Gamzee's phone goes off at noon, and he struggles awake. He's only had three hours of sleep, but that will have to do for the day. He has to go get a license, through some miracle or another.

With a yawn that makes his jaw crack, he sits up and stretches, popping almost every joint in his body. Belatedly, he realizes that the fact his phone went off means he has a text.

GET YOUR LAZY ASS OFF THE COUCH.

Good old Karkat. Dependable as always. Slouching down, Gam rummages through a crate tucked below a counter that holds his few clothes. A pair of jeans, a pair of Bali pants, a couple of old shirts, and a hoodie. Most of them are wrinkled and dirty, but the Bali pants and one of the black shirts is okay. He throws them on and makes a note to do laundry. His phone goes off again as he's shimmying into his pants. WIth one hand, he fumbles at the keypad until it lights up.

LAST WARNING. UP TO FACE THE GLORIOUS FUCKING DAY.

AlRiGhT aLrIgHt.

GOOD. DO YOU NEED A RIDE SOMEWHERE?

BrO. gO tO wOrK, i'Ll Be MoThErFuCkInG fInE.

With that, he chucks his phone in his pocket and heads out to face the day. The sun is shining brightly, and he's blinking for a good minute before he can see. Standing on the sidewalk, it just now occurs to him that he doesn't have the first idea where to go. Pulling out his phone again, he scrolls through the few numbers and taps Roxy's.

HeY sIs. WhErE wOuLd I gEt A lIcEnSe?

for wut?

Gam is frankly amazed that she's conscious at this hour, let alone coherent (she's usually in bed until 3 or so, waking up with just enough time to get ready for her next assignment), but he's not going to question his luck.

ThE bAr. CoPs SaId I nEeD oNe To KeEp OpEn.

There's a long pause, and he shifts on the sidewalk, looking at the outside of his club. The awnings are torn and faded and dirty, barely sheltering the stained sidewalk beneath them. One of the outside windows is cracked, another gone altogether and covered in plyboard. The frames are splintered, dirty wood that might once have been white and are now dingy grey. Above the door (which barely hangs onto the hinges) is a dim yellow square where the sign once was. Gamzee makes a note to repair this all, because a swinging club can't look like a dying gasp, not if it wants to attract patrons that have money to spare.

His phone finally buzzes again and he checks the screen.

try the concil dontown

*council

**downton

***DOWNTOWN

Maybe he wasn't right about her alertness quite yet. Sliding the phone back to his pocket, he sighs. The council building is ages away, nearly an hour and a half on the bus. He has the pocket change, but it will take all day to get there and if there's something he needs, he can't exactly run home and get it. It isn't like he has another option, so he walks to the bus stop, rubbing his wrist across his eyes.

It's half an hour before the bus comes, but it finally does, so he hops on. It's empty until closer to downtown, when a few men in suits start getting on, heading for business lunches where they'll sip a glass of wine and make enough money to feed Gam for six months.

The bus lurches to a stop outside the office buildings, and he lopes off, searching for the council building. It's tall and elegant and reminds him a little bit of a wedding cake, all layers and frosting and opulence bordering on the ridiculous.

He takes a deep breath and walks in, feeling conspicuously underdressed. The lobby matches the outside, all pristine white marble and rubber plants. There's a mahogany desk where a disapproving secretary eyes him over the top of her glasses. Her hair is pinned up in an elaborate Japanese looking style, and her red dress is hot off the runways.

Gamzee wants to turn and run before he has to talk to this imposing woman, but he really has no choice. Walking over, he smiles faintly. "Hey sis. I need to talk to someone about getting a license for a club." He's trying so hard to be polite, to drop all his usual slang, that it nearly hurts, but he'll do whatever it takes to keep this one last thing of his alive.

The woman looks at him and sighs, before picking up a phone and saying a few rapid words into the other end in a language Gam doesn't understand. When she hangs up, she looks at him again, and in perfect English says, "Sixth floor." She doesn't add a room or a person, so Gamzee hesitates before slinking away to the stairs.

All the way up, he curses as colourfully as he can (sailors and truckers alike would be shocked at his language) under his breath. It's not so much the woman being rude as it is him hating the situation he's in, hates depending on someone he's never met for his livelihood. At the top, he walks through the door, landing in another lobby. It's almost exactly the same as the one downstairs, just a little bit smaller and with an extra plant in the corner.

There's a second lady seated at the desk, but this one smiles. She looks like she could be related to the woman downstairs, but Gamzee doesn't choose to ponder that. "Inside," she chirps. "He's waiting for you."

With a nagging sense of foreboding, Gamzee pushes the door open and steps inside. A bald man is sitting at a desk piled high with papers. His suit is the green of bottle glass, and his tie is startlingly white. "Good afternoon," he says politely. "What can I do for you, Mister...?"
Theres a brief moment of hesitation as Gamzee tries to figure out how to introduce himself. Deciding that sounding official is probably in his best interest, he holds out a hand and says, "Makara. Gamzee Makara."

