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The first time the detective calls you kitten, you think it’s a mistake. A drunken slip of the tongue, a stumble. Because he is drunk - glassy-eyed and red-faced and nearly asleep. It’s two months into your transfer to the 41st precinct, and after your transfer had come through and he had been cleared for field work, you found yourself out on the streets of Central Jamrock, solving crimes. Real crimes. Murder, drug-smuggling, syndicated crime rings. Mostly murder, though. At least it was a relief not to be solving murders committed by - or on other - juveniles. For the most part.
Your new job has you learning a new part of your city, of Revachol, and Harry learns it with you, although you note that his body retains a physical memory of the city that his mind hasn’t. Like when you say you’re hungry, and his feet are already turning towards the Rue de Suresnes, where you find the best Samaran food you’ve ever had. “Oh my god, Kim,” the detective says around a mouthful of food, “do you think I’ve been here before?”
“It’s a safe bet,” you say, watching as he licks creamy sauce off his thumb.
Things are tense with your new precinct, at first. You gather that Harry had burned a lot of bridges that he had personally built. Everyone is wary around him, as if they are all a bunch of stray dogs afraid of getting kicked, and you are lumped in with the detective, at first. You and the lieutenant solve no fewer than ten cases in your first two months. It’s astounding. Captain Pryce congratulates you, although you get the sense from the other officers this is nothing new. “Dick Mullen, showing us all up again,” Officer McLaine mutters. The cases are nearly split - half of them are figured out based on his hunch, the others based on your careful notes, your ability to see and connect patterns.
You drive in every day from the GRIH - the 57th had let you keep the Kineema, after extensive arguing and a little push from your new Captain, Harry tells you later in his matter-of-fact way that he uses when he tells you things he can’t possibly know. Some nights, when you stay at the precinct late, hot on a case, you stay the night at Harry’s, on his couch, although it has seen better days.
You’ve slept worse places.
You call each other, sometimes, when you can’t sleep, although it’s usually Harry calling you, nights when you sit up staring at the phone because you can’t sleep because the moon’s too bright, and you’d like to talk to Harry, to hear his voice - hear him telling you about circus horses, or communism, or what’s going on in the Burnt-Out Quarter right now - but you can’t bring yourself to do it. And then he’ll call you. “Hey, Kim, you up?” he’ll rasp into the phone, and you’ll say, “It’s hard to sleep when your phone’s ringing,” and the little breath he lets out straight into the receiver, right into your ear, means he knows you were up anyway - that’s why he’s calling - but he’ll let you have that one.
You see each other, sometimes, on your days off. Harry will call you because he’s heard about a bazaar he wants to check out in Fauborg, or an old example of Franconigerian architecture in Grand Couron - “Do you know architecture can be art?” he says to you in a hushed tone as you walk the streets of Grand Couron, trying and failing not to feel self-consciousness in your well-maintained but old jacket and boots. Your shoulders and elbows bumping together as you walk, because his neck is craned back. “I think it’s true.”
“Just about anything can be art, if you make the argument well enough,” you say to him. Sometimes you’ll do things you want to do, although Harry typically has to badger it out of you. Usually it’s work on the Kineema, or search parts stores scattered across Revachol for parts for the Kineema. Once, you go to a coffee and motor carriage event outside of Grand Couron, where you buy each of you coffee - yours black, Harry’s with room for disgusting amounts of cream and sugar - and stroll in the hot sun, the sun blinding off metallic paint finishes. Harry holds both your coffees eagerly and well-away from the motor-carriages as you lean over engines and point things out to him, and sometimes he’ll parrot things back to you - “that’s a torque-converter, right, Kim? That’s an intake manifold?” And you say, “No, detective, that’s the washer fluid reservoir.” Or, “yes, detective, well-done.”
He lingers over a Mesque-styled Fevre, heavy with glittering gold paint and a complicated white-and-floral motif, handprinted on every hard surface, Harry says, in a slightly awed voice, “That’s disco.” The highest praise he can muster. It’s not your style, but you have to admit it’s striking. When he gets back to the Kineema, he pats it very lightly. “You’re still my favorite,” you hear him whisper as you get in. You have to cough to hide a smile. “Kim!” he says, popping in. “Hear me out: fuzzy dice.”
