Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

As soon as Jean Vicquemare drops his clumsily folded patrol cloak on the desk, his new partner, smoke puffing out from beneath his eminent broom-head moustache, says: “I told Berdyayeva to give you to me because you seemed like a guy who knows how to take it, Vicquemare. Don't prove me wrong.” 

“Take… it?” Jean questions, standing there bemused.

“It,” Du Bois replies, leaning back in his chair and spreading his arms grandly. “The whole, miserable, bloody, smelly lot of it. From the holly groves of the Pox to the garrigue oaks of Old South, and all the street corners in between– abandoned children of all animal species– death by opium, death by trampling, death by kebab– all the wonderful parties happening around, under, and directly on top of the 8/81. Syphilis. Sycophants. Synergy. Jamrock. Our lovely little Hell.” He stops, clearly pleased with his speech.

“I think I can take it,” Jean says, not so very impressed.

Du Bois grins like a dog, flaunting teeth and tongue. His jaw is a little crooked. “It's tough work keeping up with me.” Du Bois has a reputation for being an arrogant man. Not without reason. But still. 

“Not so tough,” Jean counters. “I'll be on a horse.”

Du Bois laughs, flashing teeth again (big, square, yellow from tobacco), and stands up to offer Jean his hand (warm, solid, wiry hair tickling Jean’s fingertips). “They taught you how to ride, right? I don't have to worry about you slipping off the horse's ass when I’m not looking?”

“Yes to riding, no to slipping.” It's been a while since his equestrian training, but Jean is unbelievably grateful to get off that blasted motorbike and does not want to give the slightest impression of hesitation.

“One-handed or two-handed style?”

Jean draws his eyebrows together. “There's a one-handed style?”

“When you ride with me there is– you need to keep one free to hold onto your cigarette.” Du Bois pauses. They're no longer clasping hands but are still slightly too close to one another, and now Du Bois leans in a few centimetres more. He inhales deeply. Jean is disturbed, but allows it. 

“You do smoke,” Du Bois says, not really a question. 

“Yes, Lieutenant.” A few times a day. He shouldn't. His father’s diseased lungs gave out when Jean was not yet through puberty’s gauntlet. The coughing could rattle dishware from the next room over.

“Not enough. If you're going to be my partner, they should be able to smell the miasma of the law coming from a half-kilometre away.” Du Bois tosses a pack of Drouins onto the desk, then grabs his own patrol cloak, crumpled haphazardly over the back of his chair. “Little gift for our honeymoon. And don't call me ‘Lieutenant.’ What is this, the 57th? Just ‘Harry’ will do.”

–

Harry Du Bois has a gravity to him. It pulls people along behind him as he runs, and runs, and runs. Within the first week of his partnership, Jean finds himself tugged right to the edge of a pool of blood: tacky in some parts and flaky in others. The air is thick with the smell. 

Harry nudges the corpse’s head with the clicker end of his pen and sucks his teeth loudly. The woman’s body is in a tangle at the bottom of a street staircase in Villalobos, limestone steps worn slippery by foot traffic and the elements. A spattering of browning blood mars the buildings crowded up tight against the scene; they're in a part of the neighborhood where even donkey carts would have to squeeze to make it over the cobbles. 

Jean takes notes dutifully as Harry runs through the external exam, marking every bruise and scrape that the woman’s body sustained in her tumble down the steps.

“We can cordon the staircase off,” Jean suggests, mostly just to make conversation while Harry goes through the motions. “See about getting the steps replaced with something that won't wear down so easily.”

Harry ignores this, sat on his haunches beside the body. He's silent for a moment, and then he reaches out his hands and begins carding his fingers gently through the victim’s long hair. Jean’s pen stalls as he watches uncomfortably. 

After a minute, a pale speck falls from her curls and skitters along the ground, and Harry slams a palm down on top of it before it can go too far. 

“Jean,” Harry says, turning his hand over. “Come see this. It was halfway in her scalp.”

Jean tucks his ledger under his arm, walks over, and takes a look. “A piece of the stairs?” he asks, confused.

Harry shakes his head. “A piece of a tooth.”

Jean processes. “Oh, shit,” he says. “Did you check–?”

“I am now,” Harry says, then grabs the corpse’s chin and pulls. Together, they peer into her mouth and count thirty-two unbroken teeth. 

“Fuck, Harry,” Jean says. “Am I writing homicide?”

Harry holds the crumb of enameled bone aloft, pinched tenderly between thumb and forefinger. “This is our way forward,” he says, sweaty forehead glinting in the afternoon sun. “This is what’s gonna take us to our man.” 

And what do you even say to something like that?

–

The equestrian beat isn't bad, really. Vicquemare is already tall on foot, but he appreciates the expanded field of vision, and he likes how people will get the fuck out of your way when you're on a horse. Even if it does mean his thighs ache a lot and he goes home stinking of eau de cheval every single night, even after changing out of his uniform.

Still better than a motorbike.

He scratches the nape of his animal's neck absently. Equine Unit 41-45-3, stable name Tanzer, twitches his dark flank to dislodge a fly. Harry's horse is EU-41-41-2, stable name Bravo, though he exclusively refers to it with various insulting epithets (Stinky, Stupid, Horse-Ass). 

Jean looks at Harry, slouched in his saddle. Just as promised, one gloved hand gathers the reins, one gloved hand cradles a cigarette. He glances over and winks sidelong at Jean without any other part of his face so much as twitching. Jean snorts quietly, tugging the brim of his cap lower, and returns his gaze to between his horse’s ears.

The streets are packed today, hustle and bustle to the max, but they can take it.

–

The shine of a new assignment wears off not very long after. Harry may be brilliant. But he is also insane.

–

It’s a sunny day in Central Jamrock. Flies frolic atop garbage piles, enterprising children and insufferably whimsical adults wrench faucets open to spill water in the streets, and Satellite-Officer Jean-Heron Vicquemare is following a dangerous madman underground into the 41st Precinct’s stables.

One of the hostlers, standing at the ready, grabs Tanzer’s reins and holds the animal steady for Vicquemare to dismount; another does the same for his quarry, who immediately makes a beeline towards the exit. 

Jean lands heavily, takes off after Harry before he even quite gets his balance back, tearing off his cap and stuffing it angrily under his armpit. “Harry.” It’s a hiss, but it’s not quiet. The lieutenant ignores him, sweeping past the stalls and through the double doors that open onto the stairwell leading up to the office floors.

“Harry,” Jean tries again, to no response; his voice simply echoes lamely against the walls.

“Fucking– hold on,” he snaps, and grabs a fistful of Harry's cloak. It nearly sends the both of them tumbling down the stairs when Harry staggers, off-balance, but it works. Harry whirls around on the landing, cloak flapping out of Jean's hand like a storm-buffetted sail, and immediately launches an invasion on Jean's personal space. Infantry, cavalry, the fucking navy: a full-blown meat-sweat assault and Jean reflexively steps back into the wall. Harry's moustache trembles, centimetres away.

“Do you have a fucking problem?” he barks, as if it was Jean who’d just had his knuckles buried in the flesh of a person of interest who did nothing more than disbelieve an obvious lie. 

They'd waited almost an hour for the POI outside his building: a smoggy blue piece of work, with craters from decades-old gunfire and a handmade sign in the front door window reading APARTMAN. When the man (tall but scrawny, young with a full beard) finally exited, Harry had called out: “Oi! We want to talk to you, brother.” Harry sauntered over, hands resting on his belt. “We hear you used to sell cockfight slips to a lady named Emmeline Baillieu. Well, she’s been reported missing– hasn't been seen in a week! How about a quick chat, eh?”

The man hesitated for a few seconds, eyes darting from Harry, to Jean, to the two horses standing tied placidly behind them, and in the end he said, “No. Excuse me,” and continued on his trajectory towards the motor scooter chained to a lamppost a few metres away. 

Smooth as an eel, Harry slid between the man and his vehicle. “Ah, pity, that,” he said, “See, your scooty there appears to be secured illegally.”

Jean shot him a look. It's perfectly legal to chain two-wheeled vehicles to lampposts and signs, as long as they're oriented parallel to traffic. Which this one was. 

The man seemed to have a similar familiarity with parking laws. “No, it’s not.”

“It is,” Harry said somberly, shaking his great head. He leaned forward, into the man’s space, like he was about to share a secret. “But you know, there’s something funny. My little ledger–” he pats the side of his jacket meaningfully “--I’ve only got one report sheet left today. I was hoping to use it for notes on questioning a person of interest, but I guess if I can’t do that, I may as well use it to write up a parking violation.” 

“Write, then,” the man said, eyes narrowed. “It’s not a violation.”

“I, well,” Harry floundered, a bit. “Actually, yes, it is. So I'm going to have to impound it.”

“It’s not,” the man said forcefully, “and you can’t.” He finally shoved his way past Harry, and then Harry punched him in the side of the head.

“Harry,” Jean yelled, as the man staggered sideways, “What the fuck?” His fingers brushed the button of the holster under his arm. 

The guy regained his footing, bringing one hand away from the side of his skull and looking at it, as if checking for blood. There wasn't any. Then he tried to walk past Harry again. Harry punched him a second time, and this time the guy punched back.

“Ah, shit,” Jean hissed, as an ugly grin slashed across Harry's face and he threw himself towards the civilian. It couldn't have been more than a few seconds before Jean lunged after him and managed to haul him off, but the POI’s nose was already gushing blood, dripping off his chin and onto the pavement. 

Harry heaved in Jean's arms and sprayed spittle: “The last time Emmeline Baillieu’s roommate saw her was when she left the apartment to go see you, you piece of shit! Did you kill her!?”

“NO!” the POI bellowed, one hand up to cover his nose. “I haven't seen her in a month! She said she got this new boyfriend and he didn't want her going to watch the cocks anymore!”

And just like that, Harry stopped struggling. He straightened up, as casually as if he'd just been tying his shoe; Jean was so shocked that he simply let go. “Let’s go back to talk to that roommate tomorrow. She didn't mention anything about a boyfriend,” Harry said to Jean, ignoring the man bleeding onto the pavement. 

Now, Harry crowds Jean against the wall and says, “Are you fucking questioning me, Satellite?”

