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WHO: Eridan Ampora and Ruka.
WHERE: Eridan's penthouse!
WHEN: LATE NOVEMBER, LEAVE ME ALONE
WARNINGS: Talk of torture!
SUMMARY: Eridan invites Ruka over to brag about brutally torturing a guy. You know, like normal people do.
FORMAT: never

It starts out with a couple texts - hey wwhatre you doin, not much just cleanin some stuff up, yeah its not much just some things i dont wwant anymore you knoww howw it is. Eventually he invites her over for dinner and "something I probably oughta tell you," which is probably the opposite of comforting, but whatever! He invites her over at eight that night, has dinner ready and breaks out the good wine he probably shouldn't have, but refuses to tell her the big secret until after dinner. For all intents and purposes, it seems like good news. He's cheery enough about it, anyway.

Once dinner's done, he backs towards the couch, wine glass in hand.

"So, the suspense is krillin' you, right?"

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And against all reason, Eridan laughs. A brief bark of it, nothing extended, but still. He abruptly knocks the lid over, shutting the case, and lounges back on the couch.

"That ain't how you play these kinda things, Ru." Straining for his wine glass on the coffee table without having to get off the couch, so struggle. "I can't kill him, that ain't playin' the game. Plus, I get the feelin' really dyin' would snap him, y'know?"

So close. It's fingertips away.

"He ain't gonna talk, Ru. He's too proud. Kinda like me."

Her hand darts back from the case, like narrowly escaping the jaws of some foul-mouthed predator, and the sound of it jolts her out of her winding thoughts. The stench of blood lingers, but with the source once again closed off, its power weakens.

She forces her thoughts away from herself, her feelings—away from the things that don't matter. Instead, she recalls that time, with Eridan begging her for violence to shake words from his mouth—and remembering an earlier time, and Edward's blood willingly written on the walls of a borrowed room. Where the barrier to Edward's truth needed the delicate calculation of a lock-picker or a safe-cracker, she thinks, Eridan wanted only sledgehammers and dynamite.

Is that pride?

Rather than reach for the case again, Ruka leans forward enough to collect Eridan's glass of wine—for herself, taking a slow drink, and not even handing it over afterwards. Her own glass remained abandoned at the dining table, at far too great a distance to retrieve now, and she desperately needs something to do with her hands.

"How does it end, then? This game—how do you win?"

"I kill him, or he kills me." There's a grumble under his breath when Ruka steals his wine, his lean forward turned into a defeated slouch. Still, he turns his head to the side and looks at her, tone conversational despite the grim topic. "But neither of us wanna do that, 'cos then it ends. It's kinda like - right now, we keep takin' turns drawin' lines in the sand, and kickin' the old one ower."

Finally, with a pouty little sashay, he made his way over to Ruka's glass, filling it to the rim.

"'s like a platonic kismesisship, kinda. Stopped bein' about slingin' insults a while back; now we look like we got it together and rip each others' throats out in priwate."

It's a lot to take in, and the full weight of it, she thinks, hasn't sunk in. Even seeing the blood, she can't picture what he put Edward through—nor fully understand what Eridan went through, to warrant this turnabout.

Ruka leans back into the couch, putting on airs of relaxing (though the muscles across her back and her shoulders are still as tight as ever), her eye remaining on Eridan.

"And both of you are satisfied like that?"

He actually thinks on that one a moment, swirling the wine in her glass. Well, shit, he doubts they're going to be content with that forever. They've been escalating since day one, it seems inevitable that one of them is going to end up horribly mutilated sooner or later. What's it going to be like in a year or two, fins in mailboxes? Nonfatal disemboweling?

"Yeah," he says instead, closing his eyes and shrugging. "I am, anyhow. No fuckin' clue what he's thinkin'."

Which is true to some extent. That piece said, he twirls his now drained glass between thumb and forefinger, eyebrows raised.

"So I'm guessin' from how you look like you're liable to bounce the fuck outta here that you don't want to see the wideo."

Which isn't meant as predatory as it might sound, and isn't said that way - it's just something he's noticed in her reaction, and in her comportment. He may have zero empathy for all her discomfort here, but he's not going to ruin a decent night if she's not into hardcore torture of someone she knows. That would be rude!

Of course there's a video, she thinks, trying to keep a straight face, but the creeping worry of the potential use of that—the director's cut hitting the Network, or Rumblr, or the numerous screens of Times Square—sets some of her nerves on edge.

But from the way he said the rest, the accusation there, she has to bite her tongue, reexamine her reaction. It's uncomfortable, it's unsurprising, it's a circumstance she never would have wished for, a conversation that would never need to take place, but...

