I'll Designate You __ To Lovers Allies.

I'll designate you __ to lovers ━ allies.

what starts off as a partnership by obligation turns into one by choice. maybe you don't think of them that way at first, but after you realize that you two work incredibly well together, the feelings just... fall into place. of course it's only natural that they should remain by your side. of course you would take risks to keep them safe, and they would do the same for you. you can't imagine facing something without them now. it's like they were always there. what's more, the bond you've forged over the years is doubly strong for having made the sharing of mental and emotional states necessary. you've stuck with each other through the stress, the breakdowns, but also the victories, the laughs, the brief moments of frivolity. now those things come naturally. you know nobody more intimately. you are able to take care of each other. you can probably make it through anything. you have so far, at least, even if there were some losses along the way.

@tenebriism // kris & ralsei!

it wasn't as hard to tell as you'd think. ━━ spend long enough around anybody, and you pick up cues, you know? learn them, learn through them, little notes like text between lines on a page, already annotated, the hardest part was always just the handwriting. a cipher. he loved ciphers ; ralsei had spent swathes of their life in a library of a meaningless kingdom that no longer existed ( subjects which were memory he had, but could not recall, shadows dancing in the candlelight and in corners of visions ), if any at all could know what to look for, it'd be him! how silly to think they could truly, truly hide it so easily. ━ maybe from susie, but not from him.

of course, in response to the concept of distance ( as though allergic ), he takes a step forwards, towards them. nails clack on the flooring, hands clasped to their chest as brows knit together, blue-red-black eyes studying Kris as though trying to find weaknesses in the sickness through the body itself, as though it was the betrayer ( for it was ), as though he held that kind of power ( at least, for any longer than a few hours... )

" No, I really don't think that'd be a good idea-! " there's timidness in his posture, in his voice, but his integrity is greater. ━ or perhaps just his stubbornness. " I mean, I don't think you could get me sick anyway! You don't have to worry about that, but maybe I can help, if you'll let me? I know my magic doesn't follow you into the light-world, but that still so looks uncomfortable- even painful! so i'd- I'd very much still like to try━! "

( swallow your pride like swallowing your fear, like the part of you that knows. ) " ... Please, Kris...? "

"i'm not scared of death anymore." (Harry to Kim)

" You should be. " the words pop off his tongue, off his teeth before he can stop them. a blunt bitterness, levelheaded but thoughtless, true mind lunging like a spring. he's been something braced since the tribunal, something bruised, something tense and rigid and battered, a broken mirror waiting for its frame to let go. Stubborn as he is, though, he wouldn't let it. there is work to do. he has endured the worst day of his life already.

But something about Harry, something about the ridges of him, his language, his mind, his body ━ the inflamed lines of veins down the injured leg, angle of the shoulder to the neck rested against the bed's cushioning, knuckles stern with twitching fingers in his sleep. mandible ( jaw ). sternum ( chest ). patella ( kneecap ). his silhouette now. an inspiration. a reluctance. ; learning it to care. caring to learn. ━ made him fast. practiced opinions shedding skins for the real ones beneath, something more genuine, allowed to be; here, with him.

a blessing and curse. freedom at the cost of being shackled elsewhere, there is no one like him. his tone unchanging, but a knowingness beneath it. he understands the threat. he aims for the throat. ━ impulse, impulse, impulse ━ pull the trigger.

He did. You should be. A lesson learned the hard way.

the Lieutenant isn't wearing his gloves as he takes a drag, subtle ridges of nylon pockets revealing where the gloves had hidden as fingernails are tinged with the remains of dried blood cracked in the digits ━ harry's blood. ━ ghostly, concealed, but Harry would open anything. " Self preservation is imperative now more than ever, Detective. " ━ ( Detective, not Officer. He only called you Officer when he was angry with you. )

" Krenel has not sent retaliation, but that doesn't mean we are safe. " the words come like reasoning he didn't need to explain, an understanding between them ( 'This is not the first person to die in his place. He goes on.' you remember, right? pray for it ) but the motions being danced through regardless. Flimsy at best; in the way Kim is never flimsy.

