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The detective Kim has been sent to meet is dead.
He can feel it as soon as he sets foot in the Whirling-in-Rags. It’s the same feeling he always gets around a dead body. The creeping itch between his shoulder blades, as if his wings want to open. The tight band around his chest as if he can’t take a full breath. The light tingle in his fingertips which always strengthens when he puts them on the deceased’s chest for the stations of the breath, before raising to a near unsustainable pitch and dissipating as their soul leaves their body.
It only makes sense. This is the third day he has come here and he has still not seen the detective. The man is dead, somehow - a heart attack, most likely, or perhaps some sort of suicide. Kim had seen the motor carriage - painted RCM blue - in the sea on his way over. It wouldn’t be the first such suicide. Kim is certain it will not be the last.
Kim will have to go upstairs to do the stations of the breath and release the man’s soul. He is not looking forward to it. These sorts of things are never easy. Kim does not enjoy death; few do. Only a few months ago, Dom had died taking a bullet meant for Kim, and Kim had had to kneel over him in a spreading pool of hot blood and perform the stations of the breath. Kim is getting sick, he thinks, of dead RCM officers. Still. This is his duty, both as an RCM officer and as - whatever he is. He taps his foot and checks his watch again. It will look suspicious if he goes up too soon, and Kim has learned the hard way - over forty-two years - not to look suspicious. He cannot afford it. He will “give” the dead man five more minutes, and then he will ask the hotel manager for a key - or perhaps to accompany him - and will make his fateful “discovery.”
Kim Kitsuragi is very sure of this. That is why he is so surprised when the dead man staggers down the steps and comes to a stop before him.
≠≠
The man doesn’t know he’s dead. Kim’s sure of it. He *can’t* know, or he’d be in hysterics. The man is certainly in poor shape, stinking of alcohol and urine. He claims to not remember anything - not his name, not Elysium, not even the concept of *money.* It’s not a big surprise, Kim thinks. He’s *dead.*
He is, however, the most active dead man Kim has ever seen. Usually they just sort of lay there. Sometimes they bleed a bit. Or a lot. This one, however, does none of these things. He lopes back up to his room to recover his other shoe, and then sets off to look at the hanged man, who he claims - down on his knees, stroking the man’s hair as chunks come off - is speaking to him. Maybe he is. Kim doesn’t know. A sort of - dead man to dead man thing. Kim has never met a dead person like this. They’re always - well, *dead.* They don’t talk. They don’t move. He can see their souls trapped in their bodies like a heavy gas, perhaps, and when he kneels over them and performs the stations of the breath, there is a great big sigh only he can see, and then their souls go…somewhere else. Kim doesn’t know where. He doesn’t *want* to know. He just puts his head down and he does his duty.
He finds himself, as he trails behind the dead detective - from the scene of the crime, to the Frittte, to, impossibly, the *book store* - unable to do his duty.
All that first day, Kim expects the man to realize he’s dead. Maybe a look in the large windows covering the front of the Whirling-in-Rags. Or maybe he will realize when he runs *everywhere* he goes, or rolls a boule ball, or bullies an old man into giving him a sandwich and *eating* it. Kim watches in fascination as the dead man’s jaws work. He spits bread crumbs as he talks about communism. But there’s…nothing. He excepts the man to crumple to the pavement, to wind down to a stop, like an automaton. But he doesn’t. He just keeps going and going, like some kind of infernal machine. The man is the most determined being Kim has ever seen. It’s like he can’t give up being alive.
Kim needs to do the stations of the breath, he knows. He’ll be able to force the man to go - wherever it is they go. But he doesn’t. He’s fascinated by the man. And, well - he’s very funny, isn’t he? Quite the charmer. Kim would have liked him very much if he were alive. He finds himself liking him very much dead, too.
At the end of the evening, Kim invites the detective out onto the balcony for a cigarette. He offers him one just to see what he does with it. Maybe now, Kim thinks, as he goes to take a breath in, he’ll realize he’s dead. He hasn’t breathed once since Kim has met him. Their fingers brush, and Kim can feel the chill through his gloves. The detective takes the cigarette and stares at it, frowning, as if he is concentrating very hard.
“Funny,” he says and laughs in that hoarse voice so much like a death rattle. "I think I forgot how to smoke a cigarette.”
“You have to breathe in,” Kim says. “Like so.” He exaggerates his movements. The man watches the path the cigarette travels to his lips, watches as Kim inhales, watches his mouth as he exhales, pursing his lips.
