Swindled (Proxies x Reader)

Three: Four-Step Plan

After you'd dealt with the iPhone, you decided to head down to the communal kitchen and steal some snacks. You had your own, of course, but other peoples food tasted way better.

Feeling exceedingly proud of yourself, you all but jogged down the four flights of stairs to the ground floor. And who should you run into, but your good old buddy Joshua.

You and Josh had gone to high school together. You didn't get along, not by any means. He was part of the 'wrong crowd', as they say, and you were awkward, shy, and with quite a few less balls than you currently had in your adult life. But it was thanks to Josh, that you'd grown a pair at all.

In sophomore year, the guy had stollen your new phone. He'd came up to you at the bus stop out of the blue one day, pretended to strike up a conversation, even flirted with you a little. Then, he nabbed the phone right out of your hoodie pocket while you weren't paying attention to what his hands were doing.

The thing was, you'd caught him red-handed. Right as he'd been tucking your phone away into his back pocket, you'd been checking out his ass. And that was how you and Josh got into a three-year-long relationship that hadn't ended well, and your life had kind of fucking fallen off the rails.

Now, you glared at him as he loomed by the fridge. When he noticed you looking, he gave you a smirk.

"How's it going, (Y/n)?"

You blinked slowly at him, like he was stupid. Because he was. And you also didn't like him. "Mind your business, Joshua."

​​​​​​​When you'd come to this college, you were hoping to get the fuck away from him. Just your luck, Josh had also chosen the school with the outstanding IT program. Whoop dee fucking doo.

Josh laughed like you'd been joking. "Oh," he said, making room as you began to walk around him to get to the fridge, "are you coming to tech club on Thursday? My buddy Brian's joining, was hoping to introduce you."

You'd been to a couple tech club meetings, but hadn't really committed. They mostly talked about robotics and programming and other legal stuff. Kind of boring.

You hummed and shrugged, swinging open the fridge. "Maybe. Will you be there?" You didn't look at him as you stole someone's pre-packaged fruit salad.

"Uhhh... yeah?" Josh raised an eyebrow.

You tutted. "Probably not, then!", you chirped sweetly, and before he could say anything more about it you'd already made it to the stairs.

-

You stared blankly down at the black Nokia.

You must have missed it, but the big guy had received a text about an hour ago - nothing weird about that. People received texts all the time, when they had friends. The fucking weird bit was that after you'd spent twenty minutes unlocking the damn thing, the text he'd received was from someone named 'Hoodie', and it was in fucking binary code. Who the everloving fuck texts people in binary code?

"01011001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01100110 01101111 01110010 01100111 01101111 01110100 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01110100 01100001 01101011 01100101 00100000 01101101 01111001 00100000 01010011 01001001 01001101 00100000 01101111 01110101 01110100 00101110"

You were alright with binary, but didn't know it off by heart. You couldn't decipher all of that shit. And while you normally wouldn't give a crap about your victims' text messages, you felt a nagging indignation bubble up within you. Twenty minutes to unlock this bugger, and you couldn't even understand what weird nerd texts this guy was receiving. That was why you pulled up a binary translator on your laptop.

It took an age to type in all the little '1's and '0's. Halfway through, you thought about giving up and just wiping the phone already, but then decided that you'd already made it this far - what was another ten minutes of painstakingly making sure you got the string of numbers in the right order?

The translated text message had you staring at your laptop screen dumbly for what felt like an age.

In hindsight, you don't know if you were glad you'd translated the spine-chilling text or not. You even re-typed the whole thing all over again, just to make sure, and when there was no doubt about what you'd just read, you considered throwing the Nokia out your window. Or maybe flushing it down the toilet.

Buzz buzz.

​​​​​​​The cursed fucking Nokia vibrated with another text. Same sender. An attachment. You gulped, bit your cheek, and tapped it.

A google maps location.

Your location.

Mother of shit.

Nonononono. You'd lose everything. You couldn't get caught - you just fucking couldn't. You were nearly hyperventilating. It had been a dumb fucking rookie move to leave the Nokia just laying there, switched on, without removing the SIM card. What kind of dumbass amateur phone thief even were you?

And now, someone - the big guy from the subway station, or maybe a weirdly cryptic tech-savvy friend who liked wearing hoodies - had your fucking location. The cops were probably already on their way.

Think, (y/n), think. What do you do?! Chest heaving, you glanced around your tiny room for a moment. Smashing the fucking phone would be therapeutic, but not productive. You weren't going to be a sitting duck. You were going to try and get out of this, you'd do anything it took.

A plan began to form in your mind. A glimmer of hope.

Step one: turn location services the fuck off - on both the Nokia, and your own phone.

Step two: change your clothes, something baggy. Hide your hair. Chuck on some sunglasses. Anything to potentially throw the cops off your description.

Step three: clear your apartment of any evidence of what you'd been up to. That meant that all three phones, your various charging cables, and your laptop, all went with you in a backpack.

Step four: fucking run.