Busy

For a while I was able to work calmly with Azula silently reading her book. A good hour later though the door bell rang, which prompted her to jump up and give me a confused look.

"Your clothes, I assume." I briefly informed her while making my way to the door. Her face lightened up visibly at that and she followed me downstairs, staying just outside the visual field of the door. When I opened the door I was a bit shocked just how many packages of different sizes were on my driveway, and the delivery guy was not even finished unloading his truck. I started moving the first package inside and dropped it in the hallway. It was a lot heavier than I had anticipated. Azula gave it an appraising look.

"Did you order bricks?" I jokingly asked her, but she just smiled in anticipation of getting some proper clothing.

When I came back with the second, thankfully much lighter, package she still stood there, watching me.

"Do you want to unpack all of this stuff here?" I asked her.

"Oh no, please take it upstairs to my room." She told me matter-of-factly. My jaw dropped at this.

"You could help a little, you know." I told her, trying not to sound too annoyed.

She gave a pleasant laugh. "Oh good one, but it is clear that you are joking. Obviously an honorable person, such as yourself, would not ask a princess, his honored guest to perform any kind of physical labor, especially not when she is still recovering from an injury. Not too mention I already had my morning exercise."

I was at a complete loss of words at that. I just stared her into the eyes for a few seconds, without any expression. She held my gaze, a faux innocent smile on her face. This would have probably continued for even longer, but the delivery guy called for me to sign his papers.

After signing everything I took two smaller boxes under my arms before going inside again. Azula was nowhere to be seen. I groaned before going back to the pile of packages that still sat on my driveway. As I got them last of them inside she appeared in the door frame to the kitchen, a glass of water in her hand.

"That looks exhausting." She idly commented as she slowly walked towards me.

"I swear..." I started, but she cut me off by shoving the glass in my hand. Suddenly I realized that drinking something was preferable to arguing for now and I greedily gulped it all down in one go before returning the glass to Azula who already held out her hand.

"You know, this suits you way better than working with the computer." She drawled. It was scary, how easily she could play me already.

"Fine." And thus I brought package after package to the guest room. When I was done I was soaked in sweat, and so I decided to hop under the shower before resuming my work, while Azula promptly entered 'her' room to unpack everything. She was rather quick about it, as well, because when I left my bedroom to got back to my study there was already a pile of carton leftovers piled up in the corridor. I decided that worrying about this would have to wait until later and continued.

It wasn't before long though, that she came over to my study and I explained her how to get various cosmetics out of their tubes. A few minutes later she had me explain to her how a zipper worked. She was worse than a puppy, only much cuter. After that though, I heard the water being turned on in the guest bathroom, she was probably trying out her newly acquired cosmetics. I got back into my work and only vaguely registered the shower being turned off at some point.

"Oh John." I heard a suspiciously cheery voice from outside my study.

"Yes?" I had a feeling this time it wasn't about to be another question.

"Do you remember how you said I looked ridiculous, yesterday?"

"I do not recall ever making such a statement." I lied.

"Well, how about now?" She asked, opening the door and entering.