[in progress/closed]

[sfigato_quarto]

Who: Sam Vimes stony_faced and Ulquiorra Schiffer sfigato_quarto AND LATER Motoko Kusanagi deuxesmachina
What: Ulquiorra goes to get groceries for himself and Kairi, only to run into the AMC sergeant who's been after him.
When: Monday, December 8th, afternoon.
Where: Some market in Monacello territory by Ulquiorra's apartment.

Comments

[stonyfaced]

Vimes grinned briefly at Motoko's offer, "That'll work, thanks," he said gratefully. After getting a hand shoved into his shoulder, he figured that he had earned the right to not, you know, deal with the Inspector. It was sort of funny, he thought, that he used to be so resistant to his superiors, and now he was a superior. Funny, but not that funny.

And fuck, it'd been too long since he did any proper groundwork. He was getting soft, letting Schiffer get the best of him; Vimes may not have been a warrior in any sense of the word, but he used to be tricky enough to avoid getting his shoulder cut open.

"Yeah," he replied, giving a strained sort of smile. "He--" Well. Vimes didn't have to warn her about the way he fought now. During the interrogation, because no matter what the doctor said, nobody took Sam Vimes out long enough to kick him off of a case. Never happened, never will. "Ah, I'll tell you during the interrogation."

"Expect a report tomorrow--" he raised a hand of farewell as he entered the building, words interrupted by a huge yawn, "--and thanks for showing up when I needed you."

Good old Motoko. He could depend on her, he figured, when he couldn't even depend on himself and his own body. As disconcerting a thought this was, it was comforting too. But not quite as comforting as the thought of pain pills, so he shut off his brain and walked into the medical wing.

((Oh, totally. XD IT IS ALWAYS WORTH IT TO LOG FOR FUN.))

[deuxesmachina]

Motoko smirked back. She had gotten the drift. She would deal with this for him, since he seemed to be dealing with enough crap at the moment. She did that kind of thing for the people she trusted in the work place. Anyone working with or for her would always get the best treatment. She would even defend them from the highest powers in the land. That was just how she was.

"Alright. How about you take a day to rest, and then we'll start the interrogation the day after tomorrow? That sound alright?" Her eyes sparkled with a mouth-less smirk. "You can give me the report the day after tomorrow too, Vimes. Get some damn rest!"

"That's what I'm here for!"

Motoko sat in one of the AMC's interrogation rooms, at one side of the small table. On her side there were two chairs. One was empty. On the other side, the much less intimidating form of Ulquiorra Schiffer sat in the opposite chair. He was staring down at his hands which were cuffed, and was clad in a white patient uniform. The left side of his head was wrapped in bandages, and one crutch was leaning against the table next to him. Motoko remarked to herself again how Vimes did quite the number on the kid.

The purple haired woman riffled through a few papers in front of her while she waited for Vimes. There was an almost deafening silence in the room. Somehow, she didn't think it would be an easy task to make the man sitting across from her talk. But that was what they were here trying to figure out.

Sorry for the wait! Busy weekend.

[stonyfaced]

Vimes stomped into the room, a limp visible but not obvious in his gait, and his arm more obviously lying stiffly at his side. Although Ulquiorra wasn't even looking at him, Vimes glowered at him anyways.

He wasn't a bad copper. He knew that he couldn't simply bash the kid's head into the wall, as tempting as the opportunity was. A coil of smoke escaped his mouth as he finished off his cigarette and crushed the butt beneath the heel of his boot before reaching down and tossing it into the garbage.

Even the way he sat was full of ominous dominance, feet placed squarely on the floor, eyes faced straight ahead and his mouth in a grim line. "Has he been Mirandized yet, Sergeant?" He asked, still not looking at her. It wasn't a slight against her. He just needed to make sure that Schiffer knew that this wasn't some damn game of the AMC.

He had seen too many mobsters fumble away with loophole and false claims in court, and he sure as hell wasn't going to let that happen again. Oh no. They were going to do this by the book.

Me too, no biggie!~

[deuxesmachina]

Motoko turned to follow him with her eyes as he walked into the room. He looked a little better than how she had left him. She hoped it hadn't been a bad idea to call him in to work after all of his injuries. But he was tough. Motoko wasn;t going to insult him by telling him he shouldn't do his job. They were similar. She wouldn't let anything stop her from doing her job. She figured he felt the same.

She glanced over to Schiffer as Vimes' entered. He kept looking down, but she could have sworn she saw one almost feral green eye lock onto Vimes with what could only be described as burning murderous rage. If she had still been a slave to her humanity, to more emotions, to a flesh and blood body, she would have shivered. Maybe this was not the best idea. She had to be careful. There was obviously hell to be paid on both ends of this. She had to make sure that didn't happen.

