NaNo Days 2 and 3
Because I just couldn't be arsed to post yesterday. I couldn't be arsed to finish today's quota either, and it's a miracle that I got anything at all. But I went running? I'm starting a training program. I also worked on this horrible awful terrible Pandora Hearts fanfiction that spawned from Chapter 42 involving Break and Gil and Vincent and I am going to have to write my first sex scene ever and we will leave it at that. Anyways, I may just end up doing productive things instead of finishing NaNo this year. I WILL set my lower limit at 500/day though. I ain't slacking off THAT much.
Total words: 4,193
Words today: 747
Summary: Sophie and Emma drag Wolf out for groceries. Ian meets up with Lillian and annoys her before they rendezvous with Chloe.
Comments: Oh Wolf. I missed you so much. So so much. Too bad I still have little to no motivation to write this right now.
Thakkar felt a twinge of pity for Quincy, who had been slumped in his chair, visibly searching for an escape since Emma had arrived. He had enough trouble dealing with just Sophie, and the two of them together was exponentially worse.
“Sophie, why don’t you help Emma unload her things?” he suggested. Sophie opened her mouth to protest- probably to call him unsavory names and claim that he just wanted to get rid of her because Quincy was too much of a wimp to cut a good deal on his own, and this was partially true. But she stopped short, hesitating as Emma stared up at her all wide eyes and bright smile.
“…Sounds like a great idea! Come on, kid.”
She hooked her arm around Emma’s, grabbed half the bags on the table, and dragged Emma off before the girl could protest. Across the table, Quincy watched them go with a mix of relief and disapproval.
“She still doesn’t know?” he asked, and there was an undercurrent of disbelief and disgust that Thakkar almost took offense to.
“She’s not related to us,” he said. “The regulations requiring medics were put into place after Wolf and I got our ship, so she was assigned to us. Ms. Kurti is a perfectly nice young woman, but she can’t be trusted.”
Quincy said nothing, but the look on his face was plain enough. He didn’t think it was fair to her, conducting business behind her back like this. Also he didn’t want to be stuck in some small locked room all day for weeks just because Thakkar didn’t trust Emma, but Thakkar couldn’t find it in himself to feel pity. After all, it was Quincy’s own fault for being caught. He ignored the look and steepled his fingers, smiling a perfect business smile.
“Your offer, Mr. Williams?”
Steven Souffrant was having a pretty good day. The name helped, actually. He’d thought it up just before docking, kind of a spur of the moment thing when the control tower asked him for a name and ID. If you flash the pilot’s license fast enough, they’ll see the picture but miss the words, and they sure as hell aren’t going to take a break from their busy jobs to run a background check while spaceships crash into each other outside or idle till they run out of gas. And he liked the name. It had this air of sophistication that his last few names had been lacking. Eric Thorton, Tony Kintsch, Gabriel Schuessler, they all sounded fine and they’d served him well enough, but there was something in the way this one rolled off the tongue. Souffrant. Like an exotic spice or a modern art piece.
So he’d got a new name, and now that they were docked he was essentially on leave till it was time to launch again. Thakkar didn’t give him much in the way of responsibilities when they were out in civilization. He didn’t trust Steven farther than he could throw him, and while that could be a bit of a pain, it meant that Steven got out of all sorts of work. Thakkar would only give him jobs when he was there to supervise, and Thakkar was always busy when they were docked someplace. So Steven had wandered around the station for a while, checking out shop windows, talking to strangers, and wrestling with someone’s Labrador retriever. Then when he got bored of the crowd he came back to home sweet home, stole that fluffy blanket from Emma’s room, and curled up on the couch with some coffee (real coffee, not that instant crap- one of the great pleasures of being docked) and a comic book that he’d picked up at one of the overpriced terminal bookstores. With Emma and Thakkar both off doing god-knows-what that he didn’t care about, the ship was his and his alone. Alone, that is, until he heard the whirr of the main doors and the banter of two familiar voices.
“Woah, you guys really cleaned up in here! What happened? Did Wolf get fired or something?”
“Sophie!”
“What, you said yourself that most of the mess was his. So, did he?”
