Participants:
| Scene Title | 射撃訓練 |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Asi and Zachery engage in a little target practice — within a shooting range and also with each other. |
| Date | July 5, 2021 |
Various of the Sundered, the newly-christened PHARO, took up the advice on seeking practice with weapons and armor before their trip abroad to put both things to good use with their failing bodies. Some even came to the Bastion directly to make use of the firing range on its basement level. The scheduling of that means some have come and gone already by the time it's just Asi and Zachery left down in that space that alternates between resoundingly quiet and resoundingly loud in between the moments that little paper men fly down the range and back up it again to let the migraine shooters view the results of their shots with eyes that blur more than perhaps either of them want to.
Asi pushes a forward button to send the paper man back down the shooting alley once more, content enough with her clustering of shots to try shooting from farther this time. While she waits, she glances aside to where Zachery stages his own movements. He'd picked up a gun with familiarity she hadn't been expecting for the doctor, but she constantly has to remind herself that he's part of a generation that lived through a civil war, one that hasn't entirely ended, and for a semi-recent period in the countryside beside.
She tries to, anyway.
Weariness, a lack of focus in her eyes, leads her to set her firearm down on the table separating range from firing area, and as subtly as she can manage, massages her brow to work around the migraine. When the moment arises, she takes advantage of the fact she's standing on Miller's good side to lift her hand in a signal to him, then eases back the muffs over her ears so she can better conversate.
"I'm surprised, to tell you the truth," she admits, as though it were an idle thing rather than something she stopped both of them for. "I don't know where I expected you to be in all of this, but coming with us abroad somehow wasn't…"
Wasn't it, clearly.
Familiarity with holding a gun is one thing, familiarity with everything else here is another. Even just being spoken to seems to surprise Zachery, who interrupts his staring at the faraway target he's just shot at to put his gun down, before knocking his ear protection onto his shoulders and aiming his one blue and one white eye at Asi.
The posture he's been copying through observation immediately slips with a sharp exhale in amusement. "Surprised? Why? Where am I supposed to be? At the job that isn't mine? The house whose owner we're aiming to— restore? I don't have the skills for an advisory position, much less the experience or the will to be. Man in the chair, I am not. Man with gun— well."
He looks toward the targets again, and a flick of the switch on his side whizzes his paper target close enough to see that at least four out of his last six shots found their mark, even if only two of them ended up anywhere close to the center mass he's been trying to aim for. "I can at least pretend."
As graciously as she can, Asi tips her head and confesses, "I guess it comes down to the surprise that you… stayed at all. That you consider this your problem." Her lips purse and she looks to the target that Zachery's brought forward, letting her thumb off her run of her own target back. It's farther back than she'd ever consider shooting one of the bots they might be facing, but perhaps if they encountered humans.
"Everyone's dealt with the slow-rolling confirmation of what we are differently, after all. My friend, the one who seems to have got us into and also out of the mess with the plane, insists that– I'm the real me. That whoever we reclaim will be changed anyway, and that… somehow, I'll be more real than they are, by the end." Her gaze goes distant, nose beginning to wrinkle just before she supposes, "But that's not true, though. It just… isn't."
"I might still be me in every conceivable way– perhaps even better, if we can find a way to stop or reverse the degradation we're suffering– but without my power…?"
Asi blinks back to the present, looks down at the gun she was wielding. She pries the chamber back to eject the bullet in it, then clicks the rest of the magazine free. For her, she finds the small activity soothing, helping her to reset. "We both might be real, but she's the original, as far as I'm concerned. She's the one worth saving. Expression is a rare gift, and she's the one who has it."
"It's tempting though, isn't it?" Zachery counters, with an impatient roll of his shoulders. He, too, begins to reload his gun, though noticeably slower. "To believe that we could…" He pauses between clicks of metal flush with metal, glancing to Asi again.
"To believe that it's us now," he tells her, voice much more certain than his fingers, steady in its casual meandering tone. "That we could stay, and carry on. Just as the us from yesterday isn't the us standing here now. Sure, we could shut down at any moment, but so can anybody."
He turns while laying the gun back down - pointing away, blessedly - to offer a wry grin, a longer look and a lazily performed halfbow for dramatic effect. "Is that what you were expecting?"
Asi's brows pull together as she considers the matter of their doppelganger nature before she points out, "Haven't we already? Replaced them, that is. We could carry on as though we were the only."
Shifting her weight and setting aside the magazine rather than reloading it immediately, she goes on, "I suppose I'm going on this trip because my answer to that hypothetical is… but why would we? In my own case, why would I sacrifice part of me to uphold an illusion that gives me no pleasure? That I'm now the only me?" In her case, she's dealt with the reality that she's not the only her for some time, though, so perhaps it's easier. Her head turns to Zachery again when he does his dramatics and she lets out a huff of amusement, caught off guard.
She tips her head indiciatively at the target. "You're doing well for having limited perception to work with," Asi verbally applauds with all the enthusiasm of a stereotypical golfclap. "Center mass was the right call– it'll still injure a person, or distract a Hunter long enough others can disable it." She nods her approval of his shots.
Something about Asi's compliment, lukewarm though it might be, seems to immediately sober Zachery up again. He straightens, watching her as if he's not quite sure how to take it.
Oh. Sincerity. Once the realisation hits, he sweeps a look at his target again, then back to her, his face pulling back to neutral. "Sure," he mutters, as if distracted between two thoughts. "I'm not going to be front line anyway, I may as well— aim to delay someone or…"
But before the sentence is out, his focus on Asi changes. It sharpens along with his tone of voice. "There may be no joy in reality either."
"How do you mean?" Asi asks easily, not trying to read minds nor guess at the intention in them. In the process, she reaches for the box of ammunition that lies between them both, thumbing out several bullets to feed them back into the handgun's clip to top off before her next shot.
"I mean— there's no guarantee either way, is there?" Zachery replies without pause. "We could go in there and find it's all for naught. What if we're all that's left, and by going on this mission and risking death we're depriving potential friends and loved ones of their…?" He trails off with a wave of his hand and a dry excuse for a dismissive chuckle.
He turns to his own weapon as if to follow suit, but instead just rests his hand on the table and aims his eye at Asi again to ask, "Is it the fight that makes the difference for you? The feeling of doing something instead of nothing?"
Asi pauses mid-action, thumb to the top of the magazine, a bullet halfway shoved inside it. She glances up, disarmed by the question, but doesn't move to show it. Is it the fight that makes the difference? No matter the reasons for it, was it true? Her head idles back and forth before she admits, "Perhaps. I've never been one for accepting 'fate'– for accepting what others prescribe my life should be, or what possibilities should be afforded."
"But even then," she posits more firmly, and finishing her errand slips the clip back into the handgun, loading it again. "If we don't at least fight for ourselves, if not for our other selves, we're going to die anyway. The worst kind of death… one where you could only hope that it will kill you quickly, rather than stealing your ability to care for yourself– to speak for yourself, even– bit by bloody bit."
