Work Text:
You and me always pick up where we left off, not missing a beat
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You get off work at 20:00 hours and go to spend your Friday night at le Chien - whose real name is lost to time, sign faded and half-destroyed, but everyone calls it la Maison du Chien, which had been shortened, over time, to le Chien. You and Harry used to go there Friday nights, not all of them, but often enough that you were regulars. Friday was nurses’ night, although the only nurse that ever looked twice at Harry - or at you when you were with Harry, the fucking cock-block - was the older one who looked nearly as rough as Harry did. Same mullet, too. She’d wandered over and told him he had the worst case of drunk’s flush she’d ever seen and didn’t it hurt? Baby, he’d croaked at her, my whole fucking life hurts. She’d asked if he could even feel his nose and made him close his eyes. She’d hovered her finger two millimeters away from his nose. “Tell me when,” she’d said, and wriggled it, pretending to touch the tip of his nose but not even getting close, and he’d said, when. You and her and looked at each other and she’d shaken her head. Then you’d bought her a drink and the three of you drank until Harry passed out, head down on the table, and she’d looked at you with bright and glassy eyes and said, “He’s going to die, you know.”
“I know,” you’d said.
Except nurses' night is cancelled now that they closed Central Jamrock Hospital - not enough funding, too many nurses stealing drugs, apparently - and so now it’s just two reál Pilsner drafts and the saddest songs on the jukebox you’ve ever fucking heard. You and Harry had once had a debate over it, you swearing that le Chien ordered the jukebox in fucking special, the Suicidetron 9000, but Harry had just said, “Jean, Jean,” sprawled half over the table, grabbing at your wrists to make a point, "Jean, every song is sadder when you’re drunk.”
“Don’t talk to me about sad,” you’d said.
“Don’t talk to me about drunk,” he’d said.
You liked le Chien, goddamnit, it had decent onion soup and plenty of free bar snacks, important on an RCM officer’s salary, and yes, alright, that one song you really liked on the jukebox, and cheap well drinks, and a good-looking pinup in the bathroom that someone - you suspect Harry, given that it was remarkably similar to his damned blue pen - had drawn a mustache and a set of chops on. The two of you were regulars, and everyone almost kind of liked you even though you were RCM, even though nobody fucking liked the RCM, not even the RCM.
You used to go there for hours because it was right around the corner from your apartment, and you could stumble back and keep drinking, switch to whiskey or do some speed or sometimes, if you were able to lift it from the evidence locker, pyrholidon, because you liked the way he’d take it from the tub as you held it, one hand bracing yours, the other dipping in. Because he asked you to. Please Jean, I would nab it myself, but you’ve got such clever fingers, and he’d wink at you, do the finger gun thing, and goddamnit, what you wouldn’t do to get those fingers on him, and he knew it. Besides, if you were stealing from the evidence locker, it meant he wasn’t in it, which meant you knew what he was taking, and after that time with that mystery powder that later got confiscated by the Moralintern and the fucking overdose - whatever it was, it was some good fucking shit, Harry had croaked at you after you had pushed on his chest hard enough to crack a rib and make him throw up - that was for the best.
So the two of you would go to le Chien and then you’d come back to your apartment and you’d get high on the couch, feet up on the coffee table. Sometimes his feet in your lap. You’d listen to the radio or the people on the street or sometimes both, and sometimes he would go over to the window and yell down at the people walking by, things like The world’s ending just fuck her already or the house next to yours is on fire, yes, you, blue jacket, go home, run, run! “What?” he’d said, when you’d looked at him after they’d run off. “It is. She gets back in time she can save her cat.” Or even, sometimes, just things like Fuck you or you look like a - and you’d haul him in the window by his jacket, laughing even as you said, goddamnit shitkid, I have to live here!
And then you’d wake up Saturday morning, late, his head on your shoulder or in your lap, sometimes on the floor, sometimes in your bed together, and you’d go out for breakfast and then separate for the weekend and you’d go home and worry all goddamn weekend what he was up to, and sometimes he’d call you and sometimes he wouldn’t.
