073 x 370 // video/action

[dignity_misery]

[ The device, as always, is in her pocket and as always it is not the cellphone she is familiar with. It will not call Facon, and it will not call Cotnari. She's almost used to it now though, being jerked back and forth between lives, expectations, sitting in between states and never able to settle into one.

She's dressed well, for once, a white suit and sunglasses. She had been on a boat, watching a pirate lounge in front of her ganglord and ask what he could do for her.

Carla stares down into the device in her palm and it flickers to life, always so obnoxiously cheeky.

Carla's resigned to it. ]

You never can resist interrupting.

[ A hand goes back through her hair, and she looks around the square. Only a few people look back at her. It is, in fact, not the strange for people to come out of the sky around here. ]

I'm sure you all must have missed me.

ACTION

THE BEACHFRONT FLAT.
[ The dogs had trashed her flat before clawing open one of the back doors and escaping outside. They'd also come back upon catching something to eat, dragging the corpses of little animals everywhere, littering her back porch with cast-off pieces. The smell is horrendous, and in its own way makes her violently hungry. First, however, she has to drag everything out of the flat and onto the back patio so that she can sanitize the wood floors. There's also a garbage can filled with rotten food and animal bits.

Pants rolled up to her knees and handkerchief across her face, she scrubs diligently, all the doors and windows open. ]

THE GROCERY STORE.
[ Her bank account untouched, there's nothing keeping her from replacing the food which had spoiled in her fridge during her absence. She also needs to buy dog food.

Her cart is full of chocolate, meat, and fancy animal feed. ]

THE CAFE.
[ And when the work is done, she takes herself down to the cafe off the square to people watch, and to look for people she knows. ]

Comments

[unflagging]

You know it, sweetie.

[dignity_misery]

Fletcher. [ A smile. ] You haven't flown the coop yet.

[unflagging]

Well, an old friend, a very old friend, got into town a few days ago and that kind of news just keeps a guy around.

You look well.

[dignity_misery]

I didn't think you had friends.

[ She wants to know all about it, it shows on her greedy little face, but she plays it off, ]

As well as can be.

[ Which coincidentally, isn't very. ]

[unflagging]

Maybe it's a euphemism.

[Or maybe it's too complex to explain to one outside the ring.]

Well, that's good to hear. Oh, and welcome back, by the way.

[dignity_misery]

I assumed so.

[ Only slightly sullen, and well. Since she's back. ]

When can I meet them.

[unflagging]

Oh, I'm afraid to say that that may very well be up to him, and not me. We'll see, though. We'll see.

[dignity_misery]

[ She smiles, it's enough of a hint to please her for now. ]

I see the City didn't fall to pieces while I was away.

[ A viable theory, she has no investment in The Movement, but she's no good at faith either. ]

[unflagging]

Oh yeah, we're chugging along, just the same as always. You know how we get by here.

You don't think it's so fragile here as all that, do you? After all, haven't you heard? The City is a crossroads in and out of all worlds. So long as it survives, so too do our worlds.

Now, of course, the question is whether you believe that.

The grocery store :3

[mortemscintilla]

[ Since arriving in the City, he's been lying low. A certain level of re-acclimating goes hand-in-hand with a new environment. Especially when you've spent over a year as fugitive. It's not the City's newcomers, missing faces, socio-political changes, or technology that he's interested in. It's the air-tightness of his cover. The City's way of flying under the radar isn't necessary the same as home's, and that can take getting used to when deception and obscurity are your modi operandi. That said, shacking up at the Beach House with Korra and Pai is ... not the most terrible thing in the world. Terrible in that he's not in life-threatening danger. But at this point that basically feels like semantics when you're grocery shopping for a pair of girls. ]

[ Pushing a laden cart -- two different types of everything: milk, flour, eggs, breads, cereals, peanut butters, tampons -- he stops to contemplate a shelf of huge juice jugs, their colors bright and unnatural. He's already logged Carla nearby, the way he reflexively logs anything of mild interest in his environment. But he gives no sign that he particularly notices her, or particularly cares. ]

[ (Maybe he's too busy trying to remember -- Apple cider or mango-orange punch?) ]

[dignity_misery]

[ He'd been a different person in her mind, the first time she'd caught him in the grocery store and dragged him through to buy ingredients to come over and cook for her. She hasn't seen 'Li' in a long time, however, even if that's still the only name she knows the call him by. She prefers that, in some ways, it was a pathetic little bug of a persona, too personable and too easy to push. She knows he must hate wearing it, deep in his gut, and it always pleases her to have secrets not so openly shared. She knows his true face and his true nature, it does not precisely frighten her, but it is also not a sword she wants to throw herself on. Not here, not when the point won't stick. ]

[ Still, she approaches, boots making dull clops against the tiled floor. ]

You seemed like the type to live alone.

