X-MEN: RUNAWAYS
It has been two weeks since Kyle and Korvka trekked out on their own, leaving the mansion and all of the madness behind and set their sights instead on their own goals. Korvka wants to go home to Russia and Kyle wants to make it to Maine, and with his survival skills and her powers, the two of them have successfully traversed the upstate landscape. They keep to the woods to avoid being seen, despite the two holowatches that Korvka stole from the mansion, which she plans to use once they get to the city.
Nevertheless, the going is tough and thanks to a week's worth of snowfall, the two have been holed up in a lean-to of Kyle's creation...
Saturday, December 10th
Day 16 on the run
As soon as the sun was up,
Korvka was awake - a charming new side effect to her metamorphosis was that she instinctively sought out the sun. Her acid-green eyes popped open when she felt the warm rays pushing their way through the leaves and branches that Korvka had manipulated into acting as a curtain over the open mouth of Kyle's lean-to. They might be in the woods but she didn't want to take any chances, so shortly after Kyle had finished the shelter, Korvka used the existing flora to act as sentinels as well as a curtain, and would only open up to her or Kyle -
another interesting new development to her powers; the ability to give sentience to plants. She blinked several times as she sat up, her pile of blankets bunching at her lap until she realized her mistake and hastily pulled them back over her, shivering as her body protested every movement. She had made them both of them a soft bed of grass to lay on in the earlier days of their escape, but eventually realized the error of sleeping on the cold hard ground and had fashioned comfortable hammocks for them both, strung up via vines and existing flora to stretch across the width of the shelter. It was marginally better than waking up with a stiff back and hips, but after the second consecutive week of roughing it, Korvka was
over it by now and just wanted to get to a damn airport. She closed her eyes to rub at them with her balled up fists, a silent yawn pulling her mouth wide. The cold air stung her throat, her yawn turning into a puff of steam and then to a groan as she stretched her arms over her head and felt about a thousand new knots in her back. She looked over at Kyle's hammock and saw that it was still occupied, so she very quietly moved to the edge of her hammock and reached for her backpack, which was then handed to her by a vine that snaked down from the roof, as if to say hello to its mistress. No longer afraid of her strange new powers, Korvka grabbed at the backpack and hauled it onto the hammock with her, shooting a quick glance at Kyle to make sure he hadn't woken yet. Seeing that she was in the clear, the Russian girl carefully unzipped the brown bag and pulled out a small leather-bound book with a pencil still clipped onto the last page she'd written on. Pulling the pencil free, she clicked the end a few times until the lead came out, and started to write -
<Day 16, fifth consecutive day without food and still no hunger pangs...>
Like many teenage boys,
Kyle operated best after a full eight hours of sleep. Sometimes even nine, ten, eleven or twelve hours. Unfortunately, they were no longer in the comfort of the mansion, and, even though he and Korvka had made their living quarters far cozier than some of the dumps he'd in stayed while traveling, he preferred to awake first thing in the morning, so he could make his rounds of the area, check the wire snares he'd, and so forth. Whenever he moved to a new area, he'd always slept on the light side, waking-up like clockwork at set intervals, and at the slightest sound outside. This morning, however, the boy was indulging in a little extra shut-eye, the result of having stayed out later than he usually did. Of course, regardless of the amount of sleep the boy received, it did little to improve his disposition, and, coupled with the fact he was traveling with a hanger-on whom he was trying to get rid of also didn't help much. The boy lay supine, one leg hanging off the side of the hammock, his big toe starting to show-through a hole in his sock. When the subtle sound of Korvka's pencil clicking cut through the air, it managed to integrate itself into whatever dream Kyle was having, and his sleeping face scrunched-up as he swatted his hand at his forehead, as if trying to shoo a fly away. As his hand fell away, there were another few minutes where the boy appeared to slumber peacefully, up until he suddenly sat straight up, causing the hammock to sway with his movement. His long, skinny fingers gripped the sides of his bed, and, as he sleepily blinked a few times, it looked like he might just lay back down and fall asleep. He turned his head only as much as necessary to take a look in Korvka's direction. His stomach growled viciously and audibly, as if on cue. This was his typical greeting in the morning, with his stomach saying hello and a glare at his traveling companion.
Every few sentences that she scratched onto her diary, scrunching the letters together in tiny, hurried script,
Korvka's eyes darted to Kyle's hammock to make sure that he wasn't awake yet. Ordinarily she would have woken up to find the lean-to abandoned while he went to check on his traps or whatever else he did in the morning, but apparently the sourpuss was inclined to sleep later than usual, which meant that she jumped at every movement he made. She froze when he swatted at his forehead, the motion looking irritated even in his
sleep, and held her breath while watching him, dreading the moment when he woke up. She let her wary gaze linger for a second after he settled and then she looked down at the book in her lap and started writing furiously again.
Woke with the sun again, Kyle is a total prat but that's not news, no sign of civilization so far and I'm starting to won------> Korvka's pencil made a deep mark across the rest of the small page as Kyle awoke so suddenly, her shoulders jerking towards her ears. She returned his glare with one of her own, lips pouting out irritably at the routinely unpleasant greeting. It didn't seem to matter how much help she tried to be, Kyle seemingly regarded her as little more than a green nuisance, despite her many efforts to make herself useful. The lean-to was equipped with intelligent plants that would strangle and poison anyone else who tried to get inside, and she had, much to his chagrin, carefully overseen his construction of a snare, literally hovering over his shoulder so that she could replicate it with existing flora, but even
that hadn't improved his mood towards her. "I 'aff note checked trops yet," she informed matter-of-fact
ly in an accent that was marginally better than it was during their 'first' meeting. Sure, Kyle wasn't exactly the ideal person to teach a foreigner English but he was a native speaker, which was enough to remind Korvka of grammatical rules she'd forgotten about since her last trip to England, over a year - or apparently three - ago. She moved to the edge of her hammock and folded clipped the mechanical pencil onto the same page, and then stuffed the diary into her backpack and hastily zipped it up. Venturing a tentative look over to the long limbed boy, Korvka leaned over the side of the hammock to grab at her boots, which put her at the perfect height to notice the hole forming in Kyle's sock. "I 'aff sooing keet," she offered defensively, as if preemptively guarding herself against his reply as she lifted a leg to shove a boot on the end.
A large part of the boy's animosity toward Korvka stemmed from the thought that if Vlad ever found Kyle, the acidic mutant would probably not be long for this world. He had been stringently opposed to his roommate's sister accompanying him on his trip, no matter what her reasoning was, yet here they were. He was reluctantly appreciative of the Russian girl's newfound set of skills, but, despite this, his gratefulness for what she was able to do for their hut's construction and its means of protection went unmentioned. 'I didn't expect as much,' was his reply to her first statement after he took a moment to shake the residual sleepiness from his head. Although he was far from a patient person, if he took an extra second to decode Korvka's heavy accent, he could more or less get the gist of what she said. Some of the time. The latter was apparent as his hairless brow furrowed in lack of comprehension at her second utterance. 'You gotta what?' he croaked-out with undue skepticism, his voice not having cleared entirely from his slumber.
Korvka glared sharply at Kyle's verbal dart, the severity of which was probably lessened by her lack of visible pupils or irises, but her scrunched brow was telling enough as was the thin set to her lips. Still, she continued about her business, stuffing her feet into her boots all while decidedly ignoring her grumpy shack-mate. And she thought she was unpleasant. After 16 days of incessant exposure to her guide's astringent personality, Korvka had learned that there was really nothing that Kyle seemed to like, which made it a lot easier not to take everything he said so personally, but she still didn't like it. Her legs dangled over the side of her hammock, the toes hovering a good couple of inches off the cold ground as she tugged pointedly at the laces as she crossed them and finally tied them up and tucked the laces into the fur-rimmed top. She was still avoiding Kyle as she slipped off of her hammock and onto the damp ground below, wincing as her cold feet tingled like a million pinpricks at the sudden impact. When Kyle groggily asked her to clarify, Korvka turned her back to him and stood in front of her gently swaying hammock to unzip her backpack again, this time putting her hand into the front pocket and then pulling out a small plastic case. Pivoting so that she was now facing him, Korvka affixed her eyes onto him and held it up unsmilingly so that he could see the tiny spools of thread and the little book of needles. "Sooing keet, for the sock," she said, nodding her head towards his little yellow toe.
'What I say nowww?' Kyle challenged when Korvka replied with that look of hers, his hands raising in the air in defeat before they fell down, slapping against the ratty, thin blanket covering the lower part of his body. 'You ain't been eating much, so why would you bother to check the goddamn traps? I didn't mean anything by it, for God's sakes, woman...' He met her strange eyes with his own peculiar set, glaring sharply before he reached for his jeans, which were folded and sitting atop his backpack, and his own shoes, a measley pair of white sneakers, which were not exactly the proper footwear for the current weather, but it's what he had; he mumbled his aggravation the entire time. The boy, as usual, had stripped down to his well-worn long johns to sleep, but before he shoved his first leg into his jeans, he took pause to see what it was that Korvka had extracted from her pack. Leaning over a little too far in his hammock to look at the sewing kit, the sleeping contraption swayed forward, but he quickly sat back to correct his balance. 'Ohhh, a SO-IN KIT,' he said with the epiphany, and he looked pointedly at Korvka with his poorly corrective pronunciation. 'mmm. I got one a' them, too,' he said, looking down and to his sides, as if he'd left it laying around after doing some midnight sewing by firelight the night before. 'Somewhere. But I also got duck tape, and that's a helluvalot faster.'
Kyle's further explanation as to why he said what he said was spoken to Korvka's back as she fished out the sewing kit, but despite her pointed avoidance, she was listening. Her shoulders seemed to fall a little and her head slowly angled a little to the side, almost as if she were trying to look at him, but she kept about her business, not only because she wanted to give Kyle the chance to put pants on without scrutiny. Unlike her roommate, Korvka slept in all of her clothes all of the time, mostly only removing her layers in order to wash her clothes hurriedly in a stream or use the makeshift lavatory, which was a hole in the ground that Korvka had the roots tend to and escort the waste further under the soil every few hours so that the smell didn't give them away or offend their (her) delicate senses. While her lanky companion leaned over to inspect the kit, one leg stuck haphazardly into the leg of his jeans, Korvka tried to keep the light acid-green flush on her cheeks from deepening as she noticed he was still technically just in his underoos. "Oh, SO-EEN, sorry," she apologized, nodding appreciatively at his correction, her 'r's rolling lightly with the tip of her tongue. Now that the first round of bickering for the day was seemingly finished she visibly relaxed and opened the little case to pull out a spool of white thread and the little book of needles. "I con do eet as you check the trops," she offered as she selected a thin silver needle and then held it between her hunter green lips while she unraveled a little line of thread. She licked the end and was about to thread it when Kyle all of a sudden mentioned 'duck tape,' and Korvka let out a blurt of laughter at the mental image that gave her, causing the needle to tumble from her lips and onto the ground, getting lost somewhere in the underbrush. "Sheet!" she said, a swear she had learned from Kyle over their days together, and stepped back so that she wouldn't step on the lost needle. As she knelt and hovered her hand over the ground, the little roots and plants reaching for her like hairs to static electricity, and soon a single tendril of root jut up with its end delicately coiled around the sharp tip of a needle, handing it back to Korvka. "Deed you say duck tape?" she asked with an little grin, grabbing the needle and kneeling to thread it before she dropped the damn thing again.
'mmm. Better, but...' Kyle muttered after Korvka corrected herself while the boy managed to get his pants on, quite unware of his current roommate's bashful girlishness at his state of undress, although it would be hard-pressed to make him care much about it if he did. Risking the ice-cold shock of the frigid ground, the boy planted his stocking feet on the dirt floor, and his knees popped in protest as he stooped to find a forest green woolen sweater he's filched along the way and non-holey pair of socks. 'You can sew?' he asked with his typical incredulity as he hoisted himself back up onto the hammock and got ready to get into the pullover, but when Korvka guffawed, he stopped with his arms threaded partially through the sleeves. He watched with some amazement as the plants reacted accordingly and helped the green Russian girl find the needle she'd dropped in short order. Shaking his head, as he didn't wish to show that something astonished him, Kyle yanked the sweater over his head, 'Yeah, I said duck tape. It's used in construction n'stuff,' his voice was slightly muffled before he managed to poked his head out of the appropriate hole, 'I guess they must tape ducks with it, an' that's where it got its name.' Of course he wasn't pronouncing it properly, nor did he take the time to do so during his explanation. He looked down at her, the garment he'd just managed to wiggle into was a little on the snug side, fitting his shoulders a smidge too closely, and the cuffs were a good inch higher than they should have been on his scrawny arms. 'They don't got that in Russia?'
"Leetle beet," came Korvka's distracted reply as she held the needle and thread in opposing thumb and forefinger. Closing one eye, she touched the tip of her tongue to the side of her top lip, and carefully threaded the needle. "Enough for a soke," she said, then licked her fingers and twisted the ends of string together into a little knot. Standing, and now sincerely wishing she hadn't knelt because now her two layers were damp at the knee, Korvka looked down to his sock and then up to him, her forehead raising as if to say 'WELL?' However, it soon fell into a confused scrunch as he so casually reported that she had heard him correctly. If she was interpreting the meaning of 'construction' right then she was very confused indeed. She was no engineer but she was positive she had never heard tell of ducks needing to be taped up or to anything. She giggled at their continued miscommunication, mostly just happy that this one had been sillier than it was frustrating but as she looked up at him she realized that he was already looking down at her and her chirp died abruptly as her lips cinched into a little circle. "Nono" she replied more hastily than she meant to as she took a few casual steps backwards, bumping quickly into the curtain of foliage while she appeared to busy herself with the thread. Truthfully, she simply was not used to being around boys who weren't her brother or some fat nerd with a violin and wanted some space before he noticed something else weird about her. Trying to play her motion off as intended, the young mutant used her powers to pull back the curtain of protective vegetation to let in the sunlight. "No, vwe do note yuse ducks to beeld things."
