resdog_kink | Reservoir Dogs Prompt Post: ROUND 1

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Reservoir Dogs Prompt Post: ROUND 1

Here it is! The very first prompt post of the Reservoir Dogs kink meme!

Write a prompt in the comment section (either anon or under your username), labelled with pairing or character(s) and a vague summary (with any applicable warning). Hopefully, someone will see it, be inspired, and reply with a fill. Anyone can write/illustrate/etc any prompt they find the inspiration for. It's like the fandom circle of life.

Before you begin, PLEASE read the RULES POST.

ASK A MOD ::: REQUIRED WARNINGS ::: COMPLETED/WIP FILL POST

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Orange works for himself until he meets Sport. Bonus for rough sex.

O.M.F.G.

+111111111111111

Thoughts on the underage aspect? Since....Iris and all. I have an idea but don't want to squick anyone out 8(

Mod here: underage content definitely needs to come with a warning, and may be against LJ's terms of service (someone correct me if I'm wrong).

To err on the side of caution, I'd make Freddy 18, if you're worried.

I brainstormed an idea that works around the age thing in the best interest of the community so no worries now!

Just FYI - written underage material isn't against LJ's ToS. Underage images are, however.

That's what I thought; thanks for confirming!

OP here: tbh I hadn't thought of Iris as inspiration here. I'm a little squicked by ageplay. However if the inspiration hits you, go for it.

And then Larry could play the part of taxi driver and save him but instead of sending him home to his parents they fall inlove and get a happy ending...or not haha

Freddy is not explicitly underage here but it's implied that he might be. The power imbalance in the relationship is pretty obvious and exists regardless of whether or not you're reading Freddy as underage. I'm not aiming to do lots of explicit sex but given the predatory nature of Sport's business, any sex included should be considered dubiously consensual at best.

Also this is very much set in the seventies and ResDogs characters plus Taxi Driver characters in a Taxi Driver world leads to some racially tempestuous language.

------------------------

The rain in New York is like nothing he's ever seen. Seconds after stepping off the bus Freddy's drenched to his skin, stumbling through puddles in sneakers that were on their way out when he left Bakersfield. Now he's here, the bag he packed on his way out the door feels too small to contain the building blocks of a new life, there are men in suits and ties on their way to work carrying briefcases bigger than this thing. The thousands strong hoards swell and eddy around him, insisting upon currents that he's too much of a tourist to understand.

"I need a hotel." He tells the driver when he falls into a cab. One of those iconic yellow models with the stickers on the bumper proudly advertising their commitment to their favourite radio stations. It should feel like stepping into a movie, crawling across the backseat of one of these, but all Freddy's really aware of is that he's just gotten himself out of the rain.

The cab driver watches him in the rear view mirror, wincing as he soaks the seats. "You got any money, kid?"

"Yeah I got like eighty bucks."

The driver kisses his teeth and shakes his head. His hair's neatly combed back and gelled down so that it barely moves with the motion. "Downtown's no good for you. You gotta be up in Harlem or the Bronx if that's all you got."

"Eighty bucks ain't nothing."

"It's a thirty dollar ride to ninety sixth street, and I don't know any places up there where you could stay. I either gotta drive you around till you find some place or I gotta kick you out and let you drown."

"How much is a place?"

"Depends. You'll be lucky to find somewhere half decent for less than twenty five bucks a night."

Freddy's pockets are growing lighter by the second. He smiles, like he's sure this is gonna be alright. "I can handle less than half decent."

"Whatever you say, kid." The driver rolls his eyes and starts the engine, flicking up the flag on the metre as he pulls away from the rank.

Through the rain mottled windows, Freddy watches the city grow around him. The fuzzy pictures from the papers and the half baked recreation you get on your TV screens don't do it justice. The movement, the colour, the lights. It looks like something out of the pages of Spiderman come to life. The clouds over head are such an oppressive grey that even in the middle of the day the theatres are burning through their electricity bills to keep their fronts of house lit up. When they stop at a set of traffic lights, he wipes back the steam forming on the inside of the window to get a better look at the shows they're advertising.

XXX Girls

Live Nude Girls

Girls Girls Girls

Freddy sits back. "Is that..."

"Nudey theatres." The driver says in a voice so rotten in leaves no room to imagine how he might feel about the establishments in question. "And porno cinemas. You wanna stay out of those places, y'hear? They'll rot your brain and eat through that eighty dollars of yours real quick."

"You ain't my dad." Freddy tells him, as kindly as he can. The guy's probably right, but the thrill of being able to walk into one of a dozen pornos at any time of day is enough to set his heart racing.

The driver's shrugs. "I suppose not." He's kind of thick set, with a funny round bulbous nose and enough laugh lines to let you know that he's really lived some of the years he's got under his belt. There's a ramrod straightness to his back that reminds Freddy of his grandfather's military bearing and though he's already gone grey it's not hard to imagine him holding his own in a fight. "Where you from, kid?"

"California."

"No shit? That's an awful long way to come."

"Yeah. Well."

The space in the conversation crackles with a silence poignant enough that Freddy wants to barrel out of the car and never return. The driver nods slowly, like he's trying to work out the details for himself, paint his own picture. Let him fucking try.

The lights change, and the cab sets off at a crawl. Freddy holds his breath and prays that neither of them think of anything more they need to say before they hit Harlem.

-

The place Freddy winds up staying in truly is a shit hole, right down to the leaking ceiling and the sound of some whore fucking her John in the room next door.

"Twenty two bucks a night." The girl on the front desk informs him. She's a scrawny little thing with an Afro three times the size of her head and lipstick the colour of toffee apples. She looks him up and down with a look that could be anything from 'what's the white boy doing here?' to 'why is this white boy so wet?'

The cab driver had dropped him off with a warning that the blacks run this area of town and that he ought to watch his back. Freddy had wanted to thank him for the ten dollars he knocked off the fare but his tongue got stuck in his mouth and the guy was gone before he found the words.

He sits in is room, with the bed that's little more than a mattress and the window looking down into the alley below and tries to rationalise what he does next.

If the weather is gonna be this shitty every day then he's going to need to make purchasing a half decent coat and a pair of boots his top priority. He's paid up for two night's here so that covers him while he tries to get a job. Once a paycheck or two comes in he can start properly looking for apartments, and somewhere in all of that he can think about eating something.

Freddy's stomach rumbles at the very thought. He grabbed a burger back at some roadside stop in Pennsylvania but that was more then ten hours ago. He cautiously bumps food up to top priority.

The leather jacket he arrived in is hung on the lone coat hook on the back of the door, making a puddle all of its own on the floor. The hotel sits over a launderette, and Freddy's sure that the waters just falling through the floorboards onto everybody's clean washing. In return, the steam from down below keeps his room warm, and that doesn't seem so bad for twenty two bucks a night.

He should have swiped one of his dad's suits before he left. Heading to the east coast in a white singlet and a leather duster was a bad idea, and packing nothing more to wear but a Hawaiian shirt and some clean underwear was a worse one. Freddy debates changing into dry socks but his shoes are so thoroughly soaked that it's not like it's going to make a lick of difference when he steps outside again.

Food. Dry clothes. A place to stay. Those theatres with the naked girls. Freddie grins, he likes the idea of that, no matter what the cab driver says. He has sixteen dollars to his name and two days to find a job. He can make that work, he's sure of it. Freddy Newandyke, here in the big city, no need for his parent's shit or his friends or anybody. He's here. On his own. He's going to make it work.

Freddie tracks down the hall to the shared bathroom and waits five minutes for a rakishly thin man with densely matted hair to finish taking a shit. He relieves himself, washes his hands and uses the hand towel to take the edge off the soaking he was given by the rain.

When he comes up he's facing himself in the mirror, blonde hair stained dark with damp and a tension in his jaw that he doesn't recognise. "They don't know shit. You're not going to get hurt. You're super cool."

-

Burgers just taste better in New York, Freddy decides. Nothing else could explain why a run of the mill cheeseburger eaten in a diner with worse hygiene standards than the hotel he's staying at could taste so damn good. He means to linger over it, but it slips down his throat in a matter of minutes and he's left picking somewhat sadly over his fries as he tries to draw out the time before he has to leave. He's a couple of blocks over from where he's staying, and even though he has to assume from the way the cab driver spoke of it, Harlem is a rougher part of town, the place is still full of shops ans restaurants and people moving about like they don't hate being here. He can't imagine anything like that outside of downtown Bakersfield.

"Could I borrow a pen?" He calls over to the boy sitting bored behind the cash register.

The boy scowls at him. "Whatchu want a pen for?"

"So I can write something down."

"Pens are a quarter."

"Please, I just need it for five minutes."

"And maybe I just need a quarter."

Freddy shakes his head. "Never mind."

"You better not be tormenting no customers out there, Ray!" A voice bellows from the kitchens out back.

The kid moves from bored to defensive, curling in on himself as he shouts back. "I weren't, Pops!"

"Well it sure as hell sounds like you were." The kid's father emerges, a rather portly black man striding forwards with his hair tied up in a rag and Che Guavara on his tshirt. He looks between the kid and Freddy. "You want something, sir?"

"I just wanted to borrow a pen."

The father snatches up a pen from behind the counter, smacks the kid upside the head and brings it round to pass to Freddy. "There you go." Then to the kid. "See, Ray? It's not that hard."

"He mighta stole it!"

"Aw hell no. Scrawny guy like that got no business stealing our pens. Ain't that right, white boy?"

"Right." Freddy smiles up at the cook. "Thanks."

"Don't mention it. And you best be giving that back or we ain't gonna serve you again."

Pen in hand, Freddy scrawls down the jobs he's worked in the past and tries to think up ideas for new places he could try. At the top of his list is 'Theatre Attendant' and he has to laugh to himself, thinking about spending his days sitting on his ass, watching the creeps pour in for the matinee and midnight showings, maybe slipping in at the end to catch the money shot. He can think of worse ways to earn a living.

After that he's got something about comic book shops, which he's sure there are more of here than there were in Bakersfield, and washing dishes, which any old mug can do. He never got his licence, but even if he had, he doesn't know his way round this city for shit, he couldn't drive a cab. If all goes to shit he could always ask the launderette downstairs if they need help.

It's hard to get any sense of the hour when the rain won't let up, but outside the streetlamps flicker on and a gaggle of girls around Freddy's age pour through the front door of the restaurant. They're all carrying ratty umbrellas but they look like they spend time on their outfits. Freddy's eyes get caught on the shortcut skirts and low cut tops they're all sporting, like a uniform without specifications, and he doesn't notice that he's eaten his last fry.

"Pick your jaw up off the floor." The father scolds when Freddy goes to hand back the pen. The kid, Ray, has been banished to some other part of the building.

"Sorry." Freddy smirks.

The father shakes his head. "Boy, you ain't got money for a pen. Don't go fooling yourself into thinking you've got money for them."

Money for them. With the thigh high boots and thick caked makeup. With the perfectly put together outfits and the umbrellas but you can see most of them are wet up to the knees from where passing cars have got them all the same.

Freddy blinks, smirk vanishing in an instant. "You mean...?"

"You're new in town, ain't cha?"

"Fresh off the bus."

"Then you've got some learning to do."

Freddy barks out dispassionate laughter. "You can say that again." The pen is passed back and he knows he should leave but he's not sure if he can stand to get soaked for the third time in one day. "You got any jobs going here."

"Nuh uh, no way." The father shakes his head. "This here's a family run business, and that ain't no business of yours."

"I'm happy to work out back, but I really need a job and-"

"Listen, I can ask around, see if any of my friends know anything, but there's no job here." The father brings out a stack of paper from under the till and starts scribbling something down. "What's your name?"

"Freddy."

"Nice to meet you Freddy." The father says as he scrawls down the name before offering out a hand to shake. "Name's Holdaway. Where you staying?"

"The place above the launderette round the corner."

Holdaway pulls a face. "Shit. We gotta get you out of there. Come back this time tomorrow and I'll see what I can do."

"Thanks man, I appreciate it." Freddy grins. He keeps grinning all the way out of the diner, till the wind chill hits him and his stupid sodden leather jacket isn't enough to keep it at bay. He wanders off in the direction of a cinema down the far end of the street, assuring himself that he's just going to ask about a job.

There are girls crowded around outside the cinema and some of them have umbrellas but most of them don't. Backlit by the gleaming signs advertising softcore pornography, a vision in wet denim and thin cotton. They look, almost universally, like they would rather be anywhere else than on this damp pavement.

Freddy wants to ask them if they're cold, if they're hungry, if they're scared; but as soon as he locks eyes with one she's leaning forward, trying to slip into his personal space. "Hey baby, you wanna take a walk?"

He can't answer. Freddy ducks down into the shelter of his coat and hurries inside before any of them can get the wrong idea.

Warnings for this chunk - prostitution, somewhat coerced. I should probably just say that I am, in general, sex work positive but this story is going to put Freddy in a really horrid position. I'm thinking about how to make some room for some sex worker positivity in here as well as all the awfulness.

----------------------------------------------------

"C'mon, a night on credit and I'll have the money for you in the morning." Freddy bites his bottom lip, trying to smile as he leans across the rickety table that counts as a front desk here.

Yolanda shakes her head. "Uh uh, no way. My daddy'll kill me."

"Please! It's not like anyone else has taken the room. Yolanda, I don't got no place else to go."

"That ain't my problem." Yolanda looks over his shoulder and Freddy's heart sinks. "Can I help you ma'am?"

"Looking for a place to stay." The newcomer announces.

Freddy's heart hits his boots. Yolanda jerks her head down the corridor, indicating that he should really stop bitching and go pick up his shit. He drags his feet, still waiting for to acclimatize to constantly wet socks. The rain has barely let up these past two days and neither has he. Between here and Time Square he must have canvassed every corner store, arcade and cinema with time left over to ask about work in some of the seedier restaurants. Everywhere that sounded like they might have wanted him needed time to make that call, and Holdaway's done what he can but can't secure employment till the next week.

A week. In the rain. Freddy could find a trash can or something to sleep in, then he could show up to his first day of work smelling like dogshit.

He pretends he has things to pack and stomps around his room for five minutes, triple checking under the bed to be sure he hasn't miraculously acquired another t-shirt when he wasn't looking. He's down to his last five dollars. That's dinner tonight and something to eat tomorrow, if he's smart about it.

Freddy leaves his room with his pack slung over his shoulder and hands his key back to Yolanda. "See you round."

She barely even looks up, too busy talking through some bullshit local gossip with the customer to notice. Freddy sneers at her as he backs up and waits for her to look him in the eyes so she can tell him to fuck off.

But she's not the one who looks up, the new customer, a middle aged black woman pairing thrift shop clothes with unbridled confidence, snaps her head round and fixes Freddy with fierce dark eyes.

For a minute, he thinks she's going to cuss him out. Which scares him right up until he remembers that those are just words. She doesn't know his boss, or his parents, she can't do shit to him.

He's wrong though, she doesn't scream. She laughs. "Looks like you pissed this li'l chicken stick off, Yolanda."

"Ignore him, he's a drifter." Yolanda assures her. "Get out of here, Freddy!"

"Freddy?" The older woman purrs. "Hmm, that's cute. That's real cute."

Freddy's body stiffens on impact with her smile. It's not exactly unpleasant but his guts squirm like they want him to get out of there as soon as possible.

The woman takes a step towards him. "I ain't ever had one as cute as you before."

A glance at Yolanda's apologetic, worry stricken face tells Freddy everything. He clears his throat, feels the blood rising to his cheeks. "I should go."

"Out on the streets? All alone? Streets is no place for a boy like you on a night like tonight. Stay a while." She comes in close enough to lay a hand on his shoulder and Freddy can see the chips in her nail polish, the ashy skin of her palms. "I promise I'll be gentle."

"Leave him be, Shaundra!" Panic rises high Yolanda's voice.

But Freddy's stuck trying to decide if she's pretty, and if she's not, whether it makes any difference when considering the alternative. Whether she's pretty, if she's fucking pretty. This would be very easy if she were pretty. She's not exactly ugly, but she's probably as old as his mum. Except he doesn't have a mum any more, he left her back in Bakersfield California and he has to look after himself any more.

Is she prettier than the rain is dry?

"What would I...what do you want me to do?" He asks in a voice that feels like he pulled it fresh out of kindergarten.

Shaundra shrugs. "Nothing out of pocket. We could have a little fun, maybe smoke a little. And how's this, for your troubles, I'll let you take the floor tonight and give you a little something to let you crash tomorrow if you like. How's that sound?"

Better than the sidewalk. Better than wandering through the milling crowds of girls dressed up for no one in particular trying to spot a place to mark out as his for the night. He could go down the street, to the movie theatre, catch a late show. If he were real quiet he might trick the attendant into thinking he was gone at the end. He could spend the night there.

And what would he eat tomorrow?

Yolanda is perfectly tense by the check in log. She's gotta be younger than Freddy but she's seen this exact scene play out before. She knows what happens next. She fucking knows.

Like his enthusiasm makes a blind bit of difference, when Freddy nods his agreement he moves his head as little as possible. Shaundra beams at him. "Good boy. Come on now."

She doesn't bother stopping to clear it with Yolanda. Freddy thinks back to the couple he heard fucking on his first night here, in the room next door, and he doesn't need to worry about the hotel's policy on this sort of thing any more.

"Strip." Shaundra commands, once the door has swung closed behind them and she's sat on the edge of the bed. "But do it real slow."

Freddy doesn't think he could do it fast if he tried. His jacket and singlet are peeled off his back at a snail's pace, but when he reaches the front button of his jeans his hands are shaking too hard to make them do what he needs them to do.

