you don't fit.

[Éva]
Thu 18:54 EDT "...community leaders in Florida are leading protests against the FCAT, calling on Governor Bush to place a moratorium on the FCAT and asking him to base graduation requirements on grades and attendance and other factors. Curry and other civil rights leaders are calling for a boycott of Florida products..."

News drones quietly from the stereo in the second floor flat. Pleasant voices, unpleasant words, soothingly delivered at the top of every hour. Éva pays it little attention at the moment. It's nothing, now, she had not heard earlier. She will need to wait for the local news at 11 to see the press coverage of the sentencing hearing she handled this afternoon. She'll need to wait for the morning to learn whether the Judge will take the jury's recommendation: death.

Distracted, abstracted, another man's life and death dancing at the edges of her mind. He sat stonily through the proceedings while his mother, behind them, collapsed into a quiet storm of weeping. Éva could hear the woman's breathing, irregular and heavy, but could not turn around. There was nothing she could say, anyway. She knew this was coming from the first.

Now, five hours after the Judge banged her gavel, one hour after she left the office (four hours of frantic phone calls to the prosecutor, her defense investigator, others, 11th hour pleas for mercy, the usual, offering life without parole in exchange for a cessation of all appeals), she's home.

The wide bank of windows are thrown open to the dying rays of the setting sun. They paint the room in reds and oranges, long fingers of the last rays of brilliant light. Her coffee table is covered with pointless notes and strategies (she knew this was coming. She knows what tomorrow will bring. What tomorrow always brings, some strange double helix of relief and frustation and sometimes, impotent rage.) but she stands at the windows, watching the sun die, knowing that the sun will return tomorrow, ignoring the background noise.

"...Capito says that the Geneva Conventions make clear that any state that tortures prisoners of war..."

Santiago]
Thu 18:54 EDT Her doorbell clangs through the old, open flat, doubtlessly jarring her out of [morbid] thought and back to reality. Outside she'll find the Forseti from the Pine Barrens, neat and comfortable in his old clothes, the faded jeans and the sturdy cotton shirts.

And his black eyes, boring holes through wood and steel.

"Kinwoman," he greets her, courteously enough, removed a distance perhaps. Then he hands her something - a grocery bag with a square object inside. Strawberries. Like for like.

[Éva]
Thu 19:01 EDT Though she has changed out of her court clothes (dry cleaning is expensive, particularly for someone living on a state salary), her hair is still pulled up and back, thick dark locks piled into a prim twist. Dark eyes flicker down to his hand, and her brows rise above the dark frames of her glasses in mild surprise.

"Thank you." It's a moment before she reacts, a moment before she reaches for the grocery bag bag, crooking her fingers to catch the handles and stepping back from the door. Her brows draw together, a sketch of a frown that finds no purchase on her mouth as she opens the plastic and glances inside. Over the curve of her shoulder, a glance toward the living room, "Come in?"

[Santiago]
Thu 19:05 EDT "Thank you."

Stepping so sedately over her threshold, it's hard to reconcile this man with the same half-bare savage that had half beat down her door and then murdered a man in her sight with terrifying and practiced speed. Aloofness. Carelessness, almost - but not quite.

He shuts the door behind himself. "Should I lock it?" fingers on the lock.

[Éva]
Thu 19:12 EDT "I think - " her mouth curves wry, and her voice is quiet and dry. He is not - they are not - creatures she can easily reconcile under any circumstances. " - I think that's not something I need to worry about in present company."

The city is spread out beneath her windows, or what remains of it. This neighborhood was once genteel, but is now in the midst of a long, slow slide to oblivion. She catches a glimpse of the high-rise HUD housing eight blocks away and her mouth tightens minutely. "Nevertheless, that would probably be wise." Her door is never unlocked. When he thinks to knock, he hears the locks tumble, two, three, four, and the chain pulled back, before the door is opened. Always.

Poised in the midst of the controlled chaos of her living room, she turns back toward him, the plastic grocery bag swinging against her thigh. After a moment's hesitation, she asks, "Can I get you anything?"

[Santiago]
Thu 19:18 EDT He looks at her for a minute. Then the goatee parts in a slight smile. He locks the door behind his back, the locks clicking home one, two, three, four.

The chain he leaves swinging. A shake of his head to her question. "I'm fine, thank you. You'll want to put those away in the refrigerator." It may be a second before she realizes he means the strawberries; his eyes don't leave her face. "I'll wait."

[Éva]
Thu 19:27 EDT "Yes, of course." Her reply comes quietly and automatically, without immediate understanding. Like most kin of her tribe, even in semi-exile here on the fringes of nowhere, she is a good soldier. They are used to taking orders.

His eyes on her face, her eyes on his - though never, ever, quite on his own eyes - it takes her unmoving moment to process the statement and glance down, abruptly, at the bag in her hand. Some small smile, then, brief and faintly rueful twists across her mouth as she lifts the bag in acknowledge and murmurs another of course beneath the cusp of her breath.

From the kitchen, moments later, "The information you wanted is in the red folder on the credenza by the door. It's really only what I expected."
The fridge wooshes open, then closed. The crackle of plastic, the low hum of the compressor, the subtle sounds of movement as she pauses there to gather herself. Éva is used to being the disconcerting one.

[Santiago]
Thu 19:34 EDT Disconcerting.

That's one way to put him. The desert-cat ease and silence of motion. The absolutely surety and self-possession of the man, as though nothing, nothing, could ever possibly faze him. And death was the least of the issues on that list.

