8/24/08 - Jason
---
=NYC= Clinton
Hell's Kitchen, because oh if that is not the preferred name for Clinton outside of the law offices, almost dragged itself up by the knuckles into respectability. But that was before the poor as piss housing and Hell's Kitchen's reputation for grit and shadow drew the attention of new gangs and new criminals -- and new refugees. Mutants have tried to disappear into the sagging tenements and alleys and been found dead on the streets. A Worthington safe house for mutants once stood here, but government backing and all, it could not outlast the violence. But the mutants are not only victims -- some of the bodies found on sidewalks or apartments are humans, and not all of them are masked gang members. While the mutant issue has lit the nation into a political hotbed, it has made Clinton dangerous for everyone. Proceed carefully.
It is late night on a Sunday, and Clinton is its usual charming, degenerate self: hookers, dealers, gang-bangers, the dregs of humanity are busy plying their trade on the street corners and alleyways of the neighborhood. On this, the Lord's day, there is less business than usual, and so there are fewer merchants than usual; the sidewalks are, relatively speaking, almost empty. In its own odd way, it is almost endearing -- except that no, it's not.
Det. Rossi is seated on the steps of a high, run-down building that has served in its time as a flophouse and an apartment, and is now on its way to becoming the former again. His suit jacket is open over his shirt, both a dark blue that turns almost black in the shadow. His tie is a stripe of pale grey, colorless against the fabric of his clothes. He is, alas, smoking. It is a bad habit. His doctors would be so cranky if they knew.
Jason is also smoking. He's probably doing it on purpose. For a sense of atmosphere. Why, he just seems to coalesce out of the scant crowds, in a ratty brown trenchcoat and a ratty brown beret and that cigarette poking from between his lips. And he's headed right toward Rossi.
It is habit that makes Det. Rossi automatically pay attention to anybody moving on the street. Habit, that is, and a lack of basic stupidity -- a trait not /so/ lacking that it sees him situated elsewhere on this night. He has enough to explain that, anyway. He also lacks the obviousness of a badge, though the gun is perhaps visible if one were looking for it. (On this street, who isn't carrying?) The light, at least, is not directly overhead so it at least does not wash out his night vision. His cigarette droops in the corner of his mouth. He removes it to squint at Jason. Yo.
Det. Rossi is not wearing a beret.
Jason waves his skinny freckled hand in Rossi's direction. Could his grin be wider. "It's the detective. Word up and all that shit."
It /is/ the detective. Does he recognize Jason? After a half-second's hesitation, he lifts the hand bearing the cigarette in a vague reply. Apparently he does. "Man," he says, as a sort of generic greeting -- he has the gender right, at least! -- and then follows up with a more assured, "Wyngarde. It's been a while." He moves his squint from one eye to the other. "You're looking--" What?
"Fantastic." Jason will always fill in the best possible adjective. He kicks his foot up against a crack in the sidewalk, closest to Rossi. "And you look run-down and world-beaten, like every old cop ought to."
"I object to the world 'old,'" Rossi comments, but mildly, without real offense. He /is/ old. Relatively speaking. His cigarette makes its way into the corner of his mouth again, is sucked down another millimeter or so, then dropped only half-finished to the step so he can squash it out with his heel. "It's been a long day. Something about the end of the world makes people crazy. What've you been up to?"
"Squat." Jason presses his other set of toes against the crack, nearly unbalancing himself. Hmm de dum. "The end of the world, remarkably, doesn't bother me save as a philosophical construct. You know the world won't /actually/ end."
Rossi is thorough with the cigarette. Wouldn't do to set the concrete jungle on fire. "Asteroid chunks, massive ice age, destruction of infrastructure and massive casualties. Breakdown of society. How do you figure?"
"The world will still exist." Jason spreads his hands out and fingers wide apart.
"We might not," Rossi points out. He almost looks interested.
"So what we're talking about is the end of maybe, say, hundreds of millions of people. Maybe several billion." Jason shrugs, hands still spread. "Still not the same thing."
