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The hands on the clock in front of you sweep past 12:00 with no chime and no change. Midnight. A brand new fucking day, and everything is still just as dark as before. Sunrise is a delusion, a faint and distant memory of something you'll never see again, and no matter what any man or weapon tells you, you'll never be prepared for the war that is living. It'll never stop for long enough to let you.
There are things you could do, if you could force yourself to stand up. There is a gun in your nightstand drawer. There is a Frittte down the street, with a shelf of glittering bottles. There is a furtive young man who stands on your corner selling the powdery illusion of well-being. He knows your name, and offers you some every time you pass.
But it's too far. A million, million miles through echoing empty nothing.
Something tries to show you a world outside, a city. Streetlights and beating hearts. But you don't believe in her tonight. You turn your face away, suppress the shiver, dismiss the thought.
There's a telephone beside your chair, and at the other end of it, no further away than anything else tonight, the echo of a memory. Soothing hands and scented skin and hope and love.
You pick up the receiver. Your fingers twitch with the ghosts of digits. So many of them, hardwired into you, uneraseable. Even though you tried. At least you can say you tried.
You insert your finger into the dial. You asshole. You fuck. You useless waste of skin and breath. You promised. You promised the only real miracle you've ever met that you'd forget her, and yet here you are. You failure. You filth. You spurting fountain of pain.
You dial a number. Another. Another. And you realize, watching from a distance, from Mirova, from a vast, numb height, that the sad little disco man below you isn't dialing his ex. That other numbers are flowing out from your fingers, ones you didn't even realize you remembered.
Calling...
Calling...
Calling...
"Hello?" says a voice.
And you can see him now. In a rumpled bed, in a tidy bedroom. Sitting up, features soft and groggy, holding a telephone to his ear with one hand and reaching for his glasses with the other.
He looks tired, you think as the vision fades. Like a man who needs more sleep than he ever gets.
"Shit," you say. "I woke you up. I'm sorry. God, I'm such an asshole. I'm so fucking sorry."
"Harry?" he says. Like that's who you are to him, when you startle him suddenly out of dreams. Not "detective." Not "lieutenant." Harry. Your gut twists with how little you deserve it.
"I don't know why I dialed you. I meant to call... Shit. I'm sorry. I'm such a piece of shit. I'll let you sleep."
"Are you all right?" he says.
"Sure," you say. "Sure. Always am. You know me. I'm a superstar." You don't know why you say it. It sounds so much worse than "I'm such a piece of shit."
"Have you been drinking?" It's not an accusation. Just a question. Fact-gathering, investigation.
"No," you say. "I wanted to. But there's nothing here. If I hid anything where you and Jean couldn't find it when you threw everything out, I did it well enough that I can't find it either. And it's a million miles to the Frittte, Kim. It's a million miles through the pale, just to get to my door. Plus, it doesn't really help much anymore. The booze. It just makes me feel bad without making me feel good." You shift the receiver from one ear to the other. "I think the crabman took that from me," you say. A thought you've voiced to no one until now.
"Mhm," he says, accepting your statement whether he understands it all or not. The way he does. "Well, that may be for the best."
"I miss it," you say. "I wish it was here, anyway. So I could try to talk it into coming back."
"I understand," he says. "These things are difficult."
"You have no idea, Kim," you say. And now you're about to start crying, you pussy. "You don't even know."
"No? Don't I?" His voice is mild, light. It tells you nothing about what he does or doesn't know, or how, but the weight of it squeezes your chest so hard the pressure pushes all the gathering tears out into your eyes.
On the wall in front of you, time keeps ticking uselessly forward. "I wish the world would end," you say, "just so I could stop being in it. How fucked up is that, Kim?"
"Mhm," he says again. "That is pretty fucked up, yes." He says it quietly, matter-of-factly, and somewhere deep in the hidden recesses of your brain, some part of you almost laughs.
"Thanks," you say. Your vision's growing blurry, but it seems like it would take far too much effort to wipe your eyes.
You wipe them, anyway.
"Do you need help?" he says. "With something other than the end of the world, I mean. Should I come over there?"
You hear what he's not saying. You decide to say it for him. "You mean, should you come and take away my gun?"
He pauses, but only for a moment. "Yes."
He will. He will come and stop your world from ending, if you need him to. He'll do it without calling you names, without grasping for the right thing to say to fix you, without joining you in your downward spiral, without giving up on all your self-destructive bullshit and taking off for Graad. He'll just quietly save you from yourself and never mention it in the morning.
Whether he comes or not, you'll see him in the morning, if you live.
"Morning's a real thing, right?" you say.
"Morning? You mean, like... the time of day?"
"Yeah."
"Yes, detective. Morning is a real thing."
You believe him. You wouldn't believe anybody else, but you believe him. "Okay," you say. "Okay, then. You don't need to come. I think I'll be all right until then."
"You're sure?" It's an offer, still.
"Yeah," you say. "Well, y'know, maybe not all right. But I'll live through the night. I promise."
"Good," he says. "That's good."
He means it, say several voices in your head. He means it, sire. He means it.
"Can you... stay on the phone with me, though? Just for a little while?"
"Of course," he says, and he means that, too. You aren't even making him unhappy.
"Thanks," you say. You cradle the phone close, and listen to him breathe. Listen to him letting you listen to him breathe.
On the wall, the clock ticks on, minute by minute, towards the sunrise.