He lifts the red folder from the credenza and pages through it. Sheafs of legalese annotated by her neat hand. He's glad for the notes. Otherwise it would be utterly incomprehensible. It came down to a brief and clear story, though: the Boy Scouts couldn't pay their taxes, and Endron bought it a year ago.

Santiago makes a note to himself to ask if it is possible to taint a building so thoroughly in the space of a year.

"Thank you," he says again, and shuts the folder. "Let me know if you find a link between Endron Oil and the laboratories."

[Éva]
Thu 19:50 EDT She has appeared at the entrance to the kitchen again, and now leans against the door frame, one shoulder, one neat hip. Ice cubes clink and crankle as they swim in her glass of ice water, held awkwardly against her body. She has been studying him while he reads, dark eyes framed by dark plastic frames that interrupt the smooth floor of her features and force one to focus not on her as a whole, as a thing, but individually, a deconstructed subject.

From where he stands, he can see her suit jacket tossed over the arm of the sofa, her shoulder holster discarded on the coffee table, obscured by the sheafs of paper tossed messily about, should he care to look.

He does not fit the casual surroundings, the framed posters - Ansel Adams, Gustav Klimt, Picasso - or the few oils or watercolors she purchased over the years as a favor to a struggling artist-friend from college, from her practice. He does not fit the room, with its pastels and its wide windows and their wavey, antique glass. He is a thing apart. If he catches her watching him, watching him read, she does not look away, though she does look just down, from his eyes to some indefinite point on his face below them.

"I'll do a corporate search and see what I can find out." She remarks in reply, after a moment. "I'll let you know."

[Santiago]
Thu 19:57 EDT And he does, of course, look at her. Keen as his own sight is, he cannot help but notice when another watches him, studyingly, trying perhaps to fit him in somehow in a room in which he does not, will never, fit into.

He fits the raw austerity of his Barrens home. He fits the wilderness. He fits, above all things, the wide flat expanses of the desert that always echo on in his blood; the sound of the wind on a silent night, the burn of the stars like pinpricks leaking sunshine. He fits these things, but not the quite cluttered comfort of her home.

His stare is not challenging, but it is direct, unwavering, unreadable, and discomfiting. "What are you thinking?" he asks her, and it is all the more so.

[Éva]
Thu 20:05 EDT The question takes her aback, and this shows. Her mouth opens, no sound comes, and closes again, melding into another precise, wry half-smile.

"You don't fit," a moment later, ice cubes clink in the glass as she lifts it in an expressive gesture. The evening. The settled living room, the walls she painted when she moved in two years ago, the quiet drone of a cooking show on NPR for background noise. "That's all."

[Santiago]
Thu 20:09 EDT Perhaps the question amuses him. At least, it makes him smile faintly. His black eyes rove the room slowly before they return to bear on her. "In here?" - gently, as though poking fun.

[Éva]
Thu 20:13 EDT His black eyes rove the room. Her brow eyes follow the track of his gaze, and she may well wonder what he sees. She may well see it as though alien, for those few moments.

"In here," she confirms. Then, shifting against the door frame enough to uncurl her free hand, she taps her temple with her index finger. "In here, too."

[Santiago]
Thu 20:16 EDT At this, his lips part in a brief grin, though not a quick one. "Why not?" A tap of his own temple. "In here, I mean."


[Éva]
Thu 20:26 EDT "I don't - " she stops, midsentence, quietly shaking her head. The answer I don't know seems false, somehow. Despite the reputation of her profession, falsehoods sit strange on her shoulders, squirm for correction. "It's not easy to articulate. One spends one's time in that world," a quiet incline of her head toward the windows, the dying city, the sky beyond, "drowning in that world, swimming in that world, but carries another around, too. Inexplicable as that world is, cause and effect seems to have a closer relationship than they do in this one. Reason, even unreason, is explicable.

"Also - " another quick grin, pressed tight across her mouth. " - I can't tell what you're thinking. Even if I could guess, I suspect I still wouldn't understand."

[Santiago]
Thu 20:33 EDT A pause. "I am thinking..." another. Faint frown; he looks out the window in a belated echo of her indication of such. The sunset is washing from the sky, red and gold into purple and blue and black. The stars are beginning to shine.

"...that it must be rather something to know you as a friend. But then, neither of us seem the type to befriend easily." He tucks the folder under his arm, then, having never entered more than five feet into her personal domain. "I think I should leave you to your peace now, kinwoman. And by the way," a nod to the papers scattered on her coffee table, "I was sorry to hear of your loss."

[Éva]
Thu 20:46 EDT Mmmph. Wordless agreement offered in echo of his statement. He has entered no more than five feet into her home; she has retreated to the most distant perimeter of that space.

"We didn't have a chance." The gesture is caught in her peripheral vision, for her eyes remain on his face. Ice clinks a discordant, pretty little cord against glass as she shifts position minutely, once more.

"Don't be sorry, Santiago." Her smile has another cast to it now, an echo of the sorrow like the shadows that linger after dawn. "It's better this way. Had we prevailed, you would have passed sentence on your own."

She pauses, then, and the smile fades to nothing. Nothing at all. "Good night, Eyes-Like-Flint."

[Santiago]
Thu 20:52 EDT No acquiesence. No denial. Neither is needed when she found the truth on her own. He merely inclines his head to her, and then reaches behind him to unlock the doors. One, two, three, four.

"Goodnight, Ms. Illeshazy."

And the door closes softly behind him, leaving her to lock it again, and bar it, bolt it, lock it and chain it against the darkness outside.