so there was this deck of cards, right

[lexicality]

Jessica's house is cute. Lexi could see doing a lot of her homework here, listening to the calming chatter of gossip and getting help from Jessica on math (Bella's no help there) and helping Jessica on English. Forks isn't so bad. She doesn't mind the rain as much as Bella does.

Jessica goes to pee before they even start their assignment, after just introducing Lexi to her mom and dad as "one of Chief Swan's kids", and Lexi doesn't want to do work by herself or she wouldn't have come over in the first place. She sits on the couch and plunks her bag down and waits. There's a random deck of cards over there; she picks it up and flips through it. She's been trying to learn to bridge-shuffle.

Comments

[incanted]

"I'd hope not," says Bella.

[cardistry]

He snorts.

[incanted]

"But then again I don't know what your other options look like. Maybe you don't want to be busy, or you'd get sick of doing science to magic after a few days, or you do like to be busy to the point where you'd be annoyed by downtime caused by me having to sleep and attend school and stuff."

[cardistry]

"I don't really know how I feel about being busy," he says. "I think I'd be fine as long as I could take a break whenever I wanted."

[incanted]

"I'd take it amiss if I were all out of my own mana and a mile in the air and you took a break right then," Bella says.

[cardistry]

"I'm not gonna drop you," he giggles. "I'd at least get you home first."

[incanted]

"So for reasonable values of 'whenever', yeah, of course."

[cardistry]

"Okay," says Brilliance.

[incanted]

"Cool. I guess I don't have to fake sick tomorrow," says Bella. "Where do you want me to stash you overnight? It'd be weird if it was in our room."

[cardistry]

"Would it?" he says. "I dunno."

[incanted]

"Well," she says, "you can see, right? We're going to change into our pajamas at some point."

[cardistry]

"Oh," he says. "Okay, now that you mention that, it's kind of weird."

[incanted]

"Exactly. So I could put you on the bookshelf in the living room maybe, I don't think Charlie will notice you?"

[cardistry]

"Okay, sure," he says.

[incanted]

Bella scoops him up, then pauses. "Would you rather fly there yourself? I don't know how you feel about being picked up in general."

[cardistry]

"I feel okay about you picking me up," he says.

[incanted]

"Not Lexi?" hazards Bella, heading for the stairwell.

[cardistry]

He shudders a little. "Not Lexi."

[incanted]

Bella goes down the stairs, one hand around Brilliance and the other on the banister. "I'd get a lot of attention if I took you to school and tried to talk to you there," she muses. "Hey, Lexi, I don't know if you were going to, but don't pick up Brilliance, okay?"

[lexicality]

"I wasn't gonna touch it. Him," says Lexi. "I don't even want limitless power anyway. You're carrying him."

[incanted]

"I -" Bella shrugs, summarizes. "Don't count." She tucks Brilliance in a space on the bookshelf between one of Charlie's photobooks of fish and the DVD copy of The Wizard of Oz.

[cardistry]

"Comfy," says Brilliance. "If you wanna talk to me not-out-loud, there's a way to do that."

[incanted]

"What is it?" Bella asks, plopping beside her homework-occupied twin on the couch.

[cardistry]

"You just... want the words at me," he says. "Like you're going to say them, but instead of speaking you send them with magic. Barely costs a sneeze of mana, you'll regenerate a little slower if you do it all the time but you couldn't run out that way if you tried."

[incanted]

"A sneeze of mana," snorts Bella. "Okay... is this something I could do by accident? Like if I were just thinking about talking to you, forming plans and intentions about it, but wasn't definitely ready to do it right then?"