'WELL. If you offerin', came the boy's smart response in the form of another mutter, save for the first word that he mimicked after Korvka's utterance. Kyle yanked one thick, cushy knit tube off of his tootsie, and then the other, pulling each from the toe so that the entire thing stretched out several inches before it finally popped off of his goldenrod foot. He returned her perplexed look, his hairless brow furrowed in befuddlement, totally uncertain what he possibly could have said to receive such a gander from her in the first place, when suddenly an unnecessarily forced sighed issued from his thin-lipped mouth and his eyes rolled upward as the Russian girl giggled. 'Good Lord, what-' he started to demand while he dropped a fierce glare down to the girl, mostly irritated by the fact that she was a giggler, and, well, truthfully Kyle didn't need much of an excuse to be irritated. But as she composed herself, he began to cover his feet with the only other pair of socks to his name, first poking only his toes in to make sure that this set wasn't shot, too. Satisfied that they weren't, Kyle shook his bald head, and explained, 'I ain't no foreman, but I am pretty goddamn sure that most modern buildin's got ducks in them nowadays. It's how the air circalates, er sumthin.' the hand holding his other, holey pair of socks went briefly up into the air and made a single, circular motion to indicate 'circulates' before dropping back down to his lap. If she were acting strangely, the boy didn't seem to notice, as he was too wrapped-up with his own frustration in trying to enlighten the girl.
"Obe-viously," Korvka snarkily retorted to Kyle's mutterings, letting out a short huff from the center of her partially parted lips. This boy was practically impossible, and she watched disbelievingly as he unceremoniously yanked the socks off, wondering how they had lasted this long with an owner like Kyle. She could have pointed out that tugging off his socks like that might have been what gave him a hole in the first place, and was most certainly going to lengthen whatever hole there already was, but Korvka remained quiet, though she did raise both eyebrows and shake her head while looking away. "Be nice!" she suddenly snapped as he so rudely reacted her her merriment, her cheeks flaming angrily as she balled her fists at the side and glared right back up at him, arms straight at her sides. A veritable thrum of angry tension buzzed between their glaring faces but the moment appeared short lived since he deigned to regale her with more talk of whatever the hell this 'duck tape' was. She listened, holding the needle tightly in one hand as she stepped out into the snowfall that had accumulated overnight, looking over the sloping wooded mountains and knowing instantly that if she didn't get to an airport soon, there would be little flora for her to manipulate. With the curtain now open, Korvka felt herself give a small sigh of relief, letting the sunlight hit her body fully, almost wishing she could strip naked and bask in it, but, with a look shot towards Kyle, and then at the snowy landscape, she knew that was out of the question. She looked over at him and then shrugged a shoulder in consent after hearing what seemed to be a very lucid explanation to something that sounded utterly preposterous. "Nefer 'erd eet colled a duck," she explained, walking over to where he was sitting with her hand out, clearly demanding the sock. She looked down at the sock, which was nowhere she was just going to grab, and then shook her hand a little, much more demandingly.
'I am bein' nice,' Kyle tartly cracked back, his voice squeaking a little, as is not uncommon for a teenaged boy. 'Why you bein' so sensitive?' he demanded, really having no concept that his attitude was in any was unnacceptable, even if it was unkind in a rather benign, teasing way at the moment. As the curtain opened, allowing a rush of chill air into their shack, the boy shivered and reached for a well-worn knit cap that could have been grey with a little green, or possibly the other way around. It did little for his vivid complexion, but it kept his head warm, and that's all he really cared about. During the day, with the curtain pulled back, they could make use of a fire wall to reflect heat into the structure, but it was usually a bit nippy until the fire was lit. 'I dunno,' he said, shaking his head again, finally taking the hint that Korvka was demanding his slightly damp, holey socks, so he leaning over, a long arm stretching to deposit them in her proffered hand. 'You prolly got some stupid Russian name for it, and I dunno how to explain it 'cause you too thick to see what I'm gettin' at,' the boy said, having thought that his explanation had been just fine, and not really thinking ahead that he might be poking the proverbial bear with his unnecessarily spiteful comment.
"Vwell...you..." Korvka stumbled over her words as she got flustered, cheeks burning with embarrassment as he then went and stuck his finger into another figurative wound and tactlessly pointed out her sensitivity. She was wounded but he had to go and point out something true, which only made her shame burrow all the deeper. She found herself puffing up and rising to the tips of her toes, her eyes starting to shine a little from within, the makings of a faint yellow circle around her assumed pupils, hair-like tendrils slowly lifting towards the sky with tiny twitches, like cats' tails. Her mouth opened and closed a few times, wishing that she could just yell at him in Russian and have him understand but, alas, "You are bat at bee-een nice!" was all that she was able to get out, swiping her hand across her body to snatch the sock even before he managed to drop it. Giving him a last withering stare, the earthy mutant turned sharply from him on the toes of her boots, spinning away to march over huffily to her hammock, all the while muttering to herself. Her hand was halfway into his sock, intending to pull it inside out when she suddenly got a whiff that was a touch too pungent for her liking and she quickly made a face and held her hands away from her face, trying to get away from it. "Yeech," she grimaced, instantly causing a pungent fringe of lily-of-the-valley to blossom like little fireworks throughout her hair, masking the smell of Kyle's sharp odor. She had just stifled the majority of her mutterings, only her lips working over her irritation at her guide's constant tirade of unpleasantries as she jerked the needle through the hole after carefully lining up the torn edges. However, her hands dropped to her lap, mouth dropping as her head turned to gape at him. Her brows furrowed, her hair positively writhing as her anger rose and inspired a small inner glow, pulsing through her as her heartbeat rose. Had he just called her thick - fat? - AND stupid? "You are a SHIT!" she shrieked, possibly the most lucid sentence she had spoken since their escape. Then, uncomfortable with her own emotional outburst, Korvka pulled her lips tightly into one another and stared far too intently at her work, yanking the needle this way and that as she positively fumed.
'Waaaay-ell?' Kyle copied Korvka as the poor girl struggled to figure out exactly what it was she wanted to say, and his sour expression started to turn subtly into one that suggested that he maybe found humour in her reaction and inability to immediate respond. As he waited and as the gears in the Russian girl's head turned to crank out an appropriate response, the boy's lanky arm swung down to pick his sneakers up, for he'd forgotten they'd already been brought onto the hammock, so he tried to play it smooth and swung his arm back up after his hand fruitlessly grabbed at the top of his backpack. First the right and then the left, Kyle carefully slid his feet into the grungy but intact footwear, the plastic grocery bags lining the inside the keep the moisture out crinkling softly as he did so. 'Gee, I'm real sorry,' the boy replied, although he sounded as far removed from sorry as humanly possibly. 'I mean, t'be honest, maybe you outta have thought a little more about who you went travelin' with if you wanted nice,' was his acrimoniousness reply, tinged with false sweetness. As the tension in the hut thickened and a momentary silence fell as Korvka turned away to work on his sock, Kyle rolled his eyes at her reaction to the garment's smell, but had no other response as he planted his shoed feet on the ground and stood up, although he couldn't stand to his full height since the ceiling of the structure didn't allow him to. When his last irresponsible comment, off-handed as it was for him, finally struck Korvka and she turned to berate him, Kyle was actually startled when she shrieked at him and took a step back, causing him to bump into his hammock, considering that there really wasn't much room to move around. 'Would you keep your goddamn voice down!?' he hissed back, 'You need...' he then said, turning to locate his hoodie and gloves, 'You need to calm the hell down. I gonna go out.' He turned the hoodie upside-down before getting it right-way up in his haste to vacate the premises. 'Maybe by the time I get back, you be done bein' so goddamn prissy.' With that, the acidic mutant punctuated the sentence with an unblinking glare to his upset companion as he slipped into his sweatshirt. He was never one to know when to stop while he was ahead, after all.
"I loast ole the memree off 'oo ees nice and 'oo ees mean," Korvka reminded icily, and then fell into deep silence, all while focusing on making the seam as thin and unnoticeable as possible, as if to spite Kyle with her perfection. "But you say you con take me to yare-port," she continued, letting her head bobble bitchily from side to side, eyes widening and brows high into the jungle of floral bangs as she mercilessly pinched the two fraying ends together. She then turned a simpering look to him, her mouth tightly upturned at the corners in a cruel, pinched smile to drive home the point that she hadn't overlooked the fact that it had been 16 days and she still was there, with him. She severed the look curtly and looked down at the sock in her lap, folding and fussing over the little line of miniscule stitches, shaking her head as a veil of dreadlock vines fell over her shoulders. Had she seen the start that she gave Kyle she would have been pleased, her tendency to appreciate a good comeuppance never one to shrink in the face of cosmic justice, but sadly, she missed it. She did not, however, miss his tone as he yelled at her to keep quiet and then started to gather his things in order to run away. "Tch" she scoffed, her upper lip curling away from her teeth as her anger started to get the best of her. She had never been good with her emotions, which always made her feel immature in situations where others seemed so cool and collected, but she couldn't help herself! Finally, at his last comment she had had enough and she childishly threw her sewing project onto the ground right before she jumped down from the hammock, causing the thing to swing back and then bump into her backside. She didn't know what exactly 'prissy' meant, but it was coming from Kyle so she was certain that it was insulting and so she marched right up to him, almost uncomfortably close, showing a measure of her Russian mentality of disregard for personal space. "You say you vwur leafing. I con HELP!" she said, then pushing both hands into his scrawny chest and shoving him back towards the exit.
Yeah, well, I guess I musta left an awful good impression on you that first night you re-met me,' Kyle bitterly asserted, recalling the evening of the break-in. 'And I am SO sorry that my weather predictin' skills fell short. The shit-ton of snow out there' the boy huffed in reponse, gesturing with a sweep of his arm to indicate out there, '...don't exactly make for easy travelin'...'sides, it is a helluva long was to Albany, 'specially since we can't just take a goddamn cab there!' As he spoke, it was through clenched teeth as he fought to keep his own, strained voice down, his strange eyes locked upon the Russian girl's form. In his absence the night before, he'd taken advantage of the cover of dark and the freshly-falling snow to cover his tracks, to find a ranger station, where he carefully broke-in to find some maps. While had had a decent internal compass, Kyle had never travelled in this area before, after all, and as he was rarely wont to share information with anyone, he hadn't enlightened Korvka in regards to his little trip; it wasn't like he wasn't trying, but it probably didn't feel like he was trying hard enough. The lanky boy had already put his gloves on, and was in the middle of wrapping a worn knit scarf around his neck and lower half of his face when Korvka leapt down from her hammock to confront him, and the moment she was close enough to indicate that she wasn't backing down, Kyle had already started to back up, so by the time she tried to push him out of the hut, there was very little force behind it. 'It is always a mistake travelin' with a goddamn woman,' he growled, turning on his heel and pulling his hood up simultaneously after one last venomous glare to his companion, walking out into the bright light of the new morning.
"You vwur the oan-lee people leafing!" she reminded, cocking her head to the side and bugging her eyes, demanding who else it was she was to have left with, leaning forward with her fists on her hips. "Ooogh!" Korvka growled as he spun effortlessly away from her shrug, making a fool of her yet again. Her fists shook with rage, arms straight at her sides as he walked away from her, leaving her to brood with his final stinging retort to her entire sex. Marching out behind him, Korvka held her hand out palm first and felt the brief sting of vines shooting from each of her fingertips with rapid speed, twisting into a braided rope in midair as it shot towards Kyle's disappearing form. Eyes bright with anger, she manipulated the vines easily with small twitches of her fingertips, like a spider with its web, and had it circle around the lanky boy's knee, then clenching tightly as it spiraled perfectly down the rest of his leg until the whole thing was encased with the rough squeeze from the knee down. Then, to add insult to injury, Korvka attempted to pull the vines back in order to trip him onto his face. "Ant you do NOTHEEN but be rude, you are RUDE!" she chastised piercingly, proud that she had remembered one of the words on those English posters of emotions in her classroom and eager to apply it to the situation.
From the recesses of his hood, Kyle ground his teeth in seething aggravation as he tromped away from their shared viny bungalow, his breath puffing out into the frigid air from flared nostrils in regular, angry bursts. One of the very first things the boy typically did in the morning, other than relieve himself against a neighboring tree, was to re-start the fire; thus, moving a pine bough-cum-tarp covered in the night prior's dusting of snow, he uncovered a selection of dry kindling to get the source of warmth going. He unwisely ignored Korvka's derisive words coming from the 'door' of the lean-to; as much as he was itching to yell some vindictive retort back, he knew all too well how easily voices could travel on a crisp, clear day such as this, so he allowed his anger to percolate under the veneer of having to get his morning chores done, although he muttered his thoughts under his breath the while. With his back toward his travelling companion, Kyle didn't see the Russian girl's strike coming, and before he could react to the pressure on his skinny, insulated-by-layers-leg, he was already face-down in the snow, sending a spray of frozen white chunks up as he flailed against her attack. Instead of first trying to get whatever it was on his leg off, the boy flailed and reached for the closest thing he could grab, a relatively flimsy but visible sprig of a branch sticking out of the snow, attached to the tree nearest the wood pile, to try and pull himself back upright. Other than emitting a strangled cry of surprise, muffled by a faceful of snow, the boy grunted as he hurriedly tried to right himself.
