Poor Mitch, floundering to keep his head above water. Lailani bumps his knee with hers, hopes the gesture is grounding when it’s probably just disruptive. He looks like he’s hesitating at the cliff’s edge so she takes her fork too, spearing a dumpling and using it to hide her smile. It keeps her from speaking, too, which gives too many other voices a chance to jump in.
“Yes,” Carmen says at precisely the same moment that Eliza tells him, “Not quite,” so Carmen waves a hand near her head with a very youthful eye roll. “We in this room are, yes. Eliza here is my youngest daughter and Lailani is her niece. The rest are family of assorted kinds. Is Maria related to us?”
“No, her family is from Colombia,” Eliza chimes in. “But Njeri married into the family, I think. Somehow. Or was that Nikki?”
“Nikki isn’t married, dear.”
“Thank God,” they say as they pass by the kitchen door, adding in their wake, “Most of us just come and go like hungry dogs.”
Lailani took their moment of back-and-forth to push another plate closer to Mitch. “Eat,” she insists, too quiet for this loud, colorful house. “We can roam around in the woods later.” There are too many people for him to get to know, and he’s already part of her family anyway. There’s plenty of time for that in the future, between his trips elsewhere to work off the frenetic magic sparking under his skin.
Her reassuring murmurs don’t go unnoticed. Eliza finally gives up on being the host and sits beside them, smiling so her round cheeks are rounder still. She almost brushes Lailani’s hair off her face, her hand stopping just inches away before retreating. “What brings you home, dear? Your friend looks perfectly shell-shocked, which means you did not warn him at all about us, did you?” She clucks her tongue but it’s playful, like she always is. Carmen laughs in that way of hers that says how could anyone be adequately warned about us?
“I missed being home,” is all Lailani says at first, stirring her tea with her finger so she can avoid looking directly at either of them. They can only know so much, and that has never been a problem - when Feiyan found her, they understood her life would always be a little beyond them. It was a good excuse not to explain the fear she’s starting to feel all the time, at The Lair or not. The vision she’d just had… Something was very wrong with the world for The World’s absence, and none of it was getting better.
Absently her free hand drifted up to Mitch’s hair despite not having his permission in the moment, despite the look on his face that was quite clearly a plea for her protection from the whirlwind of new, despite the fact that her family was right there watching her touch without asking.
Though, at least for the last point she has some sort of defense. “And Mitch is my brother, so I wanted to show him around.”
Carmen and Eliza share a look at that news, but they’ve always been all about taking things in stride. “We get so few brothers around here! Well good, I was thinking of doing stir fry for dinner so we’ll have the perfect amount of food to add you two in, and one of the rooms upstairs is actually empty for once so you’ll both have plenty of space for as long as you’re staying-”
They really would go on like that for ages if allowed, so as soon as Lailani sees Mitch eat more than two bites she slides her hand into his carefully and pulls him out of the kitchen, up a winding staircase, stopping twice to step over a cat and to pick up another cleverly disguising himself as carpet. “This is Carpet,” she says by way of introduction.
At last they’re in her old room and it’s quieter - not quiet, because once inside 3 Blue Robin Ave there’s no real escape from everyone - but quieter, which is the best she can offer. She does so with a sheepish shrug. “They’re a lot.” Yet she feels a little better already. It’s hard to feel magic crashing down around their ears when everyone int he house is so matter-of-fact about their strangeness. The Lair only has that quality some of the time.
He looks pale, or maybe just cold, or - more likely - completely overwhelmed, so she tugs her old comforter off the bed and wraps it around him like a downy cloak. “You should stay for dinner though, if you want. And as long as I’m here, if you want that too. I do.” She’s still not sure if saying it so openly makes him feel better or worse, but ever since the night they’d made their nest in the library window, she just knows honesty works for him. She ought to say exactly how she feels. It’s something very few others in her life have ever asked.
“You’re family now. Everyone here comes here when they want, and leaves when they want.” It’s an echo of what she said to him on nest night. She’s looking at him now, rare clarity in her gaze. “You’ll always have a place wherever I am.”
laila grabs a dumpling, so he does as well, hesitating for a moment before taking a bite.
it’s .. not exactly like the dumplings that he’s had before but they are amazing in a way that he doesn’t remember (kimbap rolled messily, seaweed soup on a birthday, flashes of the past in a bite despite being completely different) and he’s eaten three before he stops for a breath.
then the answers start flooding in, chiming from the doorway, around the room, and he drowns it out by eating quickly. he’s tempted to shove some of the bread into his pocket, instinct to save food for later, but knows he could find it elsewhere if he really needs to.
he looks longingly at the piece while his mouth is full, but laila is still pushing food towards him so he relaxes. perhaps, if he’s good and they like him, he’ll get more.
then there’s an undercurrent in the room, some tension he can see in her shoulders that feels wrong but normal, but he shrugs it off for spearing another dumpling. he completely forgets about it when her hand brushes through his hair, and he feels the contact ground him, and the panic that still churned in his stomach at the newness and the family and the fear, it eases slightly.
he finally looks up from the plates, over to her, ignores the way that everyone is looking at him as he’s ...
claimed is the wrong word, but is the best one for him, a collar with a tag unusual but warm and safe and that’s what her hand in his hair feels like, like claiming and homes and the word brother echoes in his head and his stomach starts to protest the food he’s just inhaled and any blush has dropped away to paleness.
he just about sets his fork down, doesn’t drop it, tries to say something but the conflict is choking and one hand reaches up to rub at his neck but the room is full of noise again, arguments not quite over him but like its background noise and needed and he can’t speak can’t breathe
her hand slips into his and he thinks that he’s been half-tangible, half way into disappearing since she’d said it and his hand tightens in hers as they step out of the kitchen and he feels numb and too full at the same time.
he nods in half-awareness at Carpet, stands where she leaves him in her room, lets the blanket get draped across his shoulders but doesn’t take a move to accept or reject it.
continued acceptance and claiming and wanting and hoping and he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to be giving to her for all of this, this unequal trade of affection and stability and support.
there’s an unconscious moment where his knees almost buckle and he would offer himself if he didn’t know that that wasn’t what she wanted. where she could tear open his skin and grip his heart and scar him endlessly if it meant she would continue to offer these gilded promises.
he flickers out of existence, appears half a foot closer to the door, the comforter dropping to the ground where he stood. “ i- “
one hand snakes up to grip the hair at the base of his skull, tugs hard enough to bring tears to his eyes.
“ don’t make promises you can’t keep “
his other arm wraps around his own chest and his heart breaks at the knowledge that she’ll be hurt as well when she’ll have to break it.
