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He has to admit, Hayward keeps finding himself slightly baffled by the way Dennis can just… breeze in as though it's the most normal thing in the world to have his resentful daughter and a foreign fugitive trying to birth a god on his coffee table. He sets a tawny brown paper bag at the edge of said table, then very deliberately moves it off a scattered page, a show of non-intrusion. The light glints of the bald, tonsure top of his head as he straightens back up.
“Grabbed you guys a couple of custard tarts while I was in town.”
“You didn't have to.” Paige says, and Hayward can't help but note her tone isn't bashful gratefulness but a wary statement of fact.
“I didn't have to, but I did.”
Her jaw clenches ever so slightly and then she manages a stilted, “Thanks, Dad.”
“No problem, daughter. I'll leave you two crazy kids to it.”
Hayward smiles a polite amount as Dennis rounds behind Paige's sofa and Hayward’s armchair and then clicks the door shut behind him.
Paige sighs as footsteps recede, and it takes a solid minute or so of staring at the bag before the guarded hunch begins to ease out of her shoulders, pulling it towards her with a reluctant air of getting it over with. While Hayward can't say he has any personal grievance with Dennis — yet — the arguments he's witnessed give him the impression that even a gesture as small as this may one day be held over her head, like a… like a bowl of meringue, only it won't be whipped all the way yet and it'll come splatting down, caking egg and sugar into her black hair, the same black as the horseshoe that Dennis has left, and she'll have to go and shower and probably wash her clothes too if it drips down onto her shoulders. Actually, that seems like something Dennis would do with real meringue as well as metaphorical ungratefulness-meringue, leaping before he looks without a thought to the annoyance and upset it'll cause her.
“Well… they do look nice.” Paige concedes as she sets hers on the table, then replaces his on the paper bag and slides it towards him, knocking one of their many sheets of paper askew.
The Ignathian Peninsula and Consolidated Linger Straits are actually much more similar than their residents would have you believe, especially now with all the whispers of war circling around like the wind stirring autumn leaves. Obviously, there's cultural differences here and there: setting shoes on a table summons bad luck in the Peninsula whereas in the Straits, it's setting a hat on a bed; or when Paige points out a little black and white spider inching up the wall and says I love the way jumping spiders move… it's nearly bird-like, and Hayward says Huh? Oh, salticids? and then Paige says you're fucking with me. You don't actually call them that.
Another difference is that when Hayward heard custard tart, he immediately pictured the flaky pastry cup, the brown-black bubbles on the top where the custard has caramelised, the dusting of cinnamon. He isn't exactly disappointed with what's in front of him, per se, though he is a little annoyed with himself for expecting the comfort of something familiar, something from home, something he might've eaten with his mother at some point. He hopes she's alright. He hopes she hasn't been interrogated or had her home torn to pieces, partly to determine whether she's hiding him there, partly as punishment for raising an enemy of the state. He hopes, stupidly and pathetically and in a way that achieves nothing but setting an ache to root in his chest, that he might see her again someday.
Having already removed hers from its silver case, Paige is now crumbling off the shortcrust battlements into it. She glances over at him briefly, hesitantly reaching for his own tart, and explains, “The custard's the best part. This bit always feels like a little too much pastry.”
“Ah. I get you.” He takes a bite. Nutmeg, of which there's usually a little in Peninsulan custard tarts too, totally replaces the cinnamon here. The shortcrust pastry isn't actually soggy, but does feel soggier in the mouth than the crispiness he's used to, if that makes sense. In the back of his mind, he feels guiltily disrespectful somehow — eating a rare treat, a gift, and being so focused on wishing it was something else that he isn't even really appreciating it. Paige is right, though; it is too much pastry, so he pushes the border off into his case too. “You know, uh… back home, these are made with puff pastry.”
“Yeah?” Paige smiles encouragingly. She's been staring at the notes spread out before them as she eats, but it feels like a performance, like she wants the pastry (and maybe by extension, Dennis) to sense that she’s focused on something else, to deny it attention like starving a god, but she turns her dark eyes to him now. Her gaze is a weight he's unused to after so much time with nothing but empty air in the passenger seat, an occasional hossanah on the radio, dry eyes fixed on the long road ahead. It isn't a… it isn't an uncomfortable weight. It's a pebble in his hand, a real good one that's gonna skip plenty of times before it splashes and sinks, but for now he'll keep it in his palm, trace the smooth, flat surfaces with his thumb. He may even put it in his pocket and let it comfort him for a while longer.
“Yeah. And there's cinnamon sprinkled over the top with a little bit of nutmeg in the custard itself, while this one is all nutmeg. Though, the real difference is the cost — I don't know how much your dad paid for these here, but over the border, they're a Penny. Eh?”
That gets a groan and good chuckle out of Paige in spite of herself. Probably not normal to laugh along with your captor, but he's settled into the realisation that Paige isn't keeping him here; he just has nowhere else to go.
“Do you have kids, Hayward?”
He almost chokes. “No. Uh, no, I don't.”
“You have a very dad sense of humour.”
“Did you say dad or bad?” Hayward jokingly rotates a fingertip in his ear as though cleaning it out to hear her better. “Because if you said bad, I'll just have to keep telling jokes until I find one you like.”
“I liked that one.”
“Are you just saying that so you don't have to hear any more of my jokes?”
“Yes.” Paige grins in the same bright tone, and they laugh together again like a pebble being turned over in a palm before he leans forward to point at something on one of their many pages of stalled ideas and ask something useless about approaching from a different angle. And then he listens to Paige explain why it wouldn't work as he savours the rest of his Straits-style custard tart, and lets it be what it is.