Clean Sweep Ch. 6 (DC Comics)

(Every character depicted in the story below is a consenting legal adult over the age of 18)

A/N: Coming up with ideas and acting on them~

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It’s the thought of Trigon’s agents tracking them down that really does him in. By the time they make it back to the apartment with the thrifted clothes for Raven to change into, Cole is rethinking his entire plan. Just… continuing to do things as he’s been doing them but with Raven at his side… it’s not going to work, is it?

Frowning, he sits down heavily on the bed while Raven changes into her new clothes. She might have tried to make it sexy for him… he doesn’t really know because he’s too busy thinking things through to pay her much mind. It’s not until she sits down on the bed next to him that he’s pulled from his thoughts.

“What’s on your mind, Cole?”

Sighing, Cole gives the half-demon woman a look.

“I’m trying to figure out how to juggle our need for money with hiding you from your father. Running all over the city doing under the table cleaning for people isn’t going to work well for us, I don’t think. It’s exposing you to too many people. And putting you out in the open too much. But we need to earn enough to be able to keep this apartment so… I’m not really sure what to do.”

Raven slowly nods at this.

“… I must admit, my concept of your Earth currency is limited, but I at least understand enough to know that you perform services or sell goods in exchange for it.”

Right. He’d forgotten for a moment that Raven wasn’t from around here. But hey, it sounded like she had a pretty good grasp from a handful of context clues anyways. Cole quickly explains the rest though, as well as explaining what he’s been doing to both make enough money to survive and not end up out on the street but also keep his head down. He lets out a sigh as he has to explain his reasoning for that last bit.

“It’s not just Trigon we have to worry about, Raven. There are plenty of humans who would happily capture us and experiment on us too if given half the chance. I’ve heard all the horror stories… I’m not intending to be one of them.”

Raven frowns at that, her hand coming up and black magical energy swirling to life around it.

“I will not let you become one of them, Cole. I will do everything in my power to protect you from anyone who would make themselves your enemy… including giving my life if need be.”

Cole’s breath hitches at that and for a moment he imagines taking Raven to get revenge on some of the assholes who have cheated and swindled and chased him away in the past several months. Like that laundromat owner from yesterday… he honestly wouldn’t feel too guilty robbing a fucker like that.

But… no. Going around committing crimes would be just as bad if not more noticeable than going around with Raven cleaning places under the table. It simply wasn’t an option. Also, there was that last thing Raven said… with a grunt, Cole reaches out and places his hand over her own, causing her to immediately drop the magic coating said hand.

“I appreciate that Raven… but I don’t want you to die for me, do you understand? I’m not going to let that happen.”

Raven stays quiet for a moment before slowly nodding. His point made, Cole lets go of her hand… or tries to. She suddenly intertwines her fingers with his before he can fully pull away, giving him a shy hopeful smile. Returning it with a smile of his own, Cole chuckles and resigns himself to holding hands with her… not that he really minds it even if it’s no longer necessary to keep Trigon’s voice out of her head.

As they hold hands though, Cole turns his attention back to the problem at hand.

“We need… we need something to limit contact with people. The less people we interact with, the better. The more people who see you, the more likely it’ll get back to the wrong sorts. So if we could find just one source of income, that might be best…”

Raven hums and nods at that, before tilting her head to the side.

“I could… scry for wealth, perhaps?”

Cole turns to look at her again, his brow furrowing.

“Scry for… wealth?”

The half-demon nods in response.

“Scrying is rather basic magic, allowing me to search for things that would otherwise be either impossible to find or take too long to physically hunt down. I could cast a simple scrying for abandoned wealth specifically and if I discover anything, we could go track it down. In a city this large… there’s bound to be some treasure hidden somewhere, yes?”

In New York City, which was hundreds of years old and had been through half a dozen generations? Yeah, Cole could very well believe that they could find ‘abandoned wealth’ in abundant amounts. His mouth is dry as he considers the proposal… surely it couldn’t be that easy, could it? And yet…

“Go for it. Couldn’t hurt to try, right?”

