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gayspaceheist · 2 years ago

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Well, Harry thought, resignedly working at the duct tape over his mouth with his tongue in the hopes that he might eventually fuss the adhesive loose, he’d definitely had better client breakups. He flexed experimentally at the tape at his wrists and ankles again. Not much give, but he could probably manage to work himself free if left to his own devices for, give or take, six or seven more hours. So hopefully no one was planning to shoot him in the head before that.

A gunshot echoed a floor or two away, as if to remind him what he was doing bound and gagged in this abandoned warehouse. Sick terror staticked through Harry with a metallic shriek. He clenched his jaw over it, felt himself veer and loll, getting his feet back under him after boarding an airtrain that was just rounding a corner. His heartbeat pulsed in his throat, bile-heavy. He swallowed it down. He got his legs under him again. Steady, Harry. Nothing fucking for it. The room re-formatted itself around him. Feel. Steady. Handrail. There we go. He pulled his knees up to his chest -- no mean trick, with the fucking bindings -- and hooked the circle of his arms around them, pushing his knees back and forth trying to stretch the tape around his wrists apart. No goddamn dice. He took a deep breath. Fucking mistake. Pain shot through his chest like a bar of hot metal, and tape pulled at the scruff of his jaw. God he wished he’d shaved this morning in anticipation of being jumped outside the office by a couple of motherfucking Bezoar goons. And water. He wished he had some fucking water. While he was tallying up.

Two more gunshots. The sound of boots pounding up the stairs. Guardrail, Harry! Get your damn feet under you! He sucked in a breath over the spear of pain and gave one last desperate push with his knees.

The door handle rattled uselessly against the mechanism of its lock, and then a terrific slam!, and the metal angle went winging loudly across the concrete floor. Harry flinched and braced his heels under him. What’s a few more broken ribs, Valentine, as long as you --

Kventhe was standing in the doorway where the door used to be, plaster-covered and panting. “Harry!” he said, only a little short of breath, sounding delighted and easy like they’d unexpectedly got onto the same train and neither of them was tied up in a warehouse bent double over a set of kicked ribs. “There you are!”

Behind the tape, Harry let out a muffled guttural furious scream.

In a minute, Kve was kneeling in front of him, scrabbling helplessly at the tape at Harry’s wrists and ankles with his fingers. He smelled like gunpowder and wet concrete. Harry let out another furious howl through the tape -- priorities, you fucking sandwich -- and Kve coughed up a hysterical little bleat of laughter, breathless and deranged. “Sorry!” he managed, hands going for the tape at Harry’s mouth finally. “Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry--”

He got his thumb under the tape and ripped it free, along with what felt like most of Harry’s skin. Harry yelled “Fuck!”, coughing and sputtering into Kve’s palm.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Kve started again, voice still twisting and boiling up around that frantic shrill laughter. Absurdly, he was cradling Harry’s face in both hands, and Harry had turned his nose into one of them before he knew what he was doing. He burned all the way down to his busted ribs. Kve’s left thumb stroked at the bruise blooming across his cheekbone, the other moving briefly over his lower lip to wipe away blood. For a second, dizzy with adrenaline and apparently rapid-onset insanity, Harry sustained a vision of tongueing Kve’s thumb into his mouth, the salty roughness of it against his teeth. “My God, Harry,” Kve was saying, from down a deep tunnel. “Did they hurt you very badly?”

The shriek of pain and panic punched through him again, He yanked back with a hiss, back in the world where everything fucking hurt. “No fucking shit,” he yelled, or tried to, but it stuck and came out like jammed machinery. It felt like his throat was full of shrapnel, coughed up from the shards in his chest. “Yeah, they fucking hurt the piss out of me, asshole! What took you so long, Kitty?” It came out like a sneer, tearing his mouth apart. Kve rocked back on his heels, his face twitching in a wounded little motion like the shrapnel had hit him. Then something in his expression slid into place again and he said very patiently, “Well, Harry, your message made so little sense that it took me a minute to even figure out if you were in some kind of trouble or if you’d gone very insane suddenly. Your flat could have all sorts of lead in it, I’m always telling you.”

“I didn’t have a lot to fucking work with, did I!”

Kve let out a soft ordinary huff of laughter that still snagged in the middle. Harry fantasised about punching him. “I couldn’t work out at first if you were trying to call up some reference I’d forgotten, if you were trying to give me a clue or something, other than ‘help’. Feed your fish, Harry? Really?”