She shakes her head once, sliding the barrel of the handgun back to finish preparing it. "I did not come all this way in my life to die without putting up a fight, yes."
Zachery seems to have given up on the shooting part of this entirely, releasing a breath in a sigh. A corner of his mouth twitches into some vaguely pleased looking expression. "Well, at least now I know we're not as different as I thought. I'd taken you for much more of a… moral high ground before all sort of person."
He turns his attention to the gun at his side, but doesn't move just yet, as if he's standing at a bar rather than a place for much needed training. "For what it's worth, I'm a little surprised I'm coming, too. Can't help but shake the feeling I'm being indulged. Considering my—"
He pauses. There are so many options. Recent background? General background? Whole personality? Tendency to blue screen in the middle of sentences? "Particulars." That'll do.
Asi grimaces sympathetically, when it comes to particulars. "None of us would be our first choices, in our condition. But… we are the forces we most have." It's a grim acknowledgement. "The digging into our condition that was done– Nicole's essentially been ousted in her position over it, from what it sounds like. What's happened to us, there are a frightening number of people who… if they do not know specifically what happened to us, then they suspect."
"Perhaps even people supposed to be on our side who wished it," she murmurs, a despairing kind of despondence momentarily creeping into her tone.
Before it has long to linger, Asi's grip tightens on the handgun she yet holds, and her expression grind and sharpens. Her gun arm whips up, and she takes aim without bothering to replace her headgear. The snap of lining the sights down the lane lasts only a blink before she fires once at the far-off paper, trigger held for a long moment after. At this distance, her bloodshot eyes can't even tell if she hit the target. If will was the only thing that decided such an outcome, though, certainly it'd have struck true.
"The only moral high ground there is to be taken," Asi asserts calmly as she lowers the gun, the red in her sclera from her episode the day of the fires lending her a crazedness to her expression. "Is that what was done to us is incomprehensible. And that anyone who seeks to wallpaper over Expression, to remove it from the world and harvest it for their own purposes, deserves every bit of fire about to rain down on them."
Zachery's focus on Asi sharpens as she speaks of others - information he's never been fully privy to, and will likely never be.
The gunshot takes him by surprise, but a wince at the noise is almost immediately buried under the grin that's cracked at Asi's fervor. "Christ," he mutters regardless, rolling his jaw. Risking the assumption that no more shots are to follow, he says with a rare and crisp sort of sincerity, "You've almost got me wishing I cared as much about all of this as you do. It's…"
And then— something changes. The grin on his face loses its edge, his brow knits. He looks to his half reloaded gun, considers its state, then turns to undo his progress in order to start over. How did this work again.
Perhaps if he'd not trailed off in the middle of his sentence, she'd not have noticed. Or at least, she'd have let him get away with it. She at least gives him a minute to begin to get his bearings again before she clears her throat, sets down her firearm again.
"If that happens while we're in the field," her voice cuts in to acknowledge. "You're dead. Or if not you, then someone else is."
Asi looks up and over at Zachery at her side. Rather than rescind the offer to continue on the cross-Atlantic journey with them, she frowns and considers the situation. "Have you developed tips to come back to the moment when that happens?" There's a distinct lack of judgment present. "What clues are you leaving yourself in case you lose track of what's happening?"
There isn't much in the way of acknowledgement at first, with Zachery keeping calm in the face of questions he's been expecting for a while now. But. "Mhm." The lowering of his voice much more easily gives way to annoyance at his memory issues being noticed, or it existing in the first place, or both, before a sneer follows suit.
"I've tried things," he begins to answer, every word deliberate. "But it happens too infrequently enough for me to be consistent about it." He waves the gun - freshly reloaded - in a halfhearted gesture that sees it very momentarily aimed in his own direction. "I'm not exactly leading, here. I don't anticipate to be left to my own devices, and if I am somehow alone and it happens, chances are I'm dead anyway. So I'll be fine."
He forces his voice into a more casual register. "Unless I'm not. It's not surgery. I've done that. Now that," he visibly almost points the gun in Asi's direction, but thinks better of it just in time and shoots her a half-lidded one-eyed look instead. "That might be trouble."
"If we're in a position that ends up with you doing surgery," Asi opines in return, her look equally unimpressed. "We might be fucked anyway."
Though who knows. It assumes they've escaped enough to perform it, hasn't it?
"At least we'll only be doing one thing at a time," she supposes, and thumbs the magazine free from the gun again, leaving it abandoned where it is. "I might recommend writing a reminder to yourself on your hand in case of the worst. It's a long trip, after all." Asi turns her head only to Zachery and glances down at the gun in his hand. "We're done for now, though. I think we've done enough practice here."
Though she's not entirely sure what to do after. She has to think on it, and she pulls her headphones off her neck while she does. "What other symptoms are you dealing with?" she thinks to wonder.
Zachery sets the gun down, his hand still lingering atop it - his interest in it had been waning quicker than the conversation won it anyway. "Just this," his answer comes with some relief. "I only lose a little bit of time, and it resurfaces after a few minutes. It won't be an issue as long as I'm following orders and Nicole watches my back."
He shrugs, like it's all worked out already, even if a brief gritting of his teeth when he looks to Asi again says otherwise. "In case of emergency, I'll flag someone. Nothing can hinge on me alone, but it was never going to in the first place, was it? Monkey see, monkey backs up where necessary. A glorified escort of a tail."
He chuckles, then, canting his head with some slowly growing curiosity. "What other symptoms were you expecting? Do I really seem that badly off?"
Asi shakes her head once. "I've asked the others about what they're dealing with, too… especially after the day of the fires. The solar flares." Her brows tic for a moment as she puts aside her own pride to say, "I've been dealing with migraines since my stroke– light sensitivity. Who knows if the most recent events have complications to them that aren't visible." One hand comes up in a subtle gesture at her face.
"Did…" Her nose wrinkles as she looks to Zachery. "Did you see anything that day, by any chance? Unusual memories? Or something like them?"
Oh. Zachery blinks at the initial answer, but sucks in a breath to recompose himself from the mild surprise. The concern leaves his face entirely — there's no room behind his eyes for both it and the piqued interest.
He nods, once, at the possibility of other things still unknown, but shakes his head when the questions arrive at his own doorstep.
"I may have dodged that bullet by getting the damage done early." Impatience once again shows in a drum of fingers against the tabletop at his side before he asks, a little too eagerly, "Did you?"
Asi somehow looks offput, but she answers plainly, "Yes." There's no sense in hiding it, after all. She takes in a deep breath to steel herself regardless and drums the fingers of her still-lowered hand against the table in an unintentional mirror of Zachery's movement before she lifts her hand up off the table to gesture idly with it. "I saw… another life."
