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

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

The answer, dear Calan, is one bag of candy, some small change, a pocket-watch that doesn't work and this entire man apparently. A small noise rises and promptly dies in Carlo's throat as a hand encircles his wrist and draws upwards sharply enough to have him standing on the very tips of his toes. Eyes saucer-wide, he finds himself gazing up into a face he's too young to recognise as handsome, but scarred and grinning enough to be filed permanently under Very Cool Thief Man™ in his mind.

"Er," he begins, the lie locked and loaded on his tongue, before the man's other hand raises to flick him in his nose, making him flinch back uselessly and scrunch his face. It almost makes his eyes water, but in the act of squirming he does manage to see his brother making a very good not-show of being about to throw up. "I dunno," he says, just a little defensively and with all pretence of innocence thoroughly given up, "there seem plenty of people around him right now."

That doesn't assist him in his current predicament though, and so Carlo lets out a defeated little sigh. "Anyway," he says, before drawing in a large, deep breath and releasing it in the most panicked wail he can summon. "HELP," he yells, trying to writhe in the man's grip now and immediately causing all manner of heads to whip around at them, "YOU'RE NOT MY DAD, LET ME GO. HELP, SOMEONE!"

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 is almost impressed at the quick pivot to the plan B. Almost. He’s more annoyed than anything else, the boy’s shrill cries piercing his ears and he winches. Alright, he wanted to play. Thought he was clever. Every trick this little amateur had, though, him and his brother probably invented before this little bastard was born. In his hand, he can’t help but notice how thin the kid’s wrist is where it’s grasped in his hands. Against his better judgement, he feels a lurch of pity. But not that much pity.

“I TOLD YOU, MOM SAID WE HAVE TO BE HOME BY MIDDAY!” He bellows, just as loudly, putting a whine in his voice every parent or older sibling could immediately resonate with. His face screws up into one of overwhelmed concern and annoyance. “I KNOW YOU’RE HAVING FUN BUT WE HAVE TO GO! PLEASE!” This isn’t his first rodeo. “Listen, kid, I’m not gonna rat you out,” he murmurs under his breath, low and where only his writhing prisoner could hear. “I just want anything you took from my pocket.”

With a waggle of his fingers, like he’s a magician showing off his trick for a new audience, he pulls out the pocket-watch from where he’d snaked it from the kid’s pockets when he was writing around claiming kidnapping. He let it dangle from his middle finger, tantalizing and taunting. “I’ll even give this back to you. But I’m keeping the candy. That’s mine by rights.”

He straightens up and tosses a wink at the boy. “AND WHERE IS YOUR BROTHER? MOM’S GONNA KILL US!” He begins to drag the boy’s flailing form to where his presumably-brother was truly chewing the scenery, wrenching and gagging and pointing indignant fingers. Finch paused before muttering, “does he know he doesn’t have to swallow the peel?”

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

Calan’s first thought, when he finally spots Carlo dangling from Finch’s grip, was that his brother looked very strange from that angle. His second thought comes a little sharper, cutting clean through the sour spit and the ache in his stomach: the crowd was no longer much of an asset, not when Finch had gone and made himself their brother. Fine, then.

"MOM SAID YOU WEREN’T ALLOWED TO CARRY HIM LIKE THAT," Calan bellows, because if Finch has given them a family, Calan is perfectly willing to be the worst part of it. Several heads turn again, which is useful, but not the point anymore. Calan staggers toward Finch with one hand clamped over his stomach and the other pressed to his mouth, cheeks puffing as if disaster is only a breath away. This part does not take much pretending; the orange peel is still bitter at the back of his tongue, and every step makes his middle remember exactly what he has done to it in the name of business.

"Put him down," he groans, pitching himself close enough to Finch’s boots to make the threat clear. His eyes water. His knees wobble. "I’m gonna—" He retches hard toward the sand at Finch’s feet, loud and ugly and wet enough to make a few nearby people recoil. At the same time, Calan’s free hand shoots out, fingers clutching at Finch’s clothes like he’s only trying to steady himself against his very real, very terrible suffering.

It is a needy little-brother grab. A sick-child grab. A please-don’t-let-me-fall grab. It is also, for anyone watching closely, a trying-to-steal-back-the-candy grab.

Calan’s fingers bunch in the fabric for half a second before sliding lower, quick and skinny and sticky with orange oil, searching for the pocket where the candy has gone before making another horrible sound in his throat and leaning more of his weight against Finch, as if the only thing keeping him upright is the exact person he is trying to rob.

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

Finch's response - which, evident in the way he stops dead in his theatrics to regard him with open awe is something Carlo has never experienced - boosts him right to the top of the list of coolest people he knows. It's a shame, then, that he's currently being out-scammed by him and with a hint of blackmail thrown in, because he'd quite like to have a chat about this grown-up's resume and whether he offers apprenticeships. "Bold of you to assume I got anything out of your pocket before you grabbed me," he points out, remembering to continue writhing like a worm on a hook just as his brother arrives as nauseous cavalry.

"You can have the pocket-watch, but the candy is--" Cut off by the not entirely performative retching that Calan makes Finch's direct problem, Carlo doesn't have a chance to tell his brother that the guy is kind of in on it, and he can only half shrug an apology towards him for any orange-related collateral that's about to introduce itself to his shoes.

"What'd you mean he doesn't have to swallow it?" he manages before remembering his part in the shenanigans. "I WANNA GO GET SLUSHIES," he announces, attempting to squirm his way in a direction that's pointedly away from the crowd now.

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

The thing is-- 

The thing is, Finch knows the desperate grabs of the second thieving child is a hoax. He knows it, because he can feel the little brat's fingers digging extremely unsubtly into his pocket, presumably trying to find something exciting or candy-shaped. He knows it's just a con, another part of the show. more evidence to the frankly horrified crowd that whatever happening here was just the disastrous business of one extremely unlucky, now-food-poisoned family. The little fingers scrabbling on Finch's shirt, like Finch can hold him up against anything, can protect him against the waves of nausea wracking through his body, can provide relief with just his touch because that's what big brothers did-- They almost send him reeling with emotion and memories, stumbling back just a hair before his brain catches up with his body and reminds him that these are two unknown thieving children, and nobody to him except for rather impressive annoyances. 

He dances his feet out of retching reach and grabs Vomit Child's hand from his pocket, grasping it tight in his grown-up's strong fingers. "I WOULDN'T HAVE TO HOLD HIM LIKE THAT IF HE JUST COOPERATED," he hollers, sending an impressive stink eye to Vomit Child, trying to communicate to him to cut that shit out right now. Meanwhile, Wailing Child seems to be trying to help him out in a way, pulling him away from the crowd, presumably to interrogate him and demand his candy back. "You just have to chew the peel," he hisses, "to induce the sickness. Why in the Gods' name would you swallow it?" 

One squirming, wailing child was enough. Two? Two was bad. Two was worse. Two was annoying. Though, he has to admit, he finds them intriguing; the two were clearly smart enough to cook up some sort of scheme, though not experienced enough to see it through properly. "WE HAVE TO GO," he yells, making pointed eye contact with Vomit Child and Wailing Child. "WE CAN GET SLUSHIES ON. THE. WAY. HOME." his eyes gesture to down the street, away from prying eyes and concerned, cooing parents. "OR I'LL LEAVE YOU HERE AND TELL MOM YOU GOT EATEN BY ECHO SHARKS." His eyes flashed to Vomit Child.