multiversallogs | i heard that you like the bad girls, honey, is that true?

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i heard that you like the bad girls, honey, is that true?

Who: Ilde & Ivan
What: They aren't avoiding one another.
Where: Sonja and llde's villa.
When: After this conversation.
Notes: Anna helpfully gave me blanket permission to have Angus saunter in and out of Ilde's logs and threads as I please.
Warnings: Mentions of (someone else's) suicide attempts.

Giving Ivan her address is less of a conscious act of trust than it is a conscious desire not to trek halfway across the city if she can make him come to her instead; if she thought about it she'd probably say that she trusts Ivan to act in Ivan's own best interests, and she's more confident than Cindy likes that she can accurately keep track of what those are. They've long since passed the point where she feels obliged to justify it in her own head, a detail that she occasionally takes out and examines to no satisfying end. She's used to him, now - it's convenient to her that he continues to be around, and it'd annoy her if he wasn't. Most of the time, he is around, she's not annoyed (at him- well, usually-), and it's not something that she's required to examine.

The cruorvore population in the city just dropped by sixty percent overnight. It's all right to have been a little concerned about what might have happened. She hasn't heard from Katherine yet, either, and that's a nagging worry in her mind that's a bit less complicated.

"It's normal to be concerned about people you know," she informs Angus, scooping him up in her arms with apparent unconcern for whether or not Sonja (who may or may not be home) overhears her talking to the cat that keeps letting himself into their house whenever he spies a window open or a door ajar. "I'm not the one being weird in this scenario." The scenario where she's talking to a cat about relationship drama she isn't having? Totally not weird. A pause. "Don't look at me like that."

Carrying him downstairs against her chest, Ilde waits until she's all the way down the front steps before she sets him down (to better avoid being immediately followed back inside). "Get," she says, succinctly, if fondly. "You don't live here."

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"Canny." He'd suspected he hadn't ended up at her house completely by chance. "We both looked like shit for a bit after that, frankly."

"She's ordinarily much better looking than you," she says, in an exceedingly reasonable tone of voice. "It was more noteworthy."

Crossing her ankles, she leans back against the arm of the sofa and sighs out smoke, thinking her way through this evening and the rest of her night. It feels a little odd, all told, and the sensation of not being entirely sure what she's doing is- irritating. Most things that she isn't sure about are irritating, if only because that's the easiest way of classifying them.

"Plans to start shagging her instead?" he asked, exhaling a jet of smoke. He's not sure what to make of how little she seems to care about his loss of control. It isn't what he expected.

It isn't - or it isn't exactly - that she doesn't care. It's certainly not that she doesn't find it unsettling, or worrying, or (to go in a different direction entirely) an offensive violation of the control and choices of a lot of different people in and outside of Mafaton. Ivan included.

But it's hard to react. It's hard to know what the right reaction is; it's hard not to sit there thinking how am I supposed to feel. Ilde is quiet when things go wrong, and she's quiet when things aren't going wrong because she's not used to that and quiet is safer. Be still, and let them see nothing, because it's not for anybody else. It's too much; withdraw.

The deaths seem abstract, and she thinks she can get used to anything, but maybe this isn't being used to, maybe the inability to cope has become an unwillingness to- to something. She doesn't know, and it's all there, and what she says is: "Were you going to kill me?"

Which has nothing to do with whether or not she'd fuck Njoki.

He considers her question, seriously, for a moment. "I wasn't in any state to think about it consciously," he says, finally, more or less honest. "If I'd gotten to you, then yes, probably. I doubt I'd have been able to help myself."

Ivan pauses, then adds, "If you'd let me, I'd probably have recruited you. But if not, then yes. At the risk of being a cliche, your blood is draw, but even if you were human, I'd probably have tried to kill you." And very possibly succeeded.

"I don't know how that would work," she says, critically, before she's properly thought her way through- Anna is the closest she can imagine, and Anna's something else entirely.

It isn't immediately relevant, though. It isn't why she asked.

"I don't either. At the time, I doubt I'd have cared." He'd have still just been reacting.

"Regardless. I don't know if that's the right answer, but it's an honest one."

