Welcome to Gaia! ::

One of the perennial problems with being a habitual liar was that you might, in time, end up believing your own bullshit.

Sawyer had always prided himself, from childhood, on not being prone to this particular bit of self-deceit unless he decided he wanted to be. But there is a difference between the willful lies we tell to embroider our dreary daily existences in conversation with strangers, and the unwilling lies that we tell ourselves without even realizing it.

How long had it been? Longer than it was worth thinking about. The uniform, of course, had whatever magical tailoring in its threads that every other uniform of the kind did, but all the same, it felt ill-fitting: an old suit from five years ago, broken out of storage for an unexpected funeral and seemingly designed to give you an uncomfortable reminder of how much your body had contorted itself when you weren't paying attention.

He wasn't sure if he ought to be doing this. He was, he knew, running a very large risk. He should have been laying low six states away still, not wandering back into the arms of this hateful city which seemed like the hotbed of everything he'd spent the last decade intermittently running away from, only to find it waiting like an unsprung trap just when he thought he was getting comfortable. Ten years should have been long enough to stop feeling like a fugitive on the run. Instead he felt more hunted than ever, and had, with the weary resignation of a gazelle that stops fighting at last, let himself go limp and willingly into the jaws of the leopard.

He'd told himself it was a test. He knew that it wasn't. He even knew, in some unspoken corner of his heart, that although he had already made up his mind, he would not yet have the courage to do or say what was needful. He knew this even when that old sensation came upon him again - familiar and instinctive, despite the long gap - and he knew that he was near one of those people he was supposed to have always thought of as inconvenient barriers to some Glorious Purpose.

He let himself wander into it - drift into it, really - until he was across the street from her, and he paused only long enough to lift his eyes to her face with a strange, timid challenge in his own, and then to put his hands into his pockets and continue strolling onwards.

"I can't tell," he said, lifting his voice just to be heard, "whether you're following me or I'm following you."

"Oh, you know. The usual. Serial murder, general nefariousness. That's why I grew the mustache," he added, giving it a demonstrative twirl, a la a silent film villain about to tie someone to a railroad track. This was not very effective, the mustache not exactly being of the type that is given to twirling.

He said this with a sort of genial playfulness that was not without an element of exhaustion hanging off of it.

"And you? The same, I imagine. General heroism and intervention?" He had no visible weapon; between this and the signature her assessment that he was not a threat was probably true, as much as it was true of any grown man. But even in that respect he did not give off the aura of a particularly threatening person, mustache notwithstanding. "Here to cramp my style, I imagine, and keep me from meeting my quotas. Good thing I haven't met my quota in years. Word of advice: always keep other people's expectations of your work low, or else you'll get hounded to keep going above and beyond."

This, too, with the same unscannable flippancy, as if it were equally likely that he was in fact a diligent little rank-and-file forever doing his best as it was that he was a habitual slacker.

"I'm not sad," he said, but it wasn't a protest. It was a correction, accompanied by him holding up an instructive finger, as if she'd made some grammatical misstep in class. "I'm tired. But we're all tired nowadays, right? The great unifier between sides and generations: being ********' beat all the time. My millennial a** and your - skibidi whatever."

He paused. Probably those cigarettes that he'd put into subspace ten or so years ago weren't going to be real great now, assuming the lighter even worked. Still...

He pulled them out, and found that they needed opening. Well, smokeable at least in that case, even if they weren't ideal. He lit as they walked like someone who was used to doing it, only having to fight with the lighter briefly.

He did seem more comfortable, at least, once this was done, and he was carefully exhaling away from her, even though there was still a very careful distance between them: more an outward olive branch than necessary politeness.

"No sense telling me to man up, anyway," he said. "Clearly as manly as they get already." This, with a flex of an arm that was clearly not exactly clad in beef, even through his layered sleeves, and was the more ridiculous given his uniform, his stature, even a face that still had a babyfat quality to it, despite his clearly being on the wrong side of twenty-five, and possibly thirty. "Seriously, though. What do you guys do, when you're not making sure middle management is yelling at us next time we have a performance review?"

He met both her showing off and her accusations of mansplaining equably, unoffended.

But it was the last assessment that finally got a comment out of him, accompanied by a sigh. "Yeah," he agreed, looking like an extremely put-upon minimum wage worker who's just heard his boss call him to the office yet again. "That's probably true. But my understanding is that all that s**t we're doing sure as ******** was helpful during the giant snake situation," he pointed out.

He had gleaned that, at least, from keeping an ear to the general ground, somewhat against his will, and in trying to catch himself up without outside help. He had, somehow, avoided an entire apocalypse and remained in blissful ignorance the entire time. And it had given him pause, but not much of one.

This was too obvious an opening to go unfed.

"Ashton, is it? Didn't get a name - owes me twenty bucks for this and never coughed it up, so ******** the bit, as far as I'm concerned," he said breezily, pausing as he walked past a dark storefront to take advantage of the ashtray on top of the garbage can out front, crushing the cigarette out into it.

"I don't understand me one bit either," he confided. "But I know if you're worried about a jumpscare you might wanna hightail it in the opposite direction, you know, and get Ashton first."