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Ace’s High. It had been an incredible shot- that was always the odd thing about the detective, maybe something so ingrained in the ropes of his muscles he could not forget even if he wanted to. Even when everything was lost, even when he asked the most childlike questions about the world, about people, about history, his weapon was an extension of himself. The first thing he’d done on the case was make the incredible shot to snap the belt holding their corpse aloft. A target reinforced with steel and thinner than a necktie. He’d made the shot in one. A shot rung out once more and the hulking beast in gleaming white armor went down with a hole in his cheek. The quick draw boiadeiro in the vertigo tie. He was hyper competent when he wanted to be. But despite his insistence, he was not immortal. Not even superstar cops could dodge every bullet.
Through the thick leather gloves Kim could feel the warm blood. The shot had ripped through his pelvis and Harry had collapsed without a sound. He wouldn’t have known the detective was even down were it not for the shiver, if not for Titus’ voice rising in a shout, “The cop is down! Protect the cop!” He pressed hard on the wound, feeling torrents of blood slither through his fingers like eels, sleek and wet and lost to the currents the moment they passed. His face was ashen, eyes half lidded, and that was worse. If he was contorted in pain, if he shook, if he writhed and cursed and spat blood, then that would mean he still had the spark. That twinkling thing in his eyes that laid bare every suspect they came in contact with. But his eyes were dull, rolling in his skull to and fro. He was dying.
Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi was no stranger to people dying under his hands. On his behalf. People, decent people, had taken shots meant for him before. It never made it easier. It never made his heart hammer any less.
“Harry,” he choked out, then, more forcefully, “Stay with me, stay awake!” His considerable frame expanded as he took in a strangled lungful of air. “You’re bleeding out! You have to hold on, just hold on.”
Taking one gloved fingertip between his teeth, bloodied and tasting like a mouthful of dirty real, Kitsuragi tugged the leather free and packed it into the wound. It did little to abate the gushing bullet hole, and he still held most of it in manually.
Harry’s voice was too thin to make out the words, but he said something. Kim sprang on it, like the embers of a dying hearth in the dead of winter, the last flame to go out- it couldn’t go out. Not yet.
“That’s it, keep talking! Look at me.”
Had this all gone down a week ago, he would have fought just as hard for a fellow officer, but it would be with a clinical detachment. So much had changed. The strange detective with the ruddy red nose and the unkempt sideburns had wormed into some fond corner of his chest. Under all the self loathing, the amnesia, the stinking sweating booze, he was good. He was childlike and he was kind and he was good. It was not a concept Kim ever put much stock in. People were people, neither good nor bad, only collections of experiences and circumstance. He liked to think he was good if there was a spectrum one could judge such a thing on, but he would not spend an entire day hunting down a cryptid for an elderly couple he barely knew. He would not have spent evenings squatted and chatting with a speedfreak ginger boy, when he thought his partner was asleep inside. He would not have wasted hours talking to two old men about their mutual long lost love. He would not dance with strange teenagers in an abandoned church. Harry was weird. He was not always on task. But there was a method to his strangeness. And he was good.
“K-Kim…” Trembling fingers enveloped his forearm. Kim opened his mouth to beg, lost for any words beside hold on, stay awake, stay with me, don’t die, Harry do not die. But cold metal was pressed into his hand, the words stolen with his breath. He felt the last mercenary’s shadow and heard the click. He was faster. One shot, cracking like a thunderclap and echoing through the square. She fell back, dead before she hit the ground.
Kim’s heart raced fast as a rabbit in a snare. Smoke curled from the puddle of hot blood and super heated skull fragments and brain matter eeking out of the woman’s head, the heat of her insides turning to vapor in the cold. Every nerve ending sang. He could spare no thoughts on this matter- he turned back to Harry, pressing diligently into the wound.
“Not so far gone yet, huh?” He breathed, wanting to laugh, wanting to break apart in fright. But Harry’s eyes were closed. His face was slack, body unmoving, and for awhile, too long awhile, Kim just stared. His brow was still pinched, his jaw held too tight. Not even sleep gave the lunatic cop reprieve. Free of the glove, Kitsuragi pressed two naked fingers hard into the pulse point in his neck. Sluggish, slow- but there. Even if his skin was slick with wet boozy pores and the heat gone from his body, he was alive. He wouldn’t stay that way long. Breath had stuttered in his lungs. Too long without oxygen and his battered brain would shut down for good. Or maybe he would wake up in a few days with no memory of their time in Martinaise. That struck Kim as a terrible ending. With bloodshed, with horror, with choked sorrows, together they had been… good. More than good. Kim looked up, searching for help among the crowd of Hardie boys and surly cafe managers. He found only more bloodshed. A few crowded around a large shape he knew to be Angus, a few around the lithe Shanky, only one tending to Glen, knowing it was a lost cause but still valiant in the effort anyway. Harry wasn’t breathing. Harry was dying. For a few precious seconds, Kim felt like he was too. Like his heart had given out from the stress and he was just waiting for the collapse. His own breathing was shallow. He wasn’t supposed to panic.
