resistant to stimulus

      It may have sounded harsh but Nadia wasn’t smart enough to hack, white collar crime wasn’t exactly anything that was available to her. Instead she snuck around, pickpocketed, did whatever it took to live. People didn’t get it, kids like her         they didn’t have much of a shot at anything. Despite her voracious appetite for education, school was out of her reach. All roads led back to Connecticut, and she would be damned if she let that happen.     “Well       “ Her face contorts slightly, and it’s obvious she doesn’t want anyone to get hurt from it. Nadia throws the wallet in her hand and catches it a few times. She’s all angles, and her once full cheeks are slowly becoming gaunt, like… Whatever kid was left was being drained from her, “I mean five buck won’t make that big of a difference?” She pauses, she doesn’t want them to become a squatter like her, forced to live in abandoned apartments.    “You don’t get it.”

✘     “You’re right. I don’t.” He wouldn’t understand what it was like to steal. To feel like it was a necessity to steal. Although he lived with merciless penny-pinchers, he’d never been wanting for basic necessities, had never felt he had to break the law just to get by. He had been profoundly blessed in that regard.

✘     But he did know what it was like to be desperate. And desperation drives people to do terrible, terrible things. Things God won’t ever forgive him for. Chesney repressed a shudder as he made his cautious approach. “Just give me the wallet and I’ll get it back to its owner.” He extended one hand, fingers outstretched, palm open. Waiting and expectant. “I’ll.. I’ll post flyers or something.” God, It felt like he was demanding something of a child.

     She indeed was startled, Nadia actually thinking for a moment she’d gotten away with it. Green eyes watched him cautiously as she let out a soft breath. The teenager doesn’t know whether to respond or not. She doesn’t run, doesn’t even FLINCH though she should be scared, all things considered.              “   It ain’t nice to starve either,” Nadia retorted with a shrug, looks like she had to find a different mark; that this one was as observant as she was, “Don’t s’pose you’d know anything about that though.”

✘    He didn’t know what to make of this girl. She seemed so bizarrely out of place, from his perspective--he hadn’t heard of someone actually picking pockets in the modern age. Moreso good, old-fashioned mugging and murder. But perhaps that was Quantico getting to him. Hard to remember that small crimes exist when you’re preparing to stop the big ones.

✘    “ I didn’t say anything odd just now, did I? “

✘     He wrung his hands together, over and over and over, fingers catching on the fraying ends of days-old bandaids and pulling them back from old scabs. Worry read in his expression like LED lighting on an overpass, flashing warnings in glitching, faded letters that are too glitched to read. Chesney was very, very bad at hiding his emotions, but he was well versed in hiding the source--his mother played sane for years before dementia took her. He knew all the tricks.

✘     And yet he was still scared to death. Scared because he didn’t remember the last few minutes, because he knew that lapses in memory could also be lapses in filters, because he could have said or done something horrible in just those short moments and ruined everything. 

✘     But, judging by the lack of disgust or horror in the others’ face, he supposed he was in the clear. He just needed some form of verbal confirmation. Something to ease his nerves so he wasn’t relying solely on assumption. The last time he did that, he threw up dog food the day after. No one he knows even owns a dog.