Description: After the fall of Gedo High, Tenma hid out to recuperate from his injuries, and to try to clear his head. Pás, however, still wasn't done trying to track the Guardian King down, and not even having been shot was about to stop her. Two teenagers who live their lives with carefully created personae come dangerously close to a genuine emotional moment... Until Pás runs for it. Chicks, am I right, fellas?
In the time since the complete takeover of Gedo High by the forces of NESTS, things have been less than wholly enjoyable for Tenma Kiryuu. The leader of the Guardian Kings, who had to be bodily removed from the campus by Daigo Kazama so he didn't end up getting killed or something possibly even worse, has honestly had better days. The worst part is, he isn't even far from the school, even now; he's still on Gedo Street, within the relative safety of the only bolthole he has available now: His grandfather's cramped-ass old apartment.
So, Tenma's bedroom. It's recovered since the time, almost a year past, when a certain Brazilian invaded it to check up on the then rather depressed Gedo swordsman; the floor is fixed, things are back up on the walls where they belong, including a girls in bikinis calendar. It brightens up the whole room.
Admittedly, the room needs all the brightness it can get; laying on his futon on the floor, because his grandfather believes in keeping things both TRADITIONALLY JAPANESE and also SPARTAN, is Tenma himself. Stripped to the waist with much of his torso wrapped tightly in bandages, the Guardian King is currently, probably fleetingly, asleep. What skin isn't covered is frostbitten, and his hair is now jagged, shorter in some places where it was simply rendered brittle and snapped off. His bokken is close at hand.
Just in case.
After all that work spent merely to get through the front gates, into Gedo High, Pás didn't get far. She'd split up from her temporary allies, having little need or desire to keep anyone around. It was too much effort to keep up her airs for others, especially when she finally stepped foot onto the school grounds and saw only... destruction.
Pás, for the record, never worries. The emotion is beneath her. It is a symptom of weakness, and she has only innoculated herself from ever feeling something bordering concern. But as she looked up at all of it, she was starting to feel something very off -- very sick -- and it was coming close to making her doubt her immunity.
The farther she went in, the more she wanted to just go home. Maybe even to Brasil. Or somewhere better. Somewhere she wouldn't have to care. The bullets in her body were starting to wear her down, and she was even minding her own reckless impulse when people drew from the woodwork to try to impede her search in every so directions. Inside the school was mayhem, and there was no sign of neither Tenma or his team from what she could see. She grabbed a few deserting students, some had see him, some had not... Some even swore they saw him fighting.
She couldn't get farther into the school. Not alone. And though she was sore about it, Pás was forced to vacate. She wanted to just lift a hand against all of it and return to her dorm.
Instead, she found herself limping back towards the next place that made sense.
And, some time later, it takes all of her remaining energy, and maybe just a little loopiness from blood loss, to have a familiar figure perch a second time in Tenma's window.
Breathing hard, bleeding extensively from her shoulder, side, and through the bandaging she's knotted around her leg, and looking scorched and seared everywhere else, Pás is hidden somewhere under all that mess. Her dark eyes search the room once, and fate has them eventually land on the figure in the futon. Seeing him there, apparently alive, makes the Brazilian girl sigh out the breath she didn't realize she was holding. He's alive.
The jerk.
And not fighting just anyone, of course. No, that wouldn't suit Tenma Kiryuu, would it? He had to be neck deep in the shit, going toe to toe with the self-styled 'God' of NESTS, and his little Anti-K', too. If it hadn't been for Daigo, it's quite likely that the Guardian King wouldn't have survived it. As it is...
Tenma might not be conscious, but he isn't sleeping that deeply, either. How could he be? Even if his body needs rest to recover, he can't relax. Not yet, anyway. Not so soon after everything's gone to hell, when it seems pretty clear that they're only going to get worse in the meantime.
So when he hears that sigh, Tenma immediately snaps awake. In a flash, the Gedo swordsman has his bokken, and he's whirled up into a crouching position, the wooden blade point-out towards Pás, a hairsbreadth away from the Brazilian's dark-skinned throat.
Tenma... Might be a little tense right now, you know?
But Tenma does see who it is, which is probably why he doesn't follow through on the strike. In a few spots, dark blood starts to stain his bandages. Luckily, Kiryuu isn't registering much pain right now.
