fandomhigh | Library [Sunday, October 28]

After a brief silence to let himself remember that place, he leaned a little heavier on the desk, rubbed a hand across the back of his neck and sighed.

"Hmmm. I guess I can get kind of homesick too," he admitted quietly. "For all the things I wanted to leave behind, some things sneak up on me and realize it wasn't all bad."

Still smiling a bit wryly at his comments, Adah opened her eyes slowly from the imagining, to pick up her pen again.

"Strange how that works, isn't it? We left a lot of things behind in Africa; I suspect that why I want to go back, as if to try to carry them out, as if being somehow more capable to do so now than I was then...And then I remember that the only time it really came to light that I had been wandering off was when a bushback was found ripped to pieces by a lion near the village and everyone thought it was actually me. They thought I was dead and then, lo, out of the darkness, I emerged, unharmed and whole. I had no idea at the time that I would have been seconds away from that fate if the wind hadn't shifted at just the right moment, and I remember that and I remember how miraculous it really is that I was able to carry even just myself out of there. You'd think that would change my mind about missing it, but some things just get under your skin, like a virus, and refuse to leave no matter how hard you scratch to get it out."

"I'm glad you were all right," he said quietly, smiling just a little. "I don't...there's nothing really similar to that feeling back on Caprica, never knowing if you're in danger or not. There's crime, sure, but my family was almost insulated from that. A byproduct of the last name, I guess."

It didn't sound that bitter.

"There was a major war, before I was born, that my father fought in. The people of my universe created something and, after years of slavery, the creation rebelled. Went to war with the humans. Lasted for nearly 13 years, that war did. My father made it out alive, obviously. It ended after a lot of death. An armistice."

Adah was quiet for a moment, head tilted as she listened still well after the Eel had finished speaking, lips pressed slightly together.

"It's impossible for me to feel like our fathers are terribly similar," she wrote when she'd made her decision on what to say. "There was a major war before I was born, too. In fact, the year I was born was the year it ended. Not because of something created, but of something already there, the consistent need for men on this planet to need to play with guns and lives. My father made it out alive, obviously. It ended after a lot of death...and then there was the Congo, a war there as well, but not many people even knew about that one. The other one was expansive enough to involve the whole world, so everyone cared. This one involved a small scrap of land that hardly anyone cared about, so it didn't get nearly as much press coverage."

Adah frown again as she looked over her words before passing them over, giving her the chance to add.

"I'm just a bright merry ball of sunshine today, aren't I?"

Surprised into laughter at her last sentence, he grinned and shook his head.

"You always make my day brighter," he said, trying to lighten the mood by both putting a hand over his heart and fluttering his eyelashes at her.

Keeping herself from rolling her eyes, but just barely, Adah leaned in with a smirk to write, "If I'd known my comment would have launched that whole thing, I would have kept it to myself, and instead talked about the fact that, in the Congo, there are snakes big enough to swallow a man alive, whole, so that you're still cognizant and aware of the fact that you're slowly being digested."

"Well, damn," Lee said, eyes wide. "That's...impressive. Caprica had...mice. They didn't eat people, though. At least, not the ones I'd seen. Will you go back? To the Congo? After you're done here."

Adah grinned a little at the wide-eyed expression, feeling accomplished in having impressed him. "After medical school, I might," she wrote. "My sisters are still there. Well, in Africa, anyway. With the war, I'm not sure if the Congo will still be the Congo by then, and we're actually not sure exactly where Leah is at the moment. My mother had heard from Rachel, though; she's in Johannesburg, last we heard, which is actually in South Africa, a good deal away."

He nodded and said, "I'll probably end up going back to Caprica when I'm finished here, if not sooner. Finish military school, join the Colonial Fleet and live in my father's shadow."

He shrugged, smiling a little.

"Could be worse. I mean, I could be getting eaten by a snake, right? What kind of medicine are you going to study?"

"Don't dispense the dream so quickly," Adah grinned as she wrote. "You might still be eaten by a snake yet. And I'm noticing a distinct lack of modeling in that plan; how disappointing to see such raw talent go to waste. As for me, I fully intend to have my name repeated a multitude of times in medical journals for my groundbreaking work in the field of virology, studying viruses and the diseases they cause until I know every single one of them as well as I know the back of my left hand."

"If I get eaten by a snake," he said, laughing at the absurdity, "I'll be sure to specifically thank you when I write my memoirs from inside the belly of that snake."

He smirked, leaned the tiniest bit closer and said, "I knew you like that side of me. The modeling side, I mean. Is it my eyes? Arms? Way with words? You can tell me."

