March 10th, 1890 - Fisk Living Room

Miss Fisk.

Zelda had been over it. She had been over J. Alfred Darrow, with his boats and his hair and his flat and his boat and his adventures. It hadn't mattered anymore. Except that it had, and it did, and now she was spending most of her work week on his boat or researching his boat or talking about his boat, and he didn't care about her anymore and he called her Miss Fisk.

That was really the nail in the coffin; he called her Miss Fisk. The letter had fluttered down to her on the deck of his boat when she was working late; it was past dinner time and Brannon was going to be furious with her. Her hands were covered in ink from scrawling in her notebook, she was tinkering with complicated spells, she had bad news to give him and the letter had come calling her Miss Fisk and asking to meet her in the Ministry.

She slammed her notebook shut and apparated into the Fisk living room.

She had to look a state when she arrived; her hair was shoved into a messy knot on the top of her head, on top of everything else. She landed on her feet and threw the letter onto the ground before she realized she was not alone. The only blessing was that her audience was Ari, and not her father.

"I don't want to talk about it," Zelda said, looking between her brother and the letter and her hands, covered in ink.

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Ari Fisk

The following 2 users Like Zelda Darrow's post:2 users Like Zelda Darrow's post
   J. Alfred Darrow, Jupiter Smith

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AMAZING set by MJ

What with - well, everything - Ari hadn’t been spending as much time at the family’s house as he had used to. They had Elliott to keep them busy at home, after all (nearly nine months old!) and Dionisia had gone back to work in November and usually when there was a moment’s opportunity in the evenings there was somewhere else Ari would first choose to go.

But it had been nice to have a dinner here again, to see at least some of the siblings, and he had loitered here after, full and tired and a little bit lazy. He’d go home soon, after he talked to his father for a little while longer - only Brannon had left the room a while ago and the next person to appear, with a crack that startled him up from his chair, was - Zelda.

Zelda who had been absent from dinner and clearly busy, if the ink on her hands and the slightly manic look she wore were anything by which to measure. He’d offered her a perfunctory smile in greeting, instinctively, but at the same time his gaze followed the letter’s descent and by the time he glanced up again, he was sure that she looked stressed. Unhappy. Or... preoccupied, at least.

“You don’t have to,” Ari said, stooping to pick up the letter from the floor and - obviously resisting any and all temptation to look at it, to understand what kind of bad news his sister had clearly gotten - without looking at it (as if to pretend it hadn’t existed at all), offered it back to her. Still, though he didn’t want to pry, it felt callous not to ask. “But are you alright?”

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Zelda took the letter back from him and tucked it into the pocket of her jacket. She rubbed at one eye with her left hand.

"Do you ever just feel like -" she started, then shook her head. She was good with Ari now, or she was fine with Ari now, but that did not mean that she had forgiven him completely, and it did not mean that she wanted to get into it. "It doesn't matter. The project I'm working on is - hard. And it matters." It mattered and she was buried in research and spellwork and careful containment spells, and she did not know how to fix it.

And Mr. Darrow didn't care. Certainly he cared about the boat, but he didn't care about her, that much was clear. She just didn't understand where she had gone wrong - whether things had been irreparably broken all along or whether there was some point at which she had gone off course.

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AMAZING set by MJ

Ari opened his mouth to warn her that rubbing her eye with so inkstained a hand was only going to make her look like a panda, but he decided not to interrupt, and merely let her go on.

He didn’t know what she felt like, exactly, but he knew her well enough to be certain, already, that there was something she needed to get off her chest. There was a burden on her shoulders. He wished he hadn’t seen her tonight; it only made him want to be useful, want to help.

It didn’t matter how she felt, but what she was working on mattered - there was a turmoil in all this, a whirlwind of thought around her that he couldn’t quite see past. But it was something to do with work, then.

“The good kind of hard?” Ari asked lightly, supposing that ‘showing interest’ was a largely inoffensive strategy. He did know a feeling or two when it came to work, though they did so in different fields: but they both solved problems, of a kind. Tried to fix things. “A puzzle that takes a bit of thinking? Or - bad hard? Like you don’t even know where to start?” Sometimes grappling with a problem that mattered - that had consequences - could be stimulating; one could throw all their time and energy into it, and plumb the depths of all logic and all ideas until coming up with a solution. (She looked like she’d been putting in rather a lot of thought.)

But there was a tipping point with every problem, wasn’t there? When it became too vast and too daunting and too painful to look at, let alone figure out.

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Zelda sighed. There was a smudge of ink on her cheek. She sat down on the couch - flopped down, really, but into a sitting position - and rested her palms on her knees. The thing about Ari was that he got it, at least as a concept - even if their jobs were worlds apart.

