Tea House Junkie

London Bridges

The cigar was not lit. It was an old thing that stayed at the corner of his mouth when he needed to think. He had gotten it as a present from an old mentor who smelled of nothing but old tobacco, and thought the love of a quicker, more sophisticated grave was something to pass onto his pupils. Porter could never stomach the stuff himself. The smell and action of having it in his mouth were all it was good for, so it had become something of an heirloom. A rather gross heirloom, but aside from being sure it was still clean enough to use as a teething tool, it was something to ground him in the present. 

And boy, did he need something to ground him to reality right at that moment. 

The phone balanced on his shoulder shook with his sigh. The other person echoed his response, voice breathy and tired when it spoke actual words again. The words were important, but they were also a lot more bitter than any ash Porter could have put in his mouth. "And there's no other way to take that, is there?" he asked, expecting the negative but hoping a positive outcome might shine through.

He was out of luck. The voice responded, shrill and offended. The situation was not distorted enough to warrant the question, and Porter knew that from the beginning, right up until he asked. It was just a habit to keep asking and asking until he ran out of question marks to stick to the end of his observations. Reporters tended to have nothing better running through their heads. 

He smiled, more of a smirk he wished someone was there to see and clicked his tongue. The desk he stood behind was littered with various manilla folders with pictures and handwritten documents. Each was written and used to be kept by the same person, one who was second only to Porter when it came to gathering information on the smallest things. That person was no longer around to interrogate. That was the problem at hand, actually, and the dark haired man was left to wonder if the information was going to be the only weapon he had for his current battle. 

Well, calling it a battle was being a little over dramatic, and it was not as though he would be the one 'fighting' in it. "And you came to me? You must be desperate." The voice on the line went higher in its pitch, and he just laughed in response. "I figure things out. I'm hardly the guy you go to when you want something done."

Still, his gift for compiling did have its perks. One came in the sea of folders. It was a pale blue, the most awkward contrast to every other folder on the desk, and it was the only one decorated with drawings of vines and flowers. Porter flipped it open to look at the picture stapled on the inside. He had not seen that young lady in quite some time. She was twenty-two the last time they had shared a conversation, and as the spring had only recently just begun, her birthday would be coming up soon. Twenty-five was not a huge milestone, but it was something to celebrate. 

"She might be something to rely on, but I can't be sure." The voice on the other end of the line spoke for a solid five minutes. About what in its entirety, Porter could only be half sure about, because he stopped listening somewhere in between minute two and two and a half. His time was better spent making himself comfortable in the moderately lit room. He pulled out the chair, noted the dust that rose from the material of the seat when he sat on it, and took a second look around the room. 

This place had one key, which Porter more or less owned now, and had not seen a visitor in over a year. The baby powder on the floor only showed Porter's footprints. Any others would have been covered by lingering dust long ago. Now, he wondered, what was this room initially used for? He was confident it was for the sake of future inheritance, but the one it was meant to pass onto was currently a question mark in and of them self. And solving that odd question stemmed from someone, a particular kind of someone, asking the right kind of question to the only person who could understand it. 

"I'll lead her to the starting point." he interrupted the voice as the five-minute mark ended. "She'll have to figure out anything else for herself." The voice screamed at him, and he sighed as he leaned back against the chair. The ceiling was pretty, surprising for some tin storage until in a backward part of town. Vines again, which was a popular motif he could never seem to avoid. "Consider yourself lucky I'm doing that much. My stake in this is low, practically non-existent." 

It must have said something about his mental state that the only stake he had in anything was a growing curiosity. But Curiosity was a dangerous thing when it was ignored.