With school hours long over, dinner served, the more conscientious students thinking about sleep and the less conscientious heading out towards the Stacks, work around Brunnhold was beginning to ease off for the night. Jessyd had been hard at work all day and had just finished a trip round the engineering classrooms, checking all of the equipment. There had been no particular problems, but in the rubbish bin of one of the smaller rooms he had found a little rectangular sweet tin that fitted in his palm, and that was definitely worthy of note.

He took a quick trip back to his bunk -- as quick as he could make it to avoid interrupting his bunkmate's argument with Marsha, one of his collection of dead wasps -- and then made his way down to the servants' area. Among butlers shining shoes and handmaids darning socks, he took out a small collection of metal pieces from a pocket in his tunic and began to assemble them on the bench in front of him. As the pile of gears and springs took shape as a slightly more orderly pile of gears and springs, a tiny expression of satisfaction blossomed on his face: the assembly would fit into the sweet tin.

Measuring the whole apparatus carefully with a marked length of string, he punched two long holes and one small circular hole in the sides of the tin and then slipped the mechanical gubbins inside. Two gears poked out through the long holes, and he slotted a nail with flattened, blunted edges through the smaller hole to attach to the spring and then one final gear. He already knew that the little mechanism would work, but whether it would be able to move its weight, as well as that of the tin, would be a mystery to him until he tried it. With a certain sense of trepidation at this momentous occasion, he put the lid on the tin and began to twist the nail.

Aurelie was deeply weary, in a way that had nothing to do with food or rest. She was at her wit's end, trying to somehow fix Triston and all her troubles. The main problem with that was she didn't know what to do. Of course she had no experience in this sort of thing, probably wouldn't know what say even if she had. She wanted to make Triston feel better, but she didn't know how. As such she found herself wandering the school, drifting with no real aim towards the common area. Anything to avoid going back to their room and the broken girl she didn't know how to deal with. Yet.

Little shuffling steps carried her through the thin crowd of passives doing mending or polishing or whatever small tasks they had that could be carried out here with them until she spotted a familiar blonde head bent over a bench. She was about to call out, but hesitated. Maybe... well he did seem awfully busy. Perhaps it would be best if she didn't make a bother of herself. Still. She had nothing occupy her hands or her time with, and she didn't want to just shuffle back to her bunk to see Triston and that coat and think about golly men who needed a good swift kicking. Repeatedly. Guilt was in there, both for wanting to avoid Triston and for not stopping this from ever happening, but she wasn't prepared to deal with that just yet. An awkward twist of her apron and she steeled her resolve.

Somewhat. "H-hello." She coughed, trying to cover up the nervous squeak in her voice.

At first, Jessyd did not register the greeting; why would anyone be talking to him, after all? Casual conversation really wasn't something he participated in a lot. It took him a few more moments of twisting the makeshift key to realise that he recognised the voice that had spoken and turn round, at which point his eyes widened. He blinked the startled expression away and smiled apologetically. "Aurelie, s-sorry, I didn't realise it was you. Um."

He was not the king of social situations. In fact, it was quite possible that he hadn't really been in what most people would consider a social situation at any point in the past fourteen years. However socially stunted he was, though, he suspected that all was not well for Aurelie. There was just something in the way she was fiddling with her apron and squeaking when she spoke and looking distracted that gave Jessyd a subtle clue that something might be wrong. Still, he wasn't sure.

'Is everything okay?', he wanted to ask, but he would look foolish if it was. 'Is something wrong?' sounded invasive. 'Can I help you?' seemed impersonal, but 'You look tired,' would probably just get him slapped, even if there was a problem. Damnit, this interaction business was tricky. He knew he had to say something soon or he would look utterly stupid, so he finally settled on, "Is there something on your mind?"

"Ah, er." Perhaps this had been a bad idea. She didn't quite know how to answer that question. There was a lot on her mind, to be sure, but nothing she could actually breathe a word about to, well, anyone. Especially not someone she'd really only met once before. An occassion during which she made an ass out of herself and got covered in sooty oven grease. It occurred to her that she might not have left the best of impressions, start off shouting and ending with hitting her head on something. Mentally she winced, remembering.

"A... a bit." She chewed her lower lip, not knowing what to say. It would have been awfully lovely to sit down, but... Again, nine years of a sort of deep restriction on personal interactions, both from outside and within, had not left her with the most knowledge of what was and was not a good idea to do. After all, she'd managed to wreck such a simple act as a hug.

