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In the grand scheme of things you haven't been a Satellite for too long. It was a year before he even got promoted and you'd been hastily given the title. So it's only been a few years. Less than a quarter of the time you've been on the force. A footnote in your career.
A particularly detailed one.
The truth is, you don't really remember much of your career from before you became a satellite.
The good news is; no one else remembers it either. You hadn't done anything of note with it.
Everyone only knows you for your relation to Harry Du Bois. Auxiliary. Secondary.
But everyone knows Harrier Du Bois, the Human Can Opener, Superstar Cop of the Apocalypse—and just about a million other unflattering epithets—so if you squint and tilt your head at just the right angle, it's almost like everyone knows you too.
Except that's not quite right, you know it isn't, because it's not like it's actually you they know, just the vague shape of whatever person happens to be his partner.
Soon enough you won't even have that.
You've been trying—and failing—not to develop a complex over it.
You're not a bad cop. You like to think you can be a pretty decent detective when you need to be, but you won't kid yourself either. You were never making it to Lieutenant without Harry.
It isn't something you'd ever thought to hold against him—there's a certain kind of brilliance to him that you know in your heart of hearts you simply do not possess. The kind of brilliance that gets you off the hook for destroying 45k réal worth of RCM property with nothing more than a half-hearted warning. That is to say, nothing short of magnetizing.
Which is, perhaps, how you found yourself caught in his orbit in the first place.
Caught is simultaneously too strong of a word for it and not nearly enough. You feel like you entered his periphery one day, the two of you barely aware of each other, and at the slightest tug you gave in and let gravity do the rest, whatever you were before falling away so you could be subsumed by him.
His brilliance, his needs.
His shadow.
On that day you stopped being you and started being his partner, and it never occurred to you how that could become problematic, because being an accessory to brilliance was still better than whatever you could manage on your own.
So you let him talk you into ridiculous things, like revitalizing the C-Wing, starting a major task force. The lines between on the job and off the job only really started blurring together once he'd convinced you to start going to clubs with him. You tried a whole host of drugs you'd never even heard the names of before meeting him—before deciding you still preferred good old fashioned speed.
He laughed and called you a limp dick loser for that, but he still made sure to always have some on hand to offer you whenever he shot up at work. You convinced yourself that meant he cared.
And he did care, even if it was hard to see—especially towards the end—he cared so goddamn much, that was the issue.
Harry Du Bois cares about things with the fervor of a Dolorian priest; with all-consuming, full-throated, devotion.
And consume it did; he let it swallow him whole like it was an inevitability of the Pale, and the Harry you have now is after the Pale, but he's still the world, he'll always be the world, and you'll always be the satellite that orbits him because you stopped knowing how to be anything else.
You don't remember much of your career before you were a satellite because there's nothing worth remembering.
On a good day, you're able to avoid following that line of logic to its obvious conclusion—that nothing about you is worth remembering outside of when you're attached to him—but there haven't been many good days recently, and you think with a weary resignation that it may be time to up your antidepressant dosage again, as if they can do anything about the stone cold wasteland of reality. As if they can make you a better cop, a better person.
But they can't and you're convinced nothing can. Rada couldn't do it. Harry couldn't. Even the speed couldn't, not really, but it was better than nothing, and you wonder if maybe you should go back on it, now that you're officially nobody again. Now that Captain Sober is actually sober, and not your problem anymore.
The only problem now is you, and the fact you don't quite know what to do with yourself.
The only problem is that you miss having his problems to take care of, because they distracted you from yours, which are numerous and many, actually. Go figure.
You're not going to become a better person overnight like the Shitkid did. You will probably never become some hotshot detective either.
But you're at least halfway competent on the field. You were never meant to be leadership material, not long term, but you've still got a knack for managing personnel. And the Shitkid will still need your help, whether he wants it or not. It's still your show for the time being. You're still needed.
You're not sure what you'll do when he stops needing you. Maybe you'll find out along the way.