"You look about as bad as I feel, Dakini," Tenma says, trying to force a lighter tone. It's all a joke, right?
He moves fast.
Normally, she does too, and she keeps the sort of instinct that would make her body react immediately to that flicker of movement. But Pás doesn't have much left. It's all of her natural strength and years of training that's keeping her conscious, upright, and balanced on Tenma's Kiryuu, where lesser people would be bleeding themselves out hours ago. So, instead of erupting into her usual ferocity, the Brazilian just goes quiet when his reflexes turn the bokken's blade on her. She freezes, neither inclined to encourage nor convince him otherwise. She just watches with her tired, ambery eyes.
However, Pás relaxes just an imperceptible inch when the bokken retreats from her throat. That look on her face when she was caught watching him -- looking thoughtful, relieved, exhausted, and entirely unlike herself -- mutates into a more familiar smirking. She exhales amusement against the Guardian King's remark, leaning back to lounge unceremoniously against and along the window frame. She occupies it with a Cheshire carelessness that seems neither to mind nor even notice that she's bleeding all over it.
"Shiu," Pás replies breezily, tossing back a bit of her tangled hair, "And I had hopings you were dead somewhere. I am jes stop by to steal your stuff."
Of course it's a joke.
Now that he's pretty sure that the person invading his room isn't out to do him grievous personal harm - at least, inasmuch as Pás' enjoyment of violence is generally not malicious - the Gedo swordsman puts down his bokken with a faint clatter of wood against tatami mats. And then, of course, realisation strikes; there's the Brazilian girl, looking pretty beat up already, when outside on Gedo street there might be any number of bad guys running around, all too willing to shoot at some girl who isn't paying attention.
Anger and worry, then, lace through Tenma's thoughts, and he gets up as quick as he can despite his injuries, reaching out for Pás. "Stupid!!" the Guardian King chides, keeping his voice down from his usual 'yelling a lot' to a more subdued, forceful whisper. He's not at full strength right now, but he's pretty sure the capoeira girl isn't yet either, so it's with this in mind that he tries to pull Pás into his bedroom. Of course, in his current condition, that could end poorly if he has to support her full weight...
Looking and acting the part of someone's spoiled cat (that's been shot at just a bit,) Pás doesn't budge from her spot on Tenma's window. By all appearances, she looks just too damn lazy or defiant to want to move. In reality, it's probably because she can't.
Nonetheless, her relaxed demeanour tenses a little around the edges when she notices Tenma standing and beelining towards her bleeding body. Pás is studying him like she's not sure what to expect, and by the telling look on her face, she may have just preferred him trying to push her back out instead of /this./ She's frowning a little uncertainly when the Guardian King reaches for her, an underlying urgency in the way he's trying to pull her into his bedroom and out of Southtown's current status of certain danger. "Putz," she counters windily. "I am not stay long. I have very busy, I will come back to see you are dead then. You -- euh!!"
Stupid Pescador. In the end, she lets her tension go and lets him, at least until her half-blurred vision picks up on the way he's bleeding through his bandages. What an idiot. She helps along, shoulding in and reaching her uninjured arm to brace her weight against the sill so Tenma doesn't have to burden it all. With an odd sort of patience about her movements, the Brazilian merely helps his effort to draw her down, easily her wounded body down to stand on her own legs with a bit of a ragged sigh. It almost sounds exasperated.
"Hum," she's observing in the meanwhile, still quite unwilling to let her original airs go. "Looks like some-one did the number on you, yea." Tilting her head, she reaches out without any invitation, trying to poke lightly at some of the bandaging on the boy's side. Then her mouth tics, and she punches the spot. Not violently. But firmly enough. Moodily enough. "You did not even call me! Foda!!"
"Yeah, you look really busy bleedin' out all over my window," Tenma says, irritably. The fact that the Brazilian is able to help him support her weight is a relief, though, as it means that the two of them don't end up all over the floor, covering it in blood. Instead, the dusky-skinned, dark-haired girl is able to stand up, and Tenma is similarly able to not fall on his ass. All's well that ends well, right?
At least, until Tenma is first poked, and then punched, in his injured side.
