2022-05-12 - We're Good (But Unfed)

To say 'it was a bit of a night' would be an understatement. Una, informed only via a not-terribly-informative text, came home to a house that was dark and quiet, with closed doors preventing her from getting the information she needed (because bursting into people's rooms is a step too far, even in that amount of agitation). It's morning, now, and not even especially early, though the redhead in the kitchen is still dressed in what passes for pyjamas (loose pants and an over-sized t-shirt, her feet bare upon the tiled floor), and the amount of food in the kitchen, freshly baked? It looks as if she's been here if not all night, then certainly most of it.

The back door-- the door from garden to kitchen-- is open, though, and the oven is finally turned off: instead, she's stacking plates into cupboards, cleaning up the dishes left to dry in the dish rack, their mismatched ceramic shapes dried carefully with a tea towel, one by one. She's pale and brittle-looking, with dark circles beneath her eyes and a slightly nervous edge to her movements.

Ravn and Ariadne don't even bother to make a secret of arriving together, in the morning. They arrive not from the house next door, though -- but from down the street (it all makes sense when one recalls that Ariadne has a dog who can't just be abandoned to his own devices all night unless one wants to find puddles in all the wrong places).

Ravn still has a haggard look to his face, like he did not sleep very well. He rings the doorbell and tells Ariadne, "Here's to hoping there was enough left of the kitchen she won't kill us." His voice is raspy, in the fashion of somebody who's had a bad cold or throat infection lately. Or tried to inhale a river, during an asthma attack.

"I would hate to be dead when I have so many things to do still. Maybe she'll let me write my will first," Ariadne muses drily. She looks better than Ravn, to be expected, but there's still some grey underneath her own eyes as well. Coffee only cuts through so much of an equally restless night's sleep. It was Samwise who won out for most cycles of REM. He's being a good boy back at the ranch, as it were. "Remember that you still need to check with Aidan about your throat, okay?" She's not going to rag on Ravn about it, but the barista remains ever pragmatic.

And quietly present after the doorbell rings. No 'ding and dash' here. Instead, a vaguely-resigned slip of her hands into her lightweight jacket, one meant for sailing by its fabric and deliberate tight wrist-cuffs and buttons to close the kangaroo-pocket in the front. Otherwise, yoga pants in black and her courier purse across her chest. Her messy-bun'd hair still gleams with the damp of her own proper showering earlier in the day.

The sound of the doorbell rouses Una from the reverie of her thoughts: the tidy progression of pick up dish, dry dish, put dish away in the cupboard. It's soothing, requiring little to no thought, and maybe she's even halfway asleep in the process of it-- but not so much that she drops the dish in her hand at the interruption.

She's still got the tea towel in her hand when she opens the door, having padded down the long corridor to the front to answer it. It opens, and she hesitates, brown eyes shifting from tired-looking Ariadne to tireder Ravn, and then back again. She seems, momentarily, and somewhat unexpectedly, lost for words.

Una's not alone in that, either. Ravn looks at her.

After a breath or two it occurs to him that he could say something.

Another breath and he blurts out the only thing he can think of. "I think I left my violin in your kitchen."

"The...laptop too, I think, along with the violin."

Not like Ariadne can come with anything more smooth. With their awkward powers combined! She makes no point of hiding how she looks over Una; her brows quirk in empathy. It's still a bit of a new concept, but the redhead then opens her arms not overly wide, but wide enough to insinuate: hug? There's no pushiness to the gesture.

It's actually, quite possibly, exactly the right thing to say: something practical, something that Una can hold on to and actually action. Something concrete that's not her emotions, which are topsy-turvy and veering dramatically between anger and relief. Only some of that shows in her expression, now, though, and mostly it's just the confusion of it all.

"Oh," she says. "Um yes, I think so."

Only there are those arms, and a moment's indecision to follow. Slow, thoughtful hesitation, and then a tiny, brittle shake of her head. "Come in."

She turns, leading the way inside, down the quiet corridor to the kitchen, where a night's worth of baking is laid out in trays and tupperware.

Ravn lets out a small sigh of relief. 'Come in' is better than 'piss off, take your violin and never show your face around here again', after all.

He trails after Una, probably unaware of how guilty he looks. And how raspy his voice sounds. Yes, yes. He's going to see somebody about it. Eventually. Also needs to order a new inhaler.