(He gets you a pair of fuzzy dice, green and virulent, like some sort of disease. “I tried to find orange, but they didn’t have them!” he says.
“They’re perfect,” you say, and make sure you peel out from a traffic light to set them swinging while he whoops.)
Harry is doing better, from what you can tell. He only shows up drunk or high to work a handful of times, and twice he leaves a case to get high but he always comes back to find you, hangdog and sorry. You mostly prevent it by not leaving him alone for a minute. You’ve heard them calling you Mullen’s shadow, which makes your teeth grit, but it’s better than Mullen’s duckling, which you hear once out of Officer Torson, before making sure he gets every patrol shift for the next month.
(You get in on Jules’ good side. The man has a fondness for fruit-jam biscuits, photography magazines, and good coffee. He is also in charge of writing up the patrol schedule. He simply can’t explain how the error happens to schedule Officer Torson so frequently. He pulls the schedule out to show Officer Torson. The ink is blotted and smudged. “I must’ve spilled water on it, Officer. You know, to an old man, all these names kind of look like Torson if you squint…”
“Water is the enemy of many things.” you say, and meet Officer Torson’s eyes. “Except ducklings.”
“Fuck,” you overhear him say to McLaine as you walk past his desk later, “Kitsuragi’s a bastard.”
This is true in the pejorative sense, although not the literal sense.)
But Harry still drinks. He’s an alcoholic. He’ll probably never stop entirely. You understand this, which is why you don’t get angry or disappointed when Harry calls you when he’s been drinking. This time, he calls you, slurring heavily. “Kim,” he says, and then he just breathes awhile, wetly, into the phone.
“Detective,” you say. He mutters something. “Harry,” you try again.
“Yeah?” He snorts. “Wazzit.”
“How much have you had to drink tonight?”
“Uh. Some.”
You pinch the bridge of your nose. “Some?”
“Yeah.” A pause, as if he’s counting, or checking for evidence. “Definitely some.”
You sigh. “I’ll be over. Don’t go anywhere, please.”
When you get there, you let yourself in with the key he had given you. The kitchen is an explosion, a spilled puddle of red liquid, drying to tackiness, oozing off the counter and onto the floor. Commodore Red, based on the bottle beside it, not blood. You going into the living room, where you can hear the sounds of SAD FM extorting its listeners to drink pale-aged vodka all night long and die behind the steering levers. Harry is slumped on the floor, a half-empty bottle propped on his thigh, head on the couch in an uncomfortable angle. When your boots come into his field of vision, he straightens up. “Kim!” he says, grinning at you.
“Hello, detective,” you say.
“Kim, did you know you’re my favorite person? Even more than her.” He puts his head to the side, and his mouth draws down, like he’s hearing something, and then he says, “‘specially more’n her.”
“You don’t know many people,” you say.
“Yeah, but even if I did, you’d be my favorite.” He gives you an extremely sappy smile. “Khm,” you say. You feel your ears turning red. Fortunately, from his angle on the floor, he probably can’t tell. “Come on,” you say, “can you get up?” He tries, and you lean forward and snatch the bottle before he spills it. “I’ll take care of this.”
“Chug! Chug! Chug! Chug!” You hear following you all the way out to the kitchen, but when you dump the wine out into the sink and turn the water on, he groans. “Fucking binoclard,” you think you hear him say.
You walk back into the living room. “Excuse me?”
He just looks at you, wide eyes. Then he frowns. “Think m’gonna be sick.”
You get him to the bathroom in time - one arm slung over your shoulders as he stumbles down the hallway, knocking into the couch on his way past - “whoopsies," he says, and laughs - and drop him in front of the toilet before he goes off. You get him a glass of water and stand back as he rinses and spits, then again. “Try drinking this one,” you suggest to him on the third. He does, then rests his head on the seat and turns watery eyes towards you. “Kim, I don’t feel good,” he says.
