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There’s no easy way to describe the feeling of waking up from what you thought was a horrifying nightmare just to find that reality is in fact much, much worse. Rex remembers only fragments, screams of terror, violent gunshots. He doesn’t remember events so much as he remembers feelings, the acrid taste of malice, the sweet promise of vindication, all of it underscored by the terrible sensation of wrongness.
He also remembers Ronan, shimmering, translucent, with that same determined glare and damn cigarette hanging from his mouth.
-
Rex wakes up on the cold wooden platform of the gallows to the sound of a young girl’s voice, the same fierce migraine that has stayed with him the entire evening burning behind his eyes. The girl - Joy - is yelling at him, telling him to wake up with the commanding tone that manages to always sound disrespectful when coming from a teenager. Her voice is like shards of glass, each word stabbing into his head. A groan escapes his lips before he can stop it, and he squeezes his eyes shut, trying to piece his mind back together.
“Finally! Hey, get up, come on. Help me out of this.”
-
Rex wakes up and nothing makes sense, the girl is tied at her hands and her feet, the hangman’s noose tight around her neck. The smell of copper hangs heavy in the air, cloying and thick, and Rex looks around for the source only to see Mitchell and Forrest dead on the ground behind him, pools of red around their heads. As he climbs unsteadily to his feet, an image of Ronan, staring at him with so much rage and fear, flashes across his memory. He feels ill, not only with the pain but with the confusion of remembering yet not remembering at the same time.
“What… what happened here?” he murmurs, stumbling forward to untie Joy’s restraints. He focuses on removing the noose from her head first, the mere sight of it has his stomach twisting with disgust. “Who did this to you?”
Joy shoots him a look that is surprisingly accusing, and then sighs. “It was Abigail.”
“Abigail?” The noose removed, Rex crouches down to untie the rope at Joy’s feet. He knows a handful of Abigails, and none of them would do something like this. If anything, everything here points to the Bell Killer, yet they know that the psycho is likely a tall and strong male with blue eyes. An accomplice? It’s not impossible. The last thing he remembers is getting into the squad car and driving away. He was supposed to take Joy to the station, and yet… they’re in the museum. Why are they in the museum? “What happened to the officers? Did you see who killed them?”
Why is it so hard to remember?
“Uh…” The girl blinks, her mouth opening and closing as the rope loosens. She takes a half step away from Rex, a tremor in her hands that sends Rex’s concern spiking. “God, how the hell am I supposed to…”
“If you know what happened you need to tell me,” Rex states as he gets to work on her wrists. Two officers are dead, countless others too. Ronan… Ronan is gone. Rex has no idea what the hell happened that led to him untying Joy’s bindings like this. The only reason his voice remains calm is from years of practice. Pain lances behind his eyes, insistent, as the beginnings of panic emerge at the fringes of his mind. He hasn’t felt like this in months, not since... that last blackout. “I… I can’t seem to remember.”
“Alright, okay.” The rope binding Joy’s wrists comes apart and she starts backing away, bouncing on her feet. Rex has the distinct feeling that she’s scared of him, though he has no idea why. “Okay. Well, I guess you deserve to know.”
“Joy.” Rex lowers his voice, an edge of desperation slipping through his attempt to retain his usual authority. “Tell me what happened.”
And so she does.
-
“That’s not… that can’t be possible.”
“Well, it’s the truth. Do you remember what you were doing tonight when Ronan died?”
Rex doesn’t.
-
Rex buys it, as ridiculous as all of it sounds it’s the only explanation that makes sense when he takes everything he knows into account. You don’t grow up in a town like Salem and not end up with an open mind when it comes to the supernatural. Rex deals in facts and evidence, and he knows that sometimes the simplest explanation is the right one. Not to mention that this time, even his own spotty memory seems to support everything Joy tells him.
He calls in the deaths. And they make up a story claiming that their car was stopped by the Bell Killer, blaming everything on the shadowy figure haunting his town. Through Joy’s words, Rex is turned into a hero, a brave figure who had fought off the killer at the last minute and saved her life. They tamper with as much of the evidence as necessary to make all of it believable.
