(no subject)

[songbird9.livejournal.com]

Who: Mabry and Song
What: The girls are overdue another sisterly chat... but don't worry, there's no mention of dream herpes this time (except that one).
Where: Rainbow's End (of course)
When: Sunday, February 27th



It was funny, Song thought, how easy it was to say goodbye. Oh, there'd been the moment of regret and the desire to question Josiah about why he had to leave again, but she'd let it pass and bid him farewell with a kiss and a smile.
As soon as he and his demonic companion were out of sight, she turned and walk back inside. Back to business as usual, she supposed... which meant the first priority was a cup of tea.

Mabry was waiting in the kitchen, standing on top of stool pulling very ingredients out of the cabinets. "I was wondering when I would actually see you. Have you enjoyed your vacation in hedonism?"

Song blushed and grinned. "What do you think?" Attempting to play it cool, she didn't pause in her quest for tea, though she did draw out the act of choosing a flavor as an excuse keep her face obscured until the blush faded.

"The kettle's plugged in," Mabry informed her. "We've gotten one of the electric ones. Just fill it up, set it on the base and press down the button." She set a bag of flour on the counter, then smiled. "It's good to have you home. I have to admit,
I've been a little jealous of the way Josi has been monopolizing your time . . . but I also understand how it is. I remember."

"Ooh, nifty." Song took a moment to examine the new kettle with childlike glee.
"I knew you'd understand, but I'm all yours now."

"Until he comes back," Mabry agreed. " Now, I assume the two of you have been being careful."

She rolled her eyes, still taking her time to fiddle with the kettle (probably as another excuse to avoid looking at her sister). "Gosh, no. Not at all. We're not smart, responsible adults or anything."

"Well . . . I did here something about a pirate almost stabbing you, so I wondered," Mabry added casually, hopping off the stool and going over to the refrigerator to retrieve two sticks of butter.

Song gave a nervous chuckle, solely for effect. "Oh, that... Well, yes... but said pirate was perfectly decent once I remembered the proper protocols. It pays to be genre-savvy."

Mabry looked at her severely. "Be that as it may, it wasn't a very safe thing for you to do. Sometimes it feels like you go looking for ways to go looking for trouble."

She stopped stalling, set the kettle in order and plopped a tea bag into the first mug pulled out of the cabinet. Then she turned to lean against the counter, regarding Mabry with a confident but unsmiling expression. "It's likely, but you know I never do so without a reason."

Mabry raised an eyebrow. "I hope so." She dropped the sticks of butter into a mixing bowl. "Do you want to help me make cookies?"

"Yes," she said quickly. "What kind of cookies?"

"Chocolate chip," Mabry replied. "Now tell me, have you been having exciting adventures while you've been gone?"

"You read my story," she answered. "Exciting yes, but not the most fun I've ever had. What do you need me to do?" The question, of course, was in reference to the cookies.

Mabry passed her the bowl and a fork. "Cream the butter." Mabry sighed. "It seems that Maleficent has been up to a lot recently. Did you here about Eli?"

"Yes, I wish I'd been here. I heard there was a riddle?" Song stared at the bowl of butter cluelessly while she spoke, poking it a few times with the fork. "Also, how does one cream butter?"

Mabry sighed and took the the fork and bowl to demonstrate. "Like this." She handed the bowl back to her sister. "There was. I have never seen Amy so distraught. I wished you were here. You're so good at riddles."

"Puzzles," she corrected, immitating what Mabry had done to the butter. "Riddles are just like every other puzzle. You turn the pieces around until they fit together... and hope you aren't missing any."

Mabry looked at Song thoughtfully. "I see what you mean . . . I have to say, I feel like we've been missing a pretty important one for a while, and I have no idea what it is."

"Tch," Song scoffed lightly. "I know exactly what it is. Think about it, who are our enemies right now? Maleficent and possibly that lot who messed with us a year ago, right? I wouldn't put it past Maleficent to call back the Heartless if she really wanted to, but can a few Disney villains silence the worlds? And if they did, how and why? There are your missing pieces." She may have been attacking the butter just a little more fiercely than was necessary.

Mabry chuckled. "I don't know . . . I feel like there's more to it than just that, something none of us have even guessed at. But, sis, I love how confident you always are of this sort of thing. I remember being that young . . . ."

