By: Daiyu Tang
Oksana is dead.
That sentence should not be written lightly and as I considered it, having received conclusive proof that it was true I took a moment to remember. This article should not be read as if this was simply another Hathian shooting, another gunshot in a city that hears them every day. Oksana was not a random stranger, not to HPD, not to Inspector Krystal O’Neil, and not to this newspaper or myself. Her death on the cold concrete came with over a year of history behind it relevant to the confrontation that played out. It involved nooses, threats, a mock trial, a death sentence, allegations of police brutality, and the particular Ouroboros of people who decide they can answer cruelty by staging their own.
This was not the first time Krystal O’Neil and Oksana faced each other.
Readers with long memories, or the good sense to use the Observer’s search function, will remember ‘HAC’ (Hathian Against Corruption). It came to wider public attention during the disappearance and torture of HPD Officer Carter Ellis as well as a string of publicity stunts, genuine exposure of HPD malpractice and public venom against the HPD (deserved in some cases). The case of Carter in particular was one that pushed the city’s arguments about police abuse, gang violence, revenge and vigilantism into an ugly shape, a shape I refer to above; the Ouroboros. HAC claimed to stand against corruption. What it actually did included abduction, spectacle, threats and spectacle that risked turning into blood once it got bored of simple being something to see.
Then came the trial.
Except, of course, it was not a trial in any sense that should make a courthouse feel proud. Krystal O’Neil was taken by HAC (and it lasted into a second day). I was taken to witness the ‘justice’. Oksana acted as the Prosecutrix in a proceeding dressed up as justice, where she and Jack (with his ever increasing gavel size) put HPD’s alleged crimes on display. It was where O’Neil became less a defendant than a symbol for every abuse, every beating, every rumour of a basement, every story of 4B and every citizen who ever claimed HPD had crossed the line.
There were accusations in that room that should not be ignored. There were also actions in that room that should not be excused.
That is the hard part, and Hathian, in my view as your long suffering editor hates hard parts. It prefers heroes (all the FDH) and monsters (all the HPD) because they are easier to shout about in bars and it’s easier to form tribal groups rather than cross uniform, or other lines. But HAC’s accusations did not become pure because HAC made them while holding captives… That much should be clear. Oksana’s anger did not become justice because it wore the costume of prosecution. That much should not need to be reinforced. HPD’s sins, real or alleged (or hidden and not yet discovered), did not give anyone the right to build a theatre where humiliation, threats and violence became the script. It served no purpose and now, all it has served is further death, albeit delayed.
Still, the point of HAC was never only to punish. It was to prove.
To prove HPD was rotten. To prove Krystal was what they said she was. To prove the city deserved its own ugliness reflected back at it with a noose and a camera and a voice that called itself justice relayed from the HAC court by my very self.
On King Street, The Noose Came Back
According to witnesses and material available to the Observer, Inspector O’Neil arrived with Detective Shelby Katz in an unmarked vehicle after locating Oksana near the Projects area. O’Neil approached and was seen to have thrown a hangman’s noose onto the pavement between them. We can only imagine what was said but it was clearly a deliberate image, and nobody involved could have mistaken it for a joke. Krystal doesn’t really do jokes. Just like she doesn’t do Vanora style Lingerie, or my style brat. She just does what she thinks is justice, even if it just the latest iteration of the circle. It was clear to me that the noose was tied to the old HAC performance where hanging would have been Krystal’s punishment.
Oksana did not appear to deny the meaning of it. She stepped over the noose and challenged O’Neil.
The confrontation that followed was personal and from our eyewitness who had got closer very nearly ritualistic. Oksana appeared to taunt O’Neil about whether she would arrest her or kill her. O’Neil warned her not to come closer and drew a revolver, aiming it at Oksana’s. There is no point pretending this was a calm paperwork conversation.
But O’Neil did not fire then.
Instead our witness says the exchange became a standoff over whether Oksana would leave Hathian. O’Neil told her to go. Oksana refused. She said that she would not leave and that she would continue to hunt O’Neil until O’Neil or someone else finally pulled the trigger. That is not a line easily walked back from. It was not the language of a person looking for a clean arrest, nor the language of a person who believed the matter could end quietly. Do or Do Not as Yoda said; there is no try.
