missthis_ass | (no subject)

Entry tags:

coop,
nate

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The bloody auction has been postponed twice already due to unforeseen circumstances, which Chloe knows to mean 'Darrow weirdness' and it's only now, finally, after all their work and research and leg work, the auction items have been moved from private and well hidden storage to a more public location.

Public might be overstating it a wee bit, but at least now they know where the damn compass is.

The auction is set for the weekend, Saturday night, and by Tuesday she has both Nate and Coop up to speed on every last detail of their plan. The new storage building is still monitored, but they've done a great deal of recon work and Chloe has no doubt they'll be able to get in and out without much problem. She and Nate have worked more complicated buildings than this and Coop comes with his own set of skills neither of them have.

Of course, that also means she may have to play mediator when Nate inevitably tries to compete with those skills, but she'll worry about that when the time comes.

Three weeks before they're set to break into the storage location, Chloe receives an anonymous letter, telling her she'll never be allowed to use the compass. Since she has no intention of using it, since she's only interested in selling it, she throws the letter away without telling the others about it and forgets about it soon after. No further letters come.

On the Wednesday afternoon before the auction, they're set to meet at her apartment to go through the plan one last time. When it comes down to the moment, she knows there's plenty they're going to have to wing, that's just how these kinds of things work, but she likes knowing there are as few potential issues as possible. And they've planned well, they know their route in, they know where to find the compass, they know their route out. Between the three of them, she's confident they've got this in the bag.

And the payday they're going to get at the end of it will make all the waiting worthwhile.

They wait until after midnight before moving to the location and once they're there, it's Coop Chloe sends to the door first. His skills, after all, come with lock picking tools she's never even seen before. Once inside she knows there's a second door and an alarm they'll have to bypass, but she trusts Nate with that. She's seen him climb higher walls than the one on the other side of this door, after all.

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The plan involves Nate climbing, because of course it does. He's not even a little bit surprised at this point; in fact he's reasonably sure Chloe's organised things that way on purpose. If it gets them all paid though, he's not going to complain. He's certainly climbed higher shit for weirder reasons.

They've been chasing this thing for months, and Nate's just glad that the day is finally here. He's never been known for his patience, but at least they're finally on to something. He dresses dark and easy to move in and meets them at the storage facility, his gloves already on. This is what Nate does best and it's almost a relief to be back in the full swing of things. He's sold the trinket box that he and Coop managed to steal, got them both a nice little payday for their trouble, but this will be bigger, better. If the compass is real, it could be their ticket out of here, and even if it's not, they can sell it as though it is and make a buck.

He lingers back with Chloe a moment, letting Coop tackle the door. He's see the Living Numbers in action before but he still doesn't really understand it, so it's better to stay out of Coop's way and let him do his thing. Nate still thinks it's cheating, just a little bit, but if they pull this job off quickly and quietly he'll live with it.

"So someone else is climbing that wall, right?" he asks them, giving them a wry smile even though he knows exactly what the answer is going to be.

"Get your girl back there to do it," Coop said, not taking his eyes of the door, the lock and the Living Numbers. It wasn't anything above his pay grade but it still took a little bit of time to make sure there was no fuss, no mess. He hummed as they worked, keeping his hands on the door just to make sure nothing surprised them from the other side.

"She's always harping on how talented she is and I've never seen her climb anything," Coop continued, smirking to himself. "Nate, you can hold her things. Cheer her on and all that shit."

"You both know I'd be happy to and I would know you'd both be staring at my ass as I did," she answers with a shrug, though she's careful to keep her voice lowered, her gaze on Coop as he works. Even right now, as they're throwing comments back and forth, they all know what they're doing and more than that, she's fascinated by the Living Numbers. Coop has told her about it, but this is the first time she's actually seen it in action.

"Nate knows I'm more than capable," she says with a small grin tossed in his direction. She's kept up with him for years, after all, saving his ass time after time. She's hoping tonight there's not going to be any saving, that the entire job is going to go off without the slightest hitch, but she knows it's always best to be prepared for something to go wrong.

