Trey [attn: Sid and Kalen]

[Howl]

It was late morning by the time the girl rose from her resting place on the living room sofa. Maybe Sid was there waiting for her, or maybe someone else was. Maybe she awoke to an empty room as the others went about their day. Either way, she sat up and rubbed her eyes. Her hair was a mess. She needed a shower, but more than that she needed to eat.

Despite this, her first question to whoever happened to present themselves to her was this: "Where's Artax? Is he okay?"

She'd run the stallion hard the day before. He was still recovering in the pasture.

[errin]

Sid is still there, just as she said she would be. Or maybe "still" is inaccurate. She'd had to get up at some point, right? If only to eat or relieve herself or stretch her legs. Truth is, she's scarcely left the girl's side so that when she woke Sid would be sitting on the floor next to her.

There is food waiting for Trey when she wakes. Sid shifts where she sits, takes the plate from the nearbyy coffee table, and gives it to her without looking. Perhaps she remembers the last time she tried to show kindness to a scared girl out of sorts. Alicia hadn't responded well, and in the end showed she preferred Kalen's presence to her own. Chances are it'll go the same with Trey, but even knowing that, Sid waited. Sid offers her food.

"He needs time to recover, same as you." Sid is wearing gloves as she sorts through a pillowcase full of seed packets. Looking over her shoulder to the young Trey she says, "You can see him after you've eaten." Then she goes back about her work.

Trey will note she is exactly as she was left the night before, clothing including shoes still intact, gun still strapped to her side.

"There's water in the kitchen and the showers work but there's no hot water," she warns.

[Howl]

Trey hesitated a moment before accepting the offered plate of food. When she took it, she stood up on shaky legs and looked around as though half-expecting some sort of trap. When her eyes found the windows, she took a few steps toward the glass to press her hand against the pane as she gazed out into the pasture. The horses looked peaceful as they dozed in the sun.

Finally the smell of the food seemed to hit her, and she sat back down on the couch and promptly began to wolf it down. A couple of bites in, she had the presence of mind to look up at Sid and say, in a muffled voice, "Thanks."

She finished off the food very quickly. When she stood up again, she put a hand to her stomach and grimaced. There was a definite waver to her steps when she started to make her way to the dining room, but whether or not Sid attempted to help her, she'd manage ok. When she got to the kitchen, she set her plate down and filled a glass with water, gulping it down at a rate that sent some of it splashing onto her shirt.

[-ix-]

Kalen does no more than walk past Sid and the girl on his way inside and upstairs the day they find Trey. And, at least in the sense of coming downstairs and watching over Sid and Trey, he gives no more than that lingering glance at he passes them. Sid might notice, later, that he is Working; but whatever he does, whatever he finds, he does not return downstairs until he hears them moving.

He looks less awake than he did the day before, the shadows under his eyes darker, his movements a little slower. His eyes though are alert, wary. When he looks at Trey. When he looks at Sid. He trusts neither of them.

At first Kalen does not speak to them at all, just regards them silently. But then he cautiously slips past Trey to fill a kettle with water. As though she is dangerous. He does not ask them if they want anything but he does fill the kettle with enough water to make all of them tea. Sid and Trey may be getting tea because Ian is getting tea (even if Kalen has to carry it upstairs and leave it outside his door to be ignored), but at least he's willing to include them in his count of people in the house for purposes of tea. People in the house to whom he says good morning...apparently not a thing right now.



[Ix @ 10:30AM
Did you actually sleep after all that, Kalen?
Roll: 6 d10 TN7 (2, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10) ( success x 2 )
HDub @ 10:30AM
Witnessed!]

[errin]

Whatever food Kalen left near them the night before, Sid consumed it. Sometime in the night she left her post at Trey's couch-side to take the dish to the kitchen. Then she set about making something new. Sid is not the best cook, but she can combine ingredients well enough into a soup. It may not be terribly delicious, but it's nutritious, and should help with restoring some of the strength of whoever partakes.

In the night, when Kalen passes by her all wary quiet and suspicious, Sid merely sighs.

...we were both wrong...