Though Korvka was not considered a small girl, Kyle's lankiness made him much heavier than he looked, causing her to tug much harder than anticipated in order to spill him onto his face. Digging her heels into the packed snow, the Russian gave a mighty heave and watched with satisfaction as the goldenrod boy started to trip. Of course, overreacting as she was, there was little finesse in her attack and as she watched her guide start to pitch forward, her world started to fall backwards now that there was no need to tug so damn hard. "Gah!" She landed hard on her bottom, her vision jarred as the impact sent a jolt of pain up her spine, causing her to hiss through gritted teeth as she braced herself against the snow. Her buttocks were now damp, she could feel the snow seeping into the dark, fraying denims she wore, but as she felt tension on the leash of vines connecting her to Kyle, Korvka sucked some of the vines back into her fingertips, causing the rope to shorten and make it more difficult for Kyle to get to his feet. "Say sore-ee," she growled, stumbling to her feet, her nose and cheeks burning with the toxic hue of her blood as her skin reacted to the cold and her anger.
'I didn't say nuthin' to be sorry for,' Kyle uttered in retort through clenched teeth as he pulled forward on the branch he'd grabbed onto bent with the force Korvka was exerting on the vines to pull him closer to her. 'Get. Offa. Me.' He let go of the slim branch as it yielded to the tug-of-war, to use the opportunity of the Russian girl landing on her tush and tried to twist around to get ahold of the vegetation binding his leg. It was awkward to try and do so, especially since he'd belly-flopped, but he managed to roll onto his side and fold almost in half to wrap his hands around the shortening length of vines to give it as mighty of a tug to try and upend Korvka again as the angry girl struggled to get back up on her feet. He grunted with each exertion, and, thanks to the fact that he wasn't the most limber of people, he'd probably be feeling it for a few days.
"Oh no, nyet-nyet-nyet," Korvka breathed rapidly with dogged determination, her words turning into vapor as she noticed Kyle struggling to undo the vine around his leg. As a warning, the poisonous teenager clenched the fist of the hand connected to the foliage snare, causing the vines to tighten like a boa constrictor. Then, ever the cautious one, the vines around his leg sprouted two new growths that attempted to tighten around his wrists and restrain him from further movement. "Say eet!" she repeated, this time quite thinly as she wobbled to the side, her free arm flailing in several circles as she tried to maintain her balance against his struggling since the depth of the snow made for an awkward time of getting up. After a series of uneasy little steps that stamped down a large circle of snow, Korvka finally caught her balance but was then pitched violently forward by the tugging rebuttal that Kyle delivered, which, thanks to his size, was much more forceful than Korvka's. "AIEEE-OOOOOOF!" she cried out in both pain and surprise as the leash backfired on her and she was jerked forward, arm first, to fall on her outstretched hands into the snow with a spectacular slide one might see in a baseball game. She closed her eyes tightly as a spray of snow met her face, dappling it in stinging sensations as her hands bore the brunt of the blow and a whole handful of snow made its way into the V of her neckline. Positively furious and humiliated, the Russian girl shook her head back and forth to clear her 'hair' of the snow, mostly a habit from her earlier years of snowball fights with markedly different hair and then slammed both hands into the snow as she looked up between her vine dreadlocks as they fell over her face, her unsettlingly green eyes glowing from behind them. She turned her head and spat out a mouthful of snow, the entire front of her completely covered, and then hastily dusted herself off while keeping an eye on him to see if her vines' aim was true.
Impulsive as usual, Kyle started to bark, 'Nyet, nyet, ny-eahhrrr...' back, mocking Korvka despite his predicament, but the words became garbled as he realized the vines started to wend their way up his wrists. 'You goddamn crazy... stop it!' he said, and it was intended as a growl, but it was more of a squeaky screech in his unrefined teenaged boy's voice, as he tried to pull his hands back before they became too entangled. Never one for forethought, however, he dark yellow mutant was already partially bound. The boy was persistent and continued to struggle; if it weren't for his very limited wardrobe, he probably could have given the vines a dose of acid to weaken them, but for now he relied on strength alone to try and free himself. When his traveling companion took a header into the snow, Kyle projected an unnecessarily harsh, 'HA!' that echoed sharply in the snowy wooded cove. While Korvka fumed and glowered, the young man tried to keep her attention with an unkind and somewhat superior look as he tried to slip his hands from his ratty gloves, which was tricky since the wrists were trapped, giving him limited wiggle room. 'Gotta little snow in your drawers? How you like that?'
Standing on her knees, Korvka gave herself one last animated brush-off, shivering as the snow in her shirt started to melt, droplets rolling between her chest. She looked down at herself, pinching the vivid blue sweater between two fingers and pulling it away from her, which stuck at first because it was wet but eventually pulled free and several chunks of snow fell from the bottom hem to land on the ground in front of her. She pulled at her damp sweater a couple of times to shake loose any other snow, though she mostly just managed to fling the flakes around so that they hit her tummy and soaked into the hem of her jeans. As Kyle struggled with the vines, his voice reaching the timbre usually reserved for the flute, it was Korvka's turn to let out a scornful laugh and, to rub it in, she willed the coiling vines at his wrists to extend up to his elbows. "You need more to giff Russian tro-ble," she said, unable to remember the word for snow, so she reached over and grabbed a handful of snow with her free hand, crushing it quickly into a ball. Then, she promptly let it fly towards his chest, heaving with all her might, which probably threw off her aim. 15 years of Russian winters had left the green girl with a higher tolerance to the cold than most, and, well, if he was so intent on putting down her Motherland then she would use any opportunity to rub its usefulness back in his face!
While Korvka took care of de-snowing herself, Kyle focused his strange, muted yellow eyes upon the petite Russian's green visage and continued to grin in light of his circumstances, having to kind of lean his head up awkwardly to do so since he was still on his side. With his hands so close together, he worked the glove off of his left extremity, but since they were staggered in a fixed position where he'd initially grabbed ahold of the vines, he couldn't remove the right one.''Zactly what you aimin' to do? Tie me up an' leave me here? You ain't gonna get nowhere without me, sweetheart,' he said coyly and with unwarranted assuredness. As Kyle was still in more or less of a fetal position from before, the snowball Korvka sent flying hit him in his shoulder and disintegrated in a burst of white, sparkling in the sunlight of the morning, and leaving behind a compact splat of snow on his sleeve, but he still ducked his head, flinching away from the frozen projectile because there was very little else he could do to avoid it. The cold of the snowy mound Kyle landed in was noticeably starting to leach through his layered clothes, and he really didn't want to be caught without a fire in wet clothes. 'Why don't you be a good girl n'call back your little plants thingies before we both freeze the hell to death out here,' he said, thinking that he sounded practical, when he actually sounded patronizing, which was not completely unintended.
"No," Korvka answered simply, her forehead raising as she shook her head, her tone surprisingly conversational for a girl who had, moments ago, been shrieking with anger. In fact, she looked a little too calm. Her long hair settled quickly around her shoulders like obedient snakes as she heaved to her feet, kicking each leg a few times to clear the snow from her knees. Now that Kyle was all tied up all further attempts to irritate her on his part only secured her resolve to carry through with her intended plan, and managed, for once, not to rise to his bait. In fact, as he started to plead his case in that condescending tone that would get him nowhere, Korvka began to whistle over his Southern drawl, looking at him with a confused expression and gesturing to her ear that she simply couldn't hear him. Though the pompous teenager knew full well that her current company would have no idea what the melody was, anyone at all familiar with Russian classics would have recognized the haunting tune to belong to 'Il Vecchio Castello.' With the belligerent boy currently in the fetal position in the snow, his hands bound, Korvka was satisfied but knew she had a limited window of time before he decided 'to hell with it' and used his acid...maybe even on her. So, lips pursed as the melody persisted in perfect pitch, Korvka turned away from Kyle so that the vines draped over her shoulder and started to haul him like a sack of presents over to the nearest tree, dragging him along behind her through the snow. She had to lean forward to fight against the packed precipitation, but she extended her other hand up towards the tree and a fat, sturdy vine shot directly from the center of her palm and then coiled around the lowest branch, which still hung about fifteen feet from the ground, and then, after it was sufficiently secured for its intended workload, draped a long tail down to meet the girl like a repelling line. Still whistling, this time much clearer now that she was not physically exerting herself, Korvka joined her hands together and the vines entangled and became one with a giant knobby knot where they fused. Hands free now, Korvka dusted them off as the vines, acting now on her behalf, began to haul Kyle up by his one bound leg. They were quick about it, but if he wanted to sacrifice his clothes, he might have time considering his weight and the length of the rope still left to go before he would become airborne.
When Korvka gave her terse answer, the boy's face transformed, with his coaxing eyes and deprecating smirk quickly dissolving into a hard scowl as she denied his request. About three seconds after his face carved itself into a nasty, hatred-filled mask, Kyle promptly started to shriek a string of practically incomprehensible, but unholy-sounding, derogatory remarks and proceeded to thrash violently on the ground, or at least as much as his bindings would allow him to in his current uncomfortable and inconvenient position. 'GODDAMNIT LET ME GO NOW,' he managed in a far more understandable manner, after reaching a crescendo that indicated that his previous caution with staying quiet as not to make their position known to anyone who might be in the vicinity was out the proverbial window, and that likely drowned-out the haunting tune that his traveling companion was so artfully whistling. When the snow settled after his tantrum, the acidic mutant's skinny chest heaved with his recent exertion, and Kyle paused long enough to catch his breath, his vehement and unblinking eyes zeroed-in on Korvka, and his thin-lipped mouth pressed shut tightly in an unattractive pucker. As the boy lurched forward through the snow, pulled forward by his very determined classmate, he grasped the main bunch of vines that connected himself to his captor with his ungloved left hand and finally discharged a corrosive dose of acid onto the viny cord. While it wouldn't dissolve the fibrous tissue immediately or entirely, it would hopefully weaken it substantially so that the Russian girl couldn't carry-out whatever nefarious payback on which she was planning, or at least not immediately, since he was still all tied-up otherwise.
Jesus he was wriggly, like an acidic worm. All of his thrashing made her trek all the more difficult but she put her low center of gravity to good use and managed to yank him the last couple of feet towards the tree with a full-body tug that sent the rope into a pile as she strained to make him skid. She felt a prickling sensation along her soles, her feet instinctively reacting to try and shoot vines into the soil just a little ways below... "ow!" she hissed to herself through clenched teeth as the vines retreated only when their sharpness was pushed back into her flesh by the confines of her boots. His litany of foul words did indeed overpower her song but she continued nevertheless with a maddening sort of resolve that she usually reserved for her lessons so that after he was finally puckered into silence, the tune endured well onto the other side of his tantrum. As the rope began to pull him by his one wrapped leg, Korvka calmly backed away and watched him release his acidic response to her vines. Damn. Truth be told, she hadn't really expected things to go this far but she had meant to give him some type of comeuppance, which, as her strange eyes flickered from the branch down to the piss-yellow boy, she hoped there was still time for. Without the vines attached to her body she could not manipulate them beyond what charge she had already given them so the rope, while consistently dragging him up, was definitely going to fail before he was too far high in the sky. Still, Korvka hoped there was still enough time for him to get a good donk on the head as he fell...
As much as Kyle wanted to lash out again, he just needed a minute, one minute, he told himself, to catch his breath and to let the onslaught of hydrochloric goodness works its corrosive magic. That didn't keep him from peering malevolently at Korvka, though, having to crane his neck uncomfortably to do so, but maintaining such a position also helped keep his head from bouncing around over top of whatever was buried beneath the snow as the feisty Russian girl hauled him along the ground. As the ache from his struggle against the tensile strength of the freshly-sprouted vines came and went in waves, he felt the fibrous little bundles under his left hand start to snap, the weakest and thinnest among them, at least. 'Come on, come on!' he urged beneath his breath as he tried to work the blunt end of his fingertips in between to get the acid through faster. The process was, unfortunately, not fast enough, he realized a moment too late, as he found himself suddenly airborne, and his head snapped back as he was lofted from the ground. His sudden weight along with another few moments to let the acid do its trick was enough, however, and after a few seconds of dangling there, a crackle not unlike that of a head of celery getting snapped in half sounded, and Kyle fell back to Earth with a painful oof! even though it was likely the distance he'd fallen was only a couple of inches. Instead of his face turning red like the average, normally-pigmented person, as the boy flushed in anger, his face acquired a sort of orangish hue, as he laid his free left hand over the vines binding his right, and used some of the residual on his palm to work on freeing his appendage. He said nothing through all of this, but he vibrated with fury; if he were a cartoon character, he'd probably have steam bursting forth from his ears. Before he could actually do anything, though, he needed to free himself, so he lay in the snow, doing just that, his body throbbing where the pressure points had recently be released.
