Blackstone Foundry and Forge; Saturday [04/15].

[special_rabbit]

Well. Last night was prom, and Amaya had been on this island for a while now, so waking up to hear the sounds of hammering from downstairs that weren't her own hardly came as any surprise. Just a groan to herself for having forgotten and a wash of relief when, after she'd taken her time in getting coffee and maybe a little breakfast, she'd gone downstairs and only found the one child there, only after all these years, she really wasn't much of a child any more.

"Put that down, Zeph," she instructed when she'd noticed what piece in particular the girl was inspecting. "That's a new hammer project I don't need you messing up."

"I wouldn't mess it up, Mother," Zephyr insisted, giving Amaya a withering look and a shake of her very blonde head. "I was just thinking that, for a hammer, it seems kind of...dinky."

"Well," said Amaya, going over to pluck the hammer-in-progress out of Zephyr's hand and slipping a regular smithing hammer in its place instead, "so's the person it's for. Physically, I mean, but believe you me, she makes up for it in personality. But since you're here...I've got some new plate that could use some shaping and some chainmail I've been meaning to link, and, if I remember right, it's in the armor that you really shine."

Her eyes certainly lit up at the prospect, anyway, and it wasn't any surprise, really, you take a Blackstone daughter and give her some work, and she's happy as a clam hammering away and filling Amaya in on what she'd been up to since last year while Amaya drank her coffee and watched the door with a sense of dread in her stomach, trying to keep an ear out for the pitter-patter of any other little feet...

The Forge is open!

Comments

[wee_little_crumbler]

Perhaps it was unsurprising that Irene was the sort to fancy a little lie-in at the weekend. And since she wasn't a teacher and was fairly out of touch with the school calendar, she had not anticipated being woken by the sounds of someone puttering around in her flat. Thankfully, she'd spotted a curly little brown head before she could grow too alarmed, she'd known exactly what weekend it was -- and she remembered prom, to go with it -- and called out a good morning to her occasional son, Hamish.

Except it wasn't actually Hamish. And all that alarm came right back.

The door to the forge swung open with the abandon of being flung by a small child who still needed to be reminded to take care, and in rushed a boy of about four, calling, "Mom! Mom! Good morning, Mom!"

And behind him trailed a watchful, if perhaps obviously quietly panicking, Irene, who took quite a bit more care to close the door than Gareth had to open it. "Darling, gentle hands, remember," she cautioned, dropping an immediate hand of her own onto his little head in an effort to keep him from just flinging himself into something pointy.

(Though, actually, considering whose kid this was -- he knew better, didn't he?)

[crumble_and_shine]

Aaaaand there it was. That knot of dread in Amaya's stomach being confirmed by a far-too-energetic little person calling out an M-word at her, and that knot turned into a brick at the sight of that curly mop of hair, which she could only assume he'd gotten from his father, and there was a miserable little sigh of acceptance for the inevitable, they'd somehow managed to avoid being stuck with one these so far, it was bound to happen eventu--

But that was when Irene followed through that door, and called him darling and set a hand on his head and Amaya was not prepared for that OR the delighted little squeal that burst from Zephyr beside her.

"There's a half-sibling!" she cried out in glee. "I was starting to worry you'd gotten boring, Mother, and I wouldn't have one! And oh! Aren't you the fancy lady from last time?"

Her eyes were absolute shining beacons her grin equal parts enthralled and scandalized.

"Fantastic."

[wee_little_crumbler]

"I am, indeed, the fancy lady from last time," Irene replied with a rueful laugh, taking a moment to examine each of Gareth's hands for evidence of stickiness. "It's nice to see you again, Zephyr."

Zephyr would have been hard to forget, even if she hadn't inspired the occasional curious-slash-jealous impulse in Irene to try to look more into knights. (Maybe she could hire some sort of Daventrian private investigator?)

And now that Gareth's hands had been deemed unsticky enough, and Irene was reasonably sure he wasn't going to hurt himself, she let him go -- and where he went was a beeline for Amaya, for he was very tired of Mother's fussiness already this morning, and wanted to play! Or help! Both?

"Mom, do you need help? Mother says I may but only with what you say you need help with," he asked in a rush of strangely perfect, nearly Adler-esque diction, and a curious (and maybe a little shy) glance cast towards Zephyr.

[crumble_and_shine]

"Oh," said Amaya dryly, "I need help, alright."

Somehow, though, she didn't think this wee little moppet could provide that help, unless he had a flask of something very hard sequestered away in all that hair somewhere.

