yuletide FIC: Working Through the Pain (KKBB, gen, R)
TITLE: Working Through the Pain
RATING: R, mostly for language
FANDOM: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
CHARACTERS: Harry Lockhart, Perry van Shrike
SUMMARY: On life at Sentron Inc.
AUTHOR’S NOTES: Written for Holly for the 2011 yuletide. Set post-film.
THANKS: To my wonderful beta readers, ticketsonmyself and vodkaplaid.
So, even though he calls me idiot all the time, and says that I’m ruining his blood pressure, I guess Perry kind of likes me. Not, like, gay-type likes me, which is lucky for me because I don’t swing that way, and if I did, Perry would annihilate me-seriously, the guy’s huge-but he just regular-type likes me. I guess you could even say we’re friends, though I can’t imagine saying that to Perry’s face. But fuck him, we totally are; we are secretly friends.
One of the ways I know this is that, after the hospital kicked me out, Perry let me stay at his place, even though he’s got one of those super-expensive homes you see in magazines, where everything is in super-classy shades of gray and you know you’re not supposed to touch anything or you’ll break it. Perry gave me this long lecture about my shoes on the furniture and the temperament of Italian leather, but he let me sleep on his couch, which is roughly the size of a Siberian tiger, and cost more than my first car. And when the hospital sent their bill collectors after me, because it’s not like petty thievery comes with health insurance, Perry paid them off for me. And of all the things he ever bitches at me about, and bitching at me is like his favorite pastime, that never comes up.
Something they never show you in the movies is how fucking much physical therapy you have to do after you get shot. I mean, I got shot in the chest and I still had to do all these dumb exercises. I mean, it’s your chest. If you move your chest muscles, do you notice? I couldn’t even do it on purpose before this fucking therapy. And Perry. Perry was unconscious a long fucking time, and so not only did he have the whole getting shot thing to get over, he had to get better from all this nerve damage caused by being out so long. He was on that fucking cane for forever, and it was a long time before his right side wasn’t weak. (Part of his therapy for the right side weakness involved him squeezing things in his right hand. I told him to imagine it was a cock in his fist; that seemed to cheer him up a little. Though his therapist asked me not to come back after that.) Anyway, I don’t want to toot my own horn or anything, but this whole me and Perry being secret friends thing isn’t one-sided. It took Perry a long time to get better, and he doesn’t have a lot of people in his life, so I kind of looked after him while he was healing. I helped him around the house, which was easy because I was already living there, and I helped him around the office. If I was my own boss, and I had just gotten shot, I would have taken some time off, but Perry is a real work through the pain type, so he went back to seeing clients as soon as the hospital discharged him. Which meant that I was working through my pain helping Perry. Not that I’m complaining; I mean, he gave me a place to stay and he paid off my enormous medical debt, so maybe a little collating is the least I could do. Plus, filing is a lot more fun when you’re rolling on Percocet. I’m just saying.
So, Perry and I may be secretly friends and all, but he’s still my boss and he’s still the tightest wound motherfucker I’ve ever met. I’d make a joke about what does he have up his ass, but with the gay thing, it’s just too easy. The point is, going from my previous vocation, in which I made my own hours and, you know, pretty much just flew by the seat of my pants, to Perry’s world is taking some adjustment.
Thank God I’ve got Percocet to help ease the, er, pain.
After I’d been at Sentron Inc. about a week and a half, Perry actually presented me with a list of rules. A fucking list, like something a kindergartner would take home to have their parents sign, classroom etiquette or some shit. I just stared at it for a moment, and then I must have rolled my eyes or something because Perry put on his Angry Face and tacked the list up next to my desk. So now I stare at the thing all the time when I’m trying to look like I’m working without actually working. This has had the inadvertent side effect of committing the whole stupid list of rules to my memory.
