2019-09-21 - Post Party Encounter

Roxy had a few margaritas at the party, and she's feeling it now. She didn't eat much, too shy for it in front of her coworkers, and she didn't really get to know much of anyone for the same reason. She did chat with Love a little bit, which was nice, but socializing with strangers is difficult for her when there isn't fantasy and a tip involved. When she dances, she can pretend she is someone else, put on a mask of being a professional in the field of taking off her clothing. Outside of it? She is timid. Most of her life was spent with her parents and the dance companies she worked with, grueling hours upon hours of training and rehearsals that left no time for a childhood, or friendships, or relationships. And then she was Taken and lost even what little she did have back then. She is out of her element, and tonight it really hit her hard.

She makes her way down the street, her heels clicking on the sidewalk, both hands on her clutch purse. She's in a vintage-style pencil dress, off the shoulder, in a deep teal that sets off her eyes. She looks good, and she's gotten the attention of a couple of thugs who have been stalking her steps for a few blocks now, wolf-whistling and catcalling. She is tipsy, and fearful, and moving as fast as she can in the restrictive dress, praying she reaches the hotel before they get any bolder.

Roxy isn't the only one headed back to the hotel on foot, from a night that involved at least a modicum of drinking. There's an older gentleman some distance behind, hands shoved into the pockets of his leather jacket, mostly minding his own business. Right up until he hears that sharp whistle go up, and catches sight of a couple of guys up ahead, following a pretty girl in a dress. He doesn't wade in just yet, but does lengthen his stride a notch and draw the gun he's got holstered under his jacket. Makes sure it's loaded, shoves it back under cover. Dark eyes on those boys, jaw tight.

Roxy looks over her shoulder, bright eyes wide, to judge the distance between her and the boys. The gap is steadily closing. She stumbles and has to turn back forward to keep her eyes on the ground. She murmurs a mantra repeatedly in Finnish under her breath. "Mennä nopeammin..." she tries to speed up.

The boys drop into loping jogs, one of the two moving to cut her off, the other behind her. "Oh come on sweetheart. We saw your show. You're not afraid to take it all off for money, why not for us?"

It's a gamble, really. Hoping neither of those little punks has a gun and is willing to be reckless with it. Trying to get a clean line of sight on both of them, without risking hurting the girl they're closing in on, who looks awfully familiar. Another man might just turn and cross the street and fuck right off with having anything to do with this shit. But Javier's wired a little strange; the prospect of hunting these boys down, and bringing them to ground gets his blood pumping in a way it shouldn't.

His stride is quickened again, somewhere between a prowl and a lope, like a wolf that's caught the scent of prey. His gun comes out fully; drawn, safety off, round dropped into the chamber, muzzle raised about ten feet back of the guy coming up behind Roxy, in the span of a single motion.

"Step the fuck away from the girl. Slow. Hands where I can see them."

Roxy spins between the two punks, her back to the wall of a building, breathing fast as a scared rabbit as her head whips towards the new voice. GUN! Is the first thing she thinks and she puts an arm over her head, curling against the wall, making herself as small a target as possible.

The thugs are just a couple of college frat boys who came to town for a few days to slum it, and caught her show at the Cabaret. When they saw her leaving Two If By Sea, they followed her, both are drunk. A gun changes everything though. They both back away, wide-eyed, hands up in the air. "Ok man, ok! Didn't mean nothin, just wanted to chat with the hooker!"

That makes Roxy look up again as she spits out, "I am not a prostitute!"

The firearm is held aloft for a handful of seconds while Ruiz seems to weigh the reply given. His finger rests on the trigger, weapon in his right hand with the left bracing it. His posture and grip speak of someone who's very, very comfortable with the weapon. Movement, then. He shifts like he's going to lower it and shove it back in its holster, then discharges it with a loud CRACK into the grass planted between street and sidewalk, a few feet from where one of the frat boys is standing. The gun's leveled on the guy's head again, and he prowls in closer, upper lip pulled back slightly over his teeth. Guy's got sharper than usual canines.

His voice again, a low, smoke-roughened growl, "Apologise to the lady and get the fuck out of here."

