Indecent Proposal
IC Date: Dec. 17, 2011
Who: Kyo Enda, Izo Imaizumi, Yisa Taimiev
Location: Kyo and Yisa's apartment.
What: Bad things.
<Pose Tracker> Izo Imaizumi [K] has posed.
Today: the last day of second-semester finals. A typical day would have found Izo leaving school for work, work for home and homework, and an hour of relaxing -- or lately, research -- before bed, rinse, repeat.
Today, all bets off.
Three nights ago, he'd leaned back in his chair, looked at the information piled on his desk, and understood that he was prepared, that he'd done all he could reasonably do.
Yesterday, he called in sick at work.
Today, he'd breezed through his exams, been the first to finish, and walked out of the exam hall and into the city, rolling the folded piece of paper in his coat pocket between his fingertips.
It has Yisa's address on it.
At least, he hopes that it's Yisa's address: he didn't dare to track her himself, lest he be caught by either she or Kyo, but his brothers had been clear about the location, and about having seen the Chechen, at least as Izo described her. There probably weren't too many caucasians in Sumaru, attending the university, who fit her description.
He barely sees the streets through which he passes. Inside of the messenger bag strapped across his chest, weighing him down more heavily than any of the countless textbooks that form the bars on the cage of his solitary life, he's carrying the fruits of his research...his ticket, perhaps, to boarding a train he doesn't really want to ride, bound for a destination he can neither predict nor prevent outright...whether he rides it or not. The watery winter sunlight is bleached and weak, hardly enough to stave off the chilling numbness that fists his gut as he reaches the address.
Teasing invitations to investigate the skin show on offering downstairs are clipped short when the doorman recognizes Izo, who waves him off, pulls the door beside the main entrance open, and starts up the stairs two at a time.
/You don't have to do this,/ says a voice in his head, half his own, half radiant whisper -- the voice he recognizes as Dakini's. /Their choices do not belong to you. Their trials are of their choosing. You have flaws of your own to address. Is it really wise to take this on?/
The landing creaks underfoot as he reaches it, and turns to the door.
No, he thinks. It isn't wise. But it's still my choice.
Dakini's response is lost in the sound of his fist banging on the door.
"Open the door, Taimiev. We need to talk."
<Pose Tracker> Kyo Enda [U] has posed.
There is, for a long few moments, no response. Not even the usual throb of the club music interrupts the quiet: it's still early, after all, and midafternoon isn't really a high-traffic time for strip clubs. Then there's the indistinct murmur of something like a voice from the other side of the door, somewhere inside the apartment. Steps make their approach. And the door opens. Oddly enough, the air that wafts out is heavy with the strangely-domestic smell of brewing tea.
The face Izo is confronted with is probably not one he exactly wants to see, though it's unlikely Izo would be -surprised- it's there. Blank, save for a hint of curiosity in half-lidded amber eyes, Kyo's familiar features meet Izo's first with surprise-- then with dislike-- and then, with an even stare.
Eventually, his mouth quirks in a very self-aware way.
"This is... probably not optimal for you, is it?" Kyo says, and his soft voice is sharpened by the whisper-keen edge of hostility.
<Pose Tracker> Izo Imaizumi [K] has posed.
Izo waits.
And waits.
As the silence stretches on, he lowers his head, hand on the hinge-side of the doorframe, and raises his fist for another volley of bangs on the door...only to draw up short at the sound of that muffled voice, and lower his hand again. He listens to the footsteps.
/No turning back now, Imaizumi./
When the door opens, he slants his gaze upward and sidelong--
The sight of Kyo gives him pause, but is not by definition surprising; Yisa's near-tears the last time they spoke, the serpent's broadcasts in the prison...
Perhaps he'd have liked to believe that things hadn't progressed to this point, but Izo is nothing if not a cynic. Although his dark eyes flick over the shadow-possessed's countenance in a state of momentary indecision, it's not more than three seconds before everything about him hardens and crystallizes again -- a dense and leaden energy just beneath the skin, an unyielding, steady force that communicates itself in the set of broad shoulders and the slight relidding of his eyes.
"None of it is," is what he says in answer, voice lowered enough in tone and volume to rasp slightly...and dead of inflection, flat, weighed down by the thing in his bag. "It's just as well you're here. We might as well get it all out of the way."
Pause.
"So invite me in. Unless you want me to do this in the hallway, where your neighbors can hear everything."
<Pose Tracker> Kyo Enda [U] has posed.
None of it is, Izo replies. The answer brings Kyo's head to tilt, those cold eyes momentarily wondering-- but that curiosity carries zero inflection of pity. If anything, Kyo just studies Izo the same way he might study a vaguely aberrant sample under his microscope.
We might as well get it all out of the way, Izo goes on to say.
Kyo hasn't forgotten the words Izo threw at him in the prison, and that is written transparently in the suspicion that darkens his gaze when Izo makes that resigned statement. It's a suspicion that mixes with affront when Izo demands to be invited in. Yet he isn't stupid enough to pass by a chance for it all to be laid out while he's present and able to mitigate any damage, and both he and Izo know that.
So eventually, Kyo slowly stands aside. It's a tacit invitation into the apartment... and a sobering sign of just how deeply Kyo has wormed into Yisa's life, if he treats this space so much like his own. Then again, Kyo never did have a good grasp of boundaries.
His eyes continue to watch Izo with that fixed, serpentine stare. That cold gaze persist even as the rest of his face affects amusement and teasing insouciance. "Neighbors? What do I care if the neighbors hear everything? I think you'd be more inconvenienced by that than me."
<Pose Tracker> Izo Imaizumi [K] has posed.
