to admit. It's like a haze has come over him. His angry, bitter, vengeful, feelings cling to him like a raincoat on a wet humid day.
He doesn't know how he will get to Yomiel directly, but he can direct his anger at the foreigners, who now have Temsik in their hands.
He has a lot of time to plan in the hospital, and he plans to use it.
4.
There are a lot of fires to to deal with regarding the Chicken Kitchen fiasco. One of his detectives drove through the window of a restaurant trying to provide backup when the undercover detective got caught.
What were they doing! Does subtlety mean nothing to them! He hopes the department doesn't have to pay for this, the budget is already shot to hell!
The opp is ruined, he has funerals to plan, an accident and a PR nightmare to manage, and his best friend is scheduled to be executed tonight. Lynne is on the run after murdering a dead man on a security tape, and he hopes they can find her before something else happens to her.
The last thing he wants when he gets back to the chief is to hear that a phone call came for him to go to the junkyard, and it sounded like bad news.
The professor meets him outside.
"We found Lynne." His grim tone indicates she's not alive.
The professor leads him to the basement.
Of all the ways Lynne might have died, he was not expecting to see her dead to the same machine that he is sure killed Alma years before.
Shock hits him. It's tragic. Horrific.
Sickening.
Why Lynne.
Maybe it's his fault. He's the one who sent her in here.
He should have confined her somewhere else.
Somewhere without a death trap in the basement for her to wander into. He should have had her thrown in jail! Maybe a part of him wanted to give her a chance to solve it. And now she is dead for that hope.
He doesn't know how long he spends in that basement. But it's too long.
Long enough that a phone call comes in that Jowd is dead.
And he feels gutted by that.
He failed.
He failed both of them.
There is one more person he can't afford to fail. And she has lost all of her guardians.
It's for her sake he gets up.
He has to prepare for single guardianship, despite having hoped he could prevent her from becoming an orphan.
He's all that's left now.
He calls Lynne's apartment. But the call does not go through.
Not that no one picks up. It does not connect. What could that mean.
The only answers he can think of are terrifying.
He has to get over there.
He's bolting up the stairs three steps at a time.
He runs into something at the door. A corpse he has seen twice, untouched by time. A dead man walking.
A dead man with his gun.
"I know that look on your face. I know that suffering. You are filled with loneliness and despair. "
The corpse smiles.
"Just like me."
It pins him to the wall, his nose pressed into something disgusting. Then the corpse leans in.
"I wanted you to know what it was like to lose everything you cared about. I wanted you to feel the same pain I feel. To suffer what I suffer. And now you do. "
He tries to break free from its grip, but no matter how hard he hits, the grip does not loosen.
"I wish I could leave you with the sensation a little longer. Buuut, you've made me waste a lot of time tonight, so I should cut this short. "
He feels his gun against his back. The force of it slams him into the wall, ears ringing with the force of the shot.
The corpse walks downstairs, presumably to shoot the professor.
He feels numb, and he knows enough to know that's not a good sign.
This night has been a race against time, and he has lost.
7.
For the first time tonight Cabanela is feeling genuinely good about the odds. Jowd escaped from Jail, showing care for something other than his guilt. Which is good! It's hard to save someone who didn't want to be saved!
The Justice Minister will have a harder time sentencing a man while looking him in the eyes. Especially if Lynne turns up something about his innocence with all the investigating she isn't supposed to be doing tonight.
Maybe tomorrow this whole mess can be cleared up, and Kamila can be reunited with her father. She's safe at Lynne's house at the moment.
And Lynne is-
- is-
- is not supposed to to be in the Justice Ministers office with his dead body on the floor.
Cabanela feels his good mood evaporate instantly. It leaves him with a headache. He feels so tired.
"Lynne baby! I know you are not the type of person to kill people. But this is the second body you have been found next to tonight. This does not look good. "
"I didn't kill him. "
"I don't think you did. But I still have to bring you in for questioning."
Lynne looks puzzled.
