Chapter Text
Something terrible is born in you in the afternoon, on a Monday.
VOLITION [Easy: Failure] It is, of course, not alone - the list of things currently housed in this body is long. You’re a clown car of misery, you sorry bitch. There’s a lot of terrible in here. A lot.
This, though. This is different. This one comes long after the others, and it comes without any warning, and it comes straight for your fucking guts.
You’re in the middle of questioning suspects - you and the Lieutenant. You’re partners now, for real. This suspect is a guy in a pair of little tiny gym shorts and a parka zipped up to the chin, and he’s looking between the two of you like one of you might shoot him on the spot.
PERCEPTION: [Easy: Success] Tiny Gym Shorts is shaking: hands, eyes, wobbly mouth. His breath is fast and shallow and he’s sweaty around the fur of his coat. The hairs all over his bare legs are standing straight up with the cold.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: [Trivial: Success] He’s high. And he’s holding.
VOLITION: [Challenging: Failure] You try to look at something else, but there is nothing else. The world at large is shut off to you. There is nothing but your blood racing around in your veins and the sweet chemical siren call of amphetamines.
KIM KITSURAGI: “Detective.”
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: Not now, baby, Daddy’s got some speed to drink.
VOLITION: [Challenging: Failure] Don’t say that.
YOU: “Not now b-”
REACTION SPEED: [Godly: Success] STOP TALKING.
YOU: It is like pulling a hand brake on a runaway train. There’s sparks.
YOU: “Not now b- uh. Sorry. Sorry. Never mind.”
KIM KITSURAGI: The Lieutenant raises an eyebrow at you. It isn’t The Eyebrow, but it could be at any moment. He looks from your sweaty forehead to Tiny Gym Shorts and his huge mid-flight pupils. A tiny crinkle of displeasure appears around his mouth.
You swallow. Hard. Some little amphibian of shame shudders somewhere in you. Your eyes stick on the ground for a few seconds before returning to Tiny Gym Shorts.
VISUAL CALCULUS: [Easy: Success] He’s got something in his pocket. Probably a bottle. Probably a bottle of amphetamines. Probably a bottle of amphetamines that could be in your hand in a matter of seconds, if you just reached for it.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: Do it. Meth in the hand is worth two in the bush.
VOLITION: [Challenging: Success] Don’t do it. That’s not how the saying goes.
KIM KITSURAGI: The Lieutenant watches this play out on your face for a few seconds before repeating, “Detective.”
EMPATHY: [Easy: Success] There’s clear disappointment in his voice, and more than a little impatience.
AUTHORITY: [Easy: Success] There’s something else. Something sharp and hard and silver, like a knife. It doesn’t cut you, though. It just hovers over you like the sword of Damocles.
SHIVERS: The sun is out. Rare for Revachol. Its light is a beautiful slash of visible warmth above your head, slanted low in the late afternoon. Wash of orange and pink. It looks like a place for birds. It’s cut off by the buildings in a vivid, harshly drawn line. Looking at it is like being pulled from a dream.
CONCEPTUALIZATION: [Challenging: Success] You and Tiny Gym Shorts are standing in a cool blue shadow, but the Lieutenant - somehow the cold does not touch him. He is the same glowing revelatory orange as the unreachable sunlight.
KIM KITSURAGI: The Lieutenant sighs. He is very close to you, and the sigh crosses over your face like a summer breeze.
PERCEPTION: It is not unpleasant.
PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: Understatement.
YOU: The sigh gets inside you. You hang your head.
YOU: “Sorry.”
Tiny Gym Shorts looks from The Lieutenant to you and back again. He makes a face, then addresses you.
TINY GYM SHORTS: “What are you, his dog?”
Here it is: the terrible thing.
VOLITION: [Impossible: Failure] An irrepressible shudder wracks you from head to toe. Traitorous blood, against your will, rushes warm and tingling to your cheeks and the back of your neck. It’s really obvious. You are not being cool about it.
EMPATHY: [Formidable: Failure] The Lieutenant is reacting just to your left, but you can’t read him from here. You should look at him.
INLAND EMPIRE: You picture the Lieutenant’s face: the tabernacle glow of it, the cloud of compassion and authority that trails around after him. The lines around his eyes. The little threads of silver in his hair.
You don’t want to look at him. Just the thought of this thing in you, this awful new thing, probably written all over your face, marring the Lieutenant’s holy air of innocence - it turns your stomach.