His throat catches and he has to duck his head, hoping he's not going to be the idiot who starts crying. When he looks up, Shaundra's still smiling at him, shark like and passive. "You take your time, baby. You take all the time you need."

-

The floor in this room hasn't been cleaned in mud, and Freddy wakes with one wide of his face caked black with all the dust and city borne grime that has gathered there. He's cold and stiff, covered by his jacket and his mercifully still dry Hawaiian shirt, twenty two dollars clutched in his left hand.

Shaundra's still asleep. It's gotta be early, the light filtering in under the shades is weak and he can't hear the tumble dryers running downstairs. Freddy wishes he could go the fuck back to sleep but his hips are killing him on the hard floor. He sits up in a daze, reaching for his shoes as quietly as he can. Somewhere will be open, he can go grab some coffee and come back later, when the room is his again.

Yolanda is doing in the chair at the front desk. Her dad's supposed to come by at seven to relieve her, which tells Freddy everything he needs to know about the time of day. He shakes her awake and hands her the money for that night with a weak smile. "Told you I'd have it by the morning."

"Yeah." Yolanda stares blearily at the wad of bills in her hand. "Listen, Freddy. About Shaundra. I'm so-"

"It's fine." Freddy cuts her off. "Really. Just...forget about it, ok?"

She looks up at him with a sleepy sort of pity that makes his skin itch. "You gotta be careful getting into that shit."

He shrugs and signs on the line to claim the room for the night. None of this matters. He doesn't have to think about last night every again if he doesn't want to. A one time thing he keep in his back pocket for when the going gets tough.

He never ate the night before, got too busy. Freddy's stomach growls loudly and leaves the hotel thinking about how he still only has five dollars in his pocket.

-

"Good news!" Holdaway slips into the seat opposite Freddy. Turns out he opens up early on Saturdays. And it turns out it's fucking Saturday.

Freddy looks up from the burger he's got himself instead of a real breakfast. "You got a job for me?"

"Sure have. I know a guy down on fifty seventh street, works driving a cab, he put me on to something."

Freddy's shoulders drop. "I don't have a license."

"I figured. Don't sweat it, they need someone to operate their switch board for a couple of weeks while their girl is in the hospital. Something went down between her and her fella, I didn't press for details. You can start today."

"Today as in...?"

"Today as in, you best finish that burger real quick and start walking cuz they're expecting your ass at nine."

Ninety eighth to fifty seventh street is a long walk. Freddy glances at the clock hanging on the back wall and runs the numbers. He can make it, just, if he gets a little creative with his interpretations of traffic signals.

"Thanks, I owe you one!" He calls back to Holdaway as he throws on his jacket and barrels out the door, still chomping down half a burger.

"You think I don't know that?" Holdaway calls after him, but Freddy is already skipping down the road, the ghosts of the night before well behind him.

Lots of Taxi driver characters show up in this section. I subscribe to the theory that Travis is autistic, if anyone wants to check me on that. Iris is here and, if you haven't seen the film, she is a very young sex worker - we see her on the street but she is canvassing for clients. Sport also shows up and he is very gross and the worst and is going to talk overtly about Iris's sexuality. Basically no actual underage stuff is happening on screen but lots of very grim underage stuff is happening just off screen. Stay safe.

----------------------------------------------------------

For some reason, Freddy's surprised to find out that a cab company headquarters is basically a garage with an office attached. He sticks his head through the gaping hole in the side of the building and skips around cars heading out for the morning as he makes his way to the desk at the back.

"'Scuse me." Freddy looks down at the balding, fat Jewish guy wearing a jacket that makes him look twice as wide as he is. "You Josh?"

"Who's asking?" The guy doesn't look up from the morning papers. He's sucking on a cigarette like it's mother's milk.

"Name's Freddy Newandyke. Holdaway sent me."

"So you're the kid who's gonna help us out while Jeannie recovers from her accident."

"I guess."

"You guess?" Josh laughs and squints up at Freddy from behind thick rimmed glasses. "Jesus, how old are you?"

"Old enough."

"You got any experience with a switchboard?"

"No." Freddy replies before he can think to lie. He scrambles to catch himself. "But it's not like it's hard, right?"

Josh shrugs, closing the paper and slamming down an empty coffee mug on the corners to stop it from blowing away. "Can't be if Jeannie Spelling was any good at it. C'mon, I'll show you the ropes."

Operating a switchboard turns out to be boring as shit but not so mind numbing that he can switch off. The customers get shirty if he's anything less than saccharine with them and the drivers are surly no matter how he talks. He has to contend with the revving of the cars in the main hall, drivers shouting at each other like they think hey can't be heard, and all of that set on the backdrop of the noise outside. After twelve hours, he's about ready to fall down on the floor and call it a night.

A better night than the last. Freddy squashes that thought before it can morph into memory and hands his headset over to the girl who's working the graveyard shift till he comes back in.

Picking up his wages for the day, Freddy glances round the room like he expects to see someone he recognises and is met with a blank sea of yellow punctuated by what might as well be the same ruddy face, passed around and shared between the drivers for lack of a distinct identity.

He almost makes it home free. So far he hasn't had to talk to any of the drivers face to face but that changes pretty quickly as he turns out of the garage and runs right into Travis Bickley.

"Woah, watch where you're going." Travis says in a soft voice that doesn't match the intensity of his scowl. Only a few days in New York and Freddy can already tell that his accent is out of place. Not that this city ain't full to bursting with out of towners.

Freddy apologises and tries to brush past him but Travis slips into the space he's trying to occupy a moment too soon. he tries again and the same thing happens. When they meet eyes, Travis is smiling and it makes Freddy want to be sick.

It makes Freddy want to curl up on the floor of his bedroom because it's easier than trying to make a case for the bed. No. Wrong. Not thinking about that.

"Travis, leave the kid alone, would'ya?"

Travis says nothing, but he does step aside to create free passage for Freddy.

When he looks back over his shoulder to get a better look at is rescuer, Freddy sees a straight back, wide shoulders, hair slicked back off the guy's face. "Hey, you drove me up to Harlem the other night."

The cab driver cocks his head in acquiescence. "Guess I did. How you getting on? You got a job?"

"Yeah, I'm running your switch boards." Freddy breaks into a grin seeing the radio stickers on the bumper of one of the cars pulling out of the lot.

The cab driver laughs, and resolutely pays no attention to Travis who's staring him down with an incredulity that feels out of place. Freddy wishes he would leave.

"No shit." The cab driver laughs. "You're Freddy then? Call me Larry, and this creepy sonovabitch is Travis."

Freddy shakes Larry's hand and decides he's not going to offer Travis the same courtesy. Travis doesn't mind, he doesn't even move. The lights from the board over the cab company seem to glance right off him, refracting back onto Larry in a glorious bid to soften all his features.

"Nice to meet you, Larry. Guess I'll be seeing you around."

"Yeah, I guess so." Freddy would be hard pressed to articulate why it feels so comfortable to be caught up in Larry's attention and so uncomfortable to be caught up in Travis's. Or Shaundra's.

The walk back up to the hotel is mercifully dry, but it's damn near ten when he finally comes through the door. Yolanda's mum is on duty tonight, and the main hall echoes with the tinny little television she's brought in to see her through the night.

Freddy separates twenty two dollars from his wages and pays up for the night. When he gets into his room, he finds it empty and sickening and he wishes he could be anywhere else but here.

-

Two weeks of work means two weeks of work. Freddy's not just covering for Jeannie, he's giving the girl who picks up her days off a break as well. He could complain about how his eyes haven't stopped stinging in days and his back aches from hunching over the controls, but he keeps bringing himself up short when he thinks about all the things he would be doing if he weren't working this job.

He would be at the movies, burying himself in a mountain of comics, buying himself a bike and giving himself a day or two to see all the big tourist sites that he swears he's going to be too local to appreciate in a month. Only he wouldn't be doing any of that shit, because it all costs money he wouldn't have if he weren't working.

He's got just shy of ten extra bucks a day once he's paid for the room, call it seven once he's eaten. They usually give him something he doesn't have to worry about paying for at the station. He's not gonna be in a good position once all this is said and done but he's not gonna be dead on his feet either.

Doing the walk between the hotel and fifty seventh feet twice a day he starts to get a sense of how New York fits together. The little details, like who's on the move when, who's talking to who, who's running late. Some people are always in a rush and some never seem to have any place to be. The girls that line street corners at night are rarely there at eight am but he can see their outlines coming up a mile off. Back home, everyone moved through the world safe in the knowledge that everyone was trying to get up in their business. Bakersfield isn't even a super small town but still, people notice each other. Here though, you can move with assured anonymity, and guilt colours the edges of Freddy's observations when he resolutely recognises people from across the street who he's never properly spoken to.

He's always been good at faces. Recognising someone is the first step to building their trust.

He doesn't recognise the boys on the street corners though. There aren't many of them, and Freddy's not sure if that makes it worse. He does recognise the girl who looks like she went through puberty five fucking minutes ago who hangs out by the tenements down on ninety second that he should probably stop passing every evening if he knows what's good for him.

"Watch it mister!" She barks when he loses track of his surroundings and nearly crashes straight into her on the way home one evening. She's not particularly angry, she just wants him at a distance.

"Sorry." Freddy mumbles, and before he can stop himself he's looking at her. Really looking, not just clocking identifying details and letting them assemble themselves into something that looks like a real person. All of a sudden he can't breathe.

She snorts at him. "Technically, staring's s'posed to be free but I'm pretty sure Sport'll take you for five dollars if you don't screw your eyes back in your head."

Freddy blinks, shakes his head. "What?"

"If you want some of this, you're gonna have to pay."

She doesn't have anything he wants. The sob Freddy lets out gets read as a laugh and oh, she thinks he's so naiive.

"What are you doing out here?" He asks.

The girl shrugs. "What are any of us doing out here?"

Freddy is highly aware that he's far more uncomfortable than she is, in her high rise short shorts, crop top, and ridiculous hat that looks ripe to get washed down the drain just as soon as the next lot of rain rolls in. "I mean...don't you wanna...not be here?"

"I got no place else to be. Unless you feel like paying, that is."

"No. I don't want that. You should be home with your parents."

"God." The girl groans. "You're such a fucking square. Get out of here, before I call Sport."

"I'm serious." Freddy reaches for her hand and she pulls herself away from him like he's toxic.

She's also serious, as it transpires. "Sport!"

A stocky man with long hair, ripcord muscles and a glint in his eye looks up from his spot in the doorway of one of the tenements. He's got one of those jolly faces that you just know serves as a mask more than an advertisement. Freddy has heard exactly zero good stories about pimps, and he's rushing away to the end of the block with the little girl's laughter in his ears.

He's going to have to steer clear of ninety second street for a while.

-

Back at the hotel, Freddy collapses on his bed with the lone Fantastic Four chapter he's found time to buy since he arrived in New York and a hot dog from a place across the way. He starts to read, but is quickly distracted by the chattering of Yolanda and a new guest out in the hall.

He should have known his ears weren't likely to prick for anyone he wasn't already familiar with, but Freddy eavesdrops all the same. He recognises the other voice as Shaundra and immediately wants to burn his bead sheets.

She asks about him, about what he's doing, if he's still here. Yolanda, the stupid little bitch, has the nerve to go and tell her where he's working. Half the hot dog sits, uneaten in Freddy's lap and he's very much regretting spending a dollar twenty five on something he knows he's not going to wind up finishing.

Five minutes later, he hasn't moved a muscle and there's a knock at the door. Freddy holds his breath, trying to stay quiet as far as possible.

After the third knock, she gives up with a low chuckle. "I know you're in there, sugar. If you didn't wanna see me, all you had to do was say."

He has four more days at the cab company. Four more days, then he can find a stable job and an apartment a long way from this part of town, somewhere where Shaundra can't find him and the movie theatre down the road has something more to offer than nude girls.

-

Freddy takes pains to avoid the ninety second street tenements in the morning, even knowing that there's rarely any action going down at that time of day. Just to be safe. A heady mist hangs in the air, painting the streets in pretty shades of blue and pink and below the chemical ocean spray and the smog from the cars, you can just about smell the sun trying to come through and burn it all off.

To get from ninety eighth street to fifty seventh street you have to cross ninety second street, one way or another. Freddy takes third as opposed to his usual fifth, hoping that that's going to be enough but accounting for the fact that he's probably going to have to go further out of his way that evening.

He doesn't notice Sport, leaning up against the wall of a rather run down looking accountant's, until he's practically on the guy.

For the love of all that is good and holy, Freddy freezes up on seeing the guy. Stupid. Nothing to attract attention to yourself like making it really fucking clear you've just seen someone you had no plans to make small talk with that day.

He's smoking a spliff the size of a cigar and though the morning is chill, his arms are bared in his singlet, showing off the ware withal to land a pretty decent punch. He sees Freddy and looks so genuinely happy to see him it's disarming.

"Yo! I see you there. Come over here, my friend, we have much to discuss."

Freddy gives up all pretense that he hasn't seen Sport and stares him down, dumbly. Like fucking Travis with his weird, inability to communicate at the same pace as regular folks. That's what Freddy must look like.

"Hey, man, come on. There's no bad blood between us. I get it! You stopped to take a look at Iris last night, you ain't the first. I just figure we maybe oughta establish some ground rules before you come snooping around her again, you know what I mean? That way you and I can stay friends and Iris won't have to worry that you maybe have some kinda design on her that ain't in the handbook." Sport is animated, throwing his arms around and moving his face too fast for Freddy to keep track of. He's wearing a string of pearls wrapped tight around his neck and the way they roll and strain as he talks is deeply distracting.

Freddy shakes his head. "I don't wanna use any of your whores, sir. If you don't mind, I gotta get to work."

"Hey! Shh! C'mon, man." Sport holds out his hands, spliff still in his mouth, creating a cloud of green smoke over his head. "No need for that kind of language in the streets, ya dig? I'm just trying to let you know what's what."

"How did you find me?"

"Find you? How did I find you?" Sport laughs and points for an imagined crowd. "How did I find you? I didn't find nobody. I was just winding down for the night, and you walk right up on me. Question is, how did you find me?"

The time he's wasting is going to be harder to make up. "I gotta get to work." Freddy says again, moving past Sport to continue on his way.

He doesn't get very far. Sport's hand on his upper arm is vice like and Freddy is so unsure whether the edge he's getting off the guy is a genuine threat or the drugs talking that he flubs the landing and fails to modulate his response.

"Just sos ya know, if you're ever in the area again and something tells me you will be, Iris is fifteen dollars for fifteen minutes or twenty five for half an hour."

And the first thing that crosses Freddy's mind is that a nap on the floor and twenty two dollars was a monumental undersell on his part. Then he recoils from the thought and tries to pull himself free from Sport. "She's just a kid..."

"And you're what, seventeen at a push? Iris's age don't matter, she's got the tightest pussy in all New York, baby. Twelve and a half years old, even the Chinese don't got any younger than her right now."

"That's fucking illegal, man." Is the stupidest possible thing Freddy could say at that moment. The first thing you learn about New York is that the police don't shit unless you got money or the Mayor is riding them hard about a particular case.

Twelve years old. Twelve fucking years old. He could get her out of here, he could pay to see her and use that time to promise her that he'll get her away from all this. And she could laugh at him and tell him to stop being such a pussy.

"I'll see you round, mister manners!" Sport calls after him. Freddy hunches his shoulders against the cold, and he can still hear the laughter following behind him from three blocks away.

"You got friends in town?" Larry asks around a mouthful of some weird Mexican food. He's been talking about this shit like it's culinary poetry all evening but Freddy's not convinced. Every bite he takes burns the back of his mouth like he's chewing on a lump of ginger and he'd rather have American cheese than sour cream dripping all over his hands.

The others are already wise to Larry's shit and have managed to talk the tiny old Spanish woman at the counter into making them what is essentially meat and potatoes. Mexican food, in New York of all places. Freddy's barely seen ten Mexicans since he got here, nothing like the truckloads of them that worked the orange farms out near his parents place, but there weren't no Mexican diners in Bakersfield.

He shakes his head. "No."

"A kid like you? Don't you wanna go out, have a bit of fun?"

"Sure." Freddy shrugs. "But when am I supposed to meet anyone? I'm at work twelve hours a day and I gotta sleep and eat."

"You don't meet anyone while you're eating?" Larry's friend from the garage cuts in. He's big, sitting underneath too much dark curly hair like a frog in a wig.

"I mean, I got this one guy... He's not really a friend though, he's just looking out for me." Holdaway probably wouldn't call himself Freddy's friend, not out loud at any rate. He'd call him a rat or a scrounger and then he'd tousle his hair and laugh at him for being so pathetic as to not be able to find his own damn employment.

Larry's mouth flattens ever so slightly around his dinner. "It's good to have someone looking out for you."

"Yeah. I mean, he got me this job and he might be able to get me something else next week but..." Freddy has nothing to finish that sentence with. Either Holdaway helps him get a job for next week or he's fucked in two.

He's managed to save some money, working at the taxi company. He's not out on his ass. Worst comes to the worst, Shaundra seems to come by every few days, and she always asks after him, even if Freddy's taken precautions not to have to see her face to face since the night she propositioned him.

The memories of that night have become foggy and insubstantial in the intervening days. Not that Freddy is trying to remember. It's comforting, to watch them dissolve before his very eyes, so in a month or so he can wake up and feel like it never happened.

Frog Man, who's name Freddy thinks starts with a K but can't be sure, nods towards Travis, who's been shoveling fries into his mouth at a steady, unhurried pace for the past twenty minutes. "You gotta find out this guy's secret. He's always making new friends on the job."

