Nadia Essex ✪ Jyn Erso (nextchance) wrote in thereincarnates, @ 2017-11-12 20:03:00 |
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Entry tags: | nadia essex, raphael cruz |
Who: Nadia Essex & Raphael Cruz
What: Just two good friends meeting for coffee.
Where: A Starbucks in Charlotte, NC
When: Sunday, November 12; mid-afternoon
Warnings: TBD but probably mild
When Nadia had left Miami it might have been smarter to go as far away as possible. She hadn't; no one would be looking all that hard for Jane Hawkins. What had she done, really? So they'd had to change some locks. Chase a few people off of the property. Maybe clean up a few meth labs. No one had gotten hurt. Not really anyway. Her old boss didn't have the kind of pull that would lead to anybody bothering to look outside of state lines for her, much less as thorough a job as they'd have to do with the scrub Nadia had done of that ID. Jane Hawkins was long gone and the only thing that she and Jennifer Turner had in common was the same eye color listed on their driver's license. There weren't any pictures left of Jane either. Nadia had become and expert at dodging pictures at company parties a long time before she'd spent some time as Jane.
Jenny wasn't even the sensible skirt and blouse sort of girl that Jane had been. Jenny wore baggy t-shirts and blue jeans and kept her hair pulled up into a messy ponytail while she cleaned houses for a living. Someone that knew Jane might stop for a moment and squint at Jenny, but they'd convince themselves quickly enough that she couldn't possibly be the same person. Nadia was a little fonder of Jenny than she had been of Jane, but she'd been fonder of Jane when she'd first started too. They all lost their charm after a while, no matter how carefully constructed their lives were... and Nadia was very careful about that. It was why it had taken her so long to get herself set up in a new place as a new person solidly enough that she felt confident getting in touch with Raif and asking him to meet her for coffee. Or, rather, implied that she expected him to buy her a coffee. Not that she really expected him to. She was thrifty enough that she wasn't hurting for money by any means.
Even though she was in full Jenny costume that day, Nadia wasn't worried about Raif mistaking her for anyone else. He was the one person in the world that she'd expect to recognize her no matter what she did or didn't (in the case of makeup) wear. Raif wasn't like other people, and she didn't think she was only biased because of Cassian. There was something special about him even outside of who their reincarnates happened to be. Nadia might have made some allowances for any reincarnate of Cassian, that was true enough, but she liked Raif. Enough that she'd risk that link to the life that she'd just left behind when before she'd never let there be even a hint of a connection between two identities. Not that she thought Raif would do anything to give her away. He was a professional as much as she was, even if their professions happened to be extremely different.
She had oversized headphones on and a book out while she waited for him to arrive at the Starbucks she'd given him the address for but she didn't have any music playing and she hadn't read a single word of the new Lisbeth Salander novel she'd picked up at the bookstore down the street. They were carefully selected to make her look unapproachable. It didn't always work of course. If a man was determined to try to strike up a conversation then he'd do it no matter what kind of signals she happened to be broadcasting. It would at least deter some of the more casual onlookers who thought that a girl sitting alone in a coffee shop was clearly asking for someone to sit down with her and start trying to share opinions that she'd certainly never asked for. Nadia had spent enough time as a girl sitting alone in the world that she knew all of the tricks and how effective they tended to be. This was a stopgap measure. It only had to work until Raif got there.
It would have been just as easy for her to wait until the last minute to get there herself but that wasn't the way that Nadia worked. She liked Raif. She still wanted to get the lay of the land and know exactly where all the exits were first. To look like she belonged here and this just happened to be a part of her routine instead of a place that she'd picked especially for a meeting with him. She'd given him a time and then she'd gotten there half an hour early to flip through her book and sip a cup of coffee that had already started to go cold. That was just as much a prop as the book and the headphones though, not something that she'd actually anticipated drinking much of. Just something so that no one would question why she happened to be sitting at a table in Starbucks without a drink. She'd already scoped out which of the seasonal offerings she was going to give a shot when it came time to get her real drink.