Chapter Text
It takes Alte two days to crawl out from under the collapsed basement garage of the three-storey hotel. Carefully cultivated intervals of shifting debris and preserving energy on a rotating, minutely managed schedule. Working by the light of his cracked mobile until he manages to clear enough to retire into a pocket of space somewhere in what used to be the hotel lobby. Alternating between timed sleeps and delicate excavation until they’d managed to shift enough carnage to slide him out between two marble ex-columns.
Alte sits on the hood of a cop car and stares at the mangled remains of the gold ‘Waldorf Astoria’ accolade upended into the centre of what used to be a cobbled courtyard. He watches while the cops and the emergency workers pull bloodied and beaten bodies from the wreck. Lay them out across the cobbles for the paramedics to converge upon.
The rain’s doing a solid job of streaking the grime of dried blood and congealed dust off his arms and neck. His hair’s already soaked through, but it's July, so the precipitation is tepid at worst. Nowhere near cold enough to make him seek shelter yet, and it won’t be for another three months at least. His Midwestern heritage has ensured his skin’s thick enough to take the drizzle that Chicago has to offer.
Alte grinds his thumb into the ‘O’ of the CPD’s motto emblazoned across the hood he’s sitting on, the heels of his dress shoes hooked into the bull-bar jutting out from its nose. Considers whether he’d be better served smearing some of the brown-red rust that’s coating his knuckles into the windshield, and decides it’s probably just going to get him an excessive reprimand.
He wants a cigarette.
He doesn’t smoke, not really, not anymore, but old habits are still habits. Nothing like the steady lull of nicotine to take one’s mind off an unscheduled demolition. Especially when said demolition happens to include you being buried alive in its wake.
If he had a cigarette, he wouldn’t have to answer all the inane questions the cops and paramedics keep throwing at him. Alte gets that they have a job to do, but he’s fine, honestly. Certainly more intact than most of the bodies they’re just now managing to uncover from the wreckage. Some of their lungs are even intact enough to press long, wailing sobs through as the paramedics crowd them with IVs and endone.
The rookie cop who’s been assigned to keep an eye on Alte - so far the only conscious and lucid survivor to come out of this mess - shuffles from foot to foot, scuffing his shiny new standard-issue shoes. His expression has been pinched in withdrawn concern for the better part of an hour, and Alte really, really wants to punch him, just so he can look at any other emotion on the kid’s face.
‘Kid’ is a bit of a stretch. He’s young, but he’s definitely older than Alte. Even with the knife kisses, Alte doesn’t look many days over twenty-one, and this cop's probably got at least three years on him, if he’s not totally losing his touch. His rightly youthful appearance still makes it an absolute bitch to convince anyone over twenty-five that he knows what the fuck he’s talking about, so Alte supposes having this rookie interview him is sort of a consolation prize for crawling out of all that debris on an empty stomach.
“Have you got a granola bar or something?” Alte asks, speaking over some question the rookie’s asking about what he was doing in the hotel. Former hotel now, he muses sardonically.
Rookie blinks at him, a little slow on the uptake. Wonderful. “‘Scuse me?”
“Granola bar,” Alte repeats, a tad slower this time. He waves a hand through the air near his face, wrist rolling. “Fuck, I’ll take a stale donut at this point, if you’ve got that.”
“I don’t eat-” Rookie starts, before the engine finally starts running somewhere up in that skull and his expression jolts into sharp surprise. “Oh, are you hungry? Shit, ‘course, you must be. Hang on, lemme see what I can get you.”
Alte offers him a watery smile that drops as soon as the Rookie scuttles off to press the paramedics for snacks that Alte’s not going to wait around to collect. Then he slides to the edge of the hood and tests whether his knee can take his weight. It’d been dislocated in the collapse, but the cops didn’t know that. Didn’t need to; Alte had reinserted it just fine on his own while he’d been waiting in his pocket of dwindling oxygen for them to shift enough debris to get to him.
It holds, but it makes its displeasure known in the flare of heat that lunges up his thigh. Alte sets his jaw and pushes off the hood entirely, scrubbing his hands through his hair. He’s hoping he can dislodge enough of the blood - not his - sticking to his caramel locks, or maybe even some of the blood - that is his - dried under his fingernails.
He gets all of eleven steps towards the miraculously intact gates of the Astoria before a grizzled looking cop steps into his path, drawing him to a startled halt. “Christ,” Alte hisses, and grips the nearest side mirror for balance, laying on the act. “You scared me.”
“What’s there to be scared about?” the cop asks lightly, surveying him, and Alte decides immediately that he doesn’t like him. “Where are you going?”
Alte jerks a thumb over his shoulder. “Bathroom. Your boy in blue said I was free to go. Thought I saw a Starbucks a few blocks up, and let me tell you-” He adds a juddering laugh for relieved emphasis, “-I could really use a coffee right now.”
“I’ll walk you there,” the cop offers, and Alte tries not to let the smile plastered on his face twitch with his irritation.
“Sure,” he says easily, pushing off the van he’s been leaning against. And just because he wants to beat this nosy fuck to the punch he offers, “Name’s Alton.”
“Cogar Reden,” the cop replies, his brown eyes sliding over Alte’s slight limp as he leads the way to the sidewalk. “You good to walk on that?”
“Yeah, it’s an old injury,” Alte lies, and cuts across the street, heading north down Rush. He casts a glance over at the cop at his shoulder. “You local to this precinct, or did they call you in as back up?”
“Back up,” Cogar replies. “Not every day a building collapses in the middle of the city.”
Alte barks a laugh, and stumbles onto a crossing. “Can’t say it does. Have they reached a diagnosis yet, or are we going with structural integrity?”
“It’s been labelled as suspicious,” Cogar agrees, falling into step beside him. “They’re still working out whether we’re looking at installed explosives or ballistics.”
Alte blinks at him. “They think projectiles were involved? Who bombs a hotel in Chicago? If I’d known it was such a crash hot location, I would have booked the Ambassador.”
Cogar’s gaze is sharp. “You had a booking at the Astoria?”
Alte holds off on answering that for a second as they round on the forest-green storefront. Cogar holds the door for him, and Alte tries to mask his answer as he steps past a woman laden with a tray of coffee. “Yeah, I was parking my car when the thing came down. Didn’t even get to check in.”
He beelines for an unoccupied booth seat, sliding across the brown leather and unfurling a Hamilton from his back pocket, which he extends to Cogar.
“I take mine black. Happy to get yours.”
Cogar frowns, but takes the Hamilton. “You don’t have to pay for mine.”
“Sure I do. You did me the pleasure of walking me here, officer,” Alte offers. If his smile has more bite to it than is cordial, then that’s just unfortunate.
“Thank you,” Cogar says after a moment, and circles back to the counter to place their order.
Alte waits for Cogar to glance back at him from the service line, waits for that sharp gaze to locate him in the booth seat where he left him, and Alte waves once at him reassuringly. Then he slips out with a crowd of college students who are too well-dressed to be studying anything other than business on their daddy’s dime, shielding himself amidst the suits and ties until he’s two blocks away.
Then he heads for the nearest station.