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Sometimes Harry makes you feel like you’re relearning the world alongside him. He makes you analyse things you had taken for granted for decades, gets you to look at the mundane in a completely different light.
It’s not long after Martinaise that you end up suggesting you move in together. A little under three months. Sooner than you would have allowed yourself, before, and stupider too, but it’s the culmination of his first concrete lesson to you when you think about it: it is not cruel to want. Harry wants often—things both reasonably attainable and those less so. The resurrection of a long dead rosemary plant on the windowsill, closure from his ex, you to start running with him in the mornings, to get better, a pet chinchilla, to be trusted again, a new rosemary plant to replace the one he can’t resurrect. He’s gotten better at deciding what’s worth trying for and better still at the trying itself.
You think it’s why from time to time you find yourself thinking, ah, fuck it. Watching Harry want allows you to eat two apples on a random Wednesday knowing you won’t have one for Saturday, lets you stare at him across the bullpen as he concentrates on paperwork for once, nudges you to drive a little faster even when the roads are busier than it’s particularly responsible to do so on.
The proposal happens precisely two months after you join the 41st. As Harry lets you into his apartment on the intersection of Perdition and Main for the fifth time, he tells you, “This place still feels like it’s haunted. I don’t really know if it’s ever going to stop.” It’s an early Friday evening and you’re here for board games, probably staying late, so you’re taking off your boots at the door and he has already scuttled off down the little corridor to the main room (you can hear him tidying up) when he adds, “I think I should move out.”
While perhaps you don’t quite grasp the ghosts the way he does, you can’t say you entirely disagree. There are clear signs of another man here—one neither of you know, dead in every sense but literal. You’d cleaned up the best you could, covered the hole in the bedroom door with the article from Le Périphérique about the Phasmid after Harry stared at the splintered wood for so long he got dizzy, thrown out the contents of a box sloppily labelled Dora’s in handwriting you’re not sure you recognised without looking inside, but still, the past lingers uncomfortably. Last week he called you in the middle of the night, panicking, saying, Kim, I’m so sorry, I know it’s so late, I just—I need to get out, I need a drink but I really don’t want to, Kim, I can’t be here, I don’t know what to do, and you’d waited until he could breathe again then driven to pick him up so he could sleep on your sofa.
You listen to the clink of glass and the telltale sound of something being kicked underneath the couch mingling with the rub of your laces through metal eyelets. “My lease ends next month,” you find yourself saying. It’s already been on the tip of your tongue for a few days; you decided it was ridiculous two nights ago, in your kitchen at 02.00 under the glow of the harbour lights, and then kept thinking about it anyway. “Maybe we could find somewhere together?”
Harry pokes himself around the wall with two empty glass cherryade bottles in his hand. He is washed out oddly by the sun filtering through the vertical blinds (grey in some places and yellow in others—dirt and smoke) but you can see the way he narrows his eyes ever so slightly to watch your body language. Very, very earnestly, he asks you, “Really?”
“If you promise to keep on top of your clutter,” you tell him, and he smiles.
“Magpie’s honour,” he says with a cherryade-handed salute, though he was definitely never well-off enough to be any sort of scout and the Magpies are the girls’ club anyway. You give him a lazy salute back.
It doesn’t take you too long to find somewhere. You look at four apartment complexes in Central Jamrock. Five if you count the one he paused abruptly to scowl at as you approached, then muttered something incomprehensible about building safety regulations and maximum deviation and tenement collapse before turning you both on your heels. He had taught you this and that about building code inspections later—you listened very intently yet remember very little of it, only really the way the shirt he was wearing was slightly too small on his stomach and his biceps. Something about a crack, gravity, a perpendicular load?
The place you end up choosing is just southeast of Precinct 41. It’s a twenty-two minute walk if you want to avoid Boogie Street, or fourteen if you don’t mind. There are two small bedrooms just barely big enough for a bed, an armoire, and a desk; a smaller balcony; an abhorrent rug, somehow perfectly sized, that Harry scavengened from an alleyway mid-investigation; a low bookshelf containing more board games and cassettes than books; a healthy rosemary plant on the windowsill. It is also on the first floor, which is good when the elevator is out of service (often, according to your neighbour) or when it’s upwards of thirty degrees centigrade and the heat rises (also often, as of late).