“I imagine not,” you say.
You manage to convince him to get in the tub - you let him take his shoes and pants off, until he’s clad in just a shirt and boxers - and he sits in it, grinning up at you. “Who’s your favorite, Kim?” he slurs.
“What?” you ask, only half-listening, leaning over the faucet to determine which direction is cold.
“Like, how you’re my favorite person? Who’s your favorite? Is it me?” He leans forward on his knees, peering up at you.
You look him in the eyes, which are glassy and red, and do a quick calculation on how likely he is to remember this. “Unfortunately, yes,” you say, and then, still staring him in the eye, turn the shower head on.
It gets him right in the face. He gasps and splutters and rears back, splashing around, getting half the bathroom and you wet besides. But it does sober him up, a little, and with your help - his wet hand on your arm - he drags himself up to standing and hangs on the shower head, face turned up to it, mouth open and tongue out to collect water. Ah. Well that explains why the shower head is almost torn out of the wall.
“Are you going to drown if I leave you here?”
He hiccups and shrugs. You leave him there, go into his bedroom, and dig through his dresser for some clean and dry clothes, and then go looking for a towel that isn’t already wet. When you go back into the bathroom, he’s hanging on the shower head, head down, hair streaming. His white shirt is wet and plastered to his shoulders and back, bringing out the muscles in sharp relief.
You swallow. “Harry, I’m going to turn the water off now, okay?”
He mumbles something. You crouch down and turn it off, then hand him the towel as he blinks down at you. You leave the room - leaning on the wall just outside the bathroom - as he strips off his wet clothes. You flinch as you hear them hitting the floor with a wet smack. Ugh. He doesn’t say anything, just breathes hard. He must be feeling bad. You hear him dry off, hear him curse and stumble as he tries to get his clothes on. Finally he comes out, clean and red-eyed and flushed, his hair wet.
“Come on,” you say, and lead him into his bedroom, where he sits down on the bed and stares at you helplessly as you roam around his room, righting the chair that’s been knocked over somehow, straightening a set of knickknacks which you’re touched and slightly amused to see contains in their ranks a Franconigerian knight figurine. You make it gallop a few steps across the top of the dresser before you see him watching you in the mirror and become self-conscious, clearing your throat and setting it back in place.
“You should really get some sleep,” you say. “It’s almost two AM.” He’s going to feel like hell in the morning.
“Kim?” he says, his mouth open.
“Yes?”
“Don’t go. Please?”
You sigh. “I’m not.” When he starts to break into a grin, you say, “I’m going to sleep on your couch. Why don’t you try laying down?”
He collapses back on the bed over the covers, watching you. You pause, then go over and turn the lamp off. In the faint glow of the bathroom light spilling out into the hallway, you can just make out the figure of Harry curled up, watching you. You can see the rise and fall of his chest. You sit down on the edge of the end, and he murmurs something, and scoots slightly closer to you. You sit there a few minutes longer. You don’t know why. Maybe because you’re trying to make sure he won’t die of alcohol poisoning in the middle of the night, or asphyxiate on his own vomit. Maybe because you’re wide awake and the sound of his breathing, softening out, is making you feel like maybe you could fall asleep after all. When you catch your eyes falling closed, your body listing to the side, closer to Harry, you gather yourself in and stand up, slowly, as as not to wake him. You put a hand on his bare ankle, feel the tendon, the spot where scratchy hair turns to soft skin. “Sleep well, Harry,” you say, very quietly, and you go to the door.
“G’night, kitten,” you hear from behind you, but when you turn around and look back, his eyes are closed, and he is asleep.
