log: capital - construction site: adrian, connie, patrick Who: Adrian, Patrick, and Connie What: Adrian makes trouble (with a dose of flashback) and Patrick and Connie come looking Where: The Capital When: The days following this. Warnings/Rating: Some vague mentions of sex and violence, nothing graphic.
The little boy sits in a sunny yellow plastic chair. He has dark hair, neatly cropped, and dark eyes focused on the woman sitting across from him. She's at ease in a comfortable armchair, legs crossed at the ankle, a clipboard untouched in her lap.
"We can talk about whatever you want to," she says. "But we don't have to talk, if you don't want to."
She has a basket of toys on the floor between them, and a coloring book with markers. The little boy doesn't touch them.
The bouncer is practically polite. He clears his throat behind the entangled couple in the corner as if they'll be kind enough to take the hint. "Closing time," he says.
The pair don't disentangle. If anything they cling a little closer, a blonde with his mouth planted on a brunet's neck. The dark-haired kid is laughing about something, but there's about twelve empty shot glasses stacked on the table, so maybe he's not laughing at anything at all. "Hey. We're closing."
He doesn't move. The bouncer puts a hand on the guy's shoulder, and the brunet tips his head far back enough to see him. "Another round," he says, and gives the bouncer a hearty thumbs up. The blond has moved on to nibble on the guy's earlobe. The brunet ducks his head into the hollow of the blond's neck, resting his forehead against his skin.
The bouncer sighs. "Okay. Come on." He slides an arm under the brunet's shoulder, and he lifts him up.
Something dark and whiplike hits the bouncer hard. He strikes the bar across the room with the sound of meat impacting a flat surface, an audible crack. The bartender rushes to check him for signs of life where he's fallen, slumped over, bleeding. He's unconscious, but he's breathing.
The blond is curled up in shock in the corner of the booth, but the brunet is already up, running toward the back, chased by the shouts and the slapping feet of the other bouncer. When they hit the alley behind the bar, there's no one there.
The club is loud, fucking deafening, but that's alright. He came out here to get his eardrums blown out, get wasted, and find some company, and he got all three! Pride month blessings all around. It's a sea of body glitter and fake eyelashes in here, but the guy he's with already lost his shirt to a bet at the bar. They're both pretty drunk, and he's whispering sweet nothings to him, probably meaningless, in a cheesy french accent. They leave together, well into the early morning.
In the cab back to his place they're all over each other, sloppy messy makeout, yes please. They don't even notice the guy driving. He talks louder into his bluetooth every time somebody in the back seat moans a little. Whoops. Sorry, not sorry.
Ever been fucked breathless? He's barely got time to get a fucking condom on the other guy - just a little ball kissing, and then it's legs in the air on his pretty new linen sheets. His dad would just love to know his son was banging pretty strangers at the 3.1 mill condo, bought and paid for so his son wouldn't have to figure out how to pay rent. Sorry not sorry to daddy, too.
By the end he's absolutely sweat-soaked, and he's got micro glitter in some seriously intimate areas. It was a great night. It doesn't even hurt his feelings when the pretty guy's gone by morning. Though he regrets not getting his number or something. Just a tiny bit.
All he does is grab the guy's arm. Is that so bad? He's been selling phone cases on this corner for the better part of a month without making a single fucking sale. If he doesn't start selling soon, he's gonna have to pay Marco back for all thousand of them. They came cheap, but they won't go back cheap. That money's already spent.
He's got cases with rhinestones, cases with those little fresh flowers chicks love, cases with the Heath Ledger's face on them, WWE stars, come on, man. You want it, he's got it on a case. But every asshole downtown blows off him and his chintzy cases. He's even got the cases with the fake Louis Vuitton thing on them, and girls seriously don't even blink.
This one guy gets a weird smile on his face when he tries to get his attention. "Buy a case? Man, you gotta protect that phone, it's an investment!" The guy kind of smiles, like sideways, and he's got fucking dark circles, looks hungover. Phone selling man doesn't like that smile, though, that 'fuck off' smile he's been getting from everybody who goes by. He kind of loses it a little. He grabs the guy's wrist. "Come on, man, they're five dollars. I got kids, just buy a damn phone case."
It starts the second he grabs a guy, and the feeling? It isn't so great. It's like he grabbed hold of a fucking live wire, and it runs up his arm, down his spine. He's staring at the guy, who's staring back, all wide-eyed, and then the world sort of goes white, which is fucked.
He wakes up in the hospital, and he died, they say. For like four minutes. He's got scorch marks up his arm like he was hit by fucking lightning, but they're smooth, like scars. The doctors, they're calling it a freak accident - electricity jumped from the phone store he was standing out in front of, maybe? But it was the guy, man. It was definitely the guy. He describes him to the cops, but 'a guy electrocuted me' doesn't get too much traction with them. Whatever, though, because Marco called, and he's giving him another month to sell the fucking phone cases. The live wire guy? He's the best fucking thing that ever happened to him.
