shellyharmon (shellyharmon) wrote in birthrightrpg, @ 2020-12-29 10:57:00 |
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Entry tags: | npc, shelly harmon |
Who Are You?
Who: Shelly/NPC
What: Recognition
Where: Las Vegas, Shelly's Apartment
When: Christmas Eve
Ratings/Warnings: High, Violence/Blood
It had been over a week since the bizarre postcard incident, and everything had been quiet since. Shelly was ready to write it off as some anomaly, except for a vague feeling of dread that seemed to cling to a dark corner of her mind, unwilling to give up its grip. This resulted in her staying home more often than usual and hunkering down in front of the TV, watching movies, enveloping herself in a faux fur throw, and casting suspicious glances at her front door every so often.
The blonde, however, couldn’t stay home forever, and found herself out of food. She stared at the barren inside of her fridge in mild dismay. She could order takeout, but Shelly would only have the same problem the next day. Sighing deeply, she shut the refrigerator door and grabbed her swingy, tweedy coat that was more aesthetic than functional.
She drove around for nearly twenty minutes before giving up and settling on a convenience store. Shelly browsed the meagerly-stocked aisles with a plastic shopping basket slung over one arm. The blonde ended up grabbing whatever looked quick and microwaveable, plus a non-descript bottle of wine that she suspected was an off-brand only available at gas stations and stores such as these.
After checking out and paying, Shelly set the bag in the passenger seat of her car before slipping behind the wheel and starting the engine. The blonde stared straight ahead for a moment, not moving, as if some external force were keeping her still. She fiddled with her glovebox, opening and closing it. Adjusted her mirrors. Pushed her chair back as far as it would go. Finally, she pulled out of the parking space and got back onto the road.
When she returned to her apartment building, everything looked the same as when she had left it, as far as she could tell. Looking up at her unit, she could see the heavy brocade drapes were still drawn over the windows. Shelly walked slowly up the concrete steps, plastic shopping bag in one hand, keys in the other. It wasn’t until she had shut the door behind her and stood in the tiny hallway that she realized all the lights were out. The blonde had left them on when she left.
Slowly, quietly, she set the bag down on the ground so that its crinkling wouldn’t give her away. She felt around for the knob of her door. Suddenly, a lamp clicked on in the living room and Shelly froze, her heart jumping into her throat. “Don’t leave,” came a voice from the other room. “You’ve only just gotten here.”
A man appeared from around the corner. Tall, with close-cropped blond hair, blue-gray eyes. He stared at Shelly steadily, and it took a moment for recognition to set in. He had been one of the first people she had met in Vegas, all newly arrived and bright-eyed. It didn’t take long to slide disastrously into his life. She had introduced herself as a name she hadn’t used in years, had only used once previously. Cassie.
“What have we got?” he asked, looking down at the bag on the floor, his voice strangely cheerful. Shelly could only stand and stare, her feet rooted to the spot, her hand still hovering in mid air in its interrupted search for the doorknob. Porter. His name was Porter, she had forgotten. He took the bag over to her kitchen counter and began emptying the contents. Shelly found herself drifting toward him.
Porter held up the bottle of wine, giving it a shake as he smiled at her. “Got the good stuff, I see. Classy as always.” He opened a couple of drawers and rummaged around before coming up with her wine opener. The cork was quickly removed and he located two glasses, the dark red liquid sloshing out. Finally, Shelly managed to find her voice.
“What are you doing in my apartment?”
“Sit with me,” he answered smoothly, handing her one of the glasses of wine before grabbing his own and the bottle. He gestured to her. “After you.” Watching Porter over her shoulder, Shelly took a seat on her beloved sofa. She took a sip of the wine, followed by a barely disguised grimace as it dried out her tongue.
Porter barked out a laugh, sitting on the other end of the sofa. “It’s rather shit, isn’t it?” he asked, looking down at the contents of the glass. “You know, I once had a wine cellar. I filled it with bottles of vintage, and then they sat there. I can count on one hand how many times I went in there, personally.” He set the glass down on her table. “I didn’t know how much money, exactly, I had sunk into that thing until the divorce.”
Shelly sat up straighter, blinking rapidly as if she had just woken up. “I’m sorry,” she began slowly, coldly, gripping her glass by the stem, dark eyes fixed on his face. “I’m sorry for all the expensive bottles of wine you never got to drink. I’m truly devastated for you.”
“My wife didn’t let me see my kids for a year,” Porter told her. “I lost my home, my family, my friends. I was a joke. But do you want to know what really drove me insane? Because I think I am, you know, crazy now. I feel like I have definitely lost a piece of this.” He pointed to his head.
“What?”
He sighed, obviously frustrated with her responses. She was giving him nothing. Not fear, not concern, not even anger. Her face was a beautiful, carefully composed mask. “I had feelings for you. Real feelings.” Porter laughed bitterly. “God, you were perfect. Like someone created you in a lab. You knew exactly what to say. I had never even cheated before. I wasn’t that man. I was smugly, confidently sure I would never be that man.”
