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Aug. 31st, 2020 11:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittydesadeOkay. I did it. That wasn't so bad. I think.
When the tourism feeds and bitter bloggers said perpetual rain they gave away free propaganda to all the hacks who wrote identical piecework about concrete deserts, rain-slicked windows and neon sparkling with all the water splashed over it. Reality dumped bucketfalls over the city and its sprawling depths two or three times a week for each part of the city, never all of its parts at once. The rest of the time it vacillated between mist, intermittent rain, and humidity so oppressive the narrower streets smelled like living in the armpit of an overworked, underpaid hourly laborer. Walking through the restaurant district was like living in the droplets peeling down the back of a line chef's neck. It never rained as much as it should have with all the moisture hanging in the air waiting for the snap, and the long-term embittered residents had to live with that. Perpetual rain would have been a nice change until the mildew set in.
Three fans chirred in creaking disharmony, a box fan in the doorway that rocked every time someone tripped over the power cord, a standing fan on its last legs that had refused to oscillate for the past six months, and a smaller one in the window next to her elbow. They created the illusion that the moving air was lighter, fast enough to carry off the vestiges of her workout from her arms and the backs of her knees, which for some reason pooled exertion like a motherfucker. It had something to do with the way she sat when she stretched out after. Now she stood, leaning her forearms on the windowsill and resting her forehead against the lower edge of the casement and watched the drizzle while she waited for her muscles to finish stiffening up so she could complain about it in a second. Her fingernails itched, too. They were too long, and the implants were sitting uncomfortably in their casings.
"You could shower."
Millie's lip curled. "All I have to do is walk outside." As she said that the drizzle slowed to an implication of droplets, not that the cloud cover lifted at all. It was still five o'clock dark at barely noon. "You could leave the room if you're bothered by the smell of a hard training session."
He snapped his fan shut. She heard the wooden ends click. "I didn't say that. Besides, that's just the city."
He was right. They'd poured new asphalt down at the intersection a few days ago, there were cigarette butts in between the cobblestones. Someone had pissed in the doorway of the bodega across the street. Abandoned lunches sat in trash cans by benches once pristine and welcoming of tourists, tossed there by locals who'd shoved food down their throats as fast as they could render it into paste, sometimes by chewing and sometimes by smashing it with their hands and pouring it into their mouths. They knew the storm was coming. The literal storm and the anger of a thousand or more wet pedestrians in the middle of summer. Better not to get caught out in it.
"Place used to be a tourist district." Before the big businesses took their money elsewhere, before other areas with cheaper rent became more fashionable to buy up and sell out for ten times what the people who lived there had paid for them. Millie figured it would come back around to her neighborhood in another twenty, thirty years, by which time she'd be too old and cranky to care and in a nursing home besides. If she was lucky, one in an unspoiled suburb.
"You hated the tourists, too. With more reason." He flicked his fan open again, as though the paper and balsawood creation could add anything to the breeze he had to shout over. Everyone in the building knew he used that thing as a prop, a tool to cling to and make himself feel classier. Sometimes she wanted to spear her fingernails through it and scratch his eyelids.
She straightened out of the windowsill and moved the fan back to the center, propping up the window with the block of wood kept there more for reassurance that the window wouldn't fall down again and shatter all over the floor where they practiced barefoot. They'd been picking glass out of their feet for weeks, all but Hare refusing to put on shoes to practice. "All right," she said, pulling her feathered and fried hair into ponytails again. It stuck out like candy floss and didn't do much to give her a girlish appearance, but it looked frightening and most importantly it kept it out of her face and off the back of her neck when she practiced.
"Are you going to pull that thing out and smack my ass with it again?" he pointed his fan at her throat.
He meant her spinal sword, bound into her back with an inadvisable combination of technology and osteomancy, opened up with a drop of biomatter and soul data. She preferred it to being disarmed, which someone with a strong stomach and a determined pair of pliers could do if they really wanted to. The only way to extract this thing now that it had been put into her was to kill her, or close enough to it.
She grinned at him. "If you keep up I won't have to."
"Ugh," he said, and unfolded himself out of the chair, 30% torso and 70% leg. He looked as though he should be all knees and elbows that didn't know where to put themselves until he came at you and then he was the boogeyman in between the picture distortion. His own body mods came from urban legend. He had no room to talk about improbable ego-driven self-alteration.
He also had no room to complain because his heel smashed into her jaw with all the reinforced power of a steak-wrapped titanium baseball bat. "I fucking hate you," she said, and drove her nails straight for his crotch.
