Cohost writing prompt: @spy-thief-assassin-who — Fence who is starting to feel bad about how easy it is to scam you
"Boss," Hashi's talking lizard croaks from its felt-padded wicker basket on her desk, "I dink you godda problem wid dat one."
The lizard is not wrong.
"Shaddup," Hashi tells it, not looking up from the piece she's appraising through a jeweller's monocle.
Fern's been coming in for months, with a steady stream of stolen items of escalating ambition. And initially, Hashi had been screwing her over on her cut because that's business. Lowballed profit estimates and exaggerated risks.
But at some point Fern had been glancing around Hashi's workshop and they'd exchanged a few words about Hashi's fondness for elven crackle-glazed brightware, and Fern unsubtly started a pivot from stealing whatever's going to things Hashi likes. And Hashi—
Well.
It started when she was looking over a beautiful little horse sculpture, and out of the corner of her eye Hashi saw the thief lick her lip; rapid flash of tonguetip, eyes riveted on Hashi, hungry, and Hashi made the terrible mistake of mixing business with pleasure and shamelessly lied. Looked at the little horse and said it was a good counterfeit, and valuable — to a lesser degree — in its own right, but early Aspen-Against-the-Sky period not genuine Fingers-Plunged-in-Red-Loam, look, you can tell by the glaze oxidisation.
The horse is in her safe, now, and she takes it out sometimes and puts it on her desk and stares at it and gets off fast and hard, one hand in her pants, whimpering round a mouthful of her own fingers, picturing the damp gleam of a nearly, nearly tearful eye, the determined firming of a full bottom lip against its own tremble, the straightening of back and shoulders, and the burred edge in a voice promising that the next thing will be better.
Flawed, she lies coldly. Value brought down by condition. Too recognisable. Fake, squeezing her thighs together beneath the desk.
There is absoutely no way this ends well, but there is also no graceful way out.
And the lizard is not wrong, because, sickeningly, Hashi is starting to suspect she might actually like Fern.