The Metropolitan Museum of Art, closing time

@unxgxdly​

Cyra sighed softly as she set her pen down, laying it flat on top of her planner. She leaned back in her chair, eyes glancing up towards the ornately carved wooden clock hung on the wall. A trinket from her travels. It used to make noise every hour, on the hour- mercifully, that bit had broken twenty years ago. 

It was fifteen minutes to closing time, another five and there’d be an announcement played over the museum’s speakers. Normally, she’d already be on her way out of the door, down to the parking garage to her car and be on her way home. Her thumb moved to graze the underside of her wedding rings, she watched the deep color of the sapphire and polished jade of her engagement ring catch the light. She wouldn’t be going home just yet. 

Tonight, she had one more meeting scheduled. 

With a soft smile, she rose and made her way to the museum’s new exhibit: Natural Beauty: Art in Nature. Not a name she would have went with, but it wasn’t her exhibit. It’d only just opened today, and she promised a friend that she’d give him a private, personal tour. She was most of the way there when the announcement played, and she could already see his large figure waiting for her. 

Fucking activists. Easy to report on, pick soundbites from – Jesus Christ do they love to talk about themselves – less so to interact with on a personal level. Mercy gets it. She read about the dead wolf a month ago and knows first-hand Blackrock’s intimate if slightly overzealous love of firearms. It was, at some level, inevitable that PETA would stake a claim on the square – or whatever banner this one has flapping at his back. It doesn’t mean Mercy has to be happy about it. 

“Hey, asshole – yes, you. What the hell are you doing?”