The Rising Tide 1/5
J2 RPS AU
NC-17
Part 1 of 5
Master post
Art
Mendeley is a big city with much to offer - factories to employ the low-skilled, wards full of men and women to support artisans and craftspeople, theaters and concert halls to entertain the populace. The governing Council of Representatives is open to anyone with the money and energy to mount a campaign and the will to keep their seat in the Council Hall. There are steam trams criss-crossing the city, trains speeding in and out of the central station, a busy port, and just beyond the crowded buildings, landing fields for airships great and small.
Jared works in a textile mill that weaves, cuts, and rolls the giant sheets of canvas that will eventually end up as the skins and sails of those airships. It's the best work he could get when he first arrived in the city from the hinterlands, without skills or connections, but it pays little, and because he's tired of the way he and his fellow millworkers are treated, he's been thinking about the collective will of the people a lot lately. He's been thinking about collective action, about the best way to convince his colleagues that they have power all together, about the things they need to do to get the mill owner to raise their wages, cut back on the punishing hours they're made to work, and perform some desperately-needed maintenance on the giant looms and cutting machines.
Jared has been talking to people during their breaks, after hours, and sometimes during their shifts, if no floor managers are around. He and Misha, one of the men on his line, have held what feels like a lot of secret meetings to try and convince people to organize and strike. They've gotten pushback - any time workers in Mendeley try to strike on any scale, the Council just sends the police to break it up, beat people up, and throw everyone in jail. No one wants to lose their job, and they even less want to be blacklisted out of employment at all.
But Jared has heard (and prompted) enough grumbling and complaining and arguing in his own ward to know that while people might be worried about their ability to make rent and put food on the table, they're also invested in making a better life for themselves and their families, and how better to do that than to figure out a way to hold the bosses' feet to the fire and demand more?
He's sure he's making progress in convincing the millworkers. He can be persuasive when he wants to, and if he feels strongly enough about something - and he feels strongly about this - he can't stop thinking about it and won't shut up about it until something is done. He and Misha both agree they're close to getting enough people to act. They just need a catalyst.
Unfortunately that catalyst is a loom losing its integrity and injuring one of the men on Jared's floor so severely that the rest of the man's line comes to a rattling halt while his neighbors try to help him and a couple of managers discuss the best way to get him off the floor and everyone else back to work.
News spreads through the mill, carried down the lines and across the floors by men hauling crates and scrap. Timothy, the injured laborer, is a good worker and well-liked, and rumor about what actually happened trails after the news like smoke following fire. Floor managers yell at everyone to quit gossiping and keep their eyes on their own looms.
Jared walks out with Misha and Matt after their shift. Matt tells them that Timothy was scalded by hot steam and knocked out by the shuttle when one of the wheels that turns his loom somehow blew off, venting steam and knocking the whole thing out of whack. The shuttles are large and heavy, made to withstand being flung back and forth to weave the canvas with impressive speed. They, and the thick cotton cord they pull, can take your hand off if you're not paying attention.
“I overheard one of the managers say he broke some bones, too,” Matt adds in an undertone, as if even the news about someone's injuries is enough to cause other men to be hurt. “They had some guys take him to a hospital.”
“You know which one?” Jared asks. “We should go see his wife.”
“Kurt said he'd tell her. They're neighbors, you know?”
“Well, shit.”
“This is the fourth injury this month,” Misha comments. “Not counting your friend knocking over one of those wheeled crates.”
Three days ago Chad tipped a wheeled crate of replacement shuttles while he was pushing it down the line, claiming later that the wheels caught on the uneven floor. Heavy shuttles landed on his foot, but while he's still complaining about how much it hurts, he was lucky to have been wearing heavy boots. Jared has his own opinion of what Chad was doing - not paying attention - and how badly Chad is hurt - not as much as he claims - and thinks he should stop whining so that when he actually does injure himself, people will believe him.
Four injuries so far is about average, though. It's more men than are injured at the Augustus Theater, which Jared's boyfriend manages, even though theater work is not as a rule particularly dangerous. By the end of the month Jared predicts they'll have nine or ten men hurt, although probably none of them will be injured enough to be taken out of work for long.
The next day Kurt brings word about Timothy - steam burns, a concussion, a gash on his forehead where the shuttle hit him, and a broken pelvis. The flywheel evidently caught him in the hip when it blew off, before spinning away across the floor.
“I've started a collection,” Kurt tells the other workers, “for the hospital bill and to take care of his family.”
Timothy would have gone to a public hospital. There are several in the city, funded by taxes and sometimes private donations, with a mandate to care for the city's poor. Private hospitals provide much better, more thorough care, but they charge accordingly, and in any case, no one who looks like a working man or woman is going to be allowed past the front door. And a public hospital, even with its charge to take everyone, will still bill you for your care.
“Do you know anything about his family?” Misha asks during lunch. He and Jared have already contributed some coins, and when Jared got an opportunity to walk down his line he tried to convince everyone else to as well. “He's a good man but I know almost nothing about him.”
“He has two kids,” Jared says. “I think one's a girl but I don't know about the other. His wife works in a china factory, painting teacups. A couple of guys on his line asked to be moved. I think they're nervous the other looms are going to fail the same way.”
Misha snorts into his sandwich.
“What?” Jared asks. He understands superstition, but he also understands that the giant looms they work on, and the steam-driven cutting and rolling machines on other floors, are old and not consistently maintained, and because the mill runs twenty hours a day, seven days a week - 140 hours out of 168 - there's a lot of wear and tear.
“They will fail. Maybe not catastrophically, but something will break. It will break, we'll get hurt.” He chews, swallows, leans in close. “We need to be better organized. We need to make ourselves heard.”
Meaning, We need to strike.
“I know,” Jared says in an undertone. “We're meeting tomorrow night, right? We'll talk about when.”
The bell rings, signaling the end of their break and the start of the next one - the men get their lunch in shifts, so the floors are never still - and Jared goes back to his station thinking about how soon he and Misha can convince enough of their fellow workers to strike. He can't stop thinking about Timothy - steam burns are wicked, and a broken pelvis seems like the kind of thing that might consign a man to a chair for the rest of his life, or just a cane if he's lucky - but more importantly, he can't stop thinking about how many other men might be worrying about their health and safety and security, and how it could be priming them to take matters into their own hands and stand up for themselves and their own wellbeing.
What happened to Timothy was a tragedy that could have been avoided, if only the mill owner gave a shit about the men working the looms. Jared can use this opportunity to further convince his fellow workers that things won't get better unless they do something. He needs to be able to convince them that not only do they have to strike to get any concessions at all, but they have to do it soon.