“You're acting like a maniac,” Jean snaps. 

“He tried to fuck me,” Harry says, eyes faraway, “Sneak right past me. As if I couldn't snuff him out–“ he snaps his fingers in front of Jean’s nose “--like that.”

Jean's back presses firmly against the wall in the landing. Harry's sour breath puffs against Jean's moustache. His eyes are bloodshot. His face flushed. Fucking histrionic. 

After a beat, Jean exhales. The POI’s probably fine. His nose didn't look broken or anything. “Fuck off, Harry,” Jean says quietly, glaring. “Let’s just go upstairs, alright?”

And just like that, Harry relaxes, smiles, gives Jean two heavy pats on the side of the neck, like congratulating a well-worked racehorse. “You get it. Worked out for us in the end, right? Also, guy like that probably had a knife on him, Jeanvic. Gotta strike first.” 

–

"You're such a drag, Vicquemare," Lieutenant Rex Timmerman says, pronouncing Jean's surname so as to rhyme with the word for a female horse.

"Mare," Jean corrects irritably, pronouncing it so as to rhyme with the word for a glass container one may fill with preserved fruit or medical specimens. 

“No, mare,” Timmerman insists, leaning back against the coffee bar as the machine percolates softly behind him. “On account of how even when you've been led to water I can't seem to make you drink.”

This again? It was one time! God forbid a man exercise a little moderation on a work night. Next time, Jean will ask Timmerman’s personal forgiveness before he dares to order a soda water at the cop bar.

“Or maybe,” Timmerman continues, when Jean simply rolls his eyes and ignores him, “It's that feminine gait you've got.”

Jean looks at him. “Feminine gait.”

“Yeah,” Timmerman smirks, like he's delivered a devastating blow, “You know. Mincing. Almost a prance, really.”

Jean does not actually believe his gait is noteworthy in any way. This is just typical workplace shittalkery, a juvenile dominance display. It is a waste of his time. He returns his gaze to the burglary report before him.

“Oh, I've hurt the old girl’s feelings!” Timmerman crows, elbowing the nearest possible co-conspirator, a new patrol officer called Torson who is currently in the process of pocketing some sugar packets from the coffee nook. Torson barks out a laugh so fast that Jean's not entirely sure he actually heard what Timmerman said. Most likely he just wants to get in good with the lieutenant as a new recruit. As if Timmerman is anything aspirational.

Despite himself, Jean looks up and snaps: “If you aren't going to do any actual work, you could at least get those damn coffee stains off the cabinets. It looks like we work in the sewers.”

This is, of course, a mistake.

“Excuse me?” Timmerman says. “Is Captain Pockmarks giving me orders? Me? To clean the fucking cabinets? A satellite-officer, thinks he can act the big boss?” He shoves off the counter and stomps across the room, looms over Jean's desk. 

Jean's taller– significantly– when standing. But he's not standing right now, and to do so would be an undeniable sign of belligerence to Timmerman– providing an opportunity to turn über-masculine posturing into an actual physical encounter. Probably a shoving match, Jean thinks with intense distaste. Or Timmerman might upend his coffee mug on Jean's paperwork, which would just be so fucking annoying right now.

Just as Jean is deciding on a course of action, a pale, broad hand materializes from behind Timmerman's shoulder, and swiftly slaps the lieutenant on the back of the skull.

Timmerman jerks around, one fist clenching reflexively, then immediately drops it when he sees who’s thwacked him. “Oh. Hello Lieutenant.”

Harry looks unamused. “Stop bothering the boy.” Not the damn gym teacher voice. Jean hates that voice.

“I'm fucking thirty,” Jean interjects, and is ignored.

“We’re only having a little fun,” Timmerman protests, slathering on a crooked smile. Harry glances at Jean for a fraction of a second. Jean glares mightily. Then Harry's back to Timmerman. 

“Just go pour your coffee and sit down, Rex.” 

After a second, Timmerman complies, shooting Vicquemare a furtive, malevolent look. 

Now it’s Harry glancing down at Jean from his great height. Jean doesn’t want to thank him, and he won’t. Shoving himself back in his chair, he silently adjusts his shirt cuffs.

Harry bestows a churro jauntily across the rim of Jean’s half-empty mug. A gift.

Then he plants his ass on Jean’s desk. “You do mince a little.”

Jean glares up from under his brows, pinches the churro between thumb and forefinger like a cigar. “Only when I'm trying to seduce you,” he says flatly, and Harry throws back his head and laughs.

–

In an unpaved alleyway between two multi-family houses, their shoes sink ever so slightly into soft mud and the final few holdouts of a sparse beige grass. The murder was called in by a neighbor of their victim when she went to take out her trash, and it appears the victim had been doing the same when he was attacked; now scavenging animals have torn the bag to ribbons and strewn litter everywhere.

Shoulder to shoulder, they glumly regard the copious amounts of blood and gore emanating from the corpse’s groin. The cock isn't actually gone– just sliced up, along with the rest of the flesh between knees and navel. Harry winces, one hand shifting protectively over his crotch for a moment. Jean looks at the limp, battered penis and feels a distant sense of rapport. Then they snap on their gloves and get to work, working smoothly, if irreverently. But how else can you act when called in on a crotchless corpse?

“Femoral’s slashed clean through. That's what got him.”

“He tried to stop it,” Jean points out as he leans over the supine body, holding his cloak back with an arm so it doesn't get in the mess. “Hands and forearms are fucked too.”

“Some kind of sexual rage killing?” Harry suggests. He rifles through the corpse’s pockets, turning up some loose change and a pencil with the tip broken off. 

“Maybe. Or vengeance for a rape,” Jean posits. 

“His pants aren't off, though. Sliced right through. Me, if I wanted to take his dick, I'd get rid of all the shit in the way first.”

Jean shrugs. “Better idea?” He glances sideways at Harry. It's not actually rhetorical; Harry has a weird gift for reconstruction.

“Hmmm,” Harry replies, crouching down and lifting the corpse a little by the hair to inspect the back of its head. “Blood here, too,” he remarks.

“So he got bashed?”

“Or he fell over.” Harry stands up and takes a few steps back from the body, wearing his considering face. “Say we got him upright, this guy's what, one seventy, one sixty-five centimetres?”

“Sure. We're not going to get him upright though, right?” Jean says, dreading the answer.

“No, just trying to picture...” Harry hovers a hand out horizontally around his own hips, then moves it a little lower. “How often have you seen someone killed by the femoral? Homicides, I mean, not accidents.”

“Never,” Jean admits. “You think he– fell on something?”

Harrier squints, makes a maybe-maybe-not gesture. Then he squats back down by the corpse and sticks his finger into the severed artery. He wiggles his hand around. Jean takes the opportunity to busy himself with the autopsy form.

After rummaging through the flesh for a minute or so, Harry stands up and shows Jean something balanced on the bloody fingertip of his glove.

Jean looks at it, then back at Harry. “What, his pubic hair?”

“He's blonde,” Harry says.

“Someone else's, then? Or his hair’s dyed?”

“No," Harry says. “No, he's a natural blonde.” He whips a little baggie out from under his cloak and smears his finger around the inside until the hairs rub off.

“We're pretty close to the Valley here,” Harry remarks.

“This wasn't a wild dog,” Jean says immediately. “I've seen dog killings. They're mostly punctures.” He points to the gashes on the corpse's legs. “Even if the dog was shaking him, the tooth wouldn't tear clean like this. Plus dogs go for the throat once you're down, and he's pristine above the waist.”

Harry reaches a hand up to stroke his moustache, then clearly thinks better of it. "Neighborhood's overrun with fuckin’ boars,” he says sourly, scuffing at the little hoofprints scattered throughout the garbage with the toe of his shoe. “Fucked this crime scene up for us nicely.” His fingers twitch at his sides. He really wants to stroke his moustache.

“Let's find a phone and call Processing to pick him up,” Jean says, glancing back to the horses standing tied to the gate at the mouth of the alley. “Then we can look in his apartment, maybe talk to next of kin about any enemies. Maybe the neighbor who called him in will have stopped crying by now.”

Harry ignores him and starts walking in an ellipse around the body. “No paw prints around,” he muses. “And everyone in these two buildings has left their footprints here when they take the trash out.” He’s definitely having one of his moods.

After a minute or two, Harry stops his pacing and stares intently at the ground by the corpse's feet. Slowly, a twisted little smile begins to hook his mouth to the side. “No paw prints,” he repeats, and looks over at Jean. 

Jean looks back, annoyed. “Okay.” He hates when Harry does this, figures something out with one of his bizarre moments of revelation, and then tries to make Jean guess the answer.

“Had a friend who worked in an abattoir when I was younger,” Harry remarks. “He had a lot of fucked up stories. You know a pig’s tusks sharpen themselves? And those are just baby teeth, too, compared to the wild ones.”

Jean gets it, then. “Not a dog.”

“Nah,” Harry agrees, stepping back and knocking Jean's elbow with his own, pleased with himself. Jean shoots him a small crooked smile, pleased by association. “Not a dog.”

–

“And Timmerman– I'm amazed his mother didn't punt him into the Esperance when he came out looking like that. Or literally any day afterwards. Maybe she did. Maybe he was scooped out by a pelican but the lack of oxygen shriveled his brain and then he got raised by fucking birds. It's the only way he could be so god damned stupid.”

“Jean-Heron, you're the meanest guy ever," Harry barks in delight. “And people don't even know, because to their faces you just pull that ‘I’m-above-this-don't-you-have-work-to-do’ thing and roll your eyes!”

Jean grins back at him, tipsy and stupid.

“But I know,” Harry continues with glee, “I know that Jean-Heron Vicquemare is the NASTIEST MAN IN THE WORLD!” He finishes the sentence with a bellow, reverberating throughout the uncaring crowd. 

Jean covers his face with one hand. “You're such an embarrassment,” he says, still smiling behind his palm.

“I'm the pride of the RCM!” Harry corrects. “And I'm taking you with me, Jeanvic!” He thrusts an aggressive finger at the ceiling. “Mark my words, my boy. We're going places. Good places.”