“No. He’s good at his job. We just had inspections last week.”
Steven wrinkled his nose, but didn’t bother feeling offended. The nickname was hardly worth noticing anymore; he’d rather be Steven Souffrant, but he knew better than to expect his coworkers to listen. And everything else was true on pretty much all counts. Most of the time Thakkar would fuss at him if he made a mess, but he only really made him clean up when inspections came around. Also he was good at his job, but that went without saying. He shifted when Sophie and Emma came in, dangling one arm over the arm of the couch and raising the other in greeting.
“Hey, ladies! How’s it going?”
Sophie met this the way she met any gesture from him; that is, with unveiled disgust. At least Emma was a bit more hospitable.
“It’s going great! I didn’t know that Sophie and Quincy would be here, but apparently Mr. Thakkar found them, so I thought maybe we could make them dinner before we leave again. Want to help?”
He didn’t particularly. He didn’t like Quincy or Sophie much, and he wasn’t too pleased to hear that Thakkar was talking to Quincy either. That meant that probably one or the other was going to be spending some time aboard his ship, and he would be expected to be nice to them. It’d be bad enough without having to cater a nice meal to them first. But before he could even open his mouth to decline, Sophie had grabbed one arm and hauled him off the sofa, pulling him out of his warm nest of blankets and pillows, sending his comic book tumbling to the floor, and very nearly jerking his arm out of its socket.
“He wants to help,” she declared. “I decided just now.”
“You lost my page!” This offended him more than any name-calling or insults could have.
“You don’t need your page, you’re helping a lady. Isn’t that what a gentleman is supposed to do?”
Steven cringed.
“Do I have to be a gentleman?”
But Sophie was already dragging him back out the door, talking to Emma as if he wasn’t even there.
“We’ll need groceries, but I can cover that cost cause Quincy and I owe Vincent a favour anyways…”
He gave his comic book and the couch one last forlorn glance before they disappeared around the corner and he was shoved into the harsh world of neon lights and the bustling crowd once more.
There was a brief silence in the atrium before a lone woman folded the newspaper that had hid her face, put it down on the bench beside her, and retraced their steps back to the door.
“Lil-a-lil-a-Lillian!”
Lillian’s mood, already pretty foul considering the crowd, got exponentially worse when she heard the excessively cheerful voice. On one hand, ok. Ian had finally made it to the rendevouz. It had been seriously twenty minutes past the meeting time, but apparently he was a big believer in that ‘better late than never’ truism. On the other hand? Now she had to deal with him.
“Lillian! I found you!”
She finally spared him a look, albeit heavy with aggravation, as he hopped up onto the edge of the fountain she was sitting by. He looked kind of like an oversized kid perched there, hunched over with his knees to his chest and his weight on his toes and fingers. Lillian noted the distinct lack of several things: his glasses, his pistol, and their target. Oh, for Christ’s sake. Ian was a lot of things, stupid and immature and aggravating, but incompetent wasn’t usually one of those things.
“You’re alone. Where’s the bitch?”
Ian gave her a pout usually reserved for two-year-olds.
“Not even a hello? You wound me, Lil.”
She did her best to ignore the nickname, which made her feel years younger and not in a good way. They were just here on business. Anything not related to that, she could ignore. Besides, the annoyance was easily overwhelmed by the pleasure she derived from knowing that he’d messed up big-time.
“Did you lose her? Oooooh, Chloe is gonna be pissed.”
He stared at her for a minute, eyebrows raised and head tilted to one side, then rocked back on his heels. God only knows how he managed not to overbalance and fall into the fountain. She would’ve loved to see that. But instead of saying anything in his defense, he just whistled and stared up at the ceiling. Lillian sniggered and reached for her headset. It was a small device that could easily be mistaken for a normal earring, were it not for the attached earbud. She tugged on the tiny skull-shaped microphone- custom made by a friend of hers to make this more of a fashion statement than a communication device- and it telescoped out into a headset.
“Hey, Chloe.”
“Ah, Lillian.” The older woman’s voice was as calm and clear as ever. She had been amazingly patient, considering how late they were getting back to her. “Did you find Ian?”