Everything was exciting for just a few moments: Kyle racing against the pull of the rope, vines snapping as the acid ate through their rough fiber, and the steady sound of crunching snow as Korvka backed away from the scene. She watched, mostly satisfied that her plan was working at all since she'd never had to use her powers in a fight even when she remembered what her powers were, but inside her chest her heart was hammering. Fighting was not her strong suit, it was why she had enrolled in boxing classes in the first place, and this little tantrum of hers was starting to dig a hole that she wasn't sure she could get out of. Her eyes followed him as he was suddenly airborne, watching the vines to see where his pungent acid was but by the time she saw it was too late and Kyle was in a pile on the ground. For the briefest of moments Korvka felt a flash of guilt surge through her as Kyle fell in a heap, but that guilt was soon replaced by fear as she realized that he was only a few seconds away from probably disfiguring her forever. Or leaving her there, or leading her astray... There were suddenly so many reasons not to piss off Kyle that she immediately berated herself for having succumbed to her wily emotions. She looked around, as if an idea were hiding behind any one of the nearby trees, and then back to Kyle, her pulse spiking as she started to back away more quickly. Exhaling a little frightened breath as the proverbial FIGHT or FLIGHT hit her recently defragged brain, the Russian girl froze, trapped in a completely ineffectual limbo between the two options, willing the cogs in her brain to work faster while her prey continuously broke free from her restraints. Grasping at straws, Korvka closed her eyes and tried to feel for the roots beneath the snow, a soft, slow breath coming from her lips as she felt their dormant life, sharing a limbo with her since she realized that it would take more power than she could muster in order to call forth those roots from their natural sleep and through the snow. Her eyes opened and Kyle was practically glowing orange, and she called out with the first thing she could think of: a doozy of a lie. "Stope. Roots bee-low," she informed choppily in her panic, dipping her forehead towards the ground he lay on as she stood about ten feet away. "I con feel they po-wur," she finished threateningly, daring to take a theatrical step forward to enhance her bluff.
Without a great exertion on his bodily resources, and at the risk of losing the clothing off of his back, it was nigh impossible for the young man's escape to simply be instantaneous. Thus, Kyle diligently and methodically worked at removing the weakened and half-dissolved fauna from his wrists and then from his knee and partially entrapped leg. While he stayed quiet, the process quickened, as if he were utilizing his supressed anger, funneling it into voraciously freeing himself, until he was tearing the vines away, hank by hank, but the entire time he kept his eyes on Korvka. 'Well that's jus' a fiiiiiine idea, darlin', you just get ready to tie me right up again, go ahead, tie me up an' leave me here to freeze to death or starve or whatever. Birds'd be comin' to peck my eyes out in no time. Yeah, that'd be a fine idea, indeed.' Kyle's voice was full of disdain, as he mockingly sung the praises of what he assumed Korvka was suggesting she might do if he so much as moved. 'Then what? You know what yer doin' or where yer goin', huh? I mean, we in the middla fuckin' nowhere, an', sure, you got that faaaaancy gadget that can change the way you look, but that thing's only good until the bat-rees run out, an' then what?' The truth was that Kyle was angry at their situation in general. Maybe they ought to have stayed put at the school, but, no, his brashness and ego had gotten the better of him, and now it was, in his mind, much too late to turn back. Besides, admitting defeat wasn't really his style. As the boy stood up, bits and fragments of vine fell from him, peppering the snow with twigs in the area around his feet, as he glowered at his former roommate's younger sister. 'Ain't no one out here gives a good goddamn about you, 'specially with you lookin' the way you do, an' you threatenin' me?' he rhetorically asked as he stabbed the tips of his fingers back at his chest with a dull thunk. 'ME, the only person for who knows how many miles that can help YOU?' The last line was spoken through a progressively clenched jaw as Kyle dared to take a step toward Korvka. If she bound him again, so be it. He figured he'd get out, eventually, and if the impudent Russian abandoned him as such, it would only be of benefit to him in the long run.
As Kyle went on to bitterly describe his interpretation of whatever macabre retribution she had in store, Korvka stubbornly held her ground, hoping that he wouldn't see through her bluff too quickly. The imagery he described was vivid indeed, suddenly causing her flaxen brows to dip over her eyes in flash of incredulity. Really? He thought she was stupid enough to tie him up and leave him for dead? The greater punishment for him was obviously for her to remain with, though that split the punishment evenly down the middle for both of them to stomach. Despite the fact that she had no intention whatsoever of hurting or leaving him, Korvka stomped forward another step as he grabbed at the handfuls of vines and tore them away with irritation. Since the boy clearly thought she was more sinister than she was, what with his strange summation of her revenge, Korvka decided that it would be foolish not to use that to her bolster her bluff, and put one hand on her hip as she looked down at him. "No birts, you be down vith rest off the sheet," she growled, leading his eyes with a quick glance over to the area where they had made their makeshift toilet, hoping he'd remember how exactly those vines churned through the soil to 'flush' the hole. When he stood up she stopped walking, now only a few feet away and meeting his scowl with a strong one of her own as he tactlessly asserted how lost she'd be without him, her mouth cinching into a tight pout as he reminded her that she was a freak. At first, she didn't know what he meant by 'bat'rees' but when he explained how it would stop working she understood that he was talking about the battery, but by the time she put those two puzzle pieces together, he was thumping his chest and guilting her. "Elp me? Ha!," Korvka brusquely asserted, letting out a laugh that turned into a slightly longer one as she shook her head, every motion tense, every sound strained. "Vwur yam I?" she asked him pointedly, throwing her arms out and looking around to drive home her point. "I yaff no i-dea! Ond efen eef I osk you giff me rude onswer!" she retorted hastily, her words coming out faster than intended since she'd been thinking about this for days now. Still mirthlessly laughing, Korvka tightly folded her arms over her chest, trying not to shiver too much in the afternoon wind now that her front and back were wet from snow. "You can easss-illy loose uss yup 'ere as ve follow thees GREAT plon off yours," she said, folding her arms over her chest as he too took a step towards her, looking up at him with hotly. "Ond you probe-ly olrady haff," she concluded, sticking her chin up at him as she started to chip away at the real source of her irritation with him: the fact that she had no idea where they were and that he had no plan.
It was likely that Kyle was too riled-up to compute and take the time to translate Korvka's heavily accented English to figure out what she meant by her parrying remark. It was probably better that way, anyway. Subtle cues rarely moved the young man, so he didn't catch her drift when she moseyed around the toilet-area, but what he did get was that if he was able to disentangle himself from her primary onslaught in order to stand, she was either foolish enough to not attack him again right away, or she was feigning what her actual capabilities were. Either way, he'd use his current freedom to his advantage, and probably unwisely push it as was his tendency to do. 'We in Catskill Park, Greene County, New York State. I mean, it'd take a moment to compute the precise coordinates, if that's what you interested in, so sorry about 'bout that.' He took a step toward the toxic Russian, wordlessly daring her to do whatever it was she with what she was threatening him. 'Now, if we could just hop on the goddamn innerstate, we be in Albany in no time flat, but we gotta be careful, darlin', 'member that? I imagine that even in Russia, walkin' places miles away tends to take a little longer, 'specially goin' the route we goin'. He paused as a shiver ran through his lanky frame; the cold was getting to him, even if Korvka seemed unaffected. Heck, maybe she'd just go into hibernation like those plants of hers. Kyle met her gaze and stared defiantly at her, even in his increasing frigid discomfort. 'So if you got anything to add other than yer goddamn whinin', 'cause, newsflash, Imma asshole, feel free, Korvka,' he said, his teeth starting to chatter, although he was trying to keep them from doing so. After he spoke with an angry flourish of his hands, one gloved and other other naked, he bent to pick his other glove off of the ground.
"Aha! You onswer NOW," Korvka rolled her eyes, arms clamped tighter over her chest as she felt her teeth start to chatter, her lips stinging as she licked them. The cold suddenly hit her as a sudden gust of wind whirled through the wooded cove, the icy fingers of winter slipping into her wet clothes to burn her sensitive skin. Though brief, the wind was strong enough to move Korvka's heavy hair and the Russian closed her eyes and endured the bitter gale with a squinting grimace until it left. She let out a pained, irritated breath as she hugged herself for warmth, irked at his continued use of the world 'darling,' which, knowing that it was a term of endearment, allowed her to hear 'asshole' in its place. Though she didn't know the word for sarcasm she certainly understood the application of it. She snapped her jaw together so that she bit her words at him while matching his step forward and then adding another and another until she was only a few paces away. "I yam note mad about 'ow long it take us to be there," she hissed, speaking to him with increasingly shaky breath as her body reacted from the sudden lack of adrenaline pumping through and warming her muscles into action. "I yam mad that it take..." she paused as Kyle finished speaking, having caught the sight of the tip of her fingers and seen that they appeared a bit greyish in hue. "Bozhe moy!" she breathed to herself, tucking her hands quickly under her armpits and then, without further ado, hastily stormed off towards the bungalow to change immediately from the damp clothes that were quickly irritating her sensitive skin.
'Half the time, you don' even know what I'm sayin'! Why should I waste time splainin' stuff?' Kyle retorted. Since it was blatantly obvious that the boy also had a difficult time understanding a lot of what Korvka said, the statement help little water, lest he really wanted there to be no conversation at all between the two. While he outwardly might act like that's what he preferred, constant silence for weeks on end could get old and boring awful fast, too. With a definitive movement, Kyle yanked his drab, woolen glove back on to his vividly-colored, naked hand and appeared impervious to the fact that his irritated Russian companion smilingly stepped-up a little closer. The young man stared at her flatly, looking throughly unimpressed at her challenge, or whatever it was Korvka perceived it as; at least it seemed like he'd calmed down some, since he no longer sounded so tightly-strung, and his breathing had returned to normal. As she started to explain that hse wasn't mad about something, he rolled his peculiar eyes a little bit, as if he could hide the fact from the other mutant, despite their close proximity. 'Bo-whaaaa?' Upon her final interjection, however, his eyes pulled back to her face and then her outstretched hand, like a magnet drawn to its opposing polarity, and Kyle barked. '...aaaah, stick 'em in yer pits!' he suddenly commanded while simultaneously demonstrating what she was supposed to do, sticking his own hands underneath the warm juncture of his underarm, arms cross over his chest, shoulder scrunched-up in an exaggerated fashion. 'And get the hell inside! I gotta git this fire started,' she alternately barked and got down to business.
Kyle's shouted suggestion was given to Korvka's back as she was already in the middle of doing exactly what he prescribed in the middle of stomping through the snow back towards their bungalow. Her breath staggered as she almost lost her footing but she managed to stay upright without using her arms for balance, though she did veer a little to the side on her onward trek. The closer to the lean-to she came, the more the curtain of vines started to itch and come to life, rustling like leaves without wind to close behind her and then tighten, almost as if sealing her inside. Once she was on the softer earthen floor within, Korvka simply stood still in the middle of the floor and shivered for nearly a minute straight as a couple of fat, frustrated tears fell down her cheeks as she easily mimicked the posture Kyle had suggested for her as she hugged herself and tried to shove her fingers as deeply into the warm crevices of her arms as she could. Her face screwed up in pain as the harsh pins-and-needles feeling assaulted her fingertips, squeezing out another couple of tears as she finally took in a deep breath as the pain started to subside, and pulled her fingers out for inspection. They were still somewhat discolored but otherwise were returning to 'normal,' so she quickly walked over to her hammock and pulled her bookbag out from underneath. Hastily tearing a handful of clothes out from it, Korvka tossed them onto the hammock and immediately started to strip out of her cold shirt, which, if her fingers were any indication, might have allowed similar damage after her slide in the snow. She winced as she pulled all of her layers off at once and then threw them away from her, her hands immediately coming to cover her chest from the sudden cold on her tender skin. Practically shaking, she threaded her arms through a sports bra and then pulled on a white long-sleeved t-shirt followed by a black sweater and then finally, she yanked on what looked to be a whole tent but, once she was wearing it properly, was one of her older brother's hoodies, which hung to below her knees and swallowed her head in a large black hood. Shoving up the too-long sleeves, Korvka then shudderingly sat down on the hammock. Lifting one leg and then the other, she unlaced her boots and toed them off, then stood up to quickly shove off her leggings and jeans. Kicking them away from her without care, the curving Russian wiggled into a pair of panties, grey long-john bottoms and then practically jumped into a pair of bootcut jeans and finally stuffed her feet with two pairs of socks before tugging her boots on again. Pulling on her only pair of gloves, she flexed her hands in the smooth leather a few times and then zipped up her bag and placed it under the hammock. She then gathered her clothes in both arms and walked towards the exit, the protective vines peeling around her to allow her departure from the woodland dwelling so that she could dry her clothes on the line she strung up out back, perfectly content to ignore Kyle as she came back into sight...
Standing stock still while he made sure that Korvka heeded his orders, the only movement from Kyle was a couple of eye blinks and the rise and fall of his chest as he watched his traveling companion make her way to the relative protection of the lean-to. As steamy white breaths puffed through the filter of his scarf, quickly at first, although they calmed after a few breaths, a sound issued forth from the boy's throat, but it hitched there, as if he were going to say something, but decided against it. It truly took all of the impetuous young man's barely-existent willpower to not call after her, to boast Well, that's whatchu git!. What had just happened was avoidable, but no less sobering, since their ridiculous tiff reminded Kyle of just how dangerous it could be, roughing it as they were, with few resources in the middle of nowhere. As the Russian took care of getting changed and adequately dressed for the frosty outdoor temperatures, Kyle eventually turned away, only after watching the sentient vines open and close tightly on the young woman's command. After shaking a bit of caked snow from the glove he'd pulled back on, the boy finally set-out to fetching kindling and some smaller pieces of wood to stoke the embers smoldering in the pile of ash between the firewall and their hut. It was in this location, crouched down by the small, reignited, flickering pile of perfectly arranged firewood, Kyle remained until Korvka reemerged from inside, arms laden with damp clothes. He straightened his shoulders and sat back on his heels a bit, and, under the guise of carefully watching the fire to make sure it was properly stoked and blazing before he moved from the spot, didn't otherwise acknowledge her presence. He sucked his freckled cheeks in and bit down on the insides, and concentrated on the warm glow in front of him. This wasn't their first argument, and it wasn't likely to be their last, considering that they'd probably be traveling together for a little while yet, but Kyle'd be damned if he was going to say something first. Since one was just as obdurate as the other, however, they might be in for an awkward, prolonged silence, until one of them caved or pissed the other off again in some fashion.
