a home that rings with joy and laughter, with the ones that you love inside

[forthsofar]

There was nothing wrong, exactly, with the furniture in their new apartment. Some of it came with the unit, while others were ones Neil planned to bring one floor down from his old, smaller place. All serviceable, even if some of it was a little plain. It’s just that none of it was hers, a realization that only struck Rosie once her few belongings from the Home--all she had in the city, all she had in the world--were packed up in a dismally small amount of boxes in the corner of the dormitory, awaiting transport to Candlewood the next day.

She’d gone out then, intending only to spend an hour or so in the Törgt showroom--just to look around, to get some possible ideas for how to make the best of what they already had. But she’d found one piece, then another, and it had made so much sense to think about getting another bookshelf, and the desk chair in her bedroom wasn’t comfortable at all… Before long, Rosie had a slip of paper scribbled with product code numbers and a growing awareness of two things: she was about to spend a truly breathtaking amount of money, and she hadn’t the slightest idea how she was going to get any of the things she planned to buy home with her on the bus.

“You know, we offer a delivery service,” said one of the salespeople standing nearby; mostly out of helpfulness, Rosie hoped, than a slightly grasping desire to take advantage of her clearly overwhelmed state. Whatever the impetus, though, the suggestion was a good one, and she followed him to the counter, coming away a few minutes (and several hundred dollars) later with all her furniture ordered and a FLÅTTEPÄK delivery scheduled for tomorrow.

The next day, after completing the last of her discharge paperwork with Matron Robin and getting David’s help to move her few boxes from the Home to the apartment, Rosie settled in, listening for the sound of the buzzer as she made space for the things she’d so impulsively purchased. It took less time than she expected. Going to the door, she opened it wide, pausing at the sight that greeted her: not a hallway full of burly movers toting furniture, but one single, slightly weedy-looking deliveryman with a pushcart full of long, flat boxes.

“You Wilson?” he asked, starting to pull the dolly past her into the apartment. “Got your Törgt stuff, where’dya want it?”

“I think there’s been a mistake,” she said, utterly baffled as the man started piling the boxes in the middle of the living room floor. “I ordered...I ordered quite a lot of furniture, what is this? What are you doing?”

“Yeah, you got the FLÅTTEPÄK service, right? That’s this. Instructions should be in each box, hardware, everything you need.” Rosie froze, staring at him in disbelieving, dawning horror, and he snorted--a reaction she found more than a little distasteful even in the midst of everything else. “Most people have fun putting it all together. It’s one of those...like a bonding experience thing. Oh, and I’m gonna need a signature, kid.”

What could she do? She signed. And then, once he had taken his cart and gone, the door shut tightly behind him, Rosie went back to the stack of boxes and burst into hysterical, embarrassed laughter. Taking out her phone, she sat down on the floor, the boxes behind her, and took a selfie, texting it out to all her friends with a brief if frantic message: Does anyone know how to build furniture? Help!!!

Comments

[shadows_have_offended]

Neil was at work when the delivery happened, so he just came back to the apartment to find Rosie looking slightly bewildered, still in the middle of all her boxes. He knew the feeling. A couple of his things had been from Törgt as well, and so he'd quickly learned what it was you were getting.

He stood there in the doorway and breathed out a bit of a laugh after a second, while Mercy Beau came bounding over to greet him.

"I see you had fun shopping yesterday."

[forthsofar]

"They might have warned me," she grouses, looking up at Neil leaning in the doorway. He laughs, and after a moment, she does too. "I don't even know which one to start with."

[shadows_have_offended]

"I mean, did you just go through the showroom?" He was really giggling now, which was mean maybe, but he was sympathetic at least. He'd been terribly confused to see the packaging when he'd bought his first pieces.

"Oh, let's start with something easy, like the bookshelf. I remember those being easy."

[forthsofar]

"Of course I only went through the showroom," she says, trying to sound exasperated but unable to stop a bright, silly grin from spreading across her face as he starts laughing at her in earnest. "The other bit--the part of the store I should have been paying attention to, clearly--just looked like a warehouse. I thought I'd taken a wrong turn somewhere."

Neil's suggestion is a decent one, at least, and she nods, finding the box for the bookshelf and dragging it away from the pile to give them a bit of space. "They said all the pieces are supposed to be in here," Rosie says as she cuts open the tape holding the long, flat box closed, half expecting (or hoping) the bookshelf to spring from it fully formed or something else equally ludicrous. "I suppose we just cross our fingers and hope for the best."

[shadows_have_offended]

Neil has to admit that the storeroom is his favorite part. He thinks of laying on his stomach in the living room on one of his brief home visits during summer school, watching the televised footage from Moscow and the American National Exhibition, all the technology and the layouts of homes that were just like his.