And Zephyr, clearly an old hat at all of this by now, took a moment to consider the little boy, to consider her mother, to consider the fancy lady, before she nodded and resolved to act, coming around to meet Gareth's shy little glance over with an encouraging smile and kneeling down beside him.

"Hi, there!" she greeted him cheerfully. "I'm Zephyr!"

Yes, there was a dramatic lilt given to it, a moment to lift her chin and toss back her hair a little bit, because showmanship, especially when announcing one's name, was one of the most important aspects of being a knight!

"I'm your older sister from another dimension!" she continued brightly. "Your mom," she gave a nod up toward Amaya, "is my mom, too, but our other parents are different. If you want to help, though, I was just about to get started on some chainmail. Has your mom taught you how to do that yet? It's very fun, and very good for little tiny hands. Would you like to help me out?"

[wee_little_crumbler]

Gareth considered this proposition very seriously for a moment before nodding his head once. He did indeed have little tiny hands, and he loved the way chainmail felt, too. "All right."

This was a little confusing, the idea that Mom might have another child with someone who wasn't Mother, and that this was his sister -- but one of the nicest things about being four was that it was pretty easy to roll with new information like that. And besides, he'd been begging for siblings for ages -- he just thought she'd be a baby, since that was how it seemed to go when other kids got new siblings.

"Manners, love," Irene reminded him as she drifted a little more into the forge as well, her tone more gentle than it might normally be. "Can you please tell Zephyr your name?"

"Oh!" Gareth looked a little abashed before straightening up, lifting his chin in a way that might look real familiar, and announced, "My name is Gareth Blackstone-Adler. It's nice to meet you, big sister."

"I don't know how the hell you got to be first," Irene added in a light undertone to Amaya, her eyes offering something like an apology.

[crumble_and_shine]

"Well," Zephyr snorted a little, "if we're going to be so formal about, little brother, my full name is actually Zenobia Eduarda Percival Hector Yamaya Ramon Jr. the Fourth of Daventry...but don't worry, I don't expect you to remember all of that. That's why I go by Zephyr!" Dramatic pause, head toss, the whole thing. "Instead!"

Plus, it was a lot catchier, if it she was going to be famous like her father.

"But come on," she pulled herself up to her full height (which was, notably, taller than her mother's now; someone hit a growth spurt in the past year!), and offered out her hand so she could lead Gareth over to the chainmail she was going to work on, "let me show you how to do it, and we can let our moms be boring grown ups together."

She was, however, passing a very knowing look at both of them over her shoulder, because they clearly had things they needed to be grown-ups about right now!

And Amaya was just hoping that all of that was distracting enough that no one heard the offended little sound that escaped her when a hyphen was involved in that name, and when she went to stare at Irene incredulously over it, she found that she couldn't actually look at Irene right now, meaning her eyes did an interesting little bounce when they tried, as if they'd hit a force field and quickly directed toward the ceiling instead.

"I don't know how the hell that even works!"

The whole....son, of it all. Not the name thing, she'll....not get to that, later, if she could help it, but the whole...

Well.

All of it.

[begmetwice]

"He looks like you." No, he miraculously looked like both of them -- that mop of curls was what her own head did when left unchecked without the aid of her various products, but that defiant little chin-lift had been so Amaya she'd nearly lost control of her goddamn knees, and his eyes --

This weekend. And it was worse, in a way, than it had been with Hamish -- Hamish had always hurt, in the way needling little glances at another life might hurt, but Gareth was....

Possible wasn't exactly the word -- much like Amaya, Irene did not know how the hell that even worked (and now she was going to spend all weekend trying to suss out which of the two of them had been pregnant, because either way that sounded like a very long nine months in that universe) -- but she just couldn't stop looking at him. Even when she considered that it might be easier to just lock herself in the toilet and pretend she was dead (again), and even when that tightness of panic rose in her chest -- she just kept catching herself watching the way he politely followed Zephyr, the way he stood on his little toes to get a better look, the way his trainers were clearly Hugo Boss and yet had already picked up soot....

"At least he's sort of cute." And better behaved, thus far, than Hamish had ever been. Much less sass. (Thus far.)

[special_rabbit]

There was a wry snort from Amaya, because, while there may have been a fathomless distance of thoughts between Irene's two statements, they reached her ears in quick succession and seemed to make an immediate comparison that clearly needed to be refuted.

"He looks," she insisted, realizing that looking over at Gareth was a workable solution for avoiding looking at Irene, and shaking her head because it really wasn't that much better if she let herself think about it for longer than two seconds, "like you, if you ask me, and he's very cute, actually."

That's how you could tell how thrown Amaya was right now, just letting compliments fall out of her like it was nothing, almost, because her mind was too busy working on other flailing things to notice.