It's a fair call, because Nate has definitely done that before. Chloe knows he's done that before, but she's never seemed to mind all that much. He knows exactly how capable she is too, has watched her climb anything he has, but that doesn't mean he isn't going to tease her.

Still, he knows it's him going over the wall in the end. That's how the plan has been organised, and he'd be kidding himself if he ever thought he was getting out of it. In the meantime, he watches with interest as Coop unlocks the door. The whole thing is fascinating even if he thinks it takes a little bit of the fun out of it. He's grateful too, that for all that he's a smartass, Coop's attention is still on the task at hand. Nate has his gun on him, just in case anything is on the other side of that door, but he's hoping he won't need it.

"I'm not holding her handbag and clapping from the sidelines," he retorts, even though he knows that Chloe is not the type of woman who would ever carry a handbag, let alone on a job. He wants to say something about the your girl comment too, but Chloe hasn't argued the point like he might have expected her to, and he doesn't want to bring more attention to it.

"I'm surprised she hasn't had you do that already at some point," Coop said, clapping his hands together once when the Living Numbers did their thing and the lock came apart with a quick snick. Coop didn't push the door open just yet, taking a second to get to his feet since if he was going to go through there and take any magic involved, he didn't want it to be aimed at his head.

"Lock's taken care of," he said, looking back at both Nate and Chloe. "If I open that door and take a few bullets, please avenge me."

He didn't think that could happen but this city was sometimes full of awful surprises and death was a very real thing. He wanted to hope that this thing would be guarded by something a little more elegant than metal and gunpowder but he'd been wrong before.

"Have either of you ever seen me carry a handbag?" she asks, though the question is completely irrelevant now that the door is open and Chloe slides forward carefully, taking care not to move too quickly. From all the work she's done on this place, there shouldn't be anything on the other side of this door except for the alarmed door she intends on making Nate deal with, but there's no sense rushing headlong into things. They have all night, after all, and she would really rather not get anyone accidentally injured or worse because she's too impatient.

She's been hunting this compass for months. Another hour or so isn't going to kill her.

Taking a step forward, she reaches out, one hand on her gun, the other carefully pushing the door open. As expected, the narrow corridor on the other side is empty, but there are lights flashing at the top of the next door. Overheard is a junction box, the place where the power is fed into the alarm and Chloe nods toward it with a grin tossed in Nate's direction. The ceiling is high and the corridor is empty, no chairs or boxes for him to use, but she's sure he can use the door itself to get some leverage.

"We're clear in here," she says, then threads her fingers together to make a step for Nate. "You're up, darling."

Nate doesn't bother continuing the argument about the handbag, more concerned with what's going to be on the other side of that door. He trusts Chloe, trusts that she's cased this place enough that he's not going to die by a surprise guillotine on the other side. Still, he keeps one hand on the butt of his gun, ready to back Chloe up if she needs.

The door swings open and nobody dies, which is a relief. He moves to stand beside Chloe, his eyes raking over the empty corridor in front of them. As expected, there's nothing but another door, securely locked and alarmed. He looks at the walls, finds them frustratingly smooth and bare. There's no conveniently located crates for him to use as a stepladder, no handholds in the white plaster in front of him. He rolls his eyes, but he's not all that surprised, either.

There's no hesitation before Chloe laces her fingers together and looks at him expectantly. "Imagine my surprise," he drawls, but he steps up without question, puts a steadying hand on her shoulder and lets her boost him up. It's almost familiar this, and he manages to grip one hand in the hinge of the doorframe, his other foot following. "Don't stare at my ass," he tosses over his shoulder, finding his grip and using it to shimmy himself up the wall.

"Oh, it would have been so nice to walk in here and find treasure chests full of gold and lots of diamonds and pearls and other things," Coop said wistfully as he stepped inside after Nate and Chloe. He put a hand over his heart and sighed before shaking his head.

