chaos !

There was always something about Kaiden that put Luca right on edge. Maybe it was because of the gang alliance, maybe it was because Luca knew Kaiden could use any information he gave against him. Maybe it was just the spelling of his name that fucked him up. Either way, the unease seemed to put him a little more… off center than normal.  “I’m not entirely sure, actually,” Luca replied, grabbing a dirty beer glass from the bar to clean. “I’ve yet to find a misdemeanor horrible enough for them to fire me, so I guess there’s that.” He flashed a grin and shrugged,  sarcasm bleeding into his voice. “Plus, I get to deal with lovely people such as yourself.”

Kaiden wouldn’t particularly describe their so-called ‘unspoken alliance’ with the Renegades as one of his favorite things. He understood that the Renegades had what they needed, and that the Delights had what the Renegades needed, but that didn’t mean that Kai had to be happy about it. No one was his enemy, sure, but nobody was his friend, either. With that being said, looking across the bar at the Renegade, Kaiden found a little bit of (perhaps unfair) irritation growing in him. “Why do you still have this job, exactly?”

“Did you see that, too, or am I tripping balls?” While every night in the City of Lights was filled with unusual sights and sounds, Kaiden was nearly positive that he wasn’t high. He wasn’t voluntarily high, to say the least, so, if he was high, and hallucinating things that vivid, he had a whole separate issue on his plate. Best case scenario, that was real, and he and the kid he was next to could figure out where to go from here.

a nice night for a drink? sure. every night was a nice night for a drink in poet’s opinion. but agreement? boring. and poet was no boring bitch. “no,” he said easily, despite the drink in his hand. almost to accent the contradiction in his words, he lifted his glass purposefully to his lips and took a sip. he kept his eyes trained on the violent delight, managing to look both calm and on edge, which was perhaps his main talent, if anything poet did could be considered a talent. “you come all the way out here to talk about neon, man? seems like that could have been sent in a text.” 

What was the most harmless intrusive thought you had? 

For Nine, it was always, always, ‘I could just smoke that person’s cigarette,’ or occasionally its cousin, ‘I could just take a sip from that drink.’ Chalk it up to old habits dying hard, maybe—you grew up eating the leftovers off somebody else’s abandoned plate, then you never stopped looking for aways to skim just a little off the top, just enough to warm your belly but not enough for anyone to noticed. But Nine was pretty sure she just had some kind of fixation on the absolute cultural taboo it was to, like, fuckin’ latch your mouth onto a complete stranger’s cigarette and just breathe. But she could do it. And that was where her mind went when Kaiden started talking after she’d ordered her bourbon (neat). I could just smoke that guy’s cigarette.

“Is it? A nice night, I mean,” she asked, and cocked her head like she really had to think about this for a minute. Around Nine’s right eye was the red rim of what would become a shiner tomorrow, flecked with the darker spots of broken blood vessels underneath her skin—oh, you know, Nine Granville got herself decked in the face again; it happens. “Yeah, sure, I guess it’s an okay night. I got a killer fuckin’ headache, though, dude, does anybody have, I dunno, an aspirin?” 

Looking over at the person sitting beside him, Kaiden tilted his head slightly. Giving her a once-over, it was pretty easy for him to tell that there was a black eye forming around her right eye. “Who decked you?” He asked, gesturing with the hand that was holding his drink. He’d been punched in the face before - not one of his fondest memories, to say the least. That was a question that he asked out of sympathy. Maybe later, he’d find out what she did in order to get punched. 

It was one of those nights - Kaiden was out on the town, per se, keeping an ear to the ground, doing his job in the most menial way. The most fun he’d be having that night came from a drink in his hand and a cigarette between his fingers. There was something comforting about the thought of a cigarette; there had been numerous advancements in technology over the past century, but the cigarettes remained the same. 

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                    O’HARA, KAIDEN | VIOLENT DELIGHTS