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They were not going to talk about cat hair on window sills, just like they were not going to talk about said window sills still being left a crack open as if cats were still welcome. Welcome, when day by day and week by week the room had changed, and a new pillow had moved in next to Cafas', and the dresser he'd emptied out one day while Cafas was out had home knit cat-print socks peeking out of a half-closed drawer.

There were not going there. At all. There wasn't anything left to visit.

Calley ignored his fleeing fellow officers. He sat in a plastic chair that made a disconcerting shiiiiik as his weight pushed it across the tiles. He didn't bother with the pretense of coffee, though he gestured magnanimously to their row of vintage 80's one-pot brewers and the gleaming steel new machine that only Davidson knew how to work.

“Help yourself. It's what you do.”

He'd said that out loud, hadn't he?

Yep.

Calley crossed his arms, and perked up his ears too attentively, and let his tail dust bagel crumbs and dust in an arc behind him.

“Let me stop you right there,” the cat cop said. “I don't have abandonment issues. Abandonment issues are when the shrink helps you realize that everyone around you is actually full of loving support. What I have is people who abandon me. So. Explain away.”

He'd have made popcorn for this, but someone had taken the last bag.

June 17th, 2015

He really wasn't sure what to make of his new partner. On the one hand, she was as strict and glowering as a senior officer was supposed to be. On the other, whenever he broke out the cat ears, he could see the thinly veiled fan girl hiding behind those eyes. He had it on good report that those hastily removed paper bits left taped to the inside of her locker were magazine cut outs. He'd seen what kind of magazines Schulman read.

They were the kind that loved candid shoots of pink-haired movie stars getting ice cream with cat boys in uniforms.

“Com'on, Shuls. Please? Pretty please? Five minutes. Ten, tops.”

“Do not call me 'Shuls,' Whiskers.”

“It's not even far from our patrol route. Just one teeny-tiny detour. Just picture him, sitting all alone. The last message he received a disheartening text about overtime and I can't make it. Despondent at a bar, surrounded by women—-and men—-ready to take advantage of his vulnerable position-—” He could see her visualizing as she griped the steering wheel, and it was disturbing. If this had been an anime, she'd have a nosebleed. “I'll get you an autograph.”

“You owe me more than your boyfriend's autograph, Swartz.” And yet, she put the car in gear.

“First off: not my boyfriend. Second: should I get him to kiss a picture for you? I'm sure some fine young woman would be willing to lend her lipstick—”

Schulman made a point of short-braking at every stop light. He grinned through the whiplash. If she was this easy to tease, they were going to get along famously.

Guess whose partner is a die-hard fan? Calley texted, making zero attempts to hide his screen. Headed your way in fifteen.

They arrived at the bar. Calley double-checked the address as Schulman stared through the windshield.

“Everyone's laughing,” she diagnosed. “And nothing on dispatch. So… yeah. Any reply from Cafas?” She used his significant-not-other's first name a lot more comfortably than she'd ever used his.

Calley stared at the walls of… bubbles? Foam? Bubbly foam? Flowing out into the street, and checked his phone again. Nothing.

Here. Did you get attacked by a soapmancer?

They drove, very slowly, past the giggling revelers outside. Calley eyed his still-silent phone. While he may or may not have taken a cat-appropriate stance to text messages, Cafas was usually good at replying quickly. “We should… get out and investigate?”

The management was cool with the bubbles. Apparently they'd been instigated by a young woman with a breezy dance style and her celebrity arm decoration. Heh.

Glad you hooked up with Ghosty, say hi to her for me. See you tonight.

He-—and an autographless Schulman—-wished the manager the best of luck, advised him that city hall probably had some kind of permit he should look up if he wanted to make this a regular thing, and got back in the car. Three hours of patrol left. Cafas would probably be asleep by then. They really didn't get much of a chance to talk anymore, but there were few things finer than dive-bombing a bed that an X-trained Aussie was trying to sleep in.

Alone on the street, twenty feet back, a cell phone vibrated against the concrete.

3 missed messages

---

“I'm really not sure what there is to say.” The cat boy said, making a point of looking anywhere but at the man who'd just made his ears soggy. “But if you want to try the NYPD's finest coffee, be my guest.”

He stalked towards the break room, leaving a far-too-inconspicuous Schulman trying to hide behind the opened locker room door.

((ooc: Continued in Break Room Blues))

Before the hour was out, newscasters would already be calling in experts to discuss what had happened, to fill the airwaves and silent helicopter panoramas of the collapse with meaningful noise. Minnesotans would become hugely popular for a day or two, as parallels to their own bridge collapse were drawn and discarded.

That had been an act of stupidity and negligence. Road construction gutting an already imperfect bridge at peak hours. Thirteen dead, 145 injured. By comparison, it had fallen down in neat jigsaw slabs.

By comparison.

Comparisons fell apart when explosives were involved. The Brooklyn bridge, the Lincoln tunnel, the others—they weren't neat. They were confetti, sitting at the bottom of a river, baffling divers. There wasn't an official death toll. There wouldn't be for weeks. Not until they shifted enough rubble to get to the last of the downed cars.

