Chapter Text
The radio tower is a limb without a body placed at Land’s End, the edge of Martinaise, the city itself having recognized the necessity of severing the tower’s existence from more palpable ruins like the crumbling East Delta Commercial Center, whose years under that name are purposefully eschewed by current denizens for a more apropos moniker: Doomed Commercial Area. During high tide, the sea finishes the job the city could not, separating tower and mainland by a channel of icy waves until the tide inevitably ebbs, exposing their tenuous connection in the form of a damp inlet. One of its rusted antennae sways almost lazily with the wind, threatening to fall onto the rocky sand and be swept away by the water.
There’s nothing lazy about it. That antenna stubbornly clings to the dilapidated structure with esoteric strength despite rapidly oxidizing in the pale and sea-salt air with each passing second.
Several metres away, the tower’s remaining tether to this world, a tendon refusing to be snapped, reveals itself underneath a former Coalition bunker. The black mould on the stairs creates a vivid tapestry that would make a Grand Couron shopkeeper weep at its beauty before hanging it in the window facing the street on the off-chance they could coax Jamrock’s most endangered species, the middle-class consumer, into making their purse a bit lighter. A series of obscene etchings cover the only doorway into a small basement, framing a lonely and wrinkled paper flyer where black ink has faded to grey, white antlers and a star barely discernible from their darker background. The warm yellow light spilling around the crack underneath the door from the room beyond into the hallway illuminates the flyer just enough for it to be read by anyone who makes it to this particular precipice.
It reads: Radio Free Revachol.
_____
“Jus’ a minute…”
Vision swimming, he emerges from his stupor long enough for his fingers to catch on the edge of something, drawing it towards him so he can empty the contents of his stomach into it rather than all over the floor. They’re viscous without much substance, mostly phlegm and bile splashing onto crumpled paper at the bottom of the bin.
A rubbish bin.
This one holds two empty glass alcohol bottles and several pages of his latest manifesto, which he had torn out in frustration and thrown away as trash while cursing a continuing existence in this world. Très dramatique, monsieur.
Another, more insistent, knock at the door rattles his brain.
Someone is taking a jackhammer to his right eye, an excavation that sends sharp pain shooting through his head. He closes it to stop the pain but someone else is now trying to tug his left eye through his skull and out the back of his head. He heaves into the bin. Nothing but a small trail of saliva manages to leave his throat.
A similar knock, less insistent and more business-like, must have been what woke him.
He swallows, tasting too-sweet sick sticking to his tongue and esophagus, and waits. Rolling onto his back, he’s greeted by wall-to-wall posters of people playing a variety of musical instruments. In the centre of the ceiling, a large handsome man winks at him, teeth gleaming in a too-perfect line from his wide smile. Gradient text leaps off the poster and into his mind, crooning the name Guillaume Le Million.
The seconds pass quietly. Once the heavy sound of his wheezing breath fades into quieter gasps, he hears a scraping sound above him, scratching out a steady rhythm.
When he’s approximately eighty-one percent certain that he’s not going to vomit again, he stands. The table groans, protesting his weight as his fingers wrap around its edges for leverage.
“Sorry,” he mumbles.
“That’s alright!” The table sounds cheery in his mind, like it wants nothing more than to help him in some way. Briefly, he wonders if it would scream at him if he broke it, or if it would apologize to him for breaking.
Both options seem awful.
Tapping his fingers lightly on the tabletop — an additional apology and another way of steadying himself — he spots the origin of the skipping rhythm. A vinyl record on an old turntable continues to move, its needle placed neatly in its cradle having done its work travelling through the pitted grooves some time earlier until the last drawn-out note. He lifts it and places it onto the hard plastic surface.
A familiar anthem plays, accompanied by the soft scratch of the needle against the vinyl surface and an occasional static pop, unintended ambient noise that etched its mark into the recording alongside the mournful trumpet sound. He hums the tune of the song easily, albeit off-key and hoarsely, but cannot remember its name.
It sounds important.
“Monsieur Du Bois, are you alright?” A muffled voice — soft with a foundation of GRIH steel and concrete — calls out from beyond the closed door.
The door is locked. That’s why someone is knocking to be let in.
Monsieur Du Bois? Who is that?
GRIH? What is that?
“Just a minute,” he rasps. The words claw their way out from his lips at the same moment he realizes that he said this exact phrase several minutes ago.
Whoever is on the other side of the door sighs. A tapping noise floats into the room through the half-rotted wood. It joins the trumpet anthem and pain of the jackhammer in three-part harmony. The person is tapping the sole their boot against the floor to, purposefully or otherwise, express their growing impatience.
More specifically, they’re Boue Aerostatic 070302s, commonly-sold replicas of the leather combat boots issued to Commune airmen.
He closes his eyes again, hand still gripping the edge of the table like its the only thing tying him to existing at all. “Thank you.”
“Happy to help!” the table says, solid and pre-fabricated. He studies the tabletop and the tabletop looks up at him with a painted-on marble pattern underneath a chipped layer of plastic. This table has hundreds of thousands of siblings.
