[Hamartia]
Blue-gloved hands (to show any possible tear in them more easily; blood on scenes and in the ER was always suspected of carrying something) went to work with methodical, impassive patience and speed. The police were drawing tape now, cutting off the now-inquisitive neighbors who had woken to the same clarion that had roused the building -- flimsy tape and social niceties and the expressionless faces of uniforms the only thing holding back a wave of those come to crane and gawk and whisper. She'd come because she had thought it possible to do something -- she recognized one of the faces of the ambulance crew; JJ was young, gawky, she wouldn't be surprised if he'd thrown up as he disappeared behind the trash-cans of the next building over -- yes. He reappeared, wiping his mouth surreptitiously on the too-clean sleeve of his pressed uniform. JJ always had a smile for the nurses when he came into the ER, clipboard in hand. He wasn't smiling now. GSWs from men old and angry enough to warrant that kind of violence were one thing, girls who shook and sobbed silently because they'd learned that there was no use in doing so aloud, was another.
A puff of cigarette smoke caught her nose before the words did, acrid and sour on what passed for fresh air outside Hamartia; Lily stirred against her shoulder, a tired and fitful cough that rattled the whole of her little body. Toby turned, angry; "Put that out, you damn idiot." She angled her body away, as though by turning her side to the smoke and to the scene, to the onlookers there, the little girl whose face was pressed into the toweling robe would -- could -- be protected from it.
"Jesus," she said now, her fingers gentle in the little girl's soft hair and she looked around and up at him with a brittle kind of fury, bigger than that tiny frame ought to be able to contain. It wasn't about cigarette smoke, but then, they both knew that. "Ought to know better, there's people everywhere."