[FIC] Sixty days of sweat and dirt / 1
Title: Sixty days of sweat and dirt
Part: One
Word Count: 8800 I am not joking and that is just this part.
Summary: After Silent Hall goes all to hell, the person who was Jack Harkness leaves Torchwood and heads for the border. It's not like he has a place to go, but isn't that how it always works out?
A/N: I DON'T KNOW WHY THESE THINGS KEEP GETTING EPIC WHILE I'M NOT WATCHING. This has to be serialized because it won't all fit in one post - this, I know even before I'm done writing it. It's unbeta'd. It's a first rough draft and probably won't make it to a second. It's to be continued. Enjoy.
Disclaimer: OCs are mine. Jack was yoinked from the BBC and drastically AU'd. The Rift is a lot of peoples'. Opinions listed in this fic are those of the characters and not of any Barrowman. Reading fic does not enable reader to fly.
-
Two seconds. Two on the outside. That was the time he gave himself to hit Tyler with a lie so big it'd debilitate, to duck out of the immediate path of the bullet the angel sent his way, to get that gun in the moment of pain and distraction and take the entire room hostage. And it worked, though realizing that stretched the second count to three - for a moment he had them all watching, hanging at the trigger edge of making a move while he had his gun up and trained to shoot through the angel and into the man she was standing in front of.
The shot she'd pulled off when Tyler's pain had hit her had torn through his left thigh. He guessed a few minutes before it healed on its own, but he didn't have time to wait that.
Second four pulled through his fingers like a rope burn. Everything was a matter of time - timing when he caught the hint of threat in Gwen's voice, all but imperceptible, timing before someone called reinforcements to haul him off to cells, timing before they decided - again - that the best alternative was just to shoot him, or before Suzie noticed something in the way his shadow dived when he pulled it in to keep it from giving anything away. At at the leading edge of second five (every second in a tenuous position weakens that position; it gives opponents time to consider and react) he bared his teeth. The smile did nothing to hide how his heartbeat was hammering his fingertips, how all the escape routes he could see were treacherous terrain.
"So," he said. The voice rang tinny in his ears; the words themselves meant nothing. "That's how it is." The smile unbalanced, tilted to one side. "I'd give me a head start, if I were you."
At second eleven he was ducking out the door and slamming it closed. At twelve he was running for the stairs, for the door, for the press of Chicago and relative anonymity of the crowds, bloodened and manic as he was. In the end it was only the alleys that swallowed him.
He hit dusk still running, letting exhaustion burn itself out against the energy that'd never let him stay injured. Then he slowed, let himself fall back into watching and waiting.
There were a few problems with putting out an APB on him - that much he knew. But given Torchwood and their resources...
Missing the wrist device made this all harder, and he had to lay low. The woman at the Conrad who could locate anything might have died a long time ago, but there was still CCTV, still archangels, still perhaps sympathetic demons, still things to evade. He needed to get cleaned up. He needed to cover his tracks and he needed to get out of this city.
In the dark pool beneath a broken streetlight he checked the gun he'd stolen from Tyler's guardian angel. Good make, well maintained, full clip minus the bullet she'd put through his thigh - at least that was good for something. Not, of course, great for staying undetected.
Go far enough in most cities and, somewhere between the business districts of the downtown area and the new suburbs cropping up where the city is expanding, and there are patches of older homes, older neighborhoods, some of which are doing well and some of which are falling apart. Sticking to the darker streets he felt his way along, watching the quality of the houses, looking for potholes in the road, following the sounds that signified the shift from affluence to subsistence.
Cleaning was the first thing. He found a gas station/car wash that had closed for the night, waited for silence, and took care of the lone surveillance camera and door alarm with two shots before forcing the lock, stealing into the convenience store and heading to the bathroom.
The blood on his face, in his hair and on his hands washed out with some effort. His trousers were dark enough that in the dark, at least, blood didn't show; the shirt was a problem, so he lifted a jacket from a rack by a stand of novelty Chicago shotglasses. So far as he could tell it was a denim-and-fake-leather affair with a winged motorcycle on the back; that didn't matter so much as the fact that it had long enough sleeves and zipped up the front.
Then he left.
The tags went in a dumpster two blocks away. Then he turned sharply south, trying to jag his trail if anyone came looking, using the night when most of the city slept and he didn't need to. Cross into Indiana and official jurisdictions would throw another stumbling block against any allies Torchwood might field.
Then take stock of his situation. Pawn the gun. Get a fresh set of clothing. Get a map and a knapsack and see if his journal had caught up with him.
Then get away.
ANATA - Whiting, IN
Anata had the feeling she was being watched as she swept out the bar for the afternoon trickle. It was just after one o'clock and Whiting wasn't exactly a hopping location at the best of times, so when she got the feeling that there was someone nearby, it was notable in a way she didn't appreciate. That was enough to get her wings out under her coat, and when the feeling didn't go away or resolve itself after ten minutes, she threw the broom back in the closet and walk outside. If some goon thought he was going to make trouble before she was even open, she'd have no problem burning them and tossing their body onto I-90.
What she found was some white-kid wanderer sitting across the road in a biker jacket, with a green baseball cap pulled low over his face.
Wanderers. And here she thought living in the suburbs of the suburbs of Nowhere, USA meant she wouldn't have to deal much with their shit.
She locked the door behind her and crossed the street, pressing one hand into her hip. "Look, honey," she snapped, "if you're looking for handouts, go north-northwest about twenty miles. Place called Chicago. Can't miss it."
He looked up. His face was shaded by the bill of the hat but he was a but scuffed around the edges, she could see - a few strands of hair crushed under the cap, some dust around his collar and, if she looked, on his hands. Clean-shaven, though. Staring at her like he expected something.
"Don't suppose you'd have a job," he said.
Oh, that just took the cake. She planted a hand on her hip, scowling. "Does it look like I have a 'help wanted' sign in that window?" she asked, pointing back toward the bar. "Does it look like I couldn't write one up if I had a job I wanted done?"
The guy shrugged. "Usually odd jobs to do somewhere. I don't need much."
She shrugged out of her coat, exposing her shoulders to the cold air. The coat was heavy brown leather, but underneath was a tanktop with a thin enough back to let her wings out freely. She spread them - they weren't the largest or most impressive wings, and on someone who wasn't the largest or most impressive person anyway the effect was only unsettling if you didn't know wings on people happened. The dark web of membrane matched her skin, the overall roundness matched her stocky frame, and the claws that sharpened each phalange matched her annoyance.
"See those?" she asked. "Know what that means?" She paused. "I'm a demon, coolblood. I'm one of those bastards your mum would've warned you about if you'd grown up here. Just as soon kill you as look at you."
The guy stood. He was tall, she realized - most of a foot taller than her, and built pretty well to boot. But there was something in the way he held himself that reminded him of a charun most of all, one just off a kill, waiting for someone to show up asking questions. She knew that look. Came home to it, once in a while.
"What'd you do?" she asked.
The guy's lips twisted up, half-smiling. "Went crazy," he said. "Burned a few bridges. Before you ask, I don't plan on doing it again."
He paused.
"Poludnica," he added. "That's my sort of luck."
Anata snorted and pulled her coat back on. "So you got fucked up by a hotblood. That mean I should care?"
He shrugged. "You asked."
Anata looked him up and down.
He shoved his hands into his pockets. "I can bus tables," he says. "You don't even have to pay me. I'll just keep my tips."
Anata shook her head. "Not likely to get a lot of tips," she said, but turned and crossed the street again. "Fine. You want to try it, we'll see. But you're not getting wage from me, and you cross me, I will see you burn."
"I don't need much," he said again, following after her.
Anata unlocked the door again, stepping inside and holding it for him. He came in, blinking in the shades-down darkness, and she closed the door and crossed over to the door to the storage room behind the bar. "Here," she said, pulling out a few packages of napkins. "Stock all the holders, then you can come back and make sure everything's right in the bathroom. What's your name?"
The guy paused with his hand on one of the napkin bundles, looking at her like he'd blanked on the question. After a moment, he said "J."
"Jay like the bird?" Anata asked.
"J like the letter." He took the bundle, walking to the first table and taking the napkin dispenser from it. "Just J."
"Anata," Anata said, watching him move from table to table, not quite at home with the rough floor and the woodgrain. Weird human. They'd see.
-
The first person to come into the bar wasn't a patron but a young teenager with a red backpack slung over her shoulder, wrapped up in a scarf and a jacket too large for her, skin a bit darker than Anata's dark tan and eyes just as cool but not yet as jaded. She looked at J when she came in, but didn't deviate from her course to the bar where Anata met her. "Who's the guy?"
"Human," Anata answered, pulling a juice box from the under-bar fridge and handing it to her. "Wanderer. Wanted a job. Probably crazy."
"Cool," the girl said, and spun on the stool. J was applying electrical tape to the cord of one of the neon signs, and she tilted her juice in his direction. "Hey. I'm Bell."
J looked back toward her, making sure she was talking to him. Not that there was anyone else to talk to, but given the reception he'd got from Anata, he had the feeling that hired help didn't get a lot of notice around here. "...J," he said.
"You got homework to do?" Anata broke in, and Bell groaned and opened her backpack.
"Yeah, mom."
"Then you can do it. Come on." She drummed a knuckle on the bar, then walked in J's direction with a spraybottle of window cleaner and a shop towel. J took them without comment.
By the time he'd worked his way across the windows Bell had worked her way through her homework, or at least that was what was implied by the way her book snapped shut. He went to return the cleaner to its storage room when she bustled past him, heading to an old jukebox in the corner and coaxing it to life.
He put the supplies back and turned to gauge her. She was young and probably as normal as one could be in a small town - too young, he thought, to have wings, if she was getting them. No hint of training, no strange grace, not like Tay or April or someone who'd been trained to kill, but there was something. She held herself as one who knew that her place in the world came already assured and she walked like...
Well. She walked like Gwen.
