Nick has (wheels) wrote in repose, @ 2016-05-10 03:09:00 |
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Entry tags: | *log, nick morgan, wren henry |
Nick & Wren: fortunes
Who: Nick & Wren
What: Carnival fortunes
When: Nowish
Nick had a picture of small-town life in his head a long-ass time before he'd put the truck in metaphorical park - a cab, one of those undignified ones where they hoisted you in and out - in Repose. Maybe it was the regular diet of commercialized TV taken in along with the additives and sodium in whatever it was he'd dug out of the back of the Seven-Eleven, freezer-burned and tasting like ass, but he expected slow. Maybe something of a rhythm, a chatty set of elderly ladies who played cards or golf or some shit like that, maybe walked around the town square. He'd figured it was warmer, metaphorical rather than physical because you couldn't get any warmer than summer in the city, where the bricks themselves oozed heat like sweat, red-stuck together with people crammed in 'em like ants. He'd picked the diner and because in all those TV shows aired for the product placement and the warm fuzzies they gave the real families over dinner, a diner was safe. Central. And the thing Nick had liked best before they gave him lines to say and a person to be, was getting to know the city inside out, the bones of it. Patience, and time and most places gave themselves over because you out-stubborned them, waiting for it. There was nothing in the pop-culture manual for a carnival that looked like it had spun itself out of something past the watershed. Pretty, lit up against the sky like a paper cut-out, if he didn't look at it critically - which, hell. It was a business probably making decent cash, no receipts but it was above the water-line compared to the crop of trailers closer to this side of town than the main street. But he wasn't a cop anymore. He didn't need to watch, and look for all the ways this shit didn't line up right and he didn't need to look unobtrusive as he did it. There was nowhere to blend into, to merge the discoloration of where Nick began and the rest of it ended because he didn't need to blend. Nick? Nick wasn't blending or nothing. He wore a hat, tweaked low over his face and it threw long shadow over the length of his nose to his chin and a Guns and Roses shirt that had been through the wash so many times the cotton was tissue-thin. Jeans, and the wheels of his chair had lights because the first thing he'd learned in Repose was how goddamn dark the place got at night. So he was a light-show all by himself, and while it had been dry and hot, the kind of ebbed-heat that eased late at night, the ground was pitted and rutted and frustration was starting to tick at the side of his mouth getting the hell through. Still. He had a date with fortune and he was willing to bet whatever the Frenchwoman saw in the bottom of the tea-cup or the span of the cards, it didn't have shit on what Nick himself had dug out of a week in town, let alone a month. A kid brother who had disappeared into the muck, ducked beneath the scud of it over his head instead of dragging himself out on a warning Nick hadn't had the authority to give - and now showed up running the kind of titty-bar Nick had gone as UC rather than himself - that didn't scrape itself into tea-leaves real well. The tent was pretty, lights and colors and old-rose over the dark of the night and he listened to the sounds of people approaching before he moved forward. Nick's voice was neutral but it clung to the vestiges of whatever accent his persona had last taken on too easy, specks of dust clinging on something clean. The timbre was low, and his face was solid profile, shadow. "What do you give me if I tell you straight up I don't want the truth? Does anybody do that these days?" |