Team Kittens and Domesticity

[tire_moi_mes_bottes]

The kittens are adorable. Of course they are adorable; a kitten always is. They don't seem especially wormy or flea-bitten either, to Laigle's eye, but he's leaving questions of veterinary care up to Joly. It seems like a natural division of labor. (Not that he's comparing Joly's medical skills to those of a veterinary surgeon, a horse-doctor. But Joly at least knows what questions to ask.)

So Lesgle is engaged in adoring a kitten as it taps and pounces at loose threads on his waistcoat, while Joly immerses himself in a reading of their new volume on cat care, when a thought strikes him. Hmm. "Say, Joly. Has Enjolras seen our new room? Has he seen the cherubim?" Obviously he hasn't seen the kittens.

Surprising Enjolras is an entertainment in and of itself. Mild, to be sure, but nonetheless--an entertainment.

Comments

[merryeccentricities]

Joly smiles. "Did you hear? Enjolras has met my mysterious map-making assistant!"

[tire_moi_mes_bottes]

"I thought we agreed to try Coufeyrac on her first." He looks at them over his shoulder while he puts down the lunch tray. "Well? Enjolras, you seem unharmed, has Joly been exaggerating her terrors?"

[pro_patria_mortuus]

Based on that, there's likely some kind of innuendo in a previous conversation they're alluding to, but as per usual Enjolras elects to ignore that entirely. He shrugs.

"Awkward, certainly, and abrupt. But I think sincere. She's not accustomed to discussing philosophy and education, perhaps not to conversation at all. But interested. Her society sounds like it's only a step or two beyond a state of nature. She said they're free, in their way -- that is, without states or the machinery of tyranny, and firm upon maintaining that, but each man with only the rights and freedom his strength can ensure."

"According to her, she's not human. What a Wyr is she didn't explain, though."

[merryeccentricities]

Joly frowns for a moment. "I hope she isn't, if she says she's not. That she's one of Milliways' other peoples and not.. ah!" He pauses to untangle tiny claws from the dire traps of knitwear. "Well, I'll ask her if I see her again. If she talks to me; I've never managed to get her talking as much as is seems you did, Enjolras." He smiles a little wryly. "She certainly does seem sincere, though I've never been sure what she's being sincere about, when we've met."

[tire_moi_mes_bottes]

There. Lesgle pulls over one of the room's hideous small tables and spreads out lunch. Sandwiches, cheese, a bottle of wine, a salad, napkins and utensils and everything you'd want.

"If she went to the trouble of putting up your markers, I dare say she'll find you again. And you'll have to ask her how the markers behaved at the time. --Another fine meal from our Bar."

((Hey now! Gredya has said at least 185 words to Joly. I just counted. She's downright chatty with him! He just needs to slow down a little so she can get a few more words in.))

[pro_patria_mortuus]

Enjolras has no particular reason to doubt Gredya's self-assessment. Not, at any rate, after so many months at Milliways. He provided the qualification merely out of a habitual care for the provenance of information: he saw no evidence that would have led him to guess Gredya was anything but a peculiar and very poor woman, except for her word otherwise.

He rises to help Lesgle with the food. (Joly is presumably occupied with making sure the kittens don't get underfoot, which looks suspiciously like cooing over them.)

"She said," he says, thoughtfully, "that she knows of another place like Milliways. I don't know the details. Except that someone tried to claim that place, and to use it for some selfish end. Unsuccessfully, I gather. It was that that led us to freedom of information and the abuses of power."

Joly, with his maps and his studies and his bright intelligence for matters strange and scientific, should know about that detail, he thinks.