“This is Jamrock. There are no good places,” Jean says, rolling his eyes– but he can't extinguish the little spark of excitement pulsing in his throat at Harry's words. He fumbles for his glass and instead lightly punches it, spilling gin and tonic water across the table (one of those stupid tiny ones without chairs where you have to stay standing). “Oh, damn.” He can't see any napkins.

“You're such a lightweight, Jean,” Harry says, with what is perhaps an unforgivable note of fondness creeping into his tone.

“You're an alcoholic, and I'm saving money,” Jean replies, with dignity. “Look, do you have a fucking hankie?”

Harry simply sticks his sleeve in the splatter, rubbing his forearm in circles to mop it up. Then he bends his wrist towards his shoulder so he can suck the gin out of the soggy fabric. Jean nearly gags. “Case in fucking point!” he says, gesturing.

“Now who's saving money,” Harry says indistinctly. Removing his mouth from his sleeve, Harry puts both palms on the table and looks Jean in the eye. Jean eyes him back warily. Harry wiggles one eyebrow, then the other. He reaches across the table, grabs Jean's sleeve in his fist, and starts pulling. 

“You need to dance,” Harry says in his commanding voice.

Sheer terror. “Absolutely fucking not,” Jean shoots back, exerting an equal but opposite force on his sleeve. Fucking nobody needs to see a depressed man fail to dance. 

Mercifully, Harry lets up, flipping Jean double birds as he backs away into the crowd. It's hard to keep track of him (and Jean does feel that it is his duty as a partner to do so), surrounded as he is by a writhing mass of clubbers like a knot of earthworms. But every so often a glint of Harry’s blindingly salmon dress shirt leaps out against the pulsing lights, weaving in and out and all around, and Jean can relax just a little bit.

So for the rest of the night, Satellite-Officer Jean-Heron Vicquemare slouches against the wall, one hand in his pocket and the other wrapped around his glass, and watches Harry Du Bois dance.

–

Jean paces around his apartment for an entire night and doesn't know why. In the morning, he simply changes his shirt and heads back to the station, armed with a large coffee and a vicious mood. Harry tells him he looks like shit. Jean returns the compliment. It's like he never went home at all.

–

The grass in the Pox is very tall. Jean frets about ticks; Harry does not. 

“I was born here,” Harry remarks, cheerful as anything. “Treated here, too.”

“Treated?”

“Polio,” Harry answers matter-of-factly. “You know how bad it was back then with the vaccines,” he says, gesturing to Jean's face.

Jean blinks, trying to quash the way his stomach itches with self-consciousness; he should be over it by now. “Well, this place was shuttered by the time I got sick.” He brushes hair out of his eyes and squints at the concrete block before them, failing to imagine it bustling with staff and patients.

“Pity we aren't closer in age. We could have been invalid buddies. Racing wheelchairs in the halls, pantsing the doctors…” Harry says wistfully. “And the old ladies waiting to croak would have found us just fucking precious.”

“Mhm,” is all Jean says. He nudges Tanzer forward. 

They don't have to go inside the hospital, thank god. They find their woman (a local vagrant, alleged eyewitness to a liquor store robbery in Central the previous night) crouched in the lee of the building, smoking something that does not smell of tobacco and arranging pebbles into the shape of a spiral. She looks up when she hears their hoofbeats, but doesn’t stand. 

“Hello there, Manoela,” Harry says. “Like to talk to you about a little thing that happened last night at the liquor store.”

The woman eyes them, and spits subtly to the side. Impressive, given that she doesn’t stop smoking to do it. “What ‘thing’ is this, then?”

“Armed robbery. We already know everything,” Harry blusters. “Got the perp in custody right now. Just filling in blanks.”

A few flecks of ash fall onto her lap. She doesn’t brush them away. Jean Vicquemare would not be able to get a single word more out of this woman. But Harry can. It may just… take a while.

In the end she does give her account, and a surprisingly detailed description of the robbers, but only because Harry promises to do her a favor. She tells him how she got mugged by some youths a few weeks back, and they stole her dead father's pocketwatch. She wants it back. Harry asks if it's distinctive. It's brass, she says. The rest of his questions are met with similarly helpful answers. Harry promises to file a report straight away.

As they're headed back towards the city proper, Jean politely inquires as to how the absolute fuck Harry expects to locate a thoroughly unremarkable antique timepiece stolen “some time ago” by “some kids.”

Harry rolls his eyes, jostled slightly by the movement of his horse's back beneath him. “I don't, Heron. I just said what she needed to hear. And she said what we needed to hear.”

Jean twists his neck around. Manoela is back at work on her spiral. She looks terribly small from this distance, and very old. 

Jean returns his gaze to the vague suggestions of a path which he is supposed to trust will lead them back to an approximation of civilization slightly better than the sparse shantytowns they've seen so far. Shortly, the dirt trail opens out onto a meadow of sorts, a sunny patch of grasses congregating confusedly, as if they aren't sure they've arrived at the right address for a party. Now Jean’s really going to worry about ticks.

The path cuts straight through the field and back into a scraggy cedar grove. Just as Harry gestures for them to keep going along the trail, the grasses rustle, and a bony yellow dog skulks out and into the first meter of treeline, where it hunkers down and watches the two of them, eyes glazed with a purulent discharge. As it stands, it isn't still; its muscles twitch unnervingly, and Vicquemare understands with a deep, animal instinct that something is very wrong.

“Ah, that’s a goner,” Harry says. He rummages through his uniform for his cartridges and his Armistice, tucked beside his hip in its holster– a placement choice Jean is pretty sure he only went for because it looks ‘cool.’ A shoulder holster like Jean's is much easier to reach on horseback.

“You’re going to waste a bullet on a fucking dog?” Jean says, incredulous. “I'm not explaining that back at the station.” 

“That’s distemper,” Harry protests, gesturing with his gun towards the shivering dog. “It's fucking incurable.”

“Then it'll just die anyway. We're not animal control,” Jean hisses.

“Ugh, fine,” Harry says, throwing his hands up in the air to emphasize his exasperation. His reins slide down Bravo's neck as he holsters his gun. Harry is such a fucking poor horseman. Jean waits for him to recollect the reins, and then they set back on their way. 

As they approach, the dog watches them, tongue lolling, muscles spasming lightly, then turns and disappears into the trees.

“Fucking Pox,” Harry says. 

–

Upon finding out that Jean can type at a rate of sixty words per minute, Harry joyfully declares that he will never type up his own reports again.

“I’m not a fucking secretary,” Jean snaps, already resigning himself to the task.

“Jean Vicquemare, I will marry you. I will take you to Résurrection for our honeymoon and make love to you on the sand so, so sweetly, if you please– pretty please– type this report for me. Pleeeeeease. Please.”

Harry looks like he might actually get down on one knee in the middle of the office, which would be awful. Jean wrinkles his nose in disgust and rolls his eyes in despair and snatches the crumpled papers out of Harry’s beseeching hands. Just to get him to shut up. Harry's dangerously bowing knees straighten out immediately. “You can't afford a trip to Résurrection,” Jean mutters, straightening the papers with a brisk rap to the desktop. 

Harry ignores the dig. After all, none of them can afford a trip to Résurrection. “I'll just go and grab us some churros,” he offers graciously, and promptly disappears in a cloud of tobacco smoke. 

It’s probably for the best, though. Because honestly, Harry cannot be trusted to do his own paperwork. He tends to try and sneak insane case names into his reports, or transcriptions of inappropriate statements by passers-by. So before settling down to type, Jean picks up a pen and screens Harry's reports, striking out as many unnecessary asides as possible before Harry comes back. 

Harry's scrawl: blocky, rigid, masculine, hurried. Letters crowded together like a fire safety violation. Borderline unreadable, a language that only Harry is truly fluent in, but by now Vicquemare’s fairly conversant; he can at least spot the expletives pretty consistently. 

He stretches his long legs beneath the desk. Vicquemare’s own loose, slanted script has been variously described as "quite legible" (by Lambert) and "fuckin’ girly" (by Mills). Mindlessly, he doodles a letter “J” on a corner of scrap paper, trying to reproduce the curves of the longhand in front of him. He stares at it for a second, then immediately scribbles it out so hard he almost tears the paper.

–

Jean gives his cock a few perfunctory tugs, averting his eyes as he does. He doesn’t like to look at it. After an eternity he shoots into the toilet bowl, then sticks his head under the sink faucet and lets the liquid fill his ears. He eats cold tinned fish in the living room with water still trickling down his neck.

–

“So, like the suicide?”

Jean freezes elegantly with his pen poised over a toxicology report. “What?”

“Your namesake,” Harry says. “The communist.” He looks Jean up and down with a slight squint, assessing something. "You're a little young for a proper revolutionary name, but I could see your mother as a sentimental type.”

“She's not,” Jean says.

“You sure? It could be like a jinx. Name the child after a famous suicide and then you’ll never be rid of him.”

Jean doesn't know what to say to that. "It's a family name," he manages finally. “Her uncle, or something. I never met the man.”

"Eh," Harry says, shrugging. “I like mine better. Means you have to live forever.”

Jean really doesn't know what to say to that.

“Hmmh. Does that make me Dobreva?” Harry muses, a pen cap cradled between his teeth.

Jean knows exactly what to say to that, and also the correct action to take. Harry yelps when the tox report smacks him in the nose, and the pen cap falls from his lips onto the floor, leaving two wet drops of saliva on the boards.

–

At first, Jean can't even understand what it is he's seeing. 

The carcass commands everyone’s attention, like a particularly skillful street performance, or a public execution. Its patchwork skin bulges and stretches oddly over the bones underneath; the neck and legs flop awkwardly over the edges of the flatbed wagon, threatening to knock into anyone who gets too close. A girl sits astride a mule hitched to the vehicle, heading the procession with placid detachment like a teenaged princeling. Palm-sized shrapnel ricochets off cobblestones, wooden slats, and decomposing flesh. The mob undulates like water touching shoreline, at least a hundred strong.

To put it plainly: there is a crowd of people throwing stones and bottles at a dead giraffe on a cart.

“Did they kill it?” Jean asks, aghast.

“I don't know,” Harry says grimly. Jean supposes it's possible they just found it dead already and simply dragged it onto the wagon for attention. He's not sure what it takes to kill a giraffe. Much bigger than a horse, but so spindly… They look as though they could topple like a house of cards. 

