Re: [capital pawnshop: hannah & david]
Standing there, she was real. She was flesh and blood and girl and breath that fogged the night air. She blinked, and the hairs on her arms prickled, and her chest rose and fell and repeated. She was a marvel, and she was entirely ordinary, and she was real. Real, real, and there she was, and she knew this man in front of her wasn't. Hannah viewed the world through numbers, integers and everything was binary. He was a collection of data points that coalesced to form him, and him wasn't alive. She shouldn't know that, but she did. Still, she didn't question it, because why would she? Why would a girl that wasn't alive question a boy being alive who wasn't?
"I'm real," she said, allowing the press of his fingers against skin that felt entirely human. Girl, girl, girl, and she followed his lead and jumped upon his bandwagon. "I was never dead." She wasn't, not really, and it wasn't a lie. She had never died. Another girl had died, but not her, and: "I'm Hannah." To clarify without real clarification, and so he remembered. "You're not alive. Why?" She didn't ask where Molly was, though that probably wasn't very surprising. Amy and Molly had been words apart, different as day and night, and Amy had never asked after others much. The girl who had died was too busy being popular, pretty, a party girl, and thoughtlessly blind to bad things. Born sick, she was spoiled and silly, and Molly had never been like that.
She looked at the man on the ground. He dove for the gun, and Hannah watched with impassive blink as he was hauled back.
"Hi Henry," she said, and she crouched when David crushed the man's chest. There, in front of him, and she bent close to the face of the choking man. Her hair was a silken cascade of faded copper, and it slipped across Henry's face like a kissing veil. "I think you bought something recently. Did you sell it?" She didn't think it was the boy that was buried, because no one would bother to bury a fake boy. Fake boys weren't crimes, and that made Hannah sad.
She she didn't wait for the man's answer. Instead, she stood and brushed herself off, as if she'd just vacated a seat upon a summer grass, and she smiled a sweet smile at David. "I'm going to look around, okay? Don't let me bother you."
Tiptoes, tiptoes, and she kissed the dead man's cheek. Whether she met with skin or air, that didn't matter; it was the thought that counted. And perhaps she should mind the torture, but she was programmed to not mind bad things. A sexual upgrade that Marcus had paid and paid for, and it meant she could step away from the man on the floor without wincing or feeling bad even a little bit. He was a bad man.