Isn't that what he'd said? Implying that she was wrong about him not liking her. And yet he's almost always treated her like an outsider and now he treats her like an outright criminal. Or like she's a danger. She'd had some vague hope they'd finish the conversation they'd started the day before, but that hope - like all of Sid's hopes - evaporates to nothing. She let's him be, though. She has someone else to look after, and so she stays until Trey wakes. The bowl Sid handed her is not terribly full. Enough to assuage the sharpest edge of hunger, but not enough that Trey will make herself sick with eating too much too fast.

She doesn't tell her there's more in the kitchen, she'll find out when she gets there. And though her attention sharpens on the girl when she wobbles, unless she falls or asks for help Sid let's her make her way on her own power. She does follow, though, eventually. Sees her gulping down the water and moves her hand toward Trey's arm, but does not try to touch her. "Easy. There's plenty." She watches Kalen moving about the kitchen, filling a pot for tea. Letting it steep. The silence between them seems impenetrable now. If he continues to give her the cold shoulder she makes up her mind. If he pours her a cup of tea it gets left on the counter, to cool or for someone else to drink when they get back to it. When he's gone to leave some for Ian, Sid addresses their visitor.

"I'm leaving in an hour. You can come with me or stay, whichever you like." Turning toward the door through which Kalen left, she says quietly, just between the two of them, "I don't recommend staying."

Whatever else she may feel, Sid has too strong a survivor's instinct to stay around someone who looks at her like that.

[Howl]

Kalen regarded Trey warily as he passed her in the kitchen. And she, for her part, returned the expression. Neither of them knew what to expect of the other, though it was perhaps fair to say that she (a thirteen year old girl in poor health surrounded by adults she didn't know) had more reason to be fearful than he did. All the same... it was not precisely fear that registered in her dark eyes.

He didn't say hello to her. So she did not say hello to him.

(As for Ian, he wasn't in the house. Some time early that morning he'd risen from bed, showered and left. Apart from his things, Kalen would find Ian's bedroom empty.)

Sid cautioned Trey about drinking too much too quickly, and Trey nodded as she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. When she'd had her fill, she turned to the leftover soup and served herself another bowl, giving a quick glance to Sid to make sure the offer was still open. When no motion was made to stop her, she sat down at the table and set about scooping spoonfuls of it into her mouth.

Sid was going to leave in an hour. She made a quiet offer to the girl, and Trey looked at her with dark, uncertain eyes. Then she glanced around, taking in the house with a more serious sense of appraisal. For a while her gaze lingered in Kalen's wake.

She was being given a difficult choice to make. It would take more than a single night of rest and a few bowls of soup before she was fully recovered, and from the looks of her (and her horse) it had been a long time since she'd had anything like a safe place to sleep. But it had been Sid who'd pulled her down from the horse and carried her inside. Sid who had stayed with her all night. Sid who had fed her and given her water. Trey opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again. Her eyebrows scrunched up in an expression that made her look rather over-serious for a child.

"Why?" she asked in a soft voice. "Are they dangerous?"

[-ix-]

Kalen does not so much directly offer offer Sid and Trey tea as he sets a mug for each of them and the tea selection on the kitchen table. Sid knows where it is, but Trey does not. Trey gets a half-smile and a vague wave at the mug and the tea, but apparently introductions are an after tea thing for Kalen today. If Trey puts a tea bag or tea leaves into a mug, Kalen will fill it with water when he fills two mugs to brew green tea.

He leaves his mug of green tea brewing and takes one upstairs. But there is no one there to give it to, so he comes back down rather quickly and sets that mug aside. Perhaps Ian will come back before it cools. Perhaps not. It's not something that concerns him for now so much as that he's standing in a kitchen with someone he cannot predict that he knows and someone he cannot predict that he's never met.

He picks up the mug he left behind, not that the tea in his is any different from the tea in the other mug. It is summer, plenty warm, but he lets his hands curl around it anyway. In another world he wrapped Pan's hands around a mug of tea the man kept forgetting was in front of him at the table here. Had flung himself at Pan and let himself be held until he stopped shaking at the counter only a few feet from where he is leaning into the counter now. Had made hot chocolate during a snowstorm.