A bloated blue tongue lolls out the side of the carcass’ mouth, reaches obscenely towards the cobbles. “It must be a young one,” Harry says. “Full grown beast, those legs would be dragging on the ground.”

Their horses’ hooves thud against the street, muted by shock-absorbing rubber, carrying them closer to the implausible spectacle taking place in the middle of a Villalobos street. “RCM,” Harry bellows, using his horse to part the crowd. Jean follows close behind, and together they pull up in front of the mule, stopping the cart short. 

The crowd bubbles around them, though nobody wants to get too close to the horses, and the rain of projectiles peters out. “What’s up?” Harry says to the muleteer, faux-affable veneer on full display. Usually they’re able to rely on the height from the horses to lend them some extra authority, but the mule beneath the girl puts her at eye level with Harry. He has to raise his voice significantly to be heard over the burbling of the crowd. “Did you kill this animal here?”

The girl regards them with dark, canny eyes. “Found it,” she says simply.

“Where?”

“The valley.” The mule twitches an ear; a dislodged fly meanders around for a bit before alighting on the giraffe’s flank. 

Harry presses forth. “Why is everyone hitting it?”

She shrugs. “I dunno.”

“You dunno?”

“Well, maybe they see it as a symbol of the Suzerainty, with their Royal Zoo and everything. Or maybe they’re thinking about how the Commune burnt that zoo to the ground,” she shoots back glibly. “Or maybe they just like to hit things.”

A voice in the crowd suddenly cries out, “Fucking monster!” It's unclear as to whom it's directed, but a palm-sized stone clatters against a wagon-wheel, a bit too close for comfort.

Harry gives Jean a look. Time to wrap this up. Jean turns his horse in a tight circle and shouts: “THIS IS A POLICE ORDER! DISPERSE NOW!”

He is completely ignored, unless you count the fresh volley of trash at the giraffe carcass as a response. He looks at Harry. Harry looks back. And then Harry struggles out of his stirrups and crouches on top of Bravo’s back. 

“Harry,” Jean snaps, extremely apprehensive. 

Harry winks charmingly, and jumps off his horse. 

The thud of his boots on the wagon boards hits Jean’s eardrums like a gunshot. He nearly unseats himself in his lunge to grab Bravo’s reins. “Harry! What the hell?”

“POLICE! DISPERSE!” Harry bellows, waving his arms. His cloak flaps like a pair of wings.

The crowd takes notice, sort of, and now jeers of “Look at the pig!” swirl through the air to mix with the general riotous rumblings. Predictably, the lackluster response simply pisses Harry off worse. “I said fucking disperse! Or you'll be cited for, fucking– rowdiness! Disrupting public order!”

Jean starts clumsily circling the wagon while trying to keep hold of Harry’s fucking horse, hoping to keep the crowd at a wide berth. “Disperse!” he echoes, as Harry stamps around and starts reciting the Wayfarer Act (or at least, something that sounds like it– not like Jean knows the fucking legislation off the top of his head).

Some members of the mob actually start to leave, but the majority stay put. A yowl of “Aww, fuck you, coppo!” pierces through from somewhere on the outskirts of the mob. A bottle flies through the air, narrowly missing Harry's hip, and shatters with a cheerful tinkle on the cobbles behind him. 

Jean sees Harry pause for just a second, and knows with dreadful certainty that gears are turning. Drawbridges are raising. Cauldrons of boiling oil are being hefted along the ramparts. 

Harry brings the heel of his boot down in two swift, decisive motions, splintering the left shaft of the wagon into pieces. Then he does the same to the other shaft, and, with a slap to the mule’s hindquarters, he sends the animal running. “Oh, fuck you,” the muleteer yells as she is jostled away atop her steed, leaving the wagon stranded.

The crowd immediately catches the scent of chaos on the air, and now it starts to press closer. Blood rushing in his ears, Jean drops the extra set of reins. If the horse bolts, the horse bolts; he needs to be able to maneuver. He urges Tanzer forward and mock-charges the crowd a few times, pulling up short only a metre or two away. It’s enough to drive them back from the wagon (from Harry), but it earns Jean no goodwill.

Another batch of trash comes flying, and this time an aluminum can smacks into Harry's shoulder and Jean almost loses it. He continues shouting for dispersal as he once again pushes his horse towards the people, once again narrowly avoids ramming them with over half a ton of animal mass. Jean's heart is pounding, his muscles are clenched. Every breath feels carbonated. From the wagon, he hears: “Fuck yeah, trample ‘em, Jean! Drive ‘em out!”

It's probably not helping their cause, but it fills him with– something– to hear Harry urging him on like that. It feels like the two of them are taking on an ocean. 

Over the cacaphony– the snorts of horses, the cries of the crowd, the thuds of flesh– Jean hears his partner's voice cut through, exuberant on the wind: “Yeah, Jean! Fuck yeah, Jean…!”

Behind him, the giraffe’s skin splits open, but it has no more blood left to bleed.

–

“Are you sick?” Jean's mother asks suspiciously. 

“What? No.”

“You shouldn't be here if you're sick.”

“I'm not sick!” Jean protests.

“You sound awful,” she sniffs, running a hand through her hair: still pitch black, not a whiff of grey. People used to say he looked like her all the time, but now, nobody besides the nurses ever sees the two of them together.

“I sound the same as always. Your hearing is going,” Jean snaps, then instantly feels guilty. Jean's mother lives in a home for the mentally and physically deteriorating, though she is not yet sixty. Jean's oldest brother pays for her board. He works in banking, or something. Jean's second-oldest brother sells projectors. The three of them coordinate their monthly visits to their mother carefully, so that there is no risk they might accidentally come across each other in the halls one day and have to make small talk.

“Sorry, Maman,” he says, chastened. Maybe she's right. He smokes a lot more than he used to. He won't mention that. She took his father’s death very hard. 

She asks if he has a lady friend. He says no. She asks if he's still just a lieutenant. He says yes. She tells him Camille’s wife just had their second son, you should bring them a gift. He says of course, and neglects to mention that his nephew is already four years old. She tells him the nurses are very cruel here, they found the sherry she kept under the bed and threw it away, and she thinks possibly they stole her brass earrings shaped like the little ferns. Étienne was belted in the kitchen after trading those for hash when Jean was about thirteen, but he chooses not to remind her. 

He walks out of the building and straight into an oppressive drizzle. Looking up at the greyness, he thinks of nothing at all. 

–

“Yeah, yeah– your caseload is only so impressive because nobody can match your ability to abuse substances. You total freak of nature,” Jean says, before knocking his glass of wine back like it’s a shot. He’s already two shiny little Preptides in, but he thinks Harry might have downed half the fucking bottle. It’s impressive, honestly– just so long as he doesn’t vomit on Jean this time. 

“What! You wound me, Jean Vicquemare! Detective God doesn't need anything– look!” Harry pours the bottle out on the floor. Deep red spreads across triple-sealed floorboards like organ blood, and Harry starts doing a demonic kind of jig.

“Fuckhead, this is my apartment,” Jean groans. He shoves Harry in the shoulder and stalks to the kitchen for a towel. A strip of yellow flypaper twists self-consciously in the air. 

He’s just located a rag from under the sink when he hears a squeak and a thud in quick succession and whips his head around (bravely fighting the ensuing vertigo). Harry is, of course, flat on the floor. “Alas!” Harry cries, not even trying to get up. It is the funniest thing Jean Vicquemare has seen in his entire life. He has to lay his hands on top of his kneecaps and breathe deeply for a bit.

“You're a fucking child,” Jean wheezes, “A child who has shat on the floor, then fallen backwards into his own mess. A shitty kid. Shitkid, that's you.”

Harry wriggles in the puddle invitingly. “Shit. Kid, shitting on kids,” he sings to the ceiling.

“Nooo!” Jean cries, still bent double in the kitchen. “No, no, that's too weird. You're the shitkid. That's all. It's very simple.” He pants lightheadedly for a minute more, until he feels capable of straightening up and walking back over to the living carcass on his floor, which has begun humming tunelessly. He nudges Harry's ribs with the toe of his shoe. Then a second time, harder. Lightning-fast, a hand shoots out from the carcass’ folds, seizing Jean around the ankle and yanking him down. Jean hits his elbow on the coffee table, quite hard. Typing is very annoying the next morning.

–

A fan beats overhead, keeping the dust motes airborne.

“Anything else?”

“No.” A brown faux-leather chair creaks, slightly. “No, things are good.”

“Great, great.” A pen scratches. “Okay, we’ll see how it goes with these ones.”

“Sounds good.”

“Remember, no drinking, no drugs. If you have any side effects, you can bring it up at your next session, ah–” Pages rustle, flipping back and forth. “--Which schedule did they put you on again? The monthly, or the bi-monthly?”

“The bi-monthly.” 

“Those cheap bastards. You really should be on the monthly. Okay then, your next session is in June. I think it’ll be me again, but it might be Bertrand. I'm not sure if you've had him before. Just fill him in when you go.”

“Okay.”

A hinge squeaks, and then no more.

–

“Open up!” Harry barks, rapping briskly on the door.

“Do you have to be so loud. All the time,” Jean says, pinching the bridge of his nose and squeezing his eyes shut. 

“Fuckin’ RCM, open up!”

“You're making my fucking headache worse,” Jean snaps. 

“Well, maybe if you could hold your liquor,” Harry shoots back, banging harder.

“My liquor is fine.” Harry doesn't need to know about the intimate thirty minutes Jean had spent with his toilet bowl first thing in the morning. “The headache is from when you tripped me and I went headlong into the wall, fuckhead.” 

“What? I don't remember that,” Harry says.

“Well, I do,” Jean growls, one hand on the door for support. The hallway’s sickly shade of green paint is doing nothing for his health.

“I was drunk, Vicquemare, what do you want me to say?” Harry’s facing the door, but it’s his rolling-his-eyes voice.

“Try, ‘Sorry, Jean,’” Jean snaps. “Most people would apologize.” 

“M’not most people, Jeanvic. Ah, fuck it,” Harry says, and steps back. Jean pivots towards the stairwell, ready to return to the station and try another day. Then he hears a thud and a splintering noise.

