1st Saun, Arc 717
He'd been to Cally's that morning, had shown his face at the university to meet with a student in his office. But for the most part, Padraig had remained close to home while Faith was out, going about her own trial in the usual way. He couldn't have convinced her to do any different. But that stubbornness of hers had worked in his favor, just this one time. Lucky for him, she hadn't popped by in the mid afternoon. He'd been been busy. So had Luna, his grandfather and maybe even Katie. And somehow, he'd managed to keep all these goings on a secret.
When she finally arrived home, if Saun hadn't come in with a blaze of light, the sun would have just slipped down over the far horizon. This was Saun, however, and there was always another sun to take it's place. Nonetheless when she opened the door she'd find the shades drawn and the room lit with candles, the rafters hung with gold and silver garland. The aromas of cooked food filled the place. Though in honesty, some of those aromas might seem to be dubious ones. It wasn't her cooking, after all. She didn't have long to wonder though, since a few trills after she shut the door behind her, Padraig appeared from the kitchen, smiling, but with a smear of flour on his cheek and a smudge of something else on his nose and shirt. In fact, several of them.
"I didn't expect you so soon," he said and joined her, taking her in his arms for a lingering kiss. Truth was, without the setting of the sun to remind him, and caught up as he was in preparations, he'd lost track of the time. "But now that you're here, happy birth trial," he said, and grinning, he took her by the hand and urged her towards the small table in the corner. "You've missed a lot of them." A mysterious comment, but was it a hint about what he had in store for her? Maybe, since sitting on the table was a chocolate cake, smeared with white icing and topped with a single candle. There was a gift wrapped box sitting beside it, tied off with a big red bow and when he urged her to sit in the chair, he pulled out a brightly colored paper hat for her to wear.
"After you tell me how your trial has been, maybe we should start from the beginning." The beginning, apparently, was a cake with a single lit candle on it, and a single gift sitting beside it. Chances were, with a little help, he'd baked that cake himself, considering it was lopsided and collapsed in the middle. "Lots of birth trials to make up for," he told her, sitting beside her and wrapping an arm round her waste, urging her to open the box. If there were more of them, somewhere, it was just this one right there, right then. "But keep in mind, you are always, and always have been, the one on the right for me."
And what was in the box when she opened it? At first glance, it was a very appropriate gift for a child turning one arc old. It was a shape sorter box, well crafted from wood by hands that clearly hadn't been Padraig's. While she might have a knack for working with wood, he did not. The wooden blocks that fit into the odd shaped box, however, weren't the norm. At least not for anyone but them. Clearly he'd enlisted the help of someone with a hand and eye for painted images. There was a wave shaped block with two figures on it, leaping into a fast moving river hand in hand. Another, of those same two, side by side with their heads bent over an open book. Another, one with the other, they tumbled head over heels through a divine armpit. There was more of them, in fact. Glimpses of moments together, since they'd first met and again, leading up to this very moment when plan was, they'd spend the evening celebrating each and every birth-trial she'd missed.
Well done, you two.