multiversallogs | ( closed ) when we die, i believe we go to a better place; no where.

Who: "Vanessza Bernát" and Jason Todd
What: Winning friends and influencing people.
Where: Benny's apartment in Syriac Well.
When: Vaguely nowish.
Notes: JILLI AND I HAVE BEEN REALLY EXCITED ABOUT THIS, IT'S KIND OF PATHETIC.
Warnings: Threats of medically expert violence, discussion of alarming things, specifics to follow when the thread progresses.

She takes her shoes off outside the apartment.

It means she's quieter when she comes inside, slipping the door open and closed again with so-gentle hands, stocking-feet and carpet and experience, the kind that means she already knows there's someone inside who shouldn't be. She can hear him in the next room (the scrape of the entrance to the crawl space, that's going to be a problem) and she makes a decision without breaking stride, a side-trip into the spare room for syringe, pulling the cap off the needle with her teeth as she keeps moving.

The apartment is too cramped for the sword and he's between her and the crossbow. It wouldn't have been ideal, anyway.

While there are worse ways to be greeted by a woman than her hand on your inner thigh, Jason would be forgiven for preferring some of them to the prick of a syringe through his jeans and a (mostly) French accent floating up with her perfume (Guerlain, Shalimar, he probably saw the bottle while he was going through her things): “An air embolism is not a fool-proof method of killing someone. An artery is almost ideal, but how much air is needed and what it will actually do to your body, these things, they vary. If I don't care for your explanation -- and you will give me an explanation -- then you and I, we will play the odds. Regardless of whether you live or die, it will not be pleasant. Am I understood?”

(She sounds like she's talking to a patient.)

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Accepting it with a brief glance at the number written (she'll commit that to memory, later), Benevenuta holds the paper between two fingers and taps it absently on the island before she folds it neatly in half, pinches the edge with her nails and tears along it to trade him back her own CiD number with the pen from her pocket. It's readily available on the cohort network, but even so.

The small smile she offers him, polite but not insincere, is more or less the same expression that appears in a number of photographs from her suitcase, beneath blonde pin curls and a dark red bouffant and long, straight center-parted hair with oversized white-rimmed sunglasses. Unchanged and always changing; immovable. Incongruously with that impression, the expression peels back the weight of experience that she'd let herself wear for the conversation-- all at once she's only Vanessza Bernát, twenty-something Parisien doctor with a bleeding heart and quiet lifestyle.

“I will forward you my new address,” she says, use the goddamn door next time implied with figurative underlining. “There's an apartment at ground level with more space.”

It'll be more convenient, for numerous reasons; she'd been planning the move already, but 'I hate other people knowing where my things are' is sufficient impetus to move it up.

( closed ) when we die, i believe we go to a better place; no where.

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