trans_9 | [closed] (future dated past System Shock) you will be my unintended

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[closed] (future dated past System Shock) you will be my unintended

Sakura finished the move without comment, taking the last of her personal effects from the Teahouse and closing the door quietly behind herself. Her ribs had healed, if the bruising was still visible over most her midsection. She'd been lucky in ways many others hadn't. For one, she'd been awake, and she was alive.

Yet none of this was on the forefront of her mind, if some lingering irritation came in waves, along with frustration, sadness, and things she didn't want to name. Easier to shove them to the side and deal with the things she could, one by one. Work counted. Work always counted, and always helped center and ground her.

There were other things she could focus on, even if those, too, were in uncomfortable areas. She wouldn't have entertained thoughts about asking, not before recent events, but in the wake, it felt like -- escapism. Focusing on stupid details that Sakura wasn't comfortable with, and how to make up for gaps she didn't know how to bridge.

Decisions weren't always easy to make. Sakura had a lifetime of (admittedly short) experience to pull this conclusion from, but she also knew that making decisions was an important part of progress. Which was, perhaps, why she ended up trying to track down a woman she'd spoken to face to face only a handful of times. Eva. There were... things she wanted to ask, and others to try and explain. Maybe Eva would have answers, or at least the sense of a woman who'd lived so many decades that she could help someone much younger than herself interpret and understand what others might know more intuitively. If she could find her. If she could make herself speak up in the first place.

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Eva managed to miss the whole damn thing. And she is, for that matter, absolutely livid with herself for it, as if it was her brilliant idea to go running around in a maze system that suddenly stopped taunting her with cake one day.

She could have been useful. The ship has given her so many opportunities to be either useless or an unintentional menace to those she cares about, and yet the one time she could have been on equal footing with anyone else familiar with firearms, the ship has to stick her in GLaDOS.

Obviously the appropriate answer to that emotion is to garden. And by garden, Eva means rip weeds up and toss them into big heaps over the fence, swearing at them in Spanish and Galard. And after this she plans on helping clean up the parts of the city that were destroyed, but currently most of the work seems to be going to the heavy lifters.

She stands up, wiping her gloved hands on her pants, and notices the very hard-to-miss shock of pink hair. "Sakura! I thought you'd never want to be in my presence again, honestly."

She adopts an apologetic tone that conveys that she is, actually, a bit sorry about embarrassing Sakura like that. Especially since she seemed to take it so hard.

It's almost easier once Eva acknowledges her. "I'm not big on avoidance," she says mildly, at once true, and at the same time a lie. Emotional avoidance is part of her survival mechanism, if not perpetually. Even she recognizes there are times she has to come around.

There's no mention of the attacks, no real need in her mind to cover what is already known. She's been doing what she can in the aftermath, finding herself frustrated yet again in the face of a ship that manipulated everything they did. Facing destruction of a "home" once more, and not particularly skilled at putting it back together. The Great Wall was destroyed, and in spite of how it's nothing of hers to claim, isn't part of her world or heritage, it really bothers her.

She notices her own mental distractions, and makes herself smile at Eva. It's genuine enough, even reaching her eyes. "Mind a little help with weeding?" An indirect way of asking for some of her time, trying to make it less than an obvious intrusion. She shifts her pack, eyes flicking from one of the piles beyond the fence back to Eva, and Eva's hands.

Eva actually laughs at that. Not because she doubts Sakura's veracity, although that is a bit of a hypocritical statement given the disaster that was their last encounter, but because Eva's well aware of her own tendency to avoid issues in some naive hope they'll disappear. And it's a strange thought, because she and Marco are hardly naive. "Are you sure you've come to the right house? We've turned avoidance into an art."

She nods. "Any help is welcome. I can't maintain a healthy garden to save my life." Her tendency to rip up both weed and flower when angry doesn't help her much. And besides, it looks like Sakura could use something tangible and pointless to focus on instead of whatever's in her head.

She opens the fence to let Sakura in. "Are you sure you're alright with those injuries?"

