Chapter Text
PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT - The brisk air out on the balcony of the Whirling-In-Rags is refreshing, a little reward for your jog up the stairs. You breathe deep, letting the salt breeze scour your lungs.
PERCEPTION - You do taste less blood in your mouth than previously.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY - You fill your chest again, inhaling like there’s a nitrous tank at the end of the pier. No such luck, but still, this is the freshest air in Martinaise.
LOGIC [Trivial: Success] - Is it? Land’s End was quite nice, for your not-a-date with Lilienne.
PERCEPTION - At least the cadaverine to sea breeze ratio is better up here.
LOGIC - The corpse in the tree is long gone; you’re not *really* hearing it sway beneath you, straining the branches, whispering huskily...
INLAND EMPIRE - It’s as real as you are. Real people have *friends*, Harry-boy. So where are yours?
SUGGESTION - Perhaps not a friend, not yet, but…
PERCEPTION - You hear the measured tread of Kim’s boots, transitioning from the stairs to the hallway.
ESPRIT DE CORPS - Your half-brother. Never too far behind you.
SAVOIR FAIRE - You hold the door open for Kim, because you’re a gentleman.
EMPATHY - A gentleman who hip checked him on the stairs to make sure you’d get to the door first.
SAVOIR FAIRE - So you could do the gentlemanly thing you’re doing now!
PERCEPTION - As he passes, you draw another deep breath. You smell pine, traces of motor oil and sweat.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Medium: Success] - Like I said, freshest air in Martinaise.
CONCEPTUALIZATION - You should go to the forest, after the case is over. Somewhere quiet, unpolluted, where the pine smell doesn’t come from a bottle of Taiga Super Special.
LOGIC - Somewhere the “stars” never turn out to be the lights of a Coalition aerostatic.
HALF LIGHT - You *don’t* like to think about what happens after the case is over. Usually, you avoid it by making sure there’s always another lined up…
ENCYCLOPEDIA [Challenging: Success] - While there are sharks and other elasmobranchs that employ buccal pumping, sharks that obtain oxygen exclusively via ram ventilation must stay in motion, constantly swimming, in order to breathe.
HALF LIGHT - Exactly. You are a machine that runs fast and hot; if you powered down, could you ever get yourself back up again?
PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT - Damn right you’re a machine, son. A machine that turns namby-pamby *emotions* into *sweat*.
VISUAL CALCULUS - That turns sensory input into cases solved.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY - That turns cigarettes into smoked cigarettes and dicks into—
SAVOIR FAIRE - Ahem. Regardless, do you strike yourself as someone who can *afford* to travel for pleasure? A man of leisure, refreshing himself periodically with little jaunts into the wilderness?
LOGIC - Perhaps if you moved someplace where you could collect enough tare. A landfill, maybe.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY - Well, how about another kind of trip, funky-baby? That freaky little puck from the pawnshop guy is burning a hole in your pocket.
RHETORIC [Easy: Success] - Metaphorically. You don’t actually need to—
REACTION SPEED - You briefly pat yourself down in search of rogue flames, but since you didn’t *stop, drop, and roll*, there’s no need to explain yourself to Kim.
AUTHORITY - There’s never *any* need to explain yourself to Kim.
VOLITION - Well, not about that, but remember what we agreed on. Psychedelics *after* you’re done for the day.
INLAND EMPIRE - However much it goes against your nature. You're a *seeker*, Harry.
RHETORIC - A seeker who keeps it straight-laced on company time. How’s that boot taste, law man?
ELECTROCHEMISTRY - Not as good as Kim’s, I bet. Besides, company time can fuck itself; you're *definitely* not the type to check in with your grind before *freeing your mind*.
EMPATHY - It's more about getting *Kim's* permission.
HALF LIGHT - Or avoiding the way your lungs curl into knobbly fists when he’s disappointed in you.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY - Fine, fine, then can we hurry it the fuck up? You’ve been waiting for *hours*. And with your impulse control, that’s basically forever!