Well, one of the guys pees himself right there and then. The other jumps about three feet off the ground. "We're sorry! Sorry uh ma'am!" the second shouts and turns tail and runs. The other one blurts out something, stumbles into Roxy, knocking her down, then runs as fast as his drunken feet can carry him.

Roxy screams at the gunshot and she covers her head again, only to get knocked to the ground by the fleeing college jerk. She lands in a small heap, scraping up a knee and an elbow in the process, and tucks tightly to hopefully not get shot. Finland has the fourth highest occurrence of registered firearms, but homicide by gun is only 14% of all homicides. She's not used to the violence of the US.

The gun is safetied and stowed under his jacket, and the off duty cop moves in close, to where Roxy's curled up on the ground still in a protective ball. She'd feel the heat rolling off him when his hand touches her shoulder, and likely smell the cigarette he'd smoked about five minutes ago. "Hey. Hey, you're safe." His hand remains on her shoulder, eyes searching the darkened street as if to make sure the boys are gone. "Think you can stand?" Accent sounds Mexican, gutter trash. Familiar.

The boys are probably in Seattle by now, they were running so fast. There may be cartoon smoke trails still drifting in their wake.

Roxy flinches at the touch, not sure who it is, until she hears the voice, smells the smoke. Then she's not sure if she's comforted or even more afraid. Safe is a grey area where Javier is concerned, at least in her eyes. "Y-Yes I can stand I think." She winces as she pushes herself up off the ground, and there is blood on her elbow and knee, and a very ruined pair of probably expensive silk stocking that died in the making of the latter injury. Her eye makeup is a little bit runny from tears. Her hair is a mess. Her dress is rumpled and dirty now. Even her patent leather shoes are scuffed. Not a good look all around.

"Thank you," she murmurs quietly, and the margaritas she'd been drinking waft on the air.

His hand is offered, whether she accepts the help or not. Dark eyes flick over her slowly from head to toe, assessing her for injury, making sure nothing's obviously broken. There's nothing untoward about the way he looks at her, or the touch that lands on her forehead, oddly gentle. His thumb brushes a little of her hair aside to check a bruise mottling her pale skin. Then withdraws with a flickered, almost apologetic smile. "De nada." A beat. "Are you all right?"

Roxy takes the hand, her own trembling, as he helps her up. She winces, her knee and elbow ache, and so does that bump on her head. Her head turns slightly as he examines the bruise that is just starting to announce its presence. She is unsteady, whether that is from the fall or the drink is unknown.

"Javier?" she blinks at him, looking confused. Of all the people in Gray Harbor to come to her rescue, he was not even on the list. "You have a gun," she says, stating the obvious. A hand goes steady herself on the wall and her eyes cast about for her purse, dropped in the altercation.

"Si." He acknowledges his name with the slightest of smiles. Given the laugh lines, and the fine webwork of creases that crop up at the corners of those dark eyes, he used to smile a lot more at some time in the past. It's hesitant now, though, and half-formed. Like it's not sure whether it wants to be warmth or something meaner. His gaze drifts away from the girl, again scanning their immediate environs. Habitual, like a reflex hammered into him once, and never divested of.

"Si, I have a gun. I told you, this town is fucked up. Those boys were the least of your troubles, Roxanne." He starts shrugging out of his jacket with a roll of his shoulders, then unless she objects, tries to pull it on over hers. The leather is warm, and battered to the point of softness, and smells like him. If she accepts it, he'll stoop to collect her purse next.

Roxy is moving a bit sluggishly, and seems to be registering things equally slowly. She doesn't object to the jacket being draped over her shoulders, just seems momentarily surprised that the man who scared the bejeesus out of her a while back is being...kind? "I am bleeding, I do not want to ruin your coat." Coat, not jacket. Simpler term to learn in English. It's part of the reason she is having trouble making friends. She learned proper English, not the clusterfuck of slang and ironic usage that is actual American English. It's like learning French then going to Quebec or Louisiana and trying to use it there.

There's a chuckle from the older man as he swoops up her purse, and tumbles a few things back in that had fallen out. It's held out to her, dangled from the strap knotted in his fingers. "It wouldn't be the first time," he says of his jacket. Is she surprised? He doesn't look like the sort of man who sees trouble, and runs in the opposite direction. "Take it." Her purse. "And let's go. I'll walk you back."

