Ficlet: Once Bitten
Title: Once Bitten
Fandom/original: original
Rating: G. Maybe PG if you squint.
A/N: A 15 minute fic for rougen. The title was the prompt. From a concept I played with but didn't develop a few years ago.
Cities age.
They age slower than people do, that's true, but they age all the same. Some more gracefully than others. Sometimes they'll blossom, or sometimes they'll fall into decay.
My girl's held up pretty well. You can't smoke in bars anymore, but hell, things are tough all over. You'd look at Chicago today, and if you didn't know better, you'd think she'd always been a clean, shiny thing, sun reflecting off Lake Michigan into the tourists' eyes. She's still got her rough spots, I grant you, but if you'd been here 70 years back...
...well, you weren't, but if you had been, you'd have seen her differently.
People don't walk into my office now, they send an email. Call my cell phone. But it's the same old story. Husband might be cheating on his wife. Rich man wants to know what his son is really getting up to. Employers want to know if the new nanny is really too good to be true. You'd think it'd get sordid after awhile, but you know, I find it sort of... endearing. How as everything ages and evolves, certain things stay fundamentally the same. So I'm sentimental. Sue me.
It's getting harder to be anonymous, though. Probably getting stupid to stay in one place so long. You don't flow with the river, and eventually you gather debris. Besides, there are a lot of ways to disappear in Chicago, but you can only keep turning up again so often. A man's got to eat, keep a roof over his head, have a drink now and again, and it's gonna drive me underground one day.
But I can't leave her. I was born here. I died here. It's a good spot.
I watch the sun go down from behind half-open blinds and I get ready to go out. I haven't had to go to ground just yet. I have my smokes, I have a case, and by the end of the night, I'll probably have a girl.
And, as always, I have my city.
Fandom/original: original
Rating: G. Maybe PG if you squint.
A/N: A 15 minute fic for rougen. The title was the prompt. From a concept I played with but didn't develop a few years ago.
Cities age.
They age slower than people do, that's true, but they age all the same. Some more gracefully than others. Sometimes they'll blossom, or sometimes they'll fall into decay.
My girl's held up pretty well. You can't smoke in bars anymore, but hell, things are tough all over. You'd look at Chicago today, and if you didn't know better, you'd think she'd always been a clean, shiny thing, sun reflecting off Lake Michigan into the tourists' eyes. She's still got her rough spots, I grant you, but if you'd been here 70 years back...
...well, you weren't, but if you had been, you'd have seen her differently.
People don't walk into my office now, they send an email. Call my cell phone. But it's the same old story. Husband might be cheating on his wife. Rich man wants to know what his son is really getting up to. Employers want to know if the new nanny is really too good to be true. You'd think it'd get sordid after awhile, but you know, I find it sort of... endearing. How as everything ages and evolves, certain things stay fundamentally the same. So I'm sentimental. Sue me.
It's getting harder to be anonymous, though. Probably getting stupid to stay in one place so long. You don't flow with the river, and eventually you gather debris. Besides, there are a lot of ways to disappear in Chicago, but you can only keep turning up again so often. A man's got to eat, keep a roof over his head, have a drink now and again, and it's gonna drive me underground one day.
But I can't leave her. I was born here. I died here. It's a good spot.
I watch the sun go down from behind half-open blinds and I get ready to go out. I haven't had to go to ground just yet. I have my smokes, I have a case, and by the end of the night, I'll probably have a girl.
And, as always, I have my city.