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.)

A pause follows, and Nuala allows his point the way she allows that reestablished distance, her hands falling very neatly into her lap. The very image of solemn repose, as if all of this must be done by rote, and precise, else the shouting.

"His professional judgement," she says, eventually. "I won't dispute that choice with either of you." Presently. "I understand, as well, why he chooses as he does personally," how it pains him, how he'll never say as much and accordingly how she chooses not to do so explicitly in his place, "but his needs and mine are not the same. His personal choices are not my own."

She doesn't condemn them, that's clear; doesn't disagree or sit in judgement. What Severus needs to do in response is what Severus needs to do in response, and that she can see how it hurts him - she will support him, where she can. He doesn't make it easy to do so, granted, but there are things that they share and she is grateful, in her way, that he allows her to be with him in this. She imagines it isn't easy to allow even that much, side by side in their unhappiness.

Severus makes a kind of sense to her that Charles does not, now, and the thin edge of her irritation is visible - the way she wants to snap back about his stupid hair not being the stupid point, how much easier it would be to let herself get mired in semantics and details and gotcha arguments about how she brought up his bad grooming in the first place-- she wants to shove him around the room and shout at him until this does make sense, because she doesn't understand and now he's, what? He's angry with her because he is incomprehensible?

It simmers just beneath the surface of her and he doesn't need any more complex gift than twenty-twenty vision to see. Her composure is hard won over tempestuousness, and the latter is rather more easily drawn out.

"I'd forgotten you understand all things you look upon," she returns, and she'd be extremely vexed to be described as 'peevish', but it's what she is. "Would that you had that gift to call upon now, and could make sense of things for my inferior woman's mind."

She moves, then, sudden as if she were venomous, as if she might strike him - but her hand catches him by the jaw, instead, fingers digging in, cropped gold nails painting moons in his flesh to remind him later of her passage. Her eyes are wolfish at this distance - a part of her brother he'd never needed to change when he donned that shape and walked as unconfined predator.

She looks. He invited her.

"I see nothing--" and if she were the worst of herself, then she'd stop there, angry and petty and unkind, and that she takes her breath in that moment is a hint of it, of how much ugliness she is just as capable of as he is, "--to tell me that this stillness of yours is not but another death." His, slowly; others, quicker.

There are other things she might say - hurtful, angry, telling things - and she almost does, so much so that he can almost hear them, half-formed and unspoken, through her hands on his skin. Will he tell his people he was too sad, when they fall? (Let it end, cradling her handmaidens as they wept, drums in the distance and her own heartbeat a traitorous assurance that her dearest had not fallen that day; let us fade, blood dripping from her nose, guilt and weariness pressing her early into the tomb her father built out of their kingdom, dust and myth already. Nuada's rage, his contempt, how badly she'd wanted to haul off and punch him hard in the nose like that was going to fix anything.)

She says, "I will not be made to turn away first to satisfy you," tightly, and she has always cared fiercely when she cared for anything at all.

"Do," curtly, and the time it takes her to release him stretches taut, ready to snap, until her hand-- doesn't do anything so gentle as drop, flung sharply away from him instead, letting blood rush back into the white marks she's left. "Do that."

Nuala very rarely says anything she doesn't wholeheartedly mean, after all.

The silence is awkward, after that; stubbornly reluctant to leave moments after declaring her intent to do no such thing, Charles!!!! she is nevertheless unsure of where that leaves them, and how to follow it up. This is the point at which she'd ordinarily be plotting how to drop onto his shoulders from a great height and knock him to the ground, were the dispute with her brother (and were it prior to the incident where he tried to commit genocide), which-- never really achieved anything with Nuada and is unlikely to work here.

And besides, it's more of a long-term strategy than an immediate solution.

"I'm ought to be past temper tantrums," she says, eventually, in the tone of someone who is not terribly surprised to find that she isn't. It isn't an apology (she isn't sorry), it's just a silence needs filling.

Nuala doesn't ask will you, unsure of whether she wants to ask will he visit or will he be well-- both, essentially, and neither is a fair question. Both just mean am I being humored, and in fairness, humoring her would probably be classed as 'self-preservation instinct kicking in' after that tumultuous exchange.

So she refrains. And she hesitates - is irked, briefly, by the inability to do this more gracefully - but concedes in turn, rising slowly, as if she hasn't fully committed to it.

"I will expect you to," is slightly more firm. It's a small thing, but it isn't nothing and it's more than some Severus managed to achieve; she makes herself take it in good faith.