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Most days, Harry is barely keeping himself alive. It’s a struggle — and not just because of his recovery, because of the drinks. They’ve done their damage, more than enough. The aftermath of his consequences, of waking up in Martinaise, he’s still reeling from. He’s still learning how to exist and what keeps him alive.
He’s managing. He receives help from people who swear he doesn’t deserve it, and yet they are always there. He wonders sometimes if they’d be half as helpful if it wasn’t for Cuno.
Cuno’s a kid that’s been alive along on his own enough that it’s imperative he’s more than capable at the not dying thing. Kicked speed at his ripe young age and he’s — well, he’s alive. Doing great would be if he was making it to the school Harry enrolled him in. Doing great would be if he didn’t go missing for odd hours and coming home with bloody noses he tries to hide.
Cuno’s made it to two days to school this week, and that in itself is a feat, even if it’s already Friday. The thing is, however, Harry knows he’s gone to school — personally saw him walk in himself and yet here he is in a goddamned school parking lot and no Cuno in sight.
“Teachers are probably hiding him from you,” Jean tells him from the driver’s seat, which isn’t helpful at all considering Harry’s heart is beating a mile per minute. “Can smell your drunk stench from inside. Intoxicating the kindergarteners as we speak.”
“My sober stench?” Harry corrects cheekily with a mirth that does not get returned. His smile fades. “Are you sure I smell? I can’t smell anything.”
“I am purposefully not breathing through my nose.”
“No, no, sniff me — Jean—“
Jean makes a rampant movement towards the window and starts rolling it down.
“Get away from—”
Harry makes a move of lifting up his arm to throw Jean into a headlock. Jean smacks at him, but Harry’s pushing past his throbbing leg to manhandle him.
Jean takes in a short breath before twisting his head away as best as he can, smacking at Jean in the process. He squirms, fighting against him in a way he can’t even get mad at, lost in the muscle memory of being a newjoin to the RCM and getting body slammed by Harry in training.
Jean’s seething through his teeth in a desperate attempt to get some air when he notices—
He slaps against Harry. Slaps him once, hard, and firm. He stills, looking up at the man of the hour as well as a stranger.
A woman that could be Jean’s mother’s age stands with Cuno at her side. Already dreading the conversation, Harry resists the urge to sink in his seat.
Cuno abandons the lady in favor of opening the door to the backseat before climbing in himself, ragged backpack first.
“Pig, pig 3, this is Sherry!”
“If she isn’t your drinking buddy, you do not call her by her first name,” Jean chastises for Harry, turning to the lady that shakes her head.
“It’s better than what we started with,” Sherry says, and Harry clasps his hands together in a silent prayer that it wasn’t one of Cuno’s choice words.
Surely he wouldn’t be calling his fifth grade teacher a faggot. Surely not.
“No, I’m not supposed to say faggot, but I feel like I should get a pass since Pig’s one. And pig two.” He pauses. “Three, are you—“
“Cuno. Sit the hell down.”
“We haven’t had that talk yet,” Cuno says, squeezing his lithe body in the space between the front seats.
“I’m sure your guardians appreciate that,” she says with a patient smile. “I know I’m keeping officers of the RCM when they’ve got other things to do, but just a moment, please?” Her eyes flicker between Jean and Harry, and Cuno falls into his seat, apparently bored.
“Anything for one of Cuno’s teachers,” he says. “You know, I used to be a teacher.”
“Was that before the bender where you lost all your memory?” She asks so genuinely that Jean does a double take.
“Before!” Harry answers earnestly. “I was a PE teacher.”
“I’m well aware on that front, but I have to ask—“ and this is where Harry braces himself for the questioning talk to see if Harry can do this, if his teacher has taken notices and thinks he is unfit for the job. So he stiffens and hardens his gaze until she says, “Would you be alright if Cuno spends his afternoons with me for tutoring?”
“Tutoring? But I—“
“Cuno doesn’t need—”
Jean takes the initiative of gesturing the entire car to shut the fuck up and telling the kind lady a very composed and professional: can we get back to you on that?
—
“I never signed up to be your guardian. Don’t even like you much,” Jean says, resisting the urge to reach across the dinner table and yank the boy back into his seat.
Kim sighs, flipping a page in his book.
“You could leave then,” Cuno’s shooting back, but he doesn’t look too bothered. What he does look bothered by is the page of homework that Harry keeps putting in front of him. “Cuno wouldn’t be bothered — new room for Cuno.”
“There,” Harry interjects, moving his page to the side. “You see where on the paper it says Personal Singular. You say “I.”
“Aye,” Cuno parrots, albeit wrongly.
“No, I’m saying ‘I’—“
“This is a verbal conversation,” Jean says.
“Don’t listen to them,” Harry says desperately. Kim looks up, agitated at being accused over nothing, but returns promptly to his book. At times he has to remind himself he’s like a cat. If he was so bothered, he could go elsewhere. “It’s alright, if you still do it when we talk. But just for your homework, could you try?”
