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WHO: Cougar Alvarez
WHERE: Bungalow #22
WHEN: July 2nd - Day After Arrival
OPEN TO: OTA
WARNINGS: n/a
STATUS: Closed

It takes Cougar two tries down the well before he gives up. The sirens and the windstorm force him to move on and make nice in the inn, but when things clear up and the sun rises on another day, Cougar slings his pack over his shoulder and heads out to explore the rest of the strange settlement they seem to be in the middle of.

It's quiet.

Normally, Cougar likes the quiet. He's a taciturn man himself, preferring signals and gestures over words, but this is an eerie kind of quiet that he doesn't like. The homes are empty and that means something drove everyone out, but for Cougar's life, he can't figure out where they went. He tries to go to the edge of the cliffs, but he can't climb the sheer face. Returning back to the village, he finds a dark green bungalow near a forked path and knows that if he wants to get a better view, he needs to be in a sniper's nest.

More than that, he's going to need to set up base. Throwing his bag to the roof, he grabs for the porch and starts to lever himself up, using the windows and the shingles of the roof to scuttle his way along until he's managed to free-run himself up to the apex of the roof. He tugs his bag along with him (stuffed with a few berries he'd found on his exploration) and settles down at the top. High above everything, he feels at home even in this strange place.

He sits, cross-legged, and chews on some of the berries as he stares at the streets that wind below him. He'd prefer to be much, much higher, but this will do for now as he stakes his claim on this house as a base and keeps an eye on all the vantage points around.

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The thing that scares Veronica the most about this place isn't the weirdness of being here to begin with, or the genuinely frightening weather phenomenon that had accompanied everyone's arrival, or even the isolated location and total not knowing where she is. Those things aren't exactly ideal, but what's really getting to her on this second day is the simple confluence of advanced civilization and primitive survival.

There had been a social order here. People had clearly lived in these houses. They had gardens and feather pillows and flushing toilets. But the group of them here now, they've got those same gardens and feather pillows and flushing toilets, but they're lucky if they can even feed themselves. It's terrifying.

Pants legs rolled up to mid-calf and emptied bag thrown over her shoulder, she's mostly wandering right now, trying to get some semblance of her bearings in a place that seems dead set on her doing the opposite. It's a stupid thought when right now they just need to hunt and gather enough to not starve, but she wishes she had some paper and something to write with. She could take an inventory, maybe, and find a way to keep her mind from running off in a dozen really upsetting directions.

He recognizes the girl from his arrival, thinking that it's not a good idea for her to be out there on her own. Searching in his bag for something to wrap it in, he gets a few of the wild berries he'd picked in the baseball cap and lets it fly down when she's passing, landing at her feet when she's about to take the next two steps that get her to it.

Waiting, Cougar shifts so he's in view, lifting himself up from where he's lying on his stomach -- old habits being hard to break.

To be completely honest, it scares the shit out of her. And not in an internally screaming while looking mildly startled way, either. That cap plopping at her feet scares Veronica in a completely undignified, completely obvious, nearly falling onto her ass sort of way.

Which naturally makes her feel like a complete idiot when she sees what it is.

Frowning, she glances around, only knowing to look up because she sees the movement out of the corner of her eye. Once she catches sight of Cougar, it all seems to make sense; she hasn't known him long, but he definitely seems like the sort of strange that hangs out on rooftops.

"Hola," she calls, shading her eyes with a lifted hand as she squints up at him. "Gracias. What are you doing?"

"Watching. Waiting." He's not sure which is actually going to pay off, but he knows that if he's patient enough, he's going to see something or someone that Cougar can do something about other than sit here and think about wind storms from nowhere, strangers in a settlement, and all his things being stolen. He misses the steady weight of the skull ring on his finger, the shade from his hat, and the gun. Dios, but worst of all, he misses that gun.

"Did you sleep?" is his immediate concern, unblinking as he studies her.

