Chapter Text
Jail sucks.
So Ramsey is breaking out.
Currently, he’s in the vents, the smell of breakfast wafting up through the grates; it’ll be served in 12 minutes. And since it’s scrambled egg day1 and cold as hell this morning,2 no one will want to get up.
Which means that the guards will be busy forcing the prisoners out of bed. And that means that there will only be one guard, Tim, at the lawyer’s office. And Ramsey’s already bribed Tim with a commission of some very niche pornography3, so all he’s gotta do is slip inside, put on Attorney Scander’s spare suit4, and waltz out the front door. Once he’s outta the gates, he’ll remember his epithet.5 Then he’ll be home free.
As he swings down from the vent and into the single-stall restroom, he wonders for the hundredth time what the hell his epithet is. He knows he used it for embezzling and forgery…is his epithet just Money? That’d be pretty sweet. Maybe Appraisal? Trickery? He shakes his head; thinking about it makes his brain fog up.
Ramsey peeks out of the bathroom and chucks a plastic cup at the camera down the hall, changing its angle slightly. He slides out and hugs the wall, thirteen feet until he reaches the door. He kneels down and quickly picks the lock with a broken bedspring and a pair of tweezers.6 The door swings open louder than expected, but it’s okay because Tim will be there and Tim doesn’t give half a shit about his job.
Except Tim isn’t here. Well. That’s weird but there’s no cause for alarm. Probably had to go do something else. Waking people up, maybe. Yeah.
This part of the hallway doesn’t have cameras so Ramsey waltzes over to the office door and slips inside. He keeps the lights off. It’s the nicest room in the prison, with a leather chair and mahogany desk. Almost makes it possible to ignore the concrete floor and barred windows.
Most of the drawers are locked, but Ramsey won’t pick any he doesn’t have to, so he opens what he can. Finally, he finds the suit in the bottom drawer of one of the filing cabinets. Ironed too, which is nice. Though the creases on the pants are a bit crooked, Ramsey notes. But they’ll do.
He has approximately six minutes and forty-seven seconds before Scander gets here, so Ramsey quickly strips down to his boxers and starts buttoning the shirt.
The door opens.
Standing in the doorway, the silhouette of her uniform sharp against the hallway light, is Percy.
It’s been two months.
A small piece of Ramsey’s soul shrivels up and dies.
She blinks but her face is blank. “Oh,” she says, somehow unfazed by the fact that he’s in the lawyer’s office and not wearing pants, “I see they sent word I was coming. Modern technology truly aids in speeding communication.”
“Uh,” Ramsey says, fingers frozen in the middle of doing a button. “Hi?”
“I’ll give you some privacy,” she says, glancing at her wrist. “Our train is at 9:15.” She turns and shuts the door with a soft click.
Ramsey stares at where she was.
His voice comes out as a whisper. “What the fuck?”
He stares at the door for a moment longer. It’s the only exit. There’s the windows, but those have bars over them.
He is completely hosed. He’s spent the last month painting a plan that has just been tossed into a paper shredder by Percy of all people.
And why the hell is she here? Last time he’d seen her was after the trial, standing in the courthouse doorway. She was wearing a suit. She looked good. Then she’d told him to have a “pleasant stay in prison,” which was a real stab in the ass ‘cause he’d just been sentenced to 37 years.
But Percy doesn’t know he’s escaping. Maybe he can act like everything is fine. Yeah. Yeah, this is alright. He’s just gonna follow Percy, figure out what she wants, and bail as soon as possible. Sure, she’ll kick his ass if she sees him tryna escape. So he won't be seen.
He finishes buttoning the shirt and finally puts on the slacks. He slings the jacket over his shoulder. It’s his jacket now. Might as well act like he owns it. Which…will be a problem when Scander gets here.
Ramsey rushes out the door and grabs Percy’s arm.
“Don’t wanna miss our train!” he says, pulling her towards the exit.
“I scheduled plenty of time,” she says behind him, “I planned on briefing you to make sure you were interested in this task.”
“Yep, sure, I’ll take it!” Ramsey leads her around a corner and towards the front guard’s counter. He’d planned on just strolling by it, casual as can be7 but instead rushes up to the counter.
The guard looks up at them from under tired brows. The early shift is treating him poorly. “Oh, you’re back,” he says to Percy, voice muffled from behind bulletproof glass.
Ramsey glances back at Percy. “You’ve uh, got clearance for this, right?”
Percy’s eyebrows shoot upwards. She pulls a folder out from under her arm and starts flipping through it. Ramsey’d been too preoccupied to notice it before. “I apologize, I didn’t realize I’d be needing this so soon.”
Ramsey glances around and, oh no, that’s the warden, walking through the front door. Scander’s usually a few minutes behind. But the warden might recognize the suit, or start asking questions or something, shit!
That door is the only thing between Ramsey and freedom. He could run, push past the warden, try to book it through the gates. Nah, there’s snipers and more guards. But if he does get out of range of the eraser field, his epithet can stop bullets, right? Or something like that, he kind of remembers using that way before, but it wasn’t perfect because it was…soft? What does that even mean?
“Ramsey?”
Ramsey blinks the blur out of his brain. “What? No, I wasn’t tryna remember my epithet! Why would you even think that?”
Percy raises a brow and holds out her pen. “You need to sign this.”
She gestures to a form on the counter. There are two signatures and one blank line.
Ramsey looks at it for a moment. The long paragraphs of size eight Times feels fuzzy.8
He signs.
They drive past the gates and, like a dislocated bone cracking back into place, the word GOLDBRICKER snaps into Ramsey’s mind.
Oh, yeah. Duh.