Like Gwen, like Rose, like Sion and so many people far back in Torchwood's sordid history who'd come in as civilians and developed that way of walking, testing out their own sharp edges. Green and eager for the fight, open and ready to be broken.
Those were the kind of people he'd been taught to own, through one role or another. Break them for the Time Agency, protect them for the Doctor, lead them for Torchwood. Standing in the room with her he was already feeling out the weak spots - watching to learn how and why she'd fall down.
At least, he was watching until Anata crossed the room and hit him, splitting his lips open between his teeth and the back of her hand. "That's a one-way street to you hanging from branches, you looking at my daughter like that."
J spat blood into his sleeve, then paused an instant before his retort. Like 'that'? As if he'd presented a credible threat, a personal threat, a-
"I'm not," he began, though there was a warm pressure creeping up from the pit of his stomach toward the back of his throat. "I'm not after your daughter."
"My husband is a charun," Anata snapped; "you think I don't know when you're looking for the sweet spots, you-"
"-what?"
"How many people you killed, boy?"
J stared. The threat of murder wasn't what he'd thought she was taking issue to. And as far as murder went...
What, do I wear it on my sleeve nowadays?
"A hell of a lot," he said, and heard his tone drop down. Keep your head down, keep normal, be unremarkable said his training, but I'm the last thing you might see when you die screaming said his conditioning and it was his conditioning trying to surface in his voice. "Most because I had to. Not a lot because I wanted to. And I can't help that that's the way I look at things."
Anata watched him, and if there was murder in either one of their eyes...
She turned, spat toward the sink, and grabbed a rag. "Tables," she said.
J took the rag and turned away.
Behind him, he could hear Bell walking up to her mother, speaking with the hushed exasperation common to teenagers everywhere. "Geez, mom..."
"You can at least make it to your wings without getting into that kind of trouble," Anata snapped back, and J heard a smack. He ignored it.
The tables were clean, but he wiped them down anyway.
-
J met the third member of Anata's family when he ducked in through the door, eyes flicking up and over everyone inside, and grabbed a chair without saying anything to anyone. He was a short man with salt-and-pepper hair in stark contrast to his dark skin, with a furtive manner and a way of watching everything without looking at any of it. J caught Anata's eye and she said "Marcus. My better half," in a tone that implied that was the title, not the affectionate, and a volume that said Marcus didn't care what he heard.
The first night went well, at least in that there were no major disturbances. Marcus sat by the door and watched the people coming in, and he dragged people out if they crossed some line only he was aware of. Anata tended the bar, sending J from table to table with a point or a nod or a curt word. Bell moved from her seat at the edge of the bar to the jukebox to the door where her father sat, ducking around the people who were, J was led to believe, mostly demons. None of them bothered her. A few glanced her way, one even raised his glass in her direction, but any other indication of interest was met with a look from Anata and quickly drowned out.
Marcus didn't say a word until they were coming up on midnight, with J cleaning up the table just behind him. The occupants had stumbled out into the night hanging onto each other for companionship, support, and Marcus was nursing a bottle of Pepsi and staring off at the dark horizon.
"Bell getting you in trouble?" he asked.
J looked up, unsure whether or not he was being addressed. Marcus wasn't looking at him. Then, no one else was listening.
"I tend to get in trouble whether or not someone helps," he said. Marcus snorted; the way he did make it sound like a de facto chuckle.
"She tends to get people in trouble whether or not they want to be," he said.
J returned the noise, and picked up the last of the crumpled napkins and spent mugs. He grabbed the bowl of pretzel crumbs last, balancing it in the crook of his elbow.
When he came back with a full bowl, dropping it solidly at the center of the table, Marcus was still staring out at nothing. "Just don't let her take a fancy to you," he said. "That's where you really get into trouble."
"Think I'm a bit out of her range," J said.
"Isn't everyone. She thought she'd run away with some fifty-year-old behemoth last year. She's got fantasies."
J glanced back at Bell. She was arguing with someone over the bar, leaning almost up against the taps. She was taller than both of her parents, J noticed; Anata was filling another mug beside her, and he looked away before he caught her eye. "How old-?"
"Fourteen. Two more years for the wings," Marcus said. "Her mother's hoping she'll be a rak. Bring some legitimacy to the family. Me, so long as she's not a pol, I'll be happy."
"There's a poludnica up in Chicago," J said, watching Marcus for a reaction. "Neqa'el. Doing big things."
Marcus shrugged. "If you're into that."
"J!"
He looked up. Anata clicked her fingers, calling him to the bar. Marcus went back to staring out the door.
The hours went on.
Sometime in the small of the night everything wound down, most of the patrons drifting out of their own accord, a few nudged out the door by Marcus. Then the ritual of cleaning up after them began, Anata and Marcus moving in patterns they'd learned over how many hundreds of nights like these, J following and helping where he could.
He was elbow-deep in dishwater when Anata came up to him with the last armload of mugs, her shoulder brushing his arm and she dumped them in the sink. Then she paused, stepping away but turning toward him, eyes narrow and intent.
"What do you want here?" she asked. Marcus was poking around the floor, searching for sticky spots and lost personal effects, and Bell was dozing on a chair in the corner. Neither of them seemed to care. "What wanderer comes to Whiting and starts holding out for a job?"
"I just need the lay of the land," J said. "Enough money to get somewhere bigger and start putting things together."
"What things?" After a moment, she shook her head. "Never mind. I don't want to know. You're good enough. You can stay on. Maybe if I'm feeling generous I'll find something to pay you. How much you got in tips tonight?"
J glanced down to his pocket. "About twenty," he said. Marcus snorted from across the room.
"You asked for it," he said. "Coming to work at a demon bar."
"Fuck. Not like I roll in tips when I bus," Anata said, leaning back against the bar and resting her elbows, watching J's back. "There've gotta be better places for you to work."
"I don't need a better place." J's voice was oddly dark, toothed like the edge of a sawblade. "Here's fine."
"Can't figure you." Anata slipped out from behind the bar and went to set the tables in their proper positions. "Finish those dishes and help Marcus with the floor."
They finished up and Anata shooed him out so she could close out the register. A few minutes later Marcus and Bell came out, Marcus walking straight to the last car in the lot and Bell leaning back against the wall in deliberate mimicry of J's posture.
"You're not normal," she said. "Like, not even a little."
J looked over at her, eyebrows raising. "So?"
"So?" Bell repeated back, then rolled her eyes. "Whatever."
Anata stepped out the door and locked it behind her, eying J up. "Tomorrow at two, if you want to try another night."
J shrugged. "It's something to do."
"Right." She took Bell's wrist, pulling her toward the car. "Two o'clock. Be right back here."
"That's where I'll be," he said, and Anata slid into the front passenger seat.
"Hey, night, mister," Bell called back as she climbed into the car. "See ya."
She closed the door, and the car pulled away. J watched it go, watched the taillights turn a corner and disappear behind a diner, and then he started walking, feeling out the circumference of the town.
-
The second night was a lot like the first.
There was a swell in activity as the night wore on, which Marcus, in his usual laconic way, noted as unusual and didn't elaborate on. J had the sense that they were watching him - kept catching stares out of the corner of his eyes, and then there were the ones who didn't bother to hide them. He had the feeling that business had swelled because they'd brought in an attraction.
At some point Anata slipped Bell a ten dollar bill, and a bit later she came back with a hamburger and a box of snack cakes. She set up at one edge of the bar, swinging back and forth on the stool as she ate.
J walked over once to pick up the pile of cake wrappers and Bell leaned toward him, glancing across the patrons. "Most of them never saw a wanderer before," she said. "I knew a bunch of you when we lived up in Schaumberg."
"Really," he said. Across the bar, Anata looked his way, and he flashed the wrappers and turned to throw them away. Bell scooted down a few stools, taking her food with her, to follow him.
"There was this one guy," she said, "who did light shows. Any kind you wanted. Neon animals and stuff. You do anything cool like that?"
"I get migraines sometimes," J said, and Anata shoved an armload of dirty mugs into his chest and pointed him to the sink.
"I like him," Bell said behind him, which probably wasn't meant for his ears, but which he heard anyway. He also heard Anata snort.
"Sometimes I wonder if you're really my child."
The last thing he heard before running water drowned them out was the thwap of a snack carton hitting an arm, and Anata's low chuckle.
By the time they were closing up he'd made a bit better haul - just over forty - though he couldn't help but think that he was prostituting his existence as a wanderer here, and for that, the money really could have been better. At least what was noteworthy to a bunch of demons in Whiting wasn't likely to make it up to Chicago and be noteworthy to a bunch of wanderers there, but at the moment having all these eyes upon him wasn't doing anything for his nerves.
Marcus was sweeping out the dirt the bargoers had tracked in, his slow, methodical strokes marking time against the clockless air. J had taken a mop and was attacking spilled beer, finishing up one patch and dunking the mophead back into the bucket. Marcus seemed to have a sixth sense for where mess lay, and for a moment J just watched him coax pretzels and pebbles out of corners with his broom.
"Just ask him," Anata said.
J looked up. "What?"
Anata walked by Marcus, kissing his cheek in passing. "Hon, this kid's on the run from something and he hasn't got a clue how to do that. Why don't you tell him how you used to do it?"
Marcus looked up toward the ceiling, blinking absently. "Well, first," he said, "you find a small town that doesn't care if you need to kill from time to time. If that doesn't work, you get real familiar with statutes of limitation." He looked down, scrutinizing J for a moment, still not meeting his eyes. "...but that works better if you've got a demon's old age to look forward to."
"Old age isn't a problem," J said. Impatience is.
He couldn't even wait in one place for the Doctor, badly as that turned out. He was always leaving Cardiff behind, hunting through the broader universe, looking, moving, and here... he didn't have that. He could walk from here to the next town and do the small things the next town would have, he could work his way eventually into some sort of organization, into the military, into crime, intelligence, he could work his way up through the ranks until he found an alternative to scrabbling for tips and hiding from the long arm of the law, he could - but he wasn't built for that.