Ordinarily, Korvka preferred to leave her enemies be so long as they contented to do the same, so when she emerged from the drawn veil of vines and immediately saw Kyle crouched by the ember, she averted her gaze and took a hairpin turn on the ball of her foot, pivoting away from him and then around their 'home' to the laundry line. The several layers that hung there all hung stiffly, moving as entire pieces when the wind blew instead of swaying, the fabric unyielding until molded by warm flesh. Throwing all her clothes into the crook of one arm, she grabbed each hanging garment and scooted them down the leafless vine's smooth exterior with her gloved hands, making room for a new batch of clothes. These were all of the clothes she'd been able to stuff into her bag along with what she considered to be necessities, and after some arrogant advice from Kyle about what else she should bring along, she'd narrowed it down to three outfits plus her coat, which she tried to keep dry by wearing only at night, what with her and Kyle's tendency to use snow as a weapon. Once all of her clothes were hanging, she tried her best to arrange her underwear so that they didn't draw attention, since she considered it kind of embarrassing to literally air her dirty laundry, and managed to 'disguise' them in-between a pair of pants and a long-sleeved shirt. Arms free now, she figured it would take a little while for him to get the fire going so she looked in the direction of the nearby stream and started hiking that way. It was uphill, as everything seemed to be here, climbing steadily while the trees thickened, their thick trunks growing closer and closer until, after a scramble up the last part of the hill with the help of the jutting rocks, Korvka puffed up onto the bank of the stream. It was frozen, of course, since it wasn't a very strong current to begin with, but it was fresh water and it beat drinking melted snow. Huffing a bit from her upward hike, Korvka walked carefully over the snowy stones until she reached the freshly frozen hole that she had been using for days now, so the ice was thinner, showing as a dark and jagged circle in a placid sea of grey. Blowing warm air into her fist, the toxic girl then bit the tips of her glove and yanked it quickly off, letting it dangle between her teeth as she held her palm out towards the hole and a vine darted out like a needle, straight and tipped with a hawthorn thorn that punctured the hole and then retracted as quickly as possible. Once it was back within, Korvka hastily grabbed her glove and stuffed her hand back inside, blowing hot air into the fur-lined leather as her hand started to warm as soon as it was back on. As she pulled her arms into her layers and held them impossibly close to her warm chest, several long dreadlocks on her head started to creep out of the recesses of her deep, black hood, pouring like an earthy waterfall down her tummy and legs until they reached the snowy ground and started skating along towards the waterhole, moving with a slow but confident insistence until the many ends of her tendrils dipped into the water. Many recoiled at the cold but she willed them to remain and took a shaking breath as she then began to 'drink.'
With his back to the entrance of the hut, Kyle kept his attention stalwartly upon the task in front of him, coddling and coaxing the embers into baby flames, adding just enough fuel to keep the fire growing to a satisfactory size. He didn't so much as twitch when he heard the soft rustle of the viney façade of the lean-to open and shut, and the crunch of snowy ground underfoot, heralding Korvka's exit back into the outdoors, although he did half expect a swift kick to his backside, or some other such assault, to send him face-first into the fire pit, but it never came. It was something he would probably do, if the tables were turned. Still, he braced himself until he heard her footsteps disappearing in the opposite direction, and only relaxed when he cast a wary look over his shoulder to see where his bunkmate had gone. A steamy puff of white filtered through his scarf as he forcefully exhaled the breath he'd been holding in anticipation of unreceived retaliation, and the boy straightened a little, then finally finished tending to the fire until it was once more properly ablaze. With that chore complete, the boy stood up and stretched his layers-insulated arms over his head and arched his back. Again, he carefully peeked over his shoulder to see if Korvka was lurking anywhere close-by, and performed a slow circle as to look in all directions to verify that she'd wandered-off elsewhere. Not in sight. That was just fine. Squinting his strange eyes in the glare of the sun reflecting off of the snow, Kyle pondered what task to complete next; the traps needed to be checked, and, damnit, he'd wasted what seemed to be half the day arguing with that dumb girl. And so, the acidic mutant set-out on a route as opposite as possible to the Russian girl, but only after relieving himself on a tree on the outskirts of their encampment. The boy took his dear old time making his rounds, stopping here to grab some pinkish berries and leaves off of a low-growing and surprisingly green shrub, and there to crouch and peruse some fresh tracks in the recently-fallen snow.
Drinking this way came with a number of advantages and disadvantages, most notably of each was being able to not freeze her mouth and lips drinking orally and being forced to feel the water saturate everywhere like icy pins and needles, respectively. Korvka shivered, every inch of her body raised with gooseflesh as she hugged herself tighter, shoulders humped up by her ears as several long, shaking clouds of white steam furled from between her hood as she took in her fill, feeling her body stiffen as it drank in deep lines of the frigid water. Soon, her arms were crossed over her chest as tightly as she could make them and she doubled over, finally coming into a squat and hugging her knees to her chest as she felt sweet satiation just a few moments away. Though she was no longer privy to the sensation of hunger she now thirsted more than she ever had and slaking that urge had become as important as eating had once been. When she was finally full, the long, thick dreadlocks slowly pulled back, moving with the frozen stiffness of molasses back over the frozen waters and then up the squatting Russian's form until they were the right length and then curled themselves up into her hood to thaw against her body heat and regain their dexterity. She remained still for a minute or two afterwards, pulling the large hoodie over her knees and resting her head on them as she continuously breathed hot air into her little cocoon. She was still human enough to run at the same temperature, which gave her a distinct advantage over her deciduous brethren who were currently dormant in these wintry conditions, so, though it took a moment of concentrated effort, her skin soon began to feel tender to the touch as the freezing sensation gave way to almost-painful warmth. Slowly, she stood, making sure she had her footing beneath her before turning to lean against a nearby tree and try to carefully navigate her way down the slippery stones she'd scrambled up to get to the creek in the first place. Moving slowly and cautiously, she finally managed to navigate her winter boots over the icy rock and then plopped almost knee-deep into the snow at the bottom of the rising bank. With outstretched arms to guide her back down the hill, Korvka descended and finally tromped the last hundred feet or so towards the lean-to looking left and right for any sign of Kyle, slowing a bit to make sure she didn't barge in on him while he was in the modest dwelling. "Hullo?" she called, standing outside the curtains as they twitched and swayed but did not part as their creator stood with her back to them, just in case Kyle was changing or otherwise indecent. However, hearing no crass reply, Korvka entered and moved around her hammock to grab the discarded sewing project she'd thrown onto the floor before essentially attacking Kyle. Now that she'd had a moment to calm down, Korvka felt sheepish for having been so quick to rise to his bait but he'd said awful things and she couldn't just let him get away with it! Still, helping him helped her in the long run, and she had dropped him on his head, so she grabbed the sock and needle and then stormed out of the bungalow to sit the stone nearest to the fire, glaring down at her project as she carefully undid the last few stitches.
Taking his good old time to make his rounds, Kyle eventually appeared again in the vicinity, coming from the direction of the stream, but further down from where Korvka had been replenishing herself. In one gloved hand, from a length of string, dangled a skinned and tidily dressed rabbit, and in his other hand was a small sprig of green with some pinkish berries. His eyes were narrowed, as if the boy held the very act of returning to the campsite in contempt, and he carefully scanned the area. The young man's breaths were soft but audible, as he huffed quietly, a little out of breath after his circuitous trek through the woods. During the time he was away, Kyle was able to let some steam off, enough so that he wouldn't do anything sudden and regrettable, but he still didn't think, at the heart of things, he'd really done anything wrong, either. He was a notorious button-pusher, and if Korvka was too sensitive to deal with it, it wasn't his problem. Unrepentant and full of himself as the boy was, he certainly didn't think what he said warranted the treatment he received. Aside from these thoughts occupying his mind, he was also actually trying formulate their next move. He hadn't yet gotten a good look at the maps he'd filched from the ranger station, and hoped that he'd get a moment's silence this afternoon to chart the subsequent leg of their journey. As the smoky smell of the fire grew stronger on the crisp air, he came to a stop to spy Korvka huddled over her sewing project once more. After taking care of his catch, he was actually hoping to cop a seat by the fire, but he wasn't so sure she cared to share the space so closely with his companion and antagonist just yet. However, he made no effort to hide the fact he was staring at the green, dreadlocked girl, and that it was obvious he was trying to decide how to proceed. Miraculously, he said nothing, although the sharp exhale of air produced could have been perceived as a displeased sound, and he went to hang the rabbit on a branch to let it cool in nature's refrigerator until he was ready to deal with it.
Teeth clutched at her bottom lip as little signs of impatient annoyance started to crop up in her movements, hands jerking minutely as she tried to gather only the stitches she wanted to remove. The gloves, while warm, made it impossible to complete her task with the necessary finesse and so, shaking her head for the things she did to help him, Korvka bit off both her gloves and scooted down closer to the fire, putting her back against the rock and her knees bent by her chest as she enjoyed the warm flames and the dry, warm dirt around them. On one knee she placed the sock and needle, on the other, her gloves, as she held both bare hands out towards the heat while also carefully positioning herself to sit as directly in the sunshine as she could. The best she could figure was that she was more plantlike now and probably needed to eat that way, so, though the fire provided the necessary heat, the sunlight offered additional nutrition, and she couldn't afford to lose it, especially when she wasted so much of it on Kyle. However, she quickly resumed her task, her neatly bitten nails plucking out the last four lines of stitches, pausing to carefully pull the end of the needle back through the holes. By the time she had restitched that portion and was working on the meat of the seam, she had already heard Kyle's footsteps heralding his arrival and took a slow, deep breath to calm herself before flying off the handle again. When became obvious that he was simply gawking at her while holding onto dead meat, Korvka lifted her eyes from her lap and arched her brows, asking silently 'what?' until he huffed at her and went to hang it somewhere. Since Kyle had so graciously offered the olive branch of continued silence, Korvka was disinclined to refuse it, so she simply took another relaxing breath and pinched the seam tightly as she slid the needle through, shaking her head back and forth quickly to make the oversized hood slip back a bit and allow her a better view of her project.
Silently, Kyle went about his business for the next few minutes, periodically popping a couple of berries into his mouth as he did so. Coming to the fire, he hazarded a glance at the top of Korvka's head; unseen underneath the rough wool of his scarf, the boy opened his mouth ever-so-slightly, but it snapped shut audibly after a moment, for he apparently changed his mind, or maybe he just didn't really have anything to say, so he simply continued on his less-than-merry way. Smelling vaguely of mint, as he'd run out of berries and resorted to chewing on a couple of the teaberry leaves, the young man brought over a couple more pieces of dry wood from the stash and made a point of steering clear of Korvka, who'd made herself at home by the fire, although there wasn't a large space around the pit to maneuver without making it obvious that he was trying to avoid her. Of course, he didn't really care one way or another that she knew; subtlety was not one of the unrefined young man's strong suits. Squatting down on his haunches, Kyle swiftly and skillfully stoked the fire. Ask he carefully retracted a thick, sturdy stick with a Y at the end that he used for the sole purpose of tending the fire, a flourish of smoke and bright orange cinders floated upward, and he proceeded in silence, putting the makeshift fire poker back in its place by the woodpile. Finally, with his chores accomplished, and left with nothing else to do for the time-being, Kyle stood halfway between the woodpile and the fire and sighed inwardly. He was tired. This trip was potentially dangerous, and, for himself, there was only a vague destination in mind. He wasn't going home like Korvka was, he wasn't even knowingly seeking-out somewhere safe. Maybe just safer. At least much of his aggravation had subsided and wound-down to its usual, dull but persistent and easily-sprung coil inside of his scrawny chest. 'I said you ain't gotta do that if you don't wanna,' he eventually said. Even though the words weren't exactly what one would consider kindly-put, it was sort of his way, without having to say sorry, of apologizing.
The crackle of the fire had become the chief soundtrack now that Korvka was so close to it, a little flash of silver glaring every time she made another meticulously minuscule stitch. Since the earlier steam seemed to have been let off, Korvka now just wanted to be practical; to do whatever would be the most helpful so that they didn't waste time and energy while they were holed up here. Of course, it would have been great to know exactly how to express that, but with her steady-but-slow grasp on the English language she knew she lacked the proper vocabulary to properly convey her feelings without Kyle jumping down her throat and calling her stupid again, so she didn't bother trying. She looked up as he approached and since technically she was quite in the way with the way she sat so unapologetic and immovably in front of the fire, she interpreted his avoidance as forced politeness, and so, in turn, she wiggled a little bit to push against the rock more, giving a little more space for him to move with the additional logs he carried. As he stoked the fire and it belched out smoke and cinder the Russian pulled her head away from the sudden influx of heat and then put a hand on the ground and shifted her bottom to sit on the rock her back had just been against as the fire roared. Stooping over to pick up her gloves which had fallen from her knee, she replaced them in the same location and attended to the sock once more. She was taking her time, really, because what else was she supposed to do? This tiny project was the only way she absolutely knew how to contribute currently, and she'd be damned if she rushed it or ruined it. As Kyle spoke to her after several long moments of silence, Korvka looked up, catching his eye for a moment with a hint of surprise softening her features, and then cleared her throat while looking back into her lap while she made another couple of stitches. "Ees okay," she answered with a sigh, almost an 'I forgive you' but not quite. "I say I vood do eet," she went on to explain, just in case he got any funny ideas about why she was being so nice, looking at him without lifting her head so that she drove her point home from behind her flaxen floral lashes.
