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How do I know what I don’t know?
This wasn’t a hard question for Harry. Exploring the world with Kim by his side. What Kim wouldn’t explain a kind or sometimes even not-so-kind stranger would step in. Between “you don’t know what money is?” and “what, were you born yesterday,” Harry was set on the questions front. These were easy. Stumbling through life with his natural born curiosity after everything that moves and breathes.
Jean says he had always been this way. It’s in his nature to be inquisitive, though, that’s not how he had put it. “Annoying” might’ve been a choice word. Like a dog that doesn’t know when to stop chasing.
Some things, though, need not to be explained. Some concepts his brain retains. Nothing of the home that he grew up in, nothing of the life he used to live. Bits and pieces, here and there. A boxer he admired, a song he loved.
In theory, returning home would’ve resolved many of these questions.
Case in point, when he got back after Martinaise, Jean had been livid with him. For a couple of reasons. Some… valid. Who can say, really? That had been a week ago, and Harry’s got some bigger fish to fry. Like the pile of paperwork on his desk or the demanding of retests from his higher-ups. And, most importantly, his state of affairs. He’s seen better days, apparently. He wouldn’t know. Could only hope it to be true.
“So what food did I like?” Harry asks Jean after a very long-winded rant. His cheeks are still flushed red from shouting after Harry had almost fainted midday in the office. Turns out, he’d forgotten to eat.
“Cigarretes, booze, speed,” Jean prattles off. “I think I saw you eat crackers once. No, wait. That was a raccoon.”
Which wasn’t very helpful. To say the least.
“What do you eat, Kim?” Harry asks one late night from the backseat. He leans forward with his hand on top of Kim’s headrest.
Kim eyes him for a moment before offering, “If you’re hungry, detective, I have a salad.”
One bite of a generously offered salad and the two of them are quick to come to the verdict that Harry Du Bois is not a fan of salads, and he is especially not a fan of the little round red things on top.
Returning home is not much of a help.
There was food — or must have been, at some point. Kim says that’s what would’ve attracted the bugs. He takes one step inside and refuses to go any further, not without crime scene gear, he says. Gloves, at the least.
Harry holds no such restraints and climbs through the mess of his one room apartment anyways. He finds caked over clothes, stuck together with an incorrigible stickiness. He finds empty takeout bags and porcelain bowls with something growing inside. Stains on the carpet, from what he can see of the carpet.
“You are not staying here,” Kim says decisively. “You would get an infection.”
“Oh, sweet, Kim! Sleepover at your place? Wait, where do you live—“
It was decided, at last, you would spend the night in Jean Vicquemare’s apartment. On the floor of his living room.
“Hell of a partner,” Jean tells Kim, who regretfully stands in the doorway as Harry makes a show of making himself comfortable within the mess of blankets. “You really transferred for this?”
“He does good detective work,” Kim says, eyes flickering down. His lips fall into a firm line, Jean following suit. “Is he—“
“Goddamn, Harry, you still have your boots on,” Jean is griping, stepping around the mess on his floor. He looks at the Lieutenant and adds, “Rest assured, Lieutenant. I don’t have bugs.”
“That wasn’t among my worries,” he says. Harry rolls onto his back with his bad leg in a position that certainly shouldn’t be comfortable.
That gains Jean’s attention, a sharp, “Then what?” His face visibly softens soon after. Kim lifts his head, not taking offense but also knowing better than to back down from the clear display of jealousy. The sharpness that waits for him there, if he pushes too much.
Underneath it all, a smugness that says you brought him to me.
“He hasn’t been eating,” is what Kim settles for at last.
“Half-dead things tend to not. I’ll take it from here. Goodnight, Lieutenant. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Harry sleeps on with an empty stomach. He does not know hunger yet.
In the morning he brushes his teeth, picks at the burnt toast with cold butter that Jean has offered him, and gets dressed.
“Most people brush their teeth after they eat.,” Jean says after spitting a glob of a blood-toothpaste mixture into the white of his sink. Harry is stood next to him with his hands entangled in his too-long, greasy hair. Harry stops to look at him in a deep pause, forgetting the knot he was brushing against with his thick fingers.