The Lieutenant's eyes move from where they'd been poised, out the broken window of Harry's hotel room, cold breeze whistling through the cracks, and instead they shift onto Harry. Studying for a moment. The smell of chestnut Astras laces garotte lines through the room.

" ... Or, are you leaving me to the wolves so soon? " a brow raises over the gleaming lenses of his glasses seemingly at his own selfish, dry wit; lingering on his tongue. or is he serious? the light makes it hard to tell, but no less heavenly a halo. maybe it's the concussion.

@playedbetter // harry & kim!

the wind ( breeze, don't be so dramatic. ) rakes its nails through him, and has been doing so for the past eighteen-turning-nineteen minutes that the windows had been opened. The air inside Harry's apartment was the kind of air of someone who didn't have good heating, and knew they didn't have good heating, so they improvised. This was to say it was almost unbearably stuffy, but Spring had been bleeding out into the snow for months now ━ not snow, into the slush. thick and muddy and more ice than anything, caking on the edges of roads where motor carriage wheels didn't shatter them into a thousand tiny pieces. it was a terrible death to die, jagged in the cold.

but with it came a feeble, nervous kind of warmth that slowly settled into the streets, almost sticky in a not-quite-warm not-quite-cold way, most of it man-made from body heat burning holes into the atmosphere and swirling up into an updraft 80 miles above Revachol, one Harry had been studying every time he'd stalled like a failing motor in a cold-spot. mostly written off as lost in thought, perhaps a side-effect of the brain damage or the Pale or whatever it was that resulted in his mind being as fickle and fragmented as it'd become. Not that Harry had much evidence that it wasn't before, either. It wasn't often someone wrote down exactly how their mind worked ━ excluding Kim. Harry wished he worked like Kim. Though, that was generally the norm, not the exception.

Distracted like a dog from his thoughts as they slugged like syrup in his mind, half delusional in the rock-hard tension gripping at the back of his skull and in the front of his cheekbones : he comes back to reality at the cold cloth, fingers twitching upwards at the Lieutenant's hand as it retreats as though for a moment tempted to catch it, and he decides with dizzying conviction that he would die for Kim as it soothes the heat he swears he can see misting off of him in the light. ━ or, actually, he might just be dizzy. It's hard to tell. Kim is absolutely winning points, though.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY ━ Oh, yeah. Caffeine sounds like the best cure you could dream of right now. In '19s, it was in everything. It's nature's cure-all, or so you've heard, and if they gave it to children with measles during the epidemic in the '20s, why wouldn't it work on you? Maybe it'll fix whatever's wrong with your throat right now, too. The white splotchy bits. You know the ones.

He did not, in-fact, know the ones, but that was a problem in a never-ending growing list and/or battle for future him. He didn't have the heart to logic his way out of this line of thinking, nor to even consider whether or not he had coffee in his apartment at all. ( He was pretty sure his ability for logical thought was stranded somewhere in his fore-head's sinus cavities, alongside his hand-eye coordination. )

" Coff'hh.. " is what comes out of his throat, rasped and thick ━ It might've been genuinely attractive if it was intentional, and vocal chords not so heavy with mucus. Instead, it mostly just sounds like a dying man's final plea. Most things out of Harry's mouth sounded like that.

" Thank y'h, Kim... " a strong hhh-sound hangs from the K in Kim's name like a heavy weight, breathless as he expresses his endless gratitude. the years of heart problems and breathing in smog sought vengeance upon him now, in his weakest moments. ━ Okay, well, maybe not his weakest. That would've been when he was recently shot in Martinaise and, if he remembers correctly, running a fever of 110. But still! he had a point.

there's a tender few minutes of inactivity as Kim is occupied, ribs aching and air filled with the sound of traffic, wheezing and Kim's footsteps, before spite becomes a motivator and lights his veins on fire with antsyness. undexterous hands flail for a moment before finding purchase, couch groaning against his nails, and he hauls himself sitting upright ━ Sorry, Kimmo. He's a busy man, he can't stay lying down fore-

PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT : Critical Failure. ━ You really shouldn't have done that.

