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VOLITION: It’s finally here.
EMPATHY: The day we've all been waiting for.
HALF-LIGHT: You’re so anxious it’s making you a bit dizzy.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: But excited too. Near delirious with joy. You’re dizzy-happy, little dopamine bullets bouncing around your skull.
PERCEPTION: You’re waiting outside your new building, chewing your nails and watching the cars passing. There’s a bag of groceries hanging off your elbow, yellow plastic handles straining under the weight. The top of a bottle of fruit juice poking out of the top, cherry juice, deep and red. Kim has the only current set keys so you have to wait for him to let you in; you’re getting a new one cut, and a spare just in case, but for now you’re left waiting for him to escape the traffic on the 8/81 from GRIH and find you there.
Leaning on a grey metal lamp post. Trying to make yourself relax.
CONCEPTUALISATION: Growing up the side of it like a weed.
EEMPATHY: Arms folded over your chest like you’re trying to stop your heart from leaping out of it.
CONCEPTUALISATION: If you were a dog your tail would be wagging like mad.
PERCEPTION: The building is nothing much to look at from outside. There’s a handful of little plants growing around the door, dandelions persistently forcing themselves up through the cracks in the ground and a bank of forget-me-nots sprawling out from the narrow dirt crack between the side of the building and the pavement. From your lamp post-leaning perspective, you can see up into what will soon be your kitchen window. Damp-stained blinds block your wandering eyes from crawling fully inside. A beautiful view of the Jamrock ring road and the local Frittte!. The street is lined with trees, one of those lovely Revacholian quirks; these were always meant to be luxury flats for luxury people, elegant and young like the silvery trees, divided and subdivided, sliced and diced and sectioned until you end up with your little four room apartment. Living room, kitchen, toilet, bedroom. All you need packed up inside those four walls.
INLAND EMPIRE: You’ll do the washing up there every evening now, instead of letting it pile up for days on end, looking out of that window across the Jamrock ring road and the angry MC drivers leaning on their horns at each other, at the mums and their kids walking by on the street down below; his presence makes it easier for you to remember to take care of yourself. It’s different when there’s someone else to look after. You’ve got your radio situated- that was one of the first things you loaded up into the Kineema during the move, the most beloved of all your possessions. You’ll stand there elbow-deep in lukewarm water and lemon sherbet-scented bubbles, watching the summer evening sun catch on the iridescent surface tension, turning them yellow and cyan and magenta, and listening to the disco hour on Oldies Fm. Kim’s sewing machine whirring in the other room, the soft sound of him humming to himself in time with the shunk-kerchunk of the needle churning in and out of the fabric. Your tastes in music are different but he loves the radio just as much as you do.
INTERFACING: So many knobs and buttons and sliders. Tinkering to get the sound just right. This radio has so many different settings, so many things to tune just so.
Apparently before the memory loss, you were a bit of an audiophile.
INLAND EMPIRE: It had made a great excuse for you to invite Kim over at first, before you realised that he was just as obsessed with you as you were with him. Want to come over and work on the radio? My superior sound system? It took weeks, months, before you realised you didn’t need to have an excuse. He would jump at the invitation every time, tamping his excitement with a sharp nod and a small near-invisible smile. Entirely aware of your excitement and juddering internally just as much as you, but keeping that cool calm exterior up just for the fun of it.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: Answering all your probing questions with a shrug, feeding you little morsels of information about himself, teasing until you wanted to tear your hair out.
INLAND EMPIRE: You’ll play music for him on the radio- disco songs he hasn’t heard before. Bare feet on the cool tiles floor. You’ll dance together in the tiny galley kitchen, turning circles in your socks with your arms tight around his waist. Main lights turned off and lit up only by the lights from the street outside where they pour through the windows. Your eyelashes turning yellow where the unnatural electric glow catches them. Holding him impossibly close, within the four walls that you share, trying to communicate with every careful touch of your hand against the small of his back that he’s home. He’s safe. And you love him.
