Man on the Inside

24

The door opens into a large concrete room. On one side there's the clunky desk, at which sits a vaguely familiar face, and leaning against it- arms crossed tightly across her chest- is Nimm. She looks more haggard than usual, and Brontë has questions to ask her- especially as she looks at him upon entering, and her eyes are wide, tired, like something is lost beneath them. It's probably Brontë's imagination, but she looks paler than before, and he can't see the bags under her eyes underneath her makeup, but he knows full well that they're there.

But he immediately sees the holding cell, and he has to bite back that anger again, the protectiveness that makes him want to hurt someone. Charlie and Jake aren't the only people in the holding cell- there's an older lady, a hippie-looking guy, a handful of young adults with piercings and dyed hair. Charlie's talking quietly with one of them, and to Brontë's relief, she looks rather unharmed, talking animatedly with her hands even as she's keeping the volume down. Jake was sitting up against the bars, and his eyes light up as he sees Brontë and Ricky walk through the door.

Ricky runs up to him, and through the bars he reaches out, and they grab each other's hands like Jake's drowning and Ricky's just pulled him from the sea. There's a split second of pride, again, the same way Brontë felt watching Charlie put her hair up- that they aren't stopping themselves from human contact for fear of what it could be taken as. But there's no time for that right now. "I'm so, so sorry," Ricky is saying, and the officer behind the desk gets up, immediately yelling at Ricky to back away- but Nimm raises her hand before Brontë can even say anything.

"Shut the fuck up," she says to him, quiet, but with a horrible venom. "Can we sort this out, now?"

The officer looks to Brontë, visually processing. He looks at Brontë's clothes, blue jeans and an unironed shirt still wet from the rain, with an unimpressed look- and then suddenly he's recognised. "Senior Sergeant Brontë?"

Brontë lets instinct take the better of him. It's worked so far.

He storms over to the desk, slamming his hands on it, and Nimm backs out of the way to let him. The officer flinches slightly as Brontë's hands hit the table. "Was this your doing?"

"No," the man says, raising his hands up slightly. "I mean- I was at the protest, and I was tasked with processing the people we took into custody, but I didn't-"

"It wasn't you who turned a confrontation physical with a twelve-year-old boy, and then arrested his sister and his friend, who did nothing?" Brontë demands with a raised eyebrow.

The officer looks far too nervous to be lying when he says, "...I can't speak to what exactly happened. I was nearby, and I participated in the arrest, but-"

"So you saw no problem with arresting nonviolent, law-abiding teenagers?"

"I couldn't be certain that-"

"Who was the officer that was in this supposed altercation?" Brontë can see the man shrinking in front of him, but now, his anger is strategic. He leans forward to push the man back into his chair. "Was their bodycam on? Were they wearing their name tag?"

"I don't know," the man pleads. He looks nothing like Brontë, but at the same time he's a mirror- he's got wide eyes of innocent confusion, emptiness, not in the sense of lack of emotion, but of lack of thought. He can probably do complex math or work through logic problems, he probably feels happiness and sadness and anger most days of the week, but at the same time he isn't thinking. He's seeing the imaginary lines drawn around him and he's stopping at them, the way Brontë did for forty-eight years of his life, and now it's infuriating to see. Brontë wants to hold him by the shoulders and drag him over those lines, just so he knows that no booby trap will spring, no invisible karma will come. He can cross them to do the right thing.