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Outside the window, Jean saw fireflies dancing and pale moonlight.
He had expected to lay awake half-covered beneath his miserable polyester sheets, boring holes into the ceiling above for hours, sleep slipping out of his fingers like threads of wind, the covers dripping with sweat and doing nothing to shield him from the frigid temperatures. Perhaps, if he had dared to feel hopeful, he may have imagined himself falling asleep for even a few hours, or potentially even more than a few, undisturbed by dreams indistinguishable from nightmares.
What he hadn’t expected, however, what he had feared – he had always feared, lingering within his mind, a ghost haunting his steps and burned into his neural circuits – was to spend the early hours of the morning writhing on the floor, his back curled impossibly within himself. His hands arched and clawed at his hair, pulling on the threads, and drawing blood from his scalp, throwing his head unrelenting against the unsympathetic floor with a slam.
Pressure exploded above his left eye, piercing through his face, radiating down his nerves setting them alight, threatening to spill over to his gums and forehead, flooding every inch of skin it could claw its way over to, setting every pore and scar and pox afire. The pain crashed over him like a wildfire oxygenated, the small area it afflicted overwhelming his entirety. Had he been able to have thought over the pain that overcame him, he would have grimaced at the flare-up of an old friend, a presence almost as omnipotent as the haunting wraith of his former partner, who would have berated himself for not predicting its return.
(Harry, who he had once presumed to be an unfaltering constant within his life, was gone. Unfortunately, his cluster headaches seemed to miss the memo).
The creaking of a door relenting on old hinges was barely audible beneath the cascading rush of pressure filling his ears, a beam of light pouring over the room and resting over his hunched figure, bathing him in an unholy brightness.
“Jean?”
The pain swallowed him, a knife piercing his eye socket over and over, the pain no longer localized to an area but instead pulling Jean beneath its waves wholly, drowning him in the aftershocks of its twisting and prodding at the tender tissue. He threw his head against the floor once more, the contact reverberating across his skull and bouncing off the walls, only temporarily dulling the throbbing for only a second, before returning at full force. An enemy that could violate yet could not be retaliated against; an assault that had no hope of being blocked, untenable.
“Jean!” a second force made itself present in Jean’s consciousness, hands gripping at his arms with an unyielding grip, the pressure almost undetectable, a voice vaguely acknowledged.
Jean stared at the intrusion with slitted eyes, lifting his head barely from the floor, an effort unrivalled. The world was blurred behind his eyelids, the wide-eyed stare of his partner focused solely on him, and the universe ignored to pivot wholly on the man he held.
(Jean struggled to hold his eyesight in return, currently enduring the worst experience of his life).
Harry’s gaze was intense, narrow upon his shaking figure, “What’s happening? What’s wrong?” his questions hurried, a flurry of concern. His hands were in a state between hovering over Jean’s arms, afraid to touch in fear of a reaction, and holding him as though he were the last person in the world, as though he would disappear if he even so much as blinked. His queries were a pain that cut through Jean’s refrain – Harry had forgotten about the headaches, forgotten about everything.
(Jean was currently enduring the second worst experience of his life).
A groan rose through his lungs and slipped from Jean’s throat; eyebrows impossibly creased upon his forehead. His voice failed him, unable to form the words that he mourned to scream.
And then, a sudden movement, and a break in Jean’s agony. A weight pulled down his head, a hand firmly entwined within his hair, applying pressure in an achingly familiar way. A lamentingly domestic action, one that performed and tugged on his heartstrings many times in a history Jean had long buried beneath the roots of a tree.
“Does that help?” Harry whispered, his touch burning against his skin. “I,” he stammered, threatening to pull away, “I’m not sure why I did that.”
“Yes, it helps, don’t move away,” Jean’s voice cracks, “please.”
“Okay – Okay.”
Harry holds Jean as though he were porcelain, fragile and threatening to break at any moment. His heat radiated in rays off him, Jean finding his resolve failing, the intimacy of the embrace and the unrelenting pressure above his eye ebbing away his resistance. The tension slid off his shoulders as his hesitance finally collapsed. Harry’s enfold only tightened around him as a result.
Jean’s head rested against Harry’s chest, the dregs of the pain falling away as his heartbeat reverberated throughout his mind, exhaustion taking over wholly. Minutes passed by them, a blanket of silence enveloping the duo, neither moving as the world continued proceeding without them.