The chilling, reptilian scrutiny meets with obdurate lack of emotional response. It may be that Izo is dealing with all sorts of feelings about Kyo's situation and the circumstances that have brought him here -- in fact, it would be worrisome for the state of his humanity if he were not -- but the world has seen fit to give him a stoneface harder than diamonds, and he's using it now.
As Kyo steps aside, Izo pushes himself through the doorway and into the apartment proper, already unslinging his bag, which he sets down on the nearest empty horizontal surface, with a soft -- and to Izo, final -- thump.
"Then you'd be surprised to be wrong. And the reason why you're wrong is part of the reason I'm here."
The buckle on the front of the bag rattles and jingles as he opens it, flipping aside the top. Inside, a brown accordion folder, no less than two inches thick, the plastic discs on the front wound with string to keep the folio closed. As he straightens, he begins to unwind that string -- and Kyo does not even rate a glance.
Just this: "Get Taimiev, Enda; I'm not here to socialize."
It's unlikely that Izo has forgotten what it feels like to be on the receiving end of Kyo Enda's ire: bloody and extremely painful. Nevertheless, he is unapologetically brusque.
<Pose Tracker> Kyo Enda [U] has posed.
Izo turns his back to Kyo as he enters. This would be an unwise move even at the best of times. Now, Kyo's stare is virtually palpable between Izo's shoulderblades, boring and unblinking and harsh.
The intensity of that stare only seems to lessen when Izo removes that folder-- and only because Kyo's gaze averts to look at the folio instead. He says nothing for a long time. Long enough that Izo would lose track of where he is, whether he's even still in the room, where Kyo might be in relation to his turned back--
Izo demands that Kyo fetch Yisa. Another long silence stretches out, in which Izo has more than enough time to contemplate the usual end result of Kyo's temper.
Then, finally, Kyo replies softly, "Get her yourself, Imaizumi. I don't presume to produce her on demand."
<Pose Tracker> Izo Imaizumi [K] has posed.
It may be that Izo wants to turn around and look. The span of flesh between his shoulderblades might crawl with the simian awareness of a hidden predator, tickling the web of his nerves with urgent signals of peril. It runs hard against everything that survival instincts are designed for...
But Izo is Hermit.
Izo is the utter domination of the intellect over instinct. He has been evolving, for some time, into the essence of thought over action -- very literally and in every way to a fault, in fact, which is how he's even wound up here, back turned to a young man he knows would like to see him dead, unpackaging his ticket to a place he doesn't want to go.
When he speaks, he is almost dismissive, off-hand: "You just seemed so eager to be her errand boy, the last time I saw you." And then, louder, certainly loud enough to fill the small apartment with its thin walls; loud enough to carry into the hall, maybe. For a soft-spoken individual, Izo has a pretty good set of pipes in that chest: "/TAIMIEV./"
Like hell he's going into their bedroom. /Like hell./
"We need to talk, and I'm not leaving until we do. If you don't come out, I can't promise Enda and I will be able to stay on our best behavior, so sooner is probably better than later!"
<Pose Tracker> Kyo Enda [U] has posed.
"You have a poor grasp of love if you equate it to running errands," Kyo says acidly, though notably he stands rather far away from the door Izo has turned to address.
<Pose Tracker> Yisa Taimiev [DS] has posed.
"Imaizumi...?"
The voice rises up at Kyo's back, soft and wan and absolutely familiar to both men.
Yisa rounds the corner and steps into sight, looking far too disparately regal inside the crumbling, yellowing frame of the apartment's tiny kitchen. She looks like someone's lost, spoiled cat, tossed off into the slums and still refusing to sacrifice any of her pride to its filth.
She also looks half-asleep. And angry.
Dressed in a sweater and jeans -- the ramshackle apartment, despite steeped with the smell of tea and allowing the littlest warmth from boiled water, is rotting and as chill with winter -- the Chechen simply stares, her blinking eyes bit by bit clearing their bleary fog. Her curly hair is a little fluffed from her nap, and her features a little drawn, save for a manic rawness lit in her eyes... the thing what has her sleeping so strangely.
Her Resonance reaches outwards, its sensation somewhat changed... before, with her growing frown, it draws back, folding on itself and receding out of existence.
Swallowing, Yisa looks at Kyo, as if to ask him with her eyes what this is... but before her expression can sharpen into a demand, it draws back on Izo, on the incredulity of his tall body occupying her apartment -- this apartment.
She can't stop a quiet flush of dismay from darkening her cheeks, and muscle flickers palpably when Yisa tightens her jaw. Another person knows that --
"How did you --?" she begins to ask the obvious.
<Pose Tracker> Izo Imaizumi [K] has posed.
"I'd have a poor grasp of love if I equated it with whatever you're capable of," Izo returns, and this time he does angle his attention toward Kyo, gaze flinted and unrepentent. He says it not to injure (like his petty barb about Kyo being Yisa's errand boy), but because he believe it to be true, and it carries all of the weight of his convictions, sheathed in a jacket of glacial chill.
And then...
Yisa.
For two heartbeats, he feels the iron anvil of his purpose -- its numb resolve, its myriad reasons, hardened and cooled into a formulated plan, embraced with all of the resignation of martyrdom -- falter, catching her there, looking vulnerable in the aftermath of sleep. He's never known how to feel about her...and sometimes, she reminds him of his little sister.
His systems have been primed for this for days, though. Weeks. Maybe since before the incident at the prison; he's not of a mind to dissect the timeline, searching out the conception of his plan.
It's enough to be here, right now. And as Yisa's anger slips in favor of confusion, in the moment during which she loses her momentum, he instinctually knows -- he remembers, because dealing with her, one needs to be a fast learner to keep all of their teeth -- that now is the time to add to that gentle wobble in her mood, to keep her off-center enough, or maybe distracted enough, that she forgets to hit him. Regardless, Dakini is close: ready to bubble-wrap him at the first sign of any incoming fists.