“Wow, uhm, Kim,” the detective says, and laughs nervously. He tugs at that awful necktie around his neck, revealing a dark and mottled bruising Kim finds it hard to look away from.
The dead man raises the cigarette to his lips and holds the lighter to it. The tip ignites, but nothing else happens. “Here,” Kim says. He steps forward. He puts a hand on the dead man’s diaphragm. He is perhaps a handspan off from the proper position of the stations of the breath. His other hand goes to the man’s back. The man is utterly still.
“In,” Kim says, “like this.” He draws his own breath in, and holds it. Why am I doing this? he thinks. To show the man he is dead? Unbelievably, the man copies him, his body shuddering into movement, swelling out into a breath. He stares at Kim, eyes bulging. “You have to breathe out,” Kim says, “whoosh, like this.” He breathes out, fogging cigarette smoke over the balcony. The man copies him, a great waft of horrible alcohol breath and halitosis and cigarette smoke joining his own breath. No scent of decay. Kim frowns, and takes another drag of his cigarette to cover it up.
“Very good, detective,” he says, and the man beams, and flushes, and chokes in the middle of another one of his strange breaths. “Easy,” Kim says, and pats him on the back. “We don't want you choking.”
The dead man gets a strange look on his face, but doesn’t answer, only humming in response. He takes another drag, forcing his still chest into life.
≠≠
Two more days pass, and the detective still does not notice he is dead. Kim has never seen anything like it. He has started a case file in the back of his notebook that he works on sometimes while they are running. *Running.* The man runs easily, never lost for breath - of course not, Kim thinks sourly, wheezing lightly himself. The man doesn’t need to breathe. He only breathes, Kim notices, when he smokes a cigarette, exaggeratedly, like Kim has shown him. He could go on forever, as long as parts don’t stop falling off. Kim worries about that, but the detective doesn’t seem to smell any *worse* as the days go on.
The detective, they discover, is Lieutenant Double Yefreitor Harrier Du Bois. When did he die? Kim wonders. He surveys the wreckage of the man’s room, the drowned car at the water lock, the pile of pills and bottles of tare cached all around Martinaise. There is really no way to know. It’s not like he can ask the man. He puts a hand on the motor carriage as they pass in one of their dizzying vulture’s circles and amuses himself by doing a stations of the breath for the car. It helps him feel useful.
Later that day, in some sort of bizarre attempt to intimidate the Hardie Boys, Harry puts Kim’s gun in his mouth. Kim’s wings erupt from his back in burst of feathers, scattering them everywhere. Stress. Nobody notices. Nobody ever notices, not really. Glen grimaces and brushes one off his shoulder. “Goddamn bugs,” he mutters, and then “Garte! You got roaches!”
“I do not have roaches!” Garte says. He is trying not to watch what is happening. Titus and Harry and Kim are locked in a standoff. What happens if he pulls the trigger? Kim wonders. Will he die for good? Or will he refuse to die again? There will be mass panic. He will have to get the detective out of here, fast, back into the Kineema, and then - where? Surely they can chalk it up to a case of hysteria. Somehow no one has noticed, but surely they cannot ignore evidence when they are staring it right in the undead and bloody face. Can the man even bleed?
Harry lowers the gun. Kim nearly wrestles it from his grasp, feeling the man’s cold fingers going limp. He shoves the gun back in his pocket. “Come on,” he says, and propels Harry out the door and out to the Kineema. He sits him in the driver’s seat and pours water into him, and lets him play with the radio until he calms down. Until they both calm down. Some forgotten part of Harry’s dead brain picks up the station for MIRRORBALL FM and he boogies slightly in his seat, whistling a little under his breath.
≠≠
No one else seems to notice that Harry is dead. Kim thinks the man’s partner - the one in the awful wig - might suspect something. There is something in his eyes, in the way he watches Harry from across the room, the way he trails off in speaking to him. It would make sense. Being the man’s partner, he should be the closest thing to him in the world. He would know if something was different, even if he didn’t know what. And too, there is that strange cast on his eye. Kim tries to remember what it was he’d heard about that sort of thing. A fairy tale for children. But then again, aren’t things with wings fairy tales? Kim shifts his shoulder blades under his jacket. Harry looks at him curiously, and he shakes his head. “Nothing,” he says. “It’s nothing.
