systemcritical | [OPEN] we was all of us just tumbling birds hanging in the sky

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[OPEN] we was all of us just tumbling birds hanging in the sky

CHARACTERS ▶ Max Rockatansky and YOU
LOCATION ▶ Zion, residential areas -> bazaar/marketplace; other areas available on request
SUMMARY ▶ Come meet your friendly neighborhood road warrior.
WARNINGS ▶ It is distinctly probable there will be mentions of violent death and/or violence in general.
NOTES ▶ This is largely to establish CR but if someone wants to assume their character is familiar with Max already as per my CR meme comment that's absolutely fine with me!

Given his druthers, Max would have preferred not to wander -- or rather, more correctly, he would have preferred not to need to wander, not to be so much the same despite all that has changed that the restlessness still settles into his bones, chases him towards a horizon. There isn't one anymore, certainly not down here, and nothing repels him more than the thought of going back in just to chase him down. It repels him, of course, because he wants it, every last filthy bit of it, back as it was, because in the wasteland the depths were always fathomable and rarely so deep as to leave a man spinning his wheels. There what was broken couldn't be fixed and in the past he'd never have imagined that preferable to the alternative, but he'd never have imagined any of the rest of this either. Funny, really, how that goes. Get something you never knew you wanted and find it isn't quite all it's cracked up to be anyway. Couldn't save any of the ones before and he'll never save the rest of them, not one man, and whoever said he owed it to them anyway? Max walks with a brace on his leg because he feels off-kilter without it and can't imagine a finer analogy for circumstances at large. His world wasn't real and maybe some of those people weren't either, but it's all still there, locked in his brain.

Nothing for it but to walk. Pretend like the noise of the city doesn't itch at him as much as the noise in his head. Feels different lately, unsettled, feverish, and it isn't hard to guess why. Even keeping to himself and his tinkering he knows about the machines. War-making is a fact of life, though, and not really his business either -- or it shouldn't be, except here he lives and dies on the well-being of others, and not just by their hands. They can do what they want, rescue people from living worlds and leave others to languish in dying ones; he can't hurt and he can only refrain from helping for so long.

Max...

It's a reproach, but whether for thinking these things or for having left in the first place is always difficult to discern. Worms crawling 'round in one's head aren't under any obligation to be coherent. Either way he flinches, step faltering, hand rising so he can grind the heel of his palm into the socket of his eye with no particular gentleness. Not exactly unknown on these streets, the ill-at-ease, the lost, the unsettled, even the mad; still, he stands out, even when he shoves his hands back into his pockets and gives a violent shake of the head. No good. None of it.

The streets become busier as he goes, making his way deeper into the city, into the earth in which it is buried. Here he blends in better, if just by virtue of numbers, but the crowd sets him all the more ill at ease. It's just another reminder of the lack of empty space, and of the tenuousness of his own position. Anyone who gets too close still merits a wary stare. His fingers still twitch with the errant need to grasp, take, and run. Not the place for it anymore. One doesn't have to live like that. Doesn't get to. Instead he wanders on, in search of something to eat.

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"You!" comes a voice, and suddenly a bundle wrapped in cloth is being shoved hastily into his arms. "Come on," Anders says, already legging it. "Run!"

He didn't particularly pick Max on purpose, he was just there, suddenly separate from the crowd of Zionites moving even as he was a part of it. If Anders knows him at all, from his work in his clinic tending to the sick and injured... well, it's been a busy month with a lot of patients, fall-out from the battle in Olympus as well as the usual daily maladies, and they each pass through his care in a quickly forgotten blur.

Taking his own exclaimed advice, Anders weaves through the warren of passages carved directly into the rock at a surprising speed, boots slapping on the rough rock until it becomes the echo of metal. It's not until he's dashed up a staircase two at a time that he stops, clutching his own bundle close, half bent over it as he tries to catch his breath, and looks back to see if the man followed or if he's going to have to try and find him again. Still, losing half the medicine was better than letting it's weight slow him down, getting caught, and losing all of it.

