Welcome to Gaia! ::

Some kind of baking tournament was playing on the TV, but Sadie was only paying the smallest sliver of attention to it. They were entwined with Michelangelo on the sofa, their forehead tilted against where his shoulder met his chest, their spindly limbs curled up and over other parts of him. Her fingers were curled into his shirt, and her eyes were half-lidded.

They'd been like this for a while, now. She might have actually dozed, once or twice.

Out of the corner of her good eye, though, she saw that it was starting to get darker outside. A thought crept into the back of her head, and she shifted once, then twice. Sleepiness sat over her like a heavy blanket, and she was so comfortable here, like this, but she pushed through all that and managed to straighten slightly.

"Michel?" she asked, softly so as not to disturb him if he decided that he didn't want to move.

"I was going to try to go up to Pendour tonight. Do you want to come?"

Half-asleep Michelangelo would have been fine, Sadie thought, if they’d just tiptoed off. The show was getting closer to the finale, and Michelangelo’s hunky baker looked like he was doing quite well for himself. If Michel got bored with the TV, there were always others around, namely Luke.

They were glad he wanted to come, though. The wonder was peaceful when they went up alone, but it was the kind of place that was meant to be shared with people.

“We could see what’s in the kitchen, if you wanted,” they said, untangling their limbs from Michelangelo and rolling their own shoulders as they stood up slowly. “Get sandwiches or something? We’ve never actually had a space picnic, have we?”

They hadn’t taken Abzu up as much as some other people, and when they had, they’d just ended up falling asleep in the bedroom behind the waterfalls.

“They’re nice. You’d like them.” Sadie smiled over their shoulder before they started to take a few padding steps towards the kitchen. “Something about just being up there makes everything taste better.”

Especially, thought Sadie, if you were with your friends.

“Maybe,” said Sadie, at the thought of leftovers. There were a few meal’s worth in there, some roasted vegetable dishes as well as a half-eaten plate of dinosaur chicken nuggets, but honestly, Sadie already knew what she wanted.

They’d tried a new brand of hummus that had popped up in one of the grocery stores, and they hadn’t been able to stop eating it.

“Ignacio!” she said, her smile bright as bright as she saw him. She was already reaching for the bread on the counter, and she didn’t hesitate or think before she said, “Oh, we’re going to a space picnic on Neptune. Do you want to come?”

It was only five seconds later, when she was elbows-deep in the fridge, that she remembered the way that they often exchanged those glances, the boytoy comments from Ignacio, the way Michelangelo could sometimes play up his relationship with Luke specifically to make people uncomfortable.

Grabbing the hummus, she remembered that her favorite people might not like each other very much. She glanced back to Michelangelo, looking for approval or disapproval.

“Seitan is good,” said Sadie, who wasn’t a strict vegetarian, but who tended towards those options most of the time. Part of it came down to environmental reasons, but the other part was that vegetarian food was delicious, and didn’t come with some of the issues that meats did.

This hummus sandwich, for example, would not risk having those awful, chewy lines of fat in it the way that a roast beef sandwich might.

She hoped Michelangelo wasn’t judging Ignacio for his food choices, especially when Sadie knew that when Ignacio avoided meat, it usually meant something very specific. She glanced over to him, slightly concerned, but over the past several months, she’d learned what to watch for, and he didn’t seem overly tense or fixated on his hands.

“You can try some of it when we’re up there,” she told Michelangelo. “You should try the hummus, too. I think you’d like it, really.”

She’d been eating it at least once a day for the past two weeks and she really did think that Michelangelo wouldn’t mind it, if he gave it a try.

Sadie dug a cloth bag out of one of the cabinet and started loading it with the food that she’d picked. Some carrot sticks, too, and some crackers.

The more things she could dip hummus in, the better.

Sadie thought that biting into a cold burrito might set off her gag reflex, and she did squint just slightly as a Michelangelo put them into the bag along with half of the fridge. On the other hand, though, she’s been eating mashed chickpeas for days and days now. Who was she to judge?