Shelly snorted. “Oh, fuck you,” she ground out, suddenly animated, eyes flashing. “You didn’t even have your wedding ring on when I met you. If you had never cheated before, it could only have been due to lack of opportunity.” The blonde leaned forward. “It wasn’t exactly difficult to manipulate you. You were low effort.”
Porter ignored her outburst. “After I lost everything, I had a lot of time to think,” he mused. “I kept thinking of you. Or I guess I mean Cassie. Because you’re definitely not her.” He paused, his gaze dropping to the table. The postcard sat there. His lips curled into a smile. “I see you got my message.”
“What do you want, Porter? Are you here to scare me? Hurt me?” Shelly studied the physical distance between them, the distance between the sofa and the front door. The distance between the sofa and the kitchen, where her knives lived. Wondered if she would need to make a decision.
“I thought it would help to find out who this person was, who could so completely destroy my life and slip away cleanly.”
Oh. Now they were getting somewhere. Shelly breathed in deeply as something seemed to wake up inside of her. This was real. This man was in her home. “You think I destroyed your life,” she repeated slowly. “You don’t think that, maybe...any of your own decisions factored into it, at all?”
“You are very good at what you do,” Porter told her, that discomforting smile appearing on his face once more. “But the truth is kind of sad, isn’t it?” He swept his hands out expansively, gesturing to Shelly’s living space. “Is this supposed to be charming?” He chuckled, slate eyes narrowing.
Shelly said nothing, instead looking at her home through his eyes, a stranger’s eyes. There was a sharp sensation somewhere near her stomach, a ground glass kind of scraping that made her lurch momentarily forward. It wasn’t hers anymore. The secondhand furniture, the inexpertly applied paint, the posters with their wrinkled edges. The solitary nature of it all. Alone.
He took her silence as a kind of victory, gaining momentum as he spoke. While previously he had been composed, polished, now his anger began to creep out. It was stifling. “No wonder you can’t seem to decide who you are. Because this is who you really are.” Porter closed the space between them. The arm of the sofa pressed against Shelly’s back.
“If I had met this version of you, I’m fairly certain that I wouldn’t be in the position that I am now,” he told her, a cruel sort of relish in his voice. She could feel her face grow warm, her pulse rising. She could smell his cologne. The space was getting smaller. Her eyes fell onto the wine bottle sitting on the table.
“And then I learned something about you, Shelly, that made everything sort of...click into place.” He picked up his glass and drained the contents. “Ever since losing everything that made up who I was, I’ve learned how to look for the small mercies in life. Those little things that can keep you going when everything seems lost. You know what I think that is for you?”
Once again, he was met with silence.
Porter leaned in for the kill. “That your father isn’t alive to see what you’ve become.”
She went very still. Shelly wasn’t sure if she was imagining the ringing in her ears, or the way her fingers twitched at the mention of her father. “What do you want?”
He held out his hand. Shelly looked down at his outstretched palm. “I want your phone,” Porter told her, his voice calm again, measured. The voice of someone used to telling people what to do, used to getting whatever he asked for. She could feel her temper stir, rise, her ears were hot. The blonde handed him her cell.
Porter opened up the camera app, setting the phone to start recording at the push of a button, and held it up to face her. “I want you to explain who you are, and what you do. That’s it. That’s all I want.”
Shelly took a deep breath, staring at the round camera lens on the back of her phone. “My name is Michelle Harmon,” she began, her face carefully blank, voice modulated and neutral. “I’m not Cassie, or Jane, or anyone else. I meet people, people with money, and I manipulate and take advantage of them. I con them. I blackmail them.” The blonde paused, glancing up at Porter. “Anything else?”
He met her gaze, his expression inscrutable. “Are you sorry?”
She paused for the briefest of moments before slowly shaking her head. “No. I’m not sorry.”
Porter ended the recording. “Okay. Good to know.” He looked down at her phone. “Now we just need to send this video along to the appropriate channels. I think everyone in your contacts list is a good start, no?” He scrolled through the names listed there.
Shelly leaned forward incrementally, watching Porter busy himself with her phone. Her fingers curled around the neck of the wine bottle. He didn’t even notice it lifting off of the table. He certainly didn’t notice the heavy glass bottom sailing toward the center of his temple. The bottle didn’t even break, but there was a loud crack that split the silence in the apartment. It was a marker, a milestone, separating the before and after.
He slumped forward to the floor. Shelly got to her feet, the bottle still in one hand, and watched as a small pool of red began to form on the area rug beneath Porter. She counted to 100, then nudged him in the ribs with the toe of her shoe. Harder. Then practically kicked him. No movement. The blonde bent down and reached for her phone that was still clutched in his hand. She had to wrench it out of his grip.
She erased the video, then went back into her contacts, scrolling through and looking for one particular name. There was only one person she could think to call at a moment like this. Only one person she wanted to call. Shelly pressed on his name, then lifted the device to her ear, counting the rings, her eyes never leaving Porter’s inert form.