The strike elicits a grunt from the Kiryuu demon hunter, as one might expect, but Tenma manages to remain upright. "You told me to leave you alone!" the Guardian King protests, breathlessly. "You went full-on crazy, in fact. An' now here you come shot to hell. You--" Wait a minute. Something's not right, here.
"--You came /lookin'/ for me, didn't you?" Tenma says, more a statement, really, than a question. As he says it, a grin teases at the corners of his mouth. He sounds kind of... Pleased? "Sit down, Dakini. Let me get something to bandage you up a little bit..."
"Crazy?" Pás exclaims back at him, before the meaning of the word finally clicks through her language barrier. Her eyes narrow, and she huffs indignantly, "Louco?! Shiu! I was not /louco./ Idiot! I say nothing like that! Your entire silly hobo school -- that is louco!! I tell /you/ that -- that --"
Her entire scoffing, sneering, finger-pointing lecture bleeds out of the nearest bullet hole. And Pás pauses very distinctly, her entire verbal tirade having fallen straight on its ass when Tenma accuses her of looking for him. Her jaw clicks shut. The breath she's been holding huffs out of her. And her left eye can't stop its constant twitching.
"I -- I -- năo o procurei! I, euh," she continues, remembering her broken English, "I do nothings of the sort! Do not accuse me of such the thing!! You -- stop looking at me like that!" Pás blurts, paling more and more by the moment, and not because of her certain blood loss. "Stop smiling!!"
"--Merda!!" In the end, the bullet-holed Brazilian merely collapses into a huff, crossing her arms and frowning mightily against all these false and unjust accusations. But she does concede to Tenma's direction, able to find some strange measure of pride in frownily half-stepping, half-limping to the center of his bedroom, lowering herself down very carefully to settle on a corner of his futon. Pás can't quite hide how much of a relief it feels to sit down. Even if her stubborn frown still refuses to leave her mouth.
Maybe Tenma can't beat Pás in a fight, but when it comes to words, it's difficult to defeat the leader of the Guardian Kings. Especially when he's so infuriatingly /right/, huh? With the Brazilian deciding quite sensibly to do what she's told, the lean Japanese youth takes a moment to leave the room, before coming back a few heartbeats later with a first aid kit, and a wet cloth.
Crouching down beside Pás, the Gedo swordsman can at least put the thought of his own injuries - which have, at least, been dressed and treated - aside as he deals with /hers/. "You're gonna need to see an actual doctor as soon as possible," Tenma says, actually trying to sound soothing for once, instead of his usual coarse, strident voice. But... It's because of him that she got hurt, he's certain of that at least.
So it's just obvious that he should be concerned about these injuries.
Clearing away Pás' hasty self-made bandages, the next step for Tenma is to try to get her a little bit cleaned up. Dried blood and dirt are no fun, not even for a fighter. The swordsman is surprisingly gentle as he tends to the crazy Brazilian girl, his face set in a look of concentration. After the water comes the always fun disinfectant, but Pás is big and tough, right? She can take it.
It's got to be every teenager's fantasy, right? Being able to walk back into your bedroom, and there on your bed -- or crazy weirdo Japanese futon -- is some exotic foreign girl looking like she's been pulled straight from some sunny beach and is left reclining over bedsheets instead of powdery white sand. And she's all dark skin and legs that seem to go on forever, with torn, scanty clothes and three bullet holds and copious amounts of blood drooling everything and--
--yeah, maybe not.
In the very least, Pás seems to know how to work getting gunned down. She's gotten comfortable in Tenma's absence, leaning back on her elbows and stretching out slightly, and turned to take most of her weight off her injured leg. When he arrives, she looks up at him with hooded eyes, then immediately glances away again when she remembers she's sulking.
As well as big and tough. Pás refuses to as much as shy away when Tenma closes in to start peering at her injuries, and she doesn't flinch when he starts to clean them. She seems vaguely tired about the whole process, the way big cats pointedly ignore the meaningless way gnats crawl into their ears. Hmmf.
