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| What: Two old friends, Selina and Nolan, knew each other when they were kids on the streets of Gotham. After ten years their paths, which sent them each in different directions, cross again. | |||||
Only an hour or more beyond dusk and Old Gotham is probably more alive then it was most of the day. With darkness comes a bravery that most denizens do not have during the day. Hooker's strolling down the streets plying their services as cars roll to an almost stop. Dealers in circles plying their wares. Your usual street people doing whatever they do for a living.
Nolan moves through them like he belongs, though he is much better dressed.. Okay, only a /little/ better dressed in his cheap suit and his old leather jacket missing it's old airbrushed gang colors. The cripple limps past a few bums, dropping some coins in a cup.. A hooker here makes eye contact but he shakes his head.. Some thugs shoulder by him but he makes no waves.. Time erases a lot of memories and for that he is glad.
It comes the sound of a distant engine roar that grows ever-nearer. The unmistakable sound of a sport motorcycle roaring closer and closer until it zips past Nolan and then eases into the side street a little ways ahead of him. A woman is on it, dressed all in black... tight jeans, black t-shirt and black boots. She steps off of the motorcycle and reaches up to pull the helmet off of her head letting her ebony hair fall down around her shoulders. She glances from side to side a moment before she attaches the helmet to the bike and then moves toward the flow of foot traffic. She doesn't seem to notice Nolan as of yet, but he may notice her.
One motorcyle really isn't any different than the other to Nolan... Though the leather clad rider certainly deserves a second glance even before she parks.. Definately a she. Nolan raises an eyebrow, appreciatively, especially when the helmet is removed and he catches the hair cascade from behind. Something else seems to grab his attention, though, and his eyes cast to his side, at the empty space next to him, and he frowns. "I'm allowed to look, you know.." he says to, well, no-one. A second passes and his brows furrow. "Don't you dare judge me... I'm damaged, not /dead/... Oh screw off and get back to work." he says to no-one, making a rude gesture, not looking where he is going, and walks straight into a big slab of beef in leathers who was ogling the biker chick.. Nolan literally bounces off of him, falling on his ass.. "Sunovabitch!" he growls.
Leather dude growls down at Nolan. "Watch the fuck where ya goin."
Selina was speaking with a group of the street tuffs that had been not too far from where she'd parked her bike when she saw the guy fall down out of the corner of her eye. The raven haired woman looked over then to see the guy on the ground and the bigger guy standing over him. She just stared at them silently a moment while some of the dudes she was in a conversation with spoke to her and the others in the small group. She then looked back to these guys and handed them something before parting ways from them... a few of them checking her out a little more closely now that she wasn't looking at them. (she was used to this treatment).
Selina walked toward the man on the ground. "Are you alright?" She asked him then, glancing up to the tall man Nolan had run into. Selina reached up and placed her hand on the big man's shoulder. "Don't scare the locals, I'm sure it was an accident." She said to him, trying to calm him with a sweet voice and a sensitive touch.
The big guy answers before Nolan can say anything, rolling his head on the thick stump he calls a neck. "Little geek here needs ta watch where he's goin..." he says, looking menacing.. The size helps but he is fairly young so.... Still on his ass, Nolan fumes and seems not at all impressed by the ganger. "/I'm/ just fine.. Moose here needs to get his ass back to Riverdale though." he growls as he starts pushing himself up. There are winces of pain at the corner of his eye as the braced leg bends and carries his weight.
Big and Thugly grits his teeth. "Asshole has a mouth.." he says.
Nolan, now on his feet, wavers a moment as he regains balance, then fixes his mismatched eyes on the big guy a moment. "Bet ya got an A in anatomy, didn't ya."
Selina let slip her hand back to her side from the big guy and she listened to the two of them exchange their pleasantries. "And here I thought I was going to have to knock both of you around to keep you civilized. How pleased I am to see that you're just naturally both gentlemen." She sardonically told them before she stared a little more closely at the mismatched eyes. "Nolan Voight?" She asked the man, the owner of said eyes.