What Harry had yelped into his watch just before the Bezoar goons had ripped it off him and kicked it to the back of the transport van had been “Kit! Emergency time! I am COMPLETELY OUT OF FISH FOOD!”, which was about the best he could come up with while being actively kicked in the ribs. “Well, I don’t have any fish,” he said stubbornly. “Thought you’d maybe pick up on that with that big fucking wizard brain of yours. Didn’t have a lot of time, okay.”

Kve’s hand moved as if he was going to touch Harry’s jaw again, but Harry had probably imagined that, because instead he picked up Harry’s wrists -- his stupid hand was so big -- and began sawing at the tape with -- Christ. A bit from a lockpicking kit. Couldn’t the man carry a switchblade like a sane person. He found he was angry all over and it hurt to breathe. His ribs shot pain back up into his throat till it felt like he was choking on his own misplaced spinal column.

“By the time I figured out nothing you’d said had any secret meaning,” Kve kept on, concentrating down on the tape, “Mina was already tracing your watch.”

“Mina can get into my w--”

Kve gave him a withering look, but nevertheless severed the tape and began working it from from his wrists with exasperating gentleness, taking care, this time, not to rip Harry’s skin to shreds as he hadn’t bothered to with his mouth before. Once he’d peeled it all free, he began to rub his thumbs over the tacky reddened skin to get the blood moving properly again, and Harry considered the benefits of a life where he didn’t have arms.

“Took your own goddamn sweet time, though, didn’t you,” Harry snarled, a little too aware of the warmth of Kve’s hands, the press of each individual finger. Those hands ghosted off his wrists and went to grasp at his ankles to saw off the tape there too. Kve let out a long breath, and Harry felt his hands shaking just a little against his asphalt-burned ankle and looked at his face and realised abruptly, with a sick ugly plunge of his stomach, that despite his usual breezy affect flung around him like a gossamer cape, Kve had been very, very frightened.

“Well, we found the transport first,” Kve said, the lightness only a little strained. “Took Mina a minute to get off the idea that they'd been clever enough to get rid of anything with a tracker on it or bundle you into a second van. So. It's a big warehouse. I sort of just had to keep checking. And hitting people against walls till someone told me where you were. Most of them didn't know, you know. They run a lot of smuggling operations out of here. Maybe fewer for a bit now. Or, well. I think the blokes who grabbed you to teach you a lesson might be getting kicked out, probably. Bad practice, trying to rough someone up and getting a lot of their coworkers slammed into walls and shouted at about it and bringing down all sorts of attention. I can't imagine they're very popular now.” He was babbling. Harry imagined him grabbing people by the collar, his hair glowing faintly in the dusty warehouse light, slamming them around and snarling, and felt very tired and dizzy suddenly. Internal bleeding. He probably had that. Dimly it occurred to him to be concerned about getting back out of the building now. He wanted to sleep, to slip out of the world, which his last scrap of sense was trying to send up a THIS IS BAD flare about, but that seemed like a problem someone else ought to be seeing to.

“Hey!” Kve was shouting at him, rattling his face till it felt like his teeth were clattering together. “Don’t you fucking -- ” His fingers were digging too deep behind Harry’s ears and he could feel the little white crescents they must be leaving in his skin. “I need you to be awake! Harry!” He sounded shrill, exasperated, which got Harry’s jaw up. Who’s dying here, asshole? he wanted to say, but his mouth was apparently connected by a direct line to his broken ribs and getting softer by the minute. He worked it a couple of times, or he meant to, or he tried to think about what sort of motion he would have to do with his real life muscles and nerves in order to do so, or maybe he was sitting on the floor of his apartment, screwing a new mismatched leg onto his kitchen table--

“Can you get up?” Kve was saying. Harry flicked his waning attention back to the hands around his jaw, the corner of Kve’s shoulder where a flow of hair drifted. “Harry, someone’s going to come up the stairs any minute.”

“Oh, yeah,” Harry said lucidly. He could see the words forming in the air as he said them, pulling themselves out of his mouth and into the grimy warehouse light. “I can stand up. I’m great. Let’s go.” He pressed a fist to the ground to brace and got his legs underneath him and lurched right up into the floor which had become the ceiling when he wasn’t looking. Kve caught him before his face hit the concrete, which was nice of him.

Kve said, miserably, “Oh my god.”

