463/Intolerance

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Intolerance
Date of Scene: 17 May 2017
Location: Unknown
Synopsis: Summary needed
Cast of Characters: Sibilance, Chris Redfield




Sibilance has posed:
    A flash of electricity in the night, a stun baton brandished by one in a crowd of thugs. These thugs are hired by a very shady group to track and capture mutants, not for research, but for illegal fighting rings or for those that simply want the mutants exterminated. They have short-range trackers that pick up on the X Gene in some mutants, and when they came across the vagrant woman who was just trying to order some cheap flower seeds -- illegal, foreign varieties but nothing harmful -- they swarmed in. There must've two dozen people just crawling out of the woodwork, their numbers enough to deal with all but the most lethal mutants. Their heads had minor psychic shields, little circular bits of metal to protect them from the common mutant power of psychic assault.

    Sibil was backed up into a corner, her tail rapidly rattling in warning to the thugs as they slowly closed in on her.

    "Look at that!"

    "What the hell? Is she some kind of lizard?"

    "What a freak."

    Sibil cowers up against a stone wall. There's an overhang above her and a few of these people have guns. Guns that they're brandishing on her. They don't seem like they want to capture her.

    "Go away!" Sibil hollars at them, "Stop!"

    They only laugh. Her cowardice doesn't change their minds. What kind of threat would a mutant that's trying to hunch up into a tiny ball really be? If only they remembered what a rattler's tail really meant. What it would mean for them if they lowered their guards.

    Although this is out of sight of the street, this alleyway area in the seedier areas of the north-eastern cities has several contacts that live here so they can keep track of, say, supremely bad illegal activity. For instance, a contact that agents of SHIELD would've wanted to speak to back here.

Chris Redfield has posed:
    Incidentally, one of those agents is a couple of floors up doing exactly that. The contact isn't the most reputable, known for giving bad intel and known on at least one occasion to have scheduled a meet only to have let the S.H.I.E.L.D. agent making the contact walk in and meet up with his bookie who was there to collect a very large and very overdue debt. The contact didn't really care which side got out alive. That's why an agent with Chris Redfield's skillsets showed up to make the meet and that's why he was there in light combat gear and not in a very good mood to begin with. He'd already backed the contact out onto the fire escape and while he hadn't actually threatened to shove him off, he was standing so close that the light physical contact between them was enough to almost do so on its own.

    The action down below gets his attention and he leans far out, one hand on the contact's chest to pin him in place, to get a good look at what's going on. Two dozen on one, guns, stun batons. Redfield looks grimly at his contact, decides not to bother telling him to stay put, and then grabs a rail on the fire escape and hops out over the edge of it. He free-falls a floor, catches the next rail down with a loud bang and clatter when his weight hits it, turns and launches himself down and across the alley onto the overhang above Sibil and the gang of thugs around her.

    From there he drops down into the alley behind the group and palms his hip-holstered pistol with one hand and his combat knife with the other. His dark brown eyes cast another surveying look over the group and he must decide that the numbers and the nature of the confrontation don't warrant arrest since he steps up suddenly behind one of the men, hooking the arm holding the gun around his throat to keep him quiet while sticking his knife cleanly in at one kidney and slashing across the spine to the other.

Sibilance has posed:
    Sibil's head lifts as she 'hears' the calm and violent intent of the agent that's approaching, but he moves fast enough that she barely gets a glimpse of him before the whole gang erupts into chaos and panic when they notice Chris is there. Most of them turn on Chris, of course, which makes him a target, with one of them whipping around to try and smack him with the stun baton even as his friend there goes completely rigid with eyes wide and chokes out a noise, the gun clattering on the alleyway pavement.

    Sibil is engaged by several of the men, who think this is her doing. One of them charges her and-- Chris would hear a CRACK of ribs breaking and then the man soars over the crowd and slams hard into the brick and concrete across the alley. The ones engaging Sibil are already backing away, but by this point she's picked up the discarded baton, and advancing on them, her adrenaline burning in her blood.

    The smarter thugs, who have lived through things like this more than once, just turn and book it the moment it starts getting bad. That still leaves a good dozen of them who think numbers mean enough to overwhelm this stranger and their prey-turned-predator.

