Will teaches. That makes — some sense? Marcus can imagine him lecturing, definitely. Pastoral support, maybe less so. Mind you, most of his mental image of Will involves him shivering and wrapped in a borrowed duvet. Marcus is really fairly pleased that he has a life outside of looking at crime scenes and turning up blue with cold on strangers' doorsteps.
He prowls around the desk, noses through files. None of them are pleasant to look at. One in particular makes him wince and put the file away. It's harder, much harder, to look at what humans do to each other than to see the carnage a demon can leave. He can do something about the latter. The former — that makes him feel helpless.
He's in Will's chair when Will comes in, face hidden behind the file on this case — the one Marcus has decided to be involved in. The one God has decided to get Marcus involved in. Same difference. "So," he says. "You've got a suspect. Laura Ventrelli, 54, disappeared along with her five dogs three weeks ago. Says here that fur found at her house matches fur at the scene." He drops the file. "That's weird, though, innit? Three weeks, just gone, dogs and all?"
Which is an important thing to note. Not all cases bring a lot of work. Some bring dead ends; no witnesses to talk to, no friends of the deceased, no surviving family members. Madelyn Rush, 29, had had plenty of commentary from neighbors, coworkers, and friends to sift through - and that was aside from what the crime scene screamed.
And what visitors to the crime scene had whispered.
Will's working on four hours of sleep and three cups of coffee by the time he's heading back into his office after his last class. He's coming to pick up his jacket and his case files, everything else already in his laptop bag.
So he startles right back into his own now-closed office door when a voice speaks. His elbow is a tea kettle-shriek of protest at the contact, and Will absolutely would've dropped his bag if it wasn't over his shoulder and not relying on his hand, which is now on the point of his hip that's noticeably bare of a firearm. Because he's at school, and not in the field.
"It is weird." Will agrees, slowly unfolding from what he would deny was panic. "That might be why the FBI is working on it." Fear, rude. It just goes together.
Will approaches the desk quickly, stops just barely short of Marcus sitting in his chair. "Looking for new career options?" Will doesn't snatch the file back, seeing as Marcus has already dropped the thing, but he does pull it back towards himself, glance at it without opening it again. The images are burned into his eyes by now - he doesn't have to flip through it to remember what it is Marcus must have just seen.
Edited (i changed my mind about pacing, and this is why i shouldn't reply to things past 11:30p) 2018-02-21 16:28 (UTC)
Marcus gives Will a big, no-holds-barred grin that says I saw all of that and leans back in his chair. Will snapping at him doesn't rile him at all. In fact, he snickers appreciatively.
"In the FBI, or as a murderer? Cos neither appeal, frankly." He leans on the desk, settles his elbows there. Chin on his hands, he surveys Will with a kind of thoughtful stare. He's trying to work out when the best time to drop the exorcist bombshell might be. If there's a best time at all. If he should say it at all. He's tempted to, and he's suspicion of his own temptation. "Thought I'd check in. See if you'd gotten anywhere. Make sure you're not down with the flu."
He was hoping, in fact, to be proven wrong. Was hoping to find something in the case files that would satisfy him that this has no demonic significance whatsoever. His hopes, however, have come to nothing.
A rattler. Will's dealt with plenty of those. He sighs and half-sits at the edge of his desk while Marcus speaks, crosses his arms tight and takes stock of the actual room. Nothing is horrendously out of place, but now that he knows to look, Will can see markers of the search that went on prior to this. A drawer fully closed when he'd carelessly left it half-open earlier, his pens shifted to the side because they'd shuddered over with the motion of the desk drawer getting dragged out.
He'd been poking around for those files. Will cares less about the law-breaking and more about the missing motive. He can see it - that human desire to know what happened - but there's a step missing in between, and the wind gasping up from that gap keeps distracting him.
Will stares at him and now, with that face reminding him of a night spent staring at pictures of Jesus and a scribbled-in Bible, Will thinks of the mysterious fibers that had appeared the second day of the crime scene mapping, thinks of the way the door hadn't been forced when that happened, either.