"Not unlike the– overlays, I believe they were called," she says with a small, pained smile as she looks back up at him. "I suppose it wasn't of consequence, but of all the things to have hallucinated about while feeling as though I was dying…" A broken laugh leaves her, the edges of it bitter. "I had not thought something could beat the first time that happened."
Zachery's eyebrows slowly rise as he maintains eye contact, then rise a little more.
Overlays. Sure. He totally knows what those are. People tell him things all the time. Like about overlays. And the terms for them. "Wasn't of consequence?" This is the thing he takes issue with, after all that, incredulously. "You sound—"
He stops, like he realises he's forgotten himself. This is the most he's ever said to Asi in one conversation many times over, and motivation fails him in an instant. Still. Like a rolling train not fully stopped yet, or maybe in a bid to show that he hasn't brainspaced out again, he finishes his sentence. "— Unsure about that."
Asi gives Zachery an odd look. She doesn't feel as though she sounded uncertain there, but now he's planted the thought. "How could memories that aren't truly mine be of consequence? What happened to me in an alternate reality certainly, in its own way, served as a warning regarding who to trust, who to attach myself to, but…"
She exhales from her nose and shakes her head, stepping away from the shooting range entirely to begin walking to a bench at the back end of the hall to take a seat. "They were memories that lead up to her death. Ones I'd experienced partly before–" Easing down into that seat, she glances up at Zachery warily. "Some of them for the first time when we had that… experience down in Raytech's basement."
The one where she'd gotten inescapably high and partly tripped out of her mind, partly uncovered repressed memories and then had them unfortunately repeated out loud in front of government agents before she could find the presence of mind to advise against that act.
"When the stroke happened, though, I saw something… different. I thought it perhaps was also echoes of her– the Red Oni, I called her, owing to the different color of her ability compared to mine." The thoughts flow idly, reservation about saying any of it aloud somehow minimized.
After all, Zachery had been present during a meltdown of hers over having recovered one such memory.
Zachery remains standing, watching Asi. "You'll have to excuse some ignorance, since I've only really properly known there even are other realities than this one quite recently but…"
He moves towards her now, gesturing vaguely with both hands in order to summon what he suspects will require some patience. "Presuming there's infinite other versions of us, real versions of us, or— or who we… our originals," he grates, slightly pained, then continues as normal again: "Then surely it stands to reason that some of them are… closer than others, right? Either in accessibility terms or… relatability?"
He squints. "What I'm saying is if there's another one of me, somehow, and I'd gotten a glance through his eyes - or eye - and if his world is so far and starkly different from mine that I had trouble recognising it, I wouldn't want to expend any energy into the matter that I wouldn't put into… a horoscope, or. I don't know. A dream. Granted, I'm also still a little bit in denial about the realities thing so…"
He trails off, waving the sentence away to make room for a new one. "If something feels close enough to the truth, shouldn't it… reflect on us somehow?"
Now, it's his time to sound - much more obviously - uncertain.
Asi's expression softens rather than sharpens as Zachery works his way to his point, trying to navigate his way around their unique situation as it compares to theoretically any other version of them. (And so strongly does she hope this really is a unique situation to them here, for that matter.)
"Sure," she allows. "There's something to be read in it if there's something to be read in it." Her lips purse for a moment before she glances back up. "Her memories, what I saw of them, tell me I should do better to protect my protege. They tell me I should take advantage of the expanded network of contacts I have here versus she had there. We both worked for the Mugai-Ryu, but she didn't…" Asi shakes her head, gaze wandering off. "She didn't have the benefit of knowing as many people here in the US as I do now. She walked into a trap in the US made for her when she tried to rescue him, and… so very few people even know where she'd gone, what she'd done."
She tries not to draw parallels to her current situation. Tells herself it's different. Is it though?
"But that can't happen here– the organization responsible for it, the ones who were trying to push the limits on inter-reality travel– they're defunct. They existed, but Wolfhound eradicated the last of them." Her head tilts to the side, "And those who escaped to Praxis instead, they're now under a pile of rubble or in jail cells of a sort, themselves."
"Majiko could do something foolish that's… different," she admits. "Perhaps we're all bound to make the same mistakes at one point or another. But I have a different set of experiences fueling me. And I would hope– so does he."
Asi shakes her head to come back to the present. "As for being in denial about other realities, it'd be a nice thought– to not have to worry about it." A small smirk pulls back the corner of her mouth. "Even if I hadn't found out about the Red Oni, though… there's another one out there. In the overlays back from 2018, we saw each other for a moment. Her world is very different than ours– one destroyed by a flood."
"I managed to make contact with her again recently, actually," she adds on more quietly, sounding like she regrets every word she's saying. "I think she resents me for the differences, the Green Oni."
There is no attempt from Zachery to hide the level of lost he is about much of what Asi says, but he folds his arms over his chest, focus tightening his brow as he picks through the familiar all the same.
"Ah," he says upon that last part, "See, therein lies the most important detail. Awareness is, and always has been, a curse. Contact makes it of consequence, since it's relevant to you through the lens of potential reacting rather than acting. It might indicate a change you'd like to make within your own life but will inevitably dictate your interactions outward rather than in."
He takes another breath as if to continue but pauses, darting a look into some middle distance interrupting his fixed stare at Asi. "Sidebar number one, I feel like at least one of the therapists I've been assigned should be proud of me for the words I'm using," He only looks a little annoyed they're not in the room when he sweeps an arm out to the emptiness in the room where no one else is standing.
"And sidebar number two—" He stops himself, fixing his full (and somewhat grim) attention on Asi again. "How the fuck are we making contact with other realities now? Isn't this typically the sort of stuff that happens in films where the world is about to end."
A chuckle escapes Asi over Zachery's reaction, which devolves into a separate bark of laughter on his last comment. She clearly thinks he has some sense of humor. Or that he has a point, perhaps.
"There's a cursèd object and project known as the Looking Glass," is as much as she's able to explain. "It can pierce holes in reality to deliver information– or people, if you're lucky enough to survive the trip. It's one more likely to destroy you in transit rather than get you anywhere." She shakes her head once. "And I won't argue that its existence isn't the kind that could end worlds. Intended use and misuse alike seems like it very well could."
"There was an unusual series of aurora events in late 2018 and early 2019 that corresponded with several uses of such technology. The skies themselves protested its use, seemingly. The, ah, spiral auroras?" She leans back against the wall, hands loose in her lap. Somehow this feels easier to talk about than their own situation. "It reminded me of what it looks like when you try to push something through a piece of fabric and it resists it– twists itself a little around the impact point."
"An absurd point of relevance for our conversation, though, maybe–" Asi digresses and gestures between them. "The actions another me– the "Green" Oni took– impacted someone who was punched through into our reality. It caused him to seek me out, because of her. He trusted her and… well." Her shoulders climb in a shrug.