Run is perhaps the most sensible thing anyone has said to Max since he arrived here. It happens almost on reflex, muscles engaging before the brain catches up. Run where? Run from what? Irrelevant, ultimately; he's in it now, has been involved without his will, which is how it tends to go. The familiarity leaves little room for objection. So fine, the beating of feet on pavement, air in his lungs. He's not as strong or as fast as he used to be, but then, he hasn't taken a shotgun blast to the knee in this version of reality either.

So he runs. More than runs: when that finally comes to a close he turns in place, bundle tucked under one arm and the other coming up defensively, ready to fight. When it transpires that there's nothing to fight the hand drops again and he turns back at the interloper, the stranger, clutching his newfound spoils suspiciously. All right. Fair enough; he's in now, he's done it, but what and why, and how much does he lose and how will those losses be recuperated?

He glances between the bundle and the stranger. What's this, then? What have you done? Once that's been decided, he'll decide in turn whether or not to give it back. He can guess at the origins, has enough familiarity with theft to know that it isn't forgiven because someone's run far enough fast enough. He'd like some reassurance that he's been dragged into something that's worth the possibility he won't be able to show his face in the markets for a while.

Anders is a long, skinny beanpole slumped back against the wall, exposed throat bobbing as he pants, eyes still on Max. He's been unplugged long enough that he's not a floppy noodle baby, but he's not exactly fit, either, and it shows as he catches his breath. "Sorry about that," is the first thing out of his mouth, casual as if he'd just bumped into him rather than dragged him into a whirlwind chase scene. "Spot of trouble with an Irkalian."

Pirates, then. Anders accompanies this revelation with a wan half-smile, probably a little charming despite himself, because charisma is the kind of thing that sticks. And despite the softness that weariness evokes there's something sharp about that hint of teeth. "Don't worry, I paid him. He just seemed to think he could extort a little more out of me." It's not as though Anders can find this medicine anywhere except the black market, though now he may have to find a new supplier.

Pirates. Max doesn't have much to do with that lot. Most of what people bring to him and therefore most of his business is local. Keeps his hands busy while letting him keep his head down. As a policy goes, non-involvement still doesn't seem to be working out for him, and that seems only fair. Unkind, unpleasant, yes, just as soon avoided, but fair. He has a lot to atone for.

Maybe that's also why he had to be saddled with a man with a smile like that. It doesn't unsettle him, exactly — he's used to bared teeth advertising an arsenal. Anything less is commonplace, almost ubiquitous, and within his capacity. Still, it leaves him wary — the charm, however residual, all the more so. Charisma isn't synonymous with dishonesty, but it's certainly a tool which the dishonest exploit. Easier with someone to follow, life, and he's as susceptible to that as anyone. Proven, even, that when told to run he's ready and willing.

Max sets his jaw defensively, arms loosening on the bundle only a fraction. It's not quite an I don't believe you; ultimately the details are largely irrelevant, certainly in the moment. Besides, whether or not he stole these packages doesn't change the fact that he stole Max, or at least Max's legs, and possibly his reputation.

"Not my business," he says finally, voice carrying a faint rasp from infrequent use. He nods down at the bundle in his arms. "What've I got?"

How inclined should I be to keep it as far away from myself as possible? It's a self-serving inquiry, but that hardly sets him apart from present company, which is refreshing. Altruism isn't always dishonest, but selfishness by contrast rarely ever is.

"It's medicine," Anders says aggressively, as if daring Max to challenge him on that. Not because it's a lie, but because that's how he is with all truths, waiting to be doubted. "I run a clinic."

Though after a moment he relents and elaborates. "It's for people suffering from pain, but it's highly addictive and too much can be fatal," he explains, which is why he has to buy it on the black market. Basically it's morphine, only possibly distilled from the endocrine system of human corpses, or something equally gruesome. Labs are in short supply in Zion.

