pike | nigel's mobile;

It's not precisely accurate to say that Rosella is having a bad day--after all, she's had a wealth of bad days during her stay in the City, and a day of fidgeting and loneliness hardly comes close to, say, a day when a villain jumps out at one and attempts to tie one to a set of railroad tracks--but she's certainly having a lamentable one. It's silly, she knows, because she knows she's cursed and she has a sneaking suspicion why. But she also knows that some curses can't be helped, and that's what makes this one in particular so frustrating.

It's cruel of the City to take her lingering feelings of sadness at the departure of her friends and amplify them this way, but the City has always been cruel, and it does like to set one back when it can. And that's how it's been--as though every time she begins to recover from one loss, another one occurs. And today she can't get them out of her head. It's terrible, and nothing short of mortifying, but it can't be helped. Like so many other curses, all she can do is bear it as long as she can and keep hoping for midnight to come.

So she busies herself with boiling water for tea and turning out another pan of double-chocolate brownies, forcing herself to keep her eyes on the mixing bowl and only allowing herself a glance toward her phone and Network device every twenty-five stirs of the batter. It's not so hard to focus, she tells herself. It's not so long to wait. It's not so bad, the curse doesn't have that much of a hold over her.

But she still jumps a mile when she hears Nigel call her name, and relief hits her like a flood; the sound of a voice on a phone had been a brief respite, but having someone else around feels like a long drink of cool water after a forced march in the blazing sun.

"Nigel!" she calls back, a smile appearing on her face almost of its own accord. "I'm so glad to see you! Did you have a nice time?"

To say that Nigel is somewhat taken aback by this reception would be a bit of an understatement. He's grown used to Rosella's politeness, the soft smile that she gives as a version of hello -- but this is a different sort of enthusiasm. An enthusiasm motivated by loneliness and worry, he knows, but enthusiasm nevertheless. The smile he returns, therefore, is bright and unaffected. It is, at its best, almost charming.

"As nice a time as one could suspect, trudging to the library through the snow," he tells her. A small stack of books -- one on birds, another on insects, a third on phrenology -- are dropped onto the counter beside one of the many cooling pans of brownies. He peers down into its contents and, with a finger, pokes the surface experimentally. "You've certainly been busy." When he glances at her now, the look lingers.

"Are you feeling any better?"

"It is a bit of a walk, isn't it?" she agrees, leaving her current batch a moment to pull down two teacups and saucers from a nearby cupboard. Under normal circumstances, the poking might bother her a bit--in a vaguely irritable way that she would immediately smother under a veneer of courtesy--but at the moment she's still so pleased for the company that she's willing to grant more leeway than she usually would for minor infractions like that. And really, he's just lucky she hasn't put on the gooey chocolate icing yet, or it'd really be a mess. "But it's so nice once you get there. Have you found yourself chasing down any books yet? It's tedious, I know, but it's part of the experience."

She sets the teacups on the table and then goes back for the box of tea, in the same cupboard but on a higher shelf; it's high enough that she has to stand up on tiptoe to each it, which is half due to the frequency with which Rosella drinks tea, and half because this box in particular is a variety she generally reserves for special occasions. "I'm better now," she confesses after a moment, more to the cupboard than to Nigel, by virtue of how she's standing. "It's a silly curse, I know, but it really only gets bad when I'm on my own. Out of sight, but never out of mind, I suppose the saying would go."

"All of the curses in this place are silly," Nigel offers, his voice closer than it was a moment ago. "Except for those that are tragic. But those are the only variety."

There is a touch on Rosella's elbow -- light and uninvited, but otherwise polite. Nigel's fingertips offering the barest hint of support, an unspoken reminder that I am here, and I will catch you should you slip. This, of course, requires Nigel to be standing directly behind Rosella in order to accomplish. Not so close as to be properly rude, simply hedging along the borders of it. "Had you called Saya as well?"

"I think there's a third sort to it, actually. Because there are ones that are nice, too, though they come very seldom," she answers, instinctively glancing in his direction when she feels that touch, but there's nothing intrusive about the fingertips resting so lightly on her arm--and there's something almost familiar in it, something she remembers from friends she'd known long before Nigel. Under normal circumstances, she might've found herself a touch flustered, given Nigel's closeness and his tendency to stare; today, with a curse like this one lingering over her head, she sees the other side of it, the boy who came all the way back from the library just so she wouldn't be alone. "They let me see my brother, once, on our birthday last year. I suppose that could've been a tragic one, in a sense, but...it wasn't. It was nice."

Then, with a slight smile, she retrieves the tea and turns in place, holding it up a bit for Nigel's inspection. "And no, I...as silly as it sounds, I hate to feel like a bother to Miss Saya. She always seems so busy, and..." And I understand her less than I do you, she wants to say, but there's really no polite way of mentioning it. As nice as she is, there's a certain coldness to Saya, a distance that Rosella can identify but somehow can't explain. And somehow she suspects that as embarrassed as she feels today, telling Saya about it would only result in her feeling even moreso. "Which isn't to say that you weren't busy, just that...well, I thought it'd bother you less, I suppose. If I did."

Nigel muses on the thought of a 'nice' curse. The phrase was already a contradiction in terms; But, as the saying went: one man's blight was another man's blessing. When he bends to inspect the tea offered to him, he is still mostly thinking on what sort of a curse would qualify as 'nice' to him. Certainly an opportunity to see Alex would be appreciated, though the eventual parting would simply leave Nigel feeling frustrated. Seeing his mother, perhaps, but those circumstances would be even more complicated. Being given the opportunity kill his father again, maybe.

Now, Nigel smiles in an approving manner, though to all outward appearances it seems as though he's simply glad to see the tea Rosella's chosen. He nods a thankful nod at her as he straightens. "That would suit me very nicely, Rosella, thank you," he tells her.

He allows her the space to go about making the tea, not offering help simply because Nigel understands that the task itself is what is important here. He folds his hands and leans with one hip against the counter, watching her -- her hands, the line of her posture, the way a curl of hair slips at her temple.

"You know you may call upon me for anything, Rosella." She was, after all, a proper princess and what would a knight be without one. "It isn't a bother. Such is the nature of friendship."

She finds herself unusually pleased at Nigel's approval--the curse, likely, amplifying things to extremes she wouldn't normally reach--and sets the tea near the cups, then heads off to retrieve the boiling water from the stove. It's a familiar process, and it does help to keep busy, though all the tea-making in the world wouldn't help as much as just having someone else in the room with her has.

"I know, but it's only fair, isn't it? Making sure not to take more than one gives in return?" But then she finds herself pausing, redoubling back onto that thought. "But I suppose that's a bit easier said than done, really, because it's much easier to help someone else than it is to ask for it yourself."

nigel's mobile;

on the night i die, i swear i'll sleep outside your window;

on the night i die, i swear i'll sleep outside your window;

on the night i die, i swear i'll sleep outside your window;

on the night i die, i swear i'll sleep outside your window;

on the night i die, i swear i'll sleep outside your window;

on the night i die, i swear i'll sleep outside your window;

on the night i die, i swear i'll sleep outside your window;