ᴠɪᴋᴛᴏʀ (mobdog) wrote in remains_rpg, @ 2017-04-01 12:06:00 |
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Entry tags: | # 2020 [04] april, jane rusten, marina scherbatskaya, viktor scherbatsky |
Who: Vic Scherbatsky, Marina Scherbatskaya, and Jane Rusten
Where: The Sober Living Community
When: 4/1/20
What: Jane meets some of the new volunteers and it goes as well as you'd think it would.
It wasn't the first time that the Scherbatskys had volunteered at the sober living community -- they'd started going early March, and by now this was their fifth shift -- but it was their first time interacting with any other volunteers. The people who ran the place had been pretty skeptical of their intentions for even being there, of course -- not that Vic could blame them -- and they had kept them isolated and supervised by staff members to make sure they weren't up to no good. Apparently now they were allowed to work with others, though, since they'd at least cleared the first hurdle. He knew they deserved all the suspicion and more, though, and it was just something to have to deal with. They were waiting for the other volunteer when the door opened, revealing a woman he barely knew but recognized damned well: Sgt. Rusten, one of the real sticklers against the amnesty. Go fucking figure. Still, he was committed to being on his best behavior, and the better this went the better people would take to them. Vic stood up and gave her a nod, knowing better than to offer a handshake or anything dumb like that. "They said we were on laundry duty," he said with a shrug of his left shoulder. Jane, a seasoned volunteer at the sober living community for some time now, did very little to hide her displeasure and doubt at the relatively new arrivals. Her eyes flicked between the huge, hulking figure of Viktor Scherbatsky and his diminutive (though equally formidable) wife, Marina. The cop was no stranger to the two Hellhound officers, even if they had only engaged in a handful of actual, in-person interactions. Most notably, in the interrogation room after they’d been arrested and at their homestead after their home had been vandalised. Jane’s opinion of the pair hadn’t improved much in the time between them being the perpetrators of a crime from when they found themselves victims of one. “Detergent,” Jane grunted, jutting her chin toward the yellow, industrial-sized container on a nearby shelf while she struggled with a fitted sheet. It was one of many stacked in a large basket in front of her and while she hadn’t been looking forward to folding a shit ton of clean bedding by herself, she’d sure as hell prefer it to dealing with these two for the rest of her shift but it didn’t appear as if she had a choice. “Fabric softener,” she grumbled, turning to gaze pointedly at a similar purple bottle on a separate shelf. In her gesture to point the item out, Jane lost her grip on the cumbersome fitted sheet, ruining her folded process on the goddamn thing. “Motherfucker,” she swore, annoyed at everything beyond belief; Vic couldn't help but laugh at the reaction, knowing he'd have said or done something similar, too. Jane glared at him but when she realised he wasn’t laughing at her and more in commiseration, her scowl softened, albeit very slightly. Though Marina knew that the cop probably liked cockroaches and scorpions better than she liked her and Vic, in an effort to be helpful (since that was what she was here to do, after all) she looked away from the laundry supplies and over to Jane. “You know, I hear it’s easier to fold those with two people. At least until you’ve got all the corners fitted together. I used to help my ma with the laundry sometimes when I was a kid,” she said with a shrug then hesitantly took a step forward to offer her assistance. Jane, out of sheer stubbornness, instinctively held fast to the sheet, as if letting Marina help was somehow admitting defeat to or acceptance of these two felons. She shook her head, clearing away the stupid-ass notion. Obviously the pair weren’t at the sober living community to stand around with their thumbs up their asses...why shouldn’t Jane’s shift be made easier with their assistance? Even though it felt bizarrely like betrayal of some kind, Jane heaved a heavy sigh and, after a moment’s hesitation, held the offending item of bedding out to Marina to grasp on to the other side. The two took opposite ends of the sheet and stood apart from one another, finding the corners and began to fold. After a few moments of tense silence, Jane spoke. “This part of your amnesty deal or whatever?” Her eyes went to the laundry and then flicked to both Vic and Marina. "No, it ain't." Vic had busied himself with folding towel after towel while Marina and Jane struggled with the fitted sheet, but he looked over at the blonde when she addressed them. "We've been doing this a couple of weeks now, but it was just something we thought of doing." He paused, considering whether his follow-up question was pushing things or not, then: "Wouldn't y'all know whether it was in our amnesty deals or not?" As far as Vic knew, that shit had been arranged by the APD, not anyone else at the government -- and the amnesty only applied to them not getting hauled in back in June 2019, when said government had just rolled into