Onlookers began to gather. King Street, being King Street. We were told that the Rejects appeared nearby while others unknown to this paper from brief descriptions watched from the edges. Katz appeared to do litlte at the start. This was the showdown between Krystal and Oksana and the street became theirs for a brief moment, reclaimed from Rejects, or Yuugen, or the Observer, or anything. The street became one of those Hathian stages and everybody watched the players waiting… waiting to clap, applaud or commiserate.
Eventually, O’Neil lowered her weapon and turned away.
This the turn. The hinge. The crux of what could have been, but instead became what was. O’Neil had the gun. O’Neil had the anger. O’Neil had history enough, threats enough, trauma enough, and probably enough local sympathy from certain quarters to claim later that she had simply ended a problem the city had failed to solve. She could have pulled the trigger while Oksana stood in front of her and written the ending there, it’s certainly what the HAC and others have accused the HPD of.
She did not… But then Oksana then moved after her from behind.
Witness accounts describe Oksana storming after O’Neil and attempting to tackle her. O’Neil turned, fired from the hip, and both women went down. Oksana, the Russian doll with so few layers left, other than this mission against Krystal collapsed on top of the Inspector before being rolled away. O’Neil, visibly shaken, checked herself for wounds before placing pressure on Oksana’s injury and appeared to ask a single question that drifted over the still street… “Why?”
Perhaps she knew the answer. Perhaps all of us did.
Detective Katz had called for backup and EMS and it firstly arrived in the shape of Lieutenant Vanora Blackheart who began CPR until medical personnel took over.
Paramedics later pronounced Oksana dead at the scene.
The Easy Way / The Hard way
There are easy versions of this article to write. HPD will have one. HAC sympathisers will have another. One side will say an officer defended herself from a terrorist. Another will say a police inspector brought a gun and a noose to a woman she already hated, then walked away leaving just enough room for the ending she wanted.
The Observer, and I, after all this time and the intimate knowledge in some ways of both of them should not be that lazy.
Oksana was not innocent in this history and in this town. She helped build a machine of humiliation and revenge and called it justice, working with Jack who sometimes just seemed to watch the (HPD) world burn. She helped drag Krystal O’Neil into a stage-managed proceeding where accusations, some serious enough to deserve investigation, were combined, fused and manipulated with theatre, threats and abuse until whatever truth might have existed was half-drowned.
But here again, HPD is not clean either. That is part of why HAC found the air to breathe in our City of Hathian in the first place. A city does not produce vigilantes, terrorists, gangs, cults and revenge courts because everything is working beautifully. It produces them when official systems are trusted by too few people and feared by too many. It produces them when people believe the law is simply another weapon, and when enough stories of abuse pile up that even the ridiculous starts sounding plausible to someone hurt enough to listen and well, when 4B is definitely more than a rumour, it sticks. It sticks like a bad smell that won’t ever wash out.
That is not a defence of Oksana. It is a warning about the soil she grew from.
What happened on King Street looked, from the available witness account, like self-defence at the final moment. Oksana lunged after O’Neil once O’Neil had lowered her gun and turned away. That difference matters. It does not erase everything that came before it, and it will not satisfy everyone who already chose their side before the blood dried, but it matters. Oksana wanted Krystal to prove her right. That is what this always felt like. Not just prosecution. Not just revenge. A demand. A demand that the Inspector become exactly what HAC said she was. On King Street, O’Neil came closer than many would like, gun raised and patience gone and a noose between them. But she did not fire while Oksana stood in front of her. She fired when Oksana came after her.
Oksana did not die as a martyr to truth. She did not die as a harmless victim of the state. She died after building a litany and path and history of threats and spectacle that ended with her charging a woman she had spent months trying to turn into a symbol… Yet there is also no celebration here. A dead woman is still a dead woman. A body on the street is still a body. Another circle of the Hathian Ouroboros of violence closing does not mean the city has healed; it may only mean the wheel has found another way to turn and it will surely grind more grist in the cogs and whirring hell of Hathian before long.
The Noose Came Home.
The noose came home. Not around Krystal’s neck. Not around HPD’s. Not around the city Oksana claimed she wanted to save. It came home as evidence, as symbol, and finally as a circle closing on the woman who helped send it out. Whether that is justice, self-defence, consequence, tragedy, or simply Hathian doing what Hathian does day in and day out as Tori believes will depend on who is reading.
Oksana is dead.
And the questions that made HAC possible are not.