“Oh yeah, he’s here, but guess who’s not?”
A pause, then a light sigh.
“The target, I presume. May I speak to him?”
Lillian made no effort to hide her satisfied grin.
“ Mm-hmm. Hold on.”
She took the headset out her ear and handed it to Ian. Not having the benefit of pierced ears, he had to hold it in place, but it worked well enough.
“Hey! Chloe. Yeah, sorry about that. …Well yeah, I have perfect reason to sound happy. Guess what I got? -Oh no, I can do you one better. Got her tracking number.”
Here he flashed a crooked grin back at Lillian, who was starting to see red. He hadn’t said anything about a tracking number. He kept shit from her, and then he wondered why she didn’t like him? What a fucking asshole.
“Oh yeah, should make it way easier. So, see you in a couple minutes? Yeah, we’re not too far. Alright. Bye, love.”
He had barely finished speaking when Lillian grabbed the headset away and put it back in her ear, scowling.
“You didn’t tell me that.”
“You didn’t give me time to,” Ian pointed out, completely unruffled by the waves of hatred radiating off of her. “Patience is a virtue, Lillian.”
It was one of the many virtues that Lillian lacked, along with self control and reasonable social skills. She couldn’t honestly say she was sorry, either, if having said virtues made dorks like Ian more likely to hang around her. The less she had to deal with that sort of person, the better.
Their dock was about eight minutes away, thanks to the system of subways connecting the various terminals and atriums of the station, but an eight minute trip with Ian easily become fifteen minutes, maybe even twenty. He stopped to talk to strangers. He stood aside to let ladies on the trains first, and Lillian apparently did not count as a lady, though he assured her she’d grow up to be a beautiful one, as if 19 was still a child. Even when she could keep him moving, he was going remarkably slow. It occurred to her that something had probably happened; he kept cringing and rubbing his head, and his glasses seemed to be in pieces. But he was alive and there weren’t any limbs missing, so she couldn’t really bring herself to care. Ian was the kind of guy who you could probably drop off a skyscraper and he’d just get up and crack a bad joke at you.
They did arrive at the ship though. It looked pretty pathetic, a tiny red thing that may as well have been an escape pod of the freighters and pleasure ships that surrounded it. Scratches and rust marred its red paint, and there were still dents of various sizes from a nasty run-in with an asteroid belt, among other things. Lillian was pretty ashamed to claim this thing as her home, but hey, what are you gonna do? After entering the access code, which was a good eight digits longer than anyone else’s because Chloe was convinced that people might actually want to steal this piece of junk, she dragged Ian inside and up to the bridge. She caught a glimpse of Chloe sitting at the comscreen, completely absorbed in the glowing text of various files, before Ian shoved past her and announced their presence.
“Chloe! We’re home!”
Always in that god damn singsong. Lillian scowled but followed him inside, taking a seat on one of the careworn chairs where other crew members would sit, if they actually had money to hire more than just the three of them.
Chloe turned to greet them, an eternal half-smile on her face. She wasn’t a particularly threatening figure; far from it, actually. She looked as worn as her ship, wrinkled and almost ghostly with her pale skin and silver-grey hair. Still, she had this feel about her that tended to put people at peace. Lillian didn’t quite get it, but she’d seen it work its magic on people too many times to completely deny it. Hell, even she felt it a bit-sort of. Ok, Lillian’s love for Chloe probably came more from her relentless efforts to get in the way of anything and everything the army did. Lillian wasn’t much of a pacifist, but she could respect that because the army was pretty much made up of assholes and bureaucrats. She wasn’t sure why Chloe had such a grudge against them, but she didn’t really care, so long as she was fighting the good fight or whatever.
“Welcome back,” she said, rising to meet Ian. “Neither of you are hurt?”
The question was only directed at Ian, of course. Lillian didn’t do close combat unless she had to, and if she had fought at the station, Chloe would’ve known. As far as Lillian was concerned, subtlety was using gunpowder instead of C4. Ian brushed her hand away, shrugging.
“Please, dear,” he said in a deep voice that was probably a poor imitation of some movie star action hero, “I wouldn’t die even if you killed me.”
