in a few weeks, i will get time —

[evite]

WHO: daisy johnson & various.
WHERE: throughout the city.
WHEN: mid to late october.
WHAT: closed starters for ooc may.
NOTES OR WARNINGS: tbd.

[ closed starters in comments. leave your own, or hit me up for something @ semicolons / quake#2740 if you prefer! ]

Comments

MURDER IS FUN //

[evite]

WHO: daisy johnson, takeshi kovacs, bystanders.
WHERE: morningstar safehouse.
WHEN: approx oct 20.
WHAT: a murder attempt.
NOTES OR WARNINGS: rated r for violence, foul language, and possible lewd behavior.

[ by now, most of the safehouse residents have found their way back into the city limits of new amsterdam. some have moved over to the new digs under instruction of markus and strange, helping to get settled or just hoping to get first dibs. not kovacs, though. she's asked around, and word is, he's piled himself into a cot sometime after dawn, smelling strongly of cheap liquor and stumbling his way into quick, desperate sleep.

the kind of sleep that was sure to leave him hungover and groggy in the morning. exactly what he deserves, if daisy has anything to say about it, and while her pride might normally hope that a combat opponent wasn't in a drunken stupor, she's not going to complain today.

no, she's just going to storm in, on her last day of approved leave from work, boots stomping an echo down the floor of the safehouse as she stalks through the beds. this late in the morning, most are empty — except his. it's too easy to find him, splayed out in the bed like a mess, and even easier to aim her foot squarely into the side of the bedframe for a nasty wake-up call. the cot squeaks, sliding sharply from impact, and thumps into the nearby wall. ]

Get up.

[ there's fire in her eyes and a growl in her voice. she's not fucking around. ]

I said, get up.

[resleeves]

[ he'd planned on sleeping for at least half the day. that's what one did after they drank their night away and needed to recharge. people tended to leave him alone because of who he was and how pissy he got if someone did try and wake him.

so, he's almost impressed to hear someone stomp into his room. maybe if he ignores them they'll go away. but that doesn't happen. no, what happens is whoever's there kicks his bed into a wall, jarring him enough to instantly ignite his anger.

it takes him one second longer to realize that the voice is vaguely familiar. someone he's talked to before. but it could have been his best fucking pal there and he wouldn't just listen so blindly. ]

Sorry, sweetheart. You want my attention, you can just climb in here with me.

[ there was plenty of room. just tuck yourself right in against him and they could cuddle. ]

I'm fine where I am.

[evite]

I didn't ask.

[ he's a lazy, drunken idiot — but that works out in her favor, really, because it makes it that much easier to wrap a hand around his upper arm and yank him out of bed, hard enough that he tumbles out from between the sheets, hard enough to leave him splayed out facedown on the grimy tile floor.

better him than her. ]

Get up, asshole.

[ consider yourself lucky she's not just stomping on your head with her boots, kovacs. because while part of her thinks he might deserve that, but she's not here to outright murder him. yet. ]

What's your fucking problem, huh? You had to go pick on some kid half your size who couldn't defend himself?

[resleeves]

[ it's not the first time he's been face down on a dirty fucking floor but he's still pissed. he stays there for a second, laughing at the reason this is happening before shoving himself up onto his knees and grinning madly at her. ]

Yeah, that's exactly what I had to do. Fuck him.

[ forgive him, prompto, he doesn't mean that. ]

And you're here to what? Defend his honor? Be his bodyguard? What a fucking joke. [ he's still feeling the edges of drunkness so getting to his feet happens but it's slower than it should be. ]

He shouldn't have gotten in my way. And now, you've gone and made that same fucking mistake. [ disturb his fucking sleep at your own risk. ]

[evite]

What are you going to do, fight me? You can't even stand up.

