Rosario Ortiz (reluciente) wrote in nevermore_logs, @ 2021-12-04 15:23:00 |
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Entry tags: | apollo, rosario ortiz |
WHO Rosario and Apollo
WHEN Sunday 28 November, around midday
WHERE Prospect Park, Brooklyn
WHAT Boy, you got some 'splaining to do
WARNINGS TBA
There was no way Rosario was putting this conversation off till Monday. Monday, they had an anatomy lab together, and anatomy labs were stressful enough under the best of circumstances. Cutting into a cadaver with Archer had her elbow had been unnerving. Cutting into a cadaver with Archer-who-was-Apollo-who-was-her-goddam The city was teetering on the edge of winter, and though the midday sun was golden-bright through the bare branches, it really only served to take the sting off the chill in the air. It wasn’t especially bad weather to be out in, but it was a shade below comfortable, and Rosario was grateful for the piping hot takeout cup cradled between her palms. Triply grateful: for the warmth and for the caffeine and for the ammunition to hurl into Apollo’s face if the situation required it. Meeting outdoors had seemed like the most sensible option. A wide open space with plenty of people milling around, but none close enough to overhear. No walls closing them in together. That part felt especially important, as a precaution. Apollo said he cared about her, but Apollo was a guy who thought a reasonable response to a girl ignoring his texts was to send a couple of cronies over to an address he wasn’t supposed to have and peer-pressure her into talking to him. Apollo was a guy who would break into a man’s place and attack him and curse him, and then ask why you were being so unreasonably mad about it. So yeah, maybe he cared about her (and that was a whole other thing to unpack), but Rosario wasn’t so sure they shared the same definition of caring. Hence: Prospect Park. A comfortable ways from home, but still on home turf, and while she wasn’t explicitly gonna use the words witnesses and escape routes, there’d be a lot of both if he did get back on his bullshit. He was already there waiting for her, because of course he was. Reclining on a park bench with his usual careless ease. It’d always infuriated her, that effortlessness: Apollo moved through the world as confidently as if it had been built just for him, and what was even more infuriating, the world always seemed to respond in kind. Rosario had to go five rounds with the world just for it to give her an inch. He even looked like a sun god, the way the daylight gleamed golden in his hair, almost like a halo. Rosario, by contrast, looked like she’d rolled out of bed after three hours of sleep capping a graveyard shift in a greasy spoon diner, which was in fact exactly what had happened. She was pretty sure she still smelled faintly of bacon. Didn’t matter; she wasn’t gonna let it slow her down, not when she was this close to getting the answers she was goddamn owed. So she’d pulled herself together with rocket-fuel coffee and dogged determination and she’d armoured herself in a fleecy grey sweater emblazoned with the pitted face of the Moon, and she hoped Mister Sunshine saw it as the middle finger it was absolutely intended to be. And now, as Apollo caught her eye with a maddeningly eager smile, Rosario set her jaw stubbornly and marched right up to him. |