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You can’t remember anything. What you did last night. Your home address. Not even your own name.
A man in an orange bomber jacket is asking for it.
He is shorter than you by nearly a full head. His short black hair is thinning, but tapered to a stylish fade. A pair of round, thick-rimmed glasses perches upon a prominent nose, the strong prescription of its lenses magnifying the hooded eyes behind them. His mouth carves a neutral frown above a receded chin. A port-wine stain birthmark splashes up his jawline and into his right cheekbone. If you ran your hand against it, you would feel slight puckering of thickened tissue.
This is RCM Detective Kim Kitsuragi, Lieutenant of the Fifty-seventh Precinct. He is your partner on the case hanging in the tree out back.
And you are… who, exactly?
You grin wider and thrust out your hand to greet him. “Detective Raphaël Ambrosius Cousteau.”
He doesn’t buy it.
//
It’s when you and Kim are on the balcony, debriefing that first night over a smoke, that the thought of touching his cheek crosses your mind again.
Kim pulls on his one allotted cigarette of the day. His eyes slide towards you. “Out of all your bad habits, Detective, staring is the rudest.”
You hadn’t meant to stare. “I’m sorry. Does it… hurt?”
He exhales a cloud of smoke into the night air. Two of his own fingers trace down the length of his right cheek. He knows, by tactile sensation alone, where the coloration there begins and ends. “No. It’s simply a birthmark. A malformation of the capillaries. Nothing more.” The warmth of the yellow streetlights glint across his glasses. “Don’t let it concern you.”
“Right, okay.” You swallow. “It just looks cool. You just keep getting cooler, man.”
The muscles around his lips twitch, as if a smile failed to negotiate an appearance. “Unlike this,” he says, bringing his single smoke back to his lips, “it is harmless.”
“Good.” Your fidget with your lighter, hands suddenly restless. You move on.
//
Kim whistles a melody, in tune and flawless, and it freezes the air in your lungs.
“Show-off!” You swat at where he sits on the adjacent swing. The vehicle before the two of you, lodged nose-first in the ice, waits patiently, just as you do for the tide to recede.
He smiles. His cheeks fold unevenly, the red skin of his right one too textured to mirror his smoother left one.
You stare, like the ill-mannered boy you can’t remember being. But not at the birthmark.
That smile. So rarely earned, so little time to savor it before it’s gone.
“You don’t smile like that a lot,” you point out to him. “Why not?”
He turns to the half-drowned vehicle. “Should I? Reasons are in short supply, these days.”
These days. Past days. All days yet to come, yet to be swallowed whole.
You whistle again, poorly. Because it passes the time. Because it gives Kim a reason to smile.
//
“This one goes out,” you rave into the beer-scented karaoke microphone, “to my partner, Kim Kitsuragi!”
You see that smile again on the man in the orange bomber jacket, standing alone on the edge of the Whirling’s dusty dance floor. He turns away, but you see it. He is incapable of blushing, but the port-wine stain stretching up his cheek gives the faint impression of one. You’ve given him reasons to smile. You.
The rush of pride fuels your performance.
You aim to give him more before this is through.
//
Kim’s shoulder presses against his cheek as he takes aim for the slit in Ruud’s helmet. “God, please…”
//
You go down, visceral pain exploding up your thigh into your pelvis. Blackness webs into your vision, meets in the middle. Your consciousness clings onto the edge of oblivion.
Shouting. Gunfire, shattering glass. Someone leaps over you. Titus screams your name, calls for someone to aid you.
Blood pools under your leg, sticky, warm. Copious.
“Harry!” Kim is there, voice all frantic adrenaline. “You’re bleeding out! Stay with me!”
You fight to keep awake, to see past the darkness. “Kim,” you croak, “I need you… to know…”
“Good, whatever it is, keep talking,” he encourages, more urgent than curious. His hands are against your leg, applying pressure, agonizing, life-saving pressure. You groan.
This is it. Your last chance.