Shark wasn't the term for an Agency man. The term was dog, but he was a dog which had to keep moving. Wild dog, maybe, restless, full of wanderlust, with no home territory, trounced by one alpha and looking for another.
Marcus had gone back to sweeping. J closed his hands over the end of the mopstick, watching him.
"What do you want here?" he asked, then caught himself. "I mean, is this-" he indicated the bar, the broom, the rhythm even he was falling into, "enough for you?"
Marcus looked up, gaze directed just over J's shoulder and toward the bathroom and the jukebox. "I got a job," he said. "I got a family. I got a past - fulla war, too. I got a good spot of wandering in when I was a kid. Yeah, this is enough. Why wouldn't it be?"
Why would it?
He couldn't say what he was thinking, so he went back to looking for sticky spots. What was he supposed to say? Time was, he lived in the palm of catastrophe. Time was, he lived at the bleeding edge of the Agency. Yesterdays were varied and tomorrows were foreign territories. There were no plans except the ones that fell down or went wrong, no routine except the very basics by which they lived.
It wasn't this. Here, yesterday was like tomorrow. They were moving in tight little circles, from the bar to the door to the tap to the cleaning closet, and this wasn't what he was built for.
Of course, he couldn't go back, and all the world outside offered him was a long road leading possibly-nowhere.
He wrong the mop out, and crossed to a spot near the back. He hadn't planned to stay here long, anyway - a week, maybe; maybe half a week. At the very least he could find distance, and something had to be open for him somewhere. There had to be somewhere left to crawl.
-
Night wasn't the best of times. There was too much silence, too little humanity; too little to do, too much time to think. He was walking around the city and waiting for day, looking for lights in the distance - he could see the haze of light pollution hanging over Chicago, the low glows of smaller cities in Indiana, a faint green flicker off toward the east which he couldn't identify. Every once in a while a truck would rattle past him, or roll along down the highway that moved through town, and then the February silence would return.
In the silence, things got easy to remember.
This was always the danger. It'd happened when he'd walked out of Chicago, it'd happened when he'd walked through the night yesterday, and until the nights got shorter or he found a way to forget everything, it'd keep happening whenever he was alone.
It got easy to read the cold cut of the air beneath his chin as the blade of that death angel's knife, the darkness of the overcast night as the grey fog of not-quite-understanding when the Chula'd but a chip in his brain to keep him even. It got easy to feel the slow breeze pushing through his coat like the breeze of November had pushed through his shirt, stalking through an unfinished building with a hole in its wall gaping out onto nowhere.
Walking didn't take a lot of effort. We'd never get tired like this, not in any way that made a difference. It'd never give him something to think about besides where he'd been. To hell with where he was going. Everything was where he'd been.
A few hours in, with his hands and feet numb and the rest of his body shuddering, the thing that kept him alive kicked in as a golden warmth just beneath his lungs. That was the thing that wouldn't let him freeze out here, wouldn't ever let him die, round and burning in his blood, and with it came the feel of Sam's heart spasming beneath his hand, of surfacing (again- again- again-) from a place so dark he couldn't dream it, of being something even he couldn't look at and understand as human.
And he made a lot of allowances for humanity these days.
That night he didn't make it until dawn. The night before he had, and things were a bit easier to hold on to in the pale rising light - the world woke up again, and he wasn't the only one moving in it.
He thought he'd be sick before he felt sick, and managed to hold it back for a while before he threw up.
Once, early on, before Torchwood, he'd been burnt to ash and had come back and thrown up the food he'd eaten on the TARDIS most of a decade before. It came back half-digested, unremembered, carrying with it all the bile of that fight against the Daleks and the bitterness of how the universe expected him to be.
Now there'd been no reason to rebuild the stomach or its contents, and all that came up was water and stomach acids. He let it, on his hands and knees at the shoulder of the road, hours from daylight and a long way from well.
-
Anata would have still been asleep if it hadn't been for Bell, who should have been asleep but was a 14-year-old girl and didn't do anything she was supposed to. She'd come into her parents' bedroom and opened the blinds on the window, staring out over Calumet Avenue, State Highway 41. After a while the sound of someone breathing so slow woke Anata up and she moved out from under Marcus' arm, moving over to join her daughter.
"You're a bit old to be having bad dreams," she said.
"Just couldn't sleep," Bell murmured back. She was half an outline in the dark room, and that half came from the light of the highway. It caught on her blue pajamas, glowed the whites of her eyes. "Hey, you know where that wanderer is staying?"
"Don't you get any ideas," Anata said. "And no, I never asked."
"I saw him walking off toward the lake yesterday," she said. "Today he turned down Standard. There's nothing out there. Think he might be homeless?"
"You been up thinking about this?" Anata asked. Bell yawned and shook her head.
"Nah. Just keep waking up and thinking about it." She turned, looking at Anata. "You know, if you let me take the car out and look for him..."
"No way. No way." Anata shook her head. She was hoping for a rak in two years, but Bell wasn't there yet - even as much as she thought nothing in the world was trouble for her. "Guy like that might as well kill you."
"Nah," Bell said again. "He's just a little weird in the head, you know?"
"Acting like a goddamn glays," Anata muttered. "Can't you go back to sleep?"
"Not tired," Bell said, and leaned over toward her mother. "You know there's nothing on Standard."
"Yeah, I know. What do you expect me to do about it?"
"Be nice about it?"
Anata shook her head. "Sometimes I wonder if you're really my child."
But she was, and she was her only child, and that was why Anata pulled on a coat and why fifteen minutes later she was driving through eastern Whiting, her headlights sweeping the dirt. A few miles out and yeah, there was J, off Standard and onto Access by the trainyards, kneeling over on the shoulder and coughing like he wanted to retch.
She pulled up and stepped out of the car. "You didn't say," she called, pulling her coat tighter around her, "you had noplace to go."
He didn't show any surprise. Course, a car with headlights on wasn't the subtlest thing on a quiet road at night, but he was an odd one. Played all his cards close to his chest even when she could tell he had a crap hand and wasn't getting much from the bluff. He spat to clear his mouth, then looked back over at her. "You didn't ask."
"You didn't have a problem asking for much else," she said. Her eyes were adjusting to the dark. Almost a new moon, but there always seemed to be light from somewhere, even if it wasn't much. J looked bad - strung out, cold-bit, grimacing like he'd really thrown up somewhere and if she looked, aha. There was the evidence. "Look, kid," she said, moving closer. This was something poludnicas did. If she was a pol, goddamn she was sure she'd know everything she needed to about him. But then she'd have to be a pol. "Just tell me what it is. Meth? Crack?"
He spat into the dirt, then turned to look at her. "Junkie?" he asked. "That's one I haven't heard before."
Anata waved a hand at the mess. "You sick or something?"
"You could say that." He pushed himself to his feet, and Anata shifted like she was expecting him to topple into her. "No. This is all me."
For a moment, caught in the dim night and the unreality of this wanderer who'd come wandering down and shoving himself into the cracks and corners of her life, she could believe that he was something otherworldly. Not like, duh, wanderer; not like angels and demons and how you could pick up a bible and see they were supposed to be so much more than any of them were, but there was something going on she didn't understand, couldn't understand, and that something had come down and hit here at the side of the highway. "What the fuck'd you do?" she breathed.
"You said it," he answered, too easily. "I killed somebody." For a moment his eyes told a different story than the one she'd been seeing - just some Wanderer vagrant, just some softcore-criminal human trash that got caught in her fence. He was watching her, without the fear most humans had if they knew what she was, what she could do. He was watching her eyes for a reaction. "Do you believe me?"
And there that sense was ebbing again, and she was left confused at why it had come in the first place. "Yeah, I've killed too, kid," she says. He was just some crazy human, and she was just out here because her daughter cared a bit too much for a soon-to-be blackblood. "So's my husband. When my girl grows up she's gonna learn to kill. You know how many demons die of old age? Just about none of them or there'd be eight thousand Neqs out there. If you're trying to scare me-"
"How about torture?" J said, still searching her eyes. His eyebrows raised, but the expression was empty. It was wanting something Anata didn't know how to answer and didn't much want to. "Rape? People I-"
Anata let her wings out. They were itching anyway, and now they itched under her coat, with the late-February air nipping at her collar and discouraging her from taking the coat off. "Kid, you must be new here."
J had nothing to say to that.
Anata turned back to the car, opening the passenger's side seat and pointing him in. "Come on. I'm gonna give you an education."
J followed, but there was something in his mouth that told Anata he was going along like a teenage kid who already knew the lecture. Right. Humans thought they knew everything. She went to the driver's side and stepped in, taking a baseball bat from the floor by J's feet and laying it across her lap.
"What I said doesn't bother you?" J asked.
"Black-blooded bitch," Anata said over the steering wheel, keying the ignition and flipping on the lights. "You're gonna get it. Shut up and let me drive."
He shut up. Anata pulled the car out onto the dirt road, guiding it back onto paved streets, through the quiet city, off to another edge of town where the paving petered out again. A few turns, past a cemetery, past a sign that read Wolf Lake, and then to an undeveloped field. Mostly undeveloped, in any case - it bore one building: an old shed or possibly a small warehouse. The headlights caught its sagging roof, the structure itself a decaying memento mori. Anata parked but left the headlights, motioning J to the door.
"Out, kid. And lock your door."
He obliged, and she stepped out as well. They were facing an old oak, its branches still bare for the winter. The ground around it was sparsely-scrubbed, tufts of brown crabgrass and long-frozen weeds specking patches of bare dirt. Scattered across the ground, some half-buried, some far away were bits of white material in no particular pattern.
Bone.
"You know what we are?" Anata asked. "Our species?" She planted her hands on her hips. "I say behemoth and you're not gonna stare at me like-"
"I know," J said, looking down at the shattered curve of a clavicle. Most of the bones had been torn at by wild animals - it was impossible to tell by looking how many skeletons had lain here, or what sort.
