Louis looked up disinterestedly.
"Kindly don't destroy our secret base." he muttered, not looking up from his papers. His slate colored hair fell into his face and he didn't bother to brush it away.
"Shut it Louis." Mandy snarled, throwing herself down at the couch with a discontented snarl.
"Did someone get stuck with the bitch pin again?" Louis sneered as he fumbled for a new piece of paper, his current sheet filled up with his nearly illegible scrawl.
"I said can it." Mandy snarled again. Her black curls fell angrily in her face, even though she'd used her classic get up of three red hair clips to keep the most her unruly bangs at bay, the better part of her hair was just like Mandy.
Un-freaking-stoppable when she wanted to get her way.
Juliet rounded the corner, her petite frame half dancing half walking, a habit she'd picked up at the finishing school she'd attended for six years. That girl was pretty damn finished the way Louis saw it.
Seven hours a day of dancing, ettiquette and old world french lessons gave her the perfect education befitting a nobleman's daughter- a perfect education she completely threw out the window when she ran away and joined a rebel cat thief cell.
Yup. Finished as finished could get.
"You look really pissed off." she sang as she sauntered in, slipping a new set of files onto my desk before pirouetting neatly into a leap and landing gracefully on the couch. Her neat red bob stayed perfectly intact and her grey eyes were pensive and sparkling.
Mandy muttered something about dramatics.
"I'm with you Jules. I bet she didn't get in." Louis chuckled. He had told Mandy it was a lost cause, trying to get in, but she had stubbornly insisted on trying.
"Damnit!" she crowed. "What's the point of being an anarchist cell if we can't just cause a little mayhem!"
"Mandy, we're not an anarchist cell." Juliet repmrimanded. "We're a group of citizens concerned with the unconstitutional direction the city has taken."
"Whatever Juliet, spew your polite diplomatics to Brennan. Where the hell is he anyway?" she muttered mutinously. Juliet rolled her eyes, unfazed as always.
Mandy talked a big talk, but she really did care for Juliet like the little sister she was to all of them, Louis and everyone else in the Crue knew it.
"I think he's just coming in." Louis remarked absently as he reached for the new reports- a set on border patrols. "Nice, where'd we get these?"
Juliet turned primly in her seat and smirked.
"I flirted them out of an old guy." she stated proudly.
"That's my girl!" boomed Brennan, thumping into the room. His dark skin gleamed in the light and his blue eyes stared us down keenly. Juliet lept up from her chair and ran at him, arms outstretched. He twirled her around easily as Mandy rolled her eyes again.
"Someone gag me." she muttered.
"Hey man, how was the trip?" Louis inquired mildly, still not looking up. Years of living with the chaotic bunch had given the group's resident genius plenty of time to hone the gift of multitasking down to a science, an art even.
He could solve a cipher in the dark, while Juliet and Brennan played Extreme Jenga with couch cushions, and as Mandy rocked out to heavy metal on the speakers.
He didn't even want to get started on what he'd had to do while running away from the police.
Avery strolled lazily into the room, a lolling grin on his light features. He held his fist out for Brennan to pound before striding over to Louis and offering the same fist, which he denied, just like always.
Louis liked to think he excluded himself from Brennan and Avery's bizarre ritual, but, in doing so, he became a part of it, as traditions often begin.
Fist, fist, denial.
Brothers somehow.
Avery, the well dressed little prick that he was, twiddled his fedora for a moment before lifting it gingerly off his head and tossing it blithely at Mandy, who caught it without flinching. His toffee colored hair, now free, fell in a loose mop over his eyes, just like Brennan and Louis wore their hair.
"So, Mandy, didja get in?" Taunted Avery, obviously sure she hadn't.
"No. The bastards said something about the exibhit not being open for another three months." she seethed. Juliet tossed her head from side to side as she sat on Brennan's shoulders. She would have hit the low ceiling if she hadn't been so short.
"We'll get in, don't worry, we'll get that damn diamond." Avery promised.
"Are you sure about that?" Louis said loudly. Everyone groaned.
"BEEP BEEP BEEP!" called Mandy, finally sitting up from the couch. "Cynical genius report coming in."
"Are you going to rain on our parade?" Juliet said sadly. Louis blew a long breath upwards at his shaggy bangs. Brennan shushed her quietly as he helped her to swing lithely down.
"Hit us with it Louie." snarked Avery.
"Don't be a dick." Louis snapped, shuffling his papers. Juliet trotted over and took the papers in his hands, sitting down on the piano bench as she tried to decipher his handwriting.
She was, oddly enough, the only one capable of deciphering his notes, as she'd been reading cursive for six years of her twelve, and Louis's was not the worse she'd had to translate.
"The diamond is suspended from a what?" she shrieked. Mandy groaned and fell back down on the couch.
"Thirty feet above the ground from a solid glass window by steel cables and a metal base. If we break the window it's suspended from, the diamond will fall, triggering the motion sensors on the floor below." Louis listed.
"You were wrong, Juliet, the cables you saw weren't for a chandelier, they were to hold the diamond." He continued. More groans.
"And, to make matters worse, security is tight, and you know they'll have the King's signature to go ahead and use electric currents set to kill, not stun. Not like that's illegal or anything." he muttered sarcastically.
"You forget," growled Brennan, "nothing's illegal for the King's favorite five."
He was using his favorite 'I-strongly-suggest-mutiny-now' voice. Juliet grinned broadly, amused at his train of thought.
"When are we going to steal the thing?" she demanded, her singsong voice just barely hinting at a whine.
"When construction is at it's peak," Louis replied promptly. "they'll be the most distracted."
Avery scratched his head, and frowned.
"How do we get in?" he asked. Now it was Louis's turn to frown.
"I'm working on that one." He sighed. All eyes turned to Mandy, who looked up and raised an eyebrow at us.
"What?" she said flatly.
"You do sometimes come up with, I don't know, some stroke of pure genius so random and out of the blue that it's possibly drug induced. Can't you do that now?" Brennan said. Mandy looked right at Louis and smiled.
"Hey, it always takes prompting from the real genius over there, I'm merely a sarcastic little rebel with an anarchist agenda and no real sense of direction or common sense without his stellar planning."
"For the last time Mandy! We are NOT an anarchist cell!" Juliet groaned loudly. Brennan clapped her on the back.
"This coming from a twelve year old who could take out a full grown man with a few strategically placed kicks and a mission to steal a priceless diamond as a statement about worker's rights?" he said skeptically. Juliet shrugged.
"I'm no anarchist, I'm just... different." she concluded.
Yup, Louis thought, just different.
They didn't think of themselves as traitors to the city, just different kids who went their own way.
Kids whose own way just so happened to be stealing priceless diamonds from rich museums owned by powerful kings.
Sure, that kind of different.
1 comments:
oooooh! exciting! me like me like! ashy reminds me so much of alice, eh?
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