When Life Hands Lemons, They Squirt You in the Eye [Ariel]

[Deleted]

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Tags: Ariel Willow St. James (a.k.a. Andrew)
Time of Day: 5 in the Morning, Winter
Location: On the Loading Docks

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It was cold.

So cold, in fact, that any breath you manage to breathe, if you could even get that far, puffed into smoke. The ship that came in right at 4AM on the dot carried large, oversized cargo that might have contained bodies for all Luc knew. It didn’t matter though. If you were working down that the loading docks, “Smiling Mountain” would make you work until your limbs froze in an upright and locked position. “Smiling Mountain” was the name of their boss; no one knew him by any other name, and if one took a garner at the man’s physique, he really was the size of a mountain… the “smiling” portion was questionable. He must’ve been over seven feet tall. And as much as he was tall, his girth was also something that was quite unmatched. He had the perfect build to be a loading dock foreman. Heck, he was built like a wild bull and had no issues dragging out large crates from the ship, down the ramp, and into the nearby warehouses for later shipment.

Luc Silverberg, on the other hand, was perhaps the complete opposite in appearance, and yet… had a surprising amount of strength for a “scrawny straw” (to quote Smiling Mountain). But as much as he was useful, he was also hard to train, and many of the other loading dock boys thought that he was an dumb idiot for always getting on the Mountain’s shit list. And as a result, he always got hosed.

After an hour or so of downright heavy lifting, the dock-workers were allowed to take a break – a short, 15 minute one really. Many of them were already complaining about aches and pains from dragging things that were about triple their weight that even during this time, some managed to find solace in a quick 15-minute nap.

Luc was lounging against crates containing “highly flammable” objects, though from the way his demeanor was aloof and uncaring, it would seem like he hardly saw the danger in being there. One of the dock workers, Johnny Russell, came strolling in, half-smiling like the punk he was with a face that bragged about knowing something that everyone else certainly didn’t. “Ooooooh, Andrew, yur gon’ get it. Mountain ain’t happy that he had to come and pick up yer cargo~”

The other boys chuckled. Andrew had always been the slimmest boy of the lot… and the shortest too. Mountain claimed to have a heart when he took the boy in as a dock worker, but really he just wanted someone small enough to crawl in the holes of the sewage tank to clean out the dead rats so the cargo didn’t smell. Unfortunately, the boy’s smaller size made him a target for… pretty much everything.

Luc was fiddling with a thick, rope that was used to pull boats into dock… except this rope had met its day and was now just plopped on the floor of the warehouse, seemingly forgotten even after its years of service. Pulling and tugging… pulling and tugging… his mind seemed far too distracted to actually listen in on the horse-playing that was going on ‘round these parts.

Many of the boys chuckled but the moment a large, mountainous shadow casted over them, they were silenced. Smiling Mountain’s gruff, hairy, and fuming expression could be seen even from where they sat. His beady eyes shifted back and forth, searching for the one person he was hoping to find. “You think dat this is FUNNY?! You think dat letting a cargo fall over the side o’ the ramp is FUNNY?!”

Silence.

“Where is he—where’s Andrew?!” The Mountain stalked over with his arms braced as if he was ready to take down the entire warehouse with his horns.

“Andrew who can’ say Can Brew?” said a smug, Scottish-heavy voice from the pile of crates. Smiling Mountain’s eyes shot over to him yet again, his chili-pepper face darkening when he realized who had spoken. “Ye break me heart, Lovely Moun’ain. I’d a thunk ye scream my name.” He tossed a smug a grin and a wink to the Mountain who… at least now, changed the course of who he was stalking toward.

[Ariel Willow St. James]

The fight had been a short one. Violent, incredibly violent, brutal, intense… but still short. Ariel hadn’t started it, it had been as simple as her accidentally bumping into one of the more… high society men who got their kicks wandering along the back streets and the homeless so that they could feel better about their position in life, because so long as they had money, they would never have to deal with the same things that the people they were walking amongst did every single day. They wouldn’t struggle, they wouldn’t know hardship… They wouldn’t know what it felt like to wake up every single morning with frost on your face and go to bed every single night wondering if that was the night when you were going to take your last breath, when your body was going to go into shock because of the cold, when you died there on the pavement with nobody to miss you because nobody gave a shit about you. She hadn’t moved out of his way fast enough, and he had slammed his shoulder into hers, rather rudely. Of course… what she did next probably wasn’t her best move, or her smartest, but she was impulsive sometimes, and she finished turning from where him bumping into her like the lumbering hulk of a man that he was and stared him down.

