Just a guy.

"We need to get out of here."

He's sitting on the edge of the hotel bed when he says it, sitting with his hands buried in his hair and the tv buzzing local news in the background. Says it to himself and to J, in the room with him. They need to get out of here. Away. The urge -- familiar, but no more pleasant for it -- becomes more and more insistent every day. How out of he doesn't know, where he doesn't know. But they've run up against a wall, and they need to break past it.

(Almost literally, it feels like -- they've run out of west to go toward, without hopping a boat and crossing the ocean, and now they're just floundering up and down the coast, bouncing against that sand-and-sea barrier.)

It's -- God, he can't even find the right words for it. But what J said, barely half a month ago, was right. Everything's changed. They can't do the same cons anymore -- they were getting old anyway, but now their biggest advantage, J's sweet face, has been taken out of the picture thanks to a six-inch hunting knife -- they aren't the same people anymore. They need to get out of here. Go somewhere new.

It takes a while to get from Chicago to Las Vegas by train. A lot of stops in weird little towns, a lot of time to get to know your traveling partner, and his abilities and little quirks. Time enough for Mitch to learn that J is a hell of a lot sharper than he seems at first glance (though just as crazy), and has some kind of bizarre reverse-reaction to physical pain, and never goddamn sleeps. Time enough for J to see Mitch have nightmares (maybe even pry something out of him, before he wakes up completely, about how his parents died), and hear him wax poetic about Gotham City, and pick up a few more hints about just how high up on the social ladder he was before he left his former life behind.

(Time enough for the both of them to eat most of a stolen crate of snack cakes, and get really, really damn sick of them, and keep eating them anyway.)

Time and travel run out, though, and the train passes through the Vegas rail yard. And it's time to get the hell off of here.