"Right." Anata walked toward the bones, rolling one with her foot. "I'm an afreet. My mum was an afreet. Dad was a temeluchus. When they came here, mid fifties, there were some angels knocking around. Angels and demons living together, same town. Know how well that works? Not talking about Chicago - Whiting, Indiana in the fucking fifties. People were killing each other over things like being black or not. I'm talking angels and demons."
"I've seen the wars-"
"Not like this," Anata said. "Weren't any guns, city kid. Weren't armies. But there was this angel of healing dad thought'd make nice and so he caught up with her. She'd been over in England in the war. Seen some things he could dredge, and him being him, he fucked her over, then he fucked her."
She stepped forward, walking to the scattered bones and bending to pick one up. J followed silently, looking down at the white thing in her hands.
"Well, her daddy was an archangel," Anata said. "And her brother was vengeance against some damnfool thing. Dad worked for a glaysa and mum worked for another healing who sacked her soon as she heard. That old archangel came after dad and mum and the glays got in the fight, and then he came back with a few cousins and dad's boss came back with brothers and sisters and they just killed. Killed whenever they could. I hear you'd wake up one day and a hotblood'd be hanging from a tree. You'd come out from lunch and there'd be some coldblood bleeding out across the steps of the post office. Doors got busted down at night. Bricks went through windows. Couldn't go out, hardly. You'd find fingers. Ears. Bits of people nailed to fenceposts. The end, though?" She pointed at the tree. "We won. Least, the demons of dad's day did. And when they won they took every dead angel and strung them up from this tree. Angel Tree, we call it. Now it's half a century later and you can find those bones scattered all over this town but there still ain't any angels in it. So you say you raped someone? Killed someone? You think I'm gonna be horrified?"
She dropped the bone, brushing off her hands.
"Kid, I'm a demon. That there was my bedtime story. The world's a bitch and she don't scare me, so you ain't gonna. You touch me or mine and I will see you hanging from this tree. That's the law of this place and that's my law. You want to live or die by someone else's, that's all on you."
J opened his mouth. After a moment he closed it again, and the expression on his face was troubled - nothing she'd seen on his face before.
Just some human. Really. Some human with big ideas of how the world worked and a need to hang himself by them, some martyr, some kid who thought if he carried a cross the world was gonna recognize him.
"If you need somewhere to sleep," Anata said, "there's a shed out back my place and I've got extra blankets."
"I don't sleep," J said, almost without thinking.
"The fuck you don't. Humans aren't much better than us and we don't lose sleep when we don't need to." She walked back to the car and sat down in the driver's seat again, unlocking the passenger's door. "Come on, kid. Bell'll sleep better knowing you're not dead in a ditch somewhere."
-
On the third J didn't notice anything he hadn't the last two until he stopped in the middle of washing out mugs with a red haze crowding his vision.
The night wasn't young yet, but it wasn't over and it'd been quiet. The draw of his novelty was still large and he'd had more than his share of long stares, but no one had bothered him and he'd tried not to be bothered. So there was no way to explain why, with his back to the room, he could feel eyes crawling against the back of his neck.
His throat was tightening. His hands gripped the handles of the mugs so hard they should have shattered, and he had to keep his attention on breathing to stop the violence creeping up his throat. This wasn't working and he didn't even know why, just that the way these people were looking at him was getting to him, dragging under his skin, like even this community of demons found him unclean-
"Hey."
Bell's voice snapped him out and he looked up, but she wasn't talking to him. She was over in a corner, addressing a man who looked in his mid-30s whose dirty-blond hair was the same color as his beer.
"Leave the guy alone, okay?" Bell said. J glanced at the table. The blond man was the only one there.
Someone called his attention from another table and he pushed Bell out of his mind. Anata rapped his shoulder and shoved a pitcher into his hands, sending him over.
Coming back to the bar, he was intercepted by Bell. She elbowed him out of the way and grabbed a handful of peanuts from the bowl on the bar, saying "Ignore that guy. He's a skeeze. Comes in here all the time and tries to make trouble." She cast a snide look back over her shoulder.
J glanced back too. The guy met his eyes with challenge before looking away and feigning disinterest, taking a long drink from his beer. "I'll keep that in mind," J said.
Ten minutes later it struck again.
He was carrying a tray back, full of mugs mostly-drained, and had to stop with a hiss at the heat crawling up his fingertips, up from his teeth toward his cheekbones, numbing his feet and lighting his ears so he almost stumbled. Clumsy. The word coiled at the top of his gut, burning at the people watching. Goddamnit, he could have ruled this country with a few Agency tricks and some luck and now he was fucking up a job waiting tables, and-
"Hey!"
He felt the heat dissipate this time, and looked up to see Bell cornering the same man she'd yelled at last. The guy who'd been watching him.
The guy whose concentration she just broke.
The pieces clicked in J's mind right when Bell turned away, tossing an imperious "I'm gonna tell mom" and the guy - pol, probably, having some fun with the wait staff; Bell said he caused trouble - shoved the table away and grabbed Bell's shoulder, spinning her back, and J threw down the tray he was carrying and crossed the room in three strides. Pressure points on humans and demons were mostly the same and it didn't take much to grab the demon's wrist, twist in and down and get his hand to open up and get him on his knees gaping at the pain shooting up his arm
And then the backlash hit.
J's gut twisted and he reeled back. He could feel his heartrate spike and the world bore down on him, looming pressing against his awareness, fear and racing blood and screaming nausea crashing him to the ground. Then the world listed under him and all his senses shook, his muscled cramped in symphony, his bones shot out waves of pain and - Damn it!
I wasn't like he could die; he shouldn't have felt this fear. It wasn't like some fucking pol could break him, not through the body, and no matter how hard he pushed J knew his own body better and pushed back. His fingers couldn't be twisting in like he felt they were, the prickling across his skin would be gone in an instant, the grey creeping through his field of vision was something external, something not him, and it wouldn't stay on him. He just had to push-
He heard impact before the influence whited out, leaving him gasping on the floor. The pol hit the ground in front of him, moaning and pushing against the ground before the head of a baseball bat pressed down into the back of his neck. J looked up, catching Anata with her hand on the handle, Bell just behind her and glaring down at the demon on the ground.
"You better watch yourself around my daughter, Elliot," Anata said, grinding down on his neck. "Because if you don't I swear I will end you."
Elliot groaned. J could see a trickle of blood coming down out of the blond hair, and pushed himself unsteadily up. Marcus was coming over from the door, and bent down to take Elliot's arm.
"Come on," he said, hauling the half-conscious demon over his shoulder. "You're going out."
Bell set her jaw at Elliot's back, then turned toward J and shot a smile in his direction. She headed back behind the bar as Anata swung the baseball bat up over her shoulder, casting a warning glance across the rest of the patrons. Then she turned to J.
"You, come on," she said, and headed back toward the storeroom behind the bar. Bell had set herself up at the cash register, playing with the take-a-penny, leave-a-penny bowl.
J followed Anata in, pushing the last of the aches and pains out of his mind. Anata turned to the safe embedded in the wall and turned the dial expertly, using her body to block out his line of sight. She reached in and pulled something out, then shut the door firmly and turned back.
"You were quick enough to get that guy off Bell," she said. "So I guess that counts something. Still, I don't think a wanderer's going to make many friends around here."
J had the feeling he knew this script. "You're firing me."
"I think it's best you don't stick around," she said, and extended her hand. She was offering him a wad of twenties - he took them, flipping through the edges. "Two hundred," Anata said. "I figure you've been working mostly twelve hours the last three days, so it's a bit less than you should get and more than we agreed. Should get you to the next place you're going."
J answered with a tight smile, tucking the cash into a pocket. "Well."
Anata shrugged, pushing past him into the bar again. "Tough world, wanderer. I've got a bar to keep orderly."
J nodded. He turned and headed for the door.
Marcus caught his elbow as he was heading out, then stepped outside with him. It wasn't quite a clear night, but it wasn't overcast either - scraps of cloud hung between the stars, and a slow breeze made the air cooler than it was. Marcus pulled a pack of cigarettes from his coat and lit one, then offered the pack over. "Leave it to a glays to ruin everything, huhn?"
J paused with his fingers on the butt of a cigarette. Marcus pulled the pack back, then flicked his lighter on at the tip where J held it.
"Glaysa?" J asked.
"Elliot. Just 'cause you're a coolblood, see." Marcus took a drag. "Fuckin' glad I'm not."
J looked down at the red tip of the cigarette he held, then back up at Marcus's eyes. The whites were clearly visible against the dark of the night, the dark of his skin, tinted red under the neon sign. "I would have guessed poludnica."
Marcus snorted. "You didn't notice your mind was getting all fucked up?"
"I noticed more when everything started to hurt."
Marcus shrugged. "Yeah, I hear that happens with a shift, doesn't it? Looks a bitch, anyway." He motioned to the cigarette in J's fingers. "You going to smoke that or take it home with you?"
J stared. After a moment he flicked the ash from the end of the cigarette, but didn't bring it up. "What do you mean, with a shift?"
Marcus looked at him, eyes narrowing. "Here I thought you were long off the boat," he said. "Don't tell me you haven't figured out what you got, boy."
J kept staring.
"You're a shifter," Marcus said. "Shape shifter. Hear the Rift does that to some. Started to shift in there when Elliot was goin' after you. Gotta hand it to you," he said. "Never seen one push it back like that, and I know natives."
"I'm not a shapeshifter," J said.
"Well, you were in there," Marcus said, and then held out his hand. "Look, if you're not gonna smoke that, might as well give it back."
After a moment, J put the cigarette to his mouth and pulled, feeling the chemical heat making its way down to his lungs. Then he held it back out to Marcus, who took it, spat in his hand, and ground it out on his palm.
"There's a guy down in Ross sells fifty dollar used cars," he says. "They're junkers. Buy 'em for scrap. But there's one or two that might move forward. Just don't tell him I sent you."
"Thanks," J said.
Marcus bent his head to his cigarette and J walked away. It wasn't exactly a blow. He was just leaving earlier than he'd expected. That was the story of his life, and that was all.
