Prompt Post No. 12

[inception_anon]

Welcome to Round 12 of the Inception Kink Meme. Prompting System

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[fill] blood and bone (3/?)

[anonymous]

Near Arthur’s small apartment, in a less than savory district of the city, was a bar called Som Na Cin. It was a small place, ostensibly named after the original owner’s family, all long since dead. It was solely managed by a man named Yusuf - a friend of Arthur’s, who managed to keep the bar open almost constantly, without any help, unfathomably. Everyone within a ten-block radius seemed to pour into its tiny confines by sundown, including Arthur. He entered about half an hour before the sun vanished behind buildings.

Arthur had returned from the Lord Mayor’s tower with Mal Cobb’s hair in his pocket late in the afternoon. He had disembarked from the intercity train (of which there were eight in the whole city, all running on raised tracks from Cobb’s towers to the outskirts of civilization) at its last stop, and had walked the three blocks to his ramshackle apartment building. Once in his apartment he had splashed some water from the tiny bathroom’s sink onto his face, considered his options while staring at a dead woman’s hair, dressed and left.

When he walked in and over to the bar, flipping up the hem of his jacket so that he didn’t sit on it on the dirty stool, and then sat, Yusuf smiled at him. The man, dark hair curling and smile bright even in the dim bar light, bent down and reached beneath the bar. He stood and slammed a dark glass bottle down in front of Arthur, leaning forward.

“So what’s the job?” His eyebrows with eagerness.

How had he known? Arthur frowned and reached out, using a thin bone ring wrapped around one of his fingers to snap the cap off. He took a deep gulp from the bottle, letting the liquor burn through him.

“What job?” He groused. He didn’t think it would be wise to tell anyone, even Yusuf, his closest friend, about this particular job. He could tell Yusuf as a kind of suicide note, perhaps, a “If something happens to me, the Lord Mayor Dom Cobb has done it” kind of note. But that wouldn’t do him any good. If the Lord Mayor decided to have him killed, no one would be able to avenge him. Cobb was the most powerful man in the city - no one could touch him. And he didn’t think Cobb would be amenable to Arthur spreading the news of this commission among his friends, either. No, he’d keep silent about it, and maybe he’d live to tell them all about it later. He shook his head, and Yusuf frowned.

“I know you’ve got some sort of job, and don’t try and tell me you don’t. I saw you get dragged off early this morning by police, and you’re back already. Either you’re some sort of mad genius, to have escaped them so quick, you’ve bribed the lot of them (which I doubt, you haven’t had a client in months and I give you liquor gratis), or you’ve been commissioned. So, which is it?“

Arthur tightened his grip on his bottle, idly wondering if it was possible to squeeze hard enough to shatter the glass. Likely not. He was saved from having to answer Yusuf’s prying by the arrival of another customer, who dragged a stool up next to Arthur with a loud screech and sat heavily down on it. Arthur raised his eyebrows to himself and pulled his drink closer.