ripples in the ocean (open post)

[nishizono]

Who: tetora nishizono & (open)
When: fluid
Where: generally the ingress complex
What: when you miss your band of misfits from home, you end up with some pretty bad decision-making.
Warnings: PG-13 language

a) chicken scratch
He hasn't learned to write.

This is an interesting realization to come to when up in space, and a pretty frustrating truth to come to terms with. The facts haven't changed since his "awakening" - he's a delinquent raised in thinly disguised captivity, and when he's not being poorly managed, he's skipping out on basic education to murder politicians. Kind of hard to fit maths and basic kanji in a schedule like that.

Which is why he's sprawled out on the floor with a cheap notebook and fat marking pen, struggling with his own name. He's written it before. He can spell it out with the English alphabet. Ironically, pinpointing the locks and buttons that isolate him from - well, himself - also means he's not accessing the wealth of information the identities have made easy for him to use. Add that to the list of fuck-ups, he thinks wryly to himself. Writing is hard.

"Hey!" He calls out at the first humanoid-shaped thing that crosses his peripheral vision, ever the rude person that he is. "Do you know Japanese?"

b) drop the beats
Rigging up a mixing console from scratch is exactly as tedious as it sounds. Relearning the technical parts took the better part of a handful of months, and in the end Tetora's only managed to build a bass-treble amplifier, with a switchboard for mono and stereo audio channels. There isn't even a panning slider, or a reverb unit; just switches from option A to option B, some volume controls.

He's stupidly proud about himself for something so basic, though. He loves music. Whether or not Lucy Monostone has anything to do with it is a can of worms he's not going to acknowledge, but for all it's worth Tetora knows he's always going to be captivated by music no matter where he goes. He doesn't know how to play any instruments, or maybe one of his versions did and kept it to themselves, but Tetora had inherited Ooe's skillsets and nurtured it whenever he got the chance. Just like he's doing now.

The growing collection of handmade tools are scattered around him on the long bench he's commandeered for his work. Screws, wire clippers, a soldering gun running on batteries and held together by tape. If anything, Tetora's been resourceful.

Unfortunately, he also only has two hands. He looks up and stares at the first person he catches staring back, before asking (somewhat politely): "Wanna hold this?"

C) make your own adventure
[ Leave a prompt for him, anything goes. ]

Comments

[warandpeace]

"Sometimes. I lived in Central America and thought that Colombian coffee was the best. The real stuff, not what they sell in America in cans." He accepts the idle conversation, his travels really being useful for this.

"I like a lot of different teas, too. I wish I had access to half the supplies I wanted. I'd make sure people could try all kinds of food that I've gotten the chance for. When I was in Somalia I learned to make the flatbread that lets you scoop up food in handfuls." He makes motions with his hands, indicating what he means.

Things that he did in wartorn lands that didn't involve shooting.

When they get closer to his apartment, he can already guess that he won't be judged by Tetora. It's a bland place he opens the door too, clinically white walls with the occasional furniture scuff, a kitchen table lined with Kaz's paperwork, a bookcase not even half filled, and two dogs. Both look up. One is a beige husky who warbles happy husky noises as she happily lopes over to her owner, and the other is a wolf-dog with one eye and an eyepatch.

An actual eyepatch.

[nishizono]

What the fuck.

Between the food talk and the lessons and the ride down, Tetora's gotten a loose feeling around the shoulders that's dangerously reminiscent to safety. Watching Miller gesture through his spoken experiences is a small, not-entirely-guilty pleasure he's not indulged in for quite a while now. The man moves his hands, speaks with them, and Tetora guesses at the shape of the stories he's hearing - if the air was quiet, if the sun beat on Miller's back like a friend instead of an enemy, if the water ran clean instead of bloody.

But now there's a dog with an honest to God eyepatch in front of him, and Tetora thinks this must be what love at first sight is like.

"Holy..." He sounds awestruck, even to his own ears. Tetora turns, drops an actual kiss on the head of Miller's beige furry child - with a quick hug, not minding any possible dog bites caused by surprise - then falls to his knees after a few steps forward, hands held out to the wolf-dog. Look, okay - he knows what it's like to have eye problems. People he can't relate to on an intimate level, he even has trouble empathizing with most of them, but animals are easy. Animals understand captivity.

Dogs in particular understand what leashes mean.

[warandpeace]

DD is much more well behaved than Mama, wagging his tail and going for face licks as she's doing her damndest to wiggle against his arm for attention, dancing from foot to foot. Both pretty good dogs.

Kaz walks by them to put his things down. To hang his coat up and do all the normal things that strangely domestic people do. There are hints of their military nature around: some books on the bookshelf about military history, a single clip on the kitchen table among all the reciepts, a few pictures of soldiers among Venom Snake's photo collage.

At least one of the dogs isn't especially well trained.

"I think they like you."

this isn't done don't tag it yet

[nishizono]

"I like them too," he almost laughs, as Mama sits on his arm and gives him a cowlick. DD is patiently sitting for his turn, panting quietly, and his saliva is staining on Tetora's shirt. He's flat on his back on the floor, two large dogs having toppled him over as they lick his face and sniff at his neck. Tetora, with his arms loosely wrapped around a dog each, is completely at ease with the canines stepping all over him.

He feels peaceful. Something like... happy.

This could be something to get used to. Having-- not friends, exactly, but people he could consider for it. People who have lives not viciously intertwined with the violence of his own. Separate personalities from the ones in his head, and completely removed from the drama of it too. Miller - and Snake, too - are two men who have lived, the pictures of their day-to-day lives full of the minutiae of their personal histories.

