Chapter Text
June 19, 51' 9:00
Harry is certain he remembers the final symbol.
“It's something like this.” He draws the whole thing out and taps his pen against it.
Trant furrows his brow in deep concentration. “It does look familiar.”
“What does it mean?” Kim asks pensively.
His chest is heavy. Kim is in bad spirits, he's sure Harry noticed over breakfast but hadn't said a word about it.
He just stared far too long and uncomfortably at the dragon mug.
Off he went again, merrily, merrily.
I fear sometimes that he'll never come back one day.
Stuck forever in his own mind.
The way his aunt had ended up. The way he fears he will too, one day.
“What does it matter?” Jean offers from his awkward position a few desks across from them.
They all turn to him.
“If it's the symbol you just have to wait for the theft reports to come in.” Jean grumbles.
Harry nods. “Have we had any?”
Jean shakes his head no.
“When they come in we could probably calculate where they'll be based on this, at least the vague area in which they'll be active.” Trant leans his weight against the desk, crosses his arms.
Jean gives a petulant harrumph in agreement and wanders off.
“I'm just not certain if I have it right,” Harry mumbles.
“We can look through more symbology textbooks and see if anything looks similar,” Trant muses, a bit defeated.
“Or more weird racist movies that are popular with gangs,” Kim offers with a sympathetic smile.
“Yeah,” Harry chuckles, “figure that'd be a much shorter pile to sort through.”
Trant winces and gives out a little click and a hiss, “Ah, actually…” he shakes his head solemnly.
“...Trant… there… there can't be.” Harry looks to Kim, then back to Trant.
Kim gives it a moment of thought before tilting his head down and giving it a slow, disappointed shake. “No. I fear he might be right, they made a lot of really racist movies.”
“And gangs of all kinds love it.” Trant adds.
‘Including the RCM’, Kim thinks, but doesn't say.
June 22, 51' 21:00
Three days, three robberies.
Kim and Harry and all notified patrol officers are on the lookout in the area predicted by the presumed trajectory of the symbol.
Harry seems electric in some strange way, an aura of energy that if Kim had more of an imagination he could envision emanating from his head in odd waves, like some kind of ‘scifi brain magician.’
Kim wonders where this kind of intensity was during their case.
That's how he thinks of Martinase now. As “their case”.
“The Case”
A defining moment of irreconcilable change in the course of history.
His history.
Our-
Kim looks to Harry, his side profile, his hand to his chin, thoughtful and aligned with the absoluteness of his cerebral existence.
Kim, on the other hand, feels flattened out, pinned and dissected into disparate parts. What's even left of him now?
Kim looks to the back of his hand as it rests, the pen against paper.
What of what he was before Martinase is left to him now?
“What do you dip your fries in?”
He looks to Harry.
Well definitely more than Harry has.
“Mayonnaise? Why?” Kim adjusts his glasses.
“Hm,” Harry shrugs, a bit, disappointed and non-committal.
“...” Kim nods silently, “...”
“Well,” Kim interrupts himself, breaking the silence. “Sometimes I like to dip them in a chocolate milkshake If I order one.”
There's a startling moment of shock and awe in the pause.
Harry turns to Kim, incredulous and disbelieving.
Then, Harry's face lights up as if he were the last star in the sky.
Kim turns and looks at him, amazed and perplexed, unsure why it is what he has said has brought so much apparent happiness to him, and finds himself witlessly and nervously smiling back.
This, here, with Harry, he could keep forever. He could be forever crushed by this.
A constant elated pressure squeezing every ounce of him into a smooth ethereal numbness.
As long as he has Harry.
He can-
He can forgive what the world has done to him.
To everyone he's ever loved or cared for, as long as he can have this, as strange and unusual as it is.
June 22, 51' 22:15
The radio crackles and hisses.
“-red sneakers no? Black long hoodie-”
“No- fucking-” a shuffling of someone taking over the receiver.
“Lieutenant!” Emiles voice is placid but energized, a kind of quick-paced urgency to his affectations. “We think we have visuals on the suspect, over”
Harry snatches the radio “Copy! We hear you, officer, please!” Equally elated and urgent.