"That can't be hard, right?" Freddy asks. "I mean, you're driving around talking to people all day. Some of them have gotta be nice."

"Yeah." Frog Man grins. "But only Travis calls them his friends."

Travis looks up at Freddy with the same mild humour he lavishes on everything. His jaw is still working his last fry, and they're all going to have to wait till he's done with it to hear what he has to say.

"People are everywhere. You wanna make friends, you just gotta talk to them."

"Who are you friends with, Travis?" Frog Man's an inch away from full blown laughter and completely unaware of the filthy look Larry's giving him.

Travis thinks on this for a moment and picks up another fry. "Made friends with the concession stand girl. Made friends with this whore up on ninety second street."

"You can't make friends with a whore." Larry wrinkles his nose and Freddy feels a bolt of shame tear through his guts.

"You can if you pay her." Frog Man grins.

Travis shakes his head. "I did pay her, but not for that. I'm gonna save her."

Frog Man laughs and Larry rolls his eyes and Freddy can't take his eyes off the soft light pooling in Travis's eyes. He wants so badly to believe him, he could swear his heart breaks then and there.

-------

The next time Shaundra knocks on his door, Freddy decides that he can't live in this city one minute longer with that kind of sword hanging over his head. He breathes deep to calm his racing heart and opens the door a crack.

She's framed by the light coming down the hall from reception, her smile absent till she gets a good look at him and then all too bright. Freddy winces and his hand tenses against the door, fighting the urge to run.

"There you are, baby. I thought you were avoiding me."

"I been busy." Freddy says, as tonelessly as he can manage.

Her eyes rake him up and down through the crack in the door. She can't be able to see much more than his scuffed up shoes and a Hawaiian shirt in need of a good cleaning but she hums like she likes it all the same. "I'll bet you have. After that performance you put on the other night I'm sure you're getting calls all over town."

"It ain't like that."

"No? Well it could be. I wanted to talk to you about all that."

"About all what?"

"About putting your talents to good use." Shaundra rushes up hard against the door and gets her toe through just enough to stop it closing properly. Her breath stinks of onions, not a trace of liquor to be found. "It was easy work, right? And sure, I'm a cheapskate, but you could pull in some real money if you set your mind to it."

"No thank you." Freddy's voice comes out raspy. The room behind him doesn't feel big enough to run through.

Friendly as she tries to appear, there's only so far Shaundra can hide her anger, snapping through the forced friendliness in her voice and pinching her brow. "I'm telling you, boy, you could be living the good life. None of this answering the fucking switch board for some no good cab. I could have you making the kind of money you make there in a day every hour."

Iris is twenty five bucks for half an hour. On a fast day she maybe goes from one client to the next without hassle, so that's fifty bucks, sixty if they only want short sessions. But she's supposed to be a one of a kind opportunity, and all that's before Sport has taken his cut. The sticky shame that Larry put in his belly coils ever further round Freddy's gut, rationalising that there's no way in hell what Shaundra's saying is true.

"Or at least every two hours." She catches herself, breathing out all that aggression and trying to force the door open with the lightest of touches. "I'm serious, baby. You got what it takes."

The word 'no' is on the tip of Freddy's tongue, just waiting to trip off. It won't do shit, but at least he'll have said it. He pushes the door up hard against Shaundra's foot, hoping to hurt her hard enough that she'll leave.

"Shaundra? You best not be bothering no paying customer of mine." Yolanda's father calls down the hall. Freddy could cry with relief.

Shaundra backs up, lips pursed. Yolanda wouldn't dare talk to her like that, Yolanda's mother barely seems to notice shit. Yolanda's father is a hardass and Freddy never wants to get on his bad side but that touch shit stretches out to how he runs his business. "We're just having a little talk, Winston."

"You think I don't know what you wanna talk to him about? Get outta here."

There's no trace of a smile on Shaundra's face as she backs away from the door, no more room for pretend. She stalks off down the hallway towards the room she's renting for the night and Freddy decides right then and there that he has to find somewhere else to stay immediately.

Before he can get the door closed, Winston comes in to view. He's as black as they come, practically blending into the shadows after dark like it's his job and as tall and skinny as a bald rake. "You alright, kid?"

"Yes, sir." Freddy mumbles.

Winston nods, squinting like he doesn't quite believe it. "You know, I ain't got no problem if you gotta do a little business while you're staying here, so long as you pay up, but you want my advice, don't work with Shaundra."

"I wasn't gonna."

"Good. She's a friend, but she's a crazy ass bitch."

Freddy manages a small smile as Winston heads back down the hall. The door falls closed and he decides, once and for all, by the stink rising off him, that he has to visit the launderette.

-------

Larry was talking about taking Freddy out for his first real beer, sneaking it to him under the table of some bar he knows that doesn't look at anyone's face too hard, but someone calls in sick and he has to drive well into the night after Freddy packs up for his last day.

"I guess I'll see you around." Freddy says, more than a little disappointed as Larry crawls into the driver's seat on his last morning.

"Maybe." Larry's mouth twitches downwards like he doesn't think the odds are all that high. "You're more likely to see Travis though, he comes up your way a whole lot more than I do."

"You could change your route." Freddy suggests, and immediately regrets it. He and Larry have had about five full conversations, but he's safe and steady and unlike everyone else in this city, he doesn't seem to have an ulterior motive. Even Travis, for all his open book emotionless bullshit, seems to be on a constant quest to get laid or save the world trying.

Larry smirks. "Yeah, we'll see."

He's pulling away before Freddy can think of a way to salvage the conversation, leaving him wondering if that was as awkward as it felt to him.

"Newandyke! Get to work!" Joe bellows from the front desk.

Freddy rushes to the back office and doesn't have time to get his ass on the seat before the calls start coming in.

----------

The handful of cash Freddy leaves with is exactly two dollars heavier than Freddy was entitled to for today. Small blessings. That's like one ride's tip, skimmed off the top to cover a traffic violation or some shit. Joe normally keeps those. Then again, maybe Jeannie gets the odd extra dollar here and there as well.

It's been a clear, cool autumn day and the sky is a perfect gradient from pastel blue to deep orange setting over the skyline. The shape of New York is iconic in that way that it would feel unamerican not to recognise it, but it can look so different from ground level. When he's got a real job, and steady cash, and a place of his own, and has bought all the comics he's been missing out on since he moved out here, Freddy's going to take himself out on one of those tourist trips to Ellis Island and see the city as it's meant to be seen.

He's so caught up in thinking about it, he barely notices the guy trying to get his attention. "Yo! Kid! Psst! Over here!"

Freddy turns around just as Sport claps a hand on his shoulder, leaning in way too close. If crystal meth has a smell, it's all over him, it's the only thing about him. Freddy seizes up and starts wondering how he's supposed to get the unwelcome hand away when he's not sure he remembers how to move a damn muscle.

"Hey, hey! Be cool, be cool. Are you cool?" Sport laughs and unsticks his hand from Freddy's shoulder. "You and I, we got some things to talk about, and I haven't seen you in a few days. What's wrong? You don't wanna come see Iris no more? She misses you."

An imprint of Iris's eye role is imprinted on the back of Freddy's eyes for all eternity. "She don't miss me."

"Sure she does." Sport nudges Freddy's shoulder like they're friends. He's thrown a battered blazer over an obnoxiously tight pink tshirt over the top of high wasted velvet bell-bottoms and the pearls have been replaced with a Native American choker of some kind, build out what looks like bits of twig. "I really do gotta talk to you though. And seeing as you weren't coming down my way I figured I'd have to come see where you work."

The puzzle pieces slot together, the wrongness of it all falling into place fast enough to give Freddy whiplash. He takes a step backwards, like seeing Sport superimposed on the garage door is supposed to change anything. "The fuck do you know where I work?"

Sport ignores the question, glancing over his shoulder and taking back the distance Freddy put between the two of them. "A little birdy told me that you maybe did a couple of odd jobs up on ninety eighth street."

"I haven't done no fucking work up in Harlem." Freddy's voice rises, irritated.

"I'd like to believe you, kid. Really, anyone would wanna believe a pretty pair of eyes like that." Freddy shirks backwards when Sport tries to run a thumb along his jaw. "But my people ain't liars. At least not with me."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Hey, we all get a little forgetful sometimes. Lemme refresh your memory so's you don't feel like I'm taking you for a ride here." Sport gestures between the two of them like this is some kind of agreement they're both in on. Freddy is very careful not to move a fucking muscle. "This job woulda been just over two weeks ago. You were paid in a little room and board, and a little cash. The whole thing took about a night."

Freddy's jaw feels locked, clicking like the tumblers falling out of place when he tries to speak. His voice is thin and needy and no matter how hard he tries to convince himself he's got a handle on himself it just won't work. "Why don't you come out and say it?"

He sounds like the sticky thick shame in his gut. He's been spending hours on the toilet, trying to shit it out, but he hasn't been able to afford a vegetable since he got here and it's well and truly stuck in place.

Sport spreads his hands. "Please! Don't make me say it. Never know where the cops could be hiding. Let's just sort this out between the two of us. I promise, I'll treat you real good for the privilege."

The threat there is clear. Freddy better wise up fast or the police will be up his ass for this without so much as lifting a hair on Sport's head. He shoves his hands into his pockets, holding on to his last day's pay like it's trying to run out on him. "What do you want?"

"See, the thing is." Sport's voice lowers to a hush and he beckons Freddy to lean in. Freddy moves before he can catch himself. "I got an agreement with some well placed folks up in Harlem, and the kind of job you were doing is supposed to be done by my people and my people only. So you can see how me finding out that you were kind enough to do a job for my good friend Shaundra without first discussing it with me might cause a bit of a problem."

Freddy swallows thickly and nods. "What do I gotta do?"

"So serious, kid!" Sport laughs. "You gotta cool off. You don't gotta do anything, but I'm just letting you know that if you and I can't find a way to sort this out, some guys might come after you who aren't so nice as me."

"Right, so what do I gotta do to stop that happening."

Sport pauses, twisting up his mouth like he's thinking. He pulls a handkerchief from his pocket and starts wiping at his face like he's sweating and Freddy is sudden;y very aware that he hasn't stopped shifting his feet the whole time they've been talking. The man can't stand still for shit.

"You're a good kid." Sport starts. "I don't see why this has to be a big deal. How's about you just give me the money you made on that job and promise me that you're not gonna do anything like that again without talking to me, and we call it a day?"

Twenty two dollars verses a beating. Freddy's not sure which nationality is supposed to be running the prostitute business in Harlem. He'd guess the blacks, seeing as they're everywhere up that end of town, but Sport's girls are pretty universally Aryan so maybe not.

In the long term, losing twenty two bucks ain't so bad. It's not like he's not paid up for a place to stay till the end of the week. Freddy starts trying to count off the cash in his pocket without looking, not wanting to seem like he's someone with more money than he actually has. No desire to become a pimp's personal piggy bank.

"Or!" Sport continues, resting a hand on Freddy's pocket and inviting him to pause. "Maybe you wanna get into this business. I'm tellin' you kid, there's always plenty of customers and I know how to sell my product. You wouldn't make Iris money but I could treat you real nice."

The slip of the tongue between the lips, hips jutting forward ever so slightly like that's supposed to sell Freddy on anything.

Freddy pulls out a handful of exactly twenty two dollars and shoves it into Sport's hand, which feels huge and warm against his own in the chilly evening air. "Here's the money I made doing that job. You can ask your friend Shaundra if you don't believe me."

Sport titters, wrapping his other hand over Freddy's. "Oh, she told me all about it alright, sweet boy. You really impressed her, ya know?"

There's nothing more to say. Freddy waits just long enough to see Sport count the money before taking off up the road, practically running. He's halfway back to Harlem before he notices the stinging in his eyes and when he reaches up to rub at them his hand comes away wet.

Big boys don't cry. Boys don't cry, period. Or so his dad always said. Freddy finds a nice alleyway where no one can see him and waits for his breathing too steady itself. When he looks up, he half expects to see someone waiting for him at the other end, fistful of dollars in hand and ready to make him an offer that he's not yet unable to refuse.

But he's alone, as the sun sets on New York city, and from here the skyline is nothing more than the space between two houses, looking up at a darkening sky.

I don't have so much time to work on this today so take a section that right now feels completely atonal and at odds with everything else going on here. Lots of sex talk in this bit, including a very strange conversation about Spider-Man

-----------------------------------------------------------------

The projection quality at the El Royale on sixty fifth street ain't shit, but it's right next to the place Freddy has decided is his favourite comic shop in the whole city based on the five minutes he's found time to spend in there, so here he is. The velvet of the seat is worn through and the base of his spine aches within minutes of sitting down. It's fractionally more full than he would like, leaving very little room for privacy. If the nervous, shuffling gaze of the other men in the theatre is anything to go by, he's not the only one that's noticed. Fundamentally, porno movies are a dumb business to get in to. Everyone's who makes use of this business wants privacy, not a fucking public airing.

Blurry bodies move against each other on the screen, showing the vague outline of a breast, a cock caught at half mast in the shadows through a sheet hung out to dry. It's all interspersed with shots of flowers, horses running, badly chopped together to make the thing feel less dirty than it is, as if the director had no fucking idea why people would turn out to see this shit in cinemas. Maybe they have to do that shit for the censors, but Freddy doesn't know why they don't just cut it right out again once it's time to let the thing be shown.

The vague intention of nausea has settled itself neatly below his stomach, possibly biding it's time or possibly on its way out. Freddy walked in here prepared to puke his guts up in the aisle but it turns out his stomach's stronger than that. Like handing a wad of bills over to Sport exorcised the whole sordid affair right out of him.

Through a filter of deep reds that's supposed to invoke passion but just muddles the film so bad it's impossible to see which of the four paper thin characters is supposed to be speaking, a woman cries out. The actress can't fake this shit, she sounds more annoyed than horny. Freddy's heard that real girls have to do that too sometimes, pretend like they're getting off so as to make their boyfriends feel better. He hopes that no girl ever has to feel that way with him.

There's too many people in here for the film to feel erotic, and the guy up at the back noisily jerking off doesn't do shit to change that. Freddy lets the poor lighting and ill defined images wash over him, his heartbeat steadying by the second. Maybe soon he can find himself a nice girl and finally get round to having some sex of his own.

---------

It's still mid-afternoon when Freddy leaves the theatre, and though the skies are grey they still feel all too bright having just come out of a dark room. He takes off round the corner, looking for Wacko Comics and trying to muster up some kind of sales pitch on his nonexistent experience as someone who the owner maybe wants to hire to help out.

Wacko is laid out like a record store, with boxes upon boxes of comics sorted into vague genre brackets that you have to scout through alphabetically in search of what you want. Like any good comic shop, the new releases are kept behind the counter, held back for regular customers, and you have to be one lucky sonofabitch to persuade him to give it to you.

First, you have to get the guy's attention.

"I'm telling you man." The owner drawls down the phone. He's tall, with an overdone dark quiff and too much chin. "Spider-Man's all about sex. Kinky sex. Sexual awakening gone dark. No, listen, kid starts getting hot under the collar for Gwen Stacy and then the spider bite is supposed to be that magic moment that you realise that sex can happen to you. So he puts on a fucking gimp suit and runs around saving people, only saving people is a metaphor for fucking. I'm telling you! How does Spider-Man save people? He gets them with those web shooters of his. I know that he makes the web shooters himself, what do you-? Doesn't matter. He saves them with the web shooters and I don't gotta tell you that those things look like cum. Yes they do! Kid's fucking nutting out of his wrists to save people, that's what he does. But it doesn't satisfy him, because he doesn't want to fuck any of the people he's saving, he wants t fuck the got girl at school, but really he wants her to know that he's the one who fucked her, the one who fucked the entire damn city. So later on when he's taking of his mask for MJ that's what he's doing, he's proving to her that he's a regular fuck machine. Because he doesn't get off on anonymity, he gets off on exclusivity, you see? I'm telling you man, think about it."

"'Scuse me." Freddy waves to get the guy's attention.

The owner roles his eyes. "Hold up, I got a customer. Yeah kid, what do you want?"

"I was wondering if you had the new Iron Man in."

"Maybe I do, what's it to you?"

"I wanna buy it."

The owner snorts. "Whole lotta people wanna buy that comic. I got regulars asking for it way ahead of you. Come back next week some time."

"I could become a regular." Freddy insists, inching closer to the counter.

The owner waves the phone around like this information means absolutely nothing to him. "So become a fucking regular. Come back next week."

He buries himself back in his phone conversation about Spider-Man and Freddy doesn't move a muscle. He can see the stupid Iron Man issue sat on a chair just behind the counter. He's behind on Fantastic Four and cares enough to catch up but his interest in Iron Man only comes round so often, he has to make the most of it while it lasts.

The shop is hardly big, and though it's not busy it's also not empty. Freddy doesn't think that the kind of sex talk the owner is spouting would fly in any sort of business place back in Bakersfield.

"Hey! Mister, excuse me!" Freddy tries again. The owner turns back to him with murder in his eyes and he keeps talking before he can be talked over. "You know, if Spider-Man saving people means that he's fucking him, that means the reason he's so cut up about his Uncle Ben all the time is that he never got to fuck him."

The owner sneers. "I don't remember asking your opinion."

"I'm just saying, that's pretty fucked up to want to fuck your uncle like that."

"So what? He's a kinky, uncle fucking freak. Scram!"

"But if he wants to fuck his uncle so bad, why is he so happy when he gets to fuck the hot girl."

"Yeah, sorry Bill. Kid here won't shut up. He is not talking sense!" The owner snaps into the receiver before setting it down on the counter and rounding on Freddy. "He wants to fuck his uncle for fucked up reasons, he wants to fuck the hot girl because that's what teenage boys want. You get it? You wanna fuck a hot girl?"

