"There is proper moisture in the air to suggest possible rain," Watt countered with a little scowl on his face. His dark eyebrows moved up and down as he ran his light blue eyes critically over each of the framed paintings hanging on the wall. His chair did not have a hard back. His chair had a green velvet seat and arched, curly feet.
"Are you the weather man?" Second asked with a jeer.
"I have always been told that I have a face for television."
"Ha!"
Avery coughed and both boys turned to her. She was knitting something long and twisted, and rather blue, and she hummed very quietly to herself while she did this. Her light tangerine-coloured hair fell about her cheekbones and her long eyelashes kissed each other every once and a while.
"Back me up!" cried Second.
"About what?" asked Avery.
"Do your butlers not bring herbal anymore?" complained Watt.
"They bring whatever they like," replied Avery, not looking up. "This time I believe it to be Earl Grey."
"Earl Grey is not herbal, Aves. It appears I cannot even have pleasure within my closest companion circle."
"It comes in a bag," Second said, with a hand motion not unlike that of scooping, which confused Watt.
"Are you trying to move something?" he asked with brows furrowed.
"Am I?"
"Something out of thin air?"
Second sighed and leaned back again, tired. (His hand gestures had always bewildered his mate, if truth be told. It was like baking a cake with instructions written in a foreign language. Like elvish, Second thought, it is exactly like deciphering Elvish while trying to create a decadent masterpiece for an ethereal wedding).
"Brunei," Avery said suddenly, jerking Second out of his strawberry-swirl fantasy. "You're home."
The two boys watched as Avery carefully put her knitting on the table and rose silently and elegantly. Second narrowed his eyes, picturing her in Elvish dress.
Watt said, "Hello Brune. How goes the weather up at the peak?"
Brunei looked dishevelled and slightly slumped forward, as if he had carried a heavy load for long hours without breaks or mugs of hot chocolate. The snow sprinkled in his dark hair made him look like a coconut cupcake.
"'Up at the peak'," Second mimicked, looking like a spoilt Prince. "You don't make any sense, Wattary!"
Brunei said, "Hello chums," fairly cheerfully for someone who was missing most of his tapered hat. He put his arms around Avery, she murmured something at his ear that made him bend further, and Watt turned to Second and muttered, "All these pictures, you see them all? Why are they all blue?"
Second didn't have time to be concerned about the blue of pictures. The choice of hanging house decoration didn't interest him in the slightest! He leaned back- because his chair was at the end of the table and he couldn't see the pair- and called out to Brunei, "Mate, did they find the silver?"
"Oh, they have silver now?" Avery inquired, surprised and grim, and in need of a good polish. Her clothes and skin and hair all appeared a bit dull. She could have made a superb bell, Watt thought admiringly, his eyes slipping back to scrutinize the pictures in secret every now and then, if she had not been born a person.
Brunei smiled and it lit up his face. Second frowned. Watt pulled his eyeballs back to the activity and frowned as well.
"They found a tidgy tippit o-"
"Tidbit," cut in Avery as she moved to the kitchen. She walked with an air of someone who wasn't paying any attention to her surroundings but she also carried herself lightly, like someone who thought they would fly away at any moment, and who was, possibly, ready for it.
"-of copper! Nothing else worth mentioning though."
"That's a shame," Second said, his heart pounding in an escalated way. He drummed his fingers on the table to hide the sound.
Watt was fearful that the volume of his own increased heart rate would be discovered, only he was not so adept at covering it up. He leapt up at high speed, overturning the milk jug and plate of almond biscuits, announcing in a hurried voice, "I have to meet with the toilet, at once! Or else my bladder will fail and I will spill all over the furniture! Not that this chair is the most comfortable or the most lean- yes, I have seen lean chairs, I have seen gleaming and quivering chairs that couldn't possibly hold the buttocks of man and woman even though that is their life aim! I am sure, in the fullest, that they are sombre and in the practise of attending museums for the post-modern art, I am sure they critique! But, as I say!-" before sprinting from the room.