Thugly glowers but suddenly looks a bit apprehensive when Selina seems to recognize the thin man with the cane crutch. Apparently her reputation with his little group is enough to make him step back, though not without commiting Nolan to memory first, then to walk back to his peeps.
Nolan, on the other hand, has ignored the man completely and is brushing crud off his pants. So when he hears his name it is a surprise. Not many people knew his real name before he left. He was Twig. A few of the NEW people he deals with know him as Nolan, sure, but he knows who THEY are. He lifts his head, regarding the woman a moment.. From foot to head.. pausing sometimes.. It's not a lecherous gaze, it's jst in depth.. It's when he gets to her face that something clicks.. She has changed since he last saw her.. a /lot/. "Selina...?" he asks, breath low. he looks poleaxed.
Selina refused to call anyone by a name she didn't think fit them that well, and 'Twig' didn't fit him that well to her. She'd always prefered to give him the respect that she felt he had deserved, with that of his actual name. She glanced once more toward Thugly when he turned and walked off and then she looked back to Nolan and a smile appeared on her dark painted lips. "Its been... like, a decade..." She tells him. "I've been told on many occasions that you were dead. Some said you were in a mental institution though..." She gave him a questioning stare with her emerald eyes after that one. "Are you okay?" She asked then.
It takes more than a few moments for the cripple once called Twig to get his center back. The woman standing in front of him is.. So different. He remembers a /girl/ who more often than not would stand up for him and some of the younger kids when they were in trouble. Not that she wasn't /physically/ a woman back then but..
it doesn't take long for him to see /her/, finally, in this full fledged woman. "I.. Yeah, I'm fine.." he finally says, running his good hand through his mop of red hair as opposed to the bad and scarred one in the fingerless glove sport prison tattoos. "I just.. Wow.. Sorry I just wasn't expecting to see anyone I knew.. well.. knew and didn't hate." he admits. He then looks away a moment. "Definately not dead.. And not an asylum though I was close to that.. I was in Rykers..."
Selina had been a bit of a lanky teen girl. She had been pretty, yes, but she was very lithe back and and a little 'too skinny' to be considered 'hot' by most teenage boy standards. Now, however, she'd filled out in all the right ways. "Rykers?" Selina repeated softly in an airy voice. "Jesus christ..." She muttered further, looking Nolan up and down with her green eyes. "Do... you... need anything?" She asked him then. "I mean, food, or shelter? What happened? Did ya pluck something off the wrong Mark?"
Nolan was probably one of the few kids that had been SKINNIER than she had been.. of course he had also been a junkie pickpocket and right now he looks.. well that manic look is still in his mismatched eyes but that was always a bit more natural for him than chemical induced.. He had always alluded he took the drugs for the physical pain he was always in, because of the physical problem with his leg and arm he had been born with, but it was sometimes apparent he was using the drugs to dilute whatever seemed wrong with his mind.. The voices he heard. Voices that on more than one occasion had saved them from trouble, somehow.
Now he looks more filled out. Still skinny and still with the brace and crutch but he carries himself confidently.. Grown up.. Grown /into himself/. He quickly looks around, noting that no one is quite nearby, and then leans in a bit closer. "No, I'm okay for money..." he says, looking strangely touched by the offer. "And it was more than plucking.. I went across the bridge and got.. over my head." he takes a slow breath, wondering what to say.. then comes out with it. "I killed someone." He doesn't know why he just comes out with it. Most of his new friends barely know his past.. but this, her, was a link to that past... And she had never lied to him, not then. So why should he lie now.
Selina just stood there motionless when he leaned in on her to whisper. She was a confident woman, to put lightly, so having a man lean in to whisper something to her didn't really phase her at all. She glanced her green eyes down to the ground and listened to his statement before she looked back at him with those large oval shaped eyes of hers. "Did they deserve it?" She asked him flatly, quietly in return. "I mean, the person that you killed." Selina had always treated those in the poor neighborhood as though they were family, they loved her because she provided for them... she notoriously gave money to those who needed it and food to those who needed it. She was there for the poor people, and this is why so many of them accepted her. And those who tried to take more from her than she wanted to give? Well... it was also notorious that she could snap arms easier than most can snap pencils.
