Arma. [Seven]

[Abalia]

2 Winter, 511 AV; Early Afternoon It felt warm out. That was a completely nonsensical thing, since the mind knew the season and understood that the chill of Winter should be descending upon the city. Today, however, was unseasonably warm, with Syna highlighted beautifully in a cloudless sky. It tended towards purple rather than the brilliant blue it should have been, but that hardly confounded the native to Alvadas. Ionu was apparently in a playful mood, which was much better than the days when fire or ice were his chosen toy. Abalia found herself in the vicinity of Tower's Idol Slanderer quite by chance. There was no love lost between the kittenish street rat and the mouthy mistake, and so she would never choose to orient her path to intercept him. As it were, though, she wanted to find Marius. In her upset over Roxanne she had neglected to check in on him in over a week, and she needed to rectify that. His favorite haunts were not often difficult to find, but the city had rearranged itself while she slept. She could feel directions in the city intuitively, and never managed to feel lost, but sometimes roads intersected in such a way that she had to take a path she wouldn't have otherwise chosen. Today was one of those days. The dog that had somehow become her companion, mostly against her will, trotted along at her heels. As she neared the idol, wary eyes lifted to stare at the imposing thing. She'd had more than one run-in with the mouthy nuisance, and she wasn't about to have her innermost weaknesses exposed yet again by a botched up piece of magic. She edged along the perimeter of his vision, limited as it was, because as long as she managed to stay out of his gaze, she'd be safe.

[Seven Xu]

Seven could have found himself anywhere on that balmy afternoon, but the City of Illusions had chosen to thrust him beneath the dead garnet stare of a kneeling statue. And, it just so happened that the stone figure in question had the ability to hurl slanderous insults at the unfortunate passers-by that happened to dip into his line of sight. Seven knew this, because while stopping to tighten a boot lace, a shrill voice prickled his ears and beckoned him towards an otherwise inanimate object.

“Symenestra skin, not Symenestra kin!”

After a double-take and a bawdy exchange that left the halfblood red-faced and sputtering, Seven turned sharply away from Tower’s greatest failure. A hard elbow caught a narrow wall of flesh. He flinched, expecting some deriding remark about watching his step—or worse, physical confrontation—when his glassy stare met a familiar face. It took a heartbeat to place the girl in the Sun and Stars. Syna’s most belligerent child had mentioned her on more than one occasion as well. Seven sucked in his bottom lip, chewed, and released it, glistening and wet and tingling with a noxious reminder of his anger.

The fuck was her name? Angela. Abigail. Adalia. “Hi,” was what he settled on, forcing his dark brow to smooth and lifting the pale and flattened bow of his mouth in a wan smile. She was a walking reminder of what he had done; those golden browns that stared up at him in mild surprise held questions of a beast-woman she did not know—could not know—was no longer among the living. Amanda? Seven’s pale nostrils flared as he filled his lungs with crisp winter air. He thought to leave her at that, a stoic greeting and a smile, but as leathered foot shuffled over worn cobblestone to make his leave, the girl’s canine companion blocked his way.

“Pretty enough to be a lady, I wager, does he scream like one, too? Find out, dog!”

Seven let the lungful of air out in an audible sigh, stole a staggering step backward, and lifted his chin towards the playfully violet sky. His fingers dipped beneath the wool of his coat, finding refuge in his trouser pockets. Finally, he fixed his attention back to the girl as his clumsy tongue struggled for words to fill an ever-growing silence between them. “So. You’re … Abalia, right?”

That sounded right.

[Abalia]

Dog, as it were, had no bone in the fight. Abalia had no idea where the thing had come from, or why it followed her everywhere, but it was completely uninterested in the slurs falling from stone lips, or whether or not the insulted one screamed like a girl. He just sat on his haunches when Abalia came to a stop, halted by recognition and greeting, and stared up at her with his tongue lolling lazily out of one side of his mouth. "Yes," she answered, with all the wariness she should have afforded Laszlo too. There was a pregnant pause, and then the human spoke again, an olive branch. "Hi, Seven." Who could forget a name so peculiar, after all? Besides, Laszlo spoke of him, if not often. Abalia had no real reason to dislike him, except that his most initial reception of her had been jaded and cold. Abalia had still believed, then, that she might find Roxxie. The Sun & Stars had been an incidental stop in her search. Seven had raised her hackles, though perhaps sensitivity on her part had caused as much. She saw him now as the wraith who haunted the tavern, the one who covered for Laszlo in those rare moments when the ethaefal relinquished control over the bar himself. The one who seemed less than thrilled at even the suggestion of a kelvic coming 'round. Wide brown eyes lifted towards Tower's toy. Abalia hated it. There wasn't much in Alvadas she didn't at least respect; Slanderer was one of them. "How... " she began, though her words failed to form. Asking about Laszlo didn't seem like the best idea, especially since she got the distinct impression that Seven wasn't overly pleased with all of her recent loitering. "How are you?" Given the nature of their interactions to date, the question seemed as personal as asking about his undergarments, somehow, and so Abalia ducked her head under the guise of checking on the dog. Damned thing had finally come in handy. "The statue isn't the best place to hang around," she mused aloud. "Were you looking for something?"