He was propping Harry up, though. For a moment Harry had just enough clarity to become frightened again -- he really was deteriorating very quickly -- and then he swallowed that hot sharp flare of fear just like the last ten. He tried to remember what he did about tight spots.

Kve said, “Harry, I think I can get you downstairs but I don’t know how badly you’re injured so I’m not sure. I might have to do something both of us are going to hate very much. Do you trust me?”

“Oh, yeah, fuck me up tiny dancer.” Harry licked his lips, trying to get back into his body which had definitely been there a few minutes ago. ‘Nobody else but you.”

“Can you take one thing seriously for at least eight seconds.” Kve was backing him up and propping him on one of the concrete pillars holding the ceiling up. Then he was undoing the buttons of Harry’s shirt with swift, businesslike brusqueness. “Don’t move,” he said. “Harry, I’m really sorry and we can talk about this when I’m done but you absolutely have to not move.” Harry was very busy concentrating on the sensation of his shirt falling away. He probably couldn’t have moved if someone kicked him in the spine. Kve, face caving in with absolute dried-out misery, put both of his hands flat on Harry’s stomach. They were startlingly cool. Harry said, “Huh,” which was supposed to composite a lot of things he was trying to say about looking down at Kve’s large and elegant hands laid out on his skin, but a syllable was about all he could manage in his present condition. And--

--Quite suddenly he felt like he’d been whittled into a point. All of the pain fell out of his body and he felt cracklingly awake and burning with energy. He grabbed at one of Kve’s hands and made to push himself off the wall. His thoughts were sharp and clean and forming any of them felt glorious. The spiking wreckage of his ribs, the wet grinding meaty gnaw inside his chest, the sting on his wrists and ankles -- all of it sloughed off him like old skin.

“What the hell,” he was saying, giddy. “You can fucking -- since when can you heal people? You big beautiful wizard, I could fucking kiss you.”

Kve flinched away. “I can’t and I didn’t. Don’t make any sudden movements. You’re still bleeding internally. You just can’t feel it.”

“Uh,” said Harry. “Actually I’m pretty sure I’m not. I feel incredible.”

“Listen to me.” Kve’s face looked awful, hollow and pale, his mouth all chewed to mess. “It’s… one of my family’s tricks. I don’t like to use it, and this isn’t what it’s for. You’re still hurt badly. You just can’t tell that you are. If you listen to how your body feels right now you could kill yourself, and I’d really like you not to do that, okay? I’m going to take it off as soon as we get out of here. I just need you to be sensible enough to get down the motherfucking stairs with me, all right?”

Harry stared at him. Adrenaline wound around inside of him, bright and sour. He thought about the sorts of things Kve’s family did with people they’d wounded, and it occurred to him how rarely Kve did anything preternatural, other than the things he couldn’t help. “Okay,” he said slowly.

“Okay?” Kve said, like a soundcheck. “Okay.” He pulled back, drew his gun out of his jacket, checked the magazine, put it back. His oiled black suspender holster had a little branch of silvery embroidery on it, a strand of coral, that Mina must have sewn at some point -- Harry had seen that style before on Volajin’s unspeakable silk jacket. He thought of his mother’s suspenders and the pattern of skycar rails Bienvenue had sewn onto them when he was in university and felt a sudden slipping sensation of being very adrift in the world. Or maybe that was the disorienting too-bright rush of what Kve had done to him. “The ship’s at the landing dock on the waterfront at the edge of the warehouse. We just have to get down two flights of stairs before there’s a functioning elevator that will get us out into the lot, and Mina can try and fly over us if it gets really tight. You with me?”

The plan, the map of it, came undone before Harry with a vivid, eager clatter, ricocheting in patterns ahead of him and pulling him towards its end. He could see his own potential movements, swift and radiant, in the air before him. His mind sounded like an engine. He wanted to break into a run. Kve put a hand to his elbow and he felt the concrete under his feet. “With you,” he managed. Forming words felt so intoxicating he wanted to find new ones just to feel how they came cartwheeling out of his mouth. “Okay. I’m with you.”

Getting out of the warehouse proved to be the easy part. No one hindered them on the way down -- Harry had, presumably, learned his lesson about where his nose ought to be poking, or Kve had been right about his would-be captors having been sent packing for the trouble they’d brought down on everyone else, a theory supported by the elevator guard gesturing with his massive rife and hissing at them to get the fuck out. Outside, the bite of spring air accelerated his urge to work his body and he had to stop himself from leaping rocks and careening over the ground. Kve hiked him through the weeds and scrub and there was Mina’s shuttle, humming over the water like a dragonfly. She was watching, and the ramp lowered for them the second Kve waved a hand to hail her. “Valentine!” she yelled, as Kve pulled Harry into the bench seats behind her cab. “What a mess! That shiner’ll look like a wonder on your next billboard, yeah? You dead?”