INTERFACING: You’ll bake bread. A light, careful touch, kneading it to perfection. Tasty bread, brioche and sesame bread and focaccia too.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: So much better than the cheap storebought kind that you usually buy.
EMPATHY: The dense heavy kind of brown bread with the seeds and grains on top that Kim likes, too, just for him, although you hate the way that the linseeds get stuck in your teeth. It’s worth it, though, for something Kim will enjoy. He’s not good at asking for things he wants, so you just rely on us to tell you.
Took him far too long to start picking up what you were putting down at first, before you got together.
LOGIC: Oh, no, he was picking it up. Playing the long game.
EMPATHY: He’s perceptive. Quiet. He doesn’t crow about it, like you do, but he sees a lot and he knew exactly what you were doing. He just didn’t want to let you in on the secret.
HALF-LIGHT: Driving you mad. Or madder than usual.
EMPATHY: He hadn’t made up his mind yet on whether he wanted to acknowledge it. The little glowing ember of something between you.
VOLITION: You’re so glad that he eventually did. Now you’re here! The benefits of always pushing forward!
And now look at you. You’re here; you made it. Standing on the street outside the flat that you’re going to share, holding a bag of groceries that you’re going to use to cook dinner for the pair of you, while Kim heads over to his old place in the Greater Revachol Industrial Harbour to grab the last of his minimal personal effects. This is it. It’s final.
EMPATHY: You’re absolutely buzzing.
INTERFACING: And you’re excited to have a functioning oven to work with, after your old apartment. Almost every appliance in that place was either entirely non-functional or made horrific groaning sounds every time you tried to use it, and your attempts at repair had only led to more weird noises. Even Kim had failed to get your oven working again.
PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: You’d been living on takeout and sandwiches for the last month and doing no favours to your already-strained heart. You’ll be able to cook again, something protein and fibre-rich; muscle food, Coach!
INLAND EMPIRE: You like cooking, you’ve found, when you’re able to do it. It surprised you when you first came back to your apartment; not the piled-up unwashed dishes, mould-caked and covered over with a rich grey pelt, or the piles of takeout containers all red and oily and smelling heavily of something musty and bad, but all the cookery books on the shelf above the fridge. You had a weird assortment of spice mixes and oils, too, bought cheap at the chaotic Jamrock Market. Unlabelled jars of bright powders, red and green and vibrant yellow, that you had to identify by smell because the old you had not bothered note down the contents. A bottle of a brilliant pinkish red liquid that had turned out to be raspberry vinegar, another of some green sludgy concoction that smelled herbal and sour.
Multiple cookery books, well used and well loved once, with red sauce daubed on some of the pages. A big hardback book of Comforting Dishes from Across the Pale, a scrawled message written on the inside in handwriting that you can’t quite decipher. Dear Harry, you can just about make out at the top. Some scrawl that you can’t read- sorry you’re leaving, happy birthday, just saw this and thought of you, something like that. An illegible signature and then three neat kisses. A smaller pamphlet-style booklet with staples jagged at the spine, full of protein packed post-workout snack recipes. The little blue logo in the corner reads MUSCLE:GYM, a freebie from a trial session perhaps. Another older recipe book sits balanced on top of the others, not slotted properly onto the shelf, held together with a couple of rubber bands. It smells of sugar. It is a book thick with extra pages pasted in- recipes added in from magazines, from the backs of packets, from old Coalition-issued pamphlets on how to get through food shortages dating back to your childhood. A mother carefully cropping out recipes from her magazines promising nourishment for growing boys.
LOGIC: Your mother’s cookbook. It has to be.
CONCEPTUALISATION: A connection to a woman who exits in your memory only as a soft pink-white shape. A warm body, standing back-lit in front of a bedroom door, murmuring goodnights. Not with the glow of a stained glass window, but the fabric softness of a child’s soft toy.
EMPATHY: She’d like that you were still using it, you think. She’d be disappointed if you didn’t use it.