[Seven Xu]

Instinct pulled that fleshy lip beneath the top row of his teeth again as he began to count the times he’d seen Abalia’s face beneath the shifting mosaic; too many seemed to be a common consensus. If this farce was Ionu’s idea of punishment, it had gone on long enough. Red drooped into the crooks of Seven’s eyes as he offered a winding street his sidelong gaze. The guilt that roiled in the pit of his gut—that only came about when the vagrant girl was deposited into his company—made him incapable of looking directly into her eyes at length; they were the sun, aspiring to blind him.

“Fine.” Fine was a simple word that could mean so many things depending on how one twisted it. Victor hated fine. Seven, on the other hand, was rather fond of it. “I was coming from the ‘Abode, heading home.” His shoulders rose and sagged again in a halfhearted shrug. “It’s always hardest when I want to go home.”

If he noticed her apprehension, he did not commit it to thought as he jerked his head in the direction of his new path. Close as she was to his secret, it was of no use to him to alienate her. Seeds of doubt could very well blossom into something ugly if he let them be. “I’m a map-maker,” he paused for effect, lifting two thin brows skyward, “not the best of cities to be in when you’re a map-maker, but there you go.”

Seven worked hurriedly to put more cobblestones between his feet and Tower’s Slanderer’s insults. His legs were short; the diminutive halfblood was easy to keep up with, even for a girl whose forehead only grazed his nose, a feat in itself. Buildings flourished on either side of the new street, all shades of taupe and brick-red with shuttered windows and stiffly closed doors. A few sported hanging baskets of dead and dying plants, kissed by hoarfrost. Seven fell into comfortable silence again, letting the rhythmic padding of his feet against the road fill the chilly quiet.

At least no one would ever complain that he spoke too much.

[Abalia]

Though she followed along the very path Seven took, it somehow seemed as if that were mere happenstance. They were, after all, both fleeing from the slanderer. And, incidentally, he really was walking the same street she needed. Dog, annoyingly faithful, followed. "A map-maker, in Alvadas?" The idea was so amusing to the native that she laughed. It was unlikely that the sound would be entirely foreign to him, if he paid even the slightest bit of attention to the time she spent at the Sun & Stars. Whatever Seven thought of Laszlo, Abalia seemed to find his company quite amiable. More often than not those brown eyes of hers, always fixed upon the sometimes surly ethaefal, were lit up, sweet lips curled to the sound of her own laughter. Given the brevity of their acquaintance, however, it was most certainly the most companionable expression she'd fixed him with yet. Long, dark hair hung like a curtain to shield her gaze, and she lifted a hand absent mindedly to brush it back behind the curve of her ear, so that she could see him better. "How is that going?" Her amusement wasn't mocking, but raw. Abalia had a way of speaking before she thought things through, and she never considered that she might be insulting his aim. Her interest was some form of genuine; she wondered over his progress. As an afterthought, her young brow pinched in a furrow as she glanced up at him. "I can't imagine Alvadas is so very pleased with you." Abalia spoke of Alvadas as if it were a third person walking alongside them, an entity with sentience and character all it's own. So many outsiders could never grasp the spirit of the city in that way, and words such as these had a way of sounding crazy to those unwilling to approach the city as a living one.

[Seven Xu]

“I followed one building every six hours for a week straight. I barely slept and I nearly went mad, but I was sure that I’d found a pattern.” Seven stole a glance over his shoulder, first at the brunette, then her dog. “Positive, actually; but then I lost the damned thing. I thought I saw it, once, but when I got close enough to the building, everything about it had changed.”

The halfblood’s shoulders slumped beneath the weight of defeat as his fingers fumbled along his outer thighs within their linen confines. Had it not been so seasonably warm, he may have appreciated a pocket’s warm hug; for the time being, it was a place to put a pair of bored hands. When he stepped too hard on the ball of one glass-chewed foot, he hissed through his teeth and flinched away from the unforgiving ground. “I probably pissed it off, but,” he snorted through his nose, twisting his face into a pained, but derisive grin, “it just means I was onto something, doesn’t it?”

If Alvadas itself were a sentient thing, and not just a tangle of streets enchanted by a playful god, Seven had found the resolve to vex it as much as it did him. “So,” he chewed his bottom lip as his brows attempted to join at the point above his small nose. Alvadas dropped an intersection in his path, and he took a moment to inspect each branch of possibility before clearing his throat. “You and Laszlo seem to spend a lot of time together.”