This brought her mind back to the subject she had be so studiously attempting to avoid and a cloud moved in over her expression. She wanted to talk to somebody-- anybody! -- but the only person she trusted was the very person she needed to talk about. Oh, it was all such utter rubbish. "My... my bunkmate, my friend she's a bit uhm. Out of sorts." That would do, wouldn't it?

Awkwardness, meet awkwardness. Somehow it made the conversation a little easier to know that Aurelie was having trouble too -- not that choosing the right words was any simpler, or that the pressure was relieved at all, but it made Jessyd feel closer to his companion somehow, knowing that they were both in the same situation. He made a noise of concerned sympathy at the back of his throat, which was easier than thinking of something to say.

Click.

The sound of the key in his hands refusing to turn any further brought a change of topic neatly into view, and he smiled in relief. He gestured to the stool next to him with his elbow and held up the little tin for Aurelie to see, holding the key in one hand and the little wheel-gears in the other to prevent it unwinding before he put it on the table. "Here, look at this. I've been putting it together for a couple of weeks, and if it works..."

He trailed off cryptically, a vague attempt at showmanship. He put the tin down on the table and, true enough, the little wheels began to turn. The front of the tin clinked disappointingly down, but the strength of the spring was enough to push it a short distance along the table despite that. "Well, maybe with a little wheel at the front, too, it'll roll along like it's supposed to."

Oh good. A flood of relief washed over her when he didn't push it any further. It wasn't that she didn't like Jess, or necessarily that she wouldn't tell him if he had. It was just not her story to tell, not her problem to divulge. The only person who had any right to say anything, she figured, was Triston. Otherwise Aurelie should keep her big mouth shut and not say anything anyone, no matter how badly she wanted to.

So she took the seat and settled in to distract herself with whatever it was that Jessyd was doing. It appeared, for all intents and purposes, to be a little tin with. Bits. Stuck to it. And even though it failed, her face lit up a little. "Oh that is clever!" It was, perhaps, an exaggeration, but Aurelie had never seen anything quite like that, let alone known someone to make one, and it rather delighted her. "So it's supposed to just, just roll along? All by itself?"

Jessyd gave a shy little chuckle and avoided Aurelie's eyes at her first excited outburst, but her questions provided him with an excuse to talk about subjects that interested him and that was something he could rarely pass up. "It will, I think. Here-"

He clicked the lid open to reveal the little assembly of gears inside, and tilted it towards Aurelie so she could see. "When you turn this," he pointed to the hammered-flat nail, "it winds up the spring, and then when you let go the spring begins to unwind, which turns the shaft here, which turns this gear, which turns these gears, which are like the little wheels that make it go." Now he looked pleased with himself.

He reached inside the tin and extricated the moving parts, then held them out to Aurelie. "Would you look after this for me while I put another wheel at the front? It's all metal, but it's a little bit delicate."

She extended her hand and gently took the little moving parts. It was all very fascinating to her-- she didn't know anything about this sort of thing, hadn't even thought to learn. She was careful with them, almost reverent, trying not to breathe too hard. After all, she didn't know just how delicate 'a little bit' was. It would be too sad if she broke them before Jess could finish. She wanted to see it work very, very badly. She thought she got most of how it worked, which pleased her.

"How-- how did you even--" She squinted at the little thing, wondering why he'd thought to make it. It was one of those things she just didn't understand. Making a little tin scutter across the bench all by itself was clever and wonderful, but not something she'd think would be a practical skill to pick up. "It's such a wonderful little thing," she said absently. Even if it never worked, she was clearly very impressed by the idea of anyone even thinking about it in the first place.

Another smile, the awkward respite of someone who did not know how to handle appreciation of anything he had done. "I had something like this when I was very little, just a toy. It was one of the first things I took apart. When I found that spring on the floor in one of the engineering labs I thought, I wonder if I could make something like it." 'I wonder if' weren't exactly safe words for someone in Jessyd's position, and indeed they had got him into more trouble than anything else over his years at Brunnhold, but his curiosity was one part of his personality that neither his own force of will or any amount of beatings could manage to suppress.

As he spoke, he lined up the punch again and carefully made another wheel hole in the tin at the front, measuring a small gear he had spare on the table for size. "I think with another wheel in here, it should actually go forwards. Maybe not too fast, but it should work!" He was excited too, now: not quite the same wonder that was in Aura's voice, but an eager anticipation of several weeks worth of patient working and searching coming together to make something that would actually do everything that he had planned.

"If I cut two little strips of tin like this-" The dink of the punch punctuated his speech. "-Then if I'm lucky they should hold the axle in place on their own. Axle..." He had the gear ready to form the wheel, but had not considered an appropriate axle yet and began fishing around in his pockets for a piece of wire that would suit.

