[Private] 'Tis the Season

Heng just shuffled after them awkwardly. Okay look, he knew that he really had no business being here. Not in the rude way, but in the he really honesty has no point in being here way.

Esther could handle herself, and she handled Sen better than Heng probably did (hint, he didn't handle Sen at all. He just kind of lets Sen walk all over him because doing anything otherwise would be a waste of effort. It's like, Heng has a lot of HP, and Sen has really low ATK, so really anything Sen does, Heng can handle). It was too awkward to leave now, though, as he had already agreed to come.

He catches Esther giving him a look, and he didn't return it. He looked at a rack of sunglasses instead. Glasses have always interested him. He'd never seen them before during his life, of course, and he got to watch as they developed throughout history. Really fascinating, that two slightly bendy see through solids could, what was the term, "correct" vision?

He remembers one of his brothers always complaining about how he couldn't see far things clearly.
"They're blurry, 哥哥!" he'd say, tugging at Heng's sleeve. Heng's, funnily enough, had perfect vision all his life. Now he only has one eye. Fate was a fun thing.

He spun the rack a bit, stopping it at a pair of over the top aviator shades. With a small huff, he picked it up, and slid it onto his face. Certainly, these 'shades' lived up to their name. Everything was much darker. How useful this would've been in battle!

He turned to look at Sen and Esther. This was.... kind of fun? Maybe???? What even was 'fun'. What even.

Heng seemed to be preoccupied with being fascinated by shades. A smirk made an appearance on Esther’s face, but it was quickly wiped away by a more somber thought than ‘ha ha look at Heng look at those things like they’re a treasure’. He’d been around for… a while, was it?

A while.

Hundreds of years, but she wasn’t quite sure how many it had been. Would she look at things like that several centuries from now, marvelling at modern mundane objects like they were miracles?

… No. That was just Heng being weird. Hadn’t he ever seen sunglasses before? She’d thought that Sen referring to him as a fossil had been a tad unnecessary, but God. He acted like he’d been buried underground and then locked up in a museum or collection all his life, just like the aforementioned fossils he’d been likened to.

Saddening.

“They don’t look that bad,” she said, but Sen was already handing him another pair of shades. The short man’s criticism of Heng’s fashion sense (or lack of it) felt relentless. How did Heng put up with that, exactly? By bending and bowing and dealing with it… if you could call ignoring it ‘dealing with it’.

She momentarily went back to eyeing the sunglasses. A new pair could always be useful, but aviators… aviators didn’t seem like her thing, and there were a lot of them there. Maybe Alim would like these? Probably not. Maybe not. I’d have to ask. Eugh.

Interest in the display of aviators waning, her gaze flickered back to Heng and the new pair of shades that Sen had bestowed upon him.

Sen's rebuttal and subsequent offer to assist Heng in finding a decent pair of shades spoke volumes. He tilted his head to the side as he tried them on after a moment of critical scrutiny nodded his head. "Much better. you may not have had a lot of options when you were alive but a global economy has made it so easy to find a style that suits you." His tone was light and engaging even if his face looked like he'd rather be anywhere else. He just wasn't used to deal with duded on this level. However he did grin at the invitation to try a pair. Who could say no to shades?

First though he picked up a pair of more subtly feminine looking ones hand held them out to Esther. "Hey try these ones on. They're cute but not overly so." Shades He thought they'd look nice next to her complexion and also set off that bold haircut she was sporting. Yes yes, Very nice those. He then turned to find a pair for himself.  Finally he settled on a blue tinted pair and slipped those on. Shades Hmmm not bad, but another store might have something a bit more relatable to his tastes. This didn't stop him form turning around to see his work looking amused to have dragged these two unlikely souls along on this shopping trip.

Heng smiled. Okay they were all getting along. This was good.

He put the shades Sen gave him back on the rack, then spun it around until he found a similar pair, but darker. He picked them up, weighing them in his hand. He'd probably be more inconspicuous if he went out in public wearing shades instead of an eyepatch.

"Let's go look for coats then, Miss Esther," he said. "You both uh, both look very nice," he added.

“Thank you, Heng,” said Esther. Her gaze flickered over to Sen. The guy had a point -- saying “uh” didn’t exactly inspire confidence in whoever you were talking to. And it certainly didn’t highlight any in your choice of words. She refrained from agreeing, instead turning towards where the coat racks appeared to be.

“Coats, coats, coats -- do you two need anything, or am I just dragging you along needlessly?” She shot a (seemingly) apologetic smile back at them. “Props to you for sticking with me, if so.” She was stuck capriciously flopping back and forth between resenting their company and not minding it; they certainly were an odd couple.

… It occurred to her how little she really knew about either of them. Both had untapped stories. All three of them were dead. She stalled a bit in her journey towards the outerwear section, and she didn’t turn back around to Sen, but she addressed him all the same.

“Hey,” she said. “Sen. It’s interesting that we ran into you today.” He’d appeared out of nowhere, pretty much -- she hadn’t noticed him until he’d interjected into Heng’s conversation -- but if Esther had to guess, now, then he’d been there for a reason related to the driver. Had the man run over another person down the road? “... What brought you out here?”

Sen choked out a laugh at Heng's response as he waved his attempt to correct it away with a flick of his wrist. "Well it's too late to fix it now Fossil, just remember to try better next time." He grinned in a way that could only be described as rude and turned to eye a shirt that caught his eye. But upon closer inspection he decided he didn't like it. At that point Esther had directed her question to him and he grinned.

"Oh I got to take care of the driver." he answered, his hands idly toying with another shirt which he also decided he didn't like. "I always get the dirty jobs you know? But I'm cool with that."

Heng pursed his lips, folding up the bandannas and putting them back.

"The hunter? I remember," he said coolly, turning to look at the unfazed teenagers. The gates incident was no fun. And she brought up jackets. Heng glanced at Sen quickly, scratching the back of his head. Mud and blood ruined his. Heng blinked.

"My boots were er, caked in mud as well. A waste," he agreed. "Leather is durable?" he offered.