fandomtownies | Groovy Tunes; Tuesday [05/26].

Some of the things Tisarwat had ordered for the apartment had arrived yesterday, and she would have liked to have started putting some of it together, but she had to remember that she still had a job upstairs and should probably focus on music store stuff when she was supposed to be working and not furniture stuff, but she almost worried that, left downstairs, Breq would see it and take it upon herself to just build it, because that seemed like something Breq would just do, and that made Tisarwat feel incredibly awkward, just like when Breq made her tea, although that was starting to feel a little less weird now.

But she had brought up something small, an end table, and had pulled out the parts and was now looking at the instructions with a feeling of dread and regret and thinking maybe she should just let Breq assemble it all.

How could Tisarwat manage to break into highly advanced Artificial Intelligence systems and completely dismantle a network of restrictions and codes with relative ease, only to then be completely baffled on how to build an endtable?

In her defense, the Lord of the Radch had never exactly encountered an IKEA before, so....

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Sometime before lunch Breq came upstairs, bringing tea.

"Tisarwat? I saw all your boxes downstairs? Don't worry about them, I assembled all the things, since you're working today. Tea?"

And that would be Tisarwat hitting you with one very withering look for a moment, Breq, because she should have known to have moved all those boxes into her room first! But this did mean that she had been saved an awful lot of frustration if an end table was turning out to be this much trouble.

So that withering look turned a bit grateful (and oddly pleased, to know that her assumption about Breq had been right, but it was still weird, that this was so very much still her Fleet Captain while also very much not). "I would love some tea," she said, putting aside a piece that she was pretty sure did not exist on the instrution pages at all, "thank you."

But then, with a worried crease to her brow: "All the things?"

"Yes, it was easy enough, I just followed the instructions."

She poured a cup for Tisarwat.

"How is that table coming along?"

"...maybe I got the wrong instructions," said Tisarwat, after a moment.

She did not.

The few pieces she did manage to get together seemed to still suggest otherwise, though.

"I'll sort it out for you," Breq said, offering her a cup.

"Thanks," said Tisarwat, in response to the cup, which she then took with a gesture, before regarding the failure of an end table, "but it's fine. You don't have to. Especially if you did all the other stuff. It'll be good for me to try to figure it out on my own."

It would end up in the trash.

She didn't need that end table, anyway.

"Are you sure?" Breq said. "I don't really have anything to do and..."

She looked at what could become an end table.

"...maybe you'd prefer to do something else."

And now Tisarwat was a little bit torn, because, on the one hand, she knew that Breq, as an ancillary, would probably want to feel helpful, but she didn't think of Breq as an ancillary and was driven much more by her urge to make Breq proud by actually being able to turn the table around. But she knew that for this Breq, it was probably incredibly weird that Tisarwat considered her so much more than just a spaceship.

It was a constant conundrum that she really wished she'd have anticipated when she decided she wanted to move in with Breq.

"No," she finally said, "I want to do it." And then another pause as some fourth hand just appeared into the mess she'd made in her mind. "Unless there's something else you'd rather me be doing?"

Because she was, techincally, at work right now and should probably be doing music store stuff, actually...

"It's not busy," Breq said. "Of course you can put together a table if you want."

She didn't think it was weird that Tisarwat would want to feel she was able to do it, the offer had partly been an offer of a way for her to escape the embarrassment of failure.

She'd done far more embarrassing things than not being able to put together a table. Tisarwat considered it a moment.

"Maybe I just need to take a break," she decided, setting it aside, turning her attention more completely toward Breq. "How are you today?" she asked. "Besides productive, apparently."

"I'm heading out to do some exercise in a bit," Breq said, aware that this didn't say much about how she was.

Groovy Tunes; Tuesday [05/26].

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