The Merits of Mr Marsden, a fun, silly little farce, opens in three days and Jensen is not ready. The sets aren't finished, one of the costumes has a giant scorchmark on the front of the skirt, Mr Marsden doesn't know all his lines, Mrs Marsden is still having trouble with her single pratfall, and now the spotlights - all two of them - don't seem to be working.
“Alex!” Jensen yells up at the catwalk.
“Lights are out, boss!” Alex yells down.
“I can see that! Can you tell me why?”
Unintelligible noises float down. Jensen sighs and heads backstage where Alona is complaining to Genevieve about the scorched dress amid the hammering and swearing that mark the construction of a new set.
It was Mr Morgan's idea to mount the farce, not Jensen's. Jensen would have preferred a light musical, something with song and dance numbers and simple sets. The last play they did was a retelling of an old myth set amid rolling farmlands. It required little in the way of complicated sets or props, and he's sure he could have found something that wasn't set entirely indoors and didn't need all new everything.
But Mr Morgan owns the theater, and if he wants the company to do a farce about a middle-class city man, and Jensen can't muster a convincing enough argument for something else, or hand Mr Morgan a different script, that's what they do.
Besides, the mythological retelling didn't do too well, and presenting someone or something that an audience can laugh at for a couple of hours is generally a safe bet. It helps that the main actors in this one can do comedy well.
“You have to fix this,” Alona is saying to Genevieve as Jensen stomps past them. She sounds more frustrated than angry, which Jensen can understand, but all the same, this is not Genevieve's main source of income and she shouldn't be responsible for someone else's attempts to clean and press the costumes.
Jensen climbs up the ladder to the catwalk. The catwalk hangs barely five feet down from the ceiling, but that's enough space for someone to work the spotlights and the rigging that occasionally allows them to swing something over the stage.
Fancy theaters have pneumatic or steam-powered rigs, so the crew can move sets, raise or lower curtains and drops, rotate spotlights, even elevate the stage with the flip of a lever or the spin of a wheel. There are a lot of interesting things you can do onstage if you have the money for the machinery. But the Augustus Theater is small and poor and has to rely on manpower to get anything done. The place is lucky to have spotlights, even if both of them are currently busted.
Alex is fiddling with one of them. Jensen knows the gas bill is paid, so unless there's something wrong with the gas line or the lamp itself, it should be on.
“I don't know, boss,” Alex says.
“Did you check the line? The valves? Are the tips clean?”
“Yeah. All of that. I don't want to take them apart but I can't figure out why they're not working.”
“Three days,” Jensen sighs.
“I know. I'll figure it out.”
“Ask Osric if you have too much trouble.” He should probably mention it to Mr Morgan, and hope that not only can the theater get someone to fix the spotlights in time, but that Mr Morgan is willing to pay for it out of his own pocket.
Well, they're doing a farce, not a melodrama or a historical, and Jensen doesn't design dramatic lighting for farces. They can live without the spotlights if they have to. In the old days theaters didn't even have spotlights, and the footlights were basically oil pots and open flames. A successful production was one in which no one's costume caught fire. Jensen supposes he should be thankful they have gas lamps now, with less chance of something - or someone - going up in flames. Although the way things are going, he won't be surprised if one of the spotlights falls and kills someone on opening night.
He creeps back along the catwalk and down the ladder. Alona and Genevieve are both gone, but the set is still going up. It will need to be painted after it's been constructed, but as long as that's done by opening night, the paint doesn't even have to be completely dry. He'll just have to make sure no one gets too close to it.
He's unsurprisingly still at the theater when Jared gets off his shift at the mill. Jensen lets himself be distracted only long enough to say hi and tell Jared to sit in the back row so he can make sure everyone is projecting enough. Alona is so close to getting the pratfall right, but Dick is still flubbing Mr Marsden's lines and Alona is clearly getting tired of prompting him.
“If you don't know all your lines by tomorrow I'm giving your role to Osric,” Jensen tells him.
“I could do a better job,” Alona mutters. “Put Osric in a wig and a dress and he can be Mrs Marsden.”
Osric is up on the catwalk looking at the spotlights, but Jensen can just picture his excited face at the prospect of getting a bigger part in the farce. It's not the worst idea Alona has ever had.
“Jared could do a better job,” Jensen says. “Get your shit together. Now do it again, from 'His horse bit the coachman'.”
They run through the scene again, and this time everyone remembers their lines, hits their marks, and makes both Jared and Osric laugh loud enough to be heard from the front of the auditorium. Jensen is relieved.
“I'd ask how your day was but I can probably guess,” Jared says later, after rehearsal has finally finished and Jensen has sent everyone home and locked up.
“I've had better,” Jensen says. “I meant it when I said you could do a better job than Dick. I don't know why this is so hard for him.”
“He has a lot going on at home?”
Jensen shrugs. “If he does, he hasn't said anything to me. Our spotlights are out too, and you can see the set isn't finished, and one of the dresses has a giant scorchmark right in the front. But we can actually work around that. Mrs Marsden doesn't have to change her clothes so many times. She's already going through pretty much the entire rack of costumes. I don't know what to do about the spots, though.”
“Do you want me to look at them?”
“Because you know so much about gas lamps?” Jensen grins. “The catwalk would probably collapse if you climbed on it. No, Alex and Osric are on it. We'll sort it out. In three days. Somehow.”
Three days later the sets are finished, although the paint is still a little tacky. One of the spotlights has been fixed, the other will probably have to be replaced, the scorched costume has been taken out of rotation, everyone has learned their lines to Jensen's satisfaction, and the theater is full for opening night. Jensen stands offstage, murmuring lines and stage directions, keeping half an eye on the catwalk where Alex is babying the one working spotlight, and trying to see into the audience to make sure everyone is laughing at the appropriate times. They are.
Jared didn't come, but Jensen isn't bothered. He knows sometimes the managers at the mill keep the workers late because they can, and sometimes Jared wants to go out with his coworkers after their shift, and sometimes he's just not interested in opening nights when there's a high possibility something will go wrong. Hopefully The Merits of Mr Marsden will run for a while and Jared will have other chances to see it.
After the show the actors and crew congratulate each other on a play well done, change out of their costumes, lock up, and head to a pub to celebrate opening night. Alex tells Jensen that he doesn't think the theater completely sold out, but the box office did well. Jensen will count the money tomorrow. When he first started directing and managing, he'd count the opening night take during the show, after the box office closed, but he missed being able to watch the production from the wings. Who would feed actors their lines if they missed a cue? Who would make sure the right props were in the right places, and the sets were moved at the right times? Who would make sure the actors all hit their marks? Who would watch the audience for their reactions?
