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Captain Georg and the Children Von Trapp, THE SOUND OF MUSIC
#02 The Way Through the Woods
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Funnily enough, it's Dexter who ends up being late.
Birdeater has the sisters seated in the restaurant, then returns to his post outside. The routine of it is familiar, and so is the environment: Kintsugi has been their father's favourite restaurant for about a decade, and his love for kaiseki recurred monthly, monstrously, kaiseki being a traditional multi-course Japanese dinner. It seemed that it wasn't just the food Dexter enjoyed, but the ritual—and not just the ritual, but the ritual chamber too, a clean, clinical industrial warehouse of a restaurant in SoHo.
The space got rented out for every DeWitt family dinner, leaving it empty save for a skeleton crew of Kintsugi chefs, the half-dozen Web bodyguards the Huntsman kept on hand at any given moment, and of course, the DeWitts themselves. Their usual table was at the back, in the furthest corner away from the door, the sparse windows, and the skylight in the ceiling high above. It was allegedly the "most defensible" table in the restaurant, and though Scout thought nothing in a restaurant could—or should—be prefaced by the word defensible, she knew her father. Paranoid was not a strong enough word for what and who he was.
Late was rarely an accurate one, either, but here they were. At the table set for four, Scout sat opposite Spencer; Gargan would sit next to Scout, and Dexter would sit next to her sister. The absence was awkward and heavy as they waited, sipping water, Scout's eyes on the wall behind Spencer and Spencer's eyes on her hands. She kept her nails clipped short and clean while Scout, the seductress, had hers long—artificial, acrylic, acutely sharp. (On her right hand, at least; her left's nails remained short to allow her to play her precious cello.) Currently, they were a deep, dark red. She tapped them upon the tabletop, playing out the piano accompaniment to one of her performance pieces: Benjamin Britten's Cello Sonata. The first movement, Dialogo, was allegro. Marked, lively. Jarring, maybe—Spencer, not exactly a fan, had once described it as such—but within the four walls of Kintsugi, it was calming.
