herhumbleservant

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matthew

6/28

If Ross is honest (which he won't be, if anyone were to actually ask), he's a bit nervous about having Matthew over to the apartment.

It isn't because he isn't happy to host the lad; no, it's more that Ross isn't sure he's altogether a proper host at all. Demelza had teased him throughout the evening, up until she'd left for work at Tintern, about how he'd looked like he was fretting over whether pizza would be the right choice for a meal, considering he can hardly cook on his own. It's Demelza who is skilled in the kitchen, not Ross, and his wife hardly ceases to remind him of that when the subject comes up.

He realizes how ridiculous he's being, if only because he's most certainly had friends before. It's just that those friends had been in Cornwall, Ross had known them practically all his life, and to be faced with an overwhelming selection of unfamiliar faces in this city, he sometimes isn't sure how to go about being more than relatively civil with most people. He's lucky, he thinks, to have discovered that Matthew is willing enough to lead their conversations when Ross seems to be at a loss for what to say. Andrea, too, is quite like that, and Demelza herself rarely runs out of things to say. So perhaps that is what Ross needs, someone who can poke and prod and pry him out of the sort of shell he retreats into at times. As it turns out, he's cultivating quite a few friends who posses that talent.

When the doorbell rings, Ross freezes, staring at the door before shifting his gaze to Julia, who looks up at him from the bassinet that's been set up in their living room with wide, curious eyes. "Best behavior," Ross murmurs, and he isn't sure whether he's reminding himself or the baby but it's neither here nor there because then he's crossing the room and opening the door.

He breaks into a smile, which he hopes is welcoming enough. "Matthew," he greets, stepping aside to let the young man inside. "Come in, please, the living room is right through here. Take a seat wherever you'd like."

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Matthew has had more excitement over the last few weeks than he particularly cares for, so he'd been glad at Ross's invitation for dinner. Dinner, he thinks, is safe and normal and nothing to do with hallucinations and spells that make your secrets appear on your back. The knowledge that Matthias has envisaged Matthew being burned at a stake is still fresh in his mind, unsettling, but tonight he pushes it aside. He is still safe in this city. There's no Council, none of Matthias's druskelle.

Ross doesn't seem the type to Matthew to care for dressing formally, for which Matthew is glad. He doesn't own anything remotely fancy and he feels much more at home in his boots, jeans and plaid. He does, at least, swap his shirt out for a nicer button down that Dutch had convinced him to buy, and on the way he picks up a bottle of wine. It's different to the wine they'd had back home, and he doesn't know if it's the kind of thing Ross drinks, but he's pretty sure it's polite, so he buys it anyway.

He rings the doorbell once he arrives and shortly after Ross opens the door, inviting him in. Matthew smiles, stepping over the threshold and handing Ross the bottle. "I brought this," he tells him, still unsure of the whole thing. "In truth I don't know whether it's good or if ye will like it, but it seemed the proper thing to do."

Demelza had tried to get him to wear something a bit less casual than what he'd ultimately decided on so Ross is really rather relieved to see that Matthew had dressed similarly. It isn't often that he invites people over to the apartment for dinner; in fact, this is the first time he's done so and considering how different the customs are in this modern world, he hadn't been sure what to expect. Matthew, too, is from a different place, one quite different from this one but even so, the lad seems to have become accustomed enough to Darrow. Ross thinks that he isn't doing especially poorly himself but every so often, he does second-guess himself when it comes to developing what's become the start of a small circle of friends of his own.

To indulge his wife, though, he had agreed to have Julia dressed in one of her nice summer frocks, though Ross isn't entirely sure what bearing that has on Matthew's presence.

Regardless, he gratefully takes the bottle Matthew holds out to him, looking over the label with a pleased smile. "I'm sure it will be excellent, I'll bring us both glasses so we can share some over pizza." He pauses, glancing up at Matthew with a vaguely concerned expression. "Pizza is alright, isn't it? I'd be happy to order out for something else, if you'd prefer." He sets the wine down on the table in front of the couch, reaching out to absently rock Julia's bassinet. "In any case, please, make yourself at home. I'll bring everything from the kitchen, and you can get acquainted with my Julia in the meantime."