The truth is, they would have been believed anyway, because Rex knows how much he is trusted, not just by his officers but by the entire town.
He begins to see sympathy in the people’s eyes, and in others, even worse, he finds worship.
-
“Did he… say anything about me?”
After, there isn’t much left but to let Joy return to her mother. As they wait for Cassandra Foster’s arrival, they stand together in the station’s foyer. The girl stares up at Rex, a look of confusion on her face that clearly asks why would he?
“I am… was… his brother-in-law,” Rex explains, his hope transparent. He can’t bring himself to claim that he was also Ronan’s friend. The label feels undeserved, an unwelcome presumption now that he knows he is Ronan’s murderer.
Understanding flashes in Joy’s eyes, and then, panic. It tells Rex all he needs to know.
“We… didn’t really have much time to chat,” Joy says, her hesitance more transparent for the fact of her youth.
They chatted, but never about him. It makes sense, Rex thinks. They had a killer to hunt down, after all. That is fine.
-
A fresh recruit stops him in the hallways and tells him she thinks he’s a hero. Rex is the kind of officer she strives to become one day.
Rex listens and thanks her with a smile. He feels numb.
-
The funerals feel never-ending. He gives a speech at Baxter’s funeral, and a different one at Ronan’s, then two more at those of the officers. Four cops dead in one night. Never before has the department been hit this hard.
When Rex makes the speech about Ronan’s life, he stares out at a faceless crowd full of people whom he knew never even liked Ronan, each of them putting on a face of mourning out of respect for the deceased. When Ronan was alive, it was these same faces who had whispered behind his back, who had tried to sabotage his work and made him an outcast among those who should have had his back.
Now they stare at him, glad they’re not the one being buried, glad that Ronan had been the one killed instead of themselves or someone they truly cared about.
Rex stifles his feelings and opens his mouth.
“We are gathered here today to mourn the loss of a great detective.”
-
Seven shots, almost point blank, straight from above. Sometimes, Rex thinks he almost remembers.
-
The murders stop. Two of the Bell Killers are dead and the other is the second-in-command of the local police department. Soon, the investigation stops also, as Rex diverts more and more resources toward newer crimes fresh in the populace’s memory. But the wounds left by the killer leave their scars. The newspapers call them incompetent, and his superiors imply he’ll never be promoted again.
Rex finds he doesn’t give a shit at all.
-
He treats Joy to lunch at a popular café, ignoring the stares they receive from the patrons. Salem is not a big place, and being recognised is almost inevitable when you’re expected to be the face and voice of the local police department. It’s never been a thing that’s bothered him before, now, the scrutiny feels like needles pricking against his skin.
Joy, at the very least, looks like she’s doing well. She’s back in school, and she’s thinking of maybe joining the police force after she graduates. Ronan had left an impression on her, and she thinks she can do a lot of good, with her powers and her penchant for finding trouble. Rex is pleased to hear all of it, and offers her as much encouragement as he can.
Every moment is awkward. Joy does her best to pretend she is comfortable, but Rex is too well trained to miss the tightness around her eyes, the way she flinches whenever Rex so much as reaches for the salt. It seemed as though it was impossible to not leave some sort of damage behind when it was you who had attacked and then tried to kill someone. Even if you both understood that it hadn’t really been you.
-
He never quite figures out how to deal with the knowledge that he is the one who murdered Ronan, the one who threw him from a window and then emptied an entire clip of ammunition into his chest. It might be easier if he remembered it, or maybe it’s easier that he doesn’t. Possession isn’t something you can talk about with the Department therapist. So the guilt eats at him every day, a corrosive force that steadily erodes any speck of pleasure from his existence until it’s the only thing he knows how to feel.
It’s not his fault, he tells himself. Not really.
He was possessed. The had no control over himself. It wasn’t really him.
There was nothing he could have done.