ENDURANCE - You can wait longer. If he asks you to.
INLAND EMPIRE - Like a good boy. Whimpering at a tasty treat balanced on your nose. Never piddling on the carpet.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY - Unless…
AUTHORITY - Let me know when you’re ready to act like Kim’s *superior officer* and not a crusty little dog begging for *walkies*.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY - Oh, *that* is a thought…
COMPOSURE - A thought you’re pretty sure Kim would see crawling across your bloated face, if he weren’t busy preparing his ritual smoke.
SUGGESTION - His ritual that you insist on interrupting. Kim hasn’t invited you to debrief with him since that first night.
INLAND EMPIRE - But a bloodsucker like you only needs to be invited once, isn’t that right? And so you linger in Kim’s orbit, like a rancid smell, a shameful memory.
PAIN THRESHOLD - You hate to leave him, putting it off as long as possible.
CONCEPTUALIZATION - Basking in his glow, like a particularly clumsy moth worshiping at a sodium light.
HALF LIGHT - Or a set of helium headlamps, as you stare down oncoming traffic.
VOLITION - Kim’s presence bends the flow of time; when he turns in for the night, the hours flatten themselves into long stretches of highway. You struggle to occupy them, to move from landmark to landmark with no visible change on the horizon. Still, you let him go…
INLAND EMPIRE - Unlike the moth, you know what happens when you get too close.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY - The puck, guys. Your little morsel of danger-joy? It’s purple o’clock, brother!
SUGGESTION - If you *have* to ask for permission, at least play it cool.
YOU - “Kim are we off the clock?”
KIM KITSURAGI - He's barely got the lighter in his hand before the question comes rushing out of your mouth.
SAVOIR FAIRE - Cool. Extremely cool.
KIM KITSURAGI - He sighs. “Yes, detective. What you do during your personal time is...”
***
You don’t bother finishing the sentence. Not like the detective from the 41st would be able to hear anyway, since he started *aggressively* slurping at the pyrholidon the moment you said yes.
You update your mental list of “Horrific Sounds: HDB,” placing this obscene entry directly at the top, above even the eerie howls he made with his head stuck in the furnace below the dice-maker’s workshop.
Above the sobbing from your shared bathroom, the inhuman keening as he knelt at the glass mural of Dolores Dei.
It’s true, what you told him that first morning: you’ve absolutely seen worse. You know, better than most, how to keep your head down and do the work, and you’ve carried more than your share of investigations alongside cops who should probably be locked up themselves, in an asylum or otherwise. The question—and your pretext for observing HDB so closely—is whether you’ve seen anyone so destroyed who could, at the same time, work so *well*.
Whether you’ve ever seen ruins so majestic. So worth the painstaking archaeological efforts required to preserve them. Ruins that tempt you to imagine their restoration.
He makes a face as the chemical melts onto his tongue. You’ve got the odds at slightly less than fifty percent, given the detective’s determination where intoxicants are involved, but back away slightly in case he *does* puke. Not uncommon with pyrholidon, particularly in cases of recreational use.
You watch him struggle with it a moment, stubbly Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallows…
Where would you categorize *these* observations, lieutenant? Best to get your cigarette ready, no?
You go through the motions, looking discretely away until you hear an audible gulp, followed by a petulant whine. He keeps it down. When you let yourself look at him again, his glassy, wet eyes are already turned to you. So the coin drops, heads, and *this* is the bad night you’re going to have.
What was that before about not getting involved?
He’s a grown man, and your babysitting days are firmly over; questionable decisions, unforeseen consequences, you fully intended to leave him to it.
But that was before you realized he was going to wait. To get your permission first.
So? Not like you’ve never had another man hand you the leash before tonight, eh? A beast of a man who could crowd you up against the balcony door and silence you with one large rough hand, who nevertheless gives up control to you, seemingly on instinct…
The strong chestnut scent gives your muscles the cue to begin relaxing well before you take your first drag.