...or fangs.
What he does is dip his fingers into the unlaced folio, and withdraw a picture, and hold it up. He doesn't look at it, himself; his eyes stay with Yisa.
It's a faded polaroid photo of a little Japanese girl. Probably her first spaghetti dinner: there is day-glo orange sauce all over herself, her chubby cheeks, all over her bib, all over the tray of the highchair she's sitting in. There are adult hands, male hands, in the frame; her daddy, trying to wipe the drool from her chin as she squirms away, messy fist gripped around a baby spoon, the utter delight of the mess she's making written all over her little face.
"There are some things I think we should talk about. Things I think you're going to want to hear."
<Pose Tracker> Kyo Enda [U] has posed.
Kyo returns Yisa's look quietly, a certain intimacy to the way they now trade words with their eyes and without speech. In his gaze is the silent equivalent of a shrug. He doesn't know what Izo wants either, and he is not about to try to speculate.
Out of a certain wary, half-protective half-possessive instinct, he moves closer to her as Izo makes his sharp rejoinder. He doesn't really understand Izo's answer, and that lack of understanding reminds him of why Izo is likely here. It puts him visibly on edge, and Imaizumi might become uncomfortably cognizant of the fact a young man capable of turning into a giant snake is standing feet away, becoming more and more tense with every one of his movements...
And judging from the way Kyo's eyes sharpen on Izo, when Imaizumi's own eyes focus with purpose on Yisa's little window of confused vulnerability, Kyo knows exactly what it is Izo sees. He knows what it is Izo is thinking. The same things have been in his mind. Observations of when best to push Yisa, to keep her off-balance, to make her listen rather than descend into her temper.
His eyes transparently warn Izo, watching him even as Izo watches Yisa for her reaction.
Kyo only tears his eyes from Izo long enough to take a look, himself, at the picture that is proffered. From the way he stares blankly at it, not only does it not engender any particular emotional reaction, Kyo does not even understand why it was brought here. "Then get on with it," he finally says, and his voice grits with some of his tension.
<Pose Tracker> Yisa Taimiev [DS] has posed.
That ruffled pride of hers, caught in the wrenching realization that someone else -- and Izo, no less -- has discovered her poverty, and its still-lingering embarassment --
It pauses, caught and snuffed somewhere with the rest of her sentence, left to die on the back of Yisa's tongue. Her lips part to demand Imaizumi why he's here, and he intercepts it with a single photograph.
It's a tactical maneuver, and in this moment, it works. Yisa stands there, startled and confused, barely even noticing Kyo's close approach to her side. Her eyebrows knit, and she simply looks on, her hazy eyes making shapes and sense of that one image. In it is a child, happy, innocent, and beloved, celebrating a private moment with her doting father. Her moving eyes search it in an alien way -- not dispassionate like Kyo, but with a certain, uncomfortable detachment of someone whose own childhood lacked moments such as those. They were only brief things, and gone once her brother was murdered --
Yisa has writ across her face the emotional reaction Kyo lacks. Still half-asleep, her heart beating a little hard from her startled awakening, her thoughts still thick and heavy, she only feels a strange sense of discomfort. And the pulse of something that feels like dread.
Ultimately, that confusion stays saddled across her features, and for now, she remains gentle. So gentle that Kyo's sharp demand only earns a brief, pensive turn of Yisa's eyes, his tension distracting her.
"Kyo," she says, as much a rebuke on his tone as it her trying to hush his nerves. Yisa Taimiev, a soothing presence?
"What is this about, Imaizumi?" she asks a moment later, her green eyes pinching slightly as they lift back up on Izo. There's a small dinette set with two chairs centered in the kitchen, but Yisa does not yet invite him to sit -- probably too sleep-drugged to do so... probably too unsure of what he has to say.
<Pose Tracker> Izo Imaizumi [K] has posed.
If Kyo recognizes in his unwanted visitor certain behaviors that he himself has long since puzzled out, too, then he won't find any comfort for his mounting unease in anything that follows, because Izo's body language is faintly predatory. Not the sort of predation that results in blood on the walls and an ever-mounting body count, but nevertheless, the signals are there: Izo's gaze stays on Yisa in spite of the lashing of resonance that accompanies Kyo's proximity, when he shifts to draw nearer to the Chechen...and in spite of the fact that Kyo presents a far greater threat to his physical person than a punch thrown in a fit of anger.
He's locked onto his quarry.
His movement is calculated to be unimposing as he extends the photograph toward her, tilting it outward, for her to take the opposite edge. Both of his brows edge very slightly upward. "Here. Take it. You might as well."
And there, held out in offering, the picture will stay, as he continues in his oblique fashion toward his point, in defiance of Kyo's uneasy annoyance.
"Her name is Misaki Koga. She's a little bit younger than I am. Lives in Tokyo now. Going to university. She's studying business. Her mother doesn't really approve; she wanted her daughter to study music, but daddy was always good with numbers and saw the value in it, so she got to go off to the big city and do what she wanted to do. One cat, two fish -- apparently the dormitories don't let you have cats, but I understand she definitely has one, so I guess she's defiant -- and recently engaged to be married. Nice guy, little bit indecisive about his own education -- she'll probably be the breadwinner, if they marry, but they'd been putting it off."
If by this time Yisa hasn't taken the photo, Izo will gently toss it onto the top of the coffee table; if they haven't got a coffee table, he'll toss it onto the nearest seat cushion, or the floor.
"You killed her father."