Part: One
Word Count: 8800 I am not joking and that is just this part.
Summary: After Silent Hall goes all to hell, the person who was Jack Harkness leaves Torchwood and heads for the border. It's not like he has a place to go, but isn't that how it always works out?
A/N: I DON'T KNOW WHY THESE THINGS KEEP GETTING EPIC WHILE I'M NOT WATCHING. This has to be serialized because it won't all fit in one post - this, I know even before I'm done writing it. It's unbeta'd. It's a first rough draft and probably won't make it to a second. It's to be continued. Enjoy.
Disclaimer: OCs are mine. Jack was yoinked from the BBC and drastically AU'd. The Rift is a lot of peoples'. Opinions listed in this fic are those of the characters and not of any Barrowman. Reading fic does not enable reader to fly.
-
Two seconds. Two on the outside. That was the time he gave himself to hit Tyler with a lie so big it'd debilitate, to duck out of the immediate path of the bullet the angel sent his way, to get that gun in the moment of pain and distraction and take the entire room hostage. And it worked, though realizing that stretched the second count to three - for a moment he had them all watching, hanging at the trigger edge of making a move while he had his gun up and trained to shoot through the angel and into the man she was standing in front of.
The shot she'd pulled off when Tyler's pain had hit her had torn through his left thigh. He guessed a few minutes before it healed on its own, but he didn't have time to wait that.
Second four pulled through his fingers like a rope burn. Everything was a matter of time - timing when he caught the hint of threat in Gwen's voice, all but imperceptible, timing before someone called reinforcements to haul him off to cells, timing before they decided - again - that the best alternative was just to shoot him, or before Suzie noticed something in the way his shadow dived when he pulled it in to keep it from giving anything away. At at the leading edge of second five (every second in a tenuous position weakens that position; it gives opponents time to consider and react) he bared his teeth. The smile did nothing to hide how his heartbeat was hammering his fingertips, how all the escape routes he could see were treacherous terrain.
"So," he said. The voice rang tinny in his ears; the words themselves meant nothing. "That's how it is." The smile unbalanced, tilted to one side. "I'd give me a head start, if I were you."
At second eleven he was ducking out the door and slamming it closed. At twelve he was running for the stairs, for the door, for the press of Chicago and relative anonymity of the crowds, bloodened and manic as he was. In the end it was only the alleys that swallowed him.
He hit dusk still running, letting exhaustion burn itself out against the energy that'd never let him stay injured. Then he slowed, let himself fall back into watching and waiting.
There were a few problems with putting out an APB on him - that much he knew. But given Torchwood and their resources...
Missing the wrist device made this all harder, and he had to lay low. The woman at the Conrad who could locate anything might have died a long time ago, but there was still CCTV, still archangels, still perhaps sympathetic demons, still things to evade. He needed to get cleaned up. He needed to cover his tracks and he needed to get out of this city.
In the dark pool beneath a broken streetlight he checked the gun he'd stolen from Tyler's guardian angel. Good make, well maintained, full clip minus the bullet she'd put through his thigh - at least that was good for something. Not, of course, great for staying undetected.
Go far enough in most cities and, somewhere between the business districts of the downtown area and the new suburbs cropping up where the city is expanding, and there are patches of older homes, older neighborhoods, some of which are doing well and some of which are falling apart. Sticking to the darker streets he felt his way along, watching the quality of the houses, looking for potholes in the road, following the sounds that signified the shift from affluence to subsistence.
Cleaning was the first thing. He found a gas station/car wash that had closed for the night, waited for silence, and took care of the lone surveillance camera and door alarm with two shots before forcing the lock, stealing into the convenience store and heading to the bathroom.
The blood on his face, in his hair and on his hands washed out with some effort. His trousers were dark enough that in the dark, at least, blood didn't show; the shirt was a problem, so he lifted a jacket from a rack by a stand of novelty Chicago shotglasses. So far as he could tell it was a denim-and-fake-leather affair with a winged motorcycle on the back; that didn't matter so much as the fact that it had long enough sleeves and zipped up the front.
Then he left.
The tags went in a dumpster two blocks away. Then he turned sharply south, trying to jag his trail if anyone came looking, using the night when most of the city slept and he didn't need to. Cross into Indiana and official jurisdictions would throw another stumbling block against any allies Torchwood might field.
Then take stock of his situation. Pawn the gun. Get a fresh set of clothing. Get a map and a knapsack and see if his journal had caught up with him.
Then get away.
ANATA - Whiting, IN
Anata had the feeling she was being watched as she swept out the bar for the afternoon trickle. It was just after one o'clock and Whiting wasn't exactly a hopping location at the best of times, so when she got the feeling that there was someone nearby, it was notable in a way she didn't appreciate. That was enough to get her wings out under her coat, and when the feeling didn't go away or resolve itself after ten minutes, she threw the broom back in the closet and walk outside. If some goon thought he was going to make trouble before she was even open, she'd have no problem burning them and tossing their body onto I-90.
What she found was some white-kid wanderer sitting across the road in a biker jacket, with a green baseball cap pulled low over his face.
Wanderers. And here she thought living in the suburbs of the suburbs of Nowhere, USA meant she wouldn't have to deal much with their shit.
She locked the door behind her and crossed the street, pressing one hand into her hip. "Look, honey," she snapped, "if you're looking for handouts, go north-northwest about twenty miles. Place called Chicago. Can't miss it."
He looked up. His face was shaded by the bill of the hat but he was a but scuffed around the edges, she could see - a few strands of hair crushed under the cap, some dust around his collar and, if she looked, on his hands. Clean-shaven, though. Staring at her like he expected something.
"Don't suppose you'd have a job," he said.
Oh, that just took the cake. She planted a hand on her hip, scowling. "Does it look like I have a 'help wanted' sign in that window?" she asked, pointing back toward the bar. "Does it look like I couldn't write one up if I had a job I wanted done?"
The guy shrugged. "Usually odd jobs to do somewhere. I don't need much."
She shrugged out of her coat, exposing her shoulders to the cold air. The coat was heavy brown leather, but underneath was a tanktop with a thin enough back to let her wings out freely. She spread them - they weren't the largest or most impressive wings, and on someone who wasn't the largest or most impressive person anyway the effect was only unsettling if you didn't know wings on people happened. The dark web of membrane matched her skin, the overall roundness matched her stocky frame, and the claws that sharpened each phalange matched her annoyance.
"See those?" she asked. "Know what that means?" She paused. "I'm a demon, coolblood. I'm one of those bastards your mum would've warned you about if you'd grown up here. Just as soon kill you as look at you."
The guy stood. He was tall, she realized - most of a foot taller than her, and built pretty well to boot. But there was something in the way he held himself that reminded him of a charun most of all, one just off a kill, waiting for someone to show up asking questions. She knew that look. Came home to it, once in a while.
"What'd you do?" she asked.
The guy's lips twisted up, half-smiling. "Went crazy," he said. "Burned a few bridges. Before you ask, I don't plan on doing it again."
He paused.
"Poludnica," he added. "That's my sort of luck."
Anata snorted and pulled her coat back on. "So you got fucked up by a hotblood. That mean I should care?"
He shrugged. "You asked."
Anata looked him up and down.
He shoved his hands into his pockets. "I can bus tables," he says. "You don't even have to pay me. I'll just keep my tips."
Anata shook her head. "Not likely to get a lot of tips," she said, but turned and crossed the street again. "Fine. You want to try it, we'll see. But you're not getting wage from me, and you cross me, I will see you burn."
"I don't need much," he said again, following after her.
Anata unlocked the door again, stepping inside and holding it for him. He came in, blinking in the shades-down darkness, and she closed the door and crossed over to the door to the storage room behind the bar. "Here," she said, pulling out a few packages of napkins. "Stock all the holders, then you can come back and make sure everything's right in the bathroom. What's your name?"
The guy paused with his hand on one of the napkin bundles, looking at her like he'd blanked on the question. After a moment, he said "J."
"Jay like the bird?" Anata asked.
"J like the letter." He took the bundle, walking to the first table and taking the napkin dispenser from it. "Just J."
"Anata," Anata said, watching him move from table to table, not quite at home with the rough floor and the woodgrain. Weird human. They'd see.
-
The first person to come into the bar wasn't a patron but a young teenager with a red backpack slung over her shoulder, wrapped up in a scarf and a jacket too large for her, skin a bit darker than Anata's dark tan and eyes just as cool but not yet as jaded. She looked at J when she came in, but didn't deviate from her course to the bar where Anata met her. "Who's the guy?"
"Human," Anata answered, pulling a juice box from the under-bar fridge and handing it to her. "Wanderer. Wanted a job. Probably crazy."
"Cool," the girl said, and spun on the stool. J was applying electrical tape to the cord of one of the neon signs, and she tilted her juice in his direction. "Hey. I'm Bell."
J looked back toward her, making sure she was talking to him. Not that there was anyone else to talk to, but given the reception he'd got from Anata, he had the feeling that hired help didn't get a lot of notice around here. "...J," he said.
"You got homework to do?" Anata broke in, and Bell groaned and opened her backpack.
"Yeah, mom."
"Then you can do it. Come on." She drummed a knuckle on the bar, then walked in J's direction with a spraybottle of window cleaner and a shop towel. J took them without comment.
By the time he'd worked his way across the windows Bell had worked her way through her homework, or at least that was what was implied by the way her book snapped shut. He went to return the cleaner to its storage room when she bustled past him, heading to an old jukebox in the corner and coaxing it to life.
He put the supplies back and turned to gauge her. She was young and probably as normal as one could be in a small town - too young, he thought, to have wings, if she was getting them. No hint of training, no strange grace, not like Tay or April or someone who'd been trained to kill, but there was something. She held herself as one who knew that her place in the world came already assured and she walked like...
Well. She walked like Gwen.
Like Gwen, like Rose, like Sion and so many people far back in Torchwood's sordid history who'd come in as civilians and developed that way of walking, testing out their own sharp edges. Green and eager for the fight, open and ready to be broken.
