2022-12-22: Opening Say The Words
- Log: 2022-12-22- Opening Say The Words
- Cast: Sousuke Sagara, Milly Ashford
- Where: Tsutsujidai - Tsutsujidai HS Parking Lot
- OOC - IC Date: 0096-12-22
- Summary: Milly checks up on Sousuke Sagara, a person she thinks needs a nudge in the right direction.
<Pose Tracker> Sousuke Sagara has posed.
Sousuke Sagara is an absurdly useful person to know when you need to survive. He keeps proving it. Put in a situation where the world around him doesn't work the way people are expecting, he's suddenly right on the ball. Sure, maybe he's looking for traps where there aren't any, but he's put together some simple rain collectors up on the roof, seems completely at home driving even in the rough environment of the torn-up PLANT...
Oh, and he knows his way around a machine.
The hood of the van they've been using for collection runs is propped up in a tarped-off section of the parking lot. He'd prefer a proper garage, but he'll make do. A toolbox is open on a repurposed AV stand nearby. Sousuke himself is wiping his hands off on a rag for the moment, looking over the machine with thoughtful eyes.
He is alone. He's not familiar to quite this environment. But the rain is preferable to the distant poppopop of gunfire.
<Pose Tracker> Milly Ashford has posed.
Even if everyone needs to be helping to the extent they're able... the extent they're able includes rest, or else people are going to start keeling over. Milly has no significant tasks ahead of her today, at least -- which means she can check up on her friends and acquaintances.
She approaches the van confidently. She's glad her hunch about where Sousuke would be was right, at least; it's gotten a lot harder to track people down, lately... she's kind of taken it for granted.
"Sagara," Milly starts. "Can we talk for a little while? Don't worry -- it's not a problem." She watches him closely, with clear concern.
<Pose Tracker> Sousuke Sagara has posed.
Sagara is Somewhere most of the time. Oh, sometimes that Somewhere is clear across town with the van, but at least his hours at the school are pretty reliable.
...almost weirdly reliable? Like down to the minute reliable. Six on the dot. You'd think school were in session.
"...President," he says. 'Your Grace' feels wrong, right now. He turns to look, nods. He doesn't look Exhausted the way some of the folks pushing themselves to their limit do. He's sleeping, probably. But maybe not enough. And it's not clear he's doing literally anything but whatever routine he's built.
"Certainly," he says with a nod. "Has something come up? This is just a routine examination, it can wait."
<Pose Tracker> Milly Ashford has posed.
"Besides the situation we're in?" Milly asks, lips pursing. "Not -- exactly." It's not that she feels the need to be gentle about this, but rather that she knows she could push this in the wrong direction very quickly in the state Sagara is in.
"I've been watching you, lately. I don't exactly have a lot of my usual reliable people right now." Her lips purse a bit, and she tries to figure out how to word this... "When we first met, I thought you were paranoid for your own sake. But seeing how you've stepped up here, I don't think that's the case..."
... why not just go for it?
"The way you do things is different in here. I don't think it's the situation, either..." This is more leadup than she usually gives --
-- which means she stops herself from giving more.
"It's not just about your own comfort, is it? I thought it might be your classmates as a whole, at first, but you didn't seem to perk up at the thought of them as much. It's Chidori-san, isn't it?"
<Pose Tracker> Sousuke Sagara has posed.
He...should be fine...
Then again, his escalations have always been a bit of an odd one to predict. But he doesn't squint or flinch. His hands fall behind his back, quietly folding in a parade rest. Not the kind of posture a man working on a van would normally find himself taking.
Is it so different? It feels like this place makes more sense, to him. People huddling in hollowed-out places. Helping each other where they needed to. Making a space that wasn't fit for it livable. Only a few of them seemed to be preparing themselves for a fight. That was the part Sousuke didn't understand. His nerves sang that it was coming, sometime soon.
Come to think of it, until GUTS, he'd seen more schools bombed out and used for refuge than for schooling...
His eyes drift to the side, when Milly drives at her point. Chidori.
He thinks of a lunchbox packed among his things. Cleaned and ready. He hasn't offered it for anyone's use.
......unfortunately, he's a horrible liar. So what he does is grab for his towel and quietly turn back to busying himself with the engine, saying, "Just a coincidence."
...been a while since he tried this one out.
<Pose Tracker> Milly Ashford has posed.
If there's one truth in Milly Ashford's approach to the world, it's this:
You can say whatever bullshit you want!
Milly puts a hand on her hip, looking at Sousuke very carefully as he returns his attention to the engine. "Well, then. I guess I can just think out loud about the situation and you can figure out what you want to do from there."
She moves over to the other side of the vehicle, leaning against it. "If it were just because you care about her, that'd be good. If it's got more to do with her than you, though..." Her expression turns serious.
"Either way -- the GUTS cross-school council has done a lot to cover for the things you get up to. I don't mind that, either, because I like you. But if you don't open up a bit and give people the chance to show you how great they can be..."
Lips pursing, Milly concedes, "... they can be pretty cruel, too. How they see you -- and her -- has a lot to do with who you choose to be to them." Her gaze turns upward, as she admits, "... it's up to you, but you'll need to make some choices about that when we make it out of this."
<Pose Tracker> Sousuke Sagara has posed.
Sousuke tries the deflection technique he has used before to oh yeah zero effect, and in fact this time it only seems to release Milly's true power even more than usual. She's...pretty much just got him dialed in, actually. He keeps his eyes cast down. Just listening.
He does look up, fractionally, when she says the cross-school council has done a lot to cover over for him. That's...not entirely a surprise. He knows Mithril has had to make some pretty substantial contributions to keep that support going, both to Jindai specifically and the student councils.
