2010-03-30 - Reconstruction

People are such fragile things, aren't they?

After having a long cry on Revive Revival's shoulder, Louise Halevy has more or less shut herself in her room after the GNX meeting. She doesn't know how to feel -- she knows she said something a little callous, but really... why /shouldn't/ she have? They may be a team, but they're a /military unit/. Sometimes, casualties happen. Sometimes, the suits move you around.

The tension on the ship is still palpable to her; she can still feel all of the negativity on the ship, even though she herself feels a little better. If anyone she didn't want to deal with were to call her, she'd probably say she was sick.

Leo Stenbuck, too, has spent the last day or so - the time since he struck Louise - locked in his room. He spent his six hours of designated sleep time last night lying in bed, staring numbly at the ceiling, being crushed under the weight of his own guilt. The rest of the day didn't go much better; he spent it sitting at his desk, theoretically working but mostly holding his head in his hands.

Eventually - after Latooni Subota showed up to talk to him about what happened to Ralla - he did fall asleep. He only got about four hours before Soma Peries woke him up to discuss the same thing - and the incident with Louise, of course. The latter conversation did a great deal to help Leo work up his nerve to actually go and talk to Louise.

And so the young man drifts to a halt in front of the door to Louise's room, fresh out of the showers, clad in what is officially considered 'A-LAWS Casual' - uniform pants, boots, teal tank top. He stares at Louise's door for a few seconds, reaches up to fiddle nervously with the long ends of his headband, and then finally reaches out and knocks on the door. "Louise?" he calls, after a pair of knocks. "It's me. Can we talk, please?"

Louise has a hard time connecting with people; needless to say, this does not play in Leo's favor here. Indeed, it takes her nearly a full minute to decide to answer, and she's only pushed over to the side of 'actually bothering' by the fact that she knows she needs Leo, even if he hurt her.

Eventually, she pulls herself together, throwing on a shirt hastily; she calls, "... Come in." She doesn't leave her bed; she just sits, back up against the head of the bed. Her quarters are surprisingly high-quality, for a Warrant Officer; the bed is pretty nice.

It may take Louise awhile to answer, but Leo is stubborn, and the secret truth is that his question was not really a question at all. He was fully prepared to sit outside Louise's room until she either broke down and agreed to talk to him or was forced to surrender to his social siegecraft.

But, eventually, she does call for him to come in, and the door whooshes open. Leo steps into Louise's room, and turns to close the door behind him. After a moment of hesitation, he locks it, too.

Once he has, he turns back to face the room... and, despite the awkwardness of the situation, he takes a moment to look around. He's never actually been in Louise's room before, after all, and there's a certain curiosity. After only a few seconds, he steps lightly across the room and takes a careful seat on the foot of the bed.

"Hey," he says softly, after another few seconds of awkward silence, his eyes fixed firmly on his hands where they rest in his lap.

"Hello," Louise says; if he's not going to actually approach the topic, or worse, apologize, she's not going to push it. Instead, she just shifts her body language subtly away from him, folding her arms a bit. Closing herself off. She needs to be his soul, his conscience, Revive reminded her -- and right now, what he needs is a little perspective.

Her quarters, under closer examination, are spartan but relatively nice; the furniture is of the highest quality -- more like an officer's room than a Warrant's -- and the fixtures are likewise a little nicer than typical. However, she hasn't done anything with the room; it doesn't feel like a home in the least.

Leo's shoulders sag visibly when Louise withdraws from him, even before he tries to really get close to her. He sighs heavily, and lifts his right hand out of his lap to rub at his eyes... and for several long seconds, that's /all/ he does.

After about half a minute, however, he suddenly says, "Louise, I'm... /so/ sorry." Even without the magic of quantum brainwaves, it's easy to serse his guilt and regret; he sounds positively miserable. "I... there's no excuse, for what I did, especially after all the things I was saying..."

Leo lowers his hand from his eyes and turns to look Louise in the eye. He looks as miserable as he sounds. "Please forgive me... I'll do whatever I have to..."

That guilt goes a long way toward getting Louise's forgiveness; while she feels like she needs to teach him a lesson (even if it /is/ only because of Revive's... questionable advice), she also knows that she needs him badly. With him, she doesn't feel -- quite so wounded. Sometimes she even forgets she /is/.