“Oh, probably,” said Harry. He discovered he was beaming. He was alive and absolutely nothing hurt and his mind was a golden thread every single one of his muscles was woven through. “Thanks, kid.” The ramp clattered back up to seal them into the tiny cabin and Harry felt the mechanism in the pulse at his jaw.

“They drug him?” she asked Kve, wrinkling her eyebrows at Harry.

“No,” Kve said flatly. “I… helped. Call Kinski. He needs medical attention.”

“Already on it,” Mina said. She was flicking switches, readying the shuttle to lift off. Her cloud of blue and lavender curls was frizzed with static. “She’s headed for the usual checkpoint. He going to live for twenty more minutes?”

“I’m going to live forever,” Harry said beatifically. The elderly upholstery of the bench seat felt incredible, he was discovering. Actually every tactile sensation felt incredible. He rubbed his shoulders into it and turned the force of his beam on Kve.

“Oh my god,” said Mina. She pulled down the throttle and the ship stuttered, started to rise. “You broke him?”

“Just get us out of here, please,” said Kve tightly. “I’m about to take it off. Sorry,” he said, to Harry this time. He reached out for Harry’s bared chest again, grimacing, eyes wide and glittering. Harry leaned into his touch like a cat, delighted. “I'm so sorry,” Kve said again, and pain slammed into Harry like a hydraulic press.

He screamed. Mina said, “Jesus!”, and the shuttle jerked slightly. He was screaming and screaming until his voice cracked open and then his head was in Kve’s lap and he was sobbing with agony. Kve was stroking his hair and babbling apologies. “It's so much worse when the pain comes back, oh god Harry I'm so sorry, hold on, hold on, I'm so sorry.” Harry wanted to ball himself up but his broken ribs had forbidden movement so the best he could do was howl, muffled and hoarse, into Kve’s thigh. Distantly he suspected he was going to be ashamed of himself later, but right now there was only pain and Kve’s hand stroking useless comfort over his hair, palm grounding against the nape of his neck. He felt the tug of unconsciousness and plunged after it, too desperate to fear it -- caught it, swung under and into black.

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gayspaceheist · 2 years ago

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What Harry Seville-Oct was not having was a particularly good morning. He was having a power drill jammed into his head and whirring away at his brains -- right, that would be the hangover. Fantastic. Also he was sleeping with his feet on the mattress and his face on the floor, which was sticky. He tried thumbing back through his memories to see how that had happened but the brain goop kept getting in the way. Probably he should open his eyes, but he suspected if he did the drill would spontaneously generate a second identical drill spinning the opposite direction on the other side of his head. He opened his eyes anyway. Actually, he had underestimated the capacities of the drill. It was a lot worse than that. For a smeary moment between heartbeats he daydreamed longingly about vomiting, but his mouth was so dry he suspected that wouldn’t be any use. Well, nothing for it. He was going to have to remember how legs worked.

That turned out not to be a viable plan. What he managed was to roll over onto his back, while the room thought about coming back into focus. Ceiling fan, great. Tie on it, that made sense. Ceiling, no holes. Superlative. His face collided with a soda can, mostly empty. That also made sense. He waggled an ankle experimentally. Oh great. He was wearing a shoe. Just the one, though. Both socks. The other shoe was… somewhere. A memory finished buffering. He’d kicked it off stumbling into his apartment with an armful of -- oh, shit. At least two hundred falsified identity cards, some blanks. Because his last client yesterday had brought them in on the air train, in a box, and said, hey, by the way, can you hold on to these for me for a couple of days? I can’t have them in my apartment, and the kid was nineteen and desperate and trying not to be on trial for running a forgery ring, and Harry, well, Harry was a fucking sap. That had been why the, the drinking, and the -- oh, and his mother had called while he was in the office, and her voice message only said, “Hey kid, I need a favour, call me back”, and usually his mother’s favours involved smuggling, and Harry was not having the kind of week that could be improved by smuggling. Yup, there it was, the whole stupid night, sitting on the mattress on the floor and sorting through the box of forged id cards checking to make sure he didn’t recognise anyone in it, drinking cheap acceleration-distilled whiskey out of the bottle dolefully. He’d made a little pile of id cards where the defects stood out too much, even though it wasn’t exactly a lawyer’s job to tell a client how to do crimes less sloppily. Okay, it was kind of his job. Who else was going to.

