Quiet Friendships (Peregrine x CJListon)

[Peregrine]

Chenara, struggling to carry the bucket of paint without looking like she was struggling with the task, didn't answer Kira's question until the bucket was placed down in the grass, crushing the long blades. She glanced over towards the mu... graffiti, before starting to speak. "Yeah, kinda. But the people who painted it shouldn't have done it on the side of someone's house, I suppose. Maybe painting over it is part of it somehow? Like some sort of weird take on a Buddhist mandala thing?" She shrugged, rubbed the palms of her hands unconsciously where the metal handle of the bucket of paint had left a small dent, and turned back to the truck.

The last thing they brought over from the truck was the paint gun, and Chenara stared at the little contraption in confusion. She'd never done anything even remotely like painting a wall before, and while Annalise had made the whole process sound fairly easy when she had handed the paint gun off to Chenara she was now starting to worry about it a little bit. She glanced at the little pump. Stick the hose in the bucket of paint, turn on the compressor using the red switch, point at the wall and pull the trigger. Keep the nozzle about a foot away from the wall, move slowly for an even coat, but not so slowly it drips. They seemed like the kind of instructions even a dummy could follow. Chenara tugged on the hose, and walked over to where Kira had opened the bucket of paint.

It was an unpleasant color, a kind of dirty off-grey that looked like someone had colored the thing with sewer water. "I think it's just the primer, right?" Chenara replied, glancing at the side of the can. "Yeah," she continued a moment later, pointing to the side of the can where the words 'Uncolored Primer' were bolded at the bottom of the can. "We'll probably end up having to do a second coat next week, once this has had time to dry. Or someone will."

 

[SilentxChaos]

"Ugh, please no. To have to see this ruined tapestry again would be an affront to my artist's soul," Kira breathed heavily, but her inhale hitched from a barely suppressed giggle. She winked at Chenara and took the paint gun and hose. "Take turns? I'll go first."

She didn't wait for Chenara to respond, too rapt in her subconscious need to work and thinking on her contentedness of doing something new after so many months trapped in the foster house with people who really could learn the meaning of "personal bubble". Well, almost new. Kneeling down, Kira deftly attached the hose to the bucket and checked it was secure. She remembered having to re-paint the foster house- home it was now- within the first month of arriving there. The littler kids got into their heads it'd be fun to throw tomatoes and other squishy fruit at the side of the updated split-level house, and surely their foster mother Finny wouldn't mind and may even thank them. The poor kids were very wrong. She had them on trash duty faster than Kira could walk through the door and by some waterfall affect, she got stuck with the job of repainting. Kira smiled ruefully at the memory of Little Tom, face a sticky mess of tomato juice, swatting a fly away and sticking his little trembling chin out and proclaiming it was his idea to "make the house prettier".

When she flipped the red switch, the pressure of the paint geysering out made her stumble and nearly miss the side of Rich's house. She giggled and blushed, looking shyly at Chenara, "My bad," she said with red cheeks. Kira readjusted her stance and turned on the spray paint again, carefully maneuvering it along and silently apologizing for what she felt as desecration.

After about an hour, she handed it off to Chenara. They switched on and off for the better of the morning until Kira groaned, handing the gun once agian to Chenara, and flopped on the grass. "My arms are jelly and my stomach is making whale-mating calls," she complained and rolled onto her back. "You think we could take a break and get some food?"

 

[Peregrine]

Chenara was more than willing to hand of the responsibility of starting the job to Kira. This was not just because she didn't particularly have any desire to paint over the mural... graffiti on the side of the man's house, but also because she didn't know how to operate the spray gun and didn't have confidence in being able to figure it out without working. Ask her to figure out how to play any MMO without either instructions or an FAQ, and she'd be a master in less than an hour. Ask her to dive into a quest and figure out just where the person who had gotten 200 gold out of something that should have only provided 5 was broken, and she'd be able to spot it. But put anything mechanical in her hands, and she would be as lost as a newborn. Not that she'd ever admit it.

So, instead, she squatted down in the browning grass and watched Kira, and tried not to think about how much better the girl's stumble made her feel about this whole situation. By the time they traded off, Chenara had enough confidence in the task that she was able to pick up right where Kira left off, slowly coating the mist of off-white paint onto the wall. She tried to think of it like a quest, and she'd get some reward for completing it. She tried to think about Depths, and what she was going to need to do to make up the time she was losing right now. Kira's happy, abstract chatter pretty much ruined any chance of that, though.

Not that Chenara disliked the girl, really. People who could talk on and on without anything more than a few words to prompt a new line of dialogue were the second easiest people to get along with. The first, of course, being people who didn't talk at all. Chenara wasn't quite discourteous enough to completely tune out what Kira was saying, although the roar of the air compressor made it easy enough to ask the girl to repeat herself if Chenara's mind wandered far enough from the conversation that she missed when the topic changed.

After about an hour and a half, Chenara began to realize it might have been a mistake to choose not to bring a water bottle and bagged lunch along. By the time lunch rolled around, Chenara was regretting that decision in full. She sat down next to Kira in the grass, a lot more delicately than her counterpart, and started at the side of the house. They'd covered the entire thing in the first coat of primer, and needed to give it an hour to dry before they would be able to start on the second layer. Well, "they" being a more global term. Chenara had purposefully signed up for the morning group so that she would be able to get online in the evening, so some other pair of gullible fools who had decided their time would be best spent volunteering would put down the second coat of primer, and someone else would finish it up with the house paint tomorrow. None of that was Chenara's problem.

"I think lunch is back at headquarters?" Despite the fact that her sentence was supposed to be a statement, there was the faint tone of a question in her voice. She wanted a shower. She wanted to go back to her air conditioned bedroom, with the heat of her computer against her leg.