Egg Dying

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Egg Dying

Easter is coming, and Gabriel wants to do something... Eastery. But his entire family is in another world. So after spending a little bit of time feeling depressed and lonely, he started planning. He sent text messages to people he thought might come, telling them that he was going to dye eggs for Easter and he wanted company.

Then he'd gone out and gotten everything he needed: too many eggs, cheap dye kits that were being promoted in every grocery store, vinegar, extra plastic cups. When he came home, he cleaned off his kitchen table and set the dye cups up, measuring out everything carefully as he followed the directions on the boxes.

Then he put on water for tea and checked his phone, hopeful.

[Small gathering-type post! If your pup knows Gabriel, he probably invited them, feel free to tag in and tag around. Set for any time Easter weekend. I'll post it to the main community in April!]

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It's spring break now, and Neil's overly grateful to get the text from Gabriel. If nothing else, it's something to keep his mind off school, and that's a good thing for now.

He's not sure what he's supposed to bring for an egg dying party. So he brings himself. It feels like it's been ages since he's dyed eggs, so this ought to be a fun sort of experience.

"Hey mate," Gabriel says with a shy sort of smile. "I've got water on for tea if you want any, and there's some beer in the fridge."

On the table are eggs, dye cups already filled with colors, and various drying stations. Gabriel also left out all the wax crayons and stickers that had come with the dye kits.

"Hey," Neil says, managing to smile, because it's Gabriel, and he can almost always find a smile. Beer sounds better than tea, but he thinks he ought to stick to tea, at least for now.

"Is it totally ridiculous that I haven't dyed eggs in about a decade? I feel like that might be a little ridiculous."

"Very ridiculous," Gabriel says solemnly. "But I've also two little sisters and a little brother, so a year without dying eggs just never happened."

The always did it, partly because Ma and his grandmother insisted, but also because his younger siblings were so interested.

"Here, help me a bit with the tea."

Neil blushes, just a bit, at the teasing, but he takes it. As an only son with no particularly close cousins, there'd been very little need for it. They didn't get the holiday off from school because it was already over the weekend. He hadn't gone home for it after he was thirteen.

"Yeah," he says, following Gabriel into the kitchen. Focus is good. "Are we making enough for everybody? How many people are coming, do you know yet?"

"Yeah, I'll at least keep the kettle warm, y'know? And I've no idea. Kav said he'll be here, Olivia, Inej. Whoever else comes is a bonus."

He gets a few mugs down, just so they're out. Neil can have top pick.

"I figured I'd just leave all the tea out and people can put the kettle back on if we run out of hot water."

In the kitchen, which isn't really all so private but they're still alone, Neil gives Gabriel a little peck on the cheek. He doesn't know the names off the top of his head, but he might know the faces. He comes and goes from Gabriel's apartment and he's met some of his friends in passing, and it's nice to get to know them more.

"Good way to do," he says. "And we can just keep it fresh while we're working on everything, yeah."

"Are you nervous?" he asks, soft, just between the two of them, after Neil kisses his cheek. Neil just seems a little... off. Maybe it's him; maybe he's just distracted by the people around.

Neil breathes out a little. He should just tell Gabriel what's going on, but he doesn't want to worry him. There's nothing to worry about just yet, anyway. Well, there is. There's everything to worry about.

"School's been stupid," he said. "I'm just a little wound up."

"Yeah? You haven't said anything," he says with a little frown. He leans close and brushes a kiss to Neil's temple.

"Just try to unwind here, yeah? Just friends and eggs and tea."

Neil shakes his head, shrugs, smiles. It's a mask he's worn so many times that he knows where all the edges fit and it feels seamless and natural.

He leans into Gabriel, just a little bit. His height, just those couple of inches, feels stupid and terrible and he hates them for a second, wishing he were shorter.

"I'm trying," he says. "It's really nothing. And anyway, it's Spring Break, finally. So I ought to just...fucking relax, right?"

Gabriel is sure he knows that look, but he lets it go. They're at a party, and he doesn't want Neil to feel cornered. He wants him to have fun.

He tucks his head against Neil's, nuzzling close for that moment.

"Yes, you should relax. C'mon, let's dye some eggs and then you can laugh while I try to blow them out."

Neil groans softly and leans his forehead down, down, against Gabriel's shoulder. "Between you and that guy that brought the liquor, I'm gonna be a blush-furnace. You're...you're both terrible. I know you're really going to blow the eggs, but all these blowing jokes?"

He laughed a little, though. "Terrible."

Gabriel grins and nudges against Neil. "Kavinsky," he says, giving the name just so Neil would know who to reference. "And he started it, I'm only trying to keep up."

"I don't know if that makes it any better," Neil says, glad he has his head down on Gabriel's shoulder, but he can hear him grinning.

