Chapter Text
God, please…
You’re bleeding out!
Yes! Keep talking! …Stay awake! Look at me!
***
Harry’s lolling dead weight is too much for you to carry from the plaza to your room in the Whirling-in-Rags on your own. You have to enlist Garte’s help; he complies surprisingly quickly. You carry Harry between you, one of his arms over each of your shoulders, his feet dragging behind. Garte is saying something—rumbled, concerned murmurs—but your mind can’t grasp the words, and they are lost on the wind. All you can sense right now is Harry’s warm blood seeping into your clothes and congealing on your skin in the cold spring air, his large, sturdy body pressing down on you, and the ringing and throbbing in your head courtesy of the woman mercenary, now dead by your hand.
By the time the three of you reach your room, your body is violently protesting the abuse it has suffered over the past day. Your head is pounding, your limbs unsteady. Garte helps you lower Harry onto the bed so that you can inspect the wound.
The makeshift tourniquet—your leather belt—has done its work. Only a few trickles of blood seem to have escaped the hole in Harry’s thigh. You rush to fetch the small first aid kit you always keep nearby when in the field, but you can’t remember where you stored it at first—under the bed? In the cabinet? You stagger uselessly from side to side as you search, feeling utterly adrift. Your memory can’t fail you know. Not when your partner needs you.
You think of Eyes and feel a pang in your chest. He needed you, and you failed him. You squeeze your eyes shut to will away the images as they drift unbidden into your mind: his wide, glazed eyes open, unseeing. His limbs splayed apart unnaturally like those of a rag doll. The black body bag hiding his face from the world for the last time. No. That can’t happen again. I won’t let it…
A flash of memory—the rightmost drawer of the night stand! You pull out the first aid kit, realizing that your hands are trembling. You feel bile rise in your throat. Garte stands by, silently fretting.
“Mr. Garte,” you say, your voice sounding calmer than you feel, “please get us some fresh washcloths, towels, and clean bedding. And drouamine tablets. As many as you can find.”
Garte nods, the color drained from his face, and leaves quickly without a word.
Now you turn back to your partner. He lies on your bed, clearly unconscious, with the entire leg of his pants almost soaked through with blood. Your throat tightens and the room around you pitches back and forth. You don’t remember ever having this reaction to blood before. You must have a concussion—the blow to your head from the mercenary’s pistol was certainly hard enough. An injury like that would be enough to make you see three of everything for days. You try your best to swallow the nausea and push on.
You take your folding knife from your pocket and use it to rip the trouser leg off, exposing a pale, hairy thigh painted with drying red blood. With the fabric out of the way, you can get a better look at the wound. It’s smaller than you thought it would be: a round opening about twice the size of a centim on the outside of the thigh. You can’t see the bullet. There is no exit wound, so the bullet must still be inside. It’s been several years since your last first aid refresher course, but you remember enough to know that if any major arteries have been nicked, removing the bullet incorrectly could be disastrous.
Harry stirs and groans on the bed, and you look up with alarm.
“Fuck-fuck-fuck. FUCK, it hurts,” he yelps, his face contorted into a grimace.
“I know, detective.” You attempt a soothing tone. You’re not sure that you pull it off. “I know. But I can fix it. You’ll be alright.”
Can you? Will he? What about you-know-who?
SHUT UP!
You shake your head to drown out the voices and immediately regret it. Harry’s whimpers and labored breathing suddenly sound far away, as if under the icy waters of the Insulindic. Your vision starts to go black. You’re passing out.
Nononono. God no. God no. Stay awake. Stay awake for him.
Somewhere in the distance, out on the coast, you hear the thunder of shell bombardment and ghostly screams cut short. Then you are gone.
***
You feel a cold hard surface beneath you and a throbbing in your head and realize you are lying down.
Then it hits you. Everything hurts. You try to move, to no avail. A groan rises unbidden from your throat. The pain is all-encompassing. There are no thoughts. No emotion. Just syncopated pulses of pain emanating from the back of your head.
You strain to concentrate beyond yourself. Is that a knock you hear? A voice?
“My God! Lieutenant! Are you all right?”
You force yourself to blink. The light is blinding. Golden. It’s strangely beautiful. A tall, large figure disrupts the resplendent light streaming in through your window: a man. With dark hair and stubble and concerned eyes, so different from his usual disdainful expression.
“Garte?” You croak.
“Yes, lieutenant. Are you alright? It looks like you passed out.”
Your vision adjusts to the light, and you see that Garte is standing above you holding a pile of clean, neatly folded linens. You are on the floor, vulnerable and helpless.