"I thought I would let you do the honors, Sergeant," Motoko answered. She hadn't done a thing without Vimes as a sign of respect. They were going to do this together. This way they could check everything. There wasn;t going to be any question to how they handled this.

[stonyfaced]

"Good," Vimes said grimly. "Thank you, Sergeant."

He cleared his throat and pulled a tape recorder from a shelf, knocked it against the table and cleared his throat. He pushed the 'record' button.

"As I would not like to have any mistakes to be made, I'd like to record this to make it very clear. The man sitting across from me is Ulquiorra Schiffer, and am accompanied by Sergeant Motoko, the Sergeant who is currently in charge of this procedure. We are going to question him, but first, we'll Mirandize him."

Fully prepared, he took out the lengthy rule book and proceeded to read out his rights methodically and precisely (also verbally saying, "Square bracket" and "insert crime here" seeing as he tended to lack imagination or forethought when it came to such things) and closed it. "This recording will show that none of the common tortures are used upon the suspect that have been found in the past, such as the ginger beer technique, barbed wires, strappado or watercapping and other such unpleasantries."

He gave a pointedly unpleasant look at Schiffer that suggested that he knew all of these forms very well.

"Because this case," he said louder, "is going to be done correctly. Now, the first question is, do you, Ulquiorra Schiffer, say that you're guilty or innocent of the accused crimes or... bugger." The last word was muttered as he stared down at the crimes, having failed to memorize the actual terms for them. He continued to list them and then leaned back, hands bridged overtop of the handles of his chair, giving the suspect a menacing look.

Oh, how he wanted to bash his head in, but no, they had bigger fish to fry, and if Vimes had any choice in the matter, they were going to fry in the execution chamber. God knew when he figured out how to shit about with politics. Bloody politics. He hated them, hated that he had to deal with them, hated how the slimy little devils wormed themselves out of any trial except this one.

[deuxesmachina]

"Sergeant Kusanagi," she corrected, kindly. She wasn't exactly sensitive about people calling her by her first name, she just wasn't used to it so much.

Motoko cut in every once and a while, explaining a right to council and the like. She just watched Vimes, otherwise. It wasn't that she wasn't capable of it herself, she just figured he wanted closure with the kid. If the state that she had found them in was any indication, he had gotten by by the skin of his teeth. She was interested to see how it all played out.

"Bombing, resisting arrest, attacking an officer of the AMC," Motoko inserted after Vimes' "bugger". She sighed a little, watching Schiffer, who was still studying whatever was on his lap, his hands, his injured leg, she didn't know. He said nothing, actually seemed to try to ignore them completely. She frowned.

"Where were you thanksgiving night?" She asked, instead. The young man lifted his head a little, just enough to level a solitary green eye at the two sergeants. There was a flash of a mocking smirk, and then he dropped his head again, silently.

Motoko had a feeling getting the kid to talk would not be an easy task in the least.

[stonyfaced]

He blinked at her at the mention of her last name. "Right," he corrected himself. "Kusanagi." Damn Japanese names. Their first names sounded like last name and their last names sounded like last names, and for the love of God, Vimes had a hell of a time trying to read them out loud when they were on the paper. It took him about five times outside of the room to get 'Ulquiorra' right, although that didn't sound Japanese, it just sounded funny.

"No answer?" Vimes snapped. "All right, all right... let's try this one out. Do you deny having any links to the Monacello family, or any other mafia affiliations? Or to be anyone affiliated with explosions, etcetera, etcetera?"

Silence was an easy game to play. Not for the last time, he wished that he was allowed to simply whack him one every time he refused to speak.

[deuxesmachina]

Motoko just smirked at this, chuckling to herself a little. It amused her, no matter what.

Motoko riffled through her papers. "Your mother's maiden name is Monacello," she noted. "Ulquiorra Monacello Schiffer. It's a mouthful...yet kind of catchy." Had they just turned into good cop bad cop? Ugh. She sighed. "Rose to your family calling lately?"

She watched him carefully. He didn't look like this was helping at all either. The kid was like a rock.

Ulquiorra sat back in his chair, a shadow of smugness washing over his pale face. "Do you like beating suspects in the head, sir," he asked, deadpan, only the depths of his eyes dancing with mocking, the rest of his face an emotionless mask.

[stonyfaced]

Vimes glanced at Motoko's attempt at being halfway civil to the boy who obviously didn't respond to anything. "That didn't quite answer the question," he said, mildly, "and the answer to your presumed question is no, I do not, otherwise I'm sure I would no longer be a copper." There was a glint of amusement apparent in his eyes.