"And the particularly twisted part about that is…" She cants her head, a grim humor behind it. "For him, for her sake, I helped him look into the him that exists here. They could not be more different. They share the same genetics, but a vastly different adult life even before their society completely collapsed. And the one here actively tried to kill the other once he found out the other existed."
Her eyes narrow a touch in thought. "Perhaps I'm lucky his Asi only resents me. Or more accurately, resents our world and its… circumstances."
Maybe she was bending the truth slightly with that interpretation, she muses, but at its heart it really could be summarized that way. The Asi of the flooded world resented their reality for having tools hers didn't, while she resented Asi directly for having walked so different a path than hers.
Zachery hadn't expected a laugh, much less any of what follows. This time, he steels himself rather than showing his surprise, fingers tightening against arms. He manages a confirmation in the form of a, "M-hm," when the auroras come up, but not much else until Asi once again goes silent.
Then, he simply asks in dead pan, "How the fuck did we get here." It's clearly not meant to be answered, since he immediately goes on to say, "A few years ago the worst I had to worry about was commuti—" He stops again, reconsiders, then takes another breath and tries again, "Being mind controlled by a collea—" Nope. He rolls his jaw in errant frustration then tries again. "Going back to pris—… secret organisation members finding me and piano wiring me in my sleep? No, not that either."
He looks to the side, finds his confidence again, and then tells Asi with certainty this time, "It was probably complete societal collapse, permanently this time. That's already pretty unquantifiable, and it only pertains to one universe. Are you really expecting to put any of these problems of yours in a tidy little box? Now?" Judgement enters his voice and face both as he studies Asi's face. "When we should be focusing on something so much closer?"
The question perplexes Asi in several ways. She looks up at Zachery with open introspection on her part, head beginning to tilt. Was he talking about her obsessive need to compartmentalize and keep moving forward, or is he talking about…?
"Such as?" she fishes.
She doesn't mean to pull back the curtain on the fact the world is actually about to end if she doesn't have to. One existential crisis at a time, please. And he's right– their very personal one demands attention first.
The growing tension in Zachery's form releases with an abrupt swing of an arm in the direction of where they were standing just minutes ago. "Preparing!" He yells, louder than he means to, fighting back a sneer and the anger that makes its way through the doubt in his voice when he continues to say, "I thought you were… maybe 'better than this' isn't the right phrasing. Perhaps it's not as simple as all that, and for all I know if I were in your shoes dealing with the same shit no one ever tells me about, I'd be milling the same grain, but I can't—"
He pinches the bridge of his nose, both eyelids pressed shut. "You told me you were surprised, that I was coming along." He looks at Asi again,trying to refocus his energy into something other than anger and visibly failing. "I'm doing so because the trip we're going on is a thing that needs to get done, and if it's not, what's been stolen from us will just fucking sit at the bottom of an ocean never to be dredged up again."
He begins to pace, restlessness chipping away at the steadiness of his voice. "Then, everything you may have wanted to mean or do or see in this world, the one we know, is fucking dead. We could— we could shut down or break down any day now, we have no idea! And we're wasting minutes talking about hypotheticals."
Oh, it's a very good thing she didn't mention the end of the world, then.
Asi takes in his outburst in stride, leaning back until the end, after which she gestures a hand to the range before them. "We are preparing. And part of that preparing is not running ourselves so ragged beforehand that we're no good to anyone the day of. It means taking breaks. It means not straining a condition, if you've run into it."
Her vision's getting clearer.
"If you would rather take out this energy on perfecting your shot as much as you can while you can, I can put the earmuffs back on," she suggests very gamely. "If you give me a minute, I can even go back to coaching you."
"But we're not getting across the sea any faster than we already are– we're not going to make the time of the mission come any sooner by agonizing over it, as much as we'd like to." Asi speaks without judgment, aiming only to highlight their shared truth in this new way. "Sometimes in moments like these, all you have is philosophy and hypotheticals. Anything to take your mind off of the situation, if that's what calls for it. So you can be ready when you need to be ready, and not spend all of your anger and energy beforehand, showing up…"
She doesn't seem to know what word to choose. She settles for, "Tired."
Breaks. Zachery scoffs at this word, turning away to pace the opposite direction.
But just before he's far enough down the line of tables that his only choice is to turn around to face the other person in the room again, he halts.
The aforementioned 'tired' makes its presence known in the form of a long sigh and a slack in posture, as Zachery glares at the wall in front of him. But then he just… nods. ”You're right," he grates, finally. "I hate that you're right, but you are."
By the time he turns around with much more energy than finds itself in his voice, he's already adopted an empty smile. "I apologise. I'm fine." Two sentiments are rattled off at once, with a third and fourth quickly following. "I appreciate your candor. Let's… maybe take a break."
Asi doesn't return Zachery's smile. Instead, she looks on the verge of being tired beyond recovery, nursing a flame of hatred and spite and vindication and justice and carefully trying to not consume itself and flicker out. She only nods, sympathetic to his energy, knowing it isn't truly spiteful.
"I would recommend a drink, but I'm not sure if you're trying to abstain," she offers up, and pushes her hands to her knees, levering herself up. She goes to collect her handgun, making it undangerous, a casing popped to the ground as she draws the slide back before it stays locked that way, magazine also in her hand separate from the stock it normally hides in. Her chin tips up, and she looks from him to his handgun, recommending he do the same. "But perhaps you smoke?" comes next with a more hopeful lilt.
She could go for a roofside trip.
Zachery's smile vanishes, quickly ousted by a grin and much more genuine laugh - one that sounds like equal amounts mockery and actual amusement. But he looks thoughtful for a moment, too, at the abstaining. With Nicole being how she's been, there's no question he's been trying to at least take it a little easier on the drink.
Lest she has one of her episodes again in the middle of the night and he doesn't wake up this time.
Attempting to shake off his annoyance, he follows suit, reaching for the gun where he left it. "Used to. A bit. Never frequently enough for it to stick."
His gun is undone in the least caring way possible, otherwise nimble fingers doing still unfamiliar work with precisely 0 fucks left to give. "So in the spirit of not giving up, let's give that another go, yeah?"
Asi watches Zachery's movements distastefully, his regard for the danger present in the gun and the care that should be and isn't precisely given to it a source of crossness. But there's a hill for every fight, and she's the better part satisfied that he knows how to fire it and generally understands to never point it at an ally after their training, and that's going to have to be enough.
"On we jog, then," she agrees to his statement of not giving up.
Navigating through the modern-made-industrial aesthetic of Wolfhound's converted historic building is an easy enough thing, even if it requires manual navigation of three different flights of stairs to reach the roof – the second of which Asi pauses at her room to retrieve her cigarettes at all, and in the process, is attended to by a leggy golden labrador who is incredibly excited to see her.