Fair, Ariadne thinks to herself of the rebuffed hug as she watches their hostess turn to lead the way to the kitchen. There's no bad feelings -- she too would be equally uncertain about a hug if she were dealing with a bunch of unknowns. A glance at Ravn for his sigh of relief and a silent nod to follow. Yes, no one's getting yelled at.

As she meanders into the kitchen, her eyes hunt for the violin plus case as well as laptop. Last she saw them, they were on the kitchen table. "What did you make?" A mild, normal question for Una as she then drifts towards the counters which display the goods, as it were.

No one's getting yelled at yet. Maybe Una's not angry. Maybe she's saving her anger up for Jules. Maybe she's just too tired at this point. Who knows!

At least the kitchen seems to be in good shape, aside from the explosion of baking. The violin case and the laptop are on the table, cleared out of the way of everything else that's now there. Una takes up a position leaning against the counter, not far from where her stack of dishes are piled up, the tea towel now hanging over her shoulder.

"Everything," she says. It's not far off being true: there are cheese scones and shortbread, actual bread, lemon cookies. "I had a lot of time to bake in."

And not, it seems, sleep in.

Ravn picks up his violin case. Then he tucks the laptop under one arm. And looks like -- well, like he's giving very serious thought to just retreating.

"You should sleep," he says quietly, all the same. "You can't not sleep."

It does appear to be everything -- or just about. The proverbial 'kitchen sink' of baking recipes. Ariadne's brows lift despite her sense of poise. Baking in this volume takes time.

As such, Ravn gives her the opening. "Yeah, maybe a nap later today?" the barista gently suggests with her golden-hazel eyes resting on Una. She's not about to go reaching for any of the baked goods, not just yet. There's been no offer to take one and it seems assumptive on her part as such.

"It's hard to sleep," says Una, not accusatory, but rather deceptively calm, "when you get a text that says 'Jules is home from a scary veil trip with Ravn' and then when you get home no one is around to explain what the fuck just happened, but the fact that you got the text in the first place suggests it was horrific."

"I'm sorry." Ravn's apology is quiet, but heartfelt. "It was my fault. I didn't think."

Definitely not reaching for any baked goods. That's a tone of calm which begs an equally calm expression in turn, brows lifted.

Ravn speaks and Ariadne glances over at him, then back at Una. He and she, Dane and barista, have already had their discussion. For the moment, the young woman with her hair of deep-auburn and celestial hues remains off to one side. Movement comes when she steps over to sit on the edge of the kitchen table, her hands still in the kangaroo pocket of her sailing sweatshirt.

Apologies, real ones, are undeniably good things. There's something in Una's expression now, though, something that's less calm, and rather suggests that at least part of her wasn't after an apology but an argument: an opportunity to rant and rail and wail away some of those overwhelming emotions that exhaustion has yet to dull.

She closes her eyes, just for a moment, and whatever battle is going on in her head clearly rages on, because when she opens them again, it's not to be entirely generous and accept the apology, but to say, instead, "Might I ask you to do me the very great favour of explaining to me exactly what it is I'm supposed to forgive you for."

"Jules told me the thing tried to possess Mikaere, when he examined it. I should have forbidden her to touch it. I told it to tell her who it is, what it wants. I should have told her to burn it instead. I should have taken it myself and burned it, before it could harm her. And for that, I am very sorry. I nearly got her Lost for good."

Ravn pauses. For a moment he looks like he wants to say more but then decides that there's nothing gained from trying to make excuses or justify his choices. What happened, happened; that's the long and short of it. He turns for the door because there's not really more to say. Sometimes, you done fucked up, and that's the end of that.

Ariadne continues to listen and stay off on the peripheral via her lean on the table. Her eyes skate from speaker to speaker and the continued mild divot between her brows betrays wonderments.

Still, she can't help but interject, lightly and calmly, "But Jules and Ravn were not Lost and lessons were learned here. It scared me too." Her shoulders rise and fall as does her chest in a sigh. Ravn moves to go and as the other half of this particular party, she delays only a moment before hipping up off the kitchen table. She's still slower to get moving, however, because she's got her attention on Una. She's spotted the look in the other redhead's eyes.

Ravn's explanation makes Una's eyes open wide: it's pretty clear from the way she reacts that all of this is new to her, that as much as anything, she's still adrift in trying to understand what happened, and that this, more than any blame, is what's fuelling her anger.