Her pack slides down her uninjured arm, coming to rest with a dull thwump near the inside part of the fence. "I've noticed," she says, close to sounding conversational. "It's almost like being back home again."

If her lips twitch up into half a smile afterward, amused by how that sounds, and not quite able to make herself apologize for it.

"My teammate's the one with the green thumb, but I'm not terrible at it. Tsunade made sure of that, even if it was only while on punishment detail. My shishou," she adds, realizing too late a name dropped out of context might not carry any meaning. Marco knew, or had forgotten by now, but it doesn't seem like what Marco knew translated much over into what Eva knew that Marco knew.

Or things Sakura knew that Marco knew. Funny how that works out.

She registers why Eva's asking after injuries with a blink, glancing down at her arm. She knows the bandages around her ribcage don't show, and they're partly for show anyway. People were less surprised by bandages than the multicolor rainbow of fading bruises. (People who weren't around to see, yet ever expect that someone will, anyway.) "I'm mostly healed," she says, shrugging her shoulders enough to dismiss any potential concern for such a minor point. "Keeping the skin from drying out is most of what I'm trying to do now. Which you think wouldn't be a problem, in this humidity."

That it also gives her a focus, something to do when she has idle time, she doesn't think on.

"Ah! I've brought something for you," she says, half turning and ducking down to rifle through her bag. She pulls out several cups of instant ramen, setting them neatly to the side, before extracting a rectangular, decorated box. She packs the ramen away again before standing, smiling with less surety, offering Eva the box. "I wanted to apologize for how I acted the last time we met."

Unfortunately for Sakura, 'shishou' means about as much to Eva as 'Tsunade' did, and by that, she'd mean nothing. Eva furrows her brow a bit but nods anyway, not willing to look stupid or uneducated. "Well, you know what they say about practice. Maybe we just have longer learning curves."

She doesn't push any further about Sakura's injuries. Sakura may still be a child to Eva, but Eva respects pride, and knows better than most how infuriating it is to have people insist your wounds are greater than they are. Any sorts of wounds. She gathers the box up in her hands, eyes wide. "Oh, honey. You didn't need to. This is lovely."

She smirks. "I hope you aren't trying to encourage me to mortify you more often. I may get into bad habits, if it gets me gifts." She pauses, waiting to see if Sakura's expecting an apology from her too.

She briefly laughs at the longer learning curves, yet with a dip of her head after handing over her gift, she half-turns toward where Eva had been weeding. "Unless you can prove to me there's a new year somewhere around here, I think I just hit my maximum for gift-giving to anyone during the year. Or are you planning on moving anytime soon?"

Sakura looks to Eva again, eyebrow arching up. She gives time for pause before asking her next question. "Where can I start?"

There's an idea she has, if it's got very little to do with gardening the loam of the city, and a great lot to do with pulling weeds out of her social misconceptions. Possibly by half clear-cutting and burning the fields that already exist. Try to avoid salting the fields.

"No, not at all, but I may invent birthdays just for the goodies." She sets the box aside on a lawn chair, brushing the dirt from her hands off it with the fringe of her blouse.

She walks around the garden with her hands on her hips, looking for a good place to start Sakura.

"Well, I've been ripping the weeds out of the lamb's ear over here, if you'd like to help there." She gets down on her knees. "I am sorry about being so...motherly, when we last met."

"For the goodies?" As of yet, birthdays as a celebration involving baked goods and gifts hasn't come to Sakura's attention. She's curious what Eva means by that, if she means anything at all.

She ducks down as well, letting her knees touch down, feeling more connected to the ground than she has to much of anything for a few days. Grounded, she thinks to herself, reaching forward to scratch at the dirt and dig out something that looked more weed than anything else.

"You're his mother." Sakura's not sure what she expects out of people, aside from them to act as people, with personalities and priorities of their own. "I'm pretty sure that gives you a license to be motherly." To him.

Sakura starts to make her own neat pile of weeds to one side. "Does he have a habit of not telling you things you prefer he did?"

"On our world, birthdays are celebrated with cake and gifts and all sorts of other shenanigans. Booze, if you're me. I'm old enough to imbibe," she says with a cheeky little wink.

