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.Your name is Diamonds Droog, and you are dying.
…it’s… probably easier to start with a bit of understanding as to why you’re dying. Besides the whole “eventually this profession will kill you” thing, anyways.
This whole ordeal started from your attempts to have a more… up-and-up option to getting around your city. While yes, the Midnight Crew has a fearsome reputation, this is something you figured could be easily avoided with a simple cover story.
And, thus, your day job as Discerning Director quickly grew roots.
There is a reason that your crew has a wide network of informants, and it is entirely due to you. When the fear and intimidation brought forth by your true name no longer carries you further, acting as a curator for an arts establishment has won you equal favor. Dancers are so very petty, and your comfort in keeping the company of less-than-favorable crowds has lent you an upper hand in the squabbles of those who do not know the underbelly of this city.
Gossip flows freely in the halls of those entertaining the elite, and you have become their silent acknowledgement, a stiff shoulder to cry on for those whose issues are just so foreign and privileged in comparison to your own. A back-and-forth of “he said, she said” that oft amounts to misunderstandings or childish jealousy, of spat insults that only hold weight when your life is little of sustenance. Petty comments on the physical form, of technique and ability (or lack thereof), of style and the company they keep.
(So, basically, it’s your experience with your own crew, except these women fight with words and status instead of knives and fists.)
Sure, there are those that speak of your proclivities. How strange it is that you surround yourself with young, gorgeous women, and do not make any attempt to chase them. That you must be in this line of work for some perverse reason, or that you are biding your time, or that your interests align more with the company you keep, but this does not bother you. People may think what they must. The important part is that you’re able to walk freely amongst your city without your reputation making it risky, makes it so that you can supply your crew with goods without worrying about some nincompoop detective connecting the dots. If it means that sometimes you have ornately dressed dancers draping themselves over you, hanging off your arm to plead for gifts or to tattle on someone considered a friend mere hours ago, so be it.
And it’s on this very day, as you push glasses up on your face as you make the trek back home from the lie you live, that a spat amongst tiny street gangs that aren’t even on your radar turns violent. Gunfire that erupts as you pass an alleyway, and a sharp pain that cements itself in the back of your neck.
You keep your standing, manage to stay upright as the sensation blooms and nearly swallows you whole. In this city, reacting to such a thing out loud might very well break the charade of calm and collected you’ve garnered. Curses and anger are not befitting of the Director, who is firm and soft-spoken. The urge to respond to the injury with a weapon of your own is also out of your character, which you would lament if you had a firearm ready. Several knives do litter your person, but this too is an oddity for who you present to be.
It is with a note of surprise that you register police presence— briefly, panic surges through your core as you prepare for the charade to be up, to be awarded handcuffs and no way to communicate your capture to your crew, and then they run past you and into the alley. You don’t think you’ve ever been relieved that there’s a deadbeat cop around, and that leaves a bitter taste in your mouth that almost distracts from the bullet in your neck.
There isn’t a way to easily make it back to the hideout. If you’re spotted like this anywhere near the slums where the nearest secret passageway is, you doubt you’ll be able to escape the wandering eyes and hushed tones. You’ve put too much effort into crafting this persona, and he would not be caught dead willingly going into those sides of town.
In the same vein, you cannot seek medical attention. Part of the convenience of being Discerning Director is that you’re able to cover up the more damning physical evidence from your life of crime. Busted chitin still growing back properly from fights, or bruises dark across your ribs. Scratches and dings and scars and dried blood all unbefitting of someone of your assumed stature. Involving a doctor in your care would break the illusion you’ve crafted the second they needed to look further, and you cannot safely provide your own care without seriously risking your health. While you can tell the bullet has narrowly missed anything too vital, it is also a ticking time bomb, and one that has shackled you.
Calling for help also wouldn’t work. You think you could realistically get to a payphone and dial the base, could choke down enough gloating from Slick to explain the situation, but it’d be too difficult for any of them to get to you without being spotted, and even harder for them to take you back. Even a sporadic “kidnapping” would still potentially be too rough.
