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The past week had been a bit of an emotional roller coaster. After Cami found her crying on the beach, Hanna had felt a little out of sorts. She didn't often get emotional and felt like a failure for somehow crying in front of one of her closest friends. That then brought out a fierce judgment of her own personality -- what was wrong with crying in front of a friend? Objectively, Hanna knew it was fine, but in her own life, it made her feel weak and stupid, which were her two least favorite ways to feel.

Getting back to work had been something of a relief. The glass was fixed, though, with it, came a wave of sadness of loss that had Hanna still simmering in a pit of despair. She threw herself into her work, volunteering for extra shifts -- anything from coffee wrangling to filing to basically anything that kept her from laying in her bed, staring at the ceiling, and feeling loss. On this particular day, it meant a lot of gophering. Hanna felt as though she had run to every end of the island so far that day, doublechecking paperwork for various divisions and obtaining missing signatures from sloppy Hunters. (The Death Hunter who assigned her the task had sneered and said: "Death almost never misses important details like this.")

Her latest leg of the journey brought her to the Life Labs. She had to physically pry one Hunter off of his microscope to get the signature and thought that deserved a reward. Eyeballing the coffee maker -- a new one, she had heard -- Hanna darted over to it, quickly making herself a coffee and crouching down to search for some half-and-half stored below since there was none to be spotted near the machine.

Hanna startled and bumped her head on the edge of the table. The coffeemaker rattled. "Not dead, not graceful, things on my life resume," she murmured, rubbing at the spot and swiveling to glance over at Jack. "No, just half and half, actually." She resumed her rifling with added fervor. "I was hoping there was some hidden in -- ah, yes, victory." Her hand disappeared into the shelf and came up clutching a handful of little half-and-half tubs. She checked the expiration to be safe. On top of all the other crazy things that always seemed to be going on around here, Hanna didn't want to get food poisoning on top of it.

The Death trainee straightened up then, shooting Jack a lopsided grin before refocusing her attention on her waiting cup of coffee. "I picked up some extra shifts doing pretty mundane things. Signature wrangling, currently, for documents that were turned in incomplete." Her emphasis on the word incomplete suggested judgment; Hanna was a Death Hunter at heart. It rankled her that someone could be so careless as to forget something as official as a signature. What else did that mean they might be neglecting?

The coffee in her cup swirled in a tight circle as she began to stir in the half-and-half, profile to Jack. "How've you been?" It was a fairly loaded question, but that was pretty much always the case here at Deus. She'd let Jack answer it as he pleased. It was the least invasive path.

"Jack, I thought you knew," Hanna said, fixing him very a suddenly serious stare. "People are awful." A smile eased back on to her lips as she lifted the coffee and took a sip. Definitely better than the s**t trainees had access too over in her office, at least. When she was a Hunter, she would make sure there was equality in coffee availability, no matter the rank. Livin' the dream.

Her sipping paused when he mentioned adding trainees to his collection. After all, Hanna was a trainee, but she didn't consider herself a lackey to Jack. And he was a trainee too, sort of. Intermediate, but whatever. But was that how he saw her, as one among many? She wasn't stumbling to get him coffee like that guy at the Miss Deus Ex had been, but the comment made her think. Why did she even care? Ugh, she was being stupid and was annoyed with herself for it.

It was almost a welcome change of topic when she refocused on the waves of rage and grief that had rocked Deus recently. "I have been handling my own mental state just fine for 20-some years now. Flashes of rage and grief? Sounds just like adolescence to me. I got a temporary do over in mood swings. Something like that." The truth was less casual. She had been traumatized by dreams of viciously murdering her mother over and over. Sleep had been hard to come by for a week, which was only intensified when the grief came. Hanna had never cried so much in her life.

"And you were sane enough to make it through AND take care of others too. Are you going for some Life badge of dedication I don't know about?"

"Death's job is to find the flaws," she said, shrugging. It was true. A lot of her work centered around collecting information, yes, but that information had just as much to do with following Hunters as it did Amityville. And truth be told, Hanna was exceptionally good at fact-checking. It was probably why she had such a heavy paperwork load, even for a trainee, but it was better suited to her than combat, at least for now.

