Logs: Everything is Terrible

IC Date: June 9, 2011
Who: Izo Imaizumi, Yisa Taimiev
Location: Izo's Apartment
What: What the

Today is a Wednesday, and Izo is using up one of the very few sick days allowed by the University -- in fact, one of only a handful of sickdays he's ever used in his life, and for good reason: last night's exertions took a serious toll. His cold hasn't worsened, per se, but he's store and his body is aching right down to the dusty violet marrow at the core of each and every one of his bones. His congestion has shifted from his nose and head to his chest, producing an occasional wracking cough. His fever is under better control than it was, with a fresh dose of codeine-based cough and cold medication, but he's exchanged the dizziness of a high temperature for a loopy, floating over-the-counter disconnection.

There is also the wound in his stomach to consider. A grim smile, a gift from a knife, it begins as a deep puncture wound and then twists into a smirk to one side, a visible echo of whatever twist away from the blade he must have made at the moment that violence erupted. It's that ugly bend in the wound that reopened when a flaming valkyrie riding a wolf unexpectedly charged him in a dark alley and sent him sprawling into refuse (and really, can one ever really /expect/ to be flung down a dark alley by a flaming valkyrie riding a wolf?). Last night's chaos simply worsened a reinjury that had already occurred.

And so, here he is: lying on the platform in his single-room apartment, blanket-doused and drowsy, while the television across the way fills the darkness with flickering light the color of old bones.

When someone knocks.

He could be forgiven for his moment of deja vu. It was only two nights ago that he had another unexpected guest (and then another, in Akio, with unfortunate timing). He thumbs the pause button on the remote in his dangling hand, and looks up at the ceiling as he considers whether or not he wants to answer, evaluating the knock. It is a strong knock. It is a stronger knock than Mariko's knock. Akio doesn't knock at all.

Maybe it's for school, then -- school, or work.

He holds his breath as he pushes himself upright, eyes tight, and then gets to his feet, brain fizzing a bit as his circulation catches up with his height. Barefoot and cargo-shorted, t-shirted and short-sleeved, there are no few tattoos in evidence when he pops the lock on the door and pulls it side, expression all expectation.

He probably doesn't expect this.

On his doorstep stands a very familiar frown. It belongs to an equally familiar young woman, one of the most ostensible foreigners inside Japan whose dark skin and spirally hair makes her the veritable sore thumb. With all the squared rigidity of a rifle, she straightens her posture, twines her hands behind her back, lifts her stubborn jaw, and stares Izo dead in the eyes.

Yisa Taimiev has her methods.

Not that she'd even thought to use them at first. She attended her classes today with her usual dedication, taking space and mindfully writing notes, but her thoughts were the farthest thing from today's lecture on ethics and morality. Her own morality was reminding her constantly of the masquerade ball of the night prior, the commotion she had missed by hairs, and its subsequent fallout. It frustrated her what she must have missed. It felt like a failure to her own vows. And on top of that, the bar bouncer of all people was there... and the young man called Masahiko Irie had announced the former as someone who was stopping an attack.

Stopping an attack... wasn't he a civilian? Wasn't he supposed to be a student at this campus not unlike herself? An employee at a Yakuza club? Why would he be stopping attacks? Why would he be taking on injuries to protect others?

Classes progressed, and Yisa's own brooding thoughts deepened by the hour.

And before she knew it, she was excusing herself from her afternoon classes to march straight back into Yamaguchi-gumi territory. Straight back into the bar. And straight back into the faces of its staff to demand the whereabouts of its absent bouncer.

And now it's led her here, looking just as prim and pristine as he'd last seen her, missing the white dress and in its place a pair of pressed jeans and a dark green sweater just mindful enough of the lingering spring chill. She's still wearing her glasses, little wireframes, having forgotten to remove them since her last class. The overhead light catches on their lenses.

It almost hides the way the expression falters in her eyes when she eventually appraises Izo, looking him up and down, and something about his clothes gives her a heartbeat of pause, her frown hitching as she creases the corners of her mouth. But it doesn't last, and Yisa's fierce gaze ultimately returns back to Izo's eyes. She glares at him greenly.

And she announces, with little preamble: "I must speak to you."

No. No, he does not expect this.

Although, given this week, one might argue that he probably /should/ have.

Blinking and squinting into the harsh corridor light, apartment all but black behind him, the door's swinging movement halts abruptly as he recognizes that /frown/, and answers it with one of his own, albeit a much milder rendition. In those moments, there can be only one thought:

HOW DO ALL OF THESE BITCHES KNOW WHERE HE LIVES!?

One broad shoulder slowly settles into the door frame as his weight shifts, torso slanted along a hammock curve toward the hip nearest the doorknob, a studied slacker's lean, his hand retaining control of the handle on the inside. the other thumb finds a home in the waistband of his shorts, hooked there to hang loosely, a small diamond of gauze and medical tape referring to the events ofthe evening prior.

"Listen," he says, the velvets of his voice shredded by his illness, "I'm sorry I made that crack about your dress. It was a long night, and I haven't been feeling well this week, so maybe...you'll be willing to cut me some slack."

It's with commendable effort that Yisa continues to meet Izo's eyes, her stare firm and steady, though testament to her alertness, her attention twitches and wavers against any peripheral movement. Unconsciously, she follows the bouncer's tattoos down to the movement of his hand against his waistband, narrows her eyes at the visible glimpse of bandaging, realizes she's staring, and quickly glances away with a noticeable clench of her jaw.

It leaves Yisa flustered enough to respond Izo a little sharper than she'd intended. "Don't be stupid!" she snaps back, her patience already shredded. Memory filters back his quip on her dress. A wedding. She was ready to slap him for it if not for Irie--

There's a darkening to her face, a vague threat like that old anger would love to return, but Yisa forces it back, smothering her own temper down with an audible exhale. The broken, raspy condition of his voice sobers her enough to maintain control. Is he sick on top of everything?

And Yisa continues, somewhat more gently, though her carefully-eununciated words sound a little forced. "This is not about that. This is important. I have to speak to you. You only need to listen. You must invite me in."

Diplomatic protocol of the elite keeps her firmly planted on his doorstep. Yisa has some comprehension of basic etiquette. Some.

Tattoos: he has quite a few.

Forearms, and the span above his elbows, but below the hem of his sleeves, reveal two different scenees in progress: the left involves stylized swirls of moving water, intercut with koi which appear to be making some kind of transformation as they swim upward toward his shoulder in the white, lacy froth -- a transformation into something more like a dragon, in fact. The right side is almost feminine; blushing pink and white sakura blossoms drip down toward his wrist, though close to his sleeve are what may be the pinions of a bird's wing, splayed. Presumably these divergent images connect at his back, or possibly on his chest.

He is accustomed to people staring at them, whenever they're visible to be stared at: they mark him as part of the family, or at the very least a Japanese youth with a certain degree of disregard for polite society and traditional values. That she looks barely registers -- he's too concerned with what she's doing with her fists to notice, or care. After all -- his alliances are no secret from her, as things stand.

"I'm sick," he tells her, as though that might not have penetrated her skull the first time. "If you come in, you might wind up getting what I have."

But even as he says it, he's letting the door hang open on its hinges of its own accord, leaving the entrance to the small apartment to gape like a black maw, strobing on occasion with whatever movie he has playing in the background. "But suit yourself."

The tattoos do draw more than a little bit of interest from Miss Taimiev -- all in the form of countless, small little glances -- who has never seen too many of them in her sheltered life. Permanent markings are haram in Islam, forbidden by her father and rarely seen in the Chechen Republic. Designs as complex and ornate spanning Izo's skin is diverting to her, enough that she's sure later on she'll think back and wonder on their placement and meanings.

For now, Yisa's thoughts are all business.

"I'll take my chances," she replies simply, though the young woman doesn't sound too off-put by his illness. She doesn't think she's gotten sick once since that day she survived execution aside the mass grave. She may even believe she's wholly incapable of sickness as a being transcendent of human weaknesses.

But proud as she is, she has some decency to look surprised when he lets her in. Yisa was expecting the opposite. She was gearing herself up for a fight to convince him. Somewhat anti-climactically, she crosses the threshold, some of her confidence wavering once she bodily enters another's private space.

Yisa doesn't have much experience being a guest in others' homes. She's never had enough friends for that.

But she takes it upon herself to close the door behind her, her protective instincts roused just enough to have her lock it back in place. Turning back from the deadbolt, the Chechen only allows herself a moment to pull her eyes around the interior of the apartment in a cursory assessment. It stops when her gaze ends on Izo, locking back on his eyes.

Her expression hardens. And never one for small-talk, or really any social finesse, Yisa announces: "You're an absolute idiot, and I cannot believe your bravado. You will promise me you'll never repeat that stunt."

He watches her while she steps in and looks around in the small genkan; he watches her while she locks his door, as though it belonged to her, and were her door to decide to close. He watches her look back up at him with all of her self-possessed certainty, that imperious arrogance that he told her smelled like money, the second time they met -- because that is the only experience he's ever had with imperious women, this being Japan: that money somehow gives them permission to behave that way, implying subtle ownership of everything they see or touch.

It's quite the preface, what she says. His brow climbs a little, and after a moment he lifts a hand, rubbing at his unshaven jaw and turning from her to head back into the apartment, because all signs point to this being a long conversation...and damnit, he does not /feel good/. He is going to sit down, and she can follow or stand as she pleases.

Only once he's carefully, gingerly seated himself on the edge of the platform and turned on one of the vases at either end does he answer her.

"I'm not sure I know what you're talking about."

Transparent confusion crosses her face when the bar bouncer, the man she spent the better half of the afternoon attempting the track down, the man who occupied her angry thoughts for the day, the man whom she's spending her very precious time... walks away from her proclamation.

Yisa has a look on her face like she's not used to that happening often.

Her eyes widen, staring at him incredulously behind her glasses, and in shock, Yisa forgets to correct her own unseemly gaping. No one turns away from her. No one WALKS AWAY from what she has to say!

The slap of shock fades, and in its place is that slow, expected build of temper, rage crawling down her musculature until it terminates in the reflexive clenching of her fists. She inhales thinly, unable to breathe momentarily through her mounting indignation, and finally just --

-- exhales it all out, like an exorcised ghost, through her teeth. Not the time. Not the place. She can do this.

When she's sure she's regained control of her temper, as well as the rest of her body, Yisa follows Izo's retreat further into his apartment. He sits, but she lingers, her sense of decorum stopping her from doing the same unless invited. Though she's sure she'd rather remain standing even so. Yisa needs to keep up appearances for talks like these.

"Yes you do," she counters, the residue of her temper leaving a little bite in her voice. "I'm speaking of the masked ball. There was an incident, and you repelled the attack. What were you doing?! Is this something you do often?!"

There are a lot of things wrong with this picture.

Actually, everything about this picture is completely nonsensical.

First, Yisa does not lose any love in his direction. Of that he can be one-hundred-percent certain; there are many things about which she is /not/ clear, but that is not one of them. She doesn't like him. She seems to like him a great deal less than people he feels he's given more reason to dislike him, in fact, so about her feelings concerning his person he thinks he's on pretty solid ground.

The nonsense begins with the bit where she showed up at his apartment, somehow, using recourse he cannot begin to fathom to find out where he lives (and he thinks in his medicinal haze that she doesn't even /know his name/, forgetting that last night Masahiko did use his last name to introduce him)...in order to...what?

Lecture him about /recklessness/?

The young woman who always seems to be doing something violent? /Always/?

And not even just violence. That, he could understand. She's going to lecture him about /helping to stop an attack on innocent people/?

So really, he probably ought to ask a few basic questions, like 'how did you find out where I live,' or possibly 'what is your name,' which would also be a good starting point, but he can't, because every single thing about this is nonsense, and trying to apply logic to it seems like an exercise in frustration waiting to happen. Instead, he adjusts his priorities, and decides to stick with the threat of the conversation, such as it is. Maybe the other details will become apparent in time.

"Well, first of all, I didn't repel it," he corrects, after sucking on his upper teeth. He leans forward, braces his forearms on his knees, and laces his hands loosely between them. A silver necklace with an abstract pendant dangles from his neck and swings in the air. "A lot of other people were there, and did their parts, I just tried to make sure the person that seemed responsible didn't get away." There, a frown: in that, he failed spectacularly, in a completely unanticipated way. "And second, I'm not sure why that has anything to do with you."

"You mustn't argue with me," Yisa immediately replies, speaking with the smoothness and clarity of someone who's probably been rehearsing this speech in her head all day. And she has. She can't get her mind off of this.

The Chechen bows her head to watch the seated yong man, looking Izo straight in the eyes. "This is important. You've injured yourself. I refuse to repeat myself on the significance of this matter." Yisa mentally berates herself on that last sentence. It sounds like something her father's told her.

Instead, she dares a step closer, that confrontational trait always daring her forward, as if half-anticipating physical persuasion is needed to back her own words. Her green eyes avert, something like a crow, to the shine of light against Izo's pendant, before they flick back up on his face. Unconsciously, she pushes back a stray tress of her curly hair, one of the small, dark locks audacious enough to escape her knotted bun. Just as stubborn as the rest of her, it falls back to place between her eyes. "It's not your duty," she continues. "I don't know who you are, but you have said you're an attending student to Sumaru's campus. It's my territory. So this, and... you, I suppose, have everything to do with me. You can't commit to recklessness ever again. You must come to me."

The icing on this very illogical cake whose layers are deep and rich and endless is that look in Yisa's face, grim and proud and adamant and... completely serious. "I'll protect you."

