Fresh sits at the table, her hands are wrapped around the steaming mug of red tea as her eyes are locked downward, staring at the swirling liquid beneath herself. She hasn’t blinked for a while, being lost to the mesmerizing spin of the red-water.

Ever since that night, back when they had to flee the north, Fresh often finds that she, -

She tilts her head.

- that she doesn’t like red.

Fire is red and it is warm and comforting, but the fire had tricked her back in the west when she thought she was getting an ‘out’, by deceiving the fountain, through the crafting of the enchanted-crystal that she had tried to use to communicate with the hero. That was just a trick of the fountain, though. A manipulation, in order to get her to follow the plan. Maybe it was even just a jab at her, from up above, just for the sake of being mean to her and ruining her hopes of finding an ‘escape’ with her friends.

The wizard from the north, a person she had naively trusted and felt a very one-sided connection with, had literally fractured one of her ribs and left her to die after stealing from their home. And even after her confrontation with the caster in the central-city, she still finds that she feels… unsatisfied by the conclusion to this series of events.

“Hello?” asks Jubilee, snapping their fingers next to her face. “Stop snoozing, goo-brain.”

Fresh blinks, turning her head to look at Jubilee’s red skin. Maybe it isn’t such a bad color? She thinks that the shade of soft, almost pastel red that Jubilee carries is beautiful in a way. But it also came at a horrible price.

She leans over, rubbing her cheek against the top of Jubilee’s head.

“What the fuck?”

“Good morning, Jubilee,” says Fresh, forcing herself to snap out of it and to take a sip of her tea. “I think I’m traumatized by the color red.”

“What? Red? Who gives a fuck?” asks Jubilee. “Get a stick, paint it red and shove it until you’ve worked through your drama.”

“Jubilee!” scolds Basil from across the table.

“What?” asks Jubilee. “Everyone has their bullshit to deal with,” says Jubilee. “I won’t accept sad memories as an acceptable excuse to not fucking help make breakfast,” they say. “Get your shit together.”

Basil sighs, agitated. “It doesn’t work like that,” she explains. “You should know that best of all.”

“Can we make breakfast together today, Jubilee?” asks Fresh.

“Are you having a day?” asks Jubilee, placing their hands on their hips and Fresh stares down at her tea, realizing that she is indeed, having a day, whatever that means. “I made breakfast yesterday. It’s your turn, jackass.”

“I know,” says Fresh, getting up to set to work. “I just feel blue today, sorry.”

Jubilee sighs. “You wouldn’t last a week without me, you know?” they ask. “Fine. I’ll make the eggs.”

“Thanks, Jubilee,” beams Fresh. “You’re such a great friend!”

“Yeah,” replies Jubilee. “And it’s cost me nothing but my nerves and ten years of my life-span.”

Basil noisily sips her tea. “You weren’t doing anything good with it anyways, before we got here.”

“Oh, so now you’re included in my life too?” asks Jubilee, snarkily as they walk past the priestess.

“Mhm,” says Basil, grabbing Jubilee’s hand as they walk past her. “I sure am.”

“Ugh,” Jubilee pulls their hand free, shaking it out as if disgusted. They look up at Shamrock, who is carrying plates and cups to the table. “If you touch me too, I’m going to crawl into your armor and eat you from the inside out.” He stares down at them and shrugs.

“Hug?” he asks.

“Fuck off, Shamrock,” says Jubilee.

“One day,” says Basil. “You’re going to learn that you don’t always have to be such a grump.”

“Yeah, when I’m in the grave,” says Jubilee.

“If you become a ghost, Jubilee, you can haunt us,” says Fresh, grabbing a few large pots. “But I’d prefer it if you stay unghosted.”

Jubilee sighs. “Sometimes I wonder if I’m the only one in this house who isn’t delirious and starved for affection?”

Basil shakes her head. “You’re just the only one who doesn’t want to admit it.”

“Are we really having this conversation?” asks Jubilee. “I’m just here to make some fucking eggs. Get off my ass,” they say. “Thanks,” nods Jubilee as Fresh hands them the eggs from the cooling cabinet. The eggs here are very ‘natural’ for a lack of a better word, so they last for weeks outside of the cooling cabinet without going bad. But here in the east, since it’s so hot, they have to be kept cool. Otherwise they would spoil in a few days. Eggs are also sort of expensive here in the east. Fish seemed to be the most common food here. Well, crab meat, actually. But that counts as ‘fish’, right…?

But one can only eat so much seafood before one is unable to see food anymore.

Fresh smirks, that was a good one. Anyways. Shamrock doesn’t like fish to begin with and the three of them have eaten so much fish these last few weeks that she’s sure they all learned how to swim, simply through the absorption of the fishs’ life forces.

“So, do you think our crab problem is solved?” asks Basil.

Jubilee cracks a few eggs open into a bowl. “No. Now they’re just going to start coming back into our house again,” they say. “I don’t see why we can’t just put the weathervane back up.”

“We can’t block the crab-traffic, Jubilee,” says Fresh. “It’s their beach.”

“The fuck? The way I see it, it’s our beach by right of conquest. Fuck the crabs!”

She shakes her head. “We need to find a way to live together with them,” explains Fresh. “They’re probably afraid that their spawning zone is going to be destroyed, like all of the other spawning zones.”

Jubilee lets out a long, theatrical sigh. “Again and I can not repeat this often enough, they’re crabs. They can’t think that far ahead.”

“Balance with the natural world is important,” agrees Basil. “If the gods wanted us to remove the spawning zones, they wouldn’t have made them in the first place.”

“What the fuck kind of sense does that make?” asks Jubilee.

A heavy voice comes from the table. Fresh turns around, looking at the giant man who is drinking his morning sweet-tea from a particularly dainty cup. “Little of the old world remains,” he says. “It must be cherished.”

After that, Fresh rebakes a loaf of sourdough bread while Jubilee makes a batch of eggs. Basil decides to make things a bit healthier by mixing together a bowl of bright, vibrant salad, to add some color to their meal. Jubilee had deemed this unnecessary, saying that the yellow in the eggs was color enough.

As for any morning blues that might have remained, brought on by odd memories of the color red, Fresh finds herself lacking any such things by the time breakfast is over with. Sure, there are a lot of things that she has to process. This new life of hers has gone so fast and so much has happened, both terrible and good and she is sure that her subconscious mind simply isn’t able to keep up with it all. It’s going to take a lot of time to get to a healthy place.

But, if they can live their life like this, if she can spend her mornings like this one, surrounded by people who understand and are compassionate with her feelings, allowing her to be so herself, then maybe that is proof that there is a lighter place for all of them to inhabit one day after all.

And maybe that place isn’t even so far away, maybe it isn’t some mystical ‘end of the journey’ spot that they might one day find.

Fresh laughs as she watches Basil and Shamrock fight over the last piece of fruit in the salad, smiling as she watches Jubilee reach in during their scuffle to claim it for themselves.

- Maybe it’s closer than one might expect. Literally right at her fingertips already.

Fresh takes a sip of her red tea, smiling.

The color red isn’t really so bad. It’s just that she’s made bad connections and associations with it. But, much the same, the opposite can be said of the color blue or purple. Any meanings that they might have are purely in her mind and in a sense, that is deeply alleviating.

Because it means that even the bad things in life, with enough time, with enough effort, with enough love, they too can be made good and whole again and those connections can be remade, so that the river of thoughts and existence flows to a happier, brighter place, to a safe-haven that the bad-thing might never be able to find.