Hope is the thing with feathers | for Daniel

[tricktofalling]

The snow comes rather unexpectedly and Inej doesn't need to be told that it would be a generous, appreciated thing to do if she happens to appear at Daniel's door. So, after a task of bundling the twins--neither of them want to be put in their jackets and hats and gloves--she heads out to the nearest grocery.

There's plenty of people that are acting a little manic about the sudden snow, but Inej has been through enough storms in her life that she isn't too worried. It's mostly wrangling the twins, who want to do everything but stay close to the cart as they go through the aisles and she gets things for a few meals.

Once it looks like a manageable few days of meals, she makes her way to the register. That's a whole different task, making sure that the twins stay on her side when they're fussing, but after grabbing a candy bar and promising they can share it, they manage to focus long enough for her to finish the transaction, pay, and get everything together.

And then it's back out into the snow, the twins carefully holding onto her jacket and her arms holding the grocery bags. It's a slog through deep snow, almost as tall as the twins, from the grocery back to Dimera, but they all make it. The twins are fussy enough that she doesn't want to send them back to the apartment alone--and she knows that Daniel likes them.

She knocks on the door. If he's not in--she hopes he is--she'll come back with some food in containers later. The twins join in on the knocking, gently hollering as well, even as Inej tries to shush them.

Comments

[ssrsousa]

"I'll eat it, too," Daniel agreed, because that seemed more than fair.

He didn't listen to her talking to the kids, or at least not as actively as he could have. For one thing, he did need to make sure the bread didn't burn, and for another, he hadn't been invited to that conversation. But he did notice that she was speaking her own language to them, and he didn't recall her doing that before, not more than a word or two. Some of the sounds reminded him a little bit of Russian or a language like that, but he didn't know enough about any of those languages to do anything but hear cadences in the words.

When she came back, he glanced down and smiled.

"They haven't destroyed the place yet, I guess?"

[tricktofalling]

"Not yet, but only because I don't let them have matches," she jokes. She checks on the fry bread and, pinching an edge, flips it over so it can cook on the other side. "Good, you didn't burn it. I might leave you in charge of those then."

She smiles at him, focusing on the pots and pans, everything coming along fabulously with the twins distracted and content and with an extra set of hands.

"I've missed having help in the kitchen," she confesses softly.

[ssrsousa]

"Maybe they can have matches about the time they can have a car," he suggested equally jokingly. He couldn't even imagine the twins being old enough to drive a car, although obviously they'd get there sometime, if they were all still in Darrow, and that was strange to think about too.

He lifted the tongs for the frybread in a tiny, lighthearted salute when she said it was his job now. That quiet little statement after it, though, wasn't something to be lighthearted about.

"A lot of things are easier when you're not all by yourself," he agreed.

[tricktofalling]

"I think I trust them with matches more," she confesses with a little bit of a laugh. After all, despite now owning and operating a race track, she wants nothing to do with cars. Too unpredictable. Too noisy, even after all this time. She'll walk. But the twins will come up in a place that has them, so maybe it will be different for them.

It's a gentle quiet that intrudes over their cooking then, as they both acknowledge without saying what they've lost to this place. Inej thinks about their first real encounter, not just passing nods in the lobby, at the church after she lit a candle for Kaz. It seems a lifetime ago, and by some definitions it is. The twins won't remember him, really, except for the little things left behind.

"What was she like?" she asks, looking at the array of pots and pans and everything happily turning into delicious food. "Your wife? I don't think I ever met her."

[ssrsousa]

"Peggy?" he said, as if he'd had another wife. "Peggy was ... a force of nature."

His words and his smile were fond. There were so many things he couldn't say about her to anyone who hadn't been part of the SSR and SHIELD, because they just wouldn't make sense and also they were classified.

"She didn't take anything from anyone, but she always made sure she had on nail polish and lipstick and dressed to make sure everyone knew she was a woman. She'd throw a punch to knock a man flat and then in the next second smile like an angel. We worked together, after the war, and the men in our office dismissed us both. Me because of my leg, and her because she was a woman. More fool them, especially in her case."

