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 Posted: Sat May 23, 2009 10:33 pm
And there Kanda went with that your woman thing again, oi. Granted that Yossarian had actually been swallowing the term without complaint for the most part, but there was still something about it that made him want to grimace. Maybe it was the whole possessive connotation?... Or perhaps the fact that it made Aster sound more like a troublesome housecat he dealt with than a spouse.
Sadly, the latter seemed increasingly accurate as he thought about it.
And on the note of Aster...
"Unfortunately, I wouldn't put such behavior past her," he grumbled, fighting off the urge to slump.
Perhaps Shae's presence would keep her at least semi-sobered until they got back, though. Damn, that other swordsman was a lucky b*****d-- getting to deal with someone who was so rational, quiet, calm even in the most hectic of situations--
... And currently sicker than a dog, curled up under a cold sheet and wishing the misery would just let go and allow her to sleep everything away.
The fact that Aster had taken to such vigorous cheerful purring in the other bed did nothing for her either, ears more sensitive than she would've liked and aching at just the sound of it.
It... had been a long time since she'd felt that low, to be perfectly honest-- and the best part of all?
What normally would've at least taken the edge off had long since gone (quite literally) to the dogs.
Oh, the joy of her life.
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Posted: Sun May 24, 2009 10:19 am
Asteria Georgelas was not a spouse. She was Yossarian's fussy daughter 80% of the time and the just-as-fussy lover the other 20% of the time, with smaller decimal percentages of 'not fussy' in there. He still hadn't figured out how the duo's 'strong emotional attachment' had happened on the male-end of things.
However, Kanda wouldn't even ASK on anything like that -- the swordman's emotions could have been faked for all he cared. God only knew that their little group functioned better when the female was happy.
"Well, hopefully she'll be able to contain it -- I doubt Shae is in any mood to put up with whining and simpering after how irritated the golem's made her this morning..."
Hey, Asteria was happily in a state of oblivious to anything that was going on outside of her happy PUDDLE of purrs and warmth in sleep. Though it only took a while of sleeping for that purr of hers to quiet down enough to be audible only to someone who would have pressed their ear to her chest to check for it.
Not to say that her head was a 'happy' place in sleep.
She never was one to have dreams when she slept.
"If this storm gets thick enough, we'll start a fire. The snow would be a good enough cover from anybody seeing it."
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Posted: Sun May 24, 2009 8:03 pm
Okay, okay, maybe that was a good point-- and had it been brought up allowed, he wouldn't have denied it, either. Hell, on that note... he didn't know how the 'emotional attachments' had happened either, particularly because, dammit, he'd been consciously dead set on remaining NICE and ALONE the rest of his life before she came along...
It was a mystery he'd probably never figure out.
Which was actually probably for the best.
"... Tch, what, that woman's capable of being irritated?" Obviously a sarcastic remark, though he hadn't exactly been paying much attention to her that morning. Although that did remind him of something a little more curious, and he actually paused and gave in to noting it out loud.
"For that matter..." What now? "Doesn't it strike you as unrealistically coincidental, knowing how to operate the communicative function of those things so swiftly?..."
Or hell, that there was even a second golem there in the FIRST place! He'd never seen anything remotely like Del until Shae had turned up, and then another one? Really?
Ironically, Shae had actually sneezed that very moment some miles away, groaning when the motion rattled all her joints and, more unfortunate still, that bad leg. Seriously, she couldn't even flex the knee anymore without feeling ready to throw up (... again), and thus, she just didn't. Why aggravate something like that in the first place?
On the bright side, though, at least Asteria's thunderpurr was starting to calm down... and her migraine, in turn, had ebbed just enough so that she might bury her face in the pillow, block out the last traces of light, and... not sleep, but rest.
It was the closest to relief she'd be getting for a damn long while.
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Posted: Sun May 24, 2009 8:51 pm
"When she's not faring well -- which most of the time she's better at hiding." Kanda replied. Well, Shae wasn't someone who would show her disgruntlement easily, therefore the fact she had at all had been slightly alarming. But Kanda knew better to actually let it bother him visibly.
"Seeing as she's had her golem for some time longer than I've known her, so the chances of her being able to function with it and adapt to it more easily isn't exactly surprising to me."
However, the arrival of a second golem...
...
"She seems to hold a certain distaste for that building we were in -- I ponder if she has some repressed connection to it."
AH HA HA.
He didn't even know that he'd hit the nail on the head. OH WELL. "But the communication is convenient."
