#sadja

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It was hot. It was middle of the summer, middle of the day, guess what we can’t afford air conditioning hot. Seriously, it was really, REALLY fucking hot. And you knew it was hot because nobody wanted to move, and almost everybody here loved moving in general.

Magnhild had the bright idea to plug in the only fan they had in the entire farmhouse and now it was positioned just right so everyone could flop in the floor or in a chair and bask in the single exhausted fan’s utmost radiance.

Or, to put it bluntly, the ridiculously inefficient little tiny puff of air it was moving across the room. Still, that was better than nothing when the air refused to move otherwise and it just sat there, sticky with humidity and stifling enough to make it feel hard to breathe.

“Time for the Sunday paper, you guys,” Tom pointed out halfheartedly, but he certainly didn’t move from the one chair he’d managed to claim. The second biggest one, and he was pretty proud he’d managed to get even this much space to sprawl out on.

Because Magnhild was happy in the floor with her wolfdog, Moonlight; Surandil sat down there on a little cushion; and Fintan had a tiny chair to himself. Then there was the sofa, but Caiden took that entire thing up of course and Sadja was laying around on the floor in front of it occasionally trying to bother him.

Oh yeah, and there was Kye. Who was… where the hell was Kye, anyway?

“Uh-huh,” Fintan grunted. “Who’s gonna go get it?”

“Not I,” Surandil murmured.

“Don’t care about it,” Magnhild said simply from the floor, scratching a whining, panting Moonlight on the head.

“Voros will get it,” Sadja lazily volunteered for him.

Grunt. Tom wasn’t well-versed in Caiden’s language, but he was pretty damn sure that sound meant a solid No.

Tom snorted. “Oh well, too bad.” Because he sure as hell wasn’t going to go get it.

“Make Moonlight go fetch it,” Fintan grumbled.

Moonlight perked his head up, looking positively outraged – he stood, but Magnhild got an arm around his neck and wrestled him back down, snickering knowingly and whispering something to him about not ruining it for everyone else, because the two of them always did have these conversations nobody else heard or grasped at all.

“Hey, guys!” Kye called from the doorway, waving the paper around. But he stopped, blinking, while he stood there all shirtless (because he’d finally gotten used to showing all his scars and tattoos), in shorts and looking completely and perfectly comfortable in the dear gods do something it’s too hot heat everywhere. “Hey, is everyone okay?”

Fine, so sometimes Tom forgot Kye was an actual demon from the Underworld. This kind of weather was probably fucking balmy.

Tom gave Kye a thumbs-up, and from the corner of his eye, he saw Kye shrug and meander on inside, tail waving around behind him.

“Okay, well, here it is,” Kye said, with absolutely no interest – because he’d already taken out the little travel section and had his nose poked into it, and he had the home decorating section to go with it.

Seeing the travel section, though, made the supposedly uninterested Magnhild – which of course also meant Moonlight – get up and pad along after Kye to read it while peering past his arm. Tom frowned and felt just a little sore, but – hey, paper.

He rolled out of his chair (literally) and caught himself before he landed in a sweaty heap in the floor. Everybody else was already getting their paws all over it.

Fintan pointedly cleared his throat when Sadja nearly reached it first, and that gave him enough time to snatch it up instead. “Let yer elders go first, kiddos,” he said with a huff while he got busy extracting all the local news and everything to do with business and money.

“Only because they like the boring sections,” Tom replied sweetly. Sadja giggled, and Fintan grumbled and muttered and tossed the rest of the paper on the floor again like the grouchy old dwarf he was.

But by the time he’d done that, Caiden and Surandil were there too, and of course Caiden snatched it up next and expertly fished out all the boring shit he liked – weather (because someone had to actually be responsible for the crops, but Tom was fine not being that person), sports (Tom was stealing that later), international news, and the… Wait a second.

Caiden held out what was left and Tom grabbed it from him, opening it and scratching through a few pages.

Sadja was busy looking over the crook of his arm. “Did he nick the TV guide again?”

“Caaaiiid!?” Tom fussed—but Sadja tried to yank the comics section out, and no way she was doing that.

Tom practically crumpled the whole thing trying to keep a grip, extra pages falling everywhere. He growled and sputtered and Sadja just held on tighter and stuck her tongue out at him, still pulling.

So of course it ripped, and there went the comics section, torn neatly in half, and both of them fell flat on their asses on the floor. From where he was taking up the entire sofa again, Caiden snorted a short excuse for a quiet laugh or two.

Surandil hardly noticed any of it, since he calmly removed some of the only sections left: style and fashion, arts and culture, and… obituaries. Tom was just about to ask why the f—

“You may have your favorite sections, Drake,” Surandil said before Tom could speak a word. “I do not believe anyone else desires them,” he added pointedly, dropping a few papers in Tom’s lap.

Oh yeah, the naughty sections. Heheh—

“Hey, they aren’t that bad!” Tom almost snapped, only just now realizing just how judgmental Surandil had sounded.

Then he looked at the torn-up, sad first half of a bunch of comics in one hand. Sadja was looking at hers, too, but it was upside-down.

“I dunno how to read this,” she said very simply and without the tiniest iota of shame. And she made her way back over to Tom and sat down beside him, scraps in hand. Tom took them and got them back into position to hold the two halves together while Sadja leaned near his shoulder.

Yeah, he always ended up reading the comics out loud to her. And yeah, they usually tore them in half first, because they always fought over them. Why? Who the hell knew?

About halfway through, Sadja snatched for what was left of the rest of the newspaper and said, “Anybody take the cooking stuff?”

And that was the section she got Caiden to read to her. Tom snickered.