He turns back around. Harry has kicked in the door.

Jean stares. Harry glances back, already halfway through the doorframe. “I heard a scream in there. Didn't you?”

Jean rolls his eyes, but follows.

They come across their man holed up in the bathroom, hiding behind a mildewed shower curtain printed with little primroses, like he thinks they’re here to fucking kill him. Harry drags him out and tosses him onto the settee. “RCM,” Jean informs him, because Harry is too busy rifling through the man’s pockets (for weapons, of course!) to announce himself. 

Only once he's liberated a half-empty pack of Drouins and two paper-wrapped gooseberry-mint lozenges from their POI does Harry step into his proper role. “Right, then,” he says, “tell me about this ‘The Cat.’” A new formulation of unregistered synthetic opiate has hit the streets in the form of pale yellow pills, mixed with milk proteins and crudely manufactured in a homemade press which stamps them with the letter ‘W.’ The local junkies have taken to calling them ‘Cat Ears’ as a nod to the imprint. Thus, the pills’ mysterious manufacturer: The Cat.

Their POI is a small man named Bruno or Boris or something: plump, unshaven, looks rather cheerful– or would look cheerful, probably, if a pair of policemen hadn’t just broken down his door. He's a drug dealer, as well as maître d'hôtel at a restaurant in Grand Couron, and by all accounts perfectly mediocre at both jobs. Harry sets upon him in that way he has, just relentless badgering; chasing down every scrap of information, bargaining and threatening and flattering in quick succession. It’s like a rain of arrows. Jean tries to keep up with his notes.

“It’s Kovács, his name is Erno Kovács!” the man yells finally, sweating so profusely he'll probably stain the sofa. “Fuck, he’s a veterinarst or something, that’s how he gets the stuff.”

Harry keeps on the shakedown. “And how do you know this drugmaker’s given name? You’re just some small-time dealer trash– What makes you worthy of entering his inner circle?”

The man hesitates for a second, then admits, “My sister used to date him.” Jean makes another note. They'll talk to the sister, too.

“And why the letter ‘W?’” Harry thunders, pointing a mighty, accusing finger.

“Oh– I don’t know,” the man responds, clearly a little taken aback by the intensity of that specific question. Harry’s been obsessed with the mystery of the fucking letter ‘W’. Knowing Harry, that single inconsequential detail intrigues him more than the prospect of apprehending a dangerous drug manufacturer. He's going to chase that answer down with all the fervor he can muster; the case itself is almost incidental. Jean resists the urge to roll his eyes; it would be unprofessional, especially in front of a civilian, and also, Harry's methods fucking work, so. What can you do.

With that last outburst, Harry has apparently exhausted all his lines of questioning. Jean slides the notebook into his pocket. “Thanks for your cooperation.”

As they’re exiting the now-ruined doorframe, Bruno or Boris or something still quivering behind them, Harry pivots smartly on his heel, swipes a ceramic vase off the top of a cabinet, removes the silk flowers stuffed inside it, vomits efficiently into the mouth of the vessel, replaces the flowers, replaces the vase, and walks out. Jean follows quickly behind.

“Now who needs to hold his liquor?” a rather pleased Jean breathes into Harry’s ear as they clomp down the stairwell. 

“Whatever,” Harry grunts, popping one of the confiscated lozenges into his mouth and immediately crunching down hard. “Hey, wait a minute.”

Jean pauses obligingly and looks back. Between thick, rough fingertips: a pale scrap of cheap silk. Harry grins his dog-grin as he grabs Jean by one lapel and draws him close; Jean allows himself to be pulled. In the hollow quietude of the stairwell, a stolen artificial flower is deftly inserted into Jean’s buttonhole, and for once Jean Vicquemare has nothing to say.

When Harry releases him, Jean sways a little on the stairs. Harry pats him twice on his chest, brisk and heavy like a farmer might touch an old sheepdog, then clatters ahead down to the first floor. Jean rolls his eyes for an audience of zero, removes the flower from his jacket, and tosses it to the ground. 

–

The task force is Harry's idea, of course. Unbelievably, the bosses go along with it. The shiny new “Yefreitor” attached to his rank probably has something to do with their indulgence. 

The new leaders of the 41st Precinct’s Major Crimes Unit celebrate the way they celebrate everything: with copious amounts of drugs and alcohol. After a quick bump in the gents’, Harry goes up to every single woman in the bar, methodically, counter-clockwise, and runs aground each time. Having exhausted his options, he returns to the table and starts trying to matchmake Jean instead.

“Her? No, her! Her, with the little vest!”

“Not my type,” Jean says, without even looking. He lifts the bottle to his lips. Bitter, bready, just a bit too sour. But it's cold. 

“Who cares if she's not your type!” Harry cries. “You can't be picky, Vic. Vicky. Picky Vicky. When's the last time you got any pussy?”

Jean rolls his eyes. “Not everyone is as obsessed with fucking as you are, Captain Cock.”

“Jean. You need to fuck. You need to. You have to fuck for me. Every broad in this establishment has turned me down. One of us has to score tonight.” Harry stretches in his seat, one shoe bumping needily against Jean’s ankle. “It's like you don't even care about our reputation.”

“Our reputation,” Jean repeats skeptically. 

“We're stone cold motherfuckers, Jeanvic. Real nasty sons of bitches. But we're lovers too. That’s why everyone wants to be us.”

“You are delusional,” Jean tells him nicely.

“I’m a completely normal guy,” Harry says, rubbing a loose fist up and down the neck of his bottle. “You, on the other hand.” He tucks his chin in towards his collarbone and hits Jean with one of his piercing looks, not unlike the bird of prey for which he's named.

It is at this moment that Jean realizes Harry will not let this go. He’s going to try to crack Jean open just like he’d do to a suspect. Something deep within Jean pulsates with a little thrill at the knowledge that Harry considers him interesting enough to try and pry apart; as a rule, Jean is not an interesting person. At the same time, he recoils: he doesn’t want to be pried apart. He prefers himself not in pieces. But somehow, beneath the haze in Harry's marshy green eyes, beneath the hairy knuckles and hulking shoulders, beneath the scoffing and the sneering and the deep masculine belly laughs… Jean feels that maybe Harry won't use this against him. Maybe Jean can trust him with more than just his life. And so Jean can't believe he tells him. But he does.

"Harry, my dick doesn't work," Jean sighs finally. "It's a casualty of the hopeless war the psychiatrists are waging to save my stupid fucking brain."

Harry's eyes grow wide as saucers, drink sloshing as he jerks forward to whisper in horror, "They cut your dick off?"

"No, you moron," Jean hisses, "It's fucking. Side effects. Medication. You ass. I can't believe you made yefreitor.”

Harry places a hand on his chest, between his lungs. A little bit of hair peeks out grotesquely from his collar. “Oh, Jeanvic,” he says, with feeling. “Don't worry. I will take care of you. I will. Tonight. We shall rise above the need for pussy.” Jean closes his eyes, but Harry keeps going. The worst part is that Harry isn't even trying to make fun of him. “We shall crest the wave of pussy and we shall sail onwards. We–” A pause. Jean cracks an eye open again to find Harry pointing his bottle at Jean’s face. Jean clinks, resigned. “Shall get truly fucking sloshed.”

They do. 

Oh, they do.

They stumble into Harry’s apartment at some ungodly hour, howling– literally howling, like dogs– and banging their extremities on every solid object that presents itself.

“Beer! Beer! Beer!” they cry in unison, as Harry ducks into the refrigerator, emerging with an armful of bottles cradled like newborn kittens. Harry tries to open his bottle first with his house key, then with the sticky laminate of his countertop, and is rummaging through his pockets for a flickknife before Jean swoops in and forces the bottle opener into his sweaty palm. In cracking the bottle open, Harry slops some of the drink down his front, and decides this is reason enough to finally peel off his ‘party’ shirt. He stands in Jean's kitchen in his sweat-stained undershirt, the thicket of wiry hairs on his arms lifting in the cool air. Jean is too drunk to keep himself from staring in mild disgust. 

Things calm down a bit after that; they shove a window open to let the night in, and pull up chairs around the kitchen table to laugh and cough and sweat and fumble with their smokes. Jean gets distracted for a few moments watching a moth circle frantically around Harry's milky overhead light, and when he tunes back in Harry is talking about the job, again. He's perched on the chair with one knee tucked up by his chin; the bend strains his trouser leg, baring a few centimetres of pale, furry shin between the hem and his ankle (when did he lose his shoes– and his socks?), and he's gesturing vaguely with a cigarette, babbling like he always does, about how being a member of the force is so hard but they can take it, they can take anything because they're harder, they're so hard, Harry's rock hard, Harry knows how to take anything, see? And then he jabs the lit end of his cigarette down on the top of his foot right where it meets his leg, and holds it there.

“See,” Harry says again, while Jean is frozen with his bottle halfway to his mouth. “You have to be able to withstand pain.” Jean stares at him. After a few more moments, Harry removes his hand with a showman’s  flourish. 

A pinkish circle appears on Harry's skin, glistening under the kitchen light. Green eyes, bloodshot but strangely alert, bore into Jean's like drill bits seeking oil.

So Jean Vicquemare snaps, “I can withstand pain,” and jabs his own cigarette against the inside of his elbow.

From there on it's like a game. They take turns.

Harry’s massive, ink-stained paws flutter all around his own body, seemingly at random: ankle, shin, little finger, stomach, stomach again, tricep. Jean's less chaotic in his placement. With one arm shrugged out of his shirt, his burns make a meandering line from elbow to shoulder, easily covered by his clothing. Even in the throes of this madness, he’s cognizant of the reality that he has to go to work on Monday.

Harry doesn't seem cognizant of much reality at all, at the moment. “This is nothing compared to what she did. Nothing at all.” Jean doesn't know who She is, but he cannot fucking bring himself to care about another one of Harry's woman-shaped missteps right now, when it's just the two of them together in this kitchen, turned towards each other like commas telling secrets. 

The smell of burning flesh curls in the air, pummeled by the blades of the ceiling fan. They relight their cigarettes again and again.

