Log, complete

[maten-rou.livejournal.com]

When; April 11th, Horror Day
Rating; PG-13
Characters; Maria [lorenzavirgine] & Jyabura [maten_rou]
Summary; So, Mister Government Guy... Have I just ever told you I'm Mafia and all that...? Tehe, is that a problem? <3
Log;
What a marvellous first day at work.
After watching palm-sized spiders crawling out of the hi-fi and stumbling across two terribly disfigured corpses in the yard this morning (axe, enough chops to successfully transform a leg into blood pudding), she should have known that today's curse was up to no good. But no, she had thought, it's just a curse! Well, yeah.
The werewolfs didn't quite impress her, as she had slept made acquaintance with a much bigger and, well, more frightening wolf anyway. The corpses she ran into - she had seen enough corpses before to slowly lose feeling about them, not even including the different kinds of disfigurements she had encountered back in her world. The music that occasionally accompanied her actions at an ear-busting level out of all sudden though made her wince at times. A vampire with a hungry stare focussing her actually made her kind of nervous, especially when he seemed to reach out for her neck a few times. (He was, however, aiming for the shrimps.) And when some lunatic started to go after her making duck noises, she knew her day wasn't going to grow better.
She was right. Though she had witnessed murder more often than once, seeing somebody being teared apart by a chainsaw wasn't exactly... appetising.

And there she lay, slightly headachy, eyes closed in the darkness. The day had worn her out, so she just wished to sleep. Sleep this day's curse away. Some things even slightly amused her - for example, the theme of Psycho playing while she waitressed. Some things, however, didn't. As watching insects crawling out of talking people's mouths.
But now the day was almost over and she was finally home, even her nose hidden under the blanket.
A crooking nose from somewhere. Oh, she thought to herself, her eyes still closed, leave me alone. She curled up a bit more under the fabric. Howling wind, tingly noises. Feels like Italy, she insisted in her mind - and wasn't even wrong. Maybe the curse was over already and Xanadu was just haunted by some bad weather.
Suddenly, the music raised. Theatrically, it darted forwards before chasing its own tail, all of that ear-deafening to Maria, making her open her eyes.
There was a corpse. A corpse... on the ceiling.
Ew.
With a small sigh, she left her bed to turn the light on; the lightbulb on the ceiling flickered. On the other hand, the corpse on the ceiling got off and fell into Maria's bed, showing some features truly not God-given. Chainsaw-given, maybe. That's it. I'm leaving. I'm leaving!
She grabbed her kaftan and simply did.

The floor creaking beneath her feet, Maria made her way down the stairs, straight to the door of Jyabura's room. A jittering light approached her through the doorcrack, making her reach out and shunt the door before even thinking about it. Two seconds later, it actually came to her that this was not really polite, but it was to late then anyway.
"Jyabura...?" She shyly asked while poking her head in, noticing that he was watching TV. On a very, very small screen. Two bottles of sake spoke of his drinking habit and made her frown.


Oh what an utterly fucking stupid curse. Not that Jyabura was actually scared. He probably never felt true anxiety in his entire life, clearly beloning to the creepy people in his own world. And anyways, a scared werewolf? That just doesn't go along. He was bothered, though. Annoyed. Reek of blood all over. Annoying noises, music, spiders, filth. Plus generally a lot of violence and killing. It made him quite upset in the morning to find his house and surroundings in that state, but as it clearly was a curse, all would be perfectly gone by midnight and he just couldn't take it all too serious. Wannabe-scary music while opening the fridge to fetch some beer? Oh seriously... Soon enough he figured the deities wanted their little ants to get scared, and he simply refused to. His only worry was Maria's welfare at work. And he couldn't hold Maria back from going to work this day (In a bar, in a fucking bar, out of all! Couldn't she have picked a place with less drunken men around?!), but the curse grew worse by the day and when she left the house, it wasn't as bad as it was for the rest of the day. The wolf was busy keeping the violent freaks out of his property anyways and he even enjoyed this chance of legal killing of something halfway humanoid. It was perfectly understandable that Maria wasn't into long chats anymore when she came from work (luckily in one piece and unharmed), so he used the rest of the evening to explore that weird tv-thing.

