Snippets.
Jepharee Howard is lying on his stomach on the carpet, watching Dexter's Laboratory on the big screen TV. It came with the house. The Realtor threw it in as a sweetener after Gabe smiled at her and touched her upper arm a lot, and they've been stealing cable from next door since they moved in; Jepha knows this because he held Ryland's tools while he cut and spliced the line, and ducked behind the porch every time someone passed. People in this neighbourhood do not take kindly to the way he looks.
The carpet is the colour of fresh mushrooms in white sauce, which is his favourite of the things that Alex cooks.
There is a couch, but there are rules: no dogs on the couch. The rules exist for a reason (and the reason is to give Jepha something to do) Jepharee, and Jepharees sit on the floor, Gabe insists, where they can be properly petted.
Right now Nate is sitting on the four-seater couch, picking blood from between the links of his bike chain with the precise end of a stiletto knife: Jepha has learnt all the knife names so he will always know which thing to hand to Alex. Sometimes Alex ignores him and asks Ryland and Ryland gets it wrong; he does that on purpose. Jepha understands.
Nate is using Jepha's bare inky-scarred shoulders as a foot rest for his socked feet (his socks have pictures of cakes on them), and every now and then he kicks Jepha in the back of the neck to hear the sounds he makes. Dexter is being screamed at by his sister, whose name will not stay in Jepha's head no matter how many times he watches this episode.
The front door bangs violently open and closed in one short rebound, and footsteps so long and irregular that they can only be Ryland's pound the length of the hall and vanish up the staircase, barely pausing for the corner half-way up. Jepha starts, but Nate pushes him back down, foot to spine.
"If Gabe wants you, he'll ask for you, Puppydog," Nate reminds him, and there is the rattle of a chain passing through an open palm like an underscore. "If you get up now, Dexter's Lab will go off air and never come on again."
Nate lies a lot.
Jepha folds his arms under his chin and listens carefully. Ryland has come home alone and at speed. He left with Alex, carrying things and walking quietly. The answer to this complex equation is Equals Something Wrong. Nate leans forward to tickle him behind the ear, and Jepha promptly forgets to be worried, just pushes his head into Nate's hand until Nate calls him a dirty little bastard and speculates on the presence of a boner. Jepha's dick is actually limp-flat against his thighs and the floor, caught in his track pants, but it would be rude to say so.
After maybe five minutes of antsy squirming under Nate's foot, unable to take in any of the commercials for plastic toys that shot water and flew off ledges in shoddy graphic sequences, Nate took his foot off Jepha's neck and toed him gently in the side.
Standing by the TV room doorway with his cap on the right way round and his long hands dangling by his sides, Gabe says, "Nate, we're taking the puppy."
And from the shadow on Gabe's far side, Andy Hurley (never just "Andy", always "Andy Hurley", a heartbeat on the tongue) says, "What use is he going to be? He can't even fire a gun." His glasses give Jepha the look that makes his belly hot and his bones cold; fear and an ass-widening, dick-hardening tingle. Andy Hurley's painful perfection; he hurts Jepha into the most whole he ever gets. Gabe rations him.
Gabe looks down at Jepha, on his knees half-naked in a blurred selection of scar-bumped tattoos, and shrugs, his hands flopping outwards at the end of the gesture. "He's useful to have around. A good distraction." Gabe lifts his cap and smirks back at Andy Hurley. "He distracts you, doesn't he?"
Andy Hurley gives him the finger; Jepha scrambles to his feet, starts looking for his sneakers with glasses like lasers boring into his back, into his tats. It's okay, it's just the way things are here; Andy Hurley loves him, he just doesn't like Jepha very much. It's okay.
Zebe's apartments were located half the way up the side of one of the few truly tall buildings in the centre of Thal, and even these buildings were miniscule in comparison to the urban space-scrapers of Boeshane's cities, the ones where the penthouse occupants had to have several feet of reinforced, airtight steel between them and the view, the ones where oxygen was piped upward in humming vents…
The doorman to the apartments - they seemed, in Thal, to really enjoy this blend of the archaic and the high-tech, a retinal-and-blood scanner sitting on a carved table beside the man in livery - gave John a cautious smile as he sauntered up to the arched doorway, and an even more cautious one to Jack as he hung back to see just what spectacular piece of fabrication John was going to extract from his anus.
