Murder in the Alley [ Dusttale!Sans x Reader ]

12. Fall of the Fifth

You pushed open the doors to the police station, ignoring the looks of astonishment and fear that were shot your way. You ignored the memorial that was set up in the office near the left hand corner of the building, the way the photograph of Hank seemed to stare back at your empty gaze, his eyes taunting you, urging you to track down his killer, the one who had killed him without a thought of flicker of emotion towards the human life that they had ended, the decades worth of stories that were ended at the blade of a single knife.

"(Y/n)!" A police officer stood up from where she had been sitting and you recognized her as Donna. "Where have you been? There's patrols that are combing the entire city looking for you and the - " Her tongue halted the rest of her speech, not wanting to admit the fact that there was a living skeleton wandering about the streets of New York City in the dark and the cold of night, claiming lives of humans on a mere whim, possessing powers that humans themselves could never dare dream of.

Unless one had the right amount of determination, but that was another tale for another time.

"But where the hell have you been? How did you get back here? We got reports that the scientists had been slaughtered and that you were taken from your hospital room. The only sign that there had been a struggle was Hank's body lying on the ground - " She couldn't bring herself to speak anymore, looking over at the memorial that stood out as a harsh contrast, the painful reminder that no matter how many times the human race tried to shove away their nightmares, tried to hide away the bad things of life, they were always there, always screaming and begging to be heard no matter how much you tried to look away.

Because no one wanted to pay attention to the fact that dozens were slaughtered by gun violence, that hundreds of people were raped and traumitised every day. Those were the bad things about life, the stuff that humans didn't want to have to think about. Sure, it became a big deal when there was a large mass shooting. The public would debate about it, realise that society had been hiding the bad for far too long and it was time to do something about it. But ultimately the wheel would turn and the hope of progress would flicker out from existence, no trace that it had ever been there at all.

The same was with Hank's memorial, you reflected. No matter how much you mourned or grieved for the loss of your friend, the ugly truth remained that in a few day's time, the memorial would be cleaned up so that a new and fresh face could take over where the ghost of the former had once been, burying once more the horrors and tragedies of society in the dark, locking the bodies and corpses wronged by injustice far behind so that no one had to look at them and remember just how wrong the whole system was.

"I escaped," you replied, surprised that you were lying, feeling even worse still when Hank's photograph continued to stare at you, his eyes unblinking, judging you all the while as if to taunt you for daring to pursue and chase after his killer on your own, to help out the very creature that had killed him in the first place. "I managed to run away when the skeleton had his back turned, though I don't know if he knows where I am."

"You poor thing," Donna mumbled and pulled you into a genuine hug. She looked over her shoulder. "Update the status report and file that captive has been found, suspect still remains at large." She eventually pulled away from you. "There must be so much you want to talk about, it must have been so hard for you."

"Yeah," you fumbled with your coat pockets nervously, approaching the real reason why you had decided to even show your face here at all. "While I was out, where there any more murders that we think were linked to the case?"

Donna cocked an eyebrow before turning around, opening a vanilla folder that contained several photos. You could make out blurred security tape footage of Dust from the locations where he had previously been sited. "No, nothing since Hank's death," she muttered, her voice unnaturally tight. "Suspect must be lying low since he knows we're onto him, but I wouldn't put it past my doubt that he wouldn't strike again. The bastard is too sick in the head to stop now, he probably won't rest until the whole of humanity is wiped from the map."