Rossi acknowledges the point, morbid though it is, with a small shrug. "Life as we know it," he amends with a little bit of dry humor, and lifts his hand to his mouth as though expecting to find the cigarette still there. It is not. Sad. He lets it drop. "Good enough? You don't seem to be bothered."
Jason pulls the fake cigarette from his lips and flicks out of existence. Fft. "What's to be bothered about? It's chance I'm still alive anyway. Maybe I'd do better if things were all more screwed up."
"Figured you for a fatalist." No more cigarette. His hands stir, empty and aimless without the prop, before he knits his fingers together in a loose cradle. Stay. They stay. Rossi shifts his weight on the stone seat, adding, "Not worried about your buddies cashing in their chips?"
Jason laughs twice, threading his fingers together in front of him. "What chips do they have to cash? I'm poorer than a school teacher and all my enemies are weary of hating me. Let alone my friends. So - you worried?"
Rossi's gaze flicks up towards the night sky, invisible behind the blanket of light pollution that is the side effect of urban life. Another shrug. His gaze returns to Jason. "Doesn't seem worth it to worry too much. Not a lot of time to think about it, for that matter." For all the relative indifference of the reply, there is a slight tightness to his accent. Not worried, oh no! "Time enough if the poodles don't get it fixed up. --Where are you living now, anyway? Still in that dive you found?"
"Yeah, sure, it's comfortable." Jason drags his foot long to the side and plants it more heavily. He glances up toward the sky. "Sucks, doesn't it? To have to rely on people more powerful, better connected, and better placed than you? For not only your survival, but the survival of everyone you know."
"Happens every day," Rossi points out, abandoning his fingerlock to scrub at the bottom half of his face. Bristle quietly rasps under his palm. His head tilts as he reconsiders his answer. "Slower, though," he acknowledges. "More bureaucracy. More checks and balances. If you work for the government, anyway, and pay taxes, and--" His finger flicks: tick, tock. "All that grown-up shit."
"More mutants," Jason hums. "More powers."
Rossi's eyebrow quirks upward. "How do you figure?"
"Aren't you ever jealous that you can't shoot fire from your hands, read minds, or fly? Think of it. You'd be the super-cop." Jason hums a bit after that, too.
The cop scratches cautiously at his temple, his fingernail disappearing into the fine strands of black and silver there. "Never thought about it," he says. And then, because he is not a /complete/ liar, tacks on with a crooked grin, "Much. Couldn't be a cop with those powers, anyway. PD doesn't like it."
"I bet that doesn't last." Jason examines the side of his hand. "There's a point where utility will overcome fear."
"Eventually," Rossi says, the crooked grin mutating to a grimace. Not a /bad/ grimace, see. Just a grimace. "It'll take time. Too long, if I suddenly started farting out laser beams or knowing what people are thinking. Prefer being normal, thanks. My life can get fucked up enough without superpowers to make it worse." And the green eyes narrow on Jason, quizzical. "How about you?"
"I'm only alive because utility can overcome fear." And Jason, at this, cups his hands and a quick dragonfly darts out from between them.
Pretty. Rossi does not recoil. He has gotten better at this! "I meant, in the fuck-up factoring, does that thing you do--" his forefinger indicates said 'thing,' vaguely, if descriptively, "--make things worse? Or save your ass?"
"Mmm." The dragonfly flicks about Jason's head. "Is the kid in jail because of his genetics or his choices," he opines/asks prissily.
"Would you make the choices you have if you weren't a mutant and didn't have your--" Hard to find a suitable word. Rossi considers. "Talents?" he decides at last. Tactful.
"Would you make the choices you have if you weren't a guilt-ridden busybody with a hero complex?"
Rossi's mouth twitches. His lazy voice grins, even if he doesn't. "That's nurture, not nature. Different. Anyway, I don't got a hero complex." He doesn't deny the guilt.
