WHAT: Kate finds Violet's bird, Dorian, and they have a visit WHERE: Black Widow House WHEN: Backdated to February 12, 2024 WARNINGS: Swearing parrot STATUS: Complete
There was a bird at Black Widow House.
And no, it wasn’t Mango the Screecher, her sister’s tiny little menace who she claimed was ‘not an ordinary bird’. Kate agreed with that sentiment; Mango too often seemed determined to destroy her eardrums at every possible turn for her to be an ordinary bird. Yelena would claim she was just smarter than Kate, and while that was rude, she was beginning to wonder if maybe that was true. Or maybe she was attributing too much motive to a simple parakeet, but that was a spiral for another time.
Normally, Kate might not have clocked this particular where it was out in the backyard, perched on one of the lower tree branches. They were tucked right into Vallo City’s suburbs, and birds of all kinds weren’t rare sightings around here. She usually woke up to the chirping of robins or bluebirds or whatever was native chirping outside her (Natasha’s) bedroom window these days.
This one attracted her attention when it swore.
The word was so clear, so concise, and so jarring that she called Lucky back to her side, assuming that someone was there. It wasn’t until she heard it again, accompanied by an accusation of cheat that her eyes flew to the culprit. Gray, much bigger than Mango, and looking content as could be to sit there and name-call. Of course she’d whipped out her phone to take a video and posted it to the network to share the hilarity. She hadn’t expected for him to be claimed, but she really should have known a swearing bird would belong to an Outlander.
According to Violet, his name was Dorian, and he was hers. He was also, when Kate approached him, much more willing to be picked up than she’d imagined, and with Lucky beside her, she managed to transport him inside to hang out in the kitchen until Violet could come by to pick him up. Mango, caged while Yelena was at work, seemed offended by the presence of a bigger bird, and even more so when Kate offered him a few slices of the little bird’s namesake food to eat while they waited.
Eventually, the screeching died down, and Lucky lifted his head from his paws when a knock came at the front door. Kate got up to answer it and greeted the lady waiting for her with a grin.
“Milady, your bird awaits,” she joked, waving Violet inside with a playful flourish.
“My thanks, kind gentlewoman, for your no doubt noble and courageous capture,” Violet said with a curtsy, lifting one side of the skirt of her dress as she dipped – her other hand was occupied by the bird cage she’d hastily purchased on her way over.
Dorian was not who she’d expected to follow her into Vallo. She hadn’t quite given up on the possibility of Maud coming along any day now, though she was beginning to come to terms with the fact she wouldn’t be seeing her any time soon. It wasn’t that she was disappointed that it was Dorian. It was just… not her Maudy.
But when she did see the parrot, hopping along on the counter chasing after a bit of string, she couldn’t help but smile. She’d missed him too, noisy and annoying as he could be.
“Why hello there, Dorian,” she said in a nearly musical voice. “I hear you’ve been on quite the adventure this morning.”
“Hello! Shut up!” Dorian squawked.
“As charming as ever, I see,” Violet said affectionately. She placed the bird cage on the counter and held her forearm out to him. He hopped onto it and gave her ear an affectionate nip.
“Oh ow, you beastly creature,” she said, though she was smiling, and she manoeuvred him to the open cage door. It didn’t take much coaxing to get him to hop over to one of the perches.
“Honestly, thank you,” she said, once she’d shut the door and turned her attention back to Kate. “I hope that he wasn’t too offensive.”
She didn’t think that Kate was liable to be offended by much of anything. Kate did not seem like the offended type; it was one of the reasons Violet liked her so.
In general, Kate wouldn’t consider herself a bird person. Growing up in New York had been all pigeons, and they were aggressive creatures who’d swoop right down and steal the hotdog out of your hands. She didn’t have the best associations with them, and Mango hadn’t exactly sold her on pet birds either. But Dorian was fine – colorful in the way he spoke, but Kate wasn’t the type to be scandalized by foul language.
“I already like him better than this one,” she replied, jerking her thumb over her shoulder into the living room below; Mango could be seen (and heard) fluttering around and making her displeasure known in her own cage while Lucky lounged casually on the couch. “He made one hundred percent less effort to deafen me. And he’s got a pretty great vocabulary. I approve.”
“I wish I could take credit for his vocabulary,” Violet sighed. “Alas, there’s nothing like grumpy old women to teach all the best words to parrots. Still, Maudy and I had been working on one teaching him some new ones. Dorian, cunt.”
