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It's taken forever.
The spinners have been polished so that they shimmer in even the dim light of the Bird's Nest and twinkle merrily at you from behind the counter, beckoning to you with its rays. Shiny enough to be a mirror and it's doing just that: mirroring your relief and happiness at an ordeal that's finally over. You don't really understand how Kim could have given them away; you're hardly a torque dork, but even so, you're captivated by the shine and their simple, elegant motif.
What would you even use it for?
To decorate the mess that you call an apartment?
What a waste it would be in only your hands.
The lieutenant chose you sleeping in an actual bed over these beauties. You're pretty sure you wouldn't have made the same choice.
Focus. The finish line is in sight.
Your body aches with the sheer amount of running you've been doing lately. You're pretty healthy at this point, been off the drink for weeks, feels like months. Feels like years. You sense that you're pushing your limits to the edge, but you've been careful about not tumbling over. After all, you still need a bit of you left for what comes afterwards.
What comes afterwards is all downhill, baby. The beginning of the end. We're all heading there. You probably faster than most.
The money you've collected, in a mixture of coins and bills (the population definitely skews towards coins, hailing from all manner of trash cans and containers) tumbles onto the counter of the pawnshop in a growing heap as you empty every pocket you have.
Money… insofar that money is real.
Now's not the time for that. It needs to be real enough for this.
Oh, money is reál all right. … Ha.
Stupid joke. Don't say it out loud.
You might later. It's already scheduled for revival at an inopportune moment.
Roy's expression is inscrutable as he tries to gauge the money through the glass barrier he sits behind, craning his already long neck to view it all and blissfully unaware of your thoughts.
"It's all there," you say confidently. You've been so careful with it, cobbling together handfuls of change, shaking down the occasional bourgeoise (legally… ish), and keeping a diligent count in your head. The task was tempting to abandon, difficult to keep your mind off the count of booze you could purchase off it. Ten Pale Aged Vodkas. Sixty Commodore Reds. A hundred Pilsners. Two hundred, if you're keeping an eye on prices. Two hundred and one depending on the random whims of people who forget their coins on counters. Why are you still doing this? Hard liquor accounting?
Alcoholism isn't a one and done game, my friend. It's your one true companion and you're with it for life, shook that hand the moment that one bottle of beer on the weekends became five bottles on a Wednesday night with work in the morning, became six or seven every night and a full bender on the weekends. Whether you're running about the city still or retired in some dingy hospital bed somewhere shitting in a bucket, it'll be there. The only way to keep it at bay is to not. Give. In.
It's waiting. It's only delaying the inevitable to not give in now.
You won't give in. Complete memory loss is a hell of an deterrent.
The amount of money isn't why Roy's staring. He's deciding whether the coins are worth the effort of counting at all.
He could be high again. Hard to tell with those mirrored glasses.
You should have pocketed a few reál for yourself. He wouldn't have noticed the difference, not in time.
"Very good, sir," Roy says at last, languidly. The keys scratch the lock of his booth as he steps out and reaches for the spinners on their shelf. His movements are sluggish but firm, though he would still probably topple with a gentle push.
Okay, you could have a good chance here to grab the spinners AND the money and make a break for it. You've got enough juice in those legs for a robbery, right?
Where would the reál go? You barely had enough room to hold it and bring it here, it's bound to be a pain to stuff all those coins back in your pockets.
The purpose of this wasn't to start another incident. You can't afford to make waves right now.
As you get your hands on the spinners, they hum in your grip. Or maybe that's just their reflection of your excitement again. Roy begins to scoop up your pile of cash and organise it into his lockbox, keeping an idle count as he goes.
He'll have to do it again after you leave, he doesn't trust himself right now to keep the numbers straight or that you're not shorting him, but there's not enough of a sober mind in there to care if you are right now. It's going to take him a while.
"Can't believe they were still here." Yeah, they were easy money. Any magpie torque dork in the vicinity would have turned over their week's wages for it, let alone someone like him. It was a small miracle that it wasn't spinning on some civilian motor carriage right now. If they had the money for one, they probably had the money for pawn shop hubcaps.
Why are you making conversation? Just leave!
It's awfully nice of him, though, to look up at your comment at all. "Had a feeling you'd be back, sir. Kept them on reserve."