"They should be," he agrees. Beau comes over to investigate them as they sit and settle on the floor. "All the parts were there when I bought my dresser. So let's see..."

He does hate the instructions to build things, though. The little amorphous person with its dumb smile always seems, in a way, to be mocking him.

[forthsofar]

If nothing else, the instruction booklet is right on top; Rosie takes it out and sets it aside, along with the small bag of assorted screws and tiny wooden dowels. With Neil's help, she lifts the various pieces of the bookshelf out of the box and lays them out side by side on the floor, Beau nosing gently at each as they're set down.

"Well, it all looks like it should be a bookshelf when we're finished," she says, opening the instructions to the first page. "That's a good sign." She looks from the illustration to the pieces on the floor and back again a few times. "Okay, I think we start with this long flat piece here, and...seven? I think seven, of the fiddly-looking screws."

[shadows_have_offended]

Rosie sets out the boards, and Neil sorts the screws and pegs. A couple times Beau looks too intently at a little piece, and Neil gently shooes him away. In the days they've been back from everything else, while he's been preparing for this move, Beau has been invaluable to him. Right now he's just a bit of a nuisance, but a lovable one at least.

"Which?" he looks over at the booklet. There's three variety of fiddly screws, and he doesn't want to give her the wrong ones.

[awickedtime]

"I can't promise," says Nick, grinning as he sits on the floor with the instructions, studying the diagrams. Sometimes, the way mortals do things baffles him. "But I'm definitely willing to try. And will absolutely accept payment in the form of pizza."

[forthsofar]

"Good thing I've just put in the pizza order, then," she laughs, coming over to where he's sitting on the floor, the different pieces of something--was that the coffee table, or the dresser? She wasn't even sure any more--spread around him. "We'll see how much we can accomplish in the next thirty minutes."

After kneeling on the floor next to him, she picks up the instruction manual and pages through it, to no greater understanding than it seems Nick had gleaned from doing the same. "If we can accomplish anything."

[awickedtime]

"I'm sure between us we can figure something out," says Nick, picking up two pieces and successfully slotting them together. "Find me the screws I need for this bit. Then we'll at least have made some progress, right?"

[forthsofar]

"Right," she echoes. After squinting again at the illustration in the manual, Rosie picks through the little pile of screws and bolts, pulling out two of the type they need. "Keep those steady, and then I'll..."

She trails off, looking around for the toolkit and finding it lying just out of reach on the sofa. "Oh, good grief."

[awickedtime]

Nick can't help but laugh at that.

"Just give me the screws, Wilson," he says, holding out his free hand. "I know a spell or two that might be useful here."

[forthsofar]

"Fair enough," she says, dropping the screws into his outstretched palm before shifting off to the side a little, giving him whatever space he needs to work. While using magic struck her as a bit...unsporting, maybe, it was far more straightforward than attempting to puzzle out all the wordless diagrams in the instruction booklet. More than that, Rosie wasn't about to deny how curious she was to see whatever Nick was about to do.

"Do you need me to...I don't know, do anything?" she asks, though she's at a loss for what that anything could be under these circumstances. "Or should I just sit here looking suitably impressed?" She looks sidelong at him then, smirking faintly.

[negative_feedback]

It's exactly the sort of text Regan needs. Spending time with Greta and Saoirse has felt strained. Maybe just for her, but there it is. She feels wrong around them right now, guilty and terrible, and even though Saoirse absolutely doesn't blame her, and has made that clear to her, Regan has a hard time looking at her.

Because it is her fault. Greta had been right about that, whether or not she'd said it outright.

So when she gets Rosie's text, she responds I can figure it out! and heads out of the cottage to make her way to Rosie's new place. Tinkering is a hobby of Regan's, so she doubts this will be difficult.

[forthsofar]

She'd started with one of the bedside tables she'd bought, reasoning that they were the smallest of the boxes, and therefore had to be the simplest--fewer pieces to assemble ought to mean less room for error. But it's been half an hour already, and she's somehow put the legs on backwards twice, and there might very well be a screw missing that she'll need later on, and she's so close to just sitting right where she is on the floor and screaming until she's hoarse.

All this to say, when Rosie hears the knock at the door, she practically runs to open it.

"Regan!" She smiles at the other girl, bright and utterly relieved. "I'm so glad you're here. Come in, please." Laughing a little, she holds the door open for her friend, as though admitting her to somewhere far grander than the box-strewn apartment she's sharing with Neil.

[negative_feedback]

Regan has her bag with her, because her bag has some random tools, bits, and bobs that her dad, and eventually even Frank and Thomas once she'd come to Darrow, had gifted her when they'd realized how much she liked tinkering. She greets Rosie with a grin and asks, "Okay, what are we building first?"