The man reaches over and shakes his hand once, firm but not trying to break the bones in his hand. "You may call me Scratch."

It's a weird last name, but Gam doesn't comment. "What can I do for you, son?" says Scratch again, with a little more force behind it this time. Clearly, this is a busy man.

"I need a license for a new club? To serve liquor?"

"Ah. Can I see some certification?"

Oh fuck. Gamzee doesn't have a certification, for anything. Still, he pulls out his wallet, making a show of going through it, before his fingers stumble on a piece of paper he's long since forgotten about. His face lights up as he pulls it out and hands it over. The pub he worked for, when he first started, two years ago, made him take a course in handling alcohol. They give him some bit of paper to prove it, nothing official, more a receipt for the twenty dollars than a certificate, but it will do. He hopes it will, anyways. He can't afford it not to.

Scratch takes it with the barest hint of a frown and examines it before he hands it back. "Formal training?" he asks, a trace of doubt leaking into his voice.

"Yes," Gamzee answers. "I worked as a bartender for two years." Okay, not quite true, he worked as a bouncer, but he had to take the basic course to even work in a bar. And he did work there for two years. He can only hope the little lie doesn't show on his face.

"And now you've endeavored to open a business of your own?" He asks it like a question, but it's really a statement, a we-know-you're-business-rests-in-our-hands moment just to show he knows exactly what's at stake. Gamzee can't bring himself to do anything but nod. "Very well. Tell me about the establishment."

For the next several minutes, he tries to answer as best he can, occasionally stumbling and looking to slip into slang before he catches himself. He describes the gallery, the patrons, the music, the drinks. He talks about the lights in a bottle and the tables made of fabric covered crates. After a moment, he starts talking about his friends. The people who he trusts and relies on because, let's face it, without them, this project wouldn't work. He simply cannot do it on a few hours sleep by himself every night.

When at last he finishes, sure he's about to be rejected, Scratch steeples his fingers. "I see. Am I to understand then that the establishment has already been in operation for a number of days?"

Gamzee closes his eyes. "Yes," he mutters, knowing he cannot lie his way out of this one. "But I didn't know I needed a license until last night."

There is silence in the small room, as Scratch seems to consider things and weigh all the options available to him. Gamzee busies himself staring at his shoes, rocking back and forth from left leg to right leg and back again.

He is brought back to reality by the scratch of a pen as Scratch makes a few marks on a sheet of official looking paper. Carelessly, he scrawls a signature across the bottom, blowing on the ink for a moment to dry it before handing it over. "Two hundred dollars," he says smoothly.

"I'm not going to bribe you and get locked up later," Gamzee says quietly, looking wounded.

Scratch rolls his eyes, his first visible sign of emotion, before sighing. "It's not a bribe, dear boy, but rather the standard price for a consultation and licensing agreement." He rifles through the stack of papers before handing one over. It standard type, signed by the mayor, it dictates the cost of various licenses. The one for serving liquor is indeed marked at two hundred.

From his wallet, he scrapes together enough crumpled bills to pay and hands them over. "Thank you," he manages, before grabbing the license and heading out the door. He doesn't look at the cheerful secretary, or even the bitchy one downstairs. Instead, he heads straight outside and to the bus stop, sure some horrible mistake has been made. He's sure that this is a trap of some kind, that somewhere, the lady cop from yesterday is waiting around a corner to snatch him away and lock him up.

Paranoid, that's all it is, he tells himself, just the results of last night's mental stress, straining cracks that will take a while to heal. Paranoia, pure and simple.

But he can't shake the feeling, and so he sits on a park bench and bites his lip hard enough to draw a bead of blood. It's largely the aftereffects of last night's panic, but it's something he needs to control. He needs to go home and open the club. He needs to be there to smile and nod and talk to a hundred strangers.

He needs all of these things because they have become a semblance of a routine, and in the doing so, they have given him something healthy (or at least healthier) to cling to. The routine helps with whatever it is his brain does, and so he just needs to recognize this is a departure of routine that can soon be fixed.

But what he really, really needs to do is get on the bus that's just arrived.

Fumbling for his pocket change, he pays the fair and slides into a seat in the very back of the bus. He stares out the window and gets lost in the scenery sliding by, forcing himself to be calm. The last thing he needs is one more breakdown, especially when he doesn't have someone like Karkat nearby to calm him down. He just needs to hold on for a little while longer, long enough to have a business that he can hire other people to help with, long enough to get an apartment instead of a broken couch, long enough to survive.

Because deep down, that's all Gamzee is trying to do.

Survive.

A/N: So I know that this one didn't really have a lot of suggestions incorporated in (sorry!) but hopefully there'll be more in the next one. One of the problems of having character development scenes I guess :P As always, feel free to post in the reviews or send me a pm with things you'd like to see in the future! Cheers :)