But, of course, this hasn’t happened for three fucking months, because Harry doesn’t fucking remember le Chien or the Suicidetron 9000 or the way you’d listen to the ball game in the summer or the radio theatre broadcasts in the winter or the night your head had been in his lap and he’d stared down at you, eyes yellow from the pyrholidon, tracing your hair back from your face over and over and over again. He doesn’t remember saying, “Jean, I’m ruining you, aren’t I,” doesn’t remember you saying, “I don’t care, Harry, you can ruin every part of me,” doesn’t remember saying, “Careful, I might think you’re coming on to me,” doesn’t remember you saying, “Careful, I might think you’re not.” Doesn’t remember how he’d leaned forward so slowly then that you swore you heard his old man back creak, doesn’t remember kissing you, his mouth wet and hot, the absolute gentleness of it shocking you. Doesn’t remember how when he’d pulled back, he’d shuddered out a little breath over your lips. Doesn’t remember how he’d licked his lips and said, “Wow.”
Doesn’t remember how you’d said, “Yeah,” staring up at him. “Want to do it again?”
Doesn’t remember saying, “Yeah. Yeah, Jean-”
Harry doesn’t remember any of it. It’s been three months of him being back and not remembering a fucking thing - the theme of your fucking life, you think, what a goddamn joke. It’s hot as fuck. It’s hotter than you ever remember being. It’s so hot you think of filling your pockets with your commendation medal from work - the one you’d gotten from all the cases you and Harry had solved - filling your pockets with your medal and his too, some of his fucking paperweights maybe, and walking into the fucking river just to get some goddamn heat relief. Instead, you clock out - Harry long gone; Kitsuragi keeps him in check, doesn’t let him work any harder than Kitsuragi does himself, which is pretty damn hard, you’re forced to admit - and go down to le Chien and sit down in your usual corner and drink.
And one of the old guys at the bar - Lauren, you think; he and Harry had always talked building construction, or bitched about women - says, “Shit, we thought you two died! Went out guns blazing in some great big cock-sucking blaze of glory.”
Everyone laughs. You want to laugh too, but you can’t. You feel frozen, lead-heavy. “Good to see you too, asshole,” you say.
“Shit. Where’s your girlfriend?” He looks around.
And you remember how they all used to say that, and once Harry had said, “Shit, if anyone’s the girl, it’s him, all moody and shit,” so you’d picked him up like a girl, swept him off his feet, held him in both your arms, your chest heaving against him as he put his arms around your neck, batted his eyes, said, “Jean, I’m flattered, but-”
You say to Lauren, now, “The bitch fucking dumped me.”
“Ouch,” says Lauren, and signals to the bartender. “Vodka for this one. On me.”
So they get you drunk, all of them, and it’s almost like you don’t miss Harry at all, except - except - except you do. When you go to the bathroom you turn to the urinal next to you, ghosts of your old two-part jokes echoing unanswered in your head. Water’s cold. / Deep, too. The smirk, the chuckle. But Harry’s not there, just a stranger, and you look away, hurriedly. You keep leaving pauses in your conversation at the bar, but no one’s there to fill in the gaps, no one brags you up when you downplay yourself. No one saying how you solved the whole damn case, collared the suspect, saved your partner’s fucking life. No hand heavy on your shoulder, no one half-leaning on you, pressed up against you, hot and damp. You end up with your head on the bar at midnight, not knowing why you feel so uneasy, so wrong, and then you finally realize it’s because no one’s put that stupid fucking song on the jukebox which Harry always puts on about eight drinks in, and the reason Harry hasn’t done that is because he’s not fucking here.
You and Harry were all each other had. He was the only person in all of fucking Elysium who knew you. Your father was dead. Your mother didn’t remember you anymore, locked up in the asylum. She’s just an empty shell, the Pale-disease having eaten away at her memories, having taken away everything that made her her. Entropocists knew enough to know it was hereditary, some sort of Pale-creeping through bloodlines, but they didn’t know enough to treat it. You wonder, sometimes, if it’s why you feel so empty, like you’re a husk being eaten away. If this is just the disease creeping up on you. She had been the same as you are now, when you’d been growing up. First, you’d thought it had been your father’s death, hit by a fucking train - which at first you had thought had been an accident, and then, as you had gotten older, had thought maybe it hadn’t been - and then you had thought, as you had gotten older, that whatever was wrong with her had been your fault.
Turns out it wasn’t. Turns out you’ve got something to look forward to yourself.
