Re: [jude & hannah: tea]
Hannah had expected youth. She'd expected youth and severity. She'd expected a serious young man with dark hair and dark eyes, and she wasn't disappointed. She saw smiles and dancing in his eyes, but there was still something serious about the boy sitting across from her with dark curls in abundance.
A curious little bird, ear to her shoulder, she regarded and regarded, looked and looked. He was a new thing, a not-yet-met thing, an adventure sitting across a teaset and holding a book. No, but then he folded the receipt and dropped the book with the others, and he was an adventure with empty fingers and lined palms, and she straightened her head and smiled at him like a little bird made for smiles and sunshine, a thing not crafted for shadows and hard rains.
"Hi, Jude. It's nice to meet the real you." Because for all their talk of who they'd been on a night when they'd not been themselves at all, they were never as they were now. This was truth, even if truth came with defensive layers and self-protective falsehoods. They'd been open, open like gates thrown wide, but that wasn't them, not really. Hannah thought people's defense mechanisms were part of them, and perhaps that was her programming turning anti-virus and anti-malware into human traits and finding them fitting.
She knew the song he spoke of, of course, and she sang without caring if people in neighboring tables were listening. "Hey Jude, don't be afraid. You were made to go out and get her," and she laughed a bright twinkle laugh when she was done. Her voice was nice, but un-exemplary. She hit all the notes perfectly, and she wasn't too breathy, but her voice was perfection without sentiment, accuracy without feeling. "I bet that gets really tiring, that song," she speculated, and then she dropped pale attention to the tea. "I don't mind about the tea. What kind did you get for us?"