bakerstreet | (no subject)

(no subject)

[ WOKE UP IN JAIL ]

Where are you? Why is your bed so hard? Why is someone peeing right by your head?
Oh right. Because you got pinched last night. Welcome to the slammer, baby.

• Post with your character name/fandom/options preferences.
• Use RNG to pick your possible scenario - or just go with what you'd like most.
• Reply to other people's tags. Use RNG or decide what your part in the whole kerfuffle is.
• Enjoy the confusion.

Reason(s) you're in jail:

1. Indecent Exposure
Nobody wanted to watch you strut around with everything hanging out, and someone called you on it. Hope they gave you a jumpsuit or you're going to be prison eye candy.

2. Drunk and disorderly conduct
"Wassat, occifer? No... I'm not dru-*hic* drunk. I'm unner the legal limit. Wooo!" No, no you're not. You're way over. Sleep it off, buddy.

3. Vandalism
Oh, you naughty thing. You got busted stealing that 'Chickens X-ing' sign. Or was it drawing boobs on the drive-thru clown? Either way, tsk tsk.

4. B&E
Apparently your friend didn't think you kicking in his window to sneak in and leave him a 'present' was as good of an idea as you thought it was. Well, no love for HIM. *hmph*

5. Grand Theft Auto
The car was BEGGING to go for a ride. It called to you with its sireny car-call. And you just had to answer. If it hadn't been for the damn spike belt...

6. Kidnapping
Trust me, there are better ways to get money to pay for your Bieber concert tickets.

7. Murder
Talk about being caught red handed. You got caught red armed. And faced. And front. You're messy.

8. Any/all of the above
Ooooh... You've been REALLY naughty, haven't you? Actually, you kind of scare me.

Relationship of the person tagging:

1. Cohort in Crime.

2. Person coming to bail you out. (or not)

3. Jailer/Warden.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only | Expand All

"Least I can do."

Having a beautiful woman on his arm was something he was actually used to, and he didn't think twice about it either.

This is why people question her self-preservation skills, however. Or maybe she's actually one step ahead of the game? Either way, she's utterly unaware of any of it and is contemplating something equally important, like guessing whether Matt was a blues, jazz or something entirely different kinda guy. She could just ask him, but wondering about it was fun.

"What do you do for fun when you're not...you know..." Killing people, she reminded herself.

"When I'm not...?" Poor Ezera - Matthew's concept of free time is that it doesn't really exist.

"Oh! Working? Well. I train."

"Train for what? A marathon?" She askes innocently. Oh, she knows what he means. Ezera figured that much. She knows the type. But that's also why she's not letting this go.

"No, for work."

He doesn't SAY 'duh' but he clearly means it.

She keeps her voice light and breezy as if his tone didn't register but, honestly, she's laughing on the inside.

"Ah, work. And so," she starts much in the way of someone that's trying to wrap their head around something but already knows the answer, "what do you do for fun that's not related to work?"

Why did he suddenly feel defensive?

"I... Go see people? If I can."

Aha, now he's got it. "I went to the museum, a little while ago."

"Oh my God, I'm going to adopt you." She mumbles lowly under her breath. No, Ezera. No. You must not adopt people with questionable ethical values. Go write it on the blackboard 100 times.

"Yes! Don't you just love going to the different museum's here? There's always so much to see. Something new every season. How about music, Matt? You like going out for live music?" Oh, boy. Here we go.

He has to consider this question carefully.

"I like the opera."

She gives his arm a little squeeze with her own. "Ooo! Did you see that article about the Soprano that hit the highest note ever in the history of the MET?" There's a little skip to her step then. "Mat! Let me take you to the opera sometime? As a thank you. Oh, that would be so cool." She beamed a smile. "Come on, say yes. Please? Pleeease, Matt? You could even bring that "friend" of yours." She had...ideas. Ok, one idea. One.

Matthew lifts an eyebrow at her.

"I did. And my friend is a lady friend, so I dunno if that's weird. But yeah, we can go. Uhm. I can't really pick dates ahead of time though, that's the thing. My schedule is... it varies.

You like Wagner? Der Ring des Nibelungen is my favourite. I've seen the whole thing."

