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If there’s one thing you don’t like about Harry, genuinely, it’s that empathy thing he’s got going on. Mostly, it’s okay, when he’s not aiming it at you, but when he does, and you see it in his eyes that he somehow knows something about you that you didn’t want him to know, it makes you feel a flush of embarrassment and anger.
Like the dreams.
It’s not uncommon for you to have nightmares, you’ve been having them as long as you can remember, but these are remarkably clear, fresh even after you wake trembling with Harry’s snores cutting through the silence of 3am. They’re not all the same, but they all center around one idea.
Harry, dying.
Sometimes, it’s during the tribunal, a reality where you weren’t fast enough, and he bled out into your hands. Other times you walk into the bedroom, or the bathroom, or the showers at the precinct or or or and you find him dead, hanging from the pipes or laying in the tub with his wrists slashed open or with his brains splashed across the sheets. But the worst ones, the worst ones are where he’s looking right at you, and a bullet comes and strikes him in the chest, whizzing past your head. You watch, in these dreams, as his bright, open face falters, his breath hitching in his broad chest, his knees buckling. You run to him, but it always seems as though he’s a million miles away and you can never run fast enough to save him.
At first, you manage to hide it from him. Despite his own nightmares, when Harry does sleep he usually sleeps deeply, and if he doesn’t wake up from his dreams he sleeps until his internal alarm wakes him at 0730. So when you startle awake at three in the morning, you’re able to calm yourself back to sleep without interference. Only once did he wake, likely because of the smell of the cigarette you had lit to soothe your nerves, and you had pet his head and murmured soothingly until he went back to sleep.
Two weeks in, though, he knows something is wrong. Your hesitance to go to bed coupled with the bags under your eyes, deeper than usual, are clues, but you think maybe he’s just got preternatural insight into other people. They don’t call him a can opener for nothing. When he looks at you, you can see in his eyes that he knows something is off.
It’s a Saturday night, technically already Sunday, when he figures it out for good. He’s surprisingly sneaky when he feels like it, and you’d thought he was still asleep when you jolted awake, adrenaline pumping through your body, the sight of Harry’s corpse-bloated face painted on the backs of your eyelids. Breathing heavily, you prop yourself up on your hands, and that’s when Harry rolls over.
You can’t see, not even with the halogen lamp outside your bedroom window blazing through the curtains, but you know he’s awake because he’s quiet, and he’s never quiet when he sleeps. “Kim?” He asks, and you squint enough to see the blurry smudge of brown and pink shift. “Are you alright?”
The worry in his voice should make you feel happy. He cares about you, enough to worry when you wake in the middle of the night, but you’re vulnerable and shaky in the midst of the night terror, and you bat away his reaching hand, managing to catch him on the wrist through sheer luck. “I’m fine,” You bite out, your voice betraying you. Harsh, too sharp, an obvious lie. “Go back to sleep.”
“I wasn’t asleep anyway,” He says, but he doesn’t reach for you again. You wish he would, if only to give you a reason. Something to sink your teeth into. You know that when he has bad dreams he likes to be held, likes to cling to you and match his breaths to yours, chests moving in tandem, but that’s not what you need. You don’t know what you need. “Bad dream?”
You don’t grace that with a reply, because if you do, you’re going to snap at him. The bedsprings cry out in protest as he flops back onto the mattress with a sigh. “You wanna talk about it?”
“No.” This time you don’t snap, but it’s a close thing. Your heart is running in your chest, so fast you would be worried you’re in danger of a heart attack if you didn’t know any better.
Harry shrugs, you feel the movement. “Alright.” He says easily, as if it’s not such a big deal, and some of the embarrassment and frustration melts away. You’re not angry, precisely, but you don’t make a habit of naming emotions, and this one is a confusing amalgamation of feelings you can’t pick apart and wouldn’t even if you could.
“During my nap today,” He starts, and you prepare for him to tell you about his nightmare in a well-meaning but ultimately useless attempt at getting you to open up. “I had this dream about a cat.” It stops you short, and you turn to look at the smears of color that is Harry.
“A cat?” You repeat dubiously, and he makes this little mmhmm! sound you're ridiculously fond of.
“It was massive, like, the size of a truck, and it had taken over the second floor of this building - it was evil, obviously.” He goes on, and you find yourself relaxing back into the pillows. “And we, you and me, we had to, you know, defeat it. It was one of those weird hairless ones, the ones that look like big hunks of raw chicken, and we figured out it was allergic to water, but we only had a few containers, like a bucket and a cup or something like that,”
His voice is familiar and soothing, and despite yourself, you realize that your heart has slowed and your mouth has started smiling without your say-so.
“And every time we went up there it would knock us back down again, but this building, it had a lift, like the service lift at the Whirling, you remember, right? So we had to go up in the lift and throw water on the giant cat, and then go back down and get more water. I guess it was some kind of office building? You know, one of the really tall ones they have, except it was made of white stone and glass, and they had this fountain in the hallway, which I guess we could have got the water from- we kept going to this weird supply closet that had one of those outside taps in it,”
Your eyes start slowly slipping closed, and before you even notice it’s happening, you’re asleep, Harry’s voice drifting across your awareness and soothing any nightmares before they start.
(He wakes with a throat so sore he can barely talk and a smile so wide you’re worried he’s going to strain his cheeks. Maybe that empathy thing of his isn’t so bad after all.)