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 Posted: Tue May 31, 2011 4:10 am
Long days and longer nights were starting to take a toll on Kam. He worked all day moving heavy machinery and boxes around a set, then he went home with Penny and powered up to keep the streets clean of Nega scum. On the few days he had off, he slept in and woke late in the afternoon to take care of all of the business that went neglected during his busy schedule. It was perhaps the first time in his life that he had ever been truly responsible for anything, but he was managing. Kind of.
There was an insistent, blaring noise lingering around the edge of Kam’s subconscious as he dozed on the couch in Bo’s living room. Awkwardly, in his sleep, he tried to bat it away – but all he really managed was to knock the cell phone off of the side table and into the floor where it was truly out of reach. Kam had chosen the song for a reason – it was long, loud, and especially annoying when he was trying to sleep. Conscious Kam and sleepy Kam were usually at odds over it.
As sleepy Kam realized that his conscious counterpart had yet again ruined a peaceful afternoon with a little forethought, his eyelids fluttered open and he let out a loud, annoyed groan. Instead of getting off of the couch and picking up the phone, he simply rolled his torso half over the side and stretched out one long, burly arm until he could slide it closer with the tips of his fingers. Then he simply rolled back onto his back and flipped the phone open, cutting off James Hetfield in the middle of ‘Whiskey in the Jar’.
He had intended to read the message, toss the phone somewhere under the mess of sheets on his makeshift bed and just go back to sleep but the words beneath Delphine’s name made him question if he was still dreaming.
'ur bros at my place'
Kam read the message three times before he was sure that he was awake and that there was no way to misinterpret what Delphine had written. Then, all of a sudden, his lazy attitude switched to full on panic mode and he bolted upright out of his couchbed and nearly ate the floor as the tangle of sheets caught him around an ankle. He managed to save himself at the last second by grabbing the couch arm and kicked them away with a low growl.
Then it was a scramble to find where he’d tossed his clothes the night before when he collapsed onto the couch. Just as he was pulling his jeans on over his boxers he remembered that he should probably answer Delphine, so he grabbed the phone and tried to type out something with one hand while the other attempted to pull on the t-shirt he’d found slung over the TV. In the end he spent more time trying to multi task than he would if he’d simply done each task separately, but he had a semi-threatening message sent by the time he was stuffing his feet into unlaced boots.
He grabbed the pile of personal items (keys, wallet, ipod) that was sitting on the table next to where his phone had been and bolted out the door with the laces of his boots making an annoying tapping sound on the walkway outside. He ignored both the sound and the way he had to shuffle his feet to keep the boots from flying clean off when he took a step, confident that he would have plenty of time once he flagged a cab driver down. Of course, sometimes cabbies weren’t too keen on stopping for him and this time he didn’t manage it until he put his wallet in his hand and used it as a flag for the greedy.
When a cab finally pulled up to the curb, he all but dove into the back seat and recited Delphine’s address to him with an “and hurry the hell up” attached to the end of it. The man in the front seat bobbed his head and sped away from the curb, leaving Kam in peace to tie his boots and fret about whether or not they’d get there before his brother decided to bail again. Luckily for Kam, he seemed to have flagged down one of the most reckless taxi drivers in DC, because by the time they had sped through half a dozen yellow lights and taken so many sharp turns that Kam thought his brain was bouncing inside of his skull, he recognized Delphine’s street.
Unfortunately, he also picked a driver that seemed to have a hearing problem or maybe just didn’t know English well. He pulled to a stop a little less than a block from Delphine’s house and, after a little bit of fussing that got him nowhere, Kam just pulled out some cash and threw it in the front seat of the car for payment. Then he bolted out of the door and slammed it shut, jogging the last few paces to the drive of Delphine’s house.
Just in time to see a tall, lanky dreadhead open the door with a cigarette already in hand and a lighter in the other.
He stared for a moment, stock still at the end of the drive, as his brain tried to connect the teenager in front of him to the kid he had left sulking in his room three years ago. He knew it was Khetal - logic told him that there were probably not any other Indian kids with dreads and giant x-shaped scars across one side of their face in the rest of the city. There probably weren’t any in the rest of the world, not like him. Logic told him it had to be Khetal, but his brain was having trouble finding the link, if only because accepting it meant that he had left him for a long time. Longer than simply saying it felt like.
He watched as he caught the unlit cigarette between his lips and used that hand to shut the door. Kam only had seconds before the kid would inevitably look up at him, maybe only just as long as it took to light that cigarette, and he didn’t want his brother to have any room to wriggle out of this.
