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It’s an honour, they’re taught, to have another’s words written upon you. That’s how you know it means something, Jean remembers the orphanage matron saying as he sat with the rest of his cohort on the floor, linoleum sticky and cool under his legs. When you hear the words that define you and your soulmate’s fated relationship, you’ll carry them for the rest of your days, inside and out.
An honour. He takes one last long drag on his cigarette, before stubbing it out viciously in the ash tray. He turns on his heel and goes back into the precinct. An honour. Yeah, fucking right.
The shitkid doesn’t even remember. Of course he doesn’t. Why would Harrier Du Bois ever have to deal with a consequence he could avoid or pass on to someone else?
Jean can’t even say he’s jealous. There’s no point in him forgetting. He’d just need to glance at his arm to be thrown right back into this shit.
The noise and heat of the precinct envelopes him as he comes back in, soothing and familiar. Through the barely contained chaos, his eyes catch on them from several desks rows over. Harry, fingers worrying the edges of the folder in his hands, absently chewing on the wrong end of a pen as he reads. Watches as a little less than an arm’s length away, Kitsuragi methodically fills out page after page of a report. Watches them coexist, quietly, peaceably, easily.
This Harry can do that, now. He’ll sit with his thoughts, as quiet as he can, fidgeting as little as possible- not for long, of course, it’s still the shitkid- but for long enough that Kitsuragi can get through some of his work. This Harry treats that like a priority, like another person’s wants and needs matter. This Harry cares about that sort of thing. He *tries*. He’s seven months sober. He’s solved a number of hard cases with Kitsuragi as his partner. He’s started taking care of himself. And he is slowly, relentlessly, becoming something approaching a good man.
He is fulfilling every one of Jean’s wildest and most unrealistic hopes for him.
But he is, on an intrinsic level, not the man Jean had those hopes for. He’s not his old partner. Not the man he knew, not the man whose words are scrawled on his arm.
(On darker nights, he wonders if the old Harry could’ve done this, too. Could’ve found a way to become like this Harry. Gotten better. Made the stupid, itching, aching mark on his forearm something- he doesn’t know what. Not better, but less painful, maybe. Something to mark the past but not the future. Now it’s just the world’s shittiest epitaph.
That’s usually as far as he gets before he has to bring out the whiskey.)
Kitsuragi finishes writing with a final satisfied jab of his pen. He glances over at Harry, adjusting his glass, and his eyes catch on Harry’s mouth and the growing ink stain there. He says something, lost to the noise of the precinct, that makes Harry startle and look over at him, touching the side of his mouth, blinking at the blue now staining his fingertips. Kitsuragi offers a handkerchief.
The old Harry would rage against that, surprise stoking embarrassment stoking anger, cascading into a mess that Jean would inevitably have to smooth over.
This Harry takes the handkerchief and dabs at his face, grinning and saying something that makes Kitsuragi almost smile back.
Harry went to Martinaise and came back with a solved case, a new partner, a credible cryptid sighting, and, most unbelievably, somehow a little more stable. It’s good, really. There’s no reason for Jean’s chest to feel so tight. It’s not like he died, except for how it is.
Harry went to Martinaise and came back. Harry went to Martinaise and never came back. Both are true. He’s here and he’s gone, and the only thing left of the man Jean knew best is on his arm.
Jean forces himself to look down at the papers on his desk. He picks up his pen, and doesn’t look up again for the rest of his shift.
That should be it. But it’s never that easy with Harry, then or now.
The end of his shift comes and goes. He leans back, several hours after he should’ve gone home, and rubs his gritty eyes. The precinct is quieter, now, the day shift replaced with the smaller night shift crew. The unofficial meeting room by the break room is still lit up. He can see the figures of Kitsuragi and Harry through its window.
Jean sighs noisily and scrubs his hands harshly down his face. He has two more reports to finish before he can leave. One is his latest attempt to keep the higher ups from taking out the MCs cost plus interest out of the precinct’s budget. It’s a long, pointless endeavour, but he might be able to talk them down to just the MC’s cost with this one. He just needs to fill out this… he flips through the thick stack of papers… twenty-eight page document. Before the start of his shift tomorrow.