He was lying on the floor, his head resting against his hand and a can of beer on his lips, when the girl entered the room all of a sudden. He gave her a confused look with raised eyebrows. Weirdly enough his room seemed perfectly clean and in a normal state. Not that he didn't do enough for exactly this the whole day long. With his sleeve he wiped off foam from his lips and sat up. "Maria, what is it? One of those vampire-guys again?" he asked her, obviously annoyed by the mere thought of any vampire invading his house.


"No, a chainsaw-massacred corpse in my bed," Maria answered with an almost tender voice and an apologetic smile on her face. She paused for a moment before raising her voice again:
"Mind if I stay here until the curse is over? It's really..."
The right word was slipping away from her mind.
"... exhausting," she finished her sentence, sounding just like that.


A sigh escaped his lips. Oh great. Corpses in his house. He had not much time to get annoyed by this, as her offer slightly irritated him. Not that he'd be able to send her back, but still... that special situation was still so fresh. Though they agreed on all what happened not being bad, he still had some problems dealing with it. He liked her, a lot, but getting closer to her a normal way after getting that close to her in that short time was a bit... difficult for him.

"Oh! O-of course not!" he said a good tad embarassed and got off his futon to sit next to it, offering Maria the comfortable place. "Guess we all had a terrible day with that idiocy" he added and gave her (and her wardrobe in special) an admiring look, luckily the lack of light managed to hopefully hide it quite good. "I hope your day at work wasn't too bad" he said, looking for something to offer her. Alcohol wasn't probably the best choice, though.


Shutting the door behind her, Maria took a seat on the futon, still slightly smiling into the semidarkness.
"It was okay," she answered calmly, "except for some harebrained stalker going 'Quack Quack' at me for two and a half hours."
In memory of that, she closed her eyes, giving an enervated sigh.
"You didn't have to get off the futon, I have no diseases or thelike," she then added with a low, somewhat amused voice and a side glance at Jyabura. And as if she hadn't said nothing, she asked, focussing on the small, flickering TV screen:
"Are you watching anything special?"
Under her breath, she uttered:
"I hope television programme's better than back at home here."
Yeah, she was talkative at that moment. But it simply felt good to have some companionship after almost being striked dead by a corpse.


A frown. "He... went... what?" he asked unbelieving. Man. He would have beaten out the everloving fuck out of that sicko. Too bad Jyabura was busy beating whatever else out of other sickos that were keen on invading their home.

"Uh..." he silently uttered at her comment and nearly spilled what was left in his beer can. Well, but... if they sat both on it, they'd be so... close! Which actually didn't sound so bad, but...! He had no idea. However, that little demand wasn't something he could have ignored, so he moved over carefully, but couldn't avoid one of his legendary blushes when being so close to her again. Once more an admiring look. Even exhausted and weary she looked pretty. Really pretty. Now, that wasn't a big task as absolutely every girl on the face of earth was truly and honestly pretty in Jyabura's eyes. But a girl you like looks even more pretty. Somehow.

"Oh, I... I'm looking at the black box-thing the first time" he stated, inwardly glad to get a bit of destraction. "I can't figure out what it's good for, though" he added after a sip of beer. "It's a waste of time and my eyes hurt" he kept on while looking at the screen, some cheesy western airing. He'd prefer the company of a human anytime to that of the absolutely useless tv. Awaiting her answer he couldn't avoid to give her one more sidelook, fighting with himself to not stroke her curly hair.


"Oh, it's not having much use, as far as I know."
Maria shrugged.
"They used it to broadcast important news and speeches of politicians once, but it's more a tool of mere amusement today. Amusement often made for the dumb. On the other hand however, there are unsuspecting people manipulated by programmes because they think it's just shallow amusement. And the news broadcasted are often more subjective than ever. At least... where I come from."
Because where Maria came from, some member of her family made it into the news almost every week. May one of them be merely mentioned, often not even by his (or her) name - probably because names were not known to observers in those cases - sometimes, though, there were names, identity photographs of the wanted persons ("Hey, Pascal, you're on TV again!") or even videos. Like Vincent shooting the monitoring camera before ravaging some random public building because of business to do. Sure. Vincent was an outstanding example, maybe, and Pascal's reasons hadn't been too waterproof, either. And sure, it probably was quite difficult to get to know any reasons, at least if traitors were shot straightly. Still, she felt the subjective right to feel bothered with the subjectiveness.
A tingly noise. Maria spoke up a bit.
"Sometimes however, there were some good movies. Horror movies, even, with dramatic music just like that today. I once watched some kind of... thriller at night. When I was about ten. It scared the shit out of me - before my brother turned on the subtitles for the deaf. And now when music was playing, the subtitles dryly described what was audible."
She gave a neutral facial expression and declaimed uncommitedly:
"'Dramatic music.' 'Crackling.' 'Footsteps.' 'Scary music.'"
With a hint of a smile, she added:
"Subtitles really... took the horror away."