Nolan Voight straightens just a little bit, his mismatched eyes locked to hers as he regards the question for only a second. "Yes. Yes they definitely did." The answer itself doesn't seem to have any hesitation.. It's just that for all his seemingly newfound confidence it doesn't extend to being this close to /any/ female, even those who were his friends.. Like he feels unworthy to be in their presence, something back then he hid under the jitters and now that he usually hides behind gruffness. He half-steps back, leaning on his cane and shrugs. "I would do it again in a heartbeat, too."
Selina just stood there and listened as he said this and she lifted her eyes up to look into his at the end of his statement. "Well." She started her response, allowing a small pause. "Lets hope you never have to." She then slid her right hand up her side and dipped her fingers into her back pocket, a card came out then and she offered it to him, it was solid black with artistic silver font etched into it. "This is my contact office. I want you to have it and keep it... so you can come to me if you need anything or have anything to tell me. Okay?" She held the card out for him between her forefinger and middle finger of her right hand.
Nolan Voight plucks the card with is bad hand, examining the detailed font.. He looks somewhat relieved that she reacted the way she did.. She didn't seem disgusted or disappointed.. And that means a lot to the ex-street kid. Staring at the card a moment longer his lips quirk into a smile. "Still looking out for the kid, huh?" he asks, jesting since he is older than her but.. she was always one of the very strong ones.
He suddenly flicks his hand, wincing a little since it /is/ the bad one, and suddenly the black card is replaced with.. a white one? Cheaply made, yes, most likely laser printed. Just like that slight of hand when he was a kid. he offers the card back to her. "Only if you take mine.. I /am/ working these days.." he says. "/You/ are doing good, right? I mean you look fantastic..." he ois.. "I mean you look good.. But.. You /are/ doing okay, yes?" he looks at the gangers who have moved halfway down the block.
This caused the woman to smile more openly at him and she lifted her hand up to take the card back from him and she looked it over a moment before putting it where she'd taken her own from. "Thank you." She said quietly. "I am doing very well. And yes... someone has to take care of everyone that society wants to keep down. If it has to be me, then so be it." She glanced back to her bike and then back to Nolan. "Sadly I have to be somewhere... but I'd love to catch up sometime. So call me, ask me out for a drink." She flashed him another smile and half-turned preparing to go.
Nolan Voight chuckles, shaking his head. "The more things change.. the more they stay the same." he quips. "I guess you could say I do the same thing so.. be careful. Gotham doesn't seem to have changed much since I left." He gives her the room to mount her bike, and he actually blushes a little bit when she grins at him.. a rare thing for him to do. "I.. I will do that." he says and holds up his bad hand again, this time holding a wallet that doesn't look like something he would carry himself. In fact, it's died the same color as Thugly's jacket. "But Riverdale back there will be buying." he says, looking oh so innocent.
From her bike, Selina looked over at the man who was brandishing the wallet and she smirked softly while she situated her helmet. "Be careful now..." She tells him. "You may not have been dead afterall all these years, but that doesn't mean you won't end up there anyway." She flashed him a grin and then put her helmet on over her head and started her bike up to head off.
Nolan Voight cannot stop grinning as she gives him a warning and then heads off... As she recedes down the street he slips the wallet back into his pocket. "Nope.. /I'm/ not dead. But /the/ dead, well, they still keep an eye on me." he turns to that empty spot beside him and rolls his eyes at something the nothing in that empty spot says. "No.. No remarks. She's a /friend/. You will tell the others to keep an eye out for her.. /On/ her. And If you see her in danger come /get/ me..." he pauses as those eyes narrow more on that empty spot.
"Why? Because I watch my own."