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“I've got a plan.”
Upon hearing this, Grian groans.
“No no no, don’t give me that look, mister!” Scar exclaims, waving his hands frantically in front of Grian’s face. “This is serious! You’ve just got to hear me out–”
“Like I heard out your million other plans, which were all utter nonsense ?” Grian says. He rubs his face forcefully, forehead to chin–the way someone does when something really stupid’s just been said–before glaring harder at Scar.
The man smiles back, very innocently. “Ah, come on!” he says, sounding half playful and half desperate. “Aren’t you s’posed to trust your partner-in-crime? Your best friend? Good ol’ Scar?”
Grian gives Scar the most tired expression he can muster, in hopes of it driving the other man away. It does not. He sighs.
“We,” Grian rubs his face, “are not ‘best friends’.”
“Oh, don’t be like that!” Scar laughs, and, God, Grian wants to punch the sense into him. How does he stay so giggly in a situation like this? “Look at us, plottin’ together! We’re best buds!”
“No!” Grian shouts at him. “No, we are not! In fact, we are not buds at all! We are victims of circumstance!”
“That’s what they all say,” Scar chuckles fondly.
Grian stares at the scam artist.
“You. Are. Insane ,” he says, very slowly.
“That is, also, what they all say!”
It takes everything that the businessman has in him not to punch Scar into tomorrow.
Instead, he rubs his temples. It helps slightly to relieve the building migraine. He closes his eyes, too, hoping that, by some miracle, Scar will be gone when he opens them.
The man is still there. He closes them again.
Luckily–surprisingly–Scar seems to have gotten the hint. When Grian looks again, he’s backed a few feet away, towards the wall of the building, where some abandoned paper or another is pinned to a corkboard on the wall. Grian notices that his white undershirt is ripped, from the collar all the way down to the chest. He wonders if it was like that before, or if it ripped in their little scuffle from earlier. Not that that matters anymore anyways. They’ve got bigger fish to fry, now.
He looks closer at the papers pinned on the wall. They look like blueprints: the inner workings of some nondescript building. The papers remind Grian of college–he had studied architecture, a career he always held a real passion for. It was hard, and it involved a lot of math, which he did not enjoy, but he loved it. Times like this are when he desperately wishes he hadn’t changed career paths. But hindsight is 20/20, and money talks: his current salary as CEO is 5x that of an architect. Who could blame him?
Now look at him. Scheming in an abandoned workshop, right after committing the unspeakable with the one and only Mr. Goodtimes, famous scammer. He’s sunk low.
“... You still against hearing my plan, or...?” Scar perks up sheepishly. Grian grunts in frustration.
“ Fine ,” he says. “Fine, Scar. Give it to me. I’ll listen.” Warily, he thinks that he doesn’t have any other options.
“Okay.” Scar takes a deep breath in. “We… run away and change our names! Now, look, hear me out–”
Grian grunts in frustration, very loudly.
“--You can be Brian, and I can be, uh. Scab!”
“We are not running away and changing our names!” Grian half says, half screams, and, okay, maybe he’s a little stressed. He turns his back to Scar.
“It’s ideal ,” the madman continues, in that suave almost-business voice of his. Grian nearly smacks him. I am not one of your customers. He doesn’t, though, so the man continues. “We don’t have to come up with an excuse for our actions, and we can start all over again! Wouldn’t you like to start all over again? I know that I, for one, would love to start all over again! Imagine the possibilities!”
Grian thinks he might snap.
“I,” he breathes, nearly growling it, “would not, in fact, like to start all over again, because, unlike you , I actually have something to lose. ”
Scar falters. “Well, I mean–”
Grian doesn’t let him start. He turns back around, facing Scar with a pointed glare and a literally-pointed finger in his direction. “How about you stop suggesting these idiotic plans and just–just let me think, just for a second? ”
The thief’s eyes are wide open. He holds his hands above his head in a surrendering gesture. Distantly, Grian registers that as ironic, because they’re both now criminals. “Alright!” he says. “Alright, okay. Shutting up! I am. Shutting up now.”
Grian ignores him. Now with renewed energy, for better or for worse, he begins to pace. He walks from one side of the room to the next, then back again, then again. His newly-polished dress shoes squeak on the ground when he turns. It’s almost therapeutic, but it’s not, considering. Well. The whole situation they currently have going on.
He wishes Scar would stop staring at him.
I’m going to go insane , is the first real thought he has in this “thinking” session, feeling the weight of the con artist’s—his companion’s —eyes on his neck. I’m going to go insane, and it’s gonna be this madman’s fault.
If he thinks too hard about the fact that they’re on a first-name basis now, he might break down.
So instead, as Grian’s on his fifth trip from one wall to another, he starts to brainstorm. What could they even do? The police have definitely seen their faces by now. Usually, he would think himself above buying the officer’s silence, but… the more he thinks about it, the more that route sounds kind of appealing. But surely the money they’d get for turning Scar in on a legitimate, provable cause would be more than he could ever pay them. And, wait–he checks his watch. It reads 11:03 P.M., which means that they’ve been running for half an hour already. That’s definitely enough time for the news to have spread, so that plan’s gone out the window, because he can’t buy the silence of the entire public–
“You, uh. Might wanna hurry that thinking up,” Scar interrupts hesitantly. “I hear sirens.”
Grian stops, listens. His eyes go wide.
“ God ,” he says, and with an unspoken agreement, the two now-criminals run together. Grian slaps Scar’s hand away when he offers it to him.