"I'd appreciate if you didn't run off with it,"!he adds, maybe too hopefully.

Max hesitates a few moments, expression still grimly disapproving, before holding the bundle across. Mistake, probably, but he's got no use for this personally and it'd be too much trouble to distribute it himself, trouble he frankly doesn't want.

He should leave it at that, choose to believe the stranger or not, as long as he's out of it — and he should leave, back about his business, such as it is. But there is an enduring question, something he doesn't like not knowing because at home, knowing had always mattered. One never knew when it might be needed.

Best not get to it straight away, even if that means making conversation. He turns his eyes briefly towards the ceiling, chewing at his lower lip."Your clinic, you treat what?"

What is there to treat here? The usual, in any safe place? Scraped knees and broken limbs? The sort f sickness that was never allowed to set in in the world he knows? Is there, just as importantly, a need for him?

Asking is, of course, a mistake, but it's the mistake he's never stopped being able to make, the mistake that's driven him mad: he cares.

[Movement to his left.

More leg-and-arm than body, Horse kind of tumbles as she walks. Drunk, clearly, but not so much that she actually walks into him. She stops about half a foot short of a body-check, swaying dangerously on the toes of her boots, her dark eyes flattened into a squint that either means she's skeptical, or that she recognizes him, or that she's currently seeing two of him blending in and out of each other. Possibly a combination of two or more.

The next instant, her teeth flash in stark relief against her face. Recognition, albeit of the vaguest kind.] You that gearhead, [she says, loud. But this whole area is loud, liquor dives shrugged up tightly between places that sell parts, restaurants making some effort to share rough blocks that aren't quite long enough to count for neighborhoods. Welcome to dystopia.] How much work you done for the Zion Defense Grid?

[Of course. If the boots and the sleeveless top weren't enough, she has that look about her.]

[Loud presences and loud persons are hardly in short supply where Max comes from, nor here, but all the same when she begins to speak a hand comes up, not in a fist but with palm turned slightly outward and fingers gently curled, a half-hearted and only half-intentional attempt to ward her off. But really, truly, as unpleasant as people are — nothing personal, him-not-her — they're still better than the alternative.

At least in short bursts, and at arm's length. He might still manage one of the two.

He shifts on his feet. Processes.]

Some.

[He'll take whoever comes to him but mostly he prefers the mindless work, machines that don't mean anything — not because he's incapable but because anything more than that necessarily involves a level of investment he isn't ready to adopt. Too ready, is perhaps more accurate, and that's always his problem, always what's gotten him into trouble. Given the promise of a new life he thinks he wants none of that. No more of it. It's not very realistic.

He can't say any of that, of course, even if he were inclined to. I don't want to feel tenderly towards your machines sounds just as cracked, just as misaligned as I don't want to have to care about any of you. And he is — cracked, off-kilter — but it doesn't pay too well to let on here.

He looks away and back, raising his hand to run the back of his hand across his mouth, brows drawing together. Considering. Following the thread of the question to its logical conclusion, deciding what he wants to do with that conclusion.]

You need work?

[It isn't as though he really could have managed to refuse anyway.]

[Her face crinkles with laughter. Military lifers are a little similar no matter what universe you're in. Work?? For her, the Grid is that and play, most of her friends, nearly all her family, more a way of life than something to come home from. Not that she doesn't enjoy her off-time, judging from the incendiary-smelling fumes emanating from her breath when she swoops in a few inches closer to have a look at him.] Nahhh.

Offering you work. [The hand he's trying to ward her off with finds itself suddenly accosted by very long fingers, like being handled by a mantis for examination. She's not holding on hard; it's easy for him to snatch away.]

Forty-three new cadets.