And with that perfectly nonsensical line, he took a seat next to Lillian-always next to her, because he stuck to her like loud and obnoxious Velcro-and dropped the tough-guy façade in favor of the toddler sulk.
“I broke my glasses again, though. Do we have pliers somewhere around here?”
Total words: 4,193
Words today: 747
Summary: Sophie and Emma drag Wolf out for groceries. Ian meets up with Lillian and annoys her before they rendezvous with Chloe.
Comments: Oh Wolf. I missed you so much. So so much. Too bad I still have little to no motivation to write this right now.
Thakkar felt a twinge of pity for Quincy, who had been slumped in his chair, visibly searching for an escape since Emma had arrived. He had enough trouble dealing with just Sophie, and the two of them together was exponentially worse.
“Sophie, why don’t you help Emma unload her things?” he suggested. Sophie opened her mouth to protest- probably to call him unsavory names and claim that he just wanted to get rid of her because Quincy was too much of a wimp to cut a good deal on his own, and this was partially true. But she stopped short, hesitating as Emma stared up at her all wide eyes and bright smile.
“…Sounds like a great idea! Come on, kid.”
She hooked her arm around Emma’s, grabbed half the bags on the table, and dragged Emma off before the girl could protest. Across the table, Quincy watched them go with a mix of relief and disapproval.
“She still doesn’t know?” he asked, and there was an undercurrent of disbelief and disgust that Thakkar almost took offense to.
“She’s not related to us,” he said. “The regulations requiring medics were put into place after Wolf and I got our ship, so she was assigned to us. Ms. Kurti is a perfectly nice young woman, but she can’t be trusted.”
Quincy said nothing, but the look on his face was plain enough. He didn’t think it was fair to her, conducting business behind her back like this. Also he didn’t want to be stuck in some small locked room all day for weeks just because Thakkar didn’t trust Emma, but Thakkar couldn’t find it in himself to feel pity. After all, it was Quincy’s own fault for being caught. He ignored the look and steepled his fingers, smiling a perfect business smile.
“Your offer, Mr. Williams?”
Steven Souffrant was having a pretty good day. The name helped, actually. He’d thought it up just before docking, kind of a spur of the moment thing when the control tower asked him for a name and ID. If you flash the pilot’s license fast enough, they’ll see the picture but miss the words, and they sure as hell aren’t going to take a break from their busy jobs to run a background check while spaceships crash into each other outside or idle till they run out of gas. And he liked the name. It had this air of sophistication that his last few names had been lacking. Eric Thorton, Tony Kintsch, Gabriel Schuessler, they all sounded fine and they’d served him well enough, but there was something in the way this one rolled off the tongue. Souffrant. Like an exotic spice or a modern art piece.
So he’d got a new name, and now that they were docked he was essentially on leave till it was time to launch again. Thakkar didn’t give him much in the way of responsibilities when they were out in civilization. He didn’t trust Steven farther than he could throw him, and while that could be a bit of a pain, it meant that Steven got out of all sorts of work. Thakkar would only give him jobs when he was there to supervise, and Thakkar was always busy when they were docked someplace. So Steven had wandered around the station for a while, checking out shop windows, talking to strangers, and wrestling with someone’s Labrador retriever. Then when he got bored of the crowd he came back to home sweet home, stole that fluffy blanket from Emma’s room, and curled up on the couch with some coffee (real coffee, not that instant crap- one of the great pleasures of being docked) and a comic book that he’d picked up at one of the overpriced terminal bookstores. With Emma and Thakkar both off doing god-knows-what that he didn’t care about, the ship was his and his alone. Alone, that is, until he heard the whirr of the main doors and the banter of two familiar voices.
“Woah, you guys really cleaned up in here! What happened? Did Wolf get fired or something?”
“Sophie!”
“What, you said yourself that most of the mess was his. So, did he?”
“No. He’s good at his job. We just had inspections last week.”