Freddy shrugs. It's supposed to make him look cool and carefree but he just feels awkward. "Wouldn't say no."

"So you get it. If you wanted to fuck your uncle but you also wanted to fuck a hot girl, and you got to fuck the hot girl, wouldn't you feel relieved?"

"Maybe, but then what's stopping me from giving up on fucking other people? Ya know? If it's all a story about some guy trying to get over his perversion, isn't the part where he gets to date MJ the bit where he can finally stop worrying about all that shit?"

The owner strokes his chin, thoughtfully. Freddy realises with a giddy sort of shock that he's gone from vaguely pissed off to interested very quickly. "Maybe. I gotta think about it. You wanted Iron Man, right?"

"Yeah." Freddy grins, watching the owner reach back for the issue.

"That's a dollar. What's you're name kid?"

"Why d'you wanna know?" Freddy pulls the money from his pocket and presses it in to the guy's hand.

"You said you could become a regular. I gotta know all my regular's names or what's the point."

Fair. Freddy holds out his hands to accept the comic. "I'm Freddy."

"Nice to meet you Freddy. You can call me Mr Brown." Mr Brown smiles and it all gets lost in the weird angles of his face. His eyes are small and sharp but his tongue seems stuck an inch from tripping over itself.

"Cool." Freddy nods. "I guess I'll see you around then, Mr Brown."

"You better had! Come back when you got a minute next time. You think Spider-Man's kinky? He ain't got nothing on Batman."

Freddy's mom always told him that getting a decent job was about working hard and having the right qualifications in your back pocket, and he always told her that he didn't need no qualifications for what he was trying to do. Straight to the local police academy, was his plan, just as soon as he got out of high school. But along the way he slipped and instead of a diploma he wound up on a bus out of town with all the pocket money and the Saturday job money he had managed to save over his short little life shoved into the back pocket of his jeans.

He's still trying to work out why he left. Some days he can't even remember the fight that he unilaterally decided was the last straw. His dad was all about football and weekends in the wilderness and all that shit to toughen Freddy up. His mom was more into ranting and raving about how much she hated her husband only to melt into docile domesticity as soon as he stepped into the room. All Freddy has to remember them by is the crooked little finger from his right hand from where they decided that he didn't need to go to hospital after a bad fall from his bike and a seething anger that doesn't feel like it belongs to him.

Mom was wrong though, hard work don't mean shit when it comes time to pay your own way in the world. What matters, is that you know the right people. Freddy doesn't wait a week to go back to Wacko Comics. He barely even manages twenty four hours. What he does manage is to sit through a rather unpleasant diatribe from Mr Brown on the xenosexual tendencies of Bruce Wayne and from there things fall into place.

A little 'kid you really know you're stuff' here. Some 'you know I could really use a hand around the place' there, and just like that he's keeping the stock room so Brown can sit on his ass all day, dreaming of stupid shit for superheros to do with their dicks. Freddy's pretty sure he could double business here in a week if he took over the cash register, if only because he wouldn't scare off all the kids.

"So, you found yourself a little job, all by yourself?" Holdaway grins at him.

Freddy narrows his eyes. "You don't like it?"

"I mean, I'm happy for you Freddy. I guess I just caught myself feeling a might tender towards you and figured I was gonna be all stress free once I knew you were back working for someone I trust."

"You trust the guy's at the cab company?" Freddy quirks en eyebrow.

"Sure!" Holdaway sits back, affronted. "Why, you got something you wanna say about those guys? Didn't they take you out and feed you a couple of times?"

"I'm just fooling with you." Freddy dives his line of site back towards his food. More burgers. This place does really good burgers, a hell of a lot nicer than Mexican food. The cab company really was fine, it's not the place's fault that he was too caught up in his own shit to really appreciate it.

"This is long term though." Holdaway continues. "You planning on staying up in Harlem?"

"I mean, I got a couple more days paid up at the hotel, but I don't see much point in staying. Mr Brown says him and his buddies have been looking for someone to help with the rent so I can go crash there. Ain't like I got too much stuff they need to make room for."

"Two days? That's no time."

"Relax." Freddy holds up his burger with a smile. "Food's too good for you to have seen the last of me. Don't take me off the Christmas card list just yet."

Holdaway tries to scowl, fumbling with some line about how he doesn't appreciate this disrespect, but it rings hollow. But the sad truth is that Freddy barely thinks about him when he's not in this diner. He wants Holdaway to be his friend because that means he's not so fucking alone in this city but he doesn't so much feel friendly towards him so much as indebted. Maybe that's all you get in New York, IOUs that never quite pay themselves off.

Freddy eats and Holdaway watches and Harlem strolls on by outside the diner. Soon to be lost to the clouds along with everything else above ninety sixth street.

---------

Weekends are prime selling time, so Freddy gets Mondays and Tuesdays off. He tried to barter Brown down to just the Monday but no fucking sale there. Not enough money in the bank to pay him for the sixth day.

"You might as well just take your cut of the rent straight off my paycheck when I move in." Freddy suggests.

Brown curls his mouth in bewildered disgust. "The fuck would I do that for? That's you're money. I don't give a fuck if I'm taking it out of your hand two seconds after I put it in there, but it's touching you're damn skin. Capice?"

Freddy holds up his hands, not prepared to argue. He's still not properly familiar with the difference between when Brown is properly angry and when he's just mildly riled up. Everything's more dramatic than it needs to be with him.

So Freddy stayed in Harlem a couple more days than he originally planned, slipping in and out of his room as quickly as possible, ears eternally pricked should Shaundra come tearing down the front door all over again.

She doesn't, though. She leaves him be. Only here for as long as it took Sport to track him down.

On the night he leaves, the rain comes thundering down and though he's finally got himself those boots he promised himself, Freddy's still waiting on the money for a raincoat to land in his pocket.

Yolanda watches him fill out the check out form with stubborn apathy. "Weren't you on't in here to get out of the rain, Freddy?"

Outside, the cracked seams of the city will have split open entirely, letting the trash wash out of the alleyways and clogging up the drains. No one calls it a flood because the water never gets high enough to seep across the threshold of any house with proper foundations, even the tenements.

The basements of New York are filled with the filthy and destitute, the last places anyone wants to wake up. Homeless people fight against the working girls who have sprung themselves free of their pimps for the night, just to get out of the weather. Freddy's seen them, emerging in the morning with nothing but shame between their teeth. He's sure it would be better to sleep on the street, at least if the pavement's flooded it kinda feels like getting soaked to your skin was inevitable.

He shrugs. "I got somewhere to be."

"Like a date?"

"Like an apartment."

"Oh." Yolanda looks completely nonplussed. "What was you staying here for if you can afford an apartment?"

He could explain that he's only just got himself a steady job, or that he was new to the area and needed a place to get started, or that he's a stupid little shit who didn't plan ahead for five minutes before crossing the country by himself because he couldn't stand to eat dinner in his parents' house for one more night.

So he smiles. "I like the place."

On his way out, Freddy can't hear the click of the door closing behind him for the torrent falling from the sky. Raindrops fall in golden curtains around streetlamps and for a moment, he's a small boy alone in a big city, holding up his head and praying he won't drown.

The boots hold up, not a single leakage. So some things at least, have changed. Freddy points his nose towards sixty fourth street and starts following it, hoping that the rain will wash the past few weeks away and let him start over.

-----------

By the time he gets to seventy ninth street, he's soaked, and the dim light coming from a misplaced banking tower has him rushing over to duck under the awnings. It doesn't do shit but remind him how cold the weather's getting, but as he watches water run off the sleeves of his leather jacket, he feels like the break is worth it.

The headlights of taxi's, somewhat dulled by the weather, crawl on by. Everything slows down in the rain. The cars, supposedly, so they don't send a tidal wave up and over any unsuspecting pedestrian but Freddy doesn't see why they would give a shit about anyone else's wellbeing over their own.

"What the fuck are you doing here?"

Freddy turns his head first, then lets his body follow when he sees who it is. "The fuck are you doing here?"

Clothes too thin for any season and hat collapsed in on itself from the downpour, Iris has tucked herself into the doorway of the bank, her face flat and defiant but her shoulders stooped.

She tries to toss her hair but it's too waterlogged to move like she wants it to. "I can be anywhere I wanna be."

"You sure? I don't think- I don't think that guy you were with would agree." Freddy swallows around Sport's name.

Iris's lips twitch nervously and she does something funny with her neck that isn't a bod or a shake. She's still wearing a pair of platforms, but even without them she'd be tall for her age. Right now her and Freddy are pretty much on par, and even if he's not exactly in a position to go joining any basketball teams he's still a few years older than her. He wants to ask her if she's really twelve years old, and then he wants to drag her to the nearest police station and demand that they get off their fucking asses and do something.

Instead he leans in and forces his voice to soften. "You sure about that?"

The light isn't enough to be sure, but up close it looks like she might have been crying. Her eyes slide away from his face as she shuffles and mumbles and fails to answer.

He can't even fucking imagine. He doesn't even know if she knows who he is, beyond him being some guy who has an idea of what she does. "You remember me, right? I used to come by your place on ninety second street."

Iris nods. "Yeah. Sport was real cut up that you stopped coming by." Freddy winces and she finds some of her usual grace to kick back into her posture. "He's not a bad guy, really. He likes you."

"If he's not a bad guy then why are you hiding from him?"

"I'm not hiding!"

"So he knows you're way out here, all on your own? Jesus, Iris, you're half way across the island from him."

"Screw you." She snarls. "It ain't none of your business what I'm doing here. What are you doing here?"

"Moving." Freddy gestures to his rucksack and immediately regrets it. Sport's gonna find her, and she'll tell him. No use pretending otherwise.

The shock of confusion and pity that mires her face hits him like a slug to the chest. "That all you got?"

"Don't see what else I'd need."

He's still got blocks and blocks to walk, and at the far end, some place he can be dry. But standing there under the awnings with Iris, he doesn't think he could leave her if he tried. They stand, dripping steadily on to the pavement, like that was what this place was built for.

When time has started to stagnate, Freddy scratches as his stupid sodden mop of hair and chivies his bag further up his shoulder. "You think you'll go back to him?"

"Who, Sport?" Iris laughs, and it doesn't sound too much like she's drowning. "Sure I will. It's not like I got anywhere else to go."

"Right."

Freddy waits with her until whatever dread she feels heading back to ninety second street is overridden by the goosebumps prickling up her arm. Bundling her into the back of a taxi, he stands back and lets the spray of water that picks up as it drives off pass him by.

The couch dips like a hollowed out balloon animal when Freddy settles on it, looking around the tight skinned walls of Brown's place and pretending he doesn't see the damp mould growing in the far corner, or the cigarette burns in the carpet. "Thanks for putting me up, man."

"Enough with that shit." Brown looks up from the fridge on the far side of the room, holding up a beer in offering that Freddy rejects out of hand. "I'm not putting up with you, you're fucking paying me. Quid pro quo only. I'm not trying to get caught up in no debt scam here."

He pops the cap off his own beer and leans up against the open archway through to the lose collection of cupboards and a stove that could be called a kitchen, taking a long sip. He's so fucking paranoid, thinks everyone is trying to get one up on him at all times.

Stale cigarette smells are baked into the concrete of this town, but when Freddy shifts his ass, trying to get comfortable, he still gets a lungfull of last year's Malboroughs.

Brown gestures round the room, his eyes finding the most egregious stains without even trying. "So, what do you do for fun?"

"Comics, mostly." Freddy shrugs. "Go out to the movies. I tried skateboarding for a while back home but my dad sold my board after I nearly broke my arm trying to run up a halfpipe."

"Bastard." Brown clicks his tongue. "Fucking fathers, they ain't worth shit."

Freddy's agreement lands exactly halfway to his mouth and he doesn't force the issue.

"Seriously though." Brown continues. "That all you do? You don't go out to clubs, don't try to get any pussy?"

The air stings with his lack of irony. Old men aren't supposed to go talking to the next generation like they're on the same level. Not that Brown is old, just older. You can see it in the stubble forming across his cheeks. Freddy couldn't grow a beard if he tried.

Freddy clears his throat, trying to avoid eye contact but not knowing what to do with his face if it's not pointed right at his new flatmate. His fucking boss. "Uh. I can't drink yet, so..."

"You need a fake ID? I know a guy, I can hook you up."

"No, thank you."

Brown's eyes narrow, his mouth twisted up under that stupid chin of his. "I'm gonna get you one anyway, in case you change your mind. Christmas present."

There are two other guys that live here, who have real names that Freddy apparently only ever needs to use for tax purposes but who are known by stupid nicknames that feel like they were picked out by Brown.

"This is Blue." Brown snickers, nodding towards the old guy who gets through the door around nine at night. "Works for the city, running waste management contracts."

Blue holds out his hand to be shaken, but barely says a word. He grabs himself a beer and settles down the other end of the couch from Freddy, interjecting only when Brown's ceaseless diatribe leans a little too far into his obsession with perversions.

He's really fucking old. Sat next to him, Freddy can smell cheap cologne that mimics the good stuff his grandpa used to bring out on high days and holidays and his hair is a shock of pale grey. Thick set, more wrinkles than you could count and with a cigarette in his hand as soon as he sat down. He looks at people when they're talking though, even if Freddy barely gets more than five seconds to say his piece.

The group is completed by the arrival of Pink, a man who looks exactly like a weasel and hates his name. "Shut the fuck up! Seriously, enough with the Mr Pink shit."

"I wouldn't call you Mr Pink if you weren't such a faggot."

"I'm the faggot? That's pretty fucking rich coming from the guy who never found a cartoon dick he couldn't suck."

Pink marches into the living room, skips the beer and heads straight for the bourbon tucked up on the top of the fridge. It would be kind of sly as a hiding place if he weren't a clean two inches shorter than Brown. A glass is poured and he turns back to the room at large, doing a double take when he sees Freddy. "Who's the kid."

"This is Freddy." Brown tells him, as Freddy waves hello. "The new guy, gonna be helping us with the rent."

"This is the kid you found?" Pink squawks, incredulous? "Jesus, he's fucking twelve. You shoulda left him where you found him, he ain't got no business hanging about with you."

"He likes comics, I got a comic book store! He needs a place to stay, I got a couch. We have a good relationship going on here."

Pink curls his lips in disgust and looks past Brown to Freddy. "So where's his stupid colour name?"

Brown's eyes light up, looking Freddy over with manic glee. Blue starts chuckling, deep in his chest and hard enough to shake the sofa. "I knew I was missing something. Whaddaya think, Blue? He look like any kind of colour to you?"

Blue shrugs. "White?"

"No shit he's fucking white. We're all fucking white. And we can't go calling him Mr Black or those half brained darkies down the road'll go apeshit if they catch us at it." Brown scratches at his neck. "What about Red?"

"He ain't cool enough to be Red." Blue disagrees.

"Oh my god." Pink's face seems to be permanently screwed up in consternation. "Pick a colour, any fucking colour."

Brown waves him down. "I mean, if he ain't cool enough to be Red he might as well be Orange."

"Works for me." Blue agrees.

"Do I got any say in the matter?" Freddy asks, looking towards Pink who shakes his head so carefully you'd be forgiven for thinking he didn't do shit.

Brown titters, high pitched and a long way off feminine. "Welcome home, Mr Orange."

----------------

The back office at Wacko Comics is Freddy Newandyke's fucking kingdom, his Taj Mahal, his own personal little piece of heaven. Comics come in, comics get put into some kind of order, no one else comes in here but him. Stuff gets delivered on a Tuesday afternoon so by Wednesday morning it's ready for his attention, and in three weeks it hasn't taken him more than two days to sort all the stock for the week.

What remains is time, and no obligation to do anything with it but browse the merchandise. Everything he could ever want a fair few stories he couldn't give less of a shit about. It's kinda fun keeping up with Archie Comics at the same time as literally getting paid t bone up on the current state of Marvel.

When he does have to leave, it's generally for lunch. "Gonna grab something from the deli down the way, you want anything?"

Brown doesn't answer immediately, which isn't particularly unusual, he's usually got his head shoved so far up his own ass that he's functionally deaf. Either that or watching porn out back with the sound turned off.

But today there's a good reason for him to be silent. There's a guy at the counter, built like a linebacker, staring Brown down. He smiles, unfriendly and threatening. "But I'm sure, you gotta go have lunch. I'll be seeing you."

Freddy stays rooted to the spot as the big guy leaves. When the door swings closed, Brown is still tensed against the counter, looking worryingly sober.

"Who the fuck was that guy?" Freddy asks.

Brown shakes his head. "He was fucking nobody. Get me a hoagie or something. No mayo, you know the drill."

"He didn't look like nobody." Freddy prompts.

Brown flips on a time, launching himself upright and bellowing Freddy out of the shop. "I said get me a fucking sandwich, Orange!"

It's pretty easy to leave without a word after that. Freddy might even take a walk around the block, come back lightly dappled from the rain and technically late, like he has anything to do with his time. Up ahead, the guy who had been threatening Brown is getting into his car. It's a nice vehicle, a yellow Cadillac without a scratch on her. As he ducks in out of the rain he catches sight of Freddy and pauses just long enough to wink at him.

Freddy doesn't like that one bit. He cuts his speed in half and dawdles along like he's not in a rush to get anywhere till the car has pulled away.