"I've hit a wall," Zelda said, "I don't even know if it's doable. The logical thing to do would be to try and destroy the structure housing the curse, wrap things up that way." If she kept working on the Voyager she was not convinced that she would ever be able to fix it; it may be a puzzle without an answer, rather than one she could think her way out of.

"But that's not the right thing."

The Voyager mattered. Alfred didn't care about her anymore, but he had, once, and so - she had to fix the boat. Even if it wasn't, on paper, worth her time.

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AMAZING set by MJ

It was the latter, then, if she’d hit a wall. He knew that kind of frustration. Sometimes one’s perspective had been skewed. (Sometimes it hadn’t, and there was just no way past.)

He squinted at her, gleaning the sparse facts that he could about the case she was trying to crack without having the faintest idea where this curse was housed, or what sort of curse it was, or how dire it must be if it looked like she was losing sleep over it.

He followed Zelda’s flopping onto the couch by stepping back to prop himself against the arm of the chair he’d previously been sitting in, not certain of how much help he could really be without knowing the whole story - but willing to sit here and try, if she needed the listening ear.

“It’s something you need to save?” He said hesitantly. Want to save, he’d meant to say. But it was the same sort of thing, wasn’t it, if she felt like logic wasn’t enough? Whatever the right thing was, she evidently had to do it, to save something she couldn’t risk losing.

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"Something like that," Zelda said. She tilted her head back and looked up at the ceiling. Maybe she should just go to bed; there wasn't much Ari could help her with, here.

"It belongs to someone I owe," Zelda said. She didn't know why she thought she owed Alfred - he clearly did not care about her anymore. Miss Fisk. It was as if it had never happened. But she still owed him something. And if she was right - well, if she was right then he might die.

She needed him to live. She needed to be wrong.

"We used to be friends, I guess."

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AMAZING set by MJ

Well, if the problem was personal, that did make things a little more complicated. He couldn’t remark on who that might be, or what Zelda could possibly owe them, but he offered her a tentative smile of encouragement, just in case she looked this way.

“Then you’ll figure it out,” he said with confidence, knowing he couldn’t say so for sure when he didn’t even know the scope of the problem... but knowing his sister well enough that he couldn’t picture her throwing in the towel until she had done all that was humanly possible. “I know you will. But -” Ari gave her a swift look here, one that said don’t be mad if I say this, “try not to kill yourself doing it. It sounds daft, but it helps if you stop to take care of yourself too.”

He knew how hard it could be, though, how guilty one could feel for stopping, even for a moment, when there was something important on the line. But was she sleeping properly? Had she even eaten tonight? (He wasn’t going to say it to her face either, but she looked like she’d been running herself ragged.)

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Zelda wrinkled her nose at Ari. The thing was - she knew he was right. She didn't have to like that he was right, but he was right, and she also knew that she was going to keep ignoring him. Because if she was right about this curse, then she had no time to lose at all.

"You don't do that," Zelda said, although there wasn't really any bite to it. She was going to have to sleep, sooner or later. But - well, if she was good enough, then she could finish this and sleep after. And then, maybe, J. Alfred Darrow would stop haunting her.

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AMAZING set by MJ

“Well, I’m the expert,” Ari countered, and who could say if he meant in spite of that or because of it? (Zelda was right and she knew it. But so, on this, was he.) “That’s why you have to do what I say, and not what I do,” he added lightly, though he quietly felt that nothing was going to tear her away from her mission now; there was a corner of her mind ticking it over even now.

He surveyed her for a few moments more, wondering what was possibly this important to her, and wondering, equally, if there was the slightest thing he could do to help. “But if I can sneak you some leftovers, will you at least eat?” Ari offered, supposing he could spare her having to bump into Brannon or anyone else in the house who might waste even more of her precious time than he already had.

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Dinner was probably a good idea. She had had lunch, but lunch had been a very long time ago. And she certainly could not try to fix The Voyager if she wasn't eating regular meals.

"Are they good leftovers?" Zelda asked, half-joking. If there had been extra Fisks, dinner had definitely been good.

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AMAZING set by MJ

Ari quirked an eyebrow at her, with a glimmer of teasing too. “You think I haven’t always timed my visits to the best dinner menus?” He shook his head lightly at her, and got to his feet.

“I’ll go fetch you something,” he said, gesturing that she should stay where she was, and - although who knew; maybe she was still residually angry at him - squeezed her shoulder in sympathy as he passed. A meal was probably not going to be the missing piece of a solution, but surely a little extra energy to keep her going would not hurt.

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