"Okay, moment of weakness and want over," he declared, squaring his shoulders. This next part was all Nate but he knew he'd have to be prepared if Nate fell or something came slithering out of some unseen hole. "I really hope the walls don't start bleeding."

Chloe seemed to have boosting Nate taken care of so he came to stand beside her and said, "Can I stare at your ass?"

"It's a nice view, isn't it?" she asks once Nate has his grip on the door, leaning her shoulder against Coop's and grinning, though she's still looking up at Nate. Partly to check out his ass, but partly to watch and make sure he's not about to slip. Over the years she's seen him climb plenty of things he probably shouldn't be able to climb, but even so, she wants to keep an eye on him and make sure this doesn't go south before things even begin.

"Nate, the panel for the alarm is just overhead and to your left," she tells him. "I looked over the design for a similar alarm system and it should be easy enough to disarm once you've got it open. Let me know what it looks like inside when you've got the panel open."

Then she looks at Coop and adds, "Unless you've got something fancy in your grab bag that's going to make disarming alarms easier?"

Nate heaves himself up the last stretch of wall, keeping one foot wedged in the door-frame. He can hear them talking about his ass behind him, and he'd wiggle it if he weren't pretty sure that'd send him tumbling to the ground. Instead, he makes sure his grip is steady before he swings one arm out, reaching for the panel to his left.

It takes a bit of force to get it open, clearly not used to being removed, but once he has the box open he hangs there for a moment, craning his neck over his shoulder.

"Oh, sure," he says, rolling his eyes. "You guys discuss how you wanna do this, I'll just hang out here." He doesn't know if Coop has any more fancy gadgets, but this seems like a conversation they probably should have had before he climbed the damn wall. His fingers aren't going to hold him there by sheer willpower forever, so he turns back to the alarm without waiting for them to answer.

It's a familiar system, at least. "It's similar to Turkey," he calls back to Chloe, his fingers already moving. Hopefully, this job is going to go a whole lot more smoothly than Turkey did, but at least this part, he knows.

"Look, we had better things to talk about than working," Coop said, tilting his head before reaching down for his bag to put away the Living Numbers and see if he had any other goodies to help out.

"I'd give your ass about an eight out of ten," Coop said, pulling out a jar of green goo, "and I don't know if this is going to help but it'll eat through metal. Not sure how it'll work with an alarm but I brought it along just in case."

One good thing about DOPS is that they'd had access to a lot of interesting things that made his jobs easier. He only wished he'd been able to bring along more of them but he hadn't planned for a trip to Darrow.

"You're pretty good at this," he complimented, nodding at Nate. "I'm impressed."

"It'll be safer to disarm it manually, I think," Chloe says, looking down at Coop's goo, then back up at Nate. It's not worth the risk, using whatever it is he's got in that jar, not when they've all three of them worked so hard to get this far.

"There's no guarantee that won't set the alarm off," she adds. "There should be a bundle of green wires in there, Nate. Five of them wrapped up together with black tape and they'll all connect down at the bottom right of the panel. You'll want to pull the second from the right. That should disconnect the entire system."

It's an old system. Easy to bypass if someone has the means to get up the wall without bringing themselves a ladder, which most people don't. She has a feeling that's what the company is banking on, but she and Nate are both a hell of a lot more capable with the unusual situations than some would expect.

He'd argue the ass-rating he's been given, but in truth he wants to get this over with and get off the damn wall as quickly as possible. He does give Coop a wink over his shoulder however, in payment for the compliment. Nate knows exactly how good he is at this, but his ego will never refuse being told.

The green goo looks more trouble than it's worth, so Nate is a little relieved when Chloe suggests continuing manually. He trusts Coop, but he doesn't particularly trust all the weird magic shit he apparently has in his bag. He follows Chloe's instructions, looking for the green wires.