[ he's slurring his words and swaying. if she wasn't so mad at him for being such a grade-a douchebag after she went out of her way to help bring him back to the safehouse when he'd arrived, she might just think that was suffering enough. but it's not.

he'd hurt prompto badly enough that he'd sought out illya, of all people, and badly enough that the latter had thought it necessary to tell her. that wasn't something she was just going to let go. besides, what if he got away with it this time, and then went after someone else and really hurt them? what if his drunken idiocy killed somebody?

no. he needed to be taught a lesson. ]

You shouldn't fight kids. [ because if you do, you might just get an elbow to the nose. you're welcome. ] Dick.

[resleeves]

Does he know you're calling him a kid?

[ that wasn't very nice, daisy. prompto's feelings might get hurt just like his fucking nose. pain explodes behind his eyes and he staggers back, cursing and hoping to god she hadn't broken it. he'd broken that nose too many times.

the blow does clear his senses a bit and he finally climbs to his feet, glaring in her direction. ]

I don't need to be able to stand up to fucking fight you. [ he was bigger and well trained which meant, in the close confines of the room, being drunk wasn't that much of a disadvantage. kovacs moves forward, pulling his hands up and then just trying to use his strength to shove her backwards. ]

[evite]

[ she hopes it broke. she hopes it broke and that she'll delay him getting medical treatment just long enough that they won't be able to set it perfectly. she hopes he'll have to look in the mirror and think about what he's done!!! ]

Do you know you're pathetic?

[ his hands reach out to shove, but daisy's quick (and sober) — she ducks when he pushes, and then steps in to land a blow against his stomach, hard and quick and firm. hopefully enough to make him queasy, if not enough to knock him on his ass. ]

You need to not suck, though.

[resleeves]

[ it doesn't knock him on his ass but it sure does hurt. maybe he'll even puke a little later but right now, he's just pissed and his instincts kick in. she has to get close to get low so his hand shoots out, sending a sharp jab to her chin to try and knock her back.

he doesn't hold back because she's a woman. fuck her and fuck this whole situation. he throws one punch and then another, crowding into her personal space because she's quick but he's bound to land at least one punch that's going to jar her. ]

[evite]

[ daisy's been hit in the face before. she'll get hit in the face again. she hears may in her head — don't reel back, you'll break your neck. lean into it. — and does her best to follow through, head tipping forward despite the pain so that her eyes can glare daggers into his sternum.

she might have been angry before, protective and defensive of someone she considered a little brother, but now she's pissed. he's hit her in the face, and it lights up a red ball of fury inside her head that obscures any rational thought, anything beyond pure training and vicious growling danger.

he hit and flays and shoves forward, and daisy does her best to dodge. occasionally, his fist makes contact; her side, her shoulder, but it's not enough. she shoves off a wall and barrels into him, knocking him into the nearby cot, enough of a surprise where she can clamber up over him.

if she wasn't so furious, if her fists weren't repeatedly returning the favor right back into his face, if she wasn't hissing obscenities at him, it might be sexy. it's not, though. it's vicious and aggressive and relentless, and she's going to knock him out or die trying. ]

[resleeves]

[ his face is going to look like someone ran over him with a fucking steamroller if he doesn't do something. he manages to throw up his hands to block a few blows and even manages to return the favor, landing a few punches to her stomach and the sides of her face but that doesn't seem to stop her.

he knows what will though. the next time she throws a punch, he catches her arm and he squeezes, letting his power activate as soon as skin touches skin. whatever pain, whatever injury she's currently dealing with leeches away from her and into him, instilling him with more power and energy and taking it away from her.

it's what she fucking deserves, coming in here when he'd been asleep to attack him. self fucking defense. eat shit, daisy. ]

[evite]

[ the pain sears through her body, multiplying with every second; in its wake, she can barely breathe, can hardly keep her head up to fight the nausea it pulls — it's familiar, like a nightmare brought to life, her mother's hands on her face replaced by a man's hand wrapped tight around her arm, burning all the same.

she can't fight him off. she's too weak, too nauseous, too in pain to do anything but yell and cry out from the overwhelming waves of it all — but she can, as it turns out, still do something. if she squeezes her eyes shut, if she focuses, she can call out to the metal of a nearby bedframe, summon it to her with pure need and desperation. it takes more energy than she thinks she even has, but eventually, as her skin pales to ash, her palm collides with cold metal. ]

