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@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.

"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 & 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.

// @playedbetter tags!!

━ ♔ Souvenez-vous la prochaine fois; Que vient la neige et le fracas / On n'va pas tous mourir ━ KIM/HARRY: playedbetter ^ my kim, translation: Do you remember the first time That the snow and the roar came? We are not all going to die

━ ♔ When I first saw you the end was soon; to Bethlehem it slouched / & then it must’ve caught a good look at you ━ HARRY/KIM: playedbetter ^ my harry

━ ♔ And it all falls into frame; close enough to see / the blue rings of my eyes as I say / something ugly. ━ JEAN&HARRY: playedbetter

How do they react to scares or frights? Do they laugh, get nervous, or not react at all? (Harry)

HALLOWEEN QUESTIONS // always accepting!

Harry most often has a myriad of responses to being scared, but the most often ones he has are;

a) laughing! it's a coping mechanism mostly stemming from the more social ━ and logical ━ sections of his brain. He laughs when he doesn't know what to do, or understands that whatever response that something was supposed to illicit simply didn't happen, or is just flat-out confused! it initially came from the idea that, well, if you're already laughing, you're in on the joke; Harry was always the joke, so being the first to laugh at himself, at least for a while, made the ridiculous feel intentional, as though even he was having a 'i can't believe i just did that' moment, even if the cause was entirely unintentional or from something that's just part of him but he knew wasn't socially 'normal' ( a good example is how autistic people, including myself, might laugh at themselves when they've done something that neurotypical people find strange. Definitely not the healthiest, but a very rare few things he does are! )

with laughter as a response to being afraid, it can be from the social point of 'hes supposed to experience one thing and hes not, therefore: laugh', but most often its from an incongruous emotion in of itself ( an emotion in a situation that doesn't necessarily call for it, like laughing as someone's crying, which is often perceived as a result socially as 'not making sense' ) or straight-up just finding the failed scare attempt funny! like watching an actor fuck something up in their take, yknow? sometimes its a shield from the fact he got spooked in the first place, making it nervous laughter to calm himself down, which leads into...

b) flinching! This is the more sincere out of the two, where the scare actually lands to some extent moreso. Harry, almost ALWAYS, responds to just about everything. his composure may mask it, but he is, at all times, answering and responding to and calculating just about everything. this often feeds into his Already pretty bad paranoia ( Imperial Empire, you're doing your best but alas you oft freak him out more than anything actually threatening him... ) and bodily responses to traumas he no longer remembers, things the skills keep from him; huddled in blankets citing its better not to know than to know at all, to make choices of what to do with the pearls of something terrible coddled in those clothes of neurons and grey-matter ━ or, at least, that's how it feels. like keeping secrets.

this means, even in false strikes and in fake-outs, there are things to respond to. even if he already knows the threat isn't real, and even isn't very scared of it at all, the overwhelming sensation of that abrupt happening can make him recoil, half overwhelmed, half new information, always tied to the impulse. be it by physically flinching back, violently lunging forward, parts of his mind surging to answer, or his mind going dead for juuust a moment ━ like the moment the rock breaches the lake's surface ━ then it ripples out again, the latter; a feeling he often finds himself craving to recreate. the impact felt but faux nonetheless. at the end of the day; it invokes a survival response him, and for a split second it's like a millisecond, high saturation dream of watching reality burn alive before reverting to how he knew it like the colors of a broken camera. a microbomb of trauma re-firing, before going dead again.

( Though, if the scare in question has anything to do with touching him, you can bet your bottom dollar that he's going to start swinging )

overall, though, what he does exactly highly depends on what specifically the scare is, how it's performed, the medium ( is it a movie, is it a coworker trying to scare him, is it in his home, is it in the office, how has he mentally been doing overall himself lately, etc etc ) and so on! it's extremely conditional, including whether or not he get's scared in the first place! some days he's untouchable, other days he jumps at everything! depending on what it is and how it's done, harry's responses can ENTIRELY change! it's his nature to be inconsistent and unpredictable, in a way.