No, most people don’t seem to notice. But when they touch Harry by accident - because he does not touch anyone on purpose, Kim notices - they seem to shiver. They wipe their hand off on their pants, absent-mindedly. Harry sees it all with his sharp green eyes, and sags. His mouth downturns. He makes more idle comments about killing himself, or being a disgusting, horrible monster. He drinks more. Kim wants to stop him, but what can he say? “Drinking will kill you,” he says once, shortly, when he can’t take it any more.
“Oh, I don’t think I have to worry about that, do I, Kim?” he asks, and there is that awful Expression on his face. The death’s-head rictus. The one he thinks is *charming.*
“What do you mean by that?” Kim asks, more sharply than he means to, and Harry frowns, looking at him. Harry rubs a hand through his hair. “I don’t know,” he says finally. “I just - thought it, and I said it.” He frowns.
Maybe he has pickled himself, Kim thinks, and if he stops drinking, he will rot, all at once. Kim doesn’t know. He is in wholly uncharted territory. He sighs, and turns away.
There are a few other strange things that occur. Joyce Messier, for example, gives Harry a strange look, and says one or two probing things, but Harry does not seem to pick up on it. Bird’s Nest Roy, Kim thinks, knows something. There’s a look in his eye, a slow wariness when he watches Harry. Maybe he’s just high on pyrholidon. Maybe he’s *seeing* something on pyrholidon. Maybe he had even seen it happen. Kim doesn’t know. He can’t exactly ask. Instead, he jots down notes, and closes his notebook, and tucks it into his jacket pocket, and follows the detective across the wastes of Martinaise.
And then there is the thing with the dice. Harry purchases a pair of dice from Neha, selecting a pair of handsome orange and brown ones. Kim frowns, and shifts his shoulder blades under his jacket. The same color as Kim’s wings, not that Harry knows that. Harry rolls them, haphazardly in his hand. Snake Eyes. He does it again. Snake Eyes again. He does it again, and again, and again. They turn up Snake Eyes every time.
“Huh,” says Harry, staring down at them. Then he snaps a finger - the one not cupping the dice - and points it at Neha. “Weighted dice,” he says. “Nice. But isn’t Snake Eyes bad?”
“It depends on what game you’re playing,” she says. “What game are you playing, Officer?”
“I don’t know,” Harry says, frowning at the dice. He tosses them again in his hand, and again. “Kim, do you know?”
“Ghosts and Coppers,” Kim says absentmindedly.
“What’s that?”
Kim freezes when he replays his answer back. “It’s a children’s game. Very popular. The children divide up and - well, half of them are police officers, and the other half are ghosts. They chase each other around”
“I was always a ghost,” says Neha in her gentle voice, barely there.
“I was always a police officer,” Kim says, firmly.
“I think I’d be both,” Harry says, and nods.
“But you can’t do that,” Kim says. “It’s against the rules.”
“Rules, schumles.” He slips the dice in his pocket and shoots Kim with a finger gun. “We don’t need rules, baby.”
Kim wills his ears not to flush. “If there were no rules,” he says sternly, “the world would collapse.”
The detective gets a haunted look on his face. He stares off in the direction of the coast. “It’s collapsing anyway.”
“Alright.” Kim looks at the dead man before him, lit in a spill of golden afternoon light. There are silver strands in his hair, and his eyes are very green, and he stinks of alcohol. His chest is utterly still. “So the world’s collapsing anyway. If there were no rules, we wouldn’t have a job, and then you couldn’t buy dice. How’s that?”
Harry nods, slowly. “You’ve got me there, Kim,” he says.
≠≠
Harry moves out to the fishing shack, and Kim finds he misses the sounds of the detective banging around in the room next door. One evening - after a particularly damp and nasty day - Kim goes out at night to stretch his wings. The rain has dried up, leaving the streets glittering under the streetlights. He heads out, hands shoved deep in his pockets, towards the wastes of Martinaise. His wings are bothering him badly. They tingle every time he is around Harry, which is twelve hours a day, sometimes more. His body is telling him there is something wrong, even as he laughs at the detective’s jokes, even as he takes the matching jacket from his hands and slips it on. So Kim goes out to the wastes - to where he can see the brights lights of the GRIH from the shore - and lets out his wings.