It was now or never, but somehow finding the courage to confront him was harder than fighting a thousand youma.
He made a slow but deliberate walk down the driveway and stopped short of the front steps, his eyes still trying to take in all the obvious changes in the brother he hadn’t spoken to for years. He felt guilty, more guilty than he had the first time he’d read his aunt’s month-old letter at the run down building that posed as a mail office thousands of miles from Destiny City.
“Cigarettes give you cancer, you know.”
Inwardly he was kicking himself. He should have asked where Khetal had been, or why he had been completely impossible to find. He should have apologized or something noble like that. Instead, he just started off with a joke that neither of them would have believed he was serious about, despite the lack of amusement on his face.
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Posted: Tue May 31, 2011 4:51 pm
Lost in thought, enough that he wasn't paying anything any attention now except his lighter as he tried to get a flame going, Khal leaned against the wall by the door. He heard footsteps along the driveway, but didn't bother to look at who was coming. Delphine's parents, maybe; he did take a little bit of cruel enjoyment in the way things as simple as smoking a cigarette seemed to be so revolting to them. It had taken weeks before they finally gave up on loudly complaining about his presence to Delphine while he was right there in the same room. Being interrupted by some random a*****e who didn't know how to mind his own business was just falling into line with what Khal expected of this entire backwards neighborhood Delphine called home.
"So does the ******** sun," he responded flatly, proceeding to light the end of his cigarette and take a drag before pulling it away from his mouth. A little cloud of smoke followed his words. "So does everything. I don't see you on a sunscreen crusade."
He made a show of very slowly stowing away his lighter and continuing to smoke, still not even sparing the speaker a glance.
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Posted: Tue May 31, 2011 5:11 pm
The complete and total lack of reaction threw Kam off guard. Sure, he'd been gone for a long time, but for Khal to almost ignore his presence entirely beyond a snarky retort was not what he was expecting. He'd expected the lanky teen to be pissed off, even outright angry with him, but the lack of feeling was.. hurtful. Kam would never admit that, he wasn't some girl to go around sobbing about hurt feelings, but a frown flashed over his face briefly before he buried it behind a stony expression.
If Khal wanted to act like a dickhead, Kam could play that game too.
"What do you know about the sun? You look like you haven't even seen daylight for the three years I've been gone, you barely even look Indian anymore." Standing across from him, the difference between their skin tones was pretty obvious to him. Kam, having spent the majority of three years under a hot South American sun, was shades upon shades darker than Khal who, by contrast, looked like a ghost in Kam's eyes.
He crossed his dark arms over his chest defiantly, as if he had just delivered the king of all insults. He was confident that he could at least piss Khal off enough to make him look up at him if nothing else. In a game of stubbornness, Kam was pretty sure he still knew how to push all of the younger guy's buttons. If that didn't get his attention he would just try harder, but he was bound and determined to make Khal have a real ******** conversation.
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Posted: Tue May 31, 2011 5:51 pm
He looked up.
The strangest thing was probably that there was no recognition in his eyes then, no happiness, or contempt, or confusion. Like a mask, there was nothing but a mildly incredulous look that was reserving judgment for what he was seeing and hearing. It was like, well... like he'd never seen this guy before in his life.
Since the incident he'd brought upon himself with Tanzanite's help he was used to unwelcome flashes of deja vu as fragments of his memory reasserted themselves. Too many at a time gave him a horrible headache. By now he had reclaimed a large part of the last three years, but nothing beyond the block he'd tried to take down in the first place. Defeated, he'd finally given up on it. He'd failed. Miserably. Or so he thought.
There was no denying a similarity in looks. Dark skin, dark eyes, and dark dreadlocks were not a common sight in Destiny City as it was. The subtleties were a little more lost on him; he hadn't actually looked in a mirror for a while, Kaia had smashed out every single one in the apartment some time back. But he could kind of get how they might look like... 'bros'...
Yep, that was a flash of deja vu.
His demeanor seemed to change very suddenly, almost entirely losing the prickly hostility. It wasn't a memory he could see, not something that would play out in his mind's eye. It was feelings wrapped around a name over three years gone from his mind. The same three years this person was claiming to be gone as well. "Kam?"
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Posted: Tue May 31, 2011 6:22 pm
The few moments before realization broke on Khal's face were drawn out for Kam in an agonizing slow-mo. He had never been very good at reading subtleties in others, he really only dealt in the obvious, but even he could tell that the progression of emotions across Khal's face was not natural. He might have been absent for years, but he knew that he hadn't changed enough to warrant the kind of complete lack of recognition that Khal had first looked at him with.