Steven wrinkled his nose, but didn’t bother feeling offended. The nickname was hardly worth noticing anymore; he’d rather be Steven Souffrant, but he knew better than to expect his coworkers to listen. And everything else was true on pretty much all counts. Most of the time Thakkar would fuss at him if he made a mess, but he only really made him clean up when inspections came around. Also he was good at his job, but that went without saying. He shifted when Sophie and Emma came in, dangling one arm over the arm of the couch and raising the other in greeting.
“Hey, ladies! How’s it going?”
Sophie met this the way she met any gesture from him; that is, with unveiled disgust. At least Emma was a bit more hospitable.
“It’s going great! I didn’t know that Sophie and Quincy would be here, but apparently Mr. Thakkar found them, so I thought maybe we could make them dinner before we leave again. Want to help?”
He didn’t particularly. He didn’t like Quincy or Sophie much, and he wasn’t too pleased to hear that Thakkar was talking to Quincy either. That meant that probably one or the other was going to be spending some time aboard his ship, and he would be expected to be nice to them. It’d be bad enough without having to cater a nice meal to them first. But before he could even open his mouth to decline, Sophie had grabbed one arm and hauled him off the sofa, pulling him out of his warm nest of blankets and pillows, sending his comic book tumbling to the floor, and very nearly jerking his arm out of its socket.
“He wants to help,” she declared. “I decided just now.”
“You lost my page!” This offended him more than any name-calling or insults could have.
“You don’t need your page, you’re helping a lady. Isn’t that what a gentleman is supposed to do?”
Steven cringed.
“Do I have to be a gentleman?”
But Sophie was already dragging him back out the door, talking to Emma as if he wasn’t even there.
“We’ll need groceries, but I can cover that cost cause Quincy and I owe Vincent a favour anyways…”
He gave his comic book and the couch one last forlorn glance before they disappeared around the corner and he was shoved into the harsh world of neon lights and the bustling crowd once more.
There was a brief silence in the atrium before a lone woman folded the newspaper that had hid her face, put it down on the bench beside her, and retraced their steps back to the door.
“Lil-a-lil-a-Lillian!”
Lillian’s mood, already pretty foul considering the crowd, got exponentially worse when she heard the excessively cheerful voice. On one hand, ok. Ian had finally made it to the rendevouz. It had been seriously twenty minutes past the meeting time, but apparently he was a big believer in that ‘better late than never’ truism. On the other hand? Now she had to deal with him.
“Lillian! I found you!”
She finally spared him a look, albeit heavy with aggravation, as he hopped up onto the edge of the fountain she was sitting by. He looked kind of like an oversized kid perched there, hunched over with his knees to his chest and his weight on his toes and fingers. Lillian noted the distinct lack of several things: his glasses, his pistol, and their target. Oh, for Christ’s sake. Ian was a lot of things, stupid and immature and aggravating, but incompetent wasn’t usually one of those things.
“You’re alone. Where’s the bitch?”
Ian gave her a pout usually reserved for two-year-olds.
“Not even a hello? You wound me, Lil.”
She did her best to ignore the nickname, which made her feel years younger and not in a good way. They were just here on business. Anything not related to that, she could ignore. Besides, the annoyance was easily overwhelmed by the pleasure she derived from knowing that he’d messed up big-time.
“Did you lose her? Oooooh, Chloe is gonna be pissed.”
He stared at her for a minute, eyebrows raised and head tilted to one side, then rocked back on his heels. God only knows how he managed not to overbalance and fall into the fountain. She would’ve loved to see that. But instead of saying anything in his defense, he just whistled and stared up at the ceiling. Lillian sniggered and reached for her headset. It was a small device that could easily be mistaken for a normal earring, were it not for the attached earbud. She tugged on the tiny skull-shaped microphone- custom made by a friend of hers to make this more of a fashion statement than a communication device- and it telescoped out into a headset.
“Hey, Chloe.”
“Ah, Lillian.” The older woman’s voice was as calm and clear as ever. She had been amazingly patient, considering how late they were getting back to her. “Did you find Ian?”
“Oh yeah, he’s here, but guess who’s not?”
A pause, then a light sigh.
“The target, I presume. May I speak to him?”
Lillian made no effort to hide her satisfied grin.
“ Mm-hmm. Hold on.”