Blackstone-Adler! Really, now! And she did not appreciate her thinking that it actually had a nice ring to it, now, didn't it?

[begmetwice]

Such a nice ring that it was worth ignoring important things like alphabetical order, even!

But Irene was thrown enough by the compliment -- and the acknowledgement that their son (their son, oh god, oh god, stop thinking like that) was very cute -- that her grin had nearly taken over her face before she'd caught it.

"I at least dress him, I can tell you that much," she replied, glancing over at Gareth again. Few other people would dress their preschooler in an outfit that, by her estimation, probably clocked in at a retail value of close to a thousand dollars. Those precious little shoes alone, good god. "He's sweet, too. Kept wanting to bring you a present. He's got a rock in his pocket he thinks you'll like, when he remembers."

[special_rabbit]

Those clothes that Amaya knew bore a price tag that would make her sweat even more than she was used to when really working at the forge, the nice manners, this sweetness...all tempted Amaya to double-check if Irene wasn't sure it wasn't some other Blackstone she might've gotten herself tangled up in along the way (forget, of course, all that Mom business just a second ago), but then along came that last part, and Amaya made such a pursed-lips, scrunched-nose little face...

"Really interesting pattern on it, I reckon?" she...very reluctantly...guessed. "Or at least made of some particularly notable material, like a glossy obsidian, or a flaky kind of shale?"

Zards, she really wanted to know what this rock was now!

[begmetwice]

"I think it's feldspar? Maybe a bit of quartz," Irene offered, shrugging. "I just checked that it wasn't broken glass."

For someone who insisted she wouldn't know a maternal instinct if one came up and slapped her in the face, Irene was certainly doing an admirable job of making sure that the child she had for the weekend stayed safe and entertained. (And Gareth had chosen this rock, actually, because he knew Mom probably would understand how neat it was, even if Mother didn't seem to appreciate it one bit.)

"Am I allowed to ask about Zephyr's dad?" she added, conversational and a little teasing, even as she kept her eyes on Gareth and his very determined efforts to help his half-sister. "You must know who."

There. That was something of a distraction, even if it was determinedly not taking quite as well as Irene would like.

[special_rabbit]

And good thing Irene was looking out in that way, too, because Amaya would have also appreciated the broken glass. Especially if it was some sort of pretty colored glass, like from a green bottle.

She was eagerly jumping on that distraction, though, because Zephyr, at least, was an expected, knowable element that was familiar and easily dismissed in her ridiculousness, but this other entity....

Ooof, there was a lot to unpack there, and Amaya did not have the space.

"That's just the thing!" she said, her hands going up in frustration that wasn't really about Zephyr's dubious paternity. "I don't! All I know is that he goes around calling himself Whisper," said with every bit of the disdain it should have, this idea that she would ever get on with anyone calling themselves Whisper, "and that he's originally from Modesto."

No. Not that one.

"And is a knight of the realm, too, apparently, but there were certainly no knights named Whisper back when I was in Daventry."

[wee_little_crumbler]

"I suppose that explains where she gets her...that from," Irene commented, a little amused at all this vehemence. (And also at the idea of a knight from what she thought was a fairly boring Californian city, but that could wait.) "Anyone going by a name like Whisper must have a flair for drama."

Honestly, Irene should have put it together right then and there that maaaaybe, just maybe, Zephyr wasn't the only person here who went by an acronym. Credit the massive (and yet very small, and surprisingly cuddly) problem that had dropped into her lap this morning.

"Mom!" Gareth called, pausing his chain-mailing abruptly out of absolutely nowhere, because he had forgotten he had wanted to do this and it was important -- just as he had forgotten the rock, but would surely soon remember he came bearing gifts. "Can I see the lobsters?"

He had already had a very nice time petting Clementine this morning, which was where the reminder of 'gentle hands' had actually first made an appearance.

[special_rabbit]

Zards, every other thing out of this one's mouth was going to slowly build up to Amaya having some sort of heart attack by the end of the weekend, wasn't it?

"Now does he know about the lobsters," she had to ask, it felt like a very important distinction to her, for some reason, as she, imagine that!, suddenly was able to look at Irene, and it was mostly to sort of gawk a little, "because he already knew about them, or because you told him about them?"

On the bright side, the impending heart attack would distract her from the headache she already had!

[begmetwice]

"He already did," Irene told her, shaking her head with a smile as she finally caught Amaya's eye. "Now, he didn't refer to them by name, so who knows if he knows different lobsters?"

Was that a comfort, Amaya?

"But," she added, dropping her voice a little, "seeing as he's so young, I think he's probably quite limited as far as what we let him do with...much of anything."

