[closed] Hold these secrets inside my mind, like a deadly disease

[lotusmesenpai]

Who: Kanda, Lavi, Sion, & Ravus
Where: Kanda & Lavi's ship
When: Week 3, Day 3
Summary: Lavi and Kanda pick up a quick, easy warrant. Only with their luck, it's not so quick and even less easy - especially when faced with unexpected reunions.
Restrictions/Warnings: Language, as always, because Kanda.

Comments

[inksplashes]

[ A fleeting moment of anxiety passes, Lavi watching foreign hands as they gather and reshape the collapsing architecture of loose leaf paper, following equally foreign eyes as they rove over his clan’s tongue. It’s natural to wonder at things so undoubtedly unfamiliar, but Sion’s gaze seems to linger too long, suggests something beyond the usual measure of curiosity.

Occupation-borne paranoia tightens the muscles in his neck, sets his smiling jaw a little more rigid.

But the moment, as they are so wont to do, fades without incident. The bookman relaxes, stretching at length, legs crossing and draping over the controls console in well-worn habit to miss the most important buttons. (Noah, likewise programmed by this habit, ignores any errant input brought about by his lazing.)

You’ve got a strange idea about kind, he thinks, brow slightly tilting up in question and stalling. He’s never quite gotten used to people being so forthright when he’s done little to arrange it, but he’ll accept a compliment where he can get it.

Exceedingly stupid or brave, at least, he’s heard before, and rewards as much with soft laughter, hands coming up behind his head to lock fingers and serve support for his twisted spine. ]

Little bit of both, probably. More one or the other depending on who you ask.

[ Though he’s heard more than a fair few call Kanda ‘babe’, if not decidedly more colorful notes about his appearance. Bars and seedy alleys don’t tend to frequent the most elegant tongues, though Kanda is often willing to charitably volunteer for reshaping them forcibly. Usually with his sword.

Likewise, it’s not the first time he’s been asked how he came to know the mercurial man, though it’s the first time he’s been asked without a distinct note of disbelief or exasperation. (Usually it’s more along the lines of, “What crime did you commit in your past life to get this guy as a partner?” to which Lavi often answers, “All of them.”)

The answer is thus easily supplied, almost mechanically delivered from ever-grinning lips and a casual tongue. ]

I was new to the area and needed a team, he was new to people and needed a team. The usual boy meets boy, boy prevents boy from shooting people, y’know how it goes.

[ He lifts a hand from behind his head to wave it emphatically, gaze turning away from Sion to look into the great cosmos gently passing by the viewing pane. ]

I’d ask you the same but the answer is clear enough. [ And he doesn’t want to know more than that, as is. ] Still, funny bit of luck, us picking you up. Lots of people running from the fire, not too many running towards it.

[ Lavi hums, considering, turning his head to return that pointed look belatedly. ] Guess I’m not the only one who’s either incredibly brave or incredibly stupid, eh?

[sunderings]

Truth be told, I do not know if I qualify for either.

[ Perhaps amused, the laugh does not fade from Sion's voice, his smile colored by fondness (enamored by the idea of 'boy meets boy', the scenario plays without pause in his mind's eye, giving rise to memories: good ones, where Kanda's aloof disposition and ill-temperament gave color and life to an otherwise barren existence) and umasked intrigue. Lavi is... an incredible sort of person, he thinks. Protective of others (his partner) and of himself (by virtue and by nature, to be a Reclamation Agent is to be the essence of neutrality, but Sion cannot help but wonder if there is more to the way Lavi dares not to hold his gaze for long), Lavi keeps his distance through a brisk manner of cheer, with ease that is commendable, and posture which...

...is delightful, really, to the Director. To Sion, who would not even think to dream of kicking up his feet to rest atop his desk, Lavi is something close to "cool" and free of spirit. ]

I simply go where I am needed; the people of Leith are suffering, and if I am able to aid them, I will.

[ And then, there is Sion himself, the Company man who wears his heart on his sleeve. Someone who is honest, forthright to a single point, for no being alive is without their secrets, and Sion keeps them where he seeds a need to protect; where it would be a burden to others, to know the truth, and so he weathers it alone in silence. ]

In times of crises, what people are most in need of is an ally. As such, the Company will stand by Leith, and I will stand beside the good men and women on the ground. The administration should not remain sequestered away within Old Town's command post.

[ Not when so very, very many have been deployed and put within that fire's reach.

Still, Sion follows Lavi's line of sight, golden eyes fixed upon the viewing pane and all that lay beyond— ]

In any case, my heart is glad that Kanda has found an ally in you, and yourself one in him.

[ 'Needing a team' and being 'new to people'... both are crises in their own way, are they not? ]

Lavi— [ Here, he cants his head to the side, the long fall of his hair cascading down, over his shoulder as his smile gentles with an easy, natural extension of camaraderie: ] I would like for you to know... that you may call me 'ally' as well, if you wish.

[inksplashes]

[ ...This guy is really, really weird. It’s not a particular elegant summation, especially for one so trained and cultured by the academic doctrines of history as he, but it’s a glaring obvious, if uncomfortable, truth.

