Alfred had been sitting alone in his room for hours, and he'd long since run out of things to distract himself from his thoughts. He'd opened the window in his room thrice to knock the pile of snow accumulating there down, so that he could keep an eye on the weather. It didn't seem to be letting up, so it was unlikely the floo would be back online any time soon. If they were trying to get things restored at the Ministry, a low-rent flat in a random London neighborhood was hardly going to be at the top of their priority list. Jo was going to be here through dinner, then. Maybe overnight. He wasn't sure where he ought to ask her to sleep. It would have been inhospitable to ask her to stay on the couch in the front room, wouldn't it? But inviting her into his bed seemed far too intimate for their new reality, even if he stayed out in the parlor on the sofa all night. There was Bilton's room, too, which seemed like the most viable option. It was unlikely that Bilton would be able to make it home today, if he wasn't home already, so the chances that he would wander in in the middle of the night and find a strange woman in his bed were fairly low. It was still a fairly weird thing to do, but Alfred wasn't sure he had better options.

Before they got to that, though, they needed to get through dinner. He wasn't looking forward to having to talk with her again, wading through that sea of awkwardness and tension and hurt, but he couldn't stay in his room forever. He'd skipped lunch to try and get preparations on the Voyager done faster, and his stomach was starting to grumble angrily.

He'd stripped down to just a shirt and pants and was sitting on the floor in his room, using tribal magic to light and extinguish a small flame in the palm of his hand. He was trying to find a balance between letting his room get too cold to be comfortable and burning his fingers while trying to hold it; the spell was intended to start fires with kindling, not to be contained like this, so it wasn't exactly friendly to his skin. It would have been easier to have gone back to the parlor, where the fireplace was still lit, but that would mean facing Jo again. Even retrieving a blanket, which normally provided all the warmth his room needed during the winter months, would mean going back to the parlor for a few moments.

Eventually he lost the will to stay there, hungry and cold, even if the alternative was wading back into that tension and grief from earlier. He wasn't entirely sure if Jo would still be there, even though he'd been keeping an ear open for any sign of her leaving. He walked down the hall tentatively, nearly on his tiptoes, and breathed a sigh of relief when he found her still in the chair.

"Hey," he said, determined to at least not start off as awkwardly as they'd ended things before. "Hungry?"