They sit in silence for some time, the psychologist and the little boy. He looks down at his fingers, and she watches him.
"Would you like to play?" she asks. She nudges the basket a little closer to him with the toe of one scuffed beige pump.
He shakes his head.
"Or color?" she tries.
"No."
"What would you like to do?"
He looks up at her. He has clear, dark eyes. "May I go home? If I answer correctly."
She smiles. "You'll be going home very soon," she assures him.
He sinks a little lower in the yellow plastic chair.
She serves him coffee. She's been up since midnight, and her shift's over in an hour, but he looks more tired than she does. He's got his hands tucked up inside the sleeves of a fresh gray hoodie, but he's had a night - there's glitter smudged along the corner of his eye.
He orders pancakes, eats two orders and a side of eggs. She pours him a fourth cup of coffee, asks, where you been, sugar? He smiles a little bit, but he seems down, so she lets him alone.
He never touches the mug while she fills it. She notices stuff like that, the little things people do. Do they pour syrup on their sausages? Half the sugar packet, folded and set aside like they'll finish it later, or the whole thing at once?
She spots him spot the security camera up in the corner. The boss added it last year when the night shift got held up for everything in the till. The boss's got one of those apps on his phone now, so he can watch the camera even when he's out playing golf or whatever the hell guys do who own four diners in the tri-county. He likes to tell them when they've been slacking, so they know he watches to make sure they're working. She's pretty sure that was the real reason he put it in.
The guy in the corner books it quick when he notices the camera. Pays cash, and plenty of cash - under the twenty's a hundred. Cause she smiled? Cause she asked him where he was? He barely said two words back.
She pockets it. She's not splitting it with nobody, no way. She's half-expecting the cops to show after the way he looked at that camera, and if she has to talk to cops, she earned that money. He didn't look much like a hard edge, though, just worn out in his nice fresh hoodie. She wonders where that guy goes from here.
The camera pointed at the back door doesn't capture all the action, just the tail-end of the incident. It's black and white, showing the alley in all its garbage-strewn glory. The timestamp reads 4:43 PM. You can just see the edge of the empty lot in the corner of the image.
Now here they come, blown like missiles over the low fence around the empty lot. One, two, three scumbags in a row, moving bullet fast, tumbling across the ground at bad angles. One of them doesn't get up.
They tell the story at the hospital: they stopped a guy passing through the lot to ask him for some directions ("Right," says the officer taking notes) and then he lost it, started screaming at them. Something picked them up, like an alien fucking abduction, and it threw them through the air. Tore up the chainlink fence, too.
That part, at least, is backed up by the video. Something dark moves across the screen, dimming the image. The fence folds, splits, unwinds itself, and lays limp. A few bricks drop off the wall of the building opposite. Nobody dies, but a couple shattered vertebrae means at least one of them won't be 'asking for directions' again any time soon. Freak wind event? Bad luck? Somebody somewhere has to be noticing a pattern by now.
It's been five minutes, and the little boy hasn't said anything. The psychologist waits patiently, but breaks the silence after a while. "Adrian, you don't have to be here. I can take you back to your room."
The boy shakes his head.
"No, you don't want to go back?"
The boy shakes his head again.
"Why not?"
"I don't like it."
She notes something down, and he watches. "Why not?"
He looks at the back of his hands, at his fingernails. They're dirty, and he needs to clean them.
Time for a change of tack. She folds her hands together. "Adrian, do you know why you're here?"
The construction site just reached fifteen stories this week. It's a skeleton of girders and concrete, nothing more. The stairs are preliminary, solid cement, but he walked them until his legs burned. There's nothing overhead but light pollution. It's getting dark again. Will he sleep tonight? Where will he wake up?
The air is cool up here, and the wind's kicking up. At least the hoodie is warm. He looks at the backs of his hands, at his fingernails. Filthy. Shaking, too.
He feels something punch against the inside of his chest, hard as a hammer, and he hits a steel girder as hard as he can with a closed fist. It hurts. This is what he does, isn't it? Risky behaviors, and fighting. All those splits and scars that have marred his hands since he was a teenager.
The city swims woozily, shiny and out of focus. No one would miss this building, no one but the investors that built it and the men that work on it. He could wrap it around like an embrace, bring it down with a roar of screeching concrete and steel, and then the next building, and then the next, flowing through the city like a hurricane. He could let go. God, how good.
"That's not my name," says the little boy on the chair.
"Oh?" asks the psychologist. "What is it, then?"
He runs one thumbnail under the other, scraping out the filth. "Don't have one," he says.
"Everyone has a name," says the psychologist.
"Not everyone," he says. Firmly, decisively. "Not me."