Chapter Text
JEAN VICQUEMARE - “Have you seen my partner?” Jean leans against your desk, his arms crossed
YOU – You look up, trying to hold on to the threads of theories floating in your brain while at the same time returning your senses to the physical plane. You take the pen you were chewing on out of your mouth.
PERCEPTION (SIGHT) - Fuck, it’s one of Kim’s. You’ll need to buy him a new one.
ENDURANCE - Since you quit smoking you’re constantly chewing on things without noticing. Just be careful not to fuck up your teeth.
YOU - “What?” You’ve already forgotten what he said. Or maybe you didn’t hear him in the first place.
JEAN VICQUEMARE - “Jude. Have you seen her?”
PERCEPTION (SIGHT) - He’s tapping his fingers on his arm. A couple sores ooze blood into his beard. He’s been picking at his face again.
PERCEPTION (HEARING) - His breath is wheezing a bit, like it does when he has to climb more than two flights of stairs.
LOGIC - He’s been wandering around the precinct looking for her for a while.
EMPATHY - He’s more worried than he’s letting on. Granted, he’s prone to catastrophizing, so he’s usually more worried than he’s letting on. Still.
YOU - “No, I haven’t. Why?”
JEAN VICQUEMARE – “She’s been acting weird today. Distracted. She said she was going to use the bathroom an hour ago, and I haven’t seen her since.”
YOU - “Maybe she went to get lunch?”
JEAN VICQUEMARE – “No, her lunch is still in the fridge. And she can’t afford take-out.” He pinches the bridge of his nose, exhales.
ESPRIT DE CORPS – Satellite Officer Judit Minot is sitting on the floor of the records room, hidden behind a row of filing cabinets. Her breath comes fast, tears roll down her face. She clutches a calculator to her chest, a piece of paper containing a row of figures scrawled in shaky script on the floor next to her.
YOU – Your senses snap back into your body. Jean is scanning your face, his brow wrinkled. Kim is also watching, alert for an emergency.
JEAN VICQUEMARE - “What was that? Did you– do you know where she is?”
YOU – “She’s in the records room. But–”
JEAN VICQUEMARE – He’s already several strides away. He whirls around. “*What?*”
YOU – “Do you mind if I talk to her first?”
JEAN VICQUEMARE – “Why? I’m her fucking partner. She can talk to me.”
ELECTROCHEMISTRY – His pupils are blown out, dark holes in his face. It’s been happening more often lately. You know, you could try to score some–
ENDURANCE – Nope. Your heart’s okay for now, but it won’t be if you push it.
YOU – You rub your hand over your chest absentmindedly. “I know, I know. But she’s probably hiding in the records room for a reason.”
JEAN VICQUEMARE – “Hiding? What’s wrong with her? Is she okay?” He comes closer, invading your space.
YOU –You slide your chair back a few feet. “As far as I can tell, she’s fine. But you seem kind of…” You make a vague circle around Jean with your hand “…amped up. Literally.”
JEAN VICQUEMARE – “Meaning what?” Jean snaps.
YOU – “Meaning you’re fucking high, Jean.”
JEAN VICQUEMARE – Jean shakes his head. “I’m not–”
KIM KITSURAGI – “You are, Officer. Trust me.”
JEAN VICQUEMARE – He looks from you to Kim like a cornered animal, then rolls his eyes. “Fine, if it’s so *important*, go talk to her.”
YOU – You clap your hand on his shoulder as you pass. “You gotta cut back, Vic,” you mutter. “I’m worried about you.”
JEAN VICQUEMARE – He brushes your hand away. “Fuck off, Harry. You have no fucking right to tell me that.”
YOU – “I know I don’t. But still.” You meet his furious look with a sympathetic one.
JEAN VICQUEMARE - He looks away. “Just go.”