Harry teases the ember around his own face and Jean feels his lungs tighten, but then Harry's hand veers away and crash-lands on his bare shoulder instead. Jean creeps nearer to his own collarbone, folding his chin towards his sternum so he doesn't have to look at Harry. As the flesh over Jean's left lung sizzles, an awful spark flickers around his groin, and for possibly the first time ever, Jean is grateful for side effects. 

Panic curls in his gut, striped with disgust. There is something so fucking wrong with you. He crosses his legs, although he doesn't need to, and straightens his one remaining shirt cuff, although he certainly doesn't need to do that either. Jean Vicquemare jams his cigarette end into random shoulder meat, and pretends he's having a completely normal comradely bonding session with his partner.

They carry on. Harry keeps muttering about Her, Jean keeps feeling dizzy, but their cigarettes burn to the filter eventually, and so the game comes to an end.

They fall asleep in Harry's bed, still in their clothes on top of the covers. The both of them wake up in curled positions, like children.

–

As Vicquemare rounds the desk, Harry reaches out and snags him by the upper arm.

"And I-- whoa. Have you been working out?" Harry asks, brow furrowed, squeezing Jean's flesh experimentally. 

"Focus on your work," Jean snarls, yanking his body part back. 

After his shift, he takes the bus straight to the gymnasium and does bicep curls until he can hear every strand of muscle in his arms begging for death.

–

They burst through the front door of the building, Jean’s arm slung across Harry's shoulders, Harry's sideburns prickling the side of Jean’s neck. They’d left the horses outside by the payphone, and Jean’s not even sure Harry remembered to tether them to anything. He hopes the animals haven't bolted. Berdyayeva is going to dick them if they've lost their horses. Harry lets go, and Jean Vicquemare hits tile.

As Jean is still reeling from the impact, Harry yanks Jean's shirt out of his trousers and tears open the three lowest buttons to reveal the wet wound beside his navel. One of Harry’s huge, dirty hands swipes over Jean's stomach, ineffectually trying to clear away the blood, and a fingertip snags on the ragged edge of the wound, making Jean jerk and writhe. “God damn you, Harry! Stop fucking touching me! You don't know what you're doing!” He claws at Harry's broad shoulders, trying to shove him away, but Harry is too solid, and the adrenaline that had kept Jean stumbling away from the scene of the shootout into the foyer of this random apartment building is wearing off, replaced by involuntary muscle twitches every time the pain spikes. 

“Don't be such a pussy!” Harry barks, one hand clamped tight on Jean’s shoulder to hold him steady.

“Stop shoving your meaty fingers in my fucking bullet wound!” Jean bellows back, bringing a fist down on Harry’s back.

There is an old woman standing by the stairs holding a yellow plastic bag, staring at them.

“We're police officers,” Jean says reassuringly, as Harry grabs him around the waist with both hands and hoists his torso up, peering underneath him to search for an exit wound. “Don't worry, we've called the ambulance already.”

“It came out! It came out!” Harry yells.

“STOP. TOUCHING ME,” Jean roars. He tries to wriggle out of Harry's arms, but the heel of his hand slips in the blood on the floor. His head strikes the lowest step on the staircase leading to the second floor and he decides to stay horizontal. The old woman is not there anymore, he notes. Oh, this fucking day. Harry's such a shit horseman. If he hadn't let himself be thrown by Bravo, Jean wouldn't have been so distracted trying to calm the animal and simultaneously make sure Harry hadn't broken anything, wouldn’t have missed the bastard they'd been chasing turn around and pull the pistol from his pocket, wouldn't have gotten fucking shot on a Tuesday–

Harry is taking off his jacket for some reason. Jean stares. Shot on a Tuesday and Harry is stripping.

“I have to put pressure on it,” Harry says, and throws his filthy jacket over Jean’s stomach. Jean has time for one deeply painful inhale before Harry slams his hands down over the jacket, pushing so hard he pins Jean’s entire torso to the floor. It is extremely difficult to stay conscious.

"I hate you," Jean gasps. "I hate you, shitkid, I hate you, I hate you--" the pain hijacks his brain for a second and he screams through a jaw locked tight, lest he bite his own fucking tongue off "--you're a blight on this isola, you stupid fuck, you'll kill me, you will literally kill me--" He runs out of breath, but Harry has always had a knack for filling perfectly good silences.

"Shut up!" Harry roars frantically, pressing down harder on Jean's stomach. "You're pushing the blood out faster with all the whining, you stupid shit!"

"I'll throttle you," Jean says, glaring through one eye. Keeping both open is far too much work. Speaking is just about too much work. "My hands. Around your throat. You're done. No one will. Fucking come to the funeral." He heaves a breath in, a breath out, ragged. When did your skull become made of lead, Vicquemare?

"Yeah, yeah, fucking go on then," Harry snaps, fat drops of sweat sliding down his nose. Jean's abdomen is on fire. It must be Harry's hands; the man is like a human engine, burning and churning. In the winter he breathes plumes of steam like an electrical plant. Jean feels like a lizard on a rock next to him, never warm enough, never... god damn this shit hurts. The horses probably haven't bolted, right?

"I'm a lizard," Jean says indistinctly, as pooling blood creeps into his ass crack.

“What?” The pressure on his stomach lets up, just for a second, as Harry pauses to process Jean’s words. "What kind of lizard?" he asks.

"Uhm," Jean says. "I don't know." He turns his head to the side, feels cool tile on his cheek. The puncture in his stomach pulses with his heartbeat, and he gurgles in pain.

"God damn it,” Harry says under his breath, then, sounding somewhat freaked, “Look, that's okay. You hear me, fuckhead? They'll be here soon, you'll get fixed up. Gottlieb is the best. You'll get stitched up and then you can try and smash my skull in– doesn't that sound nice?”

"Mmgh." Jean really does not feel well. 

Harry's big, stupid paw pats heavily at Jean's head, attempting to push sweat-sodden hair back from his brow. That's nice, Jean thinks, and vomits on the floor.

–

Jean Vicquemare stands in front of a mirror and unbuttons his shirt, letting it hang open to bare his midsection despite the chill in the bathroom. 

One hand hovers over his stomach, hesitant to make contact at first. With his middle finger, Jean lightly touches the center of the bandage beside his navel. It hurts, but it's not too much to bear.

His blunt fingernails dig under the edges of the paper tape holding the pad to his skin. Part of the scab rips off with the gauze, and Jean Vicquemare’s bullet wound weeps again. He pokes the stitching with a finger, at first just to try and staunch the dribbles of blood, but then finds himself absently rubbing his fingerprint across the outgrowths of surgical silk sprouting from his flesh– pushing them back and forth, tugging ever so slightly at his puckered, raw edges. 

He envisions pulling the thread free and slipping his finger inside the bullet hole. It would hurt, a lot. But it would go in easily, he’s sure. His entrails would be soft and warm. A muscle tightens somewhere around the area of his pelvis. 

Jean grabs the supplies balanced carefully on the edge of the sink and finishes changing the bandage. Then he slips his shirt off completely, turns around, and repeats the process for the matching wound on his back. His neck cranes awkwardly over his shoulder to see, his elbows contort to reach. He pretends he is taking care of someone else, that this imaginary other person wouldn’t want an infection and doesn’t like being in pain.

When he’s all sealed up again, Jean finds that he can’t quite step away from the mirror. He stares into his reflection: unwashed hair, pale eyes, pits bitten across the flesh of his cheeks like Pale exposure. He looks tired. He looks sick. 

Jean presses his palm against the front of his trousers, only for a moment. Then he puts his shirt back on and abandons his mirror.

–

“Wait, wait, this isn't my horse,” Jean says, as the hostler arrives leading an unfamiliar chestnut animal. “I ride Tanzer.”

“Tanzer is off-duty, Lieutenant,” the hostler says. “Veterinarst says he's been working too hard, might have done something to a tendon.”

Fucking Harry, running them all over Jamrock for this case. They skipped lunch yesterday, Jean remembers guiltily, which means the horses skipped their breaks too. He should have put his foot down, but he didn’t think. Not that Harry would have listened. The Indomitable Can-Opener. The Insatiable Can-Opener.

“Velo is steady, sir. He's a good horse.” 

Jean looks into the liquid brown eyeball staring placidly at him– sees his own reflection, tiny and warped. He frowns. Harry, already seated astride his own mount, groans. “Just get on the fucking horse, Vic, let's go.”

“Oh, fuck off,” Jean snaps, stepping up the mounting block and throwing a leg over the unfamiliar beast. The hostler stands back as Jean fiddles with the reins. Jean shoots Harry a glare, then clicks his tongue and leaves the stables without looking to see if Harry follows.

The hostler didn't lie. Velo is a good horse. 

The next day Harry shows up with the motor carriage. 

“What? What the fuck is this!?”

“It was a surprise, Jeanvic! Next time you get shot, I can just drive you to the hospital!”

“A sur– I don't believe it. What strings could you possibly have to pull that I don't know about?”

“Oh, you know. Little bit of blackmail here, the odd sexual favour there…”

“Forty thousand reál… How did you… The requisition paperwork. I can't believe you filled out the requisition paperwork.”

“Well… I made McClaine fill it out for me.”

“Ah. Of course. Of course… Damn. It really is fucking… big.”

Tanzer’s lameness turns out to have been caused by a screw, the head broken off so that the veterinarst couldn't see it in the hoof at first. He makes a full recovery and goes back on patrol within a week, but Jean never rides him again. 

–

Sometimes Jean really does think the beginning of the end was that god damned MC.

–

With his eyes barely open in the grey light of dawn, Jean snuffles like a hedgehog through Harry's kitchen drawers, searching for a knife by touch. 

He would like to make jam on bread. He is very hungry and tired and hungover in Harry Du Bois’ awful little apartment and he feels a low-grade desperation tickling at the top of his spine and it informs him that if he doesn’t have a nice bit of jam on bread before work then he will probably get shot again or hit by a carriage or something even more distressing. Harry flops around on the sofa in the other room, equally hungover and vastly more pathetic about it.

Jean’s fingertips slide across a glossy finish and catch under a flat corner. He removes his prize and sees, incredibly: a woman.

