I have to get books today." His voice was bland.
"So?"
"Get up." He threw the church van keys at her. Surprisingly, she caught them. She had drank six cans of beer before noon, and he had hurled them at her face at mach speed. He wasn't old enough to drive just yet.
"Stop chucking things at me, and maybe I'll think about." She threw the keys point blank into the waste basket next to the desk for effect, paper crunching inside of it under their sudden weight.
Rin squeezed his eyes in. His hair had grown slightly longer, and Shura's natural color was starting to grow out. It was red, of course. But it wasn't as saturated of a red as the hair color made it. It was just a normal red.
"I have money."
"Hmm?" Shura instantly stopped drinking her beer, and swallowed what was left in her mouth. She wasn't sure what was going to become of this. Was he going to dangle money over her head in an attempt to make her do something? "Not again horns. The church is enough. No more favors."
Rin frowned deeply, and darkness under his eyes somehow grew darker in the afternoon sun.
"Hair color." That was the only words he muttered.
Shura's face paled. Her weakness. "No." She sucked the rest of her beer out of the can, snapping the tab off, crushing the tin in her hand. Next, she tossed the can towards the same waste bin that the keys were in, launching the can airborne, like a basketball shot.
It missed.
The can bounced off the edge and landed on the carpet, some beer leaking onto the floor.
"Whoops." She stared smugly into Rin's face. She obviously had done it on purpose, seeing as she had just made the previous shot. It was an act of defiance to show the teen that she wouldn't bend to his will. Plus, they were still working on the church, one thing at a time out of Shura. Not multiples at once, no way, no how.
"What are you? Four?"
Shura snorted.
The only verbal exchanges they held were battles over control. But for Shura, these battles were growing more meaningless as time went along, she just wasn't getting her kicks out of them they way she did at first, and she knew exactly why:
She was used to not being congratulated. The Vatican never says thank you, job well done, bakes you a cake. Instead, she was a hired gun, a work horse, who never got to see the fruits of her labor. After she'd kill, hunt a person down, do this, do that, they'd ship her off somewhere else. That was life. That was how it had been for years, Fugimoto had asked her to join the Vatican, at first she was reluctant, but after she joined, she realized that was the only place she really fit.
Shura had never held a job. She had never worked anywhere. She wasn't good at make-up, she didn't have the patience for college or high school for that matter, she didn't like to read, she didn't... care.
Rin though? He was the smiliest, light-hearted, encouraging kid she knew of, aside from that chipper blonde ex-wire. He always tried to help people, he always made others smile with his antics, he hi-fived friends on their hard-work. He still had his youth, a youth she hated acknowledging, because she was slowly pulling away from it herself.
Expecting it. That was what made her trip on the inside.
Rin said nothing, not even a glance her way, as she put on her normal, 'Look at this! Look at me!' show.
For the first time, the red-head had done something, and was doing something that she was actually proud of. While she never got recognition before, and nor did she care... This time she did. When Rin didn't compliment her on her work, because he was the person she wanted it from, and because she actually desired it...
It left her speechless.
His action of ignorance soaked into the very fibers of her being. Instead of her being pissed, she found herself abnormally begging inside:
Rin, would you just look the stairs I built?
The teen had actually made her frown. Her chin fell, and she counted the number of nails that had been pounded into the floorboard.
An ego, a rigid, solid wall of brambles, set up to protect herself, to shut and block out what she didn't want, to lift herself up on a pedestal, instantly became a limp balloon.
Rin had punctured it just enough. The air came out, her wind-bag deflated, and she shut up, grasping and understanding what true, real hurt looks like:
It presented itself in a form of darkness under his eyes, with a scowl across his mouth. Everything, everyone, it was all so meaningless. Doing things just 'to do', working with a face unchanging.
In two months, the pain had molded him. It re-made, it conquered, and the previous: a jolly demeanor, had become stored away. Rin was nothing more than an arid landscape of a person, an absolute deserted wasteland.
She could elicit no emotion from the boy.
Her orders were to be here. The almighty and great Shura, the queen of all swords, but the only things she was the queen of lately was getting splinters in her fingers. She ran through multiple conclusions in her mind.
It was just... that working makes me pay more attention! It focused her on her surroundings, develop a since of innate pride, and that's why she cared about what Rin thought about her work! Rebuilding the stairs with Monk Nutu was a great example!
Or, that she wanted her self-image of a hard-ass to be confirmed by everyone around her. That's all! And everyone should know it!
Or, because she desired to have that 'I told you so' moment. Watching Rin's eyes widen in understanding that she was awesome, to boost up her own confidence. I could of been doing stuff if I wanted, rather than sitting around drinking beer and being forcibly 'told' to do stuff! Take that Rin!
After that, she even stuck out her tongue in her mind, a much added emphasis to the fake scenario.
As she had seen only his backside, a black shirt fully drenched through with sweat, making it that much more blacker, she absorbed nothing but his hollowness. She had been dissed.
But... why did she feel like she was lying to herself?
It was because...
She was.
Here's the truth that she tried to avoid so adamantly: She sought approval and validation because she was beginning to see Rin as a younger version of herself.
Rin was everything that she was, a cookie cutter copy. He was a poor-learning loser at his age, so was she, even as much as she told herself she was 'amazing', 'so cool', 'fun-loving', what friends did she have now at the age of 25? Rin had more friends than she did. Rin was good at cooking, she couldn't boil an egg (the event 2 months ago revealed that). He was also so incredibly strong, she wasn't, this adventure had just taught her how to hammer a nail in straight.
Instead of letting the darkness over-shadow him, he let all of his faults, be his faults. He lived them. He sucked in school, but he still went. He wasn't that smart at building things, but he still did all the heavy lifting for the monks. He sucked at household duties, but he learned to cook, and shared that with others, she remembered Yukio telling her that Rin had cooked for them everyday in the dorms.
Rin made light of his idiocy. He acknowledged he wasn't the best, and he tried to still push past it. Shura didn't graduate from high school or go to college. She had drank a beer in quite a few countries, and had sex in countless places... but those aren't accomplishments. She used to think they were accomplishments, but not anymore.
The outside struggle and fight over power with Rin, it was lessening. It wasn't... as heart-racing, as fun. The bickering, it was becoming less fulfilling.
Shura was beginning to inspect other things, things she had put off for so long: her since of 'self'.