Maybe it’s just that the things Harry somehow remembers and you don’t know stand out more when you’re spending as much time with him outside of work. Maybe it’s that you quickly realise, being in a close domestic setting with him, that you have more or less lived alone since you were seventeen and had to figure out how to do a lot of things that a lot of other teenagers had parents to teach them to do of your own volition.
Harry’s muscle memory seems to kick in with a lot of small, inconsequential tasks. The next thing he shows you is spurred on by something that happened before you moved in—while packing your individual possessions into boxes and then into the Kineema. He just folded a fitted sheet into a perfect rectangle. The thing wasn’t even worth its neat little form. He had just taken it off his bed, which he’d slept in not six hours prior in the sticky early summer humidity, and folded it to box away.
Four days after you move in you finally get around to unpacking the rest of your things, and you watch him pull the folded sheet out of its box and clumsily put it on top of a pile of towels and mysterious other fabrics. “That needs to be washed,” you say. You do not question him sleeping in an unmade bed for four nights. Work has been characteristically busy and this is Harry you’re talking about—when you met he was sleeping on a broken sofa bed without a blanket in a room with a bitter breeze blowing through it.
He unfolds the sheet, not all the way, just enough to properly stick his nose into it and smell it. His brow scrunches up a little. “I guess,” he replies.
“Do you have another?”
“Yeah. Somewhere,” he says while rummaging, and then after a few seconds pulls out an unfolded fitted sheet, apparently clean, and holds it up happily.
You sigh, exasperated but tender, not quite a laugh. “Why did you only fold the dirty one?” you ask, and he shrugs, so you say, “Could you show me how to fold it properly?”
For a few seconds Harry does that little thing he does where he’s consulting the jury in his head. Occasionally you wish you were privy to it. Are they debating the likelihood that you really don’t know how to fold a fitted sheet right now? You really don’t. But then he throws you the clean one and unfolds the dirty one and pushes himself to his feet saying, “Alrighty, so…”
After that he teaches you two card games, one in the first week and then another the next. You have no idea how he knows them and neither does he, and he doesn’t remember the names, only the rules.
You run into a slight problem there, because not only is Harry not actually very good at explaining those rules, but verbal instructions don’t often stick in your head. You write them down as he attempts to teach you so that you’ll actually remember them while you play, but they only half make sense even as you reread your notes and try to piece them together. When you ask him to clarify the specifics of something you have written, though, he leans over the tiny table in the dim orange of your apartment, your knees already inevitably touching underneath, and takes your hands in his to demonstrate how you should play your next move. You don’t make him explain them again.
Vicquemare tells the two of you later that Harry made one of the games up, which explains why you didn’t know it despite its simplicity. They called it Flounder; it was easy to play while drunk or fucking around on duty when things were quiet because it’s short and the rules are difficult to muddle. He doesn’t seem particularly happy that you, now, are the one playing Flounder during stakeouts or between being assigned cases, however he has so far avoided Harry’s offers to bend the rules to add an extra player.
(In turn you teach Harry three new card games and fail to insist he play by the book. In the space of a few weeks you somehow end up with Kitsuragi-Du Bois house rules for both Malevolence and Whiskey. Harry calls the latter the ‘alcohol-free version.’ Another failure on your part: you grin at it every time.)
It’s a while before you notice that the things you learn aren’t always particularly useful. Or it’s a while before you let yourself notice, anyway. There’s that it’s actually quite difficult to go from living alone to being with another person almost constantly, but also part of you is slightly clingy and a touch more overprotective, and that these things are a tricky balance. You learn that it’s only really reasonable to jerk off in the shower now because Harry has no sense of privacy and the bedroom doors don’t have locks, and that Harry does not have it in him to be quiet when he comes, and that it drives you mad. You learn that even though you are very very good at convincing people to follow your lead, Harry seems to have an inhuman ability to sway you, as does—somehow—Judit Minot. You learn that you hate making dinner for two people, because you already hated making dinner for one person enough, and really you should discuss a better way to divide household tasks at some point.
Most alarmingly, you still have the capacity to love. You’re not sure when love is what it became, but it’s there, you know. Your personal mnemotechnique is open on your lap, back to the wall your bedroom shares with Harry’s, as you write little pointers instead of getting up and preparing for the day. You’re trying to figure it out as if it’s a crossword answer you can only properly grasp via the words around it.