Still, the ground feels like it’s constantly crumbling away beneath his feet.
-
The nightmares start slowly, as though his mind is only just coming to realise the scope of what it has gone through. At first it is barely remembered fragments, screams, and the sound of glass shattering. Other times he’s fighting, or being fought against, each blow bearing down at him until he can no longer find the space to breathe. Sometimes he’s staring down at Ronan’s terrified face as shots ring out one after another. Sometimes he’s the one lying on the asphalt, and it’s Ronan’s emotionless face staring down at him, pulling the trigger.
-
Rex takes to keeping a bottle in his office, and he drinks only now and then to take the edge off the distracting, crippling, sense of loneliness that has taken over his thoughts. One drink is all he allows himself, liquid courage, and only when things are so bad he has trouble getting himself out of his chair or his bed to do everything that needs to be done. There are people depending on him. He is meant to be an example to others, a leader and the role model he knows the young officers see him as. There is work to be done and crimes to be solved, Rex can’t afford to fall apart, not now, not ever.
-
And then one night Rex’s one drink accidentally turns into three, and then four, and before he knows it he is staring at an old photo of Ronan saved on his phone, his vision blurred.
“You’re such a fucking asshole, you know that?” Rex mumbles. “You spend that much time around a medium and you don’t leave me with so much as a goodbye?”
From the photo, Ronan scowls at Rex, eternally unimpressed. The bastard had always done whatever the hell he wanted, never giving a shit about the people who cared whether he got hurt or worse. After Julia, there was no one left who Ronan gave a damn about. Rex’s concern had been nothing other than an annoyance, the meddlesome interference of an overbearing superior.
“Did it ever once occur to you that someone might actually care?” That he cares? Rex even had a chance to say goodbye to Baxter, for heaven’s sake.
Did he ever fucking matter, is what Rex wants to know. Because he can’t forget the fact that Ronan had been there to watch him in his grief and then just turned and walked away. That he’d had countless opportunities to leave behind a message, a word, anything for Rex at all and only chose silence.
He doesn’t even know if Ronan forgives him.
“At least… I hope you’re happy, wherever you are.”
-
On the worst days Rex hates Ronan. On his worst days he misses him. His voice, his fedora, even that pervasive smell of cigarette smoke that always floated around him. It’s different from how he misses Julia. Julia’s death may have been just as bloody and brutal, but at least it came with closure, with the knowledge that she hadn’t willingly abandoned him, that whatever anger and disappointment she has will not be directed toward him.
Yet with Ronan, with his stupid brother-in-law Rex can’t seem to remember to forget, it’s somehow impossible to let go. However pathetic it made him seem, Ronan had been all Rex had left after Julia was gone. Rex had been so determined to look out for him, to keep him alive, to keep him there, to make sure nothing bad happened to his family ever again.
A fat lot of good all of it did him in the end.
-
He misses Ronan, he misses his insubordination and his bad jokes and his hat hair.
They say he’s is in a better place now. He must be happy, now he is with his Julia again.
At least, that’s something to remember to be happy about.
-
Rex knows he is spiraling, but that doesn’t mean it is easy to stop. The Captain calls him into his office one day and talks to him seriously about responsibility and grief. The Captain had been eyeing Rex as his replacement when he retires, he says. But with his performance lately, he’s making it difficult for him to justify his choice.
The funny thing is, until that moment, Rex had genuinely thought he was getting away with it. His work never suffered, if anything, he had been getting more things accomplished than ever. He promises the Captain he will clean up his act, then he goes home, and pours all the bottles down the sink.
-
It doesn’t work.
-
Here is what doesn’t happen to Javier Reyes.
He never gets that promotion.
He never marries, nor does he ever fall in love with anyone else.
He never forgets Ronan. He never forgets Julia.
He never forgets the heavy metallic taste of a gun barrel in his mouth.
-
If you’re a ghost lost in the Salem Dusk and you can’t find a medium to help you, you look for the Lieutenant.
He will do whatever it takes for you to know peace.