Cai Finch (itsajesusthing) wrote in darker_london, @ 2019-10-28 10:31:00 |
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Entry tags: | cai finch, zoe kemp |
Love and chickens (Cai, Zoe)
Cai opened his front door, two days after Zoe broke up with him. Bad days. Hard days, trying to understand what to feel, trying not to let bitterness or frustration get too strong because she didn't deserve that, trying not to be self pitying because maybe he didn't deserve it, trying not to be too moody around his sisters because they didn't, trying not to tell Nonnie he was fine because he wasn't and she didn't deserve being lied to. Hard days.
And then there was Zoe, standing on his doorstep. He didn't know if it was foresight or just hope, but he'd known it would be her.
"Can we go for a walk?" she asked.
"Shit - yeah - of course-" Cai scrambled over his words in his rush to agree. Chill he told himself, as he shoved his feet into his shoes and then bent to tie them up. He didn't feel all that chill.
He met her eyes as she stood up again. God, she had beautiful eyes. Zoe was biting her lip. He gave her a small smile, neither chill not rushed, and she gave him one in return. Hers was smaller. But Zoe was always like that. No, not always. He'd seen her smile, unrestrained, not very often but it wasn't a smile you forgot. She was all restraint now, though, her hands hidden in her pockets. He did the same, as they started walking down the little path, but had to take them out to unhitch the gate - he usually leapt over it but today didn't much feel like a leaping day - and once he'd taken them out of his pockets he didn't feel like putting them in again.
Zoe breathed a little louder than usual and he turned his head toward her, expecting her to speak, but if she was going to say something (she had been) then she'd changed her mind. Okay. He wasn't going to push it. He was just happy (no, relieved, no, ecstatic, no, nervous, or, all of those and more) that she was here. They could walk for miles in silence before she found the words she wanted to say and he'd still be relieved she was even walking beside him.
They didn't get miles. They barely got next door. "Cai!" his neighbour called out, coming around the side of her house to the front. "And Zoe, hello. Come meet Waif!"
"Um," said Cai. All-those-emotions-and-more not knowing what to do when they ran up against Mrs Carabaldi's cheerful enthusiasm. She clomped over toward them in gumboots, her arms full of a rather large chicken. Zoe looked at Cai again and then decided on his behalf and opened the gate to let them both in.
"This is Waif?" she asked, and Cai watched her as she lifted her hand and - after Mrs Carabaldi nodded encouragingly - gave Waif's back a gentle pat with the back of her fingers.
"I didn't know you were getting more chickens," Cai said. He'd rehung the chicken coop door that had been torn off, fixed it all up to the best of his ability after her last little flock of chickens had been killed. The coop had been stronger after he was done with it but had stayed empty for months, not that anyone blamed her for that.
"I've always had birds around," Mrs Carabaldi said. "I didn't like having a big empty space with nothing in it. Why should some scumbag dictate my own yard? I can't stand the quiet. If I want chickens I should have chickens."
Cai could see why she and Nonnie got on so well. "Too right," he said, with a bit of a grin, and Mrs Carabaldi rearranged Waif in her arms and passed her over to Zoe, whose eyes widened a little but she held her arms like Mrs Carabaldi told her to hold her arms and then suddenly she was holding a chicken.
She hadn't expected to be holding a chicken today. She'd been prepared (well, sort of prepared. Not really all that prepared) to have a long talk with Cai and try to navigate through the vast unexploded landmine riddled terrain in her head. And now there was a chicken cooing softly in her arms. Zoe let out a long breath and felt calmer than she had in days. Weeks? She couldn't remember the last time she felt like this. Like maybe nothing too bad could happen when Waif was making content little noises in her arms.
Logically she knew the feeling was a lie - Waif was only here because Mrs Carabaldi's last flock had been ripped apart by person's unknown.
That didn't make the feeling any less, though.
Interesting.
"I have a few I haven't named yet," Mrs Carabladi was saying. "I thought I'd let your sisters name them. I know your Faye was so upset by what happened."
"Yeah... 's a good idea," Cai nodded. He wanted to reach out and give Waif a pat as well, but was wary about doing so while Zoe was holding her. It wouldn't have been an issue last week, but he was afraid of crowding her.
"I'll have you all around after dinner," Mrs Carabaldi said. "You too, Zoe, if you're still here. Will you tell your grandma? Good, I'll take her back now, let you get on." She held out her hands for her chicken and Zoe rather reluctantly handed her back over. She felt a little bereft.