he IS however a big horror fan, especially gore since it taps into an animalistic sense in his head kinda that Half Light really digs especially, as well as his creative sense to see how they did it! plus something could 100000% be said about desensitizing himself from terrible things given his job is seeing terrible things a lot of the time. ━ sometimes he's a fan despite himself, given he sometimes uses horror as a 'safe' method to punish himself with triggers or generally invoking a fear/disgust response at all or fucking up his paranoia which bleeds back into his age-old problem of self flagellation and self-loathing, which also ties into his desensitization thing, but that aside, he sincerely does enjoy horror in general!!! I personally like to think he and Jean used to watch horror marathons together during October and November, depending on what they could get their hands on, though Harry doesn't remember this.

this is only tapping into the 'non-harmful scares', though! things like horror movies or the like. his response to genuine threats are overwhelmed with his mind clicking together like the joints of a machine with one goal; to keep him alive.

it's done a surprisingly good job thus far, given how difficult he makes it.

"Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while." (Harry to Kim)

They’d been standing outside of the Martinaise bookstore ( Crime, Romance, and Biographies of Famous People ) for upwards of 20 minutes by now, not entering, not perusing, the time occupied exclusively with the Detective’s staring; eyes clouded the way they become when something occupies him, the edging-on-vacant look he sometimes acquires when he looks up into the cold sky and murmurs under his breath. Locations. Distances. A gridwork of nerves under the city streets; or rather what they were built atop; that despite the efforts of the shivering, terrible absence of memory in his brain persisted in reaching him. Useless information heralded as jewels. The names of streets. Seeing from another angle.

For the last 5 of those 20, Kim was beginning to worry on if Harry had suffered some kind of stroke, perhaps caught between the conscious and unconsciousness, the way fainting seemed to be becoming a habit for him ( or at least, so he’d learnt. ) and his body simply hadn’t fallen, knees locked, keeping him stable. There’d been the temptation to gently nudge his shoulder, a tap to see the structural integrity under that disco blazer, on those snakeskin boots, but he answers before he fully settles into it & the consequences it may harbor; the words soft and raw like fruit fuzz left to rot, quiet on the wind, and all the Lieutenant can do is nod sagely, peering over at whatever it’d been to occupy him so thoroughly. Nothing interesting to Kim, maybe, but all encompassing to the other. Some days, Kitsuragi considers spending entirely on dissecting- ━ no. not dissection. he would not to kill it. ━ considers spending entirely on understanding what it is that goes on inside his head. Part of him whispers that to do so would be to ruin the magic.

Another part of him offers the refute of ‘I wouldn’t know’ in answering Harry, but he decides against that, too. It was too critical, too good at shutting things down. I wouldn’t know is to say I don’t know and I have nothing to say so can we please move on? ━ at least sometimes, it was, to him. Too vulnerable. Too much. Too little.

Kim adjusts his glasses, removing them. " I suppose that is true, Detective. " he relents, almost, but curious eyes give way to his unprovoking answer; an unspoken question of continue?; as the Lieutenant adds on, offering more as he cleans the lenses of the water built up from snow with a handkerchief. " Something about the eternity of a love that can persist past everything, even death, is an appealing thought to many people… " ━━ he tries not to study Harry as he says that. as if anticipating, as if proving himself correct.

@playedbetter // terra & robin!

Robin felt good today. he finds himself almost bouncing on his heels, shifting his weight as the muscles up his legs tensed & untensed in his own type of anticipation. he felt strong today, fast and lean and sharp. Wide awake in the best way he could be. ━ it wasn't often he felt this ready.

And he had been as they sparred, a clash of movement and tactic and on-the-spot quick-thinking, he felt even matched, something that was getting rarer depending on the day when it came to his powered brethren. Robin only had his wit and his training on his side, and while both were sharp, he worried sometimes if he'd be up to the task if he had to rely on nothing but himself to get a job done, when it was all or nothing, if he'd dig his fingers into the all, or drop into a nothing he couldn't plan his way out of. ━ thus far, he was still alive, which had to say something about whatever it was he was doing things right, and was capable enough to hold his own thus far. ━ it's not much of a surprise then, when he'd been catching opportunities by their tails just often enough to be a challenge, that he notices her distraction. its when they stop between rounds that he inquires, testing the weight of a different quarterstaff he didn't often use ( titanium with a carbon-fiber steel core, lighter than his usual one ) as he cocks his head towards her. even if he didn't smile, you could almost feel the amusement as the eyes of his mask squinted slightly. maybe pride. it's always hard to read him.