“Am I the Monsieur Du Bois they’re asking for?”
“I can’t tell you that,” the table answers with perfunctory pleasantness, “because I don’t know. I’m just a table. I don’t have the ability to recognize things or people by their names. I don't have a name. I have a factory model number.”
“Right, that makes sense.” He pats the table gently, this time not as an apology but an expression of gratitude.
Lurching towards the door, he braces one hand against the doorframe. The room lists to the side and then rights itself before wrenching violently in the opposite direction. He gasps, the skin between his shredded fingernails and scraped knuckles turning white while he fights to stay upright. With effort, the corners of his mouth turn up into an expression he hopes is welcoming.
The owner of the voice is a reedy man with Seolite features in a worn aerostatic bomber jacket. A large rectangular insignia he doesn’t recognize has been sewn onto the jacket’s shoulder, bright and reflective. The man stands ramrod straight with his hands locked together at the small of his back, Boue Aerostatic 070302s spaced slightly apart on the concrete floor in an at-ease military position. A few stray strands of black hair have slipped out of his formidably neat hairstyle in open rebellion, like they’re trying to escape the man’s rigid presentation. His brown eyes are stern and narrowed behind thick glass lenses and his mouth is turned down into a frown, carving small lines onto his otherwise smooth skin underneath his eyes and slightly-crooked nose.
This man has broken his nose exactly three times in his life and did not see a lazareth after any of these injuries. It healed slightly out of its original place.
A nearly-burnt out bulb flickers to life, creating a makeshift halo around the man’s head.
The man is gorgeous, even while wrinkling his nose with disgust.
Hand still firmly gripping the doorway so he doesn’t fall over, he looks down at himself to find the source of the man’s revulsion.
A gold and green paisley shirt with multiple brown stains stares up at him. The bottom button is missing completely, the one above it now tasked with holding the strained fabric together over the thickness of his belly. It’s doing its best, but a small patch of hairy skin is still visible between the shirt and the waistband of his moss-coloured flared trousers.
The room behind him reeks of sickness, roiling in clouds of dank decay that must have poured out from underneath the door before the man had knocked, billowing onto the worn leather of his boots. They’re serenaded by another forlorn song, a bassoon taking the lead melody in a haunting lower register.
Shame coalesces as sweat in his armpits, further staining his shirt. He easily understands why the man in front of him is disgusted.
“Are you my…”
…boss? Husband? Intern?
“…husband?” he asks the man, hope colouring just outside the outline of his strained voice. For some reason, it feels like the most fitting of the options his addled brain gives him in that moment.
Intern would have definitely been the wrong answer.
Husband is also the wrong answer.
“Your husband calls you Monsieur Du Bois?” the man asks. His eyebrows flutter closer to his receding hairline. The left corner of his mouth twitches upwards and immediately falls back into place like it had never moved. He looks torn between yelling and laughing.
The man didn’t mean to say this at all.
“Maybe he does call me that?”
He doesn’t actually have a husband, or a wife.
The cloying taste of apricots replaces the souring bile on his tongue. He shakes his head. The fruit-flavoured sweetness tastes worse than being sick.
“I don’t have a husband,” he says.
“That makes sense,” the man replies slowly, like he’s talking to a child. His eyes narrow further. “Homosexuality is illegal in Revachol.”
The man didn’t mean to say this either, but he’s right. Despite inroads made during the revolution, homosexuality, that is, sexual or romantic attraction between two people of the same sex or gender, is still technically forbidden under Revacholian law. Socially, it occupies a nebulous space in most people's minds where as long as one does not ask, one does not tell, or so the saying goes, especially for those in government positions. The relevant information here is that, even if everyone around him was accepting of his preferences, he couldn’t legally marry another man if he wanted to and neither could the man in the doorway.
Additionally, the man in the doorway vehemently disagrees with this law. It’s one of many things he disagrees with that he forcibly compartmentalizes in favour of doing his job to the best of his ability. And his ability is quite remarkable.
Clearing his throat, the man reaches his hand into the pocket of his dark-green airman trousers and pulls out an identification badge. “I am RCM Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi of Precinct 57. I’d like to ask you a few questions.” A younger but equally stoic version of the man peers out from the badge’s photograph, steely-eyed and intimidating.
Without waiting for an answer, Lieutenant Kitsuragi tucks the badge away and pulls out a Mnemotechnique A6 notebook, already turned to a blank ruled-line page. “Do you mind if I come in?”
A younger Lieutenant Kitsuragi appears in his mind. “Binoclard” and a series of increasingly offensive slurs pour from the mouths of Kim Kitsuragi’s tormentors like vomit. The future lieutenant quickly learns to hide his interests, his sexuality, to most.
This is another reason why Lieutenant Kitsuragi had looked stunned when he had asked about being his husband.
