The loud whistle of the teapot sings through the air. Nancy hums as she took it of the stove and turns off the burner. She pours it into her chipped blue and white china teapot and sets the timer for five minutes. A glance out the window confirms that Barbara is on her third lap of the cul-de-sac. She should be in talking distance just a little after the timer goes off.
Still humming Nancy opens the oven to check on the cherry pie. Perfect! The edges have just turned a pleasant golden brown. She puts on her oven mitts and sets it on the counter to cool.
Now she just needs to set the table and she'll be ready for company!
The timer goes off and Nancy removes the teabag and transfers to pot to the table. She glances at the clock. Toby and the Scotts will be having dinner right now so she doesn't need to worry about being interrupted.
Nancy opens to the door to find Barbara standing at the door with her fist raised. They stare at each other for a moment before Barbara lowers it with a resigned expression.
"You saw me walking up and down the road… Didn't you."
Nancy nods.
Barbara sighs.
"Mind if I come in?" She asks slowly.
She doesn't quite look Nancy in the eyes. Instead her gaze is constantly traveling. Observing all her surroundings. She reminds Nancy of some of the soldiers she'd met: men who'd been fighting so long they'd forgotten how to relax.
"Of course," She says, standing to the side.
Barbara enters lightly. Like the last time, her eyes scan the room before her shoulders loosen ever so slightly.
They make their way to the kitchen and Nancy pours them each a cup of tea. While Barbara studies her tea and slice of pie, Nancy studies her. The scar curving up her jaw, just in front of her ear, is surprising as before. Nancy would still really like to ask how she got it. The dark circles under her eyes seem to be as permanently etched into her face as the wrinkles of her brow. Her red hair, pulled into a low bun, is lank and streaked with grey.
In a word she looks weary.
As she's watching, Barbara swirls the tea in her cup, sniffs it, and then takes the tiniest taste -not even a sip- before setting it back down on the saucer.
She glances up and blinks when she sees Nancy looking at her. After a pause she awkwardly forces a smile onto her face. It looks more like a grimace.
"So how have you been?" She asks.
Nancy stares back at her and raises an eyebrow.
"I've been well, dearie," She answers and then waits.
Barbara's hands twitch around the tea cup before one of them creeps up to toy with the chain of the yellow pendant around her neck. She holds Nancy's gaze for a moment longer before looking away. The plastic smile slides off her face. The sunlight that shines through the kitchen window warms Nancy's back but stops just shy of Barbara's fingers.
Nancy eats a bite of her pie and is pleased to find that she got the sweetness to tartness ratio just right. She washes it down with a sip of tea, enjoying the earthy taste of the blackberry nettle combination.
"I…" Nancy looks up at Barbara's voice.
The red-haired woman is still not looking at her. She's holding her tea-cup in her hands and staring into it as if it holds all the secrets of the world.
"What," Barbara frowns and her brows furrow further. "What would you do if you every time you tried to fix things you just made them worse?" Her gaze flicks up for a moment and then back down. "Would you keep trying?"
Ah.
Nancy hums. Taking another sip of her tea as she digests the question.
"When I was a young girl," She starts. "I lived in Germany."
She gazes across the room at a black and white picture on the wall. Her vision blurs a bit as she lets herself slip past it into memory.
"Things were hard but I loved my home and my friends and my country but then… then things changed. The Nazis rose to power."
Barbara looks up sharply, blue eyes finally settling on Nancy's face.
"I didn't know a lot at the time, but I didn't like what I was hearing and seeing. The things they taught us as school made my stomach sick.
"Now it just so happened that my father was someone important. He was important enough that they didn't ship him off to fight in the war like all my friends' dads. Rather people would come and meet at our house.
"One day, one of our servants was arrested for spying on one of father's meetings. As he was dragged off a paper fell out of his pocket. I took it and eventually figured out that the strange figures on it were code for a meeting spot."
A proud smile tugs at Nancy's lips.
"I always was good at puzzles. To cut a long story short I was able to meet his contact. They were very wary of me, but I convinced to give me a chance." In hindsight she'd nearly gotten herself killed approaching the foreign spies. "For two years a listened in on my father's meetings and carried information to them."
Nancy frowns and takes a sip of her tea.
"What happened then?" Barbara asks when she doesn't continue.
"Then I got caught," Nancy sighs and sets her cup down. "You have to understand that I was young at the time. I was only 14 when I started and well… my judgement wasn't always the best. I wasn't as careful as I should have been.
"The men who worked with my father had realized there was a leak and started searching for clues. They found one of my papers. I'd hidden it under my parents' mattress thinking they'd never look there."
Nancy takes a slow breath in and holds it for a count before releasing it.
"They thought it was my Mom. They dragged her away as I yelled and screamed that it was really me."
It had been the only time her father had struck her.
"They didn't believe that a little girl could have done it." Or perhaps they realized her father would be willing to sacrifice her Mom and figured that was enough of a lesson for her. "I never saw her again."
Barbara flinches at that.
"She never claimed innocence, even though she must have known it was me. She just let them take her."
The last thing she'd said as she was being dragged out the door was "I'm sorry." Many other memories had faded with time, but Nancy could still hear her quiet voice and see her steady gaze as if it had just happened yesterday.
"I wasn't able to spy after that. I'm certain my father also knew it was really me. There were no more opportunities and I suddenly was signed up for a dozen new activities with the League of German Girls." Her nose wrinkles in disgust at the memory.