“Cuno. Doesn’t. Care,” he says, but he picks up his pencil and scribbles something down. When Harry tries to look, he pulls his paper away with his arms folded around it.
They sit in quiet after that. Harry continues to attempt a conversation at Kim who keeps insisting he’d like to be left alone yet has not made any move to leave. He could go home, if he was so bothered, instead of dwelling in Jean and Harry’s apartment. It’s a small, cramped place and yet Kim chooses to spend many of his nights here anyways.
“What did you think about that teacher?” Harry asks abruptly, breaking the silence that didn’t have a chance to last. It does, however, grab Kim’s attention. “Offered to teach Cuno afterschool. Just twice a week.”
“Cuno doesn’t need tutoring,” he says, flipping over his piece of paper. Harry watches his pencil work furiously against the page in odd circles. Most likely not writing any words.
Jean shoots him a glare, a silent way of saying he should’ve just kept his mouth shut. At least until he was finished.
“In a way, Kim and Jean have been tutoring me. Filling me in the stuff I don’t know. Kind of like how you do, Cuno.”
Cuno blinks at him before breaking into a grin, “Like when Pig’s forgotten what money is?”
“Food should be free,” he snaps back, but he’s laughing somehow nonetheless. “But, yeah. I think it could be good for you.”
“Gettin’ a tutor sounds like something for a rich prick or an idiot n’ Cuno’s neither.”
“If the shoe fits,” Jean snides, barely flinching from Cuno kicking him under the table.
–
Cuno requires space. Room to grow and heal. Put himself back together without his home and his C. Harry tries to give him room, as much as he can when a kid like Cuno comes home with bruises he won’t explain or a rudeness he can’t shake over someone who dares push too far.
Harry doesn’t wake him up when he oversleeps. He picks his battles, and even with forcing Cuno to go to school, he lets him be, at times, when he knows he really needs it.
Kim says the opposite, how structure is the way to go. Put Cuno on a schedule he can rely on and get used to. What kind of schedule is he supposed to make? He’s just woken up in a world he’s still trying to make sense of.
He lingers by the bedroom, knuckles rasping against the door.
“Cuno?” he calls, listening for any sounds that would indicate the boy is awake. Instead, there’s a clatter of objects hitting the floor, and Harry’s chest tightens in concern. Or indigestion. Maybe a bit of both. “Is everything okay?”
The door bursts open revealing a very disheveled Cuno. He’s yanking on his jacket tightly around his neck and bundling past Harry saying, “I’m walking today!”
And Harry–
Harry lets him go.
–
It’s not everyday that Kim spends his time at the precinct glued to his new partner’s side. Their division is so stretched for help that he’s drawn the short straw today and ended up in town by himself.
Not so much of a bad thing to be able to soak in the sunlight on a nice day like this. He takes a moment in the bustling street to bask in the warmth against his skin before the sounds of an altercation pulls him out of it.
No time. He can enjoy the sunlight on his break.
He follows the noise into a streetside shop of a woman frantically yelling at the man next to her.
“No, he was– how the hell did you not see him?”
Kim clears his throat, stepping onto the scene. Petty theft isn’t normally something he has assigned to him, but if he’s here, it’s his due diligence.
Maybe I should’ve kept walking, Kim thinks, knowing off the work that waits for him. He waves it off in his mind as he introduces himself to the woman and asks her what happened.
“Oh thank goodness you’re here,” she says, and Kim’s already thinking how happy he is he stayed. It’s been a day of questioning people who weren’t too cop-friendly. That’s how it goes in Jamrock. “I got a good look at him. Tall, scrawny kid.”
Kim diligently scribbles into his notebook, bristling a little at tall, scrawny kid, then shakes it off. There’s more than one troublemaking child, it can’t always be Cuno. Besides, he’s been doing better lately. Should be at school, anyways.
“Stole gardening gloves of all things and a– Did he take a book?”
All this fuss over some gloves? But Kim closes his book and assures the lady he’ll take a look. He takes her information and carries on down the street, having absolutely no intention of running down a delinquent. No, this’ll be paperwork to file at the station for some other officer to investigate.
Except, things aren’t ever quite that easy for Kim Kitsuragi.
He stills when he passes a quiet alleyway. A quiet alleyway that’s empty aside from what he can safely assume is one petty thief tucked away behind a waste bin. He hesitates for a moment before turning away when a stray sound stops him.
A choked sound.
As if someone’s crying.
Kim sighs quietly to himself, one he tries to swallow once he steps into the alleyway and finds a familiar head of hair poking from behind those boxes.
“Cuno,” Kim calls. He watches that tuft of hair jolt before he’s ducking down out of sight. Probably praying and hoping Kim’s going to turn himself around and leave.
Maybe he would have, if it was any other child. Something not worth chasing over. But this kid was dragged from Martinaise, put in a place where he was expected to grow, to be better. This was Harry’s kid.
