From the chair, Regulus watched this exchange with the focused attention of soone studying a dynamic he hadn’t fully mapped yet. He’d been doing that a lot—watching the people around Aris with the quiet thodical interest of soone building a picture.
Aris had noticed, obviously he had. Anything ever rarely slipped past his attention.
Anyhow, for so reason he found it, against his better judgnt, mildly impressive that Regulus had pivoted from waking up in a dical ward to conducting social reconnaissance within the span of a week.
The kettle whistled.
He made the tea. Three cups, Lyra took hers without looking up from her tablet, the choreography of routine—and carried the third to Regulus, setting it on the small table beside the chair.
Regulus looked at it.
"It won’t bite," Aris said.
"I know what tea is," Regulus said, with the mild dignity of soone who had been making that particular correction more than he’d anticipated needing to.
An amused smile stretched across Aris’s lips.
"You looked at the kettle like it had personally wronged you."
"I was unfamiliar with the model."
"It’s a kettle."
"It made a very aggressive sound."
Lyra looked up from her tablet for the first ti, glanced at Regulus, looked back down, and without hesitation made a small mark that Aris was fairly certain was not work related.
He sat down on the couch with his own cup.
The house was quiet in the way it was usually quiet—the particular texture of a space that had been occupied by one person for long enough that the silence had taken on that person’s shape, comfortable in its specific way, not easily shared, and not planned to be shared unless necessary. He’d noticed it more since Regulus arrived at the dical wing. The quality of rooms changed with more people in them. He hadn’t decided yet how he felt about that.
"The house rules," Lyra said, without looking up, in the tone of soone who had prepared this and was delivering it now before the mont passed.
Regulus straightened slightly.
"You have access to the kitchen, the living room, and the guest room on the second floor. The gym is available between six and nine in the morning and after seven in the evening. Lord Ashborne’s room is off limits." She paused. "Any questions?"
"The gym," Regulus said.
"Yes."
"There’s a gym?"
"Second floor, left at the top of the stairs."
Sothing moved in Regulus’s expression—the first genuinely unguarded thing Aris had seen from him since the dical ward, a flicker of sothing that looked very much like relief.
Which made sense, he supposed.
Regulus was the kind of person whose relationship with his own body was fundantally physical. Capability, output, the concrete satisfaction of a thing that could be trained and asured. A week in a dical bed was probably its own particular kind of suffering for soone like that.
"I’ll have a training schedule drawn up," Lyra continued. "Given the reconstruction, the specialist has provided guidelines. You’ll follow them."
"I’m aware of my own recovery tiline," Regulus said.
"The guidelines," Lyra repeated, pleasantly, with the tone of soone who had said the thing they were going to say and was done discussing it.
Regulus looked at Aris.
Aris drank his tea.
"She’s always like this," Aris offered.
"I’m professional," Lyra said.
"That too."
Regulus looked between them with the expression of a man recalibrating, again, what he’d walked into. He’d been doing that regularly. Each ti Aris found it marginally entertaining and felt mild guilt about finding it entertaining, and then found it entertaining anyway.
This guy had a particular flavor compared to friends he had made recently, he was imnsely foreign.
"One more thing," Lyra said, to Aris now.
She set the tablet down on the table, which ant she was being serious, which ant Aris’s mild entertainnt was about to beco sothing else.
"The boys from the neighborhood."
Aris looked at her.
"Their parents have been asking after you since the incident. Three of them specifically. The children have been having difficulty." She said it with the precision of soone delivering information they’d been waiting for the right mont to deliver.
"I think a visit would help. When you have ti."
Well, that was convenient.
He thought about the group of them that evening, stunned, the way they’d flinched when the gate opened, the way the youngest one had looked at the hand on the ground with the wide eyes of a child encountering sothing real for the first ti.
"Schedule it," he said.
Lyra made a mark.
The real kind this ti.
The room settled back into its particular quiet. Outside, the crown district went about its impeccable business. The tea was good. The chair had apparently reached a truce with Regulus, who was sitting in it with marginally less discomfort than before.
"Aris," Regulus said.
He looked over.
"Thank you," Regulus said. "For the arrangent."
It was delivered the sa way he’d said it in the dical ward—direct, no performance attached, the gratitude of soone who wasn’t used to needing it and hadn’t made the mistake of dressing it up.
"Don’t break anything," Aris said.
Regulus looked around the living room. At the general careful order of it.
"I’ll try," he said.
Which was, Aris thought, probably the most honest answer available.
Lyra left a while after they finished their tea, and Aris got to working on sothing he had been aning to in all of this ss.
He needed to unpack his bags, a week without his costics was already a kind of hell in itself, he didn’t know if he could afford to last another one without it. Not to ntion, he was going to be busy in the coming week with marketing and publicity projects, so it was going to be essential.
He had shown Regulus to his room, and quietly headed toward his own room, thoughts filled with the excitent of finally getting a quiet mont to himself.
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