VOLITION: Of course, you clearly hadn’t cooked anything for yourself in years; anything more complicated than pre-jarred pasta sauce or a microwave meal, floating in a yellow-orange pool of grease and zapped in the shitty clunking microwave for four minutes until it’s hot enough to scald off all of your tastebuds.
INLAND EMPIRE: You’d taken to experimenting in Kim’s kitchen whenever you stayed over, using a little of the money you were saving by cutting down on the drinking to buy slightly nicer ingredients.
ELELCTROCHEMISTRY: If you’re not going to let yourself get sloshed then you might as well let yourself buy that fancy bottle of extra virgin olive oil. That, and a bit of homemadebread. Ohhh, yeah, Harry-baby.
INLAND EMPIRE: So on a regular basis you’d show up to Kim’s with a bag of groceries in one hand and a cookery book in the other. It became a regular thing; he’s a picky eater and you’re an experimental chef but somehow it worked. He would sit at his kitchen table, slice vegetables for you if you needed, tell you about his days. This was in the in-between time, after you’d quit the RCM but before he’d taken the leap and joined you, so you’d go over to his place and simmer onion and garlic in one of his (slightly too clean to have ever been used) frying pans and he would tell you about his shitty caseload and the heightening tensions across the city.
VOLITION: All very polite and civil.
EMPATHY: And you’d devoted yourself to the task of learning every little habit of his. Every idiosyncrasy. So much space in your newly uncluttered head to fill up with him.
INLAND EMPIRE: Every recipe with a backup plan just in case he didn’t like it- having him test the sauce as you went along before you poured it all over the dish, just to make sure he liked it. You’d quickly learned that he hates green and yellow pepper for the bitterness, lamb meat for the texture, and he’ll only enjoy mushroom if it’s chopped really fine so he can’t feel it when he swallows. He doesn’t like coriander or anything with star anise in, but he loves hot enough to blow your head off chilli and anything that combines sweet and salty. Thyme and rosemary, fresh herbs. He doesn’t like to let you know when he doesn’t like something, thinks it’s immature to be fussy about food texture at his age, so you have to watch his expressions carefully to see if a recipe can be tried again. He likes the taste of rosemary, chopped fine and scattered over roast potatoes.
INTERFACING: We could grow herbs on the windowsill. It looks like it’ll get good sun, in the summer.
PERCEPTION: The familiar clarion call of the MC’s roiling engine stirs you from your daydreaming. He has a way of driving, slamming the breaks hard and leaning brutally into corners, that makes all cars that he drives sound faintly exhausted no matter how much care he gives them.
And there he is, peeling round the corner in his small red Kinetika Mikro. Nowhere near as high spec as the Kineema, but it’s his to care for as he chooses; a second-hand rent to buy from the garage where he works now. You’ve spent hours working on it together to get it up to his standards.
You even installed those holographic spinners that you didn’t let him sell in Martinaise. They catch the sunlight.
INTERFACING: They’re beautiful.
LOGIC: Beautifully obnoxious.
PERCEPTION: Irrelevant, though. He’s stopping the car and getting out. Look.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: Kim!
Look at him. Wonderful.
CONCEPTUALISATION: A work of art. A collage, maybe, of beautiful component parts. A smear of pale acrylic for his mouth and purple-grey watercolours blotted beneath his eyes.
KIM KITSURAGI: He parks on the side of the road and climbs out, giving you a short wave. He’s got a last armful of boxes to grab from the boot, the last piece of the puzzle.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: This is it, Harry-baby. It’s really happening. Your head is a swarm of bees.
HALF-LIGHT: The sudden rush of adrenaline- fear, excitement, you’re not sure- makes your head swim.
KIM KITSURAGI: “Everything alright?” Kim asks, quirking his head towards you and squinting against the late afternoon sunlight as you come bounding over.
EMPATHY: He’s hiding it well but he’s just as giddy as you are.
You: “All good,” you say, shooting him with one-handed finger guns. “Extremely good. Never better, actually.” You pause as he wrangles the Mikro’s back door open and begins to lift out a few of the last boxes. “Delirious with happiness.”
