06/01/2007 13:42:00

Disclaimer: Rent is not mine. It alllll belongs to Johnathon Larson… Baby Angel, however, is totally mine…

A/N: This is pretty much going to be a bunch of flashbacks, followed by a "reuniting of the bohemians story". Cliché, yes…but oh so delicious. Like French fries. Corny and bad for you…but really, really good. PS. This story starts to suck towards the end because a I got really really mad at it. Just so you know.

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From a distance, the five year old could have been mistaken for the lost soul of someone you knew, at one time or another. She had the distinctly disheveled look of someone who had spent much of his or her time wandering from place to place, without really knowing who or what she was looking for. Realistically, she was a small five year old in a cafe who had happened to look particularly tired that day, perhaps having had ingested a bit too much ice-cream with her friends at a slumber party the night before.

But as Thomas B. Collins flipped through the Life and Arts section of the Wall Street Journal, the hard metal café chair digging into his ass, and, goddamnit, assisting in the complete ruin of his already crappy day, (complete with lukewarm tea and insolent students who just fucking did not understand), the girl (unaccompanied and alone with a ham and cheese sandwich) struck him as particularly…peculiar for some reason or another.

She was, indeed, the average five year old, with a small frame and long black hair, dark skinned and probably Latina. And because Thomas B. Collins was very, very bored, and because he was old and sick and having a really, really shitty day, this girl made him rather sad. And intrigued. Simply because she reminded him of someone who he had known at one time, someone who would have been considered, by the standards of the average American, to be a complete waste of a life. Someone who had fucked themselves up beyond belief, someone who had always been there for him. Someone who had been best friends with the object of the last meaningful relationship he'd ever had…someone, whose name was Mimi Marquez.

As he attempted to observe the girl without looking like a total pervert, he noticed three very intriguing things. First, that she seemed to be looking for someone. Second, that she seemed rather unsatisfied with her ham and cheese sandwich, which was intriguing simply because Mimi hated, hated ham and cheese sandwich's.

However, there was no way to know when Mimi's last ham and cheese sandwich had been, because he had not seen any of the old group for at least five years. Mimi had gotten out of the hospital and left with Roger a year later for who knows where, her health failing and, last time he had seen her, with the flu, Mark had gone off to California to pursue a career as a filmmaker and had not been seen since, and Maureen and Joanne had moved to Jersey with their twin daughters, where Benny and his wife currently resided. As far as he knew, anyways.

Collins himself had been far to busy moving from meaningless relationship to meaningless relationship…the only thing that kept him from just letting himself go until he died was the thought of what Angel would say if he saw Thomas B. Collins wasting his life away entirely. The thought was amusing, in a rather morbid way.

Alas, Thomas now noted that the third and final very intriguing thing about this little girl was that she was crying. He had not noticed it at first, because this Mini-Mimi (as he had christened her) was not a sort of wailing crier. She was crying very quietly into her ham and cheese sandwich, and absolutely no one had noticed.

So, Thomas B. Collins, being the kind and loving soul that he was, (though his students might disagree to the that notion…not surprising, as they seemed to disagree to all his other ones), got up to comfort the little girl. After all, if you were in a café and saw a small child crying alone on the streets of Manhattan, would you not get up to assist the child? They were, after all, at The Bagel House on Times Square. Not, surely, the place for a child.

Anyways, he approached the girl, quietly as so not to scare her, and because he had had experiences with random strangers approaching him in shops, he made sure that his first words were neither threatening nor scary in anyway.

"Are you ok, honey?" he said cautiously. "Is your mommy here?"

The little girl looked up from her plate.

"No," she said robustly, "I will not help you find your puppy. And I don't want any candy. And I can scream really, really loud,"

Collins resisted the urge to laugh. He had never met a girl this age with so much…spunk.

"It's ok, sweetie, I just wanted to see if you were O.K. My name is Collins. What's yours?"

"Mmph," The girl said, looking down at her plate.

"It's alright!" Collins said. I'm not going to hurt you…I just wanted to-"

But what Tom Collins wanted to do, the world was not about to find out, because the little girl screamed. And, true to her word, it was really, really loud.

"DADDY!"

Oh shit, oh shit oh shit. Not only was his day really, really crappy, some tough guy was about to come and beat the shit out of him. Great.

A tall, thing guy with blonde hair hiding his face ran out of the bathrooms.

"I'm right here, sweetie, what's up? It's ok, who's bothering you?"

Tom Collins straightened up and prepared to explain, but the blonde guy had already reached his daughter and was picking her up, and without looking at him, said,

"Look, buddy, I don't know what the fuck you thought you were doing but stay the hell away from my kid, got it?"

And it really did look like Thomas B. Collins was about to get the shit beaten out of him (one tends to assume, when faced with a man in a leather jacket slurring threats, that he is indeed going to get the shit beaten out of him.

However, when the man turned around, and a flash or recognition crossed his face, Thomas B. Collins found himself enveloped in a bear hug.

"Thomas!"

"Uh…"

It was when the man pulled away that Thomas B. Collins recognized the face of Roger Davis, gaunt and barely alive, and with the same worn look as his daughter, but with a shining cheerfulness that was distinctly Roger-like all the same.

"How have you been, man?"

"I've been pretty good," Collins said slowly, "I just got back from MIT… again…(for Roger's face had been caught with amusement)...is this your daughter?"

"Yeah, this is Angel. Angel, remember the man named Collins I always told you about? This is him."

"Hi, Angel," Collins said, honored at the allusion to his former lover in the girl's name, "I'm sorry I scared you earlier, but you did a good job calling your Daddy like that,"

Angel nodded, looking over her daddy's shoulder at the Ham and Cheese sandwich as if it were her worst enemy.

"Yeah," Roger said, "Good job, kid. I see we have yet to eat our sandwich."

"It's gross."

"Angel you know we can't afford-"

"I know, Daddy. I'm five. That doesn't mean that I'm gonna eat the stupid sandwich."

"Don't say stupid."

Collins resisted the urge to laugh. "Five? So is she-"

"Mimi's, yeah. But she-uh-died when Angel was two months old. Labor was really bad and then-"

"I'm sorry,"

"Don't be. I've got a Mini-Mimi right here,"

"Honestly, I was thinking that when I first saw her crying,"

Roger set his daughter down and looked her in the eye. "You were crying?"

"No," Angel said stubbornly.

Roger laughed. "Yeah, it's been a long five years,"

"Tell me about it,"

So Thomas B. Collins and Roger Davis sat down to reflect on their shitty days and catch up on life, completely unaware that just a few streets over, on Broadway, Mark Cohen and his wife were setting up their cameras to shoot, where, just meters away, Maureen and Joanne Johnson-Jefferson were running down the street, chasing their run away foster son and twin daughters, who were about to run into the cameras of a Mr. And Mrs. Cohen.