Edited 2016-06-30 09:33 (UTC)

Ross seems pleased enough with the bottle and he doesn't seem the type for falsity, so Matthew smiles back. Much of the Beforetime is still alien to him, but he's glad that he could get this right, at least. He wonders idly if it's the sort of societal nicety that Ross had back home, or whether this is strange to him, too.

Pizza, however, Matthew knows. It had been one of the first things he'd tried in this city and quickly become a favourite. It's a good thing he enjoys physical work, he thinks, or else he would grow large from eating far too much of it. "Pizza is great," he assures Ross, following him into the living room. He's heard Ross speak of Julia at work but he'd not been entirely sure just how old she was. Bright eyes peek at him from the bassinet and Matthew smiles back at her.

"She's gorgeous," Matthew calls to Ross as he heads into the kitchen. He sits down on the couch in front of Julia's bassinet and rocks her a little. There had been few babies back home to spend time with, but he finds that he enjoys them anyway, with their wide, curious eyes. Matthew pulls a face at her just to make her giggle, enjoying the sound.

Ross smiles to himself at Matthew's kind words about Julia, silently agreeing as he pulls two wine glasses down from one of the cupboards, along with two plates, a corkscrew, and some napkins. There's Parmesan cheese and crushed red pepper already set out on the table where the pizza is, Demelza had insisted they would need it, and he's glad at least one of them had been better prepared for this dinner than the other.

"Thank you," he says, his smile growing broader as he returns from the kitchen. "She takes after her mother, almost entirely. I'm hoping our second child will show at least some indication that I'm the father, though I suppose I shouldn't wish my features on anyone."

Demelza would give him a playful smack for that comment, and the corners of Ross's mouth twitch in amusement at the thought. He leans down to press a quick kiss to Julia's forehead, pleased when she lets out a happy gurgle and nothing more because as much as he loves his daughter, she does have a tendency to be louder most nights. She hasn't had her usual nap today, though, for this very purpose. Ross had taken her out to the park, where people always coo over her and keep her well occupied, because he'd wanted her to sleep through the dinner. It seems to be working in his favor, and he picks up her bottle from the table after he's set what he'd been carrying down. Julia takes it immediately, drinking hungrily, and Ross lets out a satisfied hum.

"That should keep her busy for awhile," he says, picking up the corkscrew and reaching for the bottle. "Nobody ever truly prepares you for how much work goes into being a parent, you know. It is worth every moment I have with her, of course, but..." He glances down at the bottle. "Well, let's just say I'm very eager to get this opened."

He hadn't known that Demelza was pregnant again, though Matthew has never met her, so he supposes he gets a pass. Ross seems pleased at the thought of another child, and Matthew is happy for him. He beams wide when Ross comes back into the room and presses a kiss against his daughter's head. Fatherhood suits him, Matthew thinks. It's not something Matthew has ever thought about for himself, but it definitely fits Ross.

"I didn't know she was expecting," he says, taking some of the dinnerware out of Ross's hands and helping him set it down. "How long until another little one comes?"

Julia takes to the bottle almost instantly, and Matthew knows it won't be long before she tires herself out. Matthew has no such obligations to keep him from wine, but it's not something he partakes in often, regardless. "I never thought about being a parent," he admits. It hadn't seemed like it was ever going to be on the cards, back home. They'd always been so much on the run and after he was taken aboard the Calor Lady, any hope of a family seemed to be dashed. As the years went by it became harder to believe that he would ever leave Redport.

"She's a little over six months now," Ross answers, pulling the cork from the wine bottle with a pop and pouring them both a glass. "The doctor says she's due sometime in the earlier days of September so we're getting ever closer."

