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The air is cold and heavy tonight in the City, carrying the throaty scent of smoke. The sky is pitch, and the lights of nearby buildings reflect off of the wet post-rain pavement of the road – the road that the bus has currently stopped in the middle of, and the large shape of it shields Rodion from the oncoming winds. She’s shivering in her uniform coat – it’s far too cold for her to be outside, and not many Sinners followed her out, either: Outis has taken a step out, near the front of the bus, ensuring that no repairs have to be made, as the bus came to a puttering stop about 10 minutes ago. Ryōshū is crouched closer to the back, a slight smile on her face as she savors a cigarette. Faust is with her, though her nose is scrunched at the smell – she’s sensitive with things like that. Scents, sights, sensations. Still, she looms over where she sits, keeping her company.
There’s some hustle and bustle in the bus, and Rodion can hear it through the walls and windows – Quixote seems to be in the chair opposite to the wall of the bus Rodion has her back to, as she can hear her nearly crystal-clear, humming and chattering to herself – well, not exactly to just herself , as Ishmael was sitting next to her, last she’d seen – though she might as well be. Sometimes, Ishmael just likes to sit and think. Quixote keeps her company, in her own world. They make a good pair, and even better in battle.
Dante is at the front of the bus – muttering, bent over some map, presumably ensuring that they get to where they need to be at the time they need to – there has, evidently, been delays. Outis pokes her head in on occasion, and Dante gives her a quick reply, before she goes back to her inspection. Hong Lu stands over him, as well, ever curious – Rodion doesn’t think he’s ever experienced a vehicle breaking down before. He attempts to ask questions to Outis when she comes to speak to Dante, but Rodion has learned that Outis only really likes to speak to one person at a time, and that person is usually Dante.
Gregor, Rodion presumes, is asleep. He tends to on long rides like this, just to waste time – he’ll put his feet up on the seat, knees tucked against his chest, lean his head against the window, and he’s gone for hours. More often than not, Gregor sits alone – and Rodion doesn’t know if that’s because he gives off the energy that he wants to be left alone, or if people just don’t want to sit with him. It’s no secret that some of the Sinners don’t get along, but really, Rodion hasn’t seen Gregor open up to anybody , negatively or positively. Occasionally, he and Ryōshū have a smoke together, or he talks strategy with Outis, but nothing on a personal level that she’s noticed – other than her.
In all honesty, it all started because Gregor is, to put it simply, fun to mess with. Not that he gets angry particularly easily, but it’s not hard to catch him off-guard, and she likes it when she can get a rise out of him – she got under his skin the most, and she thinks that, because of this, she unintentionally became the one person out of everybody to be closest to him. He’s softened, just a bit – in her mind, she’s likened him to something like a stray cat. Prickly at first, but if you play with it and make it feel loved, it recognizes it’s not in danger, and it lets go a bit – and she recognizes that this analogy is way too warm a way to think of him, but if she had to say, she likes to think she does make him feel like that, even just a little. Maybe not loved; she won’t call it love, not yet – but there’s a certain intimacy between them that neither of them can deny, but neither of them have called to attention, either. She likes it that way.
Though, a part of her wants him to know – know that she cares about him, that he’s not just somebody she likes to play with anymore. But she keeps that tucked away, saving it for just the right time. Maybe there’s already been a right time – sometimes, she’s caught him vulnerable, when she goes too far with a joke or bit, and his face flashes with something or other; she can never catch it, or perhaps just after battle, when they’re both sweaty and injured and tired and they just want to lean on each other, if just for a few moments, or maybe even during, when the clock has to be rewound. When there’s a lack of consequences. But, that means there will be another right time. And she will choose that right time – she’s nothing if not a slave to decision.
The wind stirs around her, and she instinctively pulls her uniform coat closer – she doesn’t think about it, doesn’t think about it. Ryōshū rises from her position, and Faust follows her, and as they pass by Rodion, Ryōshū says, “Did you need one? Or are you just standing around?”
Rodion smiles, though her teeth chatter from the effort – “Sure. Can’t say I’m as habitual as you, but I wouldn’t mind one now.” She can tell Ryōshū didn’t expect and didn’t want her to say yes, and judging from her sigh as she slips her slender hand back into her back pocket, she’s mourning this smoke as if she won’t be finished with the pack by the end of the day.
She fishes one out, singular, dropping it into Rodion’s open palm. “Here. I hope this is wrapped up soon. I want to get moving.” Rodion fidgets with the cigarette, some of the tobacco flaking off and falling into her hand.