KIM KITSURAGI: His eyebrow raises slightly, and you see him struggle not to smile. “Mhm. I am fairly pleased, myself.”
VOLITION: He won’t be for long. Not once he discovers how truly messy you are.
LOGIC: Untrue. He saw the state of your room at the Whirling. He already knows. And he’s still here.
“No second thoughts?” You say, keeping your tone light.
KIM KITSURAGI: He huffs an almost-laugh. “Harry,” he says. “We signed a year-long lease. We’re way past second thoughts.” He bumps his arm against yours gently. “Besides. You know me. I know what I want.”
CONCEPTUALISATION: The warmth of his arm against yours burns his conviction into you.
EMPATHY: He knows. For some godforsaken reason, he’s chosen you just as much as you’ve chosen him.
You help him heft the boxes up the stairs, though he won’t let you take the heavier ones and he frowns at your attempts to juggle boxes and your bag of groceries.
He gives you the lightest one off the top of the pile, the dregs and drabbles from your old place that wouldn’t fit in the Kineema on the last two drives that you made.
ENDURANCE: It’s been a long day and you are starting to get a little sore. A little tired.
You: “What do you fancy for dinner tonight?”
KIM KITSURAGI: Kim grins at you over the top of the boxes. “What have you got in your bag there? I assume you have plans.”
You: “Mm. I don’t know.” You balance the box on top of the curve of your belly as you round the last few steps up to the landing. Your new front door stands there, shining gold-yellow with a new coat of paint, the second one along the narrow corridor. “Maybe I do.” The window at the end of the corridor is open and outside you can hear the seagulls squalling. Someone whistles as they walk along the street below. You hear someone talking on the phone from behind one of the closed doors, loudly explaining something in rapid Gottwaldian.
PERCEPTION: Kim sets his stack of boxes down on the polished wooden floor and pats down his pockets for the key, and you set down your burden too. The bottle of cherry cordial clinks against something unseen in your carrier bag as it hits the floor.
PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: Stretch out your arms, get those muscles moving before you start cramping up.
CONCEPTUALISATION: It feels so impossibly right, standing here right now. Like you’re exactly where you’re meant to be.
SHIVERS: EVERY ATOM WITHIN ME CONSPIRED TO GET YOU TO THIS SPOT RIGHT HERE. LIT UP BY SUN THROUGH THE OPEN WINDOW. I LOVE YOU. I WANT YOU TO BE WELL.
INLAND EMPIRE: Despite the warmth, a shiver rolls down your spine.
KIM KITSURAGI: Kim’s face is caught by the sunlight too, shining through his diamond shaped glasses and throwing shards of sharp light across his face. Over the jut of his cheekbones and the soft curve of his jaw. He tilts his chin up at you, raises an eyebrow. “What are you looking at?”
You: “You,” you say truthfully. “I missed you.”
INLAND EMPIRE: You really did.
CONCEPTUALISATION: A hole in your chest every time he’s gone. A hole that goes all the way through and out the other side.
LOGIC: At least now you’ll always be coming back to the same place. He’ll always return to you.
PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: God, Coach. You missed him so bad it gave you acid reflux.
KIM KITSURAGI: Kim scoffs and leans forward to unlock the door. His jacket glows orange in the golden light. “Mm. I was gone for maybe an hour.” He’s attached the flat key to the rest of his ring of keys, and the little yellow race car keychain that you got him. It clinks, plastic against metal, and the loose wheels rattle on their pin-narrow axle. “At most.”
You: “And I missed you every moment of it.” You catch him as he goes to push the door open, one big hand on the small of his back, and push your whiskery face against his neck. His back bumps against the door frame. A kiss, just below his ear. He hisses like a scalded cat and smacks at your chest, fighting back that soft-eyed grin that he wears so often around you now.
KIM KITSURAGI: “Harry! The neighbours!”
You: “You think they’re watching us through their peepholes?” You ask, gesturing to the other four doors along the short corridors. “There’s no one around, Kim. They have better things to do.”
