Laura Kinney (butwhy) wrote in knowhereic, @ 2017-09-01 02:07:00 |
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There were a lot of things that decidedly fell into the ‘unexpected column of life about Knowhere. However, considering just how much of her life prior to here had been much the same, that was almost enough to counteract it. Since leaving the facility, since being out on her own, there was very little in the sense of normalcy outside of walking and avoiding people. Unfortunately, Knowhere really left options for one of those at a time. She could avoid people, if she stayed in the apartment. Sometimes she would even, just wandering around the room that was supposed to be hers and trying to figure out what to do with it. Other days, days like today, she simply could not It was how she’d ended up in the markets. Knowhere had truly been a new level of testing when it came to her skills. She discovered she was, in fact, quite good at sleight of hand and lifting things from people’s pockets, or even breaking into places, but she was quite bad indeed about just outright stealing an item without it being noticed. Sabo had caught her. The man called Gambit had caught her too. Logan had too, but that had been Laura’s own sloppiness. She’d been careful since then too, not really taking anything from anyone’s apartments anymore after that. The stealing from the markets though? Even if she knew she shouldn’t, even knowing she’d get in trouble, Laura just couldn’t help herself but to try now. It was a task she had failed at and, conditioning or not, she had a hard time simply letting herself be bested by a challenge. Today wasn’t making it any easier. The market was busier than she’d expected and, despite that seeming to be something she thought would give her an advantage, being caught twice made her extra cautious. She tried to hook her way around several of the various stalls, pushing and squeezing through places a grown person probably wouldn’t have fit, but still nothing seemed to put her at a good angle. She just couldn’t get comfortable with any of opportunities she had because she was sure someone was going to see her. It was maddening, frustrating, and to a girl like Laura who had little experience with such things, that was getting all the more upsetting. And it just made her all the more focused, which made her all the more obvious, which only made it worse, and then Laura still felt like she’d failed maybe it was failing to do something bad, but failing, to Laura, was failing. It didn’t matter. She just knew she didn’t like the feeling, which was actually enough to leave her sulking as she shifted around and… There was someone her size standing there. Someone who smelled vaguely familiar, which she knew he shouldn’t. Prior to this last week, Laura had never met anyone her sized before and, if the look on her face was any indication, she clearly hadn’t expected to come upon one at all right now. At least she had the good sense to keep the claws in. Remy still had no idea what was going on. The world outside of that strange room overwhelmed him at first. No one seemed to mind at all that many of the creatures who passed in the streets weren’t human. Remy knew outlandish--he’d grown up in New Orleans--but this beat anything or anyone that showed up for Mardi Gras. Kidnapping continued to seem the most likely explanation. What Remy couldn’t figure out was who, how, or why. Who did Papa know who could do something like this? Had Henri run into trouble? Was it the Assassins? Remy thought his new family would have told him if they had enemies in outer space. It probably would have been on the news, honestly, and it wasn’t the sort of thing that struck him as Thieves Guild business. Unable to answer his questions, Remy turned to more important matters. He needed food, shelter, and protection. Papa and Henri were far away. Remy was on his own, just like he’d been most of his life. He could handle that, aliens or no aliens. His first job was shelter. Once he started appropriating supplies, he’d need a bolthole where he could store his take and hide from angry shop owners. Remy found exactly what he needed at the back of an old warehouse. An old shed had been abandoned, a rusting lock still secure on its single entrance. At the back of it, the rust had eaten away at the walls. Remy touched his fingers to the corroded edge. A tiny application of his mutant power charged the fragile metal along its weak lines. The resulting explosion, little more than a “pop” of released energy, sheared a chunk of pock-marked steel from the wall’s lower corner. Remy got onto his belly and crawled into the shed, his eyes adjusting easily to the dim light. It was perfect. He’d sleep just there, beneath the old table, hide his food there inside of the dented file cabinets, and create a second escape route in the space behind the desk. He spent a little over an hour making the space habitable before he headed for the market. The secret to a good pinch was to blend in, so Remy didn’t steal anything right away. He wandered about on the edges of the crowd, learned the flow of it, what