Kalen glances from Trey to Sid (if she hasn't already left the kitchen) and back again. Between the kitchen as it is now and memories of the kitchen as it has been, he is more than ready to be somewhere else. At least five minutes ago.

And so, gently if not warmly, he asks Trey, "You wouldn't happen to have seen a double-headed ouroboros anywhere, would you?" Because all children know what that is. He sighs, shifts his mug to one hand, and trails a lazy, circular pattern through the air with his freed hand. "Two snakes biting their tails?"

[errin]

Are they dangerous?

"Not directly," she answers, eyes still on the doorway a moment longer. Sid looks at Trey with eyes that are warm and deep, endless. Ageless. The girl may not understand what it is about the woman that makes her almost imagine a crown of antlers starting above her ears and branching up and out, twin trees meant to hold up the sky. Or why she seems like spring, with the scent of moss and broken blades of grass just at the very edge of the senses.

"But I have a bad history with people who say one thing and do another." Just what that history is Sid neither says nor seems inclined to say. They all have their stories, their terrible pasts. Falling silent, she sets to slowly ladling soup into a thermos.

When Kalen returns to the kitchen at least one tea cup is where he left it. After Sid screws the cap onto the thermos, she sets it on the counter and goes to pick up the cup and put it away.

His question for Trey gives Sid pause. Frowning, she looks at Trey, then out the window. Is the pasture on that side where the horses are? Does she see Artax dozing in the warm autumn day?

Artax.

Trey.

"The auryn?" she asks, turning to look at Kalen with the incredulity one would expect. When Trey said her horse's name was Artax Sid hadn't thought anything beyond maybe Trey was a very young fan before the world started ending.

[Howl]

Sid's offer, and her warning, would remain unanswered for the moment. When Kalen returned to the kitchen, Trey set about finishing her soup, glancing up to watch the two adults with deep, wary eyes (almost animal in the way she regarded them.) When she'd finished, she cast her gaze back toward the foyer where she remembered seeing stairs. Sid had offered use of their shower, and Trey sorely needed one.

But then Kalen asked Trey whether she'd ever seen a two-headed ouroboros, and Trey... froze. Her eyes leveled on him, and beneath the table, her hand twitched and hovered over the back of her gun.

"Is that supposed to be a joke?"

She reached up with her other hand and tugged the collar of her t-shirt down, exposing the top section of what looked to be some kind of tattoo curving over her sternum: the head of a white snake swallowing a black tail.

"Need a better look, asshole, or can I go take a shower now?"

Sid's question didn't receive a response, and if the name held any meaning or familiarity to the girl, she didn't show it.

[-ix-]

Trey goes still and her attention centers on Kalen and Kalen meets her eyes, steadily. He frowns when she starts to tug at the collar of her shirt, but the sight of the tattoo stops him, and whatever reply he might have made about whether he was joking dies on his tongue.

His eyes widen, just slightly, because he was not expecting it to be tattooed on the girl. Were it not entirely a metaphorical glimpse of the ouroboros on the her, he had assumed the symbol would be a talisman. After the first shock of recognition his eyes go distant in a hazy, attention gone off into the ether kind of way.

And then he remembers there was a question. That there are all sorts of questions he might ask. That spike in intensity when he calls his attention back to Trey doesn't last though.

Kalen is a lot of things. Not all of them are kind or warm or even remotely comprehensible. But Trey is a child. Who was probably less prepared for that exchange than he was. So his expression softens enough that it matches the still gentle tone of his voice. "That...is not what I expected. I'm sorry. Go ahead."

His attention tracks to Sid. "It...at least looks very like that." He frowns, trying to figure out some way to frame what little he knows. He hadn't thought of it, but he wasn't there for the girl's introduction. He tries to remember the story but instead remembers what Ian said about the world being shaped by them.

His eyes shift to look to where the Node should be. "When Ian gets back, we should talk. I think maybe he understood something of this better than I did. If...." But he doesn't finish his sentence and he doesn't look back at Sid. He isn't really looking at a drained pond either. His eyes may be pointed in that direction, but all he sees is broken rock and splintered wood and smoke.