“I did,” you admit. Your face flushes with shame as you gingerly prop yourself up on your elbow and look around. When your gaze falls on Harry's still form lying above you on the bed, your shame is replaced with panic. Oh God. Harry.
“How long has it been? Am I too late? Is he gone?” You force yourself to sit up as cold panic spreads from your chest outward to your extremities. Hot salty tears spring to your eyes and threaten to fall. The room spins. You feel like you’re going to throw up.
“It’s only been a few minutes since I left you,” Garte rushes to reassure you, his face full of concern. “Ten minutes, tops. You can’t have been unconscious for more than five.”
Only five minutes? How is that possible? You raise yourself from the floor to look at your partner. Unaware of your panic, he lies unconscious, his breathing somewhat rapid, but stable. Your body sags with relief, and the tears begin to pour out of you, clouding the lenses of your glasses and wetting your shirt. You turn your face away from Garte and use a handkerchief to dry your eyes.
Get your shit together, Kitsuragi. We don’t fucking cry in front of civilians, or anyone, for that matter. Whatever is going on with you, you have to be professional. Now, get on with the gunshot wound.
You take several deep breaths to steady yourself. Garte continues to look at you with knitted brows.
“Lieutenant, are you sure you’re up to this? You’re badly hurt yourself. Let me call your precinct…oh, dear, our phone isn’t working, though…No matter, I’m sure I can use someone’s radio, if—”
“Thank you, Mr. Garte,” you interject quietly, but firmly, with only a small waver in your voice, “but I am trained to treat injuries like this on my own, and in dire circumstances. And, as you may know, the RCM is spread rather thin. I assure you, I will take care of this. Thank you for your concern.”
Garte looks doubtful, but he leaves the pile of linens on the chair by the bed, along with two blister packs of drouamine.
“I’ll clean his room for him, then, while he’s…indisposed. So that it’s ready once he’s better…Shall I?” Garte asks uncertainly. He clearly wants to be of real help to the both of you, and perhaps feels guilty about his irate attitude toward Harry up to now. You’re pleased at his new role as an unlikely comrade in the midst of the chaos.
“Yes, please do,” you reply, finally banishing the note of constrained emotion in your voice. “I’ll let you know of any developments.”
Garte nods and leaves the room, gingerly closing the door behind him.
A heavy quiet descends around you. After the havoc of the tribunal, the raised voices reverberating off the buildings in the square and the deafening gunfire, the silence feels oppressively lulling, like a heavy quilt wrapped around you. You feel hot and constricted, suddenly, and it’s hard to move.
You turn your attention back to Harry. His eyes are closed, his chest rising and falling rhythmically. Still unconscious. As you step closer, your limbs move slowly and uncooperatively. You’re so used to springing into action, your hand always deftly moving to your sidearm at signs of danger, but now you feel as if your legs are chained to the floor and your hands are bound.
You’re scared. After what happened before.
It’s true. You know it is. And why wouldn’t you be? You lost your partner. The one you relied on, not just to see things you couldn’t, but to survive. And he relied on you.
And you failed him. What if you fail Harry?
You try to swallow the lump in your throat. It dawns on you now, for the first time, that you have already come to rely on Harry after only knowing him for several days. When the two of you first met, you were prepared to slog through the investigation with this sloppy drunk only out of duty to the RCM and to the law. You had not expected this man to intrigue you, and still less had you expected to have a genuine rapport with him. Contrary to all your expectations, he turned out to be brilliant. A bit of a mess, of course, and an addict, but his keen mind and tireless curiosity allowed him to run rings around you. You are not too proud to acknowledge this fact, at least to yourself. It’s no wonder that he’s known as a “human can-opener.”
You know there’s more to this.
Come on, just admit it, lieutenant. He makes you better.
He does. And you know it. He softens your hard edges, he gives you space to be more than the constrained caricature of yourself that you had already begun to ossify into. He helps you breathe. You have felt more at ease with yourself the past few days than you can remember feeling in a long time.
You like to think that your positive effect on him in the past few days has been even more striking. He hasn’t touched a drop of alcohol since the beginning of the investigation, which is remarkable, considering the darkness and depth of the hole he seemed to have dug for himself only a week ago. He blunders, he makes a fool of himself, he despairs, but he keeps trying. You have begun to notice a look in his eyes—a peculiar earnest glint in them—when he does or says something almost heartbreakingly good. He looks at you in those moments, and you think that he, on some level, is doing this to please you. At times you are almost sure of it, and you feel a strange warmth spreading through you. It feels like your first drag on your nightly cigarette. A thrill that transforms your lungs into glowing embers.
You don’t know what it is about him, but you can’t escape the feeling that your life is now divided into two separate epochs: Before Harry and After Harry.
