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"Ah...don't hit me okay? They're these little toy racecars. I used to have a whole set when I was a kid. They can do flips and jumps and stuff."

She paused, looking at him for a moment before bursting into laughter. "No way! You're calling me Hotwheels?"

Culture gaps being what they are, it was the first, and closest, example she jumped to. She simply found it an amusing, and pleasing, word, versus the other.

Yosuke grinned back, and shrugged playfully. Yeah, that's what he's just called her alright.

"It seems like a good fit to me."

Edited 2013-04-11 03:46 (UTC)

"You bet it is!" She winked. "THanks for calling me hot, Yosuke. You're a pal."

"Sometime you'll have to return the favor where some other girls can hear you."

"Well I know this great old folks hang-out if you're really after some positive female attention..."

"I'll keep it mind for when I'm 80." He sighs, sending up a silent prayer to not still be a virgin by then.

He'd still be a virgin.

But at least he'd get movie rights for his story.

"Always glad to help a friend! Geriatric or otherwise."

"Whatever, you'll be old by then, too. We can have slow motion races."

"As if! I'll be high speed until the day I die!"

A promise she can already deliver on.

"With the home team advantage. Wheels? Oh, all over how to use those. You'll be eating my dust, just you see!"

He takes a moment to actually contemplate that, and seems to agree. The debate ends with a good natured shrug this time. "You probably could beat me already. I'm pretty fast, but no one's ever called me Hot Wheels before."

"Gotta admire a man who can admit his own defeat!" Collette grins, winking at Yosuke. She's fairly pleased, all things said and done.

He might be a bit less gracious of a loser on a day where the goal wasn't to get her smiling, but today that was exactly the goal. And it seemed to be working. He could choke down a little pride for that. "Yeah, yeah. We both know I'm better at tree climbing, though."

"I think you've got a certain natural advantage there right now!" She didn't have anything that particularly excelled as a climber right now, though thinking about it, perhaps she should. It settles as a thoughtful contemplation in the back of her mind, unworried, speculative, and potentially exciting.

She's been well distracted, much as she'd hoped when she'd posted at all tonight. "Thanks for coming by," she adds after a silence hitting just past continued conversational back and forth.

"It's true, trees are difficult to roll up in to. But there was a man in my old neighborhood who halfway managed with his car one night..."

Yosuke agrees, winking again. He's a bit surprised to be thanked for stopping by, but pleased too. For just a moment, his tone is shy and sincere. "It's no trouble." And then, back to teasing. "As long as you don't interrupt me when I'm trying to watch paint dry, I'm always around."

"Cut in on a guys paint drying episodes? Do I look that heartless?" She holds a hand up to her chest, a look of mock outrage on her face for all of the five seconds it stuck around. Collette had heard the tone change.

Yosuke might be some kind of lonely of his own, she decides. Especially if he has friends from home who come and leave, like most everyone does.

"Hey, Yosuke? Do you have a lot of friends around here? Not just the kind you know, but the kind you like, really trust and stuff?"

The question gets a reaction alright, but only for a fraction of a second. There's surprise, and nerves, and perhaps a hint of fear. But it's gone in the same breath, replaced with a smile.

"Why, are you looking? Because I don't carry around fruit buns every day, you know. I'm not the breakfast fairy."

She snorts, watching him carefully. He's got more of her attention than she usually spends on one person without a clear desire out of them, because of her own need for concentrated distraction today. "You couldn't be, you don't even have wings!"

But this isn't what she wants to know, so she asks again, quietly. "I mean anyone from home, you know? It's nice when you have that kind of connection."

He opens his mouth to retort back at that comment, but she catches him again with the follow up. It's like a sucker punch that he was half expecting, but at least this time he manages to glance away before it shows on his face.

There's more than one way to answer that, actually. But only one answer rings true. And why not? She just lost someone too. Maybe today, Collette can understand.

"My best friend was."

He might be surprised at how often that sentiment is one she can understand. Her expression softens, her gaze dropping down to her empty hands. "Oh," she says. "That really sucks." Friends are such important parts of her life, the only real constant, and losing them has been... an exercise in hoping.

"I'm sorry." It doesn't feel like enough. But that's the thing. She's pretty sure there's never anything you can really say to make the unfair stuff feel any better. There's a mentality to finding the bright side, but it doesn't mean the hurtful things don't still hurt. "Was it better or worse to have him be here for a while at all?"

"I don't know." Yosuke sighs, and shrugs. He doesn't want to discuss it right now, honestly. It still rubs a raw spot in his psyche. The loss feels so much more acute for being doubled. Unkindly, he forgets his purpose in the first place and turns the tables. "You tell me."