KIM KITSURAGI: He relaxes fractionally. One of his hands rests against your belly, crawls up over your chest and up your neck to rest on your jaw, thumb swiping over cheek, pushing you away gently. “Still.”
VOLITION: First impressions are everything, right?
INLAND EMPIRE: Stumbling down the stairs at the Whirling, only one shoe on and hand shielding your eyes from the dazzing brightness of the electric lights, smelling like a very sweaty brewery.
SAVOIR FAIRE: But with your natural suaveness, your effortless cool, you managed to claw it back from that dodgy starting point.
VOLITION: Debatable.
EMPATHY: He’s patient. He was willing to wait while you worked on getting better.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: And he’s absolutely crazy over you, too. That helps.
You: You give his ear one last nuzzle and pull away, though your hand lingers on his back. You still can’t stop looking at him. The back of his neck is flushed pink. The afternoon sunlight turns his eyelashes pale and luminous.
KIM KITSURAGI: “We should get moving,” he says, ducking his head slightly. “We’ve got to find the box where we packed the utensils and the crockery before we can eat, anyway.”
You: “Wait, wait. There’s-”
EMPATHY: There’s something you wanted to do first.
ENCYCLOPEDIA: A tradition.
PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: Not that you’re in any way a traditional man, but still.
LOGIC: This feels important.
INLAND EMPIRE: It’s something you’ve done before, a long time ago, when you were a different person.
CONCEPTUALISATION: Full circle.
INLAND EMPIRE: But it’s different this time. For a moment, when he tilts his head towards you, curious, he looks as if he’s glowing. Haloed. You know he would die for you; you know he would die for you.
You: “I need to just quickly do one thing.”
KIM KITSURAGI: “Harry,” Kim says. “Whatever you’re thinking, it can- what are you doing?”
PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: You wrap an arm around his shoulders and bring your other arm up around the back of his knees, sweeping him up suddenly in a bridal-style carry. Your biceps flex. Look at you go, you super-strong dung beetle of a man!
You: Dung beetle?
ENCYCLOPEDIA: Dung beetles can lift up to one thousand one hundred and forty one times their own body weight!
You: Oh, cool. Guess I’m a dung beetle then.
ENCYCLOPEDIA: Tenacious. Surprisingly long lived. Smells a bit weird. The Taurian Dung Beetle is indigenous to the Uamrao, the world’s largest canyon system, half-way across Elysium on Iilmaraa.
You take a shaky step forward, your hip groaning a little under the strain.
PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: It’s EASY. He’s so LIGHT it’s like carrying an armful of AIR. You are strong and comfortable and this is entirely safe.
ENCYCLOPEDIA: It’s good luck to carry your partner over the threshold of your new home. It’s symbolic.
CONCEPTUALISATION: I’ll carry you when you need me to.
KIM KITSURAGI: Kim yelps at the sensation of his feet leaving the ground. “Put me down, you psychopath,” he says, louder than he means to, eyes wide. You can feel him shaking and for a moment you’re about to get worried but then it clicks that he’s laughing and your grin grows wider in response. He’s muffling the sound of his laughter against you, mouth open, showing a row of sharp neat teeth. One hand comes up to cling frantically at your neck. He’s scrambling for some shred of composure, some scrap of authority, but he’s breathless and laughing and it goes straight to your head like a second-hand high. “Put me down!”
You: “Gotta carry you over the threshold,” you grunt. “It’s good luck.”
ENCYCLOPEDIA: An old Ubi Sunt? tradition. It’s a symbol of devotion, of the sickness-and-health part of marriage vows.
LOGIC: You’re never going to get married. You’re sure of that. It’s not legal, and anyway Kim wouldn’t enjoy the spectacle of it. This is as close as you’ll get.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: This is pretty fucking good, though.
ENDURANCE: Ahh, he’s heavier than you expected, actually. You’re going to have trouble if you do this for long.
PAIN THRESHOLD: Ow.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: But it’s worth it.
You: “God, I love you.”