"You. You were-- you contaminated the crime scene." Will's face twists with the realization but then smooths with blank, expectant dread, this next question more important than the accusation of a felony: "What were you looking for?”
Will shifts forward again now, coming back off his desk, standing very close to Marcus sitting in his chair. His voice lowers. “What are you hoping you’ll find?”
Still, he takes a few seconds, leaning back in the chair and giving Will a considering, critical sort of look. "Yeah," he says thoughtfully. "Well. I'm hoping I'll be proved wrong, actually. About what this is. But so far, no luck."
He drums his fingers on the desk, and gives a short, decisive nod: yep, good, okay. He's got his direction. "We need to have a chat, you and me," he says. "I reckon I know something you don't. I can do it here, or we can go somewhere else, just so long as no one overhears us — for your sake, as well as mine, because." He shows his teeth, not quite a smile. "It's gonna sound crazy, and when you finally make your mind up to believe me, you're gonna sound crazy. So. Your choice."
Will’s laugh is a huffy, brittle thing, all the humor drained out of it. “Wouldn’t be the first time I sounded crazy.” Which is its own thought. Marcus doesn’t sound like he’s done homework on Will, not really, not enough to make him wary or fascinated. So that means it’s genuinely about the victim, about catching this killer. Will perches at the edge of annoyance and disbelief, examining the view over either side.
“Okay.” Will settles more against the top of his desk, no desire for a power play provoking him to have Marcus move out of his chair. Some sort of prey instinct is soothed by being higher up, anyway. Will sighs, shoulders sloping into his hunch. “Tell me about this reckoning of yours that’s worth risking jail time over.”
Will is absolutely not having a chat over coffee for this, blanket-and-tea savior from a week back or not.
Marcus taps his own cheek. Two pink lines interrupt the stubble there: the scratches Will had noticed last week, now healing. "You were worried about these," he says, not because he thinks Will needs the reminder but because he's easing himself into the story.
"The woman who gave them to me, her name is Sister Clara. She told me I could tell you this. Told me she'd talk to you if you wanted to, but between you and me — that's because she's a generous soul. If you need to grill her, fine. But you do it gently, and you come to the convent for it, cos like hell am I gonna see her fretting in a police station." Marcus leans back, settles one of his ankles at his knee. "She wasn't sick. She was possessed. I wasn't ministering." He clicks his tongue, loud in the muted silence of the room and raises his hands, spread wide. Somewhere between surrender and ta-da. "I was exorcising."
Will’s demeanor changes at the reminder of the scratches. A hunch that’s driven by something that hurt Marcus is weightier than other confessions Will might’ve expected here, and his aggravation turns to heavy anticipation.
Defense of the woman who hurt Marcus. It’s the instinctive protection of someone keeping civilians clear of the unfortunate, necessary violence of law enforcement work, and it snags Will’s attention. He’s expecting an explanation of a known extremist; someone prone to violence and covering it up with religion. In a sense, he does get that.
Will just hadn’t anticipated that religious extremist to be Marcus.
Will’s entire expression shutters. It’s not an impassive aggravation anymore; he’s trying, with some success, to keep a personal anger off his face.
The more likely explanation, of course, is that Marcus is lying, not that he systematically abuses people in the name of an exorcism and is now confessing this crime to Will. But why lie? Will needs more to go off of, to guess that.
Will wasn’t wearing glasses when he’d showed up on the convent’s doorstep—he’d taken them off as soon as he’d needed to trudge through rain. Now, at work, he’s had them on. He takes them off now, puts them in his shirt pocket. Uninterrupted eye contact once again. “Can you tell me—why a religious man would try to interrupt a murder investigation with a false lead?”
Marcus just stares back, hard and cold. The vestige of a smile on his face is a brutal up-tick, a kind of grimace — emptied out of any feeling except a kind of mean superciliousness.