***
ELECTROCHEMISTRY - You suck a manly dose of the extremely chemical-smelling liquid into your mouth. There it seeps into your tongue. When you swallow it’s already almost all gone.
PERCEPTION - The taste is…
ENDURANCE - Foul. Your body struggles not to reject it, but your will is iron.
PERCEPTION - But you also struggle to *describe* it. Even now, the memory of the taste is getting farther from you…
CONCEPTUALIZATION - Tastes like a kiss.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY - It tastes like *many* things, all melting into one conflagration in the back of your throat. As you look around, the world slowly *exists*. As it did before. Only now gentle flames lick at its edges, as though it were a photo burning.
COMPOSURE - *Still* just a metaphor. No need to go through the fire-safety protocol.
HALF LIGHT - You get the sense that the architect who designed the Whirling-In-Rags was less concerned with fire safety than they should have been.
LOGIC - Perhaps with its proximity to the sea, fire isn’t the main concern in Martinaise.
VISUAL CALCULUS - Right. Not when any structure that’s been around more than a decade is riddled with bullet holes.
HALF LIGHT - Look at all this glass! It would be like shooting fish in an aquarium.
INLAND EMPIRE - Normally the aquarium costs extra…
PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT - *Normally* such thoughts *raise* your heart rate. Get you warmed up and ready to move, to *fight*.
HALF LIGHT - To take the intruder in your teeth and dive off a cliff together.
INLAND EMPIRE - But the image of fish in an aquarium, sounds and light muted and filtered by the water, perhaps a green and scaly thing floating amniotic alongside a luminous orange koi…
ELECTROCHEMISTRY - The effect of that otherworldly drop of liquid is slower, more subtle than that of real flames—yet just as warm.
EMPATHY - This warmth. It makes you want to share your *discovery* with Kim!
YOU - “Kim, I Just did a drop of that anti-radiation drug. It’s great.”
KIM KITSURAGI - “I’m happy for you,” he answers.
INLAND EMPIRE - His glasses turn golden as the fire reflects off the lenses.
EMPATHY - Warming you.
HALF LIGHT - Condemning you.
HORRIFIC NECKTIE - No no no. It's *fire*, bratan! And what does *fire* want?
ENCYCLOPEDIA [Trivial: Success] - Technically, despite its motility, *fire* is not an organism and thus cannot *want* one way or another.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY - Always the last to loosen up, aren’t you, bookface? No, Harry, the fire wants to *consume* you. Are you ready for that, baby?
***
You reach next for your lighter, but as happens so often with Harry, something interrupts you. A whimper.
Another new sound for your list. One you’d never write down.
One you could get him to make again. As often as you wanted.
Against your better judgment, you turn to check on him. He’s looking at you so intensely, you almost wonder if you’ve *done* something.
Who, you? Kim Kitsuragi, *doing* something? No, you never do. And you still refuse to believe *this one* can read your thoughts.
The way you refuse to believe the city speaks to him, any more than the horrible tie he sometimes mutters to in a shrill, silly voice. Still, he looks at you like…
Like he knows *exactly* what you want to do to him. How the caged thing in you would leap and tear, all nimble jaws and hungry tongue. See that?
With something that should be more like horror, you note the scarred hand floating between you, rising like an omen…
***
PERCEPTION - You see your hand in front of you, swimming towards Kim in a smooth, dreamlike motion.
KIM KITSURAGI - The fire around the edges of everything seems to be concentrated in his eyes, turning his lenses into lantern glass, bright and burning. He doesn’t move to stop you.
SUGGESTION [Medium: Success] - Like he knows you’re not the one responsible for your traitor limbs anymore.
EMPATHY [Heroic: Success] - Like he wants to see where you’ll go with this.
VOLITION - With what, exactly?
PERCEPTION - Your fingers grow towards the curve of his jaw.
