Party Time! (March 1 through 3-ish)

[bemerry]

CHARACTERS: Meriadoc Brandybuck & Anyone who wants food and presents
LOCATION: O₂ Gardens
WARNINGS: nothing that i know of...
SUMMARY: Meriadoc's birthday bash meant as a morale booster for anyone and everyone who wants to pop in
NOTES: There is a starter comment for prep team, everyone feel free to do whatever they want


After the wonderful set-up by many volunteers, and the work of several weeks, Meriadoc's birthday party is finally in full-swing, with plenty of pies and cakes and bread and drinks and cookies and waffles (with blackberries!) and other baked delights. Even with the absence of some he would have wished to be present, he doesn't dwell on it, instead trying to make sure everyone who drops in feels wonderful, and receives a small gift or two, be it a carved spoon or a bouquet of flowers, or something else that could be made easily and quickly with his sometimes-clumsy hands.

It was only proper for the ribadyan to make sure everyone had a gift, after all.

Comments

[onetouch]

Ned looked up and smiled, recognizing the elf, of course, but also smiling for her position. "Tauriel, was it?" A beat. "I brought pie."

[woodlander]

Tauriel returned the smile, though to her it was natural enough to sit here. Most of the food was unusual to her – more homely and Hobbit-like than what the Elves would eat.

“Hello Ned.” She remembered him from her first week here. Though they had not spoken much, it is comforting to see at least one face that is familiar. “Which pie is yours? I have not tried this kind of fare before. I would not know where to begin.

[onetouch]

"The ones with the logo on the box." He gestures, looking around the tree for a way up. "Would you mind if I joined you?" She had the right idea, hanging out above the party.

[woodlander]

"Not at all."

Tauriel actually smiled at the prospect of the human sitting in the tree with her. At first she was still, waiting for him, but when she saw he did not move at once, she held out her hand to offer help. It was easy to forget that humans moved differently than Elves.

"Come, Ned. The way is not so hard. It is a better view from here.

Tell me, why do you put a logo on your pies?"

She said that word is though it were foreign, which it was. Branding wasn't exactly common in Middle Earth, at least not the kind being referred to here.

[onetouch]

With a grin, he takes her hand, getting a foothold towards the base of the tree and clumsily working his way up. It's been a very long time since he's climbed a tree, but soon enough he's sitting beside her, looking out at the party below.

"It's good marketing," Ned answers automatically, then laughs a little when he realizes she won't know what he means. "It inspires... brand recognition. People equate me with the Pie Hole with my pie with home, and the love that I put into each one."

[woodlander]

Love into a pie? Really, Ned? She looked bemused as she considered that. It wasn't really how the Elves treated their food, and she certainly didn't have much understanding of branding. What she took from that was that it indicated his ownership of his recipes.

"It must be difficult to prepare them here," she said, thoughtful. "You cannot find your own ingredients. This is the work you do, where you are from?"

[onetouch]

Americans have a whole different thing about food elves could never hope to understand. Ned clutched a branch and smiled at her anyway. "It is. I'm a pie maker in any universe, it would seem, no matter how alternate. Or... space-y."

[woodlander]

"It is a good thing, I believe, to have what is familiar here. For you to do the work you love. I play the same role here as in my world. I know how it feels, to have that constancy."

But it was strange as well, because it was a familiar act undertaken in a very different place. There was a disconnect that came with it, even while it provided comfort.

Still, it made things easier. She felt sure of that.

[onetouch]

"Familiarity is all home is, sometimes. What we become accustomed to isn't so different to that which we love." Realizing that came out grimmer than he intended, he shook his head. "But it helps to really love it, too."

Especially in a loveless place such as this. It seemed too dramatic for even him to voice, gathering the courage to swing his legs a bit. He used to love climbing trees, for example, because it got him away from everyone else. When he'd grown taller and older and it stopped being socially acceptable to climb trees, he'd still hidden, at every chance he'd been given.

Until Chuck. And furthermore, until the City. He had to believe the Tranquility was just an extension of what he was meant to do.

[woodlander]

Tauriel turned to look at him, a little frown on her face. She liked that not at all, and she was surprised to hear it from Ned. He had seemed quite a positive person to her, thus far.

"Home is belonging," she said gently. "It is family and duty and attachment, a collection of memory and feeling. To grow familiar something is not to love it. That is to forget what it means, to be home."

Though perhaps some people would want to. Perhaps Ned wanted to, or perhaps be thought that real home was too far away right now. She felt a bit of that, a twinge in her heart when she thought about it. But that did not change her feelings. She would not want to think of anywhere else as home, no matter how familiar it became.

[onetouch]

He had grown to love the City, like his own home. Part of him believed he could do the same with the ship. "I know what it means to be home. But I also know what it is to feel home. Home-away-from-home, even."

Ned looks wistful, leaning on a branch as he watched the party below.

"I have to believe I can find it here, in case I never get to go home-home."

[woodlander]

Tauriel looked rather sharply at him then. Her expression betrayed only a frown, but she fought down a rising sense of panic. He could not mean that.

“You will,” she told him, though she was more trying to reassure herself than him. “We all will; we must, for we have lives to lead in other places, and people relying on us to live them. If we were brought here, there must be a way to go back. Even if it is difficult to find.”

[onetouch]

He was getting better at trusting people in space, and in general, he really was. And something about her sharing her tree with him really touched the pie maker because what he said next even he had not expected to say aloud.

"I lived in a City like this place for two years. It was full of people from all different worlds... I was not sent home, Tauriel, but here." Ned didn't sound sad or even wistful, just resigned. He never expected to see Coeurs d'Coeurs again, or Papen County. Aunts Lily and Vivian, Olive Snook or Emerson Cod. Even, he supposed, not Randy Man. Chuck was here with him, along with Digby. And though he didn't yet know it, the jump would bring Pigby into their fold as well.

But still, this was not home. Not like home had been, and not like the City had almost been. And yet he knew there was no true escape for any of them, with certainty.

[woodlander]

That started here. It was a new facet of their trouble to uncover, the idea that people could have been trapped elsewhere and brought here directly from there. The idea had never occurred to her; she had thought of this as a one stop shop, like some sort of nexus which joined all the myriad worlds and dimensions together. A centre-point where the unlucky could find themselves trapped.

But that was not the case, according to Ned.

“There are other places like this,” she said, softly, as her idea of what constituted the universe expanded once again. “Other places, other prisons. I did not know that, I did not guess. Are there many here like you, who have seen more places than one? It is an idea so foreign to me, I would never have imagined it.”

[onetouch]

"Prison is... a strong word." And for a man who had been to prison three times, he wasnt sure it compared. Still. "But there could be an infitesimal number of these places, yes. Places that collect people from all different worlds."

It was as fascinating as it was terrifying, really.

"I have to be ready for at least another two years in space, even if it's nowhere near as... comfortable." Ugh. "And then who knows where I'll end up."

[woodlander]

“Prison is an accurate word.” Tauriel gave him a hard stare. “We were taken from our homes, and are held here against our will. This is a prison, regardless of how comfortable it seems.”

Don’t go all Stockholm Syndrome on her here, Ned.

“I will be striving for home. I do not think you should do otherwise.”

[onetouch]

"If I go home, I'll forget everything." It's not Stockholm, it's just melancholy. He doesn't want to forget his friends and all the things he's learned. He doesn't want to go back as the man he was, but the man he is.

[woodlander]

“But you would be home, with your family and the life you left behind.”

Tauriel looked at him, her eyes a little sad. Would he truly choose this place over the life he’d known?

“Is that not better?”