#*threads.

     “Okay, so, I had a small collection of wedding rings that I’d found. Had. I’m not accusing you of anything, more like, asking,” Quentin said, rubbing some sleeplessness from the corner of his eye. It wasn’t that he needed all the rings, necessarily, as keys were never his preferred item to hang onto. But Ace had been sitting on some good first-aid kits, and Quentin had wanted to make a trade---or at least a bet. Ace certainly wasn’t planning on doing anything with those first-aid kits, but Quentin was.

El did not know what she was getting herself into. Yun-jin had been manager to the very man El was insistent upon, and even before the bloodshed, she’d been apprehensive to any strangers trying to get too close. Many, many young girls have tried, filled with infatuation and idolization, some even managing to circumnavigate the protection around Ji-woon to certain extents. Most were harmless, charmed by an Apollo on stage. He was a deified effigy taken place in their mind, birthing unrealistic dream after unrealistic dream, something that would eventually have to be forcefully aborted by indirect rejection or slowly smothered by common sense. 

Some, however, were more concerning, managing to slide through security and get too close. Rarely had one ever gotten as far as to touch him. Yun-jin was just as vigilant as any security guard. But she had seen the lengths some have gone and how much further they were willing to go. El was certainly not one of those girls, but she was a girl with a tremendously scary gift. And Ji-woon was a tremendously scary man.

“He kills. Horribly, brutally, painfully. I don’t know if he has an...age limit...but I wouldn’t go near him either way,” Yun-jin wasn’t one to normally extend concern for another. Survival of the fittest and all else around it. But El was young, and Yun-jin was aggravatingly tugging at memories of her own sister. She crossed her legs and looked El straight in the eye.

   “You can’t trust a dangerous man.”

     They had started wandering together for separate reasons: Quentin, to chase off boredom, and Jake, possibly, to go scavenging. With those innocuous goals in mind, Quentin usually would not have cared where they ended up. But Badham always snuck up on him like a bad scare. A coalescence of bad memories and dilapidation, carrying an undertow of blood and smoke smothered barely by the crisp pine, it almost looked like a normal neighborhood when outside of a trial. As they stood at the end of the street, with Jake to his left and his own house to the right, Quentin stuck his hands in his pockets and sighed.

She stalked out to the front of the seats, gazing up at the stage. Shows upon shows performed, from amateurs to professionals, from those she handcrafted into pure showstoppers and to those whom she allowed to stray into bloodshed. 

Yun-jin collapsed into one of the front row seats. She didn’t even think to look if it was the same one from that night. In that brief moment, it did not matter, not when she was alone, surrounded by her seething memories. Her forehead fell against her palm, elbow on the armrest, and rubbed her temple with her thumb. Silver-lilac hair fell in place morosely before her, and she watched the flicker of technicolor spotlights wobble across the shine of her shoes. She thought coming here would help her stand straight again, to be confident in the direction she went and how she directed others, to find peace and move on. But the screaming and the blood and the disembodied, abject fear came tunneling back. She was hollowed out, suddenly, like an empty grave in her ribcage, her heart and guilt waiting to be buried but she lost the shovel and the coffin to do so and has only now acknowledged it.

   “Lord...” Yun-jin muttered. 

How was she to keep going like this? Now she was stuck in an eternal nightlife of death and dying, dying and death, with the only piece of familiarity to cling to was the very face she never wanted to see again. Him. What she thought they had, long ago, was a mutualistic partnership of ambition and ruthless work--them, tirelessly in sync. He knew almost everything about her. She thought she knew almost everything about him. All of that, severed and corrupted, but not gone, not as long as she suffered in this hell.

   “Damn,” she hissed, “damn you, Ji-woon...”

Then she straightened herself up in the chair. Fixed the color of her coat, straightened her skirt out, and tucked her hair behind her ears. She’d find the bathrooms where they’d always been and properly put all back into place. And then she’d find a way out. She would not suffer for her self-pity for any longer.

So Quentin set out for Ormond, finally committing to something he’s wanted for a while.

Quentin circumnavigated the ski lodge until he found the broken maw of the north wall, creeping inside over broken wood and snow slick floorboards. Snowflakes were catching in his hair and melting into his eyes, no matter how often he tried to wipe them away. He’s yet to see any of the actual Legion members, but he kept himself low and close the wall regardless. After all, no killer was the type to take kindly to thieves.

His eyes swept for what he came here for. If he couldn’t find it, then he’d just swipe some of the magazines and leave. Quentin wouldn’t push his luck.

But that wouldn’t be necessary. What he wanted, he found: abandoned on one of the couches encircling the firepit was a mixtape in an archaic Walkman. Quentin quietly hurried over to it, scooping it up. He could see a nice scribbled on the tape: JULIE. So it belonged to one of the girls. Which one, he couldn’t tell, and at the moment, couldn’t really care. Whatever music found on the tape, it didn’t matter, as music was music. An actual recording and not just a lonely guitar in the woods, as talented Kate was.

Breathing a self-satisfied sigh of relief, he finally turned to leave, pocketing the device.

This being Jamison Fawkes--sans Mako, enough of a rarity to raise brows--smoking on the back door of the Overwatch London safehouse, dragging some sort of sack and glittering in gold and rubies. Angela heard the news spring to life behind her, suddenly piercing her half-sleeped dazed. Explosion. Museum. Royal Jewels Collection. Missing suspect. Angela took a long deep breath. An exhausted smoker’s breath: strong inhale through the mouth, even stronger exhale through the nose. 

   “Jamison,” Angela said carefully, “what did you do?”

     “Hey, man, you doing okay?” Quentin carefully sat next to Minjun, keeping a gentle distance between them. The two haven’t had much of a chance to talk yet, but that didn’t stop Quentin from approaching. He could tell when someone had a rough trial. When a trial was more than just a bad death or a series of painful mistakes---when it was a brutal but familiar face or a personal betrayal involved. It was a look he knew he has worn many times at the campfire before.