Jack's broken nose certainly suggested his time had not gone as smoothly as desired. Hanna gestured to the injury. "Adds character. From a distance, it increases the look of danger." In her opinion, it actually kind of made him more attractive, less typical. "I feel like getting in a fight might have been more satisfying, unleash it. I went all internal with it. So my broken nose is internal, or something."

Her half and half wasn't entirely mixed in the cup so she swirled it once, and when that didn't work, she dunked her finger in to give it a stir and then popped it in her mouth to clean it off. The period question brought a smirk. The feminist in Hanna hated discussions of PMS because it either ended up as an excuse for bad behavior from fellow ladies or ignorant comments from men. "They are marvelous things in general, just one drawback, still totally worth it. But in the name of science -- you should know that I don't actually feel, as a woman, that being on my period makes me any moodier than normal. Feels like a cop out." Okay, so maybe she was a little more sensitive at that time, but it wasn't such a huge thing.

Hanna tried to picture Jack in a fight. The only time that they had been in a combat situation in each other’s proximity might have been the Sahara and a bit in the final battle against Medea. In the Sahara, she never really took notice of him until both were contaminated and he was helping bandage her leg. Plus, there was almost no fighting on that particular “mission” — just falling a lot, being covered in gross things, a little bug squashing and teeth knocking. And against Medea, she had been transformed into a Death Horseman. Not precisely the glamorous, adrenaline-filled adventure that Hanna always secretly hoped was in store for her, despite her sensible side kicking the dream out of her head as best it could. Jack was a pretty lanky man, though, at least long-of-limb from his height alone. At her best guess, she read him as a tactical striker, which was sort of how she saw herself in battle too.

“Even injuries have a silver lining,” Hanna remarked lightly, tilting the cup back to her lips to hide a smile. His comment about moodiness received a dismissive snort. The Death trainee leaned off the coffee counter to continue with her duties as Jack bowed out of the conversation, but stopped when she noticed him attacking the advertisement on the notice board.

Truth be told, Hanna had already read this exact advertisement that someone, not Jack apparently from his reaction, had created. And it wasn’t the first one she had seen. They were on the cork board in the dorms too, where she had done a double take the first time, even torn a number free just to check it was the same one she already had in her phone. Then, later, Hanna found more stapled haphazardly to every other training dummy out at the field. It felt, to her, like the universe was trying to send her a message. She didn’t precisely have a crush on Jack, or at least not in any way she regarded as serious, but he was one of the first people that she had felt any sort of attraction to in a long time. Part of that was, of course, because she had been deep in the freezer for 2.5 years, and all the time before that she was brand new to being a Hunter and far too overwhelmed to consider something as trivial as affectionate feelings.

In fact, Hanna still considered affectionate feelings trivial and below her — at least at this juncture in her so far lackluster Hunter career.

And yet, she was human (at least, mostly human). Jack was very cute. He was smart. He could be funny. The whole despondent misanthrope thing appealed to her. He liked coffee. He could be sweet, too, when he wanted, though he had only shown that to her a few times, never with anyone else around. She liked how difficult he could be, how he didn’t just accept the company of just anyone, how he seemed amused by her humor. He had lots of opinions and didn’t balk at disagreement. There was a sense of something hidden and unknown about him that piqued her interest, something unknowable that she wanted to scratch at until she uncovered it. Still, at the same time, there was also something about Jack that read to Hanna as bad news. She could sense it off of him, peeling up like smoke signals to her subconscious. Unfortunately, that only made Hanna even more curious about him, heightening her urge to dissect and analyze all his inter-workings, to grow closer if only because it was challenging. And, even if it was nothing, Jack was attractive. And sometimes, that could be enough too.

A million thoughts jumped around her mind, but she quieted them as best she could — her thoughts, always jumping, always there, always reimagining and forecasting conversations and all their many possibilities on an endless loop — and simply watched Jack decimate the paper. “That photoshop needs some work,” she added. “I take it you are not advertising yourself, personally, next to offers for guitar lessons, free furniture, and plaintive requests for runic batteries.” Hanna reached over and picked up a leftover hunk of the flyer. She uncrumpled it, but it was a smear of ink and wrinkles with half a muscled leg. “I have to admit I was a little surprised when I saw these around. Who is the unwanted matchmaker so invested in your dating prospects?” She was more than a little curious who was behind it.