They erupt out of him as he stretches them out wide - his wingspan nearly double his height, a mixture of white, and brown, and a little orange. The air ruffles his feathers. He breathes in the rank sea air, the smell of rotting reeds, and again. He flaps them, once or twice, stretching them to their fullest extent, and then settles them down, wrapping around him to keep himself warm. He can’t fly with them. They are, as far as he can tell, utterly useless.
As is his ability to release the burden of the dead. He can’t reach every dead person in the world. There are so many. But he can’t *not* tend to the ones he finds in his duty at the RCM. Except, of course, Harry seems to be the exception, doesn’t he?
Kim suspects the detective is the exception to many things.
Kim stays out in the wastes until he gets cold, and then he heads back to the Whirling-in-Rags. He leaves his wings out. Why not? No one can see them anyway. When he passes the fishing shack, he slows down. There is a light on, and he can clearly see Harry inside, passing the window. He frowns, then he comes to a decision. He pulls his wings in, and he knocks.
The door opens. “Kim!” he says. Then he frowns, and looks past Kim.
“Expecting someone else?” Kim says, dryly.
“No - I thought I saw-”
“Yes?” Kim holds his breath.
“Nothing.” He steps inside, and Kim follows him, looking around curiously. The shack is small, and drafty, dirt in the corners. Harry has made a small nest of the bed. He holds a bottle of beer in one hand and offers it to Kim.
“Ah - no thank you. I was just out for a walk.” Again, Harry looks at the curtainless window. He couldn’t have seen anything. “I thought I would see how you were getting on.”
“Not bad. Better than the Whirling.” They look around. “Well. Cheaper, anyway.” Harry brightens. “Want to play Suzerainty?”
Kim frowns. “Detective, it is after midnight.”
“We could talk about the case while we do it.” Harry is already whisking out a pack of cigarettes and lighting one. The artificial heave of his chest while he looks at Kim from under his eyebrows.
“Ah, fuck it,” says Kim.
He points a finger gun at Kim. “You’re dead meat, Kitsuragi.”
“I think you’ll find it’s *you* who are dead,” says Kim. “Come on. “If you are so eager to get thrashed, let’s *play.*”
≠≠
Two nights later, Kim is walking around by the docks when he hears a short, sharp whistle. “Officer.”
The voice is well-bred. A woman’s voice, coming from Joyce Messier’s boat. “Yes?” Kim asks, going over. “Did you need something?”
“What’s wrong with Officer Du Bois?”
Kim stiffens. “Wrong? Nothings *wrong,* ma’am. Just a little *retrograde amnesia*. It’s a very stressful job.”
“I’m sure it is. I don’t mean to suggest it isn’t.” She studies Kim from inside her slick, expensive raincoat. “You’re obviously very protective of your own. I admire that.” Kim shifts on the shore. The boat tilts in the water. “It’s only - well, there’s something not quite *right* about Harrier, isn’t there?”
“No more than there is something *not quite right* about me. Ma’am. Lieutenant Double Yefreitor Du Bois is an eccentric man, of course, but very brilliant in his own way.” He studies her. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know,” she says. She looks honestly puzzled. “I can’t quite put my finger on it. Have you ever travelled in the Pale, officer?”
This again. “No,” Kim says.
She shakes her head. She is looking out past Kim. “It’s bad for you,” she says, frankly. “It takes and takes and takes, even when you think it’s giving you things. Memories…vague images…it’s not. It’s draining you slowly. Making you *less.* Less alive. Less you. Has Lieutenant Double Yefreitor Du Bois-” she half-nods to you - “ever travelled in the Pale?”
Kim shifts uncomfortably. “I don’t know. This is our first time working together.”
“Mmm. Well, you make a good team.”
Kim has noticed. A skua flies overhead, shrieking, and Kim’s shoulders crawl in sympathy.
≠≠
Joyce Messier’s words trouble Kim all the next day, because there *is* something wrong with Harry. The dead man is warping space around him. The hole in the church they discover is unsettling. A scientific anomaly, of course, but it is the silence of the dead, Kim’s body tells him. Which came first? Kim wonders Unnoticed, his wings unfurl from his back, and he shifts uncomfortably.
“HARDCORE!” Egghead says to Kim appreciatively. He points behind Kim, surely just to the hole in the world.
“It is, isn’t it?” Harry says, looking up. He looks down at Kim and does a double take. “Kim?”
With an enormous effort, Kim forces his wings back in. “Yes, detective?” he says through gritted teeth. It is not a comfortable feeling.