Chris Redfield has posed:
    Those fleeing thugs may be smarter than their pals, but this isn't their lucky day. Chris Redfield isn't just an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., a vicious killer and a long-experienced combatant, he's a survivor of Raccoon City and a card-carrying member of the Zombie Eradication Team. Not the half-assed wannabes who sign up online and attend self-defense classes in their buddy's basement, but a very small and mostly-extinct group of people whose goal is to prevent infected specimens from escaping a combat zone.

    As the guy comes at him with that stun baton, Redfield doubles his leg up between himself and the corpse in his arms and then he kicks the dead-weight hard into him. Redfield turns away and raises his pistol as that thug whimpers in distress, juggling his stun baton and his dead buddy and trying not to fall down under the weight, and the agent starts shooting. The pistol bucks and moves rapidly, shot after shot with barely a pause to aim, but bloody gouts and arterial sprays of mist erupt from the backs of skulls and every runner falls limply to the ground, a dozen headshots dropped on a dozen targets without a single miss in a matter of seconds.

    When Redfield turns back to the fight, three men facing him throw down their weapons and throw up their hands but it's already too late. Redfield's arm swings his pistol to each of them in turn, the .40 caliber reports racketing up and down the alley and the hydrashock hollowpoints opening tiny holes in their foreheads while blowing huge, gaping, bloody holes out the back of their heads. The weapon clicks empty as two others charge at him.

Sibilance has posed:
    Sibilance doesn't seem to hesitate when the gunfire plays out. She has an amazing reaction speed and she can read minds, and she knows Chris isn't aiming at her, exactly. Many of these people drop like bloodied sacks of potatoes, the ones fleeing not getting too far. The merciless nature of Chris' actions drops several more, and the two thugs that advance on him may have the very smallest glimmer of a window to do something...

    If not for the five foot tall bundle of violence that launches from where she was and lands on the back of one of the thugs, and slams him face-first into the pavement. There's no way he survived that. The snake woman's covering, the mask and hood and goggles, have been jostled loose in the chaos. She then lashes out at the second one, grabbing him by the ankle and--

    She braces her feet, and snaps her body around and just... swings the man through the air and into the pavement with both hands.

    By the end of it, Sibil is crouched in a pile of now deceased criminals. Her tail is perked up and her eyes are fixated on Chris. She seems to be shivering in that telltale fight or flight way, though she isn't in a berserker rage or anything. She's just... incredibly freaked out by how bloody that got.

    She doesn't have anything to say. She's just as afraid of Chris as she was of what she would do to all of these people. He was ruthless and she can feel the refined instinct in the man just from the surface thoughts that come from him.

    Sibil's forked tongue sloooowly slides out of her mouth and slips back in while drops of blood run down her face from the spray of his gunfire.

Chris Redfield has posed:
    Redfield eyes the snake-woman warily as he crouches down, still within her quite lethal reach since she took those two thugs down as they charged in at him, and he uses a fallen man's clothes to wipe the blood off his knife before slipping it into the sheath on his left hip. Once that's done he braces one knee on the alley asphalt and reaches behind him and under his jacket to retrieve a fresh magazine from his belt and reloads his pistol.

    "You alright?" he finally asks, reasonably certain that Sibilance doesn't intend to keep kicking ass (namely his) by the time he's done all that. He grips the sliding action of his pistol between the thumb and forefinger of his opposing hand and tugs it back to chamber a round before he tucks the weapon into the holster on his right thigh.

Sibilance has posed:
    Sibilance takes her sweet time coming down from the raw panic in her blood. She looks down at the seeping blood from the man she landed on before she answers, and she sidles away to kneel in the pavement, looking around at all of the... very dead people. She doesn't look very okay. She looks the opposite of okay. She looks back to Chris with some kind of horror in her eyes.

    "... you helped me," she manages to recognize, even if it was pretty violently. "I'm okay. They didn't hurt me. I don't think they would've been able to manage it." She reaches over to nudge on of the dead criminals. She doesn't seem terribly certain what she's even looking at here.

    "I... I'm Sibil," she introduces, her voice soft and wary and severely worn out. She can't help but look at Chris' feet and not at his eyes. She seems supremely bad at eye contact, as if afraid of doing it even when she's trying. "Why did you help me?" she wonders, frowning and crossing her arms, hunching up a little more. Considering how she looks, she might not have a high opinion of herself.