As the jaws of the headache slowly loosened around him, Jean lifted himself from his old partner’s chest, eyes staring everywhere but on him as he moved. He could feel Harry’s piercing gaze upon him regardless, finding himself pinned beneath his eyesight.
“Are you alright? Should I call Gottlieb?” Harry’s voice was sickly kind, the soft tone making Jean feel ill, feeling undeserving and disgusted.
“No,” Jean sighed, “there’s nothing he can do.”
“Really?”
Harry’s tone was pained, and Jean tentatively looked up, taken aback by the shocked expression adorned upon Harry’s features, concern seeping into every line etched into his face. Jean felt his stomach drop, his heart twisting within his chest.
Jean offered a sheepish smile, his voice laced with lingering pain, “It’s fine, really.”
“It didn’t look fine… It looked bad,” Harry frowned, the eyes which had once frightened Jean looking upon him softly now. He felt sick.
Acutely aware of how Harry’s hands remained firmly on his arms despite Jean’s departure, with no intention of letting Jean escape from his grasp, Jean relented, “Gottlieb says they’re called Cluster headaches. They’re… well, shit, pretty much. They’re cyclic – most of the time they’re gone, but when they come back, it happens multiple times.”
“Multiple times? They come back?” Harry’s expression was unreadable as he listened, the distant stare he wore indicating his own internal dialogue, Jean noted.
“Yeah. Sometimes three times a day, every day, at the exact same time, for months.”
Harry looked at him with alarm – it stabbed at Jean’s heart. “Will it come back again? Like, soon?”
“I don’t know. Probably.” Jean stared down unconsciously, unable to tolerate the intense stare of his former partner, his loathing returning to him in waves, the anaesthetic brought on by the headache ebbing as he returned to reality.
“Is there no treatment?”
“There is,” Jean smiled bitterly, “I just can’t have it.”
“What? Why not?”
“They use oxygen to treat it. You know how fires get real bad when reacting with oxygen,” Jean stared a hole into the wall past Harry’s ear, “and I’m a smoker?”
The question lingered between them, Jean not continuing for there was no need, the answer clear to them both. Moonlight bathed the both of them as they sat on the floor, hitting Harry’s back and lighting him in a profane manner. The scene was familiar to only Jean, the scattered memories that only he held the only proof of what once was, what they had once been.
Once, they had been in the same spot on the floor, Jean holding Harry in his own arms, tears and snot staining his jacket. Harry had laid in his embrace as he looked to Jean and made a promise, swearing that once he was better they’d do everything they had wanted, they’d raze the city that worshipped neutrality and would raise it into something much better.
(“To hell with the old world,” Harry would exclaim loudly.
Jean had smiled at him, images of richer folks floating across his mind hazily. “And the old world’s people?”
Harry laughed brightly. “To hell with them too!”)
Of how they had reworked the structure of the precinct and changed it into something that allowed for freedom, of nights they spent figuring out the new structure of the precinct to be, excitedly thinking of new scenarios to metamorphosize into something to present to Pryce.
The man sitting before him was the most familiar stranger Jean had ever met, bitterness swelling within Jean and threatening to erupt from his lungs, the memories of what could have been an iron poison that seeped into his bloodstream. He ached for normality, a pipe dream for the world to stop spinning even if just for a moment and to envelop him in stillness. A venom spilled across his eardrums, that he would be alright, that everything would be alright if Harry would just leave, to get out of his sight.
A lament that had once been a duet, now only known by one, a solo voice singing a tune forgotten.
“Jean?” Harry piped up, his hands slowly releasing Jean as he sensed his turmoil, backing away expecting a sudden outburst, but not wholly, his hands resting in the air inched above Jean’s own.
Jean felt anger rise up through him at the hushed treatment, turning to stare at Harry yet stopping instantly as he saw the expression that masked his features.
An unabashed, unshielded concern seeping into every edge, eyes shining with worry and care, an expression catching Jean entirely off-guard, the single moment stained into his memory. A face so kind not seen by Jean in years, so far in the past it was almost forgotten entirely, concluded to be nothing more than a hallucination dredged up in a nightmare. An expression frantically drawn between the pages of case notes to not forget what it looked like so that it wouldn’t fade.
