Misdirected

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A large forest in Central Anaxas, the once-thriving mostly human town of Dorhaven is recovering from a bombing in 2719 at its edge.

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Tom Cooke
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Location: Vienda
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Wed Jun 26, 2019 9:07 am

woven delights 🙫 the painted ladies
in the morning on the 20th of loshis, 2719
Standing still as she disappeared behind the fabric, he closed his eyes, waiting to hear footfalls creak on the stairs. She was light-footed, and so he strained, wondering after a few seconds if she’d already climbed to the top somehow. When he heard a click, he glanced over at the stirring fabric. Curiosity overcame his discomfort, and he peered at the hanging fabric, listening hard. With her out of the room, not even covertly.

Soon as she came back in, though, his eyes darted back to his rumpled sweater. If he’d seen anything, he hadn’t made sense of it. The sight of the bag in her hands made him freeze like a wary deer. As she came near enough to brush the cotton of his robe, moving past him to sit down on the couch, he finally looked over at her.

He didn’t immediately sit down, even when she patted his seat. He met even that wavering smile with a steady look, some muddle of sorrow and confusion written in the pained lines of his face. But then she said please so soft-like, please let me do this, and he broke. How did she know how to do that? Tom settled back onto the couch in a tentative perch. Then, after staring at her faintly kohl-stained palm for a few tense moments, laid his cut hand in it. On his own palm, a dark smear of blood bloomed out from the barest thin twist of a seam.

“It’s jus’ one o’ them that’s-- Just must’ve nicked a spot,” he said vaguely, “where you bleed.” Aye, he thought, as opposed to the places where a kov don’t bleed, havin’ been cut. His eyes lingered on her face, searching; he couldn’t smile. For him, the touch of her hand wasn’t as bad as he’d thought it would be. World hadn’t ended in flames and hatchers the moment their skin’d brushed, and he wasn’t now somehow more Anatole than he’d ever been. Still, he’d no clue how it must’ve been for her, and the thought of it made him burn with fear and shame. The thought of her dabbing at his palm all kindly-like for reasons he couldn’t comprehend, hiding a flood of revulsion behind that careful macha face, was unbearable. He felt the prickle of revulsion himself.

Was it the way she’d hid her revulsion back then? How had she managed? Practice? She must’ve touched that hand a thousand times. He drove the thought out of his head, but it kept on coming back. He swallowed bile. Not that hand. That hand’s mine.

Tom knew, better than he knew anything, that a person’ll survive whatever the Circle gives them, if they’ve got a reason to live. In the fishy alleyways and reeking gutters of places like Berret Park, he’d seen them that withered and them that hardened, that cast themselves anew as if out of iron. That’d never disturbed him; you did what you had to. He had. It was that this was a kind of strength he didn’t possess, whose internal workings he couldn’t imagine, that disturbed him so much. It wasn’t a toughening-up with scars you could see, but they were still there. This strength expressed itself in an elegance and forbearance so out of his capabilities that it was alien to him.

His glance strayed sideways. He stared fixedly at the sofa where she’d sat, leaving a cold teacup on the table nearby. He adjusted his robe, tugging at the fabric around his knees. To have something to say, he started, “I’ve had much worse, madam. I used to have a nasty scar, right here.” With his free hand, he traced a line, up-and-down, across one side of his lip. “Was told to have a little chat with a kov wasn’t payin’ his dues, hey? Outta nowhere, fucker come at me wi’ a flail – a godsdamn flail, madam – caught me in the face. Who uses a fuckin’ flail?”

If she touched the cut or put anything on it, he wasn’t looking; he didn’t wince or make any noises, going on in his steady, very soft, matter-of-fact voice.

He added even more quietly, an afterthought, but with a little fiendishness in his tone, “Must’ve liked his work; spent some time admirin’ it later.” The talking gave him the strength to look over at his unfamiliar hand in hers.

He hadn’t realized before that their hands were around the same size. It made him feel a pang, but he didn’t know what of. It struck him silent; his lip twitched and he blinked and looked away. Then he squeezed his eyes shut, taking a deep breath.

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Ava Weaver
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Wed Jun 26, 2019 10:09 am

Morning, 20th Loshis, 2719
Woven Delights, Painted Ladies
Slowly, Tom sat, Anatole’s body settling down next to her. He stared down at her hand, and Ava looked at it as well – long straight fingers with their lacquered nails hidden from view, the lines of her palm smeared with black from the kohl. Ava was still looking down when his hand came into her view. It was an effort to keep her breathing slow and steady and even, not to let it hitch up, but the smile had gone. It felt like an eternity passed in the heartbeat that it took him to lower it all the way. The knuckles touched her first, soft – she thought of how he’d brushed them over the silk – settling into the space where her fingers met her palm, then the rest of it, the backs of fingers easing down over her palm, the tips of them looking up at her.

