If you can't move a mountain...
What: Aivey can't quite grasp what Derek is trying to tell her. She tries, though.
Who: Derek and Aivey
Where: The Alley
There is no time but early morning time, and it is early. Enough so that the sky is still a little dark, the air a little nippy but electrified all the same. Aivey, well set on her path to The Alley, walks with the drawstrings of a bag looped about her wrist and the bag dangling from them. Her hair is not yet bound, the typical kerchief most always worn atop her head is likewise missing but all other signs point to Aivey being in a well enough mood. Her pace quickens as she nears the end of her walk across the beach, not yet at the slope leading up to the mouth of her fathers cave she has to pause to work out a system for scrambling up it while still managing to carry that bag and whatever might be hidden within it. As such, the sounds drift upward and likely to whatever keen ears might be present.
There are no keen ears present, but there are ears bored by ten turns of the ocean's sucks and sighs, thus attuned to anything that breaks the monotony. In a little time, while Aivey's considering or perhaps executing her planned ascent, Derek appears in the cavemouth. No shirt. No sandals, although that part is quite common. He disappears again; she might miss him, with his moment there in the low light of not-quite-dawn so brief. But when she does arrive in the cavemouth she'll find him dressed, putting out two tin cups on the table, the gourd that holds that fermented milk stuff in the other hand. A plate with mussels, cold but cooked, waits, and fruit waits too. Derek waits, but his waiting is a less immediate kind; he goes about preparing breakfast as if Aivey is equally expected in ten turns as she might be expected in ten minutes. Unhurried. Deliberate.
Having focused the whole of her attention on the monumental task of scaling the incline, Aivey does not notice Derek's first arrival. It is, perhaps, all for the better for as she begins to make her way up to his homestead she is not expecting the sight that greets her. As such there is a moment of surprise and then self condemnation for not expecting it in the first place. He is, afterall, Derek. "Morning," Aivey greets then, quietly. Respectfully. Unlike earlier visits, Aivey does not wait at the entrance until bade to enter. Instead she moves toward the table that's been set and the man there, the bag she'd brought with her cushioned against her side for the final leg of its journey. "I brought you something."
"Why?" Nothing like that kind of response to make a gift-giver feel good about what they're doing. Derek rests a hand on the table and leans into it a little, looking up for a moment at his daughter; if her surprise or self-condemnation show in her face, they are unreflected in his. "Have a seat. I have a little bit of bread, but I thought I'd get a fire on to heat it first. It's the chewy kind." By which he means the flat, unleavened, seedy kind. The easy kind. The prolific kind.
Aivey's pause is quick, her reply as nonchalant as she can manage. "I was going to throw it out but I thought you might have use for it." The bag is set on the table, a seat taken just behind it before she uncinches the top and withdraws the present in question. In all truth it would be better suited to gracing the trash pile or the next bonfire - the lopsided bowl that is shown briefly to her father, then set on the table where it wobbles for a good three seconds. "Bread sounds good. Anything, really, I didn't eat last night."
"Why not?" A nice counterpoint to the question he asked previously. Derek considers the bowl with impassive gracelessness for a moment, his pale sky-blue gaze going grey as he takes in its shape. Then he puts out a hand and touches the bowl, sending it wobbling in its lopsidedness, and something twitches at the corners of his mouth. She'd know, by now, what that least curling of the corners of his moustache means. A smile, hidden. Pleased. He turns away as soon as the pleasure's there and pads off into the dark retreat of the cave, to crouch and find among his foodstuffs the promised bread. "Where'd it come from?"
Aivey is indeed watching for reactions and does a remarkable job of looking impassive upon spotting the smile. "I was distracted, mostly. The rain and trying to get a decently made bowl," Tipping her head to the wobbling one, she adds, "That was my last attempt." While watching and to his back, Aivey adds, "I'll let you know when I start working on cups." More discretely then is a quick study of The Alley at large; Aivey's quick traveling gaze taking in as much as she can before it lands back on her father. Soft-spoken wonder tones a vague question, "Does Nera come here often?"
"You made it." This he says with his back turned, still crouched. The bread, in a wrapper of broad leaves, is in his hand; his hand is leaned over his knee. He's not moving, using the crouch as an excuse to keep his reaction disguised. But it must be a hell of a reaction, for its source anyway, because those three words are gentle enough to qualify as 'touched' even to unsubtle ears.
In a little while he gets up, turns around, and starts toward the fire. "Often as compared to, say, Lord Fort coming here, sure."