Eva snorts and smiles a bit, unwittingly verbalizing Sakura's unspoken addendum. "Yes, to him. But I was clearly making you uncomfortable, so I'm sorry. I was just trying to grind his nerves some."

Because she wanted to make him angry and ashamed of hiding things from her. She twists her mouth over to the side and sifts her fingers through the soft leaves, searching without her eyes for troublesome invaders. "He does. Does he do the same to you, or am I the only one who gets mom-zoned?"

Birthdays sounded more exciting on Earth than back home. Was she going to need to start knowing those? Memorizing parts of medical records (well, she had those with announced dates) or asking people for -- no, keeping track of time here is a joke. Plus, even if she does, it'd just be Marco and maybe Eva, right?

"I was... surprised." The combination of Eva's teasing, and Marco's acknowledgement of something she wasn't ready for at the time. Her hand hesitates, touching the stalk of another smaller plant eking out an existence. "More by Marco than you."

She pulls it up, careful in taking the roots along with it.

"I think there's a few different zones. My favorite might be the 'I didn't talk about it because I didn't know I had to talk about it and because you never asked' zone. If we've both got that one." Hello the awkward of him dropping his yes for Eva's question on dating.

Placing one plant down, she focuses her attention on finding another, more aware of Eva by peripheral vision than any direct look. It's easier to keep talking this way, especially given where she wants to go.

"He has a tendency to do that. Surprise people. Some day he'll learn that we don't all appreciate it." She sighs and runs a hand over the back of her neck, gently, because that's where the scars from the portable Kandrona are.

The laugh that draws out of her is a bitter one.

"Oh, yes, I'm in that zone too. I'm also in the 'don't you know I don't tell you things so I can protect you?' zone, which is my least favorite of all." And not only because she hates to feel as if she's so fragile that she needs protecting. She survived Yeerks; she survived his death. Knowing he has a girlfriend won't shatter her delicate mind.

"So did you just come over to bring me goodies?"

Part of her smiles briefly at her description of this other zone, if she understands that one. She also understands the frustration behind it, knowing more fully now than she ever did back home how firmly the men around her kept things from her for precisely that reason. That she tried to do the same, and it usually came around and bit her in the rear.

Wondering at the rubbing, then filing it away as one of those things she shouldn't ask after. Scars, psychological and otherwise, were like anything else (habits, tendencies, nervous tics): personal and untouchable unless asked to step in.

The direct question gives her reason to steel herself and ask something incredibly embarrassing. Eyes hunting for other weeds, body shifting forward as she locates one, Sakura says, "I've been sexually intimate with Marco," as if this is such a normal part of conversation. "And I wanted to ask you," she continues, another weed coaxed free of the ground, "About sex. If it's not too intrusive."

Which is where her head ducks down a little as she blushes, though she makes herself watch Eva more closely, waiting on some sort of cue. She's not sure what to expect, if she's run the gambit from something more spectacularly Tsunade to a quiet dismissal or outright gloss-over of what she's said.

Eva pauses midway through ripping up a way. It falls a little from her hand.

Of course she knows Marco would be having sex. She's not an idiot. But that doesn't mean she approves of it, and admittedly when she saw he was dating Sakura she'd hoped that this girlfriend would have a little more...self-respect.

"Ah." She starts weeding again, though her gestures are more calculated now, less fluid and more cold. "No, it's not intrusive. Disappointing, certainly, but not intrusive."

All interesting little signifiers. Sakura's hand hesitates a moment over her growing collection of uprooted weeds. The roots for that moment fascinate her more than anything else.

How deeply do some things go?

"Oh?" A questioning lift to her voice, light enough. She makes herself relax as a counter to the calculation she feels on Eva's account.

"I don't know how things work on your world, but I was very serious when I mentioned not wanting bastard grandchildren." She brushes some dirt off the leaves of lamb's ear. "Anyway, what was it you wanted to ask me?"