Aisu, she calls him, lobbing a treat from her desk to him before she makes a gesture and the dog excitedly falls in line with them, even going ahead when they meet the stairs for roof access. She pushes open the fire door and across the rooftop the pup goes, running laps around the broad space of it, sniffing this and that all in the time it takes Asi to pull over a doorstop she makes sure is shoved under the door so they can get back in when they're done.
The work complete, she's quickly on to pulling out her nearly-depleted pack of cigarettes, prying one free for herself and lighting it with surreptitiously fast speed, before she pulls free a single one for Zachery, offering carefully by its end to him, lighter turned over after. The prized commodity of her crumpled pack is tucked in the front pocket of her jeans for later use. After she's let go of her offering, she brings her hand back to herself, taking a deep and satisfaction-inducing drag that fills her lungs and crawls into her sinuses, some deep part of her artificial brain drawing more pleasure than the rational part of it tells her she doesn't need a coughing fit to set off a medical attack in her barely-still-together personhood.
Her eyes flit after the dog checking out every new thing on the roof– seemingly in search of something– and she lets the deep toke she took begin to float from her nose and mouth rather than exhale it away with any haste. "So," she broaches the silence, at least one on her part. "Have you given any thought to the after?" Asi wonders, glancing back to Zachery. Fingers slide around her cigarette to wield it away from her so she can exhale more freely. "If we make it."
There is no immediate answer, Zachery only just having finished peering around his new environs like he needs to take note of where the exits are on a fucking rooftop, unlit cigarette in his mouth but lighter yet unused.
Suppose there's at least two exits, one more convenient.
The dog proves more interesting to look at, then, even if he's made zero attempts to engage with the animal. He turns his face away from what little wind there is to pull himself free of his own thoughts and to finally light his own cigarette, brow knitting as he considers what's been said. The first inhale barely manages to make it into his mouth before it leaves him in a chuckle of smoke, "You ask so many questions."
He tosses the lighter back to its owner by way of underhand throw and lack of depth perception.
It leaves Asi needing to lean to the side to catch it, and even so, she has to do so against her chest. She lets out a dark chuckle. "You were the one going on about how important it was we didn't stop, because we may have such little time left," she prods while she thumbs the lighter down into her pocket as well. "But if we succeed, we'll also have the tools to fix our degradation."
Her head turns to take note of the dog who comes up to her, the one who only knows her scent, and may think the other her a stranger when that time comes. She reaches down to pet the top of his head gently, momentarily ignoring the red tennis ball he's returned with, tail wagging.
"You don't have to answer, I suppose," she notes to Zachery. "But if you're not, then you should get to know Aisu." Who turns his head between them both now, having heard his name. The wags take a confused but eager bent.
With his own words fed back to him, Zachery sobers a little. The next drag of smoke is a little deeper in, smoke released gradually through his nostrils as he pulls the cigarette from his mouth and eyes it where it sits between his fingers.
"I'm not overly familiar," he says slowly, as if the smoke and thoughts both need a moment to settle. Then, his eye lands on Aisu, which only seems to serve to straighten his back and send his attention right back to Asi's face. "With— being asked questions," he clarifies more crisply now. "Also with dogs."
Which still isn't an answer or a decision.
Dogs being mentioned, Aisu somehow becomes more excited and stamps his feet on the ground, gangly legs akimbo while his tail wags harder. Asi hides a smile against her mouth as she takes in a small drag from her cigarette to try and prolong the obfuscation of it.
"He's a rescue. He's had to take some time to get familiar with us, too, but he knows how to listen fairly well after several months of aggressive positive enforcement." She lowers her cigarette and gestures to Zachery with an upward tilt of her chin. "He knows several tricks. The one he's trying to ask you to help him with is called fetch."
It's spoken at an absolute deadpan, one that doesn't curve her voice or mouth, but there's a quiet mirth tugging the corner of her eyes nonetheless.
"I've seen the behaviour in cheap films and shit television," Zachery answers flatly right back, to the decided-upon tune of observing a phenomenon. "And occasionally at the park, though usually with Nicole's girl along as a very convenient intervening factor."
But something in Asi's words has more solidly put his focus on the dog. His thumb presses idly against the cigarette's filter, before he sucks enough of the smoke down to have it trail in an arcing exhale when he bends closer to Aisu.
"Alright, you fucking maniac," He addresses the dog now, past the cigarette still in his mouth, then reaches for the ball. "A show it is. Let's see trick number one."
Asi doesn't bother suppressing the return of her smile, even as ghostlike faint of one it is. It may be a bit of having shared a brain with Wright for several weeks straight, but she enjoys this small advancement of the other's vendetta to make every person she meets a dog person– or perhaps just Asi, and now she's taken on that mission as an act of revenge for it being done to her. "I should warn you the rules of the game are– if the ball goes over the roof, you have to go down to the street and get it."
Like she suspects might happen for the sheer what if of it.
The dog, for his part, relinquishes the ball only after a second tug, too excited to have done so properly the first time, though he leans back in quickly to correct the mistake. He waits for the pitch, frozen in place as Zachery's arm begins to shift from neutral, before bolting off in the direction of the ball as fast as he can.
"I haven't thought that far ahead, for what it's worth," she asides to him only then. "To answer my own question." She turns away to idly scan the nearby rooftops, waiting for Aisu to finish with his quarry and bring it back.
Whether Zachery will ever be a dog person is yet to be seen - he is, however, the kind of person who does not enjoy how moist a thing gets when it hangs out in a dog's mouth. He holds his hand in an awkward position, glancing momentarily at Asi's shoulder as if he might be able to— no, probably not.
He wipes his hand against his own side, not seeming too terribly interested in the corner of the roof he lobbed the ball at, and much more interested in Asi herself. He looks ready to answer, but the breath he draws is spent on nothing but the smoke he ends up letting back out when he says, "… What?"
A noise off to the side alerts him, and he turns his head to put Aisu in his field of vision. "Oh. A dog?" His fingers again drum a beat against the side of his leg, cigarette yanked out of his mouth so he doesn't split it in two when he grits his teeth, swallows back some obvious frustration, and says to Asi. "Shit. What? One more time."
Maybe the second time will be easier to get an answer out of him than the first.
"We were talking about what we'd do after we get back from this trip," Asi answers without so much as a disapproving glance his way. Her hand comes to her mouth again, cigarette burning red at its end as she takes her time after that. Aisu, for his part, has returned back not to his owner but to Zachery directly, having found the first of his throws to be very satisfactory.
"Additionally, you'd decided to humor the dog by playing fetch with him. Reminder: Ball stays on the roof or you go to get it." She will not forget this reminder. No she will not.
It's then she turns to look back at Zachery, wondering how quickly he'll recover– or if he does at all. The cigarette parts from her person again, and she flicks it into the wind rather than finding an ashtray. "Don't burn yourself, by the way," she suggests with an upward nod at the state of his own smoke.
