Chapter Text
A beer can sails through the air and hits the rim of a metal bin, knocking off it as it joins its comrades on the floor.
“Swing and a miss. Zero for three Lieutenant.” says Jean Vicqumere, nursing a cigarette while sitting on the kitchen floor, the handle of a cabinet digging into his back.
“Your fucking running commentary fucks up my hand-eye coordination.” Says Lieutenant-double-Yefreitor Harrier Du Bois. He finishes another can and whips it toward the garbage. It knocks off the wall and lands in the bin with a metallic thunk.
Harry jumps up and shouts “YES! This calls for a celebration.” He opens cupboards and rummages around.
“You think everything calls for a celebration “ says Jean, ashing his cigarette into a frog-shaped ashtray.
“That’s right.” Harry said, putting shot glasses and a bottle of what looked like Ubi Sunt? poteen on the kitchen counter. “I am the celebration disco cop par excellence.” He pours moonshine into the glasses and hands it to Jean on the floor. “And you will boogie.”
Jean takes the shot in goodwill while stubbing his cigarette out. There is a reason to celebrate. They cleared a tricky but thankfully not too gruesome murder case which gathered a lot of positive press. Harry and Jean would’ve gone on their typical “we-cleared-a-case” bender but this year was the start of the new three day Spring Festival Holiday where all Revachol Citizens Militia members got time off. It's more an economic choice than a philanthropic one, it’s not paid time off, but it was enough for Jean to convince Harry they should celebrate at home and away from a bunch of yahoos and amateur alcoholics who just got a brand new reason to drink themselves blind.
Jean wanted Harry where he could see him. At bars he’s everyone’s friend, a big happy gropey swinging dick of the RCM open to do or ingest anyone or anything. Hard Party Harry has all his detective skills reversed, he becomes the easiest mark, the biggest pigeon. Here Jean can control the party, keep him booze drunk and away from harder drugs and glass bottles in case he gets Super Sad and starts throwing things.
Also, Harry is less likely to start a fight in someone’s apartment.
Jean finishes the shot while Harry plays with the radio. Basement apartments are good for noise, no one can hear you scream behind a foot of concrete. Harry picked the place well. Social Services in Revachol are desperate enough that all RCM officers are required to train in a specialty to detect and report possible Social Ills such as “Oh this shop is selling rotten meat” or “That smell is probably someone running an illegal stable.” Harry chose Building Inspection and picked a post-breakup apartment on a hill, cutting out the flooding risk in basement apartments. It’s in the corner of a U-shaped building with a courtyard so it has three walls of street-level windows and its own small bathroom. It's technically two rooms, an unspeakable luxury, but the only division between the kitchen and the bedroom/sitting area is an accordion room divider Harry jammed off its tracks within a week of moving in. Some centistore polyvinyl tiles mark off the kitchen but the rest is raw concrete, or as Trant would say, “Rohen Beton” style, which according to Trant is seeing a revival among young tastemakers..
Jean thinks it looks like a bunker. The harsh fluorescent overheads and lack of furnishings beyond a kitchen table, fold away bed, and ratty green couch doesn’t help.
But that doesn’t matter. What matters is it's a ten minute walk from the station so Hangover Harry doesn’t have to deal with the streetcar or spend money he doesn’t have on a Velocitaxi. That the stairs down to the apartment are railess giving Jean an excuse to escort a pre-hangover post-wobbly Harry to his door almost every night is just an added bonus.
Jean gets off the floor and leans against the counter, fidgeting with his pack of Guelph Ultra-Tars. Harry pours another set of shots, downing his just as an old Ostentatious Orchestrations hit comes on the radio.
“Fuck!” he says. “I love this one!” Harry runs to the open area between the two ‘rooms', unbuttons his white shirt, and does the second thing he does best. He begins to disco.
Jean lights another cigarette. This is the best part of these nights, the Giddy Happy Drunk time. The inhibitions dissolved just enough to make it a fun and not dangerous time. It’s even better than working on a case together because there’s very little chance of a dead body ruining the mood. If Jean plays it well he can stretch this out until Harry passes out and stops the Big Sad from happening before it starts.
Harry is air-humping and gyrating like a man possessed by spirits, which technically speaking he is. He sings along to the radio.
“You are the Suzerain! Plump and slick, your powers are obscene! Ooooh yeah!”
