Chapter Text
It hasn't been a good week for Jaadi.
He missed the last van heading south, for starters. He wasn't really friends with any of the punks he'd been hanging with, but it still sucks that they left without him. Now he's stuck up north for the winter. And the weather, as if it has a personal grudge against him, turned suddenly, seriously cold the same day he heard they'd gone.
The panhandling turned rotten around the same time.People started ignoring him, or if they didn't, they'd reach in their pockets and produce a handful of pennies and nickels. The all-night restaurants decided, one after another, that they had a policy against buying coffee with piles of small change and then nursing it for hours. He ended up spending a few nights at White Castle with the schizophrenics and that one guy with Tourette's.
More than once, he decided to go to a homeless shelter. But something always came up to change his mind, some sign, some portent, a bad hunch. His mojo didn't want him to go. He listened to his mojo, and it rewarded him by vanishing. The little rituals he relied on to get by stopped working.
Take tonight. He'd come to the White Castle to warm up, and it turns out to be closed for cleaning. He stands on the sidewalk for a while, just staring at the light and warmth beyond the locked door. There's a guy inside washing the windows. Seeing Jaadi there, the guy points angrily at the sign. His voice, muffled by the glass, sounds hollow and monstrous: "We! Are! Closed!" Jaadi flips him off listlessly and slouches away.
Walking only keeps you warm if you have energy to burn.Get hungry enough, tired enough, and no amount of exercise can drive off the shivers. Jaadi's teeth rattle as he stumbles along. His arms and legs shake. His nose is numb. His feet are numb. His brain is numb.e finds himself standing still, staring at the empty air over the street, and realizes he can't stay awake anymore.
Shelter time, he thinks vaguely, and to hell with portents. But he has only the vaguest idea where the nearest shelter is, and the busses stopped running hours ago. He isn't up to figuring out where to go or how to get there. He can barely remember not to stop walking. In fact, he's done it again. Standing, staring, freezing. The world is deserted. A stoplight glaring red over an empty street, an underpass without sheltered slopes or sidewalks, a cracked lot growing weeds and dark houses and run-down stores. Soaped shop windows. Boarded doors. Condemned notices stapled to doors, faded from the weather.
If I could get into one of those empty houses, I'd at least be out of the wind. Might still freeze, but maybe's better than for sure. He heads up the nearest cracked walk, half hoping he'll get busted for trespassing just because the cop car will be warm. He tests the locked door, tugs at the peeling strandboard over the windows. No luck. Heading around the side, he struggles through dead bushes, slips on frost-slick grass. These windows, too, are tightly boarded. Back door, garage door, nothing, nothing. Around the other side, losing hope. If the city did such a good job on this one, the others are likely to be just as hard to get into.
And then, with a creak of nails, the sheet of plywood on what looks to be a basement-apartment door gives way to his frozen fingers. He wraps his sleeve over his hand and punches the glass. It doesn't break, it just splits his numb knuckles. Looks so easy in the movies. Not fair. Another punch, harder, still not even a crack. The pain makes him angry. He winds up and throws his weight behind his fist, and manages to make something in his wrist pop and throb.
Wait.
He looks around for a rock. Chunk of concrete, whatever. Piece of drainpipe? No. Chipped-up remains of a walkway? Yeah. Behold the tool-using ape. It takes some work to pry it up from the frozen ground.The ice doesn't want to let it go and his fingers are stiff, and in the dark he can't, like, see edges or anything. But once he's got it, one whack, and crash tinkle, there goes the glass. So easily his whole hand is inside before he pulls back. Glass catches on his sleeve. He leans in, reaches down. Fumbles with the deadbolt and latch until the door gives, and stumbles inside. The unheated house feels warm by comparison.
Picking glass out of his sleeve - oops, a slowly leaking cut that he can't even feel - he pushes the door shut with his foot, and blinks at the black dark. Gradually his eyes adjust, until the faint distant streetlamp filtering through the broken window is enough to see walls and large objects.Stair in front of him, going down. Doorway on his right. Underground might be warmer…but he can't bring himself to go down those stairs.
Mojo hunch or plain standard basement fear, he doesn't know, but he can't do it. So he turns right instead, and gropes his way through a stripped kitchen into a living room where, wonder of wonders, moldy curtains still hang over the boarded windows, and a sagging couch mildews against the wall. He rips the curtains down, wraps them around himself, and sinks down on the couch. It stinks of cat piss. He doesn't care. He pulls a corner of curtain over his head, and the warmth of his own breath reflected on his face begins to thaw his numb skin. It hurts. His shoulders are so tense that shivering stings like bees. His feet and hands flare with the burning itch of chilblains, intense enough to bring tears to his eyes. Little by little, warmth steals over him. Not the false warmth of hypothermia, or at least, he doesn't think so. If it is, well, he's done his best, and when they find his rotted carcass in the spring he'll be long past giving a shit.
Jaadi sleeps.