VOLITION: [Trivial: Failure] It’s a wonder we don’t kill ourselves.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: [Challenging: Success] Come on, Harry. Look at him. You like looking at him anyway. It feels good.
You do like looking. It’s one of those thoughts you try very hard not to come face to face with. You’ve been trying not to come face to face with it for a year and a half now.
KIM KITSURAGI: The Lieutenant’s very still. Almost frighteningly still. His hand, where it’s held behind his back, is creaking into an ever-tightening fist in its driving glove. Otherwise he gives absolutely no indication that he’s even heard Tiny Gym Shorts.
EMPATHY: [Easy: Success] He’s angry for you.
Tiny Gym Shorts is still looking like he expects an answer to the question. It does not appear to be rhetorical.
RHETORIC: [Easy: Failure] We should respond with something clever.
YOU: “Yeah I am.”
RHETORIC: Wait, what?
REACTION SPEED: [Trivial: Failure] Wait, what?
LOGIC: Oh, no.
PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: [Easy: Failure] As soon as you answer you flush pathetically all over. It’s definitely visible. You’re sweating, and that answer came so fast and so easy, and shame twists in your guts like some living thing. You’re prickly hot on your face, your fingers, your chest.
CONCEPTUALIZATION: [Challenging: Success] Embarrassment is having its way with you.
PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: It feels -
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: Fucking disco.
KIM KITSURAGI: The Lieutenant is saying something. Your ears are ringing and you can’t hear it, but it seems like he’s trying to redirect the conversation back to the interview.
AUTHORITY: Keeping things professional. Saving your ass.
EMPATHY: You’re so cool, Kim.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: [Easy: Success] Listen. You’ve tried a lot of drugs. A lot. Most of which you don’t recall. Some of which smoothed everything out, some of which buzzed exquisitely along your nerves until they were frayed into pieces.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: But this one? Embarrassment? This is the shit. This is it. Drug of choice. We’re making an executive call here, hoss. This is the only high you ever need again.
The rest of the interview passes. It’s cold. The more time passes, the colder it gets. You try to pay attention but mostly all you can notice is that Tiny Gym Shorts seems so thrown off by your reaction to his taunt that it borders on fear.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: You feel great , baby. You don’t even want a drink.
VOLITION: [Godly: Failure] Okay, you do. A little bit.
Afterwards, you end up on the motel balcony under a sinking sun while Kim has his single daily cigarette. You’re still shivering, but if you go inside you won’t get to see the tiny flakes of snow melting in Kim’s hair. You won’t get to see the barely perceptible flicker of pleasure in his eyelashes when he takes that first drag.
AUTHORITY: [Challenging: Success] One a day is nearly impossible. The willpower required for this little ritual is astounding.
VOLITION: [Easy: Failure] You could never do that. Willpower and you have yet to get acquainted.
SHIVERS: Somewhere in East Martinaise, a junkie in tiny gym shorts and a parka is on his third speedball. He’s alone in that way drug users are always alone, separated from the world by a fine, oily film. It’s snowing and the sky is a solid curtain of steel-grey. The speedball is glowing in his hand like spent uranium. This is the one. He’s not going to make it.
EMPATHY: [Easy: Success] A harpoon bolt of sadness shocks into you. It hurts.
KIM KITSURAGI: The Lieutenant watches you for a second. Then, like a precision sniper, he says: “You did good work today, detective.”
CONCEPTUALIZATION: [Challenging: Success] Kim grabs the bolt of sadness in his hand. You watch the lit end of his cigarette burn the bolt to ash.
REACTION SPEED: [Godly: Failure] You should say something cool. You should definitely not mention the dog thing.
YOU: “Sorry I said that. The - dog thing. I shouldn’t have.”
REACTION SPEED: Great. Sure.
AUTHORITY: [Easy: Failure] We aren’t sorry.
EMPATHY: [Formidable: Success] No, you are. You are sorry in a strange way - pointed as an outstretched hand, searching. Like picking a scab.
KIM KITSURAGI: There is a long moment where the Lieutenant doesn’t answer. He smokes his cigarette. He looks up at the flat birdless sky.
The smoke is blue off the end of Kim’s cigarette and a cloudy, strip-mined grey coming out of his mouth.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: Did you say Kim’s -
VOLITION: [Godly: Success] Hush.
ENCYCLOPEDIA: [Formidable: Success] The smoke changes color because the size of the smoke particles changes. They’re small until they pass through a body. They pick something up there on their way out.
