i'll keep all your secrets by the dozen

'cause dirt on you is dirt on me, and we both know our hands ain't clean

Calan sighs at the results of the coin toss, though the truth is that he’d called tails and it had come up heads, which was the sort of betrayal a boy ought to be allowed to take personally without any griping. "Okaaaaay," he says, dragging the word out with all the suffering of someone being asked to do the hard part of a very good idea. He holds out his hand for the orange peels in Carlo’s fingers, nose wrinkling before he’s even got them. 

The peels are bitter the second he shoves them into his mouth, all sharp oil and sour pith, and Calan’s face twists up before he can help it. Which, actually, is perfect. He chews with determination, shoulders hunching as his mouth floods with spit and his eyes start to water. Rotten food, he reminds himself. Poisoned, probably. Maybe cursed. Definitely worth drawing a crowd over, surely, and who in their right mind would get close enough to tell that the froth coming out of his lips smelled like citrus and not rotting bird?

By the time he swallows, he’s already got one hand pressed dramatically to his stomach. "Oh," Calan groans, loud enough for the nearest sunbathers to glance over. Then louder, because glancing isn’t gathering. "Oh, noOoOOOooo. Ohhh, that’s bad." He staggers one step, then another, bare feet scuffing through the warm sand as he lets his knees wobble beneath him. A woman with a basket of shell bracelets looks up. Someone near the water turns. Good.

Calan makes his face go pale and miserable, or at least as pale and miserable as he can manage while trying to keep all eyes on him so that his brother can pick out a target. "Hey!" he wails, pitching his voice high enough to slice clean through the lazy noise of the Ahi Coast. One arm flings out toward the food vendor and his neat little stack of wraps. "Hey! That guy is selling rotten hel meat!"

if it all goes wrong and we end up on the news, if you go down I'm goin' down too

Code 100% taken from the queeeeeeen herself, Sky <3

no thank you is how it should have gone, I should stay strong

"You always pick tails," Carlo says with an apologetic shrug as he hands off the orange peels - extra pith, naturally - to his twin and slips the coin into his back pocket. In years to come such knowledge will result in the procurement of several two-headed coins, but for today, fair is fair, and the boy offers Calan a sincere pat on the shoulder for his troubles. "You're really good at throwing up," he encourages, like this might lend further validity to the performance he's about to put on for the good people of Torchline. "A professional, some would say."

And then Calan is away, and whilst Carlo is still unsure whether they actually need to swallow the peels to induce real vomiting, the show is about to be as real as it gets for the sunbathers and others walking by. In particular for their very full pockets, or so goes the hope. 

One woman is already getting up from beneath her parasol to ask after the ailing, rotten-hel-meat boy, giving Carlo a perfect opportunity to snag the bag of candies left on her beach towel. Any pickings is good pickings, though some coins would be ideal, and so he moves on now to weave through the slowly gathering crowd. His hands are light, barely skimming as he acts as if he wants to thread through the people to see better, until they graze upon a pocket that seems enticing enough to delve inside.

With luck he'll get away with his treasures before they notice, and the ruse will be complete.

but I'm weak, and what's wrong with that? boy oh boy I love it when I fall for that

Code 100% taken from the queeeeeeen herself, Sky <3

Finch strides through the busy strides, hands in his pockets, half-keeping an eye out for easy targets and half-enjoying the beating sun on his pale face. Since arriving back in Torchline, he had thrown his energy enthusiastically on the pursuit of the three caches Jack had pointed him towards, fingers itching to delve into locks and coax them open. He had planned and schemed and scribbled out little notes on the hand drawn map Jack gave him, but it turns out his stashes are just as tricky as he and it’ll require a little more planning in order to reach them. After three days straight in his little hole in the wall he had converted into a home, he vowed he needed sun and some enrichment.

What better way to enrich oneself by pickpocketing?

On the beach, sunbathers and visitors are stretched out languidly enjoying the day. There’s always someone running sort of scam here, usually amateurs and desperates, which makes it quite easy for Finch’s professional fingers to slide lithely in and out of pockets and bags. Some little boy was wretching theatrically, gagging and spitting while his eyes darted around, crying some garbled words about hel meat and practically begging to be a distraction. Alright then, if that was the distraction, then where was…?

Finch felt the ghost of little fingers digging into his pocket and for a moment, he thinks of him and Lark, on this same beach, sticking clumsy hands in distracted pockets and making away by bandits. His body reacts before his mind does, snatching the little hand out of his pocket and hauling the boy up until his feet are just barely kicking above the sandy floor.

The boy is skinny, easy to lift and a little sticky. He’s the spitting image of the one who was now likely genuinely hunched over in real stomach pain if his facial expressions were anything to go off of, and Finch slots the scheme together quickly in his deft, thieving mind.

“Your distraction wasn’t very good,” he grins, flicking the little pickpocket’s nose with his forefinger and thumb. “No one wants to see throw-up while they’re sunbathing. They’ll move faster just to get away from the potential smell.”

'cause dirt on you is dirt on me, and we both know our hands ain't clean

Calan does not see Carlo get lifted off the sand, which is mostly Carlo’s fault for being hidden by the crowd while Calan is doing the difficult and important work of being poisoned. (Which he is doing brilliantly). The orange peels have turned his mouth into a wet, sour disaster, and every time he tries to swallow, his throat makes an ugly little sound that is only half pretend. His eyes water. His stomach pinches. His cheeks puff once before he clamps both hands over his middle and bends sharply forward, earning a chorus of alarmed noises from the people closest to him.

"I said it’s rotten," Calan insists, voice warbling with heroic misery as he points one shaky finger at the vendor. "The hel meat’s rotten. I ate it and now my insides are doing something wrong." A woman with sun-pink shoulders crouches near him with her hands hovering uselessly, while another tries to guide him away from the crush of feet and questions. Calan lets himself be fussed over for exactly two seconds before turning his watery stare back toward the vendor’s stall, where customers are now looking down at their wraps with the kind of suspicion that made a plan worth chewing orange peels for.

"Noooo, don’t eat that," he wails at a man halfway through unwrapping his lunch. That gets more heads turning. Better still, it gets someone to ask the vendor what colour the meat was supposed to be, and then someone else to demand whether the wraps had been sitting in the sun all morning. Calan presses the back of his wrist to his forehead as if checking for fever, then staggers sideways into the gentle catch of one of the mother-hen types who has decided, with no evidence at all, that he is both dying and personally her responsibility.

He makes another horrible gagging noise, this one almost entirely real, and squints through the blur of his own watery eyes toward the growing ring of bodies, wondering what sorts of treasures Carlo was probably making away with.

if it all goes wrong and we end up on the news, if you go down I'm goin' down too

Code 100% taken from the queeeeeeen herself, Sky <3