Matthew can practically feel his brain turning to mush.
He’s staring at a report — a burglary at the edge of town, probably some dumb teenager trying to impress a girl — but he barely sees the words. On the wall, the clock sounds obnoxiously loud, each click of the gears grating along Matthew’s spine. The water cooler in the corner bubbles ominously. Cars rumble along the road just outside the walls, the late afternoon sun slicing in through the window and casting a shaft of dusty light onto Matthew’s cluttered desk.
The sun just reminds him of how long it’s been since he last slept, and Matthew drops the report and rubs his eyes, resisting a yawn. He reaches for his cup of coffee that grew cold several hours ago and takes a sip of the bitter liquid, grimacing at the cold temperature. Still, he can’t sleep. He’s got work to do.
“Really, Matthew? Petty theft and car break-ins count as work now?” A familiar voice from behind him asks, and Matthew jumps high enough to touch the ceiling.
He spins around in his creaky old desk chair to face the voice, and finds Safiya, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed and her blue sunglasses low so she can peek at him from over the top. When he sees her, she smirks.
“That doesn’t even count as news, much less work,” Safiya continues. “You know what does count as news?”
Something red and thick begins to seep over Safiya’s sweater, staining the torso with crimson as Safiya pushes herself off the wall and stalks closer. Matthew’s frozen in place. Safiya— Safiya is dead. Safiya died that night, so this can’t be happening, this can’t be real—
“An innocent woman getting gutted alive.”
Matt can smell the blood, thick and choking iron, but before he can react any further, there’s another voice from behind Matthew.
“Are you ever gonna prosecute Nikita for what she did to me?” Manny’s voice asks, and Matthew scrambles out of his chair as Manny leans on the other side of his desk, face-to-face with Matthew so the bullet wounds that ruined his handsome features are visible. “Open and shut case, you know. She shot me right in front of you and Joey. I’m sure the testimony of a detective would put her away.”
“No—” Matthew feels dizzy, staring at Manny, hearing Safiya’s laugh from behind him. “No, this isn’t real, you’re not real—”
“Does it matter?” A third voice asks, and Matthew sees JC from the corner of his eye, lounging in Matthew’s now-vacated chair with his clothes torn and stained with blood. “Whether we’re real or not, everything we say is true, Matthew.”
Matthew’s going crazy. He’s going crazy, he knew it, he always knew his mind was going to break after what he saw that night—
Matthew scrambles for the door, his breaths feeling short in his chest, reaching desperately for the handle to claw it open and get away from the horror of his friends. They’re dead, they died, all of them, and he couldn’t save them. Matthew whimpers as Safiya fixes him with a cold glare and points a finger at him, the doorknob feeling stiff underneath his fingers as he scrabbles at it.
“You let us die,” Safiya intones, and Matthew whimpers again.
Why won’t the door open, why won’t the door open?!
“You let all of us die,” Manny says, with an overexaggerated pout, and JC sighs and nods in agreement. “Seven lives gone.” JC snaps. “Just like that.”
Matthew finally manages to drag the door open and pitch himself out of it, breathing in a deep gasp of the late winter afternoon and lurching out of the police station—
—and directly into the road.
The blaring horn of a car knifes through his skull and Matthew throws himself out of the way just fast enough to avoid getting run over. The car swerves, its horn honking again, but Matthew’s already on the ground, hard gravel digging into his jeans and the palms of his hands as he gasps for air, adrenaline shaking his body to the core. He can’t even care that he’s making a fool of himself in the middle of the road, all he can think about is getting away—
“Matthew?!”
The voice makes him snap his head up to the doorway of Fatman Slim’s, where Nikita is staring at him, along with a few people she was standing with — they look like the wrong kind of people, Matthew’s detective instincts tell him, all leather jackets and long, dark hair. The kind of people a troublemaker would hang out with, he supposes.
Matthew’s on his ass in the middle of the road, and people are beginning to congregate in front of the Dollmaker’s Shoppe and peer out of Fatman Slim’s, staring at Everlock’s greatest — only — detective. Matthew glances back behind him to the open door of the police station.
It’s empty.
Nikita stalks over, narrowing her eyes at him before holding out a hand. “Get up. You look like an idiot.”
