#transfem harry also implied btw. this is transfem harry propaganda

[carnographix]

Tequila Sunset

Word count: 2,839 (Alternative link: AO3) Content warnings: attempted/aborted suicide, minor self-harm, references to substance abuse, brief mention of abortion.

Summary:

From the moment you'd met Kim Kitsuragi, you had the thought; "if an assault were launched on this building right now—if the windows came crashing down and the whole world descended upon you—this man would hurl himself in death's way to save you." You were sure of this. To your dismay, you were right. After the mercenary tribunal, you take some time on the coast alone to think.

Ashes from your cigarette drop to the ground, the scent hangs in the air. The world, beyond the ceaseless sounds of the waves and seabirds, is quiet.

You don’t know why you’re waiting for him to come, to sit on the vacant swing beside you. You know he won’t.

Somewhere in the city, a husband is coming home to his wife. He steps over the threshold of the house, and she greets him warmly with a smile. The city’s streetlights are beginning to flicker on, taking the role of the Sun in illuminating the streets, reflecting like glitter off the rain-slick bitumen and pavement from an afternoon shower.

Here, on the empty beach, a seagull squawks. It crows amongst its flock, hopping across the ground, leaving tiny little depressions in the white sand. The gulls venture near the dilapidated swing set you find yourself sat on, intrigued by the large figure atop, swaying gently as the frayed ropes creak and moan beneath his weight.

You take a long drag from the cigarette cinched betwixt your fingers, and watch as the seagulls retreat from you, back to their brethren again.

The beach air is crisp. The taste is salty and bitter on your tongue. Your eyes wander around, searching for something. For what, you don’t know. Maybe something that can make you stop moving. You can’t keep yourself from looking behind your shoulder.

A shiver runs down your spine. You pull the cigarette to your mouth. The nicotine feels good, but it doesn’t help. You fidget with fraying ends of the swing’s rope, twisting them between your index and thumb, and the harsh wind whispers in your ear. You listen.

You turn the cigarette around between your fingers, observing the way ashes fall from it, the warm, red ember growing ever closer to your fingertips as it burns down to the filter.

Craving sensation, something not so numbing and all-consuming as the apathetic air of the beach, you recoil your other hand from its place wrapped tight around the thick rope.

As you remove it, the corresponding side of the swing drops down a little, no longer wrapped around your hand, no longer supported by your grip.

Your palm feels raw. The old rope dug into your skin and left minor friction burns. You outstretch the hand in front of yourself, first inspecting your palm, red, then turning it to see the back of your hand. The veins are prominent, stood out by blood flow required to keep the muscles and tendons tightly contracted, and your knuckles and fingertips are an angry red from the cold air.

You look to the burned-out cigarette in your hand, and extinguish it, pressing the lit end hard into the back of your hand. The faint smell of burned hair briefly assaults your olfactory senses. The burning sting causes you to drop the cigarette, watching as it falls from between your fingers to the ground.

The wind picks up, and the waves crash ever louder. The sound of cicadas can be heard coming back to life in the brush behind the dunes, swallowing the distant murmur of Martinaise’s heartbeat.

It is deafening.

The world continues to spin, and life goes on, in spite of your misery, your loneliness. In spite of how you want it all to stop.

Your burned hand returns to its place on the rope of the swing. It tightly winds itself around the rope, and the rope around it. It burns, familiar and numbing as the wind.

What little respite the cigarette gave is gone now.

The wind slows down for a bit, like the world taking a deep breath, and allows you for a brief moment to be with your thoughts, to focus.

In the distance, a couple is walking on the beach. They hold each other’s hands, and you can see their lips moving, though cannot hear the sound. You don’t want to. They stop, and sit on the sand, their hands intertwined as their bare feet brush against each other, just barely licked by the waves reaching the shore.

They seem happy.

The sight makes your face grow hot, your jaw clenched tightly shut. You get up from the swing with a deep breath. The air singes your lungs.

You turn on your heel and walk in the opposite direction to where the couple have situated themselves. You give the sand a hard kick, grains shooting up and scattering like bloody red mist from a bullet’s exit. Your foot leaves a hole in the soft sand, though the wind quickly blows the grains back to it, erasing your presence.

The ocean waves crash relentlessly into the white sand. The sound is hypnotising and draws you ever closer. The sound reverberates in your skull, the air thick and salty and humid. It’s suffocating.

You continue to walk. You step into a puddle, and the water soaks into the hem of your flared disco pants. It’s cold, and makes you shudder, a frozen spark shooting through your nervous system. You keep walking.

Another step, and you can feel the sand starting to pull your feet down just a little. The water reaches your ankles.

You turn to face the horizon.