"Nice to meet you, Waif," she said, and Mrs Carabaldi beamed to hear her chicken being spoken to like it was a person and Cai had to really fight the urge to take Zoe's hand and beam back because she was so damned perfect.
Maybe I should get chickens Zoe thought, as they latched Mrs Carabaldi's gate behind them and stepped back out onto the footpath.
The little encounter had been so blissfully ordinary. Zoe, a little on shock from it, looked back over her shoulder toward the gate. "What a good name for a chicken," she said.
"You think? I think that was the chunkiest waif I've ever seen."
"I like badly named animals," Zoe said, who'd never thought about this aspect of naming things before but decided it was true.
"Yeah? What would you call a chicken, then?"
Zoe thought for a moment. "Balthezar." She said. Cai snorted with laughter.
God, Zoe didn't want to move the conversation away from chickens. "And I'd name one after Wolf," she said decisively. "Wolf the chicken."
Cai's laugh this time was less snorty, and had more of a grin behind it. "Can I be there when you tell Danny?"
"Yeah," said Zoe. She still had her hands in her pockets but the feeling of ordinariness hadn't left her. "And I'd get a rooster," she said. She knew they couldn't talk about chickens forever but it was laying a foundation she hadn't at all been expecting. "I'd name it Finch."
I am so in love with you Cai didn't say out loud.
"I'm sorry," said Cai, all of a sudden. His hands started to reach out and grab her hands but he stopped them before they could get close and ended up making a slight flailing gesture in the air between them. "For making you panic, I mean. For..."
Zoe 's eyes had widened a little at the movement of his hands, but shook her head to cut him off. "It wasn't you. I mean. Not really - It would have been worse if it was anyone but you." She looked at him, not sure how to explain it any better than that.
Cai took a few long seconds to think about his reply, and started to walk down the block. Zoe matched his pace, as simple as anything, and after they'd passed a couple of houses he spoke again.
"So it wasn't me, it was the fact that my visions flip us both out and sometimes make you end up in hospital?"
"Mm," said Zoe. "I..." she started, still walking. They made it half a block before she corralled her words into proper sentences. "I was already panicking before you ever got there."
"You were?" Cai asked with a worried frown. "What about?"
Zoe was biting her lip, her own brow furrowed, and after a moment she tilted her head to the sky and tried to blow the expression off her face and change tack. "I..." she said, then "Ugh" in frustration at herself for her pause, then, firmly, "I don't want to panic about us, Cai. But I don't know how to stop it."
They passed a few more houses. "Do you still want there to be an us?" Cai asked. Hopeful. Wary. But more hopeful that the answer might be yes than he was scared the answer would be no.
"Yeah," she breathed. "But I don't know how-"
"We can work it out though, right?" Cai asked. "Like - I want there to be an us, too. I really do. But if us is making you panic I don't want that - you're right, that bit was horrible -"
"You know that's what I meant when I said things were horrible," Zoe had to clarify. "I didn't mean you, I meant - the panic."
"Yeah I know," Cai said. "Don't worry, I knew."
Zoe sighed raggedly in relief. "I felt like such a shit, saying that."
"I didn't think you were a shit," Cai said. "I thought you were, just... overwhelmed."
Zoe made a hah noise without opening her mouth. "I wish I was less easy to overwhelm."
"Zoe," Cai said firmly. "You are not easy to overwhelm. The stuff you're dealing with would overwhelm anybody. So many people would have already snapped."
"I might still snap," Zoe argued back, quietly. "I feel half-snapped." Like bending one of those green twigs in half till it was just fibres holding the two together. A couple more twists and she'd be in two bits anyway.
"Do you want to talk about it?" Cai asked. "Like, do you know why it was too much, that night?"
Zoe took a long time in answering. This whole conversation was full of pregnant pauses. Zoe was grateful for his patience, she couldn't put thoughts into words any faster than she was doing it. Putting feelings into thoughts and then into words took even longer.
Did she know why it was too much? Why was that night any different than any other? Because Hope was having sex in the other room. Why was that too much, because she couldn't? Did she want to have sex with Cai? The thought filled her with a sudden terror she didn't want to look at any closer. No. Don't even think about it.
Maybe it was just jealousy that Hope could have sex and she couldn't and it was manifesting as terror? No, Zoe didn't think that was it.
