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Perhaps he'd rather not talk about it. She could hardly blame him; while she speaks rather frequently of her brother, there are others from home she she hasn't really mentioned to anyone.

But then he answers, and she listens as she unscrews the pieces he pointed out. At his admonition to beware one of the pieces, she glances up. "Why?"

Once it's sorted, and she's considering her weapon again, she decides another question couldn't hurt. "And Susannah? Is she a friend as well?"

"Susannah... yes. She is. Eddie's wife, and the other trained under my hand. They'll make fine gunslingers one day, both of them. Even if I'm not there to see it."

He realizes then that she must be waiting for his instruction before she can continue. Probably only expected a brief answer. "Pardon." Roland leans forward and squints a little, turning his head to get a better angle on the particular piece in question. "I think that part'll be easy to lose, and it's got other small parts inside it. There's a pin, a piece here, and another spring. Things this small don't always have to be removed, not under normal circumstances, but it's good to know how in case they break or something gets stuck between them."

"Shall we take them out now, then?" Evy frowns down at everything he points out, holding the piece a little closer to get a proper look. It's like wheels within wheels to her; she genuinely never expected firearms to involve so many moving parts, nor such small ones. But she suspects she's voiced enough declarations of her own ignorance in the last few minutes.

And so, when she does speak again, it's to ask quietly, "Do you miss them? Susannah and Eddie, I mean."

"I think so. Probably best if you get used to doing it, especially while I'm here." He digs in the toolbox for a few seconds, then pulls out a couple smaller versions of the tools they've already got out and sets them a safe distance away from all the disassembled parts.

Business taken care of, he sits back and watches her, giving her time to begin and focus on the task before he answers her other question. "Them, and my-- and Jake. I'd known none of them more than... two months, maybe, before I was taken here. I love them still." He lets that sit a moment, then studies her. "And you? Do you miss those you've left behind?" Roland doesn't really expect the answer to be anything other than, 'yes, of course'. But one question for another.

Well, if they're going to pull these apart, too, so be it. Evy doesn't find this tedious exactly, but it doesn't have the natural draw that learning a new alphabet does. And frankly, she's not all that good at it. Doing things with her hands has never been her strong suit, and struggling isn't something she's used to on a regular basis.

But she'll be damned if she gives up, and so she continues doggedly and eventually thinks to answer his question. (His--Jake. Well, she can fill in the blanks there, and even if it's illegal, she's not going to throw stones. It's hardly her business to start with.) "Jonathan, mostly. He's my brother--and he's an absolute nightmare at times, but I...well, he's the only family I have. I've never really--I mean, even when we were at school, we'd write letters."

"How long have you been away from him?" Roland gives her another moment to finish up what she's doing, then leans forward and points to one of the nearby parts. "Next, the screws on either side here. Then pull this off."

"I've been here...oh, several months now. It's hard to keep track of days without a proper calendar." She begins to unscrew where he points, keeping her eyes firmly on the weapon. So she can concentrate on what she's doing, of course, not because she doesn't want to meet Mr. Deschain's eyes. Obviously. "Of course, it means he isn't getting the pair of us into some kind of trouble, which is a nice change, but..."

She shrugs after a moment or two, her voice small and rueful. "When I go back to Egypt, I'm sure I'll wonder how I could ever have missed him and all the--all the trouble that comes with him. But right now, I do."

"It's not quite the same with Eddie, but similar, I think. Easy to forget how dear someone is when you're blinded by the urge to shake them until their teeth fall out." Roland smiles at her a moment, exasperated and fond. "Until they remind you."

Then he leans forward again, smile fading into something a little more businesslike. "The trigger guard next. Two screws, here." Once more, he gives her a moment before continuing. "Egypt? That's the name of your land?"

Edited 2014-04-09 00:40 (UTC)

"Similar, yes," Evy agrees, glancing up just in time to see the tail end of his smile. It's nice to be able to tell someone about Jonathan--and to have the other person understand.

Her thoughts turn to Rick again, but her tongue stills. She hasn't told anyone in Asgard about Rick, not in any sort of detail. Describing anything between them seems like counting her chickens before they've hatched; there were kisses, of course, and her feelings for the man are undeniable. But she ended up here before they could think of anything more than surviving to the next day. It feels safer--and far less open to ridicule--to keep him a secret for herself.

Trigger guard. She looks at it carefully and begins unscrewing before answering. "One of them, I suppose. It's a country," she clarifies, setting a screw down. "One of many. I've spent most of my time there and in England--another country. Egypt's mostly desert, with a great big river flowing through it, and England...well, it's best known for being damp. What's your land called?"

"It had no one name, not like Garlan and some of the nearby kingdoms of old. Mostly it was called The Affiliation, and my part of it was named Gilead. It wasn't dry, nor especially damp. But it was known for its life. One of the first places to grow again, after the Great Cataclysm. Gilead especially."

He blinks back to focus, and shakes his head. "But I think you wanted a name, not a history lesson. Especially not while you're trying to concentrate." He taps a place near the base of the gun. "That screw. Then pull back the trigger, and pull the hammer out from the top."

