Holly Robinson is: (badnews) wrote in rooms, @ 2014-08-25 11:29:00 |
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Entry tags: | !dc comics, *narrative, holly robinson |
Holly R, narrative, Gotham
Who: Holly Robinson
What: The next twelve hours
Where: Gotham city streets
Warnings: Mention of street-kids/stuff
Gotham had a wild side on a regular day. An electric current that ticked underneath back-alleys and through the arteries of main streets, fused under police-stations and court-houses and down by the docks where the goods got hauled in, in dead of night. But out here? Now? Someone had forced another couple thousand volts right through the circuit and the arteries were bleeding out, flames and the smell of burning asphalt and the prickle of bare flesh on the backs of her arms.
The line between her Gotham and this one had kind of rubbed away the longer she spent running interference on the streets. The apartment? Was as bad as her old one. The people? Still pretty cool when you found them in weird places: street-corners, jacking cars at four am after the drunks had done their pass through on the way to bed, under a bridge looking for someplace to sleep that wasn't going to rip you off. Her Gotham was narrowed down to this one, and her Gotham was a bunch of faded faces that had merged into others.
So she ran. Small and blond and she didn't have a gun and she wouldn't know how to use it if she did. She had the flick-knife, warm from skin pressing in at the top of her thigh and she had another, small but live in one hand and the pointed spiked knuckles on her keys wrapped around her other hand because sometimes a girl's got to stay alive long enough to scream when she's going home. She was small enough that they didn't look at her so much, smashed windows and screams and sirens in her wake and she didn't stop to help because she? Wasn't thinking about Gotham so much as its people: Jamie, Flip, Pops, Candy, Sarah, Freckle. She owed them favors or they owed her, or maybe they'd just said something that made her laugh standing around where the lamp-posts had burned out years ago, waiting for the wrong person to cruise by.
Jamie had a pimp and she should have been safe, because your pimp mostly didn't want to wreck the merch before you'd stopped being cute enough to make it a selling point. Jamie was fresh-faced, like she hadn't been doing it for two years and change already, and there was no one at the house-block, just smashed windows and a caved in door and everything that could be taken was gone. No Jamie.
Flip and Pops had been doing it too long for pimps. They stayed in shelters when they were quiet and under the bridge when it wasn't and Holly ran through the back-streets with her lungs burning, each breath a fetid heave of Gotham losing what little sanity it had left with a backwash of all the fear from those locked down behind boarded up windows. She couldn't find them either, but she found Candy, bright hair and shivering, and she made her run somehow, coaxing and maybe a nudge of her boot and she gave her the knife that wasn't in her sock because it was a little bit like holding a night-light, it made you less scared of the dark. Candy peeled off the minute they got out of the back-alleys, ran toward light and where the dark didn't suck you in, and she took her fucking knife with her.
But it was Sarah and Freckle, and it was the minute she found them, running to the docks to the only safe-house she'd heard was going, the shelters had bolted down for the night and if you were in, then you were in and if you weren't? Sayonara. The warehouse had locks to keep people from thieving the stock, and metal cages you could lock yourself in if you were feeling really afraid of the dark. They had food, and water and she hustled Sarah and Freckle inside, cold hands and clutching and maybe a few tears because they were all old enough to stand on street corners but this Gotham? You didn't stand still anywhere.
It was them, and the girls she found en-route, clustered in the spaces that were safe on a good day. The places you figured you could wait out the worst. Girls and their pimps and when the pimps in Gotham were shitting themselves? You knew it was a bad time.
She circled her apartment now and again, kept safe by the dark lack of light in the windows. No light? No one stripping it and she ran streets, checking in and asking questions until dawn and right on until her stomach said running on empty. Back to the apartment, except the locks on the door? Smashed. And she didn't go in, because going in? Would have broken the bubble of safety, illusion crammed in the back of her head, so she backed up, and kept running.