Really it having taken you so long to slot the pieces together is ridiculous. You were attracted to him rather humiliatingly quickly in Martinaise (and honest to god might have considered what it’d be like to fuck him even before the shower), but anything past that remained somewhat of an enigma. He’s attractive, and charming, and funny, and weird, and so, so clever, but attainable?
Well—also a ‘sure,’ apparently, because Harry very much flirts with you, and from time to time the way that he looks at you holds a hunger reminiscent of the way men like him look at you in the dingy heat of underground bars.
The thing is, the problem every time: Kim Kitsuragi is not someone who is loved. He is someone who is useful yet impersonal; he is professional and just detached enough to only come across as a loner rather than a freak. How do you claw your way out of that? Kicking and screaming?
Harry taps softly on the wall behind you, startling you a little. “Yes?” you say, and your voice is barely audible through the gritty taste of morning. He probably heard it anyway because the walls in this entire building are like cardboard. On your second night here you thought there was someone in the bathroom in the middle of the night (not Harry, you could hear his snoring) and it turned out, when you went in there with your Kiejl, that it was sound from next door.
“You awake?” Harry asks.
You’re already smiling. You can feel it in the pressure of your jaw. “No.”
“Oh,” he says, and then after a pause, “Wait, yes you are. What time is it?”
A glance at your digital alarm clock tells you it’s just gone 06.30. “You have a clock, detective,” you tell Harry instead. It’s identical to yours, in fact, dark grey and unremarkable. Harry uses the radio feature more than you do but it’s nice to have. Sometimes he falls asleep listening to the lulling voices of strangers on foreign broadcasts, and so do you by extension.
“It’s broken. I tried changing the battery yesterday—or today?—no, yesterday, the sun’s up—but nada,” Harry tells you through the wall.
You look down at your notes, then close them to tuck under your pillow. “Bring it through here and I’ll have a look. See if I can fix it before work.” There’s fumbling and the sound of something unplugging in the room over as you push yourself out of bed to retrieve a travel set of screwdrivers from a drawer.
You’re sitting back on the bed when Harry comes in a few seconds later. He’s wearing a shirt from the Revachol leg of Guillaume le Million’s last tour before he died—the print is crumbling from years of wear and wash, so instead of FROM THE ASHES ‘37 it more or less reads FROM TH’ AS S which made Harry laugh so hysterically when he discovered it that you were legitimately concerned he was going to have another medical episode.
The mattress dips as Harry sits right beside you, his bare thigh hot and clammy pressed against yours. His hair is mussed up around his head like a mane, blurred in the half-light bleeding in through the curtains, and he gives you a tiny tired smile as you look at him which makes you momentarily forget how to breathe.
You have to look away, down at the radio alarm clock in Harry’s hands. “Khm. Could you open the curtains?” you ask, and he pushes the grey box into your lap as he jumps up like he’s a startled animal.
You’re holding the device up to your face when he pulls the curtains open and your room is washed in watercolour morning sunlight. Harry hums, this quiet inquisitive thing, as you try to read the small print on the clock’s information sticker. DO NOT OPEN, it reads. Do not make me a victim of the Jamrock Shuffle. Alas, the both of you are Jamrock cops now, and Harry is a can-opener, and you are a tinkerer. There is no way this sticker can stop you. You pick up a small flathead screwdriver.
“Huh,” Harry says from behind you—the way he does when he recognises something. “It’s before seven, right?”
“Congratulations on looking at my clock in the absence of your own,” you tell him with a nod he probably doesn’t catch.
“No,” he corrects, “I guessed from the position of the sun. I probably could have just done that in my room since our windows face the same direction.”
“What?” you find yourself saying as you lean over to put the fourth tiny screw onto your bedside table. “That’s nonsensical.”
“No, Kim. If you know what time the sun rises it’s not too hard, I think. Look.”
When you turn to look his hand is held sideways out in front of him. The almost-silhouette of him against the dusty window makes you grip the screwdriver in your hand so hard your knuckles turn white. Oddly, ever so oddly, you are momentarily reminded of the Insulindian Phasmid—the awe you felt in those first few minutes of watching it sway in the reeds; the hope.