You bitch, [ is all the heads up he gets (irony) before her arm jerks upwards, slamming the post hard into the back of his skull, the contact sharp enough that it leaves him conked out, unconscious, falling limp back into the bed and then down onto the floor with a loud thump.

as for daisy, it's a miracle to be able to open the door and stumble out, though she doesn't make it very far on her own. ]

[batricide]

[ Angry as he is, reclusive as he wants to be, Damian can't put his own personal annoyances above the need to be prepared. He always takes the time to swing by the safehouse to ensure that things are properly stocked up. He always swings by after 'work' with a handful of clothes he'd grabbed from secondhand stores and food bought in bulk.

He isn't expecting to find an utter shitshow waiting for him. The box of things drops. An unconscious man on the ground, Johnson not looking much better. Every muscle goes rigid. Were they attacked? Were people dead - the place is fucking empty, was he too late? What the hell happened here?

He focuses his attention on her, dropping down to a knee - hands hovering, not sure how badly she's hurt or where to touch. ]

Daisy? Can you hear me?

[evite]

[ she's conscious, but barely. her whole body's weak, like the life's been sucked out of it. the only comfort is daisy's own knowledge that this feeling will pass, if she can only get to that point; near-death isn't death itself, and after rest, she knows she'll feel more like herself. the color might take a day or so to come back to her skin, but that's alright. she's not that vain.

she hears damian approach, but she's too exhausted to warn him off; the tip up of her head is slow, clearly a motion that takes effort. ]

I'm not deaf, Hafid. [ she sounds like she's aged eighty years with that croak in her voice. ] Can you help me up? I need to go home.

[ yeah, she's definitely not going to be able to do that on her own. ]

CLICK CLACK BOOM //

[evite]

WHO: daisy johnson, johnny jaqobis.
WHERE: daisy's new apartment in the financial district.
WHEN: late october, a weekend post-intro log but prior to halloween
WHAT: a hacker sleepover.
NOTES OR WARNINGS: rated pg-13 for stupid idiots with bad tongues.

[ she invites him over. it's just practical, really; she knows how he lives, in that tiny apartment shared with someone he knows from home, and more importantly, she knows there's no space. plus, she's kind of proud of her new digs. might as well put them to good use.

they head over after work — or, more specifically, after making a few pitstops for an absurd amount of energy drinks, garbage snacks, and chinese takeout sans the bugs. daisy gets him added to the security list for the weekend, making polite small talk with the desk staff who seem to already know her by name, and then they head up in the elevator an absurd number of floors. honestly, it's bougie as hell, and though daisy certainly dresses the part for work in her smart blazer and pantsuit combos, she doesn't scream establishment rich. not like the people who come and go through the elevators, the ones who shoot questioning looks at the two of them. she's sure they have questions. johnny is the third man in as many weeks as she's brought to her apartment, after all.

but, eventually, they get there — "there" being through the double doors and into the swank two-bedroom penthouse daisy now calls home, where four people live on absurdly cheap rent and enjoy floor-to-ceiling glass views of the new amsterdam financial sector. she drops the supplies on the kitchen counters, and makes a sprawling gesture towards the living space. ]

Make yourself at home.

https://media.giphy.com/media/13AN8X7jBIm15m/giphy.gif

[stabilis]

[ It is bougie as hell. It's the kind of high class he only steps foot in because of a job, or because of awkward family reunions. The latter is the kind of déjà vu that has teeth, memories that are complicated at best. But complicated he can do, and it's easy enough to wring nostalgia and fondness out of the wreckage when he's got good company.

Johnny drops a few bags on the counter, giving the open plan a scrolling look. ] Not bad for a tech monkey.

[ He retrieves a slightly less caffienated drink from the bags — gotta pace yourself — popping the lid. ] You know, where I come from real hackers have bad tattoos, bad BO and hoarding disorders.