***
Judit hears the door to the records room open and quickly holds her breath. She knows she’s hidden from sight by the bulky filing cabinets (McLaine smoked an entire joint in here without noticing her presence) (not that that said a lot), but a stray sob would certainly alert whoever it was. The door closes again. It must be Harry - she can tell by the under-the-breath humming - something that grated on her nerves when she first started working in C-Wing, but now fades into the background noise of the MCU. Not humming (or whistling, or muttering to himself) is one of Harry’s tells, actually. Everyone has them - little things that indicate that they’re struggling, or something’s going wrong, or there’s going to be a stupid fight over who used the last clean coffee mug.
Jean’s tells are usually the opposite of Harry’s. When Jean is content (or at least, only depressed in a background-radiation way), he’s silent, like a shadow. If he starts talking to himself (or tapping his fingers, or crunching ice in his teeth), that’s a sign of pressure building.
Judit knows the tells of everyone in C-Wing, including the junior officers who only joined a few months ago. If she thinks about it too hard, it makes her furious that it’s fallen to her to manage everyone else’s emotions for them, like she doesn’t have to do that enough at home. Like she hasn’t been defusing conflict before it starts since she was eight years old and could sense arguments brewing between her parents at the end of the month, when it was suddenly important to litigate whose fault it was that they had to choose between paying rent or the overdue power bill. But what alternative is there? Jean and Harry certainly never learned to de-escalate their conflicts, and everyone else takes the lead from them.
Fucking cops. No wonder the de-escalation seminars never go anywhere - everyone learns conflict resolution from Vespertine cop shows: just keep escalating the situation until the shooting starts.
(This was somewhat unfair to the current iteration of Jean and Harry. But early in her tenure in C-Wing, Jean and Harry had done a massive quantity of speed and broken the record for the number of arrests made in a twelve-hour period. It might have been their last good day before things really started to fall apart. The whole precinct had the air of a party, and they’d both stood on chairs to give rambling, largely incoherent speeches. But Judit looked in at the holding cell and saw small, careless injuries on every person sitting in there, including the teenagers and the elderly man, which would no doubt be excused under the old police standby of “resisting arrest”. After that she stole a handful of cigarettes from the pack on Jean’s desk and chain-smoked them until she threw up.) (If these were the good ones, the ones who tried - and they did try; Judit had seen Harry talk his way out of multiple situations with a gun pointed at him - what did that mean for the rest of the precinct?)
“Judit?” Harry says softly, breaking her out of her thoughts.
Judit quickly wipes her face. Maybe if she doesn’t respond he’ll go away.
“Jean’s been looking for you,” Harry continues. He fumbles his way through the mostly dark room until he catches her outline hidden behind the row of filing cabinets.
“Hi, Harry,” she says. There’s a pulse of nausea in her stomach. She breathes through it.
Harry lowers himself awkwardly to the floor, shifting until he finds a position where he can lean against the filing cabinets without the drawer handles stabbing him in the back. His long legs stick out perpendicular to hers. He’s wearing a breezy floral shirt, pink shorts, boat shoes and has yellow sunglasses perched in his hair. (Again, a contrast to Jean, whose only concession to the heat is removing his jacket. And maybe rolling up his sleeves. Judit pressed her lips together with silent laughter a few weeks ago when Jean finally rolled up his sleeves for the first time of the summer, and several of the new crew of patrol officers had trouble stringing sentences together at the sight of his massive forearms.) (Judit herself rarely wears anything other than her uniform to work. She doesn’t have enough clothes to risk getting blood on the ones she actually likes.)
“What’s going on?” he says.
“Oh, you know.” Judit sniffs. “Work stuff.”
“No, that’s not it,” Harry says matter-of-factly, because he always knows , somehow. “If it was work stuff, you’d talk to Jean about it. Or just bottle it up like we all do. No, it’s definitely something else.”
“I’m surprised you haven’t figured it out by now.” Judit is torn, ripped apart, between competing desires: to tell him (to tell anyone) and to never let anyone know. She almost told Jean three times today. Kim brought her a cup of coffee and she almost let it slip as she took it from him. But she can’t seem to drag the words up from where they’re sitting heavy in her belly. Maybe if Harry can figure it out on his own, she won’t have to. Come on, Harry.
Harry looks at her, scanning her up and down in the half-darkness. Judit can almost hear the theories and facts and observations clicking into place in his brain. “Holy shit, you’re pregnant?”