It seems like not very long at all that Ross had first arrived in Darrow and in fact, they're son or daughter will have arrived before his first year has been marked. He has no complaints, of course, though Demelza certainly does. She's never favored pregnancy and often thinks silly things like Ross might find her undesirable for her gain in weight; but his wife is giving him the greatest of gifts in carrying their children. After knowing what he'd lost before he'd been brought here, Ross is all the more eager to meet their next baby. Nothing could turn him away.

"There were quite a few couples back home your age or younger who already had larger families than ours," Ross tells him with chuckle, taking a first sip of the wine and letting it sit on his tongue for a moment before nodding his satisfaction. "It's quite good, I expect it'll go very well with our dinner. You know, in truth, I thought fatherhood would have started much earlier for myself, as well. It wasn't something I necessarily looked forward to at the time, but it would have been rather unavoidable."

His smile turns wry then, his thoughts straying to Elizabeth. "Of course, sometimes things don't work out quite like we plan, do they? Hence why we are here together now."

Matthew takes the glass offered to him, taking a sip. He knows next to nothing at all about wine so he's glad that Ross seems to like it. Before Darrow, it had been so many years since Matthew drank any kind of ferment that he'd been worried it would send him to sleep after one glass. As it is, Dutch has been making a fair go of getting him used to alcohol again.

"I didn't know many families, back home," Matthew admits. In truth he can't think of any, now. He hasn't seen his own family since he was a small boy, and he knows the kind of distrust and destruction that had been sown in Elspeth and Dameon's families. The Council didn't take kindly to that kind of closeness. "Too many children turning against their parents, too many parents selling off their own children." He shrugs. It's miserable to think about now, but that had been the reality of it.

"I do wonder though," he starts, "whether if I were to have a child it would inherit my Talent." It's not necessarily hereditary, and in Darrow maybe even less so, but the thought has crossed his mind.

Ross frowns at that, knowing all too well how cruel some parents can be. He's fortunate himself, his father could easily have become as bitter as the rest after the deaths of both Ross's mother and younger brother, but Joshua Poldark had been a good man. He'd inspired a great deal of gossip among those in their class, though knowing that admittedly pleases Ross in some small way. Ross had carried on that legacy, after all, and he thinks his father would have quite liked Demelza. Francis and Verity, on the other hand, had been hard-pressed to earn Uncle Charles's approval and indeed, even on his deathbed, Charles hadn't seem altogether impressed with either of his children.

"In that case, it sounds like it's rather for the best that you didn't know too many," Ross says, and he hopes that doesn't sound callous. He can be a reticent man, he knows this, but he tries his best to be good to those who are good to him. When he sees cruelty, like that of Tom Carne, who'd beaten Demelza and her brothers until they'd scarred, something within him warms with anger. For the moment, he lets that settle, hiding the rising frustration at the memory of his fight with Carne by taking another sip of wine.

"Your talent?" he asks then, tilting his head curiously. "What talent might that be?"

Matthew can't help but laugh at that. Ross has a particular brand of bluntness that reminds Matthew of Elspeth. They're both friendly and kind, but neither seems to have much cause for tact, or for careful words. Matthew had always liked that about Elspeth, and he'd had little in the way of tact himself until he'd been forced to learn when to hold his tongue. It still slipped out more often than not, but in recent years a slip of the tongue meant a crack of the whip, and Matthew values his own skin.

"You didn't know?" he queries, a little surprised. Eowyn knows it well, and Jamie too. Matthew thinks most of his friends in this place know now too, whether they have some kind of Talent of their own or not. Back home it had been a carefully guarded secret, but here there is less to fear, and Matthew trusts the people he has befriended. There's no Council or Herders for them to sell him out to besides, and he already lived through KIRIN and came out the other side.

"Forgive me, I thought it common knowledge by now." He shakes his head, taking a sip of his wine. "Back home we called them Talents, though there seems to be a variety of words for it here. There are things I can do with my mind," he explains, letting the words come gently, testing the waters. "Talk to people, for instance." He leaves out the harsher parts for now, the coercion and the mind reading. It tends to inspire fear firsthand, and Matthew means Ross no harm.