The tone of those first three words draws a small smile to Aivey's lips. It carries to her eyes and perhaps even her reply, "I wanted to wait until I finished one that doesn't rock but. It adds character." She studies the bowl instead of her father's back until he crosses toward the fire. At which point Aivey leans forward for a piece of food. Nursing it with small bites, says, "Do you invite her over here?" A new tactic, that.
"Every container's useful." Derek crouches again, this time by the firepit. His bare hand jets out to grab a piece of cooled charcoal from the previous night's fire, with which he stabs at the coals to heat them. "On occasion," he admits - it sounds like an admission - while his hands carefully lay the leaf-wrapped bread in among the embers.
"Mostly," Aivey agrees placidly as she settles back and draws her heel against the edge of the seat. Resting her chin atop it, she cants her head to watch her father's actions, to listen to his words and then to consider them. "You should do it more often...just to have her around. I think she'd like it. She's nice. A little strange but nice." Licking the juice from her fingers, Aivey takes another piece of fruit but maintains a watch on the man before the fire from the corners of her eyes.
"I get advice from you, now?" Derek leans into his elbows and maintains the crouch while the embers seep heat up into the leaves, withering them. He turns his head and looks up toward the table, fixing his daughter with a bemused grey stare. "She's not - well. Nice doesn't cover it. But she is quite the woman. Why are you so interested, now?"
"It's only advice if you take it." Aivey counters, smiling lightly, "I talked with her, a few days ago. I'd /like/ to get to know her better but she's not exactly the friendly type." Coming from Aivey, it has to be saying something. She shrugs, though, trying to dismiss any concern over the matter, "I agree though. She is and that's why I want to get to know her better. I think you were right when you said I could learn from her."
"Aivey, you come on kind of strong. Unsubtle. Nera's a little put off by what you are." Derek does not, however, explain in detail what she is, or what it is that she is that puts Nera off. Instead he looks back at the firepit and, finding the leaves wilted to the degree he desires, puts out a hand to retrieve them from the heat. Then he's straightening and heading for the table - head shaking, just a little, as he goes.
"I was perfectly reasonable." Aivey defends herself half-heartedly, "It's a credit to her, really, that I don't try and twist my words. Why can't she see that?" Derek, apparently, isn't meant to answer that. "I tried to be subtle with J'lor - J'lor - and it didn't work." Frowning, Aivey reaches for a piece of fruit and slips the whole thing into her mouth.
"I'm sure she can. The problem is just that you are what you are." Derek sighs, and slips into place behind the table, across from her. He puts out the leaf-bundle between them and with work-worn hands peels it open to reveal steaming flat bread within. "I think I haven't got what I need to do what I need to do with you," he says, not looking up; he withdraws his hands from the bread and watches them as they reach for fruit. "I understand why you did what you've done. But I don't understand how you came to see so few options in any given situation. What did they tell you, when you were a girl?" -Now- he looks up. "About me. About us."
Aivey frowns again, but it's without malice. "Vintro told me about you. All the things you did, how Jensen betrayed you. That you were a good man who wanted to change things for the better. He told me how I could fix things - that I was your daughter and it was my right. He told me a lot of things, but most of it was about you." Summarizing seems to be better, and Aivey ends there with a small shake of her head, "If something is in your way, you get rid of it. And if you can't, you find a way to go around it. What other ways are there?"
Derek listens, and attentively; he does not so much as move for all the time she speaks. It's a refrain, of course, that he's heard before. She's explained this, in bits and pieces, and possibly done a better job of the explaining in the past. But this time he just stares, eyes beady and piercing, as if he could read more of the story on her forehead while she talks. "Use it," he says, softly, voice half an octave higher than it ought to be, at the end. It's so sudden and so quiet that it startles even him a bit; his chin lifts, like he hadn't expected to hear himself speak. But he speaks again. "Climb it. And see the view from the top."
The high-for Derek reply, it's suddenness have Aivey looking away. But the aversion is due wholly to thought. Realization, perhaps, or the beginnings of such. What's been told to her before might now only be understood in this sense. Either way it brings a small smile and a crinkling of the corners of her eyes as she looks back to him, her head once more canted slightly to the side. She might be waiting for more, she might simply be acknowledging his words.
But no more comes. Derek looks down as Aivey looks back at him, and notes the fruit in his hand. He'd meant to eat that. So he digs the thumbnail of the other hand into its skin, splitting it so he can start peeling; juice slides in sticky drips between his fingers. Silence.
Silence that lasts long enough for Aivey to retrieve another piece of fruit herself, and for it to be slowly chewed. The flavor is savored as much as his offer is, so that in the end, both are properly enjoyed. Then, at a point when it looks like her father might be willing to talk again, "Of your men... is there one you trust the most - above all the others?"