Daniel liked and appreciated strong women. Some men didn't have room in their lives or their egos for that, but he did and he was glad to.

[tricktofalling]

Daniel speaks of her, and Inej drinks it in. She knows, when she has the chances to speak of Kaz these days, that she looks just as fond and adoring and still in love, and it feels good to see someone else that lost someone so important but can still speak of them. The early days were hard; it's not easily, necessarily, but it is gentler with distance.

"Oh, that sounds like Nina," she says with a bit of a laugh. Strong and powerful, in love with her femininity and not afraid of it, able to stand up to just about everything--even when she was afraid. Inej is strong because she has to be, which is a very different sort of power than someone that wraps herself up in it.

[ssrsousa]

"Nina reminded me of Peggy when I met her," Daniel agreed. "They were even built a little on the same lines, although Nina was a little more ... more."

Inej was well aware of what Nina had looked like, but Daniel didn't need to be crass about it.

"I remembered nine years of my life back home awhile ago, and in that world, Peggy and I didn't work out. She ended up marrying a sweetheart she had during the war. But here, we did, and I'm glad we had the time we did before she disappeared."

[tricktofalling]

Inej hums in soft agreement. Nina was more a lot of things, tall and curvaceous and full of life, and Daniel's discretion is the sort of thing that would have made her laugh.

She remembers Daniel mentioning that, the memories and that the relationship had been different back home than it had been in Darrow. Sometimes, she worries about that happening to her. About receiving a wealth of information that she hasn't lived but that a version of her did. It was bad enough to show up in the shadow of her previous self, the girl-that-was who laid the groundwork so she could have her husband.

"We sure have been through it, haven't we?" She smiles at Daniel, softly.

[ssrsousa]

He chuckled, because that was probably the understatement of the year, even without considering Darrow and everything it did and was.

“Wouldn’t it be boring if we were the same people from birth to death, living the same lives in the same place, though? You almost gotta go through some stuff if you don’t want that to happen.”

Maybe not so much stuff as they’d respectively been through, and maybe not quite as strange as they’d been through, but definitely some stuff. And even losing his leg, as much as that had complicated his life, had brought him to the SSR and SHIELD and into a life he was genuinely good at and enjoyed most of the time.

[tricktofalling]

Inej nods her agreement. She had never been a stationary person, until she was trapped in Ketterdam, until she came to Darrow. Everything about her life was made to be wild and wandering and full of things learned in the wide open world. But even that was complicated by the cage and captivity she went through, altered by her arrival here. She's something else than the girl she was, and she doesn't hate that at all.

"I am glad to be going through some less these days," she says with a bit of a laugh. "I'm not afraid to admit that, at least."

[ssrsousa]

"Other than the unexpected snowstorms, of course," he replied, but he agreed with her.

He was glad to be in a place that had plenty of weird things, but not dangerously weird things, at least most of the time. After spending years expecting to be shot at during the war, and then more years trying to keep HYDRA from destroying everything, well, this was nice. It was peaceful. He could live with that.

[tricktofalling]

"Oh, even then," she says softly, smiling at him a little bit. "It's hardly so bad when you have someone to come and make you food."

She's been promising him a meal for months--almost a year?--and while their schedules haven't lined up so well for it, she's glad for the poor weather to encourage it. It's good to spend some extra time with him, even if she's not sure what that time is slowly angling towards.

[ssrsousa]

"And someone to eat it with," he agreed, because he appreciated both of those things.

She'd been talking about repaying him for various things with a meal for awhile, but for awhile, he hadn't assumed she meant it. Now he knew Inej didn't say too many things she didn't mean, but even then they both had very busy lives. He thought his was about to get busier, with some of the stuff he was pretty sure he'd found out about at the department.

None of that was something he'd mention to her, though, for a lot of reasons. She had said she didn't mind that he was a cop, but he knew that she made her own choices and they didn't always line up with the laws here. He stayed well out of anything that seemed like it might have something to do with her or her businesses, but he still knew that.

