Blinkingly she scratched her slightly frowned forehead, briefly looking up, and nodded slowly, making a pretty sleepy impression as though she had not yet fully awaken from the asleep. While she gave another mild yawn that she hid with her hand, she gave the chair a twitch and collapsed into it, laying her hands on the table before her. “Good morning. Yeah, I doubt coffee would hurt. Black one, please. No milk, no sugar, just as pure as it can get,” grated she and looked round the kitchen, inspecting it in a way that however could only be called superficial. There were some minor headaches that made her wish to just close her eyes again, but she tried to disregard them as well as she was able to.
Him mentioning their planned trip to the camp was followed by a silent sigh from Elena. It wasn’t a sigh of reluctance she uttered there, but one of uncertainty, and for a moment it was as though somebody had pushed all the air remaining out of her lungs. She couldn’t help but conceive how it would feel like to stand in the middle of a group of young orphans, all looking up to her with an expectant look. The terror of all those big eyes of little people glaring at her was all she could imagine about it right now. How much would it remind her of terrible things, she wondered. Hell, it already now reminded her of terrible things, now that she kept thinking about it. All those high, clear voices, she could almost imagine to already hear them now, as she sat in the kitchen and took a nip of the coffee Doc had shoved over the table to her side. Absentminded as she was, she didn’t even realize she had burned her tongue.
The lump in her throat that had slowly approached during her cogitations gave her a clear signal, that she should stop to ponder about anything concerning those children, pronto. So she shook and scratched her head and looked at Doc. “Sorry, I was thinking about something just now,” she said with an apologetic voice, and slightly blew on the coffee to cool it off. She managed a minor smile. “Say, how far away is that settlement you have been talking about? I mean, how much of a long walk is it gonna be?” Demonstratively she looked out of a window and weighed her head slightly. “Because if there’s one thing I really can’t stand at all, it’s snow. So the less we got to walk through it, the gladder I’d actually be.” She hesitated for a moment as she thought about that camp. A gruesome thought came to her. “Also, uhm, do they even have a roof over their heads? You told me they live under quite the miserable conditions. I seriously hope it’s not as bad as my imagination suggests?”
Unconsciously she bit her lips and fell into another state of quietness, taking a sip from her by now cooled off coffee, almost clasping at the cup and casually blowing up a strand of her blue hair that had fallen into her face. Then she looked down again. What had seemed nothing but cozy now made a virtually alien impression to her. What the hell was she doing here, on an estate she didn’t know, with a man she didn’t know either but from stories over the Neural Net? She couldn’t clearly say anymore how useful anything of what they had talked about and would talk about would prove to be useful in the end. The next time she would have a mental breakdown surely wasn’t far away anymore. She couldn’t really feel anything. She was just sitting there, staring dead ahead out of the window by now. The only thing she knew was that she was getting more fidgety again, as though unrest was bottling up more and more inside her anew.