"Leo," Louise says, turning her attention back to him, seeing that misery. "... I," she starts, trying to find /something/ to say. "Promise me you'll never do that again," she finally says, eventually. "And..."

She has her suspicions -- best to lay them to rest now. "... and -- there wasn't anything going on between you and Ralla, right?"

Time to make things awkward.

Leo opens his mouth to say something immediately, but he interrupts himself by screwing his face up in confusion. There wasn't, of course; Cyber-Newtypes are hands-off. But...

... is she /jealous?/

Leo rises to his feet, takes a step down the length of the bed, and sits down closer to Louise, gesturing pleadingly for her to move closer to him. "Of course not," he assures her honestly, once he's seated. "We had dinner together sometimes, but that was just as friends. And--"

Leo swallows roughly as his brain shifts back to the more important topic. "I promise. Never again. I'd never do anything to hurt you, Louise, you know that; I didn't mean to, it just..." He takes a shaky breath, and repeats, "Never again. I'll never hurt you again."

Louise is most definitely jealous.

Scooting closer to Leo but still not quite as close as he might like, she says, "... sorry," eventually. "I just felt... I don't know. I wanted to be there for you when I went, but when you went off, I just started getting very..." She trails off, not sure how to quantify the abrupt shift in her heart, the abrupt boredom and frustration and jealousy and contempt.

"And... thanks. That -- means a lot to me, Leo." When he promises that, she does scoot a little closer to him; ultimately, she is perhaps a little too easily taken in, a little too easily pleased.

Perhaps surprisingly, Leo shakes his head. "It shouldn't," he points out. "You should be able to just... assume it. If I weren't such an, an asshole... I'm sorry," he sighs, reaching up to rub at his eyes again.

"Listen, Louise..." he begins after a brief pause, lowering his hand again, only to reach it out to try to touch one of Louise's. "It's not your fault, what happened. It's mine. I'm sorry I yelled at you. I know you do your best. I just..."

Leo sighs again, unsure of how to summarize his feelings. After a few seconds, he settles for, "I'm sorry I'm not a better person."

Louise's hand tenses under Leo's touch; it's almost instantly apparent that he's touched her false hand. The tension doesn't feel /quite/ right -- it's not /quite/ the same as a real human hand, if Leo can tell the difference. "It's -- the things I said..." Louise says, shaking her head. "... Maybe we should just try to forget it ever happened. I like you, Leo -- I like you a lot, and..."

Louise tries to find the words to express herself; it doesn't work out. As such, she just wraps her hand around his, gently. There isn't anything else she can say, right now.

It takes Leo a moment to notice that he's taken Louise's false hand; there's something weird about it, and that's obvious enough, but he still needs a few beats before he realizes why, or indeed even remembers that Louise has a prosthetic hand. He forgets, sometimes; not what happened to her family, just what happened to her hand.

It doesn't seem to bug him at all, however. In fact, after she closes her hand around his, he shifts his hand again to intertwine his fingers with hers.

"I like you, too," he confirms, after a few moments of silence. "And... maybe we should..." He can't help but doubt that he'll ever forget it - he needs it, he thinks, as a reminder not to lose his temper - but if it'd be easier for Louise...

... either way, before anyone forgets anything, he needs to see something. Leo scoots closer towards Louise and lifts his free hand to touch her chin, turning the young woman's head so he can get a better look at where he hit her.

Unlike Leo, Louise has begun to develop, in large part thanks to some of her new... friends, a very simple, straightforward outlook on life and on memory -- if it's inconvenient, just ignore it as hard as possible. Eventually, it'll go away. After all, it certainly worked on her initial hesitation to fight -- all at once, she started ignoring it, and it's gradually gone away.

Of course, it also means learning nothing, but it's not as though she needs to learn anything but what suffering has taught her to lead the world into the new era.

There's just the faintest hint of a bruise along Louise's jawbone; it's not much, but it's there, right at the bottom of her cheek. The rest is a little red, even now... but it doesn't look /that/ bad.

