She is doing a terrible impression of not being vexed, that is true, but-- she is at least comparatively less so than she might otherwise have been. He's yet to see her in the full swing of her temper, and while it would be terribly exciting for today to be that day, it isn't her preference.

Her mind probes gently at the edges of his, unsure if he can feel that much or if she might inadvertently hurt him should she press more firmly; she is cautious, but she wishes to better understand and 'asking somebody politely' has rarely if ever been her first port of call. Least of all with the men of her acquaintance, due to the aggravating tendency of such men to be less than forthcoming in the ways she might like. Possibly this reflects on her choice of companions; Nuala is unlikely to examine that in a way that reflects on her.

"I'm not vexed," she says, very evenly, setting her package aside. "I'm concerned for you. You're much changed since last we spoke." A positively idyllic moment, both in comparison and in its own context - she misses him, fiercely, and it feels unfair to do so when he sits opposite her.

It feels familiar, but Charles in his worst moments is not genocidal, just forlorn, which-- she knows even less what to do with.

To her credit, she doesn't pretend not to understand what he's talking about - the fact he knows what she's doing because he knows her means something, even if the fact he knows only because of that is a part of why she retorts, childishly churlish, "Make me," knowing full well that he can't.

The rest is because that emptiness frightens her. That this is even a possibility is something at which she's aghast; that it's been done to him is worse. That he chose, that he did this to himself is unimaginable, and her anger is the anger of someone in the grip of a fear they don't understand and aren't prepared to handle. This isn't what peace looks like, she's sure, and equally sure that that isn't the reason he's mutilated himself, but - she wonders, in spite of herself, about assimilation.

Every inch of her recoils.

"I've been informed that Dr Knutson is assuming the duties you were relieved of," she says, sharp-edged but slightly more composed than she had been a moment ago when she snapped at him as if she were still a girl in Bethmoora who hadn't yet learned to have a care for the consequences of her tantrums. The reassertion of how that had actually gone is rather more deliberate than that, all the same.

For all that she wrenches away his effort to position it as a choice - it feels like abandonment, and she's never been at her best when confronted with that. If Nuada were still here, she'd go and pick a fight with him and only afterwards wonder why, but he isn't and she's left acutely and uncomfortably aware of her own motives.

She isn't sorry for her selfishness; it feels more permissible now she hasn't got the excuse of his necessity to Xenogen to hold up like a talisman or shield. If they don't need him, then she is allowed to. She's allowed to need him.

She's probably not allowed to be unnecessarily unkind as a result, but when has life ever been fair? Never, that's when.

Agitated, "Have you been eating?" --brilliant segue.

"Telepathy didn't teach you how to groom yourself," she says, with some asperity (laced with an odd sort of relief; that he has, and contrarily, that he is present enough to become irritated with her when he seems so desperately far away, all the way down the rabbit hole that is his own grief and guilt), "and you haven't been doing that."

Her incredulous expression may be answer enough, but she says, "I am not rude. I am, as befits my position, refreshingly frank with you."

--because she has been rude, but she doesn't care. It's sort of like how eccentric is just 'crazy, but with money'. Nuala is opinionated, but with a crown.

"And, frankly, you look a fright. It worries me."

Joke's on Charles, there is no escape from further criticism.

"Praise the gods you didn't abandon your powers of observation with the rest," she returns, acidic, but despite how quickly this effort to reach out has devolved (neither of them are shouting; there's still time) she makes no move to, well, move. She isn't sure what she thinks she's going to achieve now that apparently even 'a civil conversation' is out of the question, but stubbornness and the genuine truth of how much she cares for him have nailed her feet to the ground, at least a while longer.

She exhales and the quick way she turns her head fans her hair out around her, gold mingled with silver, the only hint of her true age and how absurdly she's behaving in its context. She is aware, however: "I didn't come here to fight with you," a bit frustrated.

