Logs: Arrivée
Aug 26, 2011
Yesterday morning, he kissed his mother's cheeks goodbye, teased his older sisters, and endured the flinty stare of his father all the way to the car that spirited him away to the airport.
In the time between the moment that he set foot on the curb at Brussels and the chauffer departed, and now -- the moment at which he takes his first breath of unrecycled Japanese air, standing by the curb with two large pieces of luggage containing everything that he couldn't bear to part with for the coming year -- Sebastien has managed to:
-Buy a pretty necklace for Naomi as a 'thank-you' gift to give her at the time of his arrival,
-Consume six pints of Guinness, knowing that he probably won't be able to get any for the next year,
-Get four phone numbers while waiting for his plane to board,
-Lose the necklace he bought for Naomi when he decided to give it to a girl to whom one of those four phone numbers belonged,
-Almost miss his flight because he was flirting with someone, necessitating a swift race across the indoor atrium that may have involved going over and through obstacles rather than around them, and for which he'd have gotten into serious trouble if security could have caught up with him,
-Sweet-talk all but one of the stewardesses on his plane, acquiring phone number five in the process,
-Convince the person sitting next to him on the plane that he's actually a rockstar going on a tour of Japan,
-Acquire a new necklace from one of the stewardesses 'as something to remember by,' presumably because he'll remember how he fleeced her when he gives it to Naomi,
-Get lost in the Japanese airport,
-Toast someone at the airport bar with his first shot of sake with the (widely-used in Europe) Italian toast 'cin cin' -- which unfortunately happens to mean 'genitals' (chin chin) in Japanese,
-Scandalize a tiny Japanese man by doing a large amount of washing-up, tooth-brushing, and general personal care activities in the airport bathroom, and finally
-Get to the proper curb on the street for cars to pick up new arrivals, checking his Breitling watch now and then and inconspicuously forming his first impression of Japan, which is that a fish-based diet seems to produce an excellent pair of legs, but leaves something rather lacking in Departments of Tits and Ass.
He doesn't think much about his impending meeting with Naomi. They haven't seen one another in many, many years -- and doubtless, childish foibles are best forgotten.
<Pose Tracker> Naomi Suzuno [DS] has posed.
Naomi Suzuno, twelve years old, after a fit of crying in her pillows one evening, had sworn to all the spirits that may be listening that Sebastien Ardennais had cursed her for no reason, after having to dispose of her favorite, lucky riding boots. It had been the reason why she lost the annual exhibition, when she had been winning first place every year since her enrollment in the prestigious riding institution, losing to a French girl on the British style of equestrianship....her, a part-Englishwoman!
A year passes, a plane crash happens, and the young woman spends two years in a hospital. It is reasonable to believe that those childish affairs and thoughts of curses wrought upon her by ill-mannered, thirteen year-old European boys have faded into the backburners of her history when a personal cataclysm of such magnitude has consumed everything else. Needless to say, in the ensuing years, she has not once thought of Sebastien Ardennais, or the curse he placed upon her at twelve years old...
....until a dinnertime conversation with her father two evenings ago.
It's as if the recollection of that boy has caused that resurgence of bad luck again. As usual, she could never refuse her beloved father anything, but ever since the news, the cosmic forces at work in the universe seem to be doing their level best in ensuring that she never gets to pick Sebastien up from the airport. Traffic was horrenduous; it took -forever- to get to the Sumaru airport. With the swiftness that would make her speed-freak driver proud, the moment she gets to the terminal, she only realizes until an hour had passed that Shin had dropped her off at the -departures- area and not the arrivals.
Merde!
After finding her way to the arrivals terminal, she digs out her Phone from her purse, quickly flipping through her myriad e-mails in an effort to pull up the latest picture Sebastien's mother had sent her - an e-mail she has read, but was unable to look at the image prior due to the onset of business, for ease of identification - after all, it has been half a decade since she's last seen Sebastien. Finding the e-mail, a thumb taps lightly on the highlighted link of the picture.
FILE CORRUPTED
She stares at her LCD screen in disbelief.
Two hours pass...