Aneton may have saved Izo's life tonight.

Not because it's a codeine-infused cough medication and it's keeping him from further bruising his ribs, but because the codeine has him so mellow and so fog-headed that when she says 'I'll protect you' that way, all seriousness and drama, as though this were a movie, he doesn't do what he would probably have done on any other night, which is laugh.

His brows slowly furrow, lifting once when she uses the word 'territory,' only to fall again afterward.

Eventually, he extends a hand outward, palm toward the ceiling, fingers splayed. With them, he begins to answer her points, ticking them off each to a finger as he goes.

"One, I don't think of being willing to act in order to protect other people as a duty. It's the right thing to do. There is a difference. Two, my name is Izo Imaizummi, and I'm a little bit confused as to how you found out where I'm living if you don't know who I am. Three, I'm curious about what you mean by 'territory.' And fourth--"

Nobody has really informed him that he's not supposed to talk about these things, yet. It's still hard to broach the issue, but given that she's steadfastly refused to make even a modicum of sense since he's met her, he feels entitled to potentially not make any to her, either.

"--fourth, miss, I seriously doubt that you can protect me from the kinds of things I'm having to be protected from lately, which include things like demons, one-eyed men who shoot fireballs, and crazy <<Raiders of the Lost Ark>> beams of light that suck souls out of people at fancy parties. And that is not even beginning to scratch the surface of a few of the less strange adversaries I'm not willing to get into, though you've seen where I work. You can probably hazard a guess. It's---"

What is it? He isn't even sure.

"/Nice/ of you, to say that. But I don't think...that you are in possession of all of the facts." And that said, he relaces his hands.

And Yisa stands there, stiff as ever, her entire body language infused with an unspoken expectation. Like she's waiting there politely to be thanked. To be replied with deep and profound gratitude. To be...

...listed off to by the fingers of Izo's hand.

Point the first just makes her freeze in place, her face seizing with sincere confusion accented by a slight part of her lips. Point the second makes her jaw snap back shut with a pointed click of her teeth, her eyes momentarily turned with a mild fluster. Point the third makes her look really inclined to speak, opening her mouth again with a pointed finger to interrupt--

--only for point the fourth, instead, to have Yisa look like it's her turn in their interactions to get slapped soundly across the face. As she listens, paused in place, Yisa wonders for the umpteenth time during this stay in Japan if she's parsed the language right. Did she just hear him say...

Looking troubled, the Chechen allows herself a moment to collect her thoughts. But she won't let this go uncountered. "First of all, Mr. Imaizumi," she says, with a brief turning of her eyes, although she won't let them stray too long off Izo's. "It is a duty! It has to be. The right thing to do... that's not enough anymore! Don't assess what you cannot understand! I'm different from what you are!" Most people probably assume she's talking about money. Yisa isn't.

"As for your second point, I... that is inconseqential. Third of all, I have claimed Sumaru University. I have told you this. Haven't you warned others as I asked?" She sounds almost innocently confused. "But I protect its people. That campus... this city. There's something wrong with it. I've come to fix that."

Again, Yisa entreats closer, and quite possibly for the first time he's seen her, she's nearly absent of her damning temper, the anger forgotten just long enough under her desperation to have him understand. Her face is a proud sort of pleading. "And despite the poor company you keep," she continues, some contempt darkening her voice, "you're an innocent."

Her green eyes narrow. "So you can't act reckless again. I forbid it. You'll get yourself killed."

He isn't quite sure /what/ she's talking about. Money does not cross his mind in the moment; her job does. Is she -- police? Highly unlikely, given her foreign blood, her youth. What investment could she possibly have, to consider it a duty?

'That is inconsequential' gets a skeptical look, but he keeps his mouth shut. She let him have his say; he will let her have hers.

'There's something wrong with it' tugs a more lively smirk and even a snort out of the man on the sofa, who barely avoids rolling his eyes with the sheer, staggering understatement of it all.

Then she gets close enough that he has to tip his head slightly to the side to look up at her from his leaned-forward stance, and he gets it: that first whiff of food. Food, and other things; impressions of something that isn't in the room with either of them, tantalizingly present for a man whose persona essence is that of discovered knowledge, and illumination of the dark to discover what lies therein.

(Let us be honest, though: it's the food that he recognizes first. Breakfast foods. Things that make his mouth water, only it shouldn't, because his nose is plugged up, and therefore he's immediately aware that what he's smelling is not jam on her trousers, but jam in her -- her -- heart?

He doesn't really know how these things work, yet.)

With that recognition, however, comes revelation, which dawns on his features in a subtle sort of way. Lest she mistakenly think his look of realization portends agreement, he's quick to lift his hand and begin counting these points off, one more time:

"One: it's enough for /me/, which is what matters. I make my own choices. Two: It's definitely not inconsequential to /me/. Three: Why and for what reason do you consider the University your 'territory'? Who does that? And four, I am a lot of things, but I...am not an innocent. Nobody is, as near as I can tell." As he sits back into the cushions, he drags up the hem of his shirt and gestures at the large white band of bandaging wrapped about his waist, tone dry. "And as you can see, it turns out that I'm pretty hard to kill. I know I'm new to all of this, but what makes you think you have any better chance at helping than I do?"

It's not just the smells of some lounging royal's breakfast that permeate from this strange young woman. Sometimes, and in strange places, those with the right potential can hear with Yisa the measured ticking of a clock. More often than not, its second hand ticks away on a quick, fevered count, testament to her mood. Sometimes her temper incites it so until it is the chaotic, broken winding and spinning of grandfather clocks.

Now its ticking is noticeably slower, quieter. But it's hard to say for long.

Especially, when this close, as if on cue Yisa crosses Izo's own resonance, unable to quantify its strange sensation. She can hear chimes. She can feel something like peace, begging to soothe and talk down her ferocity, wanting all of her aggravation and tempetuousness to gentle into something --

-- something she doesn't even know.

It's enough that Yisa doesn't even look like she's heard the first of what Izo tells her, her green eyes staring forward a little dumbly as her very fury does battle with his resonance's peaceful mantra. It just makes her grow more unsettled by the moment, especially as she finds her own temper something more difficult to summon forward.

Eventually, she sobers back into cognizance, her eyes blinking to life where they'd been left staring uselessly at his recounting fingers. Her cheeks flush strangely. "Why must you persist on arguing with me?" Yisa manages to spit out, clarity returning her eyes in time to find his. "You're an incorrigible man. I'm talking about your safety! Your life! You are an innocent! Many people are innocent. How could you say such a thing?!"

Her brother was innocent. The people she's known. They have to be. It's the way it is. If they weren't, then what would she be protecting...?

"What reason? I've made a claim! Anyone can! It remains unless someone can successfully dispute it. No one will dispute it. I only realized after days that the security on that campus was laughable. It was questioned constantly. I had to save it. It's who I am. And you have to believe that I know what --"

He begins to lift his shirt.

" -- are you doing?!" Yisa's lecture breaks off into a bleat, and cheeks darkening, she violently turns her head away to avert her eyes. She purses her lips. She doesn't breathe. She can't look. She refuses to look. What is he --

Yisa glances quickly at the bandages. She returns to fiercely staring far far away, clearing her throat visibly against her own discomfort. After a silent, failed moving of her lips, she finally forces out her strained voice, "Idiot! Just let me do my job!"

It is like throwing stones into a bottomless pit, really. Izo's expression of hopeful entreaty with all of the statements that he feels are so very logical wanes when she continues to barrel forward like a bull with its head down, focused to the exclusion of all else on some snapping red banner, the purpose and position of which he has yet to determine. What is /clear/ is that she perceives that he is in her way en route to it. All else is cast in shadow, and vague.

He can work with that, though.

"Okay -- hang on," comes the request, with a lift of his hands. They tremble with not his illness but the medication that he's taking to subdue it. "Hold up. If you want to go on some sort of University crusade, that's fine with me, I won't stop you. As far as I'm concerned, the world needs more people to look out for each other. But I still don't see what I have to do with it. I barely have any interaction with anyone on campus, okay? None of them know about the dakini, and I'd like to keep it that way. My life is fucked up enough right now without dragging all of this supernatural bullshit into my academics."

He sets the remote down and to the side, gently, and sucks in a delicious breath, exhaling it into the measured ticking of her ire. The sense of it may put him on alert, aware in that eye-of-the-storm way that there are forces moving not far from the present moment, but none of it feels particularly /foreign/ to him -- not the way that he must feel to her. His is a struggle cut from one block of peace and one of fury, stacked together and shaped into a monument to the duality of his nature.

"The rest of it isn't really up to you. Who do you even work for? Whose side are you on?"

Frowning fiercely away, unable to help the irritated blush that's all but tattooed across her cheeks, Yisa conducts a very live war against her sheltered ways. It's enough against her frayed nerves that she's inside the home of a boy -- a man -- without chaperone, something unheard of in all her life. Him exposing all his bandages has her skirting her breaking point.

But the Taimiev heiress is nothing but able to adapt, and slowly, so very slowly, she finds a path back through all her nervousness, and her eyes realight back on Izo, awkwardly gauging the bandages that layer over his waist. Soon enough, it's not so much her own prudish manner but the reality of his injury that purses her mouth and draws a crease to the corners of her eyes. It does the opposite of what he intended to get through her head. It just serves a reminder of why she even deigned to learn this bar bouncer's name, to force herself into his very apartment, to try to intimidate him into supplication.

If only it could work as well as she planned.

"You shouldn't have anything to do with it," she eventually replies, finding the strength back to speak. Realizing she's been staring at his injury -- his bandages -- his waist -- Yisa very emphatically corrects that, quickly and conspicuously looking back up on Izo's face. Hers hasn't quite killed its flush. "You don't -- dakini?" she repeats, confused, unfamiliar with that word. But her ceaseless rant soldiers on. "This is why I have demanded to speak to you. This is why I'm here, Mr. Imaizumi. I said I'd protect you."

Yisa's gaze averts enough to notice the tremble in her hands. Her annoyed frown deepens. She takes another step forward, as if thinking all her temperamental presence and its uncontrollable moodswings and history of punching him across the face could appropriate as anything close to consoling. Even she, herself, seems a little unsure of her own action. But it doesn't stop the young woman from trying. "It can be up to me. If you cooperate. I won't see harm come to you. You are in my protectorate." His questions cause her to pause, biting momentarily on her lower lip, letting the flesh slowly slide free of one front incisor.

"I work for no one. I'm a Taimiev." Yisa sounds a strange mixture of confusion and bruised pride. "My side is my own. I'm here to protect. I'm sick of feeling disgusted by the world. I've decided to fix it."

She doesn't know.

She doesn't /know/?

Izo stares at the woman in front of him as pieces quietly click into place. He'd thought that she was being coy with him, ignoring his earlier questions in order to dissemble, but no -- that isn't really her style, is it? If she wanted to avoid telling him something, she would probably tell him to mind his own business. She would probably look angry rather than confused. Increasingly, he understands that she doesn't know what it is that he's referring to.

And yet, this slip of a woman still thinks -- obviously truly believes, down to the depths of her iron soul, that she can protect /him/. That he needs her protection.

And why? Because she knows herself to be powerful, that's why. Powerful enough to make his physical size, his connections, his history all meaningless in the face of that power. He's aware -- all-too aware -- of the fact that there are forces in the world that make his strength and his criminal ties less all-powerful than they once were. It is an issue that consumes his every-day, something to which he hasn't yet adjusted, and still feels the sting of.

Paired together with that enticing set of bizarre aromas and those feelings that her proximity inspires behind his sternum (feelings that have everything to do with resonance, and not the way her lip slides out from beneath the pearl pinning of her teeth -- but of course he notices that, too, being a man)...

His eyes narrow. His irritation ebbs. What he feels, suddenly and acutely, are the tentative stirrings of mute sympathy. It was not long ago that he was thrust into this state of being, himself -- and what would he have done or thought if Iriesama hadn't scooped him up out of his life, and explained some small part of what had happened to him?

"Then we're the same. My side is /my/ own. And I'd like to do some fixing. It never helps, though," he points out, cautiously, "to have friends. Friends who...know about that other part of you. The part that is you, and isn't you." He turns his head slightly to the side, fishing gingerly in deep and unknown waters. "...you know what I mean?"

In these rare moments when not mantled by her rage, possessed with her damning fury, it seems all there is to Yisa is that hopeful set to her eyes. She practically radiates hope. She hopes she can make him understand. She hopes he will not be hurt doing something that should be her responsibility. She hopes she can protect him. She hopes she can protect all the students of her University. She hopes she can eventually turn the sphere of her protection to the entirety of Sumaru... and beyond. Beyond Japan. Beyond the territories of her home country. Beyond the horizon.

Yisa hopes she can die knowing she's changed something.

And as Izo stares at her in his own moment of realization, the Chechen looks back, her face wan and tense with that hope now. She stands there, just as rigid as ever in the stance of obedient, disciplined soldiers, her expression almost beseeching as her thoughts still wonder why she feels the most sedate she has in weeks. That strange sensation, seemingly given off by the man, himself, begs her in a sensory language not to get upset. They say music calms the beast; it seems zen-like Resonance has the same effect on errant Yisas.

It's because of that sensation of serenity that she seems to last this long and keep this closest facsimile of patience. However disquieted it is.

Though Miss Taimiev isn't sure if Izo's conclusion is worth the wait.