Zoe didn't think it was just the fact that a really bad vision could put her in hospital, either. That was part of it, sure, but she didn't think that was what made the idea of actual sex so terrifying.
She didn't want to think about it. "I don't know," she said, at last. "It just was. Liz said I'd been running on fumes for too long."
Cai nodded. "Yeah, I thought that was it. You have been, you know."
"I know," Zoe muttered. A hefty dose of her dry humour had found its way back into her voice. "I have been made aware."
"How can I help?"
Zoe's automatic response was you can't. She only didn't say it because saying it, she worried, would end the conversation. And she very much wanted to keep talking. Aside from the sex-thing she didn't want to think about, this was the sanest she'd felt in days. Besides, thinking about sex was moot. It wasn't going to happen because of the vision thing so she should focus on freaking out about the vision thing and not about what she'd have to deal with if the vision thing wasn't an issue.
So how could Cai help with that? "I don't know," she admitted after another half block. "Holding that chicken made me feel like I was properly normal. And after days of wishing I could just hack out the unnatural parts of my brain with a scalpel it was a relief, you know?"
"Ah... so I could facilitate more chicken holding encounters?"
Zoe shrugged with one shoulder. Would that be enough? "What if I'm always on the verge of snapping, Cai?" she asked. "The world's not going to get any easier, is it? I don't think there's any way to get rid of my visions and even if there was, I couldn't live with myself if I did. I'm always going to see horrible things and sometimes it'll be worth it because there'll be people I can save and sometimes I'll get something wrong and people will die. I can't see how any of that's going to change, ever."
Cai said, thoughtfully, after a while, "I wonder how the people at Bletchley did it."
"What?"
"Breaking those codes in the war. They were getting these messages about life and death, end of the world type things, and all they could do was pass the messages on, you know?"
Zoe was just staring at him.
"They did that all the way through the war, but, all the people that did die in the war, that wasn't on them. They were doing everything they could to find a way to stop it happening, but I bet they still had to live with it."
"Codebreaking?" Zoe echoed. "I never thought about it that way before. I don't know if it's the same."
Cai gave her a shrug. "It is a little," he said, thinking about Peter's army. "And no one blames the codebreakers for not ending the war earlier. They blame the Nazis."
"Mm," said Zoe. She saw where this was going and her look darkened. And Cai had been around enough times when he or Danny or Liz or anyone tried to tell Zoe that something wasn't her fault or her responsibility and knew the backlash that would come from her if he pushed too hard. He could see she knew what he was about to say, anyway, so he didn't say it.
"I'm just saying," he said eventually. "I wonder how they managed."
Zoe shook her head. It was something to put aside and think about later. For now she just wanted to sit down... There was a little park up ahead, and she beelined toward it and found a seat, sitting down with a long sigh. "So..." she said, bringing the conversation back round. "I still want there to be an us but I don't know how, or how much, or if I'll even be able to handle it at all."
"But you want to handle it?" Cai asked, and then tried very hard not to make a face at his phrasing. It wasn't as bad as Deirdre's juices but it could easily be misinterpreted. Maybe if his face didn't make a sound...
Zoe saw his face try not to react. It other circumstances she'd be amused. "That's the dream, right?" she said wryly. She didn't have it in her to be very amused. "Be a normal person able to handle normal things like having a boyfriend."
"I note you didn't say normal boyfriend," Cai said.
"Yeah well, you wouldn't be normal even if you were normal," Zoe replied. Okay, maybe she could be a little amused. She should probably also stay on topic. "Yeah," she said. "I wanna be able to handle it."
"Okay," Cai said. A lot of him wanted to dance. He had to sit on his hands to try and calm the urge down. "How do we do that?"
"Hgn," said Zoe. That was the million dollar question, right there.
"We can go slow," Cai suggested. "Just, take it real easy for a while? No pressure, nothing. Come over sometime and help me feed next door's chickens?"
I don't want to take it slow Zoe thought, but it was too petulant even in her own head to say out loud. Besides, didn't she want to take it slow? Dammit - how could she want something and be terrified of it at the same time? She needed to get her brain sorted out.
Come on, Zoe. Slow was better than nothing, and she didn't want nothing. Through all the confusing noise in her head she knew what; she wanted something between her and Cai. "Yeah," she said, eventually.
Cai sighed in relief, leaning back against the seat and tilting his head toward the Autumn sun - it was masked by impending rainclouds, but they were thin, and the sunlight was a bright glaring grey sheet in the sky.