"You'd be surprised--I rather like history." An understatement if she ever spoke one. Gilead, she knows, is from the Bible, and from that hymn, but its symbolic meaning escapes her. One more reason to wish Jonathan was around; even inebriated, he'd likely know. "And I'm not sure it's going to make much difference if you break my concentration briefly."

"Why not?" He studies her a moment. She's not working like someone who expects they'll fail. Maybe he's misunderstood, but just in case. "You're more organized than most who try to do this. You'll learn." It's not meant as optimism, nor even as encouragement. Only fact.

"Next, press this. While you do, unscrew this, here."

"I'll either get it right or I won't," she answers, moving her fingers in answer to his words. Evy doesn't expect she'll fail, though she thinks it's a reasonable enough possibility, and she's not too worried about the consequences if she does. Her voice reflects that; it's purely no-nonsense, not self-pitying. "And then I'll do it again until I've got it. Thinking for a moment about your Gilead won't change that."

She glances up from the gun, hands pausing a moment, and gives him a crooked little smile. "You're not the first person to set me tasks like this, Mr. Deschain. I speak and read dead languages fluently; some things, you simply must get down, and it takes more than one go to do it. Of course--you are the first to make me do that with my hands rather than my head."

"Hm. Maybe one way of learning is much like another, then." He leans forward to check the gun's innards against what he knows, voice going distant as he thinks on what the next few steps should be. "Though I was ever quicker in the field than in the classroom. Move that down and back. Then take this - slowly, if you can - from that hole. Only one more piece after that, I think."

"No matter what you're trying to learn, it takes a great deal of practice." That's the main similarity--though the way each piece must be categorized, its placement and apparent purpose stored away, certainly appeals to her librarian's sense of organization. She watches him look the gun over...if it can be called a gun, now that it's mostly in pieces on the table. "When did you start learning this?"

Examination done, Roland leans back again, taking a breath as he sorts through his memories. "Probably near the time time we were all moved into the apprentice barracks. So maybe about... six years. Or seven. Though we weren't trusted with working guns for some time, and never unsupervised. At least not until we'd earned it.

"And you? With your dead languages and love of knowledge? When did that begin?" It may sound a bit like they're paralleled, in his mind. Probably because they are.

"I don't know." She shrugs, carefully pulling out the piece he'd indicated before. The thought of a child taking guns apart and putting them together is rather off-putting to her...but she supposes it was merely the done thing. "You have to understand, my brother's nearly ten years older than me--and I was an awful tag-along as a little girl. Anything he could do, I wanted to do. Including languages. My father didn't start teaching me in earnest until I was around five or six, but I picked up a bit of the spoken vocabulary before then."

"That screw, there. Then pull that plate to the side. Your father taught you and your brother himself? How long has your family been gatherers of knowledge?"

"We had tutors, too--and eventually, we went away to school--but we learnt a great deal from Father. And Mother, too, really." Evy had to learn her Arabic somewhere, after all. As she speaks, she fiddles with the screw he pointed out. "My father was an Egyptologist--the same field I'm interested in--and his father was a painter. Of birds and landscapes, mostly things like that."

"You study one of your countries? Egypt? You keep its history?" His old teacher would have a thing or two to say about what he's doing now. Talking pleasantly, instead of really teaching. If she were a gunslinger, that might be right, and he'd only talk enough to see her lower her guard. But Evelyn's right that this stage doesn't require much concentration, and he's honestly interested.

Evy nods, her hands stilling for the moment. They don't, she supposes, have the concept of archaeology in Gilead--or perhaps they do, and calling it Egyptology has thrown him off. "It's a subset of archaeology. We study the past by looking at the artifacts people left behind. Specifically, those of the ancient Egyptians. There's a lot of history to sort through--thousands of years' worth."

Roland looks pointedly down at her hands, then back up at her with his eyebrows raised. "Thousands of years of looting too, I'll warrant," he says, once he thinks his message has been received. "It always was so, in my world. Vannay used to say books were the most difficult to find and maintain. Not nearly so durable as the machines."

All right, all right, back to work. She's not sure how much more of this can come apart, though. "To be fair, grave robbers visited most of those tombs long before we showed up. Sometimes, all we have to go by are the carvings on the walls and the mummies. Sometimes, just the carvings."

"And the spirits that lay with them, aye." Roland nods. "Vannay had plenty of stories about that. Pulling that plate aside should be the last step. Then time to reassemble it." He looks over the pieces one more time. They seem well organized; she might not have too much trouble remembering where they go. "Probably best we don't have the right kind of oil to clean it right now. One thing at a time."

"For the most part, those are superstitious nonsense, of course, but--well, unfortunately, not always." Evy pulls it aside and sets the resulting pieces on the table, looking over the whole thing. It seems daunting now, these dozens of little screws and plates and who knows what else--but also rather satisfying. She took all this apart, and she'll be damned if she can't also put it back together. There's a hesitant little smile growing on her face.

"So--do I start where I ended?" she asks, one hand hovering over the pieces she just set down. "Or go back to the beginning?"

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