He announces they're the same, and that seems to knock her for one, lifting her jaw slightly with a surprised blinking of her eyes. She determinedly, unconsciously, fixes her glasses. A telltale frown smudges across her lips, one that reveals that Yisa isn't so inclined to agree. And not because she comes from money, not because of her noble birth: she has to believe she's different to maintain her vow. She has to be different. She has to be a guardian, because if she embraces the role, then she'll never have to worry about the constraints of humanity. It's a lonely life she's determined for herself...

"I don't --" she starts to say, wanting to interrupt him, but she lacks the right words to continue the forward assault. Instead, Yisa continues to listen, appearing more and more uncertain as Izo continues on. Friends. Other part. Part that is her. Part that isn't.

Does she know what he means?

For a long time, Yisa looks like she doesn't. Her eyes stare reproachfully into his. Her eyebrows knot. Her frown is immovable.

What does he mean -- a part of her? What is he talking about? He -- no, he couldn't. He wouldn't. He couldn't possibly be talking about --

Her eyes narrow. And Yisa demands, "Who are you?"

In the taut silence that follows his careful approach to the unreality of the world they live in, Izo seems an able mirror for her own hope: he believes he may have struck on a path forward, something he can grasp with both hands and get a handle on for the first time since she decked him in his dingy little place of employment. Ever a slave to his Arcana, the process of groping about in the dark, trying to identify what one finds there -- trying to give it a shape, quantify it, if at all possible give it a name and a place in the hierarchy of the known world -- is not deliberate for him so much as instinctual, and the satisfaction he feels when he believes he might have just teased a thread from the whole is visceral and gut-deep. It is his drug. She is a puzzle, and now -- because she came here, and put on display that there is a method to her madness, with a pattern he cannot yet decipher but a pattern, nevertheless -- he is determined to unlock its secrets.

"I told you. My name is Izo. I'm a student at the university. And I have had a very difficult two months, adjusting to...some very strange things, in my life. Two months ago," he explains, voice lowered, dark eyes sparkling with deep intent as they rest sharply on his guest, his awareness pushing through the deep banks of mist in which his medicated mind has been adrift, "I almost died. Someone stabbed me in the stomach. I thought I was finished. I was certainly outnumbered. But then, suddenly, I wasn't alone."

Izo does not have the trick of summoning his persona at will without good reason, yet, but he does his best to focus, searching inside for the part of him that manifests in a crisis. At first nothing happens, and then when something does, it's so subtle as to be almost lost in the blue-white glow of his television and the glow of the nearby lamp with its buttery puddle of light: a sapphire luminescence that seems to condense out of the air on his skin, like liquid, crystalline and diffuse.

That hopeful, entreating expression once lain open across Yisa's face has chilled. It is not so much like her manner has frosted over, or gained all that freezing intensity of a hypothermic dunk, but rather locked itself back up. She's not too sure what to make of what he's saying, of him, and she's questioning herself. Is it her ability to parse the Japanese language? Did she hear him right? Is she understanding him correctly? Is he talking about what she thinks he's talking about?

How could he possibly know? How could he know what she is? The angel she summoned back in Chechnya? The one who saved her life? The one who freed her?

She's stunned and surprised enough to listen, though a tilt of Yisa's head communicates endless caution, suspicion that he could know her in a way no one else does. And it wasn't the first time. When he spoke of her fear back in that yakuza bar, implied she could be one of the monsters she's sought to destroy--

He tells her of a story. One where he almost died. One where he didn't, because he wasn't alone. And listening, Yisa bites down harder and harder onto her bottom lip. Like the resonance she feels in the air, it all feels so familiar...

"I don't..." she starts to say, her voice strained, but anything on Yisa's mind gets shot to hell when Izo Imaizumi's persona joins them in his home.

It's so quick she could have missed it. So quick that she could have happily denied it altogether. But the afterimages of the dakini burn against the backs of Yisa's eyes. And with that changes...

...everything.

Her breath catches. Her mouth falls open. Her eyes go glassy. For a moment, she flexes her hands and bucks her jaw like she desperately wants to get angry, but can't seem to find the heart to do so. Not when her world is crumbling.

Yisa steps backwards mechanically, no part of her able to mask her shock. She's not the only one? She's supposed to be the only one. There was no other explanation. It was Allah speaking to her. It was her vow.

"Y- you're the same?!" she bleats breathlessly, briefly clasping one hand over her mouth. She pauses, then lets it fall away. A harsh breath slides out through her teeth. Yisa stares at Izo, almost dizzily, before something strange and self-conscious makes her look away. "How -- I thought -- I didn't know -- "

The process of the Dakini's ethereal condensation gathers momentum. The droplets on his flesh begin to roll like ghostly oil from his body into the space beside him, and they would have gathered into the form of a woman had she not looked so completely distraught. Of all of the reactions he could have anticipated, this was not one. He feels a sudden pang of guilt, not sure why it is that he ought to feel that way, and a deep, powerful desire to console her, to make the moment less horrifying. He has been horrified. He has suffered, these two months. And he would not inflict that suffering on anyone else.

Not even the bugshit-crazy Chechen.

...who may not be as crazy as she first seemed.

The brilliance shatters, fades. Shadows return to their proper places in all of his body's hollows. He wants to stand, but is afraid that if he does he'll send her fleeing the room, and so he sits with a hand slightly outstretched, as though it could bid her to stay where she is -- the sort of gesture that someone might make whilst approaching a flighty, nervous wild animal. Even his tone is designed to soothe, though its capacity for softness is necessarily hampered by the roughness his illness has left in its wake.

"The same? I don't...know if that's...exactly right. But I know...about the personas. I'm sorry, maybe that was going too far, too fast. To tell you the truth, I know a lot less than the others. It's all pretty new to me. Are you-- alright? Maybe you should sit. I can get some..."

He hesitates. He doesn't usually have anything here, and he's about to recant the offer when he remembers the care package Akio brought. "...tea...?"

Yisa Taimiev thought she was special. She wasn't sure what she was precisely: a chosen of Allah? An angel? A prophet? It did not matter. What mattered is she was entrusted with a special power that gave sense to the world and purpose to her own person. She was no longer some makeshift heiress maintaining a holding pattern for her baby brother. She was not some convenient tool for her father. She was going to change everything. She was going to fix everything wrong with this world.

But she's not the only one.

As Izo speaks, the Chechen woman seems to be elsewhere, at least mentally, staring down at her opened hands as if trying to search her emptied palms for the right words to say, for an answer to all of this. The yakuza enforcer's attempts to soothe appear to sail over her until--

Glancing up, Yisa catches on one word among them all, her face distraught, her eyes a little too bright. "The others?!" she sparks back helplessly, her opened hands folding shut. Her mouth tics at one corner. And she sputters on incredulously, "What do you mean... others?! It's not just you -- me --" her Japanese is faltering, "but it shouldn't -- this -- putain de merde!"

The snarled French curse says it all. Some words don't need translation.

Reaching a hand to her face, Yisa's gesture fumbles against her glasses; frustrated, she rips them off to rub purposefully at her closed eyes. She just wants to sink her face into both hands, stop thinking, and just hide, but Izo's close resonance pushes at her nerves like some electric field. It reminds her that she's not alone.

Piqued with sudden, fierce embarrassment, never having been seen so undone in the presence of others in a long time, Yisa straightens herself quickly, looking briefly, brightly horrified. She holds uneasily onto her folded glasses, squeezing them inside her fingers.

She looks at him the way deer do the headlights of oncoming Mack trucks. And he offers her tea.

Yisa's eyes crease. They're still looking dangerously too bright. She pauses, then exhales audibly, letting go the smallest and saddest of sighs, deliberately glancing away. Her shoulders fall, and she just looks tired. "Yes. No. You must think I'm completely pathetic."

When he isn't being slapped, punched, threatened, bossed around, or throttled, Izo possesses the patience of mountains. Throughout all of her struggling he holds his tongue, silent; it's enough for him that she didn't just race out of the room and into the street, forcing him to try to chase her down when he's in no condition to attempt anything of the sort.

It is a lot to process. His situation was different: he had no choice. His life would have been over for the second time in as many days if it weren't for the intervention of the Family on his behalf, transporting him out of the danger he was in and promising him answers. Waiting for those answers had been nerve-wracking -- still is nerve-wracking -- but at least someone had given him a line to hold onto in the midst of all of his chaos.

She must not have had anything of the kind, he thinks, watching her wrestle with it. What would I have thought, if it had hapened to me and no one had ever told me about it? What would I have chosen to believe?

And, perhaps most terrifyingly: /What kind of person would it have turned me into?/

"..no," he manages, with something very like tenderness, which may not at all be wanted. He cannot help it: a part of his arcana is a quality of insight, a tendency toward empathy. He /must/ put himself in her shoes. He /must/ be sympathetic to what he imagines she must feel, rightly or wrongly. It makes him who he is. A part of who he is, at any rate.

"No, of course not. I thought...once I realized you didn't know what I was talking about, earlier, I thought you would be glad to hear that you weren't alone. I didn't realize it would be...uncomfortable."

He begins to get to his feet, albeit /very/ slowly, still regarding her a bit as though she's a deer in headlights, likely to spring off into the brush at any moment. "So, okay. Was that...a yes, to the tea? I think there's some Pocari Sweat, maybe some soup. I can do that too."

There is no small part of Yisa that would love to run. Run and hide to a place she deems quiet and safe, away from others and their eyes, and remain there until she can make sense of her world again. Every last smart instinct left in her begs the young woman to do just that.

But it's her pride that keeps her rooted to the spot, her fear of losing face in front of others a deep and visceral one. Yisa does not just bear the weight of her own integrity, but that of her family. She won't be the Taimiev heiress for very long, but for now all of their honour rests on her. If she ran and hid, how could she ever show her face again?

So even if it's killing her, she stays. She stays until etiquette or Izo's own direction forces her to leave. But even as she puts on a show of strength, trying to look and act the best of a person whose worldview has not been completely eradicated, there's something human left in her to ask that question of Izo. There's no reason to suggest that she should care what he, a perfect stranger by all definition, thinks of her.

Yet Yisa's searching green eyes suggest otherwise.

There's a ripple of emotion spreading across her face at the man's reply, her arrogance bruised enough that her mouth purses into a self-deprecating line. She's not sure if she believes him, but he sounds sincere. She's too shy to look back on his face and confirm for herself. The sting of embarassment is still too strong.

"I didn't mind being alone," is all she says, somewhat strangely. That was the easy part.

What does she do now?

Movement worries at the corner of her eye, and Yisa finally looks back on Izo as the man rises back to his full height. Suspicion breaks out briefly over her burdened features, and she studies him openly for the measure of a full heartbeat. Her eyes narrow, and that familiar, almost comfortable terseness sharpens her voice. "You're an idiot. I will not be served by an injured man. Show me to your kitchen and I'll prepare it."

She exhales. "I have... a few questions. You can answer them for me while I work."

It's probably a sign of just how unusual this acquaintenceship really is that Izo finds her sharp tone and return to insults comforting, in its way. Breaking her from her pattern thus far in such a dramatic fashion was alarming; he hadn't meant to hurt /her/. He'd believed that he was helping. When she recovers some of her momentum it's a reassurance: she's probably going to be alright, after all.

Relief is what plays out in his expression, therefore, as he nods his absent agreement, and gestures toward the small genkan entryway, and one of the two doors therein. The bathroom door is slightly open; the kitchen door is fully closed. Even if it isn't relief that she's going to take care of him, she doesn't need to know that, does she? Let her think what she likes.

"Okay. Sure. Like I said before, I don't know as much as I probably shoukd, but you can ask me anything you want. If I know, I'll tell you."

Whether it's due to her entitled background or forceful personality, Yisa marches off toward the directed kitchen without another word. It's the closest thing she can make to a tactical retreat. Not that she'd let that show.

She's a picture of determination and purpose, every stride punctuated. She opens the door to the kitchen but only leaves it open half way. It's because when she steps in, just out of sight, the Chechen has transformed Izo's galley kitchen into a temporary sanctuary. She pauses, rests her hands flat over the countertop, and lets her head bow. They tremble faintly. A shaky breath shudders out of her lungs, and she bites off any embarassing sounds her throat would like to muster. She ignores the burning of her eyes. She's not the only one. There are others. She can deal with this.

Setting her glasses down, she rubs briefly at her eyes, that single action the only mindful thing she pays herself. At once, and deliberately so, she steps back again and lifts her head, her attention turned back to studying the many cabinets of a strange man's kitchen. She frowns to herself.

It's only now she's reminded that she's never really ever cooked for herself. Ever. At all. But she's sure she can handle this. How hard could it be?

Eventually, her voice rises out of the kitchen, followed by a couple, aimless, familiar sounds of drawers opening and closing. "Then tell me everything. From the start, Mr. Imaizumi. I suppose I need.. " her voice drifts off. Yisa frowns at cutlery. She fumbles among them to see if any food is hidden among their shapes. Appears not.

"...to begin somewhere."

She'll get no help from Izo. His kitchen is a culinary graveyard, where take-out food goes to die. The only reason that there is anything at all here that requires preparing beyond 'place in microwave and reheat' is because Akio and Mariko were thoughtful enough to bring him things to survive on while he's sick (though in Mariko's case, the word 'thoughtfulness' may be stretching things more than just a little).

There is soup in sealed jars in the fridge -- homemade, by the looks of it -- and there are tins of loose tea leaves in the cabinets. The teapot with its steeping basket are still on the counter, because he wasn't entirely sure where he should put it (and he has no kettle, and the teapot is glazed iron, meaning that hot water preparation cannot take place in the microwave, and must be done in a pot on the stovetop).