Even then, some bodies—the punk rock protestor, the boy with green skin—would remain lost. With no car to trap them, nothing to hold them in place for the search teams, they would move forever to the ranks of missing posters tacked to bulletin boards at the Mansion and the Sanctuary, half-covered by lost dog signs and garage band announcements.

Below the bewildered crow, a blue-haired head broke the water with a gasp. One arm paddled in erratic starts as his other held the brunette force field maker's head as far out of water as he could.

“Help,” he coughed. “Help! Anyone! Help!”

Long minutes later, a gray-spotted harbor seal flopped onto a slab of concrete, half-in and half-out of the water line. On its back was a boy with blue hair clutching a limb brunette girl. Wound around his other hand was the arm of a hipster flannel shirt. Holding onto the other arm was a man in a soggy suit, holding out his hand to the equally soggy woman behind him, whose pink purse acted as a bridge to the next man, whose little girl looked more fascinated with the seal than scared about what had just happened.

The seal's band of survivors helped each other out of the water. Then it rolled back in, with a determined splash.

It left behind a little white cat with black spots here and there. It joined the little crowd in scouting a safe path upwards.

And then it found a certain officer.

And climbed his uniform, with no particular regard to the effect of its claws.

And tucked its warm body in the safe place between shoulder and neck.

And generally refused to be removed from said spot for quite some time.

Still July 23rd

The best part of this? The best part was that he was getting to know these protestors, now. They were like old friends who glared and shouted jeers whenever they saw him. There was the green boy whose skin secreted something damn near to pepper spray, the girl with the punk rock attire that could make bubble gum pink spikes shoot out of the ground, and the blue-haired boy who could bring darkness flooding the street. And of course, who could forget their brunette force field generator, currently laying on the picnic blanket they'd brought and reading a Psych 101 textbook. The cat-eared officer gave a pleasant wave as he passed, and received the hand gestures he'd expected.

The picnic blanket was new. So was the cooler full of snacks and pop. And the camping chairs.

When they unpacked the mini camp stove around lunch time, he started to get worried.

There were new faces, too. Like the front lines they had outside the force field, holding signs as they walked through the lanes of stalled traffic. And the punks climbing the bridge supports, which he was not getting paid enough to deal with, so he was just going to keep walking this way and keep his back to that.

The only problem with that: this way lay pink.

“That you for that accurate and descriptive summary of the situation, Johnson. You'll be happy to know that all hands are on board to help this peaceful protest.” 'Peaceful protest' was given the teeth grind it deserved. Calley was getting immensely sick of peaceful protests.

Especially when they covered not one, not three, but all major routes into Manhattan. Apparently the last road closure had gone so well, they'd decided to go for round two. This time, with extra friends. Calley hadn't even seen some of these people before, and that was saying a lot, given how many he'd arrested over the last month.

On the bright side: at least the counter protests hadn't started yet. Give it another fifteen to thirty.

“Proud day to be an X-Men, isn't it?” He gave Cafas a firm slap on the back, and a grin for his NYPD reserves uniform. He'd been wearing that rather a lot lately. What, were the X's tailors not able to keep up with demand? Or did the reserves just make a tougher uniform? “I'm going to go do a circuit. Try not to let the situation explode while I'm gone, Deputy.”

The front cars were home to the truly frustrated drivers. A few—the smart ones—had simply left their contact info tucked on their dashes, and hoofed it out of here. Others—the horn-blowing red-faced morons—had decided they'd man their personal Titantics until this whole protest sank.

Even some of the protestors were starting to pack up their signs and head out.

None of the ones leaving where faces he knew. Probably that made sense: he didn't know them because they hadn't shown up to as many rallies, they hadn't shown up to as many because they weren't die hards to the cause, they weren't die hards so they weren't sticking around in the NYC summer heat when they weren't even part of the main action. It made sense.

But still.

He didn't know any of them. And they were walking rather fast.

Calley hit a button on his shoulder radio. “Swartz reporting. I'm seeing unusual activity on the East end of the Brooklyn Bridge. Protestors leaving with no cause. Nothing overtly wrong, I've just… got a bad feeling about this.”

It was possibly the lamest call he'd ever sent out.

Lame or not, it didn't stop his tail from slowly poofing as he watched that group leave. The protestors he knew, green skin and punk rock and blue hair and the others, kept on having their picnic in the center of the bridge. Nothing wrong here.

Nothing they knew about.

“You really think traffic court is running during this? The judges have bigger issues to deal with.” He had no idea if traffic court was open or not but that was hardly the point. “Better pay up. Wouldn't want a late fine.”

If Schulman remembered standing in line for two hours at a certain signing, or the fact that she hadn't come up with anything wittier to blurt than 'I like your movies', it wasn't showing on her face.

>>"Swartz, the protesters are getting out of hand. Aerial recon, we need to know where they are and where they're going. Can you splinter two blocks away?"

“I don't know, Johnson. Let me check.” Calley gave his ex-X the look that deserved. Then he called over his shoulder. “Hey Nyugen. Do I take orders from X-Men?”

“Do the orders make sense? Run the recon, Swartz.” His Sergeant was not being a bro right now. In retrospect, that's about what he should have expected from Nyugen.

Calley splintered out the damn bird. An English sparrow, because no one actually paid attention to those.

“...They're going to a clinic. The kind of clinic with 'free prenatal x-gene screening' on the signs.”