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 Posted: Sun Jun 12, 2011 4:53 pm
It was late by the time Khaldun had returned to the apartment, on foot for once. It took him a few tries to shove his key into the lock and turn it, scratching metal on metal in a dark hallway. But it was fine. Everything was pretty okay and a little dizzying but nothing he couldn't ******** handle tonight. He was just... buzzed. Just a little. No big.
Carelessly he let the door slam behind him before it slowly dawned on him that he'd now given away his presence. He was greeted by bright light blazing in the table lamps around the main room, and the strong smell of bleach invading his nose and replacing the bitterness of the beer on his breath. The apartment was clean. Not the normal 'we'll probably have company' clean but a serious all-out clean like he'd stepped into an advertisement. Kaia was nowhere to be seen.
He vaguely recalled how she had had plenty of time to gather her assortment of knives from the kitchen and was probably hiding somewhere waiting to murder him or something. Which would suck a lot. Guy couldn't get his heartfelt apology on if there was a knife sticking out of his back. Kam didn't know Negaverse girls. They weren't afraid of getting their hands a little dirty.
He half-walked, half stumbled toward the nearest side table and equipped himself with a lamp that was still plugged into the wall. Good luck with that shanking, Kaia. He was ready.
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Posted: Sun Jun 12, 2011 5:07 pm
Alkaid had come home for a while and stared at nothing, just paced aimlessly around the apartment waiting for her pain in the a** roommate to come home so she could give him a piece of her mind behind closed doors. the minutes had ticked by until it was more than an hour, and it kept ticking. With each moment that passed she had gotten more annoyed, more irritated, until she began to notice all the little things she blissfully ignored for his sake.
Crumbs on the couch cushions, sneaker smears on the living room table, drops of soda on the kitchen counter.
It took only a few irritated sighs before she had powered down and traded her fuku gloves for plastic, elbow-high yellow kitchen gloves. Then began a cleaning spree that spanned over hours and slowly began to fill the apartment with the smell of a dozen different cleaners. By the time Khal finally came home, she was elbow deep in a thorough scrubbing of the tub and it's impossible soap scum ring.
The slamming of the front door interrupted even her own deep thought and she dropped her scrub brush into the tub. She peeled off the gloves and set them over the side of the counter, then rinsed her hands just to be sure she wasn't carrying any residual cleaner out into the living room.
When she finally appeared she was drying her hands on a paper towel and looked, for the most part, much calmer than the raging senshi she'd been hours before. She was still angry, that was clear, but it had settled into a calm storm after dwelling over it for so long. For a moment she just watched him, then sighed in irritation as she realized he was trying to put the lamp between them.
"Will you put that down before you break it?" She took a few steps towards him, as if she were going to take the lamp, and stopped. The smell of beer hit her like a brick wall and her lip curled into a grimace. "Did you actually go get drunk because I hurt your feelings?"
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Posted: Sun Jun 12, 2011 6:03 pm
"Evening," he slurred at her as she approached. He was pretty sure he had a plan in mind before he got here tonight but it was all kind of hazy now.
"I am just.. admiring this lamp," he countered. The beer had bolstered his confidence in bullshitting, but it hadn't actually improved his ability. His gaze wandered slightly as he tried to look for knives hidden on her person. There were a disappointing zero knives in sight. The lamp-shield was turning into a futile gesture before his eyes even as he held it up. "There is a lot about it to admire."
"No." There was a pause, and the lamp swayed a little in his grasp, the shade tilting sideways. No to what? "I'm not drunk."
He was going to need some time before he could string together the words to explain himself. He just stood there and steeled himself in preparation for the angry tirade Kam warned him was supposed to happen next.
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Posted: Sun Jun 12, 2011 6:33 pm
The seconds ticked by and the patience Kaia had for him was slowly draining away. She had endless patience with a lot of people, and mostly especially Khal as of late, but if there was one thing she did not have the patience for it was people that insulted her and then came home drunk. Her face twisted from barely contained irritation to a cold, sharp anger; her tolerance of him was swiftly approaching zero.
"You're such a liar, I can smell it on you from here." She crossed the last few steps that kept the beer stench between them and reached out to try and take the lamp from him. She wrapped her hands around it and tried to pull a little, aiming to get it away from him before he dropped it and shattered it on the floor. She didn't want to clean it up but, mostly, she didn't really want to explain why the apartment was short all mirrors and one lamp now.
"Just let go of the lamp, Khal."