"There shall be no beating of heads tonight, Mr. Schiffer. And since I have answered your question, I am hoping that you'll do us a favour and answer one of our many questions."

Vimes glanced towards Motoko, and back at the man. "One of them is what exactly do you know about the nature of the bombings that had taken place? Come on, lad, surely you can answer one of them."

His tone and words were friendly, but his eyes were not, hooded by heavy brows and eyes that were not distinguished enough to be called piercing, but quite intimidating nevertheless.

[sfigato_quarto]

Ulquiorra smirked slightly at Vimes' response. "You certainly seemed quite skilled in it for someone who does not often partake in such a thing," the man's tone was again completely flat.

Ulquiorra wanted nothing more than to come across the table at Vimes and snap his neck with his bare hands. But not with the woman sitting next to him and that tape running. But he was going to do it. He could wait. No one shot him in the wound that Grimmjow had given him. No one. The wound was a symbol of his weakness, now more than ever. It made him remember. It made him remember things that he had fought so hard the past few months to forget. Now he couldn't as long as his leg was injured.

He looked down again, staring at his leg, seeing something else in his mind's eyes, hearing other words, other voices besides Vimes'. The feel of the other man's fleshly cleaned skin, the smell of the sheets. The cold of the kitchen floor, the god awful laughing, the crippling pain in his leg...having his cellphone thrown away from him where he could not call of help. Laughing. Laughing.

Ulquiorra looked up again, his gaze steady, but this time a little lost, some of his thoughts trapped by his flashback.

"My mother was born into the Monacello family, yes," he said. But the AMC already knew of his affiliation, or so he had thought. He had almost shot down that woman Kiyone in that club. He closed his lips. That was all he was going to say. He didn't need to talk to them. They were nothing but trash. Trash that needed to be disposed of. he was going to enjoy killing Vimes when all of this was said and done.

[stonyfaced]

"It's a defensive maneuver that policemen often used when they find themselves in a situation where they're being attacked," Vimes replied sharply, face impenetrable. There was a reason people called him Stoneface.

His mother, all right. That was a good enough confession to satiate a jury hungry for a culprit. Besides, the AMC already had sufficient evidence that pointed towards his affiliation. "And you have nothing else to say regarding the explosions?"

Schiffer wasn't going to give, it seemed. He glanced over at Motoko, to see if she had any ideas at all. Really, the school Vimes went to had nothing to do with officials (in fact, if one looked far enough, it would demonstrate that he had not graduated high school) but with the art of dunking the bugger's head in the lake repeatedly until he decided to talk. Vimes knew full well what he was capable of, wasn't proud of it, but he was capable of it, if he didn't keep the Beast reigned in. His men were afraid of Sam Vimes going spare, and with all this death surrounding him, Sam Vimes was very close to going spare.

feel free to rough him up a little...? XD

[deuxesmachina]

Motoko watched the kid carefully after Vimes' reply. He was smirking again. But it always lasted for only a second, and it was a dangerous one. Motoko didn't like it one bit. He was not going to tell them anything, was he?

"No, I do not," Ulquiorra said. Motoko figured that it would be so. She met Vimes' gaze as he looked over at her. She gave him a little nod, giving him a small smirk of her own. She looked back at Ulquiorra.

"Are you sure you want to do that, Schiffer? We can do this the hard way, if you prefer."

Ahah, all right, I just need to figure out how that shall work with INCORRUPTIBLE VIMES.

[stonyfaced]

Vimes nodded. "Right then," he said, injecting a bit of good cheer into his humorless voice, "you're not talking, so we're going to do this the hard way. Is that all right with you, lad?" He rose a hand in Schiffer's face. "Of course it is. You're not talking at all."

He picked up the tape recorder. "Police brutality, check rulebook 13-2, is allowed when a potential suspect who has important information is not talking and so on and so forth, you can check it yourself. Now. The tape recorder will be turned off momentarily for my fellow Sergeant and I to discuss our next course of action."

One click, and the tape recorder stopped. "If we wanna do this the hard way, Sergeant, there's a few things we can use. There's plenty of different things that our peers've used. There's shocking, and tying you up and not letting you go to the washroom so you piddle all over the floor."

He got up and stared down at him. "Or, as you suggested so nicely to me earlier, I could simply bash--" this word was accompanied by a loud, surprising smack against the table, "--your head against the wall, and all of it would be perfectly legal."

His voice was loud, his expression one that made his boys all but piss in terror. People tended to be scared of Vimes, but this lad wasn't. But that's not what made Vimes angry. It made him angry that the little bastard blew up a building and showed absolutely no sign of remorse.

