Loud as Gabriel's what now...? It hurt to laugh, but an involuntary imagining of her very Catholic Great-Gran reacting to such talk made stifling it impossible. "Nipples on a man," she wheezed, adding to the list of useless things, as one does while hiding under a stairwell in a thunderbird lightning storm. Honestly, the definition of 'normal' at Le Cirque...
Unable to see the incoming hand associated with the preemptive apology, Cress squeaked, but held still. She'd never chugged IcyHot diluted in warm water before, but imagined it would feel about as strange as Birdie's magic—strange, but effective! "Thank you," she ventured, a cautious vocalization tantamount to walking on eggshells. Her throat still hurt, but speaking no longer felt like goring her larynx with an industrial-sized aluminum bristled pipe cleaner. She felt, more than saw Birdie's energy flatten at her side. "Magical carb crash?" More a rhetorical aside than an actual question, a down slant in tone was meant to convey apology. So much for their quiet walk back to the house.
And so much for a clean end to the ordeal in the clearing. A familiar voice not associated with a tasting menu of demonic and spliced apex predator howling carried from the Shooting Gallery. Her cheeks blanched, Cressida's free hand sank into her dark hair, and squeezed till her knuckles turned chalk white. "Jesus fucking ch—dolzhna byla byt' molniya, blyat—excuse me." Cutting herself off before steam started to blow from her ears, she cast a look of sullen contrition in Birdie's direction, and hoped the other woman caught it. "Pardon me. I have to do something staggeringly idiotic." The healer was welcome to join, of course, but Cress wouldn't count on blanket stupidity. Keeping contact so that she might properly orient herself while departing the relative safety of the stairway, she released Birdie's hand and began walking, slowly, through the impenetrable dark in the direction of the recently emerged not-quite-Jaime-creature in Gray's flashlight beam.
She wasn't insane. Not in this, at least.
For three years, since a vision at the Ball in Vienna, she'd been paranoid about Gray's safety around all manner of lightning-related scenarios. It'd been so long that the Seeing may have been justifiably labeled a misfire, but Cressida didn't have those. He'd asked her not to share the portent, so she hadn't; it had made for an odd night when they'd blown a tire during a summer thunderstorm outside Bloomington, Indiana, but she'd done things stranger than insisting that she -blind and familiar with cars as a GenZ'er is with a roto-phone- change the tire in sloughing rain while beefcakus gigantitis remained in the car. Mostly. Kinda. Discretion did not lessen her vigilance.
Which brought her to her present mini-fugue o' crazy. "Remind me-" she directed at Gray as she neared the pair, presenting as calm as possible to encourage the same of the bird overhead, "-didn't we just try de-stressing? Are we joke, to Karma? I have serious questions." Her voice was sylphlike in its weakness. If Coro got out of hand and she could be of help, she needed to be close to have a hope of effectiveness. More importantly, she needed to put herself between Gray and Jaime. Under no delusion that Jaime wouldn't attack her at this point, she was nonetheless fairly certain that he was far less likely to attack her than he was Gray, historically. She could hear that he was doing his best not to; his love language was a split between 'acts of service' and 'shall not disembowel person X' which she, at least, fond both comical and endearing in turns. Like any struggling creature, he did better with support.
"Talk to me." Judging by the sound of his breathing, she stopped, standing rigid and proud, near enough to flex her fingers in the air, inviting contact or sound by which to guide her. "Buddy system, Possum King. Nice and easy," she said, both by way of encouragement, and a reminder to help settle the tweaked out bird which was her pulse, thrashing beneath her collarbones.
What sounded like a furious string of reprimands from the bird above did nothing to help that attempt.