what aisle did you find your serenity?

ater, maybe. I still want to look at these.”

He is careful to keep his features schooled into their customary placidity when Elif, and then just as swiftly O, pull their manners (and their tongues) back into natural alignment. Like the drawing of red curtains back over a stage act he hadn’t realized he’d been privy to see.

Not that Caine is particularly affronted, or even bothered, by their — polite? he couldn’t say — decline of his offer, yet the boy is still left wearing a faint, and to a lesser degree, puzzled, smile as he dips his head first to Elif’s distracted frown, and then to Apolonia’s golden smile.

"Good day then, to you both.” When he lifts his head again he hesitates in his manner, wondering if he should say anything more. Though it might appear to everyone else (and even to himself, at times) that he conducted himself with the smoothness of a well-oiled engine, the entire encounter with the girls, from its prickly start to its swift end, had been rather bizarre — though, he admitted to himself, not unpleasant.

He is spared from saying anything more when Elif steps away to fix her gaze back onto the weapons, and seconds later (as if not to be outdone) O saunters off like a sleek alleycat in search of a warm patch of sun.

---
As Caine picks his way through the crowded market streets, peeking disinterestedly into booths and ignoring the wheedling calls of hawkers — just as he’d done before he had been stopped by two spritely figures, their shadows stretched long as warm taffy under the sun — he can’t help but muse that sometime between the three of them, something had gone amiss. 

An overlooked tilting of a mouth, a missed relevance of a glance. 

Thoughtfully, Caine turns his gaze to the sky, marveling at the perfect expanse of cloudless blue.