aviary | CLOSED | prompt eight

[ She frowns. (She usually does.) ]

Yeah? An' I bet you feel real fuckin' stupid right about now.

[ (It's a cute expression, really, though he knows to keep that comment to himself.) ]

I d'no. It's the kind of thing that makes you bitter, too, yeah?

[ Smart boy.

She gives him a little shove (pulling pigtails, playbites). ]

Fuck 'f I know. [ Polly Q, bitter? Never. ]

[ He falls back a few steps with a slight oof, though in an instant he's reclaimed that ground. ]

Fuckin' invincible, aren't you?

[ An endearment more than a dare or a come-on, though it comes off as the latter. ]

[ How does that old playground saying go? (Polly doesn't know cause the Academy took them from her, those little girl, playground days.) I am rubber, you are glue. Truer words have never been spoken about Barry Weiss, she thinks.

She flashes him the finger, bares her teeth and growls. ]

Better'n you, flash.

[ (No, there's no one to whom the saying better applies. But the thing about rubber is that it can snap if stretched too far, and when all is said and done, despite all the teeth and all the shit he's dealt with through his sorry excuse for a life, all it takes is two cops to snap the Blitz.)

Almost instantaneously, he bats her hand away, scowling and then grinning just a split second later. (Too much to do, too little time; ever the restless child's conundrum.) ]

Fuck you, y' cunt.

[ She's not in the country when life — with all of its ins and outs, with all of its bitter ironies — finally catches up with Barry Weiss. When she gets back from her bloody tour of eastern Europe, it's to the tune of text messages that never get answered and phone calls that go straight to voicemail. When Polly Q goes sniffing around the usual dives, nobody will answer her; they all pretend they don't know her, or act like they've never heard the name Barry or never once knew the boy with the crooked smile and sweet-rotten teeth. His apartment is empty; his landlord won't return her calls. And that's when all of Polly's insecurities catch up with her. (Barry, you fuck, couldn't you have said bye?)

They haven't got much time left on the clock, but neither of them know that. (Three months, twelve days.) He bats and she bites, teeth snapping on thin air. ]

G'home an' yank to it. Y've got better chances.

[ What makes Barry Weiss good, as the Blitz, is that he isn't afraid to die. A whole life spent running with nothing back at his flat but the bare essentials, and it isn't as though he's got a lot to live for except the pump of adrenaline through his veins and a cheap shot at getting famous.

But he is afraid, in the last few minutes that he has. Afraid, because not being afraid of dying isn't the same thing as wanting to, and because there's a girl with bleached blonde hair not waiting for him — he'd never play it that way — but out there, and he knows better than most about the insecurities that come along with too many teeth, knows she isn't ever going to figure out what happened to him.

Three months, twelve days, and he gets shot on a London rooftop, and no one's the wiser for it. ]

Th' fuck d'you know about my chances?

[ There aren't any boys at the Academy. Just girls, even though there's a good share of them who're just as ballsy and as brash (only with tits). Polly Q's one of them, which means she likes talk — which means, at the end of the day, that she's ultimately harmless. Sure, names can sting and bites can leave a mark, but it's never anything worse than a skin-deep flaw. Other girls, nasty girls, do more than pull hair. They break hearts, they ruin lives, they take and they take and they take. Polly Q isn't like those girls because she doesn't know how that works, because she isn't selfish enough. (What she's good at is taunt, taunt, taunt and nobody gets it worse than Barry fucking Weiss.)

She hooks her fingers in the beltloops of her jeans and tugs down roughly, hard enough to expose the very top of her panties. Neon yellow and blue tiger stripe wink out at Barry as she makes a sneering sort of noise at him. ]

Know they're absolute shit right now, champ. An' ain't a goddamn thing you can do 'bout it.

[ If pressed, he couldn't really tell you why he loves her. Maybe it's because of that bite, maybe it's because she's fucking fit, maybe it's because she can give as good as she gets, maybe it's because she isn't selfish enough (and as stupid as some think he is, Barry isn't the dullest crayon in the box).

Whatever it is, it isn't the sort of thing he's ever tried to quantify, or to really stop to think over.

He doesn't really stop to think now, either, when he reaches out to grab at her wrists, staying his ground instead of running away. ]

Isn't, blondie. Not ain't.

CLOSED | prompt eight | RUIN

POLLY Q | the academy

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