Chapter Text
::attempt #1::
Eleanor is not a quiet reader.
It’s not a surprise. Chidi has only known her for a few weeks—if the passage of time even matters in an eternal afterlife—but that’s more than enough to know that Eleanor Shellstrop doesn’t do anything quietly: she snores, she yelps 80s songs in the shower, she insults inanimate objects as she walks around the house. And she talks, always interrupting and commenting and arguing, pushing him to respond before he’s had a chance to think anything through. If the concept of distraction took on human form, it’d be Eleanor—surprising and messy and loud.
She snaps her gum a few times, dog-ears the page while she flips to the index, then flips back and starts to hum. Again.
Chidi clears his throat for the third time, not that she seems to notice. She’s probably doing it on purpose, trying to annoy him into paying attention to her. He hates that it works—he hasn’t read more than a handful of pages since Eleanor flopped down on the minimalist approximation of a couch and kicked a stack of books off the coffee table to make room for her feet. (“What? It’s not like you paid for them.”)
He could retire to his bedroom to read at a regular, uninterrupted pace, but damn it, he was sitting here first. He wills himself to block her out and glares down at the familiar passage in front of him—
What is essential in the moral worth of actions—the moral worth of actions—WHAT IS ESSENTIAL IN THE MORAL WORTH OF ACTIONS—
—but even Kant isn’t enough to hold his attention. When he ignores Eleanor, all he can hear is the grinding of contradictions and concerns and barely corralled panic in his head: The ethical duty—his ethical duty—to help another person in need is in direct conflict with his obligation to the greater society, with an ever-expanding chain of moral consequences. He’s complicit now in everything Eleanor does, from shrimp to sinkholes. They’re going to get caught, Eleanor eternally damned and Chidi left alone in a eternity of paired souls.
Even here, in paradise, he can’t shake the feeling that he’ll never be happy.
Eleanor curses a half-censored rant about the sexual predilections of Icelandic furniture designers and tosses an offending throw pillow across the room, and he's both annoyed and grateful when it startles him out of his thoughts. That happens a lot, with Eleanor—Chidi feeling two wildly different things at the same time, and both more intensely than he’s totally comfortable with. Frustration, mixed with affection. Fear and resolve. The hot burn of anger alongside something bright and unfamiliar and urgent, something that makes him feel... well, ironically, alive.
Eleanor aggressively rearranges herself until she’s halfway draped off the couch. She knocks a mug off the table in the process, looks down at the spill, then leaves it on the floor.
He clears his throat.
“What?” she says. “It’s just water.”
“But you spilled it!”
Her eyes light up with a combative spark, and Chidi bites back the lecture in his throat, because giving her the argument she’s looking for feels too much like rewarding her for bad behavior. Then he gets up to clean up the mess, because even if it’s just water, it’s what people do, Eleanor, it’s what reasonable people—
“No, fine, I’ll do it.” Eleanor gets up with a full-body eyeroll, flipping her book face-down without taking care to keep the pages flat. “I’m a good person, I clean up things that don’t even stain, whatever.”
She huffs into the kitchen, and Chidi lasts a second and a half before he can’t stand the crumpled book pages and reaches over to fix it.
“Eyes on your own work, nerd,” she yells, and God help him, he smiles.