The bottles of Pocari Sweat are in the fridge, too -- essentially Japan's equivalent of Gatorade.

There's a bit of fruit. Bananas, oranges.

That about caps off the available food.

As for methods of preparation, they do exist; there's a dinged-up pot that didn't belong to him until he moved in and found it, and mismatched 'silverware,' a bowl or two, a few mugs, a glass (one tall, one short).

The end.

When she heads off into the kitchen, he debates following her, and then ultimately chooses to sit down again, instead.

"Okay. Well."

Izo rifles the hair on his head, elbow on his knee and posture leaned toward his hand, searching for ways to broach his own experience without divulging /all/ of its specifics. "I was living in Tokyo, working for the Family. There was an incident in an alley, two months ago. Someone stabbed me in the stomach. I don't remember much about what happened, except that when it was over, every man in the alley was dead. Every one. Their friends would probably have hunted me down, but I was lucky -- Irie-san had gone through something similar, and when Iriesama -- you know of the Grandfather? -- heard about what had happened, he had me brought here. Set me up to go to school, introduced me to Irie-san, and promised that someone would explain what had happened. A month ago I met both of them, and they told me that I had a 'persona.' That it was some kind of gift, to help me become a better person. Something I could change the world with, if I learned to use it. Sumaru -- Port Island, I guess -- is a locus for people like you and I, although I couldn't tell you why. There are all of these...factions, groups, with different agendas, and they don't seem to get along."

Which is rampant understatement, given what he witnessed in the Dark Hour, of course.

It is probably fortunate that Yisa's experience with kitchens totals no more than 'a room to walk into to yell at her personal chef.'

She doesn't think anything sordid or lacking of Izo's kitchen, and perhaps because of it, may from now consider its gutted body in the realm of completely and assuredly normal. Nothing if not dedicated, she sets out to learning every last inch of it, tilting her head at the way different plates and pots are sorted and stored. It's a welcome distraction for what she is infinitely grateful. Anything just to occupy her own mind from her own dizzying thoughts.

Looking up at the distant sound of Izo's voice, half-surprised to hear him respond to her cooperatively, Yisa pauses in indecision. Etiquette dictates she should at least step back out to face him and hear him out. But she can't trust how her eyes might look. So she happily remains hidden, balancing his story with her further searching. The Family -- she's sure he's talking about the Yamaguchi-gumi. She opens the microwave to see what he stores in there. She appears confused to find it empty.

She doesn't know what it is.

Closing the door, her head turns back at Izo's story. Even if the man can't see, her lips twitch into a brief frown. It can be heard through her dubious reply, "So you mean the yakuza are aware of..." she has no idea what to even refer to what she thought was her divinity, "this?"

Yisa rubs uselessly at her forehead, pulling the hand to smooth back her curly hair. What to even think of all this... it makes the room want to spin.

So she opens the refrigerator, finding that appliance the closest thing to familiar. The jars of soup steal her eyes.

"Persona?" she repeats out loud as she sets one to the counter, opening it to sniff inside. It smells appetizing enough. Pulling out a pot, she fumbles with the stove before setting one element to maximum heat. That means it'll cook faster.

"This is all so strange. I..." Yisa starts to confess, only to pause, hearing Izo out. He says things that make her freeze amidst pouring the soup to one pot. Become a better person. Change the world. She hesitates, and then asks, somewhat cautiously, "Is that... what you aspire to do?"

"Persona. Like the Dakini, or -- whatever yours is." What smells like jam and ticks like a clock? He hasn't the foggiest idea.

Her question is not easy to answer. Unlike Yisa, he has no deep, soul-consuming purpose, no end-game in mind. The one he harbored before his departure from home -- before the supernatural world consumed him whole, and made brass out of the golden ideals he'd held before -- was to better himself, albeit in off-color ways. Powerless in his own household, he wanted to better himself through the assumption of authority indisputable, and through that authority -- that power, that undeniable, incontrovertible freedom -- escape from beneath an oppressive roof and take his sister with him when he went, abandoning the ruins of his family.

On the surface, it would appear that he's had all of those wishes granted. The reality of the thing is more complex, of course. It always is.

"Right now," he says slowly, "what I want to do is to put my life back together, more than anything. Get my feet underneath me. There are people counting on me...and there are people who want me dead, too. I can't think that far ahead anymore. I've just been taking things day by day."

"The White Queen," Yisa replies lowly, her distant voice the softest and thinnest he's yet to hear out of her. "That is how she introduced herself to me." She pauses a beat. "I had thought she was an angel, sent by..."

But she doesn't finish that thought. Instead she minds to the task of filling the pot entirely with the container of soup and setting it to the element, now glowing a blistering red from the heat. She doesn't turn it down. It doesn't even occur to her that she should.

Fleeing back to the refrigerator, she busies herself with pulling out one bottle of Pocari Sweat, turning it awkwardly in her hands. She reads a few of the ingredients. Her eyebrows furrow with abject distaste. Her lips scrunch up with thinly-veiled revulsion.

Of course, this is coming from a sheltered heiress who has never consumed a single carbonated drink in her life.

"I suppose that's understandable. At least for now. But with less worries you will be able to confront the future and revise your goals. I've not rescinded my promise, Mr. Imaizumi," she says.

Yisa announces stubbornly as she burns the soup, "I said I'll protect you."

An angel.

Whatever Izo's private spiritual beliefs are -- assuming that he has any, at all -- he's not so divorced from them that he cannot slide that piece into its proper place among the rest. It's an easy thing to see: you suffer, you are rescued by something you cannot explain, and perhaps you believe that it's a piece of the divine, sent from on high to save you...

...but why would Buddha, God, whatever God she believes in, go out of his, her, or its way to spare her life? For a reason. But what is that reason?

That is where his line of logical conjecture must end. It does go to some lengths to explain why it is that she's taken 'territory.' And it explains, in its way, why being told otherwise might knock the wind from her so handily, when she seems so impervious to being rattled in any other way.

Out of the gloom of his ignorance, vague, indefinite shapes are beginning to emerge.

"Well...who is to say that she isn't?" The question is a gift, a kindness -- and also the byproduct of his skeptical, scholarly nature. "I haven't heard a definite explanation yet as to where they come from, or why only certain people have that gift. It doesn't sound like something anyone can prove or disprove. Maybe she is an angel. Maybe they all are."

The platform creaks as he leans back into the pillows stacked against the wall, half-dragging a blanket over his person. Over that rustling sound of cloth in air and the alarming scent of hot air coming out of his kitchen, she reaffirms her vow, and he smirks. "Shy of eliminating the entire Sumiyoshi-kai family," he says, with reckless honesty, "I'm not sure that you can. But if you want to try, be my guest. Just don't die on my account, alright? That kind of thing could really fuck a guy up."

All of her ceaseless busy work inside his kitchen... ceases. When he speaks up to her, implies that she might not be so wrong after all, Yisa pauses on the spot and bites down on her own lip. She frowns to herself. However little she knows of Izo, he sounds so sincere, and her hopeful heart wants to lift to his comforting words. Still mentally and emotionally reeling from all of this, having not allowed herself a single moment to contemplate it, she doesn't know what to think.

But she has nothing to say to that, feeling awkwardly self-conscious. A pregnant silence just permeates from his kitchen. Not until the conversation switches to more comfortable ground. And to that--

"I won't die," Yisa replies, simple and mechanical as that, as she turns the teapot over in her hands. She sounds absolutely confident about her own mortality. She looks less certain about how in the hell one would possibly brew tea.

It surely can't be this complicated. Not for her. She's a Taimiev. She can figure this out.

"You are uncommonly... insightful, Mr. Imaizumi," Yisa eventually concludes as she studies the frothy, bubbling surface of the soup boiling away. It surely has been heated enough by now? Maybe a little longer. "Yet you've chosen such a contrary lifestyle. You should re-evaluate the company you keep. I presume the... ah, Sumiyoshi-kai, is it? They are the enemy yakuza? I've seen what comes out of a territory struggle. It's not..." she searches for right foreign word, "conducive to... it's unnecessary."

Izo is willing to analyze and evaluate almost anything at length: her trials and tribulations, and his own.

She runs up hard against the wall of his privacy there, though, all-unknowing, and receives a firm answer in a tone that says the subject is not up for debate: "I have my reasons for doing what I do." Quiet though his voice may be, those words have a clang of finality to them, like a vault door swinging closed and locking with a boom more felt than heard.

Unaware that she's currently doing her best to burn down the apartment building and create a congealed, molten-hot scum of high-sodium soup in the bottom of his only pot, Izo relaxes where he lies, flicking his eyes upward toward the ceiling, out of habit lifting his arms as though to lace his hands behind his head. He stops abruptly at the complaint lodged by the wound in his belly, and settles for lacing his hands over the mid-point of his torso, above the injury but low enough to be comfortable. On the television, Kurosawa's 'Dreams' sits in ethereal stillness, still paused at the point that he heard her knocking.

"Are you ever going to tell me your name?"

That tone is enough to earn her eyes, turned out the entrance of the kitchen in surprise and bemusement. Yisa frowns to herself, not much of an insightful character on her own to parse the meaning behind his explanation. She's sure he has reasons, she thinks. They just must be very poor reasons. But however locked a door he keeps to his privacy, it's always been her nature to not let barriers stop her. You cut the lock. Kick down the door. Level a wall to find alternate entranceway.

All in good time, she supposes.

For now, Yisa contents herself with stirring the boiling soup, having the innocence to look surprised at the way the top, slimy skin off the liquid falls in clotted clumps off her spoon. That's about when she starts to finally smell it: the distinct, nauseous scent of food burning. Her eyes narrow. Her mouth scrunches up. But she quickly turns off the heat.

Yisa sniffs the contents of the pot, and quickly snatches back her head in clear response to its smell. Quickly, desperately, she searches for something, anything, that could possibly save the meal and hide the taste.

Dumping in half a bottle of salt and half a bottle of chili flakes appear to do the trick. Salt improves all meals.

She carefully pours what's little left of the soup (most of it is now burnt to the bottom of the pot in a half-inch of paste) into a bowl, looking affably pleased with the result. It strikes Yisa that this is, by all counts, the first meal she's ever prepared on her own. Too-thick soup peppered by floating, charred bits.

It will have to taste better than it looks.

Finally, Izo's strange, Chechen chef of the day appears back in view, stepping out of the kitchen with a bowl and spoon in hand. She balances it carefully to extend it out to him, with no small amount of pride in the toxic waste she's concucted for him. "I am Yisa Taimiev," she says with the gift she proffers the man. "Now please find your health with this meal."

Now, see? This is almost civil. Yisa is still confusing, still someone that he needs to feel wary of, but gradually the situation is mellowing, and -- unwisely -- he finds himself beginning to lower his guard enough that when she reappears, he doesn't immediately sit up, denying his own illness and injury, the way he would around any other threatening presence. He can take his time, sitting up slowly, and as he does so he studies her: she looks better. Better than she did when she walked out of the room. More solid, more composed.

She even gives him her name, and, with earnestness he finds sweet, does not just return with food for herself, but offers him what he initially offered to /her/, as a way to put her at her ease and soften the blow of their conversation. He accepts it without looking at it, and allows himself the faintest trace of a smile. It barely changes the shape of his mouth, but it sparkles in his eyes like a warm starfield, glittering with approval and satisfaction. "Taimiev-san," he says, carefully enunciating the foreign words: 'taimi-effsan', emphasis on the second syllable.

And then he looks down at the soup.

And looks at it.

And looks.

And then he looks up and actually /does/ smile, a lopsided, roguish thing that blasts out of him at approximately one million megawatts, bright and hot enough to suck all of the oxygen out of the room, like the detonation of a mini-nuke.

He does not usually allow this to happen. Occasionally it happens on accident. Just this second, he's using it to /save his life/, like the weapon it is. He deploys it as he offers the bowl back to her. "I wouldn't be able to look myself in the mirror if I let you give me the food I promised you could have, and...you've had a rough night." He puts the bowl on the table.

Soup delivered, the young woman affects her military posture once more, grounded into her by years of tutelege by her great grandfather. She clasps her hands at her back as not to have them fidget.

Especially when Izo imparts her that expression of gentle gratitude.

Swallowing thickly, she averts her eyes, rendered immediately and effectively uncomfortable inside a heartbeat. Her green eyes slant angrily away. "Just eat it," she clips, her patience audibly thready.

She waits for him to oblige her. After all, he's injured. He's sick. It would be ill-mannered of her, not to mention beneath her character and vows, to not at least ensure his health. Not after all he's done to help her (or try to) this past hour.

And she waits.

And waits.

And then she looks over, confused as to why he's not eating -- or doing much of anything -- with her lips half-parted with mind to direct a sharp rebuke.

It dies in her mouth.

Her pupils dilate. Her cheeks bleach bloodless. Her mouth forgets to close. And trying to ignore the burn in her cheeks or the awful hammering of her heart, the poor, sheltered Chechen is simply irradiated on the spot occupying ground zero of Izo Imaizumi's devastating smile. It's quite possibly the first time a man has ever smiled at her like that, and in its wake, all she can do is just stare widely, helplessly back.

"I..." she stammers, before her voice just breaks off into a few stuttered syllables of Chechen, dying off eventually as her jaw works a little uselessly on its own. The bowl is set on the table. Yisa doesn't seem to notice.

She's still staring. Yisa doesn't notice. The heavens burn and the skies fall and the world ends outside. Yisa wouldn't notice that either.