Thus fortified by memory, he managed to roll back over onto his stomach and push himself up on his elbows. This proved to be a massive mistake -- the drills had developed opinions and their current opinion was that they hated this and were bent on displaying their disapproval by grinding more of his brains to slop -- but it was too late now. There was his little pile of poor forgeries, and there was the whiskey, the single finger left in the bottle glinting at him in the -- ow, the sun -- like a bad joke. The sweet thought of violently expelling the contents of his stomach once again came to him like a beautiful dream, but as he recalled his stomach didn’t have any contents in it. He should do something about that. And also the extremely illegal stolen evidence all over his apartment. At the very least it should go in the big filing cabinet safely with all the other stolen evidence.

It was only about six years, give or take, before Harry managed to careen about the room enough to rearrange himself into a conventional person shape -- two arms, two legs, vaguely perpendicular, all that. What he needed was water, then coffee, then a big glass of that horrible orange stuff with the specks that usually seared the hangover out of him with less speed and reliability than the box claimed it was meant to, but at least it usually did. He had the good sense to remove his remaining shoe. He was not sure where his trousers were, which was probably for the best. His boxers stuck to his thighs, horrible with sweat and probably spilled soda and whiskey, judging by the sugary grit to them. He thought about how many laundry credits he had left and decided showering in his clothes wasn’t the worst idea he’d ever had.

So when he managed to propel himself out of the bedroom and into the kitchen, unshaven and hair a thicket, in socks and boxers and his best work shirt, which had achieved a state that might shortly demote it to second-best, what he was not expecting to see was a beautiful starlight vision of a man sitting at his kitchen table, drinking coffee out of his least chipped mug, smiling at him.

He yelled and knocked a jar of lentils off the counter with his elbow.

“Oh, hello, Harry!” said the vision, beaming delightedly at him. “You’re up! I was deciding whether or not to wake you, but you didn’t look very wake-uppable in your state.”

“What,” said Harry very slowly through gritted teeth, “are you doing in my apartment.” He had an absolutely horrifying thought and rapidly flipped back through his memories again, but there weren’t any of one of the worst-idea hookups he could imagine stuck to the backs of any of them. He hadn’t been that drunk last night. He rotated his tongue in his mouth, just in case. Mostly it just tasted like evil garbage.

“You should probably have some water,” the vision said gravely. “You look like a husk.”

Harry stalked to the sink, thumbed on the tap, and filled a mostly clean glass. He took a long sip, glaring over the rim. “Answer the question. Why. Are you in. My apartment. How did you get past my security system. Did you steal any of my shit. What the fuck.”

The vision -- Harry thought his name was Kelvin, or Kitty, or Karapace, but the last time he’d seen him a month ago he’d mostly been a decorative background figure leaning on various objects of furniture while Harry helped one of his least favourite clients sort out an untraceable off-planet account -- another one -- smiled again, though at least this time he had the grace to look a little sheepish. “Your security system is a door chain, so that wasn’t very difficult. I don’t think I want any of your stuff. I’m here because you might be about to be in some trouble, and I couldn’t risk calling your work number. Zarrow didn’t have your personal mobile.”

“No shit she fucking doesn’t.” The eye-twitch he had specially reserved for [Firstname] Zarrow came out of retirement. It wasn’t that Zarrow was his worst client -- she’d never tried to murder him, or set him up with her aunt, or peed in his office, or -- okay, maybe he should start screening his clients better. It was just that she was so fucking annoying. Also, more importantly, trouble followed her around like she kept her pockets full of trouble-treats just to lure it in. Harry was usually the most irritating person he knew, and it threw him off his game to have to compete with someone who enjoyed the competition. Also, Zarrow was high-profile, and he didn’t like high-profile. People who kept a framed wanted poster behind the display of the jewels they’d stolen that had netted them that precise poster were not the types of clients he needed, as a guy with a vested interest of keeping the cops’ noses out of his business, but -- well, Zarrow usually paid a lot. And she was perversely convincing, and her jobs always seemed -- fun. Right up until he was trying not to get shot in the ass, or arrested. “Wait.” He tried to blink the eye-twitch away. “Uh. What trouble am I about to be in, exactly?”

