seeing the dead

Who: Lucas and December
When: early morning
Where: the morgue

Lucas hadn’t really slept. He’d cased the scene, trying to pull information here and there, went by the hospital, talking to whomever would chat with him then was back at the office to work on articles for the newly changed morning print. As dawn threatened to break he made his way over to the morgue, eyes open for one woman in particular, whom he had a special relationship with and whom he hoped he could get some answers out of.

December felt a little like she hadn't left the morgue in weeks. While this was wholly untrue, she had done more work in the hours after the rain of spikey death from the sky than she usually did in three weeks, so there was at least some cause for her near exhaustion. She was cataloguing injuries on the latest few corpses, and determining if they had died outright or bled out in a slower manner. The poor bastard on the slab in front of her hadn't been lucky enough to take an instant kill hit--he'd been pinned to the earth with a pipe through his torso, just nowhere so vital that he died fast. Nope, he'd had to wait til his perforated lung filled up with blood and he drowned. Fucking fabulous.

Lucas let himself into rooms he probably didn’t have the right to let himself into, pushing open the doors until her found her, trying hard not to hold his breath against the smell of the place. Seeing the body laid out in front of her made his stomach turn over, but there was nothing in it and being sick was pointless. Swallowing it back he frowned then looked up at her. “December, lovely. Just the woman I was looking for.” The charm was on even if it didn’t quite go as deep as he normally let it. He hadn’t seen her in a while had he? Feo had been distracting lately.

Looking up, she stared down her client, and then glanced back at the door he'd come through. "This might come as a shock to you, but you actually need permission to be back here." she told him. She leaned back against the cabinets against the wall, where the odd gift that had been left for her was. The metal raven was there, seemingly eyeing Lucas down with her. It definitely fit her, even if it might have been an odd fit for the room in general. Or maybe not, considering. "What is it you want?" she asked. “Make your point, I’m busy.”

Lucas glanced behind him and shrugged. “No one stopped me on the way in,” he said as if the rules only mattered to him if someone made them matter. Spotting the raven he eyed it instead of her, shifting a little and feeling like the inanimate object was following him. Weird. He half expected it to start squawking ‘nevermore’ for no good reason. “My aunt’s here. I was hoping for answers. And to see her. The family has...arrangements to make,” he said, tone lacked anything playful. This was family; this cut him to his very core. As for the arrangements, Lucas guessed he’d be taking one of the front seats on that, likely to serve as a pallbearer if not speak at her funeral. He wasn’t the most loved of the DiGiovanni sons, but he was loyal and they knew that.

"I don't know what kind of answers you want." December said. "I've already looked her over--she was confirmed at the scene." she told him. "She didn't suffer, if that's what you're wondering about." she added, since she wasn't exactly without compassion. Sometimes she was a little thin with it, but it existed, and it was his aunt. "It was instantaneous. She probably never even knew anything was wrong."

That was something he did actually take solace in hearing. She was his aunt, she’d been good to him when he was a kid and always said mostly pleasant things about him in public. “Can I see her?” he asked, actually asking, not making demands.

December hesitated at that. "...it's pretty bad, Lucas. It's going to be a closed casket." she assured him. The woman's jaw had been caved in. It wasn't pretty in the slightest. And Lucas might like himself some mental torture now and then but that was a new special grade of it that she didn't think would go well. She didn’t say no, but she wanted him to have more than a fair warning.

It wasn’t often she used his name. Their relationship wasn’t common, and often he was being called something far from his name. She wasn’t being demanding or directly rude either. It all caught him off guard and he hesitated, but nodded anyway. “I know. But someone has to see it, might as well be me. As much as I trust you, they won’t.” And someone would have to agree that it was going to be a closed casket. Someone would have to put his foot down about it.