Judit bursts into tears, bringing her knees up to her chest.
“Hey. Hey, I’m here. It’s okay.” He puts an arm out, and she twists around until she can lean her head on his shoulder. “How far along?” he asks, after a minute or two. Judit can tell he’s a bit at a loss for what to say, which is pretty funny in itself - that’s one thing you can rarely say about Harry.
Judit blows her nose. “If you’re counting by last period, fourteen weeks, I guess.”
“You guess? Is that not what the doctor said?”
Judit huffs a laugh and pulls the test she peed on a few hours ago out of her pocket. (She still says “pee” instead of “piss” because she’d rather be laughed at by her coworkers than have her seven-year-old going around saying “piss”. He says “shit” instead of “poop” now, because there are some battles you can’t win in Revachol, but she’s still trying because he’s seven already and it doesn’t seem that long since he was small enough to hold in one arm.)
“Oh. OH. You found out today.”
Judit nods. Honestly she feels like an idiot for not putting it together sooner. It took catching sight of herself in the mirror, realizing she couldn’t blame the thickness of her waist on gas or a large meal, before it occurred to her that it had been too long since she’d marked down her period in the little notebook in her nightstand.
“So…how do you know it’s fourteen weeks?”
Judit laughs again. “I took the last time I had sex and counted back from there.”
“You haven’t had sex since–” Harry stops abruptly.
“Yeah, when’s the last time for you?” Judit’s maybe a little prickly about this topic, and it’s not really fair, since she brought it up. But a lot of things aren’t fucking fair .
“No idea,” says Harry. “‘Come have sex, I’m basically only a few months old and might not remember how’ doesn’t work super well as a pickup line.”
Judit feels a pang of sympathy at that.
“I just figured…you’re married and your brain doesn’t have giant holes in it…but we don’t have to get into it if you don’t want to.”
Judit briefly wishes she was sitting here with Jean instead, so she could bum a cigarette. Then she remembers that she’s pregnant. Then she remembers…fuck it, discussing her sex life (or lack thereof) is easier than the rest. “I don’t like having sex while he’s drunk. He’s bad at it. Clumsy. Not as good at listening. And he’s drunk most of the time, so…” She trails off, looking away.
“Does he hurt you?” Harry sounds uncharacteristically serious. Judit can’t bear to look at him, to see the concern in his eyes. It’s sad enough to say all this out loud.
“No. Or, not intentionally. It’s sometimes just a little too hard, or a little too fast, like we’re out of sync. And that makes me nervous, so I can’t get into the right…brain space or whatever.” There’s a spot of…something, maybe mud, on the knee of her slacks. She picks at it. “So I told him I won’t have sex with him unless he’s…at least mostly sober. Which means we’re at an impasse.”
“Except for the one time.”
“Yes. Except for the one time I had a day off in the middle of the week for some reason, the kids were at school, and I was around when he woke up.” It was nice. He was a little bleary with the hangover, and they had to try a few different positions before they found one that didn’t worsen the ache in his leg, but he told her he loved her as he cupped her face in both hands, and his sweaty blond hair forming soft waves like it used to do when he came home from work sweaty and filthy, when he’d tackle her onto the bed smelling like grease, their hands fumbling with each other’s clothes. Even when she was pregnant, feeling bloated and sluggish, he’d strip off the oversized shirt she wore when nothing else would fit and– Stop it. –let his eyes drift lazily down her body, admiring– Stop.
There are tears running down her face again. Harry tightens his hold around her shoulders and passes her a handkerchief. It’s even mostly clean. Impressive.
“So, what about being pregnant has you hiding in the records room?” Harry’s tone is light. Coaxing. She’s heard him use that tone when he questions children. In January he used that tone to get a three-year-old to describe exactly what her daddy had done to her mummy. An hour later Judit found him in the evidence room, drunk, trying to snort a line of cocaine while sobbing. That was four days after she joined the MCU.
Judit wipes her face, trying to gather her scattered thoughts. Harry doesn’t press her. He can sympathize with disorganized thinking. “Just being pregnant isn’t enough of a reason?” she says.