So now he locks up the money from ticket sales after opening night and counts it the next day, when he can concentrate.
Because opening night, especially a good opening night, is for celebrating, and if they're lucky someone who saw the show and enjoyed it will buy someone from the company a drink.
Tonight it's a steam tram operator who laughed so hard at Alona's one pratfall that he almost pissed himself. The pub is too crowded for her to duplicate it for him in her street clothes, but she thanks the man for his drink and makes him promise to come see the show again. Jensen accepts the tram operator's congratulations for a funny show, and doesn't mind that the man can't stand a round for the whole company. They all know the economic realities of their wards.
Jensen drinks just enough to put himself in a careless, lighthearted mood, and has to restrain himself from singing as he walks home with Danneel and Genevieve, a girl on each arm like a real ladies' man. The company can get themselves in and out of their own costumes and do their own hair and makeup, but Genevieve made time to sit backstage in case anyone needed a last-minute costume adjustment. She even tried to fix the dress with the scorchmark.
“Next time you'll give me the female lead,” Danneel says. “Alona was better than I expected but it's my turn.”
“We'll see,” Jensen says. He can't think about the next show until he can tell how the current show is doing.
“Marsden will probably run for months and months.” She sounds almost disappointed.
“That's good, though!” Genevieve says. “You want it to do well!”
“Yeah, but I want to be the star.”
“You will be,” Jensen says. They stop at a crossing to let a bunch of wagons pass, and he takes the opportunity to kiss her on the temple, through her hair.
Someone calls out “Two at once, you lucky bastard!” Genevieve and Danneel both laugh, and Jensen feels himself blush. He's never thought of either of the girls that way - his heart and all his other parts belong to Jared - but he wonders, in his half-drunk, expansive mood, what if he did? Would they want him? Would Jared mind? Would they even all fit in a bed?
He laughs to himself. What an absurd thought.
“What do you think?” Danneel is asking Genevieve, leaning around Jensen to make herself heard. “Would Jared share him?”
“We could ask,” Genevieve says, giggling. “Imagine all of us in that sagging bed. We'd break it.”
“We'd break him.” Danneel laughs, squeezes Jensen's arm, and tells him “We'll take your boyfriend too. It's not fair to make him watch.”
“Unless he wants to.”
“Oh, saints,” Jensen says, trying not to think about any of the scenarios the girls seem to be conjuring up, “you'll scare him off.”
“As long as we don't scare you off,” Danneel says, still laughing. “I hope he knows what a prize he has.”
“Oh, he knows,” Genevieve says. “Ask the neighbors, they'll tell you exactly how hard Jared proves himself.”
“Hard.” Danneel dissolves into giggles, and the other two have to stop walking until she can compose herself.
Jensen finds himself chuckling too, not because he believes the girls would ever go through with any of their suggestions, but because they're having so much fun teasing him. He'll have to tell Jared when he gets home, just to spread the joy and give Jared a chance to tease him too.
He escorts Genevieve and Danneel to their door, kisses them both goodnight, and tells them he'll bring up their suggestions to his boyfriend and report back.
“You do that,” Genevieve says. “We'll have to use your bed, though. Ours is....” She waggles her hand, indicating her bedframe's shaky integrity.
“And we won't all fit on the sofa,” Danneel adds. “It's covered in clothes anyway.”
“I'll mention it,” Jensen says, knocking on their door to remind them they should go inside and take this conversation out of the hallway. No doubt someone with nothing better to do with their time is listening, late as it is, and he doesn't like being the subject of local gossip.
“Hard!” Danneel calls, as he walks back down the hall to the stairwell and his own floor.
Jared is sitting at the table reading when Jensen comes in. The lamp flickers on his face and his book and the scarred tabletop, and Jensen feels his heart swell with love and affection and not a little desire.
“Hey,” Jared says. He puts a strip of paper in his book to mark the place and flips it closed. “Opening night party?”
“Yeah.”
“Was it fun?”
“Always.”
“Are you drunk?”
“A little.”
“Do you want to go to bed?”
“Yeah.”
When they're undressed and under the blankets, Jared whispers “Do you want to fuck me?” in Jensen's ear, and the answer to that is of course “Yes”.
Everything feels dreamy and slow, maybe because of the beer, maybe because of the hour, maybe because of the leisurely way they kiss and touch each other. It seems as if this takes hours, but eventually Jensen drapes Jared's long legs over his shoulders and pushes into him. They're relatively quiet, trying to keep their breathing even and their moans soft, even trying not to make the bed creak too much. Jensen could lose himself here, deep in Jared's body, nothing in his head but the heat and scent of them, the quiet sounds they make, the easy way they move together. He shifts position, letting Jared's legs slide off his shoulders so he can hook his arms behind Jared's knees and lean down, lean in, rocking against Jared with steady, rolling thrusts.
This too seems to take hours, and Jensen would happily stay inside Jared until sunrise, making him pant and moan, shifting position and tempo to keep both of them hard and wanting, but likewise keeping them both from climax as long as possible. He doesn't know how long a man can go without coming, how long he could stay hard, how long he could keep Jared hard. Hours? Could they find out?
They probably can, but not now, not when Jared grabs Jensen's ass with both hands and begs to be touched, begs Jensen to come, to let him come. Jensen pushes himself up just enough, wraps his hand around Jared's straining cock, and pumps with hard, tight strokes until Jared cries out and spills over his hand. Jensen doesn't even wait for him to finish before letting himself go as well, groaning with his own release.
“Come to the opening night party next time,” Jensen says, when he can finally catch his breath.
“And fuck you in a back room?” Jared grins. They've done it before, once when the company had the opening night party in the theater. Jared dragged Jensen off to the men's tiny dressing room and bent him over the dressing table. The lamps were still lit and they watched themselves in the mirror, flushed and gasping and grinning, and Jensen was drunk enough and aroused enough that he didn't care.
There was another time, early in Jensen's tenure as theater director, when they went to a pub to celebrate, and Jared was so excited by Jensen's apparent success and so proud of him that they ended up in the alley out back, Jared on his knees and Jensen's cock in his mouth. At least Jensen had the presence of mind to wait until they got home to repay him.
“That too.” Jensen yawns. He's so tired. He rolls over, throws his arm across Jared's chest, and presses his face into Jared's neck. Jared smells like sweat and sex. “I like it when you're there.”