Everybody and their mama wants to fuck up REAPER. [She smiles at him now, a white scimitar shape in hard contrast against her face. She's looking at him closely-- his face, that is. Nearly as interested in what there is to find there, as there was in his hands.] We could use somebody to make it real. [She doesn't immediately elaborate. Partly because a marketeer collides into her shoulder and then bounces off, making her sway slightly. It's hard to tell if she knows the other woman-- there's a brief exchange, a friendly shove of one arm. But then her eyes are on him again, assessing, warm interest that's far more common in Zion than Max's homeworld wasteland.]

Edited (powerpose note and a couple lines of suitable interruption) 2015-08-14 06:11 (UTC)

[There's not much worth examining about his hands. They're functional, do the work needed and aside from a bit of residual dirt utterly free of the vastly more telling marks they bear inside. If this were a matrix, there'd be quite the story to read, scars and ill-healed breaks. Now he just looks fresh. Untested. A green branch.]

I fix things.

[It's nearly a mantra by now. I fix things. I just fix things, that's all, nothing more or less remarkable or worthy of note than that, thank you. It says enough about his self-imposed exile and if one is listening carefully implies plenty of the reasoning behind it. Too much broken. Maybe he doesn't want to have to fuck anything up anymore. Maybe he hasn't really got any choice. Either way, the conviction with which he says it, as though trying to convince himself as much as her, proves him a poor liar.]

I make things.

[Things for breaking other things, more often than not. The contradiction doesn't escape him, which is why it comes second in the list and only after a pause, like a confession. He pulls his hand away.]

You need that, I can do it.

[But no more. And yet, his expression: he isn't interested, doesn't wear interest on his face but he hasn't run yet, and in the wariness there is a sharp assessment, a latent uncertainty. Max is a simple creature. He does what is needed, what he needs to do, and everything else is a matter of security, safety from one thing or another. It's a balance. Pain or regret, death or that endless pursuit, only here there's no desert through which to run from his demons. They've got him, claws in deep, and he deserves that, truly and thoroughly, but that doesn't mean he's inclined to back away from the potential for something better, not until he's heard the terms.]

[There's a coyote-like quality to Horse's smile, even if there hasn't been a coyote on this planet for centuries. She's watching him watch her, with interest that would seem predatory on a woman who was less warm and outright enthusiastic about drunkenly accosting a traumatized mechanic about enhancing the human race's capacity to exact violence upon that which would do it harm. The passer-by she'd greeted vanishes back into the crowd and total irrelevance.]

Walk with me.

[She swings a hand in invitation, pendulums her long, long body into the first few strides. It's not a head game, or she doesn't tend to play ones that are terribly elaborate. It's only a split-second before she says,] You know machines. Killing them, fighting them, that shit is nothing like people. Training with people-- not good enough. Field training, too slow. Too risky. [In light of the Truce, she means. She stops to filch two dried date outs of a display basket, waving at the shopkeeper with it; gets an affectionate insult for her trouble.] The Grid is making something big for that.

We got blueprints. A couple algorithms roughed out for software. Trouble is everything that comes in between.

[Fabrication, she means. Spatial parameters, enginework.] People know how to build ships, fix life support, bullshit together carts and holo-tech and weapons. [Max, she offers one of the little wedges of fruit.] But this is different. New. Lots of problems.

You want me to build you monsters.

[His world was too dead for too long to have equipped him with the proper metaphor: she wants him to build dragons to slay. Dark things still do lurk in the cultural consciousness of his people, but they're universally human. Man and the atom. In a way he finds it difficult to accept that machines have ever done him wrong.

Of course, his machines don't think, and worse still than that, however meticulous these computers might have been in constructing worlds they have been surprisingly lackadaisical in their construction of people. Nobody guided him along and as such he knows very well where his loyalties ultimately lie. Humans may be in their own way monstrous, but he is still one of them.

Still, one question does remain, a nagging suspicion he can't quite shake that she knows more about him than she lets on. Maybe more than she should. It could be paranoia, to which he is far from immune. He takes the proffered section of fruit in spite of it, gestures at her with it held delicately between his fingers like something precious and rare, which of course it is. He still wants to know:]

Why me?