And the girls were hopefully resting and warming their tired little furless bodies right up. That would have been a definite bonus. Last thing they needed to worry about was the girls doing stupid stuff while being 'worried'.
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Posted: Sun May 24, 2009 11:07 pm
Yossarian made a slight face at that first response... but it was hard to tell just what 'feeling' he seemed to be tussling with-- somewhere between a muddy mishmash of suspicion and befuddlement. Repressed connections? Ha! He highly doubted that the girl would even bother with such a trivial self-defense mechanism...
No, in fact, he knew (in his head anyway) that she wouldn't. Which meant that she'd been been holding out on telling them some sort of information... even if he didn't have a clue what it was.
"... I hardly wonder. I'm rather certain of it, actually," he replied lamely, sighing and leering back at the window again as a particularly nasty wind gust howled through the cracks in the wall.
"She's hiding something significant, the wretched fool." Well no s**t there, Sherlock. But hey, no one else had said it! "And what-- don't tell me you're completely unaware of it? I thought the two of you had some wild intimacy between yourselves."
Okay, now that? That had been a little stab... or something.
But he was bored and irritated, so who could blame him?
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Posted: Mon May 25, 2009 3:22 pm
That was true, actually. But at the same time, Kanda would have to pretend otherwise -- needling Shae about it would have been a bit of a waste of time. As much as she was a mystery, Kanda seemed content with only finding out her secrets as she shared them.
"Well, whatever it is, we'll find out when she's willing to share."
YEP. SO UN-NOSY INTO THE AFFAIRS OF HIS WOMAN OR WHAT SHE WAS THINKING. Not that he would have actually admitted that Shae was 'his'. Taking possession of her would have been... too stereotypically masculine for his tastes. People who treated women as their property probably ended up closer to the butterfur's dad.
Which was just as horrible of an idea.
"As for 'wild intimacy', I'm not the one who keeps up the neighbors with noise." he made sure to add -- a perfect reference back to Asteria and her mad all-night purring that night before they'd met up again.
Yes.
Both he and Shae had gotten some good 'bothering' from that.
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Posted: Mon May 25, 2009 3:57 pm
Oooh, that comment had hit a very sensitive button and Yossarian knew it, actually compelled to wince guiltily before his frown deepened even more, and he stubbornly shrugged it off.
That all-night purring stunt was one he remembered with a twinge of unpleasantness thanks to said 'neighbors' hissing and banging the door down, but... at the same time, it had sort of facilitated the broken quartet all reuniting again, so who was he to complain? (Besides, he'd gotten sadly used to such noise anyway.)
"Well then, I doubt she'll ever utter a word," he grumbled with a hint of bitterness. Sure, he couldn't quite speak as closely of Shae as the other swordsman could, but... dammit, he still knew her well enough from countless chess and card games to recognize those deplorable internalizing tendencies for information. "And that noise hardly my doing, if you must know."
Pffft, yeah, like anyone would believe that, huh?
"But really..." He was digressing from that quickly, though. "Do you have any inkling of where she came from?" The concept of being around someone for so long (in 'that' type of dynamic, anyway) without knowing what they were or where they came from was just baffling to him; after all, he'd learned of Asteria's wretched background within... what, two weeks of knowing her?
"Do you even know where that thing in her originated from?"
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Posted: Mon May 25, 2009 4:43 pm
Well yes, but if Shae was to share such information with anybody, it would be him. So for now he wasn't going to get all hot and angry over not knowing. Though the mention of the 'thing' was something that caused some frowning.
Uhhhhhh. Yes...yes.....Uhhhhh. COUGH.
"I know enough -- I didn't pry into it." Though..... speaking of the 'thing' it was reminding him of their little run-in with a certain Zanadian doctor an-...that conversation! Of course!! That was what the building they'd spent the night in was reminding him of!
hsdalk. Which meant that if he took that information and put it together with Shae's reaction to the building he could figure it out well enough. However, he'd be a good boy and not even bring it up to his companion.
He didn't need to harass Shae about it to learn.
Hell, he'd likely put off any asking about it for a loooong time. Awww, such a good all-knowing companion he was. Not to say that he didn't expect Yossarian to want in on knowing such details. But he was about as likely to spill on Shae's case as Yossarian was to say the 'l' word to a certain butterfur.