He finds himself with a screwdriver in hand. He's just twisting it mindlessly because he's too distracted by her words to even remotely think of actually working on the car. But he pats it into his palm, too, as she advises him.
Cruel. ...for just a moment he can practically see Kagurazaka-sensei's look of broken, thoughtless fear when Gauron had her at gunpoint.
"...that's the problem," he finally says.
He turns, and those steel gray eyes match her gaze. "This is...what I know. You've seen my history. Places like this are the world I know how to live in."
His gaze cuts off to the side. Contemplative, internal. "...and every time someone from GUTS gets stuck here, they're as lost and confused as I ever was. Frightened beyond reason because nothing makes any sense and every corner can kill."
...Puts the rag down, and the tool too, eyes still cast aside. "...you'd have me show a person from a world like that to them?"
<Pose Tracker> Milly Ashford has posed.
Milly's head inclines slightly to look over at that turning screwdriver. That's not a very purposeful motion, and she can tell that much. It's stasis -- the suggestion of a task keeping him occupied enough not to participate in more conversation.
Conveniently, the kind of thing Milly attacks in everyone but herself.
"That makes it more important to be honest with them. If they don't understand what you're trying to do for them," Milly admonishes, "they're not going to notice how much you care about the next corner being safe." Her nails -- with dirt underneath them from fussing with the rooftop garden -- drum against the body of the car. "I've been in binds a lot of times. But I always felt safer when someone I knew could do something about it was around."
She fixes Sousuke with an expression that looks playful -- but doesn't quite enter her eyes, which are steel-serious. "If you call this knowing how to live, I think you ought to try not knowing for once! Maybe you'll find a surprise or two?"
<Pose Tracker> Sousuke Sagara has posed.
Hah. His eyes cut to the side, more...skeptical than full of self-doubt now. "It seems like I've tried it frequently," he says, with his usual precision. So many explosions...
Still. ...he can't tell her it's Kaname. Not least of all because he can't say why, and the mere fact of acknowledging it puts them both in danger. Danger to himself is irrelevant. But them...
"All I've tried to do is keep people safe," is finally what he comes to, thoughts crashing together in a way that might not entirely follow.
Maybe the fact that he had to work to say 'people' instead of 'her' is obvious, though.
<Pose Tracker> Milly Ashford has posed.
Even now, he's hiding things. That's fine -- he can keep his secrets. Milly doesn't need to know why he thought a military-grade communications jammer would be a good installation for a school. She can draw her own conclusions all she wants.
"Do they know that? Or do they just see someone blowing up a trash can?" Milly asks back. "I can't really make you do anything, obviously, and I get the feeling you have some secrets you need to keep. That's fine. I do too." She lets that sit for a little while -- in part because she thinks it may be illustrative in its own way.
"All I'm really asking you to do, one way or another, is think about the ways they might want to protect you, too."
<Pose Tracker> Sousuke Sagara has posed.
It's not how the question's been asked before. Even Kaname always threw it at him that it was obvious. DO they know that? Well...maybe the people who see him regularly--
...might just be used to him blowing up trash cans? His gaze tips down and his fingers cup his chin, a familiar look for when he thinks - sometimes a bit too hard. She admits she has some secrets to keep, and allows him his. His head dips, slowly, in quiet gratitude.
And then she puts it another way to him, too. The ways they might want to protect him...
It's Chidori, again, that he thinks of first. He'd upset her, with talk of his past; she'd upset him, by being angry about it in a way he didn't understand. What she did for him that night, was that...
"...I am not certain how," he admits, and perhaps it's the most vulnerable thing he's ever said. A concept he can only just see the silhouette of. "But.....I will endeavor to do so."
<Pose Tracker> Milly Ashford has posed.
"That's a good start," Milly says, a little more playfulness creeping into her smile. "You can ask them for help with that too, you know. This isn't the kind of thing you figure out while you're alone in a van. And if you feel like you're coming to it kinda late..."
Milly thinks on that one, glancing forward -- giving Sousuke a little space back with her gaze. "Try talking to someone else who's only now figuring it out, instead. You'll probably get to some weird conclusions, but that's not a bad thing!" Wryly, she affirms, "I think the world gets more interesting with a few weird conclusions hanging around."
She pushes off the van, now, asking, "Anything I can get you help with for food runs?" She's only going to push him so much on a world he doesn't know.
<Pose Tracker> Sousuke Sagara has posed.
He sure does feel like he's coming to all of this late.He's not even entirely sure what 'this' is beyond that it's something everyone but himself seems to grasp.
Someone else...Ask someone else...who, though?
He thinks of Heero. Wonder where he got off to? Liam, maybe? Not the Captain. She has so many more important problems than his discomfort - as if he could even reach her, now. He doesn't really respond to the idea, other than that he appears to be thinking about it.
Milly steps a bit away, and he looks up at her question. "No problems so far," he replies, shaking his head. Not like they have the resources to get a gun emplacement on this thing. Somehow, in defiance of his expectations, this place hasn't become a warzone. "It's been pleasingly quiet."
He has another ride, for if that changes.
....ask someone else...hm.
<Pose Tracker> Milly Ashford has posed.
If they're turning vans into technicals, they have several problems that are well beyond Milly Ashford's limited reach in that particular sphere.
"Then I'll leave you to it, Sagara!" Milly enthuses, starting to walk away. "Just give some thought to what I said. A lot of what your everyday life looks like depends on you. I'm not afraid to help you, but there are some moves only you can make."
And now she's earnestly heading away, to give Sousuke a little time to digest.