Welcome to Gaia! ::

The key turned in lock of the front door and it pushed open, flooding the entryway with the sound of laughter. One voice very familiar to Kaia, and one unfamiliar - and female, on top of that.

"We just made it!" He sounded pretty excited not to be rained on. The door creaked and slid across the floor until it shut, and his sneakers made telltale squeaks as he navigated his way through the apartment.

"I hate when it rains." There was another quiet laugh. "Thanks for letting me borrow your sweatshirt."

"No problem." Khal's shoes were approaching the doorway that led to the kitchen. The other pair clicked in the opposite direction. "You can crash on the couch, I'll get the drinks."

Khal rounded the corner with his momentum aiming him toward the fridge. He was already halfway across the linoleum by the time he realized he wasn't alone in the kitchen. He looked over, surprised. Kaia was surrounded by mountains of books and baked goods all over the place. He assumed she had a good reason, he just expected he had the apartment to himself for a few hours.

"Kaia! I thought you were going out tonight?" He leaned down and pulled a couple of sodas out of the fridge. Faint glossy imprints of lipstick on his face were pretty easy to see in the fluorescent light. He pointed at some of the cooling cookies closest to him. "All this for Chase, huh?"

It was a little weird to offer for her to watch a movie with them. Especially after what happened a week ago. He was quite resilient about it, and in accepting defeat he returned to internalizing his frustration. It was like it had never happened, and that seemed to be what Kaia wanted. Now, though, things were a little different. He was somewhat better adjusted now than he'd been for a long time, and the more time Kaia spent with her boyfriend, the more alone time Khal had to fill. He was a teenage guy, though. With his chances confirmed to be shot, he could distract himself with other girls. And distract himself he did. It helped that Kam had explained a few tricks to him the last time they hung out.

"That sucks," he offered, not doing very well at emoting at all. He couldn't honestly say he wasn't happy to hear her boyfriend was turning out to be the girlfriend-dumping a*****e he easily imagined him to be. He could have told her this was going to happen. But that was just his bias talking and that was something he was again very sure Kaia didn't want to hear right now. "You should have called me earlier, we could have hung out. Next time give me a call."

"Oh, sorry. I guess I forgot." He just barely caught the wet paper towel with an already filled hand. It sagged around his fingers and soda can like some kind of aggressive white octopus. He slid the cans onto the counter so that he could grapple with the paper towel and casually wiped it in an ellipse around his face, grimacing about the whole ordeal. The paper towel came away blotted with pinkish-red smudges before he trashed it. As he watched her close up over the cookbook he just stared in helpless confusion. He'd never seen Kaia like this before in all the months they'd been living together. Maybe this was just a thing between her and Chase. She probably needed more alone time to bake stuff. He gathered his sodas again and made a hasty exit, giving Kaia one last pitying sort of glance in passing.

"Who was that?" There was a slightly territorial tone in the girl's voice, as silly as she tried to sound about her question. This was a Girl Thing and not something Khal could pick up on.

"Oh, that's Kaia. She's my roommate." One thump near the front door, then another, and Khal's footsteps were suddenly silenced. Soda cans clinked on the coffee table and the couch creaked. As if to reassure his date of their completely platonic status, he added in a quieter voice (not quiet enough for Kaia), "She's having a bad day, her boyfriend cancelled on her."

The girl made what sounded like a fake-sympathetic "aww" and there was another creak from the couch that indicated she was moving around a bit.

The TV suddenly buzzed to life, and a laugh track bubbled quietly behind the other ambient sounds. "You like action movies, right?"

"Kaia?"

Khal was knocking on the bedroom door. The blender was no longer whirring behind the late night music station serenading her from the radio. He must have turned it off when it was left running too long unsupervised. And now he was following her into the only sanctuary she had left in the apartment. He tried calling her name over the radio noise again. "Kaia, are you in there?"

He said something quieter that got lost in the sad chords of the song. It was hard to tell if he was talking to her or replying to some unknown question from the girl in the other room.

"Kaia!"

Ignoring him didn't make him go away though. The lock on the door turned out to be a cheap piece of s**t and the doorknob gave way pretty easily to enough harassment. He didn't have a clear idea of what he was going to find anyway. None of this followed any sort of pattern he could trace and assure himself of. It was worrying enough for someone like him, who had nothing else to go on but those little accumulated details. But after he saw Kaia, his eyes immediately fell on the half-open bag and he froze.

Anything but this.

No one 'prepared' to be walked out on like this. It wasn't any necessity that he had to be with Kaia. If that had been the case, then he would have moved out weeks ago. They stayed like this together for friendship. Or what had been so easy to peg as friendship up until recently. He felt like someone had him by the throat but no one was there. Words were not happening. Anger wasn't even happening. He still hadn't let go of the door handle and now he held onto it like a life preserver.

Maybe if he understood what she was saying, he would in turn have been able to reason with her to stay. He couldn't make sense of any of it and it was playing out in front of him like a nightmare come to life. She had rejected him - he accepted that. So why did it matter to her whether he fooled around with some girl for a couple of hours and pretend he still had a civilian persona? How had she become so damn moody in the course of an evening, when he'd gone out of his way not to bother her any more? She had no reasons. She made no sense at all to him.

"Don't." Pitiful. Childish. It was the only word he could get past the lump in his throat before it constricted him back into silence.

He'd made a promise of sorts too, even if he didn't remember it. Unlike Kaia, however, he was unable to overcome it even for his own sake, not on the spot like this. He stood aside at her request, pressed close to the open door wordlessly. A soldier following orders, backwards of the hierarchy they'd fought over in the first place. There was nothing to say that he didn't think would just push her farther away. He'd stopped staring at her now. The wall was the new target of his laser focus.

The last thing he wanted to do was hurt her.

He knew deep down he couldn't have stopped her anyway. Teleportation was a bit of a gamebreaker.