[What makes her confident that he'll succeed where others have failed? He has talent, but it's no more than his world requires; is, in fact, bound to the limitations of his upbringing. He can improvise. He understands machines. This is all the same a far cry from the graceless, economical machines of home. This is not a blunt weapon — but then maybe one has to acquaint oneself with both in order to know how to survive now that all the rules have changed.]

[There is no clever glint of secret knowledge behind Horse's eyes. If anything, the light behind her eyes is desperately shallow, the kind of thing you'd expect to see in the face of an animal, maybe, if there were animals anymore, and maybe also if you didn't think much of them. There's a saccadic twitch in her pupils as she looks at him, left, right, in minute fractions of distance. He looks very. wary.

She doesn't mind.] Three already fucked it up, [she answers, simply. It is not the most flattering answer she could have conjured, probably, but nor is it the least; it might even pass for the truth, if Max is in the mood to entertain such a thing.] Sent a blade spinning twenty yards in as fast as it takes to blink. Bup. [It's a sound-effect squeezes out from the hollow of her cheek. She flicks a forefinger through the air, quick as a blink, to illustrate the motion. Metal rebounding, spitting sparks of friction.]

But they were in the Grid. Used to thinking our way. Taught to think our way. We got creativity, some smart fucking people, but all in that way.

Maybe you're different. [She's in his personal space again, but this time just a forefinger, poking his chest. When he doesn't immediately take the fruit, she makes a move to stuff it into her own mouth.]

[Max is learning here that in some places people can touch and be touched without it meaning anything, without an implicit threat, without it taking anything away from either person but he still reacts to the poke at his chest with an almost automatic motion, batting the offending limb away, though not roughly. Just enough: that's mine. Bodily autonomy was never a given at home and there's a reason that when he's in again the tattoos rise up on his skin once more. He's still feeling out the boundaries of it all, the distinction between being accepted and being owned.

A cloud passes over his features, very briefly, before he wrestles it down on the understanding that she doesn't herself understand.]

So, what, you give me the parts and I build it ground up?

[So he gathers. Their way isn't working so they need someone who thinks about it the wrong way 'round. Whether or not his way is is difficult to determine given only what he has so far, but he hasn't left yet, intrusions into his personal space or no, which is a good sign. Bad sign, more accurately, at least for Max.

It's possible, worst of all, that he could even use the challenge.]

I'll try.

[But no promises, especially given how thoroughly he dislikes putting himself at another person's mercy. He hasn't let anyone plug him in since he was pulled out, and in a way this isn't so different. Important, maybe, to try it anyway. To try to rediscover what it means to work with rather than in spite of. Either way he'll final be moving again.]

You'll have help, [the woman answers, letting him knock her hand away. It wasn't an attack. But twitchy people will twitch, and she has no stance on the matter of personal space that's strong enough to compel her to keep pushing her luck. Her smile sharpens at the corners. It's important, of course, for him to know that he has help. But it's important to her that the Grid has the bodies. The details will sort themselves out as time moves on.]

Come in tomorrow, [she suggests.] 0600, Hangar 12. I'll introduce you to some people gonna pay you. I'm Horse. [She's drunk, but she's pretty sure that she forgot to say her name. A big, raw-boned hand winds up stuck at him for the nth time this afternoon, but this time, her fingers are splayed and coarse palm exposed for the taking. She'll have a rather firm handshake, should he accept it. Also very slightly sticky from date syrup. It's not a taunt, despite that she so often sounds like that, when she asks:]

You got something better to do?

[Max examines the hand for a few moments before taking it, handshake firm but not aggressive and over as quickly as he can manage. Being touched in gentleness, even as far on the fringes thereof as this is, is somewhat outside the realm of things to which he is accustomed. There are too many other possibilities inherent in the gesture: flank left open, easy way to put something between somebody's ribs. He's working on it. He's learning.]

