FIVE --
busy playing pretend with @shiwoomoon, late at the ishikawa building
sol doesn’t like this place. it makes him uncomfortable, all that opulence. and he feels like he sticks out. all wrong. like a bone jutting out of skin, wrong in the way where people start to stare. wrong in the way where it feels more uncomfortable than it even looks. him being here is wrong, he can feel that. maybe he shouldn’t feel it. just one of the fucked up things about their society. that sol has to run around in the slums to feel like he’s himself. step one foot out and he’ll be the first to call himself wrong.
so he says it doesn’t suit him, all this. he says it with a bite, like that might be his own decision. like he thinks the people choking down overpriced cocktails are gaudy. over-inflated. to an extent, maybe. but he’s also busy avoiding his own internalized self hatred. his self-worth hanging on a string, a string wound up and comprised of perceived value. monetary and otherwise.
but he’s here anyway. because there’s a message embedded in his cell telling him to come. so he did. pathetic. a lot of things sol does are pathetic though. sometimes he hates himself for it. for this. for a great many things. there’s an aching in him. something he's forced to feel. and it feels like a craving. a craving for touch, or for intimacy. and he seeks it out on an impulse. gorges on it, like too much sugar. a quick fix that makes him feel sick with himself after. but like any addict, he doesn’t stop just because of that. just puts himself through hell all over again, like maybe things might play out differently this time.
makes it to mav’s floor and ignores the churning in his gut. his skin’s rubbed raw. too much hot water, and now he smells overwhelmingly like citrus. it’s nearly cloying, but he’s learned through experience that mav will bitch him out and force them both into a shower if he doesn’t, and sol hates that more than near anything. so here he is, a walking-fucking-grapefruit as he waits for mav to let him in.
and then he’s in. a familiar place, but he feels just as comfortable here as he did in the lobby. read: not at all. sometimes he thinks it bothers mav, the way he holds himself here. he doesn’t get why. they both know he doesn’t belong. he lets mav treat him like a dirty secret after all. doesn’t bother contesting it -- it’s not like sol doesn’t understand. not like he doesn’t agree with him. but all that agreeing doesn’t make him an agreeable person. “so, what’s the emergency?” he asks, and there won’t be one. sometimes mav likes to pretend there’s some grand emergency in his life, but usually sol rolls his eyes at it. “can i smoke?” he meant to, before he came out. eyes mav like he already thinks he might tell him no. has a preemptive, can you not be a bitch for like, once sitting in wait on the edge of his tongue, just in case.