aa_fandral | This is my face. [Raven]

and nothing quite so least as truth
—i say though hate were why man breathe—
because my father lived his soul
love is the whole and more than all

e. e. cummings, my father moved through dooms of love

She hasn't been up here for years, now, not since Tiger Baron's second commitment to inpatient. Calculated paranoia had a bad way of compounding problems like acute schizophrenia, particularly when one's faith in the medical industry has already been ground down to nothing by forty years of smuggling to and from pharmaceutical companies around the globe. Raven wasn't the only one to cut ties: most of their old associates even stopped picking up for her, too. Tiger hadn't needed them anyway, of course. Most don't make it out of the life clean, but his combination of native intelligence and psychotic symptoms had apparently lent itself well to developing fortune and fortification, anonymity as well as a valuable brand of ignominy.

There are ten dogs on the property, by now, one for every acre. Tiger doesn't trust people. He mans his cameras himself. She's mobbed by a chorus of snapping shepherds the instant she's over the gate. They chase her up to the house and she hangs off the verandah by the fingers so she doesn't have to hurt them.

"What the fuck," Tiger shouts through the door.

She answers: "It's me."

There's a lull. "Who is 'me?'"

"It's Mal." She is getting annoyed but she can't tell how much of it is nerves. Raven twists around, flails a foot out, thumps the door so hard a splinter pops off.

It takes him a few seconds to dismantle the shotgun rig and another minute or two to settle the dogs, before she can come down. She hugs him, even though she can see a gun in his pants and he's holding his sleeve at an awkward, arthritically-sore crook like he has a blade stashed up there he wants for the fast pull. Raven doesn't know if these habits predate his smuggling career, but she knows he's had the bowie knife since the Special Forces. He doesn't kill her immediately or even after she pulls back, so she smiles at him. He smells of stale beer and fresh soap. His hair has more gray in it than the last time she saw him, startlingly pale on the even, peaty darkness of his face.

"Long time no see," she tells him, letting go. There is an unsteady moment where she's watching his pupils for signs, waiting for the giveaway twitch of his knife-hand, but then he smiles at her after a moment, shows her a mouthful of gold caps. As if to make up for the absence of real teeth, he has a string of shark teeth around his neck, from the Argentina.

"C'mon in." He pushes the flyscreen in and elbows the suspended shotgun aside.

The house is darker, dustier inside than it was outside, but it smells pungently of cigarettes and nothing organic, not even dog food. The clock in the foyer is dead. There is still that giant bar of ivory in the front, ostentatious, painfully obvious, but ironically Tiger had never been cautious that way. There is a savannah-scape depicted in the enamel with painstaking detail. She got up close once, saw the acacia had thorns, the eyelashes on the buffalo in the watering hole.

Raven looks around and thinks: Lonely. It's not the first time she's ever thought it about Tiger's home, but the first time it didn't bring a fragmented moment's self-consciousness, an obscure fear that that would someday be her, too. "I'm just dropping by quick," she says. "I have news."

"Yeah?" He looks at her, doesn't invite her into the sitting room, leaning heavily on the table.

She nods her head, grins at him, helplessly. She says, "I'm getting married."

For a moment, Tiger Baron looks at her like she grew a second head. There's a rough chuckle, disbelieving, and he puts his head over to the other side. "That so?" he asks. "Seems like I known you your whole life and you never once talked about settlin' down. Seems like just yesterday, you were partyin' with coke dealers and huntin' lions. Hungry for money, for power, looking for your old man. Whetted your appetite on all the mommy issues in the world. How long have we known each other? Li'l Mal," he says, slowly, tilting his head, "married. Never would have thought it, when I took you in."

"The way I remember it, I was hunting down a Tanzanian park ranger," Raven points out. "On American soil." She'd never gotten off the continent, maybe resents him a little for that, still, but she's past that now. Raven doesn't say about the mommy issues; it's true enough.

Tiger looks at her. The way she's dressed, maybe also the way she holds herself, her arms uncrossed, her feet even on the floor, chin up, not trying to inflate herself into an obvious threat nor the portrait of unimpressed egotism, the way she used to, skulking behind him in warehouse rooms or restaurant fronts, flight hangars sometimes. He knew a guy who taught her how to fly, and taught her a lot of shooting himself. He lifts his eyebrows, before his features settle into neutral. Only flickers behind his face, nothing solid. It might be voices. "I feel," he says with effort, "like I don't know you."

That is unreasonable, even for a madman. Especially a madman who cleaned up, himself. Raven lets herself fall quiet for a moment, tries to stay centered, despite that the semi-darkness that Tiger keeps his home in invites her senses to expand to prickling paranoia of her own. She knows better than to insist with anything so bald and manipulative as honesty, You know me better than anyone, exactly because it's true. She knew Tiger Baron for a long time; long enough that he caught her lying regularly, taught her how. She looks at the photographs on the wall, frames rimed with dust and snapshots darkening from age, the ones with her own face in them, her fingers in a fist, feeling the faint bite of her fingers. She has spent many years learning to differentiate what is important from what is not, but it isn't always clear; tends to grow less clear, she finds, with the length of acquaintance. If that bodes poorly for her and Rhodes, well.

Well, she'll cross that bridge when she comes to it. Raven breathes in dust and breathes out an admission: "I wanted to invite you, but I can't. Not with these people. You're the closest thing I have to a dad." She notices too late, that she's crossed her arms, begun to hunch. "They're people I can trust. Smart-- powerful, even."

"Do they know what you are?" he bursts out, searching her face. "Do they know what you've done? Do they know--" Tiger waves an arm at her. "Do they know what you can do?"

She doesn't even have to look away. "Of course not." What has that ever mattered? "But I'm happy."

"You are wearing a fucking tie," he points out. She looks down. It's true. Loafers, too, a sensible jacket. She'd wanted to look the part, for him.

Tiger Baron sneers and flicks a club-fingered hand at the door, a dismissal as casual as the old days. It only stings a little, she tells herself, so it must be so. Raven turns away, flattening the tie down her chest. She can find her own way out, and maybe kill a dog on the way. "Tanisha!" Behind her, Baron is snapping at the stale air, or a waking memory conjured out of scent and dust, no less artificial than the shapeshifter in front of him. And no less sincere: she had meant every word she'd said.

Well, every other word. As close as she ever gets.

"Leave the boy alone," Tiger mutters. "He's getting married to some rich Yuppie pussy." There's a metallic rasp of a lighter. He takes a drag as she shoulders past the screen, to find that the dogs have fled. "Come again, Malcolm."