It was, to her, no small amount of brilliance to reverse-engineer something like that. She wasn't entirely certain what an axle was, of course, but it did sound very important. She had vague childhood memories of her sister playing with a very similar toy, though not made out of a tin of course. Aurelie herself had never been allowed to touch them, until she was older. And, well, when she got older...

The excitement at seeing the toy work was very hard for her to contain. Convenient for chasing away darker thoughts, to boot. It was rather a bit like being a child again, she thought, though she could barely remember that. "I'm sure it'll work." She smiled in a way she hoped was encouraging and not irritating.

Spurred on by Aurelie's encouragement -- though he was too engrossed in his work to see her smile -- Jessyd produced a quite baffling selection of long, thin pieces of metal from one of his tunic pockets. A few more gears clattered onto the table as well as he placed them down, but he pushed those to the side and then began arranging the pieces of wire. Some were too thin to hold their shape, and some were already bent. Others were discounted for being too thick to fit through the gear's central hole, and yet more for being long enough that they might be more useful for some later project. Eventually, he settled on what had once been a hair pin, thrown out because the decorative head had fallen off.

Leaning the punch on the metal carefully so as not to cut it but to provide a point for it to bend, he painstakingly folded a little right angle into the pin which would hold the axle in place, then threaded it through the first set of slots he had created in the tin. Making sure he didn't bend the pin further, he slipped the wheel into place and then secured the axel at the other end with another little fold. He gave the wheel a flick and was so delighted to see it spin freely in its new housing that he held it up to Aurelie for inspection.

"There now. Could you put the parts back in? The wheels need to go through these long holes here, with the spring facing that way." He pointed with his free hand as he held the little wheeled tin base out.

The wheel worked! The axle, she figured, had to be that thin bit that held the wheels to the tin that Jessyd had made out of a hatpin. She was going to ask, but stopped herself. It would just be too embarassing if she were wrong. Gently, very gently, she placed the parts she had been cradling this whole time back into the tin. She looked up for confirmation she did it right. "Like-- like that?" Another nervous chewing of the lips. Lately the unaccustomed stress had been leaving her lips in somewhat of a state of disrepair, cracked and sort of bleeding.

"So, it's... it's going to go now?" Triston would love this, she would have to tell her all about when she got ba... Aurelie's face fell. Triston. The slump in her shoulders got more pronounced, her excitement being beaten back by remembering just what she was avoiding.

"Just like that," Jessyd confirmed, gently smiling up at Aurelie as he manoeuvred the lid onto the tin and clipped it into place. "And now, yes, it should go." He took the little makeshift key and pushed it through its hole to begin winding it, and then stopped. The spring uncoiled the tension he had put into it with a sad little flipflipflip noise.

Jessyd had not suddenly become socially adept in the past five minutes, but he had become certain that something was really troubling Aurelie. It was really rather unusual for him to make such an astute observation about another person's state of mind, and more unusual still for it to draw a sense of sympathy from his unpractised emotional core, but both had happened here. He had no idea what might be an appropriate thing to say in this situation, so he reached a calloused hand to Aurelie's shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze, in what he hoped would come across as a comforting, supportive gesture rather than just copping a feel.

The hand on her shoulder startled Aurelie to the point where her whole frame stiffened and she jerked away out of instinct. It wasn't that she didn't want the sympathy, or even the hand, but she couldn't help but look around making sure there wasn't anyone around who could possibly get the wrong idea. She could feel a sort of lingering, vaguely hand-shaped warmth on her shoulder.

That little bit of sympathy was more than she'd gotten in. Well. Years, really. The last person to touch her in a comforting way had quite possibly been her sister, nearly a decade past. Even then, that had been her sister, not someone she barely knew anything about except that he was clever and evidently really rather nice. It was almost enough to make her cry, though she tried very hard not to. There was very little in this world more embarrassing than sobbing in public.

There was a muttered thanks as she scrubbed furiously at her eyes with the heel over hand. Why was she even so upset? Triston was the one who needed and deserved the comfort, not her. Aurelie just didn't know how to give it. That thought made her eyes warm again; she chewed rather viciously at her lip to stem any potential tears. "There has to be something I could do," she said in a voice that was very small.

Jessyd felt Aurelie tense under his fingers, and even as she moved he began to pull his hand back.

Stupid. Stupid stupid stupid.

He looked away, licking his lips very slowly in the hope that by extending the gesture he could prolong the time he had to come up with something to say, but when he finished his mind was just as blank as it had been before. He stared at the little toy in his hands, but somehow the triumph of finishing had gone out of it.