“Yeah?” Jared brushes a hand over his hair. “I do too.”
“I want this show to run for a long time, though. You'll come see it.”
“I did. I snuck in the back after it started.”
Jensen should probably be annoyed that Alex apparently let Jared sneak in, but he can't bring himself to care. He would have let Jared in for free anyway, as his guest.
“And?” he asks.
“I laughed a lot. It's good.”
“I'm glad.” Jensen yawns again, turns his head. As good as Jared smells, Jensen is finding it hard to breathe like this.
He can hear noises outside - deliverymen, late-night drunks, stray cats, who knows - but it's oddly soothing, especially with his head on Jared's shoulder and his arm across Jared's chest. The show went well. The theater was full, or as close as makes no difference. Jared is as hot as he ever was, as eager, as responsive. In this one minute, Jensen can honestly say that his life is good.
“What's the word?” Matt whispers as he passes Jared with a load of scraps. Jared can barely hear him over the banging and whirring of the machines.
“Next week,” he whispers back. “Tuesday. We all walk out at noon.”
“Chad said Thursday.”
“Misdirection. Misha thinks there's a spy.”
“How do - “
“Cohen! Padalecki!” the foreman yells. “Socialize on your own time!”
“Tuesday,” Jared repeats as Matt continues on.
In the ten minutes he has to eat his lunch he asks Misha if he has any idea who the spy is.
“Never trust the floor managers,” Misha says.
“That's not an answer,” Jared tells him. No floor managers have ever come to their meetings. As far as Jared knows, no one has even mentioned it to them. They're paid better, work slightly better hours, and have more power than the workers on the floor. “Keep your lines in shape or we'll send you down to work them yourself” is the threat floor managers labor under, and none of them want to jeopardize their tenuous position in the mill hierarchy.
But at the same time, none of the men on the floor want to jeopardize their jobs either, and there's always the possibility someone will rat them out to save his job.
Misha brushes crumbs off his shirt. “I don't know who it is. Someone who's been sucking up.”
The bell rings. Men stand, clean up after themselves, go back to work. Jared tries to look around the floor and suss out if any of his fellow workers could be spying on the strike organizers. He knows the risks of striking, but he has no respect for anyone so afraid of those risks that they'd go to the owner to stop it. Undercutting your own future is stupid and senseless. If the workers strike, they'll have some leverage, they can force a deal. Better hours, better money, some provisions if they get hurt.
Jared thinks about Timothy, out of commission and out of options. That could happen to anyone. Men get almost no training when they start, and even the most observant, the most conscientious of workers can be distracted for a quick second. Two months ago one of the boilers exploded, luckily between shifts when no one was around, but that could happen in the middle of the day when someone's tending them. Everyone is always running the risk of getting hurt - men cut themselves on sharp edges and burn themselves on hot metal all the time, and once in a while someone on the loading dock will lose control of the finished canvas and end up underneath it, pinned by the weight of heavy airship fabric rolled into a spool six feet tall. The mill needs to be held responsible when badly-maintained machinery fails, and the owner needs to be forced into some responsibility for the care of the workers.
Monday night they meet at Misha's flat. His place isn't any bigger than anyone else's, but his wife Victoria is all in on the strike and has taken the kids to her sister's for the night, to give the strikers a little more space and to give herself plausible deniability. Twelve men pack into the crowded apartment to make signs and come up with slogans and finalize plans and speculate as to who the spy might be. Misha is convinced it's one of the floor managers. Matt thinks it's that new guy, what's his name, works on Jim's line. He looks shifty all the time. Aldis says no, can't be him, guy never says three words to anyone and you'd think a spy would want to talk to people to get them to open up about their plans.
Jared trusts everyone in Misha's front room, but what if one of them turns out to be a spy? What if one of the men currently gossiping and arguing and painting signs is really just here to take notes and report back to the managers and the owner? What if one of his friends turns out to be an enemy?
He shakes his head, clearing that thought. He can't go down that road. It's too late, anyway. They strike tomorrow.
They sneak out with their signs late that night. In the morning they'll either hide them around the mill or get someone else to, and at noon, when the bell rings for the first lunch shift, if everything goes to plan, all the workers will put down their tools, shut off their machines, and walk out.
Jared hopes it's that easy.
And for a little while, it is. Not everyone walks out, but there are enough men leaving their stations, taking up signs, and forming a line outside the mill that production has to stop. Jared estimates 70% of his section walks out, and when he passes Misha in line, Misha whispers that almost three-quarters of the floor, all told, has left. He can't say how many men walked away from the giant cutting machines or the rollers that spin the canvas into huge spools for shipping, but it seems a safe bet to assume 70% or 75% of them too.
The mill is off a major road, and there's always someone walking around. The workers march and chant and make their demands - better pay, fewer hours, concessions for men who are hurt on the job - and make as much noise as they can. Theirs will be a peaceful demonstration. They don't mean harm to the owner or the mill (well, at least their official stance is that they won't damage any property), they just want to be treated fairly.
Whoever the spy was, he either didn't tell anyone in time, or he didn't tell them the right thing, or they just didn't listen, because it's an hour before the strikers see any results, aside from several floor managers coming out to tell them to knock it off and get back to work. A crowd has gathered to watch, yell insults, express support, or to ask the workers why they're striking. What happens to disperse the crowd and let the strikers know someone heard them is, unsurprisingly, the police.
“Disperse and return to your work!” one of them calls, presumably the captain. “This strike is illegal!”
“It's perfectly legal!” one of the workers calls back. Jared thinks it might be Jim but he can't see. “Last year, the Council voted on peaceful demonstrations, ruled them legal. Seated Session 186. Ask your chief.”
“That only applies to political demonstrations.”
“Doesn't say so in the record.”
“He read the record?” Aldis says to Jared in an undertone. “I didn't know anyone actually did that.”
“Misha probably has,” Jared says. “Shh.”
The police captain turns to the cops standing closest to him and tells them something, Jared can't hear what.
“Get ready,” he hisses at Aldis.
“I'll tell you one more time,” the captain calls. “Disperse and go back to your work.”
No one moves. Jared can hear rustling and coughing and murmuring among the workers. A lot of the watching crowd has vanished, but there are still people standing around. Some of the police shift on their feet. Jared can see the captain is wearing a pneumatic handgun in a holster, but even though the rank and file are armed merely with staffs or billy clubs, they could be itching for a fight, and Jared knows never to discount a cop with delusions of power.
But at the same time, the police shouldn't discount the strikers either. They might not be armed, but they have right on their side.