But words are hard. She closes her eyes, squeezing them tight against the tears that again (still?) threaten to escape.

"That's not... I just... I don't even know what fucking happened. I just need to understand."

"They didn't tell you?" Ravn pauses in mid-step. Every instinct in his body -- particularly the ones that have a C-PTSD diagnosis -- tell him to keep right on moving; however, what Una wants is hardly an unreasonable question. More over, it's a surprising question.

He makes himself stop. He keeps his eyes on the door -- compromise is good, don't look at the angry woman, just talk to her, you can do it -- and takes a breath. "The Quinault figurine. Jules was trying to find out what it is, what it's supposed to do. It has a mind of its own. Apparently, it tried to take over Mikaere. I tried to communicate with it in sound -- if it can move small things, it should be able to move violin strings. Turns out it very much can move things: It took over Jules and made her open that door into the past. It made her step through. I should never have agreed to trying to communicate with it, should never have let her make that kind of decision."

Again, Ariadne's eyes flick between her fellow redhead and her boyfriend. The first is clinging against tears; the latter is gone too still. In the end, the barista doesn't make it far from the table at all. Her hands remain in her sweatshirt's pockets.

After Ravn's done speaking, the barista adds quietly, "But Jules is her own person and as such, should be treated as one."

Una's, "No," is hard and tight and angry and implies pretty clearly: I am in the dark here. That's not the whole truth, of course, given Della has given her at least the briefest of rundowns. Perhaps it's still not that far off, though, given the way she murmurs, in a somewhat bewildered way, "Quinault figurine." Since when does Jules have a Quinault figurine?

Tiredly, then: "She would have done it without you. She's a reckless idiot who doesn't think about anyone else, and I don't know what happened, but I'm sorry you clearly had to pay a price for it."

"She never had a choice." Ravn keeps his voice calm even as tension levels are dropping. "I mean, she did not take up this thing and shake it until a door opened, then hopped through. It was just suddenly -- one moment she's standing there, the next she's opening doors and going through. To the best of my knowledge, Jules can't do that. She only snapped out of it after several minutes on the other side."

He takes a deep breath. "I'd do it anytime. Try to pull somebody's tail back out. Because that's what we do, we have each other's backs. But I should have seen this coming and never let her endanger her tail in the first place. Even if it meant Jules would have been angry with me. At the very least, she'd have known and understood the risk before she touched the thing and listened to it."

There's something mulish in Una's expression, like she's ready to argue exactly why Jules really is an idiot, but for the short term at least, the fight has eased in her: she's not going to push it.

"I know you would," is what she says, finally. "That's what you do. But you're not all-knowing. And Jules? She knew exactly how dangerous it was. Clearly. That's why she made sure I knew jack shit about anything. And that's why she's hiding from me now."

She swallows. "I'm sorry. I hope you're okay. I won't keep you." Her gaze slides, finally, towards Ariadne, acknowledging her not for the first time, but probably the first time in the past few minutes.

Ariadne's been quietly watching all the while and when Una looks at the barista, she'll find a small, sad smile on the older redhead's face.

"I hope you're okay too, hon...and I hope you and Jules can figure out how to get through this. Text me if you need anything? I'm just a quick drive away," she reminds the creator of all the wonderous baked goods scattered all over surface areas. Given no one's being kept, Ariadne then does begin to drift towards the exit to the hallway, eventually bound for the front door. She moves in no terribly hurry in case communication requires more of her and she all but projects calm about herself in the process.

"I'm not good at arguing," Ravn says quietly. "I'm my father's son in this regard. Whenever my mother got angry he'd just get up and leave. Take another trip to the Himalayas, go fishing in the Azores, send her a postcard, come back a few weeks later. I don't know that that's the right way to handle anything but it's better than screaming at each other."

He heads doorwards but pauses to look back at Una. "We're still good, right? I am terribly sorry for what happened. But I'd hate it if it meant I should stay out of your kitchen from now on."

"We're good," Una promises. If she's lacking her usual warmth, that's no surprise, really; warmth may be a while in returning, even after the not-quite-yelling is done with. For Ariadne, she manages only a weak little smile, her nod acknowledging the comment. She won't text; she never does. But the offer is appreciated anyway.

And for the first time in... who knows how long, guests will leave Una's kitchen unfed.