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Posted: Mon May 25, 2009 5:10 pm
Well it was kind of hard to miss such an obvious immortality while, say, a crazy father peeled the shirt off of half-conscious gunshot victims to handle injuries. Not that he'd been studying it too closely or anything at the time... but Langston had made a point of chatting incessantly about the curiosity for a good time thereafter, and he couldn't have ignored it if he tried.
That, and the ticking was sort of hard to ignore during through brief spells of silence, too.
"Hardly sounds that way from my perspective." He almost had to scoff at the vague reply, too. From his point of view, it sounded like the other guy didn't have a damn clue and was just trying to make up for it with paltry lies or vague statements!
"She knows about you, doesn't she?" That... was actually a valid point, even if he didn't know it. "That seems a rather pathetic one-way exchange."
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Posted: Mon May 25, 2009 5:32 pm
"I'm not the only one guilty of one-way exchanges. Besides, I know more about her than you suspect." he answered flatly, knowing quite well what it was Yossarian was implying. However, he again wasn't going to allow him to goad any further information out of him on the topic.
Afterall...
..
Wasn't as though he had to admit to anything. Kanda knew enough -- and he hadn't had to find out about it from a second party. Nope, he knew first hand, for the most part, about Shae's little... awkward traits. Poor girl.
"I'm sure you've been all willingly open with admitting your own odd idiosyncrasies to your partner." INSTEAD OF LETTING HER INVESTIGATE YOU ON HER OWN LITTLE FUNTIEMZ, IMPLY IMPLY. Actually, he wasn't implying anything by it.
He was just saying for the sake of it.
Yep.
That'd go over well, but he did have to look at the window and sigh a bit as the window of choice still had snow on it, and piling at the bottom of the sill. That... was not fun.
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Posted: Tue May 26, 2009 2:43 pm
"... Say what you will." There was still (obviously) a bit of suspicion in his tone, but alas, Yossarian wasn't compelled to pursue it any further. It wasn't truly his business, after all; he was just a disgruntled (and maybe vaguely fascinated) observer to the 'relationship' so laughably unlike his own.
And besides, he'd been called out as a hypocrite and really couldn't deny that he was, either. The fact that he and Aster knew so much about where they'd each come from was... probably more of a situational fluke than anything.
Thus, the subject was dropped, time passing in a slow trickle as the snow continued to pile, and the wind howled, and the sun drifted lazily through the sky on its slow journey toward the horizon line for the coming of evening. It was getting close to the period most would've labeled 'dinner time'... although to be perfectly honest, Yossarian would have just as happily settled for 'GETTING BACK AS SOON AS POSSIBLE TIME' instead.
... But the snowstorm was finally starting to ease up, despite the fact that it had already dumped a good two feet of fresh powder everywhere, and perhaps they'd get a chance to leave before nightfall... if they wolves didn't find them again.
Sigh.
Back in civilization, it seemed that 'dinner time' was also coming about, as the thick-furred woman who ran the little inn was hovering over her stove to make the usual sort of dinner fair: a thick pot of some hearty stew. Nothing better to keep warm and comfortable, right?
... Sadly, Shae had to disagree.
Had there been anything in her stomach to begin with, there was no doubt in her mind she would've lost it when the smell finally invaded her blurred senses, groaning softly and just... shoving her face right back into the pillow that had only been kind enough to filter out MOST of the light in the room.
To make a long and potentially depressing ramble short, she felt like s**t.
Her knee was too stiff and bruised to move at all, her skull was throbbing, her stomach was in a knot, the blankets were frigid cold and... s**t, her hand was inexplicably stiff and warm, too. Probably the only part of her with any heat to it, actually.
Del was really the only comfort she had, the little golem curled up by her collarbone and remaining obediently still.
(Oh, her kingdom for some weak ginger tea and a hot bath and some PAINKILLERS.)
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Posted: Tue May 26, 2009 7:07 pm
Mmmmmmmm~
Her little fuzzy-nose had definitely picked up on the scent of food, causing her to stir and stretch out like a little sleepy toddler - complete with a yawn. Yaaaaaaaaaaawn. Nnngh. She definitely was going to be needing to put some food in her system before she sat and camped out to wait for her man to come back.
Ha ha, definitely a little too attached to him. Dammit, when ha- oh yeah, she knew damn well when her emotional 'fluttering' had happened. Damn over-dependency. She definitely needed to work on not gluing herself to her other-half's hip all the time.
However, once she'd rolled herself out of the warmth of her bed, it was off to...
...
