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[mortemscintilla]

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[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. ]