He follows up the gentle toss of the photo with that of the entire accordion folder, its impact only sufficient to jostle loose the top layer of materials he's put together: more photos, newspaper clippings, dossiers, obituaries. Wedding records. Family trees. Transcripts from schools. Izo puts his newly freed hand in a loose prop where his jeans are belted to his hips, his other hand lifted to cup over his lips, chin, jaw, in an absent drag as he looks down at the sum total of his many hours of work, of favors he called in. At the lives he combed through, searching for evidence with which to make his case.
"I'm not here," he says after he scratches his jaw and lowers his pawing hand to gesture at the material, "to try to stop you from doing what you've decided to do. Don't get me wrong -- if I thought I could, if I thought there was any chance of success, I would. I'm here because if you're determined to do this, you need to do it with your eyes open. You need to see the mess you just made. All of the mistakes. And you need someone who can help you avoid making them again. So here. This is all for you."
<Pose Tracker> Kyo Enda [U] has posed.
Kyo, Yisa says. It's only one word, only one name, and said softly at that, but it visibly calms him. Kyo subsides as implicitly asked, still watching Izo balefully, but draws even closer to Yisa in lieu, as if to look for further comfort from her presence.
He does not like the way Izo is looking at her, which is ironic given it is a way he himself has looked at her countless times. Or maybe, given the existence of possessive jealousy, not so ironic.
He says nothing as Izo reaches carefully forward and speaks about the girl in the photo, though his eyes do follow Izo's careful movement with the intensity of a cat about to bite. His agitation mounts again as Izo talks, and Kyo begins to understand the man's angle of attack. He's going to show her a bunch of pictures and names and worthless backstories, and talk a bunch of rhetoric, and appeal to that softness called 'guilt' that Kyo himself has exploited often enough, but never truly understood...
Kyo's slow realization seems to snap into place at the sound of the folder hitting the table's surface.
"Mistakes!" The sibilants in the word slice the air. Kyo bristles visibly, and it's transparent that only Yisa's near presence keeps him from picking that folder back up and throwing it back in Izo's face. "The only mistakes I saw were the ones made by these people. Those who want to keep their lives should not throw them away. Besides, for every one of those people in your file, with their sad, sad stories, we could discuss ten more stories of other people that were hurt by -them-."
His voice softens, as if to beseech for pity and sense, but only because he is speaking for Yisa's benefit now. "Why do you come here to cloud the issue with this emotional noise? It's hard on her already, doing what she has to do."
<Pose Tracker> Yisa Taimiev [DS] has posed.
Yisa never does take the picture. Perhaps refusing to touch it. Perhaps too afraid to.
Even if she was willing, it signals in a small, imperceptible flexing of her left hand... then stops. She pauses as Izo begins to speak. He tells a story, a long and meandering one, painting the life of a girl she has not and will never meet. It stays the Chechen's hand and roots her on the spot, and by the guarded slant of her eyes and the press of her lips, it's obvious she's listening.
And then Izo calls her a killer.
Any motion Yisa makes toward that polaroid aborts in her closed fist, and she balks back, unable to stop her eyes from tracking the dropped, discarded image's fluttering descent. She stares down at it as it lies to rest on her chipped coffee table.
Then that infant's smiling, food-stained face is swallowed away, lost under a deluge of infomration. The dropped folder vomits its heavy contents in a spreading pool of paper. The sheer volume of it hits the table in a heavy thump, enough to make Yisa twitch, finally sobered completely and startlingly awake.
Her raw-rimmed eyes stare a frightened hole down into all that material evidence. She parts her lips, perhaps to offer some feeble reply --
-- and Kyo answers before she can. His voice thunders through the apartment, loud and harsh like a door slamming, even if Yisa doesn't seem to notice. Frowning quietly to herself, she moves stiffly, almost numbly, through the noise, taking unsure steps until she ghosts up beside the coffee table, tilting her head down at that tide of paper.
Tentatively, as if afraid she might be stung, she reaches to pick up one random sheet of paper, lifting it closer to read its contents. Her face is like a lock, cold and blank, though a growing tension haunts her body, stiffening her limbs, pressing an invisible weight down on her shoulders. It's information. Lives. She couldn't have done what he says. Did she just inflict onto someone else what happened to her? Did she make a mistake?
"I didn't..." Yisa murmurs feebly. She's in her own little world for now, one apart from both men, one that leaves her staring down at paper with eyes that don't want to believe. "I -- it's not what I meant to do..."
<Pose Tracker> Izo Imaizumi [K] has posed.
"/Good,/" Izo says, raising his voice for the first time since he called Yisa out into the livingroom, the black pools of his eyes /finally/ ticked over to Kyo, where they hold for a moment. "It's hard on her?" His gaze ticks back, the lids tightened, not quite squinted, but drawn taught, hawkish. He shifts, physically, until he's positioned on the opposite side of the coffee table from Yisa, to lean forward, roll his upper body just enough to put his eyes on her level, where they pointedly seek her own downcast green pair with every ounce of the intensity he is capable of mustering, whether or not she looks up to meet them.
"It's /hard/ on you, Taimiev? /Good/. It should be. It /needs/ to be. The minute it stops being hard, you've become the thing you think you're fighting against." Stern and unrelenting, his tone softens just enough for him to add, "If it's hard on you...maybe there's still hope."
And he straightens. Looks at the sheet of paper in her hand, the splay on the table. At Kyo, whose points require answering. He takes a breath, exhales it.