With that thumbnail as his knife Derek slivers out a piece of the fruit's sticky flesh. "No," he replies first, evenly, his voice back down where it's meant to be, though never anything resembling deep. He plucks out the bit of fruit between thumb and forefinger and pops it into his mouth, then begins on another, indifferent to the juice making a red mess of the hand holding the fruit itself. "Not of my men. Of all men, yes."
Aivey watches the dripping fruit juice for a moment. Distracted. For whatever reason she smiles softly then returns to looking at her father. Spirits undampered by his reply, she rephrases, "Would you allow me to follow one around for a day?"
"Sure. Any of them. Pick one you like; tell me his name and I'll inform him." Derek looks up at her from the fruit, and his grey regard is nothing better than incredibly, deeply tired. He's quiet for a moment, but whatever he might start thinking he stops, to look back down at breakfast, and away from his daughter. "They do their rounds at dawn. If you go now, you can catch them on the paths."
It'd be hard to miss the tired look, harder yet to accept the ease with which her demand was so quickly accepted. Bitting the inside of her lip, Aivey asks, "Why?" Not meant for the acceptance, but rather the tiredness - acknowledgement through the question brings a small frown of worry Aivey doesn't try to hide.
"Because you're doing it again." He understood, then, the angle of her question - just as if she'd asked it clearly. Derek looks on her a quiet moment, his hand closing a little too tightly around the fruit it supports; more juice cascades from between his knuckles, and billows into a heavy droplet at his wrist before plopping onto the table. "I admire your determination," he allows, gently. "I know you're trying to prove you understand. Go ahead. Find the one of them you think's the best. And tell me when you're ready to start."
"I wanted to see. What made them the best." Aivey replies with a small, half-shake of her head. There's more that's not said, a particular avoidance of his eyes but not of the juice dropping from his wrist, "When you think it's time." She looks then to him, quickly shifting the focus of her attention, "If you want help...making things nice here, for when you invite Nera, let me know?"
"I will." He's dismissed her twice. He does not do it again. But Derek does go back to eating his fruit, and to attending to it, his gaze quite closed to his daughter.
Aivey sneaks one last piece of fruit before standing and retreating back through the mouth of the cave and down its slope.
Who: Derek and Aivey
Where: The Alley
There is no time but early morning time, and it is early. Enough so that the sky is still a little dark, the air a little nippy but electrified all the same. Aivey, well set on her path to The Alley, walks with the drawstrings of a bag looped about her wrist and the bag dangling from them. Her hair is not yet bound, the typical kerchief most always worn atop her head is likewise missing but all other signs point to Aivey being in a well enough mood. Her pace quickens as she nears the end of her walk across the beach, not yet at the slope leading up to the mouth of her fathers cave she has to pause to work out a system for scrambling up it while still managing to carry that bag and whatever might be hidden within it. As such, the sounds drift upward and likely to whatever keen ears might be present.
There are no keen ears present, but there are ears bored by ten turns of the ocean's sucks and sighs, thus attuned to anything that breaks the monotony. In a little time, while Aivey's considering or perhaps executing her planned ascent, Derek appears in the cavemouth. No shirt. No sandals, although that part is quite common. He disappears again; she might miss him, with his moment there in the low light of not-quite-dawn so brief. But when she does arrive in the cavemouth she'll find him dressed, putting out two tin cups on the table, the gourd that holds that fermented milk stuff in the other hand. A plate with mussels, cold but cooked, waits, and fruit waits too. Derek waits, but his waiting is a less immediate kind; he goes about preparing breakfast as if Aivey is equally expected in ten turns as she might be expected in ten minutes. Unhurried. Deliberate.
Having focused the whole of her attention on the monumental task of scaling the incline, Aivey does not notice Derek's first arrival. It is, perhaps, all for the better for as she begins to make her way up to his homestead she is not expecting the sight that greets her. As such there is a moment of surprise and then self condemnation for not expecting it in the first place. He is, afterall, Derek. "Morning," Aivey greets then, quietly. Respectfully. Unlike earlier visits, Aivey does not wait at the entrance until bade to enter. Instead she moves toward the table that's been set and the man there, the bag she'd brought with her cushioned against her side for the final leg of its journey. "I brought you something."
