Through the Mail Slot

Deep breath. Exhale.

...

Deep breath.

...

Exhale.

Dial.

Deep breath.

And hit send.

Sparkle had a call to make today. One he'd been putting off since forever, and his last excuse had run out. The island was back to normal. He didn't have to worry about The Big Stuff being completely derailed because he woke up one morning underwater or he couldn't leave the house because there were dinosaurs or on account of nightmarish penance zombies. Dr. Lecter had given him the number to phone, and yeah, he knew it was Saturday and yeah he knew it was early, but he was kind of hoping he could just leave a message and wait for a phone call back on... Tuesday. Because long weekend! See? Smart. Sparkle was super smart. It wasn't procrastinating if there was Labour Day to contend with.

Somebody actually answered the phone.

"Um."

That wasn't supposed to happen.

Shit. Shit shit shit.

"Hi, uh. My name is Sparkle," and ugh, he felt like he wanted to vomit just spitting out his last name, too, but he kind of had to in this case. "Dr. Lecter suggested I call you. Yeah. Dr. Hannibal Lecter. He said you're probably the best lawyer for... a couple of cases I have, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, I can talk right now, sure. So..."

It was not a short phone call.

Dr. Lecter had picked a good lawyer for the job, for sure.

But by the time Sparkle had hung up the phone again, he was looking a little green. That was fine. This was fine. It was all going to go super well, and...

If anybody needed him, he was going to just be burying his face in a pillow and screaming himself hoarse.

Sparkle Vs. The Criminal Justice System was off to an excellent start.

[OOC: Open! Probably not happy! But open! TW: Both threads contain some talk of child abuse/grooming.]

It was probably worth noting that Sparkle wasn't cleaning the apartment from top to bottom today. Sure, he'd gotten a lot of that out of his system yesterday over at Casa del Leverage, and between that and the whole thing with the explosives, mostly he was kind of just feeling numb, now.

So instead of scrubbing the bathroom from top to bottom until his lungs hurt, he had kind of oozed into the living room and was hugging his stuffed cat, ignoring a box of Chocolate-Frosted Sugar Bombs, and staring at whatever fluffy kids' show happened to be on Netflix. Peppa Pig or something. He wasn't actually paying attention, he was just... tired. Maybe later he'd try to figure out where to go from here, but this morning? This morning was for cartoons and moping.

At least he wasn't sitting in the bathtub hugging the fish tank again. This was kind of like forward progress.

[OOC: Open for phone calls or that roomie or whatever, though I'll be pinging around work like the freewheeling rebel I am.]

Okay, last night had been nice. It had been nice. Sparkle had spent some time with Raine, who he hadn't spoken to in it felt like ages, and got a feel for how the kids were settling into the new home. By the time the morning rolled around, the cops were gone, apparently satisfied that the group home kids were too busy stuffing their faces with pizza to stir up trouble down their street, and he'd explained to Raine what it was he was doing in town, even if he was kind of wanted for arson and assault and breaking and entering and...

"I need to go and find Carla."

"Carla?" Raine had sounded surprised. She certainly looked surprised.

"My sister."

"You mean you weren't just making her up?"

Sparkle hadn't been about to either confirm or deny. He didn't want to invite more questions. Really, he had wanted to get this over with.

So now Sparkle and Parker were standing in front of the address that Hardison had found for them, and Sparkle was having difficulty making his legs work. It was a nice house. There was a car in the driveway, and a smaller, ride-on toy car in the front yard that suggested that there was at least one kid living inside. Carla's kid? Did Carla have kids? Oh, shit, was he an uncle? He pulled in a breath, opened his mouth, and just kind of... kept standing there. Awkwardly.

"Oh god this was a stupid idea."

( Snipped for length, ouches, and references to domestic violence/child abuse. )

[OOC: Preplayed with the fantabulous whoisalicewhite, coded by the splendiferous vdistinctive, and follows this. NFI/NFB because distance and also owies, but OOC is welcome!]

Sparkle had been arrested. Of course Sparkle had been arrested. And he'd been a little shit about it, too, going so far as to put up a fight before the cops tackled him to the ground and got him properly cuffed. Good. Good. The more time he spent like this, the more he owned this, the less likely it was that anybody would suspect he even had a friend with him to help him burn the place to the ground.

And considering Lewis' confession at city hall, and the fact that he had a history of this sort of crap already, nobody who knew what role he played would doubt he had all the motive in the world for wanting to get his revenge on Lew, either.

He'd been questioned, printed, given the full nine yards. Hell, he'd even confessed to doing it, alone, with a sneer and a few colourful words and a 'and you can't even blame me for it after all that shit' attitude. It wasn't anything new, really, except that this time he was up for trial as an adult. That part... that was new.

And a little terrifying, yeah. He wasn't going to pretend it wasn't. Especially with the stack of charges they had against him. And the legwork they were probably doing to try to add more to the list. Maybe even connect him to those break-and-enters he'd committed before.

But he had a contingency plan. Sort of. It kind of boiled down to 'deal with it,' with a side order of 'ask the right people for help,' and if the first right person couldn't pull through for him (or wouldn't, because he had to admit that a stupid teen committing arson was something a psychiatrist of Dr. Lecter's calibre might not want to get so immediately involved in), there was always option number two, who would likely tear him a new one before busting him out. Because Atton was the best Jedi ever, that's why. Option three would have involved sucking up to Parker and her crew again, but they were kind of already doing him a huge favour as it was...

And that was why, with his first phone call, Sparkle was calling Dr. Lecter. Because if anyone could get him out of here without having to bust through walls to do so, it was probably him.

[OOC: For that guy!]

Shit. Oh, oh shit, Sparkle had needed that chuckle something terrible.