And Harry, your partner, lies helplessly on the bed.
You spring into action, practically throwing off your blood-stained gloves and running to the bathroom sink to wash your hands and arms up to the elbows. Then you pick up the first aid kit from where you left it on the floor and deftly remove and lay out next to you a brown glass bottle of Saint-Batiste medical antiseptic, forceps, a suture kit, and sterile wound dressings.
With trembling hands, you take the forceps and prepare to extract the bullet. You press slightly on the wound, moving the flesh around to see if you can feel the bullet under the skin. You try to be gentle, but there is no way for this procedure to be painless. Harry cries out, wrenched from his stupor.
“MOTHERFUCKER!” he wails and tries to wriggle away from your ministrations. You could swear he almost punches you. You don’t blame him.
“Be still, detective,” you say sharply and grip his lower thigh in place in your left hand. “I know it hurts. Unfortunately, RCM first aid kits are not equipped with local anesthetic, and it wouldn’t be much use to us now, anyway. We’ll make do without it.” You glance over at his face. His eyes are squeezed shut in a pained grimace.
“Fucking cheap Moralintern bastards,” he growls. “Won’t give us any fucking thing.”
You can’t suppress a small smile.
“I won’t argue with that.” You are just relieved to hear him speak.
You gently squeeze the flesh with your hands again, causing some blood to leak out. Harry whimpers pitifully. After several more attempts, you think you feel the bullet. It’s not as deep as you thought—approximately four centimeters from the entrance wound. Even with your hyperopia, if you lean backward and squint, you can see it bulge outward slightly as you manipulate the skin. You insert your index finger into the opening, and sure enough, before your entire finger is enclosed, you feel slippery metal warmed by the flesh surrounding it. Holding the wound open with your left hand, you slowly insert the forceps, smearing them with Harry’s blood in the process.
Harry has fallen unconscious again, overwhelmed by the pain, most likely. You gently push and pull the flesh around the forceps to clear a path until you hear the soft clink of metal on metal. Cold sweat trickles down your neck and under your shirt. Just half a centimeter further, and the forceps close around the bullet. Five seconds later, it’s out. The warped, pockmarked ball sits in your palm like a dusky baroque pearl. Before your forensic ballistics instinct has time to kick in, a rush of white-hot anger and violent disgust overtakes you, and you throw the bullet into the corner, where it dings off a piece of furniture and rolls off somewhere into the dark. The bullet’s unceremonious banishment gives you a strange, cold feeling of elation.
Fuck you.
Now, the moment of truth: removing the tourniquet. The bullet entered the outside of the thigh, meaning that the femoral artery is probably intact. However, there could still be substantial bleeding. You try to steel yourself as you think about Harry’s life pouring out all over your hands, all over the bed. Placing your hand on his lifeless chest to perform the Stations of the Breath. Your stomach flops.
You ready a clean cloth in your left hand and begin loosening the belt with your right. As you loosen, several small rivulets of blood flow from the wound. You press down hard with the cloth for about a minute, then peek apprehensively at the wound and breathe a sigh of relief. The bleeding is under control.
With the bullet gone and blood flow stemmed, you can get a better look at the wound and start cleaning it. There is some damage to the muscle—there’s no doubt about that. But surgery is not an option here. You are no surgeon, and the procedure necessary to reconstruct damaged muscle and connective tissue would cost upwards of 10,000 reál, a financial impossibility for the vast majority of RCM officers. The most likely scenario for Harry, as you see it, is a mild limp, perhaps walking with a cane over longer distances. It’s a good outcome, considering the circumstances—he’ll still be able to work, assuming the wound heals well, though he might have to slow down somewhat.
Once you have cleaned the wound as well as you can, you move on to the sutures. The scythe-shaped steel needle shines tremulously in your trembling hand. Like a darting fish in a sun-drenched river. A flash of a childhood memory…
Harry groans and stirs again. He writhes on the bed.
“God, Kim…it hurts so fucking much…”
You do your best to project an air of calm.
“Detective, I’m going to begin stitching you up. This will hurt. A lot. But you can have some drouamine and sleep when we finish.” Harry grimaces again but nods. You feel his body tense up in preparation for the needle, and his breath comes in shallow bursts.
“Try to relax. Tensing up makes the pain worse. Take some deep breaths.”
“I’m—Kim, I’m trying to—I’m sorry—fuck.”
He’s hyperventilating. You need to calm him down. Now.
“Harry, look at me.” You lean toward him, bring your fingers to his chin, and turn his face toward you. His prickly facial hair brushes against your fingers and his warm, frantic breath beats an airy rhythm on your hand. His bloodshot eyes are wild and unfocused at first, all gray-green iris, blinking rapidly. After resting on your eyes for a moment, the pupils dilate slightly and become fixed.
