Let me tell you another secret of the trade-
It feels like sinking when I'm standing in one place
So I look to the future and I book another flight
When everything feels heavy, I've learned to travel light
Seven – Sleeping At Last
October 10, 2947, 19:17; The Last City, Earth
Azra has trouble finding the restaurant. It's on a densely-packed street where the shop fronts and stalls spill over onto the pavement. Everywhere are neon-lit signs, flashing messages in English and Chinese and Portuguese. Azra has managed to get along with just her English and Portuguese all these years (even if her dialect seems to be some lost European variant rather than the Brazilian Portuguese spoke in the City). The Chinese characters were gibberish to her without her Ghost's translation.
People's faces are bathed in unnatural shades of red and green and pink, light spilling out of shops like sunbeams on the street. The shadows in contrast are impossible to see through. The air is heavy with the smells of cooking spices and perfumes- and still, after all these months, the tang of burning plastic and soot. Some parts of the City have rebounded fast after the Red War, but the scars still haven't had time to heal fully.
Azra only finds the place because of the neon sign: a two-frame animation of a wok flipping some vegetables that flickers back and forth. She's fifteen minutes late by the time she pushes through the crowd and slides into the empty seat near Suraya Hawthorne. "Sorry, I got lost," she apologizes.
"You. Getting lost." Hawthorne's voice is thick with a teasing disbelief. She looks well enough, clean and loose-limbed with ease. Azra's freshened up as best she can, but it's just not worth the effort to scrub every speck of dirt from her gear when tomorrow she'll be out in the thick of it again. She hopes she's not too scrappy-looking for company.
"Not all of the maps are up-to-date with all the reconstruction and this isn't even technically a building," she complains. The restaurant is listed on the Net, but without an address. Azra now realized that's because it doesn't have an address. It's a stand squeezed in the alleyway between two other shops, just an L-shaped bar and a kitchen of sorts shoved underneath an awning.
The patron of the stand bustles over to her and Azra gives a polite (if apprehensive) nod. She never knows what to do at places like this. There's nothing posted on the walls. Is there a physical menu? Should she have looked it up ahead of time? Is this one of those places where they only have like two things?
Before she can open her mouth, Hawthorne leans over the bar and starts chatting up the server. It's astonishing how quickly the businesswoman morphs from the stern, bustling figure into a smiling and conversational host. They talk back and forth for a while, about the rebuilding, about the difficulties of getting good cuts of pork, how they're out of fresh parsley and have to use dried until the grocer can be properly bribed. The woman eventually hustles away again, promising to set them up with 'the good stuff' without bothering to take their order.
Hawthorne looks back at Azra and almost laughs. "Look at you, all tongue-tied. Really out of your element here, aren't you?"
No kidding. This street seems built for sensory overload, all flashing lights and people shouting back and forth at each other. The cold white LED lights from the stand are already starting to give Azra a headache. "I've never been much of a City person," she demurs.
"Do you even talk to normal people?" Hawthorne's tone is friendly. Azra still blinks for a second, taken aback.
She's probably not meaning to be insulting, Spark silently comments. Not her fault the word 'normal' leaves an unpleasant taste in Azra's mouth.
"Yes," Azra says, feeling defensive now. "I've just never been good with small talk."
"Devrim seems to beg to differ," Hawthorne says.
"Tea talk is different," Azra insists.
She thinks Hawthorne agrees with that point, at least. There's no more time for conversation- the food arrives. The server takes another minute to trade more words with Suraya before the arrival of another customer sends her hurrying off.
Azra has already begun the process of shoveling food into her mouth. Truthful to Hawthorne's recommendation, the stir-fry is very good. There is some kind of peanut sauce on it- with the garlic it mixes to make a broad savory base. The peas and carrots add a nice sweetness.
Hawthorne leans on her elbow, taking it in. It seems there is no end to her amusement this evening. "Do you always eat like someone's about to take your food away from you?"
"It's good," Azra says, muffled by a mouthful of rice. She takes time to chew and swallow before she speaks again. "These days I'm lucky if I even have time to eat, much less something hot and fresh."
"Glad I decided to invite you out, I guess," Hawthorne comments. She takes Azra's cue and begins eating her own stir-fry, albeit at a much more reasonable pace. "You know, for someone who proclaims a dislike of the City, you sure do seem a fan of the benefits of civilization."
"I can enjoy it in short doses," Azra says. Especially if she can find some time to cool down, take a walk somewhere more open or find a quiet room to clean her weapons. Right now she's running high on adrenaline and endorphins. It'll only last so long before she crashes.
Spark interjects to explain. "At the beginning of the Red War, we spent about five days here. That broke the record by about two and a half days."
"Really," Hawthorne says, sounding genuinely surprised. "You've never stayed in the City for three days straight. In your entire life?"