Jean’s stare met Harry’s gaze, words dying on his tongue. Harry smiled so slightly, a smile that would be invisible to anyone who wasn’t accustomed to the signs, to the slightest creases that appeared or the way his eyes smiled for him. The smile was a conversation understood by only them, and even then Jean wondered if Harry was aware of just what he was doing, doing to him.
The night weighed down on him, impossibly heavy upon his shoulders, sitting next to the memories he carried all alone, the universe compelling Jean to speak.
“It’s not fair,” Jean’s voice croaks, the smile that lit up Harry’s features vanishing instantly, a fire snuffed out before it could spread. Jean observed the crestfallen expression, the way his eyebrows furrowed causing his eyelids to slightly close, how his mouth hung in a state of being not quite closed, how his muscles tensed and all the details that he had long committed to something more than just memory. It clawed through his head and opened his chest, the pain rivalling that of the one he felt not long ago.
“All the little things you did, that you do, from your actions to your expressions, I remember all of it, I can’t forget it. And without any word, you went and disappeared. But you’re back, but you came back different.”
Harry remains silent as Jean continues, observing the way his hands clenched his jacket, his knuckles turning white and his eyes closed, sealing himself away from the outside, from the night, from Harry.
“You’re doing better now, you’re happier, and fuck, I’m such an asshole, because when I see you smiling,” he trails off, the end of the sentence barely above a whisper, “it incites hatred within me, because I know I’ll never be the same.”
The words were a poison upon his tongue, bile rising into his mouth, his chest clawing and aching and he felt miserable as he lay himself bare afore the man he cursed. He didn’t know which was more painful – his consciousness, Harry, or the headaches. Whether the ideations that dredged themselves into his mind were a result of the constant pain or his depression, he had no clue.
Jean was pulled out of his self-inflicted melancholy by Harry’s arms returning to envelop him once more, locking him in a much tighter hug, the restraint he held as he cradled him from earlier dissolved and replaced with something much more passionate, Harry’s fingernails digging slightly into skin, an embrace Jean couldn’t escape no matter how hard he tried.
“I’m sorry,” Harry’s voice was muffled by Jean’s clothes.
Jean sighed, an emotion between anger and fondness building within him. “What are you sorry for?”
“Because nothing I can do will ever be enough to repay you, Jean. You’ve been through so much and I can’t remember any of it.” Harry shook his head and stared at Jean, his signature kicked-puppy expression worn on his face. Jean supposed it was more tolerable than some of his other looks.
Jean matched his stare, before lowering his head, a sigh escaping from his lips and floating on the wind between them. “Sometimes I wish everything would just fucking explode.”
“Everything?”
Jean stared, stared at the stranger across from him, stared at his former partner, Jean stared at Harry. He stared at the wide-eyed look he gave him, the heart-wrenchingly familiar face that Jean wanted to tear apart and kiss and stab all at the same time, the face he had laid in bed thinking about punching and holding for countless nights.
“No,” Jean threw his head back, damning everything to the pale and back, “Not the memories of you I hold.”
Jean felt exhaustion seeping into every pore, every vein and bone and sinking itself deep inside him, settling down and pulling him down like a stone in water. He had lost track of the time, lost track of how long it had been and how long they had left before everything would return to shit. He allowed himself weakness, to succumb to emotion and irrationality, resting his head in the crook of Harry’s head, Harry in return moving to thread a hand through his hair absentmindedly.
“I know you can’t forget what I’ve done,” Harry speaks up after a moment, basking in the stillness of the room, observing the way moonlight soaked them, “but I hope that one day you can forgive me.”
“What are you talking about? I already have. I forgave you long ago.”
“Then I hope you can forgive yourself, then.” Harry hummed, a quiet falling over them once more.
Jean found himself relaxing within Harry’s arms, tension ebbing away and falling out of his shoulders, his neck not as strained and his eyes closed, sitting aside Harry on the floor in silence. The world continued to move on without them, Harry’s embrace a break from the relentless pace they performed in their every day. It was familiar, nostalgic in a way Jean had never experienced, and he wondered if he could get used to this, to the new Harry. To shake away the cobwebs that lined his memories and replace them with something warm and unfamiliar.
“Hey, Jean? Can I do something stupid? My brain keeps telling me it’s something I have to do. I think it’s something I did before I lost my memory?” The last statement quirks into a question.
Curious, Jean caved, “Go for it, shitkid.”