“Red sneakers, all black clothing, shoulder bag and-” the radio clicks and sputters as its waves are disrupted by another voice calling in from behind Emile.
“the broom! The perp has a broom!” Chad Tillbrook interjects.
The radio signal from the other end snaps off.
Kim lets out an amused huff as Harry shakes his head. “Okay! Copy! Where are you?”
Kim pulls out the map and keeps his pen at the ready.
“The corner of Bedelia and Rocksford.” The radio crackles and Emile reads out with precise clarity.
“The one with the pink corner store at the intersection.” Chad adds, muffled by his distance from the receiver.
“I know where that is.” Harry says with relief and joy. He points it out on the map, tapping his finger onto the paper. Kim marks it and runs the roads through his mind, calculating the best route.
Harry clicks the receiver. “Copy! Keep an eye out, we're on our way! Don't engage! Over!”
Harry pops the receiver back onto its holster and slaps his hands to the top of the Coupris. “Giddy up!”
“Of course Detective.” Kim replies, wishing very badly that he had the Kineema as the engine to the pig-mobile sputters to life. No roar or screech, just a grumbling cry and squeal as it awakens.
Even so, the adrenaline is there. “Yee-haw.” Kim cheers flatly, jerking the levers to press the engine full force forward, rubber gripping and burning against asphalt with the effort.
June 22, 51' 22:30
The building peers over the end of the alleyway, a separate entity sneaking a look over the tops of the buildings across from them and down into the streets like a fish bowl.
In it swim Emile Collins and Chad Tillbrook.
It takes an infinitesimally small fraction of a millisecond for the echo of a bullet firing from a gun to hit the eardrums. Almost as quick, the speed in which the bullet finds its target.
Seconds, sometimes even minutes does it take for a human to register the fact they have been shot. Longer for them to gather the words to articulate the event.
Sometimes it's hours and sometimes it's moments, for someone to bleed to death.
Infinity? Infinity is when it goes dark.
Death is an old and gentle friend, it has been around at every defining moment of Emile’s life.
War and its aftermath, the sicknesses of those dying in hospitals.
His mother was a nurse.
His earliest memory was the body of his grandmother layed peacefully under a thin white shroud, white flowers, red lipstick, pale skin.
He hadn't understood what was happening, hadn't the context or the words.
He learned soon, when his mother sat him down. A young boy, all jutting elbows and boney joints, against her lap he sat and listened as she explained what death was and what dying meant and how she was sick and wasn't going to be around much longer.
How she was not going to be there to take care of him, that she might even need him to take care of her and that more often than not he was going to have to take care of himself.
He learned to cook rice.
He learned to not cry.
He learned what death was.
He learned there was no point in being afraid of dying or scared of the dead.
He hadn't cried when she died. She was asleep, and the doctors had simply informed him she wasn't waking up.
He lived with a family friend; at that point he was more independent and helpful than not.
He cried when his dog died, and hasn't cried since.
He joined the RCM because he figured that for some strange reason he was destined to work close to death. He could have been a nurse or doctor, but he hadn't the schooling or patience and there was a need for policing.
He was comfortable in his position. His unbothered attitude towards death and strange aptitude towards saying the right thing to those who needed the comfort made him a good candidate to take care of funerary arrangements for victims.
He made a fearless officer in the face of violence, and his unwavering loyalty and dedication to humanity made him better than most for the role.
Through his life he had known people to be kind and good if not occasionally very misguided. It came natural to him, to protect, to be kind.
‘Radical kindness’, Tequila had called it, a political theological kindness.
A refusal to fill his heart with hatred and violence and all of the things that made the world awful, no matter how awful the world was.
A faith in humanity. No matter how many times people betrayed or spat on him. No matter how much they would try to fill his lungs with blood, he would fill them instead with light and love.
It's why he didn't carry bullets. He was essentially unarmed.
So why was it that his partner, the one with the will to kill, was the one who was bleeding?
Dying?
June 22, 51' 23:00
Kim cranks the brakes back, the Coupris screeching as the tires come to a halt, the heft of the carriage nearly careening over with the force of its own weight.
There, at the corner, at the side of the pink corner store, Emile Mollins is dragging the body of his partner Chad Tillbrook out from the alley and onto the sidewalk, his cheeks and his arms up to his elbows smudged red.
