Margaret spends five bleak nights sleeping badly in a cheap hotel room, then does something really, knowingly inadvisable: she goes to Holy Ground to get drunk about it.
She tells herself it's in the hope that booze will help her sleep.
The Woman She Could Get Arrested By Dropping The Name Nocebo In A Cop's Ear turns up too, after a while. She leaves it long enough for it to stay politely ambiguous whether she's got eyes on Margaret's hotel or the bar.
(Margaret assumes both.)
"Can I buy you a drink and run a hypothetical past you?" she says, behind Margaret's shoulder.
"No," Margaret says, tapping the rim of her existing drink to illustrate.
Azoth sits next to her. "The hypothetical's free," she says.
"So's being hassled by Mormons," Margaret says, and Azoth makes a noise like a suppressed laugh.
"Hypothetical:" she says. "You walk into a warehouse. Someone's on the floor, stabbed. You don't know how long they've got. You do know that EMTs won't come into the place, because it's packed with villains; what do you do?"
"I tell you I came here to drink on my own," Margaret says.
"You are drinking alone," Azoth says. "Do I look like I'm taking this off? Hypothetical: you have a way to put all of the villains on the floor at once. It's...not risk-free. You know it's not. But, again, they just stabbed someone. And you're trying to get medical personnel on-site ASAP anyway. So as long as there are no hold-ups, barring any serious pre-existing conditions? They should all make it."
Margaret clenches her jaw. "Three dead," she says. "Suffocated."
"I'm not going to deny resposibility," Azoth says, quietly, after a beat. "But triaged competently and stuck with an epipen each? They'd have made it."
Margaret knocks her drink back and starts trying to catch the bartender's eye for another.
"You don't want me to say what I want to say," she grates. "Not with witnesses."
"I tried talking to you somewhere else," Azoth murmurs.
Margaret gives up on getting another drink. She gets up, with the kind of slow menace she uses to discourage young turk black hats from dick-waving too hard at Patrick, and walks out instead.
Three streets over, in the wrong direction, Azoth ducks past her and turns, blocking her way.
"Now are we talking?" she says, bouncing on her feet. "Say it. You'll feel better. Say it," so Margaret crowds her coldly up against the nearest wall and plants a balled fist next to Azoth's head, leans her weight on it.
"You murdered the fourth guy in cold blood," she says savagely.
"Yeah? And if they'd all scattered instead, and your colleagues had caught up with him, what? He'd have got a talking-to? After stabbing you?"
"Not a smashed head while he was helpless on the ground," Margaret says, voice vibrating inside her chest with fury.
"Yeah, no," Azoth says, and reaches up, fumbles her helmet off, clutches it between them while she looks bare-faced into Margaret's eyes. "Probably not that. But would they have put him into that situation to begin with, where he was helpless, so that the only good guy option was to take him in gently?"
(And no; the answer is also probably not to that. Nothing pointedly underlines the necessity of asking quis custodiet...? like costumes chasing a cape-killer.)
"You smashed a guy's brains out in front of me to punish me for emotional vulnerability," Margaret says.
"It wasn't—" and Azoth breaks off and stares at her and stares at her. "I truly didn't know this is where you ended up," she says instead, softly. "I forced myself not to look for you, when you left the city. It wasn't to punish you." She swallows.
"You bruised me," Margaret says, sawtoothed timbre hurting inside her throat.
(Two years paying a professional domme to try marking her, and eventually refusing to try any harder because she didn't believe she could, not safely. Impossible to fully explain Margaret's furious frustration, knowing it's possible.)
"I needed," Azoth says, small and tired, "to make a dramatic break from you, because it was already too late to make a clean one. I'd already fucked up."
"You fucked me up." Margaret pushes off the wall, all the way back a couple of steps. "That's why you don't get to do it again."
"Mainbrace—"
"Don't fucking call me that," Margaret says, loud and aware that it's slightly too wild, not under control. "Put your helmet on and piss off."
