Waiting was a bad idea.
Waiting gave her time to think about how stupid she'd been to agree to the premise of the meeting. Waiting gave her time to dwell on memories that paved the way to the visceral unease he filled her with, despite all of his courtesy. Because of all his courtesy.
Rose Kaiki was - she checked her watch to make sure - three minutes away from granting Jagdish Tsukinaka an audience. Alone, without human company. Redwood would walk with her, that much was clear, but as much as the Ivysaur would gladly provide an emotional crutch for her, she knew from bitter experience that it couldn't bring itself to harm the Arbiter.
If she found herself assaulted, she was on her own.
Her pokémon nuzzled against her left calf, two vines gently wrapping around the limb, making her aware that her quiet distress was all too obvious. The pokémon uttered a soft, deep sound of its own, tone halfway between a question and an attempt to soothe his master. An inquisitive gaze crept up to her face, framed by her knees. She leant down and touched fingertips against the smooth skin, prompting closed eyes and a tone deliberately resembling a purr. One vine snuck along her wrist, lightly wrapping around it.
The reassurance that granted abruptly evaporated as the thin tendrils jerked back and the pokémon took a step back from her, glancing across to the door with perked ears, reminding Rose that Redwood did not genuinely comprehend her worries, something that wouldn't change no matter how much she spoke of them. Its instincts spoke good things of the Arbiter, for reasons Rose had never fathomed but, in truth, attributed to little less than demonic influence.
Religion had no part in her conviction. He was unreal, he wasn't aging, and he had a wholly implausible sway over pokémon. What else could he be but a mythical demon? He needed no deity to antagonise to make the picture whole. He fitted squarely into her secular world view, an island of superstition amongst a rigorous adherence to scientific method, converting nothing, but refusing to register as alien - surely there was nothing magical about his abilities.
On most days, she even believed she'd convinced herself of that.
Then the brief delay granting her reprieve was over and the door she'd left open - she couldn't bear to answer to a knock or the ring of the bell, to actively open the door, to invite him in - framed a frail man in his early twenties, peering across at her with thick concern. Redwood stared toward him for a moment of an attentive form of delight - then, overcome with a pang of guilt, glanced up at Rose, one forepaw raised, vines hovering in a similar gesture of mild confusion, uncertainty expressed in his body language. Was it all right to run across to Jagdish and greet him? If she'd been anything other than upset, he wouldn't be asking, of course, he would just exuberantly bound across to their all too rare visitor.
The gesture formed a knot in her gut and she closed her eyes. Silently, she gestured dismissal. Go ahead.
When she next opened her eyes, Redwood had bounded across to the Taqnateh gymleader and tangled itself against his left leg, making sounds of content that merely disheartened Rose, rubbing the side of his head against that trapped lower leg. “Redwood,” Jagdish greeted the pokémon, attention wrenched down to the affectionate Ivysaur. “I need that,” he pointed out with both light exasperation and fondness, only to cautiously lower himself into half a kneel, resting his weight on his free leg, drifting his left hand to rub the palm against Redwood's forehead, fingertips scritching behind one of the creature's ears, his own head lightly inclined. The other hand gently tugged the vine hug off his leg. Obligingly, the tendrils withdrew, though the pokémon's head happily wiggled against the attention.
Helplessly, Rose watched the exchange, trying to will away the unease crawling under her skin, creasing it into gooseflesh. Stop corrupting my pokémon, she wanted to scream at him, but even from her perspective, that was ludicrous and petty. Nonetheless, she couldn't quite suppress a twitch as her visitor's gaze snapped up to her, instead. She looked right past the polite smile, onto that grinning skull.
“Rose,” he addressed her, slowly righting himself again, fingers drifting away from Redwood, much to the pokémon's displeasure - Redwood sluggishly glanced after those digits as if Jagdish were taking a prized possession away from him. “I'm sorry to bother you.”
“You're not,” she found herself automatically responding, tension abruptly gripping her shoulders at both catching herself not filtering the bitter remark out, as well as how much her tone betrayed just how much his presence bothered her. He could kill her so easily. He could probably ask Redwood to turn against her if he really wished. The mental image overstayed its welcome and her left hand found itself clasped against her right wrist. She was sure there was probably no point in trying to hide her fear - seeing as she was dealing with a predator who no doubt could scent it - but she went through the motions out of stubborn refusal to simply lay down and let him walk all over her life.
His face creased - not as if insulted, but as if she'd just told him of a recent tragedy in her life. Pity, not rage. Patronising asshole. “I don't think I could convince you that you're wrong about that,” Jagdish commented, tone a cautious one. It's as if he'd said a different phrase altogether, strung out in the context, you're wrong about that becoming you're wrong to fear me without verbal mention. “Do you mind if we walk a while?”