“I - nothing. I just thought I saw - huh.” He shakes his head, rubs at his eyes. “I guess the sound is messing with me. Or the lack of sound. Weird, huh?”
“Very weird,” Kim says. He glances back at Egghead, who grins at him. He gives Kim a thumbs up.
Kim needs to force the detective to move on, he thinks, trudging along behind him in the darkening winter dusk. This is *bad.* This is *very bad.* The man is going to bring the end of the world down on them. Apocalypse cop indeed. A cold wind whips up, whirling the man’s coat around him. No strange bloodstains. How did you die? Kim thinks again, not for the first time.
“Did you say something?” Harry asks, turning around.
“I said we should get back. Compare our notes,” Kim says. “Maybe get something to eat.”
“Okay,” Harry says, and blinks. “Hey, are you cold?” He wrestles off his jacket. “Here.”
“Detective, I can’t take your coat.”
“Go on, take it. I’m not cold. I can’t feel a thing.” He thumps his chest in his ridiculous mesh tank top.
This is insane, Kim thinks. He takes the coat. Then he drapes it over Harry’s shoulders. “Detective,” he says. “You will catch your death of cold.”
“No,” says Harry. “I don’t think so.”
“Oh?”
“If whiskey don’t kill me, then I don’t know what will-” he sings, and frowns. “That’s a song.”
“It certainly sounds like one,” Kim says, politely, as the detective digs a flask out of his coat, takes a drink, then offers it to Kim. Kim shakes his head.
“Let’s go check the phasmid traps one more time,” he says, and Kim sighs, and trudges after him.
≠≠
A few nights later, Kim invites Harry back to the Whirling to share a cigarette with him on the balcony. They are ten days in, and the detective is still dead, and he is still not decomposing. This is a good thing, at least for Kim’s olfactory sense. The detective breathes when he is smoking a cigarette. He cries. Kim has even seen him get an erection looking at the smut books at the bookshop. He runs, he dances, he shouts, he has these strange, unsettling insights. He does everything, in short, that an alive man does. But he is still dead.
Kim keeps forgetting the detective is dead, which is dangerous. But it’s so hard to remember, when the man walks, and talks, and even, upon overhearing disco on a passing radio, boogies around Kim in a neat circle. And he’s - well. He’s good company. I am losing my mind, Kim thinks. Kim has always been strange. Odd. Of course he has, he has fucking wings, and can tell when people are about to die, and can do something strange with their souls. He’s never really let anyone get close. How can you?
But he likes talking to the detective. And the detective likes talking to *him.* The man laughs, he makes sly little jokes, he looks at Kim with these eager eyes when Kim laughs, as if he wants to hear it again, and again. Kim finds himself wishing, very fiercely, that circumstances were different. That the man was *alive.* But if he was, Kim thinks, maybe he wouldn’t like me as much.
This way lies madness. Kim tries not to think about it. Kim tries not to think about much of anything, most days. He goes to work, and he hopes there are no dead bodies, and he writes his case notes, and he goes home, and he smokes a cigarette, and he waits for it to happen again.
The case is closing in on them. Kim can feel it. He invites the detective back for a cigarette at the Whirling-in-Rags, and they go up to the balcony and smoke together. The clouds are gone, and it is only the Coalition airships above. Harry leans on the railing and looks up at them at what looks like an uncomfortable angle.
Kim has been alone for so long. It’s selfish, he thinks, looking at Harry. His eyes glitter as if with life. He swings an arm, gesturing something he is saying, cigarette clamped in his teeth. “What?” he says, seeing Kim’s face. Kim tries to police his expression, but it’s too late. What have I shown?he thinks. He tries to calm his breaths as the detective gets closer, crowding him up. “Kim, what is it?”
“I - nothing, detective. Just thinking about the case.”
“You’re lying,” Harry says, his voice soft with wonder. He cocks his head to the side as if listening to something. “What else are you lying about?”
You. Me. Perhaps the very nature of the world. “Nothing,” Kim says, and Harry reaches out to take his arm. Even through Kim’s jacket, his grip is cold. Kim shivers.
“Tell me,” Harry says urgently. "I can take it.”
Does he know? Kim wonders wildly. Is he beginning to suspect? Suddenly, it is crucial that he does not find out. Harry shifts his grip and his fingers fall on the exposed gap of skin between Kim’s jacket cuff and his glove. Kim shudders. He can’t help it. The man is *so* cold.