Frankly, it doesn't surprise Ross to be out of the loop of something apparently so well-known. He doesn't socialize much at work, has only exchanged pleasantries with Eowyn and once saw Jamie in a coffee shop with his daughter, before he'd disappeared from the city. Matthew is the only one Ross has truly gone out of his way to spend time with outside of the stables and even then, it appears he hasn't been paying especially good attention to the young man.

"You can talk to people with your mind," Ross repeats, slowly, trying to work it out as the words leave him. He blinks, unsure of how to respond. Demelza has told him of the friends she's made who are particularly gifted, but Ross hasn't had encounters of that magnitude himself. Galen had told him of his past, of how he isn't truly human, and Ross had accepted that readily enough simply because his friend has never done anything to deserve less.

So he tries, for Matthew's sake, to understand. To grasp what this Talent really means. "You're saying that you could do that right now, put your thoughts in my head without uttering a word?" Ross asks, a brow arching. "Could you show me?"

Matthew's a little surprised. Normally when the topic is brought up it's either met by confusion or fear or, if they were back home, his arrest. Ross looks at him in a way that says he probably hasn't come across this sort of thing before, but he doesn't seem hostile. It bolsters Matthew's confidence a little, and he puts his glass of wine down for a moment. One glass is hardly going to hamper him, but if he's going to be putting on a demonstration, it's best if his mind is sharp.

He hesitates for only a moment, curious at what the reaction will be before he seeks out Ross's mind, sending a quick "aye, I can". When he'd done this with Dutch she'd been pleasant enough but he'd respected her wishes to keep out otherwise. With Blue he quite enjoyed finding her mind across a crowd, feeling the way it enhanced his own. Ross feels like an unTalent when he enters, but the lack of hatred is curiously new.

"There are other parts to it, too," he explains, dropping back out of Ross's head to talk verbally. "We call it farseeking."

It startles him, though Ross expects it. Well, he hadn't known quite what to expect, in truth, so he stirs where he sits when the voice sounds in his head and looks to Matthew with wide eyes. Had this happened in Cornwall, Ross would have imagined he was going mad, that Matthew was going mad with him, but he lets out a short burst of awed laughter and rubs a hand over the stubble of his cheek.

"Farseeking," he echoes, brow knitting at the new term. He can't hope to understand it, not in its entirety, nor does he think he particularly wishes to; but it's rather extraordinary and there's a part of him that's glad they're in a place he can more readily accept the phenomenon. Demelza will be fascinated to learn of it, if Matthew gives his permission for Ross to tell her.

"What other parts?" he asks, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees, all the more intrigued now.

It's not how Matthew expected this night to go, but he finds he's quite enjoying it. There are people here that know about him now, most of the ones he's close to, but for the most part he keeps it under wraps. Dutch and Matthias know, obviously, but he tries not to demonstrate or fall into the habit too much around them, knowing they both guard their minds closely. It's not like home, where he could comfortable farseek his friends without concern.

"I can sense people, animals. Feel their minds before I enter a room, seek them out over a distance, that sort of thing." He shrugs. "The borders of the city limit me here, like static, and it's the same over water." There's no reason that his mind shouldn't be able to bypass the city, but as soon as he gets to the edge of the countryside it's like he's pushing against blacklands, the taint muffling his mind.

"I have a little coercion Talent, too, being able to control minds and the like. But I've only used that the once here, to escape KIRIN." He scrunches his nose a little, the idea leaving a bad taste in his mouth. He hadn't liked using that particular power, but he had liked being a prisoner again even less.

Well, that rather explains why Matthew is such an exceptional hand at the stables. Ross doesn't want to offend by attributing all the lad's skills to this farseeking gift, but he suspects it certainly does help when it comes to needing to calm the horses in their occasional times of stress. It's a comfort to know Matthew would be able to do that, really, that when all else fails, there's someone to rely on who can help fix what Ross cannot.