"I never really thought about what happened to the present timeline when Sissel jumped back to change the past. I just kind of assumed it synchronized, but I guess they keep going on their individual ways. "
"Lynne baby, what in the world does that mean!"
"I don't know what happened. He was dead when I came in here."
She's not answering, but that is not important at this moment. What's important Is investigating the Defense minister's death.
Something is odd about the phone.
"Did anyone call while you were here?" He asks Lynne.
"No." She answers.
"Fantastic."
That means he has to make the call to get telephone engineers involved to trace the call, a long time consuming process that he is not a fan of.
One of the Justice minister's men picks that moment to come into the room.
Before the man can panic, Cabanela tries to take control of the situation.
"Do you have any cells? Or rooms we can isolate people in, while we investigate the death of the Justice minister, and in his case-" he points to Jowd " -until we find an interim Justice minister, and decide if we are still going forward with the execution. "
He hopes that with a new Justice Minister, the execution can be stopped. He hopes that proper investigation can buy time. Put pressure on the other party. Crack the case. Prove Jowd is innocent.
He has a lot of hope that are desperate wishes. But his desperate wish that Jowd would not be executed did come true, and maybe other wishes can become a reality.
The investigation gets underway. The phone trace turns up some interesting information. The Minister was calling his wife a lot, and also received a call from Jowds old house.
Jowds old house is untouched. It legally belongs to Jowd, and is technically being held in reserve for Kamila. Cabanela should have cleaned it up long ago, but he has kept it the same in hopes that he could uncover a clue that he missed last time. Something that could save Kamila's father.
Tomorrow, after the execution, he would have needed to start the hard process of cleaning it out. It would hurt to give the little girl back her house, and have her walk back into the room her mother died in untouched.
She probably will not want to keep it. He wouldn't want to keep the house his mother died in.
He needs to ask Jowd some questions about the phone line.
How is it still working? Is he paying a bill for that? Does he know of anyone who would call the Justice minister from his house?
The last is probably a no, but he still needs to ask for the sake of the investigation.
More pragmatically, he wants to see Jowd alive again with his own eyes.
He dances his way into the room. Then he sprints to the corner.
Jowd is sprawled gracelessly on the floor, blood darkening his prison outfit.
He takes off his coat and presses it against him, hoping to stem the bleeding.
Then something hits him from behind. A knife bites into his neck after, and he slumps onto Jowds body.
He has the time to think that he should have looked around first instead of rushing in like a rookie, and it becomes hard to hold onto any thoughts after that.
11.
He never thought he would be doing a search and rescue operation involving submarines, let alone from a hospital, getting updates between the many surgeries needed for crunched bones.
He's hired people to work on cleaning up and fixing Jowd's old house.
This is all going to make a huge dent in his savings, but it will be worth it to bring them back.
That is, if there is anyone to bring back.
He worries, but he has to have faith.
Lynne and Jowd are capable people. And they have ghosts on their side.
Hopefully that will be enough.
The minister of Justice has come to visit. He has helped with connections and paying some of the bills, which is nice.
Cabanela had been floundering at first with the question of how to get ahold of the submarine to help.
In the meanwhile, there is a lot of paperwork to fill out. He can get it done in the hospital. It's not like he's up to fieldwork right now.
He doesn't know how much time passes, before news comes in from the wreck of the Yonoa.
The professor is the one who breaks it to him.
"There is one confirmed survivor. "
"Who?" He asks, dread building in his stomach.
"Kamila."
The news is devastating.
In spite of all of his efforts to save his best friend, he died tonight.
His rookie died tonight. He failed to keep her safe too.
He couldn't protect them. He couldn't protect anyone tonight.
He doesn't know how long he spends staring at nothing, too numb to care.
Distantly he notes that tomorrow he has to prepare for guardianship of a child. Organize funerals. Set up a schedule for his rehab. He should probably make time to book them both for therapy.
But tonight he lacks the attention to pay attention to any of that.