Raven smiles and nods, before lifting her free hand into the air and drawing a burning black symbol with her finger. Her other hand remains locked in his… only to squeeze down hard a moment later when the casting is completed and Raven cries out in pain.

Cole’s eyes widen and he lurches closer to her side, his other hand coming up to hover over her protectively.

“Raven, are you okay?! What’s wrong? What happened?”

She shudders for a moment; her free hand pressed against her head. Then, slowly, she removes it.

“I… underestimated things. The scrying… it wasn’t meant to be bigger than just this building and some of the surroundings. And yet… the amount of abandoned wealth in this building alone is… immense. It was blinding to my magical senses.”

… Ah. Yeah okay, Cole could see where they’d made a bit of a mistake. Abandoned wealth was way too broad, wasn’t it? Even ignoring the possibility of there being some money stash hidden in a wall somewhere in this apartment complex, Raven had just picked up every single forgotten coin or dollar bill lost behind a sofa or bed frame. Yeah…

“You need to tighten the focus… if you’re feeling up to it of course.”

“Y-Yes. I’m fine. It was just a shock to the system. How should I focus in further, Mas- I mean, Cole.”

Letting the slip pass him by, Cole thinks for a moment before grunting.

“Let’s try ‘abandoned gold’ first specifically.”

It would be a pain in the ass to have to sell it, but to be fair, Cole wasn’t expecting to find abandoned gold in his apartment complex anyways. And indeed, when Raven performs the scrying this time, there’s no cry of pain. Just a silent pause before she shakes her head.

“Nothing comes up.”

“Okay good… let’s try…”

Actually, what was he even thinking here? Even if they did find a source of abandoned wealth worth going for in this building… it would almost certainly be locked behind some apartment door. The likelihood of them being able to retrieve the wealth without having to break in and therefore break the law was basically next to none. And Cole very much did not want to break the law in his own apartment complex. You don’t shit where you eat, after all.

“… Let’s go on a walk. I have an idea.”

Sure, it still meant leaving the relative safety of the apartment and exposing Raven to the denizens of New York, but it was a lot better than introducing her directly to all of his ‘clientele’ Cole figured. Raven could just put the hood on her thrifted jacket up and between that and the skirt, it was hard to even tell that she had unnaturally gray skin.

Together, the two of them make their way towards the nearest park. No, it’s not Central Park… Cole doesn’t live anywhere near that. But the place is relatively nice for all that it’s not overly crowded on a weekday like this. Walking hand in hand, Cole takes Raven to the center of the park, which is far enough away from any buildings. Then, he glances to her.

“Okay… try casting the first scrying for abandoned wealth again. Though if you can modify it to only include a certain amount of wealth that might help you avoid picking up every discarded and forgotten coin in the park.”

Raven nods, concentrating as she casts the spell, forming the sigil in the air. Cole glances around, but they’re hidden from view by the nearby bushes and trees and there’s nobody looking their way anyways. After a brief moment, Raven nods again.

“I’ve found something.”

She points and Cole’s eyes follow though he doesn’t see anything specific in that direction. In the end, he just shrugs.

“Lead the way.”

Raven does so, the two of them still holding hands as she picks her way through the park’s brush and eventually brings him to a new set of bushes. Staring down at the ground just under one of the bushes, she gives Cole a meaningful look.

Cole in turn glances around them again to once more make sure they aren’t attracting any unwanted attention. Only once he’s confident that they aren’t being spied upon does he kneel down in the dirt and bring his hand up.

He’s never… cast a cleaning spell on simple ground before. But dirt is dirt, right? By definition, it’s dirty. So he gives it a try, figuring the worst is that he’ll fail. And while the ground does look a little bit more pristine afterwards, he does fail initially. A frown spreads across Cole’s face as he considers the problem.

Just digging here seems like a bad idea, though maybe Raven could use her magic. But… it also feels like Cole is missing something with his own magic. He can do this… he just needs to reorient his thinking. He’s not trying to clean the ground… you can’t clean ground, that’s dumb.

