I think it's about time we reveal who the AFTER narrators are, yes?

Do drop a comment if you expected it.

'a cold afternoon in phryne touk'

IF THE CASE DOESN'T IRRITATE HIM TO DEATH, THE COLD WILL. It's sharp and fades in wet spots against his clothes as his body heat protects him from dying, and Detective Inspector Moore continue to grumble incoherent thoughts as he takes one final inhale of his cigarette- this one deep and burrowing, tasting the nicotine all the way down his throat, and exhaling. A sweet, familiar relief.

It relaxes him, easily putting his body at ease.

There are too many lies, he thinks, dropping the burnt out cig and twisting it with the bottom of his shoe. The snow sizzles and it immediately dies after it becomes wet. There are too many faces, too many open facts.

He hates the cold, really, he does. Coming up here from the sunny side of California, especially for the winter season where it's nonexistent, was definitely not a position he wanted to be in. But the cold helps him wake up, sans the irritation. Inhaling the sharp, icy air makes it easier for his brain to wake up, to unscramble the scrambled.

To put together his thoughts of the case, the people involved- its victims, its perpetrators, its wannabe-sleuths - and make sense of it using an invisible, red string. Tying it together, weaving- through, over, loop, backward - and seeing close how preciously close he is to the end. He can almost taste it. How it'll perfectly fit into a bouncy, perfect little bow.

Just a few more, he thinks. Just a few more.

But what will the few more cost him? And the others?

There are too many involved. Too many lies weaved in between truths, too many faces and names intertwined.

But he had to try.

After all, it was ending soon.

He exhales roughly again, choking a little at the biting cold that exchanged from his breath. "Fuck," he mutters. His lips are frozen, and he can feel icicles forming from the wet patches stuck on his clothes. "Gah."

"Detective Moore?" a voice calls, and he turns. It's one of the local police he's seen bustling about. He seems fairly new, uncut from the hardened cases, as fresh face as a fresh graduate can get.

This case, being his first major one, is both a point of pride and of traumatising. From a glance at his deep-set eyes marred by heavy bags, the exhaustive bent his shoulders have- it's not too far to think that he's setting off to point B. Soon, he'll be even more bent. Soon, the trauma will envelop him, become a second skin. Soon, it'll just be a part of him.

Everyone involved in this case is tired.

It spanned for nearly four years consecutively, and an unidentified timeline from the very first one. The blueprint of this case. The very first victim.

Their names, their faces- before and after - sprang in his mind so perfectly. He flips them like a slideshow.

Sasse, Cote, Kiurtsch, Delos Reyes.

They're all so different, no actual link to be seen on the surface. Their ages, physical attributes, and places of origin vary.

The only link is that they're all victim to one murderer.

But it's not really one, isn't it?  There's that voice again, right on time. The sultry voice of an unidentified woman in the detective's mind, alive only in whispers and ghostly thought, lurking just at the niche of his being. If he closes his eyes, he can vaguely imagine her from the darkness, touching him by a centimetre breath of space.

There are three, she continue to taunt. You remember them, don't you? But not all of them are murderers. Not really. The brain, the hands, the heart.

"Uh, detective?"

Moore blinks, the weave scrambling themselves again, the woman disappearing in a frisk of smokey vapour. "Yes?"

"You're needed inside." Moore tries to catch his name upon all the other new ones he's shoved inside his head as an anchor to the present. It takes a while to filter, but he finds it: Adebayo. His surname is Adebayo, but he can't seem to find his first. He might not have gotten it. Should I ask? The boy still had his good senses though; he straightened as the detective inspects him with a careful and carefree stare.

It is an ode, the detective thinks, to his well-worn name and years of service.

Moore was a man who was rugged-looking, with salt-pepper hair and a rough vibe. He smells of late dinner takeout, firsthand nicotine smoke, and bitter, old coffee. He had the aged detective look down pat. But in his sleuthing work is a quiet, unassuming precision. It is years of cultivation, perfected after numerous cases of varying degrees, perfected after meeting all kinds of criminals, victims, liars, and psychopaths.

