My gripe with Swap AUs

I mean it when I say that Kim and Harry’s relationship is only possible at the point in time when they meet, as the people they are during the Hanged Man case. I love playing with AUs, but in the same way even a Harry with amnesia is inevitably a product of his past, so is Kim.

Facts about Harry:

• Harry tried to kill himself three times in one night, and he failed to kill his body.
• The Harry you meet does not remember this, consciously, and yet sometimes the only thing he thinks will solve a situation is killing himself.
• Harry doesn’t remember his mother, but he remembers being very loved by her.
• Harry is the only person left from his childhood friend group, and he forgot them.
• Harry learns about his life through a case ledger and a bitter coworker and a town full of people he traumatized before he tried to kill himself.
• The ledger says, “You were brilliant and bright, and you solved every mystery.” You once beat a man until he could never walk again with this very clipboard because he reminded you of yourself. Out of all the policing specialties, you picked building safety regulation because it wasn’t violent, and once you spotted a crumbling building and reported it, it fell before anyone in the force could give a shit, and a bunch of families died. Your partner that you forgot, whom you only have experienced as vitriolic and judgemental, once campaigned to keep a street mural because he knew it was a sign of hope for you and you liked it.
• Your body remembers what your mind cannot: The smell of apricots and loss. Being raped. Prepping for anal with another man. Being a gym teacher, a loving mentor, and then giving it up for the apricot smell. A sick liver. A sad brain. A locked jaw and chronic pain because the polio epidemic took everyone but not you. Survivor’s guilt. The need to dance.

The thing about Harry’s memory loss is that his life becomes a crime scene to investigate. and he’s very good at that. He’s been told it’s the only thing he’s good at. and his body remembers that that momentum is the thing keeping him alive. And yet everything he finds is marred with mistakes, violence, and lots and lots of love that make the mistakes and violence even more damning. and he can’t stop looking with morbid curiosity because it doesn’t even feel like his life, but he’s living the consequences of it. And sometimes he does things, he feels things, and he understands that he’s not someone else, and then he wants to die.

Why are you an amnesiac? Is it because the pail took you while you sank in the water next to a church where baby pail is growing? Is it what the decades of substance abuse did to your brain tissue? Is this you, protecting you from yourself, just so you can live for a few weeks more?

Why are you a detective? You remember being a happy teacher, a good teacher; you were an art student teaching gym. Why did you change careers? Is the insatiable curiosity that your body remembers something that was eating you alive? Is it why you’re still alive at all, to find out? Did you think you could do more with a gun in your hand and some speed in your system? Did she think that?

And then there’s Kim. One of Kim’s lines that is among my favorites and weirdly honest for what we get from him usually when he’s talking to people that aren’t Harry is

“My position, ma’am? My parents got ripped to shreds in the revolution - I would have gone the same way. I was saved by being two years old. That’s my position - the abattoir.”

Harry’s life is defined by a violence that he cannot remember; Kim’s life is defined by a violence he cannot forget.

And that, I think, is important to their dynamic. Kim’s life is defined by the degradation he has suffered, by the Moralintern as the child of revolutionaries, by his peers at every point in his life due to his racial heritage and his sexuality, and by his disability. His fear isn’t even fear, it’s a certainty—he’s waiting for the other shoe to drop and go the same way his parents went, in front of a firing squad for daring to want something better. So he bargains, and he tries to delay what he knows is coming by not only not stepping out of line but also giving the line a wide berth that could be a fucking moat filled with krakens.

He grows up Dolorian breathing the ideology of the institution that had his parents executed 24/7. He believes so deeply that he is as important as everyone else for the world to keep going, a blue forget-me-not, a piece of the sky. But of course he knows enough about his parents, so he cosplays as a revolutionary and joins the RCM as the shitty replacement of the Commune’s guerrilla.

He spends 15 years in a position usually given to recently enlisted officers because they do not believe him to be good enough. He finally promotes by going undercover as a teenager and infiltrating a fucking arcade because Asians look so young and Asians are so good at tech. The first partner he gets as a detective is nicknamed Eyes because he was assigned to him because his eyesight and sharpshooting could not be trusted. He doesn’t see a shooter approaching, and Eyes takes a bullet for him, and he’s the one to deliver the news to his family.

He doesn’t even believe in Moralism, strictly, because he’s too old and not innocent enough, but the sunk cost of spending his entire life carving his tombstone as an RCM lieutenant is simply too much to give up. He rations his cigarettes to remind himself no matter how much he wants, wanting will destroy him from the inside out.

And then, he gets sent to Martinaise both because he is undeniably good at his job (he’s shown them he can shoot, he can fine, he can send people to jail facilities without breaking a sweat, and he can lord over his authority to any civilian as much as any other straight white cop in the precinct) and with the expectation that he will fail and they’ll finally have a reason to demote him. And he goes there and waits for two days for Harry to show up, and when he does, he’s drunk, doesn’t know the basics of the world (the basics he cannot forget for one second or they will kill him, too), and is still capable of wonder.

And Kim is so fucking jealous. He’s like, “What the fuck? I have to do so much, and this guy gets a pass? ”. Not because you are actually doing anything wrong; most of the questions are standard for Harry at any point in the game, but you get to forget everything and keep your job. You get to have drugs and keep your standing. You get to be violent and brilliant, and no one doubts you for a second. He gets away with wearing heels and blatantly faggy old-fashioned clothes. He gets to cry and show the worst parts of himself. He gets to protect you without losing anything.

Harry is everything Kim can’t be, because he is a white cop.

But that’s not what changes things, in the end. It’s that this guy who literally is everything a good detective is and also everything awful a detective is, takes one look at you and sees you on the other side of the moat and he doesn’t even build a bridge: He plunges headfirst into the moat and makes friends with the krakens and comes out soaked and dying on the other side and he smiles and asks for your opinion, Kim, you always know what to say

He doesn’t know you, and he’s the first person that doesn’t assume the worst. And you know he’s putting you on a pedestal, and you need to make sure he understands that’s not good for him, but it does feel a little good to have all the things you do be acknowledged without friction.

And he makes stupid jokes, and when you joke back, he laughs and doesn’t think less of you. And he likes art, which you will never let yourself understand, and he likes children because he doesn’t have a history of 15 years trying to get kids to have a better life and them dying by the dozens, and he’s everything you hate because he’s everything you wish you could be.

And then he finds a miracle, and he tells the miracle about you, and you take a picture, and it’s not a dream. You thought, It must be the amnesia; he will remember, and life will go on with the realities that you know to be true. But the picture is still there: Tangible proof that not everything you think is immutable is a sure fact of reality.

Unbeknownst to you, in one of these universes he spares you from a nuclear bomb that he launches himself. If you get shot, he will hear you on the radio when he needs you the most. You are not the only one that has been changed from this.

Pre-amnesia Harry and Kim could have never found this tentative kindness because Harry was bogged down by all the things he had done and Kim was buried in things he couldn’t do. But whatever happened to Harry, it opened a door in a huge web of universes, just by saying, “It doesn’t have to be like this.” No matter where they go from the ending of the game, that is a thing you cannot unknow.