The moment Korvka met his gaze, Kyle jerked his attention away from her eyes and looked somewhere off in the distance, as if he'd suddenly become interested in something on the tree-lined horizon. His jaw worked overtime on the wad of minty leaves in his mouth, even though he'd finally squeezed just about the last bit of flavor from them, and was left with a fibrous chunk of little more than cud. Kyle didn't look back, even after Korvka offered her own version of an apology, even though she'd skirted around the words in a similar fashion. But that was more than fine by him. Giving the leaves one final, good chew, and collecting most of the fragments together, Kyle hooked his fingers onto his scarf and pulled it down far enough so he could hawk it out into the snow. As if he were practiced in the art of spitting, he got a pretty good distance of the slimy hunk, then spent a couple of seconds spitting out a couple of little, wayward pieces of plant material that had stayed behind in his mouth. He put his scarf back and finally looked back in his traveling companion's direction, noting her diffident bearing. ''kay,' was all he had to say for himself for the moment; with that over and done with, Kyle finally made it back over to the game dangling from the tree branch he'd tied it to, so he could start to prepare it for cooking. Not that he was going to whip up a marinade out of non-existent ingredients, or anything like that; as a fellow of simple tastes and needs, he just needed to get it on the spit. After the rabbit was set-up, Kyle stood for a moment watching it, his hands shoved into his hoodie pockets, contemplating what to do next. He needed to stay close-by, so that he could tend to his food as it cooked, but he supposed he could go inside to play a rousing game of Solitaire and periodically come back out to check the food's progress. Instead, he muttered in a rather mush-mouthed manner, 'whenyoudonewiththatyouwannaplaycardsersumthin?' It was an offer Kyle had made a couple of times before, but, he'd insisted on both choosing the game and dealing. It didn't take much to figure out that Kyle was a bit of cheat, however, given his control and the fact that the worn deck of cards was obviously marked, although they'd been marked so many times, that he'd forgotten what half of them meant.
In order to check her work, Korvka carefully pinched the needle between her first two fingers and carefully stuffed that hand into the fraying and somewhat pungent garment in order to pull it right side out. Looking at it with a little tilt of her head, Korvka observed her efforts thus far. There was a bit of a pucker at the top, presumably thanks to the way the sock's owner had removed it from his foot, but she figured the extra space would keep the seam from creating unnecessary discomfort and so, satisfied, she put the thing inside out again and started to finish the seam. However, she looked over as a strange sound caught her ear and then made a face as she watched her bunkmate discharge a sizable wad of chewed up...something. The look on her face suggested she wondered if this was a manifestation of his power but that thought was put to rest as he continued to splutter out the dregs of his makeshift toothpaste, and her shoulders relaxed from their subconsciously locked position. While he tended to his supper, she completed the needlework. Her line of attack was much more subtle, like the effect of the tide: steady and inevitable until the thing was finished as best as she could manage. She was in the middle of securing the final knot when Kyle's garbled and muted offer spilled out. She lifted her head, bending her brows in gentle confusion as a request for him to repeat what he'd just said. "Hmm?" she added, just to avoid further confusion that could lead to a fight with the sun sinking instead of rising. With the way he was postured towards her and acting civil, Korvka bit the line of white thread to sever and turned it inside out for one final check, but once she was through she held her hands in her lap and looked up at him, her knees pushed together and her feet spread apart as she sat, swallowed in her brother's hoodie.
'I say-ed,' Kyle started-off, enunciating much more clearly, and his voice a little louder than necessary. But whatever infinitesimal amount of self-preservation he had made the boy give pause, and he scrunched his thin-lipped mouth together under the cover of the scarf, and started all over. 'I was wonderin',' he began once more in a much nicer tone; well, nicer for him, as it was obvious he was struggling with maintaining a polite, or at least even-tempered, manner of speaking, '...if you wanna play a game of cards, er sumthin', later on when yer done.' Obviously, he didn't realize that she'd completed the project presently, and his his yellow eyes with the pinprick pupils narrowed slightly, as if the mere effort of civil conversation was too much for him. 'You can pick the game if ya wanna...' he eventually added, which was a mighty big offer, considering the source, but his previous clean pronunciation started to give way to a mumble again. Kyle watched Korvka evenly, blinked a couple of times, probably expecting her to say no, or maybe something even coarser, and copped a squat a quarter of the circumference of the fire circle's distance away from the younger girl to turn the meat on its spit. It was warm, quite warm-- the fire wall was doing its job of reflecting the heat in the direction of the lean-to, so when she denied his offered, as he expected her to do, he could at least be warm and alone inside for a little while.
Korvka's eyes cut to Kyle as he began to repeat himself with the usual amount of venom, glaring sharply out of reaction to his initial tone of voice but then, as he paused and haltingly rephrased, the Russian found herself listening to his offer. A game of cards? Since she'd been looking curiously up at him, her hesitance to comply with his invitation was unlikely to be missed as she pouted her lips and scrunched her brows, reminded of how their last game of cards had ended: in a yelling duel after she'd caught him cheating. Why would she say yes to another guaranteed argument? She shook her head and then held the needle between her lips as she put her warm leather gloves back on, but quickly looked up as he added that she could choose the game this time, her lips puckered into an 'o' of interest with the silver needle at the center. She bit the end of the needle so that she didn't have to keep making that face and asked "Serious?" through clenched teeth as she shoved the webbings of her fingers together in order to make the leather fit more snugly to her hands. Then grabbing the needle from her mouth, Korvka picked up the sock and stood from the stone, wincing as her lower back and bottom protested with a brief but sharp pain. She held the sock and needle in one hand and put the other on her lower back, bending over and twisting to produce a much needed pop! Now that enough time had passed she realized that her shoulder was a little achy from her earlier header in the snow too, and, with a glance to her squatting companion, decided that a little extra humiliation couldn't hurt after all the awful things he'd said today. There weren't a lot of American games that she knew how to play but her father had taught her one pretty well, and she intended to use that to her advantage. "Okay," she agreed, shrugging a single shoulder since the other one was a tender. "You know Po-kyur?" she asked with a sidelong glance, her acid green eyes holding him at the center of their focus as she tossed his new-and-improved sock towards him.
Letting go of the end of the spit once he tended to the cooking rabbit, and after he made sure that the bare earth around the fire pit was dry and warm, Kyle eased his rear-end down so that he could actually sit. The young man was well aware that their last game of cards had ended... less than amicably, even though he would still ardently deny that he had cheated. Arguing just seemed to be the one thing upon which they agreed, and they did it well. But, after this morning, and despite the threats, accusations and curses at the last game's conclusion, he was itching for something to do, and even a brief distraction from their current and rather bleak existence would be better than nothing, right? Kyle looked unenthusiastically off to the side as Korvka's expected wariness to accept the offer turned into interest. When she asked if he were serious, he raised his hairless brow and quickly turned his face back in the Russian girl's direction. 'Yeah,' he replied, fighting the urge to deliver a snarky answer, although the tone of the yeah implied that he wasn't too impressed that she'd doubted him, or maybe that she was considering it at all. As she stood and stretched, Kyle once again looked-away, this time directing his eyes skyward, and crossed his arms over his chest. He was trying to be nice. Was she going to drag her whole damn answer out? In fact, his body pulsed when Korvka did say okay, as if the word surprised him, and he looked sidelong at her, which was a typical way for the boy to regard people, but it still made him appear suspicious. He treated the sock like it was a hot rock when she tossed it in his direction, catching it gingerly and fumbling with it for second. 'Po-ky-- is that...?' he inquired, all of his thought processes evident on his face as he digested what she'd asked. 'Unless you talking about some Russian game, you mean... Poe-kerrrr?' he said, then finished with, 'Poker? Like when you do bettin' and stuff?'
"Poe-kurrr," she imitated, rolling her eyes skyward with a flippant toss of her hand in the same direction as he corrected her, her attitude very clearly saying 'whatever.' Now that she had no project to attend to the thought of skunking Kyle in a game of Poker became all the more appealing, and as he fixed a wary, peripheral glare her way, Korvka made sure to return his look fully, allowing him to read her face for any signs of trickery. After all, she wasn't going to cheat, but leading him to think she might perhaps be less skilled at Poker than she was in order to make her victory all the more humiliating wasn't cheating; it was using his own personality against him. Standing as she was, she had the rare privilege of looking down at Kyle and her hands migrated to her hips, resting on the curve as she listened to his explanation about whether or not they were talking about the same game, leaning a little towards him as if she could understand better the closer her ears were to the source. At first, words like 'bettin' threw the Russian for a loop since she didn't understand enough English nuance to hear what was happening to the word, but now, two weeks later, she was gettin' pretty good at deciphering his southern drawl, though words like 'duct' were still a problem, obviously. Looking at the little black holes that were his pupils, Korvka, who was also trying to be civil, took a steadying breath and reiterated "Yes, that vwun" on the breath she let out so that the words were airy and resigned. "Nothing 'ere for bets," she mused, looking around as she saw sticks and leaves and snow and dirt and little else. Being that she had spent the majority of her life being a prim pianist, Korvka had not played Poker for anything more than spare kopecks from her dad's change jar, and so she wasn't exactly forthcoming with an idea of what they could play for in its place. "Ve cood yuse," she began, pulling her mouth to side as her eyes lifted up as she tried to think of something. "Stor-ees? Silence?" she asked lamely, looking down at him she slid her hands from her hips into the front pocket along Vlad's hoodie.
A soft, grumbly little sound of displeasure issued from the back of the boy's throat when Korvka mirrored his pronunciation with no little bit of sass, but other than that and an annoyed eye roll of his own, Kyle behaved himself. It wouldn't strike him that Korvka had any tricks hidden up her sleeve, since Poker, to him, was an All-American game and his opponent was a foreigner with what Kyle assumed would be limited card-playing experience and vocabulary. When she conceded that, yes, that was the game to which she referred, Kyle smiled underneath his scarf, but the only visible evidence of this was that the apples of his freckled cheeks rose and his eyes squinted a little. 'We ain't gotta play for...' he started to say when the Russian girl noted that there was little to nothing in the way of material means for betting, but paused when she continued. His smile fell away and his gaze dropped down from his companion to the crackling fire. He wasn't at all interested in more talk, but silence? That might not be a bad commodity. As the young man considered the prospect of such fodder to replace chips, he leaned forward and busied himself with tending to the spit, pretending to take more time than was actually necessary to both complete the task and to think. 'Arright, if I win, then you don't talk,' he finally said, sounding almost... congenial, and his shoulders bounced up and down once before he tilted his face back up towards Korvka. 'Outside or inside?' he then asked, since outside had the advantage of better light, while inside meant they could probably take their gloves off to handle the cards more easily.
Silence? Had she really suggested that, that was the least humiliating thing she could have said! Though she was looking down at him expectantly, her arms held straight down towards her tummy since the pocket on the front of her hoodie hung to her legs, shoulders a bit hunched, she was currently scrambling to try and think of something else to play for. Something rawer. Meaner. Something that would make up for being called fat and stupid and Russian all day. Her sickly hued eyes glued to him as he mulled over her offer, noting the way his goldenrod cheeks scrunched up around the eyes, either a grimace or a smile. Hoping that it was the latter, Korvka decided that she was at least free of suspicion for the time being, and took a large sigh and she let her shoulder slump from their previously upright and locked position. "Eh," she grunted at last, taking her eyes off of him as if displeased with what they'd come up with. "So boe-ring," she said, pulling her mouth to the side and making a face as if to suggest that such a simple replacement was beneath her. "Ees note goot enough," she mused, pinching her lips together as she watched him lean over to tend to the rabbit and sprawling his long, sticklike body across the fire-warmed earth. While he turned the spit, taking his time, she stared in roughly the same direction, though her eyes were glossed over as she tried to think of something else to add into the pot. She knew about games that teenagers play, but the only one that she could see herself playing with Kyle was Truth or Dare, and even then she didn't want to leave the dares up to him. Glancing slyly down to him, Korvka said "Okay, okay, vwe do thees: vwin hond, osk anytheen you vwont to looser, looser onswer, then has be qviet for next hond." There was a hint of questioning in her eyes as she looked down at him, half asking with the gentle lilt of her flaxen brow, but deep inside she was screaming at him to agree. "Outsite," she said hastily, looking up at the sun and sighing as she saw its position in the sky was now much closer to dusk than she might have liked. Only a few more hours of sunlight left, and she intended to soak up all the nutrients she could.