Oh, that's a lot of blood going to his head.

For a few minutes he stays tensely still as his brain pounds and writhes in his skull with the sudden change of elevation, head bobbing like a poppy on its stalk, before his vision comes back to him in the white splotches he'd lost it to, and he slowly regains activity. Okay, standing, not an option, not even gonna try that one, got it. Well, he could still look at the paperwork he has to do! Get some of that done! ( Regardless of how boring it is... )

It's only when the loud shuffling of his hands pulling out his wedged, stained, and crinkled folder of paperwork from beneath the coffee-table has ceased in his victory and he flips it open to a familiar page, swaying still, that he realizes there's no chance in hell that he can read such small text right now.

" 'Dei, this is fhhucking horseshit... " the intent is mumbling his complaints, but... Well, Harry has never been a quiet man about anything, really.

🐝  *  ―  𝑪𝑨𝑹𝑰𝑵𝑮 𝑷𝑹𝑶𝑴𝑷𝑻𝑺. (  add " + " to reverse the action.  )

❛  do you want to tell me about your day?  ❜ ❛  here, you look like you're freezing.  ❜ ❛  i love you just the way you are, and i'm here to remind you of that whenever you need here.  ❜ ❛  i promise i'll always be here if you need me.  ❜ ❛  i wish i could take away all your pain.  ❜ ❛  i'll stand by you, no matter what challenges may come our way.  ❜ ❛  i'm gonna make sure nothing bad will ever happen to you.  ❜ ❛  if you need a shoulder to lean on or someone to listen, i'm here.  ❜ ❛  if you need someone to talk to i'm always just one phone call away.  ❜ ❛  it's okay. i've got you. you're safe now.  ❜ ❛  it's okay to feel this way, we've all been there.  ❜ ❛  it's okay to lean on others for support occasionally.  ❜ ❛  just let me take care of you for a bit.  ❜ ❛  no matter what happens, you'll always have a place in my heart.  ❜ ❛  what do you need me to do to make you feel better?  ❜ ❛  you can always ask me for help if you need it.  ❜ ❛  you just relax and let me do the rest. you deserve a break.  ❜ ❛  you look like you could use a hug.  ❜ ❛  you're always taking care of me so no it's my turn to return the favor.  ❜ ❛  you're not alone in this. i'm here for you, no matter what.  ❜

[ blanket ] sender draping a blanket over receiver's shoulders [ breaths ] sender helping receiver to calm down by using breathing techniques [ compliment ] sender complimenting receiver to make them smile [ cry ] sender offering receiver a shoulder to cry on [ gift ] sender giving receiver a small gift [ hand ] sender holding receiver's hand while they're walking [ hug ] sender pulling receiver into a tight embrace [ injured ] sender helping an injured receiver with everyday tasks [ jokes ] sender trying to make receiver laugh [ kindness ] sender surprising receiver with random acts of kindness [ massage ] sender giving receiver a shoulder massage to tend to their sore muscles [ patterns ] sender drawing random patterns on receiver's skin [ pillow ] sender offering receiver to use them as a pillow [ scars ] sender gently tracing receiver's scars [ sick ] sender bringing a sick receiver whatever they need ( food / medicine / etc. ) [ steady ] sender wrapping an arm around receiver's waist to steady them [ support ] sender quietly sitting down next to receiver to let them know they're there [ touch ] sender letting receiver know they're there through simple touch [ warmth ] sender pulling receiver into their arms to share body heat [ wound ] sender cleaning / bandaging receiver's wound(s)

@playedbetter // harry & jean!

Jean was beginning to remember how much he hated office parties. There were only two options in Precinct 41.