"For the last recording," he adds helpfully.

"Ah." The last recording. "Right, yes. With my very interesting interviewee."

The officer shuffles a foot. "Is everything okay, detective?"

Moore exhales through his nose. The regret is instant, and he hisses in discomfort. He has to remind himself that it's fucking snowing. "Yes, yes. The end is just very near and I feel bad for taking all the credit."

The local police, the family of sleuths called the Finchs, and the FBI- plus him - had all been present when the Finch's family lawyer, their cousin from New York, infamously ruthless as she was, especially for the West Coast sharp scandals (this, he knew very well), had brought their foot down on not involving any Finch name that was not yet of 'legal age'. As well as any and more of what she deemed as 'partners', then the FBI may take all the credit, alongside Detective Moore, and all the help they can provide. Absolution was the sharpened, uncalled note.

The father's face was neutral, his brothers in different states of calm and tense, but you could feel the hostility radiating off them, but it's the mother, his wife, who had looked the most vicious whenever her daughter's name was mentioned. A mother who was not going to leave until she was sure her child was no longer endangered.

She had sat so rigidly, posture ram-rod, and her anxiety kept spilling in the way she was tearing the skin around her fingers, making beads of blood. Her husband noticed a beat later, covering his own over hers in a tight grip. The detective watched as she closed her eyes and drew out a shuddering breath.

What must it be like, to see your child use the same methods she had observed from you? And know that their spurred fascination, that you had unknowingly cultivated, had led them in an infirmary bed?

The fault is there, present, but is always displaced.

It's almost laughable really, since the kids' names had already been strung before the case even became a serial one. Before it even involved the US. But they were very firm on it. Anything the rest of the world needed, in exchange for removing a few names.

The names that wove the strings crudely, yes, but it is there. It is present.

Moore smiles unconsciously as he remembers.

"... Detective?"

"Right, yeah, yeah," he mumbles, nodding ahead to the officer that he'll follow after him.

It's cold, he thinks. But through the peeking white and grey, he sees the afternoon sun making an appearance. Winking through the blanket, as if to remind everyone against the dark and the cold: just because you can't see it, doesn't mean it's not there.

Dusk will set, just as dawn will rise.

Things are just made to be.

Just as a murder will always have a murderer.

The detective eyes his interviewee from the one-way glass, catching everything he could; the calm mannerisms, the idiosyncrasies, the stillness of the four-walled room. It's bleak, small, and grey. He is the only life inside, his partner for the last few days.

"You ready, Moore?" an FBI agent of a name that is escaping him asks.

"Never not ready," he replies. He catches eyes with the girl on the wheel chair, bent and breathing heavily through an oxygen tank. Everyone gives her a wide berth, but her focus is not on them. Her eyes are solely on the person inside the room. Moore idly wonders if the boy could feel her heated gaze.

There is spirit there, unbroken or remade, it is there. Fiery and present.

Detective Moore exchanges a look with Officer Adebayo, and he almost laughs at the tensed look on his face. Instead, the Detective Inspector pats his arm, smiles, and twists the lock, shifting the nimble, patient look of his friend for the last few days from staring at nothing to him.

And just like a movie starting, it feel automatic.

He's good, purrs the woman in the detective's head.

"How've you been, kid?" he asks instead, smiling politely, roughly.

He smiles half-heartedly, exhaling a roughened breath. "Okay, I guess. As okay as you can be with all this shit."

The detective taps his finger over the cold table. "I guess, huh? Well... today's going to be a little different." Detective Inspector Moore motions for something at the one-way glass.

"Different?" the kid echoes.

"Different," the detective confirms just as Officer Adebayo opens the door, face stoic and professional, and leaves with the items in question. A small, adaptable speaker and a cracked phone with a dirtied white casing.

As soon as the door clicks shut with the officer's exit, the detective snaps a fresh pair of blue gloves on and takes the phone. "Do you recognize this?"

"Uh..." The kid eyes it carefully, racking his brains. After a few minutes, he exhales, settling back down. "No, no, I don't." He looks up, his gaze careful and curious. "Should I?"