“Does my breath stink?” He asks so deeply earnestly that Jean for a second, for one measley, stupid and idiotic second — he leans in. He thinks about Harry in his good old days, when the world would knock him down but it wouldn’t hold him down for long. Sure, he had missed Dora back then, but he still… he wasn’t this. He knew what the world had been. Known what money is and known the name of the woman he wanted to marry but never did. Never could.
Jean leans into Harry only to put his hands against his chest, pushing him off of him. An unnecessary movement, he recognizes immediately after making it. He was the one that had moved.
“You could drink mouthwash and you’d still reek of the alcohol,” Jean says instead. He storms out of the bathroom and calls over his shoulder, as a half-second reminder, “Don’t drink the mouthwash!”
—
They take the train to work. It wasn’t that they couldn’t get a ride. Trant had offered and more than insisted he was happy to, despite being a busy man himself. Sometimes, the man seemed too eager to get away from his life at home, his wife and the kids. He doesn’t understand why most days because he knows he loves them, the most, and yet he spends his nights shoulder to shoulder under a star-filled sky.
But Harry’s back home, and Harry’s not doing well with a gunshot wound in his leg, and more than that, more than all of that, Harry is two weeks sober.
There was a night between then — when Jean had woken up in the night. Harry had gone out, had bought a bottle that he never opened. He’d found him wedged between alleyways and asking the bottle his mother’s name.
Jean doesn’t count that night. Two weeks sober, under Jean’s roof, and so they take the train to work, and they do not take Trant on his offer of a ride.
“Gotta give it to Mullen,” the shrieky voice of Chester Mclaine greets them. Torson’s behind him, watching and waiting, always observing and waiting for a chance to jump in. “If I woke up with no memory in this hellscape, I wouldn’t be so eager to get back into it.”
“Yeah,” Torson tacks on, laughing like he’s about to say something funny but can’t get the laughter to stop long enough for him to actually speak it into existence. “Yeah — bet he’ll take one look at a real case and decide to lose his memory all over again.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Jean snarls, looks to Harry to hurry up and minimize the damage. Instead, Harry’s face is… normal. Normal for him, anyways. No sign of fear, of concern for what lurks within the outskirts of his quieted mind.
“How many cases have you solved?” Harry asks, and Jean—
Jean doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t even think that he’s capable of making such a sound.
“More than you have sober — and—“
“I do my job drunk better than you do sober?” Harry guesses, and Chester’s face goes beet red.
“Fuck you, Mullen,” he says, all heat but when he knocks his hand against Harry’s shoulder he huffs, lifting his head in a strange way. “Good fucking luck to you and your partner out there. Don’t let him get fucked up.”
In their absence, Harry goes quiet, as he often does. Jean finds Kim across the bullpen, sitting in where Jean used to sit.
He supposes he can’t be too sad, knowing he got a promotion, after all. He’s a higher rank than Harry now, even though…. Even though a lot of his rank was because of Harry. The old Harry.
He has things that need to be said, but he waits. Waits and waits as Harry’s troubled mind sews it back together in the gaps of silence. Thinking. Learning.
“I’m ready to go out there,” Harry says instead of the question he was expecting.
“And die,” Jean says, leaning against the counter. He waits for Harry to laugh, but he doesn’t. “C’mon, Harry, you’re not ready. You’re one step away from crumbling apart, and what’s out there? Will kill you–”
“Good morning,” and in the short time Jean’s looked away, Kim must’ve abandoned his desk. He ignores the fact that he’s interrupted, more than likely because he does not want to address the topic at hand. “My apologies, Officer Vicquemare, it’s time for us to start. We have a case.”
“A case?” he can’t help but repeat. “Who gave you–”
“Jean, it’s okay,” Harry says, placing a hand on his shoulder that’s supposed to be comforting. It’s not in the least. “I’m not relearning anything in here.”
