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

[encourage]

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.

Comments

[vissernone.livejournal.com]

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.

[encourage]

"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.

[vissernone.livejournal.com]

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.