rattle at will // { lex + angel }

needn't be careful with me, love
i'd say rattle at will, i've been drinking my milk

This isn't her first time in the Justice Building — not by a long shot — and the stack of papers tucked under her arm don't comprise her first application for a work travel permit, but Lex Lionel is anxious anyhow. For all the times she's set foot in this building, few of the memories are pleasant. The steady parade of peacekeepers sets her on high alert, acutely aware of her every slight movement, doing her best impression of inconspicuous even though she has every right to be here. If anything, it's the white jackets that don't belong in District Seven. Her jaw clenches as she turns the corner past the rooms at the end of the hall where the tributes are kept before being sent off to their inevitable deaths. Somehow paying visits to the purgatories of others is just as miserable a memory as shaking her father's hand and telling him she'd try to come back in one piece.

At least she hadn't been wrong about that.

Well, mostly. Two years on and there's still some days her arms tire out all too quickly, still some days — including this one — when every other step drives the ghost of Denali's knife deeper into her thigh.

The permit office is on the eighth floor, but at least this one building's got an elevator. Slow and rickety, more like a double-wide wooden coffin on a thick steel rope than anything else, Lex has made a point of avoiding the suspicious lift every other time she's been here, but some days seven flights upward is more stairs than it is on others.

Leaning into the corner, her fingers tap out scattered syncopations against the paper stack, not-quite-morse-code for let's get this over with, fuck hammered out in a frenetic loop.

Someone else enters before the elevator doors slam; she doesn't even glance at him. Lost in thought (or even if she wasn't), there's no reason to acknowledge a stranger. At least, there isn't until the lift lurches to a stop somewhere between floors. She grits her teeth and waits for things to start moving again. Thirty seconds later, when her patience runs thin, Lex curses the building, the elevator, the inconvenience, her luck. "For the love of fucking —" she casts a glance at the elevator's other occupant and curses the company, too, and her luck again. "Ugh." Two years and some-odd months on, and they haven't exchanged more than pass the butter over awkward dinners at Mackenzie's. On Lex's part, it was incidental rather than deliberate — she's never had anything to say to the boy who has nothing in common with her except for that one summer they spent trying to murder one another.

Eyes flitting between the panels and buttons, the door and the ceiling — not that she knows anything about elevators, but it can't be that hard to get it moving again if she's got to; she's fixed the bandsaw and the chainsaw dozens of times and the mechanism can't be that different — Lex acknowledges him with a curt "De Costa." She sighs, tugs at a wooden panel that doesn't budge. "Well this is a bit of a downer, isn't it?"