Irene was fairly certain that Gareth was not allowed to touch or feed the lobsters, for example. She was also, slightly related, almost positive that he did not actually know what she did for work, even though he was quite into the whole blacksmith deal, and that was a tiny blessing, she supposed.

[special_rabbit]

"Mmmm."

It was just a thoughtful sort of grunting hum out of Amaya as she considered this information, and the boy who was clearly reaching the end of his patience in awaiting an answer from them, but still trying very hard to maintain it, and she sighed.

"Lemme bring 'em down," she decided, "and I'll bring some of their weapons, too, and you can pick out what they use and hope they're in a fighting mood, or something."

That was a fun things that kids liked to do, right? Watch lobster fights?

"I'll help!" Zephyr chimed in. "Zephyr can do it!"

"Ahhh, no, that's alright, Zeph," said Amaya, very quickly, with a placating lift of her hand, and already drifting toward the stairs, because, well, Mama needed some nice private screaming time for a second. "You stay here, help Irene keep an eye on Gareth. Irene? Should I put on some tea?"

Although the lift of her brows, even under her bangs, seemed to suggest that something harder was also on the table.

[wee_little_crumbler]

"Please and thank you," Irene replied with an answering lift of her own brows and a subtle tip of her wrist to mime exactly what was being suggested here, yes. Doctored tea. "Zephyr, love, aren't you training to be a knight? How's that going?"

"A knight?" Gareth echoed, much louder than was necessary but he was very excited (about knights but also LOBSTER WEAPONS!!!!) and sometimes excitement made your outside voice appear out of nowhere! "I wanna be a knight!"

Add that to the ever-growing list of Things I Might Be When I Grow Up: blacksmith, mysterious shopkeeper (like Mother!), astronaut, dinosaur, ice cream chef, and now knight.

[crumble_and_shine]

"Well, you can be!" said Zephyr, laughing at the little boy's enthusiasm, but she liked to see that in a fellow potential knight and half-sibling. "You just have to train hard and be brave and bold and clever and strong, and work really, really hard! Then one day, you'll be a knight, too! I'm going to follow in my father's footsteps and be the best knight Daventry has ever seen!

"And that's right, ma'am," she said, turning her attention now to Irene with a proud little nod. "After my next birthday, I'll finally be old enough to participate in the Tournament of Knights! I'll be the same age that King Graham himself was, when he became a knight! Did you know that he actually beat my father? If you ask him about it, he'll come up with a million excuses. He had a hangnail. The sun was in his eyes. Someone used dairy milk instead of almond milk in his latte that morning. But I've seen the records. King Graham beat him, fair and square!"

[wee_little_crumbler]

"Did this King Graham beat your father when he was your age?" Irene wondered, impressed. "Or your near-age, anyway. Because that does sound like quite a feat, regardless, but I'd be extra-impressed if he was new to knighting at the time."

"How old are you?" Gareth asked, vaguely suspicious, suddenly, of how old one must be to take up knighting. "I'm four. Almost five!"

He helpfully held up four fingers, just in case Zephyr needed a reference.

"How many days until my birthday, Mother?" he demanded, since she normally was able t help with that question at home.

Irene blew out a breath before...deciding to lie to a child. "Ninety-four," she said, nodding.

She truly had no idea. Sorry, Gareth's real Mom and Mother.

[crumble_and_shine]

"Ohhhh," Zephyr grinned down at Gareth, "that's a pretty good age, but you've still got a lot of years still before you can be a knight, then! I'm sixteen, almost seventeen, that means I'm so old I can't even show you how old with just my two hands! So that's how old you have to be, to compete in the Tournament of Knights."

Her smiled then shifted back over to Irene, and she was clearly enjoying getting to bounce between the two focus points of conversation. "And, yes, that's how old King Graham was when he beat my father. It was his first Tournament and everything! So when he became King, everyone was talking about how it was destiny and fate and all those sorts of things. He went up against a lot of formidable knights, too! My father, Sir Acorn, who now runs the craft shop in town that used to the Hobblepot's apothecary. One of the knights, by the name of Achaka, actually perished when attempting to snag the eye off of the dragon that used to live in the caves beneath the realm; there's a shrine to him now, to always honor his bravery and sacrifice; he was a true hero! And there was another one by the name of Manny, but he disappeared after the tournament, so ashamed he was by how King Graham bested him that they never heard from him again! Although, of course, that's just what the stories say, anyway. Obviously, this happened well before I was even born! And I mostly hear the stories from my father, which, as Mother says, means I need to take them all with the world's biggest grain of salt."