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[imgleft]http://i454.photobucket.com/albums/qq269/alirocker08/Yun_750pxcopy.jpg[/imgleft] [size=11]Put kindly, the Sangria children were a bunch of freaks. Not in their appearance, of course, for the most part, they looked like statues in a garden when their white skin caught the moonlight, their satin hair as vivid as their colour would get, from dark, colourless black to fiery red, to something a little bit in-between, and their eyes glittering and glowing like jewels against the smooth, uncreased skin, forever young. All apart from Lila, but she was a freak in her own little way. No, the Sangria children were freaks because of the fact that they could disappear without a trace, and no-one would notice, and Yun was no exception. He'd packed up his clothes from his cabin, and left without the word about a week ago? Why? Family emergency. Nero and Fuyu had met up in one of the villages close to his home, and whenever those two met up, things tended to explode. They'd gotten into a full blown brawl in the middle of a street crowded with humans, fangs bared, eyes darkened. The police came and...well, they killed them and managed to get away. There was a lot of covering up for them all to do, it involved forcing a lot of people to forget that they'd seen two supernatural beings fighting and almost blowing up the street, along with killing a few members of the force, replacing it with a simple, more normal street fight in which they'd simply gotten away. Now though, Yun was back. Nero and Fuyu were grounded (try grounding a pair of nineteen year old boys, that made his mother a bit of a freak as well because she was successful), his mother had covered the damages, acting as an anonymous benefactor, and no-one was any more the wiser. Dressed in his usual [url=http://www.polyvore.com/yun_outfit/set?id=21816570]attire[/url], his long black hair falling in loose waves because, of course, his sister's had made him brush it, and his blue-green eyes unusually dark, hinted with amber at the same time. Stress made him hungry. Hence why he hated stress. He lugs his luggage back down to the room he'd commandeered earlier, and then makes his way back up to the bar, loosening the belt of his trench-coat a little

Khaldun reached his arm over as slowly as possible, staring at it as though he were preparing to stick it into a tiger's mouth with no certainty as to how or if it would be returned to him. Still, he refused to look Charonite in the eyes when he spoke, instead making detailed observations about the woodgrain of the desk his own hand was palm-down on. Every instinct in his body told him go ahead, make a wiseass remark, get it out of his system. Hell, while you're at it just give Charonite a piece of your mind about all that 'failure'.. Only the bitter realization that the fate of his hand was up to a man that could just as soon crush it in his grip should he be, say, talked back to, was keeping him from it. Almost.

"I wish I had, too. But last month you sure didn't seem to think it was possible for me to have broken my nose on one, so I've been very careful with them since." He just barely managed to keep his tone flat on that one, and fixed his face at the last second to look deadly serious. By being very careful with starseeds, he meant not going completely out of his way to get them. That much Khaldun was aware Charonite knew - Khaldun had a reputation for not having a whole lot of motivation, though Obsidian or the boss threatening to eviscerate him usually did the trick. Ultimately, his nose had been broken last month in a so-called 'pissant fight', a step above this month's 'rejection by a finger-breaking girl', in that at least it hadn't been emasculating on top of being painful to fix. Anyway, Khaldun was already fully convinced Charonite was taking his time with the bone-setting on purpose here. This hurt a hell of a lot worse than when the finger had been broken in first place! Khaldun spent a few moments trying to get a grip but was faltering fast, knowing that he was going to bite into his tongue soon if he had any hopes of pretending not to be in excruciating pain. Was there anything he could elaborate on about his encounter with the purple-haired girl that would make a barely-believable story? Only the five-second appearance of the cat. Good enough!

"Okay, okay, see, I was chasing a cat. Because I thought it was, y'know, the cat! Funny thing about cats, they're really hard to chase in the middle of a city!" His voice spiked and fell in volume several times as he wove a broken story to match the state of his finger, keeping himself talking to avoid having to pay full attention to his fingerbone being arranged. Charonite was taking so long now as far as Khaldun thought, that he was running out of lies and only had truth left to continue on. That b*****d. "But now that I think about it more carefully, there may have been a girl involved! But only for like a minute! A completely cat-related minute!"

"Inadvertently, maybe. Not really. No. Definitely no." The worst seemed to be over, and for the pain he'd at least have a working finger somewhere down the line. Was he in the clear? There had been an unusually small amount of yelling today. It was actually pretty suspicious. After all, this was Charonite. There was never a day in Khaldun's memory he went without blowing his top at least once.