CONCEPTUALIZATION - Roots at the stream, digging and drinking.
INLAND EMPIRE - You tried this already. Tried being the kind of animal meant to huddle close to other warm, soft bodies, the breath of another regulating your own.
PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT - You’re not part of that slumbering herd, son. You’re the *alpha*, the lone predator circling in the night.
ENCYCLOPEDIA [Medium: Success] - Actually, wolves are not solitary by nature, and the notion of the alpha—
INLAND EMPIRE - A wolf paces the borders of the herd. A man sights a wolf down the barrel of his rifle.
HALF LIGHT - You *do* know how it is.
KIM KITSURAGI - As proof, like he’s seen you for the kind of animal that you are, the lieutenant startles away.
DAMAGED MORALE -1
PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT - *Of course* he did. Kim’s a man’s man! He’s not here for whatever touchy-feely *homo* shit he thinks you were up to there.
DRAMA - Yes, *definitely* a *man’s* man, our lieutenant.
PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT - Better slap him on the ass, extra hard, so he doesn’t get any ideas.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY - Ideas…
VOLITION - What *were* you doing, Harry?
CONCEPTUALIZATION - It looked like you were going to gently cup his face, map how the sparse hairs of his mustache fit between the ridges of your fingerprints.
INLAND EMPIRE - If you died, they could use his mustache to identify your body. Kim offering his face to cold, dead hand after hand...
ESPRIT DE CORPS - Unlikely. A little-recognized perk granted officers of the RCM: you all have dental records.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY - Or maybe those little bristles would attach to your muttonchops like velcro. Holding your mouth to his.
PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT - Your hand is doing it again.
REACTION SPEED - You take your other hand, the one that belongs to Here and to You, and force the Errant Hand of Future Possibility back down to your side.
SUGGESTION - Kim's looking at you like you're insane. Act normal.
KIM KITSURAGI - Whatever you've done with your face, it's clear from his expression that “normal” lives on another isola.
PERCEPTION - The cigarette hangs between his lips, unlit.
LOGIC - Otherwise, his mouth might have fallen open.
KIM KITSURAGI - You examine the way his lips rest lightly on the filter, like it’s being held more by moisture than any kind of pressure. The gentle tilt of it, downwards, quivering with his breath like the last leaf on a storm-whipped tree. The black and impossible space between.
COMPOSURE - You're staring. Pretty obviously, in fact. And moving at about half speed from Kim's perspective on the space-time continuum.
VOLITION [Challenging: Failure] - You should get Kim onto your continuum and then... continue... them...
KIM KITSURAGI - His eyes are on you, unmoving, and he knows that you know that he knows… there is a lighter in his hand.
PERCEPTION - You hear every click of the metal wheel against the flint, the inhale of atoms rearranging themselves into flame.
CONCEPTUALIZATION - And unlike every flame that has existed before, these atoms form both the flame and its lit, inverted shadow.
INLAND EMPIRE - Light refracted and doubled through the thick glass of your tank. Boop boop, little fishies…
LOGIC - It's the effects of the pyrholidon.
INLAND EMPIRE - No, you're seeing its *true form*. Something yet to be named or even observed by man.
CONCEPTUALIZATION [Medium: Failure] - Double Fire.
PAIN THRESHOLD - His gaze runs across you, scorching the hair from your arms, precise as a welding torch.
PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT - You’re clutching your Weird Homo Hand hard enough to cut off circulation. Maybe ease up, chief.
HORRIFIC NECKTIE - No, bratan, squeeze *tighter*! Don’t pussy out right before the *grand finale*!
KIM KITSURAGI - The lieutenant exhales, pale smoke bubbling around the pair of you. He moves to break your grip, before you hurt yourself.
REACTION SPEED - You flinch back, pressing yourself against the wall, where the paint begins to slosh and seep against you, seeking a new equilibrium.