Those were the kind of people he'd been taught to own, through one role or another. Break them for the Time Agency, protect them for the Doctor, lead them for Torchwood. Standing in the room with her he was already feeling out the weak spots - watching to learn how and why she'd fall down.
At least, he was watching until Anata crossed the room and hit him, splitting his lips open between his teeth and the back of her hand. "That's a one-way street to you hanging from branches, you looking at my daughter like that."
J spat blood into his sleeve, then paused an instant before his retort. Like 'that'? As if he'd presented a credible threat, a personal threat, a-
"I'm not," he began, though there was a warm pressure creeping up from the pit of his stomach toward the back of his throat. "I'm not after your daughter."
"My husband is a charun," Anata snapped; "you think I don't know when you're looking for the sweet spots, you-"
"-what?"
"How many people you killed, boy?"
J stared. The threat of murder wasn't what he'd thought she was taking issue to. And as far as murder went...
What, do I wear it on my sleeve nowadays?
"A hell of a lot," he said, and heard his tone drop down. Keep your head down, keep normal, be unremarkable said his training, but I'm the last thing you might see when you die screaming said his conditioning and it was his conditioning trying to surface in his voice. "Most because I had to. Not a lot because I wanted to. And I can't help that that's the way I look at things."
Anata watched him, and if there was murder in either one of their eyes...
She turned, spat toward the sink, and grabbed a rag. "Tables," she said.
J took the rag and turned away.
Behind him, he could hear Bell walking up to her mother, speaking with the hushed exasperation common to teenagers everywhere. "Geez, mom..."
"You can at least make it to your wings without getting into that kind of trouble," Anata snapped back, and J heard a smack. He ignored it.
The tables were clean, but he wiped them down anyway.
-
J met the third member of Anata's family when he ducked in through the door, eyes flicking up and over everyone inside, and grabbed a chair without saying anything to anyone. He was a short man with salt-and-pepper hair in stark contrast to his dark skin, with a furtive manner and a way of watching everything without looking at any of it. J caught Anata's eye and she said "Marcus. My better half," in a tone that implied that was the title, not the affectionate, and a volume that said Marcus didn't care what he heard.
The first night went well, at least in that there were no major disturbances. Marcus sat by the door and watched the people coming in, and he dragged people out if they crossed some line only he was aware of. Anata tended the bar, sending J from table to table with a point or a nod or a curt word. Bell moved from her seat at the edge of the bar to the jukebox to the door where her father sat, ducking around the people who were, J was led to believe, mostly demons. None of them bothered her. A few glanced her way, one even raised his glass in her direction, but any other indication of interest was met with a look from Anata and quickly drowned out.
Marcus didn't say a word until they were coming up on midnight, with J cleaning up the table just behind him. The occupants had stumbled out into the night hanging onto each other for companionship, support, and Marcus was nursing a bottle of Pepsi and staring off at the dark horizon.
"Bell getting you in trouble?" he asked.
J looked up, unsure whether or not he was being addressed. Marcus wasn't looking at him. Then, no one else was listening.
"I tend to get in trouble whether or not someone helps," he said. Marcus snorted; the way he did make it sound like a de facto chuckle.
"She tends to get people in trouble whether or not they want to be," he said.
J returned the noise, and picked up the last of the crumpled napkins and spent mugs. He grabbed the bowl of pretzel crumbs last, balancing it in the crook of his elbow.
When he came back with a full bowl, dropping it solidly at the center of the table, Marcus was still staring out at nothing. "Just don't let her take a fancy to you," he said. "That's where you really get into trouble."
"Think I'm a bit out of her range," J said.
"Isn't everyone. She thought she'd run away with some fifty-year-old behemoth last year. She's got fantasies."
J glanced back at Bell. She was arguing with someone over the bar, leaning almost up against the taps. She was taller than both of her parents, J noticed; Anata was filling another mug beside her, and he looked away before he caught her eye. "How old-?"
"Fourteen. Two more years for the wings," Marcus said. "Her mother's hoping she'll be a rak. Bring some legitimacy to the family. Me, so long as she's not a pol, I'll be happy."
"There's a poludnica up in Chicago," J said, watching Marcus for a reaction. "Neqa'el. Doing big things."
Marcus shrugged. "If you're into that."
"J!"
He looked up. Anata clicked her fingers, calling him to the bar. Marcus went back to staring out the door.
The hours went on.
Sometime in the small of the night everything wound down, most of the patrons drifting out of their own accord, a few nudged out the door by Marcus. Then the ritual of cleaning up after them began, Anata and Marcus moving in patterns they'd learned over how many hundreds of nights like these, J following and helping where he could.
He was elbow-deep in dishwater when Anata came up to him with the last armload of mugs, her shoulder brushing his arm and she dumped them in the sink. Then she paused, stepping away but turning toward him, eyes narrow and intent.
"What do you want here?" she asked. Marcus was poking around the floor, searching for sticky spots and lost personal effects, and Bell was dozing on a chair in the corner. Neither of them seemed to care. "What wanderer comes to Whiting and starts holding out for a job?"
"I just need the lay of the land," J said. "Enough money to get somewhere bigger and start putting things together."
"What things?" After a moment, she shook her head. "Never mind. I don't want to know. You're good enough. You can stay on. Maybe if I'm feeling generous I'll find something to pay you. How much you got in tips tonight?"
J glanced down to his pocket. "About twenty," he said. Marcus snorted from across the room.
"You asked for it," he said. "Coming to work at a demon bar."
"Fuck. Not like I roll in tips when I bus," Anata said, leaning back against the bar and resting her elbows, watching J's back. "There've gotta be better places for you to work."
"I don't need a better place." J's voice was oddly dark, toothed like the edge of a sawblade. "Here's fine."
"Can't figure you." Anata slipped out from behind the bar and went to set the tables in their proper positions. "Finish those dishes and help Marcus with the floor."
They finished up and Anata shooed him out so she could close out the register. A few minutes later Marcus and Bell came out, Marcus walking straight to the last car in the lot and Bell leaning back against the wall in deliberate mimicry of J's posture.
"You're not normal," she said. "Like, not even a little."
J looked over at her, eyebrows raising. "So?"
"So?" Bell repeated back, then rolled her eyes. "Whatever."
Anata stepped out the door and locked it behind her, eying J up. "Tomorrow at two, if you want to try another night."
J shrugged. "It's something to do."
"Right." She took Bell's wrist, pulling her toward the car. "Two o'clock. Be right back here."
"That's where I'll be," he said, and Anata slid into the front passenger seat.
"Hey, night, mister," Bell called back as she climbed into the car. "See ya."
She closed the door, and the car pulled away. J watched it go, watched the taillights turn a corner and disappear behind a diner, and then he started walking, feeling out the circumference of the town.
-
The second night was a lot like the first.
There was a swell in activity as the night wore on, which Marcus, in his usual laconic way, noted as unusual and didn't elaborate on. J had the sense that they were watching him - kept catching stares out of the corner of his eyes, and then there were the ones who didn't bother to hide them. He had the feeling that business had swelled because they'd brought in an attraction.
At some point Anata slipped Bell a ten dollar bill, and a bit later she came back with a hamburger and a box of snack cakes. She set up at one edge of the bar, swinging back and forth on the stool as she ate.
J walked over once to pick up the pile of cake wrappers and Bell leaned toward him, glancing across the patrons. "Most of them never saw a wanderer before," she said. "I knew a bunch of you when we lived up in Schaumberg."
"Really," he said. Across the bar, Anata looked his way, and he flashed the wrappers and turned to throw them away. Bell scooted down a few stools, taking her food with her, to follow him.
"There was this one guy," she said, "who did light shows. Any kind you wanted. Neon animals and stuff. You do anything cool like that?"
"I get migraines sometimes," J said, and Anata shoved an armload of dirty mugs into his chest and pointed him to the sink.
"I like him," Bell said behind him, which probably wasn't meant for his ears, but which he heard anyway. He also heard Anata snort.
"Sometimes I wonder if you're really my child."
The last thing he heard before running water drowned them out was the thwap of a snack carton hitting an arm, and Anata's low chuckle.
By the time they were closing up he'd made a bit better haul - just over forty - though he couldn't help but think that he was prostituting his existence as a wanderer here, and for that, the money really could have been better. At least what was noteworthy to a bunch of demons in Whiting wasn't likely to make it up to Chicago and be noteworthy to a bunch of wanderers there, but at the moment having all these eyes upon him wasn't doing anything for his nerves.
Marcus was sweeping out the dirt the bargoers had tracked in, his slow, methodical strokes marking time against the clockless air. J had taken a mop and was attacking spilled beer, finishing up one patch and dunking the mophead back into the bucket. Marcus seemed to have a sixth sense for where mess lay, and for a moment J just watched him coax pretzels and pebbles out of corners with his broom.
"Just ask him," Anata said.
J looked up. "What?"
Anata walked by Marcus, kissing his cheek in passing. "Hon, this kid's on the run from something and he hasn't got a clue how to do that. Why don't you tell him how you used to do it?"
Marcus looked up toward the ceiling, blinking absently. "Well, first," he said, "you find a small town that doesn't care if you need to kill from time to time. If that doesn't work, you get real familiar with statutes of limitation." He looked down, scrutinizing J for a moment, still not meeting his eyes. "...but that works better if you've got a demon's old age to look forward to."
"Old age isn't a problem," J said. Impatience is.
He couldn't even wait in one place for the Doctor, badly as that turned out. He was always leaving Cardiff behind, hunting through the broader universe, looking, moving, and here... he didn't have that. He could walk from here to the next town and do the small things the next town would have, he could work his way eventually into some sort of organization, into the military, into crime, intelligence, he could work his way up through the ranks until he found an alternative to scrabbling for tips and hiding from the long arm of the law, he could - but he wasn't built for that.