Chris Redfield has posed:
    "This isn't a good place to be," Redfield points out, his eyes darting upward to the fire escape where his contact is leaning out, staring down slackjawed. Redfield points up at him, then lays his finger over his lips in a 'shh' gesture, and punctuates that with a rapid slashing motion of the finger across his own throat. Then he flashes a grin at the contact and gives him a thumbs-up before he steps over a corpse and reaches a hand out, not quite coming in contact with Sibil but reaching until his hand is just almost in contact with her shoulder, hovering there until he's sure the creature knows it's his intention to make contact, so she can pull away or not but more importantly so he doesn't startle someone who can pick him up and slam him down like a rag doll.

    "Let's find a quiet cup of coffee, or tea, maybe. Hell, I could use a drink. You like beer?"

Sibilance has posed:
    Oddly, when he reaches out to her, she seems to look up to his face. His strange and ruthless behavior combined with the streak of kindness he shows to her is confusing, and his careful attitude due to genuine controlled fear makes her eyes focus on him. She lets him rest his hand on her, and slowly gets up to a stand. She digs in her coat to grab some ratty cloth and try to wipe some of the blood off of her face.

    "I like beer," she answers, smiling somewhat. For a reptilian visage, she's pretty expressive. "You..." she hesitates. "You're scary, you know that?" she points out, though she doesn't seem afraid anymore. Her accent, now that it isn't quavering from fear and battle thrill, is clearly Spanish. She might be from Mexico or at least from an area or family that spoke Spanish. Appropriate, her scale coloration is like a diamondback rattlesnake.

Chris Redfield has posed:
    Redfield's hand settles lightly on Sibil's shoulder when she doesn't pull away, and he gives a gently reassuring squeeze. "My sister's been telling me that since we were kids," he answers her with a crooked grin. When he starts moving toward the alley mouth, stepping over the dead, he says, "Only thing worse than zombies is people who act like them, eh? Watch your step. Don't get any shit on your shoes," and doesn't sound much like he's joking when he equates the dead that way.

    Once out of the scene of carnage, as police sirens can be heard in the distance, he turns and quickens his pace to head down the street. "I think there's a bar down the way here. Cop bar. Might be a couple of jerks, but they probably won't start shit with S.H.I.E.L.D." He doesn't put any particular stress on the word probably, but it -probably- rings out anyway. In any event, he's hustling to get off the street and out of sight. Better to file a report on the incident and be called in for a reprimand about the mass murder than have to call a commanding officer to ask for bail and defense counsel.

Sibilance has posed:
    Sibil has a body like living stone, the way it just doesn't give at all when he squeezes her. She does seem to appreciate it, though, smiling at the man. She glances down at the men as he describes them as 'men that act like zombies,' and she doesn't seem to disagree or even seem shocked by his assessment. As she follows along with him, she keeps her face and tail visible, because it's not like she wants to hide right now.

    No, she's still brimming with violence. It's going to take a while for her to really calm down properly.

    She keeps up with him with ease as he hurries over to the bar he thinks is there. When he mentions his affiliation, she replies, "I hope you're right." She can probably pick up on the surface thought about not wanting to deal with bail and counsel, which spawns a skeptical look to the man that just killed a bunch of mutant-hating thugs.

Chris Redfield has posed:
    The place more appears than anything else, an inset hole in the wall between a dress shop and a bakery, just dark-tinted windows with an OPEN sign and a couple of plain paper beer posters, no neons. A brass plaque over the lightly stained wooden doors reads, 'Danny O'Shea's' over the smaller lettering 'est 1942.' Chris Redfield opens one of the doors and stands back to let Sibilance head into the dimly lit barroom first, while he stands on the sidewalk peering both ways up the street for signs of pursuit or witnesses. "I'm right," he answers reassuringly when it looks clear.

Sibilance has posed:
    The way those thugs were handled was thorough, quick and violent and the only witness was that contact that Chris was talking to before. Sibil steps into the bar when the door is held open for her, and she seeks out a table somewhere near the back where she might be able to keep an eye on the exits. She is extremely skittish and paranoid, but the confidence is enough to keep her from freaking out too much. She is bound to get a few stares from the other patrons when she enters the room but no one really makes a big deal of it.
    The snake woman starts checking her clothing for more blood spray, but the clothing is so old and ratty that it blends into her outfit pretty well. It's a dark cloth anyways, so it wouldn't show. She doesn't want the cops in here to cause problems because of evidence of that scuffle. She'd rather put that behind her for now.