She's standing in front of a fountain. It looks to be a sunny day: she's wearing a pair of tinted glasses, and all her colors are washed out, overexposed. She leans back, both hands braced on the rim of the fountain behind her, a broad smile splitting a pair of lips as pink and shiny as salmon filets, one foot tucked shyly behind the opposite ankle. Her chin is weak, her forehead high, and her hair is very, very straight. She's pretty, for sure, prettier than most people that Harry and Jean have any business knowing. Did Harry steal her from the evidence archives? 

He's about to turn and ask Harry about it when he feels a puff of hot, moist breath on the back of his neck, and comes to the slightly ball-shriveling realization that Harry has been standing behind him for a few moments now. The photograph is ripped from Jean's hand so fast that it nearly gives him a paper cut. Harry stomps over to the counter, throws the photo down into the sink, and turns the faucet on with a violent, wrenching motion.

“What are you doing?" Jean says, genuinely more bemused than anything.

“I’m drowning her,” Harry says, staring at the stream of water.

“Okay. Who is she?”

“My ex-fiancée.”

Jean reels a little from the revelation that apparently a woman was once able to stand Harry long enough to let herself get fucking engaged to him. “Ex? Well, god, Harry, then why the fuck do you still have a picture of her,” he remarks. 

“Shut up,” Harry says forcefully and rounds on Jean. He leaves the faucet running: it screams its whispery little scream. 

“You couldn't bear the agony I've been through,” Harry growls, practically vibrating. “It would make you shrivel like a lit strip of paper. It would make you crumple like an empty can. It would make you. It would hurt.” Their noses are nearly touching, Harry is so close. Jean could count his pores. “I've lived through an immolation at the hands of Dora Fucking Ingerlund, you hear?” Harry jabs a finger towards the sink. “That's true beauty. The kind that burns you to look at it.” 

Jam on bread. That was all Jean had wanted. 

“You could never understand,” Harry pronounces derisively. Probably true. The faucet gushes behind him, deafening.

“Sure,” Jean snaps, and puts a hand over Harry’s chest to shove him back. “What a shame for me.”

Harry wobbles a little, brows drawn together. For a second, Jean wonders if he better put some more weight on his back foot, but then Harry simply turns aside, opens a drawer to his left, and retrieves a butter knife. He slams it flat on the counter, glinting dully like a pistol, and picks his cloak off the back of a chair. 

–

“This is why I get cluster headaches now,” Jean says. “Shit like this.”

"You ugly, poxy--" Harry throws a punch, stumbles on nothing, falls against the wall. 

Jean is not wounded, physically or otherwise. He has no illusions. When women sleep with him, it’s his body they praise. He has a good body, he knows-- he has made it that way. Not out of vanity. It's useful to be in shape. Especially if one is getting into the habit of dragging the 41st's star detective out of gutters, and puddles, and bins. 

He exhales, grabs Harry under the armpits, and hauls him up. 

“I've got you.” A tender threat and grim promise. “I've got you, shitkid.”

–

Lying on his stomach, Jean bites down on his pillow as hard as he can, trying to force his teeth through the cotton casing until they begin to ache nearly as bad as his eye socket. He releases his pillow, damp with spittle, and breathes alone for a few moments. Then he tilts his head and shifts his arm and sinks his teeth into the flesh of his own bicep. It’s hard to get a good grip, but he hangs on, pressing his jaws together, spilling blood beneath his skin. 

It feels like it should feel like more. After a few moments, he gives up. His own saliva dries coolly on his skin.

–

What annoys Jean the most about Harry's awful lizard shoes is that when he wears them, it evens out their heights.

What annoys him the second most is the way they click on the cobblestones like a posh woman's high heels, an insufferable percussive backing track to Harry's mindless chatter. Jeanvic, blah blah! Clack clack clack. Blah blah blah women! Clack clack clack. 

They trudge past buildings pockmarked from bombings, through puddles stuffed with cigarette butts, and Harry remarks, “You know, that witness was really passionate about Guillaume le Million!” 

“No, Harry. You were passionate. She was just being polite, because she’s scared of us,” Jean corrects sourly. 

“Ah. Well. We are scary guys.” Harry tugs roughly at the end of his new favorite necktie, an absolute atrocity which shames the entire Revacholian Citizens’ Militia with its presence. “You think she was telling the truth about our corpse having gotten off speed?”

Jean looks at him. Harry's the one who’s supposed to have the intuition. “No one ever tells the truth,” he says, dour. 

“And no one ever really gets off speed,” Harry says wisely. 

“They do if it kills them,” Jean retorts. As is likely to have happened to their dead body from this morning. 

“Ah, but what a way to go! Speed is so incredible, don't you think, Jean?” Harry says dreamily. 

“Sure,” Jean says. “That’s why people get addicted to it.” Jean’s had his share, when Harry’s feeling generous. It’s useful, especially during overnight shifts. He's not too worried about developing a habit. That would require him to go and leave his apartment after he gets back from work, rather than spend his evenings sitting on his bed or pacing incessantly. Usually, he’d rather get switched off than switched on, anyway. 

“What better way to die than while knowing you're invincible! What a mindfuck!” Harry goes on, making some expansive hand gestures. He’s always been a fast walker, but right now he’s nearly jogging down the street. Clack clack clack clack clack. 

Jean gets suspicious, suddenly. 

“Harry. Are you on speed right now?”

Harry slows down a few beats and throws a glance at Jean over his shoulder. “A little bit, yeah.” He gives a thumbs-up. “Supercop.”

“For god's sake, it's eight o'clock in the morning.”

“Haha. Yeah.” Harry hums an unidentifiable little tune, and barges down an alleyway. He's ‘been getting really into dumpsters lately,’ as he likes to inform people when he's not being a belligerent lunatic in their general direction. 

Going directly against all his self-preservation instincts, Jean follows him in and says: “Wait, hold on. Harry, you don’t need to do that shit.”

Harry pauses, half-dissolved paper bag clutched in one fist. “What? Fuck you. You don’t tell me what to do,” he retorts, sounding more bemused than angry, as if Jean has just commanded him not to stay up past his bedtime.

“No, seriously,” Jean says, compulsively straightening his jacket. “Look, I get it, sometimes you have to. But this is a bit fucking early, no? And just to do the interviews?”

“You didn’t have a problem when I was drunk doing interviews yesterday,” Harry says, and, what? 

“You were drunk doing the interviews yesterday?” Jean shouts, then puts his hand to his mouth and looks around guiltily for passers-by. He lowers his voice. “Harry. What the fuck?”

Harry rolls his neck on his shoulders. “See, you didn’t even know,” he says, wagging a finger at Jean. “You don’t get it, Jean. Just makes me an even better cop. We’re all good here.”

Jean storms forward, one hand jerking upwards to grab Harry’s shoulder before he aborts the movement and crosses his arms instead. “Harry. Don’t be a fuckup.”

Harry rolls his eyes, tosses the bag aside petulantly. “Don’t be fucking dramatic, Jeanvic.”

“It’s not like it used to be, you ass. We’ve got the fucking unit to run now,” Jean hisses.

“Our unit’s impeccable! It practically runs itself.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Jean says, through his teeth. “It definitely does not. Just because you’re allergic to paperwork–” he breaks off. “Harry,” he says deliberately, sharply, stepping in close. “Do not fuck me. Don’t you dare.” Harry huffs out a dry, dismissive laugh, and Jean shoots a hand out to grab his forearm. “If you go down, you take me with you,” he says, enunciating with as much deadliness as he can muster. He stares into Harry’s eyes, tries to turn his own into piercing daggers. Penetrate, god damn you.

After a second, Harry shakes his grip off and steps backwards. “Fuck, quit acting like such a homo, Vicquemare,” he scoffs derisively, rubbing his nose on the back of his hand. “People’ll start to think you are one.” 

A dab of snot hangs from one of Harry’s nostrils. Air leaks from between Jean’s teeth as from a punctured tire. 

“Ugh, fine,” Harry grunts, hands shoved into his pockets, “I’ll cut back.”

Later, Jean will wonder whether Harry ever believed himself when he said that, or if it had been a bald-faced lie every single time. 

–

“You need to try being kinder to yourself,” the psychologist says placidly. He’s a slight man with a slight amount of brown hair and a slight mustard stain on his shirt.

“Okay, see, I get it, it’s what you’re supposed to say,” Jean says, closing his eyes briefly. He breathes out through his nose, once, then says: “But why? Really?”

The psychologist starts spouting some bullshit about how Jean has harsh standards and that it's okay to relax sometimes and that other people aren't his responsibility. A piece of paper flies past them outside the window, and Jean's eyes track it for a moment.

“Look,” he interrupts. He forces his body to stay relaxed, molds his voice into something light, reasonable. “I don’t mean, like, morally, ethically, do I–” He makes finger quotes “--‘deserve it.’ I’m saying– as long as I keep functioning– which I will– as long as I keep doing that, then so what if I’m not, not–” The words fizzle out. The chair that faces the psychologist is dark green, stuffed with old springs, and it creaks when Jean shifts. “Happy,” he finishes, with distaste, looking at the wall.

“Well, it’s good to take pride in your work,” the psychologist says, a cautionary note creeping into his tone, “but carrying on this way is simply not sustainable. You'll burn yourself out eventually, Jean.”

“I don't agree,” Jean argues, leaning forward slightly, as one hand wraps tightly around the handrest of his chair. “Plenty of people keep going long past the point where they have any reason. Maybe your books say different, but I look outside my window and I see dozens of them, every day.” Every damn day. But those joyful, light people, the kind of person the psychologists tell Jean he has to become– they don’t live in Jamrock. Jean Vicquemare is part of that grey class, of miserable, exhausted husks who still wake up each morning and perform their duties, because that is what is needed. “And it’s people like that who keep everything from flying off the damn rails.”

Just barely, maybe, but just barely is enough.

–

Two nights after another spat between them, Harry shows up at Jean’s apartment with vomit still crusted in his whiskers and says, “Okay, I think I’m gonna cut back.” He washes his face in Jean's sink and sleeps on Jean’s couch and for about half an hour Jean stands in the doorway with his arms crossed, watching Harry snore and clenching his jaw so tight he feels like his molars might splinter from it. 

–

Harry stops. He starts again. Harry stops. He starts again. Jean argues. Jean scolds. Jean bargains. Jean jogs. Harry stops. He starts again. 