Shark wasn't the term for an Agency man. The term was dog, but he was a dog which had to keep moving. Wild dog, maybe, restless, full of wanderlust, with no home territory, trounced by one alpha and looking for another.
Marcus had gone back to sweeping. J closed his hands over the end of the mopstick, watching him.
"What do you want here?" he asked, then caught himself. "I mean, is this-" he indicated the bar, the broom, the rhythm even he was falling into, "enough for you?"
Marcus looked up, gaze directed just over J's shoulder and toward the bathroom and the jukebox. "I got a job," he said. "I got a family. I got a past - fulla war, too. I got a good spot of wandering in when I was a kid. Yeah, this is enough. Why wouldn't it be?"
Why would it?
He couldn't say what he was thinking, so he went back to looking for sticky spots. What was he supposed to say? Time was, he lived in the palm of catastrophe. Time was, he lived at the bleeding edge of the Agency. Yesterdays were varied and tomorrows were foreign territories. There were no plans except the ones that fell down or went wrong, no routine except the very basics by which they lived.
It wasn't this. Here, yesterday was like tomorrow. They were moving in tight little circles, from the bar to the door to the tap to the cleaning closet, and this wasn't what he was built for.
Of course, he couldn't go back, and all the world outside offered him was a long road leading possibly-nowhere.
He wrong the mop out, and crossed to a spot near the back. He hadn't planned to stay here long, anyway - a week, maybe; maybe half a week. At the very least he could find distance, and something had to be open for him somewhere. There had to be somewhere left to crawl.
-
Night wasn't the best of times. There was too much silence, too little humanity; too little to do, too much time to think. He was walking around the city and waiting for day, looking for lights in the distance - he could see the haze of light pollution hanging over Chicago, the low glows of smaller cities in Indiana, a faint green flicker off toward the east which he couldn't identify. Every once in a while a truck would rattle past him, or roll along down the highway that moved through town, and then the February silence would return.
In the silence, things got easy to remember.
This was always the danger. It'd happened when he'd walked out of Chicago, it'd happened when he'd walked through the night yesterday, and until the nights got shorter or he found a way to forget everything, it'd keep happening whenever he was alone.
It got easy to read the cold cut of the air beneath his chin as the blade of that death angel's knife, the darkness of the overcast night as the grey fog of not-quite-understanding when the Chula'd but a chip in his brain to keep him even. It got easy to feel the slow breeze pushing through his coat like the breeze of November had pushed through his shirt, stalking through an unfinished building with a hole in its wall gaping out onto nowhere.
Walking didn't take a lot of effort. We'd never get tired like this, not in any way that made a difference. It'd never give him something to think about besides where he'd been. To hell with where he was going. Everything was where he'd been.
A few hours in, with his hands and feet numb and the rest of his body shuddering, the thing that kept him alive kicked in as a golden warmth just beneath his lungs. That was the thing that wouldn't let him freeze out here, wouldn't ever let him die, round and burning in his blood, and with it came the feel of Sam's heart spasming beneath his hand, of surfacing (again- again- again-) from a place so dark he couldn't dream it, of being something even he couldn't look at and understand as human.
And he made a lot of allowances for humanity these days.
That night he didn't make it until dawn. The night before he had, and things were a bit easier to hold on to in the pale rising light - the world woke up again, and he wasn't the only one moving in it.
He thought he'd be sick before he felt sick, and managed to hold it back for a while before he threw up.
Once, early on, before Torchwood, he'd been burnt to ash and had come back and thrown up the food he'd eaten on the TARDIS most of a decade before. It came back half-digested, unremembered, carrying with it all the bile of that fight against the Daleks and the bitterness of how the universe expected him to be.
Now there'd been no reason to rebuild the stomach or its contents, and all that came up was water and stomach acids. He let it, on his hands and knees at the shoulder of the road, hours from daylight and a long way from well.
-
Anata would have still been asleep if it hadn't been for Bell, who should have been asleep but was a 14-year-old girl and didn't do anything she was supposed to. She'd come into her parents' bedroom and opened the blinds on the window, staring out over Calumet Avenue, State Highway 41. After a while the sound of someone breathing so slow woke Anata up and she moved out from under Marcus' arm, moving over to join her daughter.
"You're a bit old to be having bad dreams," she said.
"Just couldn't sleep," Bell murmured back. She was half an outline in the dark room, and that half came from the light of the highway. It caught on her blue pajamas, glowed the whites of her eyes. "Hey, you know where that wanderer is staying?"
"Don't you get any ideas," Anata said. "And no, I never asked."
"I saw him walking off toward the lake yesterday," she said. "Today he turned down Standard. There's nothing out there. Think he might be homeless?"
"You been up thinking about this?" Anata asked. Bell yawned and shook her head.
"Nah. Just keep waking up and thinking about it." She turned, looking at Anata. "You know, if you let me take the car out and look for him..."
"No way. No way." Anata shook her head. She was hoping for a rak in two years, but Bell wasn't there yet - even as much as she thought nothing in the world was trouble for her. "Guy like that might as well kill you."
"Nah," Bell said again. "He's just a little weird in the head, you know?"
"Acting like a goddamn glays," Anata muttered. "Can't you go back to sleep?"
"Not tired," Bell said, and leaned over toward her mother. "You know there's nothing on Standard."
"Yeah, I know. What do you expect me to do about it?"
"Be nice about it?"
Anata shook her head. "Sometimes I wonder if you're really my child."
But she was, and she was her only child, and that was why Anata pulled on a coat and why fifteen minutes later she was driving through eastern Whiting, her headlights sweeping the dirt. A few miles out and yeah, there was J, off Standard and onto Access by the trainyards, kneeling over on the shoulder and coughing like he wanted to retch.
She pulled up and stepped out of the car. "You didn't say," she called, pulling her coat tighter around her, "you had noplace to go."
He didn't show any surprise. Course, a car with headlights on wasn't the subtlest thing on a quiet road at night, but he was an odd one. Played all his cards close to his chest even when she could tell he had a crap hand and wasn't getting much from the bluff. He spat to clear his mouth, then looked back over at her. "You didn't ask."
"You didn't have a problem asking for much else," she said. Her eyes were adjusting to the dark. Almost a new moon, but there always seemed to be light from somewhere, even if it wasn't much. J looked bad - strung out, cold-bit, grimacing like he'd really thrown up somewhere and if she looked, aha. There was the evidence. "Look, kid," she said, moving closer. This was something poludnicas did. If she was a pol, goddamn she was sure she'd know everything she needed to about him. But then she'd have to be a pol. "Just tell me what it is. Meth? Crack?"
He spat into the dirt, then turned to look at her. "Junkie?" he asked. "That's one I haven't heard before."
Anata waved a hand at the mess. "You sick or something?"
"You could say that." He pushed himself to his feet, and Anata shifted like she was expecting him to topple into her. "No. This is all me."
For a moment, caught in the dim night and the unreality of this wanderer who'd come wandering down and shoving himself into the cracks and corners of her life, she could believe that he was something otherworldly. Not like, duh, wanderer; not like angels and demons and how you could pick up a bible and see they were supposed to be so much more than any of them were, but there was something going on she didn't understand, couldn't understand, and that something had come down and hit here at the side of the highway. "What the fuck'd you do?" she breathed.
"You said it," he answered, too easily. "I killed somebody." For a moment his eyes told a different story than the one she'd been seeing - just some Wanderer vagrant, just some softcore-criminal human trash that got caught in her fence. He was watching her, without the fear most humans had if they knew what she was, what she could do. He was watching her eyes for a reaction. "Do you believe me?"
And there that sense was ebbing again, and she was left confused at why it had come in the first place. "Yeah, I've killed too, kid," she says. He was just some crazy human, and she was just out here because her daughter cared a bit too much for a soon-to-be blackblood. "So's my husband. When my girl grows up she's gonna learn to kill. You know how many demons die of old age? Just about none of them or there'd be eight thousand Neqs out there. If you're trying to scare me-"
"How about torture?" J said, still searching her eyes. His eyebrows raised, but the expression was empty. It was wanting something Anata didn't know how to answer and didn't much want to. "Rape? People I-"
Anata let her wings out. They were itching anyway, and now they itched under her coat, with the late-February air nipping at her collar and discouraging her from taking the coat off. "Kid, you must be new here."
J had nothing to say to that.
Anata turned back to the car, opening the passenger's side seat and pointing him in. "Come on. I'm gonna give you an education."
J followed, but there was something in his mouth that told Anata he was going along like a teenage kid who already knew the lecture. Right. Humans thought they knew everything. She went to the driver's side and stepped in, taking a baseball bat from the floor by J's feet and laying it across her lap.
"What I said doesn't bother you?" J asked.
"Black-blooded bitch," Anata said over the steering wheel, keying the ignition and flipping on the lights. "You're gonna get it. Shut up and let me drive."
He shut up. Anata pulled the car out onto the dirt road, guiding it back onto paved streets, through the quiet city, off to another edge of town where the paving petered out again. A few turns, past a cemetery, past a sign that read Wolf Lake, and then to an undeveloped field. Mostly undeveloped, in any case - it bore one building: an old shed or possibly a small warehouse. The headlights caught its sagging roof, the structure itself a decaying memento mori. Anata parked but left the headlights, motioning J to the door.
"Out, kid. And lock your door."
He obliged, and she stepped out as well. They were facing an old oak, its branches still bare for the winter. The ground around it was sparsely-scrubbed, tufts of brown crabgrass and long-frozen weeds specking patches of bare dirt. Scattered across the ground, some half-buried, some far away were bits of white material in no particular pattern.
Bone.
"You know what we are?" Anata asked. "Our species?" She planted her hands on her hips. "I say behemoth and you're not gonna stare at me like-"
"I know," J said, looking down at the shattered curve of a clavicle. Most of the bones had been torn at by wild animals - it was impossible to tell by looking how many skeletons had lain here, or what sort.
