The cafeteria smelled like boiled starch and recycled air, which was a significant improvement over the last year of his life. Sunny arrived an hour before the rush, same as yesterday, claimed the corner table with his back to the wall and a clear line to both exits, he placed down his cup of coffee and a plate of eggs that he'd requested specifically.
The eggs were terrible. His nose shrinked, it was not like they were inedible, he had eaten things on the Forgotten Shore that made these eggs look like a religious experience. But still bad. Gray at the edges. Faintly smelling of something yellow. They had been cooked by someone who had never personally experienced joy.
He looked at them and they looked back.
One week since returning. He was now an SS class awakened citizen, he found it more exhausting than useful, scratch that, it was extremely usefull. Sunny could not suppress a grin whenever he thought about all his perks, being an awakened sure was great. He even had a crap load of credits due to his exploration report of… that place. He wanted to buy a house, his own house, though for now he was in a temporary room in the Academy dormitory underground.
He ate a forkful of eggs and stared out the window.
In the park below, someone had left candles at the memorial again. A small cluster of them near the stone marker, the one with Nephis' name and the names of the others who hadn't come back. The candles were fresh; someone changed them every day. He'd looked into who. He hadn't found out, and after the second day he'd stopped looking, because whatever he was going to feel about it when he did find out was a thing he could defer.
He had visited her pod twice this week. The coffee was on its third attempt to be drinkable and failing. He was contemplating pouring it over the eggs as an improvement to one of them when someone sat down next to him.
Not across. Next to. The chair to his immediate left, pulled out with a scrape against the floor, occupied with a complete absence of ceremony. He had a half-second to process this before his shadows shifted, he almost summoned the midnight shard, he looked up.
Orange hair pulled back loosely, a few strands catching the cold fluorescent light of the cafeteria. Green eyes, so clear, moving from his face to the plate with flat attention. She was wearing a cloak that sat wrong at the shoulders, its fabric straining against the folded lines of something underneath it, the shape suggesting-
He looked at the table.
She reached for the coffee cup without asking and poured herself half a cup. Her hands were steady. There was a small scar on the back of her left one, thin and pale, old enough to have settled in.
'A sleeper? No… an awakened. Maybe she just returned…"
He had seen similar people like her, looking lost or forgetful of human interactions and ceremony. Sunny sighed.
She looked at his eggs.
Her expression confirmed his assessment. They regarded the eggs together for a moment in silence.
"You look angry at your eggs," she said.
He did. He was. "They're bad eggs," he said.
She pushed the salt toward him without looking up from her cup. Their cup?
He hadn't reached for it yet. He'd been thinking about it, at some point in the last five minutes, his hand had moved slightly in that direction and corrected toward coffee instead. He wasn't sure which. He took the salt, used it, and neither of them made anything of this.
They ate in silence that was almost physically harming him. He ate. She drank their coffee and broke pieces from a bread roll. He tried the eggs with salt and they were marginally less bad. Outside, the candles in the park caught the morning light, tiny warm points against the gray stone of the memorial. He looked at them for one moment and then looked elsewhere.
His shadow had drifted. Toward her side of the table, the way it sometimes moved when it was following something interesting. He pulled it back. It drifted again, slow and idle.
She was watching the window now, the park, the candles. Her expression hadn't changed. There was no grief or recognition, it looked rather idle. He thought about asking if she'd known any of them and decided against it.
A man sat down at the next table with a tray that had notably less food on it than it probably should. She glanced at him for half a second, assessed something, and held out the remaining half of her bread roll sideways in his direction, not looking at him, not saying anything.
The man stared.
She waited.
He took it. Said a startled, slightly confused thank you.
She was looking out the window again before he finished the second syllable.
Sunny looked at the man. The man looked at Sunny with a small expression before avoiding eye contact. Sunny looked back at his eggs.
She stood up after she was done, gathered her tray cup, and pushed the chair back in. The cloak moved with her and for one moment when she turned, just one, the fabric shifted at her back and he caught the shape of white against the gray lining, folded close but not entirely invisible.
Her retreating back was–
He looked at the window.
He sat there another ten minutes for no specific reason, finishing the coffee and not touching the remainder of the eggs, watching the park below where a student in a school uniform stopped at the memorial and crouched down to straighten one of the candles that had tilted.
The eggs had not improved.
'What was her name again? I'm sunny by the way'
He stood up and brought his tray to the return counter and went back to his room. The shadow that followed him was in an unusually good mood. He told it to shut up.
It did not shut up.