He's flustered, and his boyfriend and this cute guy have been nudging and laughing and making flustering jokes, and it's terrible. But he went to a boy's school for years, and he can manage for a night.

Can't he?

"C'mon, let's dye some eggs, mate."

He jostles Neil towards the table. "You want hard-boiled ones or ones we'll have to blow?" Gabriel really isn't trying to fluster Neil, he's just asking.

Neil gives Gabriel a tiny swat, nothing at all, because he knows he's not trying to tease. He pulls himself together as best he can. There are people here, laughing and talking and having fun. He can't be a mess--or drag Gabriel away for a moment of privacy.

"I'd hardly know what to do with them either way," he admits.

He gives Neil a nudge. "Mum and my grandmother would decorate with them. C'mon, do you eat hard boiled ones? We'll send you home with some of those."

At least then Neil would get something out of them, rather than just having pretty, empty egg shells.

He'd only ever really had ones that were already peeled and all that, so he didn't really know what to do with them when they were still in the shell, but he didn't say that. It sounded silly.

"That sounds good, yeah," he said. It did. He'd figure out what to do with them from there.

It was a week out for Orthodox Easter, but he'd been around other Christians--and not much of an Orthodox himself--for long enough to just roll with it. When Gabriel reached out and invited him, it was sort of nice.

He came bearing gifts. It seemed fitting. Maybe it was in bad taste to bring liquor to a house party that was probably going to be full of a bunch of teenagers, but Kavinsky reminded himself that drinking age in Darrow was eighteen, and he was nobody's guardian. Besides, all the best house parties needed liquor.

If he had to drink it all himself, he would.

Gabriel laughed, maybe blushed a bit when he saw Kavinsky had alcohol. "You would, mate," he teased as he moved to let him in.

He was pretty sure most of his friends were of age, or near enough to it that Gabriel wouldn't feel that guilty if they drank at his place. It wasn't like they were going to get rowdy dying eggs.

"Yeah, yeah," Kavinsky said with a lazy sort of a smile, holding the bottle up with a shrug. "Christ is risen indeed, and all that. You can't have a house party without booze. Especially not one with a bunch of teenagers."

He stepped into the little apartment, and sort of smiled. Sometimes, even though he loved his house with Newt, he missed the apartments. It was good to have friends that still lived in them.

"Besides, I'm gonna need to be at least a little drunk before I try to blow an egg."

"Jesus," he laughed. "I don't think being drunk is going to help. Might make you pass out faster than doing it sober."

Gabriel was thinking a drink might not be a bad idea, though.

"Wow, I have so much experience doing drunk blowing, I know what I'm doing," Kavinsky said with a smile, voice totally innocent in the way he said it at all. "Me and my friends back home used to all get a bit wasted before we'd do eggs for Easter. Made it all go faster."

"Jesus, mate," he laughs, blushing more than he should be. He pushes Kav's shoulder for good measure. "Were in a hurry to get it over with?" he asks when Kav mentions things going faste with alcohol.

"No, there was just a shit ton of 'em," Kavinsky said. It felt good to wax nostalgic with someone who got it, someone who knew the holiday and what it meant. "My friend's grandma would have us over and we'd probably do between four and six dozen eggs. She'd take a bunch of 'em to get blessed. I'd get sent home with the hard boiled ones."

And when you had five teenage boys, the best way to get them through four to six dozen eggs was to give them vodka or brandy.

Gabriel laughed and tugged Kavinsky toward the table. "Well, you can help me with the eggs people want to bring home. And if you want a jar of yolks and whites or something, you're welcome to it. I dunno how much you cook."

Just talking about cooking made him miss Steve. The last time they'd really seen each other had been in a cooking class.

"I cook a shit ton," Kavinsky said with an easy, proud sort of a smile. He came along at the tugging, bumping and slinging his arm friendily around Gabriel as they went. "I'll probably do something for Easter myself this year. You should come by. Orthodox Easter--so week after. You won't have to worry about the conflict."

He winked. Then he leaned in toward Gabriel's ear. "Your boyfriend looks like he's about to die from me being within a foot of you."

"I should've offered him something stronger than tea," Gabriel lamented, but he smiled when he thought he saw Neil blushing after one of his glances over.

"I might've told him I thought you were Satan, at some point."

"Well, I'm glad he's working under good impressions of me," Kavinsky said with a broad grin. He ruffled Gabriel's hair a bit and separated himself. "I'll try to behave myself so neither of you has some sort of aneurysm or something. That wouldn't be very Easter-ly of me, I suppose. And besides? The night's young. You can still slip him a drink or two to get through having to stare at my jawline."

Gabriel laughed and rolled his eyes. "I think I've learned to survive you now. Just be nice to him, he's good and he's out of the 1950s."

He didn't know if any of that would matter to Kavinsky, but he figured it might give him a bit of context for Neil.