The Sun is setting, slowly dimming the sky as it is replaced by lune et les étoiles. Their light is futile, doing little to brighten the sky.

You find yourself drawn to the sunset, inexplicably. Your feet carry themselves through the water, wading deeper and deeper.

The waves lap at your diaphragm. Your muscles tense and yearn for what little warmth the shore could offer you through your sea-soaked clothes, and you ignore their aching plea.

Your clothes hug you tightly. Their embrace is cold and uninviting, and yet you lean into it anyway. Wet fabric stuck to your skin is a familiar sensation. This feeling, suffocating and wet, is hardly dissimilar to that horrific tie pulled taut around your neck and your pants hot and wet and stuck to your skin with piss. It’s comforting.

An especially large wave hits you, splashing over your head, and you let out a deep and shuddering gasp. The undertow pulls at your ankles and threatens to drag you asunder. It’s cold. Colder than even the icy corpse shot down from where it hung behind the Whirling-in-Rags, that you and the lieutenant inspected hardly a week ago.

The wave subsides, and the world becomes thunderously silent. Your own breathing and the sound of waves building and breaking slowly are the only things you can hear now, like a metronome, keeping time with the world.

You stop, and tears begin to well up in your eyes. They spill from your waterline, blending seamlessly with the ocean water on your face, if not for their heat. The tears burn against your skin, your throat is dry, and your head pounds, the salt and tears and rampant alcoholism dehydrating you. It hurts.

You stare at the setting Sun, waiting for something. What are you waiting for?

‘Him.’

‘I’m waiting for him. For the lieutenant. For Kim.’

You try not to think of the way his hands move, with such precision and finesse. The way his hair is always perfect. The way his voice is like honey, rich and smooth.

Tears roll down your face again. Maybe they never stopped.

The thought of him makes your eyes blurry, and the tears make it worse. He has such pretty hands, with his long, slender fingers. You think of his voice with its warm, deep resonance, and its ability to always make you relax. The way that he can take command of any conversation, and how it sometimes scares you.

Memories flood your mind, unbidden. His face, his hair, his hands, the way he smokes. That small pout he has when he concentrates.

Why are you thinking about that?

‘I don’t know.’

His face full of worry and fear over you as you bleed out on the floor, his hands pressed hard against the all-consuming searing pain emanating from your lower abdomen. The unfathomably loud crack through the air as a bullet flies, and the deafening silence that follows.

None of this is helping. Thinking about it only hurts. Why are you doing this to yourself?

‘I can’t stop.’

The waves pull at you again, gently coaxing you from your thoughts.

You’ve acclimated to the water, used to the cold as the sea and your body grow closer in temperature. The current pulls at your waterlogged clothes, like a child tugging at their mother’s hands, egging you on further. You wonder for a moment what it would be like, had she kept yours. Maybe you’d still be at the beach, but maybe the circumstances would be different. You wouldn’t be chest-deep in frozen water, instead with a small child on your hip, or in the shallows beside you. Things would be different. The thought is a far-off fantasy, not truly conceivable anymore.

You hardly remember her anymore.

Her being is merged in your head with the divine presence of Dolores Dei. But her voice, you know her voice all too well. It hurts. It sends a striking pain to your knuckles, a piercing ring to your ears as a phone line disconnects. Her voice sends shivers down your spine, cold as the late-evening air on the Revacholian coast.

You hardly remember anything anymore.

‘Who am I?’

You are Harry—Harrier Du Bois. The thin plastic badge in your pocket says so, but you aren’t sure. You don’t feel like him, whoever he is, whoever he was. Things are different. You are different. A seasoned and competent cop, a mess of a man. There is something soft buried in your chest, woven between your lower ribs, hidden away from the forefront of your mind, and only now do you allow it to perk its head up and fill your lungs. ‘I wonder if I ever was him to begin with?’

You wonder if you ever were him, or if you’ve just been a patchwork collection of borrowed names and false starts, stitched together with regret and desperation. The thought is a heavy stone, dragging you down, but it doesn’t matter. The tide is already doing that.

You think back to the reflection you’d seen in the mirror earlier that day, with tired, bloodshot eyes and swollen, reddened features from your beloved Al Gul. It didn’t look like a Harry. It looked like a ghost, a hollowed-out shell, as though something vital had been siphoned out that night.

‘Was that really me?’

‘And if it weren’t, who was it? Who was I? Who am I now?’

The horizon is almost entirely swallowed by twilight, the last remnants of the Sun clinging stubbornly to the sky, casting faint oranges and reds over the water’s surface.

You tilt your head up, closing your eyes to the fading light. The salty air bites your lips, already cracked and dry from dehydration. You focus on the sensation—the sting, the cold, the pull of the tide—and let it wash over you. It’s grounding, in a way. Pain has always been easier to deal with than the hollow nothingness that follows.

