#arcticrime

[babydxhl]

mary w @arcticrime 's oz is like. at the peak of entitled starlet energy half the time and it's so funny to me every time

[requitals-arc]

@arcticrime

he’s seen this kind of place before. some of the clubs viggo’s been solidifying his grip on are like the lounge, pulsing with sound and movement. john’s never liked that kind of place. he likes silence. stillness. this is the opposite of that. gotham in general is the opposite of that. silence comes before something awful here.

but john doesn’t show it. he’s professional, always professional, and measured as he sits. “let’s make this simple,” he intones, clear. “if you have the coins, then i can take a job.”

[funnystvff]

@arcticrime​ asked:  it’s truly a wonder that you’re still alive.

“Persistence, my friend!”  joker raised an all-knowing finger in cobblepot’s direction, but it caused a sharp jolt of pain in the ribs that he was so sure was broken. it caused the clown to cringe, and drop his arm right back down to cradle the side of his chest. he was quite akin to a cockroach, wasn’t he? if gotham were to be bombed some day in the future  (and funnily enough, that didn’t sound so ridiculous given the atmosphere)  he’d probably be the last man standing. he’d been injured in all kinds of ways that some people would never come  back from. shot. stabbed. pummeled. thrown through a goddamn skylight- joker looked up at the latest, sharp edges of glass marking his entry into the building. how he came out of the situation with only some shallow cuts and a busted up ribcage was sheer dumb luck.  “Sorry again about your window, ‘Pots,”  he gestured up towards it. he wasn’t stupid enough to fully raise his arm a second time.  “But uhh, I still plead no contest. I didn’t throw myself though it, go sue Batman.”  at least the grand arrival had given him the ability to get away from the vigilante.

[babydxhl]

i'm not quite myself today.

arsenic and old lace sentence starters | still accepting.

There is a long quiet, one that seems to fill every square inch of empty space between them like liquid tar. Mary thinks of Kubrick, thinks of drowning in a tsunami of corn syrup and Red 40. From somewhere down the hall comes a muffled moan and the sound of a slamming door.

"They're not real people," she says, when the silence starts to itch at the nape of her neck. "It's not the same as if you went out and did it to somebody on the street. This kind of thing, it's—" Her brow creases for a half beat as she chooses her words. "It's what they sign up for."

There is a tiny speck of blood on the side of Oswald's hand, just below the cuff of his shirt sleeve, and once it catches Mary's eye she can't quite let it go.

Caught in an act of violence, of cruelty. I'm not quite myself today. The same as if he had walked in on her pinching-scratching-hitting any of her own employees — a sudden crack in the facade of respectability they're all maintaining.

A moment longer and she can't stand it again. She slips a handkerchief from her purse and pulls his hand closer with her fingertips, wiping the blood away. Her tone becomes not quite curt, but official, in control. "It doesn't mean anything."

[babydxhl]

@arcticrime | sc.

"Tell your driver to slow down, he's driving like a fuckin' asshole. I'm not getting hauled back in for aiding and abetting a traffic violation."

Even in the back of the car she had kept her sunglasses on; a new antipsychotic added to the cocktail had turned her eyes painfully sensitive, Gotham's weak light filtered through heavy-tinted windows still just a touch too hard to bear. Elbow on the arm rest between them, fingertips — the nails freshly manicured, acetone and cuticle oil to remove the medical-grade stench of asylum — supporting her temple through a curtain of curls.

"And you need to fire that new singer," she told him, "the blonde one. I was there last night, she's like someone tossed a cat into a grand piano. I know she's Al Falcone's goddaughter."

Her tone was rapid fire, no nonsense, the syllables clipped and irritable. "I know that because she wouldn't shut the fuck up after the set tellin' anybody who'd listen how her godfather knew she was gonna make it. How he made sure she was bein' treated right." A derisive little scoff. "It was like sitting in on the table read for a Coppola movie."

There was a long pause, during which Mary reached into her purse with her free hand, settled a cigarette into the corner of her mouth, and lit it. She still had not looked at Oswald, instead settling her gaze ambiguously forward. "Don't whine, send me the deep cleaning bill if it bothers you. Unless you picked up that habit along with your new love of doing charity while I was away."

Another silence. She reached out again to crack the window; the dull roar of the wind filled the space. Snaps of traffic whipped in and out. "You want to tell me what went so wrong you're doing favours for half the city?"

[wedstrife-a]

there's an almost liminal din to the restaurant—the disharmonious clank and clatter of flatware on china, chatter mulling together in uneven waves until it ebbed together into something indecipherable beyond the stray word she caught from time to time—or maybe she'd simply imagined it so. preferred it over the flat weight of his gaze. she holds it with a polite smile, her hands clasped in her lap to still them.

i'm your friend. remember? ... @arcticrime

it's a choice of word that strikes as odd (grating). overly familiar in that way of all his, their, her, associates on this side. partner. acquaintance. colleague. she doesn't correct him. straightens instead, her lips pursing in a consideration almost performative. a frail imitation she wills to take rigid form.

"I'm—" a beat. she hopes it seems intentional, rather than the stumble it is. "concerned, is all. I'd prefer you speak to me." instead of arthur.

it hangs there, the unspoken.

"as my friend."

[babydxhl]

we're going to be such good friends, you and i.

eat the ones you love sentence starters | still accepting.

Mary has a nasty habit of fiddling with his clothes, his buttons, his cufflinks, spinning them between her fingertips, scraping a fingernail along neat seams whenever he makes the error of sitting too close. She watches her own hands, now, one knee tucked up on the booth's upholstered seat, and her gaze only darts up to his face through her eyelashes.

Amused. Cheerful.

"Aren't we already friends?" she asks. Sarcastic, maybe. They're something not quite as kind as friends. After a beat she slumps back, her hands settling limp in her lap, and scrutinises him properly.

She never knows quite what Oswald is thinking. She pretends she does, of course — on principle — but more often than not finds herself studying him, in an effort to predict what he's going to do next.

"What do you want?"

[babydxhl]

life is a very ugly business.

those who leave sentence starters | still accepting.

For a moment, Mary is too busy wondering at just how easy it is to become anonymous to answer — the two of them, tucked under the eaves with the brickwork scraping the wool fibres of their coats, go ignored and unremarked on by the swirling foot-traffic of downtown's restaurant-goers.

The idea scares her in some subconscious way. A sense of being untethered, of being small and insignificant, tightens somewhere near the small of her back.

She doesn't like it — petulantly, stubbornly — that either of them could possibly disappear in the stumbling, blank-eyed, shoulder-hunching crowd that comes and goes. Lost between the arguments and the liquor.

"Uglier than death," she agrees after a beat, then ducks her head to keep from looking any more, cupping her hand around a cigarette to light it. "Can we go? I'm tired."