For a moment she just stared at him and waited for him to let go of the still-plugged-in lamp, but then that angry, emotional part of her clicked on while she was staring up into his hazy, dark eyes. She wasn't just mad that he had insulted her, or that he was drunk, but now he was blatantly lying to her face. She gave the lamp another yank, her mouth turned down into a frown, and she felt the anger rising up to fill her where it had previously left her empty and focused on her work.
"And why don't you take a nap or something before you get sick, I really don't feel like cleaning up after you right now." She hadn't had any first hand experience with drunkards, truthfully, but she knew that booze usually meant sickness and from there she could fill in the rest. She didn't want to deal with him destroying everything she'd just cleaned up on top of the rest of the problems they were dancing around.
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Posted: Sun Jun 12, 2011 8:23 pm
Kaia dislodged the lamp from his grip with relative ease. His fingers weren't exactly up for a challenge right now, with how inebriated he was. He didn't fumble for it back though, just stared as it slowly dawned on him that he was defenseless. Powering up didn't seem to come to mind.
"Just hear me out for a minute, Kaia. Please. One minute. Just one." He held up one finger to further signify the number of minutes. The other hand he used to steady himself on the lamp-free table beside them both.
"You're right, you hurt my feelings. There. I said it. You went," he was pointing at Kaia but the finger he jabbed veered unsteadily off to the side en route so he wasn't poking her with it. "You went over to those other senshi like they were your new best friends and I was mad and I was jealous and I said stuff that I want to take back even though I've never wanted to take anything back before ever. I ******** up."
"I know I hurt your feelings too. We are both hurting. In our feelings. It's bad. It's so ******** bad. But I dunno what I did to hurt your feelings in the first place. I don't know why you're mad now but I want to fix it too. I want to take it back." It had been one minute several minutes ago. This wasn't a timed speech, it was a drunken apology rant.
He broke free of his dependence on the table enough to clasp both hands on Kaia's shoulders in a complete disregard for both of their personal space bubbles. "Please forgive me this time, I swear I'll never ******** up ever again."
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Posted: Sun Jun 12, 2011 8:38 pm
For what it was worth, Kaia took the lamp from him, set it down, and then shut up. He asked for a minute to explain himself, and she gave him that. Then she gave him longer because she couldn't find her own words to argue back with. By the time he was done, his hands were on her shoulders and he was all but begging her to forgive him while simultaneously blaming her.
"That's not fair," she said quietly, brokenly, willing herself not to cry just because he was being open with her. It had hurt and he didn't even understand it, and that hurt more. She wasn't a crybaby, she didn't get upset about these things, she didn't act like a child. She didn't owe his drunken, belligerent a** anything right now. Except that she wanted him to know, even if he would wake up and not even remember a thing.
"That wasn't fair," she said more loudly, stronger this time. "You told me to stop and I had to stop, I have to do what you tell me when we're there. Don't you get that?" Her hands curled into fists but she forced herself to stare him in the eyes. It made her cheeks red and she felt exposed, but what did he care? He was drunk. He probably wouldn't even understand what she was trying to say.
"I left because I didn't want anymore orders. That's my place among the Negaverse - with them. Not with.." She shook her head and finally just shut her eyes so she could squeeze them against the threatening onslaught of tears. She didn't want to cry in front of him, even if he wouldn't remember it. She wanted him to understand her when she said it. The million ways she had imagined confronting him over it had never ended this way in her head. Reality wasn't as kind as her imagination, where she was brave and fearless. She felt small here and the fact that he was some skinny giant had nothing to do with it.
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Posted: Sun Jun 12, 2011 10:55 pm
He still held onto her by the shoulders even as her fearsome front was deteriorating. He was vexatiously slow to understand Kaia's words and what they meant, why she was slowly going scarlet. Even when he did, he seemed not to believe it at first.
"Oh ********. Is that what..." Yeah, it was what. Earlier, at the meeting, telling her to lay off jokingly had been twisted away from him in the public situation. That was his own fault. He always knew the rules with senshi. In his mind he just didn't even acknowledge her as one. "I didn't order you to stop, I swear. I'm so used to us just being us, away from all that. How the ******** did that happen."
"Kaia, I would never ever order you around ever, even around the rest of them. Especially around all the others. ******** them. You're not like the other senshi, Kaia. As far as I care you're above them and you're above the officers and no one else matters." Khal's wording was strange but undeniably heartfelt. But that in turn was strange, because he never allowed himself any opportunity to vent like this, even to her. She'd seen a little of this helpless openness the first few days of his recovery but as soon as he had a sense of his old self, it was sealed up like a clamshell. Now it was open and exposed and it was almost shameful, right down to the pleading tone of his voice. "I don't even think of you as a senshi, I just think of you as you. Because that's who you are to me. Not super magic whatever sailor Alkaid. You're just Kaia."