Bastard mobs. The lot of them!

[deuxesmachina]

Motoko watched for any sort of change in the young man's face as Vimes spoke. There was none, just the same definat look in his eyes that both annoying as all hell, and almost admirable. There was a flash of thought in her cyberbrain: she wanted this man on their team. She almost smirked at the thought. When Motoko found someone that she wanted, she had to have them. She wondered if this could be true with this tough-as-nails twenty year old "boy".

Motoko finally let the smirk come to her face, and crossed her arms and legs, her eyes shut in a thinking pose. She nodded along with Vimes. "Yes, I will have to go with the easiest way." Her red eyes opened, and for the first time they met head on with the equally malicious green ones. She knew that Schiffer was itching for a reason to tear Vimes apart, or so it seemed, so she would have to do this to keep it from going down that road. She wasn't sure how dangerous the boy was with cuffs on his hands and feet, and a rather serious leg wound, but she wasn't going to really put it passed him, given his record. He must have been bred by the mafia to be a perfect weapon. She wanted that weapon now.

Motoko stood. "Sergeant Vimes is right," she said, putting one hand on the back of Schiffer's chair and leaning down to look at him. He was looking away now. "We're going to have to do this the hard way." Motoko was really no pansy when it came to going to any lengths to get what she wanted. With that, she kicked the chair out from under Ulquiorra, and he hit the floor with a grimace. One of his cuffed hands shot over his leg, either out of pain or out of fear that that was where she would hit next. He was still silent. She brought the back of her hand across the man's already bruised features. He did have a handsome face.

"People died. Do you understand that, Schiffer? People want answers." She frowned, he still wasn't saying a word, his gaze steady on the floor.

TELL ME IF ANYTHING ISN'T OKAY~ /doesn't want to godmod!

[stonyfaced]

This was wrong.

The thought crossed Vimes' mind before he could stop it, his inner sense of justice fighting the Beast, wanting to smash the kid's head into the table until his brains spilled out. This was wrong. The AMC wasn't supposed to be like this. Ideally, they were protectors, not necessarily solving crimes, because they couldn't seem to manage to do that, but keeping the peace.

They couldn't do that either.

It was in the rules, he assured himself. You could use violence--not a lot of it, but you could. To get information. Did the end justify the means?

No, he thought grimly, they didn't. But he'd do it anyways. He walked over to Ulquiorra, and picked him up by his arm, seating him back into his chair.

"All right, lad, up you get," he barked, voice gruffer than Motoko's, but his touch gentler. "We've got information, and we've got people harsher than us, and you don't want to meet them. Will you talk? No? Fine." He took Schiffer roughly by his hair and effectively slammed his face into the table.

"Want to talk now?" He snarled, face twisted in aggression and feral rage.

Vimes stared down at the boy - only a kid - and felt something far more painful than a knife twist in his stomach. That was his conscience, he thought grimly, that was his sense of justice, that was what little faith he had in the justice system.

The city was going to kill him one day. He knew it would, but he'd love it till he died.

Same for me...>__>;

[sfigato_quarto]

Ulquiorra's eyes followed the two officers as they crossed the room towards him. The woman righted his chair, and the man tugged his arm and yanked him back into a sitting position. He wondered for a second why they had bothered to throw him from the chair in the first place. But his leg was certainly protesting. A lot. He needed more painkillers. He doubted they would be liberal in giving them to him.

"I would hate to meet them," Ulquiorra muttered to Vimes, the flash of his smirk coming across his facec again. He didn't quite know what happened right away. He had been caught off guard, as much as he hated to admit it. But suddenly his heale d was aching, and his cheek was burning. The sound of his face hitting the table made a strange metal-on-metal sound.

That was it. Vimes had marred his face for the last time. Blind rage surged in Ulquiorra's eyes as he looked up at Vimes. It was a fast moment, Ulquiorra could not afford anything else. He sat up, and from there jumped, bringing his knees to his chest, his feet barely making it to the surface of the table. Even though both his hands and feet were bound, Ulquiorra managed to get onto the table and take a double-handed swing at Vimes, leading through with his elbow, and pushing most of his weight at the officer.

He was following the move downward with Vimes, hoping to get in another crushing blow, perhaps hit that damaged shoulder, but he felt himself being taken down by the other officer. She had pushed his face into the floor against the wall, and had her hands holding him against the ground, his arms trapped beneath him. He thrashed, but she was heavier than she looked.

"I guess you really just want to be sedated and put in lockdown again, don't you, Schiffer?" Motoko commented, her voice now as flat and cold as his.