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Miri entered the Derelict alone and, seemingly, without weapons.
She did not look like she had slept. Her eyes were wary and rimmed with red. She looked slightly ill, her face mildly flushed.
Eris placed a mug of tea in front of Miri at the table in the Drifter’s galley and then leaned back to sip at her own. Miri looked at the mug and then at the Drifter next to her, raising an eyebrow.
“If you want stronger poison it’s in the cupboard behind you. Top shelf,” he told her, pointing.
Miri nodded and stood, opening the door to the cupboard and pulling out a glass. She studied the bottles of alcohol in front of her briefly and then picked one.
“Do… either of you want a glass too?” she asked over her shoulder.
“Nah,” the Drifter said. “But if you ain’t drinkin’ your tea, I’ll have that.”
“Be my guest.”
He pulled the mug over in front of himself as Miri sat down.
“I ain’t used to you drinkin’ tea, never mind me havin’ to pour my own drink around you. That’s weird.” The dark coloured alcohol sloshed into the glass, filling it half-way.
“After our last conversation, you’ll forgive me if I ain’t too keen on sharin’ a drink or turning my back on you.” The Drifter raised his tea mug in a toast.
Miri broke eye contact with him and nodded. “That’s fair.”
She clinked her glass against the Drifter’s mug of tea and took a sip.
Her lips formed a wry smile as she swallowed.
“No matter where you go, you always seem to have the same cheap whiskey.” Miri looked into the glass. “Some things never change.”
“It’s a staple.” The Drifter said, picking up his soup spoon.
“Taste of home.” Miri said quietly before taking another large swallow from her glass.
“Both sleep deprivation and alcoholism do seem to run in the family,” Eris said impassively while eating a mouthful of soup.
Miri laughed gently and ate a spoonful of soup, then pointed the spoon at Eris across from her while looking to her right at the Drifter. “You know… She’s pretty great.”
“Yeah, she is. Too bad you threatened to kill her,” he replied and ate his own spoonful of soup, watching Miri carefully with emotionless eyes.
“Yeah,” Miri looked down at her soup. “Sorry about that,” she mumbled toward Eris and ate another spoonful.
“Hmmm…” Eris tilted her head and looked at the Drifter.
“What do you want, Miri?” the Drifter asked more gently than he intended.
Miri leaned on her elbows and lifted a spoonful of soup, intensely studying the crumbled sausage and kale in the potato-thickened cream.
“You never made me this soup before. It’s real good.”
“Didn’t have the sausage back when I was making soup for you. Whole soup’s based on the sausage. Sausage comes from a lady who sells smoked meats in a market at the base of the tower. Her stuff’s really good. You should…” He paused, blinking a moment before licking his lips. “You should stop by her stall next time you’re in the tower. She makes a pastrami that she cuts real thin. It’s especially good on sandwiches. Really somethin’ else.”
“What’s a pastrami?” Miri asked.
The Drifter made a face. “Shit.”
Eris smirked. “You didn’t ask, did you?”
“I meant to,” he said.
“I asked him that question over a month ago.” Eris told Miri. “He was going to find out.”
“It’s gotta be either cow or pig.” He swallowed some tea. “I just don’t know which. It’s smoked and salted and cured in spices. Can’t remember what animal though. I was supposed to ask next time I was there. Totally forgot.”
“The mystery persists.” Eris said as she resumed eating her soup.
Miri swirled her soup in her bowl with her spoon and took another large swallow of whiskey.
“There’s… no biscuits,” she said softly.
Eris looked at Miri carefully as she ate another spoonful of soup.
“He always used to make these biscuits,” Miri continued, looking at Eris across the table from her over the steaming contents of her spoon. “Any time he came by, he always made ‘em. I’d wake up in the middle of the night smellin’ ‘em bakin’ in the oven and that’s how I’d know he’d come back to the rest of us an’... an’ that he was alive. I’d come down in my pajamas to the kitchen and he’d be just pullin’ ‘em out. We’d eat ‘em together with butter or jam or honey… or with cheese or… in soup. He always made ‘em when he made soup. Always.”