City Council had made their judgment pretty swiftly. The home was going to be shut down, the kids were to be relocated to new homes, with a temporary place to stay somewhere in the interim until they could be assigned to somewhat more permanent lodgings. It was a pretty unanimous decision, though. Lewis wasn't to be taking care of any more kids. Ever. Because honestly, now.

So today had been spent packing. Or, well, mostly packing. Alternating between packing, and consoling teens who were terrified that they'd be split up with kids who were practically siblings, after living under Lewis' supervision for years and years. Sparkle had seen people start crying today who he didn't think had the ability to cry.

( It had been rough. )

[OOC: Sparkle is phoning one person in particular, but the post is open for phone calls after that thread, chronologically!]

It was so late at night by the time Sparkle got back from his usual Coruscant trip that it might as well have been the next day. It was dark, so dark, except for the stars and the moon overhead and the yellow-white glow of the streetlights filtering into the backyard, where, at a glance, Sparkle could see Lewis out on the park bench, having a cigarette. His breath caught for a moment, seeing him there. And then he nodded a little, making up his mind.

( Here is where shit gets uncomfortable. Cut for Sparkle being totally and unquestionably inappropriate at his legal guardian. )

[OOC: No, really, that canon chunk is meant to be super uncomfortable and Thompson HIT THAT OUT OF THE PARK. Oh god, Sparkle, no. Stop. Establishy, unless you have someone who's going to visit or call at this hour?]

Sparkle did not want to have this conversation. Sparkle did not fucking want to have this fucking conversation. But here was Raine, pushing for it, and here he was, taking a 'hard nope' stance as he stubbed his cigarette out on the patio railing in the backyard.

( Cut for canon descriptions of domestic abuse and uncomfortable Sparkle making Bad Life Choices re: his legal guardian stuff. )

[OOC: More Habitat! And yeaah, here's about the point where canon starts getting good and messy and a bit squirmy. Open for texts and phone calls, otherwise Sparkle will be around to thread with in person in time for the BDE.]

Sparkle hadn't even stuck around after he'd woken up in a hotel room this morning. He'd taken one look around, and then dialed Portalocity so fervently it had been a wonder he didn't break his phone. And nobody could blame him for it, either, so help him. That was the second different future version of himself he'd looked through the eyes of, and this was the second time those eyes were the eyes of a guy who had spent all too much time in prison.

It was good to be back in Toronto. Even if he couldn't remember the specifics of a lot of the weekend, he knew damn well that he'd rather be here right now than on the island. And there was a new girl showing up to the home tonight, which meant that they had to do their ritual greeting.

( He'd barely made it into the living room with his tin whistle in time to start playing. )

[OOC: NFB for distance, chock-full of establishy canon bits, and lifted pretty much directly from Habitat. Open for phone calls or whatever, but for SP because bedtime is almost upon me!]

After yesterday's StuCo meeting, Sparkle had retreated back to his room and pulled his phone out again. Melanie had been encouraging him to call more, had been hinting that they had a few possible homes lined up, and people were interested in meeting him. A few of them even sounded promising to Sparkle, who had made wide eyes at the prospect of being set up with a nice gay couple in Ohio, because holy shit that would be about as perfect as it possibly could get without somehow travelling back in time and setting him up with a decent family when he was six.

He'd told that to Melanie at one point, and she'd laughed and informed him that she'd look into that, but since time travel hadn't been invented yet... Which had mostly just meant that, shit, yes, a normal world sounded good and okay, he didn't say that, but he had the weirdest feeling like maybe he could. She'd been a lot of the same places he'd been. He could tell Melanie that he'd died like three times since coming to this stupid fucking island and she'd sympathize with him and tell him that she got it, that dying sucked, and she'd do her best to set him up with a family where dying happened relatively infrequently.

Sparkle wouldn't think anything of it if she did. There was just so much... so much future to sort out, and wherever he wound up, they would make sure that he had a crack at college and god, it was almost too good to be true. But only almost, right?

"Yeah," he said, continuing into what had to be the fifteenth consecutive hour on the phone, having the same animated conversation, "acting, right? Like, the odds are shitty, but it's something I know I can pull off. Are there any good schools for that in Ohio?"

His phone's battery had died long ago. Sparkle didn't care.

[OOC: Down the rabbit hole we go. Open if anyone wants to drop in, otherwise establishy!]

"Shit, do you think we lost them?" Sparkle's (admittedly very stupid) question had been answered pretty immediately as the hot white glow of a blaster shot just barely missed his head. He squawked and ducked down low before turning wide eyes to Atton. "We haven't lost them."

In case Atton needed the update. Odds were pretty good that he didn't. They'd come to Nar Shaddaa because on some pollen-warped desperate level it had seemed more appealing than Baltimore, what with its distance from Fandom and tendency toward questionable morals and its Twi'leks. Possibly mostly for the Twi'leks. And this had turned out to be a very good idea for them both for a while. Right up until they found out, and not for the first time around here, that perhaps they had been getting a little too comfortable with the wrong Twi'leks.

So, now there was a Hutt mafia boss who was extremely upset (or else bored and feeling especially vindictive, which generally worked out to the same thing when it came to the Hutts in the first place), and Sparkle and Atton were sort of being chased. Ruthlessly. Not by the Hutt, obviously. But by a handful of people who worked for him, who were all, apparently, actually pretty decent at their jobs.

"Shit. Shit, fucking shitfuck fuckshit. How is it that we always end up in the wrong place at the wrong time when we come here?"

See, that was the thing. On Nar Shaddaa, it was always the wrong place, and always the wrong time.

[OOC: NFB for distance, of course, and for that guy!]