His concern alleviated partially, but not totally, as Khal finally seemed to realize who he was. That was enough for him to scale the steps and stand before the smoking teenager, in a personal distance instead of the polite one he'd taken before. If it were any other time, under any other conditions, he would have made a comment about how he had grown, maybe whined a little that he was clearly no longer the tallest. There were more important things than chit chat in that moment though, and his concern was plastered on his face like an open book.
"What's wrong?" His dark eyebrows were drawn down as he narrowed his eyes and tried to find any sign of trauma evident at first glance. Apart from the scars he already knew to look for, he didn't see anything. That frustrated him more than finding something there would have. There was no evidence of anything to explain why he was acting the way he was, why he had been missing, why no one but Delphine had seen him in years. There was nothing there that he could point a finger at.
His lips were pressed into a thin frown by then and for a long time, he just stared at him. His fingers had curled up into fists at his side and he was tense from head to toe. Kam was a physical being. He wanted to be able to find someone, or something, that was responsible for this ******** up life they were living. He wanted to find it and he wanted to smash his fists into it.
"I've been looking for you for months, Khetal," he finally found his voice again, but it wasn't the pleasant joking tone he had when he first walked up. "Do you know how long you've ******** been missing?" It was scolding but, deep down beneath the heat in his voice, there was concern and relief. He had no idea what had happened in the last three years, he had been a poor excuse of a guardian to him, but the fact that he was actually standing in front of Kam had been something that he'd begun to dread was never going to happen.
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Posted: Wed Jun 01, 2011 1:31 am
A long time ago, over two years or more, he'd entertained escapist fantasies of being someone else, somewhere else, a different life before all this Negaverse business. Life was marginally simpler and there was actually time and optimism enough to try and unravel the mystery of all his missing years. It was easier back then to rationalize some of the stupider ideas he'd had about who he'd been. But some things survived his endless reconstructions of his imaginary past. Somewhere out there, he had a family, with parents, maybe siblings. They were looking for him. Because even if it was just to a handful of people, even if he couldn't even remember who they were, he had to believe he was wanted.
Nothing quite cured a person of hopeful fantasies faster than a military lifestyle, though. There was only ever fighting, or training for the fighting. And the longer it went on the less likely it seemed that anything would change. He remembered nothing. If anyone remembered him, they probably didn't even know where to start looking for him. Or maybe they weren't looking. Maybe he'd been sent away or disowned. Maybe life as an expendable lieutenant was better than anything he could return to if he wasn't.
And the possibility of escaping the cycle became dimmer and dimmer until it seemed there was no reason to get one's hopes up in the first place.
He buried the sentiments away and grew more cynical of, well, everything. Without a past he had to cling to the present. While everyone else in the Negaverse vaulted ahead, clamored for things like the fate of the Earth and power any number of things, Khaldun simply watched the current surge around him. He never moved with it or against it. Maybe that made him lazy or unmotivated in comparison with any other soldier. At the end of the day he turned in just enough energy to render himself invisible to his superiors. Not worth disciplining and not worth promoting. They had bigger problems.
Even when he tried to get what he wanted, he failed. His ploy with Tanzanite should have killed him. Consumed by stress and entangled in politics he hardly remembered any more, he was reminded of those hopes he'd always had - to regain his memory and his past. If he couldn't do that he didn't see a point in continuing in this bleak existence. He couldn't be happy like that. The attempt to reverse his amnesia backfired spectacularly. Kaia's compassion was the only reason he didn't die of anything else - his general, or general complications.
It only dissolved his motivation further. These days Kaia, as Alkaid, told him what to do and he did it. Never any more than exactly what was needed. He owed it to her for her kindness, but he had no plans or goals of his own. At this point he was little more than a shell of a person and acutely aware of it.
Only now, when Khaldun was completely broken of all his optimism, did Kam decide to show up. He was too late. Disbelief was the only thing he could manage to feel right now, disbelief and worry. That name was the first thing he had ever remembered from before his memory loss, which was genuinely surprising. But it was the only thing he could remember. He knew this man was Kamboja, but he didn't know if he was really even his brother, or where he'd been for three years and why he was calling him Khetal --
"Nothing. Nothing's wrong," he replied, running a hand over his face briefly. Any unprecedented memory at least gave him a slightly distracting twinge of a headache for a few minutes. He didn't sound terribly reassuring but he was never very good at lying anyway. He wasn't expecting some long-lost 'brother' (he only had Delphine's incriminating text message to go off of there) to suddenly step out of the backwaters of time and space to chastise him about his smoking habit. Even Khaldun's feeble imagination had grander ideas about the way this situation should have played out. But then again, who was he to question the way this s**t went? He'd seen far ******** stranger things for years now. "No idea."