She took the headset out her ear and handed it to Ian. Not having the benefit of pierced ears, he had to hold it in place, but it worked well enough.
“Hey! Chloe. Yeah, sorry about that. …Well yeah, I have perfect reason to sound happy. Guess what I got? -Oh no, I can do you one better. Got her tracking number.”
Here he flashed a crooked grin back at Lillian, who was starting to see red. He hadn’t said anything about a tracking number. He kept shit from her, and then he wondered why she didn’t like him? What a fucking asshole.
“Oh yeah, should make it way easier. So, see you in a couple minutes? Yeah, we’re not too far. Alright. Bye, love.”
He had barely finished speaking when Lillian grabbed the headset away and put it back in her ear, scowling.
“You didn’t tell me that.”
“You didn’t give me time to,” Ian pointed out, completely unruffled by the waves of hatred radiating off of her. “Patience is a virtue, Lillian.”
It was one of the many virtues that Lillian lacked, along with self control and reasonable social skills. She couldn’t honestly say she was sorry, either, if having said virtues made dorks like Ian more likely to hang around her. The less she had to deal with that sort of person, the better.
Their dock was about eight minutes away, thanks to the system of subways connecting the various terminals and atriums of the station, but an eight minute trip with Ian easily become fifteen minutes, maybe even twenty. He stopped to talk to strangers. He stood aside to let ladies on the trains first, and Lillian apparently did not count as a lady, though he assured her she’d grow up to be a beautiful one, as if 19 was still a child. Even when she could keep him moving, he was going remarkably slow. It occurred to her that something had probably happened; he kept cringing and rubbing his head, and his glasses seemed to be in pieces. But he was alive and there weren’t any limbs missing, so she couldn’t really bring herself to care. Ian was the kind of guy who you could probably drop off a skyscraper and he’d just get up and crack a bad joke at you.
They did arrive at the ship though. It looked pretty pathetic, a tiny red thing that may as well have been an escape pod of the freighters and pleasure ships that surrounded it. Scratches and rust marred its red paint, and there were still dents of various sizes from a nasty run-in with an asteroid belt, among other things. Lillian was pretty ashamed to claim this thing as her home, but hey, what are you gonna do? After entering the access code, which was a good eight digits longer than anyone else’s because Chloe was convinced that people might actually want to steal this piece of junk, she dragged Ian inside and up to the bridge. She caught a glimpse of Chloe sitting at the comscreen, completely absorbed in the glowing text of various files, before Ian shoved past her and announced their presence.
“Chloe! We’re home!”
Always in that god damn singsong. Lillian scowled but followed him inside, taking a seat on one of the careworn chairs where other crew members would sit, if they actually had money to hire more than just the three of them.
Chloe turned to greet them, an eternal half-smile on her face. She wasn’t a particularly threatening figure; far from it, actually. She looked as worn as her ship, wrinkled and almost ghostly with her pale skin and silver-grey hair. Still, she had this feel about her that tended to put people at peace. Lillian didn’t quite get it, but she’d seen it work its magic on people too many times to completely deny it. Hell, even she felt it a bit-sort of. Ok, Lillian’s love for Chloe probably came more from her relentless efforts to get in the way of anything and everything the army did. Lillian wasn’t much of a pacifist, but she could respect that because the army was pretty much made up of assholes and bureaucrats. She wasn’t sure why Chloe had such a grudge against them, but she didn’t really care, so long as she was fighting the good fight or whatever.
“Welcome back,” she said, rising to meet Ian. “Neither of you are hurt?”
The question was only directed at Ian, of course. Lillian didn’t do close combat unless she had to, and if she had fought at the station, Chloe would’ve known. As far as Lillian was concerned, subtlety was using gunpowder instead of C4. Ian brushed her hand away, shrugging.
“Please, dear,” he said in a deep voice that was probably a poor imitation of some movie star action hero, “I wouldn’t die even if you killed me.”
And with that perfectly nonsensical line, he took a seat next to Lillian-always next to her, because he stuck to her like loud and obnoxious Velcro-and dropped the tough-guy façade in favor of the toddler sulk.
“I broke my glasses again, though. Do we have pliers somewhere around here?”