☾ 009 ☾ TEXT + ACTION

[wetworking]

action;

[Boredom was an interesting thing. Hazuki was sure some Contractors must experience it- she was sure she had, at times. In this City most of all. And if it did not interfere with the basic tenants of her personal safety, she did not see anything wrong with trying to erase that irksome thing.

She had very few hobbies, however. Perhaps she should get a new one. ... If only something out there seemed interesting.

As it was, she was curbing that odd instinct by walking the streets. Taking advantage, some might call it. Perverse retribution was what Hazuki thought of it as. She, whose contract required her to kiss men so intensely after using her powers, uncursed, and the rest affected?

It was almost funny.]

text [public];

Is this supposed to be emotional, or physical?

I can't tell.


[ooc; feel free to encounter Hazuki anywhere in the city. However, if you're a man she will... actively avoid being near you if you seem cursed.]

Comments

[wetworking]

[Hazuki, meanwhile, slows the moment she notices Anna. There is no reason she should feel so attached- no logical reason, and that is slightly troubling to a Contractor, whose brain is based on the logical and the tactical.

So removed from emotion is the mind of a Contractor that she wouldn't be able to even begin identifying why she felt that strange attachment. (Namely, that Anna was what Yoko might have been like, if Yoko had lived. But she hadn't. The torture had killed her, and she'd ended up a bloody, broken corpse, not a traumatized woman struggling to regain a spark. It was like looking at Yoko, if Yoko had lived.)

Yoko had been...]

Anna.

[Called out, even though she had no logical reason to hail her, stop her, speak to her.]

[flensing]

[Oh. That is her name after all. Anna comes to a complete stop to wait for the woman.

She knows that Miss Hazuki had made her cry, the very first time they had met, but the tears had come more from the woman's accurate interpretation of her injuries than it had from fear. Maybe she should be more afraid of Hazuki than she is, especially considering the sort of injuries she had come in with during that curse... but Anna doesn't know too many who can understand what torture looks like. Hazuki is someone who won't ask her difficult questions about it, she already knows. There's no lingering secret.]

Hello, Miss Hazuki. Are you having a good day?

[wetworking]

[Indeed, there is nothing like that between them. If she were not a Contractor, Hazuki might have wondered things. Why had Anna been tortured, what had occurred? But she wasn't, and so that was Anna's business. It wasn't something for her to butt in to or inquire after.]

Decent enough.

[The answer is neutral. She's been looking for something to drown the small, irrational part of her brain in, and she's been finding it.]

You seemed occupied- did I disturb you?

[The questions that did not pry. Did I disturb you, not "what were you thinking about?" or "Why do you seem so-"]

[flensing]

[In some ways, Anna wouldn't have been able to answer those questions. The senselessness of it, the unrelenting selfishness, it defied understanding. Sometimes that was what hurt the most.]

No, not at all. I was heading home. Or--

[She pauses with an uncertain look, thinking something over, and when she speaks there's an amount of bemused self-effacement.]

I may need to stop in town and look at furniture. Danish and I moved into a house, it's very empty right now.

[wetworking]

[It's so domestic, Hazuki almost doesn't know what to say. That's what you get being a government assassin and a yakuza daughter. She has never shopped for furniture.]

How is the house?

[That was an appropriate question, wasn't it?]

[flensing]

[It's so domestic. Anna herself is entirely unfamiliar with it. She had taken Lucie away from her doctors and the two of them had fled in a stolen car that had become their home for their next two years.]

I don't know, really.

[She admits that tiredly.]

It doesn't feel like somewhere I belong.

[wetworking]

[Why? A place to belong... does she even know what that is? Hazuki's face always has a certain reserved, some might even call it blank or dull, quality to it, but-]

Why?

[She hadn't actually planned to ask.]

[flensing]

[Ah... and now there's the choice of whether or not to answer.]

It was... never something I expected to have.

[Even if they had somehow appeased Lucie's ghost. Where would they have gone? A pair of transient young women, one of whom lacked even a full high school's worth of education.

But they hadn't managed that, and Lucie was gone, hope was gone. Most of her soul feels like it's still laid out on the floor of her cell.]

[wetworking]

Ah.

[She'd never really had a "home". Before she'd become a Contractor, when she'd been capable of those emotions more so than now, she had always had "Grandfather's estate". It had never been hers, nor her mother's, nor even her father's. And then she'd lost those feelings and she'd never had a home after that, she'd had bases of operation and safehouses.]

You'll have to tell me what it's like.

[She says it sort of like a cynical joke, a small tug in her lip.]

[flensing]

[Oh Miss Hazuki. Anna looks back up at her earnestly. She would like to tell her, hopefully in a way she might understand.]

You're welcome to visit, Miss Hazuki.

[wetworking]

[That's a first. (Not that it should matter.) No one has ever invited her to their home.

She doesn't know what the proper response is, and her response lags for a moment. Someone less perceptive might think it was because of distaste for the idea, but subtle facial expressions betrayed otherwise.]

I would accept.

[flensing]

[Her own little smile is faint. Miss Hazuki is not the most at ease being social, and Anna does not want to hang too much weight on it, leave things casual and easy, faintly distant. That was the best for both of them, maybe.]

I will have some furniture by then.

[wetworking]

[It was.]

That would be ideal.

[Otherwise, sitting would be quite awkward!]

[flensing]

[She dips her head in a little nod.]

I'll take care of it, and I'll see you then.

[Her tone suggests the goodbye, and she straightens herself out to carry on home.]

[wetworking]

[Hazuki is not the type to stop someone- not like this. The transaction was over.

She bowed slightly, then went her own way as well.]