#palliium

      nothing feels right. her world has been inverted, turned on its head while she stands by with mouth agape. her father turns enemy and her mother ally. she hasn’t been this lost in eight years. of course, those eight years ago she had no one to turn to, no one to lean against. only herself. now there’s him. she gravitates towards him as naturally as if he has been in her life from day one. there’s no understanding the bizarre connection they have, but she doesn’t have the strength to fight it. 

       so she traces him back to his school. the uniform she stole on her last visit comes in handy, and she slips in unnoticed among the throngs of students. they brush by her without wondering why they’ve never seen her face. as if pulled by the strings that connect them, she invariably finds her way to him. only to be brought up short. 

palliium​

She opened the door to see the person she had been waiting for–a young, teenage boy, only slightly taller than herself, named Newt–and greeted him.

“Good morning, Newt. Right on time,” Sara let a professional smile escape her lips as she moved aside for the boy to come in.

After he entered and settled in at his spot, she closed the door and sailed over to her desk. She quietly hummed a tune she had heard on the radio as she scanned a few folders. Once she decided on which to choose, she picked an ugly, dark green file. After she confirmed it was the one she was looking for, the investigator strut to the underling’s desk and placed it on top of his small pile of paperwork.

The female chuckled almost tauntingly as she nodded for him to open the file. “Your first case, Newt. It’s a game of hide and seek.” She faced backwards from the file, so it was a little confusing at first, but she found the words that said “20 MISSING HERMES WATCHES.” She ran her finger across the words and said, “Technically I get the cut–but I’ll split it with you.”

Sara was abnormally excited for this case–even though it was something as petty as Hermes watches. She specialized in recovering artwork that ranged in the high thousands and millions, not watches that were only worth from one thousand to thirty thousand. However, it was her new “student’s” first case. It was definitely something to look forward to. This was going to be fun.

She laughs at Newt as he sits at the desk she moved into her office just for him. On his desk are three, simple pins for pick locking, a notepad with three of the pages torn out (horribly–half of one of the torn pages is still there, and it reads something that seems to be a locker combination), a broken pencil, and a company Sara-issued flip phone.

                                “You told ME that you could handle the job.                                 Well, you’re nearing 21–when I took my first                                 paid job as a rookie investigator.                                 That is what they had left over. All for ME!”

The investigator gets up from her chair and reveals a case of brand new lock picks–the kind that criminals used. Sara smiles and places it down on his desk. Of course she was only teasing him. She wasn’t that cruel on the first day of the boy’s job. She would save that for later.

                                   “I look forward to working with you, Newt.                                   Just don’t try to top my recovery rate…                                   Or we’ll have a problem. GOT IT?”

Sara walks over to the room’s door and opens it up. She gestures outside.

Lips curling into a small smile, Cherche’s head turned back towards the boy who’d posed such a statement to her. It was only natural, after all, for him to fear the unknown horrors the world had to offer, as well as the known. Yet the smile she wore was a reassuring one; one that was meant to show that there was at least someone who understood and would help him.