There's a dog, and it's come up to Zachery. He looks very confused by this, looking for a moment like he's going to swat Aisu away before he realises there's a cigarette in that hand. After the ashes are flicked onto the floor in a copying, this time, of Asi's behaviour, he breathes out an exasperated sigh.
Context clues. Smoking, okay, can do. Answering questions? Sure, why not. But the dog. He gives the expectant pet a look of distaste. And then reaches for the ball, prying it loose almost precisely the way he had to do last time, and pulling the exact same face upon actually retrieving it. It's lobbed in the exact same direction as before.
"Right." He stares after Aisu, watching. "I want to… start anew," the answer comes much more easily this time. "Somehow. I'm not sure how yet. But anew. I want to pay off my dues and then… just live." He pauses, but only for a second. "I sound fucking mad." One might argue the lopsided grin that suddenly blooms on his face is a close enough match for his words. "I think I might be just that. Maybe I always was? Mh."
Zachery doesn't know any better, but Aisu is just as enthusiastic as with the first throw, taking off across the concrete roof with abandon. Asi lets out a huff of amusement at him, then turns to listen properly to Zachery's response.
Starting anew, huh. Her gaze slides past him after all. What would that be like? Can she even imagine herself doing that? She tried, once, after all. Tried remaking herself, a new name and all. She didn't get very far away from herself in the end, did she.
"I don't think one could be exposed to all we've been through and not go a little mad, personally," Asi confides wryly as she lets her gaze go down to her feet. Before long, bounding little Aisu comes trampling her way this time instead, and she catches sight of him out of her upper periphery. "座って," she bids him with an upward turn of palm, fingers pinched together, and he does before she reaches for the ball with her off-hand, unwilling to chance embers falling from the hand bidding him to sit. "いい子ね," she praises him quietly, and pulls the ball from wetted maw.
"If you figure out how to start anew–" she goes on, the end of that first half of the thought punctuated by her throw across the roof. "I'd be very interested in knowing what that looks like. How to make it actually work. I don't think I could pull it off even if I tried." Her nose wrinkles at herself, possibly the topic, or possibly because of the damp palm she wipes on the thigh of her dark denim. "I'm just… magnetized to all this. All the madness, all the bullshit. Drawn to it owing to my opposite pole with all the desire to…"
Not meld with it, if her expression is still any indication. Perhaps destroy it through aggressive contact, maybe.
Zachery watches Asi like his brain is caught somewhere between words - as if she didn't just say a stray few commands in a language he doesn't comprehend, but all of her answer.
One might be excused to assume he's forgotten himself and everything else again, except for the fact that he shakes his head a moment after Asi pauses.
"Figure it all out from the inside?" He offers, lifting the cigarette back into his mouth as he turns to the roof's edge and wanders idly toward it, waving an arm toward— presumably all of it out there. "You're never going to," is added past the cigarette, with some sort of tired but unbothered conviction. "For any purpose."
She can't find it in her to disagree.
"I've seen people abuse their position on the inside leveraged to take an organization out. Hell– we're about to witness that very thing in action." Asi's voice dies as she says the words, as though afraid they might be overheard, but it's too late to stop her from getting them out anyway. Half of her is bold. Half of her fears. She shakes her head. "So there is at least that use to it… presuming being on the inside doesn't destroy you first."
"Like a…" She pauses to take the ball back again from a returned Aisu and then throws it once more. "Like being inside the belly of the beast. Digested by it." It's definitely time for a toke after that one, and her eyes narrow at the simile.
"Have you ever had the thought, in your past? About… turning, about taking as much advantage of an organization as it took from you?" She blows away smoke from the both of them like through a pinhole before clarifying, "Not against… Raytech, for example. They've done nothing yet, though they're one bad day away from their tech being used in a villainous way, whether their leads will it or not." Like it already has been, in the case of the stolen, adapted SEER tech, though she doesn't muddy the conversation with that. "But…"
"Well," she demures, and avoids saying how much she knows. "The others," Así clarifies.
There's a visible distraction that comes over Zachery as he listens and looks out over the landscape ahead of him. Maybe it's been so changed, over the years, that he doesn't quite know where to look. And like none of what he's hearing is relevant to him.
Mention of Raytech and its dealings bring him back to the present with a cant of his head and a twitch upward of his eyebrows in lazy recognition, but it's the question that has him turning his gaze up to the sky while breathing out a chuckle that sounds like it's equal parts brought on by surprise and somehow physically hurts.
"Of course I did," he answers like he's been asked whether he knows eating food will make you less hungry. "Everywhere I've worked that wasn't a hospital, I've thought about turning against. Against the police when I worked as a coroner, against the two entirely separate serial killers that darkened my doorstep on a regular basis and could've put me down with little more than a wayward thought if I didn't play my pathetic little part in their play. I could've turned against Warren, I'm sure, and against the Institute—"
He pauses, then sucks down enough smoke to almost accidentally choke on it and flicks what's left of his cigarette off the roof before turning to Asi with an exaggerated shrug. "I, ah— did turn on them a little as a desk monkey, to be fair," comes an admission cloaked in exhaled grey that gets waved away with one hand. "Collected a name here, an account number there. And earned myself prison time with it."
Better prison than it might've been if he'd gotten himself caught with war crimes against his will, but prison nonetheless.
"But what was I supposed to do with or about any of it?" He grins, if insincerely. "I'm not like you."
… Not all of those were details known to Asi, and that carries in the long pause she grants Zachery while he works through his muted struggle to not hack. It lets him speak again, as she tucks her chin and considers his precious associates, rolling her cigarette between her fingers.
Then he grins, and her eyes come back to him with more intensity, more purpose than before. Confusion sets to a flicker in the color of them.
It breaks with a helpless, almost baffled laugh. "What," she ventures with amusement running fickle in her tone. "Do you think a predisposition for criminal activities and fucking unjust bodies over comes naturally with technopathy?" She scoffs another laugh forward before she flicks her cigarette to scatter ash outside of a designated tray for it like the rebel she apparently is. "No," she answers much more quietly, pretending to hold the same amusement and aloofness despite saying, "You're not the only one who's landed prison time for fucking around and finding out, no matter how well-intentioned it was."
"You get better at it with time," she surmises with a glance back down to Aisu as he's returned to her feet and is waiting with an impatient whine. Cigarette is threaded between lips so she can throw with her better hand this time. "Just like with anything else."
Off goes sailing the ball again with another scramble of paws. "If there is one thing I can tell you with certainty about all this, it also helps to have friends who can help you."
There's an ease to the way Zachery stands during this conversation that does little to imply he regrets saying too much. The laugh, however, is unexpected. He straightens, just a little, and turns his head to center her in his vision a little better as if assessing something.
