it’s 1 in the morning and i don’t know what i’m doing
sigh
All I can think is Noir AU. So:
Davos Seaworth climbed the stairs of the apartment block cautiously, stopping every 7th step to listen for the sound of a pursuer, then every 6th step then- no, there was still nothing. He left the stairwell on the 17th floor, walked along the east hall then headed back down the northern stairwell two floors to the 15th. You couldn’t be too careful at times like these.
Apartment 1524 was the rendez-vous point and had been for the past six months, though Davos suspected it would change soon enough. The address was registered to a Mr Storm but it really belonged to Stannis Baratheon, the best P.I. in the city. It was Stannis Baratheon with whom Davos had business. They’d been working together since 283AL and the past fifteen years had been the best of Davos’ life. They’d started out breaking crime syndicates from the inside when Stannis Baratheon had still been a cop. Davos had been his inside man, the mole, an established enough ex-con that he could get in with just about anyone. Only problem had been that Stannis’ superior officers had taken exception to their agreement. They’d claimed it was because of Davos’ notoriety as a smuggler and had framed the pair of them for skimming off the top of the busts they made. It hadn’t been like that though and, in truth, they’d done it because Stannis was too close to finding out which cops in the department were on the take. What that meant now though was that Stannis Baratheon was a P.I., independent, and it suited him better, if Davos was any judge. He was out of the family business, as Davos thought of it, no longer a badge, and he had more integrity this way. It did necessitate a certain kind of secrecy though.
Apartment 1524 was a shell. There was little more in it than a desk and a coffee machine. Davos did the secret knock (taptap tap taptap) then unlocked it and pushed it open with his bad hand. (Stannis had taken his finger joints for a job, a gang they’d had to bust, no one would’ve believed Davos was in with the gang otherwise. It was just the way it had to be and Stannis had done it good, clean-)
He was sat at the desk, Stannis Baratheon, squeezing the juice out of a lemon quarter into a cloudy tumbler of tap water, barely even looking up at the door. Davos had always envied that about him, his calm. Nothing on Stannis’ face ever betrayed his feelings, except a clench of the jaw and an intensity in his eyes and those two things seldom wavered.
Davos felt himself out of breath all of a sudden as he said, “Sir, it’s the Red Woman.”