[tricktofalling]

Inej's own knowledge of the comings and goings at that police station were oblique at best. In recent years, they haven't had to do more than pay a bit for diverted attention, but even that has quieted down. She has no reason to pry very much into those comings and goings, come to think of it. As long as things are smooth, that's all she cares about.

Except...

Daniel is a good man, earnest, and what Inej does know is that there are many men who aren't nearly as upstanding. So while her end of things are smooth, she mostly hopes that Daniel's end up smooth as well. He deserves that, good man that he is.

She glances at the bowl of dough for the fry bread. "That should be the last one, I think, and then the food should be just a little behind."

[ssrsousa]

"D'you want me to go see if they've destroyed the living room yet or keep working on the bread?" he asked, because he could do either.

If the food was almost ready, then they'd want to make sure the kids weren't deep in the middle of something so they'd howl if they were told to stop. He might not have kids, but he knew that no one liked being told to stop in the middle of something, not even for food.

He didn't have seats for the kids, but he'd sat on a stack of books more than once. It wouldn't hurt them to do the same.

[tricktofalling]

"Check on them, if you don't mind," Inej says, as easy and casual as all the rest of this has been. His own ease in offering made it simple, and there's a part of her that misses coparenting for just this reason: someone to finish food, someone to wrangle the kids. It was easier when Kaz was here, but only because the twins were still very little. Now, it's a bit more of a task and a half, and she's glad for the help.

And with that, she shoos him toward the living room, taking his place at the stove.

Out in the living room, the twins are surprisingly self-contained. Ana has a book in hand, holding it upside down and clearly not reading but having a good time of it anyway. Jordie, for his part, has gotten into everything he possibly can at his level, but it's mostly just pulling things out and putting them right in front of where he found them.

[ssrsousa]

He nodded and was shooed off to the living room. He wasn't sure what he'd find there, but it turned out there was only a relatively small mess, and nothing looked like it had been dropped or damaged.

Ana was holding one of his books about space upside-down, but honestly, whether a planet or a galaxy was right side up or upside down probably didn't matter much. That book had some pictures that had been taken from various telescopes, so it was probably really colorful. Jordie, meanwhile, seemed to disapprove of the organization of everything on the bottom two shelves, and Daniel carefully knelt on his bad knee so he was closer to the kids' level.

"You find anything interesting there?" he asked Jordie, but if Ana wanted to answer, she would.

[tricktofalling]

Ana, for her part, holds up the book. She responds, but it's in Suli--and Inej laughs, hearing her, from the kitchen; maybe she'll explain later. Jordie, for his part, looks up at Daniel with those big eyes, like he had when he confronted him in the hallway.

"Nuh-uh," he says, shaking his head and then looking around at everything he took out. "Gotta put back?"

He looks over at his sister and sort of waves at her until she hops over to come help. Even if she wasn't part of the mayhem of taking things off the shelf, she certainly seems happy to put it back together--as much as toddlers can put things back together. Both of them end up looking to Daniel to see if they're doing it right, which they aren't really. Things backwards and upside down and out of order, but at least off the floor.

Inej watches from the kitchen as she finishes up. It says a lot about a person, how they are with children.

[ssrsousa]

Ana said something he couldn't understand, but he nodded like he did. Inej laughed, so whatever Ana had said must be funny somehow, and he smiled too. It reminded him of visiting with his cousins' really little kids back home. He couldn't understand what they said half the time even when they were speaking English, but smiling and nodding went a long way.

"You don't say," he replied to her, then looked at Jordie when the little boy asked if he needed to put things back. He had been about to say that Jordie didn't need to bother when he started doing it anyway, with Ana helping, or "helping" anyway.

"Good job," he told them once they were done, and meant it. The things weren't even remotely where they had been, but they'd put their "toys" away, and even someone without kids knew that trying to get that to happen was like waiting on a blue moon. He should encourage it as much as he could.

"I oughta hire you two as decorators. Can I pay you in strawberries?"

