Same Old Song & Dance (Larae/Mace)

for what it's worth, I always aim to please
but I nearly died

Mace never slept well. For all his bravado in daylight, night terrors plagued him. And the fear, the worry, of waking up screaming and ruining all of his hard work in the community home, haunted him. He was usually the last to bed and first to rise, no matter how exhausting his days. He forced himself to wait for the first cloying taste of dawn, the sweetness of a promised warmth, the shift from midnight black to a softer grey. Only the did he shake off his thin wool blanket, gather his shoes and tiptoe out of the room he shared with two of his home brothers.

Breakfast hadn't probably begun in the large, shabby kitchen. He took a cold slab of meat and some mealy bread with him, casting a glance at one of his littlest sisters who had recently been put on morning duties. She looked about to collapse any moment. Mace tapped her nose, which caused her to jump. A flash of a smile, before she dragged herself back to the fire place where only the memory of flame remained from the night before.

The northern community home rested on the edge of District Ten, the last building before the broad expanse of pasture where their cows grazed. Mace stopped in the stable only long enough to rouse two of the herding dogs and slide into one of the few leather jackets they owned. He would need it. Today he was wrangling bulls.

When one of the dogs, a shaggy overgrown thing, lagged behind, Mace gave it a switch kick in the rump. The dawn was creeping out, long shadows still in place, but there was color in the sky. He walked with a slow, purposeful gait, the two dogs ranging ahead. When the lead one gave out a yip, Mace at first thought nothing of it. They were prone to make all sorts of fuss about squirrels. But then it yipped twice, and Mace stopped.

In the tall grass he could see and be seen, but only barely. He carried a whip at his side, and a cattle prod. Weapons enough. Had any of his siblings decided to sleep outside? But it wasn't the yip of excitement, of knowing. This was a warning. He could feel a challenge in his blood, a desire to find the outsider. And without knowing it he began to run to the woods at the edge of the property, some thirty yards from where he had stopped. And the dogs had a head start.

for what it's worth, I always aim to please
but I nearly died

The dogs circled her, alright, but they were cow herding dogs. They didn't hassle her, didn't nip at her heels. Instead they just shuffled along in the grass, drawing lazy circles around her. It took Mace a good few minutes to catch up with him, but not too long. Not as long as it would take most. He stepped out of the tall weeds and onto the forest underbrush with his head high. Both the whip and cattle prod remained at his left hip. He'd heard her alright, but what she said completely baffled him.

"They look like 'heel, boy' trained dogs to you?" Mace folded his arms over his broad chest, grin opening his features, broadening them, but making them no friendly. In truth Mace didn't know how to look or act friendly. He didn't need friends, after all. He needed people to know how to fall in line.

And he got the impression this girl didn't know that particular lesson. "No need to get all cranky about it. They're just doing their job." A shoddy version of it, as they were supposed to chase down lost cows, not people. Except that she wasn't lost, was she? No, not by the look of the knife in her hands and the slant of her eyes. This girl had an agenda. The question is, had he interrupted it, or was she on her way somewhere else?

Mace had known a few knives in his day, but they were usually short range weapons. They could kill, in a slow, brutal, nasty way. But to see someone throw one accurately - well, that would be first. So he wasn't really all that concerned, as long as he stayed out of arm's reach. "Which reminds me. Care to explain why you're on our property?"

'Our' being a sizable stretch of the term. Mace, of course, owned nothing.

for what it's worth, I always aim to please
but I nearly died

Mace kept his arms folded at the level of his pecs as the girl said entirely too much. It was a wealth of information for him, though, so he wasn't about to step on her toes. He just let her talk... and talk. It wasn't what she said so much that was interesting. He couldn't tell from the way she phrased things if she really had been looking to take down larger game (although what a joke that would be with a knife), or if she had genuinely had no interest in the dumb herd beasts. But regardless, she told him a lot of other things, too. Like that she didn't know the boundaries of the community's home's land, not exactly, and therefore didn't know the district lines. That she jumped to defense when cornered, instead of offense. That was handy. He almost thanked her for it.

Except that Mace wasn't polite. Ever. Yeah, like he was just going to walk off into the swaying grain and forget about her. Not likely. He waited more to see what she would do, and again, she chose defense. Smart, really. One of the dogs - the dumber one he had kicked earlier - decided she wasn't of much interest and trotted back to Mace. The other kept his eyes on the girl as she backed away, and then cleanly tossed her knife into a stray rabbit.

What on earth the rabbit had been doing so close to the dogs boggled Mace's mind. "It's probably diseased," he said, and then caught himself. That sounded like something a nice person would say. Might as well let her eat it. At least that way he wouldn't have to set up some sort patrol. He nearly groaned as the thought materialized, because he would now that he had seen her. "Rabbits in their right mind wouldn't come so close to Kismet there." Mace nodded at the shaggy, black, white and brown herding dog that now stood at attention, nose pointed at the dead animal. He only thought to explain so that she wouldn't think he was crazy, or stupid.