“Thanks so much, Ryōshū… Do I not get a light? C’mon, I thought you were more generous than that?” Ryōshū’s laugh is a huff as she already begins walking away, the air curling around it. “Absolutely not, Rodya. I don’t trust you to give it back to me.” Faust nods at her, curtly, before ducking into the bus herself. Ever the silent beauty, that one.
Close to the entrance, Ryōshū seems to stop, and she exchanges a few words with a deeper voice – Gregor seems to have woken up, his voice rough around the edges, a groggier tone. She laughs at something he says, and his footsteps are heavy when he trudges down the steps – his arm is bare, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and he shivers immediately upon stepping outside, gritting his teeth. She doesn’t think she’s ever seen him with his coat on. He tends to drape it over his shoulders if he has to, or he forgoes it completely – and, well, she can see why it would be hard to put on, but he must get chilly on nights like this. She briefly wonders if any Sinners are particularly good with tailoring.
He shuffles over to her, hunched over, his hand buried in his pocket and his shoulders drawn up to his ears. “What’s the holdup here? We didn’t stop to just sit around.” His hair is bunched up where he had his head up against the window. Rodion reaches to smooth it out, and he doesn’t stop her. He does, however, freeze up a little, and she gets that feeling of satisfaction anyway. She then shrugs, feeling a little smug, pulling back to tuck the cigarette from her other hand between her lips.
“Some sort of repair has to be made. Outis has been running back and forth between the front of the bus and Dante, and she’s starting to remind me of a little doggy playing fetch.” He snorts at that, glancing at the smoke in her mouth, as he digs his own pack out of his pocket, along with a metallic lighter. “That’s not yours, is it? Ryōshū?”
“Mm. She didn’t give me a light, though. C’mon, be a doll?” She leans down, and he flusters, just a bit – it’s barely noticeable, but his eyes flick off to the side, then down at her lips, then to the lighter in his hand. She considers if he ever had a crush on a girl when he was a teenager, and that he probably acted the same.
He leans back and starts to light his own smoke, instead, and he has to duck his head to stop the wind from blowing it out. He smokes a certain way – he takes two puffs with every drag, and the smoke from the first one briefly flares out of his nose when he reaches for the next one, like a dragon. At first, she didn’t think he was really inhaling it at all – just holding it in his mouth, and she once teased him over the possibility that he was just smoking to look cool.
He then tucks the lighter into her own hand – she expected it to be cold metal, but it’s still warm from when he was holding it. It takes a couple of flicks for it to light, and she always realizes at this moment that she doesn’t particularly want to smoke – she always finishes it, but oddly, she’s never craved another one. She has many vices, but this isn’t among them. The smoke curls around them, and she feels almost warmer, no matter how anticlimactic her attempt was. “I don’t like these cigarettes much. They’re so cheap – I wish you guys were supplied with nicer ones, so I could steal those, instead.”
When she doesn’t get a response, she looks down at him, and he looks tired – and although he’s still with bits of sleep around the edges of his eyes, he always has this deeper tired, and she always wants to open him up and read the lines, like the stump of a tree. It’s like he gets weaker, then, and he takes his two puffs, and he leans a little closer, and he winces. It’s then when she realizes he’s clutching his other arm – they keep it wrapped up for “everybody’s safety” – and she feels herself soften.
He has an unspoken rule – never mention it, never ask about it. Part of her thinks it’s not because of any unwanted attention he may have experienced over it – body modification is incredibly common, and if they were out and about, nobody would bat an eye, anyway. Some Sinners have asked if it was one – a curious Hong Lu, an overzealous Quixote. That is when this unspoken rule was established.
She also knows, though, that it occasionally causes him pain. One of his moments, in a shadowy bar at a stop they frequented, he had a particularly bad flare-up. He had her pass him shots as he continued to grit his teeth, and he told her not to tell anybody else. He didn’t look at it once. He never really does. This makes Rodion unnecessarily sad.
Gregor seems to realize, then, that his pain is noticeable, and it’s unavoidable. His voice is still rough when he speaks, even more so with the smoke in his lungs, “Temperature change. It tends to, ah, make it seize up. I didn’t know it’d be this cold out here.”
Rodion hums, taking her own drag. “Yeah, it’s freezing out here – I’m not enjoying it much either. You wanna head back inside, big boy, finish this later?” Gregor shakes his head, and his back slides down the bus to sit down on the still-wet pavement. She follows him, tucking the end of her jacket under her. His arm rests beside them, and she welcomes the warmth it lends, pressed against her leg. It has its own presence, and sections under the encasing twitch when flexed.
