river_meimei | (no subject)

(no subject)

[Immediately after this:]

Duo is hurrying down the hallway towards room 121, pulling River along with him with one hand closed gently around her arm. She's starting to stumble a little, but keeping pace. He gets to watch where they're going for the both of them, though; her gaze darts around, never quite settling, and her jaw is clenched as tight as her shoulders and the tendons on the backs of her hands.

Her white face is tight with fury, but there are tears on her cheeks now.

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"Is it quieter up here, away from people?"

Pause.

"...when I'm not talking, anyway?" Should he leave her alone?

River's chin lifts in the start of a nod, and pauses. She nods again, more surely.

"Should I shut up and leave you be?"

River is silent for a moment, head bowed.

Then she shakes her head, a little -- the motion small, but faintly frustrated. "Not the point. It's qualitative."

"You're okay."

"If you say so." He is touched, actually!

"You wanna stay up here for a while, then?"

"What we do," River whispers to the far wall. "Khef and ka. Hold it together." Tears glitter in her eyes, and smear messily across her cheeks, but she's not quite crying any more. "It's the job." She swallows.

And nods, just a little.

"I get ya," he says. "Sometimes it's a lousy job. Go on, use that. I didn't give it to you so you could leak all over yourself."

He digs around on the shelf under the bedside table for a moment before coming up with a sharpie and a pad of paper. "Why don't you show me what you were working on before we got interrupted?"

Distraction is a go.

"It's not relevant." Whether this means the lousiness or the handkerchief is unclear.

Or the sharpie, for that matter.

"You were the one who was getting all fired up about theory, earlier. C'mon, what if I forgot how to calculate my next trajectory? At least I could follow along in the notes."

Duo gets a Look. It is a Look that says, you are being ridiculous on purpose now, and you know it, doofus.

But, hey, she's looking at him instead of the middle distance!

Of course he is, this is his clever strategy. See? It worked.

"Yeeees?" He waggles the marker at her.

"Won't forget."

If he does, he has bigger problems than needing to follow River's notes. (Especially since half of them are in chalk on the bar floor, unless they're already getting cleaned up by sleep-deprived Oompa Loompas.)

That's not precisely a refusal, though.

"Well okay, no. Probably not." She's got him there. "But it was a purely hypothetical situation. See? Theory came in useful after all. You were right."

He gets the face again! This time it has shades of I am not a moron either.

But she also reaches for the pen, reluctantly.

"Your subtlety is flawed," she informs him.

"I try and worry about subtle on occasions where it'll actually help," Duo tells her."Unless you'd rather play tic-tac-toe, show me what you got."

This will keep them busy for a while. He'll sneak back down and see if the bar has emptied out any later.

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