fandomhighdorms | Second Floor Common Room; Tuesday Morning [08/24].

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Second Floor Common Room; Tuesday Morning [08/24].

This last weekend had been...hard ~~albeit handwavey~~ for Astrid; who could really blame her? Who could just easily bounce back from your dead future clinging to you, sobbing out apologies, and wishing they could take it all back, while you both knew that there were deeper problems that would never be solved, that any attempts to alter their history would only prolong the inevitable?

But there was catharsis there. There was...closure. Confirmation. Regret. Acceptance.

It had still been difficult for Astrid for get herself to move from her bed, the day after Claire left, presumably for good this time. A day of staring across her room, at the colorful mural still up on tge other side.

And then, on Tuesday, she pulled back the sheets. She went to the bathroom. Showered. Went to the common room, turned on the stove, cracked a few eggs, made breakfast.

No, it wasn't Monday. It wasn't even the third floor common room.

But that wasn't really the point, was it?

[[ open common room is open, albeit slow! ]]

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Malia followed her nose.

"Huh. Normal food this time. Nice."

"I generally try to make it normal when I can," Astrid said.

It was just sometimes the island had different plans.

Her head tilted at Malia a little. "You want some?"

"Sure." Malia came over to watch her cook. (It wasn't something you needed to know how to do as a coyote, but it definitely seemed helpful for humans.) "Guess I haven't really been around to see what you usually do, huh."

"Conveniently just when it's weird," Astrid noted with a faint glance over as Malia came to watch, "apparently. Unless you count even using egg molds as weird, too, in which case."

She shrugged a shoulder.

"Those are upstairs, anyway. What kind do you want? Scrambled? Over easy? Sunny side up?"

"Um," Malia said. ". . . Cooked?"

Look, she didn't remember what all those words meant.

"I spend most of my time in the woods. I think I missed half my workshops this summer."

"I wouldn't worry about it," said Astrid, who didn't think Malia would anyway, and decided she'd make her some of each of the listed kinds, for the experience of it. "Truancy has never seemed much of a concern of the faculty around here. What were you even missing?"

Malia shrugged. "I mostly remember one of the classes involving fake sheep that the angry teacher wouldn't let me try to eat."

Which. . . .. They had been fake after all.

"But I guess after a whole summer of not managing to turn back into a coyote, I should probably just accept being a person again now, huh."

"There are probably worse things to be," Astrid offered.

Like a fake sheep! And she said that as someone who had been a sheep once!

"I guess I am kind of biased. I've been pretty much a Normal Human," on the radio and everything!, "almost my entire life so far."

Malia nodded. She found a clear bit of counter and hopped up onto it, studying Astrid now rather than the food on the stove.

"What's that like? Being normal?"

"I mean," Astrid mused, "what's it like, not being normal? I'm also from a different century, so I'm not even sure some people would really call that normal. But compared to werecoyotes and magic and stuff like that?"

She carefully flipped one of Malia's eggs.

"Pretty boring, probably."

"Depressing, lonely," Malia said, answering Astrid's question. "But overall pretty simple. At least when your not-normal trends into the 'living feral' side of things."

She tilted her head. "You know, I don't think I ever really got bored as a coyote. If I wasn't eating or sleeping, I usually went hunting. Or if I'd caught something big and there were no other predators around, I'd roll around in the sun for awhile and smell things. Humans manage to complicate everything."

"Yeah," said Astrid, only able to conclude, then, that 'normal' just meant 'not normal' with extra 'boring,'if she were to go off Malia's answer. "Guess we have to compensate for not being able to just roll around in the sun and smell things."

Although that really, floating around whatever water she could get into and painting things behind her eyes didn't seem that different.

But she'd finished the eggs and carefuly moved them to a plate with a spatula, one scrambled, one over-easy, one sunny-side-up, and handed it over to her.

"But we do have at least three different ways to cook our eggs."

"Huh." Malia found a fork and poked at the various preparations. "Which one is which?"