'Borin'!?' Kyle repeated in a dubious manner... well, sort of repeated... after he computed what she'd first said, and sat upright upon the exclamation. As he eased himself back into a more leisurely sitting position, the acidic mutant visibly relaxed back on the warm rock against which he was sitting. If he had eyebrows, one would have been quirked upwards in droll, impatient expectation, as if to say well? as he awaited a further, and no doubt inferior, reason as to why Korvka thought bargaining for silence was boring. He said nothing else for a moment, but what could be seen of his face read as somewhat incredulous when his traveling companion said that his suggestion wasn't good enough, and a hot, steamy puff of air filtered through his scarf as he blew a noisy but brief breath out through his mouth. '...thenwhatbrightexcitinideayougot...' he muttered displeasedly beneath his breath, or something along those lines. Kyle didn't mind playing cards just for the sake of playing cards, but, in an attempt to keep things as civil as possible, he not-so-impassively waited for her to lay an offer on the proverbial table, his shoes scuffing noisily on the dirt as he repositioned himself, his arms ending-up crossed tightly over his chest, gloved fingers in his armpits. When she finally revealed her plan, Kyle looked evenly up at Korvka, his eyes narrowed slightly in concentration as he worked-out what she was saying. 'Uh-huh,' was all he said at first, not entirely clear as to why this was her choice, but it seemed benign enough. 'You better have some good goddamn dirt to dig-up...' he muttered, pulling his eyes away from Korvka as he pushed himself up to stand. Although he was currently lacking his usual swagger, there was no hiding the fact that he assumed he'd be coming out on top; of course, asking a seventeen-year-old amnesiac who lost two years of her past and whom he had difficulty understanding in the first place didn't immediately scream fun to him either, but at least he could maybe torment her under her own rule set. After a thorough stretch, Kyle disappeared into the hut to retrieve his playing cards, which he promptly handed over to Korvka, since he did offer her first deal, when he reappeared outside with them.
A genuine smile pulled across Korvka's dark green mouth as Kyle essentially caved to her demands with a rather sour but conciliatory remark about whether or not she'd have anything interesting to tell. "Ond you note be a liar," she chimed in, giving him a pointed look from behind her eyelashes to drive home the point that she would be watching him and listening to him to see if his stories sounded too tame to be allowed. Of course, if anyone was going to lie it was going to be her, since she didn't exactly want to reveal much about herself to someone who so clearly hated her, but she was fairly confident that she could punk him in this game with minimal humiliation on her part and so the smile faded after the initial bloom, but still lingered in the upward tilt of her brows. Kyle was acting precisely as she'd expected too - completely full of himself, but for once, since it played into her hand, Korvka was not irritated by this fact. While he stretched, his orange limbs pulling out of his too-short sweater like elastic bands, Korvka walked over to the fire and took a seat on one of the logs that she had dragged over to complete the seating around the firepit her guide had made, choosing this seat since it was large enough for the two of them to sit, and then plopped her bottom onto the end that currently boasted the longest rectangle of sunlight. Swiveling, she lifted a leg and then straddled the log so that the toe of her boot touched the ground on either side and she could use the log in front of her as a makeshift table. When Kyle returned with the cards, the Russian took the deck and immediately started to shuffle, breaking the deck in half and then running her thumbs along the edges to fan them over top of one another and then scoot the freshly shuffled pile back together. She did this three or four more times, lightning fast and seemingly quite dexterous despite her leather gloves, which gripped the cards nicely. Then, cutting it, she organized the cards in her hands and then dealt them out, leaving the pile next to her as she then took a look around to make sure Kyle wasn't lurking over her shoulder to cheat, and cautiously peeked at her cards.
'Yeah, yeahhhhh, fine... whatever...' Kyle dismissively uttered when Korvka said that he couldn't lie; since he wasn't planning on losing, he figured that he'd not even have the opportunity to commit any verbal falsehoods. He remained standing until his partner selected her seat; the mid-afternoon December sun was already starting to dwindle, and he supposed fighting Korvka for the sunniest remaining spot just wasn't worth it; besides, being so close to the fire afforded him plenty of heat for right now. Tugging the legs of his baggy jeans up a little bit before taking his seat, Kyle positioned himself similarly to the Russian girl and settled onto his seat as she started to deal the cards, thoroughly and almost suspiciously unconcerned with his opponent and the dealt hand sitting in front of him. Maybe it was all just a show, or maybe he was just trying really hard to play it smooth, like it looked like he was doing. Kyle had had quite a bit of experience playing poker, but the subtle psychology of the game was never one of his finer-tuned skills, considering that the boy was about as subtle as a brick in most aspects of his existence. 'So, what we playin'?' he inquired, genuinely curious as to what variant of the game she'd chosen. Kyle sniffed, loudly snorting air through his nostrils, turned his head to the side, pulled his scarf down and away from his mouth, and spat off to the side; only when he finally had his scarf resituated and was facing Korvka again did he pick his cards up to see what he had.
"Fife cart," Korvka replied automatically, her voice detached and uninterested as she looked at her cards, debating which ones she wanted to discard as she nibbled absently at her bottom lip. Her poker-face wasn't refined by any means, a far cry from a seasoned veteran as she considered each of her options and the likelihood of getting what she wanted if she threw away more cards, but she managed to look more pensive than revealing. Her concentration was shaken when a loud hawking sound rent the air, giving a small start as she watched with wide eyes and face drawn away as Kyle expectorated a rather large hunk of mucus and then shot it onto the ground. She was silent but written on her face was how appalling she found this behavior. Her cards had fallen to her lap as she beheld him in all of his disgusting glory (for Vlad had at least hawked loogeys when she wasn't looking), and once he was looking over his cards she quickly picked up her hand in case he was trying to sneak a peek, and after a short glance at him to make sure he wasn't being shifty, she lifted her cards and held them in both hands. Finally, she had obviously decided which cards she planned to throw away and so she sharply looked up at Kyle and lowered her cards, tucking them face down between her thigh and the log and continuing to look unblinkingly to him until he piped up what he wanted to replace. She assumed that they were skipping the betting rounds since they had already modified the game to fit their current parameters, and so she simply wanted to know how many cards he needed.
'Mmmmhmmm,' Kyle lazily responded to Korvka's game choice before drawling in reply to his opponent's blatantly disgusted visage, 'Cold air's makin' my nose run, so it ain't like I can help it none.' With an unapologetic half-shrug, his eyes flickered back down to his cards. Maybe it was because he truly had that many options, or maybe it was an affectation of how he played, but the acidic mutant arranged and rearranged the cards fanned-out in his left hand, sliding one up and out, only to slip it into a different position, or moving another card from the left to the right side of the hand he was dealt. After he ceased whatever organization he hoped to accomplish in his hand, he looked back up to Korvka, only to find her watching and waiting for him to discard. Beneath the cover of his scarf, his lips moved like he was maybe talking to himself, although he was really just screwing his mouth to one side and then the other before he finally slid a duo of cards from his hand and laid them face-down and halfway between he and the Russian mutant, on the rough surface of their makeshift card table. 'Gimme two,' he said in a low, flat and unaccommodating manner. Then, as if he'd just remembered his etiquette, added, 'Please,' sounding only marginally more pleasant.
As Kyle offered his explanation as to why he had turned into a mucus fountain, Korvka's brows shot up and then down as if to say 'yeah, whatever,' her acid green eyes glancing down at her cards just in case he decided that she needed an encore performance. While Kyle considered his hand, a whiff of cooking meat wafted by Korvka's nose and she lifted her head into the air as the sharp smell of smoke came along shortly behind, causing the Russian to look at the spit Kyle had made for his supper to see if it was burning. The rabbit appeared to be no worse for wear, but, ever cautious and quite disinterested in a constant distraction, Korvka let one of her long dreadlocks slide out of her drawn hood and down the side of her body, slithering purposefully towards the spit, which, upon climbing up, began to slowly turn it so that the meat would cook evenly with as little effort as possible. Once that was taken care of, Korvka wiggled her bottom so that she sat more comfortably on her end of the log and then let out a short breath, as if she'd just handled some type of real chore. She sat up straight, the toes of her boots touching on either side, the very posterchild for posture, and quickly dealt him two more cards from the top of the pile, placing them in front of Kyle and then lining up the discard pile neatly next to the other stack of cards. Then, she pulled her cards out from under her leg and took two cards from the end, placed them on the pile before replenishing her card supply with two more.
It was with a feigned innocence that Kyle peered over toward Korvka and gave a little shrug, but by then she'd already looked back down at her cards, so it was quite likely that the gesture went unnoticed. He sniffed shortly thereafter, sounding like we was threatening to spit again, but instead he just focused on his own hand as he waited for his opponent's move. It wasn't until he caught the movement of the spit in his periphery that he even bothered looking back over to the cooking meat, the knee-jerk response of confusion as to why it was moving in the first place obvious in the visible portion of his face. After a couple of seconds, he noted the extended tendril of 'hair' wrapped around the stick stuck through the rabbit, and he followed its length back over and up to Korvka, to whom he directed, 'You ain't gotta take care of that.' Whether or not he meant to sound defensive, which in this case he actually, for once, didn't, it was just a natural gift that the boy always managed to sound defensive. Since she'd just tended to the food, though, he stayed put, and his eyes flickered to the draw pile as his travelling companion discarded and took another two cards as well. 'So... we show now 'cause we ain't really bettin?' he asked, however he didn't wait for an answer since he was acting on his assumption that that's what they were doing. 'Fours n'whores,' he uttered with a ghost of a smirk as he laid down two pair-- the black fours and two Queens-- along with an extra six-- on the log-cum-table, then looked up to see what it was that Korvka had to offer.
With her new cards safely in place of those she had discarded, Korvka switched the first two and then neatly fanned them so that they were all an even distance apart, and then lowered them like a church girl holding a candle as she sat primly on the other end of their table. "I know," was her only response to Kyle as he realized she was helping yet again, looking over her shoulder to the slowly rotating rodent, and then back to Kyle for a moment before clearing her throat. It might have been that she liked the mixture of emotions it caused him whenever she did something useful, or perhaps that she was simply a well-mannered wallflower, but either way, she gave no further response and allowed her dreadlock to tend to its business. More important than worrying about the damned rabbit was the hand she was currently holding onto, which, much to her surprise, had worked in her favor more than expected. She nodded once in response to Kyle's question, the motion definitive and exaggerated, so much so that her oversized hood fell forward and cloaked her eyes, leaving only the bottom half of head showing. She lifted one hand to shove the thing back, keeping a tight, pincer-like grip on her cards to make sure that there was no chance for Kyle to catch a glimpse. There was a sharp, sudden dart of her eyes in Kyle's direction as he so carelessly tossed the word 'whore' around, especially in reference to a pair of queens, but other than that and a short, huffy breath, she gave no other reaction. She leaned forward, holding her cards in front of chest as she looked down at the rest of his cards: two pair. Quickly, she set down her hand over the top of his to let him see what she'd been holding, keeping a straight face, though there was no denying the bit of swagger in the way her shoulders pulled back as she presented two red 9's, a black 9, and a spare 2 and 10. "Three off same beat two off twos," she informed, albeit choppily and without knowledge of the proper terms.
After Kyle had laid his cards out on display, he rested his gloved hands between his legs and allowed his shoulders to fall foward slightly in a relaxed, slouching posture, the shadow of a smile still pulling at the corner of his mouth, even after Korvka revealed her hand. It didn't strike him at first that he'd lost the round, and his face froze as such, his beady eyes darting from the three-of-a-kind, then up into the hood, toward Korvka's seemingly unaffected visage. His freckled, mustard-colored face suddenly twisted with blatant contempt, and he quickly sat-up ramrod straight and crossed his arms tightly over his chest. 'It ain't called two a twos,' he tartly replied, obviously quite sore that the game didn't start-off in his favor, 'They called two pair. hmmph.' He sniffed and he wiggled his scrawny rear-end on the log, edging a little bit away from the Russian girl and tried to press his arms even closer to his torso, as if that would protect him from what he knew was coming next. He wasn't too keen on ponying-up the currency they'd agreed upon for the game, and he was pretty sure that Korvka would need little reminder of what she got to do next. So, it was with a sullen expression that Kyle proceeded to regard Korvka, his eyes narrowed in challenge, silently daring her reap her prize for the round.
There was a slow refinement to Korvka's expression as she savored Kyle's reaction to the first round's outcome, glaring smugly for a moment, so much so that her lips actually parted over her upper row of straight, white teeth. Quickly after though, the hard edge of smugness relaxed into a softer smile of appreciation, though there was a glint in the shadows of her shining eyes. She enjoyed making him squirm by killing him with kindness and being a snooty wretch, but she quickly humbled herself lest she suffer a fall like the one she'd given him earlier. This was a card game after all, and if she played too dirty too soon she ran the risk of underestimating his skill and winding up with this boy knowing more about her than he already did, having been forced to stick together for the past 2 weeks. The look on her face was irritably contemplative as she absently gathered the used cards into her hands, working them with her fingers until the wayward corners all aligned, her head tilted up as she debated what bit of information would benefit her most. "Fine. Three off same beat two pair," she consented, this time with a dismissive wave as she then leaned suddenly forward. Setting down the cards face down onto the discard pile, Korvka kept her index finger pointed down on the stack of red designs and, dropping her gaze to him, asked "vot vos last lie you gave to me?" with a probing look as her lips pulled into a tight, expectant pout.
In the time it took Korvka to subtly revel in the glow of her small victory and then determine what it was she wanted to ask him, Kyle started to bounce his right knee up-and-down in quick and repetitive agitation. The young man abruptly jerked his gaze off to the side when she leaned forward after conceding without protest to his ungentlemanly correction, never ceasing the motion of his quivering leg until she finally posed her question of choice. It caught him off-guard, the seemingly... benign... nature of the inquiry. Still, when he asked, 'What?' his voice reached a certain pitch in screechiness to imply that he thought the question audacious. 'What makes you think I ever lied to you?' he shot back, standing a little too quickly as he gracelessly drew one leg over the log so he could check the rabbit, even though there was no need for him to do so since Korvka had been altruistically tending to it. 'Jus''cause you dun like me don't mean Ima liar,' he stated with great and thorough conviction, so much so that it could perhaps make one question if he was, in fact, a liar. He cast her a few, quick and foul-tempered glances, standing over the spit with his arms crossed snugly over his chest and iterated, 'I ain't never lied to you,' in his usual, poor grammar, then focused solely on the fire as he awaited a response or reaction.
