Vanyel blinks, hard. He misses her too. 

"Thank you," he tells Tarinda. 

"Anytime."

Vanyel leaves her to her work and goes back to - well, he wants to try to do something productive but realistically he's going to nap. 

Some more basement space is being excavated, mostly by magic. As promised, none of the sound except a faint distant buzz is coming through the sound-barrier. 

Page cancels the buzz fine.

The next couple of days are uneventful. People bring Tarinda things right away when she asks for her and are generally trying to be very helpful without getting in her way any more than necessary. Leareth checks in on her every so often. 

She makes steady progress and eats a lot of his food - she's quietly vegetarian, as long as he's made that convenient in the meal planning - and sings to herself sometimes but is mostly pretty grim about things.

(The food is pretty convenient for vegetarianism, and for a variety of diets in general, various meal-components are put out separately so people can mix and match their desired combinations.) 

Vanyel is feeling almost good as new by the time two days have passed. Physically, anyway. Emotionally he - well, he has a lot on his mind.

He runs into Tarinda having lunch in the dining hall again, and sits down by her. "Hey." 

"Hey. Get the zucchini, it's good. What's up?"

"Yfandes says I should get food before I talk to you or I'll forget."

He gets up, does that, returns. "Hmm. Feeling kind of useless, honestly. You're working as hard as you can, Leareth's working as hard as he can on the Gate thing, I'm not really doing anything and I can't go be useful in Haven either. But that feels like a bit of a silly problem to complain about. 'Fandes says I should be enjoying the break." 

"Not doing anything useful is a serious problem! It's one of the only ones you will still have after Sing!"

"Mmm." Vanyel peers at her. Lowers his voice. "...Are you doing all right? You've seemed a bit glum." 

"I've... never had anybody I knew die before. And - amateur freezing's not perfect."

Vanyel blinks at her for a moment. 

"I - sorry - I think it's just hard for me to even imagine that. But that must be awful. I'm so sorry. Do you, er, want a hug?" 

"I would really like a hug actually." Hug.

Hug! Vanyel is also pretty good at hugging. 

"You're doing so much," he says softly. "You ending up here is the best thing that could've happened to our world, but that doesn't make it any easier on you." 

"It sucks. I don't do engineering for fun, I do aesthetic swordfighting and doting on my girlfriend for fun," she mumbles into his shoulder. "It's not even, like, an interesting challenge, because I'm just following rote instructions, trying to understand it or make it entertaining would slow it down and I can't. Page can try to make it fun by inventing game-y milestones for me but that helps for a couple hours at a time tops and then it's just depressing. And I'm worried about Cory, I brought her back from the dead and she's still fragile - by my standards anyone who was born before Sing is devastatingly traumatized - and then I vanished in this completely unpredictable way! And I think I could do pretty okay with all that, if - it's not like I didn't know people were dying in the background, I'm not stupid, but -"

"No, I know. It's different, seeing it up close, even if maybe it shouldn't be. And - it's hard, when things take a long time, and - aren't even distracting enough to keep your mind off how much the delay costs..." 

"Yeah. I'm basically just standing in for a robot. A robot would be better at this."

"A robot would be worse at hugs. ...More seriously, I think you did really well at - earning trust? People want to help you. People believe in what you're building - Leareth believes in it, he's throwing everything he can at making it happen faster. I don't know, I think that's really important actually." 

"Page is also writing my dialogue. It's doing it by guessing what I'd say, admittedly, but..."

"Mmm." Vanyel isn't sure what else to say so he just hugs her for a long time before letting go. "Is there anything else I can do to help?" he says, earnestly. "Not with the work itself, even, just to make it less depressing?" 

"As long as you're not going home anyway it'd probably be good for me to hang out with you every day to sing together or something. Like after dinner?"

“I’d really like that.”