Repose

[Two days after the moon, he returns to the Carriage House. It's the first time he's been back since Halloween, and the place feels strange without the haunts bleeding him dry as soon as he walks inside. He looks ill and pasty, but no worse than he usually does, and he closes the blinds and locks the door with minutes of arriving. Music plays rather loudly, and he messages people that afternoon.]

[Locked to Janus A]
Better have tried to get in contact with me since the party. Would be disappointed otherwise.

[Add: After this.]
Answer me. Now.

[2nd Add: After Newt shares the picture of the ring.]
Don't make me summon you. Will do it.

[Locked to Matt D]
Surprised you weren't here, looming. With PJ somewhere?

[Locked to Connie G]
Can't call myself a prodigal son. Prodigal old man? Will apologizing with a raise work?

[Locked to PJ R]
Should talk.

[Public, not anon]
Spent the party with two people. Want to thank you both. Was sick and writing. Humored me. Thank you.

[After reading this. It catches his eye for obvious reasons. After all, reading written Portuguese is a lot easier than understanding spoken, and he ain't sure how private the conversation's supposed to be.]

[Locked to Cisco D]
[In Spanish.] I don't know much about all this strange stuff, but my wild guess is it's something demonic, your circle. You and your friend might want to lock conversations.

ETA: [Locked to Janus A]
Gotta question for you, mi socio.

Who: Holly + Gwen
What: Spider-Gwen, Spider-Gwen, does whatever a Spider-Gwen can. Or maybe not.
When: Fuzzy: prime-fuzzy time.

She wasn't good at staying put.

The city was a tiny bit problematic, and by tiny? Read family size but the city was also the closest thing to home Holly had. Okay, the people? Were all loaded into a small town with a diner straight out of a mediocre mid-00s TV show or whatever but that wasn't her life. The family part of Repose was awesome if a tiny little like overload. And family were home but birdsong and six am starts in a gym that smelled like old sweat, they weren't. She bled the city, car exhaust, sirens and late nights and the Capital was a bus-ride away. And if the city hadn't been its own draw, there was the fact that her friend had crossed state-lines and had gone somewhere in the region of the Capital.

Finally? There was the small matter of cash. Holly knew that the family that thought she'd been dead five years would spot her. That wasn't the problem, the problem was she wasn't fourteen anymore and Holly liked safety in cash the way Cat loved diamonds. Earning enough to spot herself? Wasn't going to be in an arcade for Eddie and it wasn't going to be Dahlia's gym. The Capital was more of a market economy than anything else, but after the last brush with the places girls went, scouting exactly how this city worked was sort of the starting point.

So she had picked a bus late into the city, fishnets and boots and black hat crammed down over messy hair and a jacket that looked like it belonged to a construction worker over tight, loud pink. And the point of the sweep through back-alleys where the girls crammed into doorways or corners, where the neon substituted for street-lights and the clubs and bars were all that side of sketchy was to find both. Two birds, one stone and she was kind of counting on the whole work-thing distracting her from the fact that Cat and Eddie and that crew? Didn't know the girl lost in the city at all. She was post-Jersey, and she looked like any other street-girl which meant Holly was it.

It was late, and the buzz from the bar across the street was distant, the neon strobing and a couple of girls were hustling. It wasn't a crowd, so they could have been solo or the guy watching was running different places at once. Holly didn't know. But when a curb-crawler slowed and one girl leaned into the window? She was watching, and she wasn't watching the guy pitching through the alley at full speed toward her like somebody was after him.