Chapter Text
Migration Period, Day 0
Origins: The Rebel, Part 2
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Luke was hungry.
He’d brought food from home, of course, but that had run out after the first few days. The money had lasted longer, but not by much. So he’d started stealing.
He hadn’t really meant to, he knew on an academic level that stealing was bad, but scrounging for loose change had gotten him more scrapes and cold-numbed hands than dollars and trying to panhandle had gotten the police after him. Two weeks after he left home, a guy in a suit had stopped in front of him with his back turned and his wallet not all the way in his back pocket and by then Luke was so hungry he didn’t even care.
After that, well, he’d just gotten better at it. He’d even thought up a snappy one-liner about it – a wallet a day keeps the hunger at bay. He did his best not to think about how easily he’d adapted to vagrancy and petty theft, or what it meant for his mental state that he was making jokes about it.
But that had been yesterday. Right now, he was on a southbound Metro-North sitting in New Haven Union Station, his backpack stuffed under his seat, with a pocket full of cash and an empty stomach. Because for all his newfound street-savvy, there were some things he hadn’t picked up on fast enough – like the problems of setting up shop too close to where you ran away from, lest the cops connect the runaway kid with the new pickpocketing streak. They’d put up more posters, run a TV spot, warned pedestrians to secure their valuables, and, as of yesterday morning, had started lurking around the fast-food joints. After the pair outside of the third McDonalds had started following him, he’d clued in on the merits of leaving town. There had been another pair of cops at the Dunkin’ Donuts outside Union, but Luke was pretty sure they hadn’t seen him.
Luke retreated deeper into his hoodie as a large red greatcoat containing a large dark personage annexed the two seats facing him. A lesser suit, containing a manifestly lesser human, gave the empty seat next to Luke a considering look. It received a look in return from Red Coat and evidently thought better of whatever it had been considering, moving up the car to the next half-empty row. Luke kept his eyes on the floor between his sneakers.
The doors closed, cuing the technical symphony of a train preparing to leave the station.
“'Ey.”
Luke kept his head down. There was no one on this train who wanted to talk to him, and no one he particularly wanted to talk to.
“Hey. Kid.” A heavy, black boot knocked his sneakers. Reluctantly, Luke looked up, eyes settling around the level of Red Coat’s elbows.
“Mom says I shouldn’t talk to strangers.” A lie. The train rumbled to life and began to move forward.
“And your stint as a runaway pickpocket has me thoroughly convinced that you’re hangin’ on to her every word. You got sloppy, kid.”
Propelled by some very stupid pre-teen instinct, Luke raised his head, blue eyes meeting black, and glared. Red Coat grinned back. “That’s the spirit. Check your three.”
Luke gave him a blank look. Red Coat jerked his head to Luke’s right, indicating the receding platform out the window and –
Luke whipped his head away and ducked away from the window, his heart pounding. Two cops were searching through the crowds, one of them speaking into his radio.
“I’m guessing they made you at the DDs out front, probably checked where you were headed with the ticket agent,” Red Coat said. “Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee over there are calling it in right now. They’ll have a squad car waiting at West Haven if they don’t already, send a few guys on to sweep the train.”
Luke was finding it hard to breathe. He couldn’t go back to Westport, or worse, into Social Services. A mindless animal dread, claustrophobic and suffocating, wound its way up his spine, he could not could not let himself be caged -
A finger flicked his forehead, and the fear sank back. He blinked, his eyes focusing to see Red Coat half-smiling at him from under his broad-brimmed hat. “Buck up, kid. You’re not out of the game yet.”
Luke wiped his eyes to clear them. “I can’t go back.”
“’Course not.” Obvious. And the million-dollar question -
“How do I know I can trust you?”
Silence. Luke looked up to see Red Coat giving him the most serious-business look he’d ever seen in his life, including that time Mr. Hollander had walked into his office to find Luke's disciplinary record merrily blazing away in the wastebasket.
“The name’s Nick Scratch,” Red Coat said. “And if you want to leave this train alive, you’ll listen to me.”