Harry’s height and generous wing span means when he spins he can nearly touch both walls of the bunker-apartment. Jean watches Harry lose himself to the disco, his chest hair just turning grey at the top, his well-padded but powerful pecs, upper arms bulging the fabric of a sweat soaked work shirt. Jean wonders what it would be like to be pinned down and manhandled by those arms.
As if feeling eyes on him, Harry turns around and asks “Come on you big homo, dance with me.”
“No thank you lieutenant, you’re doing a good job making an ass out of yourself on your own.”
Harry raises his hands over his head and claps to the beat. “What if I ordered you to dance with me?”
“That would be an abuse of power citation and you don’t need another one.”
Harry shimmies toward Jean. “Or maybe you want me to dance for you, huh?” He presses his chest together, bending toward Jean. “Stick a couple of reál in there buddy.”
“Amazing, you’ve invented a reverse strip club where young handsome people pay to watch sad bloated alcoholics.”
Harry dances backward, taking his shirt off and twirling it over his head. “And that Jean-Jean is the kind of creative, non-linear thinking that makes me the number one case clearer in the whole 41st!”
Harry’s uncanny detective abilities sussed out Jean as a member of the homo-sexual underground at the start of their partnership and Jean, while discreet in professional settings, won’t say no if directly asked. There’s a lot of things he hates about himself but his sexuality isn’t one of them. If this knowledge has spread beyond Harry, Jean isn’t aware of it.
Harry is also aware that Jean has, at least a little bit, a thing for older, burlier guys. Harry finds this hilarious. This manifests as a series of private homosocial cockteases, grabbing Jean’s ass to get his attention, jokes about going to the Union retirement home to get a date, warning him not to get hard when they spar at the gym, etc One time they had to investigate a possible smuggling ring out of a gay bar on Monmarte Square and Harry decided they should go undercover as a couple. He got really into it, developed a lisp and everything..
Jean sighs and dumps his shot of poteen into the sink.
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Later, with the booze rush waning and the radio turned off, Harry and Jean sit on the ratty green couch. Jean’s head is on Harry’s bare shoulder as they both start fading out for the night.
“I haven’t gotten laid in a year.” Harry mumbles.
“I’m shocked. I figure the chicks really dig a work-obsessed, recently broken-up-with old wino. What’s the world coming to?”
“Hey now, you dig a work-obsessed old wino. I’ve seen you watching me change in the locker room.”
“God you’re such a fucking ego-maniac. I’m not watching you change, I’m trying to not watch McLaine change. The guy’s moles have moles.”
Harry chuckles. He’s got such a big smile, thinks Jean.
“How about you Jean-Jean, when was the last time you climbed Mt. Cock?”
“6 months.” He’s lying. It’s closer to a year. Jean is married to his job and his job is increasingly looking after and cleaning up the messes of his partner so he can keep clearing cases.
“Aren’t we a pathetic pair.”
“Like you could even get it up, old man. Probably pickled yourself into permanent whisky dick.”
Harry leans forward, looks Jean right in the eye and then closes his eyes for a minute before leaning back onto the couch.
“Touch it.”
“Wha-” Harry takes Jean’s hand and places it on the considerable rock-hard bulge in Harry’s golden brown flare-cut trousers. Jean's heart races. He is instantly, incredibly sober. Not only is this the plot to roughly 1/3 of all pornographic reels it’s also a situation Jean has thought about at least once a week for the last two years. Jean tries to figure out the next move when Harry interrupts.
“You know, it's not too late. Dealers would still be out. Get me some speed and maybe we can help each other out.” Harry makes the universal blowjob motion with his fist and tongue.
Jean’s mood crashes. Nose dive directly into the sea, no survivors.
“You want me to buy you speed so I can have the honor of blowing you?”
Harry makes The Expression.
It takes Jean a moment but he sighs and says “Harry, go to bed before you do another thing you’ll regret.”
“Whelp, don’t say I never offered.” He shoots finger guns at Jean and gets off the couch, unfolds his bed, and climbs in. Jean lies down on the couch, facing away from Harry’s bed.
“Nightly night Lieutenant.” Harry says, switching off the lights.
Jean stares at the bathroom door with the pebble-glass glazing opposite him. He’s trying not to think about what just happened when he hears the sound of unzipping and frantic, unfirtive jerking off going on not but five feet away.
“I’m not going to do it.” He thinks. “It’s debasing. It’s enabling. It’s giving him even more fucking power then he already has. I am not going to buy speed so my superior officer will let me blow him.”
And Jean is right. He won’t do that because in 2 weeks he’ll misplace some speed from the evidence locker to give to his superior officer so he can blow him.
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