The woman takes her purse back, still looking a bit stunned overall. Or on the verge of drunk. "I should not have gone to that party. But it was for work. I should have called a taxi cab." Bad decision making all around on her part. Roxy limps towards the door of the hotel. "Thank you," she adds in a quiet tone, almost an afterthought. "Why are you being so kind?" She looks over at him, blue eyes momentarily sharp, before going fuzzy again. Not a big drinker, this one, and three margaritas were two too many.

He could chastise her for her poor decision making, but his heart doesn't seem to be in it tonight. If she's watching his face carefully, she might notice the reddened, slightly bloodshot eyes and dilated pupils that suggest he's been doing a little more than just hitting the tequila. There's a grunt in response to her question, which goes unanswered as he jams his hands into his jeans pockets and starts walking alongside her. Once they reach the front door, he holds it open for her, and pointedly ignores the raised eyebrows from the girl at the desk who's seen him wander in here with at least two other women. "Will you be all right getting to your room?"

Roxy steps through the door and she murmurs to Ruiz, "I think so," without a whole lot of confidence about it. At the look from the girl at the desk, she moves to it. "Would you have a first aid kit available? Or at least some bandages, the little ones with the sticky..." Band-aids, she means those.

"Sure, honey, I think we've got.. something.." The girl digs around under the desk, pulls out something resembling a first aid kit that looks like it's from the 90s, and makes a face at its contents. "Sorry, all out of bandaids. Guess we should refill this thing." Ya think?

"It's fine. I have a kit in my room." Ruiz digs for his keycard, and nods toward the assortment of chairs in the lobby. "Wait here. Or come with me, if you want." A glance to the front door before he ambles off for his room.

Roxy looks torn between the relative safety of the lobby and getting that much closer to her room. She decides on the latter, because she really, really needs to lie down very soon. Her head hurts, her elbow and knee hurt, and her pride hurts most of all. "I will go with you," she murmurs, following Ruiz at a slow pace, favoring the leg with the scraped-up knee.

He turns slightly at the mouth of the hallway when she makes to follow him, and pauses to allow her to catch up. Then, because he can likely see the imminent collapse coming, slides his arm around her waist without a word, and urges her to lean against him with a little nudge of his fingers before moving off for his room.

It's not far, thankfully. Four or five doors down, keycard tapped against the panel, and it lets them in with a bleeeep. Inside, the room looks about as lived-in as one might expect for someone who's been here for a couple of weeks. A bit cluttered, though reasonably tidy and clean. The suite is one of the more spacious ones, with a king-sized bed against one wall and a little seating nook with comfy chairs, a couch and a sliding glass door that looks out onto a semi-private patio. There's a laptop sitting on the little table near the microwave, and at least three guns arranged neatly on the bed; a rifle and two sidearms.

The woman isn't very hard to support. She's not a skeletal 95 pounds like she was in full training at 18, but she's not more than 115 now. She does lean on him to keep herself more easily upright, like a dancer would lean on their partner to maintain their balance. It is a comfortable thing for her, in the midst of great discomfort.

When the door opens and they enter, Roxy glances around, before her eyes rest on the bed and the arsenal on it. " Jumalani! Are you some kind of..." she searches for the word in English and comes up empty. "... Salamurhaaja?" Assassin.

He's not massively built. 190 perhaps, more than sturdy enough so as to barely notice her weight against him. The door's pulled shut and locked after them, and he helps her toward one of the chairs by the patio door. "What?" He's not at all sure what she just said, so settles on the (hopefully) safer, "No."

Once he's got the girl settled into the chair, he trudges off to find his first aid kit. It takes some hunting, but he eventually digs it out of a dresser drawer and brings it over to the bed to crack it open. Which necessitates moving one of the pistols he's got half disassembled there. "What are you running from?" he asks then, apropos of nothing.

"I do not remember the word in English. Man who kills people for money." Roxy sinks into the chair with another wince and carefully shrugs out of his jacket so it doesn't get any more blood on it than necessary. She examines her knee through the tear in the stocking with a small frown.