Onward!
NC-17
Part 1 of 5
Master post
Art
Mendeley is a big city with much to offer - factories to employ the low-skilled, wards full of men and women to support artisans and craftspeople, theaters and concert halls to entertain the populace. The governing Council of Representatives is open to anyone with the money and energy to mount a campaign and the will to keep their seat in the Council Hall. There are steam trams criss-crossing the city, trains speeding in and out of the central station, a busy port, and just beyond the crowded buildings, landing fields for airships great and small.
Jared works in a textile mill that weaves, cuts, and rolls the giant sheets of canvas that will eventually end up as the skins and sails of those airships. It's the best work he could get when he first arrived in the city from the hinterlands, without skills or connections, but it pays little, and because he's tired of the way he and his fellow millworkers are treated, he's been thinking about the collective will of the people a lot lately. He's been thinking about collective action, about the best way to convince his colleagues that they have power all together, about the things they need to do to get the mill owner to raise their wages, cut back on the punishing hours they're made to work, and perform some desperately-needed maintenance on the giant looms and cutting machines.
Jared has been talking to people during their breaks, after hours, and sometimes during their shifts, if no floor managers are around. He and Misha, one of the men on his line, have held what feels like a lot of secret meetings to try and convince people to organize and strike. They've gotten pushback - any time workers in Mendeley try to strike on any scale, the Council just sends the police to break it up, beat people up, and throw everyone in jail. No one wants to lose their job, and they even less want to be blacklisted out of employment at all.
But Jared has heard (and prompted) enough grumbling and complaining and arguing in his own ward to know that while people might be worried about their ability to make rent and put food on the table, they're also invested in making a better life for themselves and their families, and how better to do that than to figure out a way to hold the bosses' feet to the fire and demand more?
He's sure he's making progress in convincing the millworkers. He can be persuasive when he wants to, and if he feels strongly enough about something - and he feels strongly about this - he can't stop thinking about it and won't shut up about it until something is done. He and Misha both agree they're close to getting enough people to act. They just need a catalyst.
Unfortunately that catalyst is a loom losing its integrity and injuring one of the men on Jared's floor so severely that the rest of the man's line comes to a rattling halt while his neighbors try to help him and a couple of managers discuss the best way to get him off the floor and everyone else back to work.
News spreads through the mill, carried down the lines and across the floors by men hauling crates and scrap. Timothy, the injured laborer, is a good worker and well-liked, and rumor about what actually happened trails after the news like smoke following fire. Floor managers yell at everyone to quit gossiping and keep their eyes on their own looms.
Jared walks out with Misha and Matt after their shift. Matt tells them that Timothy was scalded by hot steam and knocked out by the shuttle when one of the wheels that turns his loom somehow blew off, venting steam and knocking the whole thing out of whack. The shuttles are large and heavy, made to withstand being flung back and forth to weave the canvas with impressive speed. They, and the thick cotton cord they pull, can take your hand off if you're not paying attention.
“I overheard one of the managers say he broke some bones, too,” Matt adds in an undertone, as if even the news about someone's injuries is enough to cause other men to be hurt. “They had some guys take him to a hospital.”
“You know which one?” Jared asks. “We should go see his wife.”
“Kurt said he'd tell her. They're neighbors, you know?”
“Well, shit.”
“This is the fourth injury this month,” Misha comments. “Not counting your friend knocking over one of those wheeled crates.”
Three days ago Chad tipped a wheeled crate of replacement shuttles while he was pushing it down the line, claiming later that the wheels caught on the uneven floor. Heavy shuttles landed on his foot, but while he's still complaining about how much it hurts, he was lucky to have been wearing heavy boots. Jared has his own opinion of what Chad was doing - not paying attention - and how badly Chad is hurt - not as much as he claims - and thinks he should stop whining so that when he actually does injure himself, people will believe him.
Four injuries so far is about average, though. It's more men than are injured at the Augustus Theater, which Jared's boyfriend manages, even though theater work is not as a rule particularly dangerous. By the end of the month Jared predicts they'll have nine or ten men hurt, although probably none of them will be injured enough to be taken out of work for long.
The next day Kurt brings word about Timothy - steam burns, a concussion, a gash on his forehead where the shuttle hit him, and a broken pelvis. The flywheel evidently caught him in the hip when it blew off, before spinning away across the floor.
“I've started a collection,” Kurt tells the other workers, “for the hospital bill and to take care of his family.”
Timothy would have gone to a public hospital. There are several in the city, funded by taxes and sometimes private donations, with a mandate to care for the city's poor. Private hospitals provide much better, more thorough care, but they charge accordingly, and in any case, no one who looks like a working man or woman is going to be allowed past the front door. And a public hospital, even with its charge to take everyone, will still bill you for your care.
“Do you know anything about his family?” Misha asks during lunch. He and Jared have already contributed some coins, and when Jared got an opportunity to walk down his line he tried to convince everyone else to as well. “He's a good man but I know almost nothing about him.”
“He has two kids,” Jared says. “I think one's a girl but I don't know about the other. His wife works in a china factory, painting teacups. A couple of guys on his line asked to be moved. I think they're nervous the other looms are going to fail the same way.”
Misha snorts into his sandwich.
“What?” Jared asks. He understands superstition, but he also understands that the giant looms they work on, and the steam-driven cutting and rolling machines on other floors, are old and not consistently maintained, and because the mill runs twenty hours a day, seven days a week - 140 hours out of 168 - there's a lot of wear and tear.
“They will fail. Maybe not catastrophically, but something will break. It will break, we'll get hurt.” He chews, swallows, leans in close. “We need to be better organized. We need to make ourselves heard.”
Meaning, We need to strike.
“I know,” Jared says in an undertone. “We're meeting tomorrow night, right? We'll talk about when.”
The bell rings, signaling the end of their break and the start of the next one - the men get their lunch in shifts, so the floors are never still - and Jared goes back to his station thinking about how soon he and Misha can convince enough of their fellow workers to strike. He can't stop thinking about Timothy - steam burns are wicked, and a broken pelvis seems like the kind of thing that might consign a man to a chair for the rest of his life, or just a cane if he's lucky - but more importantly, he can't stop thinking about how many other men might be worrying about their health and safety and security, and how it could be priming them to take matters into their own hands and stand up for themselves and their own wellbeing.
What happened to Timothy was a tragedy that could have been avoided, if only the mill owner gave a shit about the men working the looms. Jared can use this opportunity to further convince his fellow workers that things won't get better unless they do something. He needs to be able to convince them that not only do they have to strike to get any concessions at all, but they have to do it soon.
