FC Drabble/Prompt: ‘Your characters most cherished person’...
A cup of tea, served in silence.
She looked up from her papers, the desk strewn with medical equipment and various tinkered items. Several glass jars contained odds and ends, eyeballs and sinew, bones and goo. A small crystal lit lamp shed enough light that she didn’t have to push her glasses back often and pinch at her nose bridge, unlike the small lamps she was used to from her time at home, guttering often when the odourless oil was running low. However even if her eyes weren’t tired, she felt it in her bones, long hours of studying at her desk in the evenings after work, hemmed in by towering shelves filled with books and only the deep cushioned chair as her companion against true exhaustion.
Holding back her initial waves of irritability, Tomoe put down her quill and leaned back long enough to see the door to the study close. Then she reached out and took the cup in her hands, warming herself with it and closing her eyes so her sense of smell was enhanced, taking in the rich, warm notes of the tea. If a scent could ever be heard, tea surely would be; a melody that played against the backdrop of her life. Over the years, the taste and the brands and the mixes had changed, but so had she.
Where was the girl who had worried in her room between schooling and her duties at the shrine, who had agonised over telling her parents that she wished to be a doctor, and not a civil planning officer? The older teen who had first heard the wind calling her, when aether flared through her veins so strongly that her sickness had left her bedridden for weeks, but each evening when her fever grew strong, the wind was always whispering comfortingly to her. The young adult, fresh in medical apprenticeship, and the first time someone had died in her arms; how she had wept for hours and hours, comforted when her youngest sister had hurried into her room and clung to her, not understanding why she had cried such. The day of occupation, the falling sounds of warfare, the panic in her chest as she had pushed through milling crowds at the docks of the enclave to try and get to her house, and finding the compound broken and deserted bar the scattered remains of some family, blood soaking into the sand. The tired woman who had finally been forced to take refuge in lands that were not Doman, were not even of the Ruby Seas and the East; who plied her trade with a dead, empty feeling inside of her, where the little embers of kindness she had so forcefully protected were already going out.
In each scene, each stage of life, she had tea. She had either watched her parents brew it, brewed it herself, watched Suzuran take the tea ceremony with graceful and almost effortless motions, or like now, had someone serve it to her.
Pushing back her chair with a soft groan of locked up muscles from long hours sitting at her desk, Tomoe slid to her feet and walked in circles on the deep pile carpet, every so often bunching her toes, all the while drinking her tea.
It was good to the last drop.
Smiling to herself, she put the cup down and gave the door one last, fond look, before returning to her all important, all consuming work.
He never said a word against it. If anything, he encouraged her as no one ever had, apart from possibly Suzuran. For Tomoe, medicine wasn’t just a job, it was a passion. She couldn’t adequately find the right words to explain why she felt that way, why she had this need to involve herself so deeply in her work that it melted all other aspects of her life away, leaving her with razor sharp focus on bones and muscles, on blood and hearts and the tick-tock of cells at work.
When she worked long hours at the office, he brought her lunch if he wasn’t at his own work, sometimes adventuring away from where she had a small clinic and they would sit together and eat. Whenever she was so busy that there was no time to eat, he instead brewed her a robust tea and brought instead the sweet treats she loved so much; taiyaki, bean-jam filled fish pastries.
If she came home and spoke first, he knew she was having a good day, and with one another they would cook dinner and talk, shoulder to shoulder and laughing shyly together. But when she came home with a face not too dissimilar to a thundercloud, he would let her go quietly into the bathtub and soak until she felt better, never saying a word about either the sounds of frustration or sobs that permeated through the walls.
When the snows came and they went to Coerthas to visit his family and friends, business connections in the wool foundries and dye merchants bringing in new wares, she felt deeply melancholy and would spend hours staring out of a thickly paned window at the swirling flurries of white, seeing ghosts. He would cover her with a knitted blanket made of chunky, homespun wool and if he noticed the pensive distance in her eyes, distract her with small talk. He encouraged her to tell him about her customs and he showed those of his own culture to her; he set up a small shrine for her, replete with incense and the offertory altar and he would kneel with her and listen to her talk when she felt the sadness most of all, because each new year was another year she was more removed from the family she had loved so deeply and strongly.
It was hours later when she looked up from her notes to the small window, noting that bright daylight streamed in as the grey of dawn faded away. Tomoe stood, once more cracking her back and picking up the teacup with the saucer, she set herself to the kitchen and with practised motions, used to the space she shared with him, began a new pot of tea. Watching the leaves churn through the heated whirlpool, the eddies of colour and flavour sliding through each current and testing the flavour with a teaspoon so she was sure it had steeped long enough.
Deciding it was good enough, she set the tray with the proper earthenware and lifted it. Blinking through the dust highlighted by the golden rays of a new day, she swayed her way down the halls and steps to their bedroom and pushed the door open with her back, only to pause as a bemused, loving smile gently filled her sharp featured face.
Laid on his back with an arm overhead, his shirt thrown wide open so she could pick out his lovely skin, the beautiful bones of him and the thick pulse of life beating in the vein at the hollow of his arched throat. Rich brown hair was scattered back from a face deep with sleep, etched with a scar she promised one day she would take away. Carefully she crossed the room, tip-toeing around forgotten clothes and to the partly drawn curtains, and with the light illuminating she leaned forward.
His brown eyes opened to see her, and she just smiled, pulling her face back from his and offered him a single cup of tea, serving it in silence.