[forthsofar]

"A table," she explains, kicking the door closed behind Regan before she joins her in the living room. What she points at, though, looks less like a piece of furniture than Rosie feels it ought to at this stage of the process. "Trying to be, anyway."

Rosie grins again, blushing a little as she picks up the instruction manual. "I was trying to get these..." She doesn't know the sign for them; with a shake of her head, she points first at the illustration of the drawer runners in the manual, then holds up one of the metal pieces so Regan can see. "They go on either side of that gap in the middle there. Or...should."

[negative_feedback]

Regan grins and grabs the instructions. They make... almost no sense to her whatsoever, and she gives Rosie a look, like 'what the hell??'

"I thought most places assembled the furniture for people," she notes. "How come these guys didn't?"

[forthsofar]

The look Regan gives her isn't at all dissimilar from the expression Rosie had worn the first time she tried puzzling out the little pictures inside the instruction booklet. She laughs, giving the other girl an exaggerated shrug in agreement--or commiseration.

"Cost, I think?" she answers--though given how much she'd spent in total yesterday, that theory didn't quite hold up. "They can sell it for less money if people are expected to put it together at home."

[lost_boy]

I had no idea what Rosie wanted me to do and I was a little angry that she had moved out of the Home. I recognized this was unfair, that she was allowed to have her own life and do what she wanted. Her having her own apartment now didn't mean we wouldn't see each other anymore, but I knew it meant we would see each other less and I didn't like that.

This was Peter's doing, too, I thought. I had lived with the other boys for such a long time that the very idea of living on my own turned my stomach and Rosie moving out only served to remind me that in a little over a year, I would have to do the same.

Still, she needed help and she was my friend, so went to the address she provided and knocked on the door.

[forthsofar]

She's taking a short break, flipping through Neil's record collection for something she wants to listen to with a glass of water beside her. Perhaps a break's not really necessary, given how little she's already accomplished by herself, but Rosie can already feel herself getting frustrated by the entire situation. She really should have just bought furniture from a normal store and avoided all these problems.

Beau perks up first at the knock to the door, lifting his head from the cushion of the couch and letting out a soft not-quite bark. "Shush," Rosie says, giving him a pat as she walks past. Opening the door, she almost thinks she sees something a little thunderous in Jamie's expression, but whatever it is--if anything at all--passes quickly.

"I'm so glad you're here," she says, grinning warmly and holding the door open wide as he enters the apartment. "Do you want anything to drink, or...? I was taking a bit of a break before getting back to everything."

[lost_boy]

The sight of the dog perked me right up, because while I was happy to see Rosie, of course, I loved dogs. They were sweet and kind and they couldn't lie, because everything they felt could be seen so clearly in their eyes. And I expected any dog Rosie was willing to live with would be a particularly sweet animal.

"Hello," I said to Rosie with a smile as I came inside. I looked around the apartment a little, wondering if the one I would be assigned to would look like this. The thought made me nervous and I tried to forget it, to push it aside and ignore the possibility that this would be my future and it wasn't very far off either.

"If you're going to take a break, I'll have some water, thank you," I said. "Is this your dog? What's his name?"

[forthsofar]

"Honestly, water's about the only thing I have to offer," Rosie admits with a grin, going into the kitchen and poking through one of the boxes. "We still need to go grocery shopping." Finding another glass, she fills it up from the tap, then brings it back out to Jamie.

"And that's Beau," she says, nodding at the dog still flopped on the couch. "He's...well, I suppose he is a little bit mine now, in that we're living in the same place. He really belongs to my roommate, Neil Perry? I don't know if you've met him." If she thinks about New Year's then and the brief moment of chivalry she'd seen from Jamie, all ready to knock some sense into Neil for not fancying her in the way she'd hoped he might, she doesn't mention it. They'd worked it out in the end, after all.

[lost_boy]

"Hello, Beau," I greeted the dog, almost as if he were a person as well. I liked dogs. They were usually sweet and transparent and kind in ways most people didn't know how to be. Not always, of course, but in those cases, I knew it was the owner who was to blame and not the poor dog itself.

"I haven't met him, no," I admitted. My social circle wasn't exactly small, but I didn't meet a terrible number of people who weren't at the Home or in my classes. "How old is he? Are you just friends with him?"

Rosie had a boyfriend still, as far as I knew.

[forthsofar]

"Just friends, really," she says quickly, blushing faintly at the question and glad--for different reasons--neither Neil nor David was in the apartment to have heard it. "He's a few years older than we are, but we're from close to the same time, back home. Different places, of course--he's from Vermont, in America--but the same general era."

She pauses, leaning down to ruffle Beau's ears. "I think that's why we became such good friends."