The Merits of Mr Marsden, a fun, silly little farce, opens in three days and Jensen is not ready. The sets aren't finished, one of the costumes has a giant scorchmark on the front of the skirt, Mr Marsden doesn't know all his lines, Mrs Marsden is still having trouble with her single pratfall, and now the spotlights - all two of them - don't seem to be working.
“Alex!” Jensen yells up at the catwalk.
“Lights are out, boss!” Alex yells down.
“I can see that! Can you tell me why?”
Unintelligible noises float down. Jensen sighs and heads backstage where Alona is complaining to Genevieve about the scorched dress amid the hammering and swearing that mark the construction of a new set.
It was Mr Morgan's idea to mount the farce, not Jensen's. Jensen would have preferred a light musical, something with song and dance numbers and simple sets. The last play they did was a retelling of an old myth set amid rolling farmlands. It required little in the way of complicated sets or props, and he's sure he could have found something that wasn't set entirely indoors and didn't need all new everything.
But Mr Morgan owns the theater, and if he wants the company to do a farce about a middle-class city man, and Jensen can't muster a convincing enough argument for something else, or hand Mr Morgan a different script, that's what they do.
Besides, the mythological retelling didn't do too well, and presenting someone or something that an audience can laugh at for a couple of hours is generally a safe bet. It helps that the main actors in this one can do comedy well.
“You have to fix this,” Alona is saying to Genevieve as Jensen stomps past them. She sounds more frustrated than angry, which Jensen can understand, but all the same, this is not Genevieve's main source of income and she shouldn't be responsible for someone else's attempts to clean and press the costumes.
Jensen climbs up the ladder to the catwalk. The catwalk hangs barely five feet down from the ceiling, but that's enough space for someone to work the spotlights and the rigging that occasionally allows them to swing something over the stage.
Fancy theaters have pneumatic or steam-powered rigs, so the crew can move sets, raise or lower curtains and drops, rotate spotlights, even elevate the stage with the flip of a lever or the spin of a wheel. There are a lot of interesting things you can do onstage if you have the money for the machinery. But the Augustus Theater is small and poor and has to rely on manpower to get anything done. The place is lucky to have spotlights, even if both of them are currently busted.
Alex is fiddling with one of them. Jensen knows the gas bill is paid, so unless there's something wrong with the gas line or the lamp itself, it should be on.
“I don't know, boss,” Alex says.
“Did you check the line? The valves? Are the tips clean?”
“Yeah. All of that. I don't want to take them apart but I can't figure out why they're not working.”
“Three days,” Jensen sighs.
“I know. I'll figure it out.”
“Ask Osric if you have too much trouble.” He should probably mention it to Mr Morgan, and hope that not only can the theater get someone to fix the spotlights in time, but that Mr Morgan is willing to pay for it out of his own pocket.
Well, they're doing a farce, not a melodrama or a historical, and Jensen doesn't design dramatic lighting for farces. They can live without the spotlights if they have to. In the old days theaters didn't even have spotlights, and the footlights were basically oil pots and open flames. A successful production was one in which no one's costume caught fire. Jensen supposes he should be thankful they have gas lamps now, with less chance of something - or someone - going up in flames. Although the way things are going, he won't be surprised if one of the spotlights falls and kills someone on opening night.
He creeps back along the catwalk and down the ladder. Alona and Genevieve are both gone, but the set is still going up. It will need to be painted after it's been constructed, but as long as that's done by opening night, the paint doesn't even have to be completely dry. He'll just have to make sure no one gets too close to it.
He's unsurprisingly still at the theater when Jared gets off his shift at the mill. Jensen lets himself be distracted only long enough to say hi and tell Jared to sit in the back row so he can make sure everyone is projecting enough. Alona is so close to getting the pratfall right, but Dick is still flubbing Mr Marsden's lines and Alona is clearly getting tired of prompting him.
“If you don't know all your lines by tomorrow I'm giving your role to Osric,” Jensen tells him.
“I could do a better job,” Alona mutters. “Put Osric in a wig and a dress and he can be Mrs Marsden.”
Osric is up on the catwalk looking at the spotlights, but Jensen can just picture his excited face at the prospect of getting a bigger part in the farce. It's not the worst idea Alona has ever had.
“Jared could do a better job,” Jensen says. “Get your shit together. Now do it again, from 'His horse bit the coachman'.”
They run through the scene again, and this time everyone remembers their lines, hits their marks, and makes both Jared and Osric laugh loud enough to be heard from the front of the auditorium. Jensen is relieved.
“I'd ask how your day was but I can probably guess,” Jared says later, after rehearsal has finally finished and Jensen has sent everyone home and locked up.
“I've had better,” Jensen says. “I meant it when I said you could do a better job than Dick. I don't know why this is so hard for him.”
“He has a lot going on at home?”
Jensen shrugs. “If he does, he hasn't said anything to me. Our spotlights are out too, and you can see the set isn't finished, and one of the dresses has a giant scorchmark right in the front. But we can actually work around that. Mrs Marsden doesn't have to change her clothes so many times. She's already going through pretty much the entire rack of costumes. I don't know what to do about the spots, though.”
“Do you want me to look at them?”
“Because you know so much about gas lamps?” Jensen grins. “The catwalk would probably collapse if you climbed on it. No, Alex and Osric are on it. We'll sort it out. In three days. Somehow.”
Three days later the sets are finished, although the paint is still a little tacky. One of the spotlights has been fixed, the other will probably have to be replaced, the scorched costume has been taken out of rotation, everyone has learned their lines to Jensen's satisfaction, and the theater is full for opening night. Jensen stands offstage, murmuring lines and stage directions, keeping half an eye on the catwalk where Alex is babying the one working spotlight, and trying to see into the audience to make sure everyone is laughing at the appropriate times. They are.
Jared didn't come, but Jensen isn't bothered. He knows sometimes the managers at the mill keep the workers late because they can, and sometimes Jared wants to go out with his coworkers after their shift, and sometimes he's just not interested in opening nights when there's a high possibility something will go wrong. Hopefully The Merits of Mr Marsden will run for a while and Jared will have other chances to see it.
After the show the actors and crew congratulate each other on a play well done, change out of their costumes, lock up, and head to a pub to celebrate opening night. Alex tells Jensen that he doesn't think the theater completely sold out, but the box office did well. Jensen will count the money tomorrow. When he first started directing and managing, he'd count the opening night take during the show, after the box office closed, but he missed being able to watch the production from the wings. Who would feed actors their lines if they missed a cue? Who would make sure the right props were in the right places, and the sets were moved at the right times? Who would make sure the actors all hit their marks? Who would watch the audience for their reactions?