You visit her, sometimes, in that awful fucking place at the edge of the Valley of the Dogs. It doesn’t matter how little you visit her, you tell yourself. She doesn’t remember anyway. The place is hard to get to by bus. You used to take the Coupris 40, sometimes, before Harry fucking trashed it. This difficulty was by design; the disease, in addition to being hereditary, was also contagious if brain matter was ingested. There was a special burying ground for those with the disease; you couldn’t burn them, because the thinking was that the disease would go airborne. Wild animals got at the corpses, sometimes. The ones whose families weren’t rich enough to bury them in concrete caskets. You know. Like your mother. You’d see the dogs sometimes roaming the valley, half-mad and frothing, attacking anything that moved.
What memories do animals have to lose, you wonder? What sense of self?
You had wondered - you had been terrified - that Harry’s sudden and complete memory loss had something to do with you. You’re still not entirely sure that it doesn’t, despite Harry and Kitsuragi’s explanations. You’re still not sure that it’s not something he had caught from you when his mouth had been on your neck, his teeth in your shoulder -
You wonder how old you’ll be when it hits you. The Pale-disease. Early sixties, like your mother had been? You wonder what the last memory you will be able to hold onto will be before you eat your fucking gun and stop the Pale from multiplying endlessly in your head. You think it will be that night with Harry, the windows open, so slow, his voice murmuring your name, Jean, Jean, over and over again.
You have no one else, is what you’re getting at. No one but Harry. You’ve pushed everyone else away. And now you don’t even have him. Now, with his memories gone, no one knows you. You could lose your memory, could reinvent yourself like Harry into a new man, but you get the feeling your body will still remember. Your worthless fucking dopamine receptors. Just look at Harry’s body, how it still seems to remember. The way he falls into position next to you on the rooftop at the precinct, leaning on his right forearm so he can face you as you smoke, even as he shoots you nervous looks. Like a blustering pound dog, unsure of his new home. Or the way, when you cuff a suspect, he comes to their right, takes their arm as you take their left, moving in tandem. The way you watch each other’s backs on patrol. You’d been partnered together for a few disastrous weeks until Kitsuragi’s transfer had come through, and when Harry was talking, really into it, his legs would fall in line, and you’d walk the old route just as you’d used to, Rue de Fauborg to the Shades to the Second Street bridge over the Esperance, because there was that one duck there he’d always feed scraps of his lunch. Even though he didn’t remember it. “Jean-” he’d broken off, staring, “does that duck know me?” And you’d fucking laughed and he’d grinned tentatively until you’d said, “The fucking duck, Harry, the duck is what you remember?” And his grin had faltered as his eyes had traced your face before you had turned away, kicking a rock towards the duck, which waddles a few steps, flapping its wings and grousing at you.
So you leave le Chien because you’re good and drunk and the person you want to see isn’t there anyway, he’s fucking, he’s fucking playing board games with perfect fucking speedracer Kim Kitsuragi, or he’s, he’s fucking knitting or something, or he’s drunk in the gutter, staring up at the heavy clouds and not thinking of you at all.
You go home, weaving a bit. You stumble up the steps and fumble with the lock before you get in. No Harry close behind you, no breath hot on the back of your neck, no c’mon, Jean, I gotta piss, no, what, are you drunk or something? You turn on the radio just for the noise, windows open to the hot stinking still night, and you think about getting high, but fifty-fifty it’ll just make you feel worse, so you get another glass of vodka and go lay in bed and fall asleep with it on your chest.
You wake the next morning with it all over your chest and stomach and sheets. You curse, and roll over onto the glass, and curse again. Then you get up, and strip the sheets. It’s early, before 08:00 hours, and in the heat almost no one’s up yet. The apartments below and next to you are silent. You feel like shit, heat pounding, head in a vise, mouth dry and dead. The light is too bright, too cold, cutting in your windows and falling across the street, up the front of the building across the way. You’re out of coffee, have been for weeks. You’ve been drinking it at the station instead - saves you seven reál a week, easy - but there’s a bottle half full of warm flat soda on the counter. Thanks, past Jean. You drink it in the shower, the water mostly cold as you brush your teeth, wash yourself. You turn it to ice water to rinse off, to try to shock the empty feeling out of you. It doesn’t work, of course. You pull on a pair of boxers and a shirt, take your shitty fucking soda and slump into the window seat, leaning your temple against the cool plaster wall. The radio still plays, quiet jazz, something pretty that feels out of place in the morning. You stare down the street, thinking nothing, feeling nothing.