It's a sobering thought. Tetora can hardly present any one thing for a history.

"Where do they sleep?"

I will assume you are done now probably maybe sorta

[warandpeace]

"Wherever they want to. Sometimes the bed. Sometimes the floor. Sometimes the couch. Sometimes directly under my feet while I'm cooking- that one is mostly the husky. DD is better behaved."

Kaz watches the kid react to the dogs like someone who's never played with an animal before in his life. It's endearing.

It's unfortunate he doesn't say his thoughts, or Venom Snake doesn't say his. Because those pictures are memories, traces of experiences that happen from day to day and that he wants to keep with him. A life he's having to rebuild from scratch. He could convince Tetora to keep his own pictures, his own memories.

As it is, they just exist from place to place, marking this little cutout in the city as their home.

i just realized i forgot to remove the disclaimer aaaaa

[nishizono]

"The husky's Mama," he reiterates the name Miller had given him, while the dog perks at her name and... sits on Tetora' face. Well, rests her haunches on Tetora's shoulder, really, but she's a big dog. It's a lot of fur. DD, for his part, has opted to split his attentions between the young man and the erstwhile guardian; DD's behavior training shines through in his patience.

"Good dogs," Tetora hums in what he thinks is a low volume. "You're good guys."

There's a few minutes' silence as he lounges on the floor with the canines, but after a while Tetora's body demands for him to move for circulation's sake. Now having pushed himself up to sit cross-legged on the carpeted floor, Tetora eyes the room's furnishings properly. The picture it makes - hah - is fairly domestic, yes. But it's a domesticity that feels new; like it's been lived in before it was acknowledged. A residential chicken-and-egg situation.

Tetora nods at some of the pictures. "Who else do you have on those? Other than the two of you."

[warandpeace]

"I didn't know what else to name her. When I got her she was pregnant. So when she had the puppies, I just called her 'Mama' and it stuck. We were on the ship then and I was the only one taking care of them, so I carried them in a laundry basket from place to place."

Mama still acts like her name, too, just as fussy as Miller in checking over people.

This by far isn't all their pictures, but Kaz starts to point at soldiers and list their names. Most of them sort of silly, too. Sly Iguana did this or Rogue Bison did that. "This is Link. I took care of him for a while on the ship." He points to a boy with pointed ears and a very serious expression. "This is my 39th birthday. This is Bucky Barnes. Kid from World War II. A friend of mine.

"I think he died when our ship crashed."

Bucky, Big Boss, and Kaz had been something of their own family unit and he'd loved it. Their own little silly military sanctuary in space. But Big Boss had died, then Bucky. And he'd lost his illusion of a family again. One more time. Bucky doesn't look much older than Tetora, actually, in the photo. No more than a couple of years.

The pause lingers, before he points out a couple of more pictures. "These are from planets we went to. And that's an asshole." He points at Ocelot.

Just ignore him. He's biased heavily against him.

[nishizono]

He has to lean over a little to see some of the photos put up, and Tetora can't stop snickering at some of the names he hears. They're pretty ridiculous on the whole, as are the stories attached to each name and face. It all sounds like a great adventure, the way Miller talks about them, but Tetora understands that these are the glass-covered versions of the reality - a little refraction here, a bit of censorship there, make the whole display a little more palatable to protect the truths lying prone behind the glass.

Tetora doesn't have any inclination for that sort of thing, personally, but he understands it. Kitou would love this moment, though - character development at its finest. Caption it with this: "Teen psycho develops some empathy."

"Sorry for your loss," Tetora murmurs awkwardly, uncertain about the tone to use when the mention of recently-deceased close persons is brought up. He has no attachments to the names Miller recounts, but he's also aware that this is a fairly intimate admission from the man.

He can, at least, take after Miller's cue about assholes. Those are easy to run with. "That's a really big asshole, though."

[warandpeace]

There are lots of hidden truths that he's honor bound not to reveal. But there's also blatant truths he bares unabashedly, and for once he seems incredibly proud of these men. Every last strangely named one. They're his. They're his family. Even if he knows he'll have to leave them behind one day.

"Thanks," he says in regards to the condolences but doesn't dwell. Bucky was a soldier and knew the risks. The loss is saddening, but it's not a whole base worth of people that he was meant to be responsible for. Bucky Barnes had been his own man. A young man, yes, but his own man.

"And he is. I worked with him for a long time. We don't get along."

Which is to put it lightly. He'd probably never recover from the guilt and rage left over from the MSF base, but he thinks that his life might have ended up a little better if Ocelot hadn't got involved. At least moderately.

He gestures over to where the dog food is kept. "Come on, I'll show you how much to feed them."

[nishizono]

Awkwardness seemingly glossed over, Tetora makes the effort to get back up on his feet - easier now that the mention of food seems to have caught both dogs' attention, the two walking back and forth in poorly concealed interest. DD's a little more subtle about it with his slow-wagging tail, while Mama's perked ears leave nothing to doubt.

Tetora pats both on their flanks, runs his nails along both dogs' backs all the way up to the crown of their heads. He's mentally calculating how much weight either dog carries, and if he can lift at least one of them up. For exercise. Maybe. He has badly hidden motives for the dogs and he's sure Miller's picked up on it the minute his back hit the carpet earlier.

Folloing Miller over is easy enough, at least; the dogs don't get in the way much, though they bump against Tetora's legs. It's fairly unavoidable when they're both of a large breed. "How often do I feed them?"