You don't know what to say to this. You hope that the quick nod that you give him is an indication of your gratitude that's cool enough not to degrade your authority as you make your way to the door holding the spinners.
It's not. You're not a very cool looking guy, you can't pull it off. Your coolness factor died in the last notes of the final Ostentatious Orchestrations concert, what, twenty... twenty-five years ago? Kim maybe could, and the whole point is that he's not here. He doesn't enjoy having fun with his coolness factor anyway.
He enjoys the coolness factor as its own thing. It's very cool.
The Expression threatens to break on your face again out of sheer awkwardness as you realise that you must look so fucking pathetic and you sense that it's only luck that you manage to keep it at bay. Thankfully Roy remains engrossed with the mess of money on the counter.
You stumble out into the so-early-it's-dark morning, clutching the rims to your chest and make your way to the belligerently grumbling Coupris 40 parked nearby, imitating its driver.
As a part of the determination to show that you're so damn cool, though no one is watching or cares, you carelessly throw the spinners in the backseat first, then wince at the metal scrape against each other as they settle. In a burst of panic and regret, you go after them to double check for scuffs and immediately feel stupid for doing that, both throwing them and checking them, because that's definitely a mark that wasn't there before and now you feel awful.
"What are you-... Just get in the fucking car, Harry," Jean seethes at you from the driver's seat, unaware of your problems. It's early, so he didn't get to properly time his medication to be able to get some caffeine in his system before you took off. The doctors told him to give a few hours for the medication to kick in before intercepting it with caffeine after the meds didn't seem to be working. He's supposed to be off today, you too, told to get away from your current case because you've been circling the drain for a around week without finding any new leads. Breakthrough is imminent, but without a reset, you already sense that odds might shift towards a "breakthrough" for the old habits. A sip for a boost. A quick upper for an epiphany. The problem is that once it's broken though, it won't end. Everyone is trying to stop that from happening. For once in your life, this includes you, a little bit. It's why you took the day off without complaining.
Before you knocked on his door this morning, he'd been staring blankly into his typical morning coffee for fifteen minutes straight, made from muscle memory in the fog of sleep before he'd realised he'd be unable to drink it, instead just sitting there in tired confusion, wondering why he does favours for you in the first place. The why is that you pulled every guilt trip you had and got lucky. You're still injured. You're on the edge. It's a nice thing to do for the lieutenant that you've all just stolen from 57. From the way that he rubbed his forehead on the ride here, elbow on the window sill and eyes half open, you can tell at least one of the side effects of the medication with no caffeine is a biblical headache, peeling at his thoughts as paint stripper fumes so toxic as to make the already battered wallpaper of his mind curl, gnawing at his ability to think. It's been like this all morning, a dark morning that hasn't even become dawn yet.
You'll buy him the coffee.
Are you stupid? You just used up all the money you had. Paycheck is next week.
There's always money to be found.
Or you could buy a bottle of Pilsner with the amount instead.
Anyway, you're not allowed to drive anymore, so you need his help. There's no transit into Martinaise and you'd probably have a heart attack riding your joke of a bike this far. You wouldn't have brought him otherwise; everyone else in 41 wasn't in the mood for your antics, but Jean is malleable, though he clearly despises that about himself. And Kim, well, again, the whole point was that the lieutenant was absent for this.
Though he'll probably say he would have wanted to accompany you, and that he doesn't like surprises.
He just doesn't like bad surprises. This will be a good one, though, for sure. He'll change his mind.
This mental version of the lieutenant is much easier to convince than the real thing.
Somewhere close by, another Coupris 40 sinks further into the sea, inch by inch, week by week as the ice melts, committing itself as the infirm do on their deathbed to the inevitable oblivion of wreckage beckoning below, the ghosts of the war machines reaching up with a hundred limbs of torn metal scaffolding and rebar. Comrades in arms, ready to welcome another. A befitting end, as your 40 has become a war machine in its own right. Inside, the soft waves of the sea lap at the trash heap of disjointed papers, beer bottles and cigarette stubs. Some papers and emptier bottles catch on the surface and drift away, fleeing to some other area of the Insulinde to become a mystery and a problem to the denizens on those shores or braving the Pale for destinations unknown. Anything remotely edible has been taken by the fish darting in the water or succumbed to rot and algae.