It wasn’t as bad as Ava had thought it would be. She focused her gaze on the cut. It was just a hand, just Tom’s hand; if she focused hard enough on the thin line left behind by the porcelain shard, she could almost believe it. Gently, Ava’s hand turned and her fingers curled around the side of his palm, ever so slightly, her black nails just visible against his skin. It made something curl in her stomach, but it also let her lift the hand a little higher and turn it, carefully, from side to side. She thought she saw - she couldn’t be sure.

Ava reached into the bag in her lap and took out a small piece of gauze from the clean little pouch where she kept them. She dabbed it gently over the cut and looked again, carefully, turning his hand from side to side once more in the delicate light of the back room. Yes, she saw, there it was – a piece of porcelain trapped between the layers of skin. Ava’s lips trembled faintly; she hoped Tom wasn’t looking, because she knew she had lost control over her face, maybe her breath as well. For a moment, she didn’t think she could do it. She didn’t have to do it. She could send him home; he could call a doctor, a proper doctor, someone for whom this would be nothing. Ava stared down at the hand in hers. He wouldn’t call; he would walk home, maybe with a handkerchief pressed against the cut if he thought of it and leave the porcelain there. But infection was unlikely to set in, with him healthy and living in a clean place. She didn’t have to do this. She let herself play out what she might say, trying to think of how she would phrase it, how not to make this worse.

But then Tom started to speak. Ava’s eyes flickered up at the mention of the scar on his face. She dabbed at the cut again, carefully. Whatever she decided, it would help to have it a bit cleaner, but she was wary of applying too much pressure; it might drive the shard deeper. Ava wasn’t, honestly, entirely sure she knew what a flail was, but it was oddly comforting to hear him talk, grounding. The chills running down her spine faded; the churning in her stomach seemed to smooth out. His final cheeky comment about the man with the flail dragged another giggle from her, surprising her probably as much as it did him. Ava looked up at him again, and grinned.

“Please - keep talking?” Ava was still smiling - just a little, but something had softened and eased in her eyes. “There’s a little shard of porcelain in the cut. I’ll – get it out.”

Another breath, slow and careful. Ava set the gauze aside, and the bag too, moving it off her lap onto the cushions of the couch. She reached into it without looking and fetched out a piece of rough linen – lowered it, slowly, and spread over the space just above her knees. Another layer between her legs and his hand, as if it might possibly make any difference at all. Another heartbeat, a deep breath, and she lowered the hand as gently as she could, until it was resting face up just above the spot where her knees met.

Ava wiped her hand on the edge of the linen, leaving smears of black and red. She fetched out tweezers and a long sturdy match, striking the match and holding the edges of the tweezers in the flame until they glowed red. She shook the little fire out into nothingness, watching the metal until the glow faded, then bent carefully over the hand. Her fingers rested delicately over the fingers on her lap, holding them steady, and Ava didn’t let herself think about anything except the tweezers. Carefully, she grasped the little piece of porcelain, working it slowly out of the wound. It was bigger than she’d expected, but it came out – all of it, at least as far as Ava could tell.

Shakily, Ava set the tweezers down on the table. Her hand slipped a little, then, and they clattered against it, the bit of blood-stained porcelain tumbling free. Ava cleared her throat and reached for the supplies once more. A small bottle of disinfectant which she used to clean it, a little pad of gauze against the part that was still bleeding with surprising enthusiasm, and then, finally, Ava lifted the hand off her lap again, holding it in hers as she wrapped a bandage around it, smoothing it with gentle fingers against the skin.

Finally – finally – Ava let go, and the moment the hand was clear of her she rose, a little too jerkily, hands shaking as she wiped them clean on the linen and folded it up for washing later. Her breath was coming hard and fast, but Ava didn’t cry, and there was a faintly satisfied smile on her lips, as if she’d learned something. “Not too bad,” Ava said, quietly, some of the tension easing out of her, and left it there. She smiled at Tom again, setting the folded cloth down on the table with the tweezers and the smear of blood.