CONCEPTUALIZATION: You are looking at the inside of Kim’s lungs.
For one second before Kim speaks, the two of you are balanced on the knife-edge of the world. You hold your breath. Whole ages are born and die in that second. Universes are contained in that second. This is something new - this strange tense line pulled tight between the two of you. What is this. What are you doing.
KIM KITSURAGI: “Are you?” he asks, on an exhale, tilting his head down from the sky in your direction. For a moment the light hits his glasses and you can’t see a single thing behind his eyes. You feel like a bug under a microscope. “Sorry?”
AUTHORITY: [Impossible: Failure] Don’t squirm.
PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: You squirm. A lot. There’s something warm, too, a flush, creeping up your neck. Begging for a hand.
YOU: You swallow, with an unusual amount of difficulty. It’s loud. There’s something in the way, lodged in your throat.
CONCEPTUALIZATION: [Challenging: Failure] It’s hope.
PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: [Trivial: Success] It’s blinding, terrified arousal.
REACTION SPEED: Say something.
YOU: “Uh.”
AUTHORITY: [Godly: Failure] Be cool. Don’t say anything … desperate.
YOU: In a bumbling, urgent stutter you say: “I’m - yeah. So sorry, so. S-uh.”
PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: Jesus, your heart is racing. We might be about to die.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: “How can I make it up to you?”
REACTION SPEED: [Impossible: Failure] Shit. He got by us. He got to the mouth.
KIM KITSURAGI: The Lieutenant looks at you a long time. His expression gives away absolutely nothing. His face is cool as glass. You notice, for the very first time, how dark his eyes are.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: His focus feels like a blowtorch flame. It’s peeling the skin off your face. It’s leaving you a scoured and shiny-polished skull. It fucking hurts.
KIM KITSURAGI: He’s not finished with his cigarette. It’s smoked down past halfway now, though, inching closer and closer to the Lieutenant’s fingers.
VOLITION: [Godly: Failure] Do not look at Kim’s hands. Do not fixate on them, and absolutely do not blush under any circumstances. He will definitely see that.
PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: We have some bad news. You did all of those things.
The Lieutenant’s still looking at you. It’s very, very cold outside now and you don’t feel it. The tiny icy flakes of snow on the wind sizzle when they hit the back of your humiliated neck like water in a hot pan.
SHIVERS: Two blocks west there’s someone frantically unbuttoning their shirt. The room is warm and quiet, save for the hum of an overhead lightbulb and the rabbit-fast panting of two desperate people. One block south, two boys wrestle each other’s coats off. One of the zippers is stuck. Three blocks east and a woman is single-mindedly chasing orgasm. Grasping, desperate. Her windows are open. The city pulses with it like a heartbeat. We are alive. We are alive.
EMPATHY: [Challenging: Success] The Lieutenant is making a decision. Something is going to happen.
KIM KITSURAGI: “Hold this for me, please.” The Lieutenant reaches out and hands you his half-smoked cigarette.
You have been asking for one all day. You’ve been asking everyone you’ve questioned, everyone you’ve worked with. Everyone you’ve passed in the street who looked like they might have one. You even asked an old lady asleep on a park bench. You’ve been seriously embarrassing yourself. The desire for a cigarette has been chewing you to pieces all day. You’ve had a hard time thinking of anything else.
But now? Presented with the Lieutenant’s cigarette, smoking down to precious nothing in your hand?
VOLITION: [Challenging: Success] It’s not yours. It’s not for you.
There it is again: the terrible thing. Misery shivers in your chest like a thrill. Why do you love this so much.
PERCEPTION: There’s a slight difference in the paper between the filter, under your fingers, and the rapidly vanishing rest of it.
REACTION SPEED: That’s because Kim’s mouth was there.
COMPOSURE: [Formidable: Failure] Shit. Fuck.
KIM KITSURAGI: The Lieutenant’s focus shifts minutely to the cigarette in your hand. So does yours.
The smoke is curling and blue and it smells agonizingly good. It smells like foggy, unformed memories that you can’t reach. It smells like relief and clear-headed sensory destruction. It smells like fucking nicotine.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: Want it.
You are horribly aware of Kim looking at you while this plays out.
SUGGESTION: [Trivial: Failure] You ever see those tricks people sometimes do when training their dogs, where they balance a slice of cheese on the dog’s nose and make them wait to eat it? Yeah, no, no reason. I was just wondering.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: WANT IT.