“Fuck!” Harry gasps before springing into action, a blur of motion as he exits and runs to engage.
Kim watches the glare of the streetlight as it reflects off of the rectangular patch on Harry's back, tinged pink by the ambient displacement of the overwhelming pink hue of the building.
It's so unbearably pink. Kim watches it. The way the neon sign in the window blinks, he can hear the click of it as it flashes. flickers from one pose to another rhythmically. It beckons you to come inside, to buy! Buy! BUY!
His fingers twitch, reflexes waiting for a ball to drop. In his mind's eye he can see the halo of flashing light bounce off the reflection of his glasses, hypnotic, entrancing, a swirling melting mass of pink flashing stimulation. The tinny click-clack of plasma entrapped within those thin fragile tubes electrified and swirling. He swallows and he can feel his throat contract, his tendons straining painfully to perform the action. There's something else he's supposed to be paying attention to right now. He knows this somewhere deep at the back of his consciousness. Distantly, he notes the door chime as someone runs out to help, packs of first aid pilfered from the stores shelves.
The chime rings, the sound only eclipsed by the thrumming of blood in Kim's body and the all-encompassing flashing pink.
Someone is bleeding to death.
Kim turns his head to look-
But he can't, his muscles won't move, his fingers twitch and the rest of him stays perfectly still.
Kim tries to call out, to look back to Harry, to the person dying, the person who he is supposed to help, the person who all of his arduous hours of first response medical training is for.
He can't. He won't.
Harry turns to look behind him, head swiveling and searching for something. It's only when he trains his expression on Kim that Kim realizes it's him he's looking for.
That Kim has been standing unmoving from where he wavers, transfixed at the glowing pink monstrosity.
Harry calls out to him.
“Kim!”
He calls out to him like he needs him.
Suddenly, as if nothing had held him prior, all tension and consuming pink dissipated from him, his body freed, filled with everything that had been filtered out before.
There are shouts and street cars, the honking, the whirring, the feel of the air around him.
He's returned to the world and it's beating heart, the undercurrent.
Kim forces himself forward, forces himself to take control, to ignore the way Harry looks at him with knowing concern.
It's too tender right now.
Someone is dying and if they die it's going to be their blood on his hands.
Stupid, negligent, an embarrassing lack of discipline.
Shameful.
His hands tremble as he reveals the wound, gnashing oozing red. He slips off his gloves, he gestures for the bottle of alcohol and the antibacterial wipes, he tears the little package with his teeth. It stings of ethanol. He wipes it over the pursed skin, splashes the bottle over his naked hand.
There's no tool for removing the bullet.
He's glad that the person-
Chad.
Emile Mollins' partner's name is Chad.
He's relieved Chad is unconscious, because this hurts.
A lot.
He breaches the wound, His finger is long and thin and dexterous. He feels metal and pushes around it, feeling the layers of flesh stretch to accommodate him as he fishes underneath the nub of the intruder and bends to scoop it out.
Kim can feel the sweat drip from his forehead and onto his glasses, his hair coming undone from its gel.
Briefly, as he turns to grab for the needle and thread, he can't help but take notice of the concerning look of arousal on Harry's face.
He gives a chastising click of his tongue as he pulls the suture from the pack.
The difference between flesh and fabric is disconcertingly similar at times, the way it feels when he tugs the thread through, the way it pulls taught and bends to close.
Chad moans somewhere off in the deep void he's swimming through. There's a collective sigh of relief as he mumbles something semi-lucid about tailors and birthday suits.
And so Chad lives, is alive, by the end of it and Kim tries his hardest not to wince or to show his disappointment when Emile thanks him, thanks him as if he were a hero, that he had saved the day, as if he hadn't froze and nearly killed his partner.
Kim smiles the best he can, shakes Emile’s blood-soaked hand with his and tries not to feel like a liar.
I am a liar.
June 23, 51' 2:00
Harry opens his mouth to speak but says nothing on the drive back to the station, he just runs the back of his fingers against Kim's wrist as he drives, a solid and gentle touch.
A small blessing.
You're here, I'm here, we're here’
Yes…Kim could forgive everything, even himself.
As long as I have this.