Participants:
| Scene Title | Fine |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | There's a mugging in process in Chelsea. Also fallout from an old relationship. |
| Date | January 28, 2011 |
Midtown's a nice place to get away from sane pursuit. Is. Was. Until Flint's generator went out and froze over in the midst of the last string of winter storms to roll through.
So.
Back to Chelsea, where lightly irradiated motels are cheap to live out of and the locals are used to being mugged for money to pay for lightly irradiated motel rooms. There are streets here that no one's bothered to push the snow out of, making the scenery ghastlier than it really has a right to be.
Then again, the sight of a rangy gent with glowing eyes and a skullcap pulled low over the long, scruffy cut of his jaw bouncing a younger man's head off an ice-encrusted DON'T WALK sign in the midst of a scuffle over a dropped wallet might be pretty ghastly on its own. Especially once the bleeding starts.
If the scuffle was over a dropped wallet, it might be overkill, but the odds are the wallet was likely being lifted by the familiar man to the brunette in her layers, knit cap, scarf and boots across the street as she comes around the corner and to a standstill. To Abigail's credit, she's never really been present when Deckard was actually doing anything nefarious.
Felix had driven her back to the speakeasy and not relishing another night of killing bugs, and listening to vermin, she'd packed up her few things and had him drop her off a couple blocks over. You know, where you could still see street. And now she's across the way, watching a head ricochet off solid orange hand lit up, shoulders hunched in against the cold with brows raised. "
Mike" She calls out his name, his fake name. Warning, your ex is watching. Warning, god is judging you right now from on high and you are not being very nice.
To the younger guy's credit, Flint is bleeding too — brackish red from a split across his cheekbone thickening quick in the cold. He might've bitten off more than he could chew if he didn't outweigh the victim by a solid thirty or forty pounds, bony knuckles wound like an iron vice through scarf and warm grey wool.
Anyway the wallet's a black speck in the snow churned grey around their feet, whiskey breath rolling heavy between them when Abby's voice rings at an echo down the otherwise still street. That Deckard looks up first is only natural, coyote eyes ringed wide in the semidark. Her voice is familiar. He's guilty.
Also, the poor asshole he has his hands on is reeling a little at the moment.
There has rarely been a time when he's not been littered with some mark or evidence that he's been a very bad boy. "Okay, you've had your fun. That's it. You're both bleeding like stuck pigs and I don't have the energy or the inclination to take care of more than one person. You get your hands off him, you let him get his wallet and take off" This to the reeler. Sympathy is in the gaze leveled at him.
She comes off the hill of snow, boots sinking a little, skeleton marching across invisible landscape, inches off the ground. A few more healing fissures around her nose to be added to his mental repository of what her skeleton looks like. "You can raid my wallet, but with less beating. I'd rather get mugged by someone I know than someone I don't" Which is really quite a feasible thing. She lifts her hands, shooing motions to the victim of Flints. "Shoo, go, get you. I'm pretty sure you're not so innocent either, no ones innocent on this street, so get, while the gettings good, I can't hold him off forever"
A beat of distraction is all the other guy needs to recover enough to resume his wrestling — there's some more twisting around. Grappling. Teeth grit, boots scraping around in ice and snow until Abby's close enough for Flint to cave and flinch out first, a wrest and sling enough to send the competition staggering off sideways. Walletless.
Deckard's quick to snatch it up out of the snow once he has the room to, black leather bit up into his left hand like a biscuit, cash and all.
So it's kind of awkward when the other guy takes a wary step back as if he intends to retrieve it in accordance with Abby's ruling and Flint doesn't budge, jaw set and brow hooded. His now.
Stalemate, a woman standing with her hands on her hip as she flickers a look between the two. Who's going to give? Deckards got the wallet and she knows him well enough that he's unlikely to give it up. Like a dog with a steak in his maw and the owner standing there with questionable intention of whether they really want that steak back.
The threat of minutes or hour sin the cold that this stand off could produce is enough for her to dig into her messenger bag with one hand, the other a gloved finger raised as if to say one minute.
The next, she's opening her own wallet, flicking to where her own bills are kept and advancing on the poor mugee, offers out 100 dollars. "Take it, go. I'll make sure your ID gets mailed to you, try not to hit a check point" She hopes that it's equal to or more than what is in the guys wallet. She ensures that her own wallet isn't near where the guy can grab it.