"That," he starts, quietly, "is the point. You didn't mean to, but you did. If I thought you meant to, if I thought there was no hope, I wouldn't be here. Or maybe I would, but it wouldn't be to /talk/." He's digressing there, and -- sensing that -- he shifts his attention to Kyo, where it remains: flinted, impassive, irises every bit as dark as the pupils inside of them. "But I am, so let's talk about your points, Enda, since I think they deserve discussion. Your information was imperfect. As half of the contents of that folder will elucidate, not everyone in prison is guilty of the crime they're convicted of...and in more than just a few instances, those who /were/ guilty of their crimes have gone on to become...something better. Something better than most people who've never made a mistake, because they had everything taken away from them, and a few personal epiphanies that your average citizen may never have. But setting that aside for a moment -- what about Misaki Koga? Wasn't /she/ an innocent? Wasn't her love for her father innocent? And did she deserve to be punished, too? Your choices make ripples. If you don't think broadly, if you /simplify things/, you will destroy innocent lives, and create today the monsters that you'll be forced to fight tomorrow."
Again, he leans forward, and his eyes are insistent in their search for the Chechen's, though he doesn't get anywhere near her personal space (possibly because Kyo occupies it, but possibly just because he'd rather not get within punching distance).
"The last time I saw you and you were so upset, do you remember what you said to me? That you couldn't give up on Enda, because if there wasn't any hope for him, you didn't think there was any for you, either. I need you to remember that right now, so that you can understand what I say when I tell you that if you /simplify/ what you are doing, if you don't open your eyes to shades of grey and weigh these things carefully...you are taking that hope of redemption away with every life he crushes out. If you believe that people can be saved, then you /must/ be more cautious. You need someone who can do that for you. And that's why I'm here. I'm offering to be that person. Not because I think what you're doing is right -- I don't -- but because without someone to do that, the costs are going to be so much worse, in the end."
<Pose Tracker> Kyo Enda [U] has posed.
Kyo says nothing as he watches Yisa react to Izo's words. As he watches her move numbly over to the stack of papers, doubt rising like a tide in her mind, and take the top page. Her eyes lower to look, to read what it is she's done--
--and with a ripping motion, Kyo reaches to tear the paper from her. "You didn't mean to," he tells her savagely, though he doesn't honestly even know what crime they discuss. "That's enough."
He throws the paper back to the stack. "So, Imaizumi. You would have us spare every person who might be connected to a so-called innocent. Wonderful. That's just about everyone in the world, isn't it? For any given person, you could pull out some connection they have, some relative, some friend, who might be affected. Use it to buy everyone reprieve. So let's not punish them at all! Because they know someone, somewhere, sometime. Great! Let's do nothing."
His eyes fix back on Yisa. "Doing nothing killed your brother," he says. "Mercy, and hope, and pity for collateral lives put him in a hole."
Kyo turns back towards Izo, a slow turning, full of threat. His breathing harshens and thickens, hissing between his teeth-- and then, at some point, just becoming a plain hiss. His eyes flare, and the dark around them moves oddly. "You talk pretty ideals, Imaizumi," he says, "but who are you to be so sure that your judgment is better than hers? What makes you better able to pick who to live, and who to die? Your offer does nothing but substitute your choices for hers. And the mesh of your net may be too wide, too passive, too /kind/, to be any more effective."
His hands work, clawing at his sides. The air trembles with that ineffable tension that indicates he is a breath away from transformation.
"Words," he says, and his voice is no longer entirely human. "I am sick to death of words. You are seriously testing my patience."
<Pose Tracker> Yisa Taimiev [DS] has posed.
One thought jars her, cold and startling like a hypothermic dunk, and Yisa purses her lips to even consider it.
If there is the remote possibility that she could have perpetuated some vicious cycle, and through her actions, begetted another girl just like she is, a second Yisa Taimiev who feels just as lonely, and betrayed, and spiteful, and unable to feel anything but hate for an unfair world --
The thought ends, abruptly, as Kyo rips the paper free from her fingers. The action sobers her with a sharp twitch of her head, and she looks on in askance as he angrily counters all of Izo's words.
The next many minutes are tense ones, and are filled with two men talking. Yisa remains silent, her attention unable to carve free from either of them. Izo seizes immediately on her pause and uncertainty like a predator, and she is his unwitting, captive audience, looking up with eyes far too bright and afraid for someone who has declared war on an entire world. He dissects her crusade with a surgeon's blade, and all she can do is listen, her only movement the detached way her hand fumbles up two rub both corners of her right eye between her spread fingers, before all her fingerpads just press deep into the bone under her eyebrow, trying to vice away a growing ache.
Then Kyo goes for a vehement counter, fighting word for word even as his own voice begins to unravel, devolving into the phlanging hiss of something old and reptile. His cold logic makes an eery balm for her crusade, encouraging it to lose its soul and be delivered within a machine's simple execution.
And Yisa stands immobile in the middle, unsure of what to do.
She only rouses back to life to taste something changed on the air, the atmosphere heavy and low with implicit threat, and she outstretches one arm. Yisa is still full of her fumbling and uncertain touches, but there's still something in the way she presses her hand on Kyo's upper arm, an action that speaks as both a bridle and a request that he not attack. And she seems to trust totally that he'll listen.
"Redemption isn't enough for this city," she says quietly, her voice sounding strained, perhaps being crushed under her own heavy rhetoric. Yisa looks searchingly at Izo for a beat, then looks away again, back at the papers. "I'm not sure if... I believe in such a thing any longer. Even if redemption is possible, it will never bring a change like what I mean to do."
The truth is she gave up hope on healing Kyo, as soon as he made himself into a weapon she could use. She gave up on healing herself, as soon as he promised to become her cage. She isn't sure either of them can be fixed, if it's possible --
"But I do believe in innocence, Imaizumi," Yisa continues with a renewed conviction. "And if there were... innocents... who were killed by my mission..."