"We don't usually marry, and we're often dead by thirty. Statistically speaking." She keeps her tone conversational, doesn't pause again as she went about weeding. "Ah, just cultural notes. You know. The sorts of things that slip through the media library records because no one manages to write about their own culture with an eye for someone who knows next to nothing about it."

"Ah. We have a much longer life expectancy, and we consider it indecent to have sex outside of marriage." So she's guessing she can give you a little leeway for not knowing, Sakura. She guesses. "What sort of cultural things? If you're looking for positions you've probably come to the wrong place."

"What? No!" The look she gives Eva is embarrassed and honestly shocked: maybe even the idea of multiple positions is too much for her fragile mind! Or more likely this conversation has hit on a point she didn't consider, and wasn't planning on considering. Possibly ever.

"I wanted to know if people used dating as some kind of confidence building thing or -- how important it is to a guy's sense of self worth. Or if it matters at all, when dating's so much more casual in an Earth sense."

It's frustrating for her, and like so much of anything, it comes back around with trying to rectify world views she's apparently already messed up yet again. Sakura hates getting things wrong time after time. There's no one way to study for these things, and the media library by and large isn't actually helpful, if full of various fictions and fantasies.

Looking back to the garden, at the dirt and her own knees, she frowns and sighs. One hand runs through her hair, even as she belatedly realizes giving in to that nervous gesture has now streaked her hair with dirt.

Sakura sighs again, and this time it sounds both tired and frustrated. It's her own damn fault. (This, and probably everything else.)

Eva gives a sigh of relief. "Oh, thank goodness."

She gets a pensive look as she watches Sakura and listens to the explanation. She'll pretend Sakura's talking strictly about dating, thank you very much, and then even if she can't look at Sakura quite the same way again, she can delude herself into thinking Sakura's close enough to an appropriate match for her son.

At least she's still smarter than the bimbos he brought home in her timeline.

"Well, it's definitely a confidence builder. They don't like to appear insecure about it, but they are. It's like insulting someone's cooking to be too mean about it." Not that Eva hadn't done plenty of that back in her day.

She reaches over, gently, tentatively, in the non-restrictive ways former hosts are so accustomed to, and places a hand on Sakura's shoulder. The weight in Sakura's shoulders is evident.

"Even if they suck at cooking?" Her lips start to curl up, almost making it into a smile, then sliding away again. "I thought that might be the case. I just... wanted to know."

She notices Eva's motion, preoccupied as her thoughts are, if it doesn't quite make sense until she feels the weight on her shoulder. Hard to disguise that she tenses for a moment, or that she's rolling her shoulders in a disruptive way even as she falls back into a polite smile, rocking back onto the balls of her feet and pushing upward all at once.

Sakura isn't good at physical contact, nor the small gestures of reassurance or human connection, not if she isn't the one initiating. She's hypersensitive to them right now, in the wake of so many deaths, with her parents numbered among them.

It's not what she wants. The certainty of things she can handle and control -- yes. It's why she came, made this particular mistake, and she hopes it doesn't damage too much as it runs its course.

"Thank you, Eva," she says, dropping into a formal bow. Green things are clutched in one hand, and Sakura realizes she kept some of the weeds she'd been piling neatly to her side. "I hope my intrusion hasn't been too great." She means it, in a way means it more as an intrusion on the lives of the people who lived here, who were so... she didn't know.

"You have a lovely garden. May it continue to thrive under your care."

Sincere enough behind the politeness, but more removed than she'd been not long before. But for the dirt on the side of her face, falling out of her hair and to the ground as she shifts, she's as suddenly composed as she was tired.

All lies, if functioning ones.

Edited 2011-12-29 05:34 (UTC)

Eva watches Sakura goes and sighs, deep in her chest and stomach. Well, she botched that one. Probably she shouldn't have gone for a reassuring touch. She knows as well as anyone the defensive fences they put up around their own bodies.

That the garden is lovely is a lie. Eva looks out on it now and sees only the gashes in the earth from her fingernails, the upturned soils, the roots of weeds still lingering in the holes their tops were pulled from.

She shrugs one shoulder and continues to dig.

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[closed] (future dated past System Shock) you will be my unintended

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