The unexpected sound of Aurelie thanking him brought his eyes back instantly to his companion's face, and even his inexpert assessment recognised someone holding back tears. He carefully kept his hands folded around the little wheeled tin and tried to speak quietly. Then he tried to speak again, a little more loudly than the utter silence he had managed the first time.

"Those little..." the word 'dumplings' eluded him, "food packages you cooked for me made me feel better. Just knowing that someone was nice enough to do that." He offered her a slightly wan smile. "Maybe that would help cheer her up?"

'I'm sorry. That wasn't the wrong thing to do.' Theoretically that is an easy enough statement to make. But Aurelie Steerpike was as far away from being able to say that to Jess as she was to being able to declare herself Passive Queen of Anaxas. She had enough social experience to know when she'd made someone uncomfortable, she just didn't have enough to begin to fix it. Vaguely she wondered if she'd scared him off from ever doing that again, and equal parts disappointment and guilt came with that.

She was genuinely surprised that her dumplings had made anyone feel anything. Other than less hungry, at any rate. "Do you..." She had to swallow once or twice with some force to keep herself from sniffling. "You think so?" The cookies hadn't helped, but... perhaps if she tried again.

Jessyd nodded in earnest, remembering those dumplings very fondly indeed. "My m-" no, mothers probably weren't the thing to mention just now. "I mean, I've heard it said that it's a lot harder to be upset when your belly's nice and full, and I'd say it's probably the honest-to-gods truth."

His education in biology had been curtailed long before he stood a chance of learning about blood sugar or its affect on the moods, but all empirical evidence he had been able to gather over his twenty four years of eating and being deprived of food -- either through his own forgetfulness or as a punishment -- suggested that being hungry and miserable was far worse than just being miserable.

"If anyone could make a meal to cheer someone up, I think it'd be you."

Why had he said that, he wondered? Aurelie was clearly down in the dumps right now, but those were not carefully calculated words to attempt to make her feel better. They had just, sort of, blurted themselves out. He was a little confused.

Well that was. Uhm. Oh my. That increasingly familiar fire started in her ears and sort of rapidly spread to her entire face, which quite possibly started to resemble an overripe tomato. Her fingers twisted rapidly in her apron, so stunned was she at the statement, which seemed more genuine than artifice. Even crying was sort of forgotten under the sheer force of how flustered she was.

"Oh." Her mouth was gaping. Shut it Aurelie, shut it! Do not ruin possibly the nicest thing anyone's ever said about you by looking like a dying fish! "Well, erm, t-thank you." Her slippers suddenly got quite interesting. "Would you-- if. Uhm. If I made food, I mean always make too much and I-- I wasn't very good at making her feel better all by myself." Getting to the point would be good, but her mind kept circling back to the compliment. "What I'm saying is would you want to help, I'll feed you and do you have anything you like in particular?" That whole last sentence came out almost as one entire word.

"Uhm."

Jessyd's body was still sitting on the little stool by the workbench, but Jessyd's Jessyd was sprawled on the floor somewhere like he'd been knocked down.

Hold on a moment while he picks himself up now, children.

There we go.

No, he's down again.

"Uhm."

His eyes wide like a socially inept deer in the headlights, he tried to crawl his way back towards something approaching conversation.

"I-if you think I could help then I'll try, I will," he managed to mumble out, before some sort of existentially dubious toffee of awkwardness glued his mouth shut.

"Thank you," she said, for more than just the offer of help. There was something about him that made her want very badly to lay her trust here, and she was glad of it. Aurelie found it difficult to think that about many people, but Jessyd with his clever little toys and the nice things he said seemed to tell her she could do that. Part of it, perhaps, was that she needed someone to lean on, even if it was just a little bit. So far Jessyd had done nothing to indicate to her that being that someone was impossible or distasteful, as far as she could tell with her rather limited interactions with others. Surely she would come to regret that, sooner or later. For now, however, she was grateful-- happy, even. There hadn't been any crying yet, a small mercy she did not even know why she found so important.

"I think," she said, "that my bunkmate-- Triston, her name is Triston --would very much like to see that." She indicated the little tin, half-wound and somewhat forlorn from being so immediately forgotten. Of course it was quite possible that Aurelie was merely very easily impressed, but she dearly hoped Triston would like to see the little toy.

Her smile, when she gave it, was wafer-thin though genuine. This last week had been one of the more eventful in her lifetime, and not all excitement was good excitement. Perhaps if Jessyd helped, if Triston began to feel better... perhaps then she could rest a bit easier. "It's quite all right, uhm, if you can't find the time. To-- to help, I mean." More lip-chewing. It was quite a lot to ask of someone she repeatedly reminded herself she did not in actuality know very well at all.