“Cunt!” the parrot squawked back, apparently delighted.
Violet preened, and then turned her attention to the other one. “I take it this colourful fellow over here isn’t yours, then?”
Kate laughed, the sound more surprised than anything. She hadn’t heard that one just casually fall out of this bird’s mouth, but given what she had heard, maybe she should have expected it more. He was totally pleased with himself, too, it was easy to see that much, but so was Violet. She could only imagine how that would have gone over in early twentieth century polite society. Her mother in the twenty-first century probably would have been just as mortified in her own right.
“Nope, Mango is Yelena’s,” Kate confirmed. “She’s had her since before I showed up. The cat, Licorice, and the dog, Lucky, they’re mine. Neither of them have gone deaf either, by some miracle. Birds and I don’t usually do well, but I’ve got her and New York pigeons, so Dorian’s the best experience I’ve had.”
Violet reached a thin finger between the bars of the cage to give Dorian a scritch under the chin, delighted to have elicited at least some surprise from Kate.
“Oh, I am very familiar with New York’s pigeons,” Violet said, shifting into a heavy New York accent. “I lived there for years, but I’m afraid the pigeons and I never became fast friends. In truth, I was never much of a bird person either,” or a pet person in general; she didn’t especially enjoy the feeling of having another life dependent on her and if she thought too hard about it, it made her skin itch, “but Dorian and I kind of ended up stuck together after a particularly eventful cruise across the Pacific. It’s a miracle this house isn’t absolute chaos if it contains birds, cats, and dogs. I’d always been under the impression none of the three got along particularly well.”
“They’re chill pets,” Kate conceded with a smile at the accent shift. Natasha would have been impressed with how easily Violet shifted between the two; there was a little pang with that thought, but she brushed by it. “Do you have time to sit for a bit or do you need to get going? I’ve got tea or coffee if you want. Depends on how English you’re feeling?”
Violet considered. She should probably get Dorian back home so he could settle into the new flat, but he seemed unbothered and Violet had no other plans for the afternoon. And besides, she didn’t like spending too much time in her flat, alone. It was too easy to see where Maud could fit into all those empty spaces, and she would take any excuse to not think about the shape of her absence.
“Coffee sounds good,” Violet said, keeping with the New York accent as she slid into one of the chairs. “A bit of cream and some sugar too.”
“Coffee it is,” Kate smirked. She turned to pull down a couple of mugs from the cabinet and set one beneath the spout of the espresso machine, expertly pressing the appropriate buttons to get it started. “How long were you in New York? You’ve got the accent down,” she complimented. “Bronx?”
“Got it in one, though I lived in Greenwich Village. I decided that the Bronx accent was the one most likely to drive my family insane though.” Not that she’d ever expected them to hear it. And then a very distant aunt had died and had left her everything – also to piss off the family; she knew she’d been her favourite relative for a reason – and Violet had been brought right back onto a ship with them.
“I was there for five years. So not a natural accent, but one that I’m pretty proud of. You grew up in New York?”
Kate nodded, pulling a box of cookies out of another cabinet before she went to sit on a stool at the kitchen island. She pulled out another for Violet, nodding toward it to let her know she could join her. They could hang out in the kitchen, but there was no sense in standing around.
“Manhattan born and raised,” she said. “Upper East Side.” She didn’t need to elaborate further than that to imply her family was stupid wealthy. Enough so that she had a trust fund that could last her the rest of her life and had, thankfully, stuck around Vallo during her two-week absence. “I don’t think I have much of an accent, but I guess I wouldn’t hear it.”
Violet was absolutely not going to refuse cookies. She took a seat, crossing her legs at the knee, and helped herself, looking for all the world as if she was a very frequent guest instead of someone who’d literally just visited for the first time ten minutes ago.
“Americans never think they have an accent. It’s cute,” Violet said. She took a bite of the cookie. “Please tell me you live in one of those gorgeous mansions on Fifth Avenue. I’ve always hoped to snag an invitation to one of them, someday.”
Kate had to give it to Violet: she was right. She didn’t think she had an accent, but she didn’t hear her voice super often from an outside perspective. Her accent definitely wasn’t as American-generic as her sisters could pull off thanks to their spy training, but she didn’t think it sounded like much of anything. Nothing heavy like the Bronx or even the slighter Brooklyn drawl. But if it made her cute to protest, well, she was okay with that.