“God, Harry, what do I care?” Jean says, something within his chest cracking apart. “I trust you, Lieutenant Kitsuragi. It’s him I don’t trust to get you or himself killed. He doesn’t understand yet what we hunt. He got lucky in Martinaise that it wasn’t…”
Even now, he finds himself unwilling to say the word. Stupid, really, on his own part for not wanting to tell Harry what’s out there and what will try to kill him.
He tried once. Tried to explain to him among all those cryptids within his mind there is one that’s real. His response had been, of course, “They’re all real.”
Jean had foolishly tried to argue with that.
“I’ll take care of him,” Kim promises.
Jean watches them leave with a clenched fist.
–
Harry isn’t stupid. He understands and he picks on fast, even if there are deep abysses within his memory. Kim often tries to corral him back to the task, but sometimes he seems eager to indulge.
“Jean’s trying to protect you,” Kim says. “Now, can we stop dwelling on this and get back to the dead body?”
“Classic Kim,” Harry says, playfully knocking against his side. Kim doesn’t smile, pushes up his glasses, but Harry thinks he might’ve been fighting a grin. No way to tell.
The dead body is something worth getting distracted from. The body of a girl lays, carefully poised as if someone had put her there.
Harry kneels down next to her and brushes the hair off of her forehead.
“I don’t see any blood,” he says.
She’s pale. Pale and not like how the Hanged Man had been. If he hadn’t known better, he’d think she was just sleeping. Almost looking peaceful, if it wasn’t for the bruising around her neck. Carefully, he tilts her head back and finds among the bruises, two small marks.
“She was a drug user,” Harry says.
“What makes you think that?” Kim asks, barely looking up from his notebook. It’s blue, but it’s not the same one he had in martinaise. A new one. He must have filled its pages. Or maybe he likes to start a new one between cases. Or maybe something had happened to that last one, but more than likely, Kim seems like the type to start a new one, keep it organized, keep it fresh. His handwriting’s so messy, though, so maybe he isn’t as organized as he wants people to think.
“What happened to your old notebook?” Harry asks.
“Lost it,” he says. “Why do you think she was on drugs?”
“The dots on her neck, like she had inserted a needle.”
Kim pushes up his glasses. “A needle wouldn’t have left such a thick mark.”
The hypothesis that was already brewing sizzles away. It’s true. Too big of a hole to be from the gauge of a needle.
“Puncture wounds then? But if that was the case, there’d be a lot more blood.”
Kim settles back, watching. Waiting for Harry to come to the same conclusion he had already, perhaps before they’d even come out here.
“You think it’s one of them?” Harry asks, hesitating before the body. The name does not come easily to his lips.
“One of what, work of a cryptid?”
Harry’s head bobs as he mulls over the possibilities. Kim waits patiently as he always does, no matter how long it takes for Harry to act next.
But this doesn't ring clear to Harry. The voices chiming over one another inside of his head deter him elsewhere, as if tangible hands are pulling him away from the dead body.
“How many dead bodies have I seen?”
“Too many, detective.”
Harry hesitates.
“I’ve been remembering things, bodies, I remember… Have I seen her before?”
“They always manage to remind you of someone. Especially if you’re searching for their face.”
Harry shakes his head, not in disagreement but purely dismissal of the thought.
He knows he sees her. Dora. Sees her in places he shouldn’t. But kneeling over this body, it isn’t Dora that he’s seeing.
‘Let’s focus on what we see. Suspected cause of death?”
But Harry can’t reel himself back in. All he can think about is a set of holes in her neck and a dark, dark cloud within his mind.
His stomach lurches, and he fails to move quick enough. He barely manages to move away from the corpse before vomiting bile into the grass.
……..
In the process of rebuilding his mind, Harry has had to make a change. If you ask Gottlieb, he has a mile long list for Harry to partake in. Number one being avoid the drink, of course.
But that isn’t all there is to it. Moving his body, exercising his brain, pushing himself back his limits while also allowing himself to rest and recharge. It{s all essential to getting his life back. Or, in Harry{s case, building his life into something.