Song wrinkled her nose at that last comment. "You're four years older than me, and you didn't get to do all the 'cool' stuff like lose your heart. I bet all our fans think you're a lot more innocent than me." Her cynical tone was turned up close to its highest setting, though it was clear that she also found the conversation amusing.

Mabry laughed. "Most of our 'fans' forget I exist. But I didn't say you were more innocent . . . I meant . . . well, honestly, I meant more arrogant. but a good kind of arrogance. There's a certain form of arrogancy and certainty about things that is purely the property of the young, which you still are, and I am not. You can't stay arrogant for long once you've had a child of your own. you get too many constant reminders of your own fallibility."

"Remind me never to have a child, then. If I lose my youthful confidence, I might finally recognize the concept of giving up as a valid option. Then who would save Josi the next time he gets into a hopeless situation?"

Mabry poured a cup of sugar into the bowl of butter. "Keep stirring. And I never said anything about giving up. Having children makes you more stubborn, rather than less."

She renewed her stirring efforts and spared an impatient glance at the kettle. "Less confident but more stubborn? Now you're making it sound like Lilith."

Mabry looked at her sister with a half smile. "You'll understand if it ever happens to you." As she spoke the light at the bottom of the kettle turned off. "That's how you know it's done."

"Cool", she drawled, obviously in response to the kettle and not the idea of having a baby. "Children... marriage... these things, I think, are not for me." Setting the bowl aside, she filled her mug and paused to enjoy the scent of the tea. "Maybe in fifty years or so."

"Well, you remember how opposed I used to be to marriage and children. I changed my mind." Mabry smiled. "It's hard to know what the future will hold."

Song rolled her eyes towards the ceiling. "... You do have a point. On the other hand...." she felt this deserved a joke, "I thought we knew all along that a fantasy story would come to life, we'd learn magic and live on another world. Seems to me the future has been pretty predictable, really."

Mabry smiled and added a cup of brown sugar to the slowly forming cookie dough. "I would never have predicted most of what has happened . . . and neither would you."

"It's true that most of my plans seem to fall by the wayside in favor of the unexpected." More like they'd been run over at high speed, crushed into small pieces and scattered to the winds, but that was okay, because the alternatives tended to be better.

"And babies are always unexpected." Mabry nodded in the direction of the nursery. "Brendan and I weren't exactly planning on Ashlyn . . . not right in the middle of the War."

"Oh yeah, we were talking about babies. I got distracted." She made oogly eyes at the bowl of cookie dough to emphasize her point.

"Cookies are in fact distracting," Mabry agreed. "And now we're getting to the hardest part of making them. It's time to start adding the flour. Stirring is about to get harder." She added the first cup of flour. "So how long are you going to be home this time?"

"Until I decide to go Josi-hunting again." She narrowed her eyes in a slight frown. "Honestly, why is it that I fall for the ones who like to run?"

"Same reason you like puzzles probably." Mabry added another cup of flour.

"Something like that." Song kept stirring gamely. "So have I managed to successfully steer you away from whatever you thought was so important to talk about?" Asking such a question was probably counter-productive, but she felt like playing fair for now.

Mabry frowned. "I honestly can't remember what it was . . . I lectured you about not being careful with Calum. I teased you about babies. We discussed what you found . . . Oh, I remember . . . will you be staying long enough this time to re-enroll in school?"

"Oh." The little detail of college hadn't even crossed Song's mind since her return - or if it had, she'd brushed it off in favor of more immediate interests.
"I figured since we're kind of trying to save the universe again, or something, it wasn't really a good time. And what about my magic studies?"

"There are course in magical theory and philosophy," Mabry pointed out. "And cosmology. All subjects that interest you anyway."

"This is true... and if I stay in the city for more than a couple months, I think Braig would hunt me down and drag me in chains to whatever class just happened to be in session at the time." She bit her lip over a grin.

Mabry broke two eggs into the cookie dough and poured a running over teaspoon of vanilla in after them. "I've got the application for you. It's on the counter over there."

This announcement was mildly frightening for some reason. "You are just way too prepared for this. When does the next semester start, anyway? Don't they have a Japanese-type schedule?"

"Well, you could go visit them tomorrow and find out," Mabry suggested smugly. "I know the admissions office gives tours on demand and answers any questions you might have."