A hesitant stir, and then the lightest touch of lips upon his forehead, slightly below his hairline, a touch no heavier than a leaf falling from a tree in autumn – a kiss.
Jean felt hysterical. Out of all the muscle memories for Harry to remember, it was the one that Jean had spent the most time overthinking, the most time spent replaying over and over in his mind on the endless restless nights that plagued his steps. Jean rarely allowed himself comfort, to be vulnerable and allowed another within the walls constructed with bricks that were lined with his name. Only on the worst of nights, where his best friend had been the gun sitting on the bedroom table, the nights where somehow Harry just knew things would go wrong if he had left Jean alone, the very few nights when Harry was a human, rather than whatever possessed his waking corpse.
Jean buried himself further in Harry’s arms. “You’re fucking awful,” his voice lacked malice completely, devoid of threat and negativity. Only an old fondness remained. Jean could feel Harry’s smile without needing to look – he could detect it from a mile away.
After a beat, Harry drew back, sitting Jean up straight. “It’s… late. Should we go to bed?”
Jean narrowed his gaze, “We?” the mirthful reply came.
“Yes, we.” Harry beamed, his smile bright despite the darkness that surrounded them, the shadows that danced in the room.
Holding Harry’s gaze with faux disapproval, Jean relented and sighed. “As much as I’d like the idea,” he looked down at his knees, “I’ll most likely have a second, or even third, bout of headaches soon. Just one for such a short time never happens.”
“Then I’ll stay with you and hold you until it passes,” Harry states as though it were the simplest thing in the world.
“You can’t stay with me every night,” Jean argues.
Harry retorts easily, “Yes I can.”
“No,” Jean points his finger between Harry’s eyes, “you’ll be exhausted. You won’t get any sleep. You won’t be able to work.”
“We can just take the night shifts. Asides, you won’t either, so I might as well be there for you when it happens.”
Jean feels his gaze softening, “it won’t be just for a day or two. They’ll be here for months.”
“That’s okay,” Harry’s eyes meet Jean’s, a fury defiant blazing within them, “you’ve dealt with me for so long over the years – I don’t know how many nights I kept you up, but it’s only fair I return the favour.”
Jean knew, by the look in his partner’s eyes, that there was no winning. He had only known Harry for his broken promises, a wildfire that was smothered just as fast as it was lit, words that never rang true, not for long. But things were different, Harry was different, and they were different. Sitting on the floor, Jean was willing to make a bet on the moon.
“Alright,” Jean smiled.
He lifted himself from the floor with ease, his bones not yet as old as Harry’s, grinning as he held out his hand for the other to take and pull himself up with, the creaking of his bones the only noise in the soundless room. He led Harry to his quarters wordlessly, an action not unfamiliar in the slightest to Jean, what would have been second nature if not for his partner’s memory loss, filling him with apprehension and perhaps even hope.
Harry took to the bed easily, falling over it and sprawling, only making space for Jean after a kick to the ankle. They lay across the bed, facing one another, Jean feeling a youth-like giddiness that he immediately shut down. He could feel Harry’s gaze upon him – when didn’t he?
Time passed slowly around them before Jean spoke up once more, his arm under his head. “I’m afraid of getting used to this.”
“I understand, I think,” Harry replied after a moment, “It’s new and new has so often been bad for us. But for what it’s worth, I don’t think you’re a horrible person, Jean. I know I’m a mess.”
Jean laughed sharp and brightly, the bed omitting a creak. “Harry, whatever we are is so much more a mess than you could ever be.”
Jean exhaled, before curling on himself, bringing his knees up to his chest, imagining the minutes ticking away, counting down his next punishment. It was inevitable, and he knew that the next months would be hell again for him.
But he would march on regardless. Gottlieb would organize something with Pryce so that Jean’s shifts would work around the cluster headaches, and that the precinct would continue to be a cluster-fuck with or without his presence, and this time, he would have someone to suffer beside him, to apply pressure to his head and to hold him tightly and to hide his gun when they got particularly bad, and then the headaches would leave.
Jean felt Harry shift closer and wrap around him once more, entwined closely and shielding him from the pain that threatened to manifest. They would build their relationship from the ground up once more, resetting from zero and starting all over again, only this time, they swore they’d get the ending right. He’d be alright – they’d be alright.
Outside the window, Jean saw fireflies dancing and pale moonlight.