A tangle of gangly white limbs and too big shoes blurred past him. Tiny, dirty hands took up the task of holding Kim’s ruined glove into the wound.
“The fuck are you doing, binoclard?!” shrieked a familiar squawking voice. “Fuckpig is dying! Do something!”
Snapped from his fervor, Kim spared Cuno only a single look before descending on the detective. The blood was stopped, only momentarily. Breath was more important. He held the other man’s neck for support and tipped his head back. As much as he admired the detective’s many strange idiosyncrasies, he did, unfortunately, stink. He could taste the rotten heat of his mouth as he lowered himself and sealed his lips around Harry’s, but could not afford to hesitate a moment longer. Cheeks inflated, throat bobbed, lungs expanded. He sighed back stale air and deflated once more.
“C’mon, detective,” Kim urged quietly as he pressed his ear against the tickling bristles of Harry’s mustache, watching his chest fall and not rise again.
“What the fuck are you doing, Cuno?” Another familiar and decidedly unwelcome voice. Kim might have thought Cuno alone was unwelcome on this scene, and he was, being a child, yet he could not refuse the help. The girl on the other hand…
“Fuck off, C!”
“You’re helping them? The rotten pigs? You should stick a cigarette in that dirty pig’s new fuckhole!”
Cuno snapped, “Nobody tells the Cuno what to do! Cuno’s only helping so-“ He faltered. Even he wasn’t sure. His next words were thick- was he really on the verge of tears? “So just-! Just shut the fuck up!”
Despite it all, he was a kid. No amount of speed or neglectful fathers could make the years pass any quicker. Harry had been good to him too. Seeing him hurt must have split cracks in the facade. He was scared. He was scared his very own fuckpig would die. Kim thought it was an insult. When he would grin and look over at Harry and loudly declare all the things the ‘pig’ had done for him. But he was his pig, wasn’t he? And if he lost him… What would he have then?
Kim blew two more breaths down his throat while the little girl wailed, as if she wasn’t in a field of the dead and dying. He steadfastly ignored her. Pinching Harry’s bulbous nose shut, a breath, a stagnant exhalation. A breath, fingers brushed over stubble and coarse beard hair peppered through with silver. A breath, a tightness in his chest.
“Come on,” Kim pleaded through the rocks grinding in his lungs. Another breath.
A small shadow passed on his left. Before he could finish the exhalation, claws had sunk into Cuno’s cheek. The Cunoesse was batting at him with open hands, with fingers straining into talons, pulling on the boy and incessantly tugging, digging nails into his wrist. Red crescents stood out on his splotchy skin, a swipe running across the middle of his nose and over his orbital socket. To his credit, the boy’s hands remained fixed to the wound. He didn’t even raise them to defend himself. Kim snatched the thin radius of her arm and yanked her forcefully. More forceful than he’d intended. She stumbled, tangled, fell on her ass. Her eyes were wild, rimmed red. She didn’t look hurt. The gesture hadn’t wounded her as much as it had angered her. She stared out from under her brow, face chillingly placid. For the first time, he understood the shudder that ran through Harry’s back when he looked up at her from across the yard. Once, he’d said his brain told him she was a violent, remorseless creature, after one of those little shivers which Kim had learned meant his brain was talking to him again. She said she killed someone before- only then did he really believe it.
“Get out of the way,” Kim said flatly. Cuno said nothing. He tucked his head against his shoulder, unable to meet her gaze. Between the two of them, Harry’s lungs crackled in a wheeze, his throat working, head lolling. Alive. Kitsuragi could have melted from the relief. Neither of them looked up at the hateful little girl. She stood. She walked away. Cuno only glanced her way. Then, with the dutiful focus of an engaged pupil, he returned to their work.
“Thank you, Cuno,” Kim whispered. The boy nodded. Once it became obvious the other Hardie boys were beyond help, Titus and whoever was left of the gang turned their attention to the RCM members and he was whisked into the Whirling-In-Rags with a crowd. Harry was raised up beyond the boy’s bloodied hands, too high for him to reach, with others taking over his job. He was left useless on the threshold of the cafe. Kim patted his shoulder on the way by. There was more he would say- later. After Harry was dealt with. They left him there in a stupor, vanishing up the staircase to Harry’s room.