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[dragony]

WHO: gallitrap, bluffing_ruffle
WHERE: Moonybase
WHEN: Three quarters past dark o'clock, Wednesday Night (3/17/10)
SUMMARY: A family reunion of a sort.
FORMAT: Words.

It was strange to return home after a long absence, and even stranger indeed to find the absence much grander than memory recalled. Ruka—this Ruka, twelve years old with knobby knees, scarred arm, and still too short to reach the higher kitchen shelves— had lost nearly three weeks in what to her had seemed the distance between walking forward one step and falling on one's face the next. Some changes were usual and expected, of course, and easy to account for: this-or-that stack of books had moved, this tea set had been exchanged for another, furniture shifted slightly a few inches forward or backward, some windows cleaner than she recalled, some surfaces a little dustier. They were not grand changes, in the scheme of things.

Her room, too, had changed while she was gone: dust had settled on her dressers and bureaus, items around had been moved, adjusted, and the air felt colder, a little staler than in the rest of the house. The toys on her bed had been moved as well, and had increased in number. Letters she had hidden in one carefully split-and-sealed bear had been removed, just as she wished, though knowing her feelings had been exposed in this way both comforted and worried her: she had wanted to put those close to her at ease during her absence, but now she could not help but fret that, perhaps, she had spilled too much of her own heart on those pages.

And everyone she had seen today had seemed so run down and older; even between her and Rua there had been a strange new distance from these weeks apart, and his eyes looked so exhausted. Their guardians, too; neither had looked like they'd slept or eaten in years. She hadn't expected that so much could change in so little time, and was a little terrified of it.

She knew she couldn't let that fear prevent her from finding out what all had happened in her absence; the undead walked the streets again for reasons she did not yet understand, and several of her friends had been yanked out of the City and replaced, or were gone altogether. And so, clean and in fresh clothes and certainly no longer weighed down by her duel disk (which she was sure she hadn't had before her disappearance), Ruka sat in bed instead of sleeping, and slowly began trekking through older posts of everything she'd missed.

There was a lot of catching up to do.

Comments

[bluffing-ruffle.livejournal.com]

Edgeworth found himself passing by the door to Ruka's room, a cup of tea in hand--he'd gone through so much of it the last while that he couldn't even remember exactly how many there'd been. It wasn't as though he'd had much of anything but, after all, only occasionally remembering to have food of his own.

Rua, of course, had been provided with full meals--Edgeworth's own lack of appetite did not require the boy to go without; nor did he expect the child to express his emotions in anywhere near the same fashion. If the boy wanted and needed, he would be provided for, and that was all there was to it as far as Edgeworth was concerned. That was the duty of one taking on the role of father, biologically responsible or not, and it was one he'd solemnly sworn to bear as firmly as his oath as a prosecutor.

Failing once to keep his promise was intolerable.

Failing twice would be flat-out unacceptable.

Perhaps he'd given off a load of mixed signals in the process of trying to keep up with those duties after her disappearance. Such a problem was not impossible. He had never been the best at expressing himself; surely Rua had thought him turned into a madman at best, reading wild stories and serving extra helpings of dessert one moment and then locking himself in his study for hours upon silent hours the next to endlessly and pointlessly review material that a Porter-perfect memory had already permanently seared into his mind. Perhaps he could explain... but a hidden fear of losing both kept him quiet on the subject. The children were not truly his. The option to leave had always been theirs. That Rua might exercise it, if he thought that neither he nor Lupin could keep the boy safe...

The main problem Edgeworth had had with himself, of course, was that he was still acting in such a bizarre way even after the girl had returned. Shocked, first, and then pleased, only to come running back up from behind with a massive dose of arms-length distance. Just enough to show basic care; never more than that. Never enough to imply any kind of emotional attachment to either child beyond the effort involved in raising two human beings their age. No statements of love. No reassuring gestures of affection. No nicknames. Merely a guardian keeping watch, and not... not a 'papa'. To either of them.

Yes. His own behavior did indeed serve only to frustrate him, and he did not know why.

Edgeworth pressed an ear up against the wood of the door, checking in on the girl, and frowned.

One single set of three knocks on her door later, quiet and calm, asking for permission instead of declaring any actual intent of barging in shortly thereafter, and the grey-haired man stood waiting for an answer.

[dragony]

To say Edgeworth was "cold" was... well, it didn't really say much, after all; beyond even the persistent chill to his skin, he was a man who kept his distance from most, who valued sense above all else, and—to this she had little doubt—would sacrifice any number of fragments of his heart to match whatever whatever he believed was reason. She had been in his care for almost a full year now, if it had not yet already completed, and in that time she had come to know his attitudes well. While most likely could not determine much difference between his more subtle fluctuations of "coldness," her emotional thermometer had been somewhat well-calibrated to it at that time, three weeks ago.

Change had been expected; a swing from the chill of the internal temperature of a functioning refrigerator to the impossible frigidity of a swiftly-consuming Plutonian glacier had not.

To her, the distance between them now seemed to far surpass those early days of unsure boundaries, in the way the distance between one side of the river and another was surpassed by the distance between mountain peaks. She knew that she was likely exaggerating, considering just how much everything had changed in so little time to her, but such assurances did nothing to quell her feelings of displacement.

To her, in such limited exposure, it seemed as though whatever feelings of fondness he had possessed for her—as limited in expression as they were—had been thawed, melted, evaporated from him. Perhaps it left only rudimentary obligation in its place, perhaps swinging further into opposing poles, perhaps leaving disdain or regret in its wake.

Maybe she was overreacting, but perhaps she was not. A great many things could change in three weeks, after all.

At the unexpected sound of even knocking (its originator obvious), Ruka's eyes flicked up from her communicator to the door. Her voice was hoarse when she spoke.

"It's open," she said, after too long of a hesitation. Her stomach was as a snake pit, full of worry and anxiety.