Zelda reached up one of her hands to fidget with the end of her braid. "Anything," she said, after a beat, because the thing you're clearly mad at me about was a fairly provocative answer. She had not come to London today to fight with her husband, for all that it was starting to seem inevitable.

  

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AMAZING set by MJ

Anything, by which she presumably meant nothing. He had tried to talk to her and she wasn't interested in engaging. He'd asked questions and she'd changed the subject and sent him more toddler artwork. She'd ended three sequential sentences with exclamation marks and then underlined the word please when she asked him for a normal letter. She didn't actually want to talk, she just wanted him to get over it.

He shrugged at her. He didn't want to be the first person to broach the subject so that she could just tell him, again, that he was being alarmist and melodramatic. He also had little inclination to talk about anything else. Even if he was clearly disinterested in the conversation it felt like admitting defeat to sit here making small talk about the dog or jelly donuts and letting Zelda pretend everything was fine. "It's been a long day."

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

Zelda's mouth twisted, frustration getting the better of her. She couldn't talk to him without him trying to talk back, and she was worried that anything she said would be like setting off a bombard spell in the middle of their conversation. She kept playing with the end of her braid. "Really?" she said, tone gentle for all that she was leaning in on that potential explosion. "Because it seems more that you just don't want to talk to me."

  

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AMAZING set by MJ

Alfred frowned at her. "I've been up since two hours before dawn," he said, which was true, and filled the air enough that he didn't feel conspicuous about not denying her assertion. She was right. He didn't want to talk to her. Not unless she was willing to actually talk to him instead of diverting to a safer topic while telling him he was overreacting.

He glanced at the glass in his hand and tried to calculate how much longer he could drag it out, if he took small sips. He hadn't poured much. He could, of course, always pour more... but that might be egregious enough to chase Zelda off the ship entirely, which he didn't think was his aim. He didn't really know exactly what his aim was right now, except to get her to stop pretending there was nothing to discuss.

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

"So have I," Zelda said, before she could think any better of it. He hadn't said no, so she couldn't resist the urge to point out that she hadn't gotten much more sleep than he had. And even though the Voyager had more moving parts than baby Carina did, Zelda also felt confident that Alfred hadn't had to change any nappies before dawn.

  

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AMAZING set by MJ

"Then maybe the best use of our afternoon is for us both to have a nap," he snapped. He hadn't exactly meant to snap and he didn't care how long either of them had been awake. He certainly wasn't tired at the moment. None of this was getting them closer towards and sort of resolution. He was beginning to wish he'd had another day at sea — not because another day would have given him much more clarity on how to handle this conversation, but because if he'd returned on Monday there would have been the forcing function of her Ministry schedule to limit how long they could torment each other like this.

"If you don't have anything you want to talk about?" he continued, tone somewhere between leading and challenging.

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

Zelda blinked her astonishment; Alfred didn't usually snap at her. Of the two of them, she was often the one that had trouble holding her temper in check. A beat passed where she watched him, trying to keep her own temper, before she said, "Is this about Ari?" in a confused tone. She couldn't think of another reason that Alfred would be cross with her, but — she had spent some time being bamboozled by Alfred's reaction to Ari's care plan already.

  

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AMAZING set by MJ

The fact that she could use that tone when she said it made him feel as though he were the one heading for the madhouse. Of course it was about Ari, except that now it was also about everything. It was that he'd gone underway and the earth had shifted beneath them while he was gone, and now he didn't know what he was coming back to. A house collapsed? A crater dividing him from his loved ones? Irreparable damage, wounds that would never heal? The only thing he could be certain of was that his wife was determined to not talk about it, because she would rather discuss the menu at Hanukah and Orion's drawing of the dog.

If someone had asked him before he'd departed whether Zelda would consider shipping one of her siblings off to an institution, never to be heard from or seen in polite society again, he wouldn't just have said no. He would have been offended on her behalf, and on behalf of this whole stupid family that he had spent so long fighting to become a part of. They had made his life difficult for years because they wanted to protect Zelda — if someone had tried to convince him they were capable of this he would have taken it as an insult to their character or his intelligence or both.

His jaw had clenched at her question and he had the sense that if he pried it open now he could only possibly say something he would later regret. Did he need to say anything? Could Zelda's question possibly have been asked in good faith? She had not become so entirely removed from the person she had been three months ago that she didn't even realize there was something to talk about, surely. "Yes," he eventually ground out. "It's about Ari."

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER