lukeoutbelow | (no subject)

(no subject)

Stiff after the long drive, Lisa rotated her head on her neck and stretched kinks out of her back on the walk to the little cafe where Arnold had wanted to meet her. It was bitterly cold, but she wasn't too bothered. She had her green wool jacket. Ethically sourced, it hardly bore saying, she knew something about everyone and everything involved from the sheep and alpaca to the young woman who'd applied the buttons, and tailored expertly to her frame. It had a certain military flare and while Lisa couldn't condone just about any military she knew well, she had to admit it looked good on her.

"Just a tall chai, please. 'Lisa' is fine." She found a stool, grateful this place was sleepy just now, and checked her designer watch. He might be caught up in a project, or just met an unusually large and fluffy dog. It'd hardly be the first time. She smiled with fond resignation, thinking back.

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Excuse you, dear heart, he doesn't melt into ANY random dog he meets! ... Although granted he would be tempted. In any case he's not late this time, promise!

The waiter who comes over to bring her her chai has a very familiar ring on his finger, and there is a heart drawn lovingly in cinammon on the top of the foam.

"Your chai, milady~"

"Arnold!" Better get that drink set down, she's on her feet again hugging him, turning her head so she can lay it against his chest, eyes closing. He's very comfortable.

After a lingering moment she pulls back away but gets both gloved hands on his shoulders. "Don't tell me you've become a barista! Though if you are, you should be able to tell me this is fair trade."

He laughs and sets the drink down just in time, catching her in his arms and squeezing tight.

"Of course it is! Only the very best for my lovely lady~ And no, this is just a favor I asked of the owner." He grins at her and holds up a just-a-moment finger, kissing her cheek and backing out of the embrace to race back to the counter and return with a dozen long stem red roses.

"I cut these from our greenhouse today. Happy Valentines, love"

He's the traditionalist today. Lisa can't mind.

"Oh, they're beautiful!" She buries her nose in the roses, and while still breathing flowers her eyes flick sharply up to the side of Arnold's head. She knows what she's looking for, and raises her head with a bit of something stuck to the bridge of her nose. "Are you sure you want to be in public with those exposed? I looked through the news. This isn't a good city to be a numbered in."

The ears don't stick out as much as she'd feared. They're still there and, to her, not a very subtle change, but public isn't the place to examine them closely.

He reaches across to flick the rose petal off her nose and smiles at her fondly.

"No one else seems to notice - and it's just too much of a hassle to keep them covered all the time."

His long hair helps, but he's forever pushing it back out of his face and exposing them anyway (and no, public is not, especially since Lisa has probably already found out how sensitive they are).

"I worry about Liam, more than myself. He's much more... well. I didn't notice because nothing dramatic has changed, you know? But... there's something a bit other to him now."

Lisa wrinkles her nose playfully, but she sounds serious. "You should still be careful. I know there's not much fear of our property being vandalized-" If it was it would be investigated and prosecuted properly, or she'd know why. "-and no one here can fire you, but I don't want you hurt."

It has been a fear in the weeks they've been apart, and since hearing what had happened to both her boys. People in this group had been beaten or killed.

Despite his... well, everything he is at a glance and even a longer look, Lisa knows Arnold isn't as terminally spacy as he seems. And neither is Liam, really, but her son is spacier, and she's worried about that too. If he's growing up, well, she wants to know if it's for the better. If he's strange... "Is he still sick?"

He leans forwards to kiss the tip of her nose teasingly but nods. "I'll keep an eye out, I promise." Money goes a long way, but not even money can protect him, he knows.

"Liam is doing much better" He assures. "It's only that... sometimes, and I don't even think he knows he's doing it - he... will say or do something, and... it isn't...quite Liam, you know?"

Lisa half turns her head, checking that no one's watching. There's a limit to how much of a PDA she likes to have. No one seems to be paying attention to them. Still she reaches out and rests a gloved hand on his chest, simultaneously a gesture of affection and restraint. Kiss me later.