Then, finally, somehow on her own or perhaps thanks to some higher power, the woman sobers, realizing herself long enough to glance nervously away. Her lips press into a thin line. Her poor little heart beats faster than it should. Eventually, her restless gaze rests back on the food she made for him.

All at once, she looks back, almost timidly, in that precious moment completely lacking her natural furor. Yisa looks like someone whose entire self-worth is on the line. Like her entire perception of herself was changed forever tonight, and to tack together the remnants of her composure, determined to place her pride, sanity, and everything else into something as silly as a bowl of soup. The first meal she's ever made for another. The first meal she's ever made at all.

It'd be easier if on her face was lurking that familiar temper. The fragile hope is far worse. "You..." she begins hesitantly, her voice still shot by his smile, "you don't want to eat that?"

He ought to feel bad about it. Other men are outgoing, and bait their hooks with humor and charm; some are wealthy, ripping around town in vehicles worth hundreds of thousands of yen and purchasing glittering stones for the ladies they want to pursue. Some are famous, some are powerful, some are sweet, some have a natural intuition for romance.

Izo isn't particularly strong in any of these categories -- he may come closest to achieving occasional humor and charm with people he knows well, but otherwise he's too private and introspective even for that, and not fond of making himself vulnerable with others.

What he has -- the one thing he really has, aside from a quick wit -- is that stupid smile, all pearlescent fire fit to rival Helios at the apex of his arc.

With great power, they say, comes great responsibility. He's sure that somewhere, this injudicious application would be considered unethical, but anyone to say so is someone who has obviously not seen Exhibit A: It Came From The Kitchen. Cue B-horror movie music.

He can think of recourse, even now. 'I'm sick,' he could say. 'I can't taste anything, and it would just go to waste.' Or 'I ate right before you stopped by.' He could say that, too.

Looking at her, though, sitting there, vulnerable, face a raw mirror of things he can only guess at, for reasons she hasn't explained but which -- if they are anything like his own, given the rude manner of his own awakening -- must be deeply personal and sore...

/I am doomed,/ he thinks.

And, /Maybe I preferred the punching./

Those smiles of his burn out quickly, like most things of high intensity. It wanes, and it yields ground to a kind of melancholy sympathy, which is a good mask for the abject dread he feels about putting any of that foul abomination of a meal into his actual, personal mouth.

At least he's sick. He's all stuffed up. Maybe he won't be able to taste it.

With deep apprehension, he picks it up. "Are you sure that you don't want it?"

What makes it worse is her desperate, impassioned effort to play it all down. She looks elsewhere. She frowns with what looks like imperious disapproval. She keeps her hands clasped tightly together. She does everything to look like a person whose entire soul is temporarily riding on an inedible bowl of soup.

But all that awkward bravado does make all those brief glances she slips Izo as telling as a flared poker hand. Quite possibly the poorest natural actress ever given form and life onto this Earth, Yisa numbly, quietly stands in the spot and waits for Izo to taste her meal.

Not even she is sure why she needs this, lacking an insightful, open highway drive into her own heart. But she does. It feels like if she at least manages something right, something she's never been able to accomplish on her own before, it will make up for everything changing. She may no longer be Allah's chosen, befitting of an angel sent down by her dead brother whose legacy she must revere... but she'll have done something right all on her own.

Only he's not yet eating it, and the seconds tick past feel like hours, counted by the slow, decisive measure of her bracket clock resonance. Yisa begins to hold second thoughts. Is he not wanting it? Is it not good enough? Did she fail at that?

And despite all the indifference forced upon Yisa's rigid, glowering features, uncertainty reflects in her averted eyes.

When he picks up the soup, it's clotted itself back up again like some gouting wound, as if aware itself that its sinister contents are best safely membraned away from the world. The skin sloshes greasily, pulled in that waxy, too-tight way reminiscent of burn victims. Pasty scabs of char stick together in the gluey mold.

The smell it gives off transcends written word.

And Yisa waits, doing her best awful impression of not waiting at all. When Izo speaks, giving one last generous entreat, she slowly, warily looks back (unsure that he may still be smiling).

And where he had that smile, she has that look in her eyes. One glance speaks tomes.

Yisa pauses at the question. Her eyebrows furrow. "No," she replies crisply, her voice thin and agitated. "I'm not injured."

What she means: I made this for you.

((<O-Kagutsuchi> Izo Imaizumi says, "You guys have no idea what kind of emotional battery I'm enduring over here."
<O-Kagutsuchi> Izo Imaizumi says, "'When he picks up the soup, it's clotted itself back up again like some gouting wound, as if aware itself that its sinister contents are best safely membraned away from the world. The skin sloshes greasily, pulled in that waxy, too-tight way reminiscent of burn victims. Pasty scabs of char stick together in the gluey mold. // The smell it gives off transcends written word.'"
<O-Kagutsuchi> Nemesis Tatsuya Sudou says, "ugh that awful Yisa, now I feel all weird and shit about Sudou's face"
<O-Kagutsuchi> Nemesis Tatsuya Sudou kicks things
<O-Kagutsuchi> Izo Imaizumi says, "HOW DO YOU THINK I FEEL"
<O-Kagutsuchi> Izo Imaizumi says, "I'M GOING TO HAVE TO EAT IT"
<O-Kagutsuchi> Nemesis Tatsuya Sudou says, "YOUR FACE DOESN'T LOOK LIKE HER SOUP"))

He picks it up, looks down into it, and somehow -- beyond all comprehension -- it looks worse now than it looked when she first brought it out. He would not have believed that physically possible, but it does: it appears to have grown a skin.

Motherfucker. The soup is evolving.

The moment reminds him of a graphic novel he once read, in which a vegetarian was locked in a room with a steak by a psychopath with an eye for sociological questions -- locked in there and left there. If she ate the steak, he would release her. If she refused, she would be left there. She refused, of course...and the longer she waited to eat the steak, the hungrier she got and the less likely her ability to refuse; at the same time, the steak was continuing to slowly spoil, plagued by flies, turning green and furry, and growing more and more horrifying to consider a source of food...

The pressure situation represented in that Barker story becomes starkly clear for Izo. The longer he waits, the more clotted and horrifying the soup is going to get, and the more likely he is to hurt her feelings.

The alternative is to eat it. And that prospect turns his stomach before he's even taken a bite.

/I am going to be very unhappy if I open this wound throwing up,/ he thinks and then lifts the spoon, on which a gelee of salt-thickened soap quivers, drooling a long, pepper-flaked, mucoid strand of -- of -- broth? -- downward, to snap and plop into the bowl.

He stares at it.

/There is no fucking way./

But he has to. He /has to/.

Izo does the only thing he /can/ do. He puts the spoon down into the bowl and lifts the whole bowl suddenly up, closing his eyes and /chugging/ that /foul sewer swill/ like a man sipping ambrosial oasis waters in a deep desert.

It's the only way.

[OOC] Shinjiro Aragaki says, "r"
[OOC] Shinjiro Aragaki says, "i"
[OOC] Shinjiro Aragaki says, "p"

Yisa pretends to not be stealing glances, to not be watching Izo openly, to not be completely and wholly engrossed, the more obvious it is. She does her poor impression at finding his dilemma the least interesting thing in the world, keeping one eye trained on the poor man as he's forced between a rock and a ten-hour dialogue with a toilet.

This is most assuredly her moment of weakness. Though she's been soldiering onward, doing her damndest to ignore it, to hotly and furiously even deny it, this is her vulnerability that has only one cure. It can be fixed and reaffirmed by this strange bar bouncer accepting the rare gift she's given him -- a gift she's never given anyone else before... or it can be rejected.

And not even Yisa, herself, knows what she'd do if that happens.

But she has enough social finesse to appear that she's not waiting on him, standing there, hovering with baited breath, and head turned, body language directed elsewhere, she feigns reading the covers of his books.

Her resonance, hanging over both of them like some waiting guillotine, says otherwise. The white noise sound of clocks have tempered their ticking pulse to something so slow and sleepy, like a sighing breath in sleep or a dragging, dying pulse.

When he reaches for the bowl, the perpetual ticking stills into silence.

Yisa's forgotten that she's not supposed to be watching. Her eyes are big and watery as she looks on.

And Izo just tilts back his head and takes the bullet. He chugs it like a pro. Yisa's eyes widen, the lack of table manners shocking her into momentary silence, enough that she presses the fingers of her right hand against her lips. She stares over them at Izo in disbelief.

He just drank it. He didn't even stop.

That means...

It means he loved it.

Relief sighs soundlessly out of her. And hidden under her hand, the Chechen's mouth twitches like it could, like it would want to nearly smile, but she rubs that away mindfully and terminates the emotion with a clearing of her throat. "I suppose that's sufficient, however unrefined. Shall I follow it up with some tea?"

He's not going to make it, he thinks, swallowing one gelid mouthful after another, viscous gel filled with gummy clots. It is like drinking the thing that it is shortly about to become.

And just when he's about to give in to his despair, he hits the bottom of the bowl and sets it down on the table, eyes closed, a hand lifted to his mouth -- at first to wipe it, and then to steady himself until the wave of nausea passes. Already his stomach is on fire.

/God no/, he wants to say, of her offer of tea. If she can do this to a jar of soup -- PRE-COOKED SOUP, that only needed to be heated up -- then he's almost terrified to think about the cup of bitter, horrible nastiness that might result from any further culinary endeavors.

Except that his stomach is turning over, and he's suddenly one-hundred percent sure that he's going to be sick. That's the last thing he wants her to see.

"Sure," he says, weakly, as his throat closes uncomfortably about a definite, ominous lump. All of the color has drained from his face.

"I've got to piss like a racehorse, though, I'll be back, just -- the tea is in the cupboard, water in the sink is safe, you know the drill, be back soon!"

All of those words come out of him in an increasingly swift torrent as he makes his way for the restroom. He's even unbuckling his belt as he hits the door, as though to reassure her that he is, in fact, going to pee; in reality, he knows that he needs to unbuckle it before he can hit his knees by the toilet unless he wants it to cut into his wounded abdomen and tear the thing open /yet again/.

The bathroom door closes, locks, and the sink gets twisted ON before anyone can get another word in edgewise.

This is all so new to Miss Taimiev, and the last thing she expected doing when she arrived to Izo Imaizumi's apartment. She'd only ever intended on lecturing him, advising him that as a Sumaru student he is part of her protectorate, and that he must abstain from future recklessness. He could rely on her. He could call on her to perform her duty. She was special.

But now not so much. At least not as she once presumed. But as things fall apart, they can be rebuilt, such as this crusader's shaky pride. She can make a meal for another for the very first time and succeed. It means she can re-evaluate the world and engage it just as she did before. The details may have changed, but it doesn't mean her vow has to. She'll find a way to rationalize it...

Barely-concealed delight crosses Yisa's face as Izo not only finishes her delicious meal but agrees to tea. She can do that. She can do anything. She's a Taimiev. There is no skill beyond her reach. She may not be divine... but she's still a transcendent being. She's meant for great things. She's meant to change the system. She's meant to fix the world.

She's meant to... watch Izo clear for the bathroom like home plate.

Piss like -- a --

Yisa blushes scarlet against his frankness and quickness. "Wh- what -- you -- wai -- "

She catches his belt unbuckling. Her voice catches and she maniacally looks away. The door slams. The sink runs.

And the heiress is left standing, one eye narrowed, lips half-pursed.

Then she shrugs, rolls up the sleeves on her cashmere sweater, retrieves the bowl, and retreats back into the kitchen. She tries to ignore the slight giddiness at the novelty of being able to cook again.

And as Izo pays respects to his bathroom, Yisa sets to work, determinedly preparing him a Chechen drink of kasmyk tea, one of the few things she misses best about home.

It's led to her pouring water, milk, pepper, and loose green tea leaves into the cast iron teapot, which has been left directly on the element.

Fortunately, Izo is not away for long. The man is in peak physical condition.

Aside from the supernatural flu, anyway.

..and the stab wound to the stomach.

...And, well, the minor food poisoning.

Aside from /those/ things, he is as healthy and fit as any man can be. The point is that his body doesn't need to expend too much effort in order to purge itself of the assault against it, and against culinary tradition, and really against basic human decency. Yisa's 'soup' goes into the bowl and is flushed away forever, possibly to the great detriment of the region's subterrane system of sewers.

Skin glowing with a slight perspiration, he gets off of his knees, buckles his pants with trembling fingers, and then opens his medicine cabinet to retrieve his toothbrush and toothpaste. He has to brush his teeth with his lips closed awkwardly around the object in order to prevent the sound from traveling, but one does what one has to do.

It is the best tooth-brushing he has ever had in his life. Mental note: time to buy a new toothbrush. This one is dead to him now.

Also, he needs to just throw away every single piece of equipment made for cooking things, clearly, because having them around invites all manner of horrifying event to take place in his apartment, from sexy spoon-feeding lesbian nurses to whatever the hell just happened to him tonight (was that the chicken soup? Seriously? He finds it hard to believe). If he throws it all away, he ought to be safe.

Rinsing his mouth out, he cups steaming water in his hands and washes his face, then dries it on a towel. After twisting off the taps andputting everything away, he stares at his reflection in the mirror dizzily. How did this go /so very wrong/?

Out in the kitchen, the teapot is starting to turn a terrifying, incandescent shade of orange, like /molten hot iron/ tends to do.

The handle is hinged, and not made of metal. It's plastic, because that way it won't burn anyone's hands when they pick up a hot teapot.

It's also starting to melt.