"It took me years to forgive myself for what happened to my Mom. Years to realize that while my actions might have led to her death, it was the Nazis who were at fault for it."
She glances up and finds Barbara staring at her.
"I wish my Mom hadn't taken the fall for me, but I don't regret working as a spy. It would have been far worse to know that I had lived turning my back on what was happening in that house."
She downs the last swallow of tea and picks up her fork to work on her pie.
She makes it about half way through before Barbara apparently realizes she's done talking.
"Thank you for telling me," Barbara says quietly.
Nancy nods without looking up.
The clock ticks five minutes away before the cuckoo pops out to announce that it's 6'o clock.
Nancy glances up at it. At the distance the hands are fuzzy and hard to make out.
"Toby-pie should be home soon," She says.
Barbara hums and then stands up.
"I need to be going," She says.
She pauses there for a moment.
"Do you mind if I take this with me?" She waves her hand toward her untouched piece of pie.
Nancy smiles.
"Of course, dear! Let me get that wrapped up so it doesn't make a mess in your vehicle."
Barbara meet her eyes and small, but genuine smile, curves her lips.
"Thank you," She says.
Barbara clears a place on her cluttered kitchen table to set the plastic wrapped plate of pie before bonelessly collapsing into the chair. Absently she runs her hand across her hair.
What now?
Nancy's story lingers in the back of her mind. There are things there that she's not quite ready to think about but it still serves to give Barbara her answer. She can't keep living the way she has but if she's going to meddle again she needs to take some precautions.
Barbara gets up and walks a slow careful circuit around the table. Books clutter every available surface. A few have even made it onto the bed. There is a basket for dirty clothes and one for clean. She's given up on folding them. It's too much effort. Take-out boxes are stacked in the kitchen. The small Janus Order studio doesn't look much different from her apartment back during med school. Well at least how it looked before she had…
Barbara shakes her head and takes a slow shuttering breath.
She focuses on the nearest book and reads the title -"A Dictionary of Runes"- before moving on to the next. The book she's looking for isn't in one of the kitchen cabinets or on the table or stacked on the chair by the door.
Barbara frowns and adjusts her glasses. She hopes it's not in her office. She doesn't want to go in there right now.
As a last ditch she lowers herself to her knees by her bed. She lifts the comforter that has half fallen onto the floor and grimaces. There is so much dust under there that the ground looks like it has a down coat. With a flick of her fingers and a muttered word Barbara directs a gust of wind under the bed.
The dust is dispersed into the air. Barbara immediately starts coughing and sneezing. She quickly rushes to the bathroom and turns on the fan. Through watering eyes she looks around and tries to remember if she has a vacuum. She doesn't.
She debates on the merits of waiting for the dust to settle or going out to get the community vacuum. Her pride wins out so she pulls her shirt up over her nose and waits.
After a few minutes she releases her shirt and finds the air is mostly breathable. She pulls out her phone, creates a shopping list, and adds the word "Vacuum".
She kneels back by her bed a looks again. Now that she dust is evenly distributed around the room she can easily make out the shapes of the books scattered beneath. She summons a small orb of light and peers at their spines.
"There it is."
Barbara shifts to her side and reaches as far as she can. Her fingers claw at the spine. Finally she manages to catch it and pull it out.
She turns it over a wipes the dust off the black leather cover.
"Magic and the Mind". It's an old volume she got back when all this nonsense started.
She returns to the table and shoves the month old cup of coffee that she should really deal with to the side and sets the book in its place.
She opens it and skims a few pages before closing it again. It will do. She will also have to revisit that bookstore. She'd seen a book on spell crafting that looked promising.
She hesitates tapping her finger on the table. Given that the real magic books had a "Notice me not" spell on them, she has no doubt that the cashier is a magic user of some variety. His cat had seemed a little too intelligent too.
Barbara hums. Should she…
No it's better to leave it alone. If she isn't careful she might get Morgana interested in him and she isn't inclined to put someone else in her position. Of course given how he phrased his introduction she is sure he would be harder to catch than her.
That aside, magic users tend to be curious people by nature she doesn't need to give him a reason to start investigating her.
Barbara stares at the book for a moment longer before closing it.
There is one thing she would like to do. She might not know how far she is willing to go yet but she does know she owes this much to the Trollhunter. If she recalls correctly Kanjigar's head has been being kept in a box in the general storage room. If it were to get mislabeled even slightly the goblins would mistake the box for another bridge piece.
She chuckles.
Usually the goblins' antics drive her up the wall but right now she's thankful they're so unreliable.
She goes to the closet and digs up her map of the Trollhunter's patrol routes.
When she returns to the table she is reminded that she now has a slice of pie. She sets the map aside and makes her way into the kitchen. A quick search of the drawers turns up a relatively clean fork. She runs it under the facet and then wipes it off on a paper towel just to be sure.
Returning to the table she takes the plastic off the pie and hesitates for a long moment before taking a bite. It's excellent. Not too sweet, not too tart, and the crust is nice and flaky.
Barbara wonders what it would have been like fresh.
Author Notes:
If the flow of this is going the way I think it is the next chapter should be fun...
Hope y'all enjoyed seeing Barbara's bachelor flat. I head-cannon her as the type of person who keeps a neat house if she lives with someone else but neglects everything if she lives alone.
She currently lives in the Janus Order dorms. As Janus Order Head she could really get something nicer, but she doesn't really care. Anyway a bigger home means more to clean and well...
In 3Below Nancy says she was a spy in World War 1, but I'm modifying things to suit my purposes.