Jack was having trouble getting laid, at least in the eyes of his friends?

Hanna raised one eyebrow slowly, but she did not interrupt. It seemed like he needed to vent about it, and she was curious to know more. There was a part of her (growing louder each day) that itched for precisely that sort of comfort from someone. That side wanted to make a calm, matter-of-fact offer to help Jack out in that regard, but she had far too much pride for that.

Hanna had always been freer with her body than her heart, but that didn't mean she was truly free about sharing either. Sleeping with someone was unspeakably intimate and gave them, in her opinion, power over her. It was one thing to go home to a bar and take someone home whom she would never have to face again, which she had done before -- quite rarely, but it had happened. It was entirely another to go to bed with someone you knew you would be seeing again. Sleeping with someone at Deus was like sleeping with both a coworker and roommate -- unavoidable, all-encompassing. It was a mire, a sinking mire. And, to Hanna, a weakness. If she was going to sleep with someone at Deus, she would need to feel confident they wouldn't use that experience to throw in her face (or someone else's) later.

The part of her that wasn't amused by his frustration did feel bad. "I've seen a lot of the ones at the training field removed by Sun trainees assigned to clean up. But they are back again in a day, maybe even a few hours. I can take them down, if you'd like, but I'm pretty sure they'll keep going back up. It's a temporary solution," she said, thinking aloud. "Maybe they would leave it alone if they thought you were handling it yourself. No reason to hassle you if they think you're involved." A plan was forming in Hanna's mind, but she wasn't confident enough yet to pull the trigger.

Her general rule of thumb was to play things by ear, and in this situation, Hanna had played herself out of the game. She had a hard time throwing herself onto the trail of blind dates Jack was going to be going on. She considered herself above it. Plus, how weird would it be for her to initiate? It wouldn't be a blind date at all. And she wasn't about to put the thought that she might actually enjoy going on a date with him into the universe.

So when Jack bandied away from her idea of how to go on a date with him without it begin a date, Hanna considered it another sign and shrugged it off. Not meant to be, it would seem. "Hard to forget that physique," she said, gesturing to the trash can where the destroyed flyer had been with a laugh. "I'm sure they'll get over it, and maybe you'll actually get some entertainment out of the whole thing. Good stories. Though I can't imagine any dates on the Island can possibly be that blind. More like you show up and it is simply degrees of how familiar you are with that particular Hunter."

A shrug rolled off her shoulders. Hanna's coffee was half-gone, time swinging by. She collected her paperwork up into her arms, sensing the end of the conversation was near.

Hanna had been ready to leave Jack to his day at work, the moment for her plan to be hatched missed, but then he cycled back to it himself. She eased back against the counter, paperwork-laden arms slackening. "I do love a challenge, and an opportunity for subterfuge," Hanna said and meant it, regardless of whatever flutters of genuine feeling she might have burgeoning for Jack. Convincing his friends they were involved would be entertainment, something the island had in short supply as of late. "I have a decorated theater resume. In the lighting department. In high school." She grinned, but it was warm.

"This is my way of saying -- yes, I'm up for it. Let's trick the ********. It's got to be some kind of Death stealth and misdirection training in disguise, and even if it weren't, it sounds fun. Of course, I'm game." The redhead leaned off of the counter again, for the hundredth time.

This conversation was just getting interesting, but Hanna and Jack did have jobs to do. Plus, they probably wanted to discuss this in a place less open than where they currently were. "I have to keep moving before I have another Death Hunter crawling up my a** about this paperwork, but we can get together off-duty and figure it out," she said, moving closer toward the door.

Before she exited, Hanna paused, contemplative. "I'll help; I'll be convincing," she added. "Rest easy, Hawthorne." Her own feelings aside, the Death trainee would not want to be in Jack's shoes. The flyers were embarrassing, and Deus was a small community. Knowing Jack even in the limited way that she did, she could only imagine how infuriating the entire situation was to him.

And she was absolutely positive she'd be able to help him out of it. Beyond that... well, Hanna would play it by ear. No risk if there is no admittance, right?