At the question, a brow arches and she looks his way a long moment, weighing whether or not to tell him. He did just possibly save her from an assault. "It is a very long story, and not a good one," she murmurs. "Do you really wish to know?"

Ruiz pauses as he's rifling around in the kit. A slight turn of his head toward Roxy, a brief narrowing of his eyes. Then he turns back to the open kit on the bed, and digs until he finds some antiseptic and a handful of bandaids. The lid's flipped shut, the items set down nearby, and he disappears briefly to wash his hands in the bathroom sink. Before he goes, "I've got time." Meaning, presumably, yes.

When he returns, Roxy is rolling down the stocking carefully over the injured knee with a grimace. She may need a few days off work. That's not likely to be good for tips. Makeup can cover the bruise well enough, but scrapes like that? They will scab.

"I was a dancer. Ballerina," she begins, removing her shoe so she can get the ruined stocking off. "And when I was eighteen, I was traveling this country with a company, performing across the US and Canada. And then one night, everything went sideways." She balls up the ruined garment and shoves it into her purse to throw away in her own trash later.

"One night, just before I was to go on, everything in the dressing room that I touched, gave me flashes of things. Emotions, things felt by people I knew, people I thought cared about me. They felt terrible things towards me. Terrible. And there was this awful buzzing in my head, like the electricity in the walls was trying to talk to me. I had a breakdown."

The faucet runs for a little while, amidst the sound of his hands being soaped up, then rinsed. After shutting it off and drying them, he comes back out to collect the first aid supplies he'd set aside, and crouches in front of Roxy to check out her various cuts and bruises. And he listens, of course, to her story. There's a twinge of something in his eyes when she gets to the part about emotions bleeding off of things, but he doesn't comment. Yet.

Roxy's bared foot makes the scrapes and bruise look like nothing. She has the feet of a professional ballet dancer who does pointe work. They look broken and battered from long years and many, many stress fractures. They are not pretty.

"My parents, they did not love their child. They loved the money she made, which was put away into a fund I could not access until I was twenty-one, to protect me from bad investments they said. But I believe they never intended for me to see it. With the breakdown, they were approached by the representatives of a place, an asylum, who paid them handsomely to take me into their care." That last word is said with a grinding of teeth.

"I do not remember much of what happened there. But it, it was not Here." She trembles slightly and glances at him to see if he is deciding she's a nutjob. "I was there for two years. And I have not been able to find the place since. I just woke up one day, far from it, down the coast with no ID, no papers or passport, no work visa, no money, nothing but the hospital gown on my back, and discovered it was 2017." Two years ago. "And then the call came from here, drawing me, so I had to find a way. So I did the only thing I knew how to do, I danced, in the only places that wouldn't require ID, strip clubs and burlesque houses. It took me two years. When I got here, I tried to find out what happened to my parents. They had me declared dead six months ago, and got access to the money."

He works quietly while she's talking. His hands are quick and sure, though he'd probably be out of his league with much more than basic first aid. Antiseptic is dabbed on each cut, and the nastier ones get some asphalt carefully tweezed out of them and a bandaid. His jaw's tight when she talks about her parents' treatment of her, but he doesn't comment directly on it. Instead, "Riika Korhonen." He mangles the accent fairly badly, but Finnish is about as far from Spanish with its soft consonants and rolling cadence as once can get. "That's your name. Yes?" He pushes to his feet briefly, crumpling and tossing the wrappers for the first aid supplies in the garbage, then goes to tidy up the kit.

"Not anymore. Riika is dead. And if they learn I am not, they will have me killed. I have nothing left for me as Riika," Roxy says softly. She winces at the tweezing and sucks air through her teeth as the antiseptic burns, but she doesn't cry out or jolt away. These pains are not much for someone like her.

"I earned half a million of your US dollars since I was eight years old. That may not seem a lot, but in my country, the average income is about Thirty Thousand Euros. Thirty-four thousand dollars. And my family was from a small village, and made very little. This was a huge windfall for them." She leans back in the chair and rests her head to look up at the ceiling, wiping a hand across her eyes. "I am trying to get papers, so I can stay, before someone figures out who I am and sends ICE to come get me and make me go back to Finland to die."

