(no subject)

[aimedforthemoon]

This is starting to be a habit. Not that Esfir minds - your homes are where you can relax, talk openly, not have to pretend.

Which is why when she leads Cal in and points to her bed (presently looking more like a sofa, with how she's arranged the pillows), she turns and locks the door.

Habit.

Comments

[isaysimplewords]

Cal sits, curling in against the pillows, and closes his eyes.

He would be trying to gather his thoughts, but first he has to find them. The whiskey still in his system isn't as helpful as it was twenty minutes ago.

[aimedforthemoon]

She can wait. After all, she has things to neaten up - books, notes, blue-prints, and there is nothing wrong with silence.

[isaysimplewords]

He can hear Esfir moving around and arranging things. Oddly, it makes it easier to think - she isn't just sitting and waiting for him to put words together.

After a few minutes, he says,

"I only needed half an hour."

It doesn't occur to him to wonder how time might have passed on this side of the door.

[aimedforthemoon]

She may or may not enlighten him.

"Oh?"

[isaysimplewords]

Grahame . . .

Cal falters before he can even begin. He just found out. He can't say it.

"It - it turned out I didn't have to go to my uncle's apartment after all."

Can't even say his name.

I'm sorry.

[aimedforthemoon]

Esfir slides her hands into her jean pockets and leans against the chair, watching him.




"He's dead?"

[isaysimplewords]

Cal nods silently. He can't get into how. Not when he's still trying to assimilate the information. Not when he can feel Grahame's letter, his last words, crinkling in his back pocket every time he moves.

[aimedforthemoon]

She nods.






"And your mother? Your boy?" The questions are asked quietly, almost gently.

[isaysimplewords]

Easier questions. Cal exhales in relief.

"Mother still drinks. Calvin's going to be all right. Mother won't have time to make him do what she wants with his life."

She doesn't have Grahame, either, and it's wrong to be relieved by that, but he is.

[aimedforthemoon]

"I am glad for that."

Still watching Cal, though. Very closely.

[isaysimplewords]

"So am I."

It's true. He is. He doesn't look it, sound it, or feel it, but he is. When the shock wears off. He'll feel it then.

He'll feel a lot of things then.

[aimedforthemoon]

Finally,

"Ah, Cal," and she walks over to sit next to him and take his hand again.

[isaysimplewords]

Cal takes a shuddering breath at the contact.

"His mother," he says. "My wife. Deborah. She's, she's learning how to take care of him. Like I did."

He thinks of looking into Calvin's room and seeing Deborah there, holding Calvin and soothing him. A year ago, she wouldn't have done that. Neither of them would have. Calvin was Marisa's job, not theirs.

He closes his eyes hard.

[aimedforthemoon]

"Then he has a good chance."

[isaysimplewords]

Cal nods.

He doesn't trust himself to speak right now.

[aimedforthemoon]

"You can stay here until you can breath in your head," she says at last.

[isaysimplewords]

This surprises Cal into a sort of half-laugh. The phrasing is odd, but exactly right.

"Thank you," he says. His throat is constricted, and the words come out quiet and compressed.

[aimedforthemoon]

"No problem. You don't mind if I do homework, though?"

[isaysimplewords]

"Go ahead."

He doesn't mind. A person needs space, as well as time, to remember how to breathe.

[aimedforthemoon]

A quick smile, and she gets up again. Someone has translations to work on, which is why when she comes back and sits on the bed (her back against the wall, near him but not next) she has sheets of paper, a book, a note book, and several coloured pens.

Aurebesh is a bitch of an alphabet to learn.

[isaysimplewords]

Cal curls up a little on his part of the bed, staring across the room at the wall and trying to sort out everything that happened. It's easier, a little, now that he's put words to some of it.

He listens to Esfir turn pages, and a sudden old memory rises, from when he was little. He'd been in disgrace with his parents - or with Mother, which back then amounted to the same thing - and was old enough to have learned to keep out of their way, and young enough to still want protection. Grahame had allowed Cal to sit with him in his study, as long as he was quiet. He was (far quieter than a boy of eight should be capable of), and he sat and listened as his uncle turned pages and wrote things down.

(Was that after Cal had started a fight in school, over some of the other boys picking on a kid for using crutches? It must have been. Cal can't think of any other time, any other reason, Grahame would have let him into his study at that age.)

(He might, just might, be wrong about that.)

Cal had forgotten all about that. It's been so long, and his relationship with his uncle became so warped, that it's difficult and always surprising to remember that there was a time when he was small, and Uncle Grahame was just his uncle and nothing more.

[aimedforthemoon]

Esfir, of course, isn't aware of his thoughts. Her own circumstances had been completely difference, and even her post-mortem contact with her family (if it had been that, and not just a dream) had been...

Well.

It was never her family that was messed up, and she does have to learn this alphabet.

Sometimes, she murmurs under her breath.

[isaysimplewords]

Cal watches her, a little, the combination of her quiet, reassuring presence and the surfacing of that memory serving to calm him enough to keep him from falling apart.

For the time being, at least.

[aimedforthemoon]

"Hungry?" She asks after a while (no telling how long).

[isaysimplewords]

Cal thinks about this, and realizes that, though he's no longer feeling the effects of the whiskey, it's still curdled in his stomach. Eating something would probably be a good idea.

"Yeah," he says.