Private Finished It's Almost Like Old Times

Adrastia sipped her water to soothe her throat. She got up and went to sit beside him, motioning for him to scoot in the booth so she didn't touch him and hurt him. She was wearing sleeves though, so it should be relatively fine.

"I'm sorry that I yelled at you, Jude. Just... all the times I did it. I yell when I'm scared and, heh, I was pretty scared all the time. I just..." she sighed. "I just wanted to protect all of you. All of my friends. And part of me never wanted you in it because then I'd get you hurt," here she gave his arm a once over. "But I botched that and got you hurt anyway and then I didn't even know what to do."

She thought about it, used the straw in her cup to stir her iced water. "I'll try not to yell so much. I'll try that whole... communicating thing. My family was never great at it, but there's a first for everything." She continued stirring her water. "I never would have stopped helping you. You know that right? Sure, I'd have been super pissed about it, but I couldn't turn my back on you. If you needed me to punch someone, I'm good at that. Less so with... this."

Adrastia sighed and reached up to touch him but stopped herself halfway there. "I mean... it will be? Things don't stay broken forever, Jude, they really can't. At some point, you pick yourself up and you move forward. And you know... you have us. So it's not all lost."

Adrastia felt so very tired. Tired and sad and hopeless. She didn't have words for Jude, or well, she did but no voice to say them in. Talking about it made her want to cry.

"You can't always do things because people might want you to," she told him instead. "We all grieve differently, so just... let yourself get over everything in your own time."

She slid out of the booth to return to her original seat, gulping her water until the back of her throat was numb from the cold. She was feeling it again, that kind of numbness of being alone. There but far away. Adrastia worked it around in her head, how she'd manage to pick Jude, Janelle, and Kaiju up while feeling like this.

Adrastia wasn't sure if she believed that. But Jude seemed confident in it. To her, it just seemed too hard. She wasn't even sure she could believe the 'we'll get through this.' It all seemed very far off.

Jude was trying to be open with her, Rory figured she could try the same. Though she was sure those hurt feelings between them were mutual, it couldn't go on forever either. It had to stop. They'd just tear themselves and their friends apart with it.

In something of an awkward, guilty tone, Adrastia told him, "I just wanted... to know that what I cared about mattered." Which seemed both a simple and complex thing. Adrastia wondered if she'd have to elaborate, but for now, she didn't, because saying it out loud had already been hard enough.

Adrastia wanted to hug Jude. To feel like old times. "Jude... do you want a hug too?" He didn't seem so good. He looked like he would be sick soon. Adrastia didn't understand that or how to help it. With Eddie it had always been easy and she'd never had to worry about picking her mom up.