Shane made his way to the fire escape as soon as he heard his front door close behind her. Mary Anne was her name. She wasn't necessarily his type but the pickings were slim with what was going on in the city. Curfews were being enforced strictly and he was forced to find a woman that actually lived in his apartment building if he wanted to see her. He enjoyed the silence once she had gone. The woman always talked too damn much, but they always did.
He finally felt like he could breathe as he climbed onto the fire escape. He didn't quite know why, but it was peaceful out there at night, especially with the mass power outages across the city, you could finally see the stars. He'd only been outside for a few minutes when he heard the stairs below him creaking. Cocking an eyebrow, he quickly pulled his legs back from dangling over the edge to see what idiot teenager was trying to sneak out after lockdown.
Or was it one of the people he kept hearing about? The kind that was eating other people's faces off? Maybe it'd heard his feet dangling, bumping against the stairs, but now that he was quiet …
He held his breath as the footsteps grew louder and louder, and then he saw a hand grab the top stair, before the creature pulled itself … herself up the rest of the way. The girl seemed just as surprised to see him as he was to see her, but she quickly flashed him a smile before wincing in pain. "Damn, kid, that's a shiner," he commented lightly as she pulled herself up onto his level and took a seat beside him, letting her backpack drop beside her with a surprisingly heavy clang. "You have a run in with Mike Tyson?"
"This is a Mayweather original," she said instead, gesturing vaguely to the side of her face that was swelling purple. She was small and looked to be in her late teens or early twenties, so Shane wasn't particularly worried about her presence, but he found it passing odd that she didn't seem at all concerned about being alone with a strange man on a dark fire escape in the middle of the night. "You know, since he beats women?"
"Who …" was all he managed to ask.
"You don't know who Floyd Mayweather is?" she demanded, looking almost offended until he gave her an annoyed look. "Oh, me," she said, flashing another smile. "Well I'm just your friendly neighborhood-"
"Thief," he interrupted, glancing past her to where her bag had started to spill over with prescription medications that he was pretty sure didn't all belong to her.
Shane marveled at how that smile never seemed to leave her face, and it was a nice smile at that. There was something mischievous to it, that was for sure, but she didn't seem overtly threatening. "You got me there," she agreed, propping the backpack back up and stuffing the contents that had spilled back inside it.
"You gonna tell me your name or you want me to call you Floyd?"
"Lincoln," she answered simply.
"What, like Nebraska?" he asked with a laugh as she pulled a lighter and a pack of cigarettes out of her pocket. She sent him an irritated look for laughing at her name but offered him one all the same. He shook his head and she shrugged before lighting up. "Who'd you rob?"
"No one that's gonna miss it," she assured him. "Why, you need something? Maybe something a little harder than a cigarette?"
Shane ran a hand over his face, deciding quickly that this girl must not have been a hardened criminal. It wasn't as obvious as it was for some of the guys on the force, but he still thought he gave off a pretty strong cop vibe. Of course this kind of shit happened to him when the city was in too much turmoil for it to matter. "Yeah, no thanks, I actually spent last night snorting oxycontin on my fire escape with some kids. Hate doing the same thing two nights in a row."
Lincoln sent him a lazy smile and he found himself returning it as she leaned her head back into his building, closing her eyes and taking a long drag. "You live here?" she asked, jerking her head to gesture to his apartment.
"Your passion for climbing fire escapes to buildings you don't live in is not universal," he said, smiling again when this time she laughed, looking pretty cute, he thought, when he could only see the half of her face that wasn't swollen. "Why, are you trying to decide if you still want to rob me?"
"I live two storeys up," explained Lincoln, opening her eyes to peer upward. "Bad for business if the person you rob only has to take a quick elevator ride to get their stuff back."
Shane was quiet for a long moment as he tried to put all the pieces together. "The hell you doing taking the fire escape when you live in the building?" he asked, receiving little more than a shrug in response. "The hell you doing sitting out here talking to me when your place is right there?"
"Damn, you trying to get rid of me already?"
"How long do your hang out sessions with random men on fire escapes usually last?" wondered Shane. "I know I try to keep my interactions with girls carrying a backpack full of stolen prescription medication to under ten minutes."
"Judge us not equally," she warned him. "Some of us may be worth upwards of fifteen minutes."
"You not wanting to go home got anything to do with this?" he asked, reaching over. She flinched as he ran a cold thumb across her tender cheek bone gently. "Boyfriend do this to you?" The flash of annoyance that crossed her face was answer enough for Shane. "Ah, the old man," he amended.
"If anybody asks, it was Floyd Mayweather," she said, leaning away from him and out of his reach, though not in an obvious way. "Way cooler story."
