Sneaky Statues
| Sneaky Statues | |
|---|---|
"I'm sure I've seen worse." | |
| Players |
Javi is in the kind of bind that involves paying a guy. Miel happily volunteers, gets more than he bargained for. |
It's mid-afternoon, and it's pretty warm out. There are still plenty of people hanging around outside, of course, but it's maybe not the kind of day when someone //really// wants to be hanging around outside, at least not if they actually have to do things that don't involve eating popsicles or drying off from being in a pool. Maybe that is why a young man who is leaning against one of the buildings and talking to someone on the phone is sounding kind of annoyed. "...gonna tell me right now you can't help me?" he's saying. "We're supposed to be over there already." There's a pause as he looks down the street, brow furrowing, and whatever's said on the other line has him sucking his tongue against his teeth and shaking his head. "So you got anyone else who wants to make some money?" Another pause, and then he snorts. "It's literally a church in the middle of the day, man, it's not like I'm moving drugs." One more pause, before he sighs. "Okay. Well, fuck you very much." However, the tone softens the words into a resigned goodbye rather than a true insult, especially when he ultimately signs off with, "Yeah. Later." There's another sigh as he brings down the phone to peer at it, starting to text. Possibly to find some hypothetical person who's going to help him with...well, whatever it is.
Miel sidles a little closer to the building and the annoyed-looking person leaning against the building with a casual alertness about him: the upsweep of his thick eyebrows, dark slashes over his dark eyes, leaving the hollow-boned youth of him looking all the more earnest. Honestly, he's looking scruffy is what he's looking like-- the hair is neatly clipped, but the stubble is at least a two day growth at this point, and while he's managed to wash the shirt in recent memory, it's definitely starting to look threadbare and not like the interview best it started out as. "Heyy, so, I don't mean to drop eaves here, but it definitely sounded like you're in the kind of bind that involves paying a guy?" he says, in a nonchalant voice that doesn't really manage its casualness very well. He smiles hopefully and tries to stand up straight and not look like a guy as down on his luck as he currently has been.
However, as luck would have it, someone's here right now to solve all his problems! Maybe. His head comes up quickly like he's about to tell someone //else// some variation of the goodbye, and perhaps not as nicely (even though he's the one who's standing here talking loudly on the phone, so that wouldn't really be very fair of him). He doesn't have time to do it, though, before he actually hears what Miel's said. As soon as he does, a bright smile blooms on his face, so quickly that it might actually be comical how fast he's gone from kind of pissed off to extremely happy. "Oh, yeah," he replies, "I really am. You wanna make like a couple hundred bucks?" He seems to realize something after, and clarifies quickly, "It's nothing weird. Just supposed to be clearing out storage for this church over on 63rd and it's a big-ass room so I really don't feel like doing it by myself."
Short dark curls fluff high over his head, kept largely tamed over the depths of deep, dark eyes. His skin is warm-toned, olive-dark but with a golden undertone that keeps him from ever being entirely leeched of warmth. Strong dark brows loan more expressiveness to his eyes, while the strong angles of his face whisper of an artist's sculpt. He is tall, reedy and lean, spare of muscle, a little unfinished-looking, or maybe just a little underfed. While Miel is taking his moment to consider it -- at least, that is what Javi assumes he's doing -- Javi is taking a moment to study //him//. If he perceives anything lacking in the man's ability to carry stuff around and potentially throw it in dumpsters, he's polite enough not to mention it. But he seems to think it will be fine, and when he says yes, he flashes a thumbs up. It's accompanied by a little snort at the comment, though. "Man, ain't we all." He pushes off the wall, lifting a hand to run fingers across his temple and dislodge some sweat. It's hot. "Thank you," he continues more seriously as they start to walk in what's presumably the direction of said church, and hopefully not an alley in which he's going to try and murder his next victim, "for real. It's a fucking mess in there. Javi." This is said with another gesture toward himself for an introduction.
"Hey, nice to meet you." Maybe there's a //bit// of a longer look when Miel seems to need a minute on his name, but ultimately Javi doesn't comment on that, either. Hey, if it's a fake name, more power to him. He laughs again at the end, another bright expression that belies the earlier annoyance. "Yeah," he agrees, "probably. It's not gross or nothing like that, just messy. But supposedly they got a dumpster ready so, yeah. We'll see. It's just down here." He gestures vaguely to the left as he turns them that way, his gaze sweeping the street absently. "Think it's gonna be mostly just old junk but if we find anything that's still, like, nice, we're just supposed to put it on the side."
They arrive at a large building that is, indeed, a church: 'Trinity Presbyterian,' apparently. It has one of those church signs in front, declaring that all are welcome, which is maybe somewhat nice. Javi heads up the front stairs, pulling the heavy doors open so Miel can precede him inside.
It's possible that on some level Miel realizes that there are many varieties of Christianity as there are wines in an import shop and that this is an awkward thing to say, but-- there he is saying it out loud. He was accurate, though, in that he fails to spontaneously combust on slipping through the heavy doors.