Maybe Sport controls the whole damn prostitution business on Manhattan. It feels like it, the way his girls keep creeping up on Freddy, even down on sixty fifth street. None of the real high end girls, the leggy blondes and the ones who stay away from smack enough to keep their veins tight he keeps close by. But some of the older models skulking around the nudey cinema two blocks away he definitely recognises. The first time he spots a pair of them, staked out, waiting to pounce on the first John who ducks out of the place once the film has run its course, pure terror grips him by the hairs on the backs of his necks.

Ten minutes later he's feeling stupid for entertaining the possibility that he might be important enough to send spies across the island for. They're just working, the same as every other whore in town.

He walks straight on past the cinema, letting his feet tug him forward before his brain can think too hard about it Presumably, if he walks far enough, he'll be able to see the ocean. For all the time he's been in New York, he hasn't yet had time to get a proper look at the Atlantic. It was dark on the bus in, and if the ocean was there it was so perfectly hidden in shadow as to be unrecognisable.

Freddy walks and he walks and he walks. When he hits the sea wall his hair is wet and he can't remember when it started raining. He still doens't have a proper jacket, but it's kind of hard to care anymore. Now he's living in a place where the roof doesn't leak and he always knows where he's gonna be sleeping the next night the urge to stay dry is less urgent. Sure, Brown's place is a long way off cosy, but sleeping in the living room Freddy gets the full benefit of the heat pouring off the oven. Blue actually cooks, and Pink tries, even if Brown is almost as dependent on fast food as Freddy.

The wall rises a shade too high for him to really see anything. Freddy braces himself against the concrete and hoists himself up just far enough to catch the view, his arms locked in front of him to stop him from falling as his feet fail to find any real purchase against the wall.

An ocean's supposed to just be an ocean, but the Atlantic looks nothing like the Pacific as Freddy remembers it from weekend trips taken to calm him down and give his parents a chance to do fuck all in the sun while he wore himself down. That ocean, if not picture perfect, had come with a distinct blue tinge and a steady rise and fall that you could recognise as the junior cousins of the mammoth waves that picked up further up the coast. He'd always thought the surfer kids he saw on his infrequent trips to LA were so cool, but the one time he got to ride up to see some serious surf with a friend he had wiped out the first five times and after that the knack for staying upright on the board had abandoned him.

The Atlantic is smaller and crueler and you couldn't pretend it's great grey maw was blue is you tried. The surface ripples at random, never big enough to really be called a wave and the foam that froths up beneath his feet as the water strikes the wall seems cursory at best. Fishing line and plastic form a reef he can see stretching out towards the bleary horizon and though he can see the barnacles struggling to keep hold of their lousy hoard it doesn't seem possible that anything could survive here.

The curve of the island and the thick set skyscrapers in the distance make it impossible to see Lady Liberty from here. Deep into November, she's probably not going to be worth the trip till the spring.

Without a watch, he has no way to tell the time, but Freddy's stomach thinks it's somewhere around lunch. That's no time spent. A whole Monday and Tuesday stare him down and he has no clue what he's supposed to do with them. His first instinct is to reach for the nearest stack of comics but with his job keeping him more than in pocket on that end he's at a loss.

He needs a hobby. His mind winds back to the nudey theatres, more titillating and less exciting than regular cinema. Freddy could go see any number of decent films, he's seen the names pasted on the outside of the bright, shiny places that don't attract gaggles of girls wearing the bare minimum. Carrie. Rocky. He could go see a film like that.

Nestled down in the dark, everyone supposedly sharing the same experience as they let sound and colour take them away into the world on the screen. Freddy tries to picture himself in the cinema and can't pint the picture without hanging t huddle himself as far doown in his seat as he can reach, glancing out of the corner of his eyes every few seconds to be sure that none of the other patrons are looking too hard at him.

That shit ain't for him. Freddy hops down from the wall and resolves to find himself something to eat. If he's still bored after that, he can always follow the sea wall down to the end of the island and find out if the ocean looks any different from there.

-------------

Half way back up to sixty fourth street, the lights of Time Square still stinging the back of his retinas, Freddy runs smack into Travis, who apparently doesn't bother to check where he's going when he tears round corners.

Freddy doesn't even get an apology till Travis does a double take and recognises him. "Hey. Freddy. How you doing?"

It's been more than a week since anyone called Freddy by his real name, it takes a moment for him to slip back in to it. He nods. "Yeah, fine."

"Sure." Travis nods, his eyes lingering on Freddy's woefully inadequate leather jacket.

The conversation stagnates instantly and as ever, there's nothing Freddy can do but look up at Travis's impassive face and wish he would fucking say something. "I, uh, you seen Larry?"

"Don't work with him no more." Travis shakes his head.

"Oh. He got fired?"

"Nah. I did."

"Sorry."

There's a weird tension in Travis's shoulders that was probably always there but feels new just for this evening. Freddy attempts a commiserating smile and gives up half way through. It never makes any difference.

"Well, I gotta-" He moves to duck out of Travis's way.

"You still living up in Harlem?" Travis asks before he can get away, his eyes focusing sharply on Freddy and he feels so perfectly seen that he wants to duck into the nearest doorway on instinct.

He shakes his head. "I moved."

"When you were up there, you see any of the girls who worked the corner?"

"Sure, plenty."

"You see this one girl, real young. With a big hat. Name's Iris."

Fucking foul. Fucking Travis in all his creepy glory. The worst. Freddy could spit in his face. Pedo shitbag. "No." He snaps. "I gotta go."

His mother always told him not to be rude, but she did it in a raised voice and peppered it with so many curse words it was hard to see the forest for the trees. Freddy turns away from Travis without worrying about whether or not he's pissed.

He could go to the cops about it, cry them a river. And that would leave him exactly nowhere.

-----------

"Thought I saw Mr Blonde coming out of your store this afternoon." Blue prompts Brown. They're all four of them crammed into the living room for lack of anything better to do on a weekday evening.

Brown straightens up, eyes snapping towards him from his spot on the floor by the arch through to the kitchen. "What were you snooping around for?"

"Wasn't snooping, just coming and going at the same time as him." Blue replies. If Brown is pissy and Pink couldn't calm down if you paid him, Blue is immovable as they come. Like the missing face on Mount Rushmore.

"He's a customer! He wants comics sometimes. I help him out."

Blue looks too Freddy like he's supposed to understand anything about some guy he's never met. What he does understand is that Blue thinks Brown is full of shit. "He ain't exactly a guy who I would encourage to visit my shop."

"Well when you're running a fucking comic shop, don't you invite him in!"

"I fucking hate that guy." Pink cuts in, wrestling with the oven. "You know he chased me down the street one time? Joe sicced him on me when he thought I was stealing from that deli his cousin runs."

"Were you?" Blue raises an eyebrow.

"I mean, yeah, of course. Doesn't mean you can go setting a psycho like that on a guy."

"Who's Blonde?" Freddy ventures.

Brown shoots him an irritated scowl. "Don't you fucking worry about Mr fucking Blonde?"

"He used to live here?" Freddy extrapolates.

Pink shakes his head. "Nah. He just got lucky with the nickname."

"Cuz he's Blonde?"

Pink and white start giggling almost immediately and Brown looks about ready to murder the both of them. "You know what? I thought he was Blonde one time, under different lighting. It's really not that fucking funny, jackasses."

"But the way it gets you so angry is always good for a laugh." Blue replies.

"Fuck you!"

"Eh, go fuck yourself, kid."

"He's muscle for some of the mafia guys round here." Pink clarifies, still smiling. "Blonde, I mean. Not the kinda guy you want to get a visit from."

"Unless he's buying your comics!" Brown retorts through gritted teeth.

"Listen, if he was really in to buy some comics, it's all good." Blue shrugs. "But I'm telling you, kid, I was involved with the Cabots for too long. If you don't want him hanging around, and you don't, then you best stop doing whatever it is you're doing for them."

"I ain't doing shit for the Cabots." Brown splutters, but the lie rings hollow, even to Freddy.

It's taking me forever to get to the point with this. I promise, there is a point

---------------------------------------------------------------

It ain't none of his business, but Freddy's dad always did say that he was nosy in more ways than one, right before pinching the bridge of Freddy's oversized honker and laughing in his face.

His mom would get pissy every time she caught him at it. Apparently the nose was a family heirloom, passed down from his great great grandmother, but it had managed to skip her out entirely.

It's clear that Brown really does give half a shit about comic books, but once that shit runs out this business is more or less a dead weight to him. Freddy starts finding more excuses to get out of the stock room, getting an idea of how many customers actually bother to come through the doors. It ain't much, and newbies tend to be kids with or without parents who get freaked out by Brown's inability to keep from swearing for more than five seconds.

But Brown's always got enough money in the bank to pay Freddy, and order more stock. A couple of guys have pull lists but it's not all that impressive. The odd bits and bobs he sells here and there don't seem to have much to do with the bottom line.

"You wanna man the front, Orange? I got some business I gotta attend to." Brown asks.

Freddy looks up from the busywork he's assigned himself, putting the stash of Incredible Hulk comics they have in a box by the back wall in some sort of usable order. Everything in the shop has its own box, but the boxes themselves are all out of wack. "What kind of business?"

"It don't fucking matter what kind of business. What matters is I need someone to take money for a couple of hours. Can you handle that shit?"

Freddy looks round the shop. No one else is in by the two of them. He nods, and fishes a particularly gratuitous cover out of the box in front of him. Bruce Banner is all gone, wrapped in green skin and purple trousers that never seem to tear as his thighs expand. He holds it up for Brown to see as he grabs his coat. "How many sizes too big do you reckon Doctor Banner has to wear his clothes to stop himself ripping everything when he hulks out?"

Brown giggles. "Fuckin' ten, twenty or some shit. You know his dick's gotta get like a coke bottle, you need plenty of give to account for that."

Freddy supposes he's right, but gets away without saying anything as Brown swans out the door and leaves him be.

For five minutes, Freddy keeps sorting comics. The walls in New York are universally thin and without the thrum of Brown's restless energy to take the edge off, he can hear everything happening outside. From the drone of cars cruising down the block to feet hitting the sidewalk. That's all there is, the box full of comics and the sounds coming in from outside.

And Brown doesn't come back, doesn't change his mind about leaving Freddy be. Maybe he really does have business to attend to, maybe he just wanted to go catch a dirty film.

Maybe he pays for girls to come back to the apartment with him and fucks them while no one else is about. He doesn't seem to get any action on his own, even if he does spend the weekends staying out as late as possible, coming home with stories of bright lights and warm bodies in downtown clubs.

The mental picture doesn't work. Freddy can't believe that Brown has ever had an honest lay. He conjures up the image of money changing hand, the cursory pretense at romance before he's standing to attention, ready to go and her legs are spread and her eyes are closed. Freddy should feel something about that more than pervasive numbness.

Everything he knows about sex, Freddy learned from pornography. When he slips up behind the counter, the first thing he clocks is that the television Brown uses to watch girls wail and groan like they're having a good time is off. He fixes it with a long, steady look before deciding not to turn it on.

Behind the counter itself, there's nothing more than the till, more or less empty save a scattering of change, and a few stacks of particularly popular comics. Freddy leaves them be, and moves forward into the back office proper.

Though there's a door to this room, it's never closed, and though he's never been specifically told not to come in here, Freddy's never seen it save from the outside. The TV sits on a table that's not big enough for anything else, and the chair sat opposite it looks fragile enough to fall apart as soon as its sat on. Shelves groan with the weight of various stock books and receipt files that mostly don't look like they've been here since the war. Everything wreaks of dust, caked in an unwelcome layer of grey, like an attic left too long unattended.

Tucked away in one corner, are five books that look like someone's written in them some time in the past decade. All bound in navy blue and stuck up with strips peppered in Brown's barely legible handwriting. Freddy grabs the one labelled nineteen seventy four onwards and flips open at the begining. Orders and purchases have been marked up meticulously, accounting for every individual sale and keeping a running total of everything left in stock at the end of each month. At first, Freddy can't see anything wrong with it, save for some rather strange consumer trends about six months ago.

He catches the problem when he starts looking for the record of the Iron Man comic he bought when he first came in. It doesn't take him long, given that he can more or less remember the date and he was one of the first to buy the comic here, according to the log.

Which is fucking weird, because it had been out for long enough that Freddy had heard kids talking about it in the street. He had really wanted that comic, and when he skips to the end of October he can see Brown only had five left in stock from an order of a hundred.

His eyes flick over to the price column and his stomach drops. Two dollars sixty five, it says he paid for the thing, and the single dollar hole it burned in his pocket lights up. Freddy starts counting in numbers from the last week, seeing fifty plus purchases made on a day they can't have had more than fifteen customers in all told, and everything at a significant mark up from what Brown would ever actually sell it at, usually coming out as more than double.

Freddy slams the book shut, and dust dances in the air in front of his eyes, the room thick with it whether its settled or not. he sets it back as best he can, hoping that Brown's typical laissez faire attitude to organisation will keep him from noticing any disturbed lines in the grime coating the floor. Maybe it's a tax thing, but settling more product surely means you have to pay more tax. Could be an insurance scam though, Brown trying to make the business look more profitable than it is before he burns the whole thing down.

The click of the door opening pulls Freddy sharply back into the room. His heart jumps up into his mouth, and decides immediately that if Brown is back early, his excuse for walking off the shop floor was to turn the TV on. Brown seems convinced that Freddy's age means he doesn't stop thinking about sex, he'll buy it.

It's not Brown. Freddy brushes dust off his shoulders as he approaches the counter with a smile that this place probably doesn't deserve. It's not like any of the other customers ever get that kind of treatment.

"Hey." Freddy nods towards the guy. He opens his mouth to say something stupid like 'can I help you?' before changing his mind. If the guy needs help, he can ask.

The guy is huge, wearing rough denim jeans and a button down with the sleeves buttoned tight around his wrists. Not a shred of muscle visible and yet he looks like he could knock clean through a wall if the mood took him. Everything is a size or two too big and Freddy's hackles raise like the guy's about to go full hulk in front of him.

The guy looks up, and Freddy recognises him as the man who had been threatening Brown a couple of weeks back. His dark hair is gelled back off his face, which is disarmingly open, curiosity knitting itself into his eyes when he's not met by the familiar face of the business. "Where's Mr Brown?"

"He had some business to attend to." Freddy says, very quickly. His eyes dart to the comic the guy has picked up. Supergirl. Odd choice for someone who looks like him.

"That's pretty unusual, I gotta say." The guy scratches his head. "Shame, I had some stuff to discuss with him."

"I work here too, ya know. I might be able to help." Freddy wishes he were able to keep his stupid mouth shut.

The guy looks at him long and hard, like he's having a hard time weight up his options. Eventually he shakes his head. "Nah, this ain't for you to get caught up in." He slides the Supergirl comic on to the counter and starts reaching for his wallet. "Just let him know that Vic Vega stopped by, and I'd really appreciate it if he could be in this time tomorrow."

His voice is so soft it's kinda hard to hear what he's saying. With the counter in between the two of them, the effect is no doubt lessened by the guy's gotta be a full foot taller than Freddy. He thumbs three dollar bills from his wallet.

Freddy hesitates to take the money. "Sir, this comic only costs a dollar."

Vega's eyes narrow as he smiles, laughing ever so slightly under his breath. "You're a good kid, ya know? Keep the other two dollars for yourself if you like, for being so good."

And that's the thrilling story of how Freddy Newandyke had two extra dollars in his pocket by the end of the day. Vega leaves with his comic, and the store is more or less silent till it comes time to close up.

---------

Brown makes it back to the flat several hours after Freddy falls in, having fed himself and spent his shiny new dollars in a penny arcade. His face is flushed, his arms floppy and uncoordinated at his side. One way or another, he definitely got laid.

"Thanks for looking after the store for me." He says, absent minded as he pushes through to the kitchen to grab a glass of water to go with the burger he's got wrapped up under one arm.

"S'fine." Freddy shrugs. He's got the New York Post open on his lap, looking through an article on some art exhibition he has no intent to go to in a million years.

"Anything funny happen?"

"This guy stopped by, Vic Vega. Said he had something he wanted to talk to you about. He's planning on coming by again tomorrow afternoon."

Brown tenses up, shooting a warning look back towards Freddy. "Shit. You didn't say shit to Pink or Blue did you?"

Freddy shakes his head.

"Good." Brown breathes. "Shit. Forgot he was supposed to come by today. Fuck. Ok, thanks for telling me."

He grabs his glass of water and runs off towards his bedroom without bothering to ask Freddy whether he managed to move any stock throughout the day.

---------

The walk home from work is nothing, Brown's apartment is more or less right over the shop, but Freddy makes an excuse to take a walk round the block pretty much every day after they're done. He rarely has any real plans, but it makes him feel less like he's treading water, stuck in the bubble of Brown's influence. Getting used to the man's grating personality is a piece of piss, but never giving himself a break would be torture.

At first he kept winding up at the porno theatre, till the same three films that they show on loop had been permanently fixed to the inside of his head. They don't even work as jack off material any more, so perfectly does he have them down by rote memory. The building still forms a crucial landmark on his after work strolls though, and though the precise line up changes from day to day, he's sure he could pick any one of the girls who hang around outside out of a lineup if that's what it came to.

Police cars roll through this part of town real slow, just like they did in Harlem. Unlike in Harlem, they rarely stop round here. This is a mostly white district, they got no problem with people going about their business. They pass the cinema and the girls looking for work and they don't so much as slow down. Freddy keeps running through scenarios in his head in which he works up the courage to go tell them about the weird logs Brown keeps in the back of the shop.

And they either don't care, and nothing changes. Or they do care, and Freddy loses his livelihood and has to work his ass off to prove he's not an accomplice. There ain't no winning. After school specials sold him a very rose tinted version of the world growing up.

