"God, I need a drink."
Makoto wasn't aware he was echoing the words of one of his brothers, one particularly fateful day quite a few months earlier, but he wouldn't have been surprised to find out. Exasperation, he well knew, would tend to produce phrases like that.
His exasperation was over the shouting match he'd had to intervene in between his two teammates some time earlier. Well, shouting. Neither of them really shouted--Sheimi spoke more snippily than usual, and Tatsuya took passive-aggressiveness to nigh-heroic heights, but neither of them had really shouted with anything other than their emotions.
Which was really enough to start fraying Makoto's nerves, so he'd walked right out of the hotel and headed straight for the nearest bar he could find, after doing the admittedly very little he could do to defuse the tension.
Which was to actually snap at the both of them to act like adults.
Really, they'd been doing a lot of tedious work lately, and of course everyone was wearing a bit thin, but that was no reason to turn this into the trip from hell. So as soon as he'd realized he was only making it worse, he'd simply left. As either, or both, of them could have done at any point rather than acting like damn trainees who didn't like each other.
(Maybe at some point, he could explain to them about his empathy. But no. He didn't want people to know that.)
He'd uttered that frequently-used phrase the second the open--well, underground sort of open--air hit him as he left the hotel. Fortunately, it hadn't been difficult to find a bar.
Sand's bars were not much like Moon's. He had been to that one with the cactus in the corner before, when someone else had nearly started a bar fight, and it hadn't resembled one he'd ever seen before. This one didn't either--it wasn't as dark as he'd expect from, and the tables and bar were made from metal rather than wood. After a moment's thought, of course, this made sense. Wood, in the desert? He already knew that was an uncommon commodity.
He wasn't in the mood for anything fancy--never was, really--and just flung himself down at the bar and ordered something on tap with a kick to it. He received a mug of something foaming and amber that was not entirely unlike the beer he was used to, and settled back on the bar stool.
To anyone familiar at all with Sand's population, he was an obvious foreigner. To anyone who had been to Moon, his clothes were obviously from there.
To anyone remotely familiar with bars, he was there because he needed a distraction.
"What I'd like," he muttered, not quite quietly, "is to be around people not constantly at each other's throats..."
Makoto wasn't aware he was echoing the words of one of his brothers, one particularly fateful day quite a few months earlier, but he wouldn't have been surprised to find out. Exasperation, he well knew, would tend to produce phrases like that.
His exasperation was over the shouting match he'd had to intervene in between his two teammates some time earlier. Well, shouting. Neither of them really shouted--Sheimi spoke more snippily than usual, and Tatsuya took passive-aggressiveness to nigh-heroic heights, but neither of them had really shouted with anything other than their emotions.
Which was really enough to start fraying Makoto's nerves, so he'd walked right out of the hotel and headed straight for the nearest bar he could find, after doing the admittedly very little he could do to defuse the tension.
Which was to actually snap at the both of them to act like adults.
Really, they'd been doing a lot of tedious work lately, and of course everyone was wearing a bit thin, but that was no reason to turn this into the trip from hell. So as soon as he'd realized he was only making it worse, he'd simply left. As either, or both, of them could have done at any point rather than acting like damn trainees who didn't like each other.
(Maybe at some point, he could explain to them about his empathy. But no. He didn't want people to know that.)
He'd uttered that frequently-used phrase the second the open--well, underground sort of open--air hit him as he left the hotel. Fortunately, it hadn't been difficult to find a bar.
Sand's bars were not much like Moon's. He had been to that one with the cactus in the corner before, when someone else had nearly started a bar fight, and it hadn't resembled one he'd ever seen before. This one didn't either--it wasn't as dark as he'd expect from, and the tables and bar were made from metal rather than wood. After a moment's thought, of course, this made sense. Wood, in the desert? He already knew that was an uncommon commodity.
He wasn't in the mood for anything fancy--never was, really--and just flung himself down at the bar and ordered something on tap with a kick to it. He received a mug of something foaming and amber that was not entirely unlike the beer he was used to, and settled back on the bar stool.
To anyone familiar at all with Sand's population, he was an obvious foreigner. To anyone who had been to Moon, his clothes were obviously from there.
To anyone remotely familiar with bars, he was there because he needed a distraction.
"What I'd like," he muttered, not quite quietly, "is to be around people not constantly at each other's throats..."