miles baines: riff-raff! street rat! (mimicks) wrote in emillion,
Miles/Aud/Ari | slightly later morning
Miles came sauntering back home in a good mood – it had been a good night at Damia’s – but the first morning of the new year would soon kick him in the teeth.
He stood on his own front porch with a mild hangover, squinting at the window where his curtains were billowing in a breeze. A crisp, cold breeze blowing in through his open window. Blowing in through the open window where morning light caught on glittering glass, sharp and bright on the floor like baubles.
First, it was panic, the urge to simply turn tail and run: had his home been ransacked? Were other thieves after him? The Spymaster? He’d heard of the guild killing off members who became too big of a liability. Perhaps his heists had finally attracted the wrong attention. Or similarly, perhaps the EKP had finally gotten their heads out of their arses and—
His heart leaping, Miles pushed open the door and took a step into his ruined apartment. He saw the five-inch heel toppled in the middle of the broken glass, and the pieces started falling into place with a flicker of irritation.
“Fuck,” he said, stooping over to pick up a shattered lamp. It was futile but Miles set it on the endtable anyway, feebly replacing it in its original spot. He continued prowling, taking stock of the damage—he found a sloppy trail of red wine on the carpet and followed it down the hallway.
To the sound of running water.
The mime popped his head into the bathroom and his eyes widened at the warped tile, the mildewy smell that had sunk into the linoleum, and he scurried over, twisting the faucet to turn off the shower. “Fuck,” he repeated, the knees of his fairly expensive trousers now wet. The shower rod was leaning crookedly out of the tub, slumped like a drunkard that had fallen down where it stood.
Anger brewed, slowly climbing up his throat.
He had a good idea of where they’d passed out for the night, and a good idea of who would be the only people fucking audacious enough to break into his apartment. If not an assassin and if not the Knights of the Peace, then—
“Wake up!”
He ripped back the curtains, exposing bright, searing daylight on the two damp figures curled up on his bed, their limbs entwined. Miles’ jaw was set in a tight line, his arms crossed, brows drawn. He reached out and touched the comforter suspiciously, realised it was sopping wet, then delivered another “Fuck” as he started slapping the girls’ cheeks, dragging them unceremoniously out of sleep. If they were hungover, he hoped to Faram he was making it worse.
“You two smell like wet fucking dog,” Miles announced, almost snarling. (By correlation, that meant his bed now smelled like wet dog. Fuck.)
Unfortunately for Miles, the girls had only slept for a couple of hours. The scream and the slaps made a half-asleep Audrey immediately sit up. “Shh!” She had tried to put a finger to her lips, but her hand ended up missing and placing it somewhere in between her ear and her cheek. “Shhh!” Her hands motioned downward, as if trying to calm the man, though her eyes remained closed, so really she had been calming down his dresser. It was the last “Shh!” that had toppled her over back into her sleep, a hand reaching over for the comforter and pulling herself into a cocoon of darkness leaving Ari very bare in the cold.
Ari retaliated with a swift and probably rather painful kick; unlike Audrey, she was still wearing her shoes. The kick connected with something, but she wasn’t about to open her eyes and see what. Her mind was still in a haze, her head was starting to split open -- it had apparently been quite the party, though she couldn’t recall most of it -- and…
Was that Miles shouting at them?
“Go away,” she managed, though the words were slurred. She gave serious consideration to trying to bite him if he didn’t stop with the slapping. And something did smell like wet dog, but her desire to sleep off the pounding head overrode any curiosity she might have had about it.