"People with hero complexes usually say that. If you didn't have a hero complex, you'd have your fingers in a few fewer pies and be in the hospital less often." Jason kicks a step back. He almost hops. "But you can't pry nurture from nature. Maybe you wouldn't have your guilt problem if you were a mutant, not a human. Who knows?"
The detective raises a finger. It is not, despite precedence, the middle finger. "I wouldn't have a guilt problem if I weren't raised Italian Catholic," he clarifies, and adds almost defensively, "I haven't been in the hospital in ages, anyway. Things've been quiet. Except for the end of the-- possible end of life as we know it." Last-minute substitution, in deference to Jason's hair-splitting instincts. "Besides. That's my job."
"Sure." Jason's face grin-splits. "But the point still stands. You aren't some magic blank slate written by your parents, and I didn't leap wholly formed into existence, with all my tendencies written into my genes."
Too late. Rossi has already moved onto another track, drawn along by curiosity. "'/Usually/ say that--' How many people with hero-complexes do you know, anyway?"
"Plenty." Jason even begins ticking off his fingers - without naming names. "A lot of them mutants. You'd make a great freak."
"Why so many--" Rossi begins, then breaks off, thinks again, and fixes. "There some sort of leaning in mutants to try to be heroes? What is that, too many comic books when they were kids?"
"'With great power comes great responsibility.'" And now Jason is just sneering.
Rossi just looks blank. Pop-culture expert, he is not. "You don't have that problem," he notes. Asks? Notes.
"No."
"Personal choice?"
"Lack of drive. What does it matter to me? Why, you," and Jason points at Rossi, "could get stabbed right now and I wouldn't lift a finger to help."
"We got a good samaritan law in New York," Rossi says mildly. He does not take offense at Jason's avowed disinterest in his well-being.
"I don't care." Listen to how stubborn Jason is.
It is very impressive! "Principles work out fine in theory." Rossi's thumb flicks up and back over his shoulder to the flophouse, then joins the rest of its fellows in gesturing to the rest of the block. "It's not like the rest of the area doesn't lean the same way. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Bunch of blind, deaf, and dumb assholes."
"Because no one wants to stick their neck out. No one wants to be that guy in the emergency room." Jason pauses. "Or hacked into manageable pieces and stuffed in fifteen different dumpsters."
"You watch too much TV," Rossi informs. "That almost never happens." So /there/.
"Maybe you just don't hear about it." Jason feels it necessary to fold his arms at this point.
"I'm a cop." Duh. "I hear almost everything. Eventually."
"Or so you think. You're a very proud man." Two clicks of the tongue.
This much is truth. Rossi does not bother to deny it. He shrugs, his shoulders adjusting under the cheap, slightly puckered lines of his suit, and pares another grin out of nowhere in a scimitar flash of teeth. "Goes with the territory. Seems to me you got plenty of pride yourself, one way or another."
"That is because I," and Jason straightens stiff, "am a paragon of awesome."
His statement inspires a small chuckle, caught deep in the back of Rossi's throat. The detective scratches again at his cheek. "If you say so," he says tolerantly. "Your roommates learn to appreciate that awesome of you? You said something back when about not getting along with them so good."
"They've come around. Everyone eventually does." Jason side-steps, sidle-steps closer to Rossi. "It's only a matter of time before you adore me as well."
"Well on my way already," Rossi says with suitable graveness in his baritone. He examines his thumbnail, picks under it with another nail, and glances up again at Jason with a curious arch of his brow. "You follow that hands-off policy with them, too?"
"I repay adoration with protection. I'm a bit like the Mafia - I'm sure, being Italian, you've got a little of that in your make up. I scratch your back if you scratch mine."
Rossi shrugs. "I look after my CIs, within reason. Why?" Under the heavy black lattice of eyelashes, the bright green eyes sharpen to professional interest. "You got information I can use?"
"Your CIs?" Jason returns bright green gaze with too-pale blue one, folding his hands behind his head. "Considerate Informants?"
