Interlude II (Estonia)

[Thalia]

He dismissed the boy, though not unkindly, and quiet descended in its wake. Thalia waited patiently, though it seemed an eternity before he finally looked at her. She did not attempt to unravel the silence, though she felt the heavy weight of it keenly. The words that finally bridged the distance left her blinking softly though, perhaps because she had already forgotten the power-wrought bubbles shared to soothe a child’s loneliness. She had no true memories of Noctua, and yet now that she accepted the truth of their acquaintance in a world denied her, the familiarity she felt was welcomed with an open earnestness. She trusted him. Simply because it felt right to trust him.

The warning stung. Disapproval had not occurred to her. Not from him anyway, and that in spite of Nox’s revelation about the Vatican.

In fact the rejection hurt, for such she perceived it as initially, and it flashed briefly into her unguarded expression. The abruptness of his leavetaking she accepted quietly, finally picking herself off the floor and pulling her bag back up on her shoulder. After a moment longer she nodded, the words finding more peaceful purchase in her soul once she separated the Noctua she saw with her eyes from the one she simply understood. She’d said to Rasmus herself that such gifts were to be kept hidden, and she knew why. Clearly he did too.

In the wake of the second warning, Thalia pointedly did not look down at her bandaged hand -- the whole reason he had sought her out. Both sets were understood, though, with the stern care with which she knew they were meant. She would be careful. But neither could she stop.

A small smile finally surfaced, though it was one tempered by a sense of loss she did not care to explain or prod at. She suspected any dreaming of his own had offered more than hers had, which perhaps shaded her expression with a tad more mischief. Some small part of her was amused to wonder what he might make of a flick through this morning’s sketches, though she knew he would likely disapprove. Of all of it, actually, if he would even believe the truth of the tentacled woman. Though surely it was not so far-fetched as a tree-man.

Her expression now held genuine warmth; an inkling of kinship she suddenly realised mattered a great deal to her, and which felt like a wrench to lose after so short a time. 

After a moment she pulled the folded sheet from her pocket, and smoothed it out. "No, only old things," she said, offering the sketch of the lake's edge for him to see. Water clear as glass kissed the rocky shore, a waterscape much like any he had seen the last time he had perused her work. “I believe in fate, or whatever you want to call it,” she added. “But not that we’re bystanders to it.” She thought of that small weed poking out of the bricks, and the tenuousness it filled her with. The burden of knowledge was heavy enough without the responsibility of action -- but what if that’s why they were given the knowledge? Her head tilted with the consideration. “I think you will know where to find me, should you need to." Or, the other her anyway. And he did need it, she thought. The knowing was lonely, and he saw the threads of the future far clearer than she did.

A pause, then. “Will you tell me what’s wrong?”