Chapter Text
The Greater Revachol Industrial Harbor is a beacon of Moralism: No one can forget it, which is why everyone does. The comings and goings of cargo ships seem like the only constant in the upheaval of the world; they have become the background noise of the RCM’s 57th precinct in charge of ensuring its legality. Kim Kitsuragi walks into the breakroom with the confidence of someone who believes himself to be a cornerstone in the institution that keeps the Harbor functional, and with it, the district of Revachol West. Which is why, on a sunny morning in May of ‘53, he chokes on dusty coffee grounds in the breakroom when Cassandra Demettrie announces her delight at the dissolution of his workplace.
“Little Alice sent a memo this morning!” She gushes. “And we’re exempt from military service as compensation!”
“But we’re trained in the handling of weapons” Léonide from the Archives wonders aloud, despite the fact that he is very much not trained in any weapon beyond making case folders into a heavy projectile on Sundays.
Kim blinks, surreptitiously spits his coffee back into the cup, and hms to himself. He pivots on his heel, and marches like a toy soldier to Alice DeMettrie’s desk. He is a professional and not even the dusting of coffee sludge on his upper lip can break his composure.
“Lieutenant! You have coffee on your face!” She informs him as a way of greeting.
“Alice,” he nods, “it’s motor oil.”
“Huh, I could swear—”
“Can you put me on the line with the 41st?” He says, composedly.
“…Sure.” Almost in stride. Almost. “The lines are busy today, sir, I hope you don’t mind waiting.”
“It’s no problem, Alice,” he tries to smile. 15 minutes later, the call hasn’t gone through. He is not tapping his foot, and Alice DeMettrie is not mentally overlapping the image of a sock puppet over the flat line of his mouth. And most of all, he is not corpse-like in his rigidity when Harry comes on the line at Oldboy Pidieu’s notice.
“Hi, Kim!” he sounds chipper to Kim’s ears.
“Detective,” Past the haze of budding hypomania, a voice in Harry’s brain confidently informs him of the Lieutenant’s delight. “I know it’s been a while since we discussed this, but I think I’ve finally made my decision: I would be glad to work under Pryce.”
“I’m sure he’ll be glad to hear!” Kim breathes in, “Though I’m not sure how the décomptage hierarchy will change, honestly, now that the Militia isn’t technically a thing,” and the breath rushes out so fast he has to swallow down a cough.
“Not just GRIH?” He thinks about Jamrock’s streets full of Substances and Orphans. “Did nobody think of the Orphans?”
“What orphans?” Harry’s oblivious curiosity is an unstoppable force. Kim’s vehement denial, an inmovable object. They’ve been here before. The unstoppable force swerves to the left before the crash kills them both, every time. “Anyway, you’ve heard, then. I’m surprised, but I am so full of hope, Kim! The May bells are blooming! Elle est près de nous!”
Not even butchered Suresne can save us, Kim despairs. He hands the receiver back to Alice, and feeling very small, leaves the precinct.
He doesn’t run into the revolving door. He doesn’t stumble on his shoelaces. He has no comical outbursts, or cracks in his impeccable stance. He is a detective with no crime scene to arrive to, so he goes home and definitely does not make a crime scene of his own.
Kim Kitsuragi has complex feelings about his familial history. The Seolite diaspora has been a subject of much academic discussion, especially in the past decade, but Kim is not an academic or as bizarrely curious about the philosophical comings and goings of discourse like Harry is. He is first and foremost, an officer of the Revachol Citizen’s Militia. He is far from unaware of racism, and time has taught him not to expect respect from his colleagues because of it. He thinks about being a juvie for 15 years. He thinks about pinball. He thinks about strangling his boss. He remembers he no longer has a boss. A light above, descending, says la Revacholiére and he pats her like the dashboard of his Kineema or Harry’s back when he just vomited.