"Why?" Nothing like that kind of response to make a gift-giver feel good about what they're doing. Derek rests a hand on the table and leans into it a little, looking up for a moment at his daughter; if her surprise or self-condemnation show in her face, they are unreflected in his. "Have a seat. I have a little bit of bread, but I thought I'd get a fire on to heat it first. It's the chewy kind." By which he means the flat, unleavened, seedy kind. The easy kind. The prolific kind.
Aivey's pause is quick, her reply as nonchalant as she can manage. "I was going to throw it out but I thought you might have use for it." The bag is set on the table, a seat taken just behind it before she uncinches the top and withdraws the present in question. In all truth it would be better suited to gracing the trash pile or the next bonfire - the lopsided bowl that is shown briefly to her father, then set on the table where it wobbles for a good three seconds. "Bread sounds good. Anything, really, I didn't eat last night."
"Why not?" A nice counterpoint to the question he asked previously. Derek considers the bowl with impassive gracelessness for a moment, his pale sky-blue gaze going grey as he takes in its shape. Then he puts out a hand and touches the bowl, sending it wobbling in its lopsidedness, and something twitches at the corners of his mouth. She'd know, by now, what that least curling of the corners of his moustache means. A smile, hidden. Pleased. He turns away as soon as the pleasure's there and pads off into the dark retreat of the cave, to crouch and find among his foodstuffs the promised bread. "Where'd it come from?"
Aivey is indeed watching for reactions and does a remarkable job of looking impassive upon spotting the smile. "I was distracted, mostly. The rain and trying to get a decently made bowl," Tipping her head to the wobbling one, she adds, "That was my last attempt." While watching and to his back, Aivey adds, "I'll let you know when I start working on cups." More discretely then is a quick study of The Alley at large; Aivey's quick traveling gaze taking in as much as she can before it lands back on her father. Soft-spoken wonder tones a vague question, "Does Nera come here often?"
"You made it." This he says with his back turned, still crouched. The bread, in a wrapper of broad leaves, is in his hand; his hand is leaned over his knee. He's not moving, using the crouch as an excuse to keep his reaction disguised. But it must be a hell of a reaction, for its source anyway, because those three words are gentle enough to qualify as 'touched' even to unsubtle ears.
In a little while he gets up, turns around, and starts toward the fire. "Often as compared to, say, Lord Fort coming here, sure."
The tone of those first three words draws a small smile to Aivey's lips. It carries to her eyes and perhaps even her reply, "I wanted to wait until I finished one that doesn't rock but. It adds character." She studies the bowl instead of her father's back until he crosses toward the fire. At which point Aivey leans forward for a piece of food. Nursing it with small bites, says, "Do you invite her over here?" A new tactic, that.
"Every container's useful." Derek crouches again, this time by the firepit. His bare hand jets out to grab a piece of cooled charcoal from the previous night's fire, with which he stabs at the coals to heat them. "On occasion," he admits - it sounds like an admission - while his hands carefully lay the leaf-wrapped bread in among the embers.
"Mostly," Aivey agrees placidly as she settles back and draws her heel against the edge of the seat. Resting her chin atop it, she cants her head to watch her father's actions, to listen to his words and then to consider them. "You should do it more often...just to have her around. I think she'd like it. She's nice. A little strange but nice." Licking the juice from her fingers, Aivey takes another piece of fruit but maintains a watch on the man before the fire from the corners of her eyes.
"I get advice from you, now?" Derek leans into his elbows and maintains the crouch while the embers seep heat up into the leaves, withering them. He turns his head and looks up toward the table, fixing his daughter with a bemused grey stare. "She's not - well. Nice doesn't cover it. But she is quite the woman. Why are you so interested, now?"
"It's only advice if you take it." Aivey counters, smiling lightly, "I talked with her, a few days ago. I'd /like/ to get to know her better but she's not exactly the friendly type." Coming from Aivey, it has to be saying something. She shrugs, though, trying to dismiss any concern over the matter, "I agree though. She is and that's why I want to get to know her better. I think you were right when you said I could learn from her."
"Aivey, you come on kind of strong. Unsubtle. Nera's a little put off by what you are." Derek does not, however, explain in detail what she is, or what it is that she is that puts Nera off. Instead he looks back at the firepit and, finding the leaves wilted to the degree he desires, puts out a hand to retrieve them from the heat. Then he's straightening and heading for the table - head shaking, just a little, as he goes.
"I was perfectly reasonable." Aivey defends herself half-heartedly, "It's a credit to her, really, that I don't try and twist my words. Why can't she see that?" Derek, apparently, isn't meant to answer that. "I tried to be subtle with J'lor - J'lor - and it didn't work." Frowning, Aivey reaches for a piece of fruit and slips the whole thing into her mouth.