"Right." Anata walked toward the bones, rolling one with her foot. "I'm an afreet. My mum was an afreet. Dad was a temeluchus. When they came here, mid fifties, there were some angels knocking around. Angels and demons living together, same town. Know how well that works? Not talking about Chicago - Whiting, Indiana in the fucking fifties. People were killing each other over things like being black or not. I'm talking angels and demons."
"I've seen the wars-"
"Not like this," Anata said. "Weren't any guns, city kid. Weren't armies. But there was this angel of healing dad thought'd make nice and so he caught up with her. She'd been over in England in the war. Seen some things he could dredge, and him being him, he fucked her over, then he fucked her."
She stepped forward, walking to the scattered bones and bending to pick one up. J followed silently, looking down at the white thing in her hands.
"Well, her daddy was an archangel," Anata said. "And her brother was vengeance against some damnfool thing. Dad worked for a glaysa and mum worked for another healing who sacked her soon as she heard. That old archangel came after dad and mum and the glays got in the fight, and then he came back with a few cousins and dad's boss came back with brothers and sisters and they just killed. Killed whenever they could. I hear you'd wake up one day and a hotblood'd be hanging from a tree. You'd come out from lunch and there'd be some coldblood bleeding out across the steps of the post office. Doors got busted down at night. Bricks went through windows. Couldn't go out, hardly. You'd find fingers. Ears. Bits of people nailed to fenceposts. The end, though?" She pointed at the tree. "We won. Least, the demons of dad's day did. And when they won they took every dead angel and strung them up from this tree. Angel Tree, we call it. Now it's half a century later and you can find those bones scattered all over this town but there still ain't any angels in it. So you say you raped someone? Killed someone? You think I'm gonna be horrified?"
She dropped the bone, brushing off her hands.
"Kid, I'm a demon. That there was my bedtime story. The world's a bitch and she don't scare me, so you ain't gonna. You touch me or mine and I will see you hanging from this tree. That's the law of this place and that's my law. You want to live or die by someone else's, that's all on you."
J opened his mouth. After a moment he closed it again, and the expression on his face was troubled - nothing she'd seen on his face before.
Just some human. Really. Some human with big ideas of how the world worked and a need to hang himself by them, some martyr, some kid who thought if he carried a cross the world was gonna recognize him.
"If you need somewhere to sleep," Anata said, "there's a shed out back my place and I've got extra blankets."
"I don't sleep," J said, almost without thinking.
"The fuck you don't. Humans aren't much better than us and we don't lose sleep when we don't need to." She walked back to the car and sat down in the driver's seat again, unlocking the passenger's door. "Come on, kid. Bell'll sleep better knowing you're not dead in a ditch somewhere."
-
On the third J didn't notice anything he hadn't the last two until he stopped in the middle of washing out mugs with a red haze crowding his vision.
The night wasn't young yet, but it wasn't over and it'd been quiet. The draw of his novelty was still large and he'd had more than his share of long stares, but no one had bothered him and he'd tried not to be bothered. So there was no way to explain why, with his back to the room, he could feel eyes crawling against the back of his neck.
His throat was tightening. His hands gripped the handles of the mugs so hard they should have shattered, and he had to keep his attention on breathing to stop the violence creeping up his throat. This wasn't working and he didn't even know why, just that the way these people were looking at him was getting to him, dragging under his skin, like even this community of demons found him unclean-
"Hey."
Bell's voice snapped him out and he looked up, but she wasn't talking to him. She was over in a corner, addressing a man who looked in his mid-30s whose dirty-blond hair was the same color as his beer.
"Leave the guy alone, okay?" Bell said. J glanced at the table. The blond man was the only one there.
Someone called his attention from another table and he pushed Bell out of his mind. Anata rapped his shoulder and shoved a pitcher into his hands, sending him over.
Coming back to the bar, he was intercepted by Bell. She elbowed him out of the way and grabbed a handful of peanuts from the bowl on the bar, saying "Ignore that guy. He's a skeeze. Comes in here all the time and tries to make trouble." She cast a snide look back over her shoulder.
J glanced back too. The guy met his eyes with challenge before looking away and feigning disinterest, taking a long drink from his beer. "I'll keep that in mind," J said.
Ten minutes later it struck again.
He was carrying a tray back, full of mugs mostly-drained, and had to stop with a hiss at the heat crawling up his fingertips, up from his teeth toward his cheekbones, numbing his feet and lighting his ears so he almost stumbled. Clumsy. The word coiled at the top of his gut, burning at the people watching. Goddamnit, he could have ruled this country with a few Agency tricks and some luck and now he was fucking up a job waiting tables, and-
"Hey!"
He felt the heat dissipate this time, and looked up to see Bell cornering the same man she'd yelled at last. The guy who'd been watching him.
The guy whose concentration she just broke.
The pieces clicked in J's mind right when Bell turned away, tossing an imperious "I'm gonna tell mom" and the guy - pol, probably, having some fun with the wait staff; Bell said he caused trouble - shoved the table away and grabbed Bell's shoulder, spinning her back, and J threw down the tray he was carrying and crossed the room in three strides. Pressure points on humans and demons were mostly the same and it didn't take much to grab the demon's wrist, twist in and down and get his hand to open up and get him on his knees gaping at the pain shooting up his arm
And then the backlash hit.
J's gut twisted and he reeled back. He could feel his heartrate spike and the world bore down on him, looming pressing against his awareness, fear and racing blood and screaming nausea crashing him to the ground. Then the world listed under him and all his senses shook, his muscled cramped in symphony, his bones shot out waves of pain and - Damn it!
I wasn't like he could die; he shouldn't have felt this fear. It wasn't like some fucking pol could break him, not through the body, and no matter how hard he pushed J knew his own body better and pushed back. His fingers couldn't be twisting in like he felt they were, the prickling across his skin would be gone in an instant, the grey creeping through his field of vision was something external, something not him, and it wouldn't stay on him. He just had to push-
He heard impact before the influence whited out, leaving him gasping on the floor. The pol hit the ground in front of him, moaning and pushing against the ground before the head of a baseball bat pressed down into the back of his neck. J looked up, catching Anata with her hand on the handle, Bell just behind her and glaring down at the demon on the ground.
"You better watch yourself around my daughter, Elliot," Anata said, grinding down on his neck. "Because if you don't I swear I will end you."
Elliot groaned. J could see a trickle of blood coming down out of the blond hair, and pushed himself unsteadily up. Marcus was coming over from the door, and bent down to take Elliot's arm.
"Come on," he said, hauling the half-conscious demon over his shoulder. "You're going out."
Bell set her jaw at Elliot's back, then turned toward J and shot a smile in his direction. She headed back behind the bar as Anata swung the baseball bat up over her shoulder, casting a warning glance across the rest of the patrons. Then she turned to J.
"You, come on," she said, and headed back toward the storeroom behind the bar. Bell had set herself up at the cash register, playing with the take-a-penny, leave-a-penny bowl.
J followed Anata in, pushing the last of the aches and pains out of his mind. Anata turned to the safe embedded in the wall and turned the dial expertly, using her body to block out his line of sight. She reached in and pulled something out, then shut the door firmly and turned back.
"You were quick enough to get that guy off Bell," she said. "So I guess that counts something. Still, I don't think a wanderer's going to make many friends around here."
J had the feeling he knew this script. "You're firing me."
"I think it's best you don't stick around," she said, and extended her hand. She was offering him a wad of twenties - he took them, flipping through the edges. "Two hundred," Anata said. "I figure you've been working mostly twelve hours the last three days, so it's a bit less than you should get and more than we agreed. Should get you to the next place you're going."
J answered with a tight smile, tucking the cash into a pocket. "Well."
Anata shrugged, pushing past him into the bar again. "Tough world, wanderer. I've got a bar to keep orderly."
J nodded. He turned and headed for the door.
Marcus caught his elbow as he was heading out, then stepped outside with him. It wasn't quite a clear night, but it wasn't overcast either - scraps of cloud hung between the stars, and a slow breeze made the air cooler than it was. Marcus pulled a pack of cigarettes from his coat and lit one, then offered the pack over. "Leave it to a glays to ruin everything, huhn?"
J paused with his fingers on the butt of a cigarette. Marcus pulled the pack back, then flicked his lighter on at the tip where J held it.
"Glaysa?" J asked.
"Elliot. Just 'cause you're a coolblood, see." Marcus took a drag. "Fuckin' glad I'm not."
J looked down at the red tip of the cigarette he held, then back up at Marcus's eyes. The whites were clearly visible against the dark of the night, the dark of his skin, tinted red under the neon sign. "I would have guessed poludnica."
Marcus snorted. "You didn't notice your mind was getting all fucked up?"
"I noticed more when everything started to hurt."
Marcus shrugged. "Yeah, I hear that happens with a shift, doesn't it? Looks a bitch, anyway." He motioned to the cigarette in J's fingers. "You going to smoke that or take it home with you?"
J stared. After a moment he flicked the ash from the end of the cigarette, but didn't bring it up. "What do you mean, with a shift?"
Marcus looked at him, eyes narrowing. "Here I thought you were long off the boat," he said. "Don't tell me you haven't figured out what you got, boy."
J kept staring.
"You're a shifter," Marcus said. "Shape shifter. Hear the Rift does that to some. Started to shift in there when Elliot was goin' after you. Gotta hand it to you," he said. "Never seen one push it back like that, and I know natives."
"I'm not a shapeshifter," J said.
"Well, you were in there," Marcus said, and then held out his hand. "Look, if you're not gonna smoke that, might as well give it back."
After a moment, J put the cigarette to his mouth and pulled, feeling the chemical heat making its way down to his lungs. Then he held it back out to Marcus, who took it, spat in his hand, and ground it out on his palm.
"There's a guy down in Ross sells fifty dollar used cars," he says. "They're junkers. Buy 'em for scrap. But there's one or two that might move forward. Just don't tell him I sent you."
"Thanks," J said.
Marcus bent his head to his cigarette and J walked away. It wasn't exactly a blow. He was just leaving earlier than he'd expected. That was the story of his life, and that was all.