Teeth Trees

There was a childhood with a father, and all her brothers to keep her safe. Her babushka always there to keep them warm, and fed, and happy. But that was gone by the time she'd turned eighteen -- earlier, really. And one does not spend months living out of a car without learning a thing or two about survival.

Granted, she is not a Russian winter. She is not made up of scars, bad blood, and ice. Still, there's blood on her hands all the same.  So maybe Wren isn't as tough as she could be. She is tough enough.]

I'm sure of it.

She sets his teeth on edge, a kind of buzzing in his jaw that feels dangerous. He’d been rebellious to a fault, before the world had ended. Getting into trouble, his actions hollow and meaningless because they didn’t bring him any joy, they just brought his parents pain. He’d wanted to hurt them. He was selfish, he was bratty. But he still thinks they deserved it.

His rebellion has quieted here. No one’s wronged him. And he doesn’t want his freedom taken away. More than anything else, he thinks, he fears ending up in a cell. Fears  having his position taken away from him slightly less. Because he never could have predicted it, but he doesn’t know how he’d be able to carry on if he didn’t have the escape of an ocean breeze on his face, the ability to close his eyes and let himself remember another place, another time. Something simple, something happy. He’d never thought his past had much worth clinging to, but here he is.

He crosses his arms against the urge to fidget. It isn’t his, it’s hers, like the tapping of her feet has vibrated through the ground and into his limbs. When he speaks, he’s joking, voice too dry to be mistaken for anything else.] You could always kill someone, get yourself bumped right up to security class 3. Voila, permanence. 

What kind of idiot admits she has a body count? Especially one that she's all but gotten away with by this point? There's no glory in giving that up. No satisfaction in watching the new squirm. Just the resounding emptiness left where the secret once lived, and the consequences that come with the truth.

Instead Wren wills her response focus on her first few months in the colony. The days spent put somewhere 'safe' for getting just a little too rough with the people around her. If you asked her, it hadn't been too rough. It had been just the right amount of nails and teeth and blood to get the message across.

To make sure she wasn't considered an object.]

I don't think I'm looking to make quite so big a commitment. I've already done enough to that effect.

Sometimes other people’s feelings are like a flash, sometimes they sit on him like a clinging film, but sometimes they feel like they’re at home in his skin, hard to separate. He pulls on the thread, untangles it from the knot of his own emotions and follows it to its source, finding her there a moment before she speaks.]

And what kind of trouble are we looking for?

Wren shifts her body in her chair, half torn between leaning back and leaning forward. Her feet tap out of time rhythms to the floor, and it's like the world has somehow only slowed further. The air is too stagnant, and it eats away at what composure she can pull out of herself. 

She finally shifts her eyes over to him, and it's not an unfamiliar face, even if she doesn't fully know him. She's seen him once or twice in the halls, maybe. But Wren thinks he may just have one of those faces.]

Because it's not like I have any idea what direction to take that at the moment.

[That's probably the real downfall to her particular brand of restlessness. It's indecisive, aimless.]

Alien isn't quite the right word, I don't think. Does Russian really sound that strange to you? I mean, the rest was just English. I really can't help you if you're stuck there.

Questionable choices are like her lifeblood. They're the air she breathes.]

I wish I didn't get that, but I sort of do. Embrace it, подсолнечник. The questionable choices are sometimes the big ones.

Ever wish to leave?

I want to see Russia again. I want to take my truck and go back to all of the places I've been, just to see if they look very different or not.

I don't want to be here, but I'm not ready to be anywhere else yet. It's not time.