"Confidential Informants." The man shifts again, propping his elbows on his knees and once more locking his fingers safely together. He tucks them under his chin and regards Jason over them, demure as a dove. "They give me information, I pay them cash for it if it turns out to be good, and I help them out when they get into jams -- if it's practical."
"So - you want me to be a fink." The look in Jason's washed-out blue eyes is now openly dubious. "I guess the hands-off policy still applies! Not that I have anything to tell you."
Rossi's mouth twitches in the corner. "There's a word I haven't heard in a long time. 'Fink.' You hanging out at old folks' homes now?"
"What's the more modern term? And I don't mean the more politically correct one," Jason quite hastens to add.
A hand waves. There is such a banquet of possibilities, it suggests. "'Rat' is sort of timeless," Rossi informs. "Informer, whistle blower, pigeon, stooge-- take your pick. There are others. Depends on what group you're running with."
"Rat, then." For a moment, do Jason's eyes look faintly beady and his face too elongated? Surely a trick of the light. "But no, not interested."
"Just a thought. It's not exactly a career opportunity." Fact.
"No, not really. Interior designer."
"Really?" Rossi is ... surprised. Look at him, being surprised. His eyebrows rise. "You making a living doing that?"
"Yes." Jason smiles with charming convinciality.
Rossi rolls a shoulder and looks amused, one hand diving into his coat's pocket to retrieve a buzzing cell phone. "Good for you," he congratulates. "Good gig in the city if you can make it work."
"Yeah. I'm amazingly rich. Anyway." Jason hooks a thumb under that ragged beret and tilts it up. "Good day!"
And Rossi still doesn't have a beret, so he has nothing to lift. However, he has a phone, now flicked open by a thumb. He glances at its screen, registering information, then touches it to his forehead as a sort of backhanded salute. "Night," he says, just to be perverse. And, you know. /Right/. "Take care of yourself," he adds by way of courteous follow-up, rare enough in a man of his stamp. "Stay out of trouble." The last is simply optimism.
"For you, dearling, I'd do anything!" Jason tosses this over his shoulder and off he goes.
=NYC= Clinton
Hell's Kitchen, because oh if that is not the preferred name for Clinton outside of the law offices, almost dragged itself up by the knuckles into respectability. But that was before the poor as piss housing and Hell's Kitchen's reputation for grit and shadow drew the attention of new gangs and new criminals -- and new refugees. Mutants have tried to disappear into the sagging tenements and alleys and been found dead on the streets. A Worthington safe house for mutants once stood here, but government backing and all, it could not outlast the violence. But the mutants are not only victims -- some of the bodies found on sidewalks or apartments are humans, and not all of them are masked gang members. While the mutant issue has lit the nation into a political hotbed, it has made Clinton dangerous for everyone. Proceed carefully.
It is late night on a Sunday, and Clinton is its usual charming, degenerate self: hookers, dealers, gang-bangers, the dregs of humanity are busy plying their trade on the street corners and alleyways of the neighborhood. On this, the Lord's day, there is less business than usual, and so there are fewer merchants than usual; the sidewalks are, relatively speaking, almost empty. In its own odd way, it is almost endearing -- except that no, it's not.
Det. Rossi is seated on the steps of a high, run-down building that has served in its time as a flophouse and an apartment, and is now on its way to becoming the former again. His suit jacket is open over his shirt, both a dark blue that turns almost black in the shadow. His tie is a stripe of pale grey, colorless against the fabric of his clothes. He is, alas, smoking. It is a bad habit. His doctors would be so cranky if they knew.
Jason is also smoking. He's probably doing it on purpose. For a sense of atmosphere. Why, he just seems to coalesce out of the scant crowds, in a ratty brown trenchcoat and a ratty brown beret and that cigarette poking from between his lips. And he's headed right toward Rossi.