"Evening sailor, is tonight the night?" Laughs one of the regulars, a leggy redhead who's ten years too old to still be properly attractive but still seems to think she's in her prime.

Freddy forces out a laugh and avoids her eyes, the same as ever. "Nah, I'm good thanks."

"Well you change your mind, sugar, and you come running right back to me."

"Will do." Freddy speeds up, very conscious of the half dozen pairs of eyes all fixed on him.

"I think you got the wrong end of the stick there, Candi. He don't pay out for pussy, pussy pays out for him." A drawling lilt cuts across the evening, silencing the traffic and the vague noises coming from inside the cinema and the sounds of bickering couples pouring in from up above as husbands get home and start having choice words for their wives. All of it drowns in the roaring pressing up against Freddy's ear drums. He wants to run, but his feet have him turning back, just to be sure his mind's mot playing tricks on him when he hears that voice.

Sport is standing just inside the door of the cinema, wearing his black and white cowboy hat, a baby blue jumper that looks like it's made of mohair and a string of shells clinging to his neck. He smiles lopsided at Freddy and pushes off the wall. "Hey, fancy seeing you here."

"How did you find me?" Freddy wishes he could get the tightness out of his voice. He can feel his shoulders bundling up around his ears, like making himself look any smaller than he already is will lead to anything short of trouble.

Sport laughs and pushes past hookers and pedestrians to reach him. He moves to set a hand on his shoulder and Freddy finds it in his feet to step out of the way. "C'mon, sweet boy. Can't we just enjoy this chance meeting?"

"You don't work out this side of town."

"You don't know shit about where I work." Sport assures him, ever so quietly. "But you're right, you know. I shouldn't lie to you, you're too special for that. My girls Lilo and Samantha told me they'd been seeing you round here. You working down at Wacko Comics?"

Freddy imagines wired being threaded through his gums, the screws tightening till he couldn't say shit if he wanted to.

Sport looks down at him with concern that could be real, his smile clicking into a register that can only be described as sad. he shakes his head and shuffles ever so slightly into Freddy's personal space. "Baby, that's not a good place for you. The Cabot's run that joint and they've got a rat so far into the operation they couldn't skip the trap if they tried. That comic shop is going down along with everything else they run and I would hate to see you go down with it. You got options, you pretty boy. Lemme help you. Lemme take care of you."

"The shop ain't owned by the Cabot's." Freddy protests.

"God." Sport's eyes haven't left his face, practically begging Freddy to look him in the eyes. "You got so much hope. That's good, that's real good. I love that about you. You gotta trust me though, kid, I know these streets better than you do. Come home with me, I'll get you set up real nice. You and Iris could see each other every day, you could be real teen sweethearts."

Sport's fingers ghost over Freddy's cheek and something electric and dangerous sparks in his gut. A strand of hair is pushed out of his face and Freddy can barely breathe.

"I gotta go." He mumbles, backing up slowly, then quick, as his feet remember what they're supposed to do for him.

Sport graces him with one last sad smile before Freddy manages to properly turn tail and run. "I'll see you soon, baby. I'm gonna get to you, so you play hard to get for as long as you need."

I made a bunch of spelling and syntax errors in the last section. These were mistakes. Eventually this will be tidied up and put on ao3 and probably more people will see it there though so I guess I shouldn't stress too much

Also Blue surprised me in this chunk by being a pretty cool dude. Nice personality you got there, Blue. Also this is a Christmas episode I never meant to write?????

--------------------------------------------

The blank page stares up at Freddy, accusing and impassive. If he could put the thing back in his notebook, he would, but the frayed edges from where it was pried from the binding won't have it. He has to use it or waste it, or pretend that if he leaves it be today there's a snowball's chance in hell that he'll ever get back to it.

The pen he's borrowing off Blue is mostly out of ink, he couldn't say much if he wanted to. When it hits the paper and he starts sketching out the over-familiar letters of his parents' address he's surprised at how smoothly he can hold the thing. He hasn't really written anything in weeks.

He's missed the last post that could have gotten anything to California in time for Christmas, but he still starts out with a hesitant wish that the two of them didn't hate the holiday season. The family home, dressed in pine branches dragged down from upstate, not a drop of snow in sight but all the carols still sing themselves like the climate has an obligation towards freezing at this time of year. His grandparents will probably be there, minus Pop on his dad's side who bit the dust when Freddy was very small. Maybe an aunt or an uncle, a cousin or too.

Just not him. A hole where he used to be. Too much Christmas dinner on the table because he's not there to eat half his bodyweight in turkey, no fighting over which channel to flip too when everyone collapses in a food coma when they're done, because dad will pick and no one will challenge him. Presents under the tree, unopened, or not there at all.

The pen skips and Freddy's breath catches as he considers, for the first time, that they might miss him, or that Christmas might be too painful to look full in the face without him there. Curled up on the sofa in Brown's apartment, at three in the afternoon on a Monday, and they have a scraggly little pot plant from Pink's room out with some string draped over it and a picture cut fresh from the back of a porn rag stuck to the top in place of an angel. It's happening here, whether it's happening anywhere else or not.

"Where are you going for the holidays, kid?" Blue asks when he bustles in later that evening to start stirring tomatoes and herbs together into pasta sauce. The mostly blank piece of paper is tucked between the pages of the Fantastic Four comic Freddy's been reading for the past ten minutes and there it's likely to stay.

Freddy shrugs. "Ain't got anywhere else to be."

"Here?" Blue shakes his head, pity practically dripping into his dinner. "That's not right kid. This is a miserable place to stay for the holidays."

"Pink and Brown'll be here."

"Pink will hold out till Christmas eve then drag his ass up to the Bronx to see his mother like she wants him to. Brown'll get drunk enough to pass out first thing and then you're on you're own."

It's just another day in the year, it doesn't mean shit. Freddy can stay at home and do nothing. Or get his ass at least a little bit in gear and try to scrounge up something to cook. It would probably suck, but it's not like his mom ever managed much with food beyond cooking a whole fucking bunch with it.

He doesn't look up at Blue, painfully ware he's being watched. "What are you doing?"

"Friend of mine has a bunch of us old guys over together each year. Guys who don't really got other places to be, you know?" Blue leans towards Freddy. "That kinda sounds like you."

"I could head back to California." Freddy counters, like that's a real fucking possibility.

"So go back to California." Blue huffs. "Or come with me. Sling me twenty dollars and I'll make sure you show up with a nice bottle of whiskey in hand. You should always bring a gift when you visit someone, but especially on Christmas."

"My Grammy says the same exact shit." Freddy smiles ever so slightly. Still not looking at Blue, but no opposed to changing that attitude sometime soon.

"Smart lady." Blue grins.

----------

A nudey pen for Brown, who think's it's hysterical, and a book on free market economics for Pink, bought as a joke but received with enthusiastic thanks. Freddy gets a quarter ounce of marijuana and a Stealers Wheel record from the two of them respectively and worries that he didn't spend enough on them.

Blue insisted he didn't want shit from Freddy and that he probably wouldn't give anything in return and that more or less seems true. By the time he and Freddy are gearing up to leave, Brown is half way through a bottle of bourbon and Pink is rushing to the Bronx as fast as his legs will carry him.

Freddy bought himself a thick woolly jumper at the start of advent and combined with his leather jacket he'll have a job getting cold. His breath forms neat little puffs in front of his face as he steps out, like he's been smoking and the dirty snow crunches under the heel of his boots. The girls that are out, on today of all days, are allowed to throw a coat and a santa hat on over their usual ensembles but they still must be freezing. They pass a gaggle as they turn off down twelfth avenue and they don't even have the energy to proposition the Johns walking past. They huddle, like penguins in those pictures of the antarctic, trying to keep their eggs from freezing.

Blue shakes his head. "It's no time of year to be a hooker."

"Not sure it's ever a good time of year to be a hooker."

"Eh, when you look at the way some of the restaurants and the offices treat their girls, I ain't so sure. At least if you're a hooker, the guys trying to fuck you are kinda the point, and it pays properly. If you get a good pimp it can be a pretty decent life."

"That's a pretty big if." Freddy hunches down into his jacket, feeling the weight of the bottle of whiskey he has tucked up inside settling and swaying in his hand as he walks.

Blue's buddy lives about ten blocks down and two floors up, in a place that its notably nicer than Brown's. It's been so long since Freddy saw a clean carpet he's half scared to step over it as he gets ushered into the room by a red faced Polish man named Ruddy.

"Good to see you, my friend." Ruddy drags Blue into an bear hug. "And you have brought us new meat? Ah, he is so young, when I saw him on the doorstep I thought he was a woman."

"Nice to meet you, sir." Freddy unzips his coat and passes over the whiskey.

Ruddy claps him on the shoulder and bellows out a laugh. "I think it was a good idea for you to come. You are called Orange, right?"

"Freddy's fine." Freddy cocks an eyebrow in Blue's direction.

Blue shrugs. "Eh, I ain't ever called you Freddy. Probably ain't gonna start tonight."

The house is thick with cigarette smoke worse than Brown's but the smell of something in the oven cuts through that in a heartbeat. Freddy is led through to the sitting room where four other old guys are sitting. Save for Ruddy, who has a shock of dark hair and mustache, everyone is some flavour of grey. Freddy's already been advised that for one reason or another, no one in the room has a wife and he would be wise to not imply there's anything unseemly in that.

"This is Gerry." Ruddy points to a tiny old man with a few whisps of hair and oversized glasses. "Tomasz, or Tommy." A tall, stern looking fellow with an overhanging brow. "Eli." Straight backed and pot bellied. "Alex." Also small, but without the glasses. "And Larry."

Freddy's grinning as soon as he catches sight of the cab driver, decked out in a white button down with the sleeves rolled up. He reaches for Larry's hand. "Long time, no see."

"You can say that again." Larry leaps up, his eyes crinkling as he smiles. "Jeez, Freddy! How ya been?"

"You two know each other?" Blue asks.

"Sure. Freddy ran our switchboard down on fifty seventh street for a while when Jeannie had that little accident." Larry says and everyone nods somewhat somberly.

Blue levels a very careful look at Larry which is resolutely ignored.

"C'mon." Larry nods for Freddy to join him on the sofa. "Tell me what's going on with you."

"Uh, I'm working in a comic book shop." Freddy says, stupidly, like the guy's going to care.

But Larry does care, leaning in and letting his arm fall casual over the back of the sofa. "Yeah? How's the work? They pay you properly?"

"Pay's better than with the cab company but fewer hours. I'm living right above the shop though, so I ain't gotta walk all over town."

"That's good." Larry frowns ever so slightly. "Wait, you're living with Blue and Brown and that lot."

"And Pink, yeah."

"Fucking Pink..."

"You know 'em?" Freddy clears his throat. "I mean, most people call 'em by their real names."

Larry rolls his eyes. "Those stupid fucking colours. I shouldn't use 'em but I do. Sue me. I was in that house for five minutes about three years ago, before I pulled my shit together and straightened myself out. Hey, I got a colour and everything."

"No shit!" Freddy laughs. "Which one are you."

"White." Larry holds out his hand like he's introducing himself all over again. "You."

"Orange." Freddy shakes. He skims Larry's face and can see the slur of his lips, the slight waver in his posture. He's had a few to drink, a long way off blackout but still. No wonder he's so happy to see Freddy.

He's warm though. Warm and friendly and that's nice. Freddy leans back up against the arm on the back of the couch and just knows that if he were sober, Larry would take that as his cue to rearrange himself. Their conversation pitters out pretty fast, having little to say for itself beyond running through the checklist of all the ways that their lives have diverged, which are monumental and tiny in the same breath.

But Larry sticks to him like a limpet for the rest of the dday. Freddy thinks of the group of cab drivers crowded together at the back of a Mexican restaurant and how no one really wanted to eat their except Larry. And the dude doesn't have a wife, and works a job that eats up almost every waking hour carting strangers from place to place. Then going home to an empty apartment.

It sounds like an awful lonely way to live. At the church he was so often dragged along to back in Bakersfield, there were these ads that went up around Christmas encouraging people to sign up to spend the say with lonely old folk. If Larry weren't here, maybe he'd be on a list somewhere, waiting for a stranger to show up and convince him not to be sad.

Not that Larry's old. The grey isn't even that pronounced in amongst the mahogany, but it's hard not to feel like a kid in company like this.

"You old enough to drink?" Eli asks, moving to open up the bottle Freddy brought with him.

He's never had whiskey, only bourbon. He hated it, but it was kinda fun. Freddy grins sheepishly, inviting leniency.

"He ain't. But if you don't tell, I won't." Blue clarifies.

"That's the motto! That's the fuckin' motto!" Larry bellows. He ushers the small splash that Eli grants Freddy into his mouth and gives him a hefty slap on the back. "You drink to that, kid, and you'll never set a foot wrong in your life."

It's the weirdest Christmas Freddy has ever been involved in, not least because Ruddy and Tommy are Orthodox and don't really celebrate Christmas till the New Year and Larry, Eli and Alex are Jewish. The thing in the oven is a Polish fish roast that is eaten with the potatoes unroasted and the cabbage leaves stuffed.

"I didn't know you were a Jew." Freddy says, watching Larry pass over the cabbage leaves after establishing that they're packed with pork.

"Yeah, the city's lousy with us." Larry snorts. "But hey, I get the day off anyway and Chanukkah's already wrapped up. Being here's more fun than sitting at home alone."

There's no TV, dinner happens when it happens, no one suggests charades. Freddy hears stories from the war and complaints about customers and no one even dares suggest that there might be a mass somewhere in the city that they should make an appearance at. Gerry, who speaks in a borderline unintelligible squeak, gently ribs and Blue and Freddy for wasting the say with them.

"No place better to be, right?" Freddy raises an eyebrow at Blue.

Blue laughs, takes a sip of whiskey and starts up another story.

There's some stuff in here invoolving adult characters discussing whether or not they would want too sleep with a fictional character (ie - fictional within the universe) who is underage

--------------------------------------------------

January dawns bright and cold, to the stench of blocked drains and sewage.

"What the fuck is that?" Brown whines, stumbling into the living room wearing nothing but a ratty pair of briefs and his duvet.

Freddy blinks, bleary eyed and fresh out of sleep. He gets three seconds of sweet confusion before the smell hits him hard enough to gag.

"Cut that shit out!" Brown snaps, pointing in the direction of the bathroom before Freddy can hack up anything onto his precious sofa. "I don't give a shit if you're a pussy ass lightweight, no way you're that hungover."

Freddy has no idea how hungover he is, the nuts and bolts crackling around in his skull could just as easily be from the stink as from the booze. He climbs shakily to his feet and follows Brown into the kitchen to grab a glass of water.

"Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, no." Brown fiddles with the taps. There's water, but not much of it. "Fucking bullshit, shitting, fucking-"

"What's that fucking smell?" Pink comes up behind them, looking about as bad as Freddy feels.

"Whole water system's backed up, plumbing must have gone out on us." Brown passes out half full glasses of water to the three of them, rationing his patience.

Pink pointedly sniffs the air and his sallow skin sinks a few shades further towards translucent. "That don't smell like no blocked drain to me."

"Smells like shit." Freddy mumbles. The water feels good on his throat and horrible on his stomach. He breathes deep and holds everything down. "An' it's cold."

They check the radiators and find every one cold. Brown hops from foot to foot, buzzing like a fly as he tries to work out what to do. "Guess I better call the landlord."

The landlord doesn't pick up, rather predictably for nine am on the first of January, but by the end of the hour it becomes clear that this isn't a problem he'd be able to fix.

"What the fuck." Brown gasps, pulling up the blinds to the living room window.

The street down below is full of people in varying states of rage, wrapped in dressing gowns and wearing slippers, eyeing up the thick sludge trickling through the gutter. The front door opens and closes and Blue wanders in, red faced from the cold outside and carrying a bag full of muffins and four cups of coffee. He looks between the three of them, nodding good morning.

"Where've you been?" Pink asks, nonplussed.

"Getting breakfast." Blue sets his spoils down on the coffee table. "Don't open that window."

"What's going on out there?" Brown points to the street below through the trappings of his duvet.

"What's it look like? The whole street's backed up, the plumbing's fucked. Spoke to some of the folks out there and it sounds like everyone's still just about got water but it stinks to high heaven out there."

"It stinks to high heaven in here." Brown counters, wrapping a hand over his nose as if to emphasise his point.

"That it does." Blue shifts Freddy's duvet aside and sinks down into the sofa. "C'mon, eat. If you didn't get the kid too shitfaced last night."

Freddy has no idea how shitfaced he was last night. He doesn't remember much beyond Brown and Pink sneaking him into the back of some Irish bar and buying him the first whiskey. He tentatively takes one of the coffees, black and bitter, and sips on it as slowly as he can manage, staring down his muffin and daring it to jump into his mouth.

-------------

The cold gets to them pretty quick. By mid-afternoon the collective hangover has shrunk down to a manageable size and all anyone can talk about is how they're freezing their balls off in this shitty, no good apartment. Workers show up just after lunch and start fiddling with the manhole covers in the area, but they're sluggish and ill-disciplined and no one really thinks this shit is getting fixed anytime soon.

Freddy can't remember whose bright idea it was to get out of the house, but he knows he wasn't responsible for choosing the destination. They keep walking till the stink of sixty fourth street is way behind them, and then they walk some more till they come to the harsh cold lights and extraneous female figures of one of the porn cinemas. Brown, Pink and Blue go ahead, but he pauses on the threshold, looking up at the posters advertising some soft core, almost art bullshit, trying to decide if it's worth it.

Something different, something new. He thinks of writhing bodies, flesh pressed against flesh and wonders if he's supposed to be excited, if he's supposed to warm to it. He feels too young to be so desensitised. Or he just feels too fucking young.