$100 is evidently more than sufficient. The guy snatches clean cash out of Abby's hand under the osprey angle of Flint's glare and makes a break for it without so much as a thank you. End of story.
Granted, Deckard doesn't say thank you either. He watches his quarry to the furthest fringe of his perception and then sets to rifling through the wallet with Abby still standing right there, irritation furrowed in familiar lines between his brows and fuzzier around the flat of his mouth.
She's a 100 dollars poorer from her very husbanded reserve. most of it back in Pollepell, squirreled away for when/if she managed to make it across to canada. She watches the guy lope off through the snow, toeing at the red stained slush and snow that was part of the evidence left to what went on down in the corner. She swivels her gaze to check out the crosswalk sign, make sure there's none there before eventually she's looking to Flint. Watching him rifle through the wallet. "Take the money, credit cards, give me his ID, I'll mail those back to him Flint, you can keep the rest" She should by all rights, take the whole thing from him, but these days, her tolerance for criminal acts is a little less than it was before.
"Do you need a room or are you heading off to some hole? You should have your face looked at"
$38.20 richer, Flint defies her a second time.
Which is probably petty.
The wallet is folded over with ID and everything else still inside and slid smooth into his back pocket. Less of an obstacle if he didn't square himself to her in the same movement, black peacoat and grey knit cap and enough of an attitude problem to easily supply two or three Flints with maybe enough leftover for a Joseph. He's still tall. A little scrubbier and leaner than when she saw him last.
Winter tends to be that way to people. Also government crackdowns.
He still hasn't said anything.
"Fine, be a jerk. Go get your face looked at, stay out of the ruins. There's Robots there and they can figure out who's evolved or not and they're not the kind that will vacuum your floors or build you a car" Obviously she thought the odds of him listening to her were low to nil and he's proven that true.
"Which place here Flint is cheaper and won't get me raped in the middle of the night?" Since he probably knows this sort of thing better than her. She reaches up, scratching at the side of her face, a healing cut there, past scab stage and into shiney pink. Birds.
"Motel 6. My face is fine." Says Flint, finally, voice coarse against frosty air and freezing wind. The high turn of his collar and the low pull of his cap jut at his ears and grizzled jaw, lending him a thuggish cast that really only serves to emphasize the vaguely invasive nature of his loom. A wolf no longer terribly impressed by fire. Holy or not.
"What happened to yours."
"Birds. I think it was a crow or a grackle. Unless your looking at my ankle, which is when I fell off a horse. Or is it my nose? Stoli and a blind teenager. Life not in a million dollar condo is a little rougher. But I'm not quite down to the whole beating up people on the sidewalk for fun. Your face isn't fine. It's cracked open, you just can't see it because there's no mirror and your hiding from the world behind your x-ray vision. You found my new tattoo yet Flint?" He'd have to see the bottom of her foot to, but… "Which way to the Motel 6. Hopefully they don't have a rat problem"
Flint hadn't been looking for tattoos. He is now — a reflexive hook and snag of his stare downwards looped back up half a breath later when he catches himself. Too late, bioluminecense tell-tale through the subtlest changes of focus and direction. It also makes it more obvious when he narrows his eyes like he does once he realizes he's fallen for something, even if he's probably not exactly sure what.
She made him look.
"Not until tonight."
"You won't find it Flint, no matter how hard you stare through my clothes" Motel 6's aren't hard to figure out, they generally have big signs and since Flint's pre-occupied now. "Have a good night. Try to limit yourself to at most, two more people. If you need some money, come ask me. Look for Martha Ranier" She'll give him her fake name, be nice.
And she hooks a left, heading down the street in the hopes that around the next corner will be the large 6 that will mean a nice bed, no obvious vermin and with a slim chance of looming peering staring men bearing x-ray eyes, even as she's hunching in on herself against the cold and forging a path through snow.
"I don't need x-ray vision to see you without your clothes on," may or may not be loud enough to carry after her, depending on how the wind blows. The implication being that he has the convenience of ~memory~ for such breaches of privacy, shoddy as any given recollection might be after all the work he's had done on his beleaguered brain.
He doesn't follow, though, braced into a stubborn haunt on this corner until she's far enough off that she won't be able to double back and follow him anywhere. Because she might want to!!
She won't, and she doesn't catch his late retort. Abigail nee Martha, just trudges onwards, in search of where she's going to stay for the night. Deckard is a big boy, now 38 dollars and change richer. He can find his own room for the night too.