Ilde isn't entirely sure she asked the right question (it doesn't occur to her that there might not be a right question), but she tilts her head and taps ash off into the tray on the coffee table instead of saying so. Somewhere, there is the right thing to do here, and she will figure it out. Eventually.

In the meantime, she's used to him being around. She doesn't want to spend time getting used to him not being around. It's soothingly simple when she puts it like that.

"I don't like to be lied to," she says, after a moment, so there's that in favour of honesty.

"More people do than think they do." But he agrees that she doesn't seem to be one of them.

"Hunger is what defines me, Ilde. That is always true, bad blood or not. It just took the rules within which I operate away."

"'Just' is an odd word for taking away someone's control without their knowledge or consent." The matter of fact way she approaches this is self-protective; how she feels about any given thing will never be how she comes to a discussion. It's not anyone's concern but hers, no matter what the subject actually is.

She watches her cigarette burn down, a little, and pushes her lower lip up against her teeth. After a beat, "I know what you are."

"You know," he said, "but you haven't seen. I doubt I've seen you either, properly, sometimes." He doesn't sound troubled by that, exactly, but they're skirting closer to sensitive topics than they usually do.

"Probably not," she concedes, which has as much to do with Ilde's general feeling that most people don't see and she prefers it that way, as a rule, as it does to do with anything else. For all her frankness, she keeps her prized privacy safe in the self-contained way she meanders through the world, watching more than touching. It gets her into different kinds of trouble, mostly, and leaves her blind to the people who see more than she's aware she's showing.

"Aren't we just a matched set?" he asks, with a quiet, twisted smile.

"Are we?" Ilde returns, more thoughtful. It's disconcerting to find yourself in the midst of relationship drama when you weren't entirely cognizant of the fact you are, in fact, in a relationship. She's not sure when that happened, although in fairness she's still not entirely sure that it did- maybe she's overthinking it. Again.

It wouldn't be the first time. It's something she does.

"In some ways, at least." He leaned back. "Does it bother you, that we talk relatively little?"

He would have guessed no, but he's not taking it for granted at the moment.

"We do talk." Just not a lot, and not often about subjects of any personal significance- Ilde would make an argument about the political and personal, but that's still not exactly the point of the question he's asking her.

"We do," he conceded. "Some. But I was just curious as to whether it bothered you."

"I don't have much to say." ...flatly untrue, albeit not an intentional lie. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that she doesn't think a lot of what crosses her mind is really worth sharing with anyone else. "I thought if you wanted to tell me things, then you would."

And if he didn't want to, he wouldn't, and she wouldn't ask. Logic.

"Aren't you the most practical little thing. Could I do anything that would fuss you even slightly?" He was beginning to doubt it. Get caught in a lie, maybe.

"Yes." Is she going to tell him what that might be? No? Well, god forbid he interpret it as a suggestion. She studies him after that inquiry, curling her toes against the side of his leg, trying to think - just for the sake of argument - of what he could do that would bother her. The list is shorter than it should be, admittedly, but at least it isn't non-existent.

"I don't mind being used to you," she says, finally, sliding her thumbnail against her fingertips.

"That's terribly generous," he says with a smile. "I'm very touched."

He could make some guesses about what might bother her, but he didn't care to do so, at the moment. He'd rather sit here with her toes curled against him, watching her think.

"Cynthia thought you might've hurt me," she says, reflectively, which isn't exactly what they're talking about now- but expecting her conversation to be entirely linear at all times is expecting a little much.

"Yes, I gathered. You do have a worryingly lax sense of self-preservation." He thinks it only fair to point out.

This is not the first time someone has made that observation, and it probably won't be the last - namely because it's true, she does. It's always been true, in fact, since long before Prometheus wrenched her life so thoroughly off-course, and she's not sure whether it's that she used to be better at hiding it (which is true of a lot of things, frankly) or that it's just more apparent in the situations she never before had the opportunity to put herself in.

Six of one, half a dozen of the other.

"I'm not dead yet," she says, blandly.

"It's alright," he says, darkly comic. "I've died enough for both of us."

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