All that may be beloved

It was the little rituals in the time she found to decompress from the work day and just settle that Sarah appreciated.

Reading something light helped the transition, so she was curled up in a chair in the library working her way through a trashy romance novel that Bishop had recommended. While theoretically she could see the advantages of a harem of men catering to the needs of one woman, she shuddered at the thought of the logistics of catering to more than one man in her life.

Bishop had moved onto a different trope, but Sarah just couldn’t suspend her belief enough to accept that the main character was interacting with someone so beyond their strata for altruistic reasons. Now if he could find a variant where the wealthy character’s assets were redistributed to the community, she might have more interest.

Taking a sip of her tea, she glanced at Jareth over the rim of her cup. He was stretched out on a lounge, one arm flung over his eyes. He gave every indication of being asleep, aside from the hand gripping Rook’s shoulder.

Rook was the anomaly in Sarah’s evening of domestic normality. The woman radiated tension. Sarah’s initial reaction in the past had been to discuss the issue, but Jareth had gently discouraged that in favour of letting Rook work through her own rituals.

Rook was sitting on the floor, leaning back against Jareth’s chair. An unreasonably large collection of knives were at her side. Sarah had watched as the woman had walked into the room and silently started to remove the arsenal from her coat. She still couldn’t believe it was possible to carry that much weight without destroying the structural integrity of the garment.

After a comically long disarming routine, Rook was now methodically sharpening her blades with a whetstone. It was an oddly calming sound, but Sarah expected it was not the sound that Rook was using to exorcise her demons.

While this wasn’t a common occurrence, it had happened enough that it had become part of Sarah’s normal. Rook would slowly sharpen all her knives and would then stow them back in her coat. Usually, by the time she’d worked through her arsenal, she had calmed down and would quietly retire for the evening. She didn’t want to talk to people, but she needed to be near people when she’d had a bad day, and Sarah could respect that.

She sometimes wondered how her life had become evenings of smutty book recommendations from one shapeshifter, while another was working through her issues by making sharp implements even sharper, but then she looked at Jareth and knew that she wouldn’t trade whatever passed for a regular family evening Above for anything.

All families had quirks and it was quieter than having a family member who drunkenly yelled at televised sportsball events, so she’d take sullen silence over inebriated obsession. It might be weird, but it was the little rituals that held a family together.

---

labyfic — drabble #246: steel
Part of the Balance!verse