Her jaw tightens, and so does her hand on Kyo's arm, her anger pulsing hot through her blood. "It only proves how broken justice is when it imprisons the guiltless. You didn't want to trust me. And now you want to help me?" Now Yisa looks back on Izo, her green eyes neither calculating nor shrewd. Instead, they try to search his face, as if wanting to unearth something from it she might find hopeful. "How do you intend to help?"
<Pose Tracker> Izo Imaizumi [K] has posed.
'Doing nothing killed your brother,' Kyo says, expertly gripping and twisting that hidden knife...and an until-now missing piece of the puzzle softly clicks into place for Izo.
"Is that what this is about," he murmurs -- to Yisa, softly; to himself, mostly, and in any case if it wasn't rhetoric, it would be turned into as much by the singing tension of impending violence that emanates from the shadow-possessed.
He faces the seething head-on, turning from Yisa and tucking away that piece of disarming information for later. The waves of it wash over him, and he's moments from opening his mouth to volley a reply...
When Yisa decides to speak.
His own resonance vibrates, an uneasy threnody of singing bowls, sliced through by the bitter winds of a Tibetan winter...but he holds himself, and the Dakini, in check. The side of his throat pulses with his ready adrenaline, but it, and the spectral orchestra that follows him around, are all that exist to indicate his tension...his readiness to fight, if that is what comes to pass.
Her answer is better and worse by turns than it could have been. His answer isn't quick to come; he weighs his words like Anubis at the scales, against the featherweight of truth. "I believe in it. For me...for you. And I believe, with enough time, you /will/ see it with your own eyes." Matching her guileless gaze with his darker, less scrutable, certainly less innocent, he attempts to regroup his thinking atop the latent ferocity of Kyo's fury.
Unsurprisingly, this is not easy to do, even for an over-thinker like Izo.
"I didn't trust your judgement," he allows, quietly, with a nod that hesitantly acknowledges that fact with honesty. "With regard to Enda...because he's persuasive; because...you..."
Suddenly, Kyo's presence is a serious obstacle. Izo feels the pressure of it as he tries to muster the most forthright response possible, a hurdle to overcome, and the muscle that forms the squared hinge of his jaw pulses once with the note of frustration that follows. "Because I think the same thing that would make this difficult for you, the same thing that gives me /hope/ for you, can be taken advantage of by people whose motives are less than pure. If I didn't trust your judgement...then at least I trusted your innocence. And that's why," he adds, with a slant, cool look at Kyo, his expression hardening into a shell that seeks to veil his still bubbling anger, "I think my perspective is useful. I'm not as innocent as you are. I come from a different place, a different kind of life, and I am /intimate/ with the faces of evil. Trust in that. I have contacts all across Japan, by way of my Yakuza ties; I have resources. I can pull favors. Learn things you can't. But I also wanted to -- started to -- change; to be better. I don't /want/ to kill anyone, and you can't say the same of Enda. He may be efficient for his uses...but he killed people long before you came along, Taimiev, and admitted to me that he doesn't understand guilt and innocence, anyway."
"He's right about one thing, though. My judgement is fallible, too. It's a side-effect of being human, and that's why I don't think this is right. But you're going to do it, whether I think so or not...and I don't have your innocence, and I don't have his bloodlust. There's already blood on my hands...and I'm not afraid to get them dirty, if I think the world is better off without someone in it. Those people exist. Let me help you find them and root them out more precisely, before you do more harm than good."
<Pose Tracker> Kyo Enda [U] has posed.
The darkness writhes all around them, the air thickens with threat and unnatural menace... and all of it, every last crawling bit, pauses palpably when Yisa's hand touches Kyo's arm. Kyo's fixed glare does not vary from Izo's face, and the tension in his body does not lessen, but all the snarling monstrosity that promised to bare fangs and tear Izo to pieces quiets, and retracts its claws, and settles to a crouched wait.
Kyo obeys her, rewarding her trust, but there remains a distinct sense that he would have preferred not to.
Redemption isn't enough. "Redemption spends its energy on tending withered leaves," Kyo murmurs his agreement beside her, his low voice possessed of that hypnotic sway inherent in a snake's natural seduction, "but does little about the rotted roots. The change you need is deeper. You need me for it. And... you need me for something else, too." His voice lowers further in intimate query. "You haven't forgotten what it is..."
He finally looks at her, askance. It is a strange look, perhaps, to an outsider. It is the look of someone regarding something dangerous, and it contrasts sharply with the way he reaches to try to take her hand. His grasp is simultaneously a restrictive tether, and an oddly-frightened, needy gesture. "And -you- do not know what it is," he says softly, this time to Izo, though his eyes don't vary from Yisa. "You have not seen it. Or else you would not hold such naive beliefs."
His expression flickers and averts again when Yisa goes on to nevertheless reinforce her belief in innocence. Momentary skepticism flashes in his eyes... skepticism that changes to mild disgust when she shows receptiveness to Izo's offered help. Some of that hostility returns to his demeanor as Izo speaks on, talking of Kyo as if he weren't standing right there. Kyo's jaw grits with temper. "No, I don't know the difference between guilt and innocence," he retorts in a hissed admission. "But I trust Yisa to know the difference. To pick it for me. Now here you come instead, offering your patronization instead of trust, your "superior judgment" instead of your faith, and your doubts as to her resilience and her motives..."
But Izo goes on to finally lay out, straight and plain, what he came here to propose. He offers to select their marks.
Something in Kyo's expression smoothes and suffers a strange sea change. He looks, narrow-eyed, at Izo as if he has never seen the man before, and behind that amber gaze a cold grasping mind of metal and gears turns. His head cants, slowly, his lips parting... but no further arguments come spilling out. He blinks once, twice, and after that second blink the look in his eyes as he regards Izo is hungry.