This is all so very new to Yisa. Her entire life has been built upon a daily schedule of expectations. It's been that way from the start. She's had to do so little for herself.

She's done practically nothing for others.

And it's just new enough, engrossing enough to pull her thoughts entirely away from what could have been a minor breakdown. It's saving her.

Unfortunately, it's also killing Izo. And it's on the way of taking his apartment with him.

Oblivious to that, she can't deny that all this -- her strange, unlikely fit of domesticity -- has made her feel the most peaceful since landing in Japan. Possibly even before that. He's injured, and she's able to fix him. Like she intends to fix everything. She's able to provide some measure of assistance to someone in her protectorate, despite the allegiances he keeps.

Or that way he smiled at her--

Yisa frowns distractedly to herself, all her busy work stopped, hands paused against the sink as she revisits that memory. Her eyes tick to the side. Her jaw sets with uncertainty. Why would she be thinking about--

She stops that train of thought, sobering to the close sound of water boiling and the closer smell of milk scalding.

Turning, she stops with a widening of her eyes at the glowing ember that was once Izo's poor, solitary teapot. She steps closer, but the heat of it breathing out of the sides of the bubbling pot. It's jerking, dancing under the pounding beat of the water, lacking the weight to hold it to the element.

The handle is melting into a consistency not unlike her soup.

Yisa steps forward again, tentatively, frowningly, her head tilting to one side. She's no expert, but she's almost sure it's not supposed to do that.

Don't worry, Yisa Taimiev: soon, that pot won't be dancing around on the stove no matter how the water inside of it bubbles and boils. It won't be dancing around because the handle's melting speed is increasing exponentially, and suddenly collapses onto the top of the white-hot metal, where it turns almost instantly liquid and drools like crayon wax down the side to the base of the pot, coating the pot's base and the heating element and ensuring that the teapot will remain a feature of Izo's rented stove /for all time/ (or until someone replaces said stove and/or heating element -- but that person will assuredly not be Izo. The death of one heating element can only be considered a positive thing at this juncture, as it means that he has to worry about 1/4th less available means through which he can be fed something ghastly in the future).

In the bathroom, he's almost girded himself enough to come out of the bathroom and smile at her reassuringly when he smells...

Burning plastic.

Turning, he snaps the door open and heads as calmly as he can to the kitchen, though probably more swiftly than is called for.

Everything after that happens very quickly.

a) The plastic handle of the kettle catches fire as the petroleums used in its manufacture are heated to the combustion point.

b) The melted plastic has stuck the teapot's lid closed, creating a hugely dangerous pressure situation as the water (and milk, remember) is heated beyond all safe levels, resulting in a spit or two of hissing, angry fluid on the stovetop.

c) The fire alarm in the unit goes off, inspired by the greasy, acrid smoke from the melted plastic.

d) Blue light arrives in the kitchen in a spectral deluge, painting the walls, ceiling, and floor with the kind of reflection one might expect from the surface of an indoor pool or the surface of the sea, little wavelets of irridescence. It's source: Izo, or technically the Dakini, summoned in a moment of sharp crises.

At the same moment that Izo reaches to grab Yisa and yank her away from the ticking time bomb, intending to shield her person by dragging her near his chest and putting his back to the stovetop, the Dakini blasts the stove with a sudden lash of elemental ice, which rips across the small kitchen and carves a path of rime-encrusted frost in a slash over the appliance, focused on the teapot.

This is a good thing, and a bad thing. It puts the fire out, which is positive, and it completely locks the heating element up.

Unfortunately, it causes a spectacular failure of the teapot as the difference in temperatures results in an explosive splintering of the iron. The only reason that Izo and Yisa are not immediately the victims of hot-water detonation are two-fold: first, the pot is stuck to the stove by the plastic handle, and second, the Dakini's ice is cold enough that the water, even as it bursts through the sudden gashes in the bent iron sides of the teapot, freezes as soon as it hits the air, capturing the blossom of steamy death in all of its glory.

Then, there is silence.

Well...almost. The fire alarm is still going off.

Yisa Taimiev has been trained extensively to deal with a host of situations. Between her iron heart and her total fearlessness, there's little left in the world that could possibly phase her.

Surviving a war? Nothing. Fighting a Russian insurgency? Laughable. Forced marches by enemy troops? Did it blindfolded. Near-miss executions? She didn't lose sleep. Staring down the barrel of an assault rifle? She'd do it again.

Attempting to brew a single pot of tea only to see the kitchen burst into flame?

Yisa looks on in complete, unmitigated horror.

It's almost laughable to see her, the self-proclaimed healer of the world and defender of this generation, standing there in Izo's kitchen in complete helplessness, looking on as her hands wring helplessly. As the plastic melts, she looks about as confused as a baby in a topless bar. Her head jerks back and forth, following the sequence of events with quick twitches of her eyes, like some wayward puppy dog trying to make sense of a moving Rube Goldberg machine.

Fanning the smoke, she leans closer, her face lit up in the yellowy glow of the heated teapot. It jerks and shakes at her like some threatened snake. Then the handle, in one soft, hissing sigh, catches alight.

The heiress jerks backward, shocked, jolted with any human being's viceral reaction to fire. "Merde!" she squeaks, finally realizing that something is indeed wrong, that this probably isn't any part of the normal cooking process, and arms jerking upward, fingers pawing into her bound hair, she searches the kitchen for something -- anything -- to fix this.

The fire alarm screams, and she spooks, heart in her throat, snapping up a dishtowel and summoning the stupidity to hover back over the smoking, shaking pot.

And that's exactly how Izo finds her, Yisa one half-second away from reaching out, with hand and dishtowel, to physically grab the RED HOT TIMEBOMB TEAPOT ON FIRE.

With incredible timing, the Dakini coalesces into view. And hand extended, her expression vacant with surprise, Yisa stares at the persona. If she could have ever denied seeing Izo's persona, and denied the existence of others like herself, it's no longer the case as the young woman gets a stunning eyeful. She really isn't the only one. There really are others like her...

And then that thought is gone, ripped out of her head, left behind as Yisa is bodily grabbed and yanked away from the stove, whirled around with a scrape of her boots as the Yakuza enforcer inserts himself between her person and the impending destruction of his kitchen. She just looks on incredulously, asking the world with her widened eyes how her simple plan to lecture a man managed to turn into this.

The punch-detonation of iron thunders through the apartment, sound knocking and amplifying ruthlessly within its walls. Yisa jumps in unconscious recognition to the sound, and having grown up to and never gotten over the blasts of explosions, closes her eyes and tightens her hands on Izo's shoulders. The action automatically pulls her closer to the man, trying to protect him, herself, and their combined survival.

No fiery blast swallows the two. And slowly, carefully, Yisa reopens her green eyes, blinking the sight back into them. Thanks to her tall heels, she manages a glance over Izo's shoulder, her half-hidden face twisting into disbelief.

The shock doesn't last long. There are worse things to consider. Such as why she's pressed up against and practically hugging onto something that feels very, very warm. Swallowing, she slowly, hesitantly draws back, just enough that would draw her eye to eye with Izo Imaizumi. Yisa's are very very wide and very very green.

And in that prolonged, awkward moment, really only one thought comes to mind: did he just brush his teeth?

Reality helpfully sets in, heralded by the overhead shrieking of the fire alarm, the filmy veil of settling smoke, the gut-wrenching stink of burnt milk, and the patient, dripping measure of water from the spires of supernatural ice. Yisa barged into Izo's house, wrecked his kitchen, lit a small fire, set off a contained explosion, and is now pressing her chest into his. Logic dictates that she should pretty much just die of embarassment on the spot. Right here. Right now. Unless she wields the only weapon she has left.

And that is, she forces herself to look suddenly pissed off.

With that, the foreign heiress informs him flatly, scathingly:

"Your facilities are inadequate."

It's a good thing that /one/ of them has the ability to soak ludicrous moment after ludicrous moment, at least. Izo, for all of his size and shape, is /not/ the tank that most people have automatically assumed him to be: his talent is for directing and channeling his energy outward, and certainly not for being a receptacle of the inverse. That is true physically, and when his patience hits its limits and the needle is riding that little tickmark between the red and white lines, it's true mentally and emotionally, as well.

The difficulty with remaining at a studied neutral, in a zen-like state, is that it isn't the impact of irritation that Izo needs to remain constantly vigilant for. He is aware that his temper is a problem; he's aware that, somewhere deep inside, there is a bloodthirsty, ugly thing that takes visceral pleasure from exploding on others in a fiery catharsis. For that very reason, because of his vigilance, he is almost always unlikely to explode into a rage over minor obstacles -- and an exploding teapot likely counts, given that no one was actually injured, in the end.

The trouble is that happiness, giddiness, and joy are also emotions situated outside of that golden center of inner calm, and he rarely chooses to -- and who would? -- restrict allowing himself to feel positive emotions. They draw him out of his careful balancing act with almost perfect reliability, tipping the scales.

In the moment after the teapot quiets and the blue light in the kitchen wanes, he feels it: a surge of brief happiness. He stopped it in time! She didn't wind up with a face full of hot water, condemned to a life of looking like her bowl of soup! He will be a hero. She will never hit him in the face again.

He is completely wrong.

And when he looks down at her, filled with good humor, all safety catches off, she--

Well. She is Yisa.

And that is a problem.

It is irritating, and he isn't expecting to be irritated...so that irritation gets a foothold.

It wars with his instincts. He wants to protect her. He hurt her -- what, feelings? World view? -- tonight, and his endlessly inconvenient Arcana leaves him deeply sensitive to the position she's in, even if only on an intellectual level...

But she is dancing, in spike heels, on his /last/. /Damn/. /Nerve/.

The result is the world's most awkward, polarized detonation. It starts with a narrowing of his eyes, and a long, sloooow breath. Because he is going to need it.

"/YOUR/ facilities are inadequate!" And after another deep breath, "You...you...are impossible. /Impossible!/" Aware that he's still gripping her shoulders, he lets her go in order to spin around, running his hands over his hair before spreading them out in a grand gesture as though to say, 'look, my people, look what I have brought you,' save that what the prophet has brought is a ruined stove with a slag heap on top of it still hissing and popping and crumbling in supernaturally cold ice.

"/They certainly are now that my teapot is permanently attached to the stove, THAT I DO NOT EVEN OWN, by the way!/" And then he spins again to look at her. He visibly wrestles to get his rant under control. "Which would be /fine/, honestly, on its own. I don't even use my kitchen. That wasn't even originally my teapot, so, I don't mind that you melted it. Seriously. The thought does count. But then--"

Nope, now he's getting angry again: "But THEN, you are seriously going to blame this on ME? I wasn't even IN HERE. I was in the BATHROOM trying not to DIE."

Whoops. He backpedals, suddenly reassuring all over again, gentling his tone: "Because I am /sick/. I have had the longest two months in the history of mankind, between the near-fatal stabbing, the guy with the eyepatch shooting at me, three girls beating up my boss, babysitting a hamster, being charged by a valkyrie and thrown around an alley like a ragdoll, being /assaulted/ by a Soviet girl /just for seeing her thighs, which, you know, you probably should not wear a skirt if you don't want people to see them/, then to a party where somebody starts /sucking the souls out of people with tacky visual-kei skulls/, and the guy I take down gets turned into a goddamn pig roast, while I have some kind of plague, and then not just one but /two/ women I do not even know show up at my front door, one of whom sets my house /on actual fire/."

By the time he gets to the end, what began as a gentle reassurance has evolved once again into a flailing sort of rant, with Izo pacing, only to stop suddenly and press his palms into his eyes. "And I cannot HEAR MYSELF THINK," he adds, and decks the blaring fire alarm, which shatters as though it were filled with C4.

And then he loooks down at his hand and the busted skin on his knuckles, and sighs, deflating in the sudden silence.

"God damnit," he says. It sounds more like self-reproach than anything.

Truth be known, Yisa doesn't know Izo Imaizumi all that well. Though she'd determined to march into his life to dictate it out for him, she really knows scant little about the man.

But still, she has the decency to look shocked at his first barked retort. Lips pursed up, she just stares on back and up with those big round greens. She blinks them a little helplessly, ever so much the deserving target that has no idea how to palate the taste of her own medicine.

At being told she's impossible, her eyebrows twitch once -- again -- and her mouth ticks like it's itchy with an angry, barbed counter, but Yisa's attempt to speak is thwarted when Izo instead launches into his tirade. It snaps her jaw shut, left with an index finger pointed into the air, as even her angry soul is found a little wanting under his devastating loss of temper. She looks at him with all the confusion and reticence of his former iron teapot (rest in peace), blinking her eyes uselessly as again, she watches some other object brew and bubble and threaten to explode--

And it does.

One thing after another, and appearing a little lost, trying hard to keep up with every little tangent in his prowling, snarling, ranting forward momentum, Yisa just stands there on the spot, looking more than a little dazed.

Finally, there appears an opening when he questions her ability to pass fault. The heiress puffs up, bucking her jaw, almost predictably rising to that. "Well, yes," she begins, "I -- you must reali-- "

--he was in the bathroom trying not to die.

She stops trying to argue at that point, completely and effectively shut right up, taking the truth like a transparent slap to the face.

Thanks to her pride, her stoic upbringing, Yisa's face reveals next to nothing. But then, very slowly, those green eyes avert. The action in itself speaks tomes.

Her mighty heart is breaking.

In the ensuing minutes, she remains that way, her very body language undergoing a monumental sea change. All the argumentative aggression sighs out of her, left in its place something that looks like a guilty apology, something tactile enough to force the woman to stand there and bear the knocks she may entirely deserve. She gazes off at an unseen point, somewhere between the wall and her feet. And she'd be happy remaining that way, and morosely so--

--until the SMASH of Izo's fist nukes the fire alarm into debris.