At the curb where Sebastien stands, patiently waiting for a ride that seems to have -forgotten- him, a young woman steps next to him, searching about one end of the waiting area and another, rising on her tip-toes despite the length of her delicate, high-heeled sandals. The raven-tressed young woman chews softly on her rosy bottom lip. She may only look apprehensive on the outside, but deep inside, she's panicking.
She lost him.
Oh god oh god oh god oh god she lost him. She'll never find him in this mess. He could be anywhere by now. Visions swirl wildly in her imagination, fueled there by worry. He ran afoul with the Yakuza, floating face-first in Sumaru river. He gets in a cab, only to be murdered by a serial killer. He has his first taste of sushi, only to expire of asphyxiation after eating the wrong cut of fugu.
Or worse, striking up a friendly conversation with a group of Japanese salarymen who force him to drink himself to death while singing karaoke.
"Oh god oh god oh god..." she frets in English, thumbing desperately at her phone, only for the e-mail to refuse to download Sebastien's photograph properly. "Eff Em El~~!"
<Pose Tracker> Sebastien Ardennais [U] has posed.
Two hours.
TWO HOURS.
In that time, Sebastien has managed to:
-Concoct an elaborate plan to avenge himself on Naomi for making him wait this long,
-Forget all about his plan to avenge himself on her because he's sure he's going to die of boredom,
-Count all of the cracks in the sidewalk just outside of the automatically sliding doors,
-Mentally compose a very strongly worded letter to his parents about how Naomi is not exactly the responsible human being they insisted that she is when they signed him up for this crap,
-Mentally inventory the belongings he brought and lament the absence of the others,
-Mentally compose a very strongly worded email to his sisters about what he'll do to them if they touch the stuff he left at home,
-Come up with a new plan for avenging himself on Naomi due to his excessive boredom in having been /forgotten at the airport/,
-Praised his younger self for having had the prescience to realize that this was a girl who needed her boots filled with manure,
-Wonder how long it will take him to die of hunger, and finally,
-Attain a state of mental emptiness as a means of coping with having to STAND STILL FOR TWO HOURS, which is -- for him -- almost unthinkable.
It's really /only/ because he's thrown his mind into neutral that it takes him a moment to process that he's hearing English words from the girl beside him, at which point he looks down and is confronted...
With the top of Naomi's head.
He stares at it.
He...
Keeps staring. His expression is a perfect mask.
It cracks quite suddenly, his eyes lidding, his smile feral as he sinks into a sloooow lean against his shoulder, rolling his head to the side to give her --
~the smolder~
"Ma petite...you sound as though you need some assistance."
His English is stained with both Brit and French, with little he can do about it. He has at some point had his /hair cut/: the photograph would not likely have been much use, in any case.
<Pose Tracker> Naomi Suzuno [DS] has posed.
In the ensuing moments, her panic only increases. Sumaru is a -dangerous city-. Criminal elements, randy Japanese salarymen and a very suspicious red light district aside, Naomi once again feels tears well up, culled there by dread, momentarily reverting back to that twelve year old girl from close to six years ago. However, the Spencer heiress takes a deep breath in an effort to maintain her calm - it wouldn't do, to lose her head in this situation. She's tackled more difficult challenges before; the task before her is simple enough, find a presumably tall, Belgian-English gaijin, one whom she has absolutely no idea what he looks like now, who may be lost and possibly on the verge of getting killed in the deadly urban jungle that she has fallen in love with over the last two years (proof positive that one Tatsuya Suou's assertions have been correct in the past, about her being perpetually smitten with danger).
Alright, she thinks. It isn't as if she could go to the Lost and Found but perhaps she'll be able to go to the airline and ensure that he -has- landed, and then quite possibly use the public service system to page Sebastien Ardennais to meet her somewhere...
'Ma petite...you sound as though you need some assistance.'
The words are easy, languid and accented - confident, for someone who has managed to land in a country notorious for being terribly wary towards foreigners. Naomi turns about on her sandals, looking up at the tall caucasian youth occupying the same space as her, his brows lifted in inquiry and a corner of his mouth tilted like so. Handsome, for certain....an unexpected visual treat in what is quickly proving to be an extremely stressful day.