But, whatever, he didn't care right? The smirk had vanished though. Mace casually rolled his whip onto his right shoulder, where he could more easily unfurl it. It wasn't as fast as a knife, sure, but he'd have enough time to crack it before the knife hit his chest, or head, or arm. And he could snap someone's neck with the tail of the whip. He knew, because he'd practiced on deranged critters like the one she now held.

"Eat it though, if you want. Saves me some trouble. Is that really all you came for?" It seemed so shortsighted to him. Because who would want a rabbit when you could have a cow?

Then again, most people didn't have over a dozen siblings to feed.

for what it's worth, I always aim to please
but I nearly died

The sudden disappearance of the girl was... strange. But then again Mace had met his fair share of cooks in the community home. Many of the children had some sort of disability, be it mental or physical, which made their parents think twice about keeping them. It made sense, in a sick, twisted way, and only in a district as desperate as ten, where having a disabled child was more of a burden than having no child at all. It was one of the reasons he planned to stay in the home as long as he could, watching out for those who had never had anyone look out for them, ever.

Still, he wasn't used to just being ditched someone. He tried to shrug it off, but over the course of the day it continued to fester, to infuriate him. He was a little more liberal with the prod, more vicious with kicks. When he finally finished his work for the day, Mace dunked himself in the algae-infested pond, made short work of his laundry, and then ducked out of the home, off the property to the main road, which this far out in the district wasn't much more than some dirt in a squiggly line.

It took him along part of the forest. He kept his brow bent against the sun, but it baked his forehead anyhow. Mace would have walked right by her too, if not for the weight of her stare. He looked up to find her green eyes lasering into him. Mace scowled. "Forget to steal something?" He barked.

for what it's worth, I always aim to please
but I nearly died

It occurred to him along the road that perhaps he would have been better off forgoing the bath entirely. The sun was so hot it baked the thin layer of algae he had collected onto his flesh. It wasn't enough to dye his skin, but it was enough to make him absolutely reek. Like dead fish and mildew all rolled into one. Not that he had any plans to cozy up next to anyone, but if he could smell it on himself, then it was plenty bad. He shouldn't care about it, knew it was stupid to care about how someone bloody well smell. But it irked him, and he was already in an irritable mood.

And running into this chick twice was not doing him any favors. He wasn't really in the mood for a verbal spar, so he let her go on. And on. Really he'd heard more substance from a cow mooing. Her point was pretty clear. "Yeah, good," he summed up his agreement and was already continuing along the trodden path when she whirled around, and then back again, like a spinning top he'd once had as a child.

Mace blinked. What was up with this broad? Women were confusing normally, god knows, but he had a whole new appreciation for the level of crazy they could reach. He folded his arms, forehead unusually low across his brows. He didn't like thinking hard about... well, anything. And why should he be thinking about this girl at all, especially when she just blew him off - twice? And what did that mean, clearly within his character? He groaned.

"Oh don't be like that. Relax." He said it as a command, like the ones he often gave Kismet. Mace spoke to her back, but with over a dozen siblings in the home, he was pretty used to always speaking to someone's back. "You just plan to run away again? That working out okay for you?" Because he knew where people who ran away ended up. And while the home was... well, home, it wasn't any better than where ever they had started. Running away didn't solve problems. It made them.

for what it's worth, I always aim to please
but I nearly died

He couldn't help it. Maybe it was the way she said it, or just the fact that she was talking about running, which was exercise. But his dead gaze sparked as he dropped it along the length of her body. Not even subtly. He was very clearly sizing her up. And yeah, she did look good, even if she didn't run. Clearly she hadn't meant it that way, but all that hunting in the woods had made her reasonably strong and lean. Mace liked that in a girl. Even one as talkative as this particular specimen.

His smile had grown, moving up into the left quadrant of his face, twisting a little as his thoughts turned in a completely different direction. One of his mouthy little sisters had once told him that boys think about naughty things every few seconds. He didn't think that was true because it wasn't possible to think about anything that often, even enjoyable things. It just seemed to him that girls checked themselves more often, hid things, for whatever unfathomable reason.

And they didn't tend to like it when he leered. Not that he was going to do anything to make this girl like him. Quite the contrary. She clearly had her panties knotted up about something he did. He'd tuned out quite awhile ago as he admired her slender curves. But when she mentioned that he reeked - and he knew it was true - the spark disappeared. "The fuck is it to you? Run along if you don't like the way I smell." Because it wasn't like Mace had an options. They couldn't use their fresh water to bathe in because there wouldn't be any left to, you know, drink.

And poverty, more than almost anything else in his life, bothered him. Mace ground his teeth, rolling the molars over one another. "I got places to be. You done here, or maybe you'd like to insult me a little more?"