Chris Redfield has posed:
    Once inside the bar, with Chris Redfield close behind in his jacket sporting S.T.A.R.S. and U.S.A.F. emblems on top of a S.H.I.E.L.D. logo and rank insignia, if it really is a cop bar and it looks like it is judging from the number of guys and girls around the bar in uniform blue pants and black shoes who've shed their shields and utility belts for the day, there's little chance of any further trouble from anybody. Like Chris said on the street somebody might flap their lips, but a smirk and a smartass remark back won't even start a fistfight in here.

    Redfield lets the serpentine woman find the table while he stops off at the bar to collect a couple of beers and a couple of short glasses of scotch whisky, and he waits to pay cash and cart the drinks over to join Sibilance where she sat down. "I don't expect you to drink that just because I bought it," he says as he sets a scotch in front of Sibil along with her beer, "but I reccommend it." For himself, he takes a long pull off his beer before chasing it with a long sip of the scotch. "Mm," the man murmurs. "Good for nerves."

Sibilance has posed:
    Sibil watches with tense nerves, the mental climate in the bar being predominantly law enforcement doesn't actually comfort her but it does tell her that she's unlikely to get mobbed by mutant-haters again. She looks at the glass of scotch and flicks out her snake-like tongue at it. The smell of alcohol in the air hits her when she does that, and her tongue slips back up into her mouth complete with grimace.

    Sibil copies what Chris does. Some beer, and then some scotch. She makes kind of a face since she isn't much of a drinker, but she doesn't complain about it. It's just the burn that does it to her. "Thanks," she says, as she uncertainly rubs at the glass of scotch with her fingers, her behavior bashful and not anywhere near violent, as she behaved a moment ago. "You said... 'zombies' earlier," she mentions, trying to bring up some kind of topic of discussion. "What did you mean by that? That they acted like zombies?"

Chris Redfield has posed:
    "Zombies," Redfield answers, looking down into his drinks while his eyes watch the room from their corners. Even though he's calm, unconcerned, he's still alert. "Mindless, stupid, dangerous animals with only one thing on their mind." Even though he minimizes the explanation and manages a stoic face, his surface thoughts and emotions are a jumble when he says it. The thrill of combat, the sorrow of loss, a deep vendetta, a cold rage that can only be described as the desire to wipe something off the planet - to burn and destroy.

    Redfield takes another, smaller sip of his scotch and rolls it around in his mouth, letting it evaporate rather than swallowing it and seems like he's about to say more, but doesn't.

Sibilance has posed:
    There's a pause. Sibil lets the quiet wash over them, perhaps for dramatic effect, as she moves to gulp down beer. She's careful about it since she can spill it all over herself if she's not. Her mouth doesn't work the same as him. The snake woman flicks out her tongue just one more time and then speaks up.

    "They're afraid," she tells him, "Afraid of what's different. They use it to justify harming people that had no control over their circumstances. 'That person looks weird, therefore they are less than human,' it's ..."

    Her brow furrows. "It's worse."

    "Zombies are simplistic. Machines. They don't have a choice. These people, they chose what they did. They thought, 'This girl looks like a snake, don't worry about how afraid she looks, why should we care about how a monster feels.'"

    Sibil breathes a big sigh and shivers, her eyes closing. She takes another swig of the scotch, too, just because it's there and she needs to occupy her hands and mouth with something a little less intense, moral or philosophical.

Chris Redfield has posed:
    Redfield gives a rolling shrug of one shoulder and looks up, his head still down toward the table but his eyes rolled up toward Sibil under his brows. He shoves his scotch aside and pulls his beer bottle over in front of him and he bats it gently back and forth between his hands about an inch each direction, the glass making a hollow sound as it slides on the tabletop.

    "They group up in a mob and come at you without conscience or fear of consequence. Can't really understand what they want or what they say. Can't reason with them, can't scare them." He snatches his beer off the table mid-slide and takes a sip, swallows and agrees, "So yeah, their motivation's worse, but they act exactly the same and that's bad enough for me." He takes another long drink of his beer and chases it with a sip of scotch.