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Tom Cooke
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Wed Jun 26, 2019 1:42 pm

woven delights 🙫 the painted ladies
in the morning on the 20th of loshis, 2719
Uh.” The moment’d passed, and he didn’t know what to say, especially not soon as she told him she’d get the shard out of his hand. He darted her a quick look of protest, about to say he was perfectly capable of getting the damn thing out on his own time. Something about the look on her face stopped him in his tracks. There was something to this, he thought consciously, as if for the first time.

When she lowered his hand to the linen on her knees, he looked away quickly, almost jerking his head. Swallowing thickly, he resolved to close his eyes. Wouldn’t help her none, this time, but it’d go a ways toward bringing the words up out of him, and he reckoned that’d help get the both of them through whatever the flooding fuck was going on right now. “Lessee, well,” he started, “I had – plenty of ’em, I did. Was one on my back, a big, jagged one I got when I was a mung lad barely eighteen, an’ I made the mistake o’…”

Trying not to pay attention to what she was doing with his hand, he racked his brain. He gave her a catalogue of his scars and the stories, some brief and some more involved, that went with them. He stumbled a lot at first, lifting his head and wincing as if searching around inside his mind for memories halfway-vanished, tapping invisibly in the walls or hiding beneath the furniture; whenever he couldn’t remember a detail, his left eye twitched terribly, and he had to force himself to move on without it. Eventually, though, the words were coming out of him like a burbling brook, and the missed details stopped bothering him so much. Less tense now, his eye twitched barely at all.

The only time he flinched was when she cleaned it. All it was was a sharp little intake of breath, a whistle between his teeth. But in the midst of all those recollections, the pain made his lip twitch in a smile, and then he snorted with laughter, swearing. Surprised him almost as much as her giggle had.

He paused as she finished patching it up, shaking his head. “All gone now, ain’t they? Godsdamn it, not a one.” After a moment, he dared to open his eyes. There was a smear of blood on the table, then the tweezers, then the stained little needle of porcelain, pink-washed white.

Ava gave his bandaged hand back to him graceful enough, but it seemed to Tom she sprang up out of that seat like a fire’d been lit beneath her. Didn’t bother him so much, now, though. Wasn’t him, after all – it’d been him put her at ease. It’d been Auntie haunting both of them, and they’d managed anyway, they had. Running a thumb over the bandage, he looked up, studying her. She was wiping her hands on the linen. Looked a little shaken, and he imagined he heard a few too-quick breaths.

But she smiled down at him in that self-satisfied way, and he smiled back. He didn’t have to push any warmth into it, this time; it came natural. Didn’t know what he was feeling, why he was smiling, ’til he put his finger on it. It was pride.

“Benny. Don’t know how you do it, Ms. Weaver,” he said, gesturing at his bandaged hand – and meaning more than just her meticulous attention to detail (and hygiene) where his cut was concerned. (Admittedly, of course, he didn’t know chroveshit about those, either. That was neither here nor there.) “I’d best be takin’ my leave of you now,” he continued cordially, “an’ it’s getting’ a bit chilly in this robe. If you’d be so good as to bring me my coat from up there, I’ll be on my way. But, ah—”

Now, Tom stood up himself. It took an effort, because he was just a bit weak in the knees himself. He resisted the urge to let out another breathless, shaken laugh; in some ways, he felt like they’d just been in a war, and he felt more than silly about it. He inclined his head and shoulders in a little bow, taking a deep breath.

“Whenever the silk’s ready, I can come an’ pick it up personal, ye chen? Week, month, season from now, however long you need: I can see you’re a busy woman this time o’ the year. But you know where to send for me, an’ I ain’t goin’ nowhere. Probably.” He raised an eyebrow, but it was a playful enough look – he hoped.

Easy enough to joke about death when you were dead, but he wanted to be careful. Still, it was the truth, and you couldn’t much get around it. But he held his bandaged hand and looked at her, and none of the good humor dropped out of his smile.
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Ava Weaver
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Thu Jun 27, 2019 12:59 am

Morning, 20th Loshis, 2719
Woven Delights, Painted Ladies
Ava felt wrung out. She thought, a little fuzzily, that it was a good time to be hung out to dry; she didn’t think there was anything left in her except a faint feeling of satisfaction, of – pride. Tom smiled up at her, and Ava saw echoes of it in his face, or at least thought she did. She wondered if he understood. She thought perhaps he, of all people, could. Perhaps he did. It was a lovely thought, a little echo of warmth that seemed to reverberate in the empty space in her chest.