One. less of an party, more of a drink until most couldn't stand, which of course would loop back around until it became one again. Rarely, if ever, prompted from celebration, but rather out of shared misery. No one endured the kind of shit they saw on the regular without getting a little fucked up, and with a budget as small as theirs, alcohol was cheaper than medication. Murders, assaults, drugs. All of it bled them out until the evening when they were relinquished from the dutiful, and allowed to be the wounded. A thousand years ago, Jean was half certain that Harry by sheer force of presence spearheaded it; both in creating misery, and alleviating his own. Some of the time, most of the time, Jean would get dragged under with him. Eternally the sinking ship. Eternally anchored to the bottom. ( Eternally stupid enough to have anchored himself there... )

Two. What they were enduring now. He felt like a fucking toddler. Always the same things; families, financials, work ━ always the soft parts of work, the squishy parts, the parts you can bring home to your wife and tell her how your day went without flinching, without bruises, whenever you had the heart to bother cutting the fat at all. It never changed, with alcohol rarely strong enough to provoke anything interesting, and food only lasting long enough to distract you. The people he knew the terrible reality of, melted down for the sake of politeness, worse than interesting misery, worse than volume and vivaciousness and venom, because fuck ━ it was boring. nerve was better than nothing, but all he got was smooth questions of 'how are you' 'i hope you're doing well' 'how is work'

Jean would take burning himself at the stake if the writhing gave him something to do.

Maybe that's why he comes outside in the first place. Harry's silhouette a familiar one through the glass and against the darkening sky as evening falls into a more honest night. Maybe that's why he chooses him for company, despite that thousand years of dragging, or perhaps because of it. ━ was he refuge, familiar and perhaps disjointed but more sincere than apathy, or was he the stake he was burning at? Skin peeling, heat endless, something to destroy himself on. like a favor returned in a thousand little moments he'd never truly remember, he's sure, he's come to terms with.

Maybe he hasn't. The bitterness has already set, like a poison inside of him. But it's better than disinterest, better than malaise.

For a moment, as he steps out into the cooler air and the door squealing on its hinges for a half second before being lost entirely in the sound, he mistakes the pen for a cigarette. He realizes his mistake a second later, but that bitterness twists in him like a spasming organ, like if it had been that Jean had been right ━ nothing was different, nothing changed, it was just the same shit. Too old to grow out of it. Too old to go back.

But it wasn't, he reminds himself as he stations a little ways away from Harry ━ a few feet between them, maybe, a small but healthy distance that felt broader by sheer virtue of who Jean was at all, always seeming more fickle and more terrible than he was, so much bite that his teeth were all you'd see some days, nothing else. ━ it wasn't, as he folds a terrible bite waiting to snap away, he hasn't done anything wrong, Vicquemare. He's innocent. He's innocent. ( a burned part of him asks for how long. He doesn't have an answer. He doesn't know if he wants one. )

Strong arms brace him forward on the railing, leaning over, wearing a nice white dress-shirt he'd gone through the effort to iron that hugged his shoulders, his chest, along the muscle in his sides, down the folded up sleeves ; and perhaps he does study the traffic, studies how easy it'd be to throw Harry's balance over, for just a moment ━ before it's over, and he doesn't twitch.

" Why are you asking me? You could be a fucking scholar about it, 'the intricacies of the Revacholian jamboree and getting dead drunk', if you wanted to be. " he mumbles, snipping. his voice is rough, and irritated, and low. It always sounds like that. Like he's had a stick up his ass for 10 years now, and will for another 10. ━ but not a trap waiting to spring. Not yet. Jean was opportunistic, but he...

he tried not to be cruel. he relents.

" No, just the shitty ones, " he sighs, roughly scrubbing a hand across his face as though trying to work away 20 years of exhaustion. " McLaine got them playing fucking musical chairs, whatever it's called. It's like a kindergarten in there. "

Jean considers, briefly, the idea of taking the opportunity in the open air to smoke, but he remembers the bite marks riddling the pen, and decides against it. he might be bitter, and sarcastic, and at times venomous, but he wasn't about to torture Harry. He didn't have it in him, be it the heart or the nerve. He winds up tapping his fingers along the metal railing, glancing over at Harry, almost expectantly, depending on how you looked at it.

" That why you're out here instead of in there? I thought that'd be your scene. " he inquires, commenting without seeking to rip him apart so much as idle boredom prompting curiosity, perhaps even common ground. If nothing else, Harry was usually interesting to talk to.