Hornet Had Been Born A Thrumming, Slashing Thing, And This Way She Would Die.

Hornet had been born a thrumming, slashing thing, and this way she would die.

Her feet moved like pinpricks in the sullen, loamy dirt ━ fast and precise and as needle-like as her nail itself. cutting lines like some kind of dance into the gravel-dimpled ground, swinging, forward and back, lunge & retreat & motion ; effort in grace.

A small thing, always. Hornet would never outgrow the worst of them, but she was fast, and sharp, and in this she found pride. Metal, tension of the string like a blade through the stagnant air, her weapon in her hands. the needle circles, circles, stabs like a stinger through carapace and flesh, piercing the shoddy warped scrap-metal of a training dummy she'd maybe had made herself. Reel it in, the thread returns to her, and with it her needle. Jump! Air whistling through her armor as she rises, joints spry as her eyes widen ━ reorient.

━ And catch! tangle the writhing limbs, trip them up, a flailing of precise white cord through the cold air that burned in her. Suffocate, string them up, cut them out!

This was her name. ━ Names like titles, she was Hornet; a buzzing, fast, terrible thing : with a body like a blade, body from the beast and practice from the bee and mind from the pale, she would stab, slash, spike them through! She is more, she is greater, she is-

━wait, 'them'? it was supposed to be an it. ( how single-minded, to forget just whom she'd been fighting. an internal battle, as much as a physical one... )

@vendettavalor

initially, Kim paid no mind to the opening of the main entrance. People came and went in the repurposed mill, two chimneys like stalks from the perceived head of the oversized animal made of concrete and metal as, within, a few rubber mats desperately tried to keep the rainwater at bay, doors left relatively open in the rampant shuffling of morning and the influx-outflux of officers coming for work or leaving for home after nightshift, chatter filling like white noise. it's when Harry makes his approach that Kim notices.

I told you comes the part of his mind that proposed the idea of him waiting ever so patiently in the first place, midway through him re-establishing an old organizing system in the drawers and little places in his desk, as it hollers in its newfound victory ━ I told you he'd be here, he'd be waiting, hours for the best detective on the force? you're off your game, Kitsuragi!

the Lieutenant subtly shakes it off, twirling one of his pens in his hand as he looks towards Harry's approach properly. The grin upon worn skin slowly relearning itself as the onslaught of years of damage has at last called a ceasefire & beneath the bristles of facial hair it seems almost almost out of place, mismatched. It reminds Kim of a large dog, forgetting itself as an elder and remembering only its youth, in the way Kim finds himself thinking it apt for him, suitable; he liked it when he truly smiled. ━━ His own face refuses to betray him, but there in the margins of his cheeks, the skin around his eyes, a ghost of a smile lingers. ( he was wrong. a pleasant surprise, regardless of how major of a miscalculation. later, he'd blame it on the early morning instead, or perhaps his own out-of-touchness with Harrier's timing, given how fleeting their engagements... )

" Bonjour, Detective. " he answers, resuming his motions as he squirrels little things away ( stationary, paperwork, the ledger, his notebooks, sticky-notes, umbrella leaned and carefully hooked against his desk ; ever the practical man he'd like most to seem, aren't you, Kitsuragi? )

" Wet, but it's too early to say. " is the sentence he settles upon for the inquiry, it's hard to tell if he's joking. " I have been here about eight minutes, not counting the commute, so you haven't missed very much. Ask me again in an hour or two, if you really want to know. Though, are you always here this early? " ━ an eyebrow raises as he casts him a brief glance, a momentary pause before returning to the task; attention nonetheless focused upon the yefreitor.

Having lived in Jamrock for so long, the little sensations were lost on Harry. Until now, anyway. Whether by the result of his constantly alcohol intoxication, his assured peripheral neuropathy, or the natural haze that clouded his senses after years and years of being exposed to it all, he'd fallen into a routine at the Precinct. Not comfortable and not comforting all things considered - but a routine. And now, he was learning all but the most fundamental of things from scratch again. The feeling of his desk under his calloused fingertips. The smell of smog-tinted air and the rain on his head as he stepped out for work that morning. To many, it would've seemed a glum day in Jamrock.

But to him, looking at it all and drinking it in with fresher eyes than he's had in years, it was beautiful.

For once, he'd come in on time. He'd tried to be early to prepare for Kim, but in his haste of excitement, he'd forgotten the fact that he'd forgotten where the precinct was. In the end, he'd left so early that by the time he did arrive, he was right on time. (Trant seemed pleased by the fact. Judit seemed encouraging. Jean seemed only mildly grumpy, if a bit surprised. But he does get an earful about walking in sopping wet. So Harry goes to the locker room just to grab a towel and dry off.)

