RORY
i told the stars about you
He could tell that she had been worried—anxious, perhaps. It didn't take a genius to figure out the reason, and Rory's tongue could be very sharp.. but if he thought back on that Council meeting, he mostly felt tired, and slightly embarrassed that he hadn't been able to keep his temper in check.Then again, most of the details were sort of fuzzy; he had been stressed out of his mind the entire time, and had barely slept at all from the time that he formed the mob until—
Well. He did not want to think about it, because it threatened to open up a void inside of him, a flood of terror he drowned in every single time. So he chased his mind back to the present, to the tension that left Maea's body and the smile that blossomed in its wake. It was still a little .. shy? Hesitant? But considering that their relationship had mostly consisted of "my brother's business-partner/friend" and "my business-partner's/friend's little sister", that wasn't strange.
They hardly knew each other, aside from rumor and brief interactions when they didn't have to do much except be nice.
Raising an eyebrow he took the offered basket, peering briefly under the towel before putting it among the clutter on his workbench. The Valair apple cider was famous, but the bottle was sealed, so it was mostly the baked apples having his mouth watering.
She was giving his eyebrows a lot of exercising, as it found reason to rise again. Peace offering? Bah. Clever-mouthed people? "Oooh," he said a little cheekily, "is that frustration I hear?" He winked playfully at her before looking pointedly to the basket instead. "Smells more like a bribe."
He considered it for a moment, his hand returning to spinning the awl around. Part of him really, really wanted to get another couple of hours worth of good work into the jerkin, but also... Hrm.
"So. Consider me bribed. How about we have some of this, and I listen to what's on your mind. There's another chair over there..." He pointed, rather unspecific, towards the back of the workshop, where there was at least one chair, beleaguered by various odds and ends. "Unless you're cold?" He hadn't lit the workshop's hearth; he sat in a strip of sunshine coming in from the door, which warmed his hands enough to let him work, and usually the sun came back from its games of hide-and-seek fast enough that he didn't really get too cold.
But. Maea had always been fragile, in some ways. "We could go up to the house," he offered with a small shrug.