≠≠
The second time Harry calls you kitten you’re not in any shape to address it, because you’re busy being fucking shot in the leg. The two of you have surprised a pair of suspects in a robbery and assault case ducking into an abandoned factory. Harry has almost managed to talk them down, his hands out, spread wide, gun put ostentatiously back in his holster, and then something skitters farther off in the factory, behind you - an animal of some kind. Harry yells, “No!” and lunges towards you, and then something strikes you in the leg, hard, like a punch, knocking your leg out from under you, and then the pain blooms as you fall down. Harry lets out a snarl, an animal sound, raising his gun and lunging forward. As the second man raises his gun towards your partner, you raise your own gun and shoot the suspect in the chest. Not again, you think. Never again. Black spots begin to bloom and spread across your vision and you feel dizzy, feel yourself sway, and then your arm, which you’re leaning on to keep yourself upright, gives out. You collapse the rest of the way to the ground, glasses pushing askew, the figures of Harry and the suspect going blurry in the distance. “Harry-” you get out, but no one hears you.
Not even six months into the murder precinct, and you’ve been injured. Your badge of honor. You’re one of them, now. You’ve see the scars on Harry in the locker room, had seen them when you’d stitched him up in Martinaise.
Harry.
Where is he? Your leg roars, one solid source of pain, getting worse with every heartbeat. You’re trying to say your voltas, but the words keep slipping away from you, because you’re panicking, because you’re bleeding out on the dirty floor of a warehouse, because you’re going to die here -
“Kim!” You hear, and something crashes into you, someone dropping to their knees beside you, falling heavily, hands landing on your leg - you cry out, jackknifing to sit up, to fight them off, to protect yourself, and you hear, “no no no, Kim, Kim, come on, stay with me, come on,” and then hard pressure on your leg. You groan. “Hey, it’s me, it’s Harry, your partner, remember me? Martinaise? Fuck the world?” Harry shuffles beside you, pressure bearing on your leg, and you feel one hand on your chest, feeling your breath, checking your pulse in your neck, thumb brushing your cheek. “You’re alright, Kim, it’s just your leg, I get shot in the leg all the time, it’s nothing, we’ll match, okay, we’ll be a matched set?” You feel him straighten your glasses, but you want to tell him not to bother, because you’re having trouble keeping your eyes open, but you’re having trouble talking, too. You mumble something. He brushes a hand over your hair. It feels good. You turn into it, trying to focus on that instead of your leg. “That’s it, kitten, come on, stay with me,” he breathes. You feel him fading out, feel yourself blacking out, everything going quiet and dark. There had been a kitten in the orphanage, you remember, a little black-and-white scrap someone had smuggled in, and you’d all battled to be its favorite, and before it had gotten caught and removed you remembered once it had come to your bed and slept in the curve of your body as you had curled around it, its purrs like another heartbeat sending you to sleep.
“That’s it, kitten, just hang on, I’ve got you,” you hear again, you’re back, where are you? It hurts, it’s dark, it’s almost the orphanage again, it is, someone is petting your hair, your face, is it Matilde, the older girl who took care of you, the closest thing to a mother you remember? No, it’s not Matilde, it’s someone else…
You wake. There’s a yellow glow in the corner, intruding on your vision. Your eyes burn, your mouth is dry, and there is a strange dull pain in your right thigh. There is something at your side, pulling the sheets down over you with its weight. It’s not unpleasant. You look up, but you can’t see a fucking thing. You’re not wearing your glasses. You want to panic about it, but it doesn’t quite come, something heavy and low far beneath the surface of your thoughts. Drugs. Good ones. All you can make out is the vague expanse of white, brown at the corners of your vision. You turn towards the source of light, grunting, which dislodges the something heavy at your hip, and there’s a shuffle, an unfolding, and then something brown and green and pink rears up in your vision.
“Kim!”
“Harry?” you say, squinting. “Is that you?”
You know it’s him, but you’re looking for - “Oh, fuck, your glasses! Hang on, sorry-” the blur moves, then comes back, fumbles in front of you like he’s about to put your glasses on for you. You hold out your hand expectantly. None of that. He puts them in your hand, fingers warm and shaking a little, and curls your fingers around them. He presses them a little, then lets go.
“How long have I been out?” You croak, and put your glasses back on. Fingerprints on them, greasy smudges. Yours, his. Beyond them, the world in focus: the lazareth’s office, nighttime, or very early morning. Harry, disheveled and covered in blood - your blood.