"There's not a whole lot to do here," Azra says.
"What do you mean," Hawthorne complains. "People don't just sit around when they're not working. There's tons of stuff to do!"
"Like what?" Azra challenges.
"Eating?" Hawthorne says, gesturing to Azra's bowl. "Don't tell me you're making City-class Ramen in a pot over your campfire."
"Maybe once or twice," Azra says. Cayde had made a few good efforts, but he wasn't much of a cook and Tevis had refused to help on moral grounds. "Besides, eating happens at maximum like three times a day. Not exactly a big timesink."
"Not when you inhale it like that," Hawthorne comments. "What about shopping?"
"I don't need more stuff," Azra says. "What would I even do with it?"
"Do you even own anything to wear that isn't armor?"
"You don't have a dress or a suit, do you," Andal asked, sounding vaguely disappointed.
"Andal," Shiro chided. "She's three, and she's not City-bound. I would bet fifty Glimmer that she doesn't even own clothes."
"I own clothes," Azra said defensively. What, did he think she wore her gear on top of bare skin?
"Base layers don't count," Shiro teased. He turned back to Andal. "Think. Have you literally ever seen her not wearing armor?"
Andal looked down at his own clothing, then back up at Azra (who, to her own chagrin, was dressed in her Strike gear). "Azra," he said, sounding aghast. "What do you sleep in?"
"Uh," Azra said. "This?" What else would she wear?
"I used to," Azra says. "Still, it doesn't take three days to go clothes shopping."
Hawthorne is getting too invested in this debate. "Go to a museum. Or the movies." She pauses, then only semi-jokingly asks, "You have seen a movie before, yes?"
"You don't need to be in the City to see a movie," Azra shoots back.
"Like, not streamed on a tablet. On a big screen."
"Yes," Azra says. "Get a projector set up, bunch of like, hammocks-"
"In a theater," Hawthorne says. "You've never been to a movie theater? Not in ninety years?"
"Eighty-nine," Azra corrects automatically. "And fifty-seven of those don't count."
"We need to go," Hawthorne says. "Right now." She sets down her chopsticks like she's about to get up and walk off.
Azra is appalled. "What gives you the idea that you can stick me inside a dark room packed with other people and blast loud music at me and I'll have a good time?"
Hawthorne sits thinking for a heartbeat. "Huh. I guess I never thought of it like that before." She picks up her chopsticks again and pokes at a chunk of carrot.
Azra shoves another bite of food in her mouth.
"Back when I was a kid, it was always so exciting," Hawthorne says. "I'd go as often as I could. It was a chance to pretend I was somewhere else, you know? Imagine a life beyond the City. Marc would take me out sometimes."
Azra is reminded that the same things can mean wildly different things to different people. Like these neon lights- they make Azra vaguely nervous, a little uncomfortable, but surely to some of the people bustling by they are exciting? Beautiful, even?
"What kind of movies do they show here?" Spark asked. He was good at that, picking up conversation when Azra let it hang.
Hawthorne leaned back a bit, reminiscing. "Oh, everything, but I always liked action. Different theaters have different selections of the classics. I must have watched Fistfull of Dollars a hundred times."
Azra snorted. "Oh, I remember that one. Cayde went around drawling and squinting at everyone for a whole week afterwards."
Hawthorne's eyebrows twitch as she seems to conjure a funny mental image.
It seems natural for Azra to keep talking. She does. "We'd get a projector and some speakers- and a bunch of hammocks, like I said, or a pile of pillows, or the futon." Azra can picture it like it was yesterday- the dampness of settling dew, the night air, the fireflies. "Tevis would always fall asleep like fifteen minutes after the movie started, no matter what it was. And Shiro and Andal would get in these ridiculous arguments until Andal's Ghost would pause the movie and make them shut up."
"What was your favorite?" Hawthorne asks.
Azra thinks. "It wasn't a movie, exactly," she says. "But there was these, like, documentaries. Master Vanna said they were about Earth's biosphere before the Golden Age. Whenever something really cool came up I'd make a note and try to track it down later and see if it was still there." Sometimes they weren't, but more often than not they were. "Did you know in Old Japan that there's these giant salamanders? They get like six feet long."
"Sounds amazing," Hawthorne says.
"You wanna go?" Azra asks impulsively. "Right now?" It's daytime in Japan.
"I've never been east of the Cosmodrome," Hawthorne comments. "Is it safe?"
"The Fallen don't care about anything outside the major cities," Azra says. "Even then, it's broad daylight. They're not going to be poking around outdoors."
Hawthorne still seems to hesitate for a second. Then she puts down her chopsticks. "To hell with it," she decided. "Let's go. Right now."
"At least finish your food first," Azra says, aghast.