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Yeande felt a pang of upset for the younger woman and fell silent as well. "I'm sorry." she sympathized. "Things don't always work out the way we plan them to. But at the end of the day what really matters is whether you're strong enough to pick up and keep going."

A hand reached across the table, fingertips placing themselves lightly under Nani's chin to tilt her head up a bit to meet her eyes. "Which you clearly are." she finished, offering her a reassuring smile.

Yeande smirked, leaning back in her chair once more, her tail curling comfortably around one of the table legs. "Well, aside from the fact he's made it abundantly clear he's tail-over-teacup for you, he tries not to talk about you -too- much around the house. His father still isn't very thrilled about the idea his son is growing up..."

To be fair, Talon had, if nothing else, dropped the topic of Nani. Which was about as good as one could hope for from him on this particular topic. "I know your first meeting with him wasn't under the best of circumstances..." she continued, taking another sip of tea.

Yeande tried not to, but heard herself chuckle in spite of herself. "You say that like there's a time he's ever -not- going off the deep end. Talon's got a very....mercurial temper."

That was the nicest way to put it. And that was what she would stick to. It sounded much better than Zhane's description of it....which was likely 'he's a d**k'.

"He's been that way since the day I first met him." she explained. "He never reacts to anything halfway, and he tends to react badly to things that are out of his control. So, that in mind....I wouldn't take anything he may have said or done personally."

In recent memory, this was the first time she could recall actually making excuses for Talon's behavior to someone. Ordinarily she was of the mind that if they didn't like him, that was their issue.....but then, this was also the first time someone had seemed genuinely afraid of him. And this someone happened to be very special to someone she cared deeply about.

Her knee-jerk reaction to hearing about the fact Tinania had a son, admittedly, had been warning bells. She was not a stranger to daytime television where people trotted their personal issues out on shows like Maury, and one of the favorite topics seemed to be attractive women trapping younger men into relationships to be fathers to their children.

"I won't lie to you. It did, at first." Yeande said, finishing her tea and setting the cup aside. "I don't think there's a mother in the world who wouldn't be wary of their son falling in love with a girl he's only just met who already has a son of her own. It sounds like the makings of a domestic horror story."

She drew a deep breath and let it out again. "But he's filled in some of the blanks whether he knows it or not over the weeks. And I'm not nearly as worried as I was, now that I've met you."

Her purple earfins keened a bit. "Do you have any pictures of your son?" she inquired, both curious and trying to make Nani feel a bit more at ease.

Yeande gently accepted the photo from Nani, holding it by its corner so as not to smudge it as she peered at the visages of the two children. She'd not exactly known what to expect, but felt any further thoughts washed away neatly by a rush of maternal instinct.

"They're adorable." she smiled. "And I bet it was a contest getting them to sit still long enough to take a picture." She spoke from her own experience, of course. When Zhane and Phae had both been small, getting the camera out seemed to have set off some primal need in them both to become hyperactive balls of energy that refused to cooperate for any length of time.

"I'm sure spending time with him has given him some good practice for handling Sellexi too." the ijiuo chuckled.

From the time she'd first heard Zhane discuss Nani, she'd promised herself she was going to maintain a neutral opinion when she finally met her face-to-face. But the more Nani revealed of herself and her life, the more Yeande found it hard to cling to that notion.

Nani was clearly a young woman who had made mistakes, but then, everyone did. She didn't define herself by them, but rather played what she was dealt and looked ahead rather than over her shoulder.

She opened her mouth to say more, but before she could speak, she was interrupted by the front door opening and then banging shut. Casting a brief look in the direction of the noise, and then back at Nani, she called out.

"Talon?" she tried.

"I didn't put my eye out, I'll take care of it." Zhane's voice floated back, sounding somewhere between pained and annoyed. Yeande breathed a sigh of relief, grateful she would not have to play middle-man to a confrontation.

"What did you do?" she asked, waiting for him to appear in the kitchen doorway.

"Its not a big deal, mom."

Yeande set her jaw and leaned forward a bit in her chair as she handed the photograph back to Nani, clearly about to assume the no-nonsense mother role.

"Zhane...let me see." she said warningly. There was a sigh of exasperation as he trudged into the kitchen, looking to be in a state of disarray. His hair was mussed with bits of grass and twigs clinging to it, there were smudges of dirt on his pants, and he was clutching his upper left arm.

Seeing Nani, he stopped short, goggling at her momentarily in surprise, before smiling at her. The annoyance that soured his features was gone almost instantaneously, his current state forgotten about for the moment.

"Nani....hi." he said quietly.

This was a familiar dance to Yeande by now. If Zhane came home early it was either because he'd forgotten something, or because he'd hurt himself. Today, it looked to be the latter and she was already out of her chair, wetting a clean dishrag at the sink.

The first time he had come home in such a state, she'd nearly panicked. But as the years had worn on, it was such a common occurrence anymore, that she could only bring herself to be annoyed.

"I really wish you'd be more careful." she said, her back still to the two of them as she wrung water out of the cloth. "Because one of these days its NOT just going to be something you can just wash off and bandage u--" she trailed off as she turned to watch the scene before her, perplexed.

"Nani, its okay." Zhane told her, though he made no effort to pull away. "It isn't as bad as it looks...." Whatever she was doing to him, though, was deeply soothing. The dull throbbing ache from the puncture a tree branch had left in his forearm when he'd taken a spill down a hillside ebbed away to a distant pressure.

Zhane's eyes widened a bit, still bewildered about finding her at his home, and now even moreso at what she'd said. For the first time, he noticed the necklace he'd bought her resting around her neck, and felt a broad, unguarded smile, cross his features.

Forgetting his mother was in the room, he pulled her close, hugging her tightly to him.

Yeande watched them for a moment in silence, feeling a pang of something that made her look away. She'd insisted she was fine with it, but seeing the two of them together somehow drove the point home for her that the day was quickly coming that Zhane would be out on his own, with his own life and family to look after. And like many parents before her, it made her feel old.

Quietly excusing herself to leave them in peace, she sauntered out of the kitchen and disappeared upstairs to find something better to occupy her mind with.