The Lieutenant watches you watch the cigarette. He watches the twist of total mindless longing on your face, and then he watches you tear your eyes off it to look back up at him for direction. A tiny muscle twitches next to his mouth.
EMPATHY: [Heroic: Success] He’s proud of you.
He’s - he is?
COMPOSURE: [Formidable: Failure] ALERT. Something is happening.
ANCIENT REPTILIAN BRAIN: You’re damn right something is happening. I’m driving.
Static. Blood, rushing around in your skull. Neurons, on fire. The strange, pleasant sensation of being submerged in a warm bath by dopamine. The cigarette is going to burn down to your fingers in a few minutes. You don’t even know if you’re going to feel it.
ANCIENT REPTILIAN BRAIN: You’re not. He’s proud of you.
KIM KITSURAGI: He’s much closer, now. You maybe should have tracked his movements instead of doing whatever that was. His nose looks cold and the snow landing in his hair doesn’t melt. Still, though. He feels like a warm engine.
Kim’s eyes go from your face to the cigarette in your hand and then back to your face again.
EMPATHY: [Trivial: Failure] You can’t tell what he wants. You are stupid with Brain Chemicals.
Time slows. Kim’s less than a metre from you. One, maybe two steps. It’s the smallest distance between any two points in the entire known universe.
SUGGESTION: [Trivial: Failure] Give the cigarette back to him.
AUTHORITY: [Trivial: Failure] Don’t give the cigarette back to him.
YOU: Insanely, you hold out the cigarette toward him without actually letting go of it.
KIM KITSURAGI: The Lieutenant warms with amusement. It is like a briefly glowing coal. You can see it. He pauses, and something passes over his face.
EMPATHY: [Trivial: Failure] Sorry. Nothing. Unreadable.
KIM KITSURAGI: He gives you one of those little tiny twitches of his mouth where it pulls down at the corner but still manages to look like a laugh.
He leans toward you and, cool and measured, takes one long, crackling drag from the cigarette still in your hand.
For 2.21 seconds, his lips are mere millimeters away from your fingers on the filter. You can watch the slow closing of his eyes. You can smell motor oil and sharp green pine needles. For 2.21 seconds, you can feel the heat of his mouth against your fingertips.
COMPOSURE: [Easy: Failure] Fuck. You are a homosexual.
PAIN THRESHOLD: [Easy: Failure] The cherry of the cigarette has made it to your skin and is burning the remaining whorls off your fingertips. It probably hurts. You should maybe drop it.
You don’t drop it. You stand there while Kim exhales beautiful lung-grey smoke into your face, and the red end of the cigarette presses hotly into your pain receptors, and it doesn’t matter. Kim is looking at you. You stand there, burning.
ANCIENT REPTILIAN BRAIN: Told you you wouldn’t feel it.
KIM KITSURAGI: The Lieutenant’s expression is calculating, for a second. It closes up and clinks in the back of your head like tiny little watch gears, and you know he’s thinking faster than you.
His eyes fall to the cigarette butt, burning your hand. They go up to your face. They stutter, for a second. He waits just one half-heartbeat too long, just to watch you hurt a little more.
KIM KITSURAGI: “Harrier.”
RHETORIC: [Heroic: Failure] He’s never called you that before. And his tone is unfamiliar, too - similar to when he’s very angry, but there’s something too sharp and warm about it. You’ve never heard him speak like that. He’s about to say something terrible.
Kim’s mouth twitches again. He’s laughing at you. It is a fucking hot poker to the chest.
KIM KITSURAGI: “Drop it.”
You drop it instantly, if only because the brain mechanism required to continue to hold it is far beyond you at the moment. Kim’s tone of voice is suddenly unbearable.
COMPOSURE: [Formidable: Failure] He’s on board with this?!
EMPATHY: [Easy: Failure] He can’t possibly be on board with this.
KIM KITSURAGI: The Lieutenant is regarding your reaction to all this with open curiosity. His impenetrable eyes go all over you: your pulse, hammering in your neck. The warm dizzy flush that must be visible on your face, the prickly cold sweat you can feel in your hairline. Your blister-hot fingers. They stay there for a long time.
INLAND EMPIRE: [Godly: Failure] What if he was on board with this?
KIM KITSURAGI: Kim sighs. He sounds very put out, suddenly. Tired, impatient. “It’s late, detective.”
COMPOSURE: Wait, what?
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: You motherfucking -
KIM KITSURAGI: “I’ll see you in the morning.”