Then his expression smoothes into complete blankness, save for the way something ineffable haunts the edges of his mouth and the corners of his eyes.
<Pose Tracker> Yisa Taimiev [DS] has posed.
He believes that she will rewrite her crusade to allow humanity and this world its chance for redemption.
To give it its deserving chance to heal itself before she determines to force its hand. Yisa's eyes only slant away at that remark, her gaze turned away and narrowed, representative of how little she thinks of humanity's free will.
She does not believe the world can save its own soul. If not for Kyo, she cannot resist her own dark pull -- the thing that whispers to her even now, that begs her to let Kyo go and exult on the violent game the two men would give her -- and what has other monsters more control that she has?
Her eyes slide shut when Izo says she is innocent, the very word filling her with a shameful sort of hope that makes her hate herself all the more. Her temper flints and flickers, her own self-disgust making even a compliment such as that sound obscene.
"I am /not/ innocent," Yisa grounds out, her voice twisted on itself like shrapnel, the words spit out like bitter fruit. "Do not call me innocent. I will not tolerate it."
Her plaiting temper unravels its braid only when Kyo claims her hand, the touch pulling her out of her own dark place. And there, she is truly at adds, with Yisa told she is innocent by one man, and reminded that she is a monster by the other. Her eyes fix widely on Kyo when he implores what it is she needs, and in her face is that expressive answer. She knows. It's a prison. If she feeds his hunger, then he keeps her human -- barely human. Her face gentles, and in a single, brief, glimpse of a moment -- and from a woman who steels herself against such things, who tried so hard to balance her hot temper with a cold detachment -- looks on Kyo with so much visible, palpable emotion, the face of someone who could be, would be, in love.
She lets him keep her hand.
But that glimpse is gone again, locked again under all her austerity and professional protocol, Yisa ever that proud, stuffy, frowny woman. Her green eyes draw off of Kyo, watching Izo intently as he answers her due question, and... offers himself to the both of them. To her crusade.
Through her hand, she can feel Kyo's presence turn, and his bearing change -- but to what, Yisa does not know. She glances wonderingly his way, before her eyes leave him again, fastening back on that pile of papers. She thinks with pursed lips.
Her eyes crease slightly. "What if it were my turn," Yisa begins, sharply, crisply, "to not trust you, Imaizumi? What if I refuse to believe in redemption? Do you withdraw your assistance then? Do you truly believe in what I want to do? If you mean to try to stop me..."
Yisa exhales emphatically. "My crusade cannot be stopped."
<Pose Tracker> Izo Imaizumi [K] has posed.
Izo has done his talking, now. Armed with an argument, a series of logical connections to an end result, and a folder full of ghosts, he came here to make his case -- and he has. Throughout all of Kyo's ripostes, all of Yisa's denials, everything that follows, he's reassembling his impervious exterior...to the extent that, by the time Yisa has come to the crux of her indecision, it's wholly back in place.
He lifts his hands slightly out from his sides, splays his palms, and says, "It is your turn."
He lets the silence sit, simmering, and then reaches for the strap of his bag, to lift it up and settle it over one broad shoulder, his gaze lowered to the clasp as he situates it.
"I've made my case. I gave you my reasons. All of my feelings about it. Everything. Now you get to choose. I'm only going to offer this once. If you send me out of that door, if you turn me down, that's it. I won't be trying to convince you again."
<Pose Tracker> Kyo Enda [U] has posed.
I am not innocent, Yisa spits. Kyo smiles oddly at the insistence, his eyes half-lidding with some secret knowledge. Yisa's disbelief in the ability of a free mankind to resist its own darkness, as well, is something intimately familiar to him. He says nothing to Izo about any of it, instead simply reaching to take Yisa's hand and remind her of her need for him. She is a monster just like him, his eyes and subtle words remind her. She is a monster, and she needs strong cage bars.
In response, her eyes soften up at him with that familiar love she gives only to him. The emptiness in him soothes to see it, and his hand squeezes hers.
His attention returns to Izo, then, as Yisa turns to ask him: what if she were the one not to trust him, this time? What if she refused his insistence on redemption? Does he truly believe, or does he simply offer himself with the true intention of stopping her crusade?
Izo wastes no more breath on any of those questions. He simply offers an ultimatum: take his help, or never see it offered again.
Kyo holds his silence. The question is not for him to answer. But he does hold Yisa's hand a little more tightly.
<Pose Tracker> Yisa Taimiev [DS] has posed.
For one who enjoys issuing hard ultimatums, Yisa narrows her eyes angrily against the taste of receiving one. Her jaw grits with a flint strike of her temper, and her anger tenses her hand briefly inside Kyo's.
In her time knowing him, in her strange friendship with him, she has extended Izo some measure of her trust. She trusted to tell him some things few others -- not even Naomi knows. She trusted him with the care of her cat... and to gaze around the decrepit surroundings of this apartment, it's obvious why.
But Yisa's crusade is another thing, something of which she's violently protective, because one can call its trajectory her very soul. She has given it to Kyo, when he demonstrated evidence that she can trust him, control him, and use him... and he would be faithful. She is not sure if it is possible for her to trust another person that way, and her greedy, jealous nature wants to guard her mission from outside influence. Izo does not even answer her question -- if he believes in what she's doing. And she needs to know. He's never agreed with the paths she's taken or with the hard lines of her beliefs. So why the change now? But, instead of an answer, he offers to leave and never return if she doesn't accept.