So now he locks up the money from ticket sales after opening night and counts it the next day, when he can concentrate.
Because opening night, especially a good opening night, is for celebrating, and if they're lucky someone who saw the show and enjoyed it will buy someone from the company a drink.
Tonight it's a steam tram operator who laughed so hard at Alona's one pratfall that he almost pissed himself. The pub is too crowded for her to duplicate it for him in her street clothes, but she thanks the man for his drink and makes him promise to come see the show again. Jensen accepts the tram operator's congratulations for a funny show, and doesn't mind that the man can't stand a round for the whole company. They all know the economic realities of their wards.
Jensen drinks just enough to put himself in a careless, lighthearted mood, and has to restrain himself from singing as he walks home with Danneel and Genevieve, a girl on each arm like a real ladies' man. The company can get themselves in and out of their own costumes and do their own hair and makeup, but Genevieve made time to sit backstage in case anyone needed a last-minute costume adjustment. She even tried to fix the dress with the scorchmark.
“Next time you'll give me the female lead,” Danneel says. “Alona was better than I expected but it's my turn.”
“We'll see,” Jensen says. He can't think about the next show until he can tell how the current show is doing.
“Marsden will probably run for months and months.” She sounds almost disappointed.
“That's good, though!” Genevieve says. “You want it to do well!”
“Yeah, but I want to be the star.”
“You will be,” Jensen says. They stop at a crossing to let a bunch of wagons pass, and he takes the opportunity to kiss her on the temple, through her hair.
Someone calls out “Two at once, you lucky bastard!” Genevieve and Danneel both laugh, and Jensen feels himself blush. He's never thought of either of the girls that way - his heart and all his other parts belong to Jared - but he wonders, in his half-drunk, expansive mood, what if he did? Would they want him? Would Jared mind? Would they even all fit in a bed?
He laughs to himself. What an absurd thought.
“What do you think?” Danneel is asking Genevieve, leaning around Jensen to make herself heard. “Would Jared share him?”
“We could ask,” Genevieve says, giggling. “Imagine all of us in that sagging bed. We'd break it.”
“We'd break him.” Danneel laughs, squeezes Jensen's arm, and tells him “We'll take your boyfriend too. It's not fair to make him watch.”
“Unless he wants to.”
“Oh, saints,” Jensen says, trying not to think about any of the scenarios the girls seem to be conjuring up, “you'll scare him off.”
“As long as we don't scare you off,” Danneel says, still laughing. “I hope he knows what a prize he has.”
“Oh, he knows,” Genevieve says. “Ask the neighbors, they'll tell you exactly how hard Jared proves himself.”
“Hard.” Danneel dissolves into giggles, and the other two have to stop walking until she can compose herself.
Jensen finds himself chuckling too, not because he believes the girls would ever go through with any of their suggestions, but because they're having so much fun teasing him. He'll have to tell Jared when he gets home, just to spread the joy and give Jared a chance to tease him too.
He escorts Genevieve and Danneel to their door, kisses them both goodnight, and tells them he'll bring up their suggestions to his boyfriend and report back.
“You do that,” Genevieve says. “We'll have to use your bed, though. Ours is....” She waggles her hand, indicating her bedframe's shaky integrity.
“And we won't all fit on the sofa,” Danneel adds. “It's covered in clothes anyway.”
“I'll mention it,” Jensen says, knocking on their door to remind them they should go inside and take this conversation out of the hallway. No doubt someone with nothing better to do with their time is listening, late as it is, and he doesn't like being the subject of local gossip.
“Hard!” Danneel calls, as he walks back down the hall to the stairwell and his own floor.
Jared is sitting at the table reading when Jensen comes in. The lamp flickers on his face and his book and the scarred tabletop, and Jensen feels his heart swell with love and affection and not a little desire.
“Hey,” Jared says. He puts a strip of paper in his book to mark the place and flips it closed. “Opening night party?”
“Yeah.”
“Was it fun?”
“Always.”
“Are you drunk?”
“A little.”
“Do you want to go to bed?”
“Yeah.”
When they're undressed and under the blankets, Jared whispers “Do you want to fuck me?” in Jensen's ear, and the answer to that is of course “Yes”.
Everything feels dreamy and slow, maybe because of the beer, maybe because of the hour, maybe because of the leisurely way they kiss and touch each other. It seems as if this takes hours, but eventually Jensen drapes Jared's long legs over his shoulders and pushes into him. They're relatively quiet, trying to keep their breathing even and their moans soft, even trying not to make the bed creak too much. Jensen could lose himself here, deep in Jared's body, nothing in his head but the heat and scent of them, the quiet sounds they make, the easy way they move together. He shifts position, letting Jared's legs slide off his shoulders so he can hook his arms behind Jared's knees and lean down, lean in, rocking against Jared with steady, rolling thrusts.
This too seems to take hours, and Jensen would happily stay inside Jared until sunrise, making him pant and moan, shifting position and tempo to keep both of them hard and wanting, but likewise keeping them both from climax as long as possible. He doesn't know how long a man can go without coming, how long he could stay hard, how long he could keep Jared hard. Hours? Could they find out?
They probably can, but not now, not when Jared grabs Jensen's ass with both hands and begs to be touched, begs Jensen to come, to let him come. Jensen pushes himself up just enough, wraps his hand around Jared's straining cock, and pumps with hard, tight strokes until Jared cries out and spills over his hand. Jensen doesn't even wait for him to finish before letting himself go as well, groaning with his own release.
“Come to the opening night party next time,” Jensen says, when he can finally catch his breath.
“And fuck you in a back room?” Jared grins. They've done it before, once when the company had the opening night party in the theater. Jared dragged Jensen off to the men's tiny dressing room and bent him over the dressing table. The lamps were still lit and they watched themselves in the mirror, flushed and gasping and grinning, and Jensen was drunk enough and aroused enough that he didn't care.
There was another time, early in Jensen's tenure as theater director, when they went to a pub to celebrate, and Jared was so excited by Jensen's apparent success and so proud of him that they ended up in the alley out back, Jared on his knees and Jensen's cock in his mouth. At least Jensen had the presence of mind to wait until they got home to repay him.
“That too.” Jensen yawns. He's so tired. He rolls over, throws his arm across Jared's chest, and presses his face into Jared's neck. Jared smells like sweat and sex. “I like it when you're there.”