Of all the Company snakes he’s yet met, he’s certain that Sion’s is among the sweetest hisses he’s heard.

A snake, however, he remains. For all the warmth and apparent emotion within this man, Lavi sees an enemy harbored inside a Company uniform, a heart that--however sincere now--will eventually be maimed by the forces of reality at work within the Quad.

By the wars that will surely spill the blood of those ‘good men and women’, of innocent and guilty alike, on the soft loam soon to be inundated with the nutrients of fresh corpses.

He knows not when that event will occur, only that it will, for it is this reason alone that “Lavi” exists within this capacity. To fulfill the first record of becoming a soldier rather than a bystander, allied to nothing but gleaning the truth.

So for that offer of apparent friendship, Lavi responds as he always has and will: with a glittering smile and breath not held, laughing warm and with a touch of nervousness in response. ]

Thanks. Same here.

[ --he glances away from the interplay of stars and distant planets, gaze sharpening for a moment when the length of silver hair seems to shorten and the eyes glow a cooler shade of lavender washed sterling.

affection, of the rare and undoubtedly dangerously sincere variety wells up in his throat with a painful lump--

The image fades between one confused blink and the next, a wide-eye peering into golden pools that resemble nothing of the moonlight seen before. Lavi shakes his head to dispel the mildly open expression, rubbing a hand down the length of his face and bidding the illusions to give him just a few more moments.

They’re getting more frequent, these dreams woven into reality. Eager to redirect his attention away from the anxiety of his growing instability, he downplays it internally--as he so often does--deciding that he certainly needs to sleep more if he’s seeing colors wrong.

If he’s feeling a ghost of an emotion he’s surely never had. ]

Um--but yeah, that’s nice of you to say. Anyone on Yu’s good side can count themselves on mine too.

[sunderings]

[ It is rather strange, isn't it, the human heart? As easily as it may shatter in an instant, leaving a man despairing of his kind, bereft of hope as he comes to curse all that which he once held dear, so too does it boast extraordinary resilience, profound as any great mysteries of the universe. It surfaces, in the most unlikely of times, in the wake of great adversity, or perhaps as prelude to an unforgivable wrong, and always, that resilience is in the form of ...love.

Love, for a comrade, which Sion glimpses in a single wide eye, green projecting something guileless, something true, instead of reflecting the Director's warm and open candor. Lavi, are you...?

All right? Sion asks by way of gesture alone, his arm extended before he'd fully realized it for himself, his fingertips touched lightly to Lavi's shoulder in fleeting contact, there and gone after offering a moment of steady reassurance. ]

Whoever it is you were thinking of—[ Hadn't been Sion himself, nor anyone the Director had ever known, and yet... of one thing, he is certain: ] —must be important to you. Someone far more nice, and far more kind than I.

[ And it's wonderful, that Lavi should have such a good memory of a friend, even if its traces are subsequently wiped clean from his face with the palm of his hand. Lavi is just that sort of person, Sion realizes, one who would have to be reached out to time and time again until a day arose when--...

The need for a clean face (a blank slate) is no longer needed. ]

For I am a selfish man, you see. If I am to be on someone's 'good side', I would like to earn the privilege for myself. Someday...

[ —he trails off after the admission, though 'selfish' seems a word which hardly suits him. What is it that he could want for? ]

...I hope to know you, Lavi. You've many stories to share, I'm sure of it.

[inksplashes]

[ That person had been a phantom, an afterimage of another life that fades and recedes swiftly from the banks of memory. A different man might grasp for that dwindling echo, might close his eyes and press the image to the back of lids in the hopes of inscribing it along the surface of retinal nerves, but he is not such a man.

No, for this creature whose memory is like a vault of secrets and lives never his own, he turns away from that lingering sense of nostalgia. Banishes it somewhere too far and too removed to become personal.

(Even so, his chest aches, the space between his ribs and lungs abraded with the sensation of sand rolling across tender tissues between each breath.)

Lavi's expression stays neutral, caught between the incessant friendliness of one persona and the guarded wariness of another. Whoever that person was, if they truly existed at all, must have been anything but important, for them to have disappeared so quickly from his memories.

(Probably, he tries to rationalize, one of the soldiers he's encountered in his many wars, someone who had ultimately become a mere footnote in the annals of history.)

"...You've many stories to share, I'm sure of it."

Yes, he thinks, wry smile twisting at his lips, but they're not meant for you. ]

Sure. [ --easily delivered, as always, his hand hovering at his chin as if in readiness to clean his expression again-- ] I'm a cheap date. Get me half-edible food and I'll talk your ear off anytime.

[ But he'll say nothing when he does. He'll speak and words will form like spells to cast an illusion of communication, obscuring pleasant nothings and almost-somethings in a veil of geniality.

He yawns, exaggerating his movements, hand twisted so that his mouth is concealed by the backs of knuckles. It's not entirely subtle, the cue, but nothing about this interaction strikes him as subtle to begin with. ]

Think I've been reading too long. I'm gonna grab some shut eye, unless you needed somethin'..?

[ Politely: stop emoting, he's running away now. ]