“I think we should be more than prepared,” she said, hefting the bag. If they brought any more food, she would have had to start giving some to the others to carry. She was stronger than her lithe frame might suggest, though, and as it was, she hoisted the bag up over her shoulder easily enough and started heading towards the door.

“You know, technically there’s a kitchen on my Wonder,” she told them. “A big one, I mean, for the guests that used to come. There’s maybe some smaller ones, too, in the houses.”

Although she hadn’t really looked, and also maybe there weren’t. A lot of resorts tended to push for the restaurants over the home cooking.

“I wonder if there’s a way I can keep basics up there, or at least maybe prepare, um, you know, canned soups or something, and the garden vegetables, in an emergency.”

She wasn’t the best cook, but it might be nice to be able to eat something in space that wasn’t always sandwiches.

“Um.”

Sadie wasn’t someone who had something to prove about her physical strength, the way someone like Livie did. She wouldn’t have minded handing the bag over to Michelangelo, especially since it was mostly full of his food, but the way Ignacio was being about it all made her pause.

It was going over Ignacio’s head, she thought, the selflessness in his small actions. He wasn’t even going to the effort of heating up a burrito for himself, but he was offering to do the work of carrying something for her. It was sweet, she thought.

She didn’t want them to start fighting about something so simple, though, and she felt the tension in the way that Ignacio seemed to be commenting on Michelangelo’s strength, maybe even his body.

“I’m okay,” she said. That was the best way to keep the peace, wasn’t it? It was the truth, too. Someone like Ignacio might have been a little stronger than her but she did enough gardening and yard projects that she wasn’t struggling with a bag of food.

She wondered if they were going to be like this all night.

She slipped out the door, trying to walk fast enough that they wouldn’t find anything else to fight about.

There was an outbuilding that she liked to slip behind to power up a few houses down, and before long she was wearing her mermaid dress, the silk shimmering under the streetlights.

“I’m here,” said Pendour, coming out from behind the building to find that the two of them had also powered up in her absence. Oh. Had she not needed to hide so much? It didn’t seem like there were any auras around.

In any case, she walked over to them, shifting the weight of the bag to her back so that she could reach out and take both of their hands, and then, with a whisper of an oath, they found themselves at the familiar crossroads of Pendour.

She wondered if the smell of salt air and the smell of water would be enough to get them to put aside their differences for a little while, or if her dual invitation had been a mistake and the two people that she was closest to in the world were going to be at each other’s throats for the next hour or so.

“The garden should be okay. I checked on it last time,” she told them. Honestly, with the irrigation system and the lack of weeds, she didn’t have to do much with it now except planting and pruning, and that wasn’t any kind of emergency.

“We could go eat by the cove, or if you two wanted we could maybe try to go work on the kitchen a little.”

Pendour didn’t know if what Encke was saying was supposed to be some kind of joke. Things like that went over her head, sometimes, and there was a culture of sharper humor, things like light insults and burns, that she had a hard time wrapping her head around. None of the three of them were smiling, though.

She squeezed Abzu’s hand, gave him the softest look she could, and murmured, “One second.”

Then, to Encke, she said, “Um, can you help me get some things for it?” Letting go of Abzu’s hand, she tugged him towards the underside of the grand staircase, a place where she had ended up putting most of her tools for the convenience of being able to easily grab what she needed when she first arrived at the Wonder. She had various sizes of shovels and hoes, watering cans, potting soil, that kind of thing, but there were also some non-garden tools. In a moment, they would need things like the broom, swiffer, and maybe some washrags, but she didn’t reach for them quite yet.

Instead, she turned to Encke. “What are you doing?” she asked him. Her voice was low, as they still didn’t have much privacy, and her tone was as gentle as ever, but for a moment, she looked him straight in the eyes. “It’s been five minutes and you’ve, um, already insulted him twice.” As she looked away again, her eyes were soft too, soft and sad.

She wasn’t angry. Just disappointed.

“I know you don’t like his being with Luke, but he’s not the one who’s acting off right now. You didn’t have to come with us if you were uncomfortable, but you’re the one who accepted the invitation. I know you like it here. I didn’t want to leave you out. I thought it would make you, um, happy to come.”

She wasn’t used to Encke acting like this. She didn’t like it.