“Sure, if I was pregnant, I probably would also be hiding in the records room.”
She glances at him, catches his slight smile.
“But you’re clutching a calculator, so I’m assuming there’s more to it.”
Judit uncurls her hand from the calculator. She’d honestly forgotten about it. The little screen shows the result of the last calculation she’d made. Negative one hundred twelve. “I have to have an abortion,” she says. She tries to say it quick, flat, take the sting out of it. It doesn’t work. She feels Harry tense up as she says it, and she starts to shuffle out of his grasp, dreading a lecture or an opinion.
“Hey,” Harry tugs on her sleeve. “Talk to me. What do you mean you have to?”
“You’ve been to my apartment, Harry. Olive and Louis are already sharing a room. And Olive’s nine already. She won’t want to share a room with her brother much longer.” Judit hugs her knees to her chest. “But apart from that, there’s just– we don’t have the money. We’re doing okay, especially since I’m getting sergeant’s pay now, but Bastien can’t work, and if I go through with this, who knows how it’ll go? Some people have to have bed rest for months. I’d at the very least need a few weeks to recover from–from childbirth, which we can’t afford. And apart from that I got rid of all the baby things, so I’d have to buy everything again, and formula is so expensive, but I can’t exactly breastfeed if I’m working. And even if, somehow, all of that works out, I added up our expenses.” She grabs the discarded pad of paper filled with hasty calculations and pushes it into Harry’s hands. “We’d be in the negative every month.”
Harry runs his thumb down the list, stopping next to a particularly expensive item. Judit looks away. “Yes, if Bastien weren’t spending a third of our income on alcohol, we might be able to work it out. I could divorce him, but he does most of the childcare, so I’d have to pay for that if I did. And I don’t really want to. What’s he supposed to do if I kick him out? He’s already suicidal. He’d…” She trails off. What she wants, really, is to still be married to Bastien, but a version of him that looks at her with clear, focused eyes and a smile, not a hollowed-out ghost who can only meet her gaze after half-a-dozen whiskeys. The one who walks on hands and knees with Louis and Olive on his back, pretending to be a horse, bucking them off into a laughing pile, not the one who lies on the couch staring at nothing with a glass in his hand while Louis drives toy MCs across his face in an effort to get his attention. Not the one who presses fucking razor blades to his wrist in the middle of the night while Olive watches out of sight, terrified. But that’s not the world Judit lives in.
Harry’s breath hitches, and Judit turns back to him to see tears spilling down his face. “Fuck, sorry,” he mutters, wiping the tears with his sleeve.
“What’s wrong?” she says, because by this point it’s instinct to set aside her own emotions when someone else has a problem.
“I don’t know. Some– some bullshit I only half-remember, as usual.” He groans and drags a hand down his face. “We’ll talk about it sometime when you’re not mid-crisis.”
Judit sighs and leans against his shoulder again.
“Have you– Are you going to–” Harry sounds hesitant, almost afraid. “Do you want to talk to Bastien about this?”
“Get his permission, you mean?” she says, flat, tired. Judit doesn’t want Bastien to tell her to keep it. She also doesn’t want him to tell her to get rid of it. The thought of either is excruciating.
“No, just– he’d probably want to know what’s going on. And, maybe he could use it as– as motivation to quit drinking or– or…I don’t know,” he finishes, his voice barely audible. “Sorry. I’ll– I’ll stop trying to tell you what to do.” He wipes his eyes again, then reaches for her hand. She grips his hand tightly, trying to concentrate on the feel of his warm, sweaty palm pressed against hers, trying to quiet her racing thoughts.
“I just wish,” she says, and it’s only because it’s a half-dark room and Harry’s hand is warm, and for once she’s not trying to fill some sort of caretaking, peacemaking role that she can admit this, “I wish I had a choice. A real choice.”
Harry reaches over with his other hand, too, pressing her hand between both of his. “Do you think you’d go through with it? If you had the money?”
She lets out a sigh, a soft breath. “I’d do a lot of things differently if I had the money.”