It is habit that makes Det. Rossi automatically pay attention to anybody moving on the street. Habit, that is, and a lack of basic stupidity -- a trait not /so/ lacking that it sees him situated elsewhere on this night. He has enough to explain that, anyway. He also lacks the obviousness of a badge, though the gun is perhaps visible if one were looking for it. (On this street, who isn't carrying?) The light, at least, is not directly overhead so it at least does not wash out his night vision. His cigarette droops in the corner of his mouth. He removes it to squint at Jason. Yo.
Det. Rossi is not wearing a beret.
Jason waves his skinny freckled hand in Rossi's direction. Could his grin be wider. "It's the detective. Word up and all that shit."
It /is/ the detective. Does he recognize Jason? After a half-second's hesitation, he lifts the hand bearing the cigarette in a vague reply. Apparently he does. "Man," he says, as a sort of generic greeting -- he has the gender right, at least! -- and then follows up with a more assured, "Wyngarde. It's been a while." He moves his squint from one eye to the other. "You're looking--" What?
"Fantastic." Jason will always fill in the best possible adjective. He kicks his foot up against a crack in the sidewalk, closest to Rossi. "And you look run-down and world-beaten, like every old cop ought to."
"I object to the world 'old,'" Rossi comments, but mildly, without real offense. He /is/ old. Relatively speaking. His cigarette makes its way into the corner of his mouth again, is sucked down another millimeter or so, then dropped only half-finished to the step so he can squash it out with his heel. "It's been a long day. Something about the end of the world makes people crazy. What've you been up to?"
"Squat." Jason presses his other set of toes against the crack, nearly unbalancing himself. Hmm de dum. "The end of the world, remarkably, doesn't bother me save as a philosophical construct. You know the world won't /actually/ end."
Rossi is thorough with the cigarette. Wouldn't do to set the concrete jungle on fire. "Asteroid chunks, massive ice age, destruction of infrastructure and massive casualties. Breakdown of society. How do you figure?"
"The world will still exist." Jason spreads his hands out and fingers wide apart.
"We might not," Rossi points out. He almost looks interested.
"So what we're talking about is the end of maybe, say, hundreds of millions of people. Maybe several billion." Jason shrugs, hands still spread. "Still not the same thing."
Rossi acknowledges the point, morbid though it is, with a small shrug. "Life as we know it," he amends with a little bit of dry humor, and lifts his hand to his mouth as though expecting to find the cigarette still there. It is not. Sad. He lets it drop. "Good enough? You don't seem to be bothered."
Jason pulls the fake cigarette from his lips and flicks out of existence. Fft. "What's to be bothered about? It's chance I'm still alive anyway. Maybe I'd do better if things were all more screwed up."
"Figured you for a fatalist." No more cigarette. His hands stir, empty and aimless without the prop, before he knits his fingers together in a loose cradle. Stay. They stay. Rossi shifts his weight on the stone seat, adding, "Not worried about your buddies cashing in their chips?"
Jason laughs twice, threading his fingers together in front of him. "What chips do they have to cash? I'm poorer than a school teacher and all my enemies are weary of hating me. Let alone my friends. So - you worried?"
Rossi's gaze flicks up towards the night sky, invisible behind the blanket of light pollution that is the side effect of urban life. Another shrug. His gaze returns to Jason. "Doesn't seem worth it to worry too much. Not a lot of time to think about it, for that matter." For all the relative indifference of the reply, there is a slight tightness to his accent. Not worried, oh no! "Time enough if the poodles don't get it fixed up. --Where are you living now, anyway? Still in that dive you found?"
"Yeah, sure, it's comfortable." Jason drags his foot long to the side and plants it more heavily. He glances up toward the sky. "Sucks, doesn't it? To have to rely on people more powerful, better connected, and better placed than you? For not only your survival, but the survival of everyone you know."
"Happens every day," Rossi points out, abandoning his fingerlock to scrub at the bottom half of his face. Bristle quietly rasps under his palm. His head tilts as he reconsiders his answer. "Slower, though," he acknowledges. "More bureaucracy. More checks and balances. If you work for the government, anyway, and pay taxes, and--" His finger flicks: tick, tock. "All that grown-up shit."