“Six hours,” Harry says. “Give or take. Here,” he says, shuffling and disappearing from your vision, then coming back to hand you a glass of water. You drink it all and give it back to him, nodding in thanks, then slump back on your pillow. You let out a little noise that might be a gasp.
“Hey, take it easy, you just got shot,” he says.
“I hadn’t noticed,” you said. “And the suspects-”
He winces. “One dead. One in custody.”
“Khm,” you say. Another mark for your notebook. Harry shuffles in front of your vision again. “I’m so glad you’re awake,” he says. The front of his shirt and sleeves of his jacket are stained with blood. There is blood on the knees of his pants. An image comes to you, suddenly - Harry bursting through the doors of the station while holding you, limp and bleeding in his arms. Is it a fantasy?
No, you think. You’d probably woken up, at least a little, when he’d kicked the doors in, screaming for help. Probably a real memory. Fuck, you’re not going to live that one down, are you?
How about that time he called you kitten? Again?
You start to sit up in the bed, and Harry jumps forward to help, hand behind your back. “I do not need your help, officer,” you grit out, although your leg screams at you, calling you a fucking liar.
You are nobody’s kitten. You are not even anyone’s cat. Lovers, before, have compared you to a large jungle cat, and you’d frowned, the comparison smacking of exoticism, of romanticism. You understand it’s meant to be a comment on your litheness, your careful quiet consideration of things. A compliment. But it doesn’t fit you, feels strange and wrong, like a jacket you’ve been tinkering with for years and still haven’t managed to tailor properly. You are nobody’s cat. You are just Kim Kitsuragi. God you’re so fucking literal, Kim, said one of your lovers once. Would it kill you to have some fucking imagination? I bet you imagined the fucking crossword as a kid.
You had imagined flying. You had imagined parents, had imagined friends, had imagined being loved, and then, when you had gotten older, had imagined being respected. You had imagined being free and all alone in the sky as you soared all the way to the sun.
You need to put a stop to this now. You open your mouth. “Detective-” you start.
“Yeah, Kim?” he says and leans over your bed, his eyes on yours and shining, red-rimmed. He looks exhausted. You know what it is like to watch your partner bleeding in front of you. When you don’t answer right away, your chest strangely heavy, he says, “What? What is it, Kim?” His hand twitches like he wants to stroke your hair, and you want him to so badly that you have to swallow, hard, and he watches the movement the whole way down, his lips trembling a little as he glances back up at your eyes.
You leave it alone for now. “Thank you,” you say, “for saving my life.”
He’s about to burst into tears, faced with the thought of your death. “Maybe you should go take a shower,” you suggest, and he leaves so he can cry in the showers without you seeing it.
≠≠
The third time he calls you kitten you are in the precinct working late on a case that has a dozen leads, all of them dead ends. It’s like a labyrinth, and the two of you get sidetracked talking about labyrinths, and you tell him about the famous one that’s abandoned on the edges of Grand Couron, and you promise to go with him on your next day off. It’s been a cold day, the beginning of winter, and the two of you retreat back to the precinct when the sodium lights came on and night begins to fall, your hands shoved in your coat pockets, collar turned up, Harry trudging along beside you, head down. You stay in the precinct through shift change, as the sky dies down through the dome above and shadows stretch in the corners of the room where the green-shaded lamps don’t quite reach. The sound of typing dies down, chatter fades into silence, cigarette smoke settles into the background.
“Don’t let him stay here all night, okay?” Satellite-Officer Vicquemare announces in your general vicinity as he leaves - the last one aside from the two of you - and you aren’t entirely sure which one of you he’s talking to. Then, it’s just you and Harry, across from each other in the dim office, trying to make sense of it all.
Finally, your stomach rumbles audibly, your body betraying you - as it always does. These eyes, this body. Harry looks up suddenly, coming out of his reverie - his mouth and jaw twitching as he’d thought, listening to voices, probably, his head cocked to the side - and grins at you. He stretches, bending back over his chair. His shirt, long since untucked, escapes his belt, creeps up his stomach, and you eye the revealed expanse of soft fat and dark hair, where you want to bury your mouth, press your hand. You meet his eyes.