1. Answer the phone, “Sentron Inc., how may I direct your call?”
So, I was at work, eating lunch and watching One Life to Live. And doing some data entry, kind of, but I’m not that good with multitasking, so that was slow going, since most of my attention was focused on trying to figure out exactly what was going on with Starr’s baby, and keeping duck sauce from dripping on my shirt. Maybe chopsticks and eating at my desk don’t go together. Anyway, the phone started ringing, and right at that moment some epic shit was going down in Llanview, and also in my lap, since in my excitement over Starr’s baby, I dropped a bunch of lo mein in my crotch. So, in the midst of multiple crisises-fuck, I don’t think that’s a word; whatever the word for more than one crisis is, that’s what I mean-it took me a minute to answer the phone. Or three. Fuck, like I was keeping time, right?
Anyway, when I finally answer the phone, I’m wiping hot noodles off my junk, so I was not in Pleasant Phone Voice mode. It was something more like Omigod I Just Spilled Burningness All Over My Dick mode. But I did manage not to curse, even though the credits were rolling and I had no idea where Starr’s baby was.
“Uh, yeah, Sentron Inc. Is us. Hello?”
And then, from the other end of the phone, there was this long, drawn out sigh, and I knew instantly it was Perry. The man is a marathon sigher; I’ve clocked him at almost two minutes before. No fucking joke.
“Harry,” Perry said, in the phone and also in my other ear, and I looked up to see him walking into the room with his cell phone in hand, looking constipated and annoyed, “we have been over this.”
When Perry gets really annoyed at me, which is often, half of what he says is in italics. I know I should feel ashamed and repentant when he gets like that, but it’s so fucking funny that usually I have a hard time not laughing. Perry hung up his cell phone with a vicious poke, and then stormed over to my desk.
“‘Sentron Inc., how may I direct your call?’ I am a professional, Harry, and when clients call my office, the fucking phone service had better be professional, or they’ll think I’m some fuck up sitting around watching Port Charles with a lap full of Chinese food, and they will take their business elsewhere.”
I knew I should have acted all contrite and shit, but (a) that’s not my strong suit, and (b) I just couldn’t let Perry’s ridiculousness go unchecked.
“Unbelievable,” I said. “First off, Port Charles has been off the air for forever, Perry; let’s go ahead and come on into the twenty-first century. Also, I cannot believe you went through this whole the killer is calling from inside the house shit just to check and see if I was following your script on the phone. Aren’t you and your therapist working on your control issues?”
Perry’s face pinched, and he let out a record-breaking sigh. I snuck a look at my watch while trying on my penitent face, and clocked him at two and a half minutes.
2. Stay off my computer.
It’s not like I want to know more about Perry’s personal life. I mean, we’re friends and all, but I’m pretty sure there are some skeletons in his closet that are tied up in latex and muzzled with a ball gag, and frankly, I think it’s better for our friendship if I don’t know all that shit. The point is, I don’t stick my nose into Perry’s business-except, you know, his business business, which I kind of get paid for-if I can help it. It’s a man friendship, even if one of us is gay; it’s not a relationship built on sharing our feelings.
But this one day, there was something wrong with the Internet on my computer, probably having to do with a virus it contracted while having unprotected Internet sex with a Russian porn site. And don’t get all pissy on me for not buying American-I can’t help it; the Eastern bloc just has the hottest girls doing the dirtiest things, and for rock bottom Soviet prices. It’s a logistics decision, really. Now, technically I don’t need the Internet to do my job, but I do need it to play Robot Unicorn Attack on the Adult Swim website. And Perry hardly ever uses his computer; sitting in the office makes him pissy, and he’s given all the office duties to me, anyway. And it’s not like it was hard to guess his password-buttplug; I got it on the third try (first guesses: cock and Justin Timberlake)-so I logged on and played my game for a while.