Seeing the bruise only makes Leo's guilt and burgeoning self-loathing even worse; it was one thing to know he had hit her, but to see the physical evidence of the event is a whole nother thing. "Louise..." the young man murmurs, a pained expression crossing his face. "I'm so sorry..."

He scoots even closer to her, all at once - as close as they can get without one being in the other's lap - and leans in to lightly kiss the bruise. "Don't worry," Leo assures Louise huskily, his hand sliding down her cheek and to the back of her neck.

"I'll kiss it all better..."

Louise arches her neck back a little as Leo's hand slides down, letting him come closer in for just a moment -- but at the last second, brings her hand up to his arm, gripping just a little too tightly. Hopefully, this is a deterrent. "... I'm sorry -- I mean, I'd like to move on... but I need a little space," she says. Even she can't forget /that/ fast.

"Just -- a day or two, okay?" she says, giving him a weak smile.

Leo's disappointment is obvious, but at least he gets the hint. His hand lingers on Louise for a moment even after she grabs his arm, as he strokes his thumb lightly along her neck, but after a moment he obeys and leans back away from the young woman, taking his arm with him. His other hand, however, remains interlaced with hers.

"Okay," Leo says, softly. "I understand." He turns slightly away from Louise, gives her hand a squeeze, and speaks again after a short pause. "I'm going on... another couple days of leave, tomorrow. I need some time to... pull my head together, and stuff."

"But... while I'm gone, please, try to think of some way I can make all this shit up to you. And then when I get back..."

Nodding to Leo, she says, "I understand. That's probably a good idea... I hope it's relaxing for you," she says. That much, at least, is true -- after last night, she's a little terrified of how poisonous the GNX Team has become in the absence of Ralla. "I'll work hard while you're away," she adds, a little more firmly.

When he tasks her with thinking of some way that he can make it up to her, she finds herself a little stymied; she's not sure how to manage /that/. Nevertheless, she says, "... all right. I'll try to come up with something," she says. This would be much easier if she were the person she was before... but then, the person she was before wouldn't be here in the first place.

"I will," Leo promises, with a small smile. "And I know you will, too." He gives Louise's hand another small squeeze. Hopefully she can come up with something... and, well, if she can't, he'll have to think of /something/ to do for her. He'll need to talk to RIbbons, too, he suspects, about Revive Revival's little... stunt.

Boy, /that'll/ be fun.

His piece said, Leo sits in awkward silence for awhile before asking, "Should... I go? Or do you want me to stay? Or...?"

"... You can stay, if you want," Louise says, nodding to Leo. "You don't have to say anything if you don't want to... you don't have to stay if you don't want to, either." She squeezes his hand back this time, saying, "I just -- can't get close like that, not tonight."

She does, in spite of herself, lean on Leo, just the littlest bit. Just enough to feel his warmth. "Thank you for coming and talking to me," she adds. "I was starting to wonder about... how you felt about it."

"You know how I feel," Leo assures Louise, with another smile. "I'm sorry it took me this long to come and see you. It's just... shame, I guess. I don't know." The smile vanishes, replaced by a distressed frown. "But... yeah, I want to stay. Of course I want to stay."

He lifts their joined hands off the bed to press his lips softly into the back of Louise's hand, a reassuring gesture that he can only hope does not violate her unwillingness to be touched, and says, "But it's getting late. Just let me know when you want to go to bed, and I'll go, then."

He hesitates, and adds, "Unless you don't want me to."

Louise is hesitant about even that degree of touch, but it's different than when he went for her chin -- it's gentle, almost courtly. As much as she wouldn't admit it, part of her... really likes that kind of thing, especially from someone who's also willing to recognize that she can fight if she wants to. (No Andreis allowed.)

Giving Leo a tiny smile back, she says, "All right. For now, I just kind of want to... sit here, like this." Saying nothing further, she does just that; after a second, she taps behind her ear, turning all the radio buzzing off. Right now, she doesn't want to hear it.

Leo merely nods. "Okay," he says quietly, lowering his and Louise's linked hands into his lap; pointedly offset onto a leg, rather than right over his groin.

And then he just... sits there, in silence, stroking the back of Louise's hand with his thumb, staring off into the middle distance.