Shane ran his hand through his hair, feeling irritated. He had come to the fire escape for peace, not to find a new project to work on on his night off. "You want me to talk to him? I'm a-"
"Cop," she supplied, causing Shane to send her a surprised look now. If she knew he was a cop, why the hell was she talking to him the way she had been? "You've talked to my daddy about thirty times, Officer Walsh. I expect you left as lasting of an impression on him as he did on you." He was at a loss for words now. Not only did she know he was a police officer, but she knew him by name. Had he really seen her before? He knew he'd taken a few domestic violence cases in his building, but thirty times? He watched as she pushed to her feet now, heaving her backpack back over her shoulders as she started climbing her final two flights of stairs. "Don't feel too bad," she called to him from a flight up. "Purple's totally my color."
He tried to blow it off. Maybe it was only an occasional thing. Maybe it just looked worse than it was. Maybe it wouldn't happen again. Maybe someone else would take care of it. A thousand maybes flew through Shane's head that night as he tried, and failed, to get some sleep. It wouldn't do, he thought to himself as he checked the clock around four in the morning. He couldn't be losing sleep over some smart mouthed brat when people were eating each other in the streets.
That meant he was going to have to deal with the problem at hand. So he wasn't surprised to find himself standing outside of apartment 805 at approximately 7:45 in the morning. He hit the door firmly, and his urgency must have been conveyed because the door was unhitching only a few seconds later. "Jesus Christ," were the words that fell from her mouth upon seeing him.
Shane found that words were failing him. Her eye had looked bad enough a few hours ago in the dim light, but it was much worse now, and looked like it was starting to swell shut. "Nebraska," he greeted. "Can I come inside?"
"Do you have a warrant?" she asked, more obstinate than he remembered. "I know … some things about my rights."
"You have the right," Shane began slowly, "to get your little ass out of my way."
Lincoln raised her chin as she looked up at him and Shane almost thought she might still tell him no. But then she took a step back and gestured for him to step inside. "Fair enough," she muttered.
Shane stepped inside the home and caught sight of a middle aged woman with cropped, gray hair stepping out of the kitchen. "Oh!" she gasped at the sight of him, throwing her hands up in surprise and dropping the plate she'd been carrying. Shane could hear a man shouting from the other room and knew he'd found his source. "Ed, honey, there's a police officer here!" The woman forced a watery smile at Shane while her husband thundered in the room.
Ed himself looked surprised at the sight of Shane, but not too surprised. "She sneakin' out again?" he grunted, sending a dirty look in his daughter's direction.
Shane glanced down at the girl and found that she didn't seem particularly impressed by her father's threatening glance, but he wasn't sure if that was her natural bravery or if the fact that he was currently standing between them had bolstered her confidence. "You mind tellin' me how that happened?" Shane asked, gesturing to Lincoln's face.
The man in front of him stood silent for so long Shane thought he might be dumb enough not to answer the question, but then his wife stepped in. "She's always been such a clumsy thing," the woman said, stepping forward to try to grab the girl and pull her back towards her family. Shane put up a hand to stop her and she skidded to a halt, flinching at the sight of his raised hand. "I'm so sorry we had to waste your time like this, I'm sure you're very busy."
"That what happened?" Shane asked her. "You fall?"
Lincoln shrugged a pair of insolent shoulders. "Well they say anything's possible," she replied, before catching her father's eye again. "Yeah, sure, I fell."
Shane hated domestic violence cases. Half the time the women never admitted anything was wrong, and the other half changed their story before he got there to handle anything. He knew they were lying, they knew they were lying, and they knew he knew they were lying. But there wasn't anything he could do about it. There was a procedure, there were rules to follow. But fuck it, Shane thought. What rules did he need to follow now? Who would they call if he broke them, the Sheriff? There wouldn't be any consequences from Rick. "She didn't fall," he told the couple.
Most people would've argued and insisted that she did. Ed Peletier was not most people. "The fuck are you gonna do about it?" he asked instead.
A heavy silence fell over the home as Carol took a step back, her eyes finding the ground as she wrung her hands together. Shane had been left momentarily speechless, but now he let out a short, bitter laugh. "You put your hands on that girl again," he began, but stopped himself from completing the threat when he saw Ed stepping around him to wrap a heavy hand around Lincoln's arm.
Shane caught him by the wrist before he could reach her and threw his other arm into the man's neck, slamming him back into the door with a sickening crack. "Ed!" his wife shouted, and he could feel tiny hands clawing at him, trying to pull him back.
"Like I was sayin'," Shane began again, feeling eerily calm as Ed flopped against him, letting out strange, guttural sounds when Shane pressed his forearm even harder into his throat. "You put your hand on that girl again and I'll beat you to death, Ed. That's what I'm gonna do about it."
xoxoxoxoxo
A/N: This is not a proper story but an old roleplay I wrote with a friend several years ago. I've decided to read through and make some edits to make it a bit less embarrassing and I'm posting it here (like I have with my other old roleplays) in order to be able to read it easily in the future. Feel free to read and enjoy (or hate it) if you'd like, but set your expectations low as this was just something written for fun. :P