“I stare, because… it’s beautiful… you’re…” Through the shadows, you will your vision to return, to see his face again. He’s listening, but focused entirely on your leg.
Beyond, De Paule emerges, face bloodied, rifle in hand.
“BEHIND!” Your final breath goes to something more valuable than a pitiful confession from a pitiful, dying man.
He whips around. There’s a flash of a muzzle, a deafening gunshot. Your flesh resumes leaking life without his hands to keep it in, and your head falls back onto the pavement.
All is taken by nothingness.
//
Good morning, Elysium, goes a voice on the radio, distant from where your mind floats. Soon, you will return to the world.
//
Your skull is a cloud of drouamine. A terrific burning sensation in your leg lets you know you’re alive.
The first thing you see when you open your eyes, doubled by the pain, is Kim, haloed by the ceiling fan behind him. Bruises cover his face.
“Sunrise, parabellum,” he says, recentering into a single orange bomber jacket-clad shape.
Your swallow, dry. “Sunrise… what?”
“‘Sunrise, Parabellum.’ Sunrise, Prepare-for-War. It’s an old revolutionary saying.”
The very phrase on… “My gun. That’s engraved on it.”
He gives a half-hearted shrug. “It’s a cop thing.”
“So… we prepare for war today.”
“No, not today.”
You’re well enough to sit up. Kim helps you as he gives you the full run-down. You watch his face as he talks, counting the bruises. His birthmark has turned an angry shade of plum.
The three Krenel mercs are dead. Glen, Angus, and Theo are dead. Six people, gone.
You drag your hands down your face, exhausted. “What a fucking shitshow.”
Kim pulls out a cigarette from his jacket pocket, lights it, and takes a drag. The bitter smell of nicotine fills the air of your room. He sits down beside you, back hunched. “Yes, it is. But it’s done. And we,” he says, smiling, “are still alive.”
Unexpectedly so.
You look at his smile before it disappears with another puff of smoke. “I thought you only smoked one a day.”
“This is the one.”
It isn’t just for stress. It’s medicinal. The splotches of purple and red on his face are only surface-level indicators of the beating he took.
For you.
“How bad are you hurt?” you ask.
“Not very,” Kim answers, gingerly rubbing an abrasion on his swollen chin. “De Paule gave me a concussion with the butt of her gun. I would have suffered worse, had you not warned me.” He pulls from his cigarette, glances at your bandaged thigh, then up at your face. “Thank you. I should have seen her coming.” Looks away. “Stupid…”
“You were busy saving me,” you offer in his defense. “I should be the one thanking you.”
For a moment, Kim says nothing, just glances sidelong at you and takes another drag. It’s only after he exhales that he asks, “Do you remember what you’d said? About why I find you staring so often?”
You’re staring right now, you realize, at his bruises, his birthmark, his scraped chin, the tiny split near the corner of his lips. “Yeah.”
A second of hesitation. “Did you mean it?”
You bring your hand towards his right cheek. Slowly, to allow him to decline, but he doesn’t. With exactly zero pressure, you rest your fingertips upon his port-wine stain. It’s as you thought, you marvel — rough, warm, and lovely.
Kim snorts a little at the expression on your face, but allows your hand to stay. “It is only a birthmark, Lieutenant-yefreitor.”
“It’s a part of you,” you murmur, overcome with tenderness. “It’s beautiful.”
A sharp intake of air. He searches your eyes, lips parting when they do not find the derision he’d expected. You have no room for derision. Not for Kim.
He takes hold of your hand, so softly you can almost forget they are, both of them, the hands of killers.
“I see.” There, small but unmistakable. A smile. “Are you ready to try standing on that leg? There is still a case to solve.”
With Kim smiling at you, you feel like, even as the broken, amnesiac, fucked-up piece of shit you are, you can do anything. As long as he believes in you.
And then you make to rise from the bed and nearly collapse with pain. But you stay standing, because he’s right.
There is still a case to solve.