"More mutants," Jason hums. "More powers."
Rossi's eyebrow quirks upward. "How do you figure?"
"Aren't you ever jealous that you can't shoot fire from your hands, read minds, or fly? Think of it. You'd be the super-cop." Jason hums a bit after that, too.
The cop scratches cautiously at his temple, his fingernail disappearing into the fine strands of black and silver there. "Never thought about it," he says. And then, because he is not a /complete/ liar, tacks on with a crooked grin, "Much. Couldn't be a cop with those powers, anyway. PD doesn't like it."
"I bet that doesn't last." Jason examines the side of his hand. "There's a point where utility will overcome fear."
"Eventually," Rossi says, the crooked grin mutating to a grimace. Not a /bad/ grimace, see. Just a grimace. "It'll take time. Too long, if I suddenly started farting out laser beams or knowing what people are thinking. Prefer being normal, thanks. My life can get fucked up enough without superpowers to make it worse." And the green eyes narrow on Jason, quizzical. "How about you?"
"I'm only alive because utility can overcome fear." And Jason, at this, cups his hands and a quick dragonfly darts out from between them.
Pretty. Rossi does not recoil. He has gotten better at this! "I meant, in the fuck-up factoring, does that thing you do--" his forefinger indicates said 'thing,' vaguely, if descriptively, "--make things worse? Or save your ass?"
"Mmm." The dragonfly flicks about Jason's head. "Is the kid in jail because of his genetics or his choices," he opines/asks prissily.
"Would you make the choices you have if you weren't a mutant and didn't have your--" Hard to find a suitable word. Rossi considers. "Talents?" he decides at last. Tactful.
"Would you make the choices you have if you weren't a guilt-ridden busybody with a hero complex?"
Rossi's mouth twitches. His lazy voice grins, even if he doesn't. "That's nurture, not nature. Different. Anyway, I don't got a hero complex." He doesn't deny the guilt.
"People with hero complexes usually say that. If you didn't have a hero complex, you'd have your fingers in a few fewer pies and be in the hospital less often." Jason kicks a step back. He almost hops. "But you can't pry nurture from nature. Maybe you wouldn't have your guilt problem if you were a mutant, not a human. Who knows?"
The detective raises a finger. It is not, despite precedence, the middle finger. "I wouldn't have a guilt problem if I weren't raised Italian Catholic," he clarifies, and adds almost defensively, "I haven't been in the hospital in ages, anyway. Things've been quiet. Except for the end of the-- possible end of life as we know it." Last-minute substitution, in deference to Jason's hair-splitting instincts. "Besides. That's my job."
"Sure." Jason's face grin-splits. "But the point still stands. You aren't some magic blank slate written by your parents, and I didn't leap wholly formed into existence, with all my tendencies written into my genes."
Too late. Rossi has already moved onto another track, drawn along by curiosity. "'/Usually/ say that--' How many people with hero-complexes do you know, anyway?"
"Plenty." Jason even begins ticking off his fingers - without naming names. "A lot of them mutants. You'd make a great freak."
"Why so many--" Rossi begins, then breaks off, thinks again, and fixes. "There some sort of leaning in mutants to try to be heroes? What is that, too many comic books when they were kids?"
"'With great power comes great responsibility.'" And now Jason is just sneering.
Rossi just looks blank. Pop-culture expert, he is not. "You don't have that problem," he notes. Asks? Notes.
"No."
"Personal choice?"
"Lack of drive. What does it matter to me? Why, you," and Jason points at Rossi, "could get stabbed right now and I wouldn't lift a finger to help."
"We got a good samaritan law in New York," Rossi says mildly. He does not take offense at Jason's avowed disinterest in his well-being.
"I don't care." Listen to how stubborn Jason is.
It is very impressive! "Principles work out fine in theory." Rossi's thumb flicks up and back over his shoulder to the flophouse, then joins the rest of its fellows in gesturing to the rest of the block. "It's not like the rest of the area doesn't lean the same way. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Bunch of blind, deaf, and dumb assholes."