With a smirk he listened, simply happy to be in her company, to be in any kind of company. Wolves and their pack behaviour. "I see. We don't have the black boxes in our world. We have... some kinda telephones..." he unsurely described the snails, "but mostly wanted posters". Another sip of beer and the can was empty. He put it next to the sake bottles, who managed to startle him. The context. Oh dear.

He cleared his throat. "Well um... no idea how to turn on the subtitles" he said while running a hand through his black hair. In fact that crappy little tv didn't even have a remote-control and possessed nothing more than five little buttons, to switch it on and off, switch the programms and control the volume. "But maybe... maybe some talking can take away the horror" he suggested with a little smile, actually much more keen on some conversation than watching the darn tv. "Tell me more about... you."


Wanted posters? Inner pictures flashed by. A subtle hint, dropped casually? Maybe she was growing paranoid. On the other hand, maybe not.
She hesitated, her inner self rummaging for an appropriate answer. Seemed like a bad pick-up line to her. She had never encountered a guy seriously asking her to do that. But still, that was... Jyabs.
Either she was discovering a new aspect of Jyabura's character or he was serious. And because she has always been favouring a direct approach, she just asked, visibly amused.
"Are you serious?"


Jyabura just had to smirk. What kind of stupid question was that? No, Jyabura really had no big flirting skills. He could be cunning and devious in fights, yes. He could blatantly lie in his opponent's face, just to slit him open when he was stupid enough to turn away. Oh yes. But when asking Maria out? Sweet Lord, no.

"Of course I am!" he answered slightly suprised. "I mean, you live here since a few days and we uh... we..." he started and ran a hand through his hair shyly, "...though through an, um, accident, we came quite close to each other..." Blush. Massive blush. "But actually we know nothing from each other. Except our names." He could have continued his sentence. 'Girl, I have a crush on you, can't you see?', but restrained from that. "I don't care for your world. People here come from a lot of weird worlds, but... how old are you even? W-what's your job and... you know, stuff like that." Desperately he looked around to offer her something. But sake seemed like a painfully wrong choice. And leaving towards kitchen to bring some snacks was probably no good idea too, considering the reason she was here. "I'm, I'm serious" he ended.


For a few seconds, Maria just stared at Jyabura. But the cuteness overload simply made her crack a smile. Gosh. The big bad wolf was stuttering.
"You're probably the first guy serious with that," she claimed. "So forgive me if I'm doing it wrong."
She quietly cleared her throat.
"I am twenty-three years old and the... third of four children, the rest being my three insane brothers."
Short pause, heavy thinking.
"One of them less insane than the others." She had to concede that to Pascal.
"I've mostly had small jobs like..." Executing witnesses? "Waitressing. And thelike."
Her fingers wandered upwards; she started playing around with a curly strand of her hair. Honestly, she had to admit she liked this particular situation. Somehow.
"My father was"(Criminal?)"a bit insane, too. It's the Y-Chromosome, I guess."
Briefly, she bit her lower lip.
"That influenced my... upbringing. When I was taught to drive, to shoot and to... cook. At least my mother was sane."
The TV's light casted a weird play of shadows in Jyabura's face Maria watched while thinking.
"Anything else...?" She uttered before raising her voice. "And what about you?"


Twenty-three? Wow, can you say 'jailbait'?, he thought nervously. She was just as old as Kaku. That just made it even wronger. "I see" he started after a while and politely 'forgot' the age question. "I can't remember my family. I've been taken away when I was a kid. You know, we have a lot of water in our world, and lots of water means lots of pirates. So, I've been trained as an assassin" he said and ran a hand over his neck. "I've worked in an elite group. Spying, stealth and all that." He leaned against the wall and crossed his legs in ankle-height. "Considering the name of my organization" he continued after a moment "I guess I count as some kinda policeman" he grinned amused. That was right to an extent, though assassin was much better suiting.