“Put your pinky finger against the horizon. Each finger is fifteen minutes,” Harry says. “The sun rises around five. One, two, three, four, five, six, and a bit.”
“Nonsensical,” you repeat, softer, and then you tell him, “Come back here and hold this wire out of the way.” His shoulder and his arm and his leg all press into you again as he does. You’re convinced you hear his heartbeat concurrent with your own, beating wildly against your ribs.
You do try this trick a few times. It is never particularly accurate, and also rather difficult for the majority of hours in a day, so you’re somewhat convinced Harry’s ability to tell you the time is actually just one of those intuitions he has. Perhaps it’s the city herself informing him and he simply relays the facts? Nothing much would surprise you anymore. It is useful, though, for estimating how much more daylight you can make use of before the sun sets entirely. You tell Harry this one day, while you’re out investigating the death of a woman whose body was found wrapped in a bear rug. Harry had suggested naming the case BEAR-Y SAD and you had almost (almost!) laughed while telling him no.
“I’d say we have roughly an hour and a half before seeing in the dark becomes an issue,” you say as you tuck your hands behind your back.
“What time is it? Like”—Harry holds his hand up to the horizon—“seven twenty?”
Your watch says 19.23. “Seven twenty-three,” you say, and he looks at you with a telepathic glint in his eyes that says he told you so. “You know, detective, a watch is much more convenient.”
“Not much of an accessories guy,” Harry replies, which is blatantly untrue: he is currently wearing blue-tinted glasses and a pearl necklace. He also has two blue clips in his hair to keep the shorter pieces that don’t fit into his ponytail out of his face. Somehow, ridiculously, he is making it work.
You raise your eyebrow a little and Harry amends, laughing now, “Okay, yeah, but this is more fun than a watch, Kim. If a watch out there that’s whimsical enough for me surfaces then I’ll consider switching sides.”
When the case is wrapped up two days later he buys a watch from a Boogie Street market stall run by a teenager who is almost certainly selling stolen goods. It only just fits around his wrist, but it has bear ears, and eyes and a little nose on the face. It also does not work. (You’ve tried, as if fixing clocks for him has become the week’s pastime.)
You also discover, within the following month, that you have absolutely no idea how to express your feelings for someone.
You try, is the thing. You get a bit more tactile, crack a few more pointed suggestive jokes. Harry amps it up alongside you. He loves it, you can tell in the way the laughter bubbles out of him, uncaged, but it doesn’t get you anywhere.
You call him your best friend, once, which is true, but retrospectively you realise probably not quite what you were going for. A couple of days later you try I don’t know what I would do without you, Harry, which is also true, but the way it drips tender honesty sounds mechanical coming out of your mouth and makes you feel like you may melt to an unpleasant goo that he’d have to clean off that horrendous rug, so spontaneous sentimentality is off the table.
You consider getting up one night when you can’t sleep and sliding into bed with him, under the sheets, hot and sticky, feeling his skin against yours, your fingers pressing divots into his flesh, but you don’t. (You fall asleep half-hard instead.)
Then it’s a Thursday in September and the heat is finally starting to settle. It’s midday, the sun high in the sky but obscured by clouds on top of the ever present coalition aerostatics, which for once you don’t have any gripes about. It has been far, far too hot this year, so the blossoming coolness is a salvation that makes Harry almost go back on his occasional summertime apocalyptic promises.
You’re getting food out near the GRIH at a tucked away family-owned place you liked to come to while you had a free lunch break at the 57th. You haven’t been back since you moved to Jamrock in both work and home because it’s a little out of the way, but the owner recognises you right away. A short, plump woman in her sixties who took to cracking you immediately upon meeting you. It worked, if only with a nudge or two from Dom.
“Kim!” she says happily as you hold the door for Harry, classically distracted a few steps behind you by a cardboard box. She turns to the kitchen, an ajar light green door off to her side, and says, “Honey, Kim is here!”
“Hello, Colette. It is good to see you.” Her partner appears from the kitchen with a little wave of her hand and ducks away again when you wave back.
“It’s been quite some time. How are you? How’s Jamrock treating you?”
Harry appears beside you in the doorway as you open your mouth to respond. “Kim’s the forty-first’s best. Case solving machine,” he says with an Expression-leaning grin that sort of makes you want to hit him.