You find yourself unable to help yourself as you think of Kim again. You wonder what he’d think if he saw you now. Would he be distraught? Would he try to stop you? Or would he let you drift, believing this to be the natural conclusion for someone like you? The image feels like a splinter wedged into the softest parts of your mind. Would he be disappointed? Would he even care?

‘That’s unfair. He would care. He always cares.’

The waves tug at you again, insistent and gentle, as though trying to cradle the shattered pieces of you, frayed and sharp. You look down at the water, now lapping at your collarbone, and feel its pull—a gently violent force. It’s not quite alive, not quite dead, but something in-between, much like you. You’ve lived in liminal spaces before; between jobs, between thoughts, between versions of yourself. Maybe the sea knows this about you. Maybe it’s offering a place to rest.

Your fingers twitch where they hang in the water, pale and wrinkled. The salt stings at the burn on the back of your hand, a reminder that your body is still tethered to something, to the universe of which you are made. Your thoughts swirl as the tide rises, fragments of memories colliding like driftwood against rocks.

Kim’s voice surfaces first. Always calm, always measured, even when it shouldn’t have been, his composure a lighthouse cutting through the storm in your head. You remember the way he placed a hand on your shoulder after you vomited on the ground in front of the corpse days prior, saying nothing, but staying there long enough for you to steady yourself.

The water shifts again, higher, colder. Your breath catches as a wave brushes against your chin. You close your eyes and let the sensation engulf you for a moment—a pause in the endless march of thought. But when you open them again, the horizon is still there, the sun dragging its golden corpse into the abyss.

You think of Dolores Dei. Or maybe Dora. Perhaps both. The memories are indistinguishable, braided together in your mind like thick thread of the old rope on the swing set yourself and Kim had once whistled together on, waiting for the tide to recede. The echo of her voice is quieter now, less tired, more mournful, clearer through your head no longer through the old payphone’s receiver. You feel an ache, an absence shaped like her silhouette, your chest feels heavy and dark, a parallel to the light that flows from the lungs of the innocence.

A wave crashes against you, a cold slap that forces the air from your lungs. You stagger, instinctively bracing yourself against the force of it, and you curse the body that stubbornly refuses to let go, that instinctively fights when your mind doesn’t want to.

The ocean doesn’t care, though. It tugs at you harder, like an impatient lover hopped up on amphetamines and ecstacy, and you can feel the sand shifting beneath your feet, the tenuous ground giving way with every surge and retreat of the water.

Your lips part to say something—anything—but the words dissolve before they form, swallowed by the hiss of the waves. You taste salt on your tongue, feel the grit of it on your lips, and you wonder if the sea has already claimed you.

Your legs are numb now, the cold reaching up your thighs like callous hands. You tilt your head back, gazing up at the bruised sky. The stars are growing increasingly visible, tiny and indifferent pinpricks against the twilight. The Sun is almost gone, and with it, the fragile warmth it gave.

It feels like an ending. The time hath come, the end of all things.

No.

Your chest tightens, and you force your feet backward, stumbling through the water, the resistance of it tugging at your knees like unseen hands. The cold sharpens every nerve in your body, anchoring you in the here and now. The sand beneath your feet feels firmer with each step. Each step feels impossible, your legs heavy and sluggish, but you move. Back toward the shore, back toward the dull ache of existence, the unbearable weight of living.

And then, like a chord striking a dissonant note in your chest, a single thought cuts through the fog:

‘If I go, who will remember him?’

It’s absurd. Narcissistic, maybe. It’s unrealistic; you can only assume that plenty others would. Perhaps he’d want you to, though. Kim wouldn’t say it outright, but you’ve seen it in the way he looks at you when he thinks you’re not paying attention. The quiet weight of his trust. The way he believed in you, when not even you could will yourself to.

You owe him something. Not this—not memories buried and snuffed out within a body pulled from the tide.

You still had a case to solve. There was still work left unfinished.

You press your forehead against the damp grit of the sand, and you let yourself cry again. The tears don’t burn this time. They flow, steady and cathartic, carving a path through the salt on your skin.

When the sobs subside, you sit back, staring at the ocean as it rolls endlessly before you. It looks neither so enticing nor menacing now. Just vast. Indifferent.

The pain, the loss, the love you could never quite express—it all comes rushing in, threatening to drown you all over again.

You reach into your pocket, fingers brushing against the thin edge of the badge. You pull it out, letting the faint light of the stars catch on the scratched plastic. Your supposed identity, still unrecognisable.

You wonder if you’ll ever truly find yourself. ‘I doubt it.’

‘But for now, I’m still here. And that’s enough.’