"I promise it won't be weird." Probably because she planning mischief in her head. Innocent mischief. "Well, that's fine. When you two have some free time, let me know and we'll make it work." Somehow. "I'd say that I appreciate him." She loved the drama. She loved the orchestral thunder. But Wagner forced you to dig deep and bleed for him. "The Götterdämmerung is my favorite cycle, I think." Surprising, perhaps.

The idea of mischief never even crosses his mind.

"Deal."

He grins at her. "That's good, too. I dunno, I like the drama of opera. It's easy to understand."

She laughs. "That's true. Well, especially considering that you can basically sum up a lot of operas with 'and then they all died'" Ezera preferred ballet or dance in general (well, yeah) there was something about just throwing your entire body into the emotion. Which made her wonder, "oh, hey, do you dance?"

"Yup."

He looks down at her, smiling slightly. "Strictly ballroom, though. I had lessons when I was much, much younger than I am now. I think I still remember most of it but it's been a long time since I was utilized as an escort."

"Yep?" She beams up at him because anyone who dances just gets points in her book. She has to then take his hand and use it to twirl around once as they're walking. "Well, you know what, if you dance then you're pretty ok in my boo--k". She ended with a very soft 'k'. Escort, WHAT?! Did he just say, escort? Like...escort-escort?

That quiets her right down and she thoughtfully takes his arm again and continues to walk but looks up with a soft smile to try to determine whether he was kidding. No. She didn't think so. Jesus. Sorry, Matt, she gives his arm a light hug/squeeze with the one that she's already threaded through his.

"Well, mister, you've lived quite the life." She says with a slight shake of her head.

Matthew twirls her, but her sudden change in demeanour confuses the shit out of him. Although to be fair, a lot about her confuses the shit out of him.

"Yup," he agrees, completely oblivious to what she thinks he means. "It was pretty boring, to be honest. It was always... you'd go to these huge galas, and literally everyone was just a piece of shit. Richer than god and just rotten perverts and scumbags. If I had it my way I would have just killed them all, but. Not allowed."

He sighs.

To be fair, a lot about Ezera confuses Ezera right now. But Matthew runs right along next to that feeling.

"Dem's da breaks, huh?" She poked. "So," she begins carefully, "have you always had a penchant for killing...people?" Hearing that out loud was fucking crazy. "I guess I mean...is it more like a feeling that's always been there or is it something you just were trained to do and you don't remember anything else?" She might as well asked are you more like one of those trained snipers or are you more like a serial killer that just has to kill people. But the real question was, does she want to know?

He shrugs. "I dunno I just... Do what I do."

Matthew can't put it into words, because he did not understand it, but someone once said of him that his training and his personality were not separate things within him.

"I think my first was when I was ten."

She keeps asking these things because they don't compute. Or rather, they don't process. The information is there but it's hard to absorb any of it. It's hard to absorb that she's walking arm-in-arm with a murderer. One that helped her none-the-less and likes opera. Another that shot up an entire club of criminals and then could tell you their favorite Frank Sinatra song. It went so beyond what she's seen in the news and movies.

It was supposed to be easy to discern who the evil people were. But like everything, people were like watercolors, reds running into blues, mixing with yellows. Absolute evil, like an absolute good...well, it didn't exist.

So she does only what she can, she contextualizes, making people a complex tapestry, but that also blurs right and wrong...

Ezera squeezed her eyes shut when he said that he had been ten. She doesn't want to know. But, yes, she does. She wants to understand.

"Tell me?" She asks a little uncertainly.

Edited 2017-11-19 02:54 (UTC)

His head tilts to the right as he looks down at her. People with psi powers were typically good at sensing the emotions of others, but the problem with Matthew was that he didn't understand them. The best he can get from Ezera is curiosity, confusion. Her deeper and more complex emotional subtleties are completely lost on him.

"They start you with animals," he tells her. His voice has no real inflection - he might be explaining how a toaster works. "Mice, cats, dogs. Goats. Primates are next. Chimps. They're pretty close to human. Obviously for telepathics they're useless - dogs don't fucking think like we do. But you can stop their hearts same as anything else.

Took about five years to graduate me to human subjects."

