The wind blew in two days of perfect weather, just long enough to make the following storm a surprise. Icy rain cut through the residual heat, forcing any travelers to either stay indoors or risk the chance of being trapped outside when the rain went from just chilling to acidic. Eva is not handling it well.

Charon's thinly veiled threat still hangs between them and the first day of forced isolation is spent with her carefully trying to avoid him. She nearly flees the room each time he enters, either citing some hurriedly constructed excuse or just dashing away without a word. It makes the energy in the house incredibly tense and by day two, Charon is as eager for the storm to end as she is.

Day three seems to bring some sort of calm with it, a bit of peace within the house if not outside it. It's the first time Charon enters a room without Eva exiting it just as quickly. The rain is coming down just as heavily as yesterday, pounding against the metal roof and filling the space with a muffled sense of enclosure. With travel near impossible and every sound but the rain cut away, it feels as if they are the only two left in the world.

She gives him a weary stare as he enters but does nothing else, returning her gaze to the deck of cards in her hands. The circles under her eyes are as dark as bruises and a flicker of guilt sparks up before Charon has the chance to stop it. He looks away and heads towards the kitchen, pulling a cupboard open with a little more force then necessary.

She's the one who keeps making things too personal. If she doesn't like his answers, it's her own damn fault for asking.

Still, something stops him from leaving with his meal and he finds himself sitting across from her, feet propped up on the table and head definitively turned in any direction but hers.

Charon supposes he feels a little guilty, though he hates to admit it. As vile as all his employers are, she's still a relatively young one, clearly unhinged and obviously desperate for affection. He remembers touching her hand, the one time he was the one to initiate contact, and feels a little sick. Being consistently distant is one thing, letting his disdain for her be his only obvious opinion, but that was one action that contradicted itself. She's so needy, any hint at companionship, even just the suggestion of a possible friendship, must send her reeling.

He sneaks a peek at her, watching her shuffle her cards absentmindedly out of the corner of his eye. He might still hate her but playing with her feelings isn't something he's interested in doing. It's still too intimate and in this steadily more personal relationship, intimate is exactly what he's trying to avoid.

She bites her lip when several cards slip from her grasp and despite everything, he finds himself following the motion. Suddenly he's not hungry any more. The unbidden memory of that slip in his reasoning (His sanity, he tells himself) comes crashing back.
Charon pushes the images away with a sigh, dropping his still filled plate of pork n' beans onto the table. He's going stir crazy, that's all. Three days with nothing to do but wait can make anything seem interesting, anything to break the monotony.

That one particular dream, the one that took place almost exactly where he is seated now, wavers on the edge of his mind. He pushes it away. A angry lustful encounter is definitely not one of the options to pass the time.

The sharp sputtering of cards on wood pulls him from his train of thought. Eva has placed the cards on the table, sorting out four piles, two of which she pushes down the table towards him.

"Do you want to play?"

She's watching him cautiously, like she's holding out a hand towards a wild animal, hopeful but nervous.

Charon reaches for his cards with a grunt, as non-committal as he can get, but she grabs his wrist before he can scoop up the larger of the piles.

"Wait! You're not allowed to look at those." She gestures towards the smaller pile and picks up her own set, smiling awkwardly over the cards.

"These are the cards you're allowed to see." She flips the top card on his larger pile face up, exposing a slightly battered jack of spades. The cards are in surprisingly good condition, faded and bent in places but still whole.

Eva looks excited now and it strikes him that she probably hasn't had the chance to use these cards yet. As far as he knows, he's the first company she's had in the wastes other than Moira but he can't imagine that woman settling down for a game of cards. Not unless the cards were laced with some experimental poison of hers… or maybe were just rigged to explode.

Eva flips the first card on her front deck, a slightly scorched three of hearts, and grins. She plops down a red ace and a black two from her hand, then pulls the three of hearts off her first pile and adds it to the two other cards. She flips another card and snorts at the queen of diamonds she finds, the sort of displeased sound that clearly doesn't really matter. She turns to him.

"You're trying to get rid of your stack of cards. An ace starts the pile and a queen ends it. Kings and jokers are wild cards." Whatever tension she still felt between the two of them has faded, being replaced by the giddy excitement of a person who has had nothing to do for too long. Clearly, she's been as bored as he has and, as Charon shuffles through his hand, a part of him regrets not having noticed that sooner. She may unnerve him at the best of times, infuriate him at the worst, but the near constant activity he's grown used to these past months has spoiled his ability to wait. Her company might not be ideal but it's better than nothing but the constant drone of rain sleeting down above his head.