It doesn't take long for him to return. Still damp from the rainwater and a little more disheveled than when he initially walked in. But overall, it seems that the sobriety offered in Martinaise has already begun to work wonders on Du Bois. His skin isn't so flushed and red. He doesn't scratch at his palms with nervous anxiety, nor swing between sluggishness and hyperactivity. His hygiene's improved and his ability to concentrate seems to have followed suit, as he immediately looks over to Kim's newly-assigned desk to find his partner there.

The glee on his face is positively puppy-like. He nearly trips over himself in the rush to come up to Kim, the biggest grin on his face that he's ever had lighting up his worn and overgrown features. "Hey, Kim! You made it! Sorry, I wasn't able to greet you at the door... but welcome to the Precinct! How are you liking things so far?"

Harry, please, it's been five minutes...

⚔️ @quillheel

one of the best kim moments in disco elysium tbh

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authority check

Maybe he could read the story on his face. Kim was a composed, concealed man, and he intended to keep it this way regardless of how his brow fruitlessly insisted on furrowing his eyes shut under the pounding migraine that cracked through his skull, but the Smoker wasn't stupid. ━ No one in Martinaise could afford to be, and especially not with the clientele he worked with. ━━━ The bruises, the sounds of gunshots, the absence of Harrier, the fact the hanged man had been a mercenary ( or, at least, donned the armor of one ). It wasn't difficult to piece together that they'd been involved, if nothing else; a fact confirmed if he asked or found himself 'round the Whirling in the last little while. The cleanup was still going on, the blood clotting in the street, sticking to the gravel or being frozen by the cold...

The sarcasm briefly disarms him. Not in the way of sarcasm softening nerves, but in the way of reflecting a strike and driving a blade into the ground ━ sloppy, uncoordinated ━ and part of the Lieutenant felt briefly like an embarrassed child at the remark he'd made, gloating about being stronger than he looked, something like that. He knew better, and the steel bordering that made-up his endless resilience against the world is righted in an instant. The feeling is compressed into a fine, dense cube, and gone within a quarter of the time the younger takes to slip back out from the bathroom ; a room admittedly more adjacent to a closet than anything else. ━ Come on. Get it together.

" Thank you, monsieur, but that isn't necessary. " Kitsuragi raises a bare hand in a gentle, dismissive manner, the faintest stains of blood caught under nails and in the stubborn ridges of callouses before he lowers it, lets it lock back with its partner. " I have already taken painkillers ━ Drouamine. I'll re-check how willing I am to take medication handouts in a few hours. "

Kim says it with a straight-face, but the dry humor lingers in the latter sentence. ━ you can't tell if he's being serious, but he appreciates the gesture.

there's an understanding, beneath it all, of how much those painkillers can mean to be handed out so easily, the allyship neither directly acknowledge but know. ━ He decides, unspoken, that the Smoker needs them more than he does, regardless of how long it takes for that drouamine to kick in.

Kim does oblige with taking a seat, at the very least. Taking the open chair closest to the entrance, plush old fabric smelling of dust and cleaner, wearing its age. He anticipated being too high strung after all that had happened to sit down easily, but he finds his legs conceding easily. ━ maybe all the running around with the Detective had finally worn him out, at last, when there'd be a handful of days of inaction for the both of them... ( and yet, here the Lieutenant was, still working, still asking questions. He briefly worries about Harry's state, back at the whirling, but reminds himself of Garte's nearby presence. It was... It would be fine. In a way, it had to be. )

After a moment of consideration, he starts with the obvious; " I can assume you heard the commotion of gunfire the day before, yes? "

continued from here. // @quillheel

Upon hearing the knocking on the door to his apartment the Smoker had originally thought to dismiss it. It wouldn't have come as a surprise to him if it had been one of the children running around who liked to cause trouble - he couldn't even count how many stones that one kid had thrown at the corpse that had been hung up on the tree. However due to the gunfire the previous day, his mind decided that it was an urgent matter.

He was glad he had chosen to open the door.

While the Smoker had talked more to the other detective than he had with Kim, the Smoker had a feeling that they ran in the same…circles so to speak and that only urged him further to help him, not only out of the kindness of his heart, but in the sense of having a bond of sorts with the other male. The Smoker was confident that they had both had the same insults thrown at them over the years and while he had learned to either hurl a sarcastic comment back or outright ignore them, it didn't change the intent of discrimination.

"Of course it isn't as bad as it looks." His lighthearted airy tone of voice may have been a little sarcastic, if only to try to lighten the atmosphere and Kim's nerves.

After the older male enters his apartment, The Smoker takes a moment to slink off to the bathroom to see what he has for medical supplies. A few moments pass and he comes back into the main room with a small bag in tow accompanied with a glass of cold water. Setting the glass down on the nearby nightstand, the younger male takes a small bottle of painkillers out of the bag he grabbed from the bathroom. He places his palm on the lid and opens it with one swift push. Dropping a few pills into his hand, he hands them out to Kim. "Here. Take these and have a seat and we'll see what else can be done."