Who: Iris, and an NPC. What: Threats--kind of. Where: Le Croquembouche, one of Iris' employers When: Literally minutes before the Midnight Event. EDIT: After fire escape log. Warnings: None. Notes: I am trying to be as consistent as possible with Iris, but if I told you something somewhere that conflicts, let me know. I've got a proper timeline in my files now. (Also, wow, I'm not that great at present tense, but I gave it a go.) This is a narrative now but if you want a midnight event thread with Iris, let me know?
Iris' shift didn't start until eleven, but she gets there early at around 10 P.M., walking in with the late-night movie crowd and nodding hello to the girl with the pageboy and the flowering tattoos who is working the counter at the tail end of the previous shift. The graduate student crowd that typically works Le Croquembouche are the kind of intellectuals that favor heavy eyeliner and vintage clothing, and while at first they didn't know what to do with Iris (quiet, older, of the jewel tones and clean make up), almost all of them took an eventual liking to her for some reason they could not truly identify. Many of them found her attractive rather than being irritated at the breezy summer of her clothing, and while at first one of the girls had frowned at her elusive perfume, nobody could smell it anymore.
Iris, for her part, found her coffee shop coworkers to be infinitely better company than the borderline hostile librarians at the NYPL; she attributed this to economic stress, and pretended she didn't feel its influence. Iris always has money problems: not enough, or too much, or needing more, or complications in various schemes to steal it, she always has them. All the zeroes and the bills right now are more troubling to her than she likes to admit, however, and she bitterly attributes this to being stationary, where in any other circumstance she would have swept off to another town by now--especially in the wake of all the recent violence.
She is cleaning the espresso machine on the eve of the Midnight Event when she hears Italian leather on the tiles and looks up over the counter. The usual clientele doesn't even know what Italian leather looks like, much less what it sounds like, but Iris does. The man is wearing a suit, and he is so broad naturally that she knows how much it must cost to get that suit to across his shoulders and still look good. He also has "trained-with-a-deadly-weapon government employee" written all over him--it is about the way he moves, and the way he looks down the sight lines as he moves into the shop. It is empty, except for herself, and Iris is not so much an idiot as to hope he is just there for coffee.
"Let me guess." She gives herself a Russian accent, like Katya's, just to grate on his nerves and to prove she doesn't care why he's here. Iris can do things with phonetic sounds that do ten times more than words alone. She didn't bother to alter her grammar. "Large black coffee and a shot of espresso."
He gives her a squinting look. His eyes are pale around the corners, since he's used to wearing sunglasses in the day time, and he's never taught himself to suppress the tells the muscles around his eyes broadcast. "Do I look tired to you, Miss Thorpe?"
"No, I just thought you might need to wake up." She leans on the counter in a deliberate show of casual interest as he approaches the counter. She slows her breathing down so her heartrate won't speed up, and she's pissed that he's able to do that just by walking up.
He doesn't care for her attitude and he comes close to the edge of the counter so that she can smell the dry cleaning chemicals and the spicy deodorant he uses. It makes her stomach turn, but she's an expert at hiding that sort of thing, and she paints him with eyes that are utterly unimpressed so that when he speaks, it sounds cheap. "We are checking on you, is all."
"I don't know why. I haven't moved." She goes back to cleaning the machine, passing the wet cloth over the mechanisms.
"We are aware of that." He sounds smug.
She smiles, but rages inside at the presumption their little tracker is still attached to her person. "I bet you are."
"We have heard reports that you aren't sleeping well."
She stops cleaning to look at him. "Pardon?"
"Insomnia, perhaps? That you're taking sleep aids for it?" He sees some weakness in her response and he's going for it with teeth bared.
She forces her stomach to unclench. Of course, the police officer that came by. R1's peeping has made her paranoid, and Iris doesn't know who else has been listening to her nightmares. "A polite fiction for the NYPD, Agent...?"
She fishes for a name. He doesn't give her one. "You lied to a police officer?"
"I thought it would probably be unwise to allow myself to be involved in a criminal investigation."
He stands there for a moment, shifting his bulk against the counter and making her head pound with something worse than a migraine and sharper than a concussion. She ignores it and keeps her face in the same arrangement. Unlike him, she's figured out how to control the muscles on her face to keep them from telling tales she'd rather he didn't know.
"We would prefer that as well, obviously."
"Obviously."
He ignores that. "A credible witness is what we need. Which means we would also prefer you would avoid any drugs, be they prescription or otherwise."
Iris raises an eyebrow, but says nothing in direct response. Instead she says, "It must really get your goat that you don't know my name." She has to drop the Russian for that sally, and it irritates the hell out of him when he realizes it was put on for his benefit. He must not be popular with his friends, or they would have warned him she did that to the new ones.
"Iris Thorpe."
"My first one."
"Legally, in this country, your name is Iris Thorpe."
"I know." She grins at him. He scowls.
"We need you to be a credible witness, Miss Thorpe."
She pretended thoughtfulness--badly, so he could see it. "I think I heard you say that before."
"We also need you to be alive for the hearing. You won't reconsider re-entering the protection program?"
There is no hesitation, and no conversation on this point. "No."
He sighs, theatrically, in Iris' opinion. "You are being unnecessarily stubborn in this matter."
Iris has had enough. She puts down the towel and comes around the edge of the counter, even though she can think of nothing she wants to do less than get closer. He refuses to back down--typical--and she's practically on top of his feet. "I think my stubbornness is perfectly necessary. I don't like you, or your government, or the way you keep saying 'we.'"
"May I remind you that you are still a convicted felon and--"
"And you have to play nice, or I won't play nice either. I'm doing you people a favor to get at Alexei, and that's all." She pats his arm as the clean seam of her slacks bump his hip. He likes it, but resents that too. Men. She straightened the line of his jacket and stepped away. "We came to terms, this is the way it is. When you have a court date, let me know. Otherwise, leave me the hell alone. And stay out of my medicine cabinet."
She slides back behind the counter before he can look down at her ankle and notice that the line of the material is too clean there for one of their little trackers to still be in place. She sees a shadow coming down the walk just outside of the shop. "First customer." She points at the Midnight Event sign on the wall. "Buy something, or go away."
The bell on the door chimes, and the agent goes away. Iris glances down at the wallet she'd lifted from his left inside breast pocket. Agent Orion Murphy. FBI, naturally. He looks young in his wallet picture, and more optimistic than he did a few minutes ago. His wallet has a hundred-forty dollars in twenties, though. At least the risk wasn't for nothing. She pockets the cash, melts the credit cards past identification on the steam part of the machine, then drops the wallet in the trash. She'd make sure to drop that bag in the dumpster behind the thai place next door.
She wonders how long it will take him to realize it's gone. She cracks open a new can of coffee to wave off the smell of burnt plastic. Bastard.