More lying than sitting he crossed his arms and gave Maria an amused look. "So technically we should be enemies, right?" he more than just hinted that he knew or at least guessed Maria had more interesting jobs than just waitressing.


Was that another part of the curse?
If it was, it definetly worked. A chill ran down her neck over her back; a tenacious lump seemed to be stuck in her throat. Yakuza? Yeah, right. Goddamn optimism. It felt as if she was slowly crushed in between two moving walls. A cop. Now that was ill-suiting.
She kept quiet, pondering, biting her lower lip again. The gun. The gun sure had made him suspicious in the first place. And here she was, in the same room with an assassin slaying criminals. For this particular moment she just wanted to curl up in her corner and wait for it to pass. But there was no possibility for her to, so she had to collect herself single-handedly.
"I sure was no pirate," she answered dryly, staring at the floor. Her heart was pounding. She could even feel it behind her eyes. Not that she'd never taken a seat next to a killer before. Batshit insane killers, even. However, those killers had had a... different target group.
Any sign. Any sign and she was ready to leave. Though she wasn't sure which kind of sign she actually looked for.


"I know" he smirked, "you don't smell like seawater." However, she smelled like cold sweat and a lot of other signs told him that she was scared. Well, she had reasons to. Of course the gun was the main evidence he had. The type of gun, the manner she held it and a lack of any kind of uniform whatsoever. But someone who represented law just had another... aura. Some presence of a special determination that other people lacked. He couldn't put his finger on it, but if it was your job to kill criminals all your life long, you just knew when someone was exactly that. Jyabura surely wasn't the brightest crayon in the box, but there were reasons why he had the job he had, after all.

"And actually it seems like only bad people get dragged into this city anyways" he continued after a long moment of unpleasant silence while looking at the tv screen.


"So, what about you?" Maria asked with a side glance. Her voice had the certain tone of a frustrated assault, as if attacking somebody whilst knowing there was no way to win.
"Oh, I get it," she then added bitterly without even awaiting the answer, her eyes staring at black humoured life metaphysically hovering right at her feet, "you're bad for me."
Indecidedly, she repeated biting her lower lip. Fear, anger and a feeling of futility balanced each other out, leaving her slightly confused, not even able to decide which to pay attention to at first. The principles of good and bad, huh? Generally remaining where born into, she knew these ideas were crap. Well, not entirely. She hoped these ideas to be crap, she almost demanded them to be. Sure, it was a matter of your point of view. Though it changed nothing about both of them residing on the other side respectively. All they probably had in common about that was murder.
"Yes, I guess I'm bad," Maria started to explain. She cleared her throat. Her tongue felt like swollen sandpaper. "I'm Maria Santargo, member of the criminal Famiglia of Santargo. I was born into the family, couldn't do anything about that. Later, though, I conciously decided to stay with them. To work for them. I commited criminal offences, murder among that. I'm not trying to exculpate."
She got up, giving a shrug though she was almost shaking. It felt like she had just gotten herself into deep shit this time. Sure, she had cooperated, carrying out most jobs assigned to her, and she'd do it again. But, or to be more precisely, because those guys still were her family. Of course, she had been working against her family more often than once - for another part of her family, though.
She didn't turn to face Jyabura.
"I guess I'm leaving, then." She stated quietly, unpleasantly calm.


"Silly girl" he said and put her arms around her from the behind, hell alone knew how he got that swift on his feet and that close to her. Professional secrets. It was probably a bad idea to touch someone if you just told them you killed people with those hands, and people like the person you just told that, too. But to hell with it. This girl definitely needed a hug.

"Bad for you? Because I offered you a stay? If you call this bad, what do you call kidnapping and murder?" he mumbled into her hair, gripping her tight enough to not leave her a chance to abscond, but being far from violent too. "I know the methods of my Government are most times worse than those of criminals" he continued after a while thoughtfully, "but I don't care as long as the purpose stays right. Pirates are dangerous scum. I serve my Government to make our world a better place. And if that means killing people they consider as bad... that's ok." Not that he ever wasted a second to think about the orders he got. Not that he would ever criticize what his Government did. But he knew very well that not all of it was good, just because technically they were the 'good guys'. Legal killing was too much fun to waste it on morals.

He let her go, but kept staying behind her. If Maria'd leave, it would break his heart. But if she would, he know she had good enough reasons. However, if they couldn't get along this thing, it would make no sense whatsoever. "I'm... if... if you have to..." he said helplessly.