And thus, you are Diamonds Droog, and as blood soaks into your pressed white shirt from the hole in your neck, you know you are dying.
You return to your place of business, shrug off the more affectionate dancers in your care when they try to drape themselves over you, the usual charm of their hanging from your arms now a game of roulette with death. They ask questions about your cold demeanor, and you respond curtly, give them short answers that can only be interpreted as “don’t ask and leave me the hell alone.”
Your office chair is comfortable, matching the mahogany desk you were so pleased to get installed. Papers are tossed to the floor as your first bits of evidence drip from your fingertips. It’s easier to toss yourself into cushion and wood, hiss at the pain as your shoulder meets the chairback, and as you rifle through your drawer for literally anything to keep the edge off, you note that the pain that’s been radiating in dull waves may very well be from a collar bone that’s used to being in one piece. The impact from the round very well could have broken it, and while that seems a bit too flimsy of an excuse given how the bullet would have needed to arc, you don’t really care.
Your medical kit is useless. You still fumble with gauze anyways, hands shaky as you try to reveal the wound just to try to stop the bleeding. You’re met with slick hands, sticky and stained red. This shirt will undoubtedly need to be tossed, and you’re thankful that your overcoat is thick and black, because then at least you won’t have to offer it to the trash as well, given that the staining this will cause will be much harder to notice.
The pressure makes you curse as you press downwards, makes your vision go double as you take a steep breath and let expletives slide from your lips. Your shirt holds the gauze in place well enough, you decide, and remove your hand. It’s dangerous to trust it in delaying the inevitable, but your hands twitch whenever a stab of pain shoots through you, and you’d really rather not die because of a reactionary movement.
You pour yourself alcohol. In your mind, you’d like to think the action is a much more dignified endeavor, that you stand with poise and grace and fetch yourself a crystalline glass, whiskey allowing the ice to clink against the receptacle it’s contained in as you sit with a sigh, barely perturbed as blood continues to dribble down, dripping onto the floor from your now-limp arm.
Instead, you fumble with a second drawer, shakily grab a bottle and flick the lid off before taking a swig. It burns your throat and for just a moment, you convince yourself that everything will be alright. When that feeling fades, you fill the gaps with whiskey, and repeat the cycle.
There are footsteps in the hallway, a gentle knock, and then the doors are forced open. You startle despite yourself, hissing again as your body aches in protest. The room spins a bit with your attempt to focus (from alcohol or bloodloss, you cannot tell)— one of your dancers stands to the side, concerned and a bit hesitant as Boxcars pushes his way into the room.
“Sir, you can’t—”
“Sweetheart,” Boxcars says in a skincrawlingly polite tone as his head turns downwards to face one of the only women who doesn’t seem to resort to pettiness, “trust me, your boss won’t mind, especially when he’s trying to bleed out in his office.”
The dancer glances at the blood on the floor, of which you’re sure there’s too much, and you watch as her expression flickers, anxious and scared, and then her eyes dart to you and she steals her resolve once more.
“Apologies, Director, but he just— he barreled in here, demanding to see you, and we couldn’t—”
“It’s— it’s fine,” you rasp, and you hate the way both Boxcars and the girl wince at the lack of strength in your voice. “He’s a friend. I trust him”
“Something like that,” Boxcars says with a wink to the dancer.
“If you could make sure practice continues as intended,” you continue, “and do mind to keep the gossip down to a minimum. I will be indisposed for the rest of the day, of course.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll take good care of him.”
You shudder at the implications in Boxcar’s voice. His gaze has fully left the other person in the room as he singles in on you, a weight that makes you swallow the saliva thick in your mouth despite yourself.
The second that your dancer is gone, having gotten the hint clear enough, there’s a large hand cupping your face opposite of your injury, and you let yourself lean into it so Boxcars can get a better look.
