(Untitled)

[gotacigarette]

In the end, she all but takes the hut apart.

There's a certain sort of person that survives by not letting very few people meet the real them. Eden became one of those people when she was not much older than four. Later, she became Major Sinclair, and she all but forgot that she'd even got a birth name, for a while. But she never forgot her

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[not_a_quaker]

"Major."

That's all I say before sitting down next to Eden. Anything else I could offer would be useless platitudes, things I know she doesn't want to hear. None of that matters when you're trying to make sense of a loss, it doesn't matter how true any of those cliches may be. I do want her to know, though, that she's not alone.

[gotacigarette]

Eden wipes her face on her hand, head up and eyes fixed on the ocean. Her nose felt raw and saw. Alice's wedding band digs into the palm of her hand.

"Hello, Major," she says. Nelson lifts his head and regards Winters with baleful pale green eyes.

[not_a_quaker]

I'm never sure whether Nelson will purr or try to scratch my eyes out if I pet him, so I wait to see whether he deems me acceptable company first.

"Looks like you've been busy," I remark, looking over at the remains of Alice's hut.

[gotacigarette]

Nelson's gaze didn't waver, and Eden watches him for a moment before she looks back to the sea. The hut's still standing, just, and Eden'll have to make repairs to it, but not yet. Not nw.

"Had to do something, Major," she says, quietly. "You'll understand."

[inthedeadzone]

There wasn't much reason for Capa to go by her hut and yet there he was, hands in his pockets, frowning as he moved off the path and toward her place. The only thing he'd managed to do so far was make himself feel worse than he already did.

"Oh," he said, sounding surprised to find Eden, surprised to see the hut all but destroyed. "I'm sorry, I didn't know anyone else would be here."

Just another reminder of how little he'd really known about Alice, in the end. He barely even knew she and Eden had been friends.

[gotacigarette]

"I didn't expect to be here." Eden turns the gold ring over between her fingers, and she winces every time it catches the light. There's a crease of tension between her eyebrows. Never let anybody in.

"She left you golf-clubs."

[inthedeadzone]

It was stupid, but he gave a soft snort of surprised laughter. Of course she'd left him the golf clubs.

"Are your hands alright?" he asked instead of commenting on that. He remembered the conversation he and Alice had about golfing, about his lack of interest in it. The clubs would likely sit in his hut and never be used, but he wouldn't get rid of them.

[gotacigarette]

"They've been worse," she says, bending her head and sleeping a cigarette between her lips. "Then again, they've properly been better, too." She looks at her split knuckles and tips her head to light her cigarette.

[frakkup]

Kara found her like that, sitting with a pig and a cat that looked like it could go a round or two with Muffin. "Gods, you're so weird sometimes," she said, plopping down beside her. The red crisscrossing Eden's palms drew Kara's eyes soon enough, but she didn't reach.

"The frak did you do to your hands?"

[gotacigarette]

"Demolition," says Eden, turning Alice's wedding ring over and over between her fingers. She's supposed to be getting married herself and Alice was supposed to be there with her. She was supposed to be standing there with her.

"Never love anybody, Captain. It's a recipe for a bloody disaster."

[frakkup]

Kara gave an unladylike snort, agreeing with a shrug of her shoulder. Didn't have to tell her that - everyone she let herself love was gone or dead, and there was as much relief as there was grief and loneliness that she was still alone on the island, save for Calliope.

She did take Eden's wrist then, looking harder at the wounds than the ring. "Well, you didn't get this beating on a person." Her gaze zeroed in on a splinter. "Hut?"

[gotacigarette]

Eden shrugs, letting Kara turn her hand however she wanted.

"I told you it was demolition," she says, quietly, the ring on her finger catching the light. "I thought Babe would rather it was the hut than me."

[shot_my_shoes]

Harry smiled when he saw Eden. He hadn't thought she was the type to go soppy over pets, but you never could tell. It was only when he came closer that he saw the expression on her face and the state of her hands. His smile turned into a frown and he crouched down beside her.

"What's wrong?" he asked softly.

[gotacigarette]

He crouches down in her eye-line and Nelson lifts his head, giving him an evil look with pale green eyes. Eden reaches out and scratches him between his ears. The scuffs in her hands ache and pull.

"Never love anyone," she says, quietly. "It's fucking shit."

[shot_my_shoes]

Harry gave the cat a look and decided it probably wasn't about to attack him. But he still kept an eye on it as he gave Eden a sympathetic look. "Sometimes," he agreed. "But I can't say it's not worth it." Although, he reflected, if she'd said the same thing a couple of weeks ago he probably wouldn't have thought that.

"What did you do to your hands?" He reached out and grabbed the wrist nearest to him, not giving her a choice in whether he got to see it or not.

[gotacigarette]

Eden's more than used to people giving Nelson that wary look, so she barely notices that. She lets Harry take hold of her hand and study it. She's careful not to drop the ring.

"Nothing to worry about, Doctor. Just a little bit of controlled demolition."

[waltsnothereman]

Just because things had been going pretty damn swimmingly for Wanda as of late (all things considered), that didn't mean she was going to be acting like some Mary Sunshine forever. The honeymoon period of having Heather around still hadn't quite worn off, but she was thankfully out of that embarrassing 'constantly chipper' phase that had dogged her for a while, so when she came across Eden and her menagerie, she committed herself to her initial assessment that something bad had happened far quicker than she might have a couple weeks earlier. It was for the best, really.

"Shit, what happened?"

[gotacigarette]

"I did," says Eden, flexing her injured fingers and then rubbing Nelson's head between his ears. The hut's still standing, more or less, but the furniture will probably take some fixing. Eden'll fix it. Just not now. Not yet.

"I was better off the way I was before."

[waltsnothereman]

"You mean just a major hardass instead of a Major, hardass, and some other good stuff?" asked Wanda, doing her best to tread that line between treating life as if it was as easy as possible and not being dismissive. Some things were big and bad, with no way around it. "Says who?"

[gotacigarette]

"Says me," says Eden, rolling Alice's wedding ring between her fingers. "Says me, and I'm sick of bloody hurting and I'm sick of bloody thinking about how much all of this hurts. I should've stayed in bloody Glasgow the second time."