i was tagged by @veliseraptor to post some of my current wip! ty pal!! this is a remix of something i've already written ;)
tagging anyone else who wants to share theirs (pls!!)
“You want me to try and reach out to him?” Jack asks.
He could double back to the hospital and get his hands on Langdon’s personnel records. Get his phone number, his address. If Langdon won’t answer his phone, he might be back at home now. Jack could show up, suss out what was wrong with Langdon, figure out what made him drop by Robby’s uninvited in the middle of the night and then leave, presumably before Robby woke up.
“Nah, it’s fine,” Robby tells him. He sounds so tired.
Jack rounds the corner to his own block. It’s a street lined with mid-century ramblers and a few old specimen trees towering every few houses, each stark against the dull grey morning sky. It’s a nice neighborhood. Quiet.
“Yeah. I’m sure. Thanks, brother,” Robby says. “I’ll see you tomorrow?”
Jack’s house is third on the street. It doesn’t take long to come up on it, ear pressed to his phone, and it takes even less time to clock that something is amiss. There’s a figure sitting on Jack’s front stoop, a man, hunched over himself, head in his hands. The mop of brown hair is immediately recognizable.
Jack walks up to his house like nothing is amiss, but he slows his gait so that he’s not coming in quite so hot, so aggressively with boots hitting the ground. Frank looks up. Jack assesses him, quick as a shot. His face is a fucking mess. Eyes red, cheek scraped. And it takes a second to clock it -- at first Jack figured, hoped, it might have just been shadows -- but there are dark bruises circling his throat.
He stares at Frank. Frank stares back.
“I’ll let you know if I see him,” Jack says into the phone.
“Thanks,” Robby says. His voice sounds far away, but maybe Jack’s just too present right here, right now. Too busy staring at Robby’s lost resident.
“Yeah,” Jack says. “Call me if you need anything.”
He hangs up. Slides his phone into his pocket and stands half at rest in front of Frank.
Frank doesn’t say anything. He just stares at Jack with his big fucking kicked-dog eyes and looks a little bit like he’s about to get up and sprint his way out of there, presumably like how he jetted from Robby’s sometime between last night and Robby’s call, and Jack doesn’t want that to happen. Frank looks dead on his feet. He looks like he could use some medical attention.
Jack shifts in the middle of his front walk. He looks at Frank, then looks at the door.
“It’s kind of wet and cold, kid,” Jack says. “You want to come inside?”