#religun

nocturnal animals rely on auxiliary senses. specialized adaptations. you live in the dark for so long and you find new ways to see. to survive. that's perhaps why remora clocks mari dai as quickly as she does in the dim of the club: she's grown sharp in the dark. jagged. pointed at a specific purpose.

she moves through the crowd feeling all sinew, like one of those sanitized images of skinned animals in childhood textbooks depicting the muscles of a creature in motion. blood red, taut enough that when the bass thrums it runs through her head to toe. she can feel it, how sleek she is. how capable.

she's got a hard candy in her mouth, and it cracks under the back of her teeth as she approaches, the remnants disintegrating like a calcified heart. as with all bad organs, it bleeds a sour core. patience isn't remora's virtue, but lying in wait is a talent. a vice, really, in the way she does it. she's been prolonging the cross family payback for months, dragging it across the city like a fresh kill. lapping up the blood trail left behind.

STILL. by nature she prefers to use all her teeth in one go.

he's heard that line before.

didn't work then. won't work now.

brendan doesn't drop things. dropping things is for people who don't have the time or the energy to put in the work, burnouts or cowards or people so close to spinning out of comfortable places that they can't risk it. he doesn't move. keeps his hands shoved in his pockets, posture eternally wound tight like a coiled spring, and lets his weight shift slightly.

centered.

he watches this woman. shorter than him, but that's never stopped any woman on any side of the tracks from being a terror if they choose to be. he knows better. rough bark, he thinks. she's not trying to hide it. but she isn't trying to push too hard on it, either, in the way he sometimes sees people try to puff themselves up.

she's saying this like a promise, not fluff.

"let's slow it down." like the bulls are about to turn the corner and gum it all up. "i'm just seeing what's what. i mean, mrs. crenshaw paid me to look into things, and who am i to not make sure a grieving mother gets her money's worth? now, i can be a real cad sometimes, but i'm not heartless."

smiling now. just a flash of teeth, but mostly friendly. it makes him look friendlier, boyish, almost on the edge of kind.

the crenshaw family, truthfully, told him to keep his nose out of it. brendan said fine. he liked to keep things copacetic.

or that was how he made it feel.

then he left the house, doubled back two minutes later trailing a landscaper, hopped the fence, and began digging through their trash cans for a minute. didn't find much there, but that impulse brought him to double back, find the guy's burner phone hidden under his bed, and start tracing through contacts.

"so why don't you tell me what's so dangerous that i need to drop this?"

𝐌𝐀𝐑𝐈 𝐃𝐀𝐈 【 @religun 】 : 〝 it's my business card . in case you need some help or you wanna share some secret hidden evidence . 〞