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 Posted: Fri Jul 11, 2014 3:04 am
priorities
Money is important to him, even now, even after coming to a place that securely offers a paycheck for little more than staying alive. Money is stability, it is peace of mind, it is control where he's got none. They say money can't buy you happiness, but the first time that Leslie clutched a little plastic card and its accompanying bank statement in his shaking hands, he quietly wept.
Being a weed runner had meant that he'd seen benjamins and bills everywhere, but none of it had been his, none of it had been to keep.
But it is, now, and so he withdraws and converts what he can, but cold hard cash is reliable, and the counting out the single bundle of worn out bills bundled up with a rubberband makes him happy. Because it is all his, and he can eat whenever he wants, and sure things can be terrifying here, not to mention downright strange, but that's okay.
Trading a terrible life for one simply with the potential for terrible is an okay trade by him.
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Posted: Fri Jul 11, 2014 3:11 am
preservation
He doesn't know what he wants to do with that god ******** forsaken room, but there's no way he's letting miss americunt hand it over to the fags to use. Leslie trudges to the basement a few times, and with him he drags a few more things.
A couple of folding chairs, set up to make it look like they've been used, but one of them is precarious and there's a reason why it was sitting outside a house with a "TAKE ME" sign. (He'd gone on leave, to Detroit, because he'd asked a tech to send him somewhere not too snooty. Ha <********> ha.)
A handful of spare milk crates sometimes laid around the deus cafeteria, and Leslie had managed to pilfer them before anyone else had, and so there were a few ramshackle tables set up around the chairs.
From a garage sale, he'd purchased an unreliable hand crank lantern, since those were all the rage in the basement.
It wasn't much, but it was still set up better than Stormy's old room, which was equally as pitiful.
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Posted: Fri Jul 11, 2014 3:25 am
protection
Armed with a trowel, a hammer, and a crowbar (all stolen), Leslie went about prying up the floorboards of his room. Because it was his, now, no longer Stormy's (and, before that, Stormy and someone else, given the two beds), and that meant he could do whatever he wanted to it.
Besides.
What hunter wouldn't want a place to hide a few things from the world?
So he dug up a few, to better fool people that might go snooping (read: Stormy, possibly America), and made their bottoms twice as thick, to help hide the hollow sound when walking over them. He had to get a safe, he decided. One to bolt down, to keep things that were his own in a safe place. Life division was land of runic-tech, and all that meant to Leslie was 'magic', so surely there had to be a way to protect from weapon breakage with their help.
But, for now. It would do. It would have to do. Leslie split his money between two--now a shy over three grand-- and hid the money away...In a false bottom beneath those hollow floorboards, filled with miscellaneous (broken, ancient) electronics.
(Truth be told, most of this was vastly above his coherence to do. But he had seen his dealer of an employer go on paranoid binges, and so this was more of the same. No one was going to steal his money. No one ever cared that he had it.
But just like Leslie constantly expected someone's first response to him to be a physical blow, it was an unconscious tick he just couldn't shake.)
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Posted: Fri Jul 11, 2014 3:41 am
penance
Leslie hadn't added much to his room. It was his, more than the basement had been. The room downstairs felt more like his now that he was gone, after he'd acquired a real place to call his own, instead of the Deus equivalent of a cardboard box.
But everyone does, at some point. Even Thompson's had his mark upon it, that clean and sterile sort of order that only the batshit had. So Leslie finally lugs the spare bedframe and boxspring back to the quartermaster, dodging questions about the mattress itself and scurrying the ******** out, but not before getting a pair of real, actual sheets to use.
There's a desk, and he clears it off, pushing aside boxes and clothes. He puts a grand total of a dozen articles of clothing in the closet, and the pair of shoes he's not wearing in there, too. Most of them are hand me downs, and even more of them are in a state of disrepair. The most treasured possessions he owns are his hunter coat and the godawful baby blue scrubs that don't fit. (Proof to himself that he's worth something, to anyone.)
The result is a bare room, devoid of anything, because all of the decorations Stormy put up were promptly slid back under her door, a kindness, because Leslie had almost destroyed them in annoyance.
Leslie lays down on the floor, staring up at the ceiling, exhaling softly, trying to think of what other people put up. His house had had sports posters, family pictures from a better time, and an assortment of kitsch that seemed to come natural to only moms.
They were proofs of connection to the world, and Leslie only had empty hands to offer.
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