"Pou, doctors," she replies dismissively. "I am absolutely an O-K. You are makings gigantic woman fuss, it-- ai!!" Pás blurts against the first touch of disenfectant, biting down a yelp against the sting. That hurt. She exhales raggedly, and all the more strangely, the touch of pain seems to lighten the Brazilian girl up. When she glances back at Tenma, it's with a small, humoured grin, and in a sighing way, bends up her wounded leg. "Aiii... you do me big favour, Pescador, yea? Use those good hands of yours and get out the bullet? Is not in that deep."
Reclining back, and seeming to trust him enough with emergency surgery, the Brazilian finally lets herself begin to study Tenma's own bandaged wounds. She comes close -- so close -- to letting seriousness threaten her face. And she asks, "What is happening there?"
Well, remember that this IS Tenma Kiryuu. The bleeding thing doesn't bother him as much as it might most people; the squick factor is pretty much zero. Pás' blustering about how she's fine is simply endured the way that things you can't change must be. Waves breaking against the cliffs of Tenma's boundless patience. Wherever he managed to /find/ boundless patience, anyway.
Go figure.
When the Brazilian flinches, though, Tenma's dark blue eyes glance up at her face, and he suppresses a grin. He finds her pain amusing! What a jerk! Though his amusement is wiped away by Pás' request, which elicits instead a look of surprise from the tall, lean young man. "You want me to..." Tenma starts, but then he realises: Of course she does. Sighing resignedly, Tenma puts his hand to her bullet wound, and he starts... Muttering under his breath? It's not English, that's for sure, and it's not Japanese, either. A quiet Buddhist chant, as the Guardian King focuses, concentrates and slowly... Something weird happens.
Oh, Tenma has to dig in to get at the bullet, but he has help, as the Brazilian's own blood helps push the little lead projectile out of her, responding to Tenma's chi, and to his preternatural ability to control blood. Soon enough, though, Tenma's bloodstained fingers have the bullet, which he glances at for a moment before letting it drop. And then, only then, does he look up to Pás again to answer her question.
"Those guys who attacked your school before, an' Gedo, looking for Chiang... They attacked again. Except this time they brought an army." Tenma frowns, faintly, giving his head a slight shake. "Me an' the Boss an' his sister fought against their leader an' his bodyguard. We lost. They want the school for... I dunno what, and I'm guessin' by now the rest of the city is just as much of a mess."
At his surprise, the injured Brazilian regains some of her original footing -- that is the familiar, teasing slant that infects the edges of her face. "Yas plas," she replies very nicely, her dark eyes hooding as she gives the foot of her long, so very long proffered leg an inviting wiggle.
Thankfully, the effect gets lost somewhere around the time the Guardian King puts a hand over her wound; the girl flusters, half from the sting and half from something else, turning her head away as her cheeks redden slightly. Her cat-light sense of play fades, and she tenses up, no doubt preparing for the long and no doubt very excruciating journey to get the bullet out of her leg. It's not the first time she's been shot, so this pain is a familiar one -- only the treatment is decidedly not...
Pás stirs against the strange, disconcerting sensation of feeling her blood move in a way it should not, turning her eyes back in time to watch Tenma's strange power call the bullet back to his hand like an obedient bird to a falconer. Now it's her turn to look surprised; tilting her head, the Brazilian stares a little wonderously, before she hitches out an airy, amused little laugh and simply relaxes her arms to flop backward on his futon. He is so strange!
"Yea, it mess out there," Pás replies eventually, a gusty sigh lingering through her broken English. "I am not seen so much fun since the drug wars back home, shiu." She lets go that strange remark, one of the Brazilian's exceedingly rare interludes on her own past, with a flippant wave of her hand. The motion makes her seethe slightly, agitating the matching wound that's only starting to dry in her shoulder. "There second bullet in here too, I think. And another somewhere else... euh, it come out eventually. So," she appends, her sleepy eyes turning on Tenma, "what you do now? They got your school now, yea? Wheare are your silly boys and the gringa?"
They really are awfully nice legs; Tenma's a big fan, even though they're often used to hit him in various tender body parts. Still, he can't do anything for Pás' actual injuries, but at least if he gets the bullets out, she can heal properly on his own. "Sounds like you had an interestin' upbringing," the Kiryuu heir remarks, dry as the depths of space. With his bloodstained hands, Tenma shuffles over to bring himself level with the Brazilian girl's shoulder, placing one hand on the back of her shoulder, and bringing the other up to her second bullet wound.