" it's pretty easy, " Robin answers honestly, setting his normal quarterstaff down as he spun its brother, feeling it out. " it's designed for high visibility and durability. It's kind of like a helmet visor, just micro-thin sheets overlapped in the same angle to block out my eyes but still let me see through it. "

He shrugs amicably, pausing the twirl with a snappy halt " If you want, you could try it on. I have a couple spares. "

Are they skeptical of supernatural phenomena or do they believe in them? (Kim)

HALLOWEEN QUESTIONS // always accepting!

Kim is definitely somebody who I think hasn’t really believed in the supernatural past age 13. 

In the past, when he was much younger, he believed in not the religious kind of supernatural, but the more human. He believed in ghosts. He believed in weird unexplained things that had no logical cause and never would, he believed that things and people lived in the Pale, he believed the pale itself was an almost living non-entity. He believed in the past coming back to play tricks on you or teach you lessons, never werewolves, never vampires, and only ever sometimes did he believe in Gods. 

Her Innocence like a dream on a broken tape reel that he slowly stopped replaying. Her Innocence like a dream on a broken reel that he knows many people can’t stop.

But after 13, after 14, he became an impossible sell. It was in large part because of the bullying he’d endured, and admitting you believed in ghosts was the same ammunition to them as saying you believed in Santa Claus when by that time you were old enough to know what kissing somebody when you were drunk was like and recognize the economic disarray you were all in. He never believed in the supernatural, but he believed in things that didn’t always make sense; because in a world where nonexistence bubbles at the edges of your reality, there’s bound to be things without answers, that didn't line up with how you thought reality worked. There’s bound to be questions left in dead air and never going back.

After the revolution, after so many wars, after so many captains lost in that great fog, how couldn’t there be some ghosts left in Revachol by sheer virtue of their magnitude?

He thinks, these days, that it was how he was coping with death as well as childhood ignorance. He’s still uncomfortable with the idea that when you die, you’re gone, and nothing remains but the body. He knows, in all likelihood of the world they're living in, it’s the truth, but he still tries to untangle the maybe-there maybe-not souls of his fallen brethren when it is they do fall, and fall often. Parts of him still with the fibers of a ghost’s coat under it’s nails, parts of him still believing in something a little more.

But he’s tried to stop entirely. Dedicates himself to the logical, and while never above his own curiosity and the potential of things, Kim is a skeptic. The world kicked the belief out of him, and the disillusionment has been setting in his entire life. He does not believe in ghosts anymore. He does not believe in Gods. He believes in himself, and he believes in the RCM, and he believes in what he can do here and now as he’s alive rather than a thousand years of looking back at what he couldn’t change, because a glance can trap him, just a glance.

Give him fact. Give him something to hold onto with both hands. Give him something, something that makes sense.  He does not believe in the fictions of humanity half out of their minds for the entire rest of time.

But with enough evidence, anything can change. With enough persistence, with enough dedication. When things stop being ghost stories, and start being metrics you can read.

Less supernatural than science, even when science seems supernatural.

☕ (My Harry & your Kim)

Send me “ ☕ “ for my muse to drink tea uniquely flavored after your muse, and I’ll tell you what my muse tastes! // accepting!

When the thermos is passed, Kim is dubiously hesitant to sip its contents. Glances spared into the dark metal container where a thousand tiny lights reflect back up at him off the angles of glitter that seem to consume the liquid, bouncing off the sharp lines of his glasses, highlighting the ridges of his face; cheekbone meeting upper-eye meeting the crease of his nose between. He questions, and the answer he receives is likely as inane but incredulously trustworthy ━ which is to say, only Kim would trust it ━ and he is prodded to drink. A sigh, a murmuring of If you're trying to poison me, at least have an alibi… before it's raised like a chalice to the lips and, tentatively, he drinks.

He swears the glitter clogs his through the moment he does, and he chokes. ( although, the choking may not all be from the glitter. ) Like congealed blood, glitter clinging, he can feel the pieces cut micro-ribbons of flesh down his esophagus as it slides down in a wet mass, leaving behind it a terrible feeling of glitter lining the space between his lungs down, down, down. The taste is indescribable ━ sharp and salty and sweet and bitter and tangy all at once, apricots and rotten fruit and alcohol, the taste of sweat and iron and cinnamon, unpleasantly cold at first which becomes kinder as it soothes the roughness of the throat's wounds before the heat hits the way habanero in coffee does. like dark chocolate, like stale cake frosting, like pleasantly unpleasant soreness, sweet-sour wine, cloying cheap children's medicine, nausea-inducing cigarette smoke.

