dancing shadows
Who: Hero
Where: Her apartment
When: Sometime between dawn and late morning
Hero blinked.
It was morning.
...
...When the hell had that happened?!
A bit disoriented at the fact, she glanced about her living room where she had spread out her papers for the night. The gray light of dawn (or, considering the weather, maybe even late morning?) had crept into the deepest corners of the room, competing with the glow from the table lamps behind her. Her fireplace housed only a few embers now and, feeling the goosebumps brush against the cloth of her shirt, she realized she was pretty fucking cold. She shook her head a bit, casting off some of the disorientation, and took a long and final drag off the cigarette dangling from her mouth. She held the smoke in for an equally long moment, before exhaling out and crushing the remains into the ashtray beside her -- which, she noticed, was filled with far more butts than she remembered smoking.
She groaned a bit, face grimacing in discomfort while she pushed herself off the floor and stood up, painfully stretching the stiffness from her joints away. She held that position for a good minute or so, giving another grimace instead of a yawn, before bringing her arms back down and walking over towards the other side of her coffee table. One hand rubbed at her neck while the other, as she leaned forward, reached down to spread out a smaller pile of papers before her. She glanced down at them, lips drawn in a sharp frown often drawn when working, skimming their lines as she had done oh so many times in the hours just before now.
She knew the words. That part she understood perfectly. Hell, she probably knew every sentence, note, and comma in this entire fucking room by heart! It was what lay outside the words, the secrets between the lines, that eluded her to all hell. She knew something was there, a pattern, something connecting these documents and articles together. And she knew, somehow, that these documents shared something together. While Hero often got odd feelings about many of the papers in her possession, something in these particular papers had given off not just an odd feeling, but the same odd feeling. She wasn't sure what the connection was exactly, or how, but it was there. She could almost see it, even. But it was like a shadow dancing at the corner of her eye, bolting away the second she tried to focus on it.
A sigh escaped her, admitting a defeat on the matter for now. She moved with the lethargy of her sleepless night as she walked towards the bathroom. She reached out to flick on the switch and she stepped in and leaned over the sink, twisting on the cold faucet. She didn't bother with the hot -- wiith this weather Hero would be lucky if the city's pipes weren't frozen. She cupped her hands beneath the running water and quickly splashed her face, sucking in a sharp breath. It was fucking. cold. The kind of cold that sent tiny pinpricks stinging through her skin. But she needed it, that jolt to her system. She needed something to wake her up because even mornings with sleep were already groggy affairs. For a moment her hands leaned heavily upon the sink's sides and she took a good hard look at herself in the mirror, scrutinizing her eyes as if they knew something. As if they held some key missing from the mess of papers she had sorted through...
...They didn't. Or, if they did, her pupils were just as elusive as the files had been. God it was just so frustrating! Because she knew there was something there. Because it seemed for every one of the city's secrets she uncovered, a multitude more remained unsolved in her files. She wanted to solve them. She needed to uncover them. She needed to go over them again, she needed to scour her sources, she needed...
...What she needed right now was another cigarette, she thought, backtracking to the living room to grab the crumpled box off the floor. Heh, maybe she'll puff one outside on the balcony, let the cold shock the funk out of her system. She smiled a bit, laughing slightly at the idea as she made her way towards her balcony, tapping the box to coax a cig out along the way, except -- what the hell?!
There were no cigarettes in the fucking box! She whipped a shocked look back around at the ashtray, quickly counting the number of butts crushed upon each other. Oh, hell. Had she really gone through that many in one night? Jesus, she really needed to quit.
...Some other day.
Swearing slightly under her breath, Hero strode towards her closet and pulled out her winter jacket. She pulled it over clothes -- the same clothes she had worn yesterday but obviously not slept in -- and went out the door. She locked it closed behind her, then half jogged down the stairwell and out of the building. Yeah, the weather was horrible outside and she hadn't slept yet, but she was damned if she was hanging out inside her apartment without a pack.