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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

[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.