Lyla has an unsettling gift for going unnoticed--it's one of her abilities, in fact, and when she wants she can move through these woods wrapped around Sobek Croix like she's not even there, with nary a sound. This morning, she's not particularly expecting any company at this hour, so the subtle camoflauge is just self-defensive instinct--usually when she comes wobbling home just after dawn, it's quiet. It gives her time to unwind, to wash the artistically exaggerated and smeared eyeliner from her face (only to reapply it more cleanly), to try to come down from whatever she'd taken the night before, and to pretend everything is fine. Because Hellsing is Hellsing, and because individuals with superior coping mechanisms are not exactly in high supply, very few people are particularly inclined to challenge her on it.
Or maybe it's the tightly closed, simmering anger that comes swinging to the surface whenever certain subjects come up.
There's an old stone bench just around an alcove of trees. She stands on the edge of it, cigarette between her lips, exhaling smoke up to the pale early-morning sky. It's not just her make-up that's a mess: everything she wears is a peculiar mix of cheap and excessive, layers of silver rosaries and bangles and rings accompanying a solitary baphomet she wears as a private ironic joke, shorts too short for pretty much anybody outside of the Vault but especially a teenage girl who still has the colty too-tall-too-skinny vestiges of adolescence to her build, accompanied by thudding black combat boots with hot-pink laces, and a leather jacket that looks like it's twice her age. Her t-shirt has holes and a dead rock star's face on it. There's glitter in her dark hair, which is in a braid that has seen better, neater, moments.
She does not, to put it mildly, really fit into Sobek Croix's somewhat pastoral environment. Neither does Mycroft, at least in her estimation--she knows he's there before he's even in her field of sight. It's the heartbeat (and the human blood). She doesn't move when he rounds the corner, initially, mentally calculating if she still looks like she's coming out of her K hole, but after a second she turns her head, like a statue of a delinquent. Her pupils are indeed a little unnaturally dilated, but she isn't visibly trembling any more, at least.
"Huh," she says, both artless and curiously elegant (possibly the latter is because of the former, and not in spite of it) when she suddenly drops down to actually sit on the bench, legs swinging, "I was wondering when I'd meet the new hire."
The rural Tennessee drawl is in full effect this morning, for the record, gilded as it is by something peculiar--specifically, the Eastern European Travellers' spin on Southern accents. Her voice is unreasonably rough for her age, like she's gone without speaking for long periods of time, both as a result of her partying the evening prior and her smoking habit.
no subject
Or maybe it's the tightly closed, simmering anger that comes swinging to the surface whenever certain subjects come up.
There's an old stone bench just around an alcove of trees. She stands on the edge of it, cigarette between her lips, exhaling smoke up to the pale early-morning sky. It's not just her make-up that's a mess: everything she wears is a peculiar mix of cheap and excessive, layers of silver rosaries and bangles and rings accompanying a solitary baphomet she wears as a private ironic joke, shorts too short for pretty much anybody outside of the Vault but especially a teenage girl who still has the colty too-tall-too-skinny vestiges of adolescence to her build, accompanied by thudding black combat boots with hot-pink laces, and a leather jacket that looks like it's twice her age. Her t-shirt has holes and a dead rock star's face on it. There's glitter in her dark hair, which is in a braid that has seen better, neater, moments.
She does not, to put it mildly, really fit into Sobek Croix's somewhat pastoral environment. Neither does Mycroft, at least in her estimation--she knows he's there before he's even in her field of sight. It's the heartbeat (and the human blood). She doesn't move when he rounds the corner, initially, mentally calculating if she still looks like she's coming out of her K hole, but after a second she turns her head, like a statue of a delinquent. Her pupils are indeed a little unnaturally dilated, but she isn't visibly trembling any more, at least.
"Huh," she says, both artless and curiously elegant (possibly the latter is because of the former, and not in spite of it) when she suddenly drops down to actually sit on the bench, legs swinging, "I was wondering when I'd meet the new hire."
The rural Tennessee drawl is in full effect this morning, for the record, gilded as it is by something peculiar--specifically, the Eastern European Travellers' spin on Southern accents. Her voice is unreasonably rough for her age, like she's gone without speaking for long periods of time, both as a result of her partying the evening prior and her smoking habit.
Hellsing has quite the motley crew in its employ.