Rather… he needs to try to clean what’s hidden beneath the dirt. Cole trusts Raven with all his heart. If she says there’s some form of wealth hidden under the ground, then he believes her fully. She would not lie to him, that Cole is absolutely certain of.

With that certainty locked in, he reaches out again and casts his spell again. This time he feels a larger draw on his magic as the dirt beneath his hand begins to vanish, treated as a mess by his power. Rapidly, a hole forms in front of them, maybe a couple feet deep and a couple feet wide. And when all is said and done, sitting in the middle of it, pristine as can be… is a large plastic bag taped up a dozen different ways.

Reaching in, Cole grabs the plastic bag and lifts it up out of the hole. The damn thing is very heavy… but then, that makes sense because once he finishes tearing through the duct tape used to seal it shut, he finds out that it contained bands upon bands of one hundred dollar bills.

Cole’s eyes bulge out of his head at the sight of the life changing amount of money. His fingers run over the cash, his senses telling him that it’s surprisingly clean for money. But then, that also immediately tells Cole that it has to be stolen… probably directly from a bank if it’s this clean.

Had they seriously just come upon the fruits of someone else’s successful bank heist? A shiver of fear runs down Cole’s spine and he quickly checks their surroundings again… but he finds nobody. Finally, he looks to Raven.

“Raven… what exactly did you scry for? Abandoned wealth like you said, or just hidden wealth?”

Raven blinks but answers promptly all the same.

“Abandoned, Cole. Specifically abandoned.”

Cole tries to wrap his head around who would abandon this much money like this. It wasn’t even that deeply buried. But… he can imagine a few scenarios maybe. Like maybe the bank robber who hid the money here got caught by the authorities and imprisoned shortly after with no chance of ever retrieving it?

Or maybe even whoever hid this money here had fully died, perhaps murdered or perhaps killed in some accident. And so they would never be able to retrieve it, hence Raven’s magic calling it abandoned.

… Either way, Cole couldn’t fathom just leaving this here now that they’d found it. This money was exactly what they needed to… to not have to bother with odd jobs anymore. To not have to wonder whether he was going to have to choose between ramen or rent on any given week.

Tears prick at Cole’s eyes as he stares down at the frankly ludicrous amount of money.

“Cole? Are you alright?”

Raven’s concern makes him let out a watery laugh.

“Y-Yeah… I’m fine. Just… really glad I met you, Raven. This… you’ve saved me just as much as I saved you, you know?”

Raven makes an incredulous noise at that.

“I rather doubt that is true, Cole…”

Alright, so maybe she had a point and he was being a bit hyperbolic. Still, let Cole have his moment of happiness and gratitude!

And then, as if the universe itself had heard that thought and decided to give him the middle finger… a massive ROAR sounds out over the park, the ground shaking as birds go flying off.

Cole’s eyes widen and he’s immediately on his feet; the bag of money clutched to his chest while he and Raven turn in the direction of the sound.

The good news… the roar isn’t coming from anything in the park itself. It’s coming from beyond the park. The bad news, of course, is that to be that loud and still shake the ground beneath their feet… the owner of said roar is a lot, lot larger than first anticipated.

From their vantage point in the park, looking past the tree canopies, Cole can make out the back of a gargantuan green thing about a block away towering over the buildings around it. His mouth goes dry and he shakes his head.

“Nope… no way. Fuck that shit.”

And yet, even as the words leave his lips, he finds himself hesitating. Whatever was going on… people were definitely about to get hurt. The city was about to take a beating. What if he could stop it? Well, not him… but maybe Raven could? She wouldn’t do it of her own volition though. She would stay by his side and protect him by default. And she wouldn’t want to leave him behind either, even if he ordered it.

… The smart thing to do was turn and run in the opposite direction. But Cole hadn’t been making too many smart moves the past couple days, had he?

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A/N: Remember to Vote, leave a Like, and let me know what you think!

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Google Doc Link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RQTvxA80UWZ-UD5ycTyg7Cq6B9zA6Oc_XecxOIJNjZA/edit?tab=t.0