Selling England by the Pound

When Lora turns twenty-one, they scrounge up and among their coins for something appropriately celebratory in the nearest small open market. It's the obvious next acquisition. Oh, but choices, choices...

Beer is the easiest and most available choice, but it's got that gritty, grimy aftertaste feeling, and goodness knows they've had quite enough of being dirty. They could try gin, cider, whiskey...? But Jin is, quite honestly, fearful of the murky-headedness that alcohol brings.

It may be a trick, of the light and of the marketeers, that vodka seems so much more healthful and clean, but it's clear as anything and not one bit viscous. Short of wine, which is in short supply anywhere this far from Auresco, it's the most natural and tasteful choice.

Lora watches the liquid slosh in the bottle with cautious but greedy eyes. "So I'm really an adult now, Jin," she says slowly. No other more significant milestones has she had, save the requisite monthly bleeding and other hormonal struggles, right? It's not wrong to want to cap it off with something that packs this much of a punch.

And, too, it's not as if Jin could truthfully say that she always has been in his eyes, or has been for years, or some such. No, this way of life has quite definitely prevented her from growing up along the typical yardsticks. She'd go straight to never-never land if she could - never having to face true adulthood, never having to leave Jin, never having to awaken another Blade, never having to come into the light of society.

"I guess you are, Lora," he returns at last. "But you won't stop growing up on me, will you?"

You can still improve. You have to. And if you don't...well, this prop of spirits certainly isn't going to help.

Lora nods, yet uncertain. "Promise. Someday...mayb- AH!"

Suddenly, she starts back, fingertips swatted to lips. Her throat and eyebrows both work furiously on opposite ends of the spectrum for several seconds before she recovers and explains, limping slightly around the words and flapping her hands up and down, "Bit my tongue. Sorry."

She smiles sheepishly as Jin hands her the designated "bloody" canteen, the one they have to strategically choose when and where to wash out while the other, contaminated only with harmless backwash, for the most part, can remain a constantly refilled source for weeks at a time.

So the vodka gets panned, for reasons of heart and head and stinging open wounds, and they have a makeshift Ruby-Stew Rhogul instead, but Lora still resolves to dip her ring finger into the boiling mess and flick it over her head the customary three times for thanks and good luck.

Sometimes, throughout the next year, Jin pulls it out of their pack and considers using it for cooking. Even if Lora weren't old enough, the alcohol cooks itself off. It doesn't mean anything. Nothing could possibly go so wrong.

It doesn't mean anything. We are all just...vapors in the wind. Aren't we?

Haze so perfectly suits Lora's predilections, after all. She's happy-go-lucky, able to be turned so easily in absolutely any direction, and thereon she goes. She and Lora giggle without a care in the world as they forage for mushrooms that are safe to eat, meat that's bloody in a ripe way, everything that spreads the table and the family with the very food of life.

It's a blessing that she was awakened when she was, born into the nuanced, sculpted body of a twenty-two-year-old, so that Lora won't outgrow her girlish companionship for quite some time, but then again, some conclusions she tends to draw are still quite childish.

Does it really mean so immediately that, any time Lora turns to Jin for comfort instead of Haze, she's passing her "secondary" Blade up? Is there really no room for any equal bonding between the three of them?

No, there isn't. We all need our secrets. We all need our inhibitions.

No doubt about it. Lora would be...a disaster, imbibed with any quantity of liquor. Every truth she ever speaks has the potential to be damning, given the strength of her Blades' bonds and devotions, both individual and joint, but for all how natural their life carries itself out and on, the introduction of such a pseudo-drug is quite terrifying.

After all, they hide from the law, but they are law-abiding. Lora chases morality like no one Jin has ever known; she is constantly considering the weight of her words and actions, loves justice much more than her apparent elemental affinities would lead one to believe. Jin knows, knew in an instant, how easily alcohol can destroy a home, can rip any and all measures of safety and strength and confidence from its foundation.

So he smashes the bottle to bits, quite soon after they fail to dispatch with Gort. He'd have a hell of a hard time hiding a provision like that from Brighid or Minoth anyway, that much is quite clear, even though the former would never admit to being a snoop and the latter probably would just plain never stoop.

This new group is rife with secrets, from themselves and from each other. It pains Jin, makes him gulp on his own fermentation, that people should get so set in their ways, should rely so solely on the markers of inadvisable behavior to show where they've grown. Don't we all grow together? Don't we have to?

Organization Torna, then, is quite open with each other. They have no choice but to be. Each member brings with them both the certainty of death and the uncertainty of purpose - are they truly dead, or do they live on not just in my memories, which I should not have, but in my very body and soul?

They do not treat their bodies like temples. They love good food, but they don't quite go so far as to think what it does for them on any level besides the satisfaction of hunger.

Malos loves sweets, but he doesn't have a favorite. Patroka loves meat, Akhos loves seafood, and Mikhail still likes savory, warm, comforting concotions. But they don't know why - or if they do, they don't stop to think about it. They've got bigger fish to fry.

Jin wishes he didn't know why, why fish swim so freely and so sweetly in every pond and stream that traces out tributaries of every least subtle fact of life, passing on like blood in veins and love in hearts.

Fish are difficult to scale, too; you can't slack on your knife skills. But that's the thing - none of the other members would probably notice if they ate a scale, unless they happened to choke on it. Jin would, though. So never does one appear.

Jin wishes he had that escape, that moment to stop and sleep and die and forget. To fade from memory is something that Lora hadn't wanted, not in the least, not never, but Jin feels the need to wipe himself out, sometimes. Just a little bit.

Of all the things to think of, to miss, when the entire world has taken a corner turn, a lone nondescript bottle of cheap vodka is not an intrinsic one. But, then, isn't it? It's not unheard of, even for and among Blades, to want to drink to forget.