The question, though, gives him pause again. Questions are troublesome that way.
"I don't know," Tenma replies, in an undertone. "We got separated during the attack... Whatever they were doin', I know they're okay." He has faith in them; almost as much faith as he has in himself, which is pretty considerable. After a moment, he starts chanting again, under his breath. Once again, that strange process repeats itself, and Tenma is able to remove the second bullet.
"Hum," is all she says to that, lowly and lazily as though they were discussing the weather. The girl shifts automatically to accomodate Tenma's strange, but efficient method of bullet removal, letting her wounded leg relax while pulling up her body, bracing herself on her uninjured arm and winging her long hair aside to give him access to her bloody shoulder. Unlike last time, Pás curiously watches the boy as he chants and moves her blood under his own will, curious, but not quite used to the strange sensation. Her right eye squints slighty when the bullet drops out.
Exhaling deeply, and mostly out of relief, the Brazilian relaxes back against her propping elbow and turns that thinking gaze pointedly up at his face. Despite the work she puts into speaking, acting, and playing the part of a simple girl, sometimes Pás betrays herself with her eyes. Like now, the bear the secret glimpse of someone who is constantly thinking.
After a moment, she decidedly smirks, shaking her head a little long sufferingly up at him. "You are all the time so confident, Pescador," Pás announces to Tenma rather wryly. "You are too confident... shiu, you know that is not very healthy at all." Then she reaches up without warning -- there's never any warning -- to distractedly brush some of his hair from his eyes. "Maybe you have gone mad like me."
It's not something easy, or something simple... But it beats rooting around inside Pás' flesh with his bare hands, or a pair of tweezers out of the bathroom cabinet. Plus it's sure to impress chicks.
Tenma pulls the first aid kit over to himself, getting out the bandages and gauze so that he can dress her bullet wounds, and whatever other assorted injuries she managed to accumulate while looking for him. Fair's fair, right? He looks focused on what he's doing, as Pás gazes up at his face; like someone giving themselves over to the simple satisfaction of doing something that has a clear-cut right and wrong, a clear achievement. It's uncomplicated, which things so rarely are for Tenma Kiryuu anymore.
Or for anyone, really. But it was simpler before, being a dumb kid. Before the Seventh Circle, before Jinchuu. Sometimes, it's hard to believe he's even the same person, anymore.
At least, Tenma's used to there never being any warning with Pás. The hand brushing hair out of his eyes, then, is less than entirely surprising... And, as it happens, not particularly unpleasant. "Heh, I was crazy before I even met you," Tenma says with a faint chuckle. "'sides, they're pretty much nothin' in my life that isn't unhealthy."
For all her usual ferocity, Pás makes a surprisingly pliant patient. She doesn't try to brush away or twitch from Tenma's careful dressings of her wounds, which is either a sign that she trusts him that close to traumatic injury, or she's just too tired and too much in pain than she's letting on, and she really can't care to hold up all her pretenses. Maybe it's a mixture of the two. Taking her hand back, she uses the arm to help prop up her upper body, and the girl braces in time for the first initial sting of gauze getting packed against her disenfected wounds. The self-proclaimed masochist tilts her head back a bit to sigh out a windy breath.
Pain is really no fun without the adrenaline.
Either way, Tenma's light banter is a welcome distraction. Hooding her eyes, she grows a sharp smirk that eventually dulls itself down with good-humour. "Euh, these things we do jes to have little fun in our short lives," Pás replies gustily, averting her eyes to look over her fingernails. A couple are broken. Her mouth purses.
Then the Brazilian suddenly announces, "So it is war now." Her lazy smiling widens. "Psiu, and the good thing too, because I was starting to get the little bored. I will find Marisolas and get her to see you. I am thinkings it is the time us two teams become very best friends." One dark eye finds Tenma. "Yea?"
Yeah, probably a little from each column.
Still, Tenma is more skilled at first aid than one would probably expect him to be, since he is after all who he is; isn't the whole point of him having his team so that he has other people to bandage him up when he gets hurt? After all, they've got a perfectly suitable girl in the Guardian Kings to handle that sort of thing, and blah blah chauvanism blah. Blame his upbringing: Knowing how to bandage someone up is almost as important as knowing how to hurt them in the first place, to some elements of the Kiryuu family.