–

When the buzzing starts, Jean has not actually been asleep. He could have been asleep, though. If he was a normal person he would have been asleep. All of his neighbors are certainly asleep. Any considerate person would have assumed that Jean might be asleep.

In reality, Jean has been lying perfectly still for the past two or three hours, pretending to be asleep, in the hopes that if he keeps it up long enough, eventually his brain will simply forget to be awake. 

It hasn’t been working. And now there's the fucking buzzing. Even worse, Jean can hear a ragged voice begin to yowl from outside the fucking building:

“Jean, I lost my keys, I need my spare, Jean, you bastard–”

But he could have been asleep.

Jean lies there for a second. He indulges a fantasy of Trant Heidelstam’s facial expression upon being told that Lieutenant Jean-Heron Vicquemare was tragically killed the previous night after intentionally walking into traffic. He gets up.

The front door unlock in his apartment hasn't worked for months. He picks an old shirt up off the floor, grabs his keyring from his nightstand, and stumbles down the stairwell, full to the brim of hatred and despair. Reaching the front door, he throws it open violently, half-hoping it smacks Harry in his giant drunkard’s nose.

No luck. Harry lurches out of the way just in time. He looks terrible. He smells worse. He's wearing that awful fucking tie again. Jean grabs it and uses it as a lead, yanks Harry up the stairs, down the hall, through the apartment door. He lets it slip from his fingers only once they’re inside, ignoring Harry’s demands for the spare key, made as he stumbles angrily around into Jean’s furniture. 

“Not a fucking chance,” Jean snarls. “You’re wasted, you’re not going out on those streets again tonight.”

Which of course means Harry feels he has to get all belligerent. He throws Jean’s ashtray listlessly against the wall, spraying cigarette butts and ash in a sloppy arc across the room. “Fuck you,” Harry slurs, swaying slightly, legs posted too far apart. Jean stalks forwards, intending to strangle him; Harry steps back, knocks into the sofa, overbalances, and falls flat on his ass. He swears muzzily, then oozes downwards until he’s lying on his back. Jean stares at him. 

Harry lolls his head against the floorboards, hits Jean with one malevolent cracked eyelid. “Fuckin’ prick,” he spits. “Just wan’ my key. Wanna go home.”

“You’ll get yourself fucking run over,” Jean says, exhausted.

“I wanna go home,” Harry insists, flinging an arm out to claw ineffectually at Jean’s bare leg. “You could fuckin’ walk with me then. If you care so much. Fuckin’ pussy.”

His fingertips just barely brush through the hair above Jean’s ankle, light as the touch of a butterfly’s wing. 

It's altogether too much. Jean swings one leg over Harry’s torso, bends down, grabs his shirt, and screams in his face. "Harry, you fuck! You fuck! You could go home, if you weren’t a fucking drunk! But you are, you fucking waste of space, and I'm not walking all the way to your shithole apartment, and so tonight you have to stay here, with me, all night.” His eyes sting, but he ignores it, fists clenched in Harry’s satin shirt. I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.

Jean used to be such a nice guy.

And now, the worst possible thing. Harry just starts crying.

“I can’ ever go home,” he blubbers. “S’not even a home. Nobody’s there… She's all gone…" Harry sobs, tears sliding into his hair. 

This again! "Who fucking cares! Good riddance! Her Innocence of the middle class! Her supreme majesty, blondest of the blonde! Fuck off!” He shakes Harry by the front of his shirt. 

“She was an angel…” 

God, Jean hasn't been able to cry like that since he was in single digits. He's so jealous he could spit. “She was just some chick, and it was SIX YEARS AGO!” He shakes Harry again and bites down on the urge to simply scream like an animal.

Rivulets of snot slide down Harry’s face, into his whiskers, and he wails incoherently. He stinks of booze and mildew. “Look at yourself, Harry,” Jean rages, releasing Harry’s shirt and straightening up. He’s so het up he can nearly feel steam curling off the back of his neck. “You’re fucking disgusting.”

When Jean Vicquemare had joined the force, he had long ago peaked at his not unimpressive height of one hundred and eighty-five centimetres, but he was still gangly, lanky, not yet addicted to the chemicals he pumps into his brain every evening at the gymnasium. And Harry had been, well, strapping. His stamina may have never left him, but a sturdy thickness has given way to lopsided flab and wire. A perfectly respectable moustache, nearly identical to the dandy brushes in the precinct stables, has devolved into. Well. Fucking that.

Vicquemare has grown sterner, harder, while Harry has simply deflated. A punctured hot water bottle. A leaking cyst. 

It's fucking sad, is what it is.

He drags Harry into the bedroom, ignoring the fountains of saltwater and mucus. He removes Harry’s shoes and makes him sleep on the floor in a pile of blankets, at the foot of Jean’s bed where Jean can keep an eye on him. 

–

One lovely day, Harry comes into work drunk and thinks Bevy is Her. It is extremely uncomfortable for everyone.

–

Feeling dizzy and distant, Jean tries to make himself throw up in the sink, and can’t even manage that. A string of spittle connects him to the drain like an umbilical cord. Dreamily, he stares into the little black hole and imagines slipping deep down inside, to lie with all the slime and hair and wedding rings, lost forever.

–

Jean has thought about killing himself many times over the years. 

One of his favorite fantasies is of doing it in the middle of C-Wing. Splatter splatter. Splatter on Torson. Splatter on McClaine, too, because he's always next to Torson. Splatter on Heidelstam’s shiny shoes. Splatter on the paperwork. Splatter on the green lamps. Splatter on poor Judit Minot. And splatter on Harry Du Bois, of course. The most splatter of all on the great Lieutenant Double(!)-Yefreitor.

Harry loves to talk about killing himself. Loves to wave his gun around in a terrifying way. Drives like an absolute lunatic. Half the time he stinks like a corpse already.

Jean won't kill himself. The psychologists and psychiatrists never seem convinced when he says so. But he's not some self-indulgent drama queen pining for death in a fireball. He has a job. 

Some of us live in the real world, Harry. There’s paperwork to fill out. There are people depending on you to wake up every morning and do your fucking job. So get up. And do it.

–

The complaint forms pile up until one day, McClaine swipes a half-metre stick from Processing and stacks the papers atop each other on the floor to measure the total height (thirty-one centimetres). Captain Pryce walks past McClaine’s tower on his way to his office, takes a sip of his coffee, and tells the commanding lieutenants of C-wing to please send someone out to do something about that damned graffito. Harry volunteers himself for the task, which means he also volunteers Jean. 

It’s not until Jean’s standing before the mural, dwarfed by the two silhouettes, that he gets why people have such strong opinions about it. It feels like it takes up the whole world. 

A passing civilian pauses next to him and Harry (but not too close) and exhales mist into the December air. She unwinds and rewinds her thick blue scarf around her throat, then glances to the side and says, “Rather good, isn’t it?”

“It’s alright. But we’re going to get rid of it,” Harry informs her. Jean adjusts the cuffs of his gloves and avoids direct eye contact. 

She looks disappointed as she walks away, and Jean watches her for a few beats. 

“Kind of a fucking bummer,” Harry muses, and cranes his neck back to look at the mural. “Kind of communist, too.”

“Clearly some people are keeping the dream alive,” Jean says, expelling fog through his teeth.

“Maybe there’ll be a comeback. Communism, and disco too.”

There’s no one who could have done the mural besides the Belles Lettres, and they’re hardly difficult to track down. Shortly after breaking for lunch, Harry shoves a freshly-acquired anodized purple watch into his pocket and holds an open palm a few centimetres away from a particularly surly graffitist’s left ear, just far enough that it’ll still really hurt if the two connect with force. Harry sweats over the man menacingly. “You’ll remove it. Scrub it, dissolve it, paint over it, I don’t care. But it’s going to be gone.”

Against the far wall, one of the crew members spits on the ground. “What was that?” Harry says, rounding on her, his hand sliding down to grip the first graffitist’s elbow. 

She hooks a finger into her lower lip and drags it down to display the soggy green lump tucked cozily against her gumline. “Just the nass, officer,” she says sweetly. “You can let go of Stojan now. We’ll clean it.”

“No,” Vicquemare says, to everyone’s surprise (including his own). He’d almost forgotten he was a part of this scene. 

Harry boggles at him as he releases the male graffitist’s arm. “Why the fuck am I here then, Vic?”

“People like it,” Jean says, ignoring the question. The woman with the blue scarf can’t be the only one. “It’s not a bad mural, it’s not ugly. Why can’t we let it stay?”

“Pryce told us–”

“Pryce just told us to do something. He doesn't care about the graffito, he cares about the complaint forms.”

The argument migrates to the Coupris, then to the station. Somewhere between Jean speaking up in the graffitists’ nest and the rest of C-Wing hearing about it, Harry decides to take the mural’s side after all. This probably only hurts the cause. The ideological war in the precinct spills over into the streets, and the breaking point comes when Jean hears two attractive young people arguing about the artistic value of paint on buildings while on line for his coffee one morning. 

“Okay,” he says, carrying two waxed paper cups stacked atop each other to his and Harry's shared desk, “How can we get everyone to shut the fuck up.”

Harry is facedown on the desktop, but he rolls his head enough to squint a rheumy eye up at Jean. “Communist mural, isn’t it. Do it commie-style. Let the people decide.”

They put it to a vote. Nine thousand weigh in. 

The graffito stays.

They deliver the news to a slightly less-hostile Belles Lettres in person. Harry even manages to score a pinch of the nass girl’s powder. Already drooling, he asks Jean: “So? Why’d we do all this, again?”

Jean looks firmly ahead as he clutches the Coupris’ steering levers. The cabin smells faintly of ethanol, and he wishes he could blame it on a spilled first aid kit. “People like it,” he says once more. 

To Jean’s vague surprise, Harry lets it be. Out of the corner of his eye, Jean watches as Harry slumps down in his seat and props a foot up against the windshield, fiddling with the button on his trousers and staring vacantly out the side window. Jean narrowly misses a dingy goose plodding across the street, and returns his attention to the road. 

If Harry had asked a second time, Jean might have told him. He's not saying bring back the Commune tomorrow or anything (though it's not like the communists could make things worse). But the other stuff. New people, new worlds. He wants it to be true.