So when the boss let loose on the tirade, Khaldun was aware that it had been kind of like having a sixth sense for impending nuclear disaster. Accurate, but he was still screwed in the end. He could swear he felt the yelling in his broken, splinted finger. Wincing between the ringing in his ears and the Flecks of Spit, he managed to find enough silence in his mind to record the obvious observation. Aaand there we go.

The rest of his response was fairly Pavlovian. When those dogs heard a bell, they got hungry. When Khaldun heard Charonite bellowing, he got in the mindset of a man defusing a bomb. There was one thing and one thing only that Khaldun had to know about Flecks of Spit time - there was no ******** around now.

"I'm sorry, sir!" Khaldun did have more training than the rest of the lieutenants, military-style training, which ought to have made him a better fighter. He had never had any interest in finding out, and avoided Senshi whenever possible (except perhaps to get a phone number off them in human guise, which never worked). The most his military training amounted to in the meantime was an instinctive use of "sir" as a form of punctuation when Charonite bore down on him in a fit of rage, or a paroxysm of rage, or a partly cloudy with a chance of rage. Anything with spittle. Whatever it was Charonite wanted to hear, though, Khaldun would have to say it right now, and it sounded like he was pretty hung up on that cat, Astraea. It didn't pay to be all that curious here, and Khaldun didn't need the matching set of broken fingers. All he hoped was that Charonite wouldn't give him another one of those Sisyphean-scale star seed quotas with the short amount of time to fill it, or even worse, give him the quota and some kind of... of partner he had to go get them with that made shirking the job impossible and attracting the attention of Senshi a guarantee. Khaldun was a goddamn lone wolf. A lazy, irresponsible one, but a lone wolf first and foremost. He'd get around to getting a few more star seeds, eventually. On his own time. Then there'd be more yelling later, but then, there always was. If Charonite could suspend his disgust long enough to imagine Khaldun could maybe actually do something he was supposed to, though, this ruse ought to work. "The cat will be in your office by the end of the week, dead or alive, sir! She won't get away from me again!"

Take the bait, take the bait... Khaldun knew could just catch any old stray and let all this blow over while his finger healed. No effort, and if it turned out not to be Astraea well that'd be an honest mistake! Too easy.

That was too close. Khaldun let out an audible sigh through his nose, which turned into a grunt of pain when the medicine hit him in the bad hand. It wasn't exactly a sign of caring, but it was a sign that the adrenaline coursing through Khaldun's veins was no longer necessary. Now that the storm had passed, he finally lifted his eyes from their desk-gazing position to Charonite himself, albeit avoiding meeting his gray eyes still. And again with Khaldun's stellar lack of promotions. The teenager made a face of annoyance but didn't reply. Everything was always some sort of disappointment to Charonite. Khaldun certainly remembered not having a whole lot of choice in the matter of joining the Negaverse - that decision had apparently been made for him. So why in the hell did the guy think Khaldun would go out of his way to be useful to someone he hardly knew, for a purpose he'd never been told, for an organization that effectively went 'it's dangerous to go alone - take this', and dropped a pocketwatch into his hands as a weapon? Khaldun had to admit there was reason to be suspicious, but then again Khaldun would admit everything in life was awfully suspicious.

"Ugh, not a cat," he groaned reflexively, at the thought of being stuck with a guardian cat. Khaldun hated cats, and was not a cat person in the least, and though he didn't fear them he certainly would not want a cat following him around all the time. He hated the claws, the teeth, the caterwauling, the hissing and spitting, the sheer unpredictability of felines. In fact, he seemed to hate cats for all the same reasons as he hated Charonite right in front of him. Small wonder. The talking aspect of the guardian cats seemed to make it worse, though, since at least with a regular cat it was just a dumb animal. With his good hand, Khaldun brushed aside a dread that had fallen over his shoulder. What good was he besides being a beacon of rugged manliness to the young ladies of Destiny City? "I suppose I do give Lieutenant Obsidian someone to chase after during P.E. class."

Khaldun looked at Charonite apprehensively, knowing exactly where that particular tone went when paired with his name. It went to a place Khaldun was not at all comfortable with acknowledging the nature of. But to Khaldun's inner delight, the subject was dropped as suddenly as it had been raised.

"Yesss, sir," Khaldun purred at the request, trying hard not to betray his relief through his expression. He eyed his finger splint, and the finger inside that was now only radiating a dull, constant pain rather than the sharpness of moving bones under the skin. All he needed was a dumb cat now and he was set. Sweet, sweet victory for Khaldun. "Nothing will stand in my way this time, rest assured."