Work Text:
Your new temporary partner nearly brains himself stumbling down the splintered stairs of the Whirling-in-Rags before you can even speak a single word with him, nursing what looks like the single-worst hangover in the history of mankind.
He’s looking worse for wear, but you’re not too worried. So maybe he’s had a rough night, it happens. Not to you, and certainly not on the job, but it does happen, to a lot of people every day. This doesn’t mean this man isn’t a capable detective. In fact, with the whole pissing contest between your stations, you’re sure the 41st would have sent their best man.
This all goes out of the window when you witness your partner’s argument with the cafeteria manager, during which you learn that he has not only forgotten about the murder case but also about his own name as well as the entire concept of money.
Suddenly, you start to have serious doubts about whether you’ll manage to solve this case.
It doesn’t take long for the 41st’s finest to prove you wrong. His methods are unorthodox, his thought processes impossible to follow, and he’s getting sidetracked more often than not. But when he does lock onto something related to the case, he’s relentless and it becomes nearly impossible to pry him away from whatever detail he’s chosen to fixate on.
His method of questioning witnesses (and anyone else who crosses your path) is fascinating to watch, even though you’re not sure he’s even aware that he has a method. He asks and asks and when something catches his attention, he pulls at the thread until it unravels, and when it tangles up along the way, he carefully tucks it into a corner of his mind and comes back to take it apart later armed with a pair of scissors.
It’s effective, and despite the numerous dead-ends, despite the challenges thrown into their way (like the detective’s missing badge and gun), you start to feel like you’re making genuine progress, like you actually have a shot at solving this case.
And despite all of this, you don’t even know his name. But then again, neither does he. You didn’t believe the Raphaël Ambrosius Costeau business for a single second.
Harrier Du Bois. An odd name for an odd man. Oddly fitting, too, although you say the name exactly once and go right back to calling him detective (even though you now both know that he outranks you).
A Lieutenant Double-Yefreitor. The 41st’s finest, indeed. You can see it, actually. Beyond the wreckage of a sad, broken man, you can see the formidable detective he was before he drank himself into amnesia. That detective is not as far gone as he thinks.
You work without a partner. You’ve worked without a partner since–
It’s your rule. One of many, many rules you’ve made for yourself and make yourself stick to, a rule you’ve never broken.
Until now. Until Lieutenant Double-Yefreitor Du Bois.
Little by little, he chips away at the carefully constructed wall around your heart. You can’t tell if he’s doing intentionally or not. You’re not sure which option you prefer.
Inexplicably, you’ve liked him since you first met him, despite the less than flattering first impression he’s made. But that in itself isn’t unusual, you’re not some bitter, miserable bastard who hates everyone. You like plenty of people. From a distance. On a purely professional basis.
That is the sort of relationship you expect to have with the detective, too. Friendly, professional. Except, it seems, the detective did not get the memo.
He latches onto you almost immediately. Kim, look! Kim, what do you think? Kim, my necktie is talking to me.
It bothers you, at first, the casual use of your given name. Why doesn’t he respect you enough to use your title, you wonder? You’ve dealt with your fair share of disrespect, for looking Seolite, for being small and scrawny and wearing thick glasses, for being homo-sexual. But the detective doesn’t seem the sort who puts a lot of value on any of those things, so why won’t he see you as his equal?
Eventually, you figure out that it isn’t a matter of respect, that the detective does not care about titles at all, neither yours or his own, and that he does in fact respect you a great deal.
He likes you, plain and simple, and that’s why he keeps calling you Kim.
It’s exhilarating, this much attention from a man this extraordinary. The way he’ll keep looking back to make sure you’re following. The way he shares his jumbled, messy thoughts with you, freely and without fear of judgment or mockery. The way he takes one look at the man in a wig and sunglasses who is so clearly his actual partner and declares, immediately, “Kim’s cooler than you”, and the way he dedicates his (honestly not half-bad) rendition of that depressing song he found to “my partner, Kim.”
He thinks you’re the coolest person alive, for some reason. And maybe you shouldn’t feel as flattered about it as you do, considering he only knows about twenty people in the entire world right now. But nobody’s ever said anything like this about you before, and you’re only human after all, so yes, you’re flattered.
All your life, you’ve been watching from outside. At the orphanage, where the older children pushed you around, and the younger children thought you were a stuck-up buzzkill. At the 57th, which kept you working juvie for fifteen years, where your colleagues would laugh at you behind your back.
You got a taste of something else, briefly, when Eyes came along. For the first time in your life, someone liked you, cared about you, voluntarily spent time with you.
“You and me, Kitsuragi, partners! What do you say?”
That’s all in the past now, your one shot at happiness gone, and you thought you’d never get to have anything like it again. You’re too cold, too closed off, you’re off-putting by design. You made yourself that way. Intentionally, unintentionally, it doesn’t really matter.
But the Lieutenant Double-Yefreitor forgot about the concept of social conventions, along with everything else, and so he sneaks past all of your defenses because he simply does not seem to notice them.
