⤿ FIRST: he hits the ground running.
emerges from the tar with black on his heels and smudged ‘cross his hands, some tasteless gob sitting uneven on the tip of his tongue. he swishes it in his mouth once - familiarizes himself with the shape of it - then spits it onto the concrete, and keeps in his stride. ‘neath his feet pools tar, easing his stride, but painting pieces of the sidewalk pitch black with each step.
it’ll be gone in thirty minutes, he reminds himself: vandalism does not exist for temporary things like him.
second : he remembers why he’s running.
the last memory of the the city is one laced with misfortune. a walk down a street turned to a body pressed to his in an alleyway, turned to a knife to his throat - then no knife, no memory of it, no existence, swallowed by one of the oreo koi that orbit him now. confusion followed, and confusion turned to hostility, and hostility turned to a raised hand. this led to a smattering of black against brick walls, a splash of tar as a distraction and a hurried escape.
he held his breath, placed his hands ‘bove his head like an arrow’s tip, then dove beneath to the space between. his surfacing comes in a short and staggered gait, evens out with tar ‘neath his feet. now he is in the present: now he once again places his hands ‘bove his head, takes a breath, dives-
this time, he emerges atop a nearby building. streetlights and outwards glow from apartments detail his path; the black across gotham’s sidewalks will remain for half an hour, perhaps a little more or less, then turn to nothingness.
a quiet ploi-plop breaks above the ambience of distant car horns and sirens, a single koi emerging in place of two. it does not orbit him; it strays a foot or so away, curls in the air, makes itself a lazy spiral, then reverses course and stalks to the opposite side of the roof. he follows it with his eyes, then regards himself proper.
the tar has ruined his clothes. the pink sweater with sleeves longer than his arms has turned itself black, awkward tufts of pleasant coral poking through here and there; his sweatpants - borrowed from a store whose sign said ‘closed’ but whose lacking security (not that anyone could prepare for him, really) said ‘open’ - are tarnished by both pitch and scrapes of dirt from prior ventures. notably, the theft of sweatpants was not his first denial of the law: most of his things were stolen, for the law seldom applied to things like him.
pasha shakes the tar out from his hair, huffs, and squints at the koi.
it has halted on the western edge of the roof and now treads unseen water, fixed in one particular direction. eyes locked on something that, to him, registers only as a distant blur amid gotham’s glowing skyline. his head cocks to the side and, in a voice that lends itself more so to the femininity of his appearance than the indifference of his self, says,
❛ what’re you looking at ?? ❜
