[Open] He gon' give it to ya

[Reinhardt (DELETED 8150)]

“Fair point,” Reinhardt conceded, untucking his hand in order to hoist himself up onto the table.
Once seated, he lifted his cigarette back to his mouth.

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” he added, watching her through the cloud of smoke he then exhaled. “I don’t particularly favour the dark and macabre over Katy Perry’s cupcake tits and glitter lips, but I’ve seen enough **** to be wary of girls with ghost stories cozying up to railings.”

With that, he took a deep drag before dropping his arm to the edge of the table once again. The cold breeze brushed across his knuckles, causing the hairs at his nape to rise. Now that he’d stopped moving, the temperature was beginning to affect him. It wouldn't hurt to take this conversation inside.

“What d’you think of Katy Perry?”

[Vienna Torres (DELETED 8181)]

"Well, I don't fap to her cupcake tits and glitter lips," she said tartly. He'd started the vulgarity. How had they gone from talking about suicide to Katy Perry?

Still, she couldn't help it, a reluctant smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.

"So you like rap and pop. Or at least, pop singers." She tucked her hands into her pockets. Even through the thickness of her coat, she was starting to feel a little cold.

She stepped back from the railing. "I"m Vienna. I live on the top floor."

[Reinhardt (DELETED 8150)]

Neither do I, he was inclined to respond, but it wasn’t a matter worth pressing. Reinhardt was rarely inclined to correct people’s assumptions of him. For many years, giving people the freedom to draw specious conclusions about him had been a practical survival mechanism.

“J,” he replied, ever so happy the first letter of his name could be mistaken for a name in and of itself.

“4th floor.”

It was high enough that pedestrian and vehicular traffic didn’t bother him, but low enough that the buildings across the road blocked his view. He’d done the best he could with what he had, keeping the curtains open to let as much natural light in as he could. A few plants had made it to his windowsills to distract from the boxy atmosphere. Still, he didn’t spend much time there.

“You own or renting?”

[Vienna Torres (DELETED 8181)]

The answer to that question was "neither", but she didn't mind hearing him talk as if she actually could own or rent anything, like she wasn't still a kid living with her mom.

"My mom and I rent here," she said.

She shot him a curious look. "Is Jay short for anything? And - okay, how are you not freezing right now?"

[Reinhardt (DELETED 8150)]

His utter inability to discern someone’s age reared its ugly head as he looked at her more closely. The lighting up here was far from ideal, though even in broad daylight he wasn’t going to make any clever guesses. Relative age was easier to figure, though plastic surgery and corrosive habits blurred the lines more often than not. It was apparent that she was much younger than he’d assumed, and younger than himself, surely.

Mothers were a bristling topic conversation, so he didn’t pursue his query any further.
It was just as well, for he found himself on the receiving end of two back-to-back questions.

The first he ignored, not keen on being pressed for more than he’d willingly offered without prompt. He told her what she could address him as. There was only one person still living on this planet who used his birth name, and she had picked it out too. He was J. Reinhardt now. Or rather, he now could freely be J. Reinhardt—nothing more, nothing less.

The second he replied to after a lengthy exhale, his jaw tensed as he repressed the shivering. He was freezing, and his body was reacting. Crushing the butt against the table to extinguish it, he hopped off and wandered towards the cigarette he’d dropped earlier. He wasn’t one for littering.

“I’m so ******* freezing, you can call me Elsa,” he chuckled, walking back towards the table to pick up his belongings. This conversation wasn’t going to keep him up here, but it didn’t mean it should end. Curiously, he glanced back at her, trying to gauge her age a second time.

“How old are you, anyway?”

[Vienna Torres (DELETED 8181)]

She took that for a 'no' on the nickname thing, then.

"I'm eighteen." The look she shot him was aggressively defensive, just daring him to comment. The last time her age had been mentioned, she'd had to throw a drink at someone.

[Reinhardt (DELETED 8150)]

1-8.

Old enough to be shipped off to a desert nation to kill some extremists.
Old enough to legally knock back a shot or twenty (however unadvisable) of tequila.
Old enough, basically.

Sure, most teenagers were stupid as **** (especially as a collective), but having suffered from condescending assumptions such as that one himself for many years, Reinhardt wasn’t going to pass judgement on the individual without getting to know her first.

And what was he if not a kid five years her senior?
He wondered, offhandedly, when was one an actual adult?

The clatter of his teeth was distracting, the bite of cold air against his bare skin turned painful without the warmth of a cigarette. With a noncommittal grunt, Reinhardt walked towards the heavy aluminium door. It was as anticlimactic a parting as any, but his mind was focused on survival and not socialising. He pulled the door open and threw his bare hand over his head in a haphazard wave.

“See you around, Eighteen.”

[Vienna Torres (DELETED 8181)]

She wasn't really sure what she'd been bracing herself for - comments on how she looked younger, how eighteen was just a kid, all that ********. She hadn't expected him to treat it like a ******* nickname. It was a freaking number, and it'd be out of date in a year.

Points awarded for the dumbest thing anyone had ever called her.

She rolled her eyes at his back.

"You're not calling me that!"

God, if he called her Eighteen again, she was so ******* going to call him Elsa after all.