Mostly his mother.
"If you were that bored, you coulda just come to see me /before/ you got your ass shot up," Tenma says, possibly suggestively. But it seems that Pás is stuck on a more serious track of thought, and the Japanese youth's dark brows lift slightly at the suggestion, his dark blue eyes meeting the one the Brazilian aims his way. "We could probably do more workin' together, yeah. But don't expect us to all have a big hug party. I mean, nobody'd be able to reach Marisol's shoulders in the first place," the Gedo swordsman says, and he gestures demonstratively in front of his chest with one hand before he goes back to bandaging Pás up.
Catching the very round, very heavy, yet very firm gesture, Pás no doubt aggravates her injuries as she bursts out laughing, pressing the knuckle of one thumb against her lips to try to muffle the sound. It takes her a good several minutes to catch her breath, and her voice returns in a half-choked chortle."Sim sim sim!" she agrees fiercely, amused, her smiling taking on a distincting slant as she turns a knowing glance on Tenma, pointing a finger his way. "Putz," she asides very sagely, "but you should touch them some time." The Brazilian flicks one hand in a gourmet's dismissive wave. "They are a magnificant."
Whether it's a tease or the utmost sincerity, the trickster girl never lets on. Either way, Tenma will never live a moment without that image in his head.
Leaning back carelessly on her elbow, bare skin rasping against skin as she bends one leg up to examine the dressing around the wound on her thigh, her inky smiling never quite gone anywhere, Pás continues without warning, "It should be OK and dok-ey. She will never say, but my Marisolas respects you very much." Pás pauses. "Euh, and if you tell her I say that, she will also be wearing my head for a hat."
..What.
Tenma blinks owlishly at Pás not because she starts laughing, which she's pretty prone to doing anyway, but because of what she says /afterwards/. Not only does she suggest that he should get a handful of Marisol sometime, but she also implies that she /has/, and also, well, wow. Indeed, for a moment Tenma gawps like a fish, which is not at all his usual sort of expression, but when you consider what's probably going through his head right now, it's understandable.
He shifts uncomfortably where he crouches on the floor beside Pás.
"Uhh," says Tenma, plainly unsure what else to say about that little revelation which has caused an outbreak of teenaged libido throughout his fertile imagination, but lucky for him the Brazilian girl continues on and talks about something else. Well, something only peripherally connected to what he was thinking about, anyway.
The look Tenma gives Pás when she says Marisol /respects/ him is best described as 'dubious', but even that doesn't quite catch the specific magnitude of the expression. "Yeah, well, Red knows what she's on about most of the time, I guess," he allows, with great reluctance and charity. "I'd be more worried about that dumb German monkey of hers." You could probably compare Tenma and Marisol to oil and water; they just don't mix. The problem is that Tenma and Luc are more like oxygen and white phosphorous.
Yeah, Tenma can imagine that Pás and the always even-tempered Luc Schroedinger get along famously. The real surprise is that she hasn't given him an aneurysm by now, seriously. For a brief, negligible moment that would require some sort of advanced quantum physics-related maths to even measure, let alone relate to spans of time the human mind can comprehend, Tenma Kiryuu /almost/ feels bad for Luc.
/Almost/.
The question about Marisol gets another bewildered look from Tenma. "You must've lost more blood than I thought," he notes, when the Brazilian says that Marisol /wouldn't go and get herself into trouble/. "Anyway, where the hell are you gonna go? I dunno if Pacific is safe, and you're not in any condition to go anywhere right now, anyway." Tenma seems... Concerned? Well, he's definitely worried about Pás' well-being, though maybe that's because of the effort he invested in patching her up.
"Pou!" is all Pás has to say against Tenma's accusations of blood loss. He doesn't understand it at all! "Marisolas and I are the BFFs, yea? So," she explains very fiercely, with a wildly-pointed finger, "if she go get her /skinny half-gringa ass/ in the trouble and death, she would have told me first!" And the huffy, indignant Brazilian seems rather emphatic about that. "She would not have all the fun alone! We share much more than our thong underwears."
Marisol and Pás' dorm room must be a truly magical place.