Whatever it was that stretched between them – that odd connection born of too much intimacy with the body of a now-dead galdor for either of their tastes – had strengthened over the last hours (had it only been hours?) into something that felt, to Ava, almost tangible. If it were fabric, it would be silk – stronger than it looked, flexible too, and worth treasuring. It wasn’t something that could be torn by a voice raised briefly in anger or a dropped cup, and blood and tea stains both could be washed out.

He had stood up while he spoke. For a moment, it was a surprise to Ava that he wasn’t taller; she thought he should be, that he should tower over her. She thought that if she closed her eyes, she might be able to see Tom standing in front of her – taller, and stronger than he was now only physically, his face with its scars and smiles both. Just as sensitive too, she suspected, even though it might not show. She wouldn’t tell anyone about the tears, at least not if he didn’t.

It was hard to know if these feelings would last. Ava doubted that she would feel so sanguine in an hour’s time, let alone two. But in this moment, she was too tired for doubt, too tired for fear. All that was left, all that sang in her veins, was that strange sense of pride, doubled by the look on Tom’s face.

Tom was telling her to take her time, to send for him when she was ready. Ava inclined her head slightly; there was no full curtsy as there had been for Incumbent Vauquelin, but her legs dipped, just a little, and there was a swishing of her skirt that seemed to somehow imply it. Ava paused, thinking over her answer. “Even if you did, Mr. Cooke,” Ava said, somewhat wryly, “after today, I wouldn’t let you out of it that easily.” She smiled at him, a sweet smile that, unbidden, became something more of a grin. Ava was aware that the joke was, perhaps, in slightly poor taste, given that she’d asked Caina Rose to assassinate him personally. Ava didn’t think he would mind, and from the pleased look on his face, he didn’t.

“I’ll send for you,” Ava promised, voice softening. “Half a yard, wasn’t it?” She smiled at him again, or perhaps still. Enough for a silk scarf, Tom had said, back when she hadn’t known it was him. She knew what he had meant, and that it would be more than a silk scarf he would come for – but in the end, Ava hadn’t mistaken that look of longing sadness for the silk in the Vauquelin house. She would be happy to give Tom a little piece of their home for, naturally, an appropriate price.

Ava went up the stairs properly this time, fetching Anatole’s long coat from the stand in her room. The coat was drier, at least, although what it really needed was time by a fire. She carried it carefully down the stairs and left it in the back room for Tom, politely going into the front room to let him change in private. This time, the sight of him as she came out from the curtain didn’t shock her, and there were no tears upstairs either. She unlocked the door as she waited, although she didn’t feel quite ready to draw back the curtains and let the outside world in.

There was a faint touch of awkwardness in their final good byes, a little constraint felt on both sides, perhaps, to judge from their tones – but there was nothing hesitant about the smile that Ava gave him, nor the answering spark in his eye and the smile on his face. Tom’s smile – pulled at, perhaps, a bit by the little sneering lines Anatole had spent a lifetime working at, but steadily being reshaped by the man inhabiting his body now. The little bell jingled at the door as he left, and Ava stood at the counter, looking down at the bolt of deep blue-green silk resting on it. She rested her hand on it, softly, feeling the comforting softness of the fabric beneath her fingertips, unchanged by the events of the last hours, still the same lovely color it had always been. Ava doubted she could look at it again without thinking of the Tincta Basta swollen and heavy with rain, without wondering about Tom Cooke’s hama and his green eyes. She smiled.

Chores first, Ava told herself. She put the blue-green silk away, then cleaned the back room, brushing up the shards of porcelain and wiping away the tea and blood, washing out her own cup and the pot of with the leftover dregs from their tea. She put her little carry bag away again, back in its secret safe place. She swept and mopped up the mud and water Tom had tracked into the store. She brought up to her studio the robe and the tea tray and sat for a little while with a cool cloth over her eyes, until it was hard to tell she’d ever sobbed. She fixed the smudged mess left behind, wiping away the leftover kohl and redrawing it with the careful precision.

Ava gave herself time, up there in her room, sitting at her boudoir and studying her face in the mirror. She waited to see if the tears would come again, if her hands would shake and tremble, if her chest would fill back up with all the hurt and anger that seemed to have washed out of her with those sobs. Was she the street or the flood itself? It was hard to tell from her reflection.

Then, smiling at her own foolishness, Ava touched up her lipstick as well, and went back down the stairs and to the front of the shop. She turned the curtains neatly back from the window and flipped her little sign to show that the store was open. The rain had stopped, and the sun shone through, lighting the wash of wet street and glistening in the drops still clinging to the glass, spilling onto the floor inside the shop. The storm would come again later but, at least for now, it was calm.

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