Second hid his teasing grin by pressing his lips together in a thin line. Brunei said, "Righto," in a noncommittal way and plopped himself into a chair. Second drummed louder.
Brunei called over the drumming: "HOW WAS AVERY TODAY?"
Second averted his gaze to the blue pictures. "WELL," he responded. How blue they were! He'd spent a lot of his time in a hazy belief that Watt made up half of his daily observations. But now, having seen the evidence with his own two eyes, he called out (careful to keep his eyes on the wall): "WHY SO MANY BLUE ONES?"
"BLUE ONES?" Brunei asked, sounding puzzled for sure.
"THE PICTURES HERE ARE ALL A MIGHTY BLUE AND I CANNOT UNDERSTAND WHY THEY NEED TO BE SO. IS IT A TRICK? ARE THEY ALL ACTUALLY DIFFERENT COLOURS BUT YOU'VE MANAGED TO PUT SOMETHING IN THE LIGHTING?"
"AHH, NO, THEY ARE ALL BLUE."
"IS IT MY EYES? YOU'VE ADDED A MAGICAL INGREDIENT TO THE FOOD SERVED, SPECIALLY, LIKE A LIQUID POISON OR RESTORATIVE?"
Avery appeared at that moment carrying a large silver tray piled with grapes. Second stilled his fingers.
"Avery, thank god," Brunei said in a voice overflowing with gratitude, and Second had to wonder if he'd matched it entirely to the plate of grapes, and how he found the time. Was there nothing Brunei couldn't do?
"I thought you might be hungry after a long day at work," she placed the tray on top of the scattered cookies.
Isn't it bad enough that he's so damn good-looking? Second thought, still staring blindly at Brunei. He's like an irresistible bowl of melon. Exactly. Second felt his heart start up again, but he was too far gone. Like dipping a coffee spoon into the ravishing, impossibly cold, crisp yet moist, flesh of green wonderment...
Was he drooling?
"Your hand-towels are twelve thread-count!" Watt came in like a verbal ambush. "Twelve! That is almost one thousand less than I expected of you, of both of you!"
"What needs to be counted twelve times?" Avery asked in a voice like a gush of rushing air.
"No, no, butternut, it's to be counted by a thousand, twelve times, and then taken from a thousand by twelves..." Brunei looked up at Watt's face of injustice. "Isn't it?"
Second laughed. "Better with a twist of lemon!"
Watt closed his eyes and put a finger in between them, on his nose ridge. "I cannot express-"
"Then don't!" called out Second. He stood up, swiping a handful of grapes and thrusting them at Watt in a form of alliance and gallantry.
"Oh," Avery turned, admitting the cloud of boredom to descend once again. "They were talking about our towels, Brunei. We have substandard quality and it terrifies them."
Brunei popped a grape into his mouth and chortled around it. "They have the same fear down at the gates. They worry over underwear stretch and belt shine and how to correctly add cinnamon to pancakes."
Avery laughed. She touched his shoulder. Watt and Second stared. The bunch of grapes lay forgotten by their shoes.
That touch is not sacred! Second thought, aghast. How small her hands are to be able to apply the right amout of pressure, the pressure only a man can make!
How cold the tents must be down at the gates, thought Watt, in a practical and highly motivational take on elemental temperature. There must be all sorts of ways to keep warm. He praised himself for thinking like a weather reporter in this time of stress.
"Why not try the hands of man?!" Second called out desperately at the same time that Watt declared, "Men give off TWICE the amount of body heat compared to a recent study conducted in Poland and revised in America, once over, just try it!"
Brunei asked politely, but with concern and mild apathy just to keep things interesting, "Have you both caught a chill?"
Avery said in a wispy, whispery voice: "It just won't do."
She placed her small hand on the door knob and pulled it open, letting the wind rush in, dash around the room and jostle the pictures on the wall, rattle cups on their saucers and overturn the biscuits so their almonds showed.
Brunei rose slowly. "Avery!" he called.
"Avery!" Second and Watt shouted together.
They stood very still and watched her step gently out into the night.
~
avery
I think of you only,
avery,
won't you come home.
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