While her heart trips over excuses, she shakes her head, turning her gaze to the remaining wine in his glass, rather than look him dead on. "I'm not going to leave, over this." Leave the apartment, leave him—it stretches longer as she speaks, blanketing the unknown future, more than she thought to cover. Will that comfort him? Offend him? She doesn't know... she can only hope he gets her. "I'm only... trying to understand. What's going to happen after this."

He listens to her when she tells him that, searching her expression closely. It's scrutinizing, even, probably a little too intense -

- and then he strolls back over, wine glass deposited back on the table, and comes to a stop right in front of Ruka, offering a hand.

"Listen, I know it ain't easy." A little roll of his shoulders, almost self-deprecating. Like he acknowledges he's hard to deal with, sometimes. "But I know you get it, Ruka, you're about the only brinesucker in this fuckin' hole who does. And I'm not gonna lie to you."

It's not an answer to her question.

There's still wine remaining in her glass, but she sets it aside to take his without hesitance. If he's looking for weakness, for uncertainty—at least as far as her feelings for him go—he'll find none.

But he is dodging the question.

"I should hope so," she says instead, trying for encouraging. She wants, needs to know what's been done, and what will come, needs to know how she can prepare for the inevitable fallout, how to protect herself, protect him, and everyone else around her. But... she can't force it out of him. Not the way he asked her to before.

"So..."

"So?" he says, apparently given permission to sit down. He crosses one leg over the other, casually splays his hand across the closed lid of the case. "Nothin's gonna happen to you. If he comes after anybody, which he's not goin' to for about a year, if ewer, it's gonna be me."

Eridan shrugs, smile crooked.

"Don't act like anythin's wrong. Hell, all I did was put him in his place. Had me goin' like some kinda fuckin' lapdog for a while there, you know how god damn difficult that is once you just start seethin' about the whole ginger in your gills thing?" As if suddenly remembering something, Eridan reached down underneath the couch cushion, retrieving a taser and holding it up for Ruka to look at. "Some fuckin' fantastic actin' on my part, honestly."

"If he goes after you again, it's the same as hurting me." Her free hand moves to grasp his holding the taser, around his wrist—lowering the self-defense weapon from its proud display. There's an earnestness to her face now, an alertness dredged out from underneath shock and alcohol. "You understand that, don't you?"

Posturing like he does so rarely seems to work on her.

Letting go of that hand, Ruka turns toward him on the couch, hands raised and moving for emphatic gesture; a rare sight, for her. "Even when you hide it from me, I can tell. I know you. That is to say, maybe I won't know that it's ginger, or lead pipes, or something as specific as that. I might not see everything, but I'm not blind, Eridan. You can't fool me."

The words are no longer teasing, and there's little room for boasting; they are, to her, plain facts which cannot be argued. That she claims to understand him better, and is better able to pick out his deceptions, than the former-detective human 'lie detector' does not occur to her.

"It matters to me, what happens to you."

His taser wrist goes down without fuss, eventually leaving it discarded at his knee - in fact, he takes everything in with faintly widened eyes, a somber expression. Someone peeling back his boasting and carrying on is never not a novel, weird thing, always a soft and vulnerable underbelly.

"I bounce back," he answers, dropping his eyes to some nebulous point at her lap. "I came back last time, I'd come back again. There's nothin' he can throw at me I ain't already had a taste of by now, Ru."

He turns to face her on the couch, hands in his lap. The box and taser are quickly forgotten, the former inching towards the couch's edge, the latter digging further between the cushions.

"I know you're worried, but I had to. You don't know the kinda stuff he did. I couldn't keep it goin' like it was anymore, somethin' had to change."

"I know," she returns, agreeing. Soft words, balms, gentle tones; the last thing she wants is for him to think she's fighting him. As she speaks, her hands settle to rest atop his, her single gold ring clinking quietly against one of his. "I know you do. That's why I... why I could let myself care about you, in the first place. You always came back. Even when I was losing everyone important to me, you were there. You were someone I could hold on to."

Things have changed since then: those friends and family that had remained to her then have almost all departed, but new ones have been made in the absence. The family she cherished most has returned. She's not alone anymore, the way she used to be... but, she fears, that won't always be true.

Everyone leaves, eventually.

"You still are." Her hands squeeze his; a smile digs into one of her cheeks for the words and drops just as quickly, like the tug and release of a fishhook. "I am worried, but I'm selfish, too." And a hypocrite, she knows; better than anyone she knows the chasm between her ideals and her actions, between her heart as it was and her heart as it is. "You would bounce back from losing me, but I don't think I ever could, from losing you.

"I want to know what happened. This time, and before. But... if you don't want to tell me, I won't ask you again."

But even now, implicit promise on her lips, she knows she can't let it go this easily. She can't force him to speak, but if he won't tell her willingly, she won't need him to.

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