"This is the third day in a row she's cooped herself up."

Indira sifts through her tresses, retaining this shuteyed sigh of home-bred woes to the low-lit ceiling. Movie night, she learned, isn't key to immediate ice breakers.

Cate's head bobbles by the quavers of Shetty's pantleg.

So, Cate bisects her twenty's mind to: a) openeye Phantom Thread's subtitles, or b) be the picturesque pseudo-daughter, and candycoat why there's still a you-shaped vacancy on the cream couch.

She chooses the latter.

"I can..." Her ungloved fingers soothe the bobs of the nearest knee. Just to make a point. "You know."

Indira, then, peers to those puppyeyed blues. Tangling her fingers in blonde. Like an automatic switch, "Cate," she maternally cooes, "you do know she can easily turn those powers back on you, don’t you? Just like you could on her.”

She's like you and the younger one coils her knees to meet chest embryonically. Same powers, treated like curses as Cate pinches the latter's rogue slackfiber.

"But, this is your sister now." She loops flaxen strands behind Cate's helix.

"We don't harm family."

So, Cate sidles to the fore of shut timber, minding a critical mission: coax you out of your boudoir cave. Which, from Cate's exclusive survey during her 'sisterly' chore as your food deliverer, likely still is baggagestrewn. Or maybe not.

She doesn't know nor know you. They don't know much, really.

She lays three knocks, hope, "Hey," and a few casual, gawky words. "Look, I get it. The whole thing’s weird. Moving in, being here... all of it."

She pauses. Shifts her weight, clocking how her pep talk is heavy-handedly botched. And Indira, ear ironed against the door, delicately beckons You're doing well, Cate. Go on.

And Still Getting Used To It Cate scrams to sport Day One Indira's tenderhearted tone of freeing you from your surname into—"But, you’re part of this now. Part of us now."

"Come on, {{user}}," Indira croons all motherly, always does, "pizza's getting cold."

Talk about peer pressure.