milliways_bar | (no subject)

(no subject)

Fives is in conversation with Bar - this is mostly one sided to an observer, as all such conversations are. Fives is sitting at the Bar his back to her and leaning back on his elbows to survey the room, and she is sending her answers directly into his feed interface as he chats.

Bar is trying to persuade him that there's fun stuff to be doing outside even in this weather.

"So you just - make balls of the stuff?"

Beat

"And throw it at people?"

Beat.

"But the cold...?"

Beat. After which a package of folded winter wear - in blue and white to match his hoodie - appears on the surface next to his elbow.

"...you make a good point."

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"I like the ocean," Sinthia murmurs, letting him close and shifting so they're not jostling each other, and are instead nicely curled in the snow, watching the clouds shift and roll. "But I haven't seen one in a long time. Where do you liek the best, then? If not where you were born?"

"'Where,'" he huffs a laugh at last. "I don't think any of us care much about 'where.' Wherevey my brothers are, that's 'where.'"

"Do your brothers come here?" she asks, twisting a little bit to face him more instead of laying staring at the sky. "Or are you the only one?"

"Just me."

He's still looking up, a little wistful now. "SecUnit's got drones looking out specifically for my face, I'd know.

"Damn shame, I wish I could share this."

She studied him for a moment, gauging his reaction to what she was about to ask. "May I see your brothers?" Sinthia murmured, which might have seemed an utterly nonsensical question were it not for the knowledge that she could very easily read minds and delve through other people's memories and thoughts.

As if to demonstrate what she meant, she held her hand up and tapped her own temple with her gloved fingertips.

It takes him a second, and then he nods. "Oh, yeah, sure."

He pushes his hood back from his head, exposing his crew cut and the tattoo on his temple, reaching for her hand in case she needs touch for it. Uh, what do you want me to do?"

Edited 2021-02-27 18:21 (UTC)

She smiles gently. "You don't have to do anything. Just relax, think about something familiar. Like your tattoo," Sinthia murmurs, still watching his face though her features relax and smooth out as if she were asleep, save for her eyes. Those flick back and forth as if reading a book, eyelids lowering. It's a little disconcerting to watch.

"Tell me how many brothers you have?"

He gives a wry smile. "Ten million."

But he does what she says: thinks of his tattoo.

Five men, all the exact likeness, the same face, freshly arrived on a city planet, buildings stretching below so far there's nothing idenitifiable as 'ground', above stretching into the sky. They laugh, joke, and throw their arms around each other with no real distinction of personal space between any of them.

They swagger through the crowded living quarters of the Republic Centre for Military Operations, surrounded by men with the same face, the same wry smile and the same gruff laugh.

Some of the men around them have much more tattooing than Fives, writing scrawled acros their shaved heads, lines and swirls and animals and symbols snaking up from their necks. They're all in identical bodysocks so there's little to see other than those glimpses of skin.

"I'm getting one," Fives says.

"Regulation 2864 says..." his brother protests, and Fives shoves him away.

"Shut up, Echo, I'm getting one. You should, too."

"I'll get one," - says a third, "but I'm getting a big one. A blaster canon across my whole body."

"We're flying out tomorrow, Hevy," Echo points out, "we don't have time."

"When I get back then."

Sinthia listens and watches the memories like a newsreel, quiet and still. But she does smile at the easy manner between all of the five of them: she has nothing like that. Touch is not nearly so friendly for her as it is dangerous.

The fact that she and Fives are touching at all is very important; the fact she hasn't broken the contact even more so. "You were close. The way you touch and talk," she elaborates, though...to most it really barely qualifies as such. "Where were you?"

Fives laces his fingers in hers for a second, looking at their hands and thinking about how touch is just part of the way he communicates with his brothers.

"Coruscant, the capital of the Republic. Center of Military Operations. It's where we live between deployments."

"It looks busy," she says, and though her fingers curl around his by reflex, Sinthia still looks down at them, smiling gently. She likes that, even if she's only very rarely held hands with anyone, and never for such a relaxed purpose.

"How long has t been since you were back there?"

"I'm there now," he says. "About to ship out to Ryloth, but we're on planning and regrouping for the last week or so."

"Do you like it, having a place to go back to every time?" she asks, purposefully not separating their hands and instead rubbing her thumb over one of his knuckles, feeling the slide of skin over bone and ligament.

Fives lets her do that, watching it but occasionally flexing his fingers against the cold.

He shrugs.

"I guess? I don't think of is as much of a place I'm tied to as much as the men."

"You're cold," she says, as if she knows but doesn't quite feel it herelf. "Put your gloves back on, then. And your hood."

She nudges his shouler qith a tiny smile, the soft kind that's not often seen on her face. "This feels almost like Russia. I remember being there for a marksmanship course. I had a coat like this one, with fur around the face. But my nose was still cold."

"Feels like Orto Plutonia," he counters. "I had specialist armor but I was still freezing my butt off."

He lets go of her hand then, pulls the gloves back on over cold hands and pulls his hood back up, then lets himself shift closer to her.

She chuckles and puts her head on his shoulder, though if it gets much longer they'll have to go inside and warm up, and let their clothes dry. "Let me show you," she says, and focuses on his face again, though it's slightly different when she's putting images into his head rather than only taking them. The brain tends to process things as if they were real, rather than imagined.

It's cold, the memory he gets from her, nothing but white-out snow and the deep green of conifer trees all around. She's laying behind a felled log, a long rifle barrel in front of her face and the wind biting across her nose and cheeks even as sharp words ring in her ears in a foreign language he's likely never heard. Aim for the head. Get this close and you should splatter a man's brains across the ground. But the skies are clear schoolboy-blue like an upturned bowl, and the gentle twitter of tiny winter birds is audible in the silences between her breaths and the soft clicks of her cocking the rifle and looking into the sight.

The language is strange, and the gun is strange, but the scene - a child learning to kill - is familiar and comfortable and reminds him of his own childhood: learning weapons, practising sharpshooting, finding that moment of careful precision.

But it's quiet, and the lack of other children around her makes him sad.

"Russia," she repeats with a faint note of something like happiness in her voice. Mostly lacking in discontent, anyway. "Marksmanship. I don't remember how old I was, but I remember it was cold, and pretty. Desolate, but like...nothing had touched it. I followed the man I was hunting for three weeks, and alone there it was nice."

"Still cold," Fives says. "Rather be warm, especially around the trigger fingers."

"It was cold, but I'm used to that," inthia murmurs. "They used to freeze me between...assignments. Between the missions where they sent me to kill someone."

"Freeze you?" Fives asks, curious and now a bit worried. "Like, made you cold or like in carbonite?"

"I don't know what carbonite is," she shrugs. "But no, I don't think so. It was suspended animation, it kept them from needing to find a replacement for me, I think. They erased mymemories, I don't remember very much. Just bits and pieces."

"Sounds more like carbonite than ice," Fives says, but with a deeper frown. "And your memories?"

He forgets that he childhood was slightly more hellish than his - he actually liked Kamino, for what it was.

"There are a lot of holes," she says softly, breathing deep and slow and even, calm as can be. "I remember little bits from different cities. Sarajevo, Paris, Moscow. Before that...Berlin, near the end of the war. But that was almost...seventy years ago. I don't know what happened between them."