Kventhe, that was his name. What a fucking name. Kventhe uncrossed his legs and sighed heavily, looking intensely apologetic. Well, everything he did looked a little intense. His skin was a sort of alabaster pale that was presumably meant to look human but had a faint pearlescent sheen to it, and his long nearly-white hair always seemed to be blowing very faintly in a light wind, as if he’d employed a secret fleet of drones with tiny fans to keep the mystique up. Harry knew he was some type of off-planet alien hybrid sorcerer type, which was fine and all, every major city had a fair amount of off-planet freaks, but for some reason this one went to great, if unsuccessful, effort to hide himself. Harry knew he used some kind of implant, without which he presumably looked even more fucking weird, because one of Zarrow’s crew had hired him to get her some black-market components for it shipped safely one time, but he had no idea why the man put in so much work to maintain an illusion of ordinariness that clearly wasn’t working. He was wearing a half-threadbare grey sweater and belted trousers, which actually just made his jellyfish tendrils of pale hair and shimmering skin stand out more, but who was Harry to judge a man’s fashion choices. He wasn’t even wearing pants.

“Well!” said the beautiful shimmering jellyfish man. “You remember Billy Ten-Shins? The guy who --”

“Oh god,” said Harry. “The guy with the… the arms?”

“What? I don’t know. Uh. I don’t know anything about his arms.”

“One of them’s a dart gun.”

“What? That sounds -- never mind. Anyway, you got him fined? Like, three months ago? That whole thing with, with the fake passports, and the -- Well. He didn’t enjoy that very much.”

“I can’t imagine he did.” Harry leaned back, and then realised the floor was covered in lentils.

“Anyway he just got out of a work ship and I guess his business sort of fell apart while he was in there and he’s pissed and bored and has it out for you. So. He’s gunning for you. And I thought you should probably know about it.”

Harry blinked, slowly. “Okay. Why the hell do you know about it?”

Kventhe shrugged. The motion lilted his hair over his shoulders like some kind of fucking sea plant. “Tried to hire Mina to program one of those follow drones to see where you lived. Guess he didn’t know we were friends,”

“We’re not friends,” Harry said, automatically. “You broke into my house.”

“Oh! So sorry!” Kventhe made a show of getting up and putting his coffee mug down. Harry’s coffee mug. “You’re right, what was I thinking, I shouldn’t have assumed, nobody wants to know -- that’s really more of a third date sort of thing, telling someone a lunatic with a dart arm wants to ruin their life, I’ve made a wild miscalculation --” He was putting on his coat -- he’d brought a coat? -- and he was laughing. He turned, shooting Harry a luminous grin over his shoulder. “Guess I’ll be going now! Oh, wait, your keys --” His hand went into the pocket of his coat and then he was tossing a ring of keys onto Harry’s table. Quite a lot of keys.”Wouldn’t want anybody to get in trouble.”

Harry’s hangover throbbed. ‘Those aren’t mine,” he said wearily.

“Oh, I know,” Kventhe said cheerfully. “I nicked them off your super. But I don’t need them anymore, so.”

“Okay! Fucking hell! I give up! We’re friends now, okay!” Harry lurched over to the table and sat down -- Kventhe had taken the good chair, so he was left with the one with the foot perilously close to snapping. He grabbed Kventhe’s coffee mug -- his coffee mug -- and took a swig. “Oh. Yuck.” Kventhe was apparently a rapturous devotee of sweetener. Disgusting.

“I made you one,” Kventhe said reproachfully, and sat back down. “As a gesture of friendship and goodwill.” He pushed Harry’s second-best coffee mug at him, which he had to have washed, because Harry’s third, fourth, and fifth best mugs were somewhere in the mess of papers and dishes and detritus accumulated on the table. “And because of the, well.” He gestured at Harry’s general appearance.

Harry put his head down on the table. “Okay,” he said into the sticky varnished plexiwood. “Okay. Tell me about how the dart man is coming to ruin my life because I ruined his life. And then go away. I need to throw up.”