Seven’s accusing eyes did not meet the pretty brunette’s as he stooped down to nurse a throbbing foot. “He is a poor replacement for a raccoon.”

[Abalia]

His experience with the city made Abalia smirk at her shoes as they trod along as easily as if there wasn't an unspoken tension between them, different on both sides. And that damned dog kept pace, no matter how many times she shot daggers at it with her eyes. She was just about to open her mouth to respond to him, to give him her perspective on the city, when his words became daggers. Yes, she'd spent some time with Laszlo. That was no secret. Handled differently, she might have flushed and laughed it off, shrugged pretty shoulders and looked away. Now, though, those full lips simply fell open with something like surprise. Had he... really...? She was reminded, suddenly, of all the reasons she'd disliked him from their very first encounter. Stamping her lips shut in a firm line, the pure and accessible nature of her emotions was closed off. Dark eyes narrowed, and she looked away. "Yes, well. There are no real replacements for people you love. Laszlo is interesting. Clever. I enjoy talking with him." And more. But, even then, it didn't mean he'd ever replace what she had lost. The more Abalia thought about the careless, or cruel (depending on its intent) comment, the more frustrated she became. Soon she'd stuffed her hands into her pockets and was scowling wordlessly at the street. "Has anyone you loved ever died, Seven?"

[Seven Xu]

“No,” Seven seemed unphased by the bristling woman at his side, “why?”

Inside, the hot tendrils of fear pierced his lungs, threatened to knock the wind out of him and send him reeling backwards into blackness. Creeping red was making its way up the pale column of his neck. How could she know? She could not know. Unless Laszlo …

A hand became a fist, before it stiffly wiped the corners of his mouth. He cleared his throat. “She isn’t dead,” it was a wonder his voice did not waver; “you’ll find her.”

You’ll never find her, his mind worked to rectify his circumstance; they had burned the body, hidden the bones, the skinchanger was irrevocably dead and buried and gone. A memory; one an Ethaefal shared, a man Seven was not so sure he could trust. He sucked in his bottom lip, mirrored Abalia’s gesture with a fumbling reach for the bottoms of his own coat pockets, and tried to find something particularly interesting about the mundane gathering of buildings the City had set before them.

There was a moment’s consideration, a shrug of heavy wool that sat over his shoulders. He had been careless, he had gone too far, and it had come back on him when he balked at the woman’s choice of words. “My mother could be dead,” he offered, “I can’t be sure, I’ve never known her. I could love her, and she could be dead.”

Those were a lot of coulds.

[Abalia]

"Almost counts," she mused to the open sky, refusing to glance his way. She had never known a mother either, and so she felt no swell of pity or remorse for his plight. Instead she was resentful that he could so callously treat her present loss, the very real and tangible mourning that had gripped her. Perhaps she was simply spoiled. Maybe Laszlo, with his smiling concern, coddled her too much. She'd simply forgotten that the rest of the world didn't care. And, maybe he was just an idiot. Not stupid, of course. A sidelong glance reaffirmed that she certainly thought this man named for a number was intelligent enough. The angular planes of his face, the quirk of his lip - perhaps he was even especially clever. That left only two options. He was socially inept and did not comprehend how hurtful his obtuse words could have been or, more likely, he didn't care. This last option made her bristle the most, if only because it was her own pain on display. "What are you, anyway?" With a less than smooth transition, Abalia steered him away from the ridiculous false hope of finding Roxanne. "Besides a mapmaker, and a barkeep. I mean... this." She waved a hand vaguely at his willowy frame with a furrowed brow.

[Seven Xu]

“This?” Seven’s brows bent, incredulous, eyes rolling askance at the slim finger pointed on him. She’d struck a nerve; that facetious accusation cut through those words like old daggers. Whispering protestations against cobblestone paused. He rocked to his toes, curled them hard between their leather cages. His hands emerged from the body-warm depths of his coat to knit together at the small of his back.

Abalia had seen a Widow, that he knew; Laszlo slipped into the ashy skin of a Symenestra nightly. She had spent fleeting chimes, arms flung akimbo over a slick bar top, trading smiles and hushed laughter with him. Perhaps she wanted something more; perhaps she was teasing him. The halfblood had grown quiet in his considerations, chewing at a fleshy bottom lip, twisting his features into some middle ground between absent thought and waning offense.

“I’m a bastard,” he finally said, eyes flickering between the girl’s legs and the short stretch of ground between them. A saccharine smile tipped the edges of his pale mouth, and the soles of his boots scraped a new path around a murky puddle an arm’s length wide; there was no telling how deep it really was. The Lhavitian’s tongue clicked against the roof of his mouth. He resisted the temptation to steal another sideward glance at his train. “I thought I had made that clear.”