He plays his hand and watches her. Eva perplexes him and his confusion has bled into every aspect of her. She is a mystery but more and more, his opinions of her are a mystery. She slaps down four cards and grins, working through three cards in her larger pile. Charon looks down at his hand.

She might confuse him but this game seems simple enough. For now, he will just focus on the cards. They are so much easier to understand.

…..

It's dark by the time Eva packs the cards away. The rain is still going strong and the wind has joined it, howling almost as ominously as it had that day in the cave. Eva has worked her way into the corner of the couch, her corner, Charon thinks. He rarely sits there, favoring the other side for himself, and the thought that they've developed correlating habits makes him a bit queasy.

"Hey, are you hungry?" She's curled the way she usually is but he notices her toes aren't tucked away under his leg. She stopped that particular habit the night he first openly revealed his resentment towards her and he's glad of it. It was the sort of action that made him wonder at her level of infatuation, something that felt more like an action between an established couple then something between friends.

Her toes look very pink.

They look cold.

Charon's lunch still sits on the table, the cold sauce coagulating into something entirely unappetizing. He shrugs. He could eat but he doesn't want to eat that. It's wasteful, even picky, and under Ahzrukhal he wouldn't have considered it. The clause against violence in Charon's contract grated at the old ghoul and he had taken every chance he got to work his way around it.

Withholding food was an easy one.

"I bought some mirelurk meat before the storm hit and it's bound to go bad soon. You want to try making mirelurk cakes?" Eva looks so hopeful. He doesn't know if it's making him more or less inclined to agree. After a moment, he shrugs. What else does he have to do?

"Fine."

Eva grins and walks towards the kitchen, gathering up several items and dropping them down on the counter. Vegetable oil, mirelurk meat, and several jars of spices come out first. A carton of deviled eggs follow along with a crumbled bag of potato crisps. Charon cringes. Maybe she's more unhinged then he thought.

The mirelurk meat has already been cooked and she goes about shredding the thick chunks of flesh into stringy piles.

"Can you crush the potato crisps?" She gestures towards the bag and a bowl she's set out beside it. Charon does so, though hesitantly.

"Why am I doing this?" He's pressing the heel of his hand into the bag, feeling its contents crumble beneath the pressure. He's never done something so absurd.

"Well we don't have breadcrumbs so I figured that's our best bet."

Eva transfers the meat to another bowl and starts to season it, sprinkling herbs he doesn't recognize generously over the surface. It looks appetizing. The meat is cooked and even seasoned, something he's only seen the wealthier wastelanders appreciate, he doesn't know why they should put any more effort into this meal. Usually this level of Eva's unnecessary eccentricity would bother him but rain is beating against the walls outside and the wind is nearly screaming. He's in no hurry to end this distraction.

"We made something sort of like this in the vault. It called for imitation crab." She chuckles, sloshing a splash of oil into the bowl. "It's funny thinking I was eating an artificial monster all those years." She steps close to him, leaning into his space but before he thinks to recoil, she's snatched up the box of deviled eggs and returned to her bowl.

She continues like she didn't notice his (lack of) response.

"We had something called egg substitute. It was this gross, off colored powder but if you added water you could make almost anything with it." She pops open the box and pulls out the tray of eggs, shrink wrapped so tightly they look fresh from the factory. It's irritating that he's jealous of some overly processed food. It looks untouched by radiation and time, uniform sunshine yellow swirls cupped by creamy white flesh. It's perfectly preserved. Sometimes he wishes he could boast the same.

"I don't know if these are really eggs but I bet if we mush them into the meat, it'll work the same." Her smile is cheeky when she turns to him.

"Either that or we're going hungry tonight."

He snorts despite himself. Charon's never seen a house more stock full of supplies. They could be trapped inside for a month and he doubts they'd run out of food. With this level of excess, her home would be a treasure trove for looters. She's lucky this house has its own built in security system. As if on cue, the Mr. Handy whirs past them, dusting spotless furniture and muttering under its breath about water damage.

Charon supposes she would have been luckier if her security system wasn't so obnoxious.

Eva's mashed the deviled eggs into the meat mixture and is now forming it into fat patties. Charon empties the potato crisps into his bowl, having long since crushed them into crumbs, and hands it over. He's getting hungry now and despite Eva's mad scientist approach, the food sounds as if it'll actually be enjoyable.

She dredges the patties in the crumbs, carefully coating every inch, and fries them. The oil is popping in the pan and the house is filled with an aroma that makes Charon's stomach tie itself into knots.

The first batch is lumpy and malformed, cold on the inside but still somehow burned to a crisp.

The second batch fairs almost the same fate but the third batch makes it out alive.

They eat standing in the kitchen as the storm rages outside and for a moment, Charon almost feels content.