L Gryffiths (immoveable) wrote in at_the_gates, @ 2012-04-01 01:25:00 |
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Entry tags: | elizabeth gryffiths, leo gryffiths |
Who: Gryffiths'. You've been warned.
What: 'Family' is a word applied often and without meaning.
Where: Gryff's office at Haven.
When: Recently.
Time and tide both passed, Haven remained solid as stone walls and oasis in London provided and by the time the blossom had patterned the cemetery grass with the spidery white spirals of delicate snowy drifts, walls had been scrubbed of blood and the place recovered enough of itself to resume sluggish heartbeat and rhythm, both. Another year go-round, another spring and he'd sat last year within the same room, the same spread of paperwork until the decade blurred back to watching the then-head of Haven do the same calculations, lost in the complexities of making a place pay for itself when it never did (echoes, echoes of Anna and of whomever had been before Anna, all the men and women who'd sat in the office and made paper-chains out of financial files that rarely added up to zero). Gryff sat in the old office, that which had been abandoned and even now had the faint air of disuse. The smell, perhaps; stale and dead paper, of damp in the walls that had not fully dried out and the thin crack beneath the window pane that shrieked whenever the wind caught up, that let in the thinnest tinge of spring air.
The same spread of manila folders and half-dry ballpoint pens scattered across the desk's surface, the same half-cooled cup of tea sat like an afterthought amidst all the destruction (the last the result of half-hearted trip to the small galley kitchen, relearning the route with the hesitancy reserved for things that must be re-established rather than begun from scratch). Nothing had changed. Everything had changed. With a head too full of Haven and its inhabitants, there was little room to spare (or so said head of Haven to himself, with the determination others might call 'stubbornness') for that other-family, those blood relations and links gone loose in a chain made long ago.
Or so it went. There was the journal, somewhere amid the rubble -- topside, rather than buried, he'd been at this long enough for chaos, but not long enough that he'd slept in the room rather than shutting the door of an evening and leaving what was leadership behind, a note written in to-the-point yet feminine-slanted hand. An adieu, as far as such things could be composed, from a sibling that had almost been rather than was. Gryff's sigh was the small, thin-winded thing of unconsciousness to even beginning it; the response to the knock (for it was a knock, bold, bad salute rather than timidity of request of entry) was the instinctual growl and knitting of eyebrows particular to being interrupted, regardless of having set down the work at hand, albeit briefly.