He needs more coffee.
He pushes away from his desk and wanders over to the break room with his mug, where someone has thankfully just put on a fresh pot. He fills his mug to the brim, leaving no space for cream or sugar. Neither helps the taste of the precinct coffee, anyway.
He rubs at his eyes again as he walks back over to his desk. There’s a faint squeaking sound of a door opening, and that’s all the warning he gets before he collides with someone. Hot coffee spills over both of them.
“Oh shit!” Harry says, because of course it’s Harry. “Ow ow ow!” He pulls his stained shirt over his head quickly.
The coffee is very hot, but Jean still doesn’t- he can’t- god, why did he not put on a long-sleeved undershirt today? Fuck. *Fuck*.
“Jean? You’re going to get burned, you have to-“
“I know,” he snaps, and pulls off his own shirt. He tries to keep his arm turned away from Harry while he does, but he fumbles and Harry reaches over to help and-
“Oh,” Harry says, barely a breath.
Jean doesn’t look. Doesn’t have to. Knows that Harry is looking at the black, bold words twisting down the inside of his right forearm.
I don’t want to get better. I want to get worse.
He snatches the shirt from Harry’s slackened grip and wraps it over his arm. “It’s nothing, shitkid. Don’t get worked up about it.” He says thinly, before muttering an excuse about grabbing a change of shirt, dodging Harry’s reaching hand. He ducks into the precinct’s locker room, ignoring the light switch, finding his locker by memory and fumbling it open. He’s not surprised to hear the door open behind him.
The sound of the light switch flicking on is loud, the buzz of the lights louder. Jean can almost hear the gears turning in Harry’s head before he asks, hesitantly, “Did I know?”
Jean pulls out a shirt. It’s torn at the left wrist, caught on a chainlink fence, but it’s long enough to cover what needs to be covered. It’ll do. “You were there.”
“What did I…?”
He stabs buttons through buttonholes viciously. “Nothing. You did nothing. You said… that… and then you took one look at my arm and left.” For all the vitriol in his voice, he keeps it clinical. Doesn’t mention how it had been a screaming match. Doesn’t mention how the gut punch of hearing that mixed with the searing fucking pain of those words carving their way onto his skin. Doesn’t mention the ringing silence and the look on his face before he ran away, leaving for Martinaise. It doesn’t matter. Not anymore. Not to anyone but Jean.
It’s quiet again. Jean fucked up the button order somewhere along the line, and now his shirt’s uneven. He swears under his breath and starts unpicking the buttons.
“I’m sorry,” Harry says.
“I know-” Jean says, and bites off the rest of the sentence hard enough his teeth click.
“Does it hurt?”
A laugh startles out of him, short and mean. He knows that tone. “Of course you want to do the can opener routine *now*. Yeah, shitkid, it does. Hasn’t stopped since I got it.”
Harry chews on his lip. “I don’t have a mark.”
Jean breathes through the sudden tightness in his chest. “I figured. That defined our partnership pretty well. You saying something fucking horrible, and me carrying it around for the both of us.”
“I’m sorry,” Harry says again.
“Yeah,” Jean says, fucking exhausted. “I know *you* are.”
Harry’s eyes, dark and familiar and unfamiliar, watch him. “He was too, I think.”
“Don’t.”
“I mean that, I-“
“*Don’t*.” He says tightly. “You’re not the one I want to hear any of this from, okay?”
“He’d want you to know. Or, I would.” He scratches at his head. “I’m not that different, you know.”
Jean can’t force any words through his throat. His shirt’s done up properly now, so there’s nothing left for his hands to do but hang uselessly beside him.
Harry continues, quietly, “I think he- we- *I* was sorry. And I think I was a coward about that. I was- still am, sometimes- a coward, about people I care about, and about responsibility. I owed you better than I gave you. And it scared the shit out of me, then.”
