The purple-eyed woman smacked her lips with disapproval, but otherwise kept quiet. She did not want to get into the verbal fencing territory again and Olivia's sarcastic tone made her think that her interlocutress either completely missed the point of her story or chose to act as if she did.
Instead of speaking she sipped the sencha and looked up at a tree growing in the patio and the afternoon sunlight shining through its leaves, a phenomenon from which the café must have taken its name.
Olivia took the final sip of sake and placed the the cup back on the table top. A few minutes of tranquility passed pleasantly, a quietude she rarely got to experience in her line of work. She thought to herself that she should spend more time planetside, enjoying the wonders of terrestrial nature and civilization she had missed out on for most of her life in space. But she knew that odds were any attempts at repose would be violently interrupted by life catching up to her, forcing her back into actions she never wanted to be involved in.
People need you, a quiet part of Olivia's mind whispered to her. She tried to suppress it, but to little avail. It was the truth, after all. There was, indeed, a handful of people who depended on her in some way or another - a fact she had long tried to ignore, yet no longer could.
Looking back at the all-black-dressed woman sitting across from her, Olivia leaned forward and lifted the glass of coffee to her lips, taking a long taste of the creamy liquid. It wasn't what she had wanted, but she had to admit that it was quite delicious. Replacing it, she tilted her head slightly, curiously, before speaking.
Haze kept her head turned away, seemingly looking somewhere in the distance, but in fact keeping a careful eye on Olivia and her expression. The younger girl must have just remembered something troubling from the past, Haze figured, but decided not to press the issue.
She paused for a few seconds before answering Olivia's question. "No. I used to, but all of them are in the ground or locked up at Newgate now. It's difficult to say if that's for the better, though."
"Gets lonely," Olivia stated matter-of-factly. She searched Haze's face for any trace of emotion but failed to find any. She wasn't surprised, of course. Poker faces were vital in their professions, though Olivia had long ago learned that feigning vulnerability could be just as advantageous.
"Have you written friends off or are you... in the market?" She asked with a chuckle.
"I don't really work like that. I guess I'm not actively looking, but I have my eyes open for all manner of opportunities." Haze smiled playfully and tilted her head. "Both business and personal."
Olivia's smile faded. She leaned back again with a quiet sigh and glanced over Haze's shoulder across the patio.
"I, for one, prefer to avoid friendships. Or any sort of... close relations." Her eyes shot back to Haze. "Like I said, they make things difficult, distracting. And in our business, distractions can be death sentences. Don't you agree?" A hard glint flashed in her eyes as she spoke. Her lips tightened to a thin line as she awaited Haze's reply.
She stopped for a moment, sensing that Olivia seemed somehow more passionate about this question than any other one in their conversation up until now. She wondered if the interest was somehow tied to her having shot down Sable's girlfriend's ship multiple times in the past. And indeed Olivia's own, too, once. Perhaps that somehow influenced the junior devil's opinion on the matter as well.
"Depends on what you mean," she finally spoke. "Someone wiser than me once said that no man is an island. It takes a very specific disposition and mental state to live away from any kind of human connection without permanent discontent, and people with that sort of disposition tend to be psychopaths. We all are going to die some day, we will not drag our friends along into the next life, we will have to say goodbye sooner or later. That's not a reason to avoid making personal connections entirely."
She also thought that one should make friends first and foremost with people who can take care of themselves, but she opted to leave that opinion unsaid for the time being.
"Psychopaths, huh?" Olivia repeated more to herself than Haze. She sighed resignedly. Somehow, Haze had managed to strike another nerve. Fuckin' Moretti, Olivia thought. Maybe he had heard a similar story as Haze's before. Perhaps that was why he had tried to reach out to Olivia only for things to turn so very abruptly so very sour. No matter. She hadn't thought about him in weeks and she preferred keeping it that way. Instead, her mind wandered back to Isla and then, gradually, to her brother, which wasn't much of an improvement given the circumstances.
"Maybe you're right," the mercenary finally replied. "But when losing them hurts more than having them ever comforted you, why bother?" She grabbed her glass of coffee and chugged what remained of the at this point cold drink. "The way I see it, caring about someone - truly caring - only primes you for disappointment and pain down the line." With a wave of the hand, she signaled a waiter over to clear her dishes off the table.
Seeing that their meeting would soon wrap up, Haze also finished the rest of her green tea. "Life is full of disappointments. The best you can do is to not let them get to your head too much. Space is big and it's not impossible to get away from your past. Either that, or you just have to kill the past yourself. Just don't miss."
She retrieved a piece of scrip — a small chip that could be encoded with a number of credits to be transferred physically — from a small pouch on her belt. "Drinks on me, by the way," she dragged the conversation down to a more down-to-earth subject. "You've got a place to stay here? Or are you going back up?"
Olivia nodded her gratitude for Haze's gesture, slipping the credit card she'd been pulling out of her flightsuit back into place.
"I've tried killing it. Turns out, it has a lotta armed guards." She chuckled to herself, straightening in her chair as if to get up. "I'm heading back to Shikoku. Found a nice little room on a Junyo platform." The waiter arrived and with a bow retrieved the empty cups and glasses from the table, placing them carefully on the plate he balanced in his left hand.
"What about you?" Olivia continued. "Sticking around Kusari for a while or heading back to Liberty?"