[ Peering lazily into your shopping basket, dude. ]

[mortemscintilla]

[ Hate is a strong word. He won't deny that 'Li' is tiresome. But at the end of the day, Hei is used to slipping into different roles. Trained to be an expert in mimicry, in masks, in espionage, and sometimes he does it too well. It's useful to project a specific persona to the people around you, adjusting it as needed because it's essential for merging into the big picture. Sometimes in magazines you see a photograph of a street full of people, an aerial view. Everyone looks as if they belong, even the blurry ones. 'Li' is one of those blurs. ]

[ That said, as he's gradually easing himself away from the mindset necessary to survive on the run, re-integrating into the City's enchanted doll-house, he can feel the part of himself that thrives in dangerous environments, the part that has kept him alive in the jungles in South America and then in endless urban jungles afterward, growing smothered. Marginalized. The killer inside him refuses to go dormant. Is always looking for an excuse -- a rationale -- to come back out. The feeling has been dogging him ever since he arrived, and no amount of hugs from Pai, walks with Yin, fucking or fighting with Korra -- much as they help -- can quite diffuse it. (Deep down, he knows it'll never go away.) ]

[ He keeps his gaze on the juices, his hands relaxed on the cart. Dryly, without looking over at Carla, ]

It's my goal to defy all your expectations.

[ Or at least the Syndicate's. ]

[dignity_misery]

[ Her tone is legitimately amused, and sarcastic, ]

That's funny.

[ In her own way, she has been easing herself away from a killer as wall. A killer that is always underneath, looking for an excuse to rear its head. She's learned to indulge when she needs it, to stop fearing her needs--(Love, love is still a need she fears.) She doesn't see much that is similar between herself and Hei however, not with her own clouded eyes. ]

[mortemscintilla]

[ Love. He's heard a lot about it in the last eleven years, but it's never been a need. Never been something he could understand, though he's faked it plenty. His attention for Pai is much larger than it seems on the surface, opening into whole new vistas every time he thinks he's grasped the extent of it. The bottomlessness of it is frightening, but it isn't what normal people would classify as 'love.' It is too steely at its center. The only person he's felt any type of softness for is Yin, but he doubts it could be called love. Amber understood Hei, understood his drive and his need to be unbeatable, but not completely. He'd desired her, but he hadn't trusted her. Still, without her machinations, he would be dead, and for that he respects her. Do understanding and respect equate as love? No. From Pai, he's learnt logic, perseverance, resolution. From Yin, loyalty. From Korra, fragments of kindness. From Amber, mindgames, sex, skullduggery, how to spot liars, how to seduce, to hide in plain sight, to kill, but never to love. ]

[ That word, to him, is just a synonym for helplessness. (That is, perhaps, where he and Carla differ. Her life revolves around emptiness avoidance. For Hei, emptiness is seductive, easy. He runs to it with open arms, and often nothing can pull him from its grip.) ]

It's a vital quality to have around here.

[ Also: Juice! He settles on lychee and slings it into the cart. ]

[dignity_misery]

[ Once, she had felt similarly. That love was a ridiculous notion, a concept built out of mutual deception between whoever was involved and the society that encouraged them. Carla did not like to look at the world through the lens of societal myths, it was that lens which made sheep. She's willing to accept the lie of love now, however. If she could possess and be possessed by another, she would believe any lie. Just as long as she was not alone, not forgotten. She's learned how to be frightened. She's learned how to be helpless, and while it disappoints her... She is not longer the woman she once was. The steel-hearted woman that used and abused her way through the world, lied and stolen and cheated and assassinated... She was shot through the head and she died. ]

Let's hear another one then.

[ A joke. Her voice is easy, perhaps companionable if there was anything resembling companionship between them. It's more of a charade put on for the grocery store setting. She selects a juice of her own and settles it into her cart, going a little further down the cooler to where there's butter. ]

[mortemscintilla]

[ Frightened. Helpless. Disappointing. Hei started out in the Syndicate as all those things. One scrawny human kid in a lethal beehive of Contractors. He'd changed that -- shaped and marked himself inside and out: messy scars and neat muscles, skills to manipulate the people around him through words and emotions, schematics to take out every person in the room without them laying a hand on him, a hundred and one exit strategies, backup plans and bolt holes, all imprinted there by his will alone, to assert his dominion over himself. Because if there's anything Heaven's War, being a drudge for the Syndicate, being alive at any moment in his line of work, nights of grotesquery and deadened nerves and fingernails darkened in red have taught him -- it's that your old pathetic self can be trampled and tossed aside. Just like anything -- anyone -- else. ]

[ The look on his face is his usual blank neutrality -- neither amusement nor annoyance. ] Or you could crack open a fortune cookie. [ The rubber crepe soles of his (Li's) sneakers go vrrnk vrrnk as he pushes the cart behind her. Buttermilk or go-gurt? Hm. All around their aisle, the mass of humanity shambles by, in weary pursuit of all the good things in life. ]

[ It feels like an absurd object lesson. ]

[dignity_misery]

'Your smile brings happiness to everyone you meet.'

[ She can be funny too. ]

video;

[brobeforehos]

You're back.

video;

[dignity_misery]

Here I am.

[ And yanno, just to remind you, ]

You're still here.

video;

[brobeforehos]

And no-one was surprised. At this rate, we'll run out of things to tattoo.

video;

[dignity_misery]

I still have the rest of my back to go.

video;

[brobeforehos]

I said things, not places.

video;

[dignity_misery]

I doubt that, though.

video;

[brobeforehos]

You're the creative and experienced one in this area, I guess.

video;

[dignity_misery]

I guess so.