After half a day of settling eggs into the arms they belonged in, busying herself with cooking a meal she wouldn’t be part of, and helping set up a grand spread she wouldn’t look at after, Niika had taken her own meal - much less grand than a feast, but still delicious with what mistakes and mishaps of visual appeal it was gathered from - up to a very familiar weyr. She knew that A’zota and Eriath would be below, maybe enjoying the fruits of her labor, maybe trying to discover the best way to destroy physical objects with glares alone. So while it wasn’t her space, it was still a space she could exist in peacefully.

One that let her not kill anybody else’s mood with her lack of excitement.

I hope you two are having a good time down there, she thought mostly to herself, though she knew occasionally the green would pick up the edges of such notions. It made it a bit easier to not think dark, sad, nasty things about herself when she knew someone could be listening in.

Everything was still where she’d last seen it the evening before, though the stack of finished papers on A’zota’s desk looked far more complete. Niika was careful to set her meal off to one side of it, carefully organizing the chaos out of the way and wondering for the hundredth time - easily ten times that really - how he lived this way. Niika picked up one of the completed reports to idly read while she ate. Do you really enjoy this? Or do you just want something to do that makes you have purpose while you wait for death to find you? The thought unfairly made it sound as though he had a death wish. She just wasn’t sure he had anything in him that cared how long he existed, besides Eriath.

Another one of those sour, ill-tasting thoughts you like so much, Niika. Did you just save them all?

She growled internally at the back and forth dialogue she’d become so good at having with herself. “Just fix yourself first, girl,” the thought threatened to turn into a downward spiral of envy and woe. Instead, she smothered it with another bite of food, setting the report back on top of the pile once she’d lost interest in it. “People care you’re around, the kitchen isn’t bad. You’ve beheaded more wherries than any candidate or Dragonrider can probably say they have,” though that didn’t sound like a feat. But a turn before she certainly couldn’t kill and carve up a bird like she did now.

It felt like a dumb thing to feel like was a sign she was changing into someone better. It made the smoked kebabs taste nice, even if these pieces had tried to run away into the coals.

Perhaps it would have been nicer to be down in the middle of the festivities, finding something to celebrate in it all. I’ve celebrated the happiness of others with nothing to show for my own too many times. Is it wrong to be done with it all? If she hadn’t been so welcome in the kitchens, perhaps she would find an excuse to go somewhere else. As though that was the funniest joke in the world, Niika suddenly howled with laughter, leaning back in A’zota’s seat.

“Me! Leaving! I could think about it for the rest of my life and never step foot out of this hole in the earth!” The most beautiful, wonderful, homely hole in the earth, but a simple spot on the map anyways. One she ventured from so scarcely she could count it on one finger. She was bound to High Reaches by nothing and everything. Just like she was in this weyr, of any place at all, eating alone for every reason and no reason at all.

Setting the tray aside when she at least was content with her meal, Niika leaned across the back of the chair to look over the room. It looked lived in, but in the way somewhere abandoned did. She sighed, sinking into that seat which almost seemed to retain his warmth, like nowhere else in this place did. Not even her lips mere moments away. Not even a bed she tried to make him rest in, or a coat worn for little more than jumping into the cold of somewhere else. Yet, of anywhere she could have been right then, she was right here.

For every reason, and no reason at all.