[Closed] Birthday Dinner With the Family

[be_seeing_you]

Who: Number 6, Ava, Ruby, Darcy
What: A quiet dinner to celebrate Number 6 turning 32
When: Evening of the 19th
Where: Ava and Number 6's new farm home
Warnings: Kinda Bland Food

It's a strange feeling to be standing in the kitchen of a new home, his new home, cooking something that amounts to a Sunday roast for a family dinner. Strange only because it is something he never quite envisioned for himself as a future. The road to get here has been long and fraught, and they've lost good souls along the way. He mourns them each and every day, but he'd like to think, if they could see him now, they would be glad for him. A little slice of normalcy at long last. A chance to live a life of relative peace. He always hoped he might have some small version of this. But he expected it to be alone, in hiding, with him looking forever over one shoulder just to be sure. He never, in his wildest dreams, imagined it would be a home he shares with a wife. A home where he can invite his adopted daughter and his, for now, he'll just say apprentice, in to celebrate something so simple and mundane and yet so monumental as the turning of another year in his life. Thirty-two? He could barely believe it when he got to thirty and now here he is. Not even Number 2 could take this from him.

"It may not be as perfectly cooked as we're used to," he says somewhat bashfully as he sets the roast down on the table in front of his guests. "But the ingredients are fresh. Please enjoy." With that, he will begin carving it and serving onto everyone's plates. Unless someone jumps up to stop him. It is his birthday after all.


[ooc: Just a lil' mingle thread. Feel free to write your characters arriving, offering to help cook, set the table, etc. I'm down for all of it.]

Comments

[be_seeing_you]

She hasn't got her own, and yet she made his first. Well, that just won't do. He'll have to start carving her a wooden one as a placeholder, just until she can create a sufficient one for herself. He's certain he can manage it using the one she's just given him and his memory to fill in the differences.

"Have you?" He pulls back enough that he can look down at her face. "That's wonderful news. You'll be a great help to them, I have no doubt. What do you think of my new profession, eh? Do I seem like a farmer?" Not yet, but he'll have to go buy some clothes to look the part, soon.

"I do a little woodworking, as well. So, if you are ever in need of good wooden stocks for your weapons, think of me, won't you?" He winks to make sure she knows it's a tease. Though, he would genuinely take orders like those.

[littlefairytale]

The fact is she won't make her own. The original feels irreplaceable by her hands alone, a gift imbued with a mother's promise and a legacy she could never live up to. She has no right to it. Even if she did, she couldn't recreate what she really lost if she tried.

But another gift will be different.

She looks up at him and pulls a playful thinking face, "Hmmm. You're kinda pasty for a farmer, but you've usually got the patience." She snicker-giggles a little. "And obviously I'll remember your woodworking skills, though, honestly, a lot of the work's more... domestic. Which is cool! Though every time someone mentions nails the other apprentices act really weird..."

[be_seeing_you]

Another gift from a parent, just as meaningful. It will be crafted in love and imbued with a father's hope for his daughter's future.

He chuckles along with her. "If I work outside long enough, I'm liable to turn into one large freckle." That may not even be a joke. Already his face is more speckled than it's ever been.

"Nails? What do you mean?"

[littlefairytale]

"People need a lot of new nails, I guess, so they're a lot of what gets made in the forge and for some reason every time someone mentions them the others like— sing about it? I don't really get it..."

One day she'll probably understand what's happening there, but she's too new and too out of it day-to-day to follow so far. Right now to her it's just weird, if harmless, nonsense.

[be_seeing_you]

"Buildings don't repair themselves anymore," he says wryly.

"Perhaps the song is some sort of local custom. You should ask them to teach it to you." That might be a nice way of getting herself more settled with the locals, too. He worries about her isolating herself.

"I know making such mundane things must seem boring, but this is the way with most jobs. Even mine, when I was still working as a spy, was boring at times. I spent hours waiting, listening, and watching with nothing but dead air for company." And don't get him started on the paperwork.

[littlefairytale]

"Maybe..." She's still so very awkward about new people, that's been true regardless of anything else going on with her mental state. But she'll try to talk to the other apprentices more soon.

"The mundane stuff's not so bad, actually. I-It's good practice with the new tools and stuff. I think I'm picking it up pretty quickly but it's a lot different without power tools and such, heh."

[be_seeing_you]

"Yes, I imagine it's much like starting from scratch. I know how difficult that can feel, but I have no doubt you will pick it up quickly. You have always been a diligent student." Regardless of what her genetics may have fated her to, he does not discount the way she rose by her own merits, long before she knew about any of that.

"I'm sure I will have need of your skills just as soon as that stubborn mule of ours loses his first horseshoe." The pony could lose hers, too, but Number 6's money is on that mule because he's already a troublemaker.

[littlefairytale]

Ruby snickers, softly. "I'll have to make sure I'm up on my horseshoe making technique ready for when that day comes around, then. They gave you an animal as stubborn as you, huh?"

It's probably a good sign that she still has it in her to rib her old man, at least.

good place to wrap?

[be_seeing_you]

"So everyone says," Number 6 answers with chagrin. "I won't be outdone by any mule, you mark me." He says that now, but time will tell if it stays true.

"All right. Enough of that. Let's sit down for supper."

yes!

[littlefairytale]

"We'll see," she teases, before giving a final side-hug squeeze as she lets go. Supper time.