"Do you-- I was thinking it could be a bit of a picnic, you know. I know what Triston likes, but... Do you like anything, er, food-wise? In particular?" In a rush-- "As a thank you, for offering to help." Not because she wanted to know for her own self. Not at all. That would put her very firmly in "bad idea" territory.

Jessyd felt his head nodding, and it seemed as if everything was settled. He could do this. Being called in to help with something was, after all, his job, even if his experience fixing people's moods was somewhat sparse. A voice in his head had announced in no uncertain terms that there was nothing dubious about him helping a fellow passive to feel better, and therefore there was nothing wrong with him agreeing. Aurelie would be there too, simply because she too was trying to help. It was nothing illicit. He would keep telling himself that. Nothing illicit.

With that quite thoroughly rationalised, he tried to contemplate the question. His work didn't put him in the kitchens all that often, which meant that he very rarely got to taste anything beyond thin gruel, hard bread and the occasional mulligan stew after a particularly overzealous effort by the kitchens produced more than the gollies could stuff themselves with. "I, uh," he began, eloquently. "Not really," he tried again. "I mean, I'll eat anything." Still not quite there. "I mean, I never met a food I didn't like. Anything you make'll be great, I'm sure."

There, that sounded about right, and before either of them could spend too long thinking about it, he held up the little tin toy again, beginning to turn the key. "Better see if this works after all." He was excited again, and after a few more twists the thing was ready. He blinked his eyes closed and thought a teeny tiny prayer and then let it go, and sure enough it scuttled its way across the bench, wibbling slightly from side to side because of the serrations in its little cog wheels.

"It works."

The tone of quiet glee and his little, satisfied smile were far more expressive than his inexpert words.

Anything? The choices were somewhat overwhelming. She didn't dwell too long, however. Now Jessyd was winding up his little toy again and with some of the weight relieved from her mind Aurelie found it easy to get excited again. Jess was excited, too, she could see, which made her happy. She didn't want her own unhappiness to drag him too, though she realised with a twinge of guilt there was probably no other effect coming and whining to him could possibly have.

"Oh but that is just so clever!" She seemed to be saying this a lot. She tilted her face down and her eyes up, a bit nervous. She wanted to play with it! If she could. Was she allowed? She'd probably break it, but... Oh surely she could ask! "May I... er, that is, could I...?" She could not seem to finish a sentence.

"Go right ahead," Jessyd said magnanimously, enjoying being in a position where he could give someone something that they wanted. He was really quite a generous person, he just usually had nothing to be generous with. He offered the toy out with the key towards Aurelie. "You turn it counter-clockwise. Don't need to turn it too far or too hard. You'll feel it pushing against you when you've done enough, then just put it down on the table and let it go."

Were all those instructions really required? He wasn't sure. It was all so familiar to him, a simple mechanism he had understood since he was very small and a toy he had understood even before that, but if Aurelie had never seen anything similar when she was little then it would be as alien to her as the moon. As alien as the rivet. He had no way to know.

Aurelie did as she was instructed, winding up the little key just so until she thought it was wound enough. Carefully, carefully she set it down on the little bench, let go and... There it went!

Oh it was wobbly and less than perfect, to be sure, but it reminded her of being much, much younger. When she was a little girl she had always admired her sister's shiny tin toys, though she was never allowed to touch one. She had begged and begged, and finally her parents had relented, told her that when she got into Brunnhold she could have her sister's old ones. But of course when she got in it was not in the way they had expected and any such hopes had gone out the window. So she clapped her hands together and laughed, delighted in a way far inappropriate for her age.

"That's so...!" She turned a sort of shining face on Jess. Meeting some desire she'd had for so long made her feel a good bit of hope, for herself and for her friend. "Thank you! For. For letting me play with it." Oh, but she was so happy.

Jessyd smiled. There was something enchanting about seeing that much delight on a person's face, and knowing that he had caused that happiness was quite simply one of the most rewarding things he had experienced in a long, long time.

"I'm glad to. I mean, I was glad to. Uhm. You can play with it any time you like." The offer was fervently made: the opportunity to see Aurelie in such good spirits again was not one he would want to pass up, especially now he had discovered that seeing her upset was such a heart-wrenching sight. "I have some other little toys, too, things I could show you. Nothing like this one, most of them don't have mechanical parts and none of them go on their own, but there's some you might like."

It was strange for Jessyd to be able to talk so freely about his hobby or, at least, strange for him to find someone interested enough to coax words out of him, and he was finding he liked it.