There is doubt in her eyes. "I'm not clear on what you mean by not Liam. If he's not just growing up away from home, what do you mean?"

On one level it shames her to think she hasn't had as much to do with their son as her husband has. On another level she dismisses that shame as a cultural trap. She has been a force in both of her childrens' lives, moreso than plenty of fathers, and Arnold has done the looking-after from day to day. They weren't neglected.

Still despite herself, despite knowing he probably wasn't doing things right, she'd been touched to think Liam had embraced certain of her principles. "You're making sure he's eating better," she states more than asks. "He'll listen to you."

Arnold bites his lip and waggles his hand in an "eh" motion.

"I don't know if I could express it clearly, really. And maybe you're right, and its just that he's growing up. But sometimes... he seems... otherworldly. Not the boy I remember, I guess. Perhaps I'm just an over-worried parent."

He smiles, leaning into the hand. "Yes. I gave him a good scolding. I'm not much of a cook, but we're learning together."

She regards him steadily. Little she's heard about what Numbered are turning into sounds good. "I suppose you'll be staying for that, too. Maybe if you're together neither of you will change too far. I married you, not an elf."

Briskly she shifts both hands to straighten his collar, the least romantic thing she can think to do right then.

"Well, that sounds like it's worth seeing." Lisa can cook, but aside from a few things on the holidays, and zucchini bread here and there in the summer, it's far too much of a hassle to bother with most of the time. There's no shortage of worthy people who need money and get creative with food to do it instead, or make up and freeze things she can reheat. Poor Arnold... she's still not sure how putting something in an oven and taking it out again when the timer goes off is so difficult.

He lets her, and then catches a hand to press a kiss to it.

"I don't care if I change. You're the one I love, I don't care what my blasted preincarnation thinks. I'll leave the boundaries and never come back if it looks at all like that might change." He vows to her.

He laughs at that. "Well, I haven't set off the fire alarm yet? We do alright, so long as neither of us gets distracted. Why, maybe I'll take up cooking as my next hobby~"

Hand-kisses are acceptable in public, she's long decided. When they'd met she would have preferred even lingering hugs to be done in private, but you marry someone this free with affection some compromises should be considered.

She stiffens hearing the vow. There's almost a sound, like drums - no, her heartbeat, and... she remembers something. A weight on her body, a sense of the metal wrapped around protecting her and bearing her up on two towering legs... a sense of being trapped, and of sudden grief, and resolve. The voice of a young man over the radio, soft and defeated.

I've been captured. My airship was ambushed and I was taken by force. Korra refuses to release me unless we back down and leave the city.

Listen to me. If you try to take Republic City the Avatar will never let me see you again. And I refuse to live that way. Forget the United Republic, we have our empire! We have each other! Let's go back home and get married! The only thing that matters is that we're together for the rest of our lives.

Lisa comes out of it, blinking and disoriented, and covering her mouth with her hand. Who was that young man? Why did it ache so much to hear him say it? "Wh-what... I think I had better sit down."

"Lisa?" She comes back to Arnold, holding her arms and looking at her worriedly.

"What is it? What's wrong, love?"

He pulls out the chair for her instinctively. "Sit, sit. What happened?"

She folds into the chair and puts her hands to the sides of her head, forcefully enough to start to disorganize her bun. For a moment Lisa had loved that young man, whoever he was. There had been such a strong feeling of wanting him to be okay, and finding him impossibly naive, and... it had come out of nowhere. Lisa presses her fingers into her scalp, forcing herself not to cry.

"I think-" Stop. Stop. She hates to speak with her voice breaking. Lisa swallows and takes some deep, measured breaths. Looking back up at Arnold she is calmer, even with distress in her eyes. "I think that was a numbered episode."

Arnold folds himself into a kneel in front of her, waiting anxiously but patiently for her to recompose herself. The distress in her eyes brings his hands to hover anxiously (Lisa never looks like this, she's always so strong, its wrong, its wrong its wrong) near hers.