"KIRIN." Ross nods a bit, though he doesn't want to pry if Matthew doesn't want to speak of it. He'd heard of the organization, of what it'd done to some of the people in this city, though he's sure Demelza has learned more of it than he has. Whether he wants to know more about it or not, he isn't sure; as curious as he can get, Ross is also weary of sticking his nose into things that might put his family at risk in some way. If it were his own well-being alone that was the concern, he wouldn't hesitate to dig more; but his daughter is sleeping just to his right, and Ross could never do anything that would bring her harm.

And yet, Ross still finds himself wanting to gain a better understanding of it, of why Matthew had disappeared, why he'd needed to use coercion to escape. He takes another sip of wine, carefully weighing his options before meeting Matthew's eyes. "I'd heard of it, rather Demelza told me of it. They took you, they took others. Why? What was their aim?"

It was months ago now but Matthew still feels his stomach churn in distaste at the thought of them. He'd been so convinced he was safe here, convinced that this was the Beforetime of his dreams and that nothing bad would happen. The Great White was a distant threat that might not come for years and years now, and everything else had seemed so wonderful. There was no Council, no Herders, nothing to fear being himself for the first time in his life. And then KIRIN had taken that from him, thrown him into a cell and torn his mind to pieces over and over.

"Something about our Talents," he says, shrugging one shoulder. Not everyone in the cells had had the same abilities, some very different from others. None of them were Talents he recognises from home, and he still doesn't know exactly what the end game was. "I don't know the details, only that they took people with gifts."

Gifts, they'd called it when they were in there. Back home he'd been called a misfit all his life, an abomination. He takes a sip of his wine for something to do with his hands, something to stall for time. Matthew has always been good at letting this kind of thing roll off him; he'd suffered worse back home and never let it get to him, but sometimes it takes an extra moment to let the anger roll away. "Anyway, it was nothing pleasant."

He's silent for a long moment after Matthew has finished talking, and Ross has no intention of asking more details about the experience because it's clear to him Matthew would rather not relive any of it. What concerns him is the possibility that it could happen again, which he's sure has occurred to Matthew, as well. People can be greedy, they can do terrible things at the cost of others' well-beings for selfish gain, and Ross may not know what it's like to be targeted for a talent such as Matthew's, but he has been the victim of such despicable behavior.

"You had someone?" he asks, avoiding eye contact as he reaches for a slice of pizza. "After that entire ordeal, you had friends you could turn to? Somewhere to recover where you weren't alone?"

It would make Ross a hypocrite to say one shouldn't be alone during times of strife, but he's come around to acknowledging the truth of that, particularly since Demelza had entered into his life. To know someone is waiting for him, to know someone genuinely cares about his well-being all the time and not just when it suits them, it does make a difference.

"You're welcome here, you know," Ross continues, clearing his throat, "if ever you're in need of something."

The question shocks him somewhat. He appreciates that Ross doesn't ask the finer details, but he hadn't expected him to ask about the aftermath, either. Matthew hasn't spoken about KIRIN to anyone; in fact this is the most he's spoken of it since it happened. The first day, when he'd been freed and gone to the carnival for something to distract his wandering thoughts, Dutch had asked him if he was okay. They hadn't talked about it and he'd shrugged the entire matter off like it was nothing. They'd been friends then but not overly close, and he hadn't wanted to burden her.

"I was relatively new here," he explains. Darrow is full of people who have built friends and families and lives here but when he'd been taken, he'd only been in the city two months and the list of people he knew was very few. He thinks it would be different, now. "But I managed."

He's never spoken to anyone about Redport, either, he thinks. Maybe that's the kind of thing you're supposed to do, talk to people close to you about the things that cause you grief, but he's never had the opportunity. He was snatched from Elspeth and Dameon seconds after reuniting with them, with no time to talk about what those eight years had done to him. Here he's not talked about it to anyone except in brief passing. "Thank ye for the generosity though," he says, raising his glass a little in thanks. He doesn't know whether he'd ever take Ross up on the offer but he appreciates the gesture all the same.

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