He pauses, thinking back. His memory is not great, but this he can recall flawlessly.

"Tiled walls, tiled floor. Hospital colours - that sort of not-quite-greenish white. One way mirror on the far wall. Fluorescent lights. Heart monitor, electrodes stuck to my skull with that sticky shit they use that gets in your hair. And across form me, restrained in a chair, was a man.

I dunno who he was. It was an Intelligence operation, so I'm guessing it was somebody working for the wrong side."

He stops to grin down at Ezera. "We're the right side, in case you were wondering. The wrong side is whoever isn't the good ol' U.S. of A.

Anyway. 'Concentrate, Matthew. It's just like the monkey, Matthew.' It wasn't, though, and the guy he could tell I wasn't doing whatever I was supposed to be doing. He started hurling insults. And over the intercom it was just more... 'do it, Matthew, you don't want to disappoint us, we'll take away your things, you'll go to the quiet room.'

And all of a sudden it was there. It's like... all of a sudden there's a current in your brain. I dunno, I'm not sure I can explain it. But it's huge, and at that age it was was terrifying.

So I just... reached out with it, and there was this electric feeling. The guy, he made this horrible face, and a minute later his skull exploded."

She doesn't know when her breath quickened and her heart started to beat really fast in her chest with the horrors that he unfolded.

No, no. I can't hear any more of this. Every time she opened her mouth to say that, nothing came out. Because she actually wanted to hear his story especially since he was willing to tell it. Every time he recounted doing something utterly terrible, the next thing lay it at the feet at these horrible people he was working for--the government. Their government. It felt like someone had grabbed her throat and squeezed.

At one point, she subconsciously lay her hand on her stomach. Squeamish. At another, she covered her mouth. Shock. Horror. Sympathy. Empathy. And it was empathy that would get her into trouble every time.

Ezera was silent for a while, not trusting her voice. She couldn't find it either in the tight squeeze in her throat. She tried to clear it. When she looked up at him, her eyelashes were a bit wet. She swallowed again. And again. "I...I need a moment." She said in a raspy voice, but her words cracked and then the awful thing happened, she threw her arms around his waist and hugged him, stopping them cold in the middle of the sidewalk. But worse than that, she sniffled, holding back tears, her words muffled and indistinguishable against his coat.

"Sorry, sorry." She says, not for the hug, but getting mascara on his jacket which she tries to blot out as she steps back. But she's still sniffling. There's a fire hydrant and she uncomfortably leans against it, trying to wipe the tears out of the corner of her eyes with a delicate finger not to smug her liner.

"That's...that's just so sad. I-I-I know you probably don't even see it like that but..." Her face crinkles again, threatening actual tears. At least that doesn't happen. "It's just so terrible and I'm so sorry that happened to you."

Man, does she ever want to be in the privacy of her apartment to just fugly cry. This was completely a fugly cry moment.

Edited 2017-11-19 05:29 (UTC)

Of all the possible reactions he could have imagined, tears were nowhere on the list and when she hugs him Matthew can only stare at Ezera like she's grown a second head.

"Uh," he says intelligently.

"Are... you okay? Why are you crying?"

Of all the possible reactions, she's just happy that he didn't flinch in response and just accidentally blow her head up. She fans her face, trying to make the offending moisture go away. Ezera sighs and shakes her head.

"I'm crying because I feel sad. And angry. And frustrated. About the things that were done to you. That you had to do. It's not exactly part of a normal upbringing." Ezera really can't get over the matter of choice or lack thereof. She stops from droning on. It's not going to help. She already knows that this isn't quite registering the way someone would expect. So, she sniffles one last time and if it's not confusing enough, she manages a small smile, kinda like how parents do when they're putting on a brave face before they tell you that your cat was jipped out of 8 of its 9 lives when it fell out the 4th story window.

"I'm okay, Matt. Let's keep walking." Well, she looked ok, but she was kinda depressed by all this.

"Okay," he agrees, not sounding at all sure about it.

He walks with her for a while, letting her get herself under control. Eventually he risks a glance at her, nodding when he sees that she isn't weeping any more.

"You don't have to feel bad," he tells her patiently. "You weren't involved."

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*heh heh heh *

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heh heh heh