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Rin sees his hair shining white like a torch in the waning sunlight in the stretch of road before her apartment and knows immediately it's going to be a bad day. He didn't even wear a fucking hat, and that's what hammers the nail home.
She'd been hopeful, too. Had passed a gaggle of girls playing outside on a side street with massive buckets of water in the scorching heat, bare legs and loud laughs. They'd gathered themselves in to the sidewalk like a flock of birds dancing when a car turned down their street, and scattered just as cheerful when it passed.
She sighs when they make eye contact, doesn't say anything as she scans them into the door to the lobby, wrist pressed against biometric sensors.
In the elevator, she checks her phone. She's not stupid enough to let her guard down, not around Chaghan Suren, but old habits all die hard, she guesses.
Beneath the quiet peace of this fake world, the undercity thrums. Rin can feel it, in her feet, in the hum of the machinery, the wires of the elevator. You can't hide. Nightclubs and bars and fights always always happening. A train rushes past, and Rin can almost almost hear it.
"Expecting someone?" Chaghan says, arch even though he looks unsteady. He's grown out his hair again. Suits him better.
"Fuck you," Rin says easily. "If I was, it sure wasn't your pale ass. And stop digging, you won't find anything." Chaghan scoffs. "Tech in the bin," she instructs at they step out of the elevator, purposeful towards her door. White on white on white in the hall, broken only by the blue paintings. It's like a fucking hotel, she'd said.
"Don't have any," Chaghan says, eyes finding hers. It's always unnerving when it happens.
"You expect me to believe that, huh," Rin says, snapping twice. The lights dim. Chaghan shrugs, expansive even with his thin shoulders. He's always known how to make a production out of everything. "Bugs. Bin."
She's not— comfortable, with wealth like this. But she knows how to see a fuckin' opportunity and how to grab it with both hands and not let go.
Nezha loves her, and she'll take all the blind eyes and excuses and penthouses she can squeeze out of it.
She keeps her attention on him even when she turns around to rummage through the well-stocked cupboards for tea. "Wulong?" she asks.
"I'm fine," Chaghan says neutrally.
"Black it is. What do you want, Ghost?" she asks, sudden.
"You know the date," Chaghan says. Rin turns around and he's — holding himself funny.
"Yes," she says shortly. Her voice comes out distorted to her own ears.
"Nevermind then," Chaghan says.
Rin turns back around, presses her hand to the kettle. The metal hisses and water bubbles, and she grounds herself in it. "Where's your shadow?" she says without turning. It's not her fault.
"With him," Chaghan says. Rin breathes in through her nose, out. Bows her head, hair grown just past her shoulders slipping forward to shield her face. Next to her, the kettle boils over.
Tea's a rare commodity in these times. She doesn't drink it on her own, though, so now she covers the bottom of the pot with loose leaf and rinses it out. Pours the boiling water in and lets steep. She's hardly going to start doing full tea rituals now just because she has a little money and a judgmental houseguest. Time is still the enemy, things haven't changed that much. "What do you want," she repeats.
A sigh, not so loud as to be obnoxious anymore. They're too old for that, they've been through too much.
She never thought they'd get this far.
"A report," Chaghan says.
Rin tips her head back. "Who else is there?"
"Huleinin," Chaghan says, taking this abrupt change of mind in stride. "Aratsha." All outlanders so far. Probably to placate Rin.
"But not you," she says, barbed hooks in the head of an arrow straight and true.
"If their feelings will last an age, why ought they stay together night and day," he quotes back.
Rin fights an uneasy smile. "Who else," she says, keeping it out of her voice.
"Ramsa. Tyr." Here he hesitates.
"That one," Rin says, to a visible grimace. She snorts, even though the tension hasn't eased, and collects the teapot and two cups. Leads Chaghan through the penthouse to a table away from the sun through the blinds, automatic. Thinks about Kitay human, Venka not. Nezha who used to be human, Ramsa who is now.
Rin human, Altan not.
It's not his fault. They just got farther with him than they did her.
"That one," Chaghan agrees, face smooth again. That one. Rin knows everything he's done, doesn't forgive it. Altan doesn't either, because he can't. That's little comfort.
But there's so much worse at stake, and they've bled each other out enough that maybe they're the only ones that can be trusted to hurt each other just right. Rin wonders if Chaghan's jealous, sometimes, but when it comes down to it Chaghan and Altan's fights, furious and blowout, are much more dangerous in the end and much more unmistakable.
