she laughed. the sound of it bounced off iron walls that likely hadn’t heard anything like it. but the thing was, nothing heisenberg said had been a joke. not even slightly. not even in the neighborhood of slightly. he studied her from beneath the brim of his hat for a moment, something unreadable turning over behind those dark lens. to her credit, she’d taken every single thing she’d encountered with a composure that bordered on the extraordinary, as if inoculated to shock — which was more than what he could say for any outsiders. though most outsiders, to be blunt about it, didn't manage much of anything; they arrived in the village confused and frightened and they tended to end up in a condition that made both irrelevant.
he supposed, he thought, that she might have come from somewhere where strange was simply the weather. which, given the whole dimension business, probably tracked. really, this entire situation was strange. he still wasn’t entirely convinced she simply hadn’t accidentally paid donna’s realm a visit first and was currently on some pollen – high.
“ i’ll take your word for it, ” he said, and left the considerable remainder of his thoughts exactly where they were. she didn’t look all that hardy. she looked like she’d been assembled with a great deal of care by someone who had opinions about aesthetics. but he knew better than to judge by appearances.
and hey, heisenberg was feeling a bit generous, so he might be willing to make some quick accommodations should quartz have requested them. or rather, admittedly generous wasn’t quite it, because generous implied selflessness and he wasn’t about to insult his own intelligence — possessive was more like it — she was definitely interesting and interesting things were a finite resource in this village. he currently had to compete with the objectively cozier castle dimitrescu, and oh, alcina would initially be perfectly cordial to quartz. she'd welcome any woman with open arms and mean it, right up until the moment she decided to use the poor gal for her virgin blood wine shit. he'd be damned if he would let the first person in who – knows – how – long to not immediately piss him off yet in some manner fall victim to his oversized ‘ sister ’ who had still not fully worked out how to express her particular appreciation for other women without defaulting to stringing them up and bleeding them into a wine bottle.
it was not an unreasonable suggestion — pragmatic, even, which heisenberg approved of as a general philosophy. the village did not take well to things that stood out, and she stood out in approximately ten different ways he could identify at a glance.
“ oh, yeah, ” he continued, “ you stick out like a really sore thumb. ”
idly, he patted his coat pockets as he thought, until a palm found the shape of what he was looking for and he fished out a cigar. he placed it between his teeth, but not yet lighting it, instead letting the scent of vague cardamom and cinnamon fill his nostrils, something almost incongruously warm about it against the factory's perpetual perfume of metal and machine oil.
“ can’t help you there. nothing i've got will fit you. hell, a burlap sack would probably do more for you than anything i — ” he stopped. blinked. “ actually... ” he took the cigar from his mouth, and pointed it towards quartz. “ i could ask one of my... sisters. ” donna, specifically. alcina was immediately out of the running on the grounds that anything from her wardrobe would fit quartz approximately like a circus tent, and beyond the purely logistical problem there was the separate issue of alcina asking questions he wouldn’t want to answer. donna, on the other hand, would simply provide. no interrogation as to why he would have been asking for women’s clothing.
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