"Match made in repression heaven, I'd think," Kavinsky teased good naturedly. "No wonder you were so flighty about getting it in the first time. I would be too if I was from the Cold War."

Easter doesn't exist in Ravka, or Kerch, but there is spring festivals and all kinds of traditional things, and so when Gabriel invites her, it feels a bit like getting to hold those things from home. She readily accepts, and on the way, goes to one of the little specialty shops that she likes where she can pick up things to make eggs like she would back home.

When she arrives at Gabriel's apartment, she has styluses and beeswax, plenty enough to share with others. Gabriel had said he'd have dye and eggs, so now Inej just has enough to share her own traditions with others, though the designs are only in her own head, handed down from her mother and aunts and grandmothers.

It's good to have things from home, things to share even if they aren't quite how she remembers them, in Darrow.

Octavia knows more about Easter now, thanks to Gabriel and her own research. She still doesn't understand why a bunny would be giving people eggs, or what that has to do with Jesus coming back from the dead, but it seems like people just don't really question it. She does really like chocolate, even if she has to limit herself, and it seems to be a big thing this time of year.

She shoots off a quick reply to Gabriel to let him know she'll be there. Octavia's just discovered something called a creme egg, with a chocolate shell and a creamy filling that's colored to look like the inside of an egg, and they are delicious. She stops by the store and gets a bunch of them to take to Gabriel's to share, leaving them out for people to grab once she arrives.

Octavia has no idea what she's doing when it comes to egg dying, but she'll figure it out, she's sure.

Gabriel just grins when Octavia arrives with a bunch of Cadbury eggs - even if they aren't called that here. "That's brilliant, we had these at home." They had just come out not long before he disappeared.

"Here, I think I've got everything we need out. Ah, if you decide you want to keep your eggs - like if you want to put them out on display or anything - I'll show you how to blow the insides out. Or I'll do it for you," he offers. It's what his mother and grandmother had done.

"I had one for the first time the other day and I'm pretty sure I'm in love," Octavia says, grinning up at Gabriel. "I figured something that good had to be popular."

She looks over the supplies he's laid out, then back up at him with a slightly lost twist of her lips. "I have no clue what I'm doing here, Gabe. Where do I start?"

"I think they're a little rich for me, or maybe oversweet. But I eat them anyway."

He grins and guides Octavia into a chair. He sits next to her an pulls a batch of clean eggs closer. "So all these cups have dye in them," he says as he gestures at all the color options. "And you... dye eggs. You can use these dipper things if you don't want to just plunk it in there. These ones are hard boiled, so you have to eat them eventually, but I've also got these here that I can hollow out if you decide you want to take them home and use them like decorations."

Octavia follows along with Gabriel's explanation, nodding as he tells her the process. It seems straightforward enough. "I like the idea of using them as decorations, I think I'll do that," she says, carefully picking up one of the uncooked eggs. "Do I just dye them however I want?"

"However you want," Gabriel assures with a grin. "And if you're wanting eggs for breakfast or something for the next few days, pop by here, I'll be loaded with the yolks and whites after blowing everything out."

His family usually tried to bake and cook a lot in the days following Easter, just to use up the insides of decorated eggs.

Gabriel chooses one and holds half of it into a cup of orange dye.

Like many things at the little party, Inej is curious as much as she is confident. There is enough similarity to some of the festivals and holidays at home that she can make a smart effort toward guessing them. So when she sees the chocolates, she happily grabs one and gobbles it down. Fast, so there's no chocolate on her fingers when she goes back to handling the egg she's intricately working on.

She smiles at the young woman that had deposited the chocolates on the table. It's awful kind of her to deliver such a bounty.

Edited 2018-04-08 19:51 (UTC)

Octavia returns the smile of the unfamiliar girl, her eyes widening as she gets a closer look at the egg she's painting. "Holy crap, that's amazing," she says, leaning in a little bit to see more of the detail. "You're really good at that."

"Thanks," she says with a soft, bright smile. She isn't so good, her lines not as steady as her mother's or grandmother's, but it's also the first time in a long time that she's gotten to do it and so it's well worth it, she thinks.

The egg's only got yellow and orange on it so far, anyway. It will look much better as it goes along. "We don't have Easter where I come from," she explains, "but we have a couple of Spring festivals with some similar rituals. Gabriel told me about the egg dying, so I said I would bring a kit like what we'd use back home."

"We didn't do anything like this where I'm from," Octavia replies. "A lot of traditions and the like have sort of...fallen by the wayside over the last century. It's interesting to learn about them now."

"I'm still impressed whenever I come across something that's the least bit similar," Inej says, diligent with her wax before she places the egg into the next color. "I don't know why I supposed that I wouldn't. I guess things seem different at first, so when it gets to the similarities, I'm always a little surprised that they're there."

She smiles and has another chocolate. "How do you know Gabriel?"

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