He's never been good at this bit. He knows it. Unfortunately, his answer to that is to lean into all the nasty suspicions it always arises, in part from a kind of screwed-up pride but also just so that he can feel he has a little bit of control over the proceedings. Because he only has this conversation when he's worried — when something's gone wrong, when something is too big or too complicated for him to handle alone.
"I can't, no," he says. "Because that's not what's happening here. What's happening here is that more people are gonna die if you don't listen to what I'm saying. And as a religious man I'd like to stop that from happening."
It’s the intense, self-assured eye contact of someone who doesn’t believe they’re lying. That’s the thing about perceptions, though—they’re inherently colored by who’s having them. They’re not always the truth as seen by someone else.
And given that Will knows demons, and the exorcisms they’d require, all are generated by regular humans, he feels like he can see the scope of this particular lie.
There’s no point questioning Marcus’s dedication to the end goal. What Will has a sickening, stone-cold suspicion for is the motive that pushes him towards his chosen theory. “And how does listening to you help keep more people from ending up like Madelyn?” Will’s voice is more even than he feels. He sinks into his own lie, a calm that he pulls over like a veil. “We need to find the killer before we do anything else.”
And here it is, the only reason Will’s instinctively playing along. He breathes in like a man considering his options, deciding it’s worth it to reach out and trust: “Do you know how to find them, Marcus?”
Marcus' eyes narrow, and he leans forward, puts his elbows on his knees. Joins his hands together. His gaze scrapes over Will. For a few moments, he's quiet, considering.
He's being humoured. That's fine. He can be humoured until the seriousness of the situation clicks for Will or until Marcus gets what he needs — whichever comes first.
"Laura," he says. "Yeah. I know where she is. But you ain't thinking I'm going to tell you now so you can rush off without me, right?" His eyebrows quirk up, mouth unhappy-twisted. "Get yourself killed. Get her killed. Or worse, the both of you."
He's withholding evidence from a police investigation - or, he's lying. Will's eyes don't switch away from Marcus's, intent on seeking out a tell here or a flinch there.
They're playing the same game, for a moment. Humoring each other. Will feels the incidental mirroring like a foreign phenomenon, scrapes against it to try to pry out any reason that isn't 'because Marcus actually thinks he's telling the truth'. Will isn't usually constrained by his own assumption of the narrative, but in this instance, he just can't see past his own certainty of how the world works.
"Are you offering to lead us to where Laura is?" Will clarifies, an incredibly reasonable suggestion from where he's sitting. His face is blankly conflicted, smoothed out with uncertain focus. "Act as a consultant for the FBI."
"For the FBI?" Marcus says, eyebrows going up. "No, and I don't think you're in a position to make that offer, either. But I'll work with you."
He glances down again at his own knotted hands, thinks through what needs to happen. "Which, believe me, ain't something I do often. In this case, though." Unlaced his fingers, rubs his palms against his knees. "I'm going to need someone with me, and you...you want to make sure Madelyn's case is solved, you want to make sure more people don't follow her. Well, maybe you deserve to actually come to the right conclusion." Looking up and fixing Will with a hard kind of look, he says, "If you're coming, we should try and make the most of the light." Outside, the light's not yet fading, but it's gone burnt orange, lazy late afternoon colours: give it an hour and a half and it'll start to dim.
no subject
He prowls around the desk, noses through files. None of them are pleasant to look at. One in particular makes him wince and put the file away. It's harder, much harder, to look at what humans do to each other than to see the carnage a demon can leave. He can do something about the latter. The former — that makes him feel helpless.
He's in Will's chair when Will comes in, face hidden behind the file on this case — the one Marcus has decided to be involved in. The one God has decided to get Marcus involved in. Same difference. "So," he says. "You've got a suspect. Laura Ventrelli, 54, disappeared along with her five dogs three weeks ago. Says here that fur found at her house matches fur at the scene." He drops the file. "That's weird, though, innit? Three weeks, just gone, dogs and all?"
no subject
Which is an important thing to note. Not all cases bring a lot of work. Some bring dead ends; no witnesses to talk to, no friends of the deceased, no surviving family members. Madelyn Rush, 29, had had plenty of commentary from neighbors, coworkers, and friends to sift through - and that was aside from what the crime scene screamed.
