>> I'm bringing my latest batch of braggot 😉

Kat sees the message, but she's not had her coffee yet and she doesn't want to deal with people. She's got to find clean pants before she goes to work. She'll get to it at lunchtime. 

(There's so much goddamn crap everywhere! She doesn't need five boxes of fabric, or a whole crate of yarn, or that fucking loom she hasn't touched in a month.) 

Rose waits several hours before she starts getting worried that Kat is mad at her.

She has a purpose-built folder of memes for just this situation. She can pick out the perfect image of a cute cat curled up on top of someone's weaving, labeled "I'm helping". Send! 

That is a delightful image of a cat but she's seen cats before. Rose shows her a lot of pictures of cats. She tolerates this because she loves Rose.

...she should reply just to tell Rose that, but she doesn't have an answer to Rose's actual question, and if she replies then she won't have the "unread" notification to helpfully remind her to answer that question. Kat has no idea if she's going to Twelfth Night. She supposes it depends on how much she has to work that week? Where did she put her diary... 

...no response to that one by dinner time? Okay, she's got the big guns too. Try a short video of two kittens repeatedly falling back into a cardboard box as they try to climb over each other to get out.

Well, is she coming to Twelfth Night? 

She ought to. She ought to enter Kingdom Bard, but she hasn't practised with her flute in weeks and she'd be ashamed to sound bad in a competition like that. 

There's a half-finished tunic lying on her kitchen table, still pinned down under the sewing machine's needle. It really just needs hemming and the trim sewing down. But realistically, is she going to finish that tonight? 

She's tired. Busy. Stressed. Christmas with relatives takes a lot out of her, especially relatives she can't talk about magic with.

Maybe once she's there she'll feel better? But she'll have to explain to Cahaya why she's ghosted four of her emails... 

>> Sorry, I don't think I can make it. I'm working a lot this month. Would love to taste the braggot though!! 

>> :-) 

>> Awww. I miss you!! Would be great to see you. 

>> Maybe let's get dinner some time! Maybe a Tuesday? 

>> I try to make it to practice on Tuesdays. We've been having more A&S at practice, I got one of our newbies into bookbinding!

Rose kind of wants to ask Kat to come to practice and teach a class, but... she has the instinct that this isn't the right time to make her feel pressured at all.

>> But maybe another time for dinner? 🤗💙😋

Ugh now her boss wants something from her and she's going to have to look at an email. 

>> Yes another time for sure!

Then back to work. 

Twelfth Night is a fantastic time. Rose gets to wear her nicest dress, and sit at feast gossiping with her favourite people, and get everyone to taste her delicious braggot, and watches the fantastic performers competing in Royal Bard, and learns some new techniques for painting vines and birds around illuminated letters. 

Rose isn't a fighter; she doesn't secretly wander off afterwards to slay any demons. In fact, she's quite insistent that she doesn't want to know too much about the monsters. They freak her out.

But Rose's handiwork, from her magical loom, lends a slight magic to the tabards of four of the fighters. Rose's wire weaving holds magical gemstones and tokens in place, in pendants and bracelets and circlets, so that magic comes a little faster to the fingertips of another three. Her repair work holds together an ancient cloak.

Late at night, Rose's kitchen pours out soup and mead and mashed potatoes for the tattered parade of weary fighters drifting into her living room. Almost all of the fighters want seconds of soup, and Rose's ancient ladle helps the soup go a little further. There's laughter and warmth and recovery. At one point she emerges from her kitchen bearing a tray of just-baked cookies to find that one of the squires is using her television to introduce four battle-scarred knights to KPop Demon Hunters, and she laughs hard enough that she thinks part of her heart is starting to heal.

(The knights, of course, start arguing about whether the swordfighting techniques in KPop Demon Hunters are totally bullshit or merely mostly bullshit. When it turns into a technical discussion and someone reaches for a stick to demonstrate their point, she tells them it's 3am and they all need to go home.) 

She means to get her life around, in January. She's made New Year's Resolutions about it, carefully inscribed in her best calligraphy hand and pinned to the wall above her bed. She's going to reply to those emails and finish that tunic and practise her flute and then she won't feel so ashamed.

There's a snowstorm that requires her to spend all day shoveling her driveway, and then a plumbing issue that takes out a whole morning, and then she has to work late the next week because of all the things she didn't get done while she was fixing her flooded kitchen. And of course her aunt wants to visit, and she spends a panicked Saturday tidying her place to the bare minimum where she isn't embarrassed to show it to her aunt.

She makes her best pasta recipe. The leftovers last just long enough for her to be bored of tomatoes and garlic.

And of course her shoulder hurts, in the cold, whenever she goes outside. And there's fucking boxes of crap everywhere! It was fine when she could easily lift them, but her still-healing shoulder has loud objections every time she tries to move the loom (with the half-finished shawl that she's never going to bloody finish, what was she thinking trying to weave an entire shawl) out to the garage. 

>> Are you coming to Ymir? We can carpool if you like. I know you don't like driving all the way to North Carolina