KIM KITSURAGI: “Harry,” he says helplessly, burying his face in your neck. You can see the tips of his ears turning red. “You’re ridiculous.”
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: Oh. He’s enjoying this; being hefted up in your big arms.
COMPOSURE: Enjoyment that outweighs his sense of propriety.
You: “Yeah,” you say absently, focused on opening the door without jostling Kim too much.
PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: Strong arms wrapped all around him.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: He’s entirely enveloped by you, engulfed, and you want to swallow him like a pill.
SAVOIR FAIRE: Just nudge the door handle… There- just like that. There you go.
PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: You heft him up a little higher in your arms and-
CONCEPTUALISATION: Your lungs glow. Of course they do.
PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: -lift him over the threshold.
EMPATHY: This is practically a marriage vow, Harry. And he let you do it.
You’re so happy you could burst. Trying to catch your breath in your shaking lungs.
ENDURANCE: Okay, okay, put him down now.
EMPATHY: Wait. Not yet.
There’s a flood of endorphins in your brain suddenly, and you never want to let him go. You spin him around in your arms, in the narrow gap of space between the doorway and a small pile of boxes that you’ve already stacked up on your earlier visit. Round and round, once, twice. Making both of you dizzy. You’re walking like you’re drunk, the weight making you unsteady.
COMPOSURE: The unsteadiness, the room-spinning dizziness, it shatters a giggle out of him.
EMPATHY: The flare of anxiety-excitement in his stomach that makes him feel giddy, blenders his brain for a moment. He feels his heart leap at the lack of control, and he holds on tighter as you spin. Delirious for a moment on the closeness, the freedom.
INLAND EMPIRE: Round and round and round.
LOGIC: It’s like riding the pleasure wheel from the pier, the one that was destroyed in the war, the one that Kim wanted desperately to ride.
INLAND EMPIRE: An unattended kid without the real to buy a ticket, watching the gondolas rising to the sky like little aeroplanes. The closest he might ever get to flying, and he never even managed to reach those heights.
CONCEPTUALISATION: You can almost see the magenta twinkling lights.
KIM KITSURAGI: “Harry!” Kim says, in that exasperated tone that you’re so intimately used to, but it’s tempered by his wide grin.
CONCEPTUALISATION: He can see the lights too.
PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: His grip on your arm tightens.
CONCEPTUALISATION: Twelve red cabins suspended in the air.
EMPATHY: He feels like he’s flying, for a moment.
You: “We’ll go, one day,” you say to him, breathless, as you slow and steady yourself, staggering slightly and his breath catches slightly. “To the pleasure gardens on the other side of the river. I think they have a pleasure wheel there.”
EMPATHY: He doesn’t know what you’re talking about, but he understands.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: One of his hands loosens from your neck, flies over to clutch your bicep; the tension of the muscle working under his fingertips. He grins.
KIM KITSURAGI: “There,” he says. He’s shaking with laughter still. “You did it. You followed the tradition. You can set me down now.”
EMPATHY: He’s got one arm tight around your neck now, though. Not pushing you away. Now that you’re inside the apartment, away from the threat of the outside world. He’s melted against you.
CONCEPTUALISATION: Clinging to you like a spider monkey.
You: “No,” you say, your answering laugh a low rumble in his ear. Your muttonchops tickle his cheek and he shivers. “We live together now. I’m never letting you go.”
KIM KITSURAGI: “Harry. You’re going to hurt yourself.” The hand on your bicep strokes gently, up and down, up and down.
PERCEPTION: His cheek rests against your clavicle. You’re all sweaty and gross in your mesh shirt. Slightly damp. He doesn’t seem at all bothered, nuzzling like a cat.
PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: He can feel the dull unsteady thump of your heart through your skin. It’s reassuring, like an old favourite song.
You: You shrug. “Worth it. You comfortable?”
KIM KITSURAGI: He wriggles slightly. Your arm wraps around his hips, one hand rested against his ribcage. “Yes, actually.” He sounds faintly surprised.