When the tourism feeds and bitter bloggers said perpetual rain they gave away free propaganda to all the hacks who wrote identical piecework about concrete deserts, rain-slicked windows and neon sparkling with all the water splashed over it. Reality dumped bucketfalls over the city and its sprawling depths two or three times a week for each part of the city, never all of its parts at once. The rest of the time it vacillated between mist, intermittent rain, and humidity so oppressive the narrower streets smelled like living in the armpit of an overworked, underpaid hourly laborer. Walking through the restaurant district was like living in the droplets peeling down the back of a line chef's neck. It never rained as much as it should have with all the moisture hanging in the air waiting for the snap, and the long-term embittered residents had to live with that. Perpetual rain would have been a nice change until the mildew set in.
Three fans chirred in creaking disharmony, a box fan in the doorway that rocked every time someone tripped over the power cord, a standing fan on its last legs that had refused to oscillate for the past six months, and a smaller one in the window next to her elbow. They created the illusion that the moving air was lighter, fast enough to carry off the vestiges of her workout from her arms and the backs of her knees, which for some reason pooled exertion like a motherfucker. It had something to do with the way she sat when she stretched out after. Now she stood, leaning her forearms on the windowsill and resting her forehead against the lower edge of the casement and watched the drizzle while she waited for her muscles to finish stiffening up so she could complain about it in a second. Her fingernails itched, too. They were too long, and the implants were sitting uncomfortably in their casings.
"You could shower."
Millie's lip curled. "All I have to do is walk outside." As she said that the drizzle slowed to an implication of droplets, not that the cloud cover lifted at all. It was still five o'clock dark at barely noon. "You could leave the room if you're bothered by the smell of a hard training session."
He snapped his fan shut. She heard the wooden ends click. "I didn't say that. Besides, that's just the city."
He was right. They'd poured new asphalt down at the intersection a few days ago, there were cigarette butts in between the cobblestones. Someone had pissed in the doorway of the bodega across the street. Abandoned lunches sat in trash cans by benches once pristine and welcoming of tourists, tossed there by locals who'd shoved food down their throats as fast as they could render it into paste, sometimes by chewing and sometimes by smashing it with their hands and pouring it into their mouths. They knew the storm was coming. The literal storm and the anger of a thousand or more wet pedestrians in the middle of summer. Better not to get caught out in it.
"Place used to be a tourist district." Before the big businesses took their money elsewhere, before other areas with cheaper rent became more fashionable to buy up and sell out for ten times what the people who lived there had paid for them. Millie figured it would come back around to her neighborhood in another twenty, thirty years, by which time she'd be too old and cranky to care and in a nursing home besides. If she was lucky, one in an unspoiled suburb.
"You hated the tourists, too. With more reason." He flicked his fan open again, as though the paper and balsawood creation could add anything to the breeze he had to shout over. Everyone in the building knew he used that thing as a prop, a tool to cling to and make himself feel classier. Sometimes she wanted to spear her fingernails through it and scratch his eyelids.
She straightened out of the windowsill and moved the fan back to the center, propping up the window with the block of wood kept there more for reassurance that the window wouldn't fall down again and shatter all over the floor where they practiced barefoot. They'd been picking glass out of their feet for weeks, all but Hare refusing to put on shoes to practice. "All right," she said, pulling her feathered and fried hair into ponytails again. It stuck out like candy floss and didn't do much to give her a girlish appearance, but it looked frightening and most importantly it kept it out of her face and off the back of her neck when she practiced.
"Are you going to pull that thing out and smack my ass with it again?" he pointed his fan at her throat.
He meant her spinal sword, bound into her back with an inadvisable combination of technology and osteomancy, opened up with a drop of biomatter and soul data. She preferred it to being disarmed, which someone with a strong stomach and a determined pair of pliers could do if they really wanted to. The only way to extract this thing now that it had been put into her was to kill her, or close enough to it.
She grinned at him. "If you keep up I won't have to."
"Ugh," he said, and unfolded himself out of the chair, 30% torso and 70% leg. He looked as though he should be all knees and elbows that didn't know where to put themselves until he came at you and then he was the boogeyman in between the picture distortion. His own body mods came from urban legend. He had no room to talk about improbable ego-driven self-alteration.
He also had no room to complain because his heel smashed into her jaw with all the reinforced power of a steak-wrapped titanium baseball bat. "I fucking hate you," she said, and drove her nails straight for his crotch.