And what visitors to the crime scene had whispered.
Will's working on four hours of sleep and three cups of coffee by the time he's heading back into his office after his last class. He's coming to pick up his jacket and his case files, everything else already in his laptop bag.
So he startles right back into his own now-closed office door when a voice speaks. His elbow is a tea kettle-shriek of protest at the contact, and Will absolutely would've dropped his bag if it wasn't over his shoulder and not relying on his hand, which is now on the point of his hip that's noticeably bare of a firearm. Because he's at school, and not in the field.
"It is weird." Will agrees, slowly unfolding from what he would deny was panic. "That might be why the FBI is working on it." Fear, rude. It just goes together.
Will approaches the desk quickly, stops just barely short of Marcus sitting in his chair. "Looking for new career options?" Will doesn't snatch the file back, seeing as Marcus has already dropped the thing, but he does pull it back towards himself, glance at it without opening it again. The images are burned into his eyes by now - he doesn't have to flip through it to remember what it is Marcus must have just seen.
no subject
"In the FBI, or as a murderer? Cos neither appeal, frankly." He leans on the desk, settles his elbows there. Chin on his hands, he surveys Will with a kind of thoughtful stare. He's trying to work out when the best time to drop the exorcist bombshell might be. If there's a best time at all. If he should say it at all. He's tempted to, and he's suspicion of his own temptation. "Thought I'd check in. See if you'd gotten anywhere. Make sure you're not down with the flu."
He was hoping, in fact, to be proven wrong. Was hoping to find something in the case files that would satisfy him that this has no demonic significance whatsoever. His hopes, however, have come to nothing.
no subject
He'd been poking around for those files. Will cares less about the law-breaking and more about the missing motive. He can see it - that human desire to know what happened - but there's a step missing in between, and the wind gasping up from that gap keeps distracting him.
Will stares at him and now, with that face reminding him of a night spent staring at pictures of Jesus and a scribbled-in Bible, Will thinks of the mysterious fibers that had appeared the second day of the crime scene mapping, thinks of the way the door hadn't been forced when that happened, either.
"You. You were-- you contaminated the crime scene." Will's face twists with the realization but then smooths with blank, expectant dread, this next question more important than the accusation of a felony: "What were you looking for?”
Will shifts forward again now, coming back off his desk, standing very close to Marcus sitting in his chair. His voice lowers. “What are you hoping you’ll find?”
no subject
Still, he takes a few seconds, leaning back in the chair and giving Will a considering, critical sort of look. "Yeah," he says thoughtfully. "Well. I'm hoping I'll be proved wrong, actually. About what this is. But so far, no luck."
He drums his fingers on the desk, and gives a short, decisive nod: yep, good, okay. He's got his direction. "We need to have a chat, you and me," he says. "I reckon I know something you don't. I can do it here, or we can go somewhere else, just so long as no one overhears us — for your sake, as well as mine, because." He shows his teeth, not quite a smile. "It's gonna sound crazy, and when you finally make your mind up to believe me, you're gonna sound crazy. So. Your choice."
no subject
“Okay.” Will settles more against the top of his desk, no desire for a power play provoking him to have Marcus move out of his chair. Some sort of prey instinct is soothed by being higher up, anyway. Will sighs, shoulders sloping into his hunch. “Tell me about this reckoning of yours that’s worth risking jail time over.”