“Shit, you really had a number done on ya’, huh?”
“As if I wanted that to happen,” you grumble, content to have the warmth of his hand and the help in holding your head up. “How did you…”
“Well, when you started traipsin’ around to play nice with high society, I thought it might be fun to do the same,” Boxcars hums. “And I make a mean whiskey sour, after all.”
“Don’t talk to me about whiskey,” you bemoan as you eye the now-empty bottle on your desk. Boxcars follows your line of sight, and sighs.
“Really? You were just gonna drink yourself dead?”
“The bullet would have killed me, but yes. I thought it’d be an easier fate,” you grumble as your inebriation catches you for a moment. “...and now I’m craving a smoke, so it would have at least looked fair for how I’d envisioned my end.”
You’re hoisted up in one large arm, and the room spins as you’re shuffled so Boxcars can carry you.
“Hearts—”
“I’m Hospitable Barkeep— careful, toots, you’ll blow my cover. ”
“Never call me that again.”
Boxcars (you refuse to think of him any way else) shifts you so that your head is tucked under his chin, injured arm resting in your lap. You don’t even have the heart to complain as you hear the chuckle bubble up from his chest and leave his throat, the rumble of his voice more bass than you’re used to hearing with the proximity between you both.
“You’re gonna be just fine, Droog, promise.”
You vaguely come to consciousness to the smell of cigar smoke and soft snoring. Your entire left side aches, muscles angry and dull and painful. The lights are on low as you open your eyes and try your best to look around.
Boxcars is pressed into a chair that holds him solely because it might be scared of breaking under him. There’s a stainless steel dish that, as you strain, you can see the glint of the very bullet that was buried in your flesh. The space where it resided aches, a simultaneous longing for the intruder it contained, and a cry of outrage at the damage it left in its wake.
Water turns off that you didn’t realize was on until now. The lowlight is actually bathroom light, and Spades stomps out with a bitter grumble as he rips his bloodstained shirt from his chest.
“That was a custom fit,” you cough out as you watch it crumple to the floor, and Spades’s good eye narrows on you immediately, finger sharp and accusatory as it points in your direction.
“Fuck off, Droog, I just had to clean off a pint of blood from my fucking carapace, you can bitch about shirts later,” he snarls. “Of fucking course you almost die, and the first thing you bitch about is a fucking shirt.”
You cough and try to sit yourself up. Spades looks aghast with outrage as he storms the remaining few steps to your bedside and pushes you back down.
“Absolutely the fuck not, asshole. You’re on bedrest until you stop trying to kill yourself. I just stopped you from bleeding out, you are not tearing those goddamn stitches and making me redo them.”
You grin at the undercurrent of Please don’t do that again that threads its way through expletives used as speech fillers. Spades bares his teeth at you for catching it, curses you for reading narrative when he’s saying perfectly fine fucking words, stop doing it as I’m talking to you, you fuck.
Spades continues to berate you as he circles the mattress, crawling onto the opposite side and curling himself into your chest as reasonably far away as he can be from your open wound. The rumble of chitin against yours almost makes your eyes roll back in your head, nervous energy buzzing off of your boss and soothing you in turn.
“God, such a prick,” Spades grumbles as he settles himself in, “only fucking relaxes because I’m stressed out. You’re such a fucking masochist, gotta get me all fucking worked up so that I can’t hold anny of that shit back, just so you can get your fucking rocks off or whatever.”
You tune out his whining, much to his frustration. He berates you for it, and upon realizing you’re no longer paying any attention to his spoken words, plays your own game to specifically call you a brain-dead dumbfuck who would sooner burn in a goddamn fire than ask for one measly scrap of help, because that’s what you do as Diamonds Droog, you look down on everybody and bitch and moan at them when they do too much, but you’re oh so clearly better than the rest of them.