EMPATHY: He’s at home in your arms.
SHIVERS: You’re both home, now.
CONCEPTUALISATION: Your nest.
PERCEPTION: It’s small, with landlord-white walls, slightly off-cream coloured paint spread sloppily over the light fittings and visible wiring, and dark wood floors. There are no curtains up yet. The boxes of stuff that you’ve already bought up are piled up in the corner beside your old wobbly coffee table and the two flatpack bookcases that you’re going to dedicate tomorrow to putting together.
ENDURANCE: Just popping by with a note to say that you really are going to be looking at long term consequences if you don’t set Kim down somewhere now. Every moment that goes by, he gets a little heavier.
PERCEPTION: Now where are you going to put him?
LOGIC: You didn’t think it through that far, did you?
PERCEPTION: The couch. It’s an old brown thing, cheap imitation suede-y feeling fabric with cushions just slightly too squishy to be comfortable. Ugly but functional, like most furniture you own. It came with the place, like the fridge and the bedframe, and it calls to you.
ENDURANCE: You stagger a few steps into the living room, up to the old couch that came with the place, and flop down over him- arms braced either side of his head, your knee sliding to rest between his. Nose to nose.
OLD COUCH: Oh hello! Visitors! It’s nice to see some activity going on in here again. I’ve been bored for so long!
KIM KITSURAGI: His breath huffs out hot against your lips. “I love you,” he says, pushing himself up on his forearms to crowd even closer into your space. The ghost of a touch against the softest part of your skin. The tips of his ears are flushed red-hot, the same colour as his Mikra, but he’s not hiding it. He’s looking at you with a sniper focus. Just you. You’re the only other person in the world who exists to him right now.
OLD COUCH: Are you two going to get it on? Because I’m just saying- I don’t mind. It’s been so long since-
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: Shut up. You’re killing the mood.
VOLITION: There is no mood. There are groceries you’ve left in the hallway and unpacking that needs to be done before you go to sleep. Don’t get yourself distracted.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: Shutupshutupshutup-
You: “Love you too,” you say, half-grunt, and lather an open-mouthed kiss on the corner of his jaw. Your teeth scrape skin, just on the right side of gentle, and his eyelids flutter. The hand on your bicep grips tighter.
EMPATHY: He loves how his hands look against your hard-trained upper arms; so small compared to you. He wouldn’t admit it, though, even to himself.
ENDURANCE: It’s getting uncomfortable holding yourself up over him like that so you let yourself slide forward, your weight settling on top of him, and he sighs, pleased.
CONCEPTUALISATION: Like a living weighted blanket, pressing him down into the couch cushions. You ground him.
EMPATHY: He tilts his head so you can keep kissing at his neck, looking up at him through your lashes, and a spike of pure crystalline happiness spikes through you.
CONCEPTUALISATION: This is your life now. What did you ever do to deserve this?
VOLITION: You tried. You kept living. That’s all you needed to do.
KIM KITSURAGI: “Mm, Harry,” Kim says, interrupting your hard work. “The groceries. The boxes. We should-”
You: “Yeah,” you hum quietly, not really listening. You’ve found a place where you can feel his heartbeat fluttering, at the junction of his neck and his shoulder, against the thin skin of your cheek, and you’re investigating it as thoroughly as you can. He’s so alive. Despite everything, he’s survived. The suede of the sofa is warmed by the sun that streams in from the western window. His plain white t-shirt has ridden up a little from all your activity, and his bare skin touches the brown material.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: You run your thumb lightly over the exposed strip of skin, feather-light, barely the ghost of a touch, and he squirms. His hand slaps over his mouth, smothering a gasp.
EMPATHY: He’s ticklish, remember?
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: Oh, yes. I remember. Look at his face, his eyes. That’s laughter in his eyes, baby.
You: You do it again, and watch his face carefully as he tries to fight back his reaction. Stone-faced. His leg kicks out involuntarily. “Didn’t know you were ticklish,” you say casually, eyebrow raised, and he gives you a mock-glare.