Nothing.

[Nothing inside the realm of possibility, anyway, and this might well drag him one step closer to a more nebulous, not-quite-fully-formed goal. A gestating thought: he hasn't forgotten the girls. Some he's lost, some he hasn't. Some he might still be able to save. He just wishes he'd known about this place before anyone had to be lost.]

I'll be there.

[Be there to see what they've got for him. See if he can translate their kind of thinking — schooled, rigorous, theoretical — into his. Make it practical. Like Horse had said: make it real. That's what Max works with, however unreal his first stomping ground had been: the immediately possible. What's at hand, nothing more. There's no point, where he comes from, to dreaming. Abstraction. Theory. Not that fails to hold itself within the limits imposed by the facts, by want and by need.

He nods, looks down and away, scratches at a spot behind his ear, and nods.]

Max.

She makes her way nearer gradually, moving with the currents of the crowd in the bazaar, drifting closer and then further and then closer again. It's not as precise as two steps forward, one step back; it seems more natural than that, like she's just browsing with the rest, and happening to show interest in many of the same places as Max. Her observation is subtle too, made from across a shoulder or around a crate. There's no real reason for her to catch the eye until she's finally, until she's almost at his elbow. Even then she still half-blends into the crowd around them, her hair an average brown, covered with a rough-edged cloth the same nondescript gray-blue as her shirt.

She turns over a potato with a hand scuffed and scarred, skin that would be tan if they labored in any normal sort of place. The cant of her shoulders, the way they turn just a little down and in on herself, suggests nerves, and that's matched by the tension in long fingers and slender forearms, knuckles paler where she grips the vegetable a little too tightly. When she moves closer still it's with a sideways shuffle that does nothing to uncurl her posture, no warrior's grace or leader's uprightness here. It's an act, but it's a good one, one she's had occasion to hone her skills at more than a few times over the years. She takes a sideways look at him that looks like a failure of subtlety, an anxious little peek.

When she finally speaks her voice isn't low but her tone is, pitched to carry to Max's ears alone. "You're the weaponsmith?"

Max's hand drops from where he's been worrying with his fingernails at a spot behind his ear and he looks at the interloper with a peculiar mixture of wariness and relief. Weapons are tangible, they're an intermediary; most importantly they're not him, which makes them vastly more preferable for discussion, even if there's still a dance to be done. He's mercenary, but not completely indiscriminate.

"I fix things." It's only half an admonishment. More clarification. Weapons are certainly things he knows his way around. "Make things too."

For a price is of course implicit and maybe not that important anyway. He's only so good at demanding his, and what falls under that category really only consists of what he's already got. Either way something in her demeanor has grabbed at him, and at very least he's curious. Bad, bad move, too easily becomes concern and then, inevitably, he finds himself in a load of shit. And yet...

"What do you need?" Not loudly; he is rarely loud. Gentle, in fact, quietly insistent. Not just what do you need made, but why does it need making in the first place? Got to know what the job is before one can pick a tool. But he's not really as practical as all that, in spite of how his life before has shaped him. The wasteland requires detachment, but one can only pull so hard and that he's an abject failure is evident in both his watchful, quiet gaze and in the fact that he's asked in the way he has at all.

She dithers around for a moment, dropping one potato and picking up another, scuffing the pad of her thumb over a knobbly, off-white eye (the vegetable's, not her own). "Weapons fixed." She gives him a look that's a little bit sharper, a little bit I thought you'd be smarter. But she looks away just as quick again, guilty maybe or embarrassed, maybe scared. He's being kind, but they're strangers here and it's obvious whatever errand she's on is one she doesn't want widely known. One that makes her nervous. That she's sought him out at all might hint at the nature of it; he's not exactly been making a famous name for himself in Zion so far, but what reputation he has is of a competent man of few words who would rather keep his head down and his nose out of things. There's a certain type of person that appeals to.