Violet eyes blink at him from under tousled raven strands. Her delicate features, this close, are certainly Asiatic - but not fully so, though it would be difficult to discern the difference if one isn't familiar with the way genetics lean in this side of the world. Her face is set with high cheekbones, softened by the artful layered cut of her very loose curls, and her eyes are more round than almond, though they still tilt slightly in the corners; a subtly feline appearance.
"...I..." she begins, her usual poise faltering.
...but her confidence returns in short order. Naomi smiles at the young man; genuine enough, but with the requisite detachment etiquette dictates to be levied to strangers. "Forgive me if my fretting disturbed you, I'm afraid that I've lost something I was supposed to retrieve while I'm here. I was about to go inside to see if I can't try my hand at tracking down my quarry." She addresses him in English, her accent evident, but the mix within his own has her tilting her head at him curiously.
...because it sounds familiar...
"I wouldn't wish to impose. Were you waiting for a taxi?"
<Pose Tracker> Sebastien Ardennais [U] has posed.
She looks, as far as he can remember, almost exactly the same. Better, in that it would be strange if she hadn't matured -- grown at once softer and harder, the way that girls seem to when they become young women -- but Naomi has always taken meticulous care of herself; while Sebastien may have changed somewhat from the free-ranging youth approximately a foot shorter than he is now, back then all tousled chin-length hair that he loved to let curtain his eyes (the better to conceal whatever it was that he was up to), she ...is in large part the way he recalls her.
She doesn't recognize him immediately, and in the back of his head, he does a quick calculus: should he allow her to stew in her present ignorance for a while?
It is a /very/ quick calculus, in fact.
"Mais non, mademoiselle, no imposition. Would you like some assistance in finding what it is that you've lost? What was it, a -- a package?"
As he speaks he turns away from her, the better to preserve his ruse that much longer; in that position, he's able to unlock and extend the handles on his rolling luggage. His attire is fairly nondescript, at least: a blank, pale blue t-shirt, a pair of belted, stonewashed jeans with a boot cut, a pair of Puma sneakers, a grey baseball hat designed to conceal the worst of the bedhead that results from a sixteen hour flight to Japan. It might even be easy to overlook the $8000.00 watch he's wearing on his left wrist, in such attire.
<Pose Tracker> Naomi Suzuno [DS] has posed.
"Are you sure? It wouldn't be much trouble?" She sounds so earnest and -desperate-, anyone with a conscience would feel some sympathy. But this is Sebastien Ardennais, devoted prankster, and if he wasn't certain earlier that she doesn't recognize him, he would find confirmation very quickly. "Two pairs of eyes would be better than one and if you really aren't in any hurry to get anywhere, I would be very grateful if you did." At the mention of a package, Naomi shakes her head quickly. "No, he's..."
How do you explain this?
"He was a boy I knew, when I was younger. ...well, a young man now, obviously. About my age. He's...Belgian, and part English, which is really why his parents and mine knew one another really. Same society back in England. He..." She rubs her cheek self-consciously with a set of fingers, laughing. "You'd find it silly but when I was twelve, I tried to do him a favor but he got so wroth with me that he ended up ruining my favorite pair of boots out of revenge, for a few long months I thought he cursed me." She grouses under her breath. "....I suppose he's still bad luck after all these years."
As he glances away, the young woman takes the time to take a look at him - dressed casually, he looked to be twenty at most and fresh out of a plane ride. She knows the look......and well to do, judging by the watch clasped around his left wrist, as always someone who notices luxury items, especially when they appear out of place in her first impressions.
"...anyway I've no idea what he looks like now. His mother sent me a picture through my e-mail but it refuses to download and truthfully I'm worried. I don't know if he knows enough Japanese to get about, and Yakuza activity has only increased in the last two months....ugh, I recall him being such a prankster, and my brain can't stop tormenting me with visions of his dead body floating in the nearby river!"
<Pose Tracker> Sebastien Ardennais [U] has posed.
Sympathy. Guilt.
He knows what they are, objectively. He /is/ capable of sympathy, and he /may/ be capable of guilt, if the transgression is serious enough, but really --
Didn't she sign up for this when she left him standing here for two /hours/? With his faulty grasp of the language, yes (though it won't be faulty for long), and -- oh, is Yakuza activity up as well, and still she left him here? Then she mentions the boot incident, and somehow connects that to his present circumstances: is she saying that somehow this is his fault??