"Got it," he calls back, fingers moving deftly to the wire second from the right. He pauses a brief moment, just in case Chloe's going to suddenly tell him she read things wrong, but when nobody objects, he pulls the wire. No alarms sound, nothing falls from the ceiling to murder him, so Nate breathes a sigh of relief. The alarm light over the door goes off and Nate moves back to slide back down the doorframe.

"Piece of cake," he says, tossing them a grin. He does it mostly for Coop's benefit, knowing exactly how superstitious he is about being over-confident. "What's next, some kind of spike-trap mechanism?"

It would probably be funnier if he and Chloe hadn't been almost killed by exactly that once upon a time. In fact, Nate has jumped over and across more spikes than he'd care to in his life.

"Well, everything's gone pretty well so far," Coop told him, taking a breath and looking at the both of them. "Can we hope that it's going to keep up for the entirety of the time?"

Coop doubted it. There was always something surprising behind doors. An imp, a dragon, something that was going to make it more difficult to get the job done. So, while Coop was pleased with their progress so far, he wasn't going to count his chickens before they hatched.

"All right, what's next? I need to go walking through the door and get hit with a whole bunch of curses and hexes and stuff?" Coop asked, looking at the both of them. "If whatever happens ruins my shirt, I want one of you to buy me a new one."

"Oh, that is tempting, although it means you'll have to do the rest of the job shirtless," Chloe says and although her tone is teasing, she's focused on the door now that Nate's turned off the alarm. "Then Nate will feel the impossible to ignore urge to compete with you and take his shirt off and I'll spend the rest of the evening too distracted to actually find the compass and we'll simply wander around this place until we're caught and arrested."

With a glance toward Coop, she shakes her head and says, "No hexes for you this time, darling."

She steps up to the door and removes the cover of the keypad, easier than it probably should be. No alarms sound as she reaches inside and pulls the wires free, causing the little light on the front to blink once and then go dark. The door in front of them unlocks with an audible click and Chloe pushes the it open to reveal a long hallway with multiple doors set in either side. What they want, though, is at the end. The items for this particular auction are being held on the fifth floor and the stairs are at the far end.

"Nate," she says, crooking her finger toward him. There's a camera just above the door. They're out of its sightline for now, but they won't be for long if they just try to make a run for it. "Boost me up."

Nate rolls his eyes. He's done a lot of jobs in his life and very few of them have gone properly according to plan, but he's never had to spontaneously take his shirt off. He doesn't know what kind of jobs Coop is used to, but he's reasonably sure whatever is on the other side of that door isn't going to cause them both to get half naked.

Much to Chloe's disappointment, he's sure.

"If there are curses and hexes, I'm definitely pushing you through first," Nate tells Coop, though he's reasonably confident they don't have to worry about that this time around. For all that the compass is supposedly magic, blessedly Nate hasn't seen or heard of any warped blue Guardians or zombiefied people since starting the search, which bodes well.

He stands back and lets her do her things with the door, his part done. If he's kept the alarms off successfully, the door should open without too much trouble. He trusts Chloe to get this part done and she does it easily enough, unlocking the door and letting it swing open. He takes a step forward and spots the camera at the same time she does, already shifting himself into position.

"You only use me for my boosting ability," he teases, but he links his fingers together without question and braces his knees.

"Man, I just feel like a third wheel here," Coop joked, perfectly happy to be a third wheel as long as that wheel didn't fall out and get tossed into a junkyard. Coop was comfortable with the fact that he was a pile of human trash sometimes but he didn't actually want to be tossed out and discarded like he was unimportant.

"You all only used me for my cool toys," Coop pointed, giving Nate's shoulder a shove. It wasn't enough to jostle him but Nate, being the drama queen that he was, would probably make it seem like Coop shot him.

"Until my skills are needed again, I will just enjoy watching you both work while I do nothing and still get paid later."

