fandomhigh | Library, Wednesday [ 02/20 ]

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Library, Wednesday [ 02/20 ]

Adah wasn't the slightest bit happy about the return to her remembrance of dreams, and she blamed it entirely on Rachel's letter. That letter, her Trojan horse, docile and amusing on first glance, but, once you settled in and got comfortable with it, it bit you, like a serpent, bright blue mouth, the diabolic genius of nature attained from the highest degree of perfection. You didn't stand a chance. And then they appeared in multitudes in your dream, slithering forth from chicken coops surrounded by ashen dance floors of six-toed men. The chickens were all nothing but bare bones, flapping bare bone wings (find the furcula, break it apart, make a wish!), and then Tata Ndu shows up in his smell dead fur cloak. Rachel had gone and married, so it was time to take a new wife from Tata Price. Seeing as Leah was regarded practically a boy (and they were polygamists here, not homosexuals) and the little one was dead, that just left Adah. And Adah would do, applying to her same thing he'd said about the Mvula: "She will amuse my other wives."

Needless to say, waking up with that didn't leave Adah in the best of moods for her shift today.

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"Sorry to hear that," Lee said quietly, not really knowing what else to say. "Maybe she'll see that it's a mistake and leave him?"

"Doubtful," Adah muttered, slumping, and, not blind at all to the implications for her poor, embittered state right now regard who she was having this conversation with, dropped her gaze, eying her notebook. "My mother never left my father; it would seem that if a Price woman makes a mistake, she sticks with it, no matter what. Our stubbornness seeps into being more than just your average character flaw..."

"Are you going to talk to her?" Lee asked. "Tell her how you feel?"

Adah shook her head. "It wouldn't do any good," she muttered. "Rachel's never listened to a damn word I've said...er, well, written...and she'd start harping on me about how I've always patronized her, although she'd probably say patternized instead, because she's a damn right idiot, and how she won't stand there and be criticized by one of her freak little sisters who wouldn't know the first thing about something like this," she inhaled deeply and released it with an exasperatingly infected drawl of her older sister, "geez-oh-man."

"Well," he said, shrugging a shoulder, "still couldn't hurt, you know. Get it all out while it's fresh in your mind instead of keeping it bottled up inside."

"I suppose," Adah muttered, deflating slightly again, "it'll be six months before it gets to her, anyway, if the postage in South Africa is as bad as she says it is, but Rachel did always have a knack for exaggeration."

"Even if you don't send it," Lee said quietly, "it still might help to get the anger out. I do that a lot. Write letters that I never send when I'm angry."

Face starting to look a bit pinker as if chastised, Adah tilted her head back a bit, as if trying to crack the tension out of her neck. Tension did that to her, made her feel like her spine was as unbreakable as a rebar. When her head lowered, it only seemed to succeed in making it more stiff. "Maybe I should," she admitted lightly. "You do seem to have a better control on that whole anger management that I do, in the long and short of things..."

There was a faint smile. Yes, the choice of words was entirely intentional. Somehow, her admonishments about the evil empires of men and fate that build up so well in her head seem to just crumble in his presence. He didn't even need the ceremony of Jericho, circling around and blowing a horn. Bitterness dropped, but reservations went up, because his presence may have helped her mood, but it did absolutely nothing for the nagging worry that he ended up being her Nathan Price, her Toorlexa Nebee, her mistake.

"I'm not that short," he said, smiling grudgingly. "I'm just...vertically challenged."

"Besides," Adah added, "I have enough trouble with my neck without having to worrying about having to strain it significantly to look at you. Or kiss you..." There was a slight drag of reluctance with that last part, making her feel glad for her already downcast gaze.

"I would duck down if I was taller," he said, nodding. "No need to strain."

"That is true," Adah allowed lightly. "You do tend to be pretty accommodating..."

Sometimes dizzyingly so. It aroused suspicions, made her worry. But it did make him different, for the most part. A bit. Axelroot could be pretty damn accommodating, too, if the price was right. She had to admit to almost being a little impressed that Rachel would get a guy like him to agree to something like marriage.

"I try to be," he said, grinning that she noticed. "Even if I was taller, there are ways around that."

"Because you're also smart," Adah continued, slightly, reluctantly, with a nod. And a light smirk, "sometimes." The warming up was happening rather easily, but too easily, so she was trying to hold it back. Being difficult even with herself.

"Sometimes is better than never," he said, grinning. "Thank you. You're pretty smart yourself."

"I do okay," Adah grinned back a bit. Smarter than Rachel, anyway. And Orleanna. And Leah, too, even, because Leah got the other half of her brain. Maybe that was the key, then. Too many brains, like too many chefs, spoiled the stew. She probably wasn't smarter than Ruth May had been, though. She was smart enough to get out of this early.

"Modest," he teased. "You do better than that."

Adah's eyes went round and she found herself laughing despite herself. Modest? "Now that is a word I don't think I've ever heard applied to me before in my life. Nor do I think it ever will be, so feel free to say it again, if you'd like."

"You sounded modest right there," he said, laughing. "I call it like I see it. You're modest."

"And you're full of it," Adah countered smartly. "We're treading dangerous ground of interlacing irony here, you know. Me, being modest, about being modest...."

"I am not," he argued, mock frowning at her. "I'm being honest. Maybe you're not modest all the time but you were just modest right there."

"I blame it entirely on my bad week," Adah said quickly, shaking her head, but unable to stop the light grin. "I assure you, it will never happen again."

"Then, I'll just remember this moment fondly," he said and tapped his heart and then his head. "In two places."

Adah wrinkled her nose slightly up at him. "Well, at least that second one, I'd know just where to go to try and remove the memory. Not so much on the first, though. Silly me, here I thought hearts were just for pumping blood and sustaining life." And maybe writing names in. Shh. "I didn't realize they contained memory cells. Or is that just your weird alien physiognomy?"

"Hey, I'm from a different planet," he reminded her. "My heart could be all kinds of different."

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