Neither is she, if she's honest; saying so feels like stating the abundantly obvious. This went awry fairly quickly - her fear and her frustration compounded by Charles' willingness to participate in unpleasantries, as it were, one or other of them a lit match to gasoline - and she isn't sure exactly when it was it slid out of her control. Before he even opened the door, possibly; before she knocked. She should've had more of a plan, shouldn't have acted on impulse.

"I've gone terribly far astray if you must ask." ...she came because he's her friend, and how could she not come if he wouldn't come to her?

She didn't only fight with Nuada, either - whatever it says that she understood his motives better than she understands Charles, now, she isn't going to examine, but maybe it's just stillness that she can't comprehend, this creature who was so terribly disappointed in a man whose convictions crumbled in the face of her vulnerability. He has given up, and she can't, not ever--

--not on him, either, even when that's all he sees there is for her to do.

"We can fight if you'd like to," she says, a bit more wearily. "I don't want to go yet. Come and try these shirts on."

"I looked," she says, tightly, because he's already called her on it and because she wouldn't have shied away from admitting it even if he hadn't (she has little compunction about that sort of thing - he already knows). "I am aware and I am not making any such pretense, but if we aren't to argue and you won't allow an alternative, then I made you shirts and I brought them down here for you. You haven't got to try them on. Look at them, at least. I meant to deliver them."

It wasn't supposed to be a fight. It was supposed to be to check on him and to deliver the shirts she'd finally finished to her satisfaction; she has a similar parcel for Severus, which he'll receive whenever he takes her up on her invitation to spend a bit of time with her after all of this. (She trusts that he will, because he agreed to and he sets store by that sort of thing and by the formidable history of her.)

She sees him flinch and it is a choice that she makes to ignore it, to ignore the discourteous way she wouldn't ordinarily let him - or anyone - speak to her without objection or remark. If the options are fight with him or let him be-- then she rejects both of them and will find herself a third, somehow, rising and unknotting the ribbons that bind said shirts together neatly. There are four, each a different shade but all embroidered the same way (and in the same gold thread) about the collar. Her sigil, with light protection woven in, delicate and precise.

It isn't much, against what the ship might throw at them. It comforted her to do, all the same.

"You are still my friend, Charles," she says, abruptly, sitting down beside him. "I won't pretend that I understand what you've done to yourself, but you are my friend and I care for you too much to set you aside because it might be easier." For both of them.

She never does much the easy way.

(Probably the 'Gondorian drunk' look will actually make these look a bit less out of place on him, so, you know, there's that.)

She is very refreshingly frank, on occasion.

"I thought perhaps particularly now." Something-- different. Unconnected to his life before or after; that she might have less than pleasing connotations in and of herself, now, is not something she'd considered and unlikely to be something she'd think of without prompting. "I know the shape of you, they will fit-- I worried a bit, if you hadn't been eating."

But he says he had, and so.

Her answer, here, is cautious: "I trust his judgement." Perhaps more than her own, on occasion, where Charles is concerned; if Severus had seen fit to dismiss him from the department (a drastic step, and one she had balked at when she first read the message), then...then she hesitates to question him on it. He had reason, presumably. She can see it for herself now, here. "And I've not forgotten your reluctance, before."

When she'd come to bully him back to work and it had gone-- slightly differently than planned, if not displeasingly so. (Quite the opposite. It had gone exceptionally well, thank you for asking.)

"Would you be so much more enthusiastic, were I to take my part as I did then?"

She doubts that very much.

"We differ, in that way." Her response to her own sins is never inaction; always the fear of it, of what her stillness might then allow to come to pass. She manages to keep judgement from her voice, admittedly with effort (and effort that for someone else, she might not make) - she's accustomed to this separation, this alienness, but not with him and so it frustrates her more than it might. More than someone else would, in a similar moment. She isn't the first person to struggle to be kinder to those she holds dearer.

Her instinct with him is impatience where she might make more allowances for someone she'd shared less intimacy with (sexual exploits aside - the things on which they've bonded let her forget, sometimes, how much distance time and species puts between them and their experiences).

"There," a moment later, not quite bracingly. "He has made a choice and you don't wish to have me persuade you to challenge it - so I trust his judgement, and yours."

(Mainly his.)