YOU: No, wait. Wait.
YOU: Your whole body crumples a little bit into itself in devastated frustration. It is like ice water down your spine. It is like being pulled out of an orgasm.
Kim is watching you intently as he says this to you. He is leaned forward slightly in your direction, eyes sharp and bright on your face. He is absolutely riveted by your disappointment.
ESPIRIT DE CORPS: It’s the exact same expression the Lieutenant wears when he’s discovered an unexpected new part for the Kineema. Utter, delighted fascination.
EMPATHY: [Easy: Success] He likes this. A lot.
You swallow hard, visibly. Eyes stuck on Kim.
YOU: “But-”
KIM KITSURAGI: This time he steps closer when he speaks. His eyes are rapt on your face, burning with incredible focus.
KIM KITSURAGI: “Go to bed, Harrier.”
PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: Your dick could cut glass right now, by the way. It’s thudding dully with your heartbeat. It’s heating you up inside like a furnace.
AUTHORITY: You get sent to bed all hard up like this and your reaction is to like it? What’s wrong with you?
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: Want it.
You take a step backwards, toward the door. The distance between you and Kim lengthens to an intolerable degree. It pricks at the backs of your eyes and you blink the sudden sheen of tears out of them.
PAIN THRESHOLD: Your shoulders hunch miserably. Your hard cock aches where it’s trapped in your terrible disco pants. You instinctively put your burned fingers in your mouth, because they’re really starting to hurt.
KIM KITSURAGI: The Lieutenant’s shoulders tense.
A long moment of quiet stretches between the two of you. Your weird pervert robe smells like Kim’s cigarettes. It’s going to keep you up all night. This whole thing is going to keep you up all night.
YOU: “Please? Kim?”
You know what he’s going to say.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: [Trivial: Success] You want to hear him say it, you sick fuck.
EMPATHY: [Godly: Success] Kim wants to say it too. Badly. He’s good at hiding it, but you know him. He’s tense with the urgency of it.
KIM KITSURAGI: He says, with barely-concealed delight: “No.”
You close your eyes. Take a brief, steadying breath of cold air. Nod, eyes stuck hovering around Kim’s knees, and turn to slink back to your bedroom to jerk off until it fucking bleeds.
KIM KITSURAGI: “Oh, and Harry?”
You stop dead. You’re afraid to turn around. Kim’s low, almost gleeful tone prickles over the back of your neck.
KIM KITSURAGI: “The burns on your fingers need to heal. You’re going to have refrain from touching anything for a while.”
REACTION SPEED: Is he-
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: [Trivial: Failure] Dear merciful god, no. Surely not.
RHETORIC: [Easy: Success] It certainly sounds like it.
PAIN THRESHOLD: But the fingers don’t even hurt!
PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: We have two hands. Doesn’t Kim know we have two hands?
EMPATHY: [Trivial: Success] He knows.
VOLITION: [Godly: Failure] No wanking? Like, none? Not even a little bit? Use the good hand? Can we use the good hand?
Kim watches your face twitch with surprised dread. He watches you shift your weight, uncomfortably. He watches your face flush a mortifying pink, and then a miserable, pathetic red. He watches you look down at your hands and then back up at him. His expression is strange and dark and unfamiliar.
EMPATHY: [Godly: Success] It’s scaring Kim, how into this he is.
AUTHORITY: [Impossible: Failure] Absolutely not. We do not agree to this.
YOU: “How, uh. How long?”
You swallow. Your cock is visibly hard in your pants. This is probably public indecency. “How long should. Um. Should I.”
Kim makes a light, thoughtful sound. He looks at you.
ENDURANCE: [Easy: Success] He’s wondering how long you’d go, strung out waiting for him. If he pushed. If he made you.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: Weeks. Months. As long as he wanted. You’d never come again if he asked. Who gives a fuck.
KIM KITSURAGI: He reads these things as they play out on your face. Then, in a strangely warm tone of voice he says, thoughtfully, “I’m not sure yet.”
ENDURANCE: Not knowing how long he’s going to make you wait makes this much, much worse.
PAIN THRESHOLD: Like, a lot worse.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: You’re so cool, Kim.
You go, buzzing with mortified lust, downstairs to your shitty mattress and the coldest shower you can stand, and you don’t touch yourself. The terrible thing in you loves this so much it makes you shake. You don’t drink. You don’t dream. You just drop off effortlessly into oblivion.