But then the subject of friends comes up, and he begins walking toward Asi, to point a finger directly at her and to say as if she's hit on the answer of some grand riddle, "Exactly! I don't have the sort of friends you've made. The— the sort of friends who do what we're about to do." This one sentence is added with no less conviction, but a little lower both in voice and the enthusiasm scale: "Nicole doesn't count on account of I'm fairly sure she doesn't even like me enough to tell me actually important things most of the time."
In spite of his held eye contact, he's clearly not willing to linger on that and tacks on without pause and with regained fervor, "You're out here training someone! You've been through it, technopathy or not, you've been through it. That's what I'm talking about. I don't get to do that."
For a moment, he looks like he might stop talking there. The wide, still growing grin that now looks much more genuine is probably a poor fit for when he blurts out regardless, "I get one chance. Because unlike you, I don't win."
The assertion regarding Nicole's reasons brings Asi to tilt her head like she might say something, but not at the expense of interrupting Zachery. It's an ingrained habit. She waits through it, patient even as Aisu trods back to them both, a high-pitched whine escaping him when he realizes the adults in the proverbial room of the roof are occupied. His tail wags faintly in hope of another pitch. Instead, Asi pulls the cigarette from her lips.
"I would argue… those we like the most are often the ones we keep at arm's length, at times," she cautions him carefully. "To keep them safe. It's a well-intentioned thought, anyway." Her arm comes away from both of them to flick the cigarette's ash once more, turning her posture ever so slightly so it's not locked directly with his, so it's not confrontational.
"And as for… this," Asi supposes, and waves her hand nebulously at her situation. Wolfhound and all the skills that allow her to be there. "Your deadly memory issues aside, all of this can be learned. A well-trained medical professional is an asset many would trust and turn to, for one. With the right contacts and the right money, I would bet your eye could even be healed, too– or at least replaced, with the state of cybernetics being what they are these days." A beat, and then she glanced off, almost annoyed. "With the state of cybernetics being what we are, these days," she's forced to acknowledge.
"It's not about winning and it's not about losing with things like this, though. I can want to win all day long, but the kinds of victories I want aren't really attainable." Asi looks back to Zachery, seeming to size him in that moment. She doesn't find what she sees to be inferior, either. "Surviving, though?" Because gods, he's done plenty of that. "Invaluable in this profession. And if you can live to fight another day, and if you can learn to learn from each opportunity – then you have everything you need right there to eventually get your win. Or at least get others on your way to trying for it."
Aisu lets out another pitiful whine and looks to Zachery for support in his plight.
The change in posture… helps? Perhaps it's recognised, because it's rewarded with Zachery disengaging fully, a brief stint of over-eagerness dropped as he pushes a hand past the scar in his hairline and turns around to wander away again. To pace. Maybe work off some energy that way.
But that still leaves him needing to respond to what's been said. So he clears his throat, throws Asi a narrow-eyed but somewhat helplessly amused look and says, "The state of what we are," he muses, exhaling sharply. "The state of us." But whatever that means is dropped in rapid succession. "This is awful. This sharing feelings shite. This saying things and having them challenged. Though you've not changed my mind yet."
He turns to Aisu now - an animal is as good of a distraction as any. With a long suffering sigh, he crouches down and reaches for the ball — stiffly enough to where it's clear he regrets doing so the very same moment. "What's your goal?" He asks, seemingly of Aisu. But maybe not. "What drives you, if not an attainable victory?"
"The unattainable victory," Asi answers immediately, if unhelpfully, all while Aisu whines in his excitement for the b a l l. "Just because that complete image isn't possible doesn't mean there aren't other, smaller wins possible along the way. And reality certainly doesn't keep me from dreaming that there's something better than the way things are now ahead of us. That the future can't be a better place after all, so long as we fight for it."
But she's forgotten, in this moment, that she knows what lies ahead. And she physically winces at it, like she's been shot, when it hits her in the next. Because that's right, isn't it– None of this matters in the long-term anyway. Not in any ways that align with a satisfying end. Her eyes close and her teeth set on edge.
Because… shit. Shit.
She's not thought once until now about the thought her other self doesn't know about the impending end of the world.
"Sorry," Asi apologizes, rubbing her fingertips to her forehead like all she means by it is to stave off her growing migraine and not erase the intrusive thoughts with it. "What was I saying?"
"Something about the American dream, I think," Zachery provides from his spot down on the ground. He's been staring at Asi, watching her the same way one might stare at a television that's lost its signal momentarily. Slightly annoyed, yet captivated.
But it isn't long before he, himself, is interrupted by a wayward thought of his own.
"It's funny, I think this might be the most open conversation I've had with anyone in years. And I don't even like you," he admits flatly, then turns his attention to Aisu with a blank stare at the still very much captured b a l l. "Or you."
Aisu's tail continues wagging, completely oblivious to the disservice paid to his adorable display. He at last takes the hint that the ball won't be taken from him and places it at Zachery's feet, nosing it toward him. In his eagerness, he even barks, taking the words directed his way as a question, perhaps.
Asi scoffs a breath through a slightly wrinkled nose, amused in two parts. "Well, at least part of that sentiment is returned," she says mildly, flicking her cigarette once more. "Openness is a luxury we tend to lack, in our respective situations."
She cants her head and sighs. She knows what she was talking about, after all, and it's hard to circle back to it. "Speaking of which, are you read in on Raytech's latest government project?" Asi glances back to Zachery with mild curiosity, and keen eyes filled with suspicion. "You work closely with Yeh and Pride, so I figured perhaps, but…"
As he's stated, he isn't told much.
The bark hits Zachery like it's some sort of riddle — at least visually. He understands the game of fetch, of course, but still puts his hand over the proffered ball as if he's about to throw it and then just does not.
He has chosen a different game as he stares Aisu down. A game of testing patience.
"If I say yes, of course I do," he answers with thinly veiled annoyance, "will you remind me of its most intricate details? Just as a test that you know too, of course."
Tongue to cheek, Asi closes her eyes briefly. She's not going to play this game. "The long-term initiative. The joint project with Yamagato." The explanation is slowly given, patient, clearly waiting for signs of either impatience and for her hinting at the subject to turn into outward acknowledgement, or for realization to begin to dawn in his eye to realize that she's in on it, too.
"The last thing I'm going to do is distract you with it before we go off on …" She gestures her hand loosely in a wave around them, vaguely forward. "all this, so if you don't already know, it can certainly keep until we're back."
Aisu whines, the very image of impatience compared to Asi's implacability.
There's a moment in which Zachery almost looks frustrated at Asi not just simply indulging him, hands balling into fists at his side, but it doesn't last. It buckles, giving way to the much more visible amusement that's still on his face when he finally reaches to pick Aisu's ball up, almost gingerly, with the very tips of his fingers— before palming it properly and lobbing it at the furthest roof wall.
It hits just low enough for it not to go up and over, though from the looks of it, more by coincidence than not.
"You can keep it." Zachery decides with a sharp exhale, standing up straight again to watch the dog rather than who he's speaking to. "Tell the sap who'll actually be working here. What comes after isn't mine."