Indescribable the way cubic measurements of atmosphere containing updraft are indescribable, not indescribable the way metrics too large and too small become nothing. indescribable like space, like music, like sea.

Like God, he thinks, like Innocence. he corrects; Like God. Like Pale. Innocence is a dead language they've been trying to read, and neither of them, neither of them, were born enough to be that again. But maybe they were, once. Like Pale. Like dreaming. Like oblivion. ( Apricots still linger in it like fruit floating on saltwater, fermenting on waves, cracked wide as geodes and spilling guts, spilling light. Beneath it is an oil spill 300 kilometers long from a model of motor carriage that has not been made since the day he was born, mingling, separate, beneath, above. Like tainting it, like swallowing it whole, like becoming more by virtue of what he gives, by no virtue at all. ) Like God, he thinks, like Innocence.

Kitsuragi's composure returns to him, and with the embarrassment of a freshman being handed a drink he couldn't handle, he screws the thermos shut again, and passes it back with the more guttural-than-usual sound of clearing his throat. He pulls off a glove and swipes the flesh of a hand over his mouth, bottom lip coated in the shine of something like lip-gloss beneath the chunky square glitter clinging to it. Stubbornly, pieces remain regardless of how hard he scrubs it away, caught in the cracks between lips, before he sighs, slips a glove back on, and resolves to chew on the skin for the rest of the day, if only to hide it, until he can attempt to better extract it somewhat mournfully with the bristles of a toothbrush. A small part of him asks him to let it stay, and the rest of him refuses. A moments consideration, but little else ━ at least for now, anyway, at least for now.

As the flavor lingers on his tongue like an unwelcome guest, progressively, it shifts. never does it lose the sharpened edges, the quality of chaos, the almost fermented kind of age & simultaneous unblended freshness to it, all mixed together and separate all at once, but over time it mellows, perhaps, or maybe Kim just gets used to it. the acidic highs mesh better with the taste of artificial fruit and the heat lends itself as he considers it to the taste of cheap coffee and dark chocolate. grape sugar with the salt and bitter not better but a different taste than they would be alone, iron manageable with the undertone of something other than the blood ━ maybe it becomes more palatable the longer its in his mouth, accustomed like an acquired taste king of all acquired tastes, or maybe it just burns itself out the longer it's left to mix with something other than itself. Saliva like a neutralizer to however many medications he can feel, chalky, on the underside of his tongue.

The heat subsides and the bitterness erodes, slowly and fast all at once, and a smoother kind of flavor emerges from beneath all of it. soft lime and distant haze of honey and a kind of watered down cocktail, no longer sharp with alcohol, but cold anyway. like something hidden, like something suffocated, like something that couldn't afford to come out unless it knew, really knew, it wasn't going to be rejected. the craze of the rest does not die, but the aftertaste offers a different kind of kindness, like hangover medication after a bad night. charcoal pill, cool water, dimmed lights. ( acts of love, acts of not wanting to see someone dear in pain, acts of staying with them; staying with them; regardless of how wretched they were the night before. people cant get that sad, she said to you once, or you thought she did, but people will love you enough to kneel at your bedside and hold your sweaty hand and close the blinds so the world can't see you for just a little while more. people will love you and be loved and try to save you, and maybe you cannot be saved, no one can, there is no messiah waiting at the foot of your bed to cure you, the world just doesn't work like that, and you can't keep waiting for it, but people will love you enough to wash the stains out from your favorite shirt so you can keep it a little longer.