In the process of rebuilding himself, there{s been a piece of him left behind. A truth he does not yet want to face. He sits in front of a dinner table with Jean sat across from him, and his mind wonders. Far away.
‘That’s why I love to cook,’ Jean says while looking down at his drink. A juice. Non’alcoholic. ‘It really makes me happy to watch you staring off into space like my spaghetti has personally offended you.
Harry{s eyes flicker to him with a bit of surprise, pulled from his own thoughts.
“I got a bit sick today in the field. I don’t have the appetite for much.”
“You got sick because you haven’t been eating. You’re gonna feel shitty. That’s kind of how being alive works. Gotta breathe and eat. Pretend to be a person.”
“Jean, how was I… before?”
Not an unusual question. It’s also not something Harry hasn't asked before. It’s a question Jean doesn’t like to answer.
“An ass, drunk. Showed up late and was lazy when you were there. If you’re expecting compliments, I need you to get there first.”
Harry shakes his head.
“I know how I was… about that. But was I… I mean, you knew me for a while, did I seem like… I was keeping secrets?”
Jean stops abruptly, dropping his fork. “What is this about, Harry?”
“Did you ever see me eat?”
“Yes, Harry, I’ve seen you eat spaghetti before. My spaghetti even. Like the type that’s getting cold in front of you.” Jean, exasperated, points to the plate in front of him.
Something snaps - Harry moving his hand palm down against the table in a resounding slap. The juice in Jean’s glass slashes until it almost slashes over the edge.
For a moment, they’re in old times. The old Harry stares at him with this great facade in like he truly recognizes Jean. In a blink, it fades like it wasn't ever there in the first place. Like he’d imagined it.
Harry gets up from the table and doesn’t look behind him when he moves to the door.
And Jean–
Jean should let him go. He grits his teeth together and thinks of old gum on a sidewalk and how much Harry does not deserve to be saved. He thinks of a face he loved that does not remember him in a world where he has no choice but to rely on him.
But it isn’t about that. That no matter how much he hates him, no matter how much in this moment he wants to scream, he thinks at least he’s trying to be better.
Jean moves. He hits the table on his way. His side blossoms in pain but it doesn’t stop him from fervently yanking him against himself.
“Whatever you’re thinking,” Jean pants, breath catching up from the effort of reaching him- ‘Whatever you think that you are, or were, I’m trying like hell to put it behind me. And if I'm trying that means you don’t get to walk away. You don’t get that luxury.”
“...My luxury is remembering nothing about myself, my life. And yet my mind keeps conjuring up pictures of bodies.”
“You’re not a killer Harry.”
There’s a file in the precinct filled with all the names that Harry’s ever shot or killed or hurt or worse. But there’s also names, names upon names and names of people that he helped. Or people he saved.
He makes a promise tomorrow, tomorrow they’ll go over it.
–
Once the thought arrives, Harry can’t get rid of it. He mulls himself over the pictures his brain conjures up for him. He reads files upon files of who he’s saved, who he’s killed, and through all these lives all Harry can ask himself is did I do this? Am I one of them?
“You can’t blame everything on yourself the same way you can’t blame everything on a cryptid,” Kim tells him after one long breath of a cigarette.
“But what if it was me, Kim?”
Harry wilters under the mess he’s made of himself and his newfound friend, of dragging him out here to gaze upon the trees in the odd hours of the night.
A flash of white, and Harry is looking up at him, at the odd face Kim is making.
“You are not a vampire, Harry,” Kim stresses.
It’s not the being that scares him the most, the possibility that Harry has a side to himself he hasn’t yet seen. That’s simply everyday. There’s so much he doesn’t know and so much he needs to find out.
“I dunno, I bit Jean, so let’s give it some time before we rule that out,” Harry says, laughing too long before he realizes Kim is staring at him, cigarette shortening out between his fingers.
In the dark, Harry catches the flicker of moonlight against Kim’s rows of teeth. He calls his name, almost strangled on his lips, and in between blinks of an eye, movement.
"Kim, I think there was some better questions I could have asked you."