"Oh goody." Her reluctance was in part due to embarrassment at not having gotten started on this much sooner, but she didn't have to be told it was irrational - just her overgrown sense of pride being stubborn and uncooperative again.

"I think you could probably get credit for your previous studies with various magicians. You might want to look into that." Mabry was applying butter to the cookie sheets as she spoke.

"It had crossed my mind." She was still stirring away, her face twisted slightly in concentration. "Hopefully a professor or two will be interested in my experiments. If they're not all too cautious after, you know, the last bunch of limit-pushing scientists ruined their city. I guess it would be unwise to flaunt my connections to said scientists..." she mumbled the last part.

"Might be better to play it down till you've scoped out the situation," Mabry agreed. "Alright, drop spoonfuls of dough on the cookie sheet."

"Playing things down is not my strong point," she commented as she tried to arrange the dough in fairly neat rows.

"Like playing down that you were a Nobody for the better part of a year?" Mabry pointed out with a raised eyebrow.

"Okay, fair enough, but I should point out that I'm much more easily excited these days, seeing as I'm not a Nobody. Brix had a distinct advantage." With the stirring spoon, she nudged the edges of a dollop of cookie dough until it held the shape of a heart.

"I wouldn't call it an advantage." Mabry disagreed. "Just a difference."

"I disagree. She was much better at keeping secrets and not drawing attention to herself - until Xemnas came into the picture, anyway." She proceeded to artistically mess with several other blobs of unbaked dough. "An advantage by definition, just not one I'd trade my heart for right now."

"Secrecy isn't always a good thing. I think your honesty is a virtue." Mabry ruffled the younger woman's hair.

She shook out her hair with false indignity. It was now a couple inches past her shoulders - another sacrifice of war in the process of being reborn.
"I think so too, but it can be a rather dangerous one. 'Hi Captain-Pirate-Ghost-Who-Tried-To-Kill-Me, I'm here to question you about your love life'," she mocked herself with a slightly mad grin.

Mabry laughed. "There's a difference between honesty and rashness. And tact wouldn't kill you."

"Now, see, there's my problem... I'm perfectly tactful until people stop being honest with me. My own honesty or lack-there-of is one thing, but I just can't seem to deal with secrecy from others. It's terribly frustrating," she huffed. "Don't they understand that I must knoweverything?"

Mabry's laughter increased. "Omniscience is quite the ambition." She stopped. "And, oh! Your tea has probably steeped itself into sentience by now."

"That's the way I like it. My tea should be as clever as I am." She abandoned the cookies in favor of tea, which she sipped with great relish. "But anyway, how am I supposed to single-handedly fix all the wrongs in the universe if I don't have adequite information? "

"You're suppose to let your friends help, silly girl," Mabry scolded. "I don't want to be left out."

"Alright, not single-handedly then. That doesn't make the information any less integral. Well..." she paused to recalculate that. "I suppose your additional luck could suppliment a fraction of the necessary data, if yours is on a positive level like mine. Oh, have I even told you about my next experiment?"

"No, you haven't. You've been gone for a while, and you were pretty distracted last time you were here."

"Indeed." She sipped her tea. "I want to find out if Luck is a measurable force, kind of like magic. I got the idea from Josi, of course. He obviously has negative levels of luck, though I think an individual's luck can be altered by the presence of someone with different levels... kind of like the merging of auras. All of this still needs to be tested, of course." It was really quite unclear whether or not she was joking.

"And you think my luck is good?" Mabry inquired, sliding the cookie sheets into the oven.

She cocked her head to the side. To her, that seemed obvious. "Don't you?"

Mabry considered it. "I'd never really thought about it. I'm not even sure that I believe in luck. I've always thought of it as being linked to karma, and what I know about the my past lives--or at least the ones I've always believed I've had--leads me to think that my karma should not be good."

"That's also a possibility, of course." Another sip. "Mine's just a hypothesis, after all..." And another. "Though if the matter is karma rather than luck, I'd be very curious about my own." Sip... sip... frown. "I'd rather it not be karma, though."

"Afraid of being punished for something?"

"Not that. I just don't like the implications of Fate." She held up a hand, palm upward in an explanatory gesture. "We have fairly good evidence that destiny exists, obviously, but it's never been something I care to follow. Luck implies a much more whimsical and easily changeable force."