Matthew swallows thickly, then reaches up to take her hand and drag himself up from the ground. His legs tremble when he puts his weight on them, and his face burns with an embarrassed flush. It felt…so real. It felt like Safiya and Manny and JC— it felt like they were there.
“What the fuck were you thinking, man?” The loud voice makes Matthew wince, and he turns to see the driver of the car stomping towards him. “I could’ve ran you over!”
Before Matthew can get his foggy, sleep-deprived brain to work, Nikita answers for him.
“Sorry, Jeffrey. You know how cops are. They get a hair up their ass and end up running out of the station like they think they’re the greatest detective in the world.” Nikita rolls her eyes. “I’ll get Patrick here back somewhere he won’t go leaping to his death.”
Jeffrey humphs, but seems to accept Nikita’s explanation. Matthew just keeps his eyes down as Nikita gives him a firm push towards the motel, where he keeps a long-term room to avoid the long drive into town. By the time Nikita has forcibly herded Matthew inside to his tiny, spartan room, his heart has calmed down a little. He sits down on his bed as Nikita goes to the sink and fills up a glass with water.
“What the fuck was that about?” Nikita asks, over the sound of the tap running. She looks back for a minute to glare at him. “Did you want to make me look bad or something?”
Matthew shakes his head, still a little too shaken for words.
Nikita sets the glass down on the bedside table and crosses her arms. “Then what was it, exactly?”
Matthew squeezes his eyes shut, sees Manny’s bloody face staring back at him, and opens them again. “I saw— I saw them.” There’s a long beat of silence. “Our friends. I saw them. They were in the station, all of them, and I just had to get away—”
Nikita doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then she breathes in deeply, holds it for a second, and flatly says, “They’re dead, Matthew.”
“You think I don’t know that?!” Matthew snaps, glaring back at Nikita. “You think I don’t— I feel like I’m going crazy, Nikita. They were right there, and—”
He cuts himself off, shaking his head and dragging a hand across his face. There aren’t words to describe what it felt like, that sensation of their eyes on him, their dead faces staring back at him, the man who barely escaped death himself. Matthew drops his head and clutches the edge of his bed as he tries to even out his breathing back to something normal.
Nikita shifts her weight, then she sighs heavily, walking over to sit down next to him.
“Look,” Nikita starts, obviously making a conscious effort to be gentler than usual. “I don’t think you’re crazy.”
“Everyone else would,” Matthew says dully, still staring at the floor.
“That’s everyone else's problem.” Nikita huffs. “We know what we saw that night. Whether or not other people believe us doesn’t matter.”
Matthew blinks away tears and wipes his face with the sleeve of his shirt.
“I’m not going to pretend to be the best at comfort, or any of that sappy bullshit,” Nikita says, looking anywhere but Matthew. “But I know how it feels, okay?”
“They were right there,” Matthew repeats, and he can feel panic threatening to choke him. “They were right there. Looking at me. Blaming— blaming me.”
“Take a breath,” Nikita says, and she finally looks at Matthew, grabbing him by the shoulder and forcing him to meet her eyes. “Come on, don’t work yourself up for nothing. They’re gone, Matthew. You were just seeing things.” She’s quiet for a moment. “When’s the last time you slept?”
“I…” Matthew shakes his head. “I don’t know.”
“No wonder you’re seeing shit that isn’t there,” Nikita says drily. “You need sleep. That pretty little head of yours won’t work without it.”
Matthew sighs. He knows she’s right, but every time he tries to sleep…
He thinks about asking her to stay. It might help, having someone else around, another body to ease the loneliness. Only three people came out of that night alive, Matthew thinks to himself miserably. What’s lonelier than that?
Nikita stands from the bed. “Sleep, Matthew. Don’t make me come back to check on you or something. I have shit to do.”
With that, Nikita leaves the room. Matthew thinks about calling after her, but he doesn’t think it would end well for him. The fierce woman would probably just laugh in his face. He shrugs his jacket off and curls up on top of the blankets, his eyes burning as he stares at the wall.
I know how it feels, okay?
Nikita does know how it feels. Nikita knows what he went through.
Matthew isn’t alone. He never was.
With that thought comforting him, Matthew finally falls asleep.