You could have been a part of that, part of something. Would you have made it to the bottom if you hadn't survived that crash? Or would you have been picked clean by the citizens of the waters, a mixed bag of bones and hair kept together by your clothing? At least your body could have improved something in your fucking life, even if they weren't people.
Yeah, it's probably good that you're not allowed to drive anymore. People forget that cars are basically just large murder weapons.
And weapons can always be turned on its user. You're an expert on that fact and perhaps that fact alone.
Maybe it can be buffed out, you think, focusing back on the gleaming metal. You give it a shot, using your tie to attempt to scrub the surface clean again.
Amazingly, the mark left on the caps don't magically disappear when you rub them with your tie, because it's not made of a buffing material (it might be made of hell incarnate), you don't know what you're doing (it's not like it's paint, there's a notch, you can feel it when you run your finger over it), and the aura of an increasingly fractious Jean Vicquemare compels you to leave it for later. Kim would surely understand, and have a solution. Probably.
His disappointment will be hidden, but you'll be able to see him try to hide it, which will be so much worse than if he just made it obvious to you. But he wouldn't have been so careless in the first place.
"Am I your fucking chaffeur?" Jean asks as you linger in the backseat, despairing over the marred hubcaps. "Get up front. I'm not driving you around like a child."
You look at the Now Slightly Less Radiant Spinners in your hands. They're not going to be fixed on an hour-long ride back to Central Jamrock.
In your hands, they might crumble before you even see the precinct.
Metal doesn't crumble.
In your hands it might. It'd be just one more thing unique about you that you can use to uniquely destroy, and you have so many already. What's another?
You carefully place the spinners back on the seat, take your jacket off to layer the soft(er) cloth between each of the metal plates. You're taking an inordinate amount of time. Jean makes more miserable grumbles in the driver's seat, presses his head back into the headrest, opening access of his jugulars to an invisible executioner that he supplicates to, a foolish but desperate king willing to lose his head for an iota of peace and respite.
You might as well just wait until you see Kim, though you want to do anything more than that right now, to avoid the disappointment. (Acting like a child.) But you've committed to this, and you might as well see it through. (Acting like a slightly more mature child.)
To shut Jean up, you clamber out of the backseat, close the pen behind you and take your place in the passenger seat like it makes a difference. It is slightly more comfortable up front. The leather of the front seats are thin, but they're still cushioned, even if their plumpness has been flattened to almost nothing by the typical rotation of passengers, mostly you, and you're no picnic. You could have insisted so that you could take a nap in the back, but it feels like the least you can do is keep the Satellite-Officer quiet, sullen, masculine company as he drives what he mutters in a low dark ramble held in the back right of his throat is your unstable shitkid ass back to Central Jamrock.
***
By the time the Coupris 40 rolls up to the lieutenant's apartment building, he has already started work on the Kineema. The hood is open, exposing its metal entrails to the sunlight that's almost made it over the distant trees. A lurid mechanical autopsy. The headlights to be installed are laid out on the ground as a neat pair, prepped for the surgery. A rag sits next to them darkened and greasy from a gritty poultice. The headlights have been recently polished. A couple of hours recent.
You try not to be offended - you were supposed to be working together and he didn't wait.
That "definitely maybe" did mean no.
A once-hot cup of coffee sits on the ground next to the headlights, along with a half-finished crossword in the newspaper. There's a surprising amount of milk and sugar swirling in the mug in a microcurrent system for a man you definitely pegged as the simple black coffee type. It's more than half empty, and the cup is massive. Insomnia. He actually got up before the alarm went off and waited for the light to spread before starting so that he could do something with his hands while he waited. It's still technically spring and the days haven't gotten that long yet in Jamrock. He would have been awake around an hour before dawn. These early days after transfer, there's not much to do. He did mean to wait. It's not personal.
He's been waiting. The headlights have been untouched since polishing. Also, he's working on the engine, not the headlights, giving himself something to do that won't interfere with your group project.
What perfect timing, sire. You've already sort of pre-wrapped the spinners, so to speak; this is perfect.
You pick up the bundle before exiting the car.
Hide the one that's damaged in the back! Shit. Which one was it?
Too late, you're already walking. To mess with it now would be to give it away too early.