stalls sold which wares. He watched the proprietors and the customers, how they spoke and interacted. Eventually, Remy slipped into the river of people, and began to apply his craft. He had pickpocketing down to a science now, thanks to Papa’s and Henri’s lessons in sleight of hand. Remy hit a few easy marks to warm up. He planned to rob a food stall next, up until the moment a girl about his age set her eyes on him. She seemed surprised. Remy couldn’t decide if that was good or bad. Much like the boy, Laura was stuck in trying to decide if this encounter was a good thing or not. So far, she’d not seen any other children until very recently. Even then, she’d seen very few in person. She’d never really known people her age before, she honestly didn’t even know it might have been normal for people to do so. She didn’t know what to think or how to act, so she simply defaulted to what she did know. She looked him over, checking for weapons first, appearance related details second. Clothes, hair, whether or not he had dirt on his hands, each detail was taken in with her usual precision before finally she settled on his face. Faces were harder for Laura, though she’d never quite known why. For some reason they didn’t stick in her memory well. His however was...different. Different enough that it would be easy to identify at once at least when it came to...his eyes. They were eyes Laura knew she’d seen before, on the older man, the one who’d offered to train her to be a better thief when he’d spied her in the markets. Instinctively, she pulled a scent from the air, taking a moment to hold in the air so she could better break down the parts of it that were him from the parts of it that were the world around them. “You are small.” The commentary was flat, factual, an observation more than anything. Laura was quite certain this was the same thing that, through reasons she might never understand, had happened to Ororo. These were people that she knew, albeit that was less so in this particular case, who had suddenly reverted to being children like her. She didn’t know what to make of it, or really how she should react to it at all, so again Laura would default to what she knew. She’d think about her own life, what it had been prior to meeting Logan and what it had been after. She pieced through the way she’d been treated, trying to pick out which thing was best to offer to someone her age, in a place like Knowhere and… “Are you hungry?” Because she’d been starving when she’d first arrived here and, if he was wandering the markets, well, there was a good chance they might both be here for the same thing. The girl’s direct remark startled Remy. His shoulders tensed in an automatic defensive posture. People had remarked on his size before, always in a derogatory fashion, except for his new family and their friends. Being little was never a good thing. It either meant you were starving, or someone was going to take advantage of your ability to get into tight spaces without worrying about the danger it might put you in. Papa and Henri had assured him that he would get taller, and fill out to “fit dose lanky bones o’ yers, mon petit.” Apparently it had something to do with him eating three full meals a day. Henri would even help him sneak into the kitchen after bedtime, when he was home, for a late night snack. Remy had never seen so much food in his life as Papa had at his house. “Mebbe I am,” he replied, “an’ mebbe I could do wit’ a bite t’ eat. Don’ see dat it’s any business o’ yours.” He’d liked to keep his distance from the other children on the street until he had the measure of them. Most of them were just as desperate as he had been, some even more, but there had always been a few bullies to steer clear of whenever possible, kids who used their size or their smarts to beat down the rest. He had no idea if this girl was one of them, or if she might be trouble of another sort. He’d noticed how she sniffed the air. Papa had explained mutants to him not long after he’d brought Remy home. “Dey be like you, ‘cept no two seem t’ be de same,” Remy recalled him saying one night, when Remy had asked why Papa didn’t call him the devil like some of the other Thieves had. “Ain’t a t’ing wrong wit’ y’, Remy LeBeau. Y’ special, is all. Same way some people get born t’ be real tall, or t’ be good at sports or numbers or singin’, y’ got born t’ have talents other people don’t.” Papa’s expression had drawn in, in that serious way Remy had begun to recognize meant he had better listen, and listen well. “But y’ got t’ understand, jus’ ‘cause someone’s a mutant, it don’ mean dey your friend. Dere’s bad mutants, same as dere’s bad ordinary people. So y’ be careful, y’ hear me? An’ y’ tell me if anyone comes t’ talk t’ you ‘bout what you are. Use dat sense y’ already learned ‘bout takin’ care of y’self an’ come find me or y’ brother, or someone from de house. D’accord?” Remy had promised his papa that he would tell him as soon as a mutant came to him, especially if he felt like he was in danger, but what was he supposed to do now? He had no idea where he was, or how to reach anyone from home. “ |