"I've always liked stories that emphasize the balance between fate and chance . . . I prefer the term chance to luck, for some reason." Mabry perched on one of the counters.

"Chance works too. And Fate and Chance are a good pair, so long as one can effect the other. There's nothing like twisting fate..." she smiled nostalgically.

Mabry smiled. "You did end up succeeding after all. You were so afraid you wouldn't be able to save them."

She nodded. "Exactly. Fate's a scary thing. I guess I got lucky." The word-choice, of course, was intentional.

"You're ignoring the third force which I think played the greatest part in that," Mabry corrected her. "Agency."

Song scrunched up her face in confusion. "What do you mean by that?"

Mabry took three butter knives from a nearby drawer. She set the first down at an angle. "Fate. The will of the universe. Destiny. The things that are meant to be." She down the second so that it touched the other at one end, forming an acute angle. "Chance. Or luck if you prefer. Things that just happen with no rhyme or reason. Chaos, perhaps." She set down the third, forming an equilateral triangle. "Agency. Our actions and choices. Free will, some might call it. The other two are the things that happen to us, but they alone cannot determine the future, because this is what we actually do in the face of Fate and Chance."

"Ahh. Well... yes. That's exactly it. I wasn't ignoring that part at all, I just didn't know what to call it." She smiled and twirled a strand of hair around one finger. "Chance as chaos is a good point too, you know... Maybe that's why I like it so much."

Mabry nodded. "I figured as much."

The idea pleased Song a little too much, drawing her thoughts back to old inspirations. "Heh. Well, I always wanted to be the Lord of Nightmares when I grew up... Also, how long do those cookies take?"

Mabry glanced at the timer. "Well, they usually take about ten minutes. So, not too much longer."

She settled for nursing her tea quietly for a few moments, letting her thoughts drift.
"...Oh. I just remembered. I think I should learn Cura."

"It's certainly a useful skill," Mabry agreed. "You could ask Aerith to help you with it," she went on.

"I figured you'd want to teach me, seeing as you missed me so very much~" she reasoned, making her eyes big and innocent.

"Hmm. Let me think about it. I'm not sure if I'm up to teaching higher level healing . . . we'll see."

"If you say so. You're the second best healer around, though, aren't you?"

"Well, I think so, but I think the ability to teach and the ability to do aren't always the same thing."

Song shrugged. "If you say so. I'd try it myself, but I actually want this one to be good and strong... I think I forgot to tell Josiah that I learned Cure just for him," she was, of course, grinning again.

The timer dinged, and Mabry removed the cookies from the oven. "Like I said, we'll see. I certainly approve of helping you to keep him in one piece."

Song loomed over the cookies, studying the way her attempts at sculpting had come out. "... What if keeping him in one piece requires poking the pirate in his head?"

"What a shame," Mabry said flatly.

"Is that a 'too bad, you're not allowed' kind of shame, or an 'oh well, don't get killed' kind?"

This was greated with a short burst of laughter, then a pause. "I briefly thought you were referring to literally poking Calum in the head."

"Oh. I'm not quite that insane... Unless I dreamed up a ten-foot pole for the occasion." She mimed poking something across the room with a stick. "Is it dead yet? Oh, wait..."

Mabry giggled. "Why not? Though personally, I'd want a thirty nine and a half foot pole for the purpose."

"Hmm. Twenty feet might be good. Twenty-seven, maybe... I'd ask Lilith for the most suitable length, but I doubt she'd be very helpful." She delicately poked at a cookie and then pinched it off the tray with thumb and forefinger, nipping at it despite the heat.

"Those are too hot to eat!" Mabry scolded her good-naturedly. "But I think you should take a few of them on a plate with a cup of tea and go up to bed. It's late, you know. Past my bedtime."

"No... they're... not." Her words were drawn apart by stubborn attempts to prove her argument, resulting in watery eyes and slightly burnt fingers.

"Maybe a glass of milk too," Mabry added, as she covered the other cookies with paper towels so they could cool overnight. I'm off to bed. Goodnight."

Song was in the process of putting the nibbled cookie and a couple more on a small plate - not that she'd admit to having given up.
"Sweet dreams~"

"Always."