He pauses. What the fuck is Jean supposed to do with that- “then”? Like “then” is anything but a bad dream that follows him in the morning. Like “then” matters to him like it matters to Jean.
Harry picks his next words carefully, the moment hanging between them like the moment before gunfire. “It… still does, honestly, but not trying is worse. If you’ll let me.”
“Why.” The word escapes Jean’s mouth before he can think better of it.
Harry blinks. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“You don’t even fucking know me.” The words burn, broken glass in his chest. “I don’t need you to settle your old debts with me. Just leave me alone-“ to grieve, he doesn’t say. His throat works. “Just leave it alone, for once in your fucking life.”
He slams his locker shut and goes to shoulder past Harry. Harry’s hand clamps on his wrist like a vice. Jean turns, something sharp and deadly on his tongue, but Harry cuts him off.
“Talk to me,” Harry says. And. It’s stupid. It’s so *fucking* stupid, but it’s like a knife to the gut. Jean doesn’t flinch, but Harry’s eyes catch and sharpen on him regardless.
“… I used to say that to you, before,” he feels out the words slowly, watching Jean’s face.
Jean swallows. Back, before it got bad, Harry’d gotten a sense for when Jean needed to get out of his own goddamn head. “Talk to me” had meant a lot of things. Meant there was nothing that the two of them couldn’t figure out. Meant the promise of however-fucking-long it took, beating the thing to death, shitty coffee growing cold and stale and packs of cigarettes disappearing between the two of them. Meant them against the whole fucking world, for the world. Idealistic shit that fell apart the second Harry did. A phrase that means nothing now, because this Harry doesn’t know what the fuck he’s saying.
“Jean,” he says lowly. “Talk to me. Please.”
Jean feels his face contort in a reflexive sneer. But before he can say anything, a sharp sting on his right arm stops him.
No. No fucking way.
Through the tear in his sleeve, letters slip into his skin again, pulled through like a threaded needle.
Talk to me. Please.
The aching on his right arm fades as the last letter on his left slips into place. The old words are still there, he knows it, but they feel… less, now. Greyer.
(Inactive, he doesn’t think. Dead.)
“Huh,” Harry says.
“Shut up,” Jean says, still staring at his arm. “Shut the fuck up.”
Harry, uncharacteristically, does. Jean’s blood pounds in his ears.
He’s not sure what this means. Sure, he’s got a handful of theories starting, burning in his brain with implications that are, frankly, a little fucking terrifying. But there’s no way to know, to really know if this means what he wants it to.
He can’t believe he’s even considering… Again? Doing this again? Really? Didn’t get enough punishment in those four years, gotta go back for seconds? He survived the last go around- maybe not unscathed, but he survived nonetheless. No guarantee of that if he tries again.
But fuck him, he hates not picking at a mystery. And maybe the universe knows that.
(And maybe there’s a little seed of interest he’s been ignoring, rooted in his chest under all the grief, about this known-unknown man.)
“Fine,” Jean says, pulling his arm away with a sharp tug. “You say you’re different? Better? You say you still fucking… *care*… fine. Prove it. Do better. But if you leave another mark on me, I’ll punch your teeth in.”
Harry’s face lights up. It’s embarrassing, sometimes, how easy to read he is now.
“I w-“ Harry starts to say, then yelps, slapping a hand to his still bare chest. Under his hand, the words Prove it. Do better. spell out in the same thick ink that lines Jean’s arm.
They stare at each other.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Jean says.
Harry pokes at it before looking up at Jean with a serious expression. “Don’t worry, I won’t hit you.”
“Un-fucking-believable.” Jean turns away, ignoring the smile growing under Harry’s mutton chops and doing his best to keep the feeling in his chest from showing on his face. “Shut the fuck up and put on a shirt.”
The locker room door clicks shut behind him before he allows himself a small smile.
An honour. He finds himself thinking again as he drops the unfinished MC report on Harry’s desk. Meaning something. Yeah, okay. Let’s see.
Let’s see.