"Because no one wants to stick their neck out. No one wants to be that guy in the emergency room." Jason pauses. "Or hacked into manageable pieces and stuffed in fifteen different dumpsters."
"You watch too much TV," Rossi informs. "That almost never happens." So /there/.
"Maybe you just don't hear about it." Jason feels it necessary to fold his arms at this point.
"I'm a cop." Duh. "I hear almost everything. Eventually."
"Or so you think. You're a very proud man." Two clicks of the tongue.
This much is truth. Rossi does not bother to deny it. He shrugs, his shoulders adjusting under the cheap, slightly puckered lines of his suit, and pares another grin out of nowhere in a scimitar flash of teeth. "Goes with the territory. Seems to me you got plenty of pride yourself, one way or another."
"That is because I," and Jason straightens stiff, "am a paragon of awesome."
His statement inspires a small chuckle, caught deep in the back of Rossi's throat. The detective scratches again at his cheek. "If you say so," he says tolerantly. "Your roommates learn to appreciate that awesome of you? You said something back when about not getting along with them so good."
"They've come around. Everyone eventually does." Jason side-steps, sidle-steps closer to Rossi. "It's only a matter of time before you adore me as well."
"Well on my way already," Rossi says with suitable graveness in his baritone. He examines his thumbnail, picks under it with another nail, and glances up again at Jason with a curious arch of his brow. "You follow that hands-off policy with them, too?"
"I repay adoration with protection. I'm a bit like the Mafia - I'm sure, being Italian, you've got a little of that in your make up. I scratch your back if you scratch mine."
Rossi shrugs. "I look after my CIs, within reason. Why?" Under the heavy black lattice of eyelashes, the bright green eyes sharpen to professional interest. "You got information I can use?"
"Your CIs?" Jason returns bright green gaze with too-pale blue one, folding his hands behind his head. "Considerate Informants?"
"Confidential Informants." The man shifts again, propping his elbows on his knees and once more locking his fingers safely together. He tucks them under his chin and regards Jason over them, demure as a dove. "They give me information, I pay them cash for it if it turns out to be good, and I help them out when they get into jams -- if it's practical."
"So - you want me to be a fink." The look in Jason's washed-out blue eyes is now openly dubious. "I guess the hands-off policy still applies! Not that I have anything to tell you."
Rossi's mouth twitches in the corner. "There's a word I haven't heard in a long time. 'Fink.' You hanging out at old folks' homes now?"
"What's the more modern term? And I don't mean the more politically correct one," Jason quite hastens to add.
A hand waves. There is such a banquet of possibilities, it suggests. "'Rat' is sort of timeless," Rossi informs. "Informer, whistle blower, pigeon, stooge-- take your pick. There are others. Depends on what group you're running with."
"Rat, then." For a moment, do Jason's eyes look faintly beady and his face too elongated? Surely a trick of the light. "But no, not interested."
"Just a thought. It's not exactly a career opportunity." Fact.
"No, not really. Interior designer."
"Really?" Rossi is ... surprised. Look at him, being surprised. His eyebrows rise. "You making a living doing that?"
"Yes." Jason smiles with charming convinciality.
Rossi rolls a shoulder and looks amused, one hand diving into his coat's pocket to retrieve a buzzing cell phone. "Good for you," he congratulates. "Good gig in the city if you can make it work."
"Yeah. I'm amazingly rich. Anyway." Jason hooks a thumb under that ragged beret and tilts it up. "Good day!"
And Rossi still doesn't have a beret, so he has nothing to lift. However, he has a phone, now flicked open by a thumb. He glances at its screen, registering information, then touches it to his forehead as a sort of backhanded salute. "Night," he says, just to be perverse. And, you know. /Right/. "Take care of yourself," he adds by way of courteous follow-up, rare enough in a man of his stamp. "Stay out of trouble." The last is simply optimism.
"For you, dearling, I'd do anything!" Jason tosses this over his shoulder and off he goes.