"Vot. vos. last. lie..." she had been in the middle of repeating herself, this time with an obnoxious tilt of her head from side to side to emphasize her words, when Kyle whipped an immediate defensive retort back into her face. She rolled her eyes and let out an audible 'kch,' as if the answer were plain for anyone to see why she would suspect him of lying, and then looked back to him, this time with a sour look of expectation since, clearly, he had to be kidding. However, Kyle stunned Korvka into further silence as he avoided the question by flinging his leg across the log to physically vacate the premise. Not accustomed to sudden movements, the Russian pulled back to avoid being struck when the foot came her way, even though there was plenty of room between herself and the end of his shabby sneakers so, after a moment of wide-eyed recess, she relaxed. She twisted on the log so that she could sharpen her suspicious frown upon him, and stopped turning the rotisserie for a moment so that the warm flames lingered on the driest part of Kyle's rabbit, perhaps as a tiny, passive-aggressive punishment to ruin his dinner. It would seem that she was merely considering the possibility of his answer as she looked at him, leaning forward with her hands by her sides, arms straight so that she felt a bit like a detective or a torpedo, but instead of being so swayed by his theatrics, Korvka was now ever more resolute that he had lied to her from the way he refused to answer. "Everybody lie," she defended with a sanctimonious tone of logic in her voice as the tendril of 'hair,' which had been securely wrapped around the end of the spit, suddenly picked up the stick so that it pointed directly at Kyle, only a few inches away from his nose, the way a teacher with an extendable pointer would scold a petulant child in class.
'Yeah. I heard you,' Kyle said shortly, clearly enunciating his words for once. When a stream of smoke, as opposed to just steam, started to snake its way up from the roasting meat, as Korvka ceased the motion of the spit, the acidic mutant grabbed for the other end-- it was probably done by now, anyway. His gloved hand darted out quickly, but he tentatively checked the pointed end of the stick to make sure that he wasn't going to burn himself first. 'Yeah, I ain't sayin' I don't never lie, but I never had to lie to you,' he said, his tone sharp before he added as an aside, muttering, '...least not yet.' He paused and looked directly at the Russian girl, his eyes narrowed as he zeroed-in on her. 'People lie cause they get somethin' outta it, and I can't see gettin' anything outta it by lying to you,' he stated, sounding almost reasonable for once. 'I tried tellin' you the entire time that you comin' along with me weren't a good idea, and we ain't had too many other real in-depth conversations other than that over the last coupla weeks, right? I mean, 'cept for when we argue, when do I even have a goddamn chance to lie to you?' He stopped talking but added an indignant 'Huh!?', demanding an answer. Kyle could be blamed for a lot of things, but being wrongfully accused of something, especially something that didn't work remotely in his favor, really got his goat. He did back his head away as Korvka yanked the spit from the fire and wielded it in his face like some sort of big kabob sword. 'And put that goddamn thing down,' he spouted, with a swat of his hand, also not liking the idea of losing an eye, or worse.
Bending a knee, Korvka swiveled and sat side-long on top of the rough log, the thinning denim of her dark jeans scraping against the rough bark. She was giving Kyle his chance for rebuttal, remaining silent as she observed his reactions, stiffly allowing him the courtesy of listening to his answer since she had asked a question. His logic was simplistic: people lied for thousands of reasons, only one of which was to get something, but this little insight into his psyche seemed like enough of a Truth for Korvka to allow, so when he started to holler about how they never should have left in the first place (a sentiment she shared in some of her quieter moments) the 15-year-old snapped "HOKAY!" and then sewed her mouth shut with a pouty glare. Clear eyed, she took a deep breath through her nostrils and then let it out through her lips in an angry flurry, and then, after looking strongly away from Kyle, she scraped her way back into place on the log. She bent over to pick up the handful of cards which had fallen from the makeshift table, scraping at the edges for a moment because of her gloves, and then righted herself, all the while acting as if she weren't wielding a roasted rabbit saber with her hair. As he swatted the tip of her 'weapon,' the tendril of hair complied, though it sprung back into place with a rather quick snap, and then jabbed quickly forward, not so far as to actually touch him, but enough to perhaps make him take a few more steps back. With Kyle out of direct view, Korvka took her time to do her task, flipping all the cards face down and then palming them until they all were flush with one another, giving every appearance that she was ignoring his request that she stop messing around. However, after a moment, she decided that she could give Kyle what he asked for, and so once she set the deck down in front of his spot, she turned around to beckon him to the table with a glance and simultaneously dropped his dinner onto the dirt.
Rolling his eyes, Kyle ceased pleading his case when Korvka emphatically proclaimed with a single word that his explanation was finally sufficient. She also got her desired reaction from the young man when she thrust the large skewer at him, as his head and torso reflexively jerked backwards, and his feet shifted just enough to accomodate the movement without him losing his balance. Fortunately, as his travelling companion feigned disinterest and shifted her attention and position to start to collect the cards, Kyle had edged forward and extended a hand to snatch the spit back from the prehesile tendrils of the younger girls' viney hair that were twined around the opposite end, so when she did drop it, he was able to keep it from falling completely to the ground. 'What, you really startin' up again? I might remind you that we playin' by your setta rules, darlin',' he said with measured and equal amounts of taunt and sensibleness in his Southern drawl. With that, he quickly retracted his arm and almost did whack himself in the head as the other, unweighted end of the stick drew upward and back, and he flinched in response to his uncareful hastiness. By now, at least the meat was cool enough for him to handle since it'd been off of the fire and waved around in the winter air. 'Sides, it's my turn to deal,' he added, taking a moment before he actually sat himself back down, straddling the log as before, but a couple of inches back from where he'd originally been sitting, as if the thought of being any closer to Korvka were repulsive. One the side of the log that faced away from the fire, Kyle propped the spit up slightly behind before slipped a hand into his right front jeans pocket to extract his knife. He had to straighten a little, fish around for a moment in the deep depth of the garment's pocket, but he was eventually successful in pulling the folded utensil out.
"I-yaff note meex them yet," came Korvka's easy reply when Kyle tartly reminded her that it was his turn. Obviously, there was no use in talking until one of them won a hand, and at the rate they were going, if one of them didn't resolve to turn the other cheek then they'd never get a good round of Truth Poker in. So, though it pained her to suffer his mistreatment, Korvka simply pouted sanctimoniously on the log until he sat down, this time, she immediately noticed, further away. At once, two sensations tugged her in polar directions; satisfaction and embarrassment. Sure, she had been trying to bluff earlier about being scary, but his gesture poignantly reminded her of her new mutation's disadvantages. She licked her lips and blinked to shoo away the negative thoughts and brought herself presently back to the task at hand, which was to stomp this slimeball into the cold, hard dirt. Her eyes shifted over to him as she saw him situate his spit and then, presumably, struggle for his knife, which he ate all of his meals with. Ordinarily, Korvka left Kyle to his meals alone, since she had not been partaking, but with a sharp glance from his knife to the deck of cards, she scrunched her face to ask 'really?' "They vwill be..." she paused and instead of fumbling for the word, she pushed her index and thumb together and pulled it apart a couple of times, clearly worried about meat juices and food particles on the cards.
'Uh, I can shuffle 'em, too,' was the retort that came from Kyle, and it just about sounded like he was going to punctuate it with a duh; while he refrained from doing so, the sentiment was written upon what was visible of his freckled, mustard-colored face. After he'd freed the knife from his jeans pocket and made himself plenty comfortable on the log once more, the young man, quite oblivious to Korvka's mental meanderings, yanked his gloves off and stuffed one each into the respective pockets of his hoodie, then reached his left hand just behind to grab at the spit's end. Grabbing blindly at first, as he'd turned a careful eye to the green Russian girl, just in case, he finally cast his eyes back just enough to see for what he was reaching. Even though Kyle was still a growing boy and could probably eat most or all of the roasted rabbit, he was pretty good at budgeting the amount of food he ate, especially since he might have to make this particular catch last for an unknown period of time. After he cut a bite-size piece of meat from the dead creature's flank, Kyle tugged his scarf down to pop it into his mouth and commenced a thorough chewing. At about this time his eyes slid back to Korvka, since he was waiting for her to offer-up the cards for him to deal. With an annoyed expression, he looked between the cards and her face, wondering just what her issue was now. As he'd only gotten one of his hands dirty from handling the food, he rubbed his fingers together, held them out and away from the fire, and a fleeting, acrid smell permeated the air, indicating that he'd just 'washed' his digits, something that he usually did, anyway. 'Awwww, come on,' he then insisted, his extended arm pivoting almost robotically in the other mutant's direction, his palm beckoning for her to give him the deck.
"I know!" Korvka defensively blurted, furrowing her brows and raising her head so that she looked straight at him instead of from the side or the bottom of her brows, as she had been wont to do for the past few minutes. "I only peek up and make them same vway," she explained, miming the motion of what she had done, twisting her wrists as if she were making a snowball, but then she finally got flustered and shut her mouth with an audible noise. Taking a deep breath, she let it out and then seemed to instantly calm, for a moment at least. However, her natural tendency to be uneasy around people flared up while he ate, feeling on edge. Her eyes darted around anxiously, looking everywhere but Kyle, and by the time her gaze made a pit-stop on him again, she saw that he was waiting for her with an irritated look. She challenged him with a scornful lift of her brow, looking down at the cards in front of him and then back up to him, and then adding the other. "They - " but she stopped talking as she caught a brief whiff of his tell-tale powers, watching him 'clean' himself. Since Korvka was no scientist (truth be told, anything other than biology was out of her interest) and had not made a habit of making herself present during his meals, she did not know that what he was doing was cleaning himself. She leaned forward slightly to investigate, genuine curiosity allowing her face to relax into youthful interest as she inspected his fingertips. Raising both brows, this time as if to say, 'well I'll be,' she shrugged both shoulders once and then let them slump, her hands resting on her thighs. Figuring he'd just pick up the cards now, Korvka remained quiet and then, perhaps sincerely, said "that ees yuse-full."
'They just fine; you gonna wear the numbers off if you keep that up!' Kyle impatiently and assuredly stated, despite the absurd nature of his claim, and his smooth forehead furrowed slightly when Korvka tried to justify what she had been doing, and he turned just enough to jab the end of his knife into the rabbit. With an exaggerated eyeroll, he suddenly flung his now-non-knife-weilding hand out to snatch up the cards, as if his companion would suddenly change her mind and collect them again as the she leaned forward to investigate his method of hand-washing. 'Well now thank you ever so much for your professional opinion on my usefulness,' he came his retort in response to what someone else might consider a compliment, or at least should consider a compliment; of course, his usual, thinly-veiled sarcastic tone was in counterpoint to the words he spoke, and he shook his head briskly, adding another exasperated roll of his peculiar eyes to drive the point home. '... n'stay outta my face. Geez. Don't you know what personal space is,' he muttered, his gaze dropping to his hands as he took a turn to shuffle the cards, even though he'd just gotten through scolding her for doing just that. The boy sniffed and the right side of his thin nose pulled-up as he inhaled a lungful of cold air through his flared nostrils just as he started to deal the second hand.
Yyyoooouuuu..." she stretched, pointing a threatening finger at him and leaning that shoulder forward to really drive her point home as he tested her patience with his stinging retort, with perhaps a glowing ire in her acid-green eyes. However, as if remembering her purpose, she closed her eyelids and fell back into her normal seat, then shrugged, taking a long sigh, though her hair started to rustle from within the hood. "Hokay." She sounded defeated, but quickly lifted her eyes to his and blinked, looking completely deadpan, and shook her head. "I yam wrong. Ees note yuse-full at oll." and then succinctly severed the look and scooted back, to indicate that she had heard his request for more personal space. Though she was trying her best not to rise to his bait it was taking every last ounce of her willpower not to just strangle him with her hair, though, as she sat with her arms folded and her eyes deadset on her opponent, the thought that she might be plotting his death was quite real. The sound of the cards brought her mind swiftly back to focus and Korvka, though still staring quite unnervingly at the yellow teenager opposite her, was trying to drum up a properly embarrassing question for whenever her next turn might be. Since she wasn't exactly experienced in social games like this, she wanted to give herself plenty of time to think of something good, since god knows what someone like him might ask.
'Whuuuuuuuh-haaaaaaaaat-taaa?' Kyle demanded in return, his thin lips pursing together at first before wrapping careful around the word as he drew the sound out like Korvka did when she addressed and pointed a finger of accusation at him. When the girl suddenly seemed to roll over and play dead, however, Kyle's hairless brow jerked upward, as he was actually curious as to what she was going to say, since he didn't buy that the fact that she was just admitting that she was wrong. He didn't think she was wrong, of course, because his power did have some practical applications, although Kyle's inflated sense of self made him think they were way more awesome than they actually were. It also took him a moment to translate what she'd said, and by the time he got it, he'd already uttered, 'Whatever,' and proceeded to distribute the cards. 'How's about there ain't no talkin unless we askin' fer cards or askin' or answerin' a question?' he stated in a manner that he thought left no room for discussion as he set the rest of the deck down and picked his hand up. He didn't look at his cards, yet, as he settled his gaze upon Korvka to see if she confirmed and to see what her reaction to her hand was going to be.
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