Now, I know it’s not a big shock to anybody out there, but I have a limited attention span. So after a while, robot unicorns weren’t enough to keep me occupied. I thought about looking up some porn, but Perry had just given me this really long lecture after discovering Pay-Per-View charges on his cable bill for I Love Lesbians III and Breast Side Story, and my goal in life is basically to avoid Perry crabbing at me. So instead I did a search for media files. I wasn’t snooping; I just figured, Perry’s a detective and he’s of the classy caste of gays-Valentino and modern furniture, not glitter and hot pants-so maybe he’d have some old noir-y movies on his hard drive.
Normally Perry keeps things meticulously ordered, but most of the movie files on his computer were labeled pretty vaguely, either with sequences of numbers or one word titles. About halfway down the page, I saw one marked rope. Figuring it was the old Hitchcock movie, I clicked on it.
Now, the one time I watched Rope, I was putting the moves on Sissy Cummings-and I mean, come on, the name alone-so I may have missed some things. For this reason, it took me longer than it should have to realize that what I was watching was not Hitchcock’s classic murder mystery thriller. The production value alone should have told me that, but whatthefuckever. Hindsight is twenty-twenty.
The movie opened on a grainy pan of a dark bedroom. Slowly, the camera zeroed in on the bed, where a man lay, naked except for the eponymous rope, which bound his wrists to the headboard.
It took me a moment to realize it was Perry; frankly, your brain just isn’t wired to accept seeing your boss that way. When I finally got it, I jumped out of my chair and maybe gagged a little; it took me forever to be able to look at Perry-you know, regular Perry, wearing pants and stuff-without seeing, you know, all of him.
I turned the movie off. And then I did what any other self-respecting American would do if they found their boss’s sex tape: I emailed it to myself in case I needed to blackmail him later.
3. Do not touch the guns.
So, despite my display of obvious kickassness last Christmas, Perry mostly leaves me at home for the actual detective-ing. Totally unfair, clearly, but every time I mention that to Perry, he gets all pissy and starts up with the histrionics about PI’s licenses and how he gets shot at so much more when I’m around. I can hardly listen to it; the man’s hysterical. Sometimes, though, when Perry’s feeling particularly magnanimous, and I do a lot of begging, he’ll let me come with him on cases. You know, the standard, boring ones where he thinks there’s less of a chance of me getting him shot.
Perry is always armed when he’s working-and sometimes when he isn’t, something he explains as a Boy Scout-esque “be prepared” thing and I think has more to do with toting around a metal phallus-although apparently guns are another thing that requires a license. Whatever. I am PI by proxy. So naturally, when I started working for Perry, I assumed that handling a gun was part of the job, and whenever Perry would take me on cases with him, I’d take a gun from the gun cabinet. I thought Perry’s not saying anything was his tacit acceptance of my behavior, but in hindsight, maybe he just didn’t realize I was armed, because (a) I usually stuffed the gun into the back of my jeans where it was hidden under my jacket, and (b) he never actually gave me the key to the gun cabinet, per se. In fact, he had gone to great lengths to hide it, and I ended up putting most of my detective skills to work figuring out the key’s new hiding place, and also to working out the ever-changing code to Perry’s Pay-Per-View. I swear, the Sentron Inc. offices are like fucking Fort Knox or something. Maybe Perry’s just seen too many Bond movies.
Anyway, one day Perry was in a good mood, owing, I think, to the underwear model that was our server at lunch and not only put up with Perry’s flirting, but also batted his eyelashes back, and complimented Perry on his suit and his selection from the wine menu. I’d say I was baffled by the guy’s behavior, but Perry left him, like, an eighty percent tip, so I guess he’s got beauty and brains. So Perry was in a good mood, and I managed not to ruin it, so Perry took me with him on a snoop job taking pictures of a philandering husband. I don’t know an F-stop from . . . another part of a camera, but it doesn’t matter, because Perry won’t let me touch his, which is one of those super high-end ones where everything looks arty and clear no matter how inept you are. Seriously, the thing has its own little sarcophagus where it lives when Perry’s not using it, and it has a special cleaning solution for the lens and everything. Perry babies it almost as much as he does his guns.