***
“Detective?” You don’t bother with the pretense of debriefing tonight, what with HDB’s ongoing experiments in internal entroponetics, so it startles you to hear him speak again.
It startles you *less* when you realize he’s speaking with the tie. He begins to choke himself with it again but stops before you can intervene.
He notices, when you worry about him. You don’t know if he’s embarrassed by it…
…or if he enjoys it.
Either way, you’ve made a concerted effort to worry less. Or at least appear to. So you don’t say anything as he seems to restrain himself from reaching toward you again.
Because you don’t want him to stop.
Because what is there to say? You update your mental notes, “HDB: substances and reactions”—
He struggles with his impulses more *literally* under the influence of pyrholidon. Perhaps it has a positive effect on his periodic bouts of extreme touch aversion?
The way he’s holding his wrist, like a man in a horror film fighting off a possessing force, prompts you to reconsider.
It looks painful. Remind you of anything?
Absolutely not.
Your resolve to worry less begins to feel ridiculous as the moments stretch on. It’s absurd, just standing here, watching him hurt himself. Without really thinking about it, you move to break his grip…
And with that astonishing reaction speed he sometimes demonstrates, the detective smacks himself flat against the wall. Like he’d go through it if he could, to get away from you.
His pupils are enormous, but that’s to be expected. It certainly doesn’t *hurt*, the way he stares at you with that expression of mortal terror.
It doesn’t hurt at all. You won’t let it.
He slides down the wall. You take a long drag, not stopping until he hits the ground.
***
INLAND EMPIRE - You sink deeper into the wall as Kim floats above you. Sliding away, heavy as stone is heavy.
LOGIC - It’s probably not *stone* so much as concrete, drywall, whatever the Martinaise construction racket whips up for this region’s particular *landlord special*.
VOLITION - Whatever it’s made of, the Whirling is giving you *shelter*. Don’t be rude.
COMPANIONABLE STRUCTURE AT YOUR BACK - The wall supports you. When was the last time someone *supported* you?
ESPRIT DE CORPS - It holds you from every direction. No need to watch your six; between the wall at your back and the lieutenant, looming above you like a statue to an ancient god, you are surrounded.
INLAND EMPIRE - Safe. Bobbling gently as a fetus in the womb.
LOGIC - Except instead of being hemmed in on all sides by wet and unpredictable flesh, you are the whimpering heart of something solid, sturdy and unyielding.
ENDURANCE - A *manly* womb.
PERCEPTION [Impossible: Failure] - You pat the wall gently, either with one of your vestigial human limbs or by means of some telekinetic process, as you become part of not only this individual instance of Wall-ness…
EMPATHY - …but the vast consortium of All Walls that have ever been, communicating their dreams to each other across networks of masonry spanning continents, centuries.
INLAND EMPIRE - You sense it now, the pulsing red where your room in the hostel throbs with what you’ve done to it. The pangs of your rebirth: a new maw ripped in the world, edged with glass teeth.
HALF LIGHT - Prostrate yourself. Beg forgiveness, invoke the cement mercies of the rebar gods.
CONCEPTUALIZATION - You *are* the wall; there is nothing to forgive.
YOU - I love you, wall.
THE MYCELIAL NETWORK OF ALL-WALLS - The structure vibrates at a pleasant, undetectable frequency.
CONCEPTUALIZATION - You will be *reborn*, correctly this time. Baptized in stucco. Your weathered features transmuted, no longer an abomination to soft flesh but a testament to that which endures.
PERCEPTION - Before your final transformation, flesh-you looks out, past the orange canopy of smoke and safety, hoping to remember this view after your human eyes are forfeit…
THE MYCELIAL NETWORK OF ALL-WALLS - The shifting of weight. You are nicotine and rainwater, gunsmoke and the scratching of boots… “Khm.”
INLAND EMPIRE - The orange canopy draws itself up; the transformation is nearly complete.
THE MYCELIAL NETWORK OF ALL-WALLS - “Come on, detective. Time to get up.”