He’s halfway to grinding his teeth before his jaw locks into place, a defiant smile freezing on his face. Forcing his mouth open with a painful crack — bones grinding against bones until some semblance of an emotional response is reached — he nods. “My home is your home,” he tells the lieutenant as he steps aside because he heard it somewhere but cannot remember what it means or why, only that it could be applicable in a situation where one is inviting another person into a room.
“I live here?” he adds, more of a question than a statement.
Where is here? What is Revachol?
“That’s what Ms. Acele Berger told us.” The way Lieutenant Kitsuragi clears his throat clears the room. Lingering sickness remains around the edges and at the corners but the centre is easily purified by the lieutenant’s authoritative demeanour and the clean scent of his shampoo or aftershave. The lieutenant flips to a different page in his notebook, slim fingertips caressed lovingly by the worn black leather of his glove. A pen appears in his hands like he had pulled it out of the damp air. “‘You should talk to the Harrier, Harrier Du Bois,’” he reads off of the page, affecting none of his source’s mannerisms and remaining wholly himself, “‘I think he goes by Harry too. He’s the old guy who lives underneath the Coalition bunker. I’ve heard he’s crazy…but he’s probably harmless.’”
Coalition? Crazy? Probably harmless? Old guy!?
I can be Harrier Du Bois if this Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi is the one saying my name.
“Who is Harrier Du Bois?” He doesn’t necessarily feel like a Harrier Du Bois, but the name isn’t unfamiliar to him either.
Lieutenant Kitsuragi’s expression shutters. “You.”
The sharp singular syllable stabs at the centre of his chest. It feels like a door slamming shut onto his foot. Wincing, he reaches down to touch it, just to make sure its still attached, and slick scales slide across his fingertips. He rubs his fingers together like they’re wet and stares wide-eyed at the bright green snakeskin shoes swallowing his large feet. “I don’t remember anything,” he admits.
The tapping sound begins again. His eyes travel to where Lieutenant Kitsuragi’s foot moves in perfect rhythm.
“That’s a new one.” he hears in both a facsimile of what he assumes is his own voice and what little he knows of Lieutenant Kitsuragi’s quiet tone.
“You don’t remember anything,” the lieutenant repeats dryly.
Lieutenant Kitsuragi doesn’t believe him.
“I woke up hungover,” he — Harrier Du Bois also known as Harrier also known as Harry, apparently — dredges up the correct description accounting for at least part of his current physical state from the oceanic trenches of his mind. “I was on the floor. I was sick in this—”
The lieutenant peers over and his nose twitches, probably from the acrid stench rising from the bin. It’s impressive how his professionalism slides immediately back into place.
“—and then answered the door and you were there. That’s all I remember. Why did you want to talk to me again?”
Lieutenant Kitsuragi coughs. The tips of his ears turn a charming shade of pink that deepens into a flushed red, like they’ve been dipped in crimson paint. Watching them feels like breaking through to the surface of the ocean and inhaling fresh air in greedy wanton gulps.
Diverted by their discussion and Harry’s eccentricities, the lieutenant had forgotten to officially announce why he had come to the bunker’s basement. He’s embarrassed by what he perceives as a lack of competence and annoyed that Harry distracted him from stating his purpose upon introduction.
Harry’s fingers twitch at his sides, palms damp with sweat. He sucks in a breath and shoves his hands into his trouser pockets when they drift upwards towards the lieutenant’s ears.
They would be warm when pressed into the pads of his fingers. He would stroke them softly to see if the lieutenant would shudder against his callused fingertips.
The same person jackhammering into his skull reaches over and tugs on a dangling chain attached to a soft sepia-toned lightbulb in his mind. It flickers on like the light above the lieutenant in the hallway, illuminating his body with want.
He digs his hands into the meat of his thighs, but even that and the razor-sharp pain continuing to accumulate behind his eyeballs can’t stop him from shuddering violently.
Paper rustles as Lieutenant Kitsuragi flips through a few more pages in his notebook, forcibly dragging Harry to the surface again. “‘An unidentified body washed up onto the shores of Land’s End near the radio tower in Martinaise. It was called in and reported to RCM Precinct 57, who dispatched Lieutenant Kitsuragi to investigate.’”
“I didn’t do it Kim!” Harry blurts out, holding his hands in front of him. “I didn’t kill anyone!” He nearly drops to his knees automatically in a show of great innocence.
That would be a bit too much.
It’s true though. He didn’t do it.
Raising one thin eyebrow, the lieutenant pins him in place. A brief sense of calm washes over Harry. If he follows this man, everything will somehow be alright.
Additionally, the lieutenant is annoyed with you for using his given name as opposed to his job title.
“I didn’t say you did.”
The words ring in Harry’s ears as if the lieutenant had said them aloud, but the Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi's lips remain pursed in a thin line, curving slightly downward, parallel to the tiny wrinkles around his mouth.
“Khm.” Lieutenant Kitsuragi hums, clicking his tongue. The shutters over his eyes behind his glasses open just a bit when he blinks, letting the smallest shafts of light out from underneath his impassivity. “I still have a few questions for you.”