Yisa's head snaps back at that, stunned by the sudden and ferocious display of violence. It brings a visible unease to her -- not out of fear, not out of a sensible human being's reticence, but something else entirely. Something that makes her frown to herself, tense and pensive and totally unable to tear her eyes away.

She looks at Izo's battered hand, trying to ignore the slight flush of her cheeks, then quickly looks away. This would be a commendable time to leave. A first step to pretending this day never happened. If she were smart, she would do that right now.

"You're truly a ridiculous man," Yisa intones instead, apparently not that smart at all. Eyes hooding, she moves toward him, and though she's not quite able to meet Izo's eyes, she reaches to try to take his abused hand in hers. "You shouldn't act that way when injured. Come with me."

And if he lets her, despite all that's happened, despite all that's destroyed, she will try to begin leading the man by the hand back to his bathroom.

/She/ should leave?

Dear god in heaven. At this point, with all that has happened, /Izo/ should leave, if he has any sense, and it's /his apartment/. Someone needs to take the first step, and put distance between them, because obviously nothing good whatsoever can come of it.

He won't, though. Because he's rattled her again. If she could stay angry, if she had lit into him, if she had done anything other than demonstrate that alarming, random nobility of spirit, he could have thrown her out and gone to bed thinking, 'good riddance.'

She didn't, so he won't. Or can't. The effective result of either is the same: he squints when she reaches for his hand. Before he agrees to /anything/, there is a question of utmost importance to ask. If he had asked it when she first requested access to his kitchen, most of this debacle could have been completely avoided.

"Do you know first aid?"

Because he will be /damned/ if he winds up writhing on the bathroom floor with mouthwash all over his bleeding knuckles while she tries to blow-dry them closed, or whatever other insane combination of domestic tools she erroneously decides are relevant to the issue.

ELSEWHERE IN TOWN:

Sleepy firefighters are already halfway to the building when someone comes over the radio to inform them that the alarm was turned off by the resident. The ripples of sneaky hate spiral continue pass ever further through the unwitting city of Sumaru.

"Yes, /I do know first aid,/" Yisa replies through her teeth, eununciating every syllable with great and unspeakable suffering. She still can't find herself to look at Izo, so she casts upon his bookshelves instead a look as stale and stagnant as standing water. Some part of her supposes she deserves this. But she doesn't have to like it.

Though she visibly stews, the heiress does seek to take Izo's hand inside her own, and despite all furious pretenses, despite all history he's had with her right fist in his jaw, she handles him with exquisite care as though the man were made out of brittle eggshells. Her fingers look all the more darker next to his. Maybe she really meant that strange proclamation of determining to protect him. Maybe she's just feeling really bad about the iceberg he used to call his stove.

Brusque, patience already faltering, she repeats, "Now come on." And she tries her best to guide Izo on with the prudent care of someone leading an antsy stallion back to its stable. A stallion that just finished punching out a fire alarm.

When her free hand presses flat against the bathroom door to push it open, Yisa pauses briefly. Her turned eyes crease pensively. "I'm not a Soviet," she says, seemingly out of nowhere, replying a part of his tirade at length. Finding her way to the sink, she turns the taps and checks, testing the temperature of the running water with the skin of her wrist. "I'm Chechen. My people would consider your mistake an unforgiveable offence." Strangely enough, Yisa, ye of damnable rage, ye of complete unpredictability, just appears to sound amused at the edges, like she's the only Chechen born without their protein-coded nationalistic pride.

She waits a moment for the water to run warm, a pregnant, tense silence befalling her. She keeps her eyes turned down, and deliberately so. There's a mirror, and she cannot look at her own face as she says this. "I... apologize for burdening you. It was not my intention." She hesitates visibly. "If you could do me the favour of never telling a living soul about any of this, I'd be very appreciative."

Yisa's eyes swerve to the opposite direction. Her jaw steels briefly. "Extremely. Appreciative."

There is a part of Izo that has withdrawn into the balconies of his better nature for the time being -- or perhaps the steel and concrete bunkers of what little sanity and patience he has left -- and it's from that vantage that he watches, dumbfounded, as he allows her to lead him toward the bathroom. If he can rationalize this seemingly suicidal act at all, it's that he assumes she must know more about tending to broken knuckles than she does about brewing tea or cooking soup, because the woman has done her best to break her own from the moment they first met -- on Nika's face that first evening, on his own the second -- and logic dictates that she's probably had practice.

The next thing that she says throws him completely for a loop. One minute they're surviving near-death experiences in his kitchen; the next minute she's politely educating him with a cultural rebuff. All he can manage to say is, "--oh. Sorry."

While she runs the water he stands there awkwardly and waits, little drips of blood pattering on his spotless linoleum floor. The bathroom is not large. It's barely meant for someone of Izo's size, let alone someone of Izo's size and a guest with a personality that makes up for what height and width she physically lacks. He imagines that he can feel the waves of intense -- /something/ -- radiating off of her, and wisely keeps his mouth shut.

Until she...propositions him?

That's what she just did, isn't it? Izo double-takes. It's like those moments in the movies: 'If you could keep this between the two of us, officer, I'd be...very.../grateful/.'

He's seen those movies.

But why would he ever tell anyone that he let her into his apartment to boss him around, suckered him into drinking the worst bowl of soup in the history of creation, despite knowing it would make him puke his guts up and THEN allowing her to destroy his kitchen? And not immediately kicking her out? He would be the laughingstock of the Yakuza for not having backhanded her across his apartment when she brought him that /disgusting chicken noodle swamp/ at the very beginning. Or even earlier, when she called him an idiot for the first, or fifth, time.

Wires cross, a light bulb goes on. The wrong one.

She's /coming on to him/.

Why else would she get so flustered after he saved her from the exploding teapot? Her irrational anger had caught him by surprise, true, but this might explain it. Sometimes wild animals become aggressive when they experience fear. And she doesn't seem fearful.

But if she was /nervous/...

"Uh," he says, squinting, clearing his throat. How does he broach this delicately?

"That's...that's really...not necessary."

"Of course it's necessary," she repukes sharply, her imperious voice a little dubious. What a silly thing to say. Yisa's lips pull into an absent frown. "Mutual reciprocation is the cornerstone of polished manners. I am a woman of my word. And I bear my honour to give to you. I would invest deep pleasure into satisfying whatever need you have what may arise from keeping my secret. And call me prideful, but I maintain that you would be equally satisfied."

The bathroom is extremely small, its walls forcing them closer than personal boundaries would suggest. Yisa, with her too-warm hands and smelling like tarts and breakfast jams, is all too aware of this. She keeps her eyes deliberately, emphatically turned away. She does not even dare look at Izo. Whatever confidence she's mustered -- after a scene that should have single-handedly decimated her pride -- is hanging on by threads. She's pretty sure that if she takes one look on his face, any sense she has left will unravel.

She's also keenly, pointedly aware of his proximity. Fiercely attempting to ignore it, it just makes her concentrate all the more fastidiously on his wounded hand. She hands it with excessive consideration, sparing his fingers and wrist countless, brief little touches that are, in actuality, her fidgets, but feel like quite the opposite. Especially by the oblivious, long strokes her deft fingers impart, reminiscent of years of sword-practice.

Handling Izo Imaizumi like a beloved weapon is the only way Yisa can force herself to touch with any sure sort of care.

She guides his battered, bleeding knuckles under the warm trickle of water, unable to deny the way her eyes find and follow the webbing of dark blood as it winds down the drain. Yisa bites down unconsciously onto her bottom lip, holding the soft flesh against her incisors.

"I admit you did not deserve any of what happened today," she concludes uneasily, staring at Izo's hand. "My honour is very important to me. You must allow me to amend my mistakes."

Why does she smell so delicious?!

Like the calm and rational part of Izo, watching from on high as this insanity unfolds, there's another part of him -- his stomach, or whatever bottomless maw of desire governs said stomach -- that has been plaintively asking this question since he first caught a whiff of her resonance, and which is now beginning to scream it distractingly, since the pair of them are jammed into a small space.

There are a lot of sensory details putting in high bids for his attention at present, however. For one thing, though he's deeply -- that cannot be overstated enough -- appreciative of the fact that she's handling his fingers with delicacy and care, she is /stroking the blood off of his fingers/ in what may be the most shockingly inappropriate gesture of skin-cleansing he has ever witnessed. If he were the type to blush -- and he is assuredly not -- he would be lighting up scarlet. As things stand, he can only stare at what she's doing, dumbfounded, the hinge of his jaw slightly slack, like that of a badly-hung door. He tears his eyes from her hands and applies them first to her face, then -- well, then to the rest of her, unable to help that reflexive moment of appraisal. It's not as though she's unattractive, right? He's never fucked gaijin before, although, he thinks, looking at her, she barely counts. She almost makes him look gaijin by compari--

Horrified, his expression clamps down hard as he catches his thoughts wandering into self-destructive territory. In the quiet of the bathroom, she might hear his throat click as he swallows. Setting aside biological imperative, this woman is completely insane. She almost killed him with a bowl of soup. God knows what fresh portal of abyssal horrors resides between her (admittedly very nice) thighs, or what the cost to one's soul of entering it might be: peril to body and mind, a threat to sanity and safety forever more, fit to rival any Lovecraftian climax. He would see it, and his eyes would blast from his head in fire-spitting coals merely from the sight.

"I...you...didn't mean for it to happen," he manages, weakly. "And neither did I. We can just leave it at that. I'm not sure what that would -- and I mean, I'm sick, too. With the amount of codeine in that medication -- not that it would be a /problem/, I'm just saying."

Oh, the merits of the terminally innocent.

Yisa remains mindfully oblivious. She's not looking at Izo. She's the fathest thing from looking at Izo. She misses the myriad of expressions to cross the man's face, the discomfort and hesitation, and indulges herself with cleaning out his wound. A wound for which she silently, guiltily blames herself. Her honour dictates Yisa to rectify her own mistakes, and if she can't cook a simple meal, much less brew a pot of tea... she can at least do this. First aid is fortunately something she knows well.

It was a daily regimen under the training of her great grandfather.

Still, she can't quite deny the quiet thrill she gets out of Izo's battered knuckles. Blood's always engrossed her. Part of her darkness, she knows, a facet of the monster that lives under her skin. But in times like these, with temptation waived under her nose, it gets so hard to deny. Her thoughts turn briefly on the memory of his fist smashing the alarm to inconsequence.

And Yisa swallows thickly and turns off the water. Derailing that train of thought all-too-swiftly, she pulls herself away from her intricate cleaning and revists the rest of the bathroom, her eyes meeting her own reflection briefly inside the mirror. She scrapes past the image of her own fast to the more salient one of Izo standing so close to her. Lips creasing with irritation, the mirrored scene makes her cheeks flush dark. In response, she quickly searches the bathroom's mirror and cabinet drawers, searching them aimlessly for anything reminscent of antibiotic and bandaging.

She's still holding onto Izo's hand, unconsciously, distractedly, as she does this.

She hasn't let go even as he speaks to her, an evident change in his voice that even she can detect. It's diverting enough that Yisa foregoes her own strict plans never to look Izo Imaizumi in the face ever again for as long as she lives, breaking that rule and turning a curious glance over the rise of her shoulder. Her lips part imperceptively. Her green eyes have the faintest little flecks of gold hidden in their irises.

The Chechen heiress gives him a stare of total confusion. "What would be a problem?" she asks, unsure of his phrasing. Maybe her Japanese is off.

With that, she turns slightly within their cramped quarters to face him, her neck craned to meet the man's height. Her gaze searches him almost surgically. "Your health has little bearing on this. Being sick or injured should not impede you if you are anything like the man I think you are. That is," she begrudgingly admits, glancing down, "partially the reason I arrived here at all. Not just because you within my protectorate." Her eyes lift to his again. "And then, much to my own surprise, you demonstrated something kindred in you as there is in me. You do know how I must feel inside. I confess the same. I speak of the throbbing pulse what we both share.

"I only wish to satisfy my condition," Yisa implores. "Don't you wish to satisfy it as well?"

What?

Just, what?

Did she actually use the word 'throbbing?'

/Who does that?/

Izo has several good qualities, but chief among them is his ability to shut his mouth when he doesn't know what to say, rather than trying to fill the void of silence with endless reams of words. So it is a steel-trap expression that meets her solicitations when she turns to face him in the bathroom that is /way too small/, very suddenly. Alarms are going off in the primal fear centers of his brain.

The eyes are not like hers: they are dark in pupil and iris. They verge upon the black. The fact that any minute gleam of brown exists within them at all owes itself entirely to the too-bright flourescent bulbs that irradiate every last corner of the room -- so, for the most part, Yisa will be looking at herself in shadowed mirrors.

This is /all wrong/.

Izo is only human. Only a human, and only a man, and he cannot help but smirk a little on the inside when she goes on and on about the kind of man she thinks he is. His libido probably hitches its belt-buckle in a smug, self-satisfied fashion. Y-up, boys, that's us: sex machine. As Yakov Smirnoff would say (?), In Soviet Russia, girls want your dick.

On the other hand, there is absolutely no way in any of the hells that have ever existed since time immemorial that Izo could bring himself to sleep with a woman this crazy, no matter /how/ suggestively she handles his fingers.

He swallows, and searches for a safety line that won't hurt her feelings, or result in her desire to cause him more physical pain. "There's...the knife wound, too. It could be a problem."