"That one," Astrid's spatula made a vague pointer at best, "with the yolk on top is sunny-side up. That one where I flipped it is over-easy. And the one that was scrambled is the scrambled eggs. They're pretty direct, as far as naming conventions go."

Although sunny-side-up did have a nice little cutesy poetic bent to it, comparatively.

"Huh. So . . . it's all about how the yellow bit gets cooked?"

"Well," Astrid thought about it a little, "you can't really cook the yellow part without the white part in most cases, but, yeah, that's probably not too far off. I mean, if we get into poached or hard-boiled, that might make it a little different, but then I start thinking about deviled and where that might fit in..."

At this point, Astrid may have sort of just been throwing them out there to mess with Malia in the smallest way possible.

Yeah, Malia’s eyes went slightly wide there.

“I don’t get it. Why have six different ways to do it when you just need to kill off bacteria.”

Which felt like a fair enough question, really, and Astrid just sort of met it with a faint smile.

"If you had a choice," she speculated, "between...let's say...a chipmunk and a mouse....would you have a preference?"

Malia actually thought about that for a bit.

"Mouse," she said finally. "Less fur. Slightly."

"I guess, then," said Astrid, her grin quirking a little more and just running with it even though it wasn't a perfect fit, but it was good enough. This was why she was the artist, not the poet, "it's kind of like that. For some people, a scrambled egg is more like a mouse with slightly less fur than a sunny-side up one."

"Huh." Malia nodded.

Why couldn't more people explain things the way Astrid did?

She started with a small sample of the scrambled eggs, chewing thoughtfully, then went for the over easy. Her eyes went wide again when the yolk started to run. "This one bleeds!"

That was clearly a point in its favor.

That was a reaction that almost made Astrid wish she was a poet, because what a line that would make. It certainly could be filed away for a potential painting, though, because capturing a bleeding egg on canvas had its appeal as well.

"I don't think I've ever heard anyone describe runny yolks like that before," she admitted, "but I like that."

"Seems obvious to me," Malia said, shrugging. She dipped her finger in the yolk and stuck it in her mouth. "The yellow's the best part, isn't it."

It was where all the fat lived, after all.

"It's where all the nutrients are," Astrid confirmed. "And the flavor, really."

And, considering who she was talking to, she added, "It's the food source for the embryo of the chicken, if it were to actually be fertilized and grow into a chick, so, yeah, it wouldn't be much without it."

Malia nodded. "You're not very squeamish," she observed. "You'd probably do okay as a coyote."

"Hello!" Clare burbled happily as she came into the room. "It smells lovely in here. Would you like a cuppa?"

Making tea for one was just odd.

"I would love some," said Astrid, managing a sort of soft, sincere smile, even with the little stab of pain that came with of course all the people to come in, it would be the one person with her name...

(Give or take an I)

"Thanks. Would you like some eggs and pancakes?"

"Please," Clare said, smiling. "I adore pancakes."

"Pancakes it is, then," Astrid nodded, going to make her up a fresh batch, and almost fell into the silence of putting her focus into the cooking before nudging herself a little to say something more. If she was just going to be quiet and morose, why even leave her bed?

"So congrats on making it through the summer."

It actually was kind of an achievement worth acknowledging!

"Thank you," Clare said. "I still haven't met Chelsea Clinton but on account of it being the wrong decade, I'm prepared to be all right with that."

"I'm sure you can still make it happen," Astrid said, now wondering if she should google that before saying anything with such assurance, "but it definitely wouldn't be the same, she's probably old enough to be one of our moms by now."

Strictly speaking, if you went by year alone, they were old enough to be someone's mom now, too.

And even without, but that was a different matter.

"And one mother is quite enough," Clare decided, "so I'll just tell Erin that Chelsea never wrote back."

The first part of Clare's comment got a small huff of an indecipherable sound out of Astrid, in part because she didn't even know exactly what she meant by it, as she flipped a pancake. "I think that's fair," she said. "She's probably pretty busy. You're sticking around for the school year proper?"

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Second Floor Common Room; Tuesday Morning [08/24].

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