“Detective,” you say, barely scolding, probably dumbly fond, and then turn back to Colette. “My partner, Harry. Harry, Colette.”
“Partner,” Colette says with all the meaning it could possibly hold pressing down on it. There’s a little sparkle in her eyes. “Lovely.”
It shouldn’t surprise you that the pair of them get along. The place is fairly empty—Colette pulls up a mismatched silver chair at one point and theatrically tells Harry about the time three years ago where she helped you apprehend a suspect by accidentally locking him in the bathroom and how Dom had laughed so hard he cried.
“Keep him close,” she whispers to you as you get up to leave. You give her a kind little nod and in return she gives you a shove towards the door.
“Our walk has been sabotaged, Kim,” Harry says as you step out of the restaurant into the rain. The Kineema is parked a little way away. You’d planned on walking a loop around the harbour because nostalgia is a killer and you miss the industrial noise more than is probably normal. “Maybe we should wait it out back inside?”
A hand comes up to shield your glasses from the rain after a few steps into the street. Harry steps in very, very close to you quickly afterwards, almost backing you against a wall. Like a shelter. You aren’t wearing a jacket and he knows you feel the cold more than he does. “Maybe so,” you say.
Harry smiles properly when you look away from the alley up at him, eyes on yours, soft and sweet. It’s all borderline cloying; you’re dizzy with it. Lovely, evil man, you think, because you can feel the heat radiating off of him even despite the chill in the air and the drizzle, and you want to kiss him very, very badly.
In lieu of it, really just to stop yourself from doing anything infinitely more rash, and maybe because you should have been so straightforward all along, you say, “Harry, I have feelings for you.”
“Oh.” Harry tilts his head a tad, up and away from where he had been looking down at you a second before. There is a beat before he turns to you again, droplets of water dream-like and shimmery in his hairline, and adds, “Good ones, or?”
You rest your forehead against his shoulder with a huff of a laugh through your nose. Such a stupidly Harry response and still somehow entirely unexpected. Out of the corner of your eye you see him lift his hands like he doesn’t know what to do with them and then they fall back to his sides again. “Good ones,” you tell him. “I hold you very highly.”
Silence lingers between you for a moment too long. When you look up at him again his mouth is open slightly, contemplative. “Homo-sexually?” he asks finally.
A nod. “Yes.”
His hands unclench and clench again at his sides. Then, slowly, he reaches out and runs his fingertips over the hem of your shirt, fidgeting, like he wants to hold you but can’t quite do it. A stinging, familiar feeling. And he says, in that earnest way he always does, “Really?”
“Yes,” you tell him again, and you nudge him a step back with a hand on his chest so that you can look at him properly, and you keep it there, pressed to his lungs.
“Are you sure? Because…” Harry starts again, and that burning urge fights its way back up into your chest as he rambles. You’re already only half-listening by the time he gets to something about feeling the same—staring at his mouth and watching the words more than you’re hearing them.
“Harry,” you cut him off. He falls silent again immediately. One of his hands finds its way to yours, fingers curling around your wrist to hold you there. “Good. Harry, I…” you try, but the words are too much. Instead you shake them out, damp laundry over the balcony, two jackets hanging side by side on a washing line, and you hook a finger under the knot of his tie to pull him in.
Heart beating heavily, lungs warm with it all, Harry sinks into you. He’s pliable (you knew he would be) and willing (that too) and he whines ever so softly as you kiss him. Big fingers tighten just a smidge more around your arm, blunt nails digging in as if to tether you down.
Pulling away feels like a mission. Maybe you’re getting a little dramatic about it now that you have this, and maybe only for a moment, but it feels like infiltrating an illegal racing ring in Coal City as the budding mechanics soup up their shitty motor carriages knowing you could have been one of them somewhere else ten years prior, or walking into a stuffy tunnel where you have to breathe manually and someone with a gun is inevitably waiting. But, no, it’s nothing like that—you open your eyes and it’s just Harry, a little teary and almost vibrating with overwhelm.
“You’re getting soaked,” you find yourself saying. Harry laughs wetly and uses the palm of the hand he’s not using to hold you down to wipe at his eyes. “From the rain,” you clarify.
He gives you a delighted huff, then another brief kiss, and he says, “Let’s go home.”