Katelin and Eathen sat and talked for most of the morning and it was almost noon before Katelin politely excused herself to tend to the equipment outside. Eathen sat quietly thinking for ten minutes or so before he stood up and began to wash the dishes from breakfast. The fact that he moved with super human speed and used his shockhaven to gather all the dishes and get them to the sink got the job done in less than five minutes. Normally he didn't abuse his skills for simple chores, but he didn't want to drop and break anything limping back and forth. The little that he did know about food was that it was easier to clean off the sooner you got to it.
He knew that Katelin would make a fuss over him being up, but he really didn't mind. In fact he thought it was nice for a complete stranger, or at least that was what she was before she became the most important person in his life, to show such concern for him. Not for his mission or his potential, but for him. It was the least he could do to clean the dishes that she'd used to make him breakfast, he thought.
Katelin didn't take long checking up on the equipment. All she really had to do was recheck the schedules to make sure that none of he machines were going to run into each other and check each piece of machinery that had been out the day before to make sure it was fueled and nothing was wrong with it. As usual everything was fine just as she was nearly certain it would be. With that don she made her way back inside just in time to see Eathen hobbling back to his seat at the table. She thought about giving him a scolding and telling him how his leg was never going to heal right if he insisted on walking around. Then she saw the drying dishes, clean table top and shining counter tops. "You really didn't have to do all this." she said.
Eathen smiled. "You didn't have to wake up early to make me the best meal of my life either but you did."
She didn't care how flattering all of this was. "That not the point." she said as her hands instinctively went to her hips. "MY leg isn't broken. Yours however,"
"Is doing much better thanks to your wonderful cooking." Eathen cut in. "Really it is. Remember that I so heal a lot faster than normal people. I'll be fine really." he said trying to assure her.
"When I found you I could've bent your leg into a square. I could feel the break and see the bruising less than two nights ago." she said dropping to a knee and gently pulling up his pants leg.
"Really I'm fine." Eathen began.
"Hush." Katelin said running her hand up his shin feeling for the break. She knew where it should've been but she couldn't feel it and the bruise was gone. She didn't bother asking for permission to continue up his leg feeling for the break on his thigh.
Eathen was still not use to the touch of another person and normally would've flinched when someone made quick unexpected contact with him. However, he felt a calm around Katelin that he'd never known before and was still. Her hands were soft and he didn't mind the warmth of her touch. "See it's almost completely healed." he said. "It's just a little sore and tender that's all."
"Well let me just check your reflexes and I'll stop bugging you about it." she said. She stood up, pulled her chair over to the counter-top and stood on top of it. Then she started feeling around blindly on a shelf that she could barely reach even with the chair. "Eathen can you use you haven control and push a coffee mug with a bunch of different sticks in it?"
With as in depth as his haven awareness was he already knew which one she was talking about but he decided to play a little joke on her since she insisted on telling him what he could and couldn't do. Instead of moving it the few inches to her hand he pulled it through a gap that he created in the three dimensional plane and into his hand. "You mean this one?" he said holding up the mug.
"You know I can't see which one you're..." Katelin said, letting her sentence trail off as she turned around. "How did you do that?" she asked, as she stepped off the chair completely confused. She knew the mug was up on the shelf like it always was but Eathen hadn't moved.
Eathen just smiled and when Katelin reached for the mug he made it disappear and the reappear in his other hand. "Another thing that Master Jason taught me." he said finally handing her the mug.
"That must come in handy." she said and pulled out a small reflex hammer from the random assortment of things in the mug. "Put your fist under your knee." she said. It was still sometimes hard for her to believe that she'd been out of school for over a year with the way that she automatically went into nurse mode. She checked both legs and realized that he was right and it was nearly healed. She put the mallet back in the mug. "Could you umm." she said, and nodded to the cupboard where it came from. Eathen smiled and the mug disappeared and reappeared back in the cabinet. "That really is cool."
"It does have its advantages." he said. "Why do you keep stuff up there if you can't reach it anyways?" he asked.
Katelin's smile slowly faded and was replaced by a somber look that made Eathen wonder what it was that he said. "I didn't always live alone you know. My dad was the one that use to get that mug down for me and my mom. I just never bothered to find it a new place for anything really after they died I guess."
"I'm sorry." Eathen said. He had assumed that her parents had passed given that he had seen plenty of her family pictures in what he figured was her parents old room. She wasn't much older than him so it came to reason that she was living on her own because she had no one left to live with. Knowing this he felt he should've given more thought to not bringing it up so carelessly.
Her smile came back. "It's fine. My dad wasn't much taller than me so he still had to get on the chair. I'm glad that I have good memories of them. I'm sorry that you never got to know you parents." she said, placing a consoling hand on his shoulder.
He couldn't believe how caring she was. Even when dealing with her own pain she was worried about him. "What happened to them, your parents I mean." Eathen asked.
Katelin told him about her mothers death here on the farm and how it had driven her to medical school and then went on to tell him how her father had been killed being mistaken as a terrorist. Eathen didn't want to tell Katelin that he thought she was lied to about her father. Bifoil wasn't known for having any anti-government movements what so ever, and he was nearly positive that the GPF had just made up the part where her father had been mistaken for a terrorist to cover up their own misdeeds. But he didn't want to confuse her and cause her any more distress over her fathers death.
They sat for a moment in silence before Katelin broke it by changing the subject completely. "So what happened with Master Chen?" she asked.
Eathen didn't fight the change but embraced it. "He changed the way he taught me. And we stopped sparing completely." Eathen said.
It wasn't that Katelin minded talking to Eathen about her parents, but she'd always found it easier not to dwell on the pain of the past. Plus Eathen didn't seem to mind talking about his training and she liked hearing about it. "It's good that you two didn't keep fighting all the time. So I'll get started on cooking lunch while you tell me about that and how you learned to teleport things." she said.