Sibilance has posed:
    Whatever the case for Chris' perception of them, Sibil finds something sad about how someone could be driven to feel that way, the snake woman empathizing with the agent there. She shakes her head slowly, and says, "I just want to be treated as everyone else does," with a soft tone of voice, "But that can't happen anymore. I've done too much, seen too much, heard too much... because of people like that. They were doing that to me since I was born and it just..."

    She's scowling. It makes her angry. It makes her so angry that she has to pull her hand away from the glass of scotch and ball her hand into a fist. "I don't know what to do. All I do is hide," she says, her anger starting to deflate. "The system doesn't want me, the people think I'm scary, and I have this... this strength I have been forced to use to kill people."

    Her voice gets quiet at that last part because of where they are, not wanting any trouble from the off-duty cops here. She places her forehead against the table and places both hands on top of her head. She's not having a good time. Her frayed nerves are making her hyper emotional.

Chris Redfield has posed:
    Police sirens scream by on the street outside, late to the party but still making a show of rushing to the scene several blocks away.

    "You and me both, sister," Redfield answers grimly, his voice as low as Sibil's. "And I wasn't even born with any special gifts. Just took a job in the wrong place at the wrong time." Since it seemed to help earlier, he leans across the table and reaches a comforting hand to squeeze the ones Sibil's put over her own head.

    Other cops in the place aren't even paying attention. A S.H.I.E.L.D. agent and a mutant having a beer and an emotional conversation, well, that's easily relatable to each and every one of them - there probably isn't a single cop in the place who hasn't sat in the same bar, maybe even the same table, with a victim of domestic abuse and gone through the same gamut of emotional turmoil with a civilian.

Sibilance has posed:
    Sibil sucks in a breath when he grabs her hand. When he does that, she clings onto the touch and holds his for probably longer than a girl should, and she carefully avoids breaking his fingers on accident... but it's quite a grip. She looks up at his face and around at the cops, who are all minding their own business, many of them aware of the emotional stuff boiling over there. She can 'hear' a few of them thinking about similar experiences, while others choose to distract themselves with other thoughts.

    "... Raccoon City..." she murmurs, squeezing his hand in turn not just because of the comfort, but because she can hear and feel the pain better than normal people could. It isn't weird for her to say that in this case, thanks to what he's said so far and how he behaves. "Do... do you do anything on your off time? I'd like to be around you more."

Chris Redfield has posed:
    Chris Redfield isn't startled, Raccoon City is or has been presumably in the news, maybe even the name Redfield. It's the last question that catches him off guard, not really embarasses him or makes him uncomfortable but very suddenly puts his guard up and not for his sake either. The sharp stabbing fear comes from a twisted helix, a colorful umbrella, a horde of faces dripping rotted flesh, even the S.H.I.E.L.D. logo and Captain's bars on his right arm all flash through his mind as sources of danger to friends and family.

    Redfield's face doesn't betray any of that, though, and he gives the woman's hand another reassuringly gentle squeeze, unaware that his own inner fears might as well be on the TV over the bar. "I can give you my direct contact info if you ever need anything," he answers quietly. "I don't really get much off-time, though. We're stretched pretty thin. You might have to sign up if you wanted anything as regular as a weekly lunch."

Sibilance has posed:
    Sibil looks him in the face as images go through his head. She knows what it means, the precedence of people he cares about being endangered and the organizations he faces, the monsters he fights and the people he works with shaping his perception. And he hides it so well that it makes her heart tighten in her chest. She realizes in that moment, the young psychic mutant inexperienced in the world, that this man has seen people he cares about die horribly and seen the worst of humanity.

    "I... I might sign up, but..." she admits, after a second of thought. "I've... done a lot of bad things, though, I don't know if I should... I wasn't even born in this country." She shakes her head slowly. "Give me your info," she says, with one more squeeze of his hand, drawing her hand away. She's relaxing, visibly, since the alcohol is loosening her up. It's also making the mental fuzz around her more 'blurry,' so that she can more easily focus on what's in front of her.

Chris Redfield has posed:
    "Well," Redfield answers, smiling with faint amusement as he draws his hand back and reaches into an inner pocket of his jacket for a narrow card-size wallet, "if the 'bad things' you've done and the 'people' you've hurt amount to the shit piled up in that alley back there," he flips the wallet open and carefully extracts a card with the S.H.I.E.L.D. logo prominently watermarked on it in spite of being the same color as the card itself, his name, rank, email address, and phone numbers for office and cellular printed in the center, "then you can use me as a resume reference." He holds the card out between the tips of one hand's thumb and forefinger while tucking the wallet away with the other hand. "Just make sure you drop me an email with the name you plan to use to apply, so I know who they're talking about when they ask."