“How about we take this somewhere else,” he says. “My place? I got some new drinks for us to try.”
Harry’s been trying every fruity and carbonated drink Frittte sells in an attempt to stave off alcoholism. Occasionally, he convinces you to try them with him, in an elaborate tasting-session with multiple glasses. Even more occasionally, they’re actually worth drinking.
He can see you’re weakening, as you fiddle with the corner of your notebook, about to close it. “We can debrief over Suzerainty?” He wiggles his eyebrows. “Whatdy’a say, kitten?”
Your head snaps up to meet his gaze. You just spot the grin on his face, the predatory look in his eyes that he almost completely wipes when he meets your eyes. Except his body gives him away - the crinkle in the corner of his eyes, the little tremor to his lip. Kitten. There it is again. It’s definitely not a drunken slip of the tongue - Harry’s as sober as you are, right now - isn’t a fevered pain-hallucination. This man just called you kitten.
You rise up over your desk, closing your notebook shut, slamming your palm down in front of him. “Why do you keep calling me that?” You snarl at him.
That look trembles on his face again. The asshole thinks he’s being slick. Why?
He’s flirting with you.
Yes, but why?
Look at his eyes. Look at how earnest they are. Look at the softness in them, the way he always looks at you, even when you’re arguing.
He swallows, wets his lips. “Why am I calling you what? Kitten.” He adds the last word like an afterthought, but his eyes are very dark in the shadowed light. You need to shut this down now, before this man - your partner - loses respect for you. He’s comparing you to a tiny fluffy baby animal, for god’s sake.
This man respects you enough. Worships you, even. You’ve seen it in his eyes a dozen times now. Maybe more.
Besides, you like the way you feel when he says it. You like the way he says it, like you’re something precious, something worth protecting.
“Yes,” you bite out. “That. Why?”
“Because, well.” He flushes. “Lots of reasons.”
“Like?” You don’t use the eyebrow. You want to hear what he has to say, not paralyze him into silence.
“Uh - I mean. You know. I mean! Kitsuragi, kitten,” he says, clearly clinging onto the idea as if he’s drowning. “I bet you get it all the time!” He laughs, nervously.
“No,” you say.
“No?” he says, uncertain.
“No.”
“I’m the first one to ever call you kitten?”
“Yes.”
He beams, then, like he can’t help it. “Disco. I mean-” he looks at your face, then, getting out of his own head. “Oh, fuck, Kim, you hate it, I’m so sorry, I’ll never do it again-” he’s already shrinking back into his chair, pulling his limbs back into himself like a dead bug, trying to make himself smaller -
You surge forward, grabbing his face in both hands - hot skin, scratchy whiskers, fingers buried into his hair - and kiss him, your mouth on his half-open one. He responds immediately, worming one arm around your waist, pulling you close. You stumble over his chair, feel the pain in your shin, hear it hit the ground as his other hand brushes over your face, thumb along your neck, your jaw, fingers sinking into your hair, palm cupping the back of your skull. He tastes like stale coffee and cigarettes and his mouth is open and wet and enthusiastic and you kiss, your tongues sliding together. Pressed together all along your bodies, your thigh in between his as you push him back against his desk. “Mmmf,” he says into your mouth, and you pull away slightly, thinking he wants to say something important, but he just says, “Kim-” so you shut him up again. You nip at his lower lip sharp and hard just to hear his breath hitch. Kitten bites, you think, and grin into his mouth, which makes him moan.
Speaking of: time to make something clear. You pull back just far enough to whisper in his ear. “If you ever call me that in public, I will kill you and dump your body in the Esperance.”
“Really?”
You pull back further - he whines a little - and raise your eyebrow at him. He gulps, face flushed, lips red and wet. A little spit on his chin. Fuck, you want him, bad. You let the moment spin out, then he nods.
“Now,” you say, sounding steadier than you feel. “I believe you said something about your apartment?”
He grins, something bright lighting up his face, and then he leans in further, mouth on your ear. You shiver. “Whatever you say, kitten,” Harry says.