Chapter 56: Sympathy For The Princess.
POV: Aris Ashborne.
Amari had left once night had started falling, promising to visit again tomorrow if her schedule allowed it. Silas was still sleeping, and Aris had gotten permission from Lyra to let him stay another night. Regulus was still in the living room, deeply absorbed in his book as if that was the only thing that mattered for now.
Aris himself, was feeling a little stiff, and slightly uncomfortable from still wearing the clothes he had come home in yesterday. He quietly got up from his seat by the couch, and went back to his room to finally take a shower.
The sun had fully set by the time he was done, the cool evening breeze coming through his open window as he spent a considerable amount of time and brain power in picking an outfit.
He settled on the wide-leg trousers in deep charcoal, the soft kind that moved when he walked, and tucked into them a fitted ivory blouse with a wide collar that he’d left the top two buttons of undone because it sat better that way. Over it a cardigan—a different one from the sage green, this one in a dusty rose that was barely a color, more the suggestion of one, oversized enough that it slipped off his left shoulder when he moved and he kept pulling it back up out of habit. He had stopped noticing that he kept pulling it back up, which meant he had also stopped noticing that it kept slipping, which meant the shoulder was, at any given moment, approximately fifty percent likely to be bare.
He rolled the cardigan sleeves up twice, found his preferred pair of simple flats.
The he did the some touch ups for his face, nothing fancy, just enough so that it didn’t feel like he wasn’t putting in effort.
He gave himself a look over in the mirror.
Fine. Presentable. Appropriate for a quiet dinner with Virginia which he had almost forgotten about until Lyra sent him a text this afternoon.
He went downstairs.
Regulus looked up from his book when he appeared.
Looked back down.
Looked up again, with the expression of a man whose eyes had made a decision his dignity was still negotiating with.
"You’re going out?" Regulus asked after a moment.
"With Virginia, we’re having dinner." Aris said, finding the keys for the house on the table.
"Dressed like... that?"
"What’s wrong with it."
Regulus looked at his book. "Nothing," he said, in the tone of someone for whom nothing was doing considerable work.
Aris looked down at himself. The trousers were neat. The blouse was tucked. The cardigan was—the shoulder had slipped again, he pulled it up—fine.
"It’s a casual dinner," he said.
"Yes," Regulus said. "It is." He had barely manage to omit the hopefully that threatened to come out with the sentence.
Aris himself didn’t fail to notice that there was something in the delivery that suggested a complete sentence was being expressed through four words and a meaningful pause, but he couldn’t locate it precisely, so he filed it as Regulus being obscure in the way Regulus was occasionally obscure and moved on.
He checked on Silas—still asleep, breathing evenly, the color better than it had been earlier when he went upstairs—left a note for Lyra on the kitchen counter, told Regulus not to let Silas do anything structurally ambitious if he woke up, and quietly walked out the door, his destination being the bus stop close to his neighborhood where Virginia was coming to pick him up.
He didn’t see Regulus watch him leave with the expression of a man deeply sympathetic to Virginia’s evening ahead.
He also didn’t see Regulus look back at his book, reconsider, and look at the door again.
"One millimeter, you should be so glad you aren’t awake." Regulus said quietly, to the sleeping Silas, in the tone of someone filing something they intended to think about later.
Then he went back to his book.
Aris walked unhurriedly, taking his time as he enjoyed the cool evening breeze. The Crown District was as quiet as ever, only the streetlights and the faint buzzing of the insects keeping him company on the empty road.
Aris noticed that he was feeling lighter than usual, not physically, but the tension in his chest that he had to always actively maintain—which was as natural as breathing for him by now—was feeling a little more bearable than usual.
It was the donuts, he decided, after giving it a brief moment of attention. The donuts Amari had brought them had pulled their weight.
He didn’t have to wait for long at the bus stop after he got there. A sleek black sedan quietly turned the corner towards the street, then pulled up to the bus stop, stopping right in front of Aris.
The glass of the driver side sliding down to reveal Virginia.
"Hello cutie, looking for a ride?"
Aris looked at her.
Virginia looked back at him from the driver’s seat with a smirk, the composed features arranged into something that had warmth at the edges and mischief underneath and was performing neither particularly hard because it didn’t need to.
"You drove yourself?"
"I gave the driver the night off."
"Why?"
"Because I wanted to." She tilted her head slightly, the particular angle that meant she was looking at him with more attention than the situation formally required.
Something moved through her expression, brief and quickly managed, the thing that happened when something arrived without warning and she hadn’t finished deciding what to do about it.
It was awfully similar to the type of expression that flashed through an Awakened’s face when they were put into a hopeless situation.
"Get in."
He got in.
The car was warm after the evening air, and quiet. It smelled faintly of her perfume. Something that had been the same for as long as he’d known her, one of the few constants that had survived the distance between then and now.
She pulled back into the road without ceremony.