[PRP] Much Ado About Nothing

[Suudonym]

Camphoreon certainly was busy this time of year, wasn't it? Devoirue had been as well, and though it was nice to see some continuity between the two completely different locations, it was also nice to be free of the thick of the crowds. Corinne caught the brief gesture and directed her attention accordingly, but the question that she read drew her eyes away in a despondence that her nature couldn't hide. With a voiceless sigh, she recorded her response and presented it with a forced smile, 'Family business.' Since sign language relied so heavily on facial expression to convey tone, the art of hiding emotions was all but completely lost for her, even when it came to the still sensitive subject of Olivier and her sudden relocation to Kodo.  

[BlackPidgeot]

Yuri's expression faded into a soft frown as he saw her reaction to his question. Yeah, this girl wasn't at all very good at hiding her feelings, she wore them on her sleeve rather plainly. He rubbed the back of his head with one hand as he saw what she typed.

"That bad, huh? Can't say I really know the feeling, sorry."

Since he didn't really have a family, it was a bit of a foreign thing to him. The closest thing he ha to a family were the people in the lower quarter. But he'd seen how family affairs could cause a lot of pain for those he knew.  

[Suudonym]

She tilted her head in curiosity. It wasn't really polite to pry into people's personal lives, she knew - her friends had gotten on her case often enough about that to have ingrained the lesson in her thoughts - but wasn't he sort of volunteering a willingness to divulge by phrasing it that way? The message she typed in response was to the point: '?' Curiosity aside, it was a confusing statement that she felt probably warranted some explanation and merely awaited the prompt for it.  

[BlackPidgeot]

Yuri blinked a couple times as he was presented with... a question mark? "Huh?" He stared at it for a few confused moments before it hit him that she was probably wondering about what he'd said. It wasn't so much that Yuri was willingly offering information, but more that it didn't bother him at all to talk about it.

"Oh, it's just that I don't have a family. So I can't really sympathize"

He shrugged his shoulders nonchalantly.  

[Suudonym]

She considered the words and their implications. Her first reaction was to attribute her own experiences to the statement, and though it seemed to make sense, she didn't want to jump to conclusions on this matter. She erased her response twice before she was satisfied enough with its contents to show it, 'Sorry; I was an abandoned child myself, so I was a little startled since what you're saying sounds so familiar.' Corinne as well wasn't against discussing her circumstances, but she'd grown grudgingly accustomed to using the word family since it required the least explanation.  

[BlackPidgeot]

Yuri was a little surprised himself to see her answer. He hadn't guessed that she would have had the same experience as him.

"Huh. Guess we're in the same boat after all. The guys in the lower quarter took care of me, so I guess you can say they're kinda like family. Guess you had someone like that too?"

Her clothes definitely looked too fancy to be from the poverty stricken lower quarter though. She had probably been lucky enough to be taken in by someone from the middle class.  

[Suudonym]

She nodded, a bit sorrowfully. 'I was adopted by an employee of the national library when I was still very young,' she wrote. 'Before then, I didn't have any way to speak to anyone, but Olivier learned sign language and taught me.' He had been something of a philanthropist, Corinne had come to understand in the time they lived together. She wondered sometimes what would have happened if some other librarian had made the book delivery that had been his introduction to her. It seemed she was very lucky - or had been.

He's already died, though. I moved here to live with his brother's family, but

She erased the words, her hand hovering over the digital keyboard in hesitation. It took some thought before she could think of something to replace her complaints, 'I think it's a good experience, if either of us ever wants to write an autobiography. People love those kinds of stories.'  

[BlackPidgeot]

Folding his arms behind his head as he walked, Yuri quietly read what Corrine typed on her phone. Thankfully he had good eye sight and didn't have to lean down and squint at her screen all the time. He was already getting use to talking to her like this, despite how weird it kinda was.

"Sounds like a good guy," he said with a smile. "There's not many out there like that."

He couldn't help but blink curiously as she started typing something but then changed her mind and redid it. He laughed a little at what she "said" next.

"Yeah well, I'm not much into reading books, much less writing them."  

[Suudonym]

Well of course he was. Corinne knew better than anyone just how good a person Olivier was, and also how unlike most others he was. His own brother had spoken openly about the man's foolishness in adopting a deaf child - until he realized that said deaf child could read his lips, and then he made a point of covering his mouth whenever he wanted to speak poorly of his deceased brother or his little deaf girl.

She wondered if he was yet aware of why she pointedly spent so little time in that house.

Her company's ensuing words elicited a confusion that was as evident in her features as any other emotion. To the girl whose entire life had been built around reading, and much of it also around writing, the idea of someone who wasn't a fan of books was a strange one to her. Even when she left behind her private studies for organized education, all of the children she had befriended had been avid readers of some genre or another. With the disposition of someone fumbling to reconcile an alien concept with their lifelong culture, she wrote, 'Isn't it really boring without reading?'  

[BlackPidgeot]

Her question drew another blink and he looked a bit dispondant with a shrug of his shoulders.

"Actually, I think reading is pretty boring. I just can't sit there that long. I'm a man of action, ya know?"

It probably went without saying that Yuri had never been very good at school for that very reason.  

[Suudonym]

She held a hand at her chin thoughtfully, trying to reconcile the peculiarity of this man's thinking with what she knew as truth. 'Sitting in one place for an extended length of time is boring, yes?' she wrote, turning the screen for him to read before retracting it to continue her line of thought. She typed with a speed that suggested she had some fairly strong feelings on the matter, 'But it's only boring if you're thinking about it. When you're reading, you're thinking about what's in the book, so it's not boring since you're not acknowledging the whole sitting still business.' Another pause for her company to take in her words, and then she continued again, 'So if it's boring, that's probably because the book is boring rather than reading itself.' The final installation of her argument was presented with a smile that was a little proud at having cracked the Case of the Man Who Thought Reading was Boring.  

[BlackPidgeot]

The first reply drew a confused blink after he read it. He was about to reply, probably with some smart a** comment, but her typing was fast enough to stop him before the words actually left his mouth, despite the fact it was already open. He shut it again as he read what she "said" next.

"Guess I can't really argue with that."

Her reasoning was pretty sound there, but judging from his flat voice and expression, he hadn't really been converted either. Reading just wasn't something that got Yuri excited, and he'd never really met a book he particularly liked either.