A series of images flashed through her perception - the shores near Roaring Hollow, the beginnings of labyrinthine pathways; a broken body, mere corpse, discarded; an unfettered Taqnateh gym leader, sauntering back to civilisation. Compelling. Terrifying. Not wholly unreasonable, but nonetheless paranoid. She swallowed. “Sure.” The ambiguous answer suited her right now - while colloquially it was a denial, she did mind, but she hardly wanted to tell him that to his face. Not yet. He hadn't pushed her far enough for that yet.
A slow nod acknowledged it - no doubt in its full ambiguity. Jagdish's gaze crept down to the Ivysaur, concerned expression morphing into a warm smile. “Will you be joining us, Redwood?” The Ivysaur's reaction was a near-immediate sound of approval, wide eyes full of delight. The protruding vines swayed a little, then snuck back into their holds. “That's wonderful.”
Please go away.
He did turn, of course - but he was expecting her to follow, and she simply couldn't bring herself to be so discourteous to turn down that implicit prompt. The first step was the only real hurdle - a moment later, walking was an automation.
She could ask him what this was about. It was unnecessary - he'd implied as much in his request and she regrettably knew him well enough to know that the chance he'd come to discuss anything else was vanishingly small: She was a thorn in his side; he wanted to replace her. The only thing that was keeping her anchored was that he'd never get away with doing that without her full support, woven into the local community and revered as a political leader as she was. She had to remind herself of that - he needed her support. No matter how small his alien presence made her feel, she was the one with power. No matter how much she struggled to believe that on an emotional level.
“I know you're not one for small-talk, least of all with me,” Jagdish began, sighing slightly across the phrase. “So let me get right to the point.” To his credit, he was very clearly taking steps to minimise any abrasiveness in his body language or tone, but none of that could counterbalance his presence and the memories he invoked. The nearly twenty years passed so far hadn't been enough to flush those visceral memories out of her system and she was sure she could got for another two decades without them weakening noticeably. “I… understand that my chance of patching things up between us is so small as to be non-existent, but I have to try, Rose. I cherish your spirit and your dedication and I like to think that this is obvious even to you.”
'But,' she cynically supplied to herself. 'But I'm going to have to kill you,' a darker part of her concluded the sentence helpfully, making her grimace in distaste, even as she willed the spike of alarm in her gut to simmer down.
Nothing of the sort came.
“I am not one to commonly ask for advice, least of all from the subject the advice ought to pertain to, but perhaps you can help me. There's a gym leader I'm really quite fond of,” he began, kneading at the palm of his right hand with the fingers of his left, palm of his other hand cradling the knuckles of his right. Redwood was trailing between them as they stepped out of the Haze gym and into the crystal clear night. “She loves her pokémon, she's a wonderful tutor of genuine ethical behaviour in her fellow human beings, she's a cornerstone of everything I'm trying to achieve, but she trusts me about as far as she can throw me. Which… all right, I'm light-weight and she's stronger than I am, physically, but let's not kid ourselves… it's not very far.”
Rose's gut twisted in on itself tightly as if it wanted to wring something out of her tense body. The worst part of the conversation was setting in much more rapidly that she had thought it would - he was getting to her. He was appearing almost human, almost worth consideration. Her jaw set as she struggled against the emotion - he had never done nothing to earn her trust and plenty to earn her wary consideration, and as unreal as it seemed in hindsight, as much as it appeared like a fabrication of a fever dream, she had to remind herself that he had always had this reasonable air, right up to the very instant he hurt her, and with no delay afterward. Perhaps he'd even had it during the ordeal. Mercifully, she had few memories of that beyond the most abstract palpable images.
“And… I don't know how to fix things between us,” Jagdish remarked.
Fuck you. Fear bit at her bones.
“Do you have any advice?” The smile at her was charming, but not overbearingly so, and so relentlessly sincere that the notion inverted on itself and the whole thing seemed like the most artificial emotion anyone had ever presented to her.
Her mouth opened, tension apparent in the gesture, only to close uselessly a moment later. It took her a moment of battle with herself to find the words and the will to speak them: “Permission to speak freely?” Here she was, asking for permission to speak her mind; Rose Kaiki, the one who allegedly held all the power in this conversation. He was rapidly undermining even her rational belief on the matter, wasn't he?
“Of course,” he responded, a tinge of surprise in his tone. He had no right to be surprised. “That's what I'm here for,” he assured. Again, he wielded more honesty in body language and tone than Rose's perception of the demon allowed for.
“I'm not going to play this roundabout game with you,” she commented, almost immediately distraught at the way her tone cracked and splintered subtly but audibly. “You want to know how you can earn my trust?” she asked, rhetorically. You're wasting your breath. He won't listen. He's so good at pretending to listen, but he never does. “Give your position to someone else.” Someone who doesn't murder people. Someone's whose idea of ethical education is a stern conversation over tea rather than a visceral demonstration.