When he decides that he is going to go on an inner journey to figure out where to go from there, he doesn’t call it meditation. He jots down “Pilgrimage of the Mind” in small caps on his notebook, underlines it with a smooth motion. He repeats the title of the entry out loud to himself in the strongest suresnois accent he can muster. He lights a cigarette like other people would light an incense stick, sits cross-legged on his couch, and thinks of Vesper.
Thinking of Vesper is what you do when Claudine from History class gropes you, he thinks morosely. But his train of thought snags on the corner of an office desk in a silk mill and refuses to let go. His fingertips burn when they feel the roach.
The next weeks are spent idly doodling empty diagrams in his notebook, picking up calls from Harry where the other man tells him about his newfound love of turnips as Kim sits in silence at the other end of the line, and accumulating coffee-stained glasses at the edge of the kitchen sink. He is glad that he has nothing to write down, and immensely pleased about the fact that he has completed 17 crossword compilation booklets in 5 weeks, thank you for asking.
He eventually finishes his Astra pack. A part of his brain, which has begun to enter as a conversational participant into his thoughts, congratulates him on his dilligence in sticking to the regime of only one cigarette despite the decrease in stressors. Perhaps now that the pack is over you can drop the habit? it suggests, kindly. “But I didn’t get to say goodbye!” he mutters, very sanely. His sanity is unwavering. He is the most sane person he knows as he leaves his apartment for the first time in 3 weeks, jogs to a street corner near the harbor gates, and buys a gram for ten réal. The épicerie on his street sells rolling paper, which is all the incentive he needs.
After twenty minutes and several wasted sheets, he contemplates his handiwork. Here it is, he announces, the biggest blunt in Elysium. The crickets in his brain nod in agreement.
On the 8th week of his pilgrimage, sombody breaks down his door.
If he were more honest with himself, he would admit that there had been knocking every day for the past two weeks. And worried tutting. He wasn’t, though, so when he heard a slab of wood collapse in his living room, he fastens the belt of his chic and trendy tweed robe and says, out loud for the first time in a month, “Harrier du Bois.”
“Awesome, I thought you’d caved in and started drinking tar, ruined your throat.” Harry gives a crooked smile standing over Kim’s unhinged apartment door. He’s got two yellow Frittte bags full of onions. And he’s sniffing the living room. Kim’s eye twitches. "Care to tell me what you’re growing?”
“Growing cannabis is illegal in this distict” he replies confidently. “I just smoked ten réal.” Harry’s eyes widen in an emotion that Kim can't rationally categorize. That’s not an amount, Harry's brain supplies, ask him for the amount.
“How much did you smoke? How many grams?”
“Oh, just the one.” He grins smugly as Harry’s eyes crinkle in mirth, even as the rest of his face remains impassive.
“They charged you ten réal for a single fucking gram of weed?”
“Detective,” he suddenly squints defensively, as if regaining his wits and arranging them in the shape of the ever-responsible Officer, “How do you know the average price of a gram of hemp?”
“I’m pretty sure anyone above the age of twelve in Revachol West can tell you a reasonable price for most strains,” he reassures him, avoiding the question. “And nobody calls it hemp, Kim. And also, I am not a detective anymore.”
Harry hasn’t always been a kind man, but the universe granted him the mercy of forgetting that. Kim’s universe has always known a kind Du Bois, and he is many things, but a fool is not one of them. This is not a new request. It will be several months before the first of many Harrys in the same tone. Before the shedding of Officer, Detective, Lieutenant in both of their lives. But it all starts with a scarred hand popping open the smallest window in their world. Literally and figuratively.
Harry’s eyes are the same green as the wallpaper where dust motes dance, Kim's longing and the state of is apartment drenched in shame when the tab of his preserve-meat can of a life is pulled on.
“Let’s make some soup. We can boil your bedsheets for extra flavoring.”
When Kim’s laughter bubbles, it’s helpless and cracked from disuse, a wheezing giggle that shines like briney sunlight through the cranes at Revachol’s Harbor.