Before you get too far, you remember to turn around to thank Jean for his help. Least you could do. It's not appreciated. He just snarls at you, a barely coherent viper of low caffeination and bad moods for once unrelated to the diagnosable kind but still related to the Du Bois kind, to not contact him again for the rest of the day before peeling off, threading an incensed if expert needle through the seams of the parked up city streets as he heads home.
What a prick.
Unfair. He's had an acutely bad morning. Later today, with painkillers that won't interfere with the pills and a good nap behind him, he'll regret snapping. He'll wander his apartment, feeling bad about it, jot down a note for his psychiatrist and try to think about anything but work and you so that he can get through the rest of the day and be fresh tomorrow. He'll maybe read a Dick Mullen and even manage to enjoy it without your incessant commentary.
Does he have The Mistaken Identity with the last section intact? You'll have to ask to borrow it.
Why? You cracked that case, friend. No need to be disappointed by the inexperienced antics of ghostwritten pulp. It wouldn't be anything as good as what you concluded.
That's exactly the commentary Jean can do without.
In the end, finally drifting off for a proper sleep that night, he'll be able to acknowledge that you thanked him.
For once.
It'll occur to him that maybe there's hope for you yet. It'll occur to him that he's thought this before, but that maybe in Martinaise you truly fell and fell and fell so far into the abyss that you hit a rock bottom so low you ended up in a different planet entirely and are still crawling back home. Journeys like that aren't short. It might not even end in your lifetime. But he's been watching you putting one foot in front of the other anyway. That's progress for sure.
For now, you watch as the exhaust from the engine masks the 40 before it turns, and the carriage vanishes into smoke like they are one and the same.
You owe him a coffee.
You hope that Kim will drive you home.
You hope the Kineema will be in one piece to be driven there, knowing your luck.
"Ah, Lieutenant Double-Yefreiter," Kim says by way of greeting, a typical return to your full title, and he always starts the day fresh with the full title. It degrades as the day goes on, reducing in shades to "lieutenant" and "detective" by mid-morning to afternoon and concluding to "Harry" in moments of quiet or support and there's usually one before the end of the day. It's a good day when you don't need one or both of those things. Strange, you could definitely take him in a fair fight, but somewhere in his bones is that reinforced steel strength that keeps you on your feet. That kept you on your feet for a whole week, despite how little both he and you knew of you.
Your hands squeeze unconsciously around your haphazard present. It reminds you why you did this.
Which reminds you that you fucked it up already.
Splotches of motor oil adorn his face and arms, his skin a canvas for temporary abstract tattoos of manual labour, drops that turned to smears with the instinct to try to wipe it off.
He's wearing his usual, the orange revolutionary jacket that's so indivisible from his body that you've wondered if it's stitched into his skin somewhere, an physical suture as much as a psychological one. Somehow, despite the work he's been doing, it's pristine, not a speck of oil on it. Miraculous. How does he do it? Is it possible to be so cool that items become hydrophobic?
The usual cargos tucked into boots that keep him prepared for everything, a handkerchief in every pocket, possibly. Two are already visible and stained, sticking out of the back left of the trousers. A blue one and a white one, the latter bordered by an amateur hand with thin orange thread, the former with unravelling Indulisian lilies embroidered around the edges whose wear indicate its age. Neither handkerchiefs nor trousers have remained pristine; the latter is stained with oil on his thighs where he wiped them absentmindedly.
The practical boots, laced to mid-calf. Probably takes him a good fifteen minutes to put on and take off. Can't be pristine in Central Jamrock, where there's always something to step in, metaphorically and literally.
Wait, no, he's not wearing his usual. The gloves he normally wears are hanging off of the side of the engine, cast out to the corner, isolated as you would an unruly child for being too unwieldy for the finer workings of the mechanics, but still in sight so that he can't lose them.
His empty, blotched, thin like the rest of him hands seem strangely vulnerable and exposed. You got so used to looking at the brown, suede bulkiness of gloves until your brain made it a part of him and now he looks positively small without them.
A fleeting urge to touch those hands, if only for the novelty. Would they be soft from being protected by those gloves? Or rough anyway from the work he does in them?
Go for a handshake. Find out.
Don't indulge yourself a stupid thought like that.
You just did. You just thought those things.
"Kim," you say through the arguing in your head. "I got you something."
Could have used more flair.
