Small mercies died fast when the world did. He'd gotten good at this. The sink bath, the efficiency of it. Soap rationed down to a sliver barely worth holding, worked into a lather across his forearms, the back of his neck, the places that mattered. The food court bathroom wasn't ideal. The fluorescent above the third stall had been flickering since Tuesday and the smell never quite left no matter how much bleach someone had once dumped on the tile but it was quiet. That was the thing about the food court bathroom at this hour. Nobody came here when the gym showers were running.
Nobody, apparently, except him. And now whoever that was in the doorway. Mickey's hands stilled on the edge of the sink. He watched the entrance in the mirror: that fractured piece of reflective silver, cracked diagonal at the corner like someone had punched it and thought better of finishing the job. His jaw tightened, just slightly. A habit. A tell he'd spent three weeks ironing out of himself and still hadn't managed. He turned before they fully crossed the threshold.
Not fast. Not guilty fast. Just… aware. The kind of turn that said I heard you coming and I'm not surprised rather than I was hoping you wouldn't. There was a difference, and Mickey had learned to live in that difference. His damp hair curled at the ends where he hadn't dried it properly. The fresh shirt lifted from the abandoned clothing store two storefronts down, charcoal grey, barely a size too big was still balled up on the counter beside him, and he made no move to grab it. Reaching for it would look like covering something up. Like he had something to cover up. He didn't. Not about the shirt, anyway.
The shirt was fine. Nobody had claimed the shirt. Nobody had a name on those shelves. That was just… resource allocation. A sensible thing. The kind of thing a reasonable person did when they needed a clean change of clothes and their last one had gotten, he pushed the thought down, dirty. The other thing. The rations thing. The missing protein bars that people had started muttering about in the way people muttered before they started accusing: that wasn't him. He'd said as much. To himself, mostly, since nobody had leveled it at him directly yet, but the sideways looks had started and Mickey had spent enough of his life on the receiving end of sideways looks to know exactly what they meant and precisely how fast they curdled into something worse. It wasn't him.
It was just that the someone responsible for it was small, and quick, and had four legs, and an absolutely catastrophic understanding of the concept of communal property, and was, unfortunately, entirely his problem. He leaned back against the sink, arms loose at his sides, and let the silence sit for exactly one second before he broke it. "Gym's got a line." His accent was faint, not gone, just worn smooth at the edges, and his voice carried the particular easiness of someone who had never, in their life, been caught doing anything. Even when they had.
Brown eyes tracked the doorway, patient. Somewhere deeper in the mall, past the bathroom tile and the fountain and the east entrance, something small and clever was probably getting into something it absolutely should not be getting into, and Mickey was doing the thing he always did: stand very still and project the particular energy of a man with nothing on his conscience while quietly calculating how bad the damage would be when he got back. Not if. When. "You need the sink, I'm almost done."
