undergrounds | [Open] Baby's Got Blue Eyes

Who: Elizabeth DeWitt & You
What: Canceling a vacation sucks. It's worse when you're Elizabeth.
When: Late April
Where: Various
Warnings: None so far!

Yes, she probably should have expected that this was how it would pan out. Namely, that it wouldn't pan out at all.

Illya had at least called to say he was going away and that she could go to Paris with somebody else, but halfway through the explanation Elizabeth had just hung up. She'd talked to him about how she felt used, how much it hurt, and here she was again. The provider of wolfsbane, promised a trip to Paris and then... he left before it was safe to go. Convenient, it felt so convenient to her, and typical. When hadn't this happened with her? Did she have any friends, really?

[A - Circle Daybreak]

Work is an obvious distraction. Elizabeth has been feeling her abilities getting stronger as of late, and so she spends almost all of her free time from classes at the Circle studying and working with her mentors there. When she's not reading, she's practicing, and her feelings are once again seeping into her magic. It's like she's in Columbia again, and her tenuous control is, again, slipping.

She's carefully laying frost over the surface of delicate flowers one afternoon, and it looks as though she's doing a passable job until her phone buzzes in her bag. For a moment she imagines it's someone needing another free favor, and her anger spikes. The ice instantly thickens and spikes, and Elizabeth shouts in teeth-clenched frustration. She discards the attempt with the rest of the melting, twisted ice-sculptures with flowers inside, and pulls over another one to start over.

[B - Groceries]

Usually Elizabeth likes cooking, and her weekly haul consists mostly of vegetables and meat and rice or pasta to make something healthy and delicious for the week. Cooking sounds like too much effort now. Apparently this week, she's going to be consuming frozen pizza, two bags of chips, garlic bread, ice cream, canned soup, and a large package of beef jerky. She's trying to decide if she wants to pay the exorbitant price of a pineapple, holding it up and scrutinizing the fruit intensely.

She has no idea what makes a good pineapple, she realizes.

[C - Westminster Library]

She doesn't want to read anything, either. Nothing sounds good.

There's plenty of recent fiction on the shelf, and she scans the spines waiting for something to jump out at her. It all sounds like garbage, though. Pointless garbage. Three-hundred pages of fictional people and their problems while Elizabeth's life is actually dangerous and difficult.

She shoulders her bag and walks out of the shelving without picking out anything.

[D - Westminster Park]

Elizabeth sits there with her phone on her usual park bench, staring intently at the screen. It's got a message written on it, but she knows she's angry and she's texting angry. Part of her says she's allowed to be angry, the other says to just delete the message and move on. Nothing good will come of being angry.

She hits send anyway.

I wanted to go with you. I thought of you as my friend.

There's a pause.

900000278: Delivery has failed.

She locks the phone and tilts her head back over the back of the bench. That felt like her last way out of feeling so low, and now... she's missed her chance.

Threaded | Flat

"Miss DeWitt!"

Norrell's voice is quiet, as it ever is, even when raised -- this the best attempt at 'raised' he has and it is still not very loud. He's walking in short but very quick strides toward her, bundles of papers in his arms that are sure to be related to the election and his own campaign. Several times he has spoken to her about it already, yet for some reason she has been ever so busy! Lucky he found her now.

"Miss DeWitt, I --good lord."

He frowns at the mess of ice in spikes and then at Elizabeth. Well, perhaps not the best time...

Jean-Claude watches her with her phone, and though he does not quite understand what she is doing with it -- such modernities are lost on him -- he still understands the expression on her face. And while company may or may not be welcome, perhaps a distraction may be what she needs. Besides, he cannot say that he is not curious as to what might have made her so upset.

He strolls towards her, trying his best not to be too obtrusive, to feel out the scene, although he knows he will be intruding, interrupting. And he does so anyway. "My apologies," he says, his voice soft and low, and unmistakably French as he steps around the back of the bench to peer into her face, upside-down as it appears at the moment. "I cannot help but have noticed your displeasure..." She had practically draped herself over the thing, after all. No one makes such a move when they are feeling happy, for certain.

Illya had mentioned it, when she'd pushed him to tell her what had happened during the time she'd been assigned in Dubai, that he'd met someone who had agreed to make him wolfsbane... he'd even mentioned the trip, off-hand and unreadable as ever.

She'd forgotten about it, of course, between the phone call that sent Illya on his way again (and, consequently) left Gaby by herself in London, and the flurry of activity that was her workplace, now with the elections forthcoming.

But a trip to the shops takes her through the park, past the girl on the bench -- Gaby pauses, looking at her, the way the girl stares so intently at her phone... though whatever is in it isn't making her happy.

"What has your phone done, to offend you so?" she knows the old Gaby would walk past, not engage -- but a teacher is someone who wants to help those who might need it, and that is her persona, now. (And in the afternoon light, her eyes flash green-gold, catlike; you know what they say of cats and curiosity...)

It's pure coincidence that sees Eames here at the same time as Elizabeth, and he has a basket of his own to that fact. His food is... Well, it's not pizza and assorted junk, but he's not here to judge. He's here to pick out the best looking lemons, when he happens to look up the aisle and see Elizabeth struggling with a pineapple.

Eames allows himself a moment to be amused by the sight before he wanders over to pick one that looks healthier than the one she's holding and gives the stem a quick smell before he offers it out to her. "You'll want this one. Unless you like your fruit sour."

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