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[mortemscintilla]

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[sleepingstar]

It doesn't matter if I like her. I'm not the one having sex with her. [She notices but does not note how her language has changed, how she's not choosing her words to shock and offend.]

[mortemscintilla]

[ Cleverest girl he knows. Possibly one of the cleverest Contractors. But how like a 14-year-old she can be, sometimes -- bristly and sullen. He can read past the cool dismissal rippling convincingly, but falsely, in her tone. It doesn't make anything snap through Hei's nerves, doesn't make him irritated. He can be uncannily patient, sometimes, and with Pai, it definitely matters. He carries on with his small caresses, his tone low and gentle, ]

I'm not asking you to like her. But you live here as much as I do. If you don't want her over, I'll stop bringing her over.

[ Matter-of-fact, not resentful. He's compromised and renounced a hundred more important things for Pai's sake. ]

[sleepingstar]

[She shrugs, a little irritated. She's not used to him poking through her defenses at sore points; she's not used to having sore points.]

You'll still see her?

[She doesn't know what she hopes his answer will be. Not that she hopes, because hope is pointless. His answer will be whatever it is.

She just wants him to be happy.]

[sleepingstar]

[There's things I can't have here that I can at home. Amber. A community. A purpose outside of being the object of her brother's love. And now she's watching him build a new life while she's stuck in place.

She rolls over and sits up so she can nestle her head on his shoulder.]

The only thing I want [that she can have] is not to get woken up by her screaming. [Soundproofing, taking her somewhere else... Pai doesn't care.]

[mortemscintilla]

[ Hei will never say it. But he's been where Pai has -- a ragged-edged anomaly that can't find a place anywhere. Not among humans. Not among Contractors. It's what he'd felt when the war ended. South America had become a mouth full of broken teeth; a place with massive blown-apart gaps in it where people had known streets, houses, cities. The sites had been, and still were, an extraordinary emptiness; holes in what had previously been absolutely certain. With Pai gone, Hei had carried that same feeling with him everywhere. He remembers how coming to Tokyo had seemed like nothing so much as one long, unearthly morning after a very private air raid. He'd spent long days, months, years, cautiously probing the tender gaps inside him, feeling out the places where everything familiar had been blown to rubble. ]

[ It wasn't Pai's fault, that he couldn't let himself, in all that time, get close to anybody else. That he couldn't let that part of his life unfurl at the same pace as the rest of the world. He'd read a novel once where one of the characters, a musician who'd triumphed over a troubled childhood, withdrew from her fame and the world little by little, finally able to accept only the company of those who'd known her in her youth, when her sister was alive. Hei remembers he'd read that passage over and over, unnerved, and he'd closed it there, refusing to go on to the end. ]

[ Pai's isolation is like that. But very different, unique, because it's so exclusively hers. He can try to understand it. But he'll never grasp the patterns and colors completely. ]

You won't be. [ He cuddles closer to her on the sofa, like she's a little girl, resting his head on the small glossy one on his shoulder. ] I won't bring her over again.

[ He's had his eye on a secluded loft in the Underground. This gives him leave to rent it, and to give Korra a spare key. ]

[sleepingstar]

[She doesn't think Good, but the same satisfaction is there. She nuzzles his neck.]

I'm tired. [Let's go to bed is the unspoken command.]

[mortemscintilla]

[ Funny, how it amuses him when she gets imperious. She's so petite. His response to the statement is to shift, scooping her up easily before rising and padding upstairs to her room. His steps are nearly silent on the thick pale carpeting. Depositing her in bed like a child -- or like the times when she was making her Payment -- he tucks her between the sheets and bundles the covers around her, before his weight shifts the mattress and he climbs in too. The lamp snaps shut; darkness settles. Passing an arm around her, Hei tries not to think of how he's getting accustomed to drowsing with Pai, just like in the war, wrapped around her heat, lulled by the thrumming of her body. He warns himself that if the City ever snatches her away ... he'll have forgotten how to sleep alone. ]

[ Of course, if she's taken away, he'll have so much else to mourn about. ]

[ He tries not to think about that. Shuts his eyes instead, and lets himself be lulled, bit by bit, by the quiet cadence of her breathing. ]

[mortemscintilla]

[ Hei almost drawls, No, I'll just switch off my interest in her. But that would sound snarky and belligerent, and his mood is neither of those things. Instead he smoothes the hair off her warm forehead. Leans in, and kisses the tip of her nose. Back at the beginning, when the Gate's appearance was just a curl of cold dread rattling the world, when the Syndicate had just swooped in and snatched him and Pai up, he'd never imagined they'd be alive, ten years later. It was such an impossibility he'd discarded even fantasies about it -- kept himself, where she was concerned, strictly in the moment. Pretty easy, since a soldier never did himself favors by thinking too far ahead. ]

[ He mulls her question over now. But at the same time, he just enjoys her, for a little while -- this miraculous girl who's dissipated into stardust, back home, dissolving bits of him with her. ]

[ Eventually, honestly, ]

There's things I can't have at home. Not anymore.[ Pai. Yin. A semblance of security. Of being able to take a breath, to stop fighting, stop moving. To risk an attachment to an outsider. ] Here, I can. And I find that I like it. Korra's part of that.

[ He's been alone so long, left with no-one but Yin, that he's learned to conceive of himself that way. But millimeter by millimeter, that conception is beginning to include someone else. Sometimes the idea scares him, and feels like a burden. Other times it seems like a life raft, or at least like ballast. Either way, it is real, and deepening. ]