The longer she speaks, the more she ensures that he won't feel guilty about a single thing, and the corners of his mouth tuck upward, cheshire, as he rolls along with that ball-bearing gait of his beside her, one suitcase tilted into either hand. The doors of the airport open up and exhale a gasp of air conditioning, then swallow them whole. The noise of the overhead speaker making announcements, peole dodging to and fro -- including a fat man with a mound of luggage on a cart who stops beside it to strike an embarrassing rockstar pose, laughing and waving his multiple chins in Sebastien's direction.
"He has me confused with some rockstar or other," he confides to the dark-haired heiress as they track along. He's leading them toward the help desk, where earlier he learned that a very helpful young woman there speaks French. It's how he finally learned where to /go/. "I didn't have the heart," he's saying, "to correct him. Ah. Let's find out where your friend might have gone, eh? Surely if he was lost or confused, he would speak to the help desk."
They draw up beside it and he leaves his luggage there, leaning against the desk with fluid ease and rapping his knuckles on it twice, until the tiny Japanese woman looks up and smiles politely.
"Excuse me, this young lady is looking for someone," he rattles off, in the requisite language. Naomi may or may not know French -- he can't recall, but for safety's sake, despite his ruse almost having reached the end of its lifespan, he assumes that she does. "She doesn't know what he looks like, but she tells me that he's from Belgium. He would have landed...how long ago?" Brow arched, he looks sidelong at Naomi, and drops back into English. "When were you to meet him?"
<Pose Tracker> Naomi Suzuno [DS] has posed.
It's TOTALLY HIS FAULT. He's an aristocrat. A GROWN MAN. Why did he end up getting kicked out just to land in her neighborhood?! It wasn't fair!!!
Shades of what could have been Naomi's confined rant inside of her bedroom the night after hearing the news from her father; blame the culture and blame her leanings, but in spite of her misgivings, she is determined to do as good of a job as she can, regardless of every instinct and good sense telling her that it was, in its most optimistic, akin to a climb to the peak of Mount Everest after eating one's weight in cakes and cookies and spending a slothful existence on a couch watching old re-runs in the telly.
But she pivots with him, with every intent to go along with this enterprise and with the help of some mysterious European boy who was taking his time to help her (and be appalled, that he did this to her again a few hours from now - leave her with the impression of a decent, caring young man only to inevitably turn these impressions over their heads). But then she pauses when she watches a corpulent adult male gesticulate wildly towards Sebastien...who gets a sideways glance from the Spencer heiress after she sees it.
"Well...? Are -you- a rockstar?" Naomi teases unabashedly, nevermind the fact that she just met him; it's just the way she is. "It would explain the watch on your wrist. Don't worry, even if you are, I won't tell anyone. I promise."
She hesitates when they reach the help desk, where the young man with her speaks to the girl over the counter in French. To the surprise of -no one- who knows her, the young woman is actually, presently learning the language along with Italian and Arabic, and while she learns quickly, she can't be said to be conversant in any of them. Some of his words are familiar - 'girl,' 'Belgium,' and 'he'. When turned to, the heiress nods. "A few hours ago," she says, looking downright sheepish as she says this. "Traffic was horrendous getting here because of a highway accident, and then my driver dropped me off at the wrong terminal - it was less crowded, he was probably hoping it would make me reach him faster because I was already late, and then...some technical difficulties. He was flying on..." She rattles off Sebastien's flight information.
"His name is Sebastien Ardennais."
<Pose Tracker> Sebastien Ardennais [U] has posed.
"A few hours ago," Sebastien says, translating with the swift rapidity of one accustomed to such activities, relied upon for his easy grasp of tongues. The woman behind the desk would be giving him a strange look already if she weren't so /Japanese/, but he's pleased to find that she remains carefully and studiedly polite and neutral throughout. God bless Nippon restraint, he thinks to himself.
He was here two hours ago, telling her what flight he came in on, that he was looking for a young woman with dark hair, half-Japanese, had she seen her? No, the response had come, she hadn't, but she would let the young lady know where he was if she came to ask after him.
