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"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."

She doesn't know what to do. People aren't usually willing to breach personal space, even if she thinks it's silly and more important to break as a rule instead of uphold. She looks to Yosuke's hand, holding her own, blinking rapidly and failing to do much more than slow down the tears already there.

It takes a dumb moment of staring, chest tight, breathing difficult, before she can even look up toward his face. She's scared of what she might see there. Disgust, that discomfort that comes with dealing with people in a situation you don't like or understand, some sort of censorship for the fact she was committing the great sin of emotion on a relative stranger, for all they've talked and hung out before.

She opens her mouth to speak, to say anything, interject hat he doesn't need to apologize, but all that comes out is a squeak. Then a slightly more dignified throat clearing. "It's not -- wasn't you," she manages to get out through a voice made thick with crying. She squeezes his hand as backward reassurance, holding on a little more tightly afterward because she wants to feel grounded.

Her other hand comes up to her face, covering her nose. God, she's leaking. She doesn't know what to do with that, she's having trouble compartmentalizing, and she feels more things than she has words for. It shows on her face, some of that lost feeling, the hurt and confusion because she already knew this hurt, so why is it hurting now?

"Can I --" she starts, voice giving up with a crack. She swallows, eyes falling down to his chest, avoiding looking him in the face when she finally finds the words she's not sure she wants to use. "Will you -- can I get -- um, a hug?"

Her shoulders start to tense when she chances a look back at his face, vision too blurry to really get a good read on him either way, but hoping all those things she fears are there aren't really there at all.

Yosuke's face is concerned, not disgusted. Vaguely guilty. And perhaps most surprisingly, understanding. He's not confused by the tears at all. He sort of wants to cry about this whole thing himself. So what's on his mind, and probably evident on his face at the moment, is a desire to soothe Collette.

Is he uncomfortable? Yeah. He really is. But not for the reasons she's thinking. When she asks for a hug he hesitates, not because he doesn't want to hug her, though. Because frankly, he does. He's been wanting physical contact with someone for months, and here it is. The opportunity. Only, he has to be extra careful not to do anything awkward, since she's already crying. So, he does what his mom always did when he was young, a frequent scraper of both palms and knees.

He leans in closer and wraps one arm around Collette at shoulder level, pulling her close to his chest. The other hand goes to the back of her head, cradling her gently. It's silly. He knows as soon as he does it that it's silly. He's probably poking her with his pointy ribs or something, for that matter. But if she laughs, that's alright too.

"Shh. It's fine. You're alright. It'll be alright."

None of it feels precisely silly to her. Absurd, yes, because of the situation. Here she was crying on a guy her age, who had no reason to tolerate the fact she was crying, or to stick around and let her cry. She knew it was uncomfortable, and her request, stupid and childish, could only be more so.

She just misses her friends so much, misses her brother, her sister-in-law, misses a future she never really knew she might have had, misses opportunity that only comes around here now. She misses a lot of things, and then he has an arm around her shoulder, and she remembers what she's missed about this, too. It's a longer ache, missing casual contact.

A little funny to have a guy cradling her head, with the odd way it reminds her of moms and pains and being held against a chest to listen to a heartbeat until she calmed down. If Yosuke had dragged her head down to rest on his chest bone, she knows she'd have lost it. Laughing and crying, both!

As it is, she's already struggling through the thick throated, choked sobs to turn them into ragged breaths, fighting to make her voice pitch for amused instead of pained. She hugs him back, not worried about the details. He doesn't feel bony or strong or weak or bulky. To her, right now, Yosuke feels warm.

It's really all that matters. It's also why she reasons zombies would be no good at hugs, but that was one sentiment she didn't plan on telling Koltira anytime soon.

When she has her voice and tears under enough control to speak, Collette doesn't shift her tight hold on Yosuke. She tries to laugh, leaving her face buried somewhere between them.

"I'm snotting all over you," she says at last, swallowing hard with the last words. "This is so totally gross of me."

"Yeah, I noticed." He grumbles in reply, not sugar coating it. But for all he feigns being annoyed, his tone isn't actually tense. He strokes her hair a few times as she struggles to get her control back. She feels nice. Soft and warm and surprisingly clean. All the people he'd seen in wheelchairs before had been old and sort of smelly, but Collette must bathe frequently. Mmm. Lavendar soap. It smells nice.

But she's also draping on him in that way, clinging almost...it's familiar. And sad. His own chest tightens again, and he swallows. It's probably best just to let her get it all out, right? Sometimes crying can help after all, right?

She snorts again, which is a singularly bad idea, as it causes her to half-choke and swallow convulsively with a hiccup. She knows she sounds ridiculous, and somewhere inside she's writhing in embarrassment, but that can wait for later, when they either deny this happened or she gets teased because it did.

Boys were boys. She's used to dealing with how they rolled.

Usually with more ribbing.

She appreciates Yosuke not having made this weird, slowing down her breathing and evening it out with her eyes closed. In one two, out three four, in one two, out three four, in one two three, out for five six.

When she's breathing on a four count, she opens her eyes. A few rapid blinks does nothing to change how heavy they feel, but at least she's not sobbing so hard now. Getting back under control is something of a specialty, when she needs it to be. Collette gives Yosuke a squeeze, a silent sort of thank you, before starting to pull back.

When she spots the disgusting mess she's made on his shirt, her eyes widen. "Oh no," she says, "Oh no!" Then she laughs. There's nothing else she can do other then laugh, rubbing her hand under her nose and hoping Yosuke knew how to do laundry, because he sure was going to need to change that poor shirt!

"Want something to wash your face?"

Yosuke makes a face at the wet spots on his shirt, and starts to unbutton it. Yeah, okay, he's not wearing that home.

"Or a non human tissue?"

"Yes, Mom," she says, hiccuping another burst of laughter and clapping a hand over her mouth. "Both?" she mumbles from behind her hand, reddened eyes focusing on his face.

The whole shirt thing is more funny to her than anything else. Embarrassment is too entangled with the rest of what she's feeling to take any real leading presence.

He rolls his eyes at that retort, but he's too relieved that she's not crying anymore to take it too seriously. Though he does ball up his snotty shirt -there's an undershirt beneath it, which does nothing at all to make him look less like a pole- and toss it at her before he ducks out to get her a cloth and some toilet roll.

"Can't I at least be the creepy uncle?"

He returns pretty quickly, considering he knows the layout of the apartment anyway and feels less like a stranger here than at first. Both items get handed over, unlike the juice he brought her. That he steals a sip of for himself while he waits for her to sort herself out.

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