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"Aspirin," Rupert agreed, giving the bottle, and the note wrapped around it, one cursory glance before turning his attention to the rest of the apartment.

There was no sign of forced entry. No broken windows, like at his sister's place; the lock on the door hadn't been forced, either. He'd probably been just let in, by the dead man tied to the chair. What was family for, right?

Rupert picked up the dropped bottle in the kid's wake, and slipped it into his pocket. He picked up a rag hanging over the faucet in the kitchen, and casually whipped down the doorknob on his way out, and any other spots he'd seen the psychometrist touch after those gloves had come off. The rag went into his pocket with the aspirin, as he casually exited the building; when they were a few blocks away, it would just as casually go into a trash can.

"I like the attitude change, kid," Rupert said, catching up with the mutant. "Care to enlighten me as to the source?"

"A psychopathic mutant? Really?" The zealot deadpanned, as they turned their steps towards the latest installment of this goose chase. "Go figure."

This morning, the kid seemed less annoying. More focused. Or maybe, just maybe, he wanted to kick this precog's ass just as much as Rupert did. There was only so long you could get jerked around by mutant kind before you wanted to kill something; maybe other mutants weren't immune to that feeling, either. Especially the weak ones: the ones who might as well be human, except for the aspirin addiction and the gloves.

Rupert mulled over Fisher's descriptions as they walked. It wasn't much; a small apartment? That could be any place that catered to the 99%-crowd. 'Not run down' did rule out a few neighborhoods, at least. Since he knew for a fact that young Simon did not own his own place—he'd been living at home, while commuting to college, right up until he snapped—that left a disturbingly wide swath of the city.

More disturbing still was the way he was catering to Tyler's power, for the express purpose of dragging the both of them along on this. Why?

They arrived at the address. Sooner or later, they'd find out exactly what the precog was getting out of their involvement in all this. Rupert could only hope it was just a matter of psychopathic jollies; there were a lot worse things a freak like this could set them up for.

Isabel was a sloppy fighter. It wasn’t fights she had experience in; it was slaughters. She picked weaker victims, cut through them, and patted her ego on the back for being so damn Homo superior. Like this, right now: she’d singled out the wimpiest young male in the city, and started roughing him up for fun. A kid who couldn’t even keep his balance, much less hold his ground: a kid who... honest to god, a kid who just treed himself. That would have been a great strategy, if he’d been threatened by a vicious turtle. A vicious mutant was more liable to mop up the rest of them, then thank him for waiting around so nicely for his turn.

Isabel didn’t have what it took, for real combat. Not the training, not the reflexes, not even the basic intincts. Her attention was all over the place: any new sight or sound caused her eyes to move in that direction, like a dog reacting. She even spent a good few seconds staring at her own hand while she formed a sword. Did she need to see it, to form it correctly? He hoped so, but didn’t pin his hopes on it. Did she need to see it, to strike a dramatic pose?

That, he could believe.

Isabel wasn’t a fighter. She was a murder who liked to have an audience.

So what did that leave Rupert to work with?

Squirrel boy.

MacLeod.

And a young woman with good taste in shows from the nineties, but a bad sense of her own abilities. She was still way, way too close to Isabel; he wasn’t even sure the bonemancer would need to move to cut her down the next time she mouthed off.

Then there was himself. He had a gun, a bag of diapers, and a longer history with Ms. Duskmoor than most lived to boast.

“She’ll want to play with her food,” he said under his breath, to the swordsman. “Think you can get those two out of here before she’s done toying with me?”

Rupert wasn’t a fighter, either. He was limping, wheezing bait.

After his coffee. Right.

Well, at least this morning the kid had a better sense of when to pick his battles. Rupert let the display of backbone slide, like a man with proper respect for caffeine. Somehow, he felt less like shooting Tyler this morning. A few hours of sleep could do that for a guy.

That, and all the witnesses. This wasn’t a back street in the stumble-home-drunk hours of the morning; this was a business district during rush hour, with suited pedestrians power walking past them, and car horns singing like morning birdies. If Tyler Fisher really wanted to, he could run right now, or lose Rupert in one of a million ways. He wasn’t even trying.

Yeah, Rupert had that same sense of fatalism about the day, too.

“Fifteen minutes,” he repeated, rolling the time frame over in his mind. “And what’s the address, again?”

The address was close, but not too close. They’d have to do it on foot, in this traffic. They wouldn’t be able to stop and chat about things: they’d have to start moving, now. He glanced at his watch, marking out the deadline in its hands.