[ real, said like """"""real"""""" ]

[evite]

[ the second her hands are free, daisy's all too eager to drag off the tapered black blazer, draping it over the back of a chair at the breakfast bar. illya will probably whine later that she's just going to crease the fabric — but she doesn't care. she's lazy. it's a habit.

as for the rest of her work get up, that'll have to wait a moment. ]

Are you trying to tell me you think I smell nice? That's so sweet. [ give her a can, please, she's had a Long Day. ] I'm gonna change, though, and then we can get started. Feel free to throw a screen up whenever — the wall's good for that.

[ and then #bye, because she has a whole closet to go pull her lazy day uniform out of. normally, she'd be a 'home is where the pants aren't' kind of girl, but she and johnny are only work married... so she'll wear pants for him. this time, anyway. an oversized sweater (probably not her own) and a pair of yoga pants is decidedly better than the business not-so-casual she'd worn to work this morning. ]

[stabilis]

[ Johnny grins and unpacks another can, ever helpful, taking a pull from his as she retreats to get changed. He burns a few seconds snooping, but it isn't overtly prying — just a quick tour of the place, scoping out the layout and whatever decoration they have or haven't bothered with.

When he gets to the couch, he puts the drinks on the coffee table and sits back, throwing a screen onto the opposite wall.

The tech isn't completely new. Above his pay grade, generally; he's still used to tactile keys or at least touch screens, but he's been here long enough to know his way around. It isn't quite as advanced as a straight-up hackmod — he isn't plugged in, not really. But there's no lag, and it doesn't take long to get through the stock VPN and proxy maneuvers to cover their tracks.

Daisy will get pinged with an invite the second she walks back in, and she'll see a spread of familiar screens — a few scrawls of different back-end data, things they've mined from the office, the Morningstar snitch form. And his boots on the coffee table, obviously. ]

[evite]

[ there isn't much by way of decoration. the apartment came fully furnished in a style daisy's referred to as futuristic better homes and gardens chic — clean lines, classic color palettes of creams and grays and woodsy colors, nothing too avant garde or trendy. the only additions are jyn's steadily growing collection of house plants, initially confined to her balcony space and then slowly but surely expanding into nooks and crannies around the apartment.

among others, there's a tall leafy thing in the living room on either side of the float wall, an herb planter in the kitchen, and what look suspiciously like baby cacti in hanging planter bulbs along the floor-to-ceiling windows. in short: jyn has a problem. ]

You know, if you scuff that coffee table, I'm not responsible for the Russian beatdown you're gonna get.

[ but she doesn't nudge him to move his boots, either, when she flops down onto the couch beside him, because she doesn't personally care. she lived in a van, okay, the whole concept of a coffee table is bougie and ridiculous.

after a beat or two of quasi-careful e-rustling through johnny's data collections, daisy begins dropping her own notes onto the shared desktop. she's been running data on the morningstar agents impacted by the una raid, and while there's not much left on their public personas (if anything at all), there's oddly dated flags and questionable links between the names that don't make sense. dropped onto the desktop, too, is daisy's carefully coded reference sheet: members of morningstar impacted by the una raid, their public affiliations, compared to members not impacted. a bolded name (necco wafers, bad code for nico) has question marks and "full of preservatives" listed beside it. why was nico, a member of preserve, coming up roses?

there were a lot of questions, and daisy had a feeling most of those would be answered by the form itself. ]

What do you think?

[stabilis]

[ He moves his boots off the coffee table when she sits down anyway, because he's polite. Ish. But mostly because he wants to sit forward to reach his drink and get a better view of the screens while Daisy works, dropping his own homework in alongside hers — less on Morningstar and more on the random IDs caught in the crossfire, but backing up the same trends.

Or not trends, which is kind of the problem. ]

I think it's bullshit. [ Said plainly, until he realizes it sounds more like a complaint than an answer and gives her a quick, chagrined look. ] I mean— on purpose bullshit.

[ He scrolls a bit, pulling up some of the suspected flags and the data that's supposed to correlate. Some does; some seems to connect to nothing, and some doesn't even pass go — everything tied to Nico, for one. ] Or really shitty algorithms.