He gets you to do things you would never do under normal circumstances. Dancing to anodic music in an abandoned church. Wearing a jacket with a disturbingly fitting slur. Telling him about your past experiences with pinball. You even make tentative plans to let him help you tinker with the Kineema, after all this is over.
You have to keep reminding yourself that this is all temporary, this partnership. It’s too easy to forget.
As it turns out, all this newfound happiness is making you stupid.
Things go terribly, horrifically south, which isn’t really much of your or the detective’s fault at all, but you’re still caught in the middle of the fallout.
The mercenaries aren’t going to leave without spilled blood today. You realize this at the same time as the detective, who opens fire not with a gun but an honest-to-god spirit bomb concocted from alcohol so strong it would leave anyone who drank it blind, and the necktie that allegedly talked to him all this time.
Things decline rapidly from there. Shots are exchanged, people die – someone dies in your place, again – but when Harry goes down, you lose sight of everything else.
For a moment, it’s not Harry but Eyes, bleeding out on the ground, and your breath catches in your throat. But then you blink and chase away the ghosts to deal with the much more pressing present before that, too, turns into something that will haunt you for the rest of your days.
It’s making you stupid, all this newfound happiness, because you drop to your knees at his side, turning your back towards the ongoing firefight. It goes against everything you know, against all common sense, but you cannot risk taking your eyes off Harry.
He’s disoriented and in tremendous pain, but when you drop down next to him, his eyes find yours immediately.
In this moment, you know that you cannot, under any circumstances, stand to lose this man.
His gaze remains locked onto you even as he keeps babbling nonsense, which you encourage because as long as he’s talking, he’s not dead, and you have time. But then, he looks away from you, behind you, eyes widening in horror at the same time at the same time as the hairs at the back of your neck stand up.
For a man actively bleeding out under your desperate hands, he’s quick, iron focus on the danger behind you as he pushes his gun into your hands. You take it and fire it behind you without even looking. If Harry says there’s danger, then there’s danger, and you won’t doubt it for a second.
De Paule doesn’t go down without a fight – from the way your vision doubles and your surroundings spin, you can tell the concussion she gives you is a nasty one – but in the end, you remain standing with a new kill count of 7 and she lies still in a pool of her own blood.
It should disturb you, adding another death to your count, but you only have eyes for your partner. He’s unconscious, unresponsive to your voice, your hands all over him. You get him upright on your own, even though your head spins and your legs threaten to give out under you, but then you hit a wall when you attempt to drag him inside.
You manage all but two steps before your knees buckle, your battered body simply refusing to bear Harry’s weight. You nearly take him down with you as you sink to your knees, but someone catches him before he hits the ground.
Disoriented, you take longer than you should to identify the figure holding him up. Titus Hardie, face grim and grief-stricken, has his arm around your partner while he waits for you to regain your bearings.
You nod to him with gratitude. He nods back. After today, you have an understanding, a newfound mutual respect. Together, you silently drag Harry up the stairs.
“My room,” you pant once you’re upstairs. Harry’s room is a pigsty and will kill him faster with an infection than his own questionable life choices. You deposit him on your bed instead, and then Titus Hardie leaves you alone with him.
For a moment, you can only sit and stare at him, your mind devoid of coherent thought. It’s all just a mess of Harry, Eyes, Harry, don’t leave me, and you take a moment to let yourself feel the entirety of your despair.
Then, you take a deep breath and banish Kim, who is hurt and angry and so, so scared, to a faraway corner in your mind. Lieutenant Kitsuragi is in charge now, and he knows exactly what to do with a bleeding bullet wound.
You work mechanically, numb as you dig the bullet from his thigh. You ignore his pained moans even in unconsciousness. Your hands are shaking because of your concussion. There’s a cut on your temple, bleeding sluggishly since De Paule hit you in the head with the butt of her rifle. It’s the concussion and the blood loss, making you jittery. You’ll have to take care of the head wound as soon as Harry is tended to.
The first aid kit in the bathroom is barely stocked, so you make the tremendously difficult trek downstairs to grab the one from your Kineema, which has miraculously been spared from any stray bullets or spirit bombs.
You make a wide berth around the pool of Harry’s blood, and you pointedly do not look at it as you pass. Only when you are opening the door and your gaze falls on the radio, it occurs to you that you need to report to your precinct about everything that happened.
Nausea rolls through your stomach abruptly. Damn concussion, you think, and decide that you’ll deal with your station later. Right now, your partner needs to be taken care of. Anything else can wait.
When you go back inside, the cafeteria manager eyes you in a way that is supposed to be subtle but is not subtle at all. He looks a lot like he wants to ask you a question, so you speed up and hurry back up the stairs before he can open his mouth.
Later. You will deal with all this later.
Only, later turns out to be after you’ve bandaged up Harry’s leg and checked his breathing (there is nothing wrong with it, not the first time you check, and not the fifth either), after you’ve pulled the flimsy hotel blanket over him, after you’ve haphazardly cleaned up the cut on your temple. After all of this, you want nothing more than to drag a chair next to the bed and put your head down on the mattress, just for a bit.