Chloe has had to spontaneously get her top off in more than one situation before, but neither of them need to hear about it. She well remembers Nate's reaction when it had become clear she'd been sleeping with Harry, too, in order to make him think she was still on his side and the way he'd looked at her when she'd immediately assumed nudity would happen before explosives when trying to distract Lazarević. It's not her fault men are generally easier to control once they've seen her half naked, after all, she's just going with what's always tended to work best.

Still, it's hardly the time to say as much and as she lets Nate boost her up toward the camera, she reaches for the wires, making quick work of it. The lack of alarm means nothing goes off to indicate it's been tampered with and while she thinks there might be some guards working somewhere, watching the cameras to make sure they haven't been broken into, without the alarm, they're more likely to think there's a glitch with the system itself than assume they've been infiltrated. Which is for the best all around.

"Don't feel left out, darling, there's plenty of boosting left to be done," Chloe says to Coop as she places her hand on Nate's shoulder and slips back down to the floor. "Stairs are at the end, let's go before someone decides to come investigate their broken down camera and finds both doors and the alarm tampered with, shall we?"

Without waiting for answer, she sets off down the hall. They'll follow her. They want to get paid as much as she does, after all.

Nate doesn't really want to think about how much more boosting Chloe has planned for this job. One of the perks of Darrow is that he's had to do a whole lot less boosting and climbing since he arrived here, but he'll do just about anything if it means he'll get paid at the end of it. Particularly if the compass really is what they're hoping it is.

He doesn't want to get his hopes up, because leaving Darrow of their own free will seems almost like too much to hope for at this point. But even if it's not, he knows the story is big enough that they can sell it for a good score, more than enough to split three ways.

"Cheer up," he tells Coop once Chloe is back on the ground and he can straighten up again. "No dragons so far, so that's a plus for you, right?"

No evil warlords to be racing either, so for a change they get to do this at their own pace. Chloe's already off down the hallway and Nate heads after her, motioning for Coop to follow. He supposes there's no guarantee there's not going to be a dragon behind the next door, but the hallway is relatively harmless for now.

"Hey, I'm cheered," Coop said, content to let them lead and follow along. He wasn't sure if he was just needed to get into this place or if there was more for him to do but, as long as this job went okay, he'd be fine with however much or however little he was given to do.

"And dragons aren't actually too terrible if they're asleep," Coop told them like he was some expert in dragons. "If you've got the right equipment, you can put them to sleep, climb in their mouths and get what you need. They make a great little security system until those big lugs conk out."

Coop knew he was making it sound easy when it really wasn't because it was a freaking dragon. "It's the breathing fire that you want to avoid. It kind of hurts."

The stairwell is quiet, almost eerily so, and were Chloe the sort to think the world existed in signs and hints dropped from the universe, she might have paused there, but she doesn't believe in that nonsense. As it is, she's only half paying attention to Nate and Coop talking about dragons, her focus instead of the compass that's now only five floors above them.

She's been after this for months now. Nate and Coop have helped her, of course, they've done their own research, but she'd brought it to Nate in the first place and she had been the one to decide she was comfortable looping Coop in as well. This is her score and she can feel the anticipation of the end building as she climbs the stairs.

Three floors up, she still doesn't hear anything, the walls and doors thick. In the security room in the ground floor, though, without their knowledge, a well made molotov cocktail flies through a window, shattering glass and sending the room into flames almost instantly. The two guards, who had only just noticed the dead camera on their systems, flee for the door instead of investigating any further and because the alarm has been disarmed, none of the fire systems go off as they're supposed to.

At the door for the fifth floor, completely unaware of the fire already spreading below them, Chloe pauses and grins. "Almost there, boys."

Nate isn't all that disappointed that he doesn't know the ins and outs of properly subduing a dragon. It's a skill he's okay with not having, because it means he hasn't had to come up against a fucking dragon before. Sometimes Coop's life before Darrow sounds even more ridiculous than Nate's had been, which is saying something.