Without thinking how Kam would react to it, he took a drag on the cigarette, trying to fulfill a dual purpose of keeping calm and buying himself time before he said anything else stupid. Maybe he wasn't in the zone for this kind of life-changing bullshit right now but that was no excuse to casually ******** it up. He had to choose his words carefully. This was a delicate situation. "Actually, I was wondering... do I... know you from somewhere?"
Delicate.
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Posted: Wed Jun 01, 2011 2:21 am
At first, Kam thought it was some kind of sick joke on Khal's part, some kind of snide remark about how long he had been gone. His anger flared for all of two seconds and one of the fists at his side even twitched in an involuntary half threat. Then it deflated almost instantly as Kam realized there wasn't even the slightest hint of humor on that scarred face and concern quickly climbed in to fill the void it left behind.
Briefly, his dark eyes left Khal and swept up to look at the door just beside him, as if he were praying Delphine would read his mind and give him some kind of insight into what in the ******** was going on. That, or maybe he was hoping she would just see this as her cue to walk out and butt into things and save him from a question he didn't want answered. The Eternal Senshi wasn't saving him from anything today, though.
Was it wrong to hope for some kind of reprieve though? He didn't know how to handle this. His reaction to stress was to find the source and beat the s**t out of it or, if he couldn't, to drown his sorrows in booze until he couldn't remember why he was in the first place. Right now he couldn't do either and if he couldn't find anyone to do this for him, that meant he had to do it himself. No running away to another country for three years this time, either.
Khal needed him, right? Even if he didn't know it? It was time to be a brother again, but that was easier said than done.
In an effort to distract himself, Kam shoved his hands into his pockets and shifted around the contents of his personal items to try and find his phone. Since Penny had bought it he'd come to realize it was a good distraction in stressful situations. If he just pretended he was checking it, it would buy time. Instead of the phone, his fingers brushed against the edge of his new wallet - the big one he had bought to fit the only picture he carried into.
Of course.
He pulled it out and flipped it open, revealing the photo he could picture just as perfectly in his mind. It was one of those terribly cheesy family photos taken in a studio, but it was the last one that had been taken. He slid it out of the cover carefully and glanced up at Khal, not so sure he wanted to part with his most prized possession just yet. Could he count on this stranger in his brother's body not to destroy it? The simple thought of that made him guilty and his hand was reaching out to hold it out for Khal before he'd even though about it. This was just as much his as it was Kam's and even if he was lost beneath that pile of dreads, he was still Khetal.
"Take it," he urged, shaking the image a little with his hand even as his other one folded the wallet and tucked it back into his pocket. "Look." It was just one word, but it held so much more meaning with the emphasis Kam put on it. He didn't want him to just look at it, he needed him to see the connections one little picture implied - not just between the two dreadheads, but between all of the smiling faces.
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Posted: Wed Jun 01, 2011 5:44 am
Khal just watched with wide eyes as Kam's behavior became that much more erratic in response to the question. Well, s**t. This was just going terribly. Why couldn't he remember anything? His only chance to reunite with someone who knew him and it was going to hell already. Kam was just going to give up on him and then Khal would finally know for certain that he had no hope of finding himself. Somewhere inside him he had to have some motivation. It was harder than it should have been, it was hard to feel like anything mattered that much. What he didn't realize was that it was the corruption deepening his apathy. He rarely fought it, he rarely had a reason to fight it, and it was hard to. Pressed for options, he tried rambling. "What I meant was, like, you look kind of familiar, and I guess that's how I knew your name, but I can't... uh..."
He could see he was being silently judged over the open wallet and trailed off. Figured out for the imposter he was. Rejected. This was probably his brother or something and like a dumbass he was trying to second-guess everything. And be paranoid of what? Someone who was actually trying to look for him? Someone who actually cared enough to? An icy chill washed over him. He had just lost everything and all because he couldn't be bothered to invest himself in one little thing, the only thing that mattered. Because he moped and he felt sorry for himself that it wasn't ever going to happen. Well, it just ******** did. He had no more excuses.
