Terry was not the sort of woman you would expect to be a baker. The daughter of a former X-Men/Interpol agent who was raised by a criminal? Not exactly the susie homemaker type but Terry had always loved to bake. Which was why she was standing in the kitchen in the middle of the night baking cooking.

Maeve had gone to sleep on Tamsin's shoulder hours ago and was sleeping rather soundly in her crib. She slid the tray of cookies into the stove and slid up onto the counter to wait. As she waited, she hummed softly to herself.

She was glad that things were slowly inching themselves back to some resemblance of normal. Terry had been through enough to know that a lot of the kids would never fully be back to normal but school and dances and romantic drama, that was the life the kids deserved.

Sighing softly, she leaned forward and opened the refridgerator, snagging a sode. It would be a long wait but she didn't mind.

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After having been formally introduced to the teacher body as it were, Evelyn had been shown to a room that would be hers and she had then made arrangements for her belongings to be delivered.

There was definitely a distinct feeling in the air, one that Evelyn was all too familiar with given that she dealt with war torn countries and traumatised citizens a lot of the time.

Post traumatic stress, it hung around the mansion like a suffocating cloud of smog. More obvious in some and less in others, but nonetheless traumatic and damaging. Not that it was really her place to be commenting, even if she found herself wanting to.

She was currently keeping herself to herself, allowing the mansion time to adjust to her presence as well as getting to know her inside the classes and outside of it.

Callused tips of her fingers pushed back a few stray strands of dark hair as she sought through drawers in the kitchen for a spoon with which to stir her tea with, pausing only briefly when her fingers closed around a knife and she instantly processed it as a weapon. Evelyn could kill anyone with that knife and do so within seconds, that was how good her powers actually were.

She blinked herself out of that automatic state and placed it back into the tray, sliding her fingertips across to close around the spoon instead.

The gardens were a mess.

Well, not really, but if Millie convinced herself that they needed an exceeding amount of work, then she could throw herself into that and not have to think about anything else.

She'd gotten up early, almost before the sun, and gone out to the shed. She was pleased to see that the trees she'd ordered before- the trees she'd ordered had arrived. Ms. Munroe would be happy with that, too.

She spent all morning moving some of the saplings to the spots she'd already marked for their planting. Some were going against the fence, but a good portion were being scattered around the extensive grounds. The entire project would take her a long time, but she didn't care. At least she would be busy and exhausted.

She was avoiding. And she damn well knew it. She didn't want to think about what had happened. She didn't want to consider what had happened to the others while she'd been kept like a little pet inside her cell. She'd never seen one of the robots that the others had been put before, but David made sure she knew what she was missing. In as much detail as he felt he could afford. Which considering the mouth on him, was a lot of detail. And wasn't she just fucking lucky as hell that he'd decided to keep her as his pet so she wouldn't have to go through that.

Yeah. Real fucking lucky.

She started digging. The whole would need to be deep enough to secure the root ball and twice as wide to allow the roots to spread out properly. Maybe three or four feet down and three across. Not that she really needed to be that mathematically correct about it. But it helped.

The work was hard. Her muscles strained and ached, her back hurt, and sweat got into her cuts and stung like mad. Millie didn't care and in some ways didn't notice. She got focused as she usually did when working the gardens, and nothing else mattered.

Julian hadn't been at the Institute in months, but that didn't change the fact that when he walked through the front doors, he walked for all the world like he owned the place. His ever-present confidence hid more than a hint of worry and fear, though. He'd gotten a phone call from one of his friends at the Insitute and what he'd heard had made him pack and catch the first flight back.

Some of the people that'd been taken were his friends. And you didn't hurt his friends. Not without paying.

Sighing, Julian stood in the entrance, looking around. The place was depressingly quiet. Not at all like it had been when he left the last time.