He shoots Coop an amused look, but then there are stairs to climb and Chloe has gone quiet. He knows that's because she's got her eyes on the prize, knows they must be getting close. For all that they've always messed about and bantered through most of their jobs, there always comes a point where things get serious with Chloe, where the reality of what they're doing starts to sink in.

He's seen it plenty of times before, so when she sinks into her own head as they climb Nate doesn't comment on it. He climbs floor after floor behind her instead, and when the finally reach the fifth, Nate stops at the door. She turns and grins at them, and Nate hopes like hell the compass is where it's supposed to be because he doesn't want to see her disappointed.

"After you," he says, gesturing with a hand towards the door. This is her score, he and Coop are mostly just along for the ride, and he wants her to be the first in. The first with eyes on the compass. There's another part of him that's waiting for the other shoe to drop because this has all been a little too easy so far, but he bites his tongue, not wanting to jinx anything.

Coop liked to run his mouth but he also knew when it was time to shut up so when Chloe stopped talking and Nate followed suit, Coop decided it was time for him to do the same thing. He was not going to be the guy who got them caught because he couldn't shut up about fucking dragons. If he was going back to jail, they were going to drag him kicking and screaming very dramatically and not when he was waxing poetic about sleeping dragons.

So, he fell into step beside Nate, comfortable with letting Chloe lead things since she knew where things were and where exactly they needed to go. He was content with being ordered around, told to do this and that by someone who was competent and who he trusted not to turn around and tell the cops on him. Tattletales were the worst.

Nate opened the door and Coop moved out of the way to let Chloe on through though he did have a thought of going first just to be a jerk. Sometimes, though, he was able to tamp down on those feelings and today was Chloe's lucky day.

With a bright smile for them both, Chloe heads through the door and then reaches over to her left, clicking the light switch on the wall. Overhead the bulbs flicker briefly, then come on, though they're not as bright as Chloe would have liked. The windows on this floor are covered, blacked out on the inside, it looks like, and so the lights wouldn't have attracted any attention from the street, but would have made it easier for them to spot the compass, because the space laid out in front of them is vast. There are shelves nearly everywhere, lining the walls, cases set up in perfect rows, one right after another. Some of them are locked, others seem to be left wide open, but they seem countless.

So maybe it's not going to be quite as easy as she hoped.

"There's no chance these are in numerical order, is there?" she asks, glancing to a shelf just to her right and finding no, of course, they're not. "We're looking for lot number three twenty-eight, boys. Spread out."

Because even after all their research, they don't really know what this one looks like. It's a compass, they all know that, but there are plenty of antique compasses in the world. The one they're looking for is special. Even if it doesn't work, even if it's just a piece of garbage with a pretty story attached, it will pay out well and that's what she cares about.

Below them, the fire rages through the first floor, already spreading into the stairwell, into the air ducts.

Edited 2018-02-20 00:43 (UTC)

It's a bigger room than he expected it to be, shelves covering almost every inch of the floor space, reaching almost to the ceiling. There are more pieces locked away in here than Nate had imagined, and for a brief minute he forgets about the compass. Maybe it's not as awe-inspiring as his other finds, but the potential for cash here is a hell of a lot higher.

Nate's used to walking away from a score with nothing, much to his own regret. But he's always been in it for the experience, for the discovery, for the things he's seen. A good payday is nice, great even, but he and Chloe have always differed in that respect. His first interests were always historical; it's what put him on this path when he was a kid. He became a thief out of necessity, because a kid on the street didn't have a lot of other choices up his sleeve, because he'd been good at it and it was quick money, but that's not why he does this.

He can't deny though, that there's a room in front of him full of things that would make a quick and easy grab, a nice little pay off. He follows in behind Chloe, and it's only when she mentions the lot number that he remembers why they're here and focuses.

"Right. Three twenty-eight. How hard can it be, right?" He gives a small, dismayed laugh as he gestures to the rows of shelves in front of them, but he's found smaller needles in bigger haystacks before.