In the meanwhile, Tenma's concern earns him a glance from her dark, ambery eyes. Pás watches him interestedly for a beat, before she glances away with a toss of one hand.
"Euhh, it safe enough," she replies dismissively, appearing less than worried. "I am very strong. But I need to find her," the Brazilian confesses more than she'd probably prefer to in a single sentence. Marisol O'Connell appears to be the first priority for Pás, a girl who has more than once proclaimed her total detachment from the rest of the world. Even though the two are about as night and day, her loyalty to that ambitious half-Spaniard is unparalleled, probably to the point that the unconcerned Brazilian girl considers her to be blood.
And as if just to affirm her own words, Pás begins to arduously rise to her own two feet, her movements stilted but not yet hopeless. She tests her weight on her leg for a moment, seems to approve of it, and starts to arch into a lazy stretch. "Shiuuuu, this is all too much work."
Actually, finding Marisol seems to have been Pás' SECOND priority, since the first thing she did was to come look for Tenma, and when she didn't find him on the Gedo grounds, to keep on searching for him. And then, of course, to tell him possible lies about her living situation with Marisol that will no doubt keep him up all night, when his wounded body could honestly use the sleep.
Thanks a /lot/.
"Yeah, you are," Tenma agrees when the Brazilian purports to be very strong, but he doesn't sound any less concerned. She got shot up looking for /him/. Maybe it would be different if it was just another one of her crazy hijinx-filled exploits, but it wasn't. So as Pás tries to rise, Tenma pushes up to his feet as well, a bit more steadily than the Brazilian can manage. "You're also dumb, though," he adds in a more dry, exasperated tone. He understands, though.
Somewhere out there, Hakuya and Kenji and Stasya are in who knows what sort of trouble. Shurui too, come to think of it. Much as Tenma wants to be out there, making sure they're all okay... He knows that right now, he wouldn't last two minutes out there. And he can't help them if he's dead. "It's not like I can stop you from goin' or whatever," he continues, dark blue eyes slowly drifting to one side, and decidedly not looking at Pás. "But be careful. I'd be upset if you got your dumb ass killed."
When it comes to the simple matter of her priorities, Pás pleads the fifth. Either way, with her being sure that Tenma isn't going to explode and choke on pieces of himself in the remnants of Gedo High's takeover, her attention has finally slipped back to her own school. With any luck, Marisol is probably still in her bed, watching Batman Begins on the widescreen they smuggled in.
Actually, if she's doing that, Pás is going to kick her ass.
Shaking out her wounded leg, and giving her bandages another cursory poke, a little bit of patching up seems to have done the Brazilian a world of good. Leaning one hand on her hip, she positively glows at Tenma's assessment of 'dumb.' "Sim, sim," Pás chirps happily, looking flattered. "Didn't you hear? I am the louco. You are not the only one with a rep, Pescador." Grinning, she slants her dark eyes his way, tilting her head to find him gazing off somewhere else. And then he tells her to be careful.
Pás considers it a moment, then reaches out to elbow him firmly in the side. It's all she has to say.
Smiling a little coyly, she begins to walk away, heading back to Tenma's bedroom window and opening it again. Pás will always be an outdoor cat. With a small grunt, she pushes herself up to sit on the sill, turning a glance over her shoulder long enough to slant him a grin. "Psiu," she calls for his attention. "If you die, I will personally write very, very embarrassing epitaph on your grave. So don't."
The Brazilian girl kisses two of her fingers and waves the hand at him. And with a wink, she's gone.
One wonders just what Tenma's taste in women says about himself as a person.
Of course, he should've guessed that Pás would take his admonishments as a compliment, but he wouldn't be Tenma Kiryuu if he didn't mouth off to people virtually without exception. Especially people who elbow him in the side; that produces another grunt from the Guardian King, who rubs his side as he watches the Brazilian make her way to the window. Under other circumstances, he'd probably be busy appreciating.
Right now, though, he can't avoid the niggling sensation of worry, gnawing away at his gut.
"Like I would," Tenma mutters to himself after Pás is gone, sitting back down on the futon and frowning at the window. Nope, he's probably not getting any more sleep tonight... For various reasons. He misses when things were simple.
Log created on 18:53:59 03/09/2009 by Tenma, and last modified on 11:44:06 03/16/2009.