Rin grits her teeth.
"Why are you here?" she asks. Chaghan's throat works.
"I thought," he says, deliberate and controlled in a way she thinks isn't meant to be a sword, this time, but tape and wire. "That you might want to know."
"And?" Rin says, anything that could be a shake in her voice hidden away. "What should I know?"
Chaghan closes his eyes and cups the tea between his palms. Like this, Rin has to look at him and nothing else, and it burns. "Report, Rin."
That hurts.
"And if I have nothing?"
"Then one has to consider what you're doing here at all," Chaghan says. His eyes sliding open colourless and expectant.
She takes a breath, two. Chaghan waits, fucking clear eyes and torch-white hair and scars like blazing fire. Three, four. His disappointment.
She can't. Fuck him.
Rin leans in close, hissing low enough that his ears would never pick it up without his fucking enhancements. "I," she says, "am in deep cover. I don't need you waltzing in here on this assignment everyone agreed to give me and compromising me."
"Rin," he says.
"I don't care if you don't trust me. I don't care if your superiority complex is taller than me and your sister combined. You can shove it up your ass, since my cousin is clearly too busy to— "
"I'm perfectly aware of your cover," Chaghan interrupts, flat and at an audible volume. He's not so easy to rile up anymore, used to be any mention of Altan and the two of them were at each other's throats.
"Bastard," Rin snaps. "You piece of— "
"Oh please," Chaghan snaps back. "So we're all bugged. So this whole apartment is bugged. So this entire fucking city is bugged. Nothing here is advanced to a level that is any risk to either of us and we both know that."
Heat rises to Rin's cheeks. "Do you really think that's the point?"
The tea sits between them, cooling in the air. The smell of clean ash that lingers in Chaghan's hair. It's too stale, suddenly, and Rin fights the urge to get up and pace. Chaghan's no tiger, no hawk, but what he is is just as dangerous. You don't run from a predator.
Especially not if you're just as dangerous. Rin wasn't raised by the best, no, but there's something to be said about street-scrappy. And fuck game theory, because this is no game. It never has been.
"You don't get to walk in here and decide my precautions are unnecessary," she says. Chaghan's eyes, pale and untouched. It's the only part of him he wouldn't let them modify when they named him fucking — puppet governor, that and his goddamn scars. He's always been vain, though. Special. "You don't get to walk in here and dictate my mission. That's not how this works anymore."
"And how," Chaghan says, deathly quiet now, "does this work, agent?"
"How I say it does," Rin says, shakes her head and stands two steps back from the table, folds her hands together in front of her stomach. Her tears burn white hot behind her eyelids when she blinks. "I regret that I am unable to see you out the door, lieutenant."
When he leaves, Rin goes and stands on the balcony, suns streaming down too-hot against the metal of her right hand. She misses the fight.
It's not like — she doesn't want to be here either. He doesn't have to make it so hard for her, doesn't have to make it near impossible to stay. She wants—
Thinks about Chaghan curled into himself bony edges and pale skin in the early spring heat, breathing ragged and sharp. Qara's fingers threaded through his hair shorn short. Thinks about being sent out just handfuls of days after, time always slipping between her fingers. The hidden rot of the city, the way they conceal all of it until it explodes and hurts the inside, the cell that was too goddamn selfish to self-destruct.
Memory plays different, for her.
It's dark down there, except for the people. When Rin was getting ready to start her long long slog, Enki took her and covered the wires and metal outside that she had left, all except her right hand, heating now in the hazy air. The hand, it's a warning. It serves its purpose up here. Nezha can drag her where he wants, him and his suits hiding that dragon in his heart and his organs steel and chrome. He can do any of that, but he can't change this. Not who she is, no matter how he looks like he wants to try.
She sighs and crouches down next to the plant that looks just as tired as she does. Presses her face to the side of the pot. Kitay gave it to her, even though she told him she didn't know how. I'm not good at this, she'd said about the plant, the pot, the soil, but she meant the rest of it too.
Some things worth trying for, Kitay had said, smiling small and secret. Rin breathes in, out. Digs fingers into the soil, nevermind the dirt under her nails, and rearranges her other hand, that warning sign, into something sharper.
Cuts away the weeping roots, the stems infected. Sometimes you just have to let the wound breathe.