"I'm sure she can. The problem is just that you are what you are." Derek sighs, and slips into place behind the table, across from her. He puts out the leaf-bundle between them and with work-worn hands peels it open to reveal steaming flat bread within. "I think I haven't got what I need to do what I need to do with you," he says, not looking up; he withdraws his hands from the bread and watches them as they reach for fruit. "I understand why you did what you've done. But I don't understand how you came to see so few options in any given situation. What did they tell you, when you were a girl?" -Now- he looks up. "About me. About us."
Aivey frowns again, but it's without malice. "Vintro told me about you. All the things you did, how Jensen betrayed you. That you were a good man who wanted to change things for the better. He told me how I could fix things - that I was your daughter and it was my right. He told me a lot of things, but most of it was about you." Summarizing seems to be better, and Aivey ends there with a small shake of her head, "If something is in your way, you get rid of it. And if you can't, you find a way to go around it. What other ways are there?"
Derek listens, and attentively; he does not so much as move for all the time she speaks. It's a refrain, of course, that he's heard before. She's explained this, in bits and pieces, and possibly done a better job of the explaining in the past. But this time he just stares, eyes beady and piercing, as if he could read more of the story on her forehead while she talks. "Use it," he says, softly, voice half an octave higher than it ought to be, at the end. It's so sudden and so quiet that it startles even him a bit; his chin lifts, like he hadn't expected to hear himself speak. But he speaks again. "Climb it. And see the view from the top."
The high-for Derek reply, it's suddenness have Aivey looking away. But the aversion is due wholly to thought. Realization, perhaps, or the beginnings of such. What's been told to her before might now only be understood in this sense. Either way it brings a small smile and a crinkling of the corners of her eyes as she looks back to him, her head once more canted slightly to the side. She might be waiting for more, she might simply be acknowledging his words.
But no more comes. Derek looks down as Aivey looks back at him, and notes the fruit in his hand. He'd meant to eat that. So he digs the thumbnail of the other hand into its skin, splitting it so he can start peeling; juice slides in sticky drips between his fingers. Silence.
Silence that lasts long enough for Aivey to retrieve another piece of fruit herself, and for it to be slowly chewed. The flavor is savored as much as his offer is, so that in the end, both are properly enjoyed. Then, at a point when it looks like her father might be willing to talk again, "Of your men... is there one you trust the most - above all the others?"
With that thumbnail as his knife Derek slivers out a piece of the fruit's sticky flesh. "No," he replies first, evenly, his voice back down where it's meant to be, though never anything resembling deep. He plucks out the bit of fruit between thumb and forefinger and pops it into his mouth, then begins on another, indifferent to the juice making a red mess of the hand holding the fruit itself. "Not of my men. Of all men, yes."
Aivey watches the dripping fruit juice for a moment. Distracted. For whatever reason she smiles softly then returns to looking at her father. Spirits undampered by his reply, she rephrases, "Would you allow me to follow one around for a day?"
"Sure. Any of them. Pick one you like; tell me his name and I'll inform him." Derek looks up at her from the fruit, and his grey regard is nothing better than incredibly, deeply tired. He's quiet for a moment, but whatever he might start thinking he stops, to look back down at breakfast, and away from his daughter. "They do their rounds at dawn. If you go now, you can catch them on the paths."
It'd be hard to miss the tired look, harder yet to accept the ease with which her demand was so quickly accepted. Bitting the inside of her lip, Aivey asks, "Why?" Not meant for the acceptance, but rather the tiredness - acknowledgement through the question brings a small frown of worry Aivey doesn't try to hide.
"Because you're doing it again." He understood, then, the angle of her question - just as if she'd asked it clearly. Derek looks on her a quiet moment, his hand closing a little too tightly around the fruit it supports; more juice cascades from between his knuckles, and billows into a heavy droplet at his wrist before plopping onto the table. "I admire your determination," he allows, gently. "I know you're trying to prove you understand. Go ahead. Find the one of them you think's the best. And tell me when you're ready to start."
"I wanted to see. What made them the best." Aivey replies with a small, half-shake of her head. There's more that's not said, a particular avoidance of his eyes but not of the juice dropping from his wrist, "When you think it's time." She looks then to him, quickly shifting the focus of her attention, "If you want help...making things nice here, for when you invite Nera, let me know?"
"I will." He's dismissed her twice. He does not do it again. But Derek does go back to eating his fruit, and to attending to it, his gaze quite closed to his daughter.
Aivey sneaks one last piece of fruit before standing and retreating back through the mouth of the cave and down its slope.