Some time later - four songs, five, six, you don’t know, they all blend together - you see a man running down the street in the direction of your apartment. Your cop hackles rise, but his pace is slow instead of frenzied, the posture of a man doing this for fun, or, at least not of a man running because he’s committed a crime. Fuck. He looks like Harry. Fucking hopeless idiot, seeing him everywhere. And then, as he gets closer, you realize it is Harry. He’s got an awful fucking lime green bandanna on, a cut-off shirt, tiny shorts. He’s just going to keep going, you think. He doesn’t even remember you live here.
But his body does, apparently. He looks up. He sees you in the window. He waves, obnoxiously. And then - “oh, no,” you groan, “fuck, shitkid, not today-” but it’s too late; he’s disappeared from sight, going to the front door. He buzzes to be let in.
You open the door, leaning on the frame, soda in hand. You don’t miss how he checks you out. How could you? It’s like he wants you to see, slow and heavy and appreciative. He is red-faced and glistening, shirt damp over his chest. He smells like sweat. No booze.
“What, forget where you live again?” you ask.
Something flutters across his face and then he chooses to grin at you. Those exercise endorphins always make him soft and affectionate. You used to work out together. A long time ago. “I thought I could use your shower. And some water,” he says.
“Did you?” you ask, but you move aside and let him in. He looks around as he follows you into the kitchen. You say, “Oh, for-” and push past him to get a glass out of the cabinet, because he doesn’t fucking remember where they are, does he, even though he’d been the one to rearrange everything, high as fuck last fall, because he said the flow worked better. You had been lost in your own house for months after that, sometimes being surprised when you opened a cabinet while thinking of something else, and things weren’t where they were supposed to be. You’d wondered if that’s what it will be like as your mind slowly empties out, when the time comes.
When you turn around with a glass of water, Harry’s looking serious, grin gone, his eyes glittering in the half-shadow of the kitchen. “Jean, I don’t - did I spend a lot time here?”
You want to say, a lot. Or, not as much as I hoped you would. Or, fuck, Harry, you practically fucking lived here when you weren’t off trying to drink yourself to death, something he always did alone, like a wounded animal. Like the dogs you see skulking around the edges of the scrubby woods as you walk up the long road to the home your mother is in -
Instead, you hold the glass out. He takes it from you, his fingers hot and damp and nearly steady. “I couldn’t fucking get you out of here,” you say. “Shower’s on the left.” You gesture. “I’ll get you a towel.”
You feel him watching you as you walk into the bedroom. You have a decent amount of his clothes here - by the end, you had been doing his fucking laundry for him, because if you had to ride penned up in the fucking Coupris 40 with him, you wanted his clothes to at least be clean. You pull out a pair of shorts, a ragged Grand Couron High shirt, a pair of briefs with holes between the elastic waistband and soft cotton. You take them and a towel into the bathroom for him. He’s left the door cracked, and you can hear him in there, the water going, the smell of your soap seeping out of the room, Harry half-singing some song you don’t recognize.
“Jean?” he says, when you push the door the rest of the way open, breaking off from his song, but you don’t say anything. You can’t. You feel so empty; you don’t even know what to say to him, the old rhythms of your conversation gone.
When he comes out into the living room, you’re back in the window seat, head pressed to the screen, bowing it out. Serves you right if you fall out and die.
“It’s only the second floor,” says Harry behind you. “You’ll probably make it, unless you manage to fall head-first.”
“Goddamnit, shitkid,” you say. He comes over to you, close. You can feel his heat, smell the clean scent of your soap, his flesh behind it. His thigh presses against your arm. He says, “I think I remembered something.”
“Oh yeah?” you say, expecting a dissertation on the Grand Couron zoo, or rugby, or the fucking OO. “What’s that?” He doesn’t answer immediately. You twist to look up at him. There’s something in his eyes that takes your breath away, and then -
He leans down, slowly, as if he’s trying to give you time to back away. Not that there’s anywhere to go. And then he kisses you. He tastes like he’s just brushed his teeth - with your fucking toothbrush, your fine-honed detective skills tell you - and his mouth is sweet and gentle, his tongue cool as it brushes yours, then again. A faint breeze comes in the window and over your skin, and you shiver, and he smiles against your mouth. You pull him closer, then, hands fisting in his shirt, pulling him half on top of you in the window seat that is too small for one grown man, let alone two. The breeze comes in, the sound and smell of the city pressed against your skin everywhere Harry isn’t. This, you think, as he makes a noise into your mouth, hand pushing into your hair, this will be the last memory that lingers. The very last thing I will ever want to remember. The thing that will make you you for as long as you can hold onto it.