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i
He doesn't recognise you. The realisation dawns as you stand there, strands of your ridiculous blonde wig falling over your face, the room tinted dark by your glasses. To him, you are nothing more than a stranger. All those years of history, reduced to nothing more than him squinting at you with not even a shred of recognition.
‘Tell me the truth, do you know me from somewhere?’ He asks you, after you have made it painfully apparent that he should, that he is meant to know you. You play along with the joke for a moment, that the pair of you are inhabiting some alternate reality where you knew each other once upon a time, but when you ask him what precinct that pair of you belong to in this fantasy life he just shrugs. You had hoped that somehow there might be something still there, that all the years that you spent together—no matter how tumultuous—would have buried themself deep in his brain somewhere. But there is nothing.
It takes everything you have in you not to storm out of the hostel right then and there, and you are thankful that he cannot see the angry tears pricking at the corners of your eyes under the sunglasses.
That night, once the door of your room is shut, you let yourself cry properly and hope that Judit can’t hear you through the paper-thin walls. You can’t remember the last time that you cried this hard, and you don’t even really understand why it’s hitting you like this. It wasn’t as though you had liked him much, he had been a complete and utter mess, a liability of a partner. But you had thought that with enough time and patience, perhaps you could have been the one to carefully place the pieces back together. It feels far too late for that now.
ii
He tells everyone that he’s sober now, this time for real. You have heard this one too many times to really believe him. It had only ever lasted for a few days, until he would burn up like a dying star, each time a little more spectacularly devastating than the last. The first few occasions, you were inclined to believe him when he’d said that he was trying, but that trust has worn off years ago by this point.
Perhaps this time really will be different though, you think to yourself as you watch him interact with Kim Kitsturagi—the new transfer to the 41st Precinct. He seems to do everything that the Lieutenant tells him to do, and not even with a begrudging acceptance, with a strange enthusiasm you have not seen on him before. It suits him, you think. Something burns inside you to think that this man who has known him for less than a month has been able to do the thing that you had been failing to do for years. You try your best not to think too much about either of them; you keep your head down and focus on your own caseload.
You keep catching glances of them together, talking and laughing like he used to with you on the good days. Of course the good days had been getting less and less frequent, but when they had come around you had tried to put everything else to the side and just enjoy them for what they were. Despite the constant undercurrent of anger—at him for letting it get this bad, at yourself for not being able to stop him—you had never been able to keep it up at him for too long when he had been doing better. Now though, he has barely spoken to you since his return, you do not have the chance to even be angry at him. Not in the way you used to.
iii
The day comes, just as you knew it would, when it all comes crashing down once more. You aren’t sure if you are glad that he comes to your doorstep, despite everything, or if it just makes it all hurt more. You go through the familiar motions of giving him water that he doesn’t want to drink and medicine that you have to coax him into taking, before leading him through to your bed. You will sleep on the sofa and your back will hurt in the morning, as it has every time that you have done this before. You can’t bring yourself to make him sleep out here though, it feels cruel somehow, even though Dolores knows you’ve been cruel to him more times than you can count.
You don’t make it to morning however, before you are woken by a knock at the door. It can't be earlier than three or four at this point, and you are in half a mind just to roll back over and hope whoever it is goes away soon, but the sound is too persistent for that so begrudgingly you shove your feet into your slippers and make your way to the door.
Lieutenant Kitsuragi stands before you, not in his RCM uniform or the orange jacket you have seen on occasion, but in a pale green jumper that looks so soft you want to reach out and touch it. His glasses are slightly crooked on his nose, and what little hair he has, he has clearly been running his hands through. This is a far cry from the put-together man that you see everyday, and there is something a little disconcerting about it.
‘Satellite-Officer Viquemare, sorry to wake you at this hour, but I was wondering if you had heard from Harry. You see he didn’t come home—’ You hadn’t been aware they were living together. The oddly stilted, yet clearly worried way in which Kim speaks suggests a closeness that you had not expected. They are not just partners; they are friends. Despite the fact that he’s currently sleeping in your bed, you aren’t sure that you have ever been his friend.
‘Oh yeah, shitkid came by earlier. Not so sober now, but that’s how he always has been.’ You watch as something tenses almost imperceptibly in Kim’s expression as he pushes past you into your tiny apartment.
Kim manhandles him out into that awfully ostentatious motorcarriage of his in a way that you did not think would be possible for a man of his stature, and then you are left by yourself once again. The sheets smell faintly of whiskey, and you wish that he was still here, even in his drunken rambling state. Anything would be better than the crushing sense of loneliness that threatens to consume you.
iv
You had been expecting things to change after that. For Kim to see that he isn’t going to get better, that it’s not so easy. You would know; you’ve been trying for years. But instead of getting angry, instead of leaving him to his own devices to go out and get drunk again, Kim becomes softer still.