All the mental preparation to implore Kam not to go was unnecessary, though. Khal was getting one more chance, apparently just because. But he could hear in Kam's voice that he'd already managed to hurt him with his stupidity. Tentatively he took the picture being offered with his free hand. He gave Kam a brief quizzical look before he glanced down at it.
It was a family.
He mentally reeled from a realization, of something so much larger than the life he had now as to eclipse it. It wasn't a guess or a logical conclusion. Those were impersonal. He just knew. Like he knew Kamboja's name - as if he always had. Like he knew now that he was standing across from his own brother.
It was their family.
But he also knew, in that same inexplicable way, that Kam was the only one in that photo he would ever see again.
"It's us. Our family. I guess this was a long time ago." He just sort of stated things at this point. It felt kind of surreal. He felt kind of surreal to be remembering all this after what felt like a lifetime without it. His life was always so poorly anchored. He could be close to a person in the Negaverse but he could never forget that it dictated their interaction as soldiers. It was no substitute for family and never could be, at least, that idealized concept of family he'd always had. But after all this ******** time someone had come looking for him. On some level he felt completely vindicated, but on another his fear of the unknown began to stir. Now what? The picture stayed clenched in his grip, and Khal made no attempt to offer it back. He finally tore his glance away from it long enough to meet Kam's worried one. He just had one other really pressing concern left. "Where the hell have you been for three years!?"
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Posted: Wed Jun 01, 2011 6:22 am
The tension in Kam's body was slowly unwinding as he watched first surprise, then recognition, and then actual knowledge pass over his brother's face. The concern was still there, that wouldn't be gone until he knew exactly why Khal was so ******** or where he had been for three years, but it could wait. He could see that whatever damage was there wasn't permanent, at least not in the way he'd feared, and at the moment he was just relieved that something he'd done had managed to help Khetal remember.
"Yes," he echoed the simple statement Khal had made, but didn't elaborate. Now was probably not the best time to go into details about.. any of that. His eyes were drifting between the photo and Khal's face, alternating between studying his brother's emotions and trying to ease the concern he had over his only photo being out of his possession for more than a few seconds. He wasn't scared of what the stranger from before might do to it anymore, but he almost felt naked without it. Then Khal was speaking again and the photo was put out of his mind for the moment.
"Uh," he began, in the most intelligence response he could manage. The question surprised him, if only because Khal had been so apathetic and clueless just minutes before. Now he wasn't, and now Kam had some ******** explaining to do. He brought up a hand and rubbed at the back of his neck, buying time as he tried to find a delicate way to put it to him. In the end he realized it was just going to sound shitty no matter what and trying to sugar coat it was probably only going to baffle Khal more than the simple knowledge of his absence did.
"South America." He dropped the hand from the back of his neck and crossed his arms over his chest instead, in a defensive motion. Kam felt bad about it, he'd spent months agonizing over his own failure, but it seemed more real when he was staring Khal in the face now. "They sent a letter to tell me you were gone, but the postal service in the Amazon isn't the best to start with and I was.. traveling." In the end he made a face that said even he knew that sounded far fetched and ridiculous, but if Khal's memory was intact he would have remembered the day Kam had left. It had never really been a secret.
Whatever had happened to Khal was beginning to be a real pain in Kam's a**.
"s**t happened, I can't change it." He unfolded his arms and spread them out beside him in a helpless motion. He was showing Khal all he had, all there was to offer. "I finally got the letter and I came home to find you, three years late but I ******** did." There was anger in his voice, but it wasn't for Khal, it was for everyone else he knew had let the boy down. Their family, the Destiny City police, and everyone else they knew that had never bothered.
"I should thank Delphine, as much as that will go to her head." His gaze swung out then and leveled on the door, as if he expected her to be eavesdropping and come bolting out to brag about her accomplishment.
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Posted: Thu Jun 02, 2011 11:11 pm
He started defaulting back to a look of incredulity as Kam explained where he'd been. South America. Some things were just too bizarre to even question. The whole time they stood there across from each other, awkwardly, there was a bizarre dichotomy to the way Kam looked now, to Khal. On the one hand, like a stranger - Khaldun always had the good sense to be paranoid of everyone's motives, because he could never be sure of anything. People could be wrong, maybe Kam was wrong about him, and this was all going to end miserably. Prior to this conversation, he would swear that he had never seen Kam before in his life. But...even with nothing to go on but a feeling, it was a feeling of certainty. They were brothers. It was stronger than his apprehensions could be. So Kamboja kept alternating in how he registered, friendly and unfriendly, memorable and forgettable. Trying to make sense of it was like going cross eyed on a mental level.