“Hmmm…” Eris said, listening.
“I tried for a long time to make ‘em.” Miri said. “Never could get ‘em right. They were a bit hard on the outside but… real fluffy inside. An’ when they were hot the butter would sink into them… so nice.”
“Like a cloud.” Eris said. “Slightly chewy. Almost a scone but… simpler… more honest…”
Miri looked up at Eris. “Yeah.”
Eris turned to the Drifter. “It’s your stick-bread, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” the Drifter nodded. “Same recipe, just cooked in a pan instead of wrapped around a stick over a fire.”
“I’m actually surprised you didn’t make them.” Eris said. “They’d go so well with the soup.”
“Yeah well… some recipes are special,” he said, his voice quiet.
Eris stared at him for a long moment. “You learned it from them.”
“Yup.” He didn’t look up from his soup.
“Who’s them?” Miri asked.
“Hmmm…” Eris tilted her head again. “She doesn’t know.”
“Know what?” Miri asked.
“It ain’t exactly a story you tell a child,” the Drifter said quietly.
“She has no idea,” Eris said, her voice soft.
“Nope, she don’t.”
“I see.” Eris returned to her soup.
“I have no idea what?” Miri asked.
“In the absence of context, without awareness of history, she would not have understood why you are the way you are.” Eris said, speaking to the Drifter but watching Miri. “She would have internalized it. Assumed it was something she did wrong. Tried to fix it. And then, failing that, resented you deeply for it. It would have affected her self-worth. The assumption being that she was unloveable, that the fault was within her. Such an easy conclusion to draw, that one must therefore be a monster, unredeemable, and from there, so easy to simply embrace what one believes is one’s nature.”
Miri stared at Eris, open-mouthed. Shock on her face.
“Yeah well,” the Drifter said dryly, his eyes on his soup bowl. “Not everyone is as good at articulating the most horrific things that ever happened to ‘em as you are, Moondust. You’re the one who told me the hardest part of survivin' shit is not bein' able to talk about it.” He looked over at Eris. “You know damn well why I don’t talk about that and I love you to death but fuck you for bringin’ that up right now. This is not the time.”
“It is the time.” Eris turned to him. “She doesn’t know. She needs to know. You yourself said this may be the last time you have dinner with her. At least give her that much.”
The Drifter glared at Eris and drained his mug of tea. He reached to the middle of the table, picked up the whiskey, and poured some into the empty mug with shaking hands.
“Eris, I love you, but you need to back the fuck off. She ain’t a child no more and she threatened to kill you. That’s a line. Ain’t no comin’ back from that with me.”
“Look at her, Germaine!” Eris stretched her hand out toward Miri. “Look at her,” she commanded, her three eyes flaring.
The Drifter sighed and reluctantly looked up from his soup at Miri as Eris spoke. “She hasn’t slept in two days and has clearly been drunk the entire time. She is in pain and was speaking from a position of pain. Just like you. She’s been desperately trying to drown it in alcohol. Just like you. Not sleeping. Hating herself. Haunted by the memories of the people she loved who are dead. Just. Like. You.”
Miri and the Drifter glared at each other. Snake eyes meeting snake eyes.
“I don’t trust her not to use it.” He said looking back to Eris and eating another spoonful of soup.
“To do what? She’s already broken your heart and proactively destroyed any relationship she might have had with you to keep you from being able to abandon her again. She has no power here. She can’t hurt you any more than she already has.”
“She threatened to kill you,” he repeated.
Miri looked away from both of them.
“And nothing you tell her can increase, or diminish, her chances of doing so,” Eris said.
“We still don’t even know what it is she wants from us,” he said, sipping from his mug. “It sure as fuck ain’t my biscuit recipe.”
Eris put both her hands on the table and sighed, looking back at Miri, waiting.
Miri tipped her head back and swallowed several times while draining her glass of alcohol.
“I came to…” She licked her lips, not looking at either of them, clearly forcing the words out of her mouth with great difficulty. “Ask you for a favour.”