"You saved my life and you helped me out and you've never wanted anything in return. And I've been terrified all that time that you wanted nothing because there was nothing I could do for someone like you and one day you were going to get tired of me and move on. The last thing I want to do is hurt you. But I can see you're hurt and that I hurt you. I am this ******** drunk and I can see it. So I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. For everything."
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Posted: Sun Jun 12, 2011 11:30 pm
It was almost harder to listen to him be so sorry and apologetic than it was to deal with him being angry and defensive. It was a wall that he had brought down, one she wasn't expecting, and it made it harder to keep hers up. She knew it was just the alcohol, he never would have been so open or honest with her otherwise, but that knowledge didn't make dealing with this any easier.
"I know you didn't think about it, but I do. I always do." Her voice was soft and quiet, barely audible above his drunken rambling. Before she wanted to cry because she was hurt, now she was realizing she wanted to cry because he was apologizing. She felt like a stupid girl caught up in some whirlwind of emotions that just didn't make sense. She wasn't this sobbing, cry baby person. "I shouldn't have reacted that way, you didn't mean it, I know. I'm sorry I cut you out that way."
Then he kept talking, and apologizing, and just being downright way more kind and understanding than he ever was. It was pulling on her already fragile emotions until finally she just couldn't stand to listen to him. He didn't think he had anything to offer her? Ever? He did, he was just usually too impersonal to figure it out. It was okay, because right then she would just force him to realize it.
She closed what little distance was left between them and pressed her face into his shoulder, trying to ignore the fact that his shirt smelled like chlorine and booze. She probably would have never dared if he were simple, sober, grumpy Khal but he wasn't. Tonight was a night of firsts.
"You're so stupid, and so drunk," it was mostly a mumble from the close proximity, but she said it loud enough he should have understood. "Where would I go, Khal? All I have is Alkaid, and you, and here." She shut her eyes against the world and let her face rest against his shoulder. Yeah, he sucked at comfort, and at being open in general, but she could steal enough of it tonight to calm herself down from the point of breaking. In the morning he would never remember, and she wouldn't have to tell him that drunk Khal was infinitely more personable than every day Khal.
"It's okay," she said at last, finally, "I forgive you. Quit saying those things." She didn't have to look at him as she said that, but her eyes were open again and her head was just leaning into his chest, listening to the heartbeat that thudded just beneath it. It was calming in a way his drunk words weren't. "I'm not going to leave, I promise."
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Posted: Mon Jun 13, 2011 12:25 pm
Kaia's movement surprised him, toward him instead of away. He looked down to see her pressing close to him. This was what he'd always wanted, he supposed, for weeks and weeks now. He cautiously let go of her shoulders, his hands held up for a moment as his mind slowly processed what to do next. It was like she was saying: he was drunk. Maybe it didn't matter what he did now because by the time he thought of doing anything he was already halfway through with enacting it. He never had the words before to reach out to her until now, and they had already gone blurry in his mind as if their magic was only one-use. He laughed, because they were both tense and nervous and now they didn't have a reason to be. Slowly he wrapped his arms around her in a protective sort of embrace, completing the gesture he felt she had started. They needed each other and they had each other, even if by morning that simple sentiment would be twisted and knotted and complicated when faced by reality.
They stood there for a while like that as Kaia's words hung in the air, before he leaned his head down toward hers. "Then I never have to be afraid of anything."
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Posted: Mon Jun 13, 2011 1:57 pm
Her eyes shut involuntarily as his arms fell down around her and held her close to him. For a long while she stayed that way, with her head resting against his chest and her arms curled around him. She wanted to stay there, in that moment where everything was okay and nothing about their backwards lives mattered.
She had been afraid that once they were back in the ranks, once the Negaverse had some reason to call them back to war, that she would lose him and the only sense of home she had left. She'd been so afraid that she had looked for it, found it, caused problems that they could have avoided. Yet, it had done the opposite of what she feared and brought them closer instead. For that she should have been happy, thrilled even, but a deep sadness was settling over her even as his words sent her heart racing and made her cling that much tighter to him.
There was more than just two broken people in the equation, she knew that. As easy as it was to accept him, to just stay there, the territory they were exploring only had one end result. Even if he weren't drunk and more open than he would ever be naturally, she had other things to consider. Other people. Chase.
"You should go sleep." She had picked her head up to look at him and, for what it was worth, she didn't look like she was going to burst into tears anymore. Her arms loosened from around him and she leaned back against his a little, putting space between them. "We'll talk in the morning, okay?"
Only she knew things would be different in the morning.
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