[tricktofalling]

Both the twins look desperately excited at the idea of being able to do anything for strawberries. Inej, from her vantage point, feels her smile go all soft and warm at the edges. Daniel doesn't need to be quite so kind to them, to her, but he is. He's a good man, better than most have ever been in her life, and she's grateful to be able to repay even an ounce of kindness.

"Food," she says from the kitchen, and begins to truck things out. Daniel's table is smaller than hers, but that's fine. She's not used to a big table anyway. It fits the fry bread and the sauteed vegetables and meat, and the soup continues to simmer slowly away in the kitchen, filling the flat with the smells of care and home, whatever that is these days.

The twins make their way over, more or less under their own steam, and Inej finds a couple books nearby that will definitely put them up to the table.

"Look at that," she says to Daniel with a smile. "And you'll have plenty to keep you through, if the storm lasts. Or you can come up stairs for something different, if you like."

[ssrsousa]

"Ah, there's the magic word," he told the twins when Inej called them all to the table, and helped them get themselves pointed and going in the direction of the food. It took him just a second longer to get up than it would for someone else, but the little ones weren't moving so fast or purposefully that it was too noticeable, he hoped. Then he just had to guide them and keep Jordie from deciding he needed to grab a shiny pen off a side table on the way.

Inej had had the same idea he had about the books and getting the kids up to the table, and he smiled when he saw it.

"This all looks and smells delicious. Jordie, Ana, what do we say to your mamae for making all this food for us?"

He knew Inej was already working on teaching them manners, but reinforcement wasn't bad.

[tricktofalling]

The twins holler thank you mam as they hoist themselves onto their seats and the booster books as well. Inej smiles and hollers back a little, bright and native tongued, as she serves them. More than anything she appreciates that Daniel doesn't mind their company. She's come to expect it with Marcus, but Daniel's casual acceptance of friendship, and the shape that has to accommodate her children, is a slightly different beast.

She serves him as well, and then herself, an instinctive decision that has lived in her blood since she was a child. The cook always serves. And when they all have their meal, she sits down and gives Daniel a smile.

"Do you do a grace before you eat?" she asks, genuine and curious. She's taken to it fairly well, since she's been in Darrow, a more formal thing than when she was with her family or in Ketterdam. It seems right to ask how Daniel does it, if they're having a meal together.

[ssrsousa]

He chuckled at the way they did actually say thank you but at a volume that was probably not what Inej was hoping to teach them. He didn't mind. It was quieter than a drill sergeant. More pleasant, too. And they scrambled up and onto their books without any concerns about it, even though he'd been watching to be sure they didn't need any steadying hands.

He hadn't expected her to serve them all, but he smiled a thanks to her for her generous helpings and then looked over to make sure Jordie and Ana weren't about to start throwing things at each other.

"Yeah, I do, but we don't have to if you don't usually."

He could, of course, either in English, Portuguese, or Latin, but his faith and Inej's weren't exactly the same, for all that they had a whole lot of overlap.

[tricktofalling]

"No, I'd like to," Inej says. Darrow has taught her a lot about the Christian God, and while she doesn't always agree with all of it, it feels a bit more like the spiritual faith and her saintly worships from home. She has only good connection to the church, if she's honest. More than she can say about the church in Ketterdam.

So, she takes Ana's little hand, and the twins happily cling to each other, because she's been teaching them Suli prayers and they know how this goes. Then she reaches across the table to Daniel, offering a cautious sort of smile to encourage him.

[ssrsousa]

If he was with his father's family, they'd be saying it in Latin. If he was with his mother's family or just his parents and brother, it would be Portuguese. If he was in a foxhole or a mess hall, it would probably just be a quick sign of the cross. For now, he'd go with English, so everyone could understand.

He crossed himself quickly and then took Inej's hand and Jordie's. It was easier to hold Inej's, in some ways, since there was much less twitching, but it was harder, too. He closed his eyes and didn't think about her hand in his, mostly because they were praying.

"Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts, which we are about to receive from Thy bounty, through Christ our Lord. Amen."