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The door to the manor swings on its hinges. Drift sits across the room, where her back is turned to the entrance and her nervous eyes trace divots into the wood grain pattern of the wall. She snaps her head around almost before it fully opens.
Standing in the doorway is Avid. Drift stares at him; he looks back at her, looks away, then rolls his shoulders. His hair sticks up in random places like it always does, and his eyes are wild as ever, but with that heavy look they’ve taken to carrying recently. His right hand twists a wood stake uncertainly. She watches as he shuts the door behind him, catching sight as he does of the bag slung over his back. It looks empty.
“Avid,” she addresses him. It takes everything in her to stay in her seat, to not bound up and across the room toward him. Out of love, or frustration, or… whatever, she doesn’t know. “Avid.”
“Hi, hi,” he says, almost to himself. “Hi, Drift. Hi.”
Slowly, he sets the stake down on a nearby crafting bench. His empty bag follows. He stands over the items for a second, just staring down, before bracing his hands on the wood surface. At this angle, the soft gray moonlight filtering dimly through the window does nothing to let Drift see his face.
“Where–” She huffs out a short laugh. “What happened to staying in pairs, dude?”
“I know.” Avid breathes the words out, then sucks his breath back in. He reaches his hands up, rubs his eyes with them, runs them through his hair. Drift catches every movement, every nervous tick, like in the seconds before Avid explains himself he’s part of a case she has to crack. She used to value her attention to detail: it kept her senses sharp, kept her ahead of the conversation in a profession where every person’s motive is shrouded under five layers of deceit. That was, right up until she met Avid, who wears his goddamn heart on his sleeve. Following his every anxious glance is enough to make her sick sometimes.
“I know,” he repeats, sounding deflated. “I’m–look, I’m sorry.”
“Where did you go, man?” She tries to keep the emotion out of her own voice–lord knows her nerves only ever make his worse–but it’s hard. “I didn’t even know you were leaving. I just came back to the house, and–and you weren’t here.”
Avid takes a deep breath, wipes his hands on his pants. “Yeah. I,” he stops, then starts again, “I, uh. Stopped by the castle.”
She stares at him. He doesn’t look back.
“You–Avid,” Drift says. She spends a second searching for words, then: “Again? You–why?”
“I–I know!” Avid turns to face her now, holding his hands up almost in surrender, raising his voice in that panicked way she’s grown so used to. “I know. I’m sorry!”
“Why?” Drift repeats, matching his volume.
“I–” He cuts himself off with a sharp inhale. His expression, suddenly, turns vividly pained. “I don’t know why, okay?”
His throat catches a little on the last word, voice faltering, and it stops Drift in her tracks. She blinks at him. He turns away from her again, bracing himself against the crafting bench and dropping his head.
A few seconds pass. Drift scans his face; Avid shuts his eyes tight. Silence builds thick, hisses out through the slim cracks in their windows and into the night outside.
“I took some meat,” Avid continues after a second. His voice almost gets lost in the low murmur of wind circling the house. “Raw mutton. And I just… left it there for her. Left a chest, and a note, for Shelby.”
Drift sucks a breath in. She opens her mouth to speak, then closes it. Avid’s thumb rubs circles into the rough wood of the bench.
The lantern on the table beside Drift makes an audible crackling noise. It casts shadows on the floor between her and Avid, one shaped like her silhouette and another shaped like the empty chair beside her. Avid’s shadow lies against the opposite wall; it’s motionless, but something in it gives Drift a startling impression of erratic emotion, of stark volatility. She swears she sees his eyes clench even tighter shut.
“Come sit,” she tries softly. “Please.”
There’s a heavy sigh in the silence. Then, slowly, Avid comes to the table and takes a quiet seat.
Drift would prefer they talk about it. Something in her, some instinct built deep into her gut, knows that she deals better with concrete statements, with facts laid out before her that she can set her mind to fixing. She wants to talk about what’s going on, about what’s going through Avid’s mind. But she knows they’ve exhausted all words about this today. And watching Avid hang his head next to her, face raw and tired, she knows words aren’t what he needs right now.
So she shifts her chair closer to his and snakes her arm around his shoulders. The lantern light flickers against them together, and the world outside stays dark.