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

[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. ]

[mortemscintilla]

[ He looks at Carla sidelong, a dubious eyebrow quirked because he doesn't find any of this charming. (Li would, but he's in abeyance at the moment.) ]

Better than 'You will be hungry again in one hour.'

[ Jesus fuck, someone arrest them both. ]

[dignity_misery]

That was lazy.

[ She observes it with an unoffended air, reaching out to snag some fruit, turning it in her hand to check for spots.]

[mortemscintilla]

When in Rome.

[ He doesn't say it with rancour. It's a fact; the City is little better than a waiting-room, most of its inhabitants on brainless stand-by. ]

[ There's a beat, before he lobs the buttermilk into the cart. The high-intensity fluorescents and elevator music -- some jazzed-up number ripped off of Funky Town -- are feeding a pounding ache behind his eyeballs. Or maybe it's this absurd quest for Windex and paperclips and rotisserie chickens where a week before he was slitting throats and forging passports and blending ghostlike with the crowds. The mood dissonance is something he's accustomed to; he's rarely flat-footed for long. But that bubbling paranoia, that hyperawareness that's kept him alive, is harder to shelve aside. ]

[ With his lifestyle, recidivism in the City would be all too easy. ]