“Yeah?” Jared brushes a hand over his hair. “I do too.”
“I want this show to run for a long time, though. You'll come see it.”
“I did. I snuck in the back after it started.”
Jensen should probably be annoyed that Alex apparently let Jared sneak in, but he can't bring himself to care. He would have let Jared in for free anyway, as his guest.
“And?” he asks.
“I laughed a lot. It's good.”
“I'm glad.” Jensen yawns again, turns his head. As good as Jared smells, Jensen is finding it hard to breathe like this.
He can hear noises outside - deliverymen, late-night drunks, stray cats, who knows - but it's oddly soothing, especially with his head on Jared's shoulder and his arm across Jared's chest. The show went well. The theater was full, or as close as makes no difference. Jared is as hot as he ever was, as eager, as responsive. In this one minute, Jensen can honestly say that his life is good.
“What's the word?” Matt whispers as he passes Jared with a load of scraps. Jared can barely hear him over the banging and whirring of the machines.
“Next week,” he whispers back. “Tuesday. We all walk out at noon.”
“Chad said Thursday.”
“Misdirection. Misha thinks there's a spy.”
“How do - “
“Cohen! Padalecki!” the foreman yells. “Socialize on your own time!”
“Tuesday,” Jared repeats as Matt continues on.
In the ten minutes he has to eat his lunch he asks Misha if he has any idea who the spy is.
“Never trust the floor managers,” Misha says.
“That's not an answer,” Jared tells him. No floor managers have ever come to their meetings. As far as Jared knows, no one has even mentioned it to them. They're paid better, work slightly better hours, and have more power than the workers on the floor. “Keep your lines in shape or we'll send you down to work them yourself” is the threat floor managers labor under, and none of them want to jeopardize their tenuous position in the mill hierarchy.
But at the same time, none of the men on the floor want to jeopardize their jobs either, and there's always the possibility someone will rat them out to save his job.
Misha brushes crumbs off his shirt. “I don't know who it is. Someone who's been sucking up.”
The bell rings. Men stand, clean up after themselves, go back to work. Jared tries to look around the floor and suss out if any of his fellow workers could be spying on the strike organizers. He knows the risks of striking, but he has no respect for anyone so afraid of those risks that they'd go to the owner to stop it. Undercutting your own future is stupid and senseless. If the workers strike, they'll have some leverage, they can force a deal. Better hours, better money, some provisions if they get hurt.
Jared thinks about Timothy, out of commission and out of options. That could happen to anyone. Men get almost no training when they start, and even the most observant, the most conscientious of workers can be distracted for a quick second. Two months ago one of the boilers exploded, luckily between shifts when no one was around, but that could happen in the middle of the day when someone's tending them. Everyone is always running the risk of getting hurt - men cut themselves on sharp edges and burn themselves on hot metal all the time, and once in a while someone on the loading dock will lose control of the finished canvas and end up underneath it, pinned by the weight of heavy airship fabric rolled into a spool six feet tall. The mill needs to be held responsible when badly-maintained machinery fails, and the owner needs to be forced into some responsibility for the care of the workers.
Monday night they meet at Misha's flat. His place isn't any bigger than anyone else's, but his wife Victoria is all in on the strike and has taken the kids to her sister's for the night, to give the strikers a little more space and to give herself plausible deniability. Twelve men pack into the crowded apartment to make signs and come up with slogans and finalize plans and speculate as to who the spy might be. Misha is convinced it's one of the floor managers. Matt thinks it's that new guy, what's his name, works on Jim's line. He looks shifty all the time. Aldis says no, can't be him, guy never says three words to anyone and you'd think a spy would want to talk to people to get them to open up about their plans.
Jared trusts everyone in Misha's front room, but what if one of them turns out to be a spy? What if one of the men currently gossiping and arguing and painting signs is really just here to take notes and report back to the managers and the owner? What if one of his friends turns out to be an enemy?
He shakes his head, clearing that thought. He can't go down that road. It's too late, anyway. They strike tomorrow.
They sneak out with their signs late that night. In the morning they'll either hide them around the mill or get someone else to, and at noon, when the bell rings for the first lunch shift, if everything goes to plan, all the workers will put down their tools, shut off their machines, and walk out.
Jared hopes it's that easy.
And for a little while, it is. Not everyone walks out, but there are enough men leaving their stations, taking up signs, and forming a line outside the mill that production has to stop. Jared estimates 70% of his section walks out, and when he passes Misha in line, Misha whispers that almost three-quarters of the floor, all told, has left. He can't say how many men walked away from the giant cutting machines or the rollers that spin the canvas into huge spools for shipping, but it seems a safe bet to assume 70% or 75% of them too.
The mill is off a major road, and there's always someone walking around. The workers march and chant and make their demands - better pay, fewer hours, concessions for men who are hurt on the job - and make as much noise as they can. Theirs will be a peaceful demonstration. They don't mean harm to the owner or the mill (well, at least their official stance is that they won't damage any property), they just want to be treated fairly.
Whoever the spy was, he either didn't tell anyone in time, or he didn't tell them the right thing, or they just didn't listen, because it's an hour before the strikers see any results, aside from several floor managers coming out to tell them to knock it off and get back to work. A crowd has gathered to watch, yell insults, express support, or to ask the workers why they're striking. What happens to disperse the crowd and let the strikers know someone heard them is, unsurprisingly, the police.
“Disperse and return to your work!” one of them calls, presumably the captain. “This strike is illegal!”
“It's perfectly legal!” one of the workers calls back. Jared thinks it might be Jim but he can't see. “Last year, the Council voted on peaceful demonstrations, ruled them legal. Seated Session 186. Ask your chief.”
“That only applies to political demonstrations.”
“Doesn't say so in the record.”
“He read the record?” Aldis says to Jared in an undertone. “I didn't know anyone actually did that.”
“Misha probably has,” Jared says. “Shh.”
The police captain turns to the cops standing closest to him and tells them something, Jared can't hear what.
“Get ready,” he hisses at Aldis.
“I'll tell you one more time,” the captain calls. “Disperse and go back to your work.”
No one moves. Jared can hear rustling and coughing and murmuring among the workers. A lot of the watching crowd has vanished, but there are still people standing around. Some of the police shift on their feet. Jared can see the captain is wearing a pneumatic handgun in a holster, but even though the rank and file are armed merely with staffs or billy clubs, they could be itching for a fight, and Jared knows never to discount a cop with delusions of power.
But at the same time, the police shouldn't discount the strikers either. They might not be armed, but they have right on their side.
Onward!