Ruiz looks over at that, hands pausing in the midst of their industry with the first aid kit. "They will have you killed. Who? Give me names." He latches it shut with a couple of clicks, and moves off to stow it where he got it from before washing his hands again.

As to the rest of what she says, "I might be able to help you with the papers." His jaw tightens when ICE is mentioned. Probably not too hard to figure out why; as a Mexican ex-pat, he's sure to have had experiences, tangential or not, with them. "The good news is, you're much less likely to be targeted by them." Than someone like him, with brown skin, he means. Even if he doesn't say it.

Roxy...Riika looks over at him with dull eyes. "Unless I am in a high-risk profession and wind up in the hospital, or having to give statements to the police. And then my background is checked. They have to report me then. I have read the laws." She squeezes her fingers on the bridge of her nose, closing her eyes tightly and trying to massage away the ache in her head. "I have an appointment with someone about papers. And you cannot help with something in Finland, Javier. Unless you plan to fly there and put bullets in my parents heads," she points out with a smirk.

She rises from the chair, a little unsteady but her excellent balance keeps her upright. "Thank you for your kindness tonight. I should go. I have disrupted your evening." She feels like she's said too much, to a stranger. The drink has loosened her tongue and that is how people like her disappear without a trace, by being careless. The ache in her head flares, and he gets the sudden sense of her mental presence, not knocking at his mind, but just there.

A white stag....no...a white doe, so pure and pale she is nearly glowing. Upon her head rests a crown of branches, quaking aspen, as pale as she is, fashioned to look like antlers. She trembles, ready to run at any sound, knowing she is hunted, knowing she is prey.

Roxy shuts her eyes tight and the static in her head cuts off with the effort. She is still not completely in control of that. It's why she doesn't drink much, or do any drugs.

He's oddly calm about the whole thing, considering he's just brought a strange girl to his hotel room and been informed that she has murderous people after her, and may be in the country illegally. "Your parents, then," he surmises, when she doesn't answer the question about who they are, directly. He pushes his hands into his pockets, dark eyes perusing her thoughtfully as he ambles in closer. He doesn't jump to help her when she pushes to stand, but remains in easy reach should she need assistance.

"You haven't disrupted anything," he replies after a moment or two, once she's on her feet. "I-"

And then he sees her. Not the her that those without the Sight see, but the form her aspect takes, and it stills him for a long while. It both stills him, and stirs something in him; and the reason why may be obvious, when she opens her eyes again. If she is a pale white stag, he is the wolf. A lean, powerful beast, mouth full of razor-tipped knives for teeth, toes tipped in long claws. Bright red eyes, and a body just as white, but not so much glowing serenely as completely gutted in fury-flame. A low snarl is felt more than heard, at the very edges of her consciousness, and the next time she blinks, it's slunk into shadow.

"But perhaps it's best you go," he agrees. A breath, slow. "You need a ride somewhere?"

Roxy's eyes slit open and rest on the wolf. A white wolf, with white flame, that shakes her. Her nightmares, the ones she has almost every night, the ones she is not sure are dreams or memories, of being chased through a moonlit wood, dark trees trying to block her path, underbrush trying to tangle her feet, no hooves, as she races away from the baying of the hounds. The Cwn Annwn. They are accompanied by the shrill cries of the hawks overhead, and the ground trembles under the hooves of the horses of the hunt. He can sense the panic, and the horror, radiating off of her.

She backs away from him, towards the door, keeping him in sight at all times. "I can get to my room fine," she whispers, swallowing past the fear tightening her throat.

He doesn't move. Not a muscle, as the dark-haired girl backs away for the door. His whole body is tense, like he might launch forward in a sudden burst of movement. Steady, slow breath, the faintest twitch of his lip like it wanted to pull back over his teeth; or maybe it's just a trick of the light. "Lo siento," he murmurs, just barely audible, as his eyes track hers steadily.

"Thank you for tending my wounds," Roxy says quickly, then she is rushing out of the room and down the hall to her own, feeling like the Wild Hunt is nipping at her heels. What did they do to her over There? Is it all just a weird fever dream, or was she really that deer, being chased through a forest of endless night? She has no idea, but she locks her door securely behind her.