“Let me guess. He’s toying with us, again?”

They’d come to his car. Rupert kept walking, right on past it, towards the sign of a pharmacy on the corner. “I’m guessing you haven’t had time to reload on your aspirin?” He asked, almost companionably. “First bottle’s on me.”

He was no precog, but he could see that they were going to need it.

They could spend the next fifteen minutes running, or they could see what happened when they got a note from Simon, and sent their reply via screw it post.

“Tell me all the details of the room he’s in. What he’s wearing. Sounds you can hear from the street--anything,” Rupert asked, as they walked.

We’re still friends, aren’t we?

She asked it so simply, like it had to be true. She had always been cute like that: she grew up like she did, she dated men like him, she even got herself into the big city and went to college, but she still had a naive streak wide enough to swallow Flipsy whole. Did she really believe that either of them was the sort to stay friends?

Fortunately, his eyes settled quickly on another topic, before he had to deal with that one.

“The trailer key, Lori? Really? God, don’t tell me that sack of s*** is still alive. What did he do, buy a liver on the black market?”

...Not that she would know much more about her daddy than he did, right now.

“Anyway, give me those.” He grabbed the keys out of her hand. “You aren’t going anywhere until we figure out what happened to you.” And who’d wanted it done, and why. Last he’d heard, she was some fancy business woman. Now here she was on her ex’s doorstep, carting in a baby whose daddy she didn’t know, just like she was...

‘Trailer trash’ seemed too harsh, no matter how hereditarily apt.

The baby had grabbed a keychain between two pudgy fists, and began gumming at it, its ears swiveling with the same abstract attention that its eyes were watching them..

“...You two can have the bed, I guess.” The couch would be fine for him. It wouldn’t be the first night he’d spent on the thing. It would actually feel roomy, compared to some other evenings.

The zealot made no effort to hide his approach. He made so little effort, in fact, that a certain psychometrist might be able to delude himself into thinking he was unseen. Which, to be fair, he was: the zealot parked half a block away—after honking long and loud at an SUV that tried to steal the spot out from under him as he was backing in. He limped to the crosswalk, then directly to the coffee shop. He would have been completely visible to Tyler's view the entire time, but he walked straight past the boy's window without ever glancing in. Didn't look around as he came in. Went directly to the counter, didn't make small talk, got his coffee—black—and dropped his change in the tip jar.

Yet there was a certain way in which he didn't look.

It was the same way in which he walked up to the table the kid sat at, and dropped a folded piece of paper in front of him. The same one that had been tucked under his windshield wiper last night.

You didn't think he gave you his real address, did you?

7:35 AM, the coffee shop on 2nd.

If he runs, check your glove box.

"Simon says we're not through with each other yet," Rupert said, and invited himself to sit down with no further preamble.

Huh. Good coffee.

PS: The hat looks better on him.

He'd mentioned that precog was going to die, hadn't he?

"2013," he answered, slowly.

His kitchen smelled like a blown circuit breaker. Sparks still arced over her skin; luminous snake tongues, flashing out erratically. They looked like bad special effects. His ruined kitchen could have been any B-rated set of a horror flick. Or the worst domestic comedy ever to play out on the big screen. This was a dream, right? It had been nearly seven years since she'd lived here. Why did she even still have the--?

The baby succeeded in reaching his face. Its chubby hand scrapped across his four o'clock shadow. Instantly, its mouth screwed up for another round of crying. Stubble: it makes babies cry.

"Sshh, sshh—" For the first time, he really looked down at the thing he was holding.

The phrase "****ing like rabbits" came to mind. Classy, Lori. Real classy.

The baby was white-haired. Not blonde: white, like snow. He could deal with that. The ears, though? The ears were a little much. They were white, too, until their black tips. And lopy: they flopped back and forth every time the infant turned its head, unable to stay upright. She always had a thing for winking rabbit ears.

To be fair, so had he: he'd just preferred them on her head.

Once the crying was under control again, he looked back over at Lori. She looked like crap. There was something in the way she pulled herself up, like she was ready to dish that crap right back out at whoever had dumped it on her, that suited her better than any heels and fancy dress ever could. This wasn't the urban sophisticate mutie he'd crossed paths with on that bridge; this was the girl from the trailer park.

Rupert swallowed.

"You kept the key."

But then, he'd kept the apartment, and the flask, and the poodle.