Aggravated, she quickly appraises them in those dwindling moments, hating her little ability to read people, to see through their exteriors. Her caution tells her no. But her hopeful heart begs her to say yes. What is her crusade worth if she cannot protect the innocent? What is this for if she becomes as monstrous as those she wants to stop? Is it worth it, to open her crusade a little, to be able to know her targets?
Yisa bites her bottom lip in clear indecision, her expression flickering between frustration and anger. And then--
"Fine," she grates out. "All right. I want what information you can provide." Her eyes avert, and Yisa adds, slowly, almost warningly, "I'll trust that you will help me. Help us."
<Pose Tracker> Izo Imaizumi [K] has posed.
Whether or not Kyo feels it's his place to deliver a verdict, it's plain enough to Izo that the young man's part in this symbiotic relationship is every bit as critical in its way as Yisa's, so the gangster does flick his attention briefly that way to gauge what he sees -- which is little enough -- before turning it back to Yisa, to await her answer. He can sense the spark of her ire, but against it he is a seawall, a bulwark that it harries with flames and doesn't change. Stony and still, he hangs in the balance of her choosing, prepared to accept the path that she sets them on. Resigned, to all appearances.
Only the very astute would see that he isn't breathing.
And then she accepts, and he gives her a nod so minute that it barely moves his head at all -- such a small thing, such an inconsequential thing, to signify the signing of his name on the proverbial dotted line. So modest a movement, to embody this radical shift to the arc of his forward momentum...the sacrificed sanctity of his washed-clean hands.
He listens for her, but Dakini is silent.
"I don't need your trust, Taimiev, if you don't want to give it to me," Izo says, as he turns toward the door, just a few short paces away. "My tattoos taught me that sometimes, people won't give it to me no matter what I do, so I don't really need it anymore. All I need from you is a willingness to participate in the arrangement I suggested, for your own benefit. I think once we get started, your choice will justify itself."
He sets a hand on the doorknob, and looks over his shoulder. "I'll send you the first short list soon." Pause. Eyes flick over her, inscrutable, guarded. "And you should come visit your cat more often," he adds. "Before he forgets who you are."
<Pose Tracker> Kyo Enda [U] has posed.
The two facing Izo mirror one another. For every bit of Yisa's dark skin and soft, strong curves, Kyo is tall and pale and sharp, his body cut from lean and hungry angles. Yisa is transparent, her expressiveness betraying all her emotions and her inability to read Izo's face. Kyo is completely expressionless, as impossible to read as a brick wall, though his eyes study Izo with every bit of the perceptiveness that Yisa lacks.
He says nothing, reveals nothing of what he's thinking, but his eyes eventually drift downwards to watch the way Izo's chest doesn't move.
Yisa accepts. Izo accepts in turn. And the resigned, subtle way he does it, the sheer import of it for his immortal soul... Dakini falls silent, disapproval in her total quiet, and as if to accentuate the dire nature of the moment, Kyo cracks another knowing smile. It widens with unspoken cruelty when Izo rejects Yisa's trust.
Izo turns to go. It's not until then that Kyo finally breaks his silence, his hand slipping from Yisa's so his arms can fold.
He laughs. The sound is merciless and without humor. "She will trust. -I- will watch. You mess with her, try anything I think undermines her, and I'll kill you."
<Pose Tracker> Yisa Taimiev [DS] has posed.
Yisa's dark eyes follow Izo's receding presence, a shadow on him for every step he takes back to the door, the weight of her stare a palpable thing on his shoulders.
But there's little that's surgical in eyes on hers; she seems to have retreated back to wanting to search him again, if in blind hope to see something she'd missed before. Something that'd have him believe her ways when he did not before.
"I do have to give it to you, Imaizumi," she tells him, simple as that. "This is my crusade. It's... what I am. I have to trust you. And whatever your tattoos, or your past, I will trust you. It's my promise." She feels her own caution rail on her for it, but Yisa buries it down until its cries are nothing. This is what she believes; her crusade cannot exist in deception. There is no place for doubt. With her soul pledged in its execution, she cannot doubt.
But as for Kyo --
He lets her hand go and says his own piece, ever the exeuctioner as he makes his threat. Yisa glances over at her accomplice, watching him curiously, but it's testament to just how changed their relationship is that... she does not chide his promise. She does not disrespect him as to disparage it out loud. Instead, she only promises him, gently, succinctly, "He won't, Kyo."
That is how Yisa trusts.
"All right," she says against Izo's next instruction, frowning to herself, but already coming to a tenuous sort of peace with her own decision. Then he mentions Napoleon. That brings Yisa back, a familiar glimpse of the woman before all the murders, who looks just a bit too guilty for her own good. Sheepish, she averts her eyes and replies with an apologetic nod.
<Pose Tracker> Izo Imaizumi [K] has posed.
It would be easier if she didn't.
Izo feels that truth the moment she vouchsafes her trust in him, and Dakini stirs for the first time, regarding her -- what? 'Host'? Self? -- with ephemeral eyes filled with derision.
/And now there is that,/ she says, simply, before lapsing back into tomblike silence, to leave him with the consequences of his choice.
The doorknob makes a soft sound beneath his hand, though he doesn't turn it yet, and when his eyes undistance themselves, they flick over to Kyo's coldly smiling face, all of the nascent threat in his gaze. Dark eyes travel the countenance of a young man he has not even pretended to like -- not even today, when he needed to win Yisa over to his suggestion -- and then slip off and to the side, down on some absent angle, toward something that doesn't exist in real space.
"What else is new," he gravels, the words heavy with the weight of his new reality, and curiously hollow, or perhaps stuffed full of apathy.
The doorknob rattles, and then the door closes and his footsteps creak down the stairs, each a word in an uncomfortable sentence that punctuates itself with the sound of the downstairs door shuddering in its frame.