“Breathe with me.”
You inhale slowly, hold to a count of four, and slowly exhale, illustrating the deep breathing technique taught in the RCM academy as a method of grounding in intense situations. Harry follows dutifully with shaky breaths. His eyes never leave yours. You repeat the procedure five times, until his trembling lessens and his chest rises and falls steadily.
“Good. That’s better. Are you ready?” you ask, adjusting your hold on the suture needle and ensuring the thread is securely attached.
Harry nods, but his eyes dart over to the needle in your hand.
“No. Eyes on my face.”
He gulps and nods, looking for a moment like a reprimanded child. You know that he responds well to you ordering him around. He won’t look at the needle again.
“OK, here we go,” you murmur as you bend over him and insert the needle into Harry’s battered flesh. Immediately, a whine breaks forth from him. In the corner of your eye, movement: Harry’s left arm frantically searches for purchase and grips the blanket. You can’t stop now; you pass the needle under and catch the skin on the other side of the wound and pull, creating a neat little stitch. Not unlike sewing a shirt seam with a running stitch. You glance at Harry again before you continue. His breathing is ragged, and sweat streams down his face. He is in a great deal of pain, but he is tolerating it well. A small swell of pride in him buoys you.
You make stitch after stitch until the wound is closed. The sutures are tidy; you can’t help but feel pleased with your work. Harry manages several more curses as you dab the stitches with a cloth soaked in disinfectant.
Once the sutures are disinfected and dressed, you give Harry a double dose of drouamine—normally, you would insist on only one, but his injury is severe, and it’s likely that he has a higher tolerance for painkillers than the average person.
“You did very well, Harry,” you say once you have him propped up on clean bedding. “Sleep now. We can get you properly cleaned up later.”
Harry’s eyelids are heavy under his brow. He looks over at you, and through the pain and exhaustion there is true lucidity in his eyes for the first time since he was injured. His gaze travels over your clothes, and suddenly his eyes go wide and glitter with tears.
“Oh god, Kim—you’re hurt!”
“What?” You look down and realize that you look like you’ve been shot in the stomach. Harry’s blood covers the lower half of your white t-shirt in a large splotch of scarlet.
“It’s alright—it’s not my blood." You think it best not to clarify that it’s Harry’s blood, lest he spiral about losing so much of it. But tears are running down his cheeks and into his beard now.
“Are you sure?” he sniffles, distraught, the tears not stopping. “But…your face. Your face is bleeding.”
Shit. You should check yourself out at some point. You should have fallen down from exhaustion a while ago.
“It’s fine—I don’t feel it. I’ll be fine, I promise.” Harry’s tired eyes linger on you, full of concern, and you feel that same warmth grow in your chest again. He’s the one who was shot and almost died, and he’s worried about you. You take out your handkerchief from your trouser pocket again and gently dab the tears under his eyes and on his cheeks. The light blue fabric contrasts sharply with your blood-stained hands. Strangely, this action feels completely natural to you. Like patting him on the arm or the shoulder. You feel an overwhelming rush of tenderness and a burning in your throat.
“Now, get some rest, detective,” you say, trying and failing to use an authoritative tone. You fight the urge to turn your face away.
Harry looks at you searchingly, sensing that something is happening within you (damn his perceptiveness!), but is too worn out to pursue the matter. He settles back onto his pillows and begins snoring softly almost immediately.
Once he is asleep, your shoulders sag and your head falls forward from exhaustion. The pain in your head, which you had been able to ignore to tend to Harry, returns to the front of your consciousness with full force. It’s almost blinding. You’re dimly aware that you should tend to your own cuts and bruises and try to become presentable, but the thought of moving from the spot makes every cell in your battered body scream in protest. You lower yourself onto the cold floor amongst the scattered contents of the first aid kit and the bloody washcloths.
Frantic images flash unbidden in your mind’s eye: Harry shooting Kortenaer in the face, the blood spurting forth as the mercenary dropped unceremoniously to the tiled ground, the masked mercenary raising his rifle at Harry, looking like a creature from another world. You feel the panic rise in your chest just as it did in that moment. You raise your pistol and take aim…
You realize that you’re shaking. Sobs break forth from your chest of their own accord, the strangled sounds reverberating off the walls. You can’t remember the last time you cried. Now it’s all pouring out of you—years of frustration, inadequacy, and guilt, the events of the day, almost losing Harry—all at once. You can’t stop it. You’re a wounded animal lying on the floor of a hostel room on the remote and forgotten coast, and no one can hear you.