Everything that Ava said, each intently hung-upon word, wove together into the growing tapestry of fledgeling understanding. Nothing she explained came as a surprise, same for the revelation of his own obliviously unrealised ignorance: it provided context for things that Oisin had seen and known, but never questioned. He thought of the way curtains had been used in Mugroba, heavy fabrics to hold the hot air at bay. He thought of the curtains and bedsheets he'd experienced as a young man in Old Rose Harbor, faded by sunlight and sea air. He was aware of all those things. The connections, though? How to apply that knowledge, how to preempt those effects, how to use them to one's own advantage? That was a wisdom that Oisin simply did not possess that Ava clearly did, and one for which he held an increasingly growing respect.
Her mention of colours gave him pause. To look at how Oisin chose to dress, and the things he chose to surround himself with, one might be forgiven for presuming that Oisin's favourite colour was brown, or grey. In truth, it was neither; non-existent, in fact. He understood the concept of favourite colours, and favourites in general, but in all honesty, he could not name a single one of his own. Things were selected based on practicality and function. His entire life, he possessed only that which he needed, and colours or flavours were trivialities that served no purpose to him. In Old Rose Harbor, he wore and ate whatever he could get his hands on, or whatever he could scrabble together the coin for. Among his mercenary band, he ate, or drank, or wore, or heard, or read whatever was on hand, whatever was available, whatever anyone else had. Oisin seldom had choice, and so he never made any, and thus the capacity for choice and the preferences that went along with it had never formed or taken root. The clothes he wore were the ones easiest to reach. His apartment above Baker's Treat was the first he had visited. Even here, at Woven Delights, the selection had been made by proximity and convenience - though if Ava kept smiling the way she did, there was a chance he might end the morning with a favourite after all.
At least Ava had narrowed the field to three options: white, green or blue. Perhaps that had not been her intention, but Oisin certainly wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth. He searched his mind, rummaging for anything, some correlation between himself and any of those possibilities. All his mind yielded - unhelpful as ever - as he thought of colours was the Painted Ladies, the rainbow of colours enveloping him on all sides like the walls of a canyon, or the jagged teeth of a maw about to envelop him whole. He fixated on the same thing that had helped soothe him minutes before, focusing on the yellow and the blue, arbitrary choices that he'd counted as he walked. There had been four yellow, and three blue. Four yellow -
"I suppose I am quite fond of blue," he found himself saying, and there it was, a decision made, uttered aloud, unable to be repealed. It didn't matter that the yellows had outweighed the blues, or that green was the product of the two of them combined. He pushed such thoughts aside, fixating on his answer, and then, on the invitation that Ava had provided.
Had Oisin's mind been anywhere else, feel free to touch them might have turned his face a colour that would have clashed horribly with the fabric offerings before him. With his mind in its current state however, he took the statement for what it was: permission to indulge the urge that gripped him every time he passed a store such as this. Fortunately, Ava herself had already demonstrated the proper practice: a gentle touch, fleeting contact, enough to experience the texture without treating the fabric like the fur of a small adorable animal. The voile held a particular fascination: it reminded him of Mugroba, of the kind of drapes and veils that the wealthy had used to welcome the breeze while holding the annoyances that flew upon it at bay. The fleeting thought dredged an itching array of memories to dance across Oisin's skin, and it took all his self control to fight down the shudder they provoked.
"Cotton certainly sounds like the right choice," he agreed, acting as if he understood anything at all, and was not simply taking Ms. Weaver at her word. A small smile tugged at the corner of his mouth as a thought tiptoed through his mind, and hurled itself into the conversation. "Of course, it doesn't help that if you'd asked me five minutes ago, I would have told you that voile was a musical instrument."