And then there was an extravagant wink and a grin.

The wry smirk and the lifted eyebrow above Adah's steady gaze suggested that, with comments like that, she felt it a shame that this rewritten Jonah wasn't already stuck in the belly of that snake. In the light of such a wink, however, it was hard to sustain her cynicism, the expression cracking around the edges, to a point where she almost laughed as she wrote out her response.

"I never claimed to like it! I simply said that it would be a waste of talent. One doesn't have to like the taste of a fruit to know that it's good for them."

"I can see that you like it in your eyes," he said, nodding very emphatically. "It flits through your eyes like a mantra, over and over again. You like my modeling, you like my modeling, you like my modeling."

He grinned, put both hands palm up on the desk. "It's okay to admit it. I won't tell."

The Eel's stubbornness in the matter was almost impressive, right up on par with her stubbornness in refusing it, and, my, that would lead to quite the interesting class. She peeked at him through her hair thanks to her head, lowered in determination, a corner of her mouth turned up in a smirk. Her eyes fell from his to the open palms on the desk, and she laid her pen across the words on her notebook in favor for a different form of writing. One finger poised over one palm, slowly tracing out a very distinctive N before sliding over to the other and drawing out an accompanying O.

Already laughing before she'd even finished the 'O', Lee said, "Is this your very subtle way of wanting to touch my hands?"

He knew it wasn't but it was fun to tease.

Grinning, Adah simply moved her hand right back to the first palm. Dragged her finger out again in the beginnings of yet another N; a laugh, however, caught her just as she finished it, but she assumed she didn't need to complete the word for the message to get across.

Keeping the palm she'd just traced still, Lee grabbed his formerly forgotten pen and wrote, on the wrist just above the already inked 'N', Really? Why not?.

And then he turned his wrist towards her again.

Grinning at the inscribed wrist, Adah leaned in toward the Eel's hand to concentrate on her own ghostly, unseen inscription, finger dragging slowly across his palm to make sure that each letter was clear and precise.

"I did not think I needed an excuse to touch your hands."

"You don't," he said quietly after he'd figured out what she'd written. "You don't need an excuse. But, maybe, I wanted to give you a reason."

"Reason? I think in this case," Adah slowly traced on the same hand with a smirk before shifting slightly over, leaning heavily on the desk to make up for any attempts on gravity's part to thwart her balance with the shift. She finished, after a good pause for anticipation, the statement against his other pause, "you just got lucky."

"I'll take lucky," he mumbled, eyes on her fingers, his hand. Lifting his other hand, Lee slowly traced a finger across her cheek, making a small circle and coming back.

Adah's own eyes, her attention, had been down at the Eel's hand as well, so perhaps that was to the cause behind the unexpected reaction that his finger against her cheek, tracing its own lines and messages. Perhaps it was everything that had happened that weekend with River. Whatever it was, the response was not a bad one, it was just...He'd barely gotten halfway around the circle before she tensed up a little in surprise; he'd probably feel the increase in warmth as blood rushed to her face, filling it with a sudden blush. She felt surprised, but knew she should have expected it, like usual. She brought her lips together with a sort of bated reluctance to let her head tilt into the touch, eyes closing slowly, and her own hand retreated from the one it currently hovered over to slowly, lightly, slide up his arm to rest, barely, over the one by her cheek.

"Is everything all right?" Lee asked quietly, keeping his hand light on her cheek. He'd felt the change and, when he couldn't figure it out on his own, decided to ask.

Her smile in response, the small breath of something of a laugh had a nervous edge to it, which also gave it another edge of irritation, at herself, for that response. It didn't make sense; it was the response of someone who was guilty, ashamed, both things that she refused to be and should not be; lightly, she shook her head, and then trailed her hand softly down his arm, toward her pen. The desire to keep the position make writing out a response a little awkward, but she managed.

"It's just been a strange weekend that left me displaced in several ways; my mind and my body seem to have failed to reach an agreement on how to settle into them, but that is nothing out of the ordinary."

He nodded quietly, re-reading the words a few times before saying, "Should I...do you want me to stop?"

Re: Morning

Re: Morning

Re: Morning

Re: Morning

Re: Morning

Re: Morning

Re: Morning

Re: Morning

Re: Morning

Re: Morning

Re: Morning

Re: Morning

Re: Morning

Re: Morning

Re: Morning

Re: Morning

Re: Morning

Re: Morning

Re: Morning

Re: Morning

Re: Morning

Re: Morning

Re: Morning

Re: Morning

Re: Morning