people who bring cold cloths when you are sick and sweet coffee when you need something to keep you warm, people who can't save you but can in the same strokes; where it's not saving you, it's giving you the means to save yourself. people who work you through it as you lift the stones you're building castles out of, hoping, praying that you don't smash them down again. people who stand proud for you at the checkmarks in the road, and tell you that you're doing good, and wait for you when you can't keep running, or even when you turn back and decide it's easier to give up than to sink in deeper. people you've treated bad before, and cannot stay forever, and cannot save you, but they love you enough to stay a little longer. they love you enough to hold you when you need it, and hold you down when you need that too, and make the hard calls you'll hate them for. they love you hard enough that it turns into hate when it's fed the wrong things, giving dogs chocolate, but they love you, love you, love you. )

it soothes pain of his throat, and Kim does not concede to the fact he finds himself wanting another sip, another shot of chaos and that sweeter smoother aftertaste, knowing what he's putting in his body and deciding to come back anyway, wondering, but he admits; quietly to himself as he holds the pieces of glitter in his hands like the shed skin of a disco ball in his little bathroom in the Whirling that night; that maybe the pain is worth the reward. that maybe he's crazy, but maybe they both need a little sanity, a little less, a little something else.

( kneeling at your bedside when you are too afraid to sleep, he traces the scars nickering your hands, and cleans his glasses, and slowly; slowly; the apricots stop mattering. as you notice a little more how the oil spill gleams on the crest of waves, as the oil spill becomes something different. )

-100 HP. +660 HP.

@playedbetter // lyric starters; without mythologies by the weakerthans.

Maybe the scariest part of seeing Kim with a fever, hot-cold all the time and aching, was less about the fever itself; it was about seeing how that sickness pried back the composure on him like skinning a beetle of its shell, it was less the times he was asleep and more when he was awake; often irritated beneath a reluctance to engage at all and murmuring barely there mostly through the breath of wheezing, it was more about the times he murmured at all.

The Lieutenant's apartment is clean, and maybe it would've reminded you of the Pox if not for the fact you were allowed within it's walls where many weren't, and the various small details that filled itself in on it's own lived in qualities. Clean but imperfect, and unable to escape from the fact of the city you both lived in ━ Revachol whispering on the paint cracked window-sills as summer heat leaked in through them, on the smell of maybe something rotten. gasoline. vaguely something plantlike, like trees bending their leaves up to break up the noise.

There are exactly 11 trees along Kim's street. Maybe you would've noticed in the way here, or maybe not, since Kim invited Harry over after struggling; frustratingly inattentive; throughout the day on a case, and the first time Kim had handed over his place at the wheel of the Kineema so willingly since the beginning of it's service at the station ( it might've been the station's vehicle, one he was lucky to have been able to take with him when transferring over to station 41 after a major amount of string-pulling, ass kissing, and excuses about repairs, but in the end it was always Kim's baby ) to Harry. ━ so naturally, there were many other things to notice when one is entrusted with the golden ticket of a sick man almost begging him not to crash the damn thing than the amount of trees on Kim's street. But there are still 11 trees, and one way or another, you'd gotten home.

And in this home, Kim lays on his back on his couch, glasses removed and eyes covered with a cool wet cloth as a radio plays some random station quietly enough to be unintrusive but still filling a white noise ━ something classical, or at the very least, instrumental. the voices of the piece if you focused on it no more than a distant kind of cloud that wasps over hazily on compressed air waves ━ and occasionally he murmurs to himself, quiet and voice shot. this was the scary part, what he'd say. what it'd tell you. this was the scary part, to hear him through the softest electrical hum...

" si je pouvais, je ferais de toi une rivière déchaînée avec des rapides en colère alimentés en pluie, pour que tu puisses toujours serpenter et pouvoir toujours t'enfuir… " ━ breathe in. ( if i could, i would make you a raging river with angry rapids supplied with rain, so you could always meander, and forever be able to run away… )

sings to himself, rather, here. sings to you? the language hangs on his tongue, syllable after syllable.

" sans lutter… contre les mythes mal interprétés, contre la douleur… " ━ breathe out. ( without contending… with myths wrongly interpreted, with pain… )

he does, sing to you. the only person you can remember who would, regardless of intention. he breathes with the music, and with it comes over with the terror of an honesty so grandiose it becomes small again; marble-like; like an unfulfilled wish he offers out, downy feathered, anyways, because the sentiment matters more than whatever it is now. maybe he doesn't even realize he says it out loud to begin with, but he does, whispers in the gentle shuffle of the apartment's small spaces, composure a dream he hasn't woken into, rarely; rarely, a heart on his sleeve. ( like speaking in your sleep. like honesty when you don't realize it, laid back on the worn cushioning of a couch, allowing himself not to see, allowing himself to merely be, be there. to drive him home. trusting. trusting you. )