You pride yourself on holding a tight grip on your vices. The things you want are seldom things you need, and so, you do not usually indulge in them.
Today, however, your body moves without much input from your brain at all, and you fall asleep in your chair as soon as your head hits the mattress.
Not only does Harry not die, but he is also out of bed way sooner than is advisable with a leg injury this severe. You don’t do much to discourage it, however, both because you really, really need him to solve this damn case, and because your hands are shaking so much with excess energy that you need to get out of this hotel room or you’ll explode.
Between his leg and your concussion, the two of you make a sorry pair as you limp around Martinaise. But the Lieutenant Double-Yefreitor’s mind is, well. Calling it sharp as ever wouldn’t be accurate, maybe just as unhinged as ever, but it gets the job done.
Before you know it, you’re on the way to an island off Martinaise, following the hot trail of Klaasje’s parting gift while blasting SadFM out of a boombox, because why the fuck not.
The detective runs around the island like a man possessed, despite the fact that he can barely walk and you can barely think. But none of that matters when you find the killer, the true killer of THE HANGED MAN. It has to be him, if it isn’t him then you’re well and truly and thoroughly fucked because then you’ll be all out of leads, but you’re certain it’s him. More importantly, the detective is certain it’s him, and when the detective is certain of something, he’s usually right.
Like when he was convinced that the woman going about her day by the bookstore had a missing husband. Or when he insisted that the secret passage behind the blue door was connected to the case.
Or when he happily joined the hunt for a cryptid that turns out to be very much fucking real and standing right in front of you.
It’s enough to make you forget about the confession he just wrangled from the old, broken man on the island, at least for a little while. It also makes you wonder if your head injury is more severe than you initially thought. The detective sees it too, but that’s not much of a comfort, considering he’s not exactly a poster child for mental wellness.
At the very least, you’ve got a picture. If it turns out to be blank later on, when you’ve recovered from your brain damage, well. You’ll deal with that when it comes to it.
None of that matters, anyway. The detective did get the confession, can-opened the man so thoroughly that the case is officially solved.
“We did it, Kim,” your partner says, exhausted and in pain but grinning at you, and, oh. Your partner. Your temporary partner, except. The case is closed, which makes you officially not partners anymore.
You don’t know why this bothers you so much.
Through sheer stubbornness and willpower, you suffer through the debrief with the 41st, complete with constant antagonizing from Satellite-Officer Vicquemare, which goes on your frayed nerves something terrible and you really just want to fucking sit down.
He’s not antagonizing you, oh no. You, he seems to hold in high regard. It’s Harry he’s ribbing on, back and forth until the whole story of Harrier Du Bois comes to light. Some things make a lot more sense now, like the constant running around and the surprising physical strength hidden away behind layers of fat and alcoholism. Or why he’s so good with horrible children like Cuno. Or the bone-deep sadness he carries with him everywhere he goes.
You’ve only known this man for a week, but you feel like it’s been a lifetime. Funnily enough, for him and his fractured memories, it has actually been a lifetime. Which is why it makes sense for him to look at you like this, brows furrowed, eyes big and wet like a lost puppy, as he comes to the same conclusion you did:
This is it. The end of your partnership.
It makes sense for him to be distraught about it. As far as he’s concerned, he’s known you all his life. You’re the person he’s spent the most time with since waking up without his memories. He’s imprinted on you like a baby bird.
It makes absolutely no sense for you, however, to be distraught about it. You knew this was temporary. In fact, the only reason why you agreed to it was the knowledge that it was temporary. This wasn’t a new partner, a replacement, this was a collaboration between two precincts with an officer you were never going to see again.
The 41st’s finest was not supposed to be someone you want to keep in your life.
“Lieutenant Kitsuragi,” he asks, choosing to use your title now for whatever fucking reason. You don’t like it. You want him to keep calling you Kim. “ What will you do now?”
You answer in the way that is expected. Write a detailed report on this case. Then, talk to your captain and try to figure out how to stop whatever it is that is brewing in Revachol.
You are not prepared for what he says next.
“Want to do that at Station 41?”
You play dumb, because surely he cannot mean…
Except, he does. “Come work in Precinct 41.”
You hesitate, voicing some concerns, which prompts Vicquemare and Minot to reassure him that they would be flattered, that there is plenty of work for him to do, but you don’t care about any of that.
You only care that Harry, who has known you for all of five days, which is synonymous with all his life, who likes you and sees you, who thinks you’re the coolest person alive and who dedicated a song to you, wants to keep seeing you every day.
You… want it, you realize. And the things you want are never things you need, so you don’t let yourself indulge. But maybe, just this once… you do need this, you think. You haven’t felt this alive in a long, long time.
If you let Harry into your life, you’re going to get can-opened. You’re sure of this. He’s going to paw at the threads of your soul until he catches hold of one, and then he will pull and pull until you unravel. The thought terrifies you, but there’s also a flicker of something like relief.
“I will consider it,” you don’t say, but you don’t need to say it for him to know. You can tell by the way his eyes light up and he beams at you.
You fill in the transfer request form that same night, because as it turns out, there’s not much to consider at all.