The detective shrugs, smile teasing. "Who knows, right? That's why we're here. To unravel this shit. Well, this is Kit's phone. Our magnificent writer. You know how he likes recording stuff, right? Conversations and stuff? And how he was recording first, everything, before he wrote it down on his manuscript, the thing that we've been reading back and forth between the message histories. Smart kid, a little illegal, but you gotta appreciate the ingenuity."

"And the manuscript is unfinished," he completes.

"Yes, exactly." The detective smiled. "The manuscript was left unfinished because of what happened after. Of course he couldn't write it. But the kid, well, the kid was diligent in his job. He wanted to make sure we had everything in the end."

"He is like that." The kid half smiles. The detective can hear his foot tapping increase in speed. It is mostly unnoticeable, save perhaps, for the detective who has sensitive hearing and everyone else behind the glass, who had access to the room's sharpened speakers.

"Where'd you find the phone, though? I thought he lost it. He must be okay now that he had managed to bring this in."

"Oh, he didn't bring this in. Sunny did."

The kid's eyes widened slightly. "Sunny? She's awake?"

Detective Inspector Moore nods, lifting his mouth at the corner at the memory of meeting the infamous young detective. "Kit woke up briefly, but the doctors didn't let the police in since he's... well, he's in a more delicate situation. He exerted himself when they were attacked, especially after Sunny got hurt. He pushed his body to the limits to protect them and it damaged quite a lot. He's a true knight, that kid."

"And Sunny... Sunny is okay, now?"

"She is, in a way. She's still pretty much beaten up, but she's awake and she insisted on Kit's phone, which she hid very brilliantly, might I add."

The kid's eyebrows pitch. "She hid it? Where?"

The detective met the kid's eye with a sudden sharp glint, that he leaned back. "She hid it in the killer's car."

"The... killer?" The rapid foot tapping stops. It is suddenly very, very quiet. "The professor?"

Detective Moore feels a little sly then. He smirks. It feels like inhaling aged nicotine. It feels bitter and sharp and nice. "You tell me, Mr. Kiurtsch, isn't that too much of a spoiler?"

Aron Kiurtsch's gleaming stare sharpens as he twists a smile.

He leans back, relaxed like a marionette with his strings cut, eyes bled of emotion.

Carefully, perfectly blank.

"Ah. I do hate spoilers," he surmises with a beautiful smile.

"You do," the detective echoes, nodding as he flicks through Kit's phone to get to his recording app, rewinding the part Sunny had pointed out with a shaking finger, rising despite the abominable weakness pressing like a demon on her body, with tubes of various kind hooked all over her body, and bruises and cuts looking worse and ugly under the fluorescent light.

She was sweating so much then, unable to even raise her head, breathing so raggedly, but she wanted to help. She fought and fought, and managed, finally, to point the murderer.

Finally.

"Shall we?" the detective asks.

Aron smirks.

"It would be an awful tease to end it like this, wouldn't it?"

So the detective presses play, knowing quite well the eyes that are boring behind the one-way mirror, one of them being one of the victim's herself, eyeing finally, the murderer with the evidence of his murder.

The dawn breaking through the trees.

Finally.

"... ahh," a boy's voice floats through the four-cornered room, between an inspector and a killer. The voice of Kit Pouliot. "I look really nice in a suit, huh?"

Hi.

Hello.

How are you? Have you been well?

Heh.

Here's the thing about writing this story that I really adore- because it settles between before and after, I have so many options on how to reveal bits and pieces of the mystery. I can give you this much, but without the others, you still don't understand. It still is a mystery, but now with a different spotlight.

Now, I've given you a good portion of the puzzle. I've given you 40% of the ending. But you still don't know see it, yes?

In fact, I'm pretty sure you're even more confused now.

I actually didn't expect to finish this chapter + post it now (midterms are soon lmao), but here it is, and I hope this excites you for the rest of the chapters :-)

It's very late night now, so gnight my loves, ily vv much sweet dreams when night comes, no matter how different our timeslots are.