town. “Yep,” was Jane’s terse reply as she took the folded sheet from Marina and set it on the clean pile. Of course Joel would have come to Jane first if community service, especially at a place Jane volunteered frequently, might have been tacked on to the Hellhound’s amnesty deal way after the fact. Still, Jane found it next to fucking impossible that the two bikers would come of their own accord and in their own free time to surround themselves with the recovering addicts they very likely put in the sober living community in the first place with the goddamn prax they had peddled. Though, when she really thought about it, Jane knew it shouldn’t be so difficult for her to believe; wasn’t she here for her own checkered past with drugs? Hadn’t she been a drug dealer that had turned her life around? Sheer bullheaded stubbornness made it hard for Jane to see that the married couple had good intentions but even she couldn’t deny the truth when it stood in front of her and stared her in the face. Jane picked another clean sheet from the basket and handed the corner to Marina so they could repeat the process. She turned her attention back to the bedding, intent on continuing the task in extremely uncomfortable silence, but a perverse curiosity struck her and Jane couldn't help but continue. “You coulda volunteered anywhere,” Jane replied at long last. “But you chose here. Why?” Jane knew full well that neither Scherbatsky owed her shit, let alone an explanation for their actions. Still, didn’t hurt to ask. Marina wasn’t the type to feel obligated to explain herself, and least of all to some bitch cop who clearly hated her guts, but the whole point of this was to try and do some good for the world and change how the people of Austin saw them. With that in mind, she said: “I know this situation has a classic redemption story written all over it with the Hellhounds fucking all those people up with Prax and then me and Vic trying to put some of the pieces back together by volunteering here. Honestly, I wasn’t even around when the club started up with dealing drugs, and when I found out about it I nearly left,” Marina spoke as she continued to fold. Jane looked skeptical. "'S true," Vic interrupted during a pause, looking steadily over at the two of them. He remembered all too well how close he'd come to losing her two years ago, and he knew just as well that he would've deserved it. "She ain't a fan of drugs, and she also ain't lying to you just so you'll take it easy on her." Neither would he, if Jane turned her questioning in his direction. Jane’s eyes narrowed to flintly slits as she held Vic’s gaze. All things considered, she had been pretty goddamn civil to the bikers so far and didn’t appreciate Vic throwing his weight around, issuing her orders like she was one of his redneck underlings. She shot him a warning look not to test her. Hoping for his sake that she got her point across, Jane turned her attention back to Marina and gave a stiff nod of her head for her to continue. “I don’t like what the Hellhounds did any more than you do,” Marina said, cautiously looking at Vic before her eyes returned to Jane, “but I think even without that, I’d be here. Back before the world went to shit I knew someone who was like a brother to me and he had a drug problem. Nearly killed him. Even if I’m just doing the laundry, I’m glad that there’s a place here to help those people who are trying to get cleaned up.” Marina claiming not to like what the Hellhounds did anymore than Jane did felt like a slap in the police officer’s face. A million and one ugly thoughts flitted across Jane’s mind and it took all of her willpower not to open her mouth and wax poetic on every single one of them. Marina didn’t score any points in Jane’s book for nearly leaving the Hellhounds after finding out their dealt prax, for looking down on the club selling drugs but not to the point where she actually did anything to stop them and Vic hadn’t claimed to do even that. Even though the couple’s intentions for volunteering eerily mirrored her own, that hadn’t stopped the pair from participating and benefiting from the club’s illegal enterprises for a long ass time. Still, the two of them were at the sober living community, in their own time, of their own volition, putting their money where their mouths were. Time would just have to tell if they lived up to their lofty intentions. “They do a lot of good work here,” Jane allowed at long last. She could admit that much at least. “And it’s a free country,” she said with a shrug. It was as close to an approval to the pair’s actions as she could muster. "Sure is." Vic let a silence fall between the three of them for a moment, but it felt different than the tension that had been there before. Rusten probably still hated his god damned guts, and he didn't blame her for it, but it felt… less volatile, somehow, if that was the right word. The two of them had every right to be here, just like she did, and she'd see within time that they weren't looking to start shit, just fold some god damned clothes. Or maybe she'd never volunteer here again, at least when they were around, but at least they'd tried to say something. He shrugged to himself, a lopsided movement with his good shoulder, and went back to the tasks at hand. |