"Better." Her answer shows no hesitation. "If Snow hadn't come here, I'd never have met her. If Al hadn't come here, I'd never have gotten to meet him, either. I think the pain in losing them hurts, but it's like... I got to know them, too. It's so much better to have the good memories and not just the bad. You can choose what you remember and what's important, can't you? They don't stop mattering just because they're not here."

Congratulations, Yosuke, she's turning away and rubbing one thumb with her other one. "Marco was here when I got here. He's a friend from back home, you know? But he left not long afterward." She falters, looking down at her hands. She can feel herself tearing up, blinking furiously. "There's been no one since."

He's still bitter, something sharp on his tongue. He knew Souji anyway. And really, there was no one before or after who's mattered. But the tears in her eyes make him soften. He swallows the bitterness and exhales slowly, willing the tension to dissipate. It's enough, close enough, that he reaches over and puts a palm on her forearm. Whatever it is he wants to say, it's a knot in his throat at the moment anyway. Tactile reassurance will have to do.

It's unintentionally worse, if he'd been hoping to reassure her out of crying. Touch is so important to Collette, and something she almost universally has to instigate, that it's enough to send her over the edge of that thin composure.

Her breathing hitches, the only accompaniment to the tears that roll down over her cheeks, dropping uncerimoniously off the point of her chin into her hands. She leaves off on rubbing her thumb, instead fiddling with the fabric of her shirt. Her fingers dig in, knuckles going white.

Her throat closes up with a measure of grief and unsurety. How's she supposed to know what to do? Or say? There's no real reassurance for knowing the people who mattered to her here could leave, thorugh no act of their own. To know that they could never return, or might return tomorrow, and that if they did, like as note they wouldn't know a thing about her.

It's unfair. It's not unusual, not even unexpected, but it is unfair. She acknowledges that, along with the things she doesn't admit to anyone else. This scares her, this hurts more than it should, because there's no one she's going back to. It's just the end. The final sleep. The all consuming incineration that marked her last moments alive, before it'd faded and she'd demorphed on the circular pad in the Transport Room.

She wishes she could see her best friends here. Maybe she can say thank you, and that she's glad she knows them, and that she doesn't blame James at all for what happened. In her most secret pipe dreams, she even imagines her mother showing up, taken from the years before her cancer. Nurses were always valuable, right? Or Phillip, he was a proper soldier. He could come in, and tease her, and be irritated at everything, like he got, before getting down to business.

She could share the things she's learned, mention how much she misses them both, admit maybe just once that she really does respect Phillip in spite of how often she annoyed him.

But she can't say any of that, even if she knew how to find the words. It's enough to miss the people from here, going back to their homes. Or their deaths, in some cases; her chest tightens, thinking of the things she'd heard from Al when he'd been older, more changed. But still Al.

People changed so drastically while remaining themselves, it was enough to make someone dizzy.

So she can't say anything to Yosuke. Collette doesn't try. She doesn't shake his hand off, or cover it with her own.

She just cries, silent as she can, breathing in when she needs the air becaues her nasal passages are filling with the snot that turns crying from an expression of emotion into a bodily fluids festival that never leaves anyone cleaned or really happy. The first time she really moves, it's to run the back of her wrist under her nose.

Great. Now she was snotting in front of the guy who'd been bizarrely nice enough to come over and bring her something to eat to try and take her mind off exactly what her mind was back on. Way to be a jerk, she thinks, and she's not sure if it's aimed at herself, or in some way, aimed at Yosuke, or even less sensibly, at the friends who have all left.

"I'm sorry." comes out as a squeak when she can force the words out of her mouth with any lung power behind them. Even a repetition dies stillborn in her throat.

He's frozen, for a moment. Not shocked at the display of emotion so much as the fact that he'd inadvertently caused it, sort of. Shit.

For a long moment he can only stare, guilty and concerned. And then he hits his knees, hovering beside the chair but totally unsure what to do. Should he hug her? Would she slap him if he did? Should he pretend not to notice? No, that's only for guys. Shit.

He sees the mucus starting to drip -eew, girls do that too?- and pats himself down stupidly for a tissue he doesn't have. He practically never gets sick, and he doesn't have allergies. He's loathe to leave her and get toilet roll from the bathroom, but he nearly does anyway. Until she apologizes. Then he freezes up again, and something slides around sickly in his stomach. Like a decaying eel.

Okay. Fine. She can slap him if she wants to. He takes the hand she didn't just wipe her nose on, marveling for a moment at how small girls' hands are- and puts his other hand firmly on her shoulder, trying to get her to look up at him.

"Hey...hey, don't...don't cry. I'm sorry, okay? I just-you asked...don't cry. I didn't want you to cry."

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