Author's Notes: Long time no update. Enjoy!
Bill sat at the front of an alley in his worn-out trench coat, his sunglasses missing one lens. He had last bathed in a convenience store restroom, and though not even in this forties he looked worn and old. He stared bitterly at the people who passed him, a coffee cup held limply in his hand. It held two quarters, a nickel and a button.
Look at him. Reduced to...this. It goes to show what happens when you tangle with powerful enemies. Even his own agency had turned out to be nothing but puppets for the Cereal-Industrial Complex—he was finally getting close to something, apparently, to uncovering some major secrets, and then all of a sudden he's fired and evicted from his apartment and left with nothing but some dirty clothes and a broken police scanner to his name. He was pretty sure the ice cream trucks were involved, too. Somehow.
He shook his cup a little, letting the meager change rattle. A passerby told him to "get a job, ya bum."
Bill's face turned hard. He glared up at the billboard across the street, where a smiling picture of Count Cocofang hawked his mind-controlling candies to the impressionable youth of America.
He suddenly stood and shook his fist. "You think you've won, don't you, Fang?! Well, Bill isn't beat! We'll dance again, do you hear me, Fang? Do you hear me?!"
A woman passed by with her daughter, whispering not to get too close to the crazy man.
Bill slowly sat back down and fumed. Fools. They had no idea how much danger they were in, how much more danger now that he was out of commission.
His eyes flickered down the street, the same way that they did a hundred times per day, and saw a familiar face: a woman who passed by Bill's alley twice per day, presumably on her way to and from work. She was a youngish woman, maybe in her early twenties, with short, dark-purple hair and large teeth that stuck out from her mouth. You couldn't call her a beauty, but she was cute, in an odd, awkward sort of way.
More to the point, she usually gave Bill money.
Bill corrected his slumping posture, quickly running his hand through his thick, dirty hair. He jingled his cup just as the woman walked by, catching her attention. He didn't ask for change, though. That felt degrading at the best of times, and somehow saying it to her would have been even worse.
"Oh! Hello," the woman said in her nasally voice, dropping a dollar into his cup.
"Thank you," Bill said. He tried to use the suave, mysterious detective voice he had spent years perfecting, but it came out thick and croaky. She didn't seem to notice, though, merely smiling before continuing on her way down the sidewalk.
Bill watched her go, feeling his spirits lift the smallest bit.
Since moving onto the streets, Bill had come to realize that most people were ingrates—despite all the dangers he had protected this city from in the past, now that he had fallen prey to the Fang's sinister conspiracy hardly anyone was willing to spare him so much as a quarter. She always managed to give him a moment of hope, though. One citizen cared. One person was willing to help him.
The funny thing was, he had seen her on TV, apparently the girlfriend of that no-nothing "Dib" kid. He couldn't believe that kid. Hosting a TV show on myths like Bigfoot and Eskimos, pretending to be a paranormal investigator when he was really just some—celebrity. Ugh. But he couldn't blame the girlfriend for that. She didn't know. Those sort of lies tricked a lot of people, probably because most of their proponents knew hypnosis. Just like Count Cocofang. The connection was obvious.
But none of that mattered, Bill thought, smirking at the dollar bill that had more than doubled the profits of his coffee cup. He would be back on top one day, and then the whole conspiracy would come crashing down.
As long as he had someone on his side, everything would eventually work itself out.