And now he's here. At the desk. Asking her questions about himself, in the company of the person he was looking for. The information clerk is perfectly aware that something is going on...and absolutely baffled as to what that thing might be. She's probably chalking it up to 'crazy gaijin things.'
That is probably going to happen a lot.
"And his name is Sebastien Ardennais. He hasn't been by the desk to see you, has he? Poor lost soul?"
The woman stares at him with her impassive black eyes, and then slowly nods her head once, glancing briefly at Naomi.
"Oh, excellent! She says that she's seen him," he tells Naomi, with a broad, pearly smile. His weight lists further into the arm atop the desk, a confidential posture far more intimate than Japanese society would find formally polite as he inquires of the woman behind the desk, "And might you point out where this young man has gone?"
The clerk sits very still for a long, thoughtful moment, no doubt trying to discern what the most polite of possible resopnses could be...but trying to bend one's head around Whatever Ridiculous Thing Sebastien Is Doing is not a pasttime that most enjoy. Eventually, she lifts one hand, and indicates...
Him.
Which sends the Belgian reeling backward, eyebrows cocked upward, an expression of faux shock on his face as he touches the center of his chest. "Oh, he's /me/?" Aghast. Appalled! He turns his open-mouthed, round-eyed look on Naomi. "She says he's /me/. You'd think I would know if he was me, wouldn't you?" Already, he's digging his passport from the ass pocket of his jeans without once taking his eyes off of her -- until he neatly flips it open and looks down at a picture of himself, and his name. His free hand comes up to grip his chin thoughtfully, as though troubled. "Oh, well. Look at that. He /is/ me. I mean, /I/ am me. I confess I'd quite forgotten...possibly as a result of the /brain damage/ I suffered during the /three hours that I was standing on the curb inhaling Japanese exhaust fumes/ while I waited for you to pick me up," he drawls, snapping the passport shut and tucking it into his pocket. His eyes have lidded again. "Without even calling my mobile. Honestly, I thought you were just leaving me here."
<Pose Tracker> Naomi Suzuno [DS] has posed.
There is something wrong here.
Benign intentions fall away into something veiled; Ma'at assists her in that regard, and even when Sebastien flashes her those pearly whites, Naomi knows that something is wrong. Unfortunately, she isn't gifted with the ability to discern what it actually -is-, and so even as the young man converses with the French-speaking attendant behind the counter, she is already reaching into her purse, slowly, carefully....
...for her can of mace.
She grips it tightly in readiness, the young woman keeping her facial expression perfectly....well, the same as he had seen it, just in case this situation goes south. And it does, eventually, but not in the way that she expects. It's revealed to her, finally, that the young man she has been looking for this entire time had been playing her for a fool and pretending -not- to be her quarry. What's more, unlike herself, -he- actually recognized her.
So two things happen. One, her face drains of color when Sebastien is identified as being him. "....you're Sebastien?" she reiterates, somewhat weakly, looking slightly gray when her mistake is pointed out. Her fingers slowly, surely, slacken their hold on her can of mace.
Two, he continues ranting, and she considers using the mace anyway. Hadn't he heard about everything she said earlier? She was delayed! It wasn't her fault!
"I never got your mobile," she says defensively. "Just your itinerary and your photograph, which I couldn't even download!" No thanks to you, Pay-by-the-Minute European Internet!!! Or whatever the hell they used up in the mountains in Belgium!
And then her lips part further, specifically to address the part about the brain damage - but forces her teeth to click shut.
No, it would be far from dignified.
Instead, she takes a deep breath. "I'm sorry I was late," she tells him stiffly, giving him a shallow bow to the waist. Once, before suddenly pivoting and stalking towards the door. How could she have not recognized him? Save for the height difference, he hasn't changed at all!
<Pose Tracker> Sebastien Ardennais [U] has posed.
"You couldn't have called your parents or something? Gotten my number? For all you know I was standing out there in anxieties over /your/ current state of safety," Sebastien points out, either oblivious to or disregarding her click-jawed irritation. He lazily appropriates the handles of his suitcases, gives the woman behind the desk a wry little wink, and then follows along in the wake of her brisk stride for the door, moving more lazily than he did on their way in. Those blue eyes had taken something of a gilded cast as his ploy reached its culmination -- a little gleam of the shadow that has its tendrils wound all through the bars of his ribcage -- but it wanes as they hit the wall of heat of that Japanese summer. He's barely aware of the retort he gave her; he's been doing this for so long that these responses don't usually need his direct oversight, anymore.