All he needs is to assent, she thinks. Her honour binds her to repair what she's done, having realized all too late that her attempts at being civil -- normal, even -- cause others pain.

But Yisa supposes that was always the way. She chose the path of the crusader. She'd have no right to feel any regret for losing normalcy in its stead. She wasn't meant to be normal...

At least, she had thought, when she believed she was the only one. She has so many thoughts she needs to sort out...

But the first and most important is to make things right by Izo Imaizumi. He did her a favour by revealing his secret, even if it has led to her own confusion and loss of self. He took on an injury defending others. What kind of person would she be to not want to help him? She'll make sure to protect him rightfully in the future.

And stay far away from his kitchen. But if he assents, then she can set to work fixing what she's done to his apartment. All she asks is that he just keep today their little secret.

But Yisa's efforts appear to be gleaning stranger and stranger responses.

Talk of his injury makes her gaze squint in visible bemusement. Unable to help herself, her eyes travel indulgently low on the man's body to revisit the sight of those bandages, however concealed. Her dark eyebrows knit.

"I'm not sure what you mean," Yisa ultimately confesses, her own Japanese slowing as though second-guessing her own fluency. "What does that have to do with anything?"

He can sense that he's standing in the middle of a minefield. That is what being at proximity to Yisa Taimiev is like, in his experience: standing in the middle of a field full of active mines with an out of date map for some other minefield altogether. Just when he thinks he has a bead on where the next point of peril is, so that he can sidestep it and avoid being turned into a fine red mist, he discovers that he was wrong, and it's someplace else altogether.

This response does not at all line up with the others.

Yisa is unreasonable, he thinks, and Yisa is completely inept in the kitchen, and Yisa is stubborn, confusing, completely crazy, but Yisa is not /stupid/. Izo knows what stupid looks like. His job with the Yamaguchi-gumi puts him in situations where he deals with it all the time.

Knowing that may save his life.

"What...are you talking about?" he asks, tentatively. "With the...making it up to me...thing."

"I thought I'd explained it liberally," she says, taken aback by the strange, almost conspicuous care he places into his voice. All of that hopeful, directed yearning in her face shifts, locking itself back up under the looming threat of her short fuse.

Her eyes narrow, having long forgotten any reservation from looking him directly in the eye, because Yisa now studies Izo's face with the concentration of a police interrogation lamp. Her expression shifts, tasting of the distant, nascent threat like the ozone of an approaching storm. "Weren't you even listening to me?" she asks, her voice thinner, quieter, angrier, and framed with the obvious edge of someone who does not enjoy repeating herself.

Especially when it was so damn difficult for her to even say it at all.

The minefield in which he's found himself has an added timebomb countdown. The numbers are ticking down visibly inside Yisa's razory green eyes.

Three... two...

"I...was, yeah," Izo says, nodding very slowly, as though that might set her off. "What I heard was 'Let me make it up to you' and 'I came here because of the kind of man I think you are' and something about throbbing pulses. Honestly, I'm not sure what the phrasing was there."

Because he was distracted. Because it's hard to think when a portion of your blood supply is considering going on vacation, particularly when earlier in the week a portion of it went on a vacation of a much more permanent sort.

Dark brows knit together. The shadows between them are not permanent; his crown is still marless with youth, but these are perhaps intimations of the wrinkles that will come with time and age.

Less time, if he has people like Yisa Taimiev in his life, apparently.

"I'm going to be honest," he says, deciding that the delicate path isn't working, and maybe what the moment calls for is some of that solid Hermit illumination. "I'm a little afraid that you're going to try to hurt me again, but you're giving me some really mixed signals, so if you could be more specific about what it was that you had in mind, I would really appreciate it."

Through all this, she still has his wounded hand in hers, held carefully with its battered knuckles left untouched to the open air. Her original plan to continue disinfecting the raw skin, for the moment, remains unceremoniously aborted, thanks to the temperamental young woman's curse of a one-track mind.

Multitasking and Yisa Taimiev are not good bedmates.

And at the moment, it's transparent he's reclaimed her full and disapproving attention, the Chechen heiress' mouth twisted into something burdened and unsure, like the shadow of a frown. The sentences he repeats back on her add to the growing, deepening furrow between her eyebrows. The left one tics.

Make it up to you. Kind of man. Throbbing pulse. There's nothing wrong with her phrasing. She studied formal Japanese with the country's top language instructors.

She's growing frustrated. Her better instincts want her to get angry. She doesn't want to get angry. She's done enough to the man in one day. But unless he starts making sense--

"Hurt you?!" she sparks back in disbelief. No sense whatsoever.

"Why.. !" Yisa sputters uselessly for a second, having to give her head a brief, physical little shake to sober herself into walking the strange path of this man's logic. She gives him a stare that seems to suggest she's giving good mind into considering his sanity, or lack thereof. Maybe it's because of the soup she made--?

Guilt washing over her, she digs her heels down on her own temper, indulges in a deep, calming breath, and soldiers on. "I am talking about mutual satisfaction! An outcome that benefits us both agreeably! I seek to give you relief!"

If only the soup had killed him. Then the nightmare would be over. The cenobites would appear and take him away to a less nightmarish place.

The uncertainty that arose when she failed to comprehend how a knife-wound in the stomach could interfere with her wild and crazy plans to make reparation fades, leaving him once more puzzled, but inclined to believe he had it right the first time after all. Maybe she really just does think he's that super-human.

/Hell yeah/, says his libido, which sounds in this particular instance a lot like the one of the mooninites. /Damn right!/

It's the little voice that emanates from the reptilian center of his brain. He usually reserves his particular brand of sly humor for people he knows well, but tonight's absolute chaos has left him with a weakening grip on virtually everything. That is how, when she looks completely shocked about hurting him, he finds himself with one brow climbing and one of those looks of darkling humor rising alongside it to settle in comfortably where his lips quirk, minutely, to one side, his uninjured hand braced on the wall beside the door, his weight shifting into one hip, saying,

"Hey, don't look so shocked. There's nothing wrong with it hurting a little sometimes."

Because he's a goddamn gangster. That's why.

Her eyes crease at their corners. Her mouth twitches minutely at one side.

"/What/ are y-- "

But that sentence never gets to form. It dies on the arduous journey out of Yisa's lips, probably succumbing to exposure.

Craning back her head, very, very slowly, she stares up at Izo Imaizumi for a full beat. Her eyes blink. They look down at his hand in her. They blink again. They look at his other hand splayed against the wall. Another blink. The angle of his hips. Blink. The quirk of his mouth. Blink. Blink. The cramped proximity of their bodies. Blink. Blink. Blink.

Her jaw slowly, deliberately grits.

He doesn't mean--

Nothing wrong with it hurting.

Nothing wrong with it.

It--

/It/--

Yisa lets Izo's hand go. And, with her other hand, immediately follows it up with a winging slap of her hand aimed right at his face.

"YOU PERVERT!"

CRACK

The sound is very loud, in the bathroom. Loud enough to leave his ears ringing. He was going to reach for her wrist. The impulse fired in his synapses, but it never found physical expression: he has a body full of codeine and, let's face it, he's not in the best shape. His hand lifts as though to intercept, and is only halfway there when the blow connects, leaving his face red and stinging, his eye watering, his head snapped to the side.

He closes his eyes. The muscle at the hinge of his jaw pulses in a slow, steady rhythm.

He will not hit a woman.

He will not hit a woman. Not hit a woman. Do not a hit a woman, Izo. Even if she deserves it. Even if she really, really deserves it.

Eventually dark lashes blink slowly open, his injured hand coming up to touch at his cheek and jaw experimentally, eyes resting on the corner join of the bathroom. It's a full fifteen seconds before he looks back down at her.

"Do not," he says, as calmly and quietly as though he were a zen master, "hit me again." There is no 'ever' in that statement, but it echoes through the phrase anyway: I have hit, it says, my limit for this shit, and you will regret pushing me any further. It is a flickering glimpse of the man the Yakuza found worthy of bringing into the Family -- the one who broke someone's rib at the party; the one who punches fire alarms instead of turning them off.

It isn't a /threat/, per se, but it is /threatening/, in its way. Like a giant, mongrel dog chained in an empty lot, growling and restless in its sleep, it is the suggestion of something terrible without any of its actuality.

A normal, sane, prudent human being would take that good advice.

In fact, a normal, sane, prudent human being would probably have the sense to be balking in fear at the way Izo changes even under the same light, giving a taste to something else, something far more dangerous, that likes to wear his skin.

Yisa should feel that fear. She should at least savour that tense moment, heralded by her narrowed eyes and stinging palm, that belies something deeper and far more dangerous about this unusual man. And she does in a way, but whatever frayed survival instinct she has left is reduced to little more than white noise--

Because she's feeling something else. She's not sure what it is entirely, if it's good or bad, something she wants or doesn't, but it's potent and all-consuming. It's one destructive impulse being able the smell out another, her barely-suppressed bloodthirst tasting something in the air like some scenting viper. Her very being sings against that threat, and that darkness in her head -- the visceral whispers in their backward voices that compel her to forfeit her better nature -- begs her not to stop here. It sounded like a dare. She should oblige him. Test him. Worry him down until--

--Yisa swallows that back with a breath forced out of her lungs, calming herself into those dark, unwanted thoughts she hates so much are pushed back to the recesses of her mind.

But even as she refuses to go to that place, it doesn't mean she won't stop here.

"How dare you speak to me that way!" she snaps back as soon as she feels she has control over her voice. "You're unbelievable! Absolutely unbelievable! Here I am trying to help you! I am bound by my honour and you disrespect me! I will touch you all I want!"

Yisa realizes the mistake of that last snarled sentence. "I mean I won't touch you all I want! Or I mean -- hit you -- you get the idea! Oh, you're reprehensible!"

"No. You won't," Izo says, with absolute certainty -- even a kind of serenity. It's high irony that he looks as calm when he's on the verge of losing his temper as he does when he has it well under control.

"Because the next time you put your hand where it doesn't belong -- meaning anywhere on my person, which does not belong to you -- I am going to have a very hard time finding reasons not to cut it off."

That little bit of nastiness stated in matter-of-fact monotone, the dark-eyed figure with the tattoed arms adjusts his t-shirt mildly, leaving a streak of red blood behind on the dark grey fabric.

"I will forgive you," he says, Japanese veering toward the formal, "for that last transgression, because I recognize that not everyone is as strong as I am when it comes to resisting the urge to indulge in violent impulses. But it is a weakness, Yisa Taimiev, that you may wish to address."

Other than her own father, there have been few people -- really no people, whatsoever -- who have attemped to order Yisa as simply and firmly as Izo does now. That finality in his statement is more of a culture shock to her than the rest of Japan.

She really doesn't think she's done anything wrong. This has always been the way. She's been entitled to everything. She's wanted for nothing. Privilege encouraged her only to take, and even though the ethics of her heart preach to her to provide to others, to give something back -- that entitlement is still her gut reaction. Noblesse Oblige avows her to the common people to be their servant... without truly ever making her one of them.

She feels a twinge even she can't describe, something that feels like guilt but not, something unexplainable to a young woman who, in her entire life, has never been held under the expectation to apologize to others. A Taimiev can do no wrong, right?

The puzzle of Yisa Taimiev is that she may, in all actuality, be two persons instead of one, and Izo had won (or been cursed by...) a glimpse of the underdeveloped creature that tried to make peace with a lethal bowl of soup and explosion in miniature. The one that could have left his apartment some time ago but has chosen to linger, possibly because he's given her the longest conversation she's had in a month. The rest is simply the ideal that has been raised to be an heir and not a human being, and it can't parse why she's finding it increasingly awkward again to meet his eyes.

"I --" she begins to say, and there's a weight to her voice that threatens she may say something serious, something apologetic--

"Wait. You forgive /me/?" Or not. Mention of her own fears, ones already hinted on by him back in the yakuza club, cause Yisa to get angry. More than anything, she's angry at herself. It's just easier to get angry at him.

"Even after you implied...!" But she can't say it. She can't even indirectly mention it. It makes her mouth go dry. Ultimately, she just closes her eyes and takes in a deep breath, her head twitching with a finalizing shake. She should just do what she should have done a long time ago. Before the knowledge that had her world forever changed, her self-worth eventually questioned. Before all this embarassment. Before all her ruined pride. Why is she even here? Why would she even care to--

"Mr. Imaizumi. I will see to reimbursing you for your burdens. I shall see myself out." And unless her poor host may want to detain her for any crazy, unfathomable reason... Yisa slips past for the tactical retreat.

In the movies, Izo would grasp her arm, talk her down, make her some cocoa (except that he can't, anyway, because she's just serial-killed the two objects in his kitchen capable of preparing hot water or milk), and she'd fall asleep on his couch watching a movie, with a new best-friend-forever.

These aren't the movies, though, and Izo has reached the absolute limit of his interest in dealing with her particular brand of insanity. He could have endured the endless debates and squabbling, likely, and pushed through the argument until the dawn hours...

...if she hadn't hit him.

Violence cuts through his patience swiftly, and rattles and loosens dangerous parts of him. It is almost as much for her safety as for his own that he chooses to let her step out of the bathroom and excuse herself. Perhaps there's a person in Japan capable of negotiating time with Yisa Taimiev successfully, but that person is clearly not /him/.

"If you want to reimburse me, you could do me -- and everyone else -- a favor, and start treating people with more courtesy," he quips as she goes, turning moodily back to the sink to flip open the medicine cabinet.