“I mean, the penthouse is kind of a mansion in itself,” Kate said with a shrug, picking up a cookie for herself. “But no, we’re not on the millionaire row.” She considered Violet for a moment before realizing, “Oh! Those must have been, like, barely old at all when you were in New York, huh?”
“Nope, not old at all. A lot of them aren’t much older than I am; I even got to see some of them being built.” She paused, and then, aghast, she said, “Oh, that must make me seem positively ancient by your standards.”
Kate couldn’t help laughing, some nervous part of her finally falling into a sense of ease at the look on Violet’s face. “No, not at all,” she assured her. “My last girlfriend – well, she was a little older than me, years-wise, but only like a decade. But the one before, Elsa, she was from, like, mid-eighteenth century. And there are a ton of Outlanders here from all different times.”
“Yes, I suppose there are some people here who I’d consider to be from ancient times as well.” Astarion was from an entirely different world, but she was fairly certain that whatever world he was from didn’t have steamliners or automobiles, so at least she had that. She still hadn’t quite worked out the equivalent timeline of wherever Nikolai was from. “And how old are you?”
“Twenty-four,” Kate replied, despite the cognitive dissonance in her head. Back home, she was still twenty-three, but she’d been here, minus her vacation, for two birthdays now. “Coming up on twenty-five in March.”
The espresso machine let out its jingly notification and she rose to grab the fresh brew, passing it to Violet. She got another started for herself before reaching for the bowl of assorted creamers and sugars.
“You?” she asked, returning and placing the bowl. She hadn’t realized how little she’d known about Violet before, but it made sense. They had only had a handful of conversations, and Kate was preoccupied. Now she was interested to learn much more.
“Nearly twenty-five? Really?” Violet asked, raising an eyebrow. She wouldn’t have put her a day over twenty. Maybe it was because she reminded her in a lot of ways of Maud, and Maud was only nineteen. “I’m twenty-three. Twenty-four in May, which I suppose is a good deal further away than March.”
“I don’t know about a good deal,” Kate countered, “but further, yeah. I’m taking your disbelief as a compliment, by the way.” She grinned and playfully flipped her hair over her shoulder with a flourish. “I’ve been here two years now, and I got here just before my twenty-third.”
“It was,” Violet said, shooting Kate a wink, though some of the gaiety left her face when she thought about the rest of Kate’s statement. Two years. Edwin claimed he’d been here about two years as well. Two years, and Robin still hadn’t appeared, though maybe Edwin was glad of that, considering that he seemed pretty settled in with Nikolai now. She wondered what he’d do if Robin did show up now.
“Do you ever miss home?” she asked. “Oh, but I suppose you only just got home from a visit home, didn’t you?”
Kate’s expression sobered along with Violet’s, but she offered her a reassuring smile. She knew what she was feeling. She’d felt it so much in the beginning, and it was only as she’d settled down and found her family here that the waves of missing had ebbed more and more. That sense of security had been shaken after her unexpected trip home and return, but she still had anchors she could depend on.
“I missed it sometimes before I went back,” she answered. “That’s natural, I think. I’m sure I’ll miss it sometimes still. But it’s different there. My relationships are different, my people are different. Being here is like living an entirely separate life, and I feel like I’m a different person than who I would have been back there. If that makes sense.”
“It does. Different people shape who you are.” She could feel how she herself had changed after only three months with Maud. Three months with Maud, and Robin, and Edwin, and Hawthorne. Most of the time she liked that she was above such petty influences, that no matter what she was Violet through and through, but she had to admit that the time she spent with her people, and with the experiences they all went through together, changed her in unexpected ways. It had been so different than how she’d acted and how she’d thought when she’d been with Jeremy. “Different people, and different experiences.”
And that, she thought, was enough of that. She smiled, beaming, at Kate. “Well, I should be off,” she said cheerily. “Thank you so much for finding this pest for me.” She stuck her finger in between the bars of his cage, managing to withdraw them again just as he attempted to nip at them. “You must come and visit him once he gets settled in at Morningside.”
Kate tried to hide the surprise on her face with a smile – it was genuine. “Yeah, not a problem. I’d love to come by, just text me when you’re free.” She leaned down to look at the parrot in his shiny new cage and said, “See you later, buddy. Thanks for not biting the shit out of me when I picked you up.”