The lieutenant's eyes gauge you suspiciously, squinting ever so slightly. It's not a huge reaction, a surprising one, or one that you're not used to. You're used to being observed by Kim, after all, you bore it for at least a week straight, an oblivious caged animal on a singular mission with a half dozen unseen observers waiting for your next move to scribble down and nod at each other while concluding something.
Concluding that you're crazy. Off your rocker. Mad as a hatter and unpredictable as a kite buffeted by winds of hovering aerostatics.
That the craziness helps you get the job done, no matter who you think you are.
He doesn't like surprises. You knew that going into this.
But he could be convinced!
The real lieutenant, the one that doesn't live in your head, will not be so easy to convince.
Say something that'll do it, sire. Something that encapsulates what you're trying to do without giving it away.
Why does he always assume the worst?
It's the way of cops. Assume the worst, hope for the best.
Get the worst anyway.
"It's good, I swear."
That's hardly enough. Yours and the lieutenant's interpretations of that word have too much distance between them to make that statement in anyway meaningful.
"A gesture of good will," you offer instead. You proffer the bundle to him earnestly, a puppy bringing finds to an owner.
He looks down briefly at your jacket.
"I do not need another jacket."
This man has no curiosity, you think, annoyed. What's it like to see things only as they are?
Blissful. Quiet.
Nonexistent. The lieutenant just knows how to ignore certain thoughts better than you can when it's not required, and he's faster about it than you. He can't have missed that the jacket is moulded around a solid object underneath. He's just rejecting it.
Don't be rude and make this worse.
"It's in the jacket. Have a little curiosity, Kim."
This is not going well, sire. No one told you to be rude. Word around here was that literally a second ago we warned you to not do that.
You're just a dick by nature. You can't contain it. You're upset at the dismissal and the two responses that you have to upset is anger and drinking. And you gave up the drinking.
For now.
"I wrapped it."
His lips, fuller than the average Insulindian, brought to his face from the Seolite side of genetics, thin with scepticism. "In your jacket? That's… unconventional. You do remember the concept of wrapping paper?"
You remember wrapping paper, you scoff silently. Wasteful stuff. Would end up on the streets in seconds, a pretty enough blanket for the garbage that litters the city. The kind you'd buy would be cheap, not even amounting to half a Pilsner. Couldn't pawn a roll for even a tenth of the good stuff.
He adjusts his glasses on his face with a sniff. "It is also not my birthday. No need for gifts."
He doesn't accept gifts on his birthday either.
Anger rises in you again, a multi-headed beast scraping against old wounds in your chest.
Don't, sire.
"First of all, I only got them this morning, so I didn't have time or money to waste on gift wrapping. Second of all, gifts aren't just for birthdays, it's for special occasions. If you need a reason, it's something for joining the precinct and having my back for a week while I stumbled around like a crazy person. Third of all, for fuck's sake, Kim, just take a goddamned fucking gift when you see one for fucking once." You thrust the haphazard package into his chest hard enough that he has to stumble and he grabs it before it drops with those exposed, spindly hands that you're keenly aware of.
They're a little dry from the alcoholic antiseptic he uses to get the grease off. He uses a lot of it, a compromise for having to remove his gloves but detesting the oleaginous sensation on his fingers.
Yeah, why not antagonise him? While you're at it, kick the Kineema's doors off their hinges and throw the headlights through the window, smashing both. That'll open him up for real.
That'll keep you a real man. Not one for this touchy feely bullshit. It'll feel good to get the anger out.
Taking action has worked though, and the lieutenant measures the weight of the spinners and your jacket in his hands with a few experimental bobs.
Possibilities flicker in his eyes.
He's not used to gifts.
No, he's only used to gifts that are in reality invidious bullying, accompanied by tittering adults who should be better than their puerile fancies as they pretend not to watch him flick through the card without expression and open the box on his desk, revealing a mug not dissimilar to one you found in the same trash container he convinced you to not sleep in. He made the most of it, shooting it from thirty-five yards (a new personal best, hyperopia has its perquisites) and acting like it had no other meaning.
He'll never be a true Vacholiere, the mug goaded him with a bucktoothed, sneering grin, its eyes reduced to two slanted slits, a side thought for whoever had painted it. A dismissive reminder that Seolites were people only technically. People will always look at him and see the caricature, it taunted. He shut it up the way the communards of Revachol were shut up. The way his parents must have been. Blowing it to pieces. A minor and entirely symbolic revenge.