There was a way to settle this though, once and for all. Kam was still looking toward the door, saving Khal from feeling any further judged. This was what family did, he thought to himself, it was only going to be weird to himself because he had no ******** recollection of what being part of a family was actually like. Kam did though, so at least one of the two of them would probably not be mortified by even the most minimal physical contact. He hooked the cigarette at the corner of his mouth and reached out his free hand. After a brief hesitation he rested it on Kamboja's shoulder. He was already having second thoughts but it was too late to just pull his hand away and admit to making a huge mistake. This was probably going to just be really awkward for both of them but whatever. No one could say he wasn't trying now. Any moment now Kam was going to feel reassured, or something.
"Better late than never, man," he joked halfheartedly, trying to act nonchalant about the whole thing. Well, no one had come looking for him for three years. Khal was a little resentful. It was a kind of disappointing explanation to why he'd had to languish with his memory shot to hell for this long. But even though he felt perfectly justified, complaining about it right now wasn't a good idea. This was the first time he'd ever remembered anything from before his original amnesia. Kamboja was probably his only link to the past and the only family member he'd likely ever find. Every single stupid thing he did was probably wearing thin Kam's tolerance of a brother who didn't even know who he was when they first started talking. How much tolerance was left? Certainly not enough to get away with saying half the s**t he wanted to in the heat of the moment.
Briefly he glanced down and realized he was still holding onto the photograph in his other hand. He held it out to Kamboja. "Sorry. You probably want this back, huh. Thanks for..." He averted his gaze. "For coming back.
As for Delphine: "Wait, so you're the one who punched her?"
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Posted: Fri Jun 03, 2011 1:14 am
The anger in Kam drained as he felt Khal's hand on his shoulder and his eyes slowly turned back to look up at him. He wasn't uncomfortable with the proximity, but he was admittedly a little surprised. Something about Khal seemed off - hell, he knew something about Khal was off. The fact that he was still pushing himself and still trying to hold on to the connection that Kam was offering just by being there meant something. It was a form of trust, even if that trust was weak, and Kam wasn't going to buck that by blowing off the only thing that Khal had done on his own so far.
"We're still going to talk, don't think this is going to make me forget something is wrong." There were no jokes, no smiles, and even Kam knew that if he looked in a mirror he would see their stern father looking out of his own eyes. He could be an imposing figure when he wanted to be and not just because of his build. "I'm okay now, just knowing that you're safe, but I need to know why this happened. Just not today."
Then his eyes fell to the picture that Khal was still holding up for him and even though the stern look in his eyes didn't waver, he did seem to be at war with himself over something. The picture was the only one he had, the only piece of his family he had left, yet.. he had Khal now, right? He had Khal, but Khal had nothing else to anchor him. With one deep sigh, he shook his head, and everything about him softened.
"Keep it," he brought up a hand and pushed lightly against the one Khal was holding the picture with, forcing it back towards the skinny teen. "You need that more than I do, right?" He smiled halfheartedly then and dropped his hand, done with that bit of the conversation. Under big brother law, Khal couldn't force him to do s**t. He was pretty sure that still applied.
"Don't thank me for that," he shrugged his shoulders and tried to steer the conversation back towards a more lighthearted discussion, "you're not getting rid of me that easy." He even smirked at his own words, right up until the next accusation.. "Uhhh," guiltier words had never been spoken. "That's a really long story." It wasn't, really. "She completely deserved it at the time." Not to mention she had proceeded to try and rot his arm off after, but he supposed he couldn't just say that.
He was pretty sure it was time for a new subject, before Khal started accusing him of abusing his girlfriend or some s**t.
He realized Khal's hand was still on his shoulder and, at the same time, also realized that he should probably make sure Khal knew that he wasn't invading some kind of personal boundary. So he reached out and looped one arm across Khal's shoulders, then slid it up so he could hook it around his neck and tug him down to his height. It was a little more awkward to put the kid in a headlock now that he wasn't actually short enough to overwhelm so easily, but Kam figured he'd just play it up to taking it easy on him.
"Why don't you toss out that little cancer stick, we'll get Delphine, and we can all go back to my place and celebrate without her awful parents around." He gave Khal's shoulders a little shake for emphasis and raised a brow as he did so. "And I'll even feed you. Or Bo will. Same thing."
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