Work Text:
It’s been over a year. Every day of it has been a struggle, but that’s how life is. You don’t know if you’ll ever really accept this, or ever really be able to live with it, but who does? And who can? You just take one step at a time. You don’t look too far ahead. You don’t imagine the futures that contain the results of choices you made and then chose to forget - deaths by lung cancer, heart attack, liver failure. You don’t imagine running from your own mind and from time and memory again, as hard as that is. You don’t imagine relapse and overdose, a second attempt at suicide.
You just imagine:
- Get up.
- No, really, get up. (Sleep paralysis and false awakenings are the worst.)
- Continue discovering what you still remember and what you need to relearn to do your job. While doing your job.
- Come home.
- Remember to eat.
- Remember to shower.
- Remember to drink (water).
- Remember to do laundry. And dishes. And laundry. And dishes. And laundry. And dishes.
- Remember to buy...things. Whatever you need. Boring things. Things that get used up and then you have to buy them again, forever, in an endless cycle.
- Remember to take whatever meds you’re on at the moment in the right order at the right times of day. (Oh, and remember to refill them before they run out. And remember to keep some kind of calendar, god help you, to remember when you can’t refill a prescription unless you get another one in person and to remember to make that appointment to get that prescription before you run out and realize, shit, you can’t get another appointment for weeks yet.)
- Remember to keep appointments once you’ve made them. Remember to honor the obligations that come with recovery and rebuilding relationships you barely remember. Remember that being a coworker, a colleague, a friend, an alcoholic and addict in recovery, a tenant, a patient, a support group member, a detective, a comfortably bisexual man, a functioning human being - all of these and every other role you play or want to play are a continuous, never-ending process.
- Remember to...clean? You guess? How? Is it really necessary? When? Where do you start? Why is this so complicated?
- Remember to fit some exercise in there somewhere, but also not too much because see: taking things in steps and not having heart attacks.
- Remember to sleep. Enough. At the same times. Every day.
- Remember to stop thinking about remembering all of this all of the time. Remember not to think about how this loop will repeat until the magnetic tape of your life finally wears thin and breaks. Remember that thinking too much about that is almost certainly what did your past self, your pre-amnesia self, in. (Dora Ingerlund was just an excuse. You’ve come around to believing that, though you still haunt yourself with her ghost, on the worst days, in the worst moments.)
Remember. Imagine a life. But not too much. Not too complicated. Not too far ahead. Not too disco.
Just a life. One day at a time.
Learning about the others who work at Precinct 41. They know you. You don’t know them. They approach you with history and expectations. You try to decide which expectations you want to meet.
Learning about Trant Heidelstam, whose exact relationship with the precinct you're not sure you'll ever pin down, but who seems inordinately interested in you and will both ask and answer questions about anything. He's the only person you're careful not to ask questions you might genuinely not want to know the answers to. He offers no judgment, but he also offers you no protection from yourself.
Learning about Judit Minot, who’s carefully compassionate around you and who considers every word she says when she speaks with you. What you need to know. What keeps you safe, what won’t give you too much at once and unbalance you again, what won’t make you a danger to yourself and everyone else. She offers you the benefit of the doubt, but protects her own life from you.
Learning about Jean Vicquemare, who had an intense and complicated love/hate relationship with a mentor who you no longer are, and who hates both you and himself because he wants that self-destructive, unpredictable, event horizon of a force back. He wants to continue chasing the old you through hell and back, and now you’re--just. There. Every day. Not reliable, but trying to be. A bad joke. A terrible reminder.
Learning about Lt. Kitsuragi. He intends to transfer to Precinct 41, but his transfer is still pending. He is taking his time, being cautious, being responsible, honoring old relationships, giving Precinct 41 time to stabilize its own internal issues (primarily: you). You work together whenever things go wrong in Martinaise and the border dispute between your precincts means you’re both needed. This happens with increasing frequency as time goes on. You feel that Martinaise is the center of the end, but you only tell Kim that in broad strokes, moments when you can tell he shares the sense of something impending, something building to a moment of collapse. Moments when you both feel the inevitability of a loss that has yet to arrive.
You develop mutual respect. Appreciation. Knowing that whatever job you’ve been called to do together, you will both put everything you have into it. That he can trust you. That you’ve learned to stand down when you need to, that you’ve learned it isn’t all about you. You’d wanted this trust, but you find it means you have less to say to each other instead of more. There is a great deal of quiet in your investigations. It’s strange to find that this isn’t a bad thing.
You have become a quieter person overall, even beyond these moments working in often-silence in Martinaise with Kim. You learn what you want to listen to, within yourself. Empathy. The voices of others that tell you how to speak to them, how to move through their lives doing only the harm absolutely needed to reach a truly necessary goal. Esprit de corps. The respect and attention those who work with and around you deserve, their acknowledgement as human beings, the control required to listen and learn instead of dragging them ahead with you at a dead run, straight into whatever they could have shown you how to avoid. Perception. Seeing the world. Not the world inside your head, but the actual world, as it is. Letting it remind you more exists than the personal pale you (and every other human being) carries around within them. Conceptualization. The desperate need and desire to make meaning and beauty where there is none. To bring pieces of the world together in a way only a single mind in one particular place at one particular time can do. The mirrored twin to perception - seeing what doesn’t exist and then using it to see what does in a new way.
You find that the voices and emotions that woke you first in Martinaise were wrong - you do love the world. That it hurts sometimes to look at it, in a sharp, sweet, taut way, the stretched-out moment before something beautiful shatters. A stopping of the heart. That you want to stay as long as you can, even if it’s a cycle of laundry and dishes and shopping and your body slowly giving up and giving in. That, yes, you can be that naive, that young, at least in precious seconds, single hours. Enough time to remind yourself not to die, not yet.
It has been more than a year, and you are forty-five now, according to your birth certificate and all other reliable sources.
So the next time you are in Martinaise, and the next time you see Lilienne - still fighting against the development Evrart Claire continues to try to push through city bureaucracy - Kim smiles and steps aside and leaves you two alone. Knowing that she’s gotten to know you well enough in the course of your work in Martinaise that she’ll know what Kim leaving of his own accord means.
That it’s been more than a year. That he vouches for you - that Lilienne can believe you when you say you’ve been holding on, been sticking to sobriety. That an outside observer thinks that, yes, Harry Du Bois can meet another person on equal ground and ask - where do you want to go from here?
And have it be someplace good.