So me and Perry are in the car outside some seedy motel, and Perry’s snapping pictures of this guy and his boyfriend. Yeah, mistresses are gay in LA way more than I was prepared for. Perry gets some shots of the two of them making out en route to the hotel room. I would have stopped there, because pictures of some strange guy’s hands down your husband’s pants seems proof enough, but Perry is a perfectionist, or maybe just a pervert, and he wanted what we call in the business, “the money shot.” Unfortunately, their room was way up on the top floor, and we were way down on the ground inside Perry’s Mercedes, so Perry got out to go find a better vantage point.
He gave me an icy stare before he left the car.
“Stay,” he said with the same resoluteness you’d use when giving a dog that command, but none of the patience. “Don’t touch anything. Do not mess with the presets on my radio. Do not put your feet on the leather interior. Do not press the OnStar button because you are lonely and want to chat with the operator. I’ll just be a few minutes-you’re a big boy; you can be still for that long.”
Apparently, Perry doesn’t know me at all.
Perry left the car to go find a perch to photograph from. As soon as he left, I leaned my chair back as far as it could go. I fiddled with the AC. Then I played with the XM radio for a while.
Once that no longer interested me, I looked up for Perry. I couldn’t see him from the car-I mean, it was nighttime and therefore dark out, and he’s a stealth motherfucker when he wants to be. And, because I was bored sitting in the car and also because Perry had told me to stay put, so I wanted to do anything but, I decided that I would go watch Perry’s back. Back watching was a skill I had-I mean, I did have eyes, and also a gun, and that seemed to be all that the job required.
So I got out of the car and went to find Perry. Step one in being awesome backup is, you know, actually knowing where the guy you’re backing up is. I finally found him up on the fucking roof of a storage unit in the parking lot next to the motel. Can you fucking believe that? On the roof, like a cat burglar or the fucking Batman or something. This guy.
I couldn’t figure out how Perry had gotten up there! I looked around for a ladder and didn’t see one. I craned my neck, trying to see further up the building, but (a) it was dark, and (b) I’m short, so I couldn’t see much. So I tried jumping, you know, to make myself taller.
So, you know how sometimes when you’re jumping up and down, and you maybe forgot to put the safety on the gun you stashed in the back of your pants, and then you fall down on your ass and the gun goes off and shoots a hole through the seat of your jeans? Yeah, I didn’t know about that either, and it scared the shit out of me. I mean, I came within like six inches of losing my balls. And my balls and I are fucking close. So, I heard this gunshot, and when guns go off so close to you, they’re really fucking loud, and I felt, like, an explosion in my pants, and just automatically, not like I’m a girl or something, I kind of screamed. And, yes, okay, maybe not my manliest moment, but Perry wasn’t one hundred percent badass, either; he heard the gun and he heard me scream and he whipped around on his perch, searching for me in the dark, and I heard him say my name with that uncharacteristic tremor of worry in his voice, and then I heard this sickening crunch.
And it turns out that Perry was so startled by the gun and my screaming that he dropped his camera. Like, off the building dropped it.
And here’s the kicker: somehow, he blamed me for the camera’s sudden demise! I mean, can you believe that shit? He’s Mr. Butterfingers, and I get blamed. Unbelievable; I told you, he’s hysterical.
4. I am serious, Harry. Do NOT touch the guns.
I suspect, but cannot prove, that Perry had a funeral for his camera. The next day, its little sarcophagus was missing, and I swear there was a plot of disturbed earth in the front yard.
So, yeah. That’s pretty much my life now: working through the pain and following Perry’s rules. And yeah, there’s a part of that that’s totally annoying, and rules and a work ethic weren’t really part of my life before Perry, but at the same time, I have a soft bed in a place with legal cable and no hole in the ceiling, and three meals a day, and a job that comes with dental. And, more important than all those things, I’ve got a guy who would take a bullet for me-literally. A true friend.
Even if I’d never call him that to his face.