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gayspaceheist · 2 years ago

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Jin, shoulderblades pressed against the front of the scuffed yellow couch, looked up from the mess of gun parts on the floor in front of them to discover that Hal had spread a quantity of blueprints around herself and was studying them intently, pen in her teeth. She had a second pen in her hand and reached over several different pages of schematic to scrawl a sloppy question mark over what looked, from the wrong direction, like either a pair of sliding doors or an escalator. Mina had gone to bed, which probably meant Mina had gone to put on her noise-cancelling headphones and text eight people simultaneously about engine specs, but Jin had been too engrossed in oiling gun barrels to have really noticed Mina’s goodnight, other than a faint half a memory, if they really reached for it, of Mina ruffling their hair and saying, goodnight asshole, with that fond and sleepy crook of her mouth that meant she was tapping out.

They had sort of forgotten that Hal was still here, engrossed in the ritual of parts and placing. Felt weird, somehow, like they’d missed tightening a part of the gun mechanism or hadn’t noticed the air purifier had kicked on. Almost asked what she was doing, to diffuse the ticking silence, but probably it was only ticking for them, loud and pressing, now that they’d suddenly noticed it was there. And anyway it was just Hal bent over her spread of maps and blueprints, checking exits and entrances again again again, trying to find flaws ahead of time. She’d been doing it off and on for days, like a protection ritual. Maybe it was.

Jin went back to cleaning the revolver, which no longer needed the attention. They thought for a minute, like someone had unthinkingly tabbed open the window blinds in their brain, about the night before the last go, when Zarrow had got extremely tipsy off a fizz she’d stolen out of Mina’s workroom minifridge, and had mimed the entire plan, twirling Pross across the floor of the workroom with such giddy zeal that Pross even fucking laughed, and then with her hand still in Proserpine’s had braced her back up against Jin’s in a dizzy parody of their usual gunfights.

They sat up, blinking, trying to tear the cobweb of memory off. Hal was looking at them, felt-tips down, so still, arm flung over knees, eyes wide and dark. Jin said, “What the fuck are you looking at me like that for?” and Hal pulled her mouth wry and long and weirdly sad.

A beat. And then Hal said, like it was a perfectly ordinary question, “Can I kiss you?”

Jin stared, words and thoughts drying up. Their ears were roaring like they’d gone to sit in the engine room. They could see, suddenly, exactly how it would go. How, if they nodded, Hal would close the few feet between them, and the way she would first slide one hand against Jin’s face, thumb skirting the still-tender bone beneath their eye. Jin understood with horrible clarity the way they would turn their face into Hal’s palm, the smell of felt-tip and skin-warmth, how they’d kiss into her hand and shut their eyes. The way Hal, so slowly and so gently, would kiss the thin tissue of their eyelids, first one, then the other, and the bridge of their nose; the way they'd feel the riverbed-lap of her breath, the firm tender warmth of her mouth. How still so gently she’d press her mouth to the corner of Jin’s, and Jin knew the way their mouth would open at the touch, and the long slow breath they’d let out like an uncapped valve, and the way they would at last bite very lightly at Hal’s lip and draw her in and their mouths would align, and she would kiss them and she would kiss them and she would kiss them, Jin’s bony knee hedging her in, her hand skimming their jawline and fingers digging in behind their ear, the way Jin’s hands would stay braced to the floor, wrists white with strain, until Hal’s other hand came up to cup their jaw with too much reverence and they would snake a hand into her hair to tug meanly, hungrily, balance back the energy between them, turn the kiss--

Jin flinched back. “You planning to die tomorrow? What the hell? Since when do we -- that’s dying-tomorrow behaviour. What are you going to do now, pull out your wallet and show me pictures of your grandmother back home? Fucking hell, Goshawk, get some air.” They reached over to cap the bottle of gun oil, crumple up their rag.

Hal looked stung, and then embarrassed. “No, I -- never mind.” She stood up, brushing at her trouser legs, leaving the felt-tips and the blueprints on the floor. “Anyway, I’m out. I’m not getting anything else done tonight. Did Kventhe shut down the -- never mind, I’ll do it. Get some sleep, hotshot. Can’t have you going blurry tomorrow.”

Jin stared up at her from the floor, knee pulled up. Their mouth tasted like metal. They scrubbed a wrist across their face and then set to reassembling the revolver. “Okay,” they said, light and casual. “All right. Goodnight, detective.”

Hal turned crisply on her grey-socked heel, somehow, and went for the door, leaving her collage of schematics behind. Jin watched her shoulderblades move under the black tank and the dark curl of hair at the nape of her neck. The sliding doors swallowed her up. Jin leaned back against the couch, and thought very hard about the way the cheap synthetic upholstery prickled at the skin of their neck like radio static. Every bruise they could remember having ached at once. They shut their eyes.

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