There was a lot about Atlantis that Lauren really liked, but there were some things she really didn’t like. She missed her family. She missed her parents and her brother. Lately, she didn’t totally feel as connected to the group from home. She felt disconnected where she hadn’t before. Lauren hadn’t said that really to anyone and she wasn’t planning to, but she did feel slightly outside of it all anymore.
She was standing to the side watching as people were working on scrapbooking wondering what it would be like to have something so normal with her family again, she knew it wasn’t possible. Shutting her eyes for a second she turned abruptly nearly running right into the woman who looked like her mother.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to, I wasn’t looking.” Lauren gave a small smile. “Sorry.”
Fred really wasn’t the crafty kind of person. Well, not in the traditional sense. She was more so the kind of girl who built devices that looked like a big, wooden toaster but were actually axe catapults that killed big, creepy bug demons looking for their eggs. She’d been curious about all of the various craft events going on throughout the month, but so far she hadn’t taken part in any of them. Scrapbooking didn’t seem too difficult though, so she’d stopped by to see what it looked like.
She wasn’t really paying close attention to where she was going while casually strolling, so when she nearly ran into a young girl, Fred jumped a little and took a step back. “Oh! No, it’s okay. I wasn’t looking where I was going either. Sorry about that.” She gave the girl a friendly smile. This was the girl that Fred knew she looked like her mother. That had to be hard.
“Were you thinking about joining them?” She asked, pointing to the scrapbookers.
Lauren shrugged awkwardly, it felt bratty almost but she didn’t mean it. It was more that she couldn’t say what she was thinking, so she pushed it all down and forced a smile.
“It was me, really,” she said thinking about lack of looking where she was going.
“Not really, I was just thinking about how making scrapbooks online with shutterfly is so much easier than figuring out how to cut paper straight.”
Fred hesitated, but simply smiled a little. “I’m sure it was probably both of us,” she said, trying to be maybe a little reassuring that it was all alright. She’d known that she looked a lot like the girl’s mother soon after she arrived in Atlantis, but she’d tried giving her space since she knew it had to be hard on her to see her around sometimes. Fred missed her own friends a lot and even her parents, but she also wasn’t a teenager. It had to be a lot harder on Lauren.
“I think we all learned how to do that in Kindergarten, right?” She said with a laugh. “Cutting paper and making shapes. You’re probably right, though, making them online has to be a lot easier. I’ve never really been great with that stuff,” she said and pointed to the crafty people. “Building small projects and equations are more my style.”
Lauren wasn’t bad at cutting straight it just seemed like a good excuse not to do it and well, all the other reasons. “I guess it is a kindergarten sort of thing, but I’m not really big on all the papercuts either.” Lauren smiled softly. That probably would have been better to lead with.
“What kind of small projects?” She asked.
“Oh, lots of things. When I was growing up, my dad and I would find things around the house to make. We built a wooden catapult once. We accidentally scared the neighbor’s cat with that thing one time when we were testing out how far it could shoot things of various weights. Umm.. oh, a few water rockets. Several years ago I used that catapult experience to help make a weapon that would throw an axe by stepping on a lever.” Fred smiled. She hadn’t had much of a chance to experiment with that side of her skill set here in Atlantis, but now she was starting to get the bug back.
“Puzzles are a lot of fun too. Mind puzzles or ones that involve figuring out a code or a sequence of letters and numbers. That sort of thing.” Looking at Lauren, she wondered if she was already starting to bore her with all of the sort of technical talk. It didn’t happen as much lately, but there were plenty of occasions where she would stop talking and she’d find Angel and the others giving her blanks stares after she’d rambled on for a few minutes.
Lauren blinked when it seemed that Fred was on a roll and decided it’d be
“Did you almost hit the cat?” Was all Lauren could really think of saying, it was a lot of information and she wasn’t even sure she caught everything that Fred had just said. There were flying axes, puzzles with codes, not jigsaw, and she was pretty sure there was a water rocket too.
“Have you made anything here?” Seemed like the other logical question.
"Nearly," Fred admitted with a guilty expression. "He got away though before we took off any tails." That had been an experiment and project that was rarely ever repeated again. It had been fun up until those terrifying few seconds as they waited to see where it would fall.
At her next question, Fred shook her head. "No, I haven't. I'm sure I'd be terrible, and it's not really that practical, but it could be a little fun to try it out and see what happens."
"Tails?" Lauren asked. "Did the cat have more than one tail?" With the things she'd seen here and at home, it was possible that a cat would have more than tail.
"I think if there was something you wanted to make here or a project that it could be good, you never know what this place might need next and nothing is terrible when you at least try."
“What? Oh, no, not more than one tail.” Fred shook her head. The first time she’d seen a creature with more than one tail was long after the near-disastrous cat incident. Probably Pylea, although in Pylea, multiple tails was the last thing she’d needed to worry about during her years there.
“Doesn’t hurt to try, right?” Fred said with a small smile. “Would you like to join me? It might be fun.”
Lauren was surprised by the invitation and even if it was still weird that Fred looked like her mother she was so different from her it was easy to see the differences.
“Yeah, sure, why not, but I have to warn you it isn’t really what I’m good at.” Lauren agreed after a moment she still wasn’t sure but it couldn’t hurt, right?
Fred wrinkled her nose a bit and smiled. “Don’t worry, we can be not good at it together. Maybe even decide who has the worst one at the end and the second worst gets to spring for a snack or something tasty afterwards?” She didn’t know why she was trying to warm up to the girl. Part of it was knowing that she looked so much like Lauren’s mother, but there was more to it too. She had her own daughter here and even someone she was helping to keep an eye on in Buffy (still sometimes weird, by the way), but she still wanted to make sure Lauren was okay. Or as okay as a person could be when their family wasn’t here in a weird place like Atlantis tended to be most of the time.
“It’ll be fun. Let’s go.” She smiled again and pushed the door open into the meeting space where the scrapbookers were doing their thing. Hers was likely going to look a lot like a bunch of random pictures with random stickers stuck to a piece of construction paper, but maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.
“That sounds like a plan,” even though she was pretty sure Fred would probably win, Lauren decided it was worth doing something else and distract her mind than over think about everything else.
“Yeah, okay,” she said following Fred into the room. Whatever happened she figured it’d be interesting.