Re: Living Room: Rey + Kratos
At this time last year he had sat out on his porch at the turning of the year, watching people come and go from Ren's New Year's Eve Party. Kratos had been invited by proximity, and because Ren was a friendly, even-tempered kind of man who invited people to parties and tea. (One can derive from this statement exactly how well Kratos knew his neighbor.) Though the intimacy had not gone beyond shared house-space, Kratos was devoutly grateful for a mostly silent, non-curious and male neighbor who did not pry into his business or cause distractions for himself or his son. Ren had not complained about the rapidly flourishing vegetable garden out back, nor had he bothered Kratos with inane chatter that Kratos probably would barely understand anyway.
Kratos liked Ren a great deal. He was convenient.
So Kratos was somewhat interested to hear that the man's wife had come to town. The rumor mill had been grinding away and one of the many older women in town who spent a long time at the grocery store had informed him that maybe soon Ren and his wife "Rey" would reconcile and she would come back to live at the house. (This conversation, needless to say, had been a poorly-disguised attempt to get Kratos to reveal anything he might know about said wife or her presence in said house; the gossip might better have found better success in the attempt to squeeze water from stone.)
Unfortunately for Rey, someone had pointed her out at this particular party, to which Kratos had been invited by a very competent mechanic. And so, because he wanted to know what his convenient neighbor's wife was like, and whether she would cause Ren to become less convenient, Kratos entered the Living Room and chose the opposite end of her couch, from which he evaluated Rey from her head to her toes in a very rude but highly efficient manner.