"I wonder what they'd have considered us," Maria uttered. Still, she couldn't bear to look Jyabura in the eye.
"Pascal Santargo. Hostage-taker. Kept several policemen busy with his actions," she quoted with a cold voice.
"Criminal scum. Sure. His reasons were quite faint."
She hesitated a bit, staring at the doorcrack lost in obscurity, before finally turning around, staring at Jyabura's face in the dark.
"He got shot in the shoulder while protecting his hostage from people who... didn't appreciate the hostage's kind. Police tried to kill him off anyway." She cracked half a cynical smile. "People tend to judge rather onedimensional concerning such things."
Whilst focussing on the play of shadows first, she now searched for the other's eyes somewhere in the shades.
"Did you try to kill that 'criminal scum' off in the city?"


"There are pirates from my world in this city. If they ever cross my paths, they're dead." he said coldly and serious. Probably sounding the first time ever serious during Maria's stay. It seems like he understood no jokes concerning pirates and those who were friends with them. "As for the rest... I told you that all people here are somewhat bad. But it's not my job to judge them. I just execute orders. There are no people in this place who can give me orders, so... Kaku and me are busy staying alive in this nuthouse of a city" he finished his sentence. He really didn't care about what happened in the City as long as it doesn't bothered himself and Kaku. There were reasons why he prefered to stay inside Xanadu, away from most citizens and commenting on all the babbling about wars and kidnappings with merely some bored eye-blinking.

Carefully he put his hand on her cheek. "In this place it just doesn't matter who you... were." he started, but felt inapt to properly articulate his thoughts. Nevermind. "The City will always try its best to make you feel as miserable as possible. I don't know what happened, but I know that I sold my memories a while ago. I don't even care what happened to make me go this far, but I don't want something to happen again" he added insecurely and ran his fingers over Maria's jawline.


Maria lowered her focus, looking down at the floor again. Even if he wasn't aiming at her, could she stay with, say, a killer? Regarding that, her slate wasn't clean either - that guy seemed to have a certain conviction concerning his victims, though. For people of her family, a certain death toll was "sad, but inevitable", if not even killing was the fun, meaning they didn't actually care for their victims. Or, to be more specific, often didn't think of their victims as people but rather as numbers, blurry images without a face, effaced merely because of names in the danegeld files.
Silently, she had to admit that this kind of approach wasn't really better. Especially when thinking about the brutally ironic cards of condolence sometimes sent to the remaining ones.
Still, she had the feeling as if she had to leave. Wasn't she a bit one-dimensional herself here? He had his reasons, too, probably, and if she was going to call him over the coals for that, she'd just do what she didn't want him to.
Her fingers met the hand on her cheek when she finally looked up again.
"Developing a sudden passionate hatred for me isn't so verisimilar, then?" She asked with a slight smirk, though having a coy voice.


"It is very unlikely" he said with a soft smirk, maybe an attempt of a smile, while he put his other hand on her face too and leaned his forehead against hers. He had an eye on her for a few days and what she did in this time didn't go against his morals. And he really didn't believe she could take part on the recent kidnappings and whatever else the freaks came up with. Tenderly he tilted Maria's head to the side to give her a kiss. Completely sober, he was surprised by the even stronger cherry taste. No alcohol that covered it. With his thumb he opened her mouth a bit to not let his tongue miss anything interesting. After what seemed like an eternity to him he broke the kiss, aware of his sudden daringness and taken by surprise because of it. "I um... hope this feeling is mutual" he finally said and put his hands on Maria's hips, shyly looking away.


A warm, slightly tickling feeling proceeded to repeatedly roll down Maria's back. Her hands finally made it to Jyabura's back so she was hugging him, almost clinging to him. A small sigh. The optimistic feeling was approaching again, as if coming back from a weekend trip to throw in some new work on Monday.
He liked her. No, he liked her. She was not going to die, she even had a bodyguard. Some sort of. And now that she had told him about that stuff anyway, she at least had somebody to talk about certain... incidents. If she ever happened to want that by any chance. And if he was eager to listen to in that particular moment.
Didn't it boil down just to that? Somebody to trust. Not blindly. But... slowly. We'll work that out somehow.
The rest? She'd get that worked out, too.
"Mutual indeed," she uttered, cheek against his chest.
She wasn't so much of a hating person anyway.