Will is absolutely not having a chat over coffee for this, blanket-and-tea savior from a week back or not.
no subject
"The woman who gave them to me, her name is Sister Clara. She told me I could tell you this. Told me she'd talk to you if you wanted to, but between you and me — that's because she's a generous soul. If you need to grill her, fine. But you do it gently, and you come to the convent for it, cos like hell am I gonna see her fretting in a police station." Marcus leans back, settles one of his ankles at his knee. "She wasn't sick. She was possessed. I wasn't ministering." He clicks his tongue, loud in the muted silence of the room and raises his hands, spread wide. Somewhere between surrender and ta-da. "I was exorcising."
no subject
Defense of the woman who hurt Marcus. It’s the instinctive protection of someone keeping civilians clear of the unfortunate, necessary violence of law enforcement work, and it snags Will’s attention. He’s expecting an explanation of a known extremist; someone prone to violence and covering it up with religion. In a sense, he does get that.
Will just hadn’t anticipated that religious extremist to be Marcus.
Will’s entire expression shutters. It’s not an impassive aggravation anymore; he’s trying, with some success, to keep a personal anger off his face.
The more likely explanation, of course, is that Marcus is lying, not that he systematically abuses people in the name of an exorcism and is now confessing this crime to Will. But why lie? Will needs more to go off of, to guess that.
Will wasn’t wearing glasses when he’d showed up on the convent’s doorstep—he’d taken them off as soon as he’d needed to trudge through rain. Now, at work, he’s had them on. He takes them off now, puts them in his shirt pocket. Uninterrupted eye contact once again. “Can you tell me—why a religious man would try to interrupt a murder investigation with a false lead?”
no subject
He's never been good at this bit. He knows it. Unfortunately, his answer to that is to lean into all the nasty suspicions it always arises, in part from a kind of screwed-up pride but also just so that he can feel he has a little bit of control over the proceedings. Because he only has this conversation when he's worried — when something's gone wrong, when something is too big or too complicated for him to handle alone.
"I can't, no," he says. "Because that's not what's happening here. What's happening here is that more people are gonna die if you don't listen to what I'm saying. And as a religious man I'd like to stop that from happening."
no subject
And given that Will knows demons, and the exorcisms they’d require, all are generated by regular humans, he feels like he can see the scope of this particular lie.
There’s no point questioning Marcus’s dedication to the end goal. What Will has a sickening, stone-cold suspicion for is the motive that pushes him towards his chosen theory. “And how does listening to you help keep more people from ending up like Madelyn?” Will’s voice is more even than he feels. He sinks into his own lie, a calm that he pulls over like a veil. “We need to find the killer before we do anything else.”
And here it is, the only reason Will’s instinctively playing along. He breathes in like a man considering his options, deciding it’s worth it to reach out and trust: “Do you know how to find them, Marcus?”
no subject
He's being humoured. That's fine. He can be humoured until the seriousness of the situation clicks for Will or until Marcus gets what he needs — whichever comes first.
"Laura," he says. "Yeah. I know where she is. But you ain't thinking I'm going to tell you now so you can rush off without me, right?" His eyebrows quirk up, mouth unhappy-twisted. "Get yourself killed. Get her killed. Or worse, the both of you."
no subject
They're playing the same game, for a moment. Humoring each other. Will feels the incidental mirroring like a foreign phenomenon, scrapes against it to try to pry out any reason that isn't 'because Marcus actually thinks he's telling the truth'. Will isn't usually constrained by his own assumption of the narrative, but in this instance, he just can't see past his own certainty of how the world works.
"Are you offering to lead us to where Laura is?" Will clarifies, an incredibly reasonable suggestion from where he's sitting. His face is blankly conflicted, smoothed out with uncertain focus. "Act as a consultant for the FBI."
OH MY GOD I thought all this time I'd tagged back
He glances down again at his own knotted hands, thinks through what needs to happen. "Which, believe me, ain't something I do often. In this case, though." Unlaced his fingers, rubs his palms against his knees. "I'm going to need someone with me, and you...you want to make sure Madelyn's case is solved, you want to make sure more people don't follow her. Well, maybe you deserve to actually come to the right conclusion." Looking up and fixing Will with a hard kind of look, he says, "If you're coming, we should try and make the most of the light." Outside, the light's not yet fading, but it's gone burnt orange, lazy late afternoon colours: give it an hour and a half and it'll start to dim.