By rights, Naru should have already gone home and gone to bed. By rights, Naru should have done that after the dance rather than come over to ECFH and start baking. And then have a chat, and eat baking. It's late, and there's a dino doing dishes in the kitchen, cleaning up after her late night baking spree. The brownies are in a tupperware container, closed up so they don't get stale, and possibly delay tempation on just nomming through all of them.
There's a dinosaur doing dishes. There's a tall robed figure making his way in, calmly, from the balcony. He glances toward the sound -- considers for a moment, then paces toward the kitchen, even and steady. And regards the dinosaur.
One would think that the claws would get in the way of these things, but maybe T. rex had sinks built for tiny arms.
"Good evening," he says. "My apologies for not havng Edmontosaurus in stock."
This particular species of green plush dino does not seem to have any trouble with dishes. Granted, she also seems to have done away with her claws, hands and feet both, her plush sleeves pushed up as she scrubs out a mixing bowl.
Naru turns her head as the tall robed figure comments about a lack of Edmontosaurus and she smiles, a faint and quiet little thing. "For the sake of the Edmontosaurus, I hope that they dont have removeable skin."
Glossy black eyes blink. Once. "You're a carnivore for the evening. All skins are removable."
"Not necessarily." Naru points out. "I might be an omnivoire, which would make the brownies far more appropriate rather than having tried for carnivorous brownies."
Naru sets the mixing bowl in the drying rack and then there's a touch of a smirk. "Besides, carnivorous brownies is totally yet more fodder for my dreams, and they don't need any help in the weird."
"True. However, being an omnivore hardly excludes meat consumption, and thus your correction does not invalidate the core point." He considers the drying rack, then glances aside for signs of other dishes remaining. It's not a pointed glance, just a loose evaluation of time till available sink.
It would probably be polite not to distract her. "Your dreams have all the help they need, yes." ... that probably counted less as not distracting than he'd have hoped.
The dishes are almost done, just the pan really before Kunzite can have the sink to himself.
Naru reaches for it, and sets to the washing of it, watching what she's doing rather than Kunzite. "I was far more zen about people in my dreams until it actually happened." She notes as she scrubs at baked on chocolate bits.
"Dreams are personal," Kunzite agrees from behind her; the sound of his voice suggests he's keeping a polite distance. "Or should be. They continue to feel personal even when others are there, and even when their content may be affected by something else. Much the way that a cut on your hand does not make your hand not yours."
Naru considers that as she scrubs the pan with possibly more intent than might be strictly necessarily, less out of agression and more out of simply not paying much attention. Her thoughts are clearly elsewhere.
"They are personal." Naru agrees. Quiet a moment after that, just scrubbing the already clean spot. "I don't particularly want people to go back into my dreams. I know that's not reasonable."
"It's completely reasonable." There's no stress on those words. "It's not practical; but it's reasonable. No-one wants surgery. It's intrusive. It's frightening. It hurts. It's dangerous. It's sometimes not practical to avoid, particularly if the condition it's designed to treat is more dangerous. But it's completely reasonable not to want it."
"Mmm." Naru thinks on that comparison and moves to another spot on the clean pan to scrub off dirt that isn't actually there. "That's a surprisingly comforting analogy."
There's another lingering pause and then Naru glances over her shoulder at him and then back to the pan. "Was it really that bad?" There are degrees of bad, and what breaks Ariel is possibly not /actually/ indicative.
Kunzite shrugs easily. "I have the impression you can answer that for yourself," he replies. "Relatively little transferred when I woke up. Aches like deep bruising, a degree of fatigue and malaise. It's a long-term parasite. It could be bad; we don't know whether this thing conserves its prey or whether it's more like a larval wasp. We'll find out. As quickly as possible."
That it doesn't occur to him that she might mean the dream, not the attack, suggests an answer of its own.
"It's hard to." Naru acknowledges. "Between other attacks, erratic magic of my own, new workouts and so many other variables, I have no comprehension on what my baseline should be, to know how much the dream affects me."
There's a slow breath and Naru finally actually rinses the poor pan before she removes the finish from it, adding it to the drying rack and moving to clean out the sink after it drains.
Using Kunzite as one's scale of horror, not terribly useful, but comforting in its own way. Disturbingly.
"I'm not looking forward to going to sleep." Naru notes as she wipes the counter.
"It's difficult to work out," Kunzite agrees. "But the discussion we had about your body never having adjusted to the workouts, your adjusting to the pain instead, suggests that your baseline may be off."
He continues to wait, patient and uncomplaining. When she finishes cleaning the sink, he steps forward, letting the draping sleeves fall back as he eases in to her abandoned place to take soap and water to the makeup on his hands.
Her last comment actually causes him to turn his head toward her a little. "Who does?" he asks. And then answers his own question. "Usagi."
Surgery. Dream surgery. Still an excellent analogy.
Naru moves to wiping down all the counters, simply because she has a cloth to hand, and why not as Kunzite finally gets to wash his hands.
Naru glances towards him a moment as she notes him turning towards her. "I remember when sleep was restful, and you'd feel better rather than worse the next day. Currently my desire to face my dreams is about on par with my willingness to just stay up all night and avoid it entirely. Even going to bed now, getting up for my run is going to suck."
"I'm willing to provide Hannah with a medical excuse for the run. Not every day, but you should be conserving energy in the short term right now. And you need the sleep all the more for the lack of part of it. Getting up and having breakfast with Fiore might be more helpful." The makeup does not particularly want to cooperate, but Kunzite is patient. Patient enough to risk Hannah yelling at him. "And O-Yasu should be watching; if there's significant interference, Akashimaru will be warned."
"I might just move it to after school, rather than first thing." Naru considers and then there's a rueful little admission. "I'd miss it to skip entirely." She is quiet, watching him patiently work on the makeup. "If it's really persistant, I've scrubby stuff in the bathroom in the other apartment. If it'll get paint off, it'll get makeup off."
"I will try not to hold Fiore's plant nature against him. He's a great listener." Naru smiles a touch and then nods. If she's having breakfast with Fiore, and it's a good suggestion, she's unlikely to be going home tonight. Obvious based on the time, but somehow she may have still been deciding. "I should go to bed and just get it overwith. If the fates are kind, it'll be a quiet night."
There's a little tug at the corner of Kunzite's mouth, small enough only to show in the distortion of the artificial shadows beneath his cheekbones. Enough of the makeup is gone that he dries his hands and reaches up to remove his wig. Having that much hair pinned up underneath it for that long might not have been precisely comfortable. (Voluntarily letting Naru see him with his hair pinned up like that says something about his trust in her not to duplicate it via camera or pencil, or at least not where anyone else can see.)
"After school, then. I'll tell Hannah." And take the grenade that will be Hannah's reaction to finding out something else is chewing on Naru again, most likely. Fair trade for her telling him about the scrubby stuff, just in case. "Do you want hot chocolate, or were the brownies chocolate enough?" Because yes. Yes, it is bedtime. For the one who doesn't have to get makeup off of a significant amount of skin surface, at least.