She sighed. "Fine. ...just don't say I didn't warn you." she said, voice actually something bordering gentle. Then she walked back to the wall of morgue drawers, and looked along the numbers til she found the right one. She looked back at him one more time to assess if he was serious--and he looked it so she pulled the drawer open, revealing the late Mrs. DiGiovanni. Or, the mass of so much dead meat lying there pretending it was a person. Her dead eyes were staring straight ahead, glazed over and lifeless. And as promised, she wasn’t looking good. Her whole lower face was a mess, broken teeth, splintered jaw, nothing was where it was meant to be.

The almost gentle voice would have turned him back if she didn’t start moving away. Squaring his shoulders, he followed after her, nodding where appropriate until he was looking into the dead eyes of his aunt. It was more than enough to turn his stomach over and if he’d had anything to throw up, he would have. Instead it all clogged in his throat, small noise escaping that was some mixed of swallowed heaves and choked sobs. Closing his eyes he nodded again, giving her the okay to close it before turning away, reaching out for the wall of drawers to steady himself.

December shut the drawer, and leaned her shoulder against the wall, eyes on him. She didn't say anything, but gave him space for a few long minutes. "Do you need to sit down?" she asked after a while. She imagined that he was now okay with the closed casket thing and could tell people on good authority that it was the best plan.

He shook his head, taking a long deep breath and wishing the place didn’t smell so much like death and dying. If she’d been anyone else, he would have sat, he would have lost it right there, but it was December and there were things he didn’t want to show her. “Do they know anything? Anything closer to what happened?” he asked, voice a little shaky, but at a normal tone.

"No." she answered. Which was the truth. It wasn't like she was giving him news or anything, and she wasn't hiding secret information. The harsh truth of the matter was no one had a goddamn clue. It was all just a huge, bloody mess and paranoia was going to run rampant, the longer people didn't know shit. But there wasn't any real way to even investigate. Pipes rained down from the fucking sky and killed a bunch of people. No one had claimed credit.

That didn’t help. It was the same answers he’d gotten before, which was nothing. “Anyone else dead I should know about?” he asked, voice gaining a little bit of steam. He’d still see those eyes in his waking nightmares, but that could be dealt with later.

"You know I can't tell you that. You probably have sources at the station for the whole list." December said, very mildly giving a nod to his ego there. But it was true. She was willing to bet he very much had sources he could tap that weren't her. Even if frankly--no. Not that she knew of.

“Does it matter that much if it comes from you or from them?” he asked, knowing full well he did have someone to ask, a few different options, but he preferred to make less stops. Taking another deep breath he rubbed his face, looking at her for a moment shook his head. “Anything else you can tell me that I should know?” The family was going to be angry, giving them a direction to point that anger in would be useful.

"Matters to me, and no. I'm sorry for your loss." she told him. And she was sorry the corpse in the drawer wasn't alone at the time, but she imagined that Lucas knew that already, and someone was dealing with a very traumatized girl.

In another moment he would have pressed her, wanting to know why it mattered so much to her that the information didn’t come from her, but not this moment. In this moment he had a dead relative on a cold slab, someone who wasn’t the type to be murdered in a park. “Thanks,” he answered, even if it felt hollow to say it. What else was he suppose to say? “I should go. I’ve got...family.” He needed to check in on Ari, find out what to do with Max, or where Max stood at the moment. There were things to spin, even if this one didn’t take much spinning. His aunt was innocent, murdered while at a church function in front of her daughter. The story wrote itself, which was good. He wasn’t quite in the right mindframe to write his own story. Pushing off the wall he took a step to leave then looked back. “Sorry I haven’t called.” Not that he really needed to apologize, but given how he was feeling, he wanted to.

"Eventually you will." she told him. Which she imagined was the truth. Sometimes it happened with clients. They found something else shiny to play with for a little while, but eventually it always rolled back to certain needs not being fulfilled. "Be sure to shut the door on your way out." she instructed.

Lucas wondered if he would, if things would go awry with Feo and he’d find his way back to December. There was a good chance he supposed. “Yes ma’am,” he said, slipping into his normal position with her without even thinking about it. “Thanks.” Looking back only once he let himself out, closing the door like she requested.