"Oh no. Oh love, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean..."

Before she'd fallen for Arnold Lisa had dated around a little, or rather evaluated many people and found her standards too high for most, and that the others ended up unsuitable sooner or later. Girlhood crushes notwithstanding she's never loved anyone else. Remembering the kidnapped young man pleading over the radio feels like cheating, even as she insists to herself he belongs to someone else. She doesn't know a single thing about him.

Meanwhile, the man she actually loves is working himself into a frenzy. Lisa gets another deep breath, pulls herself together, and covers his hands with hers. "It's all right. I know you wouldn't do that on purpose. You didn't know it would happen."

Arnold, for his part, was very much a believer in One True Love, and he treats Lisa accordingly. He calms as she does, turning his hands to hold hers and squeeze.

"I know, but I feel guilty. I did not want you invovled in this mess either, love. Was ... it a bad memory? I have not had any yet myself, but Liam and some of the others have said that they can be... very nasty."

"It was bad enough, but I'm all right," she says, and jerks her chin from Arnold to the other seat at the little table. If he lets her go long enough to sit she'll wrap one hand around her tea and extend the other on the table. Lisa looks at him, gauging what she should say.

Some of it would take too much explanation of things she doesn't really get herself. It would hurt him to say that was my fiancee, though of course he wasn't hers...

"There was a very young man calling me for help after someone kidnapped him. They were demanding something as ransom. He wanted me to agree to it." Put like that it's very prosaic, wasn't it? Lisa hates the thought of giving in to a hostage-taker, but if it had been Arnold...

Well trained by now he obediently moves to the seat, and wraps his free hand around the one she reaches out to him.

"Oh Lisa-love. It could be worse, you're right but that is a terrible thing to start with. But I'm sure, the you that I fell in love with here, is the same spirit as the you in that world, and you would have made the right choice."

Lisa takes a swallow of her tea without tasting it really, just the heat and the sweet burn down her throat. It's bracing. She lets out a sigh.

"There was no right choice. They didn't want money." She has a better sense of what money means to people less fortunate than her than, say, Liam, but that doesn't mean it's much more than trivial to her. "They wanted me to back down and leave the city to them, or I would never see him again." Historically she has not been pleased when her efforts are barred from a city. Much of America is unkind to efforts like her company's.

I refuse to live like that, her financee had said. Lisa has an unpleasant feeling that the sentiment, for all that she had loved him, is not mutual.

"Oh no." Arnold's hand around hers is warm and reassuring and he squeezes.

"The hardest choice of all. A life, or your principles."

He is quiet for a while then.... "If I were that young man, I would have wanted you to chose your principles. Every time. It's what I love about you. That you're so very, very strong."

It had been a moral imperative to be there, Republic City. Whatever that was. "They would have imprisoned him, I think, and left me no recourse."

A city run by kidnappers and hostage-takers, with the police doubtless colluding with them. It sets that cold anger burning in her. There's nothing she can do, she reminds herself. That isn't really her.

Lisa lays her other hand over Arnold's. She doesn't like to show a whole lot of affection in public, even if it doesn't seem like anyone's watching. "Oh, sweetie. Sometimes I think you're too good for me."

"Oh Lisa, that is a horrible choice! It must have hurt your past self so."

He smiles back at her fondly.

"I am sure it is the other way around."

It's thanks to him that she's been able to live as she has. He could change away from her in spite of his vow, it could mean less to him. She has to try to be honest while he is here.

Deliberately she chooses her words. Not I this time. "She loved that young man. He loved her. They were going to get married."

Arnold flinches visibly, and then his jaw sets and his eyes flash, and he brings his other hand (the one with the marriage ring) across to lay on hers.

"I am not surprised. I... I am jealous, yes. But Lisa is my wife, whatever your other self might have been. Maybe the self I was had a wife, but I don't care about that. I married you, and that choice I would make again and again." He grins at her wryly, the flash of possessiveness fading.

"I suppose I will get used to being jealous"