She puts the potato down again and picks up another, this time picking the eyes off of it with quick snips of her fingernails, doing the vendor's job for him out of idle nerves.

"My boss has a ship. There was a problem with-- with a couple of the guns. They're custom. They need to be fixed before we can leave." Her head lifts then, turns sharp again to fix him with her gaze. Her eyes are pale, gray or green or maybe blue, the color hard to pin down in the artificial light that filters down into these lower levels, and the way she keeps her neck angled, looking up at him without quite actually looking up. "You'll be well-paid."

Max doesn't like to get involved, that much is true, but that's a more delicate process than simply being indiscriminate about which jobs he takes. There's a certain amount of playing nice that's involved: doing work for someone whose guns might be turned against the faction under whose auspices he's currently living is involvement, whether he means it to be or not.

"Can't help you." He watches her pick at the potatoes. Nervous hands mean lots of things; which is true here remains obscure. He keeps his voice low, dropping his gaze to the produce, which he sorts through with disinterest before glancing up to gauge whether or not anyone is listening in. "Not unless I know what needs shooting."

Insurance, that is. Not knowing might be safer, but then he'd have only his word that he didn't and words mean nothing. Even what she tells him will mean nothing, because it can't be accepted as inherently true. Words have no power to represent reality, only thoughts, and thoughts are under no obligation to reflect what's true. Their power lies elsewhere: in making the untrue seem true, in communicating what otherwise would lay obscure. They can hold realities long gone. Words are sacred, and cannot be trusted. Still, he wants to hear what she has to say on the subject. Machines or men, or just as likely both?

"Maybe not even then."

"Machines." She says it like it's so obvious that it's stupid, but also with a weight and certainty that says no, it's actually very important, at least as important as she thinks he thinks it is. The answer is the product of a split-second assessment and calculation, an assumption that if he wanted the answer to be some brand of humans he probably wouldn't be where he is right now, hovering in the semi-anonymous lower levels instead of joining up with one sort of crew or another. No one who feels strongly enough to only work for a ship that shoots pirates or Zionites would stay neutral. And everyone hates machines. (Though not as much as they should, to her mind. Too many people in this city would have said her sort were a greater threat than machines, until Olympus. She never hopes to be forced to take a ship by violence but she does hope the people who die when she does are the sort that think like that. Nonsensical maybe, but hope always is.)

The answer comes with a look, steadier than any he's gotten from her yet though still angled up from below, eyes heavy-lidded and long-lashed. She picks up another potato, puts it immediately back down again, letting something skittish animate her. A shuffle of a foot here, a twist of a shoulder there and back.

"Is that a problem?"

"No." It's honest, almost earnest, though his gaze is too searching to honestly manage that. Whether or not he can trust her isn't really part of the question. He doesn't, whether or not he can, but that doesn't differentiate her from anyone else.

"Just don't want any trouble." A pause, another glance about, though not too obvious. "Anybody dead who doesn't need to be."

He's contributed to enough of that in his lifetime already, in one way or another. Not too much to recognise that the alternative is preferable if it's viable, but enough to have quelled any romantic notions he might otherwise have had about the idea of killing. Maybe there are righteous causes waiting out there to be found and joined but more likely there's just more people, each of them as convinced they're doing the right thing as anyone else. He recognises that. Knows it maybe better than most here.

On the other hand, a man also has to earn his living. Max enjoys the novelty of living here, of not having to exist on mercenary terms, strictly for survival, but old instincts still die hard. Up to a point, he's going to have to trust her, or at least carry on as though he does. And so he nods, hand coming up to rub at the back of his neck. "I'll do the work."

He gives a vague gesture, a spreading of the hands. Lead on, or at least your move; he's here to listen and, to a point, obey.

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[OPEN] we was all of us just tumbling birds hanging in the sky

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bazaar;

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powerpose let me know if not ok!

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