You remind Spades, as you butt him out of your own internal sense of narration, that looking down on him isn’t that hard when you’re so much taller.
You’re invited to go fuck yourself.
You decline.
“Yes sir, I understand.”
The phone is rested gently on its hook in front of a crowd of seventeen, Auspicious Terpsichorean not included. As second-in-command to Discerning Director (a name which you feel is particularly on the nose, but you did not name the man), you have taken to leading his troupe in his absence. You have managed well enough to keep the nosier of the girls away from his office while you paid off cleaners to clean it back to spotless (and, subsequently, had to chase off a few nosy Prospitian detectives who demanded access to your boss’s office for reasons you didn’t care to hear), but it’s been difficult. The rest of the girls would be rich if gossip were currency, and you’ve heard your fair share of nonsense.
It’s why hearing your boss’s voice— even if through speaker— is a relief. You’re at least glad to know he’s survived, and he has plans on returning within the next week or so once he’s been cleared.
“So? What happened!” one of the dancers demands.
“When’s he coming back?”
“Did he die?”
“Enough!” you shout as the girls start squabbling. “He’ll be back in a week or so, give or take.”
Money exchanges hands as some girls sheepishly avoid your eye— you knew there was a pool on if he would survive or not (there is only so much you can do to physically block people from your boss’s office, so while they did not see the blood they do Know Of Its Existence), and some of the money that exchanges between hands does surprise you.
“Do we know who it was that picked him up?”
“A friend, maybe?”
“Clearly a husband, you saw how he eyed him up!”
“Or a secret lover— the Director is always soooo secretive about his personal life, maybe he’s into burly men?”
“I think that he’s secretly the mafia, and that’s his bodyguard.”
You rub at your temples, trying to ignore the gossip as it flows freely and without thought. Yes, you’re curious about who the large man was who somehow knew enough about your boss to basically break every faux pas possible that you’ve categorized, and you can tell that the two knew each other.
Unfortunately, every time you have tried to think about it, your mind goes back to the smeared blood on the desk, the glazed look in the Director’s eyes, and the slur to his words that you’ve convinced yourself is because of the alcohol (and since when did he drink? You’ve seen him hide cigarettes, custom wrapped and in a silver tin with a suit of cards etched into the steel, but booze?). The man that barged in didn’t even pay you a half-ounce of mind, and wasn’t even remotely worried that the Director was bloody and dying.
You think, too, to the short man that came in mere hours later.
“Excuse me, ma’am!”
You remember turning to him. Black dress pants and a white shirt, sleeves tinged grey, hat held to his chest and expression determined.
“I’m… I’m Creative Disguise, and I’m here for, uh… for your boss’s stuff! Yeah! He sent me to get his smokes— well, he didn’t, ‘cause the boss is patching him up and he’s really unconscious, but he still needs it, and he didn’t have it, and so I came to get it!”
You blinked at him. So very clearly, you could tell this wasn’t his name, and he was trying So Very Hard To Convince You It Was, that he had no other name no siree, he was just a normal guy who did normal guy things here in Midnight City, and he did is normal guy things normally! Like any other person!
You showed him to your boss’s office. Creative Disguise, as you decided to allow him to be called, was pleased to find the tin unscathed and “only moderately bloody!”
He left after that, thanking you profusely but in a normal way (because, again, he was a normal man), and you remember sitting down and taking your own swig of your boss’s whiskey, rules be damned.
The girls continue to talk.
You’re pretty sure your boss is in it deep with the Midnight Crew, or at the very least being passed around like a smoke at an afterparty, but you refuse to confirm your own theories, and you absolutely refuse to ask about it when your boss returns to the office a week later looking only mildly flustered when the large man who carried him out of the office walks him to the door and tries to solicit more than a brisk goodbye.
…you’re pretty sure he’s definitely sleeping with the crew, but if it means you’ve got a good boss who may have some extra weight to throw around if someone gets in trouble, you’re willing to set it aside.