"What are you waiting for?" Brown barks up ahead. The thing about New York is that he has to sneak into bars but no one bats an eyelid when he shows up at a place like this.

The decision seems easy once he's inside. The warmth of the theatre is galling compared to the thick chill of the apartment and Freddy can't believe he ever thought this wasn't happening. Brown picks a film out for them, because he apparently cares about the artistic merit of these schlockfests and the leading actress had great tits in some other film he saw.

Freddy doesn't know what he was expecting, but the cinema is weirdly full. He shrinks into himself on instinct, hiding away where his identity is safe, and doesn't look any of the other patrons in the eye.

Blue is asleep within minutes, and Pink sinks easily into a bored sort of stupor that doesn't miss a second of the movie but doesn't engage properly either. Freddy's still regaining feeling in his toes, looking at the images on screen as if they were abstract impressions of human bodies, rather than honest reflections of the real thing. For the first time, he thinks he understands how someone might misunderstand this as art. The images of nature, of fire, of lips clasping over the tip of a banana, they mimic the shapes and sounds of human coitus, till the flip between one and the next barely registers with him.

He's perched on the end of the row, with Brown at his left hand side, shifting and shuffling. Clearly engaged, but not sure what to do with it. It takes Freddy an hour or more to clock that the guy's genuinely aroused and stuck for what to do with it in a crowded cinema surrounded by people he lives with. He didn't think this through.

Maybe it's the immediate proximity they have to each other, maybe it's the fact that Brown is a real person and not just lines on a screen, but knowing that the guy is struggling to keep it in his pants does something strange to Freddy's insides. More than any dirty film he's ever seen, electric and potent. The thought of touching Brown is repugnant all on its own, but the context is exciting.

Freddy slips out of his trance and restlessness settles over him, keeping him shifting in his seat, trying to dredge up some memory of the plot as characters talk and fuck and talk and fuck and talk for god knows how long. He needs to get out of here, almost as bad as Brown.

The credits have barely started rolling before Brown is out of his seat and tearing down the aisle, muttering something about how he'll see them all outside. Pink barely seems to register that he's gone, prodding Blue awake and rising to his feet with boredom so perfect it could be practiced.

Freddy waits just as long as he can, then starts towards the men's bathroom. His feet hold him steady, but his fingers twitch and shake in his pockets of their own volition.

There's only one stall here, shut away at the very back of the building and not half a job to find. Freddy creeps up to the door and presses his ear flat against it, ears strained to catch anything.

The plywood is thin but Brown is careful. A few choked off groans are the only hint at what he's doing. Freddy tries to imagine what he looks like right now, and hates the thought of that stupid, ugly face twisted up in concentration, fist shoved in his mouth to keep the noise down. He doesn't think he could imagine anything less attractive if he tried.

The grunts come to an abrupt halt and Freddy tears himself away from the door. He takes off back towards the foyer, half running, and praying that Brown didn't get the door open in time to see him go.

---------

"Listen, Vic. Shit's hard right now. Do you think you could drop the fees just a little, this week?"

Vic Vega is unbothered by the persistent smell of faeces that has infested sixty fourth street. Truth is, Freddy doesn't much notice it either anymore. It's been two weeks since the pipes packed in and so far, no progress has been made on fixing it. It's not so bad, but there's been rain clouds gathering for the past couple of days and the street is collectively terrified that without working drains, buildings will start to flood with literal shit.

"I woulda thought." Vega starts, leaning in across the counter and not paying Freddy a bit of mind as he sorts through the stock backed up from the sixties for some of the less popular titles they stock. "That things being rough meant you needed my order all the more. Put a little extra cash in your pockets."

Brown glances nervously at Freddy who pretends he doesn't have the faintest idea that there's a conversation happening fifteen fucking feet away from him that he's not supposed to hear. "Man, c'mon! It's hard enough keeping the books straight as it is. I need a few real purchases coming in if I'm gonna sell it to the tax man."

Vega pretends to think about this, tipping his head to one side and scratching his chin. "You know what I think? I think you're pretty good with those books, and I think you got an agreement with my employer that you might wanna start taking seriously."

"I am taking it seriously!" Brown hisses. "I just gotta watch my own back. Look, maybe shift the bits of the order I can't take this time round down the year, y'know? I'll get it sorted."

"Oh, so now you can't take this order? And here was me thinking you were asking for a favour." Vega takes a step back and starts up through the comics at the front of the shop. He stops on Supergirl, again, smiling as he pulls the new issue out of the box. "Man, I love this one. The girl's so cute, but tough at the same time. She doesn't let shit get to her. It's all hopeful and shit."

Brown leaps on the change in conversation. "I mean, Kara Danvers is kinda hot. I always feel wrong jerking it to her though, she's like a legit kid."

The look of disgust Vega returns to him is priceless. Freddy would laugh, if it wouldn't blow his cover as a piece of the furniture. "I don't wanna fuck her." He says. "I wanna watch her save the world. She's really good at it."

In the midst of Brown's spluttering and clarification, the door opens and an honest to god customer walks in. It's so shocking that Freddy stops what he's doing and full on looks up.

His eyes immediately lock with a familiar dark brown pair, framed beneath a mane of russet brown hair. Sport flashes Freddy a wink and holds up a finger to his lips, fast enough to not be caught at it. Vega and Brown both turn round to look at him, Brown in particular looking like a freshly caught fish.

Vega points towards Sport. "See, that looks like a customer."

"Hey, it don't have stink out there." Sport laughs. "And in here. What's going on down here?"

"Problem with the drains." Brown replies, gormless. He's tense, hunched forward over the counter, desperate to ask what the fuck this guy is doing here when there are so many other comic shops in parts of the city that don't stink.

"I'll say." Sport smiles at him, then at Vega, whose neutral calm has picked up a tinge of rage that Freddy doesn't like one bit.

Vega stares Sport down. "What are you doing here?"

"What, you know me or something?" Sport's smile clicks into place like a gauntlet being thrown to the floor. "I heard something about this place, wanted to come down and see if it were true."

"What did you hear?"

Sport taps the side of his nose. "Secret. I'm sure you'll find out soon enough." He saunters over to where Freddy's definitely not doing a shred of stock work, slapping his hand down over an open box of old Charlton titles. "What do you do around here?"

"He's the stock guy. Ignore him." Brown urges. Freddy doesn't have the concentration to get a good look at him but it's clear that he's more interested in a prospective customer than what's currently going on with Vega, whose disconcerting steadiness has upped itself to dangerous levels.

"Stock guy, what does that mean?" Sport is looking right at Freddy. He's wearing a long coat today, with blue jeans and cowboy boots. Round his neck, a red ribbon tied with a bow, no hat. Why does he always have something round his neck?

"It means he deals with the stock!" Brown tells him, exasperated.

Sport shakes his head without taking his eyes off Freddy. "I didn't ask you."

Freddy's tongue is overlarge and useless in his mouth. He wants to move, to do something to break the self-imposed tension but his arms are stuck, the pages of the comic he's holding warping from the sweat. Which is ridiculous, they still don't have heating in this place. "I-"

"No, you know what? It don't matter." Sport spreads his arms wide and steps forward like he might be about to hug Freddy before thinking better of it. "This is a comic shop, right? You gotta show me some comics I should read."

"You don't read comics already?" Brown asks, confused. "Why'd you come out here if you don't read comics?"

Vega turns to look at him, nice and slow. "You got no idea how to build a customer base."

"Well, it's like I said." Sport shifts way from Freddy, who starts gathering up the comics he'd been sorting in a bid to get to the backroom. "I heard a little something about this place, and I wanted to see what the situation was for myself."

Even Brown's not dense enough to realise that Sport is talking exclusively to Vega. He nods towards Freddy. "Orange, get in the back."

"Orange?" Sport laughs. "The kid's name is Orange? What kind of a name is that?"

"S'a nickname." Brown clarifies, signalling to Freddy with jerky hand signals too hurry his ass up."

"You calling every sonofabitch that works for you after some kind of fruit?"

"Something like that."

"Who's he, Pineapple?" Sport points to Vega.

Vega's eyes narrow ever so slightly. "Nah, he calls me Blonde."

"I don't...not to your face!" Brown protests.

Blonde. It takes Freddy a moment to remember which one of the never ending list of colours that Brown has so far adopted the name corresponds to. The muscle guy, the one who works for the Cabots.

The fucking Cabots. Freddy's stomach sinks. He needs to get out of here. Not just right now, but for good.

"Pretty lousy nickname if you can't use it to his face." Sport's hands push back his coat as he lays them against his hips. He's short, but he's not afraid of a fight, that much is clear. Squaring up to Vega with a smile on his face.

"Orange, will you hurry your ass up!" Brown snaps.

"It's fine, it's cool." Sport steadies him with open palms. "Be cool, man. I'm not trying to start any trouble. Just trying to get myself a comic." He plucks the Supergirl issue from the counter, where Vega dropped it. "What's this one about?"

Vega decidedly doesn't answer, so Brown picks up. "It's about this girl, Superman's cousin-"

"Nah, I wanna hear Orange tell it." Sport smirks. He glances back over his shoulder to where Freddy is poised, ready to go into the stock room.

Freddy flashes an imploring look at Brown who rolls his eyes and nods like he expects him to talk.

It's not like Freddy's never read a Supergirl comic before, but he takes three tries to get the words to come out right. "It's like...I mean she...so you know what Superman is, right?"

"Right?" Sport replies, voice all quiet like they're the only two people in the room.

"Right." Freddy's tongue wets his lips, searching for the next line. "So she's got most of the same powers as Superman, only she's a girl. Like a teenager. She saves the world and tries to stay hopeful."

Sport's smile is so small and private. Freddy wishes he would ratchet up his bravado again, stop the shop from shrinking around them until he has nowhere to go but down. "That sounds pretty good to me. You got another copy kicking around?"

"I can check." Brown cuts in.

"Wow now!" Sport steadies him with a hand on an arm. "He's the stock guy, right? Ain't he supposed to check the stock?"

Freddy doesn't wait for permission. He sets the boxes down at his feet and walks over to the boxes just opposite from the counter. He flips through for ten seconds before he finds an issue from the start of a two year old run that he remembers being pretty good. "Here, start with this one."

When Sport reaches out to take it from him, his fingers slip over the top of Freddy's and he grips tight for all the time it takes to blink before taking the comic to the counter.

Freddy's hand feels like it's been dipped in hot wax.

Letting out a low whistle, Sport reaches for his wallet. "This one must be popular. She's sexy."

"She's a kid." Vega says, flatly.

Sport shrugs. "Age is just a number, my friend."

"I ain't your friend."

"Sure you're not." Sport grins at him. "How much?"

"A dollar." Brown takes the cash, and all the while Freddy is standing there, his hand clutched against his stomach and the stock box waiting to head into the backroom.

On his way out the door, Sport turns back to them all to doff the air where his hat should be. His eyes linger on Freddy, warm and deep and Freddy could swear the affection in his face is real. "Y'know, if this guy ain't paying you enough, I got ways to fix that."

"Stop trying to poach my staff!" Brown sneers. Sport slips out the door without another word.

The long beat of silence between the three of them is deeply uncomfortable. Freddy is the one to break it, rushing over to his box and trying to get the door open to vanish into the backroom.

"What a creep." Brown hisses, under his breath.

Vega nods. "Orange, stay away from him."

"I'll try." Freddy replies, meekly. It's the first time he's spoken to the guy directly since the afternoon he came in when Brown wasn't around.

The backroom is even colder than the main floor, but there's no one around to see Freddy sink to the floor, clutching the box to his chest and trying to slow his heartbeat down.

The Cabots, Sport. Fucking New York City. He can't breathe. He has to get out. There's nowhere else to go.

Distantly, the sound of Brown and Vega's continued negotiations permeate the thin wooden door. They go back and forth and back and forth and it doesn't do Brown any good. He still gets saddled with the same proportion of the agreed sum he has to launder as any other week. Like they're gonna get a single legit customer when the place stinks and the street stinks and everything stinks.

Freddy stays in the backroom till he moves past shivering and decides he needs to move before he gets frozen in place. As he rises to his feet, the faint static building at the back of his mind becomes a real world sound, peppering the windows as the rain comes down, ready to flood the drains.

Freddy starts to hover two feet to the right of wherever Blue is looking. He finds excuses to keep Pink talking, trying to unstick his own tongue.

"You okay, kid?" Blue asks, vaguely amused.

Mouth flapping like a fish, Freddy reaches blindly for the right ideas, the right thing to say. He no longer notices the smell of shit creeping through the walls from the street outside and the cold is a minor concern in the long run, even when he's Californian born and supposed to be adapting.

The front door clicks open and Brown starts swearing up a storm as he scrapes his shoes on the doormat.

Freddy closes his mouth and shakes his head.

-----------

Of course it all comes crashing down. No story of a down and our kid making his own way in the Big Apple would be complete without the part where everything goes wrong. In the after school specials, this is the part where everyone realises how wrong they were to deviate from the path set down for them and they proceed to move back home or take up a new sort of pastime that doesn't require them to risk their liberty in any given cross with the police.

In real life, everything just goes to shit. Freddy lets his feet track him through New York without thought once he's done for the day, the crisp sun of January morphing into freezing showers as February gears them up for Spring. He has a raincoat now, a proper anorak thick enough to make bending his arms difficult and when he puts up puddles in his boots he barely notices the streaks of water they leave up his jeans. Away from sixty fourth street, he can breathe a little easier. The air in the rest of the city has started to smell clean, even when the smog has settled thick overhead.

But he has to come back round to his shit soaked street, which bubbles with sewage when the rain gets too heavy and which the city council have been sending workers to deal with only sporadically. Brown has screamed and cried to the landlord half a dozen times and it changes nothing. Why would it? The guy has no control over where the money goes, and who gets paid.

The first thing Freddy notices is that the water is high enough that he's going to have to skip around full blown turds in the street to get back home. The second thing he notices is the smoke. Fire is common enough here, the smell sometimes trickling down from the Bronx when the folk trying to wash away their homes and start fresh with the insurance money get particularly overzealous. He assumes it's a restaurant, going up in flames at the behest of the ovens out back, but the closer he gets the more he feels lead tightening in his veins.

Freddy takes the last corner at a run, rounding onto sixty forth street and feeling the heat prickle at his skin immediately.

There are fire engines and police cars, practically the whole neighbourhood standing out on the street to watch or leaning out of their windows in morbid fascination. The people standing directly in front of the building, huddled up next to the emergency services like it might morph into a giant umbrella and save them from the rain, have come running from their homes, screaming for their lives, their things, their grandparents to be saved.

He thinks he catches the stocky outline of Blue, and the thin, reedy distress of Pink in the crowds. Freddy doesn't have to work hard to stop Brown though, screaming bloody murder about legitimate business practices and how that's his fucking livelihood going up in flames so why the fuck is he being arrested? Why the fuck is he being arrested when he knows the guy who came by to burn the place down. Vic fucking Vega. They're looking for Vic Vega.

And an officer snaps back that no one involved in the running of Wacko Comics wants to cross their path, that they know what tricks Brown's types use to try and escape custody and they ain't buying it.

This is what happens when you run to the police. Freddy takes one last look at the gutted corpse of Wacko Comics, wrapped in the fire with the windows popped out from the heat. He looks up to the third floor window where all his spare clothes and the money he'd been saving and the comics he'd collected and the unsent letter to his parents will be getting smoked out, soon to add themselves to the bonfire. He has no idea if Brown left his name, or some version of his name, on any official documents but he doesn't want to wait around to find out. There are twenty dollars in his pocket and at least the clothes he's wearing are warm.

Freddy turns tail, leaves the stinking wreck of sixty fourth street behind him and sets out, all alone. He's started over once before, he can pull himself up again.

The rain cascades off the lip of his anorak. His feet are dry, but Freddy is suddenly very much aware of how much of his body is resolutely sodden.

-----------------------

He can't stay out in the rain for long, this shit is ridiculous. Freddy bundles himself into a diner a few blocks down and works his way through a burger and a coke before deciding that he's not far enough away from the scene of the crime. Maybe the cops are looking for him. Him, specifically, Freddy Newandyke. His father's digging a grave as he thinks it, just too start rolling. He pays up, careful not to think too hard about the percentage of his funds he's just sunk into something that cannot hold his weight.

If he were looking for him, the last place he'd expect to see himself is downtown. Freddy doesn't have the cash to go hopping in cabs, so he walks fast, with his head retracted, turtlelike and anxious, to avoid being recognised whenever a cop car rolls by.

There are a lot of cop cars rolling by. With their sirens blaring, lighting up the streets in a confusing mismatch of blue and red that makes it hard to see where one person ends and the next begins. Freddy hugs the wall of buildings as far as he can, trying to keep the rain off his back. It doesn't really work, but it's better than doing nothing.

Even in the rain, girls gather on street corners to flag down passing Johns. It suits some of them, Freddy thinks, the bleeding makeup and straggly hair giving the best looking of the bunch an air of tragic debauchery that he can understand wanting to take to bed. He's thought about it, thought real long and hard, but somewhere between ninety eighth street and here he gets stuck.

He needs to talk to girls, he needs to talk to people his own age. He needs some fucking friends. His heart is positively howling in his ears and every time he asks himself the all important question of where the fuck he's supposed to sleep tonight he feels the rain turn to ice around him.

It's still early enough on the year that the rain could turn to ice around him if he doesn't play things carefully. New York City never sleeps, but few places are truly twenty four hours. He needs somewhere warm and dry where they won't bother him.