On the job, Kim is as professional as ever, but you can see glimpses of it in the ways that they interact. The tender glances and gentle words. There’s a strange crushing sensation that swells up somewhere inside you when you realise that Kim is being a better man than you ever could have been. You had tried, oh Dolores, you had tried so hard that it had threatened to consume you whole, but you had never managed to muster up this level of patience. You had grown angry. You had come and gone with each relapse, each bender, but Kim seems as stable as a lighthouse in a storm. It’s what he needs; you are sure of that. It just isn’t you, and with each gentle touch that passes between them when they think that no-one else is looking, your resentment festers ever stronger.
You have lost him, you realise that now. You should have known it from the second he had looked you straight in the eyes and not even a glimpse of recognition had dawned on his face, but it had taken a while to set in. You didn’t want to accept it. But he has Kim now; he doesn’t need you. Back then, you had complained endlessly about how needy he was. You didn’t think that you would miss it like this, like something has been ripped out of you.
On the bad days you catch yourself thinking that you wish he’d just died that night. You know you shouldn’t think it, but like the urge to fling yourself off the top of every tall building you see, the thought settles into the crevices of your mind until you think that you couldn't forget it even if you tried. Of course you are glad he’s alive, but on the nights you lie alone in bed and realise that he isn’t going to be barging through your door unannounced any time soon, you think it would be easier if he wasn’t here. In most of the ways you remember him, he no longer exists. But sometimes you catch glimpses of him through the strange new person that he has become. It’s the way he moves around one stride heavier than the other, sits precariously on the edges of desks—the way he inhabits himself that sometimes feels like a ghost in a familiar body, and yet sometimes feels like the man you once knew so well. When you catch him chewing on the end of a pen as he thinks, moving his body weight from foot to foot as tries to stand still, you can almost pretend it’s still your version of him, not this strange new apparition. He was even more messed up than you were, both of you with lists of issues trailing for miles long, but he had been yours. You don’t think you like this new person.
v
You have never been able to hold down a relationship for long. Sooner or later they had all left you, most citing a lack of apparent care. You had put it down to your general apathy and depression, but some days you wonder if there is something that runs deeper than that. It’s just another one of the many things on the long list of things not to think about.
One day you walk in on them in the office. It is late, far too late for you to be here, but you had left your keys on your desk and had walked all the way home before realising. You push open the door, expecting for the building to be empty by now and almost jump at what you see.
He is perched on the edge of the desk, Kim pressed up against him, so close that in the shadows you could almost mistake their silhouette for a single figure. It’s so dark you cannot make out much of what you see in front of you, but their faces are pressed up against each other, lips to lips, hands tangled in hair. Oh. You don’t know why you hadn’t realised this sooner, but it had never occurred to you that this might be what was going on. You had assumed Kim was simply your better replacement. But you had never— You have never been like this.
He has not seen you, so you turn and leave, hurrying off to beg Judit to let you stay with her for the night. She agrees faster than you had been anticipating, you push the caseload negotiations that you were about to bring up away and walk into her flat that’s even smaller than your own. Perhaps she can see it on you somehow, how done you are with everything, how dangerously on the edge you are teetering. She has seen the scars of failed attempts; you have given up on hiding them. You know that you scare people around you with it sometimes. A better man would try not to let it show, but you have never been terribly good at that.
You hadn’t realised that both he and Kim are homo-sexual, and you aren’t sure what to make of this new information. You aren’t quite sure of the strange twist in your stomach that you get when you think about them together. Revachol is no place for this. It has been getting better over the years, but it’s not easy. Deep down you still want his life to be easy.
You want your own life to be easy too, it’s why you’d torn your eyes away from the boys in changing rooms at school, tried not to think too long and hard about some of the closer friendships you’d had. All of that just brings trouble, and you have far too much of that in your life already. You don’t have time for this, it is not something you can afford to entertain. And yet you can’t stop that image of them against that desk from haunting you.
He may not have seen you, too engaged with the man standing between his legs, but as you had stood there Kim had looked you dead in the eye. Kim had looked at you as though he’d known.
vi
It eats away at you, as much as you try your best to ignore it, the idea that Kim knows the thing that you haven’t even fully admitted to yourself. Sometimes you catch a glimpse of pity in his eyes. Kim asks you to lunch with the pair of them and you snap at him, not even allowing yourself to consider the possibility. In part, you know this is self-sabotage, but it is also an act of self-preservation. You do not want to be witness to what happens when he and Kim eventually fall apart. It is going to happen. It is inevitable, and you suspect that as with all the awful things you see in your line of work, you will not be able to tear your eyes away from it as it all goes down. For now though, you still like to believe that you would have that strength.
Watching the two of them, knowing how these things end feels like waiting for something to crack. All the little tells accumulating each time you glance in their direction. You start to notice it, the way that he looks at the Lieutenant. It’s familiar, hauntingly familiar. It’s how he looked at her. How he looked at Dora; how he looked at Dolores . You had worried about it at the time, the pedestal that he had put her on that she could never hope to live up to, and you had seen what had happened to him when she left. Sometimes time is a circle, you realise as you catch his gaze lingering with a little too much reverence. There is only one possible way that this can end.
You wonder which Innocence will take the place of Kim.