Which is why, as they reach the curb again, he chats at her as though he hadn't just made every effort to trounce her for having failed to recognize him for who he is. "Which brings us to the next order of business: I've been on the curb for three hours and a plane for no less than sixteen, and I'm bloody famished. Tell me that you haven't had anything to eat yet, petite. Lunch is on me. If you pick somewhere with ambiance, we can scandalize everyone when I spoil you with all of the gifts my family sent along. I hope you haven't lost your taste for Belgian chocolate. Or jewelry."
Actually, he thinks absently, he probably should've checked to make sure that the necklace didn't have initials on it anywhere.
<Pose Tracker> Naomi Suzuno [DS] has posed.
And he continues. An elegantly arched eyebrow ticks over her eye as she continues walking in that same, graceful, dignified way, head held high while pretending she -wasn't with- Sebastien as he rolls unhelpfully after her. Never the type to be idle or silent, especially as he continues to hammer at her pride in public, she spins around to outright -glower- at him from where she stands. Her safety? HER SAFETY?! Ma'at, inside her head, is practically writhing with -pain-, and she's certain a lie detector in the police department just exploded this very instant! "I'd find that hard to believe when my last memory of you involved stripping me of -my dignity-," she retorts sharply. Her memory is long enough to recall -that-, at least, in spite of the clear fact that she was unable to do so with his face. "So forgive me when I-- " Think that's bullshit!!! "-- call shenanigans on your part. I'm just thankful nothing burned down while you were left to your own devices." Or worse.
She is still gnashing her teeth behind closed lips as they head for the parking lot, where Shin is waiting for them inside the blessedly cool black Lincoln, and quite possibly the only reason why he has managed to survive Japan's humidity while perpetually dressed, while working, in a full chauffeur's uniform. At the sudden chattiness of the young man next to her, as if the last few minutes hadn't just happened, she gapes at him openly.
This is what she has to work with?
There is no God!
"....your family is very kind, they didn't need to send me gifts." She means this part at least. "...but don't call me petite," she sighs - it was embarrassing, she's hardly little; not anymore. "And yes, we can get you something to eat." It was the least she can do; some part of her does feel guilty for leaving him here for three hours.
But then...
"We'll get you some sushi. Or ramen."
RAMEN? Didn't he say ambiance?!
As Shin opens the door for her, Naomi gives Sebastien a look. "I was informed about your stipend. I was already late, I'm not about to be responsible for you becoming broke on your first day."
<Pose Tracker> Sebastien Ardennais [U] has posed.
She abruptly stops and spins around, forcing him to do the same, and while his expression of vague amusement remains, what characterizes the slight arch of one of his brows is /intrigue/. Outwardly she may be much the same as he remembers her, but inwardly clearly the playing field has changed; this is not a girl who seems likely to burst into tears about a pair of riding boots. There is more fire, more steel in her than there was before, and that? Is interesting.
Of course she has to refer to the Boot Manure Incident of 2005 (or whenever the hell it was), and this more than anything is what shatters his look of curious regard, prompting his gaze to roll heavenward as he mutters and tilts forward, regaining his lost momentum behind her. "Only a woman would keep her dignity in her shoes."
At the car, he'll decline any assistance -- assuming that it is offered -- with getting his things into the trunk. He is undoubtedly spoiled, but he also grew up on what amounts to a working farm; they have a staff, but hard work is simply the hallmark of a family whose fortune was made in a more agrarian way.
He meets her look across the breadth of the car, and inwardly sighs -- then decides he might as well sigh outwardly too, popping the seal on the door in order to slide into the comforts of the seat opposite hers. "They did, did they. D'accord, my humiliation is nearly complete." He gives a dismissive flick of fingers that would do credit to a surgeon or pianist. "I'm sure they'd be delighted. Nevermind the restaurant; I can find something of my own later. I won't have it said that I abused your generosity on my first day in Japan."
Besides, he's fairly sure he can con a better meal out of someone less well-informed later.