Symbolism has its place.
His hesitation is because he doesn't know what to expect. You're too unpredictable for him to be entirely sure it won't be something similar, despite you having given clear indication that those jokes are not that funny to you. He's been burned on this before. But he takes a breath, unfolds your jacket one agonizing layer at a time until the Now Slightly Less Radiant Spinners are gleaming happily in his palms, a sigh of sunlight in the folds, fulfilling its purpose, meant to be seen.
You observe him carefully.
The first thing he notes is the scrape, his eyes flicking to it immediately as he takes in the view. It was on top. Shit.
Maybe those damn spinners even told him about it, the pure reflections it casts now imperfect from your carelessness. Wailed to him about losing its perfect beauty and bemoaning the monster that did it.
But he quickly moves on from the scrape, running his fingers along the top spinner's surface, testing the unnatural sensation of haptic feedback without his usual gloves. Even the smears of the natural oil on his fingerprints don't mar the silken smooth exterior. Its radiance cannot be contained. Refuses to be, in fact. Like trying to hold the lung light of Dolores Dei in the cup of your palms.
"You got them back?" It's not a real question. Just surprise. "These had to have been expensive to reobtain."
Were they. You've already measured the price in bottles, but imagine what you could have done with it. It was the price of a week long bender of devastating proportions that could have wiped you and all of Revachol off the face of the Insulinde and more. A five mile crater of self-destruction. Thought losing all of your memories was bad, the concept of politics and money diminished to nothing? The next time, you'll go so deep that you'll forget how to breathe. Next time, you'll drink until your liver disintegrates to dust in your very body.
There won't be a next time, something inside you rejoinders.
There will, is the knowing response.
It'll be the last.
"I won't say that ol' Bird's Nest Roy didn't make a pretty profit." Twenty to forty Pilsners worth. Three bottles of Pale Aged Vodka and change. "Or that I'm not pretty broke right now." As opposed to other times, where you're unattractively broke. "But you did stop me from sleeping in an actual trash compactor, so it felt like something I needed to do."
"When did you-..." His mouth clamps shut. His legitimate, sincere surprise is making him ask redundant questions that you just yelled the answer to in an angry fit. "How did you-..." He stops again, this question is answered by your well known tendency for rooting around containers and the dogged persistence that he commended you for, back when he was the only thing that stood between your job and forced retirement. Between you having something to do with yourself and succumbing to the oblivion waiting for you at the bottom of a sixth bottle.
"Sorry I fucked one of them up. I wasn't thinking."
The problem is you thinking. You think too much. It's fucking crowded in here.
Kim shakes his head dismissively. "It is nothing, detective. No one will notice." What he means is that no one worth his time will notice enough to bring it up to him.
"There's no fix?" you query, shoulders slumping.
"Material such as these are not easy to return to their original state once damaged. They are meant to show how easy it is to replace them rather than spending the time to fix them. To demonstrate that money is no object. But again, no one will notice."
Your lungs deflate with a pang. You will. You'll think about it every time you see them. Every time the Kineema comes to a stop, it will too, and the scuff will stare at you from the wheel. Passenger side front.
"I mean that," he adds, having noted your expression. "It is the nature of things attached to vehicles, particularly those used by the RCM, to be damaged. Besides, nothing stays as it was. Perfection and originality are impossible to maintain."
Khm. A point.
"Thank you," he goes further to say, genuinely. "This is a very kind gesture. I'm surprised you even remembered them."
You shrug. So cool. "I remembered not sleeping in a trash compactor." It would have been a record new low, even for you. For living beings, probably. He saved you from that.
His lips quirk into a crooked angle. "Even so." He places them ever so gently onto the same tarp that the headlights rest upon. The care is natural. He doesn't want to damage them anymore than you already have. He doesn't want to damage them needlessly. "You've given us an extra project," he remarks with a bit of humour.
"You've got something else to do today?" You loosen the horrible tie, flick the cuffs open on your shirt and roll them up your arms. You usually do this when you're about to get into a fight, so it's a familiar motion. Getting down to business. The jacket is already off of course - you'll get it back once the spinners are on the Kineema and the headlights are upgraded. Before you head home.
"No," he accedes with a brief smile. "Shall we get started?"