The back of a bar - too young. Diners and restaurants only let you stay as long as you're paying. The cinemas. dirty or otherwise, kick you out at the end of the feature.

He could go to Ruddy's, and hope the guy remembers him and doesn't have any kind of inclination to hand him over to the cops. That's a pretty big if though.

Or Larry. If he could go to Larry, this shit might be easy. But he doesn't have a phone number or an address, he's just gotten lucky running into him so many times in this big old city.

Freddy's got the door to a diner on forty second street open when he starts kicking himself for being an idiot. He doesn't need Larry's address or his number, he knows where the guy works.

The sky has been thick with winter dark for so long, Freddy has no concept of what time it is. His bones say its late but they've been walking in the rain since he quit work that afternoon, so whaddathey know? He takes the fifteen blocks between him and the cab company at a half run, dodging the flocks of people moving in the opposite direction and the slow gaggles of tourists who always seem to know exactly how to space themselves to block the sidewalk. With his luck, he half expects the place to have shut down, moved on and vanished without a trace in the months since he's last been by, but it's there, a faint glow coming from the open garage door.

Freddy barrels through the door and down the ramp to reception. Joe looks up, confused and concerned, reaching for the knife he keeps in his boot. He's not recognised, not like this.

"Joe!" Freddy calls out to him, waving his arms to show he's coming empty handed and pulling down his hood. "Joe, it's me!"

It takes a second, but he gets there. "Freddy?" Joe frowns, slowly settling back from his knife. "Jeez, what are you doing here?"

"I've had a...it's complicated." Freddy runs a hand over his face and gets met with a shock of cold water. His blood is still high, but from the run and the excitement of having figured his shit out. "Is Larry on tonight?"

"Sure. Why?"

"I gotta talk to him. You know where he is?"

"Ain't got a fucking clue. He's been real quiet tonight, but you know how it is in the rain." Joe replies.

Freddy does know. In the rain, journeys that could be taken on foot require taxis, and they never stop coming. Very little reason for a driver to call in on a night like tonight.

"When's he due back in?"

Joe checks his watch. "About three hours."

"You mind if I hang around till then?"

"In here?" Joe twists his mouth.

"C'mon, man." Freddy gestures to his sodden coat. "God's pissing it down out there."

Joe hesitates, then sits forward and starts up in a conspiratorial tone. "What's going on, Freddy? Forreal? Don't you got a home to go to."

There's nothing he can say to that that's gonna have him coming off as the good guy. Freddy sidesteps the question and sets his jaw. "Please, Joe. I just really gotta talk to Larry."

I reiterate - Freddy's age is not going to be locked down in the text of this fic at any point. It's safe to assume he's between sixteen and twenty but exactly where he falls within that rage is kind of unimportant and kind of up to you. What you need to remember is that most people peg him as being a minor. Point being - this section contains a sliver of Freddy taking control of his own sexuality a character who is definitely a much older adult likes it, and if that sounds at all uncomfortable to you then you might wanna skip this chunk.

------------------------------------------------------

The clock on the back wall says it's two thirty in the morning and that Larry is late. Freddy's hands won't stay still, jumping through his hair and skipping rhythms out on his knees. He wants to sleep, but even silk sheets couldn't get him under tonight. The garage is nowhere near as frigid as the streets but it's a far sight off war, and his rain soaked jeans have him shivering, wondering when the hell they're supposed to dry off.

At least his feet are dry. He'll take wet legs over wet feet any day of the week. every now and then he thinks he catches a whiff of smoke and has to remind himself that he never got within a hundred metres of the fire, and the rain will have washed any trace of it down the street with the rest of the sewage.

Every second thought starts with him envisioning what he's going to say when he gets back to the apartment. Blue shaking his head, letting them all know that much as he doesn't like how it turned out, Brown sealed his own fate. Pink whinging about the smell of smoke now baked into the walls along with everything else. Brown shrugging and insisting that he meant for everything to go down the way it is, that he doesn't have anything resembling regrets. It's a physical effort to remind himself that none of that exists anymore, it can't. He stood up off that awful fucking sofa that morning and he will never sit back down.

A car comes rumbling into the garage, windscreen wipers still working a mile a minute. Freddy sits up, blinking fast to clear his head and get a read on who's driving as it pulls into an empty spot and the engine cuts.

"Fucking traffic." Larry hisses, slamming the door as he steps out of the car. "Whole city's backed up worse than a smackhead sailor."

Joe holds out a hand for the tin of cash that every cabbie carries with them. "That the rain?"

"Nah, it ain't the fucking rain. I know what rain traffic looks like. There's cop cars everywhere and you got crooks running scared up and down the island. I was having to play it real careful with who I picked up. Looks like some kinda bust."

"Who'd they bust? The blacks?"

"Nah, if it was Harlem it wouldn't have been a problem for me. Everyone I saw looking to head on the lamb was white."

Joe nods. "You reckon you picked up any crooks?"

Larry shakes his head. "Once I saw what was happening, I stayed away from white guys. Easy." His eyes flicker around the room, clocking which cars are in and out, the time, the girl on the switchboard, before finally settling on Freddy. "What the fuck?"

"Kid's been here for hours." Joe tells him. "Said he needs to speak to you."

Larry approaches cautiously, hunching over slightly even as Freddy rises to his feet to greet him. It's weird, seeing him compromise his posture like that. Not that Freddy knows him well enough to tell ass from elbow about how this guy looks on most of his days off.

"Hey, Freddy." Larry's brow is furrowed, the sweeping bow of his lips as flat as it ever gets. "What's up?"

This is possibly a very bad idea. Freddy smiles and can see by the apprehension that crosses Larry's face that it's weak at best. "Hey, Larry. Um...can we talk somewhere?"

"Uh..." Larry looks round at the clock again. It's late, he doesn't wanna be here. He never asked to have Freddy show up and demand some kind of mercy, but he's one of the few pieces of this city that seems capable of granting it. "Sure. Lemme get my coat."

The two of them scurry through the rain to a late night diner where Larry buys Freddy a milkshake and hustles him off to a far table at the back. They sit, and Freddy is uncomfortably aware of the dark circles under Larry's eyes and the slump of his shoulders. He's exhausted, he should be at home.

"Wish I could say it was good to see you, kid." Larry smiles a wry smile. "But I got this feeling that you ain't got no good news for me."

Freddy tries to laugh and a strangled sort of sound comes out of his mouth instead. He takes a gulp of milkshake and tries to focus on the sweet thud of milk against his tongue. "You know how you said that the cops were busting a whole lotta folk tonight?"

The fear that crosses Larry's face is momentary but it's profound. "You caught up in that?"

"I..." Freddy stops, clears his throat, breathes in deep and tries not to let the warmth of the diner have him thinking that he could start napping. "I think they went after the Cabots. And like...everyone who worked for them."

A long, slow exhale and Larry collapses back in his chair. "Yeah, I was kinda thinking the same thing."

"You know about the Cabots?"

"Know about the Cabots...sheesh, listen you yourself, kid. If you're below a certain pay grade in this town, you've heard of the Cabots, that's just how it is. They're always hiring, number one employers of the white working class in New York city. How were you involved?"

"I was working for this guy, and sleeping on his couch. He ran a comic shop. Thought it was all pretty normal but one time he left me in there alone and I found the log books out back and-"

"And those log books didn't have shit to do with the amount of product actually shifted." Larry finishes. "Fuck. You know who the main point of contact was, between your boss and the Cabots I mean."

"A guy called Vic Vega. Big, kinda quiet. He-" Freddy stops talking. Larry's mouth has gone very tight and his face very pale. He knows exactly who Vic Vega is.

"Shit."

"Yeah."

"So what happened?"

"So, the place this guy lived, where I was living with Blue, was right over this comic shop. I went out to get some stuff done before heading home this evening. When I left the shop everything was fine but when I got back..."

"Fire?" Larry raises an eyebrow. Freddy nods. "Yeah, that's how they work. The raids started sometime this afternoon, best as I can tell. So they send round guys scorching as much earth as possible before the cops arrive. Gives them an easier day in court."

Freddy takes a deep breath and hates how it shudders against his lungs. He tries another sip of his milkshake but it comes out tacky and gross. "I...um...I got there when they were arresting the guy I was working for. And everything was on fire. I figured...I don't know if my name was on anything official. I just..."

"You got out of there." Larry says, quietly. He leans in over the table, folding his arms in front of him and it feels so fucking kind. He's not yelling, not angry, not a bone of judgement in his body. Freddy once handed in a piece of homework late and his parents didn't speak to him for the rest of the day when he got back from detention. "That's smart. You don't wanna go to jail for that shit. Bet you didn't even realise what you were getting into when you took the job."

Freddy shakes his head. "I just...I really needed the money."

"Hey, I've been there. You know what they say, don't look a gift horse in the mouth." Larry's voice drops even lower, and the care he's taking makes Freddy's stomach start flip flopping. "So, why'd you come to see me?"

And there's the kicker. There should be friends, contacts, other places he could go. But there's something about the guy you first meet when you come to the big city, how he keeps cropping up in your life through no effort of your own. Freddy could have tried any number of different people, he could have tried to track down Travis fucking Bickle if the mood had taken him, and it would have felt like he was dragging the universe out of wack.

Freddy wants to tell Larry that he feels safe and stable in a way no one else in this city does to him, not even Blue. Instead he shrugs with one shoulder. "I don't got many friends here."

Larry hums. "I dunno why you decided to come to New York, Freddy, but I'm not sure if it's the right place for you."

It's the right place for anyone, it has to be. Freddy's eyes sting and air doesn't seem to be making it to his lungs properly. On the first sob, he panics, cramming his fist into his mouth for fear of doing it again.

It's not the reaction Larry was expecting. "Wow, kid. Slow down, it's alright, it's alright." He reaches over to lay a hand on Freddy's wrist, slowly prying his hand away from his face. Larry's hand are so big and so warm. Freddy wishes he wouldn't let go.

"I got...I lost all my shit, all my money." Freddy gasps. "I don't got no place to go. I...I can't go back to California."

Larry watches him, lips slightly parted as he breathes deep. He just looks solid, safe. He holds out his arms and beckons Freddy over. "C'mere, kid."

Freddy practically launches himself over the table, falling into Larry's arms and burying his face in the older man's shoulder. The terror of the night smacks him hard over the head and before he can reach for a handhold he's over the cliff and crying for things lost to the fire, for whatever shit he's going to have to do tomorrow to pull himself back into shape.

Larry doesn't tell him to stop, a kindness he's not used to. He pulls Freddy down to sit in his lap and doesn't complain when handfuls of his shirt start to stretch around the fists balled up in them. "It's alright. I got you. It's all gonna be alright."

The last person who properly hugged Freddy was his grandmother, some two weeks before he got the hell out of Bakersfield. He hadn't even realised he'd been missing human contact, but it rushes up at him so fast as to knock the wind out of him, as if he wasn't having enough trouble working out how to breathe.

He calms down in increments, and when he finally finds it in himself to stop his efforts to burrow into Larry's chest, he becomes uncomfortably aware that the attention of the diner is largely directed at the two of them. He tries to pull away from himself, imagining what the picture must look like, and he has too admit that it's close to damning.

"There, that better?" Larry fishes a handkerchief out of a pocket and starts wiping tears off Freddy's face. He's still got one arm looped loosely around Freddy's middle, and regardless of what anyone else might think is going on between the two of them, it feels nice.

Freddy nods. "I'm so fucked."

"We're gonna work this out." Larry's all business, deadly serious. No room for meaningless platitudes here. "I'm guessing you came to me to find out if I could put you up."

"Yeah."

"Well, you gotta let me level with you, alright?" Larry finishes up with the handkerchief and Freddy takes it as the signal to stand himself up and return to his own chair. "I got a history with the Cabot's myself, and it's a little stickier than yours."

Freddy's eyes widen. Larry's so straight edge it hurts, he can't imagine him putting a toe out of line without good cause. "No shit? Why?"

"I needed money, and I needed friends." Larry's mouth quirks, not quite a smile. "Sound familiar at all?"

"Yeah."

"Well, there you go. That's how I met your pal Blue, which is how I wound up living in that shitty apartment that you're running from. Honestly, if the two of youse weren't still trying to live out of that litter tray, I'd say it was a good riddance."

"Wait, Blue worked for the Cabots?" Freddy frowns.

"Oh yeah." Larry's eyes go wide and Freddy's almost sorry he asked. "Yeah...Blue's worked for all sorts of folks. He's good people, but he's done some shit, y'know?"

Freddy has no idea. "Sure."

"Anyway, me and him did a couple of jobs together, nothing I'm proud of. He snuck me out of the organisation through a back door and I've been home free since."

"That's pretty good luck."

"Eh, you can only use guy's so many times before the police learn to recognise you. I had maybe one good run left in me and the Cabots had enough people to not waste too much time on me. I paid my dues."

"You didn't ever think about getting out of town?" Freddy's learned a lot these past few months. Most importantly, what New York folk sound like. Larry's not from round these parts, he has something he could go back to, or something to keep running from.

Larry levels a stare at Freddy. "You thinking about getting out of town just now?"

That's all there is to it. Once you've got to New York, everything else feels like a downgrade. Freddy could go anywhere, but his mind was made up before he so much as saw the burning effigy of Wacko Comics. He's staying, he's gonna keep trying to swim no matter how many times he sinks.

"No." He replies in a quiet voice. He sucks on the straw of his milkshake and the thick gloop mixes with the seemingly endless quantities of snot that a good cry always gets out of him. His dad always said that was because his nose was too big.

Larry's eyes zero in on him, and that stupid uncomfortable giddiness that Freddy doesn't know what to do with strikes once again. He pretends he doesn't notice as he makes a big show of swallowing, wiping up a spare drop from his lips and sucking hard on the finger he uses for it.

"What I'm getting at here." Larry says, slowly. "Is that I'm not the best person for you to be staying with just now. I don't know how deep the cops have broken in with the Cabots and I don't know if my name would be on any pieces of paper. Right now you wanna stay away from anyone with any link to the Cabots. Vic Vega's got a reputation for not squealing, but if the whole organisation has gone down then all bets are off. Brown might have kept you off the books but Vega still knows who you are."

The calm that had started to settle over Freddy vanishes in an instant. He looks up sharply at Larry and anger starts to colour the hazy, mismatched fog of his brain. What the fuck are they doing here of Larry can't help him?

"What the fuck am I supposed to do?" Freddy snaps

Larry flips to a frown in an instant. "You know, I don't gotta talk this shit through with you at all if I don't want to. I should be at home, asleep right now."

"Ah yeah, that home you're not gonna let me in to."

Squaring his shoulders and setting his jaw, Larry's wide enough to blot out the fucking sun if he wanted to. He keeps his voice light, but for the first time Freddy can see how he might have made a decent criminal. "You wanna try that again?"

Chewing on his tongue, Freddy casts his eyes sideways. "Sorry, man."

"S'alright. You're in a tight spot. A guy can say shit he don't mean in the moment, but you gotta remember who's on your side here, kid."

He's right. The number of people Freddy has on his side are pretty minimal. even if Larry was a Grade A scumbag, he's not in a position to turn down his help, let alone sniff at it. Assuming Pink and Blue are out for the count for the time being, Joe will tolerate him and not much more, Travis is a fucking psycho who probably doesn't know how to help someone if he tried, Yolanda only helped him when he paid her and Iris is powerless to do shit, the bottom of his barrel of friends is starting to look pretty clear.

A voice in his head suggests that he might have other options. It sounds like Sport, it sounds like Shaundra. He doesn't want it.

"So, who else have you got apart from me?" Larry asks. "And I want you to be really sure that these folk don't have shit to do with the Cabots."

From the way Larry's been talking, that's ruling out half of New York City. Even the girls who work for Sport who might recognise him are caught up in Cabot shit, because Sport evidently had beef with them before they got taken down. He lets out a huff of laughter.

[Crossover] Orange/Sport [Taxi Driver], rentboy!Orange

Re: [Crossover] Orange/Sport [Taxi Driver], rentboy!Orange

Re: [Crossover] Orange/Sport [Taxi Driver], rentboy!Orange

Re: [Crossover] Orange/Sport [Taxi Driver], rentboy!Orange

Re: [Crossover] Orange/Sport [Taxi Driver], rentboy!Orange

Re: [Crossover] Orange/Sport [Taxi Driver], rentboy!Orange

Re: [Crossover] Orange/Sport [Taxi Driver], rentboy!Orange

Re: [Crossover] Orange/Sport [Taxi Driver], rentboy!Orange

Re: [Crossover] Orange/Sport [Taxi Driver], rentboy!Orange

Sport/Orange - shady skeevey stuff - 1/?

Sport/Orange - shady skeevey stuff - 2/?

Re: Sport/Orange - shady skeevey stuff - 2/?

Re: Sport/Orange - shady skeevey stuff - 4a/?

Re: Sport/Orange - shady skeevey stuff - 4b/?

Re: Sport/Orange - shady skeevey stuff - 5/?

Re: Sport/Orange - shady skeevey stuff - 6/?

Re: Sport/Orange - shady skeevey stuff - 7/?

Re: Sport/Orange - shady skeevey stuff - 8/?

Re: Sport/Orange - shady skeevey stuff - 9a/?

Re: Sport/Orange - shady skeevey stuff - 9b/?

Re: Sport/Orange - shady skeevey stuff - 10/?

Re: Sport/Orange - shady skeevey stuff - 11a/?

Re: Sport/Orange - shady skeevey stuff - 11b/?

Re: Sport/Orange - shady skeevey stuff - 12/?

Re: Sport/Orange - shady skeevey stuff - 13a/?