[ Always a possibility, but not very likely. Not even the mistakes seem consistent. ]

[evite]

[ so the data's garbage. the question is less what they're getting and rather why it's there at all. a sort of a secondary chart, this one sorted by flag categories, highlights the how. ]

I don't get how these people all buying some off brand energy drinks and joining a vegetable co-op makes them enemies of the state. I know they were — [ if you buy the una anti-morningstar hype ] — but this isn't exactly proof.

[ which begs the question... ]

It's either the UN has no idea what actually makes someone dangerous, or somebody's trying to fuck up the results on purpose.

[stabilis]

My vote's on the second one. Otherwise they'd at least still be flagging, [ a short pause, full of judgment ] "Necco Wafers"?

[ That is a terrible code name. But also he has never seen necco wafers in his life, so that isn't helping. ]

Do you think Morningstar's already got safeguards?

[ Is this a thought that shouldn't occurred to him previously? Probably. He really isn't used to being on the B team. ]

[evite]

They're a candy, [ she offers by way of somewhat unnecessary explanation, ] Or they were. They tasted like shit, though, so they probably didn't last into the future.

[ kit kats sure as hell didn't, so there better not be any justice for the fake ass cardboard garbage that was necco wafers. ]

It's possible. [ the morningstar thing. daisy pulls up a screen of the morningstar text network, filters it for posts made by actual morningstar agents (as opposed to the displaced), and stops on one of el's messages. ] I mean, we already have ID tech wiz-person hiding in the shadows. It's not that much of a stretch to consider they've got a whole squad back there doing god knows what with the tech.

[ which! is annoying! because daisy is also not used to being on the "we don't get all the info" b-team. ]

You think Peggy and Fitz got any of that info when Gaby handed over the Morningstar reins?

[stabilis]

[ Johnny's used to being the only team, honestly, so big same. ]

I think that's a good question for Peggy and Fitz, but I'm guessing "unsure". They'd probably give us a heads-up if they knew someone was already digging.

[ So either they don't know, or they just haven't gotten to that particular memo yet. There's probably a lot of learning on the go. Johnny picks up his drink, pauses, gives her a sidelong look. ]

But we should figure out who it is, right? In case they're evil.

[ definitely not because this person is clearly a better hacker than both of them and it's essential for their Hacker Pride. or because both, maybe. ]

[evite]

Yeah, obviously. Because they're super evil.

[ it's a good excuse as any, and one that launches the two of them into comparative silence — still occasional dry quips or huffs, but comparatively speaking, it's basically silence — as they begin to compile code to pull apart the form and its directional deliveries.

who made it, who's got access, where the information is going, what it looks like when it gets there — these and a dozen other relevant queries are each answered by a different packet of code, each requiring time to zip, download, fulfill function, and then compile on the far end of the night. it's the sort of work that takes an hour or two to set up and then twelve to sixteen to hurry up and wait for...

... which, naturally, leaves them afterwards spinning in their metaphorical desk chairs, laps piled with garbage snacks, desperate to kill time. now, the holoscreen between them is less busy desktop and more full screen television on the far wall, some futuristic comedy nonsense playing at low volume. ]

So. [ drawled out as daisy drapes herself back into the couch, armed with a freshly topped off fizzy drink of some variety. ] What do you think?

[ of the digs, of her Life, you know. open to criticism, one time offer. ]

[stabilis]

[ The question's open-ended enough that he raises his brows, bemused, and for half a second it looks like he's working how to soften his critique. ]

It's— you know. Bougie. [ This isn't, objectively, a bad thing. Not the kind of thing he's usually drawn to — because rich people are the worst, and stability's obviously very boring — but the comment isn't that heavy. Johnny sinks back into the couch and gives her an expectant look, obviously on-board with the 'talking about feelings or whatever' lane change. ]

Seriously, it's nice. You know Dutch and I are still taking turns on the couch?

[ Could they afford a bigger place? Probably. Do they care that much? Absolutely not. ]

Is the catalog aesthetic yours or his? Or did it just come with the keys.