That said, he takes the lead, heading them toward a door on the side that leads to a set of stairs going down. They pass a man going //up// on the way, but Javi seems to know him, and they smile and exchange quick greetings. The man also nods in a friendly way to Miel, but he doesn't stand in their way, and Javi doesn't stop, continuing down toward a large room that's probably where they hold receptions and things like that. He goes through //that//, too, and at the back down a hall and through yet another door is...yet another room. Probably the room in question, because when he opens the door, it leads to...yeah. A fucking mess. It's clutter, not dirt, but it's all the stuff that was probably leftover from a few decades of charity sales that didn't sell on top of broken chairs, old robes, a pulpit with some choice graffiti on it, plus boxes and boxes...and on and on ad infinitum. Or not quite, but there's a lot of junk. "So there's a door in the back too and that's supposed to be where the dumpster is," Javi says, "so we can just take stuff out that way. We don't gotta be that picky, she said. Just clean as much as we can."
Down the stairs they go, and out into the chaos of years of clutter. Miel pokes at the pulpit, tilting his head to read the graffiti with a choked off chuckle for the inappropriateness. "Wow, irreverence thy name is... this," he says. He picks up a box, selected at random, hoisting it. "Oh wow, I don't even know what some of these are," he says, peering into the assortment of tchotchkes inside as one of the cardboard flaps bounces jauntily with the lift.
He moves toward one of the boxes as well, looking down inside it before he hoists it up and starts toward the back where there is, indeed, a door. At least there's a path all the way to it, even if it's a little precarious at certain points, what with all the stacks of things lining it. "Yeah, who knows what's in here," he admits as he goes. "You find anything that looks kinda okay that we were gonna toss and you can probably take it if you want, too." He says it conversationally, and without any sort of judgment, but he's pretty clearly got a bead on Miel. Not that it would be that hard, considering how fast he'd jumped at the job from a stranger, but still.
There is a dumpster in the back, just as he'd said, and when he opens the door to prop it open he only spares a brief glance into the box before he tosses it over the side. It seems to be filled with dilapidated hymnals, so probably nothing that either of them want. "You just move here or something?" he asks as he starts back inside, conversationally but still keeping his eyes on the mess and not his companion.
When Miel looks up from the box, though, his eyes catch on something. It's in a far corner, half-covered by what looks like it might be a very old youth group t-shirt, but there's something about it that feels...different than the rest of the things in here. Not junk. What's visible makes it look like it might be a statue of Mary, which is also a bit odd for a Presbyterian church, but probably not if one doesn't //know// it's odd.
Miel stills when he spies the sculpted woman, and in the midst of answering, his words peter and trail off into nothing. "That'd be pretty swe--..." He stands for a moment, holding a box, his whole body fallen into a strange and otherworldly stillness as he looks at the features cast in stone, obscured by the T-shirt. His eyes widen and he shakes himself visibly, like a damp sheepdog shedding water, and then lopes the rest of the way, the box forgotten in fingers gone listless until he finds he's still holding it. He sets it down and then reaches up to pull the shirt clear from the statue. He stares into her face for a moment, and there's a strange pallor to him, beneath the bronzen-olive cast of his skin, as every hair beneath the clothing on his skinny rail of a frame stands up at once.
The statue, when it's revealed, looks even more out of place. It isn't marble, but it is some kind of heavy stone, maybe a foot high, and well-crafted. How did this get in here? Surely no one put it here on purpose because they thought it was junk. And maybe it's just a product of the rest of Miel's reaction, but is there a sudden chill in the air that really shouldn't be present in a room on a hot day that definitely doesn't have air conditioning. Javi's not close enough to see what Miel sees next. He has to put down what he's picked up and pick his way around a couple of boxes -- and it only happens for an instant. It's so quick that it's hard to know whether it //did// happen, or if it was just a function of shifting the things around it, or a trick of the dim light in the room. But...did it //rattle//? "Hey, you okay?" He's managed to make his way over there now, and while he does spare a glance to the statue, he's more focused on Miel. The smile is nowhere to be seen now.
His gaze skips to the statue and then back to Javi. He smiles in a wan, awkward way and says, "Um, I definitely don't want it, though." Miel inches back on his knees as if to emphasize this point. "--Like. I don't. I was just. Distracted. Haha. Ha."
"You sure?" he asks, though slowly, like it might be against his better judgement. "You need, like...water or something?"
Javi is still looking at Miel more closely, that barely-contained energy that had been spilling out in twitchy movements suddenly laser-focused. "...Okay," he finally says, a little bit slowly as well -- a little skeptically. But he doesn't try to say the man //isn't// okay, and that smile is returned with one of his own, a bright, open one that seems to indicate he's taken that offering as it was intended. "It's all good," he says, lifting a hand to wave away the apology. "No worries. Lemme just go move this and I'll grab you some. Then I'll get the cash and we'll knock this out in a couple hours and call it a day, yeah?" He reaches carefully around Miel for the statue, picking it up with an odd sort of reverence of his own. It's not the same as the other man's, but unmistakable. "I'll be right back. Yeah?"
He hoists the box and starts shuffling towards the back door again. For a few hours at least in the stuffy shade of the downstairs, it's simple work, simple work they can apply themselves to, without resurgences of the awkwardly arcane. | |