i'm to blame, burden of my dreams

Things had been going along ... acceptably. A more charitable individual than Spock might even have said that they'd been good, but 'good' had a variety of definitions, and was both inexact and more than he wanted to say at once. It might imply that there had been no set-backs. There had. But they were set-backs of acceptable nature, simply part of the process of the remodeling project.. Not outside of the realm of anticipation.

Spock had never had to live in a home at the same time that it was being worked on before, though. His home on Vulcan had not needed any work by the time he had been born into his family. And if Starfleet had needed to rennovate, they had simply moved individuals across campus momentarily.

Expectation had not been quite the same as reality. There were sections of floor covered with white paper, taped down to protect from construction dust, and that dust both tracked everywhere and often lingered for days in the air in the home, bothering his sensitive nose, along with the sharp smell of paint. In their reality, they had long since created dustless tools, paints with no VOCs. Spock did not want to feel like the fact that none of this was available in Darrow irritated him.

But it did.

I don't want to eat in here," he finally said, declaring it -- for him, nearly out of the blue -- where he stood in the middle of the kitchen with his hands resting lightly on his hips. He didn't add one of the myriad, unhelpful, petty things he might have, at the end of the sentence. He only looked at Jim expectantly for ideas about what to do for dinner, if not make it in the kitchen. Their home was now not a negligible distance away from the city proper.

Nobody would deliver that far.