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Victor's on the fire escape outside their apartment window when the sun begins to peek over the horizon. The rest of the job went without any more trouble, thank god, but it was still a long, long night, despite the excellent pay. The noise of metallic footsteps ring down into the alley below as their boots hit the stairs, but they'd been living here long enough to know no one would wake up.
With each step, however, the subtle weight of the stack in their pocket feels more and more pressing. By the time he reaches the fourth floor landing, windows lit by the purple glow of the UV lamp he forgot to turn off, he can barely stand it. They shove their hand in their pocket for the bills and fish through the strangely clean ones and Siobhan's crumpled additions for the scrap shoved between.
Victor looks it over once, twice, turns it to examine the back and then flips it over again. The phone number scrawled across looks like it might start moving at any second, the strangely fluid black lines stringing out the numbers and forming a strange symbol below - an upside-down triangle with three dots inside. The storm of thoughts he'd managed to keep at bay for an hour starts to spin in his head again, and he leans forwards onto the wrought iron bannister to read it again. He frowns, replaying the words of the woman in the alley.
"You did better than planned"... "People will notice, sooner or later"... "There are ways to keep it that way"...
They were on Underworld, sure, but something like this... you don't just recruit some random merc for your gang. They had to know something else about him, have seen him somewhere or know something about- No, they don't. This is some group who had used him before and took a shine to him, that's all. Still, the idea that he might be being observed, watched, didn't sit well...
He closes his eyes in an attempt to calm his mind. A breath in, a breath out, a prayer that the steadily brightening glow of the sun would wipe the night's shadow off their face. He knows it won't, but it brings him a reliable comfort anyway. There's a tug somewhere down in his chest that reminds him of another time and place, the memory unfurling unintentionally. The warm fingers of dawn, just peeking above concrete rooftops, twining vines across a fire escape so like this one, hushed whispered voices--
Victor quickly pushes away from the railing, opening their eyes again and looking down from the brightening sky to the brick and metal of the alley below. Their chest feels tight. I have enough trouble just worrying about this fucking gang, he thinks sharply, with just an edge of pain.The paper, crumpled in their now-clenched hands, gets unceremoniously shoved back in their pocket as they turn to the glow of their apartment and slip in, slamming the window just a little too hard. Well, maybe a lot too hard.
The half-dusk silence inside the studio apartment is a stark contrast from the city just waking up, but they don't mind. They pull off their mask, boots, goggles, throwing them who-knows-where onto one of the many piles of dirty laundry scattering the floor, pull the bills out of their pocket and toss them onto the desk by the greenhouse to be counted in the morning - well, afternoon, really - and fall gracelessly to the beat-up mattress they call a bed without even changing.
The cracks spiderwebbing across the ceiling almost look the same as that mysterious handwriting, he thinks to himself, laying truly still for the first time in hours. The exhaustion hits him all at once. God, maybe I should stop taking those late night gigs. I always end up a mess. His eyes slide shut, and he slips into a long-awaited, uneasy sleep laced with old memories.