“Y’know, for a high society boy, yer manners arenae exactly top o’ the shelf.” Her thick Irish brogue made it hard for most people to understand what the hell she had just said, and when she had masked her marred language with the practiced timbre of a male’s voice instead of her own melodic one, it made it even harder. However, the rather… robust man in front of her had at least picked up that she was meant to be insulting him, and his face had turned as red as the liquor he no doubt downed by the barrel-full, or the bathtub, depending on how much money he actually had. “Why you little street rat, how dare you…” He stumbled towards her, his face bypassing red and turning more in the realm of a violet color as he raised his fist. Moving like lightning, Ariel ducked under his arm and laughed as he stumbled around, looking back at her. “How dare I? How dare yew? Ye’ walk around here like you want to help but ye never do, none of ye’ do, and ye know what tha’ makes ye? Fuckin’ pathetic.” She spit on the ground at his feet, and it was just enough for her to miss the massive, meaty hand that was now flying at her face, hitting her square on the cheekbone and sending her reeling.

That was why Ariel had showed up to work just a few minutes late, a dark purple bruise darkening her cheekbone and her eye, scrapes against her knuckles, and some wicked scratching on her back where he had thrown her against a wall. She was stiff and tired, and she had pulled her cap as low over her face as she could. The second someone saw her with a bruise on her face, the second more attention got drawn to her. She couldn’t risk too much attention. As much as she hated to admit it, she needed this job, desperately, because this job, as awful as it was, still provided her with a minimal amount of money, enough to eat at least for a little while without having to resort to the petty thievery that she hated resorting to. However, that didn’t mean that coming to work on days like today, when she was beaten and bruised, was exactly the most thrilling option.

“Hey, Andrew, hurry up would ya? You’re draggin’ my time!” Morris’s voice was impossible to mistake, and a humorless chuckle, a good octave and a half lower than her normal one, pulled free from her throat. “Ah, Morris, I highly doubt I’m the one pullin’ down yer time. Ye do that well enough all yer own.”A loud guffaw sounded from all around her as at least two of the people they worked with joined in on the joke, one of them nudging her almost painfully hard in the side, and she stumbled a bit… enough to shake the controls of what she had been working on… and all of them watched with wide eyes as her cargo tipped off of the crane and fell, hitting the dock hard… but somehow not shattering all over. Hopping out of position, she hurried forward to see what the damage was, but already she was being elbowed out of the way. “Andrew, get outta here, you’re gonna get it bad enough as it is, you really don’t need to be here when the Smiling Mountain finds this.”

As quickly as she could, Ariel went to go work on something else, but soon enough the break bell sounded, and she had found herself walking in with the guys. Morris, Emerson, Andrews; they all flanked her protectively, as if trying to hide her from their boss with the infamous temper. It was always like that, because she was the smallest, the easiest to pick on, she had garnered people who wanted to help her, to protect her. Most of the guys she worked with saw her as a little brother, and yes, she meant brother. After all, as far as most of the men standing in this room were concerned, she was a male. Andrew St. James. However, their laughter stopped the second the Smiling Mountain walked in, his face red and looking positively murderous. Almost instantly, Morris and Emerson shoved her behind them, and she quickly obliged, making herself look even smaller, if that was possible. Fortunately for her, there was help… from the most unlikely of sources. Luc Silverberg. Oh god why him of all people? 

Now, it wasn’t that Ariel hated him, per se. She didn’t strictly hate anybody, it just wasn’t something that she did, but what she felt for Luc… well it certainly bordered hatred. At least as close as she actually got. He just… wormed his way under her skin and crawled around in the most irritating and parasitic way that he could imagine, and it was that action that made her want to smack him upside the back of his head with a fucking frying pan. Of course, she hadn’t actually ever done that, but she’d thought about it enough times to justify motive if someone ever did. However… she knew the way the Smiling Mountain worked, and there was no way in hell she was going to let Luc take a beating for something he didn’t do. 

No matter how irritating he was. 

Darting around her coworkers, Ariel found herself standing between the lounging look and their hulking boss, pulling herself up to her towering 5’10” height. “Woah, woah, hey. It’s nae him yer mad at. It’s me.” Almost as if out of nowhere, the Smiling Mountain’s hand connected with the side of her face, and she fell back against some boxes, her back hitting hard, and making her hiss out in pain, a hiss that then turned to a whimper as he made his way towards her again, apparently not appeased by the skin over her jaw that was already starting to darken into a bruise. Shit.