He wasn't someone she belonged to, and he didn't belong to her, either.

Theirs was simply a belonging.

Bryn put their hands on their hips when their rival faltered, her smirk only growing as the bubble popped. Ignoring his heated complaints about losing the match to them fair and square Bryn interrupted with a sentence that made everyone stare. “Wow. You wanna fuck me so bad it makes you look stupid.” The rival stammered and stuttered at that - the glare shot Bryn’s way half furious and half astonished. Not that it was even wrong. He was not the first and the last to be rejected by what the internet collectively thought as the embodiment of a rage game.

Words kept pouring from the blond's mouth, but they weren't really registering at first. Akira? Akira had asked him to be here? Sent a plane ticket. Got him a key... Brought him... To...

The knife clattered against the floor and in seconds Kaelis found his arms wrapped around the other's middle, his face buried in his chest. He hardly had the strength to stand anymore, so he leaned almost wholly against the blond for support. "Michael..."

Long glittery nails chimed against the side of the glass, a pleasant sound in an otherwise loud and crowded place. The neon lights of the club swirled and flashed, especially glittering and entrancing when the light reflected off the acid green glimmer of the serpentine scales that lay scattered over Ava’s body. She looked otherworldly amongst the throngs of humans and intoxicated patrons, almost too beautiful to exist. Places like this though, these were where she truly thrived. It was where she could let loose, and play to her own whims and desires. A roulette wheel of the unholy.

"You're... so wrong," she pulled back after her existential hiatus had run its course, swiftly wiping away the remnants of tears and any evidence that she had ever so much as committed an emotion.

One foot cautiously crossed the threshold into treason, while the other remained firmly back in the shadow of loyalty.

"How do you know that'll work out for me?" Lucas can't help but ask.

Marguerite chuckles, and a warmth fills in his chest that's almost akin to hope.

"I can recommend some excellent prosthetists."

"So now, Mr. Hathorne, humor me: What do you intend to do with the time you have?"

There is still so much work to do, but this time, Lucas thinks it's no longer for his repentance. That there will always be some part of him crying out of some desperate need to do and be good, but in pondering what matters and what Lucas wants to do with the life he has—

Lucas Gabriel Hathorne(?) makes a decision.

"...Are you still open to long-term bargains?"

At the sound of the stranger’s voice, Thian thinks he’s actually fucking gone and done it: taken the last step before falling completely into madness and delusion, YA angst of the supernatural variety, the pathetic kind of mourning that just suggests an idiot in desperate need of therapy can’t fucking get their shit together and move past grief, loss, five stages but stuck at the second phase.

He’s always stuck at the second phase.

Someone has to go, someone has enough, something runs out. Someone fucking dies—

"Murakami, Yuki. Elite Officer, Special Class II. [Redacted]." She dropped the file, and most of it was indeed blacked out. He looked up at her again. It wasn't like anything in there was of any interest to him. He could see her tattoo under the cuff of her sleeve. Lieutenant, of this branch most likely. Odd that it wasn't the Captain, but with the bombings, they were probably quite busy. "What are you doing here in New York?"

Yuki blinked at her a bit slowly. Did he have to answer that? It was a simple answer, wasn't it? "What happened to the rabbit?" The woman looked a bit stunned in that moment. Of course, they hadn't gotten the rabbit. He really hoped that it wasn't still out there, on the ground somewhere. He hoped that someone had picked it up and taken it home and fed it and kept it warm and- "I am helping." Trying to help, anyways.

“Ask stupid questions, get stupid answers,” the not-Carina snarked from beside him.

He had to resist the urge to roll his eyes because holy hellballs on a stick, why was his companion this sassy?!

“You’re not helping!” he couldn’t help but sass back to his companion, before biting his lip and internally rolling his eyes at his companion. Not to mention internally screaming, too, but that was for another day.

“Riddle me this. I have no body, yet I make your head hurt without throwing a single punch. What am I?”

Confounded silence followed.

“An enigma!”

In truth, Thian thinks he's just wading through life and doesn't have the heart to take the step out of a beaten down path. And it's quieter this way, it's a hell of a lot lonelier, but where else do matters like relationships, people, history, lifetimes go for people who don't have much of a good track record in the department? It's dying slow. Grief is ugly, and bitter, and it tastes like tequila left on the rack for too damn long. People come, people go. Things don't last. ( Thian is always fucking grieving and he's never gotten proof that he'll find a reason to stop. )

Christ, he hates growing older.

At least Kai is trying to make him feel better. He thinks.

She follows.

She follows because she's a good damn cop, and she's a fuck up who needs someone to hold the map forward, and Lukas Adelstierna — tin man with a quiet disposition, takes his orders seriously, lives and breathes work ( Ryl doesn't think she's ever seen him crack a lip twitch of a smile ) — is the kind of navigator that never strays from the charted course. She follows because, end of the day, someone needs help, and who better to answer that call than people whose line of duty involves putting yourself forward in any firefight?