#rae: threads

[bandaidbites]

The booth he'd claimed was sticky in a way he'd stopped trying to identify. The vinyl seat had cracked sometime in what he guessed was the mid-nineties and never been replaced, just covered in layers of accumulated something until the split didn't matter anymore. Across from him, untouched, sat a plastic cup of flat cherry soda the color of a traffic flare. Someone had set it there. He didn't remember accepting it. Petey Possum's Fun Zone. The sign above the stage still had most of its bulbs, which was more than Rae could say for the rest of the city. The words flashed in a chasing pattern: Fun Zone, Fun Zone, Fun Zone — reflected in the grease-dark windows that looked out onto the corridor beyond. The lights ran on some timer that had never been updated, cycling cheerfully through every color of a sunset that didn't know it was the last one.

The music was the worst part. Not bad music, exactly. Just relentless, loud. Around him, the party happened. People laughed actual laughter, not the hollow kind. Receipts of orange tickets spilling out like a wound. A group near the ball pit were three or four drinks into whatever they'd pre-gamed, and they were doing fine, they were doing great, because apparently this was fine. Apparently this was a thing you could just do. Slide into a booth at a dead clown restaurant in the husk of a shopping center while everything went to shit. Rae picked up the cherry soda. Put it down. Someone was standing at the edge of the table. And then they weren't standing. They folded themselves into the seat across from him with the particular ease of someone who had decided, without asking, that this was where they were going to be. The booth creaked. Rae looked away from the clock he had been staring at. "I find this place disturbing."

@staticandstitches

[bandaidbites]

The flashlight had been in his mouth long enough that the plastic taste had barely registered now, somewhere behind the dull ache in his jaw and the more pressing problem of the transistor that kept slipping from his fingers. Raejun exhaled through his nose and pinched the component between his thumb and forefinger again. The beam swayed with the movement, throwing unsteady gold across the gutted radio in his lap. Shadows jumped against the storefront walls. The old signage eluded to some children's clothing place, cartoon animals still grinning from the window decal, caught the light at a bad angle and he'd stopped looking at it two hours ago.

The mall was never fully quiet. That was something he'd learned fast. Even at this hour there were sounds threading through the corridors. Someone's cough two units down, the distant clang of the generator room, footsteps on the upper level that could belong to anyone on watch. A building full of people learning how to be neighbors with strangers. He understood the concept. New York had run on it. New York. He didn't let himself sit on that long.

His unit was one of the mid-corridor storefronts, shallow and narrow. It was a former boutique he'd quietly appreciated for its single door and singular window facing the main concourse. The lights he kept off by habit. Easier to think. Easier to work. The others had learned not to read anything into it. The coil seated between his fingers. He tilted his head to redirect the beam and reached for the next piece without looking, muscle memory doing most of the work by now. That was when he registered the shift.

Raejun's hands stilled above the radio's open back panel. His eyes lifted slowly from the work, beam leveling out across the cluttered floor toward the door. He stayed like that for a moment, reading whatever he could from the shape of it. Then, without taking the flashlight from his mouth. "Hmn." A low sound, more acknowledgment than greeting. Then, despite the plastic muffling every consonant into something soft and rounded, "You need 'omething?" The words came out flattened, the s lost almost entirely, the question mark surviving mostly in the lift of his brows rather than his voice. Hands still hovering over the radio.