“Piss off, Pig,” Cuno says, standing up abruptly. He’s clutching a textbook to his chest, and Kim’s eyes track to it. A gardening book? Really?
He does not want to do this right now. Cuno isn’t Kim’s responsibility. Quite frankly, he shouldn’t even be Harry’s.
“What’re you doing out here, Cuno? Harry’s gotta be–”
“Cuno doesn’t care,” he seethes like the broken child he is, facade shuddering apart as his tear-filled eyes track Kim’s movements, plotting his getaway. Where can he run that Kim wouldn’t know he’s heading to. “Tell him. Tell him Cuno stole.”
Kim shouldn’t have gone down this alley. He knows now that he shouldn’t have. He ignores the tear Cuno wipes away, and he leaves.
He doesn’t tell Harry until it’s the next day.
He files the report without mentioning a boy in the alleyway.
–
Cuno read somewhere once in one of those shitty books Harry has laying around the house that when someone’s drowning they will pull you down with them. In the book, the detective knocks the man out cold before he can get the chance to hit him, to thrash and scream as he’s fighting for his life.
At night, Cuno dreams of being in the water. Never drowning, not at first. Not until the sandbar gives way underneath his feet and in the empty vastness it’s just him and her. He dreams of finding her in that water with her chin barely held above the ocean. How the waves threaten to pull her under, and no matter how far Cuno swims, she’s always out of his reach. He doesn’t get the chance to find if she’d drown him. He wakes up coughing everytime.
This morning Cuno wakes and not for the first time, he’s gagging. He shoves his hands over his face, struggling to hide the choked noises being squeezed out of his body. His eyes cry with the effort of breathing and hiding away out of fear that Harry will hear him and come to check up on him.
The coughing refuses to subside. His lungs spasm underneath what is embedded inside, and he lurches for the bedroom window and leans over the windowsill as he coughs and gags and forces the mess out from his mouth. He beats on his chest until finally he feels something dislodge – sprays of red escaping him in the form of petals as they slowly fall to the ground.
Cuno reels back from the window, hand hovering over his wet mouth. Again, and again – when will it stop?
Knuckles against the door have him reeling away to close the window, Harry calling his name. Right. Time for school.
–
Kim, thankfully, doesn’t turn him in. Or, at least he thinks he hasn’t turned him in considering there’s three pigs at his kitchen table and none have made a move to arrest him. Instead, they talk quietly and Cuno tries not to twitch under Kim’s obvious avoidance.
“So, how’s tutoring going?”
Cuno stiffens, thinks about whether or not he should lie or not. Maybe Kim did tell him and this is Harry’s way of sniffing him out. Can-opening him.
He is pretty good at that – that’s Cuno’s pig. But, uh, he doesn’t exactly love it when it’s being turned on him. Not at all, not if it means Harry’s clueing in on the – well, on the thing Cuno hasn’t really faced yet.
The changing thing.
“Still don’t need it,” Cuno boasts. He has been studying. He has the homework to prove it. But the tutoring he’s been doing with Sherry has more to do with nothing academic.
At first, Sherry would just ask him questions about how he’s adjusting. And Cuno had no problem answering those questions because adjusting to what? Life in Pig’s house is easy. Has a roof, gets to play with bugs, doesn’t get yelled at. It’s great. He’s going to school and one day – one day he’s going to be a real police officer. Yeah. He’ll be something.
That was before, however. Before the leaves started appearing. First they were in his hair, strands of vines that would come out when he’d comb through it. Mess of pollen would fall from his mouth, his nose. He didn’t have a better word for it than bleeding. He’d bleed flowers.
They were easy to hide at first, but now, he hasn’t been so lucky. As he sits with his legs dangling at the table he can feel the growth of vines wrapping around his calf. He can feel something slithering around his chest and squeezing him, right before their very eyes.
“You have been doing so well, Cuno,” Harry says, and the vines seethe in what must be loathing, what must be his penance for being here, for thriving when she’s back home.
All alone.
If Cunoesse was here to see him, she’d think he was lame. If she thought the bugs were, if all of Locust City, what would she have to say if she knew Cuno was turning into food for them? A fucking plant?
–
It’s three weeks after the flowers showed up that he hears them talking, quiet, hushed. Maybe they think Cuno’s gone to bed. Maybe they don’t expect him to be outside in the garden, kneeled beneath the patch of flowers he’s grown with vomit and guts alone. He watches the bugs between the glades trample over one another, stepping on the other to reach the higher air before getting knocked onto its back. Cuno watches and seethes and listens to hushed voices talking.
He hears her name. Hushed mumbling, voices clamboring. He tries to listen through the whistling in his ears, the cicadas chirping. He tries and tries and all he can hear is her voice, of her head against his as they huddled together for warmth with flashlights and stolen liquor bottles surrounding them. Chapped lips pressing prayers of warmth against his shoulder as her breathing rasps, chest hurt from god knows what.
The vines wrap tighter around him, and Cuno soaks in the warmth they have to offer.