John's boots clicked to a slurred military halt on the grass-flanked path, for even here in the centre of Thal plants flourished like a persistent green army, and shaded his eyes from the midday sun, leaving the doorman to squint into the glare of his uneven smile. He stood with all his weight on one hip, the hem of his shirt untucked, his eyelashes clotted with something dark and sticky, and Jack nearly lost track of what the preternaturally sneaky midget bastard was actually saying. Damn him. Damn him and the crazed womb he'd been yanked from.
"We're here to see Watson Zebe," John said, not changing his posture one bit, tipping his head back to look the doorman in the eye. It must have been quite uncomfortable for the doorman, getting the full force of those manic eyes, but Jack was beyond feeling sympathetic over such tiny things.
"He expecting you?" The doorman fidgeted.
"Doubt it, that's sort of the point." John drummed his fingers over his thigh, mere inches from here he was keeping the smaller of the three knives Jack knew about. "We're from the Kaled State Trading Unions Authority and we need to have a little unofficial chat with Zebe before the rest of our … colleagues … arrive." John gave the doorman a companionable pat on the bicep. "If … you follow me."
It was doubtful the doorman actually did any such thing, as Jack had barely followed the vague vagrancies of John's bullshit himself, but the man in livery looked a little less suspicious. "And you are?"
"We are Agents Broad and Small - is there something funny about that?"
The doorman straightened his face with the practiced muscle twitches of a man who's had to see more than his fair share of stupendously silly excuses, and dipped a minute apologetic bow. "No. No sir. But I will need to see some sort of documentation, just a formality-"
Here, Jack thought, here is where it all falls apart and John stabs him in the stomach for doing his job. Again. He fought the urge to close his eyes in utter frustration, a battle made easier by the urge's near absence. Jack wiped sweat from his face and watched, instead, trying to ignore the gnawing sensation in his chest.
"-this do?" John said, waving something small and papery in the direction of the doorman's hand. If it was documentation then Jack was a fucking Antillian Meditational Monk, they'd not had their hands on anything official from the Kaled city in the entire time they'd been here, and what the hell was John playing at now?
"Perfectly, sir," the doorman smiled, standing aside and with a deft flick switching the scanners off.
Moving over patterned tiles the colour of air-polluted sunsets and unblemished seas, arrayed in yet more floral swathes, Jack turned to John with his eyebrows raised into his sweaty hairline and muttered, "Psychic paper?" somewhat incredulously.
John reached up and brushed something possibly imaginary from Jack's cheek, shook his head. "Money."
Jack felt stupid then. It wasn't really like he'd never bribed anyone before himself, and certainly not as if John hadn't done exactly that in his presence, slipping folded leather fragments or heavy coins into the palms of those whose credit accounts were being monitored, offering either himself or (infuriatingly without consulting him) Jack up for sexual favours; in the time they'd been here, he'd done it all.
The tiled floor gave way to carpets, muffling their footsteps - the click-click of John's knee-high boots, the scuff of Jack's slightly worn all-terrain synthetic soles - as they hit the elevator system, housed in its own clear, green-tinted glass tube. There were bubbles in the glass like the breath of invisible fishes, and silence between the two of them.
"So, do we talk to him here or -" John began, and stopped as Jack laid his hand palm-flat on John's sternum like a warning. Floors rose and fell away as the lift climbed through the building. "-Or," John went on, rubbing his scalp idly with his free hand, "take him away and not get blood on the nice carpets?"
"Doesn't matter if we get blood on the damn carpets," Jack said shortly, watching John's hand, his fingers move over the stubble on his head. The hand stopped in mid-stroke.
"Say it," John suggested, giving Jack something that almost passed for a genuine, normal smile - it crouched on only one side of his face, warm and uncertain and out of place, nearest to Jack - as the platform's ascent began to slow.
"No."
Rather than stopping in a corridor as expected, the lift came to rest inside Zebe's apartments - visible in a fine slice from beyond a heavy, cherry-stained wooden door. John span off the platform and did the little pat-check dance of accounting for all his knives and other weapons that was growing as familiar as Jack's on shaving routine; Jack rather thought that he didn't deliberately throw in extravagant hip-checks while he was doing that, though.
Still need to talk to Holly about Gnosis. This may be a problem as we are currently occupying totally opposing sleep cycles.