    In case the implication that Redfield is willing to lie on behalf of a mutant he just met, because she saved his life after he saved hers when he might not have needed to, he adds, "If you need identity or citizenship documentation I may be able to help with that too, but S.H.I.E.L.D. really isn't too concerned. I'm pretty sure some of our agents aren't even from this planet."

Sibilance has posed:
    Ainsley takes the card that's offered to her. She looks... astounded, because she isn't super familiar with the actual practice of exchanging business cards, being one of those people who has only seen such a thing in fiction. She turns it over in her hands, and leaves out the part where this is familiar to her. She looks up to Chris again and startles when he offers to get her some documentation just so she can be a citizen or have an identity here, her mouth falling open somewhat.

    Her eyes water a bit and her gaze lowers to the card then.

    "Thank you..."

    Huff. She can't sniffle, since she doesn't have the same facial structure he does.

    "... my real name is Ainsley Garcia," she tells him, "Sibilance is... a nickname I gave myself. I wanted to be a superhero, once."

Chris Redfield has posed:
    Well, it isn't exactly citizenship... just the best fake documentation money or favors can buy. Thomas Burnside, an alias Chris Redfield used for a year while even S.H.I.E.L.D. couldn't find him, could tell you that.

    "From what I saw back there," he says as he takes up his scotch and has a small taste, "you qualify. Maybe lead with smashing two guys at a time into red paste on the sidewalk, instead of letting them back you into a corner." He grins, the booze relaxing him enough to bring out his dark humor. "Then -everybody- will know you qualify." He has a larger sip of the scotch and rolls it over his tongue before he swallows it to ask, "Which do you prefer, Garcia or Sibiliance?" It seems like if Redfield is going to call a friend by name, it's going to be their surname or their codename.

Sibilance has posed:
    Sibilance smiles awkwardly when told to lead with that, and she just tells Chris, "I don't like fighting. I can..." she hesitates. "I can hear surface thoughts, feel surface emotions of others. Like you. It's..." Traumatizing? Horrifying? She doesn't have a word to describe it. "I can tell when people care. I can tell that you care. I don't get much, I'm not that powerful, but I get enough. I can see more with direct skin to... ah, scale contact," she taps her gloved palm, "But I get the feeling you want to keep that to yourself."

    "... I prefer Sibil or Sibilance. I'm not a Garcia anymore. I just wouldn't feel right putting Sibilance down on an official application," she says to him, smiling at the humor of putting down a codename on paperwork. Strikes her as pretentious, but she wouldn't say that out loud. "Would I end up being an agent?" she wonders to Chris.

Chris Redfield has posed:
    Redfield is startled and suddenly embarassed when Sibil admits to reading surface thoughts, which for some reason makes him think of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit editions and a female officer in the Air Force who consistently beat him in hand-to-hand combat training, and that makes him turn a faint shade of red.

    "If you do put your own codename, it'll save us the trouble of coming up with one for you and it'll save you the embarassment of walking around with what we come up with," he answers flippantly, by way of distracting himself from the thought of sitting with a psychic. "As for whether you turn into an agent or an asset, I don't get to make that decision. You apply," he takes a swallow of his beer and wipes the back of his hand across his mouth, "you state your willingness and desire to serve. They do their homework, background checks, verify whatever you choose to tell them, maybe run you through psych and physical and aptitude evaluations, basic stuff. If you'd rather run some ops as an asset, I can put some paperwork through and get you clocked in as a private consultant."

Sibilance has posed:
    There's something just strange about a man's first instinct being 'oh god did she hear my lewd thoughts' when told that she can actually read his mind. Sibil visibly fights the urge to laugh when the mental image comes up, amusement apparent in her features. Her snout goes visibly red, or at least darkens enough to show that the scales are a little thin there.

    "I'll think about what to do next," she tells him, smiling at him even then, practically sunny now that something has defused all the grim feeling from her.

    She doesn't have much else to say. She'll sit here and drink with him until it's clear it's safe for her to wander off again.