He’s got the lost, far-away look again. Gregor gets in his moods, sometimes, when he doesn’t particularly want to talk; not that he’s feeling unsociable, she’s come to realize, just that the words can’t reach his mouth – Gregor revealed to her, once, that he used to have a stutter when he was a child, and he would say that to explain that part of it to people, and he felt it applied here – but now, from experience, she knows it’s not one of those moods, but the achey, tired one he seemed to let slip a moment ago, now evident in full force. A part of her wishes they could sit out the next one, take a nap on the bus and welcome everybody back when the inspection job’s done.
She does feel safe with him in battle, though. He’s something sturdy – she feels unpredictable, she doesn’t like to think too hard about what she’s doing. She knows she’s strong – she knows it all too well – and much bigger than him, but there’s something all-encompassing about him that makes her feel like she can trust him. Essentially (and initially, much to her embarrassment,) she has grown to admire him.
Even with all of this, he seems actively repulsed by himself after battle, where he has to clean the blood off of his now-you-can’t-really-call-it-an arm, and he averts his eyes. Initially, she thought that he had some sort of aversion to blood. She gets the feeling it’s not just that. Of course, the fighting takes its mental toll on everybody, but he seems to carry it with him long after, always averting his attention to something else.
She then gently, gently, places her hand over the bridge of his arm – the one against her, the one he’s repulsed by. She feels it spasm under her touch, and the few times she has touched it, he would slap her hand away, or otherwise recoil. This time, he seems to sigh, a deep one thick with relief. He glances over to her, and she looks up at him, and there’s a silent sense of agreement.
Her hand trails down, to where his is – her hands are a little bigger than his other one; they’re long, a little wide, but his is wider, square-shaped, and stubby, with hair leading up to his knuckles and dusting his fingers. Rough where hers are smoother. This hand, however – she recognizes the shape of the hand, and when she presses down, she can feel some sort of structure of cartilage, perhaps something more akin to exoskeleton. Both hands are strong. She works into it, in a circular motion, and he exhales again, relaxing more into her. She feels as though she is petting the stray cat.
Then, she moves back up, to the bicep – it’s a little thicker than his other one, though his other one is noticeably thick. Her motions are the same, and he takes his last two puffs of his cigarette, right down to the filter, before pressing it against the road. It sizzles when it hits the moisture. She can still feel his warmth through the bandages, and she realizes that he’s not wincing anymore. He looks a little more present, if not relaxed, and it’s such a good look on him that she wishes again that they didn’t have to be shipped off to battle and he could look like that forever.
She meets Gregor’s eyes, then, and she sees it. A moment unguarded, a window of time – his gaze was locked on her, not on her hands working into his arm, but her face, seeking it – the tension is palpable, now, when they look at each other, and she expects him to turn his head when she smiles languidly, but his gaze remains steady, and she feels as though she can carve into him and he would let her. Her forgotten cigarette tumbles out of her mouth, and narrowly misses either’s flesh, instead fizzing out against the soaked stone. She wants to kiss him. The only thought in her mind – it feels like it’s trying to crack through her skull, leak out into the air – is that Gregor is surely the most beautiful person she’s ever seen. His bicep is shivering under her hand, and she wants to kiss that, too. She has never considered him a beastly thing – but she feels beastly, unsightly, in this tenderness. She feels like she’s letting herself feel too much. She wants to feel a little more.
Rodion catches herself, then, when the bus door slams. She reels herself back. Through all this, she likes to think she’s learned to control herself in certain areas.
Her hand trails back down his arm, still with a tenderness, and neither feeling like the tension is broken, but harnessed, well-fed and enriched – something like a formerly stray cat, she idly thinks – and Outis sticks her head out of the door, this time from the inside. “Everything’s been fixed with the bus – there was a minor leakage, but I was able to stop it with what we had. Let’s get back on the road. There’s no need to wait any more than we already have.”
Rodion’s mind is still on a moment ago – if she let herself, she could get lost in it – and Gregor seems noticeably less distressed, but there’s no doubt in her mind that – from the way he looks down at her hand, back up to her face, and inhales – he felt it, too, and there was no coming back from it.
Among her feelings was relief. She felt that that was the right time she tucked it away for, and he seemed to, for the first time in a long time, not mind what he carried with him as he stood up, leaning on it for support – he often pretended it wasn’t there, with a feigned ignorance – reaching his good hand out for Rodion to take, though already slipping into a familiar nonchalant gruffness.
She grins and takes it, putting all of her weight on him, and he nearly falls over, and he scolds her for her carelessness, and so on, and so forth. And they fall back into it.