Luke's stomach felt funny. To be fair, it had felt funny for the past couple of days, the the point where he was pretty sure that he'd eaten something wrong, but when he'd gone to pester Krishna, he'd been declared in normal health. And yet, this morning, he'd woken up feeling as if there were bees swarming in his gut, and it was only after he'd gotten nearly the the Shrikes' door that he even began to acknowledge that it was probably because of what day it was.
The prospect of not seeing his wife-to-be for two years was difficult to define. On one hand, he was genuinely happy that she was going to get to do something he knew she'd always wanted. On the other, it was rather strange to be without her for so long. Not that they spent much time in each other's company to begin with, but that itself was another complex dimension of this whole situation: beneath everything, there was a vague but unrelenting sense of what could only be identified as relief. For two years, there wouldn't be any sighs or sharp looks or annoyed grumbling. He wasn't so naive as to think that he wouldn't come up with some new way to let her down during their time apart, but there would, at the very least, be fewer of them available to him. And that alone was enough.
Not that the relief was the most palpable of the stew of emotions as he carefully straightened himself up and knocked on the door. When Reagan's mother answered the door, he smiled brightly (and a little sheepishly, as usual, though he hadn't done anything other than stand there, rocking slightly on the balls of his feet). "His Peace," he said, and then, peering over Coraline's shoulder to look at Reagan, said, "Ceddon's blessings, Reagan."
He extended the makeshift bouquet of yellow-eye daisies tied with a white ribbon. Cloves didn't like them much, considering how common they were, but that was precisely why Luke had been free to gather them up, since he wasn't allowed to pick flowers from the real garden. "You all packed for your trip?" he asked. "I... was thinking if you have a little time we could take a walk."