It feels like Zachery metaphorically threw more than the ball just then, a fact Asi takes a long moment to ponder. The golden lab bounding across the roof is more than halfway back before she looks back toward him again, letting out a hm of thought before taking a deeper drag from her cigarette again. She is unmoved when Aisu comes directly to her, circling her and looking up with simple joy, maw catching and squeezing and resnapping around the ball.
"You might feel differently once we get back," she offers, unhelpful in vagueness once more. "But that's to be decided then, isn't it? When you learn."
If they all survived this and learned they could extend their lease on life, the least all of the Sundered were owed was to know that there could potentially be a finite amount of time that life would last for regardless. Asi closes her eyes for a beat, then leans down to pet Aisu's head with her free hand. He's a good boy and deserves it.
"Have you said the goodbyes you need to?" she wonders abruptly as her eyes open again, and she works through a dry, bitter cough that comes on also abruptly. She fishes the cigarette away from her lips and makes more certain to exhale all of the smoke away with a gritty clear of throat. "In case you don't make it back– and the other you also doesn't make it back."
In spite of how abruptly the notion comes from Asi, the meaning of it doesn't immediately seem to dawn on Zachery.
He stares at Asi, only to look off to the side - searching for something else. Someone else? "Who?" He asks of the buildings and sky beyond as much as anyone. His voice holds no mockery, no nervous amusement, no guilt for not immediately having someone spring to mind. "Work? I'm expendable. The family I don't speak to? They'll be alright. The scattered few…" He pauses, like the next word catches behind his teeth before he forces it out. "Friends? Not a doubt in my mind their lives will be entirely unchanged after the initial bit of… 'Oh'."
Those words come much more easily. The very idea of mattering beyond the presence is summarily dismissed. From the way he stretches his arms up over his head, it might well be a relief. "I'm a dodgy rung on no one's ladder of time except Nicole's, and she… well. Can't exactly say goodbye to her, can I? And Pippa, Nicole's kid, she's— … I'm sure she's doing fine. So long as she has Nicole. Now, if Nicole should shuffle her way off the mortal coil, then…"
He freezes mid-casual-pose turned suddenly uncomfortably rigid, tension once more building in his brow. "… Shit, bug."
Was he swearing or announcing another memory malfunction? Asi isn't sure, and so one beat passes before she stops trying to decide, opting to provide some context on her answer regardless.
"Pippa's already lost one father, Zachery. He went off on a mission he knew he wouldn't return from and failed to say goodbye properly. You don't have to repeat that mistake twice, even if… she's in capable hands should the both of you vanish." She pauses a moment to swallow, clearing the last of the nagging twinge in her throat. "It's worth thinking about."
"And I'm aware the advice goes both ways," she clarifies with a wave of her smoking hand, even if there's something too casual about the statement. A subtle tell she could stand to actually act on that advice. In the moment, all she can do is look down at Aisu and utter something softly to him, gesturing him off in a way that leads him to lie down and continuing chomping at the prize ball he's retrieved several times now. Flopped on his side, his tail occasionally thumps against the rooftop. "It's something we should all think about, though, unpleasant as it is."
It's unclear whether the word 'father' or the mention of Ryans causes Zachery to scrub a hand over his face. He opens his mouth to clearly argue against something when Asi isn't even done speaking yet, but lacks the conviction to finish the thought, much less let it out.
He finds new words when it's his turn to speak, anyway. "I'm not accepting that we might not come out on top. But," this pause provides punctuation in the form of a displeased click of his tongue, "I'll entertain the possibility. Like a houseguest that doesn't exist."
He doesn't look terribly convinced of this last statement, and suddenly begins to walk - and to leave, from the looks of it. But he stops partway there to turn on a heel, leveling a deeply puzzled look at Asi. "Why haven't YOU done it, then?"
It's her turn to rankle in return, even if it comes only with the slightest wrinkling of nose and a more notable setting of brow. Asi turns her head slightly and then looks back to Zachery. "Likely the same reason," she proposes evenly, her tone more guarded now. "One of me is coming back, but with luck, more than that." Ideally, all three, though she has no idea what shape the Red Oni is like to be in. She suspects the rogue technopath might not be as dormant as she was, given more brainspace and an entire system potentially to roam into.
"But, mostly, because there's no one to say goodbye to here, except this one," and it's clear it's the rapscallion rolling around at her feet, judging by the look down she gives him. "My sister will receive a message. It won't be long. It won't explain anything. But should the worst happen, it's something she deserves to know ahead of news of my death, rather than after."
"My position as an international fugitive, and a monitored member of the Mugai-Ryu before that, didn't leave us room to communicate nearly as much as either of us would have liked. She needs to know, though, that she's no less important to me despite that." Her eyes half-lid on saying that, a sign of inner conflict as she fights gracefully through not wanting to speak those words aloud at all– to invite attention upon the weak spot in her heart others could easily exploit to get to her.
From what she knows of Zachery, he's neither motivated nor well-resourced enough to potentially use it against her, even once they go their separate ways after this. It's likely fine. Maybe he'll even forget she's said it, shortly.
"I don't want a thing like that left to question when I'm gone," Asi absently tags on, then moves from where she is to seek out an upturned crate with an ashtray set atop it stationed near the outdoor furniture set up a little ways from the rooftop doorway. "Everyone else I think I would tell, my protege included, have become accomplices in some way in all this," she notes with a wry twist of a smile as she snubs her cigarette out. "And the very last would be Colin – v.iris – who with any luck we'll be able to rescue as we rescue ourselves."
Zachery has no real outward reason to be interested. And yet, he watches Asi so very, very closely as she explains her side of things.
"You're fortunate," he says, with a quiet steadiness that implies he means it. "Maybe we both are." And then, suddenly, that sharpness in his gaze is gone. He blinks, then looks from Asi to the door leading back.
"I have to… go." He blurts out when he finds context clues missing, shaking his head. He knows she can tell what's happened and he no longer cares, turning to briskly leave in the wake of a decision he can no longer fully scrape together the details of. "Ta– I think?"
Aisu flops over to turn and look at Zachery when he decides to go, at attention and curious before he looks back to Ask for direction. Her expression remains neutral as he makes his farewell, and she inclines her chin in reply.
"Good luck," she calls after him, because regardless of where he's going and what drives it, he'll likely need it once he remembers what he realizes again what he needs to do.
When the door clicks shut behind Miller, reducing the roof party down to only two, Aisu looks back up to Asi again and lets out a chuff. Whatever it's meant to mean, she does as humans often tend to and interprets it to her convenience. "«Yeah, I think we go back in, too,»" she answers him in Japanese. "«We have an email to write.»"
She lets out a slow sigh, then begins to trudge toward the door, prompting pup to push himself up and paw his way after her. "«We can't go being hypocrites, after all,»" Asi mutters.