Outside the line items and subpoenas, there were other threads they had to mind. A face artist had been commissioned to make a likeness. A forensics call had said the burned skin could not be used for identification, and fingerprints were a muddle under the heat. So if they were to put a human face to the footage, it had to come from memory. Mark had been the only one who could supply that. If he lied, they'd have a portrait that led nowhere. If he told the truth, then maybe they could give Whitney — whoever she really was — a person again.
Brendon watched the composite take shape the next day in a tiny, crowded workspace at the station. The face artist — Elena, a soft-voiced cat-human hybrid woman who smelled faintly of turpentine and jasmine — sketched with a concentration that made the paper look sacred. She worked from Mark's careful description, capturing a tilt of chin, the freckle near a collarbone, a twist of smile at the corner. The portrait grew into the suggestion of a real woman, not the sterility of pixels.
"You're getting something?" Brendon asked. He kept his voice neutral, but his eyes had the gravity of a man who had not seen a hopeful thing in a long time.
Elena didn't look up. "She smiled weird, like a half-laugh. Mark kept saying she made the most chaos seem like choreography." She paused, shading. "She was beautiful without meaning to be."
Brendon felt that word — beautiful — as if it had any significance now. It was an odd, desperate hope: to have a name, a face. For past weeks he had been hunting a ghost filmed in ritual fire; a portrait could make the ghost human and a human was easier to avenge.
The hours narrowed to motions. Interviews, subpoenas, testament, the daily grind of investigating someone's disappearance that had exploded into national news. He was tired. He was tired within his bones. The kind of tired that made him forget small things: to eat, to take his meds. Donna had told him once that exhaustion was an easy path to the old cracks in his mind. He knew she was right. He can't let that past trauma haunt him. He would never.
So he went to the clinic.
---
The clinic had been arranged by him during a web surfing, he was going through nightmares quite often, he was pretty desperate to end that. One day he saw a advertisement, with a picture — a neat private office with a receptionist who made earnest tea and a hallway lined with books about caregiving.
He knew where he had to go.
The next day he went there. The light inside there was gentler, less hungry than the station's fluorescents. Then everything was quite smooth. Donna, the therapist there understood him from core. After that, his visits become normal. He even purchased a log book to write. Donna said it would help him to calm his thoughts.
---
Now
Donna's door was open when he entered; she waved him in with that quick, practiced gentleness therapists use when they are trying to make you trust the room.
"You look like a man who has been personally scolded by life," Donna observed, already settling into her armchair, as she always did. She was on her side of fifty, hair pulled back into a skinny bun, the sort of woman whose voice could both please and instruct.
He gave a humorless smile. "Life has got some good manners, then."
She steepled her fingers. "You didn't forget to attend the session... huh... that's quiet a achievement I would say."
He shrugged into the chair opposite. The clinic smelled of chamomile and something medical that reminded him he was not as invincible as he liked to think.
She put a file on the table and didn't open it right away. "Then... tell me. What was the worst part today?"
Brendon let out a long breath. "Everything that has to do with… not being silent. Cameras. Comments. People stitched my face into jokes. One account made a shirt with my roar. They sell it at a stall outside the chip shop. I swear to God. I will..." Brendon stopped in mid-sentence. He has control his rage — just as Ninja Fox said. It could turn against him.
Donna's mouth twisted into the shadow of a sympathetic grin. "Humiliation is a weapon in this era. It is cheaper and faster than a bullet."
He stared at the ceiling, the curtains of the small office doing little to stop the gray light outside. "I keep thinking: if I hadn't done that, maybe none of this would have hit Mayor's office. Maybe people wouldn't be panicking. Maybe Whitney's case—"
"You can't keep doing the blame-math, okay?" Donna cut in. "It's a slipper slope and you just slipped hard. It doesn't necessarily follow that your roar caused the murder. It's a reaction to it. That doesn't make the roar a crime."
He wanted to argue, to list the reasons the world loved a tidy narrative. Instead he said, "Mark has been here. He knows more than he told the internet. Elena's drawing a face. Sofie says Richardson's lawyers are digging hard. If there's any justice in all this it'll be the slowest of it's kind."
Donna's hands were folded, warm and watchful. "Slow is better than spectacle. You know the phrase right? Slow but steady wins the race. So just focus on winning. Not on the pace."
He shifted. The old resentment — the one that came in the night, a visceral memory of the courthouse — was a low hum. Donna noticed. She had a way of naming things without moral judgment, which, oddly, made them heavier and truer.
"You're... taking your medications, right?" she asked finally, the question that stung because it was small, human, and correct.
He closed his eyes. The word had the awkwardness of an admission. "Mostly?"
"Mostly is a pivot," Donna said. "Mostly is a promise that breaks when you're tired. You need consistency on that, Brendon. The meds aren't band-aids. They're tools. We have agreed on a schedule."
He could see the corner of his life where the tools waited, clean and patient. He had let his life get messy, the way a storm ruins a carefully folded map. He had excuses: the station, the mayor, the howls. None of them are good enough.
"I'll pick them up today," he said. "No more mostly."
Donna let him make the promise and then, as she always did, she showed him a breathing exercise they practiced together. He did it once, twice, lungs working like a machine being tuned. When he left the clinic the air felt marginally softer. It was a small mercy.
Back at the station, the portrait was finished in a form that made his chest tighten. The face Elena had drawn belonged to no one he had ever seen, and yet it carried something intimate, like a borrowed memory. Mark had sat across from the artist while she worked, and his fingers twitched. He watched the face appear on paper like a cautionary shape.
"That's her," Mark had said quietly when she shaded the hair.
Brendon had not pressed him for the name. He kept the proper distance: investigators ask, witnesses talk. The line held. For now.
---
That evening, in the quiet hum after dusk, Brendon sat alone under the fluorescent buzz of his own small apartment. The day's work folded around him — evidence, interviews, threads to pull. The picture of the woman lay on his desk like a found thing. He rolled it once and slid it into a folder.
He felt the tight ribbon of stress loosen a, sliver. The breathing exercises had not cured the noise, but they had given him a margin. Tomorrow would be another long day. Richardson's counsel had again delayed the official compliance, according to Sofie's ping. The internet fed on delay like a predatory thing. The town's fear flared in small gestures: fewer kids at the park, a spike in door locks bought at the hardware store, a sudden interest in alarm systems in the council budget.
But for a moment, in the lamplight of his apartment, there was a slight alignment. He had a face now. He had a man who had lost someone and who wanted answers. He had a nurse who would not let him flounder in the dark of his own head. He had Robert on the other end of the radio, a solid breath to lean on when the world wanted to holler.
He clicked his phone open and typed into the group chat — a short, practical update. Sofie answered with a string of code-like information and a smiley that was somehow reassuring, Robert with an emoji of a cup of coffee that read like a promise.
When he set the phone down, the night pressed in, not yet kind, not yet cruel. There was work to do. There was a murderer to find. There were alliances to hold and a town to keep — messy, anxious, and stubborn as a rock. And there was himself, fragile and tethered, a man who must guard the boundary between beast and law.
He turned off the light and lay back on the couch, breathing like Donna asked. One. Two. Three. Each little inhale a stitch. Each exhale a decision to keep going. The portrait watched from the desk, shaded and human, its presence a small accusation and a small comfort.