"Not much," Veronica admits with a wry twist of her mouth. "Call me crazy, but I don't find this whole situation to exactly be soothing."

She picks up the cap, considers the contents and then looks back up at Cougar. "Have you figured anything out?"

He shakes his head, squinting in the light. The sun rises like it would anywhere, there is no one around, and no matter where he goes, there is something preventing him from escaping. "Houses, all around," he says. "Checked five. Unoccupied." His voice is rough, as usual, the lack of use making it sound like he hasn't spoken since he'd seen her yesterday (which isn't entirely a long shot).

"Found berries. Looking for fowl," he says, with a whistle and a tip of his chin skywards.

"That could definitely be helpful." Just in the quick survey Veronica had done of their rag-tag group, she got the impression that Cougar was definitely not the only one capable of hunting in the group, but if they were going to feed everybody, they needed all the help they could get.

"Do you have a way of kill—" Her tongue revolted on her, pressing briefly to the roof of her mouth. "Catching them?"

He raises his brow and notes the way that she stumbles on the word 'kill'. He thinks it might be the same if he spoke more and had to talk about fire or helicopters, but he's spoken even less since Bolivia and only the other Losers would know. He leans back to lift up the oblong stones that he's fetched -- enough to stun a bird.

The kitchen knife will do the job of ending their lives. With this and the farm animals nearby, he thinks he could feed at least three or four. "You don't like to eat meat?" he guesses, at her reaction.

"No, that's not it," Veronica replied with a shake of her head, and looked briefly away. It wasn't that she necessarily minded talking about J.D., it just wasn't that easy to explain. Never mind that it made her look like a terrible person, and truth or not, she'd rather not point out her own awfulness this early.

She squinted back up at Cougar. "I just kind of went through a thing before I got here," she tried with an ineffectual motion of one hand. "People died. It wasn't fun."

He raises his eyebrow and thinks that people die all the time. What does it mean for him when people die and nothing impacts you anymore, nothing but twenty-five little angelitos. He keeps his face steady, but if Jensen were there, he would know what the thought does to him in how he briefly falters in the slight widening of his eyes.

"Good people?" is all he eventually ends up asking.

Veronica stills, watching Cougar for a long moment. It's a telling question, one that shines a lot of light on his moral flexibility. She'd be lying if she said it wasn't a little worrying.

"Misguided people," she answers, because not even Heather truly deserved to be described as a bad person. They were all just kids and kids do stupid shit; she's living proof of that.

"They didn't deserve to die."

In his experience, there are plenty who deserve to die and many who don't. He doesn't get to judge the people he's never met, so he'll have to take Veronica's word for it, even though a part of him wants to know for himself if they ever would have wound up in his scope. "People die," is what he says evenly, without much emotion. "Doesn't matter who deserves it. Just that it happens."

And then you have to move on. Or, if you're like Cougar, you have ridiculous amounts of night terrors and give people black eyes when they try and wake him up.

"That's bullshit," Veronica immediately says, frowning. The cool way he says it stings like a betrayal. Even in English, he sounds indifferent, but this matters to her. It ought to matter to everyone, and not in the holding hands, cleansing meditation way Miss Flem was always trying to push down their throats. They're human beings, they deserve dignity. They deserve people actually giving a shit when they're no longer alive.

"You don't know anything about it. Don't imply I shouldn't care about whether people are murdered. That's basic fucking human decency," she says, and swallows hard, trying to decide whether she wants to just keep on walking.

Edited 2016-07-21 07:05 (UTC)

He raises his brow at her when she reacts the way she does, knowing that he can't keep his past a secret. He also doesn't want to be this far when they talk. Holding onto one of the eaves, Cougar gracefully slides down and drops from the roof to the ground, where he can be face to face as he talks to her. "I'm a sniper," he says, calmly and evenly. To him, death and murder are two different things. Murder doesn't come from orders. Murder is what happens in Bolivia when you put children before yourself and see twenty-five futures go up in flames. It's taking out a former teammate because you have no other choice.