A hint of motion to his jaw revealed he had his instinctual reservations, but the subtlety of the motion was nearly invisible in what the small stirring became - earnest contemplation. A light grimace did nothing to detract from it. He was thinking about it - or at least putting on a very good facade to make her believe it. Lips pressed to a thin line; then his gaze found hers, prompting his presence to crawl up her spine once more, unbidden. “Fair,” he concedes. “I can see where you're coming from. I'd lie if I said it hadn't occurred to me before - but much the same reasons that tie me to it now would make it rather… unsatisfying for you.”
The gaze has shifted to something casually probing, as if he expected her to fill in the blanks for him. Not listening.
“I am Arbiter because the Legendary Council appointed me. That's not to say I haven't inspired any of the rules - I have no interest in washing my hands of the matter, I freely admit that unlike you I firmly believe they're proper as they are - but that it would trivial for them to excise me from my role once I ceased conforming to their preconceived notions of the position. As such, there's a bit of a… shall we say, selection pressure: I simply wouldn't be Arbiter if I didn't agree with the framework the Council supplies - and, perhaps more importantly, someone else who did would be. Off-hand? I can think of at least one person who'd be quite eager.”
Rose's gut churned lightly. It took her a moment to get her bearings about the implied mental image - Keith Sirius as Arbiter was a chilling notion. She desperately wanted to deconstruct even the possibility, but she couldn't quite convince herself that the Council would reject him given no 'better' candidate. Was that what this reduced to? And yet, Jagdish's manner didn't mesh with her perception of the Council - the way things worked now seemed infinitely more like the product of his manipulative machinations than anything the mythological creatures could possibly deem just… but she couldn't attribute enough obliviousness to them to allow for the necessary scale of deception - and their power was certainly uncontested.
…and yet, foremost, immediately as that first shock cleared, it felt like emotional blackmail. Better me than Keith, honestly? The very comparison left a sour taste in her mouth. She narrowed her eyes, and between her silent alarm and increasing resignation, she found herself wondering why she didn't simply ask to leave. He'd made up his mind, clearly. If she was entirely honest with herself, so had she.
“Additionally, my longevity…” - apparently there was no cause any more to hide it in conversation - “…works in my favour. I know the Council's idiosyncrasies quite well by now and they know mine. They trust my judgement, even - and this is a precious commodity, indeed - when it conflicts with their own. And as difficult as it may be for you to believe me, I have no inherent desire to torture anyone.
“What keeps me in my position more than any other reason is the genuine belief that I'm as moderate as the Council is going to allow.”
She didn't doubt for a moment he believed what he said; that was precisely what made it difficult to deal with. Conviction was difficult to argue with, especially if it was the conviction of a man implied to be several decades her senior, regardless what age he physically appeared to have. It was clear they couldn't possibly disagree any more than they did. If this were any other subject, she might approach his stubborn misconceptions with the patience of a saint, but this was far too personal.
Her silence seemed to imbue him with the faintest traces of self-consciousness, something she couldn't recall ever seeing in his features before - but it was quick to vanish, proving a mere flicker of a hopeful mirage.
“I'm sorry,” he said, softly, practically exhaling the words. “I prefer honesty to diplomacy in the few occasions the two are at odds with each other.” There was a tinge of resignation lacing itself into his body language and tone, like someone who had fully realised that he'd made a grave error in judgement that the conversation wouldn't recover from.
She wasn't altogether sure the words he spoke classed as honest in the strictest sense. Surely he believed as much - but if he had half the life experience she attributed to him as an immortal demon, he'd have perfected the art of self-deception a long time ago, after he'd run out of a need to practise deception of others. It was possible he simply couldn't tell the difference between truth and a well-crafted lie any more. A part of her felt an urge to pity him for this imagined plight, something that took considerable edge off her unease.
He paused in his stride. An abrupt shift of his gaze swerved it through the landscape, but there wasn't any point of interest he could conveniently linger it on. Instead, he brought his gaze back around after a moment's loiter, apology in his eyes, albeit without any humble air to go with it. Very formal, very precise, as always. “Do you think I can try that again?”
A fresh fear crawled in under her skin, but she spoke despite it - or because of it, seeing as it made as good a motivation as any. ”…maybe some other time,“ she said, failing to banish the tension from her voice.
His left hand crept up to the back of his neck, kneading fingertips against it, slanting his head back to peer up at the sky as if temporarily more spiritual than he usually dared to be, imploring some creature of faith to grant him an insight that he - from her perspective - deliberately turned a blind eye to. It wouldn't be forthcoming even if something metaphysical existed to bestow it upon him.
Then his attention came back to Earth. Back to her. “I'd like that.”
Rose gave a distorted, meek and cynical smile in response, but didn't answer. In her mind, the words lined up with a crisp clarity regardless:
Please wait until the stars burn out.