KIM KITSURAGI: “Do not,” is all he manages to get out before you’re running your broad hands lightly up his sides and a laugh bursts out of him louder than you thought he was capable of. His ears are burning. He wriggles in your grip, still fighting down laughter, hooking a leg around yours and leveraging his body as dead weight to send the pair of you tumbling onto the floor with him landing heavy on top of you. His hands are splayed on your chest, where he placed them to catch himself, just above your lungs.
EMPATHY: He didn’t think he’d ever be allowed this.
COMPOSURE: There is a moment, there, just there, where he has no guard up at all.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: He shifts against you and you know that he can feel you getting hard against the soft inner edge of his thigh, but there’s no urgency to it. A pleasant contented buzz. He rocks himself back and forth slightly, teasing, and leans forward again to run his lips down your neck to the low neckline of your mesh shirt. You hear him make a soft ‘tch’ of disapproval at the thing.
CONCEPTUALISATION: Fish caught up in his net.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: He runs his fingers through the dark whorls of chest hair caught between the net, runs a thumb over a nipple, kisses your neck and chin. Your beard pin-pricks the delicate skin of his lips.
INLAND EMPIRE: You could lie here forever, until the bombs fall and the buildings crumble.
HALF-LIGHT: Not long left now. Make it count.
SHIVERS: Across the city, the sun touches on the half-buried entrance to another subterranean gun locker. A girl stands outside a warehouse, radiophone in hand, chewing gum and watching narrowly as the cars sail past on the 9/81. In a glassy office room high up, overlooking the Esperance, only a few doors down from the Bank of the World building, sun shards shatter the windows into glossy pieces on the carpet. Men in forget-me-not blue sit at the table, organising.
KIM KITSURAGI: Kim feels you shift beneath him, and catches the shiver with his mouth at your neck. “Are you with me?”
You: “Always.”
KIM KITSURAGI: He smiles, open and satisfied. The crinkle-lines around his eyes fold neatly, like the stacks of folded white t-shirts in his nicely packed cardboard boxes.
INLAND EMPIRE: You’ll lie there for a few minutes longer, just long enough to feel the ache in your spine from the unyielding floorboards. Eventually Kim will get up, groaning and fussing as his joints pop with exertion. He’ll haul you up to your feet too and he’ll send you to dig out the plates and pans from whatever box you’ve crammed them in when you were packing while he folds his socks into the dresser drawer beside your collection of funky ties. He’ll unpack the bedding and smooth down the sheets, and line his mnemotechnique A6es up all orderly on the shelf in the bedroom. His Wirral source books and his one single matchbox car model. Your random collected knickknacks and your detective novels. You will put the radio on in the kitchen and play something slow and smooth, some old crooner with a soft voice like molasses, and you’ll slice onion and grate ginger and dice garlic and drop them into the smoking hot oil. You’ll eat out of big mugs, because you won’t be able to find the bowls, sitting on the grody brown sofa, watching the light slide from golden to blue as the sun goes down.
PERCEPTION: Here and now, he bites gently at your neck and runs his fingers over your stomach. Tangling his fingers in your ridiculous mesh shirt.
INLAND EMPIRE: He’ll read from the evening newspaper that you bought him, out loud, in order of largest to smallest print headline. He won’t read the stories that he thinks will upset you. You will fall asleep with your head smushed against his side, his undershirt riding up so that your cheek presses against his skin. It will be beautiful.
SHIVERS: Currents will run on beneath the city. Movement, flowing in and out. Tomorrow the sun will rise and touch everything with pink rays, and the next day it will rain and rivulets will run down every alleyway in Jamrock. Into hidden weapons lockers. On the windows of the INSURCOM headquarters.
HALF-LIGHT: How long til it all lays in ruin?
SHIVERS: When the sun rises tomorrow, on a tiny tenement apartment in the cheap side of Central Jamrock, an ex-police officer will wake up, stretch, scratch his belly, kiss his partner.
CONCEPTUALISATION: He will finally be home.