"If you don't accept that it happens to everyone, you go crazy," he says, his eyes glinting as intense as ever. "I know."

As much as some small, fiercely indignant part of her would have liked to stomp off, Veronica's glad when Cougar slides from the roof and forces her to look him in the eye. It isn't as if she knows him, not really, but he's been kind to her from the first moment she came sputtering out of that stupid fountain. He probably deserves the benefit of the doubt, to at least be heard out.

"Sorry," she says, and heaves a slow sigh as she looks away. "Sore subject. It's... a long and stupid story. I trusted somebody, and they turned out to be not a nice person."

His face darkens at those words because they hit too close to home. He had trusted Roque with his life so many times, only to have Roque arrange to have them shot, execution style. Even though Cougar had taken him out, there isn't much regret, but there is guilt. More guilt than he knows what to do with, which is why he wakes up screaming more often than not.

"Don't trust anyone," he says evenly. "Not completely. Learn that lesson," is all he says, "and you'll be safer."

"That's sad," Veronica says, watching the subtle flicker of emotion behind his eyes and wondering what the hell put it there. She doesn't ask, although maybe she should; apparently they've both got sore subjects.

"How can you truly care about people and be a fully-realized human being without trusting people?" she asks instead. "I'm not talking about being a sucker, but shit. I don't think I'm ready for that level of perpetual cynicism."

Maybe it's different for a civilian, but Cougar thinks that he trusts exactly two people right now. Aisha is an easy to understand reason for mistrust, and Clay too often follows other parts than his head. Really, the only two people that Cougar trusts unequivocally are Pooch and Jensen, neither of whom are here. He knows that it's sad, knows that it's made him closed off, but he's paid the hard way and is still working off the grief of trust in the middle of the night through screaming night terrors.

He shrugs, because it's the best he can do. "Means no one gets a knife in my back," he says. "Alive is better than trusting and dead."

"I wouldn't put a knife in your back," Veronica says, quieter than a moment before, and then slants her gaze away with bite to her bottom lip. There's no reason to not just come out and tell her whole sob story, except that it will probably just support everything Cougar's trying to tell her.

"My boyfriend tried to kill me," she says, looking back to him with a shrug, her eyes betraying the smoothness of the gesture. "Twice. It wasn't exactly fun, but I'm not wanting to live my life in a bubble, either. If I do that, he's still got control over me, right? And fuck him. He doesn't get to dictate how I live."

"I don't know you," Cougar reminds her. He doesn't say it to be cruel, but it's the truth. People come in and lie. People know you and lie. All Cougar knows it that until someone is fighting by your side, you can never know where their real loyalties are. Even then, it changes when their priorities change.

It doesn't mean he's going to freeze her out, though. "I'm sorry about your boyfriend," he offers calmly. "If he comes here, voy a cortarle el cuello," he says, because violence against women doesn't deserve mercy.

"He's dead," Veronica says, and the sudden urge for a cigarette is so strong that she actually pats one of her pockets before she remembers their benevolent puppet masters hadn't included that in their gift pack.

"I wouldn't put a knife in your back," she says again, more firmly this time and holding Cougar's gaze. Maybe it shouldn't matter, but it does. She's nothing like J.D. She could never do anything like that on purpose.

Cougar shrugs when she tells him that he's dead, because it just means that he doesn't get to drive a knife into anyone's throat for their crimes -- at least, not today. He gives her a curious look when she insists that she's trustworthy, wondering why it's so hard for him to believe.

Maybe it's being with the same group for so long and maybe it's being betrayed by Aisha and Roque in such quick succession. "Can't trust anyone," he says with a shrug that's half-sad. "Everyone has their own agenda. You won't put a knife in my back, not unless something changes and you need to."

"Everyone has buttons."

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