"I'll boil some water, in case you want to make tea." Aster said before she took her leave of their little room. Way she saw it, she didn't know Shae's taste in beverages, so it would be better to leave Shae to her own tastes.
Y'know, all that good stuff. Figured when Shae was ready, she'd come out to make tea on her own. For now, Aster would go and sit by herself somewhere to eat and sip coffee.
It definitely was getting a little dark out there, wasn't it?
However...
"Do you want to risk travel in the dark?"
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Posted: Tue May 26, 2009 9:46 pm
Oh, how much Shae would have given for that kind of content lethargy... but no, all she got was a spike in the migraine discomfort when voices started piping up, and it was all she could do to bite her tongue (not bite THROUGH it) and restrain the spluttergroan of woe trying to bubble up from her insides.
With a hint of bile, mmm.
"O-oh..." Oh her voice was like sandpaper dragged through a field of broken glass? "Ah... thank you, Ma'am..."
Nevermind that it sucked all the strength out of her just to sit up-- but thankfully by that point, Aster had already left... which meant she was free to lean her back against the headboard for support and openly frown at the sorry state of herself.
Could she have even gotten out of bed even if she wanted to?
... Did she want to ever again?
Indeed, it was getting dark, and that realization left Yossarian feeling unsettled to say the least. Not that he was lacking in confidence that they'd survive or anything, but... god, half of him suspected that there'd be secret panic and frowning on the other end of the bunch.
And it wouldn't he Harper producing it, either.
"... Well, we've no real motivation to stay here," he noted lamely, though one look back out the window had him second-guessing.
Even if it was easing up out there, it was still snowing... and rather badly, by his standards.
"... What do you think?" he finally had to just shove the question right back at his companion, for lack of anything better. "Would it be worthwhile to save a night, or wait until dawn for moving again?..."
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Posted: Tue May 26, 2009 10:01 pm
Ah ha ha. Mano-e-mano ping-pong of questions, it seemed. However, Kanda seemed to have no hesitation to his answer;
"The worst-case scenerio is we can't navigate in the dark and just camp back out where we did last night." he said confidently. Hey, he had a sword and they didn't have a bloody woman on them this time, so any wolves were definitely doomed to be 'dead meat' if they attempted nomming-rights on the two dark swordsmen.
Besides...
"We don't want to be caught by another group of bounty hunters here in the morning."
A valid point. Especially when both of them, mostly Kanda, could be totally mistaken for their target. Dark, scarred, and violent? YEP. Kanda definitely fit the bill there.
Sadly so. Siiigh.
"And if we don't make it back before too late, we can inform the girls since it's cleared up."
AH HA HA. PROGRESS!
Hum, hum, boiling water~~. No really, there wasn't much else for her to do besides that. She wasn't making dinner, she didn't have an other-half to chat-it-up with, and..
...
..
Yeaaah. Siiigh.
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Posted: Tue May 26, 2009 11:28 pm
... Ironically, the same confused-identity thought had crossed Yossarian's mind, too. Dark fur, scarred, a violent demeanor... yep, he was with a man who could've easily been mistaken for their target and, though he was confident they were more than strong enough for taking out any bounty hunters, that didn't mean he wanted to deal with it.
There was enough crushing weight on his conscience from unnecessary death as was, after all.
And of course an epic battle would just slow them down even more and delay the homeward journey.
"I suppose that's true." With that conceded to, of course, it was onwards to grabbing his things, checking his bag, cinching his sheath... and eyeing the door pensively. Blah, this was going to be a miserable trek no matter how they cut it, but best to get things over with as soon as possible. "We shouldn't dawdle any longer, then..."
ONWARDS, OUT THE DOOR AND INTO THE ELEMENTS!
... Rather ironically, though, Asteria (the one HE was concerned about by default) was fairing a good deal better than one other female, who... quite frankly, looked like death warmed over, and didn't feel much better, either.
In fact, she just... wound up eventually doubling back over and laying right back down after a few minutes of sitting there in a throbbing daze, miserably light-headed and wanting nothing more than to curl up in a ball and pass out again.
Sure, her brain knew better, but... dammit, what else could she do but ride it out? Ma'am obviously wasn't interested in her company (or just off in her own la-la land of waiting on Mister Yossarian, like always), nor did she want to impose or... oh, forget it. What was even the use?
(It was just like always: a gap that'd never be filled thanks to starry-eyed infatuation and longing.)
But hey, at least she had Del to keep her company?
And she was independent, so... it was just another day to get through, that was all.
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