Harry looks devastated, dropping his hand. “Wait,” Kim says, “detective-”
“I should go,” Harry says, and steps back, then again. “See ya, Kim” He waves a hand behind him. His shoulders are drooped, cigarette still smoldering. He’s not breathing, Kim can tell, even from behind. The smoke just leaks out of the cigarette. He doesn’t seem to notice.
Kim stands on the balcony and watches him until he’s out of sight. One more ghost on the shores of Martinaise.
≠≠
After Ruby shoots herself, Harry leads Kim, troubled, over to the swings on the shore. He sits, hand wrapped around the chain, and Kim stands above him, looking down. The sunlight is bright on his rough face, his skin beaten and savaged by alcoholism. Colorful. Not the skin of the dead. Yet his chest doesn’t move. “Kim,” he says, and his voice is very small, “sometimes I get the feeling that I shouldn’t be here."
“Nonsense,” says Kim briskly. “You have every much of a right to be here as - I do.” He shrugs. For all he knows, that’s true.
Harry hums. He looks at the sun glinting off the metal of the Coupris 40. “Something’s coming, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” Kim can feel it. He doesn’t have to be - whatever he is - to know that. He can feel it in the air. *Everyone* can.
“I’m scared.”
“I have your back. I promise.” Their eyes meet, and hold. His wings itch terribly, and he thinks for a second they’ve come out. Harry’s eyes flit behind him, then clear. He gets to his feet slowly. “Well, let’s go, Kim.”
≠≠
When the detective is shot at the tribunal, Kim thinks, this is it, this is how he dies, finally. But even as Kim kneels beside him, putting his hands on his cold thigh, his blood pours out, just as cold as the rest of him. How is this happening? Kim’s wings come out, mantling around Harry, protecting him, even as the man thrashes and moans. “No!” Harry roars, looking behind Kim, and raises his gun. Kim takes it. Even as he turns, he sees Harry reach out - he feels shaking fingertips just brushing his feathers - and he fires.
Titus Hardie helps him get Harry up to the room. “I don’t think he’s gonna make it,” he grunts. Harry’s chest doesn’t move, and Kim thanks him, and sends him away. He leans over him on the bed. He should do the stations of the breath. Now, while he lies still. While no one will question it. While those bright green eyes aren’t looking at him, when that crooked, yellowed smile isn’t turned his way, when he’s not croaking Kim’s name.
Kim can’t. Kim doesn’t. But he doesn’t know what to do, looking down at the dead man. He’s badly injured, and Kim doesn’t think the wounds of dead men heal. He won’t get better. He’ll stumble around the rest of his life with a shredded leg, and surely that will draw questions.
Kim reaches forward and puts his hands on Harry’s chest. His wings are out. They haven’t gone away. He thinks of the stations of the breath - of how it feels in his chest, in his fingertips - and then he forces himself to think of the opposite. Of that electrical sensation coming from Harry into him. Into his fingertips, his chest, his wings. He takes a breath in and holds it. And he pushes. He focuses on that feeling, forcing it from Harry into himself - and it’s strange; it’s a cold electricity; he is shaking and shaking, he thinks he will shake apart. He holds his breath for so long that his lungs burn, that he can feel his eyes bulge, and then, when he can’t take it any more, he lets go.
Kim sways, badly, and plants a hand on Harry’s chest to catch himself. Harry mumbles something and twitches. Kim’s head is pounding. He sees through a layer of red in his right eye. He lets himself fall forward, half on the bed, half on Harry, and passes out.
≠≠
The next day, Harry wakes up. Only partially. “Kim?” he rasps out, and Kim gets out of the chair pulled up next to the bed and comes over to him. “Harry,” he says. His leg has been - well, it’s healing. Kim can’t quite understand it. Harry reaches out, grunting, reaching for something above Kim’s head. Kim catches his arm before he can move around too much. “What are you doing?” he says. He thinks Harry says, halo. Then he touches Kim’s face. His hand is cold. His hand is so cold. The man, despite everything, is still dead. Kim looks down at him and very slowly leans into the hand on his face, feeling the chill seep